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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   30565 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 13, 2025

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I'm surprised that more people here aren't talking about Scott ripping off the bandaid in his latest series of posts, which very much take an IQ-realist and pro-Lynn stance, and without really mincing words about it.

Scott has tip-toed around the topic in the past, largely playing it safe. There was some minor controversy almost half a decade in the past when his "friend" (one who had ended up marrying Scott's enbie ex Ozzy) leaked private correspondence between the two of them where Scott explicitly acknowledged that he believed in population-wide IQ differences but felt he couldn't speak up about it. Going back even further, on his now defunct but archived LiveJournal, he outlines his harrowing experience doing charity work in Haiti, where the sheer lack of common sense or perverse and self-defeating antics from the populace knocked him speechless.

I note (with some pleasure) that Scott raises some of the same points I've been on record making myself: Namely that there's a profound difference between a person who is 60 IQ in a population where that's the norm, versus someone who is 60 IQ due to disease in a population with an average of 100.

What's the wider ramification of this? Well, I've been mildly miffed for a while now that the Scott of ACX wasn't quite as radical and outspoken as his SSC days, but now that he's come out and said this, I sincerely doubt that there are any Dark and Heretical ideas he holds but is forced to deny or decline to defend. It's refreshing, that's what it is. He might not particularly delve into the ramifications of what this might mean for society at large, but he's not burying the lede, and I have to applaud that. It might we too early to celebrate the death of wokeness, but I think that the more milquetoast Scott of today being willing to say this matters a great deal indeed.

Namely that there's a profound difference between a person who is 60 IQ in a population where that's the norm, versus someone who is 60 IQ due to disease in a population with an average of 100.

I believe at least one person (maybe on dsl) responded with "No, I've worked with them and most of their inability is due to IQ, not other disabilities". The problem is that it's easy to say this, but it's much harder to prove it or even give reasonable evidence for it. On the face of it, it looks like special pleading to explain away what would otherwise be pretty good counterevidence.

I work in a technical trade that takes place in facilities employing lots of very low skilled workers.

I have noticed that black workers stuck doing the shittiest work long term are noticeably more functional in a common sense way than white workers, and that the lowest skill workers are a lot blacker than the general population of employees at these places. White workers stuck at the lowest levels over the long term are disproportionately ‘special’.

My working hypothesis for that would be that for socioeconomic reasons, black people in those jobs would include more higher IQ workers than white people in those jobs, so the blacks actually do have higher IQ.

These are environments with essentially meritocratic back and forth between unskilled and semi-skilled labor.

If "stuck at the lowest levels" doesn't include a range of capabilities, it would be impossible for black people in those positions to be more functional than white people, unless being more functional doesn't affect their ability to do the work at all.

If "stuck at the lowest levels" does include a range of capabilities, then it is possible for the lower level to have a different distribution within that range for blacks than for whites, so blacks having higher IQ is still possible.

I think reading this as pro-Lynn or 'IQ-realist' is a total failure in reading comprehension, irrespective of what Scott 'actually' believes. He explicitly isn't asking whether Lynn's estimates are right or wrong, merely saying that his estimates are consistent with both a pro-HBD and anti-HBD stance, since both would simply account for the apparent discrepancy in different ways.

IIRC this is what the "lightning" thing in Kolmogorov Complicity was really about.

Can you give a quick summary of what the “lightning” here is referring to?

From the article:

So imagine the most irrelevant orthodoxy you can think of. Let’s say tomorrow, the government chooses “lightning comes after thunder” as their hill to die on. They come up with some BS justification like how atmospheric moisture in a thunderstorm slows the speed of light. If you think you see lightning before thunder, you’re confused – there’s lots of lightning and thunder during storms, maybe you grouped them together wrong.

But you might want to read the article for the finer points he makes.

@Jim Specifically, the point is that even if the "agree or get fired" orthodoxy is totally irrelevant to day to day life, it will still warp the sciences in a massive radius around it. Naive physicists will ask why lightning is the only light that gets slowed by atmospheric moisture and get fired, it will be harder to talk about fibre optics and supersonic aircraft and that kind of thing.

Worse, any physicist who wants to take down a colleague can accuse him/her of believing that lightning comes before thunder, and most people will be unable to convincingly refuse the accusation because they secretly do believe it's true. Physicists become routinely mistrusted, and mistrust their colleagues. People have to have an internal switch that tells them when you can and can't safely talk about lightning.

Even the humanities get affected: a bunch of old books have to be Dr. Seuss'd because they describe lightning storms in ways that make it clear that characters see lightning and THEN hear thunder.

I know I gave my initial reaction below but let me distill my thoughts a bit more:

The reason a post like this from Scott rubs me the wrong way is because I think it undermines a lot of Scott's own writings, and in particular his defense of Institutions. Scott knew the truth about HBD all along, but his public position was still in compliance with HBD denial. He never publicly challenged the wrong consensus, and he drove truthful criticism of the mainstream consensus from his own community- essentially banning it. So even though he privately believed in HBD he still publicly acted like an HBD denier. This is very significant in understanding Culture War and the fallacy of Mistake Theory.

Scott didn't change his public position due to any new argument or new data, he's citing the oldest data there is. His public position on the issue is only changing because the culture war is shifting. Scott should be considered among the highest percentile intelligent, good-faith intellectuals with expertise in the soft sciences. But he still basically enforced the consensus while privately knowing it was wrong, until the political conflict underpinning Culture War took a significant turn.

It is about political conflict, that was what drove Scott's behavior before on his issue, and that's what is driving it now. Institutions are unreliable, it is absolutely possible for something as asinine as HBD denial to exist as consensus in institutions because, at the end of the day, even the best of them are just like Scott and have a million reasons to not put themselves at risk by pointing out the emperor is naked.

In 2017, Scott published this.

Gaucher’s disease, one of the Ashkenazi genetic diseases, appears to increase IQ. CHH obtained a list of all of the Gaucher’s patients in Israel. They were about 15 times more likely than the Israeli average to be in high-IQ occupations like scientist or engineer; CHH calculate the probability that this is a coincidence to be 4×10^-19.

From me, this reads as him mostly buying into HBD as far as Ashkenazis are concerned. Of course, once you acknowledge that one ethnic group has a genetic intelligence advantage, it would be an amazing coincidence if all the other ethnics groups were exactly the same, but it is a point he did not make explicitly.

Still, placing the dots out there but not connecting them for the reader is far from "enforced the consensus".

The reason it rubs me the wrong way is that he used his influence, such as it was, to politically support the very people that were keeping him in terror of speaking out. A part of me feels like it's not fair he gets to breathe a sigh of relief now.

"Don't kick your dog when he comes to you."

Was this a great issue of intellectual integrity for Scott? No.

Has he at long last come around to admitting the truth? Yes.

So accept him as an ally and try to resist bitterly complaining about his past conduct.

I never said that the feelings I have are good or healthy, just that I have them.

But let's not get carried away with all this "ally" talk. I expect an ally to do something when bullets are flying my way. And in any case, I don't particularly care about HBD, I care about people being able to talk about it, without being ostracized.

Is he still using ACX grants to provide cash for the outgroup?

Besides endorsing Trump's presidential opponents (IIRC), who were close allies to wokism, what has he done to "politically support the very people that were keeping him in terror of speaking out"?

From what I remember, he has been a vocal critic of woke politics (which would be the ones most likely to attack people over HBD) for quite a few years. The distinction blue tribe v grey tribe was mentioned by him in 2014, for example.

That's strong "aside from that Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?" energy, he was on the opposite side of the single thing that lets him speak his mind now. In his defense I can only say that even I didn't know the election will have such a strong impact on the vibes.

Also, his past writings are good, but 2014 Scott is a very different writer from 2024 Scott.

the single thing that lets him speak his mind now

While I think that the second Trump presidency is likely an important reason for Meta's change of mind regarding the culture war, I think it is more likely that people becoming fed up with wokeness lead to both the Trump victory and Scott feeling more free to speak his mind.

Scott never had mass appeal, the average US voter was never going to read through his lengthy articles. His main mechanism to effect change was always that some of the people who read him are quite influential, causing his ideas to (sometimes) diffuse far. While for some celebrities, whom they endorse for president is their most important political decision by far, I do not think that Scott's endorsement was all that impactful.

I think that modelling Scott as someone whose most important political goal was to tell the world about HBD is likely wrong. Being able to voice his opinions about HBD without getting cancelled by twitter mobs seems certainly to be part of his utility function, but not the whole of it.

Personally, his article on the martians was what caused me to update towards HBD. He was in a unique position to even make me consider it. I had read him for some time, and he was making a careful argument. He wisely made his argument about the Ashkenazi, not the Haitians. If I had encountered HBD claims elsewhere on the internet, I would most likely have replied "just fuck off back to stormfront".

I think it is more likely that people becoming fed up with wokeness lead to both the Trump victory and Scott feeling more free to speak his mind.

This is going to be hard to debate, as it largely concerns the inner state of mind of people I either never met, or met only online, but I have a lot of trouble buying into that theory. As far as I could tell wokeness was always ranging from an embarrassment to a source of terror. The true believers were always a minority (something in the range of 10% if memory serves, there were some studies / surveys done on that but I'm not sure I can find them), and it doesn't really look like they suddenly changed their mind either. If you look at the sentiment on Twitter, it didn't change because suddenly people got fed up, it only changed because people were no longer being banned, or were even getting unbanned.

To me it looked like Kamala vs. Trump was "Wokeness on trial", if it delivered a victory, we'd still be stuck in the 2016-2024 vibes. The Blue Tribe went all in with the Coconut-Couchfucker-Joy offensive and there was no sign anyone was getting fed up. In fact, I distinctly remember people making the same old "if you want wokeness to subside, vote for Harris" argument that they were making during Biden's campaign, on the same assumption that it's the trumpness of Trump that made everybody go crazy, and if he wins again, we're just going to have a rerun of 2016-2020... except that didn't happen, he won, and now everybody is talking about the "vibe shift". I really honestly doubt this would be happening if Harris was president.

I think that modelling Scott as someone whose most important political goal was to tell the world about HBD is likely wrong.

I agree, because I think the way you're describing it is going way too far, but to me it's clear the issue is quite important to him. I mean, it's literally the first thing he chose to talk about when the environment became more permissive. It's not like he's short on controversial takes he could revisit after the fear of cancellation went away,

Right, Kolmogorov Complicity IS complicity. It's one thing to shut up, and to tell others they should shut up because otherwise the state will kill them. But Kolmogorov himself actively testified against his mentor. And Scott Aaronson suggests as part of the Kolmogorov Option that "You even seek out common ground with the local enforcers of orthodoxy." Sorry; at that point you're you're just one of their footsoldiers, and deserve contempt.

