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Talk:Race and intelligence/Archive 101

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Latest comment: 4 years ago by Ivanvector in topic Exclude IP accounts
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Sourcing requirement

Latest comment: 4 years ago12 comments9 people in discussion

Please note that I have made formal as a discretionary sanction the requirement that only high quality sources may be used, specifically peer-reviewed scholarly journals and academically focused books by reputable publishers. English-language sources are preferred over non-English ones when available and of equal quality and relevance. Barkeep49 (talk) 03:48, 3 March 2020 (UTC)

That wording suggests that no journalistic sources, no matter how high quality they are, can be used in any way. Is that so? Horse Eye Jack (talk) 04:32, 3 March 2020 (UTC)
Correct. This wording has been used, somewhat successfully from what I can tell, in at least one other arbitration enforcement topic area (Poland/Holocaust) and seems a proportionate restriction given what I've read and observed. Barkeep49 (talk) 04:37, 3 March 2020 (UTC)
Thanks for the clarification! Horse Eye Jack (talk) 04:52, 3 March 2020 (UTC)
@Barkeep49: I think this restriction will be helpful, but do you have any solution the issue of instability and edit warring on this article? With Peregrine Fisher gone this problem is likely to get worse, because he was one of the main people who opposed the undiscussed section blanking that keeps happening. 2600:1004:B10C:DF3:D9A6:8155:B0C0:A846 (talk) 04:42, 3 March 2020 (UTC)
2600:1004, I don't have a solution for that at the moment beyond our normal content dispute mechanisms. I continue to pay attention to what's going on here and do what I can as an uninvolved administrator. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 04:53, 3 March 2020 (UTC)
I'm not sure what is meant by "undiscussed" section blanking; the content in question is being discussed in the sections above at the moment, and there is no requirement to discuss prior to removal. It's also unclear why removal of large amounts of long-standing content is seen as undesirable; this seems to be an appropriate solution to an article that has historically contained large amounts of non-NPOV or off-topic content. –dlthewave ☎ 13:47, 3 March 2020 (UTC)
I think this is a good idea. It is easy to find an article in news media saying essentially anything about this topic, whereas the academic literature is much more restrained, except in off-field outlets. It has been noted by researchers many times that the media are rather inaccurate in their coverage of intelligence research in general. See The IQ Controversy, the Media and Public Policy old book, and recently the Rindermann et al 2020 survey, and the Woodley et al 2019 paper. --AndewNguyen (talk) 09:19, 10 March 2020 (UTC)

I think the underlying problem on this article currently is that it's being dominated mostly by a group of editors who were recruited to participate here in a non-neutral way, as I described in the discussion here. Based on the views expressed by uninvolved editors in the arbitration enforcement thread, it's very clear that the group currently active on this article is in no way representative of the views of the wider Wikipedia community. Part of the solution is that the article needs to receive wider attention.

The following five editors commented in the AE report but have had (as far as I know) no past involvement in this article: @Mr rnddude:, @SMcCandlish:, @Paul Siebert:, @Springee:, @DoubleCross:. Note that I'm pinging ALL of the completely uninvolved editors who commented at AE, without any regard for the views they've expressed.

Would any of you be willing to participate in this article, and to help make it more stable? Of particular relevance at the moment is this discussion, about the removal of the "Global variation of IQ scores" section. 2600:1004:B105:F5A1:A997:5864:C95E:CEE5 (talk) 21:40, 3 March 2020 (UTC)

This is not a topic area I'm interested in editing. Perhaps an AN discussion would be helpful if editors are shown to be ignoring CON, BRD etc. Springee (talk) 23:50, 3 March 2020 (UTC)
I don't know why the anon things I've had no past participation here. I've had little input into the exact article wording, but I've spent quite a bit of time, at various stages, in dealing with trolling and sockpuppets on the talk page trying to get that content changed. This article is necessarily protected from direct editing by anons and brand new accounts, so much of the shaping of the page will take place on the talk page, not in WP:REVTALK going on between direct edits.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  12:34, 4 March 2020 (UTC)
@SMcCandlish: I've spent a little while looking through the article history and talk page archives, and I didn't see your name anywhere. But I didn't look really thoroughly, so it is possible that I missed your name, especially if you edited the article a long time ago.
Based on your comment in the proposed merge below, you seem like a person who has some familiarity with the academic literature on this article's subject, so I hope you'll stick around. This article needs more attention from people who are familiar with its source literature. As I said here, some of the editors who are most active on this article seem to be making guesses about what's relevant or NPOV without actually looking at any of the sources, which makes discussions extremely difficult. 2600:1004:B165:30CA:C564:EA41:44BC:DC1 (talk) 15:02, 4 March 2020 (UTC)

Requested move 4 March 2020

Latest comment: 4 years ago79 comments36 people in discussion
The following discussion is an archived discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

No consensus to move. There is a clear absence of consensus favoring the move (and the discussion is leaning more towards consensus against the proposal). Given the substantial participation to this point, it is unlikely that relisting the discussion will lead to a different outcome. BD2412 T 18:12, 12 March 2020 (UTC)

Race and intelligence → Race and intelligence myth – More accurate title, less likely to confuse the reader. Levivich [dubious – discuss] 04:05, 4 March 2020 (UTC)

Sources and quotes (bold emphasis added, italics in original)
  • The consensus of reliable sources is that race and intelligence (as in, a genetic-based IQ) are myths, and the connection between race and intelligence is a myth. Some examples:
    • Jefferson Fish, Race and Intelligence: Separating Science from Myth, Routledge 2011 2001
      • p. 138: The Myth of Race: Implications ... This is why race is a myth and why races as conceived by Americans (and others) do not exist ... Although it is logically conceivable that a group of people large ears and small feet might differ on a test of visual memory from a group of people with small ears and large feet, it would be absurd to conduct such a study, and even more misguided, if differences were found by some bizarre happenstance, to seek a biological explanation for them.
      • p. 173: Otto Klineberg (1935) in a major study of the claims of proponents of IQ tests, demonstrated the bias in such tests ... he gave a devastating refutation of IQ tests as a measure of innate racial intelligence (see Chase, 1980). With the rise of Hitler and Nazism in the 1930s and 1940s ... Nazi practices revealed the extremes to which the myth of race differences could be taken.
      • p. 174: The very phrase "mixed race" conjures up the idea that pure races once existed, a myth that has long been contradicted by modern science.
    • Robert Sternberg, "Intelligence, race, and genetics", American Psychologist 2005 (PDF) (admittedly, the article uses the word "folk" instead of "myth", but the meaning is the same: it's not "real"; see the abstract, which I quoted in a comment further down the page)
      • pp. 49-50: Where does race fit into the genetic pattern? Actually, it fits nowhere. Race is a socially constructed concept, not a biological one ... One could pick any of a number of traits correlated with geographic patterns and find correlations with other related traits. It would be foolhardy, however, to view anyone of these traits as causative of the others. That is what people have done who have viewed differences in so-called races as somehow causative of differences in IQ. It also would be foolhardy to group fairly arbitrary sets of traits and constructs that one then reifies as being natural, some-how God-given categories. One will find a distribution of traits in any of these groups, with only slightly more differentiation in comparisons involving individuals from different groups than in comparisons involving individuals from the same group (K. K. Kidd et al., 2004).
      • p. 56: Thus, because most medical and psychological research on racial differences is based on self-defined racial or ethnic categories and there is substantial evidence questioning the accuracy of these self-classifications, the validity of racial and ethnic differences as commonly investigated is questionable.
    • Joel Myerson, "Race and General Cognitive Ability: The Myth of Diminishing Returns to Education", Psychological Science 1998 (PDF)
      • Abstract: These findings contradict the hypothesis that racial differences in intelligence are relatively immutable, in part because of the diminishing returns from increases in education.
      • p.139: With respect to education and racial differences, Herrnstein and Murray [ed: authors of The Bell Curve] argued that the relationship between education and intelligence is negatively accelerated, and therefore efforts to improve educational quality or increase the amount of education beyond 12 years will pay increasingly diminishing returns in terms of raising intelligence or reducing racial differences. However, this claim is based on assumptions that go well beyond current knowledge, and the data cited by Herrnstein and Murray are open to quite different interpretations (e.g., Fischer et al., 1996; Hauser, 1995) ... Thus, their analyses shed no light either on the nature of the effect of education on intelligence or on whether there are racial differences in this regard.
    • Ashley Montagu, Man's Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race, Rowman & Littlefield 1942, 1997 (6th ed.)
      • p. 41: The idea of 'race' represents one of the most dangerous myths of our time, and one of the most tragic. ... It is the contemporary myth, humankind's most dangerous myth, America's Original Sin.
      • p. 155: Old myths never die. Nor do they fade away. Not, certainly, if they are related to 'race' and its boon companion 'IQ.' For millions of people the terms 'race' and 'IQ' seemingly possess a clear and well-defined meaning. This common usage implies the users' belief in a reality beyond question. When, on occasion, the suggestion is made that these terms constitute an amalgam of erroneous and stultifying ideas of the most damaging kind, the suggestion is apt to received with blank incredulity or derision. Despite the fact that 'race' and 'IQ' correspond to no verifiable reality whatever, they have been made the basis for social and political agendas of the most heinous kind.
    • Ashley Montagu (ed.), Race & IQ, Oxford University Press 1975, 1999, which has essays on the topic written by S.E. Luria, Jerome Kagan, Edmund W. Gordon, Urie Bronfenbrenner, Stephen Jay Gould, C. Loring Brace, Frank B. Livingstone, Richard Lewontin, David Layzer, W.F. Bodmer, Alan Ryan, Leon Kamin, Ned Block, and more. One example quoted:
      • Leonard Lieberman, et al. p. 48: Having helped persuade many that races are not unequal, some anthropologists then began to argue that races do not exist. They argued that race is a fiction or a myth which must be exorcised like ghosts, the humors, instincts, and phlogiston. The ultimate phase in the debate has been underway among physical anthropologists for three decades beginning in the 1940s. The affirmative position states that races exist, the negative that race is a myth. Their discourse was the most recent in a tournament lasting over two centuries.
        • pp. 70–73: Splitters believe ... the idea of the existence of many overlapping races ... The lumpers accept the unity of the human species and argue against race as our 'most dangerous myth' (141). Each side believed the data supported its point of view. In 1968 when a version of this paper was first published, splitting was the dominant mode of thought. It appeared as if lumping would remain a lesser viewpoint or even fade and be forgotten. In the decades that have followed lumping has in fact flourished and support for the race concept has declined. In the next section I discuss the change that has occurred in beliefs about the existence of race among anthropologists since the debate described above. ... 'Finally, the concept of race itself was shown to be devoid of biological justification ... Consequently, the whole enterprise of racial classification once at the core of professional physical anthropology, was deprived of its scientific credibility and basically ceased to exist. The social scientist, cognizant of the inequalities and injustices perpetuated in the name of "race," could well cry "good riddance" (Brace and Hunt 1990. 342).' ... a majority of anthropologists no longer agree among themselves that there are biological races in the species Homo sapiens ... We believe that the concept of race was assumed by most anthropologists to be central to the discipline, especially to physical anthropologists, until the debate of the 1960s. We present evidence in the years following that debate the race concept lost the supporting consensus that is expected of a concept which occupies a central role in the discipline.
        • pp. 74-75: The word is out, the earth is no longer the center of this universe. The word is spreading, the human species is not divided into discrete races. A revolution is occurring in scientific thinking ... [survey of literature] ... Aside from Brues's chapters on human races, the trend in scholarly books and monographs on race is clearly away from the use of the concept in anthropology. No major work in biology or anthropology published since 1975 has taken a traditional approach to biological race among humans, except the 1982 Racial Adaptations by Carleton Coon.
        • pp. 79–81: We conclude that the concept of race has fallen to a very low acceptance level and may have lost more than consensus; that is, it may be on the way to losing legitimacy ... What Montagu had begun in 1942 has reached the public's attention through his book Man's Most Dangerous Myth and again fifty years later in the 1990s through newspapers and magazines. – Levivich [dubious – discuss] 04:07, 4 March 2020 (UTC) Updated with quotes. Levivich [dubious – discuss] 04:20, 6 March 2020 (UTC)
  • Oppose as this would invoke a denialist effort to subvert neutral presentation of facts with an ideological point of view. Jweiss11 (talk) 04:08, 4 March 2020 (UTC)
  • Support based on sources and arguments above. Ratatosk Jones (talk) 05:01, 4 March 2020 (UTC)
  • Oppose Sources from the past 20 years usually do not use the term "myth" in relation to this topic. Let's examine the sources listed here one at a time:
    • Jefferson Fish's book uses the term "myth" in relation to this topic, but contrary to Levivich's summary above it was published in 2001, not in 2011. (See Google books.)
    • The Robert Sternberg paper does not use the word "myth". Sternberg argues that the hereditarian hypothesis with respect to race and intelligence is incorrect, but that is not the same as calling it a myth.
    • The Myerson source uses the word "myth", but not to describe to this article's topic. While the paper does discuss race and intelligence, it is using the term "myth" in relation to a separate hypothesis, that education provides diminishing benefits to intelligence beyond a certain point.
    • The first Montagu source uses the term "myth" in relation to race, and includes a chapter on race and intelligence. It is a book from 78 years ago, that has been periodically updated until the final edition was published in 1997.
    • The second Montagu source was published in 1975, with an updated edition published in 1999. The updated edition includes four new chapters and a new introduction, but the only place the book refers to race as a "myth" is in one of the original chapters that was part of the book's 1975 edition (which is, incidentally, quoting Montagu's earlier book from 1942).
When we exclude the Sternberg and Myerson sources, whose contents are being misrepresented to support this request, there are three sources that support the new title: one from 2001 (not 2011), one from 1942 whose last edition was published in 1997, and one in which the only content that supports the new title has been unchanged since 1975. In order for "race and intelligence myth" to be an appropriate title, this would have to be the term used by a majority of recent sources, and the sources listed here are insufficient to demonstrate that. 2600:1004:B105:F5A1:A997:5864:C95E:CEE5 (talk) 05:52, 4 March 2020 (UTC)
Welcome to Wikipedia, User talk:2600:1004:B105:F5A1:A997:5864:C95E:CEE5! We hope you enjoy your experience here. As a new editor, with nine edits, all related to this article, we know it takes time to learn all our rules, such as Wikipedia:Single-purpose account and Wikipedia:Sock puppetry. Happy editing! Herostratus (talk) 11:20, 12 March 2020 (UTC)
That editor is on a dynamic IP range and not sure how many of these edits are theirs.[1], but it is a lot more than 9. -- Sirfurboy🏄 (talk) 12:03, 12 March 2020 (UTC)
  • Comment. This request is premature. The proposer asked less than 3 days ago whether there is interest in changing the title of the article and has suddenly closed that discussion rather than letting it run its course. (In the recent AfD I suggested renaming the article "Group differences in psychometry", so am not against a move per se.) 73.149.246.232 (talk) 07:25, 4 March 2020 (UTC)
    Nice try, but that would fail WP:COMMONNAME, WP:RECOGNIZABLE, and even WP:PRECISE ("group" has no clear definition here; do we mean "differences between police officers, nuns, and teenage video-gamers"? Those are groups. So are people with good versus bad eyesight, or thick hair versus pattern baldness, or people who like/hate mayonnaise.)  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  11:00, 4 March 2020 (UTC)
    COMMONNAME and RECOGNIZABLE can be handled by redirecting common phrasings like "race and intelligence" and "race and IQ" to the renamed article. It might be good to have an omnibus article that includes other types of group comparisons, such as IQ by sex or wealth, and the state of the nature/nurture debate for those, as far as the types of evidence and analysis are similar. If the article sticks to heredity-based groups only, then I see no objection to further precision like "racial", "ancestry" or "hereditary" in front of the word "group", with redirects covering the most common synonymous phrases. 73.149.246.232 (talk) 16:25, 4 March 2020 (UTC)
    Except not. Please familiarize yourself better with WP:AT policy and WP:RM norms. WP does not move articles to unhelpful titles and then redirect from clearer ones. We do exactly the opposite, even at the cost of various definitional nit-picks and even at the cost of some people's perceptions of socio-political neutrality/propriety. Whatever is the most commonly-sought term/phrase is what we should use. Even in choosing between "race and intelligence" vs. "intelligence and race" we can see that high-end source favor the former phrase by nearly a 4:1 ratio [2][3].  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  12:52, 5 March 2020 (UTC)
I am happy to defer to your WP expertise. In the case of a vague label such as "race and intelligence" there isn't necessarily a single most-commonly-sought thing people are looking for when they type that. So I also don't see the problem with a page under the current title that consists of links to several more specific titles with a short description of each, analogous to what one would find when looking for a topic in the index to an encyclopedia rather than the main text. 73.149.246.232 (talk) 21:56, 5 March 2020 (UTC)
  • Oppose, since sources do not call this a "myth" (WP:OR), and because that's advancing a simultaneous claim that the science is certain and it is entirely against the idea (also OR, plus WP:POV). The proposed title doesn't actually make sense. There might be an incorrect presumption (a "myth") of proven connections between "race" (which isn't objectively definable) and "intelligence" (which isn't either, nor measurable with precision – we can only measure specific things that we like to cluster under the "intelligence" umbrella). But that's not what the article is about; it is about the entire subject of the question and related questions, and all the research into them. To the extent that research leans toward suggesting that attempts to prove such a connection are faulty (are "mythmaking", if you like), we can cover that, and the article will be adequately informative without brow-beating the reader with civil rights advocacy messaging. And the science is not clear or certain. There is and has been a lot of academic debate about these matters, including about the ethics of investigating the question in the first place, and alternative explanations for initial research claims pertaining to things like certain ethnic groups in the US doing less well on IQ tests, another group accounting for an unusually large percentage of science awards, and so on, and most of these explanations are cultural. So we also have here a conflict between scientific disciplines like psychology, statistics, sociology, physical anthropology, cultural anthropology, and so on.

    I could maybe support Race and intelligence controversy. [Changed my mind, per Toomim's comments below.] The proper way to write an encyclopedia is to lay out the what the high-quality secondary sources are saying, with WP:DUE weight as to their reputability, and let the reader naturally come to the same conclusions as real-world consensus among experts. On a topic like this one, that's going to be a moving target; we are not going to write this article once and have it be stable forever. Where an article seems to be arm-twisting the reader in a "don't you dare think X" manner, we know we are not properly writing an encyclopedia article, and that starts from the title on downward. See also Historicity of Jesus, and many other controversial topics of this sort. How many of them have "myth" in the title? Speaking of which, I also object because this is a misuse of the term myth, which properly refers to a culturally important story with strong connections to religion. While people in everyday vernacular English just adore hyperbolic abuse of this word, the encyclopedia doing so is a terrible idea, and interferes with our ability to use it more precisely when we mean the proper meaning of the term. If readers get the idea that when WP says "myth" it means "commonly believed falsehood", then this has serious implications for reader understanding of WP articles on actual myths and legends. Remember that WP is not not social media and not news, nor written like either. We use a much more precise and formal register of English.

