site banner
naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32014 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 31, 2022

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

24
Top New Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Indeed, the name of the Statue of Liberty is “liberty enlightening the world”, and faces outward, to teach other nations the values of America. Lazarus was a Zionist whose family owned slaves, and also a bad poet, so she really should not have a privileged position in dictating American sentiments about immigrants. What’s more, in the inauguration ceremony of the statue, it is repeatedly mentioned that immigrants ought to be of high moral character to be allowed in.

As you write, America was a country of Europeans founding their own European societies within America. This is not what is commonly understood as immigration, but colonizing. Japan did not emigrate to Okinawa, they colonized it. When there is a direct continuation from your homeland to your new home, and you divide almost completely your life from the natives, that is obviously settler colonialism. We talk about Greek colonies and settlements in history, not Greek “immigration”.

The statue faces southeast, in order not to look at New Jersey.

No, seriously, the statue faces the entrance to New York Harbor. It can't really face outwards, because Long Island is in the way.

The pilgrims, when they showed up at Plymouth Rock, were not looking to join the existing Native American society. They were looking to build their own city upon a hill.

It seems that this analysis suggests that we should embrace "settlers" from Mexico who want to move into and stay within spanish seeking enclaves over any immigrant interested in integrating into US society.

Not really, Mexicans aren't founding cities in the wilderness, they're trying to join an existing society. The rest of the post goes into this.

So then the second group of anglos who came to join the settlements weren't settlers either.

Settlers vs immigrants seems like semantics, and if the author wants to accuse a large group of lying off that back of that semantic difference he probably needs to bring a lot more evidence to the game (and as you are posting it without comment, by extension that means you need to bring more evidence I think, or perhaps you are the author? More commentary needed to clarify there).

For a start your interpretation seems to suggest that if I emigrated to the United States with no intention of joining the existing society, then I am a settler and not an immigrant. So the more I don't want to assimilate the more I fit in with the founding ethos of the US? That seems somewhat suspect logically.

Legally of course it's a distinction without a difference. The US government is unlikely to accept my excuse that I am not immigrating but rather settling as I move in my extended Scottish clan. For your argument to hinge on there being a difference in some kind of moral way I think you need to do a lot more work on fleshing out that section. Other than wanting to assimilate vs keeping yourself apart what are the differences practically?

For another, let's say we accept your premise. The US is not a nation of immigrants it is a nation of settlers. Ok, so now your opponents nod sagely and say Ok, then let us allow more people to come in and settle. What does that actually change? Do you think it will change their argument outside of a simple word change? Or they symbolically gift a square foot of Montana to each person like buying a lairdship or a piece of the moon? Would you then tip your cap and say "Well I guess they are settlers now, my argument has been torpedoed!" Somehow I would doubt it. Which means the settlers vs immigrant dichotomy (real or not) is not the fundamental issue at stake.

The fundamental idea that the US was founded by groups of people who travelled to build new lives there from some other location. That is what people mean when they say a nation of immigrants. Whether they are semantically settlers or colonists or immigrants is really orthogonal to WHY people make that argument and what they are justifying (correctly or not).

Add that in with a whole bunch of leftist bashing (which is really irrelevant to the central logical claim that is trying to be proven (that settling is not the same as immigrating) and should probably have been excised for posting here). And it is a thumbs down from me I am afraid.

I'd suggest revisiting that central claim, cut out all the unrelated rhetorical attacks and try to build a logical structure as to whether settling and immigration are practically different and if so how. Try to buttress that argument because it is the central spine of the whole piece and it currently is not strong enough to support the weight. Repackage it for the Motte a little better perhaps as well with some commentary.

In addition to the problems others have pointed out regarding your failure to explain why the distinction between "settlers" and "immigrants" is relevant to anything anyone cares about, there seems to be an empirical problem: Let's look at 1890; you seem to say that, once the "frontier was closed," that subsequent arrivals were "immigrants," rather than "settlers."

But, what about people who arrived before 1890, but decided to live not on the frontier but in established communities? Weren't they "immigrants" rather than "settlers"? According to this report on the 1890 census at page , as of 1890 89 percent of foreign-born residents lived in the North Atlantic (ie, PA and above) or the Midwest, which were hardly the frontier. In 1850, 59 percent lived in the North Atlantic region. That seems to indicate that the US has been a country of, as you say, "immigrants," rather than "settlers" for much longer than you assume.

Other users have already pointed out the obvious ahistorocity of your central premise, no one with the possible exception of some eskimos in Alaska and Northern Canada and some uncontacted tribesman in the south American jungle is really a "native" of this hemisphere, least of all anyone who would plausibly be identified as white.

Accordingly I'm going to approach your question from the opposite direction. Who does the lie "that the US is not a nation of settlers" serve? and I suspect I have an answer.

The US is somewhat unique among nations in that it was not only explicitly founded, but that it was founded on a set of intellectual principles rather than notions of blood or territory. We Hold These Truths to be Self Evident... and all that. The United States as a nation has, from it's inception, been a cultural alliance first and everything else second. This is what Teddy Roosevelt was describing when he decried "hyphenated Americans".

I stand for straight Americanism unconditioned and unqualified, and I stand against every form of hyphenated Americanism. I do not speak of the hyphen when it is employed as a mere convenience, although personally, I like to avoid its use even in such manner. I speak and condemn its use whenever it represents an effort to form political parties along racial lines or to bring pressure to bear on parties and politicians, not for American purposes, but in the interest of some group of voters of a certain national origin, or of the country from which they or their fathers came.

Americanism is not a matter of creed, birthplace or national descent, but of the soul and of the spirit.

...and this has always stuck in the craw of a certain tribe of European intellectuals and rootless cosmopolitans because that spirit and soul, while not explicitly Christian, is heavily influenced by Christian ideals, and stands in direct repudiation of all their grand social theories. The US's wealth and success through the 19th and 20th centuries where their own projects (the Cult of Reason, Leninsm, Hitlerism, etc...) failed is the elephant in the sitting room that the intellectual class is desperate to ignore and that is why, for the last 100 years or so, academia has dedicated itself to undermining and eliminating any notion of American Exceptionalism. AkChtUaLLY judging people by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin is the real racism and other such nonsense.

I say to Hell with that, and to Hell with the entire psuedo-Marxist, post-modern, quibbling about definitions intellectual masturbation upon which your entire post is built. It's bullshit, all of it, and has no place here in the new world.

Wait, what’s the certain tribe?

Given the OP’s context, I’d assume “Jews.” That doesn’t strike me as your style.

I was thinking of the Young Hegelians and their disciples.

Though the irony is that there is a fair bit of overlap there.

“Say what you like about national socialism; at least it’s an ethos.”

*muttering* fucking nihilists man

When we consider the lie that America is a nation of immigrants

Starting with this assumption, you really need to prove it. I find it hard to read the rest when you start with such an incorrect premise. Especially when you say things like:

To begin with, it’s important to note that immigrants have never been the dominant force in American society.

If you read your American history, you should know that all of the white folks here in the U.S. were immigrants. Immigrants were absolutely the dominant force in American society during the most pivotal period - when American society was actually being built. That's what people mean when they say we are a 'nation of immigrants.' On top of that, we have have multiple waves of immigration Throughout our history, in the early 19th century and around the turn of the 20th.

When you say immigrants do you really mean 'non-whites' or 'non-British?' If so you should just come out and say that, it would make much more sense based on the argument you seem to be making. The premises you are taking to start this argument right now makes me not very interested in reading past the first bit.

You have failed to engage on even a cursory level with the distinction the OP is drawing between settlers and immigrants. If you think this distinction is specious or lacks explanatory power and utility, that’s fine and you should make an argument for it, but you appear to just be accusing OP of lying, whereas the failure here is on the part of your reading comprehension.

I don't see any need to argue minor details of architecture when the foundation of the structure is so clearly unsound.

but you appear to just be accusing OP of lying, whereas the failure here is on the part of your reading comprehension.

OP starts by accusing a fairly large group of people to be lying, and does not give any indication that they're interested in arguing for their claim at all. Moreover, when they do get around to making something resembling an argument, it's largely a definitional dispute. Calling someone lying because they might have used a different definition of a word strikes me as less-than-charitable. If anything, it reminds me of radical trans activists who scream their lungs out if you suggest that "woman" is defined by, say, genetics.

He's not accusing anyone of lying, except in the Lies My Teacher Told Me way of reexamining or recontextualizing common misconceptions, trite phrases, just-so stories, and other assorted myths.

Saying "this is a lie" is in fact accusing people of lying. It cannot be otherwise. For there to be a lie, there must be a liar who initially put it out there.

"America is a nation of immigrants" is a thing that a lot of people explicitly say outside the context of a school history class. E.g. https://www.brookings.edu/product/our-nation-of-immigrants/ and https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2013/03/29/nation-immigrants and https://iamla.org/docs/Nation_of_Immigrants.pdf and you can find lots more examples by Googling. I agree that it's ambiguous and somewhat cliched, but that doesn't make it a lie. It's at least arguably true, I think most of the people saying it believe it to be true, and, in my opinion, it points at something important.

I felt I argued my point well. I do think the distinction is spurious enough that he needs to lead with it. Especially when using such inflammatory statements as calling it a lie, he should clarify that he's using a specific definition of the word up front, not 3-5k characters into his argument.

If OP is drawing a distinction between "settlers" and "immigrants" which is not immediately obvious, then it's on the OP to lead with that. As @TheDag said: OP needs to start by demonstrating that America is not in fact a nation of immigrants. Furthermore, OP has to demonstrate that it is in fact a lie (the term "lie" means it must be a deliberate falsehood, rather than an innocent misconception). OP doesn't do either of those things though, instead just hand waving them away. Well fine, but then the rest of his argument is built on quicksand and holds no water.

He establishes the “settlers vs. immigrants” dichotomy at the end of paragraph six. I don’t think expecting people to read six paragraphs is an unreasonable burden.

It absolutely is an unreasonable ask when the OP is leading with an unproven, apparently false, argument.

The entire essay is an exercise in proving the controversial thesis which he lays out in the early part of the essay. This is a bog-standard way to approach to political/philosophical writing. Honestly, it seems like his thesis struck an emotional chord of disgust or epistemic injury in you, which rendered you unable to invest even the five-ten minutes needed to read through his entire essay to determine whether or not he satisfactorily developed an argument in favor of his thesis. I certainly think he ably defended his thesis, but even if he didn’t, it’s not like this essay is a particularly long, difficult, or high-investment read.

So now I'm feeling smug for seeing the first poorly written paragraph and then the monstrous wall of text and then skipping the post entirely.

Life is too short for shittily written monster posts.

Make your point clearly, and succinctly, meeting your readers where they are, and not clothing it in unnecessarily verbosity in an attempt to sound learned.

Or don't, but I'm not going to bother reading it otherwise, nor will most others.

[I know it's not your post, but I'm tired of poorly written posts]

Life is too short for shittily written monster posts.

lol I think you are on the wrong website. a lot of monster posts, some of which are shittily written

More comments

What are you? His publicist?

I read the essay and was still disappointed, maybe even disgusted. “Epistemic injury” had nothing to do with it.

Can't speak for @SubstantialFrivolity but I certainly didn't have an emotional chord struck by this argument. I'm actually very interested in American history, and tend to be pretty anti-immigration at this point in time (at least immigration of mass low skilled people as the left tends to push.)

If anything based on this comment it seems like you are the one who has come in here with an epistemological bias, since you have already heard this person's argument in a podcast.

I'm not in the habit of reading a long, hard to follow essay (because yes, it is both of those things contrary to your assertion otherwise) to see if OP is going to at any point defend the incorrect foundation of his argument stated in the first paragraph. You say that the entire thing is OP developing that thesis, but in no way is it clear that his thesis is the very claim "it's a lie that America is a nation of immigrants". To me, it read as though he was taking that claim for granted and building an argument based upon that very unproven claim as if we all accepted it.

