[alasdair_]

>I'm not suggesting choosing between left and right, only pointing out that the bias is pervasive and undeniable.

Can you point to specific examples of this where the science is actually robust and well documented but has somehow been blocked from being published or otherwise stopped due to this pervasive bias?

[barry-cotter]

You’re asking people to prove a negative, and also assuming that there’s no chilling effect as people learn that certain topics are not a good idea if you want a career.

The premier example of robust, well documented science with vociferous opposition has to be intelligence. Besides scholars with a fiercer attachment to their politics than the truth like Gould you also have introductory psychology textbooks that go out of their way to muddy the waters by giving space to alternative theories of intelligence to g with fuck all empirical backing like Gardner’s or Sternberg’s. If they had similar standards in other areas of psychology everything would be as bad as social.

For suppression there was an article in Third World Quarterly withdrawn due to credible threats of violence because a mob didn’t like the topic. Note it wasn’t retracted and it passed peer review. David Graeber recently led a campaign to have Noah Carl’s offer of a postdoc withdrawn at Cambridge, successfully. And there was a campaign at Hypatia, a feminist philosophy journal to have an article withdrawn for discussing trans racialism in the context of transsexuality.

[n4r9]

That Noah Carl one is interesting, hadn't heard about that. The Cambridge college actually conducted a formal investigation with a panel led by a Professor, and published a statement [0] explaining their decision to retract the fellowship. The reasons cited were lack of research ethics and integrity in Carl's work, poor scholarship, and the risk of the college being used as a platform to promote racist views.

Frankly, this seems like a measured response to a fairly standard complaint. Perhaps the only part of it that grates me is the public and "outraged" nature of the complaint. Without knowing much more about Carl's actual work, I suppose the outstanding question is, if the reasons above are true then how did he get the offer in the first place?

[0] https://www.st-edmunds.cam.ac.uk/sites/www.st-edmunds.cam.ac...

[barry-cotter]

Yeah, if you get to pick the committee you can get them to report whatever you want, whether you explicitly instruct them as to what to find or not. Read his work for yourself and come to your own conclusions.

His research gate profile.

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Noah_Carl

His website.

https://supportnoahcarl.com/

> Since I was fired, over 600 academics have signed a petition supporting me , and several leading newspapers have published articles criticising the college’s decision. The support I’ve received so far has been incredible! But petitions and newspaper articles aren’t enough. If we want to safeguard academic freedom, and freedom of speech more generally, we need to start imposing real, material costs on the institutions that buckle under activists’ pressure.

[mayniac]

> Since I was fired, over 600 academics have signed a petition supporting me

He initially got fired because (almost) 600 academics signed an open letter casting doubt on his work, on top of 800 students [0].

Also, I don't really think that "read his work for yourself" is a valid argument. For one, you're talking hours, if not days or weeks of research, which isn't reasonable. And secondly, unless the person you're responding to knows sociology well, they're probably not going to be a good judge of his work.

[0] https://medium.com/@racescienceopenletter/open-letter-no-to-...

[n4r9]

> if you get to pick the committee you can get them to report whatever you want

That's sometimes true, but I'd need more than that to suspect it in this case. The committee was chaired by a senior, tenured life fellow, and perhaps I'm biased as it's my alma mater, but Cambridge tends to be pretty insulated from cultural whims.

As the other reply pointed out it's not really reasonable to expect someone to become proficient in a body of scientific work in order to make an opinion, moreoever the great majority of his research gate articles require the text to be requested.

Unless something further comes to light I'm not yet persuaded that this is a miscarriage of justice or scientific suppression.

[charlesu]

An introductory psychology book that didn't give alternatives to g wouldn't be a very good textbook. g is easy to replicate but it doesn't really explain anything. It literally just proves that there's a correlation between cognitive tasks. That answers a what but not a why.

[barry-cotter]

I would agree if the alternatives were held to the same standards. As is teaching Sternberg or Gardner’s theories alongside g is like teaching Lamarck alongside Darwin.

[allovernow]

Hell, look at the insane, wholly unscientific public crucification of James Watson for commenting, totally reasonably, on this very subject. Stripped of a Nobel prize for suggesting that two and two may equal four. Find me one credible media outlet which even questioned such treatment!

Edit: sorry, I misread a headline about him losing the prize, it read stripped of "honors". Point still stands.

[wdbbdw]

'Dr. Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health, said that most experts on intelligence “consider any black-white differences in I.Q. testing to arise primarily from environmental, not genetic, differences.”

Dr. Collins said he was unaware of any credible research on which Dr. Watson’s “profoundly unfortunate" statement would be based.' [0]

I think this video [1], does a good job of attacking a lot of race science and intelligence, though at 2.5 hours long it may be a bit too thorough.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/01/science/watson-dna-geneti...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBc7qBS1Ujo

edited for formatting

[deogeo]

Dr. Francis is either unfamiliar with, or being profoundly misleading of, expert opinion, as surveys show:

"In the current study, EQCA experts wereasked what percentage of the US Black-White differences in IQ is, in their view, due to environment or genes. In general, EQCA experts gave a 50–50 (50% genes, 50% environment) response with a slight tilt to the environmental position (51% vs. 49%; Table 3). When EQCA experts were classified into discrete categories (genetic, environmental, or 50–50), 40% favored an environmental position, 43% a genetic position, and 17% assumed 50–50." - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.intell.2019.101406

> I think this video [1], does a good job of attacking a lot of race science and intelligence

'Attacking' is a good description, as the author of that video went to great lengths to mislead. For example, he says the author of The Bell Curve doesn't understand what 'hereditary' means. But the definition the video author gives for 'hereditary', and the definition given in the book he's reviewing, match almost perfectly. So how did he come to that conclusion? He went out of his way to find a live interview where the book author fumbled his answer, instead of giving the definition from the book he's reviewing, or as you more accurately put it, attacking.

