00:10:36.060And hence, again, we should try to build an ethically robust system which is logically independent of scientific facts, but which may be informed by them to some extent.
00:10:51.940And then the third argument of the paper was basically just that there have been clear empirical examples of where stifling debate around these topics has done harm.
00:11:02.000One of the examples I gave in that section was of research relating to the election of Donald Trump.
00:11:12.380Whether you support or you oppose Donald Trump, it's clear that very many people strongly oppose him and consider his...
00:11:19.620That is the biggest understatement in the history of trigonometry.
00:11:23.500He has engendered a certain amount of criticism, it could be said.
00:12:14.040where he showed in a series of statistical models
00:12:16.540that even after controlling for measures of anti-immigration sentiment
00:12:21.240and ethnic prejudice, opposition to political correctness was still a strong predictor of
00:12:27.300voting for Trump as opposed to Hillary Clinton. And there's some anecdotal quotations in various
00:12:33.200news sources from the 2016 campaign of people saying, well, you know, I've never voted Republican
00:12:38.340before. And, you know, I don't particularly like Trump's policies, but we just have to do something
00:12:42.000about political correctness. And of course, not all opposition to IQ research or research into
00:12:48.700population differences is a sort of juvenile manifestation of political correctness. Some of
00:12:55.820it's based on a serious judgment about the harm that could be done by this research. But I think
00:13:01.960a lot of it, or at least a certain amount of it, is just a manifestation of political correctness.
00:13:06.560And the people who take that position should recognize that imposing political correctness
00:13:13.300on others can often lead to a backlash, as it has done in the case of Donald Trump.
00:13:17.420but no when you started this research was there not a small part of your brain that just thought
00:13:22.720i'm going to get into shit for this well uh one thing i should point out as i've pointed out in
00:13:28.520in a blog post responding to some of the criticisms of my work is that i've not actually
00:13:33.160done any original research on population differences in intelligence or iq although i
00:13:38.460obviously have shown an interest in it and i am still interested in it uh to this day uh but
00:13:44.300certainly, it crossed my mind that publishing certain works or attending certain conferences
00:13:51.680might get me into trouble. It was certainly a risk I was willing to take given that I got into
00:13:57.720academia because I'm interested in finding out the truth about things and also interested in
00:14:03.980exploring controversial topics as opposed to just making incremental progress on things that are
00:14:09.420already very well understood indeed i would argue it's sort of our role as scholars to push the
00:14:15.680boundaries of of truth and of science uh and so i felt at the time that while i might get into a
00:14:23.220little bit of trouble it's probably not going to be too bad that judgment seems on reflection
00:14:27.860to have been somewhat mistaken because we laugh about it but fundamentally we were chatting just
00:14:33.440before we started the interview essentially no matter what the outcome of the legal case is your
00:14:38.260career is over now? Quite possibly, yes. I mean, as I mentioned to you in the pre-interview
00:14:43.800discussion, I'd watched an interview with Brett Weinstein, who, along with his wife, Heather
00:14:51.240Haying, was dismissed from Evergreen College following a scandal in 2017, somewhat different
00:14:57.900from mine, but received much more media attention. And Professor Weinstein and his wife have many
00:15:05.440years of uh teaching experience uh and clearly uh very well-established educators and he was
00:15:14.380saying in the interview that i watched that after having been dismissed from evergreen he's he still
00:15:19.820hasn't received any job offers from universities which is mind-boggling yeah we've we've both met
00:15:24.440brett and heather they're lovely people they're very balanced yeah they are on the left yeah and
00:15:29.580And, I mean, as I said to you jokingly, you know, you are an interesting and promising scholar.
00:15:37.000But they are people who have a 20-odd year career of teaching and giving value to the institution that they represented.
00:15:43.660So the fact that no one wants to hire them says quite a lot about what you said is cowardice, basically, on behalf of many institutions.
00:15:52.620I mean, yeah, they would seem to be just a total asset for any university.
00:15:57.640They've got all that teaching experience. They've developed a public persona of respectable and engaging scholars and clearly are, as you say, affable, nice people who simply want to understand the world and promote knowledge and learning.
00:16:17.120And yet they haven't received a single offer or at least haven't done so up until that point.
