From Vox:
There’s still no good reason to believe black-white IQ differences are due to genes
Our response to criticisms.Updated by Eric Turkheimer, Kathryn Paige Harden, and Richard E. Nisbett Jun 15, 2017, 12:00pm EDT
Actually, however, it turns out that the three academics don’t agree among themselves. Turkheimer admits:
In fact, I will close by noting that not even the three of us are completely in agreement about it: I (Turkheimer) am convinced that the question is irredeemably unscientific; Nisbett accepts it as a legitimate scientific question, and thinks evidence points fairly strongly in the direction of the black-white gap being entirely environmental in origin; while Harden questions the quality of the existing evidence, but thinks more determinative data may be found in future genetic knowledge.
It’s probably not a coincidence that the younger academic, Harden, takes a less extremist stance than the two older professors. Dr. Harden will likely be around a lot longer than Turkheimer and Nisbett, so she’s more concerned about what the rapid advance in genomic science will uncover over the rest of her lifetime than are the two older guys.
Turkeimer more or less admits something I’ve believed since 1995: that anti IQ science denialism is largely driven by Jewish paranoia and prejudice against gentiles: many Jews worry that if Americans are allowed to notice the white-black IQ gap, they will also notice the Jewish-gentile IQ gap and then the peasants will come for the Jews with torches and pitchforks.
Or, more plausibly, that awareness that American Jews have a higher mean IQ than American white gentiles will lead to college / job quotas like Jews were burdened with in the 1920s.
I recall that back in the 1970s, many Jewish intellectuals such as Nathan Glazer were strenuously opposed to the new quotas benefitting blacks and Hispanics. But over time their opposition muted as they realized that quotas against whites in general tended to have a much less deleterious effect on Jewish career prospects than the quotas against Jews in the 1920s.
And, since 1969 Jews were able to construct a mighty firewall between it being respectable to express anti-white sentiments (e.g., #OscarsTooWhite / White Privilege) and it being completely unacceptable to express anti-Jewish sentiments (e.g., nobody talks about the parallel concepts of #OscarsTooJewish / Jewish Privilege).
To convince the reader that there is no scientifically valid or ethically defensible foundation for the project of assigning group differences in complex behavior to genetic and environmental causes, I have to move the discussion in an even more uncomfortable direction. Consider the assertion that Jews are more materialistic than non-Jews. (I am Jewish, I have used a version of this example before, and I am not accusing anyone involved in this discussion of anti-Semitism. My point is to interrogate the scientific difference between assertions about blacks and assertions about Jews.)One could try to avoid the question by hoping that materialism isn’t a measurable trait like IQ, except that it is; or that materialism might not be heritable in individuals, except that it is nearly certain it would be if someone bothered to check; or perhaps that Jews aren’t really a race, although they certainly differ ancestrally from non-Jews; or that one wouldn’t actually find an average difference in materialism, but it seems perfectly plausible that one might. (In case anyone is interested, a biological theory of Jewish behavior, by the white nationalist psychologist Kevin MacDonald, actually exists.)
If you were persuaded by Murray and Harris’s conclusion that the black-white IQ gap is partially genetic, but uncomfortable with the idea that the same kind of thinking might apply to the personality traits of Jews, I have one question: Why? Couldn’t there just as easily be a science of whether Jews are genetically “tuned to” (Harris’s phrase) different levels of materialism than gentiles?
On the other hand, if you no longer believe this old anti-Semitic trope, is it because some scientific study has been conducted showing that it is false? And if the problem is simply that we haven’t run the studies, why shouldn’t we? Materialism is an important trait in individuals, and plausibly could be an important difference between groups. (Certainly the history of the Jewish people attests to the fact that it has been considered important in groups!) But the horrific recent history of false hypotheses about innate Jewish behavior helps us see how scientifically empty and morally bankrupt such ideas really are.
Turkheimer’s example is a bit of a misdirection, since it would be more straightforward in this debate over IQ to discuss higher Ashkenazi Jewish mean IQs.
My guess, however, is that most American gentiles, of whatever race, recognize that Jews tend to be smarter — e.g., 1/50th of the U.S. population makes up about 1/3rd of the Forbes 400 — and admire them for that fact.
