Tuesday, January 10, 2006

More IQ

Responding to comments to previous posts and Drum I'm still baffled, though I guess I've been around this block before and never get anywhere. First people claimed I misinterpreted what Yglesias wrote - that he didn't write that liberals think that IQ don't measure anything but instead that liberals want to shy away from any discussion which requires IQ tests are important. Drum piles on and agrees that liberals shy away from the topic.
Given that we've had a cross-blogospheric discussion of IQ tests generally and the Bell Curve specifically about a dozen times, much to everyone's boredom, since I've been blogging I just don't know which liberals shy away from talking about IQ tests. The only reason I shy away from them is that every time they're brought up I have to spend about a month explaining yet again why the Bell Curve is crap (cue trolls and "realistic liberals" right now) which requires a bit of remedial everything.

Maybe it's just my background as an economist where such discussions were not taboo, but it was just recognized that any measure of "intelligence" is a dependent, not an independent, variable.