Emil Kirkegaard

> I'd tend to agree that the sources removed are representing a fringe idea and that the Wikipedia process has been followed normally I agree with the article which made the case that they are not "fringe", if you mean "unreliable" with "fringe". If you mean "unpopular", then yes, they are, but opinions can be unpopular despite strong evidential support, as we have seen in the history of science. > I think people from both sides of the issue/argument/debate are making such edits, like with every issue. There is strong political polarization among Wikipedia editors, meaning that people from one side are overwhelmingly more likely to win such a disagreement: https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2024/09/wikipedia-editors-and-politics/

"Is there anything good about men?" https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8765372-is-there-anything-good-abo… Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4YHdl4FXYpU Lecture text: https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/wp-content/uploads/Is-There-Anything-Good… Therein you'll find this argument applied to humans, as well. It's fairly informative and rigorous (mostly). Good read, even if you disagree with the whole premise. > "I’m certainly not denying that culture has exploited women. But rather than seeing culture as patriarchy, which is to say a conspiracy by men to exploit women, I think it’s more accurate to understand culture (e.g., a country, a religion) as an abstract system that competes against rival systems — and that uses both men and women, often in different ways, to advance its cause."

> 40% of CP investigations in Germany are started against minors This in particular seems like such a silly outcome of over-regulation and bureaucracy. Amazing. Research suggests most child sexual abuse does not have much of a long-term effect at all: https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/wp-content/uploads/A-replication-of-the-m… This (of course!) does not mean it is good or should be done, but it suggests this is not an urgent issue, certainly not one that can justify abolishing privacy, especially when these measures only catch the small fish, not the large trafficking rings who will probably switch to different means of communication once theirs gets compromised.

>Plenty of studies show that the correlation between being on the edge on that curve and being extremely successful are tenuous at best, most very successful people have average IQ. Sources please. That's not my understanding of the literature at all. >Shouldn't people who are extremely exceptional in terms of their IQ be extremely successful? People who are extremely meritorious should be extremely successful. High IQ can be a contributing component to being effective, but other aspects would contribute too. You'd naively expect a correlation, though not a strict causal link. Which I believe you do find. [1] http://www.emilkirkegaard.dk/en/wp-content/uploads/Intelligence-and-so…

First of all, are Murray's claims true? That's the important question. That article gets some things right, but it seems to imply that Murray is racist even if his beliefs are true. Second, if you're going to use that article's definition of racism (the belief that there are statistical differences in IQ between races) then most researchers on cognition are racist. If you survey experts anonymously, the majority will say that there is an IQ gap and that genes are a significant contributor.[1] Critics keep smuggling in the assumption that intelligence is proportional to moral worth. Murray explicitly denies this, and claims that all humans should be given equal moral worth (and equal moral agency). 1. http://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/wp-content/uploads/2013-survey-of-expert-o…

Do you have any evidence that this effect results in machines making systematically wrong inferences? Near as I can tell, your paper shows that these "biases" result in significantly more accurate predictions. For example, Fig 1 shows that a machine trained on human language can accurately predict the % female of many professions. Fig 2 shows the machine can accurately predict the gender of humans. Normally I'd expect a "bias" to result in wrong predictions - but in this case (due to an unusual redefinition of "bias") the exact opposite seems to occur. (Drawing on your analogy with stereotypes, it's probably also worth linking to a pointer on stereotype accuracy: http://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/wp-content/uploads/Jussim-et-al-unbearable… http://spsp.org/blog/stereotype-accuracy-response )

It's worth noting that the original publication doesn't claim that it is the trees that have the effect. That is a layer of confusion generated by the New Yorker author. Berman's original work compares "natural" vs urban environments. [1]http://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/wp-content/uploads/The-Cognitive-Benefits-…

>How did people even come to this bizarre conclusion? The first reason is that it is true. All of the best evidence suggests a minor male advantage on g and a major advantage in more specific abilities, such as mental rotation. See https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2021/04/the-claim-of-substantial-differen… It is easy to see why that would be the case from an evolutionary point of view. Ironically, your own post contains a clue: in a male-dominated society where men are far more valued for their intelligence than women, such differences are bound to arise. The egalitarian bad faith interpretation of this claim is that any man is smarter than Marie Curie. What it actually says is that a hypothetical Mario Curie would almost certainly outshine his real-life counterpart. The other reason is related to sexual selection. Even if a certain man is less intelligent or physically weaker than most women, it may be adaptive for him to pretend otherwise. What beliefs come to dominate in a given population is determined by reproductive success, not directly by their truth value.