While I oppose quotas, on the other hand, there is a reasonable concept, which I got from David Brooks, that smarter American ethnic groups should feel a sense of noblesse oblige toward the average people amongst whom they have thrived. (Brooks referred, gingerly, to “new meritocratic elites,” but obviously Jews are the dominant group within the new meritocratic elites who have displaced the old WASP elites.)
The most obvious form of noblesse oblige would be for Jews to become more self-aware about how self-indulgent and petty is their traditional urge to further deconstruct the American people via mass immigration. Some Jews, such as Mickey Kaus and Stephen Miller, are exemplars of 21st Century noblesse oblige, but even Brooks can’t bring himself around to promoting moderation and prudence on immigration policy.
This is not to say that all Jews feel that IQ science is not good for the Jews. Murray’s Jewish co-author Richard Herrnstein, for example, felt that honesty about IQ was good for the Jews. But, my observations are that the old question — “Is it good for the Jews?” — is what motivates a lot of the leaders of IQ science denialism, from S.J. Gould to Eric Turkheimer.
COMMENTS:
* Jews should realize how annoying they become when they try to rework existing social orders in the societies that host them. Especially societies that have allowed them to thrive and thus far have been free of the purges and pogroms that characterized earlier Jewish relationships with host societies. But that would demand too much self-reflection and would ask that Jews try to understand why they have been persecuted by nearly every culture, nation and empire in history.
Perhaps mass Arab immigration into Europe may demonstrate to Jews the importance of maintaining the existing social order.
* A quote from Kevin Macdonald:
“It is interesting that developmental psychologists have found unusually intense fear reactions among Israeli infants in response to strangers, while the opposite pattern is found for infants from North Germany. The Israeli infants were much more likely to become “inconsolably upset” in reaction to strangers, whereas the North German infants had relatively minor reactions to strangers. The Israeli babies therefore tended to have an unusual degree of stranger anxiety, while the North German babies were the opposite — findings that fit with the hypothesis that Europeans and Jews are on opposite ends of scales of xenophobia and ethnocentrism.”
Never mind materialism, it seems that xenophobia is the most important trait here. You cannot expect the same noblesse oblige as the Parsi when your instinct is to be terrified of strangers. The only thing you can do is try to destroy the identity of the stranger, so that it becomes less fearful for you.
* Turkheimer appears, based upon your extracts, to be arguing that regardless of the evidence it is unscientific to accept hypotheses that are regarded, in the particular society we live in, as being morally unacceptable.
Is this really what he is arguing, because it would appear on the face of it to be a pretty remarkable thing for a scientist to believe? It’s pretty much a direct refutation of “sapere aude”, and of course the “Enlightenment” would have been snuffed out at birth if that approach had been successfully enforced.
* So basically we shouldn’t explore these things because the answers might be too dangerous. Even if one were to agree with Turkheimer about that, he has to realize that no one has ever been able to halt inquiry for long on the grounds that it’s too dangerous. If there’s a genetic explanation, researchers will eventually find it.
(Also, Turkheimer seems to be blissfully unaware of how much he sounds like the Grand Inquisitor, warning scholars away from knowledge that it is unsafe for man to possess.)
* Turkeimer’s materialism example is just a bunch of hand-waving. What if, instead of “materialism”, you substitute “Tay-Sachs Disease”? Turnkeimer has just “proven” that Tay-Sachs Disease has nothing to do with being Jewish and we shouldn’t even look for a genetic basis for it. Only anti-Semites associate Tay-Sachs Disease with Judaism.
Maybe Turkeimer is going in the wrong direction here – we are supposed to laugh at the obvious ridiculous of the idea that materialism is genetic, but maybe it’s not as ridiculous as Turkeimer thinks. His appeals are all appeals to moral authority, not appeals to science. IQ is not allowed to have a genetic basis because Hitler -that’s fundamentally his whole argument.
* What is your evidence that Jews are above-average eager to “deconstruct the American people”? Are we higher, by that metric, than Episcopalians? Than blacks? Than Chinese? Indians? Latinos?