Honestly, it seems like his thesis struck an emotional chord of disgust or epistemic injury in you, which rendered you unable to invest even the five-ten minutes needed to read through his entire essay to determine whether or not he satisfactorily developed an argument in favor of his thesis.

You can fuck right off with the smug statements like this. I am neither disgusted nor injured by OP's poorly written argument. I didn't even reply to OP, in fact. What I have taken exception to is you coming in here, arrogantly telling TheDag "well you obviously didn't bother to engage with the post" in response to his quite reasonable criticism of it.

The OP is a poorly written argument. Either it's poorly written because it attempts to take a controversial position as given, or it's poorly written because it fails to make clear that the controversial position is the thesis which will be addressed. It's not a question of reading comprehension, it's not a question of failure to engage, it is simply a badly written argument. Stop blaming the people pushing back on it as if it's somehow their fault.

He's starting with his thesis.

Then he needs to make it clear that it's his thesis, and not something he is taking as given in his argument.

In defense of TheDag, OP does not make that distinction until the umpteenth paragraph.

And that is because at first we did not begin as a nation of immigrants. We began as a nation of settlers. And that’s, I think, a critically important distinction.

That’s the end of the sixth paragraph. If you couldn’t make it to paragraph six, that’s on you.

  • -10

Well, I did in fact get to the end of the 6th paragraph. But, if the OP buried the lede, that is actually on the OP.

One of the most interesting things about de Tocqueville, for instance, is that he does not mention immigrants or immigration at all in Democracy in America, written in 1830. The word immigrant or immigration does not appear even once.

That's not true (emphasis mine):

In the North, as I have already remarked, a twofold migration ensues upon the abolition of slavery, or even precedes that event when circumstances have rendered it probable: the slaves quit the country to be transported southwards; and the whites of the Northern states, as well as the immigrants from Europe, hasten to fill their place. But these two causes cannot operate in the same manner in the Southern states. On the one hand, the mass of slaves is too great to allow any expectation of their being removed from the country; and on the other hand, the Europeans and Anglo-Americans of the North are afraid to come and inhabit a country in which labour has not been reinstated in its rightful honours."

(Volume 1, Chapter XVIII)

About fifty years ago Ireland began to pour a Catholic population into the United States; on the other hand, the Catholics of America made proselytes, and at the present moment more than a million of Christians professing the truths of the Church of Rome are to be met with in the Union. The Catholics are faithful to the observances of their religion; they are fervent and zealous in the support and belief of their doctrines. Nevertheless they constitute the most republican and the most democratic class of citizens which exists in the United States; and although this fact may surprise the observer at first, the causes by which it is occasioned may easily be discovered upon reflection. I think that the Catholic religion has erroneously been looked upon as the natural enemy of democracy. Amongst the various sects of Christians, Catholicism seems to me, on the contrary, to be one of those which are most favorable to the equality of conditions. . .

(Volume 1, Chapter XVII)

These are just two instances I remembered and knew to look for, I'm sure I could find more with a proper search.

There is a sense in which this supports your point, the Anglo-Americans are distinguished from the European immigrants and a parallel can be made with the settlers.

Good call! I have that book I thought I remembered him talking about immigrants but took the claim for granted. Thanks for the reminder to be skeptical.

If you will pardon some hysterical left wring political doomerism:

I think I'm having an AI risk moment, and you guys are doing it to me!

I was always kinda skeptical of leftist claims re. right wing fascism in the US.

Yes, claiming the election was stolen is a little ehhhhh, but it is also just more traditional right wing signaling about corrupt institutions and blah blah blah.

Yes, circling the wagons around Trump and friends when they were doing clearly sketchy/criminal shit was a little fucked, but could I honestly say the left or the libs wouldn't do the same thing in exchange for the presidency? Of course not.

Yes, conservative justices are openly political and have only enough respect for precedent to secure the fig leaf with blue tack, but come on now. Roe v Wade, anyone?

The reaction of right wing populists, elected officials, intellectuals, and media regarding our lovable insane maga hammerbro doing a little trolling are making me wig out. People I thought were wrong but serious passing around clear bullshit about gay escorts, pretending the dude wasn't Q radicalized, and laughing it off. It's one thing for the lunatic fringe to do that shit, it's another entirely when the largest single conservative news network and most popular intellectuals are doing it.

Then I come here for a dose of sanity, and I have to dig DEEP into the replies before I find anyone positing the plainly obvious: that if you say your political opponents are child rapist election stealing perverts, some section of the population will actually believe the literal words you are saying and "take action".

Maybe I'm just having a little moment and will regress to mean in a couple weeks, but this particular incident has shifted me from "no" to "They would if they could" regarding conservatives in this country, at least temporarily.

I was already armed because I think guns are fun and cool and are never gonna be banned regardless of how many schools get shot up so I might as well have fun, now I'm shopping around for my local John Brown chapter.

(also, if you are apolitical or don't mind some leftism from time to time and are looking for a gun club, the John Brown Gun Club and SRA are actually really chill and safe, so far. Much better than the local non-denominational clubs. I haven't been flagged once by a dude shoulder carrying his AR with closed bolt and magazine loaded yet, which is a damn sight better than the public ranges in SC.)

One last thing while I'm thinking about it: Dude once showed up to the range with the sickest Springfield armory 1911 I've ever seen, all nickel and smooth as glass and beautiful as fuck, one of their 2000$ fancy jobs. Predictably everyone gathered around and asked to see it like a bunch of 7 year olds for a foil pokemon card, then dude turns around and fucking holds me up with it practically. Scary as fuck. He let me shoot it afterwards though, so that was something.

Yes, ‘Paul Pelosi invited the crazy guy in, we know this because he’s a gay prostitute, they clearly got into a dispute over drugs’ is a ridiculous lie. So are ‘Texas bans treatment of ectopic pregnancies’, ‘George Floy’s funeral presents no public health risk but having churches open in any other context is killing grandma.’, ‘misgendering is literally violence’, ‘there is no black-white IQ difference’, and dozens of others. And those are more or less party line for the democrats.

The reaction of right wing populists, elected officials, intellectuals, and media regarding our lovable insane maga hammerbro doing a little trolling are making me wig out. People I thought were wrong but serious passing around clear bullshit about gay escorts, pretending the dude wasn't Q radicalized, and laughing it off. It's one thing for the lunatic fringe to do that shit, it's another entirely when the largest single conservative news network and most popular intellectuals are doing it.

No one would be making Paul Pelosi conspiracy theories if, instead of trying to exploit their own security incompetence for political gain (the second time in 2 years for a Pelosi), all the media was meming them for incompetence. The MSNBC line should be, "Pelosi is clearly too old to secure her own home from drug addled nudists, she should be removed from Democrat leadership and replaced with new blood." The NBC line should be "Once again Nancy Pelosi has failed at basic functions of government, we need to replace her as speaker. Give Jim Jordan a try."

Nobody would be criticizing Fox News for biased coverage of Jan 6th if, instead of exploiting their protestors' incompetence for political gain, they just memed them for incompetence. The Fox line should be: "lmao look at those stupid trump supporters, they got into the capitol and just walked around! Didn't even do anything! Classic trump incompetence. And trump endorsed them! Give biden a try."

Also, pelosi isn't personally responsible for her home's security, is each congressperson supposed to personally audit the secret service's protections or what, so the accusation doesn't make sense.

You know the incompetent people on J6 were, again, the Capitol police. The protestors weren't attempting a coup, they just wanted to be seen and heard, and they were. That the Democrats were able to make hay out of their own massive J6 incompetence in running their police force, is again, why there are J6 false flag theories. They are plausible, because Dem-incompetence led to a Dem political victory.

pelosi isn't personally responsible for her home's security, is each congressperson supposed to personally audit the secret service's protections or what

What I read about that is that spouses etc. of congress people don't get secret service protection, only the congressperson themselves. So she and her family certainly are responsible for the security of her private home.

"Should be?" Why would they do this, exactly?

Because mocking incompetency is the correct response, not rewarding it.

That is the very strange thing about this case for me; an obvious crazy guy could just stroll up and break in to a house that presumably is in a nice part of the city for rich people and has some level of "excuse me officer, a man in his underwear just jumped over that gate" monitoring going on.

I'm not expecting private security patrolling the grounds, but something like burglar alarms or a security system?

Essentially this.

If your whole brand is based on an image of "I am smart, and I know better, so shut up and do what I say" a visible display of gross incompetency is going to be extremely damaging to that brand, and the more one tries to deflect, rather than own the failure the more people are going to assume that the actual situation is even worse. As the old saying goes, it's not the facts of the crime that implicate guilt, but the cover up. The cover up demonstrates knowledge and intent.

How is what happened gross incompetence though? Most rich people and most national level politicians do not have 24 hour armed security. Is their incompetence in not fitting steel shutters a la The Purge? The guy smashed his way in through a window with a hammer while Pelosi was asleep. That could happen to just about anyone competent or not. Other than living in a gated community and having security cameras watched by Capitol police what else should they have done to avoid this accusation of incompetence?

Are other home invasion victims similarly incompetent if they fail to have fully automated machine gun turrets set up in overlapping fields of fire with SEAL Team Six on hot alert?

The guy smashed his way in through a window with a hammer while Pelosi was asleep. That could happen to just about anyone competent or not. Other than living in a gated community and having security cameras watched by Capitol police what else should they have done to avoid this accusation of incompetence?

Are other home invasion victims similarly incompetent if they fail to have fully automated machine gun turrets set up in overlapping fields of fire with SEAL Team Six on hot alert?

Probably basic firearm proficiency is a start .The overwhelming majority of home invaders are incompetent or wait for the target to leave.

Other than living in a gated community and having security cameras watched by Capitol police what else should they have done to avoid this accusation of incompetence?

They had all that, the house also basically has a gigantic amount of open land around it. If capitol police are essentially Homer Simpsoning (and I feel I may be slandering good ole Homer here) at the Pelosi's residence that is, in fact, a massive failure in staffing by Nancy Pelosi. Perhaps Jan 6 should have been a heads up to initiate an inquiry into the agency's competency after they bumbled the situation so pathetically that a large stone-and-iron building, on a hill, surrounded with crowd control fences, with fortified doors and windows was surrendered to a couple dozen unarmed cosplayers.

Are other home invasion victims similarly incompetent if they fail to have fully automated machine gun turrets set up in overlapping fields of fire with SEAL Team Six on hot alert?

If you can afford such a thing and possess items of such value that you think The Joker and Harley Quinn are likely to break in at any moment, then probably. For most people, all they can afford is a lock and maybe something that dings when a window is broken. Unlike most people, the Pelosi's both have money for armed security, and hold themselves out as people who are at serious risk of political violence.

Most standard issue home security systems will ring an alarm and some will even call 9-11 if a window is breached. You’d think if Pelosi was serious about the threats of political violence, she would at least have something like that in place. My guess is that they have something far more advanced.

Most standard issue home security systems will ring an alarm and some will even call 9-11 if a window is breached.

that takes too long when you're talking a possible life or death situation. armed security, even just knowing how to use a gun, is better.

I’m not arguing about what would be the best home security system, but that it seems unbelievable that the Pelosis didn’t even have the least home security system. A plebe like me can go to Home Depot and come home with something more effective than “don’t notice when someone breaks your window and then eventually run into the bathroom to call police.”

At the risk of inviting karmic retribution, yes It demonstrates incompetency, because we know that the Pelosi's are "deeply concerned about right wing political violence", we know that they have 24 hour security, and we know that one would have to cover approximately 50 yards of open ground (presumably covered by security cameras) to reach the French doors in question. Breaking the door down should have brought security running if the methed-out gay prostitute on the security cameras didn't.

