Cognitive Distortions

[Jimbo Jambo]

"How the culture wars came for Wikipedia’s articles about human intelligence."

[Giraffe Stapler]

"How the culture wars came for Wikipedia’s articles about human intelligence."

There are some topics best avoided on Wikipedia unless one has either infinite patience or a particular opinion to defend. Race and intelligence is one of those. And worse than others because you may find yourself rubbing elbows with racists and eugenicists.

I can't say I agree with all of the points made, but this piece is well written and worth reading.

That said, it's Quillette, so comments like this are not surprising:

rolandpj
This is the problem with giving women too much say in society.
Objectivity disappears behind the personal requirement to feel good.

[The Blue Newt]

"How the culture wars came for Wikipedia’s articles about human intelligence."

There are some topics best avoided on Wikipedia unless one has either infinite patience or a particular opinion to defend. Race and intelligence is one of those. And worse than others because you may find yourself rubbing elbows with racists and eugenicists.

I can't say I agree with all of the points made, but this piece is well written and worth reading.

That said, it's Quillette, so comments like this are not surprising:

rolandpj
This is the problem with giving women too much say in society.
Objectivity disappears behind the personal requirement to feel good.

Well, that’s only 49 percent wong, is one way to look at it.

[iii]

"How the culture wars came for Wikipedia’s articles about human intelligence."

There are some topics best avoided on Wikipedia unless one has either infinite patience or a particular opinion to defend. Race and intelligence is one of those. And worse than others because you may find yourself rubbing elbows with racists and eugenicists.

I can't say I agree with all of the points made, but this piece is well written and worth reading.

The pseudonymous authorship which includes grey literature paper production is... intriguing. I have my suspicions about which person may have written this given the particular bent of the arguments made, but I'll leave it to others to suss out what they think.

[tarantino]

Jimmy responds to a tweet from Claire Lehmann, founder of Quillette.


Occam's pal Emil Kirkegaard replies.


Flynn effect (T-H-L)

[Hemiauchenia]

Emily Willoughby (Feragho the Assassin) is currently getting cancelled on paleontology twitter over her Race & Intelligence views.

People have now also brought up the times that she drew dinosaurs in Nazi costumes.

[eppur si muove]

I draw the opposite conclusion form the Flynn effect to the racists discussed above. Because raw IQ scores have been changing over the years, there is strong evidence that any apparent difference in IQ between groups could be due to environmental factors. Therefore rather than assuming that race A is innately more clever than race B, you should make similar resources available to each. Integrating education is one way to address one element of this. Levelling employment opportunities is another. Making sure nutritious diets are available at affordable prices to children whatever their background. Making sure that their parents and other caring adults have the resources and time to support their children in their learning is another.

Even if it turned out that there was a one or two percentage point difference between the IQs of the two races once all the environmental factors had been addressed, then there will still be plenty of pair comparisons where the member of the supposedly stupider group is more intelligent than the member of the cleverer group with which they are being compared. I'm somewhat taller than the average man and still know women taller than me. And even at my fittest i would not have been able to outrun a woman club runner. So, even of the sort of differences between races and classes that the eugenicists imagine were proven to exist, there would still be plenty of people from the "inferior" race worthy of places in elite universities and even suitably talented to be on their faculty. And once it is clear that you should evaluate individuals on their own merit, then what is the point for looking for such differences between races in the first place?

[iii]

nutritious diets are available at affordable prices to children whatever their background.

I'm going to call Willoughby and her fellow travelers "racists". If you don't like that term, substitute it for whatever other term you would like.

What the racists like to do is to claim two very dubious premises: that (a) race has a genetic component and (b) after you control for all other factors except race, there is some residual difference in psychometrics which can only be explained by race. Premise (b) is the one that may be less interesting to me, but it's still problematic. Whether you think the racists have controlled for all confounding variables or not is a question that they often sealion. "Please let me know if you find any mistake in Hernstein & Murray." I'll spare you the jaunt through the many, many pieces of literature which do just that as I find that the racists dismiss these counters either completely cavalierly or in a very dishonest fashion. The argument remains one that they have a very hard time overcoming mostly because this is not an exact science, and it's pretty easy to dismiss all of psychometrics as pretty woolly. I have seen plenty of people labeled as "less intelligent" by psychometric measures do brilliant things and vice versa. It's actually too bad that these racists carry on as they do because it tends to marginalize the legitimate studies that are going on in psychometrics. Iodized salt, for example, is one of the cheapest things we can do to help developing brains the world over. Lead poisoning can be seen in psychometric data. Etc.

But let's take a beat from that. I have been rather more disgusted by their insistence on (a). The racists start from the fundamental premise that any difference based on race cannot be attributable to racism as long as you control for all other factors (wealth, geography, nutrition, etc.). Let's say that you find a difference in race. The racists argue that this must be due to genetics because they think they can control for all other factors. Of course, there is very poor evidence that race has a strong genetic component in the way that these racists would need. We're not talking about subspecies. Humans are more closely related between races than within races. (This should be old hat for a lot of you, but the science on this is well understood). But what is worse, let's say that they actually did find a difference in their psychometrics (whatever they are worth). How would that determine that this wasn't just racism? "Oh no!" they declare. "It can't be racism because we find that East Asians* and Ashkenzi Jews are more genetically predisposed to higher intelligence than white people."

They miss that this could still be due to racism! Oh those wacky racists!

*The idea that they can treat all East Asians as a monolith is another particularly galling canard in these matters.

[Hemiauchenia]

I'm going to call Willoughby and her fellow travelers "racists". If you don't like that term, substitute it for whatever other term you would like.

