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I found a review of the books of Miele and Tucker on the online version of The Occidental Quarterly. I was previously unfamiliar with this journal. Lynn is on its editorial board and Rushton has published there. The point of view of the review was very much in line with what many of the editors here have been saying - ridiculing Tucker's book and praising the account of Jensen's life. On the other hand it seem to be allied to American White nationalism.
As a compromise, I think it might be permissible to have a completely separate section at the end of the article giving Jensen's autobigraphical account of how he views the history. It could be called Jensen on "Jensenism". Mathsci ( talk) 14:44, 26 April 2010 (UTC)
<- Jensen's autobiographical statements are clearly primary sources as far as writing history is concerned: they are not necessarily reliable. That's why, for example, we have rules about sources for WP:BLP. Thus for biographies of living people we cannot use self-referential sources. That applies for example to the articles John Major or Margaret Thatcher, which are largely historical. Everything you need to read is here:
- Primary sources are very close to an event, often accounts written by people who are directly involved, offering an insider's view of an event, a period of history, a work of art, a political decision, and so on. An account of a traffic accident written by a witness is a primary source of information about the accident; similarly, a scientific paper is a primary source about the experiments performed by the authors. Historical documents such as diaries are primary sources. [1]
- Our policy: Primary sources that have been reliably published may be used in Wikipedia, but only with care, because it is easy to misuse them. Any interpretation of primary source material requires a reliable secondary source for that interpretation. A primary source can be used only to make descriptive statements that can be verified by any educated person without specialist knowledge. For example, an article about a novel may cite passages to describe the plot, but any interpretation needs a secondary source. Do not make analytic, synthetic, interpretive, explanatory, or evaluative claims about material found in a primary source. Do not base articles entirely on primary sources. Do not add unsourced material from your personal experience, as that would make Wikipedia a primary source of that material.
- Secondary sources are second-hand accounts, at least one step removed from an event. They rely for their material on primary sources, often making analytic or evaluative claims about them. [2] For example, a review article that analyzes research papers in a field is a secondary source for the research. [3]
- Our policy: Wikipedia articles usually rely on material from secondary sources. Articles may include analytic or evaluative claims only if these have been published by a reliable secondary source.
- Tertiary sources are publications such as encyclopedias or other compendia that mainly summarize secondary sources. Wikipedia is a tertiary source. Many introductory undergraduate-level textbooks are regarded as tertiary sources because they sum up multiple secondary sources.
- Our policy: Reliably published tertiary sources can be helpful in providing broad summaries of topics that involve many primary and secondary sources. Some tertiary sources may be more reliable than others, and within any given tertiary source, some articles may be more reliable than others. Wikipedia articles may not be used as tertiary sources in other Wikipedia articles, but are sometimes used as primary sources in articles about Wikipedia itself.
Thanks, Mathsci ( talk) 15:57, 27 April 2010 (UTC)
(Outdent) I don’t think anybody’s arguing here that we ought to be reinterpreting primary sources. There are really three questions about this article:
Based on the opinions expressed above by Maunus and SlimVirgin, it seems like the material quoted by DJ is acceptable (and also necessary in order to comply with BLP), since it makes it clear that these are Jensen’s own views on the matter rather than describing them as fact. I’m hoping you’ll agree with that also, but if you don’t, I’d appreciate you answering the other questions I mentioned here. -- Captain Occam ( talk) 15:32, 29 April 2010 (UTC)
This is from AAA's RACE website:
1900s-1930s:
Race and Intelligence
1980s-1990s:
The Debate Over Race and Intelligence Redux --
120 Volt monkey (
talk)
15:29, 26 April 2010 (UTC)
In view of the extensive discussion of this topic, more input from qualified experts would be helpful. Xxanthippe ( talk) 08:16, 1 May 2010 (UTC).
