I once characterized the “race science” movement as a human centipede of willful ignorance. It turns out it is an ouroboros, a network of people passing the same flawed understandings of intelligence and humanity back and forth for decades and growing ever more intertwined with one another. The new generation choosing to swallow the tail ends of rotten hereditarian pseudoscience closely follows Pinker’s example, advocating for a universal human hierarchy in polite, measured, language that leaks the rotten ideas of dead eugenicists into our future. Welcome to Box of Rocks #7 — Ouroboros
Hereditarians, biological essentialists, those who really like the idea of a universal human hierarchy to simplify and categorize and organize this messy thing we call life all share one quiet certainty: Our refusal to acquiesce to natural law is what is holding us back. The perfect void of original thought they inhabit has them convinced that we have tried everything, used every tool at our disposal to build a world that reflects the (previously self-evident) truth that all people are created equal. Swallow that one, and all that remains is to accept inequality as inevitable.
Imagine — the world we are living in could indeed be the best of all possible worlds if only we would let the right people (them) distribute power and resources as they see fit (to more of them). There isn’t quite enough money concentrated in the hands of a few (people like them), and so they actively try to centralize it further a la SBF & FTX. The social stratification that currently exists should be actively entrenched through policy that excludes, with the rocks in this box arguing that some people are too stupid to make use of assistance programs (Gottfredson, Murray), some don’t deserve them (Eysenck, Arden) and some of those people just shouldn’t exist (Lynn). If they just knew their places — really knew what Science Says™ about where they belong, then perhaps we could set about building the sociobiologist’s world, the one E.O. Wilson wondered about when he asked “whether there exists a genetic predisposition to enter certain classes and to play certain roles.
It must be incredibly frustrating for the hereditarians that people at the bottom of their universal human hierarchy keep refusing to accept that they should let their betters run the show. If J. Phillip Rushton can’t convince his own students of the universal human hierarchy he peddled for his entire life, what is an earnest “race realist” supposed to do? The only rational approach is to drip-feed the poison of “human biodiversity” (HBD) through every media platform you have in order to consolidate this mindset in those who already have power and those who would help them keep it.
Never mind that they themselves aren’t sure if it is true. Pinker, too afraid to publicly claim any of his own opinions at this point, hedges in his answer to Edge.org and waffles about which groups are actually different from one another (the sexes certainly, the races, who knows!) Scott Alexander Siskind, a rational thinker of thoughts, author of SlateStarCodex and AstralCodexTen, concluded by 2014 that human biodiversity was at least partially correct (or maybe just incorrect in ways that can’t be proven) and thought there was a lot of interesting research to be done once you accept that. Emily Willoughby shared that she had misgivings about the race and IQ research as well, but as a ‘grandstudent’ of both Pinker and Thomas Bouchard (himself an enthusiastic proponent of race science funded by the Nazi-founded, explicitly eugenic Pioneer Fund, and a scientist who could not design good experiments) she has taken her academic training to heart and gone on to publish 29 articles. John G. R.Fuerst also entered the field unconvinced of the veracity of many of the positions, especially the race-IQ one. However, he’s pretty eager to call racism good once it is proven, presumably by him, as he’s now published 37 papers on the topic while installed at self-described scientific racist Richard Lynn’s publishing mill, the Ulster Institute for Social Research. In Fuerst’s own words: “If, as they say, sociobiology entails racism, etc. and sociobiology is true, as I say, and truth is good, as I also say, then racism, etc. must also be true and good.”
These folks are not scientists. They are not attempting to disprove their hypothesis. They are convinced that there is a universal human hierarchy and that if they just squint hard enough they’ll be able to find it.
The new kids aren’t the only ones unsure if the “race science” folks have it right but willing to commit to the bit anyhow. In one thread from 1999, Steve Sailer’s “race science” discussion group considers Richard Lynn’s claim “that the average IQ of Africans in Africa is around 70”. Berkeley’s Vincent Sarich flat out states that conflating IQ and intelligence “is simply untrue empirically.” As he explains, accepting Lynn’s statement is “absurd on its face” for the patently obvious reason that Africans have the “normal cognitive range of human beings — dark-skinned, yes, but still normal human beings.”
Let me be clear — this was not a politically correct group of people. In that same email Sarich describes himself as “someone ‘perfectly willing to accept that there is a 1 [standard deviation] difference in the American black and white means along that genetic dimension”, but even he can’t swallow Lynn’s ridiculous conflation of IQ and intelligence. Further down the thread another commenter underscores this point by highlighting that Koko the Gorilla’s IQ was estimated to be ~90. “What is IQ,” they ask, “when you can score 70 and be a perfectly normal human, and score 90 and not be able to do anything a human can do?”
