from January 2025 [0]:
> Richard Lynn was a scientist who infamously tried to estimate the average IQ of every country.
a bit of additional context from Wikipedia [1]:
> Richard Lynn was a controversial English psychologist and self-described "scientific racist" who advocated for a genetic relationship between race and intelligence. He was the editor-in-chief of Mankind Quarterly, a white supremacist journal.
he claims that Lynn's work is still "hotly debated" and links to an article in "Aporia Magazine" which is published by the "Human Diversity Foundation" [2]:
> The Human Diversity Foundation (HDF) is a far-right company founded in 2022 to publish "race science" through the Aporia Magazine and Mankind Quarterly. It also publishes Edward Dutton's The Jolly Heretic podcast. Key persons of the HDF including its founder support remigration and white nationalism.
the role that Alexander plays reminds me of the attempts in the early 2000s to "teach the controversy" [3] about evolution vs. creationism. there is no actual scientific debate, but people with a political axe to grind want to shift the Overton window and give the impression that there is one.
0: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/how-to-stop-worrying-and-le...
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Lynn
When someone's #1, heavy-hitting, come-out-swinging criticism amounts to "his group is not as smart as they think they are" then they're already done. They've cooked themselves. I read that paragraph and heard it in the mean girl voice they thought they were hiding.
#2 is that his wrong ideas are immoral. #3 is that #2 draws the wrong crowd.
It's not like I don't get the point. It's just written for an audience that already deep in that corner of the blogosphere.
I'm sure they pump their fists at such a clean summing-up of why they hate him. But my eyes are glazing over.
It seems possible that if someone wasn’t familiar with Scott’s position on race science, they could read about his position on race science and then have that influence their opinion of him.
Out of curiosity, are you lumping everybody into two groups? The way your sentence was worded it sounds like there are on one hand people that believe in race science, and on the other hand “doctrinaire egalitarian leftists”. If the only qualification required to be a “doctrinaire egalitarian leftist” is “not believing in race science”, then you’ve kind of just said “Unless [you don’t believe in race science], I don’t see why reading this would change your opinion of him by a millimeter”, which might actually kind of underscore some people’s issue with him.
This is just wrong and anyone can visit the blog to see for themselves.
Read Scott’s glowing review of _Albion’s Seed_.
He sort of panders to an audience that fancies themselves much smarter than the average person, and as such categorically demand opinions that average people do not hold — no matter how sensible they might be. To accommodate that requirement he repackages existing (more usually conservative/libertarian) cultural gripes by pairing them with some light criticism and branding it as some sort of enlightened centrist/Third Way perspective. This sort of practice in general has lost some of its illusory appeal in recent years since so many previously “politically inscrutable” rich and influential folks dropped their centrist/apolitical trappings and came out as staunchly right-wing.
That being said there are quite a few readers that still want to play the “Are they right wing? Are they left wing? Are they something magical and ascendant?” game, and audience capture is a real phenomenon, so the entrenched players have no reason for introspection or change.
