To think 'academic freedom' and whistleblower punishment are misused in those protesting the suspension of Nathan Cofnas

[keepcounsel]

Many posters have cited 'academic freedom' and 'freedom of expression' as well as 'witch-hunt' in terms of Nathan Cofnas being suspended from the University of Ghent. They've also represented the suspension as punishing a whistle-blower due to his being one of the first to publicly communicate concerns about Jason Arday and plagiarism/academic standards. 200+ academics have signed a letter of protest about the suspension and the American ambassador to Belgium as well as Trump have called for him to be re-hired.

The grounds for his appointment seem to be to work as a post-doc on a Professor's project, so not overseen by the University HR department or a committee in the way a lecturer/professorial appointment would happen.
The work/activities of the Professor in question - Bouke De Vries - had been subject to complaints from his colleagues. When colleagues and students protested about Cofnas being hired Ghent's Rector said dissenting opinions should be allowed in the University.

Ghent have now said the grounds for suspension are due to:

a. He didn't conduct the research he was hired for
[they said 'The projects you publicly and repeatedly associate with your affiliation at Gent University, most notably your
'Guide for the Hereditarian Revolution' which advocates for racial barriers and segregation, fall entirely outside the scope of your official research mandate.']

b. He violated the University's ethics code
['prohibits spreading ideas of racial superiority or inciting racial segregation.']

c. He made statements that violate Belgian anti-discrimination legislation

d. He made remarks about Jason Arday that violate Belgian Criminal Code concerning offences against a person's honour or reputation

e. He caused significant unrest in the workplace by advocating a purge of those academics he thought ideologically wrong

My position as an academic invited to sign the letter of protest against his suspension is that academic freedom/freedom of speech is not unlimited, for example if it involves slander or seeks to assert racial supremacy.

I agree.

There's also kids with 'spikey' profiles in terms of aptitude such as one of my DCs - very high IQ so his school wanted him to do accelerated qualifications/be in a gifted programme but we got an extensive psychological report done that said the IQ score was 'not clinically significant' due to the extreme profile - DC is at gifted/genius level in some areas (eg Maths) and completely below average in others. DC also has a very low Vineland score (adaptability). Same DC is now in university - insisted on studying languages - and is getting starred first equivalent in the technical half of the course - fluency, linguistics - and is close to or actually failing the other half (analysing literature). Why languages etc is a story for another day.

Due to the lack of adaptability, university is tough going and DC has become quite depressed and unmotivated for stretches. All that is to say that predictability based on standardised cognitive testing for intelligence is really a tiny indicator of anything, even taking cultural biases and environment out of the equation.

No, not claimed: Demonstrated through empirical evidence to have elimintaed comfounding factors of langauge/culture. This is pretty much settled science, now.

It's naive to think that scientist/academics work unaffected by ideology; people often posit (and seek to prove) hypotheses with which they morally agree. The people who designed the colour blind tests expected and likely hoped it would show that the differences in IQ were a defect of the tests rather than racial differences in mean IQ, and that they were disappointed that they showed the opposite, which is whythey didn't defend their methodology.

I get why the conclusion that there is a difference in mean IQ by race is uncomfortable, but it's pretty much indisputable at this point. But what we can (and should) do is refute claims by Cofnas and his ilk that this is because of genetics rather than environment (because that's what the data suggests). And try to level that environmental playing field.

Notably, Coftas talks mainly about the US. But its worth noting that the mean IQ gap between the races is much less pronounced in the UK, which, in itself suggests environment rather than genetics is the cause.

Occam's razor suggests that if tests designed specifically to eliminate confounding factors show an even stronger correlation with race, then race is a likely significant factor. That you see it evidence that the tests were flawed suggests that you are working backwards from an assumption that race isn't a factor.