    The more pressing matter is that we need to merge the History of the race and intelligence controversy content-fork back into Race and intelligence (perhaps with content leaning more toward the former than the latter), and fix any lingering "He said, then she said, then he said" DUE problems, along with any over-reliance on primary source material. We shouldn't be citing any primary sources except as backup citations for expert readers, after we have already cited secondary ones, which on a topic like this probably mostly need to be literature reviews, especially systematic reviews, and some recent (under 10 years) academic-press books on the topic. By its nature, this topic veers into WP:MEDRS territory, at least in some aspects, and our usual broad-sense "secondary sources" like newspapers are magazines are absolute crap when it comes to a topic like this, other that where they are reporting on and being cited for social aspects (e.g. the nature and effects of the controversy); they are not reliable sources on the science. But neither is a primary-research paper; a new one on this topic will come out next week, and the week after, and the week after. It is not our job to parrot claims made by researchers who managed to get past a peer-review committee to get their material opened to the scrutiny of other scientists via a journal. That isn't science yet. The results after years of such scrutiny, as analyzed in systematic reviews, is science.
     — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  11:00, 4 March 2020 (UTC); revised 12:45, 5 March 2020 (UTC)

  • Oppose - the current simple title is more NPOV and inclusive of broad aspects of the topic. The proposed name is just as bad as trying to name it "race and intelligence evidence", for example. -- Netoholic @ 11:26, 4 March 2020 (UTC)
  • Support - the notion that some races are inferior to others in intelligence is a fringe view and is central to the alt-right white supremacist POV; the current title wrongly suggests that there's a connection between someone's race and their intelligence. The term myth in common usage does mean any invented story, idea, or concept: His account of the event is pure myth (dictionary.com, meaning 3). NightHeron (talk) 13:13, 4 March 2020 (UTC)
    I have to ask you to separate your distaste for some of the conclusions some have tried to draw from bad data and poorly interpreted data, from the question of what the article title should be. The proposed title is simply senseless, and does not match the material in the article even if it made better sense. See Crossroads' comment below for perhaps clearer detail on that than I provided. PS: The fact that a weakened, vague, vernacular sense exists of a word with a specific meaning doesn't magically make the specific meaning go away, and it is problematic in a work in which we frequently have need of the original, specific meaning. I've already been over this. No one needs to be informed that the term can be used the way you like to use it (much less get a dictionary quoted at them as if they deny that the usage exists at all even after talking of its existence, as I did). It's just not encyclopedic writing.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  23:00, 4 March 2020 (UTC)
  • Weak support I don't mind the current title, but also am sympathetic to highlighting the WP:FRINGE nature of the subject matter, and accentuating that is a Good Thing. Might have a greater preference for an alternative title, but this one is OK too. --Jayron32 17:29, 4 March 2020 (UTC)
  • Weak support Like Jayron32 I think we need to highlight the WP:FRINGE nature of the subject matter, but I’m not super convinced that "Race and intelligence myth” is the best of all possible titles. Horse Eye Jack (talk) 19:12, 4 March 2020 (UTC)
  • Oppose per SMcCandlish.  Spy-cicle💥  Talk? 19:42, 4 March 2020 (UTC)
  • Support per nom/Levivich and NightHeron. warshy (¥¥) 20:16, 4 March 2020 (UTC)
  • Oppose per SMcCandlish. Loksmythe (talk) 20:20, 4 March 2020 (UTC)
  • Oppose per SMcCandlish, because the proposed title is incoherent, and because the existing title is already NPOV. Calling "race and intelligence" a myth makes no sense. It's like calling "Earth and its shape" or "Species and their origin" a myth. Any myth (to use the term in the casual sense) lies in certain proposed connections between the two concepts, not merely in mentioning the two in a phrase. As for the idea that the existing title is POV, or that the topic is fringe, that makes no sense. Even if the topic were fringe, our articles on fringe topics do not generally call them a myth, pseudoscience, or whatever right in the title. Aside from that, the article is (supposed to be) about what top-quality sources (the kind SMcCandlish talked about) have to say on the topic. Such sources clearly exist, many of them being in the article already, and are about the topic as titled. Calling the topic fringe means you are also calling fringe those sources that show that any test score differences between so-called racial categories arise from differences in their environments. That such differences are not inborn is something we absolutely should be covering. I get that people wish this topic did not exist, but it does, and we should not concede discussion of it to the alt-right. If instead of sinking time into huge discussions to delete or retitle the article, people put the same effort into establishing a high standard of sourcing, then purging what does not meet that criteria, we'd all be better off. Crossroads -talk- 20:33, 4 March 2020 (UTC)
More recent sources (bold emphasis added, italics in original)
  • OK, more recent sources supporting "myth":
    • Ruth Benedict & Margaret Mead, Race: Science and Politics, University of Georgia Press, 1940, 2019 – The 2019 edition includes a new forward in which Judith Schachter writes, Then she turns to the science of genetics further to disabuse her readers of the myth of 'racial heredity', quoting the following line from pp. 55–56 in the original 1940 edition: ... racial heredity in Western civilization is a myth which sets up, in place of true heredity in family lines, an absurd picture of heredity from a race.
    • Sally Tomlinson (Honorary Fellow, Oxford), A Sociology of Special and Inclusive Education, Routledge, 2017, Chapter 4: IQ, Ability and Eugenics: ... even Socrates called this myth of the metals a 'noble lie'. It was a political legitimation for an inequitable society ... It is a myth still resonating in schools and classrooms today, that children are born with the potential to be very able, less able, unable or disabled ... the myth of some kind of fixed ability, defect or disability.
    • David Gillborn, "Softly, softly: genetics, intelligence and the hidden racism of the new geneism", Journal of Education Policy 2016 (PDF) the difference between the mythic and real meaning of heritability ... I begin by examining the gulf between the technical meaning of heritability as a concept in research and the mythic understandings that feature in press coverage and the grand claims made by certain authors ... For the sake of clarity, Table 1 summarizes the differences between the mythic presentations of heritability (in popular media and political debate) and the reality (as hidden in the technical small-print) ... Once again, the evidence contradicts the hereditarian rhetoric and popular mythology by highlighting the constructed nature of IQ tests and scores ... Gardner sets out to de-bunk the various myths and leaps of imagination that the book presents as if they were matters of scientific fact ... I have examined key examples of the popular presentation of genetics and intelligence and identified the numerous myths and misunderstandings that frequently lie at the heart of contemporary debate .... Table 1 is on page 49 and has one column labeled "Myth" and the other "Reality".
    • Jacqueline Jones, A Dreadful Deceit: The Myth of Race from the Colonial Era to Obama's America, Hachette Book Group 2013, 2015 (p. xiv: By the time of the Civil War, myths of race had hardened to presume a large underclass of dark-skinned menial laborers, men and women 'naturally' inferior to white in intelligence and moral sensibility.)
    • Robert Sussman, The Myth of Race: The Troubling and Persistence of an Unscientific Idea, Harvard University Press 2014
      • p. 1: In 1950, UNESCO issued a statement asserting that all humans belong to the same species and that 'race' is not a biological reality but a myth ... [p. 2 Section heading] The Myth of Human Racism[:] Unfortunately, along with the belief in the reality of biologically based human races, racism still abounds in the United States and Western Europe. How can this be when there is so much scientific evidence against it? ... It seems that the belief in human races, carrying along with it the prejudice and hatred of 'racism,' is so embedded in our culture and has been an integral part of our worldview for so long that many of us assume that it just must be true. ... We have been told that there are very specific things that relate to race, such as intelligence, ... What many people do not realize is that this racial structure is not based on reality. Anthropologists have shown for many years now that there is no biological reality to human race. There are no major complex behavior that directly correlate with what might be considered human 'racial' characteristics. There is no inherent relationship between intelligence, ... and race, just as there is no relationship between nose size, height, blood group, or skin color and any set of complex human behaviors. However, over the past 500 years, we have been taught by an informal, mutually reinforcing consortium of intellectuals, politicians, statesmen, business and economic leaders, and their books that human racial biology is real and that certain races are biologically better than others. ... In this book I am not going to dwell upon all the scientific information that has been gathered by anthropologists, biologists, geneticists, and other scientists concerning the fact that there are no such things as human biological races. This has been done by many people over the past fifty or so years. What I am going to do is describe the history of our myth of race and racism ... I hope to clarify why this myth still exists and remains widespread in the United States and throughout Western Europe ...
    • Sheldon Krimsky and Kathleen Sloan (eds.), Race and the Genetic Revolution: Science, Myth, and Culture, Columbia University Press, 2011
      • pp. 1–2: The CRG assembled a multidisciplinary group of scholars and community activists to contribute papers that discussed the history of the concept of 'race' and how the new field of genomics informs scientific, medical, and public understanding of 'race' in new areas like ... intelligence testing. Other papers were contributed to this volume after the conferences were held. It has been the intention of the Council for Responsible Genetics and the editors of this volume to draw attention to myths about 'race' and bring public awareness to the impacts such myths and scientific misunderstandings can have in the pursuit of social equality for all people ... Historically, the concept of 'race' has been steeped in paradox, embraced by ideology, adopted and rejected by science, but nevertheless remains an indisputable part of public discourse. The term 'race' is merely a shadow of what it once represented in science. Simply put, race is a scientific myth and a social reality.
      • p. 3: The idea that there were fixed, unalterable human morphological or genetic qualities of certain population groups, transmitted from generation to generation, was in disfavor by most scientists in the late nineteenth century. ... In 1942, Ashley Montagu published Man's Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race. Expressing what he asserted was the consensus among scientists, Montagu wrote: "Most authorities of the present entertain no doubts as to the meaninglessness of the older anthropological conception of 'race.' They do not consider that any of the existing concepts of 'race' correspond to any reality whatever." Nearly sixty years later, Michael Omi reaffirmed the consensus: "Biologists, geneticists, and physical anthropologists among others, long ago reached a common understanding that race is not a 'scientific' concept rooted in discernible biological differences." By the end of the twentieth century, race had been defined in the Unabridged Random House Dictionary as "an arbitrary classification of modern humans, sometimes, esp. formerly, based on any or a combination of various physical characteristics, as skin color, facial form, or eye shape." Thus, 'race' is a social construction.
      • p. 4: Another source of paradox can be found in how 'race' is currently used in the social sciences. In many areas of social science research, 'race' is a variable. These include studies in ... intelligence, and crime statistics to name a few. But since there are no biological or genetic markers for 'race,' it is operationally defined by self-identification ... People sort themselves out as part of a survey according to what 'race' they self-identify. But how a person self-identifies with a socially constructed idea of 'race' depends on social and cultural norms. The same person may self-identify with on 'race' in one country and another 'race' in another country. OR a person may change his or her self-identification when the options before them have changed ... The social construction of 'race' and its operational definition as 'self-identity' means that resulting outcomes of the research will also be built on this social construction and not grounded in objective biological and social realities.
      • p. 6: Of what value can racial categories, which are recognized as unscientific, arbitrary, socially constructed ideal types, have? ... Science can play a role in seeking to understand why this sorting and the consequences that derive from it takes place. But drawing generalizable conclusions in psychology, education, or medicine from these ideal types is baseless. The concept of race is a vestigial cultural artifact that persists in people's minds and public policies. The American Association of Physical Anthropology issued a consensus statement on race in 1996 that dismisses the idea of an average 'racial type': '... This fact renders untenable the idea of discrete races made up chiefly of typical representatives ... There is no national, religious, linguistic or cultural group or economic class that constitutes a race.'
      • p. 7: In part 5, 'Intelligence and Race,' Pilar Ossorio critically examines hereditarian theories of intelligence and discusses the implications of the view that IQ testing by 'race' tells us anything about how innate intelligence is distributed among population groups. Sternberg, Grigorenko, Kidd, and Stemler provide a comprehensive review and analysis of the scientific literature on intelligence, race, and genetics. They explore and evaluate claims made about the alleged relationships between race and intelligence throughout the lens of genetics.
      • Includes the article: Pilar Ossorio, "Myth and Mystification: The Science of Race and IQ"
        • p. 181: Scholars who study race generally agree on a few themes regarding how notions of race operate in society. One point of agreement is that race is a second-order construct – a belief about beliefs, behaviors, and traits. A person's racial self-identification, and her ascription of race to other people, is based on her beliefs about skin color, head shape, hair texture, religion, ancestry, language spoken, nationality, dress, political philosophy, and many other factors ... Because a person's race is not reducible to her genetically encoded traits, one could know everything about a person's genome and still not know her race. Another point of agreement among race scholars is that race is a very malleable concept ... One well-known example of this malleability is that every decennial census since the early twentieth century has defined race differently than the previous census. Thus, a person who was white in one census might have been Mexican or black in another. Another example is that some people have a different race on their birth certificate and their death certificate. The malleability of the concept of race means that one must be very careful in comparing different studies in which race is correlated with some other feature, such as income or IQ. ... These correlated factors may confound the results of studies by making it appear that race explains or 'causes' between-group differences in IQ test results when some other racially correlated factor, such as diet, parental income, neighborhood environment, etc., actually explains the differences.
        • pp. 182–183: [Section heading] Race and Intelligence[:] Just as there is no unitary definition of race, there is no agreed-upon or single definition of intelligence. One aphorism holds that intelligence is what intelligence tests measure ... Later psychologists, particularly those in the United States, ... were willing to embrace the view that intelligence was an inborn and fixed attribute of a person. We can cal this view the hereditarian theory of IQ ... Hereditarians view racial gaps in test scores, from IQ to the SAT, as evidence of inherent and immutable racial or ethnic differences in underlying cognitive capacity. Many claims of contemporary hereditarians have been critiques and debunked ...
        • pp. 185–186: Many scholars question the entire enterprise of treating heritability statistics as though genes and environment are actually separable influences on IQ or any other trait ... Correlation does not prove a causal relationship between environmental variables and IQ any more than it proves a causal relationship between race and IQ, but the presence of many strong environmental correlates with IQ raises doubts about racial or genetic explanations. Research also undermines the hereditarian claim that IQ is the primary determinant of achievement. Many environmental variables predict achievement as well as or better than IQ, except for people whose IQ scores are at the abnormally low end of the scale ... In sum, racial groups differ with respect to so many environmental factors that it is entirely plausible that environmental differences explain current racial gaps in mean IQ scores.
      • Also includes the Sternberg article posted above
    • Emanuele Felice & Ferdinando Giugliano, "Myth and reality: A response to Lynn on the determinants of Italy's North–South imbalances", Intelligence 2011 – rebutting Richard Lynn (Abstract: there is no evidence that the alleged differences in IQ are persistent in time and, therefore, attributable to genetic factors.)
    • Ian Tattersall & Rob DeSalle, Race?: Debunking a Scientific Myth, Texas A&M University Press 2011
      • p. xiii The result is that, whatever those entities may actually be that w habitually describe in the United States as "blacks" and "whites", they lie in the realm of sociocultural constructs rather than in that of biologically coherent groups.
      • p. xv This book is, then, mainly about the limits of what biology can usefully say about the nature and existence of human races. New techniques and new approaches can and will tell us an enormous amount about the biological history of our species, but they also teach us that this history was a very complex one that is very inaccurately–indeed, distortingly–summed up by any attempt to classify human variety on the basis of discrete races While we can acknowledge that our ideas of race do in some sense reflect a historical reality, and that human variety does indeed have biological underpinnings, it is important to realize that those biological foundations are both transitory and epiphenomenal. Despite cultural barriers that uniquely help slow the process down in our species, the reintegration of Homo sapiens is proceeding apace. And this places the notion of "races" as anything other than sociocultural constructs ever more at odds with reality. Increasingly, it seems, we are simply who we think we are.
      • p. 157 And despite many claims made over the years, in complex societies such as ours, stratified in a thousand different ways–mostly economic and cultural, but including subtle influences like exposure to toxic substances–nobody has yet been able to figure out a satisfactory way of separating out potential heritable from environmental effects on any measure of cognitive ability ... whatever the essence of 'intelligence' may be, it makes most sense to view any variations we observe in it as 'noise': simply the inevitable scatter around the mean that you'd expect to find in a species as biologically variable as ours.
    • Not a journal but a good, recent explanation of just how fringe this is considered to be: Jon Wiener (not to be confused with Jon Weiner), "Why Did Harvard Give a PhD for a Discredited Approach to Race and IQ?", The Nation 2013
      • The problems with all the work purporting to link 'race' and 'intelligence' have been well-known for decades. First, the concept of "race": There is no "Hispanic race." It’s a census category, not a biological one. What we call "Hispanics" in the United States includes Indian peasants from Yucatan and doctors from Mexico City (and Madrid). Second problem: the concept of "IQ." The inventors of the IQ test claimed it measured "innate intelligence." But of course what the test really measures is test-taking ability. – Levivich [dubious – discuss] 04:11, 5 March 2020 (UTC) Updated with quotes. Levivich [dubious – discuss] 04:20, 6 March 2020 (UTC)
WP:CHERRYPICKING. Do you now expect someone to list out all the sources which fail to use the term "myth" in this way? This decision isn't a winner-take-all where the name of the article is determined by what 51% of sources say... its about naming the article to allow all the viewpoints relevant to the topic to be included. -- Netoholic @ 05:13, 5 March 2020 (UTC)
Per WP:WEIGHT, we do not allow all viewpoints to be included. –dlthewave ☎ 05:27, 5 March 2020 (UTC)
These are just sources using the word "myth" about race generally, or saying that certain claims about race and intelligence are myths. None of them say "race and intelligence" is a myth because the topic is not a myth, as evidenced by the fact that sources like this exist. And again, calling the topic fringe means calling these sources fringe, which is surely not your intention. Crossroads -talk- 05:55, 5 March 2020 (UTC)
Crossroads, here's the abstract to Sternberg 2005 in American Psychologist, the official journal of the APA: "In this article, the authors argue that the overwhelming portion of the literature on intelligence, race, and genetics is based on folk taxonomies rather than scientific analysis. They suggest that because theorists of intelligence disagree as to what it is, any consideration of its relationships to other constructs must be tentative at best. They further argue that race is a social construction with no scientific definition. Thus, studies of the relationship between race and other constructs may serve social ends but cannot serve scientific ends. No gene has yet been conclusively linked to intelligence, so attempts to provide a compelling genetic link of race to intelligence are not feasible at this time. The authors also show that heritability, a behaviorgenetic concept, is inadequate in regard to providing such a link." Now, you still want to say that this paper does not say that the connection between race and intelligence is a myth? How about the book chapter entitled "Myth and Mystification: The Science of Race and IQ", which has a section called "Race and Intelligence"? Or the book, "Race and Intelligence: Separating Science from Myth"? You're saying none of these say that race and intelligence is a myth? They all say that. That's why I posted them. It's like two dozen different scientists all saying the same thing. You can't just waive it away. Bring two dozen countervailing scientists or concede the point, at long last. Race is a myth. IQ is a myth. The connection between race and IQ is a myth. Levivich [dubious – discuss] 06:47, 5 March 2020 (UTC)
The idea that race (such as self-reported race categories in an IQ study) and intelligence/IQ are myths (i.e., so vague or defective as concepts that they cannot be meaningfully related to anything, including each other, in social science research) is itself a FRINGE view. Most of your sources are either non-experts, or are using the word "myth" for something other than the items at issue, or do apply it to race and intelligence but only as a statement of IDONTLIKEIT. Demanding precision on "race" and "intelligence" far beyond what is accepted everywhere else in social science is a political stance, not evidence that there is anything logically wrong with using such concepts for the usual purposes of research: measurement, correlation, prediction, and unraveling of causation. Your sources and others like them do not object to studies of income inequality by "race" on the grounds that "black people" is an imaginary social construct and therefore the differences are meaningless and cannot be traced to some underlying cause (such as discrimination along the imaginary "race" categories, obviously that must also be a figment of our imagination and not a legitimate topic of study). It is all special pleading when the topic happens to be a controversial thing related to race. 73.149.246.232 (talk) 09:28, 5 March 2020 (UTC)
Levivich: Now, you still want to say that this paper does not say that the connection between race and intelligence is a myth? The topic (not "connection", whatever that means) of race and intelligence is not a myth, as proven by the existence of these very sources. And accordingly, none of these sources say 'race and intelligence is a myth', because again, that phrase is nonsensical. All my previous points still apply. As a particularly clear example of the problem with your analysis, the book titles you pointed to, "Myth and Mystification: The Science of Race and IQ" and "Race and Intelligence: Separating Science from Myth", by your reasoning, could be used to argue that "race and intelligence science" is a viable title. It is not, obviously. They just say that there are myths related to the topic. As for Race is a myth. IQ is a myth. The connection between race and IQ is a myth. - that is WP:SYNTH. Also, race is a socially constructed categorization that does not meaningfully reflect actual biology, but does have social meaning and therefore social and consequences, hence is studied by social scientists like any manner of socially constructed identities and things. There is some debate over the meaning of IQ, but it is associated with various life outcomes. Take a look at our articles and sources therein on the subjects. A simplistic myth! label is not helpful. But as for the idea that race is a natural biological taxonomy, or that differences in test scores amongst social groups are due to innate immutable genetic differences, I agree that these are myths. We're on the same side in that sense. I just believe that it is important that we present this topic with care. Crossroads -talk- 13:58, 5 March 2020 (UTC)
The fact that WP:CHERRYPICKING can be used to dig up a handful more instances of the word "myth" being used (in sources of variable quality, though mostly pretty good) does nothing to establish that there's a real-world consensus among experts on the matter. It's likely that one will emerge over time, but we are not there yet.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  13:00, 5 March 2020 (UTC)
  • Support, per WP:NOTCENSORED. Couching the nature of the concept in an innocuous-sounding title is not helpful to the reader. A step in the right direction. --K.e.coffman (talk) 05:09, 5 March 2020 (UTC)
    That's self-contradictory. NOTCENSORED is a primary reason to not try to ghettoize the topic under a PoV-pushing and "Wikipedia determines Truth when its editors want to make a socio-political point at all costs" title that virtually no one would actually look for and which does not actually agree with the bare fact of real-world controversies about the subject. I don't think I've ever seen NOTCENSORED cited before as an excuse to censor. It simply does not support what you want to do.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  12:57, 5 March 2020 (UTC)
  • Oppose WP does not decide scientific questions. Calling a relationship between race and inteligence a myth is making a judgment about its validity, and we have no authority to do that. The very meaning of saying there might be a relationship is unclear, and the nature and even the existence of the the relationship much disputed, both by persons interested primarily in the political aspects and those interested ins the scientific; it is possible there is no relationship, or that there is, and if there is, it is clear in what direction of with what qualifications. Many of us have a opinion of what the true connection is, but it would be more accurate to say that many of us have an opinion of what the true connection ought to be. None of us actually knows in any real sense what the ultimate scientific conclusion would be--how can we? I doubt if any of the people here actually understand the scientific arguments involved and the nature and interpretation of the data in all its aspects--I rather doubt that anyone in the world does. I make no claim to know myself, or to be able to judge, even though I have had a postdoctoral fellowship in population genetics. I don't even know what I think it ought to be--all I can realistically hope is that we will someday understand it better. Given the nature of science, we probably will, as long as we do not stifle scientific inquiry by jumping to a convenient answer. Certainly we can not decide by finding quotes in peer reviewed journals that happen to suit our preferences. Cherry-picking is not argument., and the argument from authority is the weakest of all arguments except the arguments from force, or from censorship. NOT CENSORED means something very different from the way the previous contributor uses the term. DGG ( talk ) 07:10, 5 March 2020 (UTC)