Yeah, but that's the difference: Kolmogorov and Aaronson compromised themselves too much, and for me at least, ended up on the wrong side of the friend-enemy distinction, while Scott (very, very) mildly condemned giving that much succor to one's enemies.

It refutes the main far right talking points.

  • Voting doesn’t matter : Trump’s election has loosened the tongues of intellectuals who can finally express “what the man on the street is really thinking”.

  • Discussion is pointless/conflict theory: The Truth triumphs yet again against all attempts to censure it (including a brief attempt by our own mods) ; kept alive by the tireless arguing of myself and others, transferred to the public, voted in, correcting course, guiding & guarding us on our way to a better future.

Discussion is pointless/conflict theory: The Truth triumphs yet again

...through conflict, and not through discussion. This is derived directly from the previous point.

The discussion was had and was highly relevent to subsequent developments. There was more than zero conflict, particularly around the aquisition of X/Twitter, but discussion ultimately won.

Do you think we'd be where we are now on the issue, if Harris won?

Is voting conflict now? According to SS and his ridiculous euphemism "memetic political conflict", even discussion is conflict.

As Clausewitz famously said, war is a continuation of politics by other means. Another way of looking at it is that politics is a continuation of war by other means.

politics is a continuation of war by other means

Some people use this logic to justify democracy as the alternative to bloody civil war. Rather than slaughtering each other to resolve political conflicts, we vote and then accept majority rule.

Of course.

When you vote, you are exercising political authority, you're using force. And force, my friends, is violence. The supreme authority from which all other authorities are derived.

Another way to look at it is the vote that happens after a debate to determine the winner.

But even from a perspective of the vote as representing force, the vote is less an instrument of conflict than a sublimation of it.

It's a proxy for "how many divisions can you field" and the further it is removed from that the less useful it is as a consensus mechanism. Because then, you "win" an "election" and the people with more divisions topple your illegitimate regime.

You can't escape violence, you can only add abstractions on top of it. Liberals used to understand this before they fell for their own propaganda.

I understand one-man-one-gun-one-vote fine, I don't see why it should undermine debate or democracy.

You can't escape violence, you can only add abstractions on top of it.

If you want; then I am pro-abstraction. One man goes around shooting people - another talks to them, then counts their vote, and then, only if he has won, uses limited force. Do you think they are the same?

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Yes, voting is conflict. Unlike discussion, voting means the majority wins.

What does taking over specific positions of political power have to do with the truth triumphing via discussion? Why were the intellectuals' tongues so tied before the elections? Why couldn't they just convince their opponents of the truth by making superior arguments? Yeah, in this context it's clearly conflict.

So voting works, we’re definitely done with all the nonsense about elites controlling everything and democracy being a sham? Okay, next.

Why couldn't they just convince their opponents of the truth by making superior arguments?

They did. Some, like our progenitor, in a rather ‘conflict avoidant’ way. Not my style, but still. Or did HBD warriors use their fists beat up on their enemies until they gave up?

So voting works

Sure, but that necessarily means that discussion doesn't.

we’re definitely done with all the nonsense about elites controlling everything and democracy being a sham? Okay, next.

> A billionaire very likely changed the result of the election by buying a communications platform

> "we’re definitely done with all the nonsense about elites controlling everything and democracy being a sham?"

How? Why?

They did. Some, like our progenitor, in a rather ‘conflict avoidant’ way.

He didn't. He got bullied into keeping his mouth shut, and into personally shutting the mouths of anyone who agreed with him, until Trump won.

Or did HBD warriors use their fists beat up on their enemies until they gave up?

People, a large part of which knows nothing about HBD, used their votes to take away power from people who were censoring and terrorizing HBDers.

So voting works

Sure, but that necessarily means that discussion doesn't.

Why? Is discussion incompatible with democracy?

A billionaire very likely changed the result of the election by buying a communications platform

According to the previous alt right theory, “‘the elites” were acting collectively, in a specifically “‘New York Times” direction, against the wishes of the masses, always successfully. It wasn't predicting an isolated eliteman taking a turn to the right with popular support.

Although maybe that’s a caricature of alt right thinking on my part. A caricature of my position would be that billionaires/elites are just as influential as normal people.

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You'll notice that success at the polls was conditionned on coordinated elite action. Without Elon Musk, there is no trifecta. Voting works as a coordination mechanism for existing forces, it doesn't create forces out of thin air.

You should read Michels instead of imagining caricatures of his political model.

Scott knew the truth about HBD all along, but his public position was still in compliance with HBD denial.

No it wasn't. In 2017 he wrote The Atomic Bomb Considered As Hungarian High School Science Fair Project, as well as this post that was probably the most explicit pre-AstralCodexTen:

Learning To Love Scientific Consensus:

Even things about genetic psychological differences between population groups are less bold and maverick-y than their proponents like to think. The relevant surveys I know trying to elicit scientific consensus (1, 2, 3) all find that, when asked anonymously, most scientists think these differences explain about 25% – 50% of variance.

I hate to bring that up, because it’ll probably start a flame war in the comments, but I think it’s important as a sign of exactly how hard it is to politicize science. Global warming skeptics talk about how maybe the scientific consensus on global warming is false because climatologists face political pressure to bias their results in favor of the theory. But scientists studying these areas face much more political pressure, and as long as you give the surveys anonymously they’re happy to express horrendously taboo opinions. This is about the strongest evidence in favor of the consensus on global warming – and scientific consensus in general – that I could imagine.

Coincidentally that post also addresses your point. Even with something as taboo and suprressed as HBD, you can anonymously survey experts in the field and get overwhelming support. That doesn't translate into "institutions" being automatically trustworthy, something like a public statement by a university or an article in the New York Times has little in common with an anonymous survey of experts. But I don't think he ever said otherwise. He's posted about how media outlets rarely outright lie and prefer misleading people in other ways, but that isn't the same as saying they're generally trustworthy.

I think that first one definitely had an influence on me seeing population IQ differences as a reasonable sort of thing to believe in, before I'd even considered wider implications.

I'm kind of curious about your response here, so I'm hoping you'd be willing to make it more concrete. Can you pick out the top one to three posts from Scott that you think are contradicted by his current position on HBD?

I'm not sure if I follow on the connection between HBD and Mistake Theory vs. Conflict Theory. Surely, the following can both be true: 1) IQ differences between groups are real and explained in part by genetic differences, and this affects the kinds of societal institutions that can be successful, and 2) it is better to treat policy disputes as debates where facts and evidence could theoretically make everyone converge to the correct prescriptions for society (mistake theory), rather than treating them as a war (conflict theory.)

Heck, going back through Scott's original Conflict vs. Mistake article, I find:

Mistake theorists think you can save the world by increasing intelligence. You make technocrats smart enough to determine the best policy. You make politicians smart enough to choose the right technocrats and implement their advice effectively. And you make voters smart enough to recognize the smartest politicians and sweep them into office.

Most of that, except maybe the part about voters seems completely compatible with HBD. Even taking the voters into account, through a combination of voluntary eugenics, and public education you could theoretically raise the societal IQ and show that mistake theory is a possible path to a successful society.

Can you pick out the top one to three posts from Scott that you think are contradicted by his current position on HBD?

This line from "Reactionary Philosophy in an Enormous, Planet-Sized Nutshell":

I don’t want to dwell on the biological hypothesis too much, because it sort of creeps me out even in a “let me clearly explain a hypothesis I disagree with” way.

...caused me to update negatively on Scott when I learned of the Christopher Brennan emails (which were sent before it) - not because I disapproved of his private position, but because this implied that line was a pure Denial of Peter.

Not that pure. There’s three levels of deniability to soften the lie of ‘I disagree with’: ‘sort of’ , ‘in a way’(redundant), ‘creeps me out’ (focusing on his feelings to avoid admitting his thoughts).

That conflict vs. mistake article is pretty wild to go through.

Mistake theorists think racism is a cognitive bias. White racists have mistakenly inferred that black people are dumber or more criminal.

Not, "mistake theorists believe that black people are dumber, but hide their power levels because doing otherwise would mean sticking their necks out."

Conflict theorists think a technocracy is stupid. Whatever the right policy package is, the powerful will never let anyone implement it. Either they’ll bribe the technocrats to parrot their own preferences, or they’ll prevent their recommendations from carrying any force.

...an almost exact summation of why the technocracy supported anti-HBD views. And the only way to get Scott to reveal his true thoughts was to change who was powerful. No amount of debate and convincing would have worked - he was already privately convinced, after all.

I reject the idea that there is a hard binary - you can believe that mistake theory is right for some circumstances for some people and conflict theory in others. When I talk to my dad about how stupid DEI is, he is receptive. When I argue with my brother about HBD... well it's just a bad idea. Thanksgiving dinners are a lot more pleasant if I just accept conflict theory on that one and recognize the only way to change anyone's mind is to simply win a presidential election first.

Why is it a wild read? You seem to be saying Scott is part conflict theorist, but I don't think you've argued it well.

A mistake theorist does not lie down on a train track to kill himself. He will move out of the way of an oncoming train. A mistake theorist will not try to have a discussion with a train. Likewise, a mistake theorist knows that conflict theorists exist. He will probably not try to have a discussion with them.

Know the difference

  • The Mistake theorist says: "My opponents are conflict theorists and do not respond to argument. They are making a mistake. We want the same things. Forgive them, for they know not what they do."
  • The Conflict theorist says: "My opponents are conflict theorists and do not respond to argument. They are enemies in the conflict."

For Scott to "be a Conflict theorist on some things" you would need to demonstrate that he believes his opponents to be the enemy, in the #2 sense. I think you've only demonstrated that he does not lie down on train tracks.

He himself is someone who could only be modelled by conflict theory - his public actions and stated opinion were not motivated because he was mistaken about HBD; he misrepresented his own beliefs because the dominant intellectual paradigm prevented the technocracy (ie Scott) from publicly advancing the most accurate viewpoints or influencing policy in a logical direction. He could only be 'convinced' by a display of political power by the opposition. This is exactly the situation presented by the conflict theorist in the quote I pulled.

Oh, this doesn't make Scott a Conflict Theorist (Know the difference between #1 and #2). This just means the Conflict Theorist's description of reality is correct - Power is power.

Agreed. I was trying to say that the post was wild because in retrospect because many of the conflict theorist's beliefs seem justified in retrospect, and that Scott's own revealed behavior is a repudiation of his (and, admittedly, my own) naive inclination towards mistake theory as a descriptive model.

