The Bell Curve

▶ this video It's a 2 hour video essay that covers psychometry generally as a lens to understanding a book called the Bell Curve that was a flashpoint for questions about the validity of IQ science generally (but most especially how it applies to race). It took a good chunk of my Sunday to get through it, but it was really enjoyable and gave me a ton of insight into a ton of buzzwords and studies I had heard of but couldn't really dig my teeth into. I think with this topic, getting a briefer, less nuanced summary than something like this would be a mistake because of how much misunderstanding of these topics permeates popular culture. The video also provides a number of studies and books to keep going beyond the relatively breif 2 hours of content it provides. It uses the famed/infamous book the Bell Curve as a case study and delves into how they were originally created, how they are updated, how the term hereditery when used in genetics means something that is sometimes counter-intuitive to the definition used in popular culture (for example whether someone wears earings has high heritability, whereas having 2 arms has effectively zero herritability) the statistical meaninfullness of factorization (G-factor) of domains of IQ into a single numerical value, how these domains came to be defined, the current state of understanding regarding the local vs enviornmental source of IQ for individuals, how the Flynn effect was observed, etc. But to answer a bit of your earlier question. Wh

This video about the problems with The Bell Curve (a book about IQ and other things) does a lot to explain a lot of the problems with IQ: ▶ this video . The video is well-researched; I've been a long-time fan of the creator for putting out quality stuff. >and it definitely has a large genetic component There's a number of studies showing that IQ is "heritable", but this is different from saying it's genetic. The video above (around the 39:00 mark) and link both get into this point. Wearing earrings is highly "heritable" despite being an arbitrary social custom, and having 10 fingers is not "heritable". It's also important to avoid falling into the conclusion that many people take about IQ that it being heritable means that educational efforts to improve it are worthless: >Think about the relative heights of men in a poor village in an underdeveloped country 100 years ago. The average height for these malnourished men might be 5 feet 2 inches. The heritability in observed heights within this particular society can be quite high; men of tall fathers are on the average considerably taller than men of short fathers. However, this does not mean that a program of improved sanitation and nutrition could not significantly raise the average height of this group in a few generations.

Those two assumptions are not particularly well-supported by data or modern thought on capabilities. Even the construct of "IQ" is probably a post-hoc explanation of data rather than a predictive thing. If you want an hours-long discussion of that in the context of the book, The Bell Curve, have a look at: ▶ this video

I think this video by `Shaun` is informative and well-researched (articles and books are cited). It's long; the creator isn't especially succinct, but it's as entertaining as the material allows, and the subject's complex enough to warrant a video that's a couple of hours long. ▶ this video

> For most people, performance on one type of cognitive task (e.g. verbal reasoning) is highly correlated with performance on the other types of cognitive tasks. It's cool that that's your understanding, but you're wading into territory that gets people sterilized and killed. I have a lot of trust in science, but not here. This video was informative for me: ▶ this video For example, here's an IQ test; let's say its given to 5,000,000 Canadians, and 3,000 Texans (1): * What is the capital city of Canada? * Which Canadian province is the largest by land area? * Who is considered the "Father of Medicare" in Canada? * Name the two official languages of Canada. * Which Canadian team won the Stanley Cup in 2017? * What is the national sport of Canada? * What is the name of Canada's national anthem? * Name the famous Canadian dish made with fries, cheese curds, and gravy. * Who was the first Prime Minister of Canada? * In which Canadian city is the CN Tower located? I would expect a normal distribution for Canadians, but for the Texans to score in the bottom quintile (regardless of "general intelligence"). (1) I asked ChatGPT to come up with this test. (edit: formatting)

>Ironicaly this is never mentioned, they just see this is a "many more men can have a higher iq distrubution wise due to the male gauss tail stretching out further than womens, so this is sexist to say that men are smarter". Because many advocates of GMVH are only interested in justifying the gender imbalance in leadership positions biologically, dismissing any well known social factors (e.g. competence rating on double blind fake CVs)? "Feminists say GMVH means men are all smarter" is a gross oversimplification of the situation. If you have 2.5 hours to spend on a video essay, I'd very much recommend "The Bell Curve"[1], a breakdown of the book of the same name. Not so much for the racism part, but for the background on the construction of IQ. [1]: ▶ this video

'Dr. Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health, said that most experts on intelligence “consider any black-white differences in I.Q. testing to arise primarily from environmental, not genetic, differences.” Dr. Collins said he was unaware of any credible research on which Dr. Watson’s “profoundly unfortunate" statement would be based.' [0] I think this video [1], does a good job of attacking a lot of race science and intelligence, though at 2.5 hours long it may be a bit too thorough. [0] link [1] ▶ this video edited for formatting

No the whole book is controversial. It's a political argument for dismantling the welfare state disguised as a review of science. They laundered a bunch of work by racial eugenicists along with a bunch of other junk science methodology. ▶ this video

The Bell Curve has been widely debunked. A quick glance at the Wikipedia article gets you countless citations and counter arguments. For the lazy, here’s a fun video summarizing them: ▶ this video

Some notes: " Variation in IQ during adulthood is about 70% genetic. " The proviso "during adulthood" is important: "The heritability of IQ increases with the child's age and reaches a plateau at 18–20 years old, continuing at that level well into adulthood." (Is it just me or is that a weird thing for it to do.) That being said, the Wilson Effect paper goes on to say, "It is important to specify the populations to which any results can be generalized and not misinterpret what they mean. The samples were drawn almost exclusively from Western industrial democracies. These settings have characteristic environments. Only a few of the participants were raised in real poverty or by illiterate parents, and all study participants had access to the contemporary educational programs typical of those societies. This is the domain to which we can generalize." In any case, for most of my life the variation in earring-wearing was almost 100% genetic, so there's that. " A lot of this seems to have to do with literal brain size (which is correlated with intelligence at about 0.2)... " 0.2 is not a very strong correlation. And correlations are funny. ( link ) " There have already been intelligence explosions. Long ago, humans got smart enough to invent reading and writing, which let them write down training data for each other and become even smarter (in a practical sense; this might or might not have raised their literal IQ, depending on how you think about the Flynn Effect). " This is a

There are many ways to refute The Bell Curve . In addition to the Flynn effect, the science in it are plain bad, the policy proposals they enlist don’t necessarily follow their scientifically flawed results, it repeatedly cites a disgraced eugenicist as source, it was never peer reviewed etc. At this point, nothing in this book should be accepted as nothing more than a poor attempt at scientific racism. Let alone should anyone take any sort of scientific consensus. Other than the fact that it was wrong. This YouTube video[1] does a fair job of summarizing the bulk of what is wrong with this book. But IMO very fact that the book is an apologia for eugenicists should be enough of a critique, you shouldn’t need any more. 1: ▶ this video PS. Regarding the naming of the Flynn effect: > Flynn stated that, if asked, he would have named the effect after Read D. Tuddenham who "was the first to present convincing evidence of massive gains on mental tests using a nationwide sample" in a 1948 article

False & racist. Please see ▶ this video for an extended explanation of why this is a horrible position. We don't even have strong scientific evidence that Spearman's g factor is more than a statistical convenience.