Attention conservation notice 1 – a long read about a simple idea. When reading trolls, focus on the anodyne-seeming starting assumptions rather than the obnoxious conclusions.
Attention conservation notice 2 – This is also available via my Substack newsletter, Programmable Mutter. I’ll still be writing on CT, but I have a book with Abe Newman coming out in a few months, so that there will be a lot of self-promotion and stuff that doesn’t fit as well with the CT ethos. And do pre-order the book, Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy, if you think it sounds good! We’ve gotten some great blurbs from early readers including Kim Stanley Robinson, Francis Spufford, Margaret O’Mara, Steven Berlin Johnson, Helen Thompson, Chris Miller, and my mother (the last is particularly glowing, but sadly not likely to appear on the back). Available at Bookshop.org and Amazon.
I’ve often had occasion to turn to Daniel Davies’ classic advice on “the correct way to argue with Milton Friedman” over the two decades since I’ve read it. The best white hat hacker is a reformed black hat hacker, and Dan (dsquared) knows both the offense and defense sides of trolling.
Dan (back in 2004!):
I’m pretty sure that it was JK Galbraith (with an outside chance that it was Bhagwati) who noted that there is one and only one successful tactic to use, should you happen to get into an argument with Milton Friedman about economics. That is, you listen out for the words “Let us assume” or “Let’s suppose” and immediately jump in and say “No, let’s not assume that”. The point being that if you give away the starting assumptions, Friedman’s reasoning will almost always carry you away to the conclusion he wants to reach with no further opportunities to object, but that if you examine the assumptions carefully, there’s usually one of them which provides the function of a great big rug under which all the points you might want to make have been pre-swept. A few CT mates appear to be floundering badly over this Law & Economics post at Marginal Revolution on the subject of why it’s a bad idea to have minimum standards for rented accommodation. (Atrios is doing a bit better). So I thought I’d use it as an object lesson in applying the Milton Friedman technique.
In the same friendly spirit, I’ll note that Jonathan Katz flounders a bit in his rebuttal of Richard Hanania. None of this is to blame Katz – Hanania is not only building on his knowledge of social science (he has a Ph.D.), but some truly formidable trolling techniques. Years ago, I upset Jonathan Chait by suggesting he was a highly talented troll of the second magnitude, if a bit crude in technique. Hanania is at an altogether different level. He’s not blessed with Friedman’s benign avuncularity, but he is as close to masterclass level as we are likely to get in this fallen world.
Hanania wants people to buy into a notion of “enlightened centrism,” where the space of reasoned debate would stretch from the left (Matthew Yglesias, Ezra Klein, Noah Smith, Jonathan Chait) through Andrew Sullivan and company to people on the right like Steven Sailer. Now, you might ask what an outright racist like Steve Sailer is doing on this list. You might even suspect that one of the rationales for constructing the list in the first place was to somehow shoehorn him into the space of legitimate debate. But to figure out how Hanania is trying to do this, you need to poke hard at the anodyne seeming assumptions, rather than be distracted by the explicitly galling conclusions.
That is where Katz stumbles. He gets upset at what Hanania says about the Civil Rights Act and affirmative action as the origin of wokeness, saying that Hanania “seems to think that the Civil Rights Act caused the civil rights movement, as opposed to the other way around,” tracing it all back to Barry Goldwater. Katz then remarks on Hanania’s claim in a podcast that “Government literally created race in America. Like not blacks and whites, but like basically everyone else — and Native Americans — basically everyone else was basically grouped according to the ways, you know, the federal bureaucracy was doing things.” Katz has some ripe prognostications about what Hanania hopes will happen if government got out of the way.
But Hanania isn’t relying on the authority of Barry Goldwater. He’s standing on the shoulders of academic research. In some cases – including much of the stuff that Katz focuses his fire on – left-leaning academic research. Even before I did a Google search, I surmised that Hanania’s civil rights arguments riffed on Frank Dobbins’ eminently respectable work of social science, Inventing Equal Opportunity. I don’t know which academics he’s invoking on the U.S. Census and the construction of categories such as Hispanic: there are just so many to choose from, ranging from moderates through liberals to fervently lefty.
You could go after the details of Hanania’s social science claims if you really wanted – I would be startled if there weren’t selective misreadings. It is hard to claim on the one hand that the state creates the structures of race, and on the other that structural racism is a gussied up conspiracy theory, without some fancy rhetorical footwork to work around the gaping logical crevasses. Getting involved in that kind of debate seems to me to be a waste of time. But disputing the broadest version of the case – that key aspects of equal opportunity, civil rights and ethnic categories emerged from modern politics and battles in the administrative state – seems even worse. The bull of Left Critique thunders towards the matador, who twitches his cape to one side, so that the poor beast careens into the side of the ring, and then staggers back with crossed eyes and mild concussion, raring for another go that will have the same unfortunate result, or worse.
More succinctly, you don’t want to be the bull in a fight that is rigged in favor of the bullfighter. Instead, as per dsquared, you want to figure out what is wrong with the terms of the fight and press back hard against them.
As best as I can make it out, Hanania’s “let us assume” moment comes in the middle of a series of apparently non-controversial claims about what “Enlightened Centrists” believe. In context, they initially appear to be things that any reasonable person would agree to, or not think unreasonable. I think most readers won’t even notice them, let alone the nasty stuff that is hiding beneath. Here’s what Hanania says:
Enlightened Centrists take what Bryan Caplan calls “Big Facts” seriously. They are kept in mind as new information about the world is brought to light. Some examples of Big Facts that ECs rely on are: the heritability of traits; the paradox of voting; the information problem inherent in central planning; the broken windows fallacy; Trivers’ theory of self-deception; the existence of cognitive biases; comparative advantage; the explanatory power of IQ; the efficient market hypothesis; and the elephant in the brain. New theories or ideas should be met with more skepticism if they contradict or are in tension with Big Facts that have been well established. ECs of different Level 3 ideologies will place more emphasis on certain Big Facts over others, though some, like the idea of historical progress, they all share.
Now, any sentence that non-ironically connects “Bryan Caplan” to “Big Facts” is a big fat warning sign. Hanania links to a Caplan essay that starts explaining what “Big Facts” are by citing Caplan’s own book attacking democracy. Many key claims in this book are less facts than factitious (my co-authors and I have written about this at some length). They suggest pervasive cognitive bias (in particular, bias against free market economists) undermines the case for regular democracy, so that we should go for markets instead, or perhaps give more votes to well educated people (who are, after all more likely to recognize that economists are right).
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. How exactly is Hanania using Big Factiness and for what purpose? He wants to define Enlightened Centrism so that it favors anti-democratic libertarianism, and brings “racial realists” like Steve Sailer into the conversation.
The apparently anodyne factual claims listed by Hanania systematically shift the terms of debate to undermine democracy and an economic role for the state, and instead promote markets and the belief that persistent inequalities result from some racial groups being systematically more stupid than others. To see this, it’s likely helpful to return to the passage in question, this time with the ideological translation function turned on. These translations are ideologically blunt, and perhaps tendentious, but I think they are pretty well on the mark.
