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PZ Myers dissects evolutionary psychology: brief, sharp and fabulous

I admit I LOL'd at the part about lighting up "like a Christmas tree." WATCH AND LEARN all IDWs!

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Friday, January 31, 2020

Rutgers professor Lee Jussim goes full White Citizens Council

Pinkerite has been pointing out for a long time that the IDW is right-wing, especially in its promotion of race science.

So I was not surprised to find the Trump-loving, right-wing extremist publication Breitbart moaning on behalf of right-wing race science promoter, Lee Jussim, professor at Rutgers University, because Psychology Today did not want to join in the right-wing grievance grift for which Quillette has become so well known.

So Quillette published Jussim's Orwellian lexicon when Psychology Today wouldn't play along.

The question is, why did Jussim try to post it at Psychology Today in the first place, knowing how perfect it would be for Quillette? Why not send it to Quillette first?

The answer of course is the grievance grift - right-wingers want to make Jussim look like a poor victim of political correctness because of his extremist hereditarian lexicon.

Just a few entries demonstrate Jussim's extremism:
Equalitarianism: A dogmatic, quasi-religious belief that all groups are equal on all traits that matter, usually accompanied by the belief that the only credible source of group differences is discrimination and outrage at anyone who suggests otherwise. Often accompanied by the belief that women and minorities are inherently or essentially more virtuous. 
Europhobia: Fear of Europeans and prejudice against Europeans, their descendants, and practices and ideas that originated in Europe. 
Evopsychophobia: Fear of evolutionary psychology, especially of the possibility that social groups (such as men and women) might have evolved different psychological traits and behavioral tendencies.
I'll take them in reverse order. Evolutionary psychology is a pseudoscience that pretends to be based on evolution, but in fact throws out three-quarters of evolutionary theory to focus only on adaptation as biologist PZ Myers explains.

The fear of evolutionary psychology is the fear of charlatans infiltrating academia with their just-so stories.

Europhobia is a big deal with far-right bigots who believe European culture is perfect and above criticism. If you dare suggest that European culture is not the very best of all possible cultures in every way, you are Europhobic.

Equalitarianism though really gives away Lee Jussim's racism.

As I have pointed out Equalitarianism is a term that "human biodiversity" types like the Winegards brothers borrowed from the segregationists at the White Citizens' Council. And they are not unaware of its use by the White Citizens' Council. Note the reference to religion by Jussim and the use of the term "goddess" in relation to the term by Carlton Putnam.

From in the book The Citizens' Council: Organized Resistance to the Second Reconstruction by Neil R. McMillen
Setting forth his ethnological assumption in an influential and widely circulated book, Race and Reason (1961), Putnam asserted that one need not have advanced scientific training to dispute theories of racial equalitarianism: “Any man with two eyes in his head can observe a Negro settlement in the Congo… can compare this settlement with London or Paris, and can draw his own conclusions regarding relative levels of character and intelligence…” That so few informed Americans saw things so clearly was compelling proof to Putnam that the nation had been victimized by a “pseudo-scientific hoax” popularized by such early exponents of racial equipotentiality as Franz Boas and several subsequent generations of like-minded anthropologists more devoted to “the demo-goddess of Equalitarianism” than to “the Goddess of Truth.”
Breitbart and Quillette are centers for right-wing racism and it appears to me that in addition to being a creep, Lee Jussim of Rutgers University is a right-wing racist who knowingly uses segregationist terminology to attack critics of the hereditarian swill he promotes.

I suppose we can take some comfort in the fact that Quillette is still on a downward slide on Patreon, according to Graphtreon estimates. Although I'm sure they'll find right-wing racist plutocrats to support them, maybe the same ones who support the career of racist Steve Sailer.



Wednesday, January 29, 2020

Response to "A Tale of Two Bell Curves" ~ Part 5

Stefan Molyneux created a lovely logo for Brian Boutwell.
He appears to have gotten the image of his face
from Boutwell's St. Louis University faculty page.
Originally posted on my personal blog January 24, 2018

Ugh. I am so tired of writing about just this one section of the Winegard brothers defense of The Bell Curve, published by Quillette. It's turned out to be even more ridiculous than I expected and my expectations were not high to begin with.

And I originally wanted to review what the Winegards think race is, in a separate article, but I felt I had to plow through this one first. So let's wrap this up.

At least there are only two more links.
Many scholars in the field have noted that there is a bizarre and unhealthy difference between publicly and privately expressed views. Publicly, most experts remain silent and allow vocal hereditarian skeptics to monopolize the press; privately, most concede that the hereditarian hypothesis is quite plausible. Here, we’ll leave the last word to the always judicious Earl Hunt: “Plausible cases can be made for both genetic and environmental contributions to [racial differences in] intelligence…Denials or overly precise statements on either the pro-genetic or pro-environmental side do not move the debate forward. They generate heat rather than light.” (p. 436).
Whatever the truth about the cause of racial differences in intelligence, it is not irresponsible to forward reasonable, cautiously worded, and testable hypotheses. 
Link # 12 Many scholars in the field have noted that there is a bizarre and unhealthy difference between publicly and privately expressed views.

The link presents an edition of Society magazine. The scholars listed include J. Phillippe Rushton, professional racist and Linda S. Gottfredson, professional racist. I expect there are some other racists in the table of contents, but at this point I'm suffering from too-many-racists fatigue and can't be bothered to research the other names.

Link #13 ...it is not irresponsible to forward reasonable
Whattaya know. This is a link to the very article I originally wanted to discuss, On the Reality of Race and the Abhorrence of Racism written by the Winegard bros and Brian Boutwell.

OK, let's tally their supporting sources:
  • 3 - their own work;
  • 6 - work that relies directly on Jensen and/or Rushton;
  • 2 - refutations of the hereditarian position;
  • 1 - paper they think supports them but which denies skill is 100% innate;
  • 1 - THE 2013 SURVEY OF EXPERT OPINION ON INTELLIGENCE which has a chart indicating the most reliable source of news on intelligence testing is Steve Sailer's blog.
Presumably the Winegards and Boutwell don't believe it's racist to declare differences in test scores by "race" to be genetic, but rather "race realism." Hopefully their article will explain not only what they consider the "reality of race" but also what they consider racism.

A supporter of Donald Trump's presidential campaign, he has been described as alt-right by Politico and The Washington Post, and right-wing by CNN.[3][4][5][6] The Freedomain Radio internet community which he leads has sometimes been described as a cult.[7][8][9][6] Molyneux formerly worked in the software industry.
Molyneux is also a raging misogynist.   RationalWiki quoting Molyneux:
Women who choose the assholes will fucking end this race. They will fucking end this human race if we don't start holding them a-fucking-countable. Women who choose assholes guarantee child abuse. Women who choose assholes guarantee criminality. Sociopathy. Politicians. All the cold-hearted jerks who run the world came out of the vaginas of women who married assholes, and I don't know how to make the world a better place without holding women accountable for choosing assholes! 
The theory is that if someone is evil, it's his mother's fault because she deliberately chose to reproduce with "an asshole." This is evolutionary psychology logic, since in its view of humanity, everything is caused by genetic inheritance and nothing is caused by environment. Combine that with the Men's Rights Activists/Pickup Artists philosophy that women don't like "nice guys" and you've got yourself some raging alt-right Molyneux-style misogyny.

