Other bell curves
[Written while still in Africa but was too scared to post it until I was out]
The very word ‘bell curve’ is triggering to those who try desperately hard to pretend they don’t know what it means or all that it implies. You can still say, ‘curve of normal distribution’, but you can’t say ‘bell curve’ in polite society anymore, even if you’re just talking about heights or something like that.
This sin, of course, emerges from the eponymous book by Charles Murry and Richard J. Herrnstein, which was mostly about the increasingly divergent life outcomes of high and low IQ people in the United States, but which also had a single chapter about racial differences in IQ. Guess which chapter caused all the hysteria.
For the record, here it is: the most controversial graph in the world. Read More