Thread by @alicetheoboist

Since you asked for it, a thread with screenshots from #NoahCarl 's papers to back up my points. Disclaimers: I have omitted showing data, because all this stuff is behind pay walls. I have necessarily decontextualised sentences because this is how quoting works.

Firstly a reminder: at no point do I claim to be an expert on intelligence research. I was not critiquing Carl's work, I was critiquing a quilette article which I said was misleading.

To recap, that's this Quillete article right here:
quillette.com/2018/12/07/aca…

One of the central claims in this article is that the signatories of the letter have not read Carl's work properly (an accusation that yall also love throwing at me, although I should mention I did not sign the letter, because I am a DPhil candidate and not in his area)

Said author of quilette article is basically like 'Carl never talks about intelligence and race at the same time'. Boy was he wrong.

Let's also recap, I specifically said that Carl was not explicitly white supremacist in his papers. I also said that his papers alone do not warent that petition. Its only in connection with his attendance at the UCL conference that this is worrying.

Because I'm a nice person, I also would prefer for him to not immediately lose all future in academia. I would like him to properly examine why he does the research he does with the tools he uses and the way he writes about race.

OK onto the tea 🍵

So Carl does write about race. And always in papers specifically about intelligence. In one paper he (with some 'justification') ommitts a bunch of black subjects from the study, because he's working on old data and apparently black people were over-represented.

That's a move. An interesting one. Kinda weird methodology. The reason black people were over sampled is so that there were enough of them to draw conclusions so why would you leave them out?

Interestingly, in a different paper, Carl finds that when he looks at black people his findings (that intelligence is correlated with truth) disappear. His explanation? There weren't enough black respondents and the intelligence variable is 'noisy'. K.

Just a sidenote, as yall can see, hes very much talking about race and intelligence. Like literally, that is what he's doing. Wow I guess me saying the quilette article is misleading was right. 😮.

Let's dip back into another one of Carl's papers, where, again, his results were basically invalidated when he looked at black people. This is my favourite bit.

Yall who've been up in my mentions telling me #iq tests are robust psychological method and not biased in any way? Turns out your man Carl himself knows they're biased. He put it in an appendix so it wouldn't detract from his use of them, but bitches like me gna read that Carl.

So in order to make sure his results were valid, he gets rid of the black people in the study (again, that's a Move). What happens? His results kinda don't look so nice anymore.

(again not showing actual tables because I'm pretending I have some affinity with copyright law)

What's that, your big findings may be 'attributable to lower test scores in non-whites'?

Didn't you also just tell us that the lower test scores in non-whites were because the tests you're using were biased?

Gee, looks like a M e t h o d o l o g i c a l F l a w.

So why's Carl so down with doing this research, even when he knows that the tests are flawed, and a lot of the time his results kinda just disappear when he controls for race properly?

Well that's the fun bit. Turns out he's (pretty ironically) politically motivated. Yep Carl is s a d because he just wants to be able to publish stuff telling you black people are less intelligent and there's a 'Liberal bias' against that *cue tiny violin*

Oh also, note the implication that 'you not wanting us to check whether black people are thicker means you're RaCIst because you must think they are!' which a number of people threw at me yesterday

Honey, that's not how flawed methodology works. I know it's hard to not be able to publish explicitly racist work, but you can get through this. I believe in you.

Oops sorry here's the continuation of that last screenshot. Yadayadayada we must find the truth aka I must be allowed to use my methodology which even I know is flawed to prove black people are thick. 🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩

In case you want to be like 'but he's just being neutral, and not letting political correctness influence him', no he's not. His politics are very much influencing his work. I mean, check out this research aim:

(btw this entire paper was just like 'their findings sounded racist so they checked and found some methodological flaws but HOW WORRYING THEY CHECKED god putting a spin on it much, why can't we just be rashly racist when we want #liberals)

And a reminder of why this work is being scrutinised. Noah Carl did not just go to, but presented at the eugenics conference at UCL (Google it).

If this is the kind of shit he's happily publishing, can you imagine what he's saying behind closed doors? What he said at that conference? Do you now get why Cambridge shouldn't be putting their name behind him?

What happens when he starts teaching black undergraduates? When he clearly has problems with how he thinks about and talks about race? (petition to ban the use of "the blacks" in academia)

So to recap on the claims of the letter and also me yesterday, Carl:

Talks about Race and Intelligence at the same time ✔️
Has some squiffy methodology (guys come on, even he knows its dodgy) ✔️
Has dodgy views on race ✔️

And some less incontrovertible stuff, stemming from some dogwhistle racism and a lot of red flags:
He (super ironically) lets his own (cough racist cough) politics interfere with his research aims. He claims to be neutral, but he's clearly not.

(I lowkey think politically neutral research is a) impossible and b) undesirable. Literally everythings political soz that's how it works.)

If you read between the lines? He's pretty mad he's not allowed to just tell us that different races are less intelligent and more criminal etc etc bc POlitICaL cOrREcTnESs.

So I stand by my original points: that Quilette article was misleading as hell, he knows exactly what he's doing, and the Cambridge academic community has every right to call upon the university to examine his work more thoroughly.

This has been a whistle-stop tour of SOLO with Alice, thank you and goodbye 👋

The papers I've screenshotted have been:
Carl, N. 2018: Does Activism in Social Science Explain Conservatives Distrust of Scientists
---2015a: Cognitive Ability and Political Beliefs in the United States
[cont]

--- 2015b: Can Intelligence Explain the Overrepresentation of Liberals and Leftists in American Academia
--- 2014a: Verbal Intelligence is Correlated with Socially and Economically Liberal Beliefs
--- 2014b: Generalised Trust and Intelligence in the United States