Talk:Pioneer Fund

Bouchard not funded for racial hereditarianism but article implies that.
The list of funding recipients says that Pioneer gave money to promote racial hereditarianism research. That is true, but the largest recipient, Bouchard, who got several million dollars for the MISTRA twin studies, was fighting the battle of heritability and genetics for individual IQ, not race differences. I don't think Bouchard ever had anything to do with racial hereditarianism and the article should not group him with the others in that respect. Likewise a lot of Jensen's research was about IQ heritability (and the establishment and validation of a "g"-centered psychometric view of intelligence) in individuals. Until the early 80s it was debated whether genes have much influence on intelligence at all (i.e., in individuals, not as part of a question on race differences) and whether intelligence could be quantified using IQ tests, and Pioneer paid people like Jensen and Bouchard as soldiers to win that battle, which they did. Jensen of course also wrote papers, probably with Pioneer money, about racial IQ differences and their supposed origins, but Bouchard does not appear to have been involved in that type of work, or if he was it was not what Pioneer paid him for (MISTRA).Sesquivalent (talk) 09:04, 29 August 2021 (UTC)

Does this organization still exist?
Website is defunct. Internet archives of the website indicate the director died in 2012 and half of its assets were given to another organization. Google search reveals no current output from this organization, all mentions of it are refer to pre-2012 activity. Lots of other unrelated groups using "Pioneer Fund" in their name.

Is this organization defunct? It appears to be. SONORAMA (talk) 12:14, 22 October 2022 (UTC)

By whom?
There's been some edit warring over a "By whom?" tag that has sought to include in the sentence The organization has been classified as a hate group and has been described as racist and white supremacist in nature, so I'm starting a discussion thread. In my view "By whom" is clear from the four cited sources. We do not need to list each of these four sources. Their views are not remotely controversial. See e.g. WP:YESPOV. Socksage, please present your reasoning and await a new consensus before re-adding this contested tag. Thanks, Generalrelative (talk) 23:28, 20 October 2023 (UTC)


 * Replacing "has been classified as" with "is" seems like the obvious fix. Grayfell (talk) 23:32, 20 October 2023 (UTC)
 * Perhaps Socksage has a point. Wouldn't this require attribution per MOS:LABEL? For example, when an organisation is called a hate group by SPLC, we practically always attribute it. It would be fine if multiple sources had described it as a hate group, but checking the sources it seems it comes from the SPLC, and is not mentioned in many of the reliable sources on that sentence specifically. It would be better to simply change the intro "classified a hate group by the SPLC". Zenomonoz (talk) 20:18, 29 October 2023 (UTC)

External links / website
Just a note, it seems both website external links are defunct now. I don't think the Pioneer Fund exists at either address, so both are a 'historic website' or 'defunct website'. Zenomonoz (talk) 04:02, 12 November 2023 (UTC)