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Notes -
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 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.
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