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Thursday, January 18, 2018

Steven Pinker and Steve Sailer: remuneration not repudiation

In yesterday's post I discussed the connection between Steven Pinker, one of the evo-psycho bros and alt-righter Steve Sailer. Today I want to underline one particular fact - go to the bottom of this post for the thumbnail summation.

In 2000 Steve Sailer wrote an article for VDARE, described in Wikipedia:

VDARE is an American website focused on opposition to immigration to the United States and is associated with white supremacy,[2][3] white nationalism,[4][5][6] and the alt-right.[7][8][9] Anti-Immigration in the United States: A Historical Encyclopedia describes VDARE as "one of the most prolific anti-immigration media outlets in the United States" and states that it is "broadly concerned with race issues in the United States".[10] Established in 1999, the website's editor is Peter Brimelow, who believes that "whites built American culture" and that "it is at risk from non-whites who would seek to change it".[10]

The group has been described as white supremacist.[2] The Southern Poverty Law Center describes VDARE as "an anti-immigration hate website" which "regularly publishes articles by prominent white nationalists, race scientists and anti-Semites", including Steve Sailer, Jared Taylor, J. Philippe Rushton and Samuel T. Francis.[7] Brimelow acknowledges that VDARE published writings by white nationalists but said that VDARE is not a "white nationalist Web site".[11][12][13]

Although anti-immigration VDARE is named after Virginia Dare whom the people associated with the website like to fetishize as a beautiful white woman, Dare was of course the daughter of immigrants to North American, if not "the United States" and a member of the "lost colony" of Virginia. As I wrote about 5 years ago, she may have got eaten by people.

The article in 2000 by Steve Sailer uses The Bell Curve to justify claims of black intellectual inferiority and is entitled America and the Left Half of the Bell Curve and includes the following:

IQ is off-limits today because people who are verbally facile, such as journalists and academics, tend to assume that reality is largely constructed from words. Thus, if we would all just stop writing about unpleasant facts, they would disappear.

Please note that journalists and academics refusing to write about unpleasant facts is exactly what Steven Pinker was talking about in his infamous PC video. So not only was Pinker riding a favorite alt-right hobbyhorse, it's one they've been riding since before they were called the alt-right. Sailer continues:

Unpleasant Fact # 1: Five out of six African-Americans have IQs below the white average. But not talking about this IQ difference has singularly failed to make it go away. The black-white gap has remained roughly one standard deviation for the last 80 years.

What the censorship has accomplished, however, is preventing the emergence of a more a nuanced and optimistic view of black-white differences. Although IQ is, by far, the single most effective measurement known to the social sciences for predicting human outcomes, it`s hardly omniscient. Indeed, African-Americans tend to be better than whites at certain mental abilities that IQ tests are bad at gauging, such as the improvisatory creativity that makes them world-beaters in jazz, basketball, rap, running with the football, and preaching. (See “Great Black Hopes”, my 1996 article that introduced this novel perspective. Also check out “The Half Full glass” for my more advanced 1998 review of Jensen`s The g Factor.)

Again we see how Pinker echoed Sailer in Pinker's PC video:

"What the censorship has accomplished, however, is preventing the emergence of a more a nuanced and optimistic view of black-white differences. "

There's no evidence anybody has been censoring IQ scores - neither Sailer nor Pinker can be bothered to provide any. And it's funny that Sailer thinks that the problem is journalism and academia aren't promoting a "more nuanced and optimistic view of black-white differences" since in Sailer's mind that nuanced view is that while blacks may be possessed by nature of lower intelligence, they are good at jazz, rap and sports.

Sailer goes into fuller detail in a 1998 review of The g Factor: the Science of Mental Abilities, by Arthur R. Jensen. The review was once available on his iSteve website, which isn't available anymore except via The Wayback Machine.

I'm pleased to point out that IQ tests can't accurately measure at least one mental faculty in which blacks tend to outperform whites and Asians in real life. Despite lower mean IQ's, African-Americans are not a race of talentless dullards, but are instead the most charismatic contributors to 20th Century popular culture. What mental factor underlies the black revolutions in music, sport, oratory, dance, and slang? Subjective, improvisatory creativity.

For example, like a lot of NBA stars, Scottie Pippen's below-market contract, ill-timed trade demands, team-damaging pouts, and numerous child-support obligations imply that when given time to think, he often chooses unwisely. Yet, in the flow of the game, he's a Talleyrand at real-time decision-making. Leading a fast break, there are no permanent right answers. Even "Pass the ball to Michael Jordan" gets old fast as defenses habituate. Similarly, the NFL running back, the jazz soloist, the preacher, and the rapping DJ all must heed others' expectations and instantly respond with something a little unexpected. IQ tests -- by necessity objective and standardized -- can never measure this adequately.

Further, despite his data's inevitable shortcomings in this regard, Jensen does report that blacks possess particular mental weaknesses and strengths. Among individuals with equal g's, whites and Asians (like males) are typically stronger in those visual-spatial skills so useful in engineering and many skilled trades. In contrast, blacks (like females) often enjoy better short-term memories and thus can mentally juggle more balls in social situations. (This probably contributes to the black advantage in improvisation). Jensen's findings confirm my intuition (NR, 4/6/98) that while whites and Asians tend to be less masculine than blacks in physique and personality, they are typically more masculine than blacks in mental abilities. Put bluntly, whites and Asians tend to be nerdier than blacks. How many blacks would sincerely disagree?

So according to Jensen and Sailer, blacks, like females enjoy "better short-term memories" which make them (blacks not women) good at music, sport, oratory, dance and slang.

The presidential candidacy of Barack Obama must have been a shock to Sailer who wrote a response, published by VDARE, to Obama's "Dreams From My Father" in October 2008 called AMERICA’S HALF‐BLOOD PRINCE BARACK OBAMA’S “STORY OF RACE AND INHERITANCE".

Curiously Sailer compares himself to Obama in the introduction of the book, writing:

To my father and mother, who, together, gave me more than just dreams.

