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If you’ve ever read PG’s classic essay "What You Can’t Say," Quillette may be recognizable as a publication unafraid to ask all of today’s unaskable questions.

by alanh 8y ago

If you’ve ever read PG’s classic essay "What You Can’t Say," Quillette may be recognizable as a publication unafraid to ask all of today’s unaskable questions. http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html https://quillette.com/ https://quillette.com/

pron 8y ago
Quillette doesn't strike me as containing anything "unsayable", just very, very old things. After reading one Quillette article I found myself coming back because it was so striking how the articles appear to have been lifted, almost verbatim, from Victorian publications on eugenics that we studied in grad school. Same obsession with natural selection, same topics, and same pseudoscience. Most of us here have scientific/mathematical education and see in an instant how implausible and comical Quillette's pseudo-scientific aspirations are, but I assume that many of their readerships have as much of an understanding of science as the laymen of the Victorian era, and find it all very enticing. We may enjoy reading it like we enjoy reading the publications of the flat Earth people, but I guess that to some these things may ring true. Quillette's editorial staff must know history as well as they know science, or they would have made use of an endless supply of uncopyrighted material from Victorian publications.
- darawk 8y ago
  What, specifically, did you think was incorrect?
- LudwigNagasena 8y ago
  Can you provide an example? I can’t think of a single Quillete article that could be characterized as pseudoscience that was "lifted, almost verbatim, from Victorian publications on eugenics."
  - milk_wolf_honey 8y ago
    http://quillette.com/2017/03/27/a-tale-of-two-bell-curves/ http://quillette.com/2017/03/27/a-tale-of-two-bell-curves/ Plenty of "human biodiversity" (neo-race science) nonsense like this floating around. The back half of the article amounts to the authors taking the premise that blacks are cognitively inferior to whites as a given, and then throwing up their hands and saying "Look, we examined the evidence, and the only explanation that makes sense is that they're genetically inferior!", complete with laments for poor social science researchers who have been unfairly persecuted for their objective, scientifically-minded investigations into the reasons why black people are just so damn stupid.
    - LudwigNagasena 8y ago
      This is a really good article. Framing discussion of IQ differences as "the reasons why black people are just so damn stupid" is disingenuous and hostile. If you think few IQ points difference (whether it is or it is not so) is enough to denigrate the entire race as stupid or worthless, you are a part of the problem.
      - milk_wolf_honey 8y ago
        Yes, this is exactly the kind of garbage that Quillette peddles. "Look, can't you be reasonable, can't we just discuss the reasonable possibility that blacks are cognitively inferior to whites like reasonable people?" Hi dang, can we please get bans for people trying to mainstream racist pseudoscience on HN?
        TheTrotters 8y ago
        Why isn’t it reasonable? And wouldn’t such people also want to discuss that the mean IQ of Southeastern Asians and Ashkenazi Jews is higher than that of whites?
      - rbehrends 8y ago
        Well, one standard deviation is far more than just "a few IQ points". One general problem is that much of this stuff tends to be very US-centric. If you look at British data related to poverty [1] and the IQ of children [2], you get a somewhat different picture. You even have two different black populations with shared genetic ancestry, but different economic outcomes and different average IQ. (And Black Caribbeans weren't doing as well when they first arrived, but a few generations later, the gap seems to be closing.) More importantly, as pointed out in an article by Kevin Mitchell [3], a professor of genetics and neuroscience in Dublin, we do not really know of any plausible mechanism by which such differences could have evolved. In the end, if you want to do science, you have to propose a theory by which an effect can be explained and then test that theory. What Murray & Co. have never done is to provide a testable theory that explains how cause and effect are supposed to be related. [1] http://www.poverty.org.uk/low-income-and-ethnicity/ http://www.poverty.org.uk/low-income-and-ethnicity/ [2] http://www.unz.com/jthompson/intelligence-of-5-year-olds-in-uk/ http://www.unz.com/jthompson/intelligence-of-5-year-olds-in-... (not keen on citing James Thompson here, but I didn't find an open access source for the data) [3] https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2018/may/02/why-genetic-iq-differences-between-races-are-unlikely https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2018/may/02/why-gen...
