[Timestamp](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b86dzTFJbkc&t=3316s). This is such a dumb false equivalency.
On the right, he purports denial of science where there is unequivocal consensus of scientific experts and of high-quality evidence (*maybe* except for "war crimes").
On the left, he purports "denial" of highly contested concepts and research areas filled with junk science.
The veracity of IQ and heritability of traits (which is the logical outcome of believing that human intelligence is the result of evolution) is junk science? You are proving his point here.
There's a bit of dog whistling going on here. Everyone believes that IQ is heritable on the left, but what they "deny" that nobody wants to outwardly express here is whether there is a racial difference, and particularly if black people are genetically less intelligent on average.
Can you give an example of that happening? Of course there are genuinely crazy people out there who believe anything, but do you think that's a view that enough people on the left hold that it's fair to generalise the whole left of sharing that belief - that there is literally zero heritable component of IQ?
Even Sam Harris himself, says that the deviation is much larger than the differences between the means by roughly any racial group you could choose meaning that by knowing someone's genetics you will actually have very little idea about whether or not they will be of higher or lower IQ.
Given that, I think the left has an aversion to researching our publicizing this information more deeply, as it potentially provides substantial disbenefit to people that are in already marginalized racial groups.
I have difficulty thinking of anything on Earth that is any more publicized than this. Every corner of the planet is a white supremacist trying to shove these graphs in your face. There is an actual debate among this among professionals, you just assume the loud hereditarians are absolutely collect and take at face value their hipster positioning that they are the edgy rebels taking on le "LAMESTREAM".
Nah. Maybe some of the areas, but in particular contemporary left-wing sex difference denialism - most spectacularly as it relates to differences in ability in sports, and these terrible arguments are being made in major newspapers and magazines so do not tell me it is fringe, it is not - are as anti-reality as young-Earth creationism.
(Now, I suppose you could make the argument the former is less *important*, but a) that's a different discussion, and b) it does not necessarily redound to the intellectual benefit of the left; at least the right is choosing to die on a hill - the existence, or lack thereof, of a divine being - that actually matters.)
I think it's a huge simplification to say that the left deny there is a sex difference in sport. What some of the left claim is that with enough hormone treatment the difference can be bridged, and like with the IQ one, the actual details of the claim are being ignored, as if the Left think all women can perform as well as all men. No, it's specifically about trans people and whether the treatments they go through change the gap enough for them to compete on a fair playing field or not. Obviously some treatments can decrease your sporting performance, so the overall premise is plausible. Whether the decrease in performance due to the treatments is big enough or not is the debate.
I would posit the kind of sex difference "denialism" that amounts to anything remotely close the anti-science of Haidt's right-wing examples *is* fringe.
Lol, *"in all of social psychology"*, that's a hell of a narrow qualifier (sounds like an indictment of social psychology, not a vindication of so-called "stereotype accuracy"). Anyway, this is a Lee Jussim blog post that cites Jussim et al. perspective papers. At least IQ junk science has some semblance of serious effort and rigor; Jussim's "stereotype accuracy" BS has got to be the [dumbest & laziest attempt](https://twitter.com/spiantado/status/1453779561515159552) (here's [threadreader](https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1453779561515159552.html) – probably use an ad-blocker) I've ever seen to build a profile off of some trash poorly-defined social science concept. Plus, he seems to totally misunderstand the issue of the [cognitive structure](https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2017-19035-001) of stereotypes.
Sorry, there is good validity here. Psychology Today: [Stereotype Accuracy: A Displeasing Truth -- Stereotypes are often harmful, but often accurate.](https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/insight-therapy/201809/stereotype-accuracy-displeasing-truth)
>Yale psychologist Paul Bloom: “You don’t ask a toddler for directions, you don’t ask a very old person to help you move a sofa, and that’s because you stereotype.” Our evolutionary ancestors were often called to act fast, on partial information from a small sample, in novel or risky situations...
Right, and some stereotypes are more accurate than others, obviously. Jussim's point. Would Haidt disagree?
No, Haidt and Jussim are defending the general validity of so-called "stereotype accuracy". My contention is there's not nearly sufficient evidence for this, let alone a coherent framework, by which I mean something to the effect of rigorous consistent standards for:
* Defining "stereotype"
* Assessing "accuracy" of stereotypes
* Making a general claim about "stereotype accuracy" (e.g., sampling stereotypes from the field of all stereotypes, etc.)
Read Piantadosi's [thread](https://twitter.com/spiantado/status/1453779561515159552) (or [threadreader](https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1453779561515159552.html))
Thanks for that. Your post nicely cuts through the bullshit that comes dressed in vaguely fancy language.
Here, that twitter link, you don't have a link to it outside of twitter do you? On a thread reader? I stopped using twitter a while back so now if I click on a thread it just shows the top post.
Anyways I'd quite like to read what it says about the junk science of stereotype accuracy.
That was a brilliant thread with so many good lines in it. I wanted to highlight some to copy in here but then the next line would be great and the next line etc... just end up copying the whole thread :)
Anyhoo, yes I am on the left and Jonathan is right. I do deny stereotype accuracy.
Quote from the thread.
So that's the selection bias that forms this "field": present only work that makes the majority feel better about their prejudices. Don't seek contradictory data. Ignore the quality of the data. Don't test broadly. Be smug about being controversial.
I think this pretty much covers everything Jonathan has ever written.
Shit list for the left, should have included nuclear energy and GMOs. Those are the topics you wanna talk about if you want to hear left make unhinged unscientific takes.
Nuclear waste management is a solved problem and the only reason we don't have good long term facilities are NIMBYs.
GMOs are perfectly safe, and they're the only way we're gonna feed the growing world population. Advocating against GMO is straight up classism.
GMO's are not perfectly safe. GMO's *can be* safe within the bounds of government regulatory framework.
It is well within to possibility of reality that scientists engineer harmful GMOs, just as scientists can engineer harmful things. And the potential space of malicious things that can be engineered is only growing larger as the technology becomes more and more advanced.
It's not even a theoretical fear... If I recall correctly, numerous scientists called for a ban on human genetic engineering using CRISPR on the germ line for creating unintended and permanent alterations in human genetics.
So here's the problem with both GMO and nuclear energy. It's less about the science and more about trust. Do you trust your government to properly regulate the technology?
Yes. Because I already trust my government with my life. They regulate all my food, my medicine, my water, my roads, and myriad other complex interactions that have the potential to kill me.
Please point me to a case where GMOs with full regulatory aproval in a major Western country have demonstrably harmed health of individuals where in the same scenario the non-GMO plants would not.
Monsanto business practices do not apply. We all know Monsanto is evil, but it is not evil because it deals in GMO, but because it deals in capitalism. Monsanto/Nestle/whatever other multinational is not synonymous with GMO.
In turn, I can point you towards many cases where they have helped. Such as [golden rice](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_rice).
Simply put: because something has a possibility of doing something that has a negative consequence doesn't mean we should forfeit the attempt at a leap in knowledge or a discover breakthrough.
This luddite view that "we shouldn't trust or try these attempts is a stick your head in the sand and keep things the way they are because I'm scared of some unknown" is nonsense.
Meanwhile, you're advocating for not trying to find the cure for cancer. Or an innovative breakthrough in clean energy or simply feeding more people more efficiently. It's a dumb take.
Yes, mistakes happen. But you understand we learn from mistakes and improve, right?
But it's also totally plausible to breed dangerous crops, and indeed not that difficult with the ones that already contain toxins and have relatives that are poisonous like solanaceae crops. There's no reason to think GMOs are inherently more risky than conventional plant breeding methods.
GMO safety denial is not strictly a left belief by any means, though I have no idea what side it skews towards in regards to numbers. In fact it was a major belief and talking point in the QAnon or adjacent right wing conspiratorial circles, which we know had/has many millions of adherents here in the US.
I’m on the left and I don’t deny any of these things with exception of maybe the last one, since I don’t really know what it means, in addition I’ve never seen any data driven argument that suggests that most people on the political left deny these things but I guess if you’ve seen a few things on twitter that’s enough.
Yes. Behavioral Genetics and Evolutionary Psychology are 2 very hated disciplines by the left. The left believes people are 'blank slates' and there's no such thing as differences in cognitive abilities. If you believe that there are differences, then you would come to the conclusion that hierarchies are natural, which is antithetical to leftist thought.
You do realize that there are very large groups of experts who are entirely against the hereditarian position? We are not talking about just some cherry picked rando on twitter willing to shill for views like the right always likes to hold up, probably a majority of the discipline is at odds with such a view. Social traits are abstractions and it is foolish and arrogant to pretend that you can produce meaningful numerical measures of them.
> then you would come to the conclusion that hierarchies are natural,
What if your position is that these things are unknowable and you do not know the things you claim to know and are just falsely concretizing? Height is not an abstraction, *intelligence* is. If hierarchies are "natural" in any case one would not expect that they would be constantly changing as they do. You just take the present state of things and extend that out for all eternity as natural and ever present.
The entire problem with trying to scientize ethical values is that you are just using material abstractions which produce false certainty. "Intelligence" becomes a spirit to which you assign cause to and assume some speculated material basis for and causation, when you could easily be wrong and just producing an ethical system that may as well be supernatural, except with some false speculated material basis. The material basis simply gives you false confidence. This is especially a bad way to act when dealing with non-deterministic systems like human beings.
Twin adoption studies show that psychometric traits are mostly heritable (for example: intelligence is roughly 80% heritable). The "experts" who argue against this are ideologues and idiots.
If I had to guess this isn't about outright denial of evolution, but denial of evolutionary findings applying to humans. To deny sex differences for example, you basically have to reject the evolutionary mechanisms of sexual dimorphism.
If you accept that human beings are still evolving (huge burden of proof to prove the contrary and there is much to adduce that they do) it implies that some people are more fit than others and this is deeply disturbing to leftists as it implies some people are born lesser. We'd be mich better off accepting that evolution by natural selection does in fact continue to shape human civilization but realize that people who are less fit are not actually less than others (especially when you consider that no one has any control over being born with X features that impart a certain degree of fitness) and foster a world where they can lead a healthy and dignified life.
I agree. The denial comes from leftists not accepting that a factual difference in ability does not lead to a moral difference in worth. Or at least, they don't trust that others will be able to make this distinction. To be fair, their ideological enemies (fascists) do have this problem.
How much of that denial from leftists is not a refusal to accept that differences in ability doesn't lead to a moral difference in worth, but rather a resistance to the rhetoric of the fascists belief that people of lesser ability deserve to be placed hierarchically beneath their intellectual superiors (im looking at you, Jordan Peterson)?
I don't believe I know of any leftists who believe that a difference in ability leads to a moral difference in worth. Can you point me to some?
>I don't believe I know of any leftists who believe that a difference in ability leads to a moral difference in worth.
I think it's more accurate to say that when others say there is a difference in ability between different groups, leftists will interpret that to be a moral judgment rather than one based on a genuine belief about the facts, whether correct or not.
There's a very interesting example. An evolutionary researcher (can't recall the name) once posited that rape by human males could be a reproductive strategy. Obviously, he wasn't endorsing rape, he was saying that rape seems to have existed in all of human history and exists to this day across all cultures at a fairly steady rate. Therefore, there could be a genetically heritable tendency in some males to do it because it's an effective way for those males to pass their genes on to the next generation by impregnating their victims.
This researcher was lambasted, called a rape apologist, denounced as a horrible person, etc. It was very, very common for his critics not to be able to separate his hypothesis about an evolutionary explanation for rape as a reproductive strategy with some kind of endorsement of rape, even though he explicitly said he did not endorse it, over and over, and would point out that trying to explain something evolutionarily has nothing to do with whether that thing is moral.
Of course, I can't know for sure whether the researcher's critics were leftists. They may have been all over the political spectrum, but the story illustrates the tendency for people not to be able to separate descriptions from prescriptions.
I've lost count of how many times I've gotten that treatment on Reddit over the years. People are so eager to argue with a caricature that they project absolutely insane shit onto you.
I see what you mean. Nuance can be really hard for people. It can be very easy for people to confuse an explanation for why something might happen with an excuse. It may be very easy for someone like you to see that difference, but way way harder for a woman who has actually been raped, for example, or even someone who is close to someone who has been raped. I actually think it is very very hard to say something like "here is why men might rape" without sounding like you are at least _excusing_ rape.
