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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 27, 2023

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Calling a series of factual statements a “gish gallop” is basically telling on yourself. There’s no argument here, but you’re admitting the conclusion you would draw is uncomfortable ergo assuming bad intentions.

It is interesting to try to compare the reaction of this site to this poster to the common reflexively hostile one most reddit subs have to HBD in general (which this site doesn't share and/or looks down upon)

There seems to be some history I'm missing with the user that might explain it though. Maybe.

There seems to be some history I'm missing with the user that might explain it though.

His post a week ago started with "Our struggle with China is racial", focused on the supposed inherent cruelty of Chinese people rather than something more supported like East Asians being higher conformity/conscientiousness, and was poorly argued and focused on anecdotal evidence. So there's some carryover, where people take this post as a continuation of the same argument rather than just being the (quite plausible) assertion that East Asians have personality differences separate from the higher intelligence. Obviously "this race is so incompatible that we're destined for racial conflict" is a much more dubious claim, especially when the argument isn't even about the resentment that flows from differing capability or from violent crime but vague personality differences. And as I pointed out in response to his original post, he's focusing on Chinese people but they don't have that much genetic separation from other East Asians, most of which do not have China's reputation for low empathy or its political antagonism with the U.S.

Regarding this post specifically, my largely uninformed impression of the infant studies is that they're small and potentially questionable for the usual replication crisis reasons, but unfortunately it's probably difficult to do an improved version of them for political reasons. (It's also harder to know what implications they have for adults.) It would make sense, but a lot of replication crisis stuff makes sense, that's why people were investigating the hypothesis in the first place. It's not comparable to intelligence research on population differences, where the state of the evidence is much firmer and more extensive.

Not at all.

I think he’s wrong on the merits, such as with his inability to name Asian (-American?) authors or musicians. He’s also not making only factual statements. Part of what makes it a Gish gallop is mixing in assertions, like the claim that the gap between law associates and law partners implies Asians lack “personality.” He is throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks.