The Bell Curve

What people said

tjnaylor · 2023-04 · Strong recommendation

[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

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AgentME · 2020-01 · Strong recommendation

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: [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.

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pfooti · 2024-11 · Recommendation

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: [VIDEO]

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