Facts that ECs rely on are:
the heritability of traitsintelligence is racially inherited;the paradox of votingdemocracy doesn’t work;the information problem inherent in central planningsocialism doesn’t work either;the broken windows fallacyKeynesianism – guess what?– it just doesn’t work;Trivers’ theory of self-deceptioncitizens fool themselves with flattering just-so stories;the existence of cognitive biaseslet me tell you how citizens are biased;comparative advantagemarkets are teh awesome;the explanatory power of IQhave I mentioned race and intelligence already? Let me mention it again;the efficient market hypothesismarkets are even awesomer than I just said a moment ago; andthe elephant in the braincan I haz even more citizen cognitive bias?
As per the dsquared rule, if you stipulate to these beliefs, you’ve given the game away before it’s even begun. You have accepted that it is reasonable to believe that most people are biased fools, that democracy is inherently inferior to markets, and that differences in life outcomes for black people can largely be attributed to distribution of the genes for intelligence. Charge at the matador, if you want, but good luck to you! You’ll need it.
Or instead, as per dsquared’s advice, when you are dealing with a genuinely exceptional troll like Hanania, do not give away the underlying assumptions. Don’t be distracted by the red cape. Wedge your horns beneath the seemingly reasonable claims that are intended to tilt debate, lift those claims up, toss ‘em in the air and then gore.
This is getting too long already, and I have a life, so I am not going to do the full bullfighter-toss. Instead, at the bottom of this post, I re-order Hanania’s claims so that the underlying assumptions come out more clearly, linking to resources that provide counter-evidence at length. Read if you want, but I’m providing this mostly as a source I can come back to later, or cite as needs be in desultory spats on social media. Notably, the various prebuttals come from co-authors, co-authors plus me, or, in one case, someone who I was interviewing. You can take this commonality (very plausibly) as evidence of my own biases, and enthusiasm to work with people who share them. But even if you think this, they still provide evidence that Hanania’s purported Big Facts are drenched with their own ideology, and in many cases have been bitterly debated for decades. Which is another way of saying that they aren’t established facts at all.
And some of the facts are really not like the others. It might seem weird – if you aren’t read into debates among particular kinds of libertarians – to see that stuff about IQ and heritability in there. What work exactly is this rather jarring set of claims doing for the concept of Enlightened Centrism,? Do identified left-leaning Enlightened Centrists like Ezra Klein and Matthew Yglesias “rely on” these facts, as Hanania seems to suggest they do?
Readers – they do not. Hanania seemingly wants to reconstruct policy and intellectual debate around a center in which questions of race and IQ are once more legitimate topics of inquiry and discussion. Back in the 1990s (a time that Hanania is nostalgic for), soi-disant centrists such as Andrew Sullivan could devote entire special issues of the New Republic to the urgent debate over whether black people were, in fact, stupider than white people. Big Scientific Facts Said That It Was So! Now, that brand of intellectual inquiry has fallen into disrepute. Hanania, apparently yearns for it to come back. That, presumably, is why those claims about heritability and IQ are in there, and why Steve Sailer makes the cut.
As it happens, Matt was one of the “CT mates” cited in the 2004 dsquared post that was excerpted right at the beginning of this post. I’ve had disagreements with Matt since, on other stuff, but I am quite sure that both he and Ezra are bitterly opposed to the whole race and IQ project that Hanania wants to relegitimize. I can’t imagine that they welcome being placed on a spectrum of reasonable thought that lumps them together with racist creeps like Steven Sailer. But I can imagine why Hanania wants so to lump them – it provides a patina of legitimacy for opinions that have rightly been delegitimated, but that Hanania wants to bring back into debate.
So to see what Hanania is up to, it’s more useful not to be distracted by the provocative and outrageous. Instead, you want to look very closely at what seems superficially reasonable, seems to be the starting point for debate and ask: is there something wrong with these premises? In this case, the answer, quite emphatically, is yes.
Still, you (for values of ‘you’ that really mean ‘I’) don’t want to get dragged in further unless you absolutely have to. As Noah Smith, another of Hanania’s involuntary inductees into the Enlightened Centrist Hall of Fame said, “”Race and IQ” racism is a DDOS attack” on the time and attention of anti-racists. This naturally provoked Hanania to pop up in replies with a sarcastic rejoinder. When I wrote that Vox article I had to spend weeks dealing with Jordan Peterson acolytes popping up to inform me of the Established Scientific Facts about race and IQ. I really don’t want to be back there again. So take this post as an attack on premises, and a statement of principles, rather than the slightest hint at a desire to get stuck back into discussion on race-IQ and similar. Very possibly (he says after 3,000+ words) the best way of arguing with Richard Hanania is simply not to argue at all.
MORE DETAILED DISCUSSION OF PURPORTED “BIG FACTS” BELOW
Markets are Awesome I: the information problem inherent in central planning (socialism doesn’t work). Indeed, central planning doesn’t work. This does not provide, however, a warrant for unleashing free market wildness. Instead, it suggests that we need social democracy, with all its messiness. Why so? Read on.
Markets are Awesome II: the efficient market hypothesis Well, up to a point Lord Copper. The unfortunate fact is that the computational critique of state planners’ information problems also bollocks up the standard efficient market claims. At greater length: “allowing non-convexity messes up the markets-are-always-optimal theorems of neo-classical/bourgeois economics, too. (This illustrates Stiglitz’s contention that if the neo-classicals were right about how capitalism works, Kantorovich-style socialism would have been perfectly viable.)” At greater length again: “Bowles and Gintis: “The basic problem with the Walrasian model in this respect is that it is essentially about allocations and only tangentially about markets — as one of us (Bowles) learned when he noticed that the graduate microeconomics course that he taught at Harvard was easily repackaged as ‘The Theory of Economic Planning’ at the University of Havana in 1969.” And if markets are imperfect, and so too the state and democracy, then we sometimes need to set them against each other, as recommended by social democracy. For elaboration of how this applies to machine learning too, see this week’s Economist.
Markets are Awesome III: The “broken windows” fallacy (Keynesianism doesn’t work). Under other reasonable assumptions, the “broken windows fallacy” is itself fallacious and misleading.
Markets are Awesome IV: Comparative Advantage. This is indeed a very important idea, but as per Dani Rodrik, “Our theories — such as the theory of value or the theory of comparative advantage — are just scaffoldings, which need a lot of context-specific detail to become usable. Too often economists debate a policy question as if one or the other theory has to be universally correct. Is the Keynesian or the Classical model right? In fact, which model works better depends on setting and context. Only empirical diagnostics can help us know which works better at any given time — and that is more of a craft than a science, certainly when it is done in real time. If we economists understood this, it would make us more humble, less dogmatic, and more syncretic.” I don’t imagine that this flavor of humility is what is being called for in Hanania’s piece
Democracy is Unworkable I: Trivers’ theory of self-deception (citizens tell themselves flattering just-so-stories). This is only half of the cognitive psychology story. People bullshit themselves all the time, but they also have an evolved capacity to detect bullshit in others. The implication is that group reasoning (under the right circumstances) can consistently produce better results than individual ratiocination, with results for democracy described below.
