As with the national data, a pattern arises. In CA, the Hispanic VC arrest rate is 1.5X that of Whites and the police kill rate is 1.65X. Pretty close. The Black VC arrest rate is 4X that of Whites and the police kill rate is 4.4X. Again, pretty close.
It seems like the “Mapping Police Violence” graphic is simply pointing out that there are localized differences when you finely subdivide the data (isn’t that expected in statistics?).
I can see that IQ and race mixing together spells trouble. If I say my kids are taller or paler than yours you may not disagree. But if I say mine are smarter then you won’t agree and I can’t prove it. I think @collegedad13 didn’t say that IQ is not heritable but that genetics may be negligible in the difference in IQ between races. I remember seeing long ago that kids born to black American soldiers and white German mothers were as smart as white. Is there any definitive study now of black effect on IQ? How black is black?
@jbstillflying the NYT is not a peer reviewed journal. You may have found 2 peer reviewed articles. I have 5 in my career. I think he has a little way to catch up with me. Maybe Trivers can form an armed group to protect Murray.
@LOUKYDAD I disagree with your sports reference. Just because a lot of black players are in the NFL and NBA doesn’t necessarily mean they are better at, it just means they have had more opportunities or their families value those sport.
A 6’5" white guy is just as likely to get recruited for swimming, crew, lacrosse and volleyball - sports that have not historically been very integrated.
@droppedit when analyzing crime data you need to go a little deeper. What were blacks arrested for ? Shoplifting. DUI? You shouldn’t necessarily be killed for shoplifting.
@eiholi the most recent study I saw claims that you inherit your smart genes from your mom, but I think that one’s controversial as well! LOL.
What is important is to remember that even if IQ differences are attributable primarily to genetics, that does NOT mean much for the individual person. These are broad conclusions and they are best left to policy prescriptions, not judgements about our neighbors or others in the community. Obviously, IQ - assuming such a thing exists - is not necessarily apparent the way that skin color or height is. But we passed the ADA so that people with disabilities (even hidden ones) can be more mobile with more ease. If it turns out that there is something more inherent than we’ve been thinking, so what? The only reason we’d want to know that is so those in that group can be helped to live fuller, better lives. It only spells “trouble” if there are unjust protections excusing one group over another. We haven’t even begun to have the needed conversation of how to proactively assist those at a cognitive disadvantage because people are so hung up on the “racism” aspect that they haven’t even read the work. How can you even begin to solve the problem if you discredit the work w/o reading it? It’s not like his conclusions are fabricated and no one has even suggested he fabricated data. People just don’t like the result - even though his comparisons by ethnic group are but a small part of the overall work.
@collegedad13 - that NYT reference was actually to assist you in understanding better the Stephen J. Gould issue.
Funny thing about CV’s is that they can be tailored. It’s not necessary to figure out how many peer-reviewed articles Murray - or you - might have. I know several social scientists who have published way more than five journal articles in top periodicals who have no problem with Murray’s results and see the same things play out in their college classrooms. Many of them have also seen the adverse results of NOT addressing the problem: drop-out rates, bad preparation, etc. of groups that are pushed into college w/o proper preparation for it because folks - including college administrations - have simply turned a blind eye or ignored the issue or cry Racism when you bring it up.
If you are a social scientist, then act like one and point out the faults in the methodology, the data, the models, etc. If you are not, you are probably a bit out of your league and not one of those five articles (congrats by the way) is going to help you model the problem better or run the analysis more thoroughly.
BTW, @collegedad13 - just perusing the technical articles again I found another three which are peer reviewed. Stopped after that number - he’s now as great as you
@collegedad13 – I only included violent crime arrests from Table 31 in the official CA documentation for 2015. I did that to eliminate petty crimes, drugs, etc. If you focus on murder then those multipliers go up.
@JBStillFlying – I don’t think there’s an inherent “cognitive disadvantage”. I read the Bell Curve a long time ago and what I came away with is that the IQ tests don’t really work across groups of people. Why? Because of the Flynn Effect (a term made popular by the book and repeatedly referenced). People today score far higher on IQ tests than in the past. Were our grandparents basically idiots? Of course not. We’ve had the benefit of testing all our lives … so of course we’ll do better on them (and I’m over 50). Our education is geared towards the concepts in the tests.
I thought the discussion was interesting and worth listening to.
Paraphrasing a few points -
“Colleges complain about helicopter parents. Ironically, they’ve created campuses full of helicopter deans”.
