tptacek 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Brian Pesta was fired for malfeasance. Specifically, he gained access to data sets not authorized for his race/IQ research and not only published bullshit race/IQ stuff off it, but also (as I understand it) circulated that data to a small community of race/IQ weirdos.

That's a grave violation. The data sets in question are extremely valuable for all kinds of science, and the reason they exist is that the people donating their data trust it won't be used for noncompliant reasons. It's not substantially different than a company like 23 Or Me surreptitiously giving your genomic data to their weird Substacker friends.

Plenty of people do legitimate race/IQ work. You managed to find cite the one person who managed to do it tortiously.

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nathan_compton 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

"How to lose tenure with one sentence": "Maybe it will be fine to pursue my career in Florida."

Anyway, my point stands - there is plenty of research on IQ. Only if you are specifically interested in correlating IQ with genetics have ethicists at large determined your research may be harmful. We can debate about that, I guess, but the idea that one cannot use IQ in research is a hyperbole.

	▲	nathan_compton 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Actually, I want to add something to this. The general vibe in this research area is NOT that you cannot compare IQ with genes. Indeed, its more or less an accepted fact that some portion of IQ and measures like it are indeed heritable. The specific issue this person faced is in the use of race. I'm not suggesting that we accept all the woke orthodoxy whole cloth, but race really is a socially constructed concept. No person out there in the world is "of a given race" as a scientific fact. People have genes, they don't have races. The scientific community recognizes that genes influence intelligence, but has no interest in promulgating the frankly dumb idea that humans have distinct races, probably because the last time people got really into that idea it lead to concentration camps, apartheid, and the pointless destruction of vast swaths of human potential. The main issue with the research described is that it uses genes to construct a racial narrative. If that is the world you want to live in, you do you, I guess, but I would prefer that people not be pigeon holed on the basis of (for example) arbitrary qualities like "European Ancestry," which the person explicitly states they constructed a sort of genetic fingerprint for. In a meritocratic society people should be judged on their performance, not some inference people make about what genes they have on the basis of their level of melanin, to refer to the study this guy is talking about.