Luke Ford

Jennifer Senior writes a New York Times book review on Simon Winchester’s latest — Pacific:

But what I learned most unexpectedly, to my depressed amazement, is how much the United States of today has in common with Australia … of the 1970s. Back then, a member of the Australian Senate threatened to shut down the government. (Under very different circumstances, admittedly, than House Republican have done here. But still.) Australia also suffered from xenophobia, because the government finally ended restrictions on immigration, and the country’s ambivalence about embracing the polyglot future persists today, which Mr. Winchester fears may keep it “pinioned and fettered firmly in its past.”

Steve Sailer writes Oct. 17, 2005:

The Cochran-Harpending theory is not good for the Jews, according to the cover story in New York magazine: “Are Jews smarter? Why the controversial new study of Jewish intelligence has everybody plotzing,”. For over a year, I kept telling Gregory Cochran that he was going to get roasted alive.

At first, though, most of the publicity was favorable. After all, it’s hard to be publicly against a scientific breakthrough that might someday help ease the suffering of victims of hereditary Ashkenazi diseases. But, Jennifer Senior has pulled off that feat. This article should remind us of just how brave NY Times genetics reporter Nicholas Wade really is.

For a decade, I’ve assumed that the Bell Curve controversy wasn’t really about blacks having lower than average IQs, but about Jews having higher than average IQs. After all, history shows it’s much more dangerous to be thought of as smarter than to be thought of as dimmer. So, if all mention of IQ could be banned as insulting to blacks, the thinking went, then nobody would notice how smart Jews are.

On the same day, Steve Sailer writes:

Making Jennifer Senior of New York magazine look like an IQ expert appears to be the goal of the new article in Slate, “Moral Courage: Is defending The Bell Curve an example of intellectual honesty?” by Stephen Metcalfe, whose qualifications are, apparently, that he is “a Slate critic and lives in Brooklyn.”

Metcalfe’s denunciation of Charles Murray’s recent Commentary magazine article “The Inequality Taboo” is full of howlers such as:

“Before I casually took up the cause of the race realists and assumed that only an overprogrammed PC hysteria had kept their work from gaining widespread legitimacy, I’d want to know a couple of things. I’d want to know why “the data” are always so selective and incomplete, if not hidden or misrepresented, and I’d want to know a whole lot more about the movement’s two leading lights, J. Philippe Rushton and Arthur Jensen. Rushton and Jensen came to my attention when Murray fingered them, along with Lawrence Summers, as the impetus for his new Commentary article.”

Slate is paying Metcalfe to write about the validity of IQ research, and yet Metcalfe admits that he had never heard of Arthur Jensen until a few weeks ago! Jensen, who has published 435 articles in peer-reviewed scientific journals, became a national figure in 1969 with the publication of his long meta-analysis “How Much Can We Boost I.Q. and Scholastic Achievement?” in the Harvard Educational Review. President Nixon even assigned his top domestic policy advisor, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, to keep him updated on Jensen’s research.

You really have to read this article to believe the quality of screeds that can get published these days.

From the comments:

* Yeah, Metcalf isn’t really equipped to deal with this stuff. Allow me to elaborate on Sailer’s critique of Metcalf’s self-congratulatory smear job:

“… the same daunting statistical hoodoo that left laypeople unable to evaluate the merits of The Bell Curve 11 years ago.” Hoodoo? Meaning, statistics is magic or statistics doesn’t really work? Actually, I really admired the statistical primer Herrnstein & Murray included in The Bell Curve. It was fairly lucid and brought back memories of my best stats professor. It is one of the many things they wrote to shield themselves from criticism, but of course that only shields them from criticism by people who have actually read the book (and who expect their critiques to be evaluated by others who have).

“Unless Sullivan has a degree in cognitive psychology we don’t know about, he’s as unqualified as the rest of us to determine whether Murray’s arguments are sound science….” No specialist background in cognitive science is required, just a basic ability to understand statistics, read for detail, and follow the reasoning. Psychometrics is its own field anyway, peopled mainly by those who agree with Herrnstein & Murray.

“In his own book on human intelligence, The Mismeasure of Man, Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould….” In his own book on how human intelligence can’t really be measured, non-psychometrician Gould made up claims that Jews had substandard IQs in the 1920s, in order to demolish those claims. Gould is an anti-intellectual, a socialist, and a Lysenkoist, which is pretty glassy house to be living in if you’re going to be throwing stones about anti-semitism, particularly if you go around making up Jew-bashing legends. Metcalf’s implication that mid-Century Germany was less racist than the United States is probably the most telling part of his piece.

“… the motives of people who spend their entire professional lives trying to prove black people are dumber than white people escape all scrutiny.” Difficult to address this claim, since I can’t think of anyone who has spent their entire professional life trying to prove any one thing. What he’s trying to make the reader think is that Herrnstein, Lynn, and Jensen never came up against any serious criticism, which is more evidence that he’s simply out of his league with the ten minutes of Google that would be required to learn the facts.

