Sabine Hossenfelder and the Intellectual Dark Web

Hossenfelder is not nearly as impressive
as she finds herself.
_______________________________________________________

I recently became aware of German physicist Sabine Hossenfelder when I came across her videos on nuclear energy, in which she minimizes the dangers of nuclear energy and especially nuclear waste storage. 

(Watch John Oliver on that topic.)

I immediately smelled Intellectual Dark Web.

Also, I found her personality so irritating that even though I basically agree with her about the absence of free will, I found myself coming up with pro-free will arguments as I watched her video on the subject.

So, did she have an IDW connection? I Googled her and found her hobnobbing with race pseudoscience promoter Michael Shermer. Bingo. I have a practically infallible nose for the stench of the Intellectual Dark Web after doing this blog for four and a half years.

But worst of all, Hossenfelder thinks Steven Pinker's melange of sociobiology and reactionary politics, "The Blank Slate," is an important book. 

I've read The Blank Slate. It's hot garbage. The New Yorker had Pinker's number when the book was first published.

(Fun fact: in The Blank Slate we find that Pinker is a big fan of pro-pedophilia Camille Paglia.)

I just found Rebecca Watson has a great response to Hossenfelder's feckless and poorly-supported commentary on transgender issues. And I had to share.

P. Z. Myers wrote:

But then (Hossenfelder) did the stereotypical physicist thing: she studies the fundamental building blocks of the universe, energy and matter and mathematics, so she decided to slide over into a field she knows nothing about and explain it to us. That’s why people were pestering me to critique her recent video, titled Is being trans a social fad among teenagers? I guess having a Ph.D. in physics makes you an expert in psychology and sociology as well as biology.

See also Sabine Hossenfelder, Quillette, racism and Thielbucks.

Steven Pinker and Razib Khan - still buddies pushing race pseudoscience

This past January I noted that Pinker hadn't been seen publicly associating with race pseudoscience promoting sociobiologist Razib Khan for awhile. 

I thought Pinker might be in the process of ghosting Khan like he did to racist Steve Sailer after a decade of promoting Sailer's career, but apparently not. I recently saw that Khan's Substack - which I guess I should monitor more closely than I have been - has an interview with Pinker on March 16. 

But the full interview is only available to Khan's subscribers and I'm not about to give money to Razib Khan - who do you think I am, Ron Unz?

So as usual, Pinker is preaching to the racist choir about his "Blank Slate" claims, with no need to worry he might receive any inconvenient questions or pushback about his views.

Based on the summary, it appears the interview is the usual combination of sociobiology and whining about the failure of American society at large to express admiration for Pinker and his Deep Thoughts (now shamelessly monetized) the way the lazy gullible media usually does.

Despite extraordinary advances in genome-wide association analysis and the application of cutting-edge computational biological techniques to understand how the brain and behavior work at the scale of DNA, much of American society remains wedded to the blank slate, and indeed widely applied policies have taken the implications of the assumption still further than a generation ago. Pinker points out that arguments for cultural variation driving group differences are now taboo, on top of the earlier wariness around exploring any genetic basis of these differences. 

First of all, genome-wide association analysis (GWAS) has not proven sociobiology beliefs correct, as Pinker, Khan and people like their pal Kathryn Paige Harden like to claim.

But also this sentence reveals the sociobiological thinking of Pinker and Khan:

Pinker points out that arguments for cultural variation driving group differences are now taboo, on top of the earlier wariness around exploring any genetic basis of these differences. 

"Group differences" is sociobiology-speak for different socio-economic levels of success by race. It's right next door to "human biodiversity."

According to this paper from 2021, How White nationalists mobilize genetics: From genetic ancestry and human biodiversity to counterscience and metapolitics - my bold.

The public face of human biodiversity includes, on one side, writers for the far right, White nationalist outlets like Steve Sailer of the Unz Review and Jared Taylor of American Renaissance, and, on the other, people who are not ostensibly political but willing to write provocatively about topics like race and eugenics like Razib Khan of Discover magazine and Steve Hsu, physicist and entrepreneur of the company Genomic Prediction (Eror, 2013; Feldman, 2016; MacDougald & Willick, 2017; Schulson, 2017) or centrist liberals like Steven Pinker (2006) who legitimates human biodiversity ideas like the evolution of Jewish intelligence. There is also a large set of less well-known and especially anonymous or pseudonymous bloggers and tweeters in the human biodiversity orbit. There is an effort to conceal or deny how organized human biodiversity is. The humanbiologicaldiversity.com website’s design is attributed to the generically named “James Wilson” though no contact information is offered. Blogger @hbdchick recently tweeted “human biodiversity isn’t a movement” it’s “simply the diversity found among and between human populations that has a biological basis.”10

We know that Pinker discounts racism and poverty as drivers of crime. So what does Pinker think drives crime, especially "group differences" in crime? 

Well he doesn't come right out and say it, as usual, but it's easy enough to infer, and not just because he's been supporting race pseudoscience hawkers for at least twenty years - like Sailer, Khan, the Quillette gang, Linda Gottfredson, etc.

