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Episode 89 -- IQ Fetishism with Quinn Slobodian (Patreon)

Published:
2025-08-14 14:02:56
Imported:
2026-09

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[With apologies for the late cross-posting, here's our most recent main feed episode! In our defense, we have something very cool for you tomorrow! An episode initially intended for the main feed that got too candid! It's about a certain pundit where, halfway through recording, we asked our guest whether he wanted it to be Patreon only and really cut lose.]

Historian Quinn Slobodian (Crack-Up Capitalism, Hayek's Bastards, and the forthcoming Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed) walks Moira and Adrian through the fate of IQ on late 20th century and early 21st century right wing thought. How did this concept bring together the nationalist right and self-described libertarians? How did it become a load bearing self-identifier for many a "gifted" kid of the 1990s? And how did it take hold so thoroughly among the Silicon Valley elite?

Comments

Geneva Samuelson

My dad took a 23andMe test and found out his dad wasn’t his real dad and when I took it I found out I was mostly Irish! On the nose, Moira

Nina V~

oooh, sending this to my hot med student crush as an example of why the humanities are important in the face of "hard" sciences (i say as a chemistry major)

David in Brooklyn

The guest in this episode praised a book, The Invention of Prehistory, by Stefanos Geroulanos. I've been listening to it this week; it's amazing and important (and available as an audio book from libro.fm).

Jimjam

There is a real problem in biology around how genetics and genomics- and public health tbh- is taught without including the history of eugenics. I caused a complete meltdown in my old undergraduate department for challenging them around this- and a horrific paper that talked about essentially curing autism that they made us read- and there was a strong sense of like “well WE’RE not racists/ eugenistics so we don’t want to teach the history because it makes us uncomfortable”. There was quite a good recent article in nature about this. I think the other trap the left falls into sometimes is arguing against eugenics because “it doesn’t work”. Adam Rutherford wrote a book about eugenics and science (the name escapes me currently) and whilst interesting, I found it quite defensive and not really willing to properly engage with the intertwinedness of eugenics with genomics etc. as someone who does have to do a lot of genetics in my work- PhD student working with fruit flies- I also probably fall into this trap sometimes as my instinct is to go “oh well the idea of a smart gene or an ie gene is stupid, it’s so much more complex than that”- which whilst true, doesn’t quite address the underlying issue of why are do we believe those genes exist or are desirable or why do want to find them. Again it kinda comes back to a lot of modern science being intertwined with some very dark history that is not taught or viewed as separate or solely in the past and therefore can’t affect how we work now- but of course it does. Also, having been on the recieving end of educational psychology testing for my dysexlia… yeah they straight up tell you a bunch of IQ scores. I was told part of the way dyslexia is diagnosed is a substantial difference between different types of reasoning/ability- ie having a high non verbal reasoning score or IQ but low reading/writing scores. I don’t know to what extend current practice still relies on this as a diagnostic measure but I suspect it still does… Appologies for bit of a rambling comment but cool episode!

Jimjam

Also whilst so much in the UK is well… Not Good currently, I’m very thankful that sex selection of embryos is illegal (and my understanding from some experience with ART is that in the uk the amount of embryonic testing that goes ahead is much lower than in the us)