Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Noticeboard/Archive 354

I feel that you have misled the community about what classifying the hereditarian hypothesis as a fringe theory would mean in practice. In your original RFC, Insertcleverphrase accused you of "trying to shut down sources that have a specific viewpoint, regardless of where they are from, or where they are published." In response, you denied that this was the intention of your RFC. But then after the RFC was over, you and Generalrelative went ahead and removed nearly all such sources from the articles, with the justification that "The issue of the admissibility of sources claiming a genetic link between race and intelligence was settled at the Fringe theories RfC last year." In the edit I linked in my previous comment, this even included removing sources such as Neisser and Flynn, which disagree with the hereditarian viewpoint but still include detailed discussions about it.

If the community had been told honestly that this is what the "fringe" classification would mean, instead of your denying it would mean that, would they have reached the same conclusion to classify it as a fringe theory? Who knows? Thus far you've managed to prevent the community from having a meaningful discussion about this new approach to sourcing, so we've never been able to determine the answer. Gardenofaleph (talk) 23:51, 17 September 2021 (UTC)

MrOllie (talk

) 00:08, 18 September 2021 (UTC)

@

WP:UNDUE in removing some references or revising the text that cited them. There were continual objections from opponents of the RfC consensus, which were debated at length on the talk-page. A few of those editors have persisted since then in trying to relitigate those issues and reintroduce sources that were found, after thorough discussion, to be unreliable and/or undue. Their forum-shopping and POV-pushing around race and intelligence have turned this topic into a time sink. NightHeron (talk

) 01:00, 18 September 2021 (UTC)

It should also be noted that the comment you quote about the [in]admissibility of sources claiming a genetic link between race and intelligence was made in the context of a discussion of sources for scientific consensus. Sources by Jensen, Rushton, Richard Lynn, and the like, despite their claims of being scientific, are unreliable for describing what mainstream science says. They are, however, reliable for describing what the authors believe and so are cited many times in Race and intelligence, Scientific racism, and related articles in order to give an accurate summary of the fringe POV. NightHeron (talk) 22:07, 19 September 2021 (UTC)

The summary you're giving here is simply not consistent with the pattern or removals from the articles. Quoting Generalrelative again, "Rindermann's work is seen as unreliable for any content on Wikipedia related to race and intelligence". This judgment is contrary to the existing consensus at this noticeboard, which found Rindermann to be "[an] appropriate expert in the human intelligence field." 100% of the references to sources with Rindermann as an author have been removed from the race and intelligence article. (There is one paper from him still included in the bibliography, but it is cited nowhere in the article itself.) Aside from Rindermann's book from Cambridge University Press, the removals also included a paper by Rindermann from PLOS One, which is a mainstream journal. [5]

Rushton and Jensen have been dead for nearly a decade, so while I guess it's a good thing they haven't been completely been purged from the article, they have very little relation to current research about race and intelligence. The current research about this topic is being conducted by people such as Haier, Warne, Rindermann, Nijenhuis, Woodley, etc. All of these current researchers have been completely excluded or purged from the article, regardless of how high-quality the journals or academic publishers where their work is published. Arguing about whether or not all these removals were justified or not is one thing, but we need to avoid this sort of revisionism about your edits that you've already extensively discussed and defended at the time. Gardenofaleph (talk) 03:02, 20 September 2021 (UTC)

@

WP:FRINGE works, and that NightHeron somehow hid this knowledge from everyone until it was too late. That can't be right, can it?) Now you've piled on by stating that NightHeron's summary above was simply not consistent with the pattern or removals from the articles and described it as revisionism, but failed to provide any reasons why an uninvolved observer might think so. Instead you're just repeating the same allegations over and over. I know this might sound like a radical idea, but perhaps just stop? There is clearly no appetite among the community to relitigate this in your favor. Generalrelative (talk

) 04:21, 20 September 2021 (UTC)

Note too that, in the statement you falsely attributed to me, you left out the part where Grayfell prefaced by saying My understanding of these discussions is that... When people go out of their way to be humble or circumspect, the least you can do is acknowledge that. Generalrelative (talk) 04:25, 20 September 2021 (UTC)

It's interesting that my comment at Talk:Steve Sailer from February was linked. Earlier today I looked up that study again to make sure it was as bizarre as I remembered. It was. The survey ([6]) is informative.

