So I finally got around to rereading Stephen Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man for the first time since I was in… high school? Middle school? Took me a while, because I’m easily distracted, but:

A: Holy crap I always forget how brilliant Gould is until I read one of his books. Such an excellent science writer. (Not, you know, on John McPhee’s level, but then I’m not sure McPhee has a literary equal in science writing.)

B: It’s so glaringly obvious why the Rationalists hate Gould so much.

(Oh, yeah, hi, long-time lurker, occasional alt-poster, decided it was too much trouble to have two accounts, and that I don’t actually much care if people know I’m a sneerclubber. Hell, I already slip not-so-subtle sneers against utilitarians and the like into my books already, and rant about how much the rationalists suck on Twitter regularly.)

The Mismeasure of Man is a fantastic piece of historical scholarship that deals EXTENSIVELY with the source material, far above and beyond most works of scientific history. Gould treats his subjects with respect and sympathy, despite his clear and explicit opposition to them. I can’t think of many other historians or scientists who would take the time to actually work through the math of long-dead ideological opponents to this degree. Gould intentionally focused on the historical figures in the biodeterminist camp of intelligence testing, rather than those that were his contemporaries, in order to make the book a more universal, less trend-chasing work. He absolutely succeeded in that sense, and The Mismeasure of Man remains a highly relevant book to this day.

I know it’s hardly an unknown book here, of course- I’m mostly likely preaching to the choir here. If you haven’t read it, though, I’d almost feel comfortable declaring it a canon work for sneerclubbers.

I won’t attempt to sum up Gould’s ideas here, but at the heart of the work is the idea of reification- treating an abstraction as though it were a concrete entity, and the most common, endless sin of the biodeterminists Gould confronts. It… doesn’t take a lot of effort to see it being done willy-nilly in the rationalist community. The endless evopsych bullshit speculations the rationalists produce, claiming this human behavior or that are evolutionary adaptations with absolutely no evidence is a great example. Hell, the entire MIRI project could be argued to be just an exercise in reification, with Roko’s Basilisk just an especially, uh, aggressive reification fallacy.

It really should be no surprise when the rationalists hate any opponent of biodeterminism or IQ fundamentalism, but it’s somewhat interesting to me how circumlocutory they- or at least Eliezer Yudkowsky- are about it in Gould’s case.

Yudkowsky’s first direct mention of it in the Sequences proper comes in the vitriol-laden Beware of Stephen Jay Gould, a post which, uh, seems a bit bafflingly angry about what, even if Yudkowsky were to be taken at face value (which I don’t recommend), would at most be excessive self promotion? Even if every one of Yudkowsky’s claims about Gould therein were right on the money, calling him a scoundrel and comparing him to Uri Geller seems a wee bit of a disproportionate response.

It’s not, however, Yudkowsky’s first discussion of Gould on the Less Wrong Forum. He’d already been calling Gould a villain in the explicit context of The Mismeasure of Man.

I hope you’ll all forgive me if I’m uncharitable to Yudkowsky here and just assume that he hated Gould devaluing his precious precious skull measuring so much that he delved into his work and sought out every minor little complaint he could find, blew it into epic proportions, and sought to present the widely beloved science popularizer as a great villain- without outing himself as a vocal defender of racists and biodeterminists.

Or, to say it even more bluntly: Yudkowsky is sulking because Gould doesn’t value intelligence as an inherited and immutable trait, and Yudkowsky seems to take that as a personal attack.

I wonder how much it hurts Yudkowsky’s ego that Gould remains better-known and better-loved eighteen years after his death than Yudkowsky will ever be?

As a side note to all this: the Wikipedia page for The Mismeasure of Man is clearly under the influence of Gould’s foes- a 1983 critique of the book, claiming it was panned by scientists, is cited four times in a single paragraph in the heading. The use of this critique is especially bizarre, given the fact that Gould personally responded to this attack with a more comprehensive listing of positive reviews by scientists later on, then explicitly rebutted the article yet again in the second edition of The Mismeasure of Man. Similar stuff occurs throughout the rest of the article. If anyone here edits Wikipedia, uh, it might be worth your time to review that article.