DYSPEPSIA GENERATION

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Why Is Most Journalism About IQ So Bad?

31st October 2024

Quillette.

In March, Sarah Carr—a professor of journalism and contributor to the Washington Post, the Atlantic, and Slate—published an essay in the Hechinger Report titled, “How Flawed IQ Tests Prevent Kids from Getting Help in School.” Reliance on IQ tests in many US schools, she wrote, “is now slowly starting to ebb after decades of research showing their potential for racial and class bias, among other issues. IQ scores can also change significantly over time and have proven particularly unreliable for young children.”

In August, the Atlantic published an essay by staff writer Ali Breland titled, “The Far Right Is Becoming Obsessed with Race and IQ,” which fretted that “right-wing gatekeepers are shrouding [their] bigotry in a cloak of objectivity and pseudoscientific justification.” That essay was approvingly linked by a contributor to the Free Press the following month in an essay titled, “Pseudo-Scholars and the Rise of the Barbarian Right.” Three days after the Atlantic essay appeared, Lithub ran an essay titled, “On the Dark History and Ongoing Ableist Legacy of the IQ Test.”

These are just a few recent examples of the tendentious journalism about IQ that routinely appears in mainstream news outlets otherwise dedicated to scientific rigour and accuracy. Reporting and commentary like this would lead any reasonable citizen to conclude that intelligence tests are biased and that the study of IQ is pseudoscientific. Conversely, there is very little reporting on the field’s strong research base or its efforts to improve the health of people with low IQs, accelerate treatment for children with learning disabilities, and understand the link between the brain and behaviour. Consequently, there is a mismatch between the work and findings of intelligence researchers and the portrayal of their field in the popular media.

Most ‘journalists’ are progressives, including those purported to be ‘scientists’. They hate the notion that one person can even possibly be inherently ‘better’ in any area than another; which is rooted in the Woke delusion that everybody is just as good as everybody else, everybody is just as capable as everybody else, and if differences arise they arise because somebody is being oppressed or somehow being deliberately cheated.

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