Re: Daily Mail, that link is one of the ones that was fair to the woman. If you do a modicum of research about that (which ought to be interesting to a normal person!) you can find plenty of information, including video of some major network interviewing her neighbors. I know you don't care though, you just want to downvote my insightful comments. Go find something better to do. >You know fox news represents more than half of the TV news audience, right? I'm not talking about market share, I'm talking about representation in these institutions. You should know better. I didn't just make that up about the media being biased toward the left either. It has been proven in multiple surveys and polls. Individual journalists themselves tend to lean left, and so do their agencies overall. Look at how the staff of Washington Post freaked out in response to Bezos telling them to be less biased: https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/washington-post-st… Here's a study you might be interested in, one of many (not that I have a bibliography of this): https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2021/10/new-paper-out-the-left-liberal-sk… If you think more than half of all people prefer Fox News to the rest, that ought to tell you how insufferably biased they are. These used to be well-respected institutions but they have destroyed any semblance of impartiality in writing and good will toward the masses.

There's a mountain of research. I'll cite the classic pro-homework paper by Cooper which synthesizes a whole bunch of moderate to low quality studies. https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/wp-content/uploads/Does-Homework-Improve-… , because I think it shows how lacking the optimistic case is and lets you get to a whole lot of the rest of the research both ways. A small (effectively zero) positive correlation was found between the amount of time a student says they spent on homework in elementary and achievement, but a slight negative (effectively zero) correlation was found when looking at the time parents reported students spending on it. These measures don't show a causal relationship: "good students" are more likely to do homework. "poor students" are more likely to take a lot of time to complete the same amount of homework. Elementary student reports of time spent on homework are not reliable. Parent reports are even worse. The only causal evidence of a benefit in assigning homework in elementary comes from two short-term intervention studies: whether giving a homework take-home worksheet about vocabulary improves performance on the next vocabulary test (it seems so, very slightly). The longest term observational studies show a negative effect.

The people who claim that high-IQ types are doomed and will be 'The Outsiders' and will be discriminated against to the point that 90%+ of them will not get appropriate higher education (I won't link to the pseudo-statistics that supposedly 'proves' this) are claiming very large effect sizes (and blaming that for why they need shelter in high-IQ societies). In this case, such large effects can be rejected pretty soundly; with the sample sizes given, 23 vs 1058, you have 80% power to detect `pwr.t2n.test(n1=1058, n2=23, power=0.80, alternative="greater")` ~> d=0.52 (which is, for example, about half the size of the black-white IQ gap, and considered a 'medium' effect size). In addition, the longitudinal cohort studies of the gifted like Terman, Hunter, TIP, or SMPY, do not find any signs of severe emotional/behavioral/social difficulties, the genetic correlations (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_correlation#Intelligence) are all in the wrong direction, adults are more able than kids to self-select into stimulating environments (possibly why heritability of intelligence increases with age), and so on. A new review paper which is relevant: "From Terman to Today: A Century of Findings on Intellectual Precocity" http://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/wp-content/uploads/From-Terman-to-Today-A-… , Lubinski 2016. From a statistical perspective, this result doesn't tell us much about gifted adults not because the sample size is far too…

Really appreciate the thoughtful reply. While I think you make a fair prima facie case that financial value could track merit in art, as it does so in so many other domains, I would caution that 'weirdness' in the market for art could easily distort this. ('Weirdness' being the proper technical term, if I recall correctly.) There are lots of reasons art markets are weird, imperfect substitutes, monopolies, winner-take-all dynamics. But I think the biggest factor here is that consumption of truly great art requires enormous search costs. You can't be certain if you'll love a work unless you experience it, and no one has time to experience more than a miniscule fraction of all the art humanity produces any given day. The impact is that producers and distributors can successfully make works of minimally acceptable quality, but then market the hell out of them to drown out other recommendations during our search for new great works. That's why, while yes, GoT has been great, we are coming off nearly a decade dominated by reality TV with no rewatchability. Commercial art has demonstrated the capacity for perfectly fine returns with either model. Meanwhile, I'm more frequently finding that some of my favorite works have been released for free online: Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, John Dies at the End, The Martian, How We Got Here, or Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. This shouldn't be too surprising, the idea that great works are possible without strong…

