PTT on sexual mores

We remarked here on the difficulty of striking a rational balance between traditional morality and enlightened freedom. No, we don’t want to go back to those pre-antibiotic days of arranged marriages (although…) and various forms of despotism. We’ll even prefer the liberal democracy of Current Year, such as it is, to a feudal manor. It’s equally clear that if current social trends proceed apace (and they’re showing no robust signs of abating), the world will head to a dark, scary place.

A lot of this hinges on how permissive/restrictive the society is on sexuality. Strict biblicalism is no fun (who said life was about fun?!), but does lead to prosperous stability. Free-for-all uninhibited hedonism can be fun for a while, but the bill always comes due. Can one strike a reasonable compromise, a sort of best-of-both-worlds?

Famous for our Solomonic compromises, we believe we have one here too. The key is the public/private distinction. Condemn degeneracy in public, and punish its excesses. Turn a blind eye to most private behavior among consenting adults, as long as it’s done with modesty and discretion. Fill in the details.

Dunking on Galton

Adam Mastroianni (substack, twitter) first caught our attention with his thought-provoking piece arguing that peer review is worse than useless. We don’t think he fully sold us on doing away with the thing altogether, but the facts he marshals are solid and his arguments aren’t easily dismissed.

In his latest piece, Mastroianni trains his sights on that bête noire of statistics (other than Fisher, that is) — Sir Francis Galton. Longtime readers of PTT will recall that Galton has been on the receiving end of a point-and-sputter by Jordan Ellenberg:

PTT had dutifully called Ellenberg out on his baseless and unfair accusation:

It really is too bad that Prof. Ellenberg never bothers to explicitly spell out what is so obviously wrong with Galton’s views. The latter is unequivocal about avoiding compulsion in marriage; nor, to my knowledge, has he ever advocated forced sterilization. Thus, it is plain disingenuous to go Godwin on him for the sin of others (long after his death) practicing coercion precisely where Galton had explicitly opposed it.

To place the very concept of eugenics as something beyond the pale is both dishonest and absurd, as anyone who undergoes genetic screening or evaluates a potential mate’s reproductive fitness is engaging in precisely this dastardly thing. Eugenic and dysgenic trends are every bit as real as climate change. Reasonable people may disagree about the right social policy, but at the very least we need a meaningful vocabulary to discuss such policy! Banishing perfectly legitimate concepts from polite discourse is a systemic power grab, and it’s disheartening to see Prof. Ellenberg not-so-innocently engage in it.

To Mastroianni’s credit, his facts to point-and-sputter ratio is higher than Ellenberg’s. Oh, there’s the latter all right [“Like most people in history, Galton did and said many things we would find despicable today. But Galton is especially bad. (It’s hard to do worse than inventing eugenics.)”]. There’s some dim awareness that we’re all eugenicists: ““Eugenics” has come to refer to lots of things, some of them reasonable (a preference for healthy sperm donors) and some of them terrible (ethnic cleansing)”. Mastroianni also drags Galton for being nice to an Arab slave trader and mean to his wife.

Much of the essay is devoted to pondering how We Can Do Better by not falling into Galton’s moral traps. Perhaps (Mastroianni suggests) in today’s age of democratized social media, Galton would get pushback on his silly, wrong-headed ideas. What’s one of these crazy, unethical, racist musings? Why, it’s the absurd idea that China might colonize Africa:

Perhaps seeing the horrifying implications of eugenics is actually pretty easy, but everybody with insight was kept out of the conversation. Nobody was going to listen to what the “unfit” had to say about the whole eugenics thing, and it’s pretty hard to argue when you’re busy dying in Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fires. Monocultures make for pretty dismal discourse, which is why when Galton suggests in an op-ed that Chinese people should colonize Africa, the angry reply he gets is not “that’s heinous” but “you idiot, Chinese people are lazy.”

I googled “china colonialism africa” and here are some of the top hits:

Hey, @a_m_mastroianni — you know that batshit crazy thing the old eugenicist had the audacity to suggest? It’s happening. Like, right now. Now what were you saying about getting pushback on wrong ideas from the democratized social media?

Heterodox Academy’s poison pill

Nathan Cofnas is a philosopher of extraordinary courage and integrity. Most of us in the academia understand the game and play along to varying degrees, or at least “tone it down” until tenure. Well, not this guy; the praevalebit club might as well adopt him as its mascot.

