1253: James Flynn
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Medium (Personal)
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/05/30
1980
“Today no one who wishes to clean even a minimal regard for reason or evidence can espouse racist ideology as it was in its heyday, a system as comprehensive as Marxism and to some clearly equally as satisfying. However, thanks to Jensen and Eysenck and Shockley, the racist can cling to the periphery of his ideology; for example, he can provide a reasoned defence of his position on certain issues such as immigration and foreign policy. I do not wish to minimize the ground he has lost: the retreat from world history to little more than immigration quotas is a great defeat for the racist and a great source of satisfaction for all of his opponents. I am quite convinced that the refutation of racism in the light of reason is almost complete (the effort to eradicate it as a social force is a different matter and may never be fully accomplished).”
1980
“[Jensen] does not believe that [heritability] estimates alone can decide the issue of genetic versus environmental hypotheses. However, he argues that the probability of a genetic hypothesis will be much enhanced if, in addition to evidencing high [heritability], we find we can falsify literally every plausible environmental hypothesis one by one. He challenges social scientists who believe in an environmental explanation of the IQ gap between the races to bring their hypotheses forward. … Far too many of Jensen’s critics have not taken up the challenge to refute him in any serious way, rather they have elected for various forms of escape, the most popular of which has been to seize on an argument put forward by the distinguished Harvard geneticist Richard C. Lewontin.”
1987
“I would have named the effect after Read D. Tuddenham who ‘was the first to present convincing evidence of massive gains on mental tests using a nationwide sample’ in a 1948 article.”
2007
“I am too much in love with philosophy to collect data or do field studies.”
“Someone who herds reindeer in Finland asked if medieval people had IQs below zero. I replied that such a thing made no sense, but it was quite possible to have negative critical acumen, witness the rise of postmodernism.”
“The mind is more like a muscle than we once believed. It is something that must be constantly exercised to attain and maintain peak fitness. Just as an athlete must train harder and harder as he or she matures, so children must think with greater and greater complexity as they pass through school.”
2012
“I know of no study that measures whether the quality of moral debate has risen over the twentieth century. However, I will show why it should have. The key is that more people take the hypothetical seriously, and taking the hypothetical seriously is a prerequisite to getting serious moral debate off the ground.… I never encounter contemporary racists who respond in that way.”
“The collapse of the Ice Ages hypothesis does not, of course, settle the debate about whether there are racial differences in genes for intelligence. If universities had their way, the necessary research will never be done.… It is always just far more important to establish whether squirrels enjoy The Magic Flute.”
2018
“There are almost no courses on intelligence in Psychology departments in America. When I ask staff why, they give the same answer: what if a student raised a hand and said, what do you think about the race and IQ debate?”
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