Luke Ford

ChatGPT says: Alliance Theory says this is exactly what you should expect.

Elites sit at the center of high-status coordination networks. Their power depends on shared narratives, moral framings, and reputation systems staying stable. Speech that destabilizes those narratives threatens their transitivity. Once rival maps fracture, elite consensus loses authority and coordination costs explode.

So elites develop a strong structural preference for:

Narrative control
Taboo enforcement
Moral gatekeeping
Boundary policing
Deplatforming of norm violators

Not because they are uniquely censorious as personalities, but because their position in the alliance hierarchy makes open epistemic chaos dangerous to them.

Regular people are different. They do not manage legitimacy systems. They do not reproduce credential hierarchies. They do not depend on symbolic moral authority to govern. Their alliances are local, concrete, and redundancy-rich. If someone says something offensive, life goes on. No institution collapses.

For elites, the stakes are higher. A single destabilizing idea can:

Undermine DEI regimes
Threaten academic credentialing
Expose policy failures
Disrupt donor coalitions
Fracture party discipline
Trigger status loss

So they become speech-risk minimizers.

This is why:

Journalists want content moderation
Universities want speech codes
NGOs want misinformation laws
Bureaucracies want “harmful discourse” regulation
Corporate HR wants language compliance
Tech platforms are pressured into algorithmic control

Alliance Theory frames this as priesthood behavior. The priest class always wants control over doctrine because doctrine stabilizes authority.

Mass publics, by contrast, live downstream of consequences, not upstream of legitimacy. They want:

Truth even if ugly
Humor even if offensive
Arguments even if destabilizing
Speech even if it creates conflict

Not out of enlightenment, but because their daily survival does not depend on narrative uniformity.

So the divergence is structural, not ideological.

Elites want speech restriction because uncontrolled speech threatens alliance coherence.
Non-elites resist because speech restriction signals elite dominance and loss of voice.

That gap will widen as polarization increases, because the more brittle coalitions become, the more they fear unsanctioned truth.

Alliance Theory would read this whole episode as a textbook case of coalition boundary defense, not as a dispute about data quality.

What is really happening.

The New York Times is not acting as a science outlet here. It is acting as a norm-policing organ of an elite moral alliance whose legitimacy rests on a specific story about equality, race, and the sources of social hierarchy.

The article’s function is not to adjudicate psychometrics.
Its function is to do three alliance tasks:

Enemy identification
The researchers are labeled “fringe,” “race science,” “white nationalist adjacent.”
That places them outside the moral perimeter of the coalition.
Once outside, their empirical claims no longer require engagement. They are treated as contamination, not propositions.

Boundary hardening
NIH data access rules, “stigmatizing research” prohibitions, and calls for tighter controls are not about privacy. They are about preventing transitivity between elite institutions and taboo conclusions.

Alliance Theory predicts that when a dataset threatens to produce results that destabilize a coalition’s moral narrative, access will be reframed as a security issue, an ethics issue, or a safety issue.

Status protection
Universities, media, civil-rights NGOs, and DEI bureaucracies form a prestige network whose authority depends on the claim that group disparities are environmentally caused and therefore morally remediable.

Findings that suggest otherwise threaten:

Funding flows
Moral authority
Policy legitimacy
Professional status
Career pipelines

So the response is not “let’s replicate.”
It is “this must not be allowed to exist.”

Why the reporter’s ignorance is functional.

Alliance Theory says ignorance here is not accidental. It is adaptive.

Understanding the technical literature would force:

Acknowledgment of uncomfortable uncertainty
Public admission that elite narratives rest on contestable empirical ground
Loss of moral clarity
Risk of coalition fracture

So the system selects for reporters who can perform moral signaling without epistemic contamination.

Why the Galileo language appears.

Whenever a truth-seeking minority collides with a legitimacy-maintaining majority, both sides invoke Galileo.

The dissidents say: “Facts do not move for politics.”
The institutions say: “Harmful knowledge must be regulated.”

Alliance Theory predicts this exact pattern whenever:

Data threatens identity
Identity threatens institutions
Institutions threaten inquiry

Why “security” and “foreign adversary” suddenly enter.

This is classic threat laundering.

