The recent critique at Human Varieties of Cosma Shalizi's celebrated 2007 attack on the g factor theory of intelligence has led to some fascinating discussions in the comments at Metafilter and Noahpinion, economist Noah Smith's blog.
The discussions in the comments at those two sites are not fascinating in the sense that they advance our understanding of this complex and hard to grasp topic, which they do not. Instead, they represent state of the art conventional wisdom on the topic of IQ. It would be fun to do a factor analysis of the comments to see what are main factors in the standard prejudices of the educated. Candidates for major factors represented in the comments would likely include:
Hate
Projection of Hate
Who? Whom? thinking
Arrogance
Ignorance
Ad Hominem
Guilt by Assoication
Hypocrisy
Lack of Self-Awareness
Lack of Self-Awareness
Posts
12 comments:
Noah Smith is an economist with a background in the sciences, not a computer scientist.
i know this may be demonstrating some serious isteve ignorance, but could somebody explain to me the definition of "who? whom?" i don't understand that one.
Noah (an economist, by the way) discussed things largely in terms of objective mathematics (with some amusing trolling, but that's not part of his argument). But for all Steve's adoration of mathematical reasoning, he's incapable of grappling with Noah's fairly elementary arguments, because he's an ignoramus. So we get this worthless post with a list of Steve's favorite whines.
Steve,
I find you indefatigably amicable nature and Buddha like serenity very admirable. I would have gone to town on those self righteous nitwits if they spoke about me half as rudely as they did to you.
"But for all Steve's adoration of mathematical reasoning, he's incapable of grappling with Noah's fairly elementary arguments, because he's an ignoramus."
And Noah (and Shalizi) are not themselves ignoramuses when it comes to psychometrics? Why is it, do you think, that Shalizi has now gone silent on the issue of g and IQ? Do you really imagine that those who understand these things have not themselves heard the sorts of arguments offered up by Shalizi and Noah -- and their ignorant inspiration, Stephen Jay Gould -- many a time, and understand why they aren't going anywhere interesting? Why do you think Shalizi hasn't published this supposedly devastating critique in some major journal which addresses such issues?
In the end, unless one is an expert oneself, one must go with the authorities on a given issue who make the most sense, and seem to have made the most correct predictions in the past. One need not understand every argument or every objection.
The thing about Jensen and the other "g-men" is that they seem to be making all the correct predictions. They said that The Gap is not going to reduce terribly much because at least half, if not more, derives from genetics. And indeed The Gap seems to be reducing nowhere at this point -- not even in the second generation of Affirmative Action students.
Where is the evidence that environment is doing anymore a damn thing for the Gap, despite society's rather desperate efforts to improve it?
Whom do you trust -- the guys who never seem to get things right, or the guys who seem to get nearly everything right?
And, beyond that, Noah's arguments really are just dumb. He imagines a scenario in which people have two underlying cognitive abilities which are uncorrelated, but which are tested to a degree in all subtests of an IQ test, thereby providing for a general factor of some size. But if this were so, why can no one devise a test that taps into those abilities independently? God knows how desperate people (like Sternberg) have been to create such a test -- but they just can't pull out important factors other than one. The history of psychometrics is littered with such failed attempts. Who cares if one can build a model with multiple distinct abilities if they can't be extracted in real life? Why believe in multiple distinct abilities when all one can really manage to distinguish is just one? Sure, in principle there might be many such abilities mischievously hiding behind "g", but why not take a hint from Occam's razor and assume for the nonce just one?
Actually, though, there is at least one way one can say that multiple independent entities do indeed lie behind "g", though I don't think it's what Shalizi had in mind. Those independent entities are called genes.
x said: i know this may be demonstrating some serious isteve ignorance, but could somebody explain to me the definition of "who? whom?" i don't understand that one.
"Who? Whom" was originally coined by Lenin, as a shorthand for the Marxist worldview that somebody "who" will always dominate somebody else "whom". Steve uses this phrase to resolve inconsistencies in the otherwise contradictory liberal worldview that dominates the press.
For example in this old iSteve post, he explains how liberals' love of environmentalist red tape is entirely contingent on whom the red tape targets. When government power "who" attacks some oil company "whom", the regulations are good and proper. The same government "who" attacking light rail "whom" is out of line.
We can see "who whom" thinking pretty clearly by contrasting the Trayvon Martin story and the Omar Thornton story. When the Trayvon Martin story broke, elite opinion's sympathy was clearly on the side of Trayvon Martin, who was shot in self-defense by the whitish George Zimmerman. We were witness to hundreds of stories about the saintlike Trayvon's murder at the hands of a cold-blooded racist. Even the President of the United States compared Trayvon Martin to his own hypothetical son.
By contrast, when a black man named Omar Thornton murdered 8 of his white coworkers, the press's sympathy was with Thornton. We were subjected to stories like this just digging for a way to blame the murder on the victims.
The circumstances of these killings were completely irrelevant to elite popular opinion. The only factor that mattered in elite opinion was the race of the killer "who" and the victims "whom".
Today, I left my office and went downstairs to get my shoes shined by Billy, the black man who has, for the past 28 years, been shining my shoes. He is 62 years old. His son was also helping to shine shoes. I have known his son for nearly twenty years. Billy proudly announced that in May, his son would be getting his MBA. His son, who had graduated high school in 1999, had obtained a degree in finance in 2006. Yet, he was still shining shoes. Because I knew that Billy had five children, I asked about them. As of today, he has (at age 62) 25 grandchildren, 23 great-grandchildren, and, so far, 4 great grandchildren. He explained to me that he had fathered his first child at age 14. Insofar as I can tell, Billy has now contributed 57 government-dependent citizens to our population, none of whom have the grey matter necessary to support themselves.
".. none of whom have the grey matter necessary to support themselves."
Thankfully, that's what you're there for. Praise the Lord!
Anon.
'See my earlier comment for a discussion.'
It would be fun
I guess fun, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.
i know this may be demonstrating some serious isteve ignorance, but could somebody explain to me the definition of "who? whom?" i don't understand that one.
Identity Politics.
Duke said
>Steve,
I find you indefatigably amicable nature and Buddha like serenity very admirable<
In print, Steve is like Aristotle's Magnanimous Man. It's a major reason why he rules.
Once in a while I comment that Steve ought to leave the truly shrill sarcasm to us mean girls and boys in the peanut gallery, but his seldom stabs at it seem to amuse him still. Well, the M Man follows no opinion but his own.
(Damnably, the interwebs don't reproduce the relevant passage from Nicomachean Ethics AFAIK, just excerpts embedded in various people's dubious essays.)
Why is anon posting tolerated?
If one has the brains to comment, make him use a handle.
Dan Kurt
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