Maybe the community response to this will finally demonstrate the
extent to which their subreddit has become a haven for the
far-right/racists/etc…but I wouldn’t count on it.
u/DELETED66 pointsat 1523908123.000000
Jim Crow and voting were unfair, but thex probably did less damage
than affirmative action has done.
Okay ladies and gentlemen, it's time for another round of "Stupid or Evil"!
Is our contestant tonight too ignorant of American history to understand what Jim Crow was, or are they just too far gone to care?
[Cue game show music.]
My definition of “gaslighting” is something like telling me the
response to something was “strongly positive” when it was at
least split 50/50 and highly contentious.
It’s amazing how quickly progressive jargon stops being meaningless
virtue signaling once you want to talk about how you are being
oppressed.
For whatever it's worth, anti-sj groups/ants/etc. have long since adopted "gaslighting" into their jargon.
Which is stupid, because it's a stupid term, just say they're lying, that's what you mean, no need to frame yourself as a victim.
Gaslighting is a decent term referring to a specific sort of lying particularly common in abusive relationships. That it's overused in situations that it possibly shouldn't be doesn't negate its applicability elsewhere.
I agree it makes sense to keep using it in situations of domestic abuse, but outside that context and certainly in the case of mass conversation it's a stupid usage.
In the case of mass conversation, saying "things have always been this way" and trying to undermine anyone who says things weren't is fairly similar. It's probably more a case of encouraging people to dismiss dissent rather than trying to get people to question their own memory or sanity, but the action is analogous.
I think we should be reluctant to reuse a term for a kind that refers to a kind of psychological abuse for what amounts to a bad faith rhetorical technique in online debates. It’s trivializing.
In common usage I think "gaslighting" refers to a type of lying where the hearer knows the lie is false. This contrasts with lies where as far as the hearer knows, the lie might be true.
By the strict definition, this should be for the purpose of making the hearer doubt their sanity. The liar says "the sky is green", and you think, well maybe he's right and I'm crazy to think the sky is blue. Common usage seems to have broadened beyond this though.
> no need to frame yourself as a victim.
We're in meta^2 territory right now, but for all the crying on SSC about victimhood politics they sure do claw tooth & nail to secure that oppressed label.
All Debates Are Bravery Debates, amirite?
Let's call it......**RATIONALISTLENINSIM**.
There's already an r/HBD, which is just a few commenters spamming alt-right links with no discussion. Why don't they go colonize that? ([Previously](https://web.archive.org/web/20170307155453/https://www.reddit.com/r/HBD/) the list of related subreddits was r/race, r/eugenics, r/nationalism.)
In the model of r/Stormfront...
If the r/HBD mods ever slack off too much, someone else is gonna reddit-request it and then it'll all be cakes and party hats.
I think it’s incredibly appropriate that people who are ostensibly in
favor of really strong immigration controls, deportation, eugenics, and
generally the violent expulsion of people from their community in order
to make it conform to an ideal, will always absolutely lose their shit
when even the mildest possible form of that happens to them on an
internet forum
I think a big part of the talks about HBD are not about HBD per se,
but about censorship of HBD discussions.
Which is a weird way to be on the internet’s premier HBD forum.
It’s been a while since I tried to pay attention, but my recollection
is that on the few occasions when someone asked “What actually
is HBD? What specifically are the ideas that are being censored
from consideration?” the answers fell into three categories: (1) vague
evasion, (2) uncontroversial scientific facts that everyone already
agrees on, or (3) maybe a few brave specific claims that the other
HBDers immediately disagreed with. So maybe that’s why they’re not keen
to simply move to their own spinoff subreddit: once you stop complaining
about the censorship of the ideas and actually talk about the ideas
themselves, there’s not a lot to say.
I vaguely recall in this case it was a threat to try have his employer fire him. But yes I agree the harassment of even extremely minor public figures is off these charts these days. It seems like there should be a solution to that.
