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Konkvistador comments on Politics Discussion Thread January 2013 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Elaborate please.
(Sorry for getting into tribal matters, but this is explicitly about tribalism:)
In particular, a long time ago I asked you and your alt-right associates: why do they think liberals are so adamantly in denial about the possiblity of racial differences in intelligence. All the alt-right/reactionary commenters everywhere seem to think that it's clear-cut: liberals hate Truth in all its forms, and "elite" liberals especially hate it, and they simply want to speed the collapse of decent society with such anti-Truth policies.
I tentatively suggested, however, 1) that there are no real contradictions between the ideology of modern liberalism/progressivism (as it is preached and written), and, say, the average Jew having higher IQ than the average European having higher IQ than average black people - and 2) that the semi-official ban on the topic in liberal academia exists because of complicated self-image and methodology issues going back to the Enlightenment era, and because of sincere, well-intentioned fear of resurgent racist oppression.
So, essentially, nobody is deliberately spreading lies, deliberately concealing truths, making up stories about a dragon in the garage, etc. Instead we have a complex, silent carpet brawl around the meta question on the proper relation of the normative and the descriptive in politics - e.g. given how much we value moral equality, should we try to justify it with facts/axioms about our environment, or with a deontological, non-disprovable position? - where neither side is even psychologically able to state the issue. That's how hard sufficient levels of reflection are.
How'd you say? (And btw, do you think that my meltdown about all this meta crap qualifies as evidence? I realize that my thinking is... not very close to "standard" liberal or right-wing thought, but might there be similar psychological tension generated in their long-standing conflicts?)
Why do you think religious conservatives are so adamant about abortion or contraception?
I think you haven't understood the exact question. Opposition to abortion or contraception are policies; racial differences in intelligence are an entirely external fact which should only affect policy after you filter it through the lens of your ethics. A better analogy would be confronting a Catholic with a claim that allowing abortion would make for much less poverty and death in the 3rd world. And even then, a liberal confronted with race differences in intelligence would not be similarly pressured to allow e.g. apartheid, if there is an explicit and sufficiently high value for moral equality between the races in the liberal mindset, and this moral equality demands some sort of practical egalitarianism!
What I claim in this particular example is that, since the secularization of progressivism/liberalism around the Enlightenment - and its pragmatist/utilitarian posturing - it has been having trouble deriving moral equality from first principles here, and deep down there's awareness of that. So liberals desperately try to derive an egalitarian "ought" from an inconvenient "is" - even though nobody's forcing them to!
It wasn't exactly analogous, but it wasn't meant as such. If I wanted to do that I would have brought up Creationism among Protestant Americans.
I fundamentally think there are very strong sacredness based feelings around this that are not based on consequences in the real world any more than other kinds of religious thinking is. There obviously are good secular conservative arguments in favour of religious thinking guiding how our society develops though.
Throughout the 19th century, there have been leftist thinkers - from moderate and "respectable" ones to hardcore radicals - who either had no problem acknowledging differences in average intelligence, or were even outright racists/white supremacists. E.g., I've read that many American abolitionists either acted xenophobic towards actual black people when they met them, believed that blacks can never match whites in ability or achievement, etc. Yet their moral and religious opposition to slavery - all men are created in God's image, and ought to be treated as such - covered the immorality of one race subjugating another. So... eh, it's contradictory and messy. But ultimately egalitarianism, like all moral emotions, need not be chained to any particular empirical belief.
This seems like an ok model to describe what his happening.
It is not at all obvious to me that any other hypothesis is needed to explain Gould. Why, he practically says that he kept telling himself "human equality is a contingent fact of history" until he believed it.
But Jared Diamond does appear to me to be deliberately concealing truths, because he is fairly careful not to outright lie (and because he used to be into human biodiversity).