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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   25839 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 15, 2024

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This Guardian article is a work of art as a culture war artifact.

The story: a Danish data scientist, Pallesen, who claimed that former Harvard president Gay had made "very basic" data errors in her PhD, a claim which was quoted by right wing activist Rufo.

But now the fearless investigators of the Guardian have uncovered that Pallensen also co-authored a paper called "Polygenic Scores Mediate the Jewish Phenotypic Advantage in Educational Attainment and Cognitive Ability Compared With Catholics and Lutherans" regarding the Ashkenazi, which was published by some people on the right fringe outside Respectable Academia. Some are into eugenics and "race science". Also they cited an 'antisemitic ' psychologist.

Of course, Pallesen promptly disavowed that paper when questioned by the Guardian.

Where to even start.

"Cite" in the title makes an especially bad verb in an academic context because you can generally not control who cites you. "Scientist who criticized Gay's thesis" would be more on point.

Then there is this whole five degrees of separation thing.

  • Kevin MacDonald is a retired academic who did 'antisemitic publications'. (Let's take the Guardians word for that.)
  • His papers get cited by Kirkegaard et al.
  • One of Kirkegaard's co-authors is Pallesen. (Too bad that he promptly distanced himself from the paper.)
  • Pallesen helped Rufo oust Gay.
  • Rufo is "a major ally of Ron DeSantis".
  • Therefore DeSantis is an evil racist, or something?

While both icky, there is an actual difference between eugenics and "race science" (or HBD or whatever). Eugenics is prescriptive and describes the belief that society should coordinate to affect their gene frequencies. This can go from "let's use CRISPR to fix hereditary diseases" to "kill all the kids with a disfavored eye color". This is completely separate from the claim that there are group differences between human subpopulations caused by genetic differences, which is trivially true for physical characteristics and icky for mental stuff.

My personal view is that most social science is unsound even when it is completely apolitical. If you add politics, be they woke or far-right, I fully expect the conclusions to be whatever the politics say they should be. In respected academia, genetic differences in intelligence are already a third rail. If you publish on racial genetic differences in intelligence, that will end your career faster than putting "I will increase grades for sexual favors" in your e-mail footer. The "fringe" researchers are of course also motivated by politics. So the Ashkenazi genetic intelligence hypothesis is probably undecideable in our society. (From what I remember of Scott's (who is Jewish and thus smarter than me) opinion, I would bet 75% on there being a significant (say, at least five IQ points average) genetic advantage for Ashkenazi.)

Also, I do not find the link between Ashkenazi intelligence and antisemitism all that plausible. The traditional antisemitic trope of Jews is them being shrewd manipulators, which is not exactly the same as being smart. Ask an antisemite why Jews are over-represented in the Ivy League, and they will probably say that it is because the Jews in academia collude to favor Jewish students over gentiles, helping them cheat and so on. If you convince them that the over-representation is due to raw honest brain power, that will conflict with the antisemitic trope.

Finally and foremost, the character of Mr. Pallesen is utterly irrelevant to his claims. He is not the only data scientist, so we don't have to -- and should not -- rely on his testimony exclusively. In the worlds where there is a problem with data science in Gay's PhD, I would not expect that someone who specializes in Intersectionality points it out, thereby -- in the Guardians words -- 'helping oust school’s first Black president'. In worlds where there is no such problem, I would expect that dozens of woke data scientists would jump at the chance to call bullshit on the claims.

Also, I do not find the link between Ashkenazi intelligence and antisemitism all that plausible.

As a parallel, note that woke anti-whiteness is premised on a rejection of the hypothesis that the black–white achievement gap is due to genetic factors rather than oppression.

This is like the Venn diagram meme: At the intersection of the set of those who attribute belief in a genetic basis for the black–white achievement gap to anti-black animus and the set of those who attribute belief in a genetic basis for the gentile–Jewish achievement gap to antisemitism, we find people who do not have a strong need for intellectual consistency.

It doesn’t have to be intellectually inconsistent- they could just be wrong, eg by claiming that black and white aren’t meaningful enough categories to take average IQ.

What a timely discussion on this MLK day.

The traditional antisemitic trope of Jews is them being shrewd manipulators, which is not exactly the same as being smart. Ask an antisemite why Jews are over-represented in the Ivy League, and they will probably say that it is because the Jews in academia collude to favor Jewish students over gentiles, helping them cheat and so on.

One could hypothesize that aside from Jews being good at getting into competitive schools through sheer intellectual aptitude, another factor could be that competitive American schools have largely been shaped by Jews. Perhaps Jews made Ivy League schools into schools that would admit a lot of Jews.

elite institutions sought to limit the number of Jewish students a century ago—and how the advent of that quota system has shaped U.S. higher education ever since.

back then, restricting the people who got in was an attempt to thwart a certain kind of ethnic diversity. And today, there are probably unspoken quotas in existence that are meant to enhance a certain kind of diversity.

