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.
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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I feel like calling it race pseudoscience inadvertently suggests the existence of legitimate race science.
Nitpicking, but at what point do we start calling it race pseudoscience?
"Hating Black People" would be a more fitting name.
but at what point do we start calling it race pseudoscience
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.
Race pseudoscience is racist
yes, V0ldek said this
but not all racism is racial pseudoscience
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.
Another NYT Opinion writer, Jamelle Bouie, had criticized the article before being forced to delete his posts: https://bsky.app/profile/jamellebouie.net/post/3lt44uitxc22x
The deleted posts in questions: https://bsky.app/profile/karmamylanta.bsky.social/post/3lt4dqeigfs2m
Some people who know cremie are dropping some more lore on him. He apparently has a bit of a problem re lying about credentials and grades : https://bsky.app/profile/larkshead.bsky.social/post/3ljkqiag3u22z
Man wouldn't it be delightful if people happened to start adding a 1.7 suffix to whatever he calls himself next.
Also, Cremieux being exposed as a fake ass academic isn't bad for a silver lining, no wonder he didn't want the entire audience of a sure to become viral NYT column immediately googling his real name.
edit: his sister keeps telling on him on her timeline, and taking her at her word he seems to be a whole other level of a piece of shit than he'd been letting on, yikes.
Knowing he's a failson who's alienated everyone in his family makes me very happy.
He might have also lost a lot of money in betting markets re the nyc primary and his attempt at market manipulation us leading to more exposure of the guy. A very foot shooting moment.
https://bsky.app/profile/chemprofcramer.bsky.social/post/3lt5h24hfnc2m
I got caught up in this mess because I was VPR at Minnesota in 2019 and the first author on the paper (Jordan Lasker) lists a Minnesota affiliation. Of course, the hot emails went to the President's office, and she tasked me with figuring out what the hell was going on. Happily, neither Minnesota nor its IRB had "formally" been involved. I regularly sent the attached reply, which seemed to satisfy folks. But you come to realize, as VPR, just how little control you actually have if a researcher in your massive institution really wants to go rogue... 😰
Dear [redacted],
Thank you for writing to President Gabel to share your concern with respect to an article published in Psych in 2019 purporting to have an author from the University of Minnesota. The President has asked me to respond on her behalf.
In 2018, our department of Economics requested a non-employee status for Jordan Lasker while he was working with a faculty member of that department as a data consultant. Such status permitted him a working umn.edu email address. He appears to have used that email address to claim an affiliation with the University of Minnesota that was neither warranted nor known to us prior to the publication of the article in question. Upon discovery of the article in late 2019, we immediately verified that his access had been terminated and we moreover transmitted to him that we was not to falsely claim University of Minnesota affiliation in the future. We have had no contact with him since then. He has continued to publish similarly execrable articles, sadly, but he now lists himself as an “independent researcher”.
Best regards,
Chris Cramer
Taking bets on no correction from the NYT calling him an "academic".
Aside: the willingness of news, politicians, and the general public to listen to non-peer reviewed nonsense from (often) anonymous "scientists" is an awful trend. Besides this smear campaign it's also come up in anti-vax nonsense, election fraud conspiracies, and "reports" against transgender healthcare. It's like everyone still knows science is cool beans, but forgot what science is in the first place.
academ-ick
That link seems to have broken, but this one currently works:
https://bsky.app/profile/larkshead.bsky.social/post/3lt6ugxre6k2s
Thanks!
Picked up by a relatively mainstream US politics blog:
NYTimes has posted on Twitter about the feedback* (copypasted to bluesky via screenshots lacking subtitles lol). But don't bother reading it because it says absolutely nothing.
* Their word. I'm not sure I'd call this "feedback" so much as everyone talking about how irredeemably terrible they are.
https://xcancel.com/patrickhealynyt/status/1941262786006483418#m
https://bsky.app/profile/nytimespr.bsky.social/post/3lt6cza4vr22d
Apparently the NYT hit-piece's author, Benjamin Ryan, is a subscriber to Jordan Lasker's (Cremieux's) substack.
I looked at his substack and he also writes a bunch of super skeevy transphobic concern trolling. Not a nice person all around.
Why so scared media? Lmao