The Mismeasure of Man
by Stephen Jay Gould, Joandomènec Ros, Ricardo Pochtar, Antonio Desmonts · first published 1981
40% recommend29% neutral31% critical
Why HN recommends it
Critique of biological determinism and IQ ranking, covering craniometry and biases in intelligence testing. A counterweight to The Bell Curve for readers weighing claims about race, IQ and innate ability.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
Examines the history and inherent flaws of the tests science has used to measure intelligence.
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The seminal work on this tendency we humans have to classify and rank each other is Stephen Jay Gould's The Mismeasure of Man https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mismeasure_of_Man If you have a chance, it's worth a read. It's on my list of the top ten most important books I've ever read and it permanently altered the way I think…
on “The history of humans trying to reduce one another to a personality profile” ↗…mentioned were done by Thomas J. Bouchard, Jr. He's someone who writes op-eds for the Wall Street Journal - I guess Nature and Science are too full and his work crowded into there. The second edition of the Mismeasure of Man by Stephen Jay Gould is a good book on this topic. There was a hysterical conservative reaction to Gould's book just as there was a hysterical progressive reaction to the Bell Curve. Which shows this…
on “Analyzing my DNA” ↗…University, I remember we laughed at "The Bell Curve". It wasn't considered classic scientific reading. There are a million places to start if you want to find a critique, but you can start with Gould's "The Mismeasure of Man".
on “Rich, Black, Flunking” ↗…ranking people by intelligence. First, intelligence is a very poor social measure -- it's an unreliable gauge, it has been abused countless times for political ends, and it's not well understood. Read "The Mismeasure of Man" by Stephen Jay Gould to find out why. Second, even if IQ testing were reliable, it would still be politically unacceptable to rank people by IQ -- I mean, more than we already do. Certainly not in public…
on “Why Aren't Schools Grouping Kids By Intelligence Level?” ↗Great article. If anyone who agrees with James Damore's point is motivated to see the reason these arguments are summarily dismissed by many, I recommend reading "the mismeasure of man", by Stephen Jay Gould. The idea of biological determinism has one fatal flaw... the grouping.
on “The e-mail Larry Page should have written to James Damore” ↗That is Stephen Jay Gould and I just reread the Mismeasure of Man, an excellent inoculation against essentialist beliefs about the incarnation of intelligence.
on “Biology is the New Tech: Letter from a conference on CRISPR” ↗…personal hero. He wasn't from the "far left"; he was intellectually honest and consistent. He spent an inordinate amount of time fighting the teaching of Creationism in US schools. He also wrote The Mismeasure of Man which rubbed proponents of IQ measurement the wrong way (the Wikipedia article covers the debate quite well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mismeasure_of_Man) and which I think was and still is an…
on “The Demise of Scientific American” ↗Mostly agreed, but I'd suggest that, instead of The Bell Curve- which is full of highly questionable and mostly-discredited pseudoscience- you instead read Stephen Jay Gould's "The Mismeasure of Man". The most recent edition, I believe, has an entire chapter devoted to dissecting exactly what's wrong with the arguments presented in "The Bell Curve".
on “Being Poor by John Scalzi” ↗…her to be more understanding to your hopefully pure motivations in seeking truth, you should also be more understanding of her recognition that people often hide bigotry behind science. [1] See "The Mismeasure of Man," by Stephen J. Gould. Broca, a pioneering scientist into brain research, devoted a lot of effort to measuring brain capacity in skulls and thereby "proving" that women and blacks would never achieve…
on “Female FOSS dev quits tech industry due to harassment” ↗I should start a kickstarter to buy every one of you people a copy of The Mismeasure of Man and force you all to read it.
on “Google Fires Employee Behind Controversial Diversity Memo” ↗In that case the sentence would have simply read: > Likewise, many of the genes that are associated with IQ today are likely important “because of how today’s IQ tests are set up.” See also The Mismeasure of Man by Stephen Jay Gould. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mismeasure_of_Man
on “Gene discovery from a genome-wide association study of educational attainment” ↗IMO, anybody who takes Charles Murray seriously needs to be hit upside the head with a hardcover of Stephen J. Gould's The Mismeasure of Man, which exposed race-and-IQ studies for the racist bullshit they are in the 1970s, years before the publication of The Bell Curve.
on “Scott Siskind believes scientific racism is “probably partially correct”” ↗Actually I read both books years ago and "The Mismeasure of Man" was far more sound in its analysis. In particular the biases in IQ testing were made very clear in Gould's work. My take on what the Charles Murray crowd (and its antecedents dating back to Francis…
…humans are messy. We have a long and complex history of trying to rank each other in "simple, objective" ways and it almost always ends badly. The seminal work on this subject is Stephen Jay Gould's The Mismeasure of Man. I can't recommend it highly enough. It's one of the handful of books that really changed how I look at the world. Months after I finished it, new "Hey, wait a minute!" thoughts kept bubbling up at random…
on “Employee NPS: The Golden Metric for Employee Performance Review” ↗…(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bell_Curve#Reception) where you can dive deeper by looking into the reference (I particularly recommend S.J. Gould which addresses scientific racism in length in the book Mismeasure of Man). There is also a long video essay by Shaun (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBc7qBS1Ujo) —if you have 3 hours to spare—which does an excellent job of summarizing the bad science and political agenda…
on “Reinstating our SAT/ACT requirement for future admissions cycles” ↗