Wikipedia:Fringe theories/Noticeboard/Archive 70

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Hydroxychloroquine and Azithromycin

• Hydroxychloroquine (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views)
• Azithromycin (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views)

[1] Anonymous scientist says on the Skepchick blog that those two should not be recommended for coronavirus disease 2019 because the data do not justify it. The reasons she gives sound good to me but I do not know enough about it to have an opinion. I guess others on this board do. Does this relate to Misinformation related to the 2019–20 coronavirus pandemic? --Hob Gadling (talk) 07:19, 22 March 2020 (UTC)

Yes Hob Gadling. Didier Raoult started [2] [3] this and was followed by the usual spread by the orange hair guy and his fellows on social media. Now brazilians had published a nonsense [4] guideline. Ixocactus (talk) 03:40, 28 March 2020 (UTC)

More editing by users who do not understand how science works, but know what they like (New York real estate frauds): [5] --Hob Gadling (talk) 16:45, 5 April 2020 (UTC)

And now the article states practically literally "some say this, others say that", where "some" is a medical doctor and "others" is some random guy. --Hob Gadling (talk) 20:09, 6 April 2020 (UTC)

Jesus in India (book) and Unknown years of Jesus

Mainly sourced to itself. See my edit[6] reverting another edit. I guess I might be challenged about that. Doug Weller talk 11:10, 7 April 2020 (UTC)

I was about to add from Unknown years of Jesus#Rejection by modern mainstream New Testament scholarship but the last entry there looks pretty fringe and another is from a self-published book, so that needs cleaning up. Doug Weller talk 11:13, 7 April 2020 (UTC)

Tsarichina

• Tsarichina (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views)

This page is HIGHLY questionable in origin. Is there even a Tsarichina in Bulgaria? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.86.172.157 (talk) 20:45, 6 April 2020 (UTC)

Seems like it is a real village [7]

The russian page doesn't mention the extra terrestrial junk, but the bulgarian one does. Pelirojopajaro (talk) 10:45, 8 April 2020 (UTC)

On a quick Google round the loonosphere, it looks like this is all part of the Baba Vanga mythos. There's a whole untapped seam of craziness to be cleaned up there. ‑ Iridescent 10:52, 8 April 2020 (UTC)

Not a very useful article as-is, especially that its only current sources are not reliable... —PaleoNeonate – 21:40, 10 April 2020 (UTC)

5G conspiracy theories

The mainstream media seems to have cottoned-on to the existence of conspiracy theories around 5G (COVID-19 is the latest thing being blamed on 5G[8]) and I think we should be covering this in our 5G article. I renamed/reorganized the section previously called, in rather a POV way, "Health concerns" but notice what we still have at 5G#Effect on human health seems to be a shopping list of everything anyone has said about 5G being maybe bad for health. I think WP:FRINGE could be better applied to this topic space. Thoughts? Alexbrn (talk) 17:44, 4 April 2020 (UTC)

This seems to have been improved since, many thanks, —PaleoNeonate – 21:43, 10 April 2020 (UTC)

RfC on race and intelligence

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

---

Is the claim that there are genetic differences in intelligence along racial lines a fringe viewpoint? NightHeron (talk) 23:43, 16 March 2020 (UTC)

This would mean, in particular, that sources by Jensen, Rushton, Lynn, Piffer, and Gottfredson are fringe, and statements expressing some degree of agreement with the claim that certain races are genetically inferior to others in intelligence, even if made by someone whose writings are RS for other matters, must also be treated in accordance with WP:FRINGE.

Discussion

• Yes as OP.

An IP editor who has persistently advocated for lending credence to white supremacist sources recently cited a 2010 discussion on WP:FTN to support their contention that such sources are not fringe. That discussion (see [9]), in which only 5 editors participated, ended with a weak consensus that research into race and intelligence is not fringe. What I'm asking for here is not a statement opposing all research into the topic, but rather a statement characterizing a specific conclusion as contrary to scientific consensus.

Moreover, a lot has changed since 2010. In recent years the internet has been used extensively to disseminate alt-right and extremist views, and there is much more awareness now of the need to resist this. For the most part, fringe views do not infest Wikipedia. An editor who persistently tries to use Wikipedia to promote creationism, Holocaust denialism, climate change denialism, or quack cures for COVID-19 will probably be stopped and blocked. However, some editors have successfully been promoting scientific racism and white supremacist views, notably at Race and intelligence (an article that gets over 1000 pageviews per day) and Talk:Race and intelligence. Attempts to stop this (at AfD, DRV, AE) have usually been unsuccessful.

In 2018, the Southern Poverty Law Center, one of the most respected non-profit organizations in the US that monitors hate groups and extremism, published an article criticizing Wikipedia for allowing the alt-right to advance a white supremacist agenda in certain articles. The SPLC specifically discussed the article Race and intelligence. Although some might think that we should not be influenced by off-wiki opinion, IMHO the SPLC criticism needs to be taken seriously. (It was partly off-wiki criticism that caused Wikipedia to make efforts to address gender imbalance among Wikipedia editors and among BLP articles.)

Sources:

Here are two recent (post-2010) books that discuss the fallacies of racist pseudoscience:

Angela Saini, Superior: The Return of Race Science, Beacon Press, 2019, ISBN 0807076910.

Jay Joseph, The Trouble with Twin Studies: A Reassessment of Twin Research in the Social and Behavioral Sciences, Routledge Publishers, 2015, ISBN 9781138813069.

Here are two classic books that explain the fallacies and in some cases outright fraud in this type of scientific racism:

Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man, Revised and expanded edition, W. W. Norton & Co., 1996, ISBN 0393039722.

Leon J. Kamin, The Science and Politics of I.Q., Lawrence Erlbaum Publishers, 1974, ISBN 0470455748.

From an article in American Psychologist, the journal of the American Psychological Association: The consensus among most scholars in fields such as evolutionary biology, anthropology and other disciplines is that racial distinctions fail on all 3 counts-- that is they are not genetically discrete, are not reliably measured, and are not scientifically meaningful.

From the largest professional organization of anthropologists:

The "American Anthropological Association Statement on `Race' and Intelligence"[10] (adopted December 1994) says: The American Anthropological Association (AAA) is deeply concerned by recent public discussions which imply that intelligence is biologically determined by race. Repeatedly challenged by scientists, nevertheless these ideas continue to be advanced. Such discussions distract public and scholarly attention from and diminish support for the collective challenge to ensure equal opportunities for all people, regardless of ethnicity or phenotypic variation. Earlier AAA resolutions against racism (1961, 1969, 1971, 1972) have spoken to this concern. Then in 1998 the AAA released an official position paper that expanded upon the 1994 statement.[11] They explained the background to this expanded statement as follows: As a result of public confusion about the meaning of "race," claims as to major biological differences among "races" continue to be advanced. Stemming from past AAA actions designed to address public misconceptions on race and intelligence, the need was apparent for a clear AAA statement on the biology and politics of race that would be educational and informational. Rather than wait for each spurious claim to be raised, the AAA Executive Board determined that the Association should prepare a statement for approval by the Association and elicit member input.

A similar statement was unanimously approved on 27 March 2019 by the Executive Committee of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists.[12]

From the textbook Psychology: Themes and Variations by Wayne Weiten: In the first half of the 20th century, a strong current of racial and class prejudice was apparent in the US and Britain. This prejudice supported the idea that IQ tests measured innate ability and that "undesirable" groups scored poorly because of their genetic inferiority... However, heritability explanations for ethnic differences in IQ have a variety of flaws and weaknesses.

From the prestigious journal Nature: A 16 August 2017 editorial (vol. 548) titled "Against discrimination: Science cannot and should not be used to justify prejudice" said in part: Difference between groups may therefore provide sound scientific evidence. But it's also a blunt instrument of pseudoscience, and one used to justify actions and policies that condense claimed group differences into tools of prejudice and discrimination... This is not a new phenomenon. But the recent worldwide rise of populist politics is again empowering disturbing opinions about gender and racial differences that seek to misuse science to reduce the status of both groups and individuals in a systematic way. NightHeron (talk) 23:43, 16 March 2020 (UTC)

References

• Hello NightHeron, I would suggest striking Gould from your list because the source you are using has long since been discredited. Dr Gould claimed that measurements of human skulls by Dr Morton showing Europeans had larger brains than Africans were incorrect, even though he, Dr Gould, never measured the skulls himself. An independent team remeasured the skulls Morton had used and found that Morton’s original measurements were very accurate and found Dr Gould, in his study/book, almost every detail of his analysis is wrong. It has been claimed that Dr Gould may have deliberately falsified data due to his strong anti-racism views. One of his colleagues went as far as describing Dr Gould, now deceased, as a charlatan. That source may be a good example of scientific bias if not fraud. I suggest reading this source as well as this source.

  You provide a convincing case that there is academic disagreement between anthropologists and other fields such as neuroscience, neuropsychology, and geneticists and even disagreement within those fields when evidence by other editors is considered as well, but no evidence of a consensus in order to label a viewpoint fringe.

  This RfC question has already been answered in the peer reviewed literature twice. Wikipedians are not qualified to answer this question in a RfC survey. A survey of experts published this year, 2020, found only 16 percent of experts believed that the racial I.Q. gap is entirely due to environmental factors, the rest felt it was a mixture with 43 percent saying mostly genetics and 40 percent saying mostly environmental factors. Although you dispute this survey the results are quite similar to the results of a survey conducted 30 years ago which found very similar results with only a minority of 15 percent of researchers who subscribed to the I.Q. gap being entirely due to environmental factors whilst 45 percent felt it was best explained by a mixture of genetics and environmental factors. The fact two separate surveys by entirely different authors at different time periods reached the same conclusion suggests that the scientific opinion remains the same and as both surveys reached very similar conclusions it is very unlikely either of them were fraudulent or biased as you have suggested throughout this RfC.--Literaturegeek | T@1k? 05:07, 11 April 2020 (UTC)

You're once again making your own extreme bias obvious. Earlier in this discussion (see below) you claimed that Rindermann's "survey," which you regard as reliable, proved that "experts" believe that Richard Lynn produced the best quality research (your words) and Stephen Jay Gould to be of the lowest quality (your words). Now you're repeating that allegation about Stephen Jay Gould, but making it even nastier with claims of scientific fraud against him. How does one reply to such nuttiness? Stephen Jay Gould was one of the most respected and influential scientists of the 20th century. The US Library of Congress designated him a "Living Legend." Meanwhile, Lynn is one of the most notorious and aggressive promoters of Scientific racism. Just read the two men's BLPs. Yet in your opinion Lynn is the reliable one, and Gould is a fraud. Amazing! NightHeron (talk) 06:55, 11 April 2020 (UTC)

I am not qualified to accuse him of fraud. It was the sources that I linked to and asked you to read that accused him of this. Did you read them? It was an independent study by researchers who falsified Dr Gould’s study. My POV is that I recognise that this is a topic that is very sensitive and I wish the data and literature was different but it isn’t, so we cannot create a false scientific consensus. It goes against everything Wikipedia stands for. WP:SYN is a Policy, we cannot set it aside with an RfC. He was awarded the Library of Congress Living Legend title in 2000, many years before his research was falsified by independent researchers in 2011. I am a Wikipedian, I am not qualified to determine the reliability of Lynn, it was an RS, survey of experts, who made that determination. Anybody who has a scientific viewpoint that genetics contributes to racial differences in I.Q. will be accused of scientific racism even if their results and opinions are due to scientific data. Please strike your claim that I have an extreme bias, I have clearly and consistently argued for article content to follow WP:DUEWEIGHT and WP:NPOV. I am not the one trying to set aside core Wikipedia policies and label a major academic viewpoint fringe. Perhaps you should look in the mirror and accuse me of having an extreme bias.--Literaturegeek | T@1k? 07:24, 11 April 2020 (UTC)

I assume you didn't bother to read the article Stephen Jay Gould, in which an extensively-sourced paragraph discusses the 2011 allegations. You cite cherry-picked sources by defenders of scientific racism, who of course despise Gould and other mainstream critics of racialist fringe. NightHeron (talk) 07:40, 11 April 2020 (UTC)

Here's the paragraph: In 2011, a study conducted by six anthropologists criticized Gould's claim that Samuel Morton unconsciously manipulated his skull measurements, arguing that his analysis of Morton was influenced by his opposition to racism.[109][110][111] The group's paper was briefly reviewed in the journal Nature, which recommended a degree of caution, noting that while Gould's opposition to racism might have biased his interpretation of Morton's data, the paper's authors had biases of their own.[112] In 2015, the group's paper was critically reviewed in the journal Evolution & Development by philosopher of science Michael Weisberg, who argued that Gould's arguments were sound and that Morton's initial measurements were indeed tainted by racial bias.[113] Biologists and philosophers Jonathan Kaplan, Massimo Pigliucci, and Joshua Banta also published a critique of the groups's paper, arguing that many of its claims were misleading and the re-measurements were irrelevant to an analysis of Gould's arguments.[114] Anthropologist Paul Wolff Mitchell published an analysis of Morton's original, unpublished data, which neither Gould nor subsequent commentators had directly addressed, and concluded that while Gould's specific argument about Morton's unconscious bias in measurement is not supported upon closer examination, it was true, as Gould had claimed, that Morton's racial biases influenced how he reported and interpreted his measurements.[115] NightHeron (talk) 07:47, 11 April 2020 (UTC)

May I politely ask that you stop attacking professional academics as being racists? It is a WP:BLP violation to do so, you do not have a source that they are “defenders of scientific racism”. I was able to provide sources that Dr Gould, now deceased, is alleged by some of his colleagues to be an example of a single rogue academic. I can theoretically imagine a single rogue academic... but I do not believe all six anthropologists “despised” (your unsourced original research conspiracy theory) Dr Gould and conducted a conspiracy against him in a research study, risking their career and conscience in the process. Ah, I did not cherry pick those two sources, they were actually added to this RfC conversation weeks ago by another wikipedian and I then brought them to your attention. Thank you NightHeron for bringing to my attention that paragraph, it does show opinion on the credibility of Dr Gould is controversial and mixed. But this RfC has run for several weeks now without voters/commenters realising his credibility is debated by his colleagues. Tickle me has only just yesterday found fault in other sources you listed above. This is important because, with your post being the first post detailing the literature and you being the RfC poster, many voters relied upon your original research review analysis of the literature. This RfC really is a very good reason why Wikipedians are not qualified to reassess expert opinion and consensus. Additionally the closing admins are not qualified, per WP:NOR, to reassess the medical literature and declare Wikipedians to have a superior peer review process and expertise to that of the 2020 survey, that I linked above, of experts published in the Intelligence (journal). WP:IDONTLIKEIT votes and comments do not over rule WP:NOR. And really that should be the end of the discussion.--Literaturegeek | T@1k? 09:09, 12 April 2020 (UTC)

Please take your racist bullshit elsewhere. -JBL (talk) 14:41, 12 April 2020 (UTC)

I am sorry this area of academic research deeply offends you Joel, but there is no need to lash out with personal insults. I am sure you are a good and pleasant person under normal circumstances, but it really is not my fault this controversy exists in the academic reliable sources and that reliable sources and experts are divided, and it is not my fault wikipedia is meant to follow NPOV, DUEWEIGHT, NOR, etc. I have tried to remove your personal attack but you responded by reverting me and I then tried to resolve the problem of your repeated personal attacks on your talk page but you only escalated the insults to a higher level. I have been a member of Wikipedia since 2007 with many thousands of edits with zero edits to this topic area until I saw an AfD advertised two months ago and followed soon after by this RfC, so the race and intelligence topic is of no personal interest to me. If this RfC was reversed and the page was full of editors insisting that the environmental hypothesis is fringe, I would oppose it as strongly because that would violate WP policies and guidelines.--Literaturegeek | T@1k? 16:47, 12 April 2020 (UTC)

It may be published in reliable sources such an academic journal, but it is still UNDUE. That literature carries very little WEIGHT. ---Steve Quinn (talk) 17:40, 12 April 2020 (UTC)

What sources are you considering Steve Quinn that represent your DUE position? I mean JBL, a mathematician, just states it’s “racist bullshit” and you say it is “UnDUE”. NightHeron’s 2017 source above actually says “group differences may provide sound scientific evidence” which basically provides evidence against this RfC, I am surprised she listed it. The 1994 AAA source NightHeron provided is too old to discredit newer sources, but in any event it just says that intelligence is not biologically determined by race, which nobody here disagrees with as there are average to highly intelligent people in all racial groups. Only a very small fraction of DNA is unique to one race or another, the dispute in reliable sources is whether certain genes and combinations of genes occur or likely occur more or less frequently amongst racial groups, with regard to favouring or disfavouring the frequency of average to high intelligence amongst racial groups. NightHeron’s 2019 AAA source does not even mention intelligence or IQ and so is of very limited value. Another RfC commenter pointed out that the book by Jay Joseph that NightHeron referenced above has been criticised for being anti-science by a credible researcher in this area.

From NightHeron’s sources and other editor’s sources below here is where there is a consensus: there is no dispute at all amongst reliable sources that all people should be seen as an individual and thus have equal opportunities in education and the workforce, in other words there is a consensus against racial discrimination. There is a consensus amongst reliable sources that significant gaps in average IQ exist along racial lines (or geographic heritage lines if you prefer that term). Researchers routinely disagree regarding causation but there is a consensus in reliable sources that both environmental and genetic arguments have strengths and weaknesses with further research routinely recommended. In other words the scientific consensus that this RfC claims exists in fact does not exist at all, not even close, and thus neither side of the academic debate is fringe. Can you show me where I am going wrong? I am open to convincing evidence of fault and changing my mind.--Literaturegeek | T@1k? 15:02, 19 April 2020 (UTC)

In the 2017 Nature editorial that you misleadingly quoted, the mention of the usefulness of group differences refers to the preceding sentences commenting on the importance of demographic groups in clinical trials. It has nothing to do with race or intelligence, and so I did not include those earlier sentences when quoting from the editorial. The next sentence in the editorial says that other types of claims about group differences are "a blunt instrument of pseudoscience, and one used to justify actions and policies that condense claimed group differences into tools of prejudice and discrimination against individuals - witness last weekend's violence by white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia..." The Nature editorial is crystal clear about what they mean. The blunt instrument of pseudoscience refers to academic theories of white supremacy. So you've got it totally backwards when you claim that the editorial "provides evidence against this RfC." NightHeron (talk) 22:49, 19 April 2020 (UTC)

Oh, I did summarise that part of the Nature editorial (and the dozens of other sources cited in this RfC) where I said there is scientific consensus against racial discrimination and that people of all races should be treated as an individual and given equal opportunities in education and work. Reread my above comment please. By extension, of course that means it would be pseudoscientific to claim a scientific basis, for example, to justify discrimination against a person based on their racial background rather than their job qualifications when applying for a job, etc. This RfC is not asking about pseudoscience and racial discrimination though. That 2017 Naturesource does not actually mention IQ or intelligence so carries little weight in this RfC anyway.--Literaturegeek | T@1k? 23:15, 19 April 2020 (UTC)

(Edit conflict) NightHeron, you're seeing what you choose to see. I just looked at the editorial in question, and the point that it's making (especially in the last paragraph) is that differences between group averages do not indicate anything useful about individuals, and thus research into race differences can never logically justify racial discrimination. The "pseudoscience" it's referring to is the belief that racially discriminatory policies are scientifically justified. The fact that these policies are not scientifically justified has also been made by several hereditarians, including Eysenck and Jensen.

More generally, as a few other editors have pointed out, you need to recognize that several of the sources you're citing here do not say what you're claiming they do, and you are violating the restriction against misrepresenting sources. 2600:1004:B12E:AD49:147A:3CF7:7A6C:C92C (talk) 23:32, 19 April 2020 (UTC)

Yeah, NightHeron misinterpreted and misrepresented (I think in good faith) the 1994 source as well and other non-expert wikipedians appear to have been influenced by these misinterpretations and it has messed up this RfC. I actually thought about requesting admin assistance for oversight and possible block for repeated BLP violations (unsourced accusations multiple academics were white supremacists etc) but I figured it would look like I was trying to bias the RfC outcome so just left the BLP violations as they are and hoped NightHeron would stop which she didn’t. I don’t think ArbCom enforcement can be sought, re. that editing restriction you linked to, in the middle of an RfC without it looking like the reporter has an ulterior motive.--Literaturegeek | T@1k? 23:42, 19 April 2020 (UTC)

@Literaturegeek: I don't agree admins would conclude that, but perhaps that's just because I have limited experience with arbitration enforcement. The RFC has been open for 34 days and will (hopefully) be closed soon, so most of the discussion that's going to happen in this RFC has presumably already happened. If NightHeron were to be topic banned at this point, I doubt most admins would think that his absence between now and whenever the RFC is closed will have much effect on the overall consensus here.

I admit to having an ulterior motive, but it does not concern this RFC. I've had to deal with NightHeron's disruption on the article talk page for the past four months, and whenever this RFC concludes the same behavior there will presumably continue. This has been a problem not only for me, but for other editors as well (for example see the comment by SMcCandlish here). If you can give any help addressing this long-term issue, that would be greatly appreciated. 2600:1004:B12E:AD49:147A:3CF7:7A6C:C92C (talk) 00:22, 20 April 2020 (UTC)

I would be interested in the thoughts of SMcCandlish in this matter as I really prefer to resolve disruptive behaviour without ArbCom enforcement/administrative action, much rather prefer diplomacy first.--Literaturegeek | T@1k? 01:23, 20 April 2020 (UTC)

No, I'm afraid it's you two who are misinterpreting the sources. The purveyors of scientific racism have not been mere theoreticians. They have persistently advocated right-wing discriminatory policies based on their theories. For example, Jensen's original article that caused all the furor was written in opposition to social programs to help disadvantaged children. Lynn has spoken sympathetically of the view that all foreign aid to developing countries should stop, and that people living in those countries should suffer and eventually die out like a genetically inferior species. Rindermann has spoken against immigration. That's what Nature obviously has in mind when the editorial speaks of the blunt instrument of pseudoscience that is used to justify...prejudice and discrimination. NightHeron (talk) 00:02, 20 April 2020 (UTC)

Unless I am misinterpreting things, if you read the bottom part of the relevant section on the reliable sources noticeboard it seems that Lynn does not hold these views but he was, in 1974, reviewing a book that did hold these views and that the part where he said “according to [name of book author]” was deleted to make it look like it was his own views. Here is the specific diff I am referring to. This is a toxic topic area and I know there are some poisonous far right wing views by a very small minority of academics. I don’t know about Jenson and social programs to comment. But we are getting off topic, this RfC is not about discrimination.--Literaturegeek | T@1k? 00:18, 20 April 2020 (UTC)

Here's the quote from Richard Lynn, provided by the IP-editor at RSN: If the evolutionary process is to bring its benefits, it has to be allowed to operate effectively. This means that incompetent societies have to be allowed to go to the wall. This is something we in advanced societies do not at present face up to and the reason for this, according to Cattell, is that we have become too soft-hearted. For instance, the foreign aid which we give to the under-developed world is a mistake, akin to keeping going incompetent species like the dinosaurs which are not fit for the competitive struggle for existence. What is called for here is not genocide, the killing off of the populations of incompetent cultures. But we do need to think realistically in terms of "phasing out" of such peoples. Lynn is favorably reviewing a book, presenting its racist arguments with great sympathy; and the last sentence, which is in the reviewer's voice, makes Lynn's agreement with Cattell obvious.

By the way, I am not intimidated by false charges of "disruption" or "BLP violation" made by you or the IP-editor, or by threats of taking action. I know that the IP-editor has twice complained about me behind my back (i.e., without notification) to selected admins, but without effect. Perhaps more than twice, but I'm not computer-savvy enough to track edits by frequently changing IP-addresses. NightHeron (talk) 01:18, 20 April 2020 (UTC)

Hi NightHeron, yeah I did qualify my above message with “unless I am misinterpreting” because I was, and still somewhat am, a little confused as to what and how much was Lynn’s opinion versus the author of the book he is reviewing. The last quoted sentence is unsettling and does sound like it might well be his opinion. I don’t want to go down the road of admin actions to be honest.--Literaturegeek | T@1k? 01:30, 20 April 2020 (UTC)

I read the whole 1974 book review and it is a summary of the book, not Lynn’s personal view. So I have struck my earlier thoughts. The use of the word “we” is a summary of the opinion of book’s author with regard to society. So yeah Lynn has been misquoted, grossly by certain sources, the deletion of evidence that he was doing a book review whilst being misquoted supports this conclusion. Our article on Lynn might also need to be rewritten wrt to these claims. I personally think you should strike some of your comments about Lynn. Lynn does though seem to respect the author as a fellow intellectual, albeit controversial one, based on his introductory sentence, if that means anything.--Literaturegeek | T@1k? 02:10, 20 April 2020 (UTC)

Thanks for linking to the full review, so that anyone reading this RfC discussion can easily read it. It's full of praise and admiration for Cattell's book and not a word of criticism. Lynn enthusiastically describes Cattell's extremist POV with no hint of the slightest disagreement. NightHeron (talk) 02:26, 20 April 2020 (UTC)

You are welcome. Maybe you are right, maybe you are wrong or maybe the truth is somewhere in the middle, the closing admin(s) can click on the link, if needed, and decide. Thanks for the discussion, time for me to sign out. Stay safe.--Literaturegeek | T@1k? 02:32, 20 April 2020 (UTC)

I had another look at the book review since your post above and I think you are correct that Lynn should have included criticism or disagreement to his review and not described the psychologist so favourably. I know if I were reviewing that book I would have reviewed it much differently. Although the book review was in 1974, academic attitudes and scientific knowledge were a lot different then. In any event it doesn’t help Lynn’s reputation.--Literaturegeek | T@1k? 10:12, 20 April 2020 (UTC)

For clarification: You mean Lynn, not Flynn. There's a big difference. Thanks. NightHeron (talk) 11:41, 20 April 2020 (UTC)

Typo, thanks, fixed.--Literaturegeek | T@1k? 12:10, 20 April 2020 (UTC)

• Yes per the above. XOR'easter (talk) 00:28, 17 March 2020 (UTC)
• Yes. It's clear that this is at variance with the mainstream scientific consensus. —David Eppstein (talk) 00:53, 17 March 2020 (UTC)
• No At the risk of somebody inevitably yelling at me as being racist, there is a big difference between the above statements quoted from the American Anthropological Association and American Psychologist and the statement "genetic differences in intelligence along racial lines is a fringe viewpoint". In particular, the statement "deeply concerned by recent public discussions which imply that intelligence is biologically determined by race", claims the opposite connection; people trying to determine intelligence based on race (which obviously isn't true). On an individual level you can't say anything definitive about a person's IQ based on the groups they come from (there is a normal distribution for all groups, which allows for any IQ). However, there are measurable differences in IQ between groups when discussing statistical averages (the bell curves are different shapes, often have different means). Whether these differences are entirely due to environmental conditions, or whether there is a genetic component has not been solved definitively, largely due to the difficulty in genetically distinguishing 'race' anyway (as there is obviously significant overlap in genetics between groups); note that the statement from the American Psychologist says this as well. Sources are in agreement that there is no definitive proof of a genetic component of IQ between races, but that doesn't mean that there isn't legitimate discussion about it and legitimate research into that exact question. It is known that intelligence is heritable, and also it is known that subgroups of any population that are in any way genetically isolated have variation from other subgroups. Its unreasonable to assume that all sub-groups of a population will have identical levels of any inheritable trait. And it is unreasonable to say that is a fringe viewpoint. That all being said, it might be a fringe viewpoint to say "that there is definitive proof of certain races having higher IQ than others". That isn't what the RfC proposes though, so I have to disagree based on its vagueness. As written, the results of this RfC could be applied too broadly to censor discussion and coverage of legitimate research. — Insertcleverphrasehere ^{(or here)}_{(click me!)} 00:57, 17 March 2020 (UTC)
• Yes And pseudoscience. Race (human categorization): Modern scholarship regards race as a social construct, an identity which is assigned based on rules made by society. While partially based on physical similarities within groups, race does not have an inherent physical or biological meaning --Hipal/Ronz (talk) 01:43, 17 March 2020 (UTC)

  Just about every government in the world uses race in their statistics. While race IS a social construct, social constructs can also have population averages. For example, it is commonly accurately stated that white incomes in the US are higher than black incomes. (Some or all of this difference is surely due to racism.) But the fact that it is possible to say "white incomes in the US are higher than black incomes" shows that socially-constructed categories can still have averages. Another case would be gender; also socially constructed, and yet it would also clearly be true to say that female-gendered people are more likely to be pregnant. MaximumIdeas (talk) 03:00, 17 March 2020 (UTC)

  No, the distinction woman vs man is biologically delineated, not socially constructed. Men don't get pregnant. There is no biological delineation between races, and the meaning of racial terms such as "black" varies in different countries and different historical periods. Some racial terms that are used in the US (such as Hispanic or Latino) are not even used internationally as racial designations. NightHeron (talk) 11:55, 17 March 2020 (UTC)

• Comment you are cutting a wide swath here, as was recently tried twice at WP:RSN. The spectrum of fringe theories might be useful reading ...there is an approximate demarcation between pseudoscience and questionable science, and they merit careful treatment. What exactly do you mean by these authors are fringe and treated in accordance with WP:FRINGE? Have you read the guideline: The governing policies regarding fringe theories are the three core content policies, Neutral point of view, No original research, and Verifiability. Jointly these say that articles should not contain any novel analysis or synthesis, that material likely to be challenged needs a reliable source, and that all majority and significant-minority views published in reliable sources should be represented fairly and proportionately. Should any inconsistency arise between this guideline and the content policies, the policies take precedence. By all means, treat your article in accordance with WP:FRINGE, but that guideline does not support what you seem to be trying here. fiveby (talk) 02:06, 17 March 2020 (UTC)

  To clarify, "treated in accordance with WP:FRINGE" means avoiding FALSEBALANCE. As explained in WP:FRINGE: When discussing topics that reliable sources say are pseudoscientific or fringe theories, editors should be careful not to present the pseudoscientific fringe views alongside the scientific or academic consensus as though they are opposing but still equal views. NightHeron (talk) 02:19, 17 March 2020 (UTC)

  NightHeron, People will inevitably point to this RfC to say that discussing race in relation to intelligence or IQ is pseudoscience or 'banned'. That simply isn't empirically accurate. I understand what you are trying to do here, and I support it in principle, but the wording used above is far too vague and will be abused. — Insertcleverphrasehere ^{(or here)}_{(click me!)} 02:41, 17 March 2020 (UTC)

  Insertcleverphrasehere: If they just look at my opening statement, they'll read: What I'm asking for here is not a statement opposing all research into the topic, but rather a statement characterizing a specific conclusion as contrary to scientific consensus. Notice that I emphasized not. Avoiding false balance is not the same thing as banning something. NightHeron (talk) 03:03, 17 March 2020 (UTC)

  NightHeron you have a good argument for false balance in that article, but are maybe approaching it the wrong way? The excessive detail and presentation read as if WP is making a case for a viewpoint, rather than describing it. A blanket labeling as pseudoscience would be difficult to support, but it's a no-brainer this is questionable science, which should be handled with care according to the guideline. Tighter summaries and leaving detail to the child articles would probably help, more of an overview of the subject and let the reader follow links if they like. So yeah, treat as questionable science per WP:FRINGE. fiveby (talk) 03:49, 17 March 2020 (UTC)

  Insertcleverphrasehere, I am sorry about the length, which I realize comes close to WP:WALLOFTEXT. But I felt that I had to include many sources in order to show that consensus regards racial supremacist claims as pseudoscience. Those claims are not merely questionable science. They rest on a sequence of assumptions. Perhaps the notion that whatever IQ measures should be labeled by the loaded term intelligence is questionable but not pseudo. However, some of the other assumptions -- that races are biologically delineated, that a gene for intelligence will someday be found, that there's any reason at all to think that when such genes are (hypothetically) found it will turn out that Africans and African Americans have fewer of them -- are definitely pseudoscience. NightHeron (talk) 11:37, 17 March 2020 (UTC)

  Well, there is a good policy-based argument for cleaning up that article, if you want to ignore that and continue with these broad and simplistic assertions you probably won't make any headway. Take the accusations of promoting "scientific racism" and "white supremacy" to WP:AE or WP:ANI, they are not appropriate here and certainly not appropriate for an RFC. If you want to say all these authors are engaged in pseudoscience then provide proof. I assume they have submitted to peer review and are published, have critics and supporters within the scientific community. Not one of your sources above supports the label of pseudoscience, and WP editors are not qualified to make such broad generalizations. You are going down the same path that has made that such a crappy article, engaging in the debate rather than simply describing it. fiveby (talk) 13:19, 17 March 2020 (UTC)

  NightHeron, the statement "a statement characterizing a specific conclusion as contrary to scientific consensus." Is a horrifying precedent. You are specifically trying to shut down sources that have a specific viewpoint, regardless of where they are from, or where they are published. If something is published in a reputable journal, as many of the sources posted by others here have, then there simply isn't fringe. Forget what I said about supporting you in principle. — Insertcleverphrasehere ^{(or here)}_{(click me!)} 19:47, 22 March 2020 (UTC)

Don't worry, I don't have to "forget" your "support in principle". I realized from the beginning that I never had it -- as soon as you started your "no" vote rationale by "At the risk of somebody inevitably yelling at me as being racist," which of course nobody did, and then ended it by accusing me of wanting to "censor discussion," which is not what WP:FRINGE does. Such self-dramatization and accusations do not contribute to rational discussion.

No one is advocating censorship, so please stop throwing that word at me. For example, Wikipedia regards climate change denialism as contrary to scientific consensus, that is, as fringe. That does not mean censoring it; it just means referring to it as what it is, in other words, avoiding FALSEBALANCE. Climate change denialism has sometimes appeared in reputable journals, even in recent years. That doesn't mean it's not fringe.

You're reacting to this RfC in an extreme way -- a horrifying precedent (your emphasis) -- and are again accusing me of censorship (trying to shut down sources). That's nonsense.

I won't repeat what I've said elsewhere about the different logical leaps involved in reaching the conclusion that some races are genetically endowed with less intelligence than other races. That POV has been condemned by the American Association of Physical Anthropologists, the American Anthropological Association, an editorial in Nature, and elsewhere.