  • Oppose SMcCandlish has made most of my points for me, but let me add that appending any qualifier to the title "Race and Intelligence", whether it is "Myth" or "Controversy", could reduce this article to a WP:POVFORK that excludes content from POVs other than the "Myth" or "Controversy" view. For instance, the topic "Race and Intelligence Controversy" would inherently exclude non-controversial aspects of Race and Intelligence, such as the raw data on population differences that has reached scientific consensus. Likewise, an article about the "myths" of race and intelligence would exclude the truths. To achieve a neutral POV, we must represent all the significant views that have been published by reliable sources on the topic. This means including discussion of the significant controversies, myths, and the scientific truths.
Thus, in response to the editors citing sources on myths -- the existence of sources about myths is not a justification to restrict this article to only discussing myths. --Toomim (talk) 09:45, 5 March 2020 (UTC)
The listing of sources that use the term myth was in response to SMcCandlish's statement Oppose, since sources do not call this a "myth". Your other points have been refuted many times. By the way, it is a violation of Wikipedia policy to label an edit as a minor edit (m) if it is not, per WP:MINOR. NightHeron (talk) 10:41, 5 March 2020 (UTC)
"Race and Intelligence Controversy" would inherently exclude non-controversial aspects of Race and Intelligence, such as the raw data on population differences that has reached scientific consensus.' - the fact that you feel that is not a controversial thing to put in an article about race is, IMHO, worrying. -- Sirfurboy🏄 (talk) 10:51, 5 March 2020 (UTC)
Toomim is basically correct that the existence of group differences in average test scores isn't controversial. What's controversial is how these results should be interpreted. I'll quote the summary of research in this area from Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns, a report published by the American Psychological Association in the 1990s:
African-American IQ scores have long averaged about 15 points below those of Whites, with correspondingly lower scores on academic achievement tests. In recent years the achievement-test gap has narrowed appreciably. It is possible that the IQ-score differential is narrowing as well, but this has not been clearly established. The cause of that differential is not known; it is apparently not due to any simple form of bias in the content or administration of the tests themselves. The Flynn effect shows that environmental factors can produce differences of at least this magnitude, but that effect is mysterious in its own right. Several culturally based explanations of the Black/ White IQ differential have been proposed; some are plausible, but so far none has been conclusively supported. There is even less empirical support for a genetic interpretation. In short, no adequate explanation of the differential between the IQ means of Blacks and Whites is presently available.
That's the consensus view. It apparently is controversial among some Wikipedia editors, but the APA report shows what conclusions are widely-accepted among professionals in the relevant fields. (In fact, showing what conclusions are or are not widely accepted is the entire reason for the APA report's existence.) 2600:1004:B114:998F:FCCA:1F19:F350:4F83 (talk) 11:41, 5 March 2020 (UTC)
Thanks. I am aware of those findings, and I think you are also aware of why it is not uncontroversial to equate those results with race, and with intelligence. -- Sirfurboy🏄 (talk) 11:53, 5 March 2020 (UTC)
Actually, I am not sure why it's controversial to equate the categories "Black" and "White", which are the terms used in the APA report, with racial categories. Are those terms sometimes considered to not be racial categories? 2600:1004:B114:998F:FCCA:1F19:F350:4F83 (talk) 12:28, 5 March 2020 (UTC)
Come on over to my talk page. Better to not derail this discussion with this. -- Sirfurboy🏄 (talk) 12:32, 5 March 2020 (UTC)
Thanks for the invitation, but I'm not sure this point really needs to be discussed, since it doesn't directly have any bearing on the proposed move. 2600:1004:B114:998F:FCCA:1F19:F350:4F83 (talk) 12:42, 5 March 2020 (UTC)
See WP:Race and ethnicity. The short version: While "race", and more importantly racialism and racism, are important sociological factors, "race" is simply an illusion, biologically speaking. Neighboring ethnic groups in Africa actually have more genetic diversity between them than the Finns and the Maori. What we call "race" is a human propensity to seek patterns and to assign meaning to them, rubbing up against environmental pressures and the effects they have on specific gene selection, and on top of this a dose of reality-denialism, of choosing not to see what doesn't fit preconceived expectations of a pattern one has selected to perceive as real and uniform and meaningful. In biological reality, the same environmental pressure will produce comparable results in populations who are not closely related (e.g. darker skin near the equator), and a change in environmental pressure can lead to a genetic change sweeping through a largely endogamous population in only a few generations (e.g. a specific malarial resistance). There is no "genetic package" tied to any particular "race", just mostly independently operating genes floating around within, and transferring between, haplogroups.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  13:32, 5 March 2020 (UTC)
  • Oppose per SMcCandlish and Crossroads, scientific meta analysis sources do not refer to this as 'myth', or, at least, derailing this article to be only about the myth would contextually exclude discussion of legitimate scientific data on the differences between populations. The drive to do so seems to be a desire to push a specific narrative on the reader. There are differences in average intelligence between groups, the second sentence of the lede mentions that, whether they are due to environmental, socioeconomic, or genetic factors is irrelevant. I understand the desire to fight back against specific groups that claim innate racial superiority (this is the 'myth' aspect that is trying to be fought against here). POV with a nice face is still POV. — Insertcleverphrasehere (or here)(click me!) 20:00, 5 March 2020 (UTC)
  • Support Per nom. Will focus article and will help prevent WP:FRINGE from being introduced.   // Timothy :: talk  20:02, 5 March 2020 (UTC)
  • Oppose. As others have noted, this would be like creating an article called Earth's shape myth. Race & Intelligence is a perfectly valid topic; if the editor wants to include material backing the contention that there's no real statistical correlation, that's fine and a valid result. In the same way, saying the Earth is round is not a myth. The fact that some people said the Earth is flat doesn't make the topic itself invalid, it just means those people are wrong. SnowFire (talk) 20:35, 5 March 2020 (UTC)
  • Procedural note. Note that the nominator posted a link to this RM on some unrelated noticeboards. Nominator, if you do that in the future, please announce so in the discussion itself as well per WP:CANVAS; "It is good practice to leave a note at the discussion itself about notifications which have been made." SnowFire (talk) 20:39, 5 March 2020 (UTC)
  • Oppose. Proposed move presupposes a POV. Xxanthippe (talk) 21:31, 5 March 2020 (UTC).
  • Oppose per the thoughtful considerations of SMcCandlish, Toomim, and others. This topic is already enough of a hot potato, and if we attached a POV label like "myth" to the article's name, then we're doing nothing to facilitate any meaningful academic research or debate. As has been pointed out by the likes of Bret Weinstein and others, although the outdated notions of race are biologically untenable and indefensible, it's almost certain that genetically-driven traits like average intelligence will vary at least slightly between certain populations or lineages, in the same way that certain populations have different genetically-determined height, hair type, etc. This in no way implies that members of certain populations are inherently superior to others, just like how the admission that the Nilotic peoples excel at long-distance running in no way implies that the Nilotes should be the master race, or anything of the kind. Obviously, the history of Scientific racism culminating in the Nazi exterminations informs how these kinds of ideas, if they get wrapped up in violent nationalism, can end up precipitating a nightmare scenario; it's important that we keep that in mind. However, Wikipedia is not censored, so with topics like this, we should be doing our best to present the topic without any POV. Is it really best to frame the idea that intelligence can vary between populations as entirely mythical, by naming this article on race and intelligence as entirely mythical? Doesn't this just give ammunition to the extremists who will say that they're being oppressed by a conspiracy to deny something which, ultimately, may have some kernel of truth to it? BirdValiant (talk) 22:44, 5 March 2020 (UTC)
  • Oppose. We are not here to right great wrongs. We should not subvert the purpose of the article title to counter the idea held by some that some "races" are more "intelligent" than other "races". Nobody believes crap along the lines of "races" being more "intelligent" or less "intelligent" than other "races" but racists spout this as a form of trash talk. We should not use article titles as billboards to advance ideas however accurate those ideas might be. That is called advocacy. We should use article titles solely to identify the subject matter being addressed in the article. Bus stop (talk) 00:10, 6 March 2020 (UTC)
    WP:RGW does not say that fringe views should not be identified as such in article titles. Your "nobody believes" statement is, unfortunately, incorrect. It's bizarre to say that racists spout this but don't believe it. Presumably racists do believe it. NightHeron (talk) 10:25, 6 March 2020 (UTC)
    We may be examining the relationship between race and intelligence but we are not saying that there is a relation between race and intelligence. This title alerts a reader that this article examines the relationship between race and intelligence. Contrary to the arguments put forth by some editors, the current title does not imply that there is a relation between race and intelligence. It merely alerts the reader that this article examines the relationship between race and intelligence. Bus stop (talk) 06:18, 7 March 2020 (UTC)
The title suggests that a relationship between race and intelligence is likely enough to merit a long article on Wikipedia and paves the way for a FALSEBALANCE in the coverage. The title attracts editors who want to give credence to racist pseudoscience (of Jensen, Rushton, Lynn, Piffer, etc.), since an article with the title race and intelligence seems like a good place to dump those sources. The title should alert the reader to the fact that the article is treating a fringe theory. NightHeron (talk) 13:39, 7 March 2020 (UTC)
Titles are essentially minimal. The essence of a title is its ability to identify a subject being tackled in an article. Billboards do much more. They not only identify something but say something about that which they identify. I think it is a misuse of a title to append to it some sort of message. Similarly I would oppose a title designed to attract the right kind of editor, yet you are saying "The title attracts editors who want to give credence to racist pseudoscience". Wikipedia functions in an environment of vigorous debate. It seems likely someone would come along citing UNDUE WEGHT and cut back on any pseudoscience component of the article. Bus stop (talk) 15:41, 7 March 2020 (UTC)
Adding the short word myth would not make the title too long or un-minimal. The history of this article shows that editors who try to enforce policies such as WP:FRINGE, WP:UNDUE, WP:NPOV, and WP:FALSEBALANCE have, unfortunately, been unable to remove the racialist POV from this article. The editors who are attracted by the title spare no energy in writing walls of text and bludgeoning other editors until they get their way. In addition, there is a history of abuses related to this article, such as sockpuppets, SPAs, off-wiki canvassing, etc. The article has been specifically discussed by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a prime example of the use of Wikipedia by the alt-right to advance a white supremacist agenda. Clearly something's wrong. The suggestion of adding the word myth to the title is a modest proposal that might help. NightHeron (talk) 23:11, 7 March 2020 (UTC)
The addition of the word "myth" would not help to identify the subject of this article. The addition of the word "myth" would represent the use of the title to press a point of view. The addition of the word "myth" to the title would be in violation of WP:NPOV. Please consider the relationship between a billboard and an entirely proper article title. A billboard promotes a point of view. The initiative to append "myth" to the end of this title promotes the point of view that there is no validity in any relationship between "race" and "intelligence". The promotion of that point of view can be thought of as gratuitous because it goes beyond the needs of a title for this article. Bus stop (talk) 00:03, 8 March 2020 (UTC)
  • Oppose. Not WP:NPOV. The subject is controversial, but serious research has been done on it. -- Necrothesp (talk) 10:19, 6 March 2020 (UTC)
  • So at any point is any other editor going to post or discuss even one source? Or everyone else just gonna hand-waive that myth isn’t the common name? First they said there were no sources that said that. Then they said my first round of sources was out of date. Then they said my sources didn’t say what I said they said. Then they said my sources were cherry picked. I’m still the only editor to post any sources whatsoever. Is this Wikipedia where we follow the sources, or is this debate club where we post monologues? Levivich [dubious – discuss] 13:12, 6 March 2020 (UTC)
    Your sources mean that a sentence or a paragraph can be added to the article stating that some academics believe that race and intelligence is a myth. If you were finding secondary sources that stated that there is a scientific consensus that this subject matter is a myth that would be more convincing. Do you have any of these sources?--Literaturegeek | T@1k? 13:18, 6 March 2020 (UTC)
    Fish? Montagu? Levivich [dubious – discuss] 14:15, 6 March 2020 (UTC)
    How many of the sources that you presented above are currently used in the article? It's fine if zero, but then my second question would be: How many of the ~150 sources currently used in the article, which includes journals like Nature and APA or publishers like Cambridge University Press and Oxford University Press, did you survey for their stances on the subject? I haven't looked at your sources in depth, and frankly, I'm loathe to touch this subject area. Mr rnddude (talk) 14:26, 6 March 2020 (UTC)
    Good questions. The article is a POV train wreck currently that overrelies on debunked junk like The Bell Curve, Jensen, Lynn and Eysenck, but doesn’t include seminal works like Montagu. Most (all?) of "my" sources are academic press or "real" journals like American Psychologist and Intelligence, with hundreds (or thousands in the case of Montagu) of g cites. Many of the authors and works overlap still, like Sternberg and Lieberman (which I quoted). Others like Fish are already in the "History of" article. I don’t think you’ll be disappointed by the quality of sources I’ve put forward. I understand you’re loathe to get involved, but we’re really peddling myths here (that there is, scientifically speaking, such a thing as "race" and such a thing as "intelligence" and that there is a relationship between them) and calling it reality. Changing the name to be clear about the topic is the first step to cleaning up the article so it presents the truth and not some 50-year-old repeatedly-debunked fiction. </soapbox> Levivich [dubious – discuss] 15:00, 6 March 2020 (UTC)
    Levivich, I don't need to. You have the burden of proof for showing that any sources refer to the topic of "race and intelligence" as a myth. I have now carefully re-read all the quotes from sources you have added, and none of them do so. The vast majority of them refer to just race as a myth (while one says that race is nevertheless a social reality - these are both true, as social ideas about race affect how one is treated), some refer to specific ideas about a relationship between race and intelligence as a myth (also true), and a few criticize the concept of IQ (which is not the same thing as intelligence). Many of these are good sources and should be used in the article, but they just don't support the name change, because it makes no sense and our title is not saying there is any particular relationship between the two things. Some have asserted it does, but I'm not seeing it. The first book title you listed is "Race and Intelligence: Separating Science from Myth" - note that it just starts off with "race and intelligence". Another has a section heading of "race and intelligence". This is really evidence for the current title. And, see the other points I've made above. On a side note, I see some other opposes have been for other reasons which I do not necessarily agree with. Crossroads -talk- 16:13, 6 March 2020 (UTC)
    Crossroads, thanks for the thoughtful response, but I'm surprised to read you say that a title such as "Race and intelligence" doesn't imply there is any relationship between the two. If we had an article titled "Levivich and alcoholism", that would imply there was some relationship between the two, wouldn't you agree?
    With regard to nobody saying race and intelligence is a myth, to take one example, Ashley Montagu, in Man's Most Dangerous Myth, with its not-too-shabby 1,400 google scholar cites, writes Old myths never die. Nor do they fade away. Not, certainly, if they are related to 'race' and its boon companion 'IQ.' That is a direct statement supporting this proposed new title. While it's true that "intelligence" doesn't mean just IQ anymore, in the study of "race and intelligence", "intelligence" does mean IQ, because pretty much everybody who draws a connection between race and intelligence (like The Bell Curve and Jensen and Lynn and prodigy) is talking about differences in IQ testing (or SAT or similar) between racial groups. The current lead of the article, for example, talks excusively about "IQ tests" and "IQ differences". (Montagu isn't mentioned or referenced anywhere in the article.) The notion that there is a difference between racial groups in intelligence, is the myth. The consensus of scientists is that race is a self-identification category, and there is no consensus about what intelligence is or if such a thing exists. One simply can't have any scientific study of the relationship between one variable that is a self-identified category that can be literally defined as anything (race), and another variable for which no definition exists (intelligence). It's a logical fallacy, which is the point made over and over again, for like 80 years, by the various scholars I've posted above. For example, you mentioned my first source, Fish's "Race and Intelligence: Separating Science from Myth". He writes: "Although it is logically conceivable that a group of people large ears and small feet might differ on a test of visual memory from a group of people with small ears and large feet, it would be absurd to conduct such a study, and even more misguided, if differences were found by some bizarre happenstance, to seek a biological explanation for them." In other words, there is no more credibility in "race and intelligence" or "race and <anything>" than there is in "ear size, foot size, and visual memory". The title "Race and intelligence", like "Levivich and alcoholism" or "Ear size, foot size, and visual memory", suggests there is a connection between the two, when there is none.
    Another argument is that all of the sources that say that either race, or intelligence, are myths, also support that "race and intelligence" is a myth. If "X" is a myth, then "X and Y" is a myth. If "unicorns" are a myth, then "unicorns and intelligence" is also a myth, as is "unicorns and trees", even though trees are real. If "Martians" are a myth, "Martian cars" are also a myth, even if cars are real. In this case, we have both X (race) and Y (intelligence) considered to be myths, and so, "X and Y" is also a myth. "Martians riding unicorns" is a myth because both martians and unicorns are myths.
    I thought what we were going to do during this move request was to gather and analyze the sources to find out what the common name was. I think I've met at least a prima facie burden of showing that race, intelligence, and "race and intelligence" are called "myths". I'm waiting for rebuttal by sources. I don't think any non-debunked sources (meaning, not The Bell Curve, not Jensen) say anything other than that race, intelligence, and race and intelligence are myths. Maybe one place to start is to at least agree on what the leading, current literature surveys are. Levivich [dubious – discuss] 16:52, 6 March 2020 (UTC)
    "suggests there is a connection between the two" – Except not. It suggests – correctly in this case – that whether there is a connection between the two is a real-world topic of encyclopedic interest. You're engaging in a general semantics error, like mistaking the map for the territory, the menu for the meal. "Race and intelligence" as a title is metadata about the topic of the page and the debate surrounding the topic in real research; it is not the conclusion reached within that debate, by that research. I have to agree with some others' criticism that you're taking a WP:IDONTLIKEIT position (i.e., dwelling on the very idea being "dangerous"). The fact that it is, is why we need to cover it, and do it without editorializing, which simply opens the door to contrarian viewpoints urging the opposite conclusion. WP is doing its job when it is neutral and presenting the facts that the real-world research is providing. These speak for themselves without us having to put a ring through the reader's nose and drag them around like stubborn livestock.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  03:06, 7 March 2020 (UTC)
    When did I ever call the idea "dangerous", much less "dwell" on it? And, do you have an example of an article or any work entitled "X and Y" that is not about the relationship beween X and Y? Finally, if the sources I've put forward don't reflect scientific consensus, then what sources do? What are the leading sources for this topic? Levivich [dubious – discuss] 03:51, 7 March 2020 (UTC)
  • Oppose. Why these persistent attempts at making the article less NPOV? This title clearly violates NPOV. There's any number of academic sources discussing this topic, and every expert source (those written by mainstream intelligence researchers) says the topic is scientifically unresolved. A recent survey of researchers (Rindermann et al 2020) allowing them to give anonymous input found a large majority of them believed there was some genetic causation, so how could Wikipedia label it a "myth"? We should stick to what the sources use. Happy to discuss proposed content changes, but tired of these inappropriate attempts to violate NPOV. AndewNguyen (talk) 19:34, 6 March 2020 (UTC)
  • Oppose Violates WP:NPOV as it asserts a scientific conclusion that does not exist, for example because likely hundreds or thousands of combinations of genes contribute to intelligence regardless of race and almost all of those genes are unknown in terms of relation to intelligence in humans, never mind their occurrence and frequency in different racial groups. So whether there is a genetic contribution is unknown. Whether white privilege, socio-economic factors explains everything or only part of the picture is not and cannot be proven by science yet. That is just reality. This is one of several reasons there is academic controversy and sources do not agree. It also violates WP:COMMONNAME as almost all sources discuss this topic as “race” and “intelligence” without mention of myth. On the rare occasions that myth is used it is used as an opinion of the author not as a widely accepted consensus academic term, and thus it would violate WP:NOR, in particular WP:SYN. I do get the impression that the desire by established editors — who do I believe know better — boils down to WP:IDONTLIKEIT and I get that mentality because I don’t like it either, but academic research, science and indeed Wikipedia policies are not as sensitive to our feelings. If indeed, in say 10 to 20 years time, genetic research advances and disproves once and for all any significant link to race and intelligence then at that point an article name change to myth could be considered. What is possible now, per WP:NPOV, is for a couple of sentences to be added to the article stating that some authors have described a link to race and intelligence as being a myth. I am also not convinced that every source that differs from one POV can be attributed to scientific racism and white supremacy because these scientists are not finding or arguing Asians, who have a different skin colour and race, are less intelligent than whites (they actually tend to find they and Jews are superior to whites in intelligence); I do think most scientists and academics genuinely are interested in establishing the truth as to whether a genetic contribution exists to racial differences or whether it is due to white privilege or a combination of the two, etc.--Literaturegeek | T@1k? 02:42, 7 March 2020 (UTC)
  • Opppose per Toomim, SMcCandlish and SnowFire. We already have too many titles with "myth", "conspiracy theory", "controversy", etc. in them. Srnec (talk) 00:09, 9 March 2020 (UTC)
  • Support per WP:NPOV. Wikipedia is not censored to assuage the tender feelings of the white supremacists to whom the current title improperly lends rhetorical cover. Or rather Wikipedia has for many years been censored to be a safe space for racists and misogynists, but that time needs to end yesterday. Objections based on WP:COMMONNAME miss the point that "race and intelligence" isn't a coherent thing in the first place, but merely the intersection of two fractally complex and problematic topics. As others have expounded upon at great and learned length in recent discussions, there is no common name of the subject matter because there is no coherent subject matter in the first place. The most straightforward conclusion is that this article, which has no coherent subject matter, shouldn't exist at all (as the consensus at AFD showed) -- but the proposed title would be at least an incremental improvement. -- Visviva (talk) 07:12, 12 March 2020 (UTC)
  • Support. The Wikipedia is not supposed to say that things are true which aren't true. It's a not true thing there's any relationship between race and intelligence. So our title shouldn't say, at least by implication, that there is, and its not a service to the reader to do so. It is true that racists like to promulgate a myth there is a relationship between race and intelligence. This is what is of interest, and why the article exists. The article is essentially "here's an article about a thing that racists like to do", not "here's an article about something that is a real phenomena". There's no need to present the reader with misleading titles, particulary in the service (whether intended or not) of valorizing toxic nonsense. This is why articles on stuff like this are titled Myth of the clean Wehrmacht, not "The Wehrmacht was clean" or even "Clean Wehrmacht" and so forth.
Arguments along the lines of "The proposed title is simply senseless" don't impress me much. It's not simply senseless. It's something that editors may disagree with. See the difference? Resorting to terminology which is insulting and not true is not helpful, and it's not something that should make anyone favorably inclined to the argument. It doesn't me. Herostratus (talk) 11:53, 12 March 2020 (UTC)
The difference is that "race" and "intelligence" are largely conceptual and the Wehrmacht is not. The Wehrmacht is a well-defined, concrete entity, which can be researched, analyzed, evaluated—at least more easily than "race" and "intelligence" can be researched, analyzed, evaluated. I would suggest a non-judgmental descriptive title such as "Perceptions of a relationship between race and intelligence". Bus stop (talk) 16:23, 12 March 2020 (UTC)
The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