Scott changed his public opinion on HBD due to the shifting winds of the passions of the (at least online- i.e. his audience) public, largely thanks to Elon Musk acquiring Twitter- unbanning all the icky right-wingers who did the uncredited yeoman's work for many decades challenging a blatant lie deeply rooted in our collective consciousness. Scott participated in the censorship of that group of people, although you could argue he low-key sabotaged the consensus with whatever support he gave of TheMotte.

But Scott's public opinion hasn't changed because of increasing IQ of technocrats motivated to improve policy; it changed because of a turning point in a memetic political conflict. You can't change the hearts and minds of the technocrats with evidence and well-reasoned arguments in the most important cases, you have to do it with political victory.

If this political shift hadn't happened, the high-IQ technocrats, including himself, would have happily continued defending the blatant lie of HBD denial and the catastrophic downstream political effects. But I do think his turnabout on HBD is basically explained by Musk's acquisition of Twitter. What people call a "vibe shift" is literally a politically-motivated billionaire changing content TOS and moderation on a political platform, not technocrats being convinced by rational argumentation and new evidence.

The intelligence-worship falls apart, because even the most intelligent are slaves to political conflict. You can't ignore it or pretend you are above participation or taking sides and only care about IQ, evidence, and reason.

The intelligence-worship falls apart, because even the most intelligent are slaves to political conflict. You can't ignore it or pretend you are above participation or taking sides and only care about IQ, evidence, and reason.

I think you're kind of assuming too much.

I think it is perfectly consistent for Scott to chose to sacrifice any gains in the HBD space, for all of the other gains he could get everywhere else in the Overton window. That kind of pragmatism isn't a repudiation of mistake theory, it is an example of living it out.

If a position is truly poison for those who profess it in the public sphere, then it makes sense to me that a good mistake theorist will plod along in the background, working on fixing the policy issues they can openly and safely speak about without risk of reputational damage.

The reputational damage is caused by opponents engaging in conflict theory, but nothing says you have to stoop to their level.

The consequence of Scott's ethos is that, even though his job is ostensibly to be a rational, independent thinker in the public space, he's ultimately a Johnny-come-lately to one of the most important questions of the day. And his hesitancy was due to political headwinds- not evidence and arguments. I don't doubt the personal practicality of abstaining from the debate- and banishing dissent of the consensus from his own community, I question his value for "moving the Overton window" on things like the Melatonin Question but abstaining on HBD until political winds shifted in favor of the viewpoint he has now taken.

I definitely think he was a factor in me being convinced of HBD. Posing as a within-the-overton-window thinker while talking about views that might direct one to find what's actually true more plausible worked in my case, and surely there were a bunch of others for whom that was true as well.

Scott could have been debanked and stripped of any professional license. Imagine not being able to get a bank account or credit card.

No, Scott was not at serious risk of being debanked; in the speech context, that was reserved for those who made a serious run at pre-Musk Twitter, and Scott was too niche for that. And all he had to do to vastly reduce the risk of being stripped of his professional license... was not to practice in the place most utterly under the control of the people who would do that. Scott never should have moved back to the Bay Area.

If you have celebrity status in one place on earth, you live there.

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How would Scott self-immolating have helped anything? It's not like he was sitting on some special knowledge that no one else in the universe had or that people couldn't read about in other blogs if they were inclined to. If he had explicitly pushed against the Overton Window on it, the Overton Window would have thrown him into the outer darkness. You push against the things you can shift, not sleeping tigers that are blocking the path.

Sometimes the Kolmogorov Option is the right one.

I don't think posting this exact blogpost 7 years ago would have been self-immolation. It would have been interesting and brave, neither of which it is now. Scott never claimed to be any Galileo, but what's clear is that to be a Galileo you need to have a bone to pick politically in order to be induced to face the headwinds of actually challenging Authority. It's not just about rational arguments and evidence.

What bones did Scott have to pick with authority back in 2017 outside of stuff like "unfuck the FDA somehow"?

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What people call a "vibe shift" is literally a politically-motivated billionaire changing content TOS and moderation on a political platform, not technocrats being convinced by rational argumentation and new evidence.

I disagree somewhat. The politically motivated billionaire made the vibe shift possible by changing the TOS on his platform, but in my opinion the vibe shift didn't happen until Trump won. My impression is that until his victory was secured, progressives still thought Musk could be dealt with in the short to medium term.

Oh sure, but that only drives the point home. In essence, Scott has changed his public opinion on HBD because Trump won. We are very far from "high-IQ technocrats policy-maxing social utility." Nope- it's political conflict.

But he still basically enforced the consensus while privately knowing it was wrong, until the political conflict underpinning Culture War took a significant turn.

I was under the impression that he did this on purpose and essentially told people who could read between the lines explicitly in "Kolmogorov Complicity And The Parable Of Lightning". You're totally right about what he was doing and he was always a HBD enjoyer, but he was very clearly pursuing a specific strategy to try and do as much as possible without getting the eye of sauron turned on him and his community. I think he was right to do so as well - the "cause" of HBD wouldn't really be served by Scott Alexander self immolating and tainting the reputations of a lot of other people who believed essentially the same thing, as opposed to what he actually did in continuing to allow his community to exist.

Also, look just how many likes that post got. Clearly a lot of his commenters got the message.

The article includes a bit of nonsense and it's rather verbose for how little it actually says. This comment will sound a little negative but I can't lower my standards enough to enjoy the article.

This line grossed me out: "If you take anti-racism seriously, this should make you breath a sigh of relief. This finding on its own doesn’t disprove a genetic component to racial IQ gaps. But it does suggest that the genetic component is less than 100%.".

It is trivially true that IQ is not 100% genetic (Otherwise, even sleep deprivation would not lower your IQ by a single point). I don't think anyone really thinks otherwise. I've been called racist for suggesting that black people were less intelligent than white people on average, even when I didn't specify how much, and even when I didn't suggest an explanation (be it nutrition or genetics). It feels like he made up his argument wanted to soften the conclusion. But I had his view when I was a teenager, and that's before I had any interest in "Intellectual" things. It is a surface-level analysis. The entire article basically just says "HBD is true, but feedback-loops like nutrition makes the differences seem bigger than they are".

He also understates the consequences of having 60 IQ, claiming that they will be confused if you talk about anything complex. He makes it sound like an example of something complex would be Calculus, but these people are perhaps 25 IQ points below those who struggle with calculus, and would likely struggle even in 6th grade.

It feels like he made up his argument wanted to soften the conclusion.... I don't think anyone really thinks otherwise.

Scott is familiar with how this discourse goes down. He's knows if he doesn't say "not 100% genetic" out loud along with other I'm Not A Racist-ism's, then that will be the first item in a laundry list for angry skeptics to angry type angry sneers. There are at least a dozen other items on the list and he doesn't cover those. Some make an appearance on the SSC thread. Whether it's worthwhile to fight the losing battle-- I don't know. If you're aiming to persuade someone it's a good idea. Can't win'em all.

I'm Not A Racist And This Isn't Racist-isms are a wasted if you don't consider them necessary. P He softens and hedges when dealing with this (or any controversial) topic. I'm actually surprised he didn't put more effort into softening words. This is not his most comprehensive post. It engages with a narrow slice in the intelligence pie. At a paltry 1300 words it might as well be his literal list of laundry.

Personally, I don't think anyone should be allowed to successfully beat the allegations. Sounds downright unnatural. I'd concede that if anyone can achieve this feat it may be Scott Alexander.

He also understates the consequences of having 60 IQ, claiming that they will be confused if you talk about anything complex.

What should we expect a person with 60 IQ be capable of? What should we expect a nation with an average of 60 IQ to be capable of? Are individuals with a measured IQ of 60 in our society less cognitively capable than poorer, less educated individuals measured at 60 IQ across the ocean? Why would that be?

These are practical questions worth answering. In a way that uneducated brutes can understand. Which means it is something I've had questions about. I appreciated the follow-up post and consider this reasonable enough:

For the second effect mentioned in the post - the one where Malawians are obviously smarter than intellectually disabled people - you could attribute it to any of:

  • Lynn’s data and analysis were bad.
  • Lynn’s data and analysis were fine as far as they go, but the tests he based his work off of were trivially culturally biased - for example, they asked about English vocabulary in non-English speaking countries, or math problems to people who had never learned math.
  • The tests weren’t trivially biased, but the concept of IQ itself breaks down once you try to extend it to extremely under-educated populations, and it no longer predicts things as well as you would expect.
  • The concept of IQ is fine, but you are personally miscalibrated about what low IQ means because the only very-low-IQ people in your training set had developmental disorders.

I think these probably explain 5%, 5%, 40%, and 50% of the effect respectively, and I should have been more careful to emphasize (3), which I think explains 40% of the effect.

Wouldn't that make him a public performer rather than an intellectual? Around topics like these, at least. His insights are quite good as long as they don't touch upon specific things.

I don't know what you mean by "beat the allegations"? Data cannot hate people so I don't even see the need to bring things like racism into the question. The type of people who get emotional and angry (because they think facts are opinions) tend to be stupid, so communicating in a way which requres processing to understand solves the issue (so that one skimming your article without thinking would find nothing controversial). I avoided Reddit bans for years with this method. I could for instance say that having a 'victim mentality' isn't healthy, and that it doesn't even benefit the victim. Also that one should get over the past, especially if those who were involved aren't around anymore (at this point, justice is impossible anyway). This implies "Get over the slave trade already" and many other things, but I never said anything bad directly. I personally only treat specifics as samples of what I've generalized. You can safely criticize like 11 different ideologies at once merely by writing "Don't blame all your problems on one group of people".

I can't say specifically what the 60 IQ range looks like, but I'd expect such people to engage in magical thinking, to have problem with conditionals, to only be able to use simple tools (e.g. would not be able to change a microwave to defrost mode). I don't think it matters where one is from, and I think one would still learn basic social skills (but be relatively naive and easy to trick).

But the answer I just came up with seems quite vague, uninteresting and low value. I don't have anything better though. It's not so much that I have an exact model which explains intelligence perfectly, it's more that claims like "IQ is at least partly genetic" are trivially true, and claims like "High IQs are caused by wealth" are trivially false. What annoys me is when people are wrong about trivial things and avoid obvious examples available to them. If Africans had as many nobel prize winners as Europe did, then it would make sense to question IQ as a metric, but most attempts I see at discrediting IQ are incredibly forced and require some mental gymnastics.