The reason the "Gay escort" has gained the momentum it has is that DePape is a known gay escort and it seems difficult to believe that he would be able to gain entry to the Pelosi's house without setting off any alarms unless he had been invited/let in by somebody.

DePape is a known gay escort

Source?

The red and blue cultures are qualitatively asymmetrical. Blue youths protest, sometimes en masse and sometimes in semi-orderly fashion. Red youths might attend a rally or organized protest, but the red protests pretty much started with Charlottesville and stopped with Jan 6. What you’re seeing is the lizardman’s constant on the right, the equivalent of the parade SUV massacre guy or the congressional softball shooter.

As for Mr. Pelosi’s friend David, I have yet to hear a coherent story from the left media which does fit that phone call, and the metadata on his blog is imposter levels of sus.

I don't see it that way. Charlottesville was a predominantly blue tribe protest, dissident blue tribe vs mainstream blue tribe where as the reason Jan 6th looms so large in the national psyche is that it was a red tribe protest that demonstrated a capability that the blue tribe didn't think the reds had.

The conventional wisdom is that protests need organization, corporate sponsorship, buy-in from the local attorney general, police forces etc... The idea of Trump supporters being able to not only organize a protest without such support but to do so in contested territory, to walk into the Democratic Party's holy of holies, and walk out with the high priestess' altar scared the fuck out them. Hence the outsize response by the FBI and all the talk from @ymeskhout and various others about how Jan 6th is the greatest threat to democracy since 9/11 or Pearl Harbor.

all the talk from @ymeskhout and various others about how Jan 6th is the greatest threat to democracy since 9/11 or Pearl Harbor

You have a nasty habit of making shit up about me

There’s been a handful of major red tribe protests since then, notably the trucker protests.

Yes and before then, but those aren't the ones being discussed.

The claim @DuplexFields claim that red tribe protests started with Charlottesville and ended with Jan 6th is patently false unless one is using an extremely unconventional definition of both "red tribe" and "protest".

Charlottesville was a predominantly blue tribe protest, dissident blue tribe vs mainstream blue tribe

I'm aware of your thesis about the "dissident/far/alt right" actually being leftists in rebellion, but come on, isn't this a reach? I understand that actual Blue Tribers don't have to agree, but this is too contrarian.

[Warning: highly online jargon]

Back when Reddit’s The_Donald was highly active, around the time of Hillary being appointed by the party over Bernie, we got a flood of salty Berniebros who were actively anti-Hillary and becoming walkaway/blackpilled re the Democratic Party establishment.

These were blue tribers who didn’t follow their party into the embrace of corporations and the intelligence-military-industrial complex, and who saw corporate media as the propaganda wing of the neocon❤️neolib New World Order. You can still see them bringing their memetic energy to patriots.win, The_Donald’s home in exile.

I don't think it's a reach at all, If anything Richard Spencer and the rest of the Taki's Mag Tiki-torch crew are central examples of what I'm talking about. IE a bunch of University of Chicago and UC Berkley Black Bloc types who arbitrarily decided one that that "oh we going to be right wingers now" without making any substantial changes to their beliefs or rhetoric. They thought they could "Unite The Right" by showing up at protest over a Confederate monument and being all like "Greetings fellow kids white nationalists" but they badly misread the crowd (both the opposition and their ostensible allies) because they were a bunch of University of Chicago and UC Berkley Black Bloc types who where completely out of their element.

"Blue tribe and red tribe" are different from "leftist and non-leftist". I would not be surprised if a supermajority of the 200ish people there were acculturated Blue Tribe types who had gotten themselves black-pilled over some forbidden knowledge.

The reaction of right wing populists, elected officials, intellectuals, and media regarding our lovable insane maga hammerbro doing a little trolling are making me wig out. People I thought were wrong but serious passing around clear bullshit about gay escorts, pretending the dude wasn't Q radicalized, and laughing it off. It's one thing for the lunatic fringe to do that shit, it's another entirely when the largest single conservative news network and most popular intellectuals are doing it.

Considering that the mainstream media, conservative and liberal alike, lied America into the Iraq war (among other things), same for intellectuals and the various universities and think tanks that employ them, their credibility is pretty low on my book at least. Its not the the populists are right either, but the media and intellectuals, who are entrusted to be right, really suck at being right, too. The difference between the fringe and the media is the media is considered respectable.

If "how Q-pilled was the assailant of Paul Pelosi?" is the issue that drives you to join a militia to protect yourself from the eeebil righties, might I suggest you weren't that far from the edge?

The reaction of right wing populists, elected officials, intellectuals, and media regarding our lovable insane maga hammerbro doing a little trolling are making me wig out. People I thought were wrong but serious passing around clear bullshit about gay escorts, pretending the dude wasn't Q radicalized, and laughing it off. It's one thing for the lunatic fringe to do that shit, it's another entirely when the largest single conservative news network and most popular intellectuals are doing it.

Speculating about the motive and practical execution of the attack is not the same as endorsing it. I think hammer attacks are bad. I hope that no Democrats are attacked with hammers. I feel bad for Paul Pelosi. Even if he and his wife have been getting rich via insider trading during her decades in Congress, it's not OK to attack either of them with hammers. Or even break into their house to tape them up and talk to them. It's bad. Don't do it.

Now, whether Depape is a right-wing crazy person (with BLM and Rainbow signs in his yard), or a random crazy person, or a crazy gay hustler, is a completely separate question.

There used to be a sense on the Left that rich people indulged in a lot of exploitative and perverse shit and got away with it thanks to their influence on media and law enforcement. Now that the Left have become rich and powerful with heavy influence on the media and law enforcement in their deep blue cities, they strangely don't seem concerned with the misbehaviors of the rich or telling the truth about what happens when they are involved in some kind of suspicious event. I guess that's the job of the Right now. I'd rather the Left and Right cooperate on holding the powerful accountable.

Yes, conservative justices are openly political

Thank heaven liberal justices are not, right? Never ever been any legislating from the bench, no proponents of judicial activism (or if there were, they were the good guys on the right side of history).

pretending the dude wasn't Q radicalized

From what little I've read about the Pelosi case, the guy in question is nuts. Arguing over what radicalised him in which direction is as useful as arguing "did the fact that the wind changed from south to south-west cause him to go out in his underwear to break into Nancy Pelosi's house?"

the plainly obvious: that if you say your political opponents are child rapist election stealing perverts, some section of the population will actually believe the literal words you are saying and "take action".

Same way if you say your political opponents are a basket of deplorables, bitter clingers, or forcing women to give birth and continue pregnancies that will kill them. Some section will believe the words and take action.

the John Brown Gun Club and SRA are actually really chill and safe, so far.

They are literally communists and are fundamentally a political organization.

In the event that you're genuine and not a troll:

Then I come here for a dose of sanity, and I have to dig DEEP into the replies before I find anyone positing the plainly obvious: that if you say your political opponents are child rapist election stealing perverts, some section of the population will actually believe the literal words you are saying and "take action".

And ironically, you believe your outgroup are political extremists out to get you and yours leading you to 'take action' by buying a firearm and joining your local John Brown society. Political extremism is a huge problem, but tell me exactly how you're any better or how characterizing your outgroup as 'they would kill me if they could' is any better?

Maybe I'm just having a little moment and will regress to mean in a couple weeks, but this particular incident has shifted me from "no" to "They would if they could" regarding conservatives in this country, at least temporarily.

Do you not see the profoundly self-defeating hypocrisy involved in responding to accelerationism and domestic terrorism with veiled threats of your own? Let's pretend for a moment that you're actually a relevant target for political extremists in the same way that Nancy Pelosi, third in line for the presidency, is. Do you think that fedposting and flashing your guns are likely to bring down the temperature and decrease the likelihood of domestic terrorism in any meaningful way?

If you're really concerned about any of these issues, put on your big boy pants and try having a real conversation with people instead of fedposting massively inflammatory and uncharitable takes. You're harming the causes you claim to champion, and making all of our jobs that much harder.

Do you think that fedposting and flashing your guns are likely to bring down the temperature and decrease the likelihood of domestic terrorism in any meaningful way?

I think that there's a strong belief on the right that they're holding all the cards in the event of an armed political conflict. Changing that belief would make armed conflict less attractive to the fringe that keeps incessantly talking about it.

How is the gay escort rumour 'clear bullshit'? There is an absolute tonne of weirdness in this story, from the unnamed person who let police into the residence (what were they doing, what do they know), to the fact that they apparently found this 40-something weirdo still struggling with a man in his 80s when police arrived. How hard is it to beat up an 80 year old?

And how is it that random mentally ill people can get into expensive residences in San Francisco anyway? This couple is very, very rich, (even ignoring their political power) would they not have some kind of security mechanism sufficient to keep out weirdoes with hammers? All their security is mobile, guarding Nancy wherever she happens to be? This whole story doesn't make any sense - the most reasonable part is the Q stuff infecting somebody with a very low WIS stat. I could believe that. But everything else?

How do either of those supposed weirdnesses justify the 'gay escort' theory?

And how is it that random mentally ill people can get into expensive residences in San Francisco anyway

Haven't we done the "SF has a homeless criminal problem and the police won't do anything about it" thing to death?

If he was a gay escort it would explain how he got into the house.

I can't imagine being worth over a hundred million and not having sufficient security, in San Francisco of all places (where there are many homeless criminals) and not having sufficient security to keep out random weirdoes!

If he was a gay escort it would explain how he got into the house.

another explanation, much simpler and more likely, is that they have security (secret service) but they're more focused on nancy than husband, or that they had security and messed up this one.

Yes, it would be insane if the house of the Speaker of the House didn't have 24-hour security else the Chinese could plant listening devices and terrorists bombs in the Speaker's home.

I don't think the Chinese would bother with anything like that when they can just get party cadre members hired by the Pelosis' business and likely have better access to their affairs than they do themselves.

Apparently there was security at the house. Maybe not as effective as my Rock That Keeps Tigers Away™ but still existent.

It seems suspicious to me that security was there and didn’t notice a window getting broken.

The linked article says the "security" was someone remotely watching a camera feed:

Capitol Police are conducting a full review of the incident at Pelosi’s home and its protective services division and sharing updates with lawmakers, according to a GOP aide. The department is considering any short- or long-term changes to protocol that need to be made.

The review will also include the Capitol Police’s command center, which was monitoring the security camera feed from Pelosi’s home, according to a person familiar.

Unclear where the camera (cameras? or just one) were pointed. I think the story is that the attacker broke a window in a side/back door, so maybe there was no camera pointing at it? But also, security cameras don't help a lot in this kind of situation; I guess they could have called the police a little sooner? I would think home security cameras are mostly useful for identifying intruders when the residents aren't home.

The link refers to "the Capitol Police’s command center, which was monitoring the security camera feed from Pelosi’s home". The same Capitol Police in charge of security for the Capitol on January 6. I'm beginning to see a pattern here. Perhaps the Capitol should invest in one of those rocks you speak of.

The unnamed person has been retracted from the initial coverage - DePape was not beating up Pelosi until the police arrived and it sounded like literally until they opened the door - this is all in the official report here:

https://www.justice.gov/opa/press-release/file/1548106/download

The incident is still quite weird and I'm not sure how much to hold language that convinces someone who is several standard deviations outside healthy and well-adjusted against the people speaking it, but just pushing back on a few things that seem to be misinformation.

I think I'm having an AI risk moment, and you guys are doing it to me!

How does your post tie back to AI risk?

I assume in the same sense as "the AI senses it is being existentially-threatened," as per the other thread about Terminator as a reprensation of AI risk.

now I'm shopping around for my local John Brown chapter.

Uhh. Yeah, pretty sure this is trolling. The "we will murder your families because you are just as evil as slave owners" guys are who you mob up with out of "fear of political violence"? The "violent revolution is coming, get ready to slaughter MAGA chuds" guys?

