Who is biased? On motivation and science

In the idealized science world, research is done for the sole purpose of finding truth, and doesn’t have any ulterior motives for anything else. Papers are published without regards to the utility of the findings for this or that goal of the authors. Responses to others’ research, including any pre-publication peer review is likewise done without any personal feuds, prestige, or self-interest affecting the process. Research questions are chosen optimally so as to maximize the usefulness of the time and resources available with regards to finding truth. This collective effort thus has the effect of maximizing the speed at which humanity can learn new things about the world.

How far is reality from the above? Clearly, all the various conditions I have described are violated to some degree. Nevertheless, the overall process we have in real life still works to some extent. Each month, many exciting new studies are published that throw new light at some research question, sometimes a new one, mostly existing ones. Science, just like capitalism, can work with humans as they are, not idealized homo scientificus or Mertonian scientist. It is possible to boil these various idealized science ideas into a few key principles, most famously done by Robert Merton:

communism: all scientists should have common ownership of scientific goods (intellectual property), to promote collective collaboration; secrecy is the opposite of this norm.[4]
universalism: scientific validity is independent of the sociopolitical status/personal attributes of its participants.[5]
disinterestedness: scientific institutions act for the benefit of a common scientific enterprise, rather than for specific outcomes[6] or the resulting personal gain of individuals within them.
organized skepticism: scientific claims should be exposed to critical scrutiny before being accepted: both in methodology and institutional codes of conduct.[7]

Insofar as science deviates from these high-minded principles, the self-correcting and overall speed of progress is diminished. Here’s some findings on (apparent) violations of these principles:

Huber et al 2022 found that papers supposedly written by Nobel prize winning authors receive much more favorable peer reviews.
Finseraas et al 2022 found that papers with egalitarian favoring conclusions received higher ratings than otherwise identical papers with the opposite conclusion.
Javdani & Chang 2023 found that economists rated identical statements differently depending on the attributed author (which was randomized between mainstream vs. non-mainstream vs. none).

There are many more of such papers, but the general finding is that 1) people, including scientists, agree more with and rate higher science or statements that come from trusted sources (in-group), and 2) people, including scientists, rate science as more trustworthy, rigorous etc. when they agree with the conclusion. In general, these kinds of findings are called my-side bias. Or we could simply call it a subset of confirmation bias in a broader sense.

Yesterday, I wrote about the latest criticism of national IQs. It was centered on Lynn’s work, as it always is. In my post I noted in passing that:

It’s curious because Lynn like Jensen was very apolitical. If you read his works, they rarely mention anything about his own particular politics. Here the reader might sensibly assume that the reason SM [the critic] sees a lot of politics and ideology is because she is herself very much into politics and ideology (”Former speechwriter and political adviser”).

Some people disagreed with my characterization of Lynn. I can see why because if you read anything about him instead of reading him, you will find endless accusations of being this or that ideologically motivated. Compare his Wikipedia page to the Grokipedia page. Much of the media and Wikipedia material is downstream of various SPLC and ADL hate sites. In the comments of the previous post, DeepLeftAnalysis (whose show I was on) wrote:

“Lynn like Jensen was very apolitical.” Writing for American Renaissance under the pseudonym “Hippocrates” and speaking at three of their conferences does not count as political activity?

He also posted on Substack X some evidence he considers telling, from the AmRen eulogy piece on Lynn:

Richard Lynn has been so much a part of the way I understand the world that it seems I have known him all my life, but I didn’t discover him until my late 30s, when I read a paper he wrote on the high IQ of the Japanese. After I started American Renaissance as a print publication in 1990, we corresponded — this was in the days of typewritten letters — and Richard wrote nine articles for us. He also spoke at three American Renaissance conferences, in 2000, 2002 and 2012.

So let’s think about it a little more broadly. A scientist wrote 9 articles over a period of 17 years (2008-2025) for a politically minded magazine. The articles were:

Only 1 of these concerns the politics of a particular country (8), and another one has some ideological relevance (5). The others are science journalism describing either his own or others’ research. Overall ideological rating of this output: pretty low. The topics are controversial, but the writing isn’t particularly ideological or even mentions any politics. For instance, the 2013 article on altruism is about who gives donations to charity. It summarizes a study by University of Minnesota researchers (Leslie et al 2013) published in some mainstream journal. If this writing counts as ideological, then pretty much any science reporting counts as ideological. Maybe this is a conclusion you want to embrace. Some people think everything is ideological. The argument for this position goes like this: researchers are humans, and they don’t choose research questions at random or purely through some truth maximizing approach (as described above). Rather, they choose something they find interesting, and which is publishable. Because of this, all science reflects the motivations and thus ideologies of the researchers. I take this to be true, but as a matter of degree. Some people are clearly more ideological than others. Some people dismiss any evidence that disagrees with their current opinion, whereas others go “hmm, maybe”. Some people can’t write a single blogpost or go a day on X without ranting about the current thing the other team did or their supporters, and plaster their profiles with text and logos of their political or religious ideas (rainbows, flags, Jesus). Others rarely comment on anything of the sort. I think as a prototypical case of politically motivated scientists, it is difficult to beat Not in Our Genes. In their 1984 book, the three authors (Lewontin, Rose, Kamin) spent the entire book attacking non-egalitarian science findings explicitly based on Marxist theory. This kind of overt political infusion into science is thankfully rare.