A lot of people on twitter are going on to defend her as if she's all above board, but actual comments she has made belies that. She co-authored a mixed book review in 2014 of Nicholas Wade's "A Troublesome Inhertiance". a book in which Wade literally states:

Populations that live at high altitudes, like Tibetans, represent another adaptation to extreme environments. The adaptation of Jews to capitalism is another such evolutionary process.”

https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2 ... fic-racism.

Given that the book makes statements like this, the claim in the review that the book thesis "rests on convenient just-so stories and speculation rather than on hard data" seems like somewhat of an understatement.

The review https://www.deviantart.com/domain-of-da ... -454582533 also favourably quotes "hbdchick" a "human biodiveristy" blogger, with "human biodiversity" being a euphemism used by modern scientific racists. So it's clear that Emily is very familiar with fringe "HBD" bloggers.

[eppur si muove]

nutritious diets are available at affordable prices to children whatever their background.

I'm going to call Willoughby and her fellow travelers "racists". If you don't like that term, substitute it for whatever other term you would like.

I'm sure that "racist" is accurate. There's often some class bigotry in the modern eugenicist mindset too.

I'm not going to argue with the rest of what you say either. When I was reading around this in the mid-90s when working on my Applied Social Studies Masters, I can remember that 'race' was often placed in scare quotes and that 'population' was regarded as a more scientific term. It was also said that difference within populations were generally much larger than those between populations.

Which I suppose I should have said in the post of mine you quote from. It is because I am sure that any genuine IQ difference between races, (and for reasons stated I think it unlikely that there is one,) would be tiny once all social and environmental factors have been controlled for - not that is likely to be remotely possible - then there is very little of practical value that I can see in demonstrating that such a difference does or does not exist. The only reason I can see for seeking to research it is to confirm the researchers' own pre-conceived political ideas. If you're not a racist either of the let;s-keep-those-inferior-types-from-outbreeding-us-or-diluting-our-racial-purity-type or of the patronising -the-poor-dears-will-need-special-help type, then why on earth would hunting for this difference be of any interest?

[iii]

The only reason I can see for seeking to research it is to confirm the researchers' own pre-conceived political ideas. If you're not a racist either of the let;s-keep-those-inferior-types-from-outbreeding-us-or-diluting-our-racial-purity-type or of the patronising -the-poor-dears-will-need-special-help type, then why on earth would hunting for this difference be of any interest?

Largely agree, but I think there are some (un-)interesting wrinkles in the motivations of some of these people.

I think in the case of Charles Murray and likely also Willoughby, the motivation started out as a way of trying to prop up arguments against affirmative action. Of course, when taking this claim to its logical conclusion (as in the case of Mike Judge's problematic movie that is a part inspiration for our own dear site's name), you end up in eugenics land. I suspect that many of the racists active in these areas prior to Gamergate or thereabout may have started their rabbit hole journey over feeling aggrieved by affirmative action.

A post-Gamergate motivation comes from those "Intellectual Dark Web" types who just seem to like holding water for ideas that have been shown to be racist in some fashion or another as a kind of "fuck you" to the SJWs. This is the other side of the coin for the Boghossians and Lindsays who have their noses in the air about how their exposés of Grievance Studies" are the most profound and important whistleblowing instances ever to happen, and look at all the grief they have to show for it. I don't even know if these types actually accept or even try to carefully understand the "racist" arguments. They just think they like it when the racists have a platform and are gleeful at the reactions promoting such material elicits.

[ScotFinnRadish]

There's plenty of non-racist reasons I can think of to study intelligence, other psychometrics and other traits between population groups. Aside from learning being fundamental, it's nice to study how environmental breeding pressures can effect populations, and how quickly traits can start showing up. Better understanding of heritability also gives insight into environmental factors, and how to mitigate or exploit them. All that said, there's plenty of those researchers that are racist eugenicists.

Despite how problematic Idiocracy can be, at least it's not as bad as the story it's based on. The story ends with the few remaining intelligent people blasting rockets full of idiots into the sun. The deep irony of this being that the author most likely thought it themself as one of the not-morons, but thought that rocketing people to the sun was in any way efficient enough to eliminate them.

[Giraffe Stapler]

Was Emily Willoughby ever a member here? Captain Occam is/was her boyfriend, wasn't he? He's still active here as recently as a few days ago.

[EDIT: Never mind. She was registered here as Ferahgo. Hasn't posted since 2014.]

[Hemiauchenia]

Although Willoughby is very guarded about what her views are in public. On her Quilette Forums account "Tetrapteryx" https://archive.ph/PhWPy, which while clearly pretending not to be her, as she praises her own Wikipedia activity in the third person: https://archive.ph/Logn2

Something like 90% of people who edit Wikipedia are male. If you’ve looked at the Wikipedia talk page discussions about this set of problems, the one woman commenting there (Ferahgo the Assassin) has been one of the people objecting to how the academic literature about intelligence is misrepresented.

If it were a Wikipedia account it would be blocked as WP:DUCK (there's the exact same focus on R&I as Willoughby's other work, and Tetrapteryx refers to a hypothetical transition between birds and dinosaurs, and Willoughby's art focuses on prehistoric birds and dinosaurs closely related to birds). It's been active too long (2 years) for it to have been a Joe Job imo. Also, I can't imagine someone paying to subscribe to Quillette for that purpose.