In case you had any hopes that the Heterodox Academy — a motley mix of well-meaning but squishy Jonathan Haidt and Steven Pinker types — would provide a meaningful pushback to wokeness, here is Cofnas throwing a bucket of ice water on that fantasy:

Seven years later, you can count HxA’s accomplishments in promoting heterodoxy on the fingers of zero hands. It has focused mainly on aggrandizing celebrity academics who hold conventional leftist views, and giving a platform to liberals to engage in empty virtue signaling about their alleged commitment to free inquiry. Scholars whose work is genuinely heterodox have been systematically marginalized. In at least one instance, a psychologist known for his work on race differences (Helmuth Nyborg) was denied membership.

To its credit (or perhaps to the credit of Cofnas’ stature as a scholar, his dissidence notwithstanding) the Heterodox Academy found it appropriate to respond to the indictment, rather than simply ignore it. Here, specifically, is their response to the Cofnas quote above:

Cofnas’ critique additionally implies that HxA denied membership to a scholar in 2017 based on their topic of scholarly inquiry. This is incorrect. HxA denied membership to a scholar in 2017 based on the membership criteria in place at the time that stated applicants “must have no association with racist or other hate groups.” That year an applicant was deemed to be associated with such a group, and on that basis—not because of the topic of their research—they were denied membership.

Note the conspicuous absence of specific details in HxA’s rebuttal: neither the scholar’s name, nor the racist organization were mentioned (a telltale sign of weaselliness). The scholar’s name we know from Cofnas’ piece: Helmuth Nyborg. The hateful hate group (after a bit of online digging) appears to be American Renaissance.

How exactly did HxA determine that AmRen is a “racist or other hate group”? Do they have a designated committee for that? Or did they base it on SPLC’s “long file”? Moreover, what definition of “racism” are they using? Kendi’s? Ashleigh Shackelford’s? Merriam-Webster’s — and if so, from what year?

And therein lies the poison pill. Denying membership due to some vague association with “racist or other hate groups” (as deemed by whom?) is conceding the game entirely to the woke Left. The Hetereodox Academy could have very reasonably chosen the 1st Amendment as its standard for acceptable speech. It could have a panel of experts to decide on membership based on the quality of scholarship. Someone like Kevin MacDonald, for example, would presumably be admitted — even though his ideology borders on hate and even his scholarship is shoddy*. A Nazi or Islamic terrorist who openly advocates for violence could legitimately be kept out.

* As ironic coincidence would have it, the definitive, devastating refutation of MacDonald’s theories was produced by none other than Nathan Cofnas.

Update: Instalanche!

Update II: HxA responds in the comments:

I’m the Executive Director of Heterodox Academy. I’d like your readers (and Instapundit readers!) to know that the past membership policy described here has not been in effect since 2019. Membership in HxA includes no ideological litmus test whatsoever; faculty and staff affiliated with a college or university, current or retired, can learn more and join us at HeterodoxAcademy.org.

Coherent Extrapolated Volition

Scott Aaronson’s AI Safety Lecture for UT Effective Altruism is a great read — a fine example of the pleasant, informative (and informed!) prose he’s capable of when not swerving into political commentary. We actually learned quite a bit.

But this post will not be about Scott, AI safety, or Effective Altruism. Rather, it’ll be about one of those inherent paradoxes of the human condition. Prompted by this paragraph:

So, one idea that people have had—this is actually Yudkowsky’s term—is “Coherent Extrapolated Volition.” This basically means that you’d tell the AI: “I’ve given you all this training data about human morality in the year 2022. Now simulate the humans being in a discussion seminar for 10,000 years, trying to refine all of their moral intuitions, and whatever you predict they’d end up with, those should be your values right now.”

We will cheerfully admit to not having read Yudkowsky’s 38-page treatise. Maybe later; for now, we’re more than happy to trust Scott Aaronson’s pithy précis to be fair and accurate. So where’s the paradox? Well, on the one hand, we would not want to go back to a time period of despotism, slavery, constant wars, etc. On the other hand, any sober extrapolation of the ruling elite values takes you to a world where all sexual taboos have been lifted, including incest, pedophilia, and bestiality — some slippery notion of “consent” being the only criterion. We’re heading for a world of Synthetic Sex Identities, where every biological and moral barrier defining what it once meant to be human will be removed to the extent that the technology allows. I don’t want to inhabit that world either!