By the way, IQ is made up of different domains like processing speed, verbal IQ, spatial IQ, and so on. If we stopped fusing these together into a single number, perhaps IQ scores would make sense. I remember seeing on a graph that I scrolled past on Google Images that an a working memory of about 3 items corresponded to 60 IQ, and this would be a very low working memory. We also know that chimps do better than humans on some memory tests, despite being much dumber than humans. For simple survival, working memory may be more important than abstract reasoning, and simple communication might not require that much verbal intelligence. So intellectually disabled people might have more severe issues like low working memory, while Malawians and 'healthy' naturally-low-IQ people are dragged down by other factors like poor abstract reasoning. I think education is much less important than most people believe. I could explain why, but my reply is already rather long.

Wouldn't that make him a public performer rather than an intellectual? Around topics like these, at least. His insights are quite good as long as they don't touch upon specific things.

Kinda, yeah. My read is Scott's courage is limited, though I don't consider him a coward. He remains capable of surprising his audience. He values some things before speaking Truth To Power. Mine is a purely parasocial assessment. I don't know if I have an accurate read of his character from his writing and limited appearances.

I don't know what you mean by "beat the allegations"?

It would be unnatural if the the rodeo didn't include clowns. I wasn't being very serious. I've seen this entire dynamic play out what feels like 1000 times. It's up there next to Holocaust discussions.

In terms of persuasion, then there's utility to mealy mouthed, soft arguments. They complement the courageous explorers that proudly plant their offensive pole in the snow on top of Mt. Overton. The brave can plant the pole and the soft cowards can find ways to nicely herd people towards it. Maybe Scott is an exceptional, though not exceptionally, soft coward-- not a brave explorer. He is part writer, after all.

The type of people who get emotional and angry

Many people get emotional and angry when they see stuff they don't like. Some of them are stupid, sure, many of them are not. Of those, some proportion are ideologues or people with hard values that are going to be mad and troll no matter what. There's still significant number of people worth convincing. If true, that could make shibboleths, caution, and niceties worthwhile.

Scott is someone who wants truth to help solve problems. He doesn't want truth to make the world a worse place by his own estimation. He believes in the genetic role of intelligence, but doesn't want to see pogroms. This makes him cautious and, apparently, quiet. Lots of people don't want to see pogroms, and they associate these ideas with pogrom-related events. I think a normalization and nothing happens (hopefully magic pills in 50 years) is more likely when reality eventually breaks through, but it's worth considering. If it's not worth considering then lots of people still consider it. Seems to be changing!

So intellectually disabled people might have more severe issues like low working memory, while Malawians and 'healthy' naturally-low-IQ people are dragged down by other factors like poor abstract reasoning. I think education is much less important than most people believe. I could explain why, but my reply is already rather long.

How do you reason the Flynn effect and what it means? For intelligence in general and IQ testing. Strictly nutritional and stuff like less lead?

In terms of persuasion, then there's utility to mealy mouthed, soft arguments

Yeah, but this doesn't feel like it has anything to do with understanding how the world works. I feel like you're doing something wrong if you dive into intellectual topics because you want to meet your social needs or influence the values of those around you. If he wants to remain a writer then he has no choice but to continue doing this, but what I dislike is that he's also forced to pretend that this is not what he's doing.

If he cared for truth, he'd not limit himself to those around him. At the very least, he should think things through by himself, and then return to the overton window only when communicating what he found. But if you truly think about things for longer periods of time, especially if you're intelligent, I find that your worldview will become completely incompatible with the consensus.

Many people get emotional and angry when they see stuff they don't like

Yes, and this goes for me as well, so I didn't explain it well enough. 1: Those who handle truth the best are good at seeing things from a detached and abstract/systematic perspective. And I find that those who get the most irrationally angry will only react if you make your position clear. So if you show nuance, they won't know how to react, since it seems like you're arguing for both sides (which is of course because you care about understanding the issue, and not merely nitpicking data which supports a specific ideology). Those who get the most trigged by the idea that black people are inferior to whites are those who are afraid that it might be true. High intelligence makes self-deception difficult, forcing them to think in different ways and get closer to the truth that they cannot hide from themselves. And maybe then they will say "I don't like the fact that life isn't fair" which is actually true, and a real topic worth discussing.

Scott is someone who wants truth to help solve problems

I don't agree entirely. I think he wants to promote his own personal values, and to compromise with others values, even if less appealing values would improve society more. (Relaxing sounds more appealing than confronting what scares you, but the latter is better for you. Morality might be the same, that which appeals to us might be costly and ultimately damaging)

1: Most people below 85 IQ are useless to the system, meaning that they can't do any work which warrants paying them a livable wage. This is not something we should deceive ourselves about.

2: Altruism can create dependent populations. Death is what happens to those who do not adapt, but I agree that it's good to help people to adapt by preventing their death in most cases. What's not good is to help in such a way that the amount of unfit people increases (because it allows people to avoid their own growth and improvement). You feed starving people, they survive and have children, and now you need more food to prevent starvation, right? This problem is inherently unsolvable, we must teach men to fish, not merely give them fish. By "saving" people from growth we push our problems into the future while making them worse. Same when we bail out failing banks and companies. We take surplus from the successful and give it to the unsuccessful, but this just lowers the appeal of success, meaning that less people strive for it, and that more people demand to get what others have.

3: By forcing small incidents not to occur, one makes sure that big incidents will occur in the future. The opposite applies as well, if you expose yourself to small problems then you prepare yourself for facing bigger problems (hence training, studying, exposure therapy, venting, etc). If you prevent a couple from having a few disagreements and talking them out, you get a sudden divorce instead. If you exercise your body, then you're less likely to get hurt next time you need to lift something heavy. All conflicts help fitness/adaptation, they're the feedback you need. Prevent adaptation/feedback/conflict naturally, and you will face disaster in the future. Suppression backfires. People who suppress their anger will sooner or later take all their anger out at once. Things like school-shootings happen because of pent up pressure. The amount of adaptation required is constant, but only by chopping it into pieces can you prevent it from being fatal. One of many consequences of this dynamic is that censorship of controversial subjects is prone to backfire.

How do you reason the Flynn effect and what it means?

I haven't thought much about it, honestly. When I first heard about it I thought "Makes sense, nutrition is getting better" and that still seems to make sense. Education might help too (I said it didn't matter much, but I meant for people like myself who procrastinate in school and teach themselves whatever interests them). Education likely helps performance on some IQ tests, but I don't think the effects on the G factor are very big. I suppose that the Flynn effect is different for different cognitive areas. Spatial seems to have improved the most. There's a million possible reasons for increases and decreases in average IQ, including lead, iodine, immigration, video games with spatial tasks (Tetris likely influences RPM performance), processed foods, literature getting simpler over time, and so on. I suppose these are all true to an unknown extent, which implies that the correct answer to your question looks like a confusing mess, while short precise and elegant answers are likely to be wrong.

those who get the most trigged by the idea that black people are inferior to whites are those who are afraid that it might be true

They fear what comes afterwards if their society adopts an idea like "black people are inferior." This is more often used as the strawman in the topic. With lots of hemming and hawing from the more congenial HBD people about properly identifying a problem in order to find solutions. Which is a good illustration for why someone like Scott Alexander has to hem and haw in a post such as this.

At the very least, so long as we still have manual labor then people with <85 IQ can be and are productive. They can do even more than that! That's a lot of people. That's much of the world if we accept Lynn's research. They seem to have survived alright and entered an age of abundance. Weak benefit from altruism? Sure. Dumb countries benefit from altruism? Meh. You subsidize them they subsidize the global wealthy. Smart guy invents the smart phone and I benefit. I didn't have to struggle for it.

Are we still talking about the justification for hemming and hawing in a post about intelligence or something else? We should accept our base desires (as school shooters must) stop subsidizing the weak, and initiate conflict with lessers? Euthanize all homeless, feed newborn gimps to the wolves, and stop caring for neighbors that can't even prevent themselves from getting robbed. What're we talking about here?

If we're talking of conflict more broadly, or it's a world of conflict you seek, I wouldn't be so confident intelligence is your superweapon. Intelligence has some great benefits for individuals and nations alike. Intelligent armies still lose wars, intelligent populations still get exterminated, and intelligence doesn't stop a bullet from entering the skull. Whoever can wield violence the best comes out on top in open conflict. Intelligence is a factor in that, but not necessarily a deciding one.

Conflict can provide growth for an individual. It can also be ugly, costly, destructive, nonsensical, and a great many other things. It can make things worse. Weak, dumb, and evil men have and continue to benefit from conflict. I don't believe it is a proven as a cure all. Though I'd concede the world of abundance isn't either.

If we're still talking about a cautious, iterative approach to questions of IQ, it seems to be making progress. If slowly.

Technically, "Black people are inferior" is a value judgement which means that it cannot be a fact. It can be a fact that they're less intelligent than white people on average, which puts them at an inherent disadvantage in modern socities (in which even competition between white people means that many remain lower class), and I do believe this is true. If they wish to prevent negative consequences, they should adopt a stance like "The value of human life is not decided by their intelligence" rather than "Black people are just as intelligent as whites and therefore equal in worth", for this latter way of thinking is what might bring negative consequences.

There less and less manual labor over time (in developed socities), and I think the cognitive demands of society increase over time. In the 1950s you could get by with an IQ of 80 or 85, but today I don't think you can. In the future, I expect people with an IQ of 90 to struggle as well.

Are we still talking about the justification for hemming and hawing

I don't recognize those names to be honest. My point is that the way society operates is going to cause a lot of disasters, because we naively suppress small conflicts. To give examples of this mechanism: If you're afraid of regular dentist visits and you don't go, you will be forced to have a really bad experience in a dentist chair in the future. If you avoid people because of minor social anxiety, you will sooner or later have full-blown social anxiety. If you are overprotective of your children, they are likely to get hurt when they move away from home and experience freedom for the first time. If you create "safe spaces" for people, they are prone to stay mentally fragile, which means that an encounter with reality is likely to "trigger" them. If you suppress evidence of voter fraud and vaccine side-effects, falsely claiming that both are one-in-a-billion events, you end up with huge scandals and controversies, etc. A lot of naive attempts at improving things end up doing the opposite (Reddit moderation, the DARE program, no child left behind policies, etc). If you impliment no tolerance policies in schools, don't be surprised if one day a student snaps and kills somebody.

What're we talking about here?

I'm not suggesting that we abandon those who need help, but that we create an environment in which they have both a safety net and rewards for personal growth. Rather than just throwing money at Africa, we should help them become independent of us, for instance. The best you can do for people is help them to the right degree. Too little? They die. Too much? They become reliant on your help and lose their incentives to struggle forward.