Sailer was an even more obscure fringe figure at that time than he is now, and he compares himself to the leading candidate in a US presidential race. Which gives you some idea of the bafflement and resentment of racist white men in response to Obama's career. Naturally Sailer makes sure to remind you Obama is half-white, right in the title. To get a sense of what Half-Blood Prince is about, here's a helpful paragraph from page 39:

This book serves as a reader’s guide to Obama’s Dreams from My Father. The would‐be President has written a long, luxuriant, and almost incomprehensible book, so I have penned a (relatively) short and brusque book that explains who Obama thinks he is. I mostly follow his life as it unfolds in Dreams, up through his marriage to Michelle in 1992. I especially emphasize the little‐understood but critical four years he spent in Indonesia from age six to ten, during which his white mother, for surprising reasons of her own, set about systematically inculcating in him the racial grievances, insecurities, and ambitions that make up the pages of Dreams.

I've read "Dreams" and it is not in any sense "almost incomprehensible" and of course the most important thing for Sailer is Obama's mother "inculcating in him the racial grievances..."

Most interesting of all to me is Sailer's thanks to his patrons in the introduction:

I am especially indebted to my many patrons, most of whom wish to remain anonymous, who have donated sums of money, small and large, so I can continue to get by as a full‐time professional writer. Due to political correctness, we’re heading into an era when individualistic writers once again depend not upon the mass media for their pay, but upon enlightened patrons. Fortunately, the Internet allows heretical thinkers to help scratch out a living from the small donations of people around the world.

He includes a link to a page on another version of his web site, still online, asking for money.

Like Razib Khan, Sailer owes his career to wealthy racist patrons. But both of these racist hacks would be lifted above the far-right fringe thanks to their association with Steven Pinker.

In Sailer's case, Pinker edited a book called The Best American Science and Nature Writing of 2004 and included work by Sailer.

So in summation: just four years after Steve Sailer, whose academic credentials are limited to an MBA from UCLA in finance and marketing, was opining for VDARE that while blacks were intellectually inferior to all other "races" at least they were good at jazz and basketball, Steven Pinker included Sailer's work in "The Best American Science and Nature Writing."

I have yet to find any evidence that Steven Pinker has ever repudiated any claims Steve Sailer has made about race. He prefers rather to pay him to write, and as recently as 2011, quote him for a blurb for one of his books ("Better Angels.")

I emailed Pinker's co-editer Tim Folger about the inclusion of Sailer in the publication. If he responds I will post on this blog.

But there is still the question of what, exactly Steven Pinker thinks is "race." More soon.

UPDATE: Tim Folger wrote back:

Hi Nancy,

Thanks for letting me know about this. In hindsight Sailer's story shouldn't have been included in the anthology, and we should have looked into his background more carefully. Until reading your email today, I knew nothing about Sailer's alt-right connections. Steven Pinker selected the story, and unfortunately I never discussed the article with him, an oversight that I regret.

Tim

I am waiting for my second-hand copy of "The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2004" to arrive so I can find out exactly what Pinker hired Sailer to say.

Saturday, February 03, 2018

Steve Sailer in "The Best American Science and Nature Writing" 2004

Ugh

Ugh, I'm probably the only human being to read "The Cousin Marriage Conundrum" since 2005.

Steven Pinker and Steve Sailer go back to at least 2002 when Sailer interviewed Pinker about The Blank Slate. although he mentioned Pinker even earlier on his iSteve blog and used the term "human biodiversity" too. I haven't found Pinker mentioning Sailer publicly after 2011 when he used Sailer for a positive blurb for "Better Angels."

Sailer still talks about Pinker though, posting Pinker's PC video in a recent Unz column.

Pinker must have been aware of Sailer's attitudes about race by 2004. Sailer was already saying this kind of stuff in 1997:

On average, black men tend to appear slightly more and Asian men slightly less masculine than white men, while Asian women are typically seen as slightly more and black women as slightly less feminine than white women.

Obviously, these are gross generalizations about the races. Nobody believes Michael Jackson could beat up kung-fu star Jackie Chan or that comedienne Margaret Cho is lovelier than Sports Illustratedswimsuit covergirl Tyra Banks. But life is a game of probabilities, not of abstract Platonic essences.

This is notable not only for what he says about race (and his identifying three races, black, white and Asian) but especially his use of "Platonic essences." I think the evo-psycho bros got the term "Platonic" in reference to race from Steve Sailer.

Turns out Sailer uses the term a lot, including the definition most people are familiar with, "non-sexual." But he uses other meanings more often. In addition to Platonic essences Sailer mentions Platonic archetype, idealism, idea, ideals, essentialism, universal, Temptation and form.

Sailer had also had a column at VDARE since 2000 and had published The Left Side of the Bell Curve in 2000 which says things like:

Thus, in the 1960s when American intellectuals imported Swedish sexual morals, along with Swedish-style welfare for unmarried mothers, it had few ill effects in Minnesota (traditionally the highest IQ state). But it proved an instant disaster for African-Americans.

I have yet to find Steven Pinker disavowing anything Sailer has ever said.

I can't guess what made Pinker think it was a good idea to include a known racist in a collection of science writing. Especially since "The Cousin Marriage Conundrum" isn't really about science, unless you mean political science since Sailer doesn't get into the genetics of inbreeding except in passing. The final paragraph:

In summary, although neoconservatives constantly point to America's success at reforming German and Japan after World War II as evidence that it would be easy to do the same in the Middle East, the deep social structure of Iraq is the complete opposite of those two true nation-states, with their highly patriotic, cooperative, and (not surprisingly) outbred peoples. The Iraqis, in contrast, more closely resemble the Hatfields and the McCoys.

It's interesting he didn't mention the third member of the Axis, Italy. We'll come back to that.

He is claiming that the history of feuds between the Hatfields and McCoys had something to do with inbreeding. Apparently since the families lived in West Virginia and West Virginia has a reputation for inbreeding hillbillies which is bogus Sailer decided to go ahead and conflate inbreeding with the feud. That's the level of scholarship we're talking about here.

By "reforming" Iraq what Sailer means is "rebuild Iraqi society in order to jumpstart the democratization of the middle east."

A quick glance at a Five-Thirty-Eight data form on global consanguinity by country indicates that Iraq is not the most consanguineous country in the world. It's number 16. Meanwhile Kyrgyzstan is number 7 and has a Presidential Republican form of government, like Bangladesh, which is only number 33 on the list. Croatia, which has the same form of government has a cousin marriage rate of 0.1% - less than the US with 0.2%.

