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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 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 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.
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.
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