this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2025
131 points (100.0% liked)
SneerClub
1149 readers
61 users here now
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.]
See our twin at Reddit
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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.
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.