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BLP related deletion about Jensen

I have deleted a controversial sentence that we have argued about before. It was: "He also concluded that some kind of eugenic intervention was needed to reduce the birthrate of those with low IQs, particularly in the black population, and that as students they should be taught by relying on their ability to associate rather than understand, i.e. learning by rote, not through conceptual explanation." An uninvolved editor at WP:BLP/N pointed out that he could not verify it. I agree. See there for the full discussion. Summary: When making extreme claims about a living person, the standard of proof is higher. You can't claim that Jensen made eugenics claim relating to the black population without clear evidence that he did so. Tucker saying so is not enough. (I will also note that the references to Jensen (1969) are false. Pages 95 and 115 say nothing of the sort. (Please read WP:BLP for background.) David.Kane (talk) 16:23, 28 May 2010 (UTC)

That's absolutely, completely absurd. This is a very weak objection to raise here. Where has Jensen even disputed that he said this in that article? He clearly said it. Professor marginalia (talk) 16:56, 28 May 2010 (UTC)

Even if he didn't say it there are so many independent reliable sources that have interpreted his statements in that way that it cannot possibly be a BLP issue. NPOV requires that we present Jensen's own version and that the views of his opponents are attributed as being theirs. Nothing more. ·Maunus·ƛ· 17:36, 28 May 2010 (UTC)

1) Professor marginalia: Please quote the exact sentence in the article where he said it. 2) I encourage anyone involved here to participate in the conversation at BLP. The only two uninvolved editors (Rvcx and Off2riorob) to comment there have agreed with me. Summary: Claims about living people require very high standards. It is not enough to note that Tucker (or whoever) said X. 3) "so many independent reliable sources"? Really? Other than Tucker, I am unaware of any other sources that report that Jensen was wanted to reduce the birthrate "particularly in the black population." Can you provide a citation? David.Kane (talk) 17:49, 28 May 2010 (UTC)

You were involved when this was previously discussed on the talk page so I don't understand why you're re-raising the dispute here again. Jensen has a section titled, "Genetic Improvement of Intelligence" in which he advocates a "negative eugenics" approach. "There is little doubt that in the long run the surest way of changing the biological basis of intelligence is through genetic selection," he says, but he says it's unlikely to happen because popular attitudes would oppose it. He says though that "at present" a "negative eugenics" approach is a "reasonable answer," discouraging traits that "all humane persons" would agree are "human misfortunes" to be avoided if at all possible, and quotes at length some position of Elizabeth and Sheldon Reed to elevate sterilization rates among the mental retarded. He then goes on to delve into birthrates in the low income "Negro" population which clearly is of particular concern to Jensen, who repeatedly addresses the implications of links between IQ, academic and economic performance in the context of this population in particular throughout the paper. The disproportionately high birth rates in the lower income (suggestive of lower IQ, Jensen asserts) black population poses the risk, he says, of "the genetic enslavement of a substantial segment of our population". Jensen's cite for this concern is another paper focused on this population by Hill and Jaffee called, "Negro fertility and family size preferences" and published in The Negro American. Jensen writes, "Our failure seriously to investigate these matters may well be viewed by future generations as our society's greatest injustice to Negro Americans." Even Jensen has been more forthright about what he's really said than his defenders at wikipedia seem willing to be. Professor marginalia (talk) 18:35, 28 May 2010 (UTC)

"You were involved when this was previously discussed on the talk page so I don't understand why you're re-raising the dispute here again." First, my previous involvement helped to correct a major (?) mistake: asserting that Jensen (1969) said something which, in fact, it did not. Perhaps MathSci's error in that context should have caused me to look more closely. I apologize for my tardiness in revisiting this topic. Second, because I am not an experienced editor, I had never read WP:BLP closely before. I just did today. I now understand that a much higher level of proof is called for as long as Jensen is still alive. Third, this is not an open-and-shut case, on either side. That is why I brought the topic to WP:BLP/N. As you can see there , MathSci has received zero support from uninvolved editors. Read the discussion for the details. My summary: You can't claim that something extreme about Jensen unless you can show, directly, that Jensen said it. You can't simply rely on person X saying it. I encourage you to participate in that discussion.

As to the substance, I am happy to believe that all your quotes from Jensen (1969) are accurate. But I don't see how you get from there to what we used to have in the article. You are making a major leap. You can't make such a leap when dealing with a living person. Let me remind you, also, that you claimed above about "so many independent reliable sources." Please provide them. As best I can tell, these claims about Jensen come from Tucker alone. David.Kane (talk) 19:49, 28 May 2010 (UTC)

What "leap"? And I didn't say anything about "so many independent reliable sources". It's like the target keeps moving in here...where's the beef? What do you think the article here claimed that Jensen doesn't? Professor marginalia (talk) 19:54, 28 May 2010 (UTC)

David.Kane, whose edits yesterday were self-declared to be agnostic, today has made edits that seem to be Jensenism denial. Not only can the statements of Tucker be read directly in the HER paper, but there are plenty of other primary and secondary sources. There's the 1987 book in which Jensen reiterates these claims. There is his book on Genetics and group differences form 1973. And most directly there is this interview in LIFE magazine which seems fairly unambiguous: . It's not a good sign that RegentsPark disgarees with David.Kane's point of view. Mathsci (talk) 20:10, 28 May 2010 (UTC)

Professor marginalia: Apologies! I mistakenly attributed a quote from Maunus to you. My mistake. MathSci: Please provide the exact quote(s) from these sources which justifies this sentence in the article. I agree with you that Tucker makes this claim. I see no other source which makes this claim. David.Kane (talk) 21:56, 28 May 2010 (UTC)

You say Tucker said "it". You also agree with what I quoted from Jensen about what he said, but disagree it agrees with what the claim here said. To me, all three agree. So once more what, exactly, was different about how it was formulated here from how it was formulated in Tucker or Jensen? Professor marginalia (talk) 22:11, 28 May 2010 (UTC)

Professor marginalia: Let me quote the objectionable sentence and take it apart bit by bit. I believe that much of it is fine. The problem is that, taken as a whole, it misleads about Jensen's writings.

• "He also concluded that some kind of eugenic intervention was needed to reduce the birthrate of those with low IQs . . . " Does Jensen actually write this? Again, I am not denying that Tucker says that he did, but I have trouble coming up with a citation in which Jensen writes: "People with low IQ should be sterilized." or "People with low IQ should be given monetary awards to not have children." Are you aware of such a quote? Again, I could easily be wrong about this. Perhaps Jensen does write something exactly like that. If so, it should certainly be included in the article.
• " . . . , particularly in the black population," I highly doubt that Jensen ever wrote this. He may have written something claiming that eugenics was "needed" for low IQ people, but he never said that this need was particular to the black population. It may be that, once this clause is removed, the sentence is fine.
• "and that as students they should be taught by relying on their ability to associate rather than understand, i.e. learning by rote, not through conceptual explanation." What does the "they" refer to in this sentence? If it is all low IQ students, then I think it is reasonable. Jensen certainly believed that different teaching methods should be used for students of different IQ. But I don't think he ever said (nor do Tucker's citations support that he ever said) that this claim applied more to black low IQ students then it does to Hispanic low IQ students or white low IQ students.

Thanks for taking a look at this. I do not think that you and I, at least, are too far away on what a good sentence would look like. David.Kane (talk) 22:23, 28 May 2010 (UTC)

Jensen wrote that "There is little doubt that in the long run the surest way of changing the biological basis of intelligence is through genetic selection. It is a fact that many different behavioral traits, including those we would identify as intelligence, can be changed through selective breeding in lower animals. There is no reason to believe this does not also hold true for the human species. But I doubt that we will see any move in this direction of systematic eugenics in the foreseeable future for several reasons......The reasonable answer, I believe, is to think at present only in terms of negative eugenics rather than in terms of positive eugenics." A secondary source (Tucker) characterizes Jensen's asserting this as a "reasonable answer" to elevating IQ as "advocating". Whereas you are worrying about any "implication" that suggests Jensen would apply this to blacks but not Hispanics is reading too much into it. Jensen himself concentrates on black white differences because (he in other interviews has pointed out) that's the data available. It would be false to apply this to Hispanics because he didn't in this paper. And it would be false to pretend that he saw no distinction between black and white remedies. He emphasized the differences themselves, noting the "disparity" between black and white birth rates in what he called the "disadvantaged" class, and he was concerned that continuing on that path would result in even greater black and white group differences. In other words by reducing the low IQ births of blacks the academic/economic gap between blacks and whites in society would lessen. Professor marginalia (talk) 23:26, 28 May 2010 (UTC)

<= I have added some completely new content and a new secondary source (one of many available), so that the direct quotes of Jensen could be expanded. I realized, on rereading Wooldridge's summary, that I'd left out a significant bit at the end, which has now been inserted. I changed the subclause in the lede and gave a new direct quote from Tucker's 1996 book. Everything is sourced. As other editors have said, the Tucker quote is accurate and is reflected in numerous secondary sources. Mathsci (talk) 23:58, 28 May 2010 (UTC)

MathSci: WP:BLP clearly requires us to reach consensus before contentious material about a living person is added. Why do you continue to violate this policy? I may have no choice but to revert some of your changes. David.Kane (talk) 02:43, 29 May 2010 (UTC)

What contentious material? Isn't this just a repetition of the discussion you just had above with Professor marginalia?

Just as a matter of interest, why do you think Jensen gave an interview to American Renaissance in 1992 ? (Not something that needs to be mentioned in the article since it's not described in a secondary source.) Mathsci (talk) 03:27, 29 May 2010 (UTC)

I have no idea. David.Kane (talk) 13:27, 29 May 2010 (UTC)

Professor marginalia: We are arguing over a single sentence that begins "He concluded" and that, given the context, is clearly a reference to Jensen (1969). Agreed? So, in that context, any evidence you provide to support that claim must be quotes from Jensen (1969) or from secondary sources discussing Jensen (1969). Agreed? But some of the quotes you provide are not from Jensen (1969). Can you provide quotes from Jensen (1969) to support the sentence? (If you wanted to move the sentence elsewhere and make clear that the "concluded" referred to some other article/book/speech, that would be a different matter. David.Kane (talk) 13:27, 29 May 2010 (UTC)

David.Kane, this is exasperating. All my quotes were from Jensen 1969. All of them. "He concluded" is not only sourced to Tucker, it is a perfectly adequate assessment of Jensen's own statement - to quote again, "The reasonable answer, I believe, is to think at present only in terms of negative eugenics rather than in terms of positive eugenics."

It's been very frustrating to nail the focus here. Let me lay it out this way:

• Why isn't Tucker sufficient? Because Jensen is a BLP?
• If Tucker is insufficient because this is a BLP and the claim is allegedly "contentious", how is it contentious? Does Jensen dispute it? Or does he concede to it? Do other references dispute Jensen concluded this? Or do they agree he did? More directly, for the sake of argument here, if even Jensen's own quotations confirms the same thing post 1969 (as you seemed willing to allow above) then isn't it disingenuous to argue that the claim is only narrowly "contentious" in the context of this one paper?!

