The race-IQ question remains the most controversial in all of American discourse. In this column, however, I’m going to step back from my hectic and hilarious week dismantling the tweets of outraged midwit
Will Stancil, who has been inadvertently conducting a one-man marketing campaign for my new greatest-hits anthology
Noticing: An Essential Steve Sailer Reader: 1973-2023 (the paperback is $29.95 with free domestic shipping if you enter the discount code
STANCIL).
Instead, I’ll reflect upon some of the more difficult philosophy of science questions raised by the race-IQ conundrum. There are, it appears, good reasons not to be
too confident that whichever side you come down on is definitely the right one.
I’m not going to run through all the data, but let’s start by reviewing a few basic facts.
There is no valid controversy today over whether racial differences in cognitive test scores exist. Although many Americans are shocked when they hear that whites outscore blacks on average (although they tend to be less shocked when they hear that Asians average higher than whites), this might be the most exhaustively documented finding in the history of the social sciences.