The answer, of course, is that IQ is an inappropriate metric for and psychologists should stop saying that IQ measures intelligence. Or so said Jim Flynn, the researcher who first identified generational differences in IQ and, in a conversation with Steve Sailer, went on to attribute most if not all the gain to improved environment. Charles “estimate-the-stats” Murray, is the one who named this observation the Flynn effect, using the concept to advance his argument for a universal human hierarchy in The Bell Curve
I’m going to return to Scott Alexander Siskind now because his writing has been astonishingly influential throughout future oriented communities — effective altruists, rationalists, and Silicon Valley tech folks. Like Hanania and Pinker, Siskind chose to deliberately hide his affinity for race science for writings on his popular blogs, SlateStarCodex and AstralTenCodex. In 2014 emails where he detailed his strategy for mainstreaming hereditarianism came to light and Siskind (with all the confidence of a toddler emphatically declaring through crumbs and chocolate that THEY did not eat that cookie) posted a categorical denial on another one of his websites, raikoth.net. The same webite linked to an account used six months prior to solicit resources on Asheknazi IQ to improve the arguments on “my side”. The recommended items later emerge as a lengthy post on SlateStarCodex where he finds the same discredited theory Pinker promoted “really compelling”.
Raikoth.net is a reference the utopian society Siskind spent years developing, one where the “natural fertility rate is far below replacement”, “innate virtues must be robust enough to survive even a total collapse of society”, and non-coercive eugenics are in place “to convince certain people to have more or fewer children.” The people allowed to have children in his world would be expected to follow something like his Biodeterminist’s Guide to Parenting to maximize their children’s IQ. Siskind caveats his Biodeterminist’s Guide as entertainment only, but he is crystal clear about why he considers IQ as a useful metric — he chose IQ because it is so painfully common, so helpfully simple, one convenient number to rule them all. As much as he “doesn’t want to make a big deal over whether IQ is really interesting or not”, he helpfully provides a list of correlations that demonstrates how important he thinks it is.
This is why IQ is and always will be compelling for hereditarians — it is easy. Just overlook the fact that the test doesn’t actually measure intelligence, that the resulting datasets are cherrypicked, that statistics, if done at all, are done poorly, and that the conflation of IQ and intelligence is propaganda to push the idea that humans are subject to a natural order, a universal human hierarchy that organizes us from better to worse.
See? Easy.
Siskind defends the genetic basis of IQ in 2016 and 2021, often citing Plomin (who was wrong in many different ways). In 2017 he sighs to his audience that the hereditarian left “seems like as close to a useful self-identifier as I’m going to get”. In 2012 he solicits thought experiments on eugenics, graduating to “I like both basic income and eugenics” in 2013. A now deleted 2017 comment has him argue that the science isn’t settled and skull-measuring is actually a scientifically rigorous way to determine cognitive ability. When challenged on the welcoming atmosphere he is creating for ‘race science’ and its proponents (also in 2017), Siskind says that people on Twitter seem to think Emil Kirkegaard is okay, a claim that Kirkegaard later uses to convince himself he’s not a crackpot. To put a finer point on this one — Kirkegaard is *also* installed at Richard Lynn’s publishing mill, started his own self-published, self-reviewed journal to publish folks like Willoughby and Fuerst (and host their conversations), and as part of his truly enormous body of work to promote scientific racism, spent years seeding Wikipedia with hereditarian talking points.
Like Pinker, Siskind has been promoting biological determinism and its corollaries for decades. He goes so far as to thank anonymous “race science” advocates for their work. At least one of these credits Steven Pinker with setting them on their journey saying: “I’ve always suspected genetic roots of behavior. This suspicion was solidified upon reading Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate.”
There’s no doubt that like Pinker, Siskind has created a welcoming environment for “race science” on his various media platforms, spoonfeeding faulty research and botched understandings of intelligence to a whole new generation — an audience that now includes those in the business of developing artificial intelligences. In fact, Siskind has been following Pinker’s approach to mainstreaming hereditarianism to the letter: obscure your affinity for race science through polite measured discourse that defends race and IQ researchers and keeps their debunked theories alive, ensuring that there are always people willing to line up and swallow the tail ends of the rotten theories hereditarians have been trying to implement for the last 100 years.
Lynn is dead now and Pinker may be too old to think up another grift, but Siskind and the new kids arguing for hereditarianism have a choice to make. Willful ignorance is an active and deliberate choice to carry water for “race science” and the researchers who promote it. It is truly sad that Siskind — a tireless advocate for careful, thoughtful discussion in his own writing — is either unable or unwilling to think critically about the eugenic origins of the concepts they embrace in both this world and their imaginary ones.
For the rock collectors out there:
