Steven Pinker opens “The Blank Slate” by quoting evenhanded passages from three controversial books. The only one I had heard of before Pinker was The Bell Curve. In high school english class we had the Norton Reader, which contained several selections decrying the book, sometimes as emblematic of what’s wrong in our society. There were no actual selections from the book itself. I marked it as a book I’d have to read someday. Having enjoyed the Blank Slate I picked up one of the Terrible Trio, Judith Harris’ the Nurture Assumption. I still consider it the best science writing I’ve ever come across and thought my own mother might enjoy a bit of it, but she didn’t get far before being so offended by the premise that she refused to consider the evidence. I underlined the godhead of the notorious trinity and wondered what shock-value it contained. Thanks to Chip Smith I found out in short order: something far less polemical than either Pinker or Harris. Before diving in I’d like to look the gift-horse in the mouth by noting that my copy is missing endnotes 23-25 of chapter 22, and there is a citation of “Wilson 1972” in Appendix 7 which has no match in the bibliography. This only makes me more curious about what I’m missing, so I’d appreciate it if someone in the comments with a complete version filled in the gaps.
The Bell Curve is just what I’d want in a serious analysis of a controversial social issue. It’s a continuous barrage of graphs and tables so that the authors can’t be accused of weaseling about with anecdotes and opinions. It has a section titled “Statistics for People Who Are Sure They Can’t Learn Statistics” as the first appendix and shorter explanations in the text. There are sections boxed off from the main text to more fully explore some issues that a number of readers might ignore, but also an encouragement at the beginning of their most controversial section that they assume many will start at to read the preceding material if one has not done so. While most of the firestorm over the book focused on race, they point out that such a tiny portion of variation in our society is due to variation between races that setting them all at the same median would hardly remove any of the problem (other than perhaps how we think about it). But nobody wants to talk about the tyranny of the glib. They also point out how irrelevant the argument over genetic contribution is when our inability to reshape IQ is so glaring.
Chip left a group-blog to form his own precisely over a dispute about the book, with his first non-introductory post at the Hoover Hog starting the series You Me and The Bell Curve, saving me the trouble of writing a longer and different post. Check it out: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4.
I’ll end my own discussion of the book itself where it ends. The final chapters have predictions on how society will develop from here (with “here” being 1994). Without the evidence right at their fingertips they are on less solid ground than previously in the book. The “invisible migration” has become more visible with books like The Big Sort, but not all their guesses hold up as well. The lines between “liberal” and “conservative” have not come to blur (any more than they previously did), rather the political parties have become more partisanly divided than before. As it is only the elite that have any ideology at all, the political dominance of an elite far removed from the masses would make that more likely. They draw on the same data about the rise of private arbitration and security services that Bruce Benson did in The Enterprise of Law, but extrapolations based on that were derailed when falling crime rates improved the stature the criminal justice system, and so today such dreams of privatization are still unthinkable to most. The elite have not embraced a fear-driven Latin American style of conservatism of the sort I describe here, but have become more indifferent to the underclass and relatively concerned with inequality between the rich and super-rich. Strict policing and high incarceration rates remained even after the drop in crime, but it is hard to find evidence there is a more widespread law’n’order attitude among the general public than at the time of the book’s publication rather than inertia or a ratchet effect. There has not been any move toward eliminating mandatory sentencing for any drug offenses, and putting excess prisoners in camps rather than cells is merely an eccentricity of Sherriff Joe Arpaio. The underclass has not become more spatially concentrated, but rather gentrification and section 8 housing has removed much of it from potentially valuable real-estate. Racism has not become more virulent or more open. I suspect the optimistic last chapter owes more to Murray the bleeding-heart communitarian than Herrnstein the elitist. Jeffrey Friedman attacked Charles Murray’s book “What it Means to be a Libertarian” here for advocating both libertarianism and communitarianism under the guise of having justification through empirical evidence when they really rest on his personal preference. Trends of increasing centralism, credentialism and complicated rules have not reversed and “marriage” benefits have only expanded, with “child support” being taken from fathers who can prove with DNA evidence that they are of no relation to the child. There was some effort made toward changing immigration law to be more merit-based and with less family-unification, but it came to nought. On the plus side, the EITC has risen faster than inflation. Despite all their other recommendations being ignored, society has not degenerated terribly. Perhaps I speak too soon though.
