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When's the last time anyone discussed HBD top level on the motte? I've honestly forgotten. At the risk of consensus-building, I thought we hammered most of that out on the old website.
The main thing I have to say is that the conversation on HN took on a pile-on dynamic where it was garbagetime vs two or three others. Pile-on threads are bad since the people getting piled on tend to mix up conversations they have with different people. It's very frustrating to have to make the same argument twice different places in the same thread.
Also someone mentions the 'quoted emails' from Scott? What are we talking about here? Some very innocuous emails that got leaked? I highly doubt he's written anything more aggressive than Untitled or the paranoid rant in recent years.
HBD from at least my perspective is not a good thing to need or want to use. Trying to compare races to each other only leads to bad places. But be prepared for when SCOTUS rules on affirmative action because affirmative action advocates are going to be comparing races to each other and without HBD they are going to produce dangerously wrong conclusions.
The problem with the truth is that no matter how terrible it might be, the world still operates according to it and refuses to conform to much nicer fiction.
Especially if knowing it gives you a significant material advantage for low amounts of energy. Which it clearly does here.
It's more dangerous to ignore these things. Especially as others will not and already do not. That's Scott's point in part.
I am very much on the side of truth over noble lies and have many posts here to that effect. I'm not saying anyone should be lying about these things. I'm just saying it's better that we don't go poking the bear whose location we truthfully know. The knowledge should be used when people propose opening up a daycare in the bear cave, but otherwise we should avoid the bear cave.
If we don't teach our children WHY we avoid the bear cave, they won't fully understand, and will make mistakes after we're gone.
I do think we should teach the kids liberalism. The thing to be avoided is comparing groups across immutable characteristics and the reason is all the bodies. It's not necessary to compare people to each other in order to explain why it's a bad idea. I'm not saying we should lie about it, I'm saying we should discourage finding that an interesting thing to even measure.
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I suppose that's fair. But I'd much rather we build a hunting party and kill it instead of letting stray children wander in by accident.
This issue will come back, and we must be ready and have a solution or terrible things will happen. This does not mean we shouldn't be cautious, of course.
I think killing the bear in this metaphor would be Gene editing or some kind of way to actually remedy the problem.
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I have argued that it has fallen out of favor since 2020 or so. The old sub used to be more pro-HBD than this one, especially around 2017-2020.
How much of that was natural "falling out of favor" vs a deliberate purge using any method and excuse possible, from topic bans to targeted mod harassment?
Beginning a few years ago it started to be actively suppressed by the mods and sneered at by the “cooler” users on TheMotte. I think it sort of coincided with Julius Branson. I noticed that every post mentioning HBD that wasn’t by a 5 year+ veteran was treated as “Probable sneerclub troll baiting to get the sub banned”, and at least downvoted if not banned by the mods.
Were the discussions repetitive and boring after a point? Sure, but so is everything we talk about. How many times have people discussed tech censorship of online communities? How often do we talk about overproduction of elites and wokeness as intra elite competition? It’s the same topics every week for years, barring a few new events. HBD was definitely excised from the community pretty deliberately, perhaps most here still believe it but have gotten the message that talking about it is deeply uncool and liable to get you banned.
Just look at how BorfRebus talks about “HBD autists” upthread, we don’t talk about “libertarian autists” or “classical liberal autists” or “anti censorship autists” with such casual mockery
and HlynkaCG's anti-hbd posts tend to do really well too
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It's more of a "anyone that would be convinced by argument either way already is so there's no point discussing it" rather than heretics getting axed by my estimation.
I agree. The HBD discussions bored the socks off me, because after the first few go-rounds it was the same old stuff all the time with nothing new, but a tendency to slide fast into insults and sweeping claims. I was glad rather than otherwise that the mods slowed it down. The trouble is that it is very much associated with Culture War and to my recollection a lot of the pro-HBD comments degenerated into "and this is why [population J] are all a bunch of savage wild animals, science proves it!"
