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Richard Haier is a psychologist specializing in the science of human intelligence.

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There's a book called The Bell Curve, written in 1994, written by psychologist Richard Herrnstein and political scientist Charles Murray.

The book is about the importance of intelligence in everyday life.

It has statistical analyses of very large databases that show that essentially IQ scores or their equivalent are correlated to all kinds of social problems and social benefits.

And that in itself is not where the controversy about that book came.

The controversy was about 1 chapter in that book, and that is a chapter about the average difference in mean scores between black Americans and white Americans.

And these are the terms that were used in the book at the time and are still used to some extent.

And historically, or really for decades, it has been observed that disadvantaged groups been observed that disadvantaged groups score on average lower than Caucasians on academic tests, tests of mental ability, and especially on IQ tests.

And the difference is about a standard deviation, which is about 15 points, which is a substantial difference.

In the book, Herrnstein and Murray in this 1 chapter assert clearly and unambiguously that whether this average difference is due to genetics or not, they are agnostic.

Moreover, they assert they don't care because you wouldn't treat anybody differently knowing that if there was a genetic component or not because that's a group average finding.

Every individual has to be treated as an individual.

You can't make any assumption about what that person's intellectual ability might be from the fact of an average group difference.

Nonetheless, people took away, I'm going to choose my words carefully because I have a feeling that many critics didn't actually read the book.

They took away that Herrnstein and Murray were saying that blacks are genetically inferior.

And if they weren't saying it, they were implying it because they had a chapter that discussed this empirical observation of a difference.

And so the reaction to that book was incendiary.

What do we know about, from that book and the research beyond about race differences and intelligence.

It's still the most incendiary topic in psychology.

Anybody who even discusses it is easily called a racist just for discussing it.

It's become fashionable to find racism in any discussion like this.

The short answer to your question is, there's been very little actual research on this topic since 19...

with an article published by an educational psychologist named Arthur Jensen.

Let's just take a minute and go back to that to see the bell curve in a little bit more historical perspective.

Arthur Jensen was a educational psychologist at UC Berkeley.

And in 1969 or 68, the Harvard Educational Review asked him to do a review article on the early childhood education programs that were designed to raise the IQs of minority students.

This was before the federally funded Head Start program.

Head Start had not really gotten underway at the time Jensen undertook his review of what were a number of demonstration programs.

And these demonstration programs were for young children who were around kindergarten age, and they were specially designed to be cognitively stimulating, to provide lunches, do all the things that people thought would minimize this this average gap of intelligence tests.

There was a strong belief among virtually all psychologists that the cause of the gap was unequal opportunity due to racism, due to all, you know, all negative things in the society, and if you could compensate for this, the gap would go away.

So Early childhood education back then was called literally compensatory education.

And he wrote a, It was over a hundred page article detailing these programs and the flaws in their research design.

Some of the programs reported IQ gains of on average 5 points, but a few reported 10, 20, and even 30 point games.

That investigator went to jail, ultimately, for fabricating data.

But the point is that Jensen wrote an article that said, look, The opening sentence of his article is classic.

The opening sentence is, I may not quote it exactly right, but it's, we have tried compensatory education and it has failed.

And he showed that these gains were essentially nothing.

You couldn't really document empirically any gains at all from these really earnest efforts to increase IQ.

But he went a step further, a fateful step further.

He said not only have these efforts failed, but because they have had essentially no impact, we have to reexamine our assumption that these differences are caused by environmental things that we can address with education.

We need to consider a genetic influence, whether there's a genetic influence on this group difference.

So you said that this is 1 of the more controversial works

infamous paper in all of psychology, I would go on to say.

the genetic data was very skimpy on this question.

It's always been controversial, but it was even skimpy and controversial.

It's kind of a long story that I go into a little bit in more detail in the book, Neuroscience of Intelligence.

But to say he was vilified is an understatement.

I mean, He couldn't talk at the American Psychological Association without bomb threats clearing the lecture hall.

Campus security watched him all the time.

He had to retreat to a different address.

