Theories of government are cyclical and we're back to divine right to rule again, but since there is a lot of religious diversity, it has a eugenicist skin.
If I recall there's studies that have been done about how many generations a wealth windfall lasts for, and for most family lines wealth goes back to the median after like 3 or 4 generations. So IQ fans look at much longer lasting family wealth and attribute it to genetics.
But I think this ignores other mechanisms; what if generational wealth behaves differently after you cross a certain threshold where your access and power allow your family to maintain wealth over a much longer time period. Simple studies wouldn't catch that.
Wealth, privilege, and opportunity are not necessarily heritable in a direct way.
But they are directly correlated with intelligence, [which is a known heritable characteristic](https://www.nature.com/articles/nrg.2017.104).
Someone can be born into all of those things but be retarded, and bungle those gifts as a consequence. Only the intelligent will take advantage of the gifts and give the same to their posterity, so I suppose those things can be considered indirectly heritable.
No problem it is a bit of an obscure joke.
E: also note that it prob doesn't even exist: https://skepchick.org/2020/10/the-dunning-kruger-effect-misunderstood-misrepresented-overused-and-non-existent/
Okay, this one set me off. So rant incoming- This post is clearly
meant to dogwhistle to the HBD crowd, because it’s so poorly reasoned it
falls apart if you apply any critical thinking. Scott is asking us to
accept pretty strong claims, but his data methodology is unclear and
consists of a handful of anecdotes. How did he pick the nine families he
mentions? How doe he define “impressive”? I get the vague idea it has to
do with scientific output but then you get “politician” “football
player” and “venture capitalist.
When he does present empirical evidence it’s laughably weak. He wants
us to take a study on Sweden and use that as evidence that Gavin Newsom
is somehow genetically gifted? That could be why he is governor of
California, or it could be because his dad was tight with a family of
billionaires(The Getty’s) who shepherded Gavin’s political career along.
I’ll let you decide which is more likely. To me this shows why Scott’s
deflection of privilege by using the defense of “they were only upper
class” fails. Scott isn’t accounting for privilege beyond sheer wealth.
Something that is especially egregious when half of his examples are
from Europe in the 19th century, a period with extreme class barriers,
where formal education was far more rare than it is today. It’s
infuriating to me that after all of these years they still can’t engage
with Gould’s critique of HBD and are cherry-picking anecdotes to “prove”
their weird views. Or at the very least be a little bit more original
and talk about, I don’t know, the Chinese Civil Service exams as opposed
to fetishizing Victorian intellectuals for the thousandth time.
Also, because I’m petty I checked Wikipedia and there are absolutely
enough impressive Vanderbilt descendants for them to make it on to the
list(including Timothy Olyphant apparently?). But Scott wanted to show
that this theory holds up outside Europe so he added an Indian family he
clearly knows nothing about.
There's a reason they either avoid Gould like the plague or try to discredit him on other grounds- their arguments can't survive contact with his critique.
they read [Yud on Gould](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/BahoNzY2pzSeM2Dtk/beware-of-stephen-j-gould), decided that was a good argument and they don't have to think about Gould ever again.
Exactly what I was talking about by "other grounds". That essay is ridiculous nonsense.
In general, they're, uh, more into blog posts than books, alas. They seem to love any excuse to not read a book.
Is anyone aware of what mainstream evobio books I should read to under *why* this is nonsense? I'd like to be able to give sources when I debate with my EA friends (yes I'm still trying to deprogram)
> dogwhistle to the HBD crowd
the contra-bass dog-horn
> they still can't engage with Gould's critique of HBD
ah, but Eliezer put that in the bin in 2006! You really should read the Sequences,
Yeah, that post is something else. I find it to be a really interesting look at where autodidactism can go really wrong. Yud isn't really engaging with Gould's work in that post, he's engaging with critics of Gould's work that support his preexisting biases. Then someone (apparently) credentialed shows up in the comments and says "actually Gould addressed this in one of his books". So Yud gets the book, skims a section and replies that he didn't find Gould's writing clear didn't understand some of the terms Gould used and so doesn't feel the need to change his mind. Almost as if engaging with cherry picked pieces of someone's work isn't a good way to evaluate their contribution to a field? Shocking.
