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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 19, 2026

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“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)