ISIR 2009 Distinguished Interview: Charles Murray from Timothy Bates on Vimeo.
Wednesday, January 12, 2011
Charles Murray interview
Here is Charles Murray speaking at the International Conference of Intelligence Research in 2009. About 40 49 minutes in he advises the researchers to write up their results in obscure technical language to avoid controversy. Research obfuscation will not help the cause of good governance in multiethinic societies but it does mean more fun for the Statsquatch.
ISIR 2009 Distinguished Interview: Charles Murray from Timothy Bates on Vimeo.
ISIR 2009 Distinguished Interview: Charles Murray from Timothy Bates on Vimeo.
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4 comments:
I've always seen the "unnecessarily-dense academic jargon" phenomenon as a highbrow form of what the secret-handshake is to 10-year-old boys.
If you "get it": you're in the club, you're cool, you're proud.
Or, if you prefer, it is the same as why the Catholics for so many centuries used only Latin in religious services, long after no one spoke it anymore.
[I listened to 39-42 minutes but didn't hear "be as jargony as possible"]
Hail,
Thanks, it is 49 minutes in. The key is “unnecessarily dense”. DC Rowe's (whom he mentions) liked to use simultaneous equation modeling and complicated factor analyses which are not taught in most statistics classes. Rowe needs them to make his points.
I'm of one mind with Murray so far as that remark about data from India goes. To consider the disparities between Parsi, Gond, Naga, Toda, Pathan, etc. etc., is to see right away the gross inadequacy of what psychometricians have to work with at present.
Charles Murray:
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"You can write about almost anything, as long as you write it obscurely enough. [Applause, laughter].
The great example of that is David Rowe. He wrote a piece -- was it in American Pyschologist? -- It was in one of the major psychological magazines, on the "architecture" of the black-white difference. It was an incredibly powerful argument that what you are looking at is not the result of environmental differences. It was an elegant, elegant piece of work. It was also very difficult. And very sophisticated. David did not go out of his way to make it...real obvious was to what he was saying! It got no flak whatsoever as far as I can tell.
And you know what? [Pause] I think that's OK, because the fact is: If you decide you are going to write for a general audience, and you are on some of these taboo topics, [pause] you had better be the right personality type. [...] I was probably clinically-depressed for about six months after The Bell Curve came out and all of its reaction. It is no fun. Particularly those of you in academia: You are going to take serious, serious hits, if you stray into these areas and do it in a way that becomes known to the public at large.
...If I had been at a university, my dinner party invitations would have gone way down among my colleagues, real fast, and a lot of friends would have frozen me out. I wouldn't have had my tenure taken away -- although they did try to do that with Linda Gottfriedson. But I would have found myself on the backburner with all kinds of faculty committees and so forth. I am reciting not what I think would happen: I am reciting what did happen to Dick Herrnstein after "IQ and the Meritocracy" in the early '70s.
So if you do these things and you are at a university, you are going to pay a price. You ought to know that going in." [End quote from Charles Murray].
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