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.
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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

[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.