In Pinker's book "The Better Angels of Our Nature" he wrote:

...The idea that young men are civilized by women and marriage may seem as corny as Kansas in August, but it has become a commonplace of modern criminology. A famous study that tracked a thousand low-income Boston teenagers for forty-five years discovered that two factors predicted whether a delinquent would go on to avoid a life of crime: getting a stable job, and marrying a woman he cared about and supporting her and her children. The effect of marriage was substantial: three-quarters of the bachelors, but only a third of the husbands, went on to commit more crimes. This difference alone cannot tell us whether marriage keeps men away from crime or career criminals are less likely to get married, but the sociologists Robert Sampson, John Laub, and Christopher Wimer have shown that marriage really does seem to be a pacifying cause.

So according to Pinker it's people deciding not to get married that is the problem. Unfortunately for him, Pinker is completely wrong about the magic of marriage preventing crime, as I discussed here.

The marriage is magic theory he is promoting reverses the causal arrows to claim that low marriage rates cause crime rather than that people who can't afford to get married or support a family might have stressors - like poverty - that cause the crime.

Pinker and his right-wing,
plutocrat-funded, Republican & IDW pals
on the board of Fair-for-all
__________________________________

When Jon Stewart interviewed Andrew Sullivan, (Pinker's fellow member of the board of advisors of the anti-CRT grift organization Fair for all) Sullivan claimed that the struggle for Black people in the United States had everything to do with "Black culture."

Sullivan is notorious for promoting racist Charles Murray's sociobiological claims in The Bell Curve.

So why exactly have Black people had lower marriage rates? What makes "Black culture" the way it is, if you completely discount socio-economics and history? 

Stewart didn't force Sullivan to give an answer to that - but Pinker gives an answer:

Pinker points out that arguments for cultural variation driving group differences are now taboo, on top of the earlier wariness around exploring any genetic basis of these differences. 

It's obvious here that Pinker believes the "cultural variation driving group differences" is due to the "genetic basis of these differences."

So hawkers of sociobiology like Pinker, Sullivan and Khan believe the ultimate cause for why Black people in the United States don't get married as often as other "races" ...is because they are Black. 

They believe there is some special genetic component of Blackness that makes Black people avoid marriage, and because they don't get married as often, therefore are more likely to commit crimes. And they think that GWAS studies will identify genes in Black people that cause this reluctance to get married. That is what sociobiology is all about.

Of course all "groups" in the United States are getting married less often now, but I've never seen contrary data cause sociobiologists to change their minds.

A curious coincidence, none of the three was born in the United States. Pinker was born in Canada, Sullivan was born in England and Khan was born in Bangladesh. But they seem to share the mission of coming to the United States to support racist claims (and take money from right-wing plutocrats to do it) about Black Americans, based on sociobiological beliefs.

The term sociobiology was popularized by E. O. Wilson, who, like Pinker, mostly avoided making blatant racist statements, while at the same time encouraging racist extremists. 

Wilson encouraged the career of a racist, Jean-Phillipe Rushton - who was a big influence on - you guessed it - Razib Khan. 

Because many people reacted negatively to E. O. Wilson's sociobiology claims, the term sociobiology is almost never used by those who promote sociobiology. The preferred terms are evolutionary psychology, something Pinker is closely associated with, and behavioral genetics, most recently connected to Kathryn Paige Harden but invented by extreme racist Francis Galton. 

Never forget that the people promoting GWAS as evidence of genetic "group differences" have political agendas and they are not afraid to advocate for making those agendas public policy while claiming they don't have political agendas. 

Like the time Kathryn Paige Harden, a friend and promoter of Razib Khan, compared people who refute sociobiology-based political solutions to bank robbers.

Sociologist and criminologist Callie Burt:

Harden argues that there are others who support genetics research on social outcomes, include a eugenics right, which has and will put this to use in the service of inferiorizing racial/ethnic and other disadvantaged groups. Harden positions herself as occupying the rational (ostensibly non-ideological) middle: In contrast to this ‘eugenics view’, Harden states that “[w]hat I am aiming to do in this book is to re-envision the relationship between genetic science and equality.” She asks, “[c]an we peel apart human behavioral genetics … from the racist, classist, and eugenicist ideologies it has been entwined with for decades? Can we imagine a new synthesis? And can this synthesis broaden our understanding of what equality looks like and how to achieve it?” (p18-9).

To this she answers not just ‘yes we can’, but ‘we must’. Indeed, in a surprisingly aggressive section of the book, which departs somewhat from her tone elsewhere, she argues that to do social research without considering genetic differences between individuals is the moral equivalent not of jaywalking but bank robbery(!!). Specifically, Harden writes about an asserted (but not demonstrated) “tacit collusion in social science to ignore genetic differences between people.” She states such ‘tacit collusion’ (which I dispute exists, more on that below), “is not wrong in the way that jaywalking is wrong…. It’s wrong in the way that robbing banks is wrong. It’s stealing.” 

Yikes. For the non-criminology readers, robbery isn’t ‘stealing’. Robbery is the use of force or threat of the use of force to take something from others; in bank robbery, this would be money. Perhaps if she mentioned this offhand or in a talk, I may let it go, but in a book this was clearly a thoughtful, albeit absurd and unjustified in my view, moral comparison. How does she get here? And, are her arguments sound? [Foreshadowing: no idea and no.] 

The journey is interesting, especially with the relatable personal examples, but the logic and evidence presented is partial and tendentious. Harden battles with straw men, overlooks nuance and contrary or complicating evidence, and deftly avoids several of the longstanding critiques of behavior genetics, which now apply to sociogenomics: these include the population specificity and, therefore, incomparability of heritability studies across groups (defined, for example, by social class), the social construction of the outcomes, and downward causation, as well as a host of methodological issues, including assumptions and limitations, in current GWAS and other sociogenomics studies.

