Posted on 10/20/2020 4:32:27 AM PDT by karpov
Charles A. Murray ’65 spoke to Harvard affiliates at a Friday webinar about his new book, which criticizes the idea that race and gender are social constructs. Faculty in attendance criticized his work, saying it makes unfounded claims and is rooted in flawed methodology.
Government preceptor David D. Kane invited Murray — whose work the Southern Poverty Law Center terms “racist pseudoscience” – to speak about his 2020 book “Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class” as part of a lecture series entitled “Data Scientists, Data Professionals, Data Dissidents.”
Murray said during the talk that many of Harvard’s social science and humanities faculty are “outdated” in their belief that race is a social construct.
“We know that the allele frequencies for different population groups on traits are quite different,” he said. “And the chance that once we untangle the effects of these, that they’ll balance out to zero, is statistically just about impossible.”
Sociology professor Mary C. Waters, who attended the webinar, criticized Murray’s research, writing in an email that he frequently committed the “elementary error” of confusing correlation with causation throughout his talk.
“Murray's performance was embarrassing and certainly does not reflect excellence in data science or social science,” she wrote. “His work is very weak. He cherry picks data and studies that suit his desired conclusions and he does not seem to understand the issues he writes about.”
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In the more recent “Human Diversity,” Murray critiques the social science “orthodoxy” that gender and race are social constructs and that class is a function of privilege. He presents ten counter-propositions, including claims that there are real differences in personality between the sexes, that there are genetic distinctions corresponding to self-identified race and ethnicity, and that class structure has a significant basis in genetic differences.
(Excerpt) Read more at thecrimson.com ...
If you believe in equal treatment of races under the law, the question of whether there are innate differences in average intelligence and other characteristics is less important. But if you assert that all differences in outcomes are an injustice to be eradicated, as BLM does, then the question of whether there are innate racial differences becomes more important.
Well, he has all the right enemies. Probably means the book is worth a read.
I'll just pick one point that is classically flawed. There are many but I would like to focus and make the one point.
"so why should we let someone teach social science that we know to be wrong in our social science courses?"
Because it is possible that you are wrong.
Science is not mathematics. Newtonian physics was wrong.
And social science is a further three rungs down in certainty from science.
Your level of certainty and arrogance about what can be said, and probably thought, smacks of religion, and not science. This is a political religion that permeates academia at the moment. And which I am fairly sure you will swear does not infect you, while the rest of us can see the symptoms quite plainly.
Only religions ban heretics from speaking because of the wrong-think they might cause. Real science loves a good heretic. In fact, honestly, the entire goal of science is to be a heretic. To have an idea that no other person ever had. Science is the pretty much the antithesis of your thought-police approach.
And most of academia used to be the antithesis of your thought police approach as well, until the religion of leftism took it over, with the direct help of people like you.
Why cannot race (and gender, for that matter) be both a significant biological realities and a social constructs? Which it is might well depend upon the phenomena one is examining.
I recall when Murray and Herrnstein’s “Bell Curve” first came out. It was a bold move because few would discuss group differences in IQ.
At the same time, I am not sure race and gender differences are a particularly fruitful area of inquiry for things like cognitive skills and personality traits. Why? Because the last time I checked, these things are a little difficult to change especially compared to other things like behaviors and beliefs.
Ah, modern academia. It used to be just “science”. Now it’s “our science” and “their science”. My observation is academia has become so insular that the academics existing in the corresponding echo chamber have become so emotionally weak that they fear anything that doesn’t follow the “accepted” narrative. Rather than address the real data, they choose to criticize, denigrate, and split hairs.
Remember, attaching “ology” to a name is a convenience rather than a guarantee. Even with the most honest intentions, some area of studies have big difficulties. Scientific methodology, especially areas dealing with repeat testing validations, become difficult when dealing with humans. AND this is under the best, unbiased conditions.
IMHO, Sociology is fuzzy, hazy and beset by the above problems AND there is a very real institutional bias to the LEFT. To me this is the basis of the criticisms against Murray, he has gone off of the plantation.
I’ve been trying to summarize my feelings on the Leftist religion for a long time. This comment did it better than I ever could. Spot on.
“At the same time, I am not sure race and gender differences are a particularly fruitful area(s) of inquiry for things like cognitive skills and personality traits.”
Why not? You say because you can’t change them? Why does that preclude studying them and discussing them? If there is arace difference in IQ then why should that not be a fact that leads to different educationaal systems? Gender differences we know are factual so how society treats women can also be different as long as it is not discriminayory.
Murray’s thesis is anti-diversity and that’s why the academics are against it.
I read the book and it is valuable for discussion and policy planning.
Most people categorize all sub-Saharan Africans as the same race. Genetics says there is more genetic diversity in Africa than in all the other regions of the world combined.
Also yes, it's a long standing critique (by geneticists) on Murray's work that he's been sloppy and confusing correlations with causations.
That is a great read.
