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I'm not sure what to make of this hostility towards the article. What about it is wrong, exactly?
By normie ideological purity standards sympathy for incels from a man is misogynistic. Pro-HBD guys like Razib Khan and Stephen Hsu are racist. By objective measure standards, wanting smart and beautiful people to have more children is eugenic.
Reaching verboten conclusions through 'rational means' on topics long decided by the 'ruling class' doesn't protect you from the consequences. Even if you always imagined yourself an enlightened rationalist far above the boorish outcasts that, unlike you, must have reached these very same racist conclusions through some dark age anti-rationalist sorcery.
Though I doubt this will lead anywhere, as this sort of reporting is usually just about petty politics and interpersonal relations between the uncool kids from school, I wouldn't mind it actually doing some damage. Why should this group of smarts be exempt from the contempt of mainstream society? They have certainly proven themselves to being no better morally.
It seems like some humbling is in order. After all, the very same 'rationalist sphere' in question has proven time and time again that they stand firmly behind the principles of 'racism bad', 'misogyny bad' and all the rest. By what mechanism do they propose to defend themselves after their better part falls firmly on the wrong side of these things? Like, does it need spelling out to these big brained luminaries of ours? You can't call an entire race of people stupid just because you understand statistics and studied psychology. It doesn't matter how nuanced and detailed your blogpost is. Some wordcel is just going to copy paste your conclusion and now you're no better than the evil racists you spent 15 paragraphs trying to distance yourself from. And you know what? The wordcel is right! You did reach the same conclusion, after all.
This is... true in a black-pilled way, but the way you've stated it sounds like you're defending the ruling class's morals as correct. The whole point is that the rationalists are starting from reasonable moral principles and following logical reasoning using the available evidence and reaching different conclusions than the ruling class. The ruling class's morals either don't incorporate the available evidence (i.e. are unscientific), don't follow from logical reasoning (i.e. are inconsistent), or start from different principles. All of these apply to various extents. I think the most parsimonious explanation is that the ruling class uses morals as tools, and chooses the set of morals that get them what they want. It's reasonable to criticize the ruling class on these grounds, and to think it unjust that people are punished for advocating for a less selfish set of morals.
So what? They're still the ruling class despite this, which means they get to make the rules, not the rationalists. Having "reasonable moral principles and following logical reasoning using the available evidence" on your side matters little compared to having power on your side.
Yes, and so what? The lords are the lords — and the peasants are the peasants — all the same.
Sure, but don't expect to escape the consequences of criticizing those who rule you, valid criticism or not. In the real world, the kid pointing out the emperor is naked doesn't get the crowd all agreeing with him, he gets executed (probably along with his parents) for lèse-majesté and treason, and everyone else doubles down on praising the beauty and refinement of His Majesty's raiment.
You can think it unjust all you want, but it's what the powerful think is "just" that matters.
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Does the rationalist sphere and ideologically pure normies share the same definition of racism and misogyny though?
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Did either Khan or Hsu make a statement to that effect? Note that this is different from stating that there is a racial IQ difference but hedging for individual differences.
I would argue that the process through which conclusions are reached generally matters.
If policeman A looks at a suspect, sees that he is white, well-dressed and looks innocent, and policeman B talks to the suspect and verifies that his alibi checks out, they may both conclude that their suspect is innocent, but the path which they took would matter to me.
I would consider writing a long, carefully reasoned article to be equivalent to our rule "Proactively provide evidence in proportion to how partisan and inflammatory your claim might be."
If Darwin had just drunkenly jelled "Have you seen that hairy little man? I bet his ancestors were monkeys!" instead carefully curating his evidence for years before publishing The Origin of Species, the world would rightfully have judged him differently.
If we censure utterances like "all cunts are stupid", does this mean we should also proactively bar any research into any effect of sex hormones on intelligence? Should we try ethicists discussing the trolley problem for incitement to homicide?
There is a brand of utilitarianism called two-level utilitarianism. The idea is that you mostly follow well established heuristic rules for moral decisions -- perhaps even in system one. If a kid runs in front of your car, you don't calculate the odds of them being the next Hitler given the neighborhood you are in, you just hit the brakes. But under certain circumstances (like when speaking to a murderer asking you if you have seen his prospective victims) the usually good heuristic rules (like "don't lie") might cede to a more situational consequentialist analysis.
Likewise, I would propose a two-level handling system of utterances of opinions adjacent to verboten topics. Most utterances are low effort shitposts / tweets which can safely be dismissed out of hand. If someone posts "teh gayz should kill themselfs!!!1" it is valid to conclude that the poster is not contributing a method to fight demographic changes but just a bigot asshole.
