The nonprofit racists club: the International Society for Intelligence Research

The full-time professional racist club is not 
a good club to be in - and notice that Khan
is feeling sorry for himself claiming people lie about him.
Without providing any evidence, of course.

I really should have been paying more attention to the International Society for Intelligence Research (ISIR), seeing as how it is a nonprofit organization devoted to spreading race pseudoscience.

Much more solid than the relatively amorphous Intellectual Dark Web.

In my defense, tracking the Intellectual Dark Web has been taking up a lot of my time, on top of my day job.

But my neglect of ISIR was remedied today. I saw some tweets go by about someone I had never heard of before, Emily Willoughby, and I really didn't pay attention. Until I saw psychologist Erik Turkheimer defending her.

Not suspecting anything worse, silly trusting me, I began with the assumption that Willoughby was just a typical clueless dummy who incorrectly believes that "heritability" is a measure of genetic causation. Something that both Turkheimer and the paper The Heritability Fallacy have explicitly argued against.

But Willoughby, it turns out, is very much devoted to the cause of promoting race pseudoscience, as I eventually realized.

I am really starting to have doubts about Erik Turkheimer. He always seems to end up defending hereditarians.

And what is wrong with "behavioral genetics" that people like Turkheimer believe that heritability is not a measure of genetic causation, while so many others believe it is a measure of that very thing. As Jonathan Haidt demonstrates in this image.

Nobody in the field ever seems to address what should be a major issue: they can't agree on the meaning of one of their most important terms. One more reason to think that "behavioral genetics" is just another recurrence of socio-biology, with a thin veneer of gene statistics to make it look legitimate.

So Willoughby, it turns out, is not only a long-term enthusiastic admirer of some of the most racist ghouls in the race pseudoscience universe, like Gregory Cochran, HBD Chick, Charles Murray and Linda Gottfredson, but she is on the board of directors of the International Society for Intelligence Research.

The mainstream media, as usual, ignores this shockingly racist organization in spite of its annual conferences featuring hardcore racists. But fortunately The New Statesman did publish an article about them, in 2018:

After we exposed his involvement with eugenicists, Toby Young pointed out that the conference at which he actually spoke, that of the International Society for Intelligence Research (ISIR), was “super-respectable” and attended by “numerous world-renowned academics”.

He is entirely correct. The ISIR is home to many great scientists, and its journal Intelligence is one of the most respected in its field. Yet Richard Lynn, who has called for the “phasing out” of the “populations of incompetent cultures”, serves on the editorial board of Intelligence, along with fellow director of the Pioneer Fund Gerhard Meisenberg, who edits Lynn’s journal Mankind Quarterly. Two other board members are Heiner Rindermann and Jan te Nijenhuis, frequent contributors to Mankind Quarterly and the London Conference on Intelligence. Rindermann, James Thompson, Michael Woodley of Menie and Aurelio Figueredo, all heavily implicated in the London Conference on Intelligence, helped to organise recent ISIR conferences. Linda Gottfredson, a Pioneer Fund grantee and former president of the ISIR, famously authored a letter in the Wall Street Journal defending Charles Murray’s assertion that black people are genetically disposed to an average IQ of “around 85”, compared to 100 for whites.

The tolerance afforded to eugenicists threatens the reputation of respectable scientists. Stephen Pinker, the world-renowned cognitive psychologist, spoke at last year’s ISIR conference. Another speaker at the conference, however, was the aforementioned Emil Kirkegaard, a “self-taught” eugenicist who has written a “thought experiment” which discusses whether raping a drugged child could be defended, and whose research into OKCupid made international headlines for its “grossly unprofessional, unethical and reprehensible” use of personal data.

Ah yes, Steven Pinker. Of course. At the racist roundup. If there is a pack of racists, chances are very good that Steven Pinker will be somewhere nearby. And he still can't stop promoting the career of anti-Black racist Razib Khan.

OK these people are sickening and I have French homework. More soon.