James points out the new Quillette article about IQ research. I hadn't realised the deception had risen to that level of power, but this is the common pattern, yes. Lump unconnected people together to create an association, then refute only a few of them, pretending that the work of the others is no better. Refuse to address the science and data and just say that it's scientific racism and shouldn't be listened to. Once that is in place then you don't even have to report on any "controversy," you can just decline to acknowledge the topic altogether.
I wonder if Quillette will have any effect.
Probably not. Impact of Wikipedia on chemistry research
ReplyDeleteTo find out if this “feedback loop” is happening, we set up randomized control trials—similar to a randomized drug trial—in which we add new content to Wikipedia, specifically in the field of Chemistry. In a randomized drug trial, the patients who are given the drug are the treatment group and the patients who are given the placebo are the control group, and people are put into each group randomly. Adapting this model for our purposes, we wrote new articles about Chemistry topics that were not already on Wikipedia at the time. Then, we put half of them up at random, and withheld the other half as the control, choosing which article went into which group randomly.
Over the course of several months, we found that there was a huge response to our new scientific content on Wikipedia. The average article that we put up got 4,400 views per month (which speaks to the scale of Wikipedia), and when chemists were writing in the scientific literature about the topics covered in our articles, the influence of our Wikipedia articles was clear.
The evidence from this study suggests that not only is there a correlation between the content of scientific literature and the content of thousands of Wikipedia entries, but also that Wikipedia causes scientists to write differently in scientific literature, showing the breadth and depth of Wikipedia’s influence in disseminating scientific knowledge.