“This is a new phenomenon of the last 4 years. This group of students has been raised on social media. On social media, the way you express disapproval of someone is to engage in public shaming by posting comments, etc. These Middlebury protesters have been thus trained to shame their opponents, to hurl slurs, not to engage in argument … Why can’t I ‘block’ Charles Murray?”
“Only in 4 year residential colleges. Particularly a problem in liberal arts colleges in New England. Mainly a problem in the humanities, some social sciences. Just a minority of students … but people on campus are afraid of them.”
“Dawn of a new religion. The campus has become their church, and the mob is engaging in an auto-da-fe where they punish the sinner, punish the devil, who has dared set foot in their space”.
The PLOS paper did not accuse Gould of fraud. It accuses Gould of making errors. In any case, many of the points made by the Lewis paper have been since refuted by other scholars (in an academic journals, not newspapers). For example, the new measurements by Lewis et al. were completely pointless, because Gould had already conceded that Morton’s lead shot measurements were accurate. It was the seed measurements Gould thought were biased, and Morton didn’t even consider them reliable. That’s why he redid them with lead. The main problem with Morton, Gould, and Lewis was how to scientifically group the samples, correct for biases, and draw meaningful conclusions from the mean. Lewis et al. did not do this, but to be fair neither did Gould. The glib articles in the NYT and Wired were written by journalists who had no idea what they were talking about.
See the following for a decisive refutation of Lewis, et al:
"I disagree with your sports reference. Just because a lot of black players are in the NFL and NBA doesn’t necessarily mean they are better at, it just means they have had more opportunities or their families value those sport.
@“Snowball City” Are you arguing that access to facilities, travel teams, sports camps, coaching, etc. is more readily available to African-Americans? That whites and other races aren’t fans of football and basketball?
We can all come up with our own “just so” stories about how certain groups get over-represented in certain sports. One may be availability or awareness of alternatives. Two people I knew at Megacorp could have been - get this- professional bowlers. They were that good. But the lifestyle of professional bowling was not as appealing as the lifestyle at Megacorp. So they gave up their sports dreams for engineering and finance.
How could we test these hypotheses? Gee, maybe we could collect data, and publish papers, and co-author a book. And then people who had other hypotheses could challenge our data, and we could talk about it. At a college campus, maybe. That would be a welcoming environment for discussing ideas, right?
@droppedit - you don’t need to administer a whole lot of IQ tests. Schools, colleges, etc. have already done a superlative job of separating out the “cognitive elite” over the past 50-60 years w/o most of us giving much thought to the occurrence! As you said, most of us of a certain age and younger are used to taking standardized tests from childhood on. Those results help determine placement into honors and eventually AP courses, which point to admission to more selective colleges, grad school (maybe), better jobs, meet your spouse in one of those institutions, move to the better school district, and the cycle repeats by culling the cognitive elite from that next generation.
IQ tests themselves are an imperfect indicator of any underlying “intelligence” at best, and you even have to worry about administering the same test to the same person over a shorter period of time because they can learn the test (as we all know from the massive amount of prep that goes on for the ACT/SAT!). Sorry for the confusion because I now see that I referred to “IQ” (an estimated quantity) when what I meant was “intelligence” (that underlying thing that that the IQ test tries to estimate) . According to Murray, Flynn thought that the drift was due more to changes in how “IQ” captures “intelligence” than changes in “intelligence” itself.
Standardized tests go through re-norming every so often which helps take care of drift over a shorter period of time. But you are correct - and it would completely contradict the many studies showing that “intelligence” might have a large genetic component - to conclude that we are truly 15 points higher than our grandparents on the intelligence scale! Likewise, any comparison across demographics needs to be done very carefully.
The thing to remember - and these tests might capture it imperfectly but they seem to capture something along these lines - is that if underlying “intelligence” is normally distributed, then 50% of the population is below the average. We on CC might think we know a whole lot of folks in that category but in reality that’s probably not true. And those who are below-average tend to make poorer choices, have more difficulty graduating high school, holding a job, etc. This is true REGARDLESS of ethnic group. I think Murray demonstrates that pretty effectively in his book.
Amending #476 to finish the thought. End of 2nd-to-last para. should read:
“Likewise, any comparison across demographics needs to be done very carefully because different groups might have differences in speed or rate of drift.”
I remember Rev. Jesse Jackson being asked what he thought of Charles Murray’s book the Bell Curve when it came out, and he responded “Charles Murray is a racist”. The reporter then asked him if he had read the book. His response " I don’t need to read the book to know he’s a racist".
I laughed out loud when I saw it.