That just validates everything right wingers think about leftists fretting over "political violence ", that it's not being done by and to the right people.

One local 'john brown chapter' twitter account saying that (and it's plausible it was some guy trolling, like all the 'portland city antifa' accounts - although the links below seem real) doesn't mean all john brown chapters are automatically awful. Same goes for right wing orgs or w/e

Can you link to some examples of John Brown members stating these things?

Just some kids on twitter.

Sadly a lot of my favorite examples have been deleted from reddit, but I'll get you some from my screenshots folder sometime.

Please do, we need a CW archive somewhere, with all grievances documented.

Then I come here for a dose of sanity, and I have to dig DEEP into the replies before I find anyone positing the plainly obvious: that if you say your political opponents are child rapist election stealing perverts, some section of the population will actually believe the literal words you are saying and "take action".

This is pretty much the reason I think we should not tell noble lies. Our golems will ultimately always eat us. You get it with the weird Q groups producing lunatics like the one who attacked the Pelosis and you get it with the ACAB types eventually inspiring the burning down of police stations and wanton rioting. But even you are taking the wrong tact here I think by referencing the groomer word games, which while I agree are tiresome, are not what has caused the Pelosi hammer incident. That was caused by a pervasive conspiracy theory called Q which I doubt anyone here seriously endorses as it's as plainly ridiculous now as it was when it started on 8chan. I don't know what the right can do about these people anymore than I know what the left can do about people who say "no, we were not playing word games, end the police".

I think the whole "groomer" thing is in response to "you can freely call me a Nazi, a fascist, a murderer, all this sort of thing, now how do you like it when you're called horrible names? Oh you're not a paedophile in reality? Well I'm not a Nazi, but that didn't stop you guys".

Not to be constantly carping about Rings of Power, but stuff like this :

Amazon claims there’s been a coordinated effort to attack the show for daring to diversify Tolkien with strong female characters and people of color. “The hardest part was for people on the cast who have had things related to them privately that are just harmful,” Sanders says.

...But it’s also possible Rings‘ percentage of agenda-based reviews might be much higher than for Dragon. Tolkien’s world has a long, unfortunate history of attracting fascist-adjacent admirers, something that surely would have repulsed the fantasy world’s anti-totalitarian author, whose Rings trilogy was inspired by the horrors of World War I. Italy’s newly elected far-right nationalist leader, Giorgia Meloni, for example, has been an outspoken Tolkien fan, unhelpfully.

and this:

As Tolkien researcher Craig Franson explains, far-right political actors are whipping up the controversy, weaponising it to help get fascist talking points into the mainstream. Franson shows that the right-wing “outrage machine” stirred up “a massive hate mob” through mainstream right-wing press.

Fans who feel they are defending Tolkien’s legacy are being used as pawns to serve dangerous anti-democratic and anti-egalitarian agenda and siding, whether they mean to or not, with racist extremists.

Tolkien made statements against Nazis and also apartheid, but this is not the same as being anti-racist or pro-equality. His condemnation of Hitler, he wrote in the same letter, was for

ruining, perverting, misapplying, and making forever accursed, that noble northern spirit, a supreme contribution to Europe, which I have ever loved, and tried to preserve in its true light.

The comment shows that he believed that some people were essentially different to and better than others. This notion is foundational to racism.

See? If you don't like what the show has done to canon, then if you're not a fascist yourself, you're at least fascist- and white supremacist-adjacent.

Ok, groomer.

Yes, conservative justices are openly political and have only enough respect for precedent to secure the fig leaf with blue tack, but come on now. Roe v Wade, anyone?

No more openly political than the justices who originally decided Roe v Wade in the first place. Or less, inasmuch as it's less political to say "no it doesn't" than it is to say "the constitution has an unwritten magical right to abortions"

That paragraph completes a collection of 3 paragraphs all follow the form "Republicans do <scummy thing>, but Democrats aren't any better". That is to say, I'm pretty close to certain OP is saying "Roe v Wade, anyone" as a dig at Democrats

That paragraph completes a collection of 3 paragraphs all follow the form "Republicans do , but Democrats aren't any better". That is to say, I'm pretty close to certain OP is saying "Roe v Wade, anyone" as a dig at Democrats

It read to me like the first hint of a tipping point, but it was vague.

some section of the population will actually believe the literal words you are saying and "take action".

If this standard would be applied to Pelosi, she herself would be guilty. Her kneeling with an African scarf was taken as showing her support for BLM conspiracy theories. The latter riots caused much greater damage and had a higher body count, than this home invasion by an insane guy with a hammer.

are actually really chill and safe

After you claimed that "utterly smashed them on the rhetoric and the facts" is a fair description of blank slatists performance in their debates against pro-HBD-ers, I do not trust your perception of leftist behaviour.

Then I come here for a dose of sanity, and I have to dig DEEP into the replies before I find anyone positing the plainly obvious: that if you say your political opponents are child rapist election stealing perverts, some section of the population will actually believe the literal words you are saying and "take action".

This is a fair point, but I find the rest of your post pretty uncharitable. I see the recent right-wing explosion in crazy theories as a pretty understandable, if not reasonable, response to being totally destroyed culturally and shut out of important institutions by the left. With all of the recent censorship on social media sites etc., how can we as leftists expect right-wingers not to get radicalized into conspiracy theories?

I mean, if you look at the recent social media/alphabet agency collusion, the actual deep state was literally cooperating with social media companies to censor the public. That is what we know, of course the low-IQ crazies are going to believe even worse things.

It's a shame that a couple decades ago, this type of deep state critique would be firmly in the far-left camp. Leftists have been using this conspiratorial type of critique against the Western order for the better part of a century or more to radicalize their base, albeit usually with some more qualifiers and generally sane positions. Unfortunately, the right wing flipped the script on us, and weren't able to control the crazy side of the conspiratorial minded base.

If we have to blame someone, I blame leftists for allowing one of the best social movements in human history to be captured by milquetoast wokists and clear grifters. I'm not saying the right wing is innocent, but your post reads like blaming a dying bear for lashing out at its killers.

It's a shame that a couple decades ago, this type of deep state critique would be firmly in the far-left camp. Leftists have been using this conspiratorial type of critique against the Western order for the better part of a century or more to radicalize their base, albeit usually with some more qualifiers and generally sane positions. Unfortunately, the right wing flipped the script on us, and weren't able to control the crazy side of the conspiratorial minded base.

Am I correct in understanding that you’re referring to the Chomsky type of critique, which includes literal conspiracies that actually were uncovered in due time (and even when not, carefully crafted enough to give a veneer of plausibility and deniability), over the general impression of “conspiracy theory” of things like big pharma conspiracies with vaccines and whatnot?

Am I correct in understanding that you’re referring to the Chomsky type of critique, which includes literal conspiracies that actually were uncovered in due time (and even when not, carefully crafted enough to give a veneer of plausibility and deniability), over the general impression of “conspiracy theory” of things like big pharma conspiracies with vaccines and whatnot?

He is referring to thing called parapolitics (TL;DR: hard left conspiracy community crawling through all the rabbit holes whenever they lead, and doing their research without bullshit).

Some people, like Joel Van Der Reijden of ISGP do follow where the evidence leads, all the way to full HBDIQ awareness.

https://www.isgp-studies.com

https://www.isgp-studies.com/intro

(warning: site can cause severe case of blackpilling)

The 1980's, time of Iran Contra scandal was the heyday, but the community is still here (although smaller and heavily blackpilled).

This was time when doing conspiracy research did not meant listening to Alex Jones, it meant writing down names on big table and painstakingly linking them with spider web of financial, political, personal and familial connections. If you did it thorougly for long time, you found that some major nodes of the web are people whose faces are not on TV screens and magazine covers and whose names are found only in very specialized sources (and then you would lock yourself in your room and hang yourself).

https://web.archive.org/web/20200806155838/https://lombardinetworks.net/networks/the-networks/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Lombardi

Obligatory meme:

https://i.imgur.com/snPS83O.jpg

Thank you! I've gotten pretty conspiratorial myself over the years, but can't quite fit in with most conspiracy theorists, these guys seem like someone I can relate to.

Geoff Shullenberger and guest had a pretty good podcast on this recently which took a look at how movies once promoted a fashionable kind of conspiracy mindset (Slacker, JFK). Needless to say that is way, way out now.

https://outsidertheory.fireside.fm/universal-basic-mkultra

I see the recent right-wing explosion in crazy theories as a pretty understandable, if not reasonable, response to being totally destroyed culturally and shut out of important institutions by the left. With all of the recent censorship on social media sites etc., how can we as leftists expect right-wingers not to get radicalized into conspiracy theories?

The only thing recent about this is that Trumpism blew the lid off things and left the lunatics in charge of the asylum instead of leaving political leadership to the more 'respectable' members of their coalition*. Conservatives have been losing the culture war for decades - not because leftists are censoring them on twitter (a vastly overrated phenomenon), but because liberals have systematically outcompeted them. That may be giving them a little too much credit; a lot of the drivers of conservative cultural collapse and liberal success are socio-economic forces, not political discourse. Nevertheless, the point remains: for pretty much the first time in living memory, it is liberals and not conservatives setting the default when it comes to social norms. The crisis facing conservatism is one of the extinction, not extermination - the institutions they have historically dominated no longer have the clout they once did and the stories they tell aren't as persuasive as they used to be.

It's understandable that they're freaking out about this. It's just not very sympathetic.

*Let's not forget that Obama's term saw the widespread popularity of things like Birtherism and Jade Helm conspiracy theories.

albeit usually with some more qualifiers and generally sane positions.

Left-wing conspiracy theories only seem more sane if you're predisposed to them.

if you say your political opponents are child rapist election stealing perverts, some section of the population will actually believe the literal words you are saying and "take action".

There are as nasty or nastier things that leftists say about the right, which start at Russian spies and go at least up to "literally Hitler". It results in violence too. Do you react to the left for this, similarly to how you react to the right?

A few days ago, I made a comment defending Turkheimer and critizing HBDers, in response to a vaulted "best of" comment dismissing Turkheimer. One of the main things my comment centered on was the phenotypic null hypothesis, which can roughly speaking be summarized as "correlation does not imply confounding" + "causation does not imply unmediated and unmoderated causation". Or as I phrased it:

Put simply, the phenotypic null hypothesis is this: Heritability tells you that if you go up through the chain of causation, then you will often end up with genes. However, there may be many ways that variables can be connected to each other, and there’s no particular reason to expect that every step along the chain of causation from genes to outcomes is best thought of as biological.

The consensus claimed that this was well-understood by HBDers around here, and perhaps even by HBDers more generally. Now I don't know that I buy that because it really doesn't seem well-understood in many places other than with people around Turkheimer.

In the thread, one person ended up posting an example of a paper which supposedly understood the nuances I was talking about. However, I disagree with that, and think that it is instead an excellent example of the problems with HBD epistemics. For instance, the paper opens by saying that the goal is to test evolutionary psychology hypotheses by testing for heritability in some personality traits:

According to the recent evolutionary-inspired theories (i.e., differential susceptibility [1], biological sensitivity to context [2]), humans, like many other species [3], differ substantially in their sensitivity to contextual factors, with some more susceptible to environmental influences than others. Importantly, these theories suggest that heightened sensitivity predicts both the reactivity to adverse contexts as well as the propensity to benefit from supportive features of positive environments. In other words, sensitivity is proposed to influence the impact of environmental influences in a “for better and for worse” manner [4]. These prominent theories converge on the proposition that genetic factors play a significant role in individual differences in Environmental Sensitivity (ES) [1, 2, 5].

Now, if you don't appreciate the phenotypic null hypothesis, then this would probably seem like a reasonable or even excellent idea. Evolution is about how genes are selected based on the traits they produce; if something is genetically coded, then evolution must have produced it, and conversely if evolution has produced it then it must be genetic.