Human Diversity is very carefully written. Murray deliberately avoids arguments about intelligence, obviously in an effort to outflank the predictable hysteria that would result from touching a subject so deeply embedded in blind dogmatism. The largest section of the book deals with gender, where Murray discusses differences in the distribution of psychological traits and interests. When he turns to race, Murray focuses primarily on health related differences. The medical research establishment is under heavy and growing pressure to pay attention to genetically based racial differences because the "races," however that term is defined or relabeled, are in fact different in ways that result in statistically significant differences in the incidence of various conditions, best courses of treatment, and research priorities.
Murray's overarching target is something that he calls the "sameness principle," which is the assertion that "whatever their gender, race, or the class they are born into, people in every group should become electrical engineers, nurture toddlers, win chess tournaments, and write sci-fi novels in roughly equal proportions. They should have similar distributions of family income, mental health, and life expectancy. Large groups differences in these life outcomes are prima facie evidence of social, cultural, and governmental defects that can be corrected by appropriate public policy."
Murray stresses continuously that the traits under discussion are very broadly distributed, that groups broadly overlap, that there are outliers among all groups, that people are more alike than different, and that one can infer very little about an individual's mental traits from his or her group membership. This will not slow down the critics who are playing burn the heretic, but it should give pause to any honest reader who actually wants to follow the argument.
The point is, if there are indeed differences in the incidence of various traits among different identifiable groups, one cannot jump to the conclusion that all differences in social outcomes are prima facie evidence of discrimination. That sameness principle establishes a false standard that can never be met in any free society. Which is of course why the left is so attached it it: the left is not interested in the science; the left is hostile to a free society and wants all institutions subjected to political discipline. Fanatical imposition of an objectively unattainable standard is a prescription for tyranny. Murray doesn't spell that out, but the implication is clear.
It is important to note that at no point does Murray deny the importance of socio-cultural factors. Any critic who doesn't grapple seriously with Murray's arguments on this point is simply dishonest. With regard to any issue of importance, teasing out the relative weight of socio-cultural vs. genetic influences is an important and often difficult question. But it is an important question, and it shouldn't be treated as taboo.
It would be fascinating to know how this book was put together. In his acknowledgements, Murray discusses the care with which he vetted everything with specialists in the myriad technical disciplines covered. He also emphasizes that this was done privately because many of the people with whom he was working are much younger and are in vulnerable positions in academia and elsewhere. This is an area in which truth telling can be -- and in the universities, almost certainly will be -- career ending. Murray wrote very carefully and vetted things very carefully, and then put himself out as the point man. Readers should be aware of the Orwellian academic bullying that dominates the background. One of Murray's assertions is that nothing in his book will, if stated precisely, be regarded as controversial by specialists in the relevant field, when they whisper privately among themselves out of earshot of their departmental Stasi informers. I am certainly in no position to referee that discussion, but I am aware of enough bubbling up in the quasi-samizdat of what is now being called the conservative dark web to suspect that Murray is right. When professors of woke studies, anthropology, English lit, etc. savage Murray, or when critics make conclusory accusations without getting into the weeds with careful, data-based counterarguments, my default reaction is to trust Murray.
Murray also argues that the rapid advances in various disciplines related to brain functioning will soon, probably within the next decade, make the sameness principle indefensible. He uses the example of people who tried to defend Aristotelian physics after Galileo did his thing in Pisa. The old paradigm will be rendered foolish. The paradigm shift may happen very quickly. It can't happen soon enough. At this point, unfortunately, the defenders of the sameness principle are playing scorched earth politics, precisely because they are acting in bad faith, and they know it. That they have such a chokehold in academia is a serious problem; our universities have become institutionally committed to a lie, and truth seekers are driven underground or purged.
Charles isn’t going to be invited to all the trendy cocktail parties.
JeanLM: Let’s do a thought experiment. Let’s assume that you have a statistically significant difference in the average IQs of men and women - say 100 versus 105. What would it lead you to do differently with respect to education than the difference between two individual women or two individual men whose IQs are 100 and 125?
Let’s continue and assume that the average IQs of individuals with and without two parent in the home is 95 without and 100 with both parents? Again what would you do differently in the classroom?
In short, IQ is an individual attribute and there is a much much larger variance among individuals than there is between groups. It makes far more sense to tailor educational practices by IQ rather than by any demographic characteristic.
Are you going to teach Thomas Swell or Clarence Thomas differently because they are African American?
Note that I am not saying there are not biological differences but those differences have to be defined far more precisely and causally linked to biological factors than is currently the case.
Significant group differences may well exist on individual attributes but they are best treated as starting points for research than as an end point if you some how want to change the nature of the group difference.
Murray would agree with every word you have written here. You need to read his book.
I think that while “skin color” (and all the genetics lying under it) can identify a “grouping”, but the fact that we see certain “average” academic differences between groups is I think a residual of culture - long term and short term - not genes, can and do play a role in developing one’s intelligence.
