International Correspondence (no. 2, October 1984)

Readings on the racist, pseudoscientific history of psychometrics and intelligence-testing

Seeing as how Trump regularly goes around accusing his opponents of being "low-IQ individuals," and others within his circle, such as Elon Musk, have similarly stated how they want "high-IQ revolutionaries" to run the new bullshit DOGE department of class warfare (officially the "department of government efficiency"), I thought it worth compiling a list of readings on the racist and pseudoscientific history of intelligence-testing.

I'm familiar with Stephen Jay Gould's Mismeasure of Man, but what other books are there that deal with the problems of intelligence-testing (especially when applied to societal policies, such as having people take psychometric tests for certain forms of employment), the historical connections between intelligence-testing and eugenics, the (neo-)Nazis' obsession with race and intelligence (which Trump has repeatedly given a nod to),[1] and so on? They don't have to be from a socialist perspective.

1. From the article linked to:

Mr. Trump has spoken openly about his belief in the racehorse theory, an idea, adapted from horse breeding, that good bloodlines produce superior offspring. He offered a quick explanation for how the theory applies to humans at a rally in Nevada this year. He was proclaiming his own intelligence by noting that his uncle, John Trump, was a longtime professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

“Same genes, we have the genes,” Mr. Trump said of his uncle, who died in 1985. “We’re smart people.” Then he added: “We’re like racehorses, too. You know, the fast ones produce the fast ones, and the slow ones doesn’t work out so well, right? But we’re no, we’re no different in that sense.”

It was not the first time that Mr. Trump has pointed to the theory to bolster his claims of superiority. But he has also extended the notion to others, often praising the genes of supporters he is shouting [at] from the stage. During his 2020 campaign, he notably praised the makeup of a substantially white crowd at a rally in Minnesota.

“You have good genes,” he said. “You know that, right? You have good genes. A lot of it is about the genes, isn’t it, don’t you believe? The racehorse theory. You think we’re so different? You have good genes in Minnesota.”

Mr. Trump, in contrast, has a pattern of using dehumanizing language to describe undocumented immigrants. He has repeatedly referred to immigrants who commit crimes as “animals.” At a rally in Ohio in March, he was even more explicit. “I don’t know if you call them people,” he said of immigrants accused of crimes. “In some cases, they’re not people, in my opinion.”

His remarks on Monday in some ways echoed his repeated assertion last year that undocumented immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country,” a phrase criticized by many for evoking the ideology of eugenics promulgated by Nazis in Germany and white supremacists in the United States.

Mr. Trump has defended his use of that phrase by saying he was “not a student of Hitler,” even as a number of news articles, biographers and books about his presidency have documented his long interest in Hitler. He has largely stopped using the poisoning-the-blood phrase.

Matteo Pasquinelli’s…

Matteo Pasquinelli’s autonomist AI book talks about the racist origins of IQ, how it was applied to cybernetics, and now LLMs.
https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/products/735-the-eye-of-the-master?srsltid=AfmBOoqk1P2VSZFNgNcT0X915yRetE58-iXas04r8oBlT2VbfkXcAsg5

Thanks for that. There's…

Thanks for that. There's also Yarden Katz's article in Monthly Review that provides a nice overview of the historical attempts at measuring/quantifying "intelligence," starting with Alfred Binet, and how such efforts have almost invariably gone hand in hand with eugenics, white supremacist ideologies and policies, and racial pseudoscience. The American eugenics movement in fact directly influenced the sterilization and other policies of Nazi Germany. The latter part of Katz's article also shows how modern "intelligence" testers reproduce many of the ideas of earlier eugenicists, while dropping some of the overtly racist language, by pointing to "learning" platforms like Coursera and their emphasis on how certain parts of the world are fit for certain types of labor:

Katz wrote: The rankings of individuals and their skills are then aggregated to produce an extensive intelligence hierarchy, presented in Coursera’s 2021 Global Skills Report. The report is framed from the perspective of U.S. empire, scouring the globe for workers (or “learners”) with the necessary skills to serve U.S. corporations while trying to ensure no other state threatens its hegemony. The report ranks more than one hundred countries by their performance in the valorized areas of data science and business. These rankings are justified by a circular logic familiar from intelligence testing. Just as Terman justified IQ scores by claiming that they positively correlate with incomes, Coursera justifies its rankings by suggesting they positively correlate with indicators such as the World Bank’s “Human Capital Index” (the latter being yet another crude metric that incorporates GDP, international standardized tests, and other indicators to rank countries’ worth). Coursera then uses the rankings to categorize countries and regions as “cutting edge,” “competitive,” “emerging,” or “lagging.”

The results resemble the racialist hierarchies that were concocted using the U.S. army intelligence tests of the First World War. Wealthy European countries such as Germany, Sweden, and Austria are classified as “cutting edge,” while those places still suffering the weight of colonialism, such as Algeria, Brazil, and Puerto Rico, are classified as “lagging.” The “Cutting Edge” places excel in the areas valorized by U.S. technocratic elites, such as Bayesian statistics, and have “stand-out industries” such as information technology and the arts. By contrast, the “lagging” nations are reported to excel in so-called soft skills such as “adaptability” and “sales”; their noteworthy industries are “household activities,” mining, and hospitality and food. Like Brigham’s hierarchy, Coursera’s rankings reaffirm white supremacy and imperialist attitudes. But while Brigham and his peers determined that the less white countries are less intelligent, Coursera determines that mostly non-white countries lack the most desirable skills.