-> It was already in all the Jensen references I added yesterday, with a clickable URL :) Mathsci ( talk) 15:53, 1 May 2010 (UTC)
I suggest creating an article called How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement? and refactoring the NPOV problem out of this article. If that doesn't work, I recommend moving as much as possible to Arthur_Jensen#IQ_and_academic_achievement. -- DJ ( talk) 16:13, 1 May 2010 (UTC)
I came across this article from a chance visit to AN/I, that foetid sewer of Wikipedia's underworld. The article seemed to me to be a battleground between uncompromising POV warriors and poorly written because of that. I put an expert-needed tag on the article but this was removed by SlimVirgin who claimed that the article already had one expert editing it (I don't know who he was referring to). If ever an article were in need of expert attention, this is it. Attention not from another factional POV warrior but hopefully from somebody with a scholarly record in the history of ideas who would be practiced in the exposition and comparison of competing ideological views. At present the matter of an expert-tag looks like developing into one of Wikipedia: Lamest edit wars. On a different note, in view of recent edits here, we should all be mindful of the 3RR rule. Xxanthippe ( talk) 07:23, 2 May 2010 (UTC).
<- Creating an article about Jensen's article alone would be a POV fork. But by all means try to create it and see what happens. Mathsci ( talk) 07:09, 3 May 2010 (UTC)
I have replaced the expert tag with the comment: Input needed from disinterested experts who can mediate between the factions. I think that the wish to exclude such persons is undesirable. Xxanthippe ( talk) 00:38, 4 May 2010 (UTC).
from the article:
[Jensen] advocated the allocation of educational resources according to merit and insisted on the close correlation between intelligence and occupational status, arguing that "in a society that values and rewards individual talent and merit, genetic factors inevitably take on considerable importance."
Do we instead mean that he predicted the correlation between intelligence and occupational status? I'm asking for a fact check. In general we need to be sure to distinguish between empirical predictions or descriptions on the one hand and normative recommendations on the other hand. -- DJ ( talk) 18:02, 2 May 2010 (UTC)
I'm trying gradually to find a way of summarising what's in the the book of Segestrale. It discusses certain philosphical aspects of the debate on race and intelligence in depth, as a precursor to a discussion of the parallel issues in sociobiology. The authoress actually interviewed many of the figures involved in the 1980s and is an expert in the History and philosophy of science. I am quite busy working on Triumphs of Caesar now, but I am still gradually formulating a way to summarise what is in her book. Anybody else of course is welcome to have a shot. But it's not a book from which one can just pick phrases - the book is written in a very special way, as a philosophical exploration of ideas, a slow journey of discovery. A book review might provide a good summary ...
At present what I understand Segerstale to be saying is that first of all Lewontin, followed by Gould and others, objected to an indiscriminate statistical method being applied to understand a subject where a biological underlying explanation was expected. Their view was that an explanation would follow the normal scientific path of first formulating a theory and then testing it by experiment. They did not object to the study of intelligence per se, so the charge of censorship of research for ideological reasons or Lysenkoism was incorrect. They did object to an unjustified use of statistics to express an ill-defined multidimensional entity as one single number; and they further objected that that number was then treated as an immutable physical entity, like skin colour, having some kind of innate biological sense. That is what they called the " reficiation" of intelligence, a word borrowed from Marxism, although, as Segerstrale points out, having a different meaning in their context. This physical quantity was an "average" over a preselected population group. Lewontin and Gould called this appeal to biology "bad science". Post-war, in the aftermath of the holocaust. there was a taboo on scientific investigation into race as a result of the 1950 statement on race of UNESCO, broken by Jensen's paper: that was one further underlying feature of liberal American post-Vietnam society - people grew up within the ethos of environmental thinking and social change. The scientists involved were very much affected by the social changes and upheavals of the sixties. Their flirtation with a very American brand of Marxism was more a sign of the times than a rejection of reductionism. They called Jensen's adherence to statistics "bad science" not for ideological reasons, but because no other established form of science would use a single methodology in such a naive yet confident way - collect a number of other people's data indiscriminately, throw it into a computer and then read the answer. In Segerstrale's book, Christopher Jencks is used as an example of another social scientist who repeated Jensen's analysis of data for heritability, but this time taking more care about where the data originated: his answer was significantly different. The astrophysicist David Layzer's commentary is also cited, as is the October 1973 letter "A Resolution against Racism" in the New York Times organised by Students for a Democratic Society. The published allegations of Neo-Lysenkoism in the early 1980s were a response to Gould's book The Mismeasure of Man.
