
Meet the Renegades of the Intellectual Dark Web - mgdo
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/08/opinion/intellectual-dark-web.html#news
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I agree with many of these sentiments. We live in an era where the
"mainstream" has all but abandoned truth as a value and truth-seeking as a
process. The great irony of relativism is that it is a rigid a framework which
cannot accommodate thinking outside its bounds. That causes it to fail
abjectly when people attempt to apply it to real questions. And to boot, it is
inherently incapable of resolving issues of competing relativist interests.

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tacon
>[Sam Harris] has defended the work of the social scientist Charles Murray,
who argues that genetic differences may explain differences in average IQ
across racial groups — while insisting that this does not make one group
inferior to another.

No, that is not what Charles Murray is arguing. Murray is arguing that _some_
differences in average IQ are explained by genetics, and that does not make
any particular individual inferior to another, because the distributions have
a huge overlap. People should always be evaluated as individuals.

It is endlessly horrifying that one is not allowed to make the banal statement
that "identified populations have different medians on virtually every factor
we can measure". Such statements about any other living creature are
unremarkable, but making such statements about human beings? Heresy. Just ask
Larry Summers.

