The New Racism: Charles Murray, IQ & Innumeracy.

racism most likely
you clicked on this video one way or another to hear me talk about the politics and culture of racism but that's not the problem here the problem is the difference between numeracy and innumeracy numbers are cultural symbols this is very alien but very obvious fact it seems strange to us to say that let's say it again numbers are cultural symbols if you have two men who are both very skilled optometrists they can summarize the way in which your vision is distorted in just two or three numbers those numbers really mean something to them and they really understand what's represented by those numbers in a physical sense in terms of the shape of the lens of your eye and in a much more complex sense in terms the way in which light passes through that lens the way in which it's reflected shape distorted the way in which the nervous system within your eye receives that light and turns into an image in the very complicated way in which a pane of glass can interrupt and adjust that light to improve your vision it all comes down to just a few numbers on a page a few symbols but if i'm looking at those numbers i don't really know what they mean what's going on with the revival of the race and iq debate by charles murray what's going on frankly with the revival of this particular form of scientific racism is in principle built upon innumeracy a failure to understand really what numbers mean what they represent how to think about them especially in the domain of social science statistics i think you're onto something but i i gotta come back to ground zero charles do you think black people are inferior genetically no okay well i'm laughing i'm laughing because that's such a silly question tell me why it's a silly question because that's a question that a lot of people are going to be asking me when they ask me why did you have that guy on he thinks black people are inferior okay shall i unpack my answer a little bit sure okay are there genetic differences among people who self-identify as different ethnicities yes the chances that different groups that are separated geographically would have evolved exactly the same is about the same as the chance of dropping a handful of silver dollars and they all land on their edge you know that's just not the way it works if you have geographic boundaries if you have uh other kinds of boundaries and you're talking about tens of thousands of years uh there is a lot of room for evolution to have taken place and i will say point number one is it's it's certainly true and we already know it's true that there are lots of uh population differences in in various genetic variants that is not a controversial statement among geneticists so yes you have you have differences between groups they do not determine your fate they they don't lend themselves to superiority inferiority because they're bundles uh if you're going to use the word inferior and superior then whites better get used to the idea that they're inferior east asians but here's where the importance of differences within that top percentile have so much impact on life outcomes i use the example in the book because you say to yourself suppose you're at the 99th percentile of iq what difference does it really make if you're at the 99.5 and the analogy i use is uh is in sports of a male basketball at a building yeah well you know what if you just have a measure of male basketball ability probably every starter on every college basketball team in a major school in the country is in the 99th percentile so is lebron james well you know what there is a huge difference within that top percentile and the same is also true somebody that 99th percentile of iq is a smart person somebody at the 99.9 can do things that the person at the 99th percentile captain and so it's a very small chunk of the population but if you're looking at who is on the staffs of the quantitative hedge funds in new york city making zillions of dollars they are overwhelmingly of people who are out at the 99.9 percentile and that being the case given the differences in cognitive ability that means they are asians and they are whites overwhelming well a lot of them are jewish charles and a lot of them are jewish [Music] have you ever heard someone tell you that bob dylan is a genius for some younger people in the audience or maybe by some viewers who grew up in some other part of the world where bob dylan is not a famous name you could replace the name bob dylan with almost any famous musician any famous recording artist with a series of top 10 hits on the radio have you ever heard someone say that bob dylan is a genius have you ever watched a 30 minute interview with bob dylan i'm gonna suggest you that bob dylan is not a genius he is not a person of extraordinary intelligence by any meaningful measure whatsoever you just heard charles murray suggests to you as a self-evident fact that successful hedge fund managers this is this is basically a way to play the stock market this is basically being a stock broker within that field a more specific role a hedge fund manager he referred to it as a self evident fact that hedge fund managers are people of extraordinary intelligence that they're not in the top one percent but that they're in the top one-tenth of one percent that they are superior to the rest of us in intelligence in the same way that the absolute greatest basketball player in the world towers over his competition have you ever watched a 30-minute interview with a hedge fund manager serious question you can do it right now on youtube you can go to a podcast you can hear a three hour interview with a successful hedge fund manager and he talks to you about what he did in high school and he talks to you how he met his first wife and how he cheated on her with a stripper and how he got divorced and how he became a cocaine addict and how he used to be a star trek fan and the more you listen to any any successful hedge fund manager talk about their life you are going to think this person is not a genius in the same way that you look at bob dylan after you get to know the guy after you've heard him talk about his divorce and his cocaine habit and what he did in high school in his whole life as well you heard him talking to down right away you'll start to realize gee what people perceive as genius in the case of bob dylan is really just a certain set of skills developed to a very high level of competence and in the whole rest of this guy's life there may be many areas of knowledge many areas of expertise many meaningful measures of intelligence in which he is average or mediocre or even really quite stupid have you ever heard a hedge fund manager talk about politics i have have you ever heard a famous musician like bob dylan like britney spears like little wayne talk about politics i have i've heard many hours of both i used to listen to lectures from the london school of economics that they upload i didn't go there in person i just mean they upload lectures to the internet and i've i've heard people from all these walks in live life and more talk about politics you know what the tragedy is guess who the most influential people in the world are in politics multi-millionaire hedge fund managers and famous musicians like bob dylan and britney spears this kind of celebrity and in an area like politics we see the extent to which they stand on feet of clay all right what everyone wants to talk about is racism in the year 2021 we have just sentenced the police officer derek chauvin to prison the man who killed george floyd the flames of the riots that were inspired by the death of george floyd have been doused out and cities are being rebuilt