The real question is, how do Molyneux and his alt-right cult intend to hold women "a-fucking-countable" for all the evil in the world.

OK, I don't want to fall down the alt-right rabbit hole just now, I have enough to deal with their allies the evo-psycho bros. But here is Molyneux in a Youtube video with alt-righters Gavin McInnes, misogynist about town, Owen Benjamin, MRA/"comedian" and  Mike "pizza gate" Cernovich.

For an additional understanding of how extreme Molyneux is, here he is at Infowars:

STEFAN MOLYNEUX: LEFTISTS ARE JOYLESS ZOMBIES
Brainwashed liberals are trying to eradicate happiness for the rest of America

Tuesday, January 28, 2020

Responses to Charles Murray's Human Diversity

The New Republic's Alex Shepherd has a response to the publication of Charles Murray's just-published book: Charles Murray Is Never Going Away - The author of "The Bell Curve" has a new book about race and genetics—because of course he does.

He begins by referencing the Sam Harris - Ezra Klein debate which I have previously discussed:
Two years ago, the atheist Sam Harris told Ezra Klein that Charles Murray was cancel culture’s patient zero. The co-author of 1994’s controversial The Bell Curve, which contained a chapter arguing that genetics caused blacks to have lower IQs than whites, was really a victim of political correctness, Harris said. “When I did read [The Bell Curve] and did some more research on him, I came to think that he was probably the most unfairly maligned person in my lifetime,” Harris said. “IQ is not one of my concerns and racial differences in IQ is absolutely not one of my concerns, but a person having his reputation destroyed for honestly discussing data—that deeply concerns me.”
It was a clever rhetorical trick, one frequently employed by those defending the allegedly canceled. The substance of Murray’s work was immaterial—what really mattered is that he was being silenced for pursuing “scientific” inquiry. Never mind that Murray isn’t a geneticist or biologist. Or, for that matter, that Murray’s findings have been thoroughly debunked. Or that they repeatedly cited Mankind Quarterly, which Charles Lane, writing in The New York Review of Books, described as “a notorious journal of ‘racial history’ founded, and funded, by men who believe in the genetic superiority of the white race.” The real problem was that people were pointing out that Murray’s work was based on shoddy evidence and racist journals and thus should not be taken seriously.   
Meanwhile Eric Turkheimer, whose work is cited in Murray's book, says he plans to do a series of blog posts on his responses to Murray's book. The first one was posted today and it's very good. I'm looking forward to more.

(excerpt) 
 think there are several reasons to avoid outrage in responses to the book. One that happens to pertain to me is that my ideas and research figure in the narrative, and Murray treats my work with respect even as he disagrees with it, which I acknowledge and appreciate. (Looking ahead, in the section on polygenic scores he sets up a “Turkheimer-Plomin” debate, and while conceding that in the middle rounds I am ahead on points, declares me the loser anyway, based on scientific advances that he is sure are going to occur in the next decade. More on that later.)
The more important reason to remain calm in the face of Murray’s assertions of biologically fixed differences across gender, class and race is that outrage only feeds into the scientific right’s preferred narrative about this subject, which is that most scientists recognize that the hereditarian position is correct, but refuse to admit it either because they are blinded by their own liberal prejudices, or cowed by oppressive SJW culture on today’s campus.
This is the stance Murray adopts in the Introduction. He says there is an orthodoxy in the Academe, consisting of three tenets: Gender is a social construct, race is a social construct, and class is a function of privilege. Any discussion of the biology underlying these things, he asserts, is met with contempt and exclusion from the community:

It is possible to survive on a university campus without subscribing to the orthodoxy. But you have to be inconspicuous, because the simplistic version of the orthodoxy commands the campus’s high ground. It is dangerous for a college faculty member to say openly in articles, lectures, faculty meetings, or even in casual conversations that biology has a significant role in creating differences between men and women, among races, or among social classes. Doing so often carries a price. That price can be protests by students, denial of tenure-track employment for postdocs, denial of tenure for assistant professors, or reprimands from the university’s administrators.
This picture of the PC-dominated college campus where biology is anathema is repeated so often that it is easy to assume that it must be true, but it has never made any sense to me. Are the social sciences really dominated by environmentalists? Galton, who more or less invented social science, was a hereditarian. Most of the major early theorists of genetics and intelligence were followers of Galton and hereditarians. (Murray cites John Watson, of all people, whose radical behaviorism is about as uninfluential right now as it is possible for an idea to be.) The dominant social scientists of the middle part of the century, the Cattells and the Eysencks, were hereditarians. Arthur Jensen had a pretty good run. Today, behavior genetics is a well-established part of most psychology departments in the country. Robert Plomin is among the top 5 most cited living psychologists, and was awarded the American Psychological Association’s highest award for lifetime achievement. Modern psychiatry is completely dominated by genetics and neuroscience. Do you have the sense that GWAS of behavior has been suppressed lately? You can’t get away from it. Neuroscience, if anything, is even more dominant that genetics in the modern behavioral sciences. People who still try to deny that genes or brains have anything to do with human behavior are the outcasts, not the behavior geneticists and neuroscientists.

Response to "A Tale of Two Bell Curves" ~ Part 4

Originally posted on my personal blog January 23, 2018

OK back to the Winegard bros defense of the claim in The Bell Curve that black people are intellectually inferior. I continue from this post.

Next paragraph:
For these reasons, and many more, in a 1980s survey, most scholars with expertise rejected the environment-only interpretation of the racial IQ gap, and a plurality (45%) accepted some variant of the hereditarian hypothesis. Although data are hard to obtain today, this seems to remain true. In a recent survey with 228 participants (all relevant experts), most scholars continued to reject the environment-only interpretation (supported by 17%), and a majority believed that at least 50% of the gap was genetically caused (52%). 

Link # 9 For these reasons, and many more
As with Link #3 we are back to  THIRTY YEARS OF RESEARCH ON RACE DIFFERENCES IN COGNITIVE ABILITY by Rushton and Jensen.

Link #10 1980s survey

The survey was conducted by Mark Synderman who gave a positive blurb to the work of Rushton in the right-wing National review.
"Describes hundreds of studies worldwide that show a consistent pattern of human racial differences in such characteristics as intelligence, brain size, genital size, strength of sex drive, reproductive potency, industriousness, sociability, and rule following. On each of these variables, the groups are aligned in the order: Orientals, Caucasians, Blacks."
---Mark Snyderman, National Review
Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting notes:
In a positive review (NR, 9/12/94) of Race, Evolution, and Behavior, a 1994 book by Philippe Rushton, reviewer Mark Snyderman eagerly recounted the book’s ”ambitious” and ”fearless” thesis: ”Orientals are more intelligent, have larger brains for their body size, have smaller genitalia, have less sex drive, are less fecund, work harder and are more readily socialized than Caucasians; and Caucasians on average bear the same relationship to blacks.”
Apparently Mark Snyderman knows what "race" is: Oriental, Caucasian, Black.

