Scott Alexander shows an acute appreciation for Nydwracu’s Fnord hunting (my own was far too cursory). It’s rare to see the innovation of a method (with a purpose), and it’s something more noteworthy than any but the most exceptional idea.
Someone with the requisite technical skills should implement this method in convenient software. As a quick-and-dirty way to excavate real messages, it’s hard to beat.
Scharlach has an innocent question for Jerry Coyne:
What is the current understanding of animal behavior? Is animal behavior generally understood as a collection of phenotypes that emerge at least partially from their genes? All the work on animal domestication, in particular, seems to point toward that conclusion. But I could be wrong. What’s your sense of it?
If behavior of animals — and I don’t just mean mammals, of course — is believed to have not much to do with genes, then clearly, I see no reason to connect the two in humans.
It looks as if the NYT has canned Nicholas Wade. Another stereotype conspicuously un-busted.
John Derbyshire, who know a thing or two about the social consequences of exorbitant truthiness, rounds up the reviews (prior to the axe falling).
ADDED: Wade says the DC is lying about trying to contact him (i.e. this crucial assertion: “Neither Wade nor his former employer returned requests for comment”). Since that’s the key evidence for the DC article, it makes the whole thing go away.
Wade: “I retired from the Times about two years ago. There’s a stupid story you may have seen in the blogosphere. It is completely untrue. The writer just made that up. The fact that he saw the words ‘former Science editor’ in the piece I did in Time. He assumed that I had been fired by the Times. There is nothing to the story at all. I myself wrote the word ‘former’ in because I saw that the Time editor in putting the tag line on had said that I was Science editor of the Times. Since that was some time in the past, and is no longer true, I inserted the word ‘former’ and the writer in the Daily Caller just made the story up out of thin air. He made absolutely no attempt to contact me and not a word of it is true.”
To the precise extent that an apology is due to the New York Times, curse the Daily Caller. (Thanks to commentators below for clueing me in — although Twitter got there first.)
Some concentrated Handle-awesomeness unleashed in a Tyler Cowen comments thread (on Nicholas Wade):
1. You are not going to learn any new Science
2. You are going to learn what happens in your society when a distinguished and relatively prominent Science journalist publishes a prominent book in which he shows a bit of courage and gets as close as possible to promoting an unorthodox and taboo truth without risking utter ostracization.
3. You will learn who cannot risk publically aligning with that position in order to maintain their position and current and future influence. And you will learn the techniques they must employ in order to walk the narrow path between sacrificing their integrity promoting the erroneous orthodoxy itself, and supporting the accurate contrarian position. Don’t hold anything against Prof. Cowen, he’s doing good work, but sometimes he writes a post the purpose of which is not to be a reflection of his genuine understanding or position, but, essentially, to allow Sailer to write in the comments section and do the actual updating of priors.
Asking why people successfully avoid the subject and remain respectable by constantly talking about the Flynn Effect just might be relevant to this lesson.
A Shanghaiist interview with Leta Hong Fincher wanders into inspiring delicate territory:
… in 2007, China’s State Council came out with a very important population decision. They announced that China had a severe problem with the so-called “low quality” of the population, that it’s going to cause problems for China in the future, in the global marketplace, that it’s going to affect China’s ability to compete with other nations, because the quality of the population is too low. So they made it an urgent priority to “upgrade population quality” (tigao renkou suzhi). And then they designated certain agencies to be the primary implementers of the goal of upgrading population quality. One of the agencies they named was the Women’s Federation. And they also named the Public Security Bureau. Shortly after that population decision, the state media suddenly came out with all these Leftover Women media reports, news reports cartoons, commentaries, columns, and it was just ubiquitous.
And then, the Women’s Federation defined the term and the Ministry of Education adopted the term shengnü [or ‘leftover woman’] as part of its official lexicon. And it’s just amazing when you look at these reports and cartoons just how little they vary. Fundamentally it’s the same message, kind of reworded. It’s the same theme over and over again, year after year.
Charles Murray has written a magnificent review of Nicholas Wade’s A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History. He sees the publication of this book as a major cultural event, but the impact he forecasts remains carefully hedged:
… as of 2014, true believers in the orthodoxy still dominate the social science departments of the nation’s universities. I expect that their resistance to “A Troublesome Inheritance” will be fanatical, because accepting its account will be seen, correctly, as a cataclysmic surrender on some core premises of political correctness. There is no scientific reason for the orthodoxy to win. But it might nonetheless.
