here's a great and useful rundown of Scott Alexander Siskind's actual awful beliefs, from a centrist who found it difficult to accept until that email leaked
here's a great and useful rundown of Scott Alexander Siskind's actual awful beliefs, from a centrist who found it difficult to accept until that email leaked
Personal blog of Jonathan Korman
You're viewing a single thread.
Alexandros Marinos, whom I read as engaged-with-but-skeptical-of the “Rationalist” community, says:
Seeing as Marinos' whole beef with Siskind was about the latter's dismissal of invermectin as a potent anti-covid concoction, I would hesitate to cite him as an authority on research standards.
Article worth it just for mentioning Scotty hilariously attempting to whitewash phrenology for counter-culture clout, found in another account that seems to be deep in a covid conspiracy rabbit hole at the moment.
Damn, these guys really hate Stephen Jay Gould don't they.
lmao I had no idea he's pro phrenology. amazing
Either that or he let his performative contrarianism get out of hand, he did delete the post after all.
Still, it's just like an HBD enthusiast heavy into eugenic optimisation to think that there might be something to measuring skulls, even if it didn't pan out the first time, maybe if they had known about IQ it would have been different, it's a shame the woke mob has made using calipers on school children a crime, etc.
As far as I know Siskind has never deleted any idea for the contrarianism motivating it getting out of hand. It’s just against his character. Much more likely he considered it revealing his power level (even if he recognised himself as never having really endorsed the idea besides contrarianism in the first place).
Less charitably, more plausibly, at the outside he recognised that it’s a stupid fucking thing to say that makes him look just not smart.
That's the trouble with talking about thoroughly disingenuous people, you get bogged down with defining if they meant to mean what they wrote. It's all optics.
Wasn't phrenology about skull shape and its influence on mental traits in general? Otherwise it's not really a field of study, it's just one claim: larger skull = more intelligence (which is just a less precise version of more childhood nutrition = taller = larger skull = more intelligence), but phrenologists also claimed they could explain all sorts of traits like criminality and personality with things like bumps in the skull.
To be really precise it was about measuring the size and distribution of all sorts of skull irregularities (the proverbial 'bumps') and mapping them to various traits, it's basically palm reading for the head.
Siskind is just being his usual disingenuous self, i.e. 'everyone always uses skull shape' (to indicate that my intellectual precursors were clowns) is obviously referencing phrenology, then immediately motte-and-baiieys it to a claim of correlation of cranial capacity and IQ.
Except for M&B sleight of hand to work the claim shift shouldn't happen in the same sentence, otherwise it's extremely obvious that you are claiming one thing while carrying water for the other thing (phrenology), which is probably why he ended up deleting the post.