However his co-author in the 1980s survey, Stanley Rothman, who opposed diversity policies in colleges, appears to have other ideas about which races exist:
We also tested for the effects of higher Hispanic and Asian enrollment. Hispanic enrollment has little effect on any group's ratings of the educational or racial climate. 
I don't know for sure if Rothman's "Asian" aligns with Snyderman's "Oriental" but Rothman seems to have identified another race, "Hispanic", and I'm not sure if that aligns with Caucasian or Black. Or if, in fact, Rothman has scientifically proven the existence of the Hispanic race.

 Link #11 In a recent survey with 228 participants (all relevant experts)

Holy shit. I'm going to have to end this post after this link because my mind is so blown!

And I really shouldn't be surprised after everything I've seen so far. But I admit, I gasped.

OK, so the point of the 2013 survey was to replicate the Synderman and Rothman (see above) 1980s survey, to see if there was any change in opinion. Here is how they describe their method.

2 Method
Experts
1. Authors of papers published in
• Intelligence
• Cognitive Psychology
• Biological Psychology (if article addressed intelligence or a related topic)
• Journal of Mathematical Psychology (i a i)
• Contemporary Educational Psychology (i a i)
• Journal of School-Psychology (i a i)
• New Ideas in Psychology (i a i)
• Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology (i a i)
2. For the subject well known scientists or journalists writing on it.
3. Scientists emailed by ISIR member list (thanks to ISIR and David Lubinski!).
4. Scientists informed by ISSID website (thanks to ISSID, Don Saklofske & Michael Houlihan).
5. Scientists and interested students (NSt≤3) informed by colleagues.
Participation only after invitation (to prevent any seizing by interest groups).

Web based survey
• Questionnaire with 62 main questions.
• LimeSurvey.
• Anonymous. We only know who has never reacted and who has
ever reacted, but we cannot identify persons: how many questions a person has answered and what a person has answered.

You're welcome to read the entire paper, but once I got a look at their chart "Accuracy of news sources relating intelligence testing" I knew exactly what I was dealing with.

OK, get ready. It's incredible, except when you view it, assuming you've read the rest of my evo-psycho bros series you'll probably go "oh, of course."

The survey chart has horizontal bars. It uses two colors - the blue one represents the responses of the survey-takers in 2013, the yellow bar represents the survey-takers from the 1980s survey. Some of the news sources were not available in the 1980s, and some I guess were just not included by Snyderman and Rothman  - in any case there are a lot more blue bars than yellow.

The wider the bar, the more accurate the survey-takers consider the news source to be.


OK - HERE IS THE CHART OF NEWS SOURCES RELATING INTELLIGENCE TESTING LISTED BY GREATER TO LESSER ACCURACY AS DETERMINED BY THE 2013 SURVEY OF EXPERT OPINION ON INTELLIGENCE 





That's right. These intelligence experts esteemed "Steve Sailer's blog" above some of the world's most famous and established news sources, with Anatoly Karlin's blog coming in second. I can't find Karlin's blog, but maybe they mean his column in The Unz Review.

I haven't found Karlin's scientific credentials yet. So far the most significant thing I've discovered about Anatoly Karlin is he loves Trump and Vladimir Putin:
Putin Derangement Syndrome and Trump Derangement Syndrome continue moving towards an ever more perfect union.

Monday, January 27, 2020

Response to "A Tale of Two Bell Curves" ~ Part 3

Originally posted on my personal blog January 22, 2018


I'm continuing to review the links that the Winegard brothers provided in their defense of "The Bell Curve" in Quillette. I've reviewed the first five here.

The Winegard bros maintained that the theory that some "races" are dumber than others is especially plausible because "there are, as yet, no good alternative explanations."
Scholars who support the hereditarian hypothesis have marshalled an impressive array of evidence to defend it. Perhaps the strongest evidence is simply that there are, as yet, no good alternative explanations.
They then proceed to mention some of the alternative explanations and dismiss them without discussing them.  Like this:
Upon first encountering evidence of an IQ gap between Blacks and Whites, many immediately point to socioeconomic disparities.
They don't provide any examples of people discussing socioeconomic disparities even though "many" do. Instead they jump right to:
But researchers have long known that socioeconomic status cannot explain all of the intelligence gap.
Which includes a link to work by Arthur Jensen as I already discussed. So in this next paragraph they say:
Another argument that is often forwarded is that intelligence tests are culturally biased—they are designed in such a way that Black intelligence is underestimated. Although it would be rash to contend that bias plays absolutely no role in race differences in intelligence, it is pretty clear that it does not play a large role: standardized IQ and high stakes tests predict outcomes equally well for all native-born people. As Earl Hunt argued in his textbook, “If cultural unfairness were a major cause of racial/ethnic differences in test performance, we would not have as much trouble detecting it as seems to be the case.” (p. 425).
Link #6: intelligence tests are culturally biased

They provide a link to an article from 2009 in the Huffington Post by Dan Agin Emeritus Associate Professor of Molecular Genetics and Cell Biology, who devotes one paragraph to the cultural bias issue. And they don't address his argument at all, they just move on.

Link #7: predict outcomes equally well for all native-born people

This is the first link they provide to support their position that is not written by the Winegard bros or Jensen/Rushton (Saletan references Jensen/Rushton before he apologizes for it) and they completely misrepresent it. The paper, Fact and Fiction in Cognitive Ability Testing for Admissions and Hiring Decisions is written to support the use of admissions/hiring decisions and does admit that cultural bias can have an impact on test results:
Standardized tests of cognitive abilities are grounded in the psychometric approach to intelligence, which has focused on understanding individuals’ ability to reason, plan, solve prob- lems, think abstractly, learn and adapt, and process and com- prehend complex ideas and information (Ones, Visweswaran, & Dilchert, 2005). This does not mean that cognitive tests are pure measures of individuals’ innate ability. Although highly stable over the course of decades (e.g., Deary, Whalley, Lemmon, Crawford, & Starr, 2000), test scores reflect developed abilities and are a function of innate talent, learned knowledge and skills, and environmental factors that influence knowledge and skill acquisition, such as prior educational opportunities.
Did the Winegards actually read the paper? Especially since the paper provides an explicit example of cultural bias in skill acquisition:
Now consider a skill assessment that shows some large racial differences and has effects on occupational and other outcomes. For example, there are very large Black–White group differences in swimming skills, with white swimmers, on average, being more skilled...
One could raise a legitimate societal concern that there are differential opportunities to learn swimming, as well as familial, social, environmental, peer, economic, and cultural factors that contribute to the difference. Indeed research has found support for some of these factors (Mael, 1995). However, this is not bias in the measure. The key points are that the swimming test is not the source of the difference and is a measuring a legitimate skill and a predictor of subsequent performance. We want life guards who can swim well. Addressing the skill disparity is a societal issue. Condemning the swimming test will not correct the societal issue any more than discarding a thermometer will make a fever go away. 
In other words, skill disparity caused by social conditions is not their problem.

