Noah Carl



Academic scrutiny of Noah Carl's [OpenPsych] papers clearly reveals selective use of data and unsound statistical methods which have been used to legitimise racist stereotypes about groups.

Noah Carl is a British sociologist who, outside of his respectable sociology work, publishes racialist pseudoscience and wrote an Islamophobic paper for OpenPsych and a paper for the white supremacist journal Mankind Quarterly. For this reason, he has been described as living a "double life". After the latter was exposed in December 2018, hundreds of academics signed a letter calling for Cambridge University to reconsider the award of his fellowship and to stop employing him as a postdoctoral researcher.

In April 2019, Noah Carl was stripped of his fellowship at Cambridge University and sacked from his job over his publications in OpenPsych and links to far-right extremists, including Emil Kirkegaard. Carl is the second most prolific contributor to the racist OpenPsych journal. After being sacked, Carl became associated with the right-wing Quillette website and co-authored an article with Bo Winegard arguing for pseudoscientific race realism.

Carl controversially attended the London Conference on Intelligence, and his papers published in the OpenPsych pseudojournals are now extensively quoted with approval by far-right groups and the conspiracy theorist website InfoWars:

In 2018, Carl published a paper defending race and intelligence research, arguing: "it cannot simply be taken for granted that, when in doubt, stifling debate around taboo topics is the ethical thing to do." The paper is now quoted by racists including Emil Kirkegaard, who co-founded OpenPsych. Carl has a profile on the OpenPsych forum and has published five pseudoscience papers through the pseudojournals.

One of Carl's controversial papers on immigrants tries to justify opposition to immigration by linking "immigrants of different nationalities […] with the log of immigrant arrests rates" i.e. criminality. However, it has been criticized for serious methodological flaws, with one academic writing: "this particular research offers no insight on the matter [of whether immigrant groups' criminality is related to opposition to such groups] either way", and "research this bad should never be published in any form".

On 23 March 2021, Carl made a public statement that revealed he had discontinued the lawsuit he had filed against the University of Cambridge over his sacking.

In 2022, Carl described and  as the "best candidates" for the next Conservative Party leader.

Background
Carl was born and grew up in Cambridge, England. He has a BA in Human Sciences, an MSc in Sociology, and a DPhil (Ph.D.) in Sociology from the University of Oxford; he was, until April 2019, a research fellow at St Edmund's College, Cambridge, but was sacked from his job after an investigation found he published racist pseudoscience at Open Psych. He was also formerly affiliated with Oxford University's Centre for Social Investigation at Nuffield College, until September 2018. His work appears on the website, who publish research on Brexit, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC).

In November 2018, Nuffield College were informed about Noah Carl using his university email on his OpenPsych papers; they told him to remove the email. Carl has since changed his email at OpenPsych to another email address.

Politics


Carl has described himself as a "moderate conservative". However, he's Islamophobic and arguably far-right or at least ultra-conservative. On his Facebook he "likes" Nigel Farage, Enoch Powell, Boris Johnson, Roger Scruton and Jacob Rees-Mogg as well as Quillette and Charles Murray; he also "likes" conservative organisations including The American Conservative and Oxford University Conservative Association. Carl has also published an article in The Times supporting Rees-Mogg. Additionally, he's published an article in The Conservative, sponsored by the Alliance of the Conservatives and Reformists in Europe (ACRE). He associates himself with far-right extremists and white nationalists such as Emil Kirkegaard at OpenPsych. Further, he published a controversial article in the white supremacist Mankind Quarterly and posts on the anti-Semitic website The Unz Review. Anyone who points out Carl's links to the far-right, he dismisses as guilt by association despite the fact he belongs to the same pseudoscientific "human-biodiversity" online network and blogsphere as Kirkegaard.

Sack from Cambridge University
ST EDMUND’S – Statement from the Master regarding the outcome of the investigations into complaints about the appointment of Research Fellow – 30 April 2019''':

Noah Carl Controversy: FAQ
On 7 May 2019, he published a blog post on Medium, "Noah Carl Controversy: FAQ" responding to the termination of his research fellowship at Cambridge.

For a rebuttal of Carl's FAQ point by point, see Noah Carl Controversy: FAQ (rebuttal).

OpenPsych
Carl has published several papers in OpenPsych and is a referee/peer for one of their journals, Open Quantitative Sociology & Political Science.

Islamophobic paper
In one OpenPsych paper, Carl argues that the greater number of Muslims in a population significantly increases Islamist terrorism across Western countries: "percentage of Muslims in the population had a relatively strong association with the ﬁrst, third and fourth measures of terrorist threat." Carl ignores the fact that Muslims are not a monolithic group; some Islamic schools of thought and movements are pacifists, e.g. Sufism and the Ahmadiyya. Secondly, the paper itself relies on a right-wing Islamophobic website for data; according to Media Bias Fact Check, TheReligionOfPeace.com is "a website that promotes anti-Muslim propaganda... has a right-wing bias or is otherwise questionable by our methodology." The paper was also reviewed by Kirkegaard, a hardcore Islamophobe who argues to ban Muslim immigration because he thinks its "self-destructive", and John Fuerst, a white nationalist.