So focus. It isn't our job to "vet" the strengths or weaknesses of Tucker's claims. He's the authority-we aren't. So if Tucker's to be given extra scrutiny here, by what rationale? Thanks. Professor marginalia (talk) 16:19, 29 May 2010 (UTC)

Well, perhaps I have been using a bad version of Jensen (1969). This is the one I have looked at. Do you have a better one? I do not see your quote about "But I doubt that we will see any move in this direction of systematic eugenics in the foreseeable future for several reasons" or some of the others there. Am I searching poorly? This is clearly at the root of much of our disagreement. Apologies if this is my fault somehow. David.Kane (talk) 19:52, 29 May 2010 (UTC)

Leaving aside the issue of exactly what is in Jensen (1969), let me address your questions about Tucker. Imagine Tucker has written "Jensen argued in his 1969 article that the moon is made of green cheese." Now, Tucker is, we all agree, a reliable source. But that hardly guarantees that everything in Tucker is correct. If Tucker makes a clearly false claim (as above), then surely, it does not belong in Misplaced Pages, even though it appeared in a reliable source and even if we wrote it as "Tucker concluded that Jensen argued . . . " If Jensen were dead, then I would have less of an objection to what I see as clearly false material. (And, again, this debate originally involved a mistaken interpretation of Tucker.) But, because Jensen is alive, we must be sure that claims in Misplaced Pages, even if found in a reliable source are correct. I admit that this is a subtle issue that is not currently addressed clearly by WP:BLP. In this case, the claim is "contentious" in the sense that I (and other editors) think it is clearly false. Tucker is claiming that Jensen (1969) says X when, in fact, Jensen (1969) does not say X. We are doing the contending. Now, if this were some minor issue, we would probably not care. But this is a major issue. Tucker believes that Jensen argued that all blacks should be educated differently than all whites while, in fact, Jensen argued that all low IQ students should be educated differently, regardless of race. David.Kane (talk) 20:11, 29 May 2010 (UTC)

"Well, perhaps I have been using a bad version of Jensen (1969)."--No, I'm sorry. My mistake. Some of these quotes were all from Jensen's How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement 1967 paper, not the 1969. The 1969 retains some of them word for word but not all of them and I wasn't paying close attention to the date. Jensen's words, same title - different year.

So to rewind. The issue at hand is what Jensen did say, and what Tucker did say and what this article did say. This article said, " also concluded that some kind of eugenic intervention was needed to reduce the birthrate of those with low IQs." You then asked for quotations from Jensen like, "People with low IQ should be sterilized" or "People with low IQ should be given monetary awards to not have children." We don't need those particular quotations. Taking care now to cite Jensen 1969 alone, focus on the section "Is Our National IQ declining". Jensen goes on at length suggesting the dire consequences of factors leading to a growing proportion of low IQ births, especially in the "Negro" population due high birthrates among lower IQ, lower class blacks. Low IQ black parents have disproportionately more babies, he says. "Certain census statistics suggest that there might be forces at work which could create and widen the genetic aspect of the average difference in ability between the Negro and white populations in the United States, with the possible consequence that the improvement of educational facilities and increasing equality of opportunity will have a decreasing probability of producing equal achievement or continuing gains in the Negro population's ability to compete on equal terms." He emphasizes it further: "Is there a danger that current welfare policies, unaided by eugenic foresight, could lead to the genetic enslavement of a substantial segment of our population? The possible consequences of our failure seriously to study these questions may well be viewed by future generations as our society's greatest injustice to Negro Americans." This is obviously consistent with the claim that was made here in this article and with Tucker, the secondary source. I don't know any other way to interpret it--he clearly concludes that "eugenic foresight" should factor into the setting of welfare policy, and his concern is to improve a population's IQ levels via changes in the gene frequency. He doesn't recommend sterilization or monetary awards, but he is talking about "improving" the IQ distribution of the population genetically, and he calls it eugenics. Professor marginalia (talk) 19:29, 30 May 2010 (UTC)

Summary: You claimed that X, Y and Z were in Jensen (1969). You were wrong and wasted a lot of our time. No worries. We all make mistakes. If you want to write about Jensen (1967), that would be fine. But, right now, the dispute was about Jensen (1969). In any event, I believe that MathSci's intelligent usage of longer quotes from Jensen (1969) and less of Tucker's misleading phrasing has solved almost all of the problem. In another round or two, we should be able to put that paragraph to bed. David.Kane (talk) 20:31, 30 May 2010 (UTC)

That's one summary: Here's another. Jensen said it all...so you've wasted a lot of our time here trying to twist confusions over dates into major disputes over supposedly "controversial" claims about Jensen as per BLP policy. There is no dispute about 1969. You have posed this a BLP issue pertaining to Jensen's views, not the exact dates of his remarks. If my mistake "wasted" much of your time, apply it against the amount of time you've cost us here sending us off on a wild goose "BLP" chase rather than simply clearing up some mix-up over dates. Professor marginalia (talk) 21:38, 30 May 2010 (UTC)

Comment from Jimbo Wales on standards for attributing views to Jensen

Going forward, we should probably keep in mind this comment from Jimbo Wales.

Sorry to come in late here, but I want to agree with Off2riorob on the philosophical point here. "Contentionus claims require exceptional citations" is a concise statement, beautifully put. Now, as to this particular issue, and whether that burden of proof has been met, I don't think so, but I am not certain. I read enough of the discussion which follows to think that is almost certainly has not been met, but I applaud that people do seem to agree that in order to claim that Jenson "has recommended separate curricula for Blacks and Whites" we need it from his own words, not the synthesis and conclusion-drawing of his critics.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 21:32, 28 May 2010 (UTC)

Would anyone disagree with that sentiment? David.Kane (talk) 13:58, 29 May 2010 (UTC)

Well I'm actually exchanging emails with Jimbo at the moment, so I think you should wait until that's done with. Meanwhile I have added a slightly sdifferent summary of half the statement from Joan Freeman (in gifted education); and the content of the famous "eugenic foresight" quote is summarised in many other places. So I should just wait to see how things pan out. Of course Jimbo is unaware of the long and faithful summary with as many quotes (always taken from a secondary source). I am not dead set by the way on keeping the Tucker quote. I am quite happy to break it up into two halves. But just let's wait and see for the moment. Mathsci (talk) 14:26, 29 May 2010 (UTC)

It's a red herring to pose the question here isn't it? I can't find any trace of a dispute here over the statement "Jensen recommended separate curricula for Blacks and Whites." We could do with more focus and less bluster to sort through these disputes. It's clearly adding confusion to an already challenging topic. So if you're thinking that you can conveniently apply some broadly expressed "philosophical point" to the content disputes raised in the last few days here, no. It doesn't apply. Professor marginalia (talk) 15:40, 29 May 2010 (UTC)

No. There are disputes about Jensen related points in both this article and another. Wales added his comment after both had been brought up in that thread. Read the history. In fact, a different editor complained about the lack of support for the eugenics claim that I have tried to remove from here that thread. Anyway, the main point is fairly obvious. "Contentions claims require exceptional citations" when it comes to living persons. Do you disagree with that sentiment? David.Kane (talk) 15:53, 29 May 2010 (UTC)

Sorry, but that doesn't work. There is nothing "obviously" contentious about "the eugenics claim" to anyone who knows about Jensen because Jensen has been surprisingly consistent about on this for decades. That's why we need to focus exactly on the particular claims in each and every case here and it's not helpful to try and airbrush claims about him with a broad brush rationale that the topic is "contentious". Virtually everything Jensen has said in the last 40 years has been contentious. The article is about the "controversy", of which he plays a key part for the last 50 years. Professor marginalia (talk) 17:06, 29 May 2010 (UTC)

I do think Wales's comment is of marginal relevance here. Beyond which, he is just one more editor and his view doesn't carry any more weight than anyone else's (although his experience and understanding of policy is probably pretty good).

My complaint was with the initial phrasing that Jensen articulated a "need" for eugenics, which I felt implied a level of advocacy that wasn't well-sourced. The new text said that he found "the solution" in eugenics, without clearly defining the problem being solved, which I feel is also a (much weaker) implication of advocacy. I've been bold and slightly reworded. It seems pretty clear that Jensen thought eugenics could prevent what he perceived as a growing racial IQ divide; I think the new wording stands on its own and there's little of value to be gained by strengthening it to imply advocacy. Rvcx (talk) 17:23, 29 May 2010 (UTC)

That works for me. Jensen sees eugenics as a far more effective remedy than education, but he's not an "advocate" in any realpolitik sense of the word. Pro-eugenics advocates do cite Jensen's work, but he's relatively passive. In his own words, he's resigned to the fact that it's so unpopular it won't happen so it's pointless to dwell much on it. He does think there's every chance that totalitarian regimes will implement eugenics programs and he predicts that by doing so they'll "pass up" those countries or cultures that don't. Professor marginalia (talk) 17:43, 29 May 2010 (UTC)

Well, I think we are making progress. The current version is much better than what we started with. I would ask Professor marginalia to keep in mind that there is a difference between making a claim about what Jensen believes now (or believed over the course of his career) and what he "concluded" in a specific article. If you want to claim that, in a specific article Jensen said X, it is not unreasonable for I or Rvcx to ask for a citation in that article which supports that point. David.Kane (talk) 19:47, 29 May 2010 (UTC)

No, that's not quite right. We don't overrule sources. We take extra care to use good sources. If something is obviously erroneous, polemical or inconsistent, yes of course it's legitimate to look more closely. If other sources contradict it, if it's an obscure cite rather than a widely accepted source, etc., these factors also into the decision. And the claims have to be faithful to the source. But the disputes here tend too often to go round in circles like this: "The article says 'In 1969 Jensen came out with an explosive paper that claimed the moon is made of green cheese.' That's a controversial claim so we need to be sure he said it in 1969. I'm not satisfied, so I reverted it." Then we waste considerable amount of time over texts where he consistently says it from 1970-2010, but because it's a controversial claim, the secondary sources are overruled. But of course, only secondary sources are sufficient to source controversial claims (We can't go cherry picking for favorites of our own. Secondary sources are absolutely critical to source controversial claims.) There is nothing controversial about whether he said it in 1969 or 1970. That's a detail that we should take care to be as accurate as possible, but it's the green cheese that's controversial, not the date. And with sources and Jensen consistent on that very point in other years, we correct such details--we don't dispense with the controversial issue altogether. That's why we need to sharply focus and express exactly what's wrong with something in order to fix the real problem. Professor marginalia (talk) 01:36, 30 May 2010 (UTC)

Departure from material in secondary source

The summary ofJensen's article is taken from Wooldridge's book. We paraphrase that summary in the text without inserting our interpretation. Here is the text in Wooldrdge's book . It reads

But he felt that 'the technique for rasing intelligence per se in the sense of g, probably lie more in the province of biological sciences than in psychology or eduaction'; eugenic reform rather than compensatory educationheld out the solution to the problem of the nation's intelligence.

There is no comparative here, as would be expected in an article that started "Compensatory eduction has been tried and it has apparently failed", No need to include original research by dparting from the secondary source used. That's how wikipedia is edited. We stick to the secondary source and do not include our WP:OR. Mathsci (talk) 10:33, 30 May 2010 (UTC)

You don't seem to know what a comparative is: "more". Woodson characterizes Jensen as asserting that biology would have more of an impact on raising intelligence than psychology or education. This source doesn't support Jensen as saying "we need to change people's biology", or "changing people's biology is the solution" (without qualification for what it's the solution for); only that biology would be more effective than education in raising intelligence. Rvcx (talk) 10:41, 30 May 2010 (UTC)

Mine is n close paraphrase of the secondary source. I produced two versions, the second much closer to what wooldridge wrote. Biological sciences means here eugenics not changing people's biology. It means popuplation control. Look up eugenics and look up the book of Wooldridge - not Woodson - before making howlers like this. Thanks, Mathsci (talk) 10:50, 30 May 2010 (UTC)

Since there is such disagreement in this topic, both on the part of secondary sources and the editors of the article, it is essential, when statements are attributed to persons, that accurate quotations be given from primary sources and not from secondary sources that may be biased or slanted. Xxanthippe (talk) 11:00, 30 May 2010 (UTC).