Formal education has it's flaws, but if you have a degree in something you should at least understand the history of your field and the context of the various ideas. So if you come across something new you can at least somewhat understand the various points of view on a subject. But Yud never took an intro to evolutionary biology class, and so he doesn't know that far from being discarded some of Gould's ideas have filtered down to being basic science. So he is free to insult a great(albeit flawed) scientist from the sanctuary of his Rationalist Blog(but not Harvard, unlike Gould Yud is too good for Harvard).
Oh damn, I didn't realize who I was talking to. Just went back and relistened to that episode, y'all do a great job showing how full of bullshit The Rationalists are.
I think you are right here again brother. Hey, where are you? I want to talk. Do you have an encrypted chat you like to use? Signal has worked well for me. Get back to me trashman.
Who wrote this??? What sort of website is this? First I see praise
for eugenicists, next IQ as a definitive or reasonable indicator of
intelligence, and then “only as smart as your average Ashkenazi Jew.”
Ridiculous.
This is the new slatestarcodex site, if you dont know who that is, I wonder what you think this subreddit is about.
Anyway here https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Scott_Alexander
Haha thanks! Your link definitely cleared up the description for me. I thought this sub was about making fun of people who were dicks about whatever their specific interests were. I didn't look too deeply into it, I must admit haha. This is pretty much the first post that's come up on my feed.
*adjust manbun, strokes ironically badly maintained beard*
No we only make fun of a very specific group of people here, you wouldn't enjoy it. Doesnt' matter, the ~~first albums~~ older work was the most sneerworthy anyway.
But yeah, it is mostly to make fun of Lesswrong related stuff, and their various Rationalist (not to confused with rationalists, it is only Rationalism if it comes from lesswrong, else it is just sparkling rationalism ;) ) subgroups. It gets a bit confusing at times, as people do post IDW stuff here which shouldn't be posted here, that is more a r/EnoughIDWspam thing. (As Steven Pinker is on team Rationalism however, these lines might blur).
> their various Rationalist (not to confused with rationalists, it is only Rationalism if it comes from lesswrong, else it is just sparkling rationalism ;) )
Sparkling racism, but yes.
The points where he goes out of his way to be snidely dismissive of
the people whose accomplishments he is nominally praising are …
interesting.
His daughter Esther Dyson is a venture capitalist who has apparently
been called “the most influential woman in all the computer world” even
though I have never heard of her.
Huh.
His father Debendranath Tagore founded a new religion, Brahmoism,
which apparently has several million adherents although I have never
heard of it.
I don't know if dismissive is the right word
maybe he's somewhat insecure about the fact that he hadn't heard of these people so he feels the need to signal it upfront? that's a classic scott move
I mean, maybe? But he doesn't say that of the other members of the Bohr family who are not Niels, or the other Poincarés who are not Henri. He doesn't say that of George, Leonard or Charles Galton Darwin. The only people I've ever met who knew of Charles Galton Darwin have been physicists. I'd hazard a guess that he hadn't heard of many people on his list before he set out to make it.
It's a weird list overall. It includes a "distant cousin" and a not-blood-relative; being a politician or a singer-songwriter is good, but being a TV news anchor with 18 Emmys, two Peabodys and two best-selling books is bad.
Yeah, the Curies grandkids are probably well respected scientists. But they clearly only have wiki pages because of their family connections. Also Esther Dyson's wiki page is 100% maintained by someone who works for her. It literally lists out every investment she has made complete with exit status.
it's definitely weird. I wonder how he got on this in the first place
Like did he read about this in someone else's blog post? was he just trawling through the wikipedia pages of famous people, looking for something he could turn into evidence for his usual IQ garbage?
It is tuesday, deadline tomorrow. The blog needs to be fed more rational content.