Another commenter offered another example of Lynn’s bad biases:

“I think the only solution lies in the breakup of the United States. Blacks and Hispanics are concentrated in the Southwest, the Southeast and the East, but the Northwest and the far Northeast, Maine, Vermont and upstate New York have a large predominance of whites. I believe these predominantly white states should declare independence and secede from the Union. They would then enforce strict border controls and provide minimum welfare, which would be limited to citizens. If this were done, white civilisation would survive within this handful of states.” — Undated interview with fascist magazine Right NOW!

The source is SPLC as you might expect. There is no link to the material, so the readers can’t judge for themselves. Nor is even a date given. I asked Lynn where this quote was from in 2022, and he said it was in that magazine, but that he didn’t have a copy. I emailed the old editor to ask for a copy, but sadly he didn’t have one either. Clearly, it wasn’t a fascist magazine, as even skimming the hostile Wikipedia entry reveals. Without the article itself, it’s hard to say what to make of this, but the magazine was in print 1993 to 2006, so it is a long time ago anyway. I imagine Richard Lynn was asked to give an interview and asked something about race relations, and the above was his reply. Hardly much evidence of him being very ideological. Rather, it is evidence of him holding some segregationist opinion about race relations in USA expressed sometime between 1993 to 2006. You may reply that such an opinion is very extreme, but actually it used to be quite common (among Blacks too). Remember again that Richard Lynn was old (born 1933), so it is not so unusual for him to have opinions common in older people expressed a long time ago. Why did he give an interview in that magazine? Well, why wouldn’t he? Scientists like Lynn rarely get asked to do interviews, and when they do, the outlet is always right-leaning. It’s not like The Guardian is eager to give him a fair interview. If having an interview in a right-wing magazine is evidence that one’s a bad scientist because of improper motivations or ideological bias, then right-leaning scientists either must stay quiet, get labelled as bad because of interviews in right-leaning outlets, or endure hit piece interviews in left-leaning ones. This is a silly standard to use.

The right approach to judge a person on a scale from Robotic to Ideological is to look at their collective writings and behavior. Fortunately, we have such a collection for Richard Lynn over on his memorial site. He wrote about 500 research articles, and maybe 20 books. I’ve read maybe half of his books and hundreds of the papers. Almost none of them discuss politics. When they do, they usually do so in a third-party sense of making predictions about the future that depends on judging political trends and so on (e.g. his Eugenics book from 2001). This is very unlike the typical writings of ideologues, who constantly mouth off about this or that political enemy. It’s easy to get an impression of such people because they are dominant everywhere on social media.

I also have a more personal angle. I met Richard Lynn in 2014 at the first London Conference on Intelligence (LCI), though we had emailed previously (as a philosophy student, I was reading his Eugenics book). He was soft-spoken and one might say somewhat autistic. He didn’t speak much about politics, though once he asked me in a cafe about what I thought a wise immigration policy should be. I said something along the lines of meritocratic selection using IQ testing, and he kinda nodded. Mostly we just discussed the science. If you read his autobiography, you get the same impression. A nerdy guy who found some truths that he (eventually) decided to pursue to his own detriment. This makes him quite similar to Arthur Jensen, another quite apolitical scientist. It’s truly ironic that these relatively apolitical people are accused so frequently of political bias. I think the problem is that people who are themselves very politically interested project this mindset into others. This is sometimes called the typical mind fallacy, or bias. Both DeepLeftAnalysis and Shae Mclaughlin provide examples of this tendency. Among scientists, Eric Turkheimer and Kevin Bird are the best examples of this. Turkheimer spews vitriol and his writings are full of accusations of bias, but he somehow never reflects on this fact — that the bias may be within. Politics does not belong in science, it makes people irrational (‘politics is the mind killer’). It is best to not listen so much to people who have obvious strong political views when it comes to science. But Richard Lynn wasn’t one of these people. His scientific findings have stood the test of time quite well.

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