So there doesn't seem to be any connection between a country's percentage of cousin marriages and form of government. But you couldn't expect Steve Sailer to do any research, he has his nice simple theory about cousin marriages and democratic reform and it's so much easier than doing any work.

And why should he work, when Steven Pinker will apparently include any old crap in "the best" American science and nature writing.

There's really no structured argument in this article, Sailer is all over the place. He uses the Bible as an example of "Middle Eastern norms" writing:

Jacob's dozen sons were the famous progenitors of the Twelve Tribes of Israel. Due to inbreeding, Jacob's eight legitimate sons had only six unique great-great grandparents instead of the usual eight. That's because the inbred are related to their relatives through multiple paths.

And don't even get Sailer started on the incest problems with Adam and Eve's children! Sailer doesn't mention Adam and Eve but why not? They're in the Book of Genesis too.

Sailer cites Jacob's family as actual historical people. I can't wait until Sailer explains the genetics of how Jacob lived to be 147.

The only time Sailer talks about the genetics of cousin marriage is this:

Of course there are also other disadvantages to inbreeding. The best known is medical. Being inbred increases the chances of inheriting genetic syndromes caused by malign recessive genes.

He then gets into kin selection and declares that "nepotism is biologically inspired "- which is the standard evo-psycho literary atrocity since by definition nepotism is "inspired" by one's family connections. "Nepotism is biologically inspired" is a tautology.

And while Sailer admits that inbreeding is a medical risk, he should probably say that he believes it's also an indicator of high genetic intelligence. The evo-psychos as a group seem to be convinced that Azkenazi Jews are genetically the smartest "race" and yet Israel is number 29 on the cousin-marriage list and also the Ashkenazi Jews in particular are massively inbred. The Jewish magazine Forward reports:

A model based on the genetic sequencing of 128 Ashkenazi Jews concludes that today’s Ashkenazim descend from the fusion of European and Middle-Eastern Jews during the medieval era, between 600 to 800 years ago.

The math also indicates that today’s sprawling community of Ashkenazi Jews — there are more than 10 million around the world — derived from just 350 people or so. That previously postulated population bottleneck — a drastic reduction in population size — occurred between 25 to 32 generations ago, the scientists say.

The study was published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications by a team headed by Columbia University’s Shai Carmon.

So apparently inbreeding makes Jews smarter but only makes Arabs incapable of democratic forms of government.

OK so now we get to the Italian issue. Sailer writes:

Are Muslims, especially Arabs, so much more loyal to their families than to their nations because, due to countless generations of cousin marriages, they are so much more genealogically related to their families than Westerners are related to theirs? Frank Salter, a political scientist at the Max Planck Institute in Germany whose new book Risky Translations: Trust, Kinship and Ethnicity takes a sociobiological look at the reason why Mafia families are indeed families, told me: "That's my hunch. At least it's bound to be a factor."

This is such a perfect evo-psycho paragraph. It sounds learned - hey, Max Planck Institute! - but when you actually try to figure out what he's getting at, it falls apart.

The actual description of the Salter book on Amazon is:

Trust is a central feature of relationships within the Mafia, oppressed minorities, kin groups everywhere, among dissidents, nationalist freedom fighters, ethnic tourists, ethnic middlemen, exchange networks of Kalahari Bushmen, and families subjected to Stalinist social control. Each of these types of trust is examined by a leading scholar and compared with the expectations of neo-Darwinian theory, in particular the theories of kin selection and ethnic nepotism.

A search of the book on "consanguinity" shows that the Mafia use three other relationship types besides consanguinity. In contrast to the reason Arab families "are indeed families" which Sailer claims is because they are related by blood. So where is the connection? Just because Salter takes a "sociobiological look"? And the best Salter can do is "that's my hunch." Wow, so scientific.

And by the way, Italy is rated as 0.6% on the cousin-marriage data sheet, lower than France, Sweden or Canada.

There's a fascinating article in the New Yorker from the last month called The Woman Who Took On the Mafia by Alex Perry. And the sexual politics among these mafia families, people evo-psycho bros would characterize as "white" (or European or possibly Mediterranean depending on their mood) are every bit as regressive as the most traditional patriarchal tribe in the Middle East. Which should tell you that it's not about race or religion - both things that evo-psycho bros have used to explain when some groups of people in the Middle East are violent.

But they can never admit that it's socio-environmental and economic conditions that drive the behaviors and not genes or sacred texts. Because they have this whole simple paradigm set up, and in order to make it work, you have to deny environmental factors.

Evo-psycho bros sometimes admit environment is important but they have no actual theories on how environment impacts human behavior so they almost completely ignore it. That was the problem at the root of Pinker's "Better Angels" which the New Yorker trashed. If your primary way to explain human behavior is evolution, which is of course the point of evolutionary psychology, well you aren't going to be much good at explaining any changes in human behavior that happen in less than hundreds of thousands of years.

So why did Pinker include a poorly-reasoned, non-scientific explanation for Iraqi non-democratic tendencies in this collection? Well apart from blackmail I think it's most likely because Pinker didn't realize how bad it was himself, because Pinker is not a very good writer and not a clear thinker.

The New Yorker, which knows from good writing, consistently trashes Steven Pinker's work on the basis of his shoddy reasoning. I'll talk about that soon.

Wednesday, January 17, 2018

What do the evo-psycho bros think "race" is?

UPDATE: thanks for the shout-out PZ Myers. For the folks he sent my way, for your reading convenience you can get all the posts in this series on the connections between the alt-right and promoters of evolutionary psychology under this tag: "evo-psycho bros."

The evo-psycho bros (evolutionary psychology proponents) I have in mind are Steven Pinker, Jerry Coyne and Razib Khan, because of their mutual aid society. Pinker was accused of echoing alt-right talking points, Razib Khan expresses his admiration for Pinker as one of his favorite public intellectuals, then links to Jerry Coyne defending Pinker.

