Stephen Hsu and academic freedom

Posted on June 16, 2020 by John Jackson

This is the third post in what is apparently a series about Stephen Hsu. Here are the first two for the context:

IMPORTANT UPDATE

For a brief time, Hsu had a this note up on his website indicating he would sue his critics. This is a sure indication that he is unfit for his office and that the talk about “free inquiry” is merely posturing for his poor behavior. The note is now deleted but the Wayback Machine saved it:

I wonder if Hsu knows that the discovery process during such a trial applies to him as well as his critics. It would be interesting to see all his emails to folks like Ron Unz or Steve Sailer.

Clarification: The blog post he appended the note to was posted 13 June 2020. The note was not there when he first posted it. The note is gone now 16 June 2020. The Wayback Machine archived it on 15 June 2020.

END OF UPDATE

Stephen Hsu has posted another attempted defense of his actions as our Senior Vice President, Research and Innovation. For a person concerned about character assassination, he is very quick to complain about the “Twitter mob” and his fear of the University of caving to “mob rule.” Only slightly less hyperbolic is this comment from one of Hsu’s fans: “Now we understand the social dynamics of the Cultural Revolution, Stalinism and witch-hunts.”

The truth is, of course, that Hsu completely reverses the power dynamic: the graduate students, by far the most vulnerable population on campus, are trying to take on a powerful administrator who hold the purse strings of their research funding. The 300+ faculty members who signed the petition calling for his resignation from his office are taking on those same purse strings, someone with the ear of the President, as well as someone who sits in on the tenure decisions of the untenured among them. Like many ways this controversy has been framed, Hsu’s concern about “mob rule” is the inverse of the the actual situation.

The letters of support for Stephen Hsu are beginning to come in. Only two letters mention Hsu’s support for Ron Unz and his promotion of Unz’s Holocaust denial website, making me suspect that some letters were written with incomplete information. I will also note that since Hsu is being accused of promoting false science infected with sexism that no letter of support for him has been written by a woman.

The letters, and Hsu’s own defense, do not understand the nature of free inquiry and academic freedom. Relieving Hsu of his position as Senior Vice President of Research and Innovation is not a violation of academic freedom it is the fulfillment of it. Academic freedom is a promise to police ourselves, it is a promise to society that says: “Let us explore the world as we see fit and we will produce knowledge. The cost of that freedom we will pay; it is the promise to you that the knowledge we produce is knowledge and not nonsense. We promise to you we can tell the difference.” Hsu, by his actions, has shown he cannot tell the difference between real scholarship and its pretender. He cannot tell if the person he sits down with to discuss genetics and race is a true scholar or a white supremacist. He does not care if his work is appropriated by white nationalists. To allow him to continue to do so while holding his office is to violate the responsibility that academic freedom entails.

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Stephen Hsu and the Ethical Responsibility of Scientists

Posted on June 13, 2020 by John Jackson

Hsu gets nowhere in his attempted defense of his actions

Stephen Hsu, my university’s Senior Vice President for Research and Innovation, has posted a response entitled “Twitter Attacks, and a Defense of Scientific Inquiry” to the Graduate Student Union’s long Twitter thread exposing his eugenicist beliefs. He did not respond at all to my previous post about his relationship with Ron Unz and Unz’s promotion of antisemitism. Perhaps that is coming in the future. Let’s examine his attempted defenses of some of his actions Continue reading →

Stephen Hsu and Ronald Unz and Holocaust Denial

Posted on June 11, 2020 by John Jackson

Some physicists think that because they know physics, and physics is difficult, that they are qualified to work in other disciplines. Sometimes a physicist wandering from physics turns out fine, particularly if they make use of their obvious quantitative skill; I’m thinking here of David Layzer’s well-known critique of Arthur Jensen’s IQ work. Other times it is disastrous, such as William Shockley’s eugenic proposals. Yesterday evening the Graduate Employees Union (GEU) of my own university, Michigan State University, posted a long Twitter thread that shows that the Senior Vice-President for Research and Innovation, Professor of Theoretical Physics, Stephen Hsu, here at my own university, Michigan State University is much closer to Shockley than he is to Layzer.

I’ve written before in this space on how scientific racism gains purchase when supposedly mainstream sources publish and promote it. I find the evidence in the GEU Twitter thread to be good examples of Hsu promoting outrageous figures by appearing with them on podcasts and Youtube videos, such as that of the loathsome Stephan Molyneux.

Hsu shares a conceit all too common among physicists: that “it’s really high math ability that is useful for discovering things about the world — that is, discovering truth or reasoning rigorously.” But his behavior shows that this is manifestly untrue. All the quantitative sophistication in the world does not help in disciplines that require interpreting texts in historical contexts, understanding social nuance, or properly recounting the past for present-day audiences. Add in a heaping dose of conspiracy arguments and you can quickly end up promoting racist, especially antisemitic interpretations of history. This is what happened when Hsu interviewed his friend Ron Unz last year. The Senior Vice-President for Research and Innovation at my University heaped praise on a promoter of Holocaust denial on his podcast; clear evidence of Hsu’s complete lack of scholarly and intellectual judgement.

