An article about science results that run afoul of the diktats of political correctness appears in The American, a publication of the American Enterprise Institute. It reminds me of a story told in confidence by a college friend.
Bill did a Ph.D. in psychology at the University of California. As a grad student at Berkeley he worked on a study of IQ in young children.
It was a cleverly designed study using non-verbal measures closely correlated with IQ to control for socioeconomic and cultural biasing effects. The research team wanted to show that group differences in IQ are an artifact of culturally biased written IQ tests, that by using non-verbal measures group differences disappear.
The study collected whole file cabinets of data over several years which, when analyzed, produced the "wrong" (i.e., politically incorrect) results. The Asian kids had the highest average IQs, followed by the white kids, followed by the Hispanic kids, with black kids having the lowest average. And they found this using non-verbal, culturally neutral measures and data collectors representing all four groups.
Understanding how much hate and grief the findings would bring down if published, the U.C. professor(s) running the study destroyed the data and tried to forget the years of wasted effort. Score: political correctness 1, science 0.
Bill died young over ten years ago, a cancer victim. It feels okay sharing his experience, after keeping it quiet for 30+ years.
