I'm not sure what you're referring to when you mention 3 studies, but if you're looking for a good overview of the science on race as a cultural construct this is a good place to start:

Special Issue:Race Reconciled: How Biological Anthropologists View Human Variation

See also: Living Anthropologically: Race is a Social Construction

(also, re: your first comment about whether race is real or not, one of the more important misconceptions that the blog entry clears up -- I hope -- is that "race is a social construct" doesn't entail that race isn't real in an important sense. There's an important sociological principle about that...)

"uninformed strawman" doesn't even make sense as a phrase, man, a strawman is intentionally false. There's no information level to a lie.

And up in my feelings, yeah, man, we can't all have the steely resolve of Sam harris or Jordan Peterson or Ben Shapiro, or any of the 3 distinct reactionary IDW defenders melting down in this thread over people being mean to Charles Murray.

After I wrote that Kelhus came through with the double "dunno what that publication is" defense, lol, they are so ****ing sure playing dumb is a trump card he hits us with:


To put that paragraph more bluntly since my more diplomatic phrasing didn't sink in:

If you have no ****ing idea what you're talking about, why the **** should anyone care about your opinion?

As an aside, I do find it interesting how Fly is more interested in where articles are published than what they actual say. Although, in fairness This “Appeal to Auhority” mindset is consistent with his default of making emotional/moral arguments.

In another time and place Fly probably would have made a good religious zealot. I guess if you expand the definition of religion you could argue that is exactly what he is.

The problem with him is that the juice isn’t worth the squeeze. I spent hours yesterday trying to decipher his messages, and I still don’t know who “you guys” are, and I doubt I will feel the time spent trying to pin this down would be worth it in the end in the unlikely endeavor this even happens.

You honestly sincerely have thought about it and are unable to even take a guess at what group of people I might be talking about, in this thread about the IDW, where there are distinct sides of liberal/leftists criticizing the IDW and conservatives defending it?

Like I write at like an 8th or 9th grade level here, discussing areas of well trod controversy. Doubling down on playing dumb to such an extent you can't even follow this thread doesn't make people think "ah, this bright young man clearly needs to be Civilly Discoursed with At Length", it makes them think you're not worth anyone's time. I know everyone thinks they are the protagonist of reality, but it's simply not the case.

No. We are just on 2 different wavelengths. When you are talking about an article, you have little interest in what the article says. You are concerned what side the article is on.

I am more focused on the content.

It is ok. The internet is a big place. There is room for both of us to coexist.

I sort of worry that YouTubes and podcasts are corrosive to our nation’s literacy.

The most recent Chapo had a great point that pre-2005 or so misfits were FORCED into going into the real world and making IRL friends and learning how to handle disagreement and differing viewpoints and everything, but now you can go straight from being a bookish and socially awkward preteen into the recommended videos section and never come out.

This is a wonderful fairy tale to tell yourself, man. You got a lot of those for sure. But take it one step farther with that critical thinking. What if I, for example, have definitely already been exposed to exactly that article in the two previous threads we had about Harris and Murray? This is gonna trigger the hell of out you, but like 90% of what is so insufferable about "you guys" is your deep-seated belief that as the protagonist of reality things that you just learned about are new to everyone. But this **** happened in 2017!

The old-timey internet Libertarians were at least reasonably literate. You had to slog through Ayn Rand or Road to Serfdom to get into that fandom. If Charles Murray got brought up you could at least count on them to have either read Bell Curve or have a passing familiarity with his ideas.

Fly may be overly mean but he obviously has a point with the playing dumb thing. I don't think it is reasonable to believe you can't follow his posts.

On the other hand, I also don't think it is incumbent on people to always know the history or background of the source of any article they ever post. "I looked on google, clicked the first link, read it, and posted it" seems to be a perfectly fine defense.

I feel like I am on bizarro world here. Most of the time I tell him to “show his work” it is because he is making a spurious claim he cannot defend, normally stating I said something I didn’t. And then 1 times he shows me a post from another forum I haven’t posted on in 6 years and that is a proof that I am playing dumb? I completely and emphatically do not accept the entire premise of your first paragraph.

Since you're new here I'll point out that suggesting that people are arguing in bad faith is frowned upon in this forum.

Also, that may literally be Kelhus999's most credible claim itt.

Can you provide an example of such a spurious claim?