Lower-scoring groups might have higher ability. Bias/POV to not state this?

Latest comment: 4 years ago17 comments7 people in discussion

This is a new section to house a discussion started in the Circumstantial Evidence section. NightHeron raises the question of whether not mentioning the possibility that a lower-scoring group could be of higher ability, makes the article (or its sources or editors), biased or POV. Thread starts immediately below this signature. 73.149.246.232 (talk) 15:01, 9 March 2020 (UTC)

... It is interesting that when writers speculate about what future evidence might show there always seems to be an assumption, explicit or implicit, that if future evidence shows a genetic basis for group differences in intelligence, it will be to the advantage of whites. It seems to me more likely that the future evidence will show that whites tend toward the stupid side and blacks are, on average, more intelligent genetically. Given the history of slavery and colonialism, we should be surprised that there are so many examples of achievement by blacks. (A similar argument can be made that some day women will be proven to be genetically more intelligent than men.) Also, it's still the case, and has been for a long time, that white males have largely controlled the decision-making that seems to be leading to ecological dystopia, and whites have been voting in some quite unintelligent ways in several white-dominated countries. Because of the difficulty in predicting whether the hypothetical future evidence will support white supremacy (as Jensen/Rushton/Lynn assume) or black supremacy in intelligence, maybe we should just agree to adhere to WP:CRYSTAL.

To be more specific, suppose that on some IQ test a population B scored on average 10 points below a population W. Hunt is speculating that future evidence might show that 9.7 points were due to environment and 0.3 points to a genetic advantage of population W. My point is that future evidence could show that environment explains a 10.3 point difference and heredity explains -0.3 points. In other words, if a subpopulation W' of W had been chosen randomly and subjected to exactly the same history of discrimination as B, then the difference on the test between W' and W would have been 10.3 rather than 10; however, the superior genetic intelligence of population B caused the difference to be 10 points rather than 10.3. It's puzzling that Hunt doesn't mention this possibility as well. NightHeron (talk) 13:50, 6 March 2020 (UTC)

Nobody mentions these fantasies because they collapse when confronted with data. Any kind of "hidden superiority" hypothesis would have a lot of easily observed social consequences, all of which are seen to be false. Effects would include: higher variability; simple and obvious interventions that reverse the group differences; a large number of natural experiments (e.g. single-group neighborhoods or schools) where the suppressed group reveals its secret superiority in stunningly better performance (outperforming other groups) than is usually seen. None of that has been seen in our world. In general, there aren't many cases where a clever anti-parsimonious explanation of a mountain of data all seeming to point in a particular direction turned out to be correct. And the level of proof needed to show the gap is 110 percent environmental is higher than to show 100 percent (or whatever slightly smaller number would count as defeating the hereditarians). For all these reasons there is no point in talking about hidden superiority fantasies except as sophistry to accuse anyone not explicitly talking or writing about the possibility as being implicitly racist. Or as a form of political self-defense by writers who want to discuss data that looks mighty hereditarian, while avoiding charges of chauvinism. 73.149.246.232 (talk) 19:07, 6 March 2020 (UTC)
p.s. although the "hidden ability" speculations themselves are unlikely to hold water, there would be nothing wrong in stating in the article that -- as a matter of abstract theory and as part of defining what could constitute an explanation -- the average effect of environment (or heredity!) could exceed 100 percent of the differences. For example, blacks could be smarter than whites but more suppressed by environment than we imagine, or men could be even better at math (relative to women) than shown in academic data because schools are a more girl-friendly environment that discourages men. But there is not a lot of serious discussion of those things in the literature, for the reasons given above, so it's not clear what it could be sourced from. It can also be confusing because the "amount of variance explained" measure of model quality can never go above 100 percent. 73.149.246.232 (talk) 19:19, 6 March 2020 (UTC)
I'm sorry, but you're being totally illogical. The discussion was about Hunt's speculation about what future evidence might show. His guess was 97% environment and 3% heredity. This speculation was based not on existing evidence, but on an unexplained hunch. I asked a very simple question. If we're speculating about what future data might show, in the absence of hard evidence, why not speculate about 103% rather than 97%. A difference of 3% with a purely environment explanation is so small and hard to detect reliably (that is, so that 3% is greater than the experimental error), why rule out 103%? My own speculation (since we're all indulging in speculation at this point) is that the reason Hunt and some editors don't mention that possibility is that it's an uncomfortable thought that whites might be the dumber race after all. I noticed your irritated tone and eagerness to claim that there's mounds of data available to refute my innocent speculation that blacks might be smarter genetically. NightHeron (talk) 23:56, 6 March 2020 (UTC)
Your point was understood, addressed, and refuted, yet somehow still agreed to (if taken as a suggestion that the article should mention the possibility of heredity or environment contributing more than 100 percent of a group difference) and without personal comment about you. Despite this you again claim racism, or Fear Of A Black Planet, in anyone not impressed with your reasoning. Just for kicks, I'll add a few more reasons why neither Hunt nor anyone else is obligated to make a show of considering such points.
One is that all these studies of average differences are statistical, and significance of the group differences is always evaluated using a 2-sided hypothesis test. That the test is 2-sided is exactly the idea of your argument about reality possibly being the reverse of the measured differences. This is an extremely familiar point to psychometricians, who are using such tests all the time, and Hunt explicitly mentions the null hypothesis in the quoted section.
Another is that whatever quantitative methods are used to decompose the group differences into heredity and environment components are agnostic as to the sign and magnitude of the results, other than that they add up to the observed differences. So if the phenomenon you speculate about exists, there is nothing stopping the genetic or psychometric (or other) methods from discovering it. There is no a priori assumption steering the research that heredity and environment have to work in the same direction.
Finally, since you raise the question of being logical: why stop at explicit mention of blacks (or women, or other group) potentially having higher underlying ability? Why not consider the possibility that the "real" average black ability is huge, equivalent to IQ 120 or 140 or 200 prior to suppression by the environment? There is no less evidence of that than for the hypothesis you are demanding be considered, so why don't you and Hunt and the article have to mention that to avoid charges of racism?
(added) p.p.s. I think you may have misunderstood the statement that the idea "collapses when confronted by data". There is no implication that Hunt's rhetorical point or yours had been based on any particular set of data. The assertion was rather that Hunt and many, many others would, upon considering the possibility you speculated about, quickly recognize that it would have a number of easily noticed social consequences, consequences that are false or nowhere seen. This doesn't make the idea impossible, but it does make it pointless to talk about it since there is no evidence of it being true, some (indirect) evidence of it being false, and a bunch of obvious counterarguments that would be raised in the minds of the audience as they repeat the same thought process, drawing out the logical consequences and checking them against what they know. 73.149.246.232 (talk) 06:45, 8 March 2020 (UTC)
This is now a meta discussion about stats, and science. This has nothing to do with my edit, and entirely misses the point. This talk page is not a general discussion forum. If you would like, I can discuss this on my talk page, or Nightheron might be willing to host a discussion on his, but can we stop cluttering the article talk page with this please. See WP:NOTFORUM (point 4) -- Sirfurboy🏄 (talk) 07:49, 8 March 2020 (UTC)

As far as editing goes, the central issue is whether RS establishes any form of evidence that the gap between black and white IQ scores is partly due to genetic inferiority of blacks. This issue is central to the question of what WP:NPOV means for this article. Earlier I pointed out that in this context the term circumstantial evidence -- the topic of this thread -- seems to mean correlation, combined with speculative hunches. I also said that circumstantial evidence is not a standard term in the sciences (but it is in criminal investigations). Correlation and hunches and unproved hypothetical theories do not constitute evidence. The claim of the IP-editor that quantitative methods are used to decompose the group differences into heredity and environment components is nonsense. There are no such methods that can do that. Another nonsensical claim by the IP-editor is that the possibility I mentioned (that if the multi-century history of slavery, discrimination, and a disadvantageous environment were removed, blacks would score slightly higher on the tests) would have a number of easily noticed social consequences, consequences that are false or nowhere seen. How can the consequences of a hypothetical situation (leading to a slight advantage for blacks on IQ tests) be "easily noticed"? There is no scientifically valid way to rule out the possibility that, if there were genetic differences in intellect between races, it would turn out that blacks are more intelligent genetically than whites. Of course, even the mention of this possibility gets some editors to this page very angry. They have a right to be angry: the speculation that whites might be genetically inferior to blacks in intellect (although there's circumstantial evidence for it -- just look at the 3 most recent US presidents) could be called anti-white racism. NightHeron (talk) 13:17, 8 March 2020 (UTC)

@Sirfurboy: if there is no objection, this entire thread of discussion, about NightHeron's theory of POV/racism due to the article/sources/editors not explicitly discussing "hidden superiority" of lower scoring groups as a logical possibility, can and should be moved to its own section of this Talk page. 73.149.246.232 (talk) 23:47, 8 March 2020 (UTC)

Thanks. As it is a discussion between you and Nightheron, I will leave you both to decide how to arrange it and where to continue it. -- Sirfurboy🏄 (talk) 11:54, 9 March 2020 (UTC)
@Sirfurboy: I'm happy to drop the discussion. It's always hard to know which is worse: (1) to clutter the talk page with long content-related discussions, or (2) to let specious alt-right claims (such as the false claim that there's quantitative evidence that the black-white difference in IQ test scores is partially due to black genetic inferiority) go unanswered. The IP-editor's snide reference to "NightHeron's theory" is ridiculous. It's not my theory. It's what's called logic: in the absence of evidence, you can't rule out any plausible possibility. What's plausible -- what's a reasonable speculation -- depends on one's POV. Looking at the three US presidents in this century, one might feel inclined to wonder if blacks might be the smarter race after all. NightHeron (talk) 12:21, 9 March 2020 (UTC)
The second one is definitely worse. Levivich [dubious – discuss] 15:22, 9 March 2020 (UTC)

My apologies for continuing a content discussion, but it is directly related to what NPOV means for this article, and I'm responding to Levivich's comment that alternative 2 (letting alt-right nonsense go unanswered) is worse.

First let's look at the debate about whether individual variation in IQ scores could have a genetic component. The seminal research in this field by Cyril Burt was based on the study of identical twins separated at birth. Although the implementation of the research was faulty (it did not take into account the fact that the separated twins often ended up in similar environments, and Leon Kamin found considerable evidence of fraud by Burt, see The Science and Politics of IQ), the experimental design in theory made sense.

What would be a similar experimental design capable of deciding that there's a genetic component in differences in IQ scores between races? Here's the experiment (a simplified version). Take a random sample W' of white people and remove them from W; subject them, their children, and descendents to the same treatment that blacks have gotten for centuries: enslave them, beat them, rape them, lynch them, then switch to more moderate forms of oppression -- send them to lousy schools, have the police harass them, keep them out of good neighborhoods by redlining, incarcerate them for offenses that don't normally result in jail time, and so on. Then after a couple of centuries give them IQ tests and compare the results from the population W' with the IQ scores of W. Then compare the difference between W' and W with the difference between B and W (B=black). If W minus W' is less than W minus B, then cite that as evidence of B having inferior genes; if W minus W' is greater than W minus B (which personally I would speculate would be more likely), then cite that as evidence of B having superior genes. In the latter case one could conclude that the fact that the US's first black president was hugely more intelligent than either the white president who preceded him or the one who followed him was not an anomaly. NightHeron (talk) 16:46, 9 March 2020 (UTC)

I think the first thing we need to do – and the only productive thing that can be done at this point – is to come to consensus about what the leading sources are in this area. What sources present the most-current scientific consensus on this topic? What are the sources upon which this article should be based? Right now, there are over 100 sources in the article and we treat them as if they're all equivalent; they're not. Even within the new sourcing restriction, not all peer-reviewed journals and academic press books are created equally. Not every source is Nature or Oxford. And academic authors also have varying levels of expertise and reputability. I think if we start by identifying and coming to consensus on, say, the leading, most-current literature reviews, we can have a framework within which to resolve other, subsidiary, content disputes. Levivich [dubious – discuss] 17:11, 9 March 2020 (UTC)
Isn't that more appropriate to discuss in the section that Barkeep49 made (Sourcing requirement)? There is plenty of discussion of general sourcing. In general, we don't get anywhere because a few editors think their ability to find a journalist source saying that X author is bad means that no works of that author can be cited. That is a misunderstanding of WP:RS. It has been explained many times here and elsewhere. But they just keep repeating. I am unsure what to do. There are plenty of mainstream textbooks and reviews published in relevant journals. Some of these have been mentioned earlier (e.g. Winegard et al 2020 pro-hereditarian, and Colman 2016 anti-hereditarian). I think that content was archived. Maybe one can make a page that has the current list of sources that are agreed upon as high quality. AndewNguyen (talk) 09:32, 10 March 2020 (UTC)
AndewNguyen, we do not use fringe authors as sources, ever. We can discuss what fringe authors say by reference to other non-fringe authors talking about them. In this context, fringe consists of anyone who asserts that "race" (whatever that means) is determinant of "intelligence" (whatever that means). Guy (help!) 12:08, 12 March 2020 (UTC)
I think that AndewNguyen is referring to this discussion at the RS noticeboard, and to the conclusion that it reached. You argued there that these sources should not be cited, but the consensus in that discussion opposed you. You're an experienced editor, so I'm sure you're aware that the consensus of the broader community at RSN takes priority over whatever local consensus may exist on this talk page. 2600:1004:B103:9123:1079:DE3D:EFC6:DBAA (talk) 18:34, 12 March 2020 (UTC)

Dispute resolution

Latest comment: 4 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion

It seems unlikely that the discussion above is going to answer the question of what modifications are necessary to the "Global variation of IQ scores" section, especially since a lot of the editors opposed to my current proposal aren't offering any constructive criticism. I've now raised this issue at the dispute resolution noticeboard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Dispute_resolution_noticeboard#Race_and_intelligence

This is the first time I've tried dispute resolution at Wikipedia, so I'm not entirely sure how this works, or whether other editors are allowed to comment there aside from those that I've listed as the main parties. However, most of the dispute's other participants are experienced editors, so hopefully they have more familiarity with this process. 2600:1004:B166:536E:8800:9BF8:FCBA:FABB (talk) 16:52, 14 March 2020 (UTC)

The dispute resolution request has been closed. –dlthewave ☎ 18:10, 15 March 2020 (UTC)

Global variation of IQ scores: proposal

Latest comment: 4 years ago50 comments17 people in discussion

Last month, one person edit warred to remove the article's section about international variation of IQ scores. The removals were discussed here and here. This section had been in the article for more than five years, and a few uninvolved editors commenting at Arbitration Enforcement expressed the view that it was inappropriate to repeatedly remove the section in the absence of any consensus to remove it. (See user:Springee's comment here: [6]) One of the main justifications for removing the section, that the sources were unreliable, also has been rejected by community consensus at the RS noticeboard.

In his user talk user:Sirfurboy suggested that I make a proposal on this page to restore the section, so I'm doing so now. I've kept this section mostly the same as what was in the article before, but changed the first sentence to address other editors' complaints about this sentence being unsourced, and not adequately explaining how international comparisons relate to the topic of race and intelligence. I've also reduced the amount of back-and-forth between Lynn and Vanhanen and their critics, added two other new sources (Hunt 2012 and Rindermann 2013), and changed the order of two paragraphs so that order various studies are described better matches the order they were published.

Global variation of IQ scores

Further information: Nations and intelligence

A number of studies have found that differences in average scores between racial or ethnic groups tend to be similar regardless of the region they inhabit, and whether they are a majority or minority group within a country. For example, Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese people tend to have higher average scores in both East Asian countries and as immigrant populations in Western countries, while people of sub-Saharan African origin tend to have lower average scores in both Africa and the Western world.[1] Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen have argued that populations in the third world, particularly populations in Africa, tend to have limited intelligence because of their genetic composition and that, consequently, education cannot be effective in creating social and economic development in third world countries.[2] In a meta-analysis of studies of IQ estimates in Sub-Saharan Africa, Wicherts, Dolan & van der Maas (2010, p. 10) concluded that Lynn and Vanhanen had relied on unsystematic methodology by failing to publish their criteria for including or excluding studies. They found that Lynn and Vanhanen's exclusion of studies had depressed their IQ estimate for sub-Saharan Africa, and that including studies excluded in "IQ and Global Inequality" resulted in average IQ of 82 for sub-Saharan Africa, lower than the average in Western countries, but higher than Lynn and Vanhanen's estimate of 67. Wicherts et al. conclude that this difference is likely due to sub-Saharan Africa having limited access to modern advances in education, nutrition and health care.[3]

A 2007 meta-analysis by Rindermann found many of the same groupings and correlations found by Lynn and Vanhanen, with the lowest scores in sub-Saharan Africa, and a correlation of .60 between cognitive skill and GDP per capita. Hunt (2010, pp. 437–439) considers Rindermann's analysis to be much more reliable than Lynn and Vanhanen's. By measuring the relationship between educational data and social wellbeing over time, Rindermann also performed a causal analysis, finding that when nations invest in education this leads to increased well-being later on.[4] Kamin (2006) has also criticized Lynn and Vanhanen's work on the IQs of sub-Saharan Africans.[5]

A 2010 systematic review by Wicherts et al. found that compared to American norms, the average IQ of sub-Saharan Africans was about 80. The same review concluded that the Flynn effect had not yet taken hold in sub-Saharan Africa.[6] A 2013 literature review by Rindermann found an average IQ of 75 in African majority countries. However, Rindermann cautions that "Given the quality of the data, it is not possible to come to a really precise result."[7]

Rindermann (2018) argues that studies finding a correlation between nations' overall genetic similarity and their similarity in intelligence test scores, while controlling for geographic distance and human development index, support a partially genetic basis for international differences in test scores.[8] However, Wicherts, Borsboom & Dolan (2010) argue that studies reporting support for evolutionary theories of intelligence based on national IQ data suffer from multiple fatal methodological flaws. For example, they state that such studies "...assume that the Flynn Effect is either nonexistent or invariant with respect to different regions of the world, that there have been no migrations and climatic changes over the course of evolution, and that there have been no trends over the last century in indicators of reproductive strategies (e.g., declines in fertility and infant mortality)." They also showed that a strong degree of confounding exists between national IQs and current national development status.[9]

Similarly, Pesta & Poznanski (2014) showed that the average temperature of a given U.S. state is strongly associated with that state's average IQ and other well-being variables, despite the fact that evolution has not had enough time to operate on non-Native American residents of the United States. They also noted that this association persisted even after controlling for race, and concluded that "Evolution is therefore not necessary for temperature and IQ/well-being to co-vary meaningfully across geographic space."[10] In a 2012 review of the arguments for genetic and environmental causes of international test score differences, Hunt concludes that both of these hypotheses lack direct evidence to support them, and that "until direct tests of the genetic hypothesis become possible, the correct thing to do is to profess ignorance."[11]

References

  1. ^ Rindermann, Heiner (2018). Cognitive Capitalism: Human Capital and the Wellbeing of Nations. Cambridge University Press. pp. 288–289.
  2. ^ Hunt 2010, p. 437-439.
  3. ^ Wicherts, Dolan & van der Maas 2010.
  4. ^ Hunt 2010, p. 440-443.
  5. ^ Kamin 2006.
  6. ^ Wicherts et al. 2010.
  7. ^ Rindermann, Heiner (2013). "African cognitive ability: Research, results, divergences and recommendations". Personality and Individual Differences. 53 (3): 229–233. doi:10.1016/j.paid.2012.06.022.
  8. ^ Rindermann, Heiner (2018). Cognitive Capitalism: Human Capital and the Wellbeing of Nations. Cambridge University Press. pp. 293–294.
  9. ^ Wicherts, Borsboom & Dolan 2010.
  10. ^ Pesta & Poznanski 2014.
  11. ^ Hunt, Earl (2012). "What Makes Nations Intelligent?". Perspectives on Psychological Science. 7 (3): 284–306. doi:10.1177/1745691612442905.