Granted you hear and read more from Jews who wish to deconstruct America. More, I suppose, than Latinos. But that surely reflects the fact there are more Jews in places where you’re likely to hear what they have to say. So for a fair comparison, you should compare Jewish pundits/celebrities/politicians against Episcopalians, Latinos etc who are in the same lines of work.
* With respect, I think you’re wrong about most Americans thinking Jews are smarter. Here in Vermont, anyway, most of the people I know (white to the last) don’t know that Bernie Sanders, for example, is a Jew let alone imagine it explains his smarts or mores at all.
Most Vermonters couldn’t tell you why much of their food comes labeled with a K or U. So I don’t think it ever occurred to them that our last governor was a Jew or that the mayor of Burlington, out largest town, is. If they were exposed to the fact, it wouldn’t register or mean anything. Noticing that is not a thing here.
* It’s interesting that you tie it so directly to Jews, and you are certainly logical, and Jews certainly are inexhaustibly paranoid and self-centered. However, I am content that the whole thing is explained in terms of the big white elephant we paid for with our life savings and have been tending for a generation, and that we cannot afford to admit was a mistake: the whole civil rights mess. I think the left’s existential dependence on cognitive dissonance and not keeping track of Eastasia ever trading places with Eurasia explains it. Consider their reaction to the book “Stop Helping Us.”
One of the strongest redpilling experiences is to go back to the statements and predictions of the sixties and see that the monstrous “racists” were absolutely dead on right all down the line, and the progressives on the right side of history come off now like white Rastafarians.
Furthermore there is a threat to the current Judeo-friendly (but not exclusively or specifically Jewish) power structure besides direct attack. In allowing whites to unapologetically separate, in unmaking the all-stymying swamp that they trap us in, in allowing police departments and employers to unapologetically discriminate, we can expect to see life improve by every metric for disgusting peasants in flyover country.
A Jew with a high IQ, family connections, good work ethic, family connections, and agile verbal skills should expext to beat a Gentile competitor most of the time — but it doesn’t hurt if the Jew can benefit from secret Apartheid while the Gentile is subjected to Section Eight housing experiments, expansionist urban crime, Affirmative Action, and everything else made possible by the Civil Rights movement and the crusade to end qualitative characteristics. In fact, on an even playing field, there might even arise bizarre spikes where the Jew’s natural advantages cannot save him from other factors that would become possible in a post-Civil Rights world, like popular awareness of an individual’s reputation.
They have money. They’re not trying to get money. What they want is for Rusty Shackleford to commit suicide, get lost in an electronic lotus, chase the opioid dragon or get “knocked out” without media or police attention.
* …even if everyone believed the wrong thing about Jews’ relative propensity to materialism, there would be no social cost to it. Whereas the dogged insistence that blacks and whites are, deep down, equally capable as students, as firemen, professors and rocket scientists, has resulted in a vast misallocation of resources.
And, really, are the Jews you know all that “materialistic”? I can believe that the up-and-coming Jewish merchant class, in the 1920s-1960s, appeared materialistic in the eyes of the gentile elites of the time, who could live comfortable lives thanks to their hard-driving grandfathers. But today? Nah, I don’t see that materialism. Our kids slack off with the best of them.
* If you accept the idea that IQ is paired with impulse control and that blacks have lower IQs on average, or even simply that black per capita have a high crime rate, then all of sudden the KKK looks like a bunch of white guys trying to protect their homes and families. That doesn’t make it correct still because trials are necessary to real justice. But suddenly they go from mysterious, evil motivations…to rather human.
And that will never do in a world that’s lost it’s religion. Radical egalitarianism runs very deep for a population that in part descends from puritans and have abandoned any other form of morality. If “not a racist” is not a real virtue (and to a certain extent it’s not), then who they are? How are they “good” people then?
“I’m not racist” sounds so warm and fuzzy to Christians (because in part we are not allowed to discriminate within a church along those lines) that it’s this one last “in” to not be weird. Christians too can “fit in” to an increasingly secular society. I have lost count of the “don’t be racist” Homilies I’ve listened to because they’re safe and don’t involve anything uncomfortable. (The irony being of course, they’re given to a bunch of white Northeastern transplants who have no roots in the local population.)