Rejecting this RfC in practice would mean that we'll continue to see a FALSEBALANCE on scientific racism in certain articles, and it will be difficult if not impossible to change that through routine editing. For Wikipedia to allow its articles, including ones that have over 1000 pageviews/day, to be used to effectively promote fringe views on race -- treating them as if they were mainstream -- is shocking to many people both on and off wiki, not just the Southern Poverty Law Center, which specifically monitors for alt-right disinformation. NightHeron (talk) 21:45, 22 March 2020 (UTC)

NightHeron, No offence meant, but I don't see a false balance here. The article in question isn't overrun with white nationalist sources or anything. The sources that others have cited in this discussion make it clear that this is still an avenue of legitimate discussion and that the scientific community currently is divided on what factors play a role in the observed differences between populations (environment vs genetic). This is an open question, and a messy one with a lot of conflicting research and data; muddied further by the definition of race vs clade vs population etc.. Trying to call all research that comes to a certain conclusion that you personally don't like 'fringe', even if published in a reputable source, is simply a violation of NPOV. The fact that you WP:JUSTDONTLIKEIT is a separate issue entirely. — Insertcleverphrasehere ^{(or here)}_{(click me!)} 00:18, 23 March 2020 (UTC)

• No. While OP mentions books criticizing scientific racism, which we all agree is bad, there is no evidence presented here that all five authors in particular are WP:FRINGE or that they practice scientific racism. That they have recently been published in RS sources is evidence otherwise. In general, we also must hold a particularly high standard for declaring individual persons -- and especially academics -- WP:FRINGE. Additionally: the definition of scientific racism, per Wikipedia, is using science in order "to support or justify racism (racial discrimination), racial inferiority, or racial superiority". We can all perhaps agree that the data is clear that different groups differ on average in certain traits such as height and medical predisposition. But we all know that to say that empirically one group is taller does NOT therefore mean they are superior. We should know, also, that to say one group has a higher IQ does NOT mean they are superior. And clearly, to say some groups are more likely to have "sickle cells" which both help prevent malaria but also increase the risk of other conditions does NOT mean that group is superior or inferior. When a scientist comes to any of the previously-stated empirical conclusions, one reaction may be to assume they came to such conclusions in order to make some races seem inferior/superior (scientific racism); but another possible assumption is that they are stating it because they are RS-published scientists and found this to be the true distribution. Therefore, the kind of evidence that would convince me that any of the 5 above-condemned authors are WP:FRINGE would be statements from them along the ugly lines of what we see from neo-Nazis and racial supremacists in general, who are absolutely fringe. But simply publishing data in RS sources (however heated and uncomfortable the subject) does not make all of a person's work inherently fringe. Further, I'd note that many academics know this, and therefore there is still an ongoing lively discussion about this topic in the academic literature: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C39&as_ylo=2016&q=race+and+iq&btnG= MaximumIdeas (talk) 03:00, 17 March 2020 (UTC)
  • A Google Scholar search is going to turn up "lively discussion" in garbage journals and even non-peer-reviewed material. It's not a particularly helpful indicator in circumstances like these. XOR'easter (talk) 16:12, 17 March 2020 (UTC)
• Comment I have problem with both sides, some say (for example) blacks are not as good at maths because its "white maths" (this is not being less intelligent, rather the mind works differently (apparently). Yet others say that saying blacks are not as good at maths might be (or is a sign off) racism. Yet both statements are coming from black spokes people. Thus whilst the claim that whites or more intelgent thre may be a case for "different" intelligence.Slatersteven (talk) 16:26, 17 March 2020 (UTC)
• Yes. The claim that racial lines are genetic is fringe. Full stop. Race is a sociological construct. jps (talk) 16:31, 17 March 2020 (UTC)
• Yes. Fringe, but not necessarily "pseudoscience", which is a different, stronger claim. Although some of it is clearly also that. ApLundell (talk) 03:29, 18 March 2020 (UTC)
• Yes per sources listed above by the nom (and some of it is also pseudoscience). Levivich ^{[dubious – discuss]} 06:28, 18 March 2020 (UTC)
• Yes for reasons already stated. I am strongly opposed to no-platforming but even more opposed to pseudo-science. --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 12:19, 18 March 2020 (UTC)
• No OP is right to want to find and label pseudo-scientific alt right views as Fringe. However, I worry that we might be missing the target by considering genetic differences in intelligence between races as fringe. A fringe theory must significantly depart from mainstream scientific views, yet the possibility of racial differences in intelligence is taken seriously by maisntream scholars. Take Oxford geneticist David Reich for example. In his book Who We Are and How We Got Here, David discusses how genetic variants affecting cognitive and behavioural traits are found to differ in human populations, even aligning to the social construct that is race. He makes a similar argument in a piece for the New York Times, a newspaper not known for its support of fringe extreme right theories. More broadly than anecdotes of respected mainstream scholars, there is empirical evidence that the scientific consensus takes the issue of race and intelligence seriously. In this paper the authors sent a survey to scientists who published at least one paper in journal covering cognitive ability between 2010 and 2013. 85% of responders were psychologists and only 13% were right wing. Despite this only 15% of the experts though that black-white differences in intelligence were entirely caused by environmental factors. Given that so many mainstream scientists believe taking this racial differences seriously, let alone believe it, suggests the topic cannot be considered fringe. Hayeksplosive (talk) 13:43, 18 March 2020 (UTC)

  — Hayeksplosive (talk • contribs) has made few or no other edits outside this topic.

• No to overbroad RfC It's unpopular, but some of these folks are being published by university presses and in well-regarded journals. That means the academic community is still willing to listen, which almost has to mean it's not fringe. That said, a lot of these folks are fringe-NR, certainly. I think we have to argue these on a case-by-case basis. --valereee (talk) 13:02, 18 March 2020 (UTC)

  ETA: ended with a weak consensus that research into race and intelligence is not fringe. What I'm asking for here is not a statement opposing all research into the topic, but rather a statement characterizing a specific conclusion as contrary to scientific consensus. This makes me very uncomfortable because it seems to be saying we'll report on research, but only if it says what we think it should say. If someone's research goes counter to our beliefs, we declare it to be fringe. --valereee (talk) 13:25, 18 March 2020 (UTC)

  Valereee, I'd like to try to change your mind through bludgeoning and guilt-tripping reasoned discussion. What would you need to see to be convinced that "genetic differences in intelligence along racial lines" is fringe? For example, you wrote, "some of these folks are being published ... That means the academic community is still willing to listen, which almost has to mean it's not fringe". What if I showed you that some of these folks...

  1. Were being published but are no longer being published
  2. Were published, but since then responses and critiques have been published, which describe the original published work as pseudoscience, fringe, not accepted by the scientific community, etc.
  3. Were published, but have since been kicked off of the editorial boards of journals, lost academic positions, or otherwise become pariahs in the scientific community, as a result of what they were publishing
  4. Are still being published, but admit in their own published works that their work is not accepted by the scientific community
  5. Are still being published, but only as an example of scholarship that is pseudoscience, fringe, or otherwise not accepted by the scientific community

  I don't want to snow you with examples. Would any of the above change your mind? Please reply "YES" for more or "STOP" to end these messages. Levivich ^{[dubious – discuss]} 18:35, 18 March 2020 (UTC)

  Levivich, hahaha. It's not that I think that in general this is reasonable stuff. It's ugly shit and I find it repugnant. But, for instance, Gottfredson on intelligence has been published recently. She apparently is not considered a complete loon by other academics. The key here is some of these people, which is why I think we need to address these case-by-case. --valereee (talk) 18:50, 18 March 2020 (UTC)

  @Valereee: I agree with case-by-case, I just think that the particular cases noted in this RFC are backed by sources. For example, although Gottfredson is published, she's not well-cited, and I think there are plenty of sources (which are cited more often) that consider her a loon (or similar). I put some of them at #Gottfredson below. Levivich ^{[dubious – discuss]} 21:54, 18 March 2020 (UTC)

  Levivich, I totally get it. I feel like if academics are arguing against something rather than simply ignoring it, we should be covering it. --valereee (talk) 22:33, 18 March 2020 (UTC)

• No There are two parts to this. The first is understanding why this RfC was filed. A couple of highly motivated editors over at the Race and Intelligence page have been pursuing various legal strategies to win their case. As I explained to an admin recently (Barkeep49), these so far have included: 1) try to delete the sources to the hereditarian viewpoint one at a time citing seemingly randomly chosen or made up justifications, 2) try to get the entire page deleted, 3) try to get the opposing editors blocked or banned, and 4) try to rename the article in violation of WP:NPOV. Their efforts at moves (1) and (2) both seems to have failed. So far with (3), Peregrine_Fisher was indef topic banned, and Oldstone James have been blocked (I think one year). User NightHeron (sorry, this was false, it was Dlthewave) filed a motion against Jweiss11, but it closed with a warning to both filer and accused. With two active editors removed, and one warned, they can continue their work on (1) and (4) with less resistance. As it happens, (2) succeeded and the page was deleted (this is the 4th time this attempt was tried!), but it was then restored after 3 uninvolved admins took part in a deletion review and overruled the deletion. The attempt to rename the article contrary to WP:NPOV was closed as no consensus. So, this RfC is now the 5th such legalistic attempt. While I cannot say exactly what the motivation is of these editors, they are very opposed to Wikipedia summarizing the academic literature on this topic. They would much prefer if Wikipedia did not mentioned the academic literature and instead provided summaries of journalists such as Angela Saini. I am not saying, of course, one cannot find academics with similar opinions, but such opinions are uncommon among the experts, i.e. intelligence researchers.
  This brings me to the second point. There is a wealth of reliable academic sources about what experts think of this topic. Every mainstream statement and textbook on the topic states that there is no consensus about the cause of these population (race, ethnic) differences in intelligence (IQ scores, achievement, aptitude, skills and so on). These sources have been posted many times on the talk page, see e.g. talk page on this proposal to insert a section they removed recently (no consensus was there for the removal, it was implemented by edit warring). Not only are these many textbooks, there is a recent anonymous survey of researchers in the field. This is similar to those carried out in climate science, which has a similar politically related controversy about expert opinion, which Wikipedia covers here. This survey, published in high ranking Elsevier journal by senior academics (Rindermann et al 2020), found no support for the supposed consensus that NightHeron and friends speak about, and which sources like Saini claim there is. Thus, just as the authors say, and has been noted for decades, there is a strong media in who voices their opinion publicly, such that public opinion in newspapers and the like is often saying there is a consensus against genetic causation, but the actual academic literature shows no such consensus. For instance, just a month ago or so, three professors published a new review about the genetic hypothesis in another Elsevier journal (Winegard et al 2020). Wikipedia must follow what high quality sources say. No amount of arguing about whether something is racist or not on page talks can overrule what reliable sources say. This should be clear when recently admin Barkeep49 made a rule that this page now only allows extra high quality sources, academic, not journalistic ones. I welcome such increased strictness as it will make it easier to avoid these useless debates, and focus on what matters: building an encyclopedia, not waging some political war of information. With that said, I hope editors here will see what the situation is so we can return to good work. This article is a bit out of date, there are many newer sources that can be used. ^_^ AndewNguyen (talk) 13:18, 18 March 2020 (UTC)

  AndewNguyen (talk • contribs) has made few or no other edits outside this topic. [Added by Levivich]

  I object to this kind of attempt at undermining the opinions of others by falsely claiming they have made few other edits. I looked up my edit history now, and it turns out I have edited almost 200 pages! Almost all of them are related to my home country of Norway, improving various stubs. I suggest Levivich focus on the case at hand instead of personal attacks. Very rude! --AndewNguyen (talk) 05:49, 19 March 2020 (UTC)

  There's one detail that AndewNguyen is leaving out here. When presented with sources such as the two linked above, the argument that NightHeron and others have repeatedly made is that none of these sources are reliable. In this discussion and this one, it was (unsuccessfully) argued that all sources presenting the the hereditarian viewpoint are inherently unreliable, even when they are published by respectable academic publishers such as Cambridge University Press or journals published by the American Psychological Association.

  NightHeron has continued to make this argument even after the RS noticeboard had reached a consensus opposing him. One of the sources discussed at RSN was a college-level textbook by Earl B. Hunt from Cambridge University Press, and NightHeron argued that when this source gives credence to the hereditarian view, "his textbook is not RS for this statement, although it is for other things."

  Now, in this discussion, the argument being made is that the hereditarian viewpoint should be categorized as "fringe" because the majority of reliable sources are opposed to it. Well, you can certainly make it appear that way if you declare (as NightHeron has done) that all sources presenting the viewpoint are by definition unreliable. But if I wanted to, I could try to categorize almost any viewpoint as "fringe" by using this type of circular logic. I doubt this trick would work in most other topics at Wikipedia, but some people seem to get especially emotional about this particular topic, so we'll see whether it works in this case. 2600:1004:B161:9F7C:8C8F:421E:CE7:4052 (talk) 13:58, 18 March 2020 (UTC)

  — 2600:1004:B161:9F7C:8C8F:421E:CE7:4052 (talk) has made few or no other edits outside this topic.

• With the arrival here of two of the most persistent defenders of white supremacist sources on Race and intelligence, I see that we are entering the WP:WALLOFTEXT phase of the discussion. But I will try to be brief, answering only the false accusations against me. First, I did not propose that Wikipedia stop covering white supremacist claims. I do not support censorship; I am opposed to it. Following WP:FRINGE does not mean censoring or banning anything. It means calling it what it is. Second, AndewNguyen falsely states that I filed a motion against Jweiss11. I did not file a motion at WP:AE or anywhere else against Jweiss11 or any of the other editors of that page. As someone who's been editing for less than 2 years, I leave it up to experienced editors to deal with misconduct by the alt-right or anyone else. NightHeron (talk) 14:49, 18 March 2020 (UTC)

Sorry, minor mix up with you and Dlthewave, a similar user on the same page. I also mistakenly linked to the wrong archive. It is this one. This error has not much to do with the content in the comment. AndewNguyen (talk) 06:00, 19 March 2020 (UTC)

• Yes. It is well known that racial categories don't have genetic basis. To claim otherwise is fringe. To then attempt to build more theories on top of that flawed assumption is also fringe. - MrOllie (talk) 13:35, 18 March 2020 (UTC)

  Were you aware that Wikipedia has an entire article, Race and genetics, about the correlation between racial categories and genetic variation? 2600:1004:B161:9F7C:8C8F:421E:CE7:4052 (talk) 14:11, 18 March 2020 (UTC)

  I'm aware that Wikipedia has a number of fringe articles, yes. But the existence of other crappy articles does not mean that we can't fix the crappy article at hand. - MrOllie (talk) 17:36, 18 March 2020 (UTC)

  Have you looked at the sources for that article? One of the major sources to cover this correlation is a special issue of the journal Nature Genetics devoted to the topic, including no less an authority than Francis Collins, the director of the Human Genome Project. Here is how Collins summarized the special issue's conclusions:

Well-intentioned statements over the past few years, some coming from geneticists, might lead one to believe there is no connection whatsoever between self-identified race or ethnicity and the frequency of particular genetic variants. Increasing scientific evidence, however, indicates that genetic variation can be used to make a reasonably accurate prediction of geographic origins of an individual, at least if that individual's grandparents all came from the same part of the world. As those ancestral origins in many cases have a correlation, albeit often imprecise, with self-identified race or ethnicity, it is not strictly true that race or ethnicity has no biological connection. It must be emphasized, however, that the connection is generally quite blurry because of multiple other nongenetic connotations of race, the lack of defined boundaries between populations and the fact that many individuals have ancestors from multiple regions of the world.

With respect to human genetics, Francis Collins is about as non-fringe as it's possible to get. Your comments are a perfect example of the problem with determining the answer to a project-wide NPOV question in a RFC. Unlike the earlier discussion in 2010, in which all of the participants had some level of familiarity with the topic, it's clear that the decision in this case is generally being made by people who haven't looked at the source literature, except perhaps for those sources cherry-picked by NightHeron to support his position in his opening statement. How can a random selection of users who haven't read any of this literature be an accurate judge of what is or isn't fringe or NPOV? 2600:1004:B14B:E50A:B880:292B:8DEF:3B45 (talk) 19:51, 18 March 2020 (UTC)

It's quite amazing that you can take that extremely qualified quote, which goes to great pains to explain that any connection is 'blurry' and 'imprecise', as in any way supporting the contention that race and intelligence might have something to do with each other. Your assertion that anyone who disagrees with you is ignorant is noted, but unpersuasive. - MrOllie (talk) 20:55, 18 March 2020 (UTC)

In your previous comment, you claimed that Wikipedia's race and genetics article is a "fringe article". I brought up the Nature genetics special issue for the purpose of pointing out what a bizarre statement from you that was, not because the Nature genetics special issue has anything to do with intelligence. (It doesn't, it's only about race and genetics.) Would you like me to list some sources about race and intelligence specifically? 2600:1004:B14B:E50A:B880:292B:8DEF:3B45 (talk) 21:39, 18 March 2020 (UTC)

• No There is widespread agreement among psychologists who do intelligence research that there are average differences between groups in intelligence. Sometimes they use "race," sometimes "cline," sometimes "population." These are different names for the same thing: groups tend to genetically cluster in interesting ways reflecting their evolutionary lineage. Are the IQ gaps genetic? There is disagreement about this. Disagreement drives science forward. But to label one side of a scientific disagreement "fringe" is a way of attempting to discredit it. As David Reich and Jim Flynn have argued, it is an empirical question whether the distribution of genes that influence intelligence is evenly distributed across all human populations. Only scientific investigation can settle that issue, not Wikipedians deeming one point of view offensive or "fringe." DoctorOfBiology (talk) 15:34, 18 March 2020 (UTC)

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• No A recent anonymous survey of experts on intelligence (members of the International Society for Intelligence Research and authors of papers in journals like Intelligence and Cognitive Psychology) found that only 14% think genes play no role in the Black-White IQ gap in the US (Rindermann et al., "Survey of Expert Opinion on Intelligence," Intelligence, 2020, vol. 78, Figure 3). Even if the environmentalists are right, it's clear that this is an open debate among mainstream scientists. Pangolin2019 (talk) 15:30, 18 March 2020 (UTC)

  — Pangolin2019 (talk • contribs) has made few or no other edits outside this topic.

• Yes per OP. Editors have repeatedly cited a certain RSN discussion as proof that hereditarian works by Hunt and Rindermann are reliable sources because they are published by a reliable publisher, however that same discussion concluded that they are also fringe: "... The discussion indicated that there is a lack of sources supporting or opposing the notion that the views in these books are fringe, though when a viewpoint does not have wide support, we do treat it as fringe, and do not give it undue weight. That is, we can give the views of Rindermann and Hunt, sourced to their books published by the Cambridge University Press, but take care not to promote their views as widely accepted unless/until sources can be found which indicate their views are widely accepted." –dlthewave ☎ 15:41, 18 March 2020 (UTC)
• No There is no convincing argument for describing the hypothesis that genes contribute to racial differences in intelligence as a "fringe viewpoint". This hypothesis has been discussed in many mainstream sources, including both scholarly books and scientific journals. A viewpoint should not be labelled "fringe" just because it is politically controversial. Mr Butterbur (talk) 17:03, 18 March 2020 (UTC)

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• Yes. The idea that race (whatever that is supposed to mean) is determinant of intelligence (however that might be defined or measured) is fringe. This is not about whether intelligence has a genetic component, but whether the genetic component correlates with so-called "race". Guy (help!) 18:06, 18 March 2020 (UTC)
• Yes. The scientific literature is clear on this - the idea that race and intelligence are genetically linked is a fringe theory. Yes, there are scholars who support this idea, but they are a tiny minority outside the mainstream of scientific thought - hence, fringe. I am concerned that at least two of the No votes in this RfC are by users who seem to have created accounts just to comment on this RfC - specifically, Hayeksplosive (who has 2 total edits, 1 here) and Pangolin2019 (who has 1 total edit, 1 here). It is possible that both of these users are IP users who have been avidly following the discussions on this topic and decided to create accounts just to comment here, but it seems more likely that they have joined us here as a result of off-wiki canvassing or even sockpuppetry. If it is the former, I apologize. But if it is the latter, it is concerning, especially when the RfC is on a topic of such high importance to Wikipedia's credibility and neutrality on scientific issues. Ganesha811 (talk) 18:52, 18 March 2020 (UTC)

• Ganesha811 - I am an academic and have published on this topic in mainstream journals. This is the first time I've contributed to Wikipedia. Frankly, it's disappointing to see how politicized the process is. A substantial number--if not the majority--of the relevant experts are to some degree hereditarians about race differences in intelligence. Wikipedia should cover this controversy neutrally. Pangolin2019 (talk) 09:50, 19 March 2020 (UTC)

• • Agreed about these SPA accounts. I have opened an SPI[13] as I think this is sock puppetry. -- Sirfurboy🏄 (talk) 21:20, 18 March 2020 (UTC)
    • To note, the SPI closing admin found the accounts were unrelated. Hence, this is in line with the continued Wikilawyering behavior to remove opposing editors (recall, 2 blocked already). I am not familiar with User:Sprayitchyo, seems like 50% of accounts suspected to be his over time were other people according to closing admins. --AndewNguyen (talk) 17:14, 22 March 2020 (UTC)
      • SPI exists so that potential sockpuppets can be investigated; it's an aspersion to call it "Wikilawyering behavior to remove opposing editors". --K.e.coffman (talk) 18:09, 22 March 2020 (UTC)
• Depends on what you mean - If you mean that certain races are inherently intellectually superior or inferior then yes. If you mean that there may be measurable differences in average intelligence, especially as it is influenced by environmental factors that are themselves correlated with race, then probably no. If you mean that different races achieve disparate scores on standardized IQ testing, then uncontroversially no. That has been probably the single biggest historical criticism of the validity of the tests. GMG^talk 19:06, 18 March 2020 (UTC)

  +1 How can we talk about the tests if we can't talk about the research? --valereee (talk) 19:57, 18 March 2020 (UTC)

  We can talk about it, it's just that we should tell our reader that it's fringe (or at least that it's a minority viewpoint considered fringe by many and even pseudoscience in certain extreme cases). Levivich ^{[dubious – discuss]} 22:27, 18 March 2020 (UTC)

  GreenMeansGo, at least some of the controversy stems from the fact that the tests are measuring the effects of teaching as much as native intelligence, and there is a mountain of research showing racial bias in educaiton. Guy (help!) 22:23, 18 March 2020 (UTC)

  @JzG: The problem is...complicated. The most accessible introduction I've found is this series by Radiolab, which also happens to be very well researched and very well produced. If you're looking for something to listen to in the gym, I recommend it.

The tests themselves are often normalized using biased samples. The tests...you know what...there's a lot that's wrong with the tests that can't be condensed into a noticeboard comment. The core problem is reification, and confusing whether we're talking about intelligence in the abstract, or some particular measure of it. The measures are bad, the concept in the abstract is fuzzy at best. But it's too complicated to stamp a "pseudoscience™" on it if our mission is to actually educate our readers with any semblance of nuance. GMG^talk 23:17, 18 March 2020 (UTC)

GreenMeansGo, yes, I agree with all that. But it doesn't have to be pseudoscience to be fringe. Actually I view this more as tooth fairy science than actual pseudoscience, except where practised by provable racists. Guy (help!) 07:49, 19 March 2020 (UTC)

@JzG: By the by, The Mismeasure of Man is stand-out as far as long form works on the subject, for anyone who's building a coronavirus reading list. At any rate, some of the topic is fringe, some of it is not, and some of it is just historical, in a way that was taken academically seriously at the time but is now just an interesting relic, in the same way as geocentrism.

For people working to combat the effects of racial disparity, these measures can be tremendously important. Most folks don't get all excited about that stuff, because it doesn't really lead to alternative histories about Hitler, but more to things like the impacts of exposure to industrial toxins in early childhood, access to proper nutrition, and all the accouterments of intergenerational poverty.

Having said that, just like your morbidly obese coworker who shoves the fifth candy bar in their face while telling you about that one study that found chocolate can actually help you lose weight, there is a whole cadre of people who are delighted to tout bad science and misinterpret good science to bolster whatever dark alleys their intuition has already led them into. But I am also keenly aware that Wikipedia is wont to adopt an equally oversimplified reactionary stance: bad bad bad, pseudoscience, nonsense, and now we're ready for our GA review. But then I've rarely found any subject where "moar nuance" is not my preferred option, so I guess you can take my own opinion for whatever it's worth. GMG^talk 11:43, 20 March 2020 (UTC)

GreenMeansGo, thanks much! Guy (help!) 14:09, 20 March 2020 (UTC)

The problem with "more nuance" on this matter is that if Wikipedia allows positive non-fringe coverage of scientific racism --- just as if WP were to allow positive coverage of quack cures --- that does concrete harm, because so many people rely on Wikipedia for information. This is not the case for all fringe viewpoints -- there'd probably be little damage done if there were an article with over 1000 pageviews/day that gave credence to claims of extraterrestrial abductions. Note that the editorial in Nature condemning scientific racism was in response to the violent Unite the Right rally that had occurred 4 days earlier in Charlottesville in the US.

I tried to word this RfC in a precise way, focusing only on the specific claim that some races are genetically inferior to others in intelligence, which is a fringe view. I'm not asking for anything more sweeping than that, and I don't see how that can be characterized as "oversimplified" or "reactionary." NightHeron (talk) 15:27, 20 March 2020 (UTC)

• No as per AndrewNguyen, but would like to add that this topic has been willingly engaged by a number of obviously non-controversial scientists and academics, most of whom strongly disagree with the hereditarian hypothesis but are willing to engage in what they obviously see as a worthwhile debate. See James Flynn as an example (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0047235217300958). Mainstream research is constantly being conducted on population genetics, the heritability of IQ, and so on, but the findings from these fields are not even remotely fringe. See:

• Lee, J. J. et al. (2018). Gene discovery and polygenic prediction from a genome-wide association study of educational attainment in 1.1 million individuals. Nature genetics, 50(8), 1112-1121. - A study that identified genetic variants accounting for about 10% of the variation in cognitive ability.

• Huang, T., Shu, Y., & Cai, Y. D. (2015). Genetic differences among ethnic groups. BMC genomics, 16(1), 1093. - A study that identified genetic variants that differ between Caucasian, African, Asian, and Native American populations.

• Guo, J. et al. (2018). Global genetic differentiation of complex traits shaped by natural selection in humans. Nature communications, 9(1), 1-9. Identified genetic differentiation between human populations in several complex traits.

It's one thing to dispute the hereditarian hypotheses, but quite another to claim it's fringe. It's necessary for Wikipedia to actually engage with the research that's ongoing in all these areas, instead of making blanket statements about what ideas can or can't be presented. -Ferahgo the Assassin (talk) 00:41, 19 March 2020 (UTC)

None of those three is about race and intelligence. Levivich ^{[dubious – discuss]} 00:51, 19 March 2020 (UTC)

Actually, the third source (Guo et al.) does relate to this topic. One of the traits looked at in that study is educational attainment, which is the number of years of education a person has completed. The study found that human ethnic groups differ in the frequency of genetic variants associated with completing more years of education. While education attainment isn't quite the same thing as intelligence, the two traits are very strongly related to each other.

This study is a good indication of where the mainstream view in human genetics currently is. It hasn't yet gotten to the point of directly endorsing the hereditarian view about race and intelligence, but it is edging in that direction. 2600:1004:B117:F3CA:3174:A036:DA02:381C (talk) 01:14, 19 March 2020 (UTC)

Guo et al. is not at all about race and intelligence. It's about genetics and "complex traits", and "intelligence" is not one of the "complex traits". One of the complex traits was "educational attainment years", which Guo et al. describe as a "behavioral trait". This RfC is asking "Is the claim that there are genetic differences in intelligence along racial lines a fringe viewpoint?" Guo et al. do not claim or examine whether there are genetic differences in intelligence along racial lines, and thus this RFC would have zero impact on Guo et al. (or the other two studies cited above). The words "race," "intelligence", and "IQ", appear nowhere in Guo et al. Nobody is suggesting that the entire field of genetics is fringe; that's a straw man argument. Levivich ^{[dubious – discuss]} 02:29, 19 March 2020 (UTC)

In genetic terminology, a complex trait is one with many causes, also known as multifactorial or polygenic. Intelligence is a typical polygenic trait, as found in many studies. The fact that these traits have polygenic causation is so common that it has been labeled the 4th law of behavioral genetics by Chabris et al 2015. There's many papers like Guo that look for general signs of selection for polygenic traits and find some. Guo et al themselves find evidence of selection for educational attainment, a surrogate trait used for intelligence that correlates genetically 0.80 with it or so (read e.g. Lee et al 2018 GWAS). --AndewNguyen (talk) 05:40, 19 March 2020 (UTC)

While education attainment isn't quite the same thing as intelligence right, and ethnicity is not quite the same as race, and sloppy categorisation and slippery slopes bedevil this issue. Wikipedia should not be quoting sources on one subject and applying their conclusions to a potentially related subject. That is Synthesis. I know this is a meta discussion and not the article discussion but the same concerns apply. -- Sirfurboy🏄 (talk) 08:29, 19 March 2020 (UTC)

@Sirfurboy: A large portion of the people voting that this is a "fringe" idea are basing the conclusion on arguments such as "The claim that racial lines are genetic is fringe. Full stop", or "It is well known that racial categories don't have genetic basis". When the "fringe" argument is based on statements like that, studies such as Huang et al. are relevant even though they don't directly discuss intelligence, because they show that blanket statements like these aren't accurate. The people making this argument are severely oversimplifying the issue.

Here is another way of saying this: if I were trying to prove that the hereditarian hypothesis is correct, the burden of proof would be on me, and I agree these studies would be insufficient to satisfy that burden. But when someone is trying to prove that it's a "fringe theory", the burden of proof is on them, and I think these sources demonstrate that the arguments being used to support that assertion aren't adequate to support it. Does that make sense? 2600:1004:B109:5FCD:F4DF:1F44:B1B4:C302 (talk) 09:37, 19 March 2020 (UTC)

No, it doesn't.

Of course, it is known that there are groups of people with common ancestry who share a higher vulnerability to certain ailments. Sometimes the group shares a socially constructed racial category, although far from all people in that category share the vulnerability. That has nothing to do with the truly extraordinary claim that (1) there are genes for intelligence, (2) those are unequally distributed to different races, with certain racial categories being inherently less intelligent than others, (3) IQ testing shows that blacks are the ones who are less intelligent. The burden of proof is not on those who say there is no scientific evidence for (1), (2), or (3) (let alone all three). The burden of proof is to find mainstream high-quality secondary sources that establish these three claims. We do not have to show that scientists have disproved (1), (2), and (3).

Here's an analogy. Consider the statement: Extraterrestrial aliens have kidnapped some humans and performed sexual experiments on them.

Can scientists disprove that statement? No.

Are there many people who believe that statement? Yes.

Is it nevertheless a fringe belief? Yes.

How about the statement that while there is no direct evidence of this kidnapping, we should prepare ourselves for the possibility that future investigations will provide direct evidence that extraterrestrial aliens have been kidnapping humans? Is that also fringe? Yes. NightHeron (talk) 14:03, 19 March 2020 (UTC)

• Yes an No The WP:FRINGE guideline should apply and would be useful in helping decide on content for that article. As JzG points out "it doesn't have to be pseudoscience to be fringe". There is no doubt there is much questionable science per the guideline, qualified critics have questioned not only conclusions but method and premises. There is also pseudoscience from some quarters: the quote from the editors of Nature: Difference between groups may therefore provide sound scientific evidence. But it's also a blunt instrument of pseudoscience... should give pause and highlight that care is needed. The vague nature of the proposal, and specifically the part about "statements expressing some degree of agreement" are confusing and do not really give any guidance on how editing of the article should change. Also, many of the sources and arguments presented in support and are making value judgements that are inappropriate for the question. I would point to this article written for a general audience by Eric Turkheimer, Paige Harden, and Richard E. Nisbett:

  We believe there is a fairly wide consensus among behavioral scientists in favor of our views, but there is undeniably a range of opinions in the scientific community. Some well-informed scientists hold views closer to Murray’s than to ours. And there are others who challenge views that we accept about the utility of the general concepts of intelligence and heritability...

  This is probably not a good source for the article, and somewhat off target as directed toward Murray and Harris, but I think all would agree these are qualified critics. The reason for including the quote is to highlight that WP should go no farther than those critics qualified to speak on the subject. Dlthewave has pointed to SilkTork's measured close at RSN. It is necessary for editors to evaluate works such as Mankind Quarterly, but when published in a respectable place, WP editors are not qualified to substitute their judgment for that of the editors of those works as to the scientific merit of any research, criticism, or support. fiveby(zero) 14:04, 19 March 2020 (UTC)

• No. I waited until now to vote because I wanted to see what sources other people were going to cite, so that I don't end up duplicating them. Still, it's useful to review them here. Here are some examples that others have given of sources that either argue in favor of the hereditarian hypothesis about race and intelligence, or argue that this hypotheses deserves to be taken seriously:

• Who We Are and How We Got Here (2018) by David Reich, along with the accompanying New York Times article
• Academic freedom and race: You ought not to believe what you think may be true (2018) by James Flynn
• Dodging Darwin: Race, evolution, and the hereditarian hypothesis (2020) By Winegard et al.
• Survey of expert opinion on intelligence: Intelligence research, experts' background, controversial issues, and the media (2020) by Rindermann et al.

The last source (Rindermann et al's survey) deserves special attention, because it relates directly to the question of what ideas in this area are or are not widely accepted. This was a survey conducted of researchers who had published papers in the journals Intelligence, Cognitive Psychology, Contemporary Educational Psychology, New Ideas in Psychology, and Learning and Individual Differences, and the survey includes a question about these researchers' views on the cause of racial IQ gaps. Here is how the paper summarized expert opinion on this matter:

There was no clear position among experts regarding environmental and genetic factors in the US Black-White difference in intelligence. However, experts attributed nearly half of the Black-White difference to genetic factors, with 51% attributing the difference to environmental factors and 49% to genetic factors. As shown in Fig. 3, 40% of the experts favored a more environmental perspective, 43% favored a more genetic perspective, and 17% of the experts assumed an equal influence of genes and environment (i.e., 50–50). Nevertheless, the mean preference among experts was slightly in favor of the environmental perspective (51% of the differences can be explained by environmental factors vs. 49% by genetic). This propensity can be attributed to 16% of experts favoring a 100% environmental explanation and 6% of experts favoring a 100% genetic explanation. Thus, the extreme “environmental” position was observed more frequently than the extreme “genetic” position.

Four other sources from the past decade that either argue for the hereditarian perspective, or argue that it deserves to be taken seriously, are Human Intelligence by Earl B. Hunt (Cambridge University Press, 2011), The Neuroscience of Intelligence by Richard Haier (Cambridge University Press, 2016), Cognitive Capitalism by Heiner Rindermann (Cambridge University Press, 2018), and Research on group differences in intelligence: A defense of free inquiry by Nathan Cofnas (published in the journal Philosophical Psychology, 2019). Hunt's book in particular is a standard textbook that has been positively reviewed in every academic journal that's reviewed it. Reviews and/or commentaries about this book can be found here, here, and here.

