Remember Charles Murray and The Bell Curve?

He's back with an article in the Wall Street Journal. He describes the reaction to the aformentioned tome:

...the furor over its discussion of ethnic differences in IQ was so intense that most people who have not read the book still think it was about race.

I've never read it, either, but I was subjected to lengthy professorial speculation and opinion on the topic and the book.

I bring it up because this article (which is very enjoyable - dispassionate, yet intense; subdued almost to the point of weariness, yet thorough) has a whole lot of correlation, and the central point of the argument's implication is all about causation; in a nutshell, does being of a certain race or gender cause you to be smarter or dumber than those of another gender or race?

The issue is discouragingly complex, and Mr. Murray, while concise, treats it quite well in this essay (read the whole thing), so I'll refrain from extensive comment. The point I want to make is that in these truly interesting real-world cases of statistics in action, the attempt to bring in and properly analyze as many pertinent variables as possible exposes the simple reality of correlation and causation: it's complex, ambiguous, and usually a function of numerous interactions of variables and combinations of those variables.

The takeaway for this blog comes from Steven Pinkers The Blank Slate, which Mr. Murray cites:

...equality is not the empirical claim that all groups of humans are interchangeable; it is the moral principle that individuals should not be judged or constrained by the average properties of their group.

It looks to me a lot like most racing video games, where you choose a vehicle that has a certain score on a variety of characteristics, for example, traction, acceleration, speed, etc. Who's to say which vehicle is the best? Obviously, the point is that each vehicle is the best under certain conditions. Same goes for people.

For practical application, I'll close with one last quote from Mr. Murray:

The differences I discuss involve means and distributions. In all cases, the variation within groups is greater than the variation between groups. On psychological and cognitive dimensions, some members of both sexes and all races fall everywhere along the range. One implication of this is that genius does not come in one color or sex, and neither does any other human ability. Another is that a few minutes of conversation with individuals you meet will tell you much more about them than their group membership does.