Weak, dumb, and evil men have and continue to benefit from conflict

This is a good argument. One maxim which comes to mind is "Institutions try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution". If you reward conflict more than solutions, you don't get solutions. That said, conflicts are mostly a signal that something needs to change, and we are lucky that signals come before consequences. Slight tooth ache is an early signal, stress is a signal, a bad grade is a signal. This is where one must start looking for a solution. Suppressing signals and saying "problem solved" will result in disasters later, and you can help somebody in a disaster by turning it into a minor disaster, buying them time to align themselves with reality.

It seems to be making progress

I think immigration will result in a non-negligible decrease of average IQ in every modern country. If immigration is going to be our go-to-solution for low birth rates, the consequences are going to be even worse. We won't be able to solve this problem with any amount of education, and throwing money at the problem is going to be about as effective as throwing money at Africa is currently. If you meant that we're starting to understand IQ better, I'm going to disagree with that at as well - modern politics will make it impossible to do proper research about intelligence, for the same reason that the rest of psychology is degenerating (the reason is politics). Psychology is the most important discipline in the world, but our modern understanding of human behaviour is flat out wrong, and naive idealism is replacing the consensus. Most of our modern "kindness" is out of alignment with reality and almost more harmful than beneficial.

High intelligence makes self-deception difficult.

This is false. The smartest people are often able to construct the most elaborate rationalizations and justifications.

Both are true, I think.

Smart people can argue well for almost anything, even if it's wrong. But they also have more self-awareness. For instance, you know that you're good at rationalizing things which aren't true. When you're intelligent, it's more likely that you will think of the possibility that you're deceiving yourself, even if it's also more likely that you can find a reason to think that it's a false alarm.

I think the former factor grows faster than the latter, so that intelligence is more likely to lead to disillusionment or high levels of insight, than it is to lead to having very strong beliefs. There's plenty of people with IQs in the 130s who have very strong beliefs (mostly due to the boost in confidence one may get for being above the norm), but if you go above 145 you get people like Jung and Buddha who become so self-aware that it becomes meta-self-awareness or meta-meta self-awareness.

I mean, I don't know how smart I actually am or am not, but Odin dammit if I don't have a head full of awesome rationalizations and justifications for my own bullshit. Reminds me of that Feynman quote about how science is all about not being fooled and how the easiest person to fool is ourselves--definitely true of me!

Debating the existence of racial IQ differences is boring because they so obviously exist. Now that we're allowed to talk about it, I find myself not really wanting to. There really is no legitimate debate.

I think a more interesting subject is why these difference exist. Is there any settled science on this? I assume that Ashkenazi have higher IQs due to some sort of selection process that happened in the shtetls. But why are Japanese smarter than Britons, Britons smarter than Sicilians, and Sicilians smarter than Sub-Saharans?

My guess is that these could be relatively recent selections (as in, last 2000 years or so). The British population, for example, underwent a millennium long selection process whereby rich people had many more surviving children than the poor. And, even though class mobility was limited it was not non-existent. Smart people became rich and had more children. Do this for 40 generations and IQ will rise significantly.

On the other hand, Italy had higher urbanization than Great Britain during the Middle Ages. Cities, then as now, acted as IQ shredders. Smart people moved to the city where, due to pestilence, they had sub-replacement fertility.

In the year 500, places like Italy, Turkey, Greece, and Syria were far more advanced than northern Europe. But this very advancement may have led to them gradually falling behind in IQ due to higher urbanization.

This is all rank speculation of course. That's what makes it fun!

I'd also like to hear theories about how the East Asian package (high IQ, low agency) came to be...

But why are Japanese smarter than Britons, Britons smarter than Sicilians, and Sicilians smarter than Sub-Saharans?

What's your evidence that Sicilians are lower IQ? On the country map it's as green as the rest of Italy which is as green as the UK.

One could look around modern day Sicily and note the obvious dysfunction and say well duh, but emigration from Sicily since WW2 has been high.

What country map are you talking about? One can't average the whole of Italy due to it effectively being two countries stitched together. The differences are very big.

Lots of studies show Sicily having an average IQ of about 90 with northern Italy having slightly above 100, with the GDP per capita difference being over 100%

What country map are you talking about? One can't average the whole of Italy due to it effectively being two countries stitched together. The differences are very big.

Yes. That's why I was asking. The map in the post OP links to just treats Italy as a whole unit.

Lots of studies show Sicily having an average IQ of about 90 with northern Italy having slightly above 100, with the GDP per capita difference being over 100%

Okay. But that's explained by upwardly mobile Sicilians leaving after WW2.

I'm not even disputing it necessarily. Cousin marriage is high in that culture, for example.

It would be interesting to see how diaspora Sicilians test.

And yet when people from other similar regions emigrated in similar numbers during largely the same time period, due to the same incentives, the population iq remained more or less completely unchanged? Only in Sicily did it go down by 10 whole IQ points?

If there is some kind of emigration driven selection effects happening it's been going on for far longer, considering Italian cultural and economic development. Southern Italy and Sicily have been backwards since literally the Roman times.

Southern Italy and Sicily have been backwards since literally the Roman times.

They were quite wealthy during the Middle Ages, e.g. Sicily under the Norman Roger II. However the south's cash crops stagnated the economy as great wealth flowed in without much need for diversification and increasing complexity (...and later the Kingdom of the 2 Sicilies banned agricultural exports!) Prosperity started breaking down in the 14th century, then in the 15th century when large earthquakes and plagues decimated the population and slave raids shifted settlements inland; the Spanish art of governance (rent seeking) also halted development (cf. Spanish literacy into the late 19th century).

Nevertheless, up to unification, Naples remained one of Europe's largest and wealthiest cities. Sicily had 3 of the most industrialized provinces in 1871 - but they hadn't changed production methods for centuries, doing seasonal labor in workshops (compared to the area around Milan which used power looms etc. from the 1820s).

Firstly, don't hold back out of fear of offending me.

Are you sure it's similar? My parents are Sicilian born during WW2 and something like 80% of my extended family in my parents' generation GTFO. Just packed up and relocated to America, whole hog.

In my obviously anecdata view, if you can leave Sicily, you do.

Southern Italy and Sicily have been backwards since literally the Roman times.

Not to blame everything on colonialism but if you look at the history of Sicily it's conquered over and over again throughout the millenia due to strategic importance to empires since it's in the center of the Mediterranean. My vibe from the place and the culture is that trying to coordinate above the familial unit level is considered for schmucks[1]

This can of course make you relatively retarded if you stick to farming instead of exploring (say) lending and accounting as a profession.

  1. I don't agree with Taleb about much but I think he's onto something when he describes the "Med" ethnotype.

I think a more interesting subject is why these difference exist. Is there any settled science on this?

I think rate of consanguine marriage is a major contributing factor. I haven't read it yet, but my understanding is that this was one of the main conclusions of Joseph Henrich in The WEIRDest People in the World: Europe became a dominant economic power in large part because it had a headstart in banning cousin marriage. If you compare a world map showing the average IQ in each country with a world map showing the rate of cousin marriage in each country they look very strongly negatively correlated.

I think we need more data to find a convincing explanation. We don't even really know when IQs diverged: has it been that way since time immemorial? Or maybe it was a process that took a millennium? Or maybe it was strong selection over a century or two (something with the Black Death providing a selective pressure for more effective immune systems?)

This doesn't seem like information that's been lost irrecoverably to history, either: looking at modern and ancient DNA likely would make it possible. There just would have to be a social and scientific willingness to open that Pandora's box.

Actually this is currently being investigated quite a lot, there is a massive ancient dna boom and if you can read a little bit between the lines it's pretty obvious from the papers that get published; Short story, a relatively small group migrated from africa to somewhere in the area between the arabic peninsula and the black sea, underwent (historically speaking) rapid evolution (including cold adaption and , um, "neurological changes") and then migrated further into all directions, which resulted in the modern caucasian/asian split. Modern-day subsaharan blacks have almost no ancestry from this group. I'll have to look up the exact time frame again.

But if you want to know more, razib khan also has lots on ancient dna research.

Something that hadn’t occurred to me until reading this comment…

As I understand it, Ashkenazi Jews were a primarily urban population for the past 1,500+ years. Given that cities tend to be population shredders, does anyone have any idea how that may have impacted the Ashkenazim? Did they nevertheless have large families like the Haredim today, or did their birth rate remain pretty much at replacement after the fall of the Western Roman Empire? Or does that data just not exist? (A quick search failed to pull up anything, but I figure others here may have access to better sources than Google).

It's a bit complicated. I think they were urban dwellers at certain times but after the expulsions from western Europe (13-15th centuries) they lived mostly in rural villages in Eastern Europe.

I propose this selection effect for the Ashkenazi:

Until the Industrial Revolution, we know that rich people had more surviving children. A high proportion of Jews were in g-loaded trades where greater intelligence led to riches. These include being merchants, moneylenders, and rabbis. For Jews, more so than Gentiles, a high IQ was associated with more children.

The explanation that I've heard is that Jewish culture in the shtetl selected heavily for verbal IQ as demonstrated by analysis, research and commentary on Jewish holy texts. If you wanted to have lots of kids the easiest way to do that was to be a distinguished rabbi and scholar - which is why the Ashkenazim are specifically advantaged with regards to verbal IQ, but less gifted in terms of spatial IQ. There's also a decent case to be made (though I'm not sure where the current research is on this) that the higher rates of certain mental/developmental disorders among Ashkenazim are the result of this process as well - potentially with a similar mechanism to sickle-cell, where you have an allele that confers a reproductive advantage when heterozygous but negative outcomes when homozygous.

Debating the existence of racial IQ differences is boring because they so obviously exist. Now that we're allowed to talk about it, I find myself not really wanting to. There really is no legitimate debate.

It's funny how that works, 7 years ago I would have found a post like this cathartic for cutting through the gaslighting of the time and validating my taboo conclusions after reviewing the issue. But now that I've moved beyond any degree of uncertainty and impervious to the gaslighting from the mainstream consensus, these kind of posts just come across as tedious and passe. The time to contribute something interesting to discourse with your platform on this topic was 7 years ago, dude.

I don't think that Japanese are smarter than Britons. They perform better on IQ tests, but it is clear to me just based on examining Japanese accomplishments and Japanese history that it is unlikely that Japanese have any intelligence advantage over Britons. Historically, Britain has been vastly more innovative than Japan in math, science, and social organization. Of course there are many factors that could explain this other than Britons being smarter than Japanese, but given this discrepancy, it is also hard for me to believe that Britons are stupider than Japanese. IQ tests do not perfectly measure intelligence. For example, obviously one can get better at IQ tests by doing more of them, whereas it is much harder to raise overall intelligence by similar levels through practice.

