astralcodexten.substack.com isn’t a journalist (he’s a psychiatrist) but covers current events quite well, probably has as little bias as you can as a person, and is popular on HN.
> probably has as little bias as you can as a person
Yesterday he wrote an article about being “anti-woke” on a college campus. It included recommendations such as what he called the “berserker strategy” which was to pick as many fights as possible on every social justice topic.
Scott is anything but unbiased. He writes with flowery language that elicits a sense of faux humbleness and “both sides” journalism while subtlety pushing the reader to his desired conclusions on things like race and IQ.
He’s famous for leaked e-mails where he admitted writing a lot about neoreactionaries because it gets more clicks, which has made him somewhat of a hero among those circles. He also admitted that he believes in “HBD” which is an alt-right euphemism for racist views on IQ.
He may feel unbiased and objective due to his writing style, but he’s far from it if you’ve been following him and reading closely.
"Human bio-diversity, the claim that distinct populations of humans exist and have substantial genetical variance which accounts for some difference in average intelligence from population to population"
I mean I'm sure racists love the idea, but it doesn't exactly strike me as obviously 100% untrue.
> but it doesn't exactly strike me as obviously 100% untrue.
This is the wedge used to hoist their more radical ideas into the mainstream.
The HBD crowd uses a common writing trick: They start with a low-risk scientific fact (genes influence traits) and then inflate it into misleading conclusions (race equals IQ). Depending on their audience and how much pushback they're receiving, they'll retreat further and further toward the kernel of truth they started with.
That's how they end up hooking people with thoughts such as "not obviously 100% untrue". The problem with HBD isn't the idea that genes can influence traits such as intelligence. The problem is their weird obsession with race. If they want to talk about genes and genetics, that's fine. However, for some reason much of their writing is about race with the implication that all people of the race share the same intelligence-related genes, which is patently false. Yet that's all they want to talk about.
They also greatly exaggerate, or more likely completely misunderstand, the significance of the genetics-intelligence correlations. Outside of genetic disorders, individual genes are only loosely correlated with intelligence. The correlations are vanishingly small, yet the HBD people talk about it as if it's some sort of 1:1 switch that determines who has high IQ and who has low IQ.
There are even more unsavory parts of the movement, but I'll caution you against getting hooked by their bait-and-switch arguments.
You’re misconstruing what he thinks. He has literally told everyone openly (not what you claim is open via Kolmogorov Complicity).
“ 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.)”
You don't have to be an expert on a topic to see that something is either extremely unlikely or plausible. (Anyone can still be wrong in there conclusion mind you.)
"There's a group of human's that can breath fire like a dragon"
Just using some basic knowledge of evolution and genetics, that seems pretty unlikely. What would the evolutionary pressure be ? Would there be enough time for that development? No parallel's in other mammals etc.
You can do the same to see if something is plausible. For this discussion specifically. We know there are physical difference's between populations (Height, drug tolerance, skin colour)
These observable differences are caused by different genes. What are the chances that none of these differences in genes are in the brain ? Basically zero.
So it's very plausible you'd find some differences. Just using some simple reasoning.
(Reading a little bit about it, Sam Harris basically makes this exact point.
It really is basic logic)
The history of philosophy shows that what sounds logical tells us little about how the world physically works. There's nothing logical about time dilation or quantum physics.
I mean, if the community around Astro Codex said upfront "We don't care about empiricism, we make things up based on what sounds logical to us" I would at least give them points for honesty.
The guy who runs Astro Codex blog claims he is an empiricist.
It's nuanced. We are evolved creatures, with certain intuitions about things.
You can point to domains about where it fails completely. (For understandable reasons)
But that doesn't mean intuition is useless, in fact I'd say it's rather underused for how valuable it actually is. Parachutes and RCT's come to mind.
Being empirical is really hard and rather un-natural for humans. It's a best effort thing. Current institution don't help as much as I'd like, it still takes many decades for information to propagate (And even longer for corrections where the consensus was wrong)
Ironically, a brief passage by Scott Alexander (from the hit piece targeting him linked above) describes a very good reason to read content you disagree with, almost making the parent comment germane to the overall discussion.
> Compare RationalWiki and the neoreactionaries. RationalWiki provides a steady stream of mediocrity. Almost nothing they say is outrageously wrong, but almost nothing they say is especially educational to someone who is smart enough to have already figured out that homeopathy doesn’t work. Even things of theirs I didn’t know – let’s say some particular study proving homeopathy doesn’t work that I had never read before – doesn’t provide me with real value, since they fit exactly into my existing worldview without teaching me anything new ...
> The Neoreactionaries provide a vast stream of garbage with occasional nuggets of absolute gold in them ... The garbage doesn’t matter because I can tune it out.
For more context, look up the leaked e-mails where Scott is caught admitting that he writes about neoreactionaries because it drives more clicks.
Writing about it once or twice could have been interesting, but constantly returning to neoreactionary content over and over again to mine what he calls “nuggets of absolute gold” starts to become an endorsement.
Scott’s entire writing style is based on tricks like faux-humbleness and pretending to present an unbiased “both sides” overview of a topic while planting seeds that lead the reader to a specific conclusion.
Said emails are in the link I posted above! It is, hilariously enough, literally someone trying to defend Scott by just reposting his emails in their entirety -- "Sunlight is the best disinfectant" indeed. If it's a hit piece, it's Scott writing a hit piece on himself.
Thank you for pointing that out, I didn't even realize that was Emil O. W. Kirkegaard's blog, I thought you had linked Topher Brennan's piece directly.