Rindermann chose to publish a survey that extolled Steve Sailer and Anatoly Karlin (an anti-science blogger, open white ethnonationalist, and climate change denier) as reputable sources of information on science. I'm still at a loss for words about how weird this is. Rindermann even helpfully throws in editorializing about how it is "unfortunate" that another blogger on The Unz Review couldn't have also been included. That blogger is James Thompson, who is, of course, also part of the Richard Lynn/Mankind Quarterly group.[7]

That study also cites OpenPsych, Richard Lynn, an article by Boghossian about the grievance studies affair, and a 2015 tweet from Steven Pinker. It's a trip.

It's so transparently self-indulgent that I don't think anyone at Elsevier is paying any attention. Assuming they ever were. On various talk pages, I've seen some comments defending Intelligence because it is "peer reviewed". The problem here is that the pool of peers presumably includes the kind of people who would respond to a survey from a journal which has gone completely off the rails. It's the icing on the cake that they would also use that survey to share how much they trust alt-right bloggers for their science info.

It's also noteworthy that this was published in 2020, after the journal had stopped listing Lynn and Meisenberg on the editorial board. There was talk that maybe this was the journal's attempt at cleaning up it's image problem, but the proof of the pudding is in the eating, so... This "study", more than anything, killed off the benefit of the doubt I was willing to extend to Intelligence.

Presumably some legitimate scholarship will still come out of the journal, but it will be inherently less legitimate due to being folded in with fluff about "race realist" bloggers. Grayfell (talk) 05:57, 20 September 2021 (UTC)

Your comment included the words There are also serious red flags over David Becker and Thomas R.Coyle publishing history. Becker I understand. But what did you mean about Coyle? Sesquivalent (talk) 07:44, 21 September 2021 (UTC)

More than some. . Using the data on its most cited articles, [8], I see in the top 10 articles only 1 which might be related to race in the sense of being published by someone who has also published about race and intelligence. The second ten has one of the same nature, not on race, but by a person who has to some extent also published on race. That gives 90% content which there is no reason to suspect, even if one thinks that studying what are socially called racial differences is illegitimate. "Why do angry people overestimate their intelligence? Neuroticism as a suppressor of the association between Trait-Anger and subjectively assessed intelligence" -- this is supposed to be racist? and this: "Cats (Felis silvestris catus)read human gaze for referential information" ? Almost all their content is like that. DGG ( talk ) 06:37, 20 September 2021 (UTC)

I believe the topic of discussion here is reliability of Intelligence for topics in the race and intelligence area, which seems to be the area for which it is best known. I would have no objection to citing Intelligence in an article on cats, since as far as I'm aware the editors of the journal have no history of promoting pseudoscience about cats. NightHeron (talk) 10:16, 20 September 2021 (UTC)

That gives 90% content which there is no reason to suspect Any other publication discussed on RSN having 10% of its content being pseudoscientific conspiracy theories would be a slam-dunk for complete deprecation. You're not making clear why Intelligence should be any exception - David Gerard (talk) 12:52, 20 September 2021 (UTC)

We routinely mark various publications with a 'reliability depends on topic' note. This journal apparently published fringe/nonsense on a particular topic, on a particular subject, for a particular period of time. It's received high praised as one of the most prestigious journals in the area of intelligence research, even from its critics. That should be enough to treat it with a scalpel, not a hammer.

b

} 13:30, 20 September 2021 (UTC)

I also support the scalpel approach. Addressing David Gerard's point: DGG's rough count included articles "which might be related to race", not articles which are definitively problematic. Firefangledfeathers (talk) 15:26, 20 September 2021 (UTC)

This study is also in the Scopus "top-10", with 20 cites. The study doesn't mention race, but does mention that being of non-Danish ethnicity correlates with having a low IQ. In another context, in another journal, I would give this study the benefit of the doubt, but this isn't another journal. Who gets to make the call that this is "definitively" problematic? This is a walled garden and the 'high score' with Scopus shows this. The study is cited multiple times times in Mankind Quarterly, once in OpenPsych, twice in Intelligence itself, and twice in Personality and Individual Differences which has a similar reputation to Intelligence.

