No Moods, Ads or Cutesy Fucking Icons

I’m not ruling out Goblin Emperor winning. We just read it in the Sword and Laser forum on Goodreads, and the discussion there and in the reviews section is FULL of “Nothing happens, but I really liked it!”

Yeah, I pretty much agree with you, Peter. I see a lot of people on both sides bellyaching and claiming to be victims in all this, while mostly just talking past each other, taking umbrage, and not listening.

Awards never really mean much of anything, aside from what we read into them. But, for what it’s worth, I think ECHOPRAXIA was one of the best novels of 2014.

Echopraxia. Phyl-Undhu. Now there’s challenging and interesting. All the rest scrambling for awards…

How disappointed are you really not to be counted among them?

Yep. Just yep.

Very accurate. On the moral and ethical side of the matter (I can’t even tell them apart in this particular case), what would be the moral/ethical approach for an author who submitted a story to a newly founded magazine a couple of months ago, found its editor among the Sad Puppy nominees on Saturday, was apalled by the Sad Puppies’ opinions, and now found their story accepted? Does it mean that reasonable people should now distance themselves from the whole magazine? I guess that most of the authors published there don’t feel any sympathy to the Puppies either and it may be unfair to attribute it to them. And for an author who needs every penny, it would not be responsible to decline an acceptance with their pay rates. Colleagues and family advised to let the story be published…

A local writer attended a con a few months back and was on a few panels. Told me that during one of them, the moderator turned nearly every question into something to do with his book that he was promoting similar to what you described above though I think it was more about selling copies than awards. The panel had to basically mutiny in order to get a word in edgewise. It’s puppy eat puppy. Suppose selfishness is a virtue in a dystopia. I often marveled how BS always sold better than meat-and-bones expertise in other business sectors, pretty much without fail due to the psychology of most buyers, despite the rate of problems such choices more than oft created.

As for feeling under-appreciated, yeah…know dat. And yet you are, very much.

I’m curious as to whether this politicizing of the Hugos will lead to their (financial) irrelevance. If a Hugo no longer means much other than a sort of battle in the cultural cold war between the Puppies and the Progressives, will the phrase “Hugo-Award Winning” mean anything to readers? Will it sell books?

One of the puppy nominees declined the nomination and wrote a detailed take-down of the puppy thesis. A Detailed Explanation. I’ve not finished reading it, but so far I am thinking of nominating it next year.

I might come back to your post and point out where I disagree if I have anything insightful to say*. Right now I don’t. I’m too busy being annoyed. The hugos have utility to me. I might see a nomination for an author or work I never heard of. In this alternate universe I have heard of all the novel nominees but not all the novellas or short stories.

* I ambivalently disagree with your promotion bit. and possibly your “nothing new” bit.

Peter Watts: a third-party recommendation has more intrinsic credibility than an author singing her own praises

I think I get why you say that, and I think it might hold up well in general, but when illuminated by cases like this one, where we know something of the motives and thinking of the group “recommendation”, it strikes me as a possibly flawed assumption–or at least a really interesting one. (I certainly have to admit that I’m partially motivated by an anti-Vox-Day prejudice, though. That fuckin guy.)

The Sad Puppies have neutered the Hugos, turned them into the genre version of CBC’s Bookies: awards, sort of, but hardly meritorious.

Bullshit.

Hugos were always crap, on account them being popularity contests.

Peter Watts: Dude, I’m comparing them to the Bookies.Crap is relative.

Which is, I think, part of the Sad Puppies point. If 1,000 people like X, and 100 people like Y, why do the Y people get to decide what’s good? It’s like all the world’s Michael Bay fans decided to crash the Cannes Film Festival (if Cannes had open voting).

Y.: Unless WSFS abolishes voting on Hugos, such strategies are unavoidable. Rating art seems futile to me, what objective standards are there?

Exactly. Voting-awards only sort-of work if everyone agrees on the “rules.” But SP has shown that a lot of people don’t agree on the rules.

Do the Hugos suck? Historically, the record seems pretty good. Jo Walton reread about 10 years of nominees and compared the results to other (non-fan) awards, and concluded that the Hugos did at least as well in selecting winners with value that continued to be recognized with the perspective of decades. Whether things have changed in the last 10 years is a difference issue, that perhaps can only be addressed with quite a bit more perspective.

But it is important to separate issues of nominating from issues of the final voting. The instant runoff procedure is quite resistant to being controlled by minorities. I may think some recent Hugo winners were lousy, but I can’t argue with the fact that the majority of the voters liked them.