 I do think there is much to discuss on these issues (in fact, I’m writing a book about it myself), but charitable engagement with different views and thorough engagement with existing scientific evidence and theory is not found in this book, in my reading. She’s selling a view, in part by curiously denigrating her opponents while ignoring their critiques.

Unsuprisingly, the Peter Thiel-funded Big Think promotes behavioral genetics and Harden. Although the page for the interview is branded:  IN PARTNERSHIP WITH John Templeton Foundation.

According to SourceWatch: The John Templeton Foundation tries to encourage the integration of religious beliefs and free-market principles into the classroom.

My letter to Pamela Paul ~ plus Bari Weiss, Peter Thiel and Chat GPT

Dear Ms. Paul

Your latest op-ed claims that "A Paper That Says Science Should Be Impartial Was Rejected by Major Journals” without mentioning that many of those who wrote this paper are associated with the “Intellectual Dark Web” and/or have written for racist far-right Thiel-funded Quillette.

I am including Jerry Coyne, Peter Boghossian, Anna Krylov, John McWhorter, Glenn Loury, Lee Jussim and Jay Tanzman - and those are the names I recognize immediately. 

I suspect they are not the only co-authors with right-wing views. I will investigate further - something that you apparently refuse to do. Or worse, you are deliberately hiding what you know about their political views.

After all, your former spouse was caught promoting race pseudoscience and his IDW friends rushed to his defense. It would not be surprising if you had your own IDW connections.

https://www.pinkerite.com/2020/05/four-koch-toadies-defend-race-science.html

I addressed Krylov’s dishonest, hysterical screed on the same topic on my blog a couple of years ago, and it's also available on Medium.

https://medium.com/@nancymcclernan/anna-krylov-and-the-peril-of-bullshit-31ca795583d5

You seem to be, at the very least, a deeply unethical employee of the New York Times.

Nancy McClernan

Pinkerite

-------------

The paper in question was published in "The Journal of Controversial Ideas" thus confirming that it is, along with Quillette, a tool of the Intellectual Dark Web which many of us always suspected it was.

The paper appears to have been organized by reactionary bullshit-swilling Anna Krylov, who I assume is by now on Peter Thiel's payroll. She was also an organizer for Peter Thiel's CPAC for racists. 

And while many of the co-authors are horrible reactionaries and hawkers of racist "science," the references for the paper are even worse - no less than three links to Quillette, plus citations of race pseudoscience promoters Pinker and Andrew Sullivan and grifters Pamela Paresky, Katie Herzog, Helen Pluckrose and the thoroughly grotesque Trump-loving asshole James Lindsay.

More and more it appears to me that Pamela Paul was hired to ensure that the NYTimes has someone to represent the interests of the Intellectual Dark Web, now that Bari Weiss has gone on to more obviously rightwing plutocrat-serving gigs. 

This is from TODAY. Note how Weiss describes right-wing ghouls Blake Masters and JD Vance as "anti-establishment." 

I think you mean fascist, you sleazy shameless handmaiden of stochastic terrorist monsters and babbling lunatics.

I asked Chat GPT about Weiss's connection to Thiel. 

Bonus link - Majority Report (again!): Bari Weiss HUMILIATED When Trans Child's Powerful Response To Her Lies Goes Viral. Pamela Paul is also infamous for beating the anti-trans hate drum.

NOTE: This must be investigated further, since ChatGPT is known to be factually unreliable.

UPDATE - someone put me on the "In Defense of Merit" mailing list and so I received an email today that links to this "In Defense of Merit" website. 

Apparently the people behind this grift felt that it wasn't clear enough that this is a project of right-wingers, race pseudoscience promoters and associates of the Intellectual Dark Web, so the page includes testimonials, not only from the odious Bari Weiss and Pamela Paul, the IDW-cheerleader twins, but from:

Richard Dawkins - anti-Muslim crackpot and instigator of the infamous stochastic terrorist pioneer event known as "elevatorgate"

Jordan Peterson - reactionary crackpot beloved by Quillette

Jeffrey Flier - Quillette author and a co-president of Pinker's Council of Academic Freedom grift 

Jonathan Rauch - Thielbucks via Quillette, Kochbucks via Reason Magazine

Jesse Sabatini - right-winger opposed to COVID lockdown

David Bertoli - right-winger who likes to retweet people like Nicholas Christakis and Conor Friedersdorf. Hilariously Bertoli tweeted the Upton Sinclair quote “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” while praising people who are indisputably political operatives working for Charles Koch and Peter Thiel. The lack of self-awareness and/or hypocrisy of these IDW goons is always mind-boggling.

Judith Curry - climate change denier who "receives funding from the fossil fuel industry" - what a surprise. Maybe David Bertoli can lecture her on the topic of salary sources and not understanding things. Predictably, the Koch-funded City Journal loves her.

The College Fix - funded by Koch and other right-wing plutocrats

And best of all...

