Picture a scene: the New York Times is releasing an article on Effective Altruism (EA) with an express goal to dig up every piece of negative information they can find. They contact Émile Torres, David Gerard, and Timnit Gebru, collect evidence about Sam Bankman-Fried, the OpenAI board blowup, and Pasek’s Doom, start calling Astral Codex Ten (ACX) readers to ask them about rumors they’d heard about affinity between Effective Altruists, neoreactionaries, and something called TESCREAL. They spend hundreds of hours over six months on interviews and evidence collection, paying Émile and Timnit for their time and effort. The phrase “HBD” is muttered, but it’s nobody’s birthday.

From here. (Author’s not a lesswronger themselves, I think.)

Aella: What about epilogenics? “epilogí” is greek for ‘choice’ instead of the ‘eu’ which means ‘good’

I’m pretty sure “[genetic] selection” was already calqued as επιλογή in modern Greek (as in “fisikí epilogí” for “natural selection”, and apparently analogously technití or sexoualikí epilogí). Which makes this cute, although not particularly in a “sneer at this fake Greek word” sense because I feel like language really is just like that sometimes.

OK, I just saw the comment below about eugenics being re-Greekified as eugonics. I think I’m losing my mind a bit.

There’s a survey of psychologists that gets cited regularly as evidence of expert opinion on the heritability of intelligence. Alexander brings it up in a typical way in his 2021 review of The Cult of Smart:

Earlier this week, I objected when a journalist dishonestly spliced my words to imply I supported Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve. Some people wrote me to complain that I handled this in a cowardly way - I showed that the specific thing the journalist quoted wasn’t a reference to The Bell Curve, but I never answered the broader question of what I thought of the book. They demanded I come out and give my opinion openly. Well, the most direct answer is that I’ve never read it. But that’s kind of cowardly too - I’ve read papers and articles making what I assume is the same case. So what do I think of them?

This is far enough from my field that I would usually defer to expert consensus, but all the studies I can find which try to assess expert consensus seem crazy. A while ago, I freaked out upon finding a study that seemed to show most expert scientists in the field agreed with Murray’s thesis in 1987 - about three times as many said the gap was due to a combination of genetics and environment as said it was just environment. Then I freaked out again when I found another study (here is the most recent version, from 2020) showing basically the same thing (about four times as many say it’s a combination of genetics and environment compared to just environment). I can’t find any expert surveys giving the expected result that they all agree this is dumb and definitely 100% environment and we can move on (I’d be very relieved if anybody could find those, or if they could explain why the ones I found were fake studies or fake experts or a biased sample, or explain how I’m misreading them or that they otherwise shouldn’t be trusted. If you have thoughts on this, please send me an email). I’ve vacillated back and forth on how to think about this question so many times, and right now my personal probability estimate is “I am still freaking out about this, go away go away go away”. And I understand I have at least two potentially irresolveable biases on this question: one, I’m a white person in a country with a long history of promoting white supremacy; and two, if I lean in favor then everyone will hate me, and use it as a bludgeon against anyone I have ever associated with, and I will die alone in a ditch and maybe deserve it. So the best I can do is try to route around this issue when considering important questions. This is sometimes hard, but the basic principle is that I’m far less sure of any of it than I am sure that all human beings are morally equal and deserve to have a good life and get treated with respect regardless of academic achievement.

(Hopefully I’ve given people enough ammunition against me that they won’t have to use hallucinatory ammunition in the future. If you target me based on this, please remember that it’s entirely a me problem and other people tangentially linked to me are not at fault.)

Plenty of people explained problems with the 2020 study in the comments, and I sent an email, but I never heard back. One obvious critique is that it looks like about a third of respondents on the genetics/environment question (specifically about US black/white differences) were enthusiastic followers of Steve Sailer. The study couldn’t have better overrepresented them in a purported professional consensus if it had been designed to do so. Unfortunately, this subgroup seems to have skipped later, longer questions about international differences, which show more cautious opinions even among the rest of the ISIR community. I’d hoped Alexander might find some peace of mind, since he must have been freaking out about this study since at least 2014, when he linked Steve Sailer’s blog post of its preliminary survey results in an email to Topher Brennan, under the heading “HBD is probably partially correct or at least very non-provably not-correct”. I suppose I’ll never know.