This was 1 of the earliest kinds, this is before the internet and kind of internet social media mobs, but it was that intense.

And I have written that overnight after the publication of this article, all intelligence research became radioactive.

And then it didn't, it, nobody was doing more research.

And then the bell curve came along and the Jensen controversy was dying down.

I have stories that Jensen told me about his interaction with the Nixon White House on this issue.

It was some unbelievable stories, but he told me this, so I kind of believe these stories.

So all this silence basically saying, nobody wants to do this kind of research.

There's so much pressure, so much attack against this kind of research.

And here's a sort of a bold, stupid, crazy people that decide to dive right back in.

Murray has said they discussed it and they felt they should include it and they were very careful in the way they, they wrote it, which did them no good.

So, um, as a matter of fact, when the bell curve came out, It was so controversial.

I got a call from a television show called Nightline.

It was with a broadcaster called Ted Koppel, who had this evening show, I think it was on late at night, talked about news.

And a producer called and asked if I would be on it to talk about The Bell Curve.

And I said, you know, it's, she asked me what I thought about The Bell Curve as a book.

It talks about the role of intelligence in society.

And she said, no, no, what do you think about the chapter on race?

I said, well, she said, what would you say if you were on TV?

And I said, well, what I would say is that it's not at all clear if there's any genetic component to intelligence, any differences, but if there were a strong genetic component, that would be a good thing.

And you know, complete silence on the other end of the phone.

And I said, well, if it's the more genetic any difference is the more it's biological.

And if it's biological, we can figure out how to fix it.

She said, would you say that on television?

So that's for more like biology is within the reach of science and the environment is a public policy, is social and all those kinds of things.

From your perspective, whichever 1 you think is more amenable to solutions in the short term is the 1 that excites you.

But you saying that it's good, the truth of genetic differences, no matter what, between groups, is a painful, harmful, potentially dangerous thing.

Let me ask you to this question, whether it's bell curve or any research on race differences,

can that be used to increase the amount of racism in the world?

Can that be used to increase the amount of hate in the world?

I've thought about this a lot, not as a scientist, but as a person.

And my sense is there is such enormous reservoirs of hate and racism that have nothing to do with scientific knowledge of the data that speak against that.

That, no, I don't wanna give racist groups a veto power over what scientists study.

If you think that the differences, and by the way, virtually no 1 disagrees that there are differences in scores.

It's all about what causes them and how to fix it.

So if you think this is a cultural problem, then you must ask the problem, do you want to change anything about the culture?

Or are you okay with the culture because you don't feel it's appropriate to change a person's culture.

And the fact that that may lead to disadvantages in school achievement?

If you think it's environmental, what are the environmental parameters that can be fixed?

I'll tell you 1, lead in, you know, lead from gasoline in the atmosphere, lead in paint, lead in water.

That's an environmental toxin that Society has the means to eliminate, and they should.

Yeah, just to sort of, trying to find some insights and conclusion to this very difficult topic.

Is there been research on environment versus genetics, nature versus nurture, on this question of race differences.

Tenured people don't want to do it, let alone students.

The way I talk about it, well, before I tell you the way I talk about it, I want to say 1 more thing about Jensen.

He was once asked by a journalist straight out, are you a racist?

His answer was, I've thought about that a lot, and I've concluded it doesn't matter.

I think he had a touch of Asperger's syndrome, to tell you the truth, because I saw him in many circumstances.

He would be canceled on Twitter immediately with that sentence.

Yeah, but what he meant was he had a hypothesis.

And with respect to group differences, he called it the default hypothesis.

He said whatever factors affect individual intelligence are likely the same factors that affect group differences.

And if it turned out empirical tests didn't support the hypothesis, he was happy to move on to something else.

He was absolutely committed to that scientific ideal.

That it's an empirical question, we should look at it, and let's see what happens.

The scientific method cannot be racist from his perspective.

It doesn't matter what the scientists, if they follow the scientific method, it doesn't matter what they believe.

And if they are biased and they consciously or unconsciously bias the data, other people will come along to replicate it, they will fail, and the process over time will work.

