His name wasn’t the first given, nor even the second. But it did appear. There was a special sense of anticipation waiting for his name to come. For you knew HE would arrive. The Ultimate Evil. It was inevitable he would, because the discussion was of intelligence and how not all peoples are equal in their possession of it. And how “vile” “racists” have the temerity to mention it, and, worse!, publish it.
Therefore, I don’t even have to say his name: you already know it.
The article, or rather article and podcast, was “Journals that published Richard Lynn’s racist ‘research’ articles should retract them” in Stat. The hersterical assault began with the scare quotes in the title and continued with shrieking gusto throughout the podcast and article.
I counted fifteen uses of racist, six racism, and eight race in the article alone. And that’s before we add in all the uses of bias and terms like lack of critical thinking, racial cleansing, Nazi, ridiculously bad (“but still being cited in medical journals to this day”), fringe (as in journals, right after complaining Lynn’s work appeared in the best journals, and how dare they), poor quality and practice, careless and so on and so forth. I didn’t tally words in the podcast, my ears being unable to withstand the aural battering of squeaky academics.
Anyway, they are mad that Lynn was allowed to publish, and now that he’s dead they want to make sure you know they are mad, and that they are better and more pure than Lynn, because some have mistaken Lynn for an academic, and they are academics, too. Or something. It’s hard to tell what their beef really is, because the whole is incoherent and self-contradictory.
My guess is that it’s a combination of Lynn’s and others’ expression of forbidden thoughts, and standard academic jealousy. Jealousy among academics is far stronger and more biting and nasty than between celebrities. These “racism”-users can’t stand a dead guy is still getting more air than they are.
It’s odd and worthy of consideration why academics will allow that some individuals are more or less intelligent than others, but it is forbidden to think that therefore some peoples are more intelligent than other peoples. Which would deductively follow, as long as we assume, which in fact happens, that like peoples tend to group together. Even in spite of egalitarians’ assiduous efforts at mixing them. We also need the premise that intelligence, however we are defining it, has some biological component. Which, all human history demonstrates, is a true premise.
Strike that. There is one exception to this rule. The peoples who are allowed to be thought different than others are whites, but only if those differences are negative. But you knew this.
Now I have written on IQ many times (here and blog/Substack, for example). I belong neither to the there-is-no-such-thing-as-IQ-if-it-hurts-“minorities” or the IQ-is-real-and-fixed-and-determinative camp. I am in the IQ-scores-are-useful-but-incomplete-measures-of-intelligence group. We say inferences made from IQ scores are usually too certain. Not wrong: too certain.
Our hersterical academics, in the first camp, say “There is no such thing as a culture-free test of cognitive ability.” But then they also imply that IQ scores are just fine, and that they know for certain-sure fact that they are perfectly uniformly distributed across countries, and therefore peoples.
The first contention is true, but the second false. They are right that all tests which measure intelligence necessarily have a cultural component, and that, therefore, raw comparisons of scores from these tests must be tempered by that knowledge. But they are wrong when they push uniformity, for it never appears in real life (only models).
That means if you compute the mean IQ for country A and compare it to the mean of differently cultured country B, the standard statistical methods used to quantify the difference and its uncertainty will be too sure of themselves. It’s not that the mean differences will be wrong per se, but more like the variability around that difference will be too narrow. Which is a modest correction, impossible to quantify because culture itself cannot be perfectly quantified, but not a wholesale damnation.
We also agree there are others difficulties with national-level IQ scores. Heterogeneity being the obvious. Comparing, say, the USA to Norway, without a truckload of caveats, is silly. And because of the unshakeable error in which people come to believe they have the intelligence close to the mean IQ score of the nation they happen to be in. If that were so, a man from the Belmont area of Detroit would suddenly becomes more intelligent once he steps on, say, Japanese soil. As long as he can get permanent residence status, that is. This is the Magic Dirt theory beloved of migration enthusiasts.
What our hersterical academics demand is for all of Lynn’s papers to be “retracted”. This is the word academics use for shunning. Retraction is a purely performative act these days, because once papers are released into the wilds of the internet, there is no possibility of pulling them back. But it would allow academics to avoid naming Lynn. They want his name erased from history. So that theirs appear brighter.
