June 16, 2009

A hilarious "oversight" in Nisbett's "Intelligence"

On the VDARE.com blog, I have a posting up about a striking omission in Richard E. Nisbett's book Intelligence and How to Get It.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

By Steve Sailer on 6/16/2009

23 comments:

Anonymous said...

So what was, in fact, Rick Heber sent to jail for? What exactly did he do? He was charged with mishandling funds, yes, but did he NOT carry out the research, but only invented his data, or what?

6/16/09, 4:02 PM
Nanonymous said...

So what was, in fact, Rick Heber sent to jail for?

Tax evasion

6/16/09, 4:42 PM
gordon-bennett said...

Wiki's article on the Milwaukee Project doesn't mention it as a failure.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milwaukee_Project

6/16/09, 5:17 PM
SF said...

"Tax Evasion"...
and two counts of theft, or embezzlement. (same reference)

6/16/09, 5:46 PM
Anonymous said...

http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1368&dat=19831226&id=15YWAAAAIBAJ&sjid=-BIEAAAAIBAJ&pg=7068,6069183

He was sent to jail for putting his wife on the payroll for doing nothing.

6/16/09, 6:21 PM
beowulf said...

"He was sent to jail for putting his wife on the payroll for doing nothing."

Umm, unless he and his assistant Garber were practicing polyandry, no.

"Heber put Garber's wife on a UW-Madison payroll (for no work) so Garber could be reimbursed for travel expenses."

6/16/09, 6:51 PM
Anonymous said...

This is reminiscent of the Joan Peters book "From Time Immemorial". Despite being exposed as a mixture of fraud and plagiariasm (and quite a bit of plagiarism from fraudulent sources!), it is routinely cited in discussions of the Middle East.

6/16/09, 6:58 PM
ben tillman said...

The Milwaukee Project was a small study with some 20 experimental subjects and 20 control subjects. It was not reported on by the investigators in any refereed scientific journals, yet its cost was some $14 million, mostly in federal funds.

So that's $700,000 for each "experimental" child over six years, or $117,000 per child per year -- in 1960's dollars. Since 1967, we've had inflation of about 540%, which means that in inflation-adjusted dollars the program spent $750,000 per child per annum.

Even if the results weren't fabricated, the program obviously couldn't be replicated on a large scale.

6/16/09, 10:34 PM
Big Bill said...

Tillman's comment regarding the Milwaukee Project is equally applicable to the Abecedarian project: limited sample size, massive costs show that (at best)six figures per year per dumb student lead to modest improvements.

Most of the six figure costs are spent on School of Education grad students and researchers, natch.

6/17/09, 3:46 AM
V said...

Curiously, in Arthur Jensen's The g Factor (Chapter 10), the Milwaukee project is described in entirely respectable terms. There is no mention of Heber's conviction, and not a hint of doubt in the integrity of the data he presented. (Of course, Jensen does comment on the modest results considering the exorbitant cost. In his words: "In terms of the highest peak of IQ gains... the cost was an estimated $23,000 [over $100K in today's money!] per IQ point per child.")

Jensen obviously didn't have any incentive to paint a rosy picture of this project, so I have no rational explanation for this. I can hardly believe that he hadn't heard about the affair. What makes it even more puzzling is that, according to Jensen, "the originator and first director of the project, Rick Heber, died in an airplane crash and was not involved in the production of the final report." Yet the report is cited as written in 1988, while Heber died in 1992 according to the encyclopedia cited in the Vdare article. I'm puzzled.

6/17/09, 10:44 AM
Anonymous said...

The FOIA and counterpart State laws might be overdue to use in
revealing facts of the Heber anti-
Miracle. Sketchy info suggests
a coordinated prosecution of small
easily proven charges in various
venues that Heber plead "no contest" to. No trial as such
appears to have resulted anywhere.
The story has to be extracted--not
just picked up and processed.

6/19/09, 8:41 AM
Anonymous said...

It is not ad hominem in view of the
convictions of Heber and Flanigan
and one or two others in the Project, for the Project to be
deemed temporarily suspect and
off limits for citations, etc.,
pending an objective external
inspection to see that the actual
data collection, etc. did take place and the Project was not some
Hollywood mock up. Was'nt done.

6/19/09, 8:47 AM
Anonymous said...

The various charges Heber plead
"no contest" to seem somewhat
modest and somtimes typical of
persecution-prosecution. Known facts, however, suggest the likelihood that the coordinated
investigatons--state and fed--if laid open in a trial would have caused a lot of stigma to people at UW and in D.C. that were not guility of crime--just sloven.??

6/19/09, 9:12 AM
Anonymous said...

As far as Jensen's "g" Factor book
and mention of Heber's convictions--I believe?(not certain) that in
a book length interview about 2002
by Frank Miehle, Jensen did refer to the convictions. The issue seems to be that UW / HEW etc. never had the Projet data and research conduct examined to give
assurance Heber had not fiddled with it as he had with the funds.

6/19/09, 9:25 AM
Anonymous said...

In the lush grantmanship years
of the 60's and 70's,the easiest
way probably to have filched lots
and lots of money wouldve been kickbacks vis a role as a
consultant
within the archipeligo of MR researchprojects in North America. If hopping about on your own plane could get everywhere for a little
bit,you'd be immune to prosecution

6/22/09, 12:38 PM
Anonymous said...

The Heber matter sprung into
view from a series of investigative newspaper articles in a Madison (WS) paper--maybe
Capitol Times ?? about 30 years ago But the articles are not online and no brief
summary of them (who? what? where?)
is to be found. Accounts of the
Heber scandal are virtually non
existent online. Hmmmmm.