Isn’t it possible that different populations vary in creativity levels independently of IQ? If so, it could be that East Asians are just genetically less likely to be inventors and entrepreneurs, even as they are genetically more likely to have greater raw computational power.

Of course, their form of government, system of education, and various environmental pressures may also explain the difference. I think some IQ enthusiasts tend to give too much credit to IQ and not enough to other explanatory factors.

creativity levels independently of IQ

As often as it's observed that many of these quantities are correlated, even strongly, I think compressing a notion as complex as "intelligence" to a single axis does a large disservice to the complexity of actual human skillsets. It feels like a very crude metric for what it is. Maybe with AGI approaching we'll gain a better understanding of what "intelligence" actually is, because it still feels pretty poorly-defined to me, even if I can't counter with a better suggestion.

Yes, the rationalist community is still unable to get past IQ obsession and recognize that thumos is just as much a function of HBD as IQ. The European cognitive profile, like everyone, is much more than IQ. Things like bravery, boldness have a basis in HBD just the same.

I think you're underestimating how extraordinary recent Japanese history has been. In 1868 Japan was a feudal state with almost no modern technology or contact with the outside world. Within 4 decades it defeated a European great power in a major war. It went from 1200s England to 1900s England in the span of two generations.

Then after the entire country was reduced to ash and much of a generation killed in WWII, within three decades it was the world's second-largest economy. These are the kind of rapid, massive transformations that seem impossible were it not to have happened.

Although Japan and China have demonstrated unprecedented ability to catch up to Western technology, they have not (as of yet) been able to surpass it.

Let's check back in 20 years though. It does seem that China is now pulling ahead.

Edit: And of course China was far ahead of the West during most of the Middle Ages as well. But who knows what national IQs looked liked back then. A lot of selection has probably happened in the generations since.

Another possibility is that Britain (or Europe in general) has a wider distribution of intelligence than Japan does; more geniuses (which would explain the great feats of innovation) but also a much larger (relatively) low-IQ underclass. Japanese people seem far more clustered around an IQ and personality median than Brits are. If Britain was simply better at unlocking the potential of its small number of geniuses than Japan was, you’d get pretty much the result this theory would predict.

GEVH (Greater European Variability Hypothesis)?

I think it's also extremely narrow-minded to assume that intelligence will manifest itself in certain expected outcomes, with the benefit of hindsight. Even if one were to toss the notion of cultural and societal differences entirely out the window, from a purely material standpoint Japan and Britain are very different beyond the superficial similarity of them being island nations.

For why the Islamic lands took a nosedive in IQ, you might want to check rates of cousin marriage- Arab Christians who do not do this at nearly the same rate have much higher IQs.

On the other hand, Italy had higher urbanization than Great Britain during the Middle Ages. Cities, then as now, acted as IQ shredders. Smart people moved to the city where, due to pestilence, they had sub-replacement fertility.

Except, northern Italy, where the big attractive cities are and have been for at least a thousand years, have a higher average iq than Britain and England.

Theory busted. Northern Italy, is of course, essentially German. So perhaps the selection happened earlier when Italy was urbanized and Germany wasn't.

As always, shit gets complicated pretty quick when we're talking about huge spans of time and various different population replacements. That's what makes it interesting.

Smart people moved to the city where, due to pestilence, they had sub-replacement fertility.

Is this (historically) true or conjecture?

On the topic of rank speculation, it might be worth pointing out with regards to your analysis of wealth and limited class mobility that firstborns in particularly are supposedly slightly smarter than their younger siblings on average, and under primogeniture rules you would essentially expect successive firstborns to accumulate lots of wealth, which in turn as you mention would allow them to sustain and have more children. I do not know enough about when and where primogeniture is practiced to comment extensively but it was practiced in England during the Middle Ages from what I recall. No idea if the supposed firstborn IQ advantage could be expected to have a genetic component, but since everyone acknowledges that intelligence is partially cultural maybe it's still relevant.

In theory, one could test this in Germany, assuming that there weren’t large population shifts over the past 200 years (probably not a good bet), since some practiced primogeniture while others practiced partible inheritance. I believe some areas even practiced the opposite of primogeniture, where the youngest son received the bulk of the inheritance, though I’d need to do some rereading to make sure I’m not misremembering something before claiming that for certain.

Interesting!

Harsh winters is the obvious explanation for why light-skinned races (Whites, Jews, Asians) are the smartest while dark-skinned races (Blacks, Indians, Aboriginals) are the dumbest. Obviously, high latitudes select for low melanin that their inhabitants might better absorb precious sunlight and create vitamin D, but whole months without food also select for low time-preference and the ability to plan ahead; you need to work hard most of the year and make sure to save food and wood for winter and avoid eating the seed corn even when you are really hungry. By contrast, tropical jungle environments where there is food year-around which cannot be stored for long before rotting in the heat and humidity inherently select for impulsivity and r-selection. Big brains are calorically expensive; if you don't need them, evolution is not going to make them for you and might even take them away. See Spiegelman's monster and Homo floresiensis.

First of all thanks for sharing the links. Those were interesting.

Harsh winters is the obvious explanation

I wonder. After all, the Inuit aren't particularly bright as far as I know.

And humans originally evolved big brains in Africa. If food was easily available and abundant year around, there would have been no need for big brains in the first place.

So humans evolved big brains, and then underwent additional selection pressure to get to an even higher level of intelligence outside of Africa. I believe that this is likely intra-human selection pressure in a Malthusian environment. Selection came about because of societal pressures. How else can we explain the extreme intelligence of the Ashkenazi?

After all, the Inuit aren't particularly bright as far as I know.

Greenland has an average IQ of 99, slightly higher than Denmark(lol). I suspect the dominant reason for the lack of eskimo rocket scientists is, firstly, lack of eskimos, and secondly, a culture that doesn't value education because they're still partly a traditional culture and the more urbanized ones are, well, impressively culturally dysfunctional. https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/average-iq-by-country

I tried to find a source for the average IQ of Nunavut. Nothing that seemed remotely trustworthy and plausible. Also apparently IQ is an acronym for something different in an eskimo language.

I suspect the dominant reason for the lack of eskimo rocket scientists is, firstly, lack of eskimos, and secondly, a culture that doesn't value education because they're still partly a traditional culture and the more urbanized ones are, well, impressively culturally dysfunctional.

Also the extremely high rate of alcoholism. There are very few rocket scientists who are functional alcoholics.

Yes, I said the urban ones are impressively culturally dysfunctional.

I doubted you so I looked up the data elsewhere and got a similar result. European admixture is only about 25-30% (source: Claude pulled it out of its butt) so that can't fully explain it either. It would appear that Greenlandic people possibly are much smarter than the average Native American.

Maybe there is something to this northern latitude thing, although I still don't really feel it.

I mean, by that literal statistic, eskimos are slightly smarter than Europeans- northern European countries are mostly clustered around 96-98.

I'd still like to find data on average IQ in nunavut. But I remember reading that siberian tribespeople have similar grades to ethnic russians and are estimated as having IQ like mongolians; eskimos are relatively recent migrants from Siberia IIRC, so it's very possible to me that this is the same gene mutations that led to high oriental IQ.

We’re reaching levels of cope that shouldn’t be possible.

“It wouldn’t matter if Lynn had miraculously estimated the IQ of every nation state with pinpoint accuracy, his methods did not come even close to meeting typical standards of scientific rigour, and so no "rational" person can take his dataset seriously”

Noting first that this isn’t literally a concession, where is the curiosity here? If someone who is racist and has bad data nevertheless gets the right answer, shouldn’t you like update on that? Shouldn’t you at least consider the possibility that your preconceived notions about at least one of

  • Racism,

  • Lynn’s data quality, or

  • The scientific method

Is wrong?

I shudder to think of low the probability of guessing the perfect values would be at random. I'd start attending church with Pascal.

The floodgates have already opened, enough people in good standing (tm) have directly or indirectly acknowledged it, so Scott squarely goes to the category of latecomers riding a wave of consensus rather than challenging a consensus. Not that there's much wrong with that, it's understandable, but it's funny that all these liberal figures like Destiny are admitting IQ realism while giving 0 credit to everybody who was brave enough to come before them and challenge the consensus.

Destiny for example spent years debating the "race realists" and insulting them in every which way and denying IQ realism. Now he accepts it but gives 0 acknowledgment that he was wrong and the people he's spent 10 years denigrating were right. It's a change in the wind says I.

They'll adopt the IQ realism position and give 0 credit or acknowledgment to the icky people that were right 10+ years ago.

I should note Scott deserves credit for acknowledging Lynn and Kirkegaard, so my "adopting IQ realism without acknowledging the people who challenged the consensus and turned out to be correct" applies more to this general trend than Scott's post which does acknowledge them.

Scott has always accepted HBD, almost certainly since the hungarian science fair article in 2017 and likely since the Nrx FAQ in 2013.

Sure, but he's only publicly acknowledging it because of the shifts in the political and cultural winds. Like I said, it's understandable, but it's notable that he's only publicly acknowledging it now that it's safe to do so.

Op says:

I sincerely doubt that there are any Dark and Heretical ideas he holds but is forced to deny or decline to defend. It's refreshing

But the writing is already on the wall for HBD realism and has already gone mainstream IMO. If he does hold any other Dark and Heretical idea he's going to keep it to himself until Twitter intelligentsia opinion changes on the topic.

But the writing is already on the wall for HBD realism and has already gone mainstream IMO.

I am surprised by the claim it is mainstream. I consider bringing this topic up in your work Slack to be a great way to get fired, for example.

Well, Scott seems to be defending and crediting Lynn quite vociferously. It doesn't really get much earlier than that for the modern, data-based HBD movement, though sadly for Lynn he happens to be dead before the tides turned.

I know Scott has endorsed Cremieux (or at least drew attention to them) and the latter was doing HBD before it was mainstream. And is, more importantly, alive to celebrate.

Yeah Scott is acknowledging them, I agree. I clarified in my post.

I was about to post about this, I think the top comment on the subreddit post puts it best.

Holy vibe shift Batman

Between this, Steve Sailer's book tour and Elon letting the world know about the Pakistani rape gangs in the UK, it really does feel like something has shifted. The stuff that edgy rightoids were reading about 10 years ago is now just out there in the open (relatively speaking).

Wokism is over. It overplayed its hand. What comes next? I don't know but I'm excited to find out.