Nominations, however, are easily manipulated by minorities. From last year, it appears that the majority of Hugo voters think Theodore Beale’s writing is at about the level of “Eye of Argon,” correctly in my view. But here he is with multiple nominations. In contrast to the final voting, a properly organized 15% or so of those submitting nominations can control almost the entire ballot. Someone who revs up their fan base with a “Vote for meeeee” post gets at most a handful of slots on the ballot.

There is also a difference between vote-pimping that gets nominations based on respect (possibly misguided) and nominating based on hate and spite. It is well documented that the SPs were motivated my wanting to punish those they hated. Nominating an author because you believe in the value of what she is saying rather than the quality of the work is arguably outside the spirit of the award, but nominating works because it will make other people angry and upset is a different thing.

The SF community has a history of inclusiveness, and there is no war against good writers who happen to be politically conservative. Sometimes they win Hugos, as can be seen by looking through the historical lists. Hugo winners have tended to be more to the left because that represents the set of Hugo voters. Never before has a minority of nominating voters organized to take control from the hands of the majority and done it out of malice rather than a desire to promote what they believe are worthy works.

Peter, in case you didn’t see it you got mentioned in a sort of alternate-universe list of nominees for a Hugo in the best novel category at Crooked Timber – http://crookedtimber.org/2015/04/05/sucky-hugos/#comment-624211

jcr: The SF community has a history of inclusiveness, and there is no war against good writers who happen to be politically conservative.

[citation needed]

Good writers. Okay. So no one’s willing to kill the Golden Gooses, like Simmons or Card.

But is there truly no war? Or is it like in academia, where there is ‘no war’ against conservatives because there the conservatives lost it( link pdf). Something like 15% of US academics are conservative, and in the social sciences the conservative percentage doesn’t go above a single digit.

See here:
http://www.psychologicalscience.org/index.php/news/were-only-human/74794.html

So why are only three out of a thousand raising their hands when asked? Apparently, it’s because conservative social psychologists perceive the field as hostile to their values. And it’s not just perception. The more conservative respondents were, the more they had personally experienced an intellectually unfriendly climate. Importantly, self-defined liberals do not see this—or believe it. The hostility is invisible to those who don’t run into it themselves.

The writer Sarah Hoyt claims that there is anti-conservative bias in the publishing industry.

…

After that I lived in a state of fear

I imagine it was similar to living in one of the more unsavory periods of the Soviet Union. You saw these purges happen. Whisper-purges. You got the word that someone was “not quite the thing” or that they associated with so and so who associated with so and so who was a – dropped voice – conservative. Suddenly that person’s books weren’t being bought and somehow people would clear a circle around them, because, well, you know, if you’re seen with a – dropped voice – conservative they might think you’re one too. And then it’s off to Neverland with you

I found a few other conservatives/libertarians (frankly, mostly libertarians) in the field, all living in the same state of gut clenching fear.

–snip–

Conventions were nerve wracking because I watched myself ALL the TIME. And you never knew how much you had to watch yourself. Suddenly, out of the blue, at a World Fantasy the speaker, a well known SF/F writer went on about Howard Dean, our next president. The room erupted in applause, some people stood to clap, and I sat there, frozen, unable to actually fake it to that point but too shocked to even put a complaisant expression on my face.

PhilRM:

You do realize that in your analogy, the Puppies are the 100, right?

Nope. I called SP the Michael Bay fans of scifi. And Michael Bay films sell a lot more tickets than the best of Cannes. Certainly Larry Correia feels that his readership is large and underrepresented by the scifi gatekeepers.

Now, I would take issue with that analysis, on all sorts of levels. But I think it is reasonably close to how Correia and friends feel.

PhilRM,

Sorry if I sounded brusque. I find it hard to get tone right online sometimes.

Err, Poe’s law and all, but this just has to be satire

http://blog.sadpuppies.org/

I mean, “chinese cartoons”, “a great man like Vidkung Quisling”, Nazi cosplay…

“But if the road matters to you as well as the destination, don’t lose sleep over the fact that the bad guys played a better game this time around. Give a thought to the rules that promote such strategies in the first place.”

I would be interested in your thoughts on how the rules ought to be changed. The idea of “fewer nominees than the ballot” (ie, 4 noms per voter, top six go on the ballot) plus dropping the price of an supporting membership ($10? $5?) seems plausible.

Reminder that Y is a straight up fascist. He has gone off in previous threads trying to claim that the Nazis were not fascist but left wing socialists (and then downplayed any problems someone would have with the Holocaust), argued that fascism (particularly the Italian subtype) is a good thing, and has expounded at length about James Watson and white supremacy being correct.

Y is the poster boy for the puppy slate, and is entirely not worth your time engaging.

Y.,

According to Wikipedia, Michael Flynn had 5 Hugo nominations before garnering one on the SP slate. He was a raging foam-at-the-mouth conservative last I looked and no A-list publishing powerhouse like OSC. He deserves a Hugo, though I haven’t read the recent piece (I have 6 of his books). His most recent nom in 2007 was an entry in the non-human-finds-Jesus subgenre the SPs are so enamored of. Looks like his novels are published by Tor and Macmillan and the recently nominated story was in Analog, so no special Catalia love required.

“The hostility is invisible to those who don’t run into it themselves.” Does that sound like a conservative or a SJW to you?

Everything is being politicized and polarized. The news media practice of depicting two things as being equal {because it’s what they do in Hollywood screenplays with protagonists/antagonists in order to heighten the tension–it’s about selling a story, not educating/informing the public} has bled into the real world in most aspects of our lives. IOW, there probably is both “liberal” and “conservative” discrimination in the publishing industry as well as most other industries. I use quotes because I don’t think those labels have much meaning anymore except in some trivial tribal sense. Just a lot of “Ugh!” and “Myuk-myuk, looka-looka!” leading to the same general place with different colored curtains and carpet.

Re Y, on precious conservatives being hurt

You know what those texts remind me ?

The stuff on (notoriously unfalsifiable) microagression “theory”, especially claims of microagressions against “secwave-feminist” proponents in social sciences.

Exactly same structure, exactly same notion of a vague form of hostility that can not be reliably empirically measured and is absurdly subjective (and thus is “essentially invisible” to “independent observers” and whomever is unfortunate enough to be appointed as “the aggressor”), exactly same insinuations with regards to fundamentally ideological nature of this weird “Russel’s offenses” in “academia” that are “invisible to those who don’t run into it themselves”.

It’s basically secondwave/sexneg/radfem whining, but with “patriarchy” replaced with “liberals” (do note that “modern” secondwaivers do dislike liberals as much as your most rabid conservative).

It might be, of course, that there is a certain substance to this complaint regarding “academia” (which is, mind you, a rather nebulous construct including everything from Cato Institute to MIT to Institute of African Studies) – both on part of rad/secwave people and conservatives (both of social and economic variety), but it seems to me that it is far more likely that their ideas don’t mix too well with the way this whole “empirical/falsifiable science” business goes, rather than some ideological conspiracy to “oppress” these folks.

This nicely explains why two such different groups of people have such apparently similar complaints.

It just so happens that both those groups are rather fond of ideas that are either unfalsifiable (to the point that their claims of “institutional hostility” include unfalsifiable events that are “invisible to those who don’t run into it themselves” 😀 ), notoriously devoid of solid evidence, or outright fucking wrong.

jcr: “The hostility is invisible to those who don’t run into it themselves.” Does that sound like a conservative or a SJW to you?

The study on academics was done by a couple of liberals(one even an Obama campaign staffer). Ditto for the report.

Mister_DK: Reminder that Y is a straight up fascist. He has gone off in previous threads trying to claim that the Nazis were not fascist but left wing socialists (and then downplayed any problems someone would have with the Holocaust), argued that fascism (particularly the Italian subtype) is a good thing, and has expounded at length about James Watson and white supremacy being correct.

If you’re going to go this way, at least get your facts straight, ok? So far your ‘hit’ rate in the ad hominem is about 12.5%. I am in agreement with James Watson.

If you’re in favor of the theory that in the in the ~200 K years of separate evolution nothing of substance could have changed in the human animal .. you’re welcome to try to suggest how that might have happened. Bear in mind that Ashkenazi Jews managed to raise their average intelligence by almost 1 SD in ~1500 years.

And that there’s evidence of a quite strong genetic bottleneck after the invention of agriculture, likely reflecting unequal mating success between those savvy enough to succeed in the new era and those who weren’t.

Peter Watts,

…this Correia guy, describing him as angry and perhaps misguided, but utterly sincere in his efforts to fix what he sees as a broken system… Assume that this is 100% accurate – I’m not trying to hint that it isn’t, I know next to nothing about Correia; in fact, it would be precisely nothing if not for the whole SP thing. My reaction is basically “So what?” “I should have got the Hugo! may be what Correia honestly believes, but that doesn’t count as evidence that there is a conspiracy by Those People to deny him the prize he deserves.

The Hugos have at best an indifferent relationship with actual merit; given that it’s basically the People’s Choice Award of SF, with the “people” being made up of some variable but small fraction of fans who have purchased memberships in Worldcon, this is hardly surprising.

And I find it very hard to square Correia’s alleged goal with the actual implementation of SP3/RP (the latter slate, which substantially overlapped with SP3, was even more effective at packing the nominations than the SP3 slate), which used the loophole of slate voting to largely fill the Hugo ballot with rancid crap. This isn’t “Let’s get more hard SF on the ballot!” (No Echopraxia? No A Darkling Sea? No The Three-Body Problem?), this is “Let’s stick it to Scalzi and the SJWs!”