Because psychology to me is full of gray areas.

And what I've observed about psychology, even replication crisis aside, is that something about the media, something about journalism, something about the virality of ideas in the public sphere, they misinterpret.

They take up things from studies willfully or from ignorance, misinterpret findings and tell narratives around that.

I personally believe, for me, I'm not saying that broadly about science, but for me, it's my responsibility to anticipate the ways in which findings will be misinterpreted.

So I've had, I thought about this a lot because I published papers on semi-autonomous vehicles and those, you know, cars, people dying cars.

There's people that have written me letters saying, emails, nobody writes letters, I wish they did, that have blood on my hands because of things that I would say positive or negative, there's consequences.

In the same way, when you're a researcher of intelligence, I'm sure you might get emails, or at least people might believe that a finding of your study is going to be used by a large number of people to increase the amount of hate in the world.

I think there's some responsibility on scientists, but for me, I think there's a great responsibility to anticipate the ways things will be misinterpreted, and there you have to, first of all, decide whether you want to say a thing at all or do the study at all, publish the study at all, and 2, the words with which you explain it.

I find this on Twitter a lot actually, which is when I write a tweet, and I'm usually just doing so innocently, I'll write it, you know, it takes me like 5 seconds to write it, or whatever, 30 seconds to write it, and then I'll think, all right, I close my eyes open and try to see how will the world interpret this, like what are the ways in which this will be misinterpreted?

And I'll sometimes adjust that tweet to see, like, yeah, so in my mind it's clear, but that's because it's my mind from which this tweet came, but you have to think in a fresh mind that sees this and it's spread across a large number of other minds, how will the interpretation morph?

I mean, for a tweet, that's a silly thing, it doesn't matter, but for a scientific paper and study and finding, I think it matters.

So I don't know what your thoughts are about that, because maybe for Jensen, the data is there, What do you want me to do?

This is a scientific process has been carried out.

If you think the data was polluted by bias, do other studies that reveal the bias, but the data's there.

The reason I do podcasts, the reason I write books for the public is to explain what I think the data mean and what I think the data don't mean.

I don't do very much on Twitter other than to retweet references to papers.

I don't think it's my role to explain these because they're complicated, they're nuanced.

But when you decide not to do a scientific study because you're, or not to publish a result because you're afraid the result could be harmful or insensitive, that's not an unreasonable thought.

And people will make different conclusions and decisions about that.

I wrote about this, I wrote, I'm the editor of a journal called Intelligence, which publishes scientific papers.

Sometimes we publish papers on group differences.

Those papers sometimes are controversial.

These papers are written for a scientific audience.

They're not written for the Twitter audience.

I don't promote them very much on Twitter.

But in a scientific paper, you have to now choose your words carefully also, because those papers are picked up by non-scientists, by writers of various kinds, And you have to be available to discuss what you're saying and what you're not saying Sometimes You are successful at having a good conversation Like we are today that that doesn't start out pejorative Other times I have been asked to participate in debates where my role would be to justify race science.

Well, you can see, you start out, you know, that was a BBC request that I had, that I received.

I have so much, it's a love-hate relationship, mostly hate, with these shallow journalism organizations.

So they would want to use you as a kind of, in a debate setting, to communicate as to like, there is race differences between groups and make that into debate.

Versus like educating about this field of the science of intelligence, yeah.

I wanna say 1 more thing before we get off the normal distribution.

You also asked me, what is the science after the bell curve?

And the short answer is there's not much new work, but whatever work there is supports the idea that there still are group differences.

It's arguable whether those differences have diminished at all or not.

And there is still a major problem in underperformance for school achievement for many disadvantaged and minority students.

Now we'll talk about the future on the neuroscience and the biology side, but in terms of this information as a society in the public policy, in the political space, in the social space, what do we do with this information?

The first step is to have people interested in policy understand what the data actually show to pay attention to intelligence data.

You can read policy papers about education and using your word processor, you can search for the word intelligence.

You can search a 20, 000 word document in a second and find out the word intelligence does not appear anywhere.

