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Showing posts with label Lubinski. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Lubinski. Show all posts

Thursday, July 27, 2023

The Racist Rodeo 2023 Day One ~ the International Society for Intelligence Research and Arthur Jensen

The website of the International Society for Intelligence Research (ISIR) has not yet shared anything about its ongoing annual conference on its website. 

Presumably it will share info eventually, as it has done for its previous conferences, but I expect well after the conference has ended.

Steven Pinker was scheduled to speak at the Racist Rodeo yesterday, but he has had nothing to say about the ISIR on Twitter so far. 

Meanwhile Pinker was promoting racist garbage-rag Thiel-funded Quillette.

One of the co-authors of the piece he is promoting is Naomi Schaefer Riley, a senior fellow at the Koch-funded AEI

Does Steven Pinker ever associate with anything or anybody that is NOT connected to race pseudoscience or the far-right plutocracy?

Meanwhile, the Twitter account for ISIR has been inactive since 2020, most recently retweeting something from Abdel Abdellaoui. 


Demonstrating that while Abdellaoui may detest Emil Kirkegaard, he is still firmly on the side of race pseudoscience. 

Not that I needed more evidence, he's a friend of Razib Khan, according to Khan.

Kirkegaard holds exactly the same pseudoscientific beliefs as Khan, so I guess Abdellaoui's real problem with Kirkegaard is that Kirkegaard doesn't have the right credentials and he's more blatant about his racism. I'm sure Kirkegaard and Khan agree that Black Americans, thanks to their genes, are an existential threat to the United States - but Khan manages to express that belief indirectly - by praising Charles Murray for the same beliefs. And we know how much Charles Murray agrees with Emil Kirkegaard.

Murray is not subtle about how he would like to see social policy adjusted to reflect his pseudoscientific beliefs in Black inferiority.

By the way, that is Francis Galton, notorious racist, the founder of contemporary race pseudoscience, eugenics and behavioral genetics chosen by ISIR as the avatar for their Twitter account.

ISIR loves to flaunt its connection to racists.

Anyway,  until more information is available about the 2023 Racist Rodeo, let's talk about a leading light of the ISIR, beloved by David Lubinski and Emil Kirkegaard, Arthur Jensen.

As noted yesterday, Lubinski is currently one of the officers of the Institute of Mental Chronometry. Jensen was originally one of the officers and the organization used to be called The Institute for the Study of Educational Differences, which received money from the white nationalist Pioneer Fund

And Lubinski wrote the obituary for Jensen for the American Psychological Association and right from the beginning notes Jensen's debt to racists going back to Galton:

His intellectual ancestry traces back through his mentor Hans Eysenck to Cyril Burt, Charles Spearman, and, ultimately, Sir Francis Galton.
At the end of the first page of the obituary, Lubinski gets into the reason Jensen became famous:

Initially, Art wrote a chapter on how group differences in learning were likely traceable to deprivation– opportunity differences. Digging deeper into this literature, however, he was struck by how uncritically genetic influences were dismissed, and he began publishing articles on behavior genetics and individual differences in learning potential. His article “Social Class, Race, and Genetics: Implications for Education” (1968, American Journal of Educational Research [AJER]) attracted an invitation from the Harvard Educational Review to expand his treatment of the topic. The result, “How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement?” (1969), questioned the efficacy of extant programs designed to enhance intellectual development and hypothesized that individual and group differences in learning potential have both genetic and environmental components. The article ignited a firestorm across academe, the popular press, and the Berkeley campus.

His suggestion that genetic differences give rise to important psychological differences was anathema to prevailing academic ideology, but he also hypothesized that if traits run in families because of genes, they may also run in families of families (races) for the same reason...
...was arguably the father of modern day hereditarianism pseudoscience with the publication of an article in the Harvard Educational Review...


Jensen promoted eugenics as the only practical solution to the problems facing the black community, arguing that they lacked the intelligence necessary for compensatory education programs to be successful. His ability to repackage fringe racial theories in the dry, dispassionate rhetoric of science made Jensen an instant celebrity in white nationalist circles, where he is still revered as “an intellectual pioneer comparable to Nobel Prize winners” and “a man of the highest distinction, not just scientifically, but also morally.”

