This is honestly such a disappointment. I used to appreciate your thoughts on a lot of issues and particularly loved that you were in the intersection of haskell and harry potter fanfic.
Venkatesh Rao is generally contentless and writes long winded tracts that don't actually make any kind of coherent argument for what they're saying.
Do you really think Stallman's long history of sexual harassment is because he was too gosh-darned oblivious to realize he shouldn't be doing that?
This isn't exactly "Oh he maintained eye-contact for half a second too long and the thought police are after him" territory jfc.
Yep. Recent debunking (once again) of their canon by Kevin Bird in an article titled "No support for the hereditarian hypothesis of the Black–White achievement gap using polygenic scores and tests for divergent selection"
Thanks for the kind words. I stopped using reddit some time ago but good to know there are still good people there like you working to uphold standards. I am on keybase and I'm always happy to chat with fellow reasoners: keybase.io/memexy.
I dislike getting swept up in groups and that's what happened to me on reddit and other social media sites so now I make sure to deliberately talk with individuals without worrying about performing in front of a group.
Yes, actually. It's a theme that Scott is annoyingly fond of, in his fiction and non-fiction. Unsong is entirely about kabbalistic puzzles as you know. Scott and others before him were enamored with the ideas of Leo Strauss. You can read more about Strauss' ideology of hidden truths that only the brilliant and/or worthy can perceive at the link below.
Scott Alexander uses the Kolmogorov post to have plausible deniability for his discussion of "race science". There's a reason writing "HBD" was banned in the comments section and it's that it was giving the game away to too many people.
(discussion of HBD is not banned, it's simply not permitted for that string to appear - i wonder why that might be)
> There's a reason writing "HBD" was banned in the comments section
The reason is that most people who casually reference "HBD" have no idea what they're talking about, and end up grossly misrepresenting the actual science as cover for unrelated ideas like ethno-nationalism or bigoted views about other groups. Tabooing "HBD" is a legitimate way of forcing everyone to unpack whatever it is that they actually have in mind; in many ways, it is the opposite of playing dog whistle politics.
Sorry about that. The point is, at least by now, HBD is a thoroughly confusing term that gets used in many, sometimes mutually contradictory ways. The SSC community has spent many years trying to handle the multiple sides of the many "nature vs. nurture" debates that are also referenced in OP's article, and ultimately decided that the 'HBD' term itself was not very helpful to that end. To ask for a "clarifying definition" of HBD given these circumstances is indeed rather pointless.
Let me get this straight, you contend that we should believe that Shalizi is an unreliable source and your justification is a post on a "human bio-diversity" blog run by white supremacist and anti-semite John Fuerst amongst others.
It would be bad enough if you were linking to a rebuttal of the post on heritability linked to by the parent, but this is a blog post attacking a different post by Shalizi.
How is this in any way relevant? More importantly, why would this convince anyone that Shalizi gets heritability wrong?
The pre-natal environment is shared, and depending on the adoption process there could be a great deal of correlation in a range of environmental factors. It's not like these kids are grown in a vat and distributed randomly in the population is it?
Venkatesh Rao is generally contentless and writes long winded tracts that don't actually make any kind of coherent argument for what they're saying.
Do you really think Stallman's long history of sexual harassment is because he was too gosh-darned oblivious to realize he shouldn't be doing that? This isn't exactly "Oh he maintained eye-contact for half a second too long and the thought police are after him" territory jfc.