Bret L
June 16th 09, 08:19 AM
Selling Out And How To Do It—The Case Of Richard E. Nisbett
By Steve Sailer
>>"When James D. Watson was driven from his post at the famous Cold Spring Harbor medical research laboratory for making politically incorrect remarks about IQ, Richard E. Nisbett, a psychologist at the University of Michigan, [Email him] helped put the boot in, publishing an op-ed in the December 9, 2007 New York Times under the memorable title All Brains Are the Same Color.
Now, Nisbett has a book out entitled Intelligence and How to Get It:
Why Schools and Cultures Count, which has greatly excited such
intellectual luminaries as New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell, who
nominated Nisbett for Time's Top 100 Most Influential People in 2009,
and NY Times columnist Nicholas Kristof. [Rising Above I.Q. June 6,
2009]
Strikingly, however, Nisbett’s new book on the IQ controversy never
mentions Watson’s fate.
Indeed, Intelligence and How to Get It seems to be set in some
alternative universe in which Watson’s heresies are the almost-
unchallenged orthodoxy and Gladwell is some pixel-stained wretch
barely scraping by, while I’m pulling in the big bucks making speeches
to national sales conventions. Poor Nisbett is a just a lonely
dissident bravely speaking truth to power.
It resembles a book-length version of one of those David Brooks’
columns in the NYT in which he tries to exorcize the voice of his
conscience telling him that I’m right.
Nisbett never explains his bizarre polemical strategy. But, I presume
that after a few drinks, he might justify it like this: “Well, sure, a
bunch of innumerate journalists and excited ideologues like Stephen
Jay Gould convinced themselves and a lot of their more naïve readers
that all this IQ stuff was hooey, but you know and I know that the
kind of thing you write in VDARE.com about IQ is actually the
conventional wisdom among those few who know what they are talking
about!”
Nisbett’s book thus concedes vast swathes of normally disputed
territory: according to Nisbett, 1] IQ is real and important; 2] IQ
tests measure it accurately; 3] there are sizable racial gaps in
average IQ; and 4] IQ tests are not culturally biased (which will come
as a big surprise to Sonia Sotomayor). On many of the issues I covered
in my FAQs on the subjects of IQ and race, we wouldn’t have much to
disagree over.
Nisbett, however, tries to draw a line in the sand in two places by:
*
Denying absolutely that heredity plays any role in the existing
black-white IQ gap
*
Asserting vociferously that IQ is highly malleable
As for Nisbett’s first dogmatic decree, well, time will tell. Soon—the
DNA data is flooding in.
Nisbett’s second decree—the potential effectiveness of social
engineering—is particularly popular at the moment because of the Obama
Administration’s lavish funding of education.
Unfortunately, despite his book’s self-help title, Nisbett hasn’t
figured out an actual plan for increasing IQ among one’s own children,
much less among the masses of black and Hispanic poor.
Depressingly, out of the countless educational experiments tried over
the last five decades, he mostly cites the same handful of fabled
preschool intervention studies that I’ve been reading about for much
of my life: the Perry Preschool Program of the mid-1960s, the
Milwaukee Project of the late 1960s, and the Abcedarian Project of the
late 1970s.
In his not yet published review of the book, James Lee says:
"Nisbett's account of the Milwaukee Project … is particularly
careless." Lee cites Thomas J. Bouchard's implication that IQ
increases were achieved by teaching to the IQ test, since school
achievement gains were not seen. Bouchard wrote in 1997:
"Somewhat paradoxically the Milwaukee Project appears to have
increased IQs of experimental children, which failed to translate into
similar increments in measured achievement. As a result, one might
facetiously note that the project was successful in preventing mental
retardation while causing learning disabilities (e.g., a discrepancy
between IQ and measured achievement). "
In contrast, the Perry results showed no long-term IQ gains but did
show school test improvements, while the Abcedarian project saw both
kinds of improvements. Lee notes: "It is entirely unclear what
critical factor is responsible for the divergence in outcomes among
these three interventions."
Even Nisbett laments, “a huge amount of research needs to be done to
establish whether something like the Perry or Milwaukee or Abecedarian
program would be effective and feasible if scaled up to national
proportions.”
