Perhaps you could argue both that the tests are racist and that teachers are _even more_ racist?—but you'd want to be specific about what alternative metric of "merit" you think they're being racist _with respect to_. The thing about tests is, a vast space of "objective" procedures can come up with a number, without giving anyone a reason to care about that particular number; if you care about group rank orderings, you _could_ come up with a measurement that gets the the group rank ordering you want. (Black people have more melanin than white people, on average! People with more letters in their name take longer to say their name out loud, on average! Cats do better than humans on a test of scratching, on average! "Hispanic" comes before "White" in alphabetical order!) The problem is that it looks like the "cognitive ability" thing that psychometricians are trying to measure is actually a pretty robust abstraction that summarizes variation _in individuals_ that people care about (like the ability to master a profession); if it were just a tool of racial oppression, it's hard to see why it would work so well _within_ groups.
+[TODO: mention https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Intelligence_Test_of_Cultural_Homogeneity ]
+
In the chapter on violent crime, Murray presents a table of black/white and Latino/white ratios of arrests for violent crimes in thirteen cities for which data was available. The median black/white ratio was 9.0 (that is, 9 black people arrested for violent crimes per 1 white person so arrested) and the median Latino/white ratio was 2.4.
To argue that these ratios are driven by real differences in behavior rather than biased police, Murray attempts to "triangulate" the true crime rate with other data. For example, arrests for murder specifically are going to be less biased by selective enforcement or fraud: even evil and corrupt cops who don't consider themselves above, say, planting evidence of drugs, seem less likely or able to fake a human corpse. So if racial differences in murder charges match differences in violent-crime arrests more generally, that's probabilistic evidence that arrests are tracking a real difference in criminal behavior.
... and that's the book review that I would _prefer_ to write. A social-science review of a social-science book, for social-science nerds, in a world that wasn't _about to end_. Let me explain.
-When scholars like Murray write about intelligence, they're talking about the differences _between_ humans.
+When scholars like Murray write about "intelligence", they're talking about a summary of the differences _between_ humans: we can measure how well different humans perform at various verbal or spatial or mathematical thinking-tasks, and it turns out that, on average, people who are good at one thinking-task also tend to be good at others. Graph all the test scores on an appropriately high-dimensional plot, and the longest axis of the hyperellipsoid represents "general intelligence"—the dimension of human variation that we recognize as "smart" _vs._ "dumb."
+
+But this particular dick-measuring contest takes place in the context of a human civilization; it doesn't tell us very much about "intelligence" as a natural phenomenon—the capacity of an agent to achieve goals across a variety of environments. Maybe some humans read better than others, but from the standpoint of eternity, reading itself is a _recent_ cultural practice [(invented only 3500 years ago)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy#Prehistoric_and_ancient_literacy) that piggybacks off of natural language capabilities that _all_ developmentally normal humans share. Cats and crows and octopuses _do_ have "intelligence"—various cognitive abilities that let them integrate sensory information into a model of their environment, allocate attention and make decisions to seek prey or avoid predators, _&c._, but you can't give them a [Stanford–Binet IQ test](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford%E2%80%93Binet_Intelligence_Scales), which was designed around the _specific_ set of abilties that humans have in common. But, in principle, humans aren't special.
+
+And yet—it seems like humans _are_ special, in some ways. Of all the creatures on [the tree of life](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_of_life_(biology)), our lineage "took over the world" in the sense that if humans want a resource that cats or crows or octopuses are using, the nonhuman side of the ensuing conflict is predictably going to lose. This is not because humans are stronger or have sharper teeth than other creatures, but because of something about our "intelligence" in the natural-phenomenon (not the IQ-test variation) sense. It's not even necessarily about _individual_ human intelligence being a formidable force: given no tools and no friends, and confronted by a hungry lion at ten paces, it doesn't seem easy to survive just by thinking of some incredibly clever plan.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff