> Heritage had no official position on the question of gender IQ differences
This is like having no official position on if 8 is greater than 7. However, that a conservative think tank would say this shows what a third rail it is. As for the overall thesis, as a teacher it is so obvious that to say otherwise would be farcical
If it was a setup, it's even more delicious that he had to quit despite the groveling. I remember that huge kerfuffle because one woman got the vapors over them being closer to average.
A few days ago on X, a professional feminist described her hysterics over the word "hysteric." It was hysterical that she was so self-unaware!
Almost everyone focuses on the right side of the graph with its disproportionate share of male geniuses. Thing is, there’s a left side too. I’d say that is of much greater concern and gives an advantage to women.
It doesn't. Men can father (usually consequtively) more than one family. Thus, even if a third of men in marriageable age bracket drop dead - usually in a War, happened for confederate states in the Civil War - the effects on fertility are barely noticeable.
Hegel is certain that scientific truth eventually becomes obvious to everyone, that it isn’t a matter of personal ethics but a Universal Reason. But, with IQ provocations, the idea of a world order based on IQ realism flattens out other factors which should determine policy in some manner. Not only that, it specifically flattens out individual IQs or individual achievement in favor of IQ realism. It is no wonder Heritage doesn’t “notice,” because “noticing” doesn’t notice what it is filtering out. It is ultimately, an autistic pursuit which appeals specifically to people who want to obsess about IQ, fitting in with far right social ordering. In Steve’s (your) personal case, it is a lifetime of Iq obsession which is fair enough as a choice, but there are loads of other things you could have done, which is just to demonstrate there are other things people make social order from besides IQ.
And as a sidenote, Jews were discriminated against not just in golf clubs in LA, but in housing zoning prior to the lessening of golf exclusion, but that’s a side note Steve ! Mountaingate with grandpa was a good course though.
It seems like the obsession with IQ lies on the other side: the Washington Post, for example, thinks it's national news that a Trump nominee is familiar with a basic, scientifically uncontroversial finding of psychometrics.
I definitely agree that taking the IQ realist bait which you’ve designed for decades is a bad idea for the average reporter, and that in general, leftist or progressive discourse has nothing to say except hysterics. Nonetheless, there is a progressive argument to be had.
The strongest argument against it is not an argument against the empirical nature of it, but its specific function. Is Summers neutrally lecturing to Harvard about why women due to their IQ should be 1 in 7 or 1 in 30 in faculty?
Doesn’t that strike you as autistic? Also, it does prime people to exclude or measure women as too-low-IQ or not, it is not a neutral measure of quality.
Huh? It seems like an absolutely crucial subject for the president of Harvard to raise.
When _Larry Summers_ can't mention the scientific truth in public, then we end up with Ibram X. Kendi being the only person allowed to offer an explanation and Claudine Gay becoming president of Harvard.
I understand that there is nothing you would like more than Harvard official (tm) to explicate IQ realism. In the US, it is definitely a sad truth that probably it is either a far-right person or a unintellectual repetition of progressive discourse.
Despite the anti-Europe propaganda as “fallen,” I think in general the US has a lot to learn about creating a non-racist (rather than your feared “anti-racist” Ibram X) culture on merit which maintains ordinary taste.
The tide is definitely moving in this Sailer direction of blatant sex and racial argumentation, but this is not an acceptable ground of thought, which the UK always knew.
When the first black man to vote in England was accused of being a “blackamoor” and thus shouldn’t vote, the English said, does he fit the qualifications? Does he own land and so on, was he born in Britain? Thus the racists were challenged.
You yourself want meritocracy, but i would really challenge you to think of grounds not arguing from racial tendencies which would be a challenge to Ibram X and lot, which would not be racist or sexist. It seems “woke” to say racist or sexist, but it is simply uncivilized to be racist and sexist rather than meritocratic, or to expect racism and sexism to begin discussions in high order civilized power centers.
> And as a sidenote, Jews were discriminated against not just in golf clubs in LA, but in housing zoning prior to the lessening of golf exclusion, but that’s a side note Steve ! Mountaingate with grandpa was a good course though. <
Oh geez. This is completely off topic, but it needs saying whenever this Jewish whining rears its ugly head.