Democracy is Unworkable II and III: The existence of cognitive biases/the elephant in the brain (have I mentioned cognitive bias yet). Really, these are both slight restatements of Democracy is Unworkable I (the “elephant in the brain” refers to Simler and Hanson’s book of the same name). Both Caplan and Jason Brennan have written books claiming that the pervasiveness of cognitive bias undermines the case for democracy. I’ve already mentioned the pop version of the counterargument. Here’s the academic statement of what this plausibly means for democratic theory. The Simler and Hanson book is clearly aware of the key sources for these counterarguments (one of them is mentioned in a footnote) but doesn’t deign to engage with them.
Democracy is Unworkable IV: The Paradox of Voting (democracy doesn’t work). The problem with this paradox is that it relies on the assumption that voters are rational agents. This entire genre of argument is based in rational choice, which means that it does not sit well with Democracy Is Unworkable claims I, II and III. This incompatibility of ideologically attractive critiques leads a variety of anti-democrats to hop furiously from one foot to another, all the while making special claims to stave off any mean-spirited suggestion that there is lots of irrational behavior in markets too. The resulting intellectual acrobatics are quite impressive in one sense; not at all in another.
Race and IQ I: The heritability of traits (intelligence is racially inherited). Actually, heritability does not mean what most people thinks it means. Moreover, technical meaning blows up many of the standard ‘science proves my racism’ arguments that are unfortunately so common on the Internets.
Race and IQ II: the explanatory power of IQ (IQ differences across race are real). There is excellent reason to believe that IQ has little explanatory power – it is a statistical cluster rather than a single and causally consequential underlying trait. Put more succinctly, the notion that we are able to measure general intelligence is based on a “statistical myth.” Again, this has painful implications for the Internet Libertarian Race-IQ Science Complex.
There’s lots more that could be said, but I think that’s enough to drive the point home, and it’s anyway as much as I’m willing to write on this topic. Finis.
{ 48 comments }
TM 06.28.23 at 3:46 pm
Jonathan Katz: “OK, so Hanania is a right-wing grifter who tweets racist stuff for fun and profit, and also runs an extremely lucrative “non-profit,” probably out of his house, which launders anonymous donor money in an explicit effort to reverse the most landmark piece of civil rights legislation in American history.”
John Ganz: “Hanania, an open racist of the Stormfront variety who is ensconsced in mainstream institutions, is one of the most loathsome of the youngish right-wing intellectuals, but he has the virtue of being completely without tact or discretion and is therefore unable to be coy about his views.”
https://johnganz.substack.com/p/blood-and-the-machine
I don’t get the impression that Katz has any interest in “arguing” with Hanania (in the sense of taking his openly racist claims seriously).
LFC 06.28.23 at 5:07 pm
I’m not sure I’ve ever heard of Richard Hanania, but he’s evidently a nut.
J. Katz quotes a former grad-school colleague of Hanania’s in a Reddit thread:
“I was a UCLA PhD, having completed my PhD after him [Hanania]. … tl;dr he’s a total right-wing white supremacist … Recently, in a now deleted post, he tweeted in defense of Hungary that a reduction in GDP would be worth it if it decreased the likelihood of one’s child being a member of the LGBTQ+ community … Colleagues of mine who got their PhD at UChicago told me that in a class with John Mearsheimer he advocated for the bombing of Mecca [!] and justified the Tuskegee Syphilis Study [!!].” (exclamation points mine)
Ok, the above is unverified hearsay, but if it’s true, he’s clearly a nut. And if it’s not true, he’s still one, based on the OP.
Brett 06.28.23 at 5:15 pm
I’ve noticed that these guys really like to do a “Motte and Bailey” strategy with issues of inheritance and IQ, falling back on claiming that critics believe in “blank state” and such when they get criticized for making racist claims related to IQ and heredity.
As for voting, I don’t think it’s irrational at all. Your individual vote has limited impact, so you coordinate with others to pool your votes for a greater return – much like banks pooling a bunch of individual savings accounts for investment purposes. Political parties are the retail banks of politics.
Peter Dorman 06.28.23 at 6:09 pm
Yes about zeroing in on premises and not getting sidetracked by odious conclusions.
The link to Mas-Colell’s paper doesn’t work; it takes me to his university website instead. Could you provide the title so I can track it down? I’m interested because I’ve written on this same topic (nonconvexity and multiple equilibria). I was aware of a piece by Brock and Durlauf but didn’t know AM-C had something on it too. Incidentally, if I have any claim to fame on this, it’s in recognizing that interactive nonconvexity offers a basis for a quasi-Schumpeterian theory of the firm. The idea never caught on, but I think some day it will.
J, not that one 06.28.23 at 9:16 pm
This post prompted me to ask myself “is Hanania someone I should have heard of before today?” I’m pretty confident the answer is “No.”
Life is short. Surely there are more productive things to do than become a connoisseur of the varieties of crank and the different flavors of their crankdoms.
Do I increasingly ask myself “does this apparent centrist actually believe intelligence is inherited (or stratified by gender and/or race)” however? Yes. Is it better for the number of people who say publicly that they believe these things to more or less match the actual number who do? I don’t know.
Would we be better off if the problems with central planning, etc., were better known, and were connected with lived reality a little better (as in, this means, no, someone cannot just decide everything should be better, get the power to do it, and thereby make everything okay)? Hm, worth some thought.
politicalfootball 06.28.23 at 9:26 pm
Similarly, if you want to have a substantive conversation with a Trumper, you have examine the actual matters of disagreement rather than the conclusions that arise from those disagreements.
So there’s no real point in discussing, “Was the 2020 election stolen from Trump?” The real question is some variation of: “What is truth?” Something like: “How do we separate facts from falsehoods?” Or “What makes some things true and some things not?”
Trumpists are all about Truth — Trump derides “fake news” and posts on “Truth Social.” Truth and fakery have consistent, discernible meanings that every Trumpist understands and that underly all Trumpist thinking. So if you’re talking to them about anything other than epistemology, you’re missing the real matter under dispute.
anon/portly 06.29.23 at 12:37 am
This is an excellent post overall – I agree completely with the general idea – but I think it misses something by not quoting Hanania here:
Left: Peter Beinart, Jonathan Chait, Freddie deBoer, Michelle Goldberg, Ezra Klein, Peter Singer, Noah Smith, Matt Yglesias
Center/apolitical: Scott Alexander, Josh Barro, Patrick Collison, Jonathan Haidt, Steven Pinker, Progress Studies types, Nate Silver, Alec Stapp, Andrew Sullivan, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Derek Thompson, Cathy Young
Right: GMU economics department, Tanner Greer, Sam Hammond, Anatoly Karlin, Emil Kirkegaard, Razib Khan, Megan McArdle, Virginia Postrel, Steve Sailer
The criterion for inclusion here is basically “people I enjoy reading.” That’s how I started this project, and from there tried to simply figure out what traits such individuals share.
https://www.richardhanania.com/p/towards-an-enlightened-centrism
When Henry Farrell says that Hanania “wants to define Enlightened Centrism so that it favors anti-democratic libertarianism, and brings ‘racial realists’ like Steve Sailer into the conversation,” I think Hanania would or could respond by saying something like well, yeah, at least with regard to Sailer and probably Caplan. (I don’t know if anyone else on this list is a “racial realist” or an anti-democratic libertarian).
