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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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