I do not need to be an expert in psychometrics to have an opinion.

Of course you don't. And of course you aren't. You can and do have opinions. It turns out that the ones you have expressed here are factually worthless, but I am sure you are happy to have them because they are your very own. They certainly are not shared by knowledgable individuals.

And regardless of how you feel about my opinion, you would do well to be polite and respectful.

I would do well? Sounds like a threat to me. Is that your intent? Were you being polite and respectful when you resorted to calling me an obscene name, in open violation of Slate policies? Do you feed smarter now that you have gotten down and dirty and shown us the depth of your personality? And YOU think I am not polite and respectful! Ha!!! Do you know the meaning of the word "hypocrite?" If not, please look it up in a dictionary.

You have pointed the finger at plenty of posters labelling them name-callers when that is your stock and trade.

So, besides calling me an a**ho**, you also want to begin lying about my comments? Please quote the text you have in mind. Do you want me to quote yours again?

I humbly recommend you broaden your education a bit and become more conversant with some of the other fields of science... or at least some common courtesy.

Let's see, you have demonstrated that YOU know nothing at all about the topic under discussion, but you have a problem with my education? Right. Good for you. Now you want to lecture me about curtesy, after YOU violated Slate rules and attacked me with an obscenity? Are you serious? What is your problem?

Sophistication, my friend, is, in most cultures, judged by one's manners, bearing, and cordiality.

Like calling me an a**ho**? Are you sophisticated? Is it good manners to write filth, as you have done?

You don't agree with me. I get it.

Now, now, you don't really mean that do you? I mean, really. How could you imagine such a thing?

Perhaps you should stop replying to my posts.

Are you kidding? After you calling me an a**ho**, I think I owe you a few, don't you?

Or, are you merely looking for attention?

If I were looking for attention I would call someone an a**ho**, but I am not going to behave as you did. Are you ashamed of yourself? You should be.

You wrote to sun: If you simply reject the value of intelligence qua intelligence, maybe you're in the wrong place. If you are wholly disinterested in discussing the specific topic - I.Q scores and race/ethinicity, why are you here?

It's obvious, isn't it? He is pushing his beliefs AND promoting himself. He has told us repeatedly about his being a member of Triple 9 (the actual name is Triple Nine Society, but he doesn't know that). He wants to remind us that he is really smart, but undermines his case by resorting to name calling with obscenities.

P.S. - its not humble to ask if an individual who responds to you has studied epistemology, or to mention that you know 'plenty of millionaires,' or to mention you have taken the effort to become a member of the Triple 9 Society. Keep working on Bugan wei tianxia xian

He gets an ego boost out of that behavior. The poor guy is trying to be respected and appear to be smart, but has repeatedly shown us that he comes unglued when it becomes obvious that he is clueless. His comments actually tell us that he wants us to admire him for his high intelligence and that he wants to fool us into thinking that he is a scholar. He is most certainly not a scholar in the areas that have been under discussion. My guess is that he might know something about java, IT, and canoes.

People who brag about knowing millionaires tell us a lot about themselves. And people who say that IQ doesn't matter much, but continually remind us that they have a high IQ tell us a little more.

The statistics are gathered only when people get caught, and in many instances, only when someone is actually convicted (which is actually a better indicator, given that some percentage of those arrested are in fact innocent of the crime). Your reductio ad absurdum of GD's argument is at best misleading, a better distillation would be: people who are poor are more likely to get caught and convicted of a crime. While many factors might prevent someone with higher SES from being convicted (or caught), intelligence is not causally related to the likelihood of the crime being committed in the first place.

MorganLee's problem is a matter of narrowness of view. He can do simple math and regards this ability with a kind of narcissistic awe.

He has still not responded with any honesty to allegations regarding the Pioneer Fund and its current leadership. The fund has a background as a fascist organization with a mission of supporting spurious claims of white superiority. That it has turned into an organ of more purely academic politics in the service of the psychomeretricians and that they have been happy to continue receiving its largesse says nothing positive about it, or about them.That its current leader is more fascinated with the size of his students' penises than with a more nuanced view of human intelligence sheds, i believe, the most clarifying kind of light on the "scientific" claims of what has become an academic cult.

Saying that "g" has a prehistory before Jensen is like saying Aristotle discovered gravity. It's sophomoric, and pointless. Fascination with "g," which is an artifact of a certain view of human intelligence that is, for all that it generates great piles of statistics to buttress its scientific claims, only as scientific as its contact with the real world, at the point at which those numbers are gathered in the first place, which is to say, not very.

This view of human intelligence as subject to resolution in a single statistic distributed in a single curve is always terribly fascinating and comforting for those who imagine themselves to be somewhere on the thin upper crust, statistically speaking. Mere consistency with your own terms of operation is not science. if it were, phrenology would still be an active field.

Saying that "g" has a prehistory before Jensen is like saying Aristotle discovered gravity. It's sophomoric, and pointless.

It is neither. Spearman did a lot of work with g over 100 years ago and subsequent generations of researcher did as well.

Fascination with "g," which is an artifact of a certain view of human intelligence that is, for all that it generates great piles of statistics to buttress its scientific claims, only as scientific as its contact with the real world, at the point at which those numbers are gathered in the first place, which is to say, not very.

Intelligence research is based almost exclusively on g because the researchers understand that it is g that accounts for the predictive validity of IQ tests. Anyone who understands the subject of intelligence research knows that g is the sine qua non of intelligence and that is why it is the focus of attention.

