Let us be clear. Mr. Summers did not â??state.â? He said there â??mightâ? be innate differences rather than discrimination to explain why Harvardâ??s tenured mathematicians were so – well, so male. He was, if anything, pusillanimous.

Your confidence that he was just plain â??incorrectâ? is no fault of yours since you have probably read recent press purporting that a new study demonstrated that girls were as likely as boys to be the one out of 100,000 with Harvard tenure math ability.

I wish this had been true, but the press misstated the study. In fact the study supported Summers (for the 1 out of 100,00 – not for your daughter).

These misstatements were so egregious that I would think they must be falsifications, except that I know that they were probably rewritten from university press releases which might themselves have distorted the unpalatable aspects of the study.

http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/07/30/marginal-revolution-on-the-malefemale-math-gap/

http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2008/07/summers-vindica.html

And,

Tom West, whose comments agree with you, must be your twin – separated at birth. His tag line was:

*sigh* Haven’t had my coffee. “Girl’s can’t do math” -> “Girls can’t do math”.

Posted by: Tom West at Jul 28, 2008 8:09:58 AM
http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2008/07/summers-vindica.html

For my part, even my daughter shouldnâ??t â??mess with meâ? before my coffee.

Dear Stephanie,

Just as patriotism (which has its place) is the last refuge of a scoundrel, ridicule (which has its place) is the last refuge of an anti-intellectual.

This is all a little sad, as, inevitably, many of the advocates on each side of the â??group differencesâ? debate are just choosing arguments to buttress their predilections. So the politically correct side doesnâ??t want to hurt anyoneâ??s feelings; while the other side comes sprinkled with malice up to and including holocaust deniers.

On average, I prefer the side I disagree with. Oh well.

Since we live in an age when students are likely to hear more about Marie Curie than about Albert Einstein…

Women have produced a smaller number of important visual artists, and none that is clearly in the first rank.

However controversial such assertions may still be in the eyes of the mainstream media, they are not controversial within the scientific community.

From a practical standpoint, however, the cultural explanations point to a cause of the black-white difference that is as impervious to manipulation by social policy as causes rooted in biology.

Insofar as the environment is the cause, it is not the sort of environment we know how to change, and we have tried every practical remedy that anyone has been able to think of.

Witness how few of Harvardâ??s faculty who understood the state of knowledge about sex differences were willing to speak out during the Summers affair. [aka “I’m supported in email.”]

Thus my modest recommendation, requiring no change in laws or regulations, just a little more gumption. Let us start talking about group differences openlyâ??all sorts of group differences, from the visuospatial skills of men and women to the vivaciousness of Italians and Scots. Let us talk about the nature of the manly versus the womanly virtues. About differences between Russians and Chinese that might affect their adoption of capitalism. About differences between Arabs and Europeans that might affect the assimilation of Arab immigrants into European democracies. About differences between the poor and non-poor that could inform policy for reducing poverty.

In universities, affirmative action ensures that the black-white difference in IQ in the population at large is brought onto the campus and made visible to every student.

Seriously, the boldest assertions are unsupported by any data, and the rest is whining that we don’t talk about things when what he really wants us to do is restrict what we’re talking about to the data he likes–with just a few hints at where he expects those discussions to end up.

There are two important things about this statement. First, it is incorrect. So we have an economist saying something incorrect about neurobiology. This is the same thing as, for instance, a civil engineer staninding up and giving a talk and saying “Helium, hydrogen, same thing! NO difference!” for some reason. Getting the periodic table of the elments wrong would get chemists mad, and if a person is going to take that incorrect statement to any practical next step, well, they should be stopped.

Second, getting the fact that helium and hydrogen are different elements on the periodic table wrong may or may not be a bad thing. Depends on if you’re the fill-er-up guy at the Blimp Service Station or not. But if you are a policy wonk getting the cognitive neurobiology of people wrong is NOT OK. Not. Ok. Got that?

Don’t mess with me and my daughter when I’m still drinking my first cup of coffee in the freakin AM, man.

The Inequality Taboo by Charles Murray

http://www.bible-researcher.com/murray1.html

I very much doubt that any of you will read it.

Dear Greg, if you were to publish the conclusion that blacks were substantially less intelligent than whites, you would be fired and unable to find any other job in academia.

This is an interesting field of inquiry. Among the politically incorrect, some are hatefully motivated. Some (like Charles Murray) simply (and bravely) interpret the data with some sophistication.

Frankly, considering your background, I am dismayed at the lack of rigor you show here.

This firms up my impression that Harvard-at-Salem must be regarded as a center of anti-intellectualism – like Liberty University, but different.

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/production/files/murray0905.html
http://www.ssc.uwo.ca/psychology/faculty/rushton_pubs.htm w comments

Note: What follows is a fully annotated version of the article that appears in the print edition of the September 2005 issue of COMMENTARY.

The Inequality Taboo by Charles Murray

â??What good can come of raising this divisive topic? The honest answer is that no one knows for sure. What we do know is that the taboo has crippled our ability to explore almost any topic that involves the different ways in which groups of people respond to the world around them – which means almost every political, social, or economic topic of any complexity.â?

Well I think you have a skewed perspective because you regularly expose yourself to the most egregious examples of ignorance. Of course I could be just as easily be wrong but like most people I think I’m right 🙂

“One thing you need to know, Aaron, is that the default belief among scientists who study mammals and birds is not a racialized view of the world. Racism resides mainly in sociology and anthropology, as a concept used in relation to humans, and there it is mostly a white-lie-convenience. Outside of the sciences, racism is a folk belief, like that cold is a thing (that can get out of the refrigerator or that can creep into your bones). There are other areas of science where there happens to NOT be an incorrect folk belief, but this is not one of those areas.”

I quite readily accept that social factors far outweigh anything genetic in relation to “races”. Unfortunately social factors have real consequences and it’s not hard for someone to notice that certain groups are disproportionately likely to end up in prisons, or get university degrees. I think you have to be very careful about what kind of profile you build when you encounter someone who has different beliefs because they may not hold those beliefs for the reasons you think they do.

Jack: I really think the solution has to be to keep disagreeing, but making sure that you make it clear that you respect the rank and file. The top of the foodchain are generally dishonest and I have no problem with calling them frauds, but I think it’s important to remember that the majority of the followers probably think the evidence backs them.

Given the Dawkins quote
“It is absolutely safe to say that if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked, but I’d rather not consider that).”

I think that the vast majority of them are ignorant, but the reality is that most people are ignorant about most things. You shouldn’t judge people too harshly for drawing the wrong conclusion from a bad set of evidence. And when you do judge them too harshly they’ll rightly judge you as being unfair and resent you for it, one of the most common criticisms of scientists is they are elitist, I think scientists need to be careful not to provide evidence to those criticisms.