Talk:Seymour Itzkoff

Intelligence Citations Bibliography for Articles Related to IQ Testing
You may find it helpful while reading or editing articles to look at a bibliography of Intelligence Citations, posted for the use of all Wikipedians who have occasion to edit articles on human intelligence and related issues. I happen to have circulating access to a huge academic research library at a university with an active research program in these issues (and to another library that is one of the ten largest public library systems in the United States) and have been researching these issues since 1989. You are welcome to use these citations for your own research. You can help other Wikipedians by suggesting new sources through comments on that page. It will be extremely helpful for articles on human intelligence to edit them according to the Wikipedia standards for reliable sources for medicine-related articles, as it is important to get these issues as well verified as possible. -- WeijiBaikeBianji (talk) 21:06, 30 June 2010 (UTC)


 * Referring to new sources would probably help this article improve a lot. Dig in and enjoy. -- WeijiBaikeBianji (talk) 02:38, 25 August 2010 (UTC)

The science of human diversity (Richard Lynn): a non-neutral but useful source
A few words on Richard Lynn's book "The Science of Human Diversity: A History of the Pioneer Fund." Editor Grayfell deleted the section "Secondary sources," claiming that the book was "Not a neutral, reliable source" (edit of December 20, 2018, 23:09). It is certainly true that the book is not neutral (and the reader has the right to know that Lynn has been a Pioneer Fund recipient), but it does not mean that it is altogether unreliable. The book contains bibliographical details about Itzkoff which, so far as I can tell, cannot be found elsewhere. Richard Lynn does express a non-neutral point of view on Itzkoff's books, but biographical details are valuable irrespective of whether one agrees with the viewpoints of Itzkoff or those of Lynn.

While viewpoint neutrality is an important aspect of Wikipedia, the principles of Wikipedia do not require that all non-neutral sources be omitted from the bibliography. Otherwise, many important sources would have to be excluded. The reader should not that Richard Lynn is not neutral, but the reader also benefits from knowing that Lynn wrote on Itzkoff.

To make it clear, I wrote these explanations because I have entirely read the book "The Science of Human Diversity" and because the content does not warrant the assertion that it is not reliable, at least for the bibliographical details. I would like to ask editor "Grayfell" whether he read the book as well. If yes, please give precise reasons why you think the book is "not reliable." -- Sinuthius (talk)22:27, 21 December 2018 (UTC)

PS: the editor of Lynn's book is "University Press of America", part of Rowman & Littlefield Publishing group. The editor seems to be a reliable academic publishing house. Sinuthius (talk) 22:34, 21 December 2018 (UTC)


 * This source is not about Itzkoff, it's about the Pioneer Fund. Further, the book is not WP:RS for general information without context and qualifications supported by more reliable sources. Richard Lynn is also not generally reliable for biographical details, and would only be reliable for scientific commentary in his area of expertise, likely with attribution. Since this book should not be used as a citation except in limited circumstances, it is inappropriate to recommend this book as the sole third-party reference for general reading. If this book is useful for specific claims, propose how to incorporate it. Grayfell (talk) 22:37, 21 December 2018 (UTC)

In this book, Chapter 32 is specifically dedicated to Seymour Itzkoff (p. 417-427). Pages 417-419 are about his life, p. 419-426 about his publications, p. 427 is a list of references. I suggest that we integrate specific biographical details e.g. in what year he was born or obtained specific degrees, with every claim being linked to a specific page. For the content of Itzkoff's works, or his main ideas, other sources can be found. Sinuthius (talk) 23:13, 21 December 2018 (UTC)


 * Okay, that could work. I would accept this source for those basic details which are presumed significant, such as birth year and education. Anything more than that, as you say, would need independent sources or context, to avoid trivia. If his activity as a musician, for example, is significant, there would have to be a reason beyond simple verifiability.
 * If you would like to add this information with specific page numbers, please go ahead, or list them here. I would happy to format this information so it matches the current citation style if you'd like, since this is not intuitive. Grayfell (talk) 23:28, 21 December 2018 (UTC)

Mainstream Science on Intelligence
The current description (12:07, 24 December 2018, UTC) of the Mainstream Science on Intelligence reads as follows:

"This statement claimed that the academic consensus was that black people have lower IQs than white people, and that this discrepancy was not caused by bias in testing nor due to economic differences"

This description is problematic for the following reasons:

1) It is partly counterfactual: the Mainstream Science on Intelligence did not claim "that the academic consensus was that black people have lower IQs than white people" but that there was an average difference between them. Conclusion 7 of the MSI states: "Members of all racial-ethnic groups can be found at every IQ level. The bell curves of different groups overlap considerably, but groups often differ in where their members tend to cluster along the IQ line." The current definition has to be rewritten, because it may lead the reader to believe that the MSI states that all black people have lower IQs than all white people (which it did not).