Well Peter I enjoyed reading your piece, and it again makes me realize I’m a writer of little means. So I’m going to post a blog soon and put link to this post in. My only consolation is that I paid good money to buy Firefall in hardback, because you’re worth it.

Peter Watts:

Lars: Peter, in case you didn’t see it you got mentioned in a sort of alternate-universe list of nominees for a Hugo in the best novel category at Crooked Timber

Huh. That’s nice.

One comment was a little negative and said it was only on par with Egan.

hey, nice negativity there. that’s pretty positive.

Not to get too off topic, but I for one am getting tired of the “SJW” tag. Not that they don’t exist (#FireColbert was a pretty idiotic example) — but the Internet is full of mobs of every type. Way too many people like to grab the victim label because they’ve bumped into one of those idiot mobs, rather than recognize they’re just the junk DNA of the online world.

I think GRRM’s latest post does a pretty good job of fact-checking the Sad Puppies specific Hugo complaints:
http://grrm.livejournal.com/418285.html

Of some relevance on the current topic:
http://james-nicoll.livejournal.com/5302561.html

I’m with Imran here: SP3 consists of Torgersen’s pals. Beale’s RP slate is entirely dominated by works published by his own publishing house. Kind of drenched in conflict of interest.

PhilRM,

ETA2: And of course, Correia not only appeared on the SP3 slate, he got a Hugo nomination by doing so – which he turned down.

uncertain writer,

uncertain writer,

I believe I know which magazine you are referring to. I’ve worked with the editor and found him to be a very reasonable person. In my opinion, you should accept the publication offer. Your story must’ve resonated with him or else it wouldn’t have sold. I don’t think being published by a magazine means that you endorse everything the publisher stands for but your publication does mean that the publisher thought that you wrote something worth reading.

If you have concerns then please communicate them to him first before making your decision.

I will never care if a book by Dr. Watts receives a nomination or not. I’ll keep reading them. “The Things” is still one of my all time favorite short stories and orders of magnitude better than the prequel movie.

Watts tell me why should we praise people who want us to read books based on the authors gender and race. Hoe could a person recommending that possibly be thought of as part of the good guys.

In fact Larry Correia did an excellent job addressing her absurdity.
http://monsterhunternation.com/2015/02/23/the-social-justice-warrior-racist-reading-challenge-a-fisking/

Y.: I forgot to mention the source: USA Today. Owned by the same company that owns NBC, CBS. Hardly Fox News. Source of the data is FBI, from reports they received from local police forces.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/11/18/ferguson-black-arrest-rates/19043207/

Tell me are there by any chance statistics comparing the arrest rates between men, women, whites, asians, blacks, hispanics, indians, atheiest, and religious persons. Preferrably across different countries and continents.

If racism is the cause, it should follow that those who are supposed to have the most power “white males” should have the fewest arrest, and it should be distributed in such a way that the more discriminated a group is, the more arrest follow. Meaning for example, black females should be arrested more then black males, and certainly white males. After all they are black, and female. I look forward to the statistics. And it should differ across cultures off course. Or even cstates depending of the race of those in charge and in the police force.

A few quick points:

As a relatively unbiased observer, IMO Y is owning this discussion.

Untangling RP and SP3 is important before ascribing motives to Correira and Torgensen. Mashing them together in order to bludgeon SP3 with Vox Day is sloppy and wrong

I’m not sure if this debate is going to help or hurt the perception of SF in the public forum. It certainly isn’t helping Tor. Maybe it will bring new fans…

Finally while I would have loved to see echopraxia make the ballot, I suspect it was a difficult read for many (somewhat reinforced by the Peter’s reddit AMA). Peter’s doctoral training was on full display in Blindsigh and Echopraxia. I guess he could have chased the masses by dumbing both of them down, but from a selfish perspective I am *very* glad he did not.

Peter Watts,

…those folks would be unable by definition to nominate any of the aforementioned swcms, by virtue of not having read anything by them. Oh, I completely agree with you on this – there’s a huge difference between “Hey, maybe you should try to expand your reading from the usual” and “Don’t read anything by anyone who falls into this group based on race/gender/orientation”, and I found the latter fairly obnoxious.

I do think it’s fair to point out that there is a huge comment thread (~ 500 comments) over at Making Light about how to change the voting scheme used for the nomination process to make it harder for a slate – any slate – to game the ballot.

Ack – that should have been “It’s only a flesh wound!”