Most of the 14 posts made on the account are relatively mundane, but the juiciest one is where she proposes a ban on "viewpoint discrimination", explicity bringing up the example of white supremacists as the kinds of people who should be protected.
https://archive.ph/mV4M0

For a few decades, The United States and several other countries have had laws prohibiting discrimination on the basis or race, gender, religion, or sexual orientation. If a person can prove that they were fired for their job because they’re gay or because they’re a Muslim, for example, they can easily sue their past employer over that. But at present, there is no legal protection for people who are fired for expressing the “wrong” viewpoint about topics such as the riots or the Black Lives Matter movement, and over the past few weeks we’ve seen an increasing number of people losing their jobs for that reason.

I’m proposing that citizens of the U.S. and the U.K. should petition congress and parliament to introduce legislation prohibiting viewpoint-based discrimination, in the same way that discrimination based on race, religion, and gender are already illegal in most cases. Does anyone else support this idea?

I’ve been wondering about how extreme cases like that would be handled, and I’m not sure that I agree. Suppose that somebody is, say, a computer programmer, and after they’ve been on the job for several years it’s discovered that they’re a white supremacist. But their racist beliefs have no effect on their programming ability, nor is there any plausible way these beliefs would diminish the quality of their work. Is it reasonable to fire a person for a reason that has nothing to do with their ability to perform their job?

The way other anti-discrimination laws work is that a person can only be denied a job because of their gender, religion, etc. if it’s a “bona fide qualification” for the job. So for example, being a Roman Catholic is a bona fide qualification for a priesthood in the Roman Catholic church, so it’s legal to deny a person that job because they aren’t catholic, even though denying someone a job for that reason would not be legal for most other jobs. My suggestion is that laws against viewpoint-based discrimination should work in a similar way, so that firing a person for their viewpoints is only legal in cases like that one.

EDIT: Someone has suggested to me that her long time associate Jonathan Kane (Captain Occam) might be behind this account instead, based on the fact that the same username was used to comment on a 2014 blog post. https://archive.ph/QDvaO and the JSON output of the gravatar of that account gives Jonathan Kane as the real name http://en.gravatar.com/tetrapteryx.json

[Zoloft]

I’ve owned businesses before. This is nonsense.

[iii]

There's plenty of non-racist reasons I can think of to study intelligence, other psychometrics and other traits between population groups.

Yes. To clarify, my question is what motivations exist for hobnobbing with the special group of comrades-in-arms who are strident proponents of points

(a) and (b).

[Hemiauchenia]

Oh, and she also apparently approvingly tweeted in response to Emil Kirkegaard, a Nathan Larson-esque race pseudoscientist and white nationalist who has advocated for the legalisation of child pornography, amongst many other terrible things (he was also the guy behind the OK Cupid data scandal). He edited Wikipedia under the username Deleet (T-C-L), but was indefinitely blocked in 2019
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Emil_O._W._Kirkegaard

[eppur si muove]

Oh, and she also apparently approvingly tweeted in response to Emil Kirkegaard, a Nathan Larson-esque race pseudoscientist and white nationalist who has advocated for the legalisation of child pornography, amongst many other terrible things (he was also the guy behind the OK Cupid data scandal).
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Emil_O._W._Kirkegaard

The bit from the academic-ish paper is interesting in that in challenges two 2015 references comparing male and female scores in different aspects of IQ tests, by citing sources published between 1965 and 1995 and one. Given the Flynn effect and how girls and women were historically discouraged from having academic (or even career) ambitions, then this makes me wonder about how relevant the old data can be to today's situation. Did Kirkegaard use old references because newer ones would have disproved his claims?

[Captain Occam]

EDIT: Someone has suggested to me that her long time associate Jonathan Kane (Captain Occam) might be behind this account instead, based on the fact that the same username was used to comment on a 2014 blog post. https://archive.ph/QDvaO and the JSON output of the gravatar of that account gives Jonathan Kane as the real name http://en.gravatar.com/tetrapteryx.json

Yes, Tetrapteryx is me. I use that name on Discord also. The name is a reference to a theory about the evolution of birds proposed by William Beebe (T-H-L), which is my most edited Wikipedia article. (In 2011 I raised it from start-class to a GA.)

I've already had one debate about race and intelligence on this forum, in 2014, and I'm not interested in having another one. It's a waste of time to rehash an old argument we've already had. However, I would like to point out that the vast majority of the attacks on Emily/Ferahgo at Twitter have been focused on her published research about behavioral genetics, not on her friendly comments towards individuals such as Kirkegaard and Nicholas Wade.

This was the main Twitter thread that initiated everything that's happened recently. This thread was primarily attacking a paper Emily had published, along with three other behavioral geneticists, which found that when adopted children have grown to adults, their IQ scores tend to be more similar to their biological parents than to their adoptive parents. This paper doesn't mention race. The person Tweeting about the study gave this reason for condemning it:

Let me say this carefully. IQ is a pseudoscientific myth, and the “research” she is involved in directly contributes to inequality and actively harms disadvantaged people.

On the other hand, the validity of Emily's research about genetics and IQ is being defended by Eric Turkheimer, a behavioral geneticist who is strongly opposed to "race research". The attacks against Emily aren't coming from other behavioral geneticists, not even from opponents of "race research" such as him, but mostly from paleoartists who aren't familiar with what it's normal for people with careers in behavioral genetics to study.

The left-leaning parts of society have been headed for a long time towards the conclusion that all research about genetics and IQ is inherently racist, even if race is not mentioned. I would like the people at this forum to understand that this is what's being argued by most of Emily's attackers, so that's where we are now.