Here we see some kind of 100-years cycle of antisemitism :

That’s true, although what’s interesting is that the idea of dismissing Jews, of loathing Jews because of some supposed connection to a foreign government, strikes me as awfully reminiscent of the old trope of Jews as clannish and untrustworthy that you saw in the 1920s and ’30s. In the 1930s, the idea was that they’re not trustworthy, they’re trying to lure us into war on behalf of a foreign power. And how is a lot of anti-Zionism fashioned now, except that the Jews aren’t trustworthy, they’re trying to lure us into wars on behalf of foreign powers?

Jews luring us into foreign wars?! Where are all these progressives getting that idea from? Perhaps they just happen to be in charge when billions of dollars of US taxpayer money get disbursed in foreign wars.

“One of my responsibilities as Secretary is determining, on behalf of the United States, whether atrocities have been committed,” Blinken, who is Jewish, said Monday at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum

He is also dealing with appeals from Ukraine’s Jewish president, Volodymyr Zelensky — who similarly cites the Holocaust as shaping his outlook — to do more to stop Russia’s attacks.

What's that story with the golem again? Perhaps they should teach it in Ivy League schools.

I think one deciding factor in the ranking of elites is not necessarily who is smarter, or who is more hard-working, as they are plenty of brilliant, hard-working people that never get into the spotlight, but most importantly who is most capable at conveying that they are the smartest and most hard-working. Something like 'showmanship'?

Historically it seems to me that American Jews were most effective at that one aspect of status-seeking. From the father of propaganda Edward Bernays to the 'Warner' bros (Wonsal/Wonskolaser before Anglicization), Hollywood Mogul Weinstein, the Talented Jeffrey Epstein... It appears to me that Americans who are exceptionally good at media manipulation tend to be disproportionately Jewish. Was Sam Bankman Fried the smartest, most hard-working crypto bro? Probably not, but somehow he had a way with the media.

A similar idea is expressed in the WW2 era concept of 'Big Lie'. Some people at the time seemed to think that Jews had an unusual ability to convince others of things that were not necessarily true (ie they ought to be over-represented in elite American schools). Interestingly, that same concept has apparently been applied to other things since, including the Ukraine war and Trump's elections issues, in a 'reclaiming the n-word' sort of way, perhaps?

Ironically, one who appears in so many ways to infuriate American elites and American Jews seems to have employed some of the same tricks for his rise to power.

“He was rich. He was vulgar. He was a city guy … and the women—business, sex and a guy who loves the attention. You couldn’t beat it.’’ So the tabloid writers used him and their papers thrived. But it turns out that he was using them too. To keep his name in print, to build his brand, to learn the kinds of lessons that have helped him put together a run for the White House the likes of which has never been seen. Talk to some of those tabloid writers now and they can see—with some discomfort—that the seeds of Trump’s celebrity were nurtured in their notebooks.

This Guardian article is ridiculous but seems to be the discretion leftists are taking basically calling out the motives of the people who brought attention to her fraud. The bottom line is that stuff is irrelevant and it doesn't matter if they are white supremacists or flat earthers. She's president of Harvard and a serial plagiarizer and completely unqualified for that job. The other funny thing about this is that it has nothing to do with white supremacy or white people. She was brought down by rich Zionists who were mad she didn't do enough to stop criticism of Israel and antisemitism on campus. Apparently her fraud was pretty well known and she wasn't brought down until everything that is happening with Israel since October. The best thing for white supremacists would be for her to stay in office because it shows how much of a diversity hire she was, discredits the Ivies, and it would mean they weren't cracking down on speech against Jews and Israel.

Instead of reporting on what is the actual truth is, this article makes it look like the people who want to bring her down are anti-Jewish. Somehow, these whites like Rufo have been scapegoated and Jews are the victims when it was criticism of Israel and Jews that brought her down in the first place. This is truly incredible stuff here.

Ask an antisemite why Jews are over-represented in the Ivy League, and they will probably say that it is because the Jews in academia collude to favor Jewish students over gentiles, helping them cheat and so on. If you convince them that the over-representation is due to raw honest brain power, that will conflict with the antisemitic trope.

I think that there's an element of both of these in play to be honest. The Ashkenazim verbal IQ advantage is real(and I believe it is also tied to the same alleles that are responsible for so many of the genetic disorders they encounter) but not sufficient to explain their overrepresentation in certain fields (you can just go and do the maths on that if you want) - but ethnic nepotism in combination with the IQ advantage explains it perfectly. I don't think you need to be an antisemite to point out that jewish identity is fairly strong, and it isn't like that ethnic nepotism is hidden or obscured in any way. You can just go look at various institutions and bodies set up by the jewish community to support their own, it isn't a secret at all.

I think IQ + some favoritism (not not as much as sometimes assumed) + good environment. Jewish households may do a better job fostering talent compared to gentile ones.

Jewish households may do a better job fostering talent compared to gentile ones.

A factor that itself is heritable. Genetic heritability of traits can be more than 100% due to things like that.

As I understand it, heritability can only be greater than 100% if you have negative gene-environment correlation, i.e. if the people with higher polygenic scores tend to raise their children in environments less conducive to increasing intelligence.

Hypothetically you could have infinite heritability if environment perfectly cancelled out genes, resulting in everyone having equal intelligence despite variation in genetic potential.

This was so predictable. The opening salvo against Gay would lead to relation by the left that would either make the whole thing a wash for either side or backfire against the right. Dissertations are public, after all. The only thing stopping a motivated adversary is manpower to read them all. And to think this originally started with Gaza. I hope regardless of the outcome this leads to better research . The underlying problem is that the majority of research in the social sciences are not that good.

Whites managed to get screwed both coming and going, when some other group is underrepresented it's "systemic racism", when overrepresented it's all meritocratic, "get good, scrub".

Also, I do not find the link between Ashkenazi intelligence and antisemitism all that plausible. The traditional antisemitic trope of Jews is them being shrewd manipulators, which is not exactly the same as being smart.

There's a long running tradition of certain anti-semitic right-wing types trying to discredit Ashkenazi IQ scores. (Vox Day, more recently some youtuber. No idea what neonazis do, but probably the same.

Most recently, the otherwise pretty good Neema Parvini jumped onto that bandwagon and claims the studies that show it are all invalid because low sample size, yada yada. I'm guessing it must be strategic on his part, Parvini is a very widely read scholar.

There's a long running tradition of certain anti-semitic right-wing types trying to discredit Ashkenazi IQ scores.

It's fairly recent and I find your post to exude the kind of 'boo outgroup' pathologism you imply is afflicting others.

The OG Nazis didn't like IQ tests yet found jews to be intelligent but bad people. Early neo-nazism copied most of that.

As far as groups who actively believe in HBD and IQ stuff go, during the 'Alt-Right' era, if you can call it that, it was very rare to see any refutation of jewish IQ being high. Most parroting the 115 IQ myth. The primary argument, much like the nazis of old, being that these smart jews were taking up positions of power in white societies and using it to the detriment of whites and the benefit of jews.

The only big contradicting instance to that narrative was old newspaper clippings being posted relating to a jewish SAT cheating thing, but to what end that was brought up wasn't exactly clear. The big narrative described above came first. Why bother to undermine that?

The article by Vox is one of the only ones I can find that takes direct issue with the whole jewish IQ thing. And even then Vox was always a kind of outsider with his own thing going on.

There has, however, been a lot of recent discussion on this topic, now that the 'Alt-Right' era is over and some of its bulkier narratives can be discarded. And, maybe, just maybe, because the topic is relevant, interesting, and a big thorn in the side of many a current right wing star like Jordan Peterson. Who are trying to juggle justifications of jewish power and group interest whilst simultaneously preaching individualism to whites of European ancestry.

Most parroting the 115 IQ myth.

Oh, you're in the camp that the 70 odd Jewish kids in the absolutely random Wisconsin study of 6000 school kids were carefully selected so their polygenic risk scores would 'bolster' the 'myth' of Jews being somewhat smarter on average ?

Good luck. At some point, we're going to get bigger studies, and what then ?

That's such a poor strawman I feel it manages to light itself on fire.

At some point, we're going to get bigger studies, and what then ?

Then we have the results of those bigger studies? What then? Seriously what even is this comment?

Then we have the results of those bigger studies? What then? Seriously what even is this comment?

Then they're of course going to say 1k Jew genomes isn't enough or selection effects or whatever. Because it's an article of faith for them.

And not for us, thank heavens.

Very few antisemitic alt rightists ever affirmed higher Ashkenazi intelligence. If they didn’t explicitly deny it they ignored it or took the view that nepotism / in-group loyalty still explained the vast majority or all overrepresentation. And I would reject that criticism of the theory is recent - the most infamous deboonking of overrepresentation being meritocratic (Unz’ Myth of American Meritocracy) was published in 2012.

Very few antisemitic alt rightists ever affirmed higher Ashkenazi intelligence.