00:16:21.120So let's come back to the paper that you got criticized for. The particular point number one, which is the ethics of researching race and IQ and all these things. I personally can totally see why people would have a concern about looking into whether different groups, ethnic groups, in a society that's highly polarized right now, in a society where there's constant conversation about structural oppression.
00:16:48.420and people's worries about doing research into whether Jews are more intelligent than black people
00:16:55.900or white people are more intelligent than Latinos or all this stuff
00:16:59.120and the kind of things that could be used for, the kind of things that might come out of that.
00:17:03.900So what is the moral argument in favor of that kind of research?
00:17:08.480Well, as I said, one argument is that the alternative point of view has also been misused
00:17:18.420And there are numerous examples from recent history, as again, Pinker and others have pointed out, of a group that was considered highly successful being targeted for discrimination or indeed much more serious sanctions, genocide, because its success was taken as evidence of its wickedness.
00:17:43.580The Jews in Europe and the Middle East are the most obvious example of this.
00:17:47.600Well, this is why I always say I'm massively in favor of IQ research because it always shows Jews being on top.
00:17:53.480So I'm very happy with that. But keep going. Sorry.
00:17:57.740That's OK. So one has to be aware of that other possibility,
00:18:06.840namely that if every difference in outcome is attributed to the environment
00:18:11.540and one group ends up doing a lot better socioeconomically than some other groups,
00:18:18.220members of those other groups may feel they have been unfairly dealt with by society
00:18:26.040and may target that more successful group, as was the case in Germany.
00:18:33.660And indeed, if we go to the Nazis, there's at least some evidence that prominent Nazi scholars
00:18:40.480were opposed to the concept of psychometric intelligence or IQ as it's often known
00:18:46.060precisely because it showed Ashkenazi Jews living in Germany to score higher
00:19:33.620And the reason I wrote that paper was precisely to address some of their concerns, to show that I didn't just sort of recklessly wander into this controversial area without having taken a moment to reflect on the ethics at all, which is more than can be said, I think, for many of my critics.
00:19:53.180but as I said the first argument in the paper
00:19:57.140which I think is the most important one
00:24:06.900Well, I think one benefit that people often dismiss or forget to talk about at all is just it's inherently interesting to know the truth about things.
00:24:18.680As a scientist or a scholar, I like to know whether certain things are true or false.
00:24:25.440I don't like to put particular hypotheses away in a box and put a padlock on it and lock it so that we never find out whether it's true or not.
00:24:34.560many philosophers, at least in the Western canon, probably elsewhere as well, have throughout
00:24:40.880history distinguished between three fundamental desiderata, beauty, morality, or the good,
00:24:50.500and truth. I think truth can to some extent be considered something that's valuable in and of
00:24:55.980itself. So that's pretty important as far as I'm concerned. But also we have in social science
00:25:02.540large numbers of people looking at questions like why are there gaps between self-identified
00:25:11.180racial groups and traits like education, income, home ownership, things like that. And presumably
00:25:20.780we want to know the actual answers to those questions rather than to just assume certain
00:25:25.100answers and then ignore evidence to the contrary. Now, again, this isn't to say that
00:25:29.100the more controversial answer namely that genes make some contributions definitely correct but
00:25:35.140it's just some it's something that has to be considered if we want to look at those questions
00:25:38.520seriously. And do you think that's why there's been such a backlash to you in this instance
00:25:44.380because essentially some of the things that you're talking about challenge the mainstream narrative
00:25:49.700which is everybody's equal and if anyone out anyone's outcome differs from what other groups
00:25:56.700are getting, that is purely because of discrimination. Do you think that is the reason?
00:26:00.260Yeah, I mean, that's clearly one of the reasons. And I'm certainly not the first person to have
00:26:05.860fallen afoul of that tendency. Of course, one other thing that we should remember here,
00:26:13.220which is a point that I made in my paper that we've been discussing, is that we already know
00:26:18.300beyond a reasonable doubt that differences between individuals in traits like IQ and other
00:26:24.680personality attributes are to some extent genetic in origin. There are various different kinds of
00:26:30.880studies which have shown this. Adoption studies show that if children are taken at birth and
00:26:39.380adopted by different families, they will often turn out as or more similar to their original
00:26:45.620biological parents than to their adoptive parents, which suggests that it's genes they inherited from
00:26:50.740their original biological parents that caused them to turn out the way they did rather than the
00:26:57.000parenting that they received from their adoptive parents, at least in large part. Then there are
00:27:02.160twin studies, which you may have heard of, where non-identical and identical twins are compared
00:27:09.260for similarity on a particular trait, such as cognitive ability. And what is typically found
00:27:15.120is that identical twins who share not only the intrauterine environment, but also all of their
00:27:21.120genes, except post-conception somatic mutations in genes, they tend to be much more similar on
00:27:29.860traits like cognitive ability than do dizygotic twins, which share the intrauterine environment,
00:27:36.600but only share half of their genes on average, like fraternal siblings do. And so that's the
00:27:43.620sort of useful natural experiment, which tells us that the greater genetic similarity of identical
00:27:47.680twins contributes to the greater phenotypic similarity of identical twins.
00:27:52.680In the last couple of decades, even more sophisticated methods have been developed
00:27:56.560for looking at the contribution of genetics to individual differences in traits,
00:28:03.200things like genome-wide association studies, which allows to pinpoint
00:28:07.600individual loci in the genome which may represent the genes that cause specific differences between
00:28:17.900individuals in these traits. So all that evidence suggests that or indicates very strongly that some
00:28:25.640people have a higher average IQ than other people because they possess certain genes which those
00:28:29.940other people don't possess. Does that mean that the people with the higher IQ and the higher number
00:28:35.580of iq increasing genes are superior yes to the other individual definitely yes i don't not very
00:28:41.140many people of course not very many people if anyone takes that proposition seriously we say
00:28:47.740no your your moral worth you know either we all have equal moral worth or your moral worth is
00:28:54.540determined by you know whether you do good deeds and whether you um act in a moral way in your
00:29:00.940everyday life it's not determined by whether you score higher or lower on a on a battery of
00:29:06.260cognitive tests and so i i would simply apply that same logic to differences between groups
00:29:11.180and in other words it's about saying that all human beings have equal value irrespective of
00:29:15.880which traits they have genetically or otherwise yeah it's about pointing out that we we already
00:29:19.740know again beyond a reasonable doubt that some individuals are genetically smarter than other
00:29:25.060individuals. That hasn't caused the collapse of civilization. It hasn't caused the individuals
00:29:30.820with the higher genetic propensity for cognitive ability to say, you know, all the others must
00:29:40.200genuflect before us and treat us as demigods on earth because we're slightly smarter on average.
00:29:47.140It's just the recognition of the fact that there are individual differences in the population.
00:29:50.460and there may also be average group differences in the population.
00:29:54.360We don't yet know for sure, but it's something that could be the case.
00:29:57.940And what are the benefits of conducting this type of research?
00:30:01.200If you think 10, 20, 30, 50, 100 years ahead, how could that benefit the human race?
00:30:07.440Well, as I've already argued, I don't think one has to cite a specific material benefit
00:30:13.320in order to justify doing the research.
00:30:14.960I think as scholars we should want to find out the truth about things,
00:30:18.200even if at the present time it doesn't seem to be a material benefit.
00:30:21.040However, I would argue that there is likely to be a material benefit.
00:30:24.340Not only that tail risk that I discussed earlier
00:30:29.420of avoiding persecution of more successful groups
00:31:00.740that policy may be a total waste of money
00:31:03.480and it might be better to spend that money in a different way,
00:31:06.060for example, in just redistributing income from one group to another.
00:31:08.980I mean, as I argued in that paper in the Evolutionary Psychology Journal, there's a prominent philosophy on the left, luck egalitarianism, which basically says that we can distinguish between the choices people make during the course of their lives and the initial endowments they received when they were born.
00:31:30.780That includes not only endowments like growing up in a large house or with very wealthy parents, but also genetic endowments like having a high genetic propensity for intelligence or hard work, whatever it may be.
00:31:47.460And according to Lucky Galitarianism, it's reasonable to hold people to account for the choices they make during the course of their lives.
00:31:53.600So if someone commits a crime, it's reasonable to send him to jail and punish him.
00:31:58.560But if someone is born with a low IQ, it's not reasonable to hold him to account for that because he or she didn't do anything to deserve that low IQ.
00:32:08.240And hence, it's reasonable for the society to get together and say that individual didn't have the same advantages as everyone else.
00:32:15.500So it's fair to redistribute some money to him or her or to provide additional early childhood education or training.
00:32:23.640Again, I'm not saying that you have to adopt this point of view,
00:32:25.980but it's one that can be reasonably argued for
00:32:29.300and that doesn't commit us to any sort of extreme political philosophy
00:32:36.660of social Darwinism or something like that.
00:32:39.400And how much does IQ make a difference in someone's life, having a high IQ?
00:32:49.520And it's not the only factor that makes a difference.
00:32:51.600Other personality traits make a difference.
00:32:54.640Which country you were born in makes a huge difference.
00:32:58.480Whether you had parents with connections or not makes a difference.
00:33:03.380But to go to IQ in particular, it has moderate correlations with life outcomes observed around age 30 or 40 if it's measured, say, at age 11 or age 16.
00:33:18.580in some domains it can have incremental predictive validity even within the top one percent so you
00:33:26.040might say well after a certain point iq is no longer predictive after say an iq of 120
00:33:33.620more iq doesn't really benefit you well in some domains it actually still can benefit you
00:33:39.660there was a famous study of a group of people called them the sorry the study was called the
00:33:46.020mathematically precocious youth, and these were individuals who scored very high on a mathematics
00:33:51.140test, which isn't identical to IQ, but it's very similar. And they were followed up by researchers
00:33:56.780into their 30s and 40s, and it was found that these individuals who represented the top, I think,
00:34:05.5201% of scorers in the relevant population had achieved lots of impressive things, including
00:34:17.120filing patents and publishing academic papers and winning various kinds of awards. And they found
00:34:22.120that those who scored in the top quarter of the top 1% had done more of those impressive things
00:34:27.620than those who scored in the bottom quarter of the top 1%. So it can be incredibly predictive.
00:34:33.640Of course, when it comes to a variable like lifetime income, it's somewhat less predictive.
00:34:39.880Of course, it has a correlation with lifetime income, but it's not as strong as it is with outcomes like educational attainment,
00:34:50.440where there's a more obvious connection from cognitive ability to performance in universities.
00:34:57.860you say and because uh being a former teacher you know that we were very much drummed into us that
00:35:04.120there was different types of uh intelligence you know there's academic but there's also spatial
00:35:09.620and all the rest of it do you adhere to that do you believe that that is a thing that somebody can
00:35:13.360be you know at school for whatever reason not academic but they get into the world of business
00:35:17.820for example like alan sugar and yeah so i think um the first thing to say is that uh when it comes
00:35:24.400to intelligence itself, psychometric intelligence, the generally accepted position among researchers
00:35:29.820is that there aren't different types of intelligence, although there are different
00:35:37.640subdomains, if that makes sense. What you typically find when you give a sample of people
00:35:43.740a battery of cognitive tests, say a memory test and a verbal reasoning test and a spatial
00:35:48.520reasoning test, mathematical reasoning test, is that scores on each of the tests are positively
00:35:55.280correlated, meaning that the people who do better on spatial reasoning also tend to do
00:35:58.400better on verbal reasoning, and they also tend to have slightly better memories. And
00:36:01.820that means that a so-called general factor of cognitive ability can be extracted using
00:36:08.560some statistical methods, which accounts for a large part of the differences in scores
00:36:14.260between different individuals on those tests.
00:36:16.780And that contradicts the point of view
00:43:35.020And then thirdly, there's just obviously the fact
00:43:38.800that we do want to find out the truth about things
00:43:41.800And our role as academics, I think, should be to pursue fruitful lines of inquiry and scientific data, wherever they may lead, not to act as arbiters of what should or shouldn't be allowed to be discussed in society.
00:44:01.920Jonathan Haidt, the American psychologist and free speech campaigner, has an excellent lecture up on YouTube called Two Incompatible Sacred Values at American Universities.
00:44:13.940And he talks about this conflict that has emerged in the last decade or so between free speech and academic freedom and truth on the one side and the movement to stifle certain discussion of certain topics and to impose a sort of framework of language that doesn't seem very natural to us on some topics.
00:44:42.460and he argues that universities are going to face a choice going forward
00:44:47.640between retaining telos or truth as their ultimate purpose
00:44:52.880or whether they are going to adopt a sort of dual purpose of truth
00:45:00.040He shows in his lecture that if we consider the shields of universities
00:45:06.100like Harvard and Yale, they have the word veritas on them,
00:45:10.020which means truth, indicating that the founders of these universities saw truth as one of the
00:45:19.300probably the ultimate goal of these education institutions. Whereas now, if you read some of
00:45:23.600the mission statements of universities, particularly in the US, they will say things like
00:45:29.560promoting diversity, inclusion and equity, and academic freedom. And of course, that's all very
00:45:36.180well and good until you recognize that these things can come into conflict with one another.
00:45:40.020I would argue that truth should prevail when it comes into conflict with other values, which are valid for people to hold.
00:45:49.560And I don't think universities should function as centres for teaching, learning and the promotion of a particular political point of view.
00:45:57.980I think they should just focus on the first two.
00:46:01.160And from what we've seen now with academics losing their jobs, do you think this is a trend that is going to get worse now?
00:46:10.020Um, very hard to say. I mean, it's, it's, it's notoriously unwise to make predictions. I don't see any obvious sign of it getting better. Um, I mean, it seems to be part of this more general phenomenon that has been called the great awokening, something that's happened since about 2012.
00:46:29.320in the UK, US, and some other Western countries,
00:46:36.240suddenly we see dramatic shifts in political attitudes
00:46:41.440on certain subjects, particularly on the left.
00:46:45.140In America, we see increases in the volume of Google searches
00:46:50.180for terms that once seemed very strange,
00:46:53.340like intersectionality and white privilege and cultural appropriation.
00:46:59.320We've seen, following some excellent analyses by a guy called David Rosado and a guy I mentioned earlier, Zach Goldberg, that the frequency of usage of those sort of woke terms in the newspaper of record in America, the New York Times, has increased precipitously just in the last decade or so.
00:47:17.940So there seems to be some kind of general phenomenon worthy of study which is affecting not only the wider culture but also the freedom of academics to pursue lines of inquiry that the promoters of this phenomenon consider to be objectionable.
00:47:39.620And the last time we saw each other was at a slightly secret academic conference which was on this very subject.
00:47:45.540I thought you were going to say slightly seedy.
00:47:47.940i don't feel it was seedy but speak for yourself mate all the people who were there watching this
00:47:54.000and now they know how you feel about it i know that's what i thought you were going to do slightly
00:47:57.180see it was slightly secretive but it wasn't seedy no it wasn't yeah disappointingly so anyway well
00:48:02.640done for sidetracking me for a whole 20 seconds for no purpose whatsoever thanks mate but what i
00:48:08.760noticed at that conference was a very strong feeling certainly from the people who were there
00:48:13.100and some of them were very distinguished people, was that there is a culture of fear in academia,
00:48:19.060which is exactly what we see in comedy in many different fields of the arts.
00:48:23.800There's a culture of there's certain things which must not be talked about,
00:48:27.720and if you talk about them or if you do them or if you publicly discuss some of these concepts
00:48:32.840that you talk about in The Great Awakening, you will be punished.
00:48:36.840Do you think there is that culture in academia now where people stay away from certain subjects
00:48:42.600and, in fact, in many cases feel like they have to come out
00:49:31.840I mean, one ray of hope is that, at least in surveys,
00:49:38.100Most academics do still say that they believe in academic freedom and an environment of open debate on campus as opposed to one characterized by restrictions on what you can and can't say in certain areas.
00:49:51.380There was a survey done in 2017, I believe, by a guy called Sam Abrahams, which found that about 80 percent, if I remember the figure correctly, of academics in America prefer the atmosphere of open inquiry and debate to the one that's restricted in the interests of protecting certain groups who are allegedly at risk of harm.
00:50:16.760So that would suggest to me, if the result is correct,
00:50:19.580that there's a sort of 20% on the fringe
00:50:23.960that are accounting for a disproportionate share
00:50:27.400of all the mobbing attempts and all the censure.
01:00:42.260Spoil students, bring back corporal punishment.
01:00:44.720Anyway, Noah, thank you very much for coming on the show.
01:00:47.760We've got time for one last question, which always is,
01:00:50.200what is the one thing no one's talking about that we should be talking about?
01:00:53.860Okay, so for me, this is something that a few people are talking about,
01:00:57.500But in my opinion, one that not nearly enough people are talking about, which is the fact that our cities are growing increasingly ugly, i.e. that for every beautiful new building that is constructed, 19 or 20 ugly buildings are constructed.