For someone like me that feels wary every time I see a Substack URL, are there some quality independent journalists covering current events that don’t participate in conspiracy theories and partisan echo chambers that I can discover?
Peruse the leaderboards at substack.com and in the new app (in the Discover tab).
Check out the profiles of the writers and readers you most respect (just click on their faces). You'll find lists of Substacks they're subscribed to, which may lead you to some interesting places and new writers to respect.
Yesterday he wrote an article about being “anti-woke” on a college campus. It included recommendations such as what he called the “berserker strategy” which was to pick as many fights as possible on every social justice topic.
Scott is anything but unbiased. He writes with flowery language that elicits a sense of faux humbleness and “both sides” journalism while subtlety pushing the reader to his desired conclusions on things like race and IQ.
He’s famous for leaked e-mails where he admitted writing a lot about neoreactionaries because it gets more clicks, which has made him somewhat of a hero among those circles. He also admitted that he believes in “HBD” which is an alt-right euphemism for racist views on IQ.
He may feel unbiased and objective due to his writing style, but he’s far from it if you’ve been following him and reading closely.
Pushing people towards believing the truth? The horror!
Good to see an unbiased take such as this.
Let's look up what that means. First hit on google: "HBD IQ" (For me)(https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jttfuxoQpYsnNEAqG/suppose-hb...)
"Human bio-diversity, the claim that distinct populations of humans exist and have substantial genetical variance which accounts for some difference in average intelligence from population to population"
I mean I'm sure racists love the idea, but it doesn't exactly strike me as obviously 100% untrue.
If not why would you expect any claim revolving genetics to be "obviously 100% untrue" to you?
"There's a group of human's that can breath fire like a dragon"
Just using some basic knowledge of evolution and genetics, that seems pretty unlikely. What would the evolutionary pressure be ? Would there be enough time for that development? No parallel's in other mammals etc.
You can do the same to see if something is plausible. For this discussion specifically. We know there are physical difference's between populations (Height, drug tolerance, skin colour)
These observable differences are caused by different genes. What are the chances that none of these differences in genes are in the brain ? Basically zero.
So it's very plausible you'd find some differences. Just using some simple reasoning. (Reading a little bit about it, Sam Harris basically makes this exact point. It really is basic logic)
I mean, if the community around Astro Codex said upfront "We don't care about empiricism, we make things up based on what sounds logical to us" I would at least give them points for honesty.
The guy who runs Astro Codex blog claims he is an empiricist.
You can point to domains about where it fails completely. (For understandable reasons)
But that doesn't mean intuition is useless, in fact I'd say it's rather underused for how valuable it actually is. Parachutes and RCT's come to mind.
Being empirical is really hard and rather un-natural for humans. It's a best effort thing. Current institution don't help as much as I'd like, it still takes many decades for information to propagate (And even longer for corrections where the consensus was wrong)
This is the wedge used to hoist their more radical ideas into the mainstream.
The HBD crowd uses a common writing trick: They start with a low-risk scientific fact (genes influence traits) and then inflate it into misleading conclusions (race equals IQ). Depending on their audience and how much pushback they're receiving, they'll retreat further and further toward the kernel of truth they started with.
That's how they end up hooking people with thoughts such as "not obviously 100% untrue". The problem with HBD isn't the idea that genes can influence traits such as intelligence. The problem is their weird obsession with race. If they want to talk about genes and genetics, that's fine. However, for some reason much of their writing is about race with the implication that all people of the race share the same intelligence-related genes, which is patently false. Yet that's all they want to talk about.
They also greatly exaggerate, or more likely completely misunderstand, the significance of the genetics-intelligence correlations. Outside of genetic disorders, individual genes are only loosely correlated with intelligence. The correlations are vanishingly small, yet the HBD people talk about it as if it's some sort of 1:1 switch that determines who has high IQ and who has low IQ.
There are even more unsavory parts of the movement, but I'll caution you against getting hooked by their bait-and-switch arguments.
“ This is far enough from my field that I would usually defer to expert consensus, but all the studies I can find which try to assess expert consensus seem crazy. A while ago, I freaked out upon finding a study that seemed to show most expert scientists in the field agreed with Murray's thesis in 1987 - about three times as many said the gap was due to a combination of genetics and environment as said it was just environment. Then I freaked out again when I found another study (here is the most recent version, from 2020) showing basically the same thing (about four times as many say it’s a combination of genetics and environment compared to just environment). I can't find any expert surveys giving the expected result that they all agree this is dumb and definitely 100% environment and we can move on (I'd be very relieved if anybody could find those, or if they could explain why the ones I found were fake studies or fake experts or a biased sample, or explain how I'm misreading them or that they otherwise shouldn't be trusted. If you have thoughts on this, please send me an email). I've vacillated back and forth on how to think about this question so many times, and right now my personal probability estimate is "I am still freaking out about this, go away go away go away". And I understand I have at least two potentially irresolveable biases on this question: one, I'm a white person in a country with a long history of promoting white supremacy; and two, if I lean in favor then everyone will hate me, and use it as a bludgeon against anyone I have ever associated with, and I will die alone in a ditch and maybe deserve it. So the best I can do is try to route around this issue when considering important questions. This is sometimes hard, but the basic principle is that I'm far less sure of any of it than I am sure that all human beings are morally equal and deserve to have a good life and get treated with respect regardless of academic achievement.
(Hopefully I’ve given people enough ammunition against me that they won’t have to use hallucinatory ammunition in the future.)”
I don't agree with 100% of what he writes but it is always stimulating and challenging. Very strongly recommended.
Bari Weiss’ Common Sense, Scott Alexander (the comments here trashing him are wrong, easy to tell by reading him), The Diff by Byrne Hobart is one of the best finance blogs online, Noahpinion by Noah Smith, Zvi Mowshowitz has had good writing about Covid.
Andrew Sullivan’s the weekly dish has different politics than I do, but he’s also a good writer with a scout mindset imo.
Outside of substack, Coleman Hughes, Kmele Foster, Sam Harris, Ben Thompson of Stratechery, Thomas Chatterton Williams, Julia Galef are all great.
Sam Harris in particular is a really good, smart, interviewer.
Dr. Robert Malone is not a journalist but a scientist. The analysis of recent medical studies shunned by the mainstream media is worth the time investment.
I’m trying to get away from folks that make broad, sweeping judgements without much data / firsthand knowledge or dangle open ended conspiracy theory questions about subjects they have little to no expertise in.