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Quillette doesn't strike me as containing anything "unsayable", just very, very old things. After reading one Quillette article I found myself coming back becau

by 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.

by pron 8y ago

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.