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when evo psych is literally flat earthism (https://twitter.com/evopsychgoogle/status/1188971368089444352)
62

The Shape of the Earth, a rationalist essay

I recently heard someone (who is a female and a feminist!) say that the Earth is a sphere. She, as the typical inferior thinkers do, provided no evidence for this assertion. So as an obnoxious contrarian, I decided to test this cultural Marxist’s idea and all its weird and scary consequences.

[…]

Consider this: when I go to the grocery store a few blocks away to buy my brain optimization pills, do I think about great circles and latitudes and longitudes? Obviously not! I am very smart and know everything. So if people’s rational behaviour doesn’t match with this round Earth, why do the SJWs believe in it anyway?

[…]

The only conclusion is that the round Earth is believed by Marxists because they cannot accept that the people at the centre of Circle Earth (i.e. the white race) are obviously superiorly brained. The Earth is flat and I am the smartest.

I don’t think the people who say shit like this understand how incredibly common hoax or bullshit papers getting through into journals are. It’s just people only start screaming about fashionable nonsense when it’s the humanities.

The really weird thing is that it never registers with them that the most dangerous academic hoax in recent memory was Andrew Wakefield's anti-vaccine article published in *The* fucking *Lancet*. If Sokal invalidated postmodernism, why didn't Wakefield invalidate all of modern medicine?
I wonder if there’s any overlap between rationalists and antivaxxers?

“Accepted in three weeks” what the fuck I want to switch to evopsych now

Accepted in three weeks and you don't need to have any training in biology either! >As an aside, Mr. Lal was trained in mechanical engineering and currently works as a software engineer. He does not have any background in psychology, let alone evolutionary psychology, and has not taken any biology class since high school. (But then again, neither have I.) -Satoshi Kanazawa https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Satoshi_Kanazawa#Kanazawa_Kwotes

that’s the fucking best

It's one of my favourite takedowns of all time, but then [Kanazawa is an astonishingly wide target](http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/research/published/kanazawa.pdf)
forgot this classic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satoshi_Kanazawa#Race_and_attractiveness
He also debated Primal Poly himself on whether evopsych should focus its attention on East Asia, with Miller arguing it should because it was free of PC/fundie bias, and Kanazawa arguing it shouldn't because Asian cultures are inherently uncreative and opposed to innovation
letthemfight.gif

It’s not a hoax, if you believe it.

Huh. And here I thought that the charitable interpretation for many papers in Intelligence is that they are hoax papers…

Wait, and this is all just with straightforward regression? Using great circle distances through waypoints is not only common practice but quite trivial. Though it still wouldn’t get rid of a whole load of confounding.

I can see the appeal of flat earth jesus dispersals, though. Tried to get a truncated spherical multivaviate BM model up some time ago and getting it to respect geographic boundaries (oceans, big mountain ranges, etc.) is hard :S