Many of the researchers who have argued for this and similar views, including Reich, Flynn, Haier, and Hunt, are highly prominent, uncontroversial figures within the fields of psychology and human genetics, and their views have been published by university presses and in prominent journals. Whether or not these views should be included in articles would ordinarily be a straightforward application of WP:RS and WP:NPOV, and this RFC should not be allowed to supersede those policies. 2600:1004:B162:4EE:51BB:C75C:498:D8A2 (talk) 22:48, 20 March 2020 (UTC)

Instead of responding to a wall of text with another wall of text, I'll just make two points. (1) Rindermann is described in his BLP as a frequent contributor to the white supremacist journal Mankind Quarterly. (The first sentence of the article Mankind Quarterly, supported by 3 sources, says: Mankind Quarterly is a peer-reviewed academic journal that has been described as a "cornerstone of the scientific racism establishment", a "white supremacist journal", an "infamous racist journal", and "scientific racism's keepers of the flame".) (2) This IP-editor's paraphrasing of sources has been problematic on this talk page. What does the paraphrase "argue that this hypothesis deserves to be taken seriously" mean? The book I cited Superior: The Return of Race Science by Angela Saini argues that scientific racism deserves to be taken very, very seriously, because of its long history of being used to strengthen white supremacist violence and oppression. NightHeron (talk) 02:20, 21 March 2020 (UTC)

Unless you can find a reliable source arguing that Rindermann himself is discredited, the fact that he's written papers for a low-quality journal isn't relevant to the reliability of his writings in respectable publications. The argument that this discredits everything else he's written, regardless of where it's published, is one of the arguments that was rejected by community consensus at the RS noticeboard. I know that you're aware of this. The argument is especially irrelevant in this case, because the paper I'm quoting isn't even Rindermann's own opinion; he and his two co-authors are simply reporting the views of other researchers who've published papers in cognitive psychology journals. Or are you suggesting that Rindermann and his co-authors might have actually falsified the results of the survey?

When I say that authors such as Reich, Haier and Flynn say that the hereditarian hypothesis deserves to be taken seriously, what I mean is that they think it has a non-negligible chance of eventually turning out to be true, and that researchers should take that possibility into account and investigate the hypothesis. The Flynn paper is online here, so you can read it for yourself. 2600:1004:B162:4EE:51BB:C75C:498:D8A2 (talk) 03:05, 21 March 2020 (UTC)

The fact that Rindemann has published extensively in the white supremacist journal Mankind Quarterly does mean that his writings on race and intelligence are discredited. It's well known that a biased investigator can hugely skew opinion surveys by biased sampling, biased phrasing of questions, biased interpretation of answers, etc.

This RfC does not ask for research on this topic to be declared fringe, as I pointed out at the beginning, but only asks that the specific POV that there are genetic differences in intelligence along racial lines be treated as fringe. It's irrelevant that some people think that research might be worthwhile and make speculations about what you term a "non-negligible" possibility that a certain fringe viewpoint may eventually be supported by evidence. Some people might speculate that we'll eventually uncover evidence that extraterrestrial travelers have visited the Earth. But the belief that such evidence exists is fringe. NightHeron (talk) 03:42, 21 March 2020 (UTC)

Do you understand that at the RS noticeboard, the broader community has rejected this argument that all of Rindermann's writings on the topic are "discredited" due to him having published some papers in Mankind Quarterly? I can't tell whether you honestly don't understand this, or whether you're being deliberately disingenuous.

You're also misrepresenting the perspective that Flynn argues for in the paper I linked to. I'm not going to paraphrase the whole paper for you; you can click the link and read it yourself. 2600:1004:B162:4EE:51BB:C75C:498:D8A2 (talk) 04:37, 21 March 2020 (UTC)

Your accusation that I'm "disingenuous" is a personal attack. Let's try to be rational. There were two RSN discussions, the second one initiated because of the low participation in the first. But the second one also did not have much participation, especially considering the importance of the topic. And the conclusion of the closing admin was long and ambiguous, for example: That is, we can give the views of Rindermann and Hunt, sourced to their books published by the Cambridge University Press, but take care not to promote their views as widely accepted unless/until sources can be found which indicate their views are widely accepted. That closing does not establish some sort of firm precedent, as you seem to believe, and it specifically did not take a position on whether or not Rindermann's and Hunt's views of race and intelligence are fringe.

You, not I, are misrepresenting the Flynn article. His abstract makes it crystal clear what the message of his article is. It's that research or speech on this subject should not be banned. Nothing in this RfC is about censorship. I specifically worded the RfC so that it would not say anything about whether or not it's a good idea for people to do research on race and intelligence, which is not something for Wikipedia editors to judge. NightHeron (talk) 15:31, 21 March 2020 (UTC)

NightHeron, I'm gonna have to side with IP on this one... Guilt by association is a tenuous argument. — Insertcleverphrasehere ^{(or here)}_{(click me!)} 19:13, 22 March 2020 (UTC)

• Yes: not in line with the mainstream scientific consensus & creates the appearance of false balance. --K.e.coffman (talk) 00:23, 21 March 2020 (UTC)
• No - it's a minority position, and does not reflect the consensus of the field, but certainly isn't in principle fringe or pseudoscience. Flynn (yes, that Flynn) has a pretty good essay on the topic. Hölderlin2019 (talk) 02:00, 21 March 2020 (UTC)
• No: The implication of this RfC, whether unintended or not, is that, if it were to pass, it would result in editors cherry picking sources and synthesising a scientific conclusion that does not exist. It is original research to assert that all reliable sources that are neutral or support a possible or likely genetic contribution are fringe. The truth is because so many genes, in likely literally many many thousands of different combinations (that are a long way from being understood by geneticists), contribute to human intelligence that research in this area is a long way from any meaningful conclusion, never mind determining any racial differences. There is most certainly no scientific consensus in this topic area. To assert a scientific consensus by editors picking and choosing which academic conclusion is the WP:TRUTH is classic pseudoscience and POV pushing and violates our core policy of WP:NOR, more specifically it would violate WP:SYN.--Literaturegeek | T@1k? 13:10, 21 March 2020 (UTC)

You are misunderstanding the RfC. It does not say that neutral sources are fringe, and it does not say that sources are fringe if they say that genetics can't answer questions about racial differences in intelligence. It says that the claim that there is evidence of genetic differences in intelligence along racial lines is fringe. Please respond to the actual RfC statement and not to a straw man. NightHeron (talk) 13:28, 21 March 2020 (UTC)

I did answer it. I just did not want to type up arguments that others above had already made nor write a monologue trying to address every possible argument. But to address the specific criticism you have raised: until such time genetic contribution to differences in racial intelligence is proven or disproven by geneticists academics who lean towards or away from a genetic contribution cannot be labelled as fringe. To be clear: if you are going to say academic opinion in RS that supports a genetic contribution as likely is fringe then to be neutral, per WP:NPOV, you should say that academic opinion in RS that there is no genetic contribution to racial differences is also fringe. The RfC is clearly trying to enforce one POV to be the truth over another, which is an abuse of sources and WP:SYN.--Literaturegeek | T@1k? 14:19, 21 March 2020 (UTC)

No, there is scientific consensus that races are not genetically delineated. That scientific knowledge supports the view that it is highly unlikely that one race is genetically inferior to another in intelligence. That viewpoint is not fringe. But the viewpoint that there is evidence that one race is genetically inferior to another is fringe because what scientific knowledge exists on the subject of race does not support it. NightHeron (talk) 15:00, 21 March 2020 (UTC)

There is academic debate and sources are given by other editors above re. intelligence and race. There is also academic debate and in some areas consensus of racial differences in other areas of the brain, for example scientists have found white Caucasians to have higher levels of certain personality disorders and other mental illnesses such as major depression and some medical conditions, partly due to breeding with Neanderthals thousands of years ago and the FBI interpret evidence that whites are more likely to be serial killers (a form of sociopathic/psychopathic personality disorder), so scientific research in other areas is biased against whites. We just need to summarise sources for what they say and stop trying to make science say what we want it to say, otherwise you violate another core policy of Wikipedia, WP:NPOV. Really, this RfC requires a rewriting of WP:NOR and WP:NPOV for it to pass. The RfC is clearly trying to enforce one POV to be the truth over another, which is an abuse of sources and WP:SYN. I think some editors are confusing scientific consensus with a social consensus (that it is unacceptable social behaviour to describe differences between racial groups that could be seen to be offensive) and some editors appear to be motivated by WP:IDONTLIKEIT when it comes to one set of reliable sources.--Literaturegeek | T@1k? 15:34, 21 March 2020 (UTC)

Literaturegeek, several of your arguments contradict our WP:FRINGE guideline. We label a theory as fringe based on its level of acceptance or the degree to which it departs from the prevailing/mainstream view in its field, not whether it has been "proven" or "disproven". We don't simply summarize the sources for each viewpoint; WP:FRINGELEVEL requires us to also document their level of acceptance within the academic community. Non-mainstream viewpoints are not excluded from coverage but they do need to be clearly labelled. –dlthewave ☎ 15:57, 21 March 2020 (UTC)

I agree there is some useful guidance from WP:FRINGE here, but must also take care not to be so imprecise as to call something 'fringe' within the article, as opposed to 'fringe' meaning the guideline has some application. There is also the question of acceptance of a theory vs. valid scientific inquiry or methodology, and those busybody anthropologists probably have a say, not just geneticists and behavioral psychologists. fiveby(zero) 17:02, 21 March 2020 (UTC)

Dlthewave Like I said to NightHeron, I did not want to type a monologue which refuted every possible argument. To be clear, I am an established editor and I thought it went without saying that editors should follow WP:DUEWEIGHT and I never implied every viewpoint must be applied or given the same weight. I do not believe a convincing case has been made that there is a scientific consensus amongst reliable sources for this topic area. There may well be a case that one academic viewpoint is stronger than another and that is resolved by WP:WEIGHT and consensus being established amongst editors. There are too many academics who have published in reliable sources suggesting there is some evidence of a genetic contribution to racial differences in intelligence for their viewpoint to be labelled fringe.--Literaturegeek | T@1k? 17:21, 21 March 2020 (UTC)

• Comment I would like to suggest to the closer(s) that they familiarise themselves by reading the article race and intelligence and the sources being used there so they can better interpret this RfC discussion.

• Another thing to consider: Is a RfC survey of non expert wikipedians who could include COI canvassed fringe white nationalist racists and fringe far left wing activists who are deeply offended by any evidence of group differences along racial lines more reliable than a peer reviewed survey published in a high quality journal, a journal with an above average impact factor? This RfC names certain experts and proposes to specifically label Richard Lynn as fringe and Stephen J.Gould as mainstream when a survey of experts determined the exact opposite as they reported they felt Lynn produced the best quality research and Gould to be of the lowest quality. This RfC goes in the exact opposite direction of mainstream opinion. Here is a quote from this source.

• The heterogeneity indicates that experts had split opinions on the researchers, with some experts viewing them as high in quality, innovativeness, and importance but others having divergent opinions. For quality, heterogeneity was observed for Richard Lynn (2.84), followed by Robert Sternberg (2.57) and Satoshi Kanazawa (2.52). Across all criteria, expert opinions were lowest for Stephen J. Gould........

• From the same source they found the influence of racism on research to be minimal and found that there is a significantly larger influence of people who want to suppress evidence of genetic contribution in group differences in intelligence. Consider these quotes from the same source as above:

• Separately, experts reported little concern about inclinations of discrimination or group related hostility (including racism) in intelligence research

• ....there is strong evidence that self-described liberals are more likely than conservatives to reject scientific evidence of group differences on ideological grounds... So much like right leaning USA conservatives might reject evidence of harm of e.g., gun rights, so too do left wing leaning individuals with strong equality social values. Wikipedia of course is WP:NOTCENSORED and is not a place to WP:RIGHTGREATWRONGS.

• Sources describe the atmosphere of intelligence research as toxic and dangerous, potentially career damaging with job loss as well as even potentially dangerous with scientists and scholars having been violently attacked because they published results that offended some people. The fact the survey needed to be done anonymously speaks volumes about the toxicity of this topic area for publishing experts.

• Reliable sources are clear on what way the bias in this intelligence field goes: reliable sources clearly report pressures not to publish research or conclusions that points towards a genetic contribution to racial gaps in intelligence. None of these reliable sources complain of significant social pressures by the far right to publish in support of genetic contributions or against environmental causes. Consider this source and this source.

• Only 16 percent of intelligence experts reject a genetic contribution to the large IQ gap between sub Saharan Africans and other racial groups, but this RfC proposes to take a minority opinion and assert it to be a majority opinion, in other words falsify current scientific opinion on the matter. Consider this quote from the same survey linked above:

• However, experts attributed nearly half of the Black-White difference to genetic factors, with 51% attributing the difference to environmental factors and 49% to genetic factors. As shown in Fig. 3, 40% of the experts favored a more environmental perspective, 43% favored a more genetic perspective, and 17% of the experts assumed an equal influence of genes and environment (i.e., 50–50). This propensity can be attributed to 16% of experts favoring a 100% environmental explanation and 6% of experts favoring a 100% genetic explanation.

• As shown in Fig. 3, 40% of the experts favored a more environmental perspective, 43% favored a more genetic perspective, and 17% of the experts assumed an equal influence of genes and environment (i.e., 50–50).

• If the closers took the time to take a read of the two sources linked here, this one as well as this one you will see that there is pressure and some debate as to whether intelligence experts should suppress or even lie to the general public about genetic connections to group racial differences in intelligence, but most researchers reject this approach, according to the sources. Nevertheless, I do believe many of the yes voters know what the science says but refuse to accept Wikipedia publishing it or want to force the community to falsify it because of how offensive these results are to some people. Perhaps we need to seriously determine: should Wikipedia falsely represent academic opinion for the purposes of helping in conditioning the general public to be less racist and build an equal society? This is what this RfC is asking without actually saying it. This is a question I have wrestled with for several days as I thought over the pros and the cons of this RfC. I have come to the conclusion that the approach of the yes voters of trying to counter racism is self-defeating and they will only contribute in a small way to achieving increased racial tension and a more divided society because if sub Saharan Africans are repeatedly told that the average IQ gap and underachieving in education and work place is 100 percent the consequence of white privilege, white racist educational and employment discrimination then this will lead to dramatically increased racial tensions and a more divided society, and probably some violence and possibly loss of life. Rather the focus should be a society of equal opportunities (if you have the qualifications you cannot be discriminated against in job place based on race, for example), tolerance and respect, anti discrimination policies, etc. I do empathise with some of the deeply offended/upset editors of this article but I do not think falsifying mainstream opinion as fringe is going to make the world a better place so I am sticking to my no vote and not joining “the effort”. I think a better acceptance of controversial expert opinions and an ability to move on in life and do more productive things is what is needed. Find a charity to support if you want to do good for the world or a group of people and stop senseless wikipedia drama. I know this advice will likely fall on deaf ears but I have tried.--Literaturegeek | T@1k? 15:13, 8 April 2020 (UTC)
  • This isn't a "comment". This is a hastily and jejunely prepared manifesto about how much you love the impeached journal Intelligence. I'll thank you to tell us where all those canvassed "left wing" activists are hanging out as well. This is thinly veiled "both sides"-isms. Sometimes there are corrupt white supremacist pseudoacademics out there. Sometimes people get hoodwinked by them. Here is an example of such. jps (talk) 16:44, 8 April 2020 (UTC)
    • Oh, I did not claim that far left wing editors had been canvassed, although I can see how that sentence I wrote could be misread that way.--Literaturegeek | T@1k? 17:52, 10 April 2020 (UTC)

• Despite what right-wing sources say about "leftists" supposedly trying to suppress the truth about racial differences, the fact is that there is no evidence accepted by the scientific mainstream -- absolutely zero evidence -- that supports the conclusion that there's a genetic intelligence difference along racial lines, let alone the conclusion that sub-Saharan Africans are an inferior race. Literaturegeek's WALLOFTEXT doesn't change that fact. NightHeron (talk) 17:28, 8 April 2020 (UTC)

• Yeah jps, I did think on that a lot and I figured why would multiple white supremacists concoct the exact same conspiracy individually or carry out a prolonged secret operation (via a secret society sworn to secrecy on pain of death?) to infiltrate academia and falsify multiple I.Q. datasets over many decades to say Jews and East Asians are of superior intellect to white people! It is tin foil hat stuff, sorry. Maybe their results technically make them racist, including racist against their own white race, but you cannot blame an honest scientist for honest scientific results. To me it sounds like a conspiracy theory embraced by the far left much like the crazies on the far right embrace deep state and 911 inside job conspiracy theories. It is a conspiracy theory that just doesn’t add up. If I were an intelligence academic I would feel powerful social pressures to falsify data (to avoid the drama of being denounced on TV and losing my job, etc) or not report data that could be seen to be racist and zero pressure to do the opposite. Another reason this conspiracy theory just does not add up. As for some researchers publishing in certain controversial “racist” journals (e.g., Mankind Quarterly) that is probably evidence of some mainstream journals not wanting to touch this research with a 40 foot barge pole (the survey linked above talked about this problem of difficulty publishing controversial race and I.Q. papers as well). I considered every argument on this page and read the whole RfC from top to bottom, I am not deceived. Sorry.--Literaturegeek | T@1k? 17:36, 8 April 2020 (UTC)

• Um, if you're really "not deceived", maybe stop inventing stories? From what you've written, it is clear you have not even really understood the points you think are problematic. Just to pick one of perhaps a dozen places to start, the model minority myth might be a good thing to investigate, but I won't hold my breath. It is indeed tiring to have to hold a critical race theory seminar just so that you can disabuse yourself of some of the baggage, but it's clear you aren't really equipped to deal with this subject. jps (talk) 17:53, 8 April 2020 (UTC)

• Thanks, giving that article a read now.--Literaturegeek | T@1k? 18:42, 8 April 2020 (UTC)

• NightHeron, re. the wall of text complaint, I think you have WP:BLUDGEONED this topic area way more than me or anyone else. Thanks for your comment.--Literaturegeek | T@1k? 17:36, 8 April 2020 (UTC)

• No. The research have been published by mainstream WP:RS, therefore denoting that this is a valid field of scientific inquiry. Were this to pass as a yes, it would smear the sources, the authors, and their field of inquiry as fringe. Not good. XavierItzm (talk) 17:25, 21 March 2020 (UTC)
• No. I'm uncertain that the sources cited by OP are representative of the field of differential psychology which should be the primary source for addressing this sort of work. As a biological anthropologist myself, I'm unsure if a statement by anthropologists made 25 years ago in response to The Bell Curve is a qualified statement on this "fringe" research, as it has advanced. Perhaps it was fringe back then. If such a determination that this is "fringe" in its current iteration were to be met specifically by differential psychologists currently working in intelligence, I might be more inclined to agree. The implications for this kind of research for dual inheritance theory (https://www.nature.com/articles/nrg2734), clinical work, and general theories of education are rather important. OP's statement that racial differences in intelligence are fringe is likewise empirically incorrect; or at least can't be counted as correct per the sources s/he provided. If we are to estimate, per OP's more specific criterion, its status, we should use only specifically use sources from this field. My own research shows that Richard Flynn, the world's foremost living researcher on racial differences in intelligence, will tell you that we don't know the answer(https://www.mdpi.com/2624-8611/1/1/3) and that such questions should be accepted(https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0047235217300958). For that reason, and because this study reports nearly 50% of psychologists viewing the influence of genes on heritability as genetic(https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289619301886), I'm uncertain that calling this research WP:FRINGE is appropriate.--Babylon717 (talk) 01:06, 22 March 2020 (UTC)

  — Babylon717 (talk • contribs) has made few or no other edits outside this topic. Levivich ^{[dubious – discuss]} 18:44, 26 March 2020 (UTC)

  The first source by Flynn that you cite is basically a strong refutation of Rushton, and the second source says that work in this area shouldn't be censored or banned. This RfC has nothing to do with censoring or banning anything. It says that the claim that evidence exists that some races are genetically inferior to others in intelligence is fringe. Saying "we don't know" does not explain a "no" vote on the RfC. My last 3 sources supporting a "yes" vote (the AAPA statement, the Weiten textbook, the Nature editorial) are not old sources. As far as the survey goes, the lead author Rindermann has written extensively for the white supremacist journal Mankind Quarterly. According to the well-sourced page on Mankind Quarterly, Mankind Quarterly is a peer-reviewed academic journal that has been described as a "cornerstone of the scientific racism establishment", a "white supremacist journal", an "infamous racist journal", and "scientific racism's keepers of the flame". It's well known that opinion surveys by a biased investigator can be skewed in many ways -- by biased sampling, biased wording of questions, biased interpretation of answers, selective reporting of results, etc. NightHeron (talk) 02:03, 22 March 2020 (UTC)

I think you're probably correct with regards to how I've interpreted the first Flynn paper, but I'm not certain about your interpretation of the second as calling these ideas "fringe." My critique regarding the AAPA's statement or Weiten's textbook (take as counterexamples Plomin and Haiers' textbooks) still stands- AAPA is not an appropriate place for behavioral critiques. If you check AAPAs' most recent statement on race and racism (https://physanth.org/about/position-statements/aapa-statement-race-and-racism-2019/), there is absolutely no discussion on even the socially constructed concepts of race and its relation to intelligence. These topics should best be left to sources in differential psychology. I apologize, but this remains my position. The only grounding argument in AAPA's statement is that race is socially and clinally constructed, not geographically so. I agree with this at the core, but this is not the claim being disputed in the OP: there is nothing about genes, groups, and behavior. With regards to Rindermann's paper, I trust Elsevier's editorial purview moreso than MQ's.Babylon717 (talk) 03:39, 22 March 2020 (UTC)

• Babylon717, To clarify, I did not mean to suggest that Flynn in the second source says that the claim of genetic racial differences in intelligence is fringe. I'd be surprised if he said that; calling someone else's papers "fringe" is an uncollegial thing to do, and most scholars and scientists don't use such terms when they critique other people's work. The AAPA and AAA position statements are based in part on the consensus that race is a socially constructed concept rather than a biological one, and that already makes it logically problematic to claim a genetic difference in intelligence. The other logically problematic steps that would have to all be valid in order for there to be any truth in this claim are that (i) intelligence is a well-defined one-dimensional concept that can be compared over different cultures using IQ tests, (ii) it is possible to control for the vast differences in historical and environmental circumstances between different populations, and (iii) there is reason to assume that if one were to control for those vast differences and if (i) were also true, then the genetic advantage in intelligence would be what Jensen, Lynn, Rushton, Piffer, Rindermann, and Gottfredson claim it to be, namely, that black people on average are genetically endowed with less intelligence than white people. When one has an inflammatory conclusion that's based not on science but rather on 4 problematic logical steps, and if the consensus of scholars in related fields is against this fallacious reasoning, that qualifies as fringe. NightHeron (talk) 13:16, 22 March 2020 (UTC)

• Yes - Both 'race' and 'intelligence' are concepts that are subject to manipulation to an extent that the hypothesis of a correlation between them is often subject to manipulation. Any hypothesis of a linkage is colored by the coloring of the categories, so that any discussion is fringe and requires 'special handling'. Robert McClenon (talk) 16:03, 24 March 2020 (UTC)
• Comment: A fallacious argument that's been repeatedly advanced by no-voters on this RfC is that, because Jensen/Ruston/Lynn/Gottfredson/etc sometimes get published by reputable publishers and in reputable journals, that means that those publications are RS and the POV expressed there -- that black people are genetically inferior to white people in intelligence -- is not a fringe viewpoint. On the contrary, WP:RS says: "When relying on primary sources, extreme caution is advised...Material such as an article, book, monograph, or research paper that has been vetted by the scholarly community is regarded as reliable" (my emphasis). Also: "Care should be taken with journals that exist mainly to promote a particular point of view. A claim of peer review is not an indication that the journal is respected, or that any meaningful peer review occurs. Journals that are not peer reviewed by the wider academic community should not be considered reliable, except to show the views of the groups represented by those journals." (Elsevier publishes at least two such journals, Intelligence and Personality and Individual Differences.) And: "Isolated studies are usually considered tentative and may change in the light of further academic research. If the isolated study is a primary source, it should generally not be used if there are secondary sources that cover the same content. The reliability of a single study depends on the field. Avoid undue weight when using single studies in such fields."

Saini's book (referenced at the beginning of the RfC) discusses several examples of scientific racism that appeared in reputable journals or in books published by reputable publishers. A particularly striking example is a 2005 study -- later debunked -- by Bruce Lahn et al published in Science that claimed genetic evidence that the advances in recent millennia that occurred in Europe and Asia and not in Africa can be explained by genetic inferiority of the brains of people in Africa. NightHeron (talk) 16:05, 24 March 2020 (UTC)

• I also am surprised to read multiple editors saying that if a paper is published in a journal, therefore it's not fringe. Levivich ^{[dubious – discuss]} 16:44, 24 March 2020 (UTC)

NightHeron, "that black people are genetically inferior to white people in intelligence". That statement isn't just what this RfC proposes to label fringe. This RfC is much more broad than that, which is why I opposed. The RfC as proposed would indicate that the matter is a settled question with a scientific consensus, when in fact the opposite is true. The community is not only divided, but the consensus is that it is still an open question that is difficult to answer due to difficulty in defining race and intelligence accurately. — Insertcleverphrasehere ^{(or here)}_{(click me!)} 19:01, 24 March 2020 (UTC)

Insertcleverphrasehere: You're right that the statement of the RfC is broader. In my comments I've focused on the claim that blacks are genetically less intelligent than whites because that is the most common form of scientific racism in the US, where most (not all) of the white supremacist theorists have worked. But in accordance with WP:GLOBAL it would be wrong to limit the RfC to that case. As it's worded, a yes-vote on the RfC also means that the fringe designation would apply if a Chinese source claimed that the Uyghur people were genetically less intelligent than the Chinese people, or if an Australian source claimed that the Aboriginal people were genetically less intelligent than white Australians.

The sources I gave show that there's a consensus that there is no scientific basis for making statements about one race being genetically superior or inferior to another in intelligence, in part for the reason you mention, namely, that race and intelligence are both nebulous and subjective terms. NightHeron (talk) 20:39, 24 March 2020 (UTC)

A fallacious argument that's been repeatedly advanced by no-voters on this RfC is that, because Jensen/Ruston/Lynn/Gottfredson/etc sometimes get published by reputable publishers and in reputable journals, that means that those publications are RS and the POV expressed there -- that black people are genetically inferior to white people in intelligence -- is not a fringe viewpoint.

You're mischaracterizing the argument that I and others have presented here. The argument I've made is that the only way we can judge whether or not an idea is "fringe" is based on how it is presented in sources that pass WP:RS. That includes various high-quality journals, standard textbooks such as Hunt's book, and surveys such as Rindermann et al. or the older similar survey by Snyderman and Rothman which found a similar result. Aside from how an idea is presented in reliable sources, what other criterion for judging whether or not it's fringe could possibly exist?

The argument that you have been making throughout this RFC is that we have some other way of knowing what is fringe and what isn't, that supersedes what would otherwise be a straightforward application of WP:RS and WP:NPOV. This argument appears to be mostly original research on your part (and if you were to look closely at the source material you're characterizing as "fringe", you would be aware that research in this area is using a much more specific and narrow definition of the term "intelligence" than the term's colloquial meaning.) As I said before, it would be possible to characterize almost any topic as fringe by substituting my own judgement for an impartial evaluation of the viewpoints that exist in reliable sources, the way that you've been doing. 2600:1004:B140:1416:68A3:F469:4750:75AF (talk) 00:46, 25 March 2020 (UTC)

To support the fringe designation I'm using official statements of the American Anthropological Association and the American Association of Physical Anthropologists, Weiten's textbook, and an editorial in Nature, among other sources. To refute this, your main source is the "survey" by Rindermann. You're unperturbed by the fact that the survey is totally unreliable because Rindermann is a diehard white supremacist, a frequent contributor to Mankind Quarterly, which is one of the oldest and most important journals of scientific racism. NightHeron (talk) 01:40, 25 March 2020 (UTC)

Can you provide a reliable source that directly supports your calling Rindermann a "diehard white supremacist"? As was explained to you here, it is a violation of BLP policy to make a statement like this about a living person without a reliable source supporting it, including at a noticeboard. You appeared to understand this aspect of policy when it was explained to you in that discussion, so you don't have ignorance as an excuse here. 2600:1004:B140:1416:68A3:F469:4750:75AF (talk) 01:53, 25 March 2020 (UTC)

Sure. Heiner Rindermann serves on the editorial board of the journal Intelligence, has been a frequent contributor to Mankind Quarterly, and has helped to organize conferences for the International Society for Intelligence Research.[3] This is sourced to a New Statesman article in 2018; concerning the International Society for Intelligence Research, its members, publications, and events have each also promoted ideas characterized by New Statesman as "racist pseudo-science."[5] The journal Intelligence is the official journal of that Society. Concerning Mankind Quarterly, Mankind Quarterly is a peer-reviewed academic journal that has been described as a "cornerstone of the scientific racism establishment", a "white supremacist journal",[1] an "infamous racist journal", and "scientific racism's keepers of the flame".[2][3][4] These quotes from three Wikipedia articles are well-sourced. NightHeron (talk) 02:14, 25 March 2020 (UTC)

Wikipedia itself isn't a reliable source, and I think you know that. In all of the sentences from Wikipedia articles you're quoting, the only one of the sources that actually mentions Rindermann is the New Statesman article. This article contains all of two sentences about Rindermann, and does not accuse him of being a white supremacist. (It also isn't clear whether or not the New Statesman is a reliable source.)

Let me ask you again: Can you provide a reliable source that directly supports your calling Rindermann a "diehard white supremacist"? If you can't, then you are violating BLP policy by repeatedly claiming this, and you should strike your comments making that statement on both this and other pages. 2600:1004:B140:1416:68A3:F469:4750:75AF (talk) 02:39, 25 March 2020 (UTC)

NightHeron, This is all guilt by association. It seems that you cannot provide a source that directly supports your allegations against Rindermann. So yes; BLP policy violation. Please stop. — Insertcleverphrasehere ^{(or here)}_{(click me!)} 02:42, 25 March 2020 (UTC)

Oh stop it with the apologias. The man unapologetically attended a eugenics conference. He deserves all the opprobrium we can muster. jps (talk) 00:49, 2 April 2020 (UTC)

Rindermann is an editor of the official journal of the ISIR and organizes events for that organization, both of which are described by RS as promoting "racist pseudo-science," and he is a frequent contributor to the premier journal of white supremacy and scientific racism Mankind Quarterly (the Wikipedia article gives 4 RS for that characterization of Mankind Quarterly).

Another source for Rindermann's views is the far-right The New Observer: Nonwhite invaders tested at Chemnitz University in Germany have average IQs of around 93 and this is going to cause "cognitive errors" with enormous consequences for the rest of society, one of that country's leading psychology professors has warned... Professor Heiner Rindermann, chair of Educational and Developmental Psychology at the Technical University of Chemnitz, has penned a penetrating article in the Focus Online German news service where he has spelled out the importance of IQ, culture, achievement, and its relationship to race. Titled "Secondary School Level Engineers," the article states unequivocally that the mass importation of low IQ nonwhite immigrants is going to lead to the destruction of Germany.[14]

From dictionary.com: White Supremacy: the belief, theory, or doctrine that white people are inherently superior to people from all other racial and ethnic groups, especially Black people, and are therefore rightfully the dominant group in any society.

Seems that the Duck test applies. NightHeron (talk) 09:44, 25 March 2020 (UTC)

Let me make sure I'm understanding you correctly. Are you seriously citing The New Observer, a far-right fake news and conspiracy site, to support this statement you're making about a living person? 2600:1004:B10C:1875:ED1E:ACF1:A73A:DFE3 (talk) 10:25, 25 March 2020 (UTC)

Only to show how influential Rindermann is with far-right racists. A far-right fringe source such as The New Observer can be used to show what the far-right believes and who they are using to provide an academic veneer for their racism. NightHeron (talk) 13:02, 25 March 2020 (UTC)

The New Observer is well-known for making up "facts" out of thin air. Your using of this source to support a defamatory statement about a living person, that apparently cannot be supported by any actual reliable sources, is the exact thing that BLP policy is intended to prohibit. If you really do not see any problem with what you're doing, even after having the policy explained to you by user:Barkeep49 in his user talk, all I can say is that I hope someone will do something about this, because this type of deliberate disregard for a policy should not be ignored. 2600:1004:B112:3732:A85E:6ED1:9649:3917 (talk) 13:38, 25 March 2020 (UTC)

Yes, the far-right makes up facts about their opponents and about immigrants, but it's doubtful that they make up facts about whom they admire (and quote from) in the academic world. 15:36, 25 March 2020 (UTC)

NightHeron, I assume you added the above unsigned statement. Not sure why several edits made by you here were deleted from the history of the article, but you really should stop making claims like that if they can't be backed up by a reliable source. It seems that Rindermann's work might be admired by those that some would describe as "diehard white supremacists". This does not in any way assert that he himself should be labelled as such (association fallacy at it's most obvious). Our article on him, Heiner Rindermann, makes no such claims or allegations. I can't find any sources online that do so except... well; I suggest that you read less of the RationalWiki (an excerpt of which you quoted above), and more of better-quality sources. Your "duck" test amounts to little more than your own opinion, and sorry, but WP:JUSTDONTLIKEIT is not a justification for BLP violations. — Insertcleverphrasehere ^{(or here)}_{(click me!)} 22:58, 25 March 2020 (UTC)

NightHeron, Please see Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Noticeboard/Archive_286#Books_from_Cambridge_University_Press and Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Noticeboard#Rindermann,_Intelligence. — Insertcleverphrasehere ^{(or here)}_{(click me!)} 23:26, 6 April 2020 (UTC)

• No. There is a large amount of strong evidence for the hereditarian hypothesis about race and intelligence (see any work by Francis Galton or this: "Rushton, J. P., & Jensen, A. R. (2005). Thirty years of research on race differences in cognitive ability. Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, 11, 235-294."). It has been shown that there is a hereditarian predictability, even when examining samples of people within the same race. As I see it, the argument being raised in not on the validity of such findings, but the potential damaging interpretations of such findings and the potential misuse of such findings. This concern is found in other areas of study as well. Recently, the same sort of debate was brought up by the evolutionary biologist, Richard Dawkins, when discussing the topic of Eugenics. Dawkins pointed out that it is important to separate the science from politics.

I noticed that my comment is commented as potentially a "SPA". Perhaps this was a hasty decision. Looking at the guidelines for SPA, under "Who not to tag (SPA tagging guidelines)" it states " Frequency of edits: users with as few as 3 or 4 edits are not necessarily SPAs if those edits are in a diverse set of topics and do not appear to be promoting a "single purpose."". Since I've made more than 4 edits in topics ranging from gaming to karate and ergonomics, it's reasonable to believe that I'm not a SPA, and the hasty assumption was a mistake. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Tulimafat (talk • contribs) 01:52, 25 March 2020 (UTC)

• — Tulimafat (talk • contribs) has made few or no other edits outside this topic. —PaleoNeonate – 03:11, 25 March 2020 (UTC)

• Yes. Race is a social construct with categories that vary among cultures and among individuals. Intelligence, similarly has no fixed definition, and tests to measure it, inevitably carry cultural biases that make comparisons of divergent populations invalid. Bcharles (talk) 04:01, 25 March 2020 (UTC)
• No Hey everyone. I'm a professor who has worked in this field for decades. The term "genetically inferior" in the RFC question seems chosen to provoke a certain reaction, and professionals who publish in this area don't use such value-laden terms. But this RFC is clearly asking about the hereditarian hypothesis with respect to group differences, which is not fringe at all. Such work is routinely published in journals for intelligence research and psychology in general, and researchers in my field (cognitive psychology) are divided in their opinions about the causes of the group differences often observed in average IQ scores. The recently published survey that others have linked to is is an accurate representation of the views in this field. I see that many other people have already explained this, so I don't have much more to add.--Bpesta22 (talk) 13:11, 25 March 2020 (UTC)

  — Bpesta22 (talk • contribs) has made few or no other edits outside this topic.

