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34 - Lee Carter: Socialist Win in Virginia; Hitchens Right, Harris Wrong on Bell Curve (Patreon)

Published:
2018-03-31 00:37:49
Imported:
2026-06
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Content

The first TMBS cartoon animation premiers.

Then, Assemblyman Lee Carter from Virginia joins us to talk about his journey to Democratic Socialism and how a bad worker's compensation experience drove him to run for office.  How he determined 'socialism' wasn't such a scary word. Lee points out people don't need 'jobs,' they need A Secure Job.

Then, Sam Harris has been boosting Charles Murray. Christopher Hitchens returns from the dead to set him straight on why The Bell Curve was ever talked about.

Comments

Kevin Labelle

Man, I feel like this whole IQ debate has gotten far too convoluted with regards to hereditary and environmental variables. First, for anyone to assume that IQ is inherited because of the mean IQ scores between different races demonstrates clear sample selection bias. Once again, the most worthy predictor of someone’s overall performance on an IQ Test is their Socioeconomic Status, and whether or not they live somewhere where certain crucial things are considered to be private or public goods, and whether there is a problem with childhood discrimination (towards poverty rather than just ethnicity) in their public school systems. When choosing between different ethnicities in the bottom twentieth percentile of household incomes, in regions where treatment for learning disabilities is not provided to every child, they all perform worse than the top 80% of earners. When places provide services like a school psychologist, they perform significantly better but not as well as the families in the higher income brackets — even when there’s a solid social safety, these children’s home environment is more likely to impede their capacity to learn either due to less free time to study, the undesirability of being home, and the stress that prevents them from focusing in school. In another peer-reviewed study that I’d have to find to cite the authors, adoption studies in France also demonstrated that people born in poverty but adopted into middle-class households, regardless of ethnicity — with obviously a larger share of the sample being White — consistently scored higher on IQ tests, as teenagers and young adults, than those born in the same area but whom were never placed for adoption. Twin adoption studies are a bit less reliable, because — in developed countries — it’s a bit rare for parents to put up 1/2 children for adoption. So, if both are put up for adoption, the likelihood is that both were taken into middle class households or above. Furthermore, they end up in vastly different places with significantly different school systems and varying access to public resources early-on — especially in the United States, where Texas public schools in rural areas are purposely under-developing the intelligence of children, mainly critical thinking, compared to California or New York’s rural schools. Another peer-reviewed study showed that children from a lower SES status were less likely to receive a diagnosis for dyslexia — mainly because of a lack of access to child psychologists and psychiatrists — and thus be viewed as “bad readers” by their teachers, as opposed to “dyslexic” and thus in need of more support from their teachers. Comparatively, children diagnosed with dyslexia saw their IQ scores increase with age and remained on par with — or above — the mean score of 100 from their age group. Yet, children stigmatized as bad readers never saw an IQ score improvement, and often had a decrease in performance as they aged — relative to their peers. It’s so scientifically disingenuous to assume that these scores are valid predictors of performances that are hereditary in nature. Again, studies that used a newer type of linguistic-auditory developmental technique — on children — saw an average IQ score improvement of one standard deviation after just a few weeks of training. If a kid with an average score of 100 can go up to a 115+ within a few weeks, then we have to question either the validity of the test or the influence of natural intelligence on raw scores. I’d go with the latter, because IQ tests are extremely useful for targeting academic flaws very early on, and structuring a child’s school schedule in a way that compensates for those flaws. That was the whole intention the Binet test in the early 1900s, but was taken out of context by the Army — in part — but especially by Eugenics proponent in states like Indiana and certain municipalities with large minority proponents. I highly doubt people like Charles Murray or Sam Harris give a shit about finding the “truth” about how much of our intelligence is hereditary, and what those implications are. They’re selectively choosing to apply a minimal amount of statistical control, the type that would elevate their argument — like removing as many poor Whites and wealthy African Americans from their sample as possible without appearing completely dishonest, or just flat-out not testing for those things. The sheer number of experimental controls that would have to be applied, to really test the hereditary nature of IQ, would be extremely large and would require studying everyone in every single sample from at least 6 years old to 19-21 years old. You would need poor people and rich people with and without diagnosed learning disabilities. You would have to talk to ALL of their school teachers to see if there were any biases for every all individuals, and your sample would need to be large enough that you can actually have enough people with the exact same independent variables except for race, and then race everything would have to be the same except for race and income, next would be race and diagnoses, etc. Seriously, there’s no way a half-decent intellectual could interpret any of their “facts” as possessing any validity. The end-result can only be the implementation of discriminatory policies that separates the types of work people have access to based on their ethnicity. There’s no way around that, and — at best — this research of theirs is sloppy as fuck. Just like Samuel Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations,” it’s fucking nonsense but people still adhere to it because they prefer to think of every geopolitical issue as being due to culture and/or ethnicity. They just don’t want to even attempt to think about what solutions could be implemented, it’s just way easier to say “well there’s nothing I can do about it, so let them kill each other off” without feeling the slightest bit guilty about it.