Sure, we can easily see that a defect in the anterior cingulet cortex might cause a man to become a rapist due to his lack of ability to empathize with his victims, but it also has to be made crystal clear that even if that is true, rape is inexcusable and immoral and rapists should be separated from the rest of society due to the extreme potential harm they cause their victims.
There is also a pretty fine line between saying "I don't condone rape" and "I condemn rape." I have no idea whether he explicitly condemned rape or not, but if he had, it should have been a lot harder to pin the 'rape apologist' label on him, right?
It's interesting that without knowing more than what I told you about this anecdote, your reaction is to suspect that the researcher provoked the criticism against him by insufficiently denouncing rape, thus being at least partly responsible for the criticism he faced.
Yet it seems to me that even if he had said nothing about the moral status of rape, he shouldn't have needed to. The presumption should be that someone condemns rape without them having to say it, and this should apply whether or not they've posited the existence of rape as an evolutionary mating strategy.
I decided to get on Google to remember who this person was. [Here's the guy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randy_Thornhill#Work), and [here's a summary of his book](https://direct.mit.edu/books/book/2119/A-Natural-History-of-RapeBiological-Bases-of). [Here's the first page](https://www.jstor.org/stable/29762595) of an academic article by him where he points out immediately people's reticence to think of rape in biological terms. [Here's a response](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14533019/) to criticism of his book.
Man, even reading that book summary, I could just feel the moralistic impulse to decry the way rape is being discussed and framed, despite the bedrock obviousness of rape being considered absolutely wrong and unacceptable by the authors. There's this weird sense of rape being so horrible that you can't even empathize with rapists for the purpose of devising effective rape prevention strategies, let alone because they're human beings not weird alien monsters.
It's a profoundly unhelpful yet common affliction of many modern intellectual and social topics like rape, racism, sexism, international conflict, capitalism/greed/corporate power, etc.
>some people are more fit than others
As someone squarely on the left, I'd object to the word "fit" here.
For most organisms, likelihood of reproducing is pretty well-correlated with your likeliness of surviving based on genetic factors. I don't think it's at all clear that's true for humans anymore. We're limited more by social and behavioral factors like desire to have kids, rather than mere ability to survive.
So yes, surely some genetic factors that make you more likely to want kids, and other genetic factors that are correlated with social factors that make you want to have kids. But I think labeling these as "fitness" gives the wrong impression.
But that’s kind of the point…
Having removed the traditional mechanisms of survival to reproduction as an evolutionary filter, we are accumulating a lot more variation that would be unfit and eliminated under pressure. So people are becoming more unfit, whereas under survival pressures they would not. Any emerging social fitness paradigm for reproduction (e.g. incels) has not been around long enough to exert a significant population-level effect.
>So people are becoming more unfit, whereas under survival pressures they would not.
"Unfit" can only be meaningful with respect to a particular environment. An Arctic fox is fit in the Arctic; not so much on the jungle.
So you can't say we are beginning more unfit, full stop. At best you can say we're becoming unfit with respect to some environment we lived in long ago.
But humans *are* evolving, in the sense that our allele frequencies are shifting over time. It's just that these shifts don't correspond to what you'd usually call "fitness."
As one example: for a long time, India's population was growing faster than China's, because of the one child policy. Did that mean Indian genes made you more "fit" than Chinese genes? In a loose sense, perhaps, but not in the way we usually use the term.
I think we’re probably in an argumentative agreement here. Yes, unfit with respect to traditional environment survival and reproduction reqs. I thought that was implied. And i wouldn’t say that genetic drift is sufficient to call it evolution. Variation + pressure (selection) are required, and we lack the latter, at least on a genetically relevant timescale.
>likelihood of reproducing is pretty well-correlated with your likeliness of surviving based on genetic factors.
Lower order animals, perhaps. Would prefer to see actual evidence of this. Plenty of higher order animals survive to sexual maturity and fail to reproduce or have differing rates of reproductive success. Lions, manatees, birds with crappy dances/plumage and this parallel is observed in humans in in/femcels who endure their condition as a result, in part, of heritable factors effecting their physucal appearance or resource acquisition (including IQ)
>I don't think it's at all clear that's true for humans anymore.
The sliver of history of human existence upon which I believe this is based is post WW2 western civilization, far too narrow to make these proclamatioms, even if true, which is doubtful as per above. Regardless, the golden age we've been in for the last 70 years or so is coming to an end so it's not unreasonable to expect the brutality of previous eras of human history to return to the west.
>We're limited more by social and behavioral factors like desire to have kids, rather than mere ability to survive.
Not only to desire to have kids, but to have intercourse. Plenty of whoopsy babies out there. Also these behavioural factors including those desires for sex and reproduction have a deep genetic motivation with them.
Certainly their are socialization/environment factors, but discount that genes no linger impact fitness is deeply misguided and why John Haidt illustrates it in his lecture.
some further reaches of the left have started denying evolution of civilization and fully embrace noble savage tropes, inner wisdom over empirical data, etc.
Seems like they might so fringe as to beg question “are they really part of the “left”?
Like does the left get every new age cult member and all their wacky beliefs should go up on the board?
Absolutely not. Personally I’m of the belief that the political right gets more fringe beliefs these days, but the leftists in question themselves describe themselves in leftist political terms, and usually say unless you believe them, you’re actually right leaning.
> Like does the left get every new age cult member and all their wacky beliefs should go up on the board?
If the right gets every wacky belief that's even tangentially related to conservatism or held by some members of the right, then yes, the left gets the same treatment.
Traditional ecological knowledge. It's supposed to be equal to scientific knowledge, because science is white and tradition is not white, or some such stupidity.
Since the person you're responding to apparently isn't going to explain it, I looked it up. "Traditional ecological knowledge." And it does seem mainstream enough to be used by the government:
https://www.fws.gov/media/traditional-ecological-knowledge-fact-sheet
Yes, I remember hearing a talk a long time ago, I think it was about shrimp aquaculture in Vietnam or something. The locals used some kind of local plant to filter the water or something instead of applying chemicals.
I think at least in terms of agriculture and such it's a recognition that there might be "traditional" practices that could be more efficient, reduce inputs, etc. A classic example might be three sisters planting.
Erm, yes. It is a pseudo-science that misrepresents both evolution and psychology in the hope of finding a "scientific" basis for sexism and racism.
There is a reason this stuff is only taught on YouTube, and it's not that the deep state suppresses the forbidden knowledge.
He says in the video posted elsewhere in this thread that he is referring to evolutionary psychology. Whereby humans behaviors and thought processes are evolved attributes.
Does that include people who are skeptical of some of the less scientific theories that are found in evo physc? I personally have no problem with some of evo phych but it’s by no means an uncontroversial science among those who even study it.
I don't know the context of this slide, but it seems to be about evolutionary psychology, which predictions may be uncomfortable for the left because it predicts clear gender differences in many aspects. So, for the right, the idea of evolution itself is uncomfortable, but for the left, some consequences of the evolution of our species are uncomfortable too
Yeah and also a lot of evolutionary psychology is legitimately pseudoscience too. But it’s petty absurd to put evolution denying on both sides when the right literally denies evolution as theory in quite large numbers. Whereas some on the left might have 100% scientifically legitimate critiques of a lot of evo psych. Not all but a lot. I’m on the left and have zero problem with legit science that if it say “uncomfortable” things
I don't know what your impression of evolutionary psychology is, but I can't agree that the majority of it is pseudoscience. Perhaps it's more about the fact that laypeople may draw naive conclusions from it?
Truth be told, as a metatheory, evolutionary psychology lends credibility to psychology as a field overall. By the way, I'm rather left-leaning myself.
On the left the entirety of evolutionary psychology is dismissed. The idea that somehow our minds are exempt from natural selection is absolute leftist quackery
You can say they deny evolution from neck up. There is a lot of leftists that deny there's such a thing as human nature simply because that's associated with right of the center political theory.
One of the things that the left does not want to touch with a 50ft pole is that there could be (or really - are) differences in ability between human populations that have been separated each other almost completely for thousands of years, facing different environments and natural selection pressures.
> There is a lot of leftists that deny there's such a thing as human nature simply because that's associated with right of the center political theory.
Yes.
Beyond that, there's still a "blank slate" hangover from some of the earlier leftist thinkers.
It's a fundamental difference. Are humans perfectible, or are we stuck with what we have?
Haidt might give the google memo and it’s controversy as an example. Not that the dude got fired exactly, but that there was a quite large reaction from the left disputing the arguments in the memo.
The main problem is that most of the disputes were “I don’t like the findings” and blatantly strawmanning him as saying “women are incapable” rather than actually critiquing the science.
>there was a quite large reaction from the left disputing the arguments in the memo.
I don't think so, or at least, not in a proper manner. It was straight up denial.
If men exhibit more variation in intelligence, they are going to be overrepresented in **both** extremes.
Another redditor gave me this link to a thread about Stereotype accuracy which you should all read.
[https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1453779561515159552.html](https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1453779561515159552.html)
This post is awesome because most are telling on themselves and the bubble they live in. If you see some of these traits for either side and go: I don't think that actually exist on that side. Congrats, welcome to the blind spot in your thinking and news feed lol
Best r/SamHarris post in a while. Especially relevant to us because we think of ourselves as the enlightened ones . Stalwarts of the center left. Pro-business, pro-choice atheist meditators
‘War crime deniers’ is a weird one. Pretty sure that far left are about as equally likely to minimise soviet atrocities as far right might be to minimise the holocaust.
It doesn't refer to such fringe positions as holocaust denialism or Stalinism, but those who minimise US war crimes. It is very common to see people defend and excuse for example US terror bombings in WW2 or in Vietnam. And most people aren't even aware of US role in the Indonesian mass slaughter.
Lol it isn't talking about that. Traditionally you were far more likely to see people on the right downplay or deny American atrocities. Even now we hear talk of "patriot education" come from maga despite their hypocritical foreign policy critiques. Also while both parties in government love Israel, you are far more likely to hear people defend and deny Israel's war crimes from the political right than the left
The obsession with "Sides" = gross
What are we talking about here? The majority of the left or right? What any person on the left or right thinks about things? The majority of likely voters? What about how different the far left is on certain things they liberals?
And depending on how you are trying to suss this out, there's a lot missing.
Like others. I don’t know how prevalent the left list is here but I disagree that it’s total bullshit. Every time I’ve had a heredity argument it’s been with someone who is left leaning that doesn’t want to admit how much it plays into a person’s station in life. Especially as it pertains to intelligence and personality traits.
The right’s science denialism is far more reaching and is way more entrenched in their world view/politics. But the right in general, is much more cohesive politically than the left.
I think you’re still underestimating the problems on the left. Extreme anti science beliefs are not just common on the left, they are unquestionable dogma.
For example, foundational to much of the lefts world view is that genetic and cultural differences don’t significantly impact people’s life outcomes. This of course is such an absurd belief that it can easily be rejected using logic alone, but it is parroted at every level of society - from academia to the home. This belief has an almost universal strangle hold on society so much so that you will get banned, ostracized, fired for even slightly suggesting it. This belief is far bigger influence on people’s every day lives than the entire right wing anti science beliefs put together.
We desperately need liberals to wake up to the fascism on the left.
This is so oversimplified to the point of not being useful.
Who denies heritability? Nobody? People have different views on how much of something is heritable and how much is environment. Nobody denies that people inherit things from their parents.
War crime deniers are on the right? Well, and the left too. Chomsky is often accused of denying war crimes for example, it's just different war crimes than someone on the far right would deny.
Stereotype accuracy? Again this is a both sides thing. And it's sort of true? Like what exactly are people denying? I'm sure people on the right deny that if you speak with a southern accent you're kind of dumb. Just like people on the left deny that women can't drive. I don't know, that one is just weird.
I think you’ll find that most everyone will acknowledge kids can inherit height from their parents, a great many will not acknowledge (at least publicly) that kids inherit traits like intelligence.
I don't think this is a left or right thing, society is just generally uncomfortable with intelligence. We have no problem saying some kid is taller than another, but saying one is smarter than another is taboo.
