Weaponized crackpottery and the influence of the Intellectual Dark Web

Professor Dave notes in his latest video that physicist Sabina Hossenfelder is parroting Peter Thiel's talking points about the alleged slow-down of scientific advancement, and speculates that Hossenfelder is on the Thiel payroll. Something I've been wondering about for years now.

Thiel is of course known for funding Trump. It's very likely he and his network are behind the Trump administration's attacks on science and academia.

The fact that Hossenfelder has decided to support infamous crackpot and Thiel employee Eric Weinstein - often given credit, if you can call it that, for coining the name "Intellectual Dark Web" - is something she would be more likely to do if she, too, was on the Thiel payroll. 

Although I suppose it's possible she decided to torch her science career out of sheer stupidity. 

I recorded Peter Thiel giving a speech at Stanford in 2022 - and created a transcript - and in his stream-of-consciousness babble, he explains his paranoid belief that there is a nefarious influence preventing scientific advancement, which boils down to, basically, hippies, claiming they were influenced by Charles Manson (my highlighted emphasis):

But but if I had if I had to sort of give a single again steelman idea. The best argument for why, why this has been so slow for the last 50 years and I think we have to somehow engage with and take take more seriously. Is that there is something about science and technology that has taken you know very dystopian very destructive turn in the um, in the in the 20th century and there are you know it, it is, it is not we're not in the 18th century 19th century you know rationalist enlightenment age, where it seems to be simply making everything better in every way, all the time. You know, already the two world wars, certainly, certainly the nuclear weapons. You know, on some level suggested that the sort of, I don't know the the the sort of rhetoric of Rousseau or Voltaire about the natural goodness of man was starting to run you know a little bit then by by by the 50s and 60s. And the the the kind of um the kind of history I would tell it's not perfect, but of of the last 70-75 years is this gradually seeped into society. It sort of manifested in different ways, you know um you know, you have a crazy person like Charles Manson, you know, what did he see when he was overdosing, you know, on LSD? He saw that there was going to be a thermonuclear war, and then he decided to become some sort of, you know, anti-hero from Dostoyevski and start killing people because everything was permitted in this world that was headed towards the apocalypse. And there was something like this that seeped in, and this was what gave the environmental movement so much force in the 70s. It's like we have to just slow this down. We have to put some brakes on. Uh and it is it is just the way in which so many of these technologies have this, have this dual use component.

Thiel is one of the richest men in the world and has funded race pseudoscience garbage heap Quillette, the main publication of the Intellectual Dark Web. 

You can blame at least some of the insanity of our current political situation on the malign influence of crackpot plutocrats like Thiel.

Physicist Angela Collier explains why the claim that science, or at least physics, has slowed down is bullshit in this video. At minute 0:31, Collier makes a passing reference to Hossenfelder's article Why the foundations of physics have not progressed for 40 years.

And on top of Thiel's wacky talking points, propagated thanks to money or stupidity by the likes of Eric Weinstein and Sabina Hossenfelder, there's the whole TESCREAL crackpottery. But that's a post for another day. But for now, here is a good intro - Peter Thiel's name is dropped at minute 4:25.

CBS goes full fascist, bends the knee to Trump, cancels Stephen Colbert

Nobody - not on Bluesky, not on Threads, not on Facebook, not even on Mecha-Hitler - believes that CBS dumped The Late Show with Stephen Colbert for, as CBS claims, "financial reasons."

The Atlantic: Is Colbert’s Ouster Really Just a ‘Financial Decision’? CBS no longer deserves the benefit of the doubt.

The Republican Party must never be forgiven for propping up the foul demented rapist treasonous friend-of-Epstein dictator Donald Trump.

I don't think Colbert would ever want to be a politician but the sweetest revenge would be if he ran for president in 2028 and destroyed the Republican Party. 

Here is a handy form you can use to tell Paramount they are boot-licking garbage.

Also, if you own CBS/Paramount stock DUMP IT LIKE RADIOACTIVE WASTE.