The apparently anodyne factual claims listed by Hanania systematically shift the terms of debate to undermine democracy and an economic role for the state, and instead promote markets and the belief that persistent inequalities result from some racial groups being systematically more stupid than others.
Is it clear that Hanania would completely disagree with this critique, if “listed by Hanania” was changed to “put forward by Sailer or Kaplan?” Hanania claims not to agree with all of his “Enlightened Centrists” all the time. (Is Henry Farrell guilty of all of the failings of the writers he finds value in?).
I think most readers won’t even notice them, let alone the nasty stuff that is hiding beneath.
But many on the left won’t notice anything at all about this essay other than the name “Steve Sailer,” will they? (Unless it’s some of the other names, like Yglesias and Haidt). And in case they missed Sailer’s name the first time, Hanania adds an extra “I really like Steve Sailer.” Hiding “the nasty” seems like the one thing Hanania is most anxious to avoid.
Dr. Hilarius 06.29.23 at 1:41 am
I’ve never heard of Hanania but his inclusion of “heritability of traits” and “explanatory power of IQ” immediately identify him as a racist crank. Henry Farrell is correct in viewing IQ/race debates as a total waste of time. Much like Creationists, the scientific racists endlessly recycle debunked arguments.
I would recommend posts by Cosma Shalizi (a long ago Crooked Timber contributer) on heritability and IQ. Some statistical knowledge is helpful as well as some background in genetics. Here is one of Shalizi’s posts: http://bactra.org/weblog/523.html And another: http://bactra.org/weblog/520.html
steven t johnson 06.29.23 at 1:49 am
Yes, all the genuinely strong arguments against socialism refute the possibility of a stable industrial society or democracy or both, just as much, if not even more. In my opinion this is not an accident as socialism generalizes from both, incorporates both in necessarily transmuted forms.
In more detail, accepting the information problem as refuting central planning means endorsing efficient markets. The caveat “up to a point” makes no sense as a counter-objection, because, equally, the implication is that central planning works “up to a point.” But this is vehemently rejected here by all acceptable parties, not just rightists and supposed ECs. You can’t refute Hanania by claiming social democracy entails nothing of central planning, it most certainly involves putting planners’ preferences above consumers. You might refute Hanania by denying people are to be reduced to consumers, or similar tacks but after conceding central planning doesn’t work, you have no truly coherent argument. A genial commitment to avoiding extremes is clubbable, not probative.
Further the broken windows fallacy also assumes that prices have led to correctly led to distribution to consumers’ preferences “up to a point” (unlike central planners) according the equally true “up to a point” efficient markets hypothesis. Thus Keynesianism really doesn’t work after that point, whatever meaning to that “point” may be discreetly imagined here. And the notion that there are other standards that can identify market failure fails when you commit to what here is loosely called efficient markets, particularly given the rejection of planners’ preferences over consumer preferences.
The determination there is excess capacity available (the only plausible notion of “up to a point” Keynesianism “works”) is strictly a policy preference, but what are effective central planners. Or would-be central planners at any rate. But, yet again, the essential principle, planning is wrong, misframes the debate, putting the burden of proof on would-be Keynesian interveners and defining proof as an optimized mathematical equilibrium, even though it’s not certain how relevant equilibrium analysis truly is. Even more, once you concede the critique of planning as raping consumer preference, it’s unclear what “optimal” can mean, hence objections like Pareto optimality.
Further, comparative advantage starts with the proposition that economic wants are to be measured solely in monetary terms. If this proposition is true, then yes, it is entirely sensible for a small country to reduce its agriculture to one export crop, etc. etc. etc. (And the same applies inside a large country region vs region, urban vs rural, and so on.) The objection that you can’t carry things too far and you have to be eclectic has no content. It’s the “up to a point” all over again. Even more, in practice, methods and goals of central planning are how you disregard comparative advantage. Autarky (at the extreme) is central planning with a vengeance. Yet again, the number one priority is rejecting this.
The notion that “people” have a brain organ called a BS detector directly contradicts the claim there are no heritable traits, especially given the (correct) claim that heritability is a far trickier concept. The BS detector is about as well founded as “g” in IQ studies so far as I can tell, leaving elaborations like Mercier/Sperber/Hanson/Simmler even more dubious.
The real objection to Trivers is not some BS about BS detectors (the irony!) but the observation that the relationship between political and social life relate to self-image or whatever is rather complicated, as in, how pray tell do people’s various lies to themselves actually drive the course of events? Personally I doubt that anyone, even the proponent of this stuff really truly believe it. Rational choice when people aren’t rational? It’s not even clear to me how a demand curve/set of indifference curves are coherent, much less convex.
Similarly, the notion that cognitive biases aren’t also cognitive heuristics is just wrong. Cognitive limitations or cognitive strategies might be less invidious. But of course, once you’ve used bias, the principle is conceded and the rest is, whoever has the biggest, loudest megaphone winning.
Refuting someone like Hanania
KT2 06.29.23 at 3:38 am
Scott Alexander in “Contra Hanania On Partisanship” wields Picketty on Richard Hanania.
“… The reason everything is liberal is because of the stuff Thomas Piketty keeps trying to tell us about our shifting coalition system.
…
“In 2016, for the first time, the richest 1% were more likely to support Democrats than Republicans. … If this is real and continued, it might bring the US closer to the European mainstream.
…
“So if you rephrase Hanania’s question as “how come the party of highly-educated people has more power over academia, tech, and media than the party of less-educated people?”, it kind of answers itself.
…
“This is a little more pressing than it might otherwise be, because I get the feeling Hanania is using his own explanation (liberals care more) as an apology for dictatorship. After quoting some of my piece on Turkish dictator Recep Erdogan, he writes: [RH exerpt]
…
[742 Comments]
AUG 12, 2021
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/contra-hanania-on-partisanship
*
Cues.
In “Why the backfire effect does not explain the durability of political misperceptions” Brendan Nyhan et al say:
“Ultimately, however, the best approach is to disrupt the formation of linkages between group identities and false claims and to reduce the flow of cues reinforcing those claims from elites and the media. Doing so will require a shift from a strategy focused on providing information to the public to one that considers the roles of intermediaries in forming and maintaining belief systems.”
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1912440117
Who and or what cues, does Richard Hanania listen too?
Rebuttal of the cues / cue givers will deepen and lengthen exposure and relevance of this expose.
Gareth Wilson 06.29.23 at 6:46 am
“. There is excellent reason to believe that IQ has little explanatory power – it is a statistical cluster rather than a single and causally consequential underlying trait.”
Sounds like some urgent revision to US law is necessary.
10 U.S. Code § 520:
“A person who is not a high school graduate may not be accepted for enlistment in the armed forces unless the score of that person on the Armed Forces Qualification Test is at or above the thirty-first percentile”
Ingrid Robeyns 06.29.23 at 7:41 am
I hadn’t heard from Hanania (thank goodness not all US-debates get to the other side of the Ocean), but this post gives me only reasons not to look further. Yet you’ve done us a great service in drawing our attention to the assumptions, Henry, and providing a list of debunking material. Thanks.
Methodology, there are two other things that are helpful in critiquing a (superideological) piece, rather than focussing on any outrageous conclusions: (1) spelling out the implicit values and critiquing those; (2) as to assumptions as well as values, highlighting those that are missing and how changing those changes the conclusion.as well as those that are missing.
Henry Farrell 06.29.23 at 12:05 pm
Peter – the link is taken directly in a cut-and-paste from Cosma, so I don’t have the paper, nor know it. But here, archive.org’s Wayback Machine is very likely your friend (it is such an extraordinary service, and this reminds me that I need to throw it some money)
TM 06.29.23 at 12:17 pm
The question remains why anybody would want to argue with a troll, and worse a fascist troll (which I’m convinced is what Hanania is). “Don’t feed the trolls” alas remains the most ignored internet maxim.
LFC 06.29.23 at 1:00 pm
“Focus on the assumptions, not the outrageous conclusions.”
I’m sure that’s often good advice, but sometimes the conclusions alone reveal the whole thing to be not worth engaging with. Also the “translations” are not always necessary. Someone who claims “comparative advantage”, for instance, is a principle that all so-called enlightened centrists subscribe to, without any reference to qualifications or nuances, and couples it on the same list of assumptions with “heritability of traits” — hello?
politicalfootball 06.29.23 at 1:47 pm
Any serious study of modern US politics and society involves a deep understanding of cranks. Whether politics and society are fit subjects of study, I leave up to you.
afeman 06.29.23 at 2:05 pm
The bull of Left Critique thunders towards the matador, who twitches his cape to one side, so that the poor beast careens into the side of the ring
I can’t be the only one who was anticipating an anvil.
politicalfootball 06.29.23 at 2:05 pm
anon/portly@7 — I feel like I’m missing something. Farrell’s description is fair and obviously correct. Why shouldn’t Hanania agree with it?
I’m not entirely clear on this, but I suspect you are confusing the concept of “endorsing viewpoints” with “shifting the terms of debate.” Hanania’s project, as Farrell and Hanania himself recognize, is to shift the terms of debate. And, as you note, both are in accord about the direction of that shift. Farrell’s contribution is to make explicit the cornerstone assumptions that Hanania would like to place beyond reasonable debate.
Lee A. Arnold 06.29.23 at 2:38 pm
I imagine that in twenty years “comparative advantage” will be obsolete. For two reasons. AI robots will give every region the same productive capabilities. And medical science will turn everyone into combinations of Mozart and Einstein. The only advantage you’ll have is what mineral property rights you’re sitting on. But even then, desktop printers will pull lots of different molecules from the air and from your garden dirt.
Cosma 06.29.23 at 4:52 pm
Peter @4: It was a review chapter titled “Non-Convexities” which he wrote for the New Palgrave. I can’t find it online anymore…
J, not that one 06.29.23 at 4:55 pm
When the disagreement, at bottom, comes down to the fact that they reject both (1) the law of excluded middle, and (2) “P” is true if and only if P, I don’t know what there is left to discuss.
Whether their attitude is “what I say is different from what I do or believe,” or whether it’s “this is true but that doesn’t imply anything else in particular is false,” it expresses both contempt and irresponsibility towards the rest of the world.
They believe what they want to believe. Peeling their followers off is maybe a different story though. (Maybe.)
I’ve been wondering whether the effect of people like Hanania is to make the right look like the center.
Ebenezer Scrooge 06.30.23 at 8:49 pm
Central planning works great! That’s why we have things like corporations and armies. A world with no central planning is a world of nothing but atomized individuals and perhaps contract–Somalia in excelsis. It doesn’t work, for reasons that transaction cost economists have beaten to death. OK, 100% central planning isn’t a great idea either. But we need a fair mixture to run our society, and the government has its vital if partial role.
KT2 07.01.23 at 2:26 am
@20 Cosma said in reply to:
“Peter @4: “It was a review chapter titled “Non-Convexities” which he wrote for the New Palgrave. I can’t find it online anymore…”
Hope this helps…
Mas-Colell (1974) referenced, with economic history, and full set of mathematical proofs:
“Incomplete and Intransitive Preferences”
…
“The great breakthrough was the work of Andreu Mas-Colell (1974). He did not require the supporting device of an infinite numbers of agents, nor did he wrestle unduly with utility function representations. Mas-Colell’s effort was very clean. Mas-Colell’s contribution was so nice that many economists went on to prove it all over again — and again and again.
…
“Thus it does not fulfill one of the Mas-Colell axioms — and thus fails to have a maximal element. Conversely, note that in Examples 2 and 3, all three Mas-Colell axioms are fulfilled.
…
“Proof: As noted, although first proved by Mas-Colell (1974), our method follows Shafer and Sonnenschein (1975). Let us define a function h(x, y) as:”…
…
https://cruel.org/econthought/essays/get/intransitive.html
*
Mas-Colell, A. (1987). Non-convexity. In: The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics.
Although this is a links to a pdf, it defualts to Andreu Mas-Colell webpage.
http://www.econ.upf.edu/~mcolell/research/art_083b.pdf
Arrive at:
https://www.upf.edu/web/andreu-mas-colell
*
In “A Technological and Organisational Explanation for the Size Distribution of Firms” by
Joshua S. Gans & John Quiggin, list in references:
“MasColell, A., M. Whinston and J. Green, 1995, Microeconomic Theory, Oxford: Oxford University Press.”
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1025788400818
Or do this via Simon Grant:
“Economics 501 – Microeconomic Theory,
Fall 2007
“Instructor: Simon Grant
“TABLE OF CONTENTS
General Course Information
“Text:
Microeconomic Theory by Andreu Mas-Colell, Michael D. Whinston and Jerry R. Green, Oxford Press, 1995.
http://www.owlnet.rice.edu/~econ501/
*
Andreu Mas-Colell non covexity papers listed at:
[Search term] Andreu Mas-Colell non covexity
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=Andreu+Mas-Colell+non+covexity&btnG=
Phil H 07.01.23 at 3:48 pm
I very much disagree with the tone of this post, though the content seems spot on. I’ve been reading Richard Hanania a bit, and sure, it is necessary to refute him. I also think that going after his assumptions is indeed the best way. But I don’t see the value in calling him a troll. Firstly, I don’t think that he is a troll (most of the time). He genuinely thinks a bunch of things that are wrong. He sometimes uses trollish techniques, but there is real substance to be discussed as well.