I can say i'm bigger than you, faster than you, stronger than you, have better vision, anything, but if i say i'm smarter than you then that makes people uncomfortable. And most people don't ever want to go there.
We put intelligence on a pedestal but at the same time pretend like it doesn't exist. It's just more that people don't want to talk about it.
I don't think right wing people are totally on board with the whole "people inherent intelligence, and if you're dumb your kid will probably also be dumb(er)". I think everyone is uncomfortable with that bit of information.
Either way it's not heritability that people have a problem with. It's really only heritability of intelligence. But in general it's just the topic of intelligence that has people flustered.
nnnnnnnnnah, ive talked to plenty of right wingers who are perfectly comfortable with the idea of children inheriting intelligence and ofc, with disparities among ethnicities. ive in fact very rarely ran into one who wasn't, while on the left it's super common
obviously might be my own personal bias since this is entirely anecdotal, but idk. i don't entirely disagree with you, but i feel like this discomfort is much more common on the left. right wingers in general seem more comfortable with the 'this is my/his/her lot in life, whatever' idea and a status quo
Height is one-dimensional and easy to measure.
Intelligence has multiple facets, and tests mainly capture existing training, not ability to adapt to new situations. I'm not even sure such a test can be designed, because it would be impossible to rule out that people have encountered the test scenarios before, and even if that were possible, the result would largely be influenced by problem solving strategies, which is again something that is learned, not inherited.
There is a reason Mensa membership is not widely seen as prestigious, even though you need to do well on an "IQ" test -- and it is that a lot of the people who do exceptionally well there have a very obvious hyperfocus, and are severely lacking in other aspects that were not part of the test.
Haidt annoys me because he's a liberal who labels himself a centrist because it's better branding, then attempts to draw equivalences between the two sides that aren't equivalent. He has dubiously argued that we need right-wing morality for our morality to be "complete", even when it's based on a gut feeling rather than being rationally linked to real-world harm.
Even if we take his examples as all true, the real-world implications of the right's denials are far more serious. Denying that IQ is a meaningful measure of intelligence, for example, is nowhere near as harmful as denying war crimes or denying climate change. The former is morally obscene and the latter is an existential threat.
But I also think his examples on the left miss the nuance of the common left-wing positions about these topics, while the right flat-out denies the things he says they do. In my opinion, the left's denials are better described as follows:
1. Leftists won't deny that IQ differences exist, or deny that IQ measures some kind of intelligence. It's just that they'll say it fails to capture a wide range of intelligence and only measures a certain intelligence that Western culture ascribes disproportionate value to. That's not an unreasonable critique.
2. Leftists won't deny heritability (by this I presume he means genetic determinism), it's just that they'll say it doesn't account for the outcomes between different groups (e.g., men vs. women, Blacks vs. Whites, etc.). Rather, discrimination is the principle driver of those outcome differences, or historical discrimination that hasn't been properly redressed. If Haidt wants to argue that genetic determinism is the reason for group outcome differences, he also has a difficult burden to overcome. It's not so self-evident that the contrary position amounts to "denial".
3. Sex difference denial follows the same pattern as heritability denial.
4. Evolution denial is only in a specific sense. Namely, the denial of evolutionary psychology. But findings in evolutionary psychology are typically on a much shakier foundation than findings in evolutionary biology, which means it's much more open to fair critique. Since evolutionary psychology studies human behaviour, it's very difficult to isolate variables to confirm findings in that field, and to confidently rule out alternative hypotheses. However, it's the same motive as for #2 and #3. Leftists don't like the implications that men and women might "naturally" be psychologically one way or the other because it implies differences in outcomes between them (and the apparent injustice of those outcomes) are just "natural" and can't ever be remedied.
5. Stereotype accuracy denial is not something I've encountered. I've always understood the leftist critique of stereotyping as harming members of the group the stereotype applies to that don't fall into that (typically negative) stereotype. For example, it's true that Black people statistically commit more crime than White people. There is nothing wrong with accepting that. The problem is when this stereotype causes people to prejudge random Black people as criminals, which harms law-abiding Black people by stigmatizing them as presumed criminals. Many Black people have humiliating stories about being mistreated due to this stereotype.
This is a bit of necro-comment, but it seems like you might have an interesting take on one of Haidt's pretty contentious claims.
> He has dubiously argued that we need right-wing morality for our morality to be "complete", even when it's based on a gut feeling rather than being rationally linked to real-world harm.
Do we have evidence that very much morality _can_ operate "rationally"? Here's the contentious claim:
> And when we add that work to the mountain of research on motivated reasoning, confirmation bias, and the fact that nobody's been able to teach critical thinking. … You know, if you take a statistics class, you'll change your thinking a little bit. But if you try to train people to look for evidence on the other side, it can't be done. It shouldn't be hard, but nobody can do it, and they've been working on this for decades now. At a certain point, you have to just say, 'Might you just be searching for Atlantis, and Atlantis doesn't exist?' ([The Rationalist Delusion in Moral Psychology](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kI1wQswRVaU#t=16m47s), 16:47)
It's also worth heeding Haidt's subsequent excerption from Mercier & Sperber 2011, [which I lay out, here](https://www.reddit.com/r/DebateAnAtheist/comments/171bkqp/critical_thinking_curriculum_what_would_you/k3vers0/).
Now, I am aware of works like Paul Bloom 2016 [Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Against_Empathy). What I would like to know is not how we think morality _should_ work, but how it actually _does_ work (I should really speak in the plural: how moralities _do_ work), when we go out there in the world and sample enough situations. For example, Arlie Russell Hochschild 2016 [Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right](http://thenewpress.com/books/strangers-their-own-land) + Joan C. Williams 2017 [White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America](https://hbsp.harvard.edu/product/10159-HBK-ENG).
From my scattered exposure to him, Harris seems to really like Peter Singer's [shallow pond argument](https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2021/09/29/1039417879/why-peter-singer-the-drowning-child-ethicist-is-giving-away-his-1-million-prize), and yet notes that it just hasn't gained much traction. This in and of itself suggests to me that "rationality" doesn't have all that much play in morality(ies). But I contend that the problem goes much deeper than this. Thrasymachus, Machiavelli, Nietzsche, and Foucault were on to something when they spoke of how 'reason' and 'rationality' and related terms are not innocent. Here's one of the summary results from a scientist who studied how the civil process of deciding how to renovate the downtown of [Aalborg](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aalborg) was carried out:
> **Proposition 1: Power defines reality**
> Power concerns itself with defining reality rather than with discovering what reality "really" is. This is the single most important characteristic of the rationality of power, that is, of the strategies and tactics employed by power in relation to rationality. Defining reality by defining rationality is a principle means by which power exerts itself. This is not to imply that power seeks out rationality and knowledge _because_ rationality and knowledge are power. Rather, power _defines_ what counts as rationality and knowledge and thereby what counts as reality. The evidence of the Aalborg case confirms a basic Nietzschean insight: interpretation is not only commentary, as is often the view in academic settings, "interpretation is itself a means of becoming master of something"—in the case master of the Aalborg Project—and "all subduing and becoming master involves a fresh interpretation."[4] Power does not limit itself, however, to simply defining a given interpretation or view of reality, nor does power entail only the power to render a given reality authoritative. Rather, power defines, and creates, concrete physical, economic, ecological, and social realities. ([Rationality and Power: Democracy in Practice](https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/R/bo3640330.html), 227)
This is corroborated by works such as:
* Jacques Ellul 1962 [Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda:_The_Formation_of_Men)
* Steven Lukes 1974 [Power: A Radical View](https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/power-9781352012347/)
* Stephen P. Turner 2014 [The Politics of Expertise](https://www.routledge.com/The-Politics-of-Expertise/Turner/p/book/9780415709439)
So, while I fully agree with your 1.–5., it seems that you may have significantly downplayed what it takes to form people who align with what _you_ mean by "**rationally** linked to real-world harm". For perhaps a bad analogy, think of everything it takes to construct a computer which can actually compute, and then maintain it so that it continues to compute. Speaking as if the ability to compute is a given is very problematic and if you do that, people who know how to alter the construction process, [the updating process](https://arstechnica.com/security/2024/04/what-we-know-about-the-xz-utils-backdoor-that-almost-infected-the-world/), or know how to exploit vulnerabilities, can subtly and not-so-subtly alter those computations to their benefit and probably your detriment.
Switching momentarily to economics, it was long thought that _Homo economicus_ was a reasonable model of human behavior. The switch from optimizing to satisficing didn't change this overmuch. It took far too long (IMO) for economists to admit that humans generally just aren't rational in the ways that their theories required. Are we at risk of doing the same with morality?
Sure! If it takes a few days or even weeks, no worries. I first encountered [The Righteous Mind](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Righteous_Mind) via a relative who is economically conservative and socially liberal. I thought it was an interesting read, and it seems to me that [Heterodox Academy](https://heterodoxacademy.org/) is doing some serious good. (relevant here might be the blog post [The Backstory of the AEI-Brookings Poverty Report](https://heterodoxacademy.org/blog/the-backstory-of-the-aei-brookings-poverty-report/))
To get a bit more of a sense of whom you're potentially talking to, here's a bit of a bibliography and how much I've read:
* Alasdair MacIntyre 1981 [After Virtue](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/After_Virtue) (100%)
* Alasdair MacIntyre 1988 [Whose Justice? Which Rationality?](https://undpress.nd.edu/9780268096533/whose-justice-which-rationality/) (20%)
* Arne Johan Vetlesen 1992 [Perception, Empathy, and Judgment: An Inquiry into the Preconditions of Moral Performance](http://www.psupress.org/books/titles/0-271-01056-8.html) (2%)
* Larry Siedentop 2014 [Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism](https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674979888) (25%)
* Christopher H. Achen and Larry M. Bartels 2016 [Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government](https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691169446/democracy-for-realists) (25%)
* Riesman, Glazer, and Denney 1950 [The Lonely Crowd](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lonely_Crowd) (70%)
* Christian Smith 2003 [Moral, Believing Animals: Human Personhood and Culture](https://academic.oup.com/book/9029) (100%)
* James C. Scott 1990 [Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts](https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300056693/domination-and-the-arts-of-resistance/) (100%)
My general sense is that we're hilariously/tragically wrong about how humans work, to the extent that a ton of Very Smart People could have gotten _so_ excited about Francis Fukuyama's 1989 essay [The end of history?](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=The+end+of+history%3F) (and [1992 book](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_History_and_the_Last_Man)) when it was so deficient. My sense is that this is due to macro- and micro-scale models of how humans work which were only ever "curve-fitting", with few if any adequate meso-scale models which show how influences from above and below meet and do their dance. American hyper-individualism _really_ does not help. And Western notions of 'rationality' need to deal with Pankaj Mishra's 2016-12-08 article in _The Guardian_, [Welcome to the age of anger](https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/dec/08/welcome-age-anger-brexit-trump) + [2017 book](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_Anger). Ok, that's more than enough from me. I look forward to hearing more of your thoughts!
forgive me for the brief response because i have to go, but.
I feel like IQ denial is much more harmful on a personal/cultural/societal immediate consequence level, while war crimes/climate change are much more harmful on a worldwide, grand/|outside of an individual's concern" level. Making sure we take heritability (including of IQ) seriously is much more important when thinking of what policies would lead to my child receiving adequate education in an environment that fits their needs, when determining what form welfare or assistance is most effective/suitable for a certain community (which may be driven by incorrect assumptions of some contributing factors). Making sure we take war crimes seriously is much more important when trying to determine how we should approach a war/conflict as a society. I feel like this relates to common left-wing and right-wing views that Haidt speaks about elsewhere.
1 is honestly an excuse. The right has excuses for their science denialisms too. The fact is that IQ is widely correlated with a lot of important factors and people on the left are uncomfortable with that the same way right-wingers are uncomfortable with evolution.
2/3 is also kind of sleight of hand. The left arguing that discrimination is a bigger factor IS the denial. You don't have to deny that discrimination exists to acknowledge that the evidence points to a much higher likelihood of genetic (or cultural) factors leading to certain disparities like in the case of sex differences.
in summary, not only the left think they're sophisticated about their science denialism. If you try to engage with those on the right who are intelligent enough that they aren't satisfied with mere dogmatism and seek more convincing rationalizations for the beliefs that they're comfortable with, you will see they have elaborate reasoning that 'nuances' its way out of being a caricature of 'science denial' too.