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Hey, William. I’m glad you wrote on this subject today. I’ve been wanting to talk to you about this for a while. Since you wrote this article: “The Taboos & Magical Beliefs Of Primitives And Science” (https://www.wmbriggs.com/post/46992/). In it, you say that a man named Albert Schweitzer was canceled for writing, in his book African Notebook, that “he African is my brother, but he is my younger brother by several centuries”. That book also said that: “I have given my life to try to alleviate the sufferings of Africa. There is something that all white men who have lived here like I must learn and know: that these individuals are a sub-race. They have neither the intellectual, mental, or emotional abilities to equate or to share equally with white men in any function of our civilization. I have given my life to try to bring them the advantages which our civilization must offer, but I have become well aware that we must retain this status: we the superior and they the inferior”.
I don’t know who that man is. And I find very repulsive the cancel culture, such as is practiced by those people who identify as “leftists” (I mean: that left-right thing doesn’t exist, but in their minds, but they believe in that and behave as if it were real). But that statement is very unacceptable, on many accounts: but you can summarize them on one umbrella term: racism. At least: Racism as a principle of philosophical anthropology for the interpretation of human reality; and as a principle of cultural anthropology for the identification of human groups.
Is it hard to civilize barbarians? Sure. To latin Christians, it took seven hundred years to civilize german north european peoples. You just have to read the sorrowful laments of Saint Gregory the Great on the devastation brought to Rome by the Lombards (longo bardos, long bearded men): circa the year 600 a.D. (read, for instance: Henri Daniel Rops, L’Eglise des Temps Barbares). Or the account on the state of the German peoples in Germany itself, in the VIII century, by the great Winfrid-Saint Boniface, their civilizer and apostle wrote: it was a disaster and he talks, mainly, of ordained priests (vid. Etienne Gilson, History of Christian Philosophy in the Middle Ages [a deceiving translation of this title, because Gilson studies jewish and mohammedan philosophers also: in Spanish, it’s: The philosophy in the middle ages]).
The West was fully developed by the end of the Eleventh century, but the two centuries prior to that were, maybe, the worst ones, with the norsemen, magyar, finnish and bulgar invasions… So, it’s an incredible injustice, after thousands of years of cultural integration and development, to criticize others that haven’t had the same opportunities; especially, after such a complex history. For instance, Christopher Dawson says that the protestant revolt was the response of the northern europeans to the latin form of civilization that was brought to them in the 1200 years that preceded it. On that lens, the text I’m commenting on is a huge injustice, maybe, not “cancellable”, but very problematic.
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Besides, for us, not latins, but Hispanics, it’s doubly hard to take that type of diatribe. You just have to look at things like this one:
“Florida’s story began with a positive contribution: the foundation of missions for the Indians. If in later English colonies to the north the only good Indian was a dead Indian, as Herbert E. Bolton concluded (“The Mission as a Frontier Institution in the Spanish American Colonies,” American Historical Review, XXIII, October, 1917), in the Spanish colonies it was considered a Christian duty to improve the native for this life and to prepare him for the next. Before the House of Burgesses met at Jamestown and well before the Pilgrims set foot on Plymouth Rock, the Indians of Florida were being taught the elements of Christianity and the arts of reading, writing, and singing. A century before Fray Junípero Serra’s friars could count 26,000 settled Christian Indians along the camino real of California, an equal number lived under the sound of missions bells between St. Augustine and Tallahassee, and along a second line northward from St. Augustine to Saint Catherines Island. Their villages bore such names as Name of God, Holy Faith, St. Joseph, St. Francis, Holy Cross, Ascension, St. Michael, and Our Lady of the Rosary. And the mission chains survived until 1702-1704, when the Spanish Indian system, based upon religion and agriculture, came at last into fatal collision with the English system, based upon trade and aggrandizement.
