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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   1395 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for November 1, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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So, what are you reading?

I'm reattempting Duncan's Romantic Outlaws, Beloved Prisons, an open access book.

This is a book about paradoxes and mingled yarns—about the bright sides of dark events, the silver linings of sable clouds. The book portrays law-abiding citizens who harbor a "strange liking" for criminal deeds, and criminals who find an "extraordinary beauty" in their prison yards. Thus, the book describes a nonutopian world in which criminals and noncriminals—while injuring each other in ways plain for all to see—nonetheless live together in a symbiotic as well as an adversarial relationship, needing each other, serving each other, living for as well as off each other, enriching each other's lives in profound and surprising ways.

A collection of essays, including The Will to Believe, by William James. That essay and Is life worth living? have so far been my favorites. I’ve been exploring Pragmatism recently, and I find the school a very useful way to determine how to determine knowledge given humanity’s limited ability to obtain certainty. A few key points that stick out to me:

  1. If an option is momentous, forced, and live, it is advantageous to make a choice in believing even in absence of sufficient evidence. Basically, if you only get one shot, multiple hypotheses are plausible to you, and neutrality is the same as making a positive choice, it behooves you to pick something. He applies this to religion, but it can be applied elsewhere as well such as in business ventures.
  2. The goals of “know as much truth as you can” and “avoid error as much as you can” often conflict so you have to choose between them sometimes. Knowing more truths often means believing more falsehoods.
  3. Much, likely most, of what we “know” is not organized in the form of “justified true belief” but is instead justified, if it is not outright axioms, in a far less orderly and sound way. As a result, one practically must accept a degree of limited justification and “messiness” in your epistemology if you want to maximize the total amount of truth you know.

James reminds me of a reverse Hume. Hume looked at principles like induction and said “we can’t justify this logically”. He tore down “rules” of knowledge and produced skepticism. James seems to do this in reverse; given that so much of what we “know” isn’t logically obligatory, we should attempt to see what sorts of “under justified” beliefs we really can and should hold on to.

Musashi, by Eiji Yoshikawa. A heavily fictionalized novelization of the life of Miyamoto Musashi, the "Book of Five Rings" guy. Yoshikawa originally wrote it as a serial, which shows as there are lots of tangents with side characters. It's obvious Yoshikawa just made a lot of stuff up, but it's great soapy fun.

I gave up on A Gentleman of Leisure about fifty pages in. It hadn't elicited so much as a chuckle.

Last year I bought my dad Steven Pinker's book When Everyone Knows that Everyone Knows..., about the concept of common knowledge. He enjoyed it and lent it to me. I wanted an easy read, so I started it on Tuesday. Richard Hanania's argument about the deficits of non-fiction books certainly applied here, and it did give the feel of being unnecessarily padded. In particular, even outside the chapter which was specifically about humour, there were an awful lot of references to sitcoms and jokes (I don't mean Pinker himself cracking jokes: I mean him reciting jokes told by other people to illustrate his points). I was also broadly familiar with most of the arguments he touched on. But for all that, it was absorbing enough that I'd finished it by Thursday evening.

Perhaps the only surprising part of the book came near the very end, in which, as part of a chapter about academic freedom more broadly, Pinker more or less outs himself as a HBD enjoyer. His argument, in effect, is that scientists should deliberately avoid investigating the question of whether there are differences in intelligence between the various ethnic groups, as it's simply something we don't need to know, and were it to be proven true, people would use that information to indulge their worst prejudices. I interpret this as a tacit admission that Pinker thinks that certain races are more intelligent than others, on average: if he didn't, why would he be advocating for intentionally burying our heads in the sand? This passage felt eerily familiar to me, and I realised that Scott (who wants to duel Pinker to the death) has already done the endorsing-HBD-without-technically-endorsing-HBD thing at least twice: once in Kolomogorov complicity and once in his review of Freddie deBoer's The Cult of Smart. (I'm curious if deBoer thinks scientists ought to investigate the question of whether races differ in average intelligence, and if not, why not.)

I received a gift, an adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird in comic book form. It occurred to me I haven't read the book itself since I was in secondary school, so this might be a fun way to reintroduce myself to it. A snack between meals before my copy of The Camp of the Saints arrives.

Here's Noam Chomsky doing the "let's not go there" bit in 1972:

In fact, it seems that the question of the relation, if any, between race and intelligence has very little scientific importance (as it has no social importance, except under the assumptions of a racist society). A possible correlation between mean I.Q. and skin color is of no greater scientific interest than a correlation between any two other arbitrarily selected traits, say, mean height and color of eyes. The empirical results, whatever they might be, appear to have little bearing on any issue of scientific significance. In the present state of scientific understanding, there would appear to be little interest in the discovery that one partly heritable trait correlates (or does not) with another partly heritable trait. Such questions might be interesting if the results had some bearing, say, on hypotheses about the physiological mechanisms involved, but this is not the case. Therefore the investigation seems of quite limited scientific interest, and the zeal and intensity with which some pursue or welcome it cannot reasonably be attributed to a dispassionate desire to advance science. It would, of course, be foolish to claim, in response, that "society should not be left in ignorance." Society is happily "in ignorance" of an infinitude of insignificant matters of all sorts. And, with the best of will, it is difficult to avoid questioning the good faith of those who deplore the alleged "anti-intellectualism" of the critics of scientifically trivial and socially malicious investigations. On the contrary, the investigator of race and intelligence might do well to explain the intellectual significance of the topic he is studying, and thus enlighten us as to the moral dilemma he perceives. If he perceives none, the conclusion is obvious, with no further discussion.

As to social importance, a correlation between race and mean I.Q. (were this shown to exist) entails no social consequences except in a racist society in which each individual is assigned to a racial category and dealt with not as an individual in his own right, but as a representative of this category. Herrnstein mentions a possible correlation between height and I.Q. Of what social importance is that? None, of course, since our society does not suffer under discrimination by height. We do not insist on assigning each adult to the category "below six feet in height" or "above six feet in height" when we ask what sort of education he should receive or where he should live or what work he should do. Rather, he is what he is, quite independent of the mean I.Q. of people of his height category. In a nonracist society, the category of race would be of no greater significance. The mean I.Q. of individuals of a certain racial background is irrelevant to the situation of a particular individual, who is what he is. Recognizing this perfectly obvious fact, we are left with little, if any, plausible justification for an interest in the relation between mean I.Q. and race, apart from the "justification" provided by the existence of racial discrimination.

IIRC Pinker quoted exactly this to buttress his argument.

So has Pinker genuinely not realized by 2025 that people flipped the argument around in the last decade into the form that since the existence of hereditary IQ differences is unspeakable, observed outcome differences are necessarily due to racism, or is he just playing dumb? Charles Murray spelled this out in Facing Reality back in 2021, making it the main thread of the whole book, and Pinker is probably pretty familiar with Murray.

Freddie at least claims to believe that genetic racial differences don't exist and all disparities are because of historical disadvantages and social inequality. I don't know what his answer would be to "Why shouldn't we research it" but I assume he would assume no good could come of it. Maybe because like Pinker, he secretly knows what the results would be, or maybe because he assumes the research would be done in bad faith and produce untrustworthy results.

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