Again: there is active science being done at some of the largest research universities in the world on the questions you're talking about. What there isn't is a global country-by-country survey of representative samples of people to generate "average IQ", not because such a thing would be forbidden knowledge (we're awash in data that would be equivalently "forbidden"), but because the cost of such a project likely swamps any utility it might have. It's an idee fixee of message boards.

The data discussed in the Guardian article you cited there is fraudulent. They're hunting it down because it's bad data. It's exactly the same impulse as the Data Colada and Retraction Watch people, which is celebrated on HN. But now the wrong ox is getting gored, and people are uncomfortable with it.

> But now the wrong ox is getting gored, and people are uncomfortable with it.

I'm not mad the ox was gored, just that nobody replaced it after they were done sacrificing it. Bad science deserves to die, but in my mind it should always be replaced with better science. Not just left as an empty gap.

> Again: there is active science being done at some of the largest research universities in the world on the questions you're talking about.

I wish I could find it. Neither Google, Kagi, ChatGPT, or Gemini could point me towards anything relevant. They just keep spitting out the old discredited hogwash. Maybe that's more a failing of the search engines than of the science though.

Either way, I appreciate the conversation. It's a topic that fascinates me, even if it isn't particularly relevant to my own life. I hope you have, or are actively having, a great holiday!