The Bell Curve

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_Analytics
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Re: The Bell Curve

Post by _Analytics »

EAllusion wrote:Here you are attempting to pit yourself on the side of what research says and imply I'm challenging it....

Correct. I am not an expert in this field. In fact, I know very little about it. All I'm trying to do is understand what the expert consensus actually is. If studying Calculus makes significant improvement to your SAT score and/or IQ, that's great. Just show me the evidence.

EAllusion wrote:Murray does not think what you think on this point....

Of course not. All I have to go on is what he wrote in TBC. Of course he doesn't believe what he wrote. He is way too sinister to actually write what he believes in the book.

EAllusion wrote:I'm criticizing you for not accepting the consequence of what you say you believe. It's probably because your ideological views are coming into conflict with your desire to to champion The Bell Curve.

I have no desire to believe TBC. You think I do? Screw you. I'm just trying to call balls and strikes.

What boggles my mind is that you think you have this ringer argument where you think the belief that IQ is largely genetic logically implies that you must believe quality of education doesn't matter. That argument is so stupid it really doesn't deserve a response, and I'm genuinely surprised you keep repeating it.
It’s relatively easy to agree that only Homo sapiens can speak about things that don’t really exist, and believe six impossible things before breakfast. You could never convince a monkey to give you a banana by promising him limitless bananas after death in monkey heaven.

-Yuval Noah Harari
_EAllusion
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Re: The Bell Curve

Post by _EAllusion »

Analytics wrote:
EAllusion wrote:Murray does not think what you think on this point....

Of course not. All I have to go on is what he wrote in TBC. Of course he doesn't believe what he wrote. He is way too sinister to actually write what he believes in the book.

No. He never explicitly argued what you are inferring from him. Murray has written extensively about the relative futility of things like teaching calculus to people who score low on aptitude tests starting at a young age. He thinks that most people shouldn't go to college because teaching them is not helpful and makes them unhappy by providing a poor fit for their native skills. College, you may recall, is the place you go to learn things like how to do calculus.

Murray's point is that teaching high end math, outside of advanced programming for the relatively white relatively affluent high-IQ population, is not best practice because quality of schooling just doesn't matter that much and it is a poor fit for people who should be getting more blue collar job training. I once read him argue, bemused, that some philanthropist should just throw a ton a money at a a poor school district to see if they can get them to perform better with a knowing condescension that they will not. When confronting with the natural point that maybe we shouldn't spend so much trying otherwise, a point the libertarian Murray is actively encouraging in the entire trajectory of his work, you just presume the position that schooling can teach high school math well and drastically improve performance through sustained quality of education, but cannot do the same for SAT/ASVAB style math ability despite the obvious substantial overlap between those two things. But no where is this argued in the sources you are relying on. That's you wanting to accept two positions in tension with one another.

You, seemingly not liking the implications of Murray's work and views, decide to invent a position with no evidence and attribute it to experts despite citing no one in particular as favoring it.

What boggles my mind is that you think you have this ringer argument where you think the belief that IQ is largely genetic logically implies that you must believe quality of education doesn't matter. That argument is so stupid it really doesn't deserve a response, and I'm genuinely surprised you keep repeating it.
That's not what I argued at all. What I argued is that if quality of schooling doesn't improve what aptitude tests used as a proxy for IQ measure, and we recognize quality of schooling is actively trying to improve skills highly relevant to ability to take those tests, then that tells us that there isn't much value to variance in quality of schooling when it comes to things like teaching high end math. Good class, bad class: it's approximately the same for most people. The natural implication is to care a lot less about quality gaps in schooling when making funding decisions.
_EAllusion
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Re: The Bell Curve

Post by _EAllusion »

Sam Harris has now argued that he is no longer going to engage the far left because Ezra Klein (!) is just too dishonest. Ezra Klein, the poster-boy for good faith centrism with a modest liberal slant, has turned Sam Harris off of "the far left."

