The premier example of robust, well documented science with vociferous opposition has to be intelligence. Besides scholars with a fiercer attachment to their politics than the truth like Gould you also have introductory psychology textbooks that go out of their way to muddy the waters by giving space to alternative theories of intelligence to g with fuck all empirical backing like Gardner’s or Sternberg’s. If they had similar standards in other areas of psychology everything would be as bad as social.
For suppression there was an article in Third World Quarterly withdrawn due to credible threats of violence because a mob didn’t like the topic. Note it wasn’t retracted and it passed peer review. David Graeber recently led a campaign to have Noah Carl’s offer of a postdoc withdrawn at Cambridge, successfully. And there was a campaign at Hypatia, a feminist philosophy journal to have an article withdrawn for discussing trans racialism in the context of transsexuality.
Frankly, this seems like a measured response to a fairly standard complaint. Perhaps the only part of it that grates me is the public and "outraged" nature of the complaint. Without knowing much more about Carl's actual work, I suppose the outstanding question is, if the reasons above are true then how did he get the offer in the first place?
[0] https://www.st-edmunds.cam.ac.uk/sites/www.st-edmunds.cam.ac...
His research gate profile.
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Noah_Carl
His website.
> Since I was fired, over 600 academics have signed a petition supporting me , and several leading newspapers have published articles criticising the college’s decision. The support I’ve received so far has been incredible! But petitions and newspaper articles aren’t enough. If we want to safeguard academic freedom, and freedom of speech more generally, we need to start imposing real, material costs on the institutions that buckle under activists’ pressure.
He initially got fired because (almost) 600 academics signed an open letter casting doubt on his work, on top of 800 students [0].
Also, I don't really think that "read his work for yourself" is a valid argument. For one, you're talking hours, if not days or weeks of research, which isn't reasonable. And secondly, unless the person you're responding to knows sociology well, they're probably not going to be a good judge of his work.
[0] https://medium.com/@racescienceopenletter/open-letter-no-to-...
That's sometimes true, but I'd need more than that to suspect it in this case. The committee was chaired by a senior, tenured life fellow, and perhaps I'm biased as it's my alma mater, but Cambridge tends to be pretty insulated from cultural whims.
As the other reply pointed out it's not really reasonable to expect someone to become proficient in a body of scientific work in order to make an opinion, moreoever the great majority of his research gate articles require the text to be requested.
Unless something further comes to light I'm not yet persuaded that this is a miscarriage of justice or scientific suppression.
Edit: sorry, I misread a headline about him losing the prize, it read stripped of "honors". Point still stands.
Dr. Collins said he was unaware of any credible research on which Dr. Watson’s “profoundly unfortunate" statement would be based.' [0]
I think this video [1], does a good job of attacking a lot of race science and intelligence, though at 2.5 hours long it may be a bit too thorough.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/01/science/watson-dna-geneti...
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBc7qBS1Ujo
edited for formatting
"In the current study, EQCA experts wereasked what percentage of the US Black-White differences in IQ is, in their view, due to environment or genes. In general, EQCA experts gave a 50–50 (50% genes, 50% environment) response with a slight tilt to the environmental position (51% vs. 49%; Table 3). When EQCA experts were classified into discrete categories (genetic, environmental, or 50–50), 40% favored an environmental position, 43% a genetic position, and 17% assumed 50–50." - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.intell.2019.101406
> I think this video [1], does a good job of attacking a lot of race science and intelligence
'Attacking' is a good description, as the author of that video went to great lengths to mislead. For example, he says the author of The Bell Curve doesn't understand what 'hereditary' means. But the definition the video author gives for 'hereditary', and the definition given in the book he's reviewing, match almost perfectly. So how did he come to that conclusion? He went out of his way to find a live interview where the book author fumbled his answer, instead of giving the definition from the book he's reviewing, or as you more accurately put it, attacking.
Watson wasn't crucified, or anything remotely analogous to it, his comments weren't particularly reasonable, and even his own near immediate apology explicitly noted that there was no scientific basis for them. (Though he has since returned to repeating them; the whole thing is weird since at the time he first made them, there was a very recent piece of work which could have been cited as support for the geography/IQ link he suggested, but in between then and the time he went back to issuing them that work had been torn apart for gross methodological errors, including deliberately excluding data to fit the intended conclusion.)
> Stripped of a Nobel prize for suggesting that two and two may equal four.
He wasn't stripped of a Nobel prize, and he absolutely wasn't suggesting two plus two may equal four; he made an at best thinly supported claim about geography and IQ combined with a completely unsubstantiated claim about the premises of development policy toward Africa, and drew a dire conclusion from that combination.
[0] - https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/11261872/James-Wats...
This isn’t true. Ashkenazi Jews and East Asians have higher IQ scores than whites. Male and female scores on IQ tests are identical by construction. They have different scores on the component sub tests.
http://www1.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints/1997mainstrea...
Mainstream Science on Intelligence: An Editorial With 52 Signatories, History, and Bibliography
Since the publication of “The Bell Curve,” many commentators have offered opinions about human intelligence that misstate cur- rent scientific evidence. Some conclusions dismissed in the media as discredited are ac- tually firmly supported. This statement outlines conclusions re- garded as mainstream among researchers on intelligence, in particular, on the nature, ori- gins, and practical consequences of individu- al and group differences in intelligence. Its aim is to promote more reasoned discussion of the vexing phenomenon that the research has revealed in recent decades. The follow- ing conclusions are fully described in the major textbooks, professional journals and encyclopedias in intelligence.
Really? The strongest rebuttals I ever saw boiled down to "it has not yet been conclusively proven impossible that all races are equally intelligent". Large meta-analyses certainly always find correlation, this one goes a long way towards showing there is causation as well: https://doi.org/10.1111%2Fj.1467-9280.2006.01803.x
For example, if you are, say, a Christian and some other guy is a Muslim and your offended by that belief, well, that's on you. It shouldn't discredit a scientific theory. Evidence is supposed to do that.
And worse, they're thinking they're not racist because they think they have scientific backing for their beliefs..
You know what, who cares if Watson was a flaming racist? He has done more than almost any other person to save the lives of millions of Africans but he makes one opinion about intelligence and hes slagged off and completely discredited?
Cancel culture has been in science a lot longer than people know.
On the contrary, when some facts put a positive light on certain groups (for instance the better maximal physical performance) there is magically no taboo about it at all, and no pressure groups asking for "affirmation action".