[iii]

The left-leaning parts of society have been headed for a long time towards the conclusion that all research about genetics and IQ is inherently racist, even if race is not mentioned. I would like the people at this forum to understand that this is what's being argued by most of Emily's attackers, so that's where we are now.

The paper in question does not do any genetics whatsoever. It merely assumes that if a factor is more highly correlated with a biological parent than with an adoptive parent, the preferred explanation is that the factor has a genetic component. See (a) above.

[Captain Occam]

The paper in question does not do any genetics whatsoever. It merely assumes that if a factor is more highly correlated with a biological parent than with an adoptive parent, the preferred explanation is that the factor has a genetic component. See (a) above.

There's more to behavioral genetics than just molecular genetic studies. Adoption studies have been one of the standard methods used by behavioral genetics at least since the 1980s. The textbook Behavioral Genetics, which is the main textbook used for college and graduate courses in this field, explains the adoption study method in its sixth chapter.

Let's be clear what you're arguing here. Are you arguing that, in general, the field of behavioral genetics is racist and pseudoscientific, as Emily's attackers on Twitter are arguing? I guess that is pretty similar to what you've argued both on this forum and on Wikipedia in the past, so I'm not surprised by this.

[iii]

There's more to behavioral genetics than just molecular genetic studies. Adoption studies have been one of the standard methods....

And this is why you continually fail to convince people of anything. There are obvious confounding variables when it comes to adoption studies, they are well-explained in the literature, and if you refuse to admit that, then there is no use continuing the discussion.

[Captain Occam]

And this is why you continually fail to convince people of anything. There are obvious confounding variables when it comes to adoption studies, they are well-explained in the literature, and if you refuse to admit that, then there is no use continuing the discussion.

I was asking whether you think it's justified for Emily to be attacked over publishing studies that use standard behavioral genetics methods. You've given me an evasive answer as usual, but based on the context I assume this answer means "yes".

Here's one other question: was discrediting behavioral genetics your goal all along? Most of the recent attacks on "race research", from both you and other people, could more accurately be described as disguised attacks on the the overall fields of behavioral genetics and IQ testing. If your intention was to use the issue of race as a wedge to discredit these entire fields, that was a highly effective strategy, because it meant nobody could defend them without being accused of supporting racism.

So if that was indeed your goal from the start, hats off to you for your clever strategy to discredit two scientific fields.

[iii]

It is obvious that you either are refusing to or cannot engage substantively on the point that I made. It's amazing how this same sad story plays out the same way after, what, more than 12 years? Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Race and intelligence (T-H-L)

Get over yourself.

[Captain Occam]

Do you think I'm arguing against you or criticizing you here? I'm not. I just want you to finally be open about what you've been trying to accomplish all this time. You've basically succeeded at it, so why not own up to it now? What in the world do you have to lose from being honest?

[Hemiauchenia]

And this is why you continually fail to convince people of anything. There are obvious confounding variables when it comes to adoption studies, they are well-explained in the literature, and if you refuse to admit that, then there is no use continuing the discussion.

I was asking whether you think it's justified for Emily to be attacked over publishing studies that use standard behavioral genetics methods. You've given me an evasive answer as usual, but based on the context I assume this answer means "yes".

Here's one other question: was discrediting behavioral genetics your goal all along? Most of the recent attacks on "race research", from both you and other people, could more accurately be described as disguised attacks on the the overall fields of behavioral genetics and IQ testing. If your intention was to use the issue of race as a wedge to discredit these entire fields, that was a highly effective strategy, because it meant nobody could defend them without being accused of supporting racism.

So if that was indeed your goal from the start, hats off to you for your clever strategy to discredit two scientific fields.

For over a decade, you and Willoughby have dedicated yourselves to this cause. I have to ask, why? What animates you so much about this particular issue? Do you not see how it's a major problem that hereditarian psychology is directly tied to white supremacists and racist cranks? (probably not, because you have approvingly quoted some of them). No other scientific field I am aware of is so tied to racism and nonsense. At least paleontology has standards, its most notorious crank, David Peters, is shunned like a leper.

[Captain Occam]

For over a decade, you and Willoughby have dedicated yourselves to this cause. I have to ask, why? What animates you so much about this particular issue? Do you not see how it's a major problem that hereditarian psychology is directly tied to white supremacists and racist cranks? (probably not, because you have approvingly quoted some of them). No other scientific field I am aware of is so tied to racism and nonsense. At least paleontology has standards, its most notorious crank, David Peters, is shunned like a leper.

I can't speak for Emily, but in my case it's a direct consequence of my background as a critic of creationism. (Which is where the name "Captain Occam" comes from, in case you weren't aware of that.)

When I was a teenager I used to be a very religious evangelical Christian, but I also accepted evolution, even though most of my similarly religious friends didn't. I eventually realized that in that sort of religious community, whether or not a person accepts evolution can be a fairly reliable indicator of their overall independence and open-mindedness. That was the case because there was a very strong social pressure to be a creationist in that community, and accepting evolution also meant having to interpret the Bible in a non-traditional way.

I haven't been a Christian since I was 19, but my earlier experience has caused me to place a lot of importance on those qualities. I eventually concluded that for nonreligious people, the best test of the same qualities is acceptance of behavioral genetics and its conclusions about the influence of genes on human abilities and behavior. In modern society there's a similar social pressure to believe that all humans are born with the same abilities, and accepting that we aren't means having to discard some cherished ideas about the achievability of total social equality. (I'm referring here to social inequality in general, not race.)