Steven Pinker was justifiably accused because he said this:

...I wouldn’t want to say persuadable but certainly um, whose affiliation might be up for grabs, comes from the often highly-literate, highly-intelligent people who gravitate to the alt-right, Internet-savvy, media-savvy, who um often are uh radicalized in that way, who swallow the red pill as the saying goes, the allusion from the Matrix, when they are exposed for the first time to true statements that have never been voiced in college campuses or the New York Times, in respectable media, ah that are almost like a bacillus to which they have no immunity and they are immediately infected with both the feeling of outrage that these truths are unsayable uh and no defense against taking them to what we might consider rather repellent conclusions...

The issues Pinker claims are being suppressed by "college campuses or the New York Times, in respectable media" are, as described by PZ Myers:

Capitalist societies are better than communist ones. How odd. I don’t see anyone insisting on that: instead, I see a lot of academics who point out the flaws in capitalism, which, apparently, are lies and don’t exist. Then he makes it worse by using as more specific examples the difference between North and South Korea (I’ve never met anyone who thinks North Korea is a better place to live than South Korea.) or between East and West Germany before the fall of the Berlin wall. You will rarely encounter a more pure and absolutely dishonest straw man. How about if the comparison is between, say, a ragingly capitalist country like the USA, and a socialist democracy like Sweden? It gets a bit less obvious.

Men & women are not identical in their life priorities or sexuality. Again, who is arguing that men and women are identical? He says there is someone on the Harvard campus who argues this, but doesn’t bother to name names. Generally what I’ve seen on the left is approval and encouragement of differences — that men and women are different, but that the bigger differences are between individuals, and that those differences should be respected. We do object to being compelled to fit into the straitjacket of just two stereotypical gender roles. We also don’t think you can go from a karyotype to a flawless description of life priorities or sexuality.

Different ethnic groups commit violent crimes at different rates. Oh, yeah, he went there. Look at crime statistics and all those violent black criminals! We’re done, that’s all the analysis you need to do (and, by the way, those leftist college professors do not deny the statistics at all). But why do black communities have higher crime rates? It wouldn’t have anything to do with poverty, or discriminatory policing, or the existence of laws that basically criminalize being poor, would it? And of course he brings up that always-useful distinction, that Islamic people are more likely to be suicide bombers, as if that were the sole kind of violence that one ethnic group can perpetrate on another. How many Muslims have been killed by Christians? This is not to excuse either kind of violence, but to point out that playing selective games with the statistics to ignore institutionalized violence is profoundly dishonest.

I want to focus on the race issue because the capitalism argument is just bizarre, and the evo-psychos make no secret that they think women have too much estrogen to care about critical thinking (per Sam Harris) and have evolved to have lesser aptitude for STEM careers than men (per Larry Summers although in the video Pinker misrepresented and downplayed what Summers actually said) and Coyne at least makes no secret of what he really thinks about Islam.

But when it come to race the evo-psychos are not at all clear what they mean, and I've been looking for quite a while.

Well, Razib Khan has been pretty clear about race and that's why he lost an opportunity for a steady gig at the NYTimes, something I played a part in. You can read all my posts about Khan - I've been tracking his racialist career on this blog for 12 years. It's Khan's fate that may give us some indication on why Pinker and Coyne are so unclear about race. Khan is kind of bitter about how he was targeted when, as he said in last year's Undark article:

Still, Khan insisted that his writing about the biology of race was sound. “It’s not socially acceptable to say that there might be group differences in an endophenotype — in their behavior, intelligence, anything that might have any genetic component,” Khan said. “You cannot say that, okay? If someone’s going to ask me, I’m going say, ‘It could be true.’”

Other scientists, he insisted, believe the same things. They just won’t admit it. “I’m sick of being the only fucking person that says anything,” said Khan. “I know I make people uncomfortable, but a lot of times I say what they’re thinking.”

Pinker is more than just Khan's favorite public intellectual, they have a mutual admiration society as I discuss here.

But even more blatantly racist has been Pinker's connection to Steve Sailer.

I recently discovered an exchange in the New York Times between Malcolm Gladwell and Pinker, although it's about something I have blogged about before.

But the NYTimes exchange adds a dimension:

(excerpt from Gladwell)

In one of my essays, I wrote that the position a quarterback is taken in the college draft is not a reliable indicator of his performance as a professional. That was based on the work of the academic economists David Berri and Rob Simmons, who, in a paper published in The Journal of Productivity Analysis, analyze 40 years of National Football League data. Their conclusion was that the relation between aggregate quarterback performance and draft position was weak. Further, when they looked at per-play performance — in other words, when they adjusted for the fact that highly drafted quarterbacks are more likely to play more downs — they found that quarterbacks taken in positions 11 through 90 in the draft actually slightly outplay those more highly paid and lauded players taken in the draft’s top 10 positions. I found this analysis fascinating. Pinker did not. This quarterback argument, he wrote, “is simply not true.”

I wondered about the basis of Pinker’s conclusion, so I e-mailed him, asking if he could tell me where to find the scientific data that would set me straight. He very graciously wrote me back. He had three sources, he said. The first was Steve Sailer. Sailer, for the uninitiated, is a California blogger with a market research background who is perhaps best known for his belief that black people are intellectually inferior to white people. Sailer’s “proof” of the connection between draft position and performance is, I’m sure Pinker would agree, crude: his key variable is how many times a player has been named to the Pro Bowl.

In his response, Pinker does not deny Gladwell's claim that Sailer is "best known for his belief that black people are intellectually inferior to white people." Instead he justifies using Steve Sailer as a reference like this:

Gladwell is right, of course, to privilege peer-reviewed articles over blogs. But sports is a topic in which any academic must answer to an army of statistics-savvy amateurs, and in this instance, I judged, the bloggers were correct.

It strikes me as odd that of all the sports blogger statisticians he could pick, he uses someone best known for saying blacks are intellectually inferior.

But it's what Pinker says about IQ that's most interesting. Before Gladwell points to Sailer he says:

(Pinker) is unhappy... with the fact that I have not joined him on the lonely ice floe of I.Q. fundamentalism.