“… in front of the likes of David Duke, he argues that white women’s birth canals are larger than black women’s, allowing white women to give birth to larger-brained babies.” It’s certainly a shocking claim, but I wonder why no one bothers to even try to disprove it. Could it be because leftists would rather herd people with shocks than try to inform?

“As superintendent of something called the Eugenics Record Office, Laughlin’s testimony before Congress helped pass the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924. (“The Jew is doubtless here to stay,” Laughlin confided to his associate Madison Grant, “and the Nordic’s job is to prevent more of them from coming.”)” Funny, then, that he supported a law which did not put any special limitations on Jews, or even recognize them as a category. Then again, people who haven’t read the law probably don’t know that the country with the most generous quota was Germany.

“These are people who openly admired the people who committed the worst crime in human history.” I wonder if Metcalf read visited the Pioneer Fund website. “They never disavowed that admiration or denounced that crime.” Oh yeah, I’ll bet my bottom dollar that Metcalf did some intensive quote-mining to see if anyone in Pioneer Fund ever said anything against mass murder.

“If maybe, just maybe, the inability to utter one word of acknowledgment or apology or remorse…” Just one word of “acknowledgement”? Like, Rushton’s name in the bibliography? In fact H&M do express regret over the disproportionate importance people place on intelligence, but it’s difficult to defend a book to people who are forbidden to read it.

“Have I ceased to be a liberal “in the classical sense”?” Yes.

* A reader writes:

Saw Pinker’s lecture [on the Cochran-Harpending theory of the evolution of Ashkenazi Jewish high intelligence] last night, it was great. I didn’t feel like taking frantic notes like I was back in school so I quickly came to terms with the inevitability that I’d forget most of it. But I enjoyed it while it was happening. Though not even Pinker could prevent the most technical aspects from blurring beyond my comprehension, the talk overall was very much in his clear, amusing, engagingly constructed writing style.

Noah Feldman was the moderator and he asked if potentially “dangerous” ideas shouldn’t be airtight before they can be published.

Funny how nobody asked that question before whooping up Steven D. Levitt’s now-discredited abortion-cut-crime theory for the last six years… “A lie goes halfway around the world before the truth gets its boots on.”

As I recall, Pinker basically said “Maybe, good question, but no.” I didn’t quite understand how the theories are going to be sufficiently tested if they aren’t allowed into the open until they no longer require testing. Maybe Feldman meant “in popular venues like New York magazine” as opposed to “obscure scientific venues where people are comparatively safe from politics.”

Funny how the best overall critique of Levitt’s theory appeared in Slate.com within days of his theory first surfacing in the media. In contrast, professional economists were largely missing in action for years.

But it wasn’t clear and Pinker seemed to be saying No either way. (Feldman was asking the question in a fairly nonpartisan manner, by the way; he didn’t seem at all to be arguing in favor of the withholding.)

Since it was the segment that I think inspired the most questions, I would say one of the main sources of interest to the audience were the anecdotes Pinker told which went counter the idea that Jews are intellectually accomplished because their culture/parents put so much emphasis on academic achievement (amusingly, Pinker introduced this question as “Jewish Genes or Jewish Mothers?”).

Funny how Jennifer Senior in New York denounced attributing Jewish IQ to “Jewish genes” as a “stereotype,” when her preferred explanation was “Jewish mothers.” Nothing stereotypical about that concept!

One was a quote from Noam Chomsky’s mother describing her reaction to her son’s decision to study linguistics: “I go up and down the street all the time and I never see a sign that says: ‘Help Wanted: Linguist.’”

Pinker seemed to be saying that an emphasis on education to the extent that education helps one succeed in life is not the same as a love of intellectualism for its own sake. So if the latter is a characteristic of Jews it’s not the result of parents concerned about financial viability it’s the result of raw intelligence desiring a sufficiently stimulating outlet. The audience seemed to be rebelling against this idea somewhat.

I’d sympathize with the audience. Jews definitely have a tradition of unprofitable scholarship. Marx, for instance, was always dunning his capitalist relatives for financial support in angry letters that assumed that they had a duty to support a genius like himself.

It reminded me of John McWhorter responding in the paperback of Losing the Race to the critiques that, contra his argument that blacks don’t take enough interest in academics, blacks care very much about education because they realize it’s a means of economic success. McWhorter emphasized that he didn’t mean that they didn’t get the practical value of a degree but rather that intellectualism for its own sake is what makes one do well in school.

My impression is that the intellectual orientation of blacks isn’t bad, when you adjust for IQ. I’d guess that African-Americans are significantly more intellectually oriented than Mexican-Americans, who have a higher average IQ. Even adjusting for their high IQs, I’d guess that Ashkenazi Jews were the most intellectually oriented group on Earth, with the French in second place.

But, as Pinker seemed to be saying, that’s the reverse of the real cause and effect—being into intellectualism for its own sake is the result of having a highly intelligent mind, and a highly intelligent mind is the most important thing for doing well in school, more so than “Jewish Mothers.”