Nothing but straight shooters like Charles Murray from here on, I guess.
_EAllusion
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Re: The Bell Curve

Post by _EAllusion »

In reading about this, I recently learned that the Pygmalion effect is one of the phenomena that prefigures the modern replication crises. The Pygmalion effect refers to the finding that if you tell teachers in advance certain students are smart and others not, you can drastically affect their IQ scores. It was still taught when I was a a psych major, but I vaguely knew from around that time that it was on thin ice. That's why I instead relied on more robust, but more modest expectancy effect findings when talking about that.

It turns out that the original research cannot be replicated and it's probably bogus:

https://thenewstatistics.com/itns/2018/ ... on-effect/
_Some Schmo
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Re: The Bell Curve

Post by _Some Schmo »

EAllusion wrote:Sam Harris has now argued that he is no longer going to engage the far left because Ezra Klein (!) is just too dishonest. Ezra Klein, the poster-boy for good faith centrism with a modest liberal slant, has turned Sam Harris off of "the far left."

Nothing but straight shooters like Charles Murray from here on, I guess.

CFR

(I went looking for this and couldn't find it).
God belief is for people who don't want to live life on the universe's terms.
_Doctor CamNC4Me
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Re: The Bell Curve

Post by _Doctor CamNC4Me »

If you have all the time in the world like I do (when I'm not trading Bitcoin and becoming a billionaire - suck it, Bach) this is an incredibly engaging and loooooooooooong (4+ hours) interview between Joe Rogan and Sam Harris:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJ5_hAEsLkU

- Doc
In the face of madness, rationality has no power - Xiao Wang, US historiographer, 2287 AD.

Every record...falsified, every book rewritten...every statue...has been renamed or torn down, every date...altered...the process is continuing...minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Ideology is always right.
_Some Schmo
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Re: The Bell Curve

Post by _Some Schmo »

EAllusion wrote:Sam Harris has now argued that he is no longer going to engage the far left because Ezra Klein (!) is just too dishonest. Ezra Klein, the poster-boy for good faith centrism with a modest liberal slant, has turned Sam Harris off of "the far left."

Nothing but straight shooters like Charles Murray from here on, I guess.

I guess you're not going to provide references for this claim.

I just listened to Harris's postmortem on his conversation with Klein, and while he says he believes the far left is too far gone, I didn't hear anything about his supposed intention to no longer engage them in conversation.

I usually find you fairly even keeled, EA, but on this issue, you appear blinded by your own distaste for Harris, and you consequently have no credibility when speaking of him. You simply don't know what you're talking about here. Did you even listen to the conversation?

You should quit while you're ahead.
God belief is for people who don't want to live life on the universe's terms.
_EAllusion
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Re: The Bell Curve

Post by _EAllusion »

Some Schmo wrote:
EAllusion wrote:Sam Harris has now argued that he is no longer going to engage the far left because Ezra Klein (!) is just too dishonest. Ezra Klein, the poster-boy for good faith centrism with a modest liberal slant, has turned Sam Harris off of "the far left."

Nothing but straight shooters like Charles Murray from here on, I guess.

I guess you're not going to provide references for this claim.

I just listened to Harris's postmortem on his conversation with Klein, and while he says he believes the far left is too far gone, I didn't hear anything about his supposed intention to no longer engage them in conversation.

I usually find you fairly even keeled, EAllusion, but on this issue, you appear blinded by your own distaste for Harris, and you consequently have no credibility when speaking of him. You simply don't know what you're talking about here. Did you even listen to the conversation?

You should quit while you're ahead.


I only wrote a couple posts since I wrote the one you responded to. I hadn't even seen it until just recently. I'm not avoiding you.

I'm referring to his postmortem of his exchange with Klein that can be found here:

https://www.vox.com/2018/4/9/17210248/s ... pt-podcast

It's at the beginning of his podcast with Sean Carroll:

https://samharris.org/podcasts/124-search-reality/

In the lead-in housekeeping podcast, he goes on extensively about Klein acting in bad faith for accusing Murray of promoting racialist pseudoscience (which is true) and Sam Harris not appreciating that context when promoting him (which is also true), to justify not having a podcast with him. He calls his actions slanderous. In that context, he he spends some time talking about how someone as dishonest as Klein does not deserve to be engaged to set up a change of heart after putting it to a vote to note their upcoming exchange.