Next paragraph in the Winegards' defense of The Bell Curve:
Of course, there are other possible explanations of the Black-White gap, such as parenting styles, stereotype threat, and a legacy of slavery/discrimination among others. However, to date, none of these putative causal variables has been shown to have a significant effect on the IQ gap, and no researcher has yet made a compelling case that environmental variables can explain the gap. This is certainly not for lack of effort; for good reason, scholars are highly motivated to ascertain possible environmental causes of the gap and have tried for many years to do just that.

Link #8: certainly not for lack of effort

Again they provide a link to a single source, in this case a book by Richard E. Nisbett called Intelligence and How to Get It: Why Schools and Cultures Count and they don't address any of his arguments. They just declare it a failure and move on.

But what they say prior to that is truly jaw-dropping. The idea that "a legacy of slavery/discrimination" has no impact on black intelligence is an example of the primary problem with evolutionary psychology: its extreme resistance to acknowledging socio-economic factors.

David Buller demonstrated that David Buss, a giant in the world of evo-psycho bros, mistook female slavery for female choice because, I would argue, of the reflexive habit of evo-psycho to turn everything into evolved innateness
Buss cites several studies like this as indicating that "high status in men leads directly to increased sexual access to a larger number of women," and he implies that this is due to the greater desirability of high-status men (David Buss 1999 "Evolutionary Psychology the New Science of the Mind"). 
But, among the Turkmen, women were sold by their families into marriage. The reason that higher-status males enjoyed greater reproductive success among the Turkmen is that they were able to buy wives earlier and more often than lower-status males. Other studies that clearly demonstrate a reproductive advantage for high-status males are also studies of societies or circumstances in which males "traded" in women. This isn't evidence that high-status males enjoy greater reproductive success because women find them more desirable. Indeed, it isn't evidence of female preference at all, just as the fact that many harem-holding despots produced remarkable numbers of offspring is no evidence of their desirability to women. It is only evidence that when men have power they will use it to promote their reproductive success, among other things (and that women, under such circumstances, will prefer entering a harem to suffering the dire consequences of refusal).
You can build a case for "the legacy of slavery/discrimination" having an impact on intelligence in five minutes if you possess deductive reasoning ability and have access to the Internet.

Does poverty have an impact on intelligence? Yes.
Science Magazine: Poverty Impedes Cognitive Function
Have black people in general been poor since the days of slavery? Yes.
ScienceDirect: Slavery, education, and inequality
Abstract: We investigate the effect of slavery on the current level of income inequality across US counties. We find that a larger proportion of slaves over population in 1860 persistently increases inequality, and in particular inequality across races. We also show that a crucial channel of transmission from slavery to racial inequality is human capital accumulation, i.e., current inequality is primarily influenced by slavery through the unequal educational attainment of blacks and whites. Finally, we provide suggestive evidence that the underlying links run through the political exclusion of former slaves and the resulting negative influence on the local provision of education.

So there you have it - black people have been poorer than whites since the days of slavery and not only does the legacy of slavery impact the acquisition of wealth by blacks, an important cause is unequal education attainment.  Poor education leading to poverty and the stresses of poverty itself combine to provide a compelling case that blacks having lower intelligence scores than whites is not genetic.

I wasn't aware of either of the two studies I mentioned until I sat down to write this post. I made a tiny effort to look.

The Winegard brothers didn't find any compelling cases because they didn't bother to look.

Here is Steven Pinker on Twitter, in reference to the Winegard article, claiming he doesn't agree with The Bell Curve on race.

But if Pinker doesn't agree with the Bell Curve on race, and given that the "public discussion" of the book has focused on criticisms of what it says about race, and given that he maintains the discussion has been  "ignorant and dishonest" then what exactly is it about race in The Bell Curve that Pinker doesn't agree with?

More on the links in this Bell Curve article in the next post.




Sunday, January 26, 2020

Bernie Sanders makes common cause with the IDW

Sanders appeared on Joe Rogan's show and then made a promotional ad featuring Rogan's endorsement.

This is Joe Rogan:



Rogan made the Sanders endorsement, appropriately enough, while interviewing Bari Weiss, publicist for the Intellectual Dark Web, who wrote about Rogan in her NYTimes article about the IDW:
“People are starved for controversial opinions,” said Joe Rogan, an MMA color commentator and comedian who hosts one of the most popular podcasts in the country. “And they are starved for an actual conversation.” 
That hunger has translated into a booming and, in many cases, profitable market. Episodes of “The Joe Rogan Experience,” which have featured many members of the I.D.W., can draw nearly as big an audience as Rachel Maddow. A recent episode featuring Bret Weinstein and Ms. Heying talking about gender, hotness, beauty and #MeToo was viewed on YouTube over a million times, even though the conversation lasted for nearly three hours.
Rogan is considered such an important member of the Intellectual Dark Web he had his photo taken for the article, just like Michael Shermer and Christina Hoff Sommers.



It's important to note that Rogan would like to see a ticket with Sanders and Tulsi Gabbard. In other words the two candidates who hate the Democratic Party.

I hope that this stops Sanders' recent rise in the polls. I can't imagine why any African Americans, who were already trending towards Biden, would ever vote for Sanders in the primary after this.


Sanders supporters of course can't admit any of this is a problem. I am very disappointed in Ezra Klein for defending Sanders over this. Just like the Trump cult, the Sanders cult cannot admit when their mighty leader is wrong.





Response to "A Tale of Two Bell Curves" ~ Part 2

Unlike Pinker and Coyne, the HBD web site -
which links to work by them,
the Winegards and Razib Khan,
claims to know exactly what race is
and which races exist



Originally posted on my personal blog January 21, 2018

For my discussion of the Winegard brothers' Quillette article about the Bell Curve I excerpted the section concerning the racial component of intelligence. What I want to do in this blog post is address the sources the Winegards linked in that excerpt.

Please note that in my opinion the Winegards failed to demonstrate that "race" has any real meaning outside of the colloquial one generally used by North Americans. I will get to that issue when I review their  On the Reality of Race and the Abhorrence of Racism piece.

On to the references for their Bell Curve piece.

Here is the first paragraph that contains links from the excerpt.
Although one would not believe it from reading most mainstream articles on the topic (with the exception of William Saletan’s piece at Slate), the proposal that some intelligence differences among races are genetically caused is quite plausible. It is not our goal, here, to cover this debate exhaustively. Rather, we simply want to note that the hereditarian hypothesis is reasonable and coheres with a parsimonious view of the evolution of human populations . Whether or not it is correct is another question.

