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My rule of thumb for HackerNews with regard to wrongthink is: if the username looks like a real name, then opinion discarded – at best, it's some sellout mid-career manager with a reputation at stake, in fact he's likely posting not out of genuine interest but only to neurotically reinforce his reputation, a highly compensated yet politically powerless peasant quaking in his boots at the thought of angering the HR Inner Party cat lady sovereign – if she were to check and see him being the first to stop the applause. At worst, something lobotomized and ChatGPT-like, impervious to logic.
If it's some random alphanumeric string or witty nonsense, that's perhaps a hacker or at least a thinking person, and worth a read.
...
Case in point.
Compared to TheMotte it's markedly worse, for the aforementioned reason of HN being a good boy pageant rather than a pseudonymous discussion forum of people selected for having issues with orthodoxy. Fundamentally it's the same because there is no penalty for trotting out the same two-bit, long-discredited gotchas (muh «race boundaries are nebulous», «the Irish were dumber, checkmate» etc), therefore no progress is being made and, indeed, there is a regression in cumulative knowledge with attrition of the best. Then again, no community of notable size satisfies this criterion – as far as these topics are concerned.
Scott's wrongthink in this case is so anodyne I think it's more interesting that Topher Brennan (incidentally the gender theorist Ozy Brennan's, nee Franz', husband and father of her child – guess some people just never get over their inferiority complex) believed it to be a decent attack vector, and judging by those discussions it is giving some people enough to work with. I doubt they even read it – they just skim to confirm that on the level of sentiment he's pro-HBD – and therefore definitely pro-racism, and likely pro-white supremacy and Nazism to boot.
Confirmation bias works the same way for any belief system – with pizzagates and voter frauds just as well as with suspicions of progressives. You need tremendous social capital to merely earn a hearing from a person, and not an adversarial sentiment classifier.
Agreed on all points, but:
I think there is something important here. If we were in the 70s, we would likely think that the Irish were genetically predisposed to low IQ. IQ data at the time would clearly imply that.
But then, after some economic development, they increased to regular white people IQ levels. So it wasn't bad DNA, it was economic circumstances decreasing their average mental ability.
That's great news. It may be possible to significantly improve populations' mental abilities merely through cultural and economic changes. Frankly, many Sub-Saharan populations are in a sorry state. But that may be largely economic and not that they have a set of "dumb genes".
It worked for the Irish, if we're lucky it'll work for other populations too.
Ho ho ho, I've complained about this one before, so let me reduce the broth down to its essence: anything Richard Lynn says about Irish IQ scores is politically motivated bullshit.
Very conveniently for him that the rebellious Paddies in the South are dumber (science says so!) than the loyal subjects of Empire in the North, who in turn are not quite as smart as the minor province on the mainland (the Scots) until we get to the peak and pinnacle of the British Isles, the most intelligent who live in London (naturally).
I'm not saying there isn't any data there, but he took data from two (yes, just two) IQ tests done in the 70s, kludged them together, then declared the Irish (rum Romanism and rebellion subset) had an IQ of 95. Everyone and their dog then quoted this as Gospel when writing news reports.
Later, better testing comes along and well well lookit dat: the Irish (priest-ridden Southern revolting subset) turn out to be human after all.
EDIT: There is something to the notion of better education, economic improvement and the like, I won't deny it. But the seeming jump of about 10-15 IQ points is not down to "suddenly, via progress, the Irish developed brains between one generation and another" as much as it is "modernisation produced a generation better schooled and better at test-taking, along with the environmental causes that are attributed to the Flynn Effect".
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