Does anyone else suspect that Scott grossly exaggerates his belief in Atlantis? I find it difficult to believe he was ever serious about it. And it seems to be a very useful story for him that he gets endless value out of
Bernd
Fighting algorithmic racism like John Henry
Misembrance 1yr ago·Edited 1yr ago
Remember that Scott was growing up in the golden age of "history's mysteries" with captain Riker and that guy from Babylon 5 who definitely wasn't saying it was aliens, but...
It's hard to remember what things were like back then without rewatching the X-Files. Atlantis was like kiddie's first cryptohistory theory for a 90's boy.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
Misembrance 1yr ago
I mean, as weird theories go, and presuming you don't attribute modern tech to it or something, Atlantis isn't really that weird an idea. Lots of land was inundated when the last glacial period ended, coastal cities can subside into the ocean if built improperly (e.g. Port Royal), and technological regress has occurred on a couple of occasions (most notably the Tasmanian Aborigines losing fire). There's nothing especially-well-known that contradicts Atlantis; among non-experts it's mostly just status issues keeping people away, and Scott's well-known for being willing to ignore those at least some of the time.
I feel like this is the world's longest version of Zombie Feynman's response along the lines of, the core idea of science is testing by experimentation, everything else is bookkeeping.
Definitely aimed at the hegemonic ideology and not me, since I relate intensely to this paragraph:
If I had had to suffer through a few more skeptics calling me racist because I wanted to know why there were giant underwater pyramids, I probably would have believed in Atlantis even harder, out of spite, and never talked myself out of it. And then when ivermectin came along, I would have thought “Scientists? Experts? They’re the guys who are so dumb they can’t even figure out Atlantis existed when there are giant underwater pyramids right in front of their eyes. Screw them, I’m listening to Bret Weinstein."
I often find myself leaning into weird or unsubstantiated beliefs due solely to resentment at how much scorn is poured on people who dare question the relevant orthodoxy. I'm probably a lot more willing to entertain HBD or even JQ stuff simply because asking a good faith question about either topic (and others like them) gets you shouted down, ostracized, blacklisted etc.
It's actually worse than Scott's example, because unlike the the guy Scott is beefing with, who apparently knows something about ivermectin, most people aren't even capable of arguing the "orthodox" positiom but still wouldn't hesitate to puff up and self-righteously shout some string of load catchphrases at you to score social points for being a Doubleplus Goodthinker "LMAO HORSE DEWORMER INJECTING BLEACH LOL" It's all so tiresome.
Speaking of HBD, here's an interesting, very typical recent exchange on Twitter between a bunch of race realists and a certain Dialectical Biologist (self-identified Lewontin fan), with laymen chiming in too. The crux of the argument is, as always: can races have differences in average cognitive ability? The refutation, cutting aside fluff like «IQ tests have culture bias», is twofold: first, intelligence is always adaptive, and Africans also had to plan for the future in the ancestral environment (equivalently, «would have benefitted from long-term planning for e.g. droughts and... doing something about it). Second, races aren't even a thing, so the point is moot (human groups aren't species, aren't subspecies, aren't breeds, and so he just dismisses examples of cognitive differences within such subsets in non-human animals). E.g. here's an insane bit:
DB: 'Race realists' have never provided a coherent explanation for why/how different environments supposedly selected for high or low intelligence alleles during evolutionary history. High intelligence would be advantageous in all environments!
some guy: So is strength, speed, and height. Do those vary by race?
DB: Do you have reliable data showing those traits do actually vary by race?
DB: I don't, race is synonymous with subspecies, and humans don't have subspecies
So,
pygmies aren't a «race», seeing as «race»=subspecies =an invalid concept to begin with,
so there, by definition, cannot be reliable data relating to pygmies (or anyone) showing that strength, speed and height actually vary by race;
so the example of a specific lineage of humans being obviously short and weak can be safely ignored;
and this direction of attack on the core argument – inherent implausibility of differences in selection pressure on «more is always better traits» – remains guarded.
