The Bell Curve

Watching now. I've loved Shaun's videos and I've supported him on Patreon. There's a lot of good stuff in here. I've seen various discussions bring up The Bell Curve and I'm glad to have more of an idea about what it is and what its problems are. (Spoilers: there's a surprising number.) I've decided to type just a few notes here, but I ended up typing much more than intended since the video has so much. These notes are only a small bit of the stuff of the video and not a full summary.

• Heritability doesn't exactly mean something is genetic, especially when comparing between groups. Commonly repeated statistics of the heritability of IQ probably don't mean what you think they mean. The book presents this misleadingly or maybe just gets it wrong in places. (Having two arms isn't heritable. Wearing ear rings is heritable, but the heritability has been going down as our culture has been changing to consider ear rings less gender-exclusive.)
• The Flynn effect (IQ test results have just been going up over time and IQ tests have been regularly re-calibrated for this) casts doubt on the validity of IQ tests, and this goes directly against the book's assertions that IQ is going down and that things should be done about that.
• The book argues for inherent racial differences in intelligence, cites Richard Lynn's work about the "African IQ" to defend this, and that work is wildly wrong: it quotes studies misleadingly, it quotes the wrong numbers from some studies, quotes studies where the IQ tests were given in non-native languages, quotes the numbers from studies that explicitly mention their data is biased by socioeconomic and language differences, etc. Richard Lynn is on the board of the Pioneer Fund, a pro-eugenics group started in 1937 that was founded by pro-Nazi people. The Pioneer Fund also funded several other works cited in The Bell Curve, and the TBC's afterword even has a short bit defending the Pioneer Fund.
• The book asserts that the "cognitive elite" are increasingly partitioning themselves from the rest of society and that this is a problem. The book makes a lot of policy proposals based on this information and the nature of IQ, but the policy proposals don't even necessarily follow from the book's points even if you believe them. It argues for cutting welfare, affirmative action, and education programs for under-performers. (Wouldn't this just accelerate the partitioning of society based on IQ? If there were parts of society that fundamentally can't compete with the rest, why would that be an argument for giving up on welfare and not committing more to it? Wouldn't affirmative action programs that displace some "cognitive elite" and cause them to spread between more institutions across society be kind of good then? It's peculiar that the book does mention some benefits of college legacy admission programs specifically but only the downsides of racial affirmative action in letting lower-test-scoring people in...)
• The book seems to hedge some of its claims by saying that IQ is probably mostly environmental and that IQ can't be used to predict an individual's success, but then contradicts this elsewhere and makes arguments and policy proposals based on the idea IQ is wholly genetic and unchangeable, etc. This is insidious because people criticizing the policies in the book because they're based on racist ideas can be rebuked by defenders who quote the hedged claims in the book, and then the defenders can accuse the critics of not reading the book closely enough.
• "The Bell Curve proves, if anything, that any apprehension the scientific community might have about discussing possible differences in racial cognitive ability would be very well justified, because what you shouldn't want to happen as a scientist presenting inconclusive evidence for such is for someone hearing that inconclusive evidence to then start using it as a justification to propose eugenicist political policies. The Bell Curve is all this in one package: inconclusive evidence and eugenicist politics. The Bell Curve has stuck around not because it breaks new ground or presents new ideas, but because it is a useful pseudo-scientific justification for conservatives looking to cut welfare programs and racists looking to feel justified in their racism."