In most discussions about what to do about achievement gaps, I'm not talking about test gaps, I'm talking about actual achievement gaps in schools, which everyone agrees is a problem.

The word intelligence doesn't appear among educators.

As a matter of fact, in California, there has been tremendous controversy about recent attempts to revise the curriculum for math in high schools.

And we had a Stanford professor of education who was running this review assert there's no such thing as talent, mathematical talent.

And she wanted to get rid of the advanced classes in math because, you know, not everyone could do that.

Now, of course, this has been very controversial.

But the idea that a university professor was in charge of this who believes that there's no talent, that it doesn't exist.

This is rather shocking, let alone the complete absence of intelligence data.

By the way, let me tell you something about what the intelligence data show.

Even though the origins of these studies were a long time ago, I'm blocking on the name of the report.

The Coleman Report was a famous report about education.

And they measured all kinds of variables about schools, about teachers.

And they looked at academic achievement as an outcome.

And they found the most predictive variables of education outcome were the variables the student brought with him or her into the school, essentially their ability.

And that when you combine the school and the teacher variables together, the quality of the school, the funding of the school, the quality of the teachers, their education, you put all the teacher and school variables together, it barely accounted for 10% of the variance.

So the best research we have shows that school variables and teacher variables together account for about 10% of student academic achievement.

Now, you want to have some policy on improving academic achievement?

How much money do you want to put into teacher education?

How much money do you want to put into the quality of the school administration?

You can ask the Gates Foundation because they spent a tremendous amount of money doing that and they at the end of it because they're measurement people, they want to know the data, they found it had no impact at all.

And they've kind of pulled out of that kind of program.

Let me ask you, this is me talking, but there's...

Just the 2 of us, but I'm gonna say some funny and ridiculous things, so you surely are not approving of it.

There's a funny scene in there where a lovely couple are talking about the number of previous sexual partners they had.

And the woman says that, I believe she just had a handful, like 2 or 3 or something like that, sexual partners, but then she also mentioned that she, what's that called?

A fallatio, what's the scientific, but she went, you know, gave a blowjob to 37 guys, I believe it is.

So sometimes, knowing the truth can get in the way of a successful relationship of love of some of the human flourishing.

And that seems to me that's at the core here, that facing some kind of truth that's not able to be changed makes it difficult to sort of, is limiting as opposed to empowering.

If you sort of test for intelligence and lay the data out, it feels like you will give up on certain people.

You will sort of start bidding people, it's like, well, this person is like, let's focus on the average people, or let's focus on the very intelligent people.

And there's a kind of intuition that if we just don't measure and we don't use that data, that we would treat everybody equal and give everybody equal opportunity.

If we have the data in front of us, we're likely to misdistribute the amount of sort of attention we allocate, resources we allocate to people.

It's a realistic concern, but I think it's a misplaced concern if you want to fix the problem.

If you want to fix the problem, you have to know what the problem is.

Let's go back to the bell curve for not the bell curve, but the normal distribution.

Yes 16 percent of the population on average has an IQ under

Which means they're very hard if you have an IQ under 85, it's very hard to find gainful employment at a salary that sustains you at least minimally in modern life.

of the population of the United States is about 51 or 52 million people with IQs under

What is the Venn diagram between, you know, when you have people with IQs under 85 and you have achievement in school or achievement in life, there's a lot of overlap there.

This is why, to go back to the IQ pill, if there were a way to shift that curve toward the higher end, that would have a big impact.

If I could maybe before we talk about the impact on life and so on, Some of the criticisms of the bell curve.

So Stephen Jay Gould wrote that the bell curve rests on 4 incorrect assumptions.

It would be just interesting to get your thoughts on the 4 assumptions which are intelligence must be reducible to a single number, intelligence must be capable of rank ordering people in a linear order, intelligence must be primarily genetically based, and intelligence must be essentially immutable.

Maybe not as criticisms, but as thoughts about intelligence.

Yeah, we could spend a lot of time on him.

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The Bell Curve: The most controversial book ever in science | Richard Haier and Lex Fridman