Obviously there are more layers to it: if this line of defense were somehow breached, he could concede that maxing out height isn't always better (even though I'd expect bigger pygmies to still be more successful in their environment) but intelligence is different, or some such. But he plays to maintain maximum optionality, not to score points in a rational debate, so even non-damning attacks must be deflected.
On the surface, such mental gymnastics, with rapid jumps between abstraction layers and revealed intelligence, seems to require explicit reasoning. I always wonder if these people understand what they're doing, or if they're RLHF'd into mentally circling the drain like ChatGPT is RLHF'd into incoherently preferring an H-bomb to the N-word, and are no more conscious than most folks imagine ChatGPT is. Or if there even is any substance to the idea that there could be difference. @Chrisprattalpharaptr, what say you?
Population differences aren't perfectly continuous tho. Genetic distances between clusters are larger than what would be predicted from geographic distance
Yes I know. There is population structure as the papers you cite prove. This isn't evidence that the 4chan interpretation of the left PCA is correct. Also, I always find it astonishing how hereditarians cite papers by Rosenberg/Novembre and somehow miss points such as these:
As 0.0153 is not a large value of genetic distance, and because the addition of the B term produces only a modest increase in Rˆ2, the discontinuities that give rise to genetic clusters – as we have stated previously [3] – constitute a relatively small fraction of human genetic variation.
Our evidence for clustering should not be taken as evidence of our support of any particular concept of "biological race."
That's cute. Meanwhile, I cite papers for their results, not for their authors' hopes and dreams.
Couple things.
A) That's an R^2 statistic, which should always be thought of as more impressive than people intuit them to be (squared apples n such)
B) This is a test for incremental validity; the discontinuities are part of the reason why genetic distance increases with geographic distance (this controls for that; you're bragging that A has no effect on B after controlling for the effect of A). Similarly disappointing would be the effect of geographic distance on genetic distance when controlling for the discontinuities. The proper place for this is binary hypothesis testing, which this passes.
C) Red Winged Black Birds have recognized subspecies despite said subspecies having FST distances of only 0.9%, which the incremental validity here is singlehandedly stronger than.
D) The meaningfulness of FST values differs among species (Remember, percent of variance; 100% of 10 is smaller than 10% of 1000). As it turns out, humans actually have an unusually-high amount of heterozygosity.
Wait, your argument is that you understand the meaning and extensions of scientists' work better than they do? On what basis do you denigrate their research-based conclusions about the meaning of their own work, calling them hopes and dreams rather than research-driven positions?
[…] Ah, working scientific researchers, peer reviewers & journal editors don't understand simple things about statistics. It must be nice to be so much better educated, or naturally smarter, than active researchers. But, of course, human beings are like red winged black birds, so...
Basically, a layman's understanding of science is that it's a thing when special people do certain rituals and write some really hard stuff, and then their special credentials entitle them to recite a politically appropriate conclusion that receives Science Has Shown label. It's pure divination: priestly credentials + wordcel proof of work = Credible Truth that the Sovereign can appeal to when declaring a war of conquest, an early harvest or a tax hike.
But there's sad rationality, learned helplessness, underneath it all. A layman knows that he can be Eulered and confounded, so there is no point to examining whether those conclusions follow from the results, whether they even are conceptually in the same plane, and whether that interpretation is germane to the empirical issue that's being discussed. He can only hope The Experts are deserving of his trust.
On the surface, such mental gymnastics, with rapid jumps between abstraction layers and revealed intelligence, seems to require explicit reasoning. I always wonder if these people understand what they're doing, or if they're RLHF'd into mentally circling the drain like ChatGPT is RLHF'd into incoherently preferring an H-bomb to the N-word, and are no more conscious than most folks imagine ChatGPT is. Or if there even is any substance to the idea that there could be difference. @Chrisprattalpharaptr, what say you?
I don't know; I've never met a population geneticist, let alone tried to talk to them about IQ or race so it's difficult for me to model their thinking. While trying to figure out what he was saying, I ran into both twitter blocking me from following external links (thanks Elon) and paywalled papers with high-minded titles like 'Understanding human genetics for the benefit of society.' If they can afford it, anyways.