Noah Carl loves neo-Nazi Bo Winegard
and "human biodiversity" -  if
I had to guess, I'd say everybody
who contributed to this grift
is fine with race pseudoscience

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

Noah Carl - hardcore but sneaky racist and promoter of race pseudoscience and co-author with neo-Nazi Quillette editor Bo Winegard. According to RationalWiki, Carl

is a British sociologist who, outside of his respectable sociology work, publishes racialist pseudoscience and wrote an Islamophobic paper for OpenPsych and a paper for the white supremacist journal Mankind Quarterly.[2] For this reason, he has been described as living a "double life".[3] After the latter was exposed in December 2018, hundreds of academics signed a letter calling for Cambridge University to reconsider the award of his fellowship and to stop employing him as a postdoctoral researcher.[4][5]

Krylov and her IDW pals are not even pretending anymore - they are just blatant about being far-right and racist ghouls.

I asked ChatGPT about Krylov and it said she

...holds the Stephen and Laura Hsu endowed chair in analytical chemistry.

Which certainly sounds plausible especially if that Stephen Hsu is the supporter of race pseudoscience. That Hsu can be seen Tweeting encouragement for her earlier attempt at building a culture war moral panic grift.

Like many other hawkers of race pseudoscience, Hsu gets serious funding:

...Even though mainstream science has pretty much scrapped the notion that race has any kind of biological basis long ago, that hasn’t stopped Steven Hsu from trying to link intelligence with race and getting a billion and a half dollars for research based in China. 

I don't think Krylov has ever met a race pseudoscience hawker she doesn't like. But Google couldn't find any evidence of Krylov's connection to this endowed chair and there's no mention of it on her USC page.

But WHERE IS PINKER? This IDW-heavy grift is right up his alley and he is pals with the two people I think organized the paper, Krylov and Jerry Coyne.

Pinker was hanging out with Anna Krylov at Peter Thiel's CPAC for racists and Coyne adores Pinker.

Pinker, left and Krylov  wearing glasses behind and on the right of him
at the very skewed old-white-man CPAC for racists keynoted by 
(and funded by, I suspect,) crackpot Republican fascist Peter Thiel
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Did Peter Thiel tell Pinker to stand down and focus his attention on his "Academic Freedom" grift?

Never fear, loyal Pinkeriteers, more about Steven Pinker tomorrow.

The Majority Report: Larry Summers VOX POPULI!

I know I just recently posted a Majority Report video but I have been posting recently about Larry Summers - his support for race pseudoscience hawkers from Steven Pinker on down -  and MR has a great piece on Jon Stewart's take-down of Larry Summers pro-plutocrat fiscal views. 

One of the best aspects of this video is demonstrating what a creep Larry Summers is, just personality-wise, in addition to his being a courtier of the plutocracy.

The YouTube left is really getting good, especially with criticisms of the IDW and pro-plutocrat financial policies. My pals "Some More News" just posted a video about credit scores.

UPDATE: speaking of what a creep Larry Summers is:

Harvard President Asked Epstein for Donation to Wife’s Poetry Project after Sex Offender’s Conviction

Alan Dershowitz approves his friend Steven Pinker's Council on Academic Freedom

Confirming my view that the driving force behind the council is whiny right-wing soreheads who think they should be revered and kept free from all criticism.

Dershowitz:

The difference is that today's censors have tried to silence and cancel me, as well as others who espouse centrist, liberal and civil libertarian positions — and certainly if they express conservative or God forbid pro-Trump views! That is why this council on academic freedom is so important, and that is why it is so disappointing that so many former liberals and civil libertarians have declined to join it.

Ian Chotner interviewed Dershowitz for the New Yorker to give him plenty of space to whine and spin bullshit.

Dershowitz:

Every year, they would have an overflow crowd to hear me speak about whatever book I was writing, or whatever I was doing. But suddenly, after I represented the Constitution on behalf of President Trump, the library found excuses for never having me. Their first excuse was that my crowds were too big. So I said, “Well, why don’t you limit the crowds?” They said, “Oh, we hadn’t thought of that.”

Chotner:

Can you imagine if Ed Sullivan had done that with the Beatles? It’s a ridiculous excuse.

Yeah, of course. So I’ve been cancelled, basically, by the Chilmark Library. That has resulted in lots of people in Chilmark calling me and calling the library and saying, “We’re being deprived of Alan’s annual speech.”

 [Ebba Hierta, the Chilmark’s director, disputed Dershowitz’s characterization, and said, “Not one single person has contacted me to complain that they haven’t had a chance to hear Alan speak.”]

Dershowitz is such a clown:

But you broadly support the work of the committee?

I broadly support efforts to get into what happened on January 6th. I think what happened on January 6th is appalling and dangerous. I think President Trump should not have made the speech he made. I said this publicly. I condemned him for making that speech, even though it was probably protected by the Constitution, but I condemned him for doing it. Just as I condemned the people who tried to interfere with Justice Kavanaugh’s dinner, even though I think they had the right to do it. Just because you have a right doesn’t mean you’re right.

A riot at the Capitol on one hand, and then the Kavanaugh dinner.

My views are fairly complex and nuanced on these issues, but they’ve been simplified and stereotyped.

Pinker is such a good buddy of Dershowitz that when Dershowitz asked him to help with Jeffrey Epstein's defense, he was happy to step up:

After Jeffrey Epstein was indicted for sex crimes in 2006, his Harvard lawyer, Alan Dershowitz, called on the expertise of one of his Harvard colleagues, famous linguist Steven Pinker.

An obscure document from Epstein’s legal defense shows that Pinker weighed in on the precise meaning of a federal law about using the internet to entice minors into prostitution or other illegal sex acts.

Pinker told BuzzFeed News that when he offered his opinion to Dershowitz, he was unaware of the details of the client or the case. He now regrets his involvement, he said.

