Behavioral Genetics and the Underpants Gnomes

Gotta go to work
Work all night
Search for underpants hey

Tom Scocca is Slate's politics editor.  His response to the Gideon Lewis-Kraus New Yorker profile of
Kathryn Paige Harden is so good it compelled me to subscribe to his Substack, called Indignity.

Scocca gets at the biggest issues with the whole damn Paige Harden business. The first being whether there is really a difference between "evolutionary psychology" and "behavioral genetics":

The phrenologists don't like being called "phrenologists." Even the archaic ones would tell you they were doing "anthropometry" or "craniometry," and the modern ones prefer to call themselves things like "evolutionary psychologists" or "behavior geneticists."

The more I learn about Harden style "behavioral genetics" the less difference I see between that and evolutionary psychology. 

In my email exchange with Lewis-Kraus, I suggested that Harden was one of many "evolutionary psychology-based researchers." 

Lewis-Kraus was not happy with my description:

Paige has nothing to do with evolutionary psychology, which she agrees is nonsense.

But I had recently found Harden on a page of the University of Texas at Austin website under the heading "Individual Differences and Evolutionary Psychology" and her profile was directly under one of the most prominent advocates of evolutionary psychology, David Buss.

Buss is such a reflexive believer in hereditarian explanations for human social phenomena he once suggested an example of female sexual slavery was a case of female sexual preference, as David Buller described in his book "Adapting Minds."

Scocca went farther than me, calling Harden a phrenologist.

At one point in my exchange with Lewis-Kraus, he wrote:

If you have emails between Pinker and Sailer, I will gladly review them. Otherwise, I think I'll hold my own counsel on the stories that I do, but thanks for the totally unsolicited and unwelcome advice. 

I hadn't offered him advice, I had expressed disappointment he didn't focus more on how politically-focused and well-funded race science is. But I don't think Lewis-Kraus was reading my emails carefully - his tone was hostile from his first response, seemingly appalled that I would dare to question his choice of framing at all.

Scocca was just as unhappy with Lewis-Kraus' framing as I was (my highlight):

Here's how Lewis-Kraus described Harden's own account of the tool she uses to address the most loaded social questions of our time:

GWAS simply provides a picture of how genes are correlated with success, or mental health, or criminality, for particular populations in a particular society at a particular time.....GWAS results are not "portable"; a study conducted on white Britons tells you little about people in Estonia or Nigeria.

That is, the genome makes people unequal, but it does so by an unclear mechanism, the effects of which are contingent on a person's social position in a particular time and place. Yet the reader was supposed to share Harden's regret or bafflement that Darity, a scholar of the material processes of racial inequality, would be hostile to her work.  

Behavioral genetics is an "unclear mechanism" being used to generate just-so stories.

Harden does not, in fact, study the question of how genes produce social outcomes. Frustrated by the slow progress of assigning clear social results to scientists' ever-more-complicated understanding of how genes operate, the behavior geneticists have simply skipped over the whole "how" business. Harden's work, Lewis-Kraus explained, relies on the use of the GWAS—genome-wide association study—in which computation is used "to identify hundreds or even thousands of places in the genome where differences in our DNA sequence could be correlated with a trait or an outcome." 

"[E]ven if researchers don't fully understand what they're learning, this is how the genome is used now," an unnamed population geneticist told Lewis-Kraus.

So behavioral genetics can be more succinctly, if less elegantly, expressed by the Underpants Gnomes.

Where Phase 1 is GWAS and Phase 3 is social outcomes. 

What bothered me most about Lewis-Kraus' email response was his belief that unless I can come up with personal correspondence between Steven Pinker and Steve Sailer, there's no point in writing about the politics behind contemporary race pseudoscience. 

But that's a general problem for mainstream media - their understanding of issues like Steven Pinker's promotion of race pseudoscience is hobbled by the fact that they are not in it for the long term. They dip into an issue, make shallow assessments (pretty young behavioral geneticist thinks leftists are anti-science!) and then move on. 

As long as Steven Pinker doesn't actually come out and say "I think that Black people are innately less intelligent" the cultural gatekeepers will yawn and look away, no matter how many race-mongers like Razib Khan and Linda Gottfredson, and race-mongering publications like Quillette, and racists like Sailer, Pinker has supported, in his role as respectable public intellectual.

Speaking of promoting race mongers, I see Julia Ioffe, a GQ correspondant, is also doing it. 

Have the New Yorker, Gideon Lewis-Kraus and Paige Harden made phrenology the hip new thing?

You and Your Racist Friend

Do They Might Be Giants make
Gideon Lewis-Kraus sad?

I wrote a critique of Gideon Lewis-Kraus' New Yorker piece on Kathryn Paige Harden and I also emailed Lewis-Kraus a link to my post, saying I was disappointed with his take. And to my surprise, he wrote back.

Wow, and I thought I was disappointed in him before.

We went back and forth via email several times and among other things I pointed out that Razib Khan considers Harden a friend (Lewis-Kraus' article quotes the review in which Khan says this) and I said I would like to know what Harden thought of that and whether she considered Khan a friend. I said I wished Lewis-Kraus had asked her for the article.

His response:

No, she doesn't consider him a friend, but maybe one difference between us is that I don't have political litmus tests for my friends, and the prospect of a world in which people did that would be very depressing.

I can only assume Lewis-Kraus finds the song "You and Your Racist Friend" by They Might Be Giants horribly depressing.

This is where the party ends

I can't stand here listening to you

And your racist friend

I know politics bore you

But I feel like a hypocrite talking to you

And your racist friend

I mean, what a bullshit response. I'm sure he would not be friends with a Nazi. And Razib Khan is very close to that - a professional race-monger who agrees with Charles Murray that if we don't face the "truth" about Black American inferiority, we face DISASTER.

 

Lewis-Kraus' article prompted some of the racists and race-mongers on Twitter to remove all doubt that theirs is a political movement with straightforward goals. For instance, Quillette author Nathan Cofnas.

Gosh, what would "social justice" look like if we accepted unsupported hereditarian beliefs in the innate inferiority of Black Americans? Have there been any historical precedents for that?

Please note that Michael Shermer is in full agreement with Cofnas about race-based inferiority, the only quarrel is what form "social justice" should take.

One of the people who liked the first of the tweets above is a character who goes by the Twitter handle Indian Bronson, who, in December 2019, revealed he works for the Koch-funded AEI. 

Why would any non-racists be friends with people like this?

I believe Razib Khan and most other professional hereditarians got into race-mongering because wingnut welfare is lucrative and easy. 

I can't do anything about it being lucrative - Charles Koch and other rightwing racist billionaires even give money to hardcore racist organizations like VDARE and American Renaissance.

But I'll be damned if I'll stop making it as unpleasant as I possibly can for them.

Now it should be noted that Lewis-Kraus also said:

Razib Khan is an irrelevant idiot. He has terrible views...

But is he irrelevant? He was relevant enough for Lewis-Kraus to quote him - giving him even more mainstream credibility (which Khan is happy to publicize) - in the Harden piece, and we know Khan has received money from rightwing extremist Ron Unz.

But there was something else that Lewis-Kraus wrote to me that makes me wonder if, in spite of it all, he is in denial about the threat in mainstreaming race pseudoscience. I'll discuss that next.

The Left, the hereditarian Right and the New Yorker

I've spoken admiringly in the past of the work of Gideon Lewis-Kraus, in particular his in-depth look at the work of David Reich.

Lewis-Kraus has recently published an article in the New Yorker along a similar theme - left-leaning hereditarian whose work has provided some comfort to purveyors of race pseudoscience.

In this case it's an article about Kathryn Paige Harden entitled Can Progressives Be Convinced that Genetics Matter? which, as some on Twitter pointed out, is a bullshit question.

Something that really jumped out at me in the article (my highlights):

Harden has been merciless in her response to behavior geneticists whose disciplinary salesmanship—and perhaps worse—inadvertently indulges the extreme right. In her own review of Plomin’s book, she wrote, “Insisting that DNA matters is scientifically accurate; insisting that it is the only thing that matters is scientifically outlandish.” ​(Plomin told me that Harden misrepresented his intent. He added, “Good luck to Paige in convincing people who are engaged in the culture wars about this middle path she’s suggesting. . . . My view is it isn’t worth confronting people and arguing with them.”)

With the first review of Harden’s book, these dynamics played out on cue. Razib Khan, a conservative science blogger identified with the “human biodiversity” movement, wrote that he admired her presentation of the science but was put off by the book’s politics; though he notes that a colleague of his once heard Harden described as “Charles Murray in a skirt,” he clearly thinks the honorific was misplaced. “Alas, if you do not come to this work with Harden’s commitment to social justice, much of the non-scientific content will strike you as misguided, gratuitous and at times even unfair.” This did not prevent some on the Twitter left from expressing immediate disgust. Kevin Bird, who describes himself in his Twitter bio as a “radical scientist,” tweeted, “Personally, I wouldn’t be very happy if a race science guy thought my book was good.” Harden sighed when she recounted the exchange: “It’s always from both flanks. It felt like another miniature version of Harris on one side and Darity on the other.”

But Razib Khan isn't just a race science guy who thought Harden's book was good. Razib Khan considers Kathryn Paige Harden to be his friend:

My friend Kathryn Paige Harden’s The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters For Social Equality is a well-written book that presents a somewhat tendentious position, at least to many of a progressive bent, that genetics must be considered when we design a liberal order. You can read my review over at UnHerd, though if you are subscribed to the paid version of this newsletter I’ll eventually be posting a much longer version of the review on this Substack.

How merciless can Harden be, if Razib Khan considers her a friend? I found that when I have been merciless towards the race pseudoscience of Razib Khan, he blocked me on Twitter. 

The New Yorker article mentions Quillette, Razib Khan and Charles Murray, but somehow neglects to mention that in July of this year, Khan wrote a positive review of Charles Murray's latest book for Quillette. 

And by the way, Khan declares Charles Murray to be his friend too. Is that how it works in the world of race-mongering? Friends always review the work of friends? 

The New Yorker piece demonstrates, contrary to its main theme, how much more extreme and politicized the hereditarian right is in comparison to the hereditarian left. 

Lewis-Kraus writes:

Her rhetoric is grand, though the practical implications, insofar as she discusses them, are not far removed from the mid-century social-democratic consensus—the priorities of, say, Hubert Humphrey. If genes play a significant role in educational attainment, then perhaps we ought to design our society such that you don’t need a college degree to secure health care.

As one Twitterer responded:

Meanwhile this is what the hereditarian right is saying. In his review of his friend Charles Murray's book, Razib Khan writes:

But why read a book on this topic when you can discover these facts within a few minutes? Tables on SAT scores by race are available in the Journal of Blacks In Higher Education, which pointed out in 2005 that “whites were more than seven times as likely as blacks to score 700 or above on the verbal SAT.” Wikipedia, meanwhile, has an entry entitled “Race and Crime in the United States,” which plainly states that a bit over 50 percent of victims and offenders in homicides are African American. The same website tells us that African Americans are about 13 percent of America’s population. Would you also be surprised to face the reality that the perpetrators of homicides are overwhelmingly young and male as well? These dots are there for anyone to connect if they like.

And yet very few choose to do so. Indeed, the failure—refusal, even—to connect the dots has become a vaunted feature, not a bug, of 2021’s regnant culture. Acknowledging unambiguous patterns of this kind will often result in the rebuke that some beliefs are divine mysteries, to be accepted on faith rather than analyzed more deeply. Which is precisely why Murray wants to inject these taboo realities into the intellectual bloodstream of our society. Despite being a brisk read, Murray’s short book lays out all the inferences and conclusions that remain lacunae in our public discourse. Without these facts on the table, the contemporary American debate has had to rely upon the ether of social science and nebulous theoretical explanations of “systemic racism” and “white supremacy.” Cognitive scientist Pascal Boyer has remarked that “theory is information for free,” and these are theories which purport to explain everything in American history.

