Talk:The Bell Curve/Archive 4

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Merger proposal

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section. A summary of the conclusions reached follows.

The result of this discussion was a consensus for a merger. NightHeron (talk) 20:41, 4 December 2021 (UTC)

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I propose merging Cognitive elite into The Bell Curve. I think that the worthwhile content of Cognitive elite is a small proportion of the 7KB article and can easily be incorporated into The Bell Curve. Most of the lede of Cognitive elite is devoted to The Bell Curve, whereas most of the main body is about Nietzsche. The Nietzsche material is not clearly relevant (as an editor argued recently on the talk-page), and it's a very superficial treatment compared to the main article Friedrich Nietzsche. It's also not well sourced (for example, schoolhomehelper.com). I believe that much or all of the Nietzsche material could be removed before merging. NightHeron (talk) 22:06, 6 November 2021 (UTC)

• Cognitive elite is a disaster area of WP:SYNTH. Unless the term is widely used in contexts completely separate from The Bell Curve, redirecting it to this article would be the sensible move. The fraction of the content that might be suitable for merging is very small. XOR'easter (talk) 22:32, 6 November 2021 (UTC)
• I think the merge is the way to go. The section is short, the topic is only discussed in the context of the bell curve, and there isn't commentry from other sources. Talpedia (talk) 23:14, 6 November 2021 (UTC)
• Right, merge that thing away. Also, in the Cog El article, we only learn that the concept "has been criticized", but not how. Someone tried to formally fulfil an NPOV requirement by just adding the Wikipedia Bad Writing equivalent of a Quack Miranda warning. --Hob Gadling (talk) 05:49, 7 November 2021 (UTC)
• (I'm here from watching WP:FT/N) The whole Nietzsche part should go as it is unrelated OR. In fact, I'll remove it right away. The short bit that is left, even if it has a couple refs mentioning it after the book came out, should be merged into its own section in this article with some tweaks. VdSV9•♫ 15:07, 7 November 2021 (UTC)
• Thanks, NightHeron, for taking the initiative to put out this dumpster fire. I agree that the middle-school book report on Nietzsche should be cut entirely, and will add that Gottfredson's unsubstantiated POV quote is also UNDUE for any encyclopedia article anywhere. I'm agnostic about whether the single study by Jonathan Wai is DUE in this context, but would probably tend to lean against inclusion given the well known issues with the journal Intelligence on related topics. We can certainly merge edited versions of the remaining sentences, if they're not completely redundant, into the existing subsection "Part I. The Emergence of a Cognitive Elite" –– but from a quick glance I'm not sure there's much left that isn't completely redundant. Generalrelative (talk) 16:22, 7 November 2021 (UTC)
• Right idea, wrong target. The idea of a self perpetuating, assortatively mated, quasihereditary cognitive elite is much older than the Bell Curve book and is not so specifically associated with it. It has recurred enough to get its own article eventually (starting from zero, the current content is WP:TNT material) and at least a redirect right now. If there is a merger or redirect I would direct it to someplace more general such as the Meritocracy book from the 1950's, social stratification, elite, or Social Darwinism. "Cognitive" elite isn't quite the root concept, this has been discussed more voluminously as the intellectual, educational, technocratic, bureaucratic, power, status or professional elite. Cognitive elite would fit as a section in an article on any of those. Sesquivalent (talk) 02:18, 10 November 2021 (UTC)
• Support merge - I agree the underlying topic is vague and older than the book. The phrase "cognitive elite" is closely tied to The Bell Curve by modern sources. Without this context, or at least context directly supporting the use of this term itself, the phrase would be too loaded to be usable as a title for an article on the broader concept. If necessary, the article can always be spun-off again based on newer or better sources. As it stands now, any non-redundant content can be summarized here. Grayfell (talk) 02:39, 11 November 2021 (UTC)

My concern is that someone typing "cognitive elite" into the search bar would arrive at the specific setting of The Bell Curve without mention of the broader context, the explanation of which is mostly out of scope for this article. What about reducing the Cognitive Elite page to a stub consisting of one sentence referring to the Bell Curve for the recent (though largely USA focused) association, followed by a list of links to pages on Meritocracy (book), meritocracy (concept), noocracy, and the rest? This could later be converted to a standalone article or redirected to a section of whatever article is considered as the root underlying topic, once either of those is ready. Sesquivalent (talk) 07:58, 11 November 2021 (UTC)

By the book, you mean The Rise of the Meritocracy, correct?

In practice, a very short article which mainly serves to link to other articles is a disambiguation page. Is this phrase common enough for that? Do we have an independent indication that this is a cause for confusion among readers? If we preserve an article with this specific title, it should be under the assumption that some editors are typing in this phrase expecting to find something specific. I don't know what that specific thing is, and I'm not sure anyone else does, either. My understanding is that this specific phrase is mainly used in the context of Murray's political advocacy, and not as it relates to broader philosophy. The current sources at that article superficially support that, also. If we (Wikipedia editors) are the ones creating the link in readers minds between this phrase and the broader philosophy of merit or wisdom, that would be a form of editorializing, among other serious problems. Grayfell (talk) 21:34, 11 November 2021 (UTC)

Yes, Young's book on rise of the meritocracy. There is virtually no difference in meaning between "cognitive elite" in the Bell Curve sense and Young's "meritocracy", except that the first has retained its original meaning while the second transmuted into a pop culture meme with totally different connotations. As meritocracy in Young's sense is no longer the WP:COMMON meaning of his term, it makes some sense to use cognitive elite instead.

