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Notes -
Does anyone know of a good overview of the Race and IQ debate for someone who's completely ducked the topic until now and is basically ignorant?
EDIT: Thanks for the responses everyone!
I'm arguably biased but I think debate overviews are unrealistic. This debate is too vast. At this point, collected rebuttals and pointed papers are the best way to appreciate the state of discourse, as if seeing ocean in a drop of water. So, on top of what you've been already given, a few high-profile samples:
Some anti-HBD:
Eric Turkheimer et al., There’s still no good reason to believe black-white IQ differences are due to genes
Kevin Drum, Here’s Why the Black-White IQ Gap Is Almost Certainly Environmental.
Giangrande, Turkheimer, Race, Ethnicity, and the Scarr-Rowe Hypothesis: A Cautionary Example of Fringe Science Entering the Mainstream
Ewan Birney, Adam Rutherford etc, Race, genetics and pseudoscience: an explainer
Kevin Bird, No support for the hereditarian hypothesis of the Black–White achievement gap using polygenic scores and tests for divergent selection
Marcus Feldman, Jessica Riskin, Why Biology Is Not Destiny (only implicitly HBD-related via generic hereditarianism)
And some responses:
"Cremieux", Is Eric Turkheimer a scientist?
"Cremieux", Resolute Ignorance on Race and IQ Courtesy of Kevin Drum
Emil Kirkegaard, The Bird paper, and hereditarian predictions
Bryan Pesta et al, Debunking Giangrande and Turkheimer (2021): Every Dogma has its Day
The Persistence of Cognitive Inequality: Reflections on Arthur Jensen’s “Not Unreasonable Hypothesis” after Fifty Years
Razib Khan, Nick Patterson Responds To Feldman And Riskin’s NYRB Piece (likewise, implicitly HBD-related)
Collections:
Ancient but decent, Steve Sailer's Race FAQ
Old but good, a dearly departed effortposter on Fallacious or Otherwise Bad Arguments Against Heredity
Somewhat fresher, a collection of Twitter Threads by Paolo Shirasi
Once more Kirkegaard, Unfinished Wikipedia FAQ on IQ etc.
Gwern on IQ and race, archived
Additionally:
Global Ancestry and Cognitive Ability
again Kirkegaard on Why the race and intelligence question is still not resolved
Europeans and recent cognitive evolutionreferencesthis entire blog
Old archive tracking the purge of politically incorrect thought.
Recent example of one of the authors linked above, Pesta, getting purged
Razib Khan on an implicitly anti-race-and-IQ editorial in Nature Human Behaviour
Now that I think about it, not much has changed since 1988 and The IQ Controversy, the Media and Public Policy. Well, we've got confirmations of genetic differences, and there's more censorship, and most of the big guys in the debate died. The scientific question received a political answer.
Very interesting list. But isn't it depressing if not much has changed? Shouldn't GWAS studies shown something which can't be handwaved away?
If there's something in the academic debate that can't be handwaved away, that's probably termination of your tenure. I recommend reading this and this.
I apologize for misleading phrasing. People seem to be under the impression that there is some ongoing «debate». No, the debate had been decisively won by the HBD side decades ago, on account of the opposition failing to propose any more parsimonious explanation, even one model of environmental effect that'd be up to snuff and robust to social changes or controls (that wouldn't inherently reduce the genetic component wherever it is present). The best they can do is nitpick here and there and laughably misinterpret some facts, including new facts (my favorite recent example). Admixture studies, GWAS – very cool, but for purposes of the race-IQ controversy, all these fancy new data merely confirm what was known in the 60s.
The political contest has gone the opposite way, however. Now there's an escalating mop-up and gaslighting operation. Scientists know more than ever, but do not care to integrate their knowledge into anything more than affirmation of the prestigious consensus, whereas commoners know less than their grandfathers, and care less about knowing, and flaunt their ignorance and stupidity. In the process of this mental liberation, we are dismantling the vestiges of Enlightenment ideology. Children born today will learn from show trials and grow up to inherit the world where appealing to "facts" or "fairness" or some objective "truth" will be considered inherently cringe, and only the self-affirming tyranny is a legitimate source of knowledge, for it is Based. If you think I'm exaggerating or sound like a crank, you're free to wait and see this hypothesis tested.
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