- MarkMc 8y ago
  Let's look at an example: below is an excerpt from "Black American Culture and the Racial Wealth Gap" [1] which claims that 20% of the racial wealth gap is due to Black preference for expensive cars, jewelry and clothes. Is this pseudoscience? ----------------------------------------- To what extent do poor spending habits explain the persistence of the wealth gap? Economists at the University of Chicago and the University of Pennsylvania asked this question after analyzing 16 years of nationally representative data from the Consumer Expenditure Survey. Consistent with the Nielsen data, they found that blacks with comparable incomes to whites spent 17 percent less on education, and 32 percent more (an extra $2300 per year in 2005 dollars) on ‘visible goods’—defined as cars, jewelry, and clothes. What’s more, “after controlling for visible spending,” they concluded that the “wealth gap between Blacks and Whites, conditional on permanent income, declines by 50 percent.” To be clear, that 50 percent figure doesn’t pertain to the total wealth gap, but to the proportion of the gap that remains after income is taken into account—which was 40 percent. The upshot: the fact that blacks spent more on cars, jewelry, and clothes explained fully 20 percent of the total racial wealth gap. [1] https://quillette.com/2018/07/19/black-american-culture-and-the-racial-wealth-gap/ https://quillette.com/2018/07/19/black-american-culture-and-...
  - nerdponx 8y ago
    That article to me seems thoughtful, thorough, and cites serious research by serious researchers at orthodoxy-respecting institutions.
    - pron 8y ago
      Don't confuse debate tactics with logical/scientific rigor. Here's a technique employed in this article and in many other Quillette articles: Person X said A and B; A is wrong because of [some citations], therefore B is wrong, and we conclude that C is completely wrong because science, QED. However, A is a peripheral argument while B is the central one, which in any event does not depend on A, and C is an argument which no one has made and is usually a gross straw-man generalization of B. Another technique, employed here and elsewhere, is: X said S; T is wrong because of [some citations]; but S rests on T therefore S is wrong because science, QED. But, of course, "science" does not show that S rests on T. Even if T => S, the conclusion that S rests on T (i.e. ~T => ~S, which is equivalent to S => T) is wrong. Yet another technique is: A => B according to [some citations] and C => D according to [some citations], therefore A => D because B => C, QED. But B => C is not established. These are all things that give a cursory reader the illusion of rigor, as they may come to believe that if rigor is used anywhere in the argument, then the argument is rigorous (while, in fact, an argument is rigorous iff rigor is used everywhere). Of course, some of the texts Quillette's articles respond to are not rigorous either, but Quillette's core technique relies on the illusion of rigor, hence pseudoscience or scientism.
matt4077 8y ago
Sure. If everyone hates your opinion, the obvious step is to start comparing yourself with Galileo. Of course you would get the exact same pushback if you were wrong, or your ideas potentially harmful. So the two possibilities can't really be distinguished by the reaction alone, making this essay fall on the "unactionable" side of the Paul Graham obvious<->unactionable scale. But when everyone disagrees with me, Bayesian logic tells me that I'm the only one who knows Bayesian logic and probably right.
- philwelch 8y ago
  One heuristic settled on in "What You Can't Say" is the distinction between ideas that are dismissed for being false or absurd and ideas that are dismissed for being heretical. If you go around saying the Holocaust didn't happen, people will tell you that you're wrong and will point to verifiable evidence in the historic record, and Holocaust denial is ten times as controversial as anything you'll read in Quillette.
  - hyperpape 8y ago
    This is not quite right. If you're a holocaust denier, then one in fifty people will intellectually engage with your arguments, and the other 49 will just call you a holocaust denier, and shun you from polite society.* I don't see anything wrong with that. Someone has to read it and respond to it, but I'm fine with being one of the 49. * For the sake of illustration, I omit the fact that 1 or 2 of the 50 might promote your work. P.S. This may read like I'm comparing Quillete to holocaust denial. This is not my intent.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - stcredzero 8y ago
