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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.

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.

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

by which I mean all of the California ideology, Silicon Valley, Campbellian science fiction and settler colonialism
kind interesting to see how much of Rationalist culture is actually *not* sui generis weirdness but just mainstream techbroism

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.

Wait but that’s not racism. Literally not caring what race people are in the aim of a higher goal is the opposite of racism. It would be racist to want the future to contain people of colour simply for its own sake because that is assigning value to race as a concept.
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I don’t know what “ssc” is. And I get that this sub is meant for ridicule but I don’t understand why being completely indifferent to a “race” dying off is a bad thing. Race is a social construct we should be trying to move away from.
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Of course they all have equal (or at least extremely similar) aptitude. There’s not much biological divergence between “races” (not that “race” is even a robust scientific descriptor). All the differences we *do* know about make sense from an evolutionary standpoint. Black people don’t really get sunburnt? Checks out, Africa is a hot place. Lactose intolerance is a lot more common in Asian people because guess cow pastures weren’t as common or something. For different races to have different levels of intelligence, it would have to have been more beneficial to be smart in some environments over others. I can’t imagine there being that much variance. If you WERE to focus on making the population “smarter” (good luck with such a vague goal), I imagine the races would kind of melting pot together until we’re all a fairly equal mix of all the races of the world.
What you are missing is that there are two groups of people involved here. The first group say they are indifferent to eliminating black people, and they are lying. They started as racists, found IQ testing while looking for confirmation of their racism, and used it to justify their goal of genocide. They then strain their racism into neutral-sounding science language to lie that they started from first principles, followed the science "no matter where it leads", and came to the conclusion that humanity should be divided along racial lines and exterminate certain groups. There is then a second group of people who are naively interested in "being rational", are excited to rethink all of reality from first principles, and find blog posts from the first group of people, and decide they agree with genocide because it's "where the science leads". This second group also discovers that the first group of people have always been enthusiastic racists, and don't care. There is actually only one group of people involved here: racists.
In a way, all eugenics and genetic engineering is really genocide. By definition, you're discriminating against certain genomes, and trying to eliminate them. I guess the real question is, even in the world where the eugenicists are right in their claims about what causes IQ, isn't it still evil to raise the IQ of the population by eliminating certain genomes?
You're so scared of the "hyperstitious slur cascade" that you're becoming incoherent because of the motte-and-bailey donut you're twisting yourself into. No, I don't think medicine is eugenics, or genocide against genomes. And it's a good thing the racists are wrong and that IQ is nonsense because it means we don't have to consider what we should do if they're right.
Eh, probably not IQ (since that’s a bullshit measure. “Intelligence” is a helluva lot more than IQ). One of the main problems with eugenics is the subjectivity of it. Yes, we CAN artificially select for “good” traits and against “bad” traits and have the future population be one with more of the “good” traits and less of the “bad” ones. But who decides what’s a “good” trait and what’s a “bad” one? Pretty much the only “good” trait I can think of that pretty much everyone would be on board with is “resistance to disease” but, with how medical technology is advancing, we’re probably only a few generations away from having the technology to cure/manage pretty much anything. Go back a thousand years and it becomes a decent proposition. Now? A bit late for the future good to outweigh the current bad.
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Well I, for one, welcome our Jewish overlords. /s

It’s not history. Eugenics and race science are actually becoming more prominent in certain SV circles.

Their focus on IQ is so fascinating
That's just the tip of the iceberg.

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).

they are the dentist day-traders of sociology

Has it stopped? https://www.reddit.com/r/EnoughMuskSpam/comments/11l4e9u/twitters_owner_is_out_here_doing_incel_eugenics/

So it’s basically racists all the way down. Part of me wonders if this is baked into data science as we know it.

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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A valid defense, no? Not sure what bringing up those subreddits has to do with anything
> A valid defense, no? Oh, they got this all screwed up! > A valid defense? no.
You could write a book about it. It could be called *My Struggle*.
This is so fucking stupid. "Sure the slave trade had nothing to do with racialization because that wasn't a word yet; but also if it did, who can know if it was bad, given that most of the privileged people who caused the suffering, benefited from it, and then got to tell the story didn't mention that it was bad ?"
Read or watch Othello

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"it was popular at the time" doesn't acknowledge all the people whom eugenics was degrading as inferior. internalized oppression notwithstanding, I can't imagine they were very keen on it.
it's a nazi lol
smh I didn't bother looking at its post history, that's on me
i must say this crazed banstick frenzy stuff is tremendous fun
Hey don’t you care about free speech!?
freedom isn't free