Once a long time ago, I quietly refused to sit at a table with Charles Murray. Someone scolded me that this was an illiberal position antithetical to the spirit of free debate. In retrospect, I feel pretty strongly that events have proved me right
obviously this is a terrible hypothesis but also incredible that Yggy's evidence for genius is "CEOs" and low intelligence is "prisoners". What a piece of shit.
This particular argument irritates me greatly because nobody, in the last 150 years, has proposed an adequate rebuttal to John Stuart Mill’s argument against this kind of position on intrinsic qualities in The Subjection of Women
" Until conditions of equality exist, no one can possibly assess the natural differences between women and men, distorted as they have been. What is natural to the two sexes can only be found out by allowing both to develop and use their faculties freely."
In the basis of utilitarianism, he argued for complete equality for women. Also argued that there were no differences in intelligence between women and men.
I’d argue that it fails for the very basic reason that there is simply no universal definition of “intelligence,” much less an objective way to measure it. Pointing to all the male CEOs and prisoners is inductive idiocy.
Most problematically, the corollary to Yglesias’s position is that one can simply look at the incarceration rates (and CEO prevalence) of particular demographics to understand how “intelligent” they are. Ugly stuff.
Quinta - I am sure you don’t need it, but the first 15 minutes of listening to you explain legal issues on Lawfare impressed me more than 20 years of reading political arguments by Yglesias (even back when he was better). It is a great team, but your analysis stands out for me.
It's just a myopic POV that willfully ignores nurture in favor of nature (and decades of well-designed social science which would argue otherwise). Thus, "most CEO's are men" becomes "mostly men can become CEO's".
...whatever "intelligent" means - the whole discussion is so dumb from the get go. The vast majority of priests are men too, must be more biologically holy...
I don’t think anyone actually believes all ideas are worthy of respectful debate. When people make arguments like this it’s because they think *that* idea has enough merit to be worthy of debate, but they’re not brave enough to defend it on the substance.
The misogyny in certain atheist spaces was an indicator imo. The whole “we shouldn’t talk about social issues other than atheism” backlash to Atheism+ was a pretty clear flag to those paying attention that the table was allowing some people that shouldn’t be sitting there.
Yeah, I left another atheist group after I found myself arguing with them that women who are out in public alone at night don’t deserve to be raped. (The few other women in the group agreed with them.)
yeah, that spirit of free debate and liberalism which requires you to entertain charlatans with brain dead ideas who happen to be popular with the right people
Any “good” ideas they might have unrelated to their charlatanism has almost certainly been said by someone without their baggage; we can and should talk to those people instead!
I notice that some of the SlateStarCodex diaspora, who were always interested in "Race Science", and always willing to excuse past racism by "interesting thinkers" (e.g. Hanania, Bostrom) have tended to reject Bluesky because they say it doesn't encourage diverse opinions.
Good for you. Sincerely. That was the right thing to do and few people, I feel unfortunately confident saying, would have the simple moral clarity necessary to do that.
"Go along and get along" has been a corrosive belief in the United States. Our tolerance of free expression may be admirable. That doesn't mean people expressing divisive or offensive ideas and actions need to be universally accepted. Actions have consequences
Comments
"I deny that any one knows or can know, the nature of the two sexes, as long as they have only been seen in their present relation to one another...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Subjection_of_Women
Seems evident from your soliloquy today that you didn't.
(Both can be true, I suppose.)
I would have sat next to him and let him debate my knuckles.
Not that many people care about / can do moral reasoning anymore.
We’ll, maybe not feminists. But I’m not 100 % sure about them either.
Free speech: abducting a grad student for writing an op-ed
ie People call them out.