Here's a thing I wrote on my personal FB wall as I linked to this article. #### Some creepy Danish assholes went ahead and released a full dataset on 70.000 random users of the OkCupid dating service "because data science". After being confronted about the questionable ethics of this stunt, lead researcher Emil O. W. Kirkegaard refuses interviews, stating that the data was already public. Kirkegaard also implies that opponents of his methods are "social justice warriors", an oftentimes euphemistic term for people interested in things like gender and minority rights issues. Interestingly, this term is repeated and specified as an area explicitly excluded from Kirkegaard's interest in "civil liberties" on his personal website. In addition to "civil liberties", the personal website of this "26 year old polymath wannabe" (read: fuckwit neckbeard) lists interests such as online privacy and the Pirate Party. That's right, you can't make this shit up: http://emilkirkegaard.dk These people simply don't care that the "public" information posted on a dating site may cost certain people their jobs, families or even their lives, at any point in the future. Open source intelligence like this may be used to extort people at a later date or lower the threshold for invisible discrimination everywhere from the job market to insurance claims. Perhaps all this seems irrelevant to Kirkegaard, as his self-defined interest in liberty explicitly excludes those most vulnerable to such…

It's only bold because there is a large number of people (often state founded, often controlling at least the lower levels of education, often with major influence on media) who strongly feel otherwise -- with no numbers to back them up, of course. --- If you actually do want to get to the bottom of it, I can heartily recommend Ian Deary's "Intelligence: A Short Introduction" as a place to start. http://www.amazon.com/Intelligence-A-Very-Short-Introduction/dp/019289… (Who knows, if you dig around a bit you might even be able to find a PDF, perhaps at Emil Kirkegaard's website.) You can also choose to spend an hour on this talk by Stephen Hsu who does research on IQ and genetics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62jZENi1ed8 You can read some of Plomin's stuff -- he is very much into genetics: http://www.nature.com/mp/journal/v20/n1/full/mp2014105a.html There's a paper I can't find at the moment that looks at almost 4000 non-related people, give them an IQ test each + scan their DNA for typical SNPs with a DNA chip. That gives us almost 8,000,000 pairs where we know how similar their IQ score and DNA was. That gives us almost 8,000,000 points we can plot into a 2D coordinate system (and we can of course also throw statistics at them). It turns out that there is a clear correlation between measured IQ and measured SNPs (i.e., the point cloud is denser along a line). In other words, there is a statistical relation between DNA and IQ. This is a result that is…

> but as I never see the anti immigration folk push for regulating or attacking the companies hiring said immigrants They did this already back when Reagan granted amnesty in exchange for stronger border protections [1], it just hardly ever got enforced because employers are good at lobbying. This is slowly starting to change [2]. Despite this, yes, it is xenophobia. As much as they hate to admit it, opposition to immigration usually stems from wanting to maintain some semblance of a country, not an economic zone. Though the economic case for immigration has also been debunked [3]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_Reform_and_Control_Act_of_19… [2] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2025/11/28/employers-hiring… [3] https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2024/02/fiscal-impact-of-immigrants-by-co…

The "reverse Flynn effect" is something that's been observed in a small number of Western countries that do IQ tests as part of their military conscription. But for example, in Denmark, when plotting measured IQ against first name, we observe that there is cultural effect, that would explain that the "reverse Flynn effect" is simply an averaging down, caused by the import of migrants from lower IQ regions. The "reverse Flynn effect" is not observed in Singapore, for example, which has maintained consistent high IQ over many years. https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2019/06/article-out-first-names-cognitive…

It’s explained in the link. Figure 2.7. It covers immigrants and their descendants across all ages. Here’s further analysis of the same data: https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2022/01/immigration-economics-for-economi…

actual source the tweet links to: https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2013/07/intelligenceiqgre-by-academic-fie…

https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2022/03/supersize-me-failed-replication-w… "the conclusion, weak as it is, is sufficient to show that the Supersize me documentary is dubious, or maybe even a hoax. Clearly, eating a lot of McDonald’s fast food (or Burger King etc.) is not really so unhealthy that there is serious health risk after a month. The other anecdotes and this study of 18 people showed that clearly. So what did Morgan Spurlock do? Who can say. We can think of benign explanations: maybe McD/Burger King changed their ingredients after 2004, or they differ between Sweden and USA, or Swedes are more naturally resistant to bad diets than English. Or maybe Spurlock engaged in a lot of creative freedom."

