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Murray said during the talk that many of Harvard’s social science and humanities faculty are “outdated” in their belief that race is a social construct.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.”
...
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 ...
Too many lawyers and too many sociologists! ;)
Of course they did.
It was a sarcastic aside. I have spoken to him. He is a true scientist.
The racial differences in IQ are significantly more than 5 points. Sub Saharan Africans average 70 while Northern Europeans average 100. East Asians are 5 points above that.
These diferences are not social or cultural, so we should study them and deal with things like diversity understabding that outcomes in success are related to inteliibence. My brother who was a doctor told me that his class would have been 100% jewish if the admissions stabdards weren’t rigged. He knew this because he dated and married the dean’s secretary.
I say I’m glad my hip was replaces by a second generation Jewish orthopod instead of the affirmative action doctor admitted beside him.
We should recognize individual ability but not ignore racilal differences to say that everyone should participate equally in success, and if they don’t adjust the system tp accomodate tem.
The reason for the perception of inequality is......inequality.
Segregation in Africanized enclaves promotes inequality
Segregation causes inequality or inequality causes segregation along racial lines?
How about this? In sub Saharan Africa, women don’t need men to provide for their children. They can gather food and shelter for themselves.
In northern cold climates a woman needs a man to feed clothe and shelter her children, so evolution creates a pair bond and family. Only the best suited to this harsh fact survive.
In urban ghettos black baby mamas don’t need men to take care of their kids because the welfare system does it like the favorable climate in ancestral Africa. No husbands evolve in our ghetto system and the kids run wild.
“I say I’m glad my hip was replaces by a second generation Jewish orthopod instead of the affirmative action doctor admitted beside him.”
That is entirely your choice. Me, I would choose the Ortho who has a track record of successful operations, who has high ratings from patients and who has no lawsuits. If he or she comes from Africa or is African American or Israeli or went to Harvard Med School does not seem to me to be relevant when the choice is about an individual surgeon. I might follow your choice if there was no information on his or her actual job performance - but then that is a different kind of problem.
Surgeon was all of what you said having done 37,000 hips and designed his own joint. He was at the top of his class and maybe there was a black or hispanic equivalent but I doubt it.
Now if I were picking the next 100 meter Olympic winner in track, I would check out the Jamaican team or the marathoners from Africa and skiers from Austria.
Some day the world will be as the idealists imagine it to be today, but these qualitative differences exist today and they should be studied.
Well, we are going to have to disagree. The track record for your surgeon counts far more than his ethnic heritage. The latter undoubtedly plays some role in choice of profession and could well play a role in how smart he or she is - but it is the performance that counts - just as in sprinting, distance running and skiing.
I am being an absolute realist.
Aaaahhh yes......
For the reasons you listed, I use the term Africanization to describe the process in the segregated enclaves of American cities
So, was this Crimson reporter actually at Murray’s discussion, or did he just pick up the main points from the sociology professor?
Any sober person in one of the racial groups these faculty imagine Murray is looking down on will likely acknowledge the IQ differences. I have a book that is a collection of letters written by Black conservative intellectual Thomas Sowell. In a couple of his writings, he acknowledges the lower average IQ of Blacks, but contrary to Murray’s pessimism, he expressed optimism that that average IQ would rise as Black people became more prosperous and moved up into the middle class. I happen to share Sowell’s optimism in this case.
Why should race differences have to be changed?
Do you believe black people are imperfect white people?
If not, why does it frustrate you that they are different?
Jean:
I do not doubt that there are on average differences between men and women and among races and ethnicities. But that is the problem - we are talking about averages of individual skills, behaviors, attributes, etc., as if they have actual reality.
Can you give me an example of a coherent and effective public policy issue that is predicated on the race or gender of an individual and does not amount to a tautological assertion?
I play soccer. I see no reason why women should not play soccer on teams made up primarily of me. It depends on the skills and abilities of the individual involved. For me, the same applies to combat roles in the armed services. When a woman from Africa becomes World Chess Champion perhaps we will come closer to treating all individuals as individuals and not based on their group identities.
I’ll give you one example of an individual decision that is tainted by race. The choice of an African American over an East Asian for admission to an elite college that has too few blacks to fill its quota.. The affirmative action concept is full of choices affecting individuals that are race driven.
Such admissions should be race blind.
But on issues like that we are in violent agreement. Your example proves my point. College selection decisions should be based on the capabilities of the individual: Their sex, gender and ethnicity are simply not relevant.
If you are arguing that such factors are currently part of the decision making process - then yes but my point is that they should not be - which I assume you agree with. More importantly they should not be considerations because such demographic categories are of little or no relevance to either the educational success of any particular individual or what they bring to the educational success of others. The group is simply the wrong unit of analysis. Durkheim got it wrong.
“Why cannot race (and gender, for that matter) be both a significant biological realities and a social constructs?
What’s a social construct?
Where does it come from?
How is it related to reality?
Answer those questions and you will discover that social constructs come directly from realities.
Social constructs are simply the classification of things with observed similar characteristics.
Lions and tigers and cats and dogs... are social constructs, ie, classifications based on perceived objective traits. Every named thing is a “social construct”.
So social constructs are not separate from reality, they are tightly linked. Dismissing them as artificial and changeable on a whim is like all of sudden redefining a tiger a poodle... or a man into a woman.
It’s what we call insanity.
And the source of this insanity is postmodernism which denies reality and logic and has completely taken over academia and is infecting the broader society.
That Nancy Morris is quite something.
I read the rest of her comments and she mops the floor with those fake “intellectuals”.
I googled her to find out who she and didn’t come up with anything.
“but the fact that we see certain “average” academic differences between groups is I think a residual of culture “
And what is culture and where does it come from?
“And what is culture and where does it come from?”
Culture bgins in the (a) home and family - what character values the home and family try to represent, and (b) extends to external forces which use to be predominately (b1) church and (b2) traditional education (not the political indoctrination most education has become). But over time the culture shaping ability of each of those things has been undermined, predominately from the left, first by the (c) political indoctrination that education has become, and (d) that was followed by the predominate media and its predominate Leftist bias.
And as we see in so many examplea where (1), (2), (b1) and (b2) have still played a big role in shaping individuals (I gave some examples in my original post), those cultural forces have made a difference in producing alternatives to what (c) and (d) have attempted to do, and made an impact on “average” views in academia. It is still a work in progress and it will likely take decades of unrelenting work to move the pendulum more away from the narratives the Left is attempting in inculcate in the culture.
You skipped the first (and most important part of the question) - What is culture?
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