June 25, 2007

New York Times: IQ is important and fascinating!

NYT readers put a couple of articles on the recent Norwegian study showing a small average advantage in IQ for elder brothers at the top of the Most Emailed articles list for much of last week. So, the Times responded to public interest by publishing a third article on IQ: "Study on I.Q. Prompts Debate on Family Dynamics." And now the new article is the most emailed of the day!

Hey, wait a minute, I thought that IQ was a discredited, obsolete, fraudulent, racist concept yada yada yada ... This reminds me of 2002 when the NYT editorial board thought IQ tests were great when the Supreme Court mandated their use to save low IQ murderers from the death penalty.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

C'mon, Steve! You and I know both that IQ is the last taboo.

Grown men (and women) can talk about gay "marriage," but grown men and women dare not talk about IQ, much less average differences in IQ.

Anonymous said...

Yes, and if the 2 or 3 points difference between sibling orders is this important and fascinating, imagine how much more attention we should be focusing on say, the 10-25 point difference between American ethnic groups, or the 30+ IQ differences between different nations!

We've entered a Bizarro universe where the less important the IQ finding, the more likely the media is to touch it.

Or like the recent well covered "Wealth-IQ" study, IQ is only discussed openly by the media when it supports the Creationist liberal status quo on issues like diversity and social inequality

Rain And

Anonymous said...

You guys are missing the point. IQ is important and fascinating when it pertains to which kid of a wealthy, liberal, elite upper-East sider will be "smarter." Thus more worthy of throwing the family fortune at in education (second sons can now make do at SUNY or some other cheap school).

The NYT is published for the benefit of rich upper East Siders. That's it. That's their audience (their pretensions to being a national newspaper are laughable, that's filled by the WSJ and USA-Today). That's who they write articles for.

So yes, IQ in rich elite families is very important and fascinating. Anyone else's? B-O-R-I-N-G.

Anonymous said...

Good post, 1:48 AM...

But as to the hypocrisy of open discussion of IQ re execution of low IQ criminals:

Selected IQ topics in mainstream journalism deemed kosher are just another demonstration of power by the media controllers. It's a massive "because I said so" power game. They instruct where and when IQ can be discussed, and bash and marginalize those who break the rules. The power elite, especially on the Left, are OK with hypocrisy. For them, hypocrisy is actually a tool. In fact, enforcement of absurdity, intellectual or otherwise, is part of the joy of power. It's all about humiliating the proles. Political Correctness always keeps the goal posts moving. Dance, slave!

Jewish Atheist said...

I notice with all your links, you somehow managed to miss a citation for your ridiculous claim that the NYT believes IQ is "a discredited, obsolete, fraudulent, racist concept." Nice straw man.

Anonymous said...

Another reason why they might have printed this is a large section of their readership is the urban, upwardly-mobile (or so they think) females. The chic thing these days is to have a single, preferably-designer quality baby. The only child is now the in thing -- although this is supposed to be at odds with the liberal value of learning to share. If the first child is smarter than the second, and the second than the third, etc., all the more reason to breed as few babies as possible, and replace child-rearing with say career moves or office shenanigans (which will make you so much more "alive").


JD

togo said...

notice with all your links, you somehow managed to miss a citation for your ridiculous claim that the NYT believes IQ is "a discredited, obsolete, fraudulent, racist concept." Nice straw man.

Can you meet this challenge from Jewish Atheist? Even though we all know this only a slightly exaggerated distillation of left/liberal CV on IQ.

togo said...

That should have been CW not CV.