Our meetings took place in a curious atmosphere of assumed consensus

From The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki.

The important thing about groupthink is that it works not so much by censoring dissent as by making dissent seem somehow improbable. As the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. put it, “Our meetings took place in a curious atmosphere of assumed consensus.” Even if at first no consensus exists—only the appearance of one—the group’s sense of cohesiveness works to turn the appearance into reality, and in doing so helps dissolve whatever doubts members of the group might have. This process obviously works all the more powerfully in situations where the group’s members already share a common mind-set. Because information that might represent a challenge to the conventional wisdom is either excluded or rationalized as obviously mistaken, people come away from discussions with their beliefs reinforced, convinced more than ever that they’re right. Deliberation in a groupthink setting has the disturbing effect not of opening people’s minds but of closing them. In that sense, Janis’s work suggests that the odds of a homogeneous group of people reaching a good decision are slim at best.

One obvious cost of homogeneity is also that it fosters the palpable pressures toward conformity that groups often bring to bear on their members. This seems similar to the problem of groupthink, but it’s actually distinct. When the pressure to conform is at work, a person changes his opinion not because he actually believes something different but because it’s easier to change his opinion than to challenge the group. The classic and still definitive illustration of the power of conformity is Solomon Asch’s experiment in which he asked groups of people to judge which of three lines was the same size as a line on a white card. Asch assembled groups of seven to nine people, one of them the subject and the rest (unbeknownst to the subject) confederates of the experimenter. He then put the subject at the end of the row of people, and asked each person to give his choice out loud. There were twelve cards in the experiment, and with the first two cards, everyone in the group identified the same lines. Beginning with the third card, though, Asch had his confederates begin to pick lines that were clearly not the same size as the line on the white card. The subject, in other words, sat there as everyone else in the room announced that the truth was something that he could plainly see was not true. Not surprisingly, this occasioned some bewilderment. The unwitting subjects changed the position of their heads to look at the lines from a different angle. They stood up to scrutinize the lines more closely. And they joked nervously about whether they were seeing things.

Most important, a significant number of the subjects simply went along with the group, saying that lines that were clearly shorter or longer than the line on the card were actually the same size. Most subjects said what they really thought most of the time, but 70 percent of the subjects changed their real opinion at least once, and a third of the subjects went along with the group at least half the time. When Asch talked to the subjects afterward, most of them stressed their desire to go along with the crowd. It wasn’t that they really believed the lines were the same size. They were only willing to say they were in order not to stand out.

Asch went on, though, to show something just as important: while people are willing to conform even against their own better judgment, it does not take much to get them to stop. In one variant on his experiment, for instance, Asch planted a confederate who, instead of going along with the group, picked the lines that matched the line on the card, effectively giving the unwitting subject an ally. And that was enough to make a huge difference. Having even one other person in the group who felt as they did made the subjects happy to announce their thoughts, and the rate of conformity plummeted.

Ultimately, diversity contributes not just by adding different perspectives to the group but also by making it easier for individuals to say what they really think. As we’ll see in the next chapter, independence of opinion is both a crucial ingredient in collectively wise decisions and one of the hardest things to keep intact. Because diversity helps preserve that independence, it’s hard to have a collectively wise group without it.

We are in a dangerous period when we have powerful forces, commercial, political establishment, academic and governmental, which are both censoring reality as well gaslighting the population - denying things which known to be true but which are inconvenient to Mandarin Class interests.   

It is ironic that the Mandarin Class is so ecstatic about diversity when they are at the same time so clearly committed to doxxing, deplatforming, censorship and other such methods in order to enforce a preferred pure orthodoxy of critical theory and social justice ideas, regardless of how destructive and at variance with reality those ideas might be.  

I saw such an example of straightforward gaslighting with the New York Times's recent obituary of noted intelligence researcher, Dr. James Flynn.  Flynn was a polymath and iconoclast who pursued his intellectual interests with vigor and respect.  In the field of intelligence research one of the most replicated findings is that there are group IQ differences (with a normal distribution in every case).  Some of these differences are large, some vanishingly small.  But they exist across virtually all dimensions of "group" - by race, by sex, by class, by ethnicity, by religion, by era, by status - you can find differences in group average IQ and those differences are found and replicated by different researchers at different times.  It is, indisputably, real, even if also one of the more controversial phenomena in the biological world owing to being prone to incendiary misinterpretations.  

While Flynn was one the researchers most critical of some forms of intelligence research, he was also one of the most respected by those whom he was criticizing.  His criticism arose not from ideology or emotionalism but from clearly articulated rational, empirical judgements and research.

Wikipedia's account of one particular instance stands in for the many controversies arising from his willingness to consider an open and independent view of the world.  Criticism often came not because he was wrong but because he was willing and able to discuss realities unappreciated in some quarters.

In July 2012, several media outlets reported Flynn as saying that women had, for the first time in a century, surpassed men on IQ tests based on a study he conducted in 2010. However, Flynn announced that the media had seriously distorted his results and went beyond his findings, revealing that he had instead discovered that the differences between men and women on one particular test, the Raven's Progressive Matrices, had become minimal in five modernised nations (whereas before 1982 women had scored significantly lower). Women, he argued, caught up with men in these nations as a result of exposure to modernity by entering the professions and being allowed greater educational access. Therefore, he said, when a total account of the Flynn effect is considered, women's closing the gap had moved them up in IQ slightly faster than men as a result. Flynn had previously documented this same trend among ethnic minorities and other disadvantaged groups. According to Flynn, the sexes are "dead equal on cognitive factors ... in their ability to deal with using logic on the abstract problems of Raven's", but that temperamental differences in the way boys and girls take the tests likely account for the tiny variations in mean scores, rather than any difference in intellectual ability.

In the New York Times's obituary of Flynn this past week, there was a claim that was simply not true and yet presented as fact.  

His research helped discredit the theory that differences in performance on I.Q. tests between Black and white people were a result of genetic differences.

IQ is indisputably heritable.  It is among the strongest heritable traits.  Virtually all biologists accept this.  It is consensus understanding of the variance and diversity in the world and entirely consistent with evolutionary theory.  How heritable and through what channels are much disputed issues.  What is not disputed is that variance is real and that it is, contra the NYT, heritable.  How heritable?  From Wikipedia:

Twin studies of adult individuals have found a heritability of IQ between 57% and 73% with the most recent studies showing heritability for IQ as high as 80%.

Part of the challenge behind group differences is that intelligence is a polygenic trait.  There are thousands of gene contributors to measured IQ outcome so it is no surprise that group differences, however group is defined, exist.  How big are the differences, why they occur, whether they are material, whether they are consequential, how they interact with health and culture and education are all disputed.  But they do exist.

Part of the fear is of course purely and legitimately well founded.  If you are cut from the Classical Liberal Age of Enlightenment cloth, it is irrelevant whether there there are group differences of a greater or lesser degree.  All humans are born with equal rights and should be treated as individuals regardless of which groups they might belong to.  

But if you do not natively share this Classical Liberal belief in equality of natural rights and in individualism, it is easy to conjure nightmare fears of eugenic totalitarianism.  In part because it keeps happening (National socialism being the go to example but obvious in the origins of Planned Parenthood and with innumerable state policies around the world such as is happening in China now with the Uighurs.)

So the NYT claim that there are no genetic differences in IQ between defined groups (whether race or otherwise) is scientifically risible even though they are right to be concerned about how that knowledge is interpreted.