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This is the talk page for discussing improvements to the Race and intelligence article. This is not a forum for general discussion of the article's subject.

Put new text under old text. Click here to start a new topic. New to Misplaced Pages? Welcome! Learn to edit; get help. Assume good faith Be polite and avoid personal attacks Be welcoming to newcomers Seek dispute resolution if needed Article policies Neutral point of view No original research Verifiability

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Arbitration Ruling on Race and Intelligence The article Race and intelligence, along with other articles relating to the area of conflict (namely, the intersection of race/ethnicity and human abilities and behaviour, broadly construed), is currently subject to active arbitration remedies, described in a 2010 Arbitration Committee case where the articulated principles included: Pillars: Misplaced Pages articles must be neutral, verifiable and must not contain original research. Those founding principles (the Pillars) are not negotiable and cannot be overruled, even when apparent consensus to do so exists. Original research: Misplaced Pages defines "original research" as "facts, allegations, ideas, and stories not already published by reliable sources". In particular, analyses or conclusions not already published in reliable, third-party, published sources with a reputation for fact-checking and accuracy are not appropriate for inclusion in articles. Correct use of sources: Misplaced Pages articles should be based on reliable, published secondary sources and, to a lesser extent, on tertiary sources. Primary sources are permitted if used carefully. All interpretive claims, analyses, or synthetic claims about primary sources must be referenced to a secondary source, rather than to original analysis of the primary-source material by Misplaced Pages editors. Advocacy: Misplaced Pages strives towards a neutral point of view. Accordingly, it is not the appropriate venue for advocacy or for advancing a specific point of view. While coverage of all significant points of view is a necessary part of balancing an article, striving to give exposure to minority viewpoints that are not significantly expressed in reliable secondary sources is not. Single purpose accounts: Single purpose accounts are expected to contribute neutrally instead of following their own agenda and, in particular, should take care to avoid creating the impression that their focus on one topic is non-neutral, which could strongly suggest that their editing is not compatible with the goals of this project. Decorum: Misplaced Pages users are expected to behave reasonably, calmly, and courteously in their interactions with other users; to approach even difficult situations in a dignified fashion and with a constructive and collaborative outlook; and to avoid acting in a manner that brings the project into disrepute. Unseemly conduct, such as personal attacks, incivility, assumptions of bad faith, harassment, or disruptive point-making, is prohibited. Tag-team editing: Tag teams work in unison to push a particular point of view. Tag-team editing – to thwart core policies (neutral point of view, verifiability, and no original research); or to evade procedural restrictions such as the three revert rule or to violate behavioural norms by edit warring; or to attempt to exert ownership over articles; or otherwise to prevent consensus prevailing – is prohibited. If you are a new editor, or an editor unfamiliar with the situation, please follow the above guidelines. You may also wish to review the full arbitration case page. If you are unsure if your edit is appropriate, discuss it here on this talk page first.

	Race and intelligence was a good articles nominee, but did not meet the good article criteria at the time. There may be suggestions below for improving the article. Once these issues have been addressed, the article can be renominated. Editors may also seek a reassessment of the decision if they believe there was a mistake.
Article milestones Date Process Result June 14, 2005 Articles for deletion Kept June 24, 2005 Peer review Reviewed July 18, 2005 Featured article candidate Not promoted August 25, 2006 Good article nominee Not listed December 4, 2006 Articles for deletion Kept April 11, 2011 Articles for deletion Kept Current status: Former good article nominee

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Please add the quality rating to the {{WikiProject banner shell}} template instead of this project banner. See WP:PIQA for details. Psychology Mid‑importance This article is within the scope of WikiProject Psychology, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of Psychology on Misplaced Pages. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.PsychologyWikipedia:WikiProject PsychologyTemplate:WikiProject Psychologypsychology Mid This article has been rated as Mid-importance on the project's importance scale. Please add the quality rating to the {{WikiProject banner shell}} template instead of this project banner. See WP:PIQA for details. Anthropology Mid‑importance This article is within the scope of WikiProject Anthropology, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of Anthropology on Misplaced Pages. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.AnthropologyWikipedia:WikiProject AnthropologyTemplate:WikiProject AnthropologyAnthropology Mid This article has been rated as Mid-importance on the importance scale. Please add the quality rating to the {{WikiProject banner shell}} template instead of this project banner. See WP:PIQA for details. Sociology Mid‑importance This article is within the scope of WikiProject Sociology, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of sociology on Misplaced Pages. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.SociologyWikipedia:WikiProject SociologyTemplate:WikiProject Sociologysociology Mid This article has been rated as Mid-importance on the project's importance scale. Please add the quality rating to the {{WikiProject banner shell}} template instead of this project banner. See WP:PIQA for details. Skepticism Mid‑importance This article is within the scope of WikiProject Skepticism, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of science, pseudoscience, pseudohistory and skepticism related articles on Misplaced Pages. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.SkepticismWikipedia:WikiProject SkepticismTemplate:WikiProject SkepticismSkepticism Mid This article has been rated as Mid-importance on the project's importance scale.

This article has been mentioned by multiple media organizations: "Topics that spark Misplaced Pages 'edit wars' revealed". BBC News. 18 July 2013. Retrieved 18 July 2013. Doug Gross (July 24, 2013). "Wiki wars: The 10 most controversial Misplaced Pages pages". CNN. Archived from the original on July 27, 2013. Retrieved July 27, 2013. Circumcision and "race and intelligence," both with obvious controversy attached, made the list, alongside a possibly more surprising page: a list of professional wrestlers on the roster of World Wrestling Entertainment. Justin Ward (March 12, 2018). "Misplaced Pages wars: inside the fight against far-right editors, vandals and sock puppets". Southern Poverty Law Center. Archived from the original on March 12, 2018. Retrieved March 17, 2018. In the article on "race and intelligence," relatively equal weight is given to the two sides of the debate — hereditarian and environmentalist — though environmentalism is the mainstream perspective in psychology.

Section sizes Section size for Race and intelligence (31 sections) Section name Byte count Section total (Top) 2,627 2,627 History of the controversy 3,119 11,838 Early IQ testing 3,763 3,763 The Pioneer Fund and The Bell Curve 4,956 4,956 Conceptual issues 25 12,608 Intelligence and IQ 3,402 3,402 Race 9,181 9,181 Group differences 2,017 11,738 Test scores 6,609 6,609 Flynn effect and the closing gap 3,112 3,112 Environmental factors 26 28,726 Health and nutrition 8,895 8,895 Education 4,630 4,630 Socioeconomic environment 3,656 3,656 Test bias 2,671 2,671 Stereotype threat and minority status 8,848 8,848 Research into possible genetic factors 4,981 27,192 Genetics of race and intelligence 4,001 4,001 Heritability within and between groups 4,588 4,588 Spearman's hypothesis 3,826 3,826 Adoption studies 4,255 4,255 Racial admixture studies 2,450 2,450 Mental chronometry 1,939 1,939 Brain size 937 937 Archaeological data 215 215 Policy relevance and ethics 2,717 2,717 See also 142 142 References 18 50,123 Notes 28 28 Citations 31 31 Bibliography 50,046 50,046 Total 147,711 147,711

Highlighted open discussions

Talk:Race and intelligence/Current consensus

The correlation between Race and Intelligence should occur in the Summary

This is an article on Race and IQ. The first thing someone should want to learn about is the correlation between Race and IQ, however some editors are trying to bury that evidence, hiding the science from the public, and only show criticism and debate of the evidence, without showing the evidence itself. This is science denialism and not a neutral POV.

I understand that some people don't want this evidence to exist, but it should be presented in the summary of the article. It is fine to also describe the criticism of the evidence, and to say that there is debate. But it is not ok to hide this evidence, and bury it under the debate. Note that there is no credible evidence saying that this evidence is wrong. There are simply people who do not like it. But Misplaced Pages needs to hold a neutral POV.

I fixed this by prefixing the intro with just 11 words: "Although a large body of evidence shows a correlation between race and IQ scores, the connection..." and then continued with the prose describing the debate, and the criticism of the connection between Race and Intelligence. My original edit was here. User Skllagyook reverted it here. I removed the word "large" and revised the edit here.

The Rushton article is an extremely thorough peer-reviewed, survey of 30 years of research by a U.C. Berkeley professor and University of Western Ontario professor, published in the American Psychological Association. It cites well over 100 studies, themselves having been peer-reviewed, over many decades of research. The American Psychological Association has blessed this work. It is reliable and reputable, and exactly what this article is talking about. However, Skllagyook removed this evidence from the page with the argument that "Rushton and Jenson are a contentious source who represent only one side of the debate". (See here.) That is bad behavior. You do not remove an article on the basis of it representing one side of the debate—you present both sides, so that the reader has access to the entire debate.— Preceding unsigned comment added by Toomim (talk • contribs) 19:41, 14 December 2019 (UTC)

Thanks for letting us know that you consider Philippe Rushton and Arthur Jensen to be reliable sources. They have been completely discredited by mainstream science. Onetwothreeip (talk) 21:13, 14 December 2019 (UTC)

It's not our job to decide who has been "discredited," and erase them from wikipedia articles. If that were the case, then Misplaced Pages would only show one side of every debate, rather than presenting a Neutral Point-of-View. Furthermore, it's simply not true that "they have been discredited" -- they wrote a survey paper, that cites and summarizes a wide array of research on the topic, including both sides. If that work were to proven wrong, one would have to go and disprove mountains of data with other data. Can you please show me the data that disproves the data that they cite? Finally, note that the context of this discussion is simply to present to wikipedia viewers that there is data. There are no claims made here other that that there is data showing a correlation between Race and IQ. There is a bevy of hard data that indicates this. If you disagree, please show the data. Otherwise, you are simply denying the science on the issue, in order to filter this article to one side of the debate. That goes against Misplaced Pages's 5th principle, and has no place in this encyclopedia.--Toomim (talk) 22:12, 14 December 2019 (UTC)

@Toomim: There was no attempt on my part to "bury" the evidence or correlation you mention, nor did my edit bury it. As I exained in the exit note, the existence of group test score differences was/is already (and srill is) mentioned and acnowledged in the lede/introduction (and is discussed througout the article) - the lede should be concise and mentioning it again is somewhat redudant and adds unnecessary emphasis. The lede read/reads: "There remains some debate as to whether and to what extent differences in intelligence test scores reflect environmental factors as opposed to genetic ones..." Said evidence is not being buried, hidden or denied here (not by my edit anyway). Skllagyook (talk) 22:17, 14 December 2019 (UTC)

Let's be clear-- the summary has censored all mention of the data showing a correlation between IQ and Race. You have removed the data. You have only left discussion of debate, and only one side of the debate. You are censoring the data. That is anti-science, non-neutral, and censorship.--Toomim (talk) 22:58, 14 December 2019 (UTC)

It is indeed not our job to discredit anything, as that has already been done. Misplaced Pages can show these discredited views in their proper context, but we cannot show them as valid positions of a debate when they simply aren't. The correlations between race and intelligence are explained throughout the article. Onetwothreeip (talk) 22:26, 14 December 2019 (UTC)

You are responding to the wrong point. I didn't say "it's not our job to discredit things" -- I said it's not our job to decide what has been discredited. As stated in the Misplaced Pages principles, "Misplaced Pages articles should be based on reliable, published sources, making sure that all majority and significant minority views that have appeared in those sources are covered (see Misplaced Pages:Neutral point of view)." This data has been published in numerous reliable, authoritative venues, including the APA, by top academics at credible institutions like U.C. Berkeley. The fact that these are minority opinions means that they should be included. If you want to show the debate, you need to show both sides of the debate. Otherwise you are violating the principle of Neutral point-of-view. --Toomim (talk) 22:58, 14 December 2019 (UTC)

We don't decide what is discredited either. We just have to recognise what is discredited and what isn't. Views which are discredited by mainstream science can be included, but they have to be explained in that context. Infamous figures like Philippe Rushton were not part of a genuine scientific debate. Onetwothreeip (talk) 23:08, 14 December 2019 (UTC)

Hi, let's please stick to the Misplaced Pages principles. Can you cite any principle that says "We have to recognize what is discredited"? Or any principle that would help us determine what has been discredited, or what is genuine? I don't believe these arguments have a place in Misplaced Pages, and it sounds like you are using them as rationale for censoring minority viewpoints, which are explicitly encouraged in Misplaced Pages's Neutral-Point-of-View principle. Since this is a contentious issue, we need to come to an agreement here, or I will have to raise this to dispute resolution and have a third-party judge our arguments on the application of Misplaced Pages principles. Thank you. Toomim (talk) 23:45, 14 December 2019 (UTC)

It seems odd that you are saying "hi" at this particular moment. Can you cite any principle that says "We have to recognize what is discredited"? Or any principle that would help us determine what has been discredited, or what is genuine? Misplaced Pages:Reliable sources. Certain source are reliable, while other sources are not. For example, Philippe Rushton was not a reliable source. His work was largely discredited by mainstream science. Onetwothreeip (talk) 23:51, 14 December 2019 (UTC)

Ok, so you are focused just on Rushton himself. However, this is not sufficient. The claim that "data exists showing a correlation between Race and IQ" is backed up by a great number of reliable sources. Rushton's article is only a survey paper, which summarizes them. So you would need to argue that all of these sources are unreliable. Furthermore, Rushton's article itself is reliable, in three ways. According to Misplaced Pages's Verifiability definition, there are three types of sources be analyzed when judging reliability: (1) the work itself, (2) the writer, and (3) the publisher. Rushton's article appeared in a prestigious peer-reviewed journal, of the APA. This is a reliable source in the highest sense, as stated in Misplaced Pages's definition: "If available, academic and peer-reviewed publications are usually the most reliable sources, such as in history, medicine, and science." Furthermore, the authors are tenured professors at U.C. Berkeley and the University of Western Ontario, and their article cites numerous other reliable sources. Finally, your argument that Rushton is not a reliable source simply because people have tried to discredit him falls flat on its face -- that is an argument that he speaks a minority viewpoint. In order for you to claim that he is unreliable, you would need to provide actual evidence of things he has done or said that make him unreliable, not simply state that people disagree with him. Minority viewpoints are protected by Misplaced Pages's Neutrality principle -- one of the highest values that this encyclopedia holds. --Toomim (talk) 00:24, 15 December 2019 (UTC)

It is not that people like Philippe Rushton were in a minority view. They were simply not part of any accepted mainstream view of psychology. Anything published by him may very well be reliable in reporting his views, but they certainly aren't when describing scientific fact. It is not that some people disagree with him, it is that the scientific community disagrees with him. Onetwothreeip (talk) 01:19, 15 December 2019 (UTC)

@Toomim: How can my edit be removing or censoring the correlation when it explicitly (e.g. in the part I quoted) mentions the intelligence test score differences (between groups) in an article whose subject and title is "Race and intelligence"? The correlation is clearly mentioned and referenced in the introduction (which goes on to describe the fact that its causes are uncertain/debated and that researchers' opinions on that vary). And the article discusses the test score differences (i.e. the observed correlation between IQ scores and "racial" groups) repeatedly (it is the subject of the article). Given that, I do not understand what you think I was censoring. Skllagyook (talk) 01:08, 15 December 2019 (UTC)