Yet, if these programs actually worked in the past, why haven’t they
been replicated in the last 30 years? The problem in Nisbett’s book is
rather like the one that Herodotus, the Father of History, wrestled
with in the 5th Century B.C.: the older the tale, the more miraculous
it is.
Moreover, it never quite dawns on Nisbett that educational projects
aren’t exactly like chemistry experiments, which should be perfectly
reproducible. Unusually successful schooling experiments are more like
hit movies, which notoriously depend upon the temporary and highly
unstable commingling of charismatic individuals. For example, the
original 1962 Manchurian Candidate is famous for being a daring movie
where everything clicks. It shouldn’t work. But it does. In contrast,
The Manchurian Candidate was remade in 2004 at a cost of $80 million
by a team of Oscar-winners (Denzel Washington, Meryl Streep, and
Jonathan Demme), but the remake was instantly forgotten.
As an even closer analogy, consider merely all the movies about
dedicated teachers who overcome societal prejudices to make a
difference in the lives of their students. (IMDB lists 31.) A few of
them triumphed (for example, Maggie Smith’s The Prime of Miss Jean
Brodie) while others fizzled (Michelle Pfeiffer’s Dangerous Minds).
You might think that Hollywood would have a formula for reliably
churning this genre of films out by now, but each new one remains a
gamble.
Ironically, Nisbett’s best advice for lifting your IQ is to choose
your parents wisely—i.e., get yourself adopted as an infant by rich
parents.
Nisbett is impressed by a 1989 study by two psychologists Christiane
Capron and Michael Duyme. They attempted to overcome the usual
“restriction of range” problem with adoption studies (agencies don’t
let people who are likely to be lousy parents adopt children) by
spending years searching for 40 adoptees whose biological parents were
from the top 15 percent or bottom 15 percent of French society and had
been adopted by parents at the top or bottom. They only found eight
highborn adoptees who had followed the Oliver Twist path in being
brought up in poverty, but they managed to fill out their other three
cells for a sample size of 38. Assessment of effects of socio-economic
status on IQ in a full cross-fostering Nature, August 17, 1989)On
average, those children lucky enough to be placed among the rich
averaged 12-point higher IQ scores at age 14 than those placed among
the poor. That’s a bigger nurture effect than typically seen in
American adoption studies, but it sounds plausible to me. (Note,
however, it’s not clear that this IQ boost extended past puberty. It
appears that, while children can be molded to some extent, adults tend
to choose their own environments, with levels of intellectual
stimulation best suited for their genetic endowments.)
And consider the cost to reproduce the benefits of having wealthy
parents for millions of poor children. It’s not just the additional
out-of-pocket expenditures, but the tens of thousands of hours of time
spent by well-educated people talking individually to their children:
likely seven-figures per child.
And yet, in this most pro-nurture of all the many adoption and twin
studies yet done, the nature effect was still larger than the nurture
effect. Highborn children averaged 16 points higher in IQ than lowborn
children compared to the 12-point advantage seen among those raised
rich.
Therefore, assuming this tiny study is correct, society could
eliminate roughly 75 percent of the IQ gaps caused by genetic
differences. All it would take is for the government to make parents
in the upper and lower sectors of society exchange their children.
It would be like Mark Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper —as rewritten
by Pol Pot.
I had some hopes for Nisbett. His 2004 book The Geography of Thought:
How Asians and Westerners Think Differently … and Why was an
intriguing exploration of how Northeast Asians tend to think in terms
of context and harmony while Americans are more object-oriented and
innovative.
Unfortunately, however, Nisbett’s handling of the evidence in
Intelligence and How to Get It gravely undermines his own reputation.
Terms like “cherry-picking,” “scattershot,” and “disingenuous” come to
mind. Arthur Jensen and J.P. Rushton have already pointed out many of
the ethical shortcuts Nisbett has taken in order to appeal to the
Gladwellites. An upcoming review by a Harvard psychology grad student
named James Lee will also be damaging.
Still, there’s no doubt that the intellectual establishment, and very
large numbers of well-meaning ordinary people, desperately want to
hear what Nisbett is saying.
He’s a sell-out, but a successful sell-out.