03: Also, I’d like to point out that even if conservatives are the “least-underrepresented” in those fields, they are still underrepresented which a) is not consistent with me being “wrong” and b) is consistent with my initial proposition that typical conservative ideas don’t mix too well with the scientific process (even if there are groups that have an even less compatible mindset)

Conservatives rate family higher, thus are more likely to go into more lucrative and reliable careers than science. Engineering, particularly. Physicians also seem
Here’s a graph on liberal vs conservative jobs:

Engineering seems split, politically, however most think both parties are crap:
http://machinedesign.com/news/politics-engineers

___________________________________________________________

03: First and foremost, for a slow breeding mammal

Slow breeding? Maybe ecologically constrained populations, hunter gatherers, and the like . Farmers in a mostly unoccupied land breed very quickly. Consider the early Americans colonists, or the Amish.

03: unless the evolutionary pressures are being very precisely set up to cause maximum divergence

What do you think happend to the Jews in medieval Europe? They were all banned from owning land, and crafts (due to guilds). They had no choice but to engage in finance or management. It’s not hard to see how under such an arrangement, children of successful traders would be far more likely to survive. Furthermore, they were socially isolated and did not intermarry with outsiders. And this went on for ~800 years.

03: If you claim that Ashkenazi possess inheritable biochemical structures that account for their performance and which have somehow avoided identification by previous research, then the only way to settle this for good, in an intellectually honest and productive manner

What ‘previous’ research? There’s none, really. No one was looking into that, I believe.There is right now ongoing research into genetics of mathematical ability, being conducted by Chinese.

What’s suspicious is that Jews have all these peculiar genetic diseases tied to the nervous system and at the same time are suspiciously smart. Yet they’re not as much plagued by non-brain genetic conditions as other bottlenecked populations (Amish, for example).

03: About that paleogeneticist… did he, by any chance, suddenly vanish without a trace after foolhardily enterprising a remote expedition (thus leaving the protective confines of angle-riddled cities

Nah. AFAIK, he’s still at home, doing god knows what. I’m tempted to hitchike to Oxford and extract the genetic data from him at gunpoint. The guy is such a tease.

He’ll be going to Tibet with Reinhold Messner. Or maybe not. Sykes possibly bungled mtDNA analysis of some bear hair, leading him to concluding there is a rare bear species in Tibet. Can’t make sense of the arguments.

Anyway, the interesting DNA is the one collected from Abkhazians.

03: As to Jews specifically, 800 years of oppression are exceedingly unlikely to be enough to provide meaningful selection for a complex cognitive trait (not to mention the fact that relevant mutations had to already be present in the population, which would be one hell of a lucky genetic drift )

Are you sure:

This is from the paper presenting the original hypothesis:

Quantitative traits like height or IQ are influenced by many genes. The response ofquantitative traits to selection is described by the fundamental relationship R = h2S(1)where R is the response to selection, S is the selection differential, the difference betweenthe mean value in the population and the mean value in parents, and h2 is the narrowsense heritability of the trait. This simple robust formulation is applicable to animalbreeding, laboratory experiments, and evolution in natural populations (Falconer, 1981;Lande, 1976). Estimates of the narrow-sense heritability of IQ vary, but generally range

Page 7

between 0.3 and 0.5 in children (Devlin et al., 1997) up to 0.7 or higher when measuredin adults (Jensen, 1998). Heritability must vary between populations since it is sensitivedemographic phenomena like assortative mating, the extent to which spouses are similarto each other with respect to IQ, and inbreeding. Assortative mating increases IQheritability. Inbreeding lowers offspring IQ and so could contribute extra variance to theIQ distribution, lowering heritability. With its high heritability, IQ should respond rapidly to directional selection according toequation 1. Assuming, for example, that the narrow-sense heritability of IQ is 0.8 and thatthe parents of the next generation have an average IQ one point above the populationmean, the average IQ increases by 0.8 points per generation. In 20 human generations,about 500 years, it would increase by 16 points—slightly more than the differencebetween average Ashkenazi IQ scores and average European IQ scores. Change of thismagnitude over historical time is not at all implausible.

Well, a lot of numbers in the original hypothesis (BTW, as courtesy to third parties reading this in the indeterminate future, here’s the link http://web.mit.edu/fustflum/documents/papers/AshkenaziIQ.jbiosocsci.pdf , hope you future persons still have PDF in the future 🙂 ), like the fitness effects of intelligence (which are actually rather complicated in a society where wealth and security are inherited through a social convention), and 0.8 NSH of “intelligence” looks just inappropriately huge from where we are now (It might have looked better when the paper was initially published).