The monologue that probably ended The Late Show.

Interview with Harry Shukman, the Emil Kirkegaard network mole

Harry Shukman went undercover and infiltrated the international neo-Nazi network a couple of years ago. The result of the infiltration was the important report for Hope not Hate called Race Science, Inc. 

And now Shukman is interviewed by Peter Geoghegan. 

It's unfortunately on Substack. Sigh. When will people wake up to the danger of the Nazi bar Substack, funded by fascist Marc Andreessen?

Anyway, in the interview, they start talking about the Human Diversity Foundation (now officially Polygenic Scores LLC) at about minute 26.

Thanks to Magic Money Tree for alerting me to this.

Shukman has a book out now about his undercover experience - The Year of the Rat.

REPUBLICAN PARTY DELENDA EST

 For more details here is "Some More News" on the insanity of the GOP.

They won't stop lying - until we make them stop.

Is Matt Yglesias a more or less well-intended heterodox-type thinker or just a great big racist?

Since we were talking about the racist extremist Crémieux (Jordan Lasker) recently, I couldn't help noticing that "centrist" political pundit Matthew Yglesias was, right in the middle of the NYTimes controversy involving Crémieux, promoting a tweet by Crémieux over at the Bad Place.

I had been aware of Yglesias' alliance with racists before. I wrote about his support for Razib Khan, and his defense of Richard Hanania.

While promoting and defending racist ghouls, Yglesias claims to be concerned about racism and bigotry.

On his Substack (of course) Yglesias ponders:

But I also think it’s perfectly reasonable for people to worry that stereotyping will lead to discrimination. And parsing the difference between “taste-based” and “statistical” discrimination doesn’t really change the fact that people are individuals, and they reasonably do not want to be discriminated against. Conversely, I think there is a broadly accurate stereotype that people who roam around the world articulating unflattering statistical observations about ethnic groups they don’t belong to mostly are, in fact, bigots with bad intentions. And the classic postwar observation that this kind of behavior can lead to extremely dark places with terrible results for everyone strikes me as pretty much correct. It’s not a coincidence that movements that want to destigmatize racism also want to do World War II revisionism.

But in this very same Substack post he includes extremist Curtis Yarvin, calling him "an influential and well-regarded voice on the MAGA right" while failing to mention his racism.

Yglesias appears to be doing all he can to normalize racists while claiming to be opposed to racism.

This has been Steven Pinker's strategy for a quarter of a century. Culminating most recently in aligning himself with and helping to mainstream the neo-Nazi organization run by Emil Kirkegaard.

Behavioral genetics promoter Eric Turkheimer responded to Yglesias:

Coming back to Yglesias’ concern with the manners of discussing group differences, I have a rule: All discussions of black-white differences in athletics are really about cognitive ability. If we accept that it is obvious that the predominance of Black people in the NBA is somehow the result of genetic differences, then it opens the door to having a similar discussion about why Black people have historically scored lower on IQ tests. This, I think, it the ultimate reason why Yglesias is uncomfortable with the topic, and I agree that he should be.

But genetic differences in cognitive ability are even more implausible than genetic differences in spelling or ping pong, for an obvious reason: there are massive environmental effects that compete with a genetic hypothesis. It isn’t especially easy to specify exactly how sports programs in Jamaica might go about producing top sprinters, but only bad-faith racists can deny the history of racism in the United States and around the world, beginning with slavery 500 years ago and proceeding through Jim Crow, segregation, and all of the reverberating cross-generational effects in the modern world. It is not possible to “control for” such massive environmental effects, and without doing so speculation about genetic causes is pointless.

I don’t mean to be too tough on Yglesias here. He is just trying to be reasonable about a very complex subject, and he doesn’t mention cognitive ability, although I think it is implicit in his concerns. There are many more or less well-intended heterodox-type thinkers, from Yglesias to Andrew Sullivan to Sam Harris to Jon Haidt, who try to establish their heterodox, pro-science, academic freedom bona fides by giving a fair shake to genetic explanations of race differences in behavior.