It's worth noting that the aforementioned Carl Brigham, a eugenicist and white supremacist, also created the Scholastic Aptitude Test (or SAT). Many colleges in the US still use SAT scores as part of their admission requirements, though the number of colleges requiring these scores has been decreasing in recent years, partly due to its unsavory history, as well as other factors like the pandemic and the inherently inequitable nature of such assessments.

The idea that there is something called "intelligence" in the first place, and which can supposedly be quantified by taking one of a number of "intelligence"-measuring tests, is also just fundamentally unsound and unscientific (much like the entire field of psychology itself; see for instance its replication crisis, with the reproducibility of studies being a key criterion for a field being considered scientific). "Intelligence"-measuring also serves neo-Nazis and white supremacists like Trump and co., just like it served its original proponents, by letting them point to how better-off white people (shockingly) score better on such tests, and enjoy more "success" in capitalist society, than poorer and disadvantaged groups.

Pasqunelli’s premise is…

Pasquinelli’s premise is classic operaismo; calculation of intelligence was a means of improving early automation to reproduce the average task, both physical and cognitive which he makes the point are interlinked even in menial work. Don’t think there was (or is) any notions of being scientific or right, just what is efficient. Like with LLMs, an answer to a question is what matters, not whether it’s factual. The most recent Adam Curtis series covers a bit of it as well as replication crisis and science being neutral but caught in capital’s reasoning.

I remember Michael Billig's …

I remember Michael Billig's "Psychology, Racism & Fascism" being quite good on how the far right used this stuff. It is from 1979 though. Published by Searchlight but quite decent I think :

https://archive.org/details/sparrowsnest-9959

(his book "Fascists: A Social Psychological View of The National Front" from 1978 is also good)

Nice one. I've also come…

Nice one. I've also come across Ron Roberts' Psychology and Capitalism, which partly deals with the history of "intelligence"-measuring and its historical association with eugenics. There are also loads of other informative books on the same topic if one searches around; I was just wondering if anyone had any particularly good recommendations. I still think Gould's book (The Mismeasure of Man) is a must-read as far as critiquing the reification of intelligence, along with the appalling history of "intelligence"-measuring itself (which has often been directly in the service of capital and the state).

Speaking of the "race-horse…

Speaking of the "racehorse theory," here's Trump today at his "victory rally" following a speech by Musk:

Trump said: But his son [who's 4] is a great guy [sic]. One thing we know: his son is smart. If you believe in the racehorse theory, he's got a nice smart son.

Never mind the fact that Musk came from a well-off South African family who was heavily involved in the emerald-mining trade, or the fact that his father gave him thousands of dollars to help set up his first major business (i.e. Zip2), or the fact that Musk's "success" owes much to government funding and subsidies, as well as technologies created within the government and education sectors, like the internet itself, etc. The "great-man" image of Musk that portrays him as this "revolutionary capitalist innovator," who single-handedly created all of the junk-products he peddles, is a complete myth; in many cases he is merely rebranding or commercializing technologies that had been created elsewhere. They prefer to just chalk up Musk's "success" to genes and this reified, vulgar concept of "intelligence," rather than a privileged-bourgeois upbringing and the horrific exploitation of countless workers.

This hereditary fallacy, or Trump's claim that he and his allies are fit to rule due to their "good genes" and "inherited intelligence" (they inherited wealth—not intelligence!), also sort of reminds me of Paine's critique of hereditary rule from around 250 years ago:

Paine wrote: Secondly, as no man at first could possess any other public honors than were bestowed upon him, so the givers of those honors could have no power to give away the right of posterity, and though they might say "We choose you for our head," they could not without manifest injustice to their children say "that your children and your children's children shall reign over ours forever." Because such an unwise, unjust, unnatural compact might (perhaps) in the next succession put them under the government of a rogue or a fool. Most wise men in their private sentiments have ever treated hereditary right with contempt; yet it is one of those evils which when once established is not easily removed: many submit from fear, others from superstition, and the more powerful part shares with the king the plunder of the rest. (79-80)

At any rate, it seems like there's now (and has been) a capitalist oligarchy, rather than a foreign monarchy, that the US has to contend with.

At any rate, it seems like…

At any rate, it seems like there's now (and has been) a capitalist oligarchy, rather than a foreign monarchy, that the US has to contend with.

I should maybe add that I'm aware that the issue is not the greed or cruelty of a handful of capitalists, but rather capitalism as a mode of production itself. I was just referencing how this upcoming administration is unprecedented in its closeness to business interests and billionaire tech-capitalists.

Have to enjoy the irony this…

Have to enjoy the irony this shite comes from a president born from an ‘illegal’, a vice president that’s Afrikaans and a backer that’s German. Maybe this was always on the cards of a country that created the purest of bourgeois revolutions, no Enrages or Levellers to contend with. Of all the English empire’s crimes, the Mayflower ranks pretty high.

International Correspondence (no. 2, October 1984)

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