You're not wrong. This isn't the first time an article got publicity and he got self conscious about it. One time an article was shared on instapundit and got a similar reaction from Scott.
For real though, I expected users to buck a bit if they actually went
through with the temporary moratorium. I did not expect them to throw a
hissy fit with the strength of one thousand suns (and as many reddit
golds apparently).
I can’t even say that I disagree with many of them on all of the
facts of genetic influence, but f’n christ, there were like 10 top-level
HBD posts last week.
Imho a lot of it is anyway not a matter of bare facts, but of selective reading, just-so stories that are immensely self-serving, and incredibly motivated cognition.
Certainly so. The trouble is when you challenge them with those criticisms, they fall back to, "you're only saying that because you can't argue with the facts".
...followed by twenty links to scholarly articles neither of us have the necessary background to read and understand establishing the fact that there is a racial disparity in IQ scores, which as far as I know nobody denies.
...followed by a bare assertion that the gap is purely genetic.
...followed by a blanket denial of the above assertion and a non sequitur about whether genetics play any role.
...followed by a historical just-so story about the Enlightenment starting in Europe.
...followed by an earnest plea to dispassionately examine the data.
> the fact that there is a racial disparity in IQ scores, which as far as I know nobody denies.
There's actually some pretty convincing results from people like Jelte Wicherts that calls into question what the IQ gap is really measuring/telling us and how big it is
Certainly that's true for [crossnational comparisons](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/222567773_Why_national_IQs_do_not_support_evolutionary_theories_of_intelligence), which - whatever Lynn may fabricate - are basically just indices of economic development. Wicherts has also written some fun stuff about [how bad the peer review system is](https://pure.uvt.nl/ws/files/1472335/wichertsetal2012.pdf) in the journal *Intelligence* (where all of this crap gets published).
Ooh, that's interesting about the peer-review. I had suspicions but it's nice to see something more formal. His other work on [measurement invariance between groups](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jelte_Wicherts/publication/227674177_Measurement_Invariance_in_Confirmatory_Factor_Analysis_An_Illustration_Using_IQ_Test_Performance_of_Minorities/links/59df0c96a6fdcca0d330a7cc/Measurement-Invariance-in-Confirmatory-Factor-Analysis-An-Illustration-Using-IQ-Test-Performance-of-Minorities.pdf) seems interesting (though I'd be lying if I said I understood the statistics terribly well).
It's also worth keeping in mind that Richard Haier, the editor in chief of the journal, basically writes in his book (*the Neuroscience of Intelligence*) that as far as he's concerned you can't say anything meaningful about intelligence in the short run and with a few results anyway, so therefore 'anything goes', we should just let people publish whatever and see how it shakes out. Which sure explains a lot about the often absolutely garbage stuff from that journal. But it causes problems because cultists take 'it is peer reviewed' as meaning 'this is True Biotruth'.
Also Wicherts is generally an interesting guy to follow. Most of his recent work has been at meta-level, working on misuse of statistics in psychology, neuroscience etc and improving academic process. When an alt right guy (a black one at that!) in the Netherlands got in trouble for saying white people are smarter, he was one of the people interviewed by the press about whether this was scientifically defensible. Wicherts denied it, stating that we can't interpret IQ differences like that and don't have enough information.
Yeah, when people try to make the argument any country actually has an average IQ of 70, that's when I have to assume you're either a complete moron or being incredibly disingenuous.
Wicherts could have just written an article with a citation to the Lynn and Kanazawa papers or just posted a link to the names on the editorial board. It speaks for itself.
In my opinion it's actually an issue with psychometrics and related disciplines. Far from being *too* SJW censoring and suppressing Biotruth, they really don't do it nearly enough. There's all this rigmarole, even on the part of critics like Turkheimer and Wicherts, about maintaining the highest standards of academic civil discourse yadda yadda. Which is mostly a good thing, but when you're dealing with evidently maliciously motivated people like Lynn, I think it's underpowered in efficacy.