I also should clarify that when I refer to behavioral genetics, I'm not using that as a euphemism for race research; I just mean behavioral genetics and intelligence research in general. However, a lot of what are presented as attacks on "race research" are really attacks on the entire fields of behavioral genetics or intelligence research, as is currently happening in Emily's case. When those fields are attacked, I'm motivated to defend them for the same reason that I've been motivated in the past to defend evolutionary biology.

[Hemiauchenia]

I also should clarify that when I refer to behavioral genetics, I'm not using that as a euphemism for race research; I just mean behavioral genetics and intelligence research in general. However, a lot of what are presented as attacks on "race research" are really attacks on the entire fields of behavioral genetics or intelligence research, as is currently happening in Emily's case. When those fields are attacked, I'm motivated to defend them for the same reason that I've been motivated in the past to defend evolutionary biology.

You haven't answered my question. Behavioural genetics and intelligence research is tainted by it's associated with figures like Hans Eysenck (now known to have conducted fraud in his "cancer-prone personality" research) J. Philippe Rushton (who did shoddy research in order to promote his racist beliefs) and Richard Lynn (who conducted biased literature reviews and is an unabashed racist). The latter two which are associated with American white nationalist groups like American Renaissance and VDARE. https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate ... pe-rushton https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate ... chard-lynn This just wasn't historical. Lynn was on the EDITORIAL BOARD of "Intelligence", the flagship journal of International Society for Intelligence Research (of which Willoughby is a member of the board) as recently as 2018. https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2 ... -seriously. The truth is, the ISIR (who has eugenecist Francis Galton as their twitter icon https://mobile.twitter.com/isironline) has never seriously repudiated their links to racism and white nationalism.

You yourself defended Emil Kirkegaard, who has also published in American Renaissance (admittedly years afterwards) in your 2018 unblock request:

I haven't yet addressed my actions in support of Emil Kirkegaard (user:Deleet), and since that was the subject of Bishonen's comment that User:Cullen328 is referencing there, I'd like to address it now. Deleet has gone into a fair amount of detail about his political views, and I'm 100% sure he isn't actually a Neo-Nazi. He apparently is a left-leaning centrist: However, he also loves to provoke people on social media, and he seems to enjoy how others react to his making those sorts of Nazi-related references. (Incidentally, I've complained to him about this, not because I think these sorts of jokes reflect his actual beliefs but because of how they create problems for others who interact with him.)

Here is the reason that I think Emil is a valuable editor: he is, at this point in time, the only person editing articles related to human intelligence who studies the topic professionally. Aside from what he's written for his own self-published journals, he has authored two papers on the topic in Intelligence, the field's most prominent journal, [5] three presentations for the International Society for Intelligence Research (I'm not sure how to link to those), and 15 papers in The Winnower. I think this sort of thing matters a lot. On any highly technical topic, the quality of Wikipedia's articles tends to depend on the depth of knowledge of the people who edit them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?ti ... =849740376

Given that Kirkegaard now openly associates with white nationalists, his "Nazi" comments can hardly be treated as a joke as they were then. OpenPsych is clearly a vanity press that has never published serious scholarship. Even at the time, you should have been aware of the fact that in 2016 Kirkegaard published the personal information of 70,000 OKCupid users on OpenPsych without their consent, a clear and serious breach of scholarly ethics. https://www.wired.com/2016/05/okcupid-s ... a-science/

[Captain Occam]

If you're arguing that behavioral genetics and intelligence research are more prone to fraud and shoddy research than any other area of psychology or social science, that isn't the case. Stuart Ritchie's book Science Fictions describes dozens examples of the same thing happening in other areas of psychology and biology, including Diederik Stapel (T-H-L), a social psychologist who committed what's probably the largest fraud of any modern academic, and ultimately had 58 of his publications retracted as a result.

However, science generally is able to correct itself. In Richard Lynn's case, some of his erroneous data in IQ and Global Inequality was pointed out by Jelte Wicherts about four years later, and Lynn subsequently altered the datasets in his later books based on Wicherts' criticism. Rushton's theory that human genetic variation can be modeled using r/K selection theory also has been more or less entirely abandoned by this point. If you're knowledgeable about paleontology, you must be familiar with how this process of self-correction works; remember the briefly-popular but erroneous theory that Sinornithosaurus had a venomous bite?

There is another principle here that's important, which is that research exists independently of the person who conducted it and that person's motives. This applies to more than just psychology. For example, the first research showing a link between smoking and lung cancer was conducted in Nazi Germany, and the Nazis' anti-tobacco campaign was closely linked to their racial ideology. The discovery that smoking increases the risk of cancer was "tainted" in exactly the same way you're describing, but sometimes even reprehensible people make valid scientific discoveries.

This is more or less how I feel about Kirkegaard. I actually can't stand his personality, and I can stand it less now than I could in 2018. But he also has sometimes done worthwhile research (I mean his research that's published in real journals, not in places like OpenPsych), and if nobody can identify actual methodological flaws in a study, it's a form of the ad hominem fallacy to reject the study because of who its author is.

Let me ask you the same question I asked earlier in this thread, but without getting much of an answer: do you not see anything wrong with attacking a person for studying behavioral genetics in the same way that it's studied by dozens of universities all over the world, and the same way it's presented in the vast majority of psychology textbooks? If you want to personally believe that behavioral genetics is "divorced from reality" (to use a quote from the 2014 argument), believe it if you want. But that doesn't mean you have the moral authority to say that when a person studies the topic in a manner consistent with these universities and textbook publisher, she should be attacked for it and made miserable.

