Noah Carl

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Noah Carl
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“”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.
—Clement Mouhot, Professor of Mathematics, Cambridge University[1]

Noah Carl (born 1990) is a British sociologist who outside of his respectable sociology work publishes racialist pseudoscience and wrote an Islamophobic paper for OpenPsych. For this reason he has been described as living a "double life".[2] 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.[3][4]

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.[5][6][7] Carl is the second most prolific contributor to the racist OpenPsych journal.[8] 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.[9]

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:

Noah Carl, a postdoctoral researcher in the social sciences at Nuffield College, who has spoken twice at the London Conference on Intelligence. Carl has also written several papers for Emil Kirkegaard’s OpenPsych, which include two looking at whether larger Muslim populations make Islamist terrorism more likely, and one suggesting that British stereotypes towards immigrants are “largely accurate”.

One external reviewer responded to the last paper by stating that: “It is never OK to publish research this bad, even in an inconsequential online journal.” Nevertheless, the paper was featured by conservative US website The Daily Caller, under a picture of Nigel Farage’s “Breaking Point” poster. The far-right European Free West Media cited the paper to claim that “criminal elements are represented by certain ethnic groups”, and on the blog of a far-right French presidential candidate under the headline “Study validates prejudices”. It even ended up on InfoWars, one of the most popular news websites in the USA, and can be found circulating on far-right corners of Reddit. The fact that Carl is linked to Oxford University was mentioned frequently in the coverage, providing legitimacy to the political opinions presented.[10]

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."[11] The paper is now quoted by racists including Emil Kirkegaard, who co-founded OpenPsych.[12] Carl has a profile on the OpenPsych forum and has published five pseudoscience papers through the pseudojournals.[13]

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.[14] 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".[15]

Background

Carl was born and grew up in Cambridge, England. He has a BA in Human Sciences, an MSc in Sociology and PhD in Sociology from the University of Oxford; he was formerly until April 2019 a research fellow at St Edmund's College, Cambridge,[16] 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.[17] His work appears on the UK in a Changing EuropeWikipedia 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 adress.[18]

Politics

Students at St Edmund’s College protesting Noah Carl's appointment after discovering his links to the far-right and Islamophobic papers at OpenPsych.

Carl has described himself as a "moderate conservative". However, he's Islamophobic and arguably far-right[19] 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.[20] Carl has also published an article in The Times supporting Rees-Mogg.[21] Additionally he's published an article in The Conservative, sponsored by the Alliance of the Conservatives and Reformists in Europe (ACRE).[22] He associates himself with far-right extremists and white nationalists such as Emil Kirkegaard at OpenPsych, further he controversially published an article in the white supremacist Mankind Quarterly and posts on the anti-Semitic website The Unz Review.[23] 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:

Summary

St Edmund’s College has today announced the outcome of the investigations it launched into the appointment of the Toby Jackman Newton Trust Research Fellow, Dr Noah Carl. The College launched two separate formal investigations following complaints made by its student body, the Combination Room, at the end of November last year. Following Dr Carl’s arrival in College matters emerged about some of his activities and connections linking him to far right extremists and the Combination Room questioned how he had come to be appointed by the College. The College’s formal investigations have overall upheld the majority of the Combination Room complaints. At a special meeting of the College’s Governing Body today, the Governing Body voted to adopt the findings and recommendations contained in the reports. The College has terminated Dr Carl’s appointment to the Research Fellowship.

Statement

St Edmund’s convened two investigations into the complaints. One was led by Sir Patrick Elias, a retired Court of Appeal Judge. This external review concerned the recruitment process, to address concerns expressed in the complaint about the way in which the appointment of the Research Fellow had been handled by the College. The other investigation was led by Life Fellow, Professor Michael Herrtage, who chaired a Special Investigation Panel to review the complaints about certain of Dr Carl’s research activities and connections. The Combination Room complained that these demonstrated poor scholarship, promoted extreme right-wing views and incited racial and religious hatred. The Combination Room said that the appointment of a Fellow holding such views violated the dignity of members of the College.

[...]