@Skllagyook: No, the word "correlation" no longer exists in the text. You removed it. The intro has now censored all discussion of a correlation. The text you are referencing — which was there before your edits — actually casts doubt as to whether there is even a difference in test scores. A "difference" is not a correlation. It's a lot less than a correlation. The point of this topic is the correlation, and you have censored all speech about the correlation itself. Toomim (talk) 01:34, 15 December 2019 (UTC)

@Toomim: I am aware that I did not add the part mentioning group differences, but my edit retained it. An IQ score difference between groups (which is explicitly mentioned) is a correlation between group and IQ score - one clearly indicates the other. If there are general differences in test scores between groups/"races", then there is/would be a correlation between group/race and test scores. And I do not see any where in the introduction that casts doubt on whether there are score diferrences between groups; it states that those differences exist (the disagreement/debate described concerns the causes of said differences). Skllagyook (talk) 01:47, 15 December 2019 (UTC)

@Skllagyook: Thank you for this discussion. It is not my desire to attack you, personally, but only to come to an agreement on the text of the article. It sounds like you do actually acknowledge that there is a correlation. Can you agree to re-introducing the claim that "data shows a correlation between IQ and race" in the introduction? If so, then we can move on, and I would be happy to rescind any claims of you censoring the data. Toomim (talk) 01:57, 15 December 2019 (UTC)

You should propose what changes you want to make, and we can agree or disagree with them. It's completely inappropriate to use withdrawing attacks on anybody as a condition for getting an outcome you want. Onetwothreeip (talk) 02:12, 15 December 2019 (UTC)

The change is to state "A body of data shows a correlation between IQ and race" in the introduction. Toomim (talk) 05:01, 15 December 2019 (UTC)

It's up to you to tell us why this should be in the introduction. Onetwothreeip (talk) 06:06, 21 December 2019 (UTC)

References

1. Rushton & Jensen 2005. sfn error: no target: CITEREFRushtonJensen2005 (help)

@Toomim: I am in total agreement about the obvious flaw in this article. "Race and intelligence" fails to note the most critical point, upon which all other discussion, debate, etc. is premised: that there are differences in intelligence between races. How an article can start by discussing whether or not these are genetic in cause, whether race and intelligence are valid terms, etc. But the article rests on the most basic fact—that average intelligence varies between races—yet fails to clearly state it. How is that possible? What other articles are so contorted as to eliminate the central fact from the first sentences? The cart is not just going before the horse here, but the horse has been completely hidden from view. Just look at the sections below, including "group differences" more than once, along with "test differences"—and not "alleged group differences". Where are these differences clearly explained and quantified? This article is a total mess and absolutely needs an NPOV rewrite, starting with the introduction. I suggest starting with what is obviously the long-standing consensus view: that average intelligence differs between races. Then the actual controversies can be delineated. But until then, this is not a fair, neutral, or accurate article, and is way below Misplaced Pages standards. I'm a novice here—how do we go about fixing this? Elle Kpyros (talk) 20:30, 2 February 2020 (UTC)

It makes sense to open the article by establishing the meanings (or lack thereof) of "race" and "intelligence". As stated in the Group differences section, there's not actually scientific consensus that "there are differences in intelligence between races." We don't have a way to directly measure intelligence; what we have are tests designed to assess intelligence. It remains unclear whether group differences in intelligence test scores are caused by heritable factors or by "other correlated demographic variables such as socioeconomic status, education level, and motivation." To use your analogy, we have a fully-loaded cart but we're not sure which horse is pulling it. –dlthewave ☎ 20:48, 2 February 2020 (UTC)

@Dlthewave: I beg to differ. Your question is really whether to have this article at all, since "Race and intelligence" is premised on the concept of race and of measurable intelligence (similarly, Japan is a social construct, and people question the validity of nation-states, but not their existence, and so it's not necessary to mention that validity in the first sentence of the Japan Misplaced Pages article). Look at the first sentence in Racial inequality in the United States: "Racial inequality in the United States identifies the social advantages and disparities that affect different races within the United States." Indeed, the entire article never addresses the validity of "race". Even for a more controversial topic, like Race and crime, it's not the first priority: "Race is one of the correlates of crime receiving attention in academic studies, government surveys, media coverage, and public concern." Ditto for the possible causes of the disparities; in these and other articles, those are mentioned later. The first sentence needs to clearly state that there are differences in intelligence, and what those differences are. Then the order is more flexible when it comes to quantifying them, looking at explanations, etc. And it's certainly fine to mention that some question the underlying concepts, but absolutely not in the first sentences of the Summary—unless you want to edit the first sentence of every Misplaced Pages article on race. As for the validity of "intelligence", it's worth looking at the Summary for an article like artificial intelligence, which goes almost 400 words before delving into the meaning of the term. Lastly, it's important to note that "race" as a category isn't in fact really controversial; the controversy is whether it's a biologically valid group or simply a socially constructed one. But that distinction is irrelevant to the simple question of whether there are racial differences: physicists, prisoners, presidents etc. are all "socially constructed" categories, but no one suggests that investigating their intelligence (and differences between members and with other groups) isn't valid. Elle Kpyros (talk) 21:24, 2 February 2020 (UTC)

The lead summarizes the article. Where in the article is it stated that "there are differences in intelligence, and what those differences are"? –dlthewave ☎ 21:33, 2 February 2020 (UTC)

Seriously? There's this: "a review of the results of a total of 6,246,729 participants on other tests of cognitive ability or aptitude, found a difference in mean IQ scores between blacks and whites of 1.1 SD. Consistent results were found for college and university application tests such as the Scholastic Aptitude Test (N = 2.4 million) and Graduate Record Examination (N = 2.3 million), as well as for tests of job applicants in corporate sections (N = 0.5 million) and in the military (N = 0.4 million). According to the same study, East Asians have tended to score relatively higher on visuospatial subtests with lower scores in verbal subtests while Ashkenazi Jews score higher in verbal subtests with lower scores in visuospatial subtests. The few Amerindian populations who have been systematically tested, including Arctic Natives, tend to score worse on average than white populations but better on average than black populations." And this: "a 1995 report from the American Psychological Association, "Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns", acknowledging a difference between mean IQ scores of whites and blacks as well as the absence of any adequate explanation of it, either environmental or genetic." I could go on; whole sections of the article delve into whether the black-white gap is narrowing, and if so, by how much. The fact that there are gaps is not at all in dispute. Elle Kpyros (talk) 21:43, 2 February 2020 (UTC)

You're ignoring the sections of the article which explain why differences in IQ scores may be affected by many factors and can't be definitively attributed to differences in intelligence. –dlthewave ☎ 21:58, 2 February 2020 (UTC)

But surely the fact that differences in IQ scores exist must be mentioned regardless of what has caused these differences? The entire article rests on the premise that IQ scores vary across races, yet it fails to even mention it clearly in the lede, instead jumping straight ahead to the potential causes of these differences. I think Kpyros has got a valid point there. What's your objection to stating something which is already implied more clearly? _{J̅A̅M̅E̅S̅} 02:19, 3 February 2020 (UTC)

@Oldstone James: What on earth are you on about? We're discussing Ekpyros' proposal to mention that "average intelligence varies between races" in the lead , a premise that is not at all supported by the body of the article. Nobody has suggested including IQ scores; if that's something you support, please start a new discussion. –dlthewave ☎ 02:47, 3 February 2020 (UTC)

"IQ" instead of "intelligence" is obviously fine – the entire article is about intelligence as measured by IQ, as that's the only measurable "difference" addressed in the article. Is there any other "intelligence" measured in a different way that's discussed? And my point is the same: the correlation between race and intelligence as measured by IQ tests needs to be stated in the first sentence of the article. And given that the entire article is about IQ, perhaps the title of the article should be "Race and IQ"? That would make a lot more sense than having an entire article about differences in IQ and then claiming that those differences don't need to be upfront in the article because it's actually about "intelligence" distinct from IQ.

And trying to divorce IQ scores from intelligence is not a mainstream position. As stated elsewhere in Misplaced Pages: In a survey of 661 randomly sampled psychologists and educational researchers, published in 1988, Mark Snyderman and Stanley Rothman reported a general consensus supporting the validity of IQ testing. "On the whole, scholars with any expertise in the area of intelligence and intelligence testing (defined very broadly) share a common view of the most important components of intelligence, and are convinced that it can be measured with some degree of accuracy."Elle Kpyros (talk) 04:48, 3 February 2020 (UTC)

The argument that the lead should say something like "there are differences in intelligence between races" fails to account for WP:DUE. A simplistic statement that a certain group got a higher IQ test score than another suggests to gullible readers that the certain group is more intelligent. However, the reliable sources make it clear that the situation is much more complex than that, and in fact there may no group difference in intelligence at all. The lead should not sum up the complex situation in a way that misleads readers. Johnuniq (talk) 06:23, 3 February 2020 (UTC)

Hold on, let me get this straight: what you're trying to say is that, because some readers may interpret a sentence in a way that is debunked the very next sentence, the premise that the entire article rests upon should not be stated at all. Correct? _{J̅A̅M̅E̅S̅} 13:18, 3 February 2020 (UTC)

I agree with User:Oldstone that the correlation should be included in the lead. It seems absurd not to represent the data accurately, even if it can be interpreted in different ways. --- Asteuartw (talk) 21:39, 3 February 2020 (UTC)

An analogous article we could write

To explain what's wrong with saying that racial differences in intelligence are a fact, let me describe something analogous. Suppose we wanted to create an article Party affiliation and intelligence. We could probably find RS showing that in the US there are proportionally fewer Republicans than Democrats with advanced education, and that test scores in the "red" states are on average lower than in the "blue" states. After stating as fact that Democrats are on average more intelligent than Republicans, we could describe different opinions about whether it's due to environment (e.g., red states have fewer environmental controls, leading to greater pollution with adverse effects on fetal development) or to genetics. Would such an article be okay for Misplaced Pages? Of course not. Despite the scholarly veneer, it would be just an excuse for partisan trash-talking. In the same way, we must avoid making the article Race and intelligence into an excuse for racist trash-talking. NightHeron (talk) 15:34, 22 January 2020 (UTC)

Education != Intelligence. Please research the difference between Intelligence, IQ and Education before making comments on this subject. This is a basic distinction. The actual reason there is no article on "Party Affiliation and Intelligence" is that there is no clear correlation in the literature. It looks like you are not familiar with the scientific literature. Can you please let me know if I'm mistaken? Toomim (talk) 22:56, 22 January 2020 (UTC)

Have you read Kamin's The Science and Politics of IQ and Gould's The Mismeasure of Man? Until you do, you should not accuse other editors of being poorly informed on the subject. In reality, fetishizing IQ as supposedly a reliable measure of intelligence was very fashionable in the early- and mid-20th century. There is much less significance attached to IQ in our day. If you believe that the case for intellectual inferiority of Republicans is weaker than the case for intellectual inferiority of certain racial or ethnic minorities, you're entitled to believe that. But it's a belief, not a fact. NightHeron (talk) 23:51, 22 January 2020 (UTC)

Kamin claims that IQ is not heritable, but admits that it is a reliable measure, along with all mainstream science on intelligence. If you think IQ is not reliable, then your view contradicts the data, or perhaps you are mis-using the term "reliable". IQ tests are incredibly reliable. The same person will achieve the same range of scores over and over again, throughout their life. That is what "reliability" means. Toomim (talk)

I said IQ is not a reliable measure of intelligence. It's a reliable measure of something, but using a loaded word like intelligence for whatever it measures is peculiar and old-fashioned. As far as I'm aware, the intelligent people I know don't even know what their IQ is. IQ is used for certain restricted purposes, but is not widely considered to be an all-purpose measure of intelligence. The name "Intelligence Quotient" is a misnomer that dates to a century ago. Gould's The Mismeasure of Man discusses this issue at length. NightHeron (talk)

Well, I'm afraid that's factually incorrect. IQ scores correlate strongly with things such as job and education performance and average income, as is described on the article on IQ. It is the consensus of the scholarly community that IQ tests are valid assessments of general intelligence. Quoting from that same article, clinical psychologists generally regard IQ scores as having sufficient statistical validity for many clinical purposes. Also quoting from that article a summary of the results of a survey conducted among 661 educational psychologists, On the whole, scholars with any expertise in the area of intelligence and intelligence testing (defined very broadly) share a common view of the most important components of intelligence, and are convinced that it can be measured with some degree of accuracy. There is no debate as to whether IQ is a valid measure of intelligence; the debate is around to what extent it's a valid measure. _{J̅A̅M̅E̅S̅?} 01:23, 23 January 2020 (UTC)

It is not "factually incorrect" to dispute whether whatever IQ measures should be called "general intelligence." People who disagree with right-wing writers such as Jensen (who's cited again and again in the IQ article) -- for example, Stephen Jay Gould in Mismeasure of Man -- are not "factually incorrect."

IQ tests do measure the ability to take multiple-choice tests, which is an important skill in US schools because of the wide use of high-stakes standardized multiple-choice tests. So of course they correlate with educational success (and income). IQ tests are used in a limited way in the real world, mainly with children, but not in selection processes that are looking for high levels of functional intelligence, for example: universities selecting graduate students for their PhD programs, universities hiring professors, hospitals hiring doctors, NASA hiring engineers and space scientists, etc. NightHeron (talk) 02:11, 23 January 2020 (UTC)

Well, if you want to disagree, you'll have to disagree with 661 randomly selected qualified academics, which is pretty much the most accurate representation of the scholarly consensus that we can hope to get. Personally, I doubt that even Stephen Jay Gould disputes that IQ is a valid measure of intelligence, and you haven't yet provided a quote from the book that you mentioned which proves otherwise, but even if he does, I'd say that the opinions of 661 scholars - especially randomly selected ones - are worth more than the opinion of one, even if this one scholar may be highly respected.

Also, I'm sorry about how things are in the world, but, as of right now, education, job performance, and the like are our best determinants of intelligence, even if any given one of these may not be a good indicator. But, as a whole, the fact that all of these areas are largely determined by just one shared factor is pretty good evidence that this factor exists. Psychologists call this factor "intelligence". If you have a better way of scrutinising IQ tests, you should go ahead and propose it in a journal like Nature Intelligence. But, so far, the listed methods are our best bets.

Finally, your last statement about practical use in the world is also somewhat incorrect. I myself am applying for jobs in a relatively g-loaded field (mathematics & statistics), and almost every company that I've applied to had made use of what are effectively IQ tests, all of which were more than just screening. The same is true for the massive number of my aerospace and mechanical engineering friends (yes, those NASA engineers and space scientists). I appreciate that you don't think that IQ tests are of any importance in real life, which is probably to some extent true, because other factors like ability to work hard and creativity are arguably more important when it comes to success, but that doesn't mean that IQ isn't a valid measure of intelligence - it is. It just means that intelligence is simply not as important as you might think. _{J̅A̅M̅E̅S̅?} 03:23, 23 January 2020 (UTC)

Before speculating on Stephen Jay Gould's beliefs about whether IQ measures intelligence, perhaps you should read his book.