Race of course can be a pretty contested category - and the hereditarians get tangled in knots when analysing someone of very mixed heritage to the extent that they really do sound like Nazis in terms of % of bloodlines.
Some interesting stuff here - conclusion seems to be take your cod liver oil/eat your herring
www.quora.com/If-races-have-different-levels-of-IQ-would-a-mixed-race-couple-producing-offspring-have-varying-IQ-levels

[Just introducing more considerations as race is being written about here as if it's an absolute category, contributors to that quora post are mainly actual experts]

Yes, i think historically a lot of it turned on self- identification which was a confounding factor but modern GWAS pretty much pulled the rug away from Cofnas on the genetic aspect where he'd relied on faulty admixture studies.

Oh yes, I was wondering how Cofnas etc handled GWAS or even self-ID. I've researched a bit about some OG race scientists in Harvard in the 1930s, some bonkers stuff where they went to Ireland and measured every facial feature in certain counties and then calculated the genetic origins accordingly.

In the correspondence from the person tasked with measuring women, she complains that they often lied about their age making it impossible to fully calculate her findings.

Think of it like this.

You harvest 1,000,000 seeds from a single crop. You split them in half arbitrarily. You plant group A in good soil and water them, and you plant group B in bad soil and don't water them.

Come harvest time, the average height is 10% greater in group A, and, as such, the top 1% by height across both fields will be enormously skewed to group A (the tail effect).

WITHIN in each group there's a spread of heights, which is not explained by environment - they were in the same field - so must be genetic.

BETWEEN groups the mean didference must be environmental, as the genetic mix is the same for both groups.

If you are looking to pick thr 10,000 tallest plants from across both fields TODAY your harvest it would contain many more from group A. (If your harvest was drawn proportionately from both fields, the mean height would be lower.)

But, a better bet for the FUTURE for increasing crop height would be to improve the soil and water field B.

Cofnas hates the idea of picking from field B today; he think you should pick the tallest plants whichever field they're in. He wrongly calls that meritocracy. In order to do so, he must maintain the fiction that the didference between the plants in fields A and B is genetic, which is patently false.

The trouble is that the need to improve field B is obscured by (admittedly well-meaning) people denying that the plants in fields A are currently taller than those in field B. Possibly because they wrongly assume that to do so would be to concede the genetics point.

In terms of IQ that's because they don't understand it for what it is (particularly at a population level) i.e. a measure of a group's current mean ability, not of the potential of future descendents of that group. They mistake IQ as something innate.

The relevant paragraph above should say:

Cofnas hates the idea of picking from field B today; he think you should pick the tallest plants whichever field they're in. Furthermore, he thinks the height difference is generic and that, as such, improving field B ifor the future s a waste of time. He wrongly calls that meritocracy.

Thank you. That's a good explanation. Sorry for being so rash.

critics who say the evidence shows it's environmental rather than genetic.

Why not both?

Most other things about human outcomes are some mix of nature and nurture. We know intelligence is (highly) heritable at the individual level, we know (if we believe in evolution by natural selection) that humans evolve adaptive traits. Whats the reason for thinking that doesn’t apply to cognitive traits too?

Then there’s a lot of evidence pointing at both causes. Twin adoption studies, admixture studies, polygenetic tests are hard to explain entirely environmentally.

Most researchers in the field seem to think it’s some mixture of nature and nurture, with the 100% or 100% other positions being relative outliers.

I think we should allow ourselves to think this, and reject the premise that this has anything to say about moral value. Not implicitly accept the premise, and then reject the evidence. Seems healthier and more intellectually honest.

You are writing in a very authoritative style, as if you yourself are an expert in this specific niche.

Could you point me to some evidence?
I am deeply skeptical of what I can see from a quick look. I'm seeing incompatible sample sizes, and I can't see the explanation of how subjects were recruited, compensated, or incentivised. I don't currently have an Athens login so I can't easily read full texts.

For academic work, what matters is not abstract IQ, it's whether you have all the skills, knowledge, and ability, plus inclination, to do the job.

A confounding factor is that if an individual, or group, are not inclined toward academic work eg because they fear they won't fit in socially, then they may invest their time developing other skills, and acquiring other knowledge.

The reason is the data. It points towards an extremely small genetic component.

Currently on holiday, but will post some stuff when back.

Completely agree with the last two paras though.