Unfortunately the article is based on secondary sources not on the WP:OR of editors. The secondary sources do not disagree. We have a secondary source and a primary source. Rvcx think the primary source means "changing people's biology". All secondary sources (3 or 4) and the rest of Jensen's article makes it clear that he is talking about eugenics, i.e. population control. We don't interpret the primary source but we can use secondary sources to quote from primary sources if there are citations there. In particular this applies especially to controversial primary sources and Jensen's paper is certainly one such. Mathsci (talk) 11:50, 30 May 2010 (UTC)

Most of you are probably aware of this already, but for those who aren't, I think I should mention that this issue is now being discussed at AN/I. --Captain Occam (talk) 12:05, 30 May 2010 (UTC)

MathSci: 1) Would you concede that other editors might, in good faith, disagree with your interpretation of both the secondary sources and of Jensen (1969) itself? 2) Looking only at the excerpts you have kindly provided, the secondary sources do, in fact, disagree. Wooldridge makes no claim that Jensen sought to treat low IQ blacks differently than low IQ whites. In fact, the excerpt you provide implies the opposite. Tucker makes the opposite claim, hence our arguments over phrases like "particularly in the black population." Can you provide a single citation from Wooldrige which supports the claim that Jensen sought to treat all blacks, irrespective of IQ, differently from all whites? If not, then the secondary sources disagree on this fundamental point. David.Kane (talk) 12:06, 30 May 2010 (UTC)

There doesn't seem to be any confusion in the secondary sources (eg there's a detailed discussion in the 1996 summary of Tucker). I prefer Wooldridge's style: I believe he was one of he brightest historians of his generation at Oxford, very All Souls College. Are you talking about Level I and Level II learning? Are you talking about Blacks on average not having much aptitude in Level II? The statements you've written seem very extreme and not like anything in the article. Tucker doesn't say that either. Indeed Tucker is quite careful in how he refers to Jensen. And so am I. I'm not anti-Jensen at all.

It might be of some help if I can tell you my personal feelings on Jensen as an academic. As I wrote to Jimbo, I'm a frequent academic visitor to UC Berkeley friendly with many septagenerians and octogenerians in the mathematics department, I view him just like one of those. Many are slightly eccentric, all are needless to say very smart, although sometimes ailing. All deserve quiet respect. Just reading Mackintosh makes it quite clear what the contributions of Jensen have been outside this particular topic. And I suspect that he has been denied various honours that would normally have come his way, such as membership of the NAS, because of this controversy. I think in 1970 while it was happening he said to reporters, "I wish this would all just go away." Again I also feel that he has unwittingly been used by other people with political agendas, which he does not share as he has stated many times. The 1969 paper was just speculative as the secondary sources say and the furore - as the article makes clear - was amplified vastly by the turbulent spirit of the sixties. I was mildly surprised to find the 1967 article of the same name at ed.gov: that article that was only 17 pages long and probably went down without a murmur. The later longer version probably misjudged the mood of the times. But it was doubtless Shockley's campaigning at the NAS and elsewhere that threw Jensen into events that were quite alien to his personality and views. On the topic of race and intelligence, apart from the empirical analysis of IQ scores, particularly in the US, I think almost nothing is known about the underlying biological mechanisms in any way that would satisfy a scientist. There has been a lot of speculation by psychologists, some of it not perhaps quite right, but as James R. Flynn wrote in Nature, speculation even when wrong can lead to unexpected new findings. In his case I think he was talking about the Flynn effect and discovered that as a result of examining some of Jensen's ideas. Sternberg, Mackintosh and Flynn all are associated with the Cambridge Psychometrics Centre which I now realize I go past quite a number of times on Free School Lane in Cambridge. I think they occupy the old Cavendish laboratory (follow the link). I could take a look in there this week if I'm not too busy marking exams. I once was the person throwing the sheets off the balcony in the Senate House some years ago for Part III of he Math Tripos, just like this picture File:Mathmo results.jpg. (I had to wear a mortarboard,) These are just are personal views and don't really affect the writing of the article. It might also be helpful to look in the short article by Tucker on scientific racists (in the refs). He explains his own attitude to Jensen right at the end and why he does not regard him as a scientific racist. Although the underlying theme might be black and white, there's no black and white in people's views.

I hope this is of some help to you. Mathsci (talk) 13:22, 30 May 2010 (UTC)

Claims of authority or personal expertise carry no weight here, Mathsci, and they are not a way to avoid requests for accurate sourcing. If you can get an article about Jensen published in a respected venue then we can use that as a secondary source. Rvcx (talk) 15:58, 30 May 2010 (UTC)

New description of Jensen (1969) from MathSci

MathSci created a new version of the section about Jensen (1969) (mostly drawn, I believe from Wooldrige) in our discussion over this issue at WP:BPLN.

In his article, 123 pages long, Jensen insisted on the accuracy and lack of bias in intelligence tests, stating that the absolute quantity g that they measured, the general intelligence factor first introduced by the English psychologist Charles Spearman in 1904, "stood like a Rock of Gibraltar in psychometrics". He stressed the importance of biological considerations in intelligence, commenting that "the belief in the almost infinite plasticity of intellect, the ostrich-like denial of biological factors in individual differences, and the slighting of the role of genetics in the study of intelligence can only hinder investigation and understanding of the conditions, processes, and limits through which the social environment influences human behavior." He argued at length that, contrary to environmentalist orthodoxy, intelligence was partly dependent on the same genetic factors that influence other physical attributes. More controversially, he briefly speculated that the difference in performance at school between blacks and whites might have a partly genetic explanation, commenting that there were "various lines of evidence, no one of which is definitive alone, but which, viewed all together, make it a not unreasonable hypothesis that genetic factors are strongly implicated in the average Negro-white intelligence difference. The preponderance of the evidence is, in my opinion, less consistent with a strictly environmental hypothesis than with a genetic hypothesis, which, of course, does not exclude the influence of environment or its interaction with genetic factors."He advocated the allocation of educational resources according to merit and insisted on the close correlation between intelligence and occupational status, arguing that "in a society that values and rewards individual talent and merit, genetic factors inevitably take on considerable importance." Concerned that the average IQ in the USA was inadequate to answer the increasing needs of an industrialised society, he predicted that people with lower IQs would become unemployable while there would be an insufficient number with higher IQs to fill professional posts. He felt that the solution lay in eugenic reform rather compensatory education surmising that "the technique for raising intelligence per se in the sense of g, probably lie more in the province of biological science than in psychology or education". He pointed out that intelligence and family size were inversely correlated, particularly amongst the black population, so that the current trend in average national intelligence was dysgenic rather than eugenic. As he wrote, "Is there a danger that current welfare policies, unaided by eugenic foresight, could lead to the genetic enslavement of a substantial segment of our population? The fuller consequences of our failure seriously to study these questions may well be judged by future generations as our society's greatest injustice to Negro Americans." He concluded by emphasizing the importance of child-centered education. Although a tradition had developed for the exclusive use of cognitive learning in schools, Jensen argued that it was not suited to "these children's genetic and cultural heritage": although capable of associative learning and memorization ("Type I" learning), they had difficulties with abstract conceptual reasoning ("Type II" learning). He felt that it in these circumstances the success of education depended on exploiting the "the actual potential learning that is latent in these children's patterns of abilities". He suggested that, in order to ensure equality of opportunity, "schools and society must provide a range and diversity of educational methods, programs and goals, and of occupational opportunities, just as wide as the range of human abilities." Later, writing about how the article came into being, Jensen said that the editors of the Review had specifically asked him to include his view on the heritability of race differences, which he had not previously published. He also maintains that only five percent of the article touched on the topic of race difference in IQ.

Kudos! This version is much better than what we have had before. My comments later. What do others think? Perhaps we can iterate to agreement on this contentious topic. David.Kane (talk) 12:12, 30 May 2010 (UTC)

Many thanks David, but, apart from being copy-pasted from the article, with ref-tabs removed and being made <snall>very small, it's identical to the present content apart from the sentence that Ncmvocalist has removed. Mathsci (talk) 13:27, 30 May 2010 (UTC)

Temporary change until further notice

As an uninvolved editor, I've removed the disputed material so that the article only says:

He felt that "the technique for raising intelligence per se in the sense of g, probably lie more in the province of biological science than in psychology or education".

I am emphasising that this is a temporary change until such a time there is (1) consensus to add something else, and (2) there is no misrepresentation of sources or any other policy violations.

All involved parties need to make a greater effort to allign their concerns, without resorting to edit-warring, incivility, or inadequately sourced claims.

Consensus isn't going to come with any more bold edits of the article - it will come from bold suggestions on this talk page - until there is a consensus, please avoid editing about that claim on this article. I hope the consensus-supported version has additional citations to that particular claim as it has proved controversial.

Note that this temporary change is purely as an alternative to getting an admin to full protect the article for something like a week because neither side is listening (and note, there are admins who are ready to protect if it continues). Good luck to the parties! Ncmvocalist (talk) 13:17, 30 May 2010 (UTC)

I don't feel very strongly about change of Rcvx so I have restored his version. I don't want to waste any time on debating this kind of minor point. That is certainly how wikipedia is edited. However, we do stick to the secondary sources and that is how this article is edited. There are far more editors actively involved on this page, such as Professor marginalia, Slrubenstein and Maunus; I think also RegentsPark who is on wikileave. I think there have been other ediors, e.g. Slimvirgin. So what happens on a Sunday afternoon is hardly representative and certainy is not indicative of any consensus. Mathsci (talk) 13:42, 30 May 2010 (UTC)

You have not been engaging in behavior that suggests you remember how Misplaced Pages should be edited - the same person usually doesn't make 3 identical reverts on the same page within 24 hours if that person doesn't "feel very strongly" about something, nor do they wait until the third revert before even bothering to discuss their issue(s). At least that was resolved quickly. Ncmvocalist (talk) 14:02, 30 May 2010 (UTC)

Ncmvocalist, the reason I haven’t made more of an effort to discuss this here is because it was already discussed at length at the BLP noticeboard, and Jimbo Wales offered his opinion there about these sorts of statements regarding Jensen. As I mentioned at AN/I, even though Jimbo didn’t comment on this specific piece of content, the general principle he stated was that for a claim about what Jensen advocated to appear in a secondary source isn’t enough to it to be included in an article; Jensen needs to have stated himself that he advocated it. Since in this case (eugenics) Jensen hasn’t stated this, my two reverts were enforcing not just the existing consensus on this talk page, but also what I considered to be Jimbo Wales’ instructions about how to properly abide by BLP policy. --Captain Occam (talk) 14:17, 30 May 2010 (UTC)

Suspect claim from Jensen (1968)

I just deleted this sentence: "By 1968 Jensen's emphasis had shifted. In an article published in Disadvantaged Child he decried the "misguided and ineffective attempts to improve lot" of blacks through antipoverty programs and child development programs."

