Quote note (#117)
Steve Sailer’s remarks on the twentieth anniversary of The Bell Curve make a strong case for his conclusion:
A decade ago, I was interviewing an expert psychometrician who had been head of testing for one of the major branches of the military. He proudly recounted that he had given Charles Murray access to the Pentagon’s National Longitudinal Study of Youth data that makes up the central spine of The Bell Curve. He had only one objection to Herrnstein and Murray’s interpretation of his numbers: they were too cautious, too nice.
That summarizes The Bell Curve’s predictions. While you’ve been lied to endlessly about how Herrnstein and Murray were bad people for writing The Bell Curve, the reality is that they weren’t cynical enough.
(Robert VerBruggen’s more cautious commentary is also surprisingly sane for a comparatively mainstream media channel.)
Note: As you can see, the new Archenemied capacities of this blog includes a tidied-up block-quote function — but it strips out the caps (going all hbdchick). Is this a tolerable format? I’d be inclined against it, but I know there’s a passionate block-quote chorus out there …
I once tried to explain how IQ scores are distributed to a social-sciencey girl. They have a Gaussian or “normal” distribution — also known as a “bell curve.” This I explained. She replied, quite simply: “the bell curve has been refuted.” Yes indeed, the racist white-supremacist Gaussian distribution has been refuted.
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Mai La Dreapta Reply:
October 8th, 2014 at 4:05 pm
Mathematics is a tool of the white male oppressor.
More seriously, she’s merely dutifully repeating the catechism that she’s been taught, namely that the notion of a “bell curve” with respect to IQ, time preference, or anything else plausibly related to social success, does not exist and cannot be allowed to exist. She certainly wouldn’t repeat such inanities if you brought up the bell curve with respect to, say, height. It’s only IQ that triggers the crimestop.
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Alrenous Reply:
October 8th, 2014 at 10:18 pm
However, it does suggest future proggie ideological entrepreneurship. The year is 2074. Progressivism has refuted addition.
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The caps seem to be present in the RSS feed (I see caps in email updates that come via IFTTT) and in the mobile version of the site (I only found this by accident). It is only here on the main blog that caps are missing (?).
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Posted on October 8th, 2014 at 9:00 am | Quote[…] Source: Outside In […]
Posted on October 8th, 2014 at 11:26 am | QuoteI never understood the caps-free aesthetic. Do people hate legibility of something?
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Izak Reply:
October 8th, 2014 at 6:53 pm
I think the whole point is that aesthetics aren’t a concern.
Anyhow I like the old quote format better, block quotes are stupid.
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Capitalization is civilization.
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Rasputin Reply:
October 8th, 2014 at 11:02 pm
Cap-stration.
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Agreed. I much prefer the old format, to be honest.
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Posted on October 8th, 2014 at 1:51 pm | QuoteCapitalization is order. Why should we, of all people, assist entropy? It’s doing just fine on its own.
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Posted on October 8th, 2014 at 6:00 pm | QuoteWhy not just remove “text-transform:lowercase” from the block-quote style?
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admin Reply:
October 8th, 2014 at 10:44 pm
Tried that, annoyingly doesn’t seem to make any difference (yet). I predict Mr AE will handhold me through this — no doubt insultingly simple — process in the near future.
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scientism Reply:
October 8th, 2014 at 11:52 pm
Maybe change it to “text-transform:none;”?
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blockquotes! Goldberger/Manski
Amber Munday
Review Article: The Bell Curve by Herrnstein and Murray
Arthur S. Goldberger and Charles F. Manski
http://www.jstor.org/stable/2729026
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Posted on October 9th, 2014 at 2:52 am | Quote