[wdbbdw]

While the quote you pulled from that survey seems to contradict what Dr. Collins said in his statement, the two sentences before that one seem more problematic for the idea that there's even a difference in IQ that can be attributed to race:

"There was little to no support for separate subgroup norms for different racial, ethnic, or social groups or for people with different nationalities (natives vs. immigrants), with the percentage of experts favoring separate norms below 25%.

There was no clear position among experts regarding environmental and genetic factors in the US Black-White difference in intelligence."

Maybe Dr. Collins rubs shoulders with experts other than those surveyed here, who knows.

Looking at the SD in the survey responses suggests that the position of the researchers polled in this survey wasn't accurately represented by the quote you posted.

The example you use to critique the video I posted is also not very generous, and is a pretty lame rebuttal to what was a very extensive attack on the ideas presented in "The Bell Curve". Do you have any critiques on the more relevant points that the video actually makes? E.g. what is intelligence anyway and how can it be measured, if at all? Or, presuming that IQ is an accurate measure of intelligence, then how to square the supposition the Bell Curve makes about an idiocracy-style drop in IQ points with the Flynn effect?

Another relevant question is what exactly is the scientific support for "race" as anything other than a meaningless label[0]? For example, in the interview of Charles Murray conducted by Sam Harris for his podcast, Murray used Barack Obama as an example of a typical black man, saying that, and I'm paraphrasing, even supposing that there is a difference in IQ between the races, it wouldn't justify denying a job to someone like Barack Obama if he came in applying for one. But, like, why is Obama black and not white? Have you seen a picture of Obama's mom? She's the whitest white lady from Kansas. I was recently working on some cancer project and I had a spreadsheet of the subjects' self-reported race, as well as genetic ancestry results showing the percentage of African ancestry and European ancestry. Some of the respondents who self-reported as African American had 97% European ancestry.

[0] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2018/04/race-gen...

[deogeo]

> Looking at the SD in the survey responses suggests that the position of the researchers polled in this survey wasn't accurately represented by the quote you posted.

There's one or two charts in the article, showing how many experts believe the IQ gap is 0% genetic, how many believe it's 10%, and so on, up to 100%. There's a large spike at 0%, then a noisy, mostly equal distribution up to 100%, where it drops back down to near zero - i.e. almost no hereditarian believes environment plays no role. So yes, there's no consensus, but the view that IQ is hereditary is well represented among experts - moreso than the opposite.

The Flynn effect disproves nothing, much like the increasing average height doesn't imply height isn't heritable. As I don't believe IQ is 100% determined by genes, there's any number of explanations that are consistent with heritable intelligence - changes in culture, environment, upbringing, nutrition, air quality, levels of athleticism, etc. For example:

"Similarly, researchers have shown that differences in the ways boys and girls spend their time (e.g., playing with Legos) (Bornstein et al., 1999), toy selection (Goldstein, 1994), and computer videogame experience (Quaiser-Pohl et al., 2006) are responsible for differences in their spatial abilities, also loaded on g."

> The example you use to critique the video I posted is also not very generous

The example was to show the video author was being deliberately misleading, going out of his way to hide data that opposes his conclusion. Meaning everything else in the video is probably similarly cherry-picked.

> what is intelligence anyway and how can it be measured, if at all?

I don't see how minor fuzzyness in the definition of intelligence casts any doubt on clearly defined IQ scores, especially when IQ has been shown to be such a useful and important measure - IQ is very predictive for success at other tasks also considered to require intelligence, such as academic achievement - this is referred to as being g-loaded. Moreover, the more g-loaded a test is, the more heritable performance on it is [2].

> Another relevant question is what exactly is the scientific support for "race" as anything other than a meaningless label[0]?

Race is simply how closely related people are, at a very coarse level, where clusters correspond to races. See this post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22052174

[1] https://www.cato-unbound.org/2007/11/13/stephen-j-ceci/signi...

[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4437459/

[dragonwriter]

> Hell, look at the insane, wholly unscientific public crucification of James Watson for commenting, totally reasonably, on this very subject.

Watson wasn't crucified, or anything remotely analogous to it, his comments weren't particularly reasonable, and even his own near immediate apology explicitly noted that there was no scientific basis for them. (Though he has since returned to repeating them; the whole thing is weird since at the time he first made them, there was a very recent piece of work which could have been cited as support for the geography/IQ link he suggested, but in between then and the time he went back to issuing them that work had been torn apart for gross methodological errors, including deliberately excluding data to fit the intended conclusion.)

> Stripped of a Nobel prize for suggesting that two and two may equal four.

He wasn't stripped of a Nobel prize, and he absolutely wasn't suggesting two plus two may equal four; he made an at best thinly supported claim about geography and IQ combined with a completely unsubstantiated claim about the premises of development policy toward Africa, and drew a dire conclusion from that combination.