Of course, every ugly sentiment can be padded with motivated reasoning and inflated into a scholarly-sounding article "voluntary suicide of non-reproducing individuals as a collective means of affect population dynamics" or whatever. There is probably someone out on the internet arguing lengthy that Nazi race "science" was 100% correct.
This is a pill I am willing to swallow as the alternative is to declare whole areas of research as verboten. Some Nazi rambling for tens of pages on skull forms or whatever will likely be memetically much less successful than someone who posts racist meme images. And in the odd case where the pre-decided societal consensus is actually factually false (it has happened once or twice in history!) we do not shoot the messenger.
In the words of Scott himself:
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Here is a Twitter thread listing some of the factual inaccuracies. https://x.com/ohabryka/status/1802563541633024280
Hsu claims no knowledge of cognitive differences between races caused by genetics. Has he said something different elsewhere? https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2012/10/my-controversial-views.html
Now here is actually something I can disagree with Oliver about: the choice of medium.
I am not even asking that people use fully open standards implemented by free software personally blessed by Richard Stallman running on open-design hardware they personally control, but twitter does not even allow the reading of a thread without being logged in (so that people don't train their LLMs with all that sweet high quality content without cutting Musk in). Nitter was the useful way to read it, but that is gone. x.com feels like it eats as much RAM as an 1000 reply OT on ACX before substack got their shit together (kinda) for showing me a measly four lines text and a single reply.
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To use Hsu's own words in a different context:
Sorry, Hsu, but claiming a neutral position on certain topics doesn't cut it.
Maybe as I grow older I also grow more stupid but I feel like a lot of people really needed that article by Eric Turkheimer on why race science is objectionable. Claiming that your interest is purely scientific or whatever isn't good enough. Because the wrong discoveries can do a lot of damage. You need to meet the moral/ideological/philosophical underpinnings of the progressive worldview head on. Otherwise you have no relevant objection to them crushing you when you go too far astray.
I don't understand what your point is and want to clarify that the video part of your quote is made up and not the kinds of questions he is referring to.
Are you accusing Hsu of having an interest in HBD? If so, based on what?
I had hoped that it was obvious to everyone that the part in bold was added by me. Though that may be an error as I just assumed people would read the link given to Hsu's blog. People are obviously more quick to comment than that, sadly.
It's exactly the kind of question he is referring to. A different example of his, given in an interview were he was asked about his views and the characterization as being racist he says, paraphrased:
The point I'm making is that being open to everything obviously isn't allowed. You can't be agnostic on sacred matters and Hsu knows this. In my view he's just trying to weasel his way out since he's too proud to outright lie like Turkheimer or that he knows how ridiculous die hard environmentalism is.
Just casually scrolling through his blog. He did a fun interview with Razib Khan where they go over some of their shared interests together, population genetics included... I mean, yeah the guy is not a culture warrior and I think he very adamantly doesn't want to become one. But depending on your definition of HBD the guy is very interested in differences between humans. Just not in a way that's incendiary to his career.
What reason is there to think he is unsure that the Holocaust happened?
Population genetics is not HBD. That is not what is getting him called racist.
You're not getting the point, which is that there are certain things you are not allowed to be uncertain about. Claiming that you're a physicist and that you hold to some uncertainty principles isn't an excuse for the true sacred cows. To exemplify this I took a quote from Hsu and applied it to the holocaust.
"Population genetics is a subfield of genetics that deals with genetic differences within and among populations"
As I already said, and wish you would have read: "I mean, yeah the guy is not a culture warrior and I think he very adamantly doesn't want to become one. But depending on your definition of HBD the guy is very interested in differences between humans. Just not in a way that's incendiary to his career."
You're playing definition games here. Hsu himself says that there are people calling him racist. He does research into intelligence and has no problem with things like IQ. He has interest in population genetics and doesn't rule out a hereditarian perspective. Long story short, he's on a lot of thin ice. He's basically everything an HBD person would be if they were trying to hold down a job at a university. Now, is he? I don't know or care. It's irrelevant to the fact that he is doing too many suspect things. Which is why he is a good target for our fine folks in urbanite journalism.
As an aside: I'd appreciate if you stated your intentions here. I don't care to write every point twice. I also don't care to meet your personal definition for words after I explicitly state that there's an obvious issue with definitions of words going on.
