65 Comments
Apr 17Liked by Emil O. W. Kirkegaard

Nitpick: it would be one less layer of indirection if you asked people how strongly they themselves disapprove of such research.

Expand full comment
author
Apr 18·edited Apr 18Author

Yes, but in this particular case, we were interested in taboo ratings, which is more what that paper we were replying to was talking about. We didn't really want to bother people with two long lists of 33 items with ratings, but one could write a follow-up.

Expand full comment

Good point.

Another nitpick: it would have been better IMO to insert the phrase "on average" into the race/IQ question: "Whether white Europeans are smarter on average than black Africans for genetic reasons"

Expand full comment

It was well implicit.

Expand full comment

That would be different question, albeit strongly correlated this original one.

Also, eliminating layer of indirection is not always good. E.g. "do you used illegal drugs often" might have less accurate results than "people in your neighborhood use illegal drugs often"

Expand full comment

Our uncertainty in the average answers should be positively correlated, but on an individual level I'd expect the responses to be negatively correlated, since those who deny that there is a taboo also seem to tend to be the ones who support the taboo.

Expand full comment

I read many examples of "this topic isn't a taboo, it's just a pseudoscience and its peddlers are evil people" so I could agree with this, but when I look at plots where Republicans and Asians claim less taboo despite clearly not being groups more likely to support taboo, so I don't know.

Expand full comment

Yes, the opinion choices could be: 1. Absolutely prohibited, 2. restricted to funded researchers, 3. restricted to researchers at the highest ranked universities, 4. not restricted in any fashion, and 5. strongly supported by research funding.

Expand full comment
author

If you want to pay for another survey, let me know.

Expand full comment
Apr 18Liked by Emil O. W. Kirkegaard

In the mid 80's I posted a question on a usenet news group that seemed to make me the target of all 'right thinking adults'. The question was simple. With the strong Darwinian selection against male homosexuality, the fact that it appeared to have a prevalence of ~ 0.02 or so instead of <.001 indicated that there was positive selection for a partial(s). What was the likely partial(s)?

I was condemned for asking the question - no right thinking person would do so. I still disagree with that viewpoint

Beyond taboo subjects are regulated and monitored subjects. Some research and information should not be published in the public environment. Genetic structures for dangerous diseases, .... Close to 40 years ago I was hit by a government secrecy order on one technology I was working on. There are a number of these issued every year in the US, and I am sure more elsewhere. I have a friend who had a project he was working on classified out from under him. It happens.

Expand full comment
author

This is indeed the most obvious theory. It has been extensively tested and it's not true. Relatives of (male) homosexuals don't have a big fertility boost that can explain this. The prevalence and recent increase must have other causes.

Expand full comment

I am fine with being wrong, but it was an obvious conjecture. What bothered me was the impermissibility of the question.

Expand full comment

On Chris Williamson's YT channel ModernWisdom(yes you have one of his viewers here!)when interviewing Roy Baumeister in an episode titled "The Future of the Sexual Marketplace "he asked him about the persistence of homosexuality in the human populace when the science strongly suggests that it would disappear. He replied that studies coming out of the University of Queensland showed that the heterosexual siblings of homosexual males had more sexual partners than the average man. The take on this was that as the human male seeks to appeal to women" less masculine" traits emerge and in a minority of cases it there's a tipping of the balance making the male attracted to other men .

Expand full comment
author

Mothers of gay men have lower fertility than mothers of hetero men. Large meta-analysis.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-011-9888-0

Expand full comment

Possibly because their husbands have lower T land/or because such women (and consequently their mates) tend to be more intelligent, hence postponing childbearing longer as they pursue advanced education credentials and demanding high-status careers.

Expand full comment

Maybe there's an inverse correlation between blood testosterone levels and adult socioeconomic status. High status is catnip for females of the species.

Expand full comment

These 'Taboo's' are all softballs. The truly Taboo subjects they don't dare list.....like the one where pointing out a certain group controls everything will get you deplatformed and fired from everything.

Expand full comment

Did you see question #6 in the first table?

I would have liked to see the results for other racial intelligence gaps, e.g., white vs. east Asian, white vs. Ashkenazim. It seems to me that the white vs. Asian gap should be less taboo as it doesn't align with a societally privileged oppression-narrative, but who knows?

Expand full comment

Guess you haven’t heard about the British in India. Or American Indians?

Expand full comment

I think you're attacking a strawman here.

Nomen didn't deny that Asiatic people have been oppressed by whites, nor did he imply it. While not expressed as clearly as it could have been, I understand his point to be that although discussing the gap between median white and African-American IQ could reinforce anti-black prejudice, acknowledging that the median IQ of US residents of Northeast Asian ancestry is somewhat higher than that of whites is not likely to inflame racial prejudice much in either direction.

Expand full comment
deletedApr 22·edited May 31
Comment deleted
Expand full comment

“It seems to me that the white vs. Asian gap should be less taboo as it doesn't align with a societally privileged oppression-narrative, but who knows?”

Expand full comment

Clear as mud.

Expand full comment

White vs anything comes with a historical oppression narrative.

Expand full comment

if survey asks about black vs white, and white vs asian, the answers might depend on distance and order of the questions in the list

Expand full comment

Some time ago, the journal Nature had an article on taboo genetics (vol. 502, pp. 26-28, https://dx.doi.org/10.1038/502026a .) It said that the taboo level of intelligence and genetics was "high" and race and genetics "very high". In a way, this was a hopeful sign, since if these subjects were 100% impossible to discuss, Nature would not mention them at all, even to say that they were taboo. This was over ten years ago though and prohibitionist attitudes have probably changed and intensified since then.

Expand full comment

"What can be done to reduce the biasing effect of taboos on science?"

I believe you've nailed it - centralization of funding and employment leads to uniformity of taboo. Therefore, decentralize. Start working to enable science to happen away from the academy, and free of the national granting agencies - for instance, supported by small audiences of enthusiasts, along the lines that you among others are pioneering.

Expand full comment

Very interesting, but I think there may be a problem with the way the question was phrased namely "Please indicate how taboo you think the question is", since, in most cases, it's not the questions themselves that are controversial or taboo, only reaching a certain answer in respect of those questions.

Thus, asking the question "Whether European Whites are smarter than African Blacks for genetic reasons" isn't itself all that taboo, so long as one safely reaches the firm conclusion that they definitely are not. It is other answers to the question, namely that whites are smarter, or that the matter is unresolved, that are taboo.

This might sound like a very pedantic point, but I think it might have influenced how respondents answered the questionaire, since, in respect of many of the questions, most ordinary people aren't even aware that there's any controversy on these matters.

For example, in respect of the third ranked question (which I would have expected to be the first ranked), namely whether pedophilia is harmful, most people, I suspect, wouldn't even be aware that there is any scientific debate or controversy on this question, since, to my knowledge, the last time that the issue came into the public eye was the Rind et al controversy in 1998.

In contrast, the race and IQ question emerges pretty regularly in the popular press, twice at least this year alone, with the sacking of Nathan Cofnas and Elon Musk liking a tweet regarding DEI, pilots and HBCUs.

Therefore, on some of these matters, perhaps people don't rate the questions as especially taboo, because they think the matter is entirely settled, and the politically correct answer is proven and established and hence there is no real controversy.

Expand full comment

Not sure about taboos, but not all topics need to be researched. And requires a distinction between actual Science vs. technology per se.

“breast feeding quality vs. synthetic breast milk”

The former is a legit domain of science, the latter is technological hubris

Expand full comment

Do you have some topic pertinent to this discussion in mind in saying that not all need to be researched?

Expand full comment

Well, Mark Zuckerberg is Jewish, & he’s the one funding the synthetic best milk factory. So I guess that’s another data point for your race science.

Expand full comment

What do you not understand about "a topic pertinent to this discussion"? You're ducking the question.

Expand full comment

Maybe it’s you who lacks basic understanding 🤣

Expand full comment

One thing I do know: you're still shucking and jiving instead of answering that question.

Expand full comment

I suppose the counter-point would be "the perception that a subject is taboo does not necessarily imply there are real consequences for violating the taboo". To which the counter-counter-point would be, self-censorship due to perceived taboos *is* a consequence. Interesting followup would be asking researchers which taboo topics they would be interested in studying, whether they believe they could obtain grants to conduct that research, and whether they fear negative career consequences if they did.

Expand full comment

The adverse consequences for Murry and Herrnstein from the publication of the book in which they took note of the statistical significance of the persistent one-standard-deviation gap between mean white and black IQ in the US, noted that when IQ is controlled for racial disparities in socioeconomic metrics largely disappear, and tentatively concluded that the racial IQ gap was largely due to genetic variance are almost as notorious as the book itself.

Another notorious case in point: the ensuing shitstorm and ultimate defenestration of erstwhile Harvard president Larry Summers after he surmised in a public address that male predominance in STEM fields could be due to the longer tails of male intelligence at both ends of the distribution curve, as indicated by IQ testing -- i.e., that there are considerably more men than women among those of extremely high (and low) intelligence.

Expand full comment

Consider that decades ago items that measured larger man-woman intelligence gap were removed from all IQ tests (as far as I know, from all of them).

Expand full comment

Interested as to why you and others have gone to such trouble to highlight the “taboo” question of whether white people are smarter than black. Is your point freedom of speech? Freedom of science? In either case, the question (white people are smarter than black) crumbles at the slightest consideration. What does “smart” mean? Good at IQ tests? Good at 3D visual reasoning? Logical deduction? This is an entirely white male take on “smart” and any scientific enquiry is obviated. In this case the taboo serves to avoid wasting time and energy investigating an ill formed thesis. Not only that, the taboo stands on the shoulders of some very dark chapters in human history. Why lift the lid?

