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Comment by nialse | Hacker News Reader

Do note that The Bell Curve is not considered controversial in general. The part about race and genetics is. Also genes being the sole predictor of IQ is not an accurate description of the book’s premise.

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No the whole book is controversial. It's a political argument for dismantling the welfare state disguised as a review of science. They laundered a bunch of work by racial eugenicists along with a bunch of other junk science methodology.

https://youtu.be/UBc7qBS1Ujo?si=bzVMwGU4XjPrk4sr

I hear you are invested in this line of thought, and that is okay. I just don’t agree with the analysis, and not with the labeling.

It doesn't rely on work by Eugenicists?

Fortunately, science does not rely on the character of its purveyors but on the quality of the evidence.

The quality of the evidence wasn't any better than the character of the purveyors. You're an apologist for bullshit.

Calling something "controversial" is a total non-argument. The book's science about IQ is solid.

In actuality, the content of the book was simply a collection of mainstream scientific consensus ideas at that time, without specific controversial add-ons. It's only after the book was published, the book unexpectedly was attacked by proto-woke people.

Yeah Nazi aligned eugenicist science is totally mainstream.

Inventing strawman out of thin air in order to drown discussion, to attack individuals and paint them evil, that's literally what Nazis did. How ironic.

The controversial part is specifically the policy recommendations that we avoid investing resources in certain racial groups because problems in their communities can be explained by genetics.

So were their claims falsified?

You can't determine someone's IQ based on their race, you need to give them an IQ test to do that, thus the suggestion that we prejudge people based on their race is seen as racist.

You might feel that the racism is scientifically justified, but that belief is controversial.

> You might feel that the racism is scientifically justified, but that belief is controversial.

Sir, this is HN, we love junk science and Sam Altman.

This is a clear example of people confusing explanation ("how things are") with recommendation/support ("ought to be").

The controversy is with respect to "what ought to be". The fact that there are measurable IQ differences between groups is not in dispute.

All the controversy I have seen come from people, who think that even talking about possible differences between groups of people is racist, sexist, whathaveyou.

Is it really? I'm sure those people exist, but obviously that's not the case in this thread, so I don't know what to tell you. It's also true that genuine racists and sexists are definitionally motivated by prejudice based on group differences, so a discussion without paying nuance to that reality is begging for controversy.

I read the book Bell Curve years ago, but I remember the analysis being that the found statistically significant differences between race and IQ. The authors argued that individual differences in IQ within a population are strongly influenced by genetics (heritability estimates around 40–80%). They emphasized that this doesn’t mean IQ is fixed, but that genes play a large role in explaining why individuals differ. Their ultimate policy argument was less about race per se, and more about what society can realistically do. They argued that large-scale social programs (e.g., Head Start, income redistribution, affirmative action) had limited power to reduce cognitive inequality or close gaps, because much of IQ variation was resistant to environmental manipulation. On the genetic vs. environmental debate about group differences, their ultimate claim was: we don’t know, but genetics might contribute, and pretending otherwise could be harmful to honest policy discussion.

But really, if you can't go about doing more studies on race and IQ, we'll never really know. It's a valid and legitimate scientific question

This is an extremely studied question, and The Bell Curve operates in the phlogiston era of this science. The idea that this is a forbidden topic only whispered about in the academy is an Internet myth.

Most of the reason you don't hear about current research into behavioral genetics is that a, uh, very particular excitable subset of Internet commenters are actually interested in this research, and the research results aren't coming out the way they want them to.

(You can get an isomorphic answer substituting psychometrics for behavioral genetics; this is the "twin studies" line of research that Richard Herrnstein relied on in the book, and it too is actively studied, but not talked about because the answers don't come out the way --- let's call them "Herrnstein fans" --- want them to).

The wokeistic science-denying has taken some steps back lately, but I am basing my observation on 20+ years of unbased and delusional attacks I have been witnessing. If you are interested you can take a deep dive into the articles/opinions/statements that were made against those books/authors immediately after books were released and for decades after. If you want, I can give you a few helpful/analytical youtube videos about the subject.

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