So much the worse for America."<<
http://www.vdare.com/sailer/090614_nisbett.htm
By Steve Sailer
>>"When James D. Watson was driven from his post at the famous Cold Spring Harbor medical research laboratory for making politically incorrect remarks about IQ, Richard E. Nisbett, a psychologist at the University of Michigan, [Email him] helped put the boot in, publishing an op-ed in the December 9, 2007 New York Times under the memorable title All Brains Are the Same Color.
Now, Nisbett has a book out entitled Intelligence and How to Get It:
Why Schools and Cultures Count, which has greatly excited such
intellectual luminaries as New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell, who
nominated Nisbett for Time's Top 100 Most Influential People in 2009,
and NY Times columnist Nicholas Kristof. [Rising Above I.Q. June 6,
2009]
Strikingly, however, Nisbett’s new book on the IQ controversy never
mentions Watson’s fate.
Indeed, Intelligence and How to Get It seems to be set in some
alternative universe in which Watson’s heresies are the almost-
unchallenged orthodoxy and Gladwell is some pixel-stained wretch
barely scraping by, while I’m pulling in the big bucks making speeches
to national sales conventions. Poor Nisbett is a just a lonely
dissident bravely speaking truth to power.
It resembles a book-length version of one of those David Brooks’
columns in the NYT in which he tries to exorcize the voice of his
conscience telling him that I’m right.
Nisbett never explains his bizarre polemical strategy. But, I presume
that after a few drinks, he might justify it like this: “Well, sure, a
bunch of innumerate journalists and excited ideologues like Stephen
Jay Gould convinced themselves and a lot of their more naïve readers
that all this IQ stuff was hooey, but you know and I know that the
kind of thing you write in VDARE.com about IQ is actually the
conventional wisdom among those few who know what they are talking
about!”
Nisbett’s book thus concedes vast swathes of normally disputed
territory: according to Nisbett, 1] IQ is real and important; 2] IQ
tests measure it accurately; 3] there are sizable racial gaps in
average IQ; and 4] IQ tests are not culturally biased (which will come
as a big surprise to Sonia Sotomayor). On many of the issues I covered
in my FAQs on the subjects of IQ and race, we wouldn’t have much to
disagree over.
Nisbett, however, tries to draw a line in the sand in two places by:
*
Denying absolutely that heredity plays any role in the existing
black-white IQ gap
*
Asserting vociferously that IQ is highly malleable
As for Nisbett’s first dogmatic decree, well, time will tell. Soon—the
DNA data is flooding in.
Nisbett’s second decree—the potential effectiveness of social
engineering—is particularly popular at the moment because of the Obama
Administration’s lavish funding of education.
Unfortunately, despite his book’s self-help title, Nisbett hasn’t
figured out an actual plan for increasing IQ among one’s own children,
much less among the masses of black and Hispanic poor.
Depressingly, out of the countless educational experiments tried over
the last five decades, he mostly cites the same handful of fabled
preschool intervention studies that I’ve been reading about for much
of my life: the Perry Preschool Program of the mid-1960s, the
Milwaukee Project of the late 1960s, and the Abcedarian Project of the
late 1970s.
In his not yet published review of the book, James Lee says:
"Nisbett's account of the Milwaukee Project … is particularly
careless." Lee cites Thomas J. Bouchard's implication that IQ
increases were achieved by teaching to the IQ test, since school
achievement gains were not seen. Bouchard wrote in 1997:
"Somewhat paradoxically the Milwaukee Project appears to have
increased IQs of experimental children, which failed to translate into
similar increments in measured achievement. As a result, one might
facetiously note that the project was successful in preventing mental
retardation while causing learning disabilities (e.g., a discrepancy
between IQ and measured achievement). "
In contrast, the Perry results showed no long-term IQ gains but did
show school test improvements, while the Abcedarian project saw both
kinds of improvements. Lee notes: "It is entirely unclear what
critical factor is responsible for the divergence in outcomes among
these three interventions."
Even Nisbett laments, “a huge amount of research needs to be done to
establish whether something like the Perry or Milwaukee or Abecedarian
program would be effective and feasible if scaled up to national
proportions.”