Where does this leave me? Believing that the current period — or, say, the mid-1990’s — is peak human flourishing? It’s not exactly a paradox, but somewhat implausible and rather dispiriting.

A Short Story

Stanley was an Orthodox Jew who taught electrical engineering at a large American university. Yaseen, head of the Diversity-Inclusion-Equity office, took a disliking to Stanley. He suspected Stanely of being a Zionist, a misogynist, a homophobe, and a litany of other heresies against wokeness. (He was also not super-fond of Jews, per se.) Yaseen hatched a clever plan to oust Stanley. He recruited Zoey, who identified as a woman but didn’t really pass, to come to Stanley’s office hours and try to shake his hand. Now Yaseen knew that Orthodox Jews are shomer negiah — they refrain from touching members of the opposite sex. So if Stanley were to shake Zoey’s hand, that would mean that he considered Zoey to be a man, thereby misgendering er, him. A fireable offense! But if Stanley refrained from touching Zoey, he’d be in the clear.

The fateful day came. Zoey knocked on Stanley’s door, and upon being invited to enter, promptly baritoned “Zoey, nice to meet you!” and extended, er, his hand toward Stanley. Stanley raised his open hand half-way, but rather than proceeding to the handshake, motioned for Zoey to sit down, and sat down himself. After awkwardly standing for a few more moments with an outstretched hand, Zoey turned around and left. “It’s a no go,” he SMS’d Yaseen.

What Zoey and Yaseen didn’t know is that Stanley was a germophobe, who never shook anybody’s hand.

____________________________________________

Update. A reader suggests the alternative ending: Stanley was actually a transphobe and did not want to shake Zoey’s hand, even though he wasn’t ritually prohibited from doing so.

What if he’s right? (He is.)

In his latest takimag column titled “What If I’m Right?”, Sailer asks

… despite the success my methods have demonstrated over the years at explicating some of the major public affairs conundrums of this century, the answers I come up with are widely considered unmentionable.

Why?

Sailer’s main thesis is that “the world actually is pretty much what it looks like” — so that statistical trends should reflect in lived experience and vice versa. This is actually not true of the physical world: our everyday experience with matter is nothing like what our best theories describe reality as, and even the Earth appears to be flat without additional reflection. But in the social realm he may well be right. He’s certainly correct that there are blatant “naked emperor”-type falsehoods being promulgated by megaphone-wielding elites, against which one may not speak out on pain of social (though not yet literal) death.

Why, indeed? We have seen a number of explanations.

1. it’s. all. about. the. power. This one is quite compelling and does explain quite a lot, but not everything. See next.
2. Wokeness is a religion. Power dynamics may not fully* explain why women, against their better judgment, let suspicious strange “racialized” men into their apartment buildings. “Better dead than rude” (a religious tenet) does a better job here. Fill in your nature-abhors-vacuum and God-shaped-hole clichés here; they’re all apt.
3. Wokeness is law. That’s Richard Hanania’s cogently argued thesis.
4. Finally, insofar as elites are influenced by academia and academia is taken over by gender-studies seminars, one must take note of that rarefied, unique academic frisson at asserting and believing something that is comically, grotesquely out of line with everyday common sense.

* Then again, who wants to go viral as the next Karen? So there’s a power dynamic here, too.

Listening to Michael Shermer,

who is best described as “normie”. He’ll make noises about the excesses of wokeness, but expresses full-throated support for affirmative action and the notion of “systemic racism”. A case in point is his latest podcast with Stephon Alexander. We lack the background to evaluate Alexander’s stature as a physicist, or his individual contribution to his multi-authored papers. Early on in the podcast, he grated on us with the remark that people resent affirmative action because they don’t understand how it really works. On the contrary, I think they understand perfectly well: lesser-qualified candidates get admitted ahead of better-qualified ones on the basis of race, sex, and other jellybean flavors. He described how his fellow postdocs looked down on him, suspecting him to be an AA admit. To us, this seems like a perfect reason to abolish AA, but Alexander chose to nurse racial grievances.