You may be asking now, “What does this have to do with Glenn Loury”? I’ll tell you. I’ve said before that I strangely find myself a fan of him despite our large political differences. In a recent diavlog with John McWhorter he nostalgically recalled his own days as an out-of-place “black conservative”, and the sidebar helpfully provides a short biographical profile of Loury recounting his ideological journey. It’s not a perfect one, as it claims Richard Herrnstein came out with a book in 1998 when he died shortly before the 1994 release of The Bell Curve and his book with James Q. Wilson was released in 1985, two years before the bio notes Wilson & Loury co-edited a book together.
During the 80s, when neo-conservatism was in its ascendancy and still of some value, he joined it in promoting personal responsibility as the best medicine for the black community. At the same time he was secretly hanging out in the slums to score drugs. After his arrest he was born again in Christ, and credits that with saving his marriage. It was in that context that he wrote a critical review of The Bell Curve rejected by Commentary but published by National Review. His objections to the Bell Curve begin with skepticism of the explanatory power of social science itself (Loury is currenty Professor of the Social Sciences). He is dispirited by the authors’ reductionism and mechanistic view of humanity, which is insufficiently humanist. Despite being an economist, he must question the utility of his discipline when the stakes are so high (and by that he’s not referring to their policy recommendations, which Loury claims there are plenty of good reasons to support). He pooh-poohs their “[o]bserving a correlation between a noisy measure of parenting skills […] and some score on an ability test”, when as the authors point out most social science (messy by nature) rests on lower correlations than so much of what they present in their book, and there are so many significant correlations between social phenomena we are interested in and those dreaded words: IQ. At any rate the energized religious Right, perfectly aware unlike those bad science men that we have souls and free-will, will fortunately reject Murray & Herrnstein with “a spiritual argument” that social scientists may find hard to understand. He even quotes Vaclav Havel using one of Lawrence Auster’s favorite (and one of my least favorite) words: “transcendence”.
That was then. This is now. Read the bio and you will find that Loury has rejected the religion that once served to support him and shape his views. “He found it increasingly difficult to reconcile his religious beliefs with his faith in rationality and science”. The bio ends with a quote from him that his discipline, social science, is “[a]bout being changed by reason”. An admirable change, in my view. A crisis of faith is great for changing one’s mind, and possession of faith is a sign that it’s necessary. I wonder if there’s a bottom line he’s had second thoughts about. Has he changed his position on the Bell Curve? Not as far as I know, and since he’s moved firmly into the left’s camp (and I think he would prefer that word to “liberal”) and currently views his prior focus on “autonomous communal capacity” as mistaken, that’s doubtful. It is of course the case that Murray & Herrnstein thought the actions of “the IRS […] the police […] cities and states” were important enough that their suggestions were necessary for improvement, but they doubted their capacity to significantly and durably alter IQ absent very extreme measures.
Loury has recently released a book titled “Racial Stigma, Mass Incarceration, and American Values”. He states in the above diavlog with McWhorter that he doesn’t like the term “structural racism” and it wouldn’t have been introduced if it was up to him, but whatever the name that’s the topic he’s interested in. I certainly agree that this is a large problem that we’ve been content to ignore. I favor some fairly radical changes ranging from at minimum abolishing all “victimless crimes” to (with a nod to Bruce Benson) directly attacking the political clout of the prison-industrial complex by replacing criminal with civil law. I haven’t read the book, but I’m wary of the mention of “American Values”. Do those values prohibit taking into account the Unmentionable Factor which transcends (I couldn’t help but use that word) even race? And what of other individual differences that don’t show up on an IQ test? As the Bell Curve will tell you, they do exist and are significant. Does Loury attribute his own arrest while a Harvard shining star to “structural racism” these days, or was his immediate assessment correct? Loury was correct to doubt that the masses (religious Right or otherwise) would shun certain ideas. Think of Herrnstein then or Judith Harris later. Does he really think that after being burned before with the Warren Court and Great Sixties Freakout they’ll be willing to heed an academic telling them that their punitive policy preference is disguised racism? My hunch is that Robin Hanson is correct, and our “American Values” are more what we want to be associated with than actually hold. Like Naomi Wolf (and I don’t intend that comparison to be disrespectful), I think Loury has his heart in the right place but it won’t come to much without a head like Herrnstein’s.