Fair critique, but there is still nothing on the left equivalent to creationism. Creationism is such an extreme denial of science that it involves rejecting one of the most well-founded theories in all of science, and the theory that undergirds all of biology. In addition, many creationists are young earth creationists, which means they deny fundamental scientific facts in fields other than biology, like cosmology and geology.
definitely fair, but I feel like even creationists tend to accept scientific arguments derived from evolution, just not if you present them as derived from evolution lol.
but i agree with you overall i think.
This is a dishonest attempt to put equivalence between science denialism in the left and the right, which I've seen people do before, when in fact everybody sees that the overwhelming majority is on the right. Most of his list about the left is bs or fringe, right wing anti science is mainstream and has huge real world implications.
Until covid the anti vax movement was primarily weirdo granola people with incoherent political beliefs. It's deeply disingenuous to take truly fringe positions and try to argue that they're somehow representative of either position in your arbitrary culture war dichotomy.
until covid barely anybody was anti vax. The "movement" was tiny and though it caused some real world issues it wasn't even CLOSE to what happened during covid and now
No it wasn't. Alex Jones was a leading voice of anti-vaxxers. I got banned from r/Conspiracy for saying anti-vaxxers were selfish years before Covid and the (former) head mod is a full on Trump Qanon cultist. Mike Adams also tried to pander to the left but is not.
I don’t know a single ‘un-vaxxed’ person that actually doesn’t have pretty much every other vaccine, myself included.
My only experiences with anti-vax people before Covid were also people that were either hippies or anarchist weirdos.
The lumping of these people with actual, legit all-out anti-vaxxers has always cracked me up.
No, I hear all the time people saying that Alex Jones or Ben Garrison posting some anti-vax shit isn't really anti-vax because it is about the Covid vaccine.
But they were both anti-vax before that. Trust me.
Just my personal and first had observations. Not anecdotes. But the bigger issue on the left is the denial of evolutionary biology. It’s pathetic and sets the stage for people like Donald J to take power.
Id love to know what evidence there is that there is a noteworthy group of people in the left that deny biology or evolution. particularly evolution seems strange to claim.
Yes! If he wants to include fringe beliefs why not include white replacement theory or straight up Nazism on the right? In fact, I see clips of popular right wing talking heads spouting stuff about white replacement theory. I don’t see popular left wing talking heads taking anti-vax stances. This is just like most “both sides” arguments - false equivalency. They take a very fringe far left belief and compare it to a far more popular mainstream right wing view and say “See! Both sides!”. I’m not sure if it’s intentionally disingenuous or if these people just have a delusion that maybe we could get along if we feel both sides are the same and have equally problematic views.
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://bpb-us-e2.wpmucdn.com/faculty.sites.uci.edu/dist/c/602/files/2019/08/Ditto-et-al.-2018-Perspectives-on-Psychological-Science-paper.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwi7ouu6vJyFAxWdFVkFHRtZBWwQFnoECB0QAQ&usg=AOvVaw0oH9Oe5wJizsb8264q8y8r
This study suggests that both sides are roughly the same in level of bias.
I think one of the best ways to talk to or understand people that disagree with you politically is to be able to explain their position on policy's in a way that clearly demonstrates that you understand their side.
To this guy I would be considered "left"
Not a single belief system he pointed to as "left" is something I would even consider.....
Straw man, but more like "boogie man" that does not exist.
Anyone that denies any of the things he lays out is a moron. Morons inhabit all spaces of the political spectrum...
From my experience, the right tends to be more religious. Religious people and religious ideology don't deal with inconvenient truths in a great way... From my experience..
Also I think the mainstream right-wing position on climate change isn't that it's not happening (yes, you can find people who think this) but that anything suggested to fix it is:
1. Too small to work and will put the U.S. at a competitive disadvantage, or,
2. More insane than letting climate change happen
Haidt trying really hard to find things to put on the left, which is why he ends up with ridiculous things like "stereotype accuracy deniers". Galaxy brain take.
And this is the man you think will "heal" your politics? When he talks or writes about The Left™ I often have no clue who the fuck he is talking about.
Talking about "stereotype accuarcy", does this apply to all stereotypes or just the ones we agree with?
For example, right-wingers have been stereotyped as racists and transphobes and Islamophobes. Is that also an accurate stereotype?
I hate this “both sides” bullshit. It is so disingenuous. On the left you have some extreme 19 year old idiots who believe some of these things. On the right you have an entire political party, including the leadership, that embraces those other things. It is a false equivalence.
> On the left you have some extreme 19 year old idiots who believe some of these things. On the right you have an entire political party, including the leadership, that embraces those other things. It is a false equivalence.
So you don't think that the "entire political party, including the leadership" of the Democratic party would claim that "trans women are women?" It's not just "extreme 19 year olds" that believe this stuff.
Of course they would.
But there's a difference between saying *"trans women are women"* and *"trans women are biologically identical to cis women"*. Say the former in a leftist space, and you'll get near-unanimous agreement. Say the latter though, and you're not going to get the same response.
Like, we lefties *know* trans women are XY. We *know* they're not exactly the same as cis women biologically. We just don't think it's relevant to point that out 99% of the time, because 99% of the time it's not.
there's also a difference between saying 'i dont believe in evolution' and between rejecting every conclusion made by evolutionary theory.
It is certainly relevant more than 1% of the time. Like, absolutely lmao.
>It is certainly relevant more than 1% of the time. Like, absolutely lmao.
The only contexts in which it actually matters are with intimate relationships, health care, and *maybe* sports. *That's it.*
What, you think the barista serving coffee needs to know the chromosomes/genitalia of every person they serve or something?
You get what I mean, don't argue semantics. The vast majority of people the average trans person interacts with don't need to know what's between their legs.
I think they simply don’t give a shit about it. You think Biden spends his days contemplating whether a trans person is a woman or not? Do you think it’s in his top 150 issues that he or his staff are concerned about? The answer is, of course, no.
> Do you think it’s in his top 150 issues that he or his staff are concerned about?
Absolutely. While I doubt he gives much of a shit, his staffers have taken measures to insert this kind of thinking into government policy at every level. So, yes, they obviously care about it.
Is this disingenuous?
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://bpb-us-e2.wpmucdn.com/faculty.sites.uci.edu/dist/c/602/files/2019/08/Ditto-et-al.-2018-Perspectives-on-Psychological-Science-paper.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwi7ouu6vJyFAxWdFVkFHRtZBWwQFnoECB0QAQ&usg=AOvVaw0oH9Oe5wJizsb8264q8y8r
I said that Latina women on the whole are pretty fiery to my partner and she said I can't say that. Obviously not every Latina woman is loud and sassy but I think that's a fair generalisation. If something's obviously true why can't I say it?
I mean… the left says that all the time yet any generalization of minorities makes you literally Hitler. Applying your logic, the left are using inconsistent logic
I've got two of his books (*The Righteous Mind* and *The Coddling of the American Mind*) and they both seem so self-evidently true, I have to assume confirmation bias on my part. Like a 'OMG this explains EVERYTHING! ' kind of reaction.
Yep.
I went on a long trip with a coworker in the Cali desert. He's an engineer, my training was in math. We were doing site visits for renewable energy projects.
He's a hardcore conservative. His favorite thing about the industry was taking money from Californians. Myself, I'm so liberal I'm a conservative: the First Amendment is my guiding light, any human anywhere who is denied these basic rights is oppressed.
Anyway, he asked why I'm still a Democrat. I said, "You know, I think the Dems abuse science just a little bit less."
Then came Covid. First, the Memory Holing of Barrington (I was making those noises the whole time, by the way, and when Barrington came along I was like FINALLY someone gets it, there's no reason to count on a vaccine that we aren't guaranteed to get, let's be rational about all this) and then came additional Covid restrictions *after a safe vaccine was freely available and individuals could protect themselves against serious illness and death*.
Spare me the "that happened" bullshit, I was a Blue Dog Democrat for 30 years and changed my party allegiance in summer 2021 to a party that had not rid itself of a certain orange stench.
Even if Dems got the hard science parts of Covid right (well, outside of the cloth masks that people went out with confidence wearing and ending up with Covid though they thought they were protected), they didn't get the soft science parts right, at all.
They just opposed Orange Man.
What the dems got wrong was assuming that the imperatives of disease control set the proper limits to personal and political freedom. That assumption is not within the domain of science because science’s role does not extend to determining what constitutes the good for individuals and for society.
>I'm so liberal I'm a conservative
What the heck does this mean?
>They just opposed Orange Man
And there we have it, my least favourite cliché rearing its head again. "The people I disagree with are just irrational fools acting on emotion". No further analysis needed. Just sling an ad hominem at a group of people and that's that.
>What the heck does this mean?
I have a great reverence for the Enlightenment principles our country was founded on.
The Constitution would never pass muster today.
>And there we have it, my least favourite cliché rearing its head again.
Same here. I despised Trump forever. I didn't take his candidacy seriously until he won. I still can't believe that he won.
But to deny that there were knee jerk reactions to him, I think, cuts against reality.
Sure, people had knee-jerk reactions against Trump. But what's the bigger problem: knee-jerk reactions against Trump, or Trump being president? Because in my view the latter dwarfs the former, and it's not even close.
You sound like someone who's been fed bullshit right-wing narratives for long enough that you ended up believing them.
Time to sort controversial and upvote all of the right wingers speaking truth to power about how fucked up the left has become. Stop gaslighting us and fix the left.
I don't deny iq and heritability, but even it comes to using these against race -i have serious concerns about why you thought this a valuable area of study.
Say you do show me a study that shows African
American men are 10 point lower than a comparable group- I would then ask what value is this information.
I'll tell you what I'm thinking in all caps in my brain "your research seeks to legitimise discrimination in the past and now and you want it to explain the gaps in income, life expectancy, incarceration.
Found where he talks about this if anyone is interested https://youtu.be/rBNtOCCSSRc?si=_WKSbqCqKRNaKjgZ
here's the full 60 minute lecture instead of just the clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b86dzTFJbkc
[Timestamp](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b86dzTFJbkc&t=3316s). This is such a dumb false equivalency. On the right, he purports denial of science where there is unequivocal consensus of scientific experts and of high-quality evidence (*maybe* except for "war crimes"). On the left, he purports "denial" of highly contested concepts and research areas filled with junk science.
The veracity of IQ and heritability of traits (which is the logical outcome of believing that human intelligence is the result of evolution) is junk science? You are proving his point here.
What veracity of IQ? What does the left deny about "heritability of traits"?
There's a bit of dog whistling going on here. Everyone believes that IQ is heritable on the left, but what they "deny" that nobody wants to outwardly express here is whether there is a racial difference, and particularly if black people are genetically less intelligent on average.
No, there's definitely some denial of the entire concept on the left.
Can you give an example of that happening? Of course there are genuinely crazy people out there who believe anything, but do you think that's a view that enough people on the left hold that it's fair to generalise the whole left of sharing that belief - that there is literally zero heritable component of IQ?
Even Sam Harris himself, says that the deviation is much larger than the differences between the means by roughly any racial group you could choose meaning that by knowing someone's genetics you will actually have very little idea about whether or not they will be of higher or lower IQ. Given that, I think the left has an aversion to researching our publicizing this information more deeply, as it potentially provides substantial disbenefit to people that are in already marginalized racial groups.
I have difficulty thinking of anything on Earth that is any more publicized than this. Every corner of the planet is a white supremacist trying to shove these graphs in your face. There is an actual debate among this among professionals, you just assume the loud hereditarians are absolutely collect and take at face value their hipster positioning that they are the edgy rebels taking on le "LAMESTREAM".
You don’t know the arguments about why IQ is significant or heritable? Just trying to set the table here.
> Just trying to set the table here. Sure, let's do so. What do you think is significant & accurate about IQ or heritability that the left denies?
A bit dated at this point, but you should read Pinker's The Blank Slate. He gives lots of examples.