Perhaps it is OK, but I have my doubts. Can anyone provide the full quotation from Jensen (1968) that supports this claim? I do not have access right now. As always, WP:BLP requires that we get this absolutely correct. David.Kane (talk) 15:31, 30 May 2010 (UTC)

I very clearly recall exhaustively satisfying your challenge to this particular passage already (see talk in archive). You initially weren't satisfied because it was cited to the 1969 paper-we cleared it up that it was quoting him from 1968. The date was corrected, it now has three cites. So now, a month later, "but I have my doubts" isn't enough to revert it with. Besides your own "intuitions", what is the source of this doubt? Why do you doubt it? Professor marginalia (talk) 16:25, 30 May 2010 (UTC)

An interesting observation is that if you put this passage into the search entry in google books:

As a social policy, avoidance of the issue could be harmful to everyone in the long run, especially to future generations of Negroes, who could suffer the most from well-meaning but misguided and ineffective attempts to improve their lot.

it is completely recognized and finds the book Disadvantage Child, edited by Jerome Hellmuth. Mathsci (talk) 17:50, 30 May 2010 (UTC)

Professor marginalia: Correct. MathSci (or someone else) got this wrong before. I (and others) complained until that mistake was fixed. And it only took several hundreds words to do so! At the time, I was too tired to follow up to see if you/MathSci/others had made another mistake. Perhaps you have. Perhaps you haven't. Again, I could easily be wrong about this one, but bringing up your past mistakes is probably not your best strategy for convincing other editors. As to the Google book search, can someone confirm that the reference is correct? That is, that this sentence is from the specified article written by Jensen? (I am not denying that, I just don't see it via Google books.) Finally, once we confirm that, it sure seems to me that the sentence I deleted is a highly misleading summary of Jensen's position. But I am eager to discuss the details. David.Kane (talk) 19:01, 30 May 2010 (UTC)

Professor marginalia: I left this message on your talk page. I will certainly have more faith in your claims about Jensen (1968) if you could confirm that you are quoting Jensen (1969) correctly. David.Kane (talk) 19:02, 30 May 2010 (UTC)

MathSci: I see that you have put in a long form version of the quote. I think that this is reasonable. Can you confirm that the citation is correct? I do not doubt you, but I would like to see the sentence or two before and after to ensure that we are getting accurate context. I see no need to delete the quote while we are discussing this. David.Kane (talk) 19:07, 30 May 2010 (UTC)

David.Kane, this was nobody here who made the mistake. It was a careless misuse of an "ibid" to Jensen rather than an "op cit" to Jensen in the book cited, so the 1968 Jensen rather than the 1969 was identified as the source of the quote. Good grief. It was sorted out, so can we all please dispense with the silly melodrama in here? To keep the "several hundred word" arguments to a minimum, I suggest that the absolutely uncontroversial, trivial inconsistencies stop being used as some kind of "leverage" against other editors.

And I'm sorry, but this is going too too far to try and withdraw the claim on this basis. There is absolutely no evidence to suggest that google, Tucker, Byrd and Clayton aren't reliable for this. You haven't given any. Professor marginalia (talk) 19:55, 30 May 2010 (UTC)

Professor marginalia: 1) "silly melodrama?" We have an absolute obligation to get the details about a living person correct. Please read WP:BLP for a reminder. 2) Does you silence indicate that all your "quotes" from Jensen (1969) were wrong? Admitting that mistake will go some way to re-establishing your credibility. MathSci, for one, almost never makes mistakes of that magnitude. David.Kane (talk) 20:00, 30 May 2010 (UTC)

I answered it a half hour ago. Can you please stop being deliberately confrontational? Yes, I saw your message today-and responded to it as soon as I had the free time to load up the pdfs and check it out. I have both articles saved in pdf, they have the same titles, they're both Jensen. OK? I didn't pay it any mind until your pm today because this message sent us both into a completely different direction--I didn't realize the question was still on the table. Professor marginalia (talk) 20:17, 30 May 2010 (UTC)

Where did you answer it? Apologies that I can't find it. David.Kane (talk) 20:22, 30 May 2010 (UTC) UPDATE: Never mind. I found it. Thanks for the clarification. You can now understand, I hope, why I might have displayed some frustration in arguing over this point earlier. Details do matter. David.Kane (talk) 20:25, 30 May 2010 (UTC)

Another suspect claim about Jensen (1969)

I just removed this as a potential BLP violation.

Inferring that black intelligence was different from white, he suggested that black children receive different forms of education, more suited to their needs: as she wrote, "less conceptual flights of fancy and more rote learning".

The citation is to Freeman (1980). The problem is that, no where in Jensen (1969) does Jensen "infer" that "black intelligence was different from white." He notes that average measured IQ is lower, but that is hardly the same thing. I am not sure if the mistake is in Freeman or in the interpretations we are making from Freeman. The best way to fix this is to quote directly from Jensen (1969) where he makes the same claim. (Or it could be that Freeman is referring to a different Jensen article.)

As always, I don't object to controversial claims about Jensen being included in this article. Indeed, he said all sorts of controversial things! I just insist that we are accurate about the views that we are attributing to him. WP:BLP requires nothing less. David.Kane (talk) 20:18, 30 May 2010 (UTC)

Certainly Jensen introduced level I abilities (associative) and level II abilities (cognititive) and inferred from the racial IQ gap that blacks had level I abilities but on average were not good on level II which was equivalent to what was measured by general intelligence. So this seems to have to do with your own misunderstanding of the subject. Anyway what is the relevance of your understanding it or not? Surely wikipedia doesn't rely on that. Could it not be the case that her summary was accurate (even if a simplication), but you don't personally have enough expertise to evaluate it? You find an easier explanation to be that the author is lying. But you've said this about four people - Tucker, Campbell, Wooldridge, Freeman. Isn't this argument wearing a little thin by now?

Going back to this case, on what grounds would a professor of gifted education be maliciously inclined towards an expert in psychometrics? The researchers in this subject welcomed Jensen's work. Why are you claiming on wikipedia that Joan Freeman was misrepresenting Jensen in her book published by Springer-Verlag, one of the biggest and prestigious academic publishers in the world. Indeed it's clear that her summary of Jensen's Level I /Level II theory is accurate (from reading Mackintosh's book and Wooldridge's summary). Are you saying this lady was lying and that her publishers knowingly published her lies? Please could you explain why you are implicitly making these kinds of statements about a living person like Joan Freeman on wikipedia? She looks completely reasonable to me . Mathsci (talk) 22:48, 30 May 2010 (UTC)

MathSci: Could you clarify where this phrase comes from? "Inferring that black intelligence was different from white, he suggested that black children receive different forms of education" This does not seem to be quote from Freeman. I assume it is your paraphrase. Can you provide a copy of the page, as you have helpfully done in the past? Again, we need to be very careful about the claims that we make about Jensen's opinions. We have made several mistakes about this in the past, for example, attributing views to Jensen (1969) that we now all agree were not there. I would like to avoid similar mistakes in the future. I am not asserting (yet) that this passage is wrong. WP:BLP just requires us to take special care. David.Kane (talk) 03:08, 31 May 2010 (UTC)

MathSci: Once again, your behavior is problematic. Instead of discussing this thoroughly on the talk page, you insist in edit warring and inserting your desired material. WP:BLP expressly forbids this. We need to come to some consensus here first, and then we can insert material. I am deleting the problematic passage again. Please discuss it here fully before adding it back. David.Kane (talk) 03:43, 31 May 2010 (UTC)

In order to solicit the views of uninvolved editors, I have brought this issue to WP:BLPN. Comments from all are welcome, but let us try to keep the discussion focused. What precise quotes in Jensen (1969) justify Freeman's claim? (Or feel free to argue that we have no business examining her claim and should just quote her correctly.) David.Kane (talk) 04:07, 31 May 2010 (UTC)

I added the full sentence which wou again reverted. Here is the whole passage from this Springer Verlag book:

Jensen matched black and white chidren for socio-economic level and measured their IQs. He found that the black children's IQs covered the whole range, but that their average IQ was about 15 points lower than that of the matched white children. He interpreted this as meaning that black intelligence was different from white intelligence and so could not be measured on the same tests. He proposed that different forms of education, more appropriate to their kind of intelligence, should be given to black children. There would be less conceptual flights of fancy and more rote learning for them.

You have been reported at WP:ANI now. Mathsci (talk) 08:21, 31 May 2010 (UTC)

Freeman's summary of Jensen's work is cited to the 1972 Genetics and Education by Arthur Jensen, not the 1969 paper alone. The 1972 book is Jensen's much more "in depth" exposition on his work including the conclusions he came to for the HER paper and others. Whether or not Freeman's remark was meant to apply to the 1969 HER paper in particular, I can't say. What I can say is that her analysis of Jensen's conclusions in the book are consistent with many other sources, including Yehudi Webster's Against the Multicultural Agenda published in 1997. It reads, "In 'empirical' substantiation, Jensen carried out a series of tests on black and white students and concluded that black intelligence was congenitally inferior to that of whites, and that this partly explains unequal educational achievements. He argued further that, because a certain level of underachievement was due to the inferior genetic attributes of blacks, compensatory and enrichment programs are bound to be ineffective in closing the racial gap in educational achievements." Webster is not a harsh critic of Jensen; I'd characterize him as agreeing with Jensen in overall principle teaching "everyone the same" is a failed idea, but argues "blacks" and "whites" are meaningless "genetic" categories. The quibbling over whether or not Freeman said Jensen's conclusions were made explicitly in the 1969 paper is irrelevant. The fact is that this was not a novel interpretation of Jensen's conclusion in the paper at all, whether or not it was explicit in any particular quote. Jensen's later 1972 book elaborated at much greater length on the paper and his own conclusions on the matter, and there is general agreement that the book underscored this conclusion rather than backing away from it. In the edit reverted here, Freeman's opinion was attributed to her. And again, whether or not the 1969 paper is sufficient evidence for the claim all by itself, Jensen continued to beat that drum in his own 1972 book explaining his work. So modify the claim if necessary to the 1972 book rather than the 1969 paper, and carry on. Again, this is all easily sorted out as misplaced or inordinate reliance on the 1969 HER paper. Jensen has a wide body of work on this topic, including much, much more published within this same general time frame. Jensen's HER paper was his most infamous, but his extensive body of work that continued along these lines all play a part in the race/intelligence controversy too. It doesn't have a clean beginning or end at 1969. Professor marginalia (talk) 17:06, 31 May 2010 (UTC)

Great work, Professor. BLP does not require us to protect people. It requires us to be scrupulous about sources, and your research helps us. This is the kind of constructive input we need. David Kane's is not at all constructive, and not well-informed. Slrubenstein | Talk 18:06, 31 May 2010 (UTC)

I have included the material from Yehudi Webster, since you two were in agreement. Mathsci (talk) 15:44, 1 June 2010 (UTC)

"BLP does not require us to protect people." It appears that you have not read WP:BLP: "the possibility of harm to living subjects must always be considered" Also: "Contentious material about living persons that is unsourced or poorly sourced—whether the material is negative, positive, neutral, or just questionable—should be removed immediately and without waiting for discussion." That is what I have been doing and will continue to do. (Reasonable editors may, of course, disagree over what "poorly sourced" means in this context, but I am happy to have such discussions on the Talk page. Until such issues are resolved, the material will not go in the article. David.Kane (talk) 02:19, 1 June 2010 (UTC)

"Freeman's summary of Jensen's work is cited to the 1972 Genetics and Education by Arthur Jensen, not the 1969 paper alone." In other words, the article, prior to my edit, was wrong. It incorrectly suggested (and still suggests?) that Freeman was describing Jensen (1969) when, in fact, she was describing Jensen (1972). I will delete the section until someone can confirm where it belongs. Again, I don't have a problem with quoting Freeman per se. I just object to inaccurate descriptions. WP:BLP requires us to get these details correct before adding material to the article. David.Kane (talk) 02:06, 1 June 2010 (UTC)

I see that the Freeman claim is no longer there. Good stuff. I just removed material from Ornstein (1982), which I have not read. 1) I could imagine including it, but we should discuss at Talk first. 2) Is a copy easily available? 3) Given that we all agree that Loelhin is high quality, why not just use their summary. Having two summaries is WP:UNDUE, don't you think? 4) The summary attributed to Ornstein was faulty. I don't know if this was Ornstein's fault or MathSci's. Jensen (1969) did not advocate treating all blacks the same. He advocated treating all low IQ students them, whatever their race. David.Kane (talk) 02:16, 1 June 2010 (UTC)

David dot kane

Please do not abuse BLP to edit war. BLP insists that any controversial claim about a living person e properly sourced. That is precisely what mathSci has been doing. You just accused him of misrepresenting a source ("I didn't see it") when in fact the source says just what mathSci claims. This can mean lonly one of two things: either you are a vindictive edit-warrior, or you do not read sources. Please clarify. Slrubenstein | Talk 12:36, 31 May 2010 (UTC)

I would like to see more care taken before reverts as well. I don't see much effort put to reading the sources cited before challenging them - nothing except the HER primary source is paid much due. Tucker is reverted before Tucker is consulted, Freeman is reverted before Freeman is consulted, etc. The 1968 cite is especially troubling--was reverted prior to reviewing Tucker, then reverted again after two more, a second secondary source and the primary Jensen 1968 were cited. It was reverted before even consulting the 1968 used to justify the revert.?. I think the role of a wikipedia editor needs to be spelled out a little better. We rely on secondary sources here-including in BLPs. There is no default position that a secondary sources aren't enough in a BLP. The relevant policy outlines the following:

• All quotations and any material challenged or likely to be challenged must be attributed to a reliable, published source using an inline citation- - these citations have all come from reliable published sources
• Remove immediately any contentious material about a living person that is unsourced or poorly sourced-hasn't applied here - those I've witnessed have been reliably sourced
• Avoid gossip and feedback loops-doesn't apply here
• Misuse of primary sources - this has arguably occurred in some cases, although in the other direction. There is an over-reliance on an editor's interpretation of a primary source to overrule the reliably published secondary citations-highly irregular practice at wikipedia. So highly irregular, in fact, that cited claims have been reverted for no other basis than that an editor claims be have been unable to personally consult the primary source!
• Avoid self-published sources doesn't apply to these disputes
• Using the subject as a self-published source doesn't apply
• Questionable sources and external links The only arguably applicable "questionable source" issue to consider here is the "neutrality" question. Its guideline reads that the text "fairly representing all majority and significant-minority viewpoints that have been published by reliable sources, in rough proportion to the prominence of each view. Tiny-minority views need not be included, except in articles devoted to them. Where there is disagreement between sources, their views should be clearly attributed in the text: 'John Smith argues that X, while Paul Jones maintains that Y,' followed by an inline citation." I think it's safe to say that few relevant references can be described as completely "neutral" towards Jensen, but there's no two ways around it, the "majority" can be thought of as "opponents" to his claims. The majority of authorities in the field do not support his views, but they aren't the "fringe"--he is. And as in the case of Freeman, the claims about Jensen are not only representative of the majority "side" expressed and cited, but also attributed to the author by name are still reverted. So either these reverts are made due to a poor understanding of these policies or from trying to game a dispute with them.

I've watched as the "policy" rationales offered to justify a revert of a single claim about Jensen continuously evolve-as soon as one policy objection is satisfied, another one gets raised, one after another. The BLP is just the most recent. Professor marginalia (talk) 18:16, 31 May 2010 (UTC)

Those making these reverts aren't giving any detailed justification at all. I agree that it looks as if they're not even bothering to consult the secondary sources. But surely if they challenge edits they must look carefully at the secondary sources.Tthe removal of one sentence from what's in a secondary source is inconsistent with the BLP policy above. Either the source is reliable, and so everything in it is correct, or it is unreliable, so that everything in it is suspect. Certainly the material that has been removed so far has come from impeccable sources, so the BLP policy seems to have been incorrectly applied in every case so far. Mathsci (talk) 19:28, 31 May 2010 (UTC)

It depends on the meaning of "poorly sourced" in WP:BLP. In just these discussions, we have seen examples of two kinds of poor sourcing. First, Misplaced Pages editors have misinterpreted reliable sources. The most common mistake has been attributing material as reactions to, and summaries of, Jensen (1969) when, in truth, the material/opinions has been about other Jensen work. Second, authors of (presumably) reliable sources have attributed opinions to Jensen (1969) that are, in fact, not there. How to handle that is a tricky issues. Jimbo Wales thinks:

Sorry to come in late here, but I want to agree with Off2riorob on the philosophical point here. "Contentionus claims require exceptional citations" is a concise statement, beautifully put. Now, as to this particular issue, and whether that burden of proof has been met, I don't think so, but I am not certain. I read enough of the discussion which follows to think that is almost certainly has not been met, but I applaud that people do seem to agree that in order to claim that Jenson "has recommended separate curricula for Blacks and Whites" we need it from his own words, not the synthesis and conclusion-drawing of his critics. --Jimbo Wales (talk) 21:32, 28 May 2010 (UTC)

Obviously, just because Wales says X does not mean that X is true or that X is Misplaced Pages policy, but it would be nice if MathSci, Professor marginalia and Slrubenstein were to admit that experienced (!) Misplaced Pages administrators like Wales share my careful approach to these issues. If you don't think that WP:BLP requires just this sort of care, then I think you need to re-read WP:BLP. Question: Why do you think that Wales agreed with me in this case? David.Kane (talk) 02:38, 1 June 2010 (UTC)

Since you claim to have Jimbo Wales agreement on this please persuade him to come here to participate in the dispute over claims and references properly. You seem to feel that you have been given license to act as his proxy in support of any revert you make here, and that's not a persuasive argument to me anyway. I will repeat this again because it's not getting through--catching a 1968 cite misidentified as 1969 in a footnoted citation is not related in any significant way to what makes Jensen or claims about him "controversial". Stop rationalizing to yourself that you can use this kind of thing as a BLP-portkey that you can whip out of your pocket to eject any and all claims from the article at your will. It's undermining of your own argument if you continue to play games that way. Professor marginalia (talk) 04:01, 1 June 2010 (UTC)

Quoting a subsequent comment from David.Kane in the preceding section, "I just removed material from Ornstein (1982), which I have not read." This is what I'm talking about. Professor marginalia (talk) 04:25, 1 June 2010 (UTC)

Issues with Ornstein (1982) reference

I have some issues with this reference to Ornstein (1982). Following WP:BLP, it should be kept out of the article until we can resolve those issues on the Talk page. 1) Is that a fair summary of Ornstein (1982)? I have my doubts since it is inconsistent with Jensen (1969). 2) To the extent that Ornstein actually wrote that, it is problematic for the same reason. 3) Regardless of 1) and 2), this is certainly WP:UNDUE because we already have a summary of Jensen (1969), both as written by us and as directly from Loehlin et al (1975), which we all agree is an excellent source. In any event, I would be interested to read opinions from others on this topic, which I view as a difficult case. David.Kane (talk) 02:48, 1 June 2010 (UTC)

David Kane, you have reverted for no good reason. 1) Take the time to check the reference yourself. Until you do, assume good faith. If you can show the article doesn't reflect the source, then you may have an argument. Right now, you don't. Yworo (talk) 04:05, 1 June 2010 (UTC)

Until someone demonstrates otherwise, I think we can probably assume that Ornstein wrote this, but I agree with David.Kane's other points. We've already agreed that Loehlin is a good and neutral source to use about this, so it shouldn't be necessary to add additional sources that disagree both with Loehlin and with Jensen's paper itself. --Captain Occam (talk) 04:33, 1 June 2010 (UTC)

No, three lines on a 123 page paper is inadequate. When there are multiple possible summaries in the literature, we try to represent them properly on wikipedia. Both of you are edit warring in a disruptive and tendentious way, in this case to remove material written by an expert in administration of education. This is the normal way both of you seem to edit: not by adding content carefully from reliable sources, or even by carefully discussing and evaluating those sources, but just as vindictive edit warriors (see Slrubenstein's remarks above). Please see the discussion at WP:ANI. Mathsci (talk) 07:41, 1 June 2010 (UTC)

Just a quick reminder about how wikipedia articles are edited. We find reliable secondary sources, choose the significant ones and report what they say. The summary in Loehlin et al talks is about the aims rather than the conclusions: these are different thing. Multiple other sources - from academic textbooks by major publishers (not books in popular science) and peer-reviewed papers in the top journals in educational psychology - have longer summaries which say different things. There does seems to be general agreement, however, conforming with what Ornstein wrote. None of these accounts are BLP violations: when cited on wikipedia, we accurate credit these statements to the summariser to indicate that it is his or her reading of the article. The claim that these statements are libellous is frivolous and without merit. Mathsci (talk) 08:15, 1 June 2010 (UTC)

Yworo: MathSci has kindly quoted the source directly. It is inconsistent with Jensen (1969). That is the problem. Even though it is true that Ornstein claims X about Jensen (1969), we should not include X in Misplaced Pages unless X is true. David.Kane (talk) 11:34, 1 June 2010 (UTC)

MathSci: 1) Thanks for changing the material to a direct quote of Ornstein (1982). I think that this helps matters. 2) If you have time, would you mind making available a copy of the page(s) you are quoting from, as you have helpfully done in the past with other references. I think that many uninvolved editors will soon become involved in this dispute, so it would be handy to show them the exact quote in context. (I don't doubt that you have fairly presented the material, I just want to ensure that other editors are fully informed. 3) WP:BLP is quite strict in this regard: "Contentious material about living persons that is unsourced or poorly sourced—whether the material is negative, positive, neutral, or just questionable—should be removed immediately and without waiting for discussion." and "The burden of evidence for any edit on Misplaced Pages rests with the person who adds or restores material." Captain Occam and I have both expressed doubt about this material. We need to have a thorough discussion here, and reach consensus, before it can be re-added. 4) The main problem with these edits is that Ornstein is asserting something about Jensen (1969) that does not, in fact, exist in Jensen (1969). No where does Jensen argue that all blacks should be treated differently than all whites. That claim about Jensen is, potentially, libelous. Jensen argues that low IQ students should be taught differently than high IQ students. Thanks for your help. David.Kane (talk) 11:33, 1 June 2010 (UTC)

These bad-faith allegations of BLP violations have to stop. There is no BLP issue here. If you wish to make an edit to the article, propose it on the talk page, but your consistant white-washing is making your external adgenda quite clear. Hipocrite (talk) 12:33, 1 June 2010 (UTC)

What do you believe my "external adgenda" is? David.Kane (talk) 13:10, 1 June 2010 (UTC)

Not falling for it. Hipocrite (talk) 13:12, 1 June 2010 (UTC)

Misplaced Pages is not a portrait gallery

I've removed some of the bewildering array of portraits. Strange to see such bloat, most I can recall anywhere on Misplaced Pages. Portraitpedia we are not.99.141.254.167 (talk) 13:32, 1 June 2010 (UTC)

I thought that the portraits (almost all found/added by MathSci) were really good and interesting. Maybe add back half the ones you deleted? What do other editors think? David.Kane (talk) 13:47, 1 June 2010 (UTC)

Yes, add them back, please. mikemikev (talk) 14:34, 1 June 2010 (UTC)

I have added them back. Mathsci (talk) 14:36, 1 June 2010 (UTC)

What is the encyclopedic purpose of a portrait gallery? Twenty-three images? Sixteen portraits? Not acceptable.99.141.254.167 (talk) 17:07, 1 June 2010 (UTC)

If MathSci, Mikemikev and I agree on something (!?), then we are probably right. I say keep them. David.Kane (talk)

That's not a sufficient basis for inclusion. Please support your basis, I will be removing the portraits again - the onus is upon those arguing for inclusion. 99.141.254.167 (talk) 18:30, 1 June 2010 (UTC)

I'm not aware of any Misplaced Pages policy which forbids the inclsion of images to illustrate an article. What is frowned upon is an article composed uniquely of a picture gallery, unless you can cite an article of policy of which I'm unaware. I say leave the pictures in.--Ramdrake (talk) 19:24, 1 June 2010 (UTC)

The burden for inclusion lies with those who wish to add material. What is the encyclopedic value in 23 images, 16 portraits? Each one challenged should be supported. Supporting arguments should also be presented not only for each challenged image but for the body of 23 as a whole. 23 images is far beyond any encyclopedic need. 99.141.254.167 (talk) 01:21, 2 June 2010 (UTC)

Twelve portraits removed as unsupported, individually and as a group, for inclusion in the article.99.141.254.167 (talk) 14:09, 2 June 2010 (UTC)

Summarzing the state of play

Let me sum up -

All of the secondary sources say Jensen said something.

