It is true it is a bit unfair to claim that the policies Murray were racist without providing context. Some of the research he used to back up his case definitely were but the policies he advocated for were for sure conservative but only racist by association (which is why I put it in parenthesis). Conservative values in the 1990s America were really really connected to race. The whole debate about “inner city crime” and the notion of the “welfare queen” were largely a dog whistle. And conservative policies which advocated for “tough on crime” and welfare elimination were most often doing so against a largely racialized group.

I admit this is far fetched and maybe unfair. However I’m hardly the only one to accuse this book of being racist. The Wikipedia page is full of accusations, ranging from the aforementioned data from racist studies used unapologetically, to its advocates receiving funding from organizations associated with white-supremacy.

EDIT: I also want to address why it is totally fair to advocate Mismeasure of Man as a counterargument to The Bell Curve. There is a level of scientific rigor which The Bell Curve fails and Mismeasure doesn’t. For example the studies used in The Bell Curve were—to put it bluntly—bad. The Bell Curve failed to go through peer-review, it misused concepts, relied on unbacked assumptions, reached a conclusion unrelated to the premise, etc. You might find that some of these criticism applies to Mismesure, but hardly all, and not nearly on the same level. As an objective—albeit arbitrary—measure, just look at the ratio of the Wikipedia articles for each book which is devoted to criticism and controversies. Almost the entire article about The Bell Curve goes into some controversies. If both books were criticized and surrounded in controversies, one was definitely worse then the other.

Normally I'm glad to have a good debate about whether Charles Murray is racist, but the point I'm trying to make here is that whether he is or not is irrelevant.

Here we are talking about class differences. That's the primary subject of The Bell Curve (indeed he only devotes a scant few pages to the subject of race) and the only thing relevant to this discussion. Even if he were racist, them implication that he would have nothing important to say on matters of class is absurd.

> just look at the ratio of the Wikipedia articles for each book which is devoted to criticism and controversies.

Wikipedia is a great source finding out that things exist and their connections to other things, but there is no reason to believe it is objective with regard to politically charged issues.

That is not to say that the criticisms are wholly without merit, but few are actually technical critiques of the data or analysis.

Which is actually kind of sad, because while the technical critiques may be good (I haven't the time yet to check) the non-technical critiques I've studied are pretty poor.

> If both books were criticized and surrounded in controversies, one was definitely worse then the other.

The counter argument to that is that going against the shibboleths of our modern era is going to get you more flak, regardless of whether you are right or not.

This does not mean that Murray is correct because he is going against the grain and gets a lot of negative attention. Simply that all of the negative attention tells you a lot less than you might otherwise hope.

Regarding The Bell Curve, it being a poor academic work (i.e. technical critiques) is probably the main reason it is so heavily criticized. It used deeply flawed studies to back up its case, the conclusions did not logically follow the premise, it relied on dubious assumption with weak justifications, etc.

The fact that it then goes on to advocate for conservative policies based on such a weak case is why people conclude it is simply a racist work masquerading as academic. In an alternative world where the premise wasn’t of such poor scientific quality and the findings were sound, I bet people would still criticize it, but the overall reaction would be different. We would be trying to find a way to accommodate groups of lower IQ. Social scientists would try to identify barriers and advocate for their removal etc.

However given this work’s poor scientific quality, the whole notion that this group different a) exists, b) is significant, c), is innate d) is immutable, and e) largely inherits, should simply be ignored as false. Our current scientific understanding does not allow us to conclude this, or at the very least. This book is wrong in reaching these conclusions.

I appreciate the civil perspectives of you both, and would be interested in seeing you two discuss this in written format. I'd admit to having a relatively poor view of Gould, but this is not an impression formed from particularly close reading.

> Regarding The Bell Curve, it being a poor academic work (i.e. technical critiques) is probably the main reason it is so heavily criticized. It used deeply flawed studies to back up its case, the conclusions did not logically follow the premise, it relied on dubious assumption with weak justifications, etc.

The main reason Murray gets criticized is for his alleged racism and his politics. The attempts I've seen to discredit his actual arguments tend to be more self-righteous than serious.

I haven't read all of The Bell Curve (though I have read the sections that deal with race) but I have read other works of his, as well as criticisms of those works, and to my layman's eyes I find little credit can be given to his critics. Indeed, Murray often goes to great lengths to highlight to what extent each of his claims can be supported by facts, and does a great deal to acknowledge where there is disagreement in the scientific literature. It may be that good critiques exist, but they are hard to find in the deluge of low quality hit-pieces.

> The fact that it then goes on to advocate for conservative policies based on such a weak case is why people conclude it is simply a racist work masquerading as academic

Frankly, this is why it's so hard to take his critics seriously. The only practical effect of the political Left's use of the label "racist" is to inhibit critical thought. We've spent much of this discussion talking about his alleged racism, when it still has nothing to do with the actual core thesis of The Bell Curve or my initial reasons for citing him.

