How White Nationalism Courts Internet Nerd Culture | Hacker News Reader

How White Nationalism Courts Internet Nerd Culture

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35 pointsaeontech23 comments

> IQ is a pseudoscience

This is how people trying to oppose the alt right shoot themselves in the foot. Alt right intellectuals and propagandists immediately capitalize on this kind of nonsense. (The fact that the author identifies as a communist before denying the strongest predictor in psychology is somewhat telling as well and acts as free fuel.)

IQ has scientific value but it falls quite short of the kinds of policy and ideology that spring up around it. It's a fair guess that if someone brings up IQ in a political context as justification for their position, it's pseudoscience.

Is it non-sense? I've heard many times that there a hell of a lot of problems/criticisms of IQ and that it's history is intrinsically linked with eugenics and other kinds of pseudo science. Can you link me to something supporting your claim that it's " the strongest predictor in psychology" (predictor of what... I'm not sure)?

IQ is, as far as I know, a pretty strong predictor of success in life (be it financial, educational, health-wise or longevity).

You've heard nonsense. Please read some of the literature on intelligence research (1). Steven Pinker has also written a great book on why the ideas of the blank slate and social constructivism are purely ideological and do not hold up to analysis (2).

IQ is a very strong metric predictor of pretty much every aspect of personal success, from successful marriages to income to academic achievement to interpersonal skills. By no means is the relationship deterministic, but that isn't what we mean by predictors. (Many other psychological metrics, like the nonsensical "emotional intelligence", predict nothing when IQ is included in the mix.)

1: https://www.amazon.com/Neuroscience-Intelligence-Cambridge-F...

2: https://www.amazon.com/Blank-Slate-Modern-Denial-Nature/dp/0...

The IQ denials and blank slate creationists are hurting exactly the people they claim they are trying to help. (Hard to tell if it is genuine, it might just be virtue signaling.)

The best thing we could be doing for disadvantaged groups is encouraging the smartest to have loads and loads of children.

This article is pretty bad and it's kind of annoying that it (somehow) reached the top of HN. But I'll bite.

1) IQ is not a pseudoscience. Admittedly, IQ is a pretty shitty test for intelligence (as it's highly culturally-biased), but calling it pseudoscience is just dumb and shows an inherent misunderstanding of what it's supposed to do. Yeah, white supremacists are idiots and use it to justify racism, but that's a different point than what the author is making.

2) Author criticizes Trump's sharing of the "black on black" statistics arguing that it's fabricated. However, some cursory research shows that it is, in fact, not as fabricated as one might believe: https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2013/crime-in-the-u.s.-...

According to the above, 90% of African American homicides were perpetrated by African Americans. This can be compared with white homicides which were perpetrated by 83% whites. Obviously, the numbers are highly skewed in the infographic shared by POTUS, but to bury your head in the sand and pretend this isn't a problem in black communities is unfair and does a great social disservice.

3) It doesn't take some kind of genius to "spot the signs" of Neo-Nazism. Swastikas are kind of a tell-tale sign.

4) "Deo is a union Millwright and a 12 year member of the Furry Fandom who spent 6 months infiltrating multiple Alt-Right and neo-Nazi online groups observing and recording how they recruited, organized, and operated." -- laughable. "Infiltrating" = joining a few discord servers and posting on 4chan. Got it.

Completely worthless article devoid of any actual real social commentary, potential solutions, or plans of attack. Medium has been turning into a soapbox lately.

> 4) "Deo is a union Millwright and a 12 year member of the Furry Fandom who spent 6 months infiltrating multiple Alt-Right and neo-Nazi online groups observing and recording how they recruited, organized, and operated." -- laughable. "Infiltrating" = joining a few discord servers and posting on 4chan. Got it.

I mean I'm the first to laugh at Furries myself but how else would suggest infiltrating and online community other than by joining the community online?

Clearly whoever posted it and whoever is upvoting it finds it to have value. I wonder why it's enraged you so that you feel the need to say it's completely worthless.

IQ tests are not culturally biased. This is a decades out of date canard. Some tests, like Raven's Progressive Matrices, don't even require the test giver and taker to share a language. IQ, as a statistic, washes out almost every other psychometric in predictive validity -- there are a staggering number of psychology papers which pointedly do not include IQ because whatever predictive power their metric purports to have is totally overridden by IQ. There are many subfields of intelligence and two major categories (fluid and crystal) so it's true that intelligence can't be defined as a single number, but this is a strawman since intelligence researchers have never said this.

Let's assume resources are also important in success and you use IQ "tests" as a way to allocate resources to candidates. Then, your biasing your results.

Yes, this is a legitimate problem because there are both genetic and environmental contributions to intelligence. We must be wary of eugenic arguments. After all, the easiest way to raise the average IQ of a society would be to kill everyone who doesn't meet a specified minimum IQ. A more politically palatable way would be to allocate resources away from those groups.

This isn't a matter of biasing results, though, because the metric validity of intelligence testing doesn't require that we play nice with making sure everyone has equal access. These are separate problems. Intelligence research is a scientific problem, and resource allocation is a political one.