Note that these are not my personal views and that the last paragraph is just what I've gathered from a quick second online reading of Segerstrale's fascinating book. Mathsci ( talk) 06:19, 3 May 2010 (UTC)
Just to note that the main charges of Neo- Lysenkoism, mentioned by Varoon Arya ( talk · contribs) above, appear to come from Pearson and for example can be found in his 1997 book "Race, intelligence and bias in academe". I haven't been able to locate the book. Pearson was financed by the Pioneer Fund. Doesn't this author have a rather problematic history? Just my first reaction. Of course, when he speaks of science, we as wikipedians can only take what he writes to be completely objective, not so? Mathsci ( talk) 15:06, 4 May 2010 (UTC)
Mathsci has recently added this information to the article, cited to what Tucker says in The Funding of Scientific Racism. Reading Jensen's article itself, it's obvious that what Tucker is saying about it is inaccurate: what Jensen said that he favors is some sort of policy to reverse the trend of the blacks (and whites) with the lowest IQs being the ones who have the most children, not a policy to "reduce their numbers" overall. This discussion also only takes up around five pages of Jensen's 123-page article, so referring to it as one of his "two main conclusions" is similarly inaccurate.
We've been through issues like this before, in which Mathsci wanted the article to include contentious information from a highly opinionated source, and what's been resolved in each case is that in order to be consistent with NPOV policy, information like this can't be included without providing information from additional sources in order to balance it. As a further example of the same thing, I think the information that Mathsci has just added needs to to be either removed or balanced with another source. Mathsci, do you recognize that the same principle applies here also?
![]() | This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Archive 1 | Archive 2 | Archive 3 | Archive 4 | Archive 5 |
I found a review of the books of Miele and Tucker on the online version of The Occidental Quarterly. I was previously unfamiliar with this journal. Lynn is on its editorial board and Rushton has published there. The point of view of the review was very much in line with what many of the editors here have been saying - ridiculing Tucker's book and praising the account of Jensen's life. On the other hand it seem to be allied to American White nationalism.
As a compromise, I think it might be permissible to have a completely separate section at the end of the article giving Jensen's autobigraphical account of how he views the history. It could be called Jensen on "Jensenism". Mathsci ( talk) 14:44, 26 April 2010 (UTC)
<- Jensen's autobiographical statements are clearly primary sources as far as writing history is concerned: they are not necessarily reliable. That's why, for example, we have rules about sources for WP:BLP. Thus for biographies of living people we cannot use self-referential sources. That applies for example to the articles John Major or Margaret Thatcher, which are largely historical. Everything you need to read is here:
- Primary sources are very close to an event, often accounts written by people who are directly involved, offering an insider's view of an event, a period of history, a work of art, a political decision, and so on. An account of a traffic accident written by a witness is a primary source of information about the accident; similarly, a scientific paper is a primary source about the experiments performed by the authors. Historical documents such as diaries are primary sources. [1]
- Our policy: Primary sources that have been reliably published may be used in Wikipedia, but only with care, because it is easy to misuse them. Any interpretation of primary source material requires a reliable secondary source for that interpretation. A primary source can be used only to make descriptive statements that can be verified by any educated person without specialist knowledge. For example, an article about a novel may cite passages to describe the plot, but any interpretation needs a secondary source. Do not make analytic, synthetic, interpretive, explanatory, or evaluative claims about material found in a primary source. Do not base articles entirely on primary sources. Do not add unsourced material from your personal experience, as that would make Wikipedia a primary source of that material.