Also, the neurobiology behind the intelligence effects of mutation in question looks very dodgy (fortunately, this is the most falsifiable/verifiable part of the hypothesis, so no big deal )

I guess I’ll just leave a fairly decent competing article to more eloquently illustrate some of these points

http://qr.net/smartjws

All in all, my point isn’t that it is impossible, merely that it is rather unlikely and the hypothesis is somewhat weaker than you want to present it (which does not mean it’s wrong – after all, the claims regarding the effects of sphingolipid disorders and DNA Repair Cluster disorders on intelligence are definitely a falsifiable affair, so it’s a hypothesis one can work with)

It’s perfectly fine for authors of a hypothesis to try to position it in best possible light and spin some dodgy assumptions to make the point stand out even stronger.

Its quite less fine to try to present an (interesting) hypothesis as some kind of demonstrated truth about the world, especially when most of the involved neurobiology is about on par with Peter’s vampires (and if we’re going to use those as arguments in policy discussion, I pledge allegiance to vampire overlords, TA! 😀 )

Y.: Are you really arguing that it’s impossible to breed for intelligence, whether by design or by nature?

Are you really reading what I write 🙂 ?

03“So while intelligence is technically heritable, “high yield” genetic variants that would give one a “boost” worth writing home about are yet to be found“

Currently known alleles with confirmed effect on standardized test performance (do note that test performance is a correlate of g-factor aka general intelligence, which we still don’t know how to measure “directly”) have an underwhelming effect magnitude.

That is not a statement on all intelligence-modifying alleles that might exist now, let alone on the diversity of all conceivable mutations and all conceivable new genes that might arise (naturally or artificially).

03: Currently known alleles with confirmed effect on standardized test performance (do note that test performance is a correlate of g-factor aka general intelligence, which we still don’t know how to measure “directly”) have an underwhelming effect magnitude.

How is that a problem? Suppose there isn’t 1 allele that gives 10 IQ points boost but 20 that each give 0.5 extra points, or any number of these.

Also..

the absence of any evidence that success in business required anything more than average intelligence.

I find it hard to take that guy seriously. Is he really trying to say that an IQ of 100 is enough for finance and trade, and extra smarts are of no help.

That’s a bold suggestion, I believe.

Re: Y

I did not say that it is a “problem”, did I ?

It’s not a fundamental research problem – the correct research approach is “just keep on truckin, ’tis all!”

It is a problem for your rhetorical stance, cause because we also do not know the actual polygene group size for the elusive “general intelligence”, as well as whether any of its members have pleiotropic properties.

That’s not like, a showstopper – more research on the genetics of intelligence (and attendant biochemistry) is definitely warranted.

What isn’t warranted (outside sci-fi) are far-fetched claims and policy decisions.

Re: Y, success in business

Well, again, IQ is a correlate of intelligence, not its distilled essence so it’s hardly a particularly bold statement.

Also, as long as we treat “success” as a binary, he’s quite plausibly right even for general intelligence proper – even in finance, since not all “finance” is equal.

For instance, pawnbroking isn’t very sophisticated, and is more sensitive to stuff like “reputation”, connections (both legal and, shall we say, shady), a well-established and tested procedure, and a very narrow subset of cognitive skills that are often called “emotional intelligence” (which is way more important to turning a pawning profit than abstract/mathematical reasoning proper)

Re: Y, on Present-day liberals suppressing scientific progress, or something.

Given that research into intelligence genetics is going hunky-dory, and that you’re discussing this whole thing on a liberal’s blog, your claim that liberals demand that no one contradicts “their” position appears to be rather meritless (yeah, a bunch of severe leftards may have their panties in a bunch. And a bunch of conservitards have their panties in a bunch over stem cells. Some particularly crazy antigloboos are upset about LHC for some utterly insane reason. Hey, someone probably has panties in a bunch over your/mine/our kind host’s/etc. sexual preferences and clothing tastes – but as long as they can’t persecute us or shut down crucial research, that’s perfectly fine)

Also, beliefs regarding intelligence heritability mean precisely zilch policy-wise as long as you don’t have a workable understanding of genes/alleles involved and the biochemical pathways their products constitute (which we don’t).
Not entirely sure there would be a lot of policy implications when we finally attain such knowledge, but given current state of research (several speculative hypotheses and a handful of alleles that are far from overwhelming in their properties) trying to formulate a policy decision based on current “state of the art” would be tantamount to funding a Blindsight Vampire Appeasement Committee

> we already know that intelligence is very heritable

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/2013/10/17/the-heritability-of-intelligence-not-what-you-think/

Re: Y, on success

Well, for starters there appear to be way too many different ways to measure and express “degrees” of business success, and if we simply go by monetary criterion, the relationship between fortune size and reproductive fitness seems to be a complicated one (there is, at the very least, a kind of “law of diminishing returns” here, as well as severe distortions introduced by inherited wealth that would make sustaining a selective pressure beyond the “first fuckoff rich” generation problematic)

The best move is not to play this “evolutionary reconstructionism” game and just keep studying actual, you know, genetics and biochemistry of the brain.