[Hemiauchenia]

Earlier in this thread you stated:

In modern society there's a similar social pressure to believe that all humans are born with the same abilities, and accepting that we aren't means having to discard some cherished ideas about the achievability of total social equality. (I'm referring here to social inequality in general, not race.)

This is a straw man-argument. Nobody suggests that someone with a profound intellectual disability has the same cognitive abilities as the average person, nor do many people seriously suggest that "all humans are born with the same abilities". When you state "having to discard cherished ideas about the achievability of total social equality". What is that supposed to mean? People's life chances are decided a lot the wealth and social connections that the families they are brought up into have. Are you saying that social inequality of opportunity is unimportant relative to cognitive ability, which is also heavily influenced by wealth inequality during childhood? Is this supposed to be a dog whistle against affirmitive action or something?

Let me ask you the same question I asked earlier in this thread, but without getting much of an answer: do you not see anything wrong with attacking a person for studying behavioral genetics in the same way that it's studied by dozens of universities all over the world, and the same way it's presented in the vast majority of psychology textbooks? If you want to personally believe that behavioral genetics is "divorced from reality" (to use a quote from the 2014 argument), believe it if you want. But that doesn't mean you have the moral authority to say that when a person studies the topic in a manner consistent with these universities and textbook publisher, she should be attacked for it and made miserable.

I agree that much of Prehistorica's criticism in the twitter post was off-base, especially the claim that IQ is a "pseudoscientifc myth", but you and WIlloughby have long been linked to the "HBD" community, independent of her actual academic work. There's a saying in English "If you lie down with dogs, you get fleas". Paleontology enthusiasts generally have higher standards than psychologists, it seems. She doesn't deserve to be harassed, obviously, but that's the twitter mob mentality for you.

As someone who writes mediocre poetry about dinosaurs https://web.archive.org/web/20211022034 ... illoughby/,
and claims to be a paleontology enthusiast, you should be aware of the legacy of racism and eugenics in vertebrate paleontology from figures like Edward Drinker Cope (T-H-L) and Henry Fairfield Osborn (T-H-L) both are of course giants in their field, but their racist legacies have been repudiated by modern scholars. This isn't the case in behavioural genetics/psycometry at all, where some scholars still cite Rushton's racist garbage.

[Captain Occam]

This is a straw man-argument. Nobody suggests that someone with a profound intellectual disability has the same cognitive abilities as the average person, nor do many people seriously suggest that "all humans are born with the same abilities".

The view that all humans are born with the same abilities isn't a strawman. Leon Kamin has argued that "there exist no data which should lead a prudent man to accept the hypothesis that IQ test scores are in any degree heritable", and more recently Ken Richardson and Oliver James have also argued that human ability differences are determined 100% by the environment. Here is a quote from Stuart Ritchie's review of James' book Not in Your Genes:

In reviews of his brilliant 2002 book The Blank Slate, which railed against the ‘modern denial of human nature’, Steven Pinker was accused of erecting a straw man. Nobody actually believes, scoffed the critics, that children are born with brains of soft clay, their mental makeup unaffected by genes and infinitely mouldable by their parents. Everyone acknowledges both genes and environments are important in psychological development. Don’t they? Alas, having read Not In Your Genes, the new book from celebrity psychologist Oliver James, I can confirm that such gene-phobics do exist. James is the straw man made flesh.

Are you saying that social inequality of opportunity is unimportant relative to cognitive ability, which is also heavily influenced by wealth inequality during childhood? Is this supposed to be a dog whistle against affirmitive action or something?

No, I'm referring to the hope I've sometimes seen expressed that with enough social interventions and a level playing field, it might be possible to eliminate socio-economic inequality in the United States. Maybe doing that would be possible under communism, but total socio-economic equality is not achievable in a capitalist society, because even if no one received any advantages based on wealth or family connections, inborn differences in ability would still exist. I think programs to reduce socio-economic inequalities are worthwhile, but we have to be realistic about what's possible.

you should be aware of the legacy of racism and eugenics in vertebrate paleontology from figures like Edward Drinker Cope (T-H-L) and Henry Fairfield Osborn (T-H-L) both are of course giants in their field, but their racist legacies have been repudiated by modern scholars. This isn't the case in behavioural genetics/psycometry at all, where some scholars still cite Rushton's racist garbage.

I think part of the reason for this difference is that Osborn and Cope's pro-eugenics writings have zero relevance to modern paleontology, so paleontologists can reject and denounce those writings without any possible loss. On other hand it's more complicated in Rushton's case. Rushton's studies finding a correlation between brain volume and IQ have been replicated by less controversial researchers, for example in this study from 2015 and this one from 2019. So in Rushton's case, throwing out his conclusions entirely would risk throwing out some findings that apparently were valid. Rushton only died ten years ago, and it might take another few decades for psychologists to finish separating the wheat from the chaff.

[Smultronstället]

I think programs to reduce socio-economic inequalities are worthwhile, but we have to be realistic about what's possible.

So this is a decade long endeavor of yours. Why do we need to be "realistic?" Are we pouring in a lot of wasted effort in some area? Is this the contention? Describe your fear more fully please.

[Captain Occam]

I think programs to reduce socio-economic inequalities are worthwhile, but we have to be realistic about what's possible.

So this is a decade long endeavor of yours. Why do we need to be "realistic?" Are we pouring in a lot of wasted effort in some area? Is this the contention? Describe your fear more fully please.

I only included that sentence in my post because I wanted to make it clear I'm not opposed to social programs to help the poor. I didn't mean to imply that I have any specific set of policy prescriptions.