Every single one of them did that I know of. And I was neck deep in this stuff. I am still to encounter anyone in that sphere who thinks ashkenazi jews anything other than high IQ.

If they didn’t explicitly deny it they ignored it or took the view that nepotism / in-group loyalty still explained the vast majority or all overrepresentation.

Like I went over in my comment:

it was very rare to see any refutation of jewish IQ being high. Most parroting the 115 IQ myth. The primary argument, much like the nazis of old, being that these smart jews were taking up positions of power in white societies and using it to the detriment of whites and the benefit of jews.

Jews being smart and jews being overrepresented due to nepotism is not a mutually exclusive thing. In fact it makes a lot of sense for nepotism to work better than it otherwise would when you are the group you prefer has a high IQ. Since then the nepotism is more functional and less obvious.

And I would reject that criticism of the theory is recent - the most infamous deboonking of overrepresentation being meritocratic (Unz’ Myth of American Meritocracy) was published in 2012.

Unz did not dispute jewish IQ to any relevant extent. Making the assumption that it's 109. He just posited that jews are overrepresented even when accounting for IQ.

So the Ashkenazi genetic intelligence hypothesis is probably undecideable in our society.

Wait, I thought it was pretty well confirmed but not widely publicized that average group intelligences were

  1. Ashkenazi

  2. East Asian

  3. Northern European

  4. Southern European

And then others at much lower average IQ’s(yes, obviously with smaller groups like Tamil Brahmins and Maronites in there). I’ll buy that the magnitudes of the gaps aren’t fully solved but the Ashkenazi IQ advantage being controversial scientifically rather than just not spoken about in polite company is need to me.

If that's the case, why is Israel's GDP per capita way lower than USA's?

It started from a lower starting point. The rate of growth are otherwise tied if you plot them against each other.

Why ask it that way?

Most people in Israel are from Eastern Europe/Russia/The Middle East. How does Israel's GDP per capita compare with those areas? Answer: It's massively higher.

How does the GDP per capita of American Jews compare with non-Jewish Americans? Answer: It's massively higher.

Is there a Jewish Ashkenazi group anywhere in the world that doesn't massively outperform their countrymen economically? No, there isn't.

Here's another way to look at it. Put 10 million random Americans into a tiny strip of arid land with no resources and check how they are doing in 70 years. The results wouldn't be pretty. Israel has outperformed to an almost unbelievable degree.

Here's another way to look at it. Put 10 million random Americans into a tiny strip of arid land with no resources and check how they are doing in 70 years.

That's what large chunks of the American west were. Nevada, Arizona, the Dakotas etc. all seem to be roughly on par with Israel if not ahead.

Is there a Jewish group anywhere in the world that doesn't massively outperform their countrymen economically? No, there isn't.

Yes, absolutely. Sephardic and Mizrahi jews don't noticeably outperform their countrymen, and they especially don't do it in Israel. IIRC (but I may be wrong, so don't trust this without verification) it was actually the Christians in the middle-east who outperformed economically and on IQ tests.

Here's another way to look at it. Put 10 million random Americans into a tiny strip of arid land with no resources and check how they are doing in 70 years.

This is a silly hypothetical because you have selection effects for Israel which aren't actually completely random. Exactly who counts as American is different as well - are you drawing this 10 million-strong cohort from the America of today or America as it was when Israel was founded? But even if you correct for that, throw in all the resources that Israel receives from America and the jewish Diaspora and the random Americans would most likely be doing better, if only because they don't have to support a population of non-working, non-military serving orthodox.

selection effects for Israel

Many Jews remained in the US and Europe, but hundreds of thousands were forced out of Arab countries and now there are practically no Jews in Arab countries. The selection effects were importing a lot of mizrahis which you consider unremarkable.

The selection effects were importing a lot of mizrahis which you consider unremarkable.

And from a HBD perspective, they largely are unremarkable compared to others. But the point remains that the forces bringing them and the Ashkenazim to Israel were not random at all, which is one of the reasons why it would be silly to compare them to a random selection of Americans.

I don't see how you can argue for selection effects for mizrahim when they were entirely expelled from the Arab world which was their home and are now almost all in Israel. Such a uniform phenomenon is like the opposite of a selection effect, unless you are thinking they were selected for being Jews.

Because they weren't entirely expelled - there remain populations of mizrahim in various countries, and according to wikipedia at least several of them end up moving to the USA instead. I do agree that they were under less severe pressures than the ashkenazim, but that doesn't mean there wasn't any such pressure at all.

More comments

Yes, absolutely. Sephardic and Mizrahi jews don't noticeably outperform their countrymen,

Sorry, I thought it was assumed we are talking about Ashkenazi. My bad.