Who uses that definition of HBD? HBD refers to socially relevant differences. Population genetics is based on possibly inconsequential differences that are nearly universally accepted. HBD doesn't even refer to differences in skin colour which are totally uncontroversial. Even if you want to define HBD this way, how is that relevant? No one is calling him racist because he's interested in population genetics.
I get your point. I'm just criticizing other things you've said.
I can tell you right now that no one uses your definition of HBD. HBD absolutely refers to differences in skin color. In fact, it refers to any differences between populations. HBD doesn't refer to just the controversial parts of human bio diversity.
As I went over in my earlier comment, he is catching flak because he's flying too close to too many different subjects that can, in the wrong light, be highly suspect. Population genetics is one of those. To study these fields in safety you need to deny certain things about them, like Turkheimer and co. Hsu doesn't do that so that gets him into a bad light.
I'm still wondering why.
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The guy you are arguing with is a literal Nazi who wants to convince moderate 'race realists' that they are really Nazis too. It's why he plays these weird definitional games that mirror those of progressive activists.
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This article sucks. As a congenital leftist who doesn't like racism per se but has been convinced as to the validity of HBD, I was expecting something worth reading rather than "These beliefs are offensive because... you know, they just are, there's no point examining this further." This article isn't an attempt at explaining why race science is objectionable, it just assumes that it is and then proceeds from there. Yes, I know that answering these questions might make some people feel bad. That's not actually a reason to continually lie about it and engage in efforts at restorative justice that are doomed to fail because they're based on motivated thinking rather than a look at the evidence. If my car is refusing to start, should I simply ignore the fuel gauge showing empty because I don't want to believe that I'm out of gas and spend tons of money taking my car to mechanics to figure out the problem?
There's actually a lot of evidence that could settle this! The problem isn't that no scientific evidence proving Tabula Rasa is accepted, but that every single time you actually do the experiment you end up with evidence proving the opposite or a paper that doesn't replicate. What even is the point of raising this as a hypothetical when in other places in the article he flat out admits that his own side should ignore evidence in favour of ethical concerns? He's also destroyed his own ability to prevent that evidence - why exactly should I trust an article written by someone who says that on this particular topic it is a moral imperative to lie if the facts don't match up to his ideology?
No, it isn't fucking safe to say that! Watson would absolutely know more about genetics and evolution than Eric Turkheimer, or me, or most of the people on the motte. Hell, I will flat out say that I know more about genetics than Turkheimer despite his years of study, because in this article he doesn't even seem to know how genes work (see his section on how the legacy of slavery is why African americans do worse on IQ tests). Of course, I think there's a decent chance that he is aware and is simply lying about it - after all, the position he takes is that this is a matter of morality rather than evidence, so it doesn't matter what the facts say.
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While I think there is an argument to be made with regard to the harmful effects of promulgating HBD/race science among the general public, I don't think the Turkheimer article makes a particularly good case for it. To extract the relevant points:
The issue is that the intuitions and ethical principles he describes are not universal. One is perfectly capable of believing that the moral qualities and cultural accomplishments of human beings are tied to genes, and such a belief wouldn't prevent such a person from celebrating such accomplishments any more than it prevents me from appreciating the beauty of a flower simply because said beauty was genetically determined.
But I suppose I am simply restating your point about meeting the philosophical underpinnings of your opponent's worldview head on, with which I agree.
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I think a fair summary of this article is “it’s offensive”, which is not an argument I find compelling. Am I missing something here?
I'm not posting it to convince people of Turkheimers viewpoint, I'm posting it to demonstrate at what level the debate is being had. It doesn't matter what the science says. Race science is ugly and offensive. This is a fact and anyone who disagrees can be invited to explain the hereditarian viewpoint to a kind and caring black person without feeling gross.
Or to put it another way: We object to it on the same grounds we object to excavations of alleged mass graves from Nazi death camps: The holocaust happened, there's no reason to desecrate graves of its victims. The end!
If you want to argue in favor of science and knowledge... Why here, why now? What drives ones interest towards race or the holocaust? There is no answer here. You're just a racist nazi.
If there's a genuine position that can meet progressive ontology head on I'm willing to hear it. So far the only competitors I've seen are racists or people who either willfully or ignorantly ignore the glaring issues that lie between blacks and whites.
I don't know how many more times this can be repeated, I'm sure everyone with your position who posts here has had this explained but then you go on to ask these questions again so I will explain to you again. The reason it matters to many of us is because White people in America and the world broadly are being accused of a grievous crime of holding entire races of people down. Of perpetrating massive and distributed systems of racial discrimination. The proof is the outcomes from claimed to be meritocratic processes being unequal along racial lines. Everywhere that explicit racism can be found has been rooted out by ever more hysterical people who have gotten to the point of calling the idea of meritocracy itself to be racist.
