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BELL CURVE RELOADED ?

Thanks to reader Dominic C. and eddie, I was alerted to a trio of articles by Charles Murray, the influential libertarian public intellectual and author of The Bell Curve, Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950 and numerous other books. The articles are short and vigorously argued:

“Intelligence in the Classroom“

“What’s Wrong with Vocational School?”

“Aztecs vs. Greeks“

Murray writes about IQ and public education from the perspective of the psychometrician and social policy analyst. This is not to say he is wrong – most of Murray’s points of argument are well grounded in peer-reviewed consensus and are old hat to experts, even if they sound controversial to laymen – simply that his position is derived from the predictive reliability garnered from looking at the aggregate mean scores of points on the bell curve. In setting national policy with an eye to cost-benefit ratios this is a perfectly appropriate perspective for discussion; indeed, many of Murray’s concerns about increasing spending on vocational and gifted educatuion would be in the best interest of millions of school children.

The problem lies primarily in the rigid and deterministic conception of “g” used by Murray, rather than a more fluid, neurobiological one that accepts “g” as one of several major drivers in cognition or as one factor in a complex system of intrinsic processing power, efficiency gained through practice and environmental stimulus to a brain that appears to have a massively modular structure. For example, creativity and insight, some of the most valuable aspects of human thought, overlap but not directly correlate with IQ scores. The ability to handle increasing complexity of variables and mental processing speed are also not always in sync, either.

While Murray is generally correct if you construe his points narrowly, a certain degree of humility about our lack of knowledge about human brain operations is in order. While we see, for example, correlative evidence of brain activity with mental and physical tasks in MRI studies, we have much to learn about what these patterns of activity represent. Intuitive thinking, insight, “fingertip feeling” are not quantifiable with the same ease or reliability as are verbal or mathematical reasoning or even spatial-pattern recognition.

Food for thought.

LINKS TO RELATED POSTS AT:

Gene Expression

Eide Neurolearning Blog

JOHN KEEGAN ON THE GREAT WAR

Not the “Long War” but on the importance of the now dimly recalled, First World War:

” Yet it [ WWI] damaged civilization, the rational and liberal civilization of the European Enlightenment, permanently for the worse and through damage done, world civilization also. Pre-war Europe, imperial though it was in its relations with most of the world beyond the continent, offered respect to the principles of constitutionalism, the rule of law and representative government. Post-war Europe rapidly relinquished confidence in such principles.They were altogether lost in Russia after 1917, in Italy after 1922, in Germany in 1933, in Spain after 1936, and only patchily observed at any time in the young states created or enlarged by the post-war settlement in Central and Southern Europe. Within fifteen years of the war’s end, totalitarianism….was almost everywhere on the rise.”

– John Keegan, The First World War

It is questionable, to my mind, if Europe has ever recovered from the Great War that broke her spirit, followed by the Second World War which broke her power.

The EU is itself, arguably, an attempt by European elites to refashion the common sense of identity and weaken the primary loyalties of their fellow citizens. If so, they have had but limited success in that regard beyond the circles of the governing and media classes; and that progress must be set against the countervailing rise of disturbing, ethnonationalists, like LePen, whose xenophobic ideas found few if any admirers in the immediate postwar decades (and whose followers would be of infintesimal size were it not for the EU and its bumbling immigration policies).

Here’s an interesting question, at least to me. While a number of public figures have referred to the Long War/GWOT as ” World War III or IV” or have drawn comparisons with WWII (Pearl Harbor, Appeasement, Axis etc.), perhaps the current struggle bears a better comparison with WWI ?

Not in the area of kinetics, certainly, but in the sense that this war, like the First World War is occurring at a time of an epochal shift in economics, power relations and modes of living. A war that if it does not represent a ” clash of civilizations”, at least is noteworthy for it’s civilizational discontents and the anxieties they produce in the public mind.

ADDENDUM:

At HNN, Lawrence Serewicz, a longtime fellow member of H-Diplo, describes the struggle in Periclean terms.

ETERNAL TRIBALISM ?

John’s right – this is very cool.

WIRED FOR TRANSPARENCY

The influential tech culture magazine WIRED, which I must admit is only an occasional read for me, is proceeding with the experiment in “radical transparency” proposed by Chris Anderson of The Long Tail , who is also one of the editors. The feature writer on this story, Clive Thompson, is soliciting feedback at his blog Collision Detection, where I bestirred myself to leave a brief comment.

Upon reflection, I think there are other things that may be said about this experiment and the paradigm Thompson is espousing, which is:

Secrecy is dead

Tap the Hivemind

Reputation is everything

Looking at this the way an economist might, how these variables will play out in the real world may depend on the operation of ” the attention economy“.

WIRED may become wide-open but unless they ran a story that related to one of my core research interests, I can’t see burrowing into the nitty gritty of their editorial process. Otherwise, I just don’t care that much. The overall number of online, regularly ” deep diving” readers of a radically transparent WIRED is likely to be quite small. At least compared to their overall readership. But their loyalty and sense of community, if there is a high level of interactivity with each other and the staff, is likely to be strong.

So “radical transparency” make make possible a higher level of intensity of engagement among WIRED readers that did not exist beforehand. A better quality of attention, which would seem to represent, from the perspective of WIRED, an economically valuable demographic for advertising purposes and a well-informed sounding board for magazine ideas.

Thoughts?

RADICAL GOALS, QUIET METHODS

The Jamestown Foundation had a report last month on the rising popularity in the Arab world ( or at least Salafi and devout middle class circles therein) of the Islamist group Hizb ut-Tahrir. An excerpt:

“HT is regarded with some confusion by Western analysts because while its goals of recreating a caliphate and then converting the world to Islam by force if necessary are almost indistinguishable from bin Laden’s, its methods are entirely different. Although HT members sincerely believe that the caliphate will be recreated soon, HT’s real significance is likely to be its increasingly important role in radicalizing and Islamizing the Middle East. For example, HT’s ideologies also fuel the increasingly common view that the present conflict between Western democracies and Islamists is not a resolvable dispute over land, territory and temporal politics, but is rather an inevitable clash of civilizations, cultures and religions.

HT, by saying that non-Muslim attempts to prevent the creation of a global Islamic empire amount to the deliberate persecution of Muslims, feed the victim culture that fuels Islamic radicalism today, as well as provide the necessary theological justification for individual acts of defensive or pre-emptive jihad. HT argues that the Quran says that all non-Muslim countries, cultures and individuals must submit to Islam. HT members who accept this theory naturally begin to see the world exclusively in terms of Muslims and non-Muslims, and inevitably begin to see all non-Islamic entities as worthy of destruction. In addition, HT’s absolute rejection of democracy as un-Islamic is considerably more hard line than that of the Muslim Brotherhood and other groups, while the group also takes highly conservative positions regarding women, alcohol and freedom of speech.”

This meshes with what I have previously read about the group which seems to be favored by educated and well to do ” quiet extremists”.

I once scanned a translated list of Hizb ut-Tahrir detainees in a Central Asian republic – the professions were heavily represented as were army officers and journalists. The group would seem to have the makings of a ” vanguard” movement of radicalized intellectuals that can simmer for decades before abruptly bursting forth into a spasm of revolutionary action.