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Alsadius 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?)
To address the average racial IQ thing, I think that a big part of the left's dislike of it is cognitive dissonance, in a similar fashion to the right's reflexive denial of climate change. They're facts that tend to get used in ways that they find repulsive, and it's easier to deny the fact than it is to make a claim of "It's true, but let's not worry too much about it". In both cases, deniers tend to deny even when questioned in private in my experience(and I'm using friends as my reference group here, so I assume they'd fess up to it being tactical if it was). In both cases, there seems to be a more intellectual strain(which I'm a part of in both cases) that actually does make the "It's real, but who cares?" argument.
(Hopefully that illustrative parallel doesn't turn into an AGW flame war...)