Bret L
June 25th 09, 05:51 AM
Almost Two Orders of Magnitude
[Steve Sailer]
>> "It’s interesting to compare the number of hits turned up by Google for searches of two figures important in the history of IQ research:
* Sir Cyril Burt, who among much else, conducted early research on
separated twins from which he derived a high estimate of the
heritability of IQ.
* Rick Heber, whose Milwaukee Project to use intensive daycare to
raise the IQs of poor black children was widely lauded at the time and
continues to be cited unskeptically, as in Richard J. Nisbett’s new
book Intelligence and How to Get It.
The day after Burt’s death in 1971 at 88, an anti-hereditarian
colleague advised Burt’s distraught housekeeper to burn his papers.
Soon, widely publicized charges appeared claiming that Burt had
fabricated his twin research, charges which couldn’t be disproved from
Burt’s papers, which were now ashes. Leon Kamin and Stephen Jay Gould
jumped in. Later research did much to salvage Burt’s reputation, but
by then the conventional wisdom had hardened. (Arthur Jensen concluded
in his 1998 magnum opus The g Factor that most of the charges against
Burt were exaggerations, but that he wouldn’t use Burt’s later
publications, but that it hardly matters since subsequent separated
twin studies, such as the famous Minnesota Twins project, came to
almost identical conclusions.)
In contrast to Burt, Rick Heber turned out to be a conman who was sent
to federal prison for stealing from the Milwaukee Project. In a way,
Heber’s criminality makes the Milwaukee Project a little more usable
to nurturists, since the costs of the project–$14 million supposedly
spent on just 40 children over a half dozen years beginning in the
relatively low-cost 1960s–were so insanely high that they couldn’t
possibly be replicated on a mass scale. So, knowing that Heber was
skimming some of that $14 million actually makes the Milwaukee Project
look less ridiculous on the cost front. However, that knowledge also
raises questions about it on the findings front. So, Heber’s crimes
have, unlike whatever it was that Burt did, been shoved down the
Memory Hole.
A Google search of
“Cyril Burt” scandal
turns up 2,310 hits.
Meanwhile,
“Rick Heber” scandal
turns up 26 hits.
They say history is written by the winners, but I say that history is
written by the history-writers."<<
[Steve Sailer]
>> "It’s interesting to compare the number of hits turned up by Google for searches of two figures important in the history of IQ research:
* Sir Cyril Burt, who among much else, conducted early research on
separated twins from which he derived a high estimate of the
heritability of IQ.
* Rick Heber, whose Milwaukee Project to use intensive daycare to
raise the IQs of poor black children was widely lauded at the time and
continues to be cited unskeptically, as in Richard J. Nisbett’s new
book Intelligence and How to Get It.
The day after Burt’s death in 1971 at 88, an anti-hereditarian
colleague advised Burt’s distraught housekeeper to burn his papers.
Soon, widely publicized charges appeared claiming that Burt had
fabricated his twin research, charges which couldn’t be disproved from
Burt’s papers, which were now ashes. Leon Kamin and Stephen Jay Gould
jumped in. Later research did much to salvage Burt’s reputation, but
by then the conventional wisdom had hardened. (Arthur Jensen concluded
in his 1998 magnum opus The g Factor that most of the charges against
Burt were exaggerations, but that he wouldn’t use Burt’s later
publications, but that it hardly matters since subsequent separated
twin studies, such as the famous Minnesota Twins project, came to
almost identical conclusions.)
In contrast to Burt, Rick Heber turned out to be a conman who was sent
to federal prison for stealing from the Milwaukee Project. In a way,
Heber’s criminality makes the Milwaukee Project a little more usable
to nurturists, since the costs of the project–$14 million supposedly
spent on just 40 children over a half dozen years beginning in the
relatively low-cost 1960s–were so insanely high that they couldn’t
possibly be replicated on a mass scale. So, knowing that Heber was
skimming some of that $14 million actually makes the Milwaukee Project
look less ridiculous on the cost front. However, that knowledge also
raises questions about it on the findings front. So, Heber’s crimes
have, unlike whatever it was that Burt did, been shoved down the
Memory Hole.
A Google search of
“Cyril Burt” scandal
turns up 2,310 hits.
Meanwhile,
“Rick Heber” scandal
turns up 26 hits.
They say history is written by the winners, but I say that history is
written by the history-writers."<<