And Pinker replies:

What Malcolm Gladwell calls a “lonely ice floe” is what psychologists call “the mainstream.” In a 1997 editorial in the journal Intelligence, 52 signatories wrote, “I.Q. is strongly related, probably more so than any other single measurable human trait, to many important educational, occupational, economic and social outcomes.” Similar conclusions were affirmed in a unanimous blue-ribbon report by the American Psychological Association, and in recent studies (some focusing on outliers) by Dean Simonton, David Lubinski and others.

What Pinker is saying about IQ is that it is a driver of social outcomes, the implication is that IQ is not nurture but nature.

So who are Dean Simonton and David Lubinski? Simonton's biggest accomplishment seems to be ranking all US presidents by intelligence from Washington to G. W. Bush in what appears to me a pointless exercise one step up from astrology.

Lubinski's focus appears to be on gifted children.

I found this when I did a search on Lubinsky and Pinker, it's an interview in Boing Boing in 2009. At one point Pinker says:

My own books are not about IQ or IQ testing, so I don't go over the history myself. The Bell Curve, though treated as toxic by many intellectuals, has some clear historical discussion, and the journalist Daniel Seligman (who died a couple of weeks ago) wrote a history of intelligence testing a while back. An interesting article on the original embrace of intelligence testing by progressives was written by Adrian Wooldridge: "Bell Curve liberals," New Republic, February 27, 1995. Linda Gottfredsen has documented the predictive power of IQ tests in her work, and Camilla Benbow and David Lubinski have many papers on the predictive power of high SAT scores in their sample of people who were given the test in early adolescence. J. B. Carroll has written a number of books and edited handbooks on intelligence, and I suspect that one or more contain histories of the field. Ian Deary is probably the most active researcher today on neural correlates of intelligence as measured by IQ tests, and Robert Plomin the most active researcher on its heritability. I also have citations to a number of reviews of Gould's book that challenge his prosecutorial history of testing:

Blinkhorn, S. 1982. Review of S. J. Gould's "The mismeasure of man." Nature, 296, 506.

Jensen, A. R. 1982. The debunking of scientific fossils and straw persons: Review of The Mismeasure of Man. Contemporary Education Review, 1, 121-135.

Rushton, J. P. 1996. Race, intelligence, and the brain: The errors and omissions of the "revised" edition of S. J. Gould's The mismeasure of man. Personality and Individual Differences, 23, 169-180.

Samelson, F. 1982. Intelligence and some of its testers (Review of S. J. Gould's "The Mismeasure of Man"). Science, 215, 656-657.

Pinker doesn't appear to have any criticisms of The Bell Curve, and his main focus is on liberals and political correctness - clearly a long-standing theme with Pinker. He also uses the topic as a chance to bash Gould. There's nothing the evo-pscho bros hate so much as Stephen Jay Gould. Probably because he used to slice them to ribbons. Please note that the critics Pinker cites include notorious racists Arthur Jensen and J. Philippe Ruston.

So back to Steve Sailer, Pinker's go-to guy for sports statistics.

Wikipedia says this about Sailer:

Sailer cites studies that say, on average, blacks and Mexicans in America have lower IQs than whites,[31][32] and that Ashkenazi Jews and Northeast Asians have higher IQs than non-Jewish whites.[33][34] He says that prosperity helped blacks close the IQ gap.[citation needed] He suggests that a problem with mass immigration of non-white Mestizo Mexicans into America is that native-born whites in the US will become a master caste to a non-white servant caste.[35] He also considers that "for at least some purposes—race actually is a highly useful and reasonable classification",[36] such as providing a very rough rule-of-thumb for the fact that various population groups may inherit differences in body chemistry that affect how the body uses certain pharmaceutical products,[37] for "finessing" Affirmative Action when that's economically convenient,[38] and for political gerrymandering. Sailer has also argued that Hispanic immigration is "recreating the racial hierarchy of Mexico" in California:[39]

While RationalWiki says this:

Steve Sailer (born 1958) is a racist, misogynist, white supremacist, anti-Semite, Islamophobe, homophobe, classist, ableist, transphobe, transmisogynist, xenophobe, pseudo-scientist and all-round champion dickhead who can arguably be credited—if such a resumé can be to someone's credit—as the godfather of pseudo-scientific online hate. If it's foul, fetid and attempts to give itself a biological and/or intellectual veneer, then Sailer will have had a hand in it somewhere, trust us. Another way of putting this is that Sailer was alt-right before it was "cool".

For example, Sailer crafted, christened and cruise-controlled the "Human Bio-Diversity"/HBD meme in an attempt to leverage the inadequacies and insecurities of white nerds for the white supremacist cause. His online acolytes include the likes of "geek-girl" Hbdchick and dweeb-duo Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending at West Hunter,[2] all three of whom parlay their ignorance, stupidity and non-existent grasp of elementary logic to promote a hi-hate, lo-intellect pseudo-scientific agenda of which even creationists would be ashamed to admit ownership.

(End RationalWiki quote)

Pinker has been associating with Sailer since at least 2002. Here he is giving him an interview.

In 2004 Pinker apparently co-edited a collection of work called The Best American Science and Nature Writing and included Steve Sailer in it. What are Sailer's qualifications to write about science? Funny you should ask. He apparently has "earned an MBA from UCLA in 1982 with two concentrations: finance and marketing."

Interesting. With all the science writers out there who are actual scientists, whatever could it be about Sailer's writing that would make Pinker want to include him in such a collection?

Here's Pinker quoting Sailer as a blurb for his book "Better Angels."

“Pinker’s range is extraordinary….The Better Angels of Our Nature is a major accomplishment.”
—Steve Sailer, The American Conservative, Nov. 11, 2011.

Now how alt-right is Steve Sailer?

Here is his column for Unz Review (Razib Khan used to write for it too.)
Here is his work at Taki's Magazine (Razib Khan used to write for it when Richard "heil Trump" Spencer was its editor.)
Here's Sailer in VDARE arguing for black intellectual inferiority in connection with Hurricane Katrina - and his racism is more blatantly expressed in this piece from 2000 citing The Bell Curve to claim that blacks are by nature intellectually inferior.
Sailer doesn't appear to have a regular byline at Breitbart, but they give him credit for "human biodiversity" and use him for statistics (like Pinker does) in this case to "prove" that black violence is Obama's fault.