This calls out for a search for an alternate explanation. And there are some pretty obvious places to check.
If not HBD and our attempts at rooting out explicit discrimination what's the progressive's actual endgame? Permanent and continuous transfers along racial lines with the agreed understanding that white people are just incapable of not discriminating against black people? You think that's a stable solution?
I don't disagree, but I'd argue that your position is not scientific/knowledge seeking. You want to protect white people. According to the progressive oppression stack white people rest pretty low. That's where your problem with the progressives begins.
If you're a supremacist you want to protect white people no matter what. If you're not, why protect white people when there are so many others in need? Surely whitey can wait. And if you want to challenge that aspect of progressive ontology you will be so far outside the Overton Window that they can easily just call you a racist nazi and move on. And I don't think they would be all that wrong in doing so, technically speaking. I mean, we did storm the beaches of Normandy for a reason, right? We depict those guys as heroic for a reason, right?
What a trick this is! Ask why someone might be motivated to seek knowledge "why here, why now?" to imply racial hatred as motivation and then when some other motivation is reached for you say "See!? I knew no one could just value scientific knowledge!". From how you've constrained the options no path can lead to a genuine motivation.
Being somewhat username blind it's not clear to me if you're merely trying to demonstrate how tightly hermetically sealed the progressive outlook is or if you find yourself caught in it. But in the interest of trying to unravel this nut either way. I will say I care about avoiding the pitfalls of impugning a people with the blood libel of unfalsifiable racism from the same parable the jews were famously put through and in a way that ought resonate deep in the western psyche. It is enough for me that it is cruel, unfair and a violation of our national aspiration to hold whites culpable for a crime they have not committed. But if I must appeal to the progressive stack, that loathsome concept, then I will say that it did not serve the nazis well to place the blame for all their troubles in the jews, nor did it serve Lysenko well to place the soviets on the other side of genuine scientific inquiry. History is replete with people and peoples who thought they could, this time, let resentment and catharsis take priority over truth and the hatred will not serve you. There is nothing to gain from this willful ignorance and much to lose.
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Surely "permanent" is an exaggeration.
I don't even really think that's the end of the problem most unstable. The gaps will continue to exist among people with the same background so we're really going to go ahead with the belief that in 100 years when progressive thought is no longer fought at all that we're just going to let the obviously discriminatory leaders continue to do their harm?
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Is there bulletproof glass between us?
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Ah, I see. In that case I agree that it demonstrates the discussion well.
I’m a bit confused by your last paragraph though. The obvious answer would be to judge individuals on their merit, no? That’s explicitly opposed to progressive race-based judgement, aligns well with classical liberalism and HBD views, and already has a wide acceptance society-wide.
It works up until you need to answer why their literacy rates are so low and why there are practically none of them in higher education.
You can't tell the black people the truth because that's ugly and no one has the stomach for it, so where do you go? The exact same way our modern western society has gone: Towards progressivism. Because progressive ontology actually has a beautiful answer: ordained equality and racism.
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Nah. Left wing hit-job-writing "journalists" aren't normies. If your standard is "what will ordinary people think" as opposed to "what will the Guardian think", the ideological purity standards are not that high. I know they claim to speak for all decent people, but they really don't.
Yeah, journalists aren't normies. No one said they were. That doesn't change the fact they set the standard for normies. Racism bad. Misogyny bad. Everyone except your racist uncle agrees.
You can't go and talk about race and IQ in public and come to any sort of hereditarian conclusion and not be eligible as a racist. Those are the rules.
You absolutely can though. To the normie mind, "racist" equals "doesn't like (group)". If you talk in a way that doesn't actually imply any dislike of a group, they won't grok you as racist, and won't pay any mind to people who accuse you of racism.
If you talk in a way that implies blacks are innately dumber than some other group you are not getting anywhere. Race and IQ stuff are beyond the pale if you are a hereditarian.
In what universe? I mean maybe in Berkeley, but the normies around me say shit that implies a black intelligence disadvantage all the time, they just don’t use the words ‘blacks are on average one standard deviation lower in IQ than whites’.
We must hang around different types of people.