The last paragraph is the most telling -  "I don't mean to be too tough on Yglesias here..."

The "more or less well intended" Andrew Sullivan, Sam Harris and Jon Haidt have all demonstrated their devotion to race pseudoscience and to what I call the "American hereditarian assumption" which goes like this:

In spite of 250 years of slavery, followed by more than one hundred years of anti-Black terrorism, including organizations like the Ku Klux Klan, periodic "race riots" such as the Tulsa Race Massacre, and lynchings, Jim Crow, voter suppression, redlining,[143] segregation and theft of Black property and wealth,[144] the most plausible explanation for Black inability to thrive in the United States is the Black genome.

Andrew Sullivan is clearly a racist, promoting and defending the absolute racist Charles Murray for the past thirty years, but even Ezra Klein refuses to call Sullivan a racist.

The bar to being called a racist is very high for hereditarians, especially establishment white male hereditarians who make a living as opinion-havers.

Sam Harris promoted the hard-core racist rag Quillette while defending Charles Murray. The Quillette article he linked to, written by (now) Kirkegaard employee Bo Winegard and his equally racist brother Ben, contains an example of the American hereditarian assumption in the wild:

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.

This is evidence-free bullshit, but it impresses morons like Sam Harris.

Jonathan Haidt has flown under the radar more than Harris and Sullivan have, but he has demonstrated his race pseudoscience beliefs in talks; he's a defender of the garbage "Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence" paper written by a couple of racists although never proven or tested; and in the Jeffrey Epstein-funded Edge, in 2009 Haidt said:

Recent "sweeps" of the genome across human populations show that hundreds of genes have been changing during the last 5-10 millennia in response to local selection pressures. (See papers by Benjamin Voight, Scott Williamson, and Bruce Lahn). No new mental modules can be created from scratch in a few millennia, but slight tweaks to existing mechanisms can happen quickly, and small genetic changes can have big behavioral effects, as with those Russian foxes. We must therefore begin looking beyond the Pleistocene and turn our attention to the Holocene era as well – the last 10,000 years. This was the period after the spread of agriculture during which the pace of genetic change sped up in response to the enormous increase in the variety of ways that humans earned their living, formed larger coalitions, fought wars, and competed for resources and mates. 

 

The protective "wall" is about to come crashing down, and all sorts of uncomfortable claims are going to pour in. Skin color has no moral significance, but traits that led to Darwinian success in one of the many new niches and occupations of Holocene life — traits such as collectivism, clannishness, aggressiveness, docility, or the ability to delay gratification — are often seen as virtues or vices. Virtues are acquired slowly, by practice within a cultural context, but the discovery that there might be ethnically-linked genetic variations in the ease with which people can acquire specific virtues is — and this is my prediction — going to be a "game changing" scientific event. (By "ethnic" I mean any group of people who believe they share common descent, actually do share common descent, and that descent involved at least 500 years of a sustained selection pressure, such as sheep herding, rice farming, exposure to malaria, or a caste-based social order, which favored some heritable behavioral predispositions and not others.) 

 

I believe that the "Bell Curve" wars of the 1990s, over race differences in intelligence, will seem genteel and short-lived compared to the coming arguments over ethnic differences in moralized traits. I predict that this "war" will break out between 2012 and 2017.

There are reasons to hope that we'll ultimately reach a consensus that does not aid and abet racism.

Like all respectable promoters of race pseudoscience Haidt would never use the N word, so most people will miss what he's getting at - although maybe his mention of "Bell Curve" will be a clue to some. 

But I understand what he's saying after all these years of reading the claims of race pseudoscience promoters: in 2009 Haidt believed that genetics studies would prove that there are fundamental genetic racial differences and that racists had been right all along - that Black people as a group have fewer "virtues" than other groups.