Jews are pretty much the last people who should be whining about exclusion. Jews have a thousand year history of *rejecting* integration with the host populations they were exploiting (my peasant ancestors). As whites detribalized and integrated under Christianity, Jews--most of them; the integrators would be some of my ancestors--insisted on maintaining their exclusive tribal identity/allegiance and working it for ethnic networking advantage in middle manning. In fact, Jews took exclusion and fashioned it into some of their religious duties/practices.
If some gentiles reaction to Jewish tribalism is to want to golf without Jews or live in a white neighborhood of their own religious persuasion, they are more than justified in doing so.
Jews seem to think "our stuff is our stuff ... and your stuff should be our stuff too!" But tribalism is not a one way street. Everyone can play.
This is in response to Steve’s other article and was more directed to him himself. Although talking about “Jewish whining” is pretty ugly, just aesthetically speaking. But it is sailer substack after all.
I was a research fellow at Harvard for quite a while and during that time learned that what's really going on behind the ivy covered walls is very different than what gets reported in the popular MSM. The reason why Larry Summers was booted from Harvard's presidency has nothing to do with his talk on sex differences in IQ distributions and everything to do with some shady practices relating to Harvard's endowment. A brief summary of the affair can be found in this Harvard Crimson article https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2006/2/22/summers-resigns-shortest-term-since-civil/ but this leaves out some of the juicier details. Many of these can be found here https://www.highereducationinquirer.org/2025/06/harvard-russia-and-quiet-complicity-of.html
Summer's protege, economic professor Andrei Shleifer, and Shleifer's wife were involved up to their eyebrows in the looting of the Russian economy overseen by the Harvard Institute for International Development (HIID). They made a fortune through insider trading. Summers conned Harvard into footing the multi-million dollar federal fine levied on Shleifer. Earlier Summers had talked Harvard's endowment into making some bad investments that cost the university's endowment additional millions. The faculty were sick of Summers's arrogance and the financial scandals associated with him made him unpopular among both the faculty and administration. Summers was a dead man walking before he made a peep about reasons why there are more Nobel winning male physicists than female.
The HIID scandal has never gotten the coverage it should because noticing an important aspect of that scandal is a "hate crime". The system that HIID's mostly Jewish consulting group devised for auctioning off Russian assets--and Yeltsin got conned into accepting--resulted in a disproportionate number of Jewish oligarchs walking away with a disproportionate amount of the loot. Ordinary Russians were immiserated for over a generation. Putin still gets 80% plus approval ratings because he rectified the disaster to some degree.
I am among those who was aware that Summers's financial scandals were the real reason that got the boot, but to Steve's point, what does it say that the world's foremost academic institution in collaboration with the media covered up Summers's actual crimes and instead convicted him over a non-crime statement of fact?
Harvard's motto is famously "Veritas": Truth. Yet they deposed their own president for speaking the truth while protecting him from his actual misdeeds. So by their own actions, Harvard's real motto is "Untruth"—squared.
> Shortly afterward, Roger Severino, Heritage’s vice president of domestic policy, spoke with the interns and said Antoni should not have shared that viewpoint, one of the people said. Severino told the interns that Heritage had no official position on the question of gender IQ differences, the person told The Post. <
Heritage should fire this Severino toad immediately. A bozo telling people someone "should not have shared that viewpoint"--especially when it is not just a viewpoint, but a well understood *fact*--is the antithesis of what a "think tank"--especially a conservative one--should be about.
More generally, if the presence of women, means that discussions must be censored so women won't have their feelings hurt, then logically women should not be anywhere near any positions of responsibility, really should not be voting and certainly shouldn't be in institutions involved in the search for knowledge.
How could greater IQ variability in men than women still be a hypothesis when it would be so easy to check?
It bugs me no end that there are so many people for whom "yeah, but it's true" is not a valid counterargument. But then I recognize it's probably more important for a society to agree on the average than to be right on the average.
At my high school the AP chemistry/Honors Chemistry teacher was notorious--excellent, difficult and unforgiving of dull-wittedness. She was also a staunch feminist who hated it that almost no girls took her AP chemistry class and few her honors chemistry class.
My impression was that the boy nerds considered it a rite of passage to get humiliated by Frau Mueller, while the girls' (even girls smart enough for the class) feeling was that she was mean and why should they tolerate that kind of stress?
