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