But instead of evidence for Haidt's version of the American hereditarian assumption, what we got from genetics studies was evidence of the utter failure of the claims of genetic behavioralists, as recently discussed by Jay Joseph on his (unfortunately Subtack) blog called The Gene Illusion:

Missing heritability is a term that human genetic researchers invented around 15 years ago to acknowledge unexpected causal gene discovery failure, and to describe the large discrepancy between heritability estimates derived from twin studies versus those derived from DNA-based (molecular genetic) methods such as genome-wide association studies (GWAS). Importantly, as behavioral geneticist Eric Turkheimer emphasized in his recent book (see my review here), GWASes of psychiatric conditions and behavioral characteristics such as educational attainment (EA, often seen as an IQ “proxy measure”) identify (potentially spurious) gene-behavior “associations” (correlations), not causes.

Later in the post, Joseph writes: 

Most likely, future commentators will tell a similar story about behavioral polygenic scores, GWAS, GREML, RDR, and Sib-Regression. Alexander’s post merely continues (1) the 100-year fallacy of assuming that behavioral twin (and adoption) studies are based on sound assumptions and should be interpreted genetically; (2) the 55-year fallacy of assuming that twin studies are sound, so let’s spend billions of dollars trying to find the genes; and (3) the 15-year fallacy of believing that twin studies are sound while DNA-based methods failed, so “heritability must be missing.” It’s time to abandon behavioral and psychiatric research based on twin studies after a disastrous and harmful 100-year run. 

The "Alexander" mentioned in the paragraph above is Scott Alexander, real name Scott Siskind, yet another self-impressed dumbass who promotes race pseudoscience. His Slate Star Codex is a comfortable place for Steve Sailer to hang out and promote his racist extremism. 

And speaking of Steve Sailer:

Turkheimer may have done some good work, and may be publicly anti-racist, but he's a goddam fool to quickly absolve these pernicious ghouls of their racism.

As a result of Turkheimer's hands-off attitude towards racists, you can see Sailer is all over the comments section of the Turkheimer post about Yglesias. Turkheimer makes no response to Sailer, he just allows Sailer to promote his bullshit.

Also in the comments: "Slowly Reading" provides links to neo-Nazi Aporia and yes, of course to a tweet by Crémieux.

This acceptance, by people who should know better, of race pseudoscience promoters, as "more or less well-intended heterodox-type thinkers" is why I have to keep doing this blog.

Meet the White Party

 

I am not a fan of Elon Musk but I hope his new political party (already known as the White Party on Bluesky) is successful.

Musk is not known for his consistency or endurance, so it's possible he'll get bored and go onto something else and AmericanPartyX will fall by the wayside.

But if it does become a going concern, it would most likely damage the Republican Party, which would be great, because as we say here at Pinkerite:

REPUBLICAN PARTY 

DELENDA 

EST

Meet Benjamin Ryan, the NYTimes' pipeline to race pseudoscience and neo-Nazis

Ryan's social media is pure right-wing attacks and propaganda.

I had been aware of Ryan and his connection to Jesse Singal for some time, and I always knew one day Ryan's cozy alliance with the race pseudoscience gang would become an issue.

And now it has. For the New York Times.

It's bizarre to see Ryan whining on Singal's Substack that "they're trying to turn me into the next version of you" when Ryan appears to be doing all he can to become another version of Jesse Singal. 

Like Singal, Ryan has been noted for his anti-trans campaign:

• Ben Ryan Rages at Trans Women on Twitter
• New York Times is Responding to the Full Scale Assault on Trans People by Giving Jesse Signal's #1 Fan Ben Ryan a Space to Discourse about Trans Youth
• Ben Ryan vs transgender people 

But an aspect of Jesse Singal's career that is often overlooked is his very cozy relationship with racists, especially Razib Khan, whose entire career has been devoted to promoting race pseudoscience, since at least when Ron Unz funded his college education.

And we see that Benjamin Ryan is Singal's clone in that respect too. He subscribes to racist Jordan Lasker (aka Crémieux) on X/Twitter.

The New York Times published an article, co-written by Benjamin Ryan, sharing a Columbia University admissions application by Zohran Mamdani, stolen by hackers. 