> In an alternative world where the premise wasn’t of such poor scientific quality and the findings were sound, I bet people would still criticize it, but the overall reaction would be different. We would be trying to find a way to accommodate groups of lower IQ. Social scientists would try to identify barriers and advocate for their removal etc.

What do you think Murray's advocated policies entail?

Regardless, in a world in which people acknowledged group differences, there would still be genuine differences of opinion in how best to address those differences.

>However given this work’s poor scientific quality, the whole notion that this group different a) exists, b) is significant, c), is innate d) is immutable, and e) largely inherits, should simply be ignored as false. Our current scientific understanding does not allow us to conclude this, or at the very least. This book is wrong in reaching these conclusions.

That group differences exist is an incontrovertible fact. The extent to which those differences are driven by genetics is certainly up for debate, but Murray never claimed (and indeed, specifically argued against) that those differences were completely genetic.

The idea that genetics has no role to play in group differences is quite astounding, and attempts to defend that position tend to fall afoul of Lewontin's Fallacy[1].

[1]https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12879450/

> What do you think Murray's advocated policies entail?

He and Hernstein advocated for abandoning affirmative action, and divert funds away from supporting low IQ groups (e.g. welfare) into supporting high performance groups. This conclusion would always be debated among political lines as more left wing folks would argue against it in favor of accommodations, even in a world IQ was actual proven science.

> That group differences exist is an incontrovertible fact.

This is true, however the reason for this difference, and whether it is of societal significance, is up for debate.

I would argue that we should care more about SAT scores then IQ scores because SAT scores are actually used as an admission metric. These two correlate however I can just as well come up with a new metric which correlates with SAT and use that in my models in place of SAT, that doesn’t mean it is providing any additional info over SAT, nor that anyone should care about it.

[EDIT]

Or as M. C. Frey (2019) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6963451/ puts it:

> Finally, when we understand that the SAT is a reasonable measure of intelligence, we can use SAT scores as a proxy measure for time-consuming and sometimes unavailable traditional intelligence assessments, as dozens of researchers have been doing since 2004.

Although, I should say that Frey misses an important alternative interpretation of her conclusion here, which is to ask: “Why care about IQ if we can use SAT to measure the same thing?”

[/EDIT]

We do care about the group difference present in SAT scores, and we do care that high/low SAT scores seem to follow generations. However we see that as something to rectify. Nutrition, childhood led exposure, high noise levels all contribute to lower SAT scores, so we try to eliminate those. We could do the same for IQ scores, but why would you? If we found out that 50% of the variance of SAT scores were explained by genetics, who cares? The effect size is still tiny compared to other reasons why people score low on these test. Lets fix those.

Lewontin's Fallacy is a silly path to go down. You can draw taxonomy lines wherever you want. If you base that on a silly metric you get a silly taxonomy. Junk-in Junk-out still applies even if you subscribe to Lewontin's Fallacy. This is especially true in the study of human behavior.

Humans are a remarkably homogeneous species, we share almost all the same genes. Our experience varies way more then our genes. And alas, that is how most people split us into behavioral groups, e.g. by education, by socio-economic class, by occupation, by geographic region, etc. Group difference down these groups is way more interesting study then down gene make-up. And alas, this is where you find most research which actually contributes to policy change and further our understanding of the human mind.

EDIT 2: If you want to see for your self how poor the scientific quality of The Bell Curve is, I recommend you read the sources it cites. Of particular interests is the meta-alalyses by R. Lynn (1991) [Here is a summary https://youtu.be/UBc7qBS1Ujo?t=4256].

> He and Hernstein advocated for abandoning affirmative action, and divert funds away from supporting low IQ groups (e.g. welfare) into supporting high performance groups.

There are perfectly good reasons to support these policies that have nothing to do with being racist.

> This is true, however the reason for this difference, and whether it is of societal significance, is up for debate.

Agreed! But calling people with different conclusions on that question 'racist' is not debating. It is giving yourself an excuse not to have the debate, while doing nothing to convince the other side.

And Murray does not have a strong opinion about how much of group differences are attributable to genes. He only argues that they very likely play a role.

> I would argue that we should care more about SAT scores then IQ scores because SAT scores are actually used as an admission metric

Why do you think those are two separate things? There is not one single IQ test. Any test that is g-loaded is an IQ test. IQ is simply a way of representing a score on any test that measures intelligence. The SAT is an intelligence test, and you can represent scores on that test as a quotient.

> Lewontin's Fallacy is a silly path to go down.

It's a perfectly reasonable path considering you commit the same fallacy.