If you weren't joking, I've taken the sentience blackpill and will maybe expand on it with a toplevel post at some point. If you wanted to talk about HBD again, I don't think I've changed much since the last time we've discussed it other than to retreat further into uncertainty. I tried picking up some books from the 'race is a social construct' crowd and they do, indeed, seem to be trash. Evolutionary psych arguments are almost always just as bad, as well as people holding up studies claiming to have found 'The Intelligence Gene' distinguishing Whites and Blacks. I'd maintain:
Definitionally, complex traits are determined by a mixture of genetics and environment.
IQ is a complex trait, therefore there should be a substantial genetic component and I accept the data showing this is the case.
GWAS studies and other approaches for studying complex traits have not been particularly illuminating, even in model cases like height and with massive sample sizes.
Study of environmental factors seems to have made even less progress, though whether that is due to poor methodology/researchers or even greater complexity I don't know.
All this said, I don't think any of this would substantially change my politics or worldview whichever way the chips fall.
As an aside, if you avoid using the words HBD/genetics and talk to people about talent you can get them to reveal some hilariously hardline positions. Once they agree that some kids are just more talented than others, it's easy to segue from that to nature vs. nurture so long as you aren't explicitly calling for genocide or mandatory eugenics.
But he plays to maintain maximum optionality, not to score points in a rational debate, so even non-damning attacks must be deflected.
My reading of his view is that he (correctly) understands the inherent weakness of his position. Those attacks might look non-damning at the outset, but the moment he gives ground on them the rest of his position inevitably crumbles into dust. When you allow for a group of humans like the pygmies to exist at all, you open up a line of attack on the "scientific consensus" where the only two counters are to either give up or speak power to truth.
I'm probably a lot more willing to entertain HBD or even JQ stuff simply because asking a good faith question about either topic (and others like them) gets you shouted down, ostracized, blacklisted etc.
It's not even some psychological bias, it's a legitimate heuristic. A position can be defended with facts/logic/reason or with appeals to authority, social pressure and threats. A position that is true can be defended with both, a position that is false much is easier defended with the latter. If some position is pretty much exclusively defended with the latter, that's a good evidence that it is false.
Nothing aggravates me more than (for a more recent example) someone who knew virtually nothing about Ukraine and had literally never even heard of the Azov Batallion prior to February 2022, but overnight decided that of course Ukraine doesn't have a neo-Nazi problem and this is obviously just fake news dreamt up by Putin from whole cloth as a half-hearted casus belli and to even suggest that Ukraine might have a neo-Nazi problem means that you've been brainwashed by Putin and his army of social media bots. Like how could Ukraine possibly have a neo-Nazi problem - its President is literally Jewish??*
*An argument routinely made by people who, funnily enough, have no problem believing that the US was a racist/white supremacist country in the years 2009-16, despite the ethnicity of its then-President.
That is actually very common. Most people who want to discredit conspiracy theorists actually know very little about the subject and the conspiracy theorist actually knows a great deal more (albeit often with his own bias that misleads him). When starting dialog, the discreditors are quickly faced with a failure which they don't want to accept and simply start mocking the opponent.
I already said in another place that I totally support Scott on his stance to write a long and detailed rebuttal. Maybe his choice about ivermectin wasn't the most interesting to majority but people write detailed PhD theses about more boring subjects and learn a great deal about many things. Who am I to say which subjects one should engage to and which are not allowed?
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
nopie 1yr ago
Don't forget that in a lot of cases the conspiracy theorists are actually correct. There actually weren't any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and I'm sure you can point at a more recent event where the conspiracy theory take was correct as well. I agree that sometimes the discreditors just fail in the argument and bring out the mockery, but there are a lot of instances where "simply start mocking the opponent" is actually the optimal strategy right from the get-go.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
nopie 1yr ago
Most people who want to discredit conspiracy theorists actually know very little about the subject and the conspiracy theorist actually knows a great deal more (albeit often with his own bias that misleads him).
Well this exact effect is exactly why (in a historical sense) this website exists, isn't it? Scott amputated spicy discussions from his blog because people who knew more than him about spicy conspiracy Topic X kept derailing every discussion about every other mundane Topic Y by claiming (with evidence derived from their greater knowledge) that Topic X was actually closely related to Topic Y and dragging entire comment sections into the flames.
