Is I.Q. a Conspiracy Theory?

Walter Lippmann vs. Lewis Terman in 1922.

One hugely popular conspiracy theory in 2025 is that I.Q. is just a hoax made up by a handful of frauds that would come tumbling down if anybody ever asked any questions about it.

It’s striking that liberals usually believe in Trust The Science, but not when it comes to the 120 year old science of psychometrics.

Many of the arguments over IQ that we see in 2025 are more than a century old. In 1922 the leading liberal pundit Walter Lippman, adviser to President Wilson, wrote six articles denouncing the young science of intelligence testing in The New Republic, of which he was one of the founders. They were largely aimed at Lewis Terman, creator of the Stanford-Binet IQ test in 1916.

Lippmann asked a lot of intelligent questions in 1922, but they’ve mostly turned out to be wrong.

The correlation between the various systems enables us to say only that the tests are not mere chance, and that they do seem to seize upon a certain kind of ability. But whether this ability is a sign of general intelligence or not, we have no means of knowing from such evidence alone. The same conclusion holds true of the fact that when the tests are repeated at intervals on the same group of people they give much the same results. Data of this sort are as yet meager, for intelligence testing has not been practiced long enough to give results over long periods of time. Yet the fact that the same child makes much the same score year after year is significant. It permits us to believe that some genuine capacity is being tested. But whether this is the capacity to pass tests or the capacity to deal with life, which we call intelligence, we do not know.

Good question.

But now we largely know.

This is the crucial question, and in the nature of things there can as yet be little evidence one way or another. The Stanford-Binet tests were set in order about the year 1914. The oldest children of the group tested at that time were 142 children ranging from fourteen to sixteen years of age. Those children are now between twenty-two and twenty-four. The returns are not in. The main question of whether the children who ranked high in the Stanford-Binet tests will rank high in real life is now unanswerable, and will remain unanswered for a generation.

Of course, four generations now have gone by.

This is just about what the intelligence test does. It does not weigh or measure intelligence by any objective standard. It simply arranges a group of people in a series from best to worst by balancing their capacity to do certain arbitrarily selected puzzles, against the capacity of all the others. The intelligence test, in other words, is fundamentally an instrument for classifying a group of people. It may also be an instrument for measuring their intelligence, but of that we cannot be at all sure unless we believe that M. Binet and Mr. Terman and a few other psychologists have guessed correctly but, as we shall see later, the proof is not yet at hand.

Well, it turned out that they did get off to a good start and further refinement over the next couple of decades made IQ tests even better at predicting important life outcomes.

Paywall here.

… Readers who have not examined the literature of mental testing may wonder why there is reason to fear such an abuse of an invention which has many practical uses. The answer, I think, is that most of the more prominent testers have committed themselves to a dogma which must lead to such abuse. They claim not only that they are really measuring intelligence, but that intelligence is innate, hereditary, and predetermined. They believe that they are measuring the capacity of a human being for all time and that his capacity is fatally fixed by the child’s heredity. Intelligence testing in the hands of men who hold this dogma could not but lead to an intellectual caste system in which the task of education had given way to the doctrine of predestination and infant damnation.

In contrast, how many people would blank slate egalitarians try to murder after 1922, such as for wearing eyeglasses?

If the intelligence test really measured the unchangeable hereditary capacity of human beings, as so many assert, it would inevitably evolve from an administrative convenience into a basis for hereditary caste.

Why? Wouldn’t a hereditary caste presumed to be intelligent put intelligence testers out of business?

Even somebody as smart as Lippmann had trouble thinking in terms of bell curves.

The Terman family did okay meritocratically. Lewis’s world-historical son Fred Terman became the Dean of Engineering at Stanford, the faculty mentor of Hewlett and Packard, and he more or less invented Silicon Valley as we know it today.

In the 1950s, a Palo Alto middle school was named after both Termans. By the 2000s, it had the highest test scores of any public middle school in California. During the Great Awokening, the name got canceled because Lewis was an outspoken advocated of eugenics. A proposal to drop Lewis but keep Fred Terman as the namesake was rejected on the grounds that the hereditary taint of eugenics carried on unto the seventh generation. Or something.