The complaints considered by Special Investigation Panel chaired by Professor Herrtage related to the activities and connections of Dr Carl that had subsequently come to the College’s attention after his appointment. The panel substantially upheld these complaints. The panel found that Dr Carl had put a body of work into the public domain that did not comply with established criteria for research ethics and integrity. In any event, it considered that the poor scholarship of this problematic body of Dr Carl’s work, among other things, meant that it fell outside any protection that might otherwise be claimed for academic freedom of speech.

Furthermore, the panel found that, in the course of pursuing this problematic work, Dr Carl had collaborated with a number of individuals who were known to hold extremist views. There was a serious risk that Dr Carl’s appointment could lead, directly or indirectly, to the College being used as a platform to promote views that could incite racial or religious hatred, and bring the College into disrepute. In addition, the panel also noted that the way in which Dr Carl has conducted himself with regard to his publications and the ideas he has expressed have had a detrimental effect on the atmosphere within the College with feelings of hurt, betrayal, anger and disbelief that the College could be associated with such views.[24]

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.[25]

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

Pseudoscience

OpenPsych

See the main article on this topic: OpenPsych pseudojournals

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

Take his [Noah Carl's] attempt to deal with the causes of racist stereotypes – a difficult topic in need of thorough, thoughtful debate. Following an observational study with a sample size of 23 nationalities, he argued that racist stereotypes are “reasonably accurate”. The only person to review this article outside of OpenPsych concluded by stating: “It is never OK to publish research this bad.”

Or take his two attempts to deal with the connection between Muslim immigration and terrorism – an inflammatory topic when dealt with even by the most conscientious of researchers. Among the sources Carl used for his data was TheReligionOfPeace.com, an Islamophobic conspiracy website that was cited four times in the manifesto of Anders Breivik, a Norwegian far-right terrorist. Unsurprisingly, the data uses a broad criteria, which includes domestic violence and robbery.

OpenPsych is a pseudoscience factory-farm, and Noah Carl is its prize hen. He is its second most prolific contributor, a member of the review team and its only Russell Group academic. Half of Carl’s OpenPsych reviews have come from just two people, one of whom, Emil Kirkegaard, has no educational qualifications beyond a Bachelor’s degree in linguistics, according to his own LinkedIn page. Kirkegaard also happens to be the founder of OpenPsych.

Kirkegaard is a maverick when it comes to scientific ethics. In 2016, he and Julius Bjerrekær (OpenPsych’s third most prolific author, behind Kirkegaard and Carl) were responsible for what one social scientist described as “without a doubt one of the most grossly unprofessional, unethical and reprehensible data releases I have ever seen.” The two had leaked the private data of 70,000 OKCupid users, including their personal sexual preferences.

That Noah Carl’s articles never got close to serious scrutiny didn’t stop them from spreading online. One of the studies on Muslims ended up on a far-right website under the headline: “Research: The Causes of Islamic Violence Uncovered!” The study on immigration was summarised by far-right Free West Media as showing that “criminal elements are represented by certain ethnicities.” InfoWars chose the headline: “These immigrants commit more crime in the UK and Britons want their numbers reduced,” while a French far-right politician went for the more succinct “Study Validates Prejudices.” In most cases, Noah Carl’s then position at Oxford University was quoted approvingly.

This is not unusual for OpenPsych papers – in fact, it’s the norm. OpenPsych is not simply a few undergraduates who skipped their methods classes, but a central node in a dense network of race scientists who work to provide legitimacy and propaganda for the far-right.[26]

Many of Carl’s articles have been published on the OpenPsych website set up by Kirkegaard to circumvent the peer review system. Its editors and referees are almost all associated with the far-right and often do not even have qualifications in the fields they are responsible for overseeing. Over half of the articles on the site are authored or co-authored by Kirkegaard.

