The Undark race science summary
7/10 would repost
For months, some journalist called Ashley Smart has been emailing me for quotes for some upcoming hit piece. E.g., back form January:
Hi Emil,
I'm a journalist with Undark Magazine, and I'm currently working on a story about how researchers who study the genetics of intelligence are grappling with issues of academic freedom and the potential societal risks of their work. I reached out to you earlier at your "emilkirkegaard.dk" address and got no response, but I wanted to try again, because your name has come up in my reporting and I want to be sure to give you a chance to weigh in.
For instance, it's been asserted online that you've never been a part of a credible research program, PhD program, or university, and also that you are the CEO of the company that owns OpenPsych and The Mankind Quarterly, but I wanted you to have an opportunity to confirm or refute those claims.
But perhaps more importantly for my story, I gather that you and several of your colleagues have frequently used data from Educational Attainment GWAS and other GWAS to study group differences in intelligence, and I'm hoping to get your take on the merits and limitations of that approach.
My schedule is flexible if you'd like to have a quick phone or zoom call this week or next, and we can start with an off-the-record chat if you'd like. Let me know.
Best,
Ashley
--
Ashley Smart
Associate Director, Knight Science Journalism Program at MIT
Senior Editor, Undark magazine
Office: 617-253-3442
@ashleythesmart
And November 2024:
Hi Emil,
I'm a journalist with Undark Magazine, and I'm currently working on a story about how researchers who study the genetics of intelligence are grappling with issues of academic freedom and the potential societal risks of their work. These are issues that I believe have come into sharp relief at the annual conferences of the Intellectual Society of Intelligence Research, which historically provided a venue for presenting work on the hereditarian hypothesis, but which lately seems to be grappling with how to handle that topic.
I think that, as someone who has spoken on several occasions at ISIR and who has also been the subject of controversial programming decisions, you may have valuable perspectives to bring to this story.
Might you have time to chat this week? Feel free to suggest a time that would be convenient for you. (I have conflicts between 9:30 and 12:30 Eastern this Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday, otherwise, my schedule is quite flexible.) And don't hesitate to let me know if you have any questions or if I can provide additional info.
Best,
Ashley
--
Ashley Smart
Associate Director, Knight Science Journalism Program at MIT
Senior Editor, Undark magazine
Office: 617-253-3442
@ashleythesmart
I was vaguely familiar with them because they published a hit piece on Razib Khan in 2017. So of course they are up to no good this time either. Journalists work very slowly, despite emailing me 129 days ago, their piece only just came out.
These things are always coordinated, so for this kind of piece, they have some initial idea (e.g. 'time to harass the race scientists again'), then choose some new targets. Then they email every person possibly involved for any useful quotes. Usually, someone takes the bait because they are boomers unfamiliar with journalist methods, or because they want some free PR, or because they just happen to agree with the narrative. In this case, the media darling role was taken up by Abdel Abdellaoui (again), and the critic is Elsbeth Stern.
Overall, Smart did his homework. His article is not just a copy paste of the usual lies on RatWiki or Guardian/Hate not Hope slop. He cites a variety of my own relevant writings (mainly blogposts), some even going back to 2014. Of course, the presentation is somewhat misleading. For instance, take the sentence "he has asserted that Black Americans are less honest and less intelligent than their White counterparts". True! However, the phrasing suggests I just stated some strong opinion without evidence, but reality is that we did a large study of an Americans where people themselves rated their own honesty, their parents rated their children's honesty, and the interviewer rated the honesty of the subject they were interviewing. These 3 metrics all agreed in direction, but the effect was larger for the interviewer -- an impartial 3rd person who obviously has a decent idea of the honesty of a person having just spent hours interviewing them. Furthermore, our results are congruent with the large-scale 'lost wallet' experiment that mainstream researchers did and as well as with international corruption data. Finally, I was merely the 2nd author, the first author is Seb Jensen, who sadly got no credit here. Not very inclusive of them to erase the Hispanic first author!
Their story begins with a retelling of Abdel Abdellaoui's attempts to deplatform me at ISIR, and my various talks at ISIR over the years. The general purpose of this narrative, I guess, is to make ISIR have second thoughts about accepting any of my talks in the future. After all, everybody can now google this article and see what further risks will come. ISIR uses double blind peer reviewing for their talks and posters, so they follow Merton's universalism norm "scientific validity is independent of the sociopolitical status/personal attributes of its participants.". The choice of Stern for the critic fits as well since she was the host of the Zürich Switzerland ISIR 2024, where I also gave a talk about predicting intelligence from MMPI items using machine learning, so not a controversial topic.
The second angle with Abdellaoui is the usual "what if someone somewhere used my results for work I don't like?":
That’s left Abdellaoui and other genomics researchers with a dilemma: As they improve their ability to account for the nongenetic factors that muddle, or confound, genetic signals in GWAS, they could be helping to fuel a line of inquiry that could have troubling consequences. “I can imagine that someone like this Kirkegaard guy, if he was able to do this in a methodologically sound way — which is a big ask, because there are so many confounders that are hard to deal with — that he would grab that chance,” he said.