Link #1: The Saletan piece

The Saletan piece is used by the Winegards to show that at least one mainstream media contrarian is on board the belief in race-based intelligence differences. Its title is "Liberal Creationism" and was posted November 18, 2007.

What the Winegards fail to mention is that ten days later, November 28, 2007, Saletan posted an article titled "Regrets" and said this (excerpt):
...But the thing that has upset me most concerns a co-author of one of the articles I cited. In researching this subject, I focused on published data and relied on peer review and rebuttals to expose any relevant issue. As a result, I missed something I could have picked up from a simple glance at Wikipedia. 
For the past five years, J. Philippe Rushton has been president of the Pioneer Fund, an organization dedicated to "the scientific study of heredity and human differences." During this time, the fund has awarded at least $70,000 to the New Century Foundation. To get a flavor of what New Century stands for, check out its publications on crime ("Everyone knows that blacks are dangerous") and heresy ("Unless whites shake off the teachings of racial orthodoxy they will cease to be a distinct people"). New Century publishes a magazine called American Renaissance, which preaches segregation. Rushton routinely speaks at its conferences. 
I was negligent in failing to research and report this. I'm sorry. I owe you better than that.
In his 1994 review of The Bell Curve, Charles Lane discusses the connection between The Bell Curve and the Pioneer Fund:
Which brings us back to Murray and Herrnstein. They cite in their book no fewer than thirteen scholars who have benefited from Pioneer Fund grants in the last two decades—the grants total more than $4 million. Many of The Bell Curve’s sources who worked for Mankind Quarterly were also granted Pioneer money.16
But the Winegards, who don't mention the shady racist sourcing of The Bell Curve also don't mention that Saletan apologized for failing to mention the shady racist sourcing of his beliefs in racial intelligence issues.

Link #2: a parsimonious view of the evolution of human populations

In case anybody is foolish enough to buy into the Winegards presenting themselves as objective analysts of the claims in The Bell Curve, this link, used to argue "the hereditarian hypothesis is reasonable"  links to their own work Human Biological and Psychological Diversity which shows them to be firmly in the "human bio-diversity" camp.

The next paragraph contains this:
Scholars who support the hereditarian hypothesis have marshalled an impressive array of evidence to defend it. Perhaps the strongest evidence is simply that there are, as yet, no good alternative explanations.
Link #3: an impressive array of evidence to defend it

In addition to their own HBD paper, which I'm sure the Winegards feel is just as impressive, they describe another "impressive array of evidence" which turns out to be a paper THIRTY YEARS OF RESEARCH ON RACE DIFFERENCES IN COGNITIVE ABILITY written by the previously mentioned (by Saletan) Phillippe Rushton president of the racist Pioneer Fund along with equally racist Arthur Jensen who argued that programs like Head Start were doomed to fail because the genetic stupidity of those the program served. Studies have proven Jensen was wrong but you'll never hear about that from the likes of the Winegard bros.

To take the paragraph as a whole, the Wingards are claiming that racists, funded by racists making racist claims, are providing "an impressive array of evidence" to defend racist conclusions. And the strongest evidence in favor of racist explanations, they claim, is that there are "no good alternative explanations." Later on the Winegards dismiss without argument poorly-presented alternatives, but since the Winegards are already True Believers in "human bio-diversity" they have no desire to seriously consider alternative explanations. I'll get to that in the next post.

Next paragraph
Upon first encountering evidence of an IQ gap between Blacks and Whites, many immediately point to socioeconomic disparities. But researchers have long known that socioeconomic status cannot explain all of the intelligence gap. Even if researchers control for SES, the intelligence gap is only shrunk by roughly 30% (estimates vary based on the dataset used, but almost none of the datasets finds that SES accounts for the entire gap). This is excessively charitable, as well, because intelligence also causes differences in socioeconomic status, so when researchers “control for SES,” they automatically shrink some of the gap.
Link #4: socioeconomic status cannot explain all of the intelligence gap

One again, they link to the work of Arthur Jensen, The g Factor: The Science of Mental Ability (Human Evolution, Behavior, and Intelligence)

Link #5: almost none of the datasets finds that SES accounts for the entire gap

This links to a piece on the Florida State University web site which you can't access without login credentials so I can't examine it, but presumably it's by Bo Winegard, the Winegard associated with FSU.

So what's the score so far? Of the five links, two are to their own work, two are to work by Jensen/Jensen & Rushton) and one is to a piece that Saletan apologized for because of a Rushton connection.

More looks at links in the next post. Don't worry, we haven't heard the last of Jensen and Rushton.

Saturday, January 25, 2020

Response to "A Tale of Two Bell Curves" ~ part 1

Originally posted to my personal blog January 20, 2018

It was my intention in this post to analyze the serious flaws of a piece published in Quillette on the issue of the existence of race as a biological reality but then I fell down the racist rabbit hole at Quillette. So I have to step back and discuss a few other things first.

Quillette is not some kind of peer-reviewed science periodical, but rather a right-wing/libertarian project by Claire Lehmann.

According to her bio, Lehmann is a psychology grad student drop-out who in addition to contributing to mostly right-leaning media outlets (National Review, Commentary, The Spectator) mentions writing for her own Quillette as one of her accomplishments.

Quillette opposes feminism - every article posted about feminism in Quillette is an attack on feminists. And of course it taps anti-feminist Susan Venker to write glowingly of Camille Paglia, buddy of Rush Limbaugh, whose entire claim to fame is based on attacking feminists.

I'll save you the time in reading Venker's take, which is, as always: feminists hate men.

Now typically I'd just ignore Quillette like I ignore the National Review or any other piece of right-wing trash (read about the National Review's history concerning the Civil Rights movement here), but it is used as a source frequently by Steven Pinker and Jerry Coyne. Meanwhile the third evo-psycho bro, Razib Khan, is contributor at Quillette.

And to my surprise and disgust I just realized that Jonathan Kay, who ghost-wrote Justin Trudeau's Common Ground and who I was inclined to respect and with whom I agree about the perniciousness of anti-cultural appropriation was also a contributor. Maybe I'll have to apologize to Jeet Heer, who called Kay a "rightwing provocateur." Although Kay claims on Twitter he's taking a break from Quillette.

In addition to Razib Khan, Quillette's go-to guys for opinions on race appear to be Bo Winegard, Ben Winegard and Brian Boutwell (the authors of  On the Reality of Race and the Abhorrence of Racism.)

The Khan piece I linked to early on in this post was co-authored by Boutwell.