After his exchange with Klein, he reaffirms Klein's extreme dishonesty.

What Harris specifically says is that he has given up on reaching the "far left." He calls doing so a "delusion" and compares trying to reach them like trying to reach neo-Nazis. It's hopeless. He calls them "too far gone." By engage, I mean that he has given up on a serious exchange of ideas. This doesn't mean he won't deign to lecture or insult or talk. He says specifically he will talk with them, but it's pointless to think they can engage in fruitful discourse. It just means he's given up. He is willing to engage in the same way you are willing to engage DocCam. And he's not willing to engage in precisely the same way according to his comments.

The idea that Klein is "far left" is ridiculous, though. He isn't even "left." He's a centrist liberal.
_EAllusion
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Re: The Bell Curve

Post by _EAllusion »

If this now an "I'm being totally unfair to Sam Harris" thread, I'd like to point out this Twitter thread from Sam Harris to Gadianton in which Sam Harris purports to derive an ought from an is:

https://Twitter.com/SamHarrisOrg/status ... 6529009665

This is arguably the single worst example of bad philosophy I've seen from someone who (some) people treat as having serious things to say about philosophy.

I thought you might get a kick out of it Gad. I ran into it when reading up on some of his comments regarding his book on ethical theory.
_Some Schmo
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Re: The Bell Curve

Post by _Some Schmo »

EAllusion wrote:In the lead-in housekeeping podcast, he goes on extensively about Klein acting in bad faith for accusing Murray of promoting racialist pseudoscience (which is true) and Sam Harris not appreciating that context when promoting him (which is also true), to justify not having a podcast with him.

This is a pretty good example of why it's difficult to take what you say on this subject seriously. Both your parentheticals are highly debatable. This thread is 17 pages long, ffs.

So your claim here is that Harris didn't understand the controversy surrounding the book prior to having Murrey on his podcast? This is what you want to posit?

If so, I don't think you've ever honestly listened to what he has to say. It's such an outrageous and cynical misreading of the situation, I'm not sure where to begin.

EAllusion wrote:He calls his actions slanderous. In that context, he he spends some time talking about how someone as dishonest as Klein does not deserve to be engaged to set up a change of heart after putting it to a vote to note their upcoming exchange.

So, if you saw someone publicly misrepresenting your comments and you'd been the subject of prior campaigns from other assholes misrepresenting you in similar ways, you wouldn't be wary?

EAllusion wrote:After his exchange with Klein, he reaffirms Klein's extreme dishonesty.

What Harris specifically says is that he has given up on reaching the "far left." He calls doing so a "delusion" and compares trying to reach them like trying to reach neo-Nazis. It's hopeless. He calls them "too far gone." By engage, I mean that he has given up on a serious exchange of ideas. This doesn't mean he won't deign to lecture or insult or talk. He says specifically he will talk with them, but it's pointless to think they can engage in fruitful discourse. It just mean's he's given up. He is willing to engage in the same way you are willing to engage DocCam. And he's not willing to engage in precisely the same way according to his comments.

Well, that's not the impression your initial post gave, but this is a possible interpretation of his postmortem.

I don't blame Harris for his exasperation with Klein. The guy had his head up his ass. I listened to the whole thing, and Klein never once addressed Harris's point in any real, thoughtful way. He kept insisting you can't talk about data on race without involving black people, or something equally incoherent and unrelated to the real topic. He listed several people he thought Sam should have on the show to talk about Klein's personal passions and ignored about 90% of what Sam said.

He wasn't as bad as Resa Aslan, but close. If I were in Harris's place, I wouldn't bother with him any more either. I admit, I have an issue with Harris's use of the term "far left" but I think much of what he said on that follow-up podcast was more out of exasperation than how he'll proceed to live his life going forward. Engaging people is what he's about. I've been listening to too much of what he has to say lately to think he's going to let this episode stop his from speaking to whomever, whether they deserve his attention or not (*cough creationists cough*). He's been doing it for years.
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