I may be wrong on that, but it's the impression I took away from it whenever the same old merry-go-round started up again.
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agree. the issue has become tired, although i'm game for discussing it
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Pretty much all the former, in my estimation.
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A particular e-mail from 2014. There's an imgur archive here, though the format is awful.
The OccidentalAscent link is pretty much dousing your hands with water before taking a nice big grip on the giant electrified do-not-touch of racial IQs. While I think the analysis puts too strong a thumb on the scales and don't agree with it, it is an analysis than a screed... but it's still hard to see Scott's use as anything but acceptance of the argument even if not necessarily its conclusions, in ways that the broader progressive movement considered (even contemporaneously: Middlebury wasn't until 2017, but it didn't exactly come out of the blue) and considers unacceptable. They're e-mails where Scott literally types out the phrase "I will appreciate if you NEVER TELL ANYONE I SAID THIS, not even in confidence," so even contemporaneously, I think he knew they weren't likely to be read as innocuous then, and things have gotten a lot worse in a lot of ways since.
Which wasn't bright, especially since Scott and Topher had already been fighting over feminism and Atheism+-related concerns already.
Thank you for the link.
'Partially correct or non-provably non-correct' is just a fancy way of saying that he doesn't know! That's a pretty anodyne thing to say in objective terms, though it would obviously get you to a gulag in Stalin's Russia.
The 'if you tell anyone I said this I will probably either leave the internet forever or seek some sort of horrible revenge' bit is quite sad. I wouldn't feel very threatened by Scott like I might be if I betrayed the confidence of some thuggish musclebound tough-guy with a gun collection. I rather hope he got his revenge though.
Some guy once said that 'the best revenge is massive success', and I'd say he's there. Haters can seethe, etc.
I dunno, comparing him to his old nemeses (nemesii?) Scott is doing better than Arthur Chu and David Gerard, but worse than Charles Clymer.
At least Scott lost his balls less literally, but he's definitely not in the inner party like Clymer, whose various old offenses you're not even allowed to mention any more, as the man who did them officially never existed.
If you count Vox as a singular nemesis, I'd say it's hard to call him a winner there too.
No idea who this person was, so tried Google. Very interesting results, as in - none. One mention of past as "Charles Clymer" but no connection with "Charlotte Adora Elizabeth Clymer".
Tried Edge (which I hate but was testing to see if it gave me different results) and yes indeed it did, a lot of articles about this person's prior bad behaviour.
So it's fascinating to me that Google very clearly is burying stuff about trans people that is in any way negative - or maybe just even "dead-naming".
Their Wikipedia bio is great too; though they are (converted?) Episcopalian, they work for Catholics for Choice (which is the organisation of and for liberal/dissident cultural Catholics who want legal abortion - slightly more aggressive on this than Pelosi and Biden who are just run-of-the-mill 'oh yah abortion great, human right, legal, not my job to impose my beliefs on others, of course I'm fully Catholic' types): they're "director of communications and strategy at Catholics for Choice"
So I don't know if they were raised Catholic and then took the soup, or were Episcopalian all along, but thanks Chuck for interfering in the doctrines of my faith to bring change about to your liking.
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Nemeses (Latin, third declension: 1 2), nemeseis (Greek, third declension: 1 2), or nemesises (English)
"Nemesii" would be the plural of "nemesius" (Latin, second declension).
Thank you, someday I will finally learn what a god damn declension is.
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There’s a reason the term “quokka” gets thrown around as an insulting term for rationalists. It’s hard for them to imagine others will be hostile to them for no reason besides petty political differences, to the point of trying to destroy your job and reputation
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I haven't read the paranoid rant, but I think the quoted emails were (from the perspective of a typical progressive) significantly worse than Untitled. Basically he just mentioned tentative support for hbd.
You should; it's excellent.
In vino veritas, indeed.
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Archive link to The Paranoid Rant.
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