Now at the time Jensen decided the problem with Black people was their own genetic insufficiencies, white nationalists were desperate for a hero. They had suffered a string of recent legal losses in the United States, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Loving v. Virginia ending all miscegenation laws in 1967.

White nationalists needed someone to reassure them that they were in the right after all. 

And there was Jensen to reassure them. Long before Ron DeSantis came along, Jensen was looking at the good side of slavery - suggesting that without all those slave rapes that caused "racial mixing" the Black American population would be even stupider, genetically, than Jensen and white nationalists already thought they were.

There are intelligence genes, which are found in populations in different proportions, somewhat like the distribution of blood types. The number of intelligence genes seems to be lower, over-all, in the black population than in the white. As to the effect of racial mixing, nobody has yet performed experiments that reveal its relative effect on I.Q. If the racial mixture weren’t there, it is possible that the I.Q. differences between blacks and whites would be even greater. I think such studies should be done to lay this uncertainty to rest once and for all.”
—Quoted in “jensenism, n. The theory that I.Q. is largely determined by the genes,” The New York Times Magazine, 1969

David Lubinski was about 16 in 1969. The fight for civil rights for Black Americans is well within living memory. And the promotion of Jensen and his fellow racialists as "science" in 1969 shows how quickly the backlash came.

In the obituary, Lubinski tries to claim Jensen as a martyr for The Truth, which is absolutely typical of race pseudoscience promoters. 

When asked how he withstood the assaults, Art replied that he tried to live by Gandhi’s principle of correspondence between inner thoughts and public pronouncements. 

It could be even worse. In an article in Heredity in 2003, Chris Brand, one-time director of the Institute for the Study of Educational Difference, the same organization that Lubinski now leads (rebranded in 2011 as Institute of Mental Chronometry,) actually uses the word martyrdom:

Who were Jensen's friends in martyrdom and what was the organization of the London School of which he became the revered intellectual head? (The journal Intelligence recently devoted a Special Issue to him, calling him ‘A King among Men.’) What was the plan of campaign for dealing with the rise of political correctness which was making even discussion of race impossible? Miele's book has no index allowing tracing, but such crown princes of the London School as Phil Rushton (who first linked the Mongoloid–Caucasian–Negroid continuum to a wide range of psychological features, including sexuality – Rushton, 1985) and Richard Lynn (who first noticed evidence that Black African IQ was actually only 70 – Lynn, 1991) certainly do not loom large in Jensen's ‘conversation.’ Scrupulously aiming to avoid controversy, the man who first so sensationally attracted it now disdains any interesting propositions about the human condition. Jensen even says he does not feel either ‘inclined or properly qualified’ to think through the political implications of his work.

Brand was a first-class creepy misogynist racist weirdo.

Do martyrs who don't think about the political implications of their work usually receive thousands of dollars from racist organizations like the Pioneer Fund? 

It seems to me that race pseudoscience is spectacularly profitable thanks to the Pioneer Fund and Ron Unz and Charles Koch and Peter Thiel etc.,  but purveyors of race pseudoscience are so delusional they expect general adulation on top of all that easy money. 

Although lucrative, race pseudoscience is the easiest possible career. All you have to do is find new ways of restating the same speculations about race that were made in the 19th century. Often using the same exact speculations - Richard Lynn (RIH) took credit for a "cold winters" theory of Black inferiority, but that idea has been around since at least Schopenhauer, who died in 1860.

Jensen’s ability to hide this radical agenda from the wider public stemmed in large part from his reliance on abstruse jargon to mask the crude racism of his underlying arguments. To take one glaring example, in his 1973 book, Educability and Group Differences, Jensen claimed that “[t]he possibility of a biochemical connection between skin pigmentation and intelligence is not totally unlikely in the view of the biochemical relation between melanins, which are responsible for pigmentation, and some of the neural transmitter substances in the brain. The skin and the cerebral cortex both arise from the ectoderm in the development of the embryo and share some of the same biochemical processes.” Stripped of its scientific affectations, Jensen’s statement boils down to the claim that dark skin causes stupidity. No biologist would ever take such a statement seriously, and indeed, none has—though it is now a widely accepted belief among white supremacists.