Fast forward several subsequent additional amputations and here we are.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
Butlerian 1yr ago
Wait, what? The ACX comment section doesn't have any topic bans I'm aware of. I know Motte was amputated from the SSC subreddit due to Scott caving under pressure, though.
Nobody is perfect. He needs to maintain his brand with his substack and some of these discussions can damage it.
I am being charitable to him and assume that he doesn't denounce lockdown restrictions only because he cannot without damage to his reputation. It is the same Kolgomorov's complicity he wrote about.
I can put my bets that the public is volatile. Crowds that demanded that everyone stays at home, will soon demand for blood of those who issued these orders. But I have nothing to lose if my bets do not work out. For him it is much more riskier. And he can join the crowd too when it demands blood.
I consider "Scott wrote it" to be a good reason to read an article on its own. That is, the set of all Scottposts has a high enough average quality to exceed my threshold for attention, at least to the point of clicking and reading it long enough to make up my own mind. Which is why I click on all of them.
If you don't feel the same way then you don't have to read it.
My point is that anyone can post whatever blog caught their fancy and say "this is good, read it", but usually we understand people have different preferences and interests. What might be fascinating to me, might be utterly boring to you. That's why it's good form to write a submission statement - to give people some idea if they'd be interested in reading the linked article.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
ArjinFerman 1yr ago
I do agree, which is why I gave a one-sentence summary. Didn't bother with more because I'm not super-invested in getting people to read it - I didn't write it, and I didn't think it was particularly-new ground at least for rats.
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Notes -
Does anyone else suspect that Scott grossly exaggerates his belief in Atlantis? I find it difficult to believe he was ever serious about it. And it seems to be a very useful story for him that he gets endless value out of
Remember that Scott was growing up in the golden age of "history's mysteries" with captain Riker and that guy from Babylon 5 who definitely wasn't saying it was aliens, but...
It's hard to remember what things were like back then without rewatching the X-Files. Atlantis was like kiddie's first cryptohistory theory for a 90's boy.
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I mean, as weird theories go, and presuming you don't attribute modern tech to it or something, Atlantis isn't really that weird an idea. Lots of land was inundated when the last glacial period ended, coastal cities can subside into the ocean if built improperly (e.g. Port Royal), and technological regress has occurred on a couple of occasions (most notably the Tasmanian Aborigines losing fire). There's nothing especially-well-known that contradicts Atlantis; among non-experts it's mostly just status issues keeping people away, and Scott's well-known for being willing to ignore those at least some of the time.
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Scott's followup post, which I think I found more succinct and engaging than the original.
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I feel like this is the world's longest version of Zombie Feynman's response along the lines of, the core idea of science is testing by experimentation, everything else is bookkeeping.
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Definitely aimed at the hegemonic ideology and not me, since I relate intensely to this paragraph:
I often find myself leaning into weird or unsubstantiated beliefs due solely to resentment at how much scorn is poured on people who dare question the relevant orthodoxy. I'm probably a lot more willing to entertain HBD or even JQ stuff simply because asking a good faith question about either topic (and others like them) gets you shouted down, ostracized, blacklisted etc.
It's actually worse than Scott's example, because unlike the the guy Scott is beefing with, who apparently knows something about ivermectin, most people aren't even capable of arguing the "orthodox" positiom but still wouldn't hesitate to puff up and self-righteously shout some string of load catchphrases at you to score social points for being a Doubleplus Goodthinker "LMAO HORSE DEWORMER INJECTING BLEACH LOL" It's all so tiresome.
Speaking of HBD, here's an interesting, very typical recent exchange on Twitter between a bunch of race realists and a certain Dialectical Biologist (self-identified Lewontin fan), with laymen chiming in too. The crux of the argument is, as always: can races have differences in average cognitive ability? The refutation, cutting aside fluff like «IQ tests have culture bias», is twofold: first, intelligence is always adaptive, and Africans also had to plan for the future in the ancestral environment (equivalently, «would have benefitted from long-term planning for e.g. droughts and... doing something about it). Second, races aren't even a thing, so the point is moot (human groups aren't species, aren't subspecies, aren't breeds, and so he just dismisses examples of cognitive differences within such subsets in non-human animals). E.g. here's an insane bit:
So,
pygmies aren't a «race», seeing as «race»=subspecies =an invalid concept to begin with,
so there, by definition, cannot be reliable data relating to pygmies (or anyone) showing that strength, speed and height actually vary by race;
so the example of a specific lineage of humans being obviously short and weak can be safely ignored;
and this direction of attack on the core argument – inherent implausibility of differences in selection pressure on «more is always better traits» – remains guarded.
