Tuesday, December 23, 2014

Innumeracy

Silly Sully is back on his Bell Curve kick because Coates wrote some hurtful things which failed to realize the overall importance of being incredibly civil in the high minded intellectual debate about whether black people are, in fact, stupid, and whether the innumerate editor of a prominent magazine might have some responsibility for catapulting racist pseudoscience he's incapable of understanding into the discourse.

Back in the dark ages when I taught, I'd often try to find an excuse to sneak a Bell Curve lecture into my courses. By the end of my teaching career none of my students had actually heard of it, which was good, but it still provided a way of teaching various lessons, depending on which course I shoehorned it into.

And I knew it was a zombie superhero, destined to return again and again no matter how many bullets we put into its brain.