I don't claim any deep personal expertise, but this 2013/14 US survey of experts found a pretty broad spread of views on a nature-nurture scale. The large majority believed in a significant role for both nature and nurture, with the mode belief being that they are roughly equally important.

The researchers are centre-to-left wing (self-reported), so this doesn't seem to be a fringe right-wing belief.

https://www.scribd.com/document/611683839/2020-Survey-of-Expert-Opinion-on-Intelligence

Also, an environment-only theory fits poorly with findings such as US black students from the richest families (>$200k household income) underperforming white students from the poorest families (<$20k), or the fact that the economics or history of a state (e.g. slave state, non-slave, rich, poor, high-immigrant, low-immigrant, etc) is a weaker determinant of its school-testing performance than knowing its racial composition. A nature-and-nurture theory finds those sorts of findings much less hard to explain.

As I said before, I think the thing to do with this research is not to implicitly concede that if correct it would validate some sort of value hierarchy. Whether there is a value hierarchy between the races should not be turned into an empirical question! Rejection of a hierarchy is a an important moral precept that can survive whatever the research on this issue finds.

There isn't DEI in UK. There is EDI and black people aren't really the ones who benefit from these types of policies.

The aim of EDI is to make selection processes fairer and therefore more likely that selection is based on merit.

In the UK anyway selection is currently more likely to be based on wealth and connections rather than merit.

Most people I see who are against DEI type policies are white men from affluent backgrounds.

Cofnas is a racist who is just trying to use the Arday situation to his advantage.

If he was really interested in meritocracy, then he would have looked at the PHD's of all the professors at Cambridge not just one black person's one.

I think quoting any research only conducted in the US about black versus white performance is on a hiding to nothing because race and racism is such a huge divider there that any attempt to control for it is probably missing huge parts of the picture.

What people believe isn't the same as what the data shows. I'll try to dig out some sources when I'm back.

Income isn't the entirety of environment. That rich black people dont have the same IQ as rich whites could be due to myriad other environmental factors; no need to assume genetics.

I can't see how, if the data showed white people are genetically superior (in IQ terms) to black people, you could avoid a hierarchy.

Well: you are cleverer than some people you know and stupider than others. Do you think you are superior in any moral sense to those you are cleverer than or inferior to those you are stupider than? I’d guess not.

Also, we manage to recognise all sorts of other distribution differences between races without making them value laden. Most cultures seem to have some preference for tallness, but I’ve never heard it suggested that East Asians are inferior in any moral/value sense becuase they are shorter than Nordics, on average.

The idea that we are all, in some sense, of equal moral value is one of the bits of our Christian tradition that I think we should carry forward into a secular age. But it takes a conscious effort to do so. I think it’s better to focus on that than on (what looks to me like) motivated reasoning on the evidence base.

Like: if someone thinks women are less valuable than men because they are weaker, the correct answer isn’t to explain that the strength difference must be entirely cultural, but to say that that’s a stupid way to assess value to start with.

@TheCastleRascal wrote:
"I can't see how, if the data showed white people are genetically superior (in IQ terms) to black people, you could avoid a hierarchy."

A hierarchy of what?

(And of course, even though we’ve focused on the black-white gap, there are other gaps and white isn’t the top of the list. As a white person I don’t think I should feel threatened by the idea that there may be a partly hereditary explanation for that. Or if I do feel threatened, I hope that ultimately that wouldn’t interfere with my take on the evidence either way).

Jason Arday was diagnosed as autistic during childhood and therefore did not have the everyday abilities of neurotypical people to stand up for himself when confronted, despite his academic abilities. If it is true that his PhD was based on plagiarism and not up to standard, why wasn't this picked up at the time? A PhD is supposed to be original and relevant and should be rejected if it is not.

How do you know JA was diagnosed as autistic during childhood?

A hierarchy of race

Whilst it doesn't create a hierarchy of moral worth for me, a gentic basis for racial differences would create (or more likely justify) a race-based hierarchy of esteem and respect for many.

I agree that if the science shows a genetic difference then we shouldn't pretend otherwise. But I dont think it does.