[Smultronstället]

I think programs to reduce socio-economic inequalities are worthwhile, but we have to be realistic about what's possible.

So this is a decade long endeavor of yours. Why do we need to be "realistic?" Are we pouring in a lot of wasted effort in some area? Is this the contention? Describe your fear more fully please.

I only included that sentence in my post because I wanted to make it clear I'm not opposed to social programs to help the poor. I didn't mean to imply that I have any specific set of policy prescriptions.

"We have to be realistic," was your phrase. What have you seen that makes you afraid that someone isn't being realistic, and how is that a problem worth devoting any attention to?

Is it your contention that you have been pursuing this because someone is wrong? If so, what is the outcome you fear of this wrongness?

[Captain Occam]

If you must know, the specific thing I'm afraid of is utopian societies that try to guarantee equal outcomes for everybody, like what happened in Venezuela under Hugo Chávez. Venezuela is the latest example of how these sorts of societies generally don't end well.

I'm not interested in this discussing this particular thing any further. I'm willing to have a debate here about behavioral genetics, if I must, but I'm not willing to have a political debate.

[Hemiauchenia]

On other hand it's more complicated in Rushton's case. Rushton's studies finding a correlation between brain volume and IQ have been replicated by less controversial researchers, for example in this study from 2015 and this one from 2019. So in Rushton's case, throwing out his conclusions entirely would risk throwing out some findings that apparently were valid. Rushton only died ten years ago, and it might take another few decades for psychologists to finish separating the wheat from the chaff.

This is truly some stopped clock stuff though, to quote the man himself:

“Whites have, on average, more neurons and cranial size than blacks… Blacks have an advantage in sport because they have narrower hips — but they have narrower hips because they have smaller brains.”
--J. Philippe Rushton, speaking at the 2000 American Renaissance conference

Like, one of Rushton's conclusions was on the that black people have bigger genitals and because of that they had smaller brains and were less intelligent than white people.

https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate ... pe-rushton

[Giraffe Stapler]

This is truly some stopped clock stuff though, to quote the man himself:

“Whites have, on average, more neurons and cranial size than blacks… Blacks have an advantage in sport because they have narrower hips — but they have narrower hips because they have smaller brains.”
--J. Philippe Rushton, speaking at the 2000 American Renaissance conference

Like, one of Rushton's conclusions was on the that black people have bigger genitals and because of that they had smaller brains and were less intelligent than white people.

https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate ... pe-rushton

Yes, yes, but what der Hauptmann Occam is saying is that just because these horrible people with their horrible ideas have done research that just happens to show that their horrible ideas are correct, there's no reason to dismiss that research just because they are horrible people with horrible ideas. It's not like someone with an all-pervasive worldview like White Supremacy would distort or cherrypick results to push their own agenda. They're basically like cancer researchers. Do you deny the validity of e-meters just because you don't like the Church of Scientolgy?

[Captain Occam]

Yes, yes, but what der Hauptmann Occam is saying is that just because these horrible people with their horrible ideas have done research that just happens to show that their horrible ideas are correct, there's no reason to dismiss that research just because they are horrible people with horrible ideas. It's not like someone with an all-pervasive worldview like White Supremacy would distort or cherrypick results to push their own agenda. They're basically like cancer researchers. Do you deny the validity of e-meters just because you don't like the Church of Scientolgy?

Is this sarcasm? Most of it sounds like it is, but your example of e-meters makes me unsure, because those actually are used in real clinical research.

[Giraffe Stapler]

Is this sarcasm? Most of it sounds like it is, but your example of e-meters makes me unsure, because those actually are used in real clinical research.

Are they. though?

[Captain Occam]

Is this sarcasm? Most of it sounds like it is, but your example of e-meters makes me unsure, because those actually are used in real clinical research.

Are they. though?

That seems to be the case. This 2022 paper from the Journal of the European Academy of Dermatology and Venereology describes EDA meters (which is what e-meters are called outside of scientology) as "a technique commonly used in human science". So if your earlier post was sarcasm, your example demonstrates the opposite of what you thought it does.

[Giraffe Stapler]

That seems to be the case. This 2022 paper from the Journal of the European Academy of Dermatology and Venereology describes EDA meters (which is what e-meters are called outside of scientology) as "a technique commonly used in human science". So if your earlier post was sarcasm, your example demonstrates the opposite of what you thought it does.

So you think they used e-meters to measure the electrodermal response on the subject's face and neck? Interesting.

[eppur si muove]

My social work professor - and I mean professor as in the head of department not the looser American sense - advocated Galvanic skin response meters, which seem to be the same as E-meters, as a potential tool in helping clients learn to manage their anxiety. He described them as costing about the same as two failed visits by a social worker https://books.google.co.uk/books?redir_ ... q=galvanic

[Zoloft]

[LargelyRecyclable]

Earlier in this thread you stated:

In modern society there's a similar social pressure to believe that all humans are born with the same abilities, and accepting that we aren't means having to discard some cherished ideas about the achievability of total social equality. (I'm referring here to social inequality in general, not race.)

This is a straw man-argument. Nobody suggests that someone with a profound intellectual disability has the same cognitive abilities as the average person, nor do many people seriously suggest that "all humans are born with the same abilities".

Is it though?

It actually seems to be something of a mantra of late, one that is both rhetorical and impacting public policy.

Here's Kamala Harris, last week:

So equity, as a concept, says: Recognize that everyone has the same capacity, but in order for them to have equal opportunity to reach that capacity, we must pay attention to this issue of equity if we are to expect and allow people to compete on equal footing. (Applause.)