2) It gives the impression that the MSI was mainly focused or exclusively dedicated to the question of black/white differences. This is not the case. The MSI also discusses the nature and the measurement of intelligence, the correlates with social and economic outcomes, the practical advantages of having a higher IQ, the stability of individual differences in intelligence, the heritability of intelligence, and the implications for social policy.

Moreover, I would like to point out that, currently, the sources for this description are, one the one hand, the Mainstream Science on Intelligence itself, and on the other hand, a two-page article in the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education. While both sources meet the reliability criterion, it is problematic to base a description of the MSI on these two sole sources. I added a reference to the article "What Do Undergraduates Learn About Human Intelligence?" (Warne et al., 2018), whose authors write that both the MSI and the official statement made by the APA, Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns "represent a summary of solid, noncontroversial findings in intelligence research" and "are widely cited and old enough to be commonly known" (p. 36).

Since it is not the purpose of the Itzkoff article to present a detailed description of the Mainstream Science on Intelligence, I think a good solution is to add a link to the Wikipedia article about the MSI, and export to the Itzkoff article the accepted description of the MSI as reads in the article Mainstream Science on Intelligence. I am open to alternative solutions.

Sinuthius (talk) 12:07, 24 December 2018 (UTC)


 * If we are going to mention this at all, and I think we should, we need to rely on reliable sources which in this case means independent sources. We already linked to the article on the letter, and we absolutely cannot validate claims (WP:FRINGE or otherwise) by attempting to interpret them ourselves. This would be WP:OR. If you have a reliable specifically linking Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns to Itzkoff by name, let's see it. Otherwise introducing this here is at best a distraction, and at worst WP:SYNTH. Likewise, the APA summary doesn't mention Itzkoff, although I am baffled that it described the findings as non-controversial, as it was intensely controversial at the time. Among other things, only ten experts in intelligence signed it (per Teo and others) and those tended to be part of the same walled-garden of similar ideologies. There were, and still are, many qualified experts on intelligence who rejected that letter for a wide variety of reasons, both anodyne and not. Warne doesn't hide his own position, but a work which is ostensibly about exactly that controversy should know better. This has verged into WP:NOTFORUM however, so I'll stop for now and say this:
 * Sources need to mention Itzkoff. Ideally, they should be about Itzkoff. Grayfell (talk) 10:35, 27 December 2018 (UTC)


 * I agree with your latest point. Let us mention only sources about Itzkoff.
 * Commendably, in response to my first point, you have added the word "average". However, the present definition remains unsatisfactory. First, it does not make sense to say that a group of people "have higher average IQs," because "average IQ" applies to a population, not to individuals. There is one average IQ for a population. To get what I mean, think about whether it makes sense to say: "men have higher average heights than women."
 * Let us now turn to the following part of the definition, "that this discrepancy was not caused by bias in testing nor due to economic differences." It is accurate that the signatories wrote, in conclusion n°5, that tests are "not culturally biased against American blacks or other native-born, English-speaking peoples in the U.S." As for economic differences, however, the words "nor due to economic differences" go beyond what the signatories wrote, the word "due" being the core of the problem. in the MSI, the conclusion pertaining to this question is conclusion n°23: "Racial-ethnic differences are somewhat smaller but still substantial for individuals for the same socioeconomic backgrounds. To illustrate, black students from prosperous families tend to score higher in IQ than blacks from poor families, but they score no higher, on average, than whites from poor families." This conclusion makes comparisons between different ethnic groups and socio-economic groups, not causal inferences, e.g. about IQ differences being or not being caused by economic differences, or IQ differences causing or not causing economic differences. To interpret conclusion n°23 as inevitably meaning that economic differences are not a causal factor goes against WP:NOR. As for the article in the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, it does refer to conclusion n°23, but it does not interpret it as making a causal inference.
 * Should we mention, in Itzkoff's article, the question of what the Mainstream Science on Intelligence says about average IQ differences between ethnic groups? Since the MSI has received significant coverage (and criticism) for tackling this issue, I think this is defensible. However, a description of what the MSI states on this issue should be based on reliable sources and avoid any kind of personal interpretation. To do so, the article in the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education may offer the best description: the editor writes about the signatories "all have subscribed to the proposition that intelligence tests are not biased against American blacks and that the mean IQ score of blacks is 15 points below the mean score of whites." I think we can insert part of this passage, with quotation marks.
 * My second point, about the risk of giving the impression that the Mainstream Science on Intelligence was mainly or even exclusively focused on black/white differences, remains to be addressed. The paragraph can include both a few words about the purpose of the MSI and the sentence about the question of black/white differences. A direct quote from the MSI may enable us to avoid any risk of WP:OR. Sinuthius (talk) 20:58, 5 January 2019 (UTC)


