This is honestly such a disappointment. I used to appreciate your thoughts on a lot of issues and particularly loved that you were in the intersection of haskell and harry potter fanfic.
Venkatesh Rao is generally contentless and writes long winded tracts that don't actually make any kind of coherent argument for what they're saying.
Do you really think Stallman's long history of sexual harassment is because he was too gosh-darned oblivious to realize he shouldn't be doing that?
This isn't exactly "Oh he maintained eye-contact for half a second too long and the thought police are after him" territory jfc.
Yep. Recent debunking (once again) of their canon by Kevin Bird in an article titled "No support for the hereditarian hypothesis of the Black–White achievement gap using polygenic scores and tests for divergent selection"
Yes, actually. It's a theme that Scott is annoyingly fond of, in his fiction and non-fiction. Unsong is entirely about kabbalistic puzzles as you know. Scott and others before him were enamored with the ideas of Leo Strauss. You can read more about Strauss' ideology of hidden truths that only the brilliant and/or worthy can perceive at the link below.
Scott Alexander uses the Kolmogorov post to have plausible deniability for his discussion of "race science". There's a reason writing "HBD" was banned in the comments section and it's that it was giving the game away to too many people.
(discussion of HBD is not banned, it's simply not permitted for that string to appear - i wonder why that might be)
Let me get this straight, you contend that we should believe that Shalizi is an unreliable source and your justification is a post on a "human bio-diversity" blog run by white supremacist and anti-semite John Fuerst amongst others.
It would be bad enough if you were linking to a rebuttal of the post on heritability linked to by the parent, but this is a blog post attacking a different post by Shalizi.
How is this in any way relevant? More importantly, why would this convince anyone that Shalizi gets heritability wrong?
The pre-natal environment is shared, and depending on the adoption process there could be a great deal of correlation in a range of environmental factors. It's not like these kids are grown in a vat and distributed randomly in the population is it?
Venkatesh Rao is generally contentless and writes long winded tracts that don't actually make any kind of coherent argument for what they're saying.
Do you really think Stallman's long history of sexual harassment is because he was too gosh-darned oblivious to realize he shouldn't be doing that? This isn't exactly "Oh he maintained eye-contact for half a second too long and the thought police are after him" territory jfc.