Then it was proposed to rename the school after a Japanese-American graduate war hero in the famous Fighting 442nd who’d died in combat versus the Nazis. But Chinese residents of Palo Alto objected that they hated the Japanese race, so that proposal was dropped. Eventually the school was renamed after a Jewish city councilwoman whose big accomplishment was introducing bike lanes.

Lippmann gets himself really worked up toward the end:

The claim that we have learned how to measure hereditary intelligence has no scientific foundation. We cannot measure intelligence when we have never defined it, and we cannot speak of its hereditary basis after it has been indistinguishably fused with a thousand educational and environmental influences from the time of conception to the school age. The claim that Mr. Terman or anyone else is measuring hereditary intelligence has no more scientific foundation than a hundred other fads, vitamins and glands and amateur psychoanalysis and correspondence courses in will power, and it will pass them into that limbo where phrenology and palmistry and characterology and the other Babu sciences are to be found.

Well, that didn’t actually happen.

The New Republic let Terman respond later that year, and it turned out he was much funnier than Lippmann:

“The Great Conspiracy or the Impulse Imperious of Intelligence Testers, Psychoanalyzed and Exposed by Mr. Lippmann,” New Republic 33 (December 27, 1922)

After Mr. [William Jennings] Bryan had confounded the evolutionists, and … the astronomers, it was only fitting that some equally fearless knight should stride forth in righteous wrath and annihilate that other group of pseudo-scientists known as “intelligence testers.” Mr. Walter Lippmann, alone and unaided, has performed just this service. That it took six rambling articles to do the job is unimportant. It is done. The world is deeply in debt to Mr. Lippmann. So are the psychologists, if they only knew it, for henceforth they should know better than to waste their lives monkeying with those silly little “puzzles” or juggling IQ’s and mental ages.

What have intelligence testers done that they should merit such a fate? Well, what have they not done? They have enunciated, ex cathedra, in the guise of act, law and eternal verity, such highly revolutionary and absurd doctrines as the following; to wit:

(1) That the strictly average representative of the genus homo is not a particularly intellectual animal;

(2) that some members of the species are much stupider than others;

(3) that school prodigies are usually brighter than school laggards;

(4) that college professors are more intelligent than janitors, architects than hod-carriers, railroad presidents than switch-tenders; and (most heinous of all)

(5) that the offspring of socially, economically and professionally successful parents have better mental endowment, on the average, than the offspring of said janitors, hod-carriers and switch-tenders.

These are indeed dangerous doctrines, subversive of American democracy. The crime of the “intelligence testers” is made worse by the fact that they have attempted to gain credence for their nefarious theories by resort to cunningly devised statistical formulae which common people do not understand. It is true that some of these doctrines had been voiced before, but as long as they were expressed in ordinary language they passed as mere opinion and did little harm. But to talk about mental differences in terms of IQ’s, or to reckon mental inheritance in terms of a “.50 coefficient of resemblance between parent and offspring,” is a far more serious matter. In the interest of freedom of opinion there ought to be a law passed forbidding the encroachment of quantitative methods upon those fields which from time immemorial have been reserved for the play of sentiment and opinion. For example, why should not one be allowed to take his political or social theory as he takes his religion, without having it all mixed up with IQ’s, probable errors and coefficients of correlation?

At any rate, it will not do to let the idea get abroad that human beings differ in any such vital trait as ability to think, comprehend, reason; or, if such difference really exist, that there is the remotest possibility of anyone ever being able to measure them. If the psychologists should succeed in getting the intelligentsia to swallow this vanity-satisfying doctrine, who knows what they would not next succeed in putting over a system of plural voting based upon intelligence indices (to be determined by these self-same psychologists)? Absurd? By no means. Suppose, for example, they should somehow manage to give a test to the members of Congress (it should be done without their knowing it) and should then shrewdly award to each and every one a flatteringly high IQ. Sheer instinct on the part of the recipients could be depended upon to do the rest.