Generally when something that's easy to check is not officially checked, it's because the answer is pretty well known but, as you note, socially unacceptable. It's why so many people are so hyper to avoid factual discussions about IQ.
I was tempted to use the camel's nose metaphor but admitting IQ variability by sex would mean the camel busted through the wall, yanked out the stakes, and is now racing over the next sand dune with the tent wrapped around its hump. The knock-on effects of such an admission would totally upend much of our current political and social debate.
Genetics doesn't stop at the base of the skull.
Identifiable genetic subgroups can differ in expressed intelligence.
Male and female sexual dimorphism goes deeper than external genitalia and fashion statements.
Intelligence is likely not the only human mental function that has a different distribution between sexes, and probably other genetically identifiable subgroups.
Nurturing interventions can help or hurt individuals but won't do anything to close IQ gaps between groups defined by some genetically influenced characteristic.
As Mr Sailer notes above, there are definite winners and losers in our current social hierarchy defined by pretending that none of those statements is true. Trying to force reality to bend to our wishes takes effort that could be spent in more useful directions. Distorting or prohibiting inquiries into the sources of human behavior is a major roadblock to effective amelioration of a number of social problems.
IQ spiel is a desperate attempt to make institutions relevant again. But the jig was up long ago, they produce nothing of cultural nor social value. And now they barely function to reproduce and preserve family/name status and wealth. It’s a farcical debate which feigns the relevance of these institutions.
‘Care about my IQ tests now’
Nah mate no one cares it’s boring af, impotent af, IQ yourself an imagination instead.
Whining on about liberals not being able to handle the mention of IQ results… but both liberals and yourself are in the same boat: absolute IQ and university cucks. You do realise you’re supposed to grow up and graduate? Like gtfo of the institution. Or build one that only allows the highest IQers in. Actually yeah please do the latter as that’s the test I’ve been waiting for, the IQ 2.0 test, can these super smart people create something of cultural merit and value that exceeds the institution?
I once went to a talk by Larry Summers with a Q&A afterwards. This was a few years after his Harvard firing and he was deliberately very cagey in his answers.
Observing the man from about five metres away it was clear he had perhaps a 150 IQ and knew it. I felt if he had a 100 IQ he would be the kind of coworker everyone avoids at lunchtime because he bores everyone talking about golf or trains.
Right. There was doubt about why he was appointed Harvard president when he his personality was more inclined toward telling the truth than closing the deal.
But, from 20 years on, it's obvious that if the Establishment had rallied to the Harvard president's defense when he did tell the truth, it could have shut down a lot of the subsequent insanity.
Women constantly clamor to be recognized and seen as intellectually equal to men, but both sides gloss over and never mention how often women use the sex appeal card. It isn't and never will be quantifiable, but it is oh so there. Women act like it doesn't exist, which is so disingenuous on their part.I've watched so, so much over my time. This tool is nonexistent for men. From my perch, most of (but of course not all) the #MeToo stuff came from women who weren't successful in obtaining something better by using their feminine wiles. They were bitter and saw their window to strike back.
Don't leave out Brett Kavanaugh in vowing to only hire female clerks after his fracas. Less opportunities for my sons, as Steve's wife said.
There is a story in the WSJ right now about Nestle's CEO having to step down because he was having a relationship with a subordinate. It was reported from a tipster on an employee hotline. I would bet my house the tipster was another woman angry to see another woman possibly getting elevated with the "unquantifiable" tool.
This is absurd, but there are other hints that Antoni is perhaps a bit of a crank, on top of the Soviet-style situation of firing his predecessor because the boss doesn't like the bad news she delivered. It seems that our options are "populist cranks or woke ideologues."
> Heritage had no official position on the question of gender IQ differences
This is like having no official position on if 8 is greater than 7. However, that a conservative think tank would say this shows what a third rail it is. As for the overall thesis, as a teacher it is so obvious that to say otherwise would be farcical
So much for Heritage's commitment to freedom of thought.
If it was a setup, it's even more delicious that he had to quit despite the groveling. I remember that huge kerfuffle because one woman got the vapors over them being closer to average.
A few days ago on X, a professional feminist described her hysterics over the word "hysteric." It was hysterical that she was so self-unaware!
