I have a number of times linked to the late (he’s not dead, but was fired by Psychology Today) Satoshi Kanazawa’s post British newspapers make things up. Part of the humor from that comes from Kanazawa’s own low standards. Rereading the old post, I noticed one of Kanazawa’s (at-the-time) co-bloggers posted a reply, American magazines make things up. The magazine in question was the late Newsweek and the journalist was their unfortunately chosen science editor, Sharon Begley. Begley summarized a publication, on differences in jealousy by gender and attitude toward relationships, in a manner that was not only unsupported but contradicted by the paper. The blogger (Matthew Hudson) emailed her twice to point out the necessity of correcting her summary, but only got back a response that the statistics in the paper were hard to understand (the bar graph is actually very clear) and the article is still uncorrected on Newsweek’s site. Unlike British journalists who merely don’t care one white about accuracy, Hudson suspects that the ev-psych hater deliberately misreported the results, and I’d say the charge looks substantially stronger here than in the case of Stephen Jay Gould.
July 28, 2011
Sharon Begley could be a british journalist
Posted by teageegeepea under Uncategorized[22] Comments
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July 29, 2011 at 7:31 am
“Part of the humor from that comes from Kanazawa’s own low standards.”
I critiqued the sloppiness in the article that got Kanazawa booted here.
July 30, 2011 at 2:03 pm
Yes, it was disappointing to me that a lot of people stood up to defend Kanazawa. His last post wasn’t really worse than his usual slop, but his usual was bad enough that he shouldn’t be employed enough to publish it. I also found his strange use of the word “objective” to be strange, when he could have just said “self-assessment” vs “third party assessment”. I noticed that both of the chubby girls you mentioned were asian, perhaps you don’t have a preference for that type but merely an asian fetish that compensates for it.
July 31, 2011 at 3:45 am
“I noticed that both of the chubby girls you mentioned were asian, perhaps you don’t have a preference for that type but merely an asian fetish that compensates for it.”
Race-wise, my preferences are more cosmopolitan/less biased than that; I can see why you’d reach such a conclusion, though.
July 31, 2011 at 3:54 am
It’s not a good faith conclusion, just snark.
I think MRDA was using gendered race tactically, and chose japanese/asian examples because Kanazawa is japanese/asian.
I think it’s part of the larger class of when a social agent uses an autist of different phenotype tactically as part of the larger macrosocial pageant/calculation of status and dominance for phenotypical traits and communities.
I think MRDA signals social knowledge and competence without good faith transparency (but like I said, the good faith transparent, yet competent social agent is a bit of a unicorn).
July 31, 2011 at 11:02 am
I didn’t even notice the connection between Kanazawa’s race and that of the pics. Good catch, H.A.
July 31, 2011 at 1:57 am
Interesting blog post. You approach but don’t quite reach unicorn status of a black guy capable of writing thinking critically about race without being a bit emotionally suborned by race. My acid test is a black guy who’s able to say “I think the central tendency for blacks is a bit lower intelligence than whites” without caveat or counterassertion that places the whole discussion in social epistemologically deforming competing team sophistries, powered by seemingly real emotion at the microsocial level.
July 31, 2011 at 11:50 am
The whole realm of racial differences is a relatively new one for me. I only started engaging it in the last few years.
“I think it’s part of the larger class of when a social agent uses an autist of different phenotype tactically as part of the larger macrosocial pageant/calculation of status and dominance for phenotypical traits and communities.”
Not quite sure what you’re saying here. Are you saying I’m trying to play some silly racial one-up game with my post?
“You approach but don’t quite reach unicorn status of a black guy capable of writing thinking critically about race without being a bit emotionally suborned by race.”
Didn’t think they were giving out awards.
“My acid test is a black guy who’s able to say “I think the central tendency for blacks is a bit lower intelligence than whites” without caveat or counterassertion that places the whole discussion in social epistemologically deforming competing team sophistries, powered by seemingly real emotion at the microsocial level.”
Not really the best example, as intelligence wasn’t the factor on the table, and is not open to subjectivity/consensus in the same way that “beauty” is.
July 31, 2011 at 11:56 am
MRDA,
I think you’re more tactical than good faith in your social epistemological participation. I think most folks are a mixture of both -in contrast I’d say Professor Hanson is more good faith than tactical and that Steve Sailer rides a fine line between being someone who is ironically tactical (and hence good faith) and being someone who is in fact on balance tactical.
I am aspirationally a good faith social epistemological participant (within this Hopefully Anonymous pseudonym).
I think this is an example of your tactical proclivity, evasive and posturing rather than a head clunking reach for some social epistemological teamwork with me:
“Not really the best example, as intelligence wasn’t the factor on the table, and is not open to subjectivity/consensus in the same way that “beauty” is.”
August 1, 2011 at 6:02 am
If that read as “evasive and posturing” to you, you read it wrong. I made a good faith distinction between evaluating intelligence and evaluating aesthetics. As I see it, the two can’t be evaluated in a like fashion.
“rather than a head clunking reach for some social epistemological teamwork with me”
What’s the “social epistemological teamwork” in service of here? I sincerely want to know, as all I’m seeing from you, so far, is presumptive psychologizing.
Speaking of “evasive”, I note that you did not answer my first question to you.
August 1, 2011 at 12:16 pm
Speaking of “evasive”, I note that you did not answer my first question to you.
Not quite sure what you’re saying here. Are you saying I’m trying to play some silly racial one-up game with my post?
[My last commment was a good faith response to that question. I’ll try to make my response more directly and obviously answer to your question.] No, I don’t think you’re narrowly trying to play some “silly” racial one-up game with your post. But, l I think you’re more tactical than good faith in your social epistemological participation. I think my last comment made it clear that I think good faith social epistemological vs. tactical social discourse participation is a muddy spectrum, and that I don’t think many (if any) agents or interactive instances can be placed clearly in one box or the other.
