Wednesday night I attended a function got up by one of the think tanks in New York City, at which Charles Murray debated James Flynn on the black-white gap in test scores. It was all terrifically cordial and collegial (and in fact it’s plain that Murray and Flynn, despite being on opposite sides of the nature/nurture issue, like and respect each other a lot).
Even trying my hardest not to be pre-disposed, though, I was struck by how unimpressive Flynn’s arguments are when you have to sit through them. He is a pretty pure “nurturist,” whose faith in “interventions” is infinite. He adores that Eyferth study (children of black servicemen growing up in Germany)—you can’t but suspect that it’s the only one the nurturists have got, though there are all sorts of problems with it, and, as Murray points out gently, there are now about ten thousand studies on the other side. The appeal of the Eyfurth study for Flynn is, I think, the idea that these black kids in Germany were growing up and learning without any influence from the established ghetto culture of black America—the braggadoccio and honor codes, the who’s-actin’-white? pressures and hip-hop filth—which Flynn detests. He seems not to ask himself any of the questions that obviously come to one’s mind here.
Murray demolished Flynn’s positions briskly but politely, with masses of data neatly presented on PowerPoint slides. If it’d been a fight, the ref would have stopped it in the second.
Watching Flynn’s presentation, though, you also can’t help but be struck by the fundamental decency of his democratic-socialist position. He honestly, earnestly, wants to lift up the poor and disadvantaged. His way to do it is by deploying legions of government-salaried helpers, all as earnest and sincere as himself, to supply “interventions” to any person or group that needs them. He seems not to be aware of the problems with this. A world populated entirely by Jim Flynns would probably be a pretty nice place…
Two good points from Murray:
- On those “interventions”: Charles played back some of the data on the fixed-ness of individual nature, including intelligence. Intensive intervention can shift this a bit—occasionally, in very favorable conditions, a lot—but if you remove the interventions, the individual’s statistics are soon right back to where they were before. That’s the “Head Start Lesson.” It’s what I’ve called “walking south on the deck of a north-bound ship.” Charles had a personal anecdote. At college he took a speed-reading course. Sure enough, pretty soon he was up to 3,500 words a minute (or whatever the target is). The course completed, by concentrating real hard on what he was doing, he kept up that speed for a short while, then… after a few months found he was back to a plodding 400. Every dieter knows the feeling. You’re pretty much stuck with yourself as you are, whatever the self-improvement guru sales pitch tells you. Best just get used to it.
- On the genetic side, our knowledge of the human genome is now at the point where we can move away from the coarse, binary black-white model for these studies and begin to treat race as a continuous variable. When we do our testing on that basis (says Murray) the results will be really interesting.
I noted with amusement how these guys have been thrashing these things out for so long, they’ve attained a sort of shorthand for talking about them. It’s like being among those long-term prisoners in the old joke, who have got so used to hearing each other’s jokes they’ve just given them all numbers—you only need to say “number 85″ and everyone falls around laughing. It’s the same with these IQ researchers. If you don’t know your Eyferth from your Shaker Heights, they can be real hard to follow.