Regardless of the motivation, the papers are just scientifically gibberish -- I mean Kanazawa's computations literally assume a flat earth.
It's like opening a textbook on speciation and seeing a comparison of the pros and cons of a "debate" over evolutionary systematics and [baraminology](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Created_kind#Baraminology), with the baraminologists publishing in the the same journals as the evolutionary biologists. And then the baraminologists forming their own little fake journals to screech about their persecution at the hands of the politically correct systematists.
There's that joke about parapsychology being a control group for regular psychology, but you could also add the race-IQ stuff to that.
Great thread, they are openly admitting that it’s all about a
“culture war” and more than once one of them comments on the fact that
in the end the issue is about whether racism or sexism need to be
remedied.
The key question is: what is the next euphemism on the treadmill, the
next dog whistling in basso profundo that will fool everyone for whole
milliseconds?
Remembering that “HBD” is several steps down the euphemism treadmill
already.
Also - the reason for this will be real-world publicity looking at
SSC and the rationalist subculture in general. I think they’re hoping a
quick cleanup job will sufficiently burn the evidence, something the
subculture has a great fondness for. I suspect we need /u/SnapshillBot
or a version thereof here.
Mmmmm, that’s some good posting.
It’s amazing how quickly progressive jargon stops being meaningless virtue signaling once you want to talk about how you are being oppressed.
Lmao they are apoplectic.
B-b-but if we can’t talk about how black people are genetically inferior what else can we discuss?????!?!?!
Someone suggested an r/SSCUncensored - please do! 👋🏻
I think it’s incredibly appropriate that people who are ostensibly in favor of really strong immigration controls, deportation, eugenics, and generally the violent expulsion of people from their community in order to make it conform to an ideal, will always absolutely lose their shit when even the mildest possible form of that happens to them on an internet forum
Which is a weird way to be on the internet’s premier HBD forum.
It’s been a while since I tried to pay attention, but my recollection is that on the few occasions when someone asked “What actually is HBD? What specifically are the ideas that are being censored from consideration?” the answers fell into three categories: (1) vague evasion, (2) uncontroversial scientific facts that everyone already agrees on, or (3) maybe a few brave specific claims that the other HBDers immediately disagreed with. So maybe that’s why they’re not keen to simply move to their own spinoff subreddit: once you stop complaining about the censorship of the ideas and actually talk about the ideas themselves, there’s not a lot to say.
“Oh c’mon, the subreddit hasn’t become a racist right-wing slagheap. We’re just having discussions that people are too afraid to have.”
“Fine, let’s test it.”
Cue the Internet equivalent of the peasants coming with pitchforks to burn down the castle.
“OK, you were right.”
I’ll say, I didn’t expect them to do that. That’s like 30% of their user base, surely.
Hey a month ban was my suggestion! Huzzah!
For real though, I expected users to buck a bit if they actually went through with the temporary moratorium. I did not expect them to throw a hissy fit with the strength of one thousand suns (and as many reddit golds apparently).
I can’t even say that I disagree with many of them on all of the facts of genetic influence, but f’n christ, there were like 10 top-level HBD posts last week.
ITT: fascists act shocked that people might not want their community associated with them.
Great thread, they are openly admitting that it’s all about a “culture war” and more than once one of them comments on the fact that in the end the issue is about whether racism or sexism need to be remedied.
Who was giving out all the gold?
The key question is: what is the next euphemism on the treadmill, the next dog whistling in basso profundo that will fool everyone for whole milliseconds?
Remembering that “HBD” is several steps down the euphemism treadmill already.
Also - the reason for this will be real-world publicity looking at SSC and the rationalist subculture in general. I think they’re hoping a quick cleanup job will sufficiently burn the evidence, something the subculture has a great fondness for. I suspect we need /u/SnapshillBot or a version thereof here.