If we're going to use the most-cited articles as representative, it needs to be done consistently. This is a walled garden, and articles doing the citing are often within this same fringe sub-group of a sub-group. Also more frequently cited than the cat behavior one is this article which sure seems to me to be definitively problematic. Does being more cited make this one a better example? If not, why mention the "most cited" thing at all? Let's not be selective. If nothing else, being highly cited is meaningless without this kind of context. Grayfell (talk) 01:36, 21 September 2021 (UTC)

I second Grayfell’s point about this ecosystem being a walled garden with just the veneer of academic respectability. I don’t think we need to go through and figure out which articles are "problematic," I think its safe to assume that if it was published here and not in a respected/legitimate journal then theres something "problematic" about it. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 14:36, 21 September 2021 (UTC)

• @Crossroads: how is it "entirely contrary" to WP:SOURCETYPES? The language used there seems to be purposefully non-absolute... Academic sources are “usually” the most reliable, not “always” the most reliable. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 14:42, 21 September 2021 (UTC)

  Many things, such as entertainment and current events, are not covered in academic sources. So, "usually", but not always available or uniformly better in every case. It's still pretty clearly contrary to the spirit of

  WP:SOURCETYPES

  to consider an entire academic journal unreliable just because a few news media sources say something negative. But even then, opponents of the journal can't have their cake and eat it too - all of those sources likewise call it a respected journal with the exception of race issues:

  Researchers with extreme views on race number relatively few but, having languished on the margins of their fields for many years, they are now managing to push their ideas into the mainstream, including into respectable scientific journals....Both Meisenberg and Lynn also serve on the editorial board of Intelligence, a psychology journal also published by Elsevier. The Guardian (note that since this article Lynn and Meisenberg are no longer on the editorial board - but the author is clearly calling it a respectable scientific journal)

  The ISIR is home to many great scientists, and its journal Intelligence is one of the most respected in its field....Journals and universities that allow their reputations to be used to launder or legitimate racist pseudo-science bear responsibility when that pseudo-science is used for political ends. New Statesman

  Intelligence, a more respected psychology journal that’s published by the major publishing company Elsevier, also occasionally included papers with pseudoscientific findings about intelligence differences between races. Smithsonian Magazine

  It's clear that we have no sourced basis for considering it unreliable outside of race issues. It is that topic - race and intelligence - that is the walled garden. Any claims beyond that are unsourced opinion. Crossroads ^-talk- 21:19, 21 September 2021 (UTC)

If we're going to discuss this "walled garden" allegation, we should be clear about what it includes, because this allegation has been used to reject far, far more sources than just Intelligence, Personality and Individual Difference, and poor-quality sources such as Mankind Quarterly (which fails WP:RS anyway, regardless of whether it's a walled garden). Sources rejected with this justification have included those published in Perspectives on Psychological Science, [9] Human Nature, [10] PLOS One [11], Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences [12], and at least two books from Cambridge University Press. [13] [14] I could give diffs of the rejection/removal of each of these sources, but I don't think it's controversial to say that these papers and books I've linked to have all been rejected for this reason... as one example, here is Grayfell's "walled garden" explanation for rejecting the Human Nature source, and the rejection of one of the books from Cambridge University Press has recently been discussed on the article's talk page.

