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Quillette doesn't strike me as containing anything "unsayable", just very, very old things. After reading one Quillette article I found myself coming back because it was so striking how the articles appear to have been lifted, almost verbatim, from Victorian publications on eugenics that we studied in grad school. Same obsession with natural selection, same topics, and same pseudoscience. Most of us here have scientific/mathematical education and see in an instant how implausible and comical Quillette's pseudo-scientific aspirations are, but I assume that many of their readerships have as much of an understanding of science as the laymen of the Victorian era, and find it all very enticing. We may enjoy reading it like we enjoy reading the publications of the flat Earth people, but I guess that to some these things may ring true. Quillette's editorial staff must know history as well as they know science, or they would have made use of an endless supply of uncopyrighted material from Victorian publications.

Can you provide an example? I can’t think of a single Quillete article that could be characterized as pseudoscience that was "lifted, almost verbatim, from Victorian publications on eugenics."

http://quillette.com/2017/03/27/a-tale-of-two-bell-curves/

Plenty of "human biodiversity" (neo-race science) nonsense like this floating around. The back half of the article amounts to the authors taking the premise that blacks are cognitively inferior to whites as a given, and then throwing up their hands and saying "Look, we examined the evidence, and the only explanation that makes sense is that they're genetically inferior!", complete with laments for poor social science researchers who have been unfairly persecuted for their objective, scientifically-minded investigations into the reasons why black people are just so damn stupid.

This is a really good article. Framing discussion of IQ differences as "the reasons why black people are just so damn stupid" is disingenuous and hostile.

If you think few IQ points difference (whether it is or it is not so) is enough to denigrate the entire race as stupid or worthless, you are a part of the problem.

Well, one standard deviation is far more than just "a few IQ points". One general problem is that much of this stuff tends to be very US-centric. If you look at British data related to poverty [1] and the IQ of children [2], you get a somewhat different picture. You even have two different black populations with shared genetic ancestry, but different economic outcomes and different average IQ. (And Black Caribbeans weren't doing as well when they first arrived, but a few generations later, the gap seems to be closing.)

More importantly, as pointed out in an article by Kevin Mitchell [3], a professor of genetics and neuroscience in Dublin, we do not really know of any plausible mechanism by which such differences could have evolved. In the end, if you want to do science, you have to propose a theory by which an effect can be explained and then test that theory. What Murray & Co. have never done is to provide a testable theory that explains how cause and effect are supposed to be related.

[1] http://www.poverty.org.uk/low-income-and-ethnicity/

[2] http://www.unz.com/jthompson/intelligence-of-5-year-olds-in-... (not keen on citing James Thompson here, but I didn't find an open access source for the data)

[3] https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2018/may/02/why-gen...

Article [3] is pretty terrible, he doesn't make very many coherent arguments. IQ is subject to the same mixing, complex influences, mutations and trade-offs as other heritable traits (such as physical strength and lifespan, which also have no immediately obvious downsides), and writing a long article doesn't invalidate that. For example, this line is utter stupidity:

> This constant churn of genetic variation works against any long-term rise or fall in intelligence.

How did humans evolve then?!

Yes, this is exactly the kind of garbage that Quillette peddles. "Look, can't you be reasonable, can't we just discuss the reasonable possibility that blacks are cognitively inferior to whites like reasonable people?"

Hi dang, can we please get bans for people trying to mainstream racist pseudoscience on HN?

Why isn’t it reasonable? And wouldn’t such people also want to discuss that the mean IQ of Southeastern Asians and Ashkenazi Jews is higher than that of whites?

Let's look at an example: below is an excerpt from "Black American Culture and the Racial Wealth Gap" [1] which claims that 20% of the racial wealth gap is due to Black preference for expensive cars, jewelry and clothes. Is this pseudoscience?

-----------------------------------------

To what extent do poor spending habits explain the persistence of the wealth gap? Economists at the University of Chicago and the University of Pennsylvania asked this question after analyzing 16 years of nationally representative data from the Consumer Expenditure Survey. Consistent with the Nielsen data, they found that blacks with comparable incomes to whites spent 17 percent less on education, and 32 percent more (an extra $2300 per year in 2005 dollars) on ‘visible goods’—defined as cars, jewelry, and clothes. What’s more, “after controlling for visible spending,” they concluded that the “wealth gap between Blacks and Whites, conditional on permanent income, declines by 50 percent.” To be clear, that 50 percent figure doesn’t pertain to the total wealth gap, but to the proportion of the gap that remains after income is taken into account—which was 40 percent. The upshot: the fact that blacks spent more on cars, jewelry, and clothes explained fully 20 percent of the total racial wealth gap.

[1] https://quillette.com/2018/07/19/black-american-culture-and-...

Luckily, somebody already did the work [1].

In short: There is an implication in the Coleman essay that African Americans have less wealth because they spend more.

Problem with that:

1. While black people spend more on these items than white people, white people spend correspondingly more on other luxury goods.

2. Quote: "[...] once income is controlled, if anything, black families actually have a slightly higher savings rate than their white counterparts. [...] If anything, it appears that blacks generally live more frugal lives than whites; a study conducted by the Institute on Assets and Social Policy using the 2013 Survey of Consumer Finances found that, at comparable levels of income, whites spend 1.3 times more than blacks (Traub et al.)"

So, yeah, the entire argument depends on a cherry-picked metric (we're leaving aside the question to what extent cars and clothing are necessarily Veblen goods and to what extent differences in types of spending are the result of different social constraints and incentives [2]) that does not reflect actual spending and saving habits well.

What Quillette essentially is: a Gish Gallop [3] in webzine form. Debunking all this takes time and effort and few people have the spare time to keep up with their output, and even then the debunking is often not seen by the original readers.

[1] https://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=21121635...

[2] For example, the problem that it can be more important for a black person to appear well-dressed to compensate for racial bias than for a white person.

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop

Unfortunately, [1] doesn't counter the most interesting claim, that "blacks [...] spent 17 percent less on education".

That article to me seems thoughtful, thorough, and cites serious research by serious researchers at orthodoxy-respecting institutions.

Don't confuse debate tactics with logical/scientific rigor.

Here's a technique employed in this article and in many other Quillette articles: Person X said A and B; A is wrong because of [some citations], therefore B is wrong, and we conclude that C is completely wrong because science, QED. However, A is a peripheral argument while B is the central one, which in any event does not depend on A, and C is an argument which no one has made and is usually a gross straw-man generalization of B. Another technique, employed here and elsewhere, is: X said S; T is wrong because of [some citations]; but S rests on T therefore S is wrong because science, QED. But, of course, "science" does not show that S rests on T. Even if T => S, the conclusion that S rests on T (i.e. ~T => ~S, which is equivalent to S => T) is wrong. Yet another technique is: A => B according to [some citations] and C => D according to [some citations], therefore A => D because B => C, QED. But B => C is not established.

These are all things that give a cursory reader the illusion of rigor, as they may come to believe that if rigor is used anywhere in the argument, then the argument is rigorous (while, in fact, an argument is rigorous iff rigor is used everywhere). Of course, some of the texts Quillette's articles respond to are not rigorous either, but Quillette's core technique relies on the illusion of rigor, hence pseudoscience or scientism.

What, specifically, did you think was incorrect?

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