Let there be no misapprehension; the principle of democracy is at stake.

Ironically, Lippmann was notoriously cynical about American democracy, calling the voters in his famous 1922 book Public Opinion a “bewildered herd” requiring technocratic manipulation to produce a “manufactured consent.”

Offhand, it would seem like Terman was exactly the kind of high IQ technocrat that Lippmann would approve of. Instead, the German-American Terman aggravated the wealthy German-Jewish Lippmann no end.

Why?

It’s hard to say, but a lot was going on in 1922: that year Harvard imposed a quota on Jewish admissions on the grounds that Jews were excessively smart, while Congress was moving toward limiting immigration in 1924 in part on the grounds that Yugoslav gentiles were excessively dumb.

The essential thing about a democracy is not equality of opportunity, as some foolish persons think, but equality of mental endowment. Where would our American democracy be if it should turn out that people differ in intelligence as they do in height;

When did Americans realize Southeastern Europeans tended to taller than other Europeans? I got that impression in the early 1970s when BYU big man Kresmir Cosic was UCLA’s Bill Walton’s main hurdle to the Final Four.

especially if the psychologists could make it appear that he had discovered a method of triangulating everybody’s intellectual altitude? The argument of the psychologists that they would use their method in the discovery and conservation of talent, among rich and poor alike, is brazen camouflage. They don’t care a twirl-o'-your-thumb about the conservation of talent. Their real purpose is to set up a neoaristocracy, more snobbish, more tyrannical and on every count more hateful than any that has yet burdened the earth. Insomuch as the psychologists know their little “puzzle” stunts better than anyone else can hope to know them, they are doubtless entertaining ambitious visions of themselves forming the cap stone of this new political and social structure. As Mr. Lippmann well says, “if the tester could make good his claim that his tests test intelligence he would soon occupy a position of power which no intellectual has held since the collapse of theocracy.” In short, the whole thing is motivated by the Nietzschean Impulse Imperious.

It is high time that we were penetrating the wiles of this crafty cult. We have been entirely too unsuspecting. For example, the innocent-minded Germans are being shamefully taken in at this very moment. Hardly had the old government of Germany crashed, when the educational authorities of the newly established republic [the Weimar Republic ruled by Social Democrats] allowed the psychologists to launch a wild orgy of intelligence testing in the schools. The orgy continues unabated. The ostensible purpose is to sift the schools for superior talent in order to give it a chance to make the most of itself, in whatever stratum of society it may be found. The psychologists pretend that they are trying to break up the old Prussian caste system. They are not. It is the Impulse Imperious. If the German people don’t wake up they will soon find themselves in the grip of a super-junker caste that will out-junker anything Prussia ever turned loose.

The leading Weimar IQ psychometrician was William Stern who was Jewish. In 1912 he invented the Intelligence Quotient as mental age / actual age, which Terman adopted.

England and the other European countries are in similar danger. The conspiracy has even spread to Australia, South Africa and Japan. It is world-wide.

Later, Terman adopted David Wechsler’s notion of IQ as a bell curve with a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15. Wechsler was a Jew born in Romania.

In contrast, Nazis mostly didn’t like IQ science, in part because Jews outscored Aryans on average.

… Sample No. 7. (Main Allegation, asserted at least three times in every paragraph, always with signs of greatly increased blood pressure.) The intelligence tests don’t test pure intelligence. Any appearance to the contrary is due to “a subtle statistical illusion.” The psychologist’s assumption “that his questions and puzzles can in fifty minutes isolate abstract intelligence is vanity.” It is worse than vanity; it is an attempt to restore the “doctrine of predestination and infant damnation” in favor of an “intellectual caste system,” etc., etc.

