Is it the fact that he's academically adjacent yet doesn't toe the line?
There are thousands of people with middlebrow blogs out there, why the focus on slatestarcodex?
As the rationalists might say, scientific racism is (seen as) an infohazard that will destroy many useful cultural institutions if it spreads beyond the small community of researchers with sufficient context to understand it, and he's spreading it. The thing about infohazards is that even true information can be hazardous.
Other middlebrow blogs either talk about different things, have less reach, or aren't as vulnerable.
This is a topic where a conscientious person should have an idea of its correctness and should stake that claim firmly. Best of all, doing so eliminates one's part in the harm of its nature as an infohazard.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnesota_Transracial_Adoption...
This concludes that there is 3-5 point genetic IQ gap between blacks and whites. This study is imperfect in a lot of ways, and fundamentally and irreconcilably confounded by the fact that even though the kids grow up in different environments raised by different families, there is no way to blind their childhood experience from the color of their own skin.
So, in no way do I mean to argue that this study is dispositive in favor of scientific racism. However, I do mean to argue that the existing state of the evidence points in that direction, albeit rather weakly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect#Possible_end_of_p...
The study you linked was interesting but adopted kids are an abnormal case to begin with and the effect indicated was tiny compared to societal things IMO.
However, a ray of hope in the study is that, even if you take its confidence intervals at face value (I don't), then there is quite a bit of room for improvement in the nurture sphere, as the black/white IQ test gap is generally much larger than this when not as carefully controlled as this study.
>This study is imperfect in a lot of ways, and fundamentally and irreconcilably confounded by the fact that even though the kids grow up in different environments raised by different families, there is no way to blind their childhood experience from the color of their own skin.
That's why. Racism is something that we made up, and then tried to massage circumstances and data to "prove" it. This
>However, I do mean to argue that the existing state of the evidence points in that direction, albeit rather weakly.
is rationalization seeking to uphold that unscientific exercise.
I also put a lie to it with my existence.
Sidenote: "The best study I'm aware of on the topic" is not a convincing argument that it is, in fact, even a serviceable study on the topic. However, it is a study that is often cited as such by the aforementioned bad actors. As with much racist rhetoric (spoken by avowed racists and non-racists alike), it says more about the person who brought it up than anyone else. You seem to be encountering the infohazard I mentioned earlier.
I listed reasons to doubt the conclusions of the study. The study is generally well done and accounts for just about everything you can (practically) account for. However, it is not without flaws. It is not dispositive. But it is evidence in the direction of what's sometimes called "scientific racism".
That doesn't mean it's true. The jury is still very much out on the question. But what I was asking the GP was not "why are you unsure what's true here", but rather, "why are you so confident that one answer is true over the other".
> I also put a lie to it with my existence.
This is a misunderstanding of statistics. What this study appears to show, if you take it at face value, is that the black/white IQ gap is about 1/3 of a standard deviation. That means there are still plenty of very smart black people, and very dumb white people. It's a statement about population level averages, not individuals.
That being said, I don't take the study at face value. I think there are important confounds and the answer as to the direction and magnitude of the "genetic IQ gap" if any, is still unclear. However, what I definitely do not think is warranted by the evidence is the highly confident statement that the gap is 0.
> Sidenote: "The best study I'm aware of on the topic" is not a convincing argument that it is, in fact, even a serviceable study on the topic. However, it is a study that is often cited as such by the aforementioned bad actors. As with much racist rhetoric (spoken by avowed racists and non-racists alike), it says more about the person who brought it up than anyone else. You seem to be encountering the infohazard I mentioned earlier.
I would sincerely love for you to make me aware of more and better studies on the topic. It's something about which I'm curious, and would relish the opportunity to learn more.
What his detractors claim is that he secretly believes in some variety of "scientific racism", which makes him a Bad Person. Maybe he does and maybe it does, but believing something secretly isn't spreading it.
I guess it depends on what "it" is. He has (not very often, but more than zero times: see https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/26/the-atomic-bomb-consid..., specifically section III) said positive things about the idea that Ashkenazi Jews are on average unusually smart, perhaps as a result of evolutionary pressure arising from centuries of persecution. This isn't usually what people mean by "scientific racism", and it doesn't seem obviously very infohazardous to me. (Maybe a bit infohazardous. I can see ways in which you could start there and end up being Just Plain Racist. But I haven't seen much evidence that this is in any way common.)
Let me just dig out the exact quote so I'm not paraphrasing:
> True facts can be hyperstitious slurs. “Black people commit more crime” [...] This leads to another sort of vicious cycle: half of people understand it’s a true fact that they’re not supposed to say for signaling reasons, the other half have never heard it before and assume it must be a vicious lie, and you end up with situations where someone notices that some police department arrests more blacks than whites, accuses that specific police department of racism, and everyone is afraid to explain what’s going on.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/give-up-seventy-percen...
It's a classic from the "I'm not racist, black people are just scientifically interior and I can't let that fact go unacknowledged" school of race-"realism".
And how you get people like Steve Sailer to be regular commenters, saying things like:
> It's OK to be white" was created to be a wholly unobjectionable statement that is still widely objected to. The goal is to demonstrate that wokeness is driven by anti-white racist animus. It works.
He didn't say anything about anyone being inferior, you attributed that to him.
It's all very teenage edgelord. He's triggering the libs with "facts" like black people commit more crime and attracting an audience of people who think that "the jews control the media", "being gay is a disease" etc. How smart and intelligent of him.
I'll note, again, the passage you linked wasn't about crime rates or african americans. It was about your reaction you're having here.
He was claming "black people commit more crime" is a valid thing to say, that you can't because woke people can't cope with the truth, though he'd probably be upset if someone said "women get paid less than men".
Oh, you're implying they get paid less for the same work, when really they just choose not to be CEOs because they love babies so much, he'd say, because he knows there's a whole bunch of political baggage that goes along with the "fact" that women are paid less.
He's more than smart enough to know what he's doing when he says these things.
You're not ruminating on the societal factors that give rise to these statistics, you're freaking out at the fact that this guy mentioned them at all. Exactly like he said you would.
It's got to be the distance between the quality/tone of his writing and the quality/tone of his fansplainers on HN, no?
See also:
* Rick and Morty episodes vs. Rick and Morty subreddit posts
* David Foster Wallace's oeuvre vs. Those who emulate his writing on forums
* Dream Theater vs. the Dream Theater fan who just asked me if I've ever heard of Dream Theater
These particular objects of admiration seem to generate fandoms which are a) ready and willing to educate anyone on the relevant subject matter, and c) sure seem like they only know the relevant subject matter-- if at all-- through that particular niche object of admiration.
Personally, I find that a) people don't like having other people's arbitrary hobby horses explained to them, and b) people really don't like it when the figure out that the explainer seems to be living vicariously through a second-hand explanation of the thing they admire.
I mean, I just can't imagine someone saying, "Hey, that's a fun/witty blog. I should deanonymize the author and ruin their practice." However, I can see that happening after the Nth encounter with a slatestarcodex fan.
Not to say it's fair. And personally, I enjoy both Dream Theater and conversations with their fans. But a few sentences in, those fans probably can tell that I've listened to way too much music and they quickly get off their hobby horse. Others who aren't as musically inclined probably get an unsolicited earful of an unhealthy obsession.
Why him? This went on for years and years before culminating in that NYT article.
edit: I think it was for homeless with partially heritable mental illness, not all homeless