The Bell Curve Controversy

Jerry Pournelle's suggestion in his February column that we can all test Murray's and Herrnstein's conclusions in The Bell Curve on our home computers makes about as much sense as testing the conclusions of Mein Kampf with a spelling checker: You would just be proofreading without thinking about the assumptions. You can't obscure the biased tone with matrix inversion and regression analysis. Accepting a single value as a meaningful measure of someone's intelligence may be enjoyable parlor discussion, but to suggest that social policy be based on it is ludicrous.

Nick Didkovsky
New York, NY
72250.3313@compuserve.com

While no one disputes the existence of special skills and talents, there is a consensus that a general factor is more important for predicting most behavior s. The theory of prediction by multiple-regression equations, along with the factor analysis that refines those predictions, isn't difficult to understand. But doing much with it takes a lot of computation. Prior to the availability of powerful desktop computers, there was little chance of the average educated person being able to examine the "general factor" hypothesis. Now anyone with a computer and a year or so of college math can try to falsify that hypothesis or try to find a better one.

I am not aware that Mein Kampf contains any testable hypotheses at all.

--Jerry Pournelle