For the record, I don't believe that practicing Judaism magically make you more intelligent. There was obvious some sort of genetic funnel in the Middle Ages in Europe.

Sephardic and Mizrahi jews don't noticeably outperform their countrymen, and they especially don't do it in Israel.

Sephardic Jews and Jewish converts to Christianity (Marranos) certainly were overrepresented in positions of influence, power and wealth in the Latin world, and later two of the most prominent Anglosphere Jewish politicians of the 19th century (Disraeli and Judah Benjamin) were Sephardic. Sephardim were extremely overrepresented among the affluent middle classes in Thessaloniki, Istanbul and elsewhere before WW1. And Mizrachi Jews were also very overrepresented in powerful positions, both as court advisers and as bankers, retailers, department store magnates, theater owners and so on across Egypt and the rest of Islamic North Africa, and in Persia and the Levant at times. And even before the colonial period were overrepresented among courtiers, bankers, jewelers, merchants and so on.

But again, the baseline gentile host populations have / had lower performance, so this ‘works’ even if Mizrachim average, say, 95, provided those around them are 80 or 85. The Lebanese do extremely well in Central America, but badly in Australia - the difference is a host population at 80 vs a host population at 100.

That's really interesting - I hadn't seen any sources which made the claim that they were overrepresented in those areas but I freely admit to not looking at the situation throughout history. Do you have any good links for more information on that topic? Most of the sources I can find compare Sephardim/Misrahim to Ashkenazim, which really doesn't do them any favours.

In 2003 the US had 202% of the GDP/capita of Israel. In 2022 it was only 140%. And this in a country where less than 1/3 are secular or modern orthodox Ashkenazim, the rest being Mizrachim/Sephardim, Arabs, or work-shy Chareidim. That’s not too unimpressive, and the figure is still substantially higher than most gentile white Northern European countries, without anything like the resource bounty of the US.

Most of said capita are either not Ashkenazi or economically unproductive Haredi.

USA is hardly a pure ethnostate of the most productive demographics. Cut 2 or 3 geographic regions or 2 or 3 ethnicities and it'd be similarly buoyed.

Add a rough neighborhood, minimal natural resources, a national language virtually unused outside its borders... I was only addressing the overstatement of its human capital.

Israel's average IQ is 92, a score that would be roughly on par with the nicer parts of Latin America or most of the Balkans. The US average is 97. Not an enormous difference, but the large white majority(US whites score higher than whites elsewhere in the world IIRC, closer to the east Asian average) brings it up considering Israel has very large lower-IQ demographics in comparison.

Ashkenazim are a minority in Israel and aren’t as GDP-maxing as in the USA.

(who is Jewish and thus smarter than me)

If Ashkenazi in the US have an Iq that is a half standard deviation higher than white people, there would still be far more intelligent white people than jews. There are 31 white Americans for every jew and not all those jews are Ashkenazi. Less than half of all jews are at average Ashkenazi Iq or greater, this is less than 1% of Americans. Roughly 30% of white people have an Iq a half standard deviation above 100 or higher. For every average or higher jew there are 19 white Americans with an Iq equal or greater than the Iq of the average Ashkenazi. Additionally there would be several non white goyim in this Iq range for every jew.

For the 98.8% percentile/2.5 standard deviation Ashkenazi, or about 60 000 people in the US, they are equal to the 3 standard deviation white American. 0.17% of Americans are white Americans in the 3rd standard deviation of Iq. There are about 560 000 white Americans in this age range. Add in some Asians and jews would make up less than 10% of Americas Iq elite.

Bill Ackman is going to manage to turn and burn academia to the ground. We're seeing a confluence of factors:

-- Plagiarism has become such a complex and overinclusive concept that it's impossible to actually do academic work at volume without either committing plagiarism or specifically acting to avoid plagiarism while still technically doing the same thing (ie, carefully rephrasing the same thought to avoid copy-paste). The best comparison I can think of is NFL football: the definition of what constitutes a "catch" a "fumble" or being "in bounds" is obvious at human speeds, slow everything down to frame-by-frame from four angles and it suddenly gets really complicated, to the point where I have no earthly idea what pass interference is, and the review officials have to impute intent into micro-gestures during intense physical violence. Plagiarism rules simply weren't designed for a world where powerful computers instantaneously compare every combination of words used in a 500 page work to every other combination of words ever combined in human history. God forbid we get to the point where HallMonitorGPT can interpret meanings and compare and cite them. Everyone is committing plagiarism all the time, if anyone has the energy to look into it.

-- Culture War has created a real team effort at destroying random people on each "side."