August 2, 2011 at 10:22 pm
What is “ironically tactical”?
MRDS made a post in response to something Kanazawa said about aesthetics. So he understandably wrote about aesthetics. The unicorn-statement may be roughly sufficient, but it shouldn’t be necessary to hear it in every context. Yes, I know that’s obvious, but I felt a summary was in order.
August 3, 2011 at 7:00 am
I think of Reihann Salaam calling himself an “ironic conservative” but that’s not quite what I mean. Instead of implementing a “team white” tactical strategy, Mr. Sailer tends to render transparent a “team white” strategy. He often seems to me to end up a faustian masquerading as a racialist. The closest traveler that comes to mind for me is the comedian Anthonia Cumia, who adopts the conceit that he’s a racist that’s probably about 2/3 for comedic effect, and 1/3 sincere. With Mr. Sailer I think it’s 2/3 to draw an audience to his good faith social science analysis, and 1/3 sincere. With Reihan Salaam, I think it’s about three thirds striking a Sullivanesque pose of fish out of water conservative to draw an audience to his otherwise microniche good faith social science analysis.
August 4, 2011 at 11:00 pm
I once remarked that if society was as white supremacist as many anti-racist types make it out to be, people would falsely claim to be racists rather than the other way around. And when I read Timur Kuran’s “Private Truths, Public Lies” he points out that the Nazis faced just that problem in determining public opinion (he depicts pre-civil rights America as merely containing a silent majority). I don’t see how the benefits to Sailer of adopting that pose are similar to Reihan’s.
August 5, 2011 at 7:25 am
TGGP,
I think society tends more towards trait status calculationism than narrow white supremacism. The combination of traits that make up the central tendency of whiteness tend to calculate out in a higher status zone, which I think then affects micro and macrosocial activity. This includes people of all races tending to prefer (or discriminate less against) whites as romantic partners, neighbors, and business partners (an intuition on my part and a hazy recollection of the social science consensus, not a carefully researched empirical statement).
August 7, 2011 at 9:47 pm
I don’t think it’s the case that all races prefer white romantic partners. My understanding is that men are beggars rather than choosers, and all women except asians penalize men not of their race. John Tierney found a study which tried to apply some income numbers that would cancel out racial preferences.
August 7, 2011 at 11:03 pm
John Tierney’s analysis is clever, a new angle, and may be saying something real (it may be rescuing the concept of preference for more “virile” or whatever, black men).
I’m not sure since in reality we can’t separate income differences from other racial differences. White men really do earn more than black me, although there’s overlap in that trait in the distributions just like there overlap in skin color and other areas.
As for women penalize men of other races and men beg for (at least) sex from women of all races, a racial differential is still a racial differential, and my pre-Tierney intuition was still that there’s a white advantage for either gender, including along the female race auto-preferential gradient.
August 7, 2011 at 11:07 pm
TGGP,
Also, to step outside of the narrow dynamic of you posturing somewhat against specific theories of white coordination, to what extent do you think white coordination exists?
I think it’s one of those hard things to study in good faith, because all observers are raced and exist in the context of push narrative competion (not just white vs. nonwhite, but rival racial pageantry teams of whites and nonwhites in competition with other whites and nonwhites, and whites competing for higher status with each other).
But please answer my first paragraph in good faith, rather than posture off some element of my second paragraph.
August 9, 2011 at 6:46 pm
Good point about correlated traits. A rare case of someone having a complaint that confounding variables were controlled for!
I tend to be quite reductionist, not believing there is much scope for “group selection” in evolution, for example. Borrowing from Mancur Olson’s “The Logic of Collective Action”, the larger the group the higher the coordination costs. Whites are a very large group because of that largeness whites tend to identify more with a subgroup that either heavily overlaps or is a subset of whites, and those subgroups are generally more tolerated when they explicitly try to coordinate. On the other hand, whiteness is superficially obvious in a way that handedness and even language/religion are not, and of course an individual white person still has mostly white peers to interact with. As Ira Katzelnelson reminds us, there was a time when affirmative action was white. The roots of this can be traced back to the transition to Jeffersonian/Jacksonian democracy. It was on the basis of their status as white males that the masses claimed their equal right to vote and constitute the ruling class. I haven’t actually read the history of the expansion of suffrage to the non-propertied in America, but I believe it happened state-by-state, in contrast to later federal amendments.
I suppose that’s a lot of digression and not much answer. This isn’t exactly an answer, but I can give some criteria for coordination. Dunbar’s number is the maximum that can informally coordinate in any halfway complex manner. Larger scale coordination is possible, but requires mechanisms to assist in it (such as a military/corporate hierarchy).
August 10, 2011 at 4:48 pm
“Dunbar’s number is the maximum that can informally coordinate in any halfway complex manner. Larger scale coordination is possible, but requires mechanisms to assist in it (such as a military/corporate hierarchy).”
I think this is wrong, and wrong in an important way. I think larger scale coordinations are understudied, and despite the no true scotsman element of “requires mechanisms to assist it” I think there can be total coordinations without much that resembles a transparent plan, protocol, or conspiracy. Also,I think we’re all regularly part of such coordinations, and race based ones are a big example.
August 12, 2011 at 7:33 pm
I actually intended “halfway complex” to be my “no true Scotsman”.
Do you have any favored references on macro-coordination?
August 13, 2011 at 4:32 am
“Do you have any favored references on macro-coordination?”
Nope, wish I did.
January 19, 2012 at 8:29 am
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