Quote:
Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop
For someone who says he doesn't like treating individuals as members of groups, you return to the need to assessed people as members of groups quite a bit.
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I'm not fighting the hypo. You see the meta point.
The whole act of chopping people into groups and comparing them is futile. And yet the Right and the Left are telling us this is how we must have the debate.
All of what I've said about the Left's poor reasoning applies to the Right. The only valid analyses are those done on individuals.
Example: Murray cites Asians as a monolithic group and then tells Harris, "This was tough, because we had very little solid data on Chinese people." So half of the Asian population is represented by sketchy data in his study? How's that a "study" at all?
The same applies to races, religions, etc. here. You can never tease out how many outliers skew the group IQ upward or downward. Murray was about four or five layers too high in terms of granularity. Someone will get there in the future, and I'm pretty confident they'll reach the conclusion, "It's really only useful to assess people one on one."
ETA: By the way, Murray does the same sort of lazy analysis of whites in
Coming Apart. I've not read it, and probably won't because of its flaws. But there, Murray argues that poor whites and affluent whites are turning into culturally unique groups which, via assortative mating, will eventually diverge genetically in terms of ability. For all the same reasons I find the
Bell Curve unpersuasive, this too is unpersuasive.