November 21, 2008 at 5:41 am
I note that the Overcoming Bias post you reference gets this charming comment from your “Hopefully Anonymous”.
Basically, as far as I am concerned scientist = swine.
November 21, 2008 at 1:18 pm
J.C. Lester criticizes Friedman from a critical rationalist perspective here:
http://www.la-articles.org.uk/friedman.htm
Basically, he thinks Friedman is demanding perfection from libertarianism, aka Justificationism.
November 21, 2008 at 1:51 pm
“I think Loury has his heart in the right place”
The heart is an engine forged from the ashes of a dead star. It has no other functions.
The question is not whether the heart is in the right place, but if the brain is – and whether it functions properly.
When people talk about “hearts”, they’re usually referring to a superficial and maudlin sentimentality, an eager acceptance of impulse and rejection of self-restraint.
November 21, 2008 at 3:19 pm
I realize that the impoverishment of the English language fulfills some need for a spurious precision on your part, Mr. Melendwyr, but “heart” in this instance is not to be taken literally. It is what we call a “metaphor” or a “symbol”. For example, if I say that you “suck” I do not mean this literally. What I intend to convey is that you are a moral and intellectual vacuum, from which not even light can emerge, and that you consequently spread darkness wherever you go.
Hope that helps!
November 21, 2008 at 3:33 pm
I am fully aware of both metaphor as a rhetorical technique and the meaning of the specific metaphor in question.
But I suppose someone as so filled with hubris and contempt as to suggest that those who practice science are wretched, mindless, greedily consuming, and seeking only to satiate their collections of profane and revolting hungers, would have difficulty appreciating the nuances of others’ language use.
November 21, 2008 at 6:25 pm
Hopefully Anonymous has said his current focus is on obtaining large amounts of wealth and letting other people advance science. He is not a bad science man, just a bad man.
I suppose it is a stupid phrase, but I think I got the point across. Intentions cannot make up for a shortcoming in clear thinking.
November 22, 2008 at 12:45 am
Actually, I believe that I referred to scientists as “whores” in another post. Which is another metaphor, and, admittedly, unfair to legitimate sex wo5rkers.
November 22, 2008 at 12:46 am
But, yeah, “wretched, mindless, greedily consuming, and seeking only to satiate their collections of profane and revolting hungers” works for scientists too.
November 22, 2008 at 1:37 am
a bad person. a very bad person
November 22, 2008 at 5:36 am
lung has a far out son!
(do not listen, caledonian it will pop your tiny brain!)
November 22, 2008 at 9:32 am
More to the point – why all the flirting of nerds and “third culture” types (are they not the same?) with racialism? Are you worried that teh minorities will gobble up your grant money? The Moldbugger carefully steers readers (often via mere anecdotage) towards the reimposition of segregation, although he is very coy about it. Why is no surprise that Rollins, enemy of natural rights, is also a Holocaust revisionist? And why do you all constantly play the phony “dangerous ideas” card, as if the content of an idea is less important than how “shocking” it is?
November 22, 2008 at 11:34 am
Somewhat related, E.O. Wilson gets pwned, here.
http://obsidianwings.blogs.com/obsidian_wings/2008/10/e-o-wilson-on-b.html
(from the comments section)
November 22, 2008 at 12:10 pm
I am interested in “dangerous ideas” because I think they under-receive attention relative to their content.
Both Moldbug and I work in private sector software development, so grant money is not an issue. As a tenured Harvard professor Herrnstein claimed he had an obligation to tell the truth. Most tenured professors did not consider that a good excuse at the time.
Hilzoy objects that Wilson is ignorant of ethical philosophy. As I regard ethical philosophy as basically an empty field, I don’t consider it much of a mark against him.
November 22, 2008 at 12:47 pm
I am interested in “dangerous ideas” because I know that others will neglect them due to the possible consequences of thinking and speaking about them freely.
It is especially important to be aware of things that have been censored or repressed, because they’re likely to contain important concepts or even truths that the PTB find inconvenient.