Obviously there are more layers to it: if this line of defense were somehow breached, he could concede that maxing out height isn't always better (even though I'd expect bigger pygmies to still be more successful in their environment) but intelligence is different, or some such. But he plays to maintain maximum optionality, not to score points in a rational debate, so even non-damning attacks must be deflected.
On the surface, such mental gymnastics, with rapid jumps between abstraction layers and revealed intelligence, seems to require explicit reasoning. I always wonder if these people understand what they're doing, or if they're RLHF'd into mentally circling the drain like ChatGPT is RLHF'd into incoherently preferring an H-bomb to the N-word, and are no more conscious than most folks imagine ChatGPT is. Or if there even is any substance to the idea that there could be difference. @Chrisprattalpharaptr, what say you?
But let's dig in. As evidence for races not being a thing, he shows that there is genetic continuity.
HBD bro:
Dialectical Biologist responds with an insistence to accept authors' interpretation:
HBD bro is not impressed:
And here's what I was really leading to: a layman is indignant about him disagreeing with the interpretation:
Basically, a layman's understanding of science is that it's a thing when special people do certain rituals and write some really hard stuff, and then their special credentials entitle them to recite a politically appropriate conclusion that receives Science Has Shown label. It's pure divination: priestly credentials + wordcel proof of work = Credible Truth that the Sovereign can appeal to when declaring a war of conquest, an early harvest or a tax hike.
But there's sad rationality, learned helplessness, underneath it all. A layman knows that he can be Eulered and confounded, so there is no point to examining whether those conclusions follow from the results, whether they even are conceptually in the same plane, and whether that interpretation is germane to the empirical issue that's being discussed. He can only hope The Experts are deserving of his trust.
(brought here by @official_techsupport's post in recent comments)
I don't know; I've never met a population geneticist, let alone tried to talk to them about IQ or race so it's difficult for me to model their thinking. While trying to figure out what he was saying, I ran into both twitter blocking me from following external links (thanks Elon) and paywalled papers with high-minded titles like 'Understanding human genetics for the benefit of society.' If they can afford it, anyways.
If you weren't joking, I've taken the sentience blackpill and will maybe expand on it with a toplevel post at some point. If you wanted to talk about HBD again, I don't think I've changed much since the last time we've discussed it other than to retreat further into uncertainty. I tried picking up some books from the 'race is a social construct' crowd and they do, indeed, seem to be trash. Evolutionary psych arguments are almost always just as bad, as well as people holding up studies claiming to have found 'The Intelligence Gene' distinguishing Whites and Blacks. I'd maintain:
Definitionally, complex traits are determined by a mixture of genetics and environment.
IQ is a complex trait, therefore there should be a substantial genetic component and I accept the data showing this is the case.
GWAS studies and other approaches for studying complex traits have not been particularly illuminating, even in model cases like height and with massive sample sizes.
Study of environmental factors seems to have made even less progress, though whether that is due to poor methodology/researchers or even greater complexity I don't know.
All this said, I don't think any of this would substantially change my politics or worldview whichever way the chips fall.
As an aside, if you avoid using the words HBD/genetics and talk to people about talent you can get them to reveal some hilariously hardline positions. Once they agree that some kids are just more talented than others, it's easy to segue from that to nature vs. nurture so long as you aren't explicitly calling for genocide or mandatory eugenics.
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My reading of his view is that he (correctly) understands the inherent weakness of his position. Those attacks might look non-damning at the outset, but the moment he gives ground on them the rest of his position inevitably crumbles into dust. When you allow for a group of humans like the pygmies to exist at all, you open up a line of attack on the "scientific consensus" where the only two counters are to either give up or speak power to truth.