How can this be interpreted in any way but "as long as we believe Black Americans are the victims of systemic racism and white supremacy we will not "connect the dots" about them and therefore fail to arrive at the truth: their real problem is their genetic inferiority"?

And this conclusion is not just something we can all agree to disagree about, according to Murray. As Khan writes earlier in the review:

The book’s thesis is that American society faces disaster if it is not prepared to confront certain politically uncomfortable facts about race—Murray has described it as a cri de coeur.

 

So according to the hereditarian right, we face DISASTER if we don't face the truth of Black American genetic inferiority.

That's quite a bit stronger than: "if genes are important then everybody should get healthcare."  

But for some reason, Lewis-Kraus, who has already acknowledged the existence of Quillette, Murray and Khan doesn't mention the review. Instead, when he mentions Quillette, it's part of a both-sides theme:

In Quillette, the researcher Richard Haier compared Harden and Turkheimer’s repudiation of Murray to climate-change denial—the second time in a year that Harden had been thus indicted, this time from the right.

Quillette published a review that says unless we acknowledge the genetic inferiority of Black Americans we face disaster. 

You would think that would be of some interest in an article that includes discussions of the dangers of race pseudoscience.

Richard Haier, it must be noted, writes for the far-right Federalist. In this tweet he reveals that Charles Murray is a political operative on the payroll of the Koch-funded AEI.

But of course this entire Pinkerite blog has demonstrated again and again how very well-financed the hereditarian right is by right-wing plutocrats. This is a hugely important issue in discussions of the political impact of hereditarianism, and one that Lewis-Kraus ignores. 

I'm very disappointed, New Yorker.

Go go Gizmodo

Wow great article in the Australian incarnation of Gizmodo. It contains these perfect paragraphs (my highlights):

But it also includes the New Atheist movement, which eventually spiraled into Islamophobia; the cringe-aly-titled “Intellectual Dark Web,” which portrays itself as a ragtag crew of “unclassifiable renegades” while parroting right-wing talking points; self-proclaimed anti-“cancel culture” activists; and gender warriors who have tried to gussy up anti-trans talking points as serious intellectual insights.

Substack has become a sort of hive for those latter groups, who have used it as a refuge from bans or perceived harassment on social media sites — because these are media types we’re talking about, they usually cite “Twitter mobs” as the source of their oppression. It’s also served, as in the case of The Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald or amateur race scientist Andrew Sullivan, as a lucrative landing pad for writers who were supposedly forced out of their prior publications due to censorious liberals.

Substack has recruited those people with big cash incentives in some instances, though it doesn’t disclose who it pays upfront. (Professional victim Bari Weiss quit the New York Times last summer and is reportedly pulling down $US800,000 ($1,084,560) a year on Substack.)

Kudos to author Tom McKay!

The article links to a MarketWatch piece about "professional victim Bari Weiss" and how much money she is pulling down through Substack:

So far, ‘Common Sense with Bari Weiss‘ has signed up more than 14,000 paying subscribers at $5 each in her first six months, she tells me. She has another 75,000 nonpaying followers. The numbers have been confirmed (with Weiss’s permission) by Substack.

That means her revenues are running at an annual rate of more than $800,000 a year. And rising.

When I did the math my jaw dropped. Weiss’ newsletter has become very successful very quickly. It gave me a startling insight into the kind of money other Substackers are pulling down, including some who have many more paying subs.

The article doesn't mention that Weiss' Substack has the perfect motto for Weiss, combining the obnoxiousness and self-regard that has become the Bari Weiss brand: "Honest news for sane people."

I have doubts that 14K people are interested in paying 5 bucks per month to read what Bari Weiss has to say. I'm not saying there aren't that many right-wingers, I'm saying I suspect the kind of people who are interested in Bari Weiss whining about critical race theory are not, typically, readers, they get their information from Fox News and OAN.

I also have questions about this part of the NewsWatch article:

If you’re fed up with your employer and you want to quit your job, you probably don’t want to do it the way Bari Weiss did it.

The opinion writer and editor quit the New York Times just over a year ago without a backup plan ready.

And she publicly trashed her former employer on her way out the door as well, in a devastating open letter.

“When I left the Times I had no plan, which in retrospect was completely foolish,” she says. “I had no idea. I didn’t make a choice for a while because I was so in a way shocked by what I had just done and wasn’t sure what the next step would be.”

She was, she says, “blackout emotional.”

“I was…overwhelmed and really nervous about what was going to happen next,” she says.

Meanwhile, “It was clear I wasn’t going to get a job in the corporate press, because who would want to hire me after I had done such a thing?”

Now I don't have a high opinion of Bari Weiss' intelligence but I think she's at least strategic enough that she didn't willy-nilly quit her high-profile decently-compensated job without knowing "what was going to happen next." 

We know Substack has paid people advances to join: they paid Matt Yglesias $25,000; they paid Danny Lavery $430,000; Grace Lavery $125,000; for New York Times writers Liz Bruenig and Taylor Lorenz, it offered between $200,000 - $300,000.

What are the odds Substack neglected to offer Andrew Sullivan and Bari Weiss big advances? Very small, I'd say.

Both Weiss and Sullivan have very high profiles and both joined Substack after leaving their respective jobs with great fanfare and loudly-brayed grievances. Clearly Substack would benefit by all the publicity.

Then there is the issue of possible dark money. If you've seen Breaking Bad, you may recall the episode in which Saul Goodman helps Walter White set up a money laundering system via his son's website. SaveWalterWhite.com - the website is still online.

Why wouldn't it be possible for right-wing plutocrats like Koch to have flunkies set up a system to do essentially the same thing, for their favored pundits on Substack, Patreon or other membership platform payment system? I have yet to find assurance, anywhere, that this could never happen. Or even a discussion of the possibility on mainstream media.