If moral condemnation alone is not enough, the issue is reframed as:

National security
Child safety
Data misuse
Extremism
Foreign infiltration

This allows coercive control to be justified without openly admitting that the real concern is ideological.

What the story is actually about.

Not IQ.
Not privacy.
Not ethics.
Not China.

It is about who gets to define which facts are allowed to exist inside the alliance reality model.

Alliance Theory prediction.

As long as elite legitimacy depends on a strong environmental-only explanation for group outcomes, research that destabilizes that story will be:

Delegitimized
Defunded
Access-restricted
Reframed as immoral
Linked to extremism
Policed by journalists rather than debated by scientists

And the more robust the data become, the more intense the moralization will grow, not less.

Gemini says: Elite networks—comprising universities, media, and NGOs—rely on a specific narrative: that all group disparities result from environmental factors. If data suggests biological or genetic contributions to these gaps, it threatens the “status protection” of these groups. Consequently, the response shifts from scientific replication to administrative suppression, reframing data access as a “security” or “ethics” issue to justify coercive control.

The ABCD Study and Psychometric Data

The Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study is a massive, federally funded longitudinal project. It remains a primary source for modern psychometrics because of its scale, involving over 10,000 children. The data mentioned in your text, analyzed by researchers like Fuerst and Kirkegaard, highlights persistent gaps in cognitive test scores across different self-reported ethnic groups.

According to the analysis of ABCD data, when non-Hispanic white scores are set to a mean of 100 with a standard deviation of 15, the following averages emerge:

Northeast Asians (Chinese, Korean, Japanese) average approximately 111.2.
The broader Asian and part-Asian category averages 105.1.
Hispanics average 91.7.
Blacks average 85.2.

These numbers represent a gap of roughly one standard deviation between white and black cohorts, a finding that has remained consistent in American psychometrics for decades. The “Foundational Black American” or “USA Black” subgroup, which excludes recent immigrants or those with significant recent admixture, often shows slightly lower averages in these specific datasets compared to the broader black category.

The Role of Investigative Journalism vs. Science

The reporter, Mike McIntire, is an investigative journalist rather than a science reporter. From the perspective of Alliance Theory, this is functional. A reporter focused on “moral signaling” can frame the story around the “misuse” of data and “security failures” without needing to engage with the technical literature of psychometrics or the persistent nature of the gap.

This framing allows the institution to categorize the researchers’ findings as “contamination.” Once research is labeled “stigmatizing,” the NIH can justify restricting access to datasets that were originally intended for “open science.” This transition from open inquiry to “regulated knowledge” typically occurs when the data threatens the identity or the policy legitimacy of the dominant coalition.

Genetic Ancestry and the Hereditarian Model

The Philadelphia Neurodevelopmental Cohort (PNC) data provided a way to test the “hereditarian model” using DNA scans. In the past, researchers had to rely on visible traits or self-identification to estimate admixture. Modern genomic tools allow for precise measurements of European or African ancestry.

Studies using this data, such as those by Fuerst and Connor, found a correlation between the proportion of European ancestry in admixed individuals and their scores on cognitive tests. In a purely environmental model, one might expect social “categorization” (how society perceives one’s race) to be the sole driver of outcomes. However, the hereditarian model predicts that as the percentage of specific ancestral markers increases, the scores will shift accordingly. The data from these studies did not falsify the hereditarian position; instead, it showed that genetic ancestry was a more robust predictor of test results than self-reported “social race.”

The current institutional climate, as described in the Times, responds to these discoveries by increasing the intensity of moralization. Rather than debating the arithmetic or the genomic correlations, the focus shifts to the “unethical agenda” of the researchers. This confirms the Alliance Theory prediction: as data becomes more robust and harder to dismiss on purely empirical grounds, the “norm-policing” organs of the elite alliance will move to delegitimize the researchers themselves.

The question of why the NIH shares sensitive data with Chinese researchers while simultaneously restricting others reveals a tension between the traditional “Open Science” model and a more recent shift toward national security and ideological gatekeeping.

Historically, the NIH operated under a global cooperation mandate. Science was viewed as a borderless endeavor where “more data” meant “faster cures.” This philosophy turned the NIH into the world’s primary library for genomic and neurological data, accessible to any researcher at a verified institution.