The specific phrase "cognitive elite" came into much more common use after the Bell Curve, most of it in responses espousing very different points of view than Murray's, so I don't think advocacy is a pressing issue here (a random sample of sources will come out anti Bell Curve). Anyway, there is a literature and a usage pattern that is ultimately connected to The Bell Curve but the term is synonymous with Michael Young's notion of "meritocracy", itself a satire of similar ideas that had been around for some time.

Nicholas Lemann has a couple of articles in the Atlantic on this that can be used as sources, one from 1994 reviewing Young's book (before The Bell Curve was published) and a 1996 piece A Cartoon Elite [1] with references to several other books besides Murray and Herrnstein (Young 1958, Milovan Djilas The New Class, Christopher Lasch Revolt of the Elites, Steven Brint In an Age of Experts). His summary of Young's book...

"From Young came the idea that not long after a society institutes mass educational sorting based on the results of IQ tests, a distinct high-IQ ruling class will begin to emerge. Because of the tendency of people in this class to marry fellow students at highly selective universities and pass on their IQ-rich genes to their offspring, over time the meritocratic upper class will more and more resemble a hereditary aristocracy. If this class absorbs the left-wing views that prevail in the universities, then once it is in power, it will resemble the arrogant Communist bureaucracy that was the subject of Djilas's book."

...makes it clear the concept is identical to cog-elite as popularized by Murray. Lemann's book The Big Test on the SAT probably has more on this. My point though is that there is enough of a broader topic here beyond the particular usage in The Bell Curve that its existence should be conveyed somehow. Unless the Cognitive Elite page is deleted without leaving any redirect we would be editorializing in any case by redirecting to this article on the book, which isn't the place to get into all the other literature and links to related pages. Sesquivalent (talk) 09:37, 12 November 2021 (UTC)

Coincidentally, Michael Young is also the author of To Merge or Not to Merge. Sesquivalent (talk) 10:01, 12 November 2021 (UTC)

• Support the proposed merge, but I'd also support just deleting Cognitive elite as not a notable encyclopedia topic. If there is an article that discusses this concept in a broader way than The Bell Curve, I'd support redirecting it there, too. If there isn't, but one is written later, the redirect can be re-targeted. But let's not let the perfect be the enemy of the good: Cognitive elite should not be an article. Levivich 16:19, 14 November 2021 (UTC)

Elite#Power_elite is pretty close, Elite theory is a laundry list to which cognitive elite could be added, social stratification would be ideal but with more work than the other two. There is by now a WP:SECONDARY literature on cognitive stratification besides The Bell Curve; the "hereditarian left" (Fredrik deBoer, Paige Harden) is now publishing books making the same points as Michael Young and Charles Murray. They even discuss assortative mating! From the introduction to deBoer's The Cult of Smart: "the ship has already sailed on selective breeding thanks to how we find partners in the twenty-first century, and liberals are more guilty of this selective breeding than anyone". Richard Nisbett in his hardcore environmentalist book on intelligence says there is no doubt that the upper classes are somewhat genetically smarter than the lower ones.

The left and right have started to converge on the basic facts of this subject and it is no longer accurate to treat it as a pet obsession of right wing eugenicists (Murray wants to abolish the SAT and advocates Universal Basic Income), or as very specifically tied to The Bell Curve. Between Lemann, deBoer, Harden and Nisbett there are enough ready to use recent sources. Sesquivalent (talk) 21:16, 14 November 2021 (UTC)

This is about a specific title. It is not the place to discuss or defend the underlying concept. Further, your editorializing on the supposed acceptance of some version of this topic has no bearing on the usage of the phrase in reliable sources. If sources about this perspective consistently use the phrase "cognitive elite" outside of discussions about the Bell Curve, we could evaluate those sources on their own merits. The sources you have indirectly suggested for this change are not usable to overturn the broader consensus here, because they do not represent the issue in a coherent or consistent way regarding the phrase "cognitive elite". Some pop-sci books misrepresent complex questions in order to pretend they have been answered, and their overconfidence is not a virtue. This problem is as old as science itself, but it has no bearing on this specific Wikipedia issues. To put it another way, this is especially weak for overturning Wikipedia's extremely well-established consensus on this strain of pseudoscience. Grayfell (talk) 23:19, 14 November 2021 (UTC)

You are in a minority of 2 (with 5 against and 1 unspecified) construing this discussion as being about the exact phrase "cognitive elite", as though we are editing a dictionary, rather than an encyclopedia topic or concept referenced by the phrase. The article to be merged and the suggested target of the merge both are about the concept. The complication that has arisen here is that the concept also happens to be referenced by some exact synonyms and quasi synonyms such as Young's meritocracy, bobos (David Brooks), creative class (Richard Florida), New Elite as Charles Murray now calls it, and others. There are multiple RS conjoining multiple works using these assorted terms, that state how the different words name the same thing.