Anti-immigration papers
Carl published a paper arguing public beliefs or stereotypes about immigrant groups in UK, and their anti-immigration attitudes, are "reasonably accurate" concerning criminality:

This study has been criticized for methodological flaws. Not surprisingly, it found its way onto many right-wing and far-right websites, used as an argument to justify xenophobic and racist opposition to immigrant groups, including InfoWars, The Daily Caller, Free West Media, James Thompson's blog at The Unz Review and Metapedia.

Another problem with the study is Carl's claim that "Britons reportedly think that an immigrant’s criminal history should be one of the most important characteristics when considering whether he or she should be allowed into the country" citing only one YouGov poll (n = 1,668) as evidence, when there are other polls and surveys that seemingly contradict this.

Additionally, Emil Kirkegaard and Heiner Rindermann reviewed Carl's paper. Both Kirkegaard and Rindermann are known to hold anti-Muslim immigration views. For example, Kirkegaard argues to ban Muslims from entering Europe because of their religious beliefs while also supporting Trump's travel ban on several Muslim-majority countries; Rindermann spoke at a conference, delivering an anti-immigration talk: "Cognitive and Cultural 'Enrichment' of Europe by Immigration".

Carl has reviewed an Islamophobic paper by Kirkegaard that argues crime committed by immigrants in Germany (2012-2015) is correlated "with national IQs (.46) and Islam prevalence in the home country (.35)." So basically, Kirkegaard and Carl, who are both right-wing Islamophobes and, apparently, mutual masturbators, review each other's pseudoscience papers that bash Muslims.

2015
Note: this study was later published in Intelligence.

RationalWiki
Carl isn't a fan of RationalWiki and has written a response to this page. Several of Carl's statements are false and misleading e.g.:

This simply isn't true; for example, RationalWiki doesn't consider Eric Turkheimer, Richard E. Nisbett and many other psychologists who study human population differences in IQ to be pseudoscientists. RationalWiki only considers psychologists who are proponents of hereditarianism to be pseudoscientists (Turkheimer and Nisbett are outspoken critics of hereditarianism). Carl quotes the psychologist James Flynn, who is a critic of hereditarianism, but atypically doesn't consider hereditarianism to be a pseudoscience; Flynn, however, is 84 years old and has a history of making controversial statements and saying "he [is] too old to worry about offending anyone".

Despite describing himself as pro-freedom of speech, Carl tries to censor and block articles critical of him from showing on search-engine results. He filed a misleading defamation report to Google.uk concerning this RationalWiki page. The report was unsuccessful, and Google never de-indexed the page from their search-engine. Carl has bizarrely claimed it is libel to call him "right-wing" and an Islamophobe, despite the fact that he self-identities as a conservative (so is right-wing) and has published writings widely considered Islamophobic.

Support from Neo-Nazis and alt-right
After Carl was sacked from Cambridge University, Neo-Nazis and the alt-right described him losing his job as an inquisition or witch-hunt:

Noah Carl fired from Cambridge for daring to suggest races don't have exactly the same intelligence. The fuck happened to science? This racial-Marxist nonsense will be our doom. Send the shitstain responsible an email:

masters.office@st-edmunds.cam.ac.uk

A comment underneath the Noah Carl petition gets to the heart of the matter:

"This is similar to Galileo's religious trial. The truth is independent of ethics and may or may not be consistent with one's own ethics or the shared ethics of a society."

The far-right Traditional Britain Group have made Facebook posts supporting Noah Carl.

Quillette
I love the claim made by Quilletteers for months that Noah Carl didn't do 'race science'

And, yet he managed to pull an 'In Defence of Race Science' piece out of his a** within 30 seconds of being fired by Cambridge.

Carl is associated with the far-right Quillette website. In June 2019, he authored a pseudoscientific article with Bo Winegard defending the reality of race. Carl and Winegard believe that race is a biological reality; white people have superior IQs predominantly because of genes and that skull shapes and measurements can determine human races by continental ancestry.

Anti-lockdown activist
In 2021, Carl became an anti-lockdown activist writing articles criticising COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns.

He has published articles on the website Lockdown Sceptics set up by Toby Young.

Fake news promoter
Carl is suspected of publishing fake news stories about "cancel culture" and censorship. On 27 April 2022, he claimed (without any evidence) that Amazon deleted a critical book review of Angela Saini's  implying a left-wing bias on the website. It is more likely, however, that the book review was simply deleted by the reviewer himself. The review was written by Jonathan Kane (alias Captain Occam) a banned troll from Wikipedia who wrote controversial comments about race and intelligence. Kane himself has a history of fabricating cancel culture claims on the Wikipediocracy forum. One his unsubstantiated and dubious claims is there was an attempt by "SJWs" to shut down an International Society for Intelligence Research conference in 2018.