Intelligence is awfully important in many professions, such as lawyer, doctor, professor, scientist,... but no one has to take an IQ test to enter those professions. Multiple-choice tests such as IQ tests might be helpful for jobs that require mastering rote skills. Actually, many jobs (including lower-level engineering jobs) do not demand high-level thinking but only routine applications of rote knowledge. In fact, often the employer doesn't want an employee to think independently, since decision-making is not their job and independent minded actions could be disruptive. NightHeron (talk) 16:36, 23 January 2020 (UTC)

I'm not speculating about anything - I'm just saying that you haven't yet provided a source which shows that SJG did not believe that IQ is a valid measure of intelligence. It may very well be the case, but I'd be surprised if it were, because that would only prove that even such great academics as him can get it wrong on select occasion. I'm not going to read an entire book just to verify your claim about his views.

Also, let's please distance ourselves from our personal opinions and focus instead on the available evidence. Available evidence suggests that there is overwhelming consensus that IQ is a valid and reliable measure of intelligence to at least some extent. You may believe that IQ is only good for assessing rote skills and other related qualities, but reliable sources disagree.

Finally, if you want to discuss our personal stances on the matter, we can discuss it briefly, but bear in mind that Misplaced Pages is WP:NOTAFORUM, and that these opinions should have minimal impact on what actually goes in the article. Well, first of all, if you qualify aerospace engineers as "scientists" then, yes, scientists are partially recruited through IQ tests, even at a high level. I have second-hand (i.e. information from my friends and university - a prestigious university) experience about the matter. Secondly, IQ tests are in fact pretty bad at assessing rote skills for various reasons, including that most of the questions on some tests require no prior knowledge of the subject, that many people with a high IQ have terrible memory (my good friends being good examples), and that some academics in g-loaded fields such as maths can do barely any work but still succeed in their professions. For this reason, IQ tests are mostly used for jobs that largely require skills such as abstract reasoning, problem-solving skills, and other aspects of intelligence, and that in fact require barely any rote skills at all, while professions that require mostly a high proficiency in rote learning, such as doctors, lawyers, and professors in some topics do not usually make use of abstract cognitive tests similar to IQ tests.

By the way, if you want to discuss this further, would you mind continuing down on my talk page? Because if we discuss this ("this" referring to our opinions on the matter; of course, if you want to discuss SJG's views on intelligence, please do so here) here, it just crowds the already large body of text that constitutes this discussion, without bringing much substance to it. _{J̅A̅M̅E̅S̅} 17:37, 23 January 2020 (UTC)

As for your assertion — "Would such an article be okay for Misplaced Pages? Of course not." — I disagree. If there *were* a correlation supported by reliable sources, then it *would* be appropriate for Misplaced Pages. If you disagree, then please find a principle in Misplaced Pages's guidelines to cite. It sounds like you want to censor any topic that could engender racist trash-talking. But it's not our purpose here to censor controversial topics. Again, please find a principle to cite if you want to claim that this content should not be included in Misplaced Pages. Toomim (talk) 23:41, 22 January 2020 (UTC)

Please, please I beg of you -- don't tempt me to write an article citing RS showing that Republicans are dumber than Democrats. Despite your claim that such an article would not violate Misplaced Pages policy, what would happen is that all my work creating such an article would lead to AfD, and the whole effort would be a colossal waste of my time. NightHeron (talk) 00:03, 23 January 2020 (UTC)

That's not answering the question. Which Misplaced Pages principle does this article violate? Toomim (talk) 00:36, 23 January 2020 (UTC)

The article Party affiliation and intelligence would violate WP:NPOV, WP:OR, WP:PROMOTION to start with. But I was only joking -- I would never be tempted to try to use Misplaced Pages to promote the Democratic Party (or anything else). NightHeron (talk) 00:59, 23 January 2020 (UTC)

Note that we do, in fact, have an article about Religiosity and intelligence.

I think the reason Misplaced Pages should not have an article about party affiliation and intelligence is not because of any of the policies you mentioned, but because of the WP:Notability policy. While there are indeed some studies that have examined the relation between party affiliation and intelligence, there aren't very many, and this correlation isn't something extensively covered in secondary sources. Therefore, party affiliation and intelligence probably is not a notable topic. One the other hand, there are a moderate number of secondary sources that discuss the relation between intelligence and religiosity, and even more that discuss its correlation with race. Virtually every major academic book about human intelligence includes a discussion about racial IQ gaps and the debate over their cause. Aside from the Jencks and Phillips source I cited above, which is an academic book entirely about the topic of this article, Earl Hunt's Human Intelligence and Nicholas Mackintosh's IQ and Human Intelligence are two other textbooks that each devote a chapter to this topic. 2600:1004:B168:DC9:7414:C1C2:F65A:A173 (talk) 02:24, 23 January 2020 (UTC)

Thank you for pointing out the article Religiosity and intelligence, which has a much more balanced and modern treatment of the concept of intelligence than the article on IQ. See Religiosity and intelligence#Intelligence. NightHeron (talk) 03:19, 23 January 2020 (UTC)

Correlation != causation. In re the suggestion above it would be beneficial for the lead section to mention the existence of group differences may have the result of confusing the reader about the two. --K.e.coffman (talk) 00:31, 23 January 2020 (UTC)

I think this comment belongs in a different thread — but I agree with it. I'm in favor of being clear that the data shows a correlation, but that there is a debate over the most likely cause of this correlation. I believe that is the intent of the wording, but if it isn't clear, could you suggest an improvement? Toomim (talk) 00:37, 23 January 2020 (UTC)

The term "correlation" is used in this thread as well, as in The actual reason there is no article on "Party Affiliation and Intelligence" is that there is no clear correlation in the literature and IQ scores correlate strongly with.... Why do you think that my comment belongs elsewhere? --K.e.coffman (talk) 01:31, 23 January 2020 (UTC)

Ah, well I thought the comment about clarifying the distinction between correlation and causation would benefit the thread titled "Lead section: proposal", which was proposing a way to phrase the correlation data in this article. I think that thread is what we should be focusing on! Toomim (talk) 03:36, 23 January 2020 (UTC)

I think we should have a page on politics and intelligence, or intelligence and politics. There's quite a lot of studies on this by now. Some of them look at party votes and IQ scores, and find some differences (such as voters of national conservative parties being lower IQ), and others find only minor ones (e.g. US Republicans vs. Democrats, usually tiny gaps that differ depending on whether one adjusts for covariates or not). There's some other stronger links with preferences regarding taxation (smarter people support lower taxation) and various social liberalism policies (e.g. smarter people support gay marriage more). Some typical studies: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289611001425 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/pops.12230 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/per.2027 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886915002925 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1948550618800494. --AndewNguyen (talk) 05:44, 23 January 2020 (UTC)

History

Perhaps some editors to this page are unaware of the history of beliefs in the intellectual inferiority of certain races and ethnic groups. Such beliefs were fashionable in the US in the 1920s, and led to severe restrictions on immigration, especially of Jews and others from eastern and southern Europe. Many more thousands of Jews could have been saved from the Nazi gas chambers by fleeing to America if it hadn't been for those immigration restrictions.

Intelligence is a loaded term, since it includes much of what makes humans different from other animals. The word intelligence is hard to define, let alone measure in any meaningful way. As mentioned before, there's a brief discussion of this at Religiosity and intelligence#Intelligence. Intelligence is commonly understood to include critical thinking ability, the ability to solve complicated multifaceted problems, mental adaptability to new and unexpected situations, cleverness, inventiveness, and many other things. These are not measured by multiple-choice tests. In the US, IQ tests are not used for college admissions or graduate school admissions, and the trend is to make less and less use of any kind of multiple-choice tests (including SATs and GREs) because of evidence that they fail to measure many of the relevant mental abilities and also that they discriminate against the less privileged applicants, such as racial and ethnic minorities and first-generation college.

The idea of writing an article Party affiliation and intelligence that uses RS to show that Republicans are unintelligent was intended merely to show what's wrong with a pseudo-scholarly article that disparages a group of people. I was surprised that anyone took the suggestion of such an article seriously. Other than insulting Republicans, such an article would serve no useful purpose. And I don't think that insulting Republicans is a useful purpose either. NightHeron (talk) 16:40, 23 January 2020 (UTC)

Your reasons are irrelevant to Misplaced Pages policies. It's an encyclopedia, it should cover pretty much any topic people find worth talking about. It currently covers many sex taboo topics that many find distasteful, and is blocked in many countries for covering such materials (and also not following various state doctrines on political truths!). If you don't like a topic, then don't write or read about it. ^_^ AndewNguyen (talk) 21:22, 23 January 2020 (UTC)

You say it should cover pretty much any topic people find worth talking about. Not really. See also WP:Race and ethnicity. Online plenty of people find all sorts of pseudoscience, rumors, conspiracy theories, and especially racial supremacist beliefs to be very much worth talking about and spreading. That's not what Misplaced Pages is for. In particular, the notion that intelligence means IQ score or performance on some other standardized test is a highly controversial POV that should never be expressed in wikivoice. I briefly described the history of the politics of IQ (to use Kamin's phrase) because, just as it is particularly important to avoid defaming subjects of BLPs, it is also important to avoid NPOV violations that defame minority groups and feed the alt-right white supremacists. Please don't cry censorship in response to concerns about NPOV violation. NightHeron (talk) 22:56, 23 January 2020 (UTC)

Hit the nail on the head. Besides, I don't see NightHeron's point; the article already exists, and, unless they want to bring the article to AfD, we should work to make the existing article better and more representative. The fact that they don't believe the phenomenon of different ethnic groups having varying intelligence should be documented on Misplaced Pages doesn't change that.

Also, as I already informed NighHeron in one of my previous comments, the overwhelming consensus is that IQ tests (not all of which are simply multiple-choice questions, by the way, as NightHeron claims) DOES measure whatever definition is proposed for intelligence to at least some degree. Out of the listed items, for example, problem-solving ability and ability to adjust to new situations are both measured. And the rest are perhaps some examples of the shortcomings of traditional IQ testing, but they do not in any way change the fact that IQ is a valid and reliable estimate of intelligence. _{J̅A̅M̅E̅S̅} 22:53, 23 January 2020 (UTC)

Can you name any reliable measure of any of “critical thinking ability, the ability to solve complicated multifaceted problems, mental adaptability to new and unexpected situations, cleverness, inventiveness, and many other things” that does not correlate to IQ, or reflect g? Hölderlin2019 (talk) 11:30, 24 January 2020 (UTC)

No, because I am unable to name any reliable quantitative measure of those abilities at all. My understanding of the viewpoint of the scholars (such as Stephen Jay Gould and Leon Kamin) who rejected the fetishization of IQ is not that they wanted to replace it with another number, but rather that they didn't think that it makes sense to give a numerical value to intelligence at all. NightHeron (talk) 12:01, 24 January 2020 (UTC)

References

1. "Misplaced Pages is not".

For what it’s worth, I’ve been following this all week and I too favor reverting to the older, stable version. It reflects not only the consensus view here, but also the scientific consensus. Brian Barry Smith (talk) 14:19, 30 January 2020 (UTC)

Agree. The discussion has reached an impasse and it clearly favors reverting to the previous version linked at the beginning of the discussion. Brian Barry Smith (talk) 14:23, 30 January 2020 (UTC)

Let's go back to a previous version

Not sure when the current wars started, but I think we should revert to whatever version there was right before that. Probably lose some copy editing but we can add that back in. Then we can discuss each change that isn't minor and go where consensus leads. Maybe near this dif or ? Peregrine Fisher (talk) 02:04, 23 January 2020 (UTC)

Why these particular versions? --K.e.coffman (talk) 02:18, 23 January 2020 (UTC)

I opened up the history page, did a word search for "revert", and it seemed like those might have been ones that started some warring. I spent about 3 minutes on it, so there's probably a better one. Peregrine Fisher (talk) 02:47, 23 January 2020 (UTC)

The first link is to a June 2019 version and the other is to a Dec 2019 version. It's still not clear how the two were selected or what the benefit of going back them would be. --K.e.coffman (talk) 02:59, 23 January 2020 (UTC)

The current battles started in mid-December, when Toomim tried to add a mention of group differences to the lead section without consensus. This change led to an ongoing cascade of other non-consensus changes. I consider the last stable version to be the version from right before he tried to modify the lead section: I would support restoring that version, while we continue trying to reach a consensus about whether group differences should be mentioned there or not. 2600:1004:B168:DC9:7414:C1C2:F65A:A173 (talk) 03:02, 23 January 2020 (UTC)

A "stable version" is not a good enough reason to go back to a particular past state of an article. Please see Misplaced Pages:Stable_version#Inappropriate usage for an explanation. --K.e.coffman (talk) 03:14, 23 January 2020 (UTC)

Agreed with IP, we should revert to this version. While the fact that a revert is to a stable version doesn't justify said revert, this instance is a case of the page being put on a lock, where the lock should've been placed on the last stable version of the article in the first place. The motivation behind this policy is that there is not yet enough evidence that any of the edit-warring edits should be kept, and keeping some edits but not others would be arbitrary and unfair to the other party. _{J̅A̅M̅E̅S̅?} 03:29, 23 January 2020 (UTC)

I support going back to that version. I wouldn't call it a stable version. That may not even exist for this article. But at least it would allow us to take a breath from the latest wars and hopefully move forward based on consensus. Peregrine Fisher (talk) 03:41, 23 January 2020 (UTC)

I'm on board. Note that we already decided to roll back to a stable version and find consensus before making more edits. You can see the conversation leading to that above, initiated by AndrewNguyen, if you ctrl-F for "17 December 2019". Then 2600 came up with a really nice proposal, in the thread "Lead section: proposal". That thread, being a legitimate proposal to gain consensus, seemed to attract a lot of attention, and then more people started making more edits. Toomim (talk) 03:59, 23 January 2020 (UTC)

I also want to note: as far as I can tell, we do have rough consensus for 2600's proposal, if we include the edit to remove the phrase "based-on" (to address NightHeron's critique), then there are no outstanding dissenting counter-arguments that respond to the actual proposed text -- although a number of off-topic disagreements have been brought up. In other words, it is clear that some editors do not feel good about the proposal, but all objections have been addressed.