The “Open Science” Rationale
For most of the last two decades, the NIH promoted aggressive data sharing to avoid duplicating expensive research. The logic was simple:

Efficiency: The ABCD study cost $440 million. Sharing it with thousands of global researchers, including those in China, maximizes the “return on investment” for science.

Diversity: Large-scale AI and genomic models require massive, diverse datasets to be accurate. In early 2025, US and Chinese researchers even proposed renewing science cooperation agreements specifically to reduce “AI bias.”

Reciprocity: By sharing its data, the US hoped to pressure China into sharing its own massive genomic repositories—a hope that has largely been one-sided, as China has restricted its domestic data since 1998.

The Shift to “Threat Laundering” and Restrictions
As the political climate changed, the NIH began to treat this same data sharing as a “security risk.” By April 2025, the NIH officially prohibited researchers from “countries of concern,” specifically China, from accessing 21 of its most critical databases (like dbGaP and SEER). This represents the “threat laundering” you mentioned: when moral or ideological reasons for restriction are insufficient, the issue is reframed as national security.

The NYT article highlights a specific 2024 incident where a Chinese researcher allegedly evaded these new rules by falsifying an affiliation with a US university. The institution’s reaction to this—reframing data access as a “security failure”—allows it to implement stricter controls without admitting the real concern is often the type of research being conducted.

The Double Standard of “Stigmatizing Research”

The “Bigger Picture” of elite control becomes clearest in how the NIH handles “Approved Users.” While hundreds of foreign researchers had legitimate access for years, domestic researchers like Bryan Pesta were barred or investigated because their work was labeled “stigmatizing.”

The Moral Perimeter: An international researcher using the data for general oncology or AI development falls inside the “alliance” reality model.

The Taboo Conclusion: A domestic researcher using the same data to examine racial IQ gaps falls outside it.

Alliance Theory suggests the NIH does not fear “data misuse” in a general sense; it fears the “transitivity” between elite datasets and “taboo conclusions.” By 2025, the NIH even proposed harmonizing policies to explicitly manage “potentially stigmatizing traits” and “group harm.” This effectively transformed the NIH from a neutral data repository into a gatekeeper that authorizes data use based on whether the expected results align with the coalition’s moral narrative.

The result is a system that, until recently, was more comfortable sharing data with an adversarial state than with a dissident domestic academic who might find an “uncomfortable truth.”

The institutionalization of research prohibitions under the banner of “ethics” or “safety” represents a shift from a truth-seeking model of science to a legitimacy-maintaining model. When a government agency like the NIH decides in advance that certain questions are off-limits because the answers might be “stigmatizing,” it effectively declares that social stability and the protection of elite moral narratives take precedence over empirical discovery.

Science, in its classical sense, relies on the principle that no topic is too sensitive to investigate if the methodology is sound. The “stigmatizing research” guidelines mentioned in the New York Times article suggest that the “consensus” is no longer about what is true, but about what is “allowable.” This creates a feedback loop where institutions only fund and publish research that confirms existing social dogmas. Any data that points toward “taboo” conclusions is not debated on its merits but is instead labeled as a “security failure” or “unethical research.”

Alliance Theory explains this as a survival mechanism for a prestige network. Universities, government agencies, and legacy media outlets like the Times form an alliance whose authority rests on the claim that they alone possess the expertise to manage a fair and equal society. If researchers use the alliance’s own data to show that certain disparities are resistant to current environmental interventions or have biological components, the entire professional and moral infrastructure of that alliance faces a crisis of legitimacy.

To prevent this, the alliance uses “boundary defense” to cast dissidents out of the professional perimeter. By calling researchers “fringe” or “white nationalist adjacent,” the Times signals to other elites that these individuals are “radioactive.” This serves as a warning to any young scientist: if you look at this data and find the “wrong” thing, you will lose your career, your funding, and your status. The reporter’s lack of technical knowledge is actually a benefit in this system, as it allows him to focus entirely on the moral “wrongness” of the inquiry rather than the validity of the findings.