[barry-cotter]

You can’t be stripped of a Nobel prize.

[0xADEADBEE]

Looks like he sold his medal [0] to ameliorate his loss of earnings; perhaps that's to what GP was referring.

[0] - https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/11261872/James-Wats...

[wdbbdw]

He never actually sold it [0]; a billionaire just paid him some cash instead and Watson got to keep his prize.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/dec/09/russian-bill...

[tiles]

Rather than public crucifixion, it looks like James Watson actually did quite well for himself?

[Fishysoup]

"Two and two may equal four" being a bunch of nonsensical racist slandering based on no evidence. Every result ever has pointed that all races and genders are equally "intelligent" and well-suited to the same tasks. And trust me, there's been no lack of racist scientists. It's just that bullshit doesn't stick.

[barry-cotter]

> Every result ever has pointed that all races and genders are equally "intelligent" and well-suited to the same tasks.

This isn’t true. Ashkenazi Jews and East Asians have higher IQ scores than whites. Male and female scores on IQ tests are identical by construction. They have different scores on the component sub tests.

http://www1.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints/1997mainstrea...

Mainstream Science on Intelligence: An Editorial With 52 Signatories, History, and Bibliography

Since the publication of “The Bell Curve,” many commentators have offered opinions about human intelligence that misstate cur- rent scientific evidence. Some conclusions dismissed in the media as discredited are ac- tually firmly supported. This statement outlines conclusions re- garded as mainstream among researchers on intelligence, in particular, on the nature, ori- gins, and practical consequences of individu- al and group differences in intelligence. Its aim is to promote more reasoned discussion of the vexing phenomenon that the research has revealed in recent decades. The follow- ing conclusions are fully described in the major textbooks, professional journals and encyclopedias in intelligence.

[soyiuz]

I suggest going back to school on your basic terms. Skin color taxonomies such as "white" and "black" are weak proxies for genetic diversity. Races are not taught this way anymore. This article in Scientific American puts it well in summarizing that "the mainstream belief among scientists is that race is a social construct without biological meaning."^1 "Ashkenazi Jews ... have higher IQ scores than whites" is a nonsensical statement from that perspective. You are mixing categories of ancestry and skin color. The authors of Bell Curve made the same basic mistake and were rightly skewered for it.

1. https://www-scientificamerican-com/article/race-is-a-social-...

[deogeo]

Apply principal component analysis to human DNA, and not only does race pop out, it even coincides with the 'socially constructed' categories [1,2,3]. A 2009 survey of physical anthropologists in Europe by Katarzyna Kaszycka found that 51% (N=123) recognize biological race - 33% in Western Europe, and 70% in Eastern Europe [4]. In a review of China's only biological anthropological journal Acta Anthropologica Sinica, 324 article from the 1982-2001 period that dealt with human variation. The researchers found that "all of the articles used the race concept and none of them questioned its value" [5].

[1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Principal_compon...

[2] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Individual-level_hum...

[3] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:3D_PCA_plot_of_Xavan...

[4] http://sci-hub.tw/10.1111/j.1548-1433.2009.01076.x

[5] https://lesacreduprintemps19.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/on-...

[Chris2048]

Do you have studies that use better taxonomies of "race"? Or do you mean any statement about race is so confounded by social factors it becomes nonsensical.

Also, The original claim was:

> Every result ever has pointed that all races and genders are..

If you muddy the water wrt race, it invalidates the above claim also.

[jdauriemma]

Those bell curves don't control for environmental and other non-genetic factors, making your statements - insofar as they are based on the document you linked - irrelevant to the conversation.

[toomim]

He wasn't commenting on which factors cause difference in test scores. He was simply saying that the test scores are different.

But it's become an unfortunate pattern that when people bring up the difference in scores, other people (like you) presume that mentioning the correlation data itself is akin to arguing that they are caused by genetic factors, and then attack them for not mentioning the environmental factors.

[deogeo]

> Every result ever has pointed that all races and genders are equally "intelligent" and well-suited to the same tasks.

Really? The strongest rebuttals I ever saw boiled down to "it has not yet been conclusively proven impossible that all races are equally intelligent". Large meta-analyses certainly always find correlation, this one goes a long way towards showing there is causation as well: https://doi.org/10.1111%2Fj.1467-9280.2006.01803.x

[rfdbsd]

> Large meta-analyses certainly always find correlation

No legitimate study has actually shown that such correlations are caused by genetic factors. However, numerous studies have shown that social factors (i.e. not having access to good schools, not having access to decent healthcare, etc, which statistically and historically correspond with racial divisions) play a major role.

[deogeo]

So showing a correlation between environment and intelligence is clear proof that environment plays a role, but the same kind of correlation with ancestry tells us nothing? Even when economic [1] and environmental factors [2] are corrected for (to the best of our ability), and the differences persist?

No matter what the data is, you can always construct some convoluted theory by which ancestry doesn't play a role, just like you can keep adding spheres to make a geocentric solar system work.

[1] http://www.jbhe.com/latest/news/1-22-09/satracialgapfigure.g...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnesota_Transracial_Adoption...

[steveeq1]

Ok, someone's a racist. So what? At the end of the day, it's a belief system. As long as that person treats people with respect, I have no problem with it.

For example, if you are, say, a Christian and some other guy is a Muslim and your offended by that belief, well, that's on you. It shouldn't discredit a scientific theory. Evidence is supposed to do that.