My reading of Jensens' work says he said something.

Your reading of Jensens' work says he didn't say something.

The article reflects that Jensen didn't say something.

Is that about accurate? Hipocrite (talk) 13:38, 1 June 2010 (UTC)

Hipocrite: No. That is not accurate at all. Have you read all the prior discussions? We have had a series of disputes about various claims made about Jensen, both by author authors and by Misplaced Pages editors interpreting those other sources and Jensen himself. On at least a couple of occasions, the complaints made by me (and others) have proven to be correct and no one has disputed that. (Details available on request.) On other occasions, after discussion, I (and others) have come to agree with the edits that MathSci (and others) have made. Indeed, his major paragraph about Jensen (1969) is (almost) perfect. Now, other claims that I (and others) have made have been (and are being) disputed. And that is what Misplaced Pages talk pages are for! WP:BLP simply requires, and there is no getting around this, that consensus be reached before such material can appear in the article. David.Kane (talk) 13:46, 1 June 2010 (UTC)

Details requested. Hipocrite (talk) 14:00, 1 June 2010 (UTC)

Let's see - one of the scores of SPA's say Jensen never said the things Orenstein said he said. I find quotes of him saying the things Orenstein said he said, and I include them. The SPA reverts out (without comment on this talk page) stating "material has been removed because Jensen didn't write it," except the quotes I found from Jensen were him writing it. Why are you all not blocked, again? Hipocrite (talk) 14:18, 1 June 2010 (UTC)

Can Hipocrite identify where Jensen said this:

Conversely, blacks and 'disadvantaged' children tend to do well in tasks involving rote learning — memorizing mainly through repetition; these aptitudes can be used to help raise their scholastic achievement up to a point. mikemikev (talk) 14:38, 1 June 2010 (UTC)

"Level I ability ("Associative learning ability," which "lower-class children, whether white, Negro, or Mexican-American, perform as well on") is tapped mostly by tests such as ... serial rote learning" and "I am reasonably convinced that all the basic scholastic skills can be learned by children with normal Level I learning ability, provided the instructional techniques do not make g (i.e., Level II) the sine qua non of being able to learn. Educational researchers must discover and devise teaching methods that capitalize on existing abilities for the acquisition of those basic skills which students will need in order to get good jobs when they leave school." Hipocrite (talk) 14:49, 1 June 2010 (UTC)

But the material you added refers to "blacks", all blacks. Jensen doesn't, actually he's very clear about that. mikemikev (talk) 14:57, 1 June 2010 (UTC)

The material I added is sourced to a reliable secondary source. If you have a direct quote of Jensen saying he's not refering to all blacks, I will happily add it. Please provide that quote, thanks. Hipocrite (talk) 14:59, 1 June 2010 (UTC)

Here’s one quote where he says this, from page 180 of Intelligence, Race and Genetics: Conversations with Arthur R. Jensen:

"I favor any measures that would maximize free choice. It won’t lead to either complete segregation or complete racial balance. I have repeatedly emphasized, particularly in talks before educational organizations and in a recent publication, that quality education does not mean the very same program of instruction for every child, but equal opportunity for all children to receive a specific program tailored to their individual differences in general ability and in special aptitudes. I especially stress the words individual differences to emphasize that these differences cut across all racial, ethnic, and social class groups." (Emphasis in original.) --Captain Occam (talk) 15:48, 1 June 2010 (UTC)

That's nice, but it dosent in any way say that he's not refering to all blacks. It does make it clear that he is refering to more than just blacks, but it in no way makes it clear he's not refering to all blacks as being Level I ability. Please cite a source that says what you say it says, as opposed to torturning some other source into saying what you hope it says. Hipocrite (talk) 15:51, 1 June 2010 (UTC)

Um, how does the quote I provided not demonstrate this? He’s stating that education should be based on individual differences in mental ability, that there are people at all levels of mental ability in all races and classes, and that this is why he especially stresses the word “individual”. I don’t think this can be much clearer than it is.

You made a reasonable request by asking for a quote in which Jensen explains this, so I provided one. But if you’re going to just be stonewalling about this now, I’m done trying to explain it to you. There’s obviously no consensus for this material at the moment, and you’ll need to at least make an effort at being reasonable if you want to build one for it. --Captain Occam (talk) 16:01, 1 June 2010 (UTC)

It appears clear that we are all in agreement, then - Jensen agrees that people are of differing abilities, but also states that disadvantaged people, including more than the fair share of blacks, are Level I vs Level II. Is that correct? Hipocrite (talk) 16:06, 1 June 2010 (UTC)

It depends on what you mean by “disadvantaged people”. Jensen thinks that people with below-average IQs are over-represented among blacks, and this opinion is shared by people who favor a 100%-environmental explanation for the IQ gap such as Neisser and Flynn; and Jensen also thinks that people with IQs below a certain level will benefit more from rote learning than from other educational methods. This isn’t the same as him advocating rote learning for blacks in general, as is stated by the wording you’ve been adding. The current article already provides a perfectly adequate explanation of Jensen’s actual opinion about this, so there’s no need to change this aspect of it. --Captain Occam (talk) 16:24, 1 June 2010 (UTC)

Agreement is possible!

I just want to point out that MathSci's recent edit , quoting Jencks on Jensen is perfectly fine because Jencks describes Jensen's views correctly. This is a fine edit and makes the article better. Indeed, the entire section related to Jensen (1969) seems quite good to me. (Of course, it could always be made better.) I congratulate MathSci on an excellent job. (I think that he deserves credit for the lionshare of the work on the article.) I have some minor, minor quibbles with phrases like "these children" --- not clear what "these" means in this context --- and one or two other items, but, big picture, the material is an excellent overview of Jensen (1969). David.Kane (talk) 17:59, 1 June 2010 (UTC)

Webster revert

Nothing more to say about Webster than my edit summary. This is what needs to be said. This article is not about Jensen. It is not a trial over what he "really" meant by what when. It is about the history of societal and academic controversies over race and intelligence. And how do you write an article about the controversy if you are going to pretend the key figures embroiled in it such as Arthur Jensen didn't provoke any controversy? It's not our role to resolve the controversy, we're here to describe it. So to review Jensen's part: Jensen's 1969 paper exploded in controversy-there were widespread protests, he became essentially an untouchable even in academia over it. Why? Come on! Why is because most people who read it thought it suggested blacks didn't do as well in school as whites because they inherited genes giving them significantly lower IQs than whites, and there's no way to raise it. It was interpreted to say their low IQs can't be raised through better education or improvements to their environment via social programs. That's why Jensen became an extremely provocative figure in race and intelligence controversy, why there were widespread protests against him, and why he became a something of a pariah. It's historic revisionism to pretend he wasn't criticized for this reason, or that this criticism was a completely manufactured hoax spread by fringy conspiracy kooks! That's what happened, right? So how is this article going to tell the story without including any of the key arguments traded in it? Professor marginalia (talk) 21:53, 1 June 2010 (UTC)

Talking to myself, apparently, but take a look other articles at wikipedia such as these:

• Jeremiah_Wright_controversy#Media
• Obama_birth_certificate#Claims_that_Obama_was_not_born_in_Hawaii
• Michael_Savage_(commentator)
• Madoff investment scandal

They include quotations representative of the "controversy" the article is addressing and any lack of "neutrality" is no barrier against them even when it's unflattering to a living person. OKAY? Gotta get this straight--we have to be neutral in as accurately representing the controversy as it occurred. It is not even permitted for us at wikipedia to create a whole different narrative of the controversy to make life more fair to the people who were involved in them. We don't change history, we don't "pretty" it up, we don't sensationalize it either. Professor marginalia (talk) 22:20, 1 June 2010 (UTC)

When you reverted this, you said in your edit summary “there is no blp rule that all quoted sources are ‘NPOV’”. So it sounds like you’re acknowledging that a quote which refers to Jensen believing in “the inferior genetic attributes of blacks” is not taking an NPOV perspective about this. Right? And you also agree that neutrality is of primary importance in an article about a living figure, right?

Other than the quote from the APA’s report Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns, this quote from Webster is the longest quote in the entire article. It’s also one of the most strongly anti-Jensen quotes in the article, and is at odds with both what Jensen said in his own paper and the secondary sources that we’ve agreed are neutral such as Loehlin. Now, if our goal is to make the article as neutral as possible, are the views that we want to give the most space the ones that take the most strongly anti-Jensen view? Or should the views that we give the most space the ones that we agree are fairly neutral, such as Loehlin and the APA?

That’s a rhetorical question. This is the reason why I reverted this addition to the article, and I suspect it’s why David.Kane reverted it also. If you want this quote to stay in the article, you’ll need to explain how it’s acceptable to give the most space to the sources that are the least neutral. --Captain Occam (talk) 22:30, 1 June 2010 (UTC)

This page has overstuffed with enough of this childishness already so don't put words in my mouth and grandstand with "rhetorical questions". There is no such rule, so don't use the nonexistent rule when reverting. Are we clear? I would also highly recommend you and David.Kane stop tag teaming. Are you acting as his spokesman here?

So now it's WP:NPOV. Not WP:BLP. Inconveniently, there is no "revert on sight" provision in NPOV. So no there is no urgency to revert the content before discussing it. If you think there is undue balance for one side than the other, start a new section and propose how you think to improve it in terms of the overall scope discussing the 1969 paper, or all Jensen's work that relates. It can't be accomplished by arbitrarily and imperiously "vetoing" references and claims on an WP:IDONTLIKEIT basis. Professor marginalia (talk) 23:41, 1 June 2010 (UTC)

If you actually read WP:BLP, you’ll see that the rule I’m referring to is part of it. Specifically, it’s this: Do not give disproportionate space to particular viewpoints; the views of tiny minorities should not be included at all. Care must be taken with article structure to ensure the overall presentation and section headings are broadly neutral.

You asked why David.Kane and I had both reverted this material, so I’m explaining it. I’m only acting as a spokesman for myself, although I suspect that his reasons are similar to mine. Since the two sentences I quoted are part of WP:BLP, and the rule for possible BLP violations is to revert on sight, everything I’ve done is an application of this policy.