Bari Weiss is simply too connected to too many other people funded by Koch - including several members of the Board of Advisors of FAIR - for me to believe she has been left out of the wingnut welfare system. 

I mean, in addition to the money she's made writing for the Koch-funded City Journal.

Speaking of FAIR, to my surprise the founder of FAIR has been identified - a rich guy named Bion Bartning. More about him and the New York Times' Michael Powell soon.

Anna Krylov and the Peril of Bullshit part 4

PART 1 ~ PART 2 ~ PART 3 ~ PART 4

Anna Krylov believes that when she advocates for women in STEM, it isn't political it's "fairness and merit-based approach." But those who propose a change in science term conventions are motivated by naive idealism or cynical power-grabbing.

I don't happen to agree that changing science labels, in most cases, will be efficacious in promoting fairness and a merit-based approach, but I am certainly willing to grant that those who wish to change the terms are every bit as motivated by a desire for fairness as Krylov claims to be.

Krylov's free and easy use of the term "cancellation" is not only curious because she uses it for such a diverse collection of things she doesn't like, it's also curious because she uses it, in one case at least, for something she surely must like. 

In her essay The Peril of Politicizing Science, Krylov provides this example of a series of cancellations - my highlight:

I grew up in a city that in its short history (barely over 150 years) had its name changed three times.2,3 Founded in 1869 around a steel plant and several coal mines built by the Welsh industrialist John Hughes, the settlement was originally called Hughesovka (or Yuzovka). When the Bolsheviks came to power in the 1917 Revolution, the new government of the working class, the Soviets, set out to purge the country of ideologically impure influences in the name of the proletariat and the worldwide struggle of the suppressed masses. Cities and geographical landmarks were renamed,4 statues were torn down, books were burned, and many millions were jailed and murdered.5 In due course, the commissars got to Yuzovka, and the city was stripped of the name of its founder, a representative of the hostile class of oppressors and a Westerner. In modern terms, Hughes was canceled. For a few months, the city was called Trotsk (after Leon Trotsky), until Trotsky lost in the power struggle inside the party and was himself canceled (see Figure 1). In 1924 the city became the namesake of the new supreme leader of the Communist Party (Stalin), and a few years later renamed to Stalino. My mother’s school certificates have Stalino on them. 

Following Stalin’s death in 1953, the Communist party underwent some reckoning and admitted that several decades of terror and many millions of murdered citizens were somewhat excessive. Stalin was canceled: his body was removed from the Mausoleum at Red Square (where it had been displayed next to Lenin’s); textbooks and encyclopedias were rewritten once again; and the cities, institutions, and landmarks bearing his name were promptly renamed. Stalino became Donetsk, after the river Severskii Donets.

I think we can conclude that Krylov is not a fan of Stalin, since she writes: 

Following Stalin’s death in 1953, the Communist party underwent some reckoning and admitted that several decades of terror and many millions of murdered citizens were somewhat excessive.

And yet, she summarizes anti-Stalin changes made by the Soviet Union to books, cities, institutions and landmarks as well the removal of Stalin's body from Red Square as "Stalin was canceled."

Surely Krylov is not complaining about depriving a murderous dictator of his former honors. She gives an example of renaming Stalino to Donetsk, after a river. Not even after another Communist overlord, but a river. 

So it seems fair to conclude that, sometimes, according to Krylov's own lexicon, cancellation can be a good thing.

Although she didn't respond to my last email, I emailed Krylov again because I was curious - does she consider removing the names of Confederate generals from public buildings, and the removal of Confederate statues and flags from public lands, examples of cancel culture? If she responds, I will report on it in another post.

Towards the end of her essay Krylov portrays Stalin as an exemplar of the follies of cancel culture, but those paragraphs also demonstrate the absurdity of Krylov's extreme paranoia over contemporary perils:

 In the late forties, after nuclear physicists explained that without relativity theory there will be no nuclear bomb, Stalin rolled back the planned campaign against physics and instructed Beria to give physicists some space; this led to significant advances and accomplishments by Soviet scientists in several domains. However, neither Stalin nor the subsequent Soviet leaders were able to let go of the controls completely.

Government control over science turned out to be a grand failure, and the attempts to patch the widening gap between the West and the East by espionage did not help.17 Today Russia is hopelessly behind the West, in both technology and quality of life. The book Totalitarian Science and Technology provides many more examples of such failed experiments.17

Today, STEM holds the key to solving problems far more important than the nuclear arms race: reversing climate change, fighting global hunger and poverty, controlling pandemics, and harnessing the power of new technologies (quantum computing, bioengineering, and renewable energy) for the benefit of humanity

Normalizing ideological intrusion into science and abandoning Mertonian principles24 will cost us dearly. We cannot afford it.

As discussed in part 3 of this series, Krylov compares "cancel culture" to murder. But the murder of Giordano Bruno was in 1600 and perpetrated by what was, at the time, the all-powerful Catholic Church. Another extreme example of cancel culture provided, the chemical castration (among other things) of Alan Turing, is from 1952. She also gives examples of "cancellation" from Soviet Russia, an infamously authoritarian state that no longer exists.

Of the 14 times Krylov gives examples of "cancellation," seven of them are contemporary:

1. An article proposes avoiding the use of names in science terms
2. The renaming of a science prize
3. Renaming a science term
4. Renaming a science term
5. Renaming of a science term
6. Renaming of a science term
7. A soap company reconsiders a word

So to summarize, the evidence for contemporary crimes against science are:

1. A renaming proposal
2. Five renamings
3. A corporation tweaked its marketing copy

It's likely the reason Krylov includes the extreme examples from the past is because her contemporary examples are laughably minor, and do not demonstrate anything close to the grave threat to science that religions or governments could. They are barely consequential actions - or just a proposal in one case - that Krylov does not agree with. But with no evidence, other than slippery slope ad absurdum, she asserts they are a threat to our very future. 

She truly is a member of the Quillette/IDW industrial complex.