It should be emphasized that this section is a longstanding part of the article, that was removed by edit warring in the absence of any consensus to remove it. Thus, it should not be excluded from the article unless there is a clear consensus against including it, although other editors are welcome to offer suggestions about how it could be improved. 2600:1004:B169:3DC3:813F:ED9F:D586:BA78 (talk) 23:43, 12 March 2020 (UTC)

Thanks to the IP for starting this discussion and the work done so far. I am busy today so cannot look at this in detail yet, but I support a reinsertion of material on this subject into the article, but with the following caveats: (1) I would change the heading and (2) start off the section with a caveat about the relationship between race and nationality (the last 2 paragraphs of the old material holding those caveats, but may need reworking). (3) I would always hope we can keep length down. (4) Information that is historical and no longer current thinking might need to be in the history article and not here. I will comment more when I have time. -- Sirfurboy🏄 (talk) 08:49, 13 March 2020 (UTC)
With regard to (2), it's important for the updated version of the section to address the reason other editors gave for removing it (that is, aside from the sources allegedly being unreliable). Other editors argued that the beginning of the section did not clearly spell out how international differences were relevant to the topic of race and intelligence, and that the section should not be restored unless that were made explicit. That's the reason for my change to the first sentence. Your suggestion (2) sounds like it's incompatible with the demands that other editors have made about this section, and would make the section more likely to continue getting removed because of allegedly being not relevant to the article's topic. That's a situation we should try to avoid.
With regard to (4), what parts of the section do you consider "historical"? Lynn and Vanhanen's two books that Hunt is discussing were published in 2002 and 2006, so they aren't that old. The section doesn't discuss any of the early research on international differences that was conducted from the 1970s to the 1990s.
I don't object to your other two suggestions, but I'd appreciate you making a suggestion about what specific parts should be made shorter, and suggesting a specific title for the section that's different from the current one. In some older versions of the article this section was titled "International comparisons", so I would be fine with that title also. 2600:1004:B128:9F1B:21FF:5EF4:AEE0:D46A (talk) 09:51, 13 March 2020 (UTC)
I have read this through now, and also skimmed through all the arguments below. Hopefully we can get something that would find some agreement, but I am concerned about this sentence in your proposed redrafting: Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen have argued that populations in the third world, particularly populations in Africa, tend to have limited intelligence because of their genetic composition and that, consequently, education cannot be effective in creating social and economic development in third world countries. Other information in the redrafting is quoting systematic reviews and meta analyses, but here we are just quoting the hypothesis. I appreciate it is then taken to task with the meta analyses, but I don't think it has due weight here, because one must first establish that the population do have limited intelligence, and the reviews etc. do not establish that at all. As with so much of the article, the recognition of a lower average IQ score in a population is explained by the clear evidence that IQ is heavily affected by environment. Thus a hypothesis that starts with a supposition of limited intelligence is undue. So, I continue to support some kind of inclusion of this material, but not that sentence. -- Sirfurboy🏄 (talk) 21:52, 13 March 2020 (UTC)
@Sirfurboy: Perhaps you've noticed this already, but that sentence isn't citing Lynn and Vanhanen directly; it's cited to the summary of Lynn and Vanhanen's hypothesis in Hunt's book. Hunt does not personally agree with this hypothesis, for similar reasons to those give in the Wicherts meta-analysis, but Hunt still considers the hypothesis important enough to describe. Would you prefer that Lynn and Vanhanen not be discussed in this section at all? Despite its well-known flaws, Lynn and Vanhanen's work pioneered the field of international IQ comparisons, so it seems strange to exclude any mention of them from this section, but I'm potentially willing to do that if it's the only way to get adequate support to restore the section.
I would appreciate you also commenting on the issue I raised below: the various editors claiming that my proposal gives undue weight to Hunt, Wicherts and Rindermann aren't suggesting any similarly prominent and high-quality sources about international IQ comparisons that ought to be cited instead. Sources of similar quality that take an entirely different viewpoint about this topic don't seem to exist, so this is an impossible demand. NightHeron's criticism here is particularly unfair, because he and his off-wiki friend are clearly making no effort to look at what sources exist about this topic, so even Jelte Wicherts (who is completely uncontroversial) is being characterized as "disgusting". Can you see the problem here? 2600:1004:B10E:C9DC:6534:B680:DCC4:B176 (talk) 00:23, 14 March 2020 (UTC)
It's very strange that you find it "particularly unfair" that my off-wiki friend said that it would be "disgusting" for Wikipedia to treat the following racist trash-talking as if it were a credible piece of scholarly work: Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen have argued that populations in the third world, particularly populations in Africa, tend to have limited intelligence because of their genetic composition and that, consequently, education cannot be effective in creating social and economic development in third world countries. NightHeron (talk) 01:43, 14 March 2020 (UTC)
Your earlier comment used the term "disgusting" not only for Hunt's summary of Lynn and Vanhanen, but for Wicherts as well. That's what's unfair. If even Wicherts is disgusting to you, then there probably are no high-quality secondary sources about international IQ comparisons that you would not consider disgusting.
Would you be satisfied if the discussion of Lynn and Vanhanen were removed? I think the context in which it's presented here makes it clear this is a deeply flawed hypothesis, but Sirfurboy also suggested removing it, and I'm willing to compromise about this. 2600:1004:B10E:C9DC:6534:B680:DCC4:B176 (talk) 02:15, 14 March 2020 (UTC)
No, because the whole passage is organized around responding to (partially agreeing or disagreeing) with Lynn/Vanhanen, and because you again provide a false balance in the 4th paragraph: Rindermann (2018) argues that studies finding a correlation between nations' overall genetic similarity and their similarity in intelligence test scores, while controlling for geographic distance and human development index, support a partially genetic basis for international differences in test scores. However, Wicherts, Borsboom & Dolan (2010) argue that studies reporting support for evolutionary theories of intelligence based on national IQ data suffer from multiple fatal methodological flaws. According to WP:FRINGE, fringe notions -- especially offensive ones (such as Holocaust denial or white supremacy) or harmful ones (such as anti-vaccine or quack cures) -- must be treated as fringe and not as credible theories deserving equal treatment (FALSEBALANCE). So just dropping the sentence I quoted earlier about Lynn/Vanhanen would not be nearly enough. NightHeron (talk) 02:21, 14 March 2020 (UTC)
OK, then this is what's unreasonable about your attitude. The only thing I can do is summarize the viewpoints presented in the most prominent and high-quality sources that exist, one of which is Rindermann's book. I can't make sources appear that don't exist for other viewpoints you want to include, and I can't make major sources disappear because you want sources to be automatically disqualified if they present certain viewpoints. What in the world do you want me to do, just accept that this particular aspect of the race and intelligence debate will receive zero coverage in the article? 2600:1004:B10E:C9DC:6534:B680:DCC4:B176 (talk) 02:40, 14 March 2020 (UTC)
Approve. This is fine with me as a start. It makes sense to restore the long term stable version. For updating it after that, I suggest including some newer sources. Here's some relevant ones published 2013 and onward. Of these, the Lynn (2018) chapter is the most complete summary published in WP:RS, I think.
Lynn, R. (2019). Reflections on Sixty-Eight Years of Research on Race and Intelligence. Psych, 1(1), 123-131.
Pesta, B. J., Fuerst, J., Kirkegaard, E. O., & Papaleo, B. (2019). Does intelligence explain national score variance on graduate admissions exams?. Intelligence, 73, 8-15.
Lynn, R. (2018). Chapter 16 - The Intelligence of Nations. In The Nature of Human Intelligence by Sternberg, R. J. Cambridge University Press.
Flores-Mendoza, C., Ardila, R., Rosas, R., Lucio, M. E., Gallegos, M., & Colareta, N. R. (2018). Intelligence Measurement and School Performance in Latin America.
Rindermann, H., Becker, D., & Coyle, T. R. (2016). Survey of expert opinion on intelligence: Causes of international differences in cognitive ability tests. Frontiers in psychology, 7, 399.
Salahodjaev, R. (2015). Democracy and economic growth: The role of intelligence in cross-country regressions. Intelligence, 50, 228-234
Kodila-Tedika, O., & Bolito-Losembe, R. (2014). Poverty and intelligence: Evidence using quantile regression. Economic Research Guardian, 4(1), 25.
Daniele, V. (2013). Does the intelligence of populations determine the wealth of nations?. The Journal of Socio-Economics, 46, 27-37.
Rindermann, H. (2013). The intelligence of nations: A productive research paradigm—Comment on Hunt (2012). Perspectives on Psychological Science, 8(2), 190-192.
Just my quick search! ^_^ AndewNguyen (talk) 10:31, 13 March 2020 (UTC)
I forgot one:
Whitaker, S. (2018). Assessing the intellectual ability of asylum seekers. International Journal of Developmental Disabilities, 64(4-5), 309-317.
This is a review article from 2018. The overall assessment does not differ so much from the other papers above. Note that the content in paper introduction sections may count as secondary sources according to this Wikipedia policy page. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secondary_source#Science,_technology,_and_medicine AndewNguyen (talk) 22:16, 13 March 2020 (UTC)

The proposed addition is an extreme example of FALSEBALANCE. It can be paraphrased as follows: One group of scholars, citing quantitative evidence, has stated that intelligence varies worldwide according to race, and that Africans on average are only 80% as intelligent as white Europeans and Americans. Other scholars have disputed this conclusion, stating that it is based on faulty methodology. In addition to WP:FALSEBALANCE this violates WP:FRINGE, WP:GLOBAL, and WP:NPOV. This page has gotten over 26 thousand pageviews in the last three weeks, and has functioned as a vehicle for giving credence to white supremacy. Any attempt to radically change this article results in fervent opposition by a small number of editors who effectively own it. Most editors get worn out by the bludgeoning, realize that it's a futile time sink, and avoid the whole mess. Clearly the only solution is to try again at AfD. Of course, the alt-right is prepared to go to great lengths, using special-purpose accounts, sockpuppets, and off-wiki canvassing when necessary, in order to keep this article. The criticism of Wikipedia for allowing this that was published in 2018 by the Southern Poverty Law Center is spot on. NightHeron (talk) 10:19, 13 March 2020 (UTC)

If you want to start another AFD, go ahead. But meanwhile, those of us who care about actually improving the article will continue to work on doing that. 2600:1004:B128:9F1B:21FF:5EF4:AEE0:D46A (talk) 10:30, 13 March 2020 (UTC)
SPLC is marked in the Perennial sources list as "The Southern Poverty Law Center is considered generally reliable on topics related to hate groups and extremism in the United States. As an advocacy group, the SPLC is a biased and opinionated source. The organization's views, especially when labeling hate groups, should be attributed per WP:RSOPINION. Take care to ensure that content from the SPLC constitutes due weight in the article and conforms to the biographies of living persons policy. Some editors have questioned the reliability of the SPLC on non-United States topics.". So, it is not very informative that they wrote something like that, and not really of interest to Wikipedia (aside from mentioning their opinion). If the Austrian economics group von Mises institute decided to make a list of Wikipedia pages they dislike the content of, that would be equally informative. AndewNguyen (talk) 10:36, 13 March 2020 (UTC)
With respect to this particular article, what's more relevant is that articles published by the SPLC fail the new sourcing requirement: "Only high quality sources may be used, specifically peer-reviewed scholarly journals and academically focused books by reputable publishers." 2600:1004:B128:9F1B:21FF:5EF4:AEE0:D46A (talk) 10:52, 13 March 2020 (UTC)
I was obviously not proposing the SPLC as a source for this article. I was agreeing with their criticism of Wikipedia for being unable to prevent abuse of process that allows a white supremacist slant to be preserved in an article viewed by over 1000 people per day. Given the demographics of Wikipedia, most of whose editors live in a country whose President referred to African countries as "shithole countries," it is not surprising that anti-Africa bias would be a problem here, despite such policies such as WP:GLOBAL. NightHeron (talk) 12:01, 13 March 2020 (UTC)
Changed my vote in the light of the comment by NightHeron below. --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 16:54, 13 March 2020 (UTC)
  • No thanks. There's no agreed standardised measure of intelligence that can be definitively decoupled from cultural influences, so this merely provides fodder for racists. Guy (help!) 14:08, 13 March 2020 (UTC)
  • support Quick comment here to Guy, there was a previous discussion with a consensus reached regarding Cambridge University Press at the RSN:this discussion. I believe this situation can be rectified amicably, let's try to work together. 99.48.35.129 (talk) 16:27, 13 March 2020 (UTC)
  • Comment Oppose This gives undue weight to Hunt and Rindermann; where opposing opinions are included, they are given equal or less article space with no indication of which views are widely accepted. This contradicts the outcome of the RSN discussion linked above "... The discussion indicated that there is a lack of sources supporting or opposing the notion that the views in these books are fringe, though when a viewpoint does not have wide support, we do treat it as fringe, and do not give it undue weight. That is, we can give the views of Rindermann and Hunt, sourced to their books published by the Cambridge University Press, but take care not to promote their views as widely accepted unless/until sources can be found which indicate their views are widely accepted." and WP:FRINGELEVEL "Articles which cover controversial, disputed, or discounted ideas in detail should document (with reliable sources) the current level of their acceptance among the relevant academic community. If proper attribution cannot be found among reliable sources of an idea's standing, it should be assumed that the idea has not received consideration or acceptance; ideas should not be portrayed as accepted unless such claims can be documented in reliable sources." –dlthewave ☎ 15:28, 13 March 2020 (UTC)
If you and Guy object to this section in its current state, you need to be more specific what should be changed. In order for the section gives undue weight to these authors, there would have to authors with other viewpoints that aren't adequately represented relative to those cited here, so what other sources about international IQ differences should be included? There are various primary studies by other people, such as those linked by AndewNguyen above, but almost all of the major reviews of this area are by Hunt, Rindermann, Wicherts and Lynn. (I assume you'd be objecting even more if Lynn were directly cited.) Basing the section primarily on Hunt, Rindermann, and Wicherts is a reflection of what secondary sources exist about this topic.
I could add a citation to Garett Jones' book Hive Mind if you want, since Jones is the only author of a recent secondary source on this topic who isn't represented here. However, Jones does not disagree with the sources currently cited in this section. As far as I'm aware, all recent secondary sources that cover this topic are in agreement that international IQ differences exist and are a meaningful comparison, including the lower average scores of African countries. 2600:1004:B10E:C9DC:6534:B680:DCC4:B176 (talk) 16:49, 13 March 2020 (UTC)
That is not correct. I posted a bunch of recent secondary sources in that RM that dispute that international IQ differences exist, or that IQ even exists, or that IQ tests test anything meaningful. The whole "Race and IQ" book is about this. The second batch of “more recent sources” I posted is about this. You are definitely aware of this dispute. Levivich [dubious – discuss] 17:24, 13 March 2020 (UTC)
Which of the sources that you posted there were specifically about international IQ comparisons? Most of them were about race in general, and only briefly discussed IQ if they did so at all. 2600:1004:B10E:C9DC:6534:B680:DCC4:B176 (talk) 17:34, 13 March 2020 (UTC)
For example:
  • Montagu, "Man's Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race", 1997 edition: "Old myths never die. Nor do they fade away. Not, certainly, if they are related to 'race' and its boon companion 'IQ.' ... 'race' and 'IQ' correspond to no verifiable reality whatever ..."
  • Myerson, "Race and General Cognitive Ability: The Myth of Diminishing Returns to Education" 1998: "These findings contradict the hypothesis that racial differences in intelligence are relatively immutable ... their [hereditarians'] analyses shed no light either on the nature of the effect of education on intelligence or on whether there are racial differences in this regard"
  • Fish, "Race and Intelligence" 2001: "a devastating refutation of IQ tests as a measure of innate racial intelligence"
  • Sternberg, "Intelligence, race, and genetics": 2005 "One could pick any of a number of traits correlated with geographic patterns and find correlations with other related traits. It would be foolhardy, however, to view anyone of these traits as causative of the others. That is what people have done who have viewed differences in so-called races as somehow causative of differences in IQ ... because most medical and psychological research on racial differences is based on self-defined racial or ethnic categories and there is substantial evidence questioning the accuracy of these self-classifications, the validity of racial and ethnic differences as commonly investigated is questionable"
  • Ossorio's "Myth and Mystification: The Science of Race and IQ", in Kirmsky and Sloan's "Race and the Genetic Revolution: Science, Myth, and Culture" 2011, "Correlation does not prove a causal relationship between environmental variables and IQ any more than it proves a causal relationship between race and IQ, but the presence of many strong environmental correlates with IQ raises doubts about racial or genetic explanations. Research also undermines the hereditarian claim that IQ is the primary determinant of achievement. Many environmental variables predict achievement as well as or better than IQ, except for people whose IQ scores are at the abnormally low end of the scale"
  • Tatterstall & DeSalle, "Race?: Debunking a Scientific Myth" 2011: "... nobody has yet been able to figure out a satisfactory way of separating out potential heritable from environmental effects on any measure of cognitive ability ... whatever the essence of 'intelligence' may be, it makes most sense to view any variations we observe in it as 'noise': simply the inevitable scatter around the mean that you'd expect to find in a species as biologically variable as ours."
  • Sussman, "The Myth of Race: The Troubling and Persistence of an Unscientific Idea" 2014: "What many people do not realize is that this racial structure is not based on reality. Anthropologists have shown for many years now that there is no biological reality to human race. There are no major complex behavior that directly correlate with what might be considered human 'racial' characteristics. There is no inherent relationship between intelligence, ... and race, just as there is no relationship between nose size, height, blood group, or skin color and any set of complex human behaviors."
  • Gillborn, "Softly, softly: genetics, intelligence and the hidden racism of the new geneism" 2016: "Once again, the evidence contradicts the hereditarian rhetoric and popular mythology by highlighting the constructed nature of IQ tests and scores" (emphasis in the original) Levivich [dubious – discuss] 17:51, 13 March 2020 (UTC)
I asked you, "Which of the sources that you posted there were specifically about international IQ comparisons?" You've provided a lot of sources that discuss the concept of race and IQ in general, but your argument was that there are other viewpoints I'm neglecting to include about international comparisons, and none of these sources relate to that topic. Are you not able to provide any that are about international comparisons? 2600:1004:B10E:C9DC:6534:B680:DCC4:B176 (talk) 18:03, 13 March 2020 (UTC)
Um, if IQ is bullshit, or if IQ tests are bullshit, then international comparisons of IQ or IQ tests are also bullshit. To take one example from the above list, I'm not sure how you can read this quote and then say it's not criticizing international comparisons of IQ (bold added): "One could pick any of a number of traits correlated with geographic patterns and find correlations with other related traits. It would be foolhardy, however, to view anyone of these traits as causative of the others. That is what people have done who have viewed differences in so-called races as somehow causative of differences in IQ." Anyway, this discussion nibbling around the edges is pointless. Please tell me what you think the top three sources are that review the literature to date. Let's see if we can agree on what the top sources are, and then see what they have to say on this subject. By the way, if you want to propose moving this article to the title "Geographical differences in IQ test scores", you'd have my support. But it wouldn't be about "race" at that point. Levivich [dubious – discuss] 18:21, 13 March 2020 (UTC)
Unfortunately, no one (certainly not the Pioneer Fund) finances studies comparing IQ or SAT scores between different US states and regions, looking for correlation between low scores and Republican Party strength, and then concluding something about the intellect of Republicans. I say "unfortunately" because that aspect of geographical differences in scores would be fun to read about in Wikipedia, and would undoubtedly make it into a Trevor Noah monologue. NightHeron (talk) 19:07, 13 March 2020 (UTC)
The point is that the article already has a separate section about disputes over the validity of race and IQ. It shouldn't be necessary to rehash that dispute in every individual section of the article (especially since, as I explained in my comment here, the view that "IQ is bullshit" is not given much credence in the most mainstream, broad-level psychology texts). Aside from the question of whether research about race and intelligence is valid at all, there are a lot of separate aspects of this article's topic that deserve to be covered as well, and international IQ comparisons are one of them.
With respect to international IQ comparisons, two of the top secondary sources definitely are Hunt's Human Intelligence (2011) and Rindermann's Cognitive Capitalism (2018), both published by Cambridge University Press. I'm not sure what the third one is. Garett Jones' Hive Mind (Standford University Press, 2016) is a contender, although it's mostly about the economic consequences of these differences. Another possible contender is the chapter on international differences in The Nature of Human Intelligence edited by Robert Sternberg (Cambridge University Press, 2018), which is a chapter in a major psychology handbook, but is also by Richard Lynn, who is a controversial author.
These are, I think, all of the secondary sources from major academic publishers giving broad-level overviews of international IQ comparisons that have been published in the past decade. I would be willing to cite the Jones book or the Lynn/Sternberg chapter in this section, although these sources don't say much that's different from the sources cited in my current proposal. 2600:1004:B10E:C9DC:6534:B680:DCC4:B176 (talk) 18:46, 13 March 2020 (UTC)
No, see, I disagree that "the view that 'IQ is bullshit' is not given much credence". I think that is the mainstream scientific consensus. And I'm saying, let's look–not at Rindermann or Hunt or Lynn or Jensen's prodigy or hereditarians at all–but rather, at literature reviews. In your earlier comment that you linked it, in which you argued that "IQ is bullshit" is not the mainstream view, you cited Genetics for the human race, "a comprehensive survey of what we currently know about the science of human genetic variation" from Nature (journal). That's an example of a literature review from a top-notch source, as I was seeking. It's from 2004. Do you think this still presents "what we currently know about the science of human genetic variation", or would you say it's now too old? Levivich [dubious – discuss] 18:54, 13 March 2020 (UTC)
It's a little dated, but I think the Nature source still more or less represents what we know about human genetic variation. However, this source also says almost nothing about intelligence or IQ, so it would be more relevant to the race and genetics article than to this one.
You seem to want me to find a source about international IQ comparisons that's as prominent and high-quality as the Nature special issue, but I'm pretty sure nothing like that exists. Major general-science journals such as Nature and Science haven't covered this particular topic. On this topic, the highest-quality sources available are the books from major academic publishers that I mentioned in my last comment, as well as the literature reviews by Hunt, Wicherts and Rindermann cited in my current proposal. I can't provide higher quality sources than what exists, so these sources are the best we have. 2600:1004:B10E:C9DC:6534:B680:DCC4:B176 (talk) 19:18, 13 March 2020 (UTC)
I want to identify what you think are the highest-quality, most-current literature reviews we have available to us. So far you're saying: Hunt 2010, Weicherts 2010, Sternberg 2018, Rindermann 2018... did I miss any?
W/r/t the 2010 ones, would you agree 10 years is too old to reflect current views?
W/r/t Sternberg 2018, you mean the whole book and not just Lynn's chapter, right?
W/r/t Rindermann 2018, what makes that a literature review? The jacket description says, "In this book, Heiner Rindermann establishes a new model," which sounds like a book in which he's arguing for something new, not just reviewing what we know so far. If someone is arguing for a new model, then their review of past literature would not really be neutral, wouldn't you agree? Levivich [dubious – discuss] 19:45, 13 March 2020 (UTC)
There actually are a few literature reviews published by Wicherts in 2010. I don't think they are among the most prominent literature reviews on this topic, but I do think they deserve to be included. I also think the Hunt 2012 and Rindermann 2013 reviews are fairly important. Again, not among the very most prominent sources, but still important enough to include. There's also the Garett Jones source, if you think that's relevant enough.
Hunt's book actually was published in 2011, not 2010. (Google books has the year wrong; 2011 is the copyright year given in the book itself.) You could potentially make an argument to reject some of the Wicherts papers because of their age, but Hunt's book is one of the only really thorough overviews of this topic, so I think it's too important of a source to leave out.
With respect to the Sternberg book, the entire book could be a useful source for other articles related to human intelligence, but Lynn's chapter is the only part of the book that discusses international IQ comparisons. If you think Lynn is too controversial to be cited directly, I'm sympathetic to that argument, which is one of the reasons I didn't cite this source in my initial proposal.
The way Rindermann's book is structured is that the first ten chapters are reviewing the existing literature about international test score differences, while the last four propose a new set of models about how these differences relate to international differences in prosperity. The parts of his book that are cited in my proposal are from the first portion of the book, where he's reviewing the existing literature. I agree that his review of the literature is not as neutral as Hunt's is, so this could be considered an opinionated source, but it is still a high-quality source in every other respect. It is the only book published in the past four years by a major academic publisher that's entirely about the topic of this section.
To answer your main question: my view is that when you consider factors such as currency, prominence, and relevance, the two best secondary sources available about international IQ comparisons are the Hunt and Rindermann books. After those, the sources become difficult to rank, but all of the sources I've mentioned here are of fairly high quality.
I'm open to negotiating about which of these sources should be given more or less weight in the section, but perhaps now you understand my frustration at your and others' complaints that this section gives undue weight to the views of Hunt, Wicherts, and Rindermann, without suggesting any other specific sources about international IQ comparisons that ought to be cited instead. On the topic of international IQ comparisons, books and papers by these authors (and possibly Jones and Lynn) are the most relevant and prominent secondary sources that exist, and I can't make high-quality sources for other viewpoints magically appear. 2600:1004:B10E:C9DC:6534:B680:DCC4:B176 (talk) 20:45, 13 March 2020 (UTC)
When it comes to fringe theories, we don't adjust our standards to match the best available sources. If a viewpoint hasn't received sufficient mainstream coverage to provide a balanced point of view, we simply don't include it at all. I'm not certain that this is the case here but if two of your best sources (Hunt and Rindermann) are treated as fringe per consensus at RSN, this is a strong possibility that we must consider. Keep in mind that the burden to find reliable sources lies with editors wishing to include the viewpoint. I'm sure this is frustrating for you, but that doesn't mean that you should ask other editors to come up with better sources (which may not even exist) when yours are not accepted. –dlthewave ☎ 02:08, 14 March 2020 (UTC)
There was not a consensus at RSN that these sources are fringe. The conclusion of the discussion was, "The discussion indicated that there is a lack of sources supporting or opposing the notion that the views in these books are fringe".
A little while ago, I found a discussion in the talk page archives that addressed the question of whether research in this area is fringe more generally: [7] This is from ten years ago, so I'm not sure whether the consensus in that discussion still applies, but as far as I'm aware there have not been any more recent discussions that reached a different conclusion. 2600:1004:B10E:C9DC:6534:B680:DCC4:B176 (talk) 02:27, 14 March 2020 (UTC)
You're misrepresenting the RSN discussion by omitting a key sentence. Here's a more complete quote: "The remaining concern was that the views of Rindermann and Hunt may be Fringe. The discussion indicated that there is a lack of sources supporting or opposing the notion that the views in these books are fringe, though when a viewpoint does not have wide support, we do treat it as fringe, and do not give it undue weight. That is, we can give the views of Rindermann and Hunt, sourced to their books published by the Cambridge University Press, but take care not to promote their views as widely accepted unless/until sources can be found which indicate their views are widely accepted." –dlthewave ☎ 02:35, 14 March 2020 (UTC)
Right, so we don't know whether their views are widely accepted or not. That isn't the same as saying there is a consensus that these views definitely are fringe. I should also mention that this paper from Annual Review of Psychology described Hunt's book as the best book about human intelligence published in the past several years, so that's a piece of evidence against it being "fringe".
Are you willing to make any compromises here? A lot of other people seem to be stonewalling my attempts to get constructive feedback about this section, so it would be useful if you could avoid doing the same thing. 2600:1004:B10E:C9DC:6534:B680:DCC4:B176 (talk) 02:59, 14 March 2020 (UTC)
Right, so we don't know whether their views are widely accepted or not. Of course we do, or at least we can find out. That's what I've been trying to get at. Hunt 2012 and Rindermann 2013 were 7+ years ago. Surely in the last seven years, somebody has reviewed their work, somebody has commented on it. There are literature reviews that are much more recent than 7 years old. That's why I keep asking, what do you think are the leading, most-current reviews of the work in the area of race and intelligence (including geographic or international IQ differences). It's not by reading Hunt 2012 and Rindermann 2013 that we will find out whether those works are widely accepted or not: we have to look at reviews–at papers published after that, which look back and put their work into a broader context. Then we'll know what's WP:DUE and what's not. Levivich [dubious – discuss] 18:12, 14 March 2020 (UTC)
It sounds like perhaps you're looking for something along the lines of Garret Jones' book. (Contrary to what the Wikipedia article says, this book actually was published in 2016, not 2015.) This particular book doesn't discuss race much, but it does review some of the research about international IQ differences by Lynn, Wicherts and Rindermann. Would this source meet your requirements? As I said before, if you're looking for something as prominent as the Nature special issue about race and genetics, I'm pretty sure that doesn't exist.
User:AndewNguyen knows a lot about the academic literature in this area, so perhaps he'll have some other suggestions about sources that meet your requirements. 2600:1004:B166:536E:8800:9BF8:FCBA:FABB (talk) 20:26, 14 March 2020 (UTC)
OK, I'll be specific.
Leave this racist claptrap out of the article.
Was that specific enough? Guy (help!) 23:27, 15 March 2020 (UTC)
  • Comment Reading the first paragraph of the proposed addition aloud to an off-wiki friend, I now see that it's even worse than my paraphrase above. A closer paraphrase would be: A group of scholars, using quantitative studies, concluded that the average Sub-Saharan African has genes for intelligence that are far inferior to those of white people and is technically a moron, having an IQ of 67. Another group of scholars criticized the methodology, and said the Africans are inferior in intelligence with an average IQ of 82, but that this inferiority is caused by environment rather than heredity. The off-wiki friend characterized the paragraph as "disgusting." It would be really nice to put off this whole debate until after the current pandemic is over, rather than expecting editors to have to think about two extremely unpleasant things at once, how to deal with a coronavirus infestation in their community and how to deal with an alt-right infestation on Wikipedia. NightHeron (talk) 16:35, 13 March 2020 (UTC)
  • Oppose as undue. The paragraph omits contradictory sources and presents a minority POV (fringe, really) as if it were scientific consensus. Levivich [dubious – discuss] 17:27, 13 March 2020 (UTC)
  • Oppose for reasons explained above. NightHeron (talk) 11:34, 14 March 2020 (UTC)
  • Support with revision. We already had two discussions (noted by the OP) that effectively said to retain this in some form. The problem is simply that it requires WP:DUE balance. Something of this needs to be back in, since we have the sources for it, and WP does not suppress topics because some people don't find them tasteful. However, I agree with some of the above that there's "false balance" problem the way this is currently written. A revised version of this should be acceptable.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  01:36, 16 March 2020 (UTC)