Elon letting the world know about the Pakistani rape gangs in the UK

I don't understand the strange conspiratorial language people use when they talking about Elon talking about the rape gangs. It was hardly forbidden knowledge, I mean there was an extensive Wikipedia page(s) about it. The reason nobody outside Britain knew or cared is because people generally don't know or care about things that happened over a decade ago in foreign countries. How many people outside Britain know anything about other very important British political issues from the time? Could the average American offer even a sentence on other scandals like the death of David Kelly, infected blood, the postmasters, News of the World or Windrush?

there was an extensive Wikipedia page(s) about it.

You mean "grooming gang moral panic in the UK"? You don't think the very existence of that article written by a leftist UK activist supports the conspiratorial language?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rochdale_child_sex_abuse_ring

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telford_child_sexual_exploitation_scandal

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peterborough_sex_abuse_case

etc. etc.

"grooming gang moral panic in the UK"

There is no article with that title.

An article which has now been folded in to the general 'child sex abuse in the UK' article, which of course mirrors the laundering of Pakistani rape gangs that we saw in the Alexis Jay inquiry. Instead of denying Pakistani rape gangs, just muddy the waters by talking about all child sex abuse.

just muddy the waters by talking about all child sex abuse

The article does definitely does cover race and gives an airing to both sides.

Oh certainly they haven't just deleted all the stuff about the rape gangs.

My point was more that Pakistani clans who sexually tortured hundreds of thousands of native girls over several decades in a liberal democracy with the cooperation of various organs of the state probably deserves its own article.

In the same way that The Battle of Britain has its own article in addition to Strategic Bombing in WW2. For someone to delete the Battle of Britain article would be suspicious, particularly if the existence of the battle was a live political issue, as the rape gangs are.

You're right that there was no conspiracy of silence, there was a conspiracy of murmuring.

Bringing it to the attention of the world had the effect of kicking the British political class up the arse and forcing them to do more than the bare minimum needed to brush it back under the carpet (although Labour is certainly trying with its 'limited number of local enquiries' and 'short national audit').

Wokism is over.

Someone tell my workplace HR and their mandatory training. It includes warnings about microaggressions, etc.

So many familiar sneerclub names in that thread. Even if there's a vibe shift, some groups are still fighting it out from the fuhrerbunker.

I think the average /r/SSC mod seems to have thrown up their hands at this point. They can't censor the topic very well if even Scott is talking about it, and he was the one who had the old CWR thread forced off (if memory serves, I only frequented the subreddit and The Motte's sub when it had been a year or so since the declaration).

I know that they'd have banned you for that, and even banned people for saying it can't be discussed and that they should go elsewhere (that happened to me, though they were nice enough to reverse it when I brought it up in the mod mail).

They can't censor the topic very well if even Scott is talking about it, and he was the one who had the old CWR thread forced off (if memory serves, I only frequented the subreddit and The Motte's sub when it had been a year or so since the declaration).

Correct; Scott betrayed us. See "RIP Culture War Thread" for a refresher.

"betrayed" is an awfully strong word for "asked people to not do something in association with the name of his blog."

Sigh.. Shame I never got to see things at their true peak. Not that we've done poorly here, I think The Motte has outlasted the initial pessimism and then some. And in the end, our migration off Reddit was because of Reddit turning the Eye of Sauron towards us with a frequency too high to bear.

If I had a Christmas list, I'd put Scott reversing his decision and/or regularly signal-boosting us pretty high up there. He attempted to smother something beautiful, and he acknowledges that.

Who are the SCC mods now? They hid the list iirc, so I just assumed there was a takeover by the powerjannie clique.

I can see them just fine on my Reddit app. It's one that's been modified to hide ads, but I don't think I ever touched anything in the APK that affects the mod list.

Our very own Zorba is still on there, but from memory he isn't active. I believe Bakkot does most of the modding there.

/images/17370577062779107.webp

It's not hidden.

https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/about/moderators

I see a forbidden page on that link

/images/17370571677064116.webp

Oh, you can't see the list without being logged into reddit now.

Gotta love absurdly weak protections. Like them showing [Blocked] when there's a comment/post from a user who has blocked you: You can just log out and read it.

(Twitter was right to remove the "feature" that blocking someone would remove you from their screen (only) while they were logged in.)

All subs Ive seen work like that now.

We heard about the Pakistani rape gangs before. It died down and nothing happened. Same with Cologne. When the wokeness wave recedes you can light a spark, but you can't get a fire going and you get smothered by the next incoming wave.

People seem to forget that The Bell Curve was discussed neutrally on major news networks, by academics and in the mainstream press in the mid-1990s, a positive piece on it made the cover of The New Republic at the apogee of its circulation, it was discussed in every publication and had many open defenders. These things always ebb and flow.

Right, Jared Taylor used to get invited to debate people on mainstream news. Here he is on the execrable Phil Donahue’s MSNBC show in 2003. Here he is in 1998 on Fox News debating Puerto Rican statehood, and nobody is treating him as beyond the pale. Here he is on Hardball with Chris Matthews in ‘99. He was even called as an expert witness by the defense at a black man’s murder trial, explaining why the man was right to feel threatened by two other black men whom he said he shot in self-defense.

Forget? I wasn't even alive at the time!

(That's illuminating, I had presumed it was controversial from the word go)

It was, but that's just it; it was controversial, as in there was genuine disagreement, as distinct from being universally condemned.

He was controversial; I vaguely remember a Gould polemic against the Bell Curve, back in the day (thought it was in the Mismeasure of Man, but that was published in 1981).

The difference was controversial meant "lots of people criticize you and imply bad things about you," not "you get blocked from all media organs for all eternity, as does anyone you're associated with."

Wokism is over.

I'd wait until it gets purged from the school system before calling that.

I sincerely doubt that there's are any Dark and Heretical ideas he holds but is forced to deny or decline to defend.

I suspect that he's far more sceptical on the trans issue than he lets on. This article was staggeringly evasive. "Yes it's bad that everyone is coming out as trans and we should try to understand why it's happening, but people who investigate why it's happening have had their brains broken by the issue, and the fact that two of the parties in a seminal court case on this issue have silly names means that you're silly if you pay any attention to this issue. Yes it's bad that confused teenagers are undergoing irreversible and disfiguring medical procedures they will likely come to regret, but the precautionary principle demands that we should allow them to even though the evidence base is so weak. Even if it doesn't pan out, in the scheme of things when it comes to medical malpractice it's not that big a deal, and the fact that so many European countries are taking steps to prevent teenagers from undergoing disfiguring medical procedures is just proof that they're all Stalinist nanny states. Anyway I'm not an expert on this so take everything I say with a pinch of salt" - when has "not being an expert on something" ever stopped Scott from expressing a definitive opinion on a contentious political issue, whether it's Covid treatments or rape culture or sociology or criminology or...?

There's also the tail end of this article, in which he alludes to transgenderism possibly being a Western culture-bound syndrome.

I suspect that he's far more sceptical on the trans issue than he lets on

I mean, subtle people can take different positions on different parts of the trans issue. One part is - are "trans" people really, in any sense, "actually women" - are they typically male or female in terms of psychology, the "brain"? Are they literally "women trapped in a man's body"? Even if not, do they at least have strong and deeply set desires to be the other gender, such that not satisfying them inevitably leads to pain and suffering?

And another part is - even if you don't believe any of that, even if you think it's just a weird social phenomenon caused by something like the modern social environment being inhospitable to real masculinity, lack of exercise for youth leading to low testosterone, xenoestrogens - you can still believe that the kind of person who thinks they are trans should transition, and live as a woman. Because it's the best option for them, or because they want to.

I think Scott probably is concealing, or at least being evasive about, some beliefs in the first category. But I think he's solidly progressive in the second. (I'm anti on both, even though I find most anti arguments generally bad)

Also, there are a lot of trans people in the rationalist community, so I think Scott has a lot of trans friends, so given his previously stated aversion to conflict believing or stating those people aren't their claimed gender, or shouldn't be trans, is something that might be tough, if he was otherwise inclined to believe that.

I agree with all of the above.

There's also the tail end of this article, in which he alludes to transgenderism possibly being a Western culture-bound syndrome.

Hes mentioned it again since, and I think he believes it - but this doesnt mean he is anti trans. This is the guy who was ground zero for the HBD therefore socialism argument. @self_made_human

HBD therefore socialism

Two of these three words feel like a gross misrepresentation of the article.

The most HBD thing he says in that article is that " IQ is 50% to 80% heritable". He does not talk about group differences at all.

The thing you call socialism is likely based on this paragraph:

Ozy once told me that the law of comparative advantage was one of the most inspirational things they had ever read. This was sufficiently strange that I demanded an explanation.

Ozy said that it proves everyone can contribute. Even if you are worse than everyone else at everything, you can still participate in global trade and other people will pay you money. It may not be very much money, but it will be some, and it will be a measure of how your actions are making other people better off and they are grateful for your existence.

Below that, he talks about donating a portion of your income to whatever causes you feel are important. This hardly seems to be a call for the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Fair point about HBD. Is there a simple name I could have used instead? Socialism is not really about the parts you quoted, but about the very extensive discussion of what you "deserve", even if not directly about money. If I had to pick a quote, it would be

The best reason not to say that is that we view Ramanujan as intellectually gifted. But the very phrase tells us where we should classify that belief. Ramanujan’s genius is a “gift” in much the same way your parents giving you a trust fund on your eighteenth birthday is a “gift”, and it should be weighted accordingly in the moral calculus.

HBD therefore socialism argument.

To be fair, I have long been uncertain whether widespread acceptance of HBD (to which I claim no strong opinion) isn't the right-wing slam dunk that I see it occasionally presented as. In particular, a very extreme left view of it is pretty terrifying too: "comrade, we've discovered a way to measure ability. You know, from each according to his (or her, or their) ability, and we've deemed you to have lots."

There's a reason I like to bring up HBD blogger "Jayman" on these discussions, because he was rather forthright about his support for HBD, and hard line hereditarianism (for one, he liked to argue that poor outcomes for children of single mothers are entirely due to genetic differences between the kind of women who end up single mothers and the kind who end up married mothers [and between the kind of men who knock up the former and the kind of men who marry the latter], and have nothing to do with the actual single-parent environment at all), being about justifying racial spoils in perpetuity. He'd argue that the infamous crime stat differentials are entirely due to blacks being genetically predisposed to criminality… and therefore they can't help it, and thus society owes it to them to punish them less harshly and less often than whites to compensate for this genetic disprivilege; and that black-on-white (and black-on-Asian, and black-on-Jewish) crime — which he once characterized in HBDChick's comments section as "a one-way race war" — is simply something that the less criminally-inclined races are obligated to tolerate, even indulge. That the reality of HBD means that the "genetic have" races are morally obligated to redistribute as much of their wealth to the "genetic have-not" races — particularly blacks — as is necessary to "close the gaps" and produce "racial equity" in perpetuity.