“Though I did this as a favor to a friend and colleague, and not as either a paid expert witness or as a part of a defense team, knowing what I know now I do regret writing the letter,” Pinker said by email.

Steven Pinker has the best friends - from Larry Summers to Steve Sailer to Alan Dershowitz.

Majority Report: Bill Maher is Elon Musk's little bitch

And they mention something I've been pointing out for a long time on Pinkerite:

...this is a hallmark of the IDW right, to say "my conservative views are not really actually political in fact they're moderate" or they might not be involved in politics whatsoever because they're consistently trying to launder conservative thought through apolitical means and it's the same thing. 

We saw with the Bari Weiss crowd before and now these guys are just a little bit richer and have a little bit of a bigger platform saying the same stuff we saw six seven years ago and what does it mean that Bill Maher is "they're trying to cancel me" - it means that people are criticizing him from all sides and yet he's had a show for 25 years yeah minimum and there's one time when he's been canceled and that was in the wake of uh 9 11 and with pressure from the Bush Administration...

Bill Maher is a creaky old reactionary tool. And Elon Musk is a stochastic terrorist.

Substack's Chris Best will not say that racism is banned from Substack

Which of course anybody could have predicted given that, like many people associated with Substack, Best has a Thiel connection, and has appeared on the Thiel-funded Quillette podcast.

And race pseudoscience promoters are already on Substack.

Nilay Patel of Decoder interviewed Best. The entire interview is here.

I heard about this interview because folks in the Fediverse were sharing the part where Patel nails Best to the wall.

More from Mike Masnick at TechDirt.

Why I think Harvard's "Council on Academic Freedom" is owned by Steven Pinker

It starts with the fact that Pinker co-authored the founding announcement of the Council on Academic Freedom, which was printed in the Boston Globe.

Then, in the announcement: 

• The second link goes to FIRE, the organization funded by Koch and other right-wing plutocrats. According to Source Watch:

FIRE is a former member of the State Policy Network, a group of right-wing think tanks and other politically-active nonprofits.

FIRE was a sponsor of Turning Point USA's 2017 "Student Action Summit".[6][7]

Connection to Conservative Dark Money Groups, Collaboration with Hate Group Alliance for Defending Freedom

FIRE has received millions of dollars in contributions from politically-active conservative nonprofits, including over $3.4 million from the Charles G. Koch Foundation, over $3.4 million from Donors Capital Fund and DonorsTrust, over $1.8 million from the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, over $1.3 million from the Sarah Scaife Foundation, over $1 million from the Searle Freedom Trust, and over $1 million from the Stand Together Trust.

• The third link goes to Heterodox Academy, an organization funded in part by DonorsTrust, the right-wing plutocrat funding vehicle of choice which also funds the racist obscenity VDARE, the owners of the White Supremacist Castle. Heterodox Academy is headed by "one of Charles Koch's 'pet professors,'" John Tomasi.

• The fourth link goes to FIRE.

• The fifth link goes to an article by Steven Pinker's buddy, pioneer of stochastic terrorism, among other awful things, the Koch-funded Quillette author Cathy Young. Naturally Young's article focuses on Pinker himself.

• The eighth link goes to FIRE.

The membership of the Council on Academic Freedom includes:

• Pinker's fellow Quillette author Jeffrey Flier, co-president

• Carol Hooven, a proponent of sociobiology whom Steven Pinker is apparently mentoring, and who praised neo-Nazi Quillette editor Bo Winegard, 

• Laurence Summers, another buddy of Pinker, who also praised Winegard

• Liz Gaufberg - "heterdox humanist" fan of Heterodox Academy and Bret Weinstein.

• David Haig - supporter of Napoleon Chagnon along with Pinker

• Dan Carpenter defends Amy Wax's right to be a public racist troll while a member of an academic institution and mentions FIRE and two other members of this Council, Jeannie Suk Gersen and Janet Halley. I suspect that defending Wax will be an important issue for Harvard's Council on Academic Freedom, given Wax's prominence at Peter Thiel's CPAC for Racists, at which Pinker, and other supporters of race pseudoscience, spoke.

• Joseph Henrich - evolutionary psychologist - predictably Quillette author Rob Henderson wrote a positive review of his book for the Koch-funded City Journal.

• James Hankins - author at Quillette

• Regina E. Herzlinger - Koch employee

• Jilly Hooley - evolutionary psychologist

• Randall Kennedy - co-author at Quillette with Federalist Society contributor Harvey Silverglate

• J. Mark Ramseyer - notorious for suggesting that comfort women were not coerced

• Stephen Sachs - contributor at the Federalist Society

• Richard Zeckhauser - one-time member of the Council of Academic Advisors for the Koch-funded AEI, chair of Quillette author Jason Richwine's dissertation committee

The focus of the organization is well-illustrated by the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal's commentary on the announcement:

Conservatives are so few at American universities that the battle to restore respect for free and open debate will have to be led by what used to be known as traditional liberals. Well, maybe there’s hope. On Wednesday Harvard University said it’s forming a new faculty-led Council on Academic Freedom dedicated to the free exchange of ideas as a cornerstone of “reason and rational discourse.” 

We know that Steven Pinker considers agreement with race pseudoscience an indicator of "reason and rational discourse."  

Fun fact about Harvard - it has a page on its library site about scientific racism. And meanwhile Steven Pinker is merrily promoting those who promote the same.