-- Bill Ackman's wife had Academia as her rich lady hobby. Which, on the grand scale of rich lady hobbies, is actually pretty admirable. But she got got. And Bill Ackman is showing his whole ass on Twitter and live interviewed on CNBC about it. He's hopping mad and going on the warpath to defend his wife and expose those attacking her.

-- Claudine Gay got got on plagiarism to avoid firing her for racism. That incentivizes the other team to get some of their opps.

Expect a ton of attacks on academics at every level for the next few months.

Different types of plagiarism. Copy pasting has plausible deniability as an error. Rearranging text and word substitution is worse, as it shows intent.

-- Plagiarism has become such a complex and overinclusive concept that it's impossible to actually do academic work at volume without either committing plagiarism or specifically acting to avoid plagiarism while still technically doing the same thing

I think that this is completely wrong and that you haven't actually done anything to demonstrate this at all. I can see multiple groups and people putting out original scholarship, and it isn't hard to avoid plagiarism if you're actually doing an experiment and trying to replicate something. People put out original research and academic work all the time without plagiarising - for example, look at the work that's being done on reading the Pompeii papyri.

On the other hand, I think that plagiarism is a huge problem in the field of academic functionaries who aren't capable of doing actual academic work, and those are just a lot more prominent at the moment because there are so many useless midwits in academia staffing various diversity sinecures. In that world, you get your job on the basis of your identity and your friends, with the academic work being little more than a paper requirement. These people aren't trying to study or advance human knowledge, they're trying to claw down a fat paycheck for doing nothing/pursuing the political goals they wanted to pursue anyway. Plagiarism is going to be a big problem in this cohort because as far as they're concerned the actual work of academia is not something they're there for, so why not plagiarise?

If someone told me “Hedge fund manager goes scorched earth over antisemitism and plagiarism controversy,” I’d immediately guess “Who is Bill Ackman?”.

Ackman’s long been one of my favorite PG-rated lolcows. Rated PG as in you can discuss his hijinks with your coworkers and family in a way you can’t about Chris Chan or Twitch thots.

Two of my other favorite hits from him was the massive beef and money between Ackman and Carl Icahn over Herbalife (I was rooting for Ackman, btdubs) which Ackman lost, as well as taking another L in an infamous “bike trip” story (DESPITE being just a small part of most our meat-space lives, bikes comprise a disproportionately large role in funny phenomena):

“I had done no biking all summer,” Ackman now admits. Still, he went out at a very fast clip, his hypercompetitive instincts kicking in. As he and Loeb approached Montauk, Loeb texted his friends, who rode out to meet them from the opposite direction. The etiquette would have been for Ackman and Loeb to slow down and greet the other riders, but Ackman just blew by at top speed. The others fell in behind, at first struggling to keep up with the alpha leader. But soon enough Ackman faltered—at Mile 32, Ackman recalls—and fell way behind the others. He was clearly “bonking,” as they say in the cycling world, which is what happens when a rider is dehydrated and his energy stores are depleted.

While everyone else rode back to Loeb’s East Hampton mansion, one of Loeb’s friends, David “Tiger” Williams, a respected cyclist and trader, painstakingly guided Ackman, who by then could barely pedal and was letting out primal screams of pain from the cramps in his legs, back to Bridgehampton. “I was in unbelievable pain,” Ackman recalls. As the other riders noted, it was really rather ridiculous for him to have gone out so fast, trying to lead the pack, considering his lack of training. Why not acknowledge your limits and set a pace you could maintain? As one rider notes, “I’ve never had an experience where someone has gone from being so aggressive on a bike to being so hopelessly unable to even turn the pedals…. His mind wrote a check that his body couldn’t cash.”

Nor was Ackman particularly gracious about the incident afterward, not bothering to answer e-mails of concern and support from others in the group until months later.

As to the Ackman antisemitism/plagiarism brouhaha, I’m also rooting for him to prevail against journalists and university administrators in this particular case. However, it’s also the case that I believe (like some others in this thread), that Ackman is only upset because it was his particular identity politics ox that got gored.

He doesn’t mind the presence of leopards, just whose faces they are eating.

Plagiarism has become such a complex and overinclusive concept that it's impossible to actually do academic work at volume without either committing plagiarism or specifically acting to avoid plagiarism while still technically doing the same thing (ie, carefully rephrasing the same thought to avoid copy-paste). The best comparison I can think of is NFL football: the definition of what constitutes a "catch" a "fumble" or being "in bounds" is obvious at human speeds, slow everything down to frame-by-frame from four angles and it suddenly gets really complicated, to the point where I have no earthly idea what pass interference is, and the review officials have to impute intent into micro-gestures during intense physical violence.

I disagree.