• No Labeling entire field of study as "fringe" because the conclusions could be considered unfashionable in the current climate is just not productive. I assume most people here in believe in the theory of evolution. Humans have adapted to live in very different environments, hence between-group variations in skin color, menarche , gestational periods etc. To assert that the most vital organ in the human body, namely the brain, would somehow be magically exempt from evolutionary pressures is basically secular creationism. OP mentions The Mismeasure of Man as one of his sources, but that book has several issues of its own . There are lots of respected, world class scientists who entertain the idea of a relationship between race and intelligence. For this is to be a fringe view there would have be overwhelming consensus that there is no relationship what so ever, but here is not.--Shivan (talk) 00:28, March 26, 2020 (UTC).

  — Shivan (talk • contribs) has made few or no other edits outside this topic. Levivich ^{[dubious – discuss]} 18:44, March 26, 2020

  Shivan’s account has been editing since March 2005 and has edited a diverse range of unrelated topics and has made zero other edits in this topic area. The exact opposite of a single purpose account. I am not going to revert again, I don’t have the energy or care enough to. You should realise that by you adding and reinstating SPA tags that are added without just cause to editors with a differing viewpoint to yours makes you look like you are POV pushing and trying to game the RfC and this will make your vote and comments less reliable. Levich, please try to set your emotions aside, make a vote and don’t try to WP:GAME the result of this RfC.--Literaturegeek | T@1k? 14:51, 27 March 2020 (UTC)

  I am neither emotional nor gaming anything. This account made no edits for nine years before !voting in this RFC. I don't know about you, but I consider zero edits in nine years as "few edits outside this topic". Levivich ^{[dubious – discuss]} 15:07, 27 March 2020 (UTC)

• No The question of what accounts for different group averages on IQ tests is an open one. Various hypotheses have been advanced, broadly categorized into environmental or genetic explanations. Various sources have been linked within this thread to show this: mainstream textbooks on intelligence, books by respected authors in psychometrics, and anonymous surveys on intelligence researchers' beliefs. A clear theme is that, among many other ideas, the hereditarian hypothesis is still being considered as an explanation for this observed phenomena.--Gardenofaleph (talk) 02:06, March 26, 2020 (UTC).

  — Gardenofaleph (talk • contribs) has made few or no other edits outside this topic. Levivich ^{[dubious – discuss]} 18:44, March 26, 2020

  • I've edited in the areas of psychometrics, learning software, obesity, and a few small edits to other topics. Doesn't make sense to call me a single-purpose account.--Gardenofaleph (talk) 20:15, 26 March 2020 (UTC)
    • Yeah I agree, most of your edits are clearly unrelated to this topic area. You were tagged unnecessarily, the third time this happened to someone who voted against this RfC. I have removed the template that incorrectly accused you of being an SPA.--Literaturegeek | T@1k? 12:09, 27 March 2020 (UTC)
      • I've reinstated my edits; please do not remove them. This account, like the others, has made very few edits outside this topic–three edits outside this topic area in the last 12 months. Levivich ^{[dubious – discuss]} 14:13, 27 March 2020 (UTC)
        • They edited outside the topic for well over a year before editing in it and the majority of their edits are outside the topic area. That is the opposite of a single purpose account. Levich the SPA tag really does need to be removed. The criteria you are applying is not in concordance with how Wikipedia defines a single purpose account. Please remove the SPA tag.--Literaturegeek | T@1k? 14:27, 27 March 2020 (UTC)
          • I disagree with your description of the editing history. The last 20 edits go back to December 2018; 5 are outside this topic area; 15 are within the topic area. 11 of those edits were attempting to add Rindermann to Nations and intelligence. You can disagree with me that that's an SPA, but I think it's an SPA. Levivich ^{[dubious – discuss]} 15:07, 27 March 2020 (UTC)
            • You are being very misleading because you are not mentioning all their edits prior to Dec 2018 which show their history prior to then was entirely outside the topic area and you are miscounting their last 20 edits, I count 14 inside and 7 outside the topic area. So if I edit primarily COVID-19 for the next six months to a year, despite my many edits on a diverse range of topics over the years, you can ignore all that and label me a single purpose account? Your reasoning actually can apply to several editors here who are supporting the RfC, why are you not flagging them as SPAs?--Literaturegeek | T@1k? 16:26, 27 March 2020 (UTC)
              • What are you talking about, my reasoning can apply to several editors who support the RfC? There are exactly zero non-extended confirmed editors !voting "yes" so far. (By contrast, there are multiple non-EC accounts !voting "no" that I have not tagged, because I don't think those are SPAs.) LG, your account is not an SPA because you have made many edits outside this topic. By contrast, even by your own count, Gardenofaleph's edits over the last 15 months are 70% (14/20) inside this topic. YMMV but 6 edits outside the topic in over a year constitutes "few edits outside this topic" as far as I'm concerned. Levivich ^{[dubious – discuss]} 17:20, 27 March 2020 (UTC)
                • Prior to their edits within the topic area (beginning in Dec 2018) between Aug and Dec 2018 they made 32 edits on various medical and other unrelated topics and zero within this topic area so a significant majority of their edits are outside the topic area. There is no justification that you have given for you chopping off 4 or 5 months worth of edits to make their statistics fit the definition of an SPA, it is unreasonable. Good point re. extended users, point taken.--Literaturegeek | T@1k? 17:45, 27 March 2020 (UTC)
                  • This is becoming such a side discussion, but in order to defend against accusations that I'm misusing the SPA tag, I'm expanding on my reasoning. It's not 4 or 5 months. For three weeks (Aug 20, 2018 – Sep 9, 2018), this account made edits in other topics, along with 7 more edits in October and November. Then, from Dec. 24, 2018, until March 26, 2020 – 15 months – 14 out of 21 edits were specifically trying to get Rindermann's views into Wikipedia (including their !vote here). Look, I say that's an SPA–the overwhelming majority of their editing (70%), for the overwhelming majority of their tenure (15 months), has been in one narrow topic area. Now, if you want to say that because they made more edits in the first 3 weeks than they've made since, therefore they can't be an SPA, that's fine–that's your interpretation of the data; mine is different. It's up to the closer what they want to do; but it doesn't make my tagging "unfounded". My final word on the SPA matter: the sine qua non of SPA is not the editing history of any one account, it's about (as WP:SPA explains) how many SPAs are in one discussion. One or two accounts that look like SPAs in a discussion is no big deal, and if this discussion had only a few SPAs, I would not be tagging any of them. However, this discussion has, by my count, 11 SPAs. 11 out of 18 "no" !votes (61%) to date have been from SPAs. And that's worth pointing out to the closer. Levivich ^{[dubious – discuss]} 18:07, 27 March 2020 (UTC)
                    • I actually decided not to revert you a 2nd time because I hoped it would let me move on with more important things but you continue to WP:BATTLE with misrepresentations. You are misleading the reader by selectively quoting statistics. His first 32 edits were all outside the topic area, then, of the remaining 20 edits 6 of these were outside the topic area, that gives a total of 38 edits outside the topic area and 14 inside the topic area. The large majority of his edits are outside the topic area. Please quote the part of the SPA essay that says an SPA includes someone who has a majority of edits outside the topic area or drop the stick. I do acknowledge that there are indeed too many SPAs in this discussion and the closer will no doubt reduce the weight or discount their vote via their own discretion.--Literaturegeek | T@1k? 03:15, 28 March 2020 (UTC)
                    • Levivich, An SPA is an account made to do a specific thing. This one has a history of editing elsewhere. This topic may be a recent area of interest, but that isn't a reason to accuse them of being an SPA. An accusation of being an SPA should not be done lightly, especially to editors with a history of editing unrelated pages, as doing so carries an implication of assuming bad faith on the part of the one accused. I'd suggest removing this tag from the comment of this user, whom has a history of editing other pages on the wiki going back to 2018. — Insertcleverphrasehere ^{(or here)}_{(click me!)} 20:52, 29 March 2020 (UTC)
                      • @Insertcleverphrasehere: Maybe you should actually read WP:SPA, instead of making up things about what it says? --JBL (talk) 00:47, 30 March 2020 (UTC)
                        • JBL, You want a quote? "Users with a diversified edit history that indicates that the user became inactive for an extended period and then later re-established themselves with single subject edits. Note that a time gap in edit history may be evidence that the person was referred to Wikipedia by an outside source, but it isn't evidence that the person is an SPA." — Insertcleverphrasehere ^{(or here)}_{(click me!)} 05:29, 30 March 2020 (UTC)
                          • Insertcleverphrasehere, yes, I think quoting is much better than writing a misleading summary sentence. (FWIW: "SPA-ness" comes on a spectrum, and of all the tagged accounts in this discussion I agree that Gardenofaleph is the least SPA-y. (Unlike, say, the one below that you untagged, which obviously qualifies.)) --JBL (talk) 12:42, 30 March 2020 (UTC)
• No (...but some are fringe) This RfC is too broad and an over-simplification. A lot of this controversy is also between two fields: psychology and anthropology. Two of the critical statements in the opening post are by the American Anthropological Association & Physical Anthropologists. The American Psychological Association's article cited there, on the other hand, is titled Anthropological & historical perspectives in the social construct of race - indicating a difference in the perspectives. APA's Psychology, Public Policy, and Law journal itself has published peer-reviewed articles by Rushton and Jensen. Also, not all critics of IQ studies are mainstream themselves: Kamin was a former Communist Party member who cited Marx in his criticism of IQ testing. I don't think anything useful can come out of this RfC and this should be determined case-by-case. --Pudeo (talk) 10:10, 27 March 2020 (UTC)

  Leon Kamin was not fringe. As an undergraduate he briefly belonged to the Communist Party, and then quit. He suffered during the McCarthy period because of this and because he refused to give the McCarthy Committee names of other former members. For many years he was chair of the Princeton psych department, and his book The Science and Politics of I.Q. was generally (not entirely) reviewed favorably. All of this is sourced on the Wikipedia pages for him and for his book. By the way, a citation to Marx in a book does not make someone fringe. Such a citation might be taboo in some countries, but that doesn't make it fringe on Wikipedia, per WP:GLOBAL. NightHeron (talk) 12:48, 27 March 2020 (UTC)

  Given that the RfC directly states that sources by Jensen, Rushton ... are fringe, a further clarification is warranted. As I mentioned, Jensen has published several articles in the American Psychological Association's peer-reviewed journal Psychology, Public Policy, and Law (doi:10.1037/1076-8971.6.1.121, doi:10.1037/1076-8971.11.2.235). Frankly, I don't see any justification in WP:FRINGE for disqualifying these sources. Wikipedia's job is to reflect views presented in reliable sources, even controversial ones. As expected, there also have been several articles critical of Jensen published in this journal (example: doi:10.1037/1076-8971.11.2.302). WP:NPOV and WP:WEIGHT helps with that. --Pudeo (talk) 10:56, 27 March 2020 (UTC)

  Is the definition of "fringe" that it was never published in a peer-reviewed journal? If that's the rule, there's no need for this RFC, the sourcing restriction would, in and of itself, eliminate all possible fringe sources. But it's not my understanding that "published by a respectable publisher" = "not fringe". And that's not what WP:FRINGE says... it says in the first sentence: "In Wikipedia parlance, the term fringe theory is used in a very broad sense to describe an idea that departs significantly from the prevailing views or mainstream views in its particular field". And, Jensen's theories (and Rushton, and The Bell Curve, and all hereditarianism) depart significantly from the prevailing views or mainstream views in its particular field (whether that field is psychology or anthropology). For example, most of subsequently-published works examining Jensen 2000 and 2005 are debunking or disagreeing with it. Levivich ^{[dubious – discuss]} 14:20, 27 March 2020 (UTC)

  There are 642 citations of Rushton & Jensen's 2005 review on Google Scholar. From my skimming of these, most of them just cite it as a review of the hereditarian position on the topic. There doesn't seem to be any basis for your broad claim. I checked the three most recent ones. These were 1) Tan, Y. W., Burgess, G. H., & Green, R. J. (2020). The effects of acculturation on neuropsychological test performance: A systematic literature review. The Clinical Neuropsychologist, 1-31, which mentions it as "Another study limitation is that we were unable to assess co-occurring factors, which may influence neurotoxic effects such as age at exposure,16–19 race,51 and poverty.52–54" where 51 is R&J. 2) Nugent, B. D., Davis, P. J., Noll, R. B., & Tersak, J. M. (2020). Sedation practices in pediatric patients with acute lymphoblastic leukemia. Pediatric Blood & Cancer, 67(2), e28037. where it is mentioned as "Therefore, any synthesis of these data is tentative, and based on a presumption that all neuropsychological tests are equally valid for all populations (Sternberg, 2004; Rushton & Jensen, 2005).". 3) Pesta, B. J., Kirkegaard, E. O., te Nijenhuis, J., Lasker, J., & Fuerst, J. G. (2020). Racial and ethnic group differences in the heritability of intelligence: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Intelligence, 78, 101408. "Some reviews suggest that the heritability of intelligence is similar across cultures (Plomin et al., 2014) and ethnic groups (Jensen, 1998; Rushton & Jensen, 2005). Others suggest differently (Turkheimer, Harden, & Nisbett, 2017).". So all three sources cite it in passing, two of them as noting that R&J are advocating one POV in a debate. The last source is preferred because it is published in a specialist journal for this research (Intelligence). --AndewNguyen (talk) 18:14, 27 March 2020 (UTC)

  No, I don't agree that Intelligence (or the organization behind it, International Society for Intelligence Research) is the preferred source, given recent controversy about that journal. They're like the modern-day Pioneer Fund, aren't they?

  Anyway, let's cut to the chase in this discussion: do you agree that the hereditarians, themselves, acknowledge that hereditarianism (a.k.a. the claim that there are genetic differences in intelligence along racial lines) is a "fringe" or "minority" or "unorthodox" (or whatever label you want to put on it) view, and not the "mainstream", "majority", "orthodox" (or whatever label you want to put on it) view? Levivich ^{[dubious – discuss]} 18:30, 27 March 2020 (UTC)

  • The fringe theories guideline itself states that NPOV is an overriding fundamental policy
  • NPOV states "fairly, proportionately, and, as far as possible, without editorial bias, all the significant views that have been published by reliable sources on a topic"
  • There are significant views published in reliable sources that this RfC attempts to label as fringe, seemingly in an attempt to censor or present them unfairly
  • No one supporting this RfC clearly states how a fringe label gives guidance for the article or complies with the NPOV policy

  That is not to say that the fringe guideline should not apply, there is some applicable guidance in certain sections as well as within NPOV

  • This is not an article about the views of Jensen, Rushton, Lynn, etc.
  • This is not an article about the concept solely within fields such as behavioral phsychology, genetics, etc.
  • This is not an article that is some heredity vs. environmental debate or even wholy scientific, there are social policy and ethical views
  • The scope of the article covers many aspects and many views from differing presperctives that somehow must all be presented from a mainstream perspective
  • The scientific merit and methodology of some research has been questioned, and some views are to varying degrees the minority depending on the field of study
  • The current article content does not follow NPOV and the FRINGE guideline, WP:PROPORTION and WP:GEVAL are probably the most pertinent policy links

  Just saying something is fringe whithout an opinion as to how the article content should change isn't helpful and makes this RfC pretty useless. I'm glad someone started discussing. fiveby(zero) 16:29, 27 March 2020 (UTC)

  I don't understand. This RFC is asking Is the claim that there are genetic differences in intelligence along racial lines a fringe viewpoint?, i.e., should the claim that there are genetic differences in intelligence along racial lines be treated in accordance with the guideline WP:FRINGE. (I say yes.) That doesn't mean we exclude those claims or censor anything–nothing in this RFC is talking about including vs. excluding content. It just means that we present those claims in accordance with WP:FRINGE. Levivich ^{[dubious – discuss]} 17:28, 27 March 2020 (UTC)

  The RfC lacks clarity as to how the article currently does not comply with FRINGE and how the content should change. Should have been something along these lines:

  1. There is some research claiming or supporting genetic differences in intelligence along racial lines
  2. The research and claims are significant but a small part of larger research into genetics and intelligence etc., distinctly minority, and of questionable merit and utility
  3. There are a number of implications: social, ethical, academic freedom, moral fallacy and troubling connections to historical and current viewpoints

  The amount of ink spilled on #2 and #3 vastly outweighs the actual research and its importance, and discussion has expanded way beyond the its field of study. The current article presentation is the opposite, nearly completely focused on #1, and incorporating detail better left to sub-articles such as Heritability of IQ as editors attempt to reproduce arguments for and against rather than a fair description, giving greater weight to the research than is merited. There is a false balance to the article that can be remedied by complying with the FRINGE guideline and NPOV policy. fiveby(zero) 18:31, 27 March 2020 (UTC)

  I agree there is a false balance to the article that can be remedied by complying with the FRINGE guideline and NPOV policy. However, as you can see in some of the "no" !votes above, some editors feel that the claim that there are genetic differences in intelligence along racial lines is the mainstream view, or that the scientific community is divided on it, as opposed to it being a minority/fringe view. Levivich ^{[dubious – discuss]} 18:59, 27 March 2020 (UTC)

  Levivich, i don't really see anyone arguing that it's a mainstream view, but do see many opinions which fail to take in to account major critisicsm. What i have seen by critics in some order of importance are reification as GreenMeansGo metions, sloppy use of race as proxy for genetic clusters, and the possiblilty of any genetic contribution, the inability to demonstrate that differences are completely environmental is necessarily support for a broader conclusion. Transfering the burden of proof to the environmental side, reproducing a naive argument "used as a blunt tool of pseudoscience" (which the article does) and not presenting clearly and adequately criticism (which the article fails to do) moves the article, and i think some arguments here, into fringe territory. If all the effort put into deletion, moves, arguing sources and labelling were put into article content which reflected what qualified persons had to say on the subject there could be a respectable article at that location. fiveby(zero) 17:07, 5 April 2020 (UTC)

• Mostly yes, though a caveat. There's a lot of fringe stuff in this topic regardless of whether you call it pseudoscience or not. It's pretty clear that if you have people saying one race is intellectually inferior or some waffling or middling language trying to fit that idea in, that's fringe. However, there is a potential area of nuance where racists might jump on and us fringe-watchers might overcorrect too:

For those of us who do genetics research (I know nothing of this specific topic), accounting for what we call population structure is a big deal (I'll use plant examples since that's what I know). What that basically means is that when a subgroup or landrace of say crops is grown for many years in a certain region, let's say Asia, they will tend to have some similar traits. If you add in a group of crops from Europe as well and look for correlation between say drought tolerance and different genes, your could easily get a "sigificant" effect showing seed coat color genes (let's say black vs. yellow) are correlated with drought tolerance or susceptibility. Almost any intro genetics course should point out that's a big no-no because not accounting for the background population structure causes false postives. In this case, the black drought tolerance seed was from more arid parts of Asia, and the yellow susceptible one was from Europe where there wasn't much selection pressure for drought tolerance, and people liked the yellow seed there more for some reason. Once you account for those background genetics by region, that specific gene is longer significant. That's a classic correlation ≠ caustion problem, and there are ways to account for that underlying population structure before doing your correlational study.

If the context of some content is that there is some underlying population structure like above where maybe a geographical group (who happens to be a certain skin color) scores lower on scientifically "valid" intelligence markers (just assuming such measures aren't controversial for a second), that isn't neccesarily fringe from the genetics perspective. That's only if it's in correct context though like a study saying "After accounting for population structure from race A that was more prone living in certain environmental conditions / selection pressures, we didn't find any correlations between genetic markers and intelligence." Basically, it's techncially fine to say a subgroup tends to score a certain way, but it's not fine to imply genetic or racial causation, especially without accounting for confounding factors. That part of doing the science correctly doesn't change just because the variables change to humans and race. To develop content on that though would take extreme care and likely still be messy though since I could envision racist wikilawyering being a problem while others try to hold the line on WP:FRINGE.

Maybe that's a niche example that actually hasn't come up in this dispute, but that's something that caught my eye when I put my genetics hat on where a paper could mention population structure and someone might seize on it saying "Look, there is a difference!" The content itself may not be fringe, but it could be so easily misinterpreted or POV-pushed (e.g., Climategate cherry-picking examples) that the fringe guideline would still correctly permeate the discussion. Kingofaces43 (talk) 18:03, 27 March 2020 (UTC)

• Comment: Let's not make this RfC sound more complicated than it is. The point it's making is that there is no evidence that's accepted by mainstream scientists that shows genetic differences in intelligence along racial lines. Period. Some people, using IQ tests, correlations, and speculations, claim the contrary. That claim is fringe because it's unsupported. The argument "we just don't know," which has been advanced by no-voters, is precisely the point. There is also no evidence that's accepted by mainstream scientists that shows that if later research revealed a genetic intelligence difference along racial lines, it would necessarily be to the advantage of white people over black people rather than the reverse. Again, "we just don't know."

The claim that certain populations are genetically less intelligent than others is on the face of it insulting and offensive. Giving a WP:FALSEBALANCE to such claims is contrary to policy. An analogy: Suppose some notable people made unsupported claims that Mr. X is a child molester. That claim would not be presented on Mr. X's BLP as if it were a theory that some people believe and some don't, but "we just don't know." Such false balance would be prohibited. If it were mentioned at all on the BLP, it would be mentioned as an unfounded claim made by enemies of Mr. X.

In fact, if such a claim concerning Mr. X did appear on Wikipedia with false balance, Mr. X could sue Wikipedia for defamatory content. Unfortunately, legal avenues are not available for Africans and African Americans to sue for defamatory content concerning race and intelligence. NightHeron (talk) 14:02, 28 March 2020 (UTC)

The controversial research actually shows East Asians and Jews to have significantly “superior” intellect to all other races including whites — whites are found to only be of very average intellect. So these datasets do not support any notion of white supremacy at all, white avergeness maybe. Further, science shows whites to have higher incidences of some personality disorders (including that most serial killers are white Caucasian), major depression, certain medical conditions, likely due to inbreeding between humans and Neanderthals, so why does the conversation focus on white vs black instead of East Asian, Jews vs black or some such? Is it just about smearing one side of the debate as white supremacists to win a content dispute? I get the impression that most of the yes voters seem under the delusion that they are somehow resisting white supremacy or some such and are casting WP:IDONTLIKEIT votes, because it is not normal for so many editors to vote against core policies such as WP:NOR, WP:NPOV, etc., in fact this is perhaps the first time I have seen this happen.

The don’t know status (re. the cause) of the research includes environmental factors too because without solid genetic understanding of intelligence no one can say for sure how much of a contribution is environmental/social and how much, if any, is genetic. So to call researchers who lean one way fringe when the science is very incomplete and not understood is not the norm, rather it would be the exception, if this RfC passes.--Literaturegeek | T@1k? 14:44, 28 March 2020 (UTC)

Yes, it is totally incompatible with white supremacy to believe [checks notes] that Jews are in some way exceptional. Please, take your racist bullshit elsewhere. --JBL (talk) 15:35, 28 March 2020 (UTC)

It would be highly unusual for a racist to be racist against their own race (I am a white Caucasian) and highlight research, that the FBI accepts, that whites are more likely to be serial killers and psychopaths. I guess the FBI and criminologists the world over are racists too... I could be misreading but it read as if you assumed because I highlighted research that was biased against whites that I must be a Jewish supremacist, especially as you chopped the East Asian part of my comment out about Jews and East Asians reportedly scoring higher on some cognitive tests. I am not Jewish. Instead, consider the other option, that I am motivated by Wikipedia policies and what reliable sources say, in other words assume good faith and don’t respond with personal attacks like this calling me a racist with profanity.--Literaturegeek | T@1k? 17:07, 28 March 2020 (UTC)

Science does not show "whites to have higher incidences of some personality disorders (including that most serial killers are white Caucasian), major depression, certain medical conditions, likely due to inbreeding between humans and Neanderthals". That is some serious woo right there. Levivich ^{[dubious – discuss]} 19:35, 28 March 2020 (UTC)

Here is a systematic review which suggests blacks are less likely to suffer personality disorders. I mean okay, the science is not settled, methodological explanations have been suggested but nevertheless... And pretty much everyone knows statistically serial killers are more likely to be white Caucasian. We have a Wikipedia article about Neanderthal DNA Interbreeding_between_archaic_and_modern_humans#Neanderthals. Blacks have the least Neanderthal DNA, whites have fair amount and perhaps the most Neanderthal DNA. This national geographic article comments on Neanderthal DNA contributing to or causing mental health and medical illnesses. My ex-girlfriend had lovely Neanderthal red hair lol. Look Levivich, I love science; clearly anything that discusses racial differences deeply offends you, it offends me too but obviously at a different level, I am always going to set that offence aside and follow sources and Wikipedia policy, I will not be right on every point and don’t want to feel like every time I post something I will have to defend every little point. Perhaps it is best we interact as little as possible. Both of our viewpoints have been clearly articulated for the RfC closers to consider. I enjoyed this debate but time to wind it down. Have a nice day and stay safe from the coronavirus. I don’t own the WP:TRUTH and your truth is as valuable as mine. Cheers.--Literaturegeek | T@1k? 20:11, 28 March 2020 (UTC)

No, there are no such thing as "serial killer statistics" that show that serial killers are more likely to be white Caucasian. (Also wtf is "white Caucasian", as opposed to what? Black Caucasian? White non-Caucasian?) You should ponder that we only know about the serial killers that we catch. You can say that most of the serial killers in the United States and Europe who have been caught are white, but then that makes sense, because most people in the US and Europe are white. Duh. Also, blacks have the least Neanderthal DNA is not at all what our article says, nor what the studies show. "Black" is not the same thing as "sub-Saharan African". I'm not offended by discussing racial differences, but you're making wildly-inaccurate claims in this discussion. Levivich ^{[dubious – discuss]} 20:25, 28 March 2020 (UTC)

The FBI says that The racial diversification of serial killers generally mirrors that of the overall U.S. population. - MrOllie (talk) 20:30, 28 March 2020 (UTC)

Strange but interesting Ollie because world statistics show overwhelmingly that mostly white countries produce the most serial killers with a couple of Asian countries lower in list. You have given me something to research in my spare time Ollie, maybe I was wrong after all on that point but still have questions hence bedtime hobby researching lol.--Literaturegeek | T@1k? 20:39, 28 March 2020 (UTC)

Oh, I never provided a reference for that claim Levivich, but yes white Caucasians (or Eurasians if you prefer that term) have significantly more Neanderthal DNA than those of African ancestry. I have never come across sources that suggest any different. Cheers.--Literaturegeek | T@1k? 20:56, 28 March 2020 (UTC)

So you think "modern Africans" is a racial group? (No, don't answer that, because actually what you should do is take your racist bullshit elsewhere.) --JBL (talk) 22:02, 28 March 2020 (UTC)

What a muddle. "People of African ancestry" is not the same as "black" (indeed, "black" refers to different collections of groups in the USA, South Africa, the Dominican Republic, England and Australia), nor does it represent a genetically-based grouping, including as it does everything from Berber to Igbo to Coptic Egyptian to San to Hansa. Then there is Eurasian, which is a whole lot broader than 'white Caucasian', (or any other colour of caucasian), and includes groups (such Tamils and Hmong) that would cause the white racists and xenophobes to blanch at the thought of being grouped together with them under your banner of 'white Caucasians'. And you seem to have missed the import of the article, that there was a good bit of backflow into Africa, meaning that there is no line of division that separates Sub-Saharan Africans from Supra-Saharan populations (everyone else), let alone 'blacks' from 'white caucasians'. As with most other human traits, the amount of Neanderthal DNA falls along a continuum. There are indeed geographical trends, even within sub-Saharan Africa, but they do not correspond with most societal definitions of race. Agricolae (talk) 22:26, 28 March 2020 (UTC)

Yes Agricolae, Africa has two separate major racial groups, Arabic (North Africa) and Sub Saharan. Eurasia (as the name obviously implies) includes Asian people and white Caucasians. I do not mind being described as Eurasian or being placed in same group as Asian people. I didn’t miss that line of the article; the back flow and levels of Neanderthal DNA is found in higher levels in North Africans/Arabs whereas Sub Saharan Africans have the least amount of Neanderthal DNA, possibly explaining why sub Saharan Africans appear to have reduced rates of certain illnesses compared to other racial groups.

Joel B. Lewis, obviously the topic of race is triggering for you as you seem to become deeply offended easily on this topic area and I can understand that as poisonous racist ideologies have caused much suffering. But that does not give you the right to personally attack me as a racist, which is ridiculous as my girlfriend is mixed race and this has no bearing on how I view her. She is simply a fellow human being of the woman variety lol. Any real racist would hate my views I have posted here. They would probably call me (simply for mentioning certain reliable sources) a Jew lover, white race traitor (for having a mixed race girlfriend and for saying whites have some flawed Neanderthal DNA), I dunno. Maybe because I follow reliable sources and they are conflicting and sometimes offensive to everyone, on some level, and that means they don’t make any “side” happy. But I still oppose this RfC because Wikipedia is WP:NOTCENSORED. Cheers.--Literaturegeek | T@1k? 02:55, 30 March 2020 (UTC)

Oh, jesus. That's some real Curse of Ham bullshit right there. Learn the provenance of your racial pseudoscience beliefs. jps (talk) 11:04, 2 April 2020 (UTC)

But, jps, he has black friends! --JBL (talk) 21:22, 2 April 2020 (UTC)

If the RfC question was reversed to label socio-environmental explanations for lower IQ scores of those of sub saharran African heritage fringe I would oppose that RfC question just as strongly. I actually wish the datasets of IQ scores of African Americans scoring lower than other racial groups were different and instead found they scored the same as other racial groups; this is because it is distasteful but Wikipedia is WP:NOTCENSORED. Also, I have been on Wikipedia for many years and I have made zero edits to any article related to race because the subject matter has little interest to me, I just saw an AfD “advertised” on Wikipedia and joined the discussion. So your attempt to discredit my no vote as being that of a racially conflicted editor just falls flat on its face. The reality is that I just voted differently than you and you do not like that, you should stop attacking/harassing editors who voted differently. Also if, as I suspect this RfC — if it passes — will do, genetic contribution to racial gaps in intelligence is briefly ridiculed in the article as being “fringe” without any hard science to back that position up before being excluded from the article then a significant percentage of our readers will smell a rat that the article is biased and will then search out other sources of information which could lead them to white supremacist websites so I think the effort, although well intentioned, is self-defeating. Personally I do not know the scientific reason for the IQ gap and will wait for research, both genetic and socio-environmental, to advance to the point of conclusion before I have an opinion on that.--Literaturegeek | T@1k? 22:10, 4 April 2020 (UTC)

Is this the first time that someone has argued that we need to incorporate the views of white supremacists onto Wikipedia, because otherwise people looking for the white supremacist viewpoint might be forced to go find some white supremacists to ask? --JBL (talk) 23:05, 4 April 2020 (UTC)

On the contrary, white supremacist viewpoints are horse shit paranoia about antisemitic world conspiracies and they grossly pervert the academic literature on race and intelligence and other matters, their propaganda websites and views reflect nothing like the NPOV, WEIGHT, RS approach I am suggesting. Wikipedia does a good but imperfect job of summarising reliable sources on the matter. And I have clearly, in this RfC, provided references that whites have increased risk of mental health problems compared to sub Saharan Africans, so I can assure you I do not subscribe to white supremacy. There are many “blacks” and people of other racial groups who are smarter and better people than me and I judge people on an individual level and oppose racial discrimination. Please don’t twist my words out of context. To be clear, I do not want readers reading a false scientific consensus, or cherry picked poor quality sources on white supremacist sites and I do not want them getting sucked into the evil world of antisemitism.--Literaturegeek | T@1k? 23:27, 4 April 2020 (UTC)

• Yes per nom. --JBL (talk) 14:13, 28 March 2020 (UTC) Since the discussion has continued at length, I would like to expand on this. Richard Lynn has been mentioned by several people in this discussion, starting with the nominator; some of those arguing "no" have suggested that his work on this topic should be viewed favorably in comparison with Gould's. Here is a quote from our article about him: He is a former professor emeritus of psychology at Ulster University, having had the title withdrawn by the university in 2018. Similarly, another prominent proponent of the view considered by this RfC is James Watson. Here is a quote from our article about him: In 2019, following the broadcast of a documentary in which Watson reiterated his views on race and genetics, CSHL [an institution he had served in important roles for nearly 40 years] revoked his honorary titles and severed all ties with him. What we see here is that the position under discussion is sufficiently on the margins of academic discourse that major academic institutions go to great lengths to dissociate themselves from people who hold it (even Nobel Prize winners). That is about as clear evidence on this point as a person could ask for. --JBL (talk) 23:02, 15 April 2020 (UTC)

I don't think you're interpreting the data correctly. Jensen, Rushton, Gottfredson, Robert Gordon, et al --- did not lose their positions or titles all these many years on from becoming known for their views. In Canada, the Prime Minister calling Rushton a racist wasn't enough for the university to sever ties or force him into retirement. Heck, even Peter Duesberg, crank scientist and Angel of Death to tens of thousands of black Africans and misconduct investigation target, did not lose his position at Berkeley.

So what changed lately, that Watson and Richard Lynn, James Thompson and Noah Carl (whose academic work was not even alleged to be erroneous in any way and had nothing to do with race-and-IQ) all got unpersoned at almost the same time? These disconnections are not about science and not about respect for Africans (see Duesberg, or the preceding 20 years). They are about the power of social media to organize outrage mobs; a background of moral panic since 2016 that keeps the mob cruising all the time looking for windows to break, and the mob's certainty that it can win every time against risk-averse institutions. Speaking truth to power only works as an inversion of reality where the ones speaking hold the power from the outset, and know it, but frame themselves as underdogs needing protection.

