That same person was once invited at another conference (QCon I think?) but was then uninvited after the organizers of that conference were made aware of that person's posts.
Still need a citation on this. LambdaConf's own review found this:
He is quoted by white supremacists but denies being one;
He has never written any hate speech or resorted to insulting or vulgar language (except as a literary device);
He is not pro-slavery in the historical sense, but believes individuals have a right to voluntarily sell themselves into slavery;
He believes that democracy is a failure (incompatible with “freedom”), and that white male software engineers are most qualified to run “government”.
Since then, it's just been a "me too" pile on, which is apparently the new par for the course.
Googling that blog for slave, race, etc gets you more.
The only thing I can find is
"Thus, Spaniards and Englishmen in the Americas in the 17th and earlier centuries, whose sense of political correctness was negligible, found that Africans tended to make good slaves and Indians did not. This broad pattern of observation is most parsimoniously explained by genetic differences."
[To me this seems like another witch hunt for smug social points as if it wasn't, somebody would have pointed out the actual problems of the statement, or that truth of modern white/western supremacy is that we all benefit from it, as many Africans are still essentially enslaved. What any of this has to do with speaking at a tech conference is beyond me.]
This seems like a fairly neutral belief. However it's wrong scientifically by definition. In population biology, races are formed when there is absolute geographical isolation of a population. Without isolation, you get clustering of alleles but you don't get distinct races. Over time, the clustering of alleles diminishes, much like gas dissipating into a room.
If you're really struggling with this, just ask which race does the child of a man from race A and a woman from race B belong to? And when that child reproduces with more people from either race A or race B, what race do they belong to? And then ask how long has there has been contact between human populations? Do we know if there was ever a time that human populations were truly isolated?
End result is that biologists agree there is only one human species, Homo sapiens, and one human race (a.k.a. subspecies), Homo sapiens sapiens.
The page on Wikipedia about this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism
> Scientific racism is [...] the practice of classifying individuals of different phenotypes into discrete races.
So what happens here is that first Moldbug puts forth the false premise that there are genetic / biological races. Then he says stuff like black people have a lower IQ, but he's not discriminating, rather it's the belief that having a higher IQ is better that's discriminatory. (This was in the recent blog post about how he's not a racist.) Not only is this a really slippery position, but everyone gets so caught up in his arguments built on the false premise of the existence of races that it actually starts to implicitly build support for the false premise. I personally believe that getting people to accept this premise is the point of the trolling.
According to Moldbug, there is a cluster of humanity called "black". It may not meet your requirement of perfect separation, but is merely a cluster, and biracial individuals exist who break perfect separation. So lets call it a "cluster in genotype/phenotype space" ("cluster" for short) instead of a "race" to disambiguate these concepts.
If Moldbug used the word "cluster" instead of "race", would he not be racist? (I.e., s/race/cluster/g in his post.) What if he used the word "race" but his definition agreed with the definition of your word "cluster"?
Moldbug claims this cluster has an IQ distribution which is has a lower mean than that of other clusters (e.g. whites and asians). Do you believe this claim is false? If this claim were true, would a person who believes it be a racist?
I'll also link to a slatestarcodex article on Eulering, which I think applies here: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/12/does-race-exist-does-cu...
A good environment and good genetics are necessary for high IQ. You can't meaningfully measure the contribution of genetics in the absence of a good environment. We may as well debate AGW.
I don't have a problem with identifying genetic clusters (descendants of people from Africa), I don't have a problem with the existence of stereotypes (African Americans a.k.a. blacks do poorly on IQ tests), I just have a problem with people knowingly jumping to conclusions on the basis of science that isn't there (the black race has a genetically lower IQ and that's why they fundamentally make good slaves). Moldbug isn't insidious because he's wrong, he's insidious because he knows he's wrong. Perhaps more accurately, he knows that he can't prove that he's right but he hides it.
The Eulering article was interesting, cheers. I think the anthropologists probably have a lot to say about all this, filed under ethnocentrism.
P.S. Just as an aside, I think you need to consider that genes dilute fairly rapidly into a gene pool, that humans have been migrating forever, and that there are no real purebreeds or biracial people from a population biology perspective. That said, this isn't a denial of clustering.
P.P.S. It's probably just as intellectually lazy to claim that all population groups have the same level of genetic intelligence, it's just a lot less offensive.
Why go through all this wordplay just to define most folks as racist? Why not simply adopt the common usage of the word "race"?
And with this definition of racist (uses one set of jargon rather than another), why should we care if someone is racist?
(I say your definition is uncommon because most people use "race" to refer to what you call "cluster". For example, the US Census asks for "race" rather than "cluster".)
Interestingly, someone told me once that the anthropologists say that the best way to classify humans is on the basis of the food they eat. I don't have a source for that but it just seems like such an effective way to partition people.
Race, or exposure to lead 2 generations back, which is why we can observe white people with the exact same tendency based on where their grandparents lived? Or slavery 5 generations back, which is why we can observe similar traits in Americo-Indian populations that are not in the Us but were enslaved? Maybe some other characteristic that we are not observing clearly yet is the factor that turns on and off genes?
Maybe we can turn the right set of genes back on? We've seen weirder cases of epigenetics and behavior without being racist, as you are being here.
For all you know, maybe you turned on the wrong set of genes from doing too many deadlifts and squats with the kind of twitch muscles that you predominantly have, and you've not only disrupted your back, but you've also disrupted your children and your children's children's musculoskeletal support system (and you'll need surgery every 10-15 years from now on too.
You might want to compute the epigenetic probabilities of that. It is enormously difficult, but it is more realistic than intelligence being racial/computable in the kinds of inheritance models you tend to link to/imply about via models you link to about race. "Race" is ultra-broad term, genetically speaking, where we are talking about sets of markers and characteristics established multi millions of years ago around the time when humans were first migrating out of Africa. WE've been evolving and mutating since then everywhere - and there are trends for all of humanity for more intelligence, genetic speaking. It is considered a positive, multi-gene trait, and tends to be bred for and become dominant quickly in any population it gets into. Intelligence as a genetic trait (or set of traits) is racially blind)
You quoting SSC on the subject == you confirming your own racial biases and not keeping up on the subject of intelligence. Drop it. Or choose to admit you can be not scientific, not logical, and not mathematically inclined when it suits you.
Yes.
> If this claim were true, would a person who believes it be a racist?
Yes. Well, it's complicated (not because it's nuanced but because you haven't rigorously defined what "it" means in a way that covers all relevant variables), but yes.
And here's why. As usual, the reason some people have a hard time understanding this is that they construct a model with their own set of axioms, then follow some inference rules, reach a conclusion, and then convince themselves that they're rigorous. This is plainly false, because their choice of axioms and variables not only uniquely determines the outcome, but a different choice of variables and axioms would lead to a completely different outcome, and that other choice may be far more reasonable given the facts. So far the preamble. Now for the explanation:
You make an axiomatic assumption that "black" is just an arbitrary "cluster". This is factually false. A far more historically correct axiomatization would be that "black" is a "cluster of people singled out by Europeans, and then systematically tortured, killed, enslaved, disenfranchised, humiliated and marginalized for generations". Now, is it possible that a test could be constructed that would statistically yield lower score for a cluster of people singled out for humiliation and marginalization? Absolutely, but your question was about a person who believes IQ etc..
Most people clearly understand that such a test is meaningless (i.e. that it does not measure intelligence) in the ethics of distributing power, and therefore "believing it" is not even something they consider. It's like asking me if I believed that the people living in some distant galaxy eat something similar to cheese. Yes, it's possible, but it's not something you think about. Now, in order to precisely answer your question, I need to understand exactly what you mean by a "person who believes it". Do you mean a person who thinks it's feasible to construct a test that a marginalized group would score lower on than the hegemony? In that case, no, they would not be racist. If, OTOH, they believe that a marginalized group happens to be intrinsically less intelligent and therefore less deserving of power in society, then yes; they would 100% be racist.
So the flaw is (as always) in the premise that "black" is an instance of the free variable "cluster". That assumption needs justification, which frankly would be very hard to come by given historical evidence. In fact, "black" and "IQ test" having a very strong causal bond (with IQ tests being designed for the very purpose of excluding marginalized group). It would even be more correct (although very, very far from accurate) to say that "IQ" is defined to be "that which gives blacks lower scores", or even "blacks is those who score less" (which is even far less accurate, but still more accurate than your premise), than presuming (counter to historical evidence) that the two are independent variables.
(Of course, he's wrong, there are other equally simple explanations, like "culture".)
In any case, it's not clear if he is implying that the simplest explanation is even true. He changes the subject in the next sentence after it: this isn't an article about genetics. One interpretation is that, yes, he's a racist and he sees no reason to explain further since he sees his racism as self-evident. Another is that he doesn't care about the cause, and just mentions a simple explanation in order to be able to move on to what he actually wants to talk about.
I don't know which of those (or something else) is true. It's an offhand sentence in a long article, many interpretations are possible.
https://medium.com/@curtis.yarvin/why-you-should-come-to-lam...
> Here’s how you are not-racist. You hold two beliefs: one, neurological problem-solving performance (ie, “intelligence”) is homogenously distributed across the genetically inhomogeneous human species. Two, it’s better to be smart than stupid.
> Ergo, no race is better than any other race, because all races are equally smart. Is that right? I hope I have it right.
> Here’s how I’m not-racist: I share neither belief.
But he's a racist because he uses the word race in a genetic context, and so are you if you do the same - which is what he's trying to get you to do.
[ Sorry, I realize that this isn't the most coherent post... ]
He says he doesn't think "intelligence" is uniform across human populations. That sounds racist because e.g. the Nazis said Jews were mentally inferior, and racists in the US said black people were mentally inferior. Racists believe such things, and they believe them about an entire race as a whole.
However, the tricky part is that it's hard to avoid the topic without being anti science. For example, black people are far more likely to have sickle cell anemia for genetic reasons. That's a well-known fact, and it isn't racist to mention it. What Yarvin mentions in that post is that he thinks intelligence might work the same as sickle-cell anemia. When put that way, it's not racist. It's not about races as a whole, it's about genes not being uniform across all groups.
However, obviously the difference between the racist statement and the non-racist scientific one is worryingly close. For that reason, a lot of people take the easy way and oppose even considering genetic differences in populations. That's not a good solution.
The good solution is that Yarvin is wrong for other reasons. Intelligence is NOT like sickle-cell anemia. Intelligence is a very amorphous concept, with changing definitions over time. It's not an objective, scientific quality like "has sickle-cell anemia". And we know that that ill-defined aspect of intelligence has been misused in the past, when "intelligence" tests were used to prove that black people, Jews, and Italians were mentally inferior, for example. Instead, when intelligence is studied carefully, it's actually a mix of a huge array of skills, and many of them depend on culture and training and context. Even if genes affect brains which affect mental abilities, the mediation of culture, training and context are so large that it is meaningless to talk about intelligence differences in race. There is also a huge amount of relevant genes; sickle-cell anemia has one.
The bottom line is that we know Yarvin is wrong because this was studied. For example, black children raised in adopted families have noticeably different results on IQ tests than non-adopted children with similar genetics. We know genes matter here, but we know they matter in such a complex way, and other factors matter just as much, that saying "group X is inferior" is wrong.
So no, I don't think Yarvin is being racist there - even if he cuts it close - but he is in fact wrong on the facts of the matter. We don't need to call him a racist to show he's wrong, the facts do that.
The problem I have is that population groups aren't races, even if you're talking about sickle cell anemia. "Black" is not a subspecies of human. And because of the way Yarvin conflates the word race with population group, I consider him a racist. In a matter-of-fact kind of way, simply by virtue of believing in the existence of races.
For what it's worth, in my experience most of the people that use the word race are racist, including the so-called anti-racists. It's a pointlessly divisive concept, both scientifically and socially.
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/bitwise/2015/06/cur...
(I admit, I've not come anywhere near reading his entire work. He's longwinded and that's a big barrier.)
The actual blog post that's criticized is here: http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2009/07/why-car...
My best summary of the controversial part of the blog that I can come up with is this: Suddenly we see the relationship between slavery and government. Serfdom and slavery can be described as microgovernment and nanogovernment respectively. In government proper, the normal human role of patron is filled by a giant, impersonal, and often accidentally sadistic bureaucracy...In serfdom, this role is filled by a noble house...In slavery, mastership is exercised by a mobile individual whose slaves go with him.
We see these same relationship parameters emerging...This is a pretty good clue that this structure is one to which humans are biologically adapted.
Nozick had a much shorter essay (Yarvin is not known for brevity) which expresses the same idea: http://www.colorado.edu/studentgroups/libertarians/issues/no...
The larger part of the essay is about creating order in society and Robert Carlyle's views on that.
The specific quote which is interpreted as supporting slavery is this: Thus, Spaniards and Englishmen in the Americas in the 17th and earlier centuries, whose sense of political correctness was negligible, found that Africans tended to make good slaves and Indians did not. This broad pattern of observation is most parsimoniously explained by genetic differences.
This is mostly tangential to his main points, however.
https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/4bxf6f/im_curtis_yarv...
Sometimes people write a lot about esoteric topics - my blog is a ton of statistics and code. Maybe Yarvin is just a nerd?
Yep, he's definitely a villain of the worst sort.
It was StrangeLoop, and the dis-invitation effort was spearheaded by Steve Klabnik and Bodil Stokke.