As far as I know, aside from a few newspaper and magazine articles criticizing Intelligence (and aside from sources like Mankind Quarterly, which everyone agrees is unreliable), there are no sources that say these journals or academic publishers apply a lower standard of scrutiny than any other publications that meet the criteria of

WP:SCHOLARSHIP. There also is no provision of RS policy, or any other policy, that supports rejecting sources for this reason. The policy linked above says, "Material such as an article, book, monograph, or research paper that has been vetted by the scholarly community is regarded as reliable, where the material has been published in reputable peer-reviewed sources or by well-regarded academic presses." WP:Walled garden

is an essay about a group of Wikipedia articles that all link to one another but to none outside the group, and this essay has nothing to do with judgments about whether a source is reliable or not.

The only other time this justification for rejecting sources has been discussed at the RS noticeboard was in this discussion about books from Cambridge University Press, and in that case the broader community rejected this argument. But that discussion clearly has not stopped sources from many different journals and academic publishers continuing to be rejected for this reason, so maybe now we can have a discussion about whether this overall basis for rejecting sources is supported by policy. Gardenofaleph (talk) 22:00, 21 September 2021 (UTC)

The closing of the discussion that Gardenofaleph refers to did not support the indiscriminate use of any book published by Cambridge University Press. The closer wrote: The remaining concern was that the views of Rindermann and Hunt may be 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. That closing (in February 2020) was superseded by the RfC at

WP:FTN on Race and Intelligence that closed in April 2020 (and was reaffirmed by another RfC in 2021) that held unequivocally that the belief that there's evidence of genetic superiority of certain races to other races in intelligence is a fringe viewpoint, rejected by mainstream science. NightHeron (talk

) 23:39, 21 September 2021 (UTC)

I have two specific concerns with Intelligence:

Is a source which publishes pseudoscience in one of it's main areas still trusted for overlapping topics? It seems to me that this journal's reputation is mentioned in sources as context for why it's so noteworthy that the journal publishes pseudoscience. Otherwise, why even discuss these journals at all? From this context, the journal's supposed prestige is not mentioned as a defense of the journal, instead it is an indirect critique of those academics who are either oblivious to, or choose to ignore, these serious issues. I don't find this oblique criticism to be a compelling defense of this journal's reputation.

Many articles in this journal are superficially unrelated to race, but are are still used/misused to support racist ideas. I gave one example, but many, many more can be found. If we're going to stop citing Intelligence for "race and intelligence" we also have to stop citing it for "population and intelligence" and "nation and intelligence" and "school system and intelligence" and at that point just "human intelligence". Again, the journal's name is just "intelligence" so I guess cat behavior is about all that's left. Grayfell (talk) 02:11, 22 September 2021 (UTC)

And yet the sources speak of the journal as well-respected outside of that narrow topic. Why they do so does not change the fact that they do so. The vast majority of the journal's output is about individual intelligence, or if it does speak of group differences, is not about pushing a racial hereditarian POV. For example, is the Flynn effect pseudoscience? I certainly don't think so, and I don't think anyone else does either, since Race and intelligence speaks prominently of it to explain the observed group differences in IQ test scores as plausibly explained by environmental differences between socially constructed racial groups. Much of that research was published in Intelligence. In no way does problems about a small crop of racial hereditarian research reflect on all its human intelligence research. As for "used/misused to support racist ideas", that is very broad and can be applied to almost anything. People have misused all sorts of papers to promote racism, ones where the authors implied no such thing, so by that overly broad logic we have to deprecate every journal that published "used/misused" papers. Crossroads ^-talk- 03:18, 22 September 2021 (UTC)

"And yet the sources speak of the journal as well-respected outside of that narrow topic.” can you be specific? If those sources have been shared I haven’t seen them. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 03:26, 22 September 2021 (UTC)

See my 21:19, 21 September 2021 (UTC) comment. It was in reply to you a short distance above. I quoted 3 media sources. Crossroads ^-talk- 03:43, 22 September 2021 (UTC)

I note you haven't given evidence that Intelligence is respected as a scientific source. And - as you've already had pointed out to you - its reliability as a scientific source for Wikipedia's purposes was strongly questioned in Talk:Race_and_intelligence/Archive_103#RfC_on_racial_hereditarianism. Your claim that its other articles deserve a carveout as scientific sources for Wikipedia's purposes seems not to be well founded. And, as I pointed out, any other source that was 10% pseudoscientific conspiracy theories would be a slam-dunk for deprecation, and you really haven't made a case that this one shouldn't be. We really just do not take sources with that level of unusable trash, and then say that the rest of the curate's egg is perfectly good - David Gerard (talk) 07:46, 22 September 2021 (UTC)