I see "plagiarism" as something more like traveling in basketball, where mostly everyone would agree taking five dribbleless steps while running in action is less forgivable than taking three while walking the ball up the court in the beginning of a possession. Especially when examining casual players, most basketball-familiar people can identify traveling when they see it (like pornography) and judge its severity even if complications like jump steps, floating dribbles, and step-throughs can appear.

Lifting entire passages without attribution would be like the five dribbleless steps mid-action; insufficiently rewording some well-known-in-the-field information in a sentence or two would be like the three steps while walking up the court.

I see "plagiarism" as something more like traveling in basketball, where mostly everyone would agree taking five dribbleless steps while running in action is less forgivable than taking three while walking the ball up the court in the beginning of a possession. Especially when examining casual players, most basketball-familiar people can identify traveling when they see it (like pornography) and judge its severity even if complications like jump steps, floating dribbles, and step-throughs can appear.

Lifting entire passages without attribution would be like the five dribbleless steps mid-action; insufficiently rewording some well-known-in-the-field information in a sentence or two would be like the three steps while walking up the court.

To continue the metaphor, I think the current cycle of feud and violence is going to look like this: imagine if the NBA sat down at the end of the season and identified travels in video of every game, and docked the team "convicted" of the travel points that the league determined resulted from the travel, and if the docked points were enough they started revoking wins. Imagine they started with the Lakers, and docked the Lakers several wins. Well then Lakers fans would naturally go through every other team's games, and point out uncalled travels, and pretty soon the results of any close game are in question.

Combine this with the tendency of twitter to report "Eleven instances of plagiarism have been found in the work of Dr. X" and you get a pretty toxic stew.

I agree with you that context is everything, I'm not arguing that plagiarism is everywhere in the sense that no one has original ideas. I'm arguing that a motivated reader can locate a possible accusation of plagiarism in almost any work, which will then be fed to the slaughterhouse of social media.

Well then Lakers fans would naturally go through every other team's games

Joke's on them, there is effectively no other team in academia.

Ackman

lol yeah forgot about Herbalife. He kept adding to the short position and dumped it all at a huge loss 5 years later. And now Carl Icahn has problems of his own, as his fund's dividend rate is less stable than originally assumed to be. I think the recurring theme is that these bigshot money managers are entertainment value only as egos clash. Stick to index funds otherwise.

Ackman's turn has been pretty remarkable. He's posting memes from EndWokeness on Twitter now.

Until recently, we saw most billionaires give lip service to diversity and other progressive shibboleths. They'd give some sort of weak pushback like "As a lifelong Democrat, I'm concerned by..." but they'd never actually fight the powers that be.

Now, people like Ackman have joined the other team. They are saying, explicitly, that wokeness is bad, academics are racist, and we need to vote for actual Republicans to change things.

Billionaires have never been fans of wokeness ,as they know if wokeness is carried out to its eventual end, they will be among the first to be shaken down. I think Ackman has voiced sentiment that many others share but afraid to voice. Zuckerberg is not a big fan of the woke either.

Zuckerberg is not a big fan of the woke either.

The first I've heard. Didn't he donate massive amounts of money towards helping Democrats win in 2020 by hook or crook? That's despite the fact that they hate him and that previous progressive donations have blown up in his face.

I'd love to be pointed in the direction of anything anti-woke coming from the Zuck.

As an insider, wokes in the company had been railing against Thiel being on the board for years and years. Zuck always stood up for him.

Zuck would go along with diversity initiatives but was never the one pounding the drum. The most I can remember him being fired up about woke politics is when somebody crossed out “Black Lives Matter” on a chalkboard.

COVID censorship, even inside the company, was absurd though. Mass deletions of comments for not citing “reputable” sources, for which the definition of reputable was secret and somehow didn’t include university professors.

I got the impression that Zuck is a pretty standard Silicon Valley paternalistic tech idealist.

Protection money is a thing. The left hate him because he has not done enough to stop alleged misinformation on the platform, and also his denial of Facebook's role in affecting the 2016 election..

While I am not sympathetic to people seeing the sinister hand of Da Joos everywhere, there are some patterns that are real, and one I have seen lately, of which Bill Ackman is a notable example, is of prominent Jews who were full-throated supporters of DEI and wokeness suddenly being shocked, shocked, to discover that Palestinians > Israelis/Jews. This shocking discovery causing them to suddenly reevaluate their allyship and leading to hand-wringing articles by Jews about how they are walking away from The Left/the Democratic Party, etc.

I don't have a lot of respect for people who suddenly do a heel-face turn because their ox got got.

