No. Although the term is widely abused and misapplied, so he might fall within whatever definition of eugenicist you're working with.
Maybe letting people know for what definitions he might qualify?
All societies practice eugenics to some extent, whether in banning relatives from marrying, choosing abortion when the child would have terrible life conditions, or selecting mates based on biological traits like beauty.
From the first paragraph of Wikipedia:
> Eugenics (/juːˈdʒɛnɪks/ yoo-JEN-iks; from Ancient Greek εύ̃ (eû) 'good, well', and -γενής (genḗs) 'come into being, growing')[1][2] is a set of beliefs and practices that aim to improve the genetic quality of a human population,[3][4] historically by excluding people and groups judged to be inferior or promoting those judged to be superior.[5] In recent years, the term has seen a revival in bioethical discussions on the usage of new technologies such as CRISPR and genetic screening, with a heated debate on whether these technologies should be called eugenics or not.[6]
This contention referenced by Wikipedia shows that the debate goes well beyond Nazis. There's no other convenient non-euphemistic word for this concept.
Isn’t that what choosing a partner to start a family with does?
There can be no public sanity regarding anything that was done by people in the wrong side of fresh (historical) memory
Arguably the worst things are completely natural and unconscious.
Natural selection by itself is very brutal, and often slow process, and doesn't always optimize for traits you yourself find desirable.
As far as sexual selection is concerned, it is very often conscious.
In other words, there's nothing inherently wrong about eugenics.
The wrong part is coercing people doing or not doing things.
slippery-sloping the ideas of control very quickly leads to nightmarish scenarios, of course slopes tend not to be slippery just because we fear they may be, but sometimes the slipperiness of a slope will seem not a problem until the right social movement comes along and takes advantage of it, best to be prepared is the pessimist's take.
At the most basic romantic selection level we're all doing it after all... it's how evolution works.
Not sure about Alexander, I don't really pay attention to what he writes about medical biology.
IIRC, he's not a eugenicist, but shares one of their big assumptions (that intelligence is heritable and some ethnic groups are smarter than others).
> that intelligence is heritable and some ethnic groups are smarter than others
is true because if it was true, Berkeley feminists with humanities degrees wouldn't want to admit that, and they find those people annoying, therefore the option that makes you go "well we just have to face the facts" must be the case.
Of course, the first part of the sentence doesn't imply half the things they think it does, certainly doesn't imply the second, and even then the implications "…and it must be genetic" "…and there's nothing we can do about it" "…and that's why we're more virtuous than those other people" would not necessarily be true.
(Genetics, like social sciences, doesn't produce reliable results because it uses observation studies and hasn't heard of the credibility revolution thing yet. Intervention studies are either beyond our capabilities or would be unethical to do.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dor_Yeshorim
> Dor Yeshorim (Hebrew: דור ישרים) also called Committee for Prevention of Jewish Genetic Diseases, is a nonprofit organization that offers genetic screening to members of the Jewish community worldwide. Its objective is to minimize, and eventually eliminate, the incidence of genetic disorders common to Jewish people, such as Tay–Sachs disease. Dor Yeshorim is based in Brooklyn, New York, but has offices in Israel and various other countries.
[snip]
> In both the Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jewish communities, there is an increased rate of a number of genetic disorders such as Tay–Sachs disease, an autosomal recessive disorder that goes unnoticed in carriers, but is fatal within the first few years of life in almost all homozygotes. (The exception is the rare adult-onset Tay–Sachs, which is normally not fatal but is incapacitating.)
[snip]
> Dor Yeshorim screens only for recessive traits that give rise to lethal or severely debilitating disorders, providing prophylactic, rather than diagnostic services. They do not screen for disorders arising from dominant gene mutations, as these cannot be prevented by informed mate selection. Only conditions which can be reliably reported as a positive or negative genetic match are tested.[8]
In short, they're trying to use selective breeding to remove certain genetic traits from the population.
What I imagine you've heard is people who have seen the way he treats his comments section and his approach to discourse as a commitment to hearing all sides. Before he went to Substack, he took down his blog because of a NY Times hit piece alleging he supported Charles Murray, which wasn't really true, but he was critical of universities not allowing Charles Murray to speak. He is also fairly known for his "tend his garden" thing on his own blog, which means he favors people who are polite in the way they comment over people who don't hold abhorrent points of view. For instance, his blog is about the only non-explicitly racist place you'll still see Steve Sailer on a regular basis, who is definitely a eugenicist. But to Scott, he doesn't really mind if you spend 90% of your commenting effort over several decades committed to the real problem with America being that our worst cities are overrun with genetically inferior black people, just so long as you're polite about it and don't start fights in his comments.
The unfortunate side effect of this that I don't think Scott has ever grappled with and maybe never will now that he's making money from it is that his blog has gradually fallen prey to the Gab/8chan effect that being the last person to tolerate bad people means your blog is going to become overrun with bad people. His comments sections have tremendously deteriorated over the years because of that. Everybody is very polite and friendly with each other while discussing incel theory and the problems of low IQ in the global south.
That said, Scott himself still overwhelmingly writes about nerd topics, like his absolute obsession with prediction markets. It's practically every other post. Just avoid the open thread posts that where the comment direction is entirely driven by the audience rather than by him selecting a topic.
And, I guess for completeness, I believe someone on Twitter once posted "evidence" of Scott admitting in private that he believed blacks were genetically predisposed to low IQ. He has never publicly said anything like that, so I guess take the word of some random person on the Internet that produced a collection of pixels with whatever size grain of salt you think that warrants.
That's a distortion. He took down is blog because the NYT journalist planned to use his real name, which is their typical practice. They didn't even have to break confidence to find it out, because he had publicly made the link in published work. This was also before he (or anyone else) saw the article. He and his fans seem to be under the false impression that their extremely-online internet-forum mores apply to all of society, and were outraged.
It's also an exaggeration to call the article a "hit piece." It wasn't glowing fluff, and that's all. I don't think he and his fans would have been satisfied with anything except an uncritical report of how they see and understand themselves.
No reporter is forced to out someone by “typical practice”, it’s a deliberate action. Revealing Scott’s identity only added heat to the story, not light.
That's a list of seven things, over a time period spanning 50 years. More than half appear to be cases where the person or their family were in legitimate physical danger. In all listed cases, it's the author's identity that was kept secret, not the subject of an article.
> No reporter is forced to out someone by “typical practice”, it’s a deliberate action.
In cases like Scott Alexander's, they're not compelled to hide anyone's identity either.
> Revealing Scott’s identity only added heat to the story, not light.
Maybe in the mind of his fans, but obviously not in the reporter's view. And frankly, all the "heat" came from Alexander's reaction and that of his fans.