      The tactic I'm seeing more and more of nowadays, is where someone starts talking about something nuanced, like the role of far left and far right breakdowns of the rule of law in the Weimar Republic, then someone else comes in and tries to claim it's something horrible like holocaust denial. It's disturbingly typical for discourse nowadays, and it's shockingly intellectually dishonest. What's even more shocking is the extent to which such illogic is defended by the far left and far right. It's almost like the extremists don't want the center to have a voice and want outrage chaos to predominate instead. (Sarcasm. Of course that's what extremists want.)
randomname2 8y ago
Claire actually mentioned on Twitter that this essay inspired her to start Quillette.
jakelazaroff 8y ago
The "unaskable questions" people coo over Quillette for tackling are anything but. Just look at the articles Politico calls out to show where Quillete is "willing to go": - "Black American Culture and the Racial Wealth Gap" - "Cultural Appropriation Isn't Real" - "Is It Wrong To Blame Islam?" - "Why Women Don't Code" - "How an Anonymous Accusation Derailed My Life" None of these are even remotely taboo to a center-to-right-leaning audience. Hell, even liberal publications are perfectly willing to take on these topics; here's a New York Times article literally called "Three Cheers for Cultural Appropriation"! https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/30/opinion/cultural-appropriation.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/30/opinion/cultural-appropri...
- User23 8y ago
  It's true. They should be profiling Ron Unz instead. There's a guy who will publish truly heterodox content.
- stcredzero 8y ago
  None of these are even remotely taboo to a center-to-right-leaning audience. There are people here in the Bay Area who would look at such topics, and will pattern-match anything which isn't the Far Left party line, and immediately try to tar you with the worst names they can think of. The mindlessness of it is indeed breathtaking. I can understand the motivation behind certain current memes.
  - jakelazaroff 8y ago
    Sure, but you're moving the goalposts to "does some subset of the population reflexively oppose this viewpoint". That is certainly true, but it's a fundamentally different question than "is this viewpoint unacceptable or dangerous to express". I'm not making any claim about the people to whom you're referring. I'm just asserting that it's disingenuous to claim that the topics Quillette covers are "taboo", given the breadth and number of publications who promote the exact same viewpoints.
    - stcredzero 8y ago
paulpauper 8y ago
Yeah, Quillette is not 'right wing', as some of its critics assume, but rather it explores counter-PC views that are possibly taboo/controversial, some of which could be considered further 'right' on the spectrum than 'left'. Most of it could be described as classical liberalism.
- ZeroGravitas 8y ago
  Counter-PC is tautologically right-wing since PC is a term for stuff the right wing don't like. You could describe all the lies Trump tells and his employees and supporters defend against all evidence and logic as "PC", but no one does. Instead he attacks Climate Change or Free Trade or Ozone Protection as PC hoaxes. And notably Quillete avoid Trump despite several of their big name contributors being scathing about him in other venues. I did a search on climate change, which is a reasonable bellwether for this kind of thing. I didn't find outright denial (which I guess I should celebrate, just like I celebrate the incoming head of the House Committee on Science not being a denier, even though it's the lowest of bars to meet) but I did find a rambling blog-like article about expertise that suggests we should believe climate change experts but also not do anything they recommend because they're not policy experts. And we should also believe a politician that says coal is good for humanity and believe coal experts that coal is better than renewables. It was all a bit wishy-washy but clearly wishy-washy nonsense from within their own social conservative tribe is fine, despite their attempt to paint themselves as unbiased iconoclasts of exactly that kind of thing.
  - barrkel 8y ago
    I don't like how your reply is explicitly tribal. You seem to live in a world of us / them dichotomy in political matters. That, explicitly, is unhealthy. Politics is increasingly being wired up to tribal, emotional cues, where the first thing people do when confronting a new piece of information is establish which tribe it belongs to, so they can read it with the right frame of mind - confirmation bias both ways. Precise writing backed by facts and some research is in short supply because it isn't as sticky and engaging, it doesn't get the blood flowing, whether it's raging one way or another. An article challenging left orthodoxies is far more valuable when written from a rational standpoint than from an explicitly right-wing standpoint.

