Want to wade into the snowy surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
Some rando mathematician checks out some IQ related twins studies and find out (gasp) that Cremieux is a manipulative liar with an agenda
https://davidbessis.substack.com/p/twins-reared-apart-do-not-exist
Said author is sad that Paul Graham retweets the claim and does not draw the obvious conclusion that PG is just a bog-standard Silicon Valley VC pseudo-racist.
HN is not happy and a green username calling themselves “jagoff” leads the charge
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46195226
Honestly I’m kinda grateful for people who dig into and analyze the actual data in seeming ignorance of the political context of the people pushing the other side. It’s one thing to know that Jordan “Crimieux” Lasker and friends are out here doing Deutsch Genetik and another to have someone cleanly and clearly lay out exactly why they’re wrong, especially when they do the work of assembling a more realistic and useful story about the same studies.
Well, the latter part of this sentence gives a hint at the actual reason.
And the first comment is by Hanania lol, trying to debunk the fraud allegations by saying that is just how things were done back then. While also not realizing he didnt understand the first part of the article. Amazing how these iq anon guys always react quick and to everything. Also was quite an issue on Reddit, where just a small dismissal of IQ could lead to huge (copy pasted) rambling defenses of IQ.
The author is also calling Richard out on his weird framing.
It’s fascinating to watch Hanania try and do politics in a comment space more focused on academic inquiry, and how silly he looks here. He can’t participate in this conversation without trying to make it about social interventions and class warfare (against the poor), even though I don’t know that Bessis would disagree that the thing social interventions can’t significantly increase the number of mathematical or scientific geniuses in a country (1). Instead, Hanania throws out a few brief, unsupported arguments, gets asked for clarification and validation, accuses everyone of being woke, and gets basically ignored as the conversation continues around him.
This feels like the kind of environment that Siskind and friends claim to be wanting to create, but it feels like they’re constitutionally incapable of actually doing the “ignore Nazis until they go away” part.
Very good read actually.
Except, from the epilogue:
The not-everyone-agrees link is to acx and siskind’s take on the matter, who unfortunately seems to continue to fly under the radar as a disingenuous eugenicist shitweasel with a long-term project of using his platform to sane-wash gutter racists who pretend at doing science.
Yeah, the substacker seems either naive or genuinely misinformed about Siskind’s ultimate agenda, but in their defense Scott is really really good at vomiting forth torrents of beige prose that obscure it.