Here's Joe Biden, in Januarary:

You know, we’ve heard it said, “Talent is equally distributed, but opportunity is not.”

When we invest in infrastructure, we’re really investing in opportunity. These are investments that will build a better America. It sounds like hyperbole, but it’s real.

Grounded in science or not, isn't this sort of rhetoric from prominent political leaders exactly what he's describing?

[Midsize Jake]

Grounded in science or not, isn't this sort of rhetoric from prominent political leaders exactly what he's describing?

Only if you begin with the premise that "capacity," "talent," and "ability" are all the same thing.

[LargelyRecyclable]

Only if you begin with the premise that "capacity," "talent," and "ability" are all the same thing.

They're pretty commonly understood to be synonyms, so I'd say that's a reasonable assumption in this context.

[Smultronstället]

Earlier in this thread you stated:

In modern society there's a similar social pressure to believe that all humans are born with the same abilities, and accepting that we aren't means having to discard some cherished ideas about the achievability of total social equality. (I'm referring here to social inequality in general, not race.)

This is a straw man-argument. Nobody suggests that someone with a profound intellectual disability has the same cognitive abilities as the average person, nor do many people seriously suggest that "all humans are born with the same abilities".

Is it though?

It actually seems to be something of a mantra of late, one that is both rhetorical and impacting public policy.

Here's Kamala Harris, last week:

So equity, as a concept, says: Recognize that everyone has the same capacity, but in order for them to have equal opportunity to reach that capacity, we must pay attention to this issue of equity if we are to expect and allow people to compete on equal footing. (Applause.)

Here's Joe Biden, in Januarary:

You know, we’ve heard it said, “Talent is equally distributed, but opportunity is not.”

When we invest in infrastructure, we’re really investing in opportunity. These are investments that will build a better America. It sounds like hyperbole, but it’s real.

Grounded in science or not, isn't this sort of rhetoric from prominent political leaders exactly what he's describing?

I don't think that's the argument at all, though I did hear a professor state something similar once. It's about population wide opportunities. The premise is there aren't significant differences based on gender, race, or socioeconomic status that should limit achievement.

In which objectionable ways have you seen this applied? Infrastructure spending can't be the problem. Is the Oakland Generation Fund something you don't support? It gives lower socioeconomic status students money for college or trade school and the funds look like they were voluntary contributions.

[Captain Occam]

https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins/stat ... 7808339970

One of the downsides of attacking the entire fields of behavioral genetics and intelligence research is that it results in having intellectual giants such as Richard Dawkins among one's opponents. (I'm not as big a Dawkins fan as a lot of critics of creationism are, but I still recognize he's probably the single most important individual in the anti-creationism community, with the possible exception of Eugenie Scott.)

[Hemiauchenia]

https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins/stat ... 7808339970

One of the downsides of attacking the entire fields of behavioral genetics and intelligence research is that it results in having intellectual giants such as Richard Dawkins among one's opponents. (I'm not as big a Dawkins fan as a lot of critics of creationism are, but I still recognize he's probably the single most important individual in the anti-creationism community, with the possible exception of Eugenie Scott.)

Willoughby's reputation as a researcher was never what was at stake here, it was her reputation in the paleontology community, where the controversy started, and who will still care after the controversy is over. People like Coyne and Dawkins defending her and complaining about "cancel culture" won't undo the serious damage it has done to fans of her paleoart, who are young and heavily queer. Her reputation with them is thoroughly shredded. See this tweet from Darren Naish, a professional paleontologist who has previously positively reviewed books by Willoughby (including the book you co-wrote with her "God's Word or Human Reason?" https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/te ... eationism/) for an example of how clear that is:

I think the only appropriate response to that is:

[Giraffe Stapler]

And now Emily Willoughby (T-H-L) is up for deletion again.

This article was submitted for deletion in May 2021. The reasons given were that the article fails WP:PROF and WP:GNG. This is clearly the case, since that time no reliable sources have been added. In the old afd there were 10 deletion votes and 7 keep votes, however, 2 of the keep votes were from anonymous IPs with no editing history. I am suspicious about that, I am not sure why the article was kept as "no consensus" but the issues clearly remain. This person is not notable enough for biography article and it is not possible to write a biography about them other than a few lines because independent reliable sources do not exist. Four of the sources cited are the International Society for Intelligence Research that might be the only thing they are actually notable for in regard to proper sourcing but it is debatable if the International Society for Intelligence Research is a reliable source, using it four times seems undue weight.

The other sourcing I find deceptive, for example source 1 Terakado, Kazuo (2017). The Art of the Dinosaur. PIE International. pp. 159–177 is not an independent source but a book which Willoughby contributed her artwork to. Source 11 is a deadlink and doesn't look like a reliable source. Source 12 is just a book she has contributed to. There are no academic reviews of this persons work. As for the article history itself, the article looks like it was created by a sock but even if it wasn't, the self-promotion is obvious as they have edited their own article. It looks like this person is desperate to get Google traffic to their books with a Wikipedia article. As for conflict of interest it must be noted that Captain Occam (Willoughby's partner [1]) who was banned from Wikipedia for promoting racist pseudoscience has also edited the article. I see here conflict of interest, lack of independent reliable sourcing, self-promotion and other violations of Wikipedia policy. I believe the article should be deleted. Psychologist Guy (talk) 01:06, 19 August 2022 (UTC)

As the nominator points out, two of the keep votes were from IP editors with few or no other edits. Mr Butterbur (T-C-L), another of the keep votes, looks like a sock of Captain Occam, but I could easily be wrong about that.