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                                           February 2-5, 2010

                                           DECOY

"This is the pot calling the kettle black."

         Richard Posner, on Gould
         accusing the Bell Curve
         of being an ideological work.
         p. 93, _Public Intellectuals_

And *this* is a case of one pot calling
another pot black while denying that the
original kettle was black, when all can
plainly see it is, in one sense quite
black, but in another, whiter than
white, and without much in the way of
IQ going for it.


           "The _scientific_ disagreements between Gould on the one
           hand and Herrnstein and Murray on the other are smaller than
           meet the eye, which is typical of public-intellectual work."
                   Richard Posner, p.93, _Public Intellectuals_

           If you actually read Gould, this seems like a very strange
           thing to say.  Gould attacks the "Bell Curve's" handling of
           statistical matters, in particular he accuses them of
           burying the data showing the weakness of their correlations.

           "He is right to criticize Herrnstein and Murray (as others
           have done) for having created an exaggerated impression of
           the statistical robustness of their correlations between IQ
           and worldly success or failure" -p.94

             Uh, yup.  So what exactly were you talking
             about on the previous page?

             Abusing statistics doesn't strike you
             as a slight scientific problem?



   Steve of Stevereads does a
   fair job of defending Gould
   from Posner's attack...
                                             [ref]
   Perhaps Steve's best point is that while
   Gould is a paleontologist, he's spent much
   of his career working with statistics, and
   is in fact well-qualified to talk about
   "principal-components analysis".  Gould's
   application of it to the IQ debate could
   turn out to be wrong, and even so he would
   not deserve Posner's criticism for arguing      Posner, on the
   beyond his expertise.                           other hand *would*
                                                   deserve it.



  This is one of the funnier points Steve makes:

        "Posner claims that The Bell Curve had got the
        better of the fight with Gould, which I don't
        understand: the evidence against Herrstein &
        Murray's book had been overwhelming for years
        by the time Posner wrote. Public Intellectuals
        came out in 2001, whereas Intelligence, Genes,
        and Success: Scientists Respond to The Bell
        Curve-- tearing H&M's book to shreds from a
        number of angles-- had come out in 1997."

  To get the joke, you need to know that Posner likes
  to accuse other people of ignoring criticism they       KRUGMAN_INCLINED
  should be aware of...


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