First of all, I do think one either accepts the conclusion of the US Supreme Court in KIYOSHI HIRABAYASHI v. UNITED STATES (1943) namely --Distinctions between citizens solely because of their ancestry are by their very nature odious to a free people whose institutions are founded upon the doctrine of equality -- or one goes the way of Murray etc towards racial normalization as the de facto and default position. Hirabayashi has been cited over 150 times, including in Loving v VA which allowed interracial marriage. I firmly believe it is the only way to go (even if the US isn't not there yet)
In France, due to their experience during WW2, attempting to collect the sort of statistics Murrray uses is forbidden by law. It is why President Macron came out against the importation of CRT into France last week. If you look at the European experience in the run up to, during and the aftermath of WW2, there are reasons why universalism is a good thing.
Second, Murray only examines the US data rather than looking at the UK data. He can't examine data from France because it doesn't exist. The section of the UK population which always scores the lowest is the Irish Travellers ethnic grouping (skin tone white). There are reasons why the UK government has recently warned (yet again) teaching such concepts of white privilege etc is highly contentious given the UK stats. It is quite possible (and I believe something which Sowell showed) that if you control for the quality of education that parents and grandparents received, the difference in population groups falls away. This is something that Ellen Wilkinson (UK Labour Education Minister 1946 -1948) was well aware of (see Peter Hennessy Never Again Britain 1945 -1951 chapter on Building Jerusalem for example) -- a good education affects not only the generation who receives it but subsequent generations. As the Barbara Bush Literacy foundation recently pointed out the decline in literacy in the US is costing the country trillions. Putting that generational failure to provide an adequate education which allows for social mobility on the part of the local authorities to the skin tone of recipients of said inadequate education is wrong in principle and practice to my mind.
Third, it is always more interesting to look at the outliers in something like astrophysics. For example, I believe we all owe a great debt of gratitude to Gladys West, the woman who was recently awarded the Prince Philip medal from the Royal Academy of Engineering for her work on satellite geodesy which underpins the entire GPS. She still prefers to do her calculations with pencil and paper. She of course grew up a sharecropper's daughter in VA and choose to do mathematics at a time when most women were discouraged from the subject.
There is no doubt parental education level and involvement in their children’s education has a large impact on children’s academic achievement. That’s been demonstrated repeatedly by many researchers. We also know that highly cognitively functioning people tend to have on average high cognitive functioning offspring. So by controlling for parental academic achievement and demonstrating no difference between ethnicities actually supports the genetic hypothesis for intelligence. If you select for a group with above average intelligence and then compare it to another selected group of above average intelligence you’re unlikely to find a statistical difference that reaches significance. What those data do tell you is that smart people of one race are similarly smart to people of another. That doesn’t give you any information about the average cognitive function of a given population as a whole.
So that’s again why these data from Murray don’t matter on an individual level because a highly cognitively functioning person of any race will be similarly highly functioning to a person of a different race if their IQs are the same. What Murray’s data do tell us is that one ethnicity or group maybe underrepresented in certain cognitive strata relative to other ethnicities or groups which may manifest as different proportional representation in certain endeavors that require a high degree of cognitive function. His point is these disparities in representation may not be due to bias or systemic racism but may be the result of baseline differences in capability to do those things within populations.
Second, Murray is looking at African Americans and the US population at large so there would no point to include UK data. And if you do look at the UK data, from what I understand, the academic underachievement among UK citizens of African descent is also at the bottom the Irish whites notwithstanding. There was a very interesting podcast on Triggernomentry that delved into this topic deeply about a month ago. They interviewed the head of that UK team which generated those findings. And he is a black man of British birth. He also noted that last while British Born blacks did very poorly, afrocarribean immigrants to the UK were near the top achievers. He acknowledges the selection bias inherent in immigration when discussing this.
All that is to say, the 44 million Americans of African descent includes millions of people with high intelligence and hundreds of thousands with exceptionally high cognitive function. No one disputes that including Murray. Especially Murray. But anecdotes like the one you shared and the presence of many individuals two or more standard deviations above the mean doesn’t change the fact that the majority cluster at or near the mean and that there are differences in who clusters where based on ethnicity when controlling for most if not all the known variables.
These data aren’t in and of themselves dangerous or evil. Casting value judgements like that on statistical analyses such as these is pointless. The data are what they are unless you can prove the data set is incomplete or the mathematical analysis is wrong. To my knowledge no one has been able to do that with any of Murray’s reports. If someone has please share. I do think that the ostrich approach taken by the French government is stupid. We are always better off with more data, more information, than less. What you do with the data is where the debate should lie as long as the data is sound. And that debate can and will be heated. And that’s fine, those are the discussions that need to occur.
I’ll try to find the link to the Triggernometry podcast. It’s a great podcast in general and the one on UK intelligence data and schooling was very interesting.
My big problem with Murray and indeed proponents of CRT is that they take a top down approach rather than a bottom up approach (group v individual) and therefore the poor value that some schools and indeed school boards give in providing basic education in literacy and numeracy is overlooked or excused. Ultimately it has to be how does a society create social (and occupational) mobility and ensure that the obstacles to the same are not solely derived from ancestry (including skin tone).