Anyway, most of society, not just Jews, at this point in time have a lot invested in assuming that race is only skin deep. If it were just Jews thinking along these lines, they wouldn’t have chance, regardless of their placement within society. But there’s a lot more going on and a lot more at stake.
* There are clear phenotypic differences in IQ across races — even Turkheimer can’t dispute that. So how is the question of whether those differences are to some degree genetically based not a scientific question? Is it really impossible for the methods of science to express the question sharply and to answer it? What makes IQ so special that it — in contrast to countless other phenotypic traits — is beyond the reach of science? It just makes no sense. Turkheimer sounds like a fool when he makes claims that entail such bizarre things.
If he truly believes that the moral problems of genetic research with regard to racial differences trump the standard scientific imperative to understand our world, then he should just be honest enough to say so. Pretending that such research somehow just isn’t science is nothing but disingenuous and frankly stupid.
* Pinker wrapped up his lecture on the Cochran, Harpending, and Hardy article on Ashkenazi intelligence with a Powerpoint slide asking the question, “But is it good for the Jews?” It got big laughst from the audience at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. “This question occurs to most people [i.e. most people in that audience] when they hear about this research,” Pinker said.
* When I talk with my fellow Jews about immigration, it quickly becomes apparent that they’re concerned about two things: 1.) How supporting a movement to restrict immigration is somehow an insult to their great-grandparents, who were immigrants from Russia. 2.) How immigration restriction could lead to antisemitism.
* I, as a white Christian, haven’t got the slightest problem with high Jewish IQ scores.
I DO, however, have a problem with the fact that the Jews seem to employ their high IQ for the following purposes:
1) Subversion of the U.S. Constitution (when it suits them to do so)
2) Subversion of traditional American, Protestant, culture and morality with pornography, feminism, miscegenation, gun control, and financial manipulation
3) Subversion of the American nation, the American taxpayer, and the American military to the state of Israel, which bans many things that American Jews advocate for the goyim (e.g., homosexual marriage and miscegenation)
4) Clannishness and nepotism
5) Communism, psychotherapy, and feminism
6) The notion that they are the Chosen People of God, and thus empowered to subvert and kill their enemies by any treacherous means, including women and children, which is celebrated in their religion. Numerous passages in Jewish scripture and lore attest to this, for instance, the story of Judith beheading the enemy general after having intercourse with him, the story of Esther and Mordecai subverting the Persian throne and killing 75,000 enemies of the Jews, the killing of Egyptian babies and the Egyptian army by Yahweh, the slaughter of the Amalekite women and children (sanctioned by Yahweh) in the book of Samuel, etc. And of course the torture and execution of Jesus of Nazareth of charges of blasphemy for criticizing all of this.
If a Jewish surgeon with an IQ of 140 wants to make $300k a year excising cancerous tumors, more power to him. It’s the other stuff that’s the problem…
* Sailer: …there really aren’t that many high-profile African American intellectuals anymore. We’ve reached a point where Genius T. Coates is just about the highest-profile African American intellectual.
Most intellectual disputes these days involve Jews on at least one side, if not both sides. They have the IQ, the energy, the self-confidence, the contentiousness, the money, the ethnic dispensation, and so forth.
* Turkheimer deliberately picked a trait (materialism) that lacks a reliable measuring scale, has 1/1000 the amount of research literature devoted to IQ, is probably much less heritable than intelligence, and for which group differences are not as consequential. He is right, that does make genetic questions about materialism less “scientific” than the same questions about IQ. But of course that’s also an argument for treating the questions as scientific when they are about IQ.
* Conspiracy theories look at IQ and the general success of Jews in the US and throughout history (deserved mind you, they work hard) and think they must be running everything. But they are only ever less than 5% of population in most time.
They are clever, but they are, when taken as a whole, not particularly wise. They show a great deal of what I’ve come to think of as “mind blindness”. Within their own society they value traits that are generally speaking, going to make them an anathema to almost any outside culture and blind to that fact as well.