Almost everyone focuses on the right side of the graph with its disproportionate share of male geniuses. Thing is, there’s a left side too. I’d say that is of much greater concern and gives an advantage to women.
No prison system in history has ever had less than an overwhelming ratio of males to females.
It doesn't. Men can father (usually consequtively) more than one family. Thus, even if a third of men in marriageable age bracket drop dead - usually in a War, happened for confederate states in the Civil War - the effects on fertility are barely noticeable.
Hegel is certain that scientific truth eventually becomes obvious to everyone, that it isn’t a matter of personal ethics but a Universal Reason. But, with IQ provocations, the idea of a world order based on IQ realism flattens out other factors which should determine policy in some manner. Not only that, it specifically flattens out individual IQs or individual achievement in favor of IQ realism. It is no wonder Heritage doesn’t “notice,” because “noticing” doesn’t notice what it is filtering out. It is ultimately, an autistic pursuit which appeals specifically to people who want to obsess about IQ, fitting in with far right social ordering. In Steve’s (your) personal case, it is a lifetime of Iq obsession which is fair enough as a choice, but there are loads of other things you could have done, which is just to demonstrate there are other things people make social order from besides IQ.
And as a sidenote, Jews were discriminated against not just in golf clubs in LA, but in housing zoning prior to the lessening of golf exclusion, but that’s a side note Steve ! Mountaingate with grandpa was a good course though.
It seems like the obsession with IQ lies on the other side: the Washington Post, for example, thinks it's national news that a Trump nominee is familiar with a basic, scientifically uncontroversial finding of psychometrics.
That's pretty obsessive.
I definitely agree that taking the IQ realist bait which you’ve designed for decades is a bad idea for the average reporter, and that in general, leftist or progressive discourse has nothing to say except hysterics. Nonetheless, there is a progressive argument to be had.
The strongest argument against it is not an argument against the empirical nature of it, but its specific function. Is Summers neutrally lecturing to Harvard about why women due to their IQ should be 1 in 7 or 1 in 30 in faculty?
Doesn’t that strike you as autistic? Also, it does prime people to exclude or measure women as too-low-IQ or not, it is not a neutral measure of quality.
Huh? It seems like an absolutely crucial subject for the president of Harvard to raise.
When _Larry Summers_ can't mention the scientific truth in public, then we end up with Ibram X. Kendi being the only person allowed to offer an explanation and Claudine Gay becoming president of Harvard.
I understand that there is nothing you would like more than Harvard official (tm) to explicate IQ realism. In the US, it is definitely a sad truth that probably it is either a far-right person or a unintellectual repetition of progressive discourse.
Despite the anti-Europe propaganda as “fallen,” I think in general the US has a lot to learn about creating a non-racist (rather than your feared “anti-racist” Ibram X) culture on merit which maintains ordinary taste.
The tide is definitely moving in this Sailer direction of blatant sex and racial argumentation, but this is not an acceptable ground of thought, which the UK always knew.
When the first black man to vote in England was accused of being a “blackamoor” and thus shouldn’t vote, the English said, does he fit the qualifications? Does he own land and so on, was he born in Britain? Thus the racists were challenged.
You yourself want meritocracy, but i would really challenge you to think of grounds not arguing from racial tendencies which would be a challenge to Ibram X and lot, which would not be racist or sexist. It seems “woke” to say racist or sexist, but it is simply uncivilized to be racist and sexist rather than meritocratic, or to expect racism and sexism to begin discussions in high order civilized power centers.
It's a residue of Stalin's Lysenkoism. Everywhere genetics is otherwise now recognized. Except in the field of human achievement.
> And as a sidenote, Jews were discriminated against not just in golf clubs in LA, but in housing zoning prior to the lessening of golf exclusion, but that’s a side note Steve ! Mountaingate with grandpa was a good course though. <
Oh geez. This is completely off topic, but it needs saying whenever this Jewish whining rears its ugly head.
Jews are pretty much the last people who should be whining about exclusion. Jews have a thousand year history of *rejecting* integration with the host populations they were exploiting (my peasant ancestors). As whites detribalized and integrated under Christianity, Jews--most of them; the integrators would be some of my ancestors--insisted on maintaining their exclusive tribal identity/allegiance and working it for ethnic networking advantage in middle manning. In fact, Jews took exclusion and fashioned it into some of their religious duties/practices.