Our disagreement here is about whether there should be a discussion of the broader context, involving multiple works besides The Bell Curve, in whichever article is the target article of a merge or redirect. Are you proposing to obstruct the addition of such material based on this sudden requirement of an exact match of the exact phrase, and now also suddenly excluding high quality secondary RS pieces by Lemann and David Brooks [2] by dismissing them as oversimplified?

As to pseudoscience, there is no consensus on or off Wikipedia that the Bell Curve arguments on social stratification (i.e. unrelated to race differences) are pseudo and I'm not even aware of anyone seriously claiming in print that they are. Lemann calls the idea a politicized cartoon and makes some counterarguments (arguably falsified by now in favor of Murray, as Brooks basically admits) but that's nowhere near as strong as calling the idea of a cognitive elite "pseudoscience". If cognitive stratification is pseudoscience, it is pretty odd that we have a long article on the book that treats it seriously and fails to mention that; certainly it would fail FRINGE. Do you have a source for the claim? Sesquivalent (talk) 10:18, 16 November 2021 (UTC)

The argument about social stratification has a whole lot to do with race (and gender). If readers of The Bell Curve believe Herrnstein-Murray about the cognitive elite and the notion that the US is basically a meritocracy, and if you ask them why the vast majority of top-paid positions go to white males, they'll answer: Well, it must be that women and Black people on the whole are just cognitively inferior. NightHeron (talk) 10:45, 16 November 2021 (UTC)

By "unrelated to race" I did not mean that nobody could possibly connect it to race, only that the chapters of The Bell Curve laying out the argument for cognitive elites and stratification refer only to the US as a whole, or data within the American white population. Other authors I listed also explicitly (deBoer) or implicitly (Young, Brooks) limit themselves to stratification within one group. They could all be wrong, but I don't think cognitive stratification per se was ever considered fringe or pseudoscience, and the predictions in The Bell Curve have held up well over time which is not a feature of pseudo. Sesquivalent (talk) 15:00, 16 November 2021 (UTC)

The existence of other words that might mean more or less the same thing doesn't change that this particular term is associated with this particular book. XOR'easter (talk) 00:29, 17 November 2021 (UTC)

There's a single concept (Young's the meritocracy) with an evolution of its names over time. Under the "exact phrase but not the concept" logic we are not allowed to mention Hernnstein's previous book (IQ and the meritocracy, 1973) and essay (IQ, 1971) in this article, in which the same person said the exact same things about cognitive stratification as in the Bell Curve, just because he called it "the meritocracy" (citing Young) rather than cog elite, a term apparently coined later by Murray. Do you have any objection to including 70s Herrnstein, Young, and the others conjoined to them by syntheses such as the Lemann and Brooks articles, if the merge goes to this TBC article? If so then I think we should consider a different destination, but I could also draft an article on the concept or add the material to one of the other suggestions. Sesquivalent (talk) 08:52, 18 November 2021 (UTC)

• Support merge. There's insufficient sourcing distinct from The Bell Curve to support a separate article or to justify the claim that the concept is independently notable. --Aquillion (talk) 09:10, 22 November 2021 (UTC)
  • Yeah, these are my thoughts. It's all well and good talking about the wonderful article that pays attention to a variety of sources that we might write. But I kind of thinking that we could write this later if someone is willing to do the work Talpedia (talk) 16:11, 22 November 2021 (UTC)
    • There is no opposition to a merge or demand that the current article be kept in place for a wonderful rewrite. The discussion has shifted to what happens after a merge if it is into this article, e.g. is Herrnstein's own earlier work (a shorter version of The Bell Curve) would be precluded. I'm not going to comment further on this, in the sense that it's easier and more pleasant to just do the wonderful writing or rewriting and add it somewhere, but it's worth leaving here for purposes of any later discussion of changing the redirect after the wonders of writing. Sesquivalent (talk) 23:36, 22 November 2021 (UTC)
      • Cool cool. By wonderful I really just mean "something that we are talking about by aren't actually going to do any time soon". I have seen this idea hanging around elsewhere - I remember a book arguing that assortative mating was one of the causes of the industrial revolution in the UK, so I think the idea is notable. A problem I've often found is that even though you find "the same" idea in different places, it can be hard to get the sources to tie all the different versions of the idea together. But good luck anyway. I agree that writing well sourced work about controversial can be far enjoyable than the rather less well sourced conversations that surround it. Talpedia (talk) 21:22, 27 November 2021 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Please add 'disambiguate'

This is also the colloquial term for a mathematical topic/formula in probability. Please add a disambiguate page. James (talk) 15:46, 29 May 2022 (UTC)