Richard Lynn, James Thompson and Noah Carl were removed by pressure campaigns coordinated by student groups at their campuses in tandem with student journalists (hence the New Statesman piece referenced here, and others) in relation to the London conference. Their institutions didn't suddenly take an interest in the merits of their work, they wanted to make the protest problem go away, and untenured/emeritus faculty are easy targets. Watson wasn't fired for stating a scientifically fringe position; he could have been an AIDS denier like Duesberg, a nutrition crank like Linus Pauling, or a parapsychologist like Daryl Bem and been as unharmed as they were. Nor was he fired for being unrepentant; he did that years earlier by saying, despite his apology for 2007, that he didn't think he had been racist. He wasn't fired for delving into questions of race; he didn't do that in the interview or the preceding 10 years. Watson was fired over meta-science: denying that his 2007 comment was scientifically fringe. It was socially and politically fringe, and his institution played the same game this RfC is an attempt to do, pretending social fringe equals science fringe. 73.149.246.232 (talk) 07:49, 16 April 2020 (UTC)

It's difficult for academic institutions to sever ties or take other action against purveyors of egregious fringe views, and so they rarely do. The University of Delaware tried to prevent Linda Gottfredson from being funded by the white supremacist Pioneer Fund, but she went to court, which ruled against the university. The fact that institutions did take action against Lynn and Watson (and tried to against Gottfredson) is very significant for this RfC. NightHeron (talk) 13:23, 16 April 2020 (UTC)

"It was socially and politically fringe, and his institution played the same game this RfC is an attempt to do, pretending social fringe equals science fringe." That is a false equivalence. And patently untrue. What a bunch of malarkey (in other words, B.S.) That was a totally POV interpretation. ---Steve Quinn (talk) 22:08, 16 April 2020 (UTC)

• Yes as:
  • the concept of "race" is a failed hypothesis that has never been able to give a clear and consistent definition of how exactly to tell if two people belong to different "races", which makes any IQ-race correlation study an exercise in random criteria, such as what the government thinks about your skin color,
  • sciences are supposed to be consilient with each other, and this "races differ in IQ" stuff contradicts what anthropology and genetics say about races - Africans are genetically more different from each other than from the rest of humanity,
  • nobody has been able to give any evidence refuting economic and/or cultural explanations for differing IQ scores. There is only handwaving. --Hob Gadling (talk) 16:01, 28 March 2020 (UTC)
• Yes - not only is it fringe that there are "genetic differences in intelligence along racial lines", it is fringe that 'racial lines' exist at all in any genetic sense, as opposed to as a societal construct (or rather, a range of distinct constructs among different cultures). Agricolae (talk) 20:26, 28 March 2020 (UTC)
• No. Let's examine the basis for most of the "yes" votes. There are basically two separate arguments being made here.

First, some editors are arguing that it is not possible for "race" to have a genetic correlation with intelligence or any other trait, because race is a sociological construct and has no genetic meaning. One person went so far as to claim [15] that the entire race and genetics article, which is extremely well-sourced, is a "fringe article". In response, other editors have cited studies such as Huang et al. that identified the actual genetic differences between European, Asian, African, and Native American populations. It's known that these genetic differences between continental groups affect not only superficial traits such as skin color, but also differences in brain anatomy (see Fan et al. 2015). However, it isn't yet known what effect these differences in brain anatomy might have on cognitive ability.

Whenever this has been pointed out, the "yes" voters have shifted to a second argument, [16] which is that a genetic basis for the observed group differences in average IQ scores is possible, but the idea is fringe because it has almost no support in mainstream psychology or genetics. However, the sources that most directly examine this idea's level of support suggest the opposite. Aside from the survey of cognitive psychologists that a few others have linked to, the matter is discussed in this article:

The intent behind these phrases seems meant to make it seem as if (Charles) Murray’s perspectives place him on the edges of the scientific community with regards to genetic science. Yet simply observing the fact that people with fairly unimpeachable scientific reputations such as Richard Haier (Professor Emeritus in the Pediatric Neurology Division at UCI and editor-in-chief of the esteemed scientific journal Intelligence), cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker, geneticist David Reich, Harris himself and many others have either defended Murray directly or defended essentially comparable points of view would seem to belie this impression rather blatantly.

Richard Haier, Steven Pinker, David Reich, and Sam Harris all are respected, prominent figures in psychology, neuroscience and genetics. So the second argument, that this idea has no significant support, clearly is not true either. The repeated shifting back and forth between these two arguments has made the discussion in this RFC progress in a cyclic fashion. This probably is happening because the discussion here has become too long for one person to easily read all of it. Sinuthius (talk) 09:08, 29 March 2020 (UTC)

— Sinuthius (talk • contribs) has made few or no other edits outside this topic. —JBL (talk) 12:31, 29 March 2020 (UTC)

"Genetic differences between continental groups" - sounds to me like the article should be geography and genetics, rather than race and genetics. Agricolae (talk) 13:15, 29 March 2020 (UTC)

Agricolae, Depends where you are. In my country of New Zealand it is fairly important because Maori people have higher instances of breast cancer,[17] among other things. Not all 'races' are controversial. Some are pretty damned closely correlated with geographic isolation (e.g. Pacifika Peoples). People are just too focused on Black vs. White in the USA to see the forest for the trees. — Insertcleverphrasehere ^{(or here)}_{(click me!)} 19:59, 29 March 2020 (UTC)

Yet go somewhere else and those same Maoris just got lumped together as 'coloureds' with Pakistanis, Chinese, first-generation African/Euro mixed people and long-mixed Cape Coloureds - race is very much in the eye of the beholder (and the beheld). Something similar to what you describe is seen in the United States where genetic studies have suggested that African Americans have higher hypertension due to the legacy of slavery, yet the definition of African-Americans includes everything from the full-blooded descendants of slaves to people who have very little slave ancestry but identify as African-American, to immigrant naturalized NBA players who come from a background with no slavery, to the son of a mixed marriage between a 'white' mother from Kansas and a father from Kenya. It would exclude any slave descendants whose ancestors managed to 'pass' as white, or who based on also having a Native American ancestor are registered member of the Cherokee tribe, or belong to one of the so-called Tri-Racial Isolate populations, some of which call themselves white, and some Indian, but almost none self-identify as African American even though many of them have as high as 50% 'black' slave ancestry. The use of race in this instance is at best a piss-poor proxy (or a lazy approximation) for the question they really want to ask. I am not saying that all humans are genetically uniform, that there were not historical populations that developed phenotypes specific to their groups, just that in generalizing about 'race' rather than addressing the specific populations in question, one takes it out of the realm of science and into a quagmire of conflicting social definitions that bear little relevance to actual genetics. Agricolae (talk) 21:19, 29 March 2020 (UTC)

Agricolae, what’s your point? This RFC would treat Maori the same as the I’ll defined “African American”. My point remains the same: the RFC is too broad in scope; attempting to tar all population-intelligence research with the same brush. — Insertcleverphrasehere ^{(or here)}_{(click me!)} 00:27, 30 March 2020 (UTC)

Yes, the RfC is not just about white supremacy in the US. If an author claimed that Maori people are genetically inferior to white New Zealanders in intelligence, that would also be fringe. That does not mean that the RfC is "too broad." NightHeron (talk) 00:50, 30 March 2020 (UTC)

NightHeron, And yet, you miss the point again. Being hyperbolic and always pulling out the most extreme idiots and calling them fringe doesn't illustrate where you should draw the line at what is fringe and what isn't. That's the problem with this RfC. — Insertcleverphrasehere ^{(or here)}_{(click me!)} 05:45, 30 March 2020 (UTC)

Insertcleverphrasehere: You're repeating the same illogical claim. The RfC says where to draw the line. A claim that there are genetic differences in intelligence along racial lines is fringe; a discussion of the subject that does not make that claim is not fringe. There are plenty of precedents on Wikipedia for what this RfC proposes -- climate change denial, creationism/intelligent design, homeopathy, etc. Why are you trying to make a straightforward proposal seem complicated and "too broad"? NightHeron (talk) 11:10, 30 March 2020 (UTC)

NightHeron, It's not illogical; I'll try to explain. One of my bachelors degrees is in evolutionary biology, which certainly doesn't make me an expert but does give me a little insight.

Human populations are not monolithic, there is variation between subgroups. Societal defined 'races' are sometimes correlated with these subgroup populations. This may be less true for some 'races' and more true for others and some races might not be 'real', but others are. Aboriginal Australians for example were more or less isolated from the rest of human population for a very long time.

Intelligence is based in heritable traits. This isn't up for debate. There will be a lot of genes involved, but it is obviously heritable. In any heritable trait, there is variation within a population. No two subgroups within the overall population are the same, right down to the individual level. This is basic genetics.

There is ZERO reason to assume that any two sub populations that have had ANY amount of isolation should have the exact same amount of any inheritable trait. In fact, basic statistics indicates that it would be virtually impossible for that to be the case. It might be a few points, or 10, or whatever, and it might be really hard to measure but it will be there.

The basic principles above lead to an obvious conclusion, and it's the one you are trying to label 'fringe'. Your argument is the one that doesn't make sense, and that's why so many researchers in the field, when polled, say that there is obviously going to be a genetic component to the observed intelligence differences between sub-populations amongst humans (and yes, sometimes that correlates with a societal 'race'). — Insertcleverphrasehere ^{(or here)}_{(click me!)} 22:08, 30 March 2020 (UTC)

You are generally a good editor, but please stop embarrassing yourself. --JBL (talk) 22:24, 30 March 2020 (UTC)

Joel B. Lewis, Excuse me? What kind of response is that? Be civil. — Insertcleverphrasehere ^{(or here)}_{(click me!)} 23:27, 30 March 2020 (UTC)

Insertcleverphrasehere, thanks for explaining your point, since that allows me to pinpoint what's illogical. Two things. (1) First, you're confusing individual differences with group differences. Individual differences in cows' adult heights are largely hereditary; but if a group of cows is randomly divided into two subgroups at birth, and one subgroup is fed well and the other poorly, then the two subgroups will differ in average adult height for purely environmental reasons. (2) For simplicity, let's put aside the question of whether or not racial divisions have a significant biological as opposed to socio-political basis. Let's also put aside the question of how to measure intelligence, which is a subjective, nebulous, and multifaceted concept. Let's even grant that it's theoretically possible that -- whatever races are, whatever intelligence is, and whatever genes might some day be found that relate to intelligence -- it could turn out that there's a statistically significant difference between the average number of "intelligence genes" possessed by a Maori and by a white New Zealander. There is ZERO scientific evidence that this is the case, and there is also ZERO scientific evidence that if it were the case, the difference would be to the advantage of white New Zealanders over the Maori people rather than the reverse. For this reason, any claim of racial inferiority in intelligence genes of Maori people (or of African Americans or of any other race) is fringe. An analogy I've mentioned before is that it is theoretically possible that there have been kidnappings of humans by extraterrestrial aliens who proceeded to perform sexual experiments on them. But since there is ZERO scientific evidence for that, such a claim is fringe. NightHeron (talk) 23:35, 30 March 2020 (UTC)

NightHeron, My point was that there are legitimate scientific reasons to believe that genetics play at least some role, and that is why some scientists say what they say when pressed. The study cited above (Rindermann et al. 2016) looking at researchers in the field is fairly clear. The community of experts in the field of intelligence research don't agree with what you say above. If the scientists that research this have a significant number among them that have this supposedly "fringe" viewpoint, how exactly is it fringe? You can't just say something is so when the people who actually study this stuff are divided. — Insertcleverphrasehere ^{(or here)}_{(click me!)} 23:40, 30 March 2020 (UTC)

At the beginning of the RfC I gave several sources for the scientific mainstream view. There are "experts" who reject the mainstream view and publish in journals such as Intelligence and Mankind Quarterly and on rare occasion in reputable places. (Analogous statements can be made for "experts" who deny anthropogenic climate change, or support homeopathy, or extrasensory perception, or facilitated communication.) Earlier I pointed out that Rindermann has a very strong POV, having published frequently in the overtly white supremacist Mankind Quarterly, so his "survey" is completely unreliable. NightHeron (talk) 00:08, 31 March 2020 (UTC)

NightHeron, You say it, so it must be true! I've also already pointed out that using the association fallacy is an inappropriate way to qualify sources as unreliable. — Insertcleverphrasehere ^{(or here)}_{(click me!)} 00:15, 31 March 2020 (UTC)

No, Wikipedia says it in the first sentence of the article Mankind Quarterly, giving 4 sources: Mankind Quarterly is a peer-reviewed academic journal that has been described as a "cornerstone of the scientific racism establishment", a "white supremacist journal", an "infamous racist journal", and "scientific racism's keepers of the flame". NightHeron (talk) 00:24, 31 March 2020 (UTC)

NightHeron, As soon as you can show me a source that says all that stuff about Rindermann himself, or about something he wrote, rather than just a journal he has been published in/associated with, then I'll start taking you seriously... otherwise you are just repeating the same fallacy. — Insertcleverphrasehere ^{(or here)}_{(click me!)} 09:30, 31 March 2020 (UTC)

Why are you passionately defending Rindermann? He not only is a frequent contributor to Mankind Quarterly (from his BLP), but also organized conferences for the International Society for Intelligence Research, which, according to the New Statesman, "promotes racist pseudo-science." He is apparently quite a hero to Europe-based anti-immigrant groups. Doesn't that at all cause you to doubt the reliability of his "survey"? NightHeron (talk) 11:57, 31 March 2020 (UTC)

Because you are trying to disqualify a source that you just don't like based on logical fallacies? You've made statements that are unambiguous BLP violations about this guy, and when pressed to find a source that describes him the way you have, you came up empty. I personally don't tar and feather people because of associations they have, but based on the content of their work, and what they say. I've read some of Rindermann's work since this RfC began (including the study to which we have been referring, and while I can't speak for all of his work, I haven't yet seen anything objectionable. You are essentially saying that the guy is guilty by association, but that isn't an argument that holds up to scrutiny. I'm merely pointing that out. If you have a better study looking into the same thing, I'd be glad to see it; until then, it seems the best source of data on how experts in the field view the particular question this RfC asks, and it doesn't support the RfC's proposal. — Insertcleverphrasehere ^{(or here)}_{(click me!)} 02:54, 1 April 2020 (UTC)

If someone is a frequent contributor to a leftist pro-communist journal, would you trust him to conduct a reliable survey about attitudes toward communism and socialism? If someone is a frequent contributor to an anti-abortion publication, would you trust him to conduct a reliable survey about attitudes toward abortion? My point is that Rindermann is biased. The fact that in your own personal reading of Rindermann you find nothing objectionable -- just as you personally don't consider the view that some races are genetically inferior to others in intelligence to be beyond the pale -- is irrelevant, per WP:OR. NightHeron (talk) 12:28, 1 April 2020 (UTC)

NightHeron, Everyone has a POV. Just because you have a POV does not mean that you can't create unbiased research. Like I said; find a source that says the stuff about Rindermann that you claim (including this accusation of bias in his research). Until then it is the best source we have. — Insertcleverphrasehere ^{(or here)}_{(click me!)} 19:53, 1 April 2020 (UTC)

Everyone has a POV. But not everyone would publish in a white supremacist journal. In fact, a reputable scholar wouldn't write for such a disreputable rag, let alone be a frequent contributor to Mankind Quarterly (from Rindermann's BLP). NightHeron (talk) 20:07, 1 April 2020 (UTC)

NightHeron, Please see Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Noticeboard/Archive_286#Books_from_Cambridge_University_Press and Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Noticeboard#Rindermann,_Intelligence. There are no sources that paint Rindermann as biased (that I have seen or that you have presented), nor have you presented anything that would call into question the peer review process of Intelligence such that they would not call out out any unreliable reporting in the linked study. Again, this source seems the highest quality source that most directly answers the question that this RfC poses and the source is clear; that experts' opinions are split nearly 50/50 on which has the most impact (environmental or genetic). — Insertcleverphrasehere ^{(or here)}_{(click me!)} 23:26, 6 April 2020 (UTC)

It appears that the New Statesman is incorrect in its reporting. He isn't a "frequent" contributor to Mankind Quarterly. He is credited on precisely one paper that was published there, for which he is not even the primary author. See here. NightHeron, I think you should seriously consider removing some of the earlier statements that you have made about Rindermann during this RfC as they are clearly BLP violations. We have no sources calling him the stuff that you have called him, and the one source that says anything remotely negative about him also appears to be in error. There is certainly no grounds for calling him a "diehard white supremacist", as you did earlier in this RfC. — Insertcleverphrasehere ^{(or here)}_{(click me!)} 11:39, 8 April 2020 (UTC)

Insertcleverphrasehere I've struck the words frequent and diehard from my earlier comments. But there is plenty of evidence that Rindermann is at the rightist end of the spectrum on issues of race and intelligence: (1) in 2016 speaking before the rightist Property and Freedom Society claiming cognitive and cultural inferiority of immigrants; (2) publishing in 2017 in the Mankind Quarterly; (3) being on the "review team" for OpenPsych (set up in 2014 by white supremacists Emil Kirkegaard and Davide Piffer, described as a "pseudojournal" by the Southern Poverty Law Center); (4) attending the London Conference on Intelligence, originally held secretively at the University College London and then moved after a scandal arose over UCL unknowingly hosting such a conference. NightHeron (talk) 12:31, 8 April 2020 (UTC)

NightHeron, That's a lot of synthesis, but fine, even if we take it that he is "at the rightist end of the spectrum" on these issues, that still doesn't discredit him or the survey that he conduced and published in a reputable peer-reviewed journal. You are essentially implying that he falsified data, or somehow selectively chose the participants of the study in such a way to bias the outcome, and somehow got all this past the Peer-review process at Intelligence; all without any evidence beyond "he has a POV". Again, this is a high quality source, that pretty much directly answers the question that this RfC poses, and there is no policy-based reason that its reliability should be in question. — Insertcleverphrasehere ^{(or here)}_{(click me!)} 12:53, 8 April 2020 (UTC)

(1) Intelligence is the official journal of the rightist International Society for Intelligence Research, with an editorial board that shares Rindermann's POV. It's "peer-reviewed" by "peers" chosen by those editors. (2) Let's not be naive about surveys conducted by people with strong POVs. In the US, advocacy groups and political campaigns often conduct mail or online "surveys." The questions are worded so that the alternatives they agree with sound very reasonable, and the opposing viewpoints less reasonable; and they know full well that the response rate will be much lower among recipients who dislike the advocacy group or politician than among recipients who generally agree with them. Not surprisingly, the results of the "survey" support the POV of the organization that conducts it. (3) It's a misapplication of WP:OR and WP:SYNTH to say that editors can't look at the evidence and conclude from it that a source is not reliable. We don't need to find an RS that says "this source is unreliable." NightHeron (talk) 17:09, 8 April 2020 (UTC)

NightHeron, I've specifically asked at RSN about this source, and it appears that a majority of editors do not share this viewpoint of yours. It is one of the most respected journals in the field. We can wait for a close on that of course for a final judgement. I said what you are saying is SYNTH because it doesn't add up to the conclusion that you are implying. You are saying that the outcome of the study is not valid, because the author has a POV. You are essentially implying that Rindermann has engaged in falsification of data or intentional skewing of data, which he somehow got past peer-review at Intelligence. I don't know what to say... Your sources just don't say anything that would lead up to that conclusion. He may have a POV, but there is no evidence that his POV is any more extreme than many others in his field. He may be on the "right of the spectrum", but if we only allowed research from people who were "centrists" we would quickly run out of viable citations. The fact is that this source MUST be disqualified completely for this RfC to pass, and that is why you are so vehement about naming it unreliable. It answers the question that this RfC poses, unambiguously:

In the current study, EQCA experts were asked what percentage of the US Black-White differences in IQ is, in their view, due to environment or genes. In general, EQCA experts gave a 50–50 (50% genes, 50% environment) response with a slight tilt to the environmental position (51% vs. 49%; Table 3). When EQCA experts were classified into discrete categories (genetic, environmental, or 50–50), 40% favored an environmental position, 43% a genetic position, and 17% assumed 50–50. The difference in the average versus discrete results may seem contradictory (average results tilted to the environment and discrete categories tilted to genes), except when extreme positions are considered. 16% of experts who favored an environmental perspective assumed a 100% environmental position, whereas only 6% of experts who favored a genetic perspective assumed a 100% genetic position (Fig. 3). That is, the opinion of “environmentalists” was more extreme than the opinion of “geneticists.”

— Insertcleverphrasehere ^{(or here)}_{(click me!)} 21:03, 8 April 2020 (UTC)

You are completely misrepresenting how things stand. We've had a debate about Rindermann's "survey" in this RfC discussion. You apparently were unhappy with how that debate was going, and so went WP:FORUMSHOPPING over to RSN and got a parallel discussion going there. Some of the comments that you're counting as agreeing with you did not actually address the reliability of the specific "survey" but rather disputed the general question of whether Rindermann is fringe. But the fringe nature of Rindermann,Lynn,Gottfredson,Rushton,Jensen,etc. is what we're already debating here. It's a real waste of time and a cause of confusion to have parallel debates on the same question.

Meanwhile, my point on the claimed reliability of the "survey" is very simple and has not been refuted: Rindermann and his crowd (including the International Society for Intelligence Research, the London Conference on Intelligence, the Property and Freedom Society, and the editors of Intelligence, Mankind Quarterly, and OpenPsych) represent a POV at the right end of the spectrum on this issue. People with a strong POV on an issue typically skew surveys on that issue. In the US, advocacy groups and political campaigns often conduct mail or online "surveys." The questions are worded so that the alternatives they advocate sound very reasonable, and the opposing viewpoints less reasonable. Of course, they know full well that the response rate will be much lower among recipients who dislike the advocacy group or politician than among recipients who generally agree with them. Not surprisingly, the results of the "survey" support the POV of the organization that conducts it. Rindermann's "survey" would obviously attract the participation of like-minded race theorists, while people who see the biased "survey" as a lot of nonsense would throw it in the trash.

Since the editorial board at Intelligence is dominated by the same extreme POV on race and intelligence, Rindermann did not have to somehow got past peer-review at Intelligence. The "peers" were biased in the same way that he was. You like repeating that the journal is "respected," but that depends on one's POV. From the article Intelligence (journal): It has been criticised for having included on its editorial board biochemist Gerhard Meisenberg and psychologist Richard Lynn, both of whom are alleged supporters of eugenics and scientific racism.[1][2][3]. NightHeron (talk) 00:01, 9 April 2020 (UTC)

NightHeron, So.... let me get this straight, everyone that doesn't agree with the RfC is fringe because of their right POV (which is OR or entirely based on one New Statesman opinion piece by a student journalist who also said "The ISIR is home to many great scientists, and its journal Intelligence is one of the most respected in its field."). In any case, this "POV" of theirs, which you don't like, deems them unreliable, therefore we should ignore them when looking at overall opinions of experts in the field of study with regards to the question the RfC poses? So therefore the consensus is unanimously against them in the remainder of the scientific community? Therefore they are fringe? Your arguments are circular. I haven't seen this many logical fallacies coming from one person since the last time I watched a creationist debate. Of course you are going to deem an opinion "fringe" amongst reliable sources if you start with the supposition that everyone with the opinion is not reliable. And no, I didn't FORUMSHOP. RSN is the correct place to ask for comments on a source's reliability, people who are experts on our core WP:RS policies frequent that page. — Insertcleverphrasehere ^{(or here)}_{(click me!)} 01:09, 9 April 2020 (UTC)

Insertcleverphrasehere: Your incoherent caricature of what I've said is offensive. I presented plenty of evidence that Rindermann and Intelligence have a strong POV on the question the "survey" concerned, and I explained why people with a strong POV cannot be relied on to conduct an unbiased survey. Full stop. I didn't say any of the gibberish you're attributing to me. So please cut it out. Please observe WP:AGF and WP:NPA.

Concerning the claimed reliability of Rindermann's "survey" as an indicator of what mainstream opinion is, the editor Literaturegeek wrote a long edit (see above) describing some of its "results." Among them, they reported they felt Lynn produced the best quality research and Gould to be of the lowest quality. Please read the two articles Richard Lynn and Stephen Jay Gould (just the leads, if you don't have time to read the full articles), and see which of the two is mainstream (a "Living Legend" according to the US Library of Congress) and which of the two is fringe. Doesn't that tell you something about how reliable this "survey" is? NightHeron (talk) 01:41, 9 April 2020 (UTC)

NightHeron, I'm really not sure where that quote was taken from, but the relevant section verbatim from the source is:

John B. Carroll, Thomas J. Bouchard, and Ian J. Deary received the highest quality ratings; Arthur Jensen, Robert Plomin, and Thomas J. Bouchard received the highest innovativeness ratings; and John B. Carroll, Arthur Jensen, and Thomas J. Bouchard received the highest ratings for importance of oeuvre. The ratings for all criteria were relatively homogeneous (SD = 1.0–1.8), with Arthur Jensen's ratings showing the most heterogeneity. Another analysis examined intelligence researchers who are controversial, defined by heterogeneity of ratings (based on relatively large SDs). The heterogeneity indicates that experts had split opinions on the researchers, with some experts viewing them as high in quality, innovativeness, and importance but others having divergent opinions. For quality, heterogeneity was observed for Richard Lynn (2.84), followed by Robert Sternberg (2.57) and Satoshi Kanazawa (2.52). For innovativeness, variability was observed for Robert Sternberg (2.83), Howard Gardner (2.81), and Satoshi Kanazawa (2.60). Finally, for importance of oeuvre, heterogeneity was observed for Richard Lynn (2.85), Howard Gardner (2.83), and Robert Sternberg (2.82). Across all criteria, expert opinions were lowest for Stephen J. Gould (quality: M = 2.33, SD = 1.99, N = 60; innovativeness: M = 3.17, SD = 2.36, N = 48; importance of oeuvre: M = 2.96, SD = 2.55, N = 47).1

This reports the results of the survey, not Rindermann's personal views. Lynn was regarded with "split" opinions, not "highly". Gould was indeed viewed with a negative opinion, but then, Gould was better known for his popular science contributions rather than his rigorous scientific literature contributions, and his book was received quite a bit of criticism by many researchers in the field. So this isn't particularly surprising. In any case, if your point is that this somehow invalidates the study, that makes no sense. Stop trying to pull out the name of one "discredited" scientist or another and somehow try to associate that with Rindermann or the study. It's getting old and I'm sick of asking you to stop with the association fallacy. James Flynn is on the editorial board of Intelligence, is he also unreliable? Rindermann holds the Chair of Educational and Developmental Psychology at the Technical University of Chemnitz, if he were discredited as you claim, he wouldn't be allowed such a position. — Insertcleverphrasehere ^{(or here)}_{(click me!)} 02:09, 9 April 2020 (UTC)

You're the one who's making a truly weird association fallacy -- that just because Rindermann holds an academic title at a German university, that means he's not fringe. What a bizarre thing to say! NightHeron (talk) 02:31, 9 April 2020 (UTC)

Lets continue this conversation at Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Noticeboard#Rindermann,_Intelligence rather than having a similar debate in two places at once. RSN is the correct place to be discussing the reliability of a source. — Insertcleverphrasehere ^{(or here)}_{(click me!)} 02:18, 9 April 2020 (UTC)

Better yet, let's just drop it on both noticeboards, and let other editors comment. This back-and-forth is getting tiresome and repetitious, and we should take mercy upon the poor admin(s) who will have to close these debates.NightHeron (talk) 02:31, 9 April 2020 (UTC)

Since you've decided to make this personal, essentially making an implication of racism in the process, I'll make myself clear. This paper by Nathan Cofnas roughly sums up my views on research in this field. — Insertcleverphrasehere ^{(or here)}_{(click me!)} 20:01, 1 April 2020 (UTC)

Intellectual dark web bullshit. Shameful really. Nice impact factor, guy. jps (talk) 00:56, 2 April 2020 (UTC)

Not sure how many citations you expect a paper published this year to have, but whatever. — Insertcleverphrasehere ^{(or here)}_{(click me!)} 07:54, 2 April 2020 (UTC)

Did I hurt your feelings? Impact factors apply to journals, not to papers. Now take several seats. jps (talk) 11:01, 2 April 2020 (UTC)

Something that's worth mentioning here is that the results of Rindermann et al's recent survey are similar to the results of the earlier survey of expert opinion by Snyderman and Rothman, including the earlier survey's question about the causes of the black/white IQ gap. Of the experts surveyed by Snyderman and Rothman, 15% expressed the view that the gap was entirely due to environmental factors, 45% said that the gap was due to a combination of genetic and environmental factors, 1% said that the gap was entirely due to genetics, 24% said that there were insufficient data to reach a conclusion, and 14% did not respond to the question. This other survey is from thirty years ago, so taken by itself it isn't a particularly good measure of expert opinion in the present. But the fact that Rindermann et al's recent results are consistent with the results of the earlier survey (with a plurality of experts expressing the view that the gap is due to both environment and genetics) is evidence that Rindermann et al. reported their results accurately. 2600:1004:B16E:6D44:D3B:36CE:1C4F:5B84 (talk) 06:31, 2 April 2020 (UTC)

NightHeron, Here is a hypothetical question: If a researcher in the field said "Based on the results of Studies X, Y, and Z, at least some of the observed intelligence differences between group A and Group B are likely genetic." Would that be fringe? Because your RfC would say that it is. And a lot of researchers and experts in the field have made statements exactly like this. — Insertcleverphrasehere ^{(or here)}_{(click me!)} 23:51, 30 March 2020 (UTC)

If Group A and Group B are races, yes. That's what the RfC proposal says. NightHeron (talk) 00:08, 31 March 2020 (UTC)

NightHeron, And I'm not "confusing individual differences with group differences". I'm not going to try to explain a semester worth of population dynamics university classes on a message board, but suffice it to say that your example comparing two random samplings of one population does not explain away what I said... at all. — Insertcleverphrasehere ^{(or here)}_{(click me!)} 00:01, 31 March 2020 (UTC)

This seems like exactly the opposite of what it does: it's narrowly focused on a particular claim that is problematic for precisely the reasons that Agricolae lays out. --JBL (talk) 00:42, 30 March 2020 (UTC)

This RfC is most certainly not about "all population-intelligence research", it is specifically about race-intelligence genetic research, which is a subtle difference but an important one, because different cultures draw different division lines when defining race such that there is no consistent scientific definition that has any genetic coherence. A grouping that clusters people more genetically different than that same group excludes - and most cultures' definitions of race do this to a greater or lesser extent - makes the whole concept of race not a genetic one, and looking for genetic links between intelligence and a variable cultural construct is well outside standard science. It is like investigating the genetics of 'yucky', a term so poorly defined and culturally variable as to have no scientific value. Defining races amounts to each culture drawing different arbitrary lines across the spectrum of human genetic diversity, creating arbitrary and scientifically invalid groupings that differ depending on whom you ask. Agricolae (talk) 02:06, 30 March 2020 (UTC)

The hereditarian hypothesis about race and intelligence is that genetic factors contribute to the measured variance in average IQ across racial groups. That's the hypothesis that people such as Jensen, Murray, Gottfredson, etc. have argued for, and the hypothesis that NightHeron is trying to classify as "fringe".

This hypothesis can be true or not true regardless of whether racial groups are "arbitrary lines across the spectrum of human genetic diversity". The only thing that's necessary is for racial groups to have some correlation with geographically based genetic variation. (And the race and genetics article makes it very clear that they do.) If geographically based populations differ in average cognitive ability, and cultural conceptions of race are in turn correlated with geographically based genetic variation, then it's inevitable that this geographically-based variation in cognitive ability would have some effect on the measured differences between culturally defined "races". No one is arguing that socially defined racial categories themselves affect cognitive ability; that argument is a strawman. This principle is explained in pages 408-410 of Earl Hunt's textbook. --AndewNguyen (talk) 07:28, 30 March 2020 (UTC)

Note it is cultural concepts of race, not concept - and that is an important distinction. One of the basic principles of science is that it is absolute, in the sense that it doesn't give you a different result to the same experiment depending on what country the scientist happens to live in. That makes a concept defined differently everywhere you go a non-scientific categorization, and its use for science fringe. One could theoretically get around this by independently defining the 'race' groupings based on a set of ostensibly unambiguous criteria that would recapitulate the grouping without explicitly using race, per se, but anyone who tried to match a cultural race conception with all of its quirks would get their paper bounced for its arbitrariness. You might as well look for a genetic correlation with 'people who live in ugly houses'. And I am just going to go ahead and say it - much of the research on the core question of the genetics of intelligence in humans (independent of race) is itself on shaky ground, because of significant barriers to separate out 'nurture' effects, and the use of biased intelligence measures and proxies for intelligence that are of dubious value. To then use this already-fraught field as a basis for comparison to something so interculturally subjective and ambiguous as race? I don't know what you call it, but that ain't science. Agricolae (talk) 00:17, 31 March 2020 (UTC)

The current direction of research about race and intelligence has been to separate the ambiguous social definition of "race" from the underlying genetic variation. One of the most recent studies in this area, Lasker et al. 2019, is a typical example. This study found that when people's racial identity is statistically controlled for, IQ correlates with geographic ancestry as measured with genetic tests. Then, it calculated what portion of the difference in average scores between "races" can be accounted for by this genetic variation. The concept of this study had been formerly proposed by Rowe 2005 in American Psychologist, the American Psychological Association's flagship journal. So while the Lasker study may seem to itself be a minor primary source, the underlying concept of such a study is quite mainstream.

You aren't raising any objections here that researchers in this field haven't already thought of and taken into account. This represents one of the downsides of basing a judgement about what is or isn't "real science" on a poll of Wikipedia editors, most of whom haven't studied the literature in question. AndewNguyen (talk) 05:42, 31 March 2020 (UTC)

There's a more recent review. Levivich ^{[dubious – discuss]} 06:11, 31 March 2020 (UTC)

User:Levivich The abstract to which you refer concludes the following: “Specifically, we tested a hypothesis predicting an interaction whereby those racial and ethnic groups living in relatively disadvantaged environments display lower heritability and higher environmentality. The reasoning behind this prediction is that people (or groups of people) raised in poor environments may not be able to realize their full genetic potentials. We found that White, Black, and Hispanic heritabilities were consistently moderate to high, and that these heritabilities did not differ across groups. At least in the United States, Race/Ethnicity × Heritability interactions likely do not exist.” How does concluding that living in a “relatively disadvantaged environment” does NOT affect the heritability of I.Q. (at least in the USA) prove your point???2600:1012:B009:B8C7:B91D:A6C2:405C:8300 (talk) 01:33, 2 April 2020 (UTC)

This IP-editor is making a common mistake, namely, confusing heritability among individuals with genetic differences between groups. As I said earlier when another "no"-voter made the same mistake, Individual differences in cows' adult heights are largely hereditary; but if a group of cows is randomly divided into two subgroups at birth, and one subgroup is fed well and the other poorly, then the two subgroups will differ in average adult height for purely environmental reasons. Investigators might find that the adult heights of individual cows in the poorly-fed group varies because of individual genetic variation as much as those in the well-fed group. But still the difference in average heights between the two groups would be explained by the difference in how the two groups were fed and would have nothing to do with heritability. NightHeron (talk) 01:54, 2 April 2020 (UTC)

The IP editor is not making such a mistake, and nor was I. You can't compare populations that were isolated from each other for any amount of time (and to any amount of degree) to a situation like the one you have outlined above where a single population is subdivided randomly and not given time to genetically drift from each other. In your example the difference is due entirely to environmental reasons, but that does not indicate that another population of cows, separated randomly, and then left to drift genetically over many generations, would have identical heights. In fact, genetic drift would indicate exactly the opposite would be likely to happen. If the groups remained in different environment, with different evolutionary pressures, again this could cause differences between the populations, due to natural selection. It is possible that they do randomly end up at the same end point genetically (within measurement error), and that environmental differences then explain any observed difference in height, but there is no reason to assume this outcome would be the case. Measuring the magnitudes of those environmental effects would be the correct way to go about trying to deduce what amount of the difference was due to genetics (if at all). But if it couldn't be explained adequately by environmental effects, it would be reasonable to assume that in their time spent apart, the two populations of cows developed in ways that resulted in different concentrations of alleles related to height. Again, I'm not going to try to explain a semester's worth of population dynamics university courses on a message board, but your response here makes no sense and is an oversimplification of a complex field of study. — Insertcleverphrasehere ^{(or here)}_{(click me!)} 00:02, 17 April 2020 (UTC)

The supposedly controlled studies used to support hereditarian arguments are the identical twin studies -- first the ones done by Cyril Burt and later the Minnesota study financed by the Pioneer Fund. Even if those studies had been true controlled studies (a claim that, respectively, Leon Kamin and Jay Joseph have refuted), the most they could show would be a genetic component in individual variation. Anyone who claims that there is scientific evidence for genetic differences in intelligence between population groups either is confusing variation between individuals with variation between groups, or else doesn't understand the difference between idle speculation (e.g., the various guesses reported in Rindermann's survey) and scientific evidence.

