Emil O. W. Kirkegaard blog
Now that we’re on the topic of curious people, it may be in order to recap the story of Mafia Mark, also know as Mark Alfano. He’s an associate professor of philosophy at Delft University of Technology. A few months ago, he was entertaining us all on Twitter by attacking Nathan Cofnas, a phd student…
Continue ReadingIn Making sense of Heritability (2005), Sesardić wrote: On the less obvious side, a nasty campaign against H could have the unintended effect of strengthening H [hereditarianism] epistemically, and making the criticism of H look less convincing. Simply, if you happen to believe that H is true and if you also know that opponents of…
Continue ReadingEysenck, H. J. (1995). Genius: The natural history of creativity (Vol. 12). Cambridge University Press. The book is on LibGen I continue my Eysenck readings with his popular genius book (prior review The Psychology of Politics (1954)). Having previously read some of Simonton’s work, Eysenck sure is a very different beast! The writing style follows…
Continue ReadingI am posting this because this is not widely known, but I think this angle should be taken more seriously. I hope philosophers will read this and get inspired! Urbach, P. (1974). Progress and Degeneration in the’IQ Debate’ (I). The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 25(2), 99-135. PDF Urbach, P. (1974). Progress and…
Continue ReadingPearl, J., & Mackenzie, D. (2018). The book of why: the new science of cause and effect. Basic Books. This is an interesting but annoying book. The basic pattern of the book goes like this: Scientists used to totally not know anything proper about how to do X or think about X. But no worries,…
Continue ReadingQuoting from Arthur Jensen’s book Educability and group differences (1973). He was being criticized for postulating genetic causes, which some critics think would cause great social harm if they were to be believed. That is, Jensen was replying to the Turkheimers of yesteryear. The scientific task is to get at the facts and properly verifiable…
Continue ReadingKathryn Paige Harden is professor of psychology who belongs to the Turkheimerian ‘left psychometrics’ school. I’ve discussed the odd behavior of Eric Turkheimer before, but since then I found a rather amazing essay: The Search for a Psychometric Left 1997 (the journal seems to no longer exist). It’s definitely worth reading in its entirely, but…
Continue ReadingPaul Graham‘s 2004 essay What you can’t say had a big influence on me and remains my favorite essay. In he argued essentially that popular morality shows fashion tendencies i.e. that it varies over time but for no evidence-linked reason. What is at one time considered a grievous moral evil is later considered not a…
Continue ReadingThere’s a certain type of person that doesn’t produce any empirical contribution to “Reducing the heredity-environment uncertainty”. Instead, they contribute various theoretical arguments which they take to undermine the empirical data others give. Usually, these people have a background in philosophy or some other theoretical field. A recent example of this pattern is seen on…
Continue ReadingSometimes people argue that one shouldn’t even be allowed to research race and intelligence causes. I’m sometimes asked directly why I choose to study this topic. Well, I could outline a number of reasons, but this would be endlessly quote mined by SJWs as proof of my wicked spirit. Of course, as usually noted, no…
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