It is evident that Jack has prepared an imposing giant for the slaughter. No matter that it is stuffed with straw or that it is set up in a fashion to make it the easy victim of a few vigorous puffs of super-heated atmosphere. As a matter of fact, all the “intelligence testers” will readily agree with Mr. Lippmann that their tests do not measure simon pure intelligence, but always native ability plus other things, with no final verdict yet as to exactly how much the other things affect the score. However, nearly all the psychologists believe that native ability counts very heavily. Mr. Lippmann doesn’t. He prefers to believe that more probably an individual’s IQ is determined by what happens to him in the nursery before the age of four years, in connection with the “creative opportunities which the parents and nurse girls improved or missed or bungled”! After all, if our experiences in the nursery gave us our emotional complexes, as the Freudians say, why shouldn’t they have determined our IQ’s at the same time?

As Joe Biden suggested in a Democratic debate in 2019:

BIDEN: “Play the radio, make sure the television — excuse me, make sure you have the record player on at night, the — the — make sure that kids hear words.”

As we all know, the reason black children average lower on school achievement tests is because their parents don’t talk enough. Or something.

Terman snarked on:

One wonders why Mr. Lippmann, holding this belief, did not suggest that we let up on higher education and pour our millions into kindergartens and nurseries. …

And just to think that we have been allowing all sorts of mysterious, uncontrolled, chance influences in the nursery to mould children’s IQ’s, this way and that way, right before our eyes. It is high time that we were investigating the IQ effects of different kinds of baby-talk, different versions of Mother Goose, and different makes of pacifiers and safety pins. If there is any possibility of identifying, weight and bringing under control these IQ stimulants and depressors, we can well afford to throw up every other kind of scientific research until the job is accomplished. That problem once solved, the rest of the mysteries of the universe would fall easy prey before our made-to-order IQ’s of 180 or 200.

Does not Mr. Lippmann owe it to the world to abandon his role of critic and to enter this enchanting field of research? He may safely be assured that if he unravels the secret of turning low IQ’s into high ones, or even into moderately higher ones, his fame and fortune are made. If he could guarantee to raise certified 100’s to certified 140’s, or even certified 80’s to certified 100’s, nothing but premature death or the discover and publication of his secret would keep him out of the Rockefeller-Ford class if he cared to achieve it. I know of a certain modern Croesus who alone would probably be willing to start him off with ten or twenty million if he could only raise one particular little girl from about 60 to 70 to a paltry 100 or so. Of course, if this man had only understood the secrets of “creative opportunity” in the nursery, he might have had all this and more for nothing. Who knows but if the matter were put up to him in the right way he would be willing to endow for Mr. Lippmann a Bureau of Nursery Research for the Enhancement of the IQ?

If Mr. Lippmann gets this Bureau started there are several questions I shall want to submit to it for solution. Some of these have been bothering me for a long time. One is, why both high and low IQ’s are so often found in children of the same family and of the same nursery. To be sure, parental habits change more or less as children come and grow up; nurse girls arrive and depart; toys wear out. The problem admittedly is complex, but by successive experiments in which one factor after another is kept constant while the others were varied, the evil and beneficent influences might gradually be sorted out.

Next, I should want to propose a minute comparative study of the influences operative in our California Japanese nurseries and those of our California Portuguese. Here is mystery enough to challenge any group of scientists Mr. Lippmann can get together, notwithstanding the apparent similarity of nursery environment in the two cases, the IQ results are markedly different. Our average Portuguese child carries through school and into life an IQ of about 80;

Who is the most famous half California-Portuguese: Tom Hanks?

the average Japanese child soon develops an IQ not far below that of the average California white child of Nordic descent. In this case the nurse girl factor is eliminated; one might almost say, the nursery itself. But of course there are the toys, which are more or less different. It is also conceivable that the more liquid Latin tongue exerts a sedative effect on infants' minds as compared with the harsher Japanese language, which may be stimulating in comparison.

Another problem would relate to the IQ resemblance of identical twins as compared with that of fraternal twins. The latest and most extensive investigation of this problem indicates a considerably greater IQ resemblance for the former than for the latter. This is a real poser; which I leave to Mr. Lippmann without attempting an explanation.

So, 103 years later, how much has changed?