So when the evo-psycho bros deny that Steven Pinker has sympathies with the alt-right, you have evidence, right here, that they are one-hundred percent full of shit. If Steven Pinker has ever repudiated anything that Steven Sailer has ever said, I have yet to find evidence. He rather prefers to hire him and use him for blurbs.

We see that Pinker shamelessly aligns himself with alt-right racists, but what does Pinker himself say about race? And what about Coyne? I'll get to that next.

Sunday, August 12, 2018

More about Steves Pinker & Sailer

Steven Pinker included Steve Sailer's piece on why Iraqis are too in-bred to have a democracy, in "The Best American Science and Nature Writing" in 2004 because of course he agreed with it.

Contrary to Pinker's reputation as a serious intellectual, what I have found time and again on reading his work is that it is often based on unsupported and untestable assumptions, and a complete disinterest in data.

The latter is demonstrated by Pinker's claim - in the right-wing tradition - that marriage prevents violence in men, a claim completely contradicted by data, as I discuss here.

Here we see Pinker discussing in 2007 in an article in the New Republic, Sailer's piece "The Cousin Marriage Conundrum" and of course he does not mention Sailer's inclination to white supremacy.

In January 2003, during the buildup to the war in Iraq, the journalist and blogger Steven Sailer published an article in The American Conservative in which he warned readers about a feature of that country that had been ignored in the ongoing debate. As in many traditional Middle Eastern societies, Iraqis tend to marry their cousins. About half of all marriages are consanguineous (including that of Saddam Hussein, who filled many government positions with his relatives from Tikrit). The connection between Iraqis' strong family ties and their tribalism, corruption, and lack of commitment to an overarching nation had long been noted by those familiar with the country. In 1931, King Faisal described his subjects as "devoid of any patriotic idea … connected by no common tie, giving ear to evil; prone to anarchy, and perpetually ready to rise against any government whatsoever." Sailer presciently suggested that Iraqi family structure and its mismatch with the sensibilities of civil society would frustrate any attempt at democratic nation-building.

The idea that there is a reverse correlation between cousin marriage and democracy is easy enough to debunk, as I did when writing about "The Cousin Marriage Conundrum" - by looking at the existing data on cousin marriage.

But as we have seen in the case of the magic of marriage, Pinker isn't interested in data if it's going to contradict his favorite sociobiological theories.

It's true that it's easier to get data now on such things as consanguinity by country than it was in 2003 when Sailer published the piece, but that shouldn't matter - if Sailer and Pinker expect to be taken seriously on their claims about important issues, they should be expected to put a little work into backing their claims.

And Sailer's "prescience" doesn't explain why, although Nigeria has a cousin-marriage rate of 51.2 - the highest in the world except for Kuwait and Burkina Faso, compared to Iraq's rate of 34.3, Nigeria is a democracy.

Pinker doesn't come up with arguments for why data doesn't tell the true story and thus why he and his friend Steve Sailer are correct in spite of data. Rather he completely ignores the existence of data. It seems as though it has never even occurred to him that there might be data out there. His lack of intellectual curiosity is astounding.

And Pinker is the shining exemplar of scholarly respectability in the "Intellectual Dark Web" per Bari Weiss. This gives you some sense of what a joke the "Intellectual Dark Web" is.

Thursday, May 02, 2013

Move Over, Little Debbie

Of course, some prefer to drink Virginia Dare.

I don't normally think about the racist web site VDARE.com but I couldn't help it today when I read the NYTimes news report that they've been excavating the site of the "Lost Colony" and apparently evidence of cannibalism was dug up:

Archaeologists excavating a trash pit at the Jamestown colony site in Virginia have found the first physical evidence of cannibalism among the desperate population, corroborating written accounts left behind by witnesses. Cut marks on the skull and skeleton of a 14-year-old girl show that her flesh and brain were removed, presumably to be eaten by the starving colonists during the harsh winter of 1609.

Oh no! They ate Virginia Dare!

Virginia Dare is VDARE.COM's ideal of white racial purity. As it says on their about page:

Today, Virginia Dare seems to be vanishing from American education too. But she was a fixture for earlier generations. Even Franklin D. Roosevelt felt free to give a speech commemorating the 350th anniversary of her birth. At one point, I planned to pay homage by bestowing her name on the heroine of a projected fictional concluding chapter in Alien Nation, about the flight of the last white family in Los Angeles. It seemed . . . symmetrical.
I was dissuaded.

But multiculturalists will be happy to know that there is always the possibility that the colonists survived, merging with the local Indians. There are fables that Virginia Dare as a young woman got involved in a love triangle with a warrior and an angry medicine man, who transformed her into a white doe. And there have been serious suggestions that The Lost Colony is the answer to the historical problem of the Lumbee Indians of Robeson County, North Carolina, an English-speaking group of unclear origin.

(Anthropologists call such groups "tri-racial isolates." Significant of the times, and perhaps of federal subsidies, the Lumbees seem recently to have been emphasizing their claim to pure Indian status. For example, click here... For more on the white doe legend, click here...)

Actually, anthropologists and historians reject that "serious suggestion." But let us continue...

So Virginia Dare could be symbolic of the coming racial nirvana that immigration enthusiasts are forced to start fantasizing about when you compel them to look at the statistical consequences of current policy.

Or perhaps not. The actress Heather Locklear (Melrose Place, etc.) is claimed as a prominent Lumbee. But if, through some miracle of genetic recombination, Virginia Dare is reborn in Ms. Locklear’s beautiful face, John White might well have recognized her.

Well I guess the VDARE crew can rest easier now - this new evidence seems to indicate that rather than merging with the local Indians as the "multiculturalists" (the word has about the same meaning for VDARErs as "Satan" has for fundamentalist Christians) so fervently wish for, instead THEY ATE EACH OTHER!

Naturally the VDARE crew are huge fans of The Bell Curve, which they characterize as truthful and brave. They love to imagine themselves as defenders of dispassionate science in the face of political correctness. That's a constant refrain of Steven Pinker, who is so oppressed by political correctness that he and his ideological soulmates get to complain about it and expound on the glories of accepting the scientific truth of white male intellectual superiority (in so many words) in virtually every media outlet.

Naturally the VDARE crew love Steven Pinker - and Pinker's chosen defender Razib Khan.