I also think the dismissive attitude in many of the replies below the line is…unhelpful. Saying that we can safely ignore him just because he’s a troll has been proved spectacularly wrong, hasn’t it? Furthermore, if you don’t really enjoy debating/talking to people with different viewpoints then… what are you doing? The internet can be a place to live in a bubble, I suppose, but it’s also the place where we go and engage with people who are wrong. I’m sure there’s a famous internet cartoon to that effect somewhere…
Henry Farrell 07.01.23 at 7:05 pm
Hanania admits himself that he is a bit of a troll. To say that someone is a troll is not to say that they are stupid, or that everything they say ought be dismissed. To quote myself
You may differ on the judgment calls, but when someone is looking to smuggle in IQ-Race Science as part of the generally accepted premises of centrist debate, it is worthwhile pointing out exactly what they are doing. The key qualifier in the paragraph above is “plausibly constructive with respect to the goals that you want to achieve.” My goals include pushing back against the public legitimization of quack racist pseudo-science. I don’t think Hanania is at all stupid. Nor do I think that it’s impossible that he’ll change his mind. But ‘don’t promote race science in the public space’ is not a particularly demanding or problematic standard for debate.
Henry Farrell 07.01.23 at 7:09 pm
Also, the Mas-Colell chapter can be found here. Archive.org’s Wayback Machine is a true wonder.
engels 07.01.23 at 7:52 pm
The vagueness of the concept of trolling—much like bullying—renders it largely useless if not obfuscatory for serious descriptive analysis and normative regulation of social behaviour (I realise this opinion may be regarded as trolling…) It’s striking that defensible uses of it always seem to be partial or ambivalent: “he’s a bit of a troll,” “trolling isn’t entirely a bad thing,” etc.
J, not that one 07.01.23 at 9:09 pm
“It’s not worthwhile reading Hanania” does not imply “I only want to read a narrow range of opinions.” Multiple commenters have implied it does.
Quite the opposite. I see lots of people who only discuss white supremacists and pretty much nothing else. Someone has to write about that. But I feel no obligation to read the same thing over and over again or to treat the nuances of racists’ ideologies like they’re 90s indie rock bands and I’m some hipster dude who feels an obligation to keep up.
Maybe there are people who really believe there’s “people like J” and “white supremacists,” so that I actually am obliged to read white supremacists if I’m to get out of my supposed bubble. I think that’s wrong.
Phil H 07.02.23 at 1:42 am
Thanks, Henry @25.
It’s certainly fair that we may make different judgments about which positions are worth debating. But I think this is too blanket:
“‘don’t promote race science in the public space’ is not a particularly demanding or problematic standard for debate.”
I agree with you that practically all race science that has been done to date is fatally tainted and not worth the paper it’s written on. However, race is a real thing (as in, it has impacts in the world – I’m not claiming it’s genetically ‘real’). And as an enlightened progressive, I very much do look toward science to help me understand real stuff. One of the positions that Hanania attacks is a fairly mainstream stance that: (a) listening to scientists and experts is good and important for major issues; AND (b) race is a major issue; AND (c) we must never look at the science of race.
This position is contorted and contradictory. I actually agree with it, and can just about see how we got here. But I don’t think we can deny how messed up this position is; nor is it fair to dismiss an interlocutor who points out the obvious problems. If we want to persuade anyone that what we think is right, engaging with the wrinkles and contradictions inherent in our own position has to be part of it. (That’s a rather presumptuous ‘we’ – I don’t really know if you and I think the same things, but just assuming from where we are…)
None of which is to say there’s any obligation to engage with Hanania. He’s just the next Ben Shapiro. But Shapiro/Hanania-level debate is a good thing. People need to hear those arguments presented and rebutted.
Ray Vinmad 07.02.23 at 2:25 am
This is a guy who is 100% dependent on trolling for engagement.
He is nothing if you people ignore him.
You are going to turn him into another James Lindsay.
You don’t see how he’s playing you?
At this rate, he’s going to get at column in the New York Times.
LFC 07.02.23 at 3:20 am
I think I mostly agree with ‘J, not that one’ @28.
I’m not going to refer to Hanania specifically, but I feel no obligation to read across the entire political spectrum. I’m happy to engage with and learn from differing views and believe it can be very useful to do so, but life is short, there’s too much to read, and there are people whose paid employment is to read and track extreme right-wing sites. Call me mercenary, but if I’m not employed by an organization that is paying me to read and track Stormfront or whatever the latest neo-Nazi or white supremacist site is, then I’m not going to do it.
John Q 07.02.23 at 11:42 pm
Phil H. @29 I’m not going to read Hanania for the same reasons as LFC. But your presentation of the problem rests on reading (b) as “race is a major natural science issue”. If you start from the fact that, according to scientists and experts, race is a socially constructed category with no biological basis, then we get:
(a) listening to scientists and experts is good and important for major issues (b) race is a major social science issue (c) there is no natural science of race, and “looking into” this topic is a version of “just asking questions” trollery.
J-D 07.03.23 at 1:40 am
I’m not sure to what extent this is true in other languages, but in English it’s common for the word ‘science’ to be used in a way which excludes the social sciences (anthropology, economics, political science, sociology, and so on) and refers only to the natural sciences (biology, chemistry, geology, physics, and so on). There’s plenty to be learned by using the methods of the social sciences to investigate race as a social phenomenon: but if that’s what’s meant by a ‘scientific’ investigation of race, then it’s not true that there’s a mainstream position which excludes it. The mainstream position which reprehends the treatment of race as an appropriate issue for investigation by the methods of the natural sciences is one which is not merely accepting of investigation by the methods of the social sciences but actually dependent on it.
engels 07.03.23 at 11:12 am
When “race” is used in progressive circles to justify diversity initiatives etc the most common formula now seems to be “people who look like” me/America/etc. This does not sound like a socially constructed category but a natural one. I am certain that “race” is an oppressive fiction but that doesn’t seem to be how most liberals talk any more, especially in US.
Phil H 07.03.23 at 3:15 pm
Thanks, replies above.
We have a point of factual disagreement, I guess. I don’t think he’s a white supremacist. I’ve been reading him for a while, and intend to continue, because I think it’s worth knowing what conservatives think. If he’s really a rabid racist, he’s hiding it well. Of course, it’s entirely possible that I’m being naive. But I’ve actually read some of what he’s written, and even engaged with him in his blog comments, and he doesn’t seem like like someone with views that are beyond the pale to me.
kent 07.03.23 at 4:36 pm
I responded to the substack notes comment that Henry posted, but found myself with more to say and also in want of a slightly larger audience to say it to.
I want to stick up for Hanania. Hanania is an interesting troll. He trolls the left and the right both, and his trolling of both is, as I read him, more or less intellectually fair-minded. His acceptance of the entire sphere of “race and IQ” stuff is, as far as I can tell, generated by a sincere belief that it’s true. But from other stuff that he’s written, it’s clear that he is plenty intelligent enough to learn from good arguments that it’s false. I hope that he will do the reading enough to learn that it’s false, or at least to engage reasonably with the arguments that it’s false. But this is at this point a hope only, not something you will find in his writings.