Georgism for IQ would be hilarious to suggest just for making that sort of person think about the consequences.
"If you have the IQ to post about Rick and Morty on Reddit all day, you could easily afford your tax payments by working as an investment banker instead. Hurry up: Cleetus's UBI won't pay for itself"

Reminds me a bit of Mankiw's Optimal Taxation of Height parody paper. IQ is observable, inelastic, and correlated with income, and so the government should collect IQ measurements and tax those with high IQ more.

I hadn't thought of that one in years, thanks for reminding me!

Thanks for pointing to the Mankiw, that's a pretty funny idea.

Georgism for virtue, by contrast, is already widespread. The idiom is "ruining it for everyone".

"If you have enough self-control, intelligence, and/or temperance that restricting your freedom is an injury, you're obviously wise enough to find a way to be able to pay the taxes on the licenses and permission slips we deem necessary before you may exercise those freedoms. If it saves just one life taken by the most selfish, nasty person in society, it's worth it."

Hes mentioned it again since, and I think he believes it - but this doesnt mean he is anti trans.

No, but "gender dysphoria is a very recent phenomenon almost entirely parochial to the West" contradicts at least three of the core tenets of gender ideology. I don't think hardcore trans activists (who are a penny a dozen in the circles in which Scott moves) would appreciate the nuances of a statement like "gender dysphoria is probably a culture-bound mental illness, but that doesn't mean trans people aren't deserving of respect and shouldn't be entitled to do with their bodies as they please", and I think Scott knows this better than anyone, which is why he's so cagey and evasive whenever the topic comes up. People have been smeared as transphobic bigots for much less.

This is the guy who was ground zero for the HBD therefore socialism argument.

I think a more accurate gloss of his position as I recall it is "HBD therefore UBI". I appreciate that there's significant overlap between socialism and UBI, but I don't think they're interchangeable or that one necessarily implies the other. "He who does not work, neither shall he eat" was a popular slogan in the early Soviet Union, after all.

contradicts at least three of the core tenets of gender ideology

Sure, because they are highly sensitive to any deviation, but you shouldnt take that too seriously in looking forward. The "haha yes we are transing your kids and its good" branch already does pop up occasionally, and if* the cause keeps progressing, its plausible that this could grow more visible, incorporate stuff like

Before anyone gets too excited about this, I want to stress a version of the point Bures got right earlier: there is no neutral culture. Having lots of transgender people is downstream of cultural choices. But having lots of cisgender people is also downstream of cultural choices. There isn’t infinite flexibility - evolution ensures a bias towards heterosexuality, for obvious reasons. But there’s a lot of flexibility - Spartan men married and had sex with women, but they thought this was a dumb annoying thing they had to do to have children, and sex with young boys was the obvious enjoyable satisfying option. Even within evolution’s constraints, culture can do some pretty weird stuff. I think you could probably have a culture where 99% of people were transgender, where it was generally accepted that everyone transitioned on their 18th birthday, and where only a few people (disproportionately schizophrenic) would object or see anything wrong with this.

...and remain accepted/eventually become the standard.

*uncertain in the near future, and independently of current events, I give it a good chance that trans isnt part of the progressive vision long-term.

I do think it’s suspicious and bad that everyone is suddenly becoming transgender, and I support efforts to figure out why and stop it at the root, in some way which will prevent so many kids from wanting to be transgender. But it seems cruel to fail to figure that out, let lots of kids become horribly depressed about their gender, and deny them access to treatment.

I think that's quite outspokenly anti-trans (or at least against the mainstream of trans activism, and likely the cultural milieu that Scott personally resides in as a Rat in SF).

Even if it seems like a very restrained argument, keep in mind that many (?most ?the most outspoken) trans people think that an increase in absolute and relative numbers of trans people is a victory, that the percentage of people de-transitioning is minimal, and that the idea should receive more share of the memplex and every effort should be made to have people frequently reminded that transitioning is an option and coax them to do it if they show the slightest inclination or anything that can be interpreted as dissatisfaction with their current gender.

I will caveat this with the disclaimer that I might be unfairly maligning the average trans person or trans activist. The UK, and certainly not India, have very little of that compared to the hotspot that is the US. If the majority of trans people just want to be left alone, or if most activists only endorse the right to choose and not be discriminated against, I can't say with certainty. I see things from a great remove, after all.

I think that's quite outspokenly anti-trans (or at least against the mainstream of trans activism

It's buried inside a big post and a lot of obfuscatory verbiage. The point of saying something like this is to communicate it to others. Saying it without communicating it may as well be not saying it, even if some Internet weirdos might parse it mechanically and figure it out.

At some point we're going to need the Bart Simpson meme but with "it's a vibe shift". Jokes aside, it really does seem like the election marked closure for quite a few prior modes of restraint when it comes to blunt communication. It's too early to say if this is going to stick as a meaningful change, but I'm glad of it even in the short run.

One thing that stuck out to me was how much he emphasised the environmental component of IQ. Maybe he genuinely believes this to be the biggest cause of group differences (and to be fair, someone with his education is more qualified than I am to comment on that), maybe it's wishful thinking or maybe it's a hedge against accusations of racism; after all, he's can claim he's not saying that some groups of people are inherently less intelligent than others.

I mean, to be fair, figuring out which direction causation runs for shithole countries having low IQ is actually a relevant question.

I agree. Scott seems to be doing his best to mollify the anti-HBD crowd, by claiming that a partially genetic and partially environmental explanation for IQ is actually the anti-racist position. It gives them a graceful out, with the option of acknowledging the evidence without entirely overruling their worldview in one fell swoop.

If you take anti-racism seriously, this should make you breath a sigh of relief! This finding on its own doesn’t disprove a genetic component to racial IQ gaps. But it does suggest that the genetic component is less than 100%. Practically nobody ever claimed it was 100% (Charles Murray estimates 50%), so this doesn’t refute anyone in particular. But it’s consistent with what both sides of the debate say, and a natural prediction of the environmentalist position.

Which is definitely misleading, because what's commonly accepted as the anti-racist stance is that IQ is 100% environmental, and that the IQ figures for much of the world are bogus. If they accept the substantial amount of evidence for lower IQs of African Americans, that's entirely environmental and thus proof of concerted and active racism. If a trillion dollars are spent to eliminate all inter-group differences and fails, then you've both not spent enough money and there's subtle structural racism that eats up the gains.

I'm pretty sure that most anti-racists would outright deny that if environments were equalized, there would be any significant difference between races.

Edit:

after all, he's can claim he's not saying that some groups of people are inherently less intelligent than others.

Seems to me that Scott would balk at saying it out loud, but also simultaneously not deny that he believes it. In a "that's not what I said" versus "I don't believe that" sense.

I'm pretty sure that most anti-racists would outright deny that if environments were equalized, there would be any significant difference between races.

I don't think you'd even get to that point - most of these people would deny the validity of IQ tests as a means of measuring intelligence in the first place.

As was seriously advocated by class I took in college.

The biggest woke idealists even deny the existence of differences in intelligence on the individual level. They think that anyone can be taught anything. Lysenkoism. They might say things like "imagine believing in IQ, lmao" or "IQ tests only measure someone's skill at taking an IQ test", or "intelligence isn't among the important human qualities", and perpetuate myths about social ineptitude among the supposed smartest, and so on...

I'm guessing it's a combination of the 1st 2, since Scott seems likely to believe that 3 wouldn't work; the people who tend to accuse him of racism would do so regardless of whatever hedging he might choose to do except on the margins, and those margins probably aren't that big. Like most people who dive into this topic, at least from my perception, he probably hopes that the environmental factors, which can be more easily controlled than genetic ones, are very important. Thus he ends up genuinely believing it.

It could also be a combination of 2 and 3 - also like most people who dive into this topic, he probably wishes that the types of people who would accuse him of racism for exploring this topic in good faith would be willing to modulate such accusations based on hedging. And so through wishful thinking, he genuinely believes that such hedging would help him.

Like most people who dive into this topic, at least from my perception, he probably hopes that the environmental factors, which can be more easily controlled than genetic ones, are very important.

Can they? Inequities have continued to exist despite countless social engineering efforts. If we just need to modify the environment more, that's pretty dispiriting: it's not easy and has failed.

On the other hand, if the cause is genetic, I can more easily imagine a fully egalitarian, rich world a century from now, with some new, effective gene therapy that we can put our efforts into making universally accessible.

The rather spotty - at best - track record of social engineering efforts is a good point. However, despite my generally tech-optimistic stance, I think population-engineering efforts through gene therapy has an even worse track record, i.e. none. That doesn't mean that it's worse or less likely to work, but I do think, until we actually see real-world examples that gene therapy - and specifically population-wide gene therapy of this sort - can be implemented, we are correct in believing that environmental factors are easier to manipulate than genetic ones.

Boosting Africa and India into having IQ’s in the mid eighties is enough for them to be functional lower-middle income countries. You don’t need a ginormous environmental effect.

India is a lower-middle income country?

LOWER-MIDDLE INCOME ECONOMIES ($1,146 TO $4,515). [51]. Angola, Honduras, Papua New Guinea. Bangladesh, India, Philippines. Benin, Jordan, Samoa

https://datahelpdesk.worldbank.org/knowledgebase/articles/906519-world-bank-country-and-lending-groups

We might disagree on the criteria for being a "functional" one, but it matches my own standards in a way most of Africa doesn't.

Is it high-functioning? Hell no, but it's also not Sub-Saharan Africa, and better than Nigeria and the like (I happened to have a nice chat with a Nigerian doctor who joined my workplace)

I expect that in a decade or two, if AI didn't steal livelihoods, we'd reach Thai or Eastern European standards. Think of how the average middle-class American looks at how impoverished the middle-class Brit is (and the latter really isn't starving to death or has a absolute dearth of consumer goods) and perhaps that's how they'd look at the middle-class Indian.

Thai or Eastern Europe standards

There is an enormous chasm between Thai and Eastern Europe. The latter are catching up with the west very fast, the lag is only 10 years. In Poland, for example, the purchasing power today is similar to that of Brits in 2018. The purchasing power of Thais is more like Britain in the 90s.

Poland was always a more Western European country than Eastern European. The East Slavs have always been different and they are in much worse shape.

It might [be] too early to celebrate the death of wokeness

If/when the estate of Dr. Seuss returns On Beyond Zebra and McElligott's Pool to print, I will consider wokism to have expired, gone to meet its maker, run down the final curtain, and joined the choir invisible.

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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