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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   33870 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 19, 2026

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Genetic Data From Over 20,000 U.S. Children Misused for ‘Race Science’

A group of fringe researchers thwarted safeguards at the National Institutes of Health and gained access to data from thousands of children. The researchers have used it to produce at least 16 papers purporting to find biological evidence for differences in intelligence between races, ranking ethnicities by I.Q. scores and suggesting Black people earn less because they are not very smart.

Mainstream geneticists have rejected their work as biased and unscientific. Yet by relying on genetic and other personal data from the prominent project, known as the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study, the researchers gave their theories an air of analytical rigor. Members of the research group were ineligible to obtain data from the ABCD project. But one of them gained access through an American professor who was already being investigated by the N.I.H. over his handling of another child brain study. Their papers have provided fodder for racist posts on social media and white nationalist message boards that have been viewed millions of times. Some of the papers are cited by A.I. bots like ChatGPT and Grok in response to queries about race and intelligence. On the social media platform X, Grok has referred users to the research more than two dozen times this month alone.

The misuse of the children’s data has validated longstanding concerns that hundreds of thousands of Americans’ genetic information held by the N.I.H. could fall into the wrong hands. The agency grants widespread access to stimulate new medical discoveries. But critics say the N.I.H. has failed to address the risks that the data, even with personally identifiable details removed, could be misused in unethical research, for commercial purposes or by foreign adversaries. The Times learned that in 2024, the same data was improperly obtained by an unidentified researcher in China. The data is not allowed to be shared with people in adversarial countries that could use it for blackmail, spy recruitment or military purposes. But the researcher evaded that prohibition by faking an affiliation with an American university, according to a former N.I.H. official and Dr. Jernigan, who said the agency informed her of the incident.

This debate is extremely opaque currently. For the interested outsider you have to go deep into the weeds of advanced statistics to follow along. Scott has some recent posts on the 'heritability gap' but it still makes my eyes glaze over. Optimistically, GWAS analyses will get more powerful, and environmental racial gaps will close, and the answer will be clearer in a few decades. The 'misuse' of anonymized data (what horrible crimes can the CCP and Ruzzia do with this?) is hardly that big a deal, but it will be kept under stronger lock and key in future.

If you live in a country/culture where the central mythos is “all men are created equal” then you may want to cover up evidence of that being false. All American and to a great extent Western Europe is now based on that myth.

Truth is the scientists all blocking the use of that data know that the myth is false but consider it better to limit research on the issue. They may be correct. It can be better to maintain plausible deniability.

Russia and China descent from commie revolutions, and you know commies opinion on this.

Rebuttal from one of the scientists

“IQ scores by ethnic group in a nationally-representative sample of 10-year old American children” by John G.R. Fuerst, writing as “Chuck” on HumanVarieties.org, May 2023

Link to paper

In a 2023 paper, Mr. Fuerst tried to rank the intelligence of children across ethnic groups. But the sample size for the vast majority of groups was far too small to draw meaningful conclusions.

The sample sizes are indeed pretty small for most of the races: only 7 / 30 have sample mean std error < 1.0 (I am referring to the raw M column):

  • Many adjacent ranks are close to random guessing (IQ(Chinese) > IQ(Japanese) w.p. 64%)
  • And multiple testing makes this even worse (I didn't choose to compare e.g. Chinese vs Japanese before looking at the data)

But... there is an obvious and natural comparison to make, that pretty much everyone on either side would have in mind before looking at any specific data: Black vs White! The sample sizes here are 1.5k and 5.9k, so the sample mean error is less than 0.5. And the M difference is ~40, so actually the data does "support" HBD (given the sd gap here, it feels like understatement to say "supports" as if we just found p = 0.03 or something)

And in fact, as a bonus: there are 30 groups, and 2*norm_cdf(-4) * nCr(30, 2) = 0.02, so if we only take 8sd gaps as significant, we can make all the admissible comparisons simultaeneously with 98% certainty. The data supports, e.g.

  • IQ(Chinese) > IQ(Dominicans) (Despite samples sizes of just 81 and 38)
  • IQ(White) > IQ(Central / South American)

and many other comparative IQ statements (but not all, this is a pretty conservative analysis: IQ(White Cuban) ?? IQ(Black Carribean)) that would be completely obvious to some random redneck guy.

But the sample size for the vast majority of groups was far too small to draw meaningful conclusions.

If he'd just made a more nebulous claim like "[the] NIH Toolbox battery is fluid-intelligence loaded." (like the original paper itself conceded!), this would have been much more debatable. But instead he told a straight up untruth.

I just cannot think of a charitable take here, it seems to be a mixture between:

  • McIntire is pretending to have expertise / understanding he does not have. It sure seems like he skimmed the paper, saw Chuck's disclaimer "Bear in mind that the sample sizes are often small and so the corresponding estimates are imprecise", and then changed "[some] estimates" to "[any] ranking" in his head, because they are related concepts.
  • McIntire understands what the data implies, but he is running cover for the "good guys", saying random stuff like this to trick normies for the greater good (I can get behind this kind of thinking to an extent, but this brazen level of deceit feels too far)

people in adversarial countries that could use it for blackmail, spy recruitment or military purposes.

Anonymized IQ testing data having impacts on any of these usages is an interesting bridge.

I do find the mental image of some secret Chinese taskforce having an uncontestable HBD proof and blackmailing the American state in exchange for not unleashing it funny, though

Amazing word choices in that article. Talk about an editorial in an alleged straight news piece

...

The policy of restricting the conclusions which are allowed to be drawn from data before allowing access to the data is corrosive to science, and no honest researcher would agree to restrict themselves in that way. Since pretty much all researchers will, we have a fairly good explanation for the reproducibility crisis.

and no honest researcher would agree to restrict themselves in that way.

Sometimes they can accept it if the restriction is outside their area of interest.

Wait, originally I read this as "race scientists" being exposed as misrepresenting the data to push their theory, is the "misuse" just about them having access to it and being able to use it as evidence?

Yes, the terms and conditions they put on access to the data includes a prohibition on the use of the data for studying verboten topics like race and IQ. The "scandal" is that they apparently got access to the data second-hand via another researcher and used it to do science.

I wonder if they are considering to taint the datasets with hidden watermarks, like movie industry does. However this probably would be less effective that with movies.

Another article on this topic

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