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Comment by raganwald | Hacker News Reader

Is this a conspiracy theory?

At the risk of dragging this thread back onto the topic of the story...

The story describes a number of people who put obstacles in Gwen’s way. None of them are described as being malicious, none of them got together and “conspired.” Some of them genuinely thought they were acting in Gwen’s best interests.

So if someone says that IQ tests were set up in such a way as to create bias, perhaps we can believe that yes they were biased, and possibly deliberately so, without thinking about conspiracies or racism, just people attempting to do what they thought at the time was in everyone’s best interests.

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"Set up in such a way as to" is a deliberately ambiguous construction. It allows the reader to believe that there is, or is not, a conspiracy.

If I say, "Harvard admissions are set up in such a way as to admit large numbers of Jews," someone believing in a Jewish conspiracy will hear my dog-whistle and agree with me. But to someone not believing in a Jewish conspiracy, I can deny everything. A highly useful and malignant propaganda device.

And when you add "possibly deliberately so," you prove this point completely. What else could "deliberately so" mean? So, it may be a Jewish conspiracy that Harvard admits lots of Jews. But it might not be. That's some compromise position.

Normally, when we think of conspiracy theories (like Holocaust denial), we classify Holocaust deniers and "Holocaust agnostics" in the same bin. And rightly so. I'm certainly not interested in compromising on the position that maybe the Holocaust happened, but maybe it didn't.

Also, when I believe things, I prefer to believe them on better evidence than "perhaps we can believe." Sorry - I know it's an inspiring story and you're not looking for a flamewar. This is Asperger-infested HN, however. Geeks like their facts cold, hard, and entirely factual - don't they?

I am often deliberately ambiguous about the motives of people I don’t know well. For example, you may or may not be deliberately grinding your pet axe about race and IQ tests in a story which is not really about intelligence but actually about overcoming obstacles.

And I choose to believe that you are capable of adding more signal and less noise. On very poor evidence, so far.

He is capable of adding extraordinary quantities of both signal and noise, as evidenced by his collected writings: http://moldbuggery.blogspot.com/

I wasn't responding to the original story, but to a comment which I felt made unfair and scurrilous accusations about scientists of the past whom I respect.

It's true that these charges are conventional in our society. Most people would let them pass without notice. However, most people would not endorse letting the unacceptable pass without notice - so I don't think I'm being antisocial.

Geeks like their facts cold, hard, and entirely factual - don't they?

Sort of. Those of us who live in the real world, where there are shades of grey around every corner, and where subtlety and nuance count for a lot, have realized that we can't always have things served up to us like that.

Unfortunately real life stubbornly refuses to bend to the will of us geeks (and yes, I definitely am one) who want things to behave in ways that can be modeled strictly by cold, hard facts.

"If I say, "Harvard admissions are set up in such a way as to admit large numbers of Jews," someone believing in a Jewish conspiracy will hear my dog-whistle and agree with me."

Actually, in the past Harvard deliberately restricted the number of jews they admitted: http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/anti-semitism/ha...

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