This should be enough to constitute consensus. If people are allowed to block consensus without giving a legitimate reason, then they can use this to sabotage the functioning of Misplaced Pages itself, by pretending that they are a part of the consensus process, but not actually contributing to it in good faith. In the end, Misplaced Pages's conflict resolution process requires individuals to be actively working towards consensus. Thus, I think we should only count dissent that comes with a legitimate reason attached, and by that measure, 2600's proposal has consensus. Toomim (talk) 04:18, 23 January 2020 (UTC)

I think we should keep this current discussion focused on whether to restore the stable version or not. After this question is resolved, we can start another talk page section about the lead section. I'm hopeful that we'll be able to reach a consensus to restore the stable version, so we shouldn't let this discussion get sidetracked with other issues. 2600:1004:B168:DC9:7414:C1C2:F65A:A173 (talk) 04:52, 23 January 2020 (UTC)

Sure. Thanks. Toomim (talk) 08:44, 23 January 2020 (UTC)

I agree with reverting to some prior version before this debacle. I second the proposal by "2600" IP of https://en.wikipedia.org/search/?title=Race_and_intelligence&oldid=929725498 right before Toomim's bold edit. Then we can discuss specific proposed changes from there. I also think the lock should remain in place to prevent more drive by warring. AndewNguyen (talk) 05:32, 23 January 2020 (UTC)

I'm fine with reverting per 2600's proposal while the exact wording of various bits is threshed out here. Hölderlin2019 (talk) 05:43, 23 January 2020 (UTC)

Not only is there no reason to revert back to any particular so-called "stable" version, no reason is being provided either. The article is currently stable and clearly does not need to be reverted. Changes can be made moving forward, and discussion can continue. Onetwothreeip (talk) 08:17, 23 January 2020 (UTC)

I agree. The proposal to restore an earlier stable version is an attempt to make major changes in the article without specific discussion of what they are. NightHeron (talk) 13:33, 23 January 2020 (UTC)

It's stable right now because it is locked Peregrine Fisher (talk) 16:40, 23 January 2020 (UTC)

I disagree. It's stable right now because it is better. I agree with NightHeron and Onetwothreeip. jps (talk) 19:36, 24 January 2020 (UTC)

How about we do an RfC vote, with two options. Go back to https://en.wikipedia.org/search/?title=Race_and_intelligence&oldid=929725498 or go with the current version, after the lock expires. Peregrine Fisher (talk) 20:44, 23 January 2020 (UTC)

I think we should also do an RfC vote for the edit that we were debating about. _{J̅A̅M̅E̅S̅} 21:04, 23 January 2020 (UTC)

According to https://en.wikipedia.org/Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment#Duration , a RFC typically ends after 30 days. The article's protection only lasts until January 29th, so I doubt a RFC would reach a decision quickly enough to decide which version to implement when the protection expires. 2600:1004:B11B:501F:D8D1:DACB:FE9C:8C9 (talk) 21:22, 23 January 2020 (UTC)

Never mind the RfC idea. Didn't realize it was so time consuming. Peregrine Fisher (talk) 22:52, 23 January 2020 (UTC)

• I don't think going back to a past version is a good idea even if the current version is perceived as arbitrary and unfair. It's better to look forward, rather than backwards. --K.e.coffman (talk) 01:19, 25 January 2020 (UTC)

The article's protection expires tonight, so I'd like us to try to reach a resolution about whether or not we're going to restore the stable version, so that we can hopefully avoid edit warring over this proposal. Here are the viewpoints editors have expressed in this discussion:

In favor of restoring the stable version: myself, Peregrine Fisher, Oldstone James, Toomim, AndewNguyen, and Holderin2019.

Opposed to restoring the stable version: Onetwothreeip, Nightheron, jps, and K.e.coffman.

There are six editors in favor of the proposal, and four against it. I'm not sure whether 60% percent support generally qualifies as a consensus, but I think it is sufficient in this case, because the changes that would potentially be undone were never supported by consensus in the first place. In particular, the justification for Onetowthreeip's recent major changes was rejected at the RS noticeboard, but he refused to accept the consensus at that noticeboard, and would not allow his changes to be undone. Based on the discussion at the RS noticeboard, as well as similar discussion on this talk page, there is a very strong case to be made that these recent changes have always been opposed by consensus.

The discussion at the RS noticeboard included two editors who haven't commented on this page, so I encourage either of them to participate in this discussion so that the consensus here can be clearer. @MaximumIdeas: @Loksmythe: do you have anything to add to this discussion? 2600:1004:B14D:3FDE:90DA:6A2A:FF4F:AD3D (talk) 11:47, 28 January 2020 (UTC)

Yes -- I commented before here on an edit which I think needed consensus. I would be in favor of reverting to the stable version and ensuring that we have consensus for each of the wanted edits from there. No doubt it can be made better but we should ensure that all the edits are fully thought through and have consensus among the many dedicated editors on this page. --MaximumIdeas (talk) 13:54, 28 January 2020 (UTC)

Returning to an earlier version is problematic because it would involve making changes some of which have not even been specifically discussed. Not being a very experienced editor, I don't even know if there's any way to get a diff displayed between an old version and the current version.

To get a true consensus before doing anything drastic, it would make sense to get more editors involved by means of an RfC, with notifications given to all four WikiProjects listed on this talk page. NightHeron (talk) 14:59, 28 January 2020 (UTC)

I am going to request protection be extended since people seemed to have opted out of the discussion. I'm also going to request IP-protection for the talkpage to encourage the IP-hopper from Tennessee to get an account. jps (talk) 20:13, 28 January 2020 (UTC)

That's not drastic; it's just the standard procedure for resolving edit wars - especially when the page is temporarily locked. Besides, if your argument is that reverting back to the stable version would entail making changes which have not been discussed, there is a simple solution: if the edit is clearly uncontroversial (e.g. a grammatical correction), go ahead and make it. Additionally, there's many more edits which have not been discussed that are present in the current version, so if you don't like such edits, you should support reverting back to the stable version. _{J̅A̅M̅E̅S̅} 23:38, 28 January 2020 (UTC)

Old version needs a lot of work, but I support rolling it back. -Ferahgo the Assassin (talk) 22:54, 28 January 2020 (UTC)

Including the new comments from Maximumideas and Ferahgo the Assassin, the opinions are now 8 to 4 in favor of restoring the stable version. That's a two-thirds majority, so I would tentatively say this proposal has consensus now, and twelve people giving their opinions is a much wider degree of participation than these discussions usually get. Hopefully the people who argued against restoring the stable version can accept that consensus opposes them in this case. 2600:1004:B142:966D:154D:EF5:42D2:98E5 (talk) 23:35, 28 January 2020 (UTC)

Hi, since you pinged participants of the RSN discussion, you should also ping contributors who have edited the page recently. Otherwise, it might come across as a selective notification. --K.e.coffman (talk) 23:40, 28 January 2020 (UTC)

I pinged them because the discussion here concerns some of the same changes that were previously discussed at the RS noticeboard, so this discussion is closely related to the earlier discussion at RSN. I'm not looking to notify random people who've commented on this page in the past, only the specific people who participated in the earlier discussion about these particular changes. 2600:1004:B142:966D:154D:EF5:42D2:98E5 (talk) 00:16, 29 January 2020 (UTC)

Especially if they're likely to agree with you. That's called canvassing. There's no true consensus yet. It's likely that many editors, even if they watchlist this page, don't want to waste time in endless arguments. A better procedure would be to have an RfC with wide, impartial notifications. Editors might be more inclined to participate in an RfC than in endless talk page back-and-forth because an RfC will hopefully end up closed by an admin with a definite resolution. NightHeron (talk) 01:32, 29 January 2020 (UTC)

The IP and others commenting with "revert to version ILIKE" are incorrect. Consensus is not a vote. Each edit needs to be justified as an improvement and a proposal to restore an earlier version needs to be justified with a specific explanation of its claimed superior wording or references. Given that there is no good explanation for a wholesale revert, it would be better to focus on content such as whether "whites" is better than "white people" and evaluate consensus on individual points. Johnuniq (talk) 02:03, 29 January 2020 (UTC)

Most of these specific changes and the justification for them were extensively discussed back when they were first made in December, first on this talk page and then at the RS noticeboard. (I linked to the RSN discussion above.) They were strongly opposed in both discussions, but Onetwothreeip refused to accept that consensus and would not allow his bold changes to be undone. That's how we got to the current situation. It isn't reasonable how you and other editors are demanding that we keep rehashing the same discussion over and over. Every previous discussion about these changes over the past month and a half has reached the same conclusion, and there's no reason to think rehashing the same discussion again is going to change that. 2600:1004:B142:966D:154D:EF5:42D2:98E5 (talk) 02:53, 29 January 2020 (UTC)

Please stop repeating WP:IDONTLIKEIT. This talk page is to discuss concrete proposals to improve the article. What text do you think should be added? Why is it an improvement? What about taking specific text and either justifying its inclusion or link to an earlier discussion showing consensus for it? Johnuniq (talk) 03:03, 29 January 2020 (UTC)

The earlier discussion on this page happened lasted three weeks, from December 16 to January 5. Do you really expect everyone else to rehash a three-week-long discussion that reached a conclusion less than a month ago? That's completely unreasonable.

In the earlier discussion, aside from Onetwothreeip himself, the only editor who argued that Onetwothreeip's changes were an improvement was Aquillion, while myself, Toomim, AndewNguyen and Bpesta22 all argued that they made the article worse and/or should be undone. When consensus opposed him on this page, Onetwothreeip presented the justification for his changes at the RS noticeboard, where his arguments were additionally opposed by two other editors. If you want to see my and others' comments on the specific changes, and why those changes were opposed by consensus, just read the earlier discussions. 2600:1004:B142:966D:154D:EF5:42D2:98E5 (talk) 03:30, 29 January 2020 (UTC)

In summary, you have no specific text in mind and cannot provide a link to justify anything. The only objection appears to be IDONTLIKEIT. Johnuniq (talk) 03:56, 29 January 2020 (UTC)

Stop playing games. The specific version we're thinking of restoring was linked at the beginning of this discussion, and I've told you what the discussions are in which subsequent changes were opposed by consensus. I already posted a link to the RSN discussion. I can't directly link to the discussion about these changes that happened on this page, because that discussion started in the middle of a talk page thread that was mostly about something else, which is why I gave the discussion's dates instead. If you refuse to look at these earlier discussions, that isn't my problem. 2600:1004:B142:966D:154D:EF5:42D2:98E5 (talk) 04:18, 29 January 2020 (UTC)

A few edits to the lede

I made three changes: (1) I deleted the word "intelligence" before "test scores," since there is sharp debate about whether or not the test scores measure intelligence (as acknowledged later in the lede) and so they should not be called "intelligence test scores" in wikivoice; (2) I deleted the word "non-circumstantial" before "evidence" since it's unclear what circumstantial evidence as opposed to non-circumstantial evidence means; (3) I deleted the last part of the sentence concerning speculation about the possibility that evidence might some day be found, per WP:CRYSTAL (see: Although currently accepted scientific paradigms may later be rejected, and hypotheses previously held to be controversial or incorrect sometimes become accepted by the scientific community, it is not the place of Misplaced Pages to venture such projections.) NightHeron (talk) 00:35, 30 January 2020 (UTC)

Let's talk about these two versions and find a consensus. https://en.wikipedia.org/search/?title=Race_and_intelligence&type=revision&diff=938251365&oldid=938247079 At a minimum, it messes up the grammar, with "intelligence" removed it makes not sense to say people disagree about "race" and "intelligence". Peregrine Fisher (talk) 01:11, 30 January 2020 (UTC)

Before we devote a lot of discussion to the lead section, I think we ought to finish deciding whether to restore the older version from December. We should resolve that first because if we restore that version, doing so will also involve undoing any recent changes to the lead.

Between the discussion above, and the earlier discussions in which the major changes made in mid-December were were opposed by consensus, I think there is sufficient consensus to restore the earlier version. However, I'd like this change to be handled in a way that avoids another edit war, if possible. 2600:1004:B16D:D752:2520:4B9D:9617:9E7E (talk) 01:29, 30 January 2020 (UTC)

I was going to restore that version (and be reverted). But I believe the vote counting came out about even, so I didn't. Maybe I counted wrong. Peregrine Fisher (talk) 01:55, 30 January 2020 (UTC)

No, the proposal to restore the older version ended up receiving more support. This is the final count:

In favor of restoring the older version: myself, you, Oldstone James, Toomim, AndewNguyen, Holderin2019, MaximumIdeas, and Ferahgo the Assassin.

Opposed to restoring the older version: Onetwothreeip, Nightheron, jps, K.e.coffman, and Johnuniq (probably, although his argument was just that he didn't believe the proposal had consensus.)

The final count was either 8 to 4 in favor or 8 to 5 in favor, depending on whether Johnuniq is counted among the editors opposed to it. If we also include editors who commented in the earlier discussions about the major changes that were made in December, there's one additional editor who supported those changes (Aquillion), and two additional editors who argued against them (Bpesta22 and Loksmythe), so in that case the numbers are 10 to 5 or 6 in favor of undoing the changes. 2600:1004:B16D:D752:2520:4B9D:9617:9E7E (talk) 02:18, 30 January 2020 (UTC)

RfC about lede of Race and intelligence

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Should IQ be labeled "intelligence test scores" in wikivoice, and should the view that it is "at least plausible that hard evidence for a genetic component will eventually be found" be included in the lede? NightHeron (talk) 01:45, 30 January 2020 (UTC)

That's two questions, so not sure and yes Peregrine Fisher (talk) 01:56, 30 January 2020 (UTC)

I'll say no and no if you guys are willing to keep the old version and move forwards based on discussion here. Otherwise yes and yes until we really start editing based on the discussion here. Peregrine Fisher (talk) 03:16, 2 February 2020 (UTC)

Was this supposed to be a joke? RFCs are intended to gain consensus among the larger community based on specific issues. This is not a vote. Grayfell (talk) 04:37, 2 February 2020 (UTC)

The first paragraph of the lede is the most important part of the article, so it's especially important to avoid bias there. For that purpose I made three changes that you reverted without responding to any of the reasons I gave. Those reasons were: (1) I deleted the word "intelligence" before "test scores," since there is sharp debate about whether or not the test scores measure intelligence (as acknowledged later in the lede) and so they should not be called "intelligence test scores" in wikivoice; (2) I deleted the word "non-circumstantial" before "evidence" since it's unclear what circumstantial evidence as opposed to non-circumstantial evidence means; (3) I deleted the last part of the sentence concerning speculation about the possibility that evidence might some day be found, per WP:CRYSTAL (see: Although currently accepted scientific paradigms may later be rejected, and hypotheses previously held to be controversial or incorrect sometimes become accepted by the scientific community, it is not the place of Misplaced Pages to venture such projections.) NightHeron (talk) 02:08, 30 January 2020 (UTC)

I think this RFC was started in the wrong category. Most of the sources discussing race and intelligence are publications in the fields of psychology, anthropology and genetics, so of the categories listed at Misplaced Pages:Requests for comment, the correct one would be "Maths, science, and technology". 2600:1004:B16D:D752:2520:4B9D:9617:9E7E (talk) 03:23, 30 January 2020 (UTC)

• Should IQ be labeled "intelligence test scores" in wikivoice I suggest "IQ test results", should the view that it is 'at least plausible ... Not in the lead, since it is contentious and does not represent the scientific consensus (speculation about genetics here is a separate topic to general IQ statistics IRT demographics). —PaleoNeonate – 15:08, 30 January 2020 (UTC)

"IQ test results" is just about fine, although I personally don't see any problems with the current version, which conveys more information. There are many tests which approximate intelligence, which are not limited to IQ testing. For example, SATs have been shown to have some correlation with common measures of intelligence. So the current version is certainly better, but I would also be fine with your proposed version.

