I’ve been going down a rabbit hole after finishing the Mismeasure of Man last weekend. A lot of the ideas discussed by Gould in that book resonated with me since we’re seeing the same thing happen today in neoreactionary movements.
Looking through the history of the ideas of EA and Longtermism I noticed a lot of connections to eugenicists, many of whom seem to have had tied to the Pioneer fund which was created to literally fund eugenics research. It even funded some of the research that went into the Bell Curve.
Looking back farther it seems that many of the early people in silicon valley had some ties to eugenics research. Lewis Terman, Frederick Terman’s father, was a noted eugenicist who studied IQ and intelligence. William Shockley, another founder of silicon valley, destroyed his reputation at the end of his career when his mask started to slip and he became more and more outspoken about eugenics.
Coming back to today we see many people with ties to EA and Longtermism are also putting a lot of funding in machine learning and mass surveillance which , to noones surprise, has been and is being used to justify worsen racial discrimination.
So it’s basically racists all the way down. Part of me wonders if this is baked into data science as we know it.
I don’t know if he ever had a mask in the first place; more like everybody in the new electrical engineering industry, even though he more or less founded it, refused to work with him because he was such a notorious asshole, so with nothing else to do he became a full-time Nobel laureate and spent all his time talking about his pet theories, which happened to be race pseudoscience. Stanford even employed him, a physicist, to teach a class about race genetics
fun fact: the 20th century’s leading race pseudoscientist before Murray, Arthur Jensen, was initially a race skeptic (he formally trained as an educational psychologist) till he went to Stanford and met Shockley, who persuaded him and anointed him with the zeal of the new convert (along with Pioneer Fund money)
see: Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World, by Malcolm Harris (2023), which traces this eugenics fascination in Bay Area ideology back through the Termans and ultimately all the way to Leland Stanford’s experimental horse husbandry (the Palo Alto method)
tl;dr pretty much, in that the base assumptions come from the culture they’re working in
This is basically correct, yeah. At best we’re looking at a class of people and an ideology that is so thoroughly alienated from the human beings that it proposes to exercise power over that the destruction that eugenics policies necessitate can be discounted in favor of making the right numbers theoretically go up. Their scientific aesthetic also disguises a deep incuriosity about the patterns that exist in the data they find. They uncritically accept IQ as a meaningful measure of intelligence largely because it lends itself to statistical modeling and then seem to immediately assume that whatever those models show is necessarily a neutral starting point for their social experiment; an input into their new system rather than the output of existing and historical systems. If you try to point out that increasing IQ on a population level seems like it would necessarily involve there being a lot more white people and a lot fewer black people, they either deflect or let the mask slip and acknowledge that while they may hold no actual malice towards them they have no issue sacrificing other people in the name of number-go-up.
It’s not history. Eugenics and race science are actually becoming more prominent in certain SV circles.
Sneers temporarily aside, yes, I think it’s a risk among any group of people with highly technical jobs that are abstracted enough to have discrete, modelable states. Engineers made up a majority of 9-11 bombers, I believe, and are over represented in terrorism in general (though for a variety of reasons including their usefulness). When you have a discipline has a high wash out rate and rigor, but isn’t “on the ground” (engineering, comp sci, etc) there’s a tendency to correlate your ability at one task with general ability at all cognitive tasks. I’m pretty sure it’s at play in many similar economic niches over the years, and it’s a combination of a variety of human biases working in concert to reliably produce a collective human behavior.
With this specific brand of eugenics, it’s baked way into the science fictional mythos that most of these people carry around. Remember who their favorite authors are: golden age guys, and that they’re culturally adjacent to the Sad Puppies who tried to game the Nebulas. Eugenics is deep in that culture from the pulp roots and Lovecraft, through the Lensman and Flash Gordon, all the way until the New Wave shook things up a little. Gary Gygax, for example, an cultural background count individual for these people, was representative of a lot of this thought back in the old days, to the point that he made statistical adjustments to stats and had species inherently evil. (Gygax did seem to grow out of this, I’m not trying to shit on him in particular, just demonstrate how it really is baked into the cultural medium from which a lot of this shit metastasized).
Has it stopped? https://www.reddit.com/r/EnoughMuskSpam/comments/11l4e9u/twitters_owner_is_out_here_doing_incel_eugenics/
Statistical correlation and eugenics were both developed by the same man: Francis Galton. Galton’s student, Karl Pearson, was also a huge pioneer in statistics, as well as the founder of the Annals of Eugenics. So yes, it goes pretty deep.
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