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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   32426 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 31, 2022

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because it is a matter of ethical principle that individual and cultural accomplishment is not tied to the genes in the same way as the appearance of our hair.

I'm not going to defend Turkheimer, because I don't know the guy, and a lot of academic scholars strike me as absolutely sleazy, but I think I can defend the argument.

Aquota says below:

As is constantly stated, HBD is most commonly used as an alternative to a racism of the gaps.

Sure, maybe people here and now use it this way, but it's not like we haven't seen slippery slopes happen in real time. An ironic example is "racism of the gaps" itself, didn't we get here from a completely reasonable "maybe everyone should have equal rights"? This leads me to being quite sympathetic to the idea of just tabooing anything that might lead to pushing collective responsibility. Of course the rules of such a taboo would have to be a lot different than what we have now, banning HBD while pushing CRT is unjust, and not even a stable equilibrium (and I suppose this is why we are where we are).

You're just defending being a propagandist, treating the truth and knowledge as a pawn to be sacrificed instrumentally to advance your political goals.

And I'm fully supportive of people who feel that way to confess as much, so that those of us interested in the truth for its own sake know not to waste our time by treating their arguments as being made in good faith.

I see where you're coming from, but I do take issue with being portrayed as bad faith. If I was bad faith, I wouldn't come out and declare I want to taboo an entire field of knowledge, I'd do what everyone else does, and just scream "raaacist!".

I'm accusing Turkheimer of bad faith, not you. But in any event, there are plenty of instrumental reasons to adopt a false tone of scientific analysis when engaging in bad faith reasoning, not least because it's so much easier to dismiss people who start and finish with allegations of racism.

I agree that either both CRT and HBD should be permissible to discuss, or neither should be, with the current situation being unjust against HBD. I used to lean towards "both", wanting the free market of ideas to sort it out. However, the free market of ideas doesn't seem to work, as evidenced by lots of things including HBDers not understanding the phenotypic null hypothesis, so now I don't know what to think anymore.

The phenotypic null hypothesis is an invention of Eric Turkheimer, who confessed to being a propagandist -- the receipts are upthread. How on earth could it possibly be rational for an epistemic rationalist to even invest the time to understand his argument when he has already revealed that his arguments will have only a coincidental relationship with the truth? It's a waste of time and energy, and he intends it to be exactly that.

I don't buy that his arguments have only a coincidental corration to truth. He is biased, yes, but there is also an important signal.

Counterpoint: There is no useful correlation between what Turkheimer says on this topic and the truth, because he has already admitted that his conclusions are determined by his ethical positions rather than by the pursuit of truth.

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