As to the removal of the last sentence, I don't it's warranted, given that 1) the position that genetics might have some influence is mainstream, and that 2) the position that genetics likely plays a role in explaining the differences, while not mainstream, is notable enough to be mentioned in the lede. _{J̅A̅M̅E̅S̅} 17:03, 30 January 2020 (UTC)

• should the view that it is "at least plausible that hard evidence for a genetic component will eventually be found" be included in the lede? No, it isn't a good summary of the "Research into the possible genetic influences on test score differences" section (which is where the statement occurs in the article). In the article the speculation appears to be based only on Hunt (2010), so I don't think it's WP:DUE to call out that one "maybe someday" line in the lead. Schazjmd (talk) 17:57, 30 January 2020 (UTC)

Should IQ be labeled "intelligence test scores" in wikivoice, it is fine to do this. While a few fringe researchers (e.g. Ken Richardson) do not think IQ tests measure intelligence, the overwhelming majority of the field think they do. should the view that it is 'at least plausible ... Since many experts believe genetics explain some part of the various group gaps known, this formulation is fine with me. The evidence for these claims can be found in the various surveys and mainstream books already cited on this talk page. There's only three surveys of IQ researchers, and a few similar ones of other more distant experts. AndewNguyen (talk) 11:32, 31 January 2020 (UTC)

• For the first, do not use IQ test results as a proxy for "Intelligence" without sourced context. This would be sloppy and severely over-simplifies a contentious point. Applying racialist categories and then attempting to accurately test these categories in a controlled way is a niche activity with a huge number of pitfalls, to say the least. Therefore, "the field" is not a neutral representation of the scientific mainstream. There is a walled-garden of academics, only some of whom have relevant qualifications. These are the people who study race and intelligence the most. This should not be mistaken for the mainstream, so WP:FRINGE applies here.

For the second no. Vague, loaded speculation doesn't belong in the lede. This doesn't reconcile with the academic consensus on "race", nor on "intelligence". It is pretty easy to find academics who support this perspective. It is also easy to find academics who reject this perspective. It's even easier to find those who dismiss the underlying assumptions, of which there are far, far too many. Grayfell (talk) 22:53, 31 January 2020 (UTC)

The reliable sources do not call IQ test scores as "intelligence test scores", they call them IQ test scores. As for the potentially WP:CRYSTALBALL of saying there may in the future be evidence of a racial hierarchy, we could only possibly agree to that if we see an exact proposal in context, but likely not, and certainly not without knowing why or how, as in this proposal. Onetwothreeip (talk) 23:08, 31 January 2020 (UTC)

No to both. they are called "IQ test scores." And per WP:CRYSTAL, we shouldn't speculate on what might happen in the future. Adoring nanny (talk) 13:40, 1 February 2020 (UTC)

No and No - As others have pointed out, they're called IQ tests, not intelligence tests. Speculation is also inappropriate, especially in the lede. I'm also concerned about the frequent use of "debate" which seems to be a weasel word used to imply serious academic disagreement on the topic. –dlthewave ☎ 02:45, 2 February 2020 (UTC)

Yes and I'm not sure. I'll explain my reasoning:

IQ tests are the most widely-used type of intelligence tests, but they aren't the only type of intelligence test in existence, or the only type discussed in this article. The article's current wording is kind of unclear about this, but when the sources that it cites discuss group differences in average test scores, they are also discussing the Armed Forces Qualification Test and the Woodcock–Johnson Tests of Cognitive Abilities in addition to IQ. (See page 412 in Earl Hunt's textbook.) The Armed Forces Qualification Test is a type of intelligence test, but it isn't an IQ test. Thus, it would be misrepresenting the sources cited in the article for the lead to state that the research it's discussing is about IQ exclusively. "Intelligence test" is a broader term that encompasses both IQ tests and the other types of test.

The last sentence of the first paragraph reflects what a lot of secondary sources currently say, but it may not be accurate for much longer. Russell Warne's upcoming book, which is scheduled to be published this fall, will present the case that the Lasker et al. study constitutes hard evidence for a genetic component to racial IQ gaps, because this study found that when racial identity is controlled for, both IQ and polygenic scores correlate with biogeographic ancestry as measured with genetic tests. (In other words, this study controlled for the social aspect of race, and found that when the biological component of race is isolated, it still correlates with two measurements of intelligence.) If we go with the advice of WP:CRYSTAL and base the lead on what secondary sources currently say, the last sentence of the first paragraph is accurate. But on the other hand, considering how difficult it is to get a consensus to update anything in this article, maybe it's better to remove that sentence now while we have the opportunity, so that we don't have to have this discussion again later in the year. 2600:1004:B168:DFFA:5CEA:D916:2237:DCFC (talk) 09:35, 2 February 2020 (UTC)

It seems unclear that Russel Warne is notable enough as a researcher to justify using the aforementioned work of his (when it is published) as an authority on this subject). Searching for him seems to turns up little except for his personal blog (and the second link below). Warne's work does not seem to be much mentioned/discussed in other mainstream research on the topic. Russel Warne appears to have a pre-existing history of arguing on the hereditarian side of the debate. See:

https://russellwarne.com/2020/01/22/35-mitos-sobre-la-inteligenica-humana/

https://www.researchgate.net/scientific-contributions/2026630501_Russell_T_Warne

Also, the Lasker et al. study mentioned (porporting to find evidence of a genetic basis for racial IQ gaps), which Warne may mention, is apparently by several authors (such as Bryan J. Pesta, John Fuersr, and Emil O. Kierkegaard) affiliated with Openpsych, a journal/outlet that has been described as considered fringe or "academically dodgy" for several reasons, and which may have also published the study. See:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/OpenPsych

and:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/OpenPsych

Skllagyook (talk) 15:46, 2 February 2020 (UTC)

As was previously determined here, the thing that matters when evaluating a source is the quality of the publisher, not the identity of the author. (And especially not the identities of other authors that the source in question is citing.) Warne's book was accepted for publication by Cambridge University Press, so when it's published it will be a high-quality source that the article should cite. And the sentence saying it is "at least plausible that hard evidence for a genetic component will eventually be found" probably will need to be removed in light of that source, if we don't remove it pre-emptively. 2600:1004:B122:FC8D:9C32:5F11:7F5E:8FD6 (talk) 18:59, 2 February 2020 (UTC)

Misplaced Pages:Reliable sources#Definition of a source. We must take the reliability of the author into account, mot only the publisher. Onetwothreeip (talk) 20:01, 2 February 2020 (UTC)

Being published in a reliable source does not necessarily merit coverage on Misplaced Pages, though; the viewpoint would also have to meet our due weight policy. "Misplaced Pages aims to present competing views in proportion to their representation in reliable sources on the subject." Can you demonstrate that our current coverage of the hereditarian viewpoint in the body and lead complies with this requirement? –dlthewave ☎ 20:02, 2 February 2020 (UTC)

I think the central problem with the article is that it's out of date, so that it gives undue weight to older sources relative to newer ones on both the hereditarian and environmental side. I don't perceive this problem as giving undue weight to any particular theory, but it may have that effect in individual sections of the article, due to the state of research having shifted from what it was whenever those sections were written. The ways that the article is out of date are so pervasive that they tend to obscure whatever other problems may also exist. If the article could be updated to reflect the current state of research, that will make it much easier to evaluate whether or not there's an overall NPOV problem with the entire article. 2600:1004:B11E:E654:D915:3A5E:B89D:2D0F (talk) 02:42, 3 February 2020 (UTC)

• No and no. Per Adoring nanny, IQ tests are called IQ tests and a general article like this should not speculate about possible future findings. Misplaced Pages articles follow secondary sources and do not reflect what bleeding-edge research shows or might soon show. Johnuniq (talk) 06:32, 3 February 2020 (UTC)

I went back to that old version

It was 8 to 5/4. Seems like the 8 had more policy based arguments. So I'd call that a consensus. Peregrine Fisher (talk) 02:36, 30 January 2020 (UTC)

Boy, just reading it now, I gotta say it reads a lot better. None of that disjointedness that keeps getting done to the lead lately. Peregrine Fisher (talk) 02:37, 30 January 2020 (UTC)

What's happening now is very similar to what happened in December. On this page and at the RS noticeboard, the major changes and the justification for them were opposed by consensus, but they kept being repeatedly restored by editors who refused to engage with the discussion in either place. That's why the changes stayed in the article for the past month.

I haven't yet figured out how one is supposed to deal with this situation whenever it happens. If the article is being edited in a way that completely disregards the discussion on the talk page, how can it be possible to resolve anything, aside from by edit warring? 2600:1004:B16D:D752:2520:4B9D:9617:9E7E (talk) 02:59, 30 January 2020 (UTC)

The way YOU deal with this is you create an account, and you revert. 3 reverts are allowed per person per day. I can already see that it's just me, so me reverting a second time isn't going to fix anything. If it is really 8 to 5, then 24 reverts beats 15 reverts. If only 1 of the 8 cares enough to revert, and 5/5 are willing to revert on the other side, then 5 wins. WP has many pages saying this isn't how WP works, but it is. Peregrine Fisher (talk) 03:26, 30 January 2020 (UTC)

If I decide to make an account, it isn't going to be for the intentional purpose of participating in an edit war. Also, if the article gets reverted 15+ times in the space of 24 hours, that seems like it would just result in the article being locked again.

I really hope you aren't right that that's the only way to resolve this type of situation. Can any of the other experienced editors who've been commenting here (such as Oldstone James) confirm whether this is accurate? 2600:1004:B16D:D752:2520:4B9D:9617:9E7E (talk) 04:22, 30 January 2020 (UTC)

Totally. We absolutely should not edit-war, as the most it will do is get the page locked again and some editors (likely Peregrine, with that approach) blocked. However, if some edits continue to be pushed without consensus by one or two editors, it is fine to revert them once or twice, but if they don't stop, we should simply file a complaint at ANI. The chances are, they will probably stop or get blocked, and then we can resolve the issue peacefully without edit-warring. _{J̅A̅M̅E̅S̅} 16:45, 30 January 2020 (UTC)

Redent. Misplaced Pages breaks eggs to make omelets. Just imagine trying to work on Israel/Palestine articles. It's not a bunch of non partisans trying to summarize scholarly papers! In my opinion, you should follow the rules, and also enforce them on any article your watching

For instance, I fixed up the prose on a book article American Dirt. Someone reverted it for non policy based reasons. https://en.wikipedia.org/search/?title=American_Dirt&diff=937303904&oldid=937303270 I then reverted that. https://en.wikipedia.org/search/?title=American_Dirt&diff=937447720&oldid=937447263 If I hadn't edit warred, that copy edit would be lost to time. It seems to be sticking for now. Peregrine Fisher (talk) 05:45, 30 January 2020 (UTC)

And in my head, I was like "they're going to revert". Then I was like "fuck, am I going to revert a second time?". It was stressful because I don't like to revert multiply times. That is the wiki life on certain articles though. Peregrine Fisher (talk) 05:50, 30 January 2020 (UTC)

3 reverts are not allowed per person per day

That's a misunderstanding of WP:3RR which says "Even without a 3RR violation, an administrator may still act if they believe a user's behavior constitutes edit warring, and any user may report edit warring with or without 3RR being breached. The rule is not an entitlement to revert a page a specific number of times." When editors try that they frequently are blocked. Just as they can get blocked if they do a 4th revert 25 hours after the 1st. Doug Weller talk 09:04, 30 January 2020 (UTC)

I forget exactly the rules. I believe it's that if the editors who don't like WP policies revert more than me, then I lose. Correct? Peregrine Fisher (talk) 10:15, 30 January 2020 (UTC)

I think you know that's not true. And shows a lack of good faith. Doug Weller talk 16:45, 30 January 2020 (UTC)

Doug Weller, as an admin, can you acknowledge there's a problem with what Volunteer Marek is doing here? We all just spent a week discussing whether to restore the earlier version, and while not everyone supports that proposal, it clearly has more support than keeping the current version. The discussion had participation from 13 people, and 8 of them supported restoring the earlier version. After an extensive discussion has reached that conclusion, I don't think a single user should have the right to overrule that outcome because he personally doesn't think the old version satisfies NPOV policy. He's done this twice. The other time was two weeks ago, after the previous discussion about the major changes that were made in December reached the same conclusion as the current discussion, but the outcome of that discussion also was undone by Volunteer Marek.

When the article is edited in a way that completely disregards the discussion on the talk page, that seems to create a situation where the only way to resolve disputes over the article is by edit warring. If you want to prevent edit warring over this article, surely you must disapprove of people acting this way. 2600:1004:B119:8942:B5F2:D894:CC3:9BAE (talk) 12:21, 30 January 2020 (UTC)

When you accuse other editors of acting improperly, you also invite scrutiny of your own conduct, in particular, whether your notification of selected editors from an earlier discussion at RSN constitutes canvassing. Canvassing by an IP editor is not permitted, just as canvassing by an editor with an account is not permitted. NightHeron (talk) 13:06, 30 January 2020 (UTC)

I'm not acting as monitor here, WP:AE is the appropriate venue if anyone thinks an editor has violated the sanctions. Doug Weller talk 16:45, 30 January 2020 (UTC)

No shit! I didn't know this page had arbitration rules! That's awesome. Let's try that. Peregrine Fisher (talk) 17:11, 30 January 2020 (UTC)

He was notified of the discretionary sanctions here: However, thus far he's only reverted against consensus twice. Oldstone James suggested above that we should try making the edit one or two more times, and then file a report if he keeps doing the same thing, and I agree that's the best course of action. 2600:1004:B12F:E70A:C94B:DD7B:2911:E62E (talk) 17:33, 30 January 2020 (UTC)

Wikipedia_talk:Arbitration/Requests/Enforcement#Race_and_intelligence Peregrine Fisher (talk) 17:16, 30 January 2020 (UTC)

Misplaced Pages:Arbitration/Requests/Enforcement#Race_and_intelligence Last one was in wrong place. We'll see if this correct. Peregrine Fisher (talk) 20:23, 30 January 2020 (UTC)

Why in the world didn't you delete your mistaken edit? Your second one had the same problem - you need to read the headers of pages first, the reason you were reverted there was "AE is not a general noticeboard. If requesting enforcement, please see instructions above for how to file a request." You need to bring specifics including diffs. Doug Weller talk 10:01, 31 January 2020 (UTC)

Compromise

Honestly, I just had a read over the past version and compared it to the current version; on the whole, the current version reads perfectly fine to me. The only issue that I have with the current version is a small number of edits which were forced in by means of edit-warring and failed to gain consensus.

In light of this, I propose that we keep the current version but add in bits and pieces which were previously removed without consensus. If our edit gets reverted, then we leave it be or discuss it on the talk page. If it sticks - great, we are one step closer to resolving the issues that led to the proposal of reverting back to a stable version in the first place.

How does this sound? _{J̅A̅M̅E̅S̅} 18:23, 30 January 2020 (UTC)

Your revisions were problematic and not "uncontroversial":

1. The sentence However, attempts to replicate studies evincing significant effects of stereotype threat have not yielded the same results gives an interpretation in wikivoice of the status of research on stereotype threat. Any such interpretation must be attributed to a source and must be balanced by the viewpoints of other researchers. For editors to interpret the research is OR.

2. Putting in that there's a debate over whether and to what extent there are genetic causes contradicts the following sentence, which says that there is no evidence of genetic causes.

3. As I noted earlier, the terms circumstantial evidence and non-circumstantial evidence are unclear, because, as far as I'm aware, they have no meaning in the sciences (although circumstantial evidence is a well-known term in criminal investigations). If by "circumstantial evidence" you just mean a correlation, then that's no evidence at all. Is the fact that test scores on average are higher in Connecticut than in Mississippi "circumstantial evidence" of a genetic difference between residents of the two states? NightHeron (talk) 21:59, 30 January 2020 (UTC)

@Oldstone James: You were in such a hurry to revert that you wouldn't even wait a few minutes to read my detailed explanation of why your edits are problematic. Your previous edit summary asked for an explanation of why they're problematic, and I responded to that. Judging from the tone of your latest edit summary, you seem to think that edit-warring is a game. It's not. It's a serious violation of Misplaced Pages policy. NightHeron (talk) 22:07, 30 January 2020 (UTC)

Why are we having this discussion?