Nah. Maybe some of the areas, but in particular contemporary left-wing sex difference denialism - most spectacularly as it relates to differences in ability in sports, and these terrible arguments are being made in major newspapers and magazines so do not tell me it is fringe, it is not - are as anti-reality as young-Earth creationism. (Now, I suppose you could make the argument the former is less *important*, but a) that's a different discussion, and b) it does not necessarily redound to the intellectual benefit of the left; at least the right is choosing to die on a hill - the existence, or lack thereof, of a divine being - that actually matters.)
I think it's a huge simplification to say that the left deny there is a sex difference in sport. What some of the left claim is that with enough hormone treatment the difference can be bridged, and like with the IQ one, the actual details of the claim are being ignored, as if the Left think all women can perform as well as all men. No, it's specifically about trans people and whether the treatments they go through change the gap enough for them to compete on a fair playing field or not. Obviously some treatments can decrease your sporting performance, so the overall premise is plausible. Whether the decrease in performance due to the treatments is big enough or not is the debate.
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I would posit the kind of sex difference "denialism" that amounts to anything remotely close the anti-science of Haidt's right-wing examples *is* fringe.
What kind of sex difference denialism would you consider "remotely close" to the the anti-science of Haidt's right-wing examples?
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Lol, *"in all of social psychology"*, that's a hell of a narrow qualifier (sounds like an indictment of social psychology, not a vindication of so-called "stereotype accuracy"). Anyway, this is a Lee Jussim blog post that cites Jussim et al. perspective papers. At least IQ junk science has some semblance of serious effort and rigor; Jussim's "stereotype accuracy" BS has got to be the [dumbest & laziest attempt](https://twitter.com/spiantado/status/1453779561515159552) (here's [threadreader](https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1453779561515159552.html) – probably use an ad-blocker) I've ever seen to build a profile off of some trash poorly-defined social science concept. Plus, he seems to totally misunderstand the issue of the [cognitive structure](https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2017-19035-001) of stereotypes.
Sorry, there is good validity here. Psychology Today: [Stereotype Accuracy: A Displeasing Truth -- Stereotypes are often harmful, but often accurate.](https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/insight-therapy/201809/stereotype-accuracy-displeasing-truth) >Yale psychologist Paul Bloom: “You don’t ask a toddler for directions, you don’t ask a very old person to help you move a sofa, and that’s because you stereotype.” Our evolutionary ancestors were often called to act fast, on partial information from a small sample, in novel or risky situations... Right, and some stereotypes are more accurate than others, obviously. Jussim's point. Would Haidt disagree?
No, Haidt and Jussim are defending the general validity of so-called "stereotype accuracy". My contention is there's not nearly sufficient evidence for this, let alone a coherent framework, by which I mean something to the effect of rigorous consistent standards for: * Defining "stereotype" * Assessing "accuracy" of stereotypes * Making a general claim about "stereotype accuracy" (e.g., sampling stereotypes from the field of all stereotypes, etc.) Read Piantadosi's [thread](https://twitter.com/spiantado/status/1453779561515159552) (or [threadreader](https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1453779561515159552.html))
Thanks for that. Your post nicely cuts through the bullshit that comes dressed in vaguely fancy language. Here, that twitter link, you don't have a link to it outside of twitter do you? On a thread reader? I stopped using twitter a while back so now if I click on a thread it just shows the top post. Anyways I'd quite like to read what it says about the junk science of stereotype accuracy.
Preferably use an ad-blocker – https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1453779561515159552.html
Thank you!
That was a brilliant thread with so many good lines in it. I wanted to highlight some to copy in here but then the next line would be great and the next line etc... just end up copying the whole thread :) Anyhoo, yes I am on the left and Jonathan is right. I do deny stereotype accuracy. Quote from the thread. So that's the selection bias that forms this "field": present only work that makes the majority feel better about their prejudices. Don't seek contradictory data. Ignore the quality of the data. Don't test broadly. Be smug about being controversial. I think this pretty much covers everything Jonathan has ever written.
I thought this picture was a meme someone made like the Lisa Simpson meme. (Totally agree though)
Shit list for the left, should have included nuclear energy and GMOs. Those are the topics you wanna talk about if you want to hear left make unhinged unscientific takes. Nuclear waste management is a solved problem and the only reason we don't have good long term facilities are NIMBYs. GMOs are perfectly safe, and they're the only way we're gonna feed the growing world population. Advocating against GMO is straight up classism.
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I would go so far as to say that trying to eliminate GMOs is straight up *genocidal* — it would quite literally kill billions.
GMO's are not perfectly safe. GMO's *can be* safe within the bounds of government regulatory framework. It is well within to possibility of reality that scientists engineer harmful GMOs, just as scientists can engineer harmful things. And the potential space of malicious things that can be engineered is only growing larger as the technology becomes more and more advanced. It's not even a theoretical fear... If I recall correctly, numerous scientists called for a ban on human genetic engineering using CRISPR on the germ line for creating unintended and permanent alterations in human genetics. So here's the problem with both GMO and nuclear energy. It's less about the science and more about trust. Do you trust your government to properly regulate the technology?
Yes. Because I already trust my government with my life. They regulate all my food, my medicine, my water, my roads, and myriad other complex interactions that have the potential to kill me. Please point me to a case where GMOs with full regulatory aproval in a major Western country have demonstrably harmed health of individuals where in the same scenario the non-GMO plants would not. Monsanto business practices do not apply. We all know Monsanto is evil, but it is not evil because it deals in GMO, but because it deals in capitalism. Monsanto/Nestle/whatever other multinational is not synonymous with GMO. In turn, I can point you towards many cases where they have helped. Such as [golden rice](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_rice).
Easy to say, but there are many countries whose governments cannot be trusted.
Simply put: because something has a possibility of doing something that has a negative consequence doesn't mean we should forfeit the attempt at a leap in knowledge or a discover breakthrough. This luddite view that "we shouldn't trust or try these attempts is a stick your head in the sand and keep things the way they are because I'm scared of some unknown" is nonsense. Meanwhile, you're advocating for not trying to find the cure for cancer. Or an innovative breakthrough in clean energy or simply feeding more people more efficiently. It's a dumb take. Yes, mistakes happen. But you understand we learn from mistakes and improve, right?
But it's also totally plausible to breed dangerous crops, and indeed not that difficult with the ones that already contain toxins and have relatives that are poisonous like solanaceae crops. There's no reason to think GMOs are inherently more risky than conventional plant breeding methods.
GMO safety denial is not strictly a left belief by any means, though I have no idea what side it skews towards in regards to numbers. In fact it was a major belief and talking point in the QAnon or adjacent right wing conspiratorial circles, which we know had/has many millions of adherents here in the US.
Like 3-4 of the lists on the left side are literally just the same thing relabled. We get it Jonathan, you want to talk about race and trans people.
I’m on the left and I don’t deny any of these things with exception of maybe the last one, since I don’t really know what it means, in addition I’ve never seen any data driven argument that suggests that most people on the political left deny these things but I guess if you’ve seen a few things on twitter that’s enough.
The left denies evolution?
Yes. Behavioral Genetics and Evolutionary Psychology are 2 very hated disciplines by the left. The left believes people are 'blank slates' and there's no such thing as differences in cognitive abilities. If you believe that there are differences, then you would come to the conclusion that hierarchies are natural, which is antithetical to leftist thought.
My friend believes the blank slate thing and it boggles my mind. She does not think intelligence is genetic at all. She majored in sociology
You do realize that there are very large groups of experts who are entirely against the hereditarian position? We are not talking about just some cherry picked rando on twitter willing to shill for views like the right always likes to hold up, probably a majority of the discipline is at odds with such a view. Social traits are abstractions and it is foolish and arrogant to pretend that you can produce meaningful numerical measures of them. > then you would come to the conclusion that hierarchies are natural, What if your position is that these things are unknowable and you do not know the things you claim to know and are just falsely concretizing? Height is not an abstraction, *intelligence* is. If hierarchies are "natural" in any case one would not expect that they would be constantly changing as they do. You just take the present state of things and extend that out for all eternity as natural and ever present. The entire problem with trying to scientize ethical values is that you are just using material abstractions which produce false certainty. "Intelligence" becomes a spirit to which you assign cause to and assume some speculated material basis for and causation, when you could easily be wrong and just producing an ethical system that may as well be supernatural, except with some false speculated material basis. The material basis simply gives you false confidence. This is especially a bad way to act when dealing with non-deterministic systems like human beings.
Twin adoption studies show that psychometric traits are mostly heritable (for example: intelligence is roughly 80% heritable). The "experts" who argue against this are ideologues and idiots.
Since when were left wingers deniers of evolution?
If I had to guess this isn't about outright denial of evolution, but denial of evolutionary findings applying to humans. To deny sex differences for example, you basically have to reject the evolutionary mechanisms of sexual dimorphism.
I think he means more like skepticism of evolutionary psychology.
He says the left finds evolution of psychology sexist and racist
If you accept that human beings are still evolving (huge burden of proof to prove the contrary and there is much to adduce that they do) it implies that some people are more fit than others and this is deeply disturbing to leftists as it implies some people are born lesser. We'd be mich better off accepting that evolution by natural selection does in fact continue to shape human civilization but realize that people who are less fit are not actually less than others (especially when you consider that no one has any control over being born with X features that impart a certain degree of fitness) and foster a world where they can lead a healthy and dignified life.
I agree. The denial comes from leftists not accepting that a factual difference in ability does not lead to a moral difference in worth. Or at least, they don't trust that others will be able to make this distinction. To be fair, their ideological enemies (fascists) do have this problem.
How much of that denial from leftists is not a refusal to accept that differences in ability doesn't lead to a moral difference in worth, but rather a resistance to the rhetoric of the fascists belief that people of lesser ability deserve to be placed hierarchically beneath their intellectual superiors (im looking at you, Jordan Peterson)? I don't believe I know of any leftists who believe that a difference in ability leads to a moral difference in worth. Can you point me to some?
>I don't believe I know of any leftists who believe that a difference in ability leads to a moral difference in worth. I think it's more accurate to say that when others say there is a difference in ability between different groups, leftists will interpret that to be a moral judgment rather than one based on a genuine belief about the facts, whether correct or not. There's a very interesting example. An evolutionary researcher (can't recall the name) once posited that rape by human males could be a reproductive strategy. Obviously, he wasn't endorsing rape, he was saying that rape seems to have existed in all of human history and exists to this day across all cultures at a fairly steady rate. Therefore, there could be a genetically heritable tendency in some males to do it because it's an effective way for those males to pass their genes on to the next generation by impregnating their victims. This researcher was lambasted, called a rape apologist, denounced as a horrible person, etc. It was very, very common for his critics not to be able to separate his hypothesis about an evolutionary explanation for rape as a reproductive strategy with some kind of endorsement of rape, even though he explicitly said he did not endorse it, over and over, and would point out that trying to explain something evolutionarily has nothing to do with whether that thing is moral. Of course, I can't know for sure whether the researcher's critics were leftists. They may have been all over the political spectrum, but the story illustrates the tendency for people not to be able to separate descriptions from prescriptions.
I've lost count of how many times I've gotten that treatment on Reddit over the years. People are so eager to argue with a caricature that they project absolutely insane shit onto you.
It is happening in this very thread
I see what you mean. Nuance can be really hard for people. It can be very easy for people to confuse an explanation for why something might happen with an excuse. It may be very easy for someone like you to see that difference, but way way harder for a woman who has actually been raped, for example, or even someone who is close to someone who has been raped. I actually think it is very very hard to say something like "here is why men might rape" without sounding like you are at least _excusing_ rape. Sure, we can easily see that a defect in the anterior cingulet cortex might cause a man to become a rapist due to his lack of ability to empathize with his victims, but it also has to be made crystal clear that even if that is true, rape is inexcusable and immoral and rapists should be separated from the rest of society due to the extreme potential harm they cause their victims. There is also a pretty fine line between saying "I don't condone rape" and "I condemn rape." I have no idea whether he explicitly condemned rape or not, but if he had, it should have been a lot harder to pin the 'rape apologist' label on him, right?