I would say this is probably true, but normies don’t say things where you can see them like ‘they’re kind of clueless’ when someone’s getting irritated with a black? No complaining about ‘football names’ and ‘shaniqua’ and ‘what did they expect when they decided the government should be daddy’ or snarking about Juneteenth being so close to Father’s Day so everyone could have something to celebrate? No ‘well they’re racist too’? No discussion of how ‘Katrina kids’ dragged down the public schools and they should be more like the Vietnamese or Mexicans?
I'd agree to an extent, but those are seen as being private conversations. You don't go out in public outside the friendgroup and talk like that. In fact I'd argue most people who engage in such talk believe that it is not allowed. Cue memes of the group chat getting leaked and such.
It's not a matter of having an opinion of being allowed to say X or Y, there's just a recognition that this sort of thing is not allowed in the public eye.
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The normies think what the journalists tell them to think.
Isnt the whole alleged "crisis of consensus", "political polarization", and "rampant anti-intellectualism" that typifies modern America indicative of the opposite?
There may have been a time many years ago where, if Walter Cronkite said it, people would assume it was true. But that time is long gone.
Epstien didn't kill himself.
The pandemic proved otherwise.
That just marks you as a non-normie. The normies have forgotten who Epstein was, and if you remind them, of course he killed himself, what are you, some sort of paranoid?
I think that you are woefully out of touch with what "normal people" believe.
If any thing media viewership and trust were already trending downward before 2020 and the pandemic coupled with the George Floyd "summer of love" killed what was left.
We live in a world where (if a quick Bing.com search is to be believed) Joe Rogan's podcast averages more listeners per week than all of CNN.
The George Floyd "summer of love" had middle-aged white people setting up Black Lives Matter rallies in suburban towns. While wearing masks, as they were told by CNN et al. The pandemic and Floyd should have caused a huge drop in media trust; what it did is demonstrated that the power of the media was far greater than most thought.
Again, I think that you are woefully out of touch with what "normal people" believe.
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In person, I've heard a lot of opinions from regular people with normal politics that you would typically only hear from the far-right online. What is considered allowable opinion online, much less the opinions that are typical of young journalists, are not at all typical of most people in the real world.
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They really don't. The journalists love to imagine that's the case, but it isn't.
If normies thought what the journalists told them to think, the Voice referendum would have passed with 80-90% of the vote.
Journalists have a huge influence on what people think, even if they don't follow journalists every single time. Elections are not won by every single voter doing what the journalist says; tilting the balance is enough to win the election.
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No they don't. Normies think whatever their friends do. That is, frequently, highly skeptical of the media.
I think "frequently" is understating the situation: "skeptical of the media" is now a supermajority, at an all time high, with 29% of last fall's Gallup poll reporting "not very much" trust in the mass media and 39% reporting "none at all".
Generalized distrust of media is insufficient if it does not result in skepticism of a given story. It observably did not do so for most people for COVID and BLM, which are the last two serious stress-tests of the thesis. It's really not so different from people having a super-low opinion of congress, yet reliably voting for their incumbent congressperson.
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Using truly the broadest possible interpretation of a dictionary definition, sure. But we all damned well know that isn't what is being alleged when someone is called a eugenicist.
Um, yes, in this case it very much is - Anomaly used the word himself in the paper Guardian is doing the Body Snatchers scream at, to refer (correctly) to what he was advocating.
More generally, "eugenics" is and has always been a very broad term; the eugenicists of the 19th and 20th centuries would absolutely consider these kinds of schemes eugenic. I agree that there's a lot of rhetorical trickery enabled by the term's breadth, but that breadth is authentic.
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If you are out in public airing your view that it's an inherently good thing that smart and beautiful people are having more children then you are a eugenicist. The implications of what you have to think and believe to say such a thing are obvious.
Most people would not think this or perceive the darkly hinted implications. This maximally benign idly wishing beautiful smart would have kids is not the common use understanding of eugenics and the implications are more in your imagination than other people's.
There's a small fringe of progressives actively looking for wrongthink. They denounce all sorts of mainstream views as fascism, racist dogwhistling, etc. This appears to be their hobby. Getting enraged at "bad" people feels good to them. They are a very small portion of the population. I suppose these people would sniff out the wrongthink in this and declare it to be just like the Nazis and [bad thing]-adjacent and wave around a non-common-use understanding of 'eugenics' as one of many disingenuous rhetorical smears.
Whether most people are dumb enough to not understand something or not is irrelevant. The journalist is obviously smart enough to. Doing the maximally benign wrongthink is still wrongthink. The Stasi doesn't owe you any favors to interpret you flirtations with eugenics as anything other than an ultimately hostile act.