On a straight count of responses, this edit clearly does not gain assent, but I would ask editors to step back from the edit and consider the principle instead.

I understand why editors removed the material, but did not entirely agree with it. Problems with the material removed are (1) the section appears to confuse race with nationality (2) it contained a back and forth between those for and against strong hereditarian positions. (3) there was a leap from IQ testing to intelligence despite known problems with that. However it did contain information about systematic reviews and analysis that did draw attention to the problems - including that confusion of race and nationality. I also did not entirely agree with the deletion because the attempts by Lynn and Vanhanen to extend an observation that was hitherto based very largely on US focussed studies with a US centric notion of race is, in my opinion, notable inasmuch as it describes the nature of the controversy, and is also illustrative of the methodological problems of Vanhanen and Lynn. Thus I think a neutral point of view demands some coverage of this subject as long as we understand the article to be about the notable race and intelligence controversy (and that is my understanding as to what the article is about). I think the section, rewritten in a mainstream, NPOV manner is notable and I think the IP editor's suggestion went some way towards achieving that, although as above, I also had concerns about some of it.

I would probably wish to edit the proposed material after it (or an acceptable version of it) was inserted into the article, but that is allowed. The discussion here is not seeking to gain consensus for an inviolable piece of text that cannot be improved or adapted - only consensus on coverage of the issue. The question here is only whether the matter should be covered at all, and I think it should.

Could we answer that question first? Rather than opposing or affirming the above text, what do editors feel about the principle of coverage of the subject? I have drawn a line under the above discussion to allow us to consider the question of principle before arguing about the actual text. Thanks. -- Sirfurboy🏄 (talk) 22:01, 15 March 2020 (UTC)

The majority of editors have already indicated what they think about FALSEBALANCE pro-and-con coverage of Lynn/Vanhanen's and Rindermann's unscientific and racist slurs against people in Africa and other developing regions of the world. If the majority of Wikipedia editors were Africans rather than Americans, would we even be considering including such garbage? NightHeron (talk) 23:01, 15 March 2020 (UTC)
I think you know it's quite clear from the discussion in the two recent Arbitration Enforcement reports that the wider Wikipedia community had a problem with this section's removal. The difficulty here is that the various uninvolved editors commenting at AE aren't nearly as persistent and determined on this article as people like you and Dlthewave are, so local consensus tends to go in your favor even when the wider community disagrees with you. The fact that the wider community tends to oppose this small group of editors is something that's happened consistently, the outcome of the recent proposed move being another example.
I previously pinged all the uninvolved people who participated in Dlthewave's report about Peregrine Fisher, but I haven't yet done that for those who commented in his report about Jweiss11. As before, I'm pinging ALL of the uninvolved editors who commented there, without regard for the views they've expressed, except for Springee who's said that he doesn't want to participate in this article. @Pudeo: @MaximumIdeas: @Guettarda: @SMcCandlish: Do you have an opinion about whether it's appropriate to remove the discussion of international IQ comparisons from this article? As I said in Sirfurboy's user talk, I'm flexible about the contents of this section, as long as it's well-sourced and the sources directly relate to this topic. 2600:1004:B14E:63FD:A8E7:E862:289A:18DD (talk) 01:11, 16 March 2020 (UTC)
  • Support including topic* to answer Sirfurboy🏄, international comparisons is one of the primary areas in which reputable research on the field has focused; clearly it should be included. I hope editors can work together to summarize the academic studies on international comparisons. MaximumIdeas (talk) 01:41, 16 March 2020 (UTC)

Why is 'Race and intelligence' the title of this article rather than 'Race and IQ scores'?

Latest comment: 4 years ago13 comments7 people in discussion

This article has been thoroughly discussed by editors, but I haven't seen this discussion occur recently, and given the recent attention from the AfD and other sources, it's worth bringing up. Should we rename the article to 'Race and IQ scores' or just 'Race and IQ' rather than 'Race and intelligence'? The article deals primarily with the relationship between IQ scores and race, so it would be more accurate and more specific.

There is already a section in the article (Intelligence, IQ, g and IQ tests) which discusses (accurately) the degree to which IQ and intelligence should not be considered equivalent terms. This non-equivalence should be reflected in the article's title. Since it focuses on IQ tests and not other measures of intelligence (the only major exception being a short section on test scores, which is better covered in the section's linked article), I think renaming the article to Race and IQ scores would be in line with best practices. I'm interested to hear what others think on this issue. Ganesha811 (talk) 16:46, 13 March 2020 (UTC)

Yes, that makes sense to me. --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 16:56, 13 March 2020 (UTC)
"Race and IQ" would be based on what sources? Levivich [dubious – discuss] 17:09, 13 March 2020 (UTC)
Levivich, I'm not sure what you mean. The proposed article title would be based on accurately and precisely reflecting the contents of the article. Could you explain a little more? Ganesha811 (talk) 17:49, 13 March 2020 (UTC)
Ganesha811, but the contents of the article do not accurately and precisely reflect reality. My starting argument: Ashley Montagu wrote a landmark book 80 years ago called "Man's Most Dangerous Myth", which was released in 6 editions, between 1942 and 1997. The book has over 1,400 cites per Google Scholar, and is mentioned in every literature review I've ever read. Montagu wrote in that book: 'race' and 'IQ' correspond to no verifiable reality whatever. So if Race and IQ correspond to no verifiable reality whatever, then why would Wikipedia have an article called "Race and IQ" or "Race and IQ scores"? And if you (or anyone) challenges that Montagu's statement does not carry scientific consensus, then I ask: based on what sources? Based on what sources is "Race and IQ" a "verifiable reality"? Because I got this good source that says it's not. Levivich [dubious – discuss] 17:54, 13 March 2020 (UTC)
How about "Perceptions of a relationship between race and intelligence" for a title? Ultimately it is impossible to say that any group of people is smarter than any other group of people. We don't have scientific definitions of "intelligence" and we certainly don't have scientific definitions of "race". If there were such scientific definitions this question would be easy to answer—which it is not. What we are addressing in this article are perceptions of how such qualities accrue to what we perceive as cohesive groups of people. This is a slippery slope because both terms are poorly defined. The problem with the present title, Race and intelligence, is its failure to allude to the subjective nature of findings in sources addressing this question. I am suggesting a non-judgmental descriptive title. Bus stop (talk) 17:55, 13 March 2020 (UTC)
Levivich, generally, I agree, and I felt that the AfD should have resulted in a delete. But it did not, and since the article will remain, I think making the article title reflect what the article actually covers makes sense. It won't fix any broader issues with the article, as you suggest, but it's a reasonable step that I think can garner broad, hopefully less-controversial support. Ganesha811 (talk) 17:58, 13 March 2020 (UTC)

'Race and intelligence' is a clear case of framing language. By taking IQ and intelligence being essentially identical, any further debate is pre-framed in those terms, even though it is false equivalence. By renaming the article as proposed then at least we are discussing what is actually being measured, not some chimera. --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 20:10, 15 March 2020 (UTC)

IQ stands for intelligence quotient, as I think most readers know, and that's already a false framing. In 1923, E. G. Boring defined intelligence as whatever IQ tests measure, but a consensus of later writers have disputed that definition as being unscientific and circular (paraphrasing: we devised a test to measure intelligence, which is defined as being what the test measures). Concerning race, as A. and B.D. Smedley wrote in American Psychologist (2005): The consensus among most scholars in fields such as evolutionary biology, anthropology and other disciplines is that racial distinctions fail on all 3 counts-- that is they are not genetically discrete, are not reliably measured, and are not scientifically meaningful. So even this proposed title suggests a link between a socially constructed concept that is not scientifically meaningful and a type of test whose misleading name has no scientific validity. NightHeron (talk) 22:46, 15 March 2020 (UTC)
This seems kind of a disingenuous question, since a) the article is broader than that already, and b) we have above numerous attempts (one ongoing) to suppress IQ-related material anyway. While I agree with some specific WP:UNDUE and WP:FRINGE concerns, we cannot actually tackle the topic if the very existence of the claims and alleged research behind them are not even allowed to be addressed, yet that is the clear agenda of several parties who have been disruptive here. I've said before, in multiple venues, that this "intolerance in the name of tolerance" nonsense would backfire: if WP does not properly cover this topic and debunk that which needs to be debunked - no matter how many people wish the topic simply did not exist and "could not" be written about – all that would do is cede control of the subject in the public mindshare to far-right, racist media. WP has a civic duty to cover this topic in-depth and properly.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  01:41, 16 March 2020 (UTC)
The whole point of the objections of many of us is that the article is not debunking scientific racism but rather promoting it through a false balance. If the title were changed to something like "Race and intelligence myth" (which was rejected) or "Fringe views linking race and intelligence" and if the content were changed so as to remove the false balance and truly debunk the nonsense, that would be great. In the meantime it would help a little to avoid adding any more false balance that gives credence to Lynn and his collaborators and slanders Africans. NightHeron (talk) 02:06, 16 March 2020 (UTC)
Well, the rename was rejected, so let's not relitigate that. It would be much, much more constructive to re-balance the material in the article, including the material under discussion above, so that it is consistent with our treatment of other fringe topics instead of being hidden away entirely in hopes no one will notice. Someone who (through academic connections or through applications over at WP:LIBRARY) has current free full-text access – mine has lapsed – to various journal search sites should look into more recent material on this. I find it not credible that various anthropology journals and such have not ripped into this reliance on US- and UK-authored IQ tests as obviously culturally biased to focus on things that Westerners are trained and facile at from a young age while ignoring things for which people in other societies have well-formed neural pathways. I was writing material like that (as an undergraduate – it's not citable research) way back around 1989 (also about the obvious biases in MBTI/Keirsey). I don't have ready access to the necessary current materials to really pore over this, though.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  04:30, 16 March 2020 (UTC)
There has definitely been some of that in the reviews of Lynn and Vanhanen's books, but it's generally been focused on the flaws in those particular books (many of which are indeed quite flawed), not on international IQ comparisons more generally. One thing about which there's been some degree of consensus with respect to this section is that compared to the version that's been in the article for the past five years, the section should have less focus on the back-and-forth between Lynn/Vanhanen and their various critics, and more focus on researchers in this area who are closer to the mainstream. So it would be best to not include a lot of discussion about the work by and critiques of those two authors in particular. But if you can find sources that offer a more general critique of international IQ comparisons, that aren't focused on Lynn and Vanhanen's work, I would support including those. 2600:1004:B14E:63FD:A8E7:E862:289A:18DD (talk) 05:47, 16 March 2020 (UTC)

RfC on race and intelligence at WP:FTN

Latest comment: 4 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
See Wikipedia:Fringe_theories/Noticeboard#RfC on race and intelligence

The RfC asks whether the claim that there are genetic differences in intelligence along racial lines is a fringe viewpoint. NightHeron (talk) 23:51, 16 March 2020 (UTC)

Exclude IP accounts

Latest comment: 4 years ago45 comments22 people in discussion
There is no consensus to ban IP contributions from the talk page. As always, if there is ongoing disruptive behaviour on this page, protection can be requested at WP:RFPP. Ivanvector (Talk/Edits) 18:08, 17 March 2020 (UTC)

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

In light of the fact that this page is mentioned on several neo-Nazi webpages (I shall refrain from linking to them) and there are a number of banned/blocked users that have previously been active, I more to ban all IP edits from this article and the talkpage. jps (talk) 21:42, 16 February 2020 (UTC)

