edited to add tl;dr: Siskind seems ticked off because recent papers on the genetics of schizophrenia are increasingly pointing out that at current miniscule levels of prevalence, even with the commonly accepted 80% heritability, actually developing the disorder is all but impossible unless at least some of the environmental factors are also in play. This is understandably very worrisome, since it indicates that even high heritability issues might be solvable without immediately employing eugenics.
Also notable because I don’t think it’s very often that eugenics grievances breach the surface in such an obvious way in a public siskind post, including the claim that the whole thing is just HBD denialists spreading FUD:
People really hate the finding that most diseases are substantially (often primarily) genetic. There’s a whole toolbox that people in denial about this use to sow doubt. Usually it involves misunderstanding polygenicity/omnigenicity, or confusing GWAS’ current inability to detect a gene with the gene not existing. I hope most people are already wise to these tactics.
This one comes to mind.. Like EY’s recent endeavor it’s written as a roleplay so as to be nigh-unreadable by anyone without extreme tolerance for not getting to the fucking point.
The concentrated smarm in this bullshit JAQ off piece gave me psychic damage.
Fun to see him using the “IQ is mostly genetic [because heredity]” line, which is exactly what the schizophrenia literature he takes issue with claims is a woefully inadequate descriptor if we’re going to usefully evaluate what is actually happening.
The way they always try to motte and bailey eugenics gives me the shits. No, eugenics isn’t screening embryos for terrible incurable conditions, it’s the whole deal of gatekeeping society according to arbitrary geneological norms, and the fact that they keep trying to rehabilitate the term instead of rebranding to something less awful, is certainly food for thought.
The great philosophical dialogues in English - those by Berkeley, Hume, Lakatos - are few and far between. Perhaps there is a general awareness that only these exceptional stylists could pull off the rare trick of not obviously putting words into their antagonist’s mouths, even insofar as the author clearly took the view of his protagonist. Indeed there is still, two and a half centuries later, debate about whose view in his own dialogue Hume actually took - when the rather obvious and straightforward alternative was just writing down “this is what I fucking think, alright?” that aporetic flourish was precisely what justified writing it down in dialogue form in the first place.
Jesus that is some absolutely vile sophistry even coming from Dr. Scott Siskind, psychiatry, San Francisco, CA.
It’s pretty blatant isn’t it? It’s pretty creepy how he doesn’t even shed a crocodile tear for the schizophrenics the nazis murdered.
Are “Beroe” and “Adraste” placeholder names or are they calling back to some other work? My memory of Socratic dialogs through the ages is rusty.
@gerikson “Adraste wishes to send a private message to Beroe, but suspects that Erebus is intercepting their scrolls…”
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It’s both, probably. Sounds like the Alice and Bob of compsci security parable fame, except pretentious, and Mallory is the writer.
@gerikson @Evinceo An obscure French opera from the early 1700s. Google tells me that this is an Alexander quirk.
Act III
Adraste proclaims his determination to raise all other gods against Jupiter. He calls upon Juno, Jupiter’s wife, to join him in avenging Jupiter’s unfaithfulness. Juno sends Adraste away so that she can plot her revenge. She takes on a disguise as Beroe, Semele’s nurse, to enact her jealous hatred of Semele, made even stronger when she sees Semele’s beauty.