But if you appreciate the phenotypic null hypothesis, then this study is of minimal relevance, almost no evidentiary value, and perhaps even eye-rollingly stupid. Of course the scales you administer are going to be heritable, because pretty much everything is heritable. Heritability doesn't mean that you've got anything meaningfully biological.

Now the thing is, my impression is that behavior geneticists do this sort of nonsense all the time, and that HBDers take them seriously when they do it. If HBDers instead properly appreciated the phenotypic null hypothesis, they would look somewhere else for this sort of info, or maybe even fix behavior genetics by propagating the info backwards to HBD-sympathetic behavior geneticists that they should read more Turkheimer. Notably, since this study was suggested as exemplary by someone here on TheMotte, it seems to provide at least an existence proof of someone who does not have a proper understanding of the phenotypic null hypothesis.

Tangent but;

I don't know much about the HBD literature so you will have to bear with that.

But in the context HBD is discussed around here (group outcomes and associated CW), is something being heritable or something being genetic not a distinction without a difference? You have to keep in mind this is a CW discussion forum not a HBD discussion forum, so you might not find the best defense of HBD that you are (supposedly) looking for.

Because just about all the CW related conclusions you can pull with the assumption that intelligence is genetic holds if intelligence were merely only heritable but not genetic. I can't think of anything that changes besides the discussion section in obscure intelligence research papers.

Also what evidence would raise your priors of a trait being genetic not merely heritable, other than finding the {X-gene} ?

I don't think the phenotypic null hypothesis is directly applicable to racial differences because we have a lot of specific evidence on race and IQ that makes it not a general thing. Rather, it has effects on what sorts of arguments are relevant for race and IQ.

Also what evidence would raise your priors of a trait being genetic not merely heritable, other than finding the {X-gene} ?

Correlation with anatomy, especially directly relevant anatomy (IQ correlates with brain size).

Being consistently expressed regardless of context.

Having a clear evolutionary/theoretical reason to expect being biological.

So here's a question. Can you illustrate specific testable predictions of both theories, and some experiments/measurements in which these predictions differ?

Concretely I'm asking for something like:

Experiment setup: ???

HBD prediction: X

HNU (Human Neural Uniformity) prediction: Y

X != Y

I'm asking because I vaguely recall some conversations during the ban on mentioning HBD (some years back) during which "systemic racism" was constructed as a theory which made identical predictions to HBD. Specifically, it's a force that causes Asians to excel, blacks to underperform, whites to give middling performance, and also it can't be directly measured by any methods in the social sciences.

What is "human neural uniformity"?

It's probably a modification of a moldbug neologism, "Human neurological uniformnity", from a gentle introduction p. 3. It just means - 'human intelligence and psychological traits are evenly distributed across races, no significant inter-race differences'.

But human neural uniformity sounds like a dumb and baseless theory.

HNU is whatever epistemic theory you are pushing in which twin studies have no evidentiary value. My suspicion is that you're playing similar games to folks like Cosma Shalizi - tossing out a bunch of words hinting at the technical unsophistication of HBD proponents, but in reality those words don't mean much of anything.

A great way for you to show yourself to be less vapid would be to post something along the lines:

  1. A twin study measured T to be highly heritable.

  2. HBD proponents predict X as a result of heritable T.

  3. But actually actually ~X in spite of heritable T.

What's wrong with "HBD proponents think heritable T is mraningful evidence for evopsych on T, even though it's not"?

Most folks here (including myself) think "is meaningful evidence" means "results in predictions that are likely to be true". I suspect you mean something entirely different, and are perhaps engaging in wordplay and sophistry to hide the fact that you have no meaningful critique of HBD as a theory that results in testable predictions.

I consider your continued evasion of specifics as evidence in favor of sophistry. But I would think differently if you actually illustrated your claims with examples of specific testable predictions.

Blank slatism

Blank slatism is a strawman though. E.g. Turkheimer had this denouncement to say of blank slatists who argue against heritability:

It is not a given that both sides of every argument are being reasonable. In the final analysis, this book is not reasoning forward from a known set of facts, seeking their explanation; it is confabulating backwards from a fixed conclusion, eliding any segments of the evidence that don’t lead to the preordained destination. The Trouble With Twin Studies is science denial.

If I "appreciate" the 'biological null hypothesis', everything you write is wrong. What necessitates one over the other?

I ask since it looks like we are taking the presumptive priors of environmentalism, slapping it with a 'null hypothesis' label and saying that it now beats out the presumptive priors of hereditarianism. I don't see how this changes anything. Other than framing the discussion in a way where your enemy is ignorant and hasn't considered something when in reality I am pretty sure most HBD'ers are pretty well acquainted with the environmentalist worldview.

To me, as an illiterate HBD'er, it just seems like skirting the actual issues. If you don't have an alternative theory of reality to human biology to supplant the HBD one then what is the point of this? Assert we can't know anything about anything and then what? This topic isn't worth discussing outside the context of two competing explanatory worldviews.

I ask since it looks like we are taking the presumptive priors of environmentalism, slapping it with a 'null hypothesis' label and saying that it now beats out the presumptive priors of hereditarianism. I don't see how this changes anything. Other than framing the discussion in a way where your enemy is ignorant and hasn't considered something when in reality I am pretty sure most HBD'ers are pretty well acquainted with the environmentalist worldview.

It's the phenotypic null hypothesis, not the environmental null hypothesis.

To me, as an illiterate HBD'er, it just seems like skirting the actual issues. If you don't have an alternative theory of reality to human biology to supplant the HBD one then what is the point of this? Assert we can't know anything about anything and then what? This topic isn't worth discussing outside the context of two competing explanatory worldviews.

There are various things that can be done to reduce the problems. For instance in the case of homophobia and mental illness, you can look at environmentla correlations rather than looking at genetic correlations (though that requires good measurement).

However, before one can apply these solutions, one has to actually know what the problem is.

You will have to forgive me but I'm not able to read what you are writing without it coming across to me as rather confusing and incoherent. If you could clarify for me that would be great.

It's the phenotypic null hypothesis, not the environmental null hypothesis.

I don't understand the contention. The point I was making is that the PNH expresses itself in the same way as environmentalist priors. If you believe there is infinite room for enviromentalist theory crafting without holding environmental explanatons to the same standard when it comes to genetic theory crafting then it doesn't matter what you call it. It's always the case that the other side 'could' be wrong and that their assumptions and priors are inaccurate and that there is a hidden factor they could be overlooking that could make them all wrong. What I am trying to tease out here is why you believe that this sort of rigor is some sort of guillotine for HBD'ers but not all the other fields that find no issue ignoring competing hypothesis when attributing their findings as pieces of evidence for their preferred theory.

There are various things that can be done to reduce the problems. For instance in the case of homophobia and mental illness, you can look at environmentla correlations rather than looking at genetic correlations (though that requires good measurement).

I am lost as to what you are trying to say in relation to what I wrote. You don't seem to be answering the question of why any assumption of a genetic cause needs to exclude every single possible environmental cause before it can assert itself as a contender or a piece of evidence that fits into a larger theory of how things work. Why is this a problem for HBD'ers?

From the other comment of yours:

What does the biological null hypothesis say?

That the originary primary and ultimate driver for all behavior and expressions of a biological organism in an environment is their genetic material.

What does the biological null hypothesis say?

If I understand you correctly, this is what you are calling the Phenotypic Null Hypothesis: that a trait being heritable does not mean it necessarily has a direct genetic cause. Particularly relevant to HBD, my understanding is that you might say that blacks scoring lower on tests might be shown to be heritable, but perhaps that could be because of racism. Since blackness is also genetically heritable, if blackness were to cause them to experience racism which causes their test scores to be lower, then this would be a plausible explanation for why low test scores appear to be genetically heritable in blacks, but it would actually be due to blackness being genetically inherited and that causing low test scores through a more indirect means than low intelligence.

That seems plainly reasonable and true so far as I can tell. I think people are perhaps responding to you defensively because this feels like an isolated demand for rigor or weakmanning directed specifically at HBD, without considering the epistemic failings of hardline blank-slatists which are surely even greater. Also I think that showing a trait to be heritable has to count as weak Bayesian evidence at least in favor of a genetic explanation.

Particularly relevant to HBD, my understanding is that you might say that blacks scoring lower on tests might be shown to be heritable, but perhaps that could be because of racism. Since blackness is also genetically heritable, if blackness were to cause them to experience racism which causes their test scores to be lower, then this would be a plausible explanation for why low test scores appear to be genetically heritable in blacks, but it would actually be due to blackness being genetically inherited and that causing low test scores through a more indirect means than low intelligence.

Yes, that would be one potential example (though I don't expect this to be the true answer because it has been studied by e.g. looking for whether skin color is a mediator, though I'm currently trying to commission a different study which looks at it from a different angle).

However the phenotypic null hypothesis of course applies to tons and tons of behavior genetics, not just within race stuff but also lots of other places. And HBDers often discuss other behavior genetic studies without properly appreciating the phenotypic null hypothesis.

I think people are perhaps responding to you defensively because this feels like an isolated demand for rigor or weakmanning directed specifically at HBD, without considering the epistemic failings of hardline blank-slatists which are surely even greater.

I mean I've definitely called out people on both sides for nonsense. I even tend to hang out in Turkheimer's mentions and critique him. So I don't think I'm doing isolated demands for rigor, I think I'm doing widespread demands for rigor.

Also I think that showing a trait to be heritable has to count as weak Bayesian evidence at least in favor of a genetic explanation.

The prior probability that a variable is heritable is really really high. Meanwhile, Bayesian updating depends on the probability of the evidence being low, as otherwise it doesn't change your priors much.

Since blackness is also genetically heritable, if blackness were to cause them to experience racism which causes their test scores to be lower

Note that there have been studies trying to control for this, like this admixture study:

Global Ancestry and Cognitive Ability

Using data from the Philadelphia Neurodevelopmental Cohort, we examined whether European ancestry predicted cognitive ability over and above both parental socioeconomicstatus (SES) and measures of eye, hair, and skin color. First, using multi-group confirmatory factor analysis, we verified that strict factorial invariance held between self-identified African and European-Americans. The differences between these groups, which were equivalent to 14.72 IQ points, were primarily (75.59%) due to difference in general cognitive ability (g), consistent with Spearman’s hypothesis. We found a relationship between European admixture and g. This relationship existed in samples of (a) self-identified monoracial African-Americans (B = 0.78, n = 2,179), (b) monoracial African and biracial African-European-Americans, with controls added for self-identified biracial status (B = 0.85, n = 2407), and (c) combined European, African-European, and African-American participants, with controls for self-identified race/ethnicity (B = 0.75, N = 7,273). Controlling for parental SES modestly attenuated these relationships whereas controlling for measures of skin, hair, and eye color did not.

So black people with 30% European ancestry do better on the Penn Computerized Neurocognitive Battery than those with 10% European ancestry, which is already some remarkably fine-grained racism. But people do talk about "colorism" and so they look at genes linked to skin/hair/eye color, but those genes don't seem to have an impact when ancestry is accounted for.

Skin color (assessed genetically with the highly accurate predictor [79, 93] was associated with cognitive ability (Model 1b, Table 5), but made no significant incremental contribution when ancestry was also in the model (Model 2, Table 5). Results could still be due to phenotypic confounding from other appearance variables. To test this possibility, we fitted a number of models including skin, hair, and eye color. We found that none of these features had significant effects on their own, except for brown eye color, which was positively related to cognitive ability, but with a large standard error.

Global Ancestry and Cognitive Ability

Note that the anti-HBD crowd (i.e. the Turkheimer side of the debate) have put in some effort to make the author of this publication Bryan J. Pesta, a tenured professor (!), unemployable. I've mentioned this in my first response to tailcalled, but some choice quotes from a Chronicle article praising the cancellation, to understand how the perception of ambiguity in this topic is maintained, indeed how the sausage gets made. It reads very much like a 30's Pravda report on courageous pioneers catching and handling a villain wrecker kulak to the authorities, Scooby Doo style, but that's the clownish reality of the American academia.