Yet, if these programs actually worked in the past, why haven’t they
been replicated in the last 30 years? The problem in Nisbett’s book is
rather like the one that Herodotus, the Father of History, wrestled
with in the 5th Century B.C.: the older the tale, the more miraculous
it is.
Moreover, it never quite dawns on Nisbett that educational projects
aren’t exactly like chemistry experiments, which should be perfectly
reproducible. Unusually successful schooling experiments are more like
hit movies, which notoriously depend upon the temporary and highly
unstable commingling of charismatic individuals. For example, the
original 1962 Manchurian Candidate is famous for being a daring movie
where everything clicks. It shouldn’t work. But it does. In contrast,
The Manchurian Candidate was remade in 2004 at a cost of $80 million
by a team of Oscar-winners (Denzel Washington, Meryl Streep, and
Jonathan Demme), but the remake was instantly forgotten.
As an even closer analogy, consider merely all the movies about
dedicated teachers who overcome societal prejudices to make a
difference in the lives of their students. (IMDB lists 31.) A few of
them triumphed (for example, Maggie Smith’s The Prime of Miss Jean
Brodie) while others fizzled (Michelle Pfeiffer’s Dangerous Minds).
You might think that Hollywood would have a formula for reliably
churning this genre of films out by now, but each new one remains a
gamble.
Ironically, Nisbett’s best advice for lifting your IQ is to choose
your parents wisely—i.e., get yourself adopted as an infant by rich
parents.
Nisbett is impressed by a 1989 study by two psychologists Christiane
Capron and Michael Duyme. They attempted to overcome the usual
“restriction of range” problem with adoption studies (agencies don’t
let people who are likely to be lousy parents adopt children) by
spending years searching for 40 adoptees whose biological parents were
from the top 15 percent or bottom 15 percent of French society and had
been adopted by parents at the top or bottom. They only found eight
highborn adoptees who had followed the Oliver Twist path in being
brought up in poverty, but they managed to fill out their other three
cells for a sample size of 38. Assessment of effects of socio-economic
status on IQ in a full cross-fostering Nature, August 17, 1989)On
average, those children lucky enough to be placed among the rich
averaged 12-point higher IQ scores at age 14 than those placed among
the poor. That’s a bigger nurture effect than typically seen in
American adoption studies, but it sounds plausible to me. (Note,
however, it’s not clear that this IQ boost extended past puberty. It
appears that, while children can be molded to some extent, adults tend
to choose their own environments, with levels of intellectual
stimulation best suited for their genetic endowments.)
And consider the cost to reproduce the benefits of having wealthy
parents for millions of poor children. It’s not just the additional
out-of-pocket expenditures, but the tens of thousands of hours of time
spent by well-educated people talking individually to their children:
likely seven-figures per child.
And yet, in this most pro-nurture of all the many adoption and twin
studies yet done, the nature effect was still larger than the nurture
effect. Highborn children averaged 16 points higher in IQ than lowborn
children compared to the 12-point advantage seen among those raised
rich.
Therefore, assuming this tiny study is correct, society could
eliminate roughly 75 percent of the IQ gaps caused by genetic
differences. All it would take is for the government to make parents
in the upper and lower sectors of society exchange their children.
It would be like Mark Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper —as rewritten
by Pol Pot.
I had some hopes for Nisbett. His 2004 book The Geography of Thought:
How Asians and Westerners Think Differently … and Why was an
intriguing exploration of how Northeast Asians tend to think in terms
of context and harmony while Americans are more object-oriented and
innovative.
Unfortunately, however, Nisbett’s handling of the evidence in
Intelligence and How to Get It gravely undermines his own reputation.
Terms like “cherry-picking,” “scattershot,” and “disingenuous” come to
mind. Arthur Jensen and J.P. Rushton have already pointed out many of
the ethical shortcuts Nisbett has taken in order to appeal to the
Gladwellites. An upcoming review by a Harvard psychology grad student
named James Lee will also be damaging.
Still, there’s no doubt that the intellectual establishment, and very
large numbers of well-meaning ordinary people, desperately want to
hear what Nisbett is saying.
He’s a sell-out, but a successful sell-out.
So much the worse for America."<<
http://www.vdare.com/sailer/090614_nisbett.htm