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.

  • @YouKnowWhoTheFuckIAM
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    English
    105 months ago

    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.