“How did this silly book get to be so respected in the first place?”

Same reason why fat girls believe it when their girl friends or low status males comment on their Facebook pictures and tell them they look beautiful. It’s what they want to hear.

Or as Pinker observed: “People are surely better off with the truth. Oddly enough, everyone agrees with this when it comes to the arts. Sophisticated people sneer at feel-good comedies and saccharine romances in which everyone lives happily ever after. But when it comes to science, these same people say, “Give us schmaltz!” They expect the science of human beings to be a source of emotional uplift and inspirational sermonizing.”

The alternative is to continue living in a society where the zeitgeist is to assume any disparate life outcomes are the results of discrimination or some other form of unfairness, with wasted time, money, and efforts in trying to combat this illusory discrimination/unfairness.

“the progress on that area only weakened their original, stronger, claims about important differences”

I have encountered the “let’s not study that” attitude quite a bit (see Felix’s comment a few spaces above my first comment for one example). That being said, I find the whole attitude a little bit suspect. If I’m “worried” about, say, IQ differences being found between economic groups, then that would seem to indicate that I fully expect such differences to be found if the research is pursued.

I do as well. I haven’t read “mismeasure of man” (or whatever book the quote was from), but I don’t get that from that quote. What I think he said that was uninteresting is not “the genetics of intelligence” and all that it encompasses, but rather the trivial fact that it has at some point a genetic component.

Perhaps Gould was actually a proponent of “let’s not study that”, I don’t know. If he was, he was definitely wrong on that. Despite the well founded worries about the misuse and distortions by those on the agenda of racial (and sexual) hierarchies, the progress on that area only weakened their original, stronger, claims about important differences, and they see themselves having only miserable fractions of inches of “differences” to fool themselves with, and to hold ever weaker stances — somewhat akin to the “progress” of “scientific creationism” to “ID”. James Flynn have put it quite well, “anything that is undiscussable you then leave to prejudice, opinion and ignorance”. I think it’s a second hand quote though.

On Wednesday a new gubenatorial candidate entered the race in my state announcing his interest in closing the achievement gap between Blacks/Hispanics and Whites/Asians. Apparently, the very existence of this gap is, to some, evidence of an underlying malignancy in American society. Before we move forward spending a fortune, and elevating expectations, in our effort to not only narrow but close this gap, it might be worthwhile to know what we are up against, don’t you think?

Perhaps we should let the geologists know about this as well. Really, who cares what Earth was like during the Hadean Eon? Astronomy is the same way: studying the cosmic background radiation doesn’t fix social problems, so why do it? Frankly, any research that doesn’t have an immediate social reference must be motivated by hatred of humanity.

I think it would be a reasonable safe bet that, if you take any random text by Gould, it would be more in the lines of “things are not as simple as people often say”, and not, “people often make things much more complex than they need to be, evolution for example is pretty simple, nothing more than X, and there’s not really much to talk about it”.

Quoting himself:

“I despair of persuading people to drop the familiar and comforting tactic of dichotomy. Perhaps, instead, we might expand the framework of debates by seeking other dichotomies more appropriate than, or simply different from, the conventional divisions. All dichotomies are simplifications, but the rendition of a conflict along differing axes of several orthogonal dichotomies might provide an amplitude of proper intellectual space without forcing us to forgo our most comforting tool of thought”

“I believe […] that we can still have a genre of scientific books suitable for and accessible alike to professionals and interested laypeople. The concepts of science, in all their richness and ambiguity, can be presented without any compromise, without any simplification counting as distortion, in language accessible to all intelligent people.”

“I do not claim that intelligence, however defined, has no genetic basis—I regard it as trivially true, uninteresting, and unimportant that it does. The expression of any trait represents a complex interaction of heredity and environment. [… A] specific claim purporting to demonstrate a mean genetic deficiency in the intelligence of American blacks rests upon no new facts whatever and can cite no valid data in its support. It is just as likely that blacks have a genetic advantage over whites. And, either way, it doesn’t matter a damn. An individual can’t be judged by his group mean. ”

Not that he’d necessarily have the rest of his work accordingly with these quotes, but again, for what I’ve read he was more on the opposite direction, causing him to get the label of “accidental creationist” (by “Nonzero”‘s Robert Wright, perhaps he is an example of not oversimplyfing things?), as his cautionary tales regarding the limits of natural selection served as ammunition to creationist quote mining, “here, an evolutionist admits that natural selection isn’t as powerful as an omnipotent god”.

It’s really troublesome if he made such mistakes or purposeful distortions in this particular book, but what really worries me more is how it’s going to be trumpeted by people not as interested on distortions and hurried conclusions “on the other side” as an example of how PC-communist-jew science is committed to race-denial, blinding the society from the urgent needs of creepily vaguely defined “racially-realistic/conscious social policies”.

Nevertheless, the critique you offer here is welcome. Gould is popular because he says what popular sentiment would enjoy to hear as truth, but even more, he’s popular with the chattering classes who love an “iconoclast” who confirms the herd morality.

I have always disliked him for his exceptionally reductive approach to science, which removes much of the interest and replaces it with uncannily digestible oversimplifications.

you sound like a concern troll. why don’t you just make a point about the lack of necessary transitivity of correlation to head people off at the pass? the rest of the stuff “why study” is just totally unpersuasive, but then i’m pretty wedded to this truth thing (your other comment was too rambling & polemical, this isn’t a place for us to listen to your lectures)/

there are plenty of other areas where i think gould is pulling a fast one as implied (his confusion on standard error is relatively well known). please don’t project models into my head and use my words like that for clever rhetorical purpose. that’ll get you banned.

I don’t get the point of the study. I don’t understand the value of doing this sort of research at all. Say you definitively learn that head size is correlated with IQ and that head size varies by race. Then what? What are you going to do with your information? How can that information possibly be used? Obviously no population-based data will be a valid predictor of the intelligence of any given individual anyway, and even if it was, so what? Again, what possible policies or interventions or anything should or could be done with that information? And given history and the real world we live in, how can you pretend that this information would not simply increase suffering? In short: why make this what you do with your life’s work? How is this moving the human project forward?

I’m not saying science for science’s sake is wrong. But I do not understand the personal choice of any individual to spend one’s efforts at such a project.