Not so fast, Quillette

 Quillette was seen today in that cesspool T itter, trying to whitewash its reputation, in spite of its far-right positions and its support for race pseudoscience, via ChatGPT.

So I went over to ChatGPT and had a little talk with it and by the end we agreed:

Yes indeed, ChatGPT, since Quillette does publish articles that promote race pseudoscience and since Quillette employs individuals who promote race pseudoscience, this raises questions about the publication's values and standards.

And yes, any claims or ideas that promote race pseudoscience should be challenged and debunked with evidence and reason. I will continue to do that. Thank you for your support.

As far as I can tell, the current Quillette Editorial Board is Jon Kay, Jamie Palmer, Claire Lehmann and Bo Winegard.

As I told ChatGPT, Bo Winegard is a notorious promoter of race pseudoscience and even a neo-Nazi, and I have been compiling evidence about Winegard for years.

Jon Kay has been associated with sleazy Quillette for years and is a huge hypocrite, moaning about a writer being "mobbed" then going on to participate in the exact same kind of behavior a couple of years later, as I documented here. Aided by Trump's vicious little rat-fucker Andy Ngo.

Jamie Palmer was the Quillette editor who was duped by the Archie Carter hoax. There's no such thing as shame at Quillette. Or standards. But then, Palmer apparently goes back to the earliest days of Quillette, which is maybe why he can only fail up. 

Claire Lehmann is an execrable human being, the founder of race pseudoscience-promoting Quillette and probably took money from nutty Peter Thiel to do it. She's a long-time supporter of Winegard, attacking me for daring to discuss Winegard's love of "human biodiversity" theories, and made an international name for herself as a racist idiot a couple of years ago.

Speaking of Peter Thiel, I couldn't help asking ChatGPT about the Thiel-Quillette connection.

Lehmann denied that Thiel funded Quillette. But clearly "Quillette" puts a lot of faith in ChatGPT - which is not known for its factual reliability.

Happy Indictment!

 It's the most wonderful time of the year.

Peter Thiel and his network of "liberal" goons

Back in February 2022 I floated my suspicion that many IDW-friendly new media people were being financially supported by Peter Thiel.

I missed, until just today, the Vanity Fair article published two months after my piece that makes me think it even more likely. The Vanity Fair article included a talk with racist, scary-eyed, Catholic neo-fascist Thiel employee Blake Masters about that very topic:

I asked him about the term Thielbucks, and how true it was that the Thiel Foundation was funding a network of New Right podcasters and cool-kid cultural figures as a sort of cultural vanguard.

“It depends if it’s just dissident-right think-tank stuff,” he told me, “or if anyone actually does anything.”

“I don’t know how that became a meme,” he said about Thielbucks. “I think I would know if those kids were getting money.”

“We fund some stuff,” he told me. “But we’re not funding an army of meme posters.” He told me that he and Thiel had met with Khachiyan, one of the cohosts of Red Scare. “Which was cool,” he said. “Their podcast is interesting.”

I asked if there was a world in which they might get funding from Thiel. “Maybe, yeah,” he said. “We fund some weird stuff with the Thiel Foundation.”

"Red Scare" claimed to be leftists.

Of course not everything that scary Bible-quoting Peter Thiel funds, like racist anti-trans Quillette, is a secret. 

He's an open funder of Big Think. 

I finally realized this because I saw recently that Big Think was promoting Steven Pinker, and decided to look at who is behind Big Think. Not only Peter Thiel, but Larry Summers, mentioned on this blog in the past year for his support of Quillette neo-Nazi editor Bo Winegard.

Both Pinker and Summers are considered by some to be liberals, since Pinker was a vocal Obama supporter and Summers worked for the Obama administration.

I already knew there was a Pinker-Thiel connection since Pinker has published in Quillette, but I've often wondered if there were other Thiel vehicles paying Pinker directly, in the way that Pinker also takes money from various Koch vehicles, as in the infamous Unsafe Space tour.

And speaking of the Unsafe Space tour, Pinker's remarks there were defended by disgraced journalist Jesse Singal.

Pinker and Quillette have been promoting Singal's career for years. 

I don't doubt that Singal takes money from Thiel. 

In an article from 2018 in Jezebel:

Private messages posted on a closed discussion forum and provided to Jezebel demonstrate that Singal is, in fact, aware of the criticism he has received for his Atlantic cover story and his coverage of trans issues more broadly. He’s just uninterested in hearing it, dismissing the bulk of it as an example of trans community “groupthink” and uninterrogated in-group bias, which prevents us from reporting on something like adolescent transition as fairly and accurately as he can. (Jezebel has repeatedly reached out to Singal for comment; he had not provided one as of our publication time, but we will update if he does.)

From one such exchange:

There should, of course, be more trans writers and artists. But…trans people, like members of any other group, have their own prevalent forms of groupthink. Time and time again my reporting and research has conflicted with what [the biggest-name trans activists have] told me[.] On other issues, of course, I would trust trans people more than anyone else—who better to talk about the humiliation of living in a state with a ‘bathroom’ bill, or the difficulty of getting hormones, or other stuff that only trans people have to deal with? But overall, no, I don’t think trans people are more qualified to write about the tricky science stuff going on here than I am. I’d just be lying if I said otherwise.