The thoroughness and cruelty with which Colonel James Moore of Carolina annihilated the missions of Florida has few parallels in American history. Only in comparatively recent years, thanks to careful research conducted at the two oldest universities in the state, the veil drawn over that incident by English-oriented writers of our national adventure has been lifted from the border-land proscenium, and the cause for the temporary collapse of Catholic life in early eighteenth-century Florida has become apparent. By 1763 when Florida was ceded to England, the Indian missions belonged to history, and after the retrocession in 1783 they were never successfully revived” (From: The Cross in the Sand, by Michael Gannon. University Press of Florida, Gainesville, 1983, pp. XII-XIII).
I don’t agree with the stupidity of “you are in stolen lands”, that communist use to destroy our American countries: on earth, every country comes from some sort of conquest; political societies are historical fact. It would be good for you to read the great Orestes Brownson on that point: he talks about those sentimental men who like to weep for lost nationalities. It needs to be said to them: “get over it, that’s human history, human condition”. The US is a historical fact, and that’s all you need to know. But there’s a big difference in the way different peoples do things… For me, as a Hispanic Catholic, it’s terrible to watch any kind of materialistic way of interpreting human reality. Very hard to swallow.
Excuse me for such a long comment… I needed to take that out of my system (hahahaha)…
@Carlos Julio Casanova Guerra. That was a great, informative post. Thank you, sir. I will stipulate at the outset that I am thankful that Europeans conquered the Americas. The overall benefits of their conquest to mankind, especially those benefits derived from the United States, far outweigh their detriments; on balance. Beyond that, I would point out a couple things:
1. The Spanish Conquistadors killed more Native Americans by accident than all other peoples combined. However, when it comes to the deliberate killing of NAs, the Spanish were no slouches.
2. You leave out some very important context in your post. Colonel Moore and the English were heavily aided by NA Tribes, in particular the Yamasee and others in the first Moore-lead first efforts, and the Yamasee, Muscogee and others in the subsequent efforts. This were not expressly genocidal missions, but rather battle of conquest between nation states and their tribal allies.
You used this quote above “get over it, that’s human history, human condition”. Wise words, indeed.
Have anyone ever seen raw data from an article about large sample IQ testing? I have tried to find some and given up. The data is tortured the usual way, normalized, but never disclosed. Yet it would be easy, in case of Raven matrices test this would be a file of many rows and 31 columns, first column subject ID, 30 columns of answers to 30 pictures.
“Lynn believes IQ tests can be used to determine the worth of groups of people,”
First, I doubt Lynn every actually did this. But if he did, I would absolutely disavow. A man’s (or peoples’) worth is not measured by IQ. Any attempts at doing this is not just wrong, but evil. Lots of dull people live happy, productive and useful lives. There are many jobs that need to be done that are unpleasant and require little intellectual to perform these tasks. There are plenty of high IQ people who should facing a firing squad.
Even though you could argue he is talking about groups and not individuals, the same thing still applies. What shouldn’t apply is the IQ of other racial groups because they should not be living among us in the first place. They should be living with their own in a society built by and for them.
Last night I watched PBS show on recent archeological finds in the Amazon basin. Among the discoveries were rock face paintings, dating back over 10,000 years. They were old but rather crude.
As a teenager, I was fortunate to visit the caves of Altamira, in Spain, and see the paintings (sadly, no longer possible).
The Altamira paintings are >30,000 years old. I encourage all to compare the South American efforts with their Iberian counterparts.
I wonder if Mr. “the only good Indian was a dead Indian” Herbert E. Bolton is an ancestor of John “the only good (Russian/Iraqi/Irani/fill in the blank) is a dead (Russian/Iraqi/Irani/fill in the blank)” Bolton.
What would make the story even funnier is if THE SCIEN(tm)tists fall all over themselves with injuries over trying to hersterically promote or demote one or the other side’s favored race over an IQ difference of exactly ‘1’ point.
What I really want with these nation-level IQ scores is for somebody to explain to me how come half of people in places like Sierra Leone (average IQ 45) have moderate mental retardation, yet are both able to button up their shirts, drive cars, cook their meals and handle the Ebola epidemic so well they had almost no outside help (that I know of). CLEARLY there’s something wrong with the tests. 🙂
I have no doubt that more papers have been retracted due to coming to politically incorrect conclusions than for fraud, despite fraud undoubtedly being more common.