The point is: no mainstream scientific paper has ever claimed to be able to estimate (and hence "correct for") the effect of the history of extreme mistreatment, discrimination, and inferior education on the average IQ difference between white and black populations in the US (or similarly for any other two racial groups). That's why defenders of the fringe view of black genetic inferiority (such as the Pioneer Fund) tout the identical twin studies, hoping that no one notices that they have nothing to do with genetic differences between racial groups.

You've twice mentioned having taken a "semester's worth" of undergrad courses on population dynamics, as if that gives you special qualifications. If the illogical arguments you've been making are what you have to show after those courses, you should demand your tuition back. NightHeron (talk) 01:22, 17 April 2020 (UTC)

NightHeron, Another oversimplification that simply doesn't make the point that you are trying to make. Groups are made up of individuals, obviously. Twin studies are trying to isolate the environmental component from the genetic component in order to be able to estimate its effect. Saying "no mainstream study has ever..." and then creating a narrow definition of what represents success is the textbook definition of creating a strawman (including that your representation of what is "mainstream" is clearly very skewed based on your previous comments). You haven't addressed any of what I actually said in my last comment, preferring instead to just say it is "illogical" and that I should "demand my tuition back". You have repeatedly used fallacies in this discussion to the point that I can't take you seriously any more. I won't engage further with such underhanded argument tactics or insults. — Insertcleverphrasehere ^{(or here)}_{(click me!)} 01:44, 17 April 2020 (UTC)

Trying to be logical with you is like banging one's head against a stone wall. You accuse me of creating a narrow definition of what represents success for mentioning that no one knows how to correct for the environmental effects in order to estimate the genetic effect. How else can someone claim to have an estimate for the genetic inferiority of one race relative to another (based on IQ score differences), if you have no idea how to correct for environmental effects? As a good friend of mine would put it, "Duh!" NightHeron (talk) 02:24, 17 April 2020 (UTC)

Re. your statement NightHeron that the effect of the history of extreme mistreatment, discrimination etc., explains the racial IQ gap between African Americans and other racial groups, you might be right or you might be wrong but because academics are very divided your argument does not support this RfC re. fringe. For example: This academic paper makes the point that mistreatment and discrimination likely does not significantly affect IQ partly because Jewish people have suffered significant discrimination and persecution throughout history but yet they have been repeatedly shown in many IQ studies to have the highest IQ test scores of all racial/ethnic groups. Although to be fair to your argument the academic paper did acknowledge the nature of the discrimination was different but nevertheless the paper concluded that this evidence weakens the environmental argument and makes the hereditarian viewpoint more plausible. This academic RS viewpoint of course is deeply offensive to far right racist white nationalists/supremacists who cannot tolerate evidence that whites might be less intelligent than some other ethnic or racial groups, particularly Jews, and it is equally deeply offensive to far left wing people who often have an extreme emotional attachment to equalitarianism politics. Then there are mainstream wikipedians who don’t like to see a pseudoscientific original research “scientific/NightHeron’s RfC consensus” being imposed upon our articles and instead just want the academic literature summarised fairly per WP:NPOV, WP:WEIGHT, etc. Due to the huge complexity of DNA (which really is far beyond the understanding of non-expert Wikipedian’s like you and I NightHeron) it could take, who knows, maybe say 20 or more years for experts and perhaps artificial intelligent super computers to unravel these controversial highly complex DNA/genetics and intelligence mysteries. And you know what NightHeron maybe 20 years from now there really will be a scientific consensus that confirms your original research to be accurate and you can say I told you so and I will be fine with that. Maybe it really will all boil down to a combination of different environmental factors including like you say discrimination in education, etc. But you will just have to be patient for that scientific consensus to emerge and hope it aligns with your POV.--Literaturegeek | T@1k? 18:52, 18 April 2020 (UTC)

First, you've got it into your head that Jews are a race, and are not white, and so white supremacists such as Lynn/Rushton/Gottfredson/etc are bothered by statistics showing high scores on IQ tests for Jews. Earlier I tried to disabuse you of that ridiculous notion, but I obviously did not succeed. Second, you don't seem to be able to tell the difference between science and unsubstantiated speculation. You're entitled to your opinion that, for example, American black people's scores on IQ tests cannot be adequately explained by poor schools, job discrimination, mistreatment over many generations, the history of slavery, beatings, lynchings, assassinations, police harassment, discriminatory incarceration, and so on. But there's no science to back that up. There's no science that estimates the effect on IQ tests of that environmental difference. That doesn't mean that there are no academic authors who have opinions. The 102 people who filled out Rindermann's "survey" were willing to take a guess, ranging from 0 to 100%. That doesn't change the fact that there is no scientific evidence of genetic differences of intelligence along racial lines. The insistence by you and others that there's a scientific basis for asserting such differences is fringe, because it's unsupported by science and rejected by mainstream academic institutions and organizations. NightHeron (talk) 19:24, 18 April 2020 (UTC)

Oh, I wrote “race or ethnic group” (please reread my message) because I am sensitive that some Jews view themselves as a racial group while others do not etcetera. A Jewish commenter in the race and intelligence AfD told you that my interpretation was correct and refs were exchanged in support of both positions. DNA tests can determine whether someone is Jewish or not or belong to another racial or ethnic group and such tests are available for the public to buy, so it is not as straightforward as you imply. NightHeron you claim I have an opinion when I have been clear that both you and I are not qualified to have an opinion on what academic paper and position is the WP:TRUTH. There have been many disgraceful and repugnant injustices against African Americans over the years and even centuries, something society should be ashamed of. Your first point btw was another original research BLP violation again. I cannot respond to your second point properly because it is also more original research again so do not want to waste our time further.--Literaturegeek | T@1k? 19:41, 18 April 2020 (UTC)

The fact that some Jews view themselves as a racial group while others do not just shows why 'race' is too subjective to be a valid scientific categorization. And no, DNA tests cannot determine whether someone is Jewish or not, any more than an examination for the presence of a foreskin does, because being Jewish is more than just having a Jewish ancestor (or not having a foreskin). Anyhow, this RfC is not about "race or ethnicity", just race, and if you have to invoke ethnicity because race is too ambiguous a concept, that should tell you something. Agricolae (talk) 20:10, 18 April 2020 (UTC)

I was referring to Jewish biological descent not the culture and practice of Judaic religion, of course a small number of Jews are married into the community from outside and embrace Judaism as their religion. In Israel DNA tests are routinely utilised to determine if someone is of Jewish descent.--Literaturegeek | T@1k? 15:02, 19 April 2020 (UTC)

• No - too broad a stroke for “pseudo” Seems invalid RFC. It is too broadly proposed labelling any claim of genetic differences and intelligence by race as fringe or false science. That conflates science with simple statistics, and even within science that has just been untrue - reputable science actually has investigated such for some time. There has been ongoing debate about such as The Bell Curve, but the topic seems more to have a broad range of good non-science facts, good science, poor science, and bad non-science junk. Accusations of ‘racist’ or ‘pseudoscience’ occasionally get thrown on specific items or people, and validly so, but portraying that onto the topic as a whole is too broad a stroke. There doesn’t seem to be a seeking here for authoritative scientific body or philosophy view here - just notes that some criticisms exist from SPLC and others. Mostly it seems there are no commonly accepted/acceptable objective measure for ‘intelligence’ or ‘race’ in the fields of biology, sociology, or anthropology. Scientists would obviously not say there is no genetic component or that differences do not exist between any groupings, nor that individuals vary and environment matters. Statistically, IQ differences by declared race are a simple if PC-inconvenient fact. I don’t see a scientific body declaration - I only see the AAA expressed concern over public misunderstandings, and Nature that "sound scientific evidence" is misused by some. (And says "This is not a new phenomenon.") As to the laundry list of authors ... declaring the whole list as categorically so seems a procedural oops. Pursue individual works or a specific person — but a whole list and a whole topic approach is factually ‘Not so’ and too broad a stroke. Cheers Markbassett (talk) 20:24, 29 March 2020 (UTC)

• Yes. Being skeptical doesn't mean being a sucker for false balance - I see a lot of of good-faith comments looking for subtlety and nuance in this. It sure looks like this attempt at nuance is being taken advantage of by advocates of a fringe perspective. If genetics is a pair of tweezers, biological racialism is a sledge-hammer. Racialism is itself pseudoscience, so any application of this premise is GIGO. Assuming that it has some biological validity is giving these ideas far, far more credibility than is supportable. Just because something can be framed in a way that gives it legitimacy, doesn't mean that it isn't pure fringe. "Race" does correlate with "intelligence" by some metrics, but that's meaningless, because these categories are poorly defined and constantly shifting. That's the beating heart-and-soul of pseudoscience.

We already have a (bad) article on nations and intelligence. Any attempt to lump "populations" and "intelligence" together based on some criteria beyond "race" will need to be evaluated on its own merits. Conflating "race" with "populations" is sloppy at best and euphemistic at worst. Grayfell (talk) 23:32, 30 March 2020 (UTC)

• Yes. Away with the apologetics ~ cygnis insignis 16:14, 31 March 2020 (UTC)
• No per AndrewNguyen. Respect high-quality sources. Loksmythe (talk) 15:23, 1 April 2020 (UTC)
• No per AndrewNguyen and Sinuthius (re: Richard Haier, Steven Pinker, David Reich, and Sam Harris). Jweiss11 (talk) 15:55, 1 April 2020 (UTC)
• No per Literaturegeek, AndrewNguyen, Sinthius, and Mark Basset. Research about the genetic origins of group differences (“race” being one such group) and various physiological traits is certainly not fringe. In fact the “blank slate” or “environmentalist” view has been increasingly disproven thanks to the Human Genome Project and other scientific advances. Wikipedia is not censored, even if certain mainstream ideas or facts make people uncomfortable. Additionally, this is far too broad of an RFC. 2600:1012:B009:B8C7:B91D:A6C2:405C:8300 (talk) 23:59, 1 April 2020 (UTC)

Comment It is utterly absurd to describe as mainstream the belief that there are genetic differences in intelligence along racial lines, with some races being inferior to others. A "no"-vote concerns that notion and has nothing to do with the Human Genome Project. The outlandish claim in this IP-editor's argument against the RfC shows their strong POV on this topic. NightHeron (talk) 00:29, 2 April 2020 (UTC)

My statement was: “Research about the genetic origins of group differences (“race” being one such group) and various physiological traits is certainly not fringe.” There is nothing “outlandish” or “POV” about such a statement. My only POV in this discussion is that to claim genetic differences (yes, including I.Q.) exists between populations (as they are variously defined) is not a fringe viewpoint. 2600:1012:B009:B8C7:B91D:A6C2:405C:8300 (talk) 01:33, 2 April 2020 (UTC)

Yogic Flying is defined as sitting in a lotus position plus: either flying by mental force of meditation, or hopping and getting photographed while in the air. The latter is a real thing, the former is not. So, you can say "Yogic Flying is a Real Thing". Same with "Research about the genetic origins of group differences" - it has a "real thing" component and a "not real thing" component (the racial part). This discussion is about the "not real thing" part, not the other one. That is why your No missed the point. --Hob Gadling (talk) 09:15, 2 April 2020 (UTC)

• Yes, of course. It has been proven beyond doubt that these characters are considered fringe among the relevant fields of study in the current year, and at their height of acceptance were still very controversial. It's very tedious to hear such claims being repeated as that "the science is not settled" on the matter of whether differences in intelligence between groups are genetically determined to any extent. As usual we see the same few devotees to these race theories attempt to legitimise the fringe researchers, and new accounts agreeing with them.

This doesn't mean these fringe views shouldn't be assessed on Wikipedia of course. It just means that they should be characterised as fringe, not relied upon for objective analysis of science, and not considered part of any accepted minority view or false balance. Onetwothreeip (talk) 23:37, 5 April 2020 (UTC)

No. There is a confusion between whether a theory is intrinsically racist, and whether a theory can be used by racists for their ends. There is very little that cannot be used by bigots of various sorts to support their argument. Certainly some past theories in this area have been promulgated by bigots, and certainly some types of obsolete categorization by races leads itself to the use by bigots. But the modern study of differences between various groups in the different factors that constitute inheritance is not the same as Nazi-era pseudoscience -- I have no hesitation in calling that pseudoscience as judged by contemporary standards of human biology. This does not apply to most contemporary work in the field. Terms like "white" and "black" as applied to humans have meant various things, but the current use in the US represents as much a sociological as a biological classification. It's absurd to argue that biological or sociological groups of people are not likely to exhibit meaningful differences in almost anything. The way to eliminate bigotry is to investigate what the differences are, and what their causes may be. Previous theories--theories as recent as the late 20th century -- about the biological evolution of mankind have proven to be at best incomplete, and the greatly increased data available from current studies makes it impossible to draw firm conclusions. Theories regarding the nature of human intellectual functions are in a somewhat similar state. Scientists make hypothesis on the available data, as they cannot predict what will be known in the future. Presentation of the topic in an encyclopedia requires the NPOV presentation of all positions--sufficiently NPOV that people will realize the uncertainties and incompleteness. The use of labelling prevents understanding. Those who say that people will not understand the encyclopedic contents of Wikipedia unless they are told what to think in advance are advocating a position contrary to our principles. DGG ( talk ) 19:19, 7 April 2020 (UTC)

The RfC specifically does not propose to label research into the topic as "fringe," and this is stated emphatically at the beginning of the RfC: What I'm asking for here is not a statement opposing all research into the topic, but rather a statement characterizing a specific conclusion as contrary to scientific consensus. So you're arguing against a straw man, as several of the no-voters have done. As you say, Scientists make hypothesis on the available data, as they cannot predict what will be known in the future. There is no available data to support the claim that some races are genetically inferior to others in intelligence. Some people like to predict that there will be such data in the future, and even predict which races will turn out to be less intelligent than others. But that's not science.

Wikipedia does "tell readers what to think" about homeopathy, creationism, climate change denialism, Holocaust denialism, and many other things. Just as quack cures are harmful and need to be labeled as such, similarly racialist fringe views need to be labeled as such. The purveyors of such fringe views are frequently cited by white nationalist and anti-immigrant groups in the US and Europe. Wikipedia should not lend credence to claims of racial superiority or inferiority. NightHeron (talk) 20:02, 7 April 2020 (UTC)

• Yes but with a certain level of nuance. The problem lies with the terms "race" and "intelligence", since neither term has a single, agreed-upon definition. Rushton et al. are fringe, of course, but the fact that certain "racial" groupings perform differently on various instruments meant to measure IQ isn't fringe. It's the step to say that these are "racial" differences that's fringe because that step is predicated ona. belief in "race science", on fringe beliefs about the connection between genetics and intelligence, and the idea that these (unspecified) genetic differences are nested within some set of characters that define a "race". Guettarda (talk) 15:12, 8 April 2020 (UTC)
  • Comment - I endorse what User:Guettarda wrote, which is what I was saying above. The terms 'race' and 'intelligence' are both subject to manipulation, and therefore claims about 'race' and 'intelligence' should be viewed with suspicion, which makes them fringe. Robert McClenon (talk) 19:22, 9 April 2020 (UTC)
• Yes the claim that there are genetic differences in intelligence along racial lines is a fringe viewpoint. IQ and intelligence are nebulous concepts, so how can a group be defined by a group intelligence? It can't. Also, there is a variety of IQ. For example there is Emotional IQ and so on. Race has no viable scientific definition nor does a racial group. It appears that sources produced by Jensen, Rushton, Lynn, Piffer, and Gottfredson are fringe. They are a small group of researchers that reach conclusions outside of major scientific consensus. That is the definition of holding and promoting fringe views. Knowing this is helpful and important for editing on Wikipedia. Fringe content published by RS is not a mitigating factor. Inferior intelligence in groups of people has been a rationale to justify discrimination in the early 20th century and slavery before 1865. It is a rationale existing only in the mind and not a real physical or biological thing. ---Steve Quinn (talk) 04:51, 9 April 2020 (UTC)
• Comment one of the arguments that is repeatedly being made here is that "intelligence" has no precise scientific definition, or that the relation between intelligence and genetics is a "fringe" concept, but it's unclear whether the people making this assertion are familiar with the source literature in this area. Here is a small sampling of it:

• Deary, Ian J., Lars Penke, and Wendy Johnson. "The neuroscience of human intelligence differences." Nature Reviews Neuroscience 11.3 (2010): 201-211.
• Davies, Gail, et al. "Genome-wide association studies establish that human intelligence is highly heritable and polygenic." Molecular Psychiatry 16.10 (2011): 996-1005.
• Plomin, Robert, and Ian J. Deary. "Genetics and intelligence differences: five special findings." Molecular Psychiatry 20.1 (2015): 98-108.
• Savage, Jeanne E., et al. "Genome-wide association meta-analysis in 269,867 individuals identifies new genetic and functional links to intelligence." Nature Genetics 50.7 (2018): 912-919.
• Plomin, Robert, and Sophie von Stumm. "The new genetics of intelligence." Nature Reviews Genetics 19.3 (2018): 148.

The definition of "intelligence" that's consistently used in this modern research, including in research about race and intelligence, is the concept explained in the G factor (psychometrics) article. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, Molecular Psychiatry, Nature Genetics, and Nature Reviews Genetics all are top-tier scientific journals. The argument that psychologists or behavioral geneticists do not have a precise definition of intelligence, or that genetic influences on intelligence are a "fringe" concept, is another example of Wikipedia editors substituting their own judgement for a careful examination of what sources say.

The meaning of "race" in the context of this research was explained in Sinuthius's vote, and in the comments by AndewNguyen here and here, so I won't take up additional space re-explaining it. But it would be helpful if people could review the existing discussion in this RFC before making assertions about what is or isn't ill-defined. (I know that's difficult to do when the discussion is this long.) 2600:1004:B10D:EA79:B1F8:101C:A636:B424 (talk) 14:40, 10 April 2020 (UTC)

The IP-editor is misstating what this RfC proposes to label fringe. There's no scientific consensus supporting the claim that there's a genetic influence on a certain factor that supposedly allows people to be ranked from high to low and deserves to be labeled with the loaded word intelligence. However, that belief by itself is not being called fringe. When combined with the belief that certain races are genetically inferior to other races in something labeled intelligence, it becomes fringe. There are several implausible links in the chain of claims that lead to that racial supremacist POV.

I never said research into genes influencing intelligence is fringe. That would be outside the scope of this RFC. In essence I said that connecting genes of a group showing that group's intelligence to be either inferior or superior has been deemed to be fringe, and is in fact fringe. I would like to discuss the research into trying to discover genes that influence intelligence, but that is outside the scope of this RFC. The IP appears to list studies that are about research into genetically influenced intelligence and how much influence genes have - which seems to be an unknown at this point. But, these studies do not relate to this RFC. ---Steve Quinn (talk) 11:23, 11 April 2020 (UTC)

Just because the IP lists studies that have the word "intelligence" in the title does not demonstrate there is a precise scientific definition of intelligence. I think it's kind of like a certain District Attorney said, as he was trying to shut down Larry Flynn - in so many words - the DA couldn't give an exact definition of "obscenity", however, he said he knows it when he sees it. Also, as has been previous stated in this RFC, there is no scientific definition of "race". It would be highly inaccurate to do so, especially in the area of intelligence studies. There is so much mixing and matching between people from various geographic areas that any such definition is rendered imprecise. ---Steve Quinn (talk) 11:45, 11 April 2020 (UTC)

If you were to actually read the papers that I linked to, you would see that they explain exactly what is meant by "intelligence" in a scientific context. The Deary and Davies et al. papers explain this in the papers' first few sections, while the Plomin and von Stumm paper explains it in a section titled "What is intelligence?"

I did read the papers. How about stopping with trying to set up the straw man that your miniscule amount of studies speaks for scientific consensus, because it does not. Just because some obscure studies are printed in a journal and they might be RS doesn't mean they aren't flawed. RS is where it begins for a Wikipedia article. Then there are polices, sections of policies and guidelines that adjudicate whether something is suitable for inclusion. The IP is obviously a banned editor who wants to assert what the argument is with specious claims. Steve Quinn (talk) 21:46, 16 April 2020 (UTC)

The assertions you're making here are a good example of the fundamental problem with this RFC. I and other editors have linked to a large number of sources that explain how "intelligence" and "race" are defined in this context, but meanwhile you and a lot of the other voters are making assertions about what this literature says or doesn't say without having actually looked at any of it. 2600:1004:B113:2052:B5B8:5476:8B66:EBF4 (talk) 16:55, 11 April 2020 (UTC)

Yes, the papers presented elucidate their particular definition of intelligence, as does most other studies on intelligence. But disputing a commonly known theme that there is no single prescribed definition of intelligence is amazing to me. Five papers do not represent the whole of this argument. Here is a paper that represents an overview of the issue. I quote: "Despite a long history of research and debate, there is still no standard definition of intelligence. This has lead some to believe that intelligence may be approximately described, but cannot be fully defined." The paper goes on to say that there are definitions with similarities, but it is not able to definitely command the definitive definition.

The authors do develop a definition, which is noted at the end of the paper, but even this is not the "gospel" definition. The paper cites 70 definitons of intelligence extracted from the scientific literature on intelligence, and of course says there are many more. The paper quotes R. J. Sternberg, author of "The Oxford Companion to the Mind", as saying, "Viewed narrowly, there seem to be almost as many definitions of intelligence as there were experts asked to define it." And so on. So the argument that intelligence is defined is specious.

As far as defining race - if you are referring to the two obscure surveys these do not present convincing evidence that there is such a thing as race.---Steve Quinn (talk) 16:44, 12 April 2020 (UTC)

No, I'm not referring to surveys. Did you not read the posts by AndewNguyen in which he explained this? The best explanation of how "race" is defined in the context of this research probably is in Earl Hunt's textbook, specifically pages 408-410.

Looking at the paper you're citing, it's obvious you're playing semantic word games here. The first paragraph of the paper states, Although there is no single standard definition, if one surveys the many definitions that have been proposed, strong similarities between many of the definitions quickly become obvious. In many cases different definitions, suitably interpreted, actually say the same thing but in different words. A term having many definitions, that say the same thing but in different words, is true of a huge number of concepts in biology and psychology, including "species" "emotion", and "evolution". Are we to assume that the existence of multiple definitions for those terms, that say the same thing but in different words, invalidates research about those concepts as well?

There is one other problem with the argument that you (and several others) are making here, which is that it's completely missing the point of what this RFC is really about. NightHeron worded his question for this RFC in a vague way, but based on his multitude of comments here and at RSN - as well as the argument he has been making on the article talk page for the past several months - it is clear that the hypothesis he is trying to declare as "fringe" is one specific hypothesis about the cause of the measured black/white gap in average performance on IQ tests, that has been articulated by researchers such as Hans Eysenck, Arthur Jensen, Charles Murray, and Linda Gottfredson. All of these researchers, as well as the papers I linked to two posts ago, share a single definition of intelligence that's explained in the g factor (psychometrics) article. Whatever other definitions of intelligence may exist, this particular definition and way of measuring it is the only one that applies to the body of research that this RFC is asking about. 2600:1004:B140:7CB2:989C:2E6F:3EC:BC71 (talk) 20:53, 13 April 2020 (UTC)

Accusing me of playing word games is a personal attack. Please refrain from doing so. I merely pointed out there is a scientific consensus understanding that there is no precise definition of intelligence. And it seems I proved that point. As the author of the book says, there as many definitions of intelligence as there are experts who study the phenomenon. And you are the one that is making up that there is a single definition of intelligence by cherry picking studies and claiming that is the definition of intelligence. Before it was five papers and now it is two. Sorry, but you are not the authority on what constitutes intelligence. based on Fringe scientists. And the "researchers" you mention are Fringe. Murray has no degree in intelligence or psychology or artificial intelligence. He is a political scientist who has strong beliefs. His research for his book The Bell Curve was found to be heavily flawed. ---Steve Quinn (talk) 14:54, 16 April 2020 (UTC)

In contrast to the IP I have provided evidence of 70 plus definitions of intelligence pulled from the scientific literature and statements that there is no settled scientific definition of intelligence. The IP is trying to set it up so two studies, five studies, or some other small number speak for the scientific community, which they do not. The IP has even acknowledged this group is perceived as a set of fringe researchers.

Regarding race - it is widely known that race is merely a social construct. Again, trying to say other wise based on a few skewed RS is incorrect at best and perhaps disingenuous at worst. Trying validate discredited theories or distortions of the genetic sciences does not work. Citing a book here or a paper there, which distorts the facts, is an attempt to promote POV, but also to give UNDUE weight these small groups of studies. To cite Murray (author of Bell Curve) is either a bluff or a misunderstood attempt to give UNDUE weight to an author whose methods and conclusions have been thoroughly discredited. The mainstream science says that modern human beings cannot be divided into specific biological classes. Now the IP will cite one or two papers here, a book there, point to an authority and make a sweeping overgeneralized claim these support their argument that flies in the face scientific consensus. Scientific consensus includes entire domains of science: genetics, biotechnology, biology, and so on.---Steve Quinn (talk) 21:46, 16 April 2020 (UTC)

Steve Quinn, I've read your posts above several times, and you're re-stating a lot of your earlier points, but none of this appears to be acknowledging what I said in response to these points in my previous post. Insertcleverphrasehere and Literaturegeek seem to be okay with responding to the same points over and over when their responses aren't acknowledged, but I'm not going to do that. 2600:1004:B16A:EDC8:B0AE:C1E7:40A5:534F (talk) 22:58, 16 April 2020 (UTC)

A common tactic of the no-voters is to misstate the RfC (claiming it's trying to censor something or is declaring a broad area of research to be fringe) and then argue against a straw man. NightHeron (talk) 18:35, 10 April 2020 (UTC)

2600, there are many sophmoric votes cast here doing nothing but expressing opinions and making this RfC pretty useless in my opionion. I'm sure you've seen Turkheimer, Paige Harden and Nisbett in in Vox, actually fairly measured criticism despite the title spin. These are acedemics qualfied to speak on the subject, and what they write discounts many 'yes' votes. Take a look at the section "The flawed logic of the Murray argument about race and IQ", where they lay out four premises and admit that each is to some degree accepted with serious research and debate. These premises are what many opinions here are attempting to label fringe, yet here we have prominent critics directly addressing the subject and telling us of some acceptance and a "range of opinions in the scientific community", in other words not fringe at all.

That said, why shouldn't we look at their acutual criticism, about slanting each premise in a particular direction and reaching for a broader conclusion? That proponents "...stake out the claim that at least some of the difference between racial groups is genetic, and challenge us to defend the claim that none, absolutely zero, of it is. They know that science is not designed for proving absolute negatives..." that a broader conclusion requires a "gross oversimplication" of the heritability of intelligence, and "racial groups...are such a poor proxy for underlying genetic ancestry that no self-respecting statistical geneticist would undertake a study based only on self-identified racial category..."

Each of the premises given in the article are a matter of debate within the scientific community and none can be labeled fringe, but if WP presents support for them as support for broader conclusions and social policies within the context of Race and Intelligence that is indeed questionable and fringe. WP would be simply mirroring what our critics call "flawed logic" and a casual conclusion. When WP articles describe the questions around genetics and intelligence they should do so with due balance but that does not mean we need import that same balance into an article describing race and intelligence, doing so gives credence to the "gross simplification" and "flawed logic" which is not widely accepted, of little scientific merit, and in conflict with the NPOV policy and FRINGE guideline.

Likewise arguing here that individually race and genetics or intelligence and genetics are matters of debate and need a balanced presentation is not an argument for equal balance within the race and intelligence article. fiveby(zero) 18:17, 10 April 2020 (UTC)

I commented on this particular issue in my post here. Each of these individual premises, when presented by itself, is quite mainstream. As I said in the linked post, I base this judgement on how the premises are presented in the most prominent and high-quality sources that exist about each of these topics, such as what major broad-level psychology textbooks say about the genetic basis of human intelligence, or the special issue of Nature Genetics devoted to the relation between racial categories and genetic variation.

It's important to recognize that the majority of the arguments being used to discredit the hereditarian hypothesis in this RFC are arguments that, if they were being made on the Heritability of IQ article or the Race and genetics article, would not be taken seriously there. The real debate is over whether the genetic variance that correlates with racial categories includes some the genetic variants that are known to affect human intelligence, and Wikipedia has an obligation to present that debate adequately. (This paper, for example, is an example of good criticism of the hereditarian hypothesis, that does not rely on rejecting widely-accepted concepts in psychology or genetics.)

That said, I'm sympathetic to the argument that some parts of the race and intelligence article have a problem with undue weight, although I interpret the problem differently from how you do. In my view, the main problem is that the article still describes the debate in this area the way that it was 5-10 years ago, because it's been about that long since the article was significantly updated. I've said before that if other editors could propose improvements to the article a little at the time and update the article in an orderly manner, I'd have no objection to that.

But the editors who are most active in pushing the "yes" position have shown no interest in working that way. First there were multiple attempts to blank entire sections of the article, [18] [19] [20] [21] [22] [23] [24] [25] (three separate sections, although the section about international differences was the main focus), then there was an attempt to delete the article, then there was an attempt to rename the article to "race and intelligence myth", and now there's this RFC, which is an obvious prelude to more mass blanking of content if it succeeds. This RFC doesn't exist in a vacuum. The broader context makes it obvious that it was opened because the earlier attempts at shutting down Wikipedia's coverage of this debate had mostly been unsuccessful, and that's the most important reason it ought to be opposed. 2600:1004:B10D:EA79:B1F8:101C:A636:B424 (talk) 19:48, 10 April 2020 (UTC)

The IP-editor is again imputing nefarious motives to yes-voters. The truth of the matter is that one circumstance that motivated this RfC was earlier unsuccessful attempts to remove WP:FALSEBALANCE from the article Race and intelligence, that is, to stop pretending that the POV of writers such as Arthur Jenson, J. Philippe Rushton, Davide Piffer, Linda Gottfredson, Heiner Rindermann, Richard Lynn, etc. is part of the scientific mainstream. The idea behind the AfD was that the topic is already covered much better in the article Scientific racism. As pointed out by the Southern Poverty Law Center, the article Race and intelligence had become a magnet for editors who wanted to give credence to theories of racial supremacy/inferiority. Any editor who challenged the false balance would get mired in a long, tedious, inconclusive debate with a small number of editors. No one is trying to "shut down coverage" of fringe views. The purpose of this noticeboard is not to "shut down" anything, but to identify fringe theories as such rather than to pretend that they're on an equal footing with mainstream science. NightHeron (talk) 21:41, 10 April 2020 (UTC)

You must be aware that you're making literally the exact arguments you made during the AFD and the requested move. These arguments were rejected by community consensus the previous two places you made them, so this RFC is the third attempt in another forum. You seem to have a problem with my pointing this out, but it's a very simple observation. 2600:1004:B116:B359:7048:B159:9D45:C0DC (talk) 00:17, 11 April 2020 (UTC)

No, there's been no Wikipedia "community consensus" determining that Jensen/Lynn/Rushton/Rindermann/Piffer and their ilk are non-fringe mainstream scholars. What there's been is concerted efforts by their defenders to load on to any discussion and tire out other editors with constant repetition of illogical arguments. There've been multiple irregularities, including off-wiki canvassing, several SPA's, and rapidly shifting IP-addresses that make it difficult or impossible to trace activities that contravene policy (such as multiple canvassing of selected admins). NightHeron (talk) 00:39, 11 April 2020 (UTC)

2600:1004:B1...: just yesterday you were saying this RFC is too long to be closed. Today you've added damn near 10k of additional (IMO irrelevant) commentary. Every single day you are here trying to push this RFC in various ways. Could you maybe take your foot off the gas for a week? Levivich ^{[dubious – discuss]} 22:44, 10 April 2020 (UTC)

• No, and I'm confused by the question of how anyone is saying yes given the above discussion. The entire discussion is citing articles in scientific journals debating the topic. If the issue is that the view gets too much discussion in proportion to its importance in the realm of scholarship on the topic, basically every scholarly publication cited by either side is supporting the idea that yes, the CLAIM is heavily disputed, but the theory itself is not a fringe one - it's just considered wrong my a majority of the field. Yes, supporters of racial differences are at times unambiguously engaging in questionable science (though that's true of a wide swath of social science, it seems,) and many people involved in the debates are (correctly) labelled as racists. Still, that is not an issue of Wikipedia giving attention to "non-significant subjects." The question as stated, then is sill. Racial differences in intelligence misses basically everything used to identify fringe theories in the article on fringe theories: "little or no scientific support," or "primarily described by amateurs and self-published texts," or "the only references to a particular subject are in news sources." None of these seem to be the case. Davidmanheim (talk) 17:31, 11 April 2020 (UTC)

  @Davidmanheim: I notice that this was your first edit to Wikipedia in over 6 months. This seems like an odd page to stumble across randomly -- how did that happen? --JBL (talk) 14:45, 12 April 2020 (UTC)

  • Wow, you're really on the ball investigating these things. I'm not incredibly active on wikipedia at this point, since I'm currently doing paid research for a number of other things, but I probably make more-or-less minor edits at least every week or two - though they clearly haven't shown up under my user edit history. If you dug in just a bit more than you seem to have done, you might have noticed in the change history that my comment was originally made by a not logged in user. I got a new computer several months back, and only now realized I haven't been logged in for my edits when I was commenting here, presumably since I started using this computer. But thanks for the random and completely not weird questioning of my presence - and the complete lack of substantive engagement with my point.

