On Mon, 9 Apr 2012 07:08:17 -0700 (PDT), "
wrote:

On Apr 8, 7:07*pm, George Plimpton wrote:



You didn't do anything to dispute the fact that there is no claim of
racial superiority in Derbyshire's piece, not-so-fast eddie.



The web site referenced is extremely slow. So I did not read " The
Talk " until today.

There is a lot of statements about IQ differences between blacks and
whites. While I think that there are some differences , I do not
think the differences are close to being as large as Derbyshire
claims. The book " The Bell Curve " has statistics that are probably
more accurate.

Much of " The Talk " is reasonable, but the claim of differences in IQ
are to me a unwarranted claim of racial superiority.

Dan

Derbyshire, like Murray and Lawrence Summers (in his speech about
women in high-end science and engineering jobs -- the one that cost
him the presidency of Harvard University), glissades back and forth
between statistics and individualism to weave an argument that can be
difficult to pick apart. It's an intellectual corruption, but that's
par for the course.

At least Derbyshire warns us by asserting that he's a racist -- he
thinks that blacks are inherently inferior. That's the belief that
informs his polemics. When you start with that belief, and if you're a
good essayist (he is), you can convince the unwary that the moon is
made of cheese.

This is not a response to any of those polemics; that would take a lot
of work. But you can see the pattern: Start with a tip of the hat to
the range of individual differences; then quote statistics to support
a sterotypical discrimination (what happened to treating people as
individuals?); quote some sources that reinforce the stereotypes; and
finally, end with another tip of the hat ("In that pool of forty
million, there are nonetheless many intelligent and well-socialized
blacks" [IWSBs]...), blunted with "to be an IWSB in present-day US
society is a height of felicity rarely before attained by any group of
human beings in history." Those lucky devils, eh?

Masterful. I can picture him skiing down the slalom course at Gstaad
-- backwards, on one ski.

That's an abuse of intellectual skills. As I said, getting into an
argument with them is a tedious business, but you can see the basic
logical problems with that type of argument by noting what is *not*
said -- particularly in Charle's Murray's _the Bell Curve_. Murray
points out that blacks score lower on IQ tests, and that it is a waste
of time and money, therefore, to encourage them into higher education.
Murray also notes that Asians score better than whites.

The obvious conclusion is something that he doesn't bother to address:
It is a waste of time and money to encourage white people to go to
college. If you follow Murray's logic, the smart thing would be to
encourage Asians, and don't abuse whites by encouraging them to aspire
to things for which they're not suited. Better to teach whites to be
janitors and barbers, and to leave the intellectual heavy lifting to
Asians.

I wonder if Derbyshire wears smoking jackets and drinks Port at his
club?

--
Ed Huntress