“Hilzoy objects that Wilson is ignorant of ethical philosophy.”
Ah yes, the Courtier’s Reply argument. As little as I think of PZ, he hit the nail on the head, there.
As you don’t need to know any “philosophy of science” to conduct science, I fail to see why knowledge of “philosophy of ethics” should be needed to think and speak about ethics. I can certainly see why philosophers might want people to believe that their fields are necessary, in the same way I can see how ancient priests might want people to think they were needed to bring back the sun and ensure a satisfactory harvest.
November 22, 2008 at 6:06 pm
Was the third book of the “Terrible Trio” Sociobiology or something else?
November 22, 2008 at 8:23 pm
It was “A Natural History of Rape” by Randy Thornhill and Craig Palmer.
November 22, 2008 at 11:57 pm
“Why is no surprise that Rollins, enemy of natural rights, is also a Holocaust revisionist? And why do you all constantly play the phony “dangerous ideas” card, as if the content of an idea is less important than how “shocking” it is?”
Jesus, you fucker. Have you never heard of art? Or even rock & roll? Murray and Herrnstein wrote a beautiful and important book. And Murray, at least, cares. I am as sure of this as I can be of my kitten’s soft and perfect love.
Shock is boring. Dangerous ideas matter precisely because they are worth hating. To borrow a line from Sotos, “there are reasons for everything.” I’m interested in questions. And triggers. And I’ve lost friendships over this shit.
November 23, 2008 at 2:56 am
Ah. This.
Thomas Joiner, refusing to consider an adaptive theory of suicide, despite the fact that it explains his entire model: “. . . I do not much like this adaptive suicide view; my own dad died by suicide and the idea that he was an actual burden is offensive. [Self-sacrifice] may have been adaptive under certain conditions in the course of human evolution, but we will never really know. Most important, it does not matter now.”
As if (a) that’s a good reason to reject a theory, and (b) the bloody truth “doesn’t matter now.”
More closely related to the Bell Curve business: Lawrence Summers got canned by Harvard for telling (nay, considering) the truth. The president of MIT at the time, Chuck Vest, was widely praise for telling pretty lies on the same topic. Fuck that. I think the truth is important, even if it’s ugly and against my personal interests.
November 23, 2008 at 4:23 am
Chip Smith says –
Ah, the tattered corpse of eighties alterno-industrialn ‘zine culture raises itself from beneath a pile of used syringes and clotted razor blades to proclaim “I am still relevant!” before collapsing in a coughing fit and muttering something about “high weirdness by mail.” Well, maybe “anti-natalism” will earn a mention in ANSWER ME! Oh, wait…
It is interesting how hipster types at first condescending about the fringe ideas they play with, and then often slowly become enslaved by them
Awww. Listen to your kitten. It’s soft and perfect love will save you.
November 23, 2008 at 2:15 pm
As I tried, unsuccessfully it seems, to explain on that other thread, science is a about comprehension rather than materialistic accomplishment.
One hardly knows why Mr. Sabotta cannot appreciate our efforts to promote understanding.
Understanding does not lead to tolerance, but awareness of truth will tend to save time annd energies expended in writing clever and ironic, but pointless insults.
November 23, 2008 at 3:13 pm
The funniest thing about the Larry Summers thing was when the NYT and other papers reported on a study they claimed debunked Summers when it actually just confirmed what he had said. More gab about that here at TAOTP.
I discussed Lawrence Auster’s refusal to consider ideas for reasons of unpleasantness rather than likelihood of being true here.
November 24, 2008 at 2:07 am
The letter about Wilson reminds me of my time as an undergraduate student of cultural anthropology, during which I was often instructed on the wrongness of biological models of human behavior. What amused me most about it all was just how much these humanist academics resembled… mammals ferociously defending their territory from a rival pack.
That was precisely the kind of thought I was not supposed to think, but these kind of morally-outraged disputes are often rooted in struggles for academic territory: how dare an entomologist think he can understand human culture, that’s my job! As long as biologists keep pressing butterflies they’re fine, but they must not intrude upon the humanities priesthood, whose proper role it is to discourse upon the nature of the soul. It is analogous to the situation of Galileo; he only really got in trouble when he strayed into the realm of theology, by pointing out that his findings contradicted the Bible.