Wikipedia has an entry on VDARE which includes this section - it gives you some idea of exactly where they are coming from - in spite of Steve Sailer's defense of interracial marriage.

Hurricane Katrina and IQ Steve Sailer argued on VDARE following Hurricane Katrina that the lower average IQ of African-Americans found in intelligence research correlates with "poorer native judgment than members of better-educated groups resulting in the need for stricter moral guidance from society." He said that looting after the 1995 Kobe earthquake was minimal because "when you get down to it, Japanese aren't blacks."^[16]

John Podhoretz called Sailer's comments racist.^[17] Sailer responded that his accusers admitted a correlation between low IQ and poor judgment by supporting the Supreme Court's 2002 Atkins v. Virginia decision "that, in effect, banned the death penalty for killers with IQs under 70."^[18] John Derbyshire defended Sailer, citing large variance in incarceration rates by race and birth rates for unmarried women by race.^[19]

John Derbyshire is infamous as being too racist even for the National Review.

It should be noted that Derbyshire is married to a Chinese woman, so Sailer would hardly come out against interracial marriage in general and insult his VDARE colleague. It could be argued that Sailer and Derbyshire aren't so much generalized racists as haters of African Americans.

While I was watching Obama's superlative White House Correspondents' performances I remembered that Al Franken had been a guest comedian twice during Clinton's administrations and got off a nice shot at Charles Murray, one of the authors of The Bell Curve:

...also here tonight is Charles Murray, who I understand has been hard at work on a sequel to the Bell Curve entitled "Jazz, the Music Created by Morons."

Others prefer a chaw of Virginia Dare.

UPDATE: I was amazed a couple of years ago when I saw right-wing racist Razib Khan used by Steven Pinker as a defense against an unfavorable book review in the New Yorker- but apparently Pinker used Steve Sailer(!) as a defense against Malcolm Gladwell's objections to Pinker's critique of his book:

That was based on the work of the academic economists David Berri and Rob Simmons, who, in a paper published the Journal of Productivity Analysis, analyze forty years of National Football League data. Their conclusion was that the relation between aggregate quarterback performance and draft position was weak. Further, when they looked at per-play performance—in other words, when they adjusted for the fact that highly drafted quarterbacks are more likely to play more downs—they found that quarterbacks taken in positions 11 through 90 in the draft actually slightly outplay those more highly paid and lauded players taken in the draft’s top ten positions. I found this analysis fascinating. Pinker did not. This quarterback argument, he wrote, “is simply not true.”

I wondered about the basis of Pinker’s conclusion, so I e-mailed him, asking if he could tell me where to find the scientific data that would set me straight. He very graciously wrote me back. He had three sources, he said. The first was Steve Sailer. Sailer, for the uninitiated, is a California blogger with a marketing background who is best known for his belief that black people are intellectually inferior to white people. Sailer’s “proof” of the connection between draft position and performance is, I’m sure Pinker would agree, crude: his key variable is how many times a player has been named to the Pro Bowl.

Poor Steven Pinker - he's a wealthy, respected and famous author who suffers the slings and arrows of "political correctness" - which appears to consist entirely of the rare occasions when someone points out that he considers bona fide racists to be important colleagues and allies of his.

Steven Pinker is rapidly becoming a right-wing laughing stock, right up there with Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris. And the late Christopher Hitchens - and I'm not sorry he's dead, that misogynist Bush-supporting fuckhead.

It appears to me that far from suffering from left-wing political correctness, Pinker is the beneficiary of the most powerful form of political correctness of all - the taboo against seriously considering arguments against celebrity intellectuals.

Although fortunately the New Yorker has broken that taboo, at least in the case of Pinker.

Tuesday, March 06, 2018

Steven Pinker's right-wing, alt-right & hereditarian connections

UPDATE 4/20/2018:
This chart & associated discussion has been updated with the addition of Sam Harris. You can see the revised version of the chart here:

https://mcclernan.blogspot.com/2018/04/steven-pinkers-rightwing-alt-right-and.html

909489258918027264?lang=en

Quillette has published many hereditarians, some of whom have been interviewed by Stefan Molyneux and republished articles in the white supremacist American Renaissance including Kevin M. Beaver, Brian Boutwell, Ben and Bo Winegard and John P. Wright.

Steven Pinker's rightwing, alt-right and hereditarian connections, version 2

I have added Sam Harris to the chart in honor of his shout-out at the Southern Poverty Law Center.

The PDF version is available here.

Click the image to see a larger version.

The series on "evo-psycho bros."
https://mcclernan.blogspot.com/search/label/evo-psycho%20bros

https://mcclernan.blogspot.com/search/label/evo-psycho%20bros

What are hereditarians?

Although right-wing and alt-right are fairly well-known terms, "hereditarian" is not and requires an explanation.

"Hereditarian" - an advocate of the theory that individual differences in human beings can be accounted for primarily on the basis of genetics.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hereditarian

Although in practice the term most often refers to racial differences, as discussed by Linda Gottfredson:

Rushton and Jensen’s (2005) hereditarian hypothesis is that Black–White differences in general intelligence (IQ, or the general mental ability factor, g) are “substantially” genetic in origin...

https://www1.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints/2005hereditarian-hypothesis.pdf

Other terms which are similar are "evolutionary psychology," "human biodiversity" and "racial realism." Related to these terms is "biosocial criminology."

Steven Pinker

Steven Pinker is an experimental psychologist who conducts research in visual cognition, psycholinguistics, and social relations. He grew up in Montreal and earned his BA from McGill and his PhD from Harvard. Currently Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard, he has also taught at Stanford and MIT. He has won numerous prizes for his research, his teaching, and his nine books, including The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, The Blank Slate, The Better Angels of Our Nature, and The Sense of Style. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, a Humanist of the Year, a recipient of nine honorary doctorates, and one of Foreign Policy’s “World’s Top 100 Public Intellectuals” and Time’s “100 Most Influential People in the World Today.” He is Chair of the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary, and writes frequently for The New York Times, The Guardian, and other publications. His tenth book, to be published in February 2018, is called Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress.

https://stevenpinker.com/biocv

The Blank Slate

Written by Pinker, published in 2002, this is the New Testament to The Bell Curve's Old Testament for hereditarians.

