Marginal Revolution is a watering hole for all sorts of oddballs, some of them benign, some of them not so much. Lasker and Sailer are examples of the latter kind. In Lasker's case, you kind of have to be "read in" to know what their deal is, so it's not surprising to see them quoted without any context. That context is probably not relevant to what Tabarrok is talking about anyways.
Every public-intellectual economist gets accused of that. I don't take anything they say on faith and I don't regularly read MR because the scene around it is icky, but I also don't reflexively assume they're wrong about everything. Tabarrok and Cowen are not stupid.
That's fair. He's a prominent figure on Twitter who posts a lot of charts and graphs on different and often benign subjects which get shared around a lot. It's not until you follow him that you realize his core obsession is promoting ideas about race and IQ in broad strokes. For example, singling out ethnic groups as intellectually inferior or more likely to commit crime. He has a history of posting misleading or falsified charts or data if their convenient to his agenda.
If you go deeper, his old Reddit account under a pseudonym was discovered to be a little more mask-off than his Twitter personality. From Wikipedia:
> between 2014 and 2016 Lasker had made many anti-Semitic and racist posts on Reddit under the pseudonym Faliceer.[7] In 2016, the account Faliceer self-identified as a "Jewish White Supremacist Nazi". He also wished Adolf Hitler a happy birthday, promoted eugenics and attacked interracial relationships.
I don't know about "falsified results", that's a pretty strong phrasing, but here's an interesting story about research Lasker presented on Twitter, by David Bessis:
None of you are evidencing your claims that he's unreliable. You just keep repeating it, even after being asked for specifics they other people cannot find.
It seems more likely from these posts that Lasker is actually accurate but you can't handle true claims about IQ and race, so have unilaterally decided those must be fake because they undermines a left wing world view. But group differences in IQ are a very strong and well replicated result. There is nothing unreliable about those. Until you bring receipts we have to assume you are engaging in ad hominem for ideological reasons.
If only we lived in an era of instantly-available information easily accessed through ubiquitous supercomputers that we have in our homes and in our pockets.
For those who don’t know, Cremieux is a prolific Twitter poster. He posts a lot of graphs and charts and presents himself as purely objective and data driven, but follow him for a while and you’ll start to see he’s highly politically motivated and will pretend to be completely blind to any data that disagrees with his agenda.
He has become a popular figure in the “rationalist” community which this blog (Marginal Revolution) belongs to, so you won’t find criticisms within this sphere.
Cremieux is the type of poster who posts 90% accurate information to build trust and then slips in 10% agenda-pushing material. If you’re not paying close attention or following people who will debunk him, it all looks equally scientific. He was highly active during the last election with political claims and data that were easily debunked or shown to be taken out of context.
He’s also a big proponent of buying GLP-1 peptides from questionable sources and mixing your own injections, which he advertises broadly but then puts his “guides” behind a paywall as a source of income. Because he profits from subscriptions to his guides, he has a huge conflict of interest when explaining the safety of buying these underground peptides and mixing your own injections, but he’s held up as a source of scientific truth for how completely safe it is by people who don’t recognize his conflict of interest.
> Whatever the deal is, he's probably not wrong about autism.
I agree, but it’s worth pointing out that this is kind of his whole schtick: Most of the topics he posts about are probably objectively based and generally accurate. He uses this to build trust before slipping in the bananas claims about immigrants, race/IQ stuff, and other political topics, or when it comes time to sell followers on subscriptions to his GLP-1 guides (which do not contain any information you couldn’t find freely from numerous other sources)
I agree that's the dynamic but I don't think it's useful to call him out for the accurate stuff, since, again, I think you really have to be paying attention to "that part of Twitter" (you and I apparently both do so for oppositional reasons) to know what's going on here.
Lasker won't make you wait long before bringing the racist stuff out!
This seems fairly consistent with deep, accomplished experts in any field or craft - their competencies in one area don't necessarily translate well into validity anywhere else laterally or even vertically. This seems extremely obvious even for typically "smart" people such as doctors, lawyers, engineers because among many folks I know scamming these white collar professionals out of money by feeding into their egotism is basically how they make their living. While I don't think we should fence people into professional castes or anything like that but in the modern age of AI and charisma-based validity / authority healthy skepticism seems like a requisite to not be suckered into modern infomercial quackery.
> This seems fairly consistent with deep, accomplished experts in any field or craft - their competencies in one area don't necessarily translate well into validity anywhere else laterally or even vertically.
With this person, his core area of pseudo-research has been the race/IQ generalizations. He has a long history of eugenics content and his Reddit posts engage in Nazi stuff.
He jumps into popular topics like autism statistics to ride those trends on Twitter and expand his reach. Once you follow him, you realize it’s a steady drip of the lightly disguised eugenics stuff that has been his core focus for a long time.
Lasker has repeatedly falsified results, given some feigned apology or redirection and continued the practice of falsifying results.