The co-founder of OpenPsych is Davide Piffer—another pseudo-scientific researcher who once claimed to have psychic powers—who is based at the Ulster Institute for Social Research (UISR), established by Richard Lynn. UISR is backed by Lynn’s Pioneer Fund and publishes the equally irreputable Mankind Quarterly, which regularly prints Kirkegaard’s writings. What we have here is a network of right-wing ideologues, who set up what have rightly been called “pseudo journals” through which they publish and “review” one another’s tracts.[27]

Islamophobic paper

In one OpenPsych paper, Carl argues the larger amount 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."[28] Carl ignores 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[29] 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:

The present study has shown that, in the UK, net opposition to immigrants of different nationalities correlates strongly with the log of immigrant arrests rates and the log of their arrest rates for violent crime. This is particularly noteworthy given 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.[30]

This study has been criticized for methodological flaws.[31] 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.[32][33][34][35][36]

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, it should be noted that 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 Trumps' travel ban on several Muslim-majority countries; Rindermann spoke at a Property and Freedom SocietyWikipedia 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)."[37] So basically, Kirkegaard and Carl, who are both right-wing Islamophobes, review each other's pseudoscience papers that bash Muslims.

London Conference on Intelligence papers

See the main article on this topic: London Conference on Intelligence

2015

Does intelligence explain the over representation of liberals and leftists in American academia?

Speaker: Noah Carl

It is well known that individuals with so-called liberal or leftist views are over represented in American academia. By bringing together data on American academics, the general population and a high-IQ population, the present study investigates how much of this overrepresentation can be explained by intelligence. It finds that intelligence can account for most or all of the disparity between academics and the general population on the issues of abortion, homosexuality and traditional gender roles. By contrast, it finds that intelligence cannot account for any of the disparity between academics and the general population on the issue of income inequality. But for methodological reasons, this finding is tentative. Furthermore, the paper finds that intelligence accounts for less than half of the disparity between academics and the general population on liberal versus conservative ideology, and on Democrat versus Republican identity. Overall, the findings of this study suggest that intelligence explains some but not all of the overrepresentation of liberals and leftists in American academia.

Note: this study was later published in Intelligence.[38]

2016

Openness to Experience Predicts Leftism in the Right Tail of Intelligence

Speaker: Noah Carl

Individuals with liberal or leftist views are overrepresented in academia in both the UK and the US. One possible explanation is that cognitively elite individuals who identify as liberal or leftist tend to score high on the personality trait openness to experience, which predisposes them toward intellectually stimulating careers, such as academia. In two separate studies, one based on British data and one based on American data, this paper provides the first direct test of this hypothesis. It finds that: intelligence cannot explain any of the overrepresentation of leftist views in academia in the UK; openness to experience consistently predicts leftism in the right tail of intelligence in both the UK and US; openness to experience does not consistently predict social liberalism in the right tail of intelligence in either the UK or the US. Overall, intelligence and openness to experience interact to explain part of the overrepresentation of leftist views in academia. Candidate explanations for the remaining overrepresentation are briefly reviewed.

Some Comments on the RationalWiki Page About Me

Carl isn't a fan of RationalWiki and has written a response to this page.[39] Several of Carl's statements are false and misleading e.g.:

RationalWiki seems to follow a rather simple rule, namely that if you are interested in population differences in cognitive ability, then you are––ipso facto––a 'pseudoscientist."

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".[40]

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
—Michael Coombs[41]
“”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."
—Claire Lehmann[42]

The far-right Traditional Britain Group have made Facebook posts supporting Noah Carl.[43]

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.
—Sociologist Eric Lybeck [44]

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.[45][46]