To respond to your specific point, of the reasons you mention "little or no scientific support" is why claims that certain races are genetically inferior in intelligence are fringe. Those claims are based on test-score correlations, speculation, and conjecture. The authors who indulge in such things are outside the mainstream of science, even if they occupy academic positions and occasionally get published in reputable places. "Little or no scientific support" applies here as it does to some other theories that Wikipedia rightfully categorizes as fringe, such as homeopathy and climate change denialism. Like scientific racism, homeopathy and climate change denialism are sometimes backed or partially backed by well-known scientists (Luc Montagnier in the former case, and S. Fred Singer and Freeman Dyson in the latter case), and they get published in Elsevier journals. But there's little or no scientific evidence for any of these three theories, and they're outside the scientific mainstream. NightHeron (talk) 21:16, 13 April 2020 (UTC)

• No per Sinuthius and Bpesta22. There are problems with many of the sources that are being used to support the "fringe" designation. One of these sources is The Trouble with Twin Studies by Jay Joseph. Eric Turkheimer, who is very far from a hereditarian, describes this book as "science denial". Jay Joseph's book does not represent anything close to the scientific mainstream. The statement from the American Association of Physical Anthropologists does not mention intelligence or IQ at all, and is only about how "race" is not a biologically innate category. This conclusion is something that most hereditarians also accept, as AndewNguyen previously explained.

Everyone in this RFC should read the discussion at the reliable sources noticeboard about the source that most directly answers the RFC's question. [26] At RSN there is a lot of WP:BLUDGEON behavior by the two editors who have tried to argue against nearly every "no" vote, but the arguments that this source is not reliable consist almost 100% of original research. Wikipedia is based on what reliable sources say, not on original research. tickle me 17:41, 11 April 2020 (UTC)

This is a bizarre: someone explicitly hoping to short-circuit this discussion began a separate discussion elsewhere; that discussion has been open only a week and hasn't resulted in any clear consensus; but you want to claim that it pre-empts this discussion (which has much more input from a broader swath of the community)? Be serious. --JBL (talk) 14:50, 12 April 2020 (UTC)

Joel B. Lewis, I think he said that people should read it. Not that it "pre-empts this discussion". — Insertcleverphrasehere ^{(or here)}_{(click me!)} 22:08, 12 April 2020 (UTC)

• Yes. As argued and sourced by the nominator. There is broad consensus in the academic community that genetic racial intellectual differences are unlikely and fundamentally unmeasurable because of the complexities of race and intelligence, and because of the limitations of the tools to make such a determination. There will always be an incentive for some researchers to stir the pot with sensational claims, but these are clearly WP:FRINGE. I'm not a very active editor, but even from my limited vantage it's clear how important it is that we improve the topic area around race, and how much we need community decisions like this to provide space for constructive editors to actually get work done. LaTeeDa (talk) 15:50, 14 April 2020 (UTC)
• No - the proposal is too broad. Having read many of the responses here, I find several issues. 1) "Fringe" does not mean simply "minority view". Even if it is a majority view that race and intelligence are not linked, there is clearly a significant minority view which holds that they are. "Fringe" must be something which is an extreme minority view, and that standard just doesn't apply here. 2) Genetic differences exist between ethnic groups (otherwise genealogical DNA test services would also be "fringe"), and those differences span every other aspect of human development, so its reasonable to think that intelligence differences must exist to some extent. Perhaps the real issue that needs to be resolved is to stop framing this as "race and intelligence" and instead should be "ethnicity and intelligence". 3) If we focus on "race and intelligence" - that doesn't exclusively mean that genetics is part of it. If race is a purely social construct, then it must stem from some defining social characteristics - geography, culture, etc. - which are used to construct it. There are clearly environmental factors associated with those defining characteristics which likely have an impact on average intelligence. For example, it is well-known and accepted that diet and parenting impact development of intelligence, and various cultures/races feature wildly different diets and parenting styles... so its hard to imagine those wouldn't lead to intelligence differences in adults. Overall, these views need to be covered in nuanced ways - Wikipedia can't with a brushstroke eliminate commonly-held views. -- Netoholic @ 19:43, 14 April 2020 (UTC)

• Yes The wording of this RfC, though, does not delineate fringe per Wikipedia and a fringe idea/thought/philosophy in general. WP:Fringe takes into account weight. This means that while there may be published research, even research that might be reliable in terms of it's authors/publishers, that research is much less than the mainstream research, and so must be considered per Wikipedia, fringe to the mainstream. Discussion here swings back and forth between these two definitions of fringe. I don't care what opinion is on race and intelligence. I've read too much to consider the idea credible and too complex to discuss here, but I do consider that our Wikipedia position is determined by weight and weight is on the side of fringe to the mainstream. Littleolive oil (talk) 19:33, 19 April 2020 (UTC)
• Fallacious proposition. The OP should have stuck to just asking the original question, instead of tacking on a "this means ..." rider that doesn't logically follow from the question at all. The statement that all the sources must be fringe is flawed in trying to equate the idea "a general conclusion in favor of racial differences in intelligence is fringe" with the idea "any source which presents data that can be interpreted as showing racial intelligence differences is a fringe source". This is many kinds of fallacy all at once: false equivalence, guilt by association, definist fallacy, inflation of conflict, false dichotomy, argument to emotion, poisoning the well, and a variant of fallacy of division, with the whole thing appearing to be motivated by the moralistic fallacy (though I am admittedly not a mind reader).

  While yes, the notion that science has demonstrated a "race"-based intelligence curve is fringe, it simply does not follow that every piece of research purporting to show racial or ethnic or haplogroup or other population differences at some particular task with a particular group of subjects is also fringe. What matters here is the quality of the research and (especially) its interpretation; e.g., it may well show that particular IQ tests or line-items on them are culturally or subculturally biased (and we know they are, so this isn't really a question any longer) and in what ways. Given a large enough data set, it might conceivably even show such a difference in the aggregate that seemed to possibly be innate (it would actually be strange if any matter of human performance could not be shown to vary a tiny bit, on average, by gene pool); but we should expect the differences to be statistically insignificant, and further to be counterbalanced by different performance at some other cognitive task. Whether it's politic or not to publish such research has no bearing on whether it is good research. This attempt to brand as "fringe" any research that doesn't agree with a particular viewpoint is simply emotive PoV pushing, a generalized attack on all scientists who would dare research these questions, and essentially an attempt at censorship and anti-encyclopedic information suppression.

  Every source has to be evaluated on its own merits (or lack thereof), and our focus should be on how that research has been [mis]interpreted and by whom. My answer to the actual OP question by NightHeron, before the editorializing that followed it in the same post badly confused the matter, is: yes, belief in any meaningful "race"-based intelligence difference among humans is a fringe viewpoint. Not only is there not a scientific consensus in favor of the idea, there's a scientific consensus against it; the small blips of countervailing research results are either statistically insignificant or they point to other (social) causes, not genetics. However: no, the tacked-on supposition – that this means that any contrary research is also necessarily, categorically fringe – is not valid, for numerous reasons.
   — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  13:15, 20 April 2020 (UTC)

You say: it simply does not follow that every piece of research purporting to show racial or ethnic or haplogroup or other population differences at some particular task with a particular group of subjects is also fringe. That's a straw man. Nobody is saying that "every piece of research purporting to show racial or ethnic or haplogroup or other population differences...is also fringe." The RfC specifically deals with claimed genetic inferiority/superiority in intelligence along racial lines. In proposing this RfC, I clearly stated that "What I'm asking for here is not a statement opposing all research into the topic, but rather a statement characterizing a specific conclusion as contrary to scientific consensus." I won't try to reply to your litany of accusations (guilt by association, definist fallacy etc.) except to say that all five authors I listed as examples of fringe sources are notable because of their racialist conclusions about genes and intelligence. I don't see anything wrong with giving some concrete illustrative examples.

Please observe WP:AGF. You've repeatedly made accusations of bad faith against me and others, for example, see the diff [27] cited by the IP-editor above as support for the IP-editor's claim that I'm disruptive. There you argued against another straw man, namely, that people wish the topic simply did not exist and "could not" be written about. Calling something fringe does not mean that it should not be covered in Wikipedia. NightHeron (talk) 15:47, 20 April 2020 (UTC)

Gottfredson

In response to Valeree's comment above about Gottfredson:

• Though Google Scholar cites are imperfect, they are one measure of scholarly impact. Linda Gottfredson has been published recently, but her recent intelligence work has few GS cites
• Other published works (with more GS cites than Gottfredson's recent work) classify her work as "scientific racism" or similar:

Sources and quotes

2001 Leonard Lieberman, "How 'Caucasoids' Got Such Big Crania and Why They Shrank", Current Anthropology (PDF) (91 GS cites): As the 20th century reached its end, a paradox emerged in which, while most anthropologists had come to reject concepts of biological races and racism (Lieberman and Kirk n.d., Lieberman, Stevenson, and Reynolds 1989), a number of psychologists persisted in the 'race' idea and the 'scientific' racism that had prevailed in the 19th and much of the 20th century (Herrnstein and Murray 1994; Lynn 1977a, b; Rushton 1988b). Mentions Gottfredson among other hereditarians in a section called New hierarchy, old racism: Late in the 20th century, surprisingly, some psychologists began to report that 'Mongoloids' outranked 'Caucasoids.' ... These psychologists whose work has seemed to some readers to validate the “racial” hierarchy (R. Travis Osborne, Clyde E. Noble, Arthur R. Jensen, Audrey M. Shuey, Richard Lynn, Linda Gottfredson, and Richard J. Herrnstein) have relied primarily on IQ tests ... 2014 Robert Wald Sussman, The Myth of Race, Harvard University Press (172 GS cites): (bold added) Gottfredson believes that socioeconomic inequality between races is the expected outcome of the lower intelligence of African Americans and that much current liberal social policy is based on the fraudulent claims of scientists who refuse to acknowledge that intellectual inferiority ... It is too bad that, like many of her colleagues, Gottfredson does not understand that there is no simple, unitary measure of intelligence; that measure of intelligence are greatly influenced by education and culture; and that almost all competent biologists, anthropologists, and geneticists now agree that biological races do not exist among humans. 2016 David Gillborn, "Softly, softly: genetics, intelligence and the hidden racism of the new geneism", Journal of Education Policy (Google cache) (58 GS cites): Why write a paper about racism and genetics in the second decade of the Twenty-First century? Surely arguments about race, intelligence and genetics are dead and buried? ... Until recently many in the field of behavioural genetics have been far less reticent about airing their views. The Bell Curve (Herrnstein & Murray, 1994) is the most famous, but by no means the only, example of such work (see Eysenck, 1971; Gottfredson, 1986; Jensen, 1969;Lynn, 1991 & 2001; Rushton, 1997). This paper shows how, in recent years, a softly softly approach (that avoids explicit reference to race) has become more common. I argue that this inexplicitness should not be mistaken for an absence of racialized thinking and does not signal that the current work is free from possible racist consequences. Indeed, if anything, the new softly softly version of hereditarianism may be even more dangerous than the outspoken version of earlier periods. The rules of racial standing, combined with the absence of explicit racial language in the new geneism, render any antiracist critique as automatically suspect and unscientific. In this way the space for serious race-critical debate is closed down. This tactic is frequently deployed by authors who wish to stress a powerful genetic basis for race inequalities in education and the economy. Linda S. Gottfredson (Professor of Educational Psychology at the University of Delaware), for example, has devoted an entire paper to defending the work and character of J. Philippe Rushton – one of the most outspoken and controversial of the race/IQ hereditarian authors. The fate of the Nobel prize-winner James Watson is especially important here. In 2007 Watson said in simple and clear terms what writers like Eysenck, Jensen, Lynn, Rushton, and Gottfredson have suggested many times. Watson’s subsequent fall from grace was swift, comprehensive and decisive ... The hereditarians have not changed their mind about race and intelligence – they just don’t broadcast it anymore. Neither Robert Plomin nor Linda Gottfredson have repudiated their earlier statements of support for The Bell Curve and its view of race inequity as reflective of the deeper genetic patterning of intelligence (so proudly set out as ‘mainstream science’ in the Wall Street Journal in 1994). Their more recently produced reader-friendly accounts of intelligence and genetic heritability (Asbury & Plomin, 2013; Gottfredson, 2011) adopt a discourse of racial inexplicitness that hints at past controversies but never addresses race directly and portrays their critics as driven by ideology and/or emotion. The racist patterning of differential educational opportunity and achievement, that is encoded in their views, lies buried in the small-print, hidden from the view of the general reader. The new geneism is no less racially conceived, and no less racist in its likely consequences, than the more familiar explicit scientific racism of The Bell Curve; but the colorblind façade repackages centuries old stereotypes in shiny new DNA-patterned bundles. Critical educators must quickly adapt to, and interrupt, this version or else we may find that scientific racism has reshaped our education systems without even mentioning race.

• Southern Poverty Law Center (listed at WP:RSP as green but a biased and opinionated source) lists her as an "extremist": Following a long tradition of scientific racism, Gottfredson argues that racial inequality, especially in employment, is the direct result of genetic racial differences in intelligence. (Note: SPLC wrote an article in 2018 about this WP article [28]).
• Media Matters (listed at WP:RSP as yellow and a biased and opinionated source) goes further: Gottfredson is a well-known white nationalist who has received funding from the Pioneer Fund.
• In 2018 she had a keynote cancelled following letters of complaint. [29] Levivich ^{[dubious – discuss]} 21:54, 18 March 2020 (UTC)
  • The David Gillborn paper you've quoted in the hidden section above is quite interesting. It is a paper written by a professor of Critical Race Theory, criticizing the fact that some extremely prominent individuals in the field of psychology and human genetics, including Hans Eysenck, Robert Plomin, and James Watson, have directly or indirectly advocated the hereditarian perspective about race and intelligence. Most of the researchers criticized in Gillborn's paper are far more qualified to make judgments in this area than Gillborn is. Are you sure this paper supports the argument that you are trying to make about what is "fringe" here, and what isn't? 2600:1004:B117:F3CA:3174:A036:DA02:381C (talk) 22:09, 18 March 2020 (UTC)
    • For my part, yes, I'm sure that critical race theory has mainstream acceptance, whereas hereditarian race theories do not. For example, see last year's AAPA Statement on Race & Racism: The concept of race has developed hand-in-hand with racist ideologies over the last five centuries, and biological anthropology has played an important role in the creation and perpetuation of both the race concept and racist ideologies. Racist political doctrines should not receive support from scientific endeavors, but in practice racism has been co-constructed with inaccurate depictions of human variation provided by scientists. Over our history, the AAPA, and many of its members, have been complicit in producing and reifying racist ideologies via the misuse, falsification, or biased production of scientific information ... We acknowledge that outdated and inaccurate ideas about race, and racism, still inform scientific research today, and are sometimes embedded in what otherwise appears to be “modern,” technologically-advanced science. We stand against such practices ... We offer this statement as a baseline for what we know about race and racism in order to help us do better science and better convey what we know about human biological variation to broader audiences ... Racial categories do not provide an accurate picture of human biological variation. Variation exists within and among populations across the planet, and groups of individuals can be differentiated by patterns of similarity and difference, but these patterns do not align with socially-defined racial groups (such as whites and blacks) or continentally-defined geographic clusters (such as Africans, Asians, and Europeans) ... genetic variability within and among human groups does not follow racial lines ... Like human genetic variation, phenotypic variation in our species does not follow racial lines. Race constitutes an arbitrary and artificial division of continuous variation, and thus does not provide an accurate representation of human phenotypic variation or population similarities and differences ... The belief in “races” as natural aspects of human biology, and the structures of inequality (racism) that emerge from such beliefs, are among the most damaging elements in the human experience both today and in the past. Levivich ^{[dubious – discuss]} 22:41, 18 March 2020 (UTC)
      • This is yet another unconstructive false dichotomy and guilt by association back-'n'-forth. Critical race theory has many high-profile critics, whose objections are well-reasoned and quite principled. But it is not necessary for CRT to be "right", as a whole and about everything, for a particular source who agrees with some CRT dogma to be right about something or to be a reliable source on that particular something. Facts are correct because they can be demonstrated to be correct, not because of who pointed them out or for what reason. Answering a fallacious, emotive argument with another fallacious, emotive argument does not get us any closer to a consensus. Failing to detect the fallacies in a viewpoint-laden attack on a source is a failure to properly and neutrally defend the source from a PoV-pushing attack, and adding more bogus arguments to the mix just compounds the problem, by giving the viewpoint pushers additional wedges to drive.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  14:22, 20 April 2020 (UTC)

        Will you be issuing numerical marks as well, or just the narrative feedback? Levivich ^{[dubious – discuss]} 16:01, 20 April 2020 (UTC)

References

Gould is a "fringe scientist" for topics including race and IQ

Since a lot of people are citing The Mismeasure of Man by Stephen Jay Gould for metaphysical arguments like race being a delusion or IQ testing as "reification", I'll add this here. Gould was a purveyor of a considerable amount of demented nonsense under an academic veneer, to the point that at the height of his popular acclamation people in the academy had started calling him out as a high profile source of misinformation. Even the term "fringe scientist" was used (see below). Similar comments apply to Lewontin, Kamin, Montagu, and others who tend to recur as sources in these discussions; Gould is only the most famous case with the easiest to find material, because he opined on areas further outside his expertise and sold many more books.

The following is from an exchange of letters involving John Tooby, Stephen Pinker and others in Slate in 2000 on the topic "How to Deal With Fringe Academics", centering on the then-current case of Kevin MacDonald. Tooby, founder of evolutionary psychology, wrote:

"In the mid-1970's, for example, Gould, Lewontin, and a few others injected heavy-handed moralizing, easy denunciation, the attribution of dubious intellectual genealogies, and an ad hominem attack-style into scientific debate in an effort to settle intellectual disputes by other means. One belief they cultivated assiduously was the myth that leading evolutionary scholars were ideologically motivated right-wingers."

"The most notorious tactic of Gould, Lewontin, and their allies during the early years was their attempt to drag the ideas they opposed under by manufacturing links to various repugnant doctrines. ""

"...they did succeed in tarring the revolution in evolutionary biology in the eyes of nonbiologists, together with any serious attempt to think through the relationship between culture, human nature, and human evolution. This has perpetuated the antiquated status quo, during which social scientists have remained wary of the possibility of scientifically mapping human nature, and have remained almost totally ignorant of modern evolutionary biology. The cumulative harvest of suffering from this will not be small."

" Specifically, the way scientific issues look up close, both morally and intellectually, and the way they look or can be made to look from a distance are so frequently at odds that this opens up a major niche for fluent and well-credentialed academic arbitrageurs, who can troll for, exploit or manufacture these bad appearances to acquire towering reputations for moral activism and intellectual insight. They inject consistent, major distortions into the public understanding of everything from economics to environmental science to neuroscience - and by "public" I mean to include even professionals in the same discipline who are unfamiliar with the technical niceties of the subspecialties in question - but who still decide on the hiring, promotion, publishing, and funding of those in the targeted subspecialties.

Such figures -- Gould and Lewontin are the type specimens -- are granted formidable cultural power by gatekeepers (like the editors of NYRB, the New Yorker, Scientific American) eager to do the right thing, and so these arbitrageurs drown out the voices of the experts in the fields under discussion. ... these voices are often the only ones most nonspecialists ever get to hear (I've heard that Gould's books sell far more than all other biologists' put together) ...

In short, there is a powerful dynamic guaranteeing that some of our most famous, most trusted, most authoritative scientific voices not only regularly misinform, but misrepresent fringe opinion as central. So the problem... is not so much fringe on the fringe - now that MacDonald's views have come to light, they will quickly be debunked. The deeper problem is the fringe at the center, and the genuine human cost that comes from the systematic legitimization of bad ideas. The humane and winning columns of Steve Gould, for example, frequently edge into outright fiction and contain inversions that are laugh-out-loud funny to those in the know.

Gould is currently the president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and so is arguably the nation's top scientist. Could he really be a fringe scientist? As John Maynard Smith, one of the world's top five evolutionary biologists said, Gould "is giving non-biologists a largely false picture of the state of evolutionary theory" and "the evolutionary biologists with whom I have discussed his work tend to see him as a man whose ideas are so confused as to be hardly worth bothering with, but as one who should not be publicly criticized because he is at least on our side against the creationists." Or as Harvard's Ernst Mayr, another of the five, says of Gould and his allies: they "quite conspicuously misrepresent the views of [biology's] leading spokesmen."

The basic problem with Gould as a source on this topic is that he was, by his own admission, terrible at mathematics, but a highly verbal graphomaniac. He was an old fashioned bird-watching and fossil-collecting type of scientist but the field he wrote about, evolutionary theory, passed him by in technical sophistication as it became highly mathematized. In matters of evolutionary theory he was thought to be right about punctuated equilibrium and little else. The race and IQ debate is, likewise, rather mathematical and statistical in nature, about quantitative psychometry and quantitative genetics. John Carroll, author of the professionals' bible on factor analysis of cognitive ability, wrote that Gould's book showed he "did not understand the nature or purpose of factor analysis".

Apart from the intellectual merits of Gould himself, his criticisms in The Mismeasure of Man are either wrong or irrelevant (or both) for any empirical question related to race-and-IQ. "Reification" is how normal science has always worked, until Gould decided he didn't like it. "Ranking" is a strawman that is neither an input nor an output of psychometric research (and in any case different groups tend to be higher on some measures and lower on others, including the different sub-abilities aggregated in IQ scores). It is something to be aware of as political context and in public discussions but has no bearing on the scientific questions. Gould appears to have been substantially wrong about Morton's skull data, but it doesn't matter. Morton 1850 vs Gould 1981 is immaterial when the empirical question is easily settled (I think in favor of Morton) by larger samples with MRI data, and the Morton data were not a part of the race/IQ/genetics debate in modern times. Just as the Cyril Burt data fraud controversy is obviated by the flood of behavioral genetics research, including later twin and adoption studies, that validated the basic point of high genetic heritability in several converging ways, with estimates quantitatively supporting Burt, and the older methods now superseded or supported by polygenic scores from DNA.

Gould did not live to see DNA-based genetic clustering and its extremely high concordance (100 percent separation of "whites" and "blacks" in US samples) with socially constructed race data. Maybe he would have found some metaphysical argument against it but for purposes of the genetic studies there is no problem and given the rate of concordance it is impossible that using some other definition of race could change the results of any particular study. So another verbal-philosophical objection made irrelevant by later developments. 73.149.246.232 (talk) 21:53, 19 April 2020 (UTC)

• This 100% concordance between genetics and social race constructs is either massively oversimplified or an example of the phenomenon that 65.2739% of all statistics are made up. Agricolae (talk) 22:37, 19 April 2020 (UTC)

  I do not contest the raw data. However, one has to weigh in factors such as parents' income, parents' social class, parents' education, subject's education, etc., before jumping to the conclusion that blacks are less intelligent than whites on a biological/genetic basis. It could very well be that blacks score lower on IQ test due to social and economic factors which have nothing to do with DNA (genes). The IQ tests have to be language-neutral and culture-neutral. Tgeorgescu (talk) 22:42, 19 April 2020 (UTC)

• Citing excerpts from letters in Slate, this IP-editor wants Wikipedia to decide that the leading academic critics of scientific racism of the past century, such as Leon Kamin, Richard Lewontin, Stephen Jay Gould, and Ashley Montagu, were all spouting "demented nonsense" in the IP-editor's words, and that it was the racists who were mainstream and their critics who were fringe. I don't think Wikipedia will want to follow this IP-editor down that racist rabbit-hole. NightHeron (talk) 22:44, 19 April 2020 (UTC)

  It is a fact that the forerunners of statistical tests were racists/eugenicists. They attributed poverty to bad heredity from the parents, and their statistical tests confirmed their conclusions. The gist is that they ignored that poverty is mainly caused by socioeconomic factors, and mostly not by heredity. Tgeorgescu (talk) 22:51, 19 April 2020 (UTC)

• Stephen Jay Gould is a Library of Congress Living Legend and his book The Mismeasure of Man won a National Book Critics Circle Award. Fringe or mainstream? 🤔 Levivich ^{[dubious – discuss]} 23:04, 19 April 2020 (UTC)

  @Levivich: If only he had been removed from his academic appointments, had his name removed from buildings, or had the title emeritus revoked, then we would know he was truly in the mainstream! --JBL (talk) 23:12, 19 April 2020 (UTC)

• I especially like the way the quote "Could he really be a fringe scientist?" magically turns into "Gould is a "fringe scientist"" in the IP's hands. Classic fringe methodology. Bra-vo! BTW, this also needs to be seen in the context of Gould's lifelong problems with neontologists who did not understand that, when a paleontologist says "speciation happens quickly", he means "it only takes a few thousand years", which is actually the same time span they themselves would allot it. Smart and competent people with different expertises do not necessarily agree or even get along, but it is a long way from there to fringe science. --Hob Gadling (talk) 06:00, 20 April 2020 (UTC)

  This is turning into a pointless chest-beating exercise. Many of the published criticisms of Gould are valid, and some government body like the LoC lionizing him means jack (especially given the history of this particular country's government). Yet his criticisms of "race" and of IQ tests are also valid (not just my opinion, but general scientific consensus on both points). Despite having a few valid points mired in it somewhere, the IP editor's text-walling ultimately distills to a thick mixture of false dichotomy, guilt by association, false authority, argument to ridicule, cum hoc ergo propter hoc, appeal to accomplishment, tone policing, courtier's reply, argumentum ad populum, bulverism, and poisoning the well. Unfortunately, the responses to this party have pretty much the exact same set of reasoning flaws. Cf. two wrongs don't make a right, and WP:DENY.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  14:03, 20 April 2020 (UTC)

Brief Re-cap

In evaluating the two sides of this dispute, quality of argumentation is most important. In this RfC discussion and the parallel discussion on RSN, the most frequent commenters for the no vote on the RfC have persistently claimed:

• that it's disruption and a BLP violation to use the term "white supremacist" or "racist" for someone who believes that black people are genetically inferior to white people;

• that Richard Lynn is a better scholar than Stephen Jay Gould, and that the survey by Heiner Rindermann that supports that judgment is a reliable source;

• that Richard Lynn, Arthur Jensen, Heiner Rindermann, Linda Gottfredson, and like-minded writers are mainstream, while Leon Kamin, Richard Lewontin, Ashley Montagu, and Stephen Jay Gould are fringe writers who (in the words of one editor) wrote "demented nonsense" about race and intelligence;

• that organizations and media such as New Statesman, Southern Poverty Law Center, American Association for the Advancement of Science, Scientific American, and the US Library of Congress are engaged in a liberal conspiracy to promote Kamin/Lewontin/Montagu/Gould/etc rather than Lynn/Jensen/Rindermann/Gottfredson/etc; and the institutions that employed Kamin/Lewontin/Montagu/Gould (mainly, Harvard and Princeton) were presumably also part of this conspiracy.

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) is probably the best-known US non-profit organization monitoring hate groups. At the beginning of this RfC I referred to an article the SPLC published in 2018 concerning the alt-right's influence on Wikipedia. The article is really worth reading, and I hope the closing admin(s) read it in connection with this RfC. Here I'll just quote briefly from the beginning and the conclusion of the article: However, the free encyclopedia's openness and anonymity leave it vulnerable to manipulation by neo-Nazis, white nationalists and racist academics seeking a wider audience for extreme views... in the past two years, its presence has grown with the emergence of the racist "alt-right" and the surge in rightwing populism in Europe and North America, says administrator Doug Weller. And: The presence of white nationalists and other far-right extremists on Wikipedia is an ongoing problem that is unlikely to go away in the near future given the rightward political shift in countries where the majority of the site's users live. Wikipedia's leadership is acutely aware of the issue, but it faces the difficult task of balancing its mission of inclusiveness and tolerance of a diversity of viewpoints with the aim of maintaining the integrity, accuracy and neutrality of its content. NightHeron (talk) 11:51, 20 April 2020 (UTC)

That's a vacuous truth, though. It's a given, a guarantee, that far-right voices will be among Wikipedia's editors. It simply couldn't be any other way, not with an openly editable wiki. As a left–right centrist, it's equally obvious to me that various topics on WP are utterly dominated by far-left activists, and I find that almost as alarming (especially since the community and the foundation care much less, because that bias sits closer to their own average viewpoints). The observation that right-wingnut editors have a viewpoint on this issue and its disposition and that they, too, edit wikipiedia right along with far-lefties and a broad range of more centrist viewpoint-holders, doesn't tell the closer or anyone else anything meaningful about this RfC, other than that we can expect it to actually have a wide range of viewpoints represented in the input.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  13:32, 20 April 2020 (UTC)

NightHeron, I have no issue with the viewpoints of Leon Kamin, Richard Lewontin, Ashley Montagu, they are needed for an NPOV encyclopedia. I just have an issue with Stephen Jay Gould as some of his research has been falsified and is thus pseudoscientific, I have already articulated this in more detail earlier. I also have an issue with the IP editor’s emotional antics of “demented nonsense” and cringed when I read it, such dramatic language could be seen as disruptive if this topic area ends up in another ArbCom, with the risk of sanctions if the there is a pattern of behaviour there. If the research which suggests East Asians score higher than whites in I.Q. tests was more prominent in the article, i.e. in the lead, that would kill off ideas that whites are the superior race. Then of course have the genetic versus environmental arguments discussed, per WEIGHT. White supremacists would just have to suck it up that their beliefs are not supported. Although the far left editors might oppose that as much as the far right for different reasons. This is such a difficult topic area.--Literaturegeek | T@1k? 14:14, 20 April 2020 (UTC)

That a scholar's work was disputed by advocates of viewpoints he criticized does not mean that his work was "falsified" or shown to be "pseudoscience." The 2011 paper disputing some of Gould's conclusions regarding Morton was itself disputed by others as being biased (see Stephen Jay Gould#The Mismeasure of Man). Another position of Gould that got pushback from certain psychometricians was his rejection of the reification of "intelligence," meaning conceiving of it as a single quality that can be measured or ranked from high to low. He was accused of not understanding Factor analysis. But his point was broader than any technical or mathematical question. Intelligence is a loaded term that is nebulous and subjective, as its meaning varies between cultures and historical periods. For example, in earlier times the important components of intelligence were considered to include being quick with numbers, having skill at orienteering (sense of direction, use of landmarks), and figuring out how to survive in the wilderness. In modern cultures most people don't care about any of that, thanks to calculators, GPS, and urbanization. NightHeron (talk) 18:02, 20 April 2020 (UTC)

Let me tell you how this ends

It's clear Wikipedia is being overrun with intellectual dark web bobbleheads who are getting titillated by some really poor scholarship masquerading as "free speech". I have also uncovered some off-wiki WP:CANVASSing that has occurred pointing to this RfC. Guess who is orchestrating it? I'll give you a hint, it's not the critical race theorists. Know where I've seen this plot before? Climate change circa ten years ago. I predict an omnibus arbcom with some very upset "free speech" advocates at the end of it. I'm sure we haven't seen the last of the WP:CRYBLP crowd either, what with the racism and all. jps (talk) 01:01, 2 April 2020 (UTC)

jps, Do you believe it’s possible there are genetic differences between different populations? Whether it’s arm length or visual acuity or whatever? My point is rather than framing this as a left/right thing or a “free speech” issue (which has become tiresome for all of us at this point I’d imagine). Why not just examine the science behind it? Why make it a political issue? 2600:1012:B009:B8C7:B91D:A6C2:405C:8300 (talk) 02:49, 2 April 2020 (UTC)

There are genetic differences between you and me, and I have no idea nor do I care what shade of pinkish or brownish your skin is. And I'm sorry, but this has been a political issue for a couple of centuries. HiLo48 (talk) 02:54, 2 April 2020 (UTC)

WP:RGW HiLo48 is precisely right. That this is being treated as a political football by the IP and other intellectual dark web cheerleaders is one thing. That we also know the so-called "science" behind it is being promoted by racists and eugenicists is quite another. No matter. Wikipedia is not going to cut the Gordion's Knot according to the wishes of some IP user who is a likely sockpuppet. jps (talk) 10:59, 2 April 2020 (UTC)

Is it the same racist and eugenic supporting researchers who are promoting the intellectual superiority/inferiority (racism/“breedism”) amongst different breeds/races of birds and dogs: dog intelligence and bird intelligence? I actually just stumbled across this like just now as I wondered if this research angle only applied to humans or if research had been carried out into to animals as well. Seems this research angle carries over into the animal kingdom.

As for all of the canvassed editors, they should post back to the people in their group, where they were canvassed from, that these conversations and votes here are not a democratic vote, it is more the quality of the arguments that carry an RfC, vote numbers are secondary to this, and the numerical total will have canvassed editors deducted from the total anyway, so they (canvassed editors) are mostly wasting their time unless they point out some policy violation that no one else mentioned, which is very unlikely in a well attended RfC. So please stop coming here.--Literaturegeek | T@1k? 11:21, 2 April 2020 (UTC)

I mean, the history of animal breeds is tied up in the history of eugenics, absolutely. [30] jps (talk) 19:24, 2 April 2020 (UTC)

It sounds to me like this should just go to ArbCom now, if you actually have evidence of this meat puppetry. That really shouldn't be tolerated, on this or any other issue. That said, I have to point out the guilt by association fallacy in some of the commentary above. The fact that some cluster of dimwitted, racist yahoos will latch onto, misinterpret, and exaggerate a journal paper doesn't mean that the paper is wrong or should be suppressed, it just means that there are dimwitted, racist yahoos, and that some research is hard to interpret and keep within context. The yahoos do this kind of thing with every topic of interest to them, including (as this opened with, and as well all know by now) climate change. Yet, quite notably, we do not suppress coverage of science that doesn't support every anthropogenic-climate-worsening claim and scenario, we simply give it due weight.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  13:25, 20 April 2020 (UTC)

The matter of dog intelligence and bird intelligence involves the same seemingly impossible issue of defining intelligence itself. It seems we often define as the most intelligent those dogs who do exactly what some human tells them. If we had a human who was totally obedient to others, we would call them intelligent. HiLo48 (talk) 21:44, 2 April 2020 (UTC)

There seems to be a missing "not" or "un-" in your final clause. Anyway, the stuff I've seen on bird intelligence mostly has to do with memory and with puzzle-solving to get at food. Same goes for octopus tests. I haven't read that much on the dog stuff, though have also seen some breeds singled out as better at remembering/distinguishing verbal and gestural commands, and even at figuring out the meaning of an ambiguous or novel command, though I don't know how much of that research has been done (i.e., how repeatable it is). So, yeah, this whole problem of deciding what "intelligence" means is clearly an issue in all this research, which is on very specific cognitive tasks which don't necessarily relate to any other cognitive tasks. And this definitional problem is just ignored by racists; they don't care what the truth is, only whether they can use any essentially meaningless statistical blip as part of racist narrative. This is why we have to get this article right; we cannot present results without also presenting their contexts and limitations. (And reverting later editors trying to delete those caveats or to string unrelated blips together to weave a false OR narrative.)  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  13:41, 20 April 2020 (UTC)

Dog breeders are well aware of the the difference between intelligence and training. Labradors for example are hands down one of the easiest dogs to train to do even relatively complex tasks, given their genetic predisposition to eat everything making them very susceptible to reward-based behavoural modification. They are also hands down well known for being one of the stupidest dogs ever to walk on four legs. Dog breeders will generally breed for training, not intelligence. You dont want an intelligent dog. Only in death does duty end (talk) 14:02, 20 April 2020 (UTC)

I don't disagree; if anything this points further to the difficulty of defining what "intelligence" is supposed to mean, and how measuring some particular task or set of tasks may not really tell us anything about it as a big-umbrella subject.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  14:30, 20 April 2020 (UTC)

Educational psychology and neuropsychology are mainstream robust fields of expertise and I.Q. tests by these experts are accepted without question by courts, health trusts, all healthcare disciplines. Human intelligence is reliably measured all the time for purposes of determining whether someone is learning disabled, have a specific intellectual deficit, brain injury, etc. The results reliably predict how well someone will do academically and in the workplace. Most of the tests do not measure taught intelligence (and thus the results stay the same over the lifetime, unless you cheat or develop dementia, etc) but do tests like timed problem solving, shape arranging, remembering and repeating letters forwards and backwards, measuring attention, etc. They are very in-depth with many dozens of different mini tests measuring various cognitive abilities. Has anyone here actually ever taken intellectual tests like Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale? I have taken these tests 5 times. Of course there are always ways to improve tests and some debate on a certain aspect of a test in reliable sources but only on Wikipedia have I seen this questioning and second guessing I.Q. tests and intelligence measuring. This isn’t aimed specifically at you SMcCandlish but more generally at this RfC because I.Q. tests and reliability keeps getting questioned during this RfC.--Literaturegeek | T@1k? 14:50, 20 April 2020 (UTC)

Discussion of appropriateness of proposed/solicited closing of this RfC

@SilkTork: Please reconsider whether it's appropriate for you to close this RfC. You were canvassed on User talk:SilkTork by an IP-editor who has been extremely active both in the RfC discussion and in related discussions concerning AfD and DRV for Race and intelligence. Presumably that IP-editor asked you to close this RfC because they thought you would close it in line with their no-vote. Since I have not examined your editing history (except to confirm my memory that you overturned the initial closure on Race and intelligence and to follow the link to the cited earlier discussion on your user-page with the same IP-editor), I do not know one way or the other whether the IP-editor is correct in singling you out for canvassing as an admin who's sympathetic to their POV. Perhaps it was this comment [31] of yours that convinced the IP-editor to solicit you to close the RfC.

