[Fwd: THE TEARS OF THE MIGHTY]

[Rakesh Bhandari]

This talk of banning the Bell Curve is a red herring. The question is why
the editor did not force careful answers to criticisms that have been made
for 30 years as a condition of publication. Texts are suppressed all
the time by editors for such reasons! Moreover, the book had no
interesting finding: IQ does not account for hardly any inequality
according to their  own data, and heritability estimates, no matter how
dubiously high, cannot justify pessimism about social policy interventions
to improve scores, etc.  The next question is why and how the book
received the publicity it did, being catapulted despite being 800 pp of
tedium onto the best seller's list. I wonder why the book did not
circulate as a mimeograph sold on the street by Charles Murray for $10;
instead it was promoted and reviewed (negative attention is still
attention) in all media. The undue attention it received defacto
suppressed discussion of more important matters (the so called free
media is the arbiter of what we debate and discuss) while haunting and
disturbing and depressing people for years.
Yours, Rakeshcy