A while back, I set myself the project of figuring out how much of the MIT undergrad physics curriculum could be taught from free online books. The answer, so far, is more than I had anticipated but much less than what we deserve. But working on that, along with a few other conversations, has got me to wondering. We’ve seen TESCREAL types be just plain wrong about science many times over the years. Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality botches Punnett squares and pretty much everything more advanced than that. LessWrong demonstrably has no filter against old-school math crankery. The (ahem) leading light of “effective accelerationism” just plays Mad Libs with physics words. Yudkowsky’s declarations about organic chemistry boggle the educated mind. They even manage to be weird about theoretical computer science — what we might call the “lambda calculus is super-Turing!” school of TESCREAL.
Sometimes, the difference between a TESCREAL understanding of science and a legitimate one comes from having studied the subject in a formal way. But not every aspiring autodidact with an interest in molecular biology or the theoretical limits of computation is a lost cause!
So, then: What books come down upon the superficial TESCREAL version of cool things like a ton of scientific bricks? What are the texts that one withdraws from an inside coat pocket and slides across the table, saying “This here is the good shit”?
The Mismeasure Of Man is the obvious threat, given Yudkowsky felt it necessary to post why good rationalists should not read Gould.
So what other books has the subculture declared unsuitable?
I want to add William H. Tucker’s posthumous “The Bell Curve in Perspective”, which came out I think right at the end of last year. It’s a short, thorough, assessment both of the history of The Bell Curve book itself and what has happened since.
Even the first chapter is just mindblowingly terse in brutally unpacking how (a) it was written by racists, (b) for racist ends, © Murray lied and lied afterwards in pretending that ‘only a tiny part of the book was about race’ or whatever
The Bell Curve in Perspective is free online.
I’m working through this one now, and it’s great. Gould was such a great writer, it’s no wonder Big Yud sees his work as a threat.
I did a dive on Yudkowsky’s terrible writeup of it on I Don’t Speak German, I should really write it up as a sneer
(I will never get around to this)
Was that in this episode?
A related take from PZ Myers:
that’s great!
now I know what I’m listening to during work
yep!
Seconding, Mismeasure of Man is fantastic.