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Tuesday, July 2, 2024

The racist rodeo - European-style - the 2024 conference of the International Society for Intelligence Research

The International Society for Intelligence Research (ISIR) typically alternates between holding its annual conferences in North America and Europe. This is a European year and so the conference is in Zürich.

The line-up appears to have fewer obvious racists this year, although it does have Richard Haier, who is a devotee of 20th century racist Arthur Jensen - ISIR is founded on Jensenism

Haier has been spending his time lately hobnobbing with blatant racists like Charles Murray, Bo Winegard (and the gang at Aporia) and Stefan Molyneux, while promoting the idea that Black Americans can have their innate mental genetic defects cured through genetic manipulation.

One half of the respectability power couple of ISIR, Camille Benbow is also listed as a conference participant. To get an idea of the racist world that Benbow and her husband David Lubinski inhabit, consider Charles Murray's introduction for one of his more recently-published race-screeds, Human Diversity (my emphases):
Jensen made this pronouncement in his magnum opus, The g Factor, published in 1998. The list of eminent scholars who have shared that view began with Cyril Burt and Lewis Terman in the early part of the twentieth century and continued through the rest of the century and into the twenty-first century with figures such as Raymond Cattell, Nathan Brody, Hans Eysenck, John Loehlin, David Geary, Diane Halpern, Thomas Bouchard, David Lubinski, and Camilla Benbow. I should add that Richard Herrnstein and I took the same position in The Bell Curve.
Murray dedicates the book to Supreme Court corrupter, and Bari Weiss's "sugar daddy" Harlan Crow. I'm guessing Crow is one of the monstrously evil plutocrats funding Murray's racist screeds now.

Murray has, you guessed it, also appeared at ISIR conferences. But he isn't listed (so far) for this year's conference. But let's see who is:

Elsbeth Stern is the host and she seems at first glance far more reasonable than the typical ISIR conference attendee, actually admitting to the missing heritability problem in a paper published by Nature :
The search for the genes responsible for the expression of cognitive capabilities has not yet had much success, despite the money and effort invested in human genome projects.
However, the paper shows she's a big believer in the Pioneer Fund-underwritten twins studies and her second citation is of scientifically worthless evolutionary psychology. So she is fundamentally a proponent of sociobiology - which makes her a perfect fit for the International Society for Race Pseudoscience Intelligence Research.

Brook Macnamara is an associate professor of cognitive psychology at Case Western Reserve, and is interested in "individual differences" a term that usually means "group differences" which is a sneaky way of referring to race pseudoscience. Or as Emil Kirkegaard says: "group differences are just individual differences, really." Kirkegaard has also presented at ISIR meetings, until he embarrassed them

Matt McGue has a "collegiate affiliation" in the psychology department at the University of Minnesota College of Liberal Arts, and says he is a behavioral geneticist - which is the latest term for proponents of sociobiology.

Wendy Johnson is part of the twin studies sociobiology gang, publishing with Bouchard, McGue and Ian Deary, past president of the International Society for the Study of Individual Differences.

Sophie von Strum is cited several times in "Human Diversity," by Charles Murray. She is Professor of Psychology in Education and Director of the Hungry Mind Lab at the Department of Education at the University of York and she says she wants to discuss Genomic prediction of educational outcomes - one of the favorite topics of the dread Kathryn Paige Harden, who has also appeared at ISIR conferences.


Wendy M. Williams is another member of the League of Race Pseudoscience Ghouls, Evolutionary Psychology Goons and Rightwing Grifters as well as a professor of psychology at Cornell.

Franzis Preckel, and Klaus Oberauer seem to be garden-variety researchers, notable (so far as I can tell, yet) by their comfort with associating their names with an organization full of racists.

Once again, the Jensen-founded Institute of Mental Chronometry is paying some bills:

All graduate students and postdocs with an accepted oral or poster presentation for ISIR automatically qualify for $1,500 in travel support (for traveling from outside of Europe) or $1,000 of travel support (for those traveling from within Europe) from the Institute of Mental Chronometry.

That organization is rolling in the dough-re-mi, last year it gave half a million to two race-pseudoscience promoters Emily Willoughby and James J. Lee.

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