[netsharc]

The fact that your comment is gray means to me there are a lot of racists on HN. Sigh...

And worse, they're thinking they're not racist because they think they have scientific backing for their beliefs..

[non-entity]

It was just the other day where I someone on here unironically mention social darwinsism in a positive light on here. Honestly I probably need to quit HN because despite the number of informative articles and comments I read, it's more of less just becoming a collection of shit show comment sections (albeit that may be a product of me clicking on threads that encourage this). Perhaps I'm wrong, but it seems a number of these arctlces wouldn't have ever been allowed on the site a few years ago, but I wasnt as active back then as I am now.

[Chris2048]

> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names.

If you disagree, show your reasoning, or your credentials.

[shard972]

Oh here comes the racist brigade to yell down moral proclamation upon the unwashed masses.

You know what, who cares if Watson was a flaming racist? He has done more than almost any other person to save the lives of millions of Africans but he makes one opinion about intelligence and hes slagged off and completely discredited?

Cancel culture has been in science a lot longer than people know.

[wesleywt]

Should someone be excused from dubious behaviors because he did one thing in his youth? The DNA model would have been elucidated by someone eventually. I also doubt it helped 'millions' of Africans.

[Fishysoup]

For "Africans"? Really?

Everyone is aware of Watson's contributions (though there is of course ample evidence that he stole a lot of the work from Rosalind Franklin and gave her no credit for it, then said things like "of course Franklin couldn't envision the structure of DNA because jewish women can't see in 3D - he said this in front of a preeminent female jewish structural biologist too). The discredit isn't against his scientific achievements, it's against his racist-ass opinions. That's why people don't invite him to talks much anymore, because he just goes and says made up racist shit.

[selimthegrim]

He said that about Jews, not just about Jewish women

[saagarjha]

> He has done more than almost any other person to save the lives of millions of Africans

How?

[tasogare]

Yes, intelligence is 100% environmental and cultural factor, that’s why genetic affliction such as the Down syndrome has absolutely no effect whatsoever on the subject intelligence... It’s incredible how far some people will bury their head from evidences because of their ideological beliefs.

On the contrary, when some facts put a positive light on certain groups (for instance the better maximal physical performance) there is magically no taboo about it at all, and no pressure groups asking for "affirmation action".

[Can_Not]

Strawman aside, down syndrome is just as common in black people as it is in white people, so you know, nobody was denying genetics play a role, they're just pointing out there isn't a proven correlation between "the white gene" and IQ like so many racism apologists want to believe.

[PleaseLoveMe]

If this were about "white racists", why would they rank themselves firmly below east asians and ashkenazi jews?

[lawnchair_larry]

You think it is racist to be curious about IQ variance across races? Why?

[paganel]

You would have think that him winning a Nobel prize would have made him aware that IQ tests are a scam, apparently he didn’t.

[specialist]

You're claiming that Watson's views of IQ, genetics, and race are scientific?

[wutbrodo]

You're asking for examples where science is robust and well-documented but has been _blocked_ from being published? You understand that this is effectively an unanswerable question, right? How would anyone here come to know about such findings if they existed, and further know that they well-documented _despite their not being published_?

It's fundamentally unknowable how much science is being denied the imprimatur of good science for ideological reasons while "actually" being good science. The best you can hope for is examples that meet a lower, more reasonable bar that point to problems in the culture of academia, from which you can extrapolate chilling effects.

There are examples of things like this, as in Case & Deaton's description[1] of the reaction to their study on declining mortality amongst US whites:

> Deaton: Anne presented the first paper once and was told, in no uncertain terms: How dare you work on whites. Case: I was really beaten up. Deaton: And these were really senior people. Case: Very senior people.

This example is just off the top of my head, and it's a blatant example of a study that _isn't even saying anything that taboo_, except among those whose brains have been thoroughly liquefied by politics. If examples as dramatic as this exist, at well-known, highly-regarded institutions, for a paper _published by a Nobel Laureate_, it's not unreasonable to conclude that there's some degree of unobservable cases that were actually successfully blocked, along with chilling effects changing the direction of research in the first place.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/04/06/how-d...

[Retric]

Many academics are more than happy to raise a stink about suppression of other topics outside of traditional channels. Ex: https://www.politico.com/story/2019/06/23/agriculture-depart... So, it’s reasonable to expect examples of actual suppression.

If nothing else I expect someone to be making that argument on at least one paper somewhere. Though how much merit that’s worth depends on the paper.

[wutbrodo]

This isn't inconsistent at all with the premise we're discussing. Academics are happy to make a stink about _external_ influence on their research, influence that runs contrary to beliefs dominant in academia[1]. Bitching about the Trump administration isn't going to lose you any friends in academia, but bitching about forces internal to academia, whose sympathy much of academia lies with, is a whole different ballgame.

(Note that I'm referring to the opinions of "academia" fairly carelessly here for conciseness, when I mean things like "the dominant opinion among the individuals making up the departments that affect an academic's career")

[1] Note that I'm not making any statement about academia being left or right specifically. Ie, I think the OP comment of the thread may be right about these forces being sometimes lefty

[thu2111]

To write papers academics need to get grant funding. That's where the bottlenecks are going to primarily be.