Once again, we have no idea how good of a physicist Alexander is. He may well be a decent one in the end. But here is an ironclad pattern we’ve observed, with literally zero exceptions. We’ve encountered our share of women and minorities in STEM. The good ones just do research and never air grievances. The bad ones can’t shut up about where, when, how, and by whom they were microaggressed.

Update 18-Nov-2022. A commenter here had made a valid point, one to which we had initially replied to. It later turned out that the commenter was impersonating a real person’s name and url, so we took the unusual step of deleting the comment. The valid point does stand, however: Isabella Laba is a counterexample to the claim in the last paragraph above.

DeSantis and Trump

Here’s how DeSantis should respond to Trump’s opening shot: “I thank President Trump for his service. He got some good things done during his presidency. Right now America needs someone with a proven track record of effective governance and intimate inside knowledge of the executive, legislative, and judicial apparatus. If you like what I’ve been doing as Governor of Florida, you should give me a chance as President of the United States.”

To Trump, PTT has nothing to say. He is what he always was. Of course we’d support him again over a Kamala or a Biden. And of course he won’t step aside voluntarily for DeSantis. We can only hope that by some stroke of luck the Stupid party will stumble upon the good sense to nominate DeSantis over Trump.

On Fetterman, Herschel Walker and, well Trump

Andrew Sullivan devoted a long podcast monologue and substack post to how crazy, illogical and corrupt the GOP is to be getting behind Herschel Walker. The mere mention of Trump will launch Sam Harris into half-hour-long diatribes. Now the shoe is on the other foot, with Pennsylvania democrats having to decide whether or not to vote for a man with obvious, possibly severe brain damage.

Look, it’s not as though Sullivan’s and Harris’s critiques of their respective targets are totally off-base. Most of them are actually right-on. This blog unapologetically supported Trump in the 2016 election. If we were voting in Georgia, we’d pull the lever for Walker. We’ll go a step further: putting ourselves in a PA democrats’ shoes, we’d vote for Fetterman without much hesitation.

Here’s the point, and it’s one I’ve made too many times to count. We are long past the era of gentlemanly politics where your candidate’s lack of “ideas and principles” was reason enough to throw the election to the other guy. I’d vote for a guy who combined all of Fetterman’s, Trump’s, and Walker’s shortcomings if I thought he might advance my political agenda even by an iota.

Contra Hanania on Trans

The gist of Richard Hanania’s post is that the trans thing is not a big deal, when you look at the numbers (he concedes that it’s a great wedge issue to hammer the dems). We think he has succumbed here to the Terroristic Chair Fallacy. The basic thrust of that idea is that in some sense the numbers don’t matter; what matters is my ability to control what happens to me:

Look, I don’t care how many Americans are killed by furniture annually (50? 500? 5000? — not one iota of difference). I imagine if I’d heard of anyone dying from a chair malfunction, I might look into securing my own chairs. But that’s the point: I am in control. Similarly, I couldn’t care less how many people accidentally shoot themselves. It’s their business, their problem — and those worried about accidentally shooting themselves are free not to own a gun. On the other hand, I emphatically do care how many people are shot by criminals in a given region. Unlike the chairs or guns in my household, I have no control over a criminal’s or a terrorist’s mind.

Furniture and gun accidents are problems largely under the control of the individuals involved. Invest in good furniture and you won’t be killed by falling shelves; invest in gun safety training and you won’t shoot yourself. These tragedies are preventable, and the people affected are largely the ones who didn’t take the necessary precautions (or their friends and family, I suppose). It’s a different story with terrorism and crime. There is only so much an individual can do to prevent being a victim of either; that’s why these are hotly debated public policy issues. The public’s concern about furniture safety is — correctly! — dwarfed by its concern regarding terrorism and crime; the actual figures are practically irrelevant. And all the smug deathtoll-by-chair people can take a hike.

I think what bothers the average citizen (especially a parent!) about the trans craze is not the odds of this happening to their child (which are probably low). Rather, it’s their complete powerlessness to prevent their child from being chemically castrated and mutilated, should the government (or a disgruntled spouse) set their sights on the kid. They know the pool in their house poses a much greater statistical risk of killing their child. But they control the situation: they can supervise, cover, or dismantle that pool as they see fit. It’s one thing to be a victim of one’s own stupid choices, and quite another to fall victim to the tyrannical whims of an oppressive apparatus.

Update. We do agree with Hanania that there should be a market for kidneys.