First of all, I do think one either accepts the conclusion of the US Supreme Court in KIYOSHI HIRABAYASHI v. UNITED STATES (1943) namely --Distinctions between citizens solely because of their ancestry are by their very nature odious to a free people whose institutions are founded upon the doctrine of equality -- or one goes the way of Murray etc towards racial normalization as the de facto and default position. Hirabayashi has been cited over 150 times, including in Loving v VA which allowed interracial marriage. I firmly believe it is the only way to go (even if the US isn't not there yet)
In France, due to their experience during WW2, attempting to collect the sort of statistics Murrray uses is forbidden by law. It is why President Macron came out against the importation of CRT into France last week. If you look at the European experience in the run up to, during and the aftermath of WW2, there are reasons why universalism is a good thing.
Second, Murray only examines the US data rather than looking at the UK data. He can't examine data from France because it doesn't exist. The section of the UK population which always scores the lowest is the Irish Travellers ethnic grouping (skin tone white). There are reasons why the UK government has recently warned (yet again) teaching such concepts of white privilege etc is highly contentious given the UK stats. It is quite possible (and I believe something which Sowell showed) that if you control for the quality of education that parents and grandparents received, the difference in population groups falls away. This is something that Ellen Wilkinson (UK Labour Education Minister 1946 -1948) was well aware of (see Peter Hennessy Never Again Britain 1945 -1951 chapter on Building Jerusalem for example) -- a good education affects not only the generation who receives it but subsequent generations. As the Barbara Bush Literacy foundation recently pointed out the decline in literacy in the US is costing the country trillions. Putting that generational failure to provide an adequate education which allows for social mobility on the part of the local authorities to the skin tone of recipients of said inadequate education is wrong in principle and practice to my mind.
Third, it is always more interesting to look at the outliers in something like astrophysics. For example, I believe we all owe a great debt of gratitude to Gladys West, the woman who was recently awarded the Prince Philip medal from the Royal Academy of Engineering for her work on satellite geodesy which underpins the entire GPS. She still prefers to do her calculations with pencil and paper. She of course grew up a sharecropper's daughter in VA and choose to do mathematics at a time when most women were discouraged from the subject.
Couple of points to consider:
There is no doubt parental education level and involvement in their children’s education has a large impact on children’s academic achievement. That’s been demonstrated repeatedly by many researchers. We also know that highly cognitively functioning people tend to have on average high cognitive functioning offspring. So by controlling for parental academic achievement and demonstrating no difference between ethnicities actually supports the genetic hypothesis for intelligence. If you select for a group with above average intelligence and then compare it to another selected group of above average intelligence you’re unlikely to find a statistical difference that reaches significance. What those data do tell you is that smart people of one race are similarly smart to people of another. That doesn’t give you any information about the average cognitive function of a given population as a whole.
So that’s again why these data from Murray don’t matter on an individual level because a highly cognitively functioning person of any race will be similarly highly functioning to a person of a different race if their IQs are the same. What Murray’s data do tell us is that one ethnicity or group maybe underrepresented in certain cognitive strata relative to other ethnicities or groups which may manifest as different proportional representation in certain endeavors that require a high degree of cognitive function. His point is these disparities in representation may not be due to bias or systemic racism but may be the result of baseline differences in capability to do those things within populations.
Second, Murray is looking at African Americans and the US population at large so there would no point to include UK data. And if you do look at the UK data, from what I understand, the academic underachievement among UK citizens of African descent is also at the bottom the Irish whites notwithstanding. There was a very interesting podcast on Triggernomentry that delved into this topic deeply about a month ago. They interviewed the head of that UK team which generated those findings. And he is a black man of British birth. He also noted that last while British Born blacks did very poorly, afrocarribean immigrants to the UK were near the top achievers. He acknowledges the selection bias inherent in immigration when discussing this.
All that is to say, the 44 million Americans of African descent includes millions of people with high intelligence and hundreds of thousands with exceptionally high cognitive function. No one disputes that including Murray. Especially Murray. But anecdotes like the one you shared and the presence of many individuals two or more standard deviations above the mean doesn’t change the fact that the majority cluster at or near the mean and that there are differences in who clusters where based on ethnicity when controlling for most if not all the known variables.
These data aren’t in and of themselves dangerous or evil. Casting value judgements like that on statistical analyses such as these is pointless. The data are what they are unless you can prove the data set is incomplete or the mathematical analysis is wrong. To my knowledge no one has been able to do that with any of Murray’s reports. If someone has please share. I do think that the ostrich approach taken by the French government is stupid. We are always better off with more data, more information, than less. What you do with the data is where the debate should lie as long as the data is sound. And that debate can and will be heated. And that’s fine, those are the discussions that need to occur.
I’ll try to find the link to the Triggernometry podcast. It’s a great podcast in general and the one on UK intelligence data and schooling was very interesting.
You might also find the latest UK Commons report on education interesting. It does deal with the attainment gap of poor white-British boys. https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm5802/cmselect/cmeduc/85/8504.htm#_idTextAnchor001 The UK of course remains much more of a class based society with all of the ancestral implications than the US.
My big problem with Murray and indeed proponents of CRT is that they take a top down approach rather than a bottom up approach (group v individual) and therefore the poor value that some schools and indeed school boards give in providing basic education in literacy and numeracy is overlooked or excused. Ultimately it has to be how does a society create social (and occupational) mobility and ensure that the obstacles to the same are not solely derived from ancestry (including skin tone).
Data ARE sound. Dammit, I always make that mistake inadvertently
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/triggernometry/id1375568988?i=1000524413698
Here it is and the gentleman’s name is Dr. Tony Sewell. It’s a good listen