@hudbwu: “explain to me how come half of people in places like Sierra Leone (average IQ 45) have moderate mental retardation, yet are both able to button up their shirts, etc.”
Buttoning a shirt, driving a car, cooking a meal, are all much, much simpler than manufacturing a shirt, designing and building a car, creating a tractor and combine and successfully feeding BILLIONS of people. Dogs have been trained to herd sheep, but no dog is able to run a modern ranch. Most inventions today are DESIGNED to be accessible to people with the mentality of children. A five year old can order and pay for an ice cream cone — but he can’t create one.
“The Bell Curve” is an exhaustive study of IQ groups and relevant as ever Murray & Herrnstein
are scourged by the leftwing loons as well. Just a matter of time and they’ll bring back
witch burnings or the guillotine that’s the genealogy of cancel culture it’s in their blood.
@The True Nolan: moderately mentally retarded people (IQ 35-49) should not be able to do those things. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oPRl-WZ0moo This is what mental retardation looks like. If the tests are accurate, there should be masses of people in Africa that behave like that. And further, let’s not forget that if the AVERAGE (mean) is 45, then there should be a mass of people that are even below that, in severe mental retardation. You know, institutionalized people.
Even if today Africans work on plantations or in mines, where somebody might argue mental retardation isn’t so much of a handicap, how were they living 300 years ago? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RuCnZClWwpQ There were no plantations or strip mines back then. How did they manage to survive in Africa, surrounded by lions and hyenas if 2/3rds of them were literally mentally retarted? Or did they become retarded only recently, after European colonialism?
Or maybe it’s the tests after all?
Quite a spectacular post, Briggs. You stride out oily muscled into the midst of a horde of foaming modernist anti-racismo pygmies, swinging your berserker broadsword lopping empty purple-haired heads left and right to a soundtrack of screaming, snorting, and splurting — great cinema! Did Stove put you up to this? However inspired, it’s grand theater. Two thumbs, two big toes, and a big johnson, up! Never mind your craven critics — that claque of cacophonous, caustical, cecidogenous cretins — you’re drawing blood! Even the useless wigglers (ahem) in the nosebleed seats can see it.
I should send you some coppers for shooting off my fool mouth. (And for the three (!) exclamation points. Don’t know what came over me.)
Carlos Julio Casanova Guerra — I enjoyed your comments. One thing you said: “But that statement (Albert Schweiter’s) is very unacceptable, on many accounts: but you can summarize them on one umbrella term: racism.”
Schweitzer’s comment is appropriate given the context in which he placed it: “They have neither the intellectual, mental, or emotional abilities to equate or to share equally with white men in any function of our civilization.” Note:“…of our civilization” It is unremarkable to note that Africans are inferior to Europeans regarding European Civilization. Europeans are likewise inferior to Africans regarding African civilization. I spent three years and three months living in East Africa in the late naughties managing a crafts importing business. I ran for-profit projects involving thousands of villagers in Rwanda, Tanzania, and Kenya. I came to be familiar with their good points, which are quite delightful, as well as their bad ones, which are like most men’s, only specially tailored for them.
That people are different is unremarkable. Everyone already knows it. Briggs is a horrible egghead, and I am an insufferable wiggler. Naturally, I think I am superior to Briggs in wiggling, but clearly Briggs is superior to me in eggheading. In the end I suppose it matters more how one complies with the moral law. Which moral law being the main point in contention.
@hudbwu
“What I really want with these nation-level IQ scores is for somebody to explain to me how come half of people in places like Sierra Leone (average IQ 45) have moderate mental retardation, yet are both able to button up their shirts, drive cars, cook their meals and handle the Ebola epidemic so well they had almost no outside help (that I know of). CLEARLY there’s something wrong with the tests.”
I’ve had the same question for a long time and haven’t gotten a satisfactory answer. The divergence between those numbers and observation is so wide that the tests make no sense.
