Some historical context on this issue. If Bostrom’s original post was written around 1996 (as I’ve seen some people suggest), that was just after the height of the controversy over ‘The Bell Curve’ book (1994) by Richard Herrnstein & Charles Murray.
In response to the firestorm around that book, the American Psychological Association appointed a blue-ribbon committee of 11 highly respected psychologists and psychometricians to evaluate the Bell Curve’s empirical claims. They published a report in 1996 on their findings, which you can read here, and summarized here. The APA committee affirmed most of the Bell Curve’s key claims, and concluded that there were well-established group differences in average general intelligence, but that the reasons for the differences were not yet clear.
More recently, Charles Murray has reviewed the last 30 years of psychometric and genetic evidence in his book Human Diversity (2020), and in his shorter, less technical book Facing Reality (2021).
This is the most controversial topic in all of the behavioral sciences. EAs might be prudent to treat this whole controversy as an information hazard, in which learning about the scientific findings can be socially and professionally dangerous. But it is worth noting that there is a big gap between what intelligence researchers have actually found, versus what most social scientists, journalists, and activists believe.
Epistemic status: As a psychology professor, I’ve worked on intelligence research for over 20 years, was on the editorial board of the journal Intelligence, and have published 3 books and 11 papers on the evolutionary origins, functions, genetics, and structure of human intelligence, which have been cited a few thousand times. However I’ve never worked directly on, or published on, group differences in intelligence.
Some historical context on this issue. If Bostrom’s original post was written around 1996 (as I’ve seen some people suggest), that was just after the height of the controversy over ‘The Bell Curve’ book (1994) by Richard Herrnstein & Charles Murray.
In response to the firestorm around that book, the American Psychological Association appointed a blue-ribbon committee of 11 highly respected psychologists and psychometricians to evaluate the Bell Curve’s empirical claims. They published a report in 1996 on their findings, which you can read here, and summarized here. The APA committee affirmed most of the Bell Curve’s key claims, and concluded that there were well-established group differences in average general intelligence, but that the reasons for the differences were not yet clear.
More recently, Charles Murray has reviewed the last 30 years of psychometric and genetic evidence in his book Human Diversity (2020), and in his shorter, less technical book Facing Reality (2021).
This is the most controversial topic in all of the behavioral sciences. EAs might be prudent to treat this whole controversy as an information hazard, in which learning about the scientific findings can be socially and professionally dangerous. But it is worth noting that there is a big gap between what intelligence researchers have actually found, versus what most social scientists, journalists, and activists believe.
Epistemic status: As a psychology professor, I’ve worked on intelligence research for over 20 years, was on the editorial board of the journal Intelligence, and have published 3 books and 11 papers on the evolutionary origins, functions, genetics, and structure of human intelligence, which have been cited a few thousand times. However I’ve never worked directly on, or published on, group differences in intelligence.