We've had to listen to a few very dedicated discussion participants say that the talk page has decided to revert to a particular old version of the article. Can anybody provide any reasons for this? For example, I don't understand why anybody would want to change "black people" and "white people" into "blacks" and "whites" respectively. I would really like to know what is so good about this previous version that we have editors threatening to edit war for it. Onetwothreeip (talk) 19:58, 30 January 2020 (UTC)

Let's go back and then talk about changing white people to whites. Peregrine Fisher (talk) 20:50, 30 January 2020 (UTC)

We've already had this discussion multiple times, but since a few people weren't around when it was explained before, I guess I'll explain it again.

Until December, the article was mostly structured as a debate between two controversial sources: A 2005 paper by Rushton and Jensen published in Psychology, Public Policy and Law, and Nisbett's 2009 book Intelligence and How to Get It. (Some people don't believe that Nisbett's book is controversial, but see the reviews listed in the Intelligence and How to Get It article, as well as Hunt's comments on Nisbett in his textbook Human Intelligence, "Nisbett's extreme statement has virtually no chance of being true"). This was a slightly strange way for the article to be structured, but it still gave a decent overview of the debate. Rushton and Jensen are controversial for being excessively certain that group differences have a genetic component, while Nisbett is controversial for his tendency to ignore studies that contradict his belief that psychological traits are extremely malleable, so by being biased in opposite directions, these two sources sort of balanced each other out.

What Onetwothreeip did in December is remove most of the citations to Rushton and Jensen, while keeping those to Nisbett. He also removed citations to a large number of secondary sources, such as textbooks by Hunt and Mackintosh, that discussed the Rushton and Jensen paper. His justification for this change was that any source that discusses Rushton and Jensen's ideas is by definition unreliable, even if it's a textbook from Oxford or Cambridge University Press. No one else agreed with him about this, either on this talk page or at the RS noticeboard, but he refused to accept this consensus.

Aside from how the justification for this change was decisively rejected, there are other problems with the change. The way the article is now, it includes Nisbett's replies to Rushton and Jensen without including the arguments that he's replying to. The removal of the textbook sources that are attempting to provide a neutral overview of the debate is especially egregious, because those are exactly the types of sources that the article ought to be citing as much as possible. Most of the material that he removed had been in the article for 5+ years, and had been stable until last month.

I'll also reiterate something else I've said before, which is that if someone wants to replace most of the citations to Rushton/Jensen and Nisbett with citations to newer sources (such as those that I mentioned here), and turn the article into less of a back-and-forth between opposing sources, I'm all for it. But such a change should be made with consensus one section at a time, and thus far nobody has yet volunteered to do that. A blanket removal of the sources on one side (as well as the textbooks that discuss those sources), while keeping those on the other side, is the wrong approach to take for updating the article, especially when this change has been opposed by consensus every time it's been discussed.

We've had two conversations about these changes, first a month ago when they were first made, and more recently over the past week, and both of them reached the conclusion that Onetwothreeip's changes should be undone. I've summarized the outcome of the earlier discussion, but I really would like to avoid having to repeat this argument a third time. @Oldstone James: you initially supported restoring the earlier version, but more recently said that you don't see any problem with the newer version, so I'd like you in particular to understand what I've explained here. 2600:1004:B14B:9556:5827:15ED:F8D3:D26A (talk) 22:50, 30 January 2020 (UTC)

The most pernicious lie written above is that I have ever said that Cambridge University Press is unreliable. I have never said this. What I have said is that Philippe Rushton and Arthur Jensen were themselves unreliable, for reasons I have discussed at length and am more than willing to discuss further, and have not seen anybody attempt to refute. What they had to say about race and intelligence is not reliable information and should not be presented to readers as though that was potentially correct information. I rightly removed much of the information that suggested their views were potentially valid, as they are not considered so among mainstream researchers.

If editors want to write about the criticisms of Richard Nisbett and his works, they are more than able to do so on the articles about them. If they have particular objections to those works being used in this article, they should make those objections clear and propose changes. The fact that someone wrote a book that some people have criticised is a bizarre argument to keep the highly inappropriate content by Philippe Rushton and Arthur Jensen, and of course not at all sufficient. Neither is that a sufficient argument to insert speculation into the article about an inherent racial hierarchy of intelligence. Onetwothreeip (talk) 23:28, 31 January 2020 (UTC)

I linked to your thread at the reliable sources noticeboard in my post above, so anyone else can see for themselves what arguments you were making there, as well as how those argument were received by other editors. 2600:1004:B14C:C919:E950:81A9:B8D8:510 (talk) 23:50, 31 January 2020 (UTC)

As well they should. I agree with the participants that Cambridge University Press is a reliable source, and that works by Philippe Rushton are sources that are reliable to describe what his views were. The RSN discussion that you have referred to several times now has never stated that Philippe Rushton was a reliable source on psychology, and have not contradicted me on that. Onetwothreeip (talk) 00:05, 1 February 2020 (UTC)

Protected edit request on 31 January 2020

This edit request has been answered. Set the |answered= or |ans= parameter to no to reactivate your request.

In References section:

• In Cronshaw 2006 reference, remove incorrect |year=2004, which is throwing an error because it is different than (the correct) |date=September 2006.
• The Notes and Bibliography pseudo-headers should be changed to use proper level 3 section titles; e.g., '''Notes''' → ===Notes===.

—— 01:05, 31 January 2020 (UTC)

 Done — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 11:14, 31 January 2020 (UTC)

Revert crypto-white supremacism.

I suggest reverting the crypto-white supremacism contained in this edit after protection ends: .

That is all.

jps (talk) 17:37, 31 January 2020 (UTC)

So I suppose it makes no difference to you that we just discussed this change for a week, and 8 of the 12 other participants in that discussion disagreed with you about it? I'm honestly starting to find it a little amusing how reluctant certain people are to accept that consensus opposes them. 2600:1004:B14C:C919:E950:81A9:B8D8:510 (talk) 18:30, 31 January 2020 (UTC)

Misplaced Pages should not be promoting white supremacism. Full stop. It doesn't matter how many editors think that it should. It shouldn't. jps (talk) 18:47, 31 January 2020 (UTC)

Let me put it another way. These particular changes have been discussed twice, first in December and again more recently, and in both discussions the consensus was that the stable version of the article (the version that's in the article currently) should be restored. If you think the article should be edited in a way that disregards the consensus on the talk page, that will eliminate the ability to resolve disputes the way they're supposed to be resolved, so that the only remaining way to resolve them is by edit warring. You know perfectly well that there are more editors who support the current version than who oppose it, so if you try to restore your preferred version against consensus, it will inevitably cause another edit war. Is that really what you want? 2600:1004:B14C:C919:E950:81A9:B8D8:510 (talk) 19:30, 31 January 2020 (UTC)

I must say that if I thought this article was crypto white supremacy, I'd ignore our policies and edit war to destroy this article till I was blue in the face. I don't agree, but I do understand. Peregrine Fisher (talk) 20:22, 31 January 2020 (UTC)

Bingo. So editors like yourself who disagree with this evaluation should either deal with the objection head-on or ignore it at their own peril. jps (talk) 22:30, 31 January 2020 (UTC)

There has simply not been a consensus to make those particular changes. Where has the argument been made to change "black people" to "blacks", for example? The argument has simply not been made, let alone any consensus to support that. More still, there haven't been arguments made to support the validity of work by Philippe Rushton and others associated with the Pioneer Fund and the International Society for Intelligence Research. Yet we are constantly being told that 9 out of 10 or 8 out of 12 or 7 out of 9 or 10 out of 13 talk page participants support these changes. Repeating that there is a consensus doesn't make it a consensus. If there was a consensus on some particular change, those who are attempting to make edits on that basis would be showing that consensus rather than talking about it, but they won't even justify the edits. Onetwothreeip (talk) 00:00, 1 February 2020 (UTC)

I am referring to this discussion. The earlier version of the article we were thinking of restoring was linked at the beginning of that discussion, so everyone knew exactly what was being proposed there.

The editors who supported restoring that version were: myself, Peregrine Fisher, Oldstone James, Toomim, AndewNguyen, Holderin2019, MaximumIdeas, and Ferahgo the Assassin. The editors who were opposed to restoring it were: you, Nightheron, jps, K.e.coffman, and (possibly) Johnuniq. That's 13 editors in total, and 8 who supported undoing your changes.

Seriously, what are you playing at here? You were one of the participants in that discussion, so you know exactly what its result was, but now when others discuss its outcome you're acting like you have no idea what we're talking about. 2600:1004:B14C:C919:E950:81A9:B8D8:510 (talk) 00:21, 1 February 2020 (UTC)

Which changes are you saying they support? Onetwothreeip (talk) 01:04, 1 February 2020 (UTC)

Please stop asking me the same questions over and over. Several other editors (Corker1, BullRangifer, MrX, etc.) have complained about your tendency to waste other editors' time with a WP:IDHT attitude, so I know I'm not the only person who thinks this behavior from you is disruptive. The only reason I've been replying to you is that when you forget or misrepresent the outcomes of earlier discussions, as you did in this case, I don't want editors who haven't read those earlier discussions to be confused by your posts. 2600:1004:B14C:C919:E950:81A9:B8D8:510 (talk) 05:29, 1 February 2020 (UTC)

Then at least show us where you have answered that question. Onetwothreeip (talk) 05:53, 1 February 2020 (UTC)

There is no room for doubt that Jensenism is a form of white supremacy. In his 1969 article, Jensen opposed compensatory education programs for African American children because he thought that those children are genetically inferior. At the time and ever since then, mainstream scholars have known that there is no evidence that supports Jensen's disparagement of black children. The main argument Jensen, Herrnstein, and others made was to extrapolate from genetic differences between individuals to genetic differences between groups -- a logical fallacy that any undergraduate psych student should be able to poke holes in. Like other white supremacist views, it is fringe.

Misplaced Pages has a clear policy on how to handle fringe views: WP:FRINGE. It is important to follow that policy, because so many people rely on Misplaced Pages, and spreading fringe views does real damage. Climate change denialism, which is especially influential in the centers of power in the US and Brazil, results in policies that accelerate the climate crisis. Quack cures and fringe medical theories cause people not to get proper treatment. Herrnstein's 1974 article in the Atlantic Monthly (which at the time was read by many school teachers) essentially told teachers that their African American students were uneducable. Misplaced Pages policy on fringe theories is that they should be covered in a way that makes it clear that they are fringe theories, and that there is no legitimate question about whether they might be valid. NightHeron (talk) 00:36, 1 February 2020 (UTC)

I agree. I took a look at the article, and I found it depressingly bad. It's full of tit-for-tat back-and-forth, without properly highlighting what is mainstream and what is fringe. It's entirely unclear if this is supposed to be a history of the idea of "racial" difference of IQ, or a discussion of the substance of the debate. The article is also incredibly US-centric. From a global perspective, neither "white" nor "black" are well-defined or even coherent groups. Melanesians are as as dark as most Africans - heck, after a summer on the beach I'm darker than Obama, and I probably have more Neanderthal than recent African DNA. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 01:02, 1 February 2020 (UTC)

Would it make sense to take this article to AfD, along with notifying the widest possible number of editors on all relevant talk pages and WikiProjects? This article has been locked down twice in the last two weeks. Trying to keep the article from pushing fringe views has been a time sink for editors, and the discussion has been dominated by a small number of editors who seem determined to have Misplaced Pages give credence to white supremacist views. An article cited at the top of this talk page from the Southern Poverty Law Center mentions this article as an example of the influence of the alt-right on Misplaced Pages. The article is also an example of the effects of systemic bias, that is, the under-representation among active editors of women, people of color, and people from the Global South. Is there any real need for an article titled Race and intelligence? NightHeron (talk) 10:57, 1 February 2020 (UTC)

AfD? Probably not as I doubt the community would agree to deletion in spite of WP:TNT being a pretty reasonable argument. WP:AE might be reasonable. If we can't solve things that way, and arbitration case might be in order. There are certainly alt-right accounts active at this page and we should deal with that. jps (talk) 17:04, 1 February 2020 (UTC)

Sure, you know the community much better than I do; I've been editing less than 2 years. Two arguments in support of AfD might also be (1) there's already a much better article that covers the topic, namely Scientific racism, and (2) the title of this article can be read as suggesting that race is related to intelligence, which already prejudices the matter in favor of the fringe view. NightHeron (talk) 18:15, 1 February 2020 (UTC)

Hmm, I think we should open a discussion about this page being a WP:POV Fork of scientific racism. If it is, you are indeed correct that is a reason to delete. jps (talk) 21:17, 1 February 2020 (UTC)

I don't think it's exactly a POV fork (it was created in January 2002), but strange things show up in the history of this article. For example, 1152 edits (9.1% of all the edits to this page over 18 years) were made between 2003 and 2006 by User:Quizkajer, which seems to have been a single-purpose account; they stopped editing -- or stopped editing under that account -- in June 2007. It would be interesting to know whether a very small number of users were responsible for most of the content that gives credence to white supremacist theories. NightHeron (talk) 23:46, 1 February 2020 (UTC)

White supremacism is FRINGE, but the idea that race and intelligence (whatever those words might mean) might be related is not. Race-and-intelligence is a subject of speculation, research and often vicious dispute, a controversial subject that has been disfavored for many reasons, but as an idea it has never been "fringe" in the sense of being refuted and abandoned by the mainstream. The mainstream understanding is that race exists (just not in the simplistic ways frequently held up for ridicule); that there is a substantial genetic component to individuals' intelligence; that the distribution of genes for almost any trait can and does vary between populations; and that it is very much possible, but not currently proved or disproved, for the genetic components of intelligence to be among the genetic characteristics that are distributed differently in different groups, like the genes involved in height or hair. All that is common sense, and attempts to refute it have a bad track record of being discredited, including Gould's notorious book, the Lewontin fallacy, and a large fraction of the academic literature of anthropology and psychology that is now understood to suffer from Replication Crisis and extreme politicization.73.149.246.232 (talk) 21:56, 5 February 2020 (UTC)

The idea of a POV Fork is a functional one. It doesn't matter if the article was created a long time ago, if it is now functioning as a POV fork, it is a POV fork. There are a number of documented white supremacist editors who have dedicated much of their time towards skewing this and similar articles. Reading through Misplaced Pages:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Race and intelligence should probably be required reading, although the focus in that case was a bit overly-personal and there was a sidestepping of the fundamental issues of off-wiki coordination with certain useful idiots who happened to get caught up in the drahmaz. There are still accounts who remain banned from Misplaced Pages including at least one that is from roughly the same area where the currently active IP-hopper on this page. jps (talk) 20:00, 2 February 2020 (UTC)

If one of you guys would jump through the arbcom hoops, I think that would be great. They might say that your side is correct, and I can remove this page from my watchlist! Peregrine Fisher (talk) 20:15, 1 February 2020 (UTC)

The article is badly in need of a major update. If the edit warring to restore non-consensus changes eventually stops, I'd like to have an organized discussion about how to update the article one section at a time, and you're welcome to participate in that. 2600:1004:B14C:C919:E950:81A9:B8D8:510 (talk) 01:12, 1 February 2020 (UTC)

Should the article use the terms "white people" and "black people", instead of "whites" and "blacks"?