That said I've read a whole bunch of essays by scientists whose research couldn't be published for explicitly stated ideological reasons over time, like this one:

https://quillette.com/2018/09/07/academic-activists-send-a-p...

[SpicyLemonZest]

One example is unconscious bias training. Modern meta-analyses strongly suggest that it doesn't work at all, that whatever the IAT is measuring is unrelated to patterns of discriminatory behavior. This is well-documented in the literature, and by a subset of news sites including some left leaning ones. But it would be completely impossible for a big company's HR department to say "we are cancelling our unconscious bias training because it doesn't do anything".

[ratsmack]

How about a correlation between IQ and race. It seems that no one will touch the subject out of fear the it would end their career.

[tenpies]

Not even race, but just suggesting that evolutionary psychology is a valid scientific field can get you crucified in some circles. Somehow the human brain avoided all sexual selection forces, environmental pressures, and even difference between the sexes; but everything else in our bodies was at the complete mercy of these factors.

[stephencanon]

But evo psych isn't a valid scientific field; there's no way to go back and conduct experiments to validate hypotheses. It's a bunch of nonsense just-so stories that appeal to people's existing biases. It's horoscopes-and-crystals-woo dressed up in the language of science.

[tasogare]

The point is that brain is an organ like any others, and thus also affected by the evolutionary pressure. Nothing is truly equal at birth between humans (or animals) except for twins so it’s really specious to consider that intelligence, which is based on a physical organ, is somehow magically exactly the same for everyone. And once the fact that there is indeed individual variations is accepted, it’s not too far stretched to understand why there could be a different average intelligence between population.

The second thing is most people interpret mean (average) wrongly. It does not mean that every individual of group X is less intelligent than group Y. If all those activists had a better mathematical education they could probably deal better with the facts instead of harassing people who state them.

[foldr]

No-one denies that there are differences in average intelligence between different populations. The claim that there is variation in intelligence between populations is practically equivalent to the claim that there is variation between individuals in intelligence, since given individual variation, it must be the case that some groups of individuals will have higher means than others. This could only fail to be the case if nothing was correlated with intelligence.

The controversial (and incorrect) claims are (a) that there is a scientific notion of 'race' and (b) that genetic differences between these 'races' are responsible for certain observed differences between certain populations.

[allovernow]

>there's no way to go back and conduct experiments

Well then, you should probably throw out psychology, sociology, climate science, economics, and geology, among other fields, if you want to be consistent.

Perhaps you've stumbled upon the distinction between hard and soft science.

[stephencanon]

People run rigorous psychology experiments all the time; it's one of the more-sound experimental fields. The only real constraint is that because it deals with human subjects, there are limitations on what types of experiments can be conducted.

Sociology is harder to run experiments, because it deals with interactions among groups of people, rather than individuals. Nonetheless it benefits from natural experiments taking place all around us all the time. This opens it to a different set of confounds, because you cannot precisely design experiments to control them, but you can still do science. You cannot falsify arbitrary theories, but you can falsify many theories.

Ditto climate science; we can formulate numerical models, and refute them by comparing to the ongoing ground truth around us. We can use those numerical models to examine what would happen with perturbed environmental conditions. This a sound computational science for small perturbations. For larger perturbations or very long timescales, you will not have the necessary stability guarantees, but that doesn't mean that you can't do science.

Much of economics is secretly math. You have theorems and proofs rather than experiments. You're correct that this isn't science, but it's not trying to be, and that's OK. The remaining body of economics includes behavioral economics, which--much like psychology--is absolutely science, and can be done extremely rigorously, and macroeconomics, which is largely in the same boat as sociology; they have to take advantage of retrospective studies, but in a sufficiently diverse set of regional economies, you can do some science--you just can't always control for every confound via experimental design.

[kojus]

As someone who studied cognitive science in college, I can tell you that reproductibility is a big concern among researchers not only in cognitive psychology, but also in the social, clinical and developmental subfields. Reproductibility is also a concern for serious sociologists, and I'm sure it's the same thing in most of the other disciplines you've listed.

By contrast, most of evolutionary psychology is hardly testable since it tries to extrapolate what constitutes human essence at this point primarily from observable human behaviors, which is might be more a function of our current environment rather than genetics. It can also be used politically to justify anything, from neo-Nazism to anarcho-communism.

[outlace]

It's just as valid as evolutionary biology in general. You can say there are a lot of bad evo psych studies out there but that doesn't mean it's impossible to make scientific inferences about evo psych. You can run experiments with animal models and intervene on sexual selective pressures and see the outcomes.

[GoblinSlayer]

It doesn't have the answer to everything and it's exactly the reason to research it.

[gnaritas]

> there's no way to go back and conduct experiments to validate hypotheses.

That's not required to do science. The notion one must be able to go back in time to prove evolution is absurd. Evolution happens, that's a fact. No system in the body, including the brain, is untouched by its processes and consequences.

[shard972]

But we can test people who exist today who evolved independently over millenniums? Why is it nonsense to think that maybe humans who mostly existed in hunter gatherer societies for thousands of years would face different evolutionary pressures than agricultural societies?

Is it really insane to believe the Sentinelese have a difference in genetic ability to engage in abstract thinking compared ashkenazi jews?

[lazyasciiart]

" can get you crucified in some circles."

That's....not exactly the same as being globally suppressed. Stephen Pinker seems to have not only survived but done quite well.