While Jensen was generally savvy enough to avoid the overt racism of some of his colleagues, the mask did occasionally slip. In 1992, he gave an interview to the white nationalist American Renaissance magazine in which he laid out his beliefs about black people in plain language, without hiding behind obfuscatory jargon. In this interview, Jensen ridiculed people, including his own mother, who believe “that blacks would be no different from the rest of us — the rest of the population — if they simply had the same education and all of that.”

The hiding of Jensen's radical agenda continued with changing the name of the Institute for the Study of Educational Difference to the Institute of Mental Chronometry

In examining the career of Arthur Jensen in depth, I found more confirmation that hereditarians are drama queens. In his 1969 essay Jensen wrote:

Much more thought and research should be given to the educational and social implications of these [dysgenic] trends for the future. Is there a danger that current welfare policies, unaided by eugenic foresight, could lead to the genetic enslavement of a substantial segment of our population?

Hereditarians are such true believers in genetic causation that they immediately jump from their speculations to dire warnings that public policy must be changed. I wrote about sociobiology hysteria a couple of years ago, first quoting Steven Pinker:

"Many misconceptions about behavior are harmless, but in these dangerous times some could lead to catastrophe. Steve Sailer's "The Cousin Marriage Conundrum" correctly predicts that it would be unwise to try to graft a political system onto a society without understanding how the psychology of kinship and ethnic identification plays out in the local environment."

So if we don't listen to Steve Sailer and his prediction, it could lead to "catastrophe." 

What is it about sociobiology that makes its proponents such drama queens? We've seen Razib Khan and Charles Murray say that if we don't accept the sociobiological view of Black Americans we "face disaster" and Kathryn Paige Harden, in her recent book, compared the refusal to accept the conclusions of "behavioral genetics" (basically sociobiology) with armed robbery.

As with Jensen, political scientist Charles Murray let the mask slip, when he admitted he thought discrimination against any individual Black job applicant was acceptable because of hereditarian beliefs.



And the International Society for Intelligence Research continues this hereditarian political campaign. 

Aided and abetted by people like David Lubinski and Steven Pinker.

Wednesday, July 26, 2023

Racist Rodeo 2023 begins ~ what is the Institute of Mental Chronometry?

Technically, Racist Rodeo 2023, aka this year's annual conference of the International Society for Intelligence Research starts July 27, but today there will still be festivities:

We will begin with a welcome reception sponsored by the Institute for Mental Chronometry on the evening of Wednesday, July 26, with drinks, refreshments, and guest speakers Steven Pinker and Frank Worrell! 

But what, you may ask, is the "Institute for Mental Chronometry"? The text did not include a link to any online presence for the Institute for Mental Chronometry (IMC) so almost the only information available online is via various organizations that track non-profits.

According to ProPublica, it is a Research Tax-Exempt Organizations with headquarters in Walnut Creek, California and "TAX-EXEMPT SINCE DEC. 1972."

And the name is not Institute for, it's the Institute of Mental Chronometry.


There are no tax records available on ProPublica before the 2001 tax year.

The latest tax record available is 2021 and its key employees and officers are DAVID J LUBINSKI, Pres/DIRECTOR; DANIEL J. LEVY (SEC/DIRECTOR) and DOUGLAS K DETTERMAN (VP/DIRECTOR.)

Detterman is the founder of the International Society for Intelligence Research and the Intelligence journal (which continues to publish Emil Kirkegaard as of 2023), and Lubinski I've mentioned several times already.

Daniel J. Levy doesn't appear to have any connection to intelligence "research" and appears to be an accountant.

The address given for IMC is 165 Lennon Lane #200  Walnut Creek  CA  94598, which is the address of Thomas Doll a wealth management company.

All three employees/officers received $31,890 in 2021.

Lubinski, Detterman and Levy are the only official names listed going back to 2012. 

In 2011 there is a fourth name - Arthur Jensen.


2010 appears to be the first year that Lubinski, Levy and Detterman were officers of the organization. In 2009 there was a whole different set, except for Jensen, who was working almost full time for the organization.


The same group goes back to 2005, when Barbara Jensen, his first wife, and Joe Moray, his son-in-law - are also included.

In 2004 the organization was not called Institute of Mental Chronometry, it was called Institute for the Study of Educational Differences. Same group of officers. In 2003 they got a donation of over a million dollars from the estate of Richard L. Bussman. In 2002 there was a donation of over a million from the estate of Bussman, and $50K from the estate of Dorothy Bussman. In 2001 and 2002 officers included C. C. Li and Ellis B. Page.