The sources I quoted are specifically and clearly talking about its status in psychological science. I have no idea what you are trying to distinguish it from, but sourcs don't support that. The 10% number is not accurate as stated higher above. Regarding that RfC you linked, I already stated above that Outside of that one area of race-and-intelligence that sources have commented on, I see no reason to treat it as anything other than an ordinary psychology journal, to which Generalrelative replied about that RfC, that was my understanding of the consensus among editors who discussed the journal at the RfC. Academic publishing doesn't work like the news media - journals sometimes publish ideas or hypotheses that are marginal or fringe to show them to the wider academic community for critique, etc., plus there is academic freedom. This applies to every subject, but this one is particularly hot-button. This isn't like the Daily Mail not being trusted to report events accurately. And frankly, unless you are proposing to gut the anti-racial-hereditarian material at race and intelligence, Flynn effect, etc., much of which is cited to Intelligence, I don't see a reason to keep debating this. We don't do guilt-by-association or over-the-top "purity testing" demands beyond what sources say, nor do we cherry-pick what we want to hear from the sources on the topic. Crossroads ^-talk- 15:39, 22 September 2021 (UTC)

None of the media sources you quoted in your 21:19 comment said that they were well-respected and certainly none said that it was well-respected outside of that narrow topic. Newstateman comes close, but what you’re arguing appears to go beyond what the sources are saying. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 16:02, 22 September 2021 (UTC)

To restate my point, the three sources we have for this journal's positive reputation are also sources pointing out its problem with scientific racism. The scientific racism is not incidental to the journal. It is the only reason these three sources are talking about the journal at all. This context is not hidden or arcane, it's specifically provided by these sources. Grayfell (talk) 19:39, 22 September 2021 (UTC)

I'm at a loss as to what to say further, to the point that it almost feels like people are not reading the sources I laid out, unlikely as that is. None of this negates what those sources say clearly about what is respected and what the journal's clearly specified problem area is. I can't make a few editors see what I clearly read in the sources. I asked earlier, "Is it the position of editors fighting pseudoscientific racism that all study of human intelligence is illegitimate?", and Generalrelative assured me that no one has made that claim; but since people seem to want to take down the official journal of the International Society for Intelligence Research, the overwhelming majority of whose papers are not about race, I remain concerned. Crossroads ^-talk- 00:11, 23 September 2021 (UTC)

Hm, I really didn't want to get involved here again but this doesn't seem quite right. First off, when you asked your question about whether anyone was arguing that all study of human intelligence was illegitimate I replied I'm not aware of anyone who has made this claim. I did not and would not assure you that no one has made the claim because I don't imagine myself to be omniscient. Now some folks have begun arguing that the official journal of the International Society for Intelligence Research is largely unreliable, making claims that go beyond the discussion at the RfC which I linked to above. That may be concerning to you but they are not in so doing necessarily attacking all research into intelligence as illegitimate. Research on intelligence continues to be published in top-tier journals like Nature, Science and the various journals of the American Psychological Association. As I stated below, I'm not willing at this time to stake out a position on how reliable a source Intelligence is beyond the narrow topic of race & intelligence, but those who are arguing for a broad unreliability are not thereby arguing that all research into human intelligence is illegitimate. If someone does want to pop in here and argue that, so be it, but I have not seen such an argument yet. Generalrelative (talk) 00:38, 23 September 2021 (UTC)

I didn't mean to imply you were omniscient or even 'should' know what others think, though I get that my phrasing was unusual; but my point is that concerns remain for me that there may be overzealousness on the part of some on this topic. Crossroads ^-talk- 00:43, 23 September 2021 (UTC)

Cool, thanks. And I probably shouldn't have been so defensive about it. I understand and respect your point. Generalrelative (talk) 00:46, 23 September 2021 (UTC)

I am discussing my problems with one journal. The question about "all study of human intelligence" doesn't seem appropriate to me, which is why I did not answer it. I could point to academic work on this topic that I think is reliable in various context, but that's not the point of this discussion, is it?

