Charles Murray became a pariah for talking about how America is chock full of people with below-average IQ (and therefore way below the average in the high-IQ countries). But he did not specifically address whether or not credentialed Americans are not smart enough to work with the bell curve (Normal distribution) per se.
Thankfully, the New York Times has come along to address this question. Their best and brightest journalists and editors looked at a survey of 250 colleges and universities. The results were pretty close to a normal distribution centered around the previous mean:
39% of responding institutions reported a decline in international applications, 35% reported an increase, and 26% reported no change in applicant numbers.
How did this lack of change from the previous year get understood by the journalists and characterized by the editors? “Amid ‘Trump Effect’ Fear, 40% of Colleges See Dip in Foreign Applicants”
[Thanks, Jonathan Graehl, for this beautiful example of everyday math!]
Charles Murray became a pariah for talking about how America is chock full of people with below-average IQ (and therefore way below the average in the high-IQ countries).
You left something out. That doesn’t explain why Murray became a pariah.
I do not like the fact that Charles Murray is being denied his right to speak and how his persecution became a precursor of many colleges capitulating to bulling and routine unlawful attacks on other college speakers, and disregard for the law, but… Is there hard research that intelligence is indeed distributed normally? It is a testable hypothesis and it could be tested statistically within its confidence intervals. Disclaimer: I did not read ‘The Bell Curve’ and have anecdotal evidence from pre-selected groups of people, most of similar level of intelligence. Intelligence is clearly not distributed uniformly, but is there indeed a geometric shape that describes human intelligence?
I have to admit, I’d never seen that list. Many of those countries have a mean IQ score so low that the average person would be considered intellectually disabled here in the U.S. http://aaidd.org/intellectual-disability/definition#.WO5jnFPytE4 how on earth do those places function?
Just glancing at the lower echelons of the list, those countries do not function.
Dean: IQ isn’t going to be a perfect bell curve because nobody can have an IQ below 0 and nobody has ever scored higher than https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marilyn_vos_Savant at 228. However, it would be shocking if IQ were not distributed more or less normally. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_limit_theorem for why you don’t want to bet too hard against the normal distribution. See http://www.ihvo.de/202/gaussian-distribution-of-intelligence/ for a little more on this subject.
(Also, don’t feel bad for talking about Charles Murray without having read his book(s). Based on the number of folks who claim that he is a racist, I think you have a lot of company!)
The tails are substantially fatter than a guassian. There are a lot more very smart and very dumb people than the bell curve predicts.
philg #5, for central limit theorem, are you talking about average country IQs per country distribution? I am yet to review this statistics, maybe I do some data plotting on my own. I would be surprised if country averages are in fact formed normal distributions, but it could be. I do not think average IQ per country is known well as many countries do not do IQ testing. I believe there were many practical failures where normal distribution of random variable, and even of means, were assumed. Technically we need to test for normality using something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shapiro%E2%80%93Wilk_test and remember that normality assumes that underlying data is truly random. It is better to do actual calculations when acting forces and data is well know vs relying on statistics.