“At the same time, I am not sure race and gender differences are a particularly fruitful area(s) of inquiry for things like cognitive skills and personality traits.”
Why not? You say because you can’t change them? Why does that preclude studying them and discussing them? If there is arace difference in IQ then why should that not be a fact that leads to different educationaal systems? Gender differences we know are factual so how society treats women can also be different as long as it is not discriminayory.
Murray’s thesis is anti-diversity and that’s why the academics are against it.
I read the book and it is valuable for discussion and policy planning.
JeanLM: Let’s do a thought experiment. Let’s assume that you have a statistically significant difference in the average IQs of men and women - say 100 versus 105. What would it lead you to do differently with respect to education than the difference between two individual women or two individual men whose IQs are 100 and 125?
Let’s continue and assume that the average IQs of individuals with and without two parent in the home is 95 without and 100 with both parents? Again what would you do differently in the classroom?
In short, IQ is an individual attribute and there is a much much larger variance among individuals than there is between groups. It makes far more sense to tailor educational practices by IQ rather than by any demographic characteristic.
Are you going to teach Thomas Swell or Clarence Thomas differently because they are African American?
Note that I am not saying there are not biological differences but those differences have to be defined far more precisely and causally linked to biological factors than is currently the case.
Significant group differences may well exist on individual attributes but they are best treated as starting points for research than as an end point if you some how want to change the nature of the group difference.
Jean:
I do not doubt that there are on average differences between men and women and among races and ethnicities. But that is the problem - we are talking about averages of individual skills, behaviors, attributes, etc., as if they have actual reality.
Can you give me an example of a coherent and effective public policy issue that is predicated on the race or gender of an individual and does not amount to a tautological assertion?
I play soccer. I see no reason why women should not play soccer on teams made up primarily of me. It depends on the skills and abilities of the individual involved. For me, the same applies to combat roles in the armed services. When a woman from Africa becomes World Chess Champion perhaps we will come closer to treating all individuals as individuals and not based on their group identities.