Response

[sen_no_ongaku]

Some friends of mine have posted links to this opinion piece on education and intelligence:

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

I'll assume you've read the article, and I'd like to offer something of a response and a critique to part of the piece; I'm less interested in his assertions about college and the job market.

Note also that it was written by one of the authors of The Bell Curve.
___

First of all, I contend with Murray's basic assumption that intelligence can be measured accurately and indisputably by one variable: IQ. Most cognitive scientists rebuke the very concept of a single "intelligence", claiming that there are many aspects to human cognition which, while related, are nevertheless distinct.

The author has anticipated this argument by claiming that there is some sort of general capability which scientists define as g. Fair enough. But the author never establishes whether or not "g" can even be measured, and is happy to assume that we will accept IQ and g are interchangeable despite offering no evidence that they are correlated.

Secondly, as a researcher with a strong background in statistics, Murray cannot but be extremely cognizant of the fact that "average" can mean many things, and failing to state that whether you intend "average" to mean "mean", "median", or "mode" robs you of the context you need to interpret data -- and that, in addition, lack of clarity as to what kind of "average" is generally a hint of an intent to obfuscate, if not mislead.

Nowhere in the article does Murray closely define "average".

More later, maybe.

[ETA 1/23/2007]: Another problem I have with his later pieces on higher education is that all of his assertions are predicated on the belief that the only worthwhile purpose of education is to make you fit to work -- and the implicit assumptions that a person is defined only by the job they hold, and that the job they are trained for is the only one they should ever have.

Comments

[g-me.livejournal.com]

Yes, all true critiques. The fact that his trilogy of articles is all based on the premise of IQ hurts the rest of his argument, but I do still think that many of his observations are accurate and valid.

Oh - thanks for the images you sent by the way, actually very helpful. Got any websites you really like?

[sen-no-ongaku.livejournal.com]

Got any websites you really like?

I'll send you a few shortly -- they're harder to round up than just plain images I dig.

[balsamicdragon.livejournal.com]

I find Murray and his brand of intellectual elitism to be almost laughably idiodic. Murray's arguments are the same level of reasoning as: "All cats are fish, all fish are purple, therefor all cats are purple." It's perfectly logical if you ignore the fact that all the assumptions are false!

[outsidetheparty.livejournal.com]

I'm enough of an elitist bastard to be basically sympathetic to the philosophy. Some people *are* objectively more capable than others, so from a strictly economic standpoint it makes sense for a society to maximize what it can get from the most capable. (At least at the extremes of the scale. For whichever n scales of giftedness or capability you want to define.)

But the problem is that it makes sense in the same way that eugenics or totalitarianism makes sense: there's no way to put such a thing into practice that doesn't lead to truly awful consequences. It's not possible to predict who's going to be more capable and who should be abandoned, and even if there was, we can't trust that there isn't some racist or other counterproductive assumption built into the definition. (Or that the people put in charge won't inevitably wreck things with their own biases.)

And the more I read, the less respect I had for this guy as a thinker.

His version:

"A large proportion of gifted children are born to parents who value their children's talent and do their best to see that it is realized. Most gifted children without such parents are recognized by someone somewhere along the educational line and pointed toward college. No evidence indicates that the nation has many children with IQs above 120 who are not given an opportunity for higher education."

Mine:

"A large proportion of children born to parents who value their children's talents and do their best to see that it is realized, turn out to be gifted. Most children without such parents, but who are recognized by someone somewhere along the educational line and pointed towards college also turn out to be gifted. No evidence indicates that children who are not given an opportunity for higher education frequently achieve IQs above 120."

Even if you gloss over the fuzzy definitions of IQ and "gifted", and even if you accept his wildly unsupported premises (such as that smart kids in bad schools still nearly always make it to college), his argument can't distinguish between cause and effect. That's not a good sign.

Worst of all, the basic assumption built in throughout his argument is that people who are poorly educated are so because they're inherently stupid, and not because they're socially or economically disadvantaged, is just plain irrefutably wrong: if that were true, we'd have just as many dropouts and failures from the rich-neighborhood "good" schools as we do from the poor-neighborhood "bad" schools. The only way around that obstacle is to assume that the rich people in the good schools are so because they're inherently smarter than the poor people in the bad ones. Which leads neatly back to eugenic assumptions again, just disguising the racism with economics.

[iresprite.livejournal.com]

Nowhere in the article does Murray closely define "average".

Yeah, he plays pretty fast and loose with his terminology. The rhetoric reads more like an impassioned plea than a carefully diagrammed argument.

He writes:

While concepts such as "emotional intelligence" and "multiple intelligences" have their uses, a century of psychometric evidence has been augmented over the last decade by a growing body of neuroscientific evidence. Like it or not, g exists, is grounded in the architecture and neural functioning of the brain, and is the raw material for academic performance.

Now, I admit I'm a little behind on my reading, so I don't have a firm grounding in this sort of theory. But he doesn't even bother to cite a shred of the neuroscientific evidence he claims has piled up over the past century.

I will say this: I do think that our culture makes a strong correspondence between education and social class. And I do think it's dangerous to value certain types of education over others-- a master craftsman, for example, is a damn fine craftsman, and his or her skills should not be disparaged by the person with the MBA. So in that, I can agree with the author. Until he starts talking about Aztecs and Greeks. Then I have to punch him in the junk.

[mindways]

The author has anticipated this argument by claiming that there is some sort of general capability which scientists define as g. Fair enough. But the author never establishes whether or not "g" can even be measured, and is happy to assume that we will accept IQ and g are interchangeable despite offering no evidence that they are correlated.

Yeah, this was my foremost problem with the article. Especially since his "intelligence cannot be increased" assertion was predicated on a study about IQ. I won't argue with the assertion that there's some amount of variability in human intellectual potential, but the claim that many below-average performers are at or near their full potential strikes me as at best unproven and at worst flat-out wrong.

There are other bits and pieces in there that I can agree with, but the conclusions drawn seem, as a rule, to overreach the evidence.