From: Rafal Smigrodzki (rms2g@virginia.edu)
Date: Mon Sep 16 2002 - 17:15:17 MDT
To Harvey:
Since neither one of us is a practitioner in the field of IQ testing, it is
important to establish a list of the authorities we want to base our
discussion on. I would like to establish a list of journals which both of us
might accept as such authorities. Here is a part of the list:
Psychological Review
American Psychologist
Neurology
Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry
Science
Intelligence
Child Development
Developmental Psychology
Please feel free to add any other (primary) sources you consider
trustworthy.
-------
>The American Psychological Association denounced the book by
>concluding "The scientific basis of The Bell Curve is fraudulent."
### Am I to infer that the above statement is an actual quote from an
official APA policy statement? Please be so kind and provide a link. The
official APA report at http://www.lrainc.com/swtaboo/taboos/apa_01.html
*does not* contain the word fraud. In fact, it largely repeats most of the
basic claims of The Bell Curve (validity of IQ testing, importance of IQ in
professional life, inter-group IQ differences) in a somewhat watered-down
version. This leads me to believe you did not read this document either - or
else why would you quote it is a dismissal of TBC?
I didn't get to the HUGO report you quoted, I'll inform you about its
contents later.
--------
>
> An extremely detailed analysis of the first statistical model in the
> book can be found at <http://www.srv.net/~msdata/bell.html>. It is
> very in-depth into the statistical methodology of the very first model
> cited in The Bell Curve. This researcher could reproduce the numbers
> from the book, but only following their instructions which seemed
> convoluted and invalid. He concluded that "HM's model though did not
> fit the data for subjects living under the POVERTY level: their model
> predicted none of these cases correctly." Even using their own
> models, the predicted curve did not match the data like they claimed
> it did. <http://www.srv.net/~msdata/analysis.html#rep>
### A note of correction - the author of the above (non-peer-reviewed) is
female. Did you really read the document?
She re-analyzed specifically the relationship of poverty status, age, SES,
and AFQT. This is only one of more than thirty similar analyzes in the book.
The re-analysis is not rejecting the validity of TBC's approach, merely
expresses some puzzlement, and warns that "the devil is in the details".
And, of course, she expresses no opinion about the remaining 30 similar
analyses in the book.
here is a quote:
"I examined one analysis and don't know if it's representative of the other
34 basic analyses HM presented in Appendix 4. How well would HM's model
predict unemployment? The model could predict very well or as poorly as it
did in the original POVERTY analysis. At present, I have no idea--although I
suspect I'd find more of the same, I do not know that I would.
and
"the devil is always in the details--details like the instruments you use to
measure psychological constructs, pulling data from disks and tapes,
creating variables, selecting cases, translating the preceding into one form
of computer-ese or another, and so on down the daisy chain.
---- ### OK, this is it for starters. Until tomorrow. Rafal
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