Whether they are actively looking for wrongthink or not is irrelevant. You can't do positive flirtations about verboten subjects. Even if you are an old fuddy duddy and think your tweets are benign.
I don't strictly disagree with you. I just don't understand why you are arguing this. Neither one of us makes the rules.
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Almost everyone thinks this though. It's just one of those things that people generally agree on but people get uncomfortable if you're too explicit about it.
There are plenty of people who think that beautiful, intelligent people having fewer kids is evidence that they’re ‘responsible’.
And they probably think it's even more responsible for stupid ugly people to have fewer kids.
Well yes, lots of those people will go on to say inmates shouldn’t be released without being sterilized first.
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Let's be precise.
The argument that high-IQ women should either get married and start having children as a first step after graduating from college, or avoid going to college altogether and focus on becoming mothers, i.e. that society should incentivize them to do so, I think it's fair to say, counts as borderline dissident among middle-class college-educated normies today. It doesn't count as 100% badthink maybe, but it's close. Ultimately this is the essence of positive eugenics.
Negative eugenics, i.e. the argument that the fertility rate of low-IQ people should be curbed in various ways, on the other hand, is definitely outside the Overton window. Yes, you can argue that liberal policies pertaining to abortion and birth control actually have this effect in the real world, but I doubt they actually reduce the relative fertility rate of low-IQ people as compared to that of high-IQ ones, so there's that.
Also, it's fair to say that, to the extent eugenics is dismissed as deplorable junk science by the Guardian-reading demographic, it is done so because it's interpreted as an outgrowth of White supremacism.
What I don't think is borderline dissident is the idea that smart beautiful women should have at least two kids starting in their mid to late 20s after getting their careers established and finding the right husband or that stupid ugly people should have at most two kids and also wait until they're financially and romantically stable. That is also a positive eugenics position albeit one less extreme and rarely stated explicitly. But I would guess most people agree with it.
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White middle class people having one kid is morally irresponsible in the age of climate change and economic precarity, brown people having kids in a warzone is proof that we need to open our borders and wallets to alleviate human suffering. Liberals get squeamish at any suggestion that abortion be extended specifically to populations with current, let alone future, suboptimal life outcomes. Any suggestion that abortions be subsidized for poor (brown) people or for mentally ill is met with cries of racism, and that instead their choice to carry a crack baby to term should be supported now and forever with more social welfare.
Ultimately it is pretty easy to drill down the opposition to (current thing) purely on the grounds of 'the people I hate love it'. To be fair, the right is super guilty of this too. White supremacists (larpers or not) get tied in knots when informed that abortion rights means you get less black or brown criminals ala Piketty, and there are exceedingly few white babies being aborted these days. White girls use contraceptives and aren't afraid to request condoms, black girls use their (shitty) math skills.
It's perfectly consistent to think that people should have fewer children but that they should be looked after once they're born.
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Actual population control efforts in the real world are mostly targeted at third worlders.
There was plenty of drunken campfire agonizing about the morality of neocolonial imposition of western values on local populations back in the mid 2000s already, and the rhetoric has gotten worse since. Between theological opposition to population control and liberal white guilt, population control is very much not in vogue any more. My own thoughts are that externally encouraged population control schemes have never succeeded but that goes too deep into anecdata.
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My only nitpick is that you seem to be assuming that there's an overlap between racists and social conservatives. I doubt that is, or even was the case.
Yes there is. Old not-terribly online people.
I assume you mean Boomers? Because I doubt there was ever significant racism present among them.
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And yet in 2006 Idiocracy presented the ‘stupid people having too many children is destroying this country’ school of liberalism pretty openly. It’s clear that the taboo isn’t really that, it’s more as you say in the last paragraph.
Indeed, but that was a different era, before the Great Awokening. It's also true that feminist websites posted recommendations to women for avoiding getting raped back then. It's no coincidence that liberal critiques of the movie have also appeared.
How many people are actually on board with the Great Awokening though? I don't think it's that popular.
By 'normie ideological purity standards' it's the law of the land. Whether it's popular or not doesn't matter.
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This is playing definitional games. "Believes there are measurable differences between races" is a fairly new definition. It will almost always, and probably on purpose, be conflated with "believes blacks should be treated detrimentally purely on account of being black."
Even the most ardent of public racists don't even pretend to entertain the notion that people should be treated badly because they are of this or that race.
It's not.
The only game being played here is pretending that there is some relevant distinction to be made between the views of 'rationalist HBDers' and George Lincoln Rockwell on racial differences other than confidence and honesty.