Their bios at the end of the piece:
  • Bo Winegard is a graduate student at Florida State University. Follow him on Twitter @EPoe187
  • Ben Winegard is an Assistant Professor at Carroll College. Follow him on Twitter @BenWinegard
  • Brian Boutwell is an Associate Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Saint Louis University. Follow him on Twitter @fsnole1 (NOTE: his actual account appears to be FSNole57 )

The Winegards and Brian Boutwell are proponents of "human biological diversity" as demonstrated in this piece: Human Biological and Psychological Diversity.

Not surprisingly, Steve Sailer, Steven Pinker's old buddy, is a big fan of their work.

While looking for work in Quillette by the Winegard brothers and Boutwell I discovered the Winegards':  A Tale of Two Bell Curves which was published after the Reality of Race article.

Here is an excerpt:
Claim 4b: It is likely that some of the intelligence differences among races are caused by genetics.
This was the most controversial argument of The Bell Curve, but before addressing it, it is worth noting how cautious Hernstein and Murray were when forwarding this hypothesis: “It seems highly likely to us that both genes and environment have something to do with racial differences. What might that mix be? We are resolutely agnostic on that issue; as far as we can determine, the evidence does not yet justify an estimate.” (p. 311). This is far from the strident tone one would expect from reading secondhand accounts of The Bell Curve!
There are two issues to address here. The first is how plausible is the hereditarian hypothesis (the hypothesis that genes play a causal role in racial differences in intelligence); and the second is should responsible researchers be allowed to forward reasonable, but potentially inflammatory hypotheses if they might later turn out false.
Although one would not believe it from reading most mainstream articles on the topic (with the exception of William Saletan’s piece at Slate), the proposal that some intelligence differences among races are genetically caused is quite plausible. It is not our goal, here, to cover this debate exhaustively. Rather, we simply want to note that the hereditarian hypothesis is reasonable and coheres with a parsimonious view of the evolution of human populations . Whether or not it is correct is another question.
Scholars who support the hereditarian hypothesis have marshalled an impressive array of evidence to defend it. Perhaps the strongest evidence is simply that there are, as yet, no good alternative explanations.
Upon first encountering evidence of an IQ gap between Blacks and Whites, many immediately point to socioeconomic disparities. But researchers have long known that socioeconomic status cannot explain all of the intelligence gap. Even if researchers control for SES, the intelligence gap is only shrunk by roughly 30% (estimates vary based on the dataset used, but almost none of the datasets finds that SES accounts for the entire gap). This is excessively charitable, as well, because intelligence also causes differences in socioeconomic status, so when researchers “control for SES,” they automatically shrink some of the gap.
Another argument that is often forwarded is that intelligence tests are culturally biased—they are designed in such a way that Black intelligence is underestimated. Although it would be rash to contend that bias plays absolutely no role in race differences in intelligence, it is pretty clear that it does not play a large role: standardized IQ and high stakes tests predict outcomes equally well for all native-born people. As Earl Hunt argued in his textbook, “If cultural unfairness were a major cause of racial/ethnic differences in test performance, we would not have as much trouble detecting it as seems to be the case.” (p. 425).
Of course, there are other possible explanations of the Black-White gap, such as parenting styles, stereotype threat, and a legacy of slavery/discrimination among others. However, to date, none of these putative causal variables has been shown to have a significant effect on the IQ gap, and no researcher has yet made a compelling case that environmental variables can explain the gap. This is certainly not for lack of effort; for good reason, scholars are highly motivated to ascertain possible environmental causes of the gap and have tried for many years to do just that.
For these reasons, and many more, in a 1980s survey, most scholars with expertise rejected the environment-only interpretation of the racial IQ gap, and a plurality (45%) accepted some variant of the hereditarian hypothesis. Although data are hard to obtain today, this seems to remain true. In a recent survey with 228 participants (all relevant experts), most scholars continued to reject the environment-only interpretation (supported by 17%), and a majority believed that at least 50% of the gap was genetically caused (52%). Many scholars in the field have noted that there is a bizarre and unhealthy difference between publicly and privately expressed views. Publicly, most experts remain silent and allow vocal hereditarian skeptics to monopolize the press; privately, most concede that the hereditarian hypothesis is quite plausible. Here, we’ll leave the last word to the always judicious Earl Hunt: “Plausible cases can be made for both genetic and environmental contributions to [racial differences in] intelligence…Denials or overly precise statements on either the pro-genetic or pro-environmental side do not move the debate forward. They generate heat rather than light.” (p. 436).
Whatever the truth about the cause of racial differences in intelligence, it is not irresponsible to forward reasonable, cautiously worded, and testable hypotheses. Science progresses by rigorously testing hypotheses, and it is antithetical to the spirit of science to disregard and in fact rule out of bounds an entirely reasonable category of explanations (those that posit some genetic causation in intelligence differences among racial groups). The Bell Curve is not unique for forwarding such hypotheses; it is unique because it did so publicly. Academics and media pundits quickly made Murray an effigy and relentlessly flogged him as a warning to others: If you go public with what you know, you too will suffer this fate.

I find it odd that this article, published in March 2017 talks about how "if you go public with what you know, you too will suffer (a bad) fate" and yet don't even mention Razib Khan, who co-wrote a piece in Quillette with the bros' other co-author Brian Boutwell. Even though it's in the public record that Khan lost a job working at the New York Times thanks to the controversy about his racism.

Apologists for The Bell Curve never tell you that one of the major sources of claims used by "The Bell Curve" is itself racist. In Charles Lane's 1994 review of the Bell Curve he writes:
Surely the most curious of the sources he and Herrnstein consulted is Mankind Quarterly—a journal of anthropology founded in Edinburgh in 1960. Five articles from the journal are actually cited in The Bell Curve’s bibliography (pp. 775, 807, and 828).2 But the influence on the book of scholars linked to Mankind Quarterly is more significant. No fewer than seventeen researchers cited in the bibliography of The Bell Curve have contributed to Mankind Quarterly. Ten are present or former editors, or members of its editorial advisory board. This is interesting because Mankind Quarterly is a notorious journal of “racial history” founded, and funded, by men who believe in the genetic superiority of the white race.3 
Mankind Quarterly was established during decolonization and the US civil rights movement. Defenders of the old order were eager to brush a patina of science on their efforts. Thus Mankind Quarterly’s avowed purpose was to counter the “Communist” and “egalitarian” influences that were allegedly causing anthropology to neglect the fact of racial differences. “The crimes of the Nazis,” wrote Robert Gayre, Mankind Quarterly’s founder and editor-in-chief until 1978, “did not, however, justify the enthronement of a doctrine of a-racialism as fact, nor of egalitarianism as ethnically and ethically demonstrable.”4
Gayre was a champion of apartheid in South Africa, and belonged to the ultra-right Candour League of white-ruled Rhodesia.5 In 1968, he testified for the defense at the hate speech trial of five members of the British Racial Preservation Society, offering his expert opinion that blacks are “worthless.”6 The founders of Mankind Quarterly also included Henry E. Garrett of Columbia University, a one-time pamphleteer for the White Citizens’ Councils who provided expert testimony for the defense in Brown v. Board of Education;7 and Corrado Gini, leader of fascist Italy’s eugenics movement and author of a 1927 Mussolini apologia called “The Scientific Basis of Fascism.”8
I doubt that the readers of Quillette actually take the time to look at the hyperlinked references the Winegards provide in the piece.  However I did take the time, and the Winegards sources are primarily notorious scientific racists and their own work. I will review their sources in the next post.