by alanh 8y ago

pron 8y ago

Quillette doesn't strike me as containing anything "unsayable", just very, very old things. After reading one Quillette article I found myself coming back because it was so striking how the articles appear to have been lifted, almost verbatim, from Victorian publications on eugenics that we studied in grad school. Same obsession with natural selection, same topics, and same pseudoscience. Most of us here have scientific/mathematical education and see in an instant how implausible and comical Quillette's pseudo-scientific aspirations are, but I assume that many of their readerships have as much of an understanding of science as the laymen of the Victorian era, and find it all very enticing. We may enjoy reading it like we enjoy reading the publications of the flat Earth people, but I guess that to some these things may ring true. Quillette's editorial staff must know history as well as they know science, or they would have made use of an endless supply of uncopyrighted material from Victorian publications.

darawk 8y ago
What, specifically, did you think was incorrect?
LudwigNagasena 8y ago
Can you provide an example? I can’t think of a single Quillete article that could be characterized as pseudoscience that was "lifted, almost verbatim, from Victorian publications on eugenics."
- milk_wolf_honey 8y ago
  http://quillette.com/2017/03/27/a-tale-of-two-bell-curves/ http://quillette.com/2017/03/27/a-tale-of-two-bell-curves/ Plenty of "human biodiversity" (neo-race science) nonsense like this floating around. The back half of the article amounts to the authors taking the premise that blacks are cognitively inferior to whites as a given, and then throwing up their hands and saying "Look, we examined the evidence, and the only explanation that makes sense is that they're genetically inferior!", complete with laments for poor social science researchers who have been unfairly persecuted for their objective, scientifically-minded investigations into the reasons why black people are just so damn stupid.
  - LudwigNagasena 8y ago
    This is a really good article. Framing discussion of IQ differences as "the reasons why black people are just so damn stupid" is disingenuous and hostile. If you think few IQ points difference (whether it is or it is not so) is enough to denigrate the entire race as stupid or worthless, you are a part of the problem.
    - milk_wolf_honey 8y ago
      Yes, this is exactly the kind of garbage that Quillette peddles. "Look, can't you be reasonable, can't we just discuss the reasonable possibility that blacks are cognitively inferior to whites like reasonable people?" Hi dang, can we please get bans for people trying to mainstream racist pseudoscience on HN?
      - TheTrotters 8y ago
        Why isn’t it reasonable? And wouldn’t such people also want to discuss that the mean IQ of Southeastern Asians and Ashkenazi Jews is higher than that of whites?
    - rbehrends 8y ago
      Well, one standard deviation is far more than just "a few IQ points". One general problem is that much of this stuff tends to be very US-centric. If you look at British data related to poverty [1] and the IQ of children [2], you get a somewhat different picture. You even have two different black populations with shared genetic ancestry, but different economic outcomes and different average IQ. (And Black Caribbeans weren't doing as well when they first arrived, but a few generations later, the gap seems to be closing.) More importantly, as pointed out in an article by Kevin Mitchell [3], a professor of genetics and neuroscience in Dublin, we do not really know of any plausible mechanism by which such differences could have evolved. In the end, if you want to do science, you have to propose a theory by which an effect can be explained and then test that theory. What Murray & Co. have never done is to provide a testable theory that explains how cause and effect are supposed to be related. [1] http://www.poverty.org.uk/low-income-and-ethnicity/ http://www.poverty.org.uk/low-income-and-ethnicity/ [2] http://www.unz.com/jthompson/intelligence-of-5-year-olds-in-uk/ http://www.unz.com/jthompson/intelligence-of-5-year-olds-in-... (not keen on citing James Thompson here, but I didn't find an open access source for the data) [3] https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2018/may/02/why-genetic-iq-differences-between-races-are-unlikely https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2018/may/02/why-gen...
MarkMc 8y ago
Let's look at an example: below is an excerpt from "Black American Culture and the Racial Wealth Gap" [1] which claims that 20% of the racial wealth gap is due to Black preference for expensive cars, jewelry and clothes. Is this pseudoscience? ----------------------------------------- To what extent do poor spending habits explain the persistence of the wealth gap? Economists at the University of Chicago and the University of Pennsylvania asked this question after analyzing 16 years of nationally representative data from the Consumer Expenditure Survey. Consistent with the Nielsen data, they found that blacks with comparable incomes to whites spent 17 percent less on education, and 32 percent more (an extra $2300 per year in 2005 dollars) on ‘visible goods’—defined as cars, jewelry, and clothes. What’s more, “after controlling for visible spending,” they concluded that the “wealth gap between Blacks and Whites, conditional on permanent income, declines by 50 percent.” To be clear, that 50 percent figure doesn’t pertain to the total wealth gap, but to the proportion of the gap that remains after income is taken into account—which was 40 percent. The upshot: the fact that blacks spent more on cars, jewelry, and clothes explained fully 20 percent of the total racial wealth gap. [1] https://quillette.com/2018/07/19/black-american-culture-and-the-racial-wealth-gap/ https://quillette.com/2018/07/19/black-american-culture-and-...
- nerdponx 8y ago
  That article to me seems thoughtful, thorough, and cites serious research by serious researchers at orthodoxy-respecting institutions.
  - pron 8y ago
    Don't confuse debate tactics with logical/scientific rigor. Here's a technique employed in this article and in many other Quillette articles: Person X said A and B; A is wrong because of [some citations], therefore B is wrong, and we conclude that C is completely wrong because science, QED. However, A is a peripheral argument while B is the central one, which in any event does not depend on A, and C is an argument which no one has made and is usually a gross straw-man generalization of B. Another technique, employed here and elsewhere, is: X said S; T is wrong because of [some citations]; but S rests on T therefore S is wrong because science, QED. But, of course, "science" does not show that S rests on T. Even if T => S, the conclusion that S rests on T (i.e. ~T => ~S, which is equivalent to S => T) is wrong. Yet another technique is: A => B according to [some citations] and C => D according to [some citations], therefore A => D because B => C, QED. But B => C is not established. These are all things that give a cursory reader the illusion of rigor, as they may come to believe that if rigor is used anywhere in the argument, then the argument is rigorous (while, in fact, an argument is rigorous iff rigor is used everywhere). Of course, some of the texts Quillette's articles respond to are not rigorous either, but Quillette's core technique relies on the illusion of rigor, hence pseudoscience or scientism.