The story of Joseph in the OT is the perfect example of clever, but not wise. He’s clever, but he’s got the obnoxious about him, to the point even his brothers can’t stand him. He rises to the top of the household only to find himself in trouble with some funny business between him and the mistress of the house. (The way it’s written inclines the reader to imagine it was false, but why would that be – the guy, for whatever reason, can’t even shut up around his brothers and is clearly ambitious)
As a prisoner, Joseph cleverly interprets some dreams and Pharaoh makes him his number 2. The author (and presumably Joseph) imagines this to be end result of God, the giver of good things.
In real life, a good sane leader does not make a foreign prisoner, in for rape, his number 2, even if does believe him. He might say thank you by releasing him with some gifts, but he’s stranger and foreigner. Sanity would be turning to his court for help. Since we know that inbreeding was epic with Egyptian pharaohs, it’s quite probable the guy was this side clinically insane. But the author for sure doesn’t pick up on that and we have to presume Joseph doesn’t either.
So then he whomps an amazing plan that supposedly nobody ever thought of called: save some crops for bad harvests. Then his brothers, who tried to kill him, come to him for food during the famine. Instead doing something vaguely normal like revealing himself or telling them to pound it, we get some sort of weepy reunion scene with Egyptian law enforcement acting out in the middle of the family drama. Then the people of Egypt end up stuck supporting not only a foreign prisoner, but now the entire family of sheep herders and their wives and children.
The next scene/part of the Bible (I believe) cuts straight to their slavery in Egypt like that was some sort of unpredictable event/punishment from God. But if you can see Joseph’s story from the Egyptian POV it was going to happen.
* When we know that intelligence is genetic, a significant difference in average intelligence tells us how much Jews must be biologically separated from us.
Thus, “race isn’t real”, “everybody is equal” and “intelligence isn’t genetic” (and its precursor, “intelligence isn’t real”) are all protective rings to keep us from forming a concept of the Jew as its own biological category.
Once we accept enough genetic separation to maintain 0.5 to 1 SD difference in general intelligence over centuries of living in the same place, there’s basically no other personality trait either in which we have to assume the average Jew to be “just like us.”
The current fixation of HBD on intelligence alone is another protective ring.
* I am Episcopalian. And some of the most rabid SJWs I know are my cousins (who also happened to have grown up very wealthy). Our church is burdened with a rapacious social justice sect that insists on homosexual priests conducting mass and being married in our church by other gay priests.
Go throughout Chicago and you will see many Episcopalian churches with rainbow flags, BLM placards and “no hate here” posters.
My church is largely hijacked by monstrous imbeciles who think these actions will make them more pious and increase our flock. Meanwhile, my home church withers in size as the kids aren’t returning to the suburbs and aren’t having kids. And they wonder why it’s falling apart. It’s disgraceful.
* Jews didn’t create the European or American society. They are a smart and aggressive middle minority who as a result do well in the high quality/high trust societies gentiles create. But they didn’t build those societies. In fact, it’s close to the reverse. Jews–the Ashkenazi–clearly got their initial IQ boost from the literacy requirement imposed by rabbinic Judaism. (The dropouts are my ancestors, not yours.) But they have their world beating IQ by being a middle man minority looting on top of a competent/successful European host society. Literacy, and especially Jewish business knowledge and networking gave even dumber Jews a huge advantage. But in general to be more successful–and hence more likely to pass on your genes–you needed to be smarter than the goyim. Any Jews in Arabia, or South East Asia or Africa would have found both far inferior middle man opportunities, and would not have undergone as intense selection as outwitting those peoples would have been a bit to quite a bit easier. The Ashkenazi were built essentially by looting from–both materially and in terms of “stolen” genetic selection–European gentile societies. They didn’t create European success, but were essentially created or at least “forged” by it.
And “anti-Semitism”–at least 95% of the criticism of Jews around here–is about the negative behavior–political and cultural–of Jews. We want Jews to “shape up”–stop their destructive behavior and start acting in the interests of fellow whites or “fellow Americans”–or go away.
* Jews end up in positions of public influence (media, academics, law, and occasionally politics) that other immigrants do not. Further, when they secularize they almost always push policies that are destructive to America, like open borders or in the case of Europe, championing Islamic migration. In Russia they persecuted Christian farmers (Ukraine) and Orthodox Jews alike.
When Jews keep the Covenant, they don’t tend to rogue on everyone.