6/22/09, 12:44 PM
Anonymous said...

As to Heber's death date and the
final report date--there is some
suggestion that Heber died in
December 1987--not in 1992. As
in so many ways, the facts of all
this are oddly sparse and very hard to pin down. I could find
no SSI Death Index for a birth date
of Jan. 12, 1932 AND any 1992 death
date. I have poor search skills.

6/23/09, 12:33 PM
Anonymous said...

As far as Jensen's "The g Factor"
not alluding to any prison time
for Heber, etc., I find this
interesting, too...but the content
of a book is tempered by the editors and their inhouse legal staff and often the prudent thing
about a non-essential fact that may arise from a cloudy context
is just to omit it. Relevant to
Jensen's book? I don't know.

6/23/09, 12:42 PM
Anonymous said...

Heber reportedly was an advisor
directly to the President of Egypt re MR and related health-education
issues. "Rick and Ann Heber" are
referred to often and with high
regard in bulletin boards dealing with the important and finishing
and breeding of fine Arbabian Horses. They had a stable
Ranchara Arabains at Merrimac
WI & later near Colo Springs.

6/28/09, 9:52 PM
Anonymous said...

Heber was convicted , along with an associate, of using increasingly elaborate schemes to misallocate research grants into their own personal accounts and to use the money for such things as purchasing golf clubs, etc. The unsuccessful defense was that they earned/deserved/ the money as payment for expert services, consultation, etc. Heber was also convicted in State court in at least one trial. He served time at federal "country club prisons" in Bastrop, Texas, near Colorado Springs, and finally in Utah. He was killed in the crash of small plane containing him and 10 other members of a tour he headed, this on August 03, 1987 just over the border of Zaire in very wild country within Rwanda. No survivors. He resided at the time in/near/ Monument , Colorado, where reportedly he continued his long involvement with the breeding and training of fine Arabian horses. Allegedly, he began getting "technical" and "Involved" with federal grants back in 1971 and just indulged, allegedly, in more and more sophisticasted schemes for misallocaing larger and larger amounts of money.

10/3/12, 9:52 PM
Anonymous said...

Heber and an associate, Patrick Flannigan, went to trial, apparently refusing to cop a plea, in an initial trial that lasted several days. Heber testified. It would be interesting to scrutinize the trial transcript to see why Heber felt he could defend against the charges. The parsimonious assumption is that Heber did really consider environmentalism as an established , vindicated truth and never detected early on the extent to which people in academia often express overtly what they privately disdain. He apears to have been a kind of con man who was enveloped by a Society that was doing a con job on itself about nature/hurture? HE spent very very little time on the Madison campus, although being a full professor for, what?, more than 15 years. IN fact, just in common sense terms, he was living in Colorado on his horse ranch (he imported, showed, and bred fine Arabian horses ) for at least a few years before his Project came under scrutiny about 1980. He appears to have been respected and trusted among horse fanciers, and the academic scandal appears not to have impacted that status. He also loved flying. The sense is that the Madison campus had long been simply a base of operations for him. He appears to have delegated almost everything to underlings willing to stay and work on campus. There were three prosecutions brought against him, at least two of them in State Court. One looks in vain online for transcripts of the trials, for the local newspaper reporting (there was almost no reporting beyond Madison ), for FOIA recovery of his grant applications, etc. etc.

1/26/13, 3:07 PM
Anonymous said...

What was Heber sent to jail for?
The trial in federal district court in Madison, WI in July 1981 resulted in Heber and an associate being convicted on all counts charged. But the monies diverted appear to have been not from the Milwaukee Project but from an attendant project to provide workshops in MR services (for school counselors, etc. ). The defense appears to have had such elements as the revelation of Heber's wealth and the lack of any motive to get in trouble for limited amounts of money (the cost of a used car, in one instance, etc) One count involved a phantom job for the wife of one of Heber's University cohort. But she pointed out that while the job did not exist, the "salary" paid was used entirely to pay for her husband's academic travels to Europe (workshops, etc.). It is astounding that the only fairly consistent news coverage given the Heber Affair was from the local
Madison Capitol Times newspaper. Apparently along about 1975 or so,
some of the funding he had consistently relied upon (and he got a helluva lot of money out of
the feds ), started "drying up"--someone was pinching the spigot.
One is left with the impression that the University (and others?)
generally succeeded in boxing up and burying the Heber story. The guy had huge power and prestige and was brilliant, if not sufficiently conscience laden. Perhaps the real story apropos America's insistence upon biologial equipotentiality is that
"You can not con an honest society but a dishonest one can be conned year after year, for about two decades!!!

4/28/13, 8:02 PM
Anonymous said...

Rick Heber was sent to (minimum security) federal prison for misuse of funds ($160k ) not directly involving the Milwaukee Project but involving workshops and short seminars offered by the Waisman Center (for research in Mental Retardation) that Heber had headed since its inception (1964 ff) at the Madison campus. Oddly,
there appears to be no record of investigation of funds used directly in the Milwaukee Project, and an estimated $14 million was spent in that Project--almost all of it from federal government grants at a time when the Freedom of Information Act would permit access to grant applicatons, approvals, IG surveys, correspondence, etc . How $14 million from the fed government to the Project flies off into the clouds without an accounting is indeed more interesting than the purported aims of the Project. The summary of the Milwaukee Project by Dr. Howard Garber was finally published in 1988, 22 years after the Project got underway and about 12 years after it ceased. In 1983 Garber told a regional newspaper that the report was finished and ready for publication. No one has revealed why five years elapsed before he could mail the manuscript to the publisher. Garber and his wife now live in Milwaukee, in deep retirment.

5/18/13, 3:54 PM

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