matt4077 8y ago

Sure. If everyone hates your opinion, the obvious step is to start comparing yourself with Galileo. Of course you would get the exact same pushback if you were wrong, or your ideas potentially harmful. So the two possibilities can't really be distinguished by the reaction alone, making this essay fall on the "unactionable" side of the Paul Graham obvious<->unactionable scale. But when everyone disagrees with me, Bayesian logic tells me that I'm the only one who knows Bayesian logic and probably right.

philwelch 8y ago
One heuristic settled on in "What You Can't Say" is the distinction between ideas that are dismissed for being false or absurd and ideas that are dismissed for being heretical. If you go around saying the Holocaust didn't happen, people will tell you that you're wrong and will point to verifiable evidence in the historic record, and Holocaust denial is ten times as controversial as anything you'll read in Quillette.
- hyperpape 8y ago
  This is not quite right. If you're a holocaust denier, then one in fifty people will intellectually engage with your arguments, and the other 49 will just call you a holocaust denier, and shun you from polite society.* I don't see anything wrong with that. Someone has to read it and respond to it, but I'm fine with being one of the 49. * For the sake of illustration, I omit the fact that 1 or 2 of the 50 might promote your work. P.S. This may read like I'm comparing Quillete to holocaust denial. This is not my intent.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - stcredzero 8y ago
    The tactic I'm seeing more and more of nowadays, is where someone starts talking about something nuanced, like the role of far left and far right breakdowns of the rule of law in the Weimar Republic, then someone else comes in and tries to claim it's something horrible like holocaust denial. It's disturbingly typical for discourse nowadays, and it's shockingly intellectually dishonest. What's even more shocking is the extent to which such illogic is defended by the far left and far right. It's almost like the extremists don't want the center to have a voice and want outrage chaos to predominate instead. (Sarcasm. Of course that's what extremists want.)