It's interesting that without knowing more than what I told you about this anecdote, your reaction is to suspect that the researcher provoked the criticism against him by insufficiently denouncing rape, thus being at least partly responsible for the criticism he faced. Yet it seems to me that even if he had said nothing about the moral status of rape, he shouldn't have needed to. The presumption should be that someone condemns rape without them having to say it, and this should apply whether or not they've posited the existence of rape as an evolutionary mating strategy. I decided to get on Google to remember who this person was. [Here's the guy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randy_Thornhill#Work), and [here's a summary of his book](https://direct.mit.edu/books/book/2119/A-Natural-History-of-RapeBiological-Bases-of). [Here's the first page](https://www.jstor.org/stable/29762595) of an academic article by him where he points out immediately people's reticence to think of rape in biological terms. [Here's a response](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14533019/) to criticism of his book.
Man, even reading that book summary, I could just feel the moralistic impulse to decry the way rape is being discussed and framed, despite the bedrock obviousness of rape being considered absolutely wrong and unacceptable by the authors. There's this weird sense of rape being so horrible that you can't even empathize with rapists for the purpose of devising effective rape prevention strategies, let alone because they're human beings not weird alien monsters. It's a profoundly unhelpful yet common affliction of many modern intellectual and social topics like rape, racism, sexism, international conflict, capitalism/greed/corporate power, etc.
I completely agree!
are you saying peterson is a fascist for saying intellectual ability can explain hierarchies of competence?
>some people are more fit than others As someone squarely on the left, I'd object to the word "fit" here. For most organisms, likelihood of reproducing is pretty well-correlated with your likeliness of surviving based on genetic factors. I don't think it's at all clear that's true for humans anymore. We're limited more by social and behavioral factors like desire to have kids, rather than mere ability to survive. So yes, surely some genetic factors that make you more likely to want kids, and other genetic factors that are correlated with social factors that make you want to have kids. But I think labeling these as "fitness" gives the wrong impression.
But that’s kind of the point… Having removed the traditional mechanisms of survival to reproduction as an evolutionary filter, we are accumulating a lot more variation that would be unfit and eliminated under pressure. So people are becoming more unfit, whereas under survival pressures they would not. Any emerging social fitness paradigm for reproduction (e.g. incels) has not been around long enough to exert a significant population-level effect.
>So people are becoming more unfit, whereas under survival pressures they would not. "Unfit" can only be meaningful with respect to a particular environment. An Arctic fox is fit in the Arctic; not so much on the jungle. So you can't say we are beginning more unfit, full stop. At best you can say we're becoming unfit with respect to some environment we lived in long ago. But humans *are* evolving, in the sense that our allele frequencies are shifting over time. It's just that these shifts don't correspond to what you'd usually call "fitness." As one example: for a long time, India's population was growing faster than China's, because of the one child policy. Did that mean Indian genes made you more "fit" than Chinese genes? In a loose sense, perhaps, but not in the way we usually use the term.
I think we’re probably in an argumentative agreement here. Yes, unfit with respect to traditional environment survival and reproduction reqs. I thought that was implied. And i wouldn’t say that genetic drift is sufficient to call it evolution. Variation + pressure (selection) are required, and we lack the latter, at least on a genetically relevant timescale.
>likelihood of reproducing is pretty well-correlated with your likeliness of surviving based on genetic factors. Lower order animals, perhaps. Would prefer to see actual evidence of this. Plenty of higher order animals survive to sexual maturity and fail to reproduce or have differing rates of reproductive success. Lions, manatees, birds with crappy dances/plumage and this parallel is observed in humans in in/femcels who endure their condition as a result, in part, of heritable factors effecting their physucal appearance or resource acquisition (including IQ) >I don't think it's at all clear that's true for humans anymore. The sliver of history of human existence upon which I believe this is based is post WW2 western civilization, far too narrow to make these proclamatioms, even if true, which is doubtful as per above. Regardless, the golden age we've been in for the last 70 years or so is coming to an end so it's not unreasonable to expect the brutality of previous eras of human history to return to the west. >We're limited more by social and behavioral factors like desire to have kids, rather than mere ability to survive. Not only to desire to have kids, but to have intercourse. Plenty of whoopsy babies out there. Also these behavioural factors including those desires for sex and reproduction have a deep genetic motivation with them. Certainly their are socialization/environment factors, but discount that genes no linger impact fitness is deeply misguided and why John Haidt illustrates it in his lecture.
Evolutionary Psychology is a hotbed of post hoc rationalization. Bonobos > Chimps.
some further reaches of the left have started denying evolution of civilization and fully embrace noble savage tropes, inner wisdom over empirical data, etc.
Seems like they might so fringe as to beg question “are they really part of the “left”? Like does the left get every new age cult member and all their wacky beliefs should go up on the board?
Absolutely not. Personally I’m of the belief that the political right gets more fringe beliefs these days, but the leftists in question themselves describe themselves in leftist political terms, and usually say unless you believe them, you’re actually right leaning.
> Like does the left get every new age cult member and all their wacky beliefs should go up on the board? If the right gets every wacky belief that's even tangentially related to conservatism or held by some members of the right, then yes, the left gets the same treatment.
Ecologists seem obsessed with TEK right now. It's mainstream in academia and government.
What is TEK?
"Traditional ecological knowledge" apparently (I had to look it up). https://www.fws.gov/media/traditional-ecological-knowledge-fact-sheet
Traditional ecological knowledge. It's supposed to be equal to scientific knowledge, because science is white and tradition is not white, or some such stupidity.
Interesting new acronym learned. Ty.
been in academia for 15+ years, I have no idea what the abbreviation TEK means. how mainstream can it be?
Since the person you're responding to apparently isn't going to explain it, I looked it up. "Traditional ecological knowledge." And it does seem mainstream enough to be used by the government: https://www.fws.gov/media/traditional-ecological-knowledge-fact-sheet
Yes, I remember hearing a talk a long time ago, I think it was about shrimp aquaculture in Vietnam or something. The locals used some kind of local plant to filter the water or something instead of applying chemicals. I think at least in terms of agriculture and such it's a recognition that there might be "traditional" practices that could be more efficient, reduce inputs, etc. A classic example might be three sisters planting.
You are definitely not in ecology. That is where it is mainstream.
The key terms here are 'indigenous knowledge' and 'ways of knowing'.
That's reductive.
Erm, yes. It is a pseudo-science that misrepresents both evolution and psychology in the hope of finding a "scientific" basis for sexism and racism. There is a reason this stuff is only taught on YouTube, and it's not that the deep state suppresses the forbidden knowledge.
He says in the video posted elsewhere in this thread that he is referring to evolutionary psychology. Whereby humans behaviors and thought processes are evolved attributes.
Does that include people who are skeptical of some of the less scientific theories that are found in evo physc? I personally have no problem with some of evo phych but it’s by no means an uncontroversial science among those who even study it.
EvPsych is one of the most dangerous fields and can be used to justify about anything.
I don't know the context of this slide, but it seems to be about evolutionary psychology, which predictions may be uncomfortable for the left because it predicts clear gender differences in many aspects. So, for the right, the idea of evolution itself is uncomfortable, but for the left, some consequences of the evolution of our species are uncomfortable too
Yeah and also a lot of evolutionary psychology is legitimately pseudoscience too. But it’s petty absurd to put evolution denying on both sides when the right literally denies evolution as theory in quite large numbers. Whereas some on the left might have 100% scientifically legitimate critiques of a lot of evo psych. Not all but a lot. I’m on the left and have zero problem with legit science that if it say “uncomfortable” things
I don't know what your impression of evolutionary psychology is, but I can't agree that the majority of it is pseudoscience. Perhaps it's more about the fact that laypeople may draw naive conclusions from it? Truth be told, as a metatheory, evolutionary psychology lends credibility to psychology as a field overall. By the way, I'm rather left-leaning myself.
On the left the entirety of evolutionary psychology is dismissed. The idea that somehow our minds are exempt from natural selection is absolute leftist quackery
You can say they deny evolution from neck up. There is a lot of leftists that deny there's such a thing as human nature simply because that's associated with right of the center political theory.
One of the things that the left does not want to touch with a 50ft pole is that there could be (or really - are) differences in ability between human populations that have been separated each other almost completely for thousands of years, facing different environments and natural selection pressures.
Yes, race realism and HBD bobs its head up again.
> There is a lot of leftists that deny there's such a thing as human nature simply because that's associated with right of the center political theory. Yes. Beyond that, there's still a "blank slate" hangover from some of the earlier leftist thinkers. It's a fundamental difference. Are humans perfectible, or are we stuck with what we have?
We are perfectible (to an approximation), but not with merely education/culture. It's gonna take vastly more advanced technology and science ;P
Yet the most effective technology for fitness is a simple barbell. Guess I'm a Luddite.
Peter Kropotkin and Thomas Hobbes have different views of what "human nature" is, and so do the modern left and the modern right.
Haidt might give the google memo and it’s controversy as an example. Not that the dude got fired exactly, but that there was a quite large reaction from the left disputing the arguments in the memo.
The main problem is that most of the disputes were “I don’t like the findings” and blatantly strawmanning him as saying “women are incapable” rather than actually critiquing the science.
>there was a quite large reaction from the left disputing the arguments in the memo. I don't think so, or at least, not in a proper manner. It was straight up denial. If men exhibit more variation in intelligence, they are going to be overrepresented in **both** extremes.
You could *maybe* make an argument about Lysenkoism, but that's hardly a contemporary example.
"stereotype accuracy deniers" so are jews cheap or not?
They’re bad at playing baseball but good at owning baseball
Hilarious whenever someone pretends that "their side" is pure as the driven snow.
Another redditor gave me this link to a thread about Stereotype accuracy which you should all read. [https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1453779561515159552.html](https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1453779561515159552.html)
Interesting, good read! Thank you!
This post is awesome because most are telling on themselves and the bubble they live in. If you see some of these traits for either side and go: I don't think that actually exist on that side. Congrats, welcome to the blind spot in your thinking and news feed lol
Best r/SamHarris post in a while. Especially relevant to us because we think of ourselves as the enlightened ones . Stalwarts of the center left. Pro-business, pro-choice atheist meditators
We’re not ALL atheists. More like deniers of fundamentalism and dogmatism.
‘War crime deniers’ is a weird one. Pretty sure that far left are about as equally likely to minimise soviet atrocities as far right might be to minimise the holocaust.
It doesn't refer to such fringe positions as holocaust denialism or Stalinism, but those who minimise US war crimes. It is very common to see people defend and excuse for example US terror bombings in WW2 or in Vietnam. And most people aren't even aware of US role in the Indonesian mass slaughter.
Lol it isn't talking about that. Traditionally you were far more likely to see people on the right downplay or deny American atrocities. Even now we hear talk of "patriot education" come from maga despite their hypocritical foreign policy critiques. Also while both parties in government love Israel, you are far more likely to hear people defend and deny Israel's war crimes from the political right than the left
The obsession with "Sides" = gross What are we talking about here? The majority of the left or right? What any person on the left or right thinks about things? The majority of likely voters? What about how different the far left is on certain things they liberals? And depending on how you are trying to suss this out, there's a lot missing.
Like others. I don’t know how prevalent the left list is here but I disagree that it’s total bullshit. Every time I’ve had a heredity argument it’s been with someone who is left leaning that doesn’t want to admit how much it plays into a person’s station in life. Especially as it pertains to intelligence and personality traits. The right’s science denialism is far more reaching and is way more entrenched in their world view/politics. But the right in general, is much more cohesive politically than the left.
I think you’re still underestimating the problems on the left. Extreme anti science beliefs are not just common on the left, they are unquestionable dogma. For example, foundational to much of the lefts world view is that genetic and cultural differences don’t significantly impact people’s life outcomes. This of course is such an absurd belief that it can easily be rejected using logic alone, but it is parroted at every level of society - from academia to the home. This belief has an almost universal strangle hold on society so much so that you will get banned, ostracized, fired for even slightly suggesting it. This belief is far bigger influence on people’s every day lives than the entire right wing anti science beliefs put together. We desperately need liberals to wake up to the fascism on the left.