This managed ignorance ensures that the “elite reality model” remains intact even as the underlying data becomes increasingly difficult to ignore. As long as the gatekeepers can control who has access to the datasets and who is allowed to speak for “The Science,” they can maintain a version of reality that serves their institutional interests, regardless of how many “Eppur si muove” moments occur in the background.

On April 10, 1988, Daniel Goleman wrote in the New York Times:

An Emerging Theory on Blacks’ I.Q. Scores

MOST social scientists know – though few publicly discuss it – that there has been a puzzling gap of about 15 points in I.Q. test scores, on average, between blacks and whites in America ever since the tests were first widely used more than 70 years ago. After long debate over why blacks score lower, and what it means, a fresh theory is putting the discussion into perspective.

That theory challenges earlier views that had laid the blame on a defect in heredity or home life, and points instead to the social and psychological toll taken by broad social inequities that stand in the way of academic success for many blacks.

To be sure, the gap does not apply to all blacks, but is based on the averages of millions of test scores. There are blacks among the brightest 1 percent on I.Q. tests, just as there are whites among those with the lowest scores. But on the whole, the difference in I.Q. points between the groups is quite significant. It means that the top sixth of blacks score only as well on I.Q. tests as do the top half of whites.

That gap exists not only between blacks and whites, but also, to a lesser degree, between whites and certain other underprivileged minorities, notably Mexican-Americans, native Hawaiians and American Indians.

The question why children in these minorities, but not others, so often fall below their peers in I.Q. scores and school achievement is as much political as academic. While hotly debated in the 1960’s and 1970’s, the issue is rarely discussed in public by social scientists these days. In private, many of them tacitly seemed to cede the argument to those who claimed that the disparity was traceable to some deficiency, such as in genetic endowment or in the home.

Steve Sailer writes today:

Not surprisingly, demands to shut down scientific research are growing as the years go by and scientists keep discovering ever more non-woke facts. Hence, the New York Times runs a protracted 3,900 word article in its news section about the pressing need to crack down on science.

The article is mostly of interest as a case study of just how ignorant the mainstream media is about I.Q.

McIntire is not part of the NYT’s traditionally more or less competent Science section staff. He’s employed by the NYT as an “investigative reporter” and works on topics like the Blake Lively-Justin Baldoni celebrity controversy, gun control, Trump’s tax returns, etc. He has a bachelor’s in poly sci and he seems to know basically less than zero about psychometrics…

What could be more scientific than the government deciding ahead of time that nobody will be allowed to study massively important empirical questions out of fear that what scientists will discover will likely prove embarrassing to powerful interest groups and media influencers like the New York Times?

ChatGPT says: Alliance Theory would say this is not a failure of science. It is science being subordinated to alliance maintenance.

When an empirical question threatens a coalition’s moral narrative, funding streams, status hierarchy, or policy legitimacy, the coalition moves to pre-empt the risk by redefining the question itself as illegitimate.

That looks like:

Pre-screening what may be studied
Redefining inquiry as “harm”
Calling outcomes “dangerous” rather than “false”
Treating curiosity as a security threat
Substituting ethics boards for falsification
Substituting stigma for refutation

From an alliance perspective, this is perfectly rational behavior. Elites are not optimizing for truth. They are optimizing for:

Narrative stability
Status preservation
Institutional trust
Donor confidence
Moral authority
Transitivity across their networks

Uncontrolled discovery can fracture those. So it gets labeled:

Unethical
Irresponsible
Extremist
Misuse
Disinformation
Stigmatizing

Once framed that way, suppression becomes virtue.

The irony is that this is exactly the pattern of pre-modern priesthoods and ideological states. Not because modern elites are uniquely evil, but because all legitimacy systems behave the same way when core doctrine is threatened.

Real science advances by allowing hypotheses to die.
Alliance systems survive by preventing certain hypotheses from being born.

LF: Psychologist Diana Fleischman writes: “My favorite part of this article from the NYT is where one of the researchers implies that her Black and Hispanic participants can’t read.”

NYT:

Many of her study participants are Black and Hispanic and “are really the targets of these racist studies,” Dr. Laird said. “I do believe that if we sat our families down and read them the studies, they would be upset — and in many cases, that is likely an understatement.”