My (soon-to-be) wife has very similar interests in cultural and cognitive psychology, especially regarding intelligence and the east asian/western divide. If you want to read research of equal quality (without the prestigious name) I’m sure she would have have a dozen recommendations.

Off the top of my head:

On Intelligence: The Mindset by Carol Dweck (Stanford). Comes from a ‘culturally blind’ lineage so east/west divides are ignored. Excellent insight into motivation and behavior as it related to cognitive psychology and real-life achievements.

On East/West Cultural Divide: Heejung Kim (Stanford PhD, currently at UCSB). This woman is absolutely prolific in the field. She is making enormous strides in the body of cultural psychology research.

Happy readings.

2. IQ was invented by teachers to explain why some teachers are better than other teachers. Better teachers are better because their students have high IQs. Bad teachers are bad because their students have low IQs. And the teacher have developed tests that prove that teaching ability has nothing to do with how much the student learns, provided the teacher is a union member.

Thanks for the excellent post!

I’m going to review on certain parts of Nisbett’s chapters, as reflected in your post. Much of the writing seems solid, so I will save my comments for those parts I disagree with.

Second post seems solid. Some claims mentioned by first post are more questionable. Not sure if I will just copy and paste from this email to comment, or revise further. We’ll see how opinionated I get ;-)

1 & 2. This is mentioned late in the second post, but f there are two sources of variation, it’s obvious that the effect of one increases as the variation in the other is reduced. So obviously, the more you vary nurture, the less nature seems to matter, and vice versa.

3 & 7. Summer vacation only makes dumb kids dumber. It makes smart kids smarter.

I mentioned this in passing earlier.

http://www.tdaxp.com/archive/2009/03/10/obama-on-education-2.html

SES is deeply, deeply unfair. Solutions which we may devise to help the slowest will hurt the swiftest.

4. Saying the top 20% of Americans are on part with the top 20% of international students doesn’t do much good for the author’s goal of equality, fi the other 80% are dangerously behind.

5. There may be something to parenting, but I would like to know why whites do best w/ authoritative parenting styles, and blacks and asians seem to do best w/ authoritarian parenting styles. I can’t make anything out of this repeated finding in parenting research. It seems arbitrary.

6. This sort of close-our-eyes nonsense is everywhere in the debate on race, mostly on the side of merrily ignorant liberals.

“What about correlations between specific genetic makeup and IQ? If African genes have any role, or place any limitation, on intellectual capacity, black Americans provide the ideal study group to provide it … since they have widely differing ratios of European genes in their genetic makeup. But when studies of detailed genetic makeup are matched with IQ, there are no correlations between the extent of European ancestry and IQ. Other studies with mixed-race kids in post-WW2 Germany show similar results.”

The first part of this claim strikes me as absurd, even assuming that the genetic contribution of IQ is always zero. Imagine you have two populations which differ in IQ and SES entirely for cultural reasons. Now imagine some cross-breeding between them. As like breeds with like, we should expect that lower-than-average IQ/SES members of the higher-performing population would mate with higher-than-average IQ/SES members of the lower-performing population. Sure enough, that’s what we see with white-black (“African-American”) mixing. There’s a whole literature on whether this can explained as high-performing blacks ‘trading’ objective spouse quality in exchange for social access. So my impression is the author’s comments here are making facts up.

The interpretation WW2 Germany study is actually contridcted by another part of the synopsis of the book. The Army used IQ testing to sort recruits. In general, a soldier with a bastard in Germany was (a) smart enough to get in the infantry and (b) dumb enough to be in the infantry (alternative: smart enough to blow-up a German and dumb enough to knock-up a German). Unless the author is arguing that the WW2-era army engaged in massive affirmative action, there’s no reason to expect an IQ gap between black infantry and white infantry.

I mentioned this two years ago

http://www.tdaxp.com/archive/2007/12/04/genetic-and-environmental-causes-of-human-diversity.html

Also, the comments on the Flynn Effect are deceptive, as you are trying to compare two scales that are differently normalized. Imagine weighing yourself and your wife first on a scale on the Moon, and then one on Earth. “Look, honey,” you say, “you are already as massive as I was on the Moon!” If you do that, you might be Richard Nisbett!