I make no apologies. Science should investigate the causes of group differences, of any sort, anywhere. No holds barred (Jensen 1969):
To what extent can such inequalities be attributed to unfairness in society’s multiple selection processes? (“ Unfair” meaning that selection is influenced by intrinsically irrelevant criteria, such as skin color, racial or national origin, etc.) And to what extent are these inequalities attributable to really relevant selection criteria which apply equally to all individuals but at the same time select disproportionately between some racial groups because there exist, in fact, real average differences among the groups— differences in the population distributions of those characteristics which are indisputably relevant to educational and occupational performance? This is certainly one of the most important questions confronting our nation today. The answer, which can be found only through unfettered research, has enormous consequences for the welfare of all, particularly of minorities whose plight is now in the foreground of public attention. A preordained, doctrinaire stance with regard to this issue hinders the achievement of a scientific understanding of the problem . To rule out of court, so to speak, any reasonable hypotheses on purely ideological grounds is to argue that static ignorance is preferable to increasing our knowledge of reality. I strongly disagree with those who believe in searching for the truth by scientific means only under certain circumstances and eschew this course in favor of ignorance under other circumstances, or who believe that the results of inquiry on some subjects cannot be entrusted to the public but should be kept the guarded possession of a scientific elite. Such attitudes, in my opinion, represent a danger to free inquiry and,consequently, in the long run, work to the disadvantage of society’s general welfare. “No holds barred” is the best formula for scientific inquiry. One does not decree beforehand which phenomena cannot be studied or which questions cannot be answered.
To be against such knowledge is to be against the ethos of the enlightenment, and requires some extremely strong reason to not pursue (such as inadvertently releasing a new deadly virus killing millions and causes an economic recession).
Next up are some mandatory bits about the Trump 2 administration, since I wrote some ideas they could use. There is the usual claim that definitely real experts (chosen by the journalist) have for sure really debunked such claims:
Almost universally, experts in psychology, genetics, and related fields have discredited efforts by Kirkegaard and others to use polygenic scores to demonstrate the hereditarian hypothesis, describing them as deeply flawed. They point out that it is extraordinarily difficult to disentangle the genetic and environmental factors that shape complex human traits — to demonstrate that a genetic variant not only correlates with intelligence but actually influences it. Those challenges grow steeper when the subjects include people of considerably different genetic ancestries who experienced considerably different environments.
If you click the links, their real experts are 1) strawberry geneticist Commie Kevin using an underpowered family GWAS to obtain null results (duh), 2) Turkheimer et al in Vox in 2017 (outdated), 3) Abdellaoui on his blog, 4) Sasha Gusev tweets, and 5) Turkheimer and friends again. So in other words, no real evidence of the claim "almost universally". By the way, Turkheimer and friends in their last piece wrote:
Kirkegaard et al. are aware of the problem [potential confounders in admixture regression]. A longer form of their conclusion is telling: “While the results we found are consistent with an evolutionary model, there are some potential alternative explanations, namely: phenotypic discrimination, confounding due to immigration status, confounding due to geographic location, and intergenerational environmental transmission.”81 They then proceed to apply statistical controls for the competing environmental hypotheses, make post hoc theoretical arguments, compare their results with the previous literature, and call for future research with larger and more representative samples.
To be fair, the feckless attempt to clean up the inconclusiveness of one’s main analysis in the discussion section is a hallmark of normal social science, and, if truth be known, the authors do a reasonable job of it by the usual standards. If it didn’t matter so much, if this were another of the thousands of inconclusive nonexperimental studies of human behavior that are published every year, it could be chalked up as not very valuable in its lack of rigor but mostly harmless in its consequences—perhaps controversial, but not worse. Unfortunately for all concerned, the conclusions of this study do matter. These questions are nothing to speculate about. The study is of little value because it is in- capable of discriminating the alternative hypotheses, predicting cognitive differences given genetic ancestry, or providing meaningful explanations of racial disparities in IQ.
So Turkheimer agree that we did well by normal social science standards. I think we did much better than usual considering that we didn't engage in blatant p-hacking, we discussed the alternative causal models well, and we used controls for the proposed alternative causal models (mainly colorism). Turkheimer and friends are silent on the failure of colorism across an increasingly large number of studies. See also Noah Carl's reply on Aporia. The chief contribution of their piece was this meme:
In line with this 'scared of what the results might be', the article ends with:
“If you believe, like Charles Murray, that the reason that you have these Black-White differences is that there are these differences in genetics, then you’re perfectly happy with the status quo,” said Parens. “If you believe that those differences have to be, in large measure, a function of structural racism, structural injustice, history, then you have a very different view.” (Reached for comment, Murray noted that he believes both genetic and environmental factors underlie a Black-White intelligence gap, and he said that while he is not happy with the status quo, he thinks social programs, by and large, are powerless to change it.)