Ackman was optimistic about Trump in 2016 and supported him https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/11/bill-ackman-president-trump

Business people tend to flip-flop though or hold contradicting opinions. Mark Cuban is seen as woke but he used to be more libertarian or even conservative https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/early-lead/wp/2015/08/12/mark-cuban-would-love-to-be-a-republican-if-it-werent-for-the-republican-party/

I don't have a lot of respect for people who suddenly do a heel-face turn because their ox got got.

I'd still be happy they were shooting in the proper direction... if they kept shooting in the proper direction rather than returning to the fold as soon as their ox get a reprieve.

Is their ox gonna get a reprieve? Seems like the respectable center left which goes "ok, discriminate against whites but make an exception for Jews no seriously make an exception for Jews" has lost control of the narrative.

Nope. Ackman has decided to back a full-on DEI supporter for President. His "wokeness is bad" stuff was all tactical, perhaps to get the help of Rufo. Now that he's got the head he wanted, he's back to full DEI (provided his people are on the correct side of the progressive stack).

Plagiarism rules simply weren't designed for a world where powerful computers instantaneously compare every combination of words used in a 500 page work to every other combination of words ever combined in human history. God forbid we get to the point where HallMonitorGPT can interpret meanings and compare and cite them. Everyone is committing plagiarism all the time, if anyone has the energy to look into it.

We're not talking very sophisticated, "this sequence of five words resembles a use of five words scattered throughout an entire paper" stuff here, at least if I believe what I'm hearing about my nephew, who is doing teaching work as part of his PhD and thus grading papers: one example was a student who didn't even change the name on the plagiarized paper.

I think if you can't even manage to change (not real names) "Ramchandra Paresh" to "Billy Murphy", we are not talking the highest levels of academic achievement being stifled by over-zealous sniffing out of plagiarism.

You kinda missed the point I'm getting at. I'm saying that plagiarism claims are probably universal if you dig hard enough among academics. And given that we aren't really equipped to parse the severity of those claims, we're just going to keep score by "Dr. ABC had X number of claims of plagiarism against them" that's the whole tweet. Once you get a complex enough set of rules, everyone is in violation of something all the time. Like land use ordinances or holding in the NFL, the refs call it when they want a particular result.

There are very high profile academics whose work actually gets cited and picked over just for the intellectual benefit from doing so. If their work had plagiarism it would be found out already. That, there also exists this class of hangers on who just create make work articles and think of academia as a grift they can make easy money out of, is one of the biggest faults of academia.

I'm wondering if cheating students become cheating professors. If the attitude is shifting towards "pfft, who writes their own paper, that's dumb when you can buy one that will get you the grade" then why expect "pfft, why write my whole own paper/book when I can just copy what someone else got published?" to be beyond the pale when they're the academics?

As far as I'm aware, the cases being complained of are not a few words here and there that resemble words someone else wrote, but chunks of word-for-word copying. If that's not the thing you mean, then yes, extreme demands for rigour and so on.

Also, I do not find the link between Ashkenazi intelligence and antisemitism all that plausible. The traditional antisemitic trope of Jews is them being shrewd manipulators, which is not exactly the same as being smart. Ask an antisemite why Jews are over-represented in the Ivy League, and they will probably say that it is because the Jews in academia collude to favor Jewish students over gentiles, helping them cheat and so on. If you convince them that the over-representation is due to raw honest brain power, that will conflict with the antisemitic trope.

Let's say you're not an academic so you're not well-placed to judge merit. You're also not on DR sites and aren't into the IQ-determinist camp (those tests are culturally biased anyway right?). And you keep seeing Jews do well, everywhere?

It's easy to see how you can both sincerely and self-servingly believe that Jews aren't really doing better than you and yours, they're cheating (I think I recall this outright being stated by disgruntled parents about Asians when DiBlasio was first taking on "equity" in the NY magnet schools - that they had a culture of cheating which explained they dominate). Nobody wants to just fold and say someone else's kid deserves that spot more than theirs. They'll come up with some theory.

So I don't see how there isn't a link - the former can easily motivate or aggravate the latter. A lot of people believe things in their interests and won't uncouple things when it doesn't suit them.

I know this because...this doesn't just apply to Jews who, let's face it, people already hated. Non-Chosen wypipo are even more subject to it, because you can accuse any white person of "privilege" or benefiting from the old boy's club or implicit bias or whatever without being hit with the "antisemite" label. So we hear even more about "mediocre white men" waltzing into things. If white people had the grace to score worse I doubt those theories would have the same vise grip.

Quillette founder Claire Lehmann Tweets about the Guardian article's author "Somewhat surprised to see that @guardianscience has known antifa associates writing for them now. (The author of this piece is pictured below behind camera, next to guy in brass knuckles). But I suppose scientific credentials are not required when the target is @realchrisrufo"

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