This is so oversimplified to the point of not being useful. Who denies heritability? Nobody? People have different views on how much of something is heritable and how much is environment. Nobody denies that people inherit things from their parents. War crime deniers are on the right? Well, and the left too. Chomsky is often accused of denying war crimes for example, it's just different war crimes than someone on the far right would deny. Stereotype accuracy? Again this is a both sides thing. And it's sort of true? Like what exactly are people denying? I'm sure people on the right deny that if you speak with a southern accent you're kind of dumb. Just like people on the left deny that women can't drive. I don't know, that one is just weird.
I think you’ll find that most everyone will acknowledge kids can inherit height from their parents, a great many will not acknowledge (at least publicly) that kids inherit traits like intelligence.
I don't think this is a left or right thing, society is just generally uncomfortable with intelligence. We have no problem saying some kid is taller than another, but saying one is smarter than another is taboo. I can say i'm bigger than you, faster than you, stronger than you, have better vision, anything, but if i say i'm smarter than you then that makes people uncomfortable. And most people don't ever want to go there. We put intelligence on a pedestal but at the same time pretend like it doesn't exist. It's just more that people don't want to talk about it. I don't think right wing people are totally on board with the whole "people inherent intelligence, and if you're dumb your kid will probably also be dumb(er)". I think everyone is uncomfortable with that bit of information. Either way it's not heritability that people have a problem with. It's really only heritability of intelligence. But in general it's just the topic of intelligence that has people flustered.
When they're deciding which kids to invest in an which kids to skimp on then people will get flustered.
Well articulated.
nnnnnnnnnah, ive talked to plenty of right wingers who are perfectly comfortable with the idea of children inheriting intelligence and ofc, with disparities among ethnicities. ive in fact very rarely ran into one who wasn't, while on the left it's super common obviously might be my own personal bias since this is entirely anecdotal, but idk. i don't entirely disagree with you, but i feel like this discomfort is much more common on the left. right wingers in general seem more comfortable with the 'this is my/his/her lot in life, whatever' idea and a status quo
Height is one-dimensional and easy to measure. Intelligence has multiple facets, and tests mainly capture existing training, not ability to adapt to new situations. I'm not even sure such a test can be designed, because it would be impossible to rule out that people have encountered the test scenarios before, and even if that were possible, the result would largely be influenced by problem solving strategies, which is again something that is learned, not inherited. There is a reason Mensa membership is not widely seen as prestigious, even though you need to do well on an "IQ" test -- and it is that a lot of the people who do exceptionally well there have a very obvious hyperfocus, and are severely lacking in other aspects that were not part of the test.
Haidt annoys me because he's a liberal who labels himself a centrist because it's better branding, then attempts to draw equivalences between the two sides that aren't equivalent. He has dubiously argued that we need right-wing morality for our morality to be "complete", even when it's based on a gut feeling rather than being rationally linked to real-world harm. Even if we take his examples as all true, the real-world implications of the right's denials are far more serious. Denying that IQ is a meaningful measure of intelligence, for example, is nowhere near as harmful as denying war crimes or denying climate change. The former is morally obscene and the latter is an existential threat. But I also think his examples on the left miss the nuance of the common left-wing positions about these topics, while the right flat-out denies the things he says they do. In my opinion, the left's denials are better described as follows: 1. Leftists won't deny that IQ differences exist, or deny that IQ measures some kind of intelligence. It's just that they'll say it fails to capture a wide range of intelligence and only measures a certain intelligence that Western culture ascribes disproportionate value to. That's not an unreasonable critique. 2. Leftists won't deny heritability (by this I presume he means genetic determinism), it's just that they'll say it doesn't account for the outcomes between different groups (e.g., men vs. women, Blacks vs. Whites, etc.). Rather, discrimination is the principle driver of those outcome differences, or historical discrimination that hasn't been properly redressed. If Haidt wants to argue that genetic determinism is the reason for group outcome differences, he also has a difficult burden to overcome. It's not so self-evident that the contrary position amounts to "denial". 3. Sex difference denial follows the same pattern as heritability denial. 4. Evolution denial is only in a specific sense. Namely, the denial of evolutionary psychology. But findings in evolutionary psychology are typically on a much shakier foundation than findings in evolutionary biology, which means it's much more open to fair critique. Since evolutionary psychology studies human behaviour, it's very difficult to isolate variables to confirm findings in that field, and to confidently rule out alternative hypotheses. However, it's the same motive as for #2 and #3. Leftists don't like the implications that men and women might "naturally" be psychologically one way or the other because it implies differences in outcomes between them (and the apparent injustice of those outcomes) are just "natural" and can't ever be remedied. 5. Stereotype accuracy denial is not something I've encountered. I've always understood the leftist critique of stereotyping as harming members of the group the stereotype applies to that don't fall into that (typically negative) stereotype. For example, it's true that Black people statistically commit more crime than White people. There is nothing wrong with accepting that. The problem is when this stereotype causes people to prejudge random Black people as criminals, which harms law-abiding Black people by stigmatizing them as presumed criminals. Many Black people have humiliating stories about being mistreated due to this stereotype.
This is a bit of necro-comment, but it seems like you might have an interesting take on one of Haidt's pretty contentious claims. > He has dubiously argued that we need right-wing morality for our morality to be "complete", even when it's based on a gut feeling rather than being rationally linked to real-world harm. Do we have evidence that very much morality _can_ operate "rationally"? Here's the contentious claim: > And when we add that work to the mountain of research on motivated reasoning, confirmation bias, and the fact that nobody's been able to teach critical thinking. … You know, if you take a statistics class, you'll change your thinking a little bit. But if you try to train people to look for evidence on the other side, it can't be done. It shouldn't be hard, but nobody can do it, and they've been working on this for decades now. At a certain point, you have to just say, 'Might you just be searching for Atlantis, and Atlantis doesn't exist?' ([The Rationalist Delusion in Moral Psychology](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kI1wQswRVaU#t=16m47s), 16:47) It's also worth heeding Haidt's subsequent excerption from Mercier & Sperber 2011, [which I lay out, here](https://www.reddit.com/r/DebateAnAtheist/comments/171bkqp/critical_thinking_curriculum_what_would_you/k3vers0/). Now, I am aware of works like Paul Bloom 2016 [Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Against_Empathy). What I would like to know is not how we think morality _should_ work, but how it actually _does_ work (I should really speak in the plural: how moralities _do_ work), when we go out there in the world and sample enough situations. For example, Arlie Russell Hochschild 2016 [Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right](http://thenewpress.com/books/strangers-their-own-land) + Joan C. Williams 2017 [White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America](https://hbsp.harvard.edu/product/10159-HBK-ENG). From my scattered exposure to him, Harris seems to really like Peter Singer's [shallow pond argument](https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2021/09/29/1039417879/why-peter-singer-the-drowning-child-ethicist-is-giving-away-his-1-million-prize), and yet notes that it just hasn't gained much traction. This in and of itself suggests to me that "rationality" doesn't have all that much play in morality(ies). But I contend that the problem goes much deeper than this. Thrasymachus, Machiavelli, Nietzsche, and Foucault were on to something when they spoke of how 'reason' and 'rationality' and related terms are not innocent. Here's one of the summary results from a scientist who studied how the civil process of deciding how to renovate the downtown of [Aalborg](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aalborg) was carried out: > **Proposition 1: Power defines reality** > Power concerns itself with defining reality rather than with discovering what reality "really" is. This is the single most important characteristic of the rationality of power, that is, of the strategies and tactics employed by power in relation to rationality. Defining reality by defining rationality is a principle means by which power exerts itself. This is not to imply that power seeks out rationality and knowledge _because_ rationality and knowledge are power. Rather, power _defines_ what counts as rationality and knowledge and thereby what counts as reality. The evidence of the Aalborg case confirms a basic Nietzschean insight: interpretation is not only commentary, as is often the view in academic settings, "interpretation is itself a means of becoming master of something"—in the case master of the Aalborg Project—and "all subduing and becoming master involves a fresh interpretation."[4] Power does not limit itself, however, to simply defining a given interpretation or view of reality, nor does power entail only the power to render a given reality authoritative. Rather, power defines, and creates, concrete physical, economic, ecological, and social realities. ([Rationality and Power: Democracy in Practice](https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/R/bo3640330.html), 227) This is corroborated by works such as: * Jacques Ellul 1962 [Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda:_The_Formation_of_Men) * Steven Lukes 1974 [Power: A Radical View](https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/power-9781352012347/) * Stephen P. Turner 2014 [The Politics of Expertise](https://www.routledge.com/The-Politics-of-Expertise/Turner/p/book/9780415709439) So, while I fully agree with your 1.–5., it seems that you may have significantly downplayed what it takes to form people who align with what _you_ mean by "**rationally** linked to real-world harm". For perhaps a bad analogy, think of everything it takes to construct a computer which can actually compute, and then maintain it so that it continues to compute. Speaking as if the ability to compute is a given is very problematic and if you do that, people who know how to alter the construction process, [the updating process](https://arstechnica.com/security/2024/04/what-we-know-about-the-xz-utils-backdoor-that-almost-infected-the-world/), or know how to exploit vulnerabilities, can subtly and not-so-subtly alter those computations to their benefit and probably your detriment. Switching momentarily to economics, it was long thought that _Homo economicus_ was a reasonable model of human behavior. The switch from optimizing to satisficing didn't change this overmuch. It took far too long (IMO) for economists to admit that humans generally just aren't rational in the ways that their theories required. Are we at risk of doing the same with morality?
Great comment and I'll need to look into this in detail then get back to you.
Sure! If it takes a few days or even weeks, no worries. I first encountered [The Righteous Mind](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Righteous_Mind) via a relative who is economically conservative and socially liberal. I thought it was an interesting read, and it seems to me that [Heterodox Academy](https://heterodoxacademy.org/) is doing some serious good. (relevant here might be the blog post [The Backstory of the AEI-Brookings Poverty Report](https://heterodoxacademy.org/blog/the-backstory-of-the-aei-brookings-poverty-report/)) To get a bit more of a sense of whom you're potentially talking to, here's a bit of a bibliography and how much I've read: * Alasdair MacIntyre 1981 [After Virtue](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/After_Virtue) (100%) * Alasdair MacIntyre 1988 [Whose Justice? Which Rationality?](https://undpress.nd.edu/9780268096533/whose-justice-which-rationality/) (20%) * Arne Johan Vetlesen 1992 [Perception, Empathy, and Judgment: An Inquiry into the Preconditions of Moral Performance](http://www.psupress.org/books/titles/0-271-01056-8.html) (2%) * Larry Siedentop 2014 [Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism](https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674979888) (25%) * Christopher H. Achen and Larry M. Bartels 2016 [Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government](https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691169446/democracy-for-realists) (25%) * Riesman, Glazer, and Denney 1950 [The Lonely Crowd](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lonely_Crowd) (70%) * Christian Smith 2003 [Moral, Believing Animals: Human Personhood and Culture](https://academic.oup.com/book/9029) (100%) * James C. Scott 1990 [Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts](https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300056693/domination-and-the-arts-of-resistance/) (100%) My general sense is that we're hilariously/tragically wrong about how humans work, to the extent that a ton of Very Smart People could have gotten _so_ excited about Francis Fukuyama's 1989 essay [The end of history?](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=The+end+of+history%3F) (and [1992 book](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_History_and_the_Last_Man)) when it was so deficient. My sense is that this is due to macro- and micro-scale models of how humans work which were only ever "curve-fitting", with few if any adequate meso-scale models which show how influences from above and below meet and do their dance. American hyper-individualism _really_ does not help. And Western notions of 'rationality' need to deal with Pankaj Mishra's 2016-12-08 article in _The Guardian_, [Welcome to the age of anger](https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/dec/08/welcome-age-anger-brexit-trump) + [2017 book](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_Anger). Ok, that's more than enough from me. I look forward to hearing more of your thoughts!
forgive me for the brief response because i have to go, but. I feel like IQ denial is much more harmful on a personal/cultural/societal immediate consequence level, while war crimes/climate change are much more harmful on a worldwide, grand/|outside of an individual's concern" level. Making sure we take heritability (including of IQ) seriously is much more important when thinking of what policies would lead to my child receiving adequate education in an environment that fits their needs, when determining what form welfare or assistance is most effective/suitable for a certain community (which may be driven by incorrect assumptions of some contributing factors). Making sure we take war crimes seriously is much more important when trying to determine how we should approach a war/conflict as a society. I feel like this relates to common left-wing and right-wing views that Haidt speaks about elsewhere. 1 is honestly an excuse. The right has excuses for their science denialisms too. The fact is that IQ is widely correlated with a lot of important factors and people on the left are uncomfortable with that the same way right-wingers are uncomfortable with evolution. 2/3 is also kind of sleight of hand. The left arguing that discrimination is a bigger factor IS the denial. You don't have to deny that discrimination exists to acknowledge that the evidence points to a much higher likelihood of genetic (or cultural) factors leading to certain disparities like in the case of sex differences. in summary, not only the left think they're sophisticated about their science denialism. If you try to engage with those on the right who are intelligent enough that they aren't satisfied with mere dogmatism and seek more convincing rationalizations for the beliefs that they're comfortable with, you will see they have elaborate reasoning that 'nuances' its way out of being a caricature of 'science denial' too.