In the discussion above, Onetwothreeip argued that this article ought to use the terms "white people" and "black people", instead of "whites" and "blacks". Onetwothreeip's changes have been broadly opposed by consensus (I summarized the outcome of the discussion in my comment here), but we haven't had a discussion about this particular issue of terminology, so I'll start one.

In everyday usage the terms "white people" and "black people" probably are the most common terms, but in sources that discuss this article's topic, the terms "whites" and "blacks" are more common. This is true regardless of what perspective or viewpoint the sources are taking. I've recently looked through several major secondary sources that discuss this article's topic, written from a variety of viewpoints, and here's my analysis of the terms used:

• Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns, the report published by the American Psychological Association in response to the controversy surrounding The Bell Curve, uses the terms "whites" and "blacks".
• Roth et al's paper "Ethnic group differences in cognitive ability in employment and educational settings: A meta-analysis" uses the terms "whites" and "blacks".
• Rushton and Jensen's paper "Thirty years of research on race differences in cognitive ability" uses the terms "whites" and "blacks".
• Richard Nisbett's book Intelligence and How to Get It uses the terms "whites" and "blacks".
• Earl Hunt's textbook Human Intelligence uses the terms "whites" and "African Americans" or "blacks".
• Nicholas Mackintosh's textbook IQ and Human Intelligence uses the terms "whites" and "blacks". The book includes a note on page 332 about why it uses these terms; Mackintosh explains that he uses the term "blacks" instead of "African Americans" because he is not only discussing people in the United States.
• Nisbett et al's paper Intelligence: New Findings and Theoretical Developments uses the terms "whites" and "blacks".
• James Flynn's book Are We Getting Smarter? uses the terms "whites" and "blacks".

I'll emphasize again that I deliberately chose sources representing a variety of viewpoints. The only one of these sources that argues that group differences in average IQ have a large genetic portion is the Rushton and Jensen paper, while Hunt's textbook argues that some genetic contribution is likely, but that there is not enough data to know its size. The other six sources all either think the cause is environmental, or are agnostic about the cause.

I think this article ought to reflect the terminology used in the source literature that it is citing, rather than the terms that are most common in everyday usage. I'd like to know whether others agree or disagree. For the past few days this talk page has been dominated by the relatively small group of editors who supported Onetwothreeip's changes, but I'd especially like to hear from the larger group of editors who have been opposed to those changes, and whether or not they feel differently about this question of terminology. 2600:1004:B168:DFFA:5CEA:D916:2237:DCFC (talk) 22:25, 1 February 2020 (UTC)

but we haven't had a discussion about this particular issue of terminology, so I'll start one. There has not been any consensus around particular changes. The only majority has been around "stable version" or "previous version", without discussing the particular changes. Onetwothreeip (talk) 23:21, 1 February 2020 (UTC)

• Black people and white people - Misplaced Pages is written in its own house style, not the style of the sources. We should use the commonly-used terms. –dlthewave ☎ 04:42, 2 February 2020 (UTC)
• I prefer ‘black people’ (or possibly ‘African-Americans’, where applicable, which is the case for most of the studies we mention) and ‘white people’; ‘blacks’ and ‘whites’ is jarring to the ears of most readers, and my own. That said, if a consensus begins to form in the other direction (to reflect the sources), my sentiments shouldn’t be cited against it. Hölderlin2019 (talk) 02:17, 3 February 2020 (UTC)

I vote for keeping whatever is most common in the academic literature. This seems to be the shorter terms. AndewNguyen (talk) 21:26, 5 February 2020 (UTC)

A change to the lede

The fact that differences in IQ scores between various population groups exist is clearly uncontroversial in the scholarly community, and I don't think I need to justify this, as most editors seem to agree with this valuation, anyway (besides, a comprehensive survey on the issue has been linked further up on the talk page which corroborates this). These differences are also the core pillar that the entire article rests on, and most of the article focuses on the possible causes of these differences. However, bizarrely, this fact is not even mentioned in the lede as it stands. Not only that, but it is actually implied by the sentence some debate as to whether and to what extent differences in intelligence test scores instead of clearly stated; if not a POV or summary issue, this is pretty clearly an error of style. For example, it would inappropriate to say that "Arsenal play in the Premier League" before specifying that Arsenal are a football team, as it would quite obviously be difficult for a reader previously unfamiliar with Arsenal to read.

Furthermore, if we take a look at the sister article History of the race and intelligence controversy, it is stated straight away that since the beginning of IQ testing around the time of World War I, there have been observed differences between average scores of different population groups..., and it is then explained that the causes of these differences are not well-understood. I propose that we implement a similar sentence in this article. My version would be something like: Since then, there have been observed differences between average IQ scores of different population groups, but whether and to what extent these differences reflect environmental factors as opposed to genetic ones, as well what the definitions of "race" and "intelligence" are, and whether they can be objectively defined, is subject of much debate. What do we think of this? _{J̅A̅M̅E̅S̅} 23:09, 5 February 2020 (UTC)

OK This change is fine with me, I don't feel strongly about it. AndewNguyen (talk) 06:52, 7 February 2020 (UTC)

Looks pretty good. This lead needs work so that it summarizes the article. I think that would make it closer to a summary. Peregrine Fisher (talk) 23:20, 5 February 2020 (UTC)

Absolutely agree. The entire article references differences in intelligence test scores, but the summary never establishes those differences. In the interest of clarity, I'd suggest something more direct and to the point, and using separate sentences for separate ideas:

Since the beginning of intelligence testing, some racial groups have consistently scored higher than others. The amount and cause of racial gaps in IQ scores are the subject of much debate, especially whether and to what degree the they're due to environmental and/or genetic factors. Also debated is whether "race" and "intelligence" have objective meaning, and if so, how to define them.

Elle Kpyros (talk) 23:28, 5 February 2020 (UTC)

I like that one better. Getting closer to an impartial summary of the article. Peregrine Fisher (talk) 01:47, 6 February 2020 (UTC)

I hadn't read much of this, so I read the first few paras of the body. It's extremely well written. I bet this article had an amazing lead at some time in the past. Maybe when It was trying to be a featured article. Peregrine Fisher (talk) 01:58, 6 February 2020 (UTC)

Here's the FA candidate version. WP was a lot less censored back in the day! https://en.wikipedia.org/search/?title=Race_and_intelligence&oldid=18607122 Peregrine Fisher (talk) 02:42, 6 February 2020 (UTC)

I've finally figured out when this information was removed from the lead. It was removed in this edit on 18 March 2018. Looking at the talk page archives around that time, there was no discussion of the change, so evidently there never was a consensus for it. The explanation given in the removal's edit summary also is based on an invalid reason: the assumption that the existence of group differences in average test scores is a "fringe" viewpoint. As Oldstone James explained, seeking to understand the causes of these differences is the entire foundation of the race and intelligence controversy.

The user who made that removal, Mpants at Work, is now banned from Misplaced Pages. If his change had been discussed and supported by many other users, the fact that the person who made it is banned wouldn't matter. But considering this is a controversial change that was supported by only one person, it might be significant that that one person is no longer part of the site.

I've argued before that the lead should include this information, and the wording I suggested was "While tests have broadly shown differences in average scores average scores between racial or ethnic groups". I would be fine with either that wording, or whichever of the other proposals here is best supported by consensus. 2600:1004:B14D:ADC1:584:563C:C19A:970F (talk) 15:33, 6 February 2020 (UTC)

We can certainly discuss the wording, however your procedural arguments don't hold much water. Unless the article was under a special restriction at the time (it wasn't), changes to the lead or any part of the article did not require prior discussion or consensus. WP:BOLD edits are encouraged and the lack of reversion or talk page discussion at the time shows that it stood unchallenged. Furthermore, MPants was an editor in good standing at the time, and the fact that they were later banned for unrelated reasons does not invalidate their previous work. Let's discuss this content on its own merits. –dlthewave ☎ 16:07, 6 February 2020 (UTC)

Many large changes are made to articles that never get any discussion. This does not mean we can just show up some day and demand to revert to an arbitrary historical version. However, we can of course discuss to go back towards the prior version. 'MPants' seems a very biased editor from their history of editing. It is best to stick to academic sources for such charged topics. For this article, I think it should just be permanently locked so that these drive-by edits don't go unnoticed until months later. AndewNguyen (talk) 18:46, 6 February 2020 (UTC)

This discussion has gotten somewhat off-track. When I discovered that the editor who removed this information is now banned, and that it was removed without any discussion, I wanted to mention those things, but dlthewave and AndewNguyen are right that this has limited relevance to the present situation. What we should do in the present is discuss which of the wordings proposed here is best. Can we come to a decision about that? 2600:1004:B167:19E3:34AD:BD59:62C3:ED3C (talk) 05:39, 7 February 2020 (UTC)

@Oldstone James: I think your changes to the lead are generally an improvement, but there is an issue with this edit. The way that the lead was before, its last two paragraphs gave the history of the race and intelligence controversy from the early twentieth century up through the 1990s. Arthur Jensen's 1969 paper and The Bell Curve did not represent the scientific consensus, but they were major events in the history of this controversy. But now, the lead section gives the early history of the controversy without describing its modern history.

Perhaps the best solution is to rewrite the lead after the first paragraph. The lead section should be a concise summary of the rest of the article, but historical information only makes up a small portion of this article, so the lead appears to be giving that aspect of the topic undue weight. 2600:1004:B127:E072:E1FC:1B03:A596:DDEB (talk) 16:46, 7 February 2020 (UTC)

I agree; I think the lede section past the first paragraph should be rewritten, but at this point I am short on ideas. For now, I just removed the WP:FALSEBALANCE part so that the intermediate version isn't misleading. My final edit also addressed your concerns about the completeness of the described history: as of now, only the summary of how this area of research was inaugurated and the summary of the current stance of the topic are present in the article, which is the format that many lede sections take (i.e. how X started vs how X is now). _{J̅A̅M̅E̅S̅} 16:54, 7 February 2020 (UTC)

Semi-protection

El C, it seems that semi-protection was removed from this article after you full-protected it here. This is not an article that should be without semi-protection.

No need to ping me if you reply. Flyer22 Frozen (talk) 02:12, 7 February 2020 (UTC)

Rename to Race and IQ scores

Or similar? Race and intelligence test scores? Race and IQ? Current title is probably most accurate, but it pisses off a lot of editors. Might be able to reduce drama with a clever rename. Peregrine Fisher (talk) 04:37, 7 February 2020 (UTC)

Using the term IQ would only help if the article stopped saying there was any correlation between it and intelligence. HiLo48 (talk) 04:53, 7 February 2020 (UTC)

If we're going to consider renaming the article, I think someone should look through the talk page archives to see whether there's an existing consensus about the article title. Individual sources have been added and removed over the years, but the article's title has stayed the same for the 18 years that it's existed, so it's highly probable that this question has been discussed before. 2600:1004:B167:19E3:34AD:BD59:62C3:ED3C (talk) 05:15, 7 February 2020 (UTC)

Using the word "race" at all is highly problematic, especially given that our own (relevant) article says "race is not intrinsic to human beings but rather an identity created, often by socially dominant groups..." It's an ill-defined term. Using it in an article title will attract the racists (we know this to be true) and not help anyone learn anything. HiLo48 (talk) 05:20, 7 February 2020 (UTC)

Population groups and intelligence? Self identifed race and intelligence? Peregrine Fisher (talk) 05:56, 7 February 2020 (UTC)

@Peregrine Fisher: Before we devote a lot of time to discussing what the article should be titled, could you please look through the talk page archives and see whether there's an existing consensus about the title? I would expect that there probably is. If you don't want to look, I can do so myself, but you're the person who's expressed the greatest interest in making sure the conclusions of those earlier discussions aren't forgotten about. 2600:1004:B167:19E3:34AD:BD59:62C3:ED3C (talk) 06:48, 7 February 2020 (UTC)

I don't think going to the old consensuses will help us that much. The people who want to nuke this article from orbit don't care. Let me say it differently. It's too much work going through the old talk pages for me, and how much I think they will help. I'd love to read greatest hits like "Top 5 discussions about article name" or "top 5 discussions about Jensen's reliability" or whatnot just for fun, though. I asked a question at help desk because of something you said Misplaced Pages:Help_desk#Is_editing_as_an_IP_more_anonymous_than_editing_from_an_account? Peregrine Fisher (talk) 16:00, 7 February 2020 (UTC)

The word "differences" and something more specific than "intelligence" alone are needed for better precision. I would replace Intelligence with "psychometry", "intelligence testing" or (if necessary) "IQ", and Race with "race differences" or possibly "group differences". The page will be more locatable in search engines if "psychometry" is avoided, and "group differences" is a weasel-phrase unless something other than race differences is discussed on the page, so for the page as currently constituted: "Race differences in intelligence testing" or maybe "Race differences in IQ". 73.149.246.232 (talk) 06:22, 7 February 2020 (UTC)

Psychometry or psychometrics are broader concepts than intelligence testing. In older texts, the entire area of IQ research was called psychometrics, this term is now used to refer to the broader field that is concerned with psychometrics as in the study of measurement of psychological variation. So, it would be very misleading to adopt this older use of the term. --AndewNguyen (talk) 06:48, 7 February 2020 (UTC)

No more misleading than the current title. HiLo48 (talk) 07:18, 7 February 2020 (UTC)

Oppose I don't think this is a good idea. Consider an analogue proposal to rename pages about religion and personality to religion and personality scores, or religion and scores on NEO PI-R test. These are not sensible. While some people criticize construct validity of personality tests, and thus would perhaps object to the current titles, these are a very small minority of researchers. The same is true for intelligence tests, which have broad acceptance among researchers in psychology, and especially those who study individual differences. The surveys on this topic are already given on the page, and every textbook covers the broad agreement among researchers about features of intelligence. This kind of renaming seems to bend over backwards to a fringe view who does not accept the consensus positions on construct validity (so, a few people like Ken Richardson). AndewNguyen (talk) 06:45, 7 February 2020 (UTC)

Calling the views of those who disagree with you "fringe" is pretty much a personal attack. HiLo48 (talk) 07:20, 7 February 2020 (UTC)

Oppose IQ scores measure intelligence and intelligence is the WP:COMMONNAME and intelligence is what the sources are ultimately and specifically referring to.--Literaturegeek | T@1k? 07:29, 7 February 2020 (UTC)

"IQ scores measure intelligence..." I disagree. They measure the ability to do IQ tests. Given that our own article on the subject struggles to provide anything like a precise definition of intelligence, and doesn't even mention IQ tests, you have made a rather dramatic claim there. HiLo48 (talk) 07:47, 7 February 2020 (UTC)

You might disagree as much as you'd like, but that won't change the scientific consensus that IQ tests are valid and reliable estimates of intelligence. _{J̅A̅M̅E̅S̅} 16:18, 7 February 2020 (UTC)

The points you raise were understood and answered about 100 years ago at the start of psychometric research. As I wrote to you in the AfD thread (thanks for posting the link there that led me to this discussion of the title) these types of linguistic or philosophical objections aren't all that meaningful and make no difference to the scientific, political or other aspects of the discussion. The short story is that results of different types of IQ tests normalized on different populations have extremely high correlation with each other (typically about 90%), as correlated as the scores of the same person taking the same test on different days. So IQ measures something that exists independently of the test. Furthermore, this weird measurable thing happens to correlate better than any other thing we can (easily, noninvasively) measure to stuff we would expect to depend on intelligence, like academic performance and education level, as well as more biological measures like brain size and reaction time. Even more curiously, 100 years and many attempts have not succeeded in finding any other measurable quantities ("multiple intelligences", emotional intelligence, etc) that are not detected by IQ tests but have a similar IQ-like ability to quantify capacities that would be considered as part of intelligence. All of this means that IQ is good enough as an approximate quantification of the vague and multidimensional idea of intelligence, especially if we don't ask for strong conclusions about individuals but speak only of populations on average (e.g., chemistry PhD's on average have much higher IQ than the general population). 73.149.246.232 (talk) 07:15, 8 February 2020 (UTC)

Oldstone James, how are you defining reliability and validity? I ask because, like this 2016 "Psychology: Themes and Variations" source, from Cengage Learning, page 281, states, "In the jargon of psychological testing, reliability refers to the measurement consistency of a test. A reliable test is one that yields similar scores upon repetition. Like other types of measuring devices, such as a stopwatch or a tire gauge, psychological tests need to be reasonably reliable (Geisinger, 2013). Estimates of reliability require the computation of correlation coefficients, which we introduced in Chapter 2. Do IQ tests produce consistent results when people are retested? Yes. Most IQ tests report commendable reliability estimates. In comparison with most other types of psychological tests, IQ tests are exceptionally reliable. However, like other tests, they sample behavior, and a specific testing may yield an unrepresentative score. Variations in examinees' motivation to take an IQ test or in their anxiety about the test can sometimes produce misleading scores (Duckworth et al., 2011; Hopko et al., 2005). The most common problem is that low motivation or high anxiety can drag a person's score down on a particular occasion. Although the reliability of IQ tests is excellent, caution is always in order in interpreting test scores."