[nitwit005]

A racial label doesn't tell you much of anything about their underlying ancestry or genetics. Here in the US you can easily find people who identify as white or black who have a mix of European, African and Native American ancestry.

There are people looking for genes influencing intelligence, which is a more practical thing to look for.

[Animats]

It's been tried using 23andMe genetic data for over a million people.[1] No one gene seems to have a large effect, “Yet when we analyze the combined effects of many genetic variants, taken together they can predict the length of a person’s formal education as well as demographic factors.”

[1] https://blog.23andme.com/23andme-research/massive-study-on-t...

[Nasrudith]

Well yeah - at that point you could trivially start mapping relations in those groups which to families who are advantaged materially or culturally in the sense that nine year olds usually only have access to genetics textbooks and latest papers lying around their home if their parents are genetics professors.

I am pretty sure the British royal family has distinctive combinations of genes which are of course strongly correlated with a college education!

[soyiuz]

Or, it might be evidence of systematic racism. Would it surprise you that the genetic bouquet associated with people of color would also correlate with a long history of racism, which includes poverty and denial of education?

[barry-cotter]

https://www.ias.ac.in/public/Volumes/jgen/089/04/0417-0423.p...

Comparing genetic ancestry and self-reported race/ethnicity in a multiethnic population in New York City

Self-reported race/ethnicity is frequently used in epidemiological studies to assess an individual’s background origin. How- ever, in admixed populations such as Hispanic, self-reported race/ethnicity may not accurately represent them genetically because they are admixed with European, African and Native American ancestry. We estimated the proportions of genetic admixture in an ethnically diverse population of 396 mothers and 188 of their children with 35 ancestry informative mark- ers (AIMs) using the STRUCTURE version 2.2 program. The majority of the markers showed significant deviation from Hardy–Weinberg equilibrium in our study population. In mothers self-identified as Black and White, the imputed ancestry proportions were 77.6% African and 75.1% European respectively, while the racial composition among self-identified His- panics was 29.2% European, 26.0% African, and 44.8% Native American. We also investigated the utility of AIMs by showing the improved fitness of models in paraoxanase-1 genotype–phenotype associations after incorporating AIMs; however, the im- provement was moderate at best. In summary, a minimal set of 35 AIMs is sufficient to detect population stratification and estimate the proportion of individual genetic admixture; however, the utility of these markers remains questionable.

[toasterlovin]

> A racial label doesn't tell you much of anything about their underlying ancestry or genetics.

It absolutely does, which is why medical practitioners ask for race. Different races have different susceptibility to various medical conditions, for genetic reasons (even if we don’t understand the causal mechanisms yet).

[soyiuz]

Please review your basic understanding of race as per my comments above. If you still think there are five races or whatever, you are living way in the past century.

[toomim]

Your argument is that people do not teach Race in the same way anymore. I think that your implication is that the previous way of teaching Race was wrong -- however, this very article is making the point that political activism is changing the way that people teach, and politics has certainly affected how we teach Race -- the most politically-charged topic of them all!

So when you say "you are living in the past century", that could be a compliment -- it could say that the author is not being censored or brainwashed by a political orthodoxy.

If you actually want to improve his understanding of Race, I'd suggest providing him with some data that contradicts his statements, rather than just dismissing him as old-fashioned. Because on the other side of that, it implies that you could just be getting lost in a fashion.

[dragonwriter]

> How about a correlation between IQ and race. It seems that no one will touch the subject out of fear the it would end their career.

Uh, this has been and continues to be extensively studied (along with other correlates of each, causal mechanisms, etc.), so the “no one will touch it” claim is rather firmly empirically refuted.

[dtoma]

What's the use about a study on _correlation_ between these two things? You could also have a study on correlation between IQ and poverty, IQ and access to education...

Not to mention, what's the point of IQ anyway?

Maybe no one is picking up the subject because it would be a waste of time?

[traverseda]

Well IQ is an attempt to measure the mythical G (general intelligence, if there is such a thing), and more studies in that direction would allow you to better control for various factors relating to G, and figure out what interventions are best for increasing G.

I'd personally consider those other studies to be more important than race and IQ, and certainly more palatable. I think it's possible that the race/IQ factor has made that whole field untenable though.

I very much doubt it's because it's a waste of time, figuring out what interventions allow people to be smarter, to flourish, is pretty important. I'm pretty glad we got rid of lead paint, and leaded gasoline. That's a very visible and important intervention of the type that IQ research would help with.

A lot of related research goes on, but it seems like it very rarely touches directly on the subject of IQ. That being said it's understandable when any IQ researcher's research would be immediately weaponized by racists, no matter how useful it could be. Most of the examples you cite (race, education, economic background) would not be useful in-and-of them-self (at least in a just world) but would be useful to help control for those factors in other research.

[threatofrain]

General intelligence is as dubious as general AI in that performance in one domain can predict performance in other domains, and the degree to which that’s possible is attributed to general intelligence.

[JamesBarney]

General intelligence was a statistical artifact discovered from testing. It basically a theory that if you do well on a history test you'll probably do well on a math test.

[barry-cotter]

If we’re not going to find research because it’s useless that’s the humanities gone. All of the topics you mentioned have been done and are being done.

The point of IQ research is that it effects real life outcomes that we care about, like health, education, social status, criminal behavior, STI status, having children outside marriage, many others.