Anna Krylov and the Peril of Bullshit part 3

PART 1 ~ PART 2 ~ PART 3 ~ PART 4

Now, as I was saying, when someone promotes an opinion within the realm of science that Anna Krylov disagrees with, they are "politicizing science." 

When Anna Krylov agrees with an opinion in the realm of science, it is The Truth.

In Philip Ball's response to  Krylov's essay The Peril of Politicizing Science, Ball wrote:

Krylov cites Robert Merton’s “clear separation between science and morality”. But Merton’s notion of a “pure science”, while it might have suited Heisenberg well, “sits in tension with the historical reality that scientists have always had patrons with motivations of their own, and which only rarely involved the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake”, according to Oreskes.(32)

“Seen this way,” Oreskes says, “the idea of science as a value-neutral activity is a myth.”(33) Not only is it patently untrue (as history shows again and again), but it is also a poor strategy for winning public trust. Why would you believe and trust someone who professes to bring no values to their work, to do it free from all ideologies, biases, and social preconceptions? And why would you want to? It is far preferable to lay our values on the table where they can be discussed and challenged than to pretend or insist that the scientific community is engaged in some rarefied pursuit free from all social, political, and ideological influence.

Scientific American published an article prior to Krylov's, in October 2020, entitled Yes, Science is Political which says:

Science, however, has always been political; the events of 2020 have only made the relationship between science and society more explicit. We are in the midst of a pandemic and a climate crisis, both solvable by centering scientific expertise. When our government ignores scientists, the consequences can be fatal, disproportionately so for Black, brown and Indigenous communities. Americans are suffering from wildfire-induced poor air quality. More than 200,000 Americans have died from COVID-19. Yet, as our nation grapples with the pandemic, our current (Trump) administration believes that “science shouldn’t stand in the way” of business as usual.

Krylov believes that an article praising Trump administration education schemes is "insightful" and evidence that Quillette is not a rightwing publication.

We've already seen that Krylov redefines the word "politicizing" to suit her own agenda. But it's even worse in her essay.

Krylov provides 14 examples of "cancellation":

1. Soviets changed the name of a city
2. Images of Trotsky and Kamenev erased from Soviet photographs
3. Soviets reconsider their former admiration of Stalin
4. The phenomenon where some people's reputations rising in relation to those whose reputations' have fallen
5. An article proposes avoiding the use of names in science terms
6. The renaming of a science prize
7. Renaming a science term
8. Renaming a science term
9. Renaming of a science term
10. Renaming of a science term
11. Burned at the stake
12. Asked not to show up at an awards ceremony
13. Chemical castration
14. A soap company reconsiders a word

So "cancellation" in Krylov's lexicon can mean anything from renaming a science term to murder.  She wrote:

The issue of science moralization and censorship is older than 20th century totalitarian regimes. For example, Giordano Bruno was canceled (burned at the stake in 1600) 

It appears to me she might be deliberately equating those who wish to rename science terms with murderers. 

Although perhaps it wasn't intentional - perhaps she was so inflamed by her own righteous indignation against "cancel culture" she couldn't be bothered to soberly assess her use of the term "cancel" in this essay.

But then Krylov asks rhetorically:

Do words have life and power of their own? Can they really cause injury? Do they carry hidden messages? The ideology claims so and encourages us all to be on the constant lookout...

Do words carry hidden messages? You tell me, Krylov - what does it mean to use the same word for renaming a science term as you use to describe murder? 

And if words don't cause injury, why is Krylov making such a big issue out of renaming science terms? 

Today’s censorship does not stop at purging the scientific vocabulary of the names of scientists who “crossed the line” or fail the ideological litmus tests of the Elect.11 In some schools,33,34 physics classes no longer teach “Newton’s Laws”, but “the three fundamental laws of physics”. Why was Newton canceled? Because he was white, and the new ideology10,12,15 calls for “decentering whiteness” and “decolonizing” the curriculum...

Who does it harm if Newton's Laws are called "the three fundamental laws of physics"? Certainly not Newton, who died almost 300 years ago. But a few paragraphs later, Krylov leaves no doubt that she believes that changing a term is a cataclysmic event:

The answer is simple: our future is at stake. As a community, we face an important choice. We can succumb to extreme left ideology and spend the rest of our lives ghost-chasing and witch-hunting, rewriting history, politicizing science, redefining elements of language, and turning STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) education into a farce. Or we can uphold a key principle of democratic society - the free and uncensored exchange of ideas and continue our core mission, the pursuit of truth, focusing attention on solving real, important problems of humankind.

Do words have life and power of their own? Which is it Krylov, are words lifeless and powerless, or does using different words to indicate Newton's Laws mean OUR FUTURE IS AT STAKE?

It's clear what Krylov means by "the free and uncensored exchange of ideas" - she means only ideas she agrees with. When others merely proposed a new approach to science terminology, she called that an example of "cancel culture."

Krylov appears to be having it both ways, in the Steven Pinker tradition and Pinker echos her in the tweet I shared in Part 1: "...she exposes the primitive word magic of language-cancellers: that words have dreadful powers, independent of usage, convention & context."

Krylov and Pinker scoff at the dreadful power of words, yet agree that swapping out words is an existential threat.

Now as it happens, I don't think it's necessary to change "Newton's Laws" to "the three fundamental laws of physics." I don't think retaining the original term "centers whiteness." As with many anti-racist proposals, this is ultimately useless and beside the point. The reason that whiteness is "centered" has nothing to do with the fact that Isaac Newton discovered laws of physics. The extreme racism that has prevented Black Americans from thriving in the United States is the result of complex socio-economic forces that will not be improved by changing science terms. 

The reason that there are so many of these kinds of band-aid proposals to fix racism is because affecting real fundamental change via socio-economic opportunity is so much harder to do, and it takes so much longer to accomplish.

But even band-aids make some people feel better, and they don't hurt me nor - contrary to Krylov's Pinkerite hysteria - anybody else. So why not go along with the change instead of promoting panic? 