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They are not only playing those games. They keep winning them and getting away with it.
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I agree strongly. There is a set of views which society generally considers to be cancellable (in the sense that the currently ruling elite does, as does a supermajority of people who are smart enough to have well-formed views on the issue). Steve Hsu, Razib Khan, Robin Hanson and even Scott Siskind all in fact hold some of these views. So "cancel the rationalists" is, by the rules the Grauniad and NYT are playing by, good journalism. The partisan-flipped version of "don't cancel the rationalists" is "It is okay for communists to act in Hollywood", not "The actors on Joe McCarthy's list are not in fact communists".
I am a pro-free-speech liberal, so both "racists should not be cancelled" and "it is okay for communists to act in Hollywood" are bullets I am willing to swallow. But most people aren't.
Scott is no longer trying to conceal his real name, so you can't doxx him by publishing it any more. If doxxing means anything, it means either
Okay, I may have stretched the word doxxed a bit, but looking on the about page of ACX, it seems to me that Scott Alexander does not prefer for his writing activities to be linked to his last name. Furthermore, that is the name under which he is known, adding his last name will not provide important context for the readers.
Insisting on stating his last name seems at least impolite. Given his history with journalists, I would roughly compare it to deliberately deadnaming a trans person.
If the Guardian had a policy to consistently write using the full civil names of people, as in "after finishing my latest hit piece, I danced to Mrs. Ciccone's music, watched the meeting of Mr. Bergoglio and Mr. Thondup on TV and finally fell asleep reading the biography of my idol Mr. Dzhugashvili" (or something), then a case could be made that they might also want to refer to Our Rightful Caliph by his civil name. But most of the time, they are fine referring to people by their common handle.
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Was this a deliberate echo of Sir Thomas More in A Man For All Seasons?
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I too would love it if rationalists were forced to bite the bullet and say something like "yes, racism (in some senses) is rational". However, I'd say that most of them are simply deliberately silent on these issues because they know that dissenting would wipe out their credibility and force them to become a full-time advocate on an issue that they don't particularly care about. For example, James Damore.
I too find it incredibly sad when the ones that do write about sensitive topics toe the line dishonestly, e.g. like Nick Bostrom did on race in his apology, and Eliezer and Scott Siskind on trans issues. I commend Zack M. Davis for calling them out on this and being brutally honest, but he has a horse in this race.
Also, what did Razib Khan and Stephen Hsu do wrong? They put their jobs on the line to talk about the truth. They didn't go so far as to explicitly say that racism (in some senses) is fine, but they pull their punches less than anyone who hasn't been banned entirely.
Why do you believe that Scott is dishonestly toeing the line on trans issues rather than genuinely believing whatever he wrote?
Zack Davis's posts on LW lay out the case for that in exhaustive detail, though he covers Yudkowsky more than Scott.
The gist of it is that Zack claims that identifying the word "male" with having the Y chromosome is carving reality at its joints, while saying that whoever decides they identify as male should be called male is a strictly worse way of describing reality.
The post implies that EY and Scott kinda agree with the biological definition being more robust in principle, but endorse the trans-favoring position out of political considerations.
I am mostly on board with Scott and EY here, even though I agree with Zack that in theory the chromosome-based definition is more robust. Being willing to die on definitional hills seems stupid. Once, "Sir" referred exclusively to English noblemen. From that, I could make the argument that the service industry should not refer to male (whatever's definition) customers as Sir unless they are indeed OBE or whatever.
But this is would be extremely stupid. Language evolves. Definitional battles are not worth it. What the Sequences would recommend doing would just be to taboo the words "male" and "female" to dissolve the conflict. Instead, we just swim with the tide.
Contrary to common belief, most interactions of humans in our society are not resulting in common offspring. The utility of tagging humans by whom they could breed with is basically zero (and in any case we would also want to encode fertility information if we were serious about that). Social genders are simply a weird leftover remnant, just like "Sir". We can adapt such words whatever we want them to mean.
Unlike blankly denying the possibility of any HBD because it would be to ugly to be true, calling a trans-man a man has no significant real life or epistemic costs. It would be different if we insisted that the cis-/trans-prefix and talking about sex chromosomes is verboten, and society would advise a trans-man, and cis-woman couple to just try to following a cycle calendar or specific sex positions if they have trouble conceiving a child.
The woke definition has big upsides for trans people for little costs, so I would prefer it even if I was language czar and could decide what "male" means. The ratsphere pushing back against that would be as ludicrous as if the New Atheists had decided that their No 1 priority was getting rid of "OMG" in chats.