I see on his LinkedIn that Ryan went to Columbia - I wonder if he still has a log-in to its system.

UPDATE: thank you to Bluesky's Magic Money Tree for sharing this item from Twitter/X - we see that Benjamin Ryan was chatting about Columbia University with professional racist Steve Sailer back in 2021.

The source for Ryan's article is Jordan Lasker, but the NYTimes did not give his real name, instead writing:

The data was shared with The Times by an intermediary who goes by the name Crémieux on Substack and X. He provided the data under condition of anonymity, although his identity has been made public elsewhere. He is an academic who opposes affirmative action and writes often about I.Q. and race.

The white-washing is so blatant: "writes often about IQ and race" is a funny way to describe a dedicated racist who has taken money from neo-Nazi Emil Kirkegaard to publish in Kirkegaard's neo-Nazi Substack Aporia, at least twice.

Lasker has published many papers with Kirkegaard as well as other hard-core racists including Bryan Pesta, John G. R. Fuerst, and Jan te Nijenhuis.

Lasker's connection to Crémieux was public knowledge thanks to an article in the Guardian back in March.

Unfortunately for Lasker and Ryan, by one metric at least, their attempt to hurt Mamdani failed.

But one thing that the team of Benjamin Ryan and Jordan Lasker has accomplished is to damage the New York Times' reputation, at least among those of us opposed to racism.

Thanks to the outcry, the NYTimes had to respond:

It looks like the same pipeline used to destroy trans rights is being turned on Mamdani.

But at least we know that Lasker's sister can't stand him.

UPDATE: 

Anti-woke activist applauds his ‘friends’ at the New York Times for Zohran Mamdani college application ‘scoop’

Another update: Alex Winter weighs in.

UPDATE UPDATE: the Guardian:

Is the New York Times trying to wreck Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral bid?

With their made-up scandal, combined with the pre-election editorial, the Times looks like it’s on a crusade against Mamdani

AND FINALLY... 

Matthew Yglesias promoting the account of racist extremist ghoul Crémeiux/Jordan Lasker on X/Twitter. 

But then I knew Yglesias was part of the race pseudoscience gang long ago.

Happy Fourth of July - Trump goes full anti-Semitic

Trump was feeling pretty good about the Republican Party licking his boot and voting for his bill so he figured NOW would be a good time to go full anti-Semitic.

Of course most of the people who voted for Trump are too stupid and/or ignorant to know the significance of the anti-Semitic slur "Shylock." 

Or they are too evil to be bothered by the slur.

Meanwhile Bluesky is laughing at the scheme cooked up by Jordan Lasker (aka Crémieux) and his network of right-wing ghouls, including the New York Times, to try to hurt Zohran Mamdani's chances of becoming mayor of New York City.

The New York Times story about Mamdani comes from Benjamin Ryan, a long-time supporter of the far-right gang especially Jesse Singal and his anti-trans campaign.

New York Times Grants Race Science Enthusiast Anonymity in Mamdani Hit Piece - that would be Lasker.

NYT Runs Hit Piece on Mamdani Based on Tip From Proponent of 'Race Science'

Lasker is a buddy of neo-Nazi Emil Kirkegaard. And probably a Kirkegaard employee. 

The neo-Nazis are working with the Republican Party.

The Republican Party is pure evil now and must be made to disband. 

Otherwise it will continue to destroy American democracy out of insane servile obedience to a racist, anti-Semitic madman.

REPUBLICAN PARTY DELENDA EST

Dunking on Jordan Peterson time!

Lately I've been talking about some seriously harmful people like Bari Weiss and neo-Nazis like Emil Kirkegaard, plus Steven Pinker and how Steven Pinker likes to hang around with Neo-Nazis.

I think of Jordan Peterson as somewhat less harmful, even though he is a regressive scam-meister.

 But it's always a good time to dunk on Peterson, from the PZ Myers video about the lobster from back in 2019, right up to today's video from Some More News. Enjoy.