Liam O’Brien was a master’s student in political science at Cleveland State University in 2019 when a screenshot from a new article, titled “Global Ancestry and Cognitive Ability,” crawled across his Twitter feed.

To the untrained eye, the abstract was highly technical. “Using the ancestry-adjusted association between MTAG eduPGS and g from the monoracial African-American sample as an estimate of the transracially unbiased validity of eduPGS (B = 0.124),” the authors wrote, “the results suggest that as much as 20%-25% of the race difference in g can be naïvely explained by known cognitive ability-related variants.”

The argument dressed up in that statistical jargon? That Black people are genetically disposed to be less intelligent than white people.

O’Brien was disturbed to see that debunked racial-hierarchy arguments popular in the late 19th and early 20th century had a toehold in modern academe. Scientifically rigorous research arguing that intelligence is inherited is itself controversial, but few geneticists take seriously the claim that intelligence is racially linked.

His dismay turned to outrage when he discovered that one of the authors, Bryan J. Pesta, was a tenured professor in Cleveland State’s business school. His home institution was essentially providing a soapbox for racist pseudoscience.

O’Brien had a history of political activism, so he did what came naturally, talking to students and professors about Pesta’s article, and trying to get him censured. [...]

A look at Pesta’s RateMyProfessors page shows students generally rated him very highly, describing him as “hilarious,” “interesting,” and “easy.” One warned: “If you’re easily offended, you might not like some of his jokes, especially when he compares certain graphs to phallic symbols.” But none of the 74 reviews complains about racism.

The Chronicle reached out to 10 Black students who graduated from the business school with bachelor’s or master’s degrees in 2022. Of the three who replied, none said they were familiar with Pesta.

“Literally 100s of Black students have taken my classes,” Pesta wrote in an email to The Chronicle. “I’ve won merit pay for teaching many times. I was regard [sic] as among the best teachers in the business college.”

“If I were racist, or even overly political,” he wrote, “I submit I would have been exposed by now.” [..]

Many racial hereditarians present their claims as widely accepted but deliberately suppressed facts in the scientific community. They blame the political correctness of academe for their difficulty publishing in well-respected journals.

Their critics argue that shoddy scholarship and a refusal to account for developments in the study of genetics keep racial hereditarians marginal. Even respected scholars who believe genes play a role in intelligence argue that the role of environmental factors is too complicated and profound to disentangle. Behavioral geneticists like Kathryn Paige Harden and Eric Turkheimer repudiate the idea that IQ differences between races are rooted in genetics. [..]

For “Global Ancestry and Cognitive Ability,” in 2019, Pesta had three co-authors: Jordan Lasker, John G.R. Fuerst, and Emil O.W. Kirkegaard. The Chronicle attempted to contact all of them via publicly listed email addresses, but received no replies.

[a section on trying to find their vulnerabilities]

Thomas E. Schläpfer, a research clinical psychiatrist at Germany’s University of Freiburg who studies interventional biological psychiatry, took charge of the journal in 2020. He said he had been unaware until contacted by The Chronicle of Pesta’s publication or any problems with his brief tenure as editor.

After reading Pesta’s article, he wrote, “While the scientific methods sound impressive, I find the hypothesis both ludicrous and demeaning.” [...]

O’Brien, the political-science graduate student, tried not to let Pesta’s work go ignored. He gathered students from various activist groups to make an action plan. One group put out an email blast inviting interested students to a Zoom meeting on the subject.

Many of the attendees were familiar faces. But one, who joined the call under a pseudonym and left his camera off, made organizers wary. He said he was an undergraduate but offered little else by way of introduction. After some prodding, he messaged one of the organizers his CSU email address, which contained his last name: Fuerst. The organizers shut down the meeting, then reconvened among themselves. They had been infiltrated. If Fuerst knew they were going after Pesta, then Pesta himself surely also knew.

But across the country, geneticists at other universities had set in motion institutional processes focused not on Pesta’s racist claims but on his violation of the norms and regulations of academe.

He had already been on one geneticist’s radar when “Global Ancestry and Cognitive Ability” was published in Psych.

Luke Miller (a pseudonym) is an early-career scientist who has long been rankled by racial hereditarians. As a geneticist, he said, he feels a responsibility to combat the harm done by the fringes of the scientific community. (The Chronicle has used a pseudonym for Miller and left some other early-career researchers in this article unnamed because they fear professional repercussions.) [...]

More alarmingly, the paper cited data from the National Institutes of Health’s Database of Genotypes and Phenotypes (dbGaP). The federal agency has strict controls governing who may use its data and how. It struck Miller as improbable that the NIH had given Pesta’s paper the green light, or would have even given him access to the data, if the agency had known what he planned to do with it.

Miller was tapped into a network of researchers across the country who felt similarly about hereditarianism. Together, four of them combed the methodology section of Pesta’s article and compiled evidence that he had violated NIH policies.

According to the paper’s methodology section, the data was uploaded to at least two servers: the Michigan Imputation Server, a University of Michigan program that deduces genes that haven’t been included in a sample; and HIrisPlex-S, a web application that deduces phenotypes like eye, hair, and skin color from genetic data. While only Pesta received permission to use the NIH data, and named none of his co-authors in the requests, Miller said he and the other whistle-blowers had inferred that others would have had to have access to it to do the analysis the paper described. [...]

Taylor works on an NIH-backed project called the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis. His work uses genetic data from across ethnicities to look at risk factors for cardiovascular disease. The painstaking approval processes he and his colleagues must go through — applying for IRB approval for every study, taking yearly refresher courses on the ethics of using human subjects, and signing data-use agreements — is “cumbersome in many ways,” he said.

”We complain about it to each other as well, but it’s necessary,” he added. Such safeguards in human research came about because of past abuses that poisoned many people’s faith in medical research. They’re designed to ensure that scientists don’t use subjects’ personal information in ways they would find abhorrent.

The letter set a June 2021 deadline for the university to destroy all initially approved copies of the genetic data and find out whether any unapproved copies of the data had been made. The agency also revoked Pesta’s permission to use NIH data for any existing projects, and banned him from obtaining any NIH data for the next three years. [...]

According to a letter sent to Pesta by the then provost, Laura Bloomberg — who has since been tapped as CSU’s president — the university confirmed the NIH’s findings. It also found Pesta had lied to a staff member in CSU’s research office when he said the data would be kept in a university-owned laptop and he would be the only one with access.

Pesta said he had requested and received approval from both Cleveland State and the NIH to store the data on a home computer.

“Those bastards totally ignored me when I pointed it out,” he added.

Bloomberg ultimately found that Pesta’s conduct had damaged the university’s reputation and could impede other professors’ ability to do research.

Cleveland State declared that Pesta had been incompetent or dishonest in teaching or scholarship; neglected his duty, and engaged in personal conduct that substantially impaired the fulfillment of his institutional responsibilities; and interfered with the normal operations of the university. The letter declared Bloomberg’s decision to fire Pesta.

Pesta was officially fired on March 4, 2022, two and a half years after his article was published.

etc.

Due to some issues I haven't had the opportunity to engage with the HBD/PNH discussion or indeed to read themotte recently.

That reads like satire, but only a hack would actually name the chief commissar "O’Brien."

And there are people who will look you in the eye and not just defend this behavior, but threaten you for questioning it. Vile.

Motte: "a trait being heritable does not mean it necessarily has a direct genetic cause"

Bailey: "a trait being heritable is not evidence that it has a direct genetic cause, and the base assumption should be that it does not have a direct genetic cause until very strong evidence exists that it does"

A few days ago, I made a comment defending Turkheimer and critizing HBDers, in response to a vaulted "best of" comment dismissing Turkheimer. ... In the thread, one person ended up posting an example of a paper which supposedly understood the nuances I was talking about. However, I disagree with that, and think that it is instead an excellent example of the problems with HBD epistemics.

In response to your comment, @DaseindustriesLtd already shared proof that Turkheimer confessed to being epistemically irrational about HBD:

And because whatever the faults of HBDers, the other side remains epistemologically worse. Turkheimer may have some legitimate scientific argument against between-group genetic diffs on g; his bottom line was still arrived at through moralizing. «We can recognize a contention that Chinese people are genetically predisposed to be better table tennis players than Africans as silly, and the contention that they are smarter than Africans as ugly, because it is a matter of ethical principle that individual and cultural accomplishment is not tied to the genes in the same way as the appearance of our hair.»

You did not respond to that allegation. Why should we waste time sorting through the pilpul of a confessed propagandist if we are in any way interested in epistemics, as you purport to be?

Let me also cut through what feels like a lot of unnecessary argumentation and simply ask you this: how can you explain the correlation between cognitive skills and genetic closeness depicted in this figure without acknowledging substantial genetic heritability? How is any sort of null hypothesis even necessary with this kind of direct evidence in hand?

Let me also cut through what feels like a lot of unnecessary argumentation and simply ask you this: how can you explain the correlation between cognitive skills and genetic closeness depicted in this figure without acknowledging substantial genetic heritability?

Yes, when you control for factors X, Y and Z, whatever remains is going to be what shows up on the graph. That is what "controlling for" means. Where HBD-tards drop the ball is the transition form "things like height, athletics ability, show high degrees of heritability" to "judging people by their individual qualities rather than their race is anti-science"

  • -25

If "HBD" now also has to include the extreme weakman positions of people who just want a scientific fig-leaf for racist blanket dismissal (of badly-performing groups), is there any group identification you are okay with the people like me who don't hold those positions? I genuinely believe that intelligence is heritable, there are significant differences in averages between groups and want to judge people by their individual qualities and find any policy that treats people differential based on race or ethnicity to be morally highly unpalatable. Do you not believe me that these are my positions, or do you just think that I am not allowed to hold these without taking responsibility for any cover this might give to people who believe in the first two but not the second two?

Where HBD-tards drop the ball is the transition form "things like height, athletics ability, show high degrees of heritability" to "judging people by their individual qualities rather than their race is anti-science"

Can you name any specific HBD-tards?

I am not aware of any HBD believer/tolerant people who say "a 7 foot tall white man who never misses free throws should be banned from the NBA" or "a black teenager with perfect SATs who won the math olympiad should be rejected from Caltech". Can you cite some of them?

Can you name any specific HBD-tards?

A handful in this forum but I'm already in the dog house with the mods.

  • -10

Lol I totally believe you that they exist, but you just can't link to them cause "the mods".

Speaking as a mod, there certainly are people with those beliefs on this forum, but no, it is not encouraged to call people out by name as examples of "People who believe shitty things."

"judging people by their individual qualities rather than their race is anti-science"

This is a gross mischaracterization of the HBD position and you know it. I, and every other HBD supporter I know of in the rationalist community supports judging individual people by their actual qualities. The only difference is that we don't expect such judgements to find exactly equal distributions of talent in each race.

I have literally never seen a rationalist HBD supporter who argues that a demonstrably talented individual should be denied opportunity because of their race

This is a gross mischaracterization

No, it is not a gross mischaracterization. It is the bailey in contrast to the motte. I have had arguments whicthn users in this very thread about how equality before the law is not the same thing as fungibility.

HBD-tards

Don't do this. Straight-up calling your opponents retards is not how arguments work here and you know it.

But "HBD-tards" do not advocate for this generally. As is constantly stated, HBD is most commonly used as an alternative to a racism of the gaps.

Not "generally", only when they are forced to retreat from the bailey to the motte. Hence the derision aimed towards "blank-slatists" and the like.

  • -10

If this is so I only care about the motte, if you find me outside of it feel free to let me know. But it really does not seem like people are willing to grant the motte.

