Definitely a borderline non-appropriate post for the sub, but since mods allowed this one discussing Kathryn Paige Harden - and I’m just really curious about finding an answer here and don’t subscibe to any other subs I can think of with users with relevant, knowledgeable backgrounds - I’m hoping it’ll barely fit or the mods will find the topic interesting enough to arbitrarily allow it. Even if it’s to tell me that I’m off-base here.

Obvious he’s a real scientist and science communicator, but he also seems present enough in the “There’s a left-wing war on reason and free inquiry, and this includes IQ heritability”-sphere (albeit in a calm, non-confrontational and even charming style) that I’m getting bad vibes.

Initially I considered him maybe akin to David Reich, another legitimate researcher who nevertheless is naive in a frustratingly blinkered way about the political ramifications of his public remarks, but he’s also appeared on enough shows with the likes of Pinker, and culture-war content-creators, and written articles for UnHerd, that I see him as more actively engaged with caliper-types than Reich, even if he’s still fairly tangential to the worst of them.

Am example of what I’m thinking of is his appearance on this podcast/YouTube channel (suggested to me just this morning, I assume because I lift weights, and the host seems like he’s in the “physical fitness + Western chauvinism with a veneer of intellectual curiousity” genre), where Ritchie gives a brief and uncharitable explanation of why Behavioral Genetics would attract critics: which is that the field makes politically-correct folks anxious, and they let their biases, and misconceptions about what links between behavioral traits and genetics mean, govern their responses to data.

Maybe I’m misapplying American science history to a specifically British context here, and Behavioral Genetics in the UK sprung forth fully-formed, pristine and politically-neutral, but ignoring that the field in its inception at least in North America included devout racists, and not taking a brief moment to explain why current research represents a different paradigm, to me is a specific choice that implicitly casts critics as hysterical rather than having grounded concerns, even if he disagrees with them. I dunno.