“The Bell Curve” by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray
IQ groups by race:
Black populations USA: average score of 87
Black populations Africa: average score of 75
White populations: average score of 102
Asian populations: average score of 108
Hispanic populations: average score of 90
An average IQ score of 45 in half the population of Sierra Leone is an impossible outlier or whole cloth fabrication.
One has to wonder which half don’t tell me it’s the women…cackle
Hagfish,
I may try my hand at wiggling. So watch your back.
I used to be fairly interested in IQ research, not from the IQ of nations side of things, but in terms of how human intelligence works, especially at high levels, and how general and specific intelligences interact. And there is still plenty of interesting things to learn about in that area, but for a variety of reasons I’ve come to believe that it’s not really all that important in the grand scheme of things.
First, the work that people do with their intelligence is more interesting than what their IQ’s are. Second, a people’s value isn’t based on their IQ’s. That kind thinking feeds into the inhuman ideology of, we’re all just interchangeable economic widgets and countries are just economic zones. I honestly don’t care what the relative IQ’s of the Western peoples are with respect to the rest of the world. We have value regardless of our worth as economic widgets.
Third, it is very rare, even among people interested in IQ research, to be able to truly view IQ impartially. From some things that Arthur Jensen wrote, it seems like he was able to do that, but it’s not a common attitude. There’s just no reason to believe that IQ is immune to corruption. If IQ tests and intelligence research became widely valued, then people would find ways to stack the deck to benefit themselves.
Good motivation is the most important thing (https://iqpersonalitygenius.blogspot.com/2014/01/intelligence-is-tertiary-phenomenon.html).
And anyway, we can’t do much about how intelligent we are anyway, so better to focus on trying to do good.
The basic issue is that Eugenics makes perfect sense, but all known methods of implementation are immoral – and leftist racists have made exploring the options prohibitively dangerous.
Tars Tarkus: “There are plenty of high IQ people who should facing a firing squad.”
You gave me the best laugh of the day, Mr. Tarkus. So true. Of course, I exempt our high IQ host. But still, picture Briggs, counter-revolutionary high IQ criminal, tied to the post, blindfolded, one last cig smoking in his profane, smirking Stovian lips. He addresses the firing squad — never dropping the cig — “Only homos can hit me!” Everyone misses, and so according to the tradition of firing squads, Briggs is set free.
Another great, thoughtful article. “…IQ-scores-are-useful-but-incomplete-measures-of-intelligence… We say inferences made from IQ scores are usually too certain. Not wrong: too certain.”
I agree.
What do you think of Raven’s Progressive Matrices? Was it a good attempt to create a non verbal, culture free test? Is it a culture free-er test? Does the very idea of this kind of test imply some kind of bias? I know that you aren’t a psychologist. I would value your opinions, if you have any.
@Incitadus: if you look at any listing of IQ measurements for nation states, Subsaharan Africa is an amazing outlier. https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/average-iq-by-country This is one, but you can shop around and get basically the same thing. If you take the numbers at face value, between 1/3rd and 2/3rds of people of those countries have moderate mental retardation. Yet images, stories etc coming out of Africa don’t tell us of a continent of retards.
> An average IQ score of 45 in half the population of Sierra Leone
That’s the average for ALL of Sierra Leone. Meaning that half should be stupider than even that (presumably, at least a third should have severe mental retardation, again if you take the numbers seriously).
Mention of Jung and Schweitzer reminds me of a question Jung once posed: What is Albert Schweitzer doing in Africa when he is needed in Europe? It is easier to preach down than up.
The problems with IQ measurement are very well understood by proponents like Lynn. I once had lunch with a group of London Schoolers plus James Flynn (RIP). The main topic of conversation was the lack of funding to be able to normalize IQ tests to ensure they remained at least vaguely useful as things changed. Even Flynn had stopped being excited about the Flynn Effect. IQ testing could be tremendously useful if it was embraced fully and and applied appropriately. It’s absolutely clear, however, that would not sit well with the current zeitgeist of scientism and politics (which after all are essentially the same thing). There are still people actually doing real science and engaged in trying to find out what reality really is behind the curtain of lies.