After all they are "three fundamental laws of physics" so why is it so terrible to call them that? It seems to be an accepted practice to use the term Theory of Relativity. Does Krylov also throw a tantrum whenever Einstein's name is left out? 

And is "cancellation" always bad? Using Krylov's lexicon,  I will argue in part 4 that cancellation can be a good thing, even from Krylov's own point of view.

Congratulations Dr. Adam Rutherford!

Doing this Pinkerite blog can be depressing sometimes, necessitating as it does that I wallow in the mud with Koch flunkies and race-mongers.

So it's nice to get to applaud one of the good guys for a change.

I've been a fan of Adam Rutherford for awhile, and in particular for his habit of speaking out against race pseudo-science.

As I said last April:

...I am very glad Rutherford is explicitly critical of race science, he is performing a very important service to humanity.

The best part of Rutherford getting the Royal Society David Attenborough Award and Lecture is that both on the web site and in this tweet the Royal Society says he is getting the award "in particular for challenging racist pseudoscience."

More scientists should get this award, like PZ Myers, Maxine Margolis, R. Brian Ferguson and others who fight the good fight.

But uh oh, remember what happened when Rutherford was given the Voltaire Award and Lecture by Humanists UK? He called Voltaire a "hideous racist."

Will Rutherford call David Attenborough a racist? If he does, I'm sure it will be because Attenborough deserved it.

UPDATE: when I wrote this post, I assumed Attenborough had never been accused of racism. Turns out I was wrong.

Anna Krylov and the Peril of Bullshit part 2

PART 1 ~ PART 2 ~ PART 3 ~ PART 4

I was so appalled by Anna Krylov's bullshit essay The Peril of Politicizing Science I decided to email Krylov, although not really expecting a response, since it's pretty obvious I was calling her a hypocrite. 

I wrote:

I find it curious you oppose politicizing science, when your Wikipedia page indicates you “are active in the promotion of gender equality in STEM fields, especially in theoretical chemistry."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Krylov

While I think the promotion of gender equality in STEM is a worthy goal, it is definitely a political one.

How are your political efforts in science different, or less perilous, than some of the examples you cite in your article, like changing the term “Newton’s Laws”, to “the three fundamental laws of physics”? 

Her response: 

I do not consider activities that ensure fairness and merit-based approach in science to be political. Fairness and merit-based evaluation is one of the core principles of the scientific enterprise, an essential part of the Mertonian norms (CUDOS). There is nothing political in requiring equal opportunity and equal recognition of people regardless of their gender or race!

I was astounded she would seriously claim "there is nothing political in requiring equal opportunity" - has Krylov never heard of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission? 

Since when has demanding equal opportunity in society ever been anything but a political struggle? It doesn't matter whether you agree that promoting women in STEM is a good idea (which I do), you can't just redefine a political struggle as non-political because you agree with the goal!

And of course I presented evidence in part 1 that the role of women in STEM is a controversial and politicized issue. I presented similar evidence to her in my later response.

But she wasn't done astounding me yet in this email which ends:

What my article speaks about is the intrusion of political ideology into science and education, which is already making a lot of damage-- see for example, this very recent article:
https://quillette.com/2021/08/19/as-us-schools-prioritize-diversity-over-merit-china-is-becoming-the-worlds-stem-leader/

Yes, your eyes do not deceive you. She actually cites the right-wing race pseudo-science promoting rag Quillette to support her position. In my response I said:

Do you not know anything about Quillette’s politics, or are you in agreement with them? Why on earth would you use Quillette to make a point?

Her response was to give me a condescending little lecture about science and truth and then she made unsupported claims about Quillette:

In science, we look at the essence of findings and not who said it or where it is published. This is also part of Mertonian norms. Truth is truth, irrespective of clothes. 

Are you really willing to dismiss an insightful article simply because it is published not in your favorite outlet? You should read the content and then decide for yourself whether these labels are justified. This particular paper is well supported by the data. Quileute is non-partisan and does not have a political agenda. Most of the authors are of liberal political orientation. 

Anybody who has read this Pinkerite blog knows what utter bullshit her claims are about Quillette. 

However, I was prompted by her response to read the article she shared, more carefully and I was not disappointed. The article, like just about everything else published in Quillette was dedicated to promoting right-wing positions. I wrote back, and couldn't resist getting a little snarky in response to her condescension:

Quillette is a right-wing publication and has been known as such since soon after its inception.

https://theoutline.com/post/2307/quillette-claire-lehmann-conservative-snowflakes

Continuing...

https://slate.com/technology/2019/01/quillette-claire-lehmann-intellectual-dark-web.html

Right up to the present.

https://washingtonmonthly.com/2021/07/05/conservatives-have-no-plan-to-win-the-culture-war-but-they-intend-to-rule-anyway/

"In this age of dull-witted Fox News propaganda, Q-adjacent conspiracy nonsense, and sophomorically glib Quillette contrarianism, it’s not easy to find truly thoughtful conservative writing on American politics."

++++++++

It’s also a fact that one of Quillette’s known funders is right-wing Mark Carnegie.

https://www.smh.com.au/business/companies/huge-gap-in-the-market-the-local-publisher-winning-where-others-won-t-tread-20190428-p51hz8.html

...You claim “most of the authors (of Quillette) are of liberal political orientation.”

Let’s have the data supporting that claim, like we do in, you know, science.

Finally, the article you shared is not “insightful” it’s the usual right-wing drivel, which is why the link it provides for “promising models” for schools is to an article by Rick Hess, director of Education Policy studies of the right-wing Koch-funded American Enterprise Institute, and that article praises charter schools including the controversial “Success Academy” and the Trump administration’s Betsy DeVos.

https://www.edweek.org/policy-politics/opinion-portents-of-success-for-charter-schools/2017/06

An article in Quillette that links to a Koch operative - but I imagine Krylov would claim that's not political either.

But I couldn't find out because she didn't respond to me after that. The entire exchange is available here.