Yikes. I've never read anyone who worshipped g before, so it's a bit shocking, but then I've never read anyone who considered IQ tests to be anything but subjective-- and subject to the same uncertainty of any other observed and measured phenomenon. But worse, especially in this context, is the insistence that testing well indicates superiority, or more laughable, success in life. I can only imagine what Madonna's, or Donald Trump's or the Sultan of Bahrain's IQ tests would look like.

in some of the work on emotional intelligence, if you're interested in the difference between wisdom and IQ>.

On the other hand, I don't think GD is implying what you state in your last paragraph. It's a consideration, but there are more complex factors involved. Blame the overemphasis on materialism, or blame drug abuse, or the relative ease and increased pay of criminal employment over legal employment, or read some Bill Cosby on the cultural issues. But I think GD is saying (among other things) that there's a difference of scale and opinion between poor/ low IQ folks' crimes and rich/high IQ folks. Kill one man, you're a murderer, kill a million, you're a hero, as the saying goes. Why is it easier for people to write off what Ken Lay did (that is, bankrupting so many folks, stealing their retirements, allowing his company to essentially pillage California's energy crisis), than say, a carjacking? Or worse, what we've done by invading Iraq and staying there, vs. robbing a convenience store and shooting the clerk?

I like the quote.

It is not how smart you appear, it is what you do with those smarts!

For some, the question of what intelligence is will always be secondary to the question of who has more of it. Consider how impatient the Psychomeretricians on this board were with the question of race -- as in, what race actually IS, after all. They figure that got settled back, oh, hundreds of years ago. It did not.

The only value "g" has, is in settling who gets preferential treatment and who gets to join MENSA. It was thought to have some value once in filtering low-intelligence students into special education, but that eugenic nightmare ended with mainstreaming and greater attention to learning disorders.

Cognitive science is a field with vast potential and enormous current interest. The tiny corner of it occupied by the "g" fetishists has become the clubhouse of a right-wing cult. As it began, so it ends.

I've never read anyone who worshiped g before, so it's a bit shocking,

I don't see any evidence of worship here, but there are about 5-6 people in the Fray discussion who have at least some understanding of g. The others have a lot of opinions, which they have revealed to be the consequence of believing nonsensical assertions from scientifically illiterate sources.

but then I've never read anyone who considered IQ tests to be anything but subjective--

Based on your comments, that is what would be expected. What have you read on this subject? Complete textbooks? Peer reviewed journals? Not likely. If a subjective reading were wanted, testing would not be necessary would it? People could just ask you or their neighbors for opinions.

and subject to the same uncertainty of any other observed and measured phenomenon.

Yes. Isn't that what should be expected? If you go into a laboratory and measure pH, do you have an error? If you measure the amount of gasoline in your car, is there an error? I am unaware of any measurements that are completely free from errors.

It is a common misconception that psychological measurements of human abilities are generally more prone to error or inaccuracy than are physical measurements. In most psychological research, and especially in psychometrics, this kind of measurement error is practically negligible. If need be, and with proper care, the error variance can usually be made vanishingly small. In my laboratory, for example, we have been able to measure such variables as memory span, flicker-fusion frequency (a sensory threshold), and reaction time (RT) with reliability coefficients greater than .99 (that is, less than 1 percent of the variance in RT is due to errors of measurement). The reliability coefficients for multi-item tests of more complex mental processes, such as measured by typical IQ tests, are generally about .90 to .95. This is higher than the reliability of people's height and weight measured in a doctor's office! The reliability coefficients of blood pressure measurements, blood cholesterol level, and diagnosis based on chest X-rays are typically around .50.

(Arthur Jensen. The g Factor. p50.)

Well, that explains everything. Never mind.

Isonomist:

Well, that explains everything. Never mind.

Well, yes. Should I be quoting you instead?

Why is it that everyone who dismisses Jensen and his research never point out the faults in his methodology, or specific reasons why the data he has collected is unreliable?

The reasoning seems to be that because we don't like the data, it is okay to dismiss the man who collected it.

How scholarly.

Actually, Epicurus, that is pretty accurate. It is only the lower class criminals and the stupid criminals who brag about their crimes who get caught.

There was a boy in my high school class who was KNOWN to have raped 10 girls, but he never got caught at it and was never punished for it. Why? He didn't brag about it, always said it was a lie, and never admitted that he raped the girls even today........ so women and teenagers keep on going out with him!

Also, most of the 'criminals' in this world are people who are forced by their lack of intelligence to find criminal work in order to support themselves. Regular jobs will not hire them, thinking they are 'too low class' to work for them, so they are basically driven into criminality.

There are also the OTHER situations of the 'drug dealers' where most of them are very intelligent (I've met them in my work, and they are quite smart suckers, most of them) who have been driven into criminality by unconstitutional laws that try to limit what people put into their own bodies, ostentably for the 'protection' of society...... but the laws create more harm than the drugs themselves.

The real thing that we need to do is realize that the real thing that is creating criminals is our society where the 'smart' can prey on the 'dumb'. Dumb people become the 'lower' criminals and get caught a lot, while the smart people get caught very rarely or never.

Epicurius,

You began this thread by making the unsubstantiated charge that anyone who questions Jensenism is a socialist. I think you should provide some kind of clear evidence to substantiate that charge before you go around demanding equivalent proofs from others.

When you have a test that consistently delivers results that appear to be anomalous, you have to ask yourself what it is that your testing apparatus is trying to tell you. The psychomeretricians don't ask that question because they already have the answer they want. At that point they cross over from science into ideology.

You can't blame others for taking an ideological position on what should be questions of science when your little group has already made that choice for itself. The backing that Murray gets now is entirely ideological, coming from the reactionary tools at the AEI. That is here Jensenism takes you.

Nobody lilkes or dislikes data. That's silly. What I dislike is being red-baited for disliking bad science. I dislike that a lot. You should either prove your case or apologize for your intemperate and insulting behavior.