coast-to-coast the united states statues continue to be torn down here in canada as canada reflects on its own history of uh slavery racism and genocide there's never been a better time to publish a book that's fundamentally race-baiting that's fundamentally playing to public fascination with precisely these kinds of questions and that suggests to the audience a profoundly appealing myth of meritocracy that the reason why bob dylan had hit songs the reason why he became so good not at playing his guitar no nobody would say bob dylan is extraordinarily good at playing his guitar no one would say is extraordinarily good at playing the harmonica nobody he was good at interpreting the cultural trends that were going on around him in greenwich village new york city and in making the kind of song people wanted to hear right and there's a kind of intelligence there but there's also a complex bundle of cultural presuppositions there are very palpable reasons why an immigrant who had just arrived from japan in greenwich village in new york city would be at a tremendous disadvantage compared to bob dylan at interpreting those cultural signals and putting together a hit album a hit song there are very palpable reasons why a newly arrived african immigrant someone who just flew over from ghana let's say to new york city wouldn't be able to interpret those cultural signals and come up with a new style of music and hit albums on the airwaves and the reason has nothing to do with the type of intelligence measured by iq and it has nothing to do with any property that is genetic if we're talking about the differences between people in the top ten percent and you've heard that charles murray with his new thesis is focusing on the top one percent and the top one tenth of one percent if we're talking at the bottom of the spectrum which is really where a lot of the debate about public policy needs to be directed then we'll talk about a whole different set of issues well if you're blind you have a huge disadvantage if you're dyslexic you have a huge disadvantage if you grew up with lead poisoning because in your neighborhood there were lead pipes or pipes with lead soldering lead welding around the edges you're at a huge disadvantage oh you didn't you didn't know that lead poisoning in your water especially as you grow up lowers your iq oh in the united states of america do you think that's distributed equally between white people and black people oh you didn't know that oh black people in the united states of america have a much higher rate of lead poisoning and reduced iq due to lead poisoning you want to know someone else who grew up with lead poisoning in his drinking water me my neighborhood where i grew up in toronto all the water i drank out of the tap and every day my parents took that frozen canned orange juice that nobody drinks anymore mixed it up with tap water i had lead poisoning impair my mental development as a child and we'll never know how intelligent i might have been if the government of canada if the government of the city of toronto had just given a damn and installed the pipes properly if i hadn't grown up with that disadvantage we don't know at the low end when you're looking at the bottom 10 percent when you're looking at the characteristics that cause people to fail an iq test to be incapable of writing an iq test at all that cause people to be incapable of going to university at all incapable of doing math and capable of reading and capable of learning to play a musical instrument there are factors there that profoundly skew the significance of averages of average numbers and what those average numbers mean and when we're looking at representations of intelligence of educational accomplishment and so on in mass in masses of people in millions and millions of people we are looking at the very same factors that make it impossible for someone to get a driver's license impossible for someone to get and keep a job and then that's going to turn up in the averages for that population as a whole so if you have two different ethnic segments of the population and one is living in poverty and the other isn't one has worse access to education one has better one has a higher rate of alcoholism a higher rate of drug addiction than the other a higher rate of lead poisoning all of those factors are going to show up in those statistics but what charles murray wants us to do is to instead focus at the upper limit at the extremes of what he calls intelligence and it's in that area precisely that this notion of quantifying intelligence of assigning these numbers assigning these cultural symbols to things then presuming that we know what it means starts to become most absurd starts to become most laughable why was bob dylan more successful as a musician than a hundred other people who were in greenwich village new york city at that same time trying to write songs was it really because he was more intelligent was it really because he had more intelligence as as measured by the iq test was it because he was jewish what a really absurd notion to try to reduce the accomplishment the artistic creativity and the cultural salience of what bob dylan did to his ethnicity as jewish or the relationship between his ethnicity and what you say iq tests measure or proof right and by the way what was the original idea that bob dylan had again oh right he imitated african-american music he was a white guy doing new york city cover versions of african-american folk music african-american early blues music and then he took it off in his own direction and by the way after that his career only went downhill from there that was the magic of of bob dylan uh there are quite a few other early white top 10 artists in american rock and roll about whom we could say the same thing this is the genesis of elvis presley it's actually imitating and co-opting african-american culture and making it more palatable to making it more acceptable to a white uh mass market audience okay what does it take to be successful on the stock market what are the characteristics what are the advantages that make you really successful as a stock broker or specifically as a hedge fund manager and how do those correlate to intelligence by any particular measure all right it may seem laughable to you oh it may seem ridiculous for me to suggest that the cultivation of a specialized skill in interpreting economic data has just as little to do with intelligence in a meaningful sense as cultivating the ability to look at a bunch of black lines on a piece of paper and in your own mind hear the music an idiot could do it incredibly stupid people learn how to read sheet music and learn how to focus their mind and use their creativity to improve a composition on a sheet of paper right to look at a bunch of charts to look at a bunch of economic equations and hear that music it doesn't take a genius it doesn't even take extraordinary intelligence of any kind and if you just listen to interviews with these guys who are successful stock brokers and successful head shows managers reflecting on other things in their life reflecting on politics reflected society you will realize that they are for the most part people of below average intelligence but who were born into circumstances where they had the access to education that they needed to develop that set of skills and were ultimately just like bob dylan they were lucky they were lucky in putting together putting together those opportunities in a way that a newly arrived immigrant from japan or a newly arrived immigrant from africa or someone who grew up in a drug dealing infested ghetto in los angeles would be very unlikely to do [Music] maybe we can we can practice