If some gentiles reaction to Jewish tribalism is to want to golf without Jews or live in a white neighborhood of their own religious persuasion, they are more than justified in doing so.
Jews seem to think "our stuff is our stuff ... and your stuff should be our stuff too!" But tribalism is not a one way street. Everyone can play.
This is in response to Steve’s other article and was more directed to him himself. Although talking about “Jewish whining” is pretty ugly, just aesthetically speaking. But it is sailer substack after all.
I was a research fellow at Harvard for quite a while and during that time learned that what's really going on behind the ivy covered walls is very different than what gets reported in the popular MSM. The reason why Larry Summers was booted from Harvard's presidency has nothing to do with his talk on sex differences in IQ distributions and everything to do with some shady practices relating to Harvard's endowment. A brief summary of the affair can be found in this Harvard Crimson article https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2006/2/22/summers-resigns-shortest-term-since-civil/ but this leaves out some of the juicier details. Many of these can be found here https://www.highereducationinquirer.org/2025/06/harvard-russia-and-quiet-complicity-of.html
Summer's protege, economic professor Andrei Shleifer, and Shleifer's wife were involved up to their eyebrows in the looting of the Russian economy overseen by the Harvard Institute for International Development (HIID). They made a fortune through insider trading. Summers conned Harvard into footing the multi-million dollar federal fine levied on Shleifer. Earlier Summers had talked Harvard's endowment into making some bad investments that cost the university's endowment additional millions. The faculty were sick of Summers's arrogance and the financial scandals associated with him made him unpopular among both the faculty and administration. Summers was a dead man walking before he made a peep about reasons why there are more Nobel winning male physicists than female.
The HIID scandal has never gotten the coverage it should because noticing an important aspect of that scandal is a "hate crime". The system that HIID's mostly Jewish consulting group devised for auctioning off Russian assets--and Yeltsin got conned into accepting--resulted in a disproportionate number of Jewish oligarchs walking away with a disproportionate amount of the loot. Ordinary Russians were immiserated for over a generation. Putin still gets 80% plus approval ratings because he rectified the disaster to some degree.
I am among those who was aware that Summers's financial scandals were the real reason that got the boot, but to Steve's point, what does it say that the world's foremost academic institution in collaboration with the media covered up Summers's actual crimes and instead convicted him over a non-crime statement of fact?
Harvard's motto is famously "Veritas": Truth. Yet they deposed their own president for speaking the truth while protecting him from his actual misdeeds. So by their own actions, Harvard's real motto is "Untruth"—squared.
I wrote a fair amount in 2006 about Larry Summers' Andrei Shleifer scandal and its role in his downfall. For example:
https://www.unz.com/isteve/real-larry-summers-scandal/
It’s very possible that there were several reasons.
Monocausal thinking is a low-IQ thing folks!
> Shortly afterward, Roger Severino, Heritage’s vice president of domestic policy, spoke with the interns and said Antoni should not have shared that viewpoint, one of the people said. Severino told the interns that Heritage had no official position on the question of gender IQ differences, the person told The Post. <
Heritage should fire this Severino toad immediately. A bozo telling people someone "should not have shared that viewpoint"--especially when it is not just a viewpoint, but a well understood *fact*--is the antithesis of what a "think tank"--especially a conservative one--should be about.
More generally, if the presence of women, means that discussions must be censored so women won't have their feelings hurt, then logically women should not be anywhere near any positions of responsibility, really should not be voting and certainly shouldn't be in institutions involved in the search for knowledge.
How could greater IQ variability in men than women still be a hypothesis when it would be so easy to check?
It bugs me no end that there are so many people for whom "yeah, but it's true" is not a valid counterargument. But then I recognize it's probably more important for a society to agree on the average than to be right on the average.
At my high school the AP chemistry/Honors Chemistry teacher was notorious--excellent, difficult and unforgiving of dull-wittedness. She was also a staunch feminist who hated it that almost no girls took her AP chemistry class and few her honors chemistry class.
My impression was that the boy nerds considered it a rite of passage to get humiliated by Frau Mueller, while the girls' (even girls smart enough for the class) feeling was that she was mean and why should they tolerate that kind of stress?
