There is a difficulty with giving The Bell Curve a chance

Friday, May 12th, 2017

Charles Murray explains his controversial book The Bell Curve:

In April, I recorded an interview of almost two and a half hours with Sam Harris for his Waking Up podcast, which, I learned only after I had done it, regularly attracts a few million listeners. We spent more than half of the interview discussing what is actually in “The Bell Curve” as opposed to what people think is in it. Both of us expected our Twitter feeds to light up with nasty reactions after the interview was posted. But the opposite happened. The nasty reactions were far outnumbered by people who said they had always assumed that “The Bell Curve” was the hateful pseudoscientific mess that the critics had claimed, but had now decided they wanted to give the book a chance. It has been a heartening experience.

However, there is a difficulty with giving “The Bell Curve” a chance. The paperback edition has 26 pages of front material, 552 pages of main text, a 23-page response to the critics, 111 pages of appendixes, another 111 pages of endnotes, and a 58-page bibliography. It’s a lot to get through. But there’s a shorter way to get a good idea of what’s in the book: Dick Herrnstein and I began each chapter with a summary that was usually about a page long. With the publisher’s permission, I have stitched all of those summaries together, along with selections from the Introduction and the openings to each of the four parts of the book. If these tidbits arouse enough interest that you buy the book, I will be delighted. But at this point in my life, my main objective is that a labor of love, written with a friend who I still miss twenty-three years after his death, be seen for what it is.

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