May 14, 2013

Guardian: "The real criminals" are Jencks, Borjas, and Zeckhauser

In The Guardian, distinguished psychometrician and Guardian columnist Ana Marie Cox, the original Wonkette, explains:
Indeed, as more details came to light, the more Richwine started to look like an earnest dupe – just a simple racist caught in a world he didn't create and couldn't understand. 
The real criminals here would seem to be Harvard, whose faculty is busy trying to avoid a conversation about whether they actually read Richwine's dissertation, and the insular world of Washington wonks, where you're not considered an "extremist" unless you disrupt lunch.

21 comments:

  1. I think you need to link to the actual Guardian article. Feel free to delete this comment.

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  2. Monkey Scopes Trial, 21st Century edition

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  3. Many opinion journalists are childless, especially the females. Joan Walsh, Ana Marie Cox, Ann Coulter, KJ Lopez, probably more. Cox was dumped by her husband when she hit 40. Not to mention all the gay men who seem to be far more prevalent than in the general population. This has to bleed into the anti-family bias of the press.

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  4. So Harvard didn't read it, and Richwine didn't write it, but all are guilty - guilty - guilty!

    No one has shown why the study is inaccurate.

    I guess it's inaccurate because nobody can make any money off of it.

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  5. I haven't discussed the issue much with strangers, but even my most anti-racist, IQ averse academic friends are appalled that Jencks, Borjas, and Zechauser didn't back their student after he got in trouble for research that they themselves approved. Well, maybe not appalled, but at least miffed at the breach of etiquette and lack of professional loyalty. I wonder how Harvard people (or "folks") are taking it.

    Academics have a bit of a gang (or guild) mentality, even if many are insecure hacks that eat their own. Has the real criminals' public disloyalty lost them any cred among the monks of the crimson cloister? Anyone in the know wanna chime in?

    -The Judean People's Front

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  6. bjdubbs said: Many opinion journalists are childless, especially the females. Joan Walsh, Ana Marie Cox, Ann Coulter, KJ Lopez, probably more. Cox was dumped by her husband when she hit 40. Not to mention all the gay men who seem to be far more prevalent than in the general population. This has to bleed into the anti-family bias of the press.

    Plus the whole stake in the future of the world thing seems in desperately short supply in the opinion biz, as oft noted in these parts.

    -The Judean People's Front

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  7. Criminals? The only criminals I can find in this whole kerfuffle are the millions of illegal aliens who would be the beneficiaries of the Gang of Eight.

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  8. Cox should go back to talking about anal sex. At lest it's something she understands.

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  9. This chick is hilarious, she is still quoting the American Anthropological Association's statement on race, as if it were as scientifically unimpeachable as the reality of tides. In her own country, geneticist and statistician A.W.F. Edwards has already blown the AAA's basis for that statement, Richard Lewontin's 1972 article about human diversity out of the water a decade ago ( Lewontin's Fallacy, 2003 ). Ever heard of " Lewontin's Fallacy " ? Of course she hasn't, it's BAD SCIENCE, which is a codeword for science that doesn't support her ideological preconceptions. Edwards and Cavali-Sforza pointed the flaws in this argument to Lewontin back at an International Congress of Genetics in 1963, when Lewontin first used this spurious argument, then published it and never mentioned Edwards and Cavali-Sforza's rebuttal. Richard Dawkins endorsed Edwards analysis in his book: An Ancestor's Tale.

    Richwine also has a "a fetish for the fake certainty of IQ tests suggest some problems right from the start" and "Many of the criticisms of Richwine's fraudulent research focus on his Strangelovian obsession with IQ tests – IQ is a metric of such dubiousness that almost no serious educational researcher uses it anymore". In other words people who believe in the fuzzy, vaporous ideas of Howard Gardener are scientific and people who think like Arthur Jensen are unscientific. If that doesn't sound the like blinkered ideological certainty of zealot I don't know what would be.

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  10. bjdubbs, funny the first thing I did was to go to wikkipedia to find out if she had kids.

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  11. That whole Guardian comment space is depressing.