 I'd like to believe she gave up because she could see I had the much stronger position since I actually bothered to provide evidence, like we do in science, but who knows. She clearly has no qualms about re-defining words to suit her needs.

We saw Steven Pinker do something similar a couple of years ago, when he decided it would be perfectly fine to quote people in such a way that it made it look as though they agreed with him, when they did not. Phil Torres justifiably criticized him for this, and Pinker's response was "so what"? and then Michael Shermer called Torres a "cockroach" on Pinker's behalf. 

More about Krylov's curious relationship with words in part 3.

Anna Krylov and the Peril of Bullshit, part 1

PART 2 ~ PART 3 ~ PART 4

Recently I came across Razib Khan retweeting Steven Pinker, promoting an essay, The Peril of Politicizing Science by Anna Krylov, and so I immediately suspected that Krylov's essay would be bad.

I was not wrong.

Krylov is a chemist, who, according to her Wikipedia page:

...is active in the promotion of gender equality in STEM fields, especially in theoretical chemistry.[25] She created and maintains the web directory Women in Theoretical and Computational Chemistry, Material Science, and Biochemistry,[26] which currently lists more than 400 scientists holding tenure and tenure track academic positions, or equivalent positions in industry, national laboratories, and other leading research establishments. She has delivered several talks on gender equality in STEM including a lecture at the international symposium in Uppsala, Sweden.[27]

Now I happen to believe gender equality in STEM is a worthwhile goal but even I wouldn't argue it's not a political issue. 

Certainly it is a political issue for the Quillette/IDW industrial complex, of which Steven Pinker is a member in good standing. 

In 2017 James Damore was fired by Google for publishing a memo on a company discussion board, in which he argued that women were, as a group, not as good at STEM as men, using the standard evolutionary psychology reasoning that Pinker and most or all members of the IDW favor. 

And of course Steven Pinker was a vocal defender of Damore, tying the controversy directly to electoral politics:

Steven Pinker, a Harvard University cognitive scientist, said on Twitter that Google’s actions could increase support for Mr. Trump in the tech industry.

Steven Pinker agrees with Damore about women in STEM, and according to this Guardian article, Damore got his ideas directly from Pinker.

Damore, stupidly, sued Google for firing him. The lawsuit was dismissed in 2020. 

Pinker's book "The Blank Slate" discusses his evolutionary psychology views at length. The book also has heaping helpings of Pinker's own political views including his division of feminism into two camps, the "gender feminists" (the bad kind) and the "equity feminists" (the good kind.) He includes Camille Paglia, the pedophilia supporter, in the good feminist camp.

Although Krylov is on the opposite side of the women in STEM issue from Pinker, she is firmly on Pinker's side in her Peril article. But in all cases, Anna Krylov herself is just as guilty of politicizing science as those she criticizes. Hypocrisy seems to be an absolute requirement to be part of the Quillette/IDW industrial complex.

Anna Krylov cites Bari Weiss, a political operative, on the issue of changing terminology.

Bari Weiss tweeted a link to her own article "The Miseducation of America's Elites" with a pull quote about the renaming of "Newton's laws" to "three fundamental laws of physics." The article is on Weiss's substack account but it was originally in - and I assume written for and paid for by - the City Journal, a publication of the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, funded by Charles Koch, among others.

Charles Koch is not interested in pure science. Charles Koch is interested in politics.

In her article, which was published a month after Weiss's article, Krylov cites Weiss:

Today’s censorship does not stop at purging the scientific vocabulary of the names of scientists who “crossed the line” or fail the ideological litmus tests of the Elect.11 In some schools,33,34 physics classes no longer teach “Newton’s Laws”, but “the three fundamental laws of physics”. Why was Newton canceled? Because he was white, and the new ideology10,12,15 calls for “decentering whiteness” and “decolonizing” the curriculum. 

Now I didn't expect Krylov would be in so deep with the Quillette/IDW industrial complex before I began reading her Peril article. I know, I know, even after doing this Pinkerite blog for almost three years I'm still stunningly naive sometimes.

In addition to Weiss, Krylov cites McWhorter (Quillette author, Koch employee), the blog of Jerry Coyne (race pseudo-science, reactionary and Pinker's #1 fanboy) and grifters Helen Pluckrose and James "your mom" Lindsay, employee of Christian identity extremist Michael O'Fallon.

But then I had an email exchange with Krylov and it gets even worse. More about that in part 2.

Razib Khan and the curious Insitome Institute part 3: blocked by Spencer Wells

Part 1 & Part 2

I hadn't planned to write a third part to my series on Razib Khan and the Insitome Institute, but then I discovered that the founder of the Insitome Institute, Spencer Wells, Ph.D., blocked me on Twitter.

Since he could have ignored me or muted my Pinkerite1 account, instead of blocking me, I get the impression the block is his way of punishing me for daring to ask him what he thought of Razib Khan's positive review of Charles Murray's latest book, specifically when Khan suggested we should "connect the dots" about Black Americans.

I can't say I'm surprised by Wells' response, the other member of the Insitome Institute's board of directors, Carlos D. Bustamente, did the same thing when he was asked about Khan, although he did unblock later. But erasing criticisms - or even questions - about race-mongers seems to be the knee-jerk response.

Wells has known about Khan's checkered past for a long time. I just found an interview with Wells in the Austin Monthly from July 2018 in which he defends Khan:

*Editor’s Note: In 2015, Razib Khan, Insitome’s director of scientific content, was hired and then fired by the New York Times after reports surfaced that he had in the past written articles for publications deemed racist. We asked Wells for a comment on the controversy. Here is his response:

“Razib Khan is certainly not a racist, though he has in the past written for publications that later became associated with the far right. I would characterize him more as a libertarian than anything else—he believes in free and uncensored rational inquiry, and in the current divisive political era that can sometimes get you in trouble. He's an extremely well-read scholar with an encyclopedic knowledge of human population genetics and a talent for communicating it—that's why he's our director of scientific content.”

