I want to call out one of the elephants in the room here, one that I'm sure was a major motivator in the development of this article - racial differences in IQ.

I want to call out one of the elephants in the room here, one that I'm sure was a major motivator in the development of this article - racial differences in IQ. Some people take these measured differences as sufficient cause to declare the entire concept of IQ as worthless racist pseudoscience, despite all the evidence to the contrary [1]. But it's also been shown that, for example, the black-white IQ gap is closing in America [2], a process we also observed the Irish go through [3]. If only racists like Richard Lynn did research on race and intelligence, we wouldn't know this. Lynn claims to have investigated this topic and shown that the gap is NOT closing. Discovering the opposite required less biased researchers to engage tenaciously and scientifically with technical issues, questions of measurement, etc., along with the understanding that IQ is a meaningful measurement worth engaging with. Would we prefer that anti-racists be scared off this research, and have only racists doing it? Wouldn't that feed a narrative that the racists have the truth the Establishment wants to hide? I don't think this is a simple and straightforward issue. Moralizing a topic like race and IQ and pre-emptively closing it off to inquiry could really be shooting ourselves in the foot. Instead of preventing science from harming marginalized groups, we could be preventing science from protecting marginalized groups. And I'm not saying the authors of this article are doing that. But I think we all need to grapple with this backfire risk when we go about applying the principles in this article. Which, as I've said elsewhere, are good as far as general principles go. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Intelligence-That-Matters-Stuart-Ritchie/dp/1444791877 https://www.amazon.com/Intelligence-That-Matters-Stuart-Ritc... [2] https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/20060619_iq.pdf https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/2006061... [3] https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2019/06/heres-why-the-black-white-iq-gap-is-almost-certainly-environmental/ https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2019/06/heres-why-the...