I’ve explained why I think this material isn’t consistent with this portion of BLP policy. If you think it is, then it’s now your job to explain why that’s the case. If you can’t, then it’ll need to be removed. This is no different from every other possible BLP violation we’ve discussed here. --Captain Occam (talk) 00:20, 2 June 2010 (UTC)

Yeah, well I have read it, many times, but thanks for the advice. Webster isn't fringe.. He's a sociologist, working right there in the thick of race and multicultural issues in society, written many books on it, and this particular book, as I said, has been cited many, many times. Fringe, at wikipedia, has very specific definition. Fringe, he's not. Nor is his opinion. It was shared by many, and that's why Jensen became such a lightening rod. Professor marginalia (talk) 00:50, 2 June 2010 (UTC)

I wasn’t claiming that Webster is fringe. My point is merely that if we’re seeking to describe Jensen neutrally, and to not provide disproportionate space to any viewpoint about him, providing more space to one of his most vociferous critics than we do to any other perspective about him is not the way to do it.

I actually don’t have a problem with Webster’s perspective about this being mentioned, but I think the current lengthy quote from him ought to be condensed into something that’s not longer than a sentence or so. Would you consider that an acceptable compromise? --Captain Occam (talk) 01:05, 2 June 2010 (UTC)

(ec) This doesn't in this case seem to be "the view of a tiny minority". A number of uninvolved academics from various parts of the social sciences gave their dispassionate readings of this article, which has been described as long, discursive and written in a hurry (Lee Cronbach explained why in 1975). Jensen's theory of Level I/Level II abilities (associative/cognitive) is described in numerous secondary sources and appears in the article. As many commentators write, Jensen points out that although blacks and whites perform equally well in Level I skills, blacks perform less well in Level II skills, which are the cognitive skills measured by IQ tests. Jensen suggests that it would be more reasonable to teach those with less aptitude in Level II skills, using primarily their Level I skills, i.e. by rote memorization rather than through learning abstract concepts. This is what almost all of the multiple sources so far have written. It is not a BLP violation, nor are those commenting a minority. They don't consitute a tightly formed group of conspirators. These are academic writers, often writing in a less speculative and more dispassionate way than Jensen himself. Several of the accounts occur in standard textbooks. The article of Jensen, as he himself remarked later in 1998, was not in any sense in a final state. It was speculative and he later changed his mind on several points. His academic reputation does not rest on this paper; it is on the other hand the historical document that, in a highly volatile politicalclimate of unrest and struggle, sparked a possibly disproprotionate reaction. That is made rather clear in the article (one reason the FBI picture is there, an FBI picture of the "weathermen" was the only choice because of WP copyright rules). In this case writers are assessing Jensen's article as a historical document. Their readings are therefore extremely important to provide context for why it created an uproar. That of course is slightly ambiguous (as Cronbach relates) and that is reflected in the WP article. If Jensen's article, even in just a few places, contained reasoning which as it happened was construed in a negative way, whether that was intended or not, we cannot suggest to readers of the WP article that that interpretation has not been suggested. In the article the comments are ascribed to particular authors. Mathsci (talk) 01:21, 2 June 2010 (UTC)

Before Professor marginalia paraphrases and shortens Webster's comments in the article, which of course I completely agree should be done, it would be helpful if Mikemikev and David.Kane could give some assurance that they would cease removing properly sourced material from the article. That would be a very positive step forward. Thanks, Mathsci (talk) 01:39, 2 June 2010 (UTC)

I am happy to confirm that I will not revert correctly sourced and accurate material. For example, you added a quote from Jencks. Neither I nor anyone else removed it. Why would that be if your view --- that we remove all material critical of Jensen or describing his position --- were accurate? Why do you think we have not removed that quote? Simple: Jencks describes Jensen's views accurately, just as Loehlin et al do. Correct descriptions of Jensen's views will stay. WP:BLP requires us to remove and discuss (potentially) inaccurate descriptions. David.Kane (talk) 01:59, 2 June 2010 (UTC)

Above, Professor Marginalia wrote:

So to review Jensen's part: Jensen's 1969 paper exploded in controversy-there were widespread protests, he became essentially an untouchable even in academia over it. Why? Come on! Why is because most people who read it thought it suggested blacks didn't do as well in school as whites because they inherited genes giving them significantly lower IQs than whites, and there's no way to raise it. It was interpreted to say their low IQs can't be raised through better education or improvements to their environment via social programs. That's why Jensen became an extremely provocative figure in race and intelligence controversy, why there were widespread protests against him, and why he became a something of a pariah.

I agree with all this! This is a reasonable summary of what happened. I think that the current article describes it well. I am not against adding more detail. (Although if the section devoted to Jensen (1969) gets any longer, we will need to break it off as its own article.) I simply insist on removing (and then discussing) material which, at first glance, is not accurate. The key issue seems to be claims from various folks that Jensen sought to treat all black children differently from all white children. He never wrote this. This is a much more extreme (and objectionable position) then his views on IQ differences and their genetic causes.

Professor Marginalia: In all honesty, I think that I have failed to make my position clear to you. I am in favor of detailed discussion of Jensen's views on IQ differences and their genetic cause. He really did write all those things. But WP:BLP requires that we only include accurate descriptions of his views. David.Kane (talk) 02:09, 2 June 2010 (UTC)

No wikipedian can judge whether something is a "correct version of Jensen's views" or an "accurate decription of his views". The article concerns a historical document, written in 1969. Commentators point out that Jensen changed his mind on parts of the paper subsequently. As far as the history is concerned, the WP article relies on what secondary sources say, not second-guessing by wikipedians. That is just WP:OR.

Captain Occam has said that he is happy with content in the segment from Webster. Is this also your view now? Mathsci (talk) 02:26, 2 June 2010 (UTC)

Only verifiable quotes from the subject himself are acceptable in such a controversal article about a living person. Xxanthippe (talk) 02:36, 2 June 2010 (UTC)

What you say doesn't seem to be correct. A not particularly complimentary quote from the biography by Anthony Seldon has been used in the article an John Major. That is permissible. And that would apply to almost anything in the book, provided it was not WP:UNDUE. This is not a controversial article at all: it's a neutral article. The events in history might have been controversial, but that is an entirely different matter. The article is certainly not about just one person: it is a small part of of the history of psychology, which involves many people, several of whom like Richard Lewontin and Leon Kamin are still living. Mathsci (talk)

I don't have much time to devote to this at the moment. But to XXanthippe, I don't know where you got that idea but it's not at all the BLP policy position. Nothing of the kind. And to David.Kane, I believe you're interpreting claims here as saying all black or all white when that wasn't what the claim said, or the secondary source said. Jensen didn't say they should be strictly segregated by race, but legitimized segregation was widely interpreted to be the outcome of such a recommendation given Jensen's own assertion that the average black has an IQ requiring a very different kind of education than the average white. In other words, the separate education would be the norm, not the exception? Get it? But this is what I've tried to explain many times--our job isn't to judge who did or didn't interpret Jensen's work properly. Our job is to accurately describe how these notable, published figures, academics, and other parties to the dispute did. We need to accurately describe how Jensen describes his own work. We need to accurately describe how his critics interpreted it. That's what we do. At no point do we nobodies at wikipedia step in to the fray and presume to judge the validity of those interpretations based on our own interpretation of the primary text itself. See? Professor marginalia (talk) 03:47, 2 June 2010 (UTC)

I agree with your last five sentences. The difficulty is that some people in this debate are not following their import. If this were a debate that had taken place in the nineteenth century, historians would have had time to absorb and assess all the evidence and all the participants would be dead. But this controversy is going on at present and most of the participants are very much alive. It is essential, on BLP grounds, that all the living participants are given fair treatment. Misplaced Pages must state explicitly what protagonists actually said as well as what cherry-picked commentators allege that they said. There are so many unreliable and biased secondary sources here that excruciating care must be taken to be fair. Xxanthippe (talk) 09:39, 2 June 2010 (UTC).

Xxanthippe wrote, "Only verifiable quotes from the subject himself are acceptable in such a controversal article about a living person." Not true. perhaps it would be better if this discussion were left to people who understand our BLP policy, or are willing to honor it. Slrubenstein | Talk 10:31, 2 June 2010 (UTC)

Since Mathsci has agreed with me that it's reasonable to condense the Webster material, I've gone ahead and done that now. I've also included a passage from Flynn (1980) in order to help balance it. Mathsci has stated that he considers Flynn one of the leading authorities on psychometrics, so hopefully including his view about this won't be contentious either. --Captain Occam (talk) 11:20, 2 June 2010 (UTC)

@Xxanthippe: Most of the episodes I've watched battled over here are decades old..Jensen, an octogenarian, is one of the few of the most notable participants reacting to his paper who is even still alive, and that debate is more than 50 years old now. I would like someone here to list out the supposedly "unreliable" and "biased" secondary sources allegedly filling the section, because what I've seen happen over and over and over again is the sources have been rejected out of hand by editors who didn't look at them, don't know anything about the qualifications of the author, but simply based on the editor's personal disagreement with the claim itself. In other words, the standard used here for calling a text "biased" or "unreliable" is not the authority, or lack of, to the published source. Instead, editors are judging the claim as "true" or not based on their own personal opinion of Jensen and pronouncing sources "biased" or "unreliable" if they don't conform to it. In other words, the inexpert wikipedian has appointed himself the judge of what's a "true" interpretation or conclusion to come to from a primary source. And that's completely backwards--in fact that's exactly what editors cannot do per WP:NPOV and WP:OR. Professor marginalia (talk) 16:39, 2 June 2010 (UTC)

Shorter summaries of the 1969 paper of Jensen

This section is intended for summaries. We don't include unsourced synthesis nor do comment on the writer (eg words like "in a critical account"). That is WP:OR. In the account of James R. Flynn (from New Zealand) he comments about the events of the 1969-1975. That is clearly of this section. It is to help readers understand how different academics in reliable secondary sources have interpreted Jensen's paper. Certainly it's not about whether Jensen's paper is correct or not. That people commented later on that is mentioned in the appropriate place in the article. These are straight summaries, not points of view on the correctness of Jensen's article. Thanks, Mathsci (talk) 11:53, 2 June 2010 (UTC)

The quote from Flynn isn’t about whether Jensen is right or wrong; it’s only about whether Jensen should be taken seriously as a scientist.

Let me make sure I understand your point about this correctly. Is it that you don’t have a problem with the Flynn material in general, but just think it’s in the wrong part of the article? If that’s the only problem here, then it can be moved to wherever you think is an appropriate place.

Incidentally, it might be worthwhile in general to cover the 1970s debate between Jensen and Flynn, because this debate is what defined most of the basic assumptions of the race and intelligence debate. (As well as leading to discoveries such as the Flynn Effect.) --Captain Occam (talk) 11:59, 2 June 2010 (UTC)

I agree that his Level - Level II theory was taken seriously by experts: the sentence about Flynn and Mckintosh should make that clear. We are giving authors' summaries of the articles, not their personal opinions or comments in the light of historical events. I did access a typed book or paper by Flynn where he discussed the Level I and Level II theories, but I'm not sure now that it was the 1980 book. I'd have to check that carefully. How did you access Flynn's 1980 book? Mathsci (talk) 12:34, 2 June 2010 (UTC)

The sentence about Flynn and Mckintosh just says that they both gave accounts of Jensen’s research. It doesn’t make it clear how valuable Flynn considered Jensen’s contributions to psychometrics to be, including his research about race differences. It also doesn’t provide any information about the 1970s debate between Jensen and Flynn, which I think the article should cover.