See also

External links

References

  1. ↑ https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/dec/07/cambridge-gives-role-to-academic-accused-of-racist-stereotyping
  2. ↑ https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/education/2018/12/no-objecting-cambridge-s-appointment-eugenicist-not-about-free-speech
  3. ↑ https://www.varsity.co.uk/news/16819
  4. ↑ https://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/cambridge-professor-eugenics-research-investigation-racism-london-conference-intelligence-a8672921.html
  5. ↑ https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/cambridge-academic-noah-carl-sacked-over-racist-study-btdwlf5l6
  6. ↑ https://www.varsity.co.uk/news/17456
  7. ↑ Cambridge college sacks researcher over links with far right. The Guardian.
  8. ↑ Former Nuffield fellow Noah Carl expelled from Cambridge. Ben van der Merwe.
  9. ↑ Superior: The Return of Race Science—A Review. Bo Winegard and Noah Carl.
  10. ↑ It might be a pseudo science, but students take the threat of eugenics seriously. NewStatesman. 19 Feb 2018.
  11. ↑ https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40806-018-0152-x
  12. ↑ https://twitter.com/kirkegaardemil/status/990286569956429824
  13. ↑ https://openpsych.net/person/6
  14. ↑ https://openpsych.net/paper/48
  15. ↑ http://www.healthgeomatics.com/award-winner-in-dumb-research/
  16. ↑ https://www.st-edmunds.cam.ac.uk/people/dr-noah-carl
  17. ↑ https://www.sociology.ox.ac.uk/news/congratulations-to-noah-carl-on-his-successful-completion-of-the-dphil-in-sociology.html
  18. ↑ https://openpsych.net/paper/57 (noah_carl3742@hotmail.com)
  19. ↑ https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/education/2018/12/no-objecting-cambridge-s-appointment-eugenicist-not-about-free-speech
  20. ↑ https://www.facebook.com/noah.carl.92
  21. ↑ https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/does-soubry-or-reesmogg-best-speak-for-the-tories-mk7jgm065
  22. ↑ http://theconservative.online/article/the_left_liberal_skew_of_british_academia.
  23. ↑ http://www.unz.com/comments/all/?commenterfilter=Noah+Carl
  24. ↑ Statement from the Master regarding the outcome of the investigations into complaints about the appointment of Research Fellow – 30 April 2019
  25. ↑ https://blog.usejournal.com/noah-carl-controversy-faq-ad967834b12d
  26. ↑ https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/education/2018/12/no-objecting-cambridge-s-appointment-eugenicist-not-about-free-speech
  27. ↑ https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/12/29/car1-d29.html
  28. ↑ https://openpsych.net/paper/9
  29. ↑ https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/the-religion-of-peace/
  30. ↑ https://openpsych.net/paper/48
  31. ↑ http://www.healthgeomatics.com/award-winner-in-dumb-research/
  32. ↑ https://www.infowars.com/these-immigrants-commit-more-crime-in-the-u-k-and-britons-want-their-numbers-reduced/
  33. ↑ https://dailycaller.com/2016/11/24/these-immigrants-commit-more-crime-in-the-u-k-and-britons-want-their-numbers-reduced/
  34. ↑ http://drjamesthompson.blogspot.com/2016/11/stereotypes-about-immigrant-criminality.html
  35. ↑ en.metapedia.org/wiki/Stereotypes
  36. ↑ http://freewestmedia.com/2016/11/25/migrants-that-britons-do-not-want-happen-to-be-criminal-study-shows/
  37. ↑ https://openpsych.net/paper/50
  38. ↑ Can intelligence explain the overrepresentation of liberals and leftists in American academia?, Intelligence, Vol. 53, pp. 181-193
  39. ↑ https://medium.com/@NoahCarl/some-comments-on-the-rationalwiki-page-about-me-e889d98bb165
  40. ↑ https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10450313
  41. ↑ https://gab.com/Mikemikev
  42. ↑ https://twitter.com/clairlemon/status/1124443153052860416
  43. ↑ https://www.facebook.com/ForATraditionalBritain/posts/666829110421041
  44. ↑ Eric Lybeck[a w] on Twitter, 6 June 2019.
  45. ↑ When Quillette’s Latest Attempt to Legitimise Race Science Met Actual Scientists. Uncommon Ground. Retrieved 18 August 2019.
  46. ↑ Noah Carl and Bo Winegard in Quillette in 2019 folks - whites have superior IQs and can be distinguished by *skull measurements* I wonder why they fixate on heritable 'white' (superior) difference? 3rd pic - a Quillette reader comment. Let's get real about this project please. by Bo Winegard (2:51 AM - 5 Jun 2019) Twitter (archived from June 5, 2019).
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