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It's not even some psychological bias, it's a legitimate heuristic. A position can be defended with facts/logic/reason or with appeals to authority, social pressure and threats. A position that is true can be defended with both, a position that is false much is easier defended with the latter. If some position is pretty much exclusively defended with the latter, that's a good evidence that it is false.
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Nothing aggravates me more than (for a more recent example) someone who knew virtually nothing about Ukraine and had literally never even heard of the Azov Batallion prior to February 2022, but overnight decided that of course Ukraine doesn't have a neo-Nazi problem and this is obviously just fake news dreamt up by Putin from whole cloth as a half-hearted casus belli and to even suggest that Ukraine might have a neo-Nazi problem means that you've been brainwashed by Putin and his army of social media bots. Like how could Ukraine possibly have a neo-Nazi problem - its President is literally Jewish??*
*An argument routinely made by people who, funnily enough, have no problem believing that the US was a racist/white supremacist country in the years 2009-16, despite the ethnicity of its then-President.
That is actually very common. Most people who want to discredit conspiracy theorists actually know very little about the subject and the conspiracy theorist actually knows a great deal more (albeit often with his own bias that misleads him). When starting dialog, the discreditors are quickly faced with a failure which they don't want to accept and simply start mocking the opponent.
I already said in another place that I totally support Scott on his stance to write a long and detailed rebuttal. Maybe his choice about ivermectin wasn't the most interesting to majority but people write detailed PhD theses about more boring subjects and learn a great deal about many things. Who am I to say which subjects one should engage to and which are not allowed?
Don't forget that in a lot of cases the conspiracy theorists are actually correct. There actually weren't any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and I'm sure you can point at a more recent event where the conspiracy theory take was correct as well. I agree that sometimes the discreditors just fail in the argument and bring out the mockery, but there are a lot of instances where "simply start mocking the opponent" is actually the optimal strategy right from the get-go.
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Well this exact effect is exactly why (in a historical sense) this website exists, isn't it? Scott amputated spicy discussions from his blog because people who knew more than him about spicy conspiracy Topic X kept derailing every discussion about every other mundane Topic Y by claiming (with evidence derived from their greater knowledge) that Topic X was actually closely related to Topic Y and dragging entire comment sections into the flames.
Fast forward several subsequent additional amputations and here we are.
Wait, what? The ACX comment section doesn't have any topic bans I'm aware of. I know Motte was amputated from the SSC subreddit due to Scott caving under pressure, though.
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Nobody is perfect. He needs to maintain his brand with his substack and some of these discussions can damage it.
I am being charitable to him and assume that he doesn't denounce lockdown restrictions only because he cannot without damage to his reputation. It is the same Kolgomorov's complicity he wrote about.
I can put my bets that the public is volatile. Crowds that demanded that everyone stays at home, will soon demand for blood of those who issued these orders. But I have nothing to lose if my bets do not work out. For him it is much more riskier. And he can join the crowd too when it demands blood.
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No submission statement; not reading.
It's a Scottpost, not somebody self-advertising.
Is a defence of doing science rather than "Trusting The Science".
True, I shot from the hip there in assuming that it would be exactly someone self-advertising their blog, without even considering the who or what.
A submission statement would still be nice though.
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Still not reading without a good reason to, so a submission statement would be nice.
I consider "Scott wrote it" to be a good reason to read an article on its own. That is, the set of all Scottposts has a high enough average quality to exceed my threshold for attention, at least to the point of clicking and reading it long enough to make up my own mind. Which is why I click on all of them.
If you don't feel the same way then you don't have to read it.
Thanks, I didn't.
My point is that anyone can post whatever blog caught their fancy and say "this is good, read it", but usually we understand people have different preferences and interests. What might be fascinating to me, might be utterly boring to you. That's why it's good form to write a submission statement - to give people some idea if they'd be interested in reading the linked article.
I do agree, which is why I gave a one-sentence summary. Didn't bother with more because I'm not super-invested in getting people to read it - I didn't write it, and I didn't think it was particularly-new ground at least for rats.
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