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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32065 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 31, 2022

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Reading and understanding these arguments takes significant investment. So we need to use some manner of rational principle to decide which arguments are worth the investment to understand and engage with. That the argument is endorsed by Eric Turkheimer (a confessed propagandist) and @tailcalled (from my perspective, a random and unknown internet person who describes him or herself on Twitter as an autistic hobbyist gender researcher) does not come close to surmounting the threshold of reputability that it would take to persuade me to engage with it.

Just as physicists are loathe to engage with (and likely debunk) random cranks who come bearing plans for perpetual motion machines, and number theorists are loathe to engage with (and likely debunk) random cranks who come bearing new schemes for cryptography, no one should feel compelled to spend the investment that it takes to engage with (and likely debunk) whatever latest wad of argumentative complexity Turkheimer has concocted to further his political end. The fact that you personally vouch for it means nothing to me.

One productive step you could take if you want people to engage with the argument is to do the work of simplifying the argument to the point where it doesn't take significant investment to understand it. Boil it down to a couple of sentences with a simple toy model, and explain how it analogizes back to the original claim. But your whole method of repeatedly posting to the front page "here's a link to a paper from a confessed liar, go do a ton of homework to understand it if you want to consider yourself rational" is just one iteration of a gish gallop.

One productive step you could take if you want people to engage with the argument is to do the work of simplifying the argument to the point where it doesn't take significant investment to understand it. Boil it down to a couple of sentences with a simple toy model, and explain how it analogizes back to the original claim. But your whole method of repeatedly posting to the front page "here's a link to a paper from a confessed liar, go do a ton of homework to understand it if you want to consider yourself rational" is just one iteration of a gish gallop.

What's wrong with the toy model I gave in my article, of education? That genes affect intelligence which affect exam completion which affect education?

Paste in the specific couple of sentences that summarize the view and I'll take a look.

This is exactly the conclusion I came to as well. tailcalled seems more interested in obfuscating and claiming we can't know anything than clarifying and getting closer to the truth (despite occasional protestations of the opposite).

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