Oh, and pawnbroking is very much a medieval jew thingie. Stereotypically 🙂 so (not claiming it was the only finance-related profession available, merely providing an example of a profession that is lucrative, finance-related, but not very dependent on abstract reasoning skills)

Re: Y, China

The research isn’t “taking place in China” (some of it does, but that is neither damning nor surprising).
Specifically, the two studies I quoted above (and those are rather huge studies with sample sizes one better not shake a stick at, also they are successful studies in that relevant polymorphisms were actually found) happen to have drawn expertise from numerous research centers from all over the world (including Australia, USA, UK, Netherlands, Sweden and shit whatnot).

Where do you even get this “China is the only country with major cognitive-genetics efforts underway” shit from ?

Re: Y, on “black people”

There is currently not enough empirical evidence to rule out the role of social/environmental factors as explanations for the so-called “racial” IQ gap, as well as effect of genetic factors that do not directly pertain to “g-factor” proper (just as a hypothetical example, impulse control is not what one would consider equivalent to “general intelligence”, but there are many ways in which reduced impulse control could undermine performance in standardized tests. Impulse control is also a trait that could have considerable genetic components)

Given that our understanding of intelligence genetics (and, for that matter, intelligence proper – we can’t even directly measure intelligence for fuck’s sake) is currently poor, and our experience with human genetic engineering limited, social / environmental interventions are the only ones that currently make sense.

Also, given that considerable reduction in said gap was achieved, social/environmental intervention are provably not without merit 🙂

Of course, when we finally figure out the biochemistry of it all, we’ll be able to just patch everyone up to the max, but that’s not a capacity we have right now

Re: Y, on IQ test “ban”

This is just a bold-faced lie, and I kind of think you know it’s a bold-faced lie.

IQ tests are not “banned” in the USA (The Goo is famous for administering a fuckhuge battery of intelligence tests of, as far as I know, their own devising. Also, police, but for entirely different reasons)

IQ tests during hiring of workers in professions that do not have a functional merit for higher IQ preference is banned.
Which makes sense.

Is there evidence that construction workers are better at their job with increase IQ ? Like, research ?
Nope ?
Then using IQ tests during hiring of construction workers is senseless bullshit, irrespective of racial issues. Case closed.

(surprisingly, there is evidence for certain correlations between performance and scores in some cognitive ability tests in hockey players, that’s why NHL happily applies a test of that kind to the players without much issue)

Re: Y, on trigger warning generation

The trigger warning generation started in academia.
It’s not, to the best of my knowledge, based in serious clinical psychology/psychiatry research on rape recovery, but it is endemic in “softer fringes” of social sciences and traces back to a whole load of crappy, fuzzy and ill-researched “media effects” claims

So in order to enter the academia, those types would need to exit it first, and boy wouldn’t it be glorious if that were to happen, if only for a little while.

Oh, and they can want to shut down research all they all the way to sunday (the antigloboos do want to shut down the LHC allright, so fucking what ?), as long as they can’t do that, I’m perfectly fine.

We can have a civil disagreement about the merits of such research, as long as the outcome is them having to fuck off and research proceeding as planned 🙂 Same for various skycritter cultists who have stem cells issues

Re: Y, weird teachers

Wait a moment, liberal students will have issues with… criticizing consumerism and capitalism? LOLWUT

Also, how come blanket bans on student/teacher “relationships” are part of “liberal” orthodoxy (it’s also very much a part of most conservative/rightwing orthodoxies, lol!) ?

And what exactly is so horrible about a bunch of whiny fucktards protesting Laura Kipnis? Laura Kipnis handed them their assess gift-wrapped.

A bunch of dweebs whined a whole lot and demanded that Kipnis be “reprimanded” (also of note – the protesters were so unoriginal they used Sulkowicz’s mattress performance, which has jack all to do with student/teacher sex… those people can’t even come up with their own visuals, lol).

Result?

Kipnis was not reprimanded, and got some free press coverage at the expense of outraged parties.

There is no empirical evidence as to whether protesters have cried themselves to sleep afterwards, but that appears to be a plausible hypothesis.

If this outcome causes “palpable fear” in an education professional, the issue isn’t so merely with the protesting assholes, but also with a certain someone’s hide. It needs to get thicker.
There always will be people who are out to get you. Well, unless we really pull off a biosphere-ending global war, cause then there won’t be people, fullstop 🙂

03: Where do you even get this “China is the only country with major cognitive-genetics efforts underway” shit from ?