 * What? The distinction between "population" and "group" seems arbitrary and distracting here. It's just another way of saying "Men, on average, are taller than women", it's not elegant writing, but so what? I either do not understand this point at all, or find it needlessly pedantic, but I think it's the former. This use of fuzzy distinctions is, incidentally, a common complaint against Itzkoff, Gottfredson, Lynn, etc. since they tend to define races in ways that conflict with many modern geneticists, anthropologists, and similar.
 * Anyway... as you say, we are not interested in any one editor's summary of the letter, for several reasons. The impression that the letter was focused on race is, well, because it was. It wasn't published in a vacuum. The raw quantity of information contained in the letter is a distraction, because we are not trying to summarize the entire thing, only the parts that are significant. According to sources, the letter is mainly (or only) significant in the long term because of its position on race. It was published because of the Bell Curve, which was controversial because of it's position on race. We are not obligated to ignore the context surrounding this letter. Sources don't ignore it, so neither should we. For this reason, I don't really think a direct quote is appropriate unless it's supported by a reliable, independent source, and for our purposes, that source would also have to specifically mention Itzkoff for some reason. Grayfell (talk) 22:09, 5 January 2019 (UTC)


 * It is true that the MSI was published because of the public reaction to the Bell Curve, but this public reaction was not only focused on how the Bell Curve covered the topic of race. Some reviewers expressed their disagreement with Herrnstein and Murray not only about race, but also about the existence of a general factor of intelligence or g factor, and on the question of class differences in intelligence (for instance, see this review of Gould: http://www.dartmouth.edu/~chance/course/topics/curveball.html). The idea that the MSI claims that are not about to race constitute "distraction" does not take into account the context of this time. These statements aimed at having an impact on the perception of IQ by the general public. Sinuthius (talk) 22:53, 5 January 2019 (UTC)
 * See also this review of Jack Montgomery: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/0031322X.1996.9970179. Among others, it refers to the critics of g. Montgomery explains, p. 52-53: "But even if one finds these criticisms convincing, as I do, they seem vulnerable to a line of criticism running throughout The Bell Curve. The three constitutive points in the first premise have, according to Herrnstein and Murray, long been accepted as commonplace by experts in the field. Only non-experts continue to raise such criticisms, those like Stephen Jay Gould, for example, 'author of several popular books on biology' (BC, 11). The media have picked up these criticisms and ignorantly propagated them, so that they have become the 'received wisdom' about psychometrics." This indicates that, according to Montgomery's description of the Bell Curve's argument, the Bell Curve was published in a context where experts have already accepted a series of arguments that contradicted with the public perception of IQ. The MSI offers a similar perspective. Sinuthius (talk) 23:21, 5 January 2019 (UTC)


 * Have you read the Montgomery paper you linked? I enjoyed that, so thanks for sharing. It's got some interesting points in it. One thing it points out is that g was part of the controversy (obviously) but it was controversial largely because so many of its proponents contextualize it in terms of race and eugenics, even if they danced around directly explaining their implications in simple words. This is one of the central point of that journal article.
 * As for your quote, I think you are mistaken about what the author is getting at. Montgomery is saying is that this was a specific tactic by Herrnstein and Murray so that "The Bell Curve is insulated against such criticism". As the rest of the article makes very clear, Montgomery did not share Herrnstein and Murray's views on scientific expertise (the authors presume "an insupportable conception of science and of scientific authority—indeed a silly, almost childish one.")
 * The article mentions race many times in significant detail. The conclusion of that article is specifically a criticism of both the book, and the underlying approach, all based on its racial overtones. This clearly supports my point that the Bell Curve was substantially controversial because of it's implications about race. By extension, it was also because of it's close association to an explicitly eugenicist fund. (Per Montgomery: The Pioneer Fund underwrites Mankind Quarterly, an extreme right-wing journal that publishes some of the most dubious 'research' on race and intelligence being written today, including the work of Richard Lynn and Philippe Rushton.) This is, of course, the same fund that's backed Itzkoff, which comes back to my walled-garden point earlier. Grayfell (talk) 00:39, 6 January 2019 (UTC)