  • Endorse as proposer. jps (talk) 21:42, 16 February 2020 (UTC)
  • Oppose IPs are already banned from editing the article page, due to it being semi-protected. I don't see the point of them being banned from the talk page as well, given that they should be allowed to have at least the chance to propose their ideas; speaking of which, the IP starting with 2600 had already proposed useful edits and provided helpful sources and arguments in the past. O̲L̲D̲S̲T̲O̲N̲E̲J̅A̅M̅E̅S̅ 22:02, 16 February 2020 (UTC)
  • Comment Since this proposal is obviously directed against me, I won't vote, but I'd like everyone to be aware that this proposal is a clear case of forum shopping. JPS previously requested that this page be semi-protected, so only registered users can edit it, on January 28, and his request was declined. How many times does he intend to keep requesting this? 2600:1004:B117:10E5:D530:D014:5920:FA1 (talk) 22:18, 16 February 2020 (UTC)
  • Support - Blocks and bans apply to talk pages as well; semi-protection of the article does not entirely prevent block evasion. Protecting this page would help ensure that arbitration decisions are being enforced. –dlthewave ☎ 22:38, 16 February 2020 (UTC)
  • Support per jps and dlthewave, although that restriction will probably have only a minor impact. My impression is that, historically, the problematic editors both on the article and the talk-page have not been predominantly IP-editors. On the other hand, (1) just one or two IP-editors can do a lot of bludgeoning, and (2) an IP-editor might be less inhibited in making white-supremacist or anti-semitic comments. NightHeron (talk) 01:10, 17 February 2020 (UTC)
@Horse Eye Jack: Citation needed. Can you please provide examples? On the contrary, I've seen excellent contributions from 2600, and this move seems to be entirely directed at him. Toomim (talk) 23:32, 17 February 2020 (UTC)
It's largely impossible to provide examples as the IP address changes daily; see sample: Special:Contributions/2600:1004:B15D:697F:F1AB:F59B:5A3B:897D. What I can observe is that the IP is currently a SPA for this page + related discussions on various admin noticeboards, although it's impossible to know what other pages they have edited prior to this one. --K.e.coffman (talk) 02:49, 18 February 2020 (UTC)
So are you saying that you can find edits by 2600, but that you think it is impossible to find examples of those edits being problematic? Or did I mis-understand you? Toomim (talk) 11:30, 18 February 2020 (UTC)
  • Oppose I agree that 2600's contributions have been of the most civil and consensus-building of anyone. I think he's done a better job than me to bring together both sides, and that's what this article needs, given how contentious it is. Without him, I fear this process would get even uglier. Finally, the proposer hasn't given us any examples of the problem edits that they are supposedly trying to prevent. Toomim (talk) 23:32, 17 February 2020 (UTC)
And one more important point -- since this issue is so politically-charged, people might be risking their jobs or friends to speak up about it, and we should should allow anonymous edits so that these people can still have a voice. Toomim (talk) 23:36, 17 February 2020 (UTC)
This makes no sense. IP editing is less anonymous than editing with an account, and editors are responsible for what they say and do on the project as a whole, not just in isolation. Grayfell (talk) 00:59, 18 February 2020 (UTC)
Now you are saying that IP editing is *less* anonymous. But that's self-contradicting -- if IP editing is *less* anonymous, then there wouldn't be any "bad people" doing IP editing. They would make accounts. And this whole "ban the IPs" idea would do the opposite of its claimed purpose. --Toomim (talk) 11:56, 18 February 2020 (UTC)
I think there's a confusion here between two different types of reasons for anonymity. If users want to simply protect themselves from off-wiki consequences of their editing (such as doxxing/harassment or repercussions at work or with friends/family), the best way to do this is to have an account with a pseudonym. If users want to make it harder for admins to follow what they're doing and impose sanctions when necessary, the surest way to do that is to be an IP-editor with changing IPs. NightHeron (talk) 13:16, 18 February 2020 (UTC)
  • Support: Given the previous history of site bans / topic bans for this subject and associated Talk pages. Additionally, using a dynamic IP to edit in a contentious topic area is inappropriate since the constantly changing address helps evade scrutiny by making an entire editing history extremely difficult to trace. Lastly, I don't find this argument about engaging with the topic area compelling: ...people might be risking their jobs or friends to speak up about it, and we should allow anonymous edits so that these people can still have a voice. The same would apply to conspiracy theorists, alt-righters, neo-Nazis, casual racists, anti-semites, etc. It's not important for Wikipedia that their voices be heard. --K.e.coffman (talk) 00:50, 18 February 2020 (UTC)
You have provided no examples of these problems.
Also, you cannot censor right-wing POVs from Wikipedia while allowing left-wing POVs. That is an egregious violation of NPOV. (And I am a liberal myself.) --Toomim (talk) 10:02, 18 February 2020 (UTC)
It's not a political issue, so please don't make it into one. The issue is WP:FRINGE. The anti-vaccine movement is usually associated more with the left than the right (e.g., Jill Stein for a while was supporting it). If IP editors were persistently trying to get the anti-vaxx POV into a Wikipedia article and were bludgeoning on the talk page, then it would similarly make sense to block IP editors from those pages. The issue is not left vs right, but rather science vs fringe. Just because in this instance the white-supremacist fringe POV is supported by alt-right sources, that does not mean that people who want to treat that POV in accordance with WP:FRINGE are advancing a left-wing POV. NightHeron (talk) 11:16, 18 February 2020 (UTC)
I'm not the one who made it political — K.e.coffman did by saying we should block IP addresses in order to prevent "alt-righters" from participating. He didn't use the word "fringe"; he used the word "right". That is the political right. Trying to block a political orientation from participating in Wikipedia is an egregious violation of NPOV. You are defending that behavior. --Toomim (talk) 11:27, 18 February 2020 (UTC)
I read the comment by K.e.coffman to be a list of the types of people who push for fringe views and do not contribute constructively to Wikipedia. There are leftist conspiracy theorists and leftist anti-semites, as you're probably aware, and so K.e.coffman's list is not only of rightists. Also, the term alt-right refers to the fringe wing of the right, not to mainstream conservatives. No one is saying that editors who are on the political right cannot contribute constructively. NightHeron (talk) 13:13, 18 February 2020 (UTC)
The alt-right is a political orientation that describes many millions of people. If you are arguing to block these people from editing Wikipedia, then you are in gross violation of Wikipedia's core principle of NPOV, and someone might report your account to administration. Tread carefully. Toomim (talk) 02:01, 19 February 2020 (UTC)
  • Support - The best we've seen from IPs here is WP:CIVILPOV, and that's being generous. IP editing makes it more difficult to keep track of disruptive behavior and sock puppetry, which this article has been especially plagued with for over a decade. Grayfell (talk) 00:59, 18 February 2020 (UTC)
    Can we get some examples of this being a problem? Peregrine Fisher (talk) 03:01, 18 February 2020 (UTC)
  • Questions - Was there a precedent like this at other articles before? I know that there were occasional failed proposals to globally prevent IP editing. It may also be worth evaluating if some administrators occasionally applied such measures under ARBCOM dicretionary sanctions, or if it should eventually be part of them to protect pages for other reasons than vandalism and obvious edit warring (in this case to prevent IP editing)... In any case, it would never be a proper technical solution to the problem of socks, unless the software itself was improved to automatically report potential socks to admins with CU rights (i.e. with a private backlog of 30 days or more), or accounts had to be confirmed to an actual person's identity (i.e. at OTRS discretion). But it would indeed make it easier for other editors and discussion closers to identify SPAs, for admins to sanction disruptive editors and handle obvious socks manually, as well as for new editors on the topic to learn, as they would have a stable talk page. —PaleoNeonate – 04:41, 18 February 2020 (UTC)
I'm not familiar with the circumstances that led to it, but Category:Wikipedia semi-protected talk pages shows that there is some precedent for semi-sprotecting article talk pages. –dlthewave ☎ 04:54, 18 February 2020 (UTC)
  • Oppose Seems an obvious attempt to get rid of the contributions of the frequent 2600 IP editor. OP's unsubstantiated claim about Nazis posting this page are irrelevant to Wikipedia policies. I do not understand why we cannot just work within the normal rules on this page, but every lawyer trick in the book must be attempted. In any case, I don't think this is just something one can make a vote for, and then bring in one's friends for majority. AndewNguyen (talk) 13:24, 18 February 2020 (UTC)
By implying that people you disagree with are canvassing, you are accusing other editors of acting in bad faith. This is also an odd point to make, since several of the people commenting here are near-WP:SPAs, including you. You cannot have it both ways. The article has a documented history of being targeted by multiple long-term abuse accounts. Sorry, but I'm not inclined to dig through the 100 pages of archives to point to specific examples right now. Also, Wikipedia is not a platform for Nazis, and linking to Nazi websites would be unacceptably disruptive, so saying this is "unsubstantiated " completely misses the point. Grayfell (talk) 21:39, 18 February 2020 (UTC)
Ok. None of you can provide any examples of the problems that blocking IP addresses will solve. It's time to give up on this idea. Also, that article on WP:NONAZIS says This is an essay. This page is not one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines. Please don't masquerade that as an actual Wikipedia policy . --Toomim (talk) 23:21, 18 February 2020 (UTC)
I didn't vote yet but did include rationale: But it would indeed make it easier for other editors and discussion closers to identify SPAs, for admins to sanction disruptive editors and handle obvious socks manually, as well as for new editors on the topic to learn, as they would have a stable talk page. In any case, please let people vote instead of deciding for everyone yourself? —PaleoNeonate – 00:11, 19 February 2020 (UTC)
This isn't a vote; it's a consensus process. Consensus requires both sides trying to find consensus. However, in this case, the 'support' side refuses to provide examples of the problems they are talking about. If they are not trying to find consensus, then consensus cannot proceed, and it's time to give this up. --Toomim (talk) 01:48, 19 February 2020 (UTC)
I am not currently getting involved in editing this page, nor taking sides in this or any other matter, but an example of the problem can be found on this page, scroll up to the rename section, and see the contributions from 2605:8D80:668:39E9:DB8E:11E8:912F:2CD0. These come from the (often) banned sock, Sprayitchyo[8]. -- Sirfurboy🏄 (talk) 08:22, 19 February 2020 (UTC)
ETA I will balance that comment with my observation (made elsewhere) that the IP editor 2600:1004:b1/40 appears to be in good faith, and has made a statement that they cannot use cookies. the Wikipedia technical FAQ is clear that cookies are required to edit with an account, and although most of us accept cookies as a norm, I do have sympathy for those who wish to reject all cookies. -- Sirfurboy🏄 (talk) 09:18, 19 February 2020 (UTC)
As several others have already pointed out, the context in which this proposal was made makes it obvious that it is directed against me, not against the other IP. (In fact, it was made directly in response to one of my posts.) If the purpose of this proposal were to exclude the other IP, it would have been made two weeks ago, which is the last - and I think, only - time the other IP has commented on this page. Almost all of the support for the proposal is coming from people who have disagreed with me about the content of this article.
Much has been made on this page about how "local consensus" isn't enough for certain proposals. I suppose we'll find out soon whether local consensus among the people who've disagreed with an editor on a page is enough to exclude that editor from commenting there. 2600:1004:B155:9EA4:EC0F:A884:87A9:BC55 (talk) 13:28, 19 February 2020 (UTC)

The articles and corresponding talk pages relating to Abortion shall be semi-protected for a period of three years from the conclusion of this case, such that no non-autoconfirmed editor (including IP address editors) shall edit them. Editors in good standing who wish to edit such topics under a single additional account not linked to their identity may do so under the provisions of WP:SOCK#LEGIT and WP:SOCK#NOTIFY.

I found this remedy very effective in reducing the need to continuously assume good faith with every new or random IP editor. On contentious articles such as this IP editors tend to be socks or meats more times than not. Their ability to game WP:AGF and use civil POV pushing tactics makes what is already a very difficult editing job into a practical impossibility. A decade is long enough. Any reasonable actions that will help editors work constructively on this article should be taken. —ArtifexMayhem (talk) 04:44, 19 February 2020 (UTC)
Thank you very much, ArtifexMayhem. —PaleoNeonate – 04:52, 19 February 2020 (UTC)
  • Support - Problematic-enough subject area to consider the measure. —PaleoNeonate – 04:52, 19 February 2020 (UTC)
  • Strong support. There is the serious likelihood of editors seeking to use IP addresses like sockpuppet accounts. Onetwothreeip (talk) 08:31, 19 February 2020 (UTC)
  • Oppose While article talk pages are occasionally protected from IP editing, that's a last resort and in only the most egregious of cases (non-stop vandalism, libel, copyvios etc). I see no evidence that this page is anywhere near that stage (yet), and indeed, despite requests, there seems to be a curious inability to produce diffs (=evidence) of much IP wrongdoing at all.
    While I don't see it as being an obvious attempt to get rid of the contributions of anyone, I think it is a good faith attempt to solve a problem yet to occur, which is both against policy and is contrary to the open nature of Wikipedia. This should only be done in situations where blatant vandalism or disruption is occurring—a situation which seems yet to occur. ——SN54129 11:43, 25 February 2020 (UTC)
  • Oppose Having skimmed through the "discussion" on this page a good bit, it seems obvious that this move is a targeted one that has everything to do with shutting down one specific contributor and nothing to do with the quality of the article or discussion on this talk page. Only the OP can know whether that's the case, or if this is actually a misguided attempt at stopping some unnamed wrongdoing that's yet to be presented here, some clarification would be appreciated. Going by what I can see, this looks to be an attempt to prevent discussion; not a move to better discuss the topic. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 174.255.198.2 (talk) 02:34, 4 March 2020 (UTC)
  • Oppose - There is no evidence of disruption on this talk page, and the disruption to the article has been handled sufficiently with a semi-protect. This is an inappropriate request, and IPs are editors too. Mr rnddude (talk) 14:07, 8 March 2020 (UTC)
  • Oppose per Mr rnddude. IP editors appear to be no better or worse than editors with usernames on this page.--Literaturegeek | T@1k? 14:45, 10 March 2020 (UTC)
  • Oppose. A decision of this nature should only be made on a community-wide basis. Bus stop (talk) 16:50, 10 March 2020 (UTC)

I have requested administrator action on this proposal at WP:AE: Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Enforcement#Race_and_intelligence. jps (talk) 16:51, 17 March 2020 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

I reverted, again. Do you like it? Do you not like it?

Latest comment: 4 years ago20 comments8 people in discussion

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Race_and_intelligence&diff=942698394&oldid=942674047

Seems the same as the last 10 times. Arguing particular policies and guidelines doesn't seem to have any postive effect. Peregrine Fisher (talk) 08:10, 26 February 2020 (UTC)

It does seem off topic though, this page is about Race and intelligence... Global variation of IQ scores is only tangentially related and isn't part of the core topic at all. Horse Eye Jack (talk) 08:24, 26 February 2020 (UTC)
This came up earlier with great arguments for why it is applicable. I think it was just a few days ago. Basically that's one way that reliable sources look at things.
You think it's tangentially related. I think it's completely unrelated. But realiable sources think it is related. Shoot! I guess they win. Peregrine Fisher (talk) 08:40, 26 February 2020 (UTC)
If you self reverted, that would be awesome. Peregrine Fisher (talk) 08:42, 26 February 2020 (UTC)
That discussion is still open, no consensus has been reached. Why restore the disputed content *before* consensus is reached? Horse Eye Jack (talk) 09:09, 26 February 2020 (UTC)
The edit summary for Dlthewave's removal was "see talk page", but it's unclear what talk page discussion he means.
This section was last discussed on the talk page about ten days ago. In that discussion I mentioned that the books by Hunt, Mackintosh and Rindermann all make a connection between racial IQ gaps and international differences, and Onetwothreeip replied that the removal was justified because Hunt and Rindermann's books are not reliable sources. The justification for the removal depends on that argument being correct. In response to that argument, I raised the question at the RS noticeboard, and the discussion there reached a conclusion that Hunt's and Rindermann's books do, in fact, satisfy the requirements of RS policy. Thus, based on the conclusion of the RSN discussion, the argument for removing this section seems to no longer be supported. 2600:1004:B112:19F4:748E:E57B:DD2C:7DF9 (talk) 08:45, 26 February 2020 (UTC)
The discussion is "Global variation of IQ scores" further up on this page. I've written a summary of the arguments presented there and explained why I removed the section. Chief among my concerns is the fact that the section doesn't discuss race-nationality connection. The existence of sources that mention it is not sufficient for inclusion; the section would need to be rewritten to include it and nobody seems interested in doing so. Please discuss this in the existing talk page section. –dlthewave ☎ 14:46, 26 February 2020 (UTC)
Dlthewave, I asked in my comment here what it was exactly that you think needs to be changed about that section, given that the section already mentions "patterns of difference between continental populations similar to those associated with race". I asked whether the problem is that that sentence isn't specific enough. This question was never answered directly, except to say that the section must be removed because the sources I was suggesting (Hunt's and Rindermann's books) were not reliable. The discussion at RSN then concluded that these sources are in fact reliable, and that was the end of the discussion about this section, until you went ahead and removed it three days ago.
You have been frustratingly vague about what the actual problem is with the section's existing discussion about the relation between IQ gaps between ethnic groups and between nations. If you think the section must be rewritten before it can be restored, could you please answer my question directly? 2600:1004:B146:7C71:C16E:37FA:6C52:4ACF (talk) 19:22, 29 February 2020 (UTC)
You appear to be mischaracterizing the discussion on this talk page. You also mischaracterize the RSN consensus which concludes "The remaining concern was that the views of Rindermann and Hunt may be Fringe. The discussion indicated that there is a lack of sources supporting or opposing the notion that the views in these books are fringe, though when a viewpoint does not have wide support, we do treat it as fringe, and do not give it undue weight. That is, we can give the views of Rindermann and Hunt, sourced to their books published by the Cambridge University Press, but take care not to promote their views as widely accepted unless/until sources can be found which indicate their views are widely accepted.” Having an entire section rather than a simple mention suggests that such views are widely accepted. Horse Eye Jack (talk) 09:09, 26 February 2020 (UTC)
How many sources do I have to provide showing that this section is relevant before you'll allow it to be restored? I've already provided three, two of which are major textbooks. A fourth source that makes the connection, which was just published a few days ago, is Winegard et al. 2020. I can probably find others, but it seems like you might be applying an impossibly high standard. 2600:1004:B112:19F4:748E:E57B:DD2C:7DF9 (talk) 09:27, 26 February 2020 (UTC)
I don’t see that argument being made explicitly in Winegard et al. 2020, can you pull the quotes? Horse Eye Jack (talk) 09:34, 26 February 2020 (UTC)
There is a section of the paper titled, "Global distribution of IQ". The section is too long to quote the entire thing, but it starts on the paper's sixth page. 2600:1004:B112:19F4:748E:E57B:DD2C:7DF9 (talk) 09:41, 26 February 2020 (UTC)
Yes I’ve read that section, its only three paragraphs and is implicit rather than explicit. The limited space Winegard et al. dedicate to the section (and make no mistake Winegard et al. are outside of the mainstream) suggest to me that we are giving it undue prominence here, no? Also note the point of the paper "we attempt to make the philosophical and theoretical case that hereditarianism—the view that a substantial proportion (20% or more) of differences in psychological traits within and among human popu-lations is caused by genes—is more fruitful, parsimonious, and pro-ductive than is environmentalism—the view that almost all of the dif-ferences in psychological traits either within or among humanpopulations is caused by environmental forces.” Horse Eye Jack (talk) 09:56, 26 February 2020 (UTC)
I’d be more comfortable with a source or two that wasn’t pushing a strong POV. Keep in mind that you are a WP:SPA and "single purpose accounts and editors who hold a strong personal viewpoint on a particular topic covered within Wikipedia are expected to contribute neutrally instead of following their own agenda and, in particular, should take care to avoid creating the impression that their focus on one topic is non-neutral, which could strongly suggest that their editing is not compatible with the goals of this project.” Horse Eye Jack (talk) 10:03, 26 February 2020 (UTC)
The section of the Winegard paper is around 500 words in a paper that's around 10,000 words long, so it's about five percent of the paper's total length. Percentage wise, that's actually more than the amount of space this topic was given in the Wikipedia article, where it was around 580K of text in an article that's around 150,000K long. In any case, I'm not trying to base my argument entirely on that single paper. I was just giving it as an example because it's the most recent paper to be published on this article's topic.
Have you looked at the Hunt and Mackintosh textbooks? Hunt is basically agnostic about the cause of the gaps (he thinks some genetic contribution to racial IQ gaps is likely, but that there is insufficient data to know its size, and the genetic contribution might be minuscule), while Mackintosh is agnostic but thinks a 100% environmental cause is more likely than a partially genetic one. And both textbooks bring up international IQ differences in the context of discussions about race and intelligence. 2600:1004:B112:19F4:748E:E57B:DD2C:7DF9 (talk) 10:36, 26 February 2020 (UTC)
By the way, in addition to the Hunt, Mackintosh, Rindermann, and Winegard et al. sources, a fifth source that discusses international IQ differences in this context is Flynn's 2012 book Are We Getting Smarter?. James Flynn is firmly in the "environmental" camp with respect to the cause of IQ variance between ethnic groups, but he also is one of the more moderate voices on that side, so his book is not really "pushing a strong POV". 2600:1004:B107:64A3:ED2C:F2BD:D1B5:7B42 (talk) 01:11, 27 February 2020 (UTC)
Horse Eye Jack, are you going to respond to my comments here? I've made several attempts to discuss the specifics of what needs to be changed about this section or sources that support its relevance, but in each case the editors removing the section have either dodged the question, or have dropped out of the discussion as soon as it began making progress towards resolving the dispute. 2600:1004:B10C:DF3:D9A6:8155:B0C0:A846 (talk) 05:59, 3 March 2020 (UTC)
Sorry, I generally don’t continue responding to WP:SPA users beating a dead horse. You’re not being constructive so it isn't worth my, or any other editor's, time. Have a wonderful day. Horse Eye Jack (talk) 16:01, 10 March 2020 (UTC)

Duplicate discussion

The subject was already discussed at #Global_variation_of_IQ_scores. It's unclear why a separate discussion was needed. --K.e.coffman (talk) 04:44, 27 February 2020 (UTC)

You're probably right. I can't barely tell anymore. Are we arguing about a paragraph(s) that got removed 5 days ago, or 3 days ago, or just today. Do that enough and I'll add something I meant to remove, or remove something I meant to add. Good strategy! Peregrine Fisher (talk) 10:32, 28 February 2020 (UTC)

Global variation of IQ scores

Latest comment: 4 years ago54 comments15 people in discussion

I've removed the Global variation of IQ scores section. My rationale is that this section is off topic because it deals with differences in IQ scores between nations, not "races". Please discuss any concerns here. –dlthewave ☎ 03:31, 15 February 2020 (UTC)