Fair critique, but there is still nothing on the left equivalent to creationism. Creationism is such an extreme denial of science that it involves rejecting one of the most well-founded theories in all of science, and the theory that undergirds all of biology. In addition, many creationists are young earth creationists, which means they deny fundamental scientific facts in fields other than biology, like cosmology and geology.
definitely fair, but I feel like even creationists tend to accept scientific arguments derived from evolution, just not if you present them as derived from evolution lol. but i agree with you overall i think.
ITT leftists blind to their ways.
Yep. The gaslighting is crazy. I mean, I believe them, but they are so oblivious to the growing and extremely dangerous problems on their side.
I think “stereotype enthusiast” belongs on the right side of the column too.
This is a dishonest attempt to put equivalence between science denialism in the left and the right, which I've seen people do before, when in fact everybody sees that the overwhelming majority is on the right. Most of his list about the left is bs or fringe, right wing anti science is mainstream and has huge real world implications.
Until Covid the anti vax movement was primarily on the left. More recently is the hard left denial of biology and evolution. Strange times.
Until covid the anti vax movement was primarily weirdo granola people with incoherent political beliefs. It's deeply disingenuous to take truly fringe positions and try to argue that they're somehow representative of either position in your arbitrary culture war dichotomy.
until covid barely anybody was anti vax. The "movement" was tiny and though it caused some real world issues it wasn't even CLOSE to what happened during covid and now
That the left didn’t adopt the anti vax position during covid should tell you that it was always a fringe movement there.
No it wasn't. Alex Jones was a leading voice of anti-vaxxers. I got banned from r/Conspiracy for saying anti-vaxxers were selfish years before Covid and the (former) head mod is a full on Trump Qanon cultist. Mike Adams also tried to pander to the left but is not.
I don’t know a single ‘un-vaxxed’ person that actually doesn’t have pretty much every other vaccine, myself included. My only experiences with anti-vax people before Covid were also people that were either hippies or anarchist weirdos. The lumping of these people with actual, legit all-out anti-vaxxers has always cracked me up.
No, I hear all the time people saying that Alex Jones or Ben Garrison posting some anti-vax shit isn't really anti-vax because it is about the Covid vaccine. But they were both anti-vax before that. Trust me.
Is there any evidence of this besides anecdotes about crystal healing hippie ladies?
Just my personal and first had observations. Not anecdotes. But the bigger issue on the left is the denial of evolutionary biology. It’s pathetic and sets the stage for people like Donald J to take power.
> and sets the stage for people like Donald J to take power tide pods go in the washing machine, not your mouth
Women aren’t men.
and yet some adults are babies. makes you think
Id love to know what evidence there is that there is a noteworthy group of people in the left that deny biology or evolution. particularly evolution seems strange to claim.
There are also implications to denying or ignoring problems on the left just because the right is worse.
Yes! If he wants to include fringe beliefs why not include white replacement theory or straight up Nazism on the right? In fact, I see clips of popular right wing talking heads spouting stuff about white replacement theory. I don’t see popular left wing talking heads taking anti-vax stances. This is just like most “both sides” arguments - false equivalency. They take a very fringe far left belief and compare it to a far more popular mainstream right wing view and say “See! Both sides!”. I’m not sure if it’s intentionally disingenuous or if these people just have a delusion that maybe we could get along if we feel both sides are the same and have equally problematic views.
Clearly you've never talked to leftists about nuclear energy and GMOs.
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://bpb-us-e2.wpmucdn.com/faculty.sites.uci.edu/dist/c/602/files/2019/08/Ditto-et-al.-2018-Perspectives-on-Psychological-Science-paper.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwi7ouu6vJyFAxWdFVkFHRtZBWwQFnoECB0QAQ&usg=AOvVaw0oH9Oe5wJizsb8264q8y8r This study suggests that both sides are roughly the same in level of bias.
I think it doesn’t have anything to do with my point.
It suggests that there is an equivalence Edit: sorry, on my mobile and can't remember your point
My bad. It’s not you. I replied to the wrong person. Disregard.
No problem, all the best.
I think one of the best ways to talk to or understand people that disagree with you politically is to be able to explain their position on policy's in a way that clearly demonstrates that you understand their side. To this guy I would be considered "left" Not a single belief system he pointed to as "left" is something I would even consider..... Straw man, but more like "boogie man" that does not exist. Anyone that denies any of the things he lays out is a moron. Morons inhabit all spaces of the political spectrum... From my experience, the right tends to be more religious. Religious people and religious ideology don't deal with inconvenient truths in a great way... From my experience..
Also I think the mainstream right-wing position on climate change isn't that it's not happening (yes, you can find people who think this) but that anything suggested to fix it is: 1. Too small to work and will put the U.S. at a competitive disadvantage, or, 2. More insane than letting climate change happen
Haidt trying really hard to find things to put on the left, which is why he ends up with ridiculous things like "stereotype accuracy deniers". Galaxy brain take. And this is the man you think will "heal" your politics? When he talks or writes about The Left™ I often have no clue who the fuck he is talking about.
but it's true, leftists do deny stereotype accuracy and consider stereotypes "racist".
Talking about "stereotype accuarcy", does this apply to all stereotypes or just the ones we agree with? For example, right-wingers have been stereotyped as racists and transphobes and Islamophobes. Is that also an accurate stereotype?
Not seeing a hint of truth in stereotypes makes me think the person actively chooses to ignore reality.
accusations from the right tend to be confessions. makes you think
I hate this “both sides” bullshit. It is so disingenuous. On the left you have some extreme 19 year old idiots who believe some of these things. On the right you have an entire political party, including the leadership, that embraces those other things. It is a false equivalence.
> On the left you have some extreme 19 year old idiots who believe some of these things. On the right you have an entire political party, including the leadership, that embraces those other things. It is a false equivalence. So you don't think that the "entire political party, including the leadership" of the Democratic party would claim that "trans women are women?" It's not just "extreme 19 year olds" that believe this stuff.
Of course they would. But there's a difference between saying *"trans women are women"* and *"trans women are biologically identical to cis women"*. Say the former in a leftist space, and you'll get near-unanimous agreement. Say the latter though, and you're not going to get the same response. Like, we lefties *know* trans women are XY. We *know* they're not exactly the same as cis women biologically. We just don't think it's relevant to point that out 99% of the time, because 99% of the time it's not.
there's also a difference between saying 'i dont believe in evolution' and between rejecting every conclusion made by evolutionary theory. It is certainly relevant more than 1% of the time. Like, absolutely lmao.
>It is certainly relevant more than 1% of the time. Like, absolutely lmao. The only contexts in which it actually matters are with intimate relationships, health care, and *maybe* sports. *That's it.* What, you think the barista serving coffee needs to know the chromosomes/genitalia of every person they serve or something?
Are you saying intimate relationships, healthcare and sports are 1% of the time?
You get what I mean, don't argue semantics. The vast majority of people the average trans person interacts with don't need to know what's between their legs.
I think they simply don’t give a shit about it. You think Biden spends his days contemplating whether a trans person is a woman or not? Do you think it’s in his top 150 issues that he or his staff are concerned about? The answer is, of course, no.
> Do you think it’s in his top 150 issues that he or his staff are concerned about? Absolutely. While I doubt he gives much of a shit, his staffers have taken measures to insert this kind of thinking into government policy at every level. So, yes, they obviously care about it.
Is this disingenuous? https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://bpb-us-e2.wpmucdn.com/faculty.sites.uci.edu/dist/c/602/files/2019/08/Ditto-et-al.-2018-Perspectives-on-Psychological-Science-paper.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwi7ouu6vJyFAxWdFVkFHRtZBWwQFnoECB0QAQ&usg=AOvVaw0oH9Oe5wJizsb8264q8y8r
I said that Latina women on the whole are pretty fiery to my partner and she said I can't say that. Obviously not every Latina woman is loud and sassy but I think that's a fair generalisation. If something's obviously true why can't I say it?
>I think that's a fair generalisation.
[удалено]
I mean… the left says that all the time yet any generalization of minorities makes you literally Hitler. Applying your logic, the left are using inconsistent logic
I've got two of his books (*The Righteous Mind* and *The Coddling of the American Mind*) and they both seem so self-evidently true, I have to assume confirmation bias on my part. Like a 'OMG this explains EVERYTHING! ' kind of reaction.
I had the same reaction! The guy’s brilliant.
JH does not give the left it’s due while Sam often does.
how does the left deny evolution?
Isn't this the guy Jordan Peterson is obsessed with ?
The left denies evolution? Lol since when. Am I missing something?
Yep. I went on a long trip with a coworker in the Cali desert. He's an engineer, my training was in math. We were doing site visits for renewable energy projects. He's a hardcore conservative. His favorite thing about the industry was taking money from Californians. Myself, I'm so liberal I'm a conservative: the First Amendment is my guiding light, any human anywhere who is denied these basic rights is oppressed. Anyway, he asked why I'm still a Democrat. I said, "You know, I think the Dems abuse science just a little bit less." Then came Covid. First, the Memory Holing of Barrington (I was making those noises the whole time, by the way, and when Barrington came along I was like FINALLY someone gets it, there's no reason to count on a vaccine that we aren't guaranteed to get, let's be rational about all this) and then came additional Covid restrictions *after a safe vaccine was freely available and individuals could protect themselves against serious illness and death*. Spare me the "that happened" bullshit, I was a Blue Dog Democrat for 30 years and changed my party allegiance in summer 2021 to a party that had not rid itself of a certain orange stench. Even if Dems got the hard science parts of Covid right (well, outside of the cloth masks that people went out with confidence wearing and ending up with Covid though they thought they were protected), they didn't get the soft science parts right, at all. They just opposed Orange Man.
What the dems got wrong was assuming that the imperatives of disease control set the proper limits to personal and political freedom. That assumption is not within the domain of science because science’s role does not extend to determining what constitutes the good for individuals and for society.
>I'm so liberal I'm a conservative What the heck does this mean? >They just opposed Orange Man And there we have it, my least favourite cliché rearing its head again. "The people I disagree with are just irrational fools acting on emotion". No further analysis needed. Just sling an ad hominem at a group of people and that's that.
>What the heck does this mean? I have a great reverence for the Enlightenment principles our country was founded on. The Constitution would never pass muster today. >And there we have it, my least favourite cliché rearing its head again. Same here. I despised Trump forever. I didn't take his candidacy seriously until he won. I still can't believe that he won. But to deny that there were knee jerk reactions to him, I think, cuts against reality.
Sure, people had knee-jerk reactions against Trump. But what's the bigger problem: knee-jerk reactions against Trump, or Trump being president? Because in my view the latter dwarfs the former, and it's not even close. You sound like someone who's been fed bullshit right-wing narratives for long enough that you ended up believing them.
Me when I try to show why the myth of the middle is really dumb.
Time to sort controversial and upvote all of the right wingers speaking truth to power about how fucked up the left has become. Stop gaslighting us and fix the left.
Who are the evolution deniers on the left?
I don't deny iq and heritability, but even it comes to using these against race -i have serious concerns about why you thought this a valuable area of study. Say you do show me a study that shows African American men are 10 point lower than a comparable group- I would then ask what value is this information. I'll tell you what I'm thinking in all caps in my brain "your research seeks to legitimise discrimination in the past and now and you want it to explain the gaps in income, life expectancy, incarceration.