this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2025
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Hurling ordure at the TREACLES, especially those closely related to LessWrong.
AI-Industrial-Complex grift is fine as long as it sufficiently relates to the AI doom from the TREACLES. (Though TechTakes may be more suitable.)
This is sneer club, not debate club. Unless it's amusing debate.
[Especially don't debate the race scientists, if any sneak in - we ban and delete them as unsuitable for the server.]
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Nitpicking, but at what point do we start calling it race pseudoscience? Letting the creeps have even a tiny bit of legitimacy is too much, especially as mainstream outfits are working overtime to legitimize them.
I think the word you're looking for is "racism"
What? These are pretty clearly two different concepts. Race pseudoscience is racist, but not all racism is racial pseudoscience. There is no need to water down definitions.
Edit: for some reason this has gotten people very worked up. I was simply trying to say that we don't need to eliminate the term "race pseudoscience" because we already have the word "racism". It can be a useful designation. Perhaps I misinterpreted the previous comment but it seemed like they were saying there is no need to have both terms.
Seriously I don't know what I said that is so controversial or hard to understand.
yes, V0ldek said this
they didn’t say this though, you did. race science is an excuse made up by racists to legitimize their own horseshit, just like how fascists invent a thousand different names to avoid being called what they are. call a spade a fucking spade.
why are you playing bullshit linguistic games in a discussion about racism? this is the exact same crap the “you can’t call everyone a nazi you know, that just waters down the term” tone police would pull when I’d talk about people who, shockingly, turned out to be fucking nazis.
“all nazis are fascists but not all fascists are nazis” who gives a shit, really. fascists and racists are whatever’s convenient for them at the time. a racist will and won’t believe in race science at any given time because it’s all just a convenient justification for the racist to do awful shit.
Please calm down. I like it when we have words to describe specific concepts, and it seemed like the previous poster was saying that a word to describe this specific phenomenon was unnecessary because we already have the word to describe a broader phenomenon.
It's like "all ships are boats but not all boats are ships."
When someone starts talking about race science, I don't think it's a problem to call it race pseudoscience. I think it's more specific than just calling it racism. That's it. That's my whole point. I don't know why it's controversial here.
You're a goober, and, dare I say it, a jabroni.
lol
imagine coming into a conversation with people you don’t fucking know, taking a swing and a miss at one of them, and then telling the other parties in the conversation that they need to calm down — about racism.
the rest of your horseshit post is just you restating your original point. we fucking got it. and since you missed ours, here it is one more time:
race science isn’t real. we’re under no obligation to use terms invented by racists that describe nothing. if we’re feeling particularly categorical about our racists on a given day, or pointing out that one is using the guise of race science? sure, use the term if you want.
tone policing people who want to call a racist a racist ain’t fucking it. what in the fuck do you think you added to this conversation? what does anyone gain from your sage advice that “X is Y but Y isn’t X” when the other poster didn’t say that Y is X but instead that Y doesn’t exist?
so yeah no I’m not calm, go fuck yourself. we don’t need anyone tone policing conversations about racism in favor of the god damn racists
I really don't see a reason for us making a linguistic distinction between "low-brow bigotry" and "high-brow bigotry", which is essentially what this is in practice.
When my uncle drunkenly complains about how "those stupid immigrants are everywhere and they ain't even speaking our language" - it's racism; but when a guy with a university degree writes a treatsie about how immigrants will take over and that's a problem because his bayesian priors say they're statistically less intelligent - then it's suddenly "race pseudoscience". No, both of them are the same breed of racist, the only difference is the latter had enough money to attend Yale.
The whole concept of "race science" is an attempt to smuggle long-discredited ideas from the skull measurement people back into respectable discourse, and it should be opposed as such. Calling it pseudoscience is better, but it's even better to just call it straight-up racism.
Or: Nazis don't even deserve the respect we give to cold fusion cranks, free energy grifters, and homeopaths. Their projects and arguments are even less worth acknowledging.
Exactly, like the whole point of their schtick is that they want to legitimise plain old racism as something more sophisticated, so I don't see a reason to entertain them as such.