The higher the IQ, the higher the income: https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2023/02/there-is-no-iq-threshold-effect-a…

I couldn't find any "influential" papers by him. Here's a fascinating read about Neil's scientific output. The graph at the bottom is quite informative. https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2022/09/neil-degrasse-tyson-not-much-of-a…

Immigrants from certain countries do increase crime. It is a matter of public record in many Western countries. Sweden has gone so far as to ban the collection of statistics which reveal this, though earlier statistics and their occasional comprehensive report still indicate the same trend: https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2021/11/sweden-finally-publishes-new-immi… I can't help but wonder why you would deny these plain facts.

This blog post asserts that IQ scores didn't drop for the population as a whole, and that the drop for each individual group is due to changing composition of that group: https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2023/03/new-study-didnt-really-show-iq-de… For example, if the % of people who do a postgraduate degree goes doubles, it's no longer such a select group, so you'd expect the average IQ of postgraduate degree holders to go down. This doesn't mean IQ scores are going down for the population as a whole. One more thing: why do so many papers that present charts that show how a mean or median changes over time, without also presenting charts that show how the distribution has changed over time?

> Immigration is never 100% of the reason behind housing issues, but it’s more significant than most people want to admit. Considering how the Swedish government tried to hide the crime wave that correlated with it's open doors immigration policy [0] [1] [2], I wouldn't be surprised if they were fully aware of the impact but were trying to withhold that information as well. [0] https://twitter.com/KirkegaardEmil/status/1176849017566826497 [1] https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2021/11/sweden-finally-publishes-new-immi… [2] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-45269764

Just because the primary source is both readily available but presented as images on Twitter (apologies for the hosting domain, skip down to "Scott Siskind Thu, Feb 20, 2014, 6:12 PM"), the text: https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2021/02/backstabber-brennan-knifes-scott-… Also includes his links.

Except that the business professor was using statistically unsound correlational methods to publicize false claims of race causing changes in IQ. Read this well cited paper for methodology problems on IQ studies. " Re- search designs that do not involve total experimental control by the investigator (organisms being bred for specific experimental reasons—inbred strains, partic- ipants being fully randomized to treatments, etc.) are always problematic in that alternative explanations of a finding are invariably possible. This is certainly the case with human twin and adoption studies." [1] http://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/wp-content/uploads/Genetic-and-environment…

This is false: "The fact that you can do some symbolic inference on paper does not mean that you will be more successful in life" IQ, more than any other psychometric measure, predicts a wide variety of positive life outcomes including income, health, longevity, not being incarcerated, etc. Here [0] is a simplistic article about it, but there are endless studies and discussions about this, all with the same clear and uncontroversial result. [0] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/07/11/does-iq-determine-success-a-psychologi… Further reading: [1] https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2019/07/massive-danish-sibling-study-conf… [2] https://www.google.com/search?q=iq+predicts+success

Maybe the ponderings of a highly-respected thinker of the 20th-century might be useful in this discussion, this PDF includes Bertrand Russell's essay "Science and Values". The essay's found on p. 619. of The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell, a section of Part XVI, 'The Philosopher and Expositor of Science'. [https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/wp-content/uploads/The-Basic-Writings-of-… "Science used to be valued as a means of getting to know the world; now, owing to the triumph of technique, it is conceived as showing how to change the world." That it has.

Okay well in that case the article is deficient (I skimmed it, assuming it was making the same case I already knew about[1] -- my bad). You can actually reproduce the DK graph without supposing that estimation bias depends on skill. There is an interactive visualization here[2] that does precisely that (click on the "line plot w/ centiles" tab). You can adjust the parameters to see how it behaves. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31038386 [2] http://emilkirkegaard.dk/understanding_statistics/?app=Dunning_Kruger