Flynn’s book used to be available at Google Books, but I’m not sure if it still is. You can always just buy it or find it at a library, in any case. I might purchase a copy of it on eBay or somewhere similar. --Captain Occam (talk) 13:05, 2 June 2010 (UTC)

I own a copy of Flynn (1980). It has two brief discussions of Jensen's ideas about Level I and Level II on pages 27-29 and 205-206. It seems consistent with the descriptions that we already have in the article. Let me know if you have questions. David.Kane (talk) 13:11, 2 June 2010 (UTC)

Lynn on Bushmen

One of the captions says that according to Lynn's Race Differences in Intelligence: An Evolutionary Analysis, Bushmen are "mentally retarded". This sounds dubious. I'd like to have an exact quote on this.--Victor Chmara (talk) 12:31, 2 June 2010 (UTC)

I haven't actually read Lynn's book, but when this was discussed on the talk page for the Race and intelligence article someone quoted the relevant passage of it. Based on that, I'm pretty sure the way Lynn describes this is that Bushmen have a lower mental age than other groups of people. Some of Lynn's critics have interpreted this as meaning the same thing as mental retardation, but that isn't the wording Lynn actually uses. --Captain Occam (talk) 12:42, 2 June 2010 (UTC)

If Lynn himself does not use the words "mentally retarded", then the article should not use them either.--Victor Chmara (talk) 13:05, 2 June 2010 (UTC)

It's on page 76 of Lynn and referred in the secondary source, the book review of Nicholas Mackintosh. Instead of blanking content, could editors please go to the secondary sources to verify the content? In Tucker's 2002 book, it was explained on Page 2 (and elsewhere) that the Pioneer Fund financed Mankind Quarterly. That's why there was a precise page citation. I've slightly changed the wording to make this more explicit. Mathsci (talk) 13:13, 2 June 2010 (UTC)

Mathsci has just reverted the article six times in under 24 hours. Victor, you might want to report this at AN3. I'd rather not do it myself, because of my involvement both here and in the AN/I thread; I think it's generally preferable for things like this to be reported by someone who's as un-involved as possible.

Let me know if you don’t want to, and I or David.Kane can do it. --Captain Occam (talk) 13:19, 2 June 2010 (UTC)

Matschi now claims that Mankind Quarterly is "Pioneer-financed". This suggests that all or most of its funding is from Pioneer. Is this true? Currently, the article links together the Mainstream statement, Pioneer and Mankind Quarterly in a very POV manner.

In the quote Lynn does not explicitly classify them as "mentally retarded". I modified the caption accordingly.

In reverting my edits, Mathsci ended up deleting corrections of fact, clarifications and additions that I thinkecuase, part fom even he would approve of. Can we agree on which of them are ok? The quotes from the Mainstream statement should stay and the Lynn & Vanhanen books should be mentioned.

Occam, I have no interest in reporting on Mathsci or anyone else, but you can of course do it if you want.--Victor Chmara (talk) 14:03, 2 June 2010 (UTC)

I have reverted the vandalism by the driveby IP and requested semiprotection of the page; and will continue to do so, since it against consensus. He is removing images and text against consensus. In every other case I have in fact added new properly sourced content each time. Pioneer-financed is reported in the secondary source - it only means partially in this case. I have modified the caption to agree with the secondary source (Mackintosh) and the primary source (Lynn) and disambiguate bushmen. Thanks, Mathsci (talk) 18:12, 2 June 2010 (UTC)

Request for arbitration

Note that a request for arbitration has been filed relating to various disputes over this article (among others). Rvcx (talk) 18:16, 2 June 2010 (UTC)

Article Images and Captions

Yes - MathSci, MikeMikev, and David Kane really did agree that the miniportraits were nice. And i will add my vote to the list. So it really is true that people who are often divided can find some common ground!

Now, an anonymous editor has entered into a revert war deleting the images. Apparently this IP raised an objection on this talk page, and no one agreed with the objection, and two editors who have usually differed with MathSci supported him in this case. So the IP knows that editors with a history of work on this article support the images. That this person has gone to war deleting images and reverting MathSci seems to me to be the worst kind of disruptive editing. It serves no purpose except to discourage any agreement (let alone collaboration) between MathSci, David and Mike.

The page is now protected but I urge any admin checking this out to see that MathSci was restoring edits supported by a consensus of registered users, in opposition to an anonymous SPA who refuses to listen to anyone else. Slrubenstein | Talk 19:20, 2 June 2010 (UTC)

Thanks Slr. In my new temporary statement on the RfAr I describe this consensus as a "rare event". I have no idea who the driveby IP was, but they were simply vandalizing the article. I can see no reason to WP:AGF in this case. It was out-and-out vandalism. Mathsci (talk) 20:05, 2 June 2010 (UTC)

Agreed. I think the photos added a nice touch and made the article better. I could imagine a reasonable argument for decreasing their number or substituting some for others, but visitor did not seem interested in discussion. Don't we know any admins who can fix this? David.Kane (talk) 20:13, 2 June 2010 (UTC)

No one has yet to lift even a finger to support the images notability for inclusion individually or as a group. At the moment this is simply a textbook example of the fact that Misplaced Pages is not run by "Votes". "Nice pictures" is not sufficient support for their encyclopedic notability. 99.141.254.167 (talk) 20:19, 2 June 2010 (UTC)

I'll also add that I'm tremendousnessly disappointed in the Editor "Mathsci's" fabrications. Your false declaration at ArbCom is troubling: "On the other hand I haven't seen the level of disruptive edits that have occurred on the history article, with no scholarly basis whatsoever. I don't quite know why, but a series of IPs has been randomly vandalizing the article for the last two weeks, removing images and newly added content"

My first edit to the article was at 13:30, yesterday June 1st. One needs to go back to early last month to find the next IP edits:(2), from there one needs to go back nearly another week - except this IP edit inserts an image:(3). Your false testimony otherwise, coupled with your unshaded declaration of no WP:AGF, and blatant mis-characterization of my edit as drive by vandalism does nothing to further honest discussion of the debate on its merits and substance. One can only wonder how often you resort to such techniques when your intellect fails you - perhaps such behavior can be found littered along the route that brought you before Arb-Com in the first place.99.141.254.167 (talk) 20:50, 2 June 2010 (UTC)

99.141.254.167: Can you point us toward any Misplaced Pages policy which specifies how many photos are too many in an article? Perhaps I am naive, but most encyclopedias that write an article which mentions X like to include a picture of X, if one is available. Given that the article mentions, for example, Arthur Jensen, what is wrong with including a picture of him? Perhaps your position is that the article should only include photos of people about whom there is enough discussion? I just want to get a better sense of your point of view. Can you point us toward examples of articles that also had too many photos but which, after discussion, had them removed? David.Kane (talk) 21:01, 2 June 2010 (UTC)

I agree with you on Jensen. Jensen was retained, as perhaps 3/4 of the article revolves around him. Shockley, given his fame, his association and his influence on Jensen was also retained. Lysenko's infamy and real world ramifications kept his image. (I was also influenced by a desire to highlight the link as a sort of educational "Someone You Should Know") Binet was kept (again a closet link, like Lysenko, advertising, "Something You Should Know") as the path here begins at IQ testing, itself a notable and important subject for it's controversial utility and influence. 99.141.254.167 (talk) 21:19, 2 June 2010 (UTC)

I think the pictures are great. Maybe the Lysenko and Boas portraits are questionable, since they weren't direct participants, acting more as "labels" for a certain points of view. The rest I have no problem with, and I think they help readers connect better by putting faces with a bunch of unfamiliar names. Professor marginalia (talk) 21:20, 2 June 2010 (UTC)

I'm also going to remove the wanted poster for the Weather Underground. This group, and its members, are not related to local SDS chapter action in 1973 (The image caption here incorrectly dates the protest to 1969). The Weather faction did not exist until the SDS national convention, becoming first the Weathermen and overthrowing SDS leadership before the organization SDS later effectively dissolved and core members went underground. The poster has no relevance and is an historical mis-characterization. Also note that the faction that protested (SDS-WSA) was specifically the faction that DID NOT support or include Weather.99.141.254.167 (talk) 21:43, 2 June 2010 (UTC)

The picture illustrates the article. The FBI picture dates from 1970 and the people pictured were leaders of Students for a Democratic Society. You incorrectly assert that the protest was in 1973. However that claim is cdirectly ontradicted by what's written in the 1975 article by Lee Cronbach, where he describes how the protest as occuring in 1969 two weeks after Jensen's paper appeared. The caption had a citation and you didn't bother to check the secondary source. Your personal point of view is irrelevant for editing wikipedia. Mathsci (talk) 22:28, 2 June 2010 (UTC)

Can you please directly quote the source which attributes the protest to any one of the pictured individuals - or to the Weather Underground? An organization which itself did not exist as such until Christmas, 1969? Thank you in advance for the direct quote in support of the claim.99.141.254.167 (talk) 22:37, 2 June 2010 (UTC)

<== Passage from page 3 of Cronbach (1975):

As soon as the article was in type the publicity broke. The Harvard Review made the article available to the press along with the remarks of the prearranged critics. Substantial excerpts appeared in U.S. News and the New York Times, and lesser accounts appeared in other media. Within two weeks, the Students for a Democratic Society were cruising the Berkeley campus with a sound truck whose chant was "Stop racism. Fire Jensen!"And on the Eastern seaboard, it was rumored that the Nixon cabinet had discussed whether the article could be used to justify reducing outlays to aid blacks.

So 1969, not 1973. Other sources write "Fight racism. Fire Jensen!" (probably more accurate, if it matters). 99.141.254.167 will find that Jensen wrote about this event in the 1972 book "Genetics and Education". Why is he trying to contribute here if everything he says contradicts the sources, which he doesn't bother to read? The illustration illustrates the organization not the protests. Only he seems to object and h;s said a number of quite incorrect things so far. Why should anybody pay any attention to his personal thoughts on wikipedia? This isn't a WP:FORUM after all is it? Mathsci (talk) 22:48, 2 June 2010 (UTC)

Your reference has nothing at all to do with the Weathermen. Period. The FBI wanted poster has no relevance at all. My ref regarding the 1973 SDS protest referred to "A Resolution Against Racism" that was published in the New York Times on October 28, 1973 that specifically targeted Jensen and Shockley, leading to the formation of the Committee Against Racism, (CAR). 99.141.254.167 (talk) 22:56, 2 June 2010 (UTC)

Which secondary source cites the letter to the New York Times? Mathsci (talk) 23:58, 2 June 2010 (UTC)

It wasn't a letter. Here are some cites: It's also described in this Misplaced Pages entry on the SDS here:] Are the cites acceptable?99.141.254.167 (talk) 00:29, 3 June 2010 (UTC)

1. Tucker 2002, pp. 148, 255 harvnb error: no target: CITEREFTucker2002 (help)
2. Jensen 1969, p. 95,115 harvnb error: no target: CITEREFJensen1969 (help)
3. Tucker 2002, pp. 148, 255 harvnb error: no target: CITEREFTucker2002 (help)
4. See:
   • Tucker 2002, pp. 148, 255 harvnb error: no target: CITEREFTucker2002 (help)
   • Byrd & Clayton 2001, p. 436 harvnb error: no target: CITEREFByrdClayton2001 (help)
   • Jensen 1968 harvnb error: no target: CITEREFJensen1968 (help)