Where HBD-tards drop the ball is the transition form "things like height, athletics ability, show high degrees of heritability" to "judging people by their individual qualities rather than their race is anti-science"

That wasn't remotely the topic of conversation.

The answer is the same though.

  • -15

You did not respond to that allegation. Why should we waste time sorting through the pilpul of a confessed propagandist if we are in any way interested in epistemics, as you purport to be?

I am not aware of any epistemic rules which say that you can't use moral judgements to decide whether something is silly or ugly.

Let me also cut through what feels like a lot of unnecessary argumentation and simply ask you this: how can you explain the correlation between cognitive skills and genetic closeness depicted in this figure without acknowledging substantial genetic heritability? How is any sort of null hypothesis even necessary with this kind of direct evidence in hand?

I agree that they are heritable. Turkheimer also agrees that they are heritable.

  • -10

I didn't interpret Turkheimer as judging it ugly rather than true on moral grounds, I interpreted him as judging it ugly rather than silly or unobjectionable on moral grounds.

I think you'd get more useful engagement and replies if, instead of saying 'phenotypic null hypothesis' a lot and explaining the theory of what it means, you tried to explain in a 'teaching' type way how and why it matters - like, laid out a few toy examples of populations that seem to be HBD-ish if you don't account for PNH but PNH means that heritability is explained by underlying mechanisms that are less HBD-ish.

It's not perfect that interlocutors aren't doing that work themselves, but - I spent an hour yesterday diving deep into something I disagreed with, made a long post here, came out understanding it a bit better but nothing really conclusive, and got zero replies. I could do that again, sure, but I have other stuff to do, so maybe later! People do that a lot here, but it takes enough time they won't do it every time.

"because it is a matter of ethical principle that individual and cultural accomplishment is not tied to the genes in the same way as the appearance of our hair"

What do you make of that then? Suppose the Catholic Church said "it is a matter of ethnical principle that the sun revolves around the Earth." No further arguments they made for geocentrism would be epistemically interesting. We shouldn't trust anything they say on the topic. Once someone confesses to being uninterested in the pursuit of truth, indeed to being the enemy of the truth conditional on its content, it's folly to engage with them for the purpose of pursuing the truth.

In sum: Turkheimer is a propagandist on this topic, he admitted as much, and it's a waste of time to engage with his arguments on the topic if you have any interest in finding the truth.

I have already read his point about the phenotypic null hypothesis, so your argument can't exactly persuade me to un-read it, whatever that would mean. And having read it, I've come to the conclusion that it's a critically important point for understanding heritability. Reading his paper and understanding his argument screens off whichever virtue or vice he might have.

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?

More comments

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).

because it is a matter of ethical principle that individual and cultural accomplishment is not tied to the genes in the same way as the appearance of our hair.

I'm not going to defend Turkheimer, because I don't know the guy, and a lot of academic scholars strike me as absolutely sleazy, but I think I can defend the argument.

Aquota says below:

As is constantly stated, HBD is most commonly used as an alternative to a racism of the gaps.

Sure, maybe people here and now use it this way, but it's not like we haven't seen slippery slopes happen in real time. An ironic example is "racism of the gaps" itself, didn't we get here from a completely reasonable "maybe everyone should have equal rights"? This leads me to being quite sympathetic to the idea of just tabooing anything that might lead to pushing collective responsibility. Of course the rules of such a taboo would have to be a lot different than what we have now, banning HBD while pushing CRT is unjust, and not even a stable equilibrium (and I suppose this is why we are where we are).

I agree that either both CRT and HBD should be permissible to discuss, or neither should be, with the current situation being unjust against HBD. I used to lean towards "both", wanting the free market of ideas to sort it out. However, the free market of ideas doesn't seem to work, as evidenced by lots of things including HBDers not understanding the phenotypic null hypothesis, so now I don't know what to think anymore.

The phenotypic null hypothesis is an invention of Eric Turkheimer, who confessed to being a propagandist -- the receipts are upthread. How on earth could it possibly be rational for an epistemic rationalist to even invest the time to understand his argument when he has already revealed that his arguments will have only a coincidental relationship with the truth? It's a waste of time and energy, and he intends it to be exactly that.

I don't buy that his arguments have only a coincidental corration to truth. He is biased, yes, but there is also an important signal.

Counterpoint: There is no useful correlation between what Turkheimer says on this topic and the truth, because he has already admitted that his conclusions are determined by his ethical positions rather than by the pursuit of truth.

You're just defending being a propagandist, treating the truth and knowledge as a pawn to be sacrificed instrumentally to advance your political goals.

And I'm fully supportive of people who feel that way to confess as much, so that those of us interested in the truth for its own sake know not to waste our time by treating their arguments as being made in good faith.

I see where you're coming from, but I do take issue with being portrayed as bad faith. If I was bad faith, I wouldn't come out and declare I want to taboo an entire field of knowledge, I'd do what everyone else does, and just scream "raaacist!".

I'm accusing Turkheimer of bad faith, not you. But in any event, there are plenty of instrumental reasons to adopt a false tone of scientific analysis when engaging in bad faith reasoning, not least because it's so much easier to dismiss people who start and finish with allegations of racism.

I appreciate you trying to bring nuance to the conversation, but without some examples it's still not clear to me what sorts of things you disagree with HBDers about exactly. I think the most relevant question is the extent to which the gaps in intellectual achievement, employment in various professions, and crime rates could realistically be changed by policy interventions. Do you think you have a much different answer here than HBDers?

As far as I can tell, you're saying that heritable traits might be caused along the way by others treating people differently based on their phenotype, and if that differential treatment were to go away, the presumably so would the heritability. Is that a fair summary?

And as an aside, I find the name "phenotypic null hypothesis" to be a bad name for two reasons: 1) It's not descriptive, and 2) it seems to be playing a rhetorical game by calling itself the "null hypothesis". I prefer to discuss evidence for and against various claims rather than arguing about who has the burden of proof.

I appreciate you trying to bring nuance to the conversation, but without some examples it's still not clear to me what sorts of things you disagree with HBDers about exactly.

I gave an example? The linked study? It's absolutely absurd methodology for testing the stated research question.

I think the most relevant question is the extent to which the gaps in intellectual achievement, employment in various professions, and crime rates could realistically be changed by policy interventions.

There are many possible questions one can come up with, and this is one of them, but it's not the one I'm making the threads about.

I'm making the threads about the phenotypic null hypothesis, which is a critical question for how to interpret various other kinds of evidence like twin studies.

As far as I can tell, you're saying that heritable traits might be caused along the way by others treating people differently based on their phenotype, and if that differential treatment were to go away, the presumably so would the heritability. Is that a fair summary?

Yes that is part of it, for instance if you are smart due to genetics then people will give you more education credentials and more money, and if instead people gave everyone a random amount of money, the heritability of income would disappear.

However it doesn't technically speaking have to be others treatment. It might also be your own treatment, or a result of other things like disease or physics or lots of things. Basically, variables affect each other across different levels, and that prevents heritability from distinguishing biological from nonbiological levels.

And as an aside, I find the name "phenotypic null hypothesis" to be a bad name for two reasons: 1) It's not descriptive, and 2) it seems to be playing a rhetorical game by calling itself the "null hypothesis". I prefer to discuss evidence for and against various claims rather than arguing about who has the burden of proof.

I think it has a good reason to call itself the null hypothesis. It would be absurd to claim that the heritability of income or marriage was not due to the way other people treat you phenotypically. You can't have a serious debate about HBD without the phenotypic null hypothesis being properly understood.

But so what if it is due to people treating you phenotypically? This is still genetic causation. It might indeed be interesting to some to figure out exactly through what mechanisms differences in genes result differences in income, but how exactly is this relevant for our ability to predict real world outcome of our policies? Can you show one example where “naive” (according to you) HBD would get some real world application seriously wrong, compared to approach informed by your phenotypic casual pathway correction?

I'm not talking about how things morally ought to be, I'm trying to figure out how the world is actually like. For the purpose of e.g. doing evolutionary psychology, such as with the linked study, it is relevant to know that heritability is of no evidentiary value.

it is relevant to know that heritability is of no evidentiary value.

You have not shown this. You've merely shown that heritability is not 100% ironclad.

I await your answer as to which concrete predictions HBDers will get wrong due to neglect of this.

Dude, read a few twin studies, they find that pretty much everything is heritable, of course heritability is of no evidentiary value.

Dude, read a few twin studies, they find that pretty much everything is heritable, of course heritability is of no evidentiary value.

Really? Twin studies suggest that a Korean baby raised by Americans will speak Korean? An Indian baby raised by Mormon parents will grow up Hindu?

There's plenty of non-heritable traits. Hence, heritability has evidentiary value.

Language and kind of also religion would be an exception, yes.

But beyond those exceptions, and a few others, it seems to me that there are an enormous number of traits where heritability shows up. Already at vocabulary and religiosity do you see a ton of heritability. Pretty much all personality traits and all interests are heritable. Of course the classic HBD point is that abilities tend to be heritable and highly genetically correlated. Relationship to parents, peers and teachers is heritable, I believe. Having a dog in your mid-life is heritable. Etc.

The point is that pretty much everything is heritable, so the prior for heritability is extremely high, not that absolutely everything is heritable.

More comments

This is probably the lousiest attempt at making an argument that I have seen here. The only way you could have made it worse is if you waved a credential.

I don't need to attempt hard to make an argument if the issue is very straightforward. If P(B) is high then P(A|B) ~ P(A).

I am not asking you how things morally ought to be. What I am asking you is to provide an example of a peril that awaits HBDers if they ignore your pet concern. Is there any?

You need to understand that for me and many people, the entire point of research in this (and many other) area is to guide our real world behavior, policy making, and to answer questions like “if we want to achieve X, will doing Y work? If not, what will?”. Can you provide any non artificial example of a scenario where naively taking heritability as representing “direct biological” (whatever one understands by that) casual mechanism, will lead us to substantially different policy than when one observes that genes only actually act through phenotype, and it’s the phenotype that interacts with the real world?

I'm much more interested in the science side of things than the policy side of things, so I don't really have any strong examples at hand. It's just that I think that obviously people who refuse to understand the phenotypic null hypothesis should be purged from discussions of behavior genetics, so if HBDers don't like getting purged from discussions they should make sure to understand it.

What about purging people like Turkheimer, who explicitly put their ideology above science? Are you giving them a pass, and instead prefer to focus on those who inappropriately address your methodological pet concern?

Look, to me, you seem to be more interested in purging people and silencing the discussion, instead of in using science to learn about reality and have these learning inform our behavior and policy. You can’t even provide any example why your pet concern is relevant for me at all! I think you are wasting everyone’s time, and I think this behavior should be purged from the discussions. If you don’t like your pet concern being ignored, you should make sure to understand it.

What about purging people like Turkheimer, who explicitly put their ideology above science? Are you giving them a pass, and instead prefer to focus on those who inappropriately address your methodological pet concern?

Look, to me, you seem to be more interested in purging people and silencing the discussion, instead of in using science to learn about reality and have these learning inform our behavior and policy.

I am interested in promoting people who can help me learn things and purging people who introduce noise and waste time.

It just so happens that there are a number of very general principles that must be taken into account, as they affect the results everywhere you go. HBD is one of them! For instance, racial differences in intelligence cause a whole bunch of racial inequality in outcomes, and if you don't realize that, there's going to be a comprehensive mysterious pattern, which might make you falsely infer something like "everything is racist". However, the phenotypic null hypothesis is another one! Phenotypic causality causes a whole bunch of heritability and genetic correlations, and if you don't realize that, there's going to be a comprehensive mysterious pattern, which might make you falsely infer some sort of genetic solipsism (especially in combination with measurement error, which suppresses environmental correlations).