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Whitewashing Scientific Racism: Revisiting the Equalitarian Myth

Posted on January 31, 2020 by John Jackson

“Say, Tom, let me whitewash a little.”

It is one of the most famous scenes in literature: Aunt Polly commands Tom Sawyer to whitewash the front fence in punishment for some misdeed. Clever Tom pretends it is a joy to whitewash the fence and soon has tricked all his friends into whitewashing the fence for him, indeed, they pay him for the privilege. Similarly, Race Differences in Intelligence (RDI) researchers as well as outright racists often trick mainstream scholars into whitewashing the ugly history of their activities.

A perfect example is this article in the psychology journal, Intelligence where we are presented with an analysis of “controversies in the field of intelligence research.” It is a scientometric analysis meaning it is a quantitative account of such controversies as reported in the scientific literature. There is nothing wrong with that in principle but often such work needs supplementation by a detailed account of specific incidents in the database. As Lorraine Daston recently explained:

if you are looking for causal mechanisms, often only a detailed ethnography will reveal what exactly is the cause of some observed pattern in behavior. And it can work in the other direction — a hypothesis developed from ethnographic work may require statistical testing. These two modes of inquiry, so often opposed to each other, seem to me to work hand-in-glove, at least from the standpoint of the goals of scientific explanation.

Following Daston’s advice, it behooves us to look as some of the incidents in the article in order to get the clearest picture of the listed “controversies in the field of intelligence research” and what is missing from that picture.

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Race and IQ. Again.

Posted on January 21, 2020 by John Jackson

Drawn figures with newspapers with headlines reading

Reading the Latest Article on Race Differences in Intelligence

Race Difference in Intelligence (RDI) researchers have been trying to prove their case since World War I when psychologists administered intelligence tests to those entering the Army. It won’t surprise you to learn that one outcome of this mass testing was the blustery assurance among psychologists that at last we had definitive proof of differences in intelligence between the races. However, the case soon fell apart and RDI researchers, the honest ones at least, issued embarrassed recantations. Most famous of these was Carl Brigham who wrote in 1930:

This review has summarized some of the more recent test findings which show that comparative studies of various national and racial groups may not be made with existing tests, and which show, in particular, that one of the most pretentious of these comparative racial studies-the writer’s own-was without foundation.

Brigham was merely echoing many other researchers who realized that intelligence tests could never really prove that white people are smarter than black people and not much could be done about it. For the past century, however, a few RDI researchers always lumbered on, promising that, any day now, we are right on the brink, success is just around the corner, just fifteen more minutes!, and we will have proof that most of the racial gap in IQ owes to genetics.

The latest entry into the jam-tomorrow-never-jam-today of RDI researchers is this piece by philosopher Nathan Cofnas who assures us that “In a very short time” we will know that black people are just generally dumber than white people (I paraphrase here, but that is what he means) . It is never a good sign when an article comes with a warning label as this one did. The editors claimed their decision was “based on criteria of philosophical and scientific merit, rather than ideological conformity.” One wonders what merit the editors found in the article since it has none of these promised virtues.

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The Racist Right and “Equalitarianism”

Posted on September 17, 2019 by John Jackson

Equality

Here’s a word you don’t see every day: “Equalitarianism.” What is it? According to Quillette:

According to the equalitarian model, progressives are dedicated egalitarians. They think that all individuals, all groups, all sexualities, and all sexes should be treated fairly*. They are also especially sensitive to potential threats to egalitarianism, so they adhere to the belief that all demographic groups are roughly equal on all socially valued traits, a belief we call cosmic egalitarianism. Perhaps the most common form of cosmic egalitarianism is blank slate-ism, or the belief that humans are nearly infinitely malleable, and that all important differences among them are caused by the environment, not genes. Cosmic egalitarianism serves as a protective buffer to egalitarianism because it contends two things: 1) Group disparities are caused by prejudice and discrimination (unfairness), not group differences; and 2) We absolutely should treat all groups the same because they are basically the same. Equalitarians fear that if we accept that some demographic differences are genetically caused, we might start treating groups differently from each other. For example, maybe we would encourage men to pursue STEM careers more often than women. (It is worth noting that most people who believe that there are genetically-caused demographic differences would not forward such a bad argument and are committed to treating people as individuals. However, equalitarians, as noted, are very sensitive to potential threats to egalitarianism, and they view this as a potential threat.)

Whatever you may think of this definition, you must admit that the word “equalitarianism” isn’t one you hear every day. The Quillette article maintains that the equalitarian/progressive bias in social psychology has prevented a clear view of racial and sex differences in cognitive capacity. It is a very old and tired argument. What is noteworthy is the use of the curious term “equalitarianism” which has a sordid history that reveals the unsavory politics of Quillette when it comes to race and science.