In 1990, the Institute for the Study of Educational Differences was mentioned in a University of Delaware inter-departmental memo in which the UofD explained why it would be refusing donations from the white nationalist Pioneer Fund (includes a letter from Linda Gottfredson, Lubinski's buddy, whining that only racists agree to fund her "mainstream" race pseudoscience.) 

The Institute for the Study of Educational Differences, like Gottfredson, was a recipient of money from the Pioneer Fund.

So that's probably why they changed the name to "Institute of Mental Chronometry" - to avoid the obvious connection to hardcore racists. 

It can't be because of mental chronometry's track record, which appears to be a complete failure for the race pseudoscience project:

Mental chronometry measures the elapsed time between the presentation of a sensory stimulus and the subsequent behavioral response by the participant. These studies have shown inconsistent results when comparing black and white populations groups, with some studies showing whites outperforming blacks, and others showing blacks outperforming whites.[179]
Arthur Jensen argued that this reaction time (RT) is a measure of the speed and efficiency with which the brain processes information,[180] and that scores on most types of RT tasks tend to correlate with scores on standard IQ tests as well as with g.[180] Nisbett argues that some studies have found correlations closer to 0.2, and that a correlation is not always found.[181] Nisbett points to the Jensen & Whang (1993) study in which a group of Chinese Americans had longer reaction times than a group of European Americans, despite having higher IQs. Nisbett also mentions findings in Flynn (1991) and Deary (2001) suggesting that movement time (the measure of how long it takes a person to move a finger after making the decision to do so) correlates with IQ just as strongly as reaction time, and that average movement time is faster for black people than for white people.[182] Mackintosh (2011, p. 339) considers reaction time evidence unconvincing and comments that other cognitive tests that also correlate well with IQ show no disparity at all, for example the habituation/dishabituation test. He further comments that studies show that rhesus monkeys have shorter reaction times than American college students, suggesting that different reaction times may not tell us anything useful about intelligence.

But what does Institute for Mental Chronometry do? It does not seem to generate any papers. According to an article in Intelligence (still publishing Emil Kirkegaard in 2023!) in a paper by Jensen published in 2011:

Jensen's Institute of Mental Chronometry commissioned a leading electronics firm to construct a state-of-the-art apparatus to administer, record, and analyze MC experiments.

So presumably the IMC is still working on developing this apparatus, although I haven't found any evidence yet.

Mainly, the IMC appears to be a service organization for the International Society for Intelligence Research. 

For this year's Racist Rodeo:

Travel support for graduate students and postdoctoral trainees: We are pleased to announce that enrolled Ph.D. students and postdoctoral researchers who have either an oral presentation or a poster accepted for the conference (as a presenting senior author) may be eligible for travel support, thanks to the generosity of the Institute of Mental Chronometry. Reimbursement will be available for documented transportation, lodging & meal expenses of up to $1,000 USD for travel within the United States or up to $1,500 USD for travel for all others. For students and postdocs with an accepted poster or talk, an additional $200 will added to your travel support so you can arrive a day early to enjoy the pre-conference event on July 26th, featuring talks by Steven Pinker and Frank Worrell. If you wish to apply for travel support, click “Yes” for this option when submitting your abstract.

And for last year's Racist Rodeo

The deadline for abstract submission has been extended to April 22, 2022. Please submit your abstract if you haven’t yet done so. Travel support is available for presenting graduate students and postdocs courtesy of the Institute for Mental Chronometry (IMC).

 Back in 2010, the ISIR was thanking the Templeton Foundation and Elsevier for student travel support:

We thank the Templeton Foundation for its generous support of student travel awards, and Elsevier Publishing Company for its generous contribution to the reception. 

According to SourceWatch:

The John Templeton Foundation tries to encourage the integration of religious beliefs and free-market principles into the classroom.

While researching this post, I found that Emil Kirkegaard runs a website devoted to Jensen. Maybe that's why the ISIR can't quit Kirkegaard, they both share a deep love of Arthur Jensen.

Lubinski wrote the obituary for Arthur R. Jensen for American Psychologist. I'll have more to say about that soon.

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