randomname2 8y ago

Claire actually mentioned on Twitter that this essay inspired her to start Quillette.

jakelazaroff 8y ago

The "unaskable questions" people coo over Quillette for tackling are anything but. Just look at the articles Politico calls out to show where Quillete is "willing to go": - "Black American Culture and the Racial Wealth Gap" - "Cultural Appropriation Isn't Real" - "Is It Wrong To Blame Islam?" - "Why Women Don't Code" - "How an Anonymous Accusation Derailed My Life" None of these are even remotely taboo to a center-to-right-leaning audience. Hell, even liberal publications are perfectly willing to take on these topics; here's a New York Times article literally called "Three Cheers for Cultural Appropriation"! https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/30/opinion/cultural-appropriation.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/30/opinion/cultural-appropri...

User23 8y ago
It's true. They should be profiling Ron Unz instead. There's a guy who will publish truly heterodox content.
stcredzero 8y ago
None of these are even remotely taboo to a center-to-right-leaning audience. There are people here in the Bay Area who would look at such topics, and will pattern-match anything which isn't the Far Left party line, and immediately try to tar you with the worst names they can think of. The mindlessness of it is indeed breathtaking. I can understand the motivation behind certain current memes.
- jakelazaroff 8y ago
  Sure, but you're moving the goalposts to "does some subset of the population reflexively oppose this viewpoint". That is certainly true, but it's a fundamentally different question than "is this viewpoint unacceptable or dangerous to express". I'm not making any claim about the people to whom you're referring. I'm just asserting that it's disingenuous to claim that the topics Quillette covers are "taboo", given the breadth and number of publications who promote the exact same viewpoints.
  - stcredzero 8y ago

paulpauper 8y ago

Yeah, Quillette is not 'right wing', as some of its critics assume, but rather it explores counter-PC views that are possibly taboo/controversial, some of which could be considered further 'right' on the spectrum than 'left'. Most of it could be described as classical liberalism.

ZeroGravitas 8y ago
Counter-PC is tautologically right-wing since PC is a term for stuff the right wing don't like. You could describe all the lies Trump tells and his employees and supporters defend against all evidence and logic as "PC", but no one does. Instead he attacks Climate Change or Free Trade or Ozone Protection as PC hoaxes. And notably Quillete avoid Trump despite several of their big name contributors being scathing about him in other venues. I did a search on climate change, which is a reasonable bellwether for this kind of thing. I didn't find outright denial (which I guess I should celebrate, just like I celebrate the incoming head of the House Committee on Science not being a denier, even though it's the lowest of bars to meet) but I did find a rambling blog-like article about expertise that suggests we should believe climate change experts but also not do anything they recommend because they're not policy experts. And we should also believe a politician that says coal is good for humanity and believe coal experts that coal is better than renewables. It was all a bit wishy-washy but clearly wishy-washy nonsense from within their own social conservative tribe is fine, despite their attempt to paint themselves as unbiased iconoclasts of exactly that kind of thing.
- barrkel 8y ago
  I don't like how your reply is explicitly tribal. You seem to live in a world of us / them dichotomy in political matters. That, explicitly, is unhealthy. Politics is increasingly being wired up to tribal, emotional cues, where the first thing people do when confronting a new piece of information is establish which tribe it belongs to, so they can read it with the right frame of mind - confirmation bias both ways. Precise writing backed by facts and some research is in short supply because it isn't as sticky and engaging, it doesn't get the blood flowing, whether it's raging one way or another. An article challenging left orthodoxies is far more valuable when written from a rational standpoint than from an explicitly right-wing standpoint.