Here's an interesting gaffe. In the latest newsletter from the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies (IEET), a group promoting radical human enhancement technologies (I subscribe just for kicks), there's a chart comparing IQ to socio-economic status, from what's obviously quite a biased perspective (think The Bell Curve) along with the following text:
Demonstrating the deadly feedback loop between socio-economic conditions and IQ. Cognitive enhancement will only fix one part of the loop, but it certainly can’t hurt.
I'd rather not reproduce the chart, but you can find it under March 15 at the IEET's blog. You can also find it at one of SEED magazine's ScienceBlogs, Omni Brain: Why IQ Matters - a graph, which is apparently where the IEET got it from.
Neither blog cites the source of the graph, but one of Omni Brain's readers determined that it's the work of Linda Gottfredson, a defender of The Bell Curve, who (according to Wikipedia) "advocates the innate intellectual inferiority of African Americans."
Steve Higgins of Omni Brain says he posted the chart to be ironic, though he admits he didn't know where it came from. The IEET's post shows no trace of irony, but with their ultra-left/libertarian "cyborg democracy" politics I assume they would not support Gottfredson's racist work and that this got posted without much thought. Without that in mind, it would just look to a naive observer (i.e., a student) that they're offering up this chart as scientific fact.
Of course, this is the web... what would it be without snippets of junk floating all over out of context?
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