Mga app ng Google
Pangunahing menu

Post a Comment On: Steve Sailer: iSteve

"Charles Murray on the Lake Wobegon Fallacy"

11 Comments -

1 – 11 of 11
Anonymous Floccina said...

One of the big problems that I see with schools regarding intelligence is that school is more of a long test than an education. The basic principles of physics and chemistry are very simple, in accounting debits and credits are easy to learn, the basics of principles of most subjects that would be useful in life are simple but we load the sciences up with math and accounting with concepts far beyond debits and credits so that we can grade the students. Better to educate students on the things that they need to know in life and grade them some other way. Economist Richard Vedder (author of going broke by degree) has suggested that we need to separate testing and teaching this would make education better and cheaper.

Increasingly, you hire a tutor or go to a for profit school to teach you but if you need credentials you must slog away for a long period of time in not for profit school.

BTW Some people make a tragic mistake of going to a for profit school when they are in need of credentials. They get out hoping to find a job but no one respect their education. For obvious reasons for profit schools do not want to flunk anyone thus no credentials.

Here is for a separation of education and testing.

1/16/07, 8:56 AM

Anonymous Floccina said...

BTW do you think that the tighter range of inteligence in Korea, China and Japan contribute to the Koreans, Chinese and Japanese being so hard working?

I had a friend from Korea who told me that children in Korea often leave for school at 7:00am and then after school go to tutoring and do not get home until 10:00pm. With a smaller IQ range hard work can pay off. On the other hand it would be useless for a child with a 90 IQ to study hard when plenty of 130 IQ students are around.

1/16/07, 10:10 AM

Anonymous Hubert said...

Well the quality of education in Britain's state system could certainly be improved. Last year, girls of African background (ie. excluding Caribbeans) actually had better average exam results than white boys.

1/16/07, 4:21 PM

Blogger Tom said...

Bad analogy from Charles Murray:

It is not within his power to learn to follow an exposition written beyond a limited level of complexity, any more than it is within my power to follow a proof in the American Journal of Mathematics. In both cases, the problem is not that we have not been taught enough, but that we are not smart enough.

A majority of high IQ people can't follow a proof in a mathematical journal precisely because they have not been taught math at that level. Murray seems intelligent enough to be one of them.

People who say advanced math is all Greek to them are right; many of them would be able to learn Greek easily if they put their minds into it.

But of course, not all of them will want to do that. Underachievement in some fields may be a prerequisite for overachievement in others.

1/16/07, 7:00 PM

Blogger Steve Sailer said...

"A majority of high IQ people can't follow a proof in a mathematical journal precisely because they have not been taught math at that level. Murray seems intelligent enough to be one of them."

Murray has a Ph.D. in political science from MIT. He had all the opportunity to learn higher mathematics a man could have. If he says he can't learn cutting edge math, I'd believe him.

1/16/07, 11:57 PM

Blogger Steve Sailer said...

As floccina suggested above, there is a real conflict of interest in education involving testing. Some forms of testing work pretty well, such as the SAT because the CollegeBoard doesn't give a damn what you personally score. But, allowing states to test their own students, and then grade themselves, which determines how much federal money they get under the No Child Left Behind act is a conflict of interest so flagrant it had to be intentional.

1/17/07, 2:05 AM

Anonymous meep said...

This is part of the problem with NCLB: how to deal with the definitely mentally deficient. My grandma taught middle school special education in SC for decades, and finally left after the standardized testing was also being applied to her students. I visited her classroom when I was in 1st grade, and most of my normal intelligence classmates read better than her students. My grandma could teach them some rudimentary reading, but overall logical comprehension was low. And these were the "teachable" bunch. I've got other relatives who have dealt with the "trainable" group, where the level of achievement is learning to tie shoes.

That said, Joanne Jacobs made a good point at her blog (and Murray mentions it in his own article): what exactly =can= the 1 s.d. below average IQ people achieve? Maybe not calculus, but basic algebra and reading Dickens might be in their grasp (for crying out loud, he was a bestseller in his day -- he's not all that hard to read. Think of Harry Potter now - not all the kids reading it are above average intelligence). Who knows? Maybe they can achieve the 8th grade level that the 11th grade NAEP measures. Yes, it will take them longer to get there, and yes, they're not college bound (or they shouldn't be). But that doesn't mean they can't be held to =some= standard.

I'm with floccina on the separation of the teachers and the testers. I'm also big on letting the smart people meet the standard and do what they want (more here: http://meep.livejournal.com/1469581.html). I have more than once run into a situation where the kids haven't been tested to a rigorous standard because the teachers didn't want the kids to feel bad about themselves, and it does them no good as they'll eventually run into the reality that they're not as good as they think.

Of course, the damage can be even worse when there's no hard-and-fast way to prove to some people they're just not as good as they think.

In any case, I'm waiting on my results from my last actuarial exam. Now =that's= some harsh reality. You should see the Actuarial Outpost after scores come out. Sheeee. In my career, you can lose your job for not passing a test; you can get bonuses and raises based on passing those tests. It's nice to be in a profession that can shake out some of the incompetents.

1/17/07, 2:52 AM

Blogger Tom said...

Steve:

"Murray has a Ph.D. in political science from MIT. He had all the opportunity to learn higher mathematics a man could have."

As a graduate student in political science? No schedule conflicts at all?

Well, perhaps, but did he pursue the opportunity? It could be that he studied just enough statistics to write the Bell Curve, and God bless him for that. Which is the better use of his time, applying formulae or to re-deriving them?

I'm not saying Murray could understand *all* the proofs or even many proofs. But there should be some he could follow if he had the training and the desire for it.

Few people other than mathematicians themselves (and perhaps some physicists and economists) can readily understand math papers. Are you saying high-IQ people are limited to those, Steve?

Even if Murray's brain were truly inadequate, which I doubt, his analogy still wouldn't be convincing, especially to those who do not want to be convinced (of which I'm not one). There's simply an easier explanation (your favorite Occam's Razor right here). Why can't he understand a math journal? Because he's not a mathematician!

1/17/07, 8:26 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Here in Chicago they are paying substantial amounts of money to "Hispanic" parents to get their kids to come to school.What a waste!

1/17/07, 10:13 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Most mathematicians wouldn't be able to read the articles in that journal, if they're anything like I remember. Most math articles are written =horribly= and assume you know quite a few major results in the particular field being written about.

=meep=

1/17/07, 11:16 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

I have an undergraduate degree in math, and I couldn't understand a math journal. Mathematics (real mathmatics - i.e. not algebra or even calculus) is not easy to follow unless you're an absolute expert in the particular branch being considered. Those journals are written for and by PhD people. In fact, I've heard that even the professors only understand a few articles from the journal in their particular field. Anyway, I agree. Pushing so many people to go to college devalues college degrees economically (and intrinstically as unfortunately many subjects get "dumbed down" as a result of unqualified students lowering the standards). Although the sciences and mathematics haven't met this fate yet, they probably will. Currently, I really don't think it's fair to bright people who are interested in the Humanities to have to be bored by dumbed down stuff. I was initally a Philosphy major because I really liked it, but the work was so dumbed down that I switched majors (didn't have the time or money to do a double major). Anyhow, I knew a Philosophy degree wouldn't prove anything like it should... At least I still got to minor in it. It's a waste of time for lots of people to go to college plus those of us who are suited for it no longer stand out.

2/17/07, 3:03 AM

Comments are moderated, at whim.
You can use some HTML tags, such as <b>, <i>, <a>

Comment moderation has been enabled. All comments must be approved by the blog author.

You will be asked to sign in after submitting your comment.
OpenID LiveJournal WordPress TypePad AOL