We already know that environmental contributions to IQ are important, and a reasonable and moral person who is literate on intelligence research thinks that resource allocation to lower-performing people is critically important.

Did you know that 99% of the murders in China are committed by Chinese people, whereas less than 1% are committed by Europeans? The Chinese must be murder-crazy!

Obviously if you want useful information about homicides broken down by race, you need to control for population segregation (among many other things). If black people are culturally and geographically separated and tend to only interact with each other, then of course they will tend to only murder each other. But for example they will also tend to only marry each other.

This argument is presented with the veneer of science and math, while failing to control for factors that anyone who took stats 101 would know about. That is a pseudo-science dead giveaway.

I don't think I've ever read anyone babbling on about white people being superior because they invented technology, that's a a new one for me honestly.

The article was pretty rambly and I have to admit I just skipped a bunch of it. My takeaway was he pretended to be a furry nazi for a while and discovered a bunch of idiots believing in idiotic shit then had to write a bunch of idiotic shit about his 'traumatic' experience listening to idiotic shit.

Furry nazis are pretty fucking hilarious though. I wonder if they realize real nazis would have executed them for their sexual attraction to cartoon animals?

>My takeaway was he pretended to be a furry nazi for a while and discovered a bunch of idiots believing in idiotic shit then had to write a bunch of idiotic shit about his 'traumatic' experience listening to idiotic shit.

She said something the nazis didn't like, then there was drama including threats against her. She didn't back down, and kept her position. She also read in some of their chats. (If they let her in or someone send her logs)

Then she posted that text about nazis trying to infiltrate nerd cultures like the Furry fandom (which she is a member of).

So, you completely missed. But at least you tried?

Nah I gotta be honest. I didn't really try at all.

I think there should be space for all kinds of discussion, even those I don’t agree with, but in this case what worried me the most was the authors claim that once a person enters a community to discuss whatever white nationalist subjects, they are told or manipulated into believing they cannot leave, or they are made to watch propaganda videos in order to stay in the group. That crosses the line from communication of ideas to coercion and cult behavior. I don’t know why people don’t see that they’re being treated in this manipulative way, though. Even at my most lonely, I was highly suspicious and dodgy whenever any similar tactic was used on me; I preferred to be lonely.

Because a good propagandist does two things:

1. Ground the argument in some vestige of reality (the reliance on statistics is very strong). 2. Point out the opposing denial of reality (magical thinking, social constructionism, blank slate lunacy) in order to push the radically opposite perspective without nuance.

This is inherently isolating but also makes the adherents feel very powerful. Think pieces like this do not oppose but rather support the cause they purport to be against, since the ideological leanings of the writer are plainly obvious and their own denials of reality stick out like a sore thumb.

As long as the political left is dominated by social constructionism and other lunacy, the alt-right will never be exterminated. The task ahead of us is not trivial.

Social constructionism is lunacy why?

Because it's factually wrong. Biology matters, and I'm not trying to bring in concepts like race (which is a total intellectual disaster, since the term refers to multiple concepts that mean radically different things). Many studies do not account for simple heredity, when adoption studies have already shown that traits like IQ and even personality are heritable to some degree (1). There are genetic correlations with intelligence, aggression, etc that are difficult to untangle but undeniably real.

Humans are incredibly unique animals, but you are still a biological machine and your brain is not a piece of magic pixie dust. Without getting into the free will debate, biology does not determine behavior but does influence it heavily.

Edit: I'm not denying the existence of culture or social norms. These matter, but are also undoubtedly linked to the biological machinery of the human animal. Human society is an evolutionary result (2).

Second edit: It's very easy to find evidence that the social evolution of humans is a biological process. Here is one of my favorite papers on the self-domestication of the human species (3).

1: https://www.amazon.com/Blank-Slate-Modern-Denial-Nature/dp/0...

2: https://www.amazon.com/Before-Dawn-Recovering-History-Ancest...

3: http://resources.seattlecentral.edu/faculty/jwhorley/Gracili...

It's incredibly aggravating how aggressively Nazis are attempting to corrupt internet culture to espouse their hateful ideals. The original mindset that developed on the internet was about how nobody's identity IRL mattered, and what you said/did was what proved your worth. Now, a bunch of basement-dwelling Nazis are trying to turn that meritocracy into their own whites-only club? Fuck that, that's not what internet culture is about.

I strongly believe that anyone who cares about the internet and its culture of free ideas will recognize it as a place where people can be judged based on their skills and the quality of their ideas rather than their race or gender, and will harshly judge anyone who attempts to exclude others based purely on such superficial metrics.

There were white supremacists pushing holocaust denial on usenet. What actually happened is that the social places on the Internet suddenly stopped moderating themselves which let white supremacists congregate, organize and normalize.

>I strongly believe that anyone who cares about the internet and its culture of free ideas will recognize it as a place where people can be judged based on their skills and the quality of their ideas rather than their race or gender, and will harshly judge anyone who attempts to exclude others based purely on such superficial metrics.

The internet doesn't have a culture.

It did once, but only because the pool of users was small, but as the internet became mainstream, "internet culture" became a reflection of humanity in general. That's not a corruption of anything, it's just the maturity of the platform.

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