The journal's status as the official journal of the International Society for Intelligence Research doesn't inherently make it reliable. It's not the only society, nor the only journal, on psychometrics, individual difference, etc. This society is not the sole representative of its field, and as far as I know, it never has been.

To put it another way, that society is not inherently reliable just because it has some members who perform legitimate research, even if some of it is published in Intelligence. These respected members don't cancel-out the pseudoscientists. It looks like the journal treats them all the same, so why shouldn't we? Many of these pseudoscientists are still active in the field of intelligence research, and this activity isn't confined to work which is explicitly about race. Intelligence doesn't, apparently, exercise sufficient editorial oversight for race and intelligence, but it's very tricky to pin-down which articles this actually applies to. For several reasons, I think this is by design, at least partly. This behavior therefor reflects on the entire journal.

If "race" is the issue which attracts independent scrutiny, we should be willing to use that scrutiny the same as we would any other attention. To insist that this journal's failures do not reflect on any other area seems strange, and would be to Wikipedia's detriment. Grayfell (talk) 00:13, 24 September 2021 (UTC)

And that independent scrutiny every time has confined their negative statements to content about race, and almost always makes a positive statement about the journal outside of that. It is not at all tricky to pin down the tiny minority of articles and researchers this applies to. There is a world of difference between how sources talk about Intelligence and Mankind Quarterly, so there is no basis to treat the former as the latter (as always unreliable). Crossroads ^-talk- 04:23, 24 September 2021 (UTC)

Yes, Mankind is worse. That doesn't make Intelligence acceptable.

Saying "It is not at all tricky..." is not supported by these sources. Sometimes it is obvious, but sometimes it isn't, which is exactly why sources are commenting on it. Per sources, the outlet is superficially respectable, so the question sources are asking is why does an otherwise respectable journal keep publishing pseudoscience? You may personally think it's always obvious which are good and which are bad, but I don't accept that. As I've tried to explain, some articles appear reliable but this doesn't always hold up to scrutiny.

Further: why does the outlet keep publishing this crap in the first place? Why does an outlet with a history of pseudoscience get a free pass for articles which are only indirectly about race? They published their more outlandishly articles knowing they would get outside scrutiny. How much attention are they giving to articles which don't get even that minimum level of scrutiny?

One possibility is that Intelligence gives both race and non-race related article roughly equal attention. This attention isn't sufficient to prevent naked pseudoscience from slipping past. Therefor, nothing in the journal gets the benefit of the doubt

Another option is that Intelligence has a different standard for race-related articles. If so, the journal does not, and cannot, make this distinction clear. Any article that relates to group differences, broadly construed, would therefor be less trustworthy. Grayfell (talk) 21:59, 24 September 2021 (UTC)

There is a third option you aren't mentioning: that Intelligence publishes these papers because they aren't meaningfully different from what's published by other respectable journals or academic publishers such as Perspective on Psychological Science, Human Nature, or Cambridge University Press, as in the examples I gave in my comment above. [15] Intelligence gets more attention than these other journals and publishers because it is a journal specifically about intelligence, so papers presenting the hereditarian perspective about race and intelligence inevitably are published there more often than in these other journals. But in terms of the content of the papers, there is no meaningful difference between the hereditarian papers published in Intelligence and those published in any of these other places.