If two groups are assumed to be identical but they have different outcomes one possible reason is discrimination. If they are not actually identical the difference can be real and not due to discrimination. East Africans are crushingly dominant in marathon running. This is not due to discrimination against non East Africans. If similar differences exist between different ancestry groups in intelligence you’ll see dramatic differences in outcomes. If they’re due to discrimination we can fix that. If not pretending they’re due to discrimination will just lead to a great deal of wasted effort.

[spicymaki]

Funny how environment is continually dropped from the conversation of race in favor of heritability. You note that there is now East African dominance in marathon running. That has not always been the case however. As East Africans were provided opportunity to compete on a level playing field their talents whether inherited, conditioned by demand, and/or environmental were demonstrated. Now there is intense competition and selection pressure for the fastest East African runners. West Africans and East African are of the same race, but differ in the case of marathon outcomes. Why can’t this be true for intellect?

Discrimination is not some leftist fantasy. Black Americans have been systematically deprived of quality environments for over 400 years. I am talking about truly horrific intellectual deprivation from making it illegal to read during slavery to living in highly polluted sections of segregated cities today.

When we talk about intellectual disparities history needs to be part of the conversation.

[BurningFrog]

> West Africans and East African are of the same race

They have similar skin color, but that doesn't mean they're particularly closely related.

Black Africans have the by far biggest genetic diversity of any population. This is because our species evolved there, and has had the longest to develop variations. By contrast, the rest of humanity comes from relatively small populations of Africa emigrants.

As it happens the best long distance runners come from an region in East Africa, while the best sprinters come from a region in West Africa. This includes US sprinters.

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/04/wh...

[barry-cotter]

> West Africans and East African are of the same race, but differ in the case of marathon outcomes. Why can’t this be true for intellect?

It can be. Among Africans Igbo show much higher levels of educational attainment than others. I’m sure there are other groups this is true of.

> Discrimination is not some leftist fantasy. Black Americans have been systematically deprived of quality environments for over 400 years. I am talking about truly horrific intellectual deprivation from making it illegal to read during slavery to living in highly polluted sections of segregated cities today. When we talk about intellectual disparities history needs to be part of the conversation.

I agree. For example Irish IQ scores were historically lower than English and this is no longer true.

[pochamago]

I don't believe the person you're replying to said that discrimination is a fantasy, but it's not always the answer either. It's important to study the situations so that we can identify when each is the culprit or how much of a factor they are.

[soyiuz]

"East Africans are crushingly dominant in marathon running." To be more precise, East Africans from East Africa. The effect of biology dissipates in East African communities living abroad.

[barry-cotter]

Yes, if people have other better opportunities then they’re likely to pursue those. I highly doubt they dissipate entirely, if only because biomechanics don’t change. Being tall and skinny with long legs compared to most people will place those of East African ancestry at an advantage for long distance running regardless of culture. As the East African diaspora increases you’ll see more nationalities represented among successful long distance runners but I doubt there’ll be much dispersion in the ancestry of successful long distance runners. The West African diaspora are dominant in sprinting worldwide to a ridiculous extent. I think there are two men ever who don’t fit that profile among those who have run 100m in under ten seconds.

[rfdbsd]

> Yes, if people have other better opportunities then they’re likely to pursue those.

Right, so all those olympic athletes from the rest of the world are merely under-achievers in their own societies?

[freepor]

How much of East African marathon dominance is for similar reasons to the cricket dominance of former British colonies?

[barry-cotter]

Not much though I’m sure there’s some cultural contribution. Cricket is really only played seriously in former British colonies whereas you can run a marathon with over a 1,000 competitors at least once a year in almost every city in OECD countries. For middle income countries the Mexico City Marathon was founded in 1983 and there appears to be at least 10 marathons annually in South Africa. I’ve run in the Shanghai Marathon and there must have been 10,000 competitors.

Long distance running is a good candidate for second least culture bound sport, after sprinting.

East African also overstates the relevant population group. Among East Africans the Kalenjin, an ethnolinguistic group are themselves dominant.

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/9b58/9a401e65cb8bbd1f3cacb6...

The dominance of Kenyans in distance running

Kenyan runners, and especially those originating from the Kalenjin tribe, have dominated international middle- and long-distance running for over 40 years, prompting significant interest in the factors contributing to their success. Proposed explanations have included environmental factors, psychological advantage and favourable physiological characteristics, which may be genetically conferred or environmentally determined. Running is inherent within local Kenyan tradition and culture, and the Kenyan way of life, which involves many outdoor activities and pastimes in addition to mostly unfavourable living conditions, is conducive to enhanced distance running performance. Despite economic deprivation, Kenya has produced world and international running cham- pions repeatedly over the past few decades; these champions have become role models for the younger gener- ations, who take up running in the hope of a better future for themselves. Favourable environmental conditions such as altitude, diet and anthropometry, in addition to the motivational and socio-economic factors mentioned above, have all been proposed as possible reasons for the unsurpassed achievements of Kenyan dis- tance runners. However, the fact that the majority of internationally successful runners originate from a small tribe that accounts for approximately 3% of the total Kenyan population also points to a possible genetic component. Whether this is subject to influence from other co-factors, such as altitude or training effects acquired during childhood, remains as yet unresolved.

[dragonwriter]

> What's the use about a study on _correlation_ between these two things?

