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Notes -
This Guardian article is a work of art as a culture war artifact.
The story: a Danish data scientist, Pallesen, who claimed that former Harvard president Gay had made "very basic" data errors in her PhD, a claim which was quoted by right wing activist Rufo.
But now the fearless investigators of the Guardian have uncovered that Pallensen also co-authored a paper called "Polygenic Scores Mediate the Jewish Phenotypic Advantage in Educational Attainment and Cognitive Ability Compared With Catholics and Lutherans" regarding the Ashkenazi, which was published by some people on the right fringe outside Respectable Academia. Some are into eugenics and "race science". Also they cited an 'antisemitic ' psychologist.
Of course, Pallesen promptly disavowed that paper when questioned by the Guardian.
Where to even start.
"Cite" in the title makes an especially bad verb in an academic context because you can generally not control who cites you. "Scientist who criticized Gay's thesis" would be more on point.
Then there is this whole five degrees of separation thing.
While both icky, there is an actual difference between eugenics and "race science" (or HBD or whatever). Eugenics is prescriptive and describes the belief that society should coordinate to affect their gene frequencies. This can go from "let's use CRISPR to fix hereditary diseases" to "kill all the kids with a disfavored eye color". This is completely separate from the claim that there are group differences between human subpopulations caused by genetic differences, which is trivially true for physical characteristics and icky for mental stuff.
My personal view is that most social science is unsound even when it is completely apolitical. If you add politics, be they woke or far-right, I fully expect the conclusions to be whatever the politics say they should be. In respected academia, genetic differences in intelligence are already a third rail. If you publish on racial genetic differences in intelligence, that will end your career faster than putting "I will increase grades for sexual favors" in your e-mail footer. The "fringe" researchers are of course also motivated by politics. So the Ashkenazi genetic intelligence hypothesis is probably undecideable in our society. (From what I remember of Scott's (who is Jewish and thus smarter than me) opinion, I would bet 75% on there being a significant (say, at least five IQ points average) genetic advantage for Ashkenazi.)
Also, I do not find the link between Ashkenazi intelligence and antisemitism all that plausible. The traditional antisemitic trope of Jews is them being shrewd manipulators, which is not exactly the same as being smart. Ask an antisemite why Jews are over-represented in the Ivy League, and they will probably say that it is because the Jews in academia collude to favor Jewish students over gentiles, helping them cheat and so on. If you convince them that the over-representation is due to raw honest brain power, that will conflict with the antisemitic trope.
Finally and foremost, the character of Mr. Pallesen is utterly irrelevant to his claims. He is not the only data scientist, so we don't have to -- and should not -- rely on his testimony exclusively. In the worlds where there is a problem with data science in Gay's PhD, I would not expect that someone who specializes in Intersectionality points it out, thereby -- in the Guardians words -- 'helping oust school’s first Black president'. In worlds where there is no such problem, I would expect that dozens of woke data scientists would jump at the chance to call bullshit on the claims.
There's a long running tradition of certain anti-semitic right-wing types trying to discredit Ashkenazi IQ scores. (Vox Day, more recently some youtuber. No idea what neonazis do, but probably the same.
Most recently, the otherwise pretty good Neema Parvini jumped onto that bandwagon and claims the studies that show it are all invalid because low sample size, yada yada. I'm guessing it must be strategic on his part, Parvini is a very widely read scholar.
It's fairly recent and I find your post to exude the kind of 'boo outgroup' pathologism you imply is afflicting others.
The OG Nazis didn't like IQ tests yet found jews to be intelligent but bad people. Early neo-nazism copied most of that.
As far as groups who actively believe in HBD and IQ stuff go, during the 'Alt-Right' era, if you can call it that, it was very rare to see any refutation of jewish IQ being high. Most parroting the 115 IQ myth. The primary argument, much like the nazis of old, being that these smart jews were taking up positions of power in white societies and using it to the detriment of whites and the benefit of jews.
The only big contradicting instance to that narrative was old newspaper clippings being posted relating to a jewish SAT cheating thing, but to what end that was brought up wasn't exactly clear. The big narrative described above came first. Why bother to undermine that?
The article by Vox is one of the only ones I can find that takes direct issue with the whole jewish IQ thing. And even then Vox was always a kind of outsider with his own thing going on.
There has, however, been a lot of recent discussion on this topic, now that the 'Alt-Right' era is over and some of its bulkier narratives can be discarded. And, maybe, just maybe, because the topic is relevant, interesting, and a big thorn in the side of many a current right wing star like Jordan Peterson. Who are trying to juggle justifications of jewish power and group interest whilst simultaneously preaching individualism to whites of European ancestry.
Oh, you're in the camp that the 70 odd Jewish kids in the absolutely random Wisconsin study of 6000 school kids were carefully selected so their polygenic risk scores would 'bolster' the 'myth' of Jews being somewhat smarter on average ?
Good luck. At some point, we're going to get bigger studies, and what then ?
That's such a poor strawman I feel it manages to light itself on fire.
Then we have the results of those bigger studies? What then? Seriously what even is this comment?
Then they're of course going to say 1k Jew genomes isn't enough or selection effects or whatever. Because it's an article of faith for them.
And not for us, thank heavens.
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Very few antisemitic alt rightists ever affirmed higher Ashkenazi intelligence. If they didn’t explicitly deny it they ignored it or took the view that nepotism / in-group loyalty still explained the vast majority or all overrepresentation. And I would reject that criticism of the theory is recent - the most infamous deboonking of overrepresentation being meritocratic (Unz’ Myth of American Meritocracy) was published in 2012.
Every single one of them did that I know of. And I was neck deep in this stuff. I am still to encounter anyone in that sphere who thinks ashkenazi jews anything other than high IQ.
Like I went over in my comment:
Jews being smart and jews being overrepresented due to nepotism is not a mutually exclusive thing. In fact it makes a lot of sense for nepotism to work better than it otherwise would when you are the group you prefer has a high IQ. Since then the nepotism is more functional and less obvious.
Unz did not dispute jewish IQ to any relevant extent. Making the assumption that it's 109. He just posited that jews are overrepresented even when accounting for IQ.
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