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The midwittery of HBD bloggers

Leon Voss
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Found on Spandrell’s website:

I was reading Karlin’s Malthusian Industrialism, and it perfectly embodies the problem with many bloggers in the HBD sphere (especially those with an unhealthy obsession with numbers).

For exemple [sic] this idiot has a whole section where he explains that during their demographic transition, the French selected those who did not reproduce, and that now France is, as a consequence, populated by breeders which explains why they have (or had nowadays lol) a higher TFR than Germany.

Too bad his article was published in 2018, just as the French TFR was starting to collapse and is now set to reach 1.5 children per woman