Singal posted these messages in the discussion forum of a closed listserv he belongs to, hosted on Google Groups. The listserv, per its “About” page, aims to provide an “off-the-record discussion forum for left-of-center journalists, authors, academics and wonks.” It has been around for at least eight years (I found discussion posts dating back as far as 2010), and has just over 400 members (403 at the time of this writing). These members include New York Times best-selling authors, Ivy League academics, magazine editors, and other public intellectuals—in short, a lot of important people who influence public discourse through their written work. They use the listserv’s forum to discuss current events, news from their respective fields, articles they’ve read, articles they’ve written, and other topics of public importance. There are a number of threads about trans stuff, and they read like a greatest hits of the past decade of trans-related cultural anxieties: whether Chelsea Manning would pose a threat in a women’s prison; Janet Mock’s contentious 2014 interview with Piers Morgan and the “Twitter mob” she inspired; Elinor Burkett’s New York Times piece about Caitlyn Jenner and womanhood; comparisons between Caitlyn Jenner and Rachel Dolezal; erasure of the word “vagina”; saying “pregnant people” vs. “pregnant women”; and a number of Jesse Singal’s articles over the past few years.

It seems pretty clear that Singal has been posing as a "liberal" journalist for years in order to promote an anti-trans agenda, which has existed at the Thiel-funded Quillette since at least 2018.

And much testimony indicates Singal has been wildly successful. I wrote about his "pioneering" work recently, as noted by Tom Scocca.

In April last year, Protean Magazine also testified to Singal's influence:

Threatened, Abbott and Paxton felt around for a weapon—and a wedge issue was close at hand. The initial groundwork of this maneuver was laid by fringe narratives from “trans-exclusionary radical feminists” (TERFs) and the far right. But in their campaign to mainstream the ideology that backs trans hatred, those bigots have not been entirely alone. They have been able to count on the help, conscious or not, of popular, liberal-minded writers—among them a cisgender, self-appointed expert on all things trans: Jesse Singal. Behind a veneer of empathy and concern, Singal has supplied anti-trans narratives that the right has found appealing. Singal would insist that he is not personally transphobic. Nevertheless, his writing on the subject has contributed to the wave of transphobia that is already beginning to have concrete ramifications for policy, endangering the well-being and the lives of trans people.

Singal recently deleted his Twitter account. Some have suggested it was from embarrassment when it was revealed that Singal may have violated journalistic ethics.

I think Jesse Singal has no personal experience with a sense of shame.

I think rather he's being rewarded by the Thiel organization for a job well done and is moving to a higher, even-better remunerated stage in his career, much like Thomas Chatterton Williams was given a wingnut welfare gig shortly after the Harpers Letter. 

(And of course Singal has already taken money from Koch. One of his gigs was defending the Harpers Letter.)

As Blake Master said, when asked who Thiel was funding:

“It depends if it’s just dissident-right think-tank stuff,” he told me, “or if anyone actually does anything.”

Another "liberal" media person I think is on the Thiel payroll is anti-abortion "leftist" Elizabeth Bruenig. Peter Thiel backs anti-abortion candidates like Masters and Vance.

Trans writer Jude Doyle wrote last July:

The clearest parallel is to the anti-trans pundit Jesse Singal (with whom Bruenig maintains an unsurprising friendship). The vast majority of trans people can read a Singal piece and see an argument for rolling back trans rights, but his rhetoric is carefully hedged so that some well-meaning Boomer parent can believe he’s “just asking questions.” Reproductive rights advocates can read an Elizabeth Bruenig piece and see that she’s against them. People on the sidelines often have no idea why those advocates are upset. 

Bruenig’s slipperiness allows her (like Singal) to make an argument significantly to the right of the one she claims to be making. Still, the argument is clear. Consider a sentence from that 2014 piece on “pro-life liberalism:” “Since we care enough about the outcome of pregnancy to insist against abortion, then we must continue to care about the outcome when abortion is no longer a legal option.”

I think Jesse Singal likely inherited his ethics from his father.

Is it fair of me to mention that Singal's big-shot lawyer father was picked up for soliciting a prostitute? Well, is it fair of Jesse Singal to stick his nose into transpeople's business, thus aiding and abetting - either fecklessly or for pay - the far-Right in its search for a vote-getting scapegoat? 

And speaking of sleazy little fascists who want to stick their noses into people's business, Peter Thiel wants to track your menstrual cycle.

WTF Pinker NFT LOL

Best-Selling Author & Harvard Professor Steven Pinker Will Transform His Ideas into NFTs

These collectibles will guarantee recurrent access to intimate group video calls with Pinker to discuss this topic for the next several years. 

Two tiers will be available: the gold collectible, which is unique and grants the buyer the right to co-host the calls with Pinker, will be priced at $50,000; the standard collectibles, which are limited to 30 items and grant the buyers the right to access those video calls and ask questions to Pinker at the end, will be priced at 0.2 Ethereum (~$300). 

The NFTs will be available for purchase on the Polemix NFT platform. Holders of the NFTs can expect to book their first call with Pinker as soon as two weeks following their purchase; thus receiving utility for the NFTs shortly after.

It's likely Pinker is already a millionaire. I guess too much is not enough for some. Imagine spending $50K to have access to Steven Pinker's Deep Thoughts like:

"The left was uh completely out to lunch when it came to... the um causes of crime, badly badly wrong when it uh - it still does... when it attributes crime to um poverty and racism... "

" Here's another candidate for a mythology zone: the sacred creeds of academic and intellectual elites. These include the belief that we are born blank slates, that sex is a social construction, that every difference in the social statistics of ethnic groups is caused by racism... "

"I mentioned "The Mismeasure of Man" as the foremost example, to deny the existence of genetically distinct human groups - there is a widespread myth that there is no such thing as race whatsoever, that it is purely a social construction and to call the people who don't do  this Nazis. But on the other hand there is a quotation, I don't know who's responsible for it: "reality is what refuses to go away when I stop believing in it." 