The brain is plastic in that it is not rigid and fixed in terms of its potential. It is like clay; what it is capable of can be molded. It’s structure and operation is not a definition of its potential, they are the physical things designed to be put to use, to achieve any and all tasks we try to achieve. They merely wait our commands, our exercising their ability to obtain any development of the mind that we seek. Merely the fact that someone has only achieved X instead of Y is not a statement that the potential to achieve X was not there. Will, desire, value judgements, stamina, perseverance and cultural backing for those things within and beyond family all play a role in what intellectual development anyone seeks. There is a ton of dynamics that goes on, and I think (a) the genes have done their job, but (b) making use of what the genes have provided is up to the individual.
No. I don’t believe in race. I do believe in culture.
It is hard to explain that the “black race” is incapable of brilliant intelligence when we have great examples of brilliant intelligence in individuals like Clarence Thomas, Thomas Sowell, Larry Elder and dozens of others. The culture their parents supplied and the culture they absorbed - instead of rejecting - in this society, led them to take on the challenge of developing their intelligence. They were obviously not stifled by their genes.
Absolutely, which is why schools should be race-blind and organized around ability grouping. It is government that whips out the pigment meters and demands that the elimination of racial gaps be the paramount purpose of public education, and never mind that we can't define race properly. Government is the font of racialism in America today.
With regard to gender, men and women score about the same on average on IQ tests. There is considerable evidence, which Murray discusses very carefully, with regard to the familiar argument about a male advantage in visual-spatial tasks and at the extreme level of mathematical ability, and a female advantage in verbal skills. But put that aside. The big differences on gender have to do with psychological traits and interests. There is a great deal of overlap between the sexes. There are outliers of both sexes. The differences have to do with average scores measured across large groups. On most dimensions, the differences between the sexes are relatively small -- though this leads to an important question, discussed in some detail by Murray, of whether these small differences are cumulative in effect when one moves from the measurement of isolated traits to broader patterns of social behavior and choice in complex social situations. That is a difficult thing to sort out, but it is not useful to begin with the current leftist fallacy that men and women are really just the same and that all differences are a matter of social conditioning. That is demonstrably not true, which is Murray's point.
One of Murray's illustrations comes to mind. Take aggressiveness. This is one of the biggest differences in male-female average scores. There is a great deal of overlap on this trait. There are outliers of both sexes. But on average, men are more aggressive. How much more? As a ballpark figure, if you were to pick one man and one woman at random from a large group, what are the odds that the man would test as more aggressive? About 60 percent. That's a big differences, but it also reflects a lot of overlap. There are many aggressive women.
When one moves from the measurement of a singular trait to social behaviors and outcomes, it gets much more complicated. For one thing, social and cultural patterns tend to be organized around modal behaviors. It is a good thing for a society to be complex enough to have multiple male, female, and ungendered roles, so that no one is forced into a straightjacket. But men and women, on average, will exhibit different tendencies and this will affect the cultural expectations and roles.
Another complication of Bell Curve math is that small differences at the mean can produce big differences at the extreme ends of the tails. This is a problem for the advocates of the sameness principle -- the idea that absent discrimination, men and women should have identical outcomes -- IF THE SELECTION IS BEING MADE AT THE EXTREMES. One cannot assume that one extreme is better than the other; this depends on what you are selecting for. The example that Murray uses is caregivers in an assisted living facility for the elderly vs. Navy SEALS. As he notes, in neither case is the most extreme position the best, but even so, you will find significant differences in average male and female aptitude for these roles.
I strongly recommend reading Murray's book. Murray deals at length and very fairly with all of these complications. His critics simply disregard most of what he says and set up a straw man. Most of the critics have never read his work and are simply parroting their talking points. But the originators of the criticism are often operating in conscious bad faith.
That certainly was the case in the appalling reviews of the Bell Curve.
But to be clear, my basic point remains. For the most part, spending time on large group differences such as men and women is unlikely to lead to produce better pedagogies or anything else of real operational significance - for the reasons I gave earlier. It is the wrong unit of analysis.
See Herbert Blumer’s Sociological analysis and the “variable” http://www.asanet.org/images/asa/docs/pdf/1956%20Presidential%20Address%20(Herbert%20Blumer).pdf
Talking of SEALS, one of my sons got involved in endurance racing - The World’s Toughest Mudder. It was a 10 mile obstacle course built along the lines used by British Special Forces. You have to complete as many circuits as possible in 24 hours. There were 800 competitors at the start of the race. My son managed 6! The first and second places did 9 and were separated by a matter of minutes at the end. The second place finisher was a corporate lawyer and a woman.
If I was selecting a team to run such a race, I would look at past performance in related endeavors not gender.
I agree that looking at group differences is the wrong thing to do. We should be looking at individuals as measured, as much as possible, by objective standards. But tell that to government, the media, academia, etc, which are utterly obsessed with group differences and which zealously insist that all such differences be eliminated. Even small group differences at the median can produce very large group differences two or three standard deviations out along the left or right tail of the Bell curve. If we focus on individuals and insist on a level playing field, that’s not a problem. For the race and gender wokesters, nothing else matters.
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