Understanding correlation is the first step to understanding causation, and a statistically significant correlation, by definition, implies that it is unlikely that there is not a causal relationship, though the cause may not be directly between the two studied variables.

> You could also have a study on correlation between IQ and poverty, IQ and access to education...

You could and you do. Or (to pick a real example that came up near the top, by recency, of a Google Scholar search for race and IQ) of the correlations between IQ, sex, and maternal obesity, controlling for (among other factors), race differences in IQ, which requires first having studied the correlation between race and IQ.

> Maybe no one is picking up the subject because it would be a waste of time?

Maybe the story that no one is picking up the subject is just a lie easily refuted by searching Google Scholar.

[roenxi]

> What's the use about [a study]

It's academics. Whether or not there is a use isn't really an important factor. It is enough to be agglomerating facts.

[dragonwriter]

> It's academics. Whether or not there is a use isn't really an important factor.

It certainly is to many funding sources, and academic research isn't free.

[wesleywt]

Because using a flawed test to make racist generalisations about Africans, who are the most genetically diverse racial group is not a good idea?

[freepor]

I wouldn’t say robust beyond dispute, but Brown disavowed their own professor’s research because it disagreed with the orthodoxy:

https://thefederalist.com/2018/08/31/explosive-ivy-league-st...

[klyrs]

There was quite a lot wrong with this paper, and it wasn't about the "orthodoxy." The study makes claims about children, but the study was actually a survey of how parents felt about their children's transition. There was significant bias in how parents were selected to participate in this survey; it was predominantly advertised on anti-trans websites. The survey itself was biased. By all accounts, the statistical analysis of this data is not in dispute. The methodology, however, leaves much to be desired.

I read both the Federalist and the Huffington Post, because it's interesting to contrast how issues are being presented in mass media (and I get a certain pleasure in exercising my bullshit detector). But I certainly don't link to them in pursuit of a reasoned argument, because they're both quite biased.

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/how-biased-is-your-news-so...

[tgv]

There are so many papers that make claims that are in no way proven by the actual research done, whose authors don't get disavowed, that it's almost certain it was because of the topic.

[klyrs]

The egregious and apparently deliberate sampling bias, and begging the question, are factors that cannot be ignored in this case. They tip the scales from this being a mistake made in good faith, to this being a politically motivated bad-faith effort. Science makes room for mistakes, retractions and replication efforts. But the paper in question was unscientific to the core. Authors who engage in fraud are regularly discredited.

[tgv]

But it is extremely rare that a university publicly disavows its staff.

I mean: let's talk sample bias. So many psychological studies are run with just psychology students as subjects, certainly in cognitive science. There are also quite a few studies using questionable sources like Amazon Turk. Did anybody ever get reprimanded over this from higher up? I've only saw them receiving praise for yet another article published.

[klyrs]

> But it is extremely rare that a university publicly disavows its staff.

And they didn't even do that in this case. They retracted the study because it was flawed. The researcher has had an opportunity to revise the study, which happened; updates in [1]. The retraction spells all this out; here's an excerpt, my emphasis added. You'll note that the researcher didn't lose her job, she just had to do a little more work to address concerns raised. Universities have to do this once and a while, when they publicize faulty research -- retract it, and if the researcher is willing to patch issues, post a revision.

> The University feels it is important to make the following three points about this incident:

> 1. This is not about academic freedom, as some news outlets have made it out to be. This faculty member — and, indeed, all Brown faculty members — have the right to conduct research on topics they choose. This is the case even for research that leads them into politically controversial territory. Brown gives its full support to this faculty member to conduct her research and publish her work.

> 2. This is about academic standards. Brown can publicize only a small subset of the great research conducted by our faculty. As a research institution, we feel we must ensure that work that is featured on the University website conforms to the highest academic standards. Given the concerns raised about research design and methods, the most responsible course of action was to stop publicizing the work published in this particular instance. We would have done this regardless of the topic of the article.

> 3. Academic freedom and inclusion are not mutually exclusive. This paper has attracted wide attention due to its politicized nature. Brown is steadfast in conveying to people who object to the content of the research that we stand by academic freedom, and will not do anything to thwart this (or any) faculty member’s research.

This is the problem with publications like The Federalist and Huffington Post: they mix editorializing and fact without making a clear distinction between the two. They've got agendas, and their primary focus is on reader enragement.

[1] https://news.brown.edu/articles/2018/08/gender

[specialist]

A list of victims of cancel culture would be handy. I'll start it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Donahue#MSNBC_program

[klyrs]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism#Victims_of_McCarth...

[gvjddbnvdrbv]

You just reframed the debate into terms that suit you. Very clever and great for arguing on the internet but ultimately you won't convince anyone with these methods.

[deogeo]

I can point to specific examples of requiring candidates to be politically vetted before hiring: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/11/19/mathematician...

You don't have to block science, if you can block the scientist.

Also take into account this is an official, open requirement. For something like that to manifest, it has to be preceded by a lot of bias.

[sysbin]

The only thing coming to my mind for a possibility to this question is any type of research that would be for pro-assisted-suicide. Research promoting positives of assisted suicide for people with illnesses or disabilities. That type of thing likely was held back by certain ideologies rooted in culture. I'm not sure if it can be proven and makes me think the question is very difficult to prove.

[s_y_n_t_a_x]

Dual Inheritance Theory

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_inheritance_theory

[s9w]

people would be banned for a truthful answer for flamebaiting