That said, I do often find the Just So stories and Flintstones scenarios of evolutionary psychology quite silly; I think Wilson’s sociobiology held far more promise. But for some reason people just weren’t ready to look at human society the same way we look at an anthill…
November 24, 2008 at 2:14 am
Oh, and: as to why some of us are drawn to ‘dangerous’ ideas, it is because we are aware that our society, like every society, attempts to blind its members to certain aspects of reality for the sake of social cohesion. It is only through forbidden ideas that one can attain a broader view. They must be subjected to skeptical inquiry, but then so must the conventional views.
November 24, 2008 at 3:21 am
Sabotta
“More to the point – why all the flirting of nerds and “third culture” types (are they not the same?) with racialism?”
It has nothing to do with flirting with racialism. That would imply that racialism came first — it most certainly did not. It was science that led me to books like TBC.
Are you really so thick-headed, that you can’t see a difference between authors like Murray, Watson or Jensen who help increase our understanding of the world and racial activists like Jared Taylor, Le Pen or David Duke who want to bring us back to the superstitions of the 19th century? I sure hope not.
I don’t care if people look at “the Bell Curve”, Global Warming, peak oil, porn, gay marriage, taxes, immigration, nuclear energy or war. Only two thing matter to me: 1) is the given evidence rational, empirical and valid, thus convincing (i.e. true) and 2) how can we increase human happiness with these facts considered?
November 24, 2008 at 3:43 am
Continued:
I believe Steven Pinker has the right attitude in the field of human biodiversity. He is open to the evidence and he wants more fair intellectual discussion.
No doubt that some of the Human Biodiversity stuff will prove to be wrong, imperfect or premature, but some of the evidence could be true. So, let’s test the hypothesis and see what’s true and what is not.
November 24, 2008 at 3:48 am
Dread Sister Y! Another victim has entered Your ghastly kingdom of shadows!
Heavenly, terrestrial and infernal night-enshrouded Sister Y, you who walk in the place of the tombs when the soft kittens howl, thirsty for the blood and terror of mortal men, moon of a thousand forms, all hail to you!
November 24, 2008 at 3:14 pm
Thanks, Sabotta, but I think that poor guy was a victim of the suicide prohibition and the dangerous fantasy of rescue it engenders. Clearly he expected rescue. If we had a policy of allowing suicides to die, sad people with a fantasy of rescue would know they couldn’t “signal for help” in potentially lethal way.
Ending the prohibition would be better for everyone.
November 24, 2008 at 3:25 pm
At least the man was honest enough to say that he wanted the burden hypothesis declared taboo because a relative had killed himself and the hypothesis was thus painful to him.
He didn’t possess enough intellectual integrity to refrain from demanding it, but he was at least upfront about his reasons for doing so. People who are beyond hope disguise their reasons from themselves, much less others.
November 30, 2008 at 1:31 am
I disagree that we have not yet found ways to raise IQ. IQ’s have been going up 3 pts per decade in the West since 1930, and head size has been increasing in tandem. See the Flynn Effect for more.
November 30, 2008 at 2:43 pm
Robert, IQs may have been raising but we don’t know why that is and it hasn’t been the result of design. Flynn doesn’t even think they represent real gains in g.
March 29, 2010 at 10:02 pm
[…] bandwagon of listing your top ten most influential books (Caplan, Wilkinson and Kieran all listed The Bell Curve, though not for the same reasons). I’m not going to jump on because I’m too young for […]
March 31, 2010 at 11:22 pm
[…] Red State is packed with them. There’s one on nearly every other page. I said in my review of the Bell Curve that it’s just the sort of book I would want for such a subject, but Red State takes it to an […]
December 30, 2018 at 7:29 pm
[…] had the best writing of any popular science text I’d come across. It was enough for me to suggest it to my mom, who did not care for its central message. As far as I know, Harris wasn’t writing much in her later years, but it is still sad when […]
November 6, 2019 at 5:59 pm
[…] it tends to occur on contemporary college campuses. He uses The Bell Curve as an example (which I previously discussed in relation to Loury), specifically the very heated objections to discussions of groups with lower average IQs than […]