Generally when something that's easy to check is not officially checked, it's because the answer is pretty well known but, as you note, socially unacceptable. It's why so many people are so hyper to avoid factual discussions about IQ.
I was tempted to use the camel's nose metaphor but admitting IQ variability by sex would mean the camel busted through the wall, yanked out the stakes, and is now racing over the next sand dune with the tent wrapped around its hump. The knock-on effects of such an admission would totally upend much of our current political and social debate.
Genetics doesn't stop at the base of the skull.
Identifiable genetic subgroups can differ in expressed intelligence.
Male and female sexual dimorphism goes deeper than external genitalia and fashion statements.
Intelligence is likely not the only human mental function that has a different distribution between sexes, and probably other genetically identifiable subgroups.
Nurturing interventions can help or hurt individuals but won't do anything to close IQ gaps between groups defined by some genetically influenced characteristic.
As Mr Sailer notes above, there are definite winners and losers in our current social hierarchy defined by pretending that none of those statements is true. Trying to force reality to bend to our wishes takes effort that could be spent in more useful directions. Distorting or prohibiting inquiries into the sources of human behavior is a major roadblock to effective amelioration of a number of social problems.
IQ spiel is a desperate attempt to make institutions relevant again. But the jig was up long ago, they produce nothing of cultural nor social value. And now they barely function to reproduce and preserve family/name status and wealth. It’s a farcical debate which feigns the relevance of these institutions.
‘Care about my IQ tests now’
Nah mate no one cares it’s boring af, impotent af, IQ yourself an imagination instead.
Whining on about liberals not being able to handle the mention of IQ results… but both liberals and yourself are in the same boat: absolute IQ and university cucks. You do realise you’re supposed to grow up and graduate? Like gtfo of the institution. Or build one that only allows the highest IQers in. Actually yeah please do the latter as that’s the test I’ve been waiting for, the IQ 2.0 test, can these super smart people create something of cultural merit and value that exceeds the institution?
Don’t scare the American WASPs with actual English opinions! Random other substack poster who i don’t know at all!
I once went to a talk by Larry Summers with a Q&A afterwards. This was a few years after his Harvard firing and he was deliberately very cagey in his answers.
Observing the man from about five metres away it was clear he had perhaps a 150 IQ and knew it. I felt if he had a 100 IQ he would be the kind of coworker everyone avoids at lunchtime because he bores everyone talking about golf or trains.
Right. There was doubt about why he was appointed Harvard president when he his personality was more inclined toward telling the truth than closing the deal.
But, from 20 years on, it's obvious that if the Establishment had rallied to the Harvard president's defense when he did tell the truth, it could have shut down a lot of the subsequent insanity.
It was an odd choice to give such a social job to a man with visible autistic traits.
I have those tendencies myself and I’m organisationally a lot more useful behind the spreadsheet than sucking up to people all day.
It’s a truism that you can have power or influence but not both. Summers should have the latter.
Women constantly clamor to be recognized and seen as intellectually equal to men, but both sides gloss over and never mention how often women use the sex appeal card. It isn't and never will be quantifiable, but it is oh so there. Women act like it doesn't exist, which is so disingenuous on their part.I've watched so, so much over my time. This tool is nonexistent for men. From my perch, most of (but of course not all) the #MeToo stuff came from women who weren't successful in obtaining something better by using their feminine wiles. They were bitter and saw their window to strike back.
Don't leave out Brett Kavanaugh in vowing to only hire female clerks after his fracas. Less opportunities for my sons, as Steve's wife said.
There is a story in the WSJ right now about Nestle's CEO having to step down because he was having a relationship with a subordinate. It was reported from a tipster on an employee hotline. I would bet my house the tipster was another woman angry to see another woman possibly getting elevated with the "unquantifiable" tool.
This is absurd, but there are other hints that Antoni is perhaps a bit of a crank, on top of the Soviet-style situation of firing his predecessor because the boss doesn't like the bad news she delivered. It seems that our options are "populist cranks or woke ideologues."
https://x.com/dave_hebert/status/1955054062325444659
https://x.com/danieldimartino/status/1955078917523386719
https://x.com/jessicabriedl/status/1955044169598242849
https://x.com/BeachWW453/status/1951376029060055506
I wonder if the thumb on the scale in admissions for Canadian universities has equalized after the Trudeau era?