2 Aug 2023

Emil O Kierkegaard

What to say about Emil O Kierkegaard?  Undoubtedly the world's most "incorrect" man.  An initial caution:  Don't confuse him with Soren Kierkegaard, the Danish "existential" philosopher.  For my sins I read a book by Soren Kierkegaard in my youth and found only meaningless drivel.

Emil Kierkegaard is a very hard-working Danish statistician  who subjects to exhaustive analysis any social or demographic database he can get his hands on.  He mostly analyses other people's data -- usually data from very mainstream sources. And what he finds in the datasets makes Leftist hair stand on end. They hate it. What he finds is all there in the data:  He just puts it on display, warts and all

I can't do any justice to the full body of his work here so I will just mention what he finds about one current huge controversy:  black educational and economic under-achievement.

For a long time Leftist educational and social commentators blamed the spectacular educational under-achievement of blacks on the educational system.  They were confident that if they got the teaching and the testing right, the "gap" would vanish.  After decades of trying everything the human mind could devise however, nothing worked.  The gap remained, unbudged

So they did eventually give up on that and recently moved onto something completely different:  Critical Race Theory.  According to CRT blacks are "down" because whites are racist and hold blacks down.  Black failure is the fault of whites.  That whites actually make great efforts to lift blacks up via various types of affirmative action is dismissed as tokenism. Whites don't really mean it, apparently

No evidence is  normally put forward for CRT.  It is just asserted and has become something of a religion in intellectual  circles.  It has GOT to be true in order to explain black failure, they seem to think.  There is simply no other explanation

But there is another explanation -- one that has been known and exemplified for around a hundred years, one that has a mountain of evidence for it:  The large gap in average IQ between blacks and whites.  Leftists always pooh-pooh IQ tests precisely because of that gap.  The tests must be faulty and not measure what they purport to measure, they say.  But they overlook the fact that black failure is precise confirmation that the IQ tests are valid.  What blacks achieve is precisely what one would predict from their IQ scores.  The tests are in fact a spectacular predictive success. It is hard to imagine better validation for them.

And where the real heartburn originates is that IQ is highly hereditary.  To put it bluntly, the implication is that blacks are BORN dumb.  I have just been cast into outer darkness for saying that.  

Leftists are passionately angry about the world they live in and as a result have a compulsion to change it. So telling them that something is unchangeable grates on their very bones.  They cannot and will not have it.  Black failure must be the fault of white racism.  It cannot be the result of unalterable black genetics.  The Leftist response is profoundly dogmatic and intellectually nowhere.

But there are some very bright Leftists who think they see a way out of the dilemma.  They say that IQ might be hereditarily determined among both blacks and whites but the DIFFERENCE between black and white IQ might not be genetic.  That is very unlikely but it is statistically possible so requires some reply.  My reply is that it treats blacks and whites as different SPECIES.  They are saying that black brains and white brains differ in how they work.  That actually contradicts what they are trying to prove:  That blacks and whites are really the same.

I think that is an adequate reply but it is a statistical reply that is really needed.  And that is where Kierkegaard comes in.  He has recently done a big statistical analysis using many different methods which shows that the IQ difference between blacks and whites IS mainly genetic and, as such fundamentally intractable

So what is the response Kierkegaard gets for all his statistical labours?  If they mention him at all, the Left simply dismiss him as a "racist".  They don't want any of his goddam facts.  They KNOW the truth and Kierkegaard is wrong.

https://www.emilkirkegaard.com/p/a-plethora-of-evidence-for-genetic

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This note originated as a blog post. For more blog postings from me, see
DISSECTING LEFTISM,
TONGUE-TIED,
EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL,
GREENIE WATCH,
POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH,
AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and
IMMIGRATION WATCH.

I update those frequently.



Much less often, I update Paralipomena , A Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and most days I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.



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