Although Steven Pinker claims in The Blank Slate that he doesn't agree with the conclusions about black intelligence made in The Bell Curve, he has never to my knowledge explained why, although he agrees with almost every other hereditarian claim, the Bell Curve is wrong about that.

...Intellectuals deny biology, according to Pinker, because it interferes with their pet theories of mind and behavior. These are the Blank Slate (the belief that the mind is wholly shaped by the environment), the Noble Savage (the notion that people are born good but are corrupted by society), and the Ghost in the Machine (the idea that there is a nonbiological agent in our heads with the power to change our nature at will). The "intellectuals" in Pinker's book are social scientists, progressive educators, radical feminists, academic Marxists, liberal columnists, avant-garde arts types, government planners, and postmodernist relativists. The good guys are the cognitive scientists and ordinary folks, whose common sense, except when it has been damaged by listening to intellectuals, generally correlates with what cognitive science has discovered. I wish I could say that Pinker's view of the world of ideas is more nuanced than this...

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/11/25/what-comes-naturally-2

Steven Pinker's ongoing bromance with the alt-right

Welcome Tweeter people. More of my thoughts on Pinker (and evidence of his long-term right-wing beliefs) here.

Link: https://twitter.com/sapinker/status/537251361696403456

I have long wondered why there is no mainstream media interest in the connection between Steven Pinker, a well-known writer of books about science, history, etc for a general audience and Razib Khan, identified by no less than Breitbart as an intellectual of the alt-right movement.

Khan denied a connection to the alt-right, but the White Nationalists know a good source for biology-based justifications for white supremacy when they read it.

Khan's long been a big fan of the term "human biodiversity" which is the term racists use to signal the intellectual inferiority of those people who are directly descended from Africans compared to those descended from Africans who migrated to Europe and/or Asia and/or the Americas. "Human biodiversity" has a nice science-y sounding ring to it.

Steven Pinker and other proponents of evolutionary psychology have pioneered the standard racist/evolutionary psychologist response to critics of biological essentialism. First, claim the critic is anti-science. If the critic is a scientist, claim they can't be trusted because they have liberal political beliefs. The alt-right knows a good political tactic when they see it.

Here is Pinker in 2006 showing Razib Khan how it's done on Khan's old, highly racist blog GXPN - only available through the Wayback Machine:

It's hard to say. Thanks to tenure, the people who can't tolerate biological insight into human affairs are still around in the universities. On the other hand there was a lot of support for Summers, which may not have come out a decade ago, not least among Harvard undergraduates (one of them gave me a black-on-red t-shirt with a faux-Che portrait of Larry emblazoned with "Viva El Presidente Summers.") I've found that by and large today's generation of students--black and white, women and men--are far less phobic of biology, and are baffled that anyone could find empirical hypotheses to be too dangerous to study.

Here is Jerry Coyne, a self-confessed fanboy of Pinker as quoted by PZ Myers on his Pharyngula blog, continuing the tradition in 2013:

And then we get the ideology-bashing again.

(Coyne quote) Second, it’s pretty clear that the opposition to evolutionary psychology from these quarters is ideologically rather than scientifically motivated. One gets the feeling that research on gender differences shouldn’t be done at all because it’s either designed to repress women, motivated by the desire to do that, or has the likely outcome of promoting discrimination. Well, sexist scientists may try to do that, but I haven’t seen much of that since the Seventies. And gender differences are fascinating. There’s a reason, for instance, why human males are larger and hairier than females, and have more testosterone. Are we supposed to say “You can’t work on that—could have bad repercussions!” Sure, scientific results can always be misused, but I don’t see that as a reason to put up roadblocks against scientific research. After all, what field is more misused and misquoted than evolutionary biology? I am a frequent recipient of emails from Jews trying to convince me to reject evolution because Darwin ultimately caused the Holocaust.
Please. Have I ever said that we shouldn’t study gender or racial differences? No. We know there are going to be differences. The catch is that they have to be studied very, very well, with rigor and careful analysis, because they are socially loaded and because science has a deeply deplorable history of using poor methods to reach bad conclusions that are used as ideological props for the status quo. I’m not putting up roadblocks against scientific research; I would like to put up roadblocks to sloppy, lazy ideological nonsense touted as scientific research. I should think every scientist would want that.

< end Pharyngula quote>

Pinker is of course a gigantic hypocrite since while he claims scientist critics of EP are motivated by politics he himself is in a bromance with Razib Khan who is paid to be a political operative.

More love from Pinker to Khan on Twitter.

Link: https://twitter.com/sapinker/status/551419372518928384

Link: https://twitter.com/sapinker/status/750440963428999168

Khan returns the favor.

Link: https://twitter.com/razibkhan/status/564657995083030528

But Pinker doesn't only love Razib Khan. He even uses the work of Steve Sailer, who is quite proud of his racism - Sailer is such a racist that notoriously too-racist-for-Twitter alt-right leader Milo Yiannopoulos thought he coined the term "human biodiversity."

As noted by Malcolm Gladwell:

I wondered about the basis of Pinker’s conclusion, so I e-mailed him, asking if he could tell me where to find the scientific data that would set me straight. He very graciously wrote me back. He had three sources, he said. The first was Steve Sailer. Sailer, for the uninitiated, is a California blogger with a marketing background who is best known for his belief that black people are intellectually inferior to white people. Sailer’s “proof” of the connection between draft position and performance is, I’m sure Pinker would agree, crude: his key variable is how many times a player has been named to the Pro Bowl.

Steve Sailer is another "intellectual" of the alt-right according to Breitbart:

Alongside other nodes like Steve Sailer’s blog, VDARE and American Renaissance, AlternativeRight.com became a gathering point for an eclectic mix of renegades who objected to the established political consensus in some form or another. All of these websites have been accused of racism.

UPDATE - apparently Razib Khan is leaving Unz. He wrote yesterday:

Until further notice this is my last post as a blogger at Unz Review. Just as when I left Discover, this shouldn’t impact regular readers very much in terms of substance and content.

But he doesn't explain why he's leaving. He did tweet:

This is probably the same journalist who spoke to me today. More on that later.