[An interlude on Cosma Shalizi on race and IQ — see http://bactra.org/weblog/523.html and similar writings. Personally, I love these! But I wish to complain about a very tiny flaw in this amazingly delicious free ice cream. I just don’t understand the finer details of his argument, and I have no idea how to summarize it or explain it to someone (liberal or conservative) who doesn’t have time to read the whole thing. I feel like there is room to make the argument clearer and more user-friendly. I’m imagining a webpage called “You have been referred here because you made a false claim about race and IQ” — something written for people of ordinary intelligence and a level of understanding of statistics that is substantially inferior to Cosma’s. Is such a thing possible? I definitely am not the one to write it but I sure would appreciate it.]
So what does Hanania say that’s interesting to me, as a liberal? Several things.
(1) What first drew me in was his long post, explicitly addressed to conservatives, arguing that the mainstream media is pretty damned good and in fact irreplaceable. He does not deny that it leans liberal, but he says (accurately) that conservatives seem to be incapable of producing anything of similar value.
https://www.richardhanania.com/p/why-the-media-is-honest-and-good
(2) Another really useful post of his is a long one titled “liberals read, conservatives watch TV.” And yes it’s as anti-conservative as it sounds. Conservatives aren’t interested in thinking deeply, is his point, and something he clearly believes (despite the trolly language).
https://www.richardhanania.com/p/liberals-read-conservatives-watch
(3) In a recent post, he suggested how DeSantis can beat Trump. His answer was, that DeSantis should challenge Trump to a fistfight and physically beat the shit out of him — or mock him as a coward for failing to accept the challenge. The conservative political sphere, Hanania says, is a dominance competition, not an intellectual argument. In observing Trump and his followers, one should imagine the head chimpanzeee dominating the other chimps in the tribe.
https://www.richardhanania.com/p/desantis-should-challenge-trump-to
All of these are on his substack. Maybe you think they’re stupid! They definitely have some troll in them. But they’re not arguments you’ve heard before from conservatives, and in my view they give the lie to the “just another stormfront variety racist” idea. I don’t read stormfront discourse, but I don’t imagine it involves impugning the intelligence of stormfronters or comparing their desire in power-uber-alles to that of nonhuman apes.
Tm 07.03.23 at 8:22 pm
„We need more policing, incarceration and surveillance of black people“
That CT is devoting a long post on the guy who wrote this, and commenters disagree on whether the guy who wrote this is actually racist, or whether he’s just trolling, or maybe even an „intellectually fair-minded“ troll – that more or less sums up this protofascist political moment.
Engels 34: Your profound insight into „how most liberals talk“ is as always impressive. Although admittedly I don’t quite understand the semantics of „me/America/etc“.
engels 07.03.23 at 8:53 pm
TM, I wasn’t claiming it as a profound insight, just an ‘umble commenters impression. I was reading to phrases like “it’s time for a council that looks like the city it represents” etc, surely you’ve heard things like that? If race is just something we all naturally “see” it doesn’t seem like a social construction (I know it still could be, arguably).
LFC 07.03.23 at 10:42 pm
I want to clarify my position a little bit.
If people want to engage with Hanania, that’s their choice. I specifically said in my comment @ 31 that I was mostly making a judgment about my time.
For instance, every second I spend reading or writing on a screen is usually a moment I’m not, e.g., reading a book, because as a rule I don’t like to read books online. And my recent record of book-reading is not quite what I’d like.
Lastly, I agree w JQ that there is no “natural science of race.”
J-D 07.04.23 at 12:49 am
I read that piece years ago, probably on a previous occasion when it was linked here, and I remember clearly the idea it produced in my mind, because it was fixed in my memory after I explained my idea to somebody else, who understands, if anything, even less about statistics than I do, but who had no difficulty grasping my explanation. I do understand a little about statistics, but not nearly as much as Cosma, to the point where I suspect my idea bears some relationship to the point Cosma was making, but I am not fully confident that it is close enough. With that caveat, I offer my explanation of my idea in case it is useful to you. Maybe, if I have badly misunderstood Cosma’s point, somebody will correct me, which would be useful to me.
When people are given intellectual tasks to perform, for example in the form of the kind of questions found on IQ tests, they don’t perform equally well on all of them (that is, any one individual does not perform equally well on all tasks). However, there are statistical patterns observable which suggest, loosely, that some people are better at some kinds of tasks than others. One possible explanation of this is that there is such a thing as some kind of general intellectual capacity, which has to be used in all these tasks, and there are also something like ten or twenty different kinds of more specific intellectual capacity, each of which is useful for a different category of task. When you look at the statistical patterns that appear in the results of many people answering many IQ-test-type questions, it seems to be consistent with the idea that the largest part of the variation in results is explained by the hypothesised general intellectual capacity, and there’s also a significant part explained by the tasks falling into something like ten or twenty different intellectual categories, each of which requires a different specific intellectual capacity. So some people have thought this supports the idea that IQ measures a real thing which is a definite biological or at least psychological trait, varying from individual to individual (and then there’d be something like another ten or twenty different traits with more specific usefulness, also varying from individual to individual).
However!
There is an almost completely different explanation which fits equally well with the statistical evidence. This alternative explanation is that there are something like thousands of different intellectual capacities, each of them varying from individual to individual, and that solving any of the IQ-test-type questions requires the person attempting the task to use some combination of something like hundreds of these capacities. If this explanation be the right one, then there would be something like thousands of separate intellectual traits, each one varying from individual to individual, but nothing real that resembled a general IQ.
Since the statistical evidence is equally consistent with both of these explanations, it doesn’t help us to choose between them, and therefore gives us no reason to believe that IQ measures anything real.
politicalfootball 07.04.23 at 1:12 pm
Kent, there are all kind of things that are not Stormfront that are still pretty damn racist. When a person argues that insufficient attention is given to the inborn inferiority of Blacks, that person is racist. By definition.
Note that even if racism were a valid viewpoint, it would still be racism. When people like Hanania argue that racist views should get more exposure and respect, they are being racist — even if they are right.
Hanania isn’t right.
kent 07.04.23 at 4:59 pm
Thanks J-D! Something like that is more or less what I had gotten out of the Cosma pieces, though I couldn’t have stated it as well.
Let me follow up with a simple question. Why does it matter? Let’s stipulate that intelligence is lots of different things — and I’m sure it is! The obvious hypothesis is that IQ is a blended mishmash that tells us something not-very-detailed but more-or-less adequate about a roughly-weighted average of some subset of the various capacities that go into (what we call) intelligence. Why isn’t that good enough?
Here’s an example. I’m sure that singing ability is also comprised of multiple different abilities. There’s (1) consistency, (2) the ability to hit high notes, (3) the ability to hit individual notes accurately, (4) the ability to hit very fast notes decently-accurately, (5) the ability to hold very long notes, (6) the ability to hold multiple medium-long notes sequentially, (7) something undefinable about the attractiveness of the voice, and probably a dozen other things. You can have some of these things but not others, you can have them in varying degrees. But all of them add up to “ability to sing well” and, at the end, either people want to listen to you sing or they don’t.
What, exactly, is the intellectual mistake being made by people who look at the mishmash that goes into IQ scores and say: these scores predict things about success in life, and so they’re important. At the end of the day, I either want you to write a book for me (or design a website, or do my taxes, or run a car company, …), or I don’t — and IQ is going to be predictive of all of those things, with varying degrees of accuracy.