> Group difference down these groups is way more interesting study then down gene make-up.

There's no reason we can't study all of these things, including genetic differences in population.

> If you want to see for your self how poor the scientific quality of The Bell Curve is, I recommend you read the sources it cites. Of particular interests is the meta-alalyses by R. Lynn (1991) [Here is a summary...

I'll check out the video at some point, but it is very long so I'll have to find the time. A substantive critique would be appreciated.

Murray's most recent work on human diversity, Human Diversity, is also very much worth checking out, as it does far more to address issues, like race, that people seem to be so upset about.

If you want to hear from the perspective of someone who actual works in population genetics, you should checkout what Razib Khan has had to say on Murray's work.

The fact that genetic differences exist has nothing to say whether they matter. You can study those genetic differences all you want (like Razib Khan does[1]) but if you can’t show that these differences manifest in different behavior (which Murray tries to and has so far been unconvincing) then those differences don’t matter in the context of psychology. You can study it anyway, but you might just be looking for something akin to Russell’s Teapot[2]. While we don’t have conclusive evidence that genetics contribute a significant proportion of our behavior, then there is no reason to speculate around it as if it is a fact.

Now lets talk about Lewontin's Fallacy. First I’d like to note that Lewontin's Fallacy is not a logical fallacy. It is even debated whether we should call it a “fallacy” at all[3], especially when the metrics we use to group by are suspected to be biased. IQ is by no means a clean metric and we will never completely clear it of bias (even in a world were g was a proven fact, which it isn’t by a long shot). So if your metrics are biased and you measure a small group difference where inner-group difference is much larger then the inter-group difference, and the science is not conclusive in how exactly how this difference materialized in difference in behavior. Then applying Lewontin's Fallacy is silly at best (but much more likely it is disingenuous). If you insist that we should make a taxonomical distinction on such blurry lines your are just making an arbitrary choice. There are millions of equally blurry metrics which you could draw a million different lines. Why do you insist on IQ?

Finally lets talk about the difference between IQ and SAT. First of all Frey’s assertions that they are the same thing is actually a rather fringe on in the scientific community. They don’t correlate perfectly, they don’t even share a distribution, and they are designed to measure a different thing. The SAT authors repeatedly reject this:

> name change was meant "to correct the impression among some people that the SAT measures something that is innate and impervious to change regardless of effort or instruction.

—https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAT#Name_changes

1: Although from Razib Khan’s published works it looks like he is more interested in pumping the hype for consumer genomics and the exploring the cat genome then exploring human behavior through genetics, so he should not be taken as an authority—nor even an expert—in the intersection of genetics and psychology. I’m not aware of much research in this intersection, but if you want the intersection of biology and psychology, then the field of neuroscience has plenty. When I was studying the field over 10 years ago V. S. Ramachandran and Patricia Churchland were the big shots. Though this is largely off topic.

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot

3: Although I’d like to say that a group difference with small effect size is probably still worth studying in the field of medicine. Especially in subfields where most of our studies are conducted on a single demographic of white abled bodied men.

I realized that I’ve shifted the goal post quite a bit here. From “The policies advocated by Hernstein and Murray can be considered racist” to “IQ is a scientifically uninteresting construct”. Or as you say—quite truthfully to be honest:

> But calling people with different conclusions on that question 'racist' is not debating. It is giving yourself an excuse not to have the debate, while doing nothing to convince the other side.

I did this a little on purpose (as you have noticed) because frankly the latter is a much more interesting debate (which I merge from a nibling thread I started where I made this claim).

So to address your concerns that I claim Hernstein and Murray are racist in their book The Bell Curve. First, I never called them racists directly. I claimed that their policies can be considered racist in the cultural context of 1990s american politics. I also claim that they blatantly and unapologetically use racist studies to back up their claims. So they are racists by association, and their work is racist as a result.

If they had made a convincing argument about the heritability of IQ and it’s importance in explaining behavior, and omitted citing blatant works of scientific racism to back up their case, I would be more hesitant in calling this work racist. I would just say that their conclusion is wrong. That we would need to make accommodations for people with lower IQ. We should keep affirmative action despite it being counter-productive simply because it is the right thing to do, etc.

However they did make a very unconvincing case that this g-factor explains the group difference in intelligence between groups. And they did cite racist studies to back up their case. And on top of that they used rhetoric to advocate for conservative policies which falls in line with what racists used at the time.

So to summarize my views on this less interesting debate. I consider Hernstein and Murray’s policy proposals in The Bell Curve to be racist because a) they use an unconvincing argument based on racist studies to advocate for set of policies, which b) were widely shared by other people at the time which were doing so because of their own racist beliefs. However you are of course free to disagree with my conclusion, although I hope you can see that these two premises for that conclusion have some reason.