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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   35344 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 26, 2022

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The triumph of the blank slate

an article in the Atlantic recently made the case that separating sport by sex doesn’t make sense, because it ‘reinforces the idea that boys are inherently bigger, faster, and stronger than girls in a competitive setting — a notion that’s been challenged by scientists for years.’

On a similar theme, a few weeks back the New York Times ran a piece arguing that ‘maternal instinct is a myth that men created’. In the essay, published in the world’s most influential newspaper, it was stated that ‘The notion that the selflessness and tenderness babies require is uniquely ingrained in the biology of women, ready to go at the flip of a switch, is a relatively modern — and pernicious — one. It was constructed over decades by men selling an image of what a mother should be, diverting our attention from what she actually is and calling it science.’

Just recently, Scientific American stated that ‘Before the late 18th century, Western science recognized only one sex — the male — and considered the female body an inferior version of it. The shift historians call the “two-sex model” served mainly to reinforce gender and racial divisions by tying social status to the body.’

Yet what is strange is that such ideas are triumphant, even as the scientific evidence against them mounts up, with the expanding understanding of genetics and the role of inheritance. The tabula rasa should by all rights be dead, indeed it should have been killed twenty years ago with the publication of one of the most important books of the century so far, Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate.

Rather than blank slate-led ideas falling to mockery and obscurity, the opposite has happened — they’ve proliferated and spread. Pinker was obviously right, yet seems to have lost.

i recently was in a seminar discussing fixed versus growth mindsets, and it was argued that believing in any innate/genetic component of intelligence was connected to a 'fixed' mindset. we were discouraged from using the idea of 'talent' as it implied that some people were just naturally better at some things than others. it seems like a core part of the 'diversity, equity, and inclusion' mantra that is finding its way everywhere - the idea of innate difference is anathema to the principle behind caring about equity versus equality.

There’s a reason why it’s called the Standard Social Science Model. Genetics is assumed to play no role in behaviour, contra all evidence in nature. This is what the best and brightest at Ivy League institutions believe, deeply, and they will brook no disagreement, which is automatically assumed to be racist, sexist, transphobic, etc

There’s this myth of progress, that we humans are getting smarter and better al the time. Rationalists fall hard for this type of belief, yet they ignore all the signs of societal decay everywhere. The effective altruists are even worse - they misunderstand where the true threats to societal progress stand “ooooh its malaria! It’s HIV! 🤓” the quokkas in the end discredit themselves both in their foolish and naive attempts to improve things and their shrinking cowardice at pointing out obvious truths

Actually most effective altruists I know push back against that type of ideology quite strongly, arguably the capture of scientific institutions by idiots who can't face reality is one reason why effective altruism has become so large.

Sad to see this blatant strawman being upvoted.

I hope you’re right! Perhaps I’m being too harsh

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