Saturday, January 18, 2020

Methinks it is like a weasel ~ Steven Pinker equivocates again

Yesterday Steven Pinker tweeted a link to another unctuous blog post from Jerry Coyne groveling before the Master.

It was no surprise to read Coyne suggesting that anybody who criticizes the work of Pinker is a "Pecksniff."
So you can look forward to that (as usual, the Pecksniffs will come out in force to criticize it, no matter what he says). Steve said he’ll start writing it in about a year, and I suspect it won’t be long after that until it’s finished (he wrote The Better Angels of Our Nature in only a year and a half).
The term "Pecksniff" indicates that Coyne believes Pinker's critics are guilty of hypocritically and unctuously affecting benevolence or high moral principles.

Pecksniff is a Dickens character. If I had to choose a Dickens character to compare to Coyne, I'd have to say Uriah Heep: his name has become synonymous with sycophancy.

Pinker on the other hand reminds me of a Shakespeare character, Polonius.

But I was surprised by Coyne when he wrote this:
 We talked about determinism, free will, the evolution of music (Steve thinks that there is not an adaptive evolutionary basis for music and musicality, even though music is universal in all cultures),
This struck me as odd because in his immortal review of The Blank Slate, Louis Menand wrote:
...To say that music is the product of a gene for "art-making," naturally selected to impress potential mates - which is one of the things Pinker believes..."
But when I reviewed the chapter on art in The Blank Slate to find the source, I found Pinker saying the opposite:
"...The psychological roots of (artistic) activities have become a topic of recent research and debate. Some researchers, such as the scholar Ellen Dissanayake, believe that art is an evolutionary adaptation like the emotion of fear or the ability to see in depth. Others, such as myself, believe that art (other than narrative) is a by-product of three other adaptations: the hunger for status, the aesthetic pleasure of experiencing adaptive objects and environments, and the ability to design artifacts to achieve desired ends...
However Menand can be forgiven for missing that since later in the chapter dedicated to his anti-20th century art jeremiad, Pinker seems to forget he just said art is a by-product of a "hunger for status" providing yet another example of Pinker's signature trait, equivocation.

A trait Menand himself noted:
Having it both ways is an irritating feature of "The Blank Slate." Pinker can write, in refutation of the scarecrow theory of violent behavior, "The sad fact is that despite the repeated assurances that 'we know the conditions that breed violence,' we barely have a clue," and then, a few pages later, "It is not surprising, then, that when African American teenagers are taken out of underclass neighborhoods they are no more violent or delinquent than white teenagers." Well, that should give us one clue. 
Pinker's entire point about 20th century modernism and post-modernism is that they deny human nature - which means evolutionary adaptation, which is the basis of hereditarian beliefs.

Pages after he says he does not believe art appreciation is an evolutionary adaptation, Pinker writes:
Once we recognize what modernism and postmodernism have done to the elite arts and humanities, the reasons for their decline and fall become all too obvious. The movements are based on a false theory of human psychology, the Blank Slate. They fail to apply their most vaunted ability - stripping away pretense - to themselves... 
...Young children prefer calendar landscapes to pictures of deserts and forests, and babies as young as three months old gaze longer at a pretty face than at a plain one. Babies prefer consonant musical intervals over dissonant ones...
I assume that is what prompted Menand to write the funniest line in his review:
To say that music is the product of a gene for "art-making," naturally selected to impress potential mates—which is one of the things Pinker believes—is to say absolutely nothing about what makes any particular piece of music significant to human beings. No doubt Wagner wished to impress potential mates; who does not? It is a long way from there to "Parsifal."
So Pinker wants to have it both ways - claim art is not an evolutionary adaptation itself but rather a by-product of something that truly is - hunger for status - while at the same time claim that modern art is unpopular because it denies evolutionary adaptation.
The dominant theories of elite art and criticism in the twentieth century grew out of a militant denial of human nature. One legacy is ugly, baffling and insulting art. The other is pretentious and unintelligible scholarship. And they're surprised that people are staying away in droves?
But modern art does not deny what Pinker clearly states is actually an evolutionary adaptation trait, hunger for status. If you are truly elite, a high-status individual, by definition you don't care what the droves want. The French even have an expression for it: epater les bourgeoisie, used to describe the attitude of artists from Pinker's beloved pre-20th century:
...a French phrase that became a rallying cry for the French Decadent poets of the late 19th century including Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud.[1] It means "to shock the bourgeoisie".[2]
The continuing popularity of Baudelaire and Rimbaud demonstrates that what was once considered ugly, baffling and insulting may one day be enjoyed, even by the bourgeoisie.

And I don't know if only elites are buying the work of Cindy Sherman, one of the human-nature denying scoundrels mentioned in The Blank Slate, but her work is now often sold for millions of dollars.

Phil Torres, attacked by Pinker and Coyne for daring to make a valid critique of Pinker's work - which I assume makes him a Pecksniff to Coyne - wrote:
...they refuse — they will always refuse, it’s what overconfident white men do — to admit making mistakes when they’re obviously wrong.
But thanks to Pinker's predilection for taking both sides of an issue (AKA weak and strong pinkerism), it's hard to tell exactly when he's making a mistake. He seems to constantly hedge his bets. And when he wants to say something nasty about his critics, people like Coyne and Michael Shermer are apparently happy to do it for him.

As a result, the intellectual failures (and the petty and vindictive nature) of Steven Pinker go unrecognized by many.

But every now and then a member of the elite will point it out.

Enter POLONIUS 
   HAMLET 
God bless you, sir! 
   LORD POLONIUS 
My lord, the queen would speak with you, and presently. 
   HAMLET 
Do you see yonder cloud that's almost in shape of a camel? 
   LORD POLONIUS 
By the mass, and 'tis like a camel, indeed. 
   HAMLET 
Methinks it is like a weasel. 
   LORD POLONIUS 
It is backed like a weasel. 
   HAMLET 
Or like a whale? 
   LORD POLONIUS 
Very like a whale. 
   HAMLET 
Then I will come to my mother by and by. They fool me to the top of my bent. I will come by and by.  
   LORD POLONIUS 
I will say so. 
   HAMLET 
By and by is easily said. 
Exit POLONIUS

Thursday, January 9, 2020

Sean Ono Lennon - IDW supporter

Many times John Lennon's second son, Sean Ono Lennon has expressed support for Bret and Eric Weinstein.

Eric is of course the founder of the "intellectual dark web" with ties to Trump-supporting plutocrat Peter Thiel.