I want to be clear that I’m not talking about race and IQ at all! Fuck the racists. The idea that “race” is a real thing is so wrong I can’t even stand it.
But IQ … I still need help.
Tm 07.04.23 at 7:30 pm
Engels, you are pointing out that most people – even liberals – think of skin color when they think of race, so gotcha! all that talk about race being a social construction can’t be serious?
There is as you probably are aware a huge body of literature explaining what it means for a category like race to be socially constructed and I can only recommend you to read some of it written by folks far more competent than myself, but here’s a very brief account:
Skin color itself may not be socially constructed (although our perception of skin color clearly is – most people perceived as „black“ aren’t black and most people perceived as „white“ aren’t white) but the act of ascribing social significance to skin color is a social construction.
Fossil 07.04.23 at 10:27 pm
“Right: GMU economics department, Tanner Greer, Sam Hammond, Anatoly Karlin, Emil Kirkegaard, Razib Khan, Megan McArdle, Virginia Postrel, Steve Sailer.”
Emil Kirkegaard is a racist crank and infamous activist for legalising child pornography and incest who filed a defamation lawsuit after he was called a pedophile and lost then refused to pay back the defendant’s legal costs. He is currently being counter-sued.
Anatoly Karlin is an alt-right troll and poster boy for Richard Spencer. Karlin has openly supported an ethno-state and was a former article writer at The Unz Review.
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Emil_O._W._Kirkegaard
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Anatoly_Karlin
J-D 07.05.23 at 11:29 pm
Then I hope the following is helpful, although I cannot guarantee it is worth any more than what you are paying for it!
Singing is a thing that (some) people (sometimes) want (other) people to do for them. There are many other things of which this is true, including writing books and designing websites.
IQ-ing is not one of these things!
If you want to hire somebody to do some singing for you, then the best way of making your selection is to get candidates to sing for you, because that is the best way of finding out how well they can sing (and, more specifically and more specifically relevantly, how well they can do the particular kind of singing that you want them to do). Similarly, if you want to hire somebody to write books for you, or to design websites for you, then the best way to make your selection is to get them to provide samples of (respectively) writing they have done or Web design they have done (if possible, writing or Web design of a kind similar to the kind you want to hire them to do for you).
In what situation is the best way to make your selection going to be comparing IQ test results? Do you want to hire somebody to impersonate you at an IQ test?
Consider, in the hope that it may be further illuminating, decathlons and heptathlons and pentathlons and triathlons. All of these could reasonably, in some vague loose way (a different vague loose way for each one), be considered a test of some kind of average or aggregate athletic ability, but each of them does this by aggregating or averaging results in specific different tasks, in each of which the specific abilities required for success are different. Therefore, in some sense, it might be considered that if you’re looking for the people who have the best claim to be considered the best athletes, you could select them by their results in decathlons or heptathlons or pentathlons or triathlons. However, if you’re recruiting somebody to play specifically in a competitive netball team, then the best way to do your selection is not on the basis of candidates’ performance in decathlons or heptathlons or pentathlons or triathlons but on the basis of their performance as netballers.
How is selecting people for anything on the basis of their IQ test results more sensible than selecting people for a netball team (or a football or volleyball or any other sporting team–even a fencing or swimming team) on the basis of their results in pentathlons?
J-D 07.05.23 at 11:40 pm
It is true that money is a social construct, but there are two things (it is important to understand) that this doe not mean.
Money really exists. You can see it and touch it (at least in some of its forms). Saying that money is a social construct doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist or that it isn’t real. Also, saying that money is a social construct doesn’t mean that it is constructed out of nothing. Early forms of money were constructed out of metal (and some still is), not out of nothing. More recently, money has been constructed out of paper and (more recently still) out of polymers, but still not out of nothing. Most money now is a digital electronic construct, but even this money is constructed out of something, even if it is no longer something that it is possible to touch.
Words are social constructs, but this doesn’t mean that they don’t exist or aren’t real, and it also doesn’t mean that they are constructed out of nothing: they were constructed originally out of sounds or (in the case of sign languages) gestures and more recently have also been constructed out of visible markings.
Race is a social construct, not a biological fact (and the same is true of gender), but like other social constructs (including money and words) they are constructed out of something: specifically, they are constructed out of biological facts. Just as it’s important to understand how being constructed out of metal is not the same thing as being a metal, it’s important to understand how being constructed out of biological facts is not the same thing as being a biological fact.
Phil H 07.06.23 at 2:31 am
@kent comment 42
I’ll try to have a go at your question, though I have no deeper understanding of the Shalizi pieces than anyone else.
I think there are two reasons to not talk about IQ, given what Shalizi says. First, it quite likely doesn’t exist, and talking about made-up stuff is not helpful. For example, if you conclude from the IQ test evidence that a thing called “g” or “general intelligence” does exist, and then go hunting for its genetic causes, you might well be wasting your time. You’d be looking for one thing in the genome (probably not just one gene, because you’re not an idiot, but you’d still be looking for a single pattern or form that recurs across the genomes of all people), when in fact there is no one thing, just lots of little things. You would be searching in vain. Alternatively, a scientist might spend their time looking for other behavioural correlates of g: do intelligent people pick their noses more, or marry blondes, or whatever. That scientist’s time would be wasted if there is no single thing g.
The second reason why IQ might be a bad thing to talk/think about is laid out in your post. You talk about how good someone is at singing, and list a few possible factors. But we don’t judge singing on those factors – we judge it on how good people are at singing. Like on X factor and Idol and all those shows. You just have to get up and sing, and that shows how good you are. Similarly, trying to use IQ to prejudge how good someone might be at a job like… accounting, or managing, or sales, or whatever, would be kinda useless, if IQ is just the ability to score well on IQ tests. It would end up being nothing more than a made-up reason to exclude a bunch of people from a job. And the problem with those is… if there’s no firm ground on which to base the thing, it will often be used as a channel to smuggle in the prejudices of the hirers.
This second reason actually even holds true if IQ/g is a real thing. If it’s real, what do you want to use it for? Is there any reason other than creating an underclass of unemployables? Giving an IQ test isn’t any easier than just testing whether this person can do the job. So the only goal here seems to be to generate some kind of indelible tag that will assign people to a certain professional/social status for life. I don’t see the value.
(And I know that you explicitly rejected the race issue, but you must know that one of the most common rhetorical uses of IQ is just that: people of race X have a lower IQ than people of race Y, therefore if people of race X have lower incomes, it’s not our fault, and we definitely don’t have to take any action to end/limit the harms of racism.)
engels 07.10.23 at 10:38 am
Sorry you’re all missing the point. If you think a short, fat, bearded, middle-aged Japanese businessman “looks like” a tall, athletic, clean-shaven Thai student rather than (say) a short, fat, bearded, middle-aged German businessman, you are arguably being racist, but that’s what the “looks like” rhetoric implies everyone perceives the world. Hence it normalises and entrenches racism.
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