I reverted. I haven't seen you actually wanting to improve the article. You seem to just want to destroy it. But if some editors who are not in favor of destroying this article think you did a good thing, I would abide by that no problem. Peregrine Fisher (talk) 03:44, 15 February 2020 (UTC)
The content if off-topic. Separately, I haven't seen you actually wanting to improve the article. You seem to just want to destroy it. is contrary to Wikipedia:Focus on content not contributor. I recommend self-reverting. --K.e.coffman (talk) 03:51, 15 February 2020 (UTC)
This guy and 123 think the way to help this article is to remove 5000kb chunks from it, one chunk after another. I just call em as I see em. I don't remember you. You may not be aware of these shenanigans. Check the history if you're interested. Peregrine Fisher (talk) 03:57, 15 February 2020 (UTC)
If you have an issue with a particular contributor's editing, the place to raise these concerns is on their user talk page or at an appropriate admin noticeboard. This is not what article talk pages are for. --K.e.coffman (talk) 04:22, 15 February 2020 (UTC)
I support Peregrine Fisher's restoration of this content. dlthewave, it's not off topic, as it's talking about "patterns of difference between continental populations similar to those associated with race". There are clearly meaningful differences in racial/ethnic composition between many of the world's nations. Jweiss11 (talk) 03:52, 15 February 2020 (UTC)
If you were to look at the sources for that section, you would see that a large portion of them discuss nationality and race in combination with one another. There's a significant amount of overlap between the source literature about race and intelligence and the source literature about international difference in test scores, which is why it's appropriate for international differences to be mentioned in this article. 2600:1004:B14C:A0C6:64AD:3A01:C6B4:B236 (talk) 03:53, 15 February 2020 (UTC)
If that us truly the case, then perhaps you would be willing to rewrite the section with a focus on the "Race and Intelligence" topic. The section should not be retained in its current state. –dlthewave ☎ 04:06, 15 February 2020 (UTC)
It's already focused on the topic: "patterns of difference between continental populations similar to those associated with race". Jweiss11 (talk) 04:10, 15 February 2020 (UTC)
similar to those associated with race -- according to whom? --K.e.coffman (talk) 04:22, 15 February 2020 (UTC)
K.e.coffman, anyone who uses common sense and/or skims the demographic summaries of the various nations around the world? Jweiss11 (talk) 05:45, 15 February 2020 (UTC)
Thats a very bad argument. Horse Eye Jack (talk) 06:04, 15 February 2020 (UTC)
There are three reasons for me to not rewrite that section.
1: The article is semi-protected, so only registered users can edit it.
2: Even if it weren't, I'd like to wait until the DRV is resolved before putting a lot of effort into improving the article, because our efforts might be a waste of time if the article ends up being deleted.
3: It isn't entirely clear what it is that you're objecting to in that section. The pattern of international differences in test scores is that the countries with the highest average scores are Japan, China, Singapore, and South Korea, and the countries with the lowest average scores tend to be countries in sub-Saharan Africa, with European countries in between. This mirrors the pattern of average test scores among Asian Americans, white Americans and African Americans in the United States. This is what the article means when it refers to "patterns of difference between continental populations similar to those associated with race". Are you suggesting the section should be more specific that the average scores of nations tend to align with the average scores of populations with ancestry from those regions, and therefore the question of the causes of both types of difference are part of the same debate? 2600:1004:B14C:A0C6:64AD:3A01:C6B4:B236 (talk) 04:40, 15 February 2020 (UTC)
The sources were unreliable and the section was undue. Onetwothreeip (talk) 07:19, 15 February 2020 (UTC)
Wasn't it just explained to you a few days ago that you shouldn't be attempting to strip massive amounts of content out of the article while the DRV is underway? The previous time you tried to do this was when the article was at AFD rather than DRV, but the same principle applies. 2600:1004:B10A:3B8D:688D:3BC5:92A1:5CF6 (talk) 10:58, 15 February 2020 (UTC)
That's not a rule. –dlthewave ☎ 13:17, 15 February 2020 (UTC)

@Oldstone James: You've reinstated this section without discussing it [9]. Please join us here. –dlthewave ☎ 15:08, 15 February 2020 (UTC)

As per Jweiss and 2600, I think the relevance of this section to the article is pretty clear. Also, as per my edsum, some geographical areas, such as sub-Saharan Africa, are populated predominantly by members of one race, so this section would be relevant even if "patterns of difference between continental populations" weren't "similar to those associated with race". O̲L̲D̲S̲T̲O̲N̲E̲J̅A̅M̅E̅S̅ 15:11, 15 February 2020 (UTC)
Yes, several editors have asserted that there is clear or self-evident connection between geography and race, but no source has been provided. The section only discusses geography not race. Do you have a reliable source that supports this? –dlthewave ☎ 15:22, 15 February 2020 (UTC)
This is discussed in chapter 11 of Earl Hunt's textbook. With respect to the higher average scores of both East Asian countries and Asian Americans, Hunt says "The US results are mirrored on the international scene" (page 421). With respect to the data from African Americans and from countries in sub-Saharan Africa, Hunt presents these two lines of data several pages apart, but when discussing the worldwide distribution of scores from all countries, he mentions on page 439 that one hypothesis to explain these differences is due to "differences in the racial composition of the national and regional population". Hunt argues that this hypothesis "cannot be ruled out", but also that it "goes far beyond the data". Then on pages 446-447, he argues that the most important factor in causing the lower average scores of both Africans Americans and countries in sub-Saharan Africa is their limited access to schooling and social opportunities. This source is a good example of how in academic sources about race and intelligence, the data from international comparisons and from ethnic groups within a country often are presented together, with the author suggesting that both types of difference have similar causes.
Nicholas Mackintosh takes a similar approach with the section of his own textbook titled "National or ethnic differences", which discusses both types of difference in combination. I've focused on Earl Hunt's book because it seems to be more highly-regarded of the two sources, but they are both high-quality secondary sources. Both of these sources bring up international differences in the context of discussing race and intelligence, so the Wikipedia article should reflect the source literature in this regard. 2600:1004:B15D:697F:F1AB:F59B:5A3B:897D (talk) 17:13, 15 February 2020 (UTC)
By the way, this material has been in the article for something like a decade. Before removing it and demanding that others provide sources to justify its inclusion, why can't you look in the talk page archives to see whether a similar objection has been made before? It probably has been, and it's disrespectful of others' time for you to demand that others re-explain things that probably have been explained on this page many times over. 2600:1004:B15D:697F:F1AB:F59B:5A3B:897D (talk) 17:24, 15 February 2020 (UTC)
Thanks for clarifying. From your description, using Hunt to support a connection between race, nation and intelligence is a shaky proposition to say the least; it seems that these are similar phenomena but not connected phenomena. In other words, just because the claimed racial and regional differences are thought to have similar environmental causes doesn't mean that they're associated with each other. Even if we did have solid sourcing to support this section, we would need to rewrite it to clarify the relevance to this topic. In its current state it is off-topic and should, in my opinion, be removed until someone rewrites it. By the way an unregistered user can suggest changes/rewrites on the talk page as you've been doing or register an account to directly edit the semi-protected page. –dlthewave ☎ 18:18, 15 February 2020 (UTC)
I see we've found the person who didn't look through the archives before posting. The relevance of Global variation of IQ scores to this article doesn't seem to have been discussed in detail and certainly hasn't been explained many times over.
Demanding that others justify their claims is indeed how things work around here. The onus to provide sourcing rests on those wishing to include the content. –dlthewave ☎ 18:18, 15 February 2020 (UTC)
By "associated" or "connected", I assume you mean whether or not there is a direct causal relation between the two types of difference, but that isn't relevant to whether the section belongs in the article. On a topic as controversial as race and intelligence, we can't base the article structure on a judgment about what causal relations do or don't exist, because there is a vast amount of disagreement among sources in that area. What we should do is try to present the topic in a similar way to how it's presented in secondary sources. As I just explained, two of the most important secondary sources about race and intelligence include international differences as part of their discussion, so that should be an adequate reason for the Wikipedia article to also include a discussion of those differences.
However, if you need a source that argues there is a causal relationship between race differences and international differences, Rindermann's Cognitive Capitalism makes that argument on pages 287-323. 2600:1004:B15D:697F:F1AB:F59B:5A3B:897D (talk) 19:09, 15 February 2020 (UTC)
Heiner Rindermann is certainly not a reliable secondary source, and neither was Earl Hunt. Making the implication that national differences are the same or similar to racial differences is improper synthesis and can't be included in the article. Onetwothreeip (talk) 21:25, 15 February 2020 (UTC)
Hunt's and Rindermann's books both were published by Cambridge University Press. Please remember what multiple other editors have told you about your WP:IDHT attitude: you have been making this argument for the past two months both here and at the RS noticeboard, and in both places no one else has agreed with you that these aren't reliable sources. The reason I'm replying to you is that I don't want you to think my lack of response gives you license to continue edit warring to remove the section, but I'm not going to re-explain this principle about sources to you yet again. 2600:1004:B15D:697F:F1AB:F59B:5A3B:897D (talk) 21:45, 15 February 2020 (UTC)
It is not the publisher in this case that is unreliable, it is the authors themselves. Wikipedia policy excludes using unreliable authors as sources for content. Onetwothreeip (talk) 21:51, 15 February 2020 (UTC)
There are plenty of sources for global variation in IQs (national IQs). Even some people who aren't intelligence researchers have been publishing on this. For instance, 2018 The Lancet paper, or the World Bank in 2019 (only a preprint), or this review about national IQs in the journal International Journal of Developmental Disabilities (2017). A few economists have been using national IQ data for over a decade, e.g. this 2006 paper, or this 2014 follow up. One can easily find many more. AndewNguyen (talk) 13:37, 18 February 2020 (UTC)

To summarize the discussion:

  • Keep: Editor wants to destroy the article; continental and racial differences are "similar"; sources discuss race and nationality; the connection between race and nationality is "common sense; mass content removal shouldn't take place during DRV; some geographical areas are predominantly populated by a single race; content has been in the article for a decade; editor should have checked talk archives for prior discussion before removing; plenty of sources exist.
  • Remove: Off topic (discusses nationality, not IQ); content is undue and supported by unreliable sources.

Many of the "keep" points are focused on editor behavior or cite nonexistent policies. Although the race-nationality connection is apparently discussed by several sources, the degree to which they actually make the connection and the reliability of the sources are questionable. Most importantly, the section in its current state does not actually discuss the relevance to this topic and nobody is willing to rewrite it. Based on this assessment, I will remove the section and provide a link to the current version in case anyone would like to rewrite it in the future. –dlthewave ☎ 03:28, 26 February 2020 (UTC) Removed section can be found here. –dlthewave ☎ 03:29, 26 February 2020 (UTC)

  • If this section is rewritten, it would need to cover not just the global variation in IQ scores but also its relationship to racial variation in IQ scores. For example, if we're going to discuss Lynn and Vanhanen, we should mention their claim that national differences in intelligence are largely due to racial composition, along with mainstream critical analysis of this claim. This should preferably come from a secondary source that discusses the overall debate.
Any rewrite would also need to comply with WP:WEIGHT. Keep in mind that even if a source is considered "reliable", we still need to determine whether or not the viewpoint is prominent enough for inclusion here. Being published in a reliable source does not automatically merit inclusion.
I'm happy to discuss and assist with a potential rewrite, however we all need to be open to the possibility that the connection between race, nationality and intelligence may not have sufficient RS coverage to support a section. If this is the case then removal may be appropriate. –dlthewave ☎ 01:31, 1 March 2020 (UTC)

@Jweiss11: You've restored the contested content despite the unaddressed concerns of other editors in this discussion. The only reason you've given was that it included the phrase "... patterns of difference between continental populations similar to those associated with race", however this sentence was unsourced. Please join this discussion to help address the concerns that have been raised. –dlthewave ☎ 04:00, 2 March 2020 (UTC)

"patterns of difference between continental populations similar to those associated with race" is WP:BLUESKY. Jweiss11 (talk) 04:07, 2 March 2020 (UTC)
It's not. You've been asked to provide a source and have not done so. Which "demographic studies" were you referring to above, and which source connects them to race and intelligence so that we can include it without using WP:SYNTH? –dlthewave ☎ 04:12, 2 March 2020 (UTC)
Do you want a source that shows that most citizens of sub-Saharan African nations are black or that most citizens of East Asian nations are East Asian? Jweiss11 (talk) 04:14, 2 March 2020 (UTC)
We need a source that discusses the relationship between nationality, race and intelligence, and the section needs to be rewritten to reflect it. We also need a source for the statement "patterns of difference between continental populations similar to those associated with race" if it is to be included, you can't keep citing BLUESKY and your insistence on doing so is becoming disruptive. –dlthewave ☎ 04:25, 2 March 2020 (UTC)
How many times have I cited BLUESKY? Your entire approach on this topic is hostile and disruptive. Please also stop leaving passive-aggressive templates on my talk page. Thanks, Jweiss11 (talk) 05:44, 2 March 2020 (UTC)
@Jweiss11: I will not engage with comments about my behavior on this talk page. Please focus on the content being discussed. –dlthewave ☎ 13:20, 2 March 2020 (UTC)
If you won't engage with comments about behavior on this talk page, then why did you introduce discussion about mine ("your insistence on doing so is becoming disruptive")? Jweiss11 (talk) 13:32, 2 March 2020 (UTC)
Sorry, I don't see how that is BLUESKY. If race is a social construct, are you saying that these patterns in IQ follow what would be expected based on a social construct? In addition, of course, "a number of studies" isn't BLUESKY - it's a specific factual claim that, without support, would run into WP:WEASEL concerns. Guettarda (talk) 14:01, 2 March 2020 (UTC)
Guettarda, what I'm arguing is BLUESKY is the claim that residents of sub-Saharan Africa are overwhelming black and that residents of East Asia are overwhelmingly East Asian. I don't think race and ethnicity are entirely is social constructs, as there is a genetic basis to them. I also think that the IQ testing differences we see between ethnic and racial groups are largely social/cultural. Jweiss11 (talk) 03:21, 4 March 2020 (UTC)
@Jweiss11: residents of sub-Saharan Africa are overwhelming black and that residents of East Asia are overwhelmingly East Asian: Sure, if you define the "black race" as "the race of most people who live in sub-Saharan Africa", then sure, most people who live in sub-Saharan Africa are black. But that doesn't make biological race real. Human variation is clinal, it's continuous. There's no point where you say that everyone up to this village is black, but starting from the next village on, the people are white (which is what you'd expect if biological race was real). Race "exists" where people from distant parts of the continuum are thrown together, and people construct ideas about us and them.
It doesn't matter whether biological races are real, or variation is clinal and race is a social construct. What matters is that you can't make claims one way or the other and say they don't need sourcing per BLUESKY. (As for ethnicity, ethnic groups often include completely unrelated people who are thrown together and united by cultural factors. Ethnogenesis is about the development of cultural cohesion within groups. There doesn't have to be any genetic relatedness.) Guettarda (talk) 05:16, 5 March 2020 (UTC)
Both of you, please see my comments below suggesting that this sentence could be re-worded and cited to Rindermann's book. While there are other sources that could potentially be used such as Earl Hunt's textbook, I think the Rindermann source is the best option, because its discussion about the relation between ethnicity and international differences is all in one place, rather than in several parts throughout the chapter as it is in Hunt's book.
If anyone is interested in compromising here, restoring the section with the first sentence cited to Rindermann is a potential compromise between those who don't want the sentence to remain unsourced, and those who object to this section of the article being removed entirely. 2600:1004:B12C:3F1:5D:BFBB:13A7:BC8F (talk) 05:51, 5 March 2020 (UTC)

"We need a source that discusses the relationship between nationality, race and intelligence" Dlthewave, I listed five such sources in the discussion below. When I asked you what you specifically expected to be changed about this section before it could be restored, your response was evasive. I asked you that question twice, first here and again here, and you did not answer it either time.

Despite that, you subsequently claimed "I explained what should be changed in the Global variation of IQ scores discussion above." It is disruptive of you to claim that while simultaneously refusing to answer my question about this exact thing. This looks a lot like a deliberate attempt to avoid being specific about what you want changed in that section. 2600:1004:B12D:741A:C15B:1789:8738:CD03 (talk) 14:14, 2 March 2020 (UTC)

Yes, the "I explained" comment was meant to direct you to [this explanation] which I had posted minutes earlier. As I've also explained, we need to not only show that sources exist but also rewrite the section to reflect them. Additionally, I would suggest that you discuss with editors who have raised objections to the sources provided. –dlthewave ☎ 14:47, 2 March 2020 (UTC)
You're repeating yourself without answering the specific thing I asked. Did you not read either of my earlier comments?
In the linked comment you said, "it would need to cover not just the global variation in IQ scores but also its relationship to racial variation in IQ scores." And in my own comment, I had pointed out that the section you removed had already mentioned "patterns of difference between continental populations similar to those associated with race". And I asked, "Are you suggesting the section should be more specific that the average scores of nations tend to align with the average scores of populations with ancestry from those regions, and therefore the question of the causes of both types of difference are part of the same debate?" You still haven't answered that. If your problem was that the existing wording was too vague, I also don't see why you couldn't improve that yourself instead of removing the entire section. 2600:1004:B12D:741A:C15B:1789:8738:CD03 (talk) 15:04, 2 March 2020 (UTC)
I wasn't suggesting that specifically. Yes, this is the type of data that would fit within the "global variation of IQ scores" topic, however it would need to be reliably sourced, compliant with NPOV and also connected to race specifically, not just regional ancestry. "NPOV" means that it would need to reflect the mainstream viewpoint and receive very significant coverage; being published in a reliable source does not automatically merit inclusion since peer-reviewed journals often publish emerging or minority views. "patterns of difference between continental populations similar to those associated with race" was unsourced, so its presence does not make the section relevant to race and intelligence; did you notice that I mentioned this above in response to JWeiss? –dlthewave ☎ 13:33, 3 March 2020 (UTC)
I was asking you to be specific what you want changed about this section, because I wanted to make sure you'd allow it to be added back if your requirements were met.
I would suggest rewriting the first sentence of that section to say, A number of studies have found that differences in average scores between racial or ethnic groups tend to be similar regardless of the region they inhabit, and whether they are a majority or minority group within a country. For example, Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese people tend to have higher average scores in both East Asian countries and as immigrant populations in Western countries, while the same is also true of the lower average scores of people of sub-Saharan African origin. And this would be cited to pages 288-289 in Rindermann's Cognitive Capitalism. Rindermann's book specifically mentions Chinese, Japanese, Korean Vietnamese, and sub-Saharan African people, so this is a direct paraphrase of what the source says. Note that Rindermann's book was discussed at RSN here, and the discussion there concluded that it's a reliable source. Would this change address your concern? 2600:1004:B105:F5A1:A997:5864:C95E:CEE5 (talk) 21:27, 3 March 2020 (UTC)
That's a start. It's good that you provided a specific example along with a citation. However, I'm still concerned about the sourcing. The RSN discussion closes with "we can give the views of Rindermann and Hunt, sourced to their books published by the Cambridge University Press, but take care not to promote their views as widely accepted unless/until sources can be found which indicate their views are widely accepted". Sourcing the opening paragraph to Rindermann seems to give undue weight to his viewpoint. It would be good to back up the claim with mainstream sources; if it is widely accepted, this should not be a problem.
The other paragraphs in the section would also need to be rewritten to show a race/nationality/intelligence connection, again sourced to reliable sources and presented in accordance with WP:DUE WEIGHT. Rewriting the first paragraph does not make the entire section on-topic.
I don't have any special requirements for the section, just our standard RS and NPOV policies as well as the special sourcing restriction that is in effect here. It's not my call, a number of concerns were raised by a number of editors. I can't give you a list of specific changes that need to be made, but an editor with access to the right sources should be able to find a way to address the problems. This responsibility lies with editors who wish to include the content. –dlthewave ☎ 02:49, 4 March 2020 (UTC)
As I said before, Hunt's textbook discusses this also, but in Hunt's book the discussion is split between a few different places in the chapter. (He discusses East Asians in one place, and sub-Saharan Africans in a different place.) The Rindermann source is good because it has an overall discussion about the relation between racial IQ gaps and international differences in those two pages.
This lack of specificity about what you want changed about the section is what I've been objecting to. How can you expect other editors to change the section to your satisfaction, when you won't even tell us what specific changes you want? If I'm understanding your comment correctly, it sounds as though you don't even have access to the sources for this section, so your judgement about what is or isn't relevant or NPOV is based on guesswork. You're the person who's boldly removing a section that's been in the article for 5+ years, so are the person who should be justifying your bold change, rather than trying to shift the burden to other editors. 2600:1004:B105:F5A1:A997:5864:C95E:CEE5 (talk) 03:47, 4 March 2020 (UTC)
  • The content should stay removed. I had a similar concern about the content not being explicitly related by the sources to race. The exchange was:
    • (Me): similar to those associated with race -- according to whom?
    • (Reply): K.e.coffman, anyone who uses common sense and/or skims the demographic summaries of the various nations around the world?
This is not sufficient. --K.e.coffman (talk) 05:22, 3 March 2020 (UTC)
  • The section has once again been restored, this time to a version that does not discuss race. The edit summary "not off topic; the nation discussed are here a reasonable proxy for ethnic and racial groups" is not sufficient, we need appropriate sources to support this and we need to rewrite the content to reflect those sources. Jweiss11 please join us in addressing these issues. –dlthewave ☎ 03:28, 4 March 2020 (UTC)
Again, as I stated above, my argument is that the claim that residents of sub-Saharan Africa are overwhelming black or that residents of East Asia are overwhelmingly East Asian is BLUESKY. Jweiss11 (talk) 03:31, 4 March 2020 (UTC)
As Horse Eye Jack said when you made a similar claim, "That's a very bad argument." –dlthewave ☎ 03:42, 4 March 2020 (UTC)
Neither one of you have made a substantive refutation of it. Isn't it the case that residents of sub-Saharan Africa are overwhelming black or that residents of East Asia are overwhelmingly East Asian? Jweiss11 (talk) 03:45, 4 March 2020 (UTC)
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