The Blog whose poverty is the specter of genius! The Blog whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! The Blog whose name is the Mind!
The Blog in whom I sit lonely! The Blog in whom I dream Angels! Crazy in The Blog! Cocksucker in The Blog! Lacklove and manless in The Blog!
Nice! In our universe of infinite wonder, full of extraordinary
discoveries, provoking art, and diverse people and ideas; what have you
chosen to write about?
“The most important topics of course: race, IQ, eugenics, and
elitism.”
As it happens, I was just reading about Carl Gauss’
children, so I started working up a big comment using his family as
a counterexample.
(Short version: Gauss’ situation has most of Scott’s Indicators of
Family Greatness—he had enormous natural intellectual ability; he
married a fellow academic’s daughter; he had six children, a
decent-sized “litter”—but he differs in that he strictly forbade his
kids from practicing mathematics or science, because he didn’t want them
tarnishing his legacy, because he was a dick. Sure enough, none of his
children rivaled his greatness. His most talented kid, Eugene, moved to
the States in a fit of pique and enjoyed a respectable but not
exceptional career in business. Eugene has many descendants in Missouri
and Colorado, none of whom seem to have Wikipedia pages. If dynastic
splendor can get derailed so easily, Scott’s argument seems to lack
force.)
But who gives a shit? That’s my N=1 versus Scott’s N=8, and what
exactly is Scott’s explicit argument anyway? The high incidence of
notable figures in certain families may have multiple causes—oh,
word?
By now we all know that Scott’s actual purpose is to normalize a
bunch of HBD talking points (IQ as the better part of destiny; a
conception of intelligence as a kind of substance that can accumulate or
become dilute; constant valorization of certain populations as blessed
with higher levels of the substance, with the unspoken implication there
are other groups on the other side of the bell curve) in the course of
an apparently aimless, half-scientific ramble. The more shapeless the
essay, the more digressions about Francis Galton it can fit. The more
perfectly balanced between science and breezy bullshit, the better it
can cloak its attitudes in an air of settled authority (Look! Graphs!
Great Swedish studies!) without having to justify them with any
rigor:
Commenter: Average IQ of Ivy League students being
> 130, not controlled for major, is very surprising. I could see that
for Harvard, but didn’t expect it across the board
Scott: I could be wrong, I was averaging a lot of
slightly different guesses.
Francis Galton invented the modern fields of psychometrics,
meteorology, eugenics, and statistics (including standard deviation,
correlation, and regression).
Scott I know he agrees with you, all the HBDers
in the comments saying your post is a tribute to his 1869 book. Are you
not going to mention something he also believed?
Scott please add a qualifier that he was virulent genocidal
racist.
also Meteorologist BTFO Scoot
As a meteorologist, I was a bit surprised to see Francis Galton
credited as the inventor of modern meteorology, so I had to look him up
to see what he did. Some stuff, but not nearly as foundational as, for
example, Luke Howard (cloud classification), Robert Fitz Roy (weather
forecasting), Joseph Henry (weather observation and analysis), Vilhelm
Bjerknes (meteorology as a branch of physics), and many others.
A lot of old-timey scientists were more racist than people often realize today, admittedly. A geologist not realizing how disgustingly vicious of a racist Louis Agassiz is believable, because, well, geologists are rather laser focused on the Ice Age arguments, and are fairly notorious for caring more about rocks than people, lol. (I went to school for geology, so my teasing is definitely affectionate, lol.)
But Scott not realizing how disgusting Galton is? That's, uh... much, much less believable. It's in the fucking header of his Wikipedia article, and I've literally NEVER seen a discussion of Galton in any history text that doesn't at least mention his profound racism. Not to mention, uh, the fact that Scott's a self-proclaimed eugenicist- he's absolutely just dogwhistling here.
did a ctrl-F for “brother” to check whether Scott had finally managed
to come to terms with being the older but markedly less talented
sibling; alas no
(ever since I found out that Jeremy Siskind exists and has, by all
accounts, actual career accomplishments, it’s been impossible for me
not to read Scott’s obsession with genetics through that
lens)
Apart for the huge mountain of sneer worth material there, I am
always amazed to see how his presumption of omniscience and his buying
completely into the just world fallacy makes him believe that being well
known (or known by him) is an indication of extraordinary
accomplishments rather than a mixture of good PR, sheer luck and how
well you fit into the pop culture of current year.