Quillette is fine for what it is. As far as I am concerned it functions like the Opinion section of a newspaper. I don’t even have a problem with the fact it was posted on Quillette. But I was going to copy-paste the link irregardless of where it was posted so that part of it wasn’t relevant.

Next time I am bored and at a computer I was planning to. But that isn’t going to be anytime soon (for good or bad).

What is a good measure of g, then? IQ tests are all we have, and they certainly measure g to a level better than arbitrary. At least when the results aren't explained away, that is.

In Flyland accepting the data absolutely makes you racist. No ifs no buts and empirical evidence be damned. That's why, in fly's quote of him above, even though Harris avoided associating with Murray for 25 years because he thought he was racist, when he finally read his book and couldn't find any problems with it he was effectively outing himself as hating black people.

Unfortunately for trolly's line that Murray is a racist crank manipulating data to make black people look dumb, the American Psychological Association ran it's own study after the bell curve controversy broke to get some unbiased results everybody could agree on and came up with the same results. So if trolly's right then Murray's part of a much bigger conspiracy of racist cranks within the APA all working together to make black people look dumb.

The most reasonable way to deal with this information is to accept it and realise (as Murray takes pains to point out)* that as variability within groups is way higher than variability between groups that judging anyone's intelligence based on race is a really stupid idea and then move on with your life. Same as you would if the tests had shown that black people had an average iq of 115. The only people these studies matter to are racists (who bring it up as much as possible because they incorrectly think they show that black people are in someway inferior) and people like fly (who bring it up as much as possible because they incorrectly think that anyone who believes the data must be racist).

As an aside I wonder whether fly thinks any of the people who accept the current data would also accept it if it said that black people had an IQ of 115 or if literally all of them are just being racist.

*I assume fly takes this as an attempt to disguise his racism, or else fly still hasnt listened to the podcast or read the book he's been using as a basis for most of his racism gotchas for the last few years. Not really sure which would be dumber at this point

I guess I'll have to reiterate from the previous Murray thread that Murray initially blurbed
The Bell Curve as an anti poor person book as in poor people are dumber than rich people, but the didn't get a lot of hype so they reworked it to hype up the anti black people angle

I should point out that I also dismissed the iq discrepancy thing as racist propoganda for quite a while, and thinking back on it it might actually have been fly trying to corner someone else into what he thinks is a slam dunk admission of racism that made me actually look into it. I agree with fly on most things and I admire his tenacity but on this subject he's just not reasonable at all.

Mate, you can disagree with Fly but you should absolutely learn to read first. Fly, as far as I can tell, has not said or implied anything like this.

I am not familiar with "the data" but presuming it shows the following:

you can easily accept that and believe it is ~all due to environmental factors. Which seems reasonable.

The people Fly is calling racist absolutely refuse to articulate the above position, or any position on the subject at all except that Murray is not a racist. This is, to say the least, suspicious.

I agree. I can't stand Peterson.



It is not reactionary. It is the same "this far and no further" nonsense that has resulted in nothing but society transforming into a (rather nasty) ubiquitous progressive pseudoreligion. Reactionaries want to undo society altogether, and start over.




Understanding Yarvin requires a deep, nuanced education about history and the open-minded ability to come to rational conclusions about it, not the cursory, solipsistic, propagandist baseline progressives often spew as knowledge.

From the Nazis point of view, they were acting in self-defense. Let me just pre-empt the most obvious progressive response here by qualifying this: this doesn't mean they were justified in acting the way they did (weird, more nuance). Understanding other people's motivations requires actual, not postured, neutrality and a functioning mind, instead of lazily slapping a moral declaration on them and calling it settled, like nearly all progressives do about nearly all issues they wax so superior about.




Firstly, because they are. Secondly, because they distract people from actual solutions.

They don't at all refuse to talk about that as anyone who's listened to the podcast we've been talking about for the last day could tell you. Murray's position is that the extent of the difference in scores makes it statistically extremely unlikely that it's all due to environmental factors and that it's almost certainly a mix of both. AFAIK it's still up in the air how much is due to environmental factors and how much is due to genetic factors but it's extremely unlikely to be 100% one or the other. If you could produce a study showing that the difference is 100% down to environmental factors I'm 99% sure Harris, Murray and most of the rest of fly's racists would be only too happy to accept it.

Anyway I'm off to bed I'll probably look in on this mess at some point tomorrow.

Okay, fine, but if you believe this you are racist.