By some miracle, a discussion of the career of Jonathan Haidt, in the New Yorker, actually included a mention of Haidt's support for race pseudoscience:
Haidt had risen to public-intellectual fame in the early two-thousands via his work on positive psychology, but “Coddling” turned him into a folk hero in a frequently specious war against cancel culture, winning him fans among the revanchist likes of Joe Rogan, Bari Weiss, and Jordan Peterson. He has often taken a both-sides approach to political conflict that equates leftist activism with deadly right-wing extremism. (A section in “Coddling” that deals with the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally of white supremacists and the counter-demonstrators it drew, in Charlottesville, is an especially egregious example of this tendency.) He has been beset by a troubling fixation on the heritability of I.Q.—a contention widely dismissed as scientific racism—and the purported accuracy of stereotypes.
To understand just exactly how racist Haidt's beliefs are, it's useful to know that Jesse Singal, infamous transphobe and supporter of Steve Pinker, immediately jumped in to defend Haidt and then ALL THE RACISTS jumped on Singal's thread to shout amen, including the most infamous racists, Steve Sailer, Bo Winegard and Emil Kirkegaard.
The term ‘heritability,’ as it is used today in human behavioral genetics, is one of the most misleading in the history of science. Contrary to popular belief, the measurable heritability of a trait does not tell us how ‘genetically inheritable’ that trait is. Further, it does not inform us about what causes a trait, the relative influence of genes in the development of a trait, or the relative influence of the environment in the development of a trait. Because we already know that genetic factors have significant influence on the development of all human traits, measures of heritability are of little value, except in very rare cases. We, therefore, suggest that continued use of the term does enormous damage to the public understanding of how human beings develop their individual traits and identities.
But hereditarians benefit from the confusion over the term and so they will never drop it.
But being stupid and wrong has never prevented a mediocre white man from becoming a celebrity intellectual, just ask Steven Pinker.