The English royal family comes from a bastard son of a prostitute who
conquered a land with his friends, that’s a tldr of where aristocratic
families come from.
There’s no blood connection between the Hanoverian regime & William the Bastard IIRC. When it comes to the rest of the British aristocracy you’re not wrong though - at least some of those families came to power as part of the Norman conquest.
There is a tenous one: George Is mother was the granddaughter of James VI/I, who was the great-grandson of Henry VII, whose mom was from the Lancastrian branch of the Plantagenets, who trace their descent from Empress Matilda daughter of William´s fourth son.
So there is a connection, just a very tenous one.
Personally I think a lot of it has to do with what you’re raised
around. I have a lot of CS people in my circles and even though I never
really formally studied it, I know quite a bit about how CS stuff works.
I can look at a basic malfunction and troubleshoot it without too much
difficulty, where other people are scared to try. I think if you grow up
around lawyers you’d probably learn a bit about law just from hearing
the grownups talk as a kid.
The irony of course being that several royal houses fell apart
because they eventually became inbred to the point of running out of
heirs. If the Bolshevik’s hadn’t shot them, the Romanov’s were going to
have a lot of issues with their sons all being hemophiliacs in an era
that hadn’t yet isolated clotting factors.
Also, a quick perusal of history will show you that plenty of royals
were fucking dumb. Nicholas II was genuinely smooth brained, you’ve got
to have some serious anti-communist brain worms to decide that royals
are superior to anyone.
Radical Idea: Maybe wealth, privilege, and opportunity being heritable is just as important (or even more important!) than genetics?
IDK, might be worth looking into.
from r/ssc
Argh
Also:
We know you think that Scott, we know.
Okay, this one set me off. So rant incoming- This post is clearly meant to dogwhistle to the HBD crowd, because it’s so poorly reasoned it falls apart if you apply any critical thinking. Scott is asking us to accept pretty strong claims, but his data methodology is unclear and consists of a handful of anecdotes. How did he pick the nine families he mentions? How doe he define “impressive”? I get the vague idea it has to do with scientific output but then you get “politician” “football player” and “venture capitalist.
When he does present empirical evidence it’s laughably weak. He wants us to take a study on Sweden and use that as evidence that Gavin Newsom is somehow genetically gifted? That could be why he is governor of California, or it could be because his dad was tight with a family of billionaires(The Getty’s) who shepherded Gavin’s political career along. I’ll let you decide which is more likely. To me this shows why Scott’s deflection of privilege by using the defense of “they were only upper class” fails. Scott isn’t accounting for privilege beyond sheer wealth. Something that is especially egregious when half of his examples are from Europe in the 19th century, a period with extreme class barriers, where formal education was far more rare than it is today. It’s infuriating to me that after all of these years they still can’t engage with Gould’s critique of HBD and are cherry-picking anecdotes to “prove” their weird views. Or at the very least be a little bit more original and talk about, I don’t know, the Chinese Civil Service exams as opposed to fetishizing Victorian intellectuals for the thousandth time.
Also, because I’m petty I checked Wikipedia and there are absolutely enough impressive Vanderbilt descendants for them to make it on to the list(including Timothy Olyphant apparently?). But Scott wanted to show that this theory holds up outside Europe so he added an Indian family he clearly knows nothing about.
Who wrote this??? What sort of website is this? First I see praise for eugenicists, next IQ as a definitive or reasonable indicator of intelligence, and then “only as smart as your average Ashkenazi Jew.” Ridiculous.
The points where he goes out of his way to be snidely dismissive of the people whose accomplishments he is nominally praising are … interesting.
Huh.
Huh.
“I’m a science and philosophy blogger.”
