Reddit mentions of IQ in the Meritocracy

>So AEI and Free Press both told Charles Murray to find certain things and then they published it and you think he doesn't believe these things?

Explicitly? Maybe not but that's not how conflicts of interest generally work. The point is that if Murray had a change of heart or found evidence that contradicted Hoya beliefs, he'd have to consider whether to publish it because it would mean losing out on that funding.

>What about his co author? Are you accusing Harvard of pushing for Hernstein to fabricate the disparity of IQs between the races? This claim is absolutely bizarre.

Let's just accept for the sake of argument that Herrnstein had no conflict of interest. So what?

How does that change Murray being funded by a group that wants a specific conclusion? Are you telling me that it's not a conflict of interest for creationist biologists to be funded by the Discovery Institute, or for Andrew Wakefield to be funded by a pharmaceutical group that wanted to sell a new kind of vaccine?

>You realize that the difference in IQs among the races isn't actually a good thing for libertarians or conservatives? It's much harder to have an ideology that says pull yourself up by your bootstraps, when different races are either significantly less or more intelligent than each other. It makes it even worse if the difference is genetic, since that would be very hard to solve, granted the bell curve doesn't make the claim that the difference between the races is all genetic.

It helps the conservative positions because it means we can reject a lot of social policies like affirmative action.

>So we are still not sure what is causing the difference, but we will get closer to the answers as we progress in our abilities to collect better data.

As we collect more and more data it becomes even more clear that the genetic explanation can't explain what we see.

>I would say when someone is going to benefit by making the wrong decision/choice about something.

Like getting a steady paycheck for finding certain results?

>You haven't even come close to showing a conflict of interests with the authors of the Bell Curve. I think you should if you want to pursue this accusation any farther. I'd like some hard evidence that you have that shows Murray was explicitly set to benefit for putting the IQ and race stuff in his book. It seems to me it's made him worse off by making him a pariah to many and being slandered left and right.

Let's just be clear - you think if someone did research for the AEI and attempted to get it published, journals would not require those people to declare the AEI as a conflict of interest?

>I don't think you know what a conflict of interest is. It's not a conflict of interest if I work for an evolution think tank and write a book about evolution. Evolution is true, there is no conflict.

What's an evolution think tank?

If someone worked for a group which had in its aims to discover scientific truths and investigate the world wherever it leads us then no it wouldn't be a conflict of interest. But if someone were to study gender differences and they worked for a radical feminist think tank, that would be a conflict of interest because the nature of the organisation has a vested interest in certain outcomes.

I understand conflicts of interest very well, I've done research in the private sector funded by organisations hoping to find certain outcomes with their products. You have to be extremely careful in this setup as there are a million ways in which it can bias your research without you realising and you need to declare it outright because people need to be aware that it could be affecting your results.

>So if you disagree with someone who funded research you should refuse to use it? Should we have burned all the scientific and medical research done by the Nazis or should we have used it?

Who said we should refuse to use it?

It means we should be skeptical. If the only people who can find evidence of a genetic link are those funded by white supremacists hoping to find that black people are genetically inferior, then we have to question how unbiased their research is.

>He literally published a book about the issue in 1973. You would have known about that if you went down to his published works. I guess I should challenge you about your baseless claim about Herrnstein. Where did you find that information about him? He clearly had been looking at the subject for at least two decades before the publishing of the Bell Curve.

Why would you think publishing a book is relevant to what we're talking about?

Like I said, I'm a Herrnstein fan boy, I know what he's published. At most he published a couple of commentaries on intelligence research. Just look at his research history - did you not find it strange that there are hundreds of results about research with pigeons?

> Getting paid to find a certain conclusion isn't a conflict of interest?

So AEI and Free Press both told Charles Murray to find certain things and then they published it and you think he doesn't believe these things? What about his co author? Are you accusing Harvard of pushing for Hernstein to fabricate the disparity of IQs between the races? This claim is absolutely bizarre.

You realize that the difference in IQs among the races isn't actually a good thing for libertarians or conservatives? It's much harder to have an ideology that says pull yourself up by your bootstraps, when different races are either significantly less or more intelligent than each other. It makes it even worse if the difference is genetic, since that would be very hard to solve, granted the bell curve doesn't make the claim that the difference between the races is all genetic. So we are still not sure what is causing the difference, but we will get closer to the answers as we progress in our abilities to collect better data.

>Can you tell me how you're defining conflict of interest?

I would say when someone is going to benefit by making the wrong decision/choice about something. You haven't even come close to showing a conflict of interests with the authors of the Bell Curve. I think you should if you want to pursue this accusation any farther. I'd like some hard evidence that you have that shows Murray was explicitly set to benefit for putting the IQ and race stuff in his book. It seems to me it's made him worse off by making him a pariah to many and being slandered left and right.

>It's not a smear, that's literally what a conflict of interest.

I don't think you know what a conflict of interest is. It's not a conflict of interest if I work for an evolution think tank and write a book about evolution. Evolution is true, there is no conflict.

>You mean the research funded by the Pioneer Fund?

So if you disagree with someone who funded research you should refuse to use it? Should we have burned all the scientific and medical research done by the Nazis or should we have used it?


He literally published a book about the issue in 1973. You would have known about that if you went down to his published works. I guess I should challenge you about your baseless claim about Herrnstein. Where did you find that information about him? He clearly had been looking at the subject for at least two decades before the publishing of the Bell Curve.