Expand full comment

IQ tests measure logical deductive capability and 3D visual reasoning, and though the latter is not commonly equated with intelligence per se the former most certainly is, and rightly so! And, unless I'm misinformed, there's a strong correlation between test scores of those two aptitudes.

Expand full comment

TBH I’m surprised at the levels of utter stupidity and scientific fundamentalism in this whole thread. Feels like stepping back in time. Frankenstein. Eugenics. Richard fucking Dawkins. White men are the smartest. Men are smarter than women. Disappointing that this rotten fundamentalism lingers, like a bad smell in a lab. Someone open a window.

Expand full comment

If anyone has said here that white men are the smartest I missed it. Who, exactly, are you upbraiding for expressing that opinion?

It's a matter of fairly common knowledge that the median IQ of US whites is lower than that of US residents of northeast Asian ancestry. And median IQ of Ashkenazi Jews is higher still, but I assume you weren't alluding to that when ascribing to unnamed other participants the contention that "white men are smarter."

Expand full comment

Mr Dowden above makes it clear: “How many scientists are of black African descent?.QED.” We could also ask, how many people of black African descent would applaud breaking the taboo on questions like are white people smarter than others (this is more or less explicit in the original post). Exploration of genetic smartness advantages along racial lines is A an ill formed and B ethically questionable question. There are far more interesting and pressing questions smart people of all races and genders can attend to.

Expand full comment

The median IQ of African Americans is, and has been, significantly less than that of Americans of European descent. Which isn't to say that white people are smarter than anyone else but has an important bearing on the validity of the "systemic racism" hypothesis -- i.e., the contention that disparity between the median income and net worth of same-age whites and blacks in this country is entirely, or almost entirely, due to anti-black discrimination, past and present. Murry and Herrnstein noted in The Bell Curve (1994) that if IQ is controlled for those black/white economic disparities almost entirely disappear.

Expand full comment

In an obvious way, science is a window, although it's sometimes cloudy.

May I ask why you hate Richard Dawkins? I enjoyed "The Selfish Gene" and "The Extended Phenotype" as I found both clear and illuminating.

Expand full comment

Norman, I also enjoyed selfish Gene at the time. Dawkins went on to espouse a kind of atheistic/materialistic fundamentalism that comes with fanatical conviction he is right, and kind of superior to more “primitive” peoples who believe say that trees have spirits. A century ago he would have been a eugenicist.

Expand full comment

" the taboo stands on the shoulders of some very dark chapters in human history. Why lift the lid?"

By which you mean, "I think the taboos should remain taboo." This may indeed be a good thing to do. But you should say it outright.

Expand full comment

I specifically address the white smarter than black taboo.

Expand full comment

How many scientists are of black African descent?.QED.

Expand full comment

QED what? That white men pillaged and enslaved Africa, building themselves institutions now proving to be rotten through with corruption?

Expand full comment

Arabs enslaved millions of Blacks across North and East Africa ,castrating most of the males.

Expand full comment

Okay so white men and Arabs both enslaved Africans, no descendent of whom made it to being a famous scientist. Ergo the crucial taboo science is breathless to trample is who’s the smartest: whites or Arabs? Are you getting how ludicrous this is yet?

Expand full comment

My reply was in response to your decision to make a moral judgement on the behaviour of European explorers/colonists in Africa.

Expand full comment

Let's find point where we agree on, and then travel to point where we disagree.

Do you think that rats are smarter than kangaroos?

Expand full comment

No idea. Was that comparison meant to be axiomatic?

Expand full comment

Hhhm, do you think that rats are smarter than frogs?

Expand full comment

Not being funny…but I do know some extremely smart frogs. Their smartness is probably different from that of rats. So we need a definition of “smart.” If we are to work up from rats and frogs to humans, we need a pretty evolved definition of smart. Like, IQ, EQ, relationship intelligence etc

Expand full comment

Since you didn't answer unequivocal "yes", I do not know.

What these extremely smart frogs look like and how do they act?

Expand full comment

Have a look at phyllomedusa bicolor

Expand full comment

"Though, it should be noted that some groups find things more taboo in general than others"

it appears that at least for now, Asians seem to be in general the group least concerned about taboos; & Blacks & Jews & sexual deviants are , in general, the most concerning taboos

Expand full comment
Apr 17·edited Apr 17

In the Men/Women results, are Men really pink and Women blue?

Expand full comment
author

ggplot2 default colors are based on alphabetic factor levels, which puts men before women, and the default colors for 2 categories are red and blue-ish colors, so yes, if one doesn't overrule it manually, one gets this pattern.

Expand full comment

I remember reading that in 19th century men were associated with pink and women with blue.

Expand full comment