Nice! In our universe of infinite wonder, full of extraordinary discoveries, provoking art, and diverse people and ideas; what have you chosen to write about?
“The most important topics of course: race, IQ, eugenics, and elitism.”
Oh.
As it happens, I was just reading about Carl Gauss’ children, so I started working up a big comment using his family as a counterexample.
(Short version: Gauss’ situation has most of Scott’s Indicators of Family Greatness—he had enormous natural intellectual ability; he married a fellow academic’s daughter; he had six children, a decent-sized “litter”—but he differs in that he strictly forbade his kids from practicing mathematics or science, because he didn’t want them tarnishing his legacy, because he was a dick. Sure enough, none of his children rivaled his greatness. His most talented kid, Eugene, moved to the States in a fit of pique and enjoyed a respectable but not exceptional career in business. Eugene has many descendants in Missouri and Colorado, none of whom seem to have Wikipedia pages. If dynastic splendor can get derailed so easily, Scott’s argument seems to lack force.)
But who gives a shit? That’s my N=1 versus Scott’s N=8, and what exactly is Scott’s explicit argument anyway? The high incidence of notable figures in certain families may have multiple causes—oh, word?
By now we all know that Scott’s actual purpose is to normalize a bunch of HBD talking points (IQ as the better part of destiny; a conception of intelligence as a kind of substance that can accumulate or become dilute; constant valorization of certain populations as blessed with higher levels of the substance, with the unspoken implication there are other groups on the other side of the bell curve) in the course of an apparently aimless, half-scientific ramble. The more shapeless the essay, the more digressions about Francis Galton it can fit. The more perfectly balanced between science and breezy bullshit, the better it can cloak its attitudes in an air of settled authority (Look! Graphs! Great Swedish studies!) without having to justify them with any rigor:
Fuck this shit.
i like how he presents two pretty good explanations at the beginning and end of the article but devotes most of it to made-up nonsense
Scott I know he agrees with you, all the HBDers in the comments saying your post is a tribute to his 1869 book. Are you not going to mention something he also believed?
The gain would be immense to the whole civilized world if we were to out-breed and finally displace the ne gro.
Scott please add a qualifier that he was virulent genocidal racist.
also Meteorologist BTFO Scoot
did a ctrl-F for “brother” to check whether Scott had finally managed to come to terms with being the older but markedly less talented sibling; alas no
(ever since I found out that Jeremy Siskind exists and has, by all accounts, actual career accomplishments, it’s been impossible for me not to read Scott’s obsession with genetics through that lens)
Apart for the huge mountain of sneer worth material there, I am always amazed to see how his presumption of omniscience and his buying completely into the just world fallacy makes him believe that being well known (or known by him) is an indication of extraordinary accomplishments rather than a mixture of good PR, sheer luck and how well you fit into the pop culture of current year.
The English royal family comes from a bastard son of a prostitute who conquered a land with his friends, that’s a tldr of where aristocratic families come from.
Personally I think a lot of it has to do with what you’re raised around. I have a lot of CS people in my circles and even though I never really formally studied it, I know quite a bit about how CS stuff works. I can look at a basic malfunction and troubleshoot it without too much difficulty, where other people are scared to try. I think if you grow up around lawyers you’d probably learn a bit about law just from hearing the grownups talk as a kid.
Medical doctors have bigger skulls than economists. Must be the social conscience lobe.
The irony of course being that several royal houses fell apart because they eventually became inbred to the point of running out of heirs. If the Bolshevik’s hadn’t shot them, the Romanov’s were going to have a lot of issues with their sons all being hemophiliacs in an era that hadn’t yet isolated clotting factors.
Also, a quick perusal of history will show you that plenty of royals were fucking dumb. Nicholas II was genuinely smooth brained, you’ve got to have some serious anti-communist brain worms to decide that royals are superior to anyone.
I’m losing it at his rambling style
Maybe the founder was good, but he had to marry a cousin to keep power in the family, and well soon your descendant is Charles II of Spain.