I mostly agree with this review, but it endorses some rather poor parts of the book.
Properly administered IQ tests are not demonstrably biased against social, economic, ethnic, or racial groups. … Charles Murray doesn’t bother proving the above points. These facts are well established among scientists.
Cultural neutrality is not well established. The Bell Curve’s claims here ought to be rephrased as something more like “the cultural biases of IQ tests are equivalent to the biases that 20th century academia promoted”. I’ve written about this here and here.
the gap between the adopted children with two black parents and the adopted children with two white parents was seventeen points, in line with the B/W difference customarily observed. Whatever the environmental impact may have been, it cannot have been large.
This seems to assume that parental impact constitutes most of environmental impact. Books such as The Nurture Assumption and WEIRDest People have convinced me that this assumption is way off. The Bell Curve has a section on malparenting seemed plausible to me at the time it was written, but which now looks pretty misguided (in much the same way as mainstream social science was/is misguided).
I mostly agree with this review, but it endorses some rather poor parts of the book.
Cultural neutrality is not well established. The Bell Curve’s claims here ought to be rephrased as something more like “the cultural biases of IQ tests are equivalent to the biases that 20th century academia promoted”. I’ve written about this here and here.
This seems to assume that parental impact constitutes most of environmental impact. Books such as The Nurture Assumption and WEIRDest People have convinced me that this assumption is way off. The Bell Curve has a section on malparenting seemed plausible to me at the time it was written, but which now looks pretty misguided (in much the same way as mainstream social science was/is misguided).