"What Malcolm Gladwell calls a “lonely ice floe” is what psychologists call “the mainstream.” In a 1997 editorial in the journal Intelligence, 52 signatories wrote, “I.Q. is strongly related, probably more so than any other single measurable human trait, to many important educational, occupational, economic and social outcomes.” Similar conclusions were affirmed in a unanimous blue-ribbon report by the American Psychological Association, and in recent studies (some focusing on outliers) by Dean Simonton, David Lubinski and others."

(FUN FACT: The journal Intelligence is a meeting place for racists and the editorial was written by notorious racist Linda Gottfredson - but Pinker is a big supporter.)

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s behavioral scientists like Arthur Jensen, Hans Eysenck, Richard Herrnstein, Thomas Bouchard, and Linda Gottfredson were disinvited, drowned out, and in some cases physically assaulted. On the right, for example, is a 1984 poster announcing a talk by the evolutionary biologist E. O. Wilson, which improbably called him “The Prophet of Right Wing Patriarchy” and invited students to “bring noisemakers.” So when it comes to intolerant repression of non-leftist ideas, don’t blame the Millennials or the iGens. Contra Billy Joel, we Baby Boomers did start the fire—which is not to deny that it is now blazing out of control. "

If you've read any of this blog, you've probably already guessed that those being defended by and described by Pinker as "behavioral scientists" are supporters of race pseudoscience:

• Jensen promoted eugenics as the only practical solution to the problems facing the black community, arguing that they lacked the intelligence necessary for compensatory education programs to be successful. 

• The US psychologist Arthur Jensen (1969) had recently published an article partly on the subject, propounding a hereditarian interpretation. It had stirred up a hornet's nest of controversy, and I was in the process of writing a critical response to it. What I did not know was that Eysenck was simultaneously writing a book, Race, Intelligence and Education (Eysenck, 1971), defending Jensen's position." 

• Herrnstein and Murray suggested in one chapter that the black-white IQ gap would be difficult to eliminate, in part because its causes were both genetic and environmental. 

• With its legacy of Dr. Josef Mengele’s twin experiments at Auschwitz and Dr. Burt’s bogus science, twin studies fell into disfavor. In 1979, however, Thomas J. Bouchard, Jr., a psychologist at the University of Minnesota, rehabilitated this line of research...  Bouchard obtained emergency funds from the university and arranged for the pair to be flown to him for study. To support his theory that similarities such as these were genetic in origin, he assembled a team and applied for a grant to the Pioneer Fund in 1981, stating, Our findings continue to suggest a very strong genetic influence on almost all medical and psychological traits. To date, the Pioneer Fund has contributed more than $1.2 million to Bouchard’s Minnesota Center for Twin and Adoption Research. 

And of course Linda Gottfredson.

Following a long tradition of scientific racism, Gottfredson argues that racial inequality, especially in employment, is the direct result of genetic racial differences in intelligence. Relying heavily on money obtained from the white nationalist Pioneer Fund, Gottfredson has worked tirelessly to oppose any and all efforts to reduce racial inequality in both in the workplace and in society as a whole.

And Wilson the godfather of modern sociobiology, was revealed to be a big booster of the ideas of notorious racist Jean-Phillipe Rushton.

There's nobody so confident of their worth as a mediocre white man.

SOME MORE NEWS vs. the IDW

I've mentioned "Some More News" recently, but I want to praise this almost-perfect video from them, explaining the Intellectual Dark Web's attempts to deny the importance of history and the existence of systemic racism. 

Like Steven Pinker, who as I pointed out the other day, does not believe that poverty or racism has any influence on crime - or the Black crime rates that Pinker said, back in 2018, were being hidden by the media.

Unfortunately the video doesn't mention Pinker - it would be full-on perfect if it did - which is a reason why Pinker is so much more insidious than the rest. 

Nobody else associated with the Intellectual Dark Web, as far as I am aware, was invited to the United Nations to express opinions. Steven Pinker was. 

And yet he holds the same beliefs as Sam Harris and others associated with the IDW and race pseudoscience. He's careful not to directly state those beliefs, especially since the brouhaha in 2018, but it's easy enough to infer his beliefs by who he supports and his statement that:

The left was uh completely out to lunch when it came to... the um causes of crime, badly badly wrong when it uh - it still does... when it attributes crime to um poverty and racism... 

I really wish I had been aware of Some More News long ago, I would have loved to post this video when it was first released two years ago. When the argument against the race beliefs of the IDW is stated so clearly you really have to wonder - is the IDW simply evil - or are they basically too stupid to grasp the complexity of socio-cultural-historical interactions, but have been socially promoted waaaay above their intellectual abilities.

We know how they have been promoted - racist plutocrats like Charles Koch and Peter Thiel have been funding them. Pinker was funded by Koch in 2018 when he made those controversial statements.

The best part of this video might be the analogy at minute 56:25, showing a Mario Cart race with Mario representing white people and Luigi representing Black people. It's so good but basic, even a sociobiologist might be able to understand it.