If someone keeps spamming racial inequality studies and talking about structural racism, while being difficult to convince to even think of alternate hypotheses, then a healthy behavior genetics group should consider purging them and finding someone more productive to talk to. But if someone keeps spamming twin studies and talking about genetics, while being difficult to convince to even think of alternate hypotheses, then a healthy behavior genetics group should again purge them.

Why? Partly to avoid noise and waste, but also partly to align incentives to actually learning things, and so on.

You can’t even provide any example why your pet concern is relevant for me at all!

You're not interested in behavior genetics, you admit so yourself! Of course a key principle of behavior genetics is not going to be interesting to you.

More comments

It would be absurd to claim that the heritability of income or marriage was not due to the way other people treat you phenotypically. You can't have a serious debate about HBD without the phenotypic null hypothesis being properly understood.

The relevant distinction to basically any conversation where this comes up: is heritability of income due to your skin color phenotype or your doing jobs that are valued by society well phenotype?

If you want to argue that actually heritability of income is because Asians display the "smart" phenotype and blacks display the "dumb" phenotype and smartness gets rewarded in 2022 USA, you are not disagreeing with any HBD advocate. You are merely saying "aha, if we stopped rewarding intelligence with higher income then this would change", which none of them would disagree with if it were stated clearly.

I'm not saying I'm disagreeing with the core HBD conclusion. I'm saying HBDers ought to have a sufficiently good understanding of the phenotypic null hypothesis that they roll their eyes at studies claiming to find evidence for evopsych by finding traits to be heritable.

Reliance on the "phenotypical null hypothesis" is uninteresting, and really I find the name to be ridiculous as it is just simply asserting an unearned null hypothesis status. It's the same kind of critique that the possibility that we're actual brains in a vat means I can't be certain about measurements during woodworking. Sure, granted. But you understand that this doesn't actually impact policy discussion right? I don't need proof against solipsism to accurately measure a cut of wood and I don't need a unified theory of genetic determinism to find out that the policy proposals of blank slatists fail in every conceivable way and we should stop listening to their batshit theories. Maybe there is some allergen with a simple intervention that will equalize all populations on average on IQ tests and achieve racial achievement equity and I'll celebrate that discovery more than you can image, but you don't get to call it a null hypothesis when literally no evidence has ever pointed to it being true.

Reliance on the "phenotypical null hypothesis" is uninteresting

Is the goal to be interesting or to figure out the truth?

and really I find the name to be ridiculous as it is just simply asserting an unearned null hypothesis status

It's not unearned, it's a fundamental property of heritability that it transfers through phenotypic causality, and there's lots of phenotypic causality to go through.

It's the same kind of critique that the possibility that we're actual brains in a vat means I can't be certain about measurements during woodworking.

No, the phenotypic null hypothesis agrees that the measurements work, it just points out something about what they mean.

But you understand that this doesn't actually impact policy discussion right? I don't need proof against solipsism to accurately measure a cut of wood and I don't need a unified theory of genetic determinism to find out that the policy proposals of blank slatists fail in every conceivable way and we should stop listening to their batshit theories.

I understand that the phenotypic null hypothesis is not a knockdown argument against HBD, and that it is not meant to be. Instead it covers the validity of various types of arguments.

Like if HBDers keep using argument that are invalid due to the phenotypic null hypothesis, and they refuse to learn about the phenotypic null hypothesis, then surely critics of HBD are in the right in dismissing HBDers as clueless about behavior genetics. You can't expect anti-HBDers to want to spend infinite time knocking down nonsense arguments. (Of course that point is symmetric - anti-HBDers also often come up with nonsense.)

Maybe there is some allergen with a simple intervention that will equalize all populations on average on IQ tests and achieve racial achievement equity and I'll celebrate that discovery more than you can image, but you don't get to call it a null hypothesis when literally no evidence has ever pointed to it being true.

The null hypothesis isn't about race differences in IQ, it's about within-population heritability in all sorts of things.

I forget who exactly said it but there was a comment from a long term regular in another HBD thread from a couple weeks back to the effect of "the problem with the high degree of overlap between parentage and culture is that it gives people evidence to falsely claim that culture matters more than genetics."

It seems to me that the inverse is equally true. That the high degree of overlap between parentage and culture is that it gives people evidence to falsely claim that genetics matters more than culture.

As far as I know, twin and adoption studies consistently show that genetics matter much more than parenting in causing differences between people. So the HBD-aligned people are right about that part.

Of course "does genetics or parenting matter more for causing differences between people" is not the only nature-nurture question of interest, and behavior genetic methods might not be viable for other questions, or might require adjustments to the biometric numbers to be applicable.

Is cultural intervention honestly any more palatable than genetic pessimism to the opponents of hbd? Stop doing damage to society and you can examine the issue at your leisure. But if you're going to impose large costs on me and mine you need to have real receipts.

But also, that groups vary in average just trivially follows from the idea that different individuals can vary on the same measures. Any randomly selected group will vary to some degree just due to internal variance and it takes very little selective pressure to make that variance larger. It would require some kind of miracle for groups that were isolated for thousands of years to not vary somewhat and then we're just haggling on price.

Is cultural intervention honestly any more palatable than genetic pessimism to the opponents of hbd?

I'm not sure what exactly what you're asking here. But if you're asking whether I think having a common culture/values matters more to building healthy communities racial homogeneity? or do I believe that growing up in a middle-class two-parent household has a greater effect on a child's life outcomes than the melanin content of their skin? the answer is "Yes, Absolutely."

Growing in two-parent household isn't an independent variable. Earlier, a parent might die to war or natural causes, or slave master moved them to another location. Now, in rich 1 st world countries, living with 1 parent is usually because one or both parents are bad at impulse control (assholes), which is correlated with intelligence and anything.

That is not a rebuttal.

I've seen SAT scores broken out by race and income that suggests income is less predictive.

Perhaps academic achievement is less culturally valued in the gaps.

Have there been any successful interventions promoting 2-parent households?

Depends on how you define "successful intervention" the problem being that cultural interventions are effectively monstrous in the eyes of the blue tribe and thus there is a vested interest within academia to undermine and denying any success.

cultural interventions are effectively monstrous in the eyes of the blue tribe

Do you mean cultural interventions promoting stability and 'tradition'? That tribe seems all-in on interventions promoting alphabet people or degeneracy.

As for defining success, improved performance of family formation where the children are born to married parents where everyone lives in the home and at least one parent works in gainful employment. No extra-marital births to either adult could be a 'stretch' goal.

Blacks had better family formation in the past, prior to the sexual revolution, so it's the other way around but amounts to the same thing. We do in fact know that blacks as a population can actually form stable families, because we've seen them do it. yes, there was still a gap between the best outcomes we've observed for blacks and the best outcomes we've observed for whites, but we also observe that gaps between whites and Jews and Asians don't actually cause problems by themselves absent aggressive race-baiting. It's at least a plausible route to laying race to rest.

They can, but in current year they don't.

Have there been any successful interventions promoting 2-parent households?

You are of course aware we are able to control for being raised middle class and having a two-parent household, correct? I think you know what I mean by cultural intervention, are the opponents of HBD wiling to tell underperforming groups that they are raising their kids wrong and need to be forced to change how they raise their kids? Not that I would support this even if it would work, it would be a monstrous thing. But that's what you mean by a culture explanation right?

You are of course aware we are able to control for being raised middle class and having a two-parent household, correct?

I am aware, the question is are you?

Am I aware of what? That your proposed examples are baked in already? why would this support your position?

Essentially what @PutAHelmetOn said, by controlling for factors that are not genetics you are effectively baking the assumption that genetics is the primary causal factor into your study.

As for whether the cultural explanation is "monstrous" well that's one of the fundamental points of disagreement between the blue tribe and the red.

More comments

Not the poster you replied to but I hope I don't do his argument a disservice.

Maybe being raised in a middle class house with two parents causes good outcomes, just like genes cause good outcomes. Then, controlling for one would show a correlation with the other (and outcomes).

How do studies usually show "greater effect" in situations like these? Do two studies with different controls and compare at the correlations? How is "greater effect" defined?

More comments

Do you have a graph comparing the educational outcomes of middle-class two-parent black Americans to non-middle-class non-two-parent Jewish-Americans?

I'm not an HBDist.

I believe that growing up in a middle-class two-parent household has a greater effect on a child's life outcomes than

Because you don't have evidence, it looks like "I believe that growing up in a middle-class two-parent household has a greater effect on a child's life outcomes than" is based on faith

I suspect it's got a lot more evidence both observational and academic than your nebulous claims about group differences in IQ do.

I believe he means that the socially-acceptable alternative to HBD is not cultural explanations, and the socially-acceptable alternative to any solutions HBD might imply is not changing the culture of the group with the poor outcomes. Rather, it's "blame and punish whitey".

Firstly, "socially acceptable" to whom? Secondly, what of it?

I believe that if you were to ask the median conservative or a middle-class black person about achievement gaps, black criminality, collapse of black-owned businesses/neighborhoods over the last 60 years, or any of the other negative trends that HBDists like to blame on genetics, that their response would be something about the "crisis of black fatherhood".

However you're unlikely to hear anything about this in blue-aligned spaces (be they libertarian, progressive, or reactionary) because acknowledging it calls a number of deeply held blue-tribe beliefs about personal emancipation, internal vs external loci of control, collective vs individual guilt, the role of the nuclear family (or lack there of) into question.

Journalists and academia. They're not 50% conservaties. What your median conservatives says is irreleveant

Journalists and academia.

and what "Journalists and academia" say is relevant somehow?

Firstly, "socially acceptable" to whom?

To the group which is in power and controls the Overton window.

Secondly, what of it?

If the explanation is not socially acceptable, remedies which rely on the explanation being true will not be socially acceptable either, and therefore will not be implemented. So the problem will remain and will continue to be blamed on whitey.

Do you genuinely believe that any one group actually controls the overton window?

Sounds to me like you're choosing to be blamed.

But if you're going to impose large costs on me and mine you need to have real receipts.

Actually you just need to have a sufficient majority of the voters or people in positions at power in the institutions that make decisions about what costs to bear in order to create equality. Most political decisions do not seem to be very informed by science.

I'd offer a third take: it's likely that the high degree of overlap between parentage and culture is due to the mutual influence each has upon the other, over time, to the point that there are very good reasons it's difficult to tease the two apart.

Genetics shapes culture. If a group has a higher than normal tendency to reclusiveness, or aggression, or neuroticism, or quantitative ability, etc., then if the resulting society is to be successful, it must shape its institutions to both offset the negative impacts of that tendency as well as guide the positive aspects in a productive direction. Successful institutions must deal with people as they exist, not as anyone wishes them to be.

Culture shapes genetics. Culture is what determines status, and status heavily influences who has an easier time contributing his genes to the next generation.

Overall, I'd say the blank-slatists are trivially wrong, and the HBDers are directionally correct, but that it's unfortunately easy to overstate one's case.

My father retired from thirty years at a job which I intuitively understood before I was ever hired there under him. My mother and I both do desktop publishing. Our family’s favorite game is Perquackey, the Scrabble-style dice game, and we each have a copy. None of us have Scrabble.

Brain genes are remarkable.

Certainly. I can take a look at my immediate family, and link up all sorts of similarities in terms of likes/dislikes, talents, emotional reactivity, communication style, etc. It's just that this sort of observation can't really separate nature vs. nurture when you're linked by both genes and experience.

Though once you've gone through the massive stack of adoption studies, twin studies, everything-we're-allowed-to-do-ethically studies, etc., you find that both matter a lot.

There's a pattern in the interaction that I suspect is very common. Take height as an example. Your maximum potential height is genetically determined, full stop. But your actual height as a fraction of that potential is environmentally determined--did you get adequate nutrition as a child? Did your legs get amputated in a car accident?

That said, this is more examining individual cases and family clusters, rather than the trends of population genetics.


What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats