For how much these fucks talk about “overcoming bias”, they seem ABSOLUTELY incapable of overcoming their bias for IQ as a good measure of anything outside of acute mental disability. They want a simple answer to the question that has plagued their small minds forever: “Am I smarter than that person over there?” They cling to their number like a life-preserver in the ocean of society.

It’s just so pathetic.

Fuck, I hate Medium. Everything about it has a neutralising effect on nice critical writing like this. It’s like putting floaties on a crocodile.

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There’s a survey of psychologists that gets cited regularly as evidence of expert opinion on the heritability of intelligence. Alexander brings it up in a typical way in his 2021 review of The Cult of Smart:

Earlier this week, I objected when a journalist dishonestly spliced my words to imply I supported Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve. Some people wrote me to complain that I handled this in a cowardly way - I showed that the specific thing the journalist quoted wasn’t a reference to The Bell Curve, but I never answered the broader question of what I thought of the book. They demanded I come out and give my opinion openly. Well, the most direct answer is that I’ve never read it. But that’s kind of cowardly too - I’ve read papers and articles making what I assume is the same case. So what do I think of them?

This is far enough from my field that I would usually defer to expert consensus, but all the studies I can find which try to assess expert consensus seem crazy. A while ago, I freaked out upon finding a study that seemed to show most expert scientists in the field agreed with Murray’s thesis in 1987 - about three times as many said the gap was due to a combination of genetics and environment as said it was just environment. Then I freaked out again when I found another study (here is the most recent version, from 2020) showing basically the same thing (about four times as many say it’s a combination of genetics and environment compared to just environment). I can’t find any expert surveys giving the expected result that they all agree this is dumb and definitely 100% environment and we can move on (I’d be very relieved if anybody could find those, or if they could explain why the ones I found were fake studies or fake experts or a biased sample, or explain how I’m misreading them or that they otherwise shouldn’t be trusted. If you have thoughts on this, please send me an email). I’ve vacillated back and forth on how to think about this question so many times, and right now my personal probability estimate is “I am still freaking out about this, go away go away go away”. And I understand I have at least two potentially irresolveable biases on this question: one, I’m a white person in a country with a long history of promoting white supremacy; and two, if I lean in favor then everyone will hate me, and use it as a bludgeon against anyone I have ever associated with, and I will die alone in a ditch and maybe deserve it. So the best I can do is try to route around this issue when considering important questions. This is sometimes hard, but the basic principle is that I’m far less sure of any of it than I am sure that all human beings are morally equal and deserve to have a good life and get treated with respect regardless of academic achievement.

(Hopefully I’ve given people enough ammunition against me that they won’t have to use hallucinatory ammunition in the future. If you target me based on this, please remember that it’s entirely a me problem and other people tangentially linked to me are not at fault.)

Plenty of people explained problems with the 2020 study in the comments, and I sent an email, but I never heard back. One obvious critique is that it looks like about a third of respondents on the genetics/environment question (specifically about US black/white differences) were enthusiastic followers of Steve Sailer. The study couldn’t have better overrepresented them in a purported professional consensus if it had been designed to do so. Unfortunately, this subgroup seems to have skipped later, longer questions about international differences, which show more cautious opinions even among the rest of the ISIR community. I’d hoped Alexander might find some peace of mind, since he must have been freaking out about this study since at least 2014, when he linked Steve Sailer’s blog post of its preliminary survey results in an email to Topher Brennan, under the heading “HBD is probably partially correct or at least very non-provably not-correct”. I suppose I’ll never know.

Lots of fascinating links in this article. This link in particular was fascinating:

If you’re searching for Scott Siskind… I am Scott Siskind from Ann Arbor, Michigan. There used to be more things on this webpage. Right now I’m using it to spread the message that there are multiple statements being falsely attributed to me on the Internet. Somebody who doesn’t like me - I am not sure who, but I work in mental health and guess this is sort of a professional hazard - has been trying to systematically discredit me by posting racist and profanity-laden things under my name. Some of the comments make some effort to convince, like linking back to my website. The end result is that if you Google me to try to find out what I am like, you will probably end up seeing angry racist profanity-laden comments made under my name. These are not mine.

Does anyone know the backstory here? This reads to me like a “hackers ate my password” story – the kind of ass-covering someone might concoct after their racist writings accidentally leaked onto the internet.

EDIT: This seems to be related to the stuff Topher Brennan revealed? Except it was written many years before Topher’s revelations. It’s confusing…