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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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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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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