In addition to your rejecting of the Human Nature source in the example linked above, you've also removed similar material that was published in two other journals: the Journal of Biosocial Science and Mens Sana Monographs. So I know that you're aware that in this respect there is nothing particularly unique or unusual about Intelligence or the papers published there. It's disingenuous of you to suggest that there is, unless you intend to argue that ALL of that these journals and publishers fail WP:RS. Gardenofaleph (talk) 03:08, 25 September 2021 (UTC)

First of all, please do not accuse other editors of being "disingenuous", which violates

WP:NPA. Second, your point is invalid, because Intelligence (journal) is the official journal of the International Society for Intelligence Research, which is the principal organization that promotes the hereditarian POV on intelligence and prominently includes promoters of scientific racism. The journal is largely controlled by people with a strong POV on racial hereditarianism, whereas the other journals you mention presumably are not. NightHeron (talk

) 09:52, 25 September 2021 (UTC)

Without staking out a position on the current debate, I'd just like to note that there is one more source I recently added to the article Intelligence (journal) stating that Intelligence serves as a vehicle for scientific racism: Andrew S. Winston, "Scientific Racism and North American Psychology", Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Psychology [16]. Here's the quote: Despite careful, scholarly criticism in every era since the early 1900s, scientific racism in psychology has proven remarkably resilient. Although Arthur Jensen and Philippe Rushton both died in 2012, a small but very active community of researchers continue to pursue questions of race in relation to intelligence, brain size, crime, sexuality, reproduction, and dysgenics, with new work appearing in Personality and Individual Differences, Intelligence, and other journals. This international community is led by Richard Lynn, who for a number of years served simultaneously on the editorial boards of Intelligence and Mankind Quarterly, and as president of the Pioneer Fund. . . . The interlacing of scientific psychology with racial politics has now lasted over 100 years. The community of race scientists had sufficient funding, access to journals, dedication, and shared understanding to carry on a project that most psychologists had considered moribund by the 1960s. Note that the source does not take a position on whether being a vehicle for scientific racism is the primary thing the journal Intelligence is known for, just that this journal is a crucial part of the story of the persistence of scientific racism in psychology through to the present day. I don't see anyone disagreeing with this assessment here but I wanted to make sure that with the discussion of sources this one too was given consideration. Generalrelative (talk) 22:58, 22 September 2021 (UTC)

I think this has the same implications as the sources already shown; it is basically saying the same thing about this small bunch of researchers and how they got their ideas out there. Crossroads ^-talk- 00:14, 23 September 2021 (UTC)

I agree with this assessment. The only real thing it adds is that it's not a journalistic source. Not sure about the peer-review standards of the Oxford Research Encyclopedias, but at the very least it's one more ref to add to the pile. Generalrelative (talk) 00:38, 23 September 2021 (UTC)

Citation needed on Noah Carl

The question is loaded with tendentious uncited material that is probably false.

Carl and Warne are certainly both part of a tight network of fringe racial hereditarians -- almost certainly false.

There is no indication Carl is a hereditarian at all. He is a quantitative social scientist, not a psychometrician, behavior geneticist, psychologist or geneticist. So not from any of the fields involved in research on intelligence, its possible genetic correlates, or genetic differences by race. He has no papers on anything genetic.

I looked into him a while ago during, you guessed it, Wikipedia talk page controversies on these matters and did not see any place where he takes any position on race-and-intelligence hereditarianism except the standard academic freedom arguments that it's an open question and legitimate area of research and (even if those statements were not true) that it should not lead to vilification campaigns against those who publish about it. Well-known non- or anti-hereditarians such as

Carl was an editor or reviewer of one of Kirkegaard's OpenPsych journals. Must be hereditarian, right? Actually there were 3-4 such journals, and Carl was connected to the one for quantitative social science (no apparent connection to hereditarianism) and as of the time I checked his publications and (I think) reviews were not hereditarian-related. He cosigned an article with most of the OpenPsych affiliates defending the aforementioned freedom-of-research position, but there was no place online where one can discover what, if anything, he believes about race differences in intelligence.

Ah, but Carl published in MANKIND QUARTERLY! Case closed! Yeah, but just like James Flynn in the same journal, it was an anti-hereditarian paper. Carl found some data disconfirming a pet hereditarian idea that regional IQ increases with distance from the equator.

Yes, but he wrote a paper with EMIL KIRKEGAARD!!! Not on hereditarianism, though. It was a social science paper on stereotype accuracy in Denmark.