BGI’s cognitive genomics project? The biggest such project to date?

Re: Y

They may very well think that.
Doesn’t seem to help much.

And the BGICG isn’t the biggest project currently. It’s one of the biggest national projects, sure, but the international Social Science Genetic Association Consortium are the ones with biggest guns… errr… I mean, sample sizes now (also cool name. Everything with “consortium” in it becomes cooler – much like dressing a dude in a black business suit, but for an organization 🙂 )
BGI have some pretty unique research specifically into the unusually high-IQ variants though, if memory serves, and good sample sizes for a national project.

Now, as to not hiring “mentally retarded” you definitely can – if you mean actual clinical syndrome.
As long as you can present a reasonable case for given mental trait being needed for a given work (say, construction workers must have reasonable capacity to memorize and understand construction codes and safety regulations), you can use various testing (including cognitive aptitude testing) in USA, or their various proxies.

Cuts both ways though.

If you can present a case for high IQ being problematic in a given work, and the court deems it “reasonable”, you can refuse to hire high-IQ people due to them being “too shmott”.

Re: Y

Nope, the court declared that company has no right to screen for intelligence of personnel for positions where there is no demonstrated benefit of being extra-smart (and where certain demographics might thus become impaired in what is otherwise a rather neat career fit for them).
Construction work at a nuclear powerplant isn’t, in that regard, different from construction work on a skyscraper or a large bridge.

If anything, I would have made the language of that ruling way stronger, making balls-to-the-walls scientific justification of all hiring practices mandatory, irrespective of industry and demographics involved.
At least such stronger wording would have ended the multidecadal shame of “lie-detector” bullshit (not only does that fucking machine not work, when operating on “non-naive” demographics, it actually may have a false-negative rate that exceeds false-positive rate)

I think this might interest you folks:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFR9TYxAVZQ

1995, Harlan Ellison bitching that “technology has finally caught up, people actually went on the Internet and begged for votes”…

03: Construction work at a nuclear powerplant isn’t, in that regard, different from construction work on a skyscraper or a large bridge.

Maintenance work, not construction.

03: If anything, I would have made the language of that ruling way stronger, making balls-to-the-walls scientific justification of all hiring practices mandatory, irrespective of industry and demographics involved.

And if there is no science on certain subjects? HR practices today are so screwed up that they might as well be reading chicken entrails.

Peter Watts: I dunno. Mitt Romney seems to have done just fine in business without any discernible “extra smarts”. Maybe there’s something lacking in our definitions.

You truly think Romney is of average intelligence? That’s possible, but not that likely,

Peter Watts: Uh, I think I’d object to this characterization. Given an arbitrary left/right choice I guess I’m left, but I’d have severe reservations about anyone whose political beliefs can be adequately summarized along a single dimension.

There’s more axes to politics. Permissive/restrictive social policies, liberal vs planned economics, statism vs anarchism. Probably a couple of more.

Re: Y, no science

Then get back to the drawing board and get science done 🙂

Pick applicants randomly in the meantime – which would actually be better than bullshit vodoo methodology.

Re Y, GG:

Yawn. That’s so 2014

03:
Also, on Mittens, it is remarkable that there is absolutely no public source on his IQ (there is speculation that he’s 130, but that’s just brown numbers)

None of his little business schemes are his own invention, and it doesn’t really take a genius to stand upon the shoulders of the giants… and steal their earrings while you’re at it.

What was his SAT?

Also, apparently the comment before my previous comment got eated, so here goes…

Re: Y, no scientific methods for assessing skills in some fields

Then get back to the drawing board and get science done 🙂
Pick applicants randomly in the meantime – which would actually be better than bullshit voodoo methodology.

Re Y, GG:
Yawn. That’s so 2014

Y., when you think about intelligence, how do you think it relates to the cultural ways we process information and to the biological ones?

And when you think about intelligence in those two senses, how do you think it relates to deception, modeling the thinking of others for one’s own self, and deceiving those others?

And when you think about deception and deceiving others, how do you think those things relate to making money?

I hope these are not softball questions, but I don’t know if I’m supposed to read between the lines some sort of way or if I’m misunderstanding what’s going on.

Charles R: And when you think about intelligence in those two senses, how do you think it relates to deception, modeling the thinking of others for one’s own self, and deceiving those others?

Important for all things. Dumb liars get caught more easily.

Different kinds of intelligence there too. A lot of successful ‘leaders’ where people not so good at abstract thinking but with very good intuition* regarding the emotional dispositions of others.

*what is intuition? My take is that it’s the result of subconscious mental procesess.