Turkheimer said that while he does not expect legitimate scientific studies would find that one group has a genetically based IQ advantage over another, if they did it would be a terrible outcome — with implications extending far beyond race relations. “I think it would be a very profound change in the way we understand genetic determinism in general,” he said, speculating that it might invite misguided genetic explanations for any number of cross-cultural differences. “The IQ gap is just the one that we’re used to talking about. But Japanese people are more introverted on personality measures than Americans are — and so is that on the table now?”
Recall that Turkheimer wrote in the 1990s that if such genetic causes of race differences in intelligence and the resulting social status were to be discovered:
If it is ever documented conclusively, the genetic inferiority of a race on a trait as important as intelligence will rank with the atomic bomb as the most destructive scientific discovery in human history [emphasis always mine]. The correct conclusion is to withhold judgment.
Does he sound like a guy who is likely to pursue value-free science on the topic? Of course not.
Summary
Journalists at the well-funded Undark at MIT spent 4+ months writing a hit piece centered on me.
Unlike most journalists, they did a reasonable amount of homework on my actual writings and work. Plenty of links to primary sources and even embedded a video from my Youtube channel. Smart lived up to his name reasonably well.
The usual 'send a lot of emails and use the quotes you like' approach.
The usual false claims of scientific consensus "almost universally" using a random assortment of links to communists and partisans, as opposed to anonymous surveys.
The usual 'what if science finds something some people don't like' ending.
Davide Piffer gets no love, despite being the main author of almost every polygenic score group difference study.
Overall, 7/10, net positive piece.
By the way, Ashley Smart is Black:
Ashley Smart is the Associate Director of the Knight Science Journalism Program at MIT and a senior editor at Undark magazine. He joined KSJ in 2018, after eight years as an editor at Physics Today. He is a member of the advisory boards of the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing and The Open Notebook. Ashley was a 2015–16 Knight Science Journalism fellow. He holds a Ph.D. in chemical and biological engineering from Northwestern University.
What better opportunity for you to help fund this research by subscribing to this blog. Your tax money is definitely not going to fund this.
Turkheimer picks the weirdest examples for his slippery slope fallacies. "The IQ gap is just the one that we’re used to talking about. But Japanese people are more introverted on personality measures than Americans are — and so is that on the table now?"
Sure, why not? I can imagine a possible world in which this difference is purely genetic, and I can imagine a possible world in which this difference is purely environmental, as well as various degrees of intermediate causation. Importantly, these different possible worlds do not look exactly the same. You could study this using a variety of methods: polygenic scores, adoption studies, admixture studies, and comparisons of descendant groups living in different countries. If you did all that, it would probably give you a better idea about what is actually true about the world, whichever explanation it is. (For what it's worth, I'm convinced there are pretty large cultural effects on East Asian-European introversion differences, regardless of whether or not there is also a genetic component. The Asians and Asian-Americans I've known have often had quite different personalities. If you walk around a large city or university campus in the US, you can look at ethnically Asian people from a distance and quite often guess correctly whether they will have a foreign or American accent before you can hear their voices. The clothes are different on average, but so are the facial expressions, body postures, etc. Those who grew up in America have a more socially open demeanor.)
I remember at some point seeing Turkheimer claim that research on genetic population differences in IQ was bad because: oh no, what if someone tried to make the same claim about population differences in alcoholism being genetic? From my perspective, why wouldn't we want to know that? A drink or two socially is fun. Alcohol addiction ruins your life and the lives of those around you. Twin studies indicate there is a strong genetic component to someone's risk of alcoholism. Isn't it better if individuals can get genetic tests and know what their risk is? Isn't it better if certain populations can know that, on average, they are at higher risk for alcoholism? If there are no genetic differences in this trait between populations, then we can study the environmental factors that cause it to vary. Maybe figure out how we can shape our environments to be more like the French and Italians, who drink plenty but rarely seem to get addicted. But if, say, Native Americans have a much higher risk of alcoholism than Italians, then telling them they just need to drink like Italians will not be doing them any favors. If they replicate the same environment exactly, they'll still have different results. Alcoholism can lead to cirrhosis, cancer, car accidents, domestic violence, criminal records, and birth defects. Fortunately, the genetics of alcoholism risk presents an easy gene-environment interaction: if you never start drinking, you won't get addicted. Why on earth wouldn't we want accurate information about people's genetic propensity for alcoholism, both at the individual and population level, so they can make informed choices?
This seems like only slightly better than the usual slop. As is typically the case with this genre, the author mostly refuses to engage with the actual arguments and evidence of the people he's writing about.
But I did learn some new things. For example, I learned that Sophie von Stumm is "very torn" about being at the same conference with some hereditarians. That's disappointing - I thought she would be more chill. Kudos, though, to James Lee for refusing to participate in this farce.