So one way or another, “A Troublesome Inheritance” will be historic. Its proper reception would mean enduring fame as the book that marked a turning point in social scientists’ willingness to explore the way the world really works. But there is a depressing alternative: that social scientists will continue to predict planetary movements using Ptolemaic equations, as it were, and that their refusal to come to grips with “A Troublesome Inheritance” will be seen a century from now as proof of this era’s intellectual corruption.
John Robb on the “the Neutron Bomb of Moral Warfare” (via @heresiologist):
The growing popularity of “check your privilege” and “white privilege” at Universities and in political debates is interesting. […] It’s not a force for progress or positive change, it’s a form of moral warfare. […] “Privilege” as a form of attack is going to generate an aggressive, non-violent counter response from those on the right, in the not too distant future. A response that will only serve to increase divisions and make the possibility of any meaningful debate impossible.
For the Outer Right, this outcome would, of course, be highly desirable.
A solid traditionalist argument from Nick B. Steves concludes an exploration of self-deception:
What if the veneer of religiosity was cultivated not so much to impress others as to impress — effectively trick — oneself? The human person has a very nearly infinite capacity for self-delusion. That’s why I consider myself religious … but not spiritual. Whatever in religious practice may seem dull, mundane, and ordinary is more to be trusted than those parts of it which seem highly emotional or consciousness-raising.
ADDED: While we’re on the topic of religious tradition —
On one hand [Dawkins] believes that morality, being natural, is a constant thing, stable throughout history. On the other hand, he believes in moral progress. To square the circle he plunges out of his depth, explaining that different ages have different ideas of morality, and that in recent times there has happily been a major advance in our moral conventions: above all, the principle of equality has triumphed. Such changes ‘certainly have not come from religion’, he snaps. He instead points to better education about our ‘common humanity with members of other races and with the other sex — both deeply unbiblical ideas that come from biological science, especially evolution’. But biological science, especially evolution, can be used to authorise eugenics and racism. The real issue is the triumph of an ideology of equality, of humanism. Instead of asking what this tradition is, and where it comes from, he treats it as axiomatic. This is just the natural human morality, he wants us to think, and in our times we are fortunate to see a particularly full expression of it.
The demented evil of this is pretty funny:
Student: Are you Suey Park?
Me: Oh my god. We don't all look the same.
— Angry Asian Woman (@suey_park) April 19, 2014
My positive spin on Suey Park is that she’s almost unique in her role as an agent of racial desensitization. The only way you don’t lose to move like this is by toughening up fast.
ADDED: So what is this joke saying? Be aware, you will be socially punished for noticing reality. It’s pure Sailer (but dramatized for laughs). With enemies like this, I’m guessing we can close down the propaganda unit.
ADDED: Further down the rabbit hole … (via @CBLangille)
ADDED: Some (vaguely) related intersectionalist comedy.
If you’d asked me what I think about The Prussian yesterday, I’d probably have assumed you were talking about Frederick the Great. Today I’m seeing his stuff mentioned all over the place (at least, by Bryce on Twitter, and Scott Alexander at his place). The two pieces being especially recommended share a tack (interesting) and a tone (impressive). The Outside in response to both is unsettled, but already uneven. At the very least, they initiate a conversation in a way that is unexpected and worthy of respect.
The highlight for me was this (to repeat the second link):
… when differences in African and Caucasian distributions of the ASPM gene that is involved in brain development, racialists jumped to argue that this was the long looked for basis for white cognitive supremacy (Derbyshire’s line). Unfortunately for them, it turned out that the variation does not affect IQ, but does affect the ability to hear tones, and is associated with a lack of tonal languages.
To be honest, this is a lot more interesting than any IQ mumbo-jumbo; that Indo-European languages (‘Aryan’ languages to use the term correctly, and not in the disgraceful way it was used) are non-tonal is one of the big puzzles, and may be a reason why civilization got started in these regions. This is a variant of Joseph Needham’s hypothesis of why China ‘got stuck’ at a certain level of technology. Needham argued that the Chinese failed to make the break to the conceptual level of science that the ancient Greeks did, and part of this is to do with the concrete-level of Chinese vocabulary. By contrast, the reduced sound range and hence, reduced word range available to Indo-European languages may have played a crucial role in making that initial great breakthrough.
Has the case just been made for a clearly identifiable genetic predisposition to digitization? It sounds that way to me.
ADDED: Theden gets serious on the genetics of tonal language.
ADDED: A critique of the Anti-Racialist Q&A at The Right Stuff.