Khan hasn't merely written for far-right publications - he's been on the payroll of at least one far-right publisher, Ron Unz, as discussed in part 2. 

It's an interesting question, whether Khan is a racist. But whether he is or not, he is most certainly a race-monger: he's written about race for many right-wing racists, whether it's to promote the oft-debunked Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence hypothesis for racist Taki Theodoracopolus; or to suggest we "remove all the history we take for granted" to understand the positions of Black and indigenous Americans while platformed by racist Ron Unz; to expounding on his racialist theories in agreement with Steve Sailer, in VDARE, founded by racist Peter Brimelow; to supporting racist Charles Murray, whom Khan declares is his friend.

And it's not like Khan's support for Charles Murray is ancient history. His positive review of "Facing Reality" was published just a couple of weeks ago in the race-mongering Quillette.

Race-mongering has gained Khan both money and notoriety. 

But it's possible he's not a racist, he could be just a feckless opportunist.

Khan isn't only a race-monger, he's been so involved in right-wing politics that he was profiled as a conservative operative - in the NYTimes several years before they "cancelled" him due to his race-mongering.

Which is why it's funny to see Khan, in a blog post from 2003, which has aged like supermarket sushi, attacking Richard Lewontin for having leftist leanings while doing science. 

See this article by Steve Sailer taking on Lewontin's assertion. Additionally Wells does not even hint at the fact that Lewontin is a politicized Marxist who played a critical role in personally attacking E. O. Wilson during the sociobiology controversies of the 1970s. In fact, though S. J. Gould continued the good fight on behalf of the "anti-hereditarian" Left until his death, Lewontin faded away from public view, but books like Defenders of the Truth: The Sociobiology Debate, pin-point him as the real svengali behind the scientists who made the scientific controversy into a circus.

Lewontin "faded" so much that on his recent death at age 92, he received lengthy obituaries in the most prominent mainstream and scientific media. 

In addition to Steve Sailer, look who else Khan mentions in the passage quoted above: Wells. Yes, that is Spencer Wells. Lewontin was his advisor. 

So Wells and Khan go way back and Khan appears to be a big fan. He mentions Wells several times on his Unz blog. In 2004 he discusses Wells and Wells book, recently published at that time, Journey of Man, and apparently Khan thinks Wells is very handsome, even Robert Redford-esque. But then, one of Khan's race obsessions is blondeness.

I speculated that one of Razib Khan's right-wing racist patrons offered money to the Insitome Institute to take Razib Khan on, but this latest info makes me wonder if there's another possible explanation for why Wells engaged Khan in spite of Khan's race-mongering career: flattery.

Since being blocked by Wells, I've taken a good look at the Insitome web site and I wonder what is going on there. It looks as though everything stopped about a year ago: the blog posts, the podcasts, its Facebook page even the Insitome Institute Twitter account.

But even when they were active, it's not impressive. Khan was apparently in charge of the blog and the blog posts range from nothing more than summaries of podcast episodes; to very short and badly-written ramblings about vaguely genetics-adjacent topics; to non-existent. Here's one of the older posts I found.

That is all the content...

Several of the other listed posts are also empty. And the ones that are not empty don't seem to have much to do with the stated purposes of the Insitome Institute:

Understanding the Story of You

We provide key insights about your DNA to gain a richer understanding of your origins and to help you better navigate the path forward. We explore ancestry and personal genetic traits, such as metabolism: how well you personally tolerate sensitive food substances such as glucose and lactose; how well you absorb vitamin D and calcium; how quickly you metabolize caffeine; how well you tolerate alcohol and how quickly your system is able to flush it...

Building Trust & Safeguarding your Data

DNA sequencing technology is the most rapidly growing technology of our time and it is still early days. It is widely anticipated that 30 million people will have been sequenced by the end of 2020 and, by the middle of this century, it’s likely that all humans will be sequenced at (or before) birth...

Using Science for Good

We believe that understanding how similar we all are from a genetic perspective has the power to influence hearts and minds, helping to reduce racial biases and the tendency to stereotype, and to move us past outdated notions of race.

It's very odd that the Insitome Institute has Razib Khan on staff, while they claim they want to move past "outdated notions of race." I guess that's why Spencer Wells blocked me for asking about Khan's statement that we need to "connect the dots" about Black Americans. 

Another interesting item: although Gareth Highnam is listed as if he is currently associated with Insitome, on their Team page, his Linkedin page indicates his association with the Institute ended in January 2020.

So what happened to the Insitome Institute? Why did everything suddenly stop, without explanation a year ago? Why haven't they updated the team page? The web site's primary purpose now seems to be to link three anti-race science Ph.Ds to an infamous race-monger.

Razib Khan also blocked me on Twitter, of course, but there are ways to get around that. So while having a peek at his Twitter feed I was amazed to see he and Lindsay Beyerstein are pretty friendly. I knew of Beyerstein through Amanda Marcotte's old web site Pandagon. Beyerstein & Marcotte were pals (I didn't realize Ezra Klein was also involved in Pandagon), and I came to know about Khan because commenters on Pandagon were strongly critical of the hereditarian views at Khan's blog Gene Expression. And Khan was critical in turn of Marcotte and Pandagon.

Beyerstein is still critical of racism. Does it not bother her at all that Khan is a firm supporter of Charles Murray and his hereditarian claims about Black Americans?

Beyerstein also blocked Pinkerite1 on Twitter, but I'm not sure why now. I assume because I disagreed with her about something.

Hereditarian Prophesies of Charles Murray

This excellent Twitterer provided a collection of Charles Murray's prophesies in which Murray foretells that in only a few more years or so, his belief in the genetically endowed inferiority of Black people will be proven by Science.

I provided the full images of the screen caps attached to the original tweet, below.

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The racist Bo Winegard, perhaps hoping to get Charles Murray's perch as leading race-monger of the American Enterprise Institute, once the 78-year-old Murray kicks the bucket, gives us his own prophesy. Winegard bumps Murray's ETA of hereditarian victory from a few years to thirty or so.