If we define intelligence as the ability to solve complex problems in complex environments then there is no objective way to measure competence or intelligence outside of society. If a gene makes you more attractive and because of this attractiveness others respond better to you and this makes you better able, with the help of others, to solve problems then this gene really has made you more intelligent. (This is different from this beauty gene causing others to falsely perceive you as being better able to solve problems than you really are.)

Carey's list of publications doesn't look particularly bullshitty.

I looked at a random paper called "The History of Ice: How Glaciers Became an Endangered Species" and I was like: well, at least he studies something about glaciers per se, i.e. how they became endangered.

Then I clicked at the abstract and saw this:

to understand why glaciers are so inexorably tied to global warming and why people lament the loss of ice, it is necessary to look beyond climate science and glacier melting—to turn additionally to culture, history, and power relations. Probing historical views of glaciers demonstrates that the recent emergence of an “endangered glacier” narrative stemmed from various glacier perspectives dating to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: glaciers as menace, scientific laboratories, sublime scenery, recreation sites, places to explore and conquer, and symbols of wilderness. By encompassing so many diverse meanings, glacier and global warming discourse can thus offer a platform to implement historical ideologies about nature, science, imperialism, race, recreation, wilderness, and global power dynamics.

So again, it's not about glaciers per se, but about, uhm, the cultural symbolism of glaciers.

So it's still the same thing. When talking about "glaciology", I expect something like "here are the physical processes how glaciers are made, and how they melt", but instead the guy produces something like "here is what glaciers mean in fairy tales, and here is how glaciers are compared to penises by feminists". The difference is that to write the former, you actually have to study the glaciers, while to write the latter, you only have to collect stuff people said about glaciers.

Technically, "collecting stuff people said about something" could be called science, but then it's not a subset of glaciology but rather a subset of culturology or whatever. And even in that case it should be done more scientifically, i.e. include some numbers. For example, if we are really collecting "stuff people said about glaciers", I would like to see data about how many people believe that glaciers symbolize penises, et cetera. Without those data, the research is worthless even as a subset of culturology.

"You could also, if you had a sufficiently good understanding of organic biology and aerodynamics, build an airplane that could mate with birds. I don't think this would have been a smart thing for the Wright Brothers to try to do in the early days."
— Eliezer, in this interview with John Horgan, when asked whether AIs will experience sexual desire

"As you know, birds do not have sexual organs because they would interfere with flight. In fact, this was the big breakthrough for the Wright Brothers. They were watching birds one day, trying to figure out how to get their crude machine to fly, when suddenly it dawned on Wilbur. "Orville," he said, "all we have to do is remove the sexual organs!" You should have seen their original design."
— Dave Barry, "Sex and the Single Amoeba" (1986)

Noise happens. Even if X is predictive of Y, it's rarely perfectly predictive.

For instance, suppose that 1000 students take a math test, then take a different math test that covers the same material with different problems. It is highly likely that their rankings on the two tests will be strongly correlated. It is highly unlikely that their rankings on the two tests will be exactly the same.

And it is quite possible that a few students will do vastly better on one test than the other, due to things that have nothing particularly to do with their mathematical ability. If you give a math test to a sufficiently large student population, then some student's boyfriend will have gotten hit by a car on the morning of the math test. That will probably mess with their scores.

Doesn't the word "ALL" make your statement self-contradictory?

It seems to me that "People in Group A are better than people in Group B" is often a piece of rhetoric used to make it harder for people from Group A and Group B to cooperate with each other. This is frequently to the benefit of a small subset of one or the other group.

In short: Who benefits from elevating this sort of hypothesis to consideration? Usually, not you.

When, if ever, is it morally acceptable to lie or deceive?

Culture with radical disagreement on values?

In particular worthy of note:

You are explicitly prohibited from

8: Posting or transmitting content through the Website that is harassing, threatens or encourages bodily harm, constitutes hate speech

11: Posting or transmitting content through the Website that is obscene, lewd, lascivious, or otherwise illegal

Given rules that members are forbidden from posting hate speech there might be legal responsibility for the host to allow certain messages to be posted, because that implies a judgement that they aren't hate speech.

What are your thoughts on the refugee crisis?