As I may have mentioned once or twice across the decades, centuries, and millennia, a lot of bad decisions — such as Janet Napolitano banning applicants to the University of California from submitting their test scores or Nikole Hannah-Jones’ whole career and family life — get made due to the social mandate to be ignorant about IQ science.
Ever since Arthur Jensen’s 1969 meta-analysis of the disappointing effect of the Head Start program on IQ, the conventional wisdom among elites has been that scientists like Jensen, Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, and James D. Watson must be silenced to prevent the no doubt apocalyptic damage to society that would be sure to ensue if the facts were revealed.
Just look at the Holocaust or the Armenian Genocide. Then imagine how violent white suburban mobs would run amok in the streets of Detroit if the general public were ever allowed to know that many reasonable scientists feel that the racial gap in wealth between whites and blacks is likely less due to the sheer malevolence of whites (as the conventional wisdom rightly instructs us) than to the racial disparity in average IQ, and that nobody, after generations of well-funded research, seems to have many effective ideas for how to close most of The Gap. If these scientists were allowed to speak out without being shouted down, the public would soon turn into Nazis.
Or something.
Personally, I dunno what people would conclude.
If the public learned more about the science, would they demand: “Exterminate all the brutes!”
Or would they feel: “Half of humanity is below average in intelligence? Really? So you mean they’re not just acting dumb to piss me off? Oh. Well, I guess we need to help them out …”
Or would people think that it is potentially useful for them to become better informed on nature and nurture, which might have different implications for different policy issues?
Why don’t we have much of a clue what would happen?
Well, one reason is because surprisingly little social science research has been performed on the topic. Despite the millions of words of self-confident opinionizing emitted over the last 50+ years on the dire effects of letting people learn about the science of intelligence, practically no research on the question of what would be the zeitgeist impacts has ever been performed.
In other words:
One reason is because it’s widely assumed in academia that Institutional Review Boards would never approve such obviously harmful experimental designs as asking psychology students a bunch of questions, having them read Chapter 13 of The Bell Curve and a critique of Chapter 13, then ask them some more questions to find out if they’ve turned violently fascist.
How can we know that exposing psych majors to Chapter 13 would be harmful if we never done an experiment like this>
Well, we just know. Stop asking racist questions!
Studies have been done that show that telling participants various scientific truths tends to make them deplorably better informed and realistic.
But what if you ask them about the impact on their general worldview?
This spring, a researcher published a study of what political impact learning about the findings of twin studies (which only have indirect racial angles) has on a couple of thousand Swedes and a couple of thousand Americans.
Paywall here.