Lennon has become a darling of the right.

It absolutely sickens me to think that money earned through the music of the Beatles might get funneled by someone who never had to work a day in his life into race science or anti-trans hatred or misogyny or other right-wing IDW projects.

Wednesday, January 8, 2020

Steven Pinker, signal boosting race science hack Noah Carl


Steven Pinker gave the career of racist Steve Sailer a boost, and is a consistent defender of Pioneer Fund recipient Linda Gottfredson, so it's no surprise he decided to signal boost Noah Carl, writing in Areo (Quillette's hereditarian twin sister) and claiming to be a free speech martyr.

Carl is a purveyor of the most antiquated race science possible, as I discussed here. His "science" is based on hypotheses about "race" developed centuries ago and debunked by 21st century genetics.

Pinker demonstrates once again the IDW's determination to mainstream race "science."

Tuesday, January 7, 2020

The mind of a racist, part 6: Steve Sailer and IDW funding


When Steven Pinker dropped him in 2011, Steve Sailer lost his most direct connection to mainstream respectability, and had to be content to promote his career through the right-wing racist ecosystem of VDARE, Taki and Unz.

In 2017 New York Magazine wrote an article about Sailer, The Man Who Invented Identity Politics for the New Right, about his "subliminal influence" on well-known conservatives:
As Michael Brendan Dougherty of The Week has observed, Sailer has exerted “a kind of subliminal influence across much of the right … even in the places where his controversial writing on race was decidedly unwelcome.” Sometimes that influence has not even been subliminal — David Brooks has cited Sailer in The New York Times on the correlation between white fertility rates and voting patterns, Times columnist Ross Douthat has referenced Sailer’s analogy between Breitbart-style conservatism and punk rock, and the economist Tyler Cowen has described him as “the most significant neo-reaction thinker today.
The Tyler Cowen connection is most important: Cowen is a Koch man, discussed at Naked Capitalism: Tyler Cowen, Koch Brothers Funding, Mercatus Center, George Mason University, and Academic Freedom

The Intellectual Dark Web has many ties to Koch money, most prominently through the careers of Charles Murray and Christina Hoff Sommers. Sommers is a resident scholar of the Koch-funded American Enterprise Institute and Murray is AEI's F. A. Hayek Chair in Cultural Studies. Other IDWs have received direct Koch organization funding and Steven Pinker has received indirect Koch funding.

And now Mercatus has a new funding scheme aiming to provide financial aid to members of the IDW and the like-minded, "Emergent Ventures" noted in September 2018 by TechCrunch:

Tyler Cowen,  who I interviewed here, is a fascinating economist. Part pragmatist and part dreamer, he has been researching and writing about the future for a long time in books and his blog, Marginal Revolution. Now he and his university, George Mason, are putting some money where his mouth is. 
Cowen and the team at GMU are working on Emergent Ventures, a fellowship and grant program for moon shots. The goal is to give people with big ideas a little capital to help them build out their dreams. 
“It has long been my view that risk-takers are not sufficiently rewarded in the world of ideas and that academic incentives are too conservative,” he said. “The intellectual scene should learn something from Silicon Valley and venture capital.” 
Cowen is raising $4 million for the first fund. He announced the fund in a podcast on the Mercatus website. 
“People such as Satoshi and Jordan Peterson have had huge impacts (regardless of one’s degree of enthusiasm for their ideas), and yet in terms of philanthropic funding the world just isn’t geared to seed their ambitions,” said Cowen.
Peterson is a member of the IDW, and is known for his crackpot ideas (biologist PZ Myers made a series of videos about them) and I assume the Satoshi mentioned is not the pseudonym of an influential bitcoin programmer but rather Satoshi Kanazawa, best known for his claims that "Sub-Saharan Black African countries suffer from chronic poverty and disease because their people have lower IQs, and black women are objectively less attractive than women of other races..."

Both claims with which Steve Sailer enthusiastically agrees.

Satoshi Kanazawa also wrote an obituary of extreme race science promoter J. Phillip Rushton (seen here addressing the white supremacist American Renaissance convention) and  called him a "modern-day Gaileo."

It seems in the case of Cowen and Emergent Ventures, Sailer's controversial writing on race is welcome, at least coming from someone who is not Sailer.

According to the Emergent Ventures web site:
Launched with $1 million grant from the Thiel Foundation, the mission is to jumpstart high-risk, high-reward ideas that advance prosperity, opportunity, and wellbeing. The fellowship provides participants with the short-term resources and support to quickly develop and test their ideas. 
In addition to financial support, participants will have access to mentors and networks in the George Mason community, such as Mercatus’ faculty director, Tyler Cowen, and industry leaders across the country. Emergent Ventures is looking to make a bet on talented individuals with unique ideas for changing the world. Sign up above to keep in touch.
The apparent founder of the IDW, Eric Weinstein, works for Trump supporter Peter Thiel and promotes him often.

Steve Sailer's views are not at all out of line with the views of people whom Koch and Thiel and Cowen want to support. And we know Sailer and leading race science promoter and Koch favorite Charles Murray have a mutual admiration.

So why doesn't Sailer get Koch money?

We know he doesn't, at least as of April 2019.



The person Sailer is tweeting at is Alex Nowrasteh, who works for Koch via the Cato Institute.

But Sailer doesn't seem to like him much and he really doesn't like Koch, even grouping him in with the biggest of the right-wingers' bete noirs:
The BLM/Hillary/Koch/Soros/NYT plan for betting the country on less law and order?
It seems that the AEI/Koch faction of the right prefers open borders and Sailer and the current ruling faction of the Republican Party, the Trumpers, prefer closed borders.

It's the classic division of conservative America - the rah rah capitalism side and the rah rah racism side.

I don't think the two sides disagree fundamentally about a race-based human hierarchy. I don't think the Koch side has any love for people from Central and South America.

Immigrants, especially unskilled immigrants, will work for cheap and that's good for people like Koch.

The difference between the two sides is the degree to which racism trumps capitalism. Steve Sailer is fine with capitalism, but he hates other "races" more than he loves capitalism. And although Charles Murray doesn't mind being associated with him, Sailer is probably just a little bit too obvious about his open contempt for black people for those who control the plutocrat purse strings.

But it could change. If the IDW manages to gain mainstream acceptability for race "science" the rah rah capitalism wing will no longer have to feel embarrassed about Steve Sailer's bluntness, and might start shoveling money his way.

It's possible they are already considering it, based on tweets I happened to observe. I originally wrote about that here.

This tweet (below) indicates to me that rather than dismissing Sailer, it's possible those in Kochland are arguing whether to publicly align with Sailer.

If they do, we will know that the right has decided to make a full-scale attack on any progress made since the days of the Civil Rights Movement. And they may even attempt to twist the words of Martin Luther King, Jr. to do it.


When will someone representing Bill Watterson make HBD Chick stop 
smearing his work by associating Hobbes with her racism?



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