Wilfred Reilly on political bias in social science; Scott Alexander on the psychology of conspiracy theories; Ryan Bourne on the AEA meetings; Emil O.W. Kirkegaard on the value of cognitive elites
Scott, a psychiatrist: conspiracies are products of rationalized anger
Arnold, economist, author of “In My Tribe”: conspiracies are products of tribal behavior
Probably both somewhat right, but it’s a fun anecdote where people with different hammers view the same thing as a nail. Not a bad thing -- pluralist science is great. “Specialize in production” as they say
An obvious source of conspiracy theories is that many of them are true! Conspiracies (ie, people coordinating out of the public eye to accomplish their goals) are common, and so of course people tend to look for them.
I would recommend caution with Emil Kirkegaard. His pushing of the dysgenics hypothesis as a certainty based on questionable data and bogus papers (my own conclusions from reviewing the subject) suggests he is driven more by a social agenda than by the evidence. Here’s a tweet from 2018: “Dysgenics is real. Eugenics or Western civilization dies. Choose wisely.”
“Dysgenics is real. Eugenics or Western civilization dies. Choose wisely.”
Is someone who believes that "driven more by a social agenda than by the evidence" or is someone who dismisses it out of hand "driven more by a social agenda than by the evidence"?
Could be both. But in this case, I personally evaluated the empirical evidence provided in support of the dysgenics hypothesis and found it extremely weak given the strong claims he (and others) make. Strong social demands founded on weak evidence suggests an agenda that isn’t just science. You might see it differently.
I’ve posted this here before, so apologies to all. But here are 2 links with my thoughts on the topic:
Kirkegaard is generally careful to distinguish between intelligence (the abstract, difficult to precisely measure and define, trait we're after), g (the "general factor" that appears on any battery of cognitive tests, and responsible for almost all of the predictive value of IQ scores) and IQ (the measurement of the trait). See here: https://kirkegaard.substack.com/p/iq-can-be-increased-by-more-education. His position on the Flynn effect is that it is overwhelmingly not on intelligence, but rather represents people getting better at those sorts of tests. In other words, within-cohort IQs match up pretty well (better than anything else we have) with what we're after, intelligence, but between-cohort, it doesn't. One piece of evidence for that is that the items whose scores have increased the most are those that are least g-loaded. It would also seem obvious that our grandfathers were not drooling morons with the same intelligence as the mentally handicapped today.
In any case, if you believe in evolution and a reasonably high level of heritability for most quantitative traits, you have to believe in some form of dysgenics for at least the past couple of generations, based purely on how many children people with different attributes were known/recorded to have had. How important this is is less obvious, and I think Kirkegaard is wrong about eugenics (setting ethics aside for a moment, any institution that requires multi-generational payoff is not going to work well in a society in which institutional capture and decay happens almost overnight), but for at least the past few generations in the West, there has been considerable selection against various desirable traits (and lower quality data strongly implies this is even stronger in the Third World).
Yes, this is the argument I take up in the second link above: the empirical evidence to support a dysgenic effect on intelligence is missing or weak, but based on the theory it *must* be occurring.
To me that’s not great science and not a basis for tearing down the Chesterton’s fence on eugenics. [I edited this to tone it down a little.]
I agree with you, even if the dysgenics effect is real, the impact is unclear and maybe not that big, and there might be better ways to deal with the implications than actually engaging in eugenics.
But the first hurdle is to demonstrate that dysgenics is a real problem, not just from theory, and that hasn’t been done yet.
Scott, a psychiatrist: conspiracies are products of rationalized anger
Arnold, economist, author of “In My Tribe”: conspiracies are products of tribal behavior
Probably both somewhat right, but it’s a fun anecdote where people with different hammers view the same thing as a nail. Not a bad thing -- pluralist science is great. “Specialize in production” as they say
An obvious source of conspiracy theories is that many of them are true! Conspiracies (ie, people coordinating out of the public eye to accomplish their goals) are common, and so of course people tend to look for them.
Nowadays it gets dismissed as a conspiracy theory even when the coordination is done in public.
I would recommend caution with Emil Kirkegaard. His pushing of the dysgenics hypothesis as a certainty based on questionable data and bogus papers (my own conclusions from reviewing the subject) suggests he is driven more by a social agenda than by the evidence. Here’s a tweet from 2018: “Dysgenics is real. Eugenics or Western civilization dies. Choose wisely.”
“Dysgenics is real. Eugenics or Western civilization dies. Choose wisely.”
Is someone who believes that "driven more by a social agenda than by the evidence" or is someone who dismisses it out of hand "driven more by a social agenda than by the evidence"?
Could be both. But in this case, I personally evaluated the empirical evidence provided in support of the dysgenics hypothesis and found it extremely weak given the strong claims he (and others) make. Strong social demands founded on weak evidence suggests an agenda that isn’t just science. You might see it differently.
I’ve posted this here before, so apologies to all. But here are 2 links with my thoughts on the topic:
https://trocb.blogspot.com/2022/02/pseudoscience-edward-dutton-and.html
https://trocb.blogspot.com/2022/02/one-more-on-dysgenics.html
Kirkegaard is generally careful to distinguish between intelligence (the abstract, difficult to precisely measure and define, trait we're after), g (the "general factor" that appears on any battery of cognitive tests, and responsible for almost all of the predictive value of IQ scores) and IQ (the measurement of the trait). See here: https://kirkegaard.substack.com/p/iq-can-be-increased-by-more-education. His position on the Flynn effect is that it is overwhelmingly not on intelligence, but rather represents people getting better at those sorts of tests. In other words, within-cohort IQs match up pretty well (better than anything else we have) with what we're after, intelligence, but between-cohort, it doesn't. One piece of evidence for that is that the items whose scores have increased the most are those that are least g-loaded. It would also seem obvious that our grandfathers were not drooling morons with the same intelligence as the mentally handicapped today.
In any case, if you believe in evolution and a reasonably high level of heritability for most quantitative traits, you have to believe in some form of dysgenics for at least the past couple of generations, based purely on how many children people with different attributes were known/recorded to have had. How important this is is less obvious, and I think Kirkegaard is wrong about eugenics (setting ethics aside for a moment, any institution that requires multi-generational payoff is not going to work well in a society in which institutional capture and decay happens almost overnight), but for at least the past few generations in the West, there has been considerable selection against various desirable traits (and lower quality data strongly implies this is even stronger in the Third World).
Yes, this is the argument I take up in the second link above: the empirical evidence to support a dysgenic effect on intelligence is missing or weak, but based on the theory it *must* be occurring.
To me that’s not great science and not a basis for tearing down the Chesterton’s fence on eugenics. [I edited this to tone it down a little.]
I agree with you, even if the dysgenics effect is real, the impact is unclear and maybe not that big, and there might be better ways to deal with the implications than actually engaging in eugenics.
But the first hurdle is to demonstrate that dysgenics is a real problem, not just from theory, and that hasn’t been done yet.