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PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   27782 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 13, 2025

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He all but admitted to being a HBD enjoyer when reviewing Freddie deBoer's book The Cult of Smart: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-cult-of-smart

And in "The Atomic Bomb Considered as Hungarian High School Science Fair Project". And we all know what "Kolmogorov Complicity and the Parable of Lightning" was about. It's been clear for a very long time.

Yes, I think he made it clear he didn’t want to discuss it (all that about witches), but he’s always been open that he believes it.

You have a fair point, but I do think there's a difference between candidly and affirmative Lu endorsing the controversial position that there are IQ differences between countries/races and his tone of "I'm confronted by large amounts of evidence in favor of that hypothesis, and I would love to have it debunked but, alas, that's not the case":

Earlier this week, I objected when a journalist dishonestly spliced my words to imply I supported Charles Murray's The Bell Curve. Some people wrote me to complain that I handled this in a cowardly way - I showed that the specific thing the journalist quoted wasn’t a reference to The Bell Curve, but I never answered the broader question of what I thought of the book. They demanded I come out and give my opinion openly. Well, the most direct answer is that I've never read it. But that's kind of cowardly too - I've read papers and articles making what I assume is the same case. So what do I think of them?

This is far enough from my field that I would usually defer to expert consensus, but all the studies I can find which try to assess expert consensus seem crazy. A while ago, I freaked out upon finding a study that seemed to show most expert scientists in the field agreed with Murray's thesis in 1987 - about three times as many said the gap was due to a combination of genetics and environment as said it was just environment. Then I freaked out again when I found another study (here is the most recent version, from 2020) showing basically the same thing (about four times as many say it’s a combination of genetics and environment compared to just environment). I can't find any expert surveys giving the expected result that they all agree this is dumb and definitely 100% environment and we can move on (I'd be very relieved if anybody could find those, or if they could explain why the ones I found were fake studies or fake experts or a biased sample, or explain how I'm misreading them or that they otherwise shouldn't be trusted. If you have thoughts on this, please send me an email). I've vacillated back and forth on how to think about this question so many times, and right now my personal probability estimate is "I am still freaking out about this, go away go away go away".

Not to mention:

(Feel free to talk about the rest of the review, or about what DeBoer is doing here, but I will ban anyone who uses the comment section here to explicitly discuss the object-level question of race and IQ.)

I take this as Scott desperately contorting himself so as to not lie, while also doing the equivalent of sticking his fingers in his ears in case people want to talk about it.

Contrast that to his current comment section, where he happily engages in debate on the same topic.

He was, in fact, cowardly, not that I can judge him too hard. This is far more of a flag planted in the sand.

The Hungarian High School Science Fair Project stuff, as the above comment suggests, made his view on this pretty clear, he just chose not to go ultra deep into it because then it becomes your thing and you can’t write about anything else.

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