 * Yes, I have read this paper from the beginning to the end, and there is no doubt that it is first and foremost about race. In addition, I do not in any way deny that the Bell Curve was controversial first and foremost because of what its authors wrote about race. But it should not lead to the conclusion that the MSI claims that are not about race are just "distraction."
 * It is true that Montgomery accuses Herrnstein and Murray of using what they perceive as the scientific consensus as a tactic to eliminate criticism. It is also true that Montgomery does not share Herrnstein and Murray's views on scientific expertise. But this quote reminds us that there existed, both before and after the Bell Curve was published, criticism against the g factor itself and against claims that were shared by much of the scientific community (which does not mean that every scientists agreed on this matter, Robert Sternberg being one of the dissenters). Montgomery explicitly refers to critics who were not exclusively concerned with race, p. 51-52: "Critics charge Herrnstein and Murray with employing a narrow and misleading conception of intelligence, out of step with both ordinary and biological conceptions of intelligence."
 * Now, both you and I agree that there was criticism of g when the Bell Curve was published. The question is, why should this be relevant, and why should the MSI's conclusions that are not about race be more than a distraction?
 * First, Linda Gottfredson, who wrote the Mainstream Science on Intelligence, also thinks that g is a valid construct (see her article "Why g matters: https://www1.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints/1997whygmatters.pdf). The reactions to the publication of the Bell Curve led to claims that, in her view, presented as discredited some conclusions that are widely supported. As a supporter of g, or "general intelligence", she definitely had a reason to try to counter these claims.
 * Second, is the general purpose of the MSI relevant for Itzkoff's article? I think it is because Itzkoff signed the editorial as one of the 52 individuals that the MSI describes as "experts in intelligence and allied fields." Itzkoff is, as stated in this Wikipedia article, known for his research on intelligence. But although he wrote about black/white differences in some of his books, e.g. Human Intelligence and National Power, the area of intelligence research that he is primarily known for, and that he primarily published in, is the evolution of human intelligence, including the evolution of g (see his series on The Evolution of Human Intelligence, plus The Inevitable Domination by Man and Humanity's Evolutionary Destiny). He explicitly wrote in support of the g factor as a construct (see The Road to Equality, p. 20-26, where he expressed his disagreement with Gardner). Thus, his expertise clearly relates to g and to the general purpose of the MSI, and one can hardly pretend that, in signing the MSI, he did not care about the conclusions that were not related to race. In particular, since his book The Road to Equality deals with the social and economic implications of human intelligence, it is difficult to believe that he did not care about the MSI conclusions that pertain to these social and economic implications.
 * Finally, you wrote: "We are not obligated to ignore the context surrounding this letter. Sources don't ignore it, so neither should we." This is definitely true, but "not ignoring the context" is not the same as considering the conclusions that are not about race as "distraction". This constitutes WP:OR, unless you provide reliable and independent sources that clearly make such a distinction, or that explicitly describe some parts of the MSI as insignificant or distraction. Sinuthius (talk) 20:05, 6 January 2019 (UTC)
 * I do not think anyone is going to get very far claiming that biological conceptions of intelligence have nothing to do with race. Certainly not based on Itzkoff's writing.
 * Anyway... Let's refocus on this article. We don't care why he signed the letter beyond what is supported by reliable sources. If sources explain that he signed it because of his belief in g and for no other reason, let's see them.
 * Wikipedia determines notability mainly via independent sources. From this, Itzkoff is noteworthy for his books more than anything else. Right now, we have a bland expert quote in the NYT from 1994, which mentions the Decline book, and another review from the same year. compares it to both Rushton's views on race and D'Souza's comments in defense of slavery. Without getting lost in the weeds, a glance at Google's book results for this title demonstrate that it's mainly, or even exclusively, significant because of its claims regarding race. As I've said before, the raw quantity of information within the book is not particularly important to us. These books are only significant for the reasons that reliable sources say they are significant. That reason appears to be race, mostly or exclusively.
 * Another currently cited source calls him a "terrible writer" but is cited for a strangely specific claims about hereditary intelligence ratios. This source also goes into some length criticizing Itskoff's inability to clearly explain issues of race, which is yet again ignored in the article. Likewise the LA Times review from 1987. This directly and unambiguously disputes Itzkoff's conclusions and approach, specifically regarding race and intelligence.
 * Most currently cited independent sources mention race, so the article should reflect reliable sources. Summarizing sources is not OR, and if sources consistently focus on his questionable and fringe conclusions about race, so should this article. Grayfell (talk) 01:36, 9 January 2019 (UTC)