>What Jensen & Co. do is not much different for what passes for standard
>fare in economics: applying sophisticated mathematical models to bullshit
>data (the Garbage In Garbage Out syndrome). In fact, these folks use
>scientific jargon and technical mumbo-jumbo to cover the glaring emprical
>emptiness of their thought.
As Stephen Jay Gould pointed out in his review of the Bell Curve in The New Yorker, that if, as they argue, IQ explains 50% of social outcomes, and they have r^2's of under .10 in their regressions (the only time I've ever seen an r^2 in the New Yorker), they can explain no more than 5% of the variation in social outcomes, even by their bullshit model. (I'm doing the numbers from memory, but they were somewhere in that useless range.) In their text diagrams, they only show the regression line and never the scatter points, because the scatter points would look as good as random to an eye unaided by SPSS or bigotry.
Doug