It might be fair to class Carl with people like Cofnas, Anomaly, and Winegard; social scientists who defend a similar (in fact considerably stronger) position on freedom to research hereditarianism. Some of them may have put forth an opinion on the likelihood of race differences but Carl has not.

Carl is now an independent researcher since being sacked from his university position

Carl received a large settlement when he sued the university for illegally firing him, and his independence may reflect financial independence resulting from that, not an inability to get another position. The university fired him as a virtue signal under political pressure and literally paid the price.

for "poor scholarship" and "selective use of data and unsound statistical methods which have been used to legitimise racist stereotypes"

These sound bites are conveniently quoted without a reference to any source where they can be checked. There is a long report from the university committee that investigated Carl. Having read it, my recollection is that they did not deign to name any specific problem with Carl's research (data, methods, conclusions). The sound bites may come from a shorter press release which contains general unverifiable denunciations for media (and student protestor) consumption. The papers by Carl that I looked at seemed to be standard social science. No apparent problem of poor scholarship, and in any case the papers being nebulously associated with racism had nothing to do with hereditarianism. Sesquivalent (talk) 08:39, 21 September 2021 (UTC)

You're questioning the content of the Wikipedia article. As a content issue, that should go to that article's talk page - David Gerard (talk) 15:43, 21 September 2021 (UTC)

I'm saying that this RSN posting is inviting a rejection of Carl as RS based on false information, and some correction here is therefore in order. It is also relevant to the whole "walled garden" talk page theory being aired here. Sesquivalent (talk) 16:18, 21 September 2021 (UTC)

The cites in the article seem high enough quality to validate it being stated in wiki voice there, and just as statements here. Fundamentally you're trying to relitigate the article, and the place to do that is on the article talk page - David Gerard (talk) 16:20, 21 September 2021 (UTC)

The opposite is true. There is a cluster of articles, including Noah Carl, based on a couple of garbage sources written by involved parties. That this material stays in those articles is partly due to obscurity of the subject, and mainly due to WP:OWNership and edit-warring by a handful of well known (within Wikipedia) accounts. The time scale to make any difference to that article is too long to have any bearing on this discussion --- everything will be wikilawyered down to molecules. Here, we can use all available information rather than taking the article as gospel and sole authority. Sesquivalent (talk) 16:45, 21 September 2021 (UTC)

Surely you mean all available reliable information not all available information? Horse Eye's Back (talk) 16:58, 21 September 2021 (UTC)

The available (but false) information in the question did not cite any sources, reliable or otherwise. The information I provided can for the most part be checked -- you can easily find the abstract of Carl's paper in MQ, the entirety of his papers and activity in OpenPsych, and with possibly a bit more work, the documents from his investigation. What apparently cannot be found anywhere is any instance of him being a "fringe racial hereditarian", which is kinda important as it's the essential premise of the question. Sesquivalent (talk) 17:15, 21 September 2021 (UTC)

I'll respond to a few of the above points now and if necessary will continue later. A few gross errors in the above:

1) These sound bites are conveniently quoted without a reference to any source where they can be checked. It's actually pretty easy to check by clicking through Noah Carl. You will see there that it is a quotation from the Master of St Edmund's College, i.e. Carl's former employer. I suppose this counts as a shorter press release which contains general unverifiable denunciations for media (and student protestor) consumption, but so what? It's certainly a reliable source for the position of St Edmund's College on Carl's termination.

2) Carl received a large settlement when he sued the university for illegally firing him, and his independence may reflect financial independence resulting from that, not an inability to get another position. Citation needed. The article states that Carl withdrew his claim; the case was settled by a confidential agreement between both parties.[17] Instead, it appears that Carl raised $100,000 online through cultural grievance publicity.[18] Do you have a citation for your claim otherwise? Or were you simply wrong to make this assumption?

3) Update: Sesquivalent's original heading read "Citation needed. Noah Carl is not a hereditarian." David Gerard has kindly reworded it for neutrality.