Trans people want to be called by their assumed sex because they're well aware that the word for that sex already has a preexisting meaning, and they want to be treated as though that preexisting meaning applies to themselves. Claiming that words can mean anything you want is disingenuous because if the words really did mean anything you wanted, trans people would no longer want to use them. And Zack already covered all of this.
The "sir" analogy doesn't work because people who want to be called "sir" don't do so because they want to be treated like English noblemen. The word did once refer to English noblemen, but people today are not using the word because they want to get in on the English nobleman business.
Zack's extensive posts include direct references to the Sequences recommending otherwise.
You are conflating "not pushing back" with "actively promoting".
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It sounds like you think this definitional battle is, in fact, worth it?
I'm encouraged that you acknowledged that there are costs - can you elaborate? I think Zac would claim that one serious downstream cost is autogynophiles being encouraged to castrate themselves. To me that is the main problem - confused and unhappy people being encouraged to mess up their bodies unrecoverably. I think that frank acknowledgement of the senses in which, due to the limitations of medical technology, trans people aren't actually their desired gender, would lessen this problem. So I do think that this is a definitional battle worth fighting (as do pro-trans advocates).
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The cis-/trans- prefix is already on the spectrum of verboten. Behold, the parts of woke subculture that insist on spelling transwoman as two words. This is to emphasize the woman-ness of transwomen and de-emphasizes the transness as a mere modifier, like brunette.
Similarly, if you hang around progressives and always refer to cis women as just "women" and always refer to trans women as "trans women" I am pretty sure you'd get a talking to, eventually. I hope nobody is silly enough to say, "Well that's just a couple crazy people on reddit." I know because my real-life woke friends don't actually mention that someone is trans unless it's to mention how fearful they are for their safety somewhere as a victim.
That you suggest to taboo the word "male" (not "man!") shows just how far down the slippery slope these language games have moved us this past decade. At first, progressives merely claimed the word "man," and left "male" around for us to talk about chromosomes. Sure enough in the current year, progressives act like man and male are synonyms again!
I predict that the ever-more-cumbersome phrases we retreat to, like "biological sex," will also get phased out. Make no mistake, the purpose of putting trans and cis into the same mental bucket is to push normative behaviors onto people. Someone saying "no, no I only date people with a biological sex of female, you see..." is told, "that's not a sexual orientation, that's just bigotry."
What the sequences actually say about defining a word any way you like is that it is a common misconception
I am kind of with Scott on this one. Love is the one area where one can discriminate. People are attracted to what they are attracted, which includes presenting gender, what kind of interface the other person has between their legs, skin color, body type, hair color, relative height, dialects, high nobility, potential for offspring, appearance, socioeconomic status, criminal record and anything else under the sun.
And for what it is worth, I don't think that this "either date transgender or be called a bigot" will fly even in the LGBTQWhatever community. If some hairy dude goes into a lesbian bar, declares that he identifies as a woman and challenges some lesbian to take him home or be a bigot, then the queers will not be on the side of the dude.
Have you seen what's happened to lesbians lately? They have absolutely been attacked for "don't ask women to suck your dick at a lesbian bar" policies! The thing you're suggesting would never happen already happened 5 or 6 years ago, and with the full support of the lgbtqxyz++ media!
Fair point. I can see why such policies might be instituted to solve the problem of basically-cishet-guys hitting on lesbians, as well as how this would affect the odd genuine trans-lesbian.
There is still a difference between deciding "no dicks allowed" for a bar than deciding that for one's own sexual partners. Ideally one would have a different lesbian bars with different admittance policies (no dicks, must present female, must self-identify female) and let the market do its work. This would likely result in all the guys deciding to claim female identity as a ploy to get laid ending up in one bar, where they can then give each other BJs if they really feel it is bigot to not be into cocks.
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My favorite example of this is complaints about the "cotton ceiling"[https://old.reddit.com/r/asktransgender/comments/6a3e3a/who_else_here_is_put_off_by_the_idea_of_the/]("cotton ceiling"), which to me paints a hilarious and sad picture of aspergers guys becoming trans as a gambit of rules-lawyering lesbians into sleeping with them.
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I was thinking of https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/
but that's fair, it might just have been motivated cognition. But given that Scott has independently reached unpopular contrarian opinions on his own so many times, and doesn't address the downsides of gender-defined-by-fiat head on, it's almost the same phenomenon as dishonesty imo.
I think it's definitely motivated cognition in the case of Scott. (But toeing the line for Bostrom.)
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