Open thread, Apr. 24 - Apr. 30, 2017

gilch

If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post, then it goes here.

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If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post, then it goes here.

Notes for future OT posters:

1. Please add the 'open_thread' tag.

2. Check if there is an active Open Thread before posting a new one. (Immediately before; refresh the list-of-threads page before posting.)

3. Open Threads should start on Monday, and end on Sunday.

4. Unflag the two options "Notify me of new top level comments on this article" and "Make this post available under..." before submitting.

The New York Times which serves intellectuals who want to inform themselves about the world has used the term "human biodiversity" 5 times according to Google. Neither of those 5 times happened in this decade.

If I search for HBD there are more hits but most are not about human biodiversity. I find 'The case is listed by the highway patrol as ''HBD,'' its shorthand for ''Had Been Drinking but not drunk.''' Some of Scott's readers didn't even know what HBD was and Googling told them that it's an abbreviation for "happy birthday".

Scott would not have singled out that topic if it wasn't especially good at inciting internet fights.

Internet fights are about conflicts between subcultures. The fact that something is infuriating people in a tiny bubble doesn't mean that it's central for the core social debate.

The New York Times which serves intellectuals who want to inform themselves about the world

That may have been true a while ago. Nowadays NYT mostly serves intellectuals who prefer to not peek out of their bubble.

used the term "human biodiversity" 5 times

Try the common synonym: "racism".

0tristanm9y

It doesn't serve people who are interested in debates going on online, within academia, or within the scientific community. Not very well at least. The term "HBD" I think has popped up mostly recently to refer to a collection of ideas, mostly surrounding the idea of genetic determinism or related issues. I am not sure if it has ever referred to anything else or if there used to be other terms to describe those issues. From the way I understand most of the conversations about it, it's usually used in the context of the heritability of intelligence or IQ. This is an important topic, and definitely not something that will always be constrained to "tiny internet bubbles" like Scott's blog. It has huge repercussions for how we discuss things like education, income inequality, employment, etc. If the fights over this topic really were constrained to internet subcultures, you wouldn't see violent riots popping up at various universities throughout America in response to speakers wanting to present their case for it, or the SPLC claiming that people like Charles Murray are white nationalists when that's not really the case. The fact that this issue is so core to social debate is precisely why it incites negative emotions and why people tend to immediately move to absolute certainty over it one way or the other.