- Secondary sources are second-hand accounts, at least one step removed from an event. They rely for their material on primary sources, often making analytic or evaluative claims about them. [2] For example, a review article that analyzes research papers in a field is a secondary source for the research. [3]
- Our policy: Wikipedia articles usually rely on material from secondary sources. Articles may include analytic or evaluative claims only if these have been published by a reliable secondary source.
- Tertiary sources are publications such as encyclopedias or other compendia that mainly summarize secondary sources. Wikipedia is a tertiary source. Many introductory undergraduate-level textbooks are regarded as tertiary sources because they sum up multiple secondary sources.
- Our policy: Reliably published tertiary sources can be helpful in providing broad summaries of topics that involve many primary and secondary sources. Some tertiary sources may be more reliable than others, and within any given tertiary source, some articles may be more reliable than others. Wikipedia articles may not be used as tertiary sources in other Wikipedia articles, but are sometimes used as primary sources in articles about Wikipedia itself.
Thanks, Mathsci ( talk) 15:57, 27 April 2010 (UTC)
(Outdent) I don’t think anybody’s arguing here that we ought to be reinterpreting primary sources. There are really three questions about this article:
Based on the opinions expressed above by Maunus and SlimVirgin, it seems like the material quoted by DJ is acceptable (and also necessary in order to comply with BLP), since it makes it clear that these are Jensen’s own views on the matter rather than describing them as fact. I’m hoping you’ll agree with that also, but if you don’t, I’d appreciate you answering the other questions I mentioned here. -- Captain Occam ( talk) 15:32, 29 April 2010 (UTC)
This is from AAA's RACE website:
1900s-1930s:
Race and Intelligence
1980s-1990s:
The Debate Over Race and Intelligence Redux --
120 Volt monkey (
talk)
15:29, 26 April 2010 (UTC)
In view of the extensive discussion of this topic, more input from qualified experts would be helpful. Xxanthippe ( talk) 08:16, 1 May 2010 (UTC).
-> It was already in all the Jensen references I added yesterday, with a clickable URL :) Mathsci ( talk) 15:53, 1 May 2010 (UTC)
I suggest creating an article called How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement? and refactoring the NPOV problem out of this article. If that doesn't work, I recommend moving as much as possible to Arthur_Jensen#IQ_and_academic_achievement. -- DJ ( talk) 16:13, 1 May 2010 (UTC)
I came across this article from a chance visit to AN/I, that foetid sewer of Wikipedia's underworld. The article seemed to me to be a battleground between uncompromising POV warriors and poorly written because of that. I put an expert-needed tag on the article but this was removed by SlimVirgin who claimed that the article already had one expert editing it (I don't know who he was referring to). If ever an article were in need of expert attention, this is it. Attention not from another factional POV warrior but hopefully from somebody with a scholarly record in the history of ideas who would be practiced in the exposition and comparison of competing ideological views. At present the matter of an expert-tag looks like developing into one of Wikipedia: Lamest edit wars. On a different note, in view of recent edits here, we should all be mindful of the 3RR rule. Xxanthippe ( talk) 07:23, 2 May 2010 (UTC).
<- Creating an article about Jensen's article alone would be a POV fork. But by all means try to create it and see what happens. Mathsci ( talk) 07:09, 3 May 2010 (UTC)
I have replaced the expert tag with the comment: Input needed from disinterested experts who can mediate between the factions. I think that the wish to exclude such persons is undesirable. Xxanthippe ( talk) 00:38, 4 May 2010 (UTC).
from the article:
[Jensen] advocated the allocation of educational resources according to merit and insisted on the close correlation between intelligence and occupational status, arguing that "in a society that values and rewards individual talent and merit, genetic factors inevitably take on considerable importance."