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Is Quillette Right? Are Scientists Afraid to Discuss Race? (Spoiler: No)

Posted on August 16, 2019 by John Jackson

Are scientists really hiding from the truth of racial differences?

Quillette, the online magazine, bills itself as a space where academics are free to explore “dangerous ideas.” They crow about their “commitment to the search for objective truth.” The implication is, of course, that academics have few venues to explore these “dangerous ideas” because of a smothering orthodoxy about what can and cannot be studied or said. This is a creaky trope among the American right wing who have been complaining about liberal/leftist domination of the universities at least since World War II if not before.

One of these “dangerous ideas” is race science. In layman’s terms Quillette provides a forum for the idea that black people are just stupider than white people, evolution made them that way, and to reject this idea is to be against Darwin. It is nonsense, of course, but my question today is: is it true that this scientific truth has not been discussed in mainstream scientific literature? Has this ~~stupid~~ dangerous idea been suppressed by our lefty universities? Because they are committed to “objective truth” you would expect them to supply evidence for this suppression but they never do. Let’s look at the record, shall we?

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Milton Friedman and the Case of the Missing Sentence

Posted on June 22, 2019 by John Jackson

Thanks to some re-tweeting and re-posting, this two-year old post of mine on Milton Freidman has gotten some renewed attention. Over at the twenty-first century Algonquin Round Table we call Twitter the Twittertarians donned their deerstalker caps and discovered that I didn’t include a specific sentence from Friedman’s essay hence I am a “liar” and presented a “truncated quote.” If had included that sentence it would have completely undermined the entire thesis of my post. The Twittertarians are wrong.

Just to refresh your memory I wrote that Friedman, a giant of economics, wrote a misguided history of capitalism’s relationship with racism and slavery. Friedman’s entire essay contained only one reference and that reference did not support anything Friedman claimed about how increasing property rights led to a decrease in racism and discrimination. I argued that Friedman was an example of an “imperial scholar” because he ignored the work of pioneering African-American scholars who offered better-documented and more insightful accounts of the relationship among property rights, race, and slavery.

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Arthur Jensen and His Nazi Friends

Posted on June 7, 2019 by John Jackson

Brains! Brains! Brains!

Arthur Jensen (1923-2012) was one of the most prolific psychologists of the twentieth-century. He’s so famous that there is a word named after him: “jensenism.” Jensen is remembered for arguing that black people are stupider than white people and there wasn’t much you could do about it. What distinguished Jensen from your racist uncle was that Jensen dressed up his argument in statistics and published it in psychological journals. Another thing that might distinguish Jensen from your racist uncle (unless your racist uncle is much worse than he’s ever let on at Thanksgiving) is that Jensen palled around with neo-Nazis and admirers of Nazi racial thought. People who’s views were basically recapitulations of Nazi race theorist Hans F.K. Günther. The recent awful Quillette article cites Jensen as a reliable source as do many other “race realist” writers nonetheless.

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Undead Race Science

Posted on June 5, 2019 by John Jackson

“Brain measurement and its sister art, head measurement, have no doubt had more to do with our distinctions of races than have their modes of thought or of life” Jacques Finot, 1911. “In fact, researchers can classify human variation by continent quite accurately using only data from the human skull.” Quillette, 2019.

I have better things to do with my time. I have other writing to do. I have laundry that needs to be folded. The catbox hasn’t been scooped today. There’s a hammer out in the garage I could be hitting my head with. Any of these things would be preferable to responding to this awful Quillette article on race science. Yet here I am.

I’m not the only one to find this article troublesome or to see that it is while it poses as a book review of Angela Saini’s new book Superior: The Return of Race Science it is really no such thing. Nor am I the first to make the argument that race science is the vampire science. Pronounced dead over and over and over it rises from the grave to shamble a while mumbling incoherently about “open questions” and “IQ scores” and “heritability” and “climate” despite the overwhelming scientific consensus that we have moved beyond race science. The Quillette article notes this consensus: “This contention is a common one, officially endorsed by a number of professional organizations and espoused by many celebrated intellectuals” but then dismisses it. The article then trots out a series of tired arguments as if they were new and novel and the professionals and intellectuals had never heard them before and found them wanting. Let’s look at some of these threadbare arguments, shall we?

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Fardels Bear

A History of the Alt-Right

Category Archives: Racism

Stephen Hsu and academic freedom

Stephen Hsu and the Ethical Responsibility of Scientists

Stephen Hsu and Ronald Unz and Holocaust Denial

Whitewashing Scientific Racism: Revisiting the Equalitarian Myth

Race and IQ. Again.

The Racist Right and “Equalitarianism”

Is Quillette Right? Are Scientists Afraid to Discuss Race? (Spoiler: No)

Milton Friedman and the Case of the Missing Sentence

Arthur Jensen and His Nazi Friends

Undead Race Science