    One group of Whites conducts priggish moral one-upmanship while nitpicking over the rebuttals of the White crime-thinkers of their opposing commentariat.

    Meanwhile, Browns and Blacks don't really care and replace us accordingly.

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  12. Looking at her byline picture, I must say that Ana Marie Cox looks a lot like Dana Carvey's the Church Lady on Saturday Night Live.

    Her arguments bear more than a passing resemblance to the Church Lady's, too...

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  13. Plus the whole stake in the future of the world thing seems in desperately short supply in the opinion biz, as oft noted in these parts.

    How so, JPF?

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  14. Ana Marie Cox's quoting the American Anthropological Association's statement on race as some kind of unanswerable condemnation of Richwine is pretty much the same as quoting the Inquisition to dismiss Galileo.

    No, I'm not saying Richwine's in the same league as Galileo. What I am saying is that Cox is relying on an ex cathedra judgment to refute any and all research that establishes the contrary.

    Hers is the blind faith of the bigot, nothing more.

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  15. Wonkette had some sweet jugs. Hope that doesn't make me a criminal too.

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  16. In The Guardian, distinguished psychometrician and Guardian columnist Ana Marie Cox

    ROTFL!

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  17. That whole Guardian comment space [Comment is Free, CiF for short] is depressing.

    One group of Whites conducts priggish moral one-upmanship while nitpicking over the rebuttals of the White crime-thinkers of their opposing commentariat.


    Its a thankless task trying to comment at the Guardian (try it) moderators (and some stasi commenters I assume) patrol endlessly sniffing out thoughtcrime. If you are lucky you only lose a few comments to deletion but sooner or later your ID will be zapped as well. And thats being as circumspect as possible without actually selling out completely. Its a tedious business starting a new ID every few days. Ive lost the will at the moment.

    I dont think the average CiF commenter realises just how well cocooned they are over there, protected from having to read anything that would disturb their cozy fantasy world.

    As you point out, the wonderful minorities the commentariat are so eager to carry water for are notable largely for their almost total absence.

    Comment is Free - a sick joke.

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  18. "Indeed, as more details came to light, the more Richwine started to look like an earnest dupe – just a simple racist caught in a world he didn't create and couldn't understand."
    -
    Jason Richwine didn't create the world?

    "The real criminals here would seem to be Harvard, whose faculty is busy trying to avoid a conversation about whether they actually read Richwine's dissertation, and the insular world of Washington wonks, where you're not considered an "extremist" unless you disrupt lunch."
    -
    But three other Harvard guys did?

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  19. Anonymous said:How so, JPF?

    As bjdubbs alluded to, many journos are childless. While the fecund are certainly no stranger to status signaling games and frivolous diversions, having children can force people to seriously grapple with important issues that would otherwise be trifling abstractions. I'm not a father, but I imagine that the eye-opening value of parenthood is akin to falling deeply in love and sticking around long enough to learn something. Professions such as policework, soldiering, and medicine might give even the careerist a peek at real human life, but have you read the younger scribes' drivel over at the Atlantic? As Dalrymple would say, it's all frivolity without gaiety.

    Especially for the careerists of the new journalistic class, consequential bonds of love and responsibility might be the only opportunity in their lives for contact with unvarnished reality. Having a living, breathing stake in the world brings people into an entirely different information ecology. It is easy for the world to be nothing but empty words and shitty, overly hopped craft beers until life forces it's way in.

    -The Judean People's Front

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  20. So the ideals of intellectual free enquiry and the pursuit of truth, fearlessly and never minding where it takes you - the essence of enlightenment values and the life blood of university research - mean absolutely nothing to Ms Cox.

    On another note, The Guardian never ever fails to challenge 'the latest report from the IPPR', (a Labour Party funded 'think tank'), which invariably says, after a good deal of bad-economics hocus-pocus that immigration 'benefits' the UK economy by X or Y billion pounds per year.

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  21. The part Steve excerpted is just too perfect--without seeing the rest of the post it would seem wry satire worthy of Mencken. This indie-rock fanzine chick/psychometrician's two-edged thesis is unwittingly brilliant.

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