I'm concerned that on your user-page the IP-editor made an unjustified accusation of a BLP violation on my part. The same IP-editor recently made a similar accusation against me on the user-page of another admin, Barkeep49, who'd also been involved in the AfD/DRV. After I learned of the accusation by chance, I was able to defend myself, and nothing came of it. But I do not appreciate this IP-editor's practice of accusing me of misconduct behind my back on admins' user-pages. In addition, under the guise of asking naive questions on admins' user-pages, this IP-editor seems to have the habit of sounding out admins in search of one who seems sympathetic to their arguments. This also allows a side discussion to take place without the participation of editors who have disputed the IP-editor's extreme POV (those editors are not pinged and do not routinely watchlist admins' user-pages). Thus, the side discussion enables one side of the debate to try to sway an admin who then has the power to close a contentious RfC/AfD/DRV and perhaps also take punitive action against an opponent of the IP-editor.

This RfC concerns claims that certain races are genetically inferior to others in intelligence. The WP:FALSEBALANCE that currently exists on Wikipedia, especially in Race and intelligence, gives credence to those views, which are offensive and unsupported by mainstream science. This is an important issue. Because of the highly contentious nature of the discussions and because of the allegations of irregularities (such as off-wiki canvassing, SPAs, sockpuppets), it's clear that the RfC should be closed by an uninvolved, unbiased, and uncanvassed admin -- or, better yet, a committee of admins. That admin or group of admins should evaluate the strength of the arguments (not count votes) and also look into the possible role of off-wiki canvassing, SPAs, sockpuppets, and any other irregularities. Thank you. NightHeron (talk) 13:49, 4 April 2020 (UTC)

Thanks for your comment NightHeron. I don't feel biased one way or the other. I tend to respond to requests to close discussions regardless of who asks. But if there is a view that I should step back, then no worries I will step back. Does anyone else feel I am involved or biased? SilkTork (talk) 15:43, 4 April 2020 (UTC)

@SilkTork: Because of how long the discussion here is, and because the vote is nearly tied (22 "yes" vs. 24 "no"), I think it's very important for this RFC to be closed to by admin who's able to carefully read the entire discussion and evaluate the strength of arguments and sources presented in it. As I said in your user talk, I'm looking to avoid a repeat of the situation that happened with Spartaz' initial close of the AFD, in which he does not appear to have read the entire discussion. The reason I asked you in particular is because you're clearly trusted for your ability to evaluate the consensus in complex discussions, and because you had previously offered to close the RFC if requested. I don't know anything about your opinion on this topic, so there's no need to read any further into the reason than the fact that I think that you're the most qualified person to close the RFC, or to participate in the closure if it's to be closed by a panel of multiple admins. 2600:1004:B168:6909:DCB2:E8F5:D7F6:F6BB (talk) 16:13, 4 April 2020 (UTC)

• SilkTork, I don't think you're biased or involved and have no qualms about you being the closer for the RFC. I do think that someone should have a word with the IP about their relentless admin canvassing (I remember when they went to an admin's talk page seeking to have me and others sanctioned during the move request that preceded this RFC). However, admin canvassing is ineffectual when it comes to results. I'm sure the close would be the same regardless of which admin closes it, so if you want to take the time ST, you have my thanks. Levivich ^{[dubious – discuss]} 16:59, 4 April 2020 (UTC)

SilkTork, I haven't seen any reason that would disqualify you in terms of WP:INVOLVED. That said, I kind of expect this is going to be hairy no matter where the close goes, so it might be helpful to go the WP:GMORFC route and maybe rope in one or two more admins to help solidify the close and maybe slightly diffuse issues I'm sure those involved in the topic may continue afterwards. Not a big deal to me either way since my involvement was just a quick chime-in, but it's possible it might save you more hassle too. Kingofaces43 (talk) 17:41, 4 April 2020 (UTC)

Thanks for the suggestion Kingofaces43. I'm OK closing by myself or as part of a team. I have no particular preference. If two other admins wish to volunteer, that's fine; but if not, that's also fine. SilkTork (talk) 18:03, 4 April 2020 (UTC)

@SilkTork: If there's going to be a team close, it's very important that the other admins on the team be admins who won't allow their assessment of the consensus to be swayed by their personal opinions about how Wikipedia should present this topic. That's even more of a danger in this discussion than it was in the AFD, because the consensus is less clear than it was there. I've seen enough of your judgement in this area to be confident you won't do that, but I don't have that confidence about any randomly selected admin or admins. I suggest the other admins on the team should be selected very carefully with impartiality in mind, or you should handle the closure by yourself (which might be the better option). 2600:1004:B168:6909:DCB2:E8F5:D7F6:F6BB (talk) 19:32, 4 April 2020 (UTC)

2600:1004:B...: seriously, that's not how this works. We do not "select" admin to close. How it works is that volunteers volunteer. It is not appropriate for you to continue to try and influence who closes these discussions by making vague accusations of WP:INVOLVED. If you think an admin has violated WP:INVOLVED or some other policy, post diffs at WP:AN. If you want the RFC to be closed, you can post it at WP:ANRFC. Otherwise, pre-emptively calling for "impartial" admins is not cool, just as going around to various admin's talk pages and asking them to close this or otherwise use their tools is not cool. "Admin shopping" is not cool. Please stop this now. Confine your comments to the content being discussed and don't worry about who closes the RFC. Levivich ^{[dubious – discuss]} 20:15, 4 April 2020 (UTC)

When the AFD outcome was overturned at DRV, there was a lengthy discussion about who should be selected to re-close the AFD. The admins who eventually re-closed it were not random admins who volunteered for the task, they were specifically selected as a blue-ribbon panel. So it's not true that "that's not how this works" - that apparently is how it works, at least some of the time. Perhaps that's only done in highly contentious discussions, but if that's true I think this discussion is contentious enough for something similar to be justified here.

In an earlier discussion in his user talk, about a tangentially related matter, SilkTork previously told me that he would be willing to close this RFC if requested. If it were a problem for me to make this request from SilkTork, I don't believe he would have invited me to request it. I trust his judgement about what's acceptable in this area more than yours, because he does not have any kind of agenda on this article, whereas (judging from your earlier move request) you clearly do. 2600:1004:B168:6909:DCB2:E8F5:D7F6:F6BB (talk) 20:50, 4 April 2020 (UTC)

If we look at the two discussions between the IP-editor and SilkTork (with no one else participating) on SilkTork's user talk-page, we see an example of why it's probably not a good idea for an admin to encourage this type of special pleading by one side in a contentious debate. The IP-editor presented a highly partisan view of what the issue was (for example, citing Rindermann's "surveys" without mentioning that Rindermann is a frequent contributor to the white-supremacist journal Mankind Quarterly, which makes it unlikely that his survey methods were reliable), and in response SilkTork wrote I think what you say makes sense.... This encouraged the IP-editor to return to SilkTork's user-page to continue their distorted presentation of the issues and appeal to SilkTork, as an admin the IP-editor approves of, to close the RfC. As I said before, I am not saying that SilkTork is biased on this issue, since I do not know one way or the other. But I think that both SilkTork and Barkeep49 should not have permitted this type of sneaky behavior by the IP (which included allegations of misconduct against other editors) to go on for so long. NightHeron (talk) 21:53, 4 April 2020 (UTC)

The fact that Rindermann has published papers in Mankind Quarterly was brought up at length in the RSN discussion in February, which was also closed by SilkTork, and the first sentence of SilkTork's closure summary indirectly alludes to that fact. How could he possibly have not been already aware of this? 2600:1004:B15D:51C4:592D:C5A2:4AA3:E41F (talk) 22:23, 4 April 2020 (UTC)

The discussion that you're referring to understates the significance of Rindermann's ties to Mankind Quarterly and also understates the significance of Mankind Quarterly. Rindermann has been a frequent contributor (from his BLP) to a journal that has been described as a "cornerstone of the scientific racism establishment", a "white supremacist journal",[1] an "infamous racist journal", and "scientific racism's keepers of the flame"[2][3][4] (from the 1st sentence of the article Mankind Quarterly). Any unbiased person would see that this undermines any claim that Rindermann is mainstream rather than fringe. Perhaps SilkTork was unaware of these circumstances, since it is not incumbent upon a closing admin to look up additional material besides the text of the discussion. NightHeron (talk) 22:57, 5 April 2020 (UTC)

You mention the first sentence of SilkTork's closing summary for the RSN discussion: The consensus is that books published by Cambridge University Press meet our Reliable Sources criteria regardless of the controversial nature of the material being published, nor any associations, publications, espoused views or controversies that the author(s) may otherwise have been involved in. Really?? Wikipedia considers the prestige of a publisher to be a guarantee of non-fringe content?? Elsevier, one of the world's leading scientific publishers, publishes Homeopathic Pharmacy: Theory and Practice [32]. Wikipedia recognizes homeopathy to be fringe alt-med, unsupported by mainstream science; see the article Homeopathy for details. Being published by Elsevier does not make homeopathy non-fringe. Elsevier also publishes Intelligence [33], the official journal of the International Society for Intelligence Research, described in New Statesman as an organization that promotes "racist pseudo-science". NightHeron (talk) 23:40, 5 April 2020 (UTC)

That closure summary was the outcome of community consensus at RSN, so deal with it. :) 2600:1004:B151:58B1:9DDF:E91F:7217:39A7 (talk) 00:24, 6 April 2020 (UTC)

Reading further in the closing summary of that RSN discussion, I see why you like it and repeatedly cite it, and why you really wanted SilkTork to close this RfC. The closing summary claims that the discussion established that authors such as Rindermann are appropriate experts in the human intelligence field. Appropriate for whom? Certainly not for immigrants, Africans, or racial minorities, none of whom have much voice on Wikipedia and so are not well situated to defend themselves against Wikipedia bias. How to explain an "appropriate expert" being a frequent contributor to a racist rag like Mankind Quarterly? NightHeron (talk) 10:47, 6 April 2020 (UTC)

There is no rule that says that closing admins can't have personal opinions. For example, if some Wikipedia pages started to give a false balance between proposed fake cures for COVID-19 and the scientists who debunked them, it would be just a natural human reaction to be disgusted by the dangerous quackery during a pandemic and by any false balance that lends credence to quackery. Similarly, it's a natural human reaction to be disgusted by the following sentence that was proposed as part of an addition to Race and intelligence (see [34]): Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen have argued that populations in the third world, particularly populations in Africa, tend to have limited intelligence because of their composition and that, consequently, education cannot be effective in creating social and economic development in third world countries. An admin should not be disqualified because she/he has a strong personal dislike of racism. NightHeron (talk) 20:33, 4 April 2020 (UTC)

It's such a straw man argument, too. There is no person who doesn't have a strong personal dislike of racism. Nobody says, "How do I feel about racism? Meh, I'm OK with it, it doesn't bother me much." Similarly, there are no editors who would "allow their assessment of the consensus to be swayed by their personal opinions". That's "Closing 101". If an editor did allow themselves to be so swayed, they'll be quickly corrected in a close review (as just happened in the AFD of this article). The notion that we have to carefully find an unbiased closer is 100% bullshit. (Just like the notion that black people's intelligence is genetically inferior to white people's intelligence.) Levivich ^{[dubious – discuss]} 20:49, 4 April 2020 (UTC)

Neither of you seem to understand the point that I was making. Of course everyone has an opinion, but not everyone knows how to set their personal opinion aside when evaluating the consensus in a discussion, especially a complex discussion that's almost evenly split like this one. By "impartial", I simply meant an admin who is trusted to do that, not someone with no opinion at all. If everyone knew how to do that, the AFD would have been closed as "keep" initially, instead of being closed as "delete" and then having that outcome overturned at DRV. 2600:1004:B168:6909:DCB2:E8F5:D7F6:F6BB (talk) 21:21, 4 April 2020 (UTC)

And why should you get to decide which admins can be trusted? On the subject of personal opinions and biases getting in the way, I'm assuming that, even though the IP addresses are not identical, you were also the one who proposed the sentence quoted above: Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen have argued that populations in the third world, particularly populations in Africa, tend to have limited intelligence because of their composition and that, consequently, education cannot be effective in creating social and economic development in third world countries. Similarly, an IP-editor (I thought probably you, but I could be wrong, since your IP address keeps changing) reverted an edit I made to Criticism of Wikipedia on the Southern Poverty Law Center's criticism of alt-right and white nationalist influence on Wikipedia, especially in the article Race and intelligence. The edit summary on the revert was WP is not a soapbox for the SPLC's racism. Is there anyone other than white nationalists who accuse the SPLC of "racism"? So look in the mirror if you're worried about editor bias. NightHeron (talk) 22:18, 4 April 2020 (UTC)

I haven't edited the Criticism of Wikipedia article. My IP range always starts with 2600, and the IP that edited that article is a 2604 IP. But you realize none of this is relevant, don't you? This discussion is about who's qualified to close the RFC, and I never had any intention of closing it myself. 2600:1004:B15D:51C4:592D:C5A2:4AA3:E41F (talk) 22:41, 4 April 2020 (UTC)

Sorry, my mistake. I'll keep "2600" in mind. Even though you never had any intention of closing it yourself, you did seem to want to vet the admins who close it. NightHeron (talk) 22:59, 4 April 2020 (UTC)

(edit conflict) It is certainly true that if you had tried to close the RfC yourself that would have been much more inappropriate than soliciting a particular administrator to close it (rather than following the normal procedures for such things). --JBL (talk) 23:02, 4 April 2020 (UTC)

• Comment This appears to be a thinly-veiled attempt by the IP to canvass an admin who they think might agree with them. It's certainly not standard practice for a heavily involved editor to ask a specific admin to close an RfC, particularly when they've apparently been involved in an undisclosed side discussion. That said, SilkTork isn't the problem here; they've simply been placed in the awkward position of being canvassed. I'm not strongly opposed to a close by SilkTork but it would probably be better if it was done by a completely uninvolved admin.

It's difficult to track down diffs for an unregistered editor, but I do remember a few instances where the IP encouraged specific "knowledgeable" editors (who just happened to agree with them) to participate in discussions. It's not the job of a heavily involved editor to identify the "most qualified" person to close (whatever that means) and they probably would have been warned for if they were a registered editor exhibiting similar behavior. –dlthewave ☎ 19:05, 4 April 2020 (UTC)

• Comment: I support a team close. This is a subject matter where a large percentage of the population has a personal bias or feeling. I think as this is a hugely divisive topic and RfC that is under ArbCom sanctions and because the last AFD required a deletion review followed by a team close that only a team close of 3 or 5 admins will suffice and settle this once and for all. Otherwise it will always be argued that the admin was “biased”. I do not have a problem with SilkTork being part of that team close, he is experienced and there is no evidence that he is biased, a team close should well control and eliminate any bias.--Literaturegeek | T@1k? 22:15, 4 April 2020 (UTC)
• Comment: I agree with several others above that I have no objection to SilkTork closing (or being part of a group of admins who close) but I think that the appropriate response to the IP's request would have been a telling-off rather than agreement. (This is both because the purported reasons for soliciting closure are not very convincing, and because the solicitation itself is poor behavior.) --JBL (talk) 22:35, 4 April 2020 (UTC)

• Given the doubts raised here, albeit slight, I will withdraw as closer, including as part of a team. When a debate starts up on a potential closer, that is an indicator that there will likely be a similar debate on their close, thus making the close insecure, and as such the close would not bring closure, but simply further dissent. This also means I will recuse from any race and intelligence discussions in future. SilkTork (talk) 11:15, 5 April 2020 (UTC)

@SilkTork: While I don't think it was necessary for you to recuse, I respect your decision and your desire to make the eventual closure as non-contentious as possible.

At this stage, I agree with Literaturegeek that a team closure would best. Ideally, it should be handled by a blue-ribbon panel of admins chosen for the task, as was done during the re-closure of the AFD. Although you've declined to close the discussion yourself, can you offer any assistance in selecting admins to be part of such a panel? Based on how others have objected to the manner in which I suggested you as a closer, I'd like to avoid suggesting specific other admins myself. 2600:1004:B162:F217:6C5F:5561:8A9:FBF3 (talk) 14:58, 5 April 2020 (UTC)

A neutral request, along the lines of: "Three admins needed to close a race and intelligence RfC", could be made here: Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Requests for closure. SilkTork (talk) 16:53, 5 April 2020 (UTC)

But a request there will result in three random admins volunteering, won't it? What I'm saying is that this discussion shouldn't be closed by admins chosen at random. This isn't a typical RFC, in which any admin can assess the consensus with a superficial reading of the discussion.

The vote in this RFC is nearly tied, so assessing the consensus here requires reading all the multiple sub-threads, looking at the sources presented, and also being familiar with the conclusions of earlier related discussions such as the RSN discussion about Hunt and Rindermann. The 73.149.246.232 made a similar point in your user talk about this discussion being extremely difficult to parse. This is why I'm saying we need a panel of admins who have been chosen for their ability to assess the consensus in highly complex discussions, like the panel that was assembled to re-close the AFD. 2600:1004:B162:F217:6C5F:5561:8A9:FBF3 (talk) 17:58, 5 April 2020 (UTC)

Through your multiple appeals to SilkTork, you're trying to skew the selection of admins in a way that gets an outcome you desire. Just as the earlier debates at RSN and AfD that you cite resulted in continuation of the status quo (no judgment on the fringe nature of the Hunt/Rindermann sources, no deletion of an article that gives false balance to scientific racism), you're hoping for admins who take those two non-decisions as a precedent. This RfC is different, and the debate on it has included other sources and other arguments. There is no policy reason why this RfC should again result in a perpetuation of the status quo. Nor is there any reason why the admins who close the RfC need to be ones who meet your list of qualifications. NightHeron (talk) 18:38, 5 April 2020 (UTC)

NightHeron, I think that IP is merely asking for 'High quality admins with a history of closing complex discussions'. I think that is fair. Not all admins specialise in closing discussions. That being said, I generally trust that the members of the admin corps won't take on closing such a complex RfC unless they have the prior experience and expertise to do so anyway, so it's largely a non issue. That said, it appears that IP might think that three biased admins might show up, but I'll remind them that admins are trusted members of the community, nobody is going to game the system to get a particular outcome. — Insertcleverphrasehere ^{(or here)}_{(click me!)} 22:20, 5 April 2020 (UTC)

Weren't you paying attention to any of the preceding discussion of the IP-editor's "admin shopping" -- making a case in side discussions on their user talk-page for a "no" closure and complaining about conduct by editors on the other side, and then soliciting a closure by an admin who had seemed to respond positively to the IP-editor's lobbying? NightHeron (talk) 22:32, 5 April 2020 (UTC)

NightHeron, I was referring specifically to the above statement by IP, not previous statements. — Insertcleverphrasehere ^{(or here)}_{(click me!)} 23:20, 5 April 2020 (UTC)

In his comment here, the 73.149.246.232 IP expressed concern that the "yes" voters are trying to introduce as much randomness as possible into the RFC's outcome, due to being unlikely to win on the merits. I'm not sure whether I agree with that or not, but it does seem quite suspicious that the people who most aggressively argued for the "yes" position are those who are now most aggressively arguing that no effort should be made to ensure the RFC is closed by admins who will carefully examine all the arguments and sources presented here. (For example, by asking SilkTork to appoint a blue-ribbon panel, as was done for the re-closure of the AFD.) Why else could anyone be opposed to making sure of that? 2600:1004:B151:58B1:9DDF:E91F:7217:39A7 (talk) 00:17, 6 April 2020 (UTC)

That idea is idiotic, and your idea that you personally should hand-pick admins to close this discussion is even more idiotic. Please desist. --JBL (talk) 00:44, 6 April 2020 (UTC)

We've already selected a group of admins who have the ability to assess consensus in highly complex discussions. This was done at WP:RFA. –dlthewave ☎ 18:26, 5 April 2020 (UTC)

• Comment: There is a discussion over at RSN regarding one of the sources prominently discussed within this RfC which may be highly relevant to the close of this RfC. Please add comments there if you have any. Please see Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Noticeboard#Rindermann,_Intelligence. Thanks — Insertcleverphrasehere ^{(or here)}_{(click me!)} 19:36, 6 April 2020 (UTC)

@Insertcleverphrasehere: I think it was a mistake for you to post this link here. I assume the reason you raised the matter at RSN is because you wanted input from uninvolved editors who have a good understanding of RS policy. The discussion there did receive comments from a few uninvolved editors at first, but now it's being dominated by the same editors who have been dominating this discussion, and who previously dominated the discussion on the article's talk page. 2600:1004:B14C:5FEB:A5C7:A31D:F041:4AE2 (talk) 21:29, 9 April 2020 (UTC)

User:Insertcleverphrasehere was correct in placing this notice. Wikipedia policy is to notify editors on the most relevant pages, irrespective of whether or not you anticipate that the editors who watch the page will agree with you. That's what I did for this RfC, and that's what Insertcleverphrase did for the RSN discussion. You have yet to learn that on Wikipedia you're supposed to be straightforward and not sneaky or manipulative. NightHeron (talk) 22:22, 9 April 2020 (UTC)

My purpose was to involve editors that have a significant amount of knowledge with RS policy, but I'm also not trying to hide that discussion from users here. If they want to add comments there they are more than welcome. The discussion will, as always, be judged based on the strength of arguments. — Insertcleverphrasehere ^{(or here)}_{(click me!)} 22:47, 9 April 2020 (UTC)

• IP still canvassing admin to close, this time on Barkeep's talk page. Also see WP:ANRFC. As with ST, no problem with BK closing this, but the admin shopping is inappropriate. Unlike what just happened with ST, I think admin should neither agree nor recuse based on being canvassed. Maybe it's time to ask for a rangeblock at ANI. (For the IP, not the admin.) Levivich ^{[dubious – discuss]} 14:26, 9 April 2020 (UTC)

The same IP went to User:Barkeep49's talk-page before to make complaints about the RfC and about my conduct as an editor (see [35]). I was not informed by either the IP-editor or Barkeep49 that accusations against me were being discussed. Luckily, another user who commented on the matter did refer to me in a way that automatically pinged me, after which I could go to the talk-page and defend myself. After that, Barkeep49 related to me fairly and cordially, so that was fine. However, it seems to me that it's not a good idea for an admin to cooperate with a sneaky attempt by the IP-editor to complain about another editor behind their back.

In addition, it seems that Barkeep49's role in the recent AfD of Race and intelligence (see [36]) caused the IP-editor to see Barkeep49 as being sympathetic to the IP-editor's viewpoint, and hence the canvassing. The decision to re-close that AfD as a keep was what the IP-editor wanted, and so clearly the IP-editor has been trying to maneuver for a similar decision to preserve the status quo at this RfC. It's also worth noting the first part of the re-closure statement by the admins: This AfD had a high level of participation, including some participation drawn by offwiki canvassing. We do not believe this canvassing had any impact on the final consensus. That they were unwilling to take seriously the evidence of irregularities was disappointing. During the AfD discussion an editor had found that on the same day as major off-wiki canvassing occurred, there was a huge spike in both the number of pageviews and the number of keep votes. In my opinion it would be best to have closing admins for this RfC who had no involvement in closing that AfD. NightHeron (talk) 18:30, 9 April 2020 (UTC)

I have no intention of closing this RfC. Despite being an uninvolved sysop I think our project works best when a variety of closers help with major discussions in contentious topic areas. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 21:53, 9 April 2020 (UTC)

Levivich, I read through that discussion, and I don't believe he asked Barkeep to close the discussion. — Insertcleverphrasehere ^{(or here)}_{(click me!)} 22:44, 9 April 2020 (UTC)

Insertcleverphrasehere, As you were part of the team of admins who closed the AFD, is there anything you can do to help coordinate a team close for the RFC and RSN discussion, as was requested? (This does not necessarily have to involve being part of the closing team yourself.) That's a request to be part of the closing team, or to help form one. Levivich ^{[dubious – discuss]} 23:07, 9 April 2020 (UTC)

Levivich, Hmmm... I did miss this I guess. Thanks for pointing it out. IP should stop. I trust Barkeep more than almost any other admin (due to having worked with him extensively at New Page Patrol), but by going to him in this way he has essentially blocked him from being able to participate without drawing accusations. Quite counter productive. That said, somebody needs to close this RfC. — Insertcleverphrasehere ^{(or here)}_{(click me!)} 23:38, 9 April 2020 (UTC)

Insertcleverphrasehere, yes, I agree (except I think there's no harm in letting it run to 30 days, as !votes are still coming in); there's been discussion of this at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Requests for closure#Wikipedia:Fringe theories/Noticeboard#RfC on race and intelligence. Levivich ^{[dubious – discuss]} 23:44, 9 April 2020 (UTC)

As I explained in my comment here, as the discussion here becomes longer and longer, it becomes steadily more likely that this will be an example of an RFC that never receives a formal closure. I think it's already reached the point that no admin is likely to respond to the "request for closure" request. If one of you can suggest some other possible way to bring this RFC to a conclusion, please suggest it. 2600:1004:B105:E59:893E:5FA4:4B48:5668 (talk) 00:03, 10 April 2020 (UTC)

Please stop. Just let it play out. 24 days is not a particularly long time for an RfC to remain open and this is far from the largest, most complex, or most contentious RfC I've seen or been a participant in. It will be closed, just be patient. — Insertcleverphrasehere ^{(or here)}_{(click me!)} 00:09, 10 April 2020 (UTC)

I am also in support of a team close. Wisdom of the crowds is a good idea in these things. My only concern is who selects the admins. In a partisan situation, each side will claim the other side's favorite or suggested admins are biased or hand-picked to support their POV. A good way to tell whether someone is a biased editor, is whether they are unable to abide by NPOV even on talk pages. For instance, one editor on this page wrote "racist rag" about a journal they dislike, obviously a violation of NPOV-like writing style. Another editor wrote "take your racist bullshit elsewhere" (repeated later as "because actually what you should do is take your racist bullshit elsewhere"). Such language is unbecoming, in my view, of Wikipedia! As for the two admins mentions, I'm not familiar with them, so I don't object to their inclusion in a closing team. Just my 2c. Bpesta22 (talk) 04:45, 11 April 2020 (UTC)

In other words, you don't really understand how Wikipedia works at all and your only goal is to push a particular point of view here. If the closing admins don't essentially throw out all the garbage comments from SPAs it will be to the everlasting shame of Wikipedia. --JBL (talk) 14:54, 12 April 2020 (UTC)

Joel B. Lewis, Even throwing out some 8 SPA No !votes above, the count is roughly 18 No to 23 Yes, with a few votes that are difficult to parse. !Vote counting of course isn't how closes like this are done, and the content of those SPA comments are largely covered by other comments anyway, and in general, the No !votes by established editors generally are far more informed with regards to sources added to the discussion. Why would the SPA !votes have any impact on this outcome, one way or the other? — Insertcleverphrasehere ^{(or here)}_{(click me!)} 02:16, 14 April 2020 (UTC)

@Bpesta22: Involved editors don't typically suggest specific closing admins for exactly the reasons you pointed out. In cases like this where an editor on one "side" is reaching out to admins whom they seem to prefer, we rightly view it with suspicion and ask why they're choosing those individuals. The normal process of posting a request at WP:ANRFC and waiting for an admin or group of admins to volunteer works well and avoids any question of hand-picking. –dlthewave ☎ 16:29, 12 April 2020 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Closure by TonyBallioni

I'm concerned that the closure of this RFC by TonyBallioni may not be satisfactory, for a few reasons.

• Several editors, including myself, Literaturegeek, Insertcleverphrasehere, Bpesta22, and SMcCandlish (in is comment here) suggested a three-admin closure for this RFC. While this suggestion does not quite have a consensus, there definitely has been a widespread view that a closure by a single admin would not be accepted.

• TonyBallioni's statement that he discounted the comments by single-purpose accounts suggests that he determined the outcome by counting votes, rather than examining the strength of arguments and sources presented, because in an examination of the sources and arguments presented, presumably it would not matter which editor presented them.

• There is a concern that TonyBallioni is not an uninvolved admin, because he was heavily involved in the essay WP:No Nazis. This essay is listed on his user page under "Essays I've written". Note that this essay is not only about neo-Nazis - in the WP:RACISTBELIEFS section of that essay, the very first item listed is "That white people are more intelligent than non-whites". As the author or one of the authors of this essay, TonyBallioni clearly came to this RFC with a pre-formed opinion that Wikipedia cannot regard this opinion (or similar opinions) as acceptable.

• In the discussion at requests for closure, discussion had recently begun about Barkeep49 possibly curating a three-admin closure. TonyBallioni's decision to close this RFC while that discussion was underway, with very little prior warning, looks very similar to the way that Spartaz jumped ahead of the planned closure of the AFD.

I would appreciate comments from other editors on this closure, particularly user:Literaturegeek and user:Insertcleverphrasehere, as they were the two main other editors who argued for a three-admin closure. 2600:1004:B103:626E:68A2:83EC:91F:A19 (talk) 23:59, 20 April 2020 (UTC)

• • TonyBallioni is a WP:INVOLVED admin and should not have done the close, as he wrote WP:RACISTBELIEFS WP:CRYRACIST which is clearly related to the topic area broadly construed. This is a topic area that can only be closed by a three admin panel to guard against bias. That is admin misconduct and will only increase tensions and mistrust in this topic area but whatever.--Literaturegeek | T@1k? 00:08, 21 April 2020 (UTC)
    • I only wrote the section about blocking actual neo-nazis. Being opposed to neo-nazis does not make one involved as to how genetics impacts race. I'll open up a closure review at AN myself. TonyBallioni (talk) 00:28, 21 April 2020 (UTC)
      • Your edits were not just linked to blocking Nazis section. Would you like diffs?--Literaturegeek | T@1k? 00:45, 21 April 2020 (UTC)
• I don't have an opinion on how many closers or who they should be, but there were clearly additional people and points of view coming into the discussion at the time of the close. (e.g., Stanton McCandlish posted some long comments, and I had just added a long section on Gould for which the discussion was still live). So I would have preferred to let the conversation run its course further before decisions. There have been 100 comments from NightHeron here and at the RSN, which is an unheard-of level of POV pushing by an OP, and allowing other voices to be heard would have balanced that out somewhat. 73.149.246.232 (talk) 00:17, 21 April 2020 (UTC)
• In your third bullet point, are you suggesting that an editor who is opposed to Nazis is too biased to close this RFC, or that someone who disagrees with the statement "That white people are more intelligent than non-whites" is too biased to close this RFC? Levivich ^{[dubious – discuss]} 00:39, 21 April 2020 (UTC)

I am suggesting that if an admin believes that people should be unwelcome at Wikipedia when they think there are race differences in intelligence, which is what that part of the essay is arguing, then that admin is not the right person to close this RFC. (As an aside, "that white people are more intelligent than non-whites" is an extremely crude and inaccurate way of describing the viewpoint that this RFC is about, but it's clear enough that this viewpoint is what he's referring to in that part of the essay.) 2600:1004:B103:626E:68A2:83EC:91F:A19 (talk) 00:52, 21 April 2020 (UTC)

• Under "Essays I have written" the closing admin TonyBallioni wrote: WP:BLOCKNAZIS and WP:CRYRACIST: two sections of an essay that I wrote that deal with how Wikipedia should deal with neo-nazism, white supremacism, violent racism, and false accusations of the same. Read those two sections. They do not contain the list of racist beliefs, which was written by someone else. So the claim that he wrote the list is false.

Also, please note that User:Insertcleverphrasehere, although a no-voter, did the honorable thing and went to TonyBallioni's talk page and thanked him for closing the discussion. NightHeron (talk) 00:47, 21 April 2020 (UTC)

• I've taken it for review at AN, which I suspected would happen. See Wikipedia:Administrators'_noticeboard#Self-requested_closure_review:_RfC_on_race_and_intelligence. As to my being involved: my position is that people who support genocide should be unwelcome on Wikipedia, but that you shouldn't compare others to Nazis and racists to stifle discussion. I don't think that makes me involved. TonyBallioni (talk) 01:01, 21 April 2020 (UTC)

Thanks for opening the closure review, but your current comments about your position don't entirely match up to the views you've expressed in the past. In your comment on the "No Nazis" essay here, you said: racist POV pushers will be blocked, but quickly blocking someone for being a nazi is somehow on a different level than your standard race and intelligence POV pusher (or insert other racist POV pusher here). What you seem to be saying in that comment is that both actual neo-Nazis and the type of people who voted "no" in this RFC should be blocked, but for actual neo-Nazis it's more important. Is that correct? 2600:1004:B103:626E:68A2:83EC:91F:A19 (talk) 01:14, 21 April 2020 (UTC)

No, and I specifically wrote a section of that essay to address people who make that argument as a way to stifle disagreement. See WP:CRYRACIST. If you read the discussion you cited, I was actually arguing that we should not include people other than the genocidal maniacs in that essay. Race and intelligence is a complex area, and yes, it does sometimes attract racists to it. Being one of the few administrators willing to touch it from an administrative point of view does not make me involved. I didn't separate off the section on administrative action because it made sense to me to have one page. Many people contributed to different sections of that essay. My concern was primarily with documenting what was and still is a reason many administrators use to block. TonyBallioni (talk) 01:25, 21 April 2020 (UTC)