The source goes on to speak of validity, noting that a test being quite reliable doesn't automatically equate to a test's validity. For example, it states, "Do intelligence tests measure what they're supposed to measure? Yes, but this answer has to be qualified very carefully. IQ tests are valid measures of the kind of intelligence necessary to do well in academic work. But if the purpose is to assess intelligence in a broader sense, the validity of IQ tests is questionable."

A number of reliable sources have characterized IQ tests as flawed. And issues with them are also noted in the "Validity of race and IQ" section. I'm someone who has consistently scored high on IQ tests, but I've also noted issues/flaws with the testing. Flyer22 Frozen (talk) 22:21, 8 February 2020 (UTC)

@HiLo48: I don't think the word 'race' is too problematic in the title, albeit imprecise. Even when you use 'population', 'ethnic group' or some other word in its place, you are still talking about biological human subgroups. Although 'race' is imprecise, and comes with baggage, it alludes to a similar thing. The section about defining race itself could use editing for better explanation about its debated use ('race as subspecies', 'race as population', 'race as social construct'). Human sub-populations can be demarcated, especially in 2020 with modern genomics, and do have numerous important physiological differences on average (for example, group-specific adaptations to pathogens, diet, cold, heat, humidity, aridity, free-diving, UV radiation and high altitude). 'Intelligence' is far more poorly defined, even among individuals, and there's little accepted evidence yet about specific physiological or genetic causes for it in healthy persons. All measurements of it are from imprecise tests, like IQ, and these are highly skewed by so many environmental impacts like culture, location, illness and socioeconomics, to name but a few. 2605:8D80:668:39E9:DB8E:11E8:912F:2CD0 (talk) 07:59, 7 February 2020 (UTC)

"Human sub-populations can be demarcated, especially in 2020 with modern genomics..." They can, but they very rarely are. And IQ tests are also used very infrequently across the whole world. The chances of those who've had their genes tested also being IQ tested, in enough different places to make this testing meaningful, is negligible. HiLo48 (talk) 08:12, 7 February 2020 (UTC)

IQ and race already redirects here. Of course, you could change the word race to something less loaded too. Like Heritability. Heritability of IQ, yes - that would be an article worth writing. Hmm. -- Sirfurboy (talk) 08:09, 7 February 2020 (UTC)

Oppose The article presents other methods than just IQ testing that estimate intelligence, including Nobel Prize attainment and educational achievement. Furthermore, it is the overwhelming scientific consensus that IQ tests are reliable and valid measurements of intelligence, so this specification is unwarranted. _{J̅A̅M̅E̅S̅} 15:59, 7 February 2020 (UTC)

Could you point out where "Nobel Prize attainment" is mentioned in the article? –dlthewave ☎ 04:37, 8 February 2020 (UTC)

Do we like these new changes?

I think we should undo them and discuss. Personally, I do not think they are an improvement. https://en.wikipedia.org/search/?title=Race_and_intelligence&diff=939824890&oldid=939822978 Peregrine Fisher (talk) 23:45, 8 February 2020 (UTC)

Why? –dlthewave ☎ 23:47, 8 February 2020 (UTC)

WP:IDONTLIKEIT. Onetwothreeip (talk) 23:58, 8 February 2020 (UTC)

We just had a discussion last month about how it's disruptive to try to make large changes to this article by edit warring. Being bold is acceptable, but after Dlthewave's changes were undone they shouldn't have been restored multiple times. The earlier discussion was specifically about Onetwothreeip trying to do the same thing in an earlier sequence of edits (and he has also been criticized for doing the same thing on other articles), so he has no excuse for repeating the same behavior again.

Since you asked what's wrong with these changes, though, I'll provide one example. This edit removed the statement that the publication of The Bell Curve revived the public debate over race and intelligence, and changed the section title from "The Bell Curve debate" to "Mainstream Science on Intelligence". While it would be better to cite a secondary source instead of citing The Bell Curve itself, it's completely uncontroversial that this book's publication revived the race and intelligence debate in the 1990s, and this is also mentioned in the History of the race and intelligence controversy article. Thus, there's no reason to remove that statement. The new title of that section also is misleading, because Mainstream Science on Intelligence was only one of several responses to the controversy over The Bell Curve, and not even the most prominent response. (That distinction belongs to Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns.)

That's one example of why these changes are not an improvement. However, I can't explain the problem with every change, because these recent edits removed over a dozen citations all at once. As previously happened in December, this involved removing a large amount of material that had been in the article for years. It isn't reasonable to make that many changes to long-established content at once, and then demand a consensus opposing each individual change before it can be undone. 2600:1004:B11A:7B56:3CC6:3B68:B761:EAB6 (talk) 01:47, 9 February 2020 (UTC)

IDON'TLIKEIT is when you don't have policies, guidelines, globabl consensus, and local consensus on your side. I have all those things backing my edits. You have none of them. Peregrine Fisher (talk) 01:55, 9 February 2020 (UTC)

2600, we do actually need a source stating that The Bell Curve sparked a debate. The mainstream view, as shown by Mainstream Science on Intelligence, is that someone published a fringe view and multiple academics reiterated the mainstream position; there is no sign of an academic debate or disagreement among mainstream authors.

When we cover multiple points of view, we use secondary sources or reviews that discuss these views from a mainstream perspective. Per WP:MEDREV, if all we have is "X said A, Y said B" (sourced to X and Y), we shouldn't include the content at all. Feel free to add secondary sources to support these sections, but remember that there's no deadline and others are under no obligation to slow their pace just to make things easier for you. –dlthewave ☎ 02:12, 9 February 2020 (UTC)

2600, none of what you are saying justifies the previous versions that you prefer. What was removed was far more than simply saying The Bell Curve "revived the public debate". Obviously that book is not a reliable source for describing the book's impact. There has not been consensus to retain the content I have removed.

@Dlthewave: Mainstream Science on Intelligence was very much not mainstream science. Onetwothreeip (talk) 02:22, 9 February 2020 (UTC)

Oof, that was quite the oversight on my part! (Which seems to be the intent of the title) –dlthewave ☎ 02:45, 9 February 2020 (UTC)

The mainstream reaction to Mainstream Science on Intelligence, and the reaction to The Bell Curve and other Pioneer Fund-related claims, happens to be opposed to those conclusions. Onetwothreeip (talk) 02:53, 9 February 2020 (UTC)

Dlthewave, I think you've unintentionally proven my point with your misunderstanding about the nature of the "Mainstream Science on Intelligence" statement. It was an editorial signed by 52 researchers in intelligence and related fields, defending most (but not all) of the conclusions of The Bell Curve, and arguing that these conclusions were entirely mainstream within psychology. The subsequent report from the American Psychological Association bears this out: on most scientific questions the APA report reached the same conclusions that "Mainstream Science on Intelligence" did, although it had a different emphasis.

The signatories of "Mainstream Science on Intelligence" included Thomas J. Bouchard, John B. Carroll, Hans Eysenck, Richard Haier, Alan S. Kaufman, John C. Loehlin, David Lubinski, Robert Perloff, Robert Plomin, and Sandra Scarr. All of these were or are among the most prominent researchers in their fields, and Bouchard, Loehlin, and Perloff were among the task force chosen by the American Psychological Association to author the APA's statement in response to the controversy. This certainly qualifies as "academic debate or disagreement among mainstream authors".

The source that History of the race and intelligence controversy cites for The Bell Curve having revived the race and intelligence debate page 440-441 in David Hothersall's book History of Psychology. I don't own a copy of that book, but I can see from the snippet view at Google books that these pages of the book do indeed discuss The Bell Curve and the various responses to it. This is beside the point, though. I brought up this particular edit because you and Onetwothreeip complained that others weren't being specific about their objections, but it isn't possible to have this sort of detailed discussion about every one of your changes when you make changes faster than they can be discussed. This is why you need to justify your changes one at a time, instead of making dozens at once and then trying to shift the burden of discussion to other editors.

Also, now that the article is semi-protected again, it isn't possible for me to edit it directly. 2600:1004:B11A:7B56:3CC6:3B68:B761:EAB6 (talk) 03:13, 9 February 2020 (UTC)

...And while I was typing that comment, you just made several dozen more undiscussed removals. Are you unable to see what's wrong with this approach to editing? You evidently won't allow your changes to be undone unless other editors can point out what's wrong with each one of them, but I think you know very well that this is an impossible demand. 2600:1004:B11A:7B56:3CC6:3B68:B761:EAB6 (talk) 03:22, 9 February 2020 (UTC)

All of these were or are among the most prominent researchers in their fields. Certainly not, unless you're arguing that things like gay conversion therapy are mainstream. This list is not representative of anything mainstream or prominent, and includes researchers linked to Pioneer Fund and other notorious groups. Onetwothreeip (talk) 03:25, 9 February 2020 (UTC)

Hans Eysenck is listed by Haggbloom et al. as the third most eminent psychologist of the twentieth century. Raymond Cattell, who also signed the statement, is seventh. Please, stop wasting everyone's else's time with this kind of ignorance.2600:1004:B11A:7B56:3CC6:3B68:B761:EAB6 (talk) 03:40, 9 February 2020 (UTC)

Hans Eysenck was supported by Pioneer Fund and his connections to far-right politics are well documented, including on Misplaced Pages. Likewise, Raymond Cattell was a supporter of eugenics. Quoting somebody called "Haggbloom" to plead eminence is not going to get you anywhere. Onetwothreeip (talk) 04:01, 9 February 2020 (UTC)

• The subject of this page does not belong to Medicine because Race (human classification) does not belong to medicine. WP:MEDRS is irrelevant here. Using publications by experts in WSJ (an RS) is OK. This (edit summary) is not a valid justification. Perhaps undue? But I do not see why. My very best wishes (talk) 02:20, 9 February 2020 (UTC)

Per WP:RSEDITORIAL, editorials are "reliable primary sources for statements attributed to that editor or author". This is the same primary source issue that affects many other passages which were removed, i.e. we can't use the source itself as evidence of its own significance or reliability. This holds true in non-medical topics as well. –dlthewave ☎ 02:50, 9 February 2020 (UTC)

• Of course it's an improvement.

Almost every time this article gets any attention from the larger Misplaced Pages community, (of from outside Misplaced Pages for that matter) it becomes clear that the article is a hot mess which needs serious attention. So why are a handful of editors' fighting tooth-and-nail to preserve it the way it is? If every single improvement is going to be filibustered, the article will remain an embarrassment and blight on Misplaced Pages's coverage of social sciences.

"Mainstream" was intensely controversial when it was released, over twenty-five years ago. More of the people Gottfredson asked to sign it declined or outright refused than signed, for many valid reasons. Eysenck was cited so often because he was so controversial. People cited him specifically to challenge his work, or to discuss other people who challenged his work, etc. Being well-cited isn't a "high score" in the game of reliability, good lord... This letter was not the mainstream, even based on this flawed metric. That letter is a historical relic which could not be said to be a fair summary of the topic at the time, and is especially obsolete now. But of course, that's precisely the point, isn't it? By dragging this out and making it about some specific bit of minutia, the flawed, functionally racist status quo is preserved. Any attempt at doing the actual work needed to improve the article can be reverted based on a legalistic interpretation of WP:BRD or similar. By shouting the loudest, the WP:FRINGE dominate the discussion and drive-away anyone who would otherwise bother to tackle this rat's nest. Grayfell (talk) 03:47, 9 February 2020 (UTC)

Among psychologists, the largest reason Eysenck is eminent is because of his highly influential criticism of the efficacy of psychoanalysis. (See this article: ) If you call that being controversial, well, I suppose it's controversial among people who think that psychoanalysis works, but with respect to psychoanalysis Eysenck's position in the mainstream one.

It is incredibly ironic that you would object to us wanting these huge changes to not be made without consensus. Are you aware of how ironic that is? You and I have interacted before, so I'm familiar with your favorite revert reasons. Here are a few examples from your recent edit history:

• "No. The burden is on you, here. Gain consensus on talk, if absolutely necessary. See WP:BRD"

• "WP:BRD. Again, the burden is on you to gain consensus for these changes. Do not restore until you have consensus"

• "Revert. Lacks consensus"

• "No consensus."

• "That's not how consensus works, you need to establish consensus to change the article. See WP:BRD."

In terms of content, there actually are a few of the recent changes that I don't disapprove of, but I do disapprove of them being made in a way so that it's virtually impossible to discuss them. Considering how often you give this as a revert reason, Grayfell, you could say that we've taken a page out of your book. Except that in your case, this is only a valid revert reason when undoing changes that you disagree with, right? 2600:1004:B11A:7B56:3CC6:3B68:B761:EAB6 (talk) 05:28, 9 February 2020 (UTC)

• This issue has been brought up at ANI, discussion can be found here. –dlthewave ☎ 03:53, 9 February 2020 (UTC)

"Too long" tag

Regarding the "too long" tag that was recently added, make sure that what is being considered is readable prose size. This is per WP:SIZE. I don't see that any more content needs to be split into separate articles. There is enough debate about this article. So to create another spin-off article? No. There are enough spin-off articles and the article already employs WP:Summary style. If more trimming is needed, then do that. Flyer22 Frozen (talk) 02:18, 9 February 2020 (UTC)

Articles for Deletion discussion

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