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Paper rejected by Intelligence with comments
People may regard Wikipedia as a god for providing knowledge. But it is not. It is written by ordinary internet users, who have their own personal opinion.

They regard sources criticizing MQ racist as reliable sources to discredit this journal.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Noticeboard/Archive_126#A_possible_Semitic_civilization_in_ancient_Zimbabwe

Some editor even tries to discredit intelligence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Race_and_intelligence#Piffer_.282015.29_secondary_source_discussion

Human are far from a rational creature based its behaviour on regulation, they bias their interpretation of regulation, and create regulations based on their own values.

I think editing Wikipedia is a kind of male display behaviour. It's not surprising why 90% editors are male. (There are some research in Wikipedia editing motivation, but I haven't found one linked it to showing off. I hope it will be explored.) Hence those who would like to show off are more likely to become Wikipedia editor. Meanwhile, perhaps showing one's compassion to disadvantaged group is also a kind of show off, a trait evolved through sexual selection. Therefore, it's reasonable that Wikipedia editors tend to have a race-denying tendency.
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People may regard Wikipedia as a god for providing knowledge. But it is not. It is written by ordinary internet users, who have their own personal opinion.

They regard sources criticizing MQ racist as reliable sources to discredit this journal.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Noticeboard/Archive_126#A_possible_Semitic_civilization_in_ancient_Zimbabwe

Some editor even tries to discredit intelligence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Race_and_intelligence#Piffer_.282015.29_secondary_source_discussion

Human are far from a rational creature based its behaviour on regulation, they bias their interpretation of regulation, and create regulations based on their own values.

I think editing Wikipedia is a kind of male display behaviour. It's not surprising why 90% editors are male. (There are some research in Wikipedia editing motivation, but I haven't found one linked it to showing off. I hope it will be explored.) Hence those who would like to show off are more likely to become Wikipedia editor. Meanwhile, perhaps showing one's compassion to disadvantaged group is also a kind of show off, a trait evolved through sexual selection. Therefore, it's reasonable that Wikipedia editors tend to have a race-denying tendency.


These kinds of arguments have been advanced before. However, I think Wikipedia is generally a great resource. This is especially because it is very transparent (sources are clearly visible) and available (to anyone with an internet connection). As it so happens, smarter and more knowledgeable persons tend to be more interested in editing Wikipedia, so the content is not generally written by normal people, but by persons with some level of expertise in the area. It's a kind of emergent meritocracy.

Most topics do not involve something relevant to political ideology or topics otherwise emotionally charged, so they do not get biased much (aside from the 'sampling error' of Wikipedians).

With regards to race, it is but one of many areas of science that tends to provide findings that are inconsistent with blank slateism/egalitarianism or equality-based political ideologies. The largest disservice has been done, as far as I know, by WeijiBaikeBianji and to a smaller degree maunus. The Race and Intellilgence article, for instance, is very biased due to their extreme reliance on citing everything Nisbett wrote in his case for zero between group heritability.

John Fuerst and I did a series of meta-analyses of the admixture studies recently and found results pretty much, but not exactly, as the genetic model would predict. This is true both for countries, within country political divisions (e.g. states), between individuals within SIRE groups and using various groups with known racial admixture rates (the usual method of the old studies, e.g. using persons with 1/2/3/4 'Negro' (the usual term back then) parent(s) and looking at their IQ scores or GPA). They are not formally published yet and are not going to appear in Intelligence since I don't want to work for free for Elsevier.

Due to Wikipedia's policy of using papers from mainstream journals (i.e. generally high impact factor, closed access ones), this means that this evidence will not be integrated into Wikipedia anytime soon. Note that I generally think this policy is reasonable because if it was not there, anyone could try to add wacky or nonsensical studies published in fake, pay to publish journals.

By the way, there is already a thread on the forum for discussing Wikipedia. If this discussion continues here, I will move the posts over to the other thread.
Duxide why are even pushing such study to be published in Intelligence? It sounds like something that should be published in a journal on genetics instead. Intelligence is more focused around psychometrics.
Duxide why are even pushing such study to be published in Intelligence? It sounds like something that should be published in a journal on genetics instead. Intelligence is more focused around psychometrics.


I would but I am afraid that any mention of IQ results in your paper being automatically flagged by genetics journals (with the exception of Behavior Genetics, but that deals more with within population stuff).
I'm sure the rejection of your paper had more to do with the objectivity in question. Many of those that pursue such topics research through a confirmation bias which skews interpretation and methodologies used in the study. (Lynn)