Do we instead mean that he predicted the correlation between intelligence and occupational status? I'm asking for a fact check. In general we need to be sure to distinguish between empirical predictions or descriptions on the one hand and normative recommendations on the other hand. -- DJ ( talk) 18:02, 2 May 2010 (UTC)
I'm trying gradually to find a way of summarising what's in the the book of Segestrale. It discusses certain philosphical aspects of the debate on race and intelligence in depth, as a precursor to a discussion of the parallel issues in sociobiology. The authoress actually interviewed many of the figures involved in the 1980s and is an expert in the History and philosophy of science. I am quite busy working on Triumphs of Caesar now, but I am still gradually formulating a way to summarise what is in her book. Anybody else of course is welcome to have a shot. But it's not a book from which one can just pick phrases - the book is written in a very special way, as a philosophical exploration of ideas, a slow journey of discovery. A book review might provide a good summary ...
At present what I understand Segerstale to be saying is that first of all Lewontin, followed by Gould and others, objected to an indiscriminate statistical method being applied to understand a subject where a biological underlying explanation was expected. Their view was that an explanation would follow the normal scientific path of first formulating a theory and then testing it by experiment. They did not object to the study of intelligence per se, so the charge of censorship of research for ideological reasons or Lysenkoism was incorrect. They did object to an unjustified use of statistics to express an ill-defined multidimensional entity as one single number; and they further objected that that number was then treated as an immutable physical entity, like skin colour, having some kind of innate biological sense. That is what they called the " reficiation" of intelligence, a word borrowed from Marxism, although, as Segerstrale points out, having a different meaning in their context. This physical quantity was an "average" over a preselected population group. Lewontin and Gould called this appeal to biology "bad science". Post-war, in the aftermath of the holocaust. there was a taboo on scientific investigation into race as a result of the 1950 statement on race of UNESCO, broken by Jensen's paper: that was one further underlying feature of liberal American post-Vietnam society - people grew up within the ethos of environmental thinking and social change. The scientists involved were very much affected by the social changes and upheavals of the sixties. Their flirtation with a very American brand of Marxism was more a sign of the times than a rejection of reductionism. They called Jensen's adherence to statistics "bad science" not for ideological reasons, but because no other established form of science would use a single methodology in such a naive yet confident way - collect a number of other people's data indiscriminately, throw it into a computer and then read the answer. In Segerstrale's book, Christopher Jencks is used as an example of another social scientist who repeated Jensen's analysis of data for heritability, but this time taking more care about where the data originated: his answer was significantly different. The astrophysicist David Layzer's commentary is also cited, as is the October 1973 letter "A Resolution against Racism" in the New York Times organised by Students for a Democratic Society. The published allegations of Neo-Lysenkoism in the early 1980s were a response to Gould's book The Mismeasure of Man.
Note that these are not my personal views and that the last paragraph is just what I've gathered from a quick second online reading of Segerstrale's fascinating book. Mathsci ( talk) 06:19, 3 May 2010 (UTC)
Just to note that the main charges of Neo- Lysenkoism, mentioned by Varoon Arya ( talk · contribs) above, appear to come from Pearson and for example can be found in his 1997 book "Race, intelligence and bias in academe". I haven't been able to locate the book. Pearson was financed by the Pioneer Fund. Doesn't this author have a rather problematic history? Just my first reaction. Of course, when he speaks of science, we as wikipedians can only take what he writes to be completely objective, not so? Mathsci ( talk) 15:06, 4 May 2010 (UTC)
Mathsci has recently added this information to the article, cited to what Tucker says in The Funding of Scientific Racism. Reading Jensen's article itself, it's obvious that what Tucker is saying about it is inaccurate: what Jensen said that he favors is some sort of policy to reverse the trend of the blacks (and whites) with the lowest IQs being the ones who have the most children, not a policy to "reduce their numbers" overall. This discussion also only takes up around five pages of Jensen's 123-page article, so referring to it as one of his "two main conclusions" is similarly inaccurate.
We've been through issues like this before, in which Mathsci wanted the article to include contentious information from a highly opinionated source, and what's been resolved in each case is that in order to be consistent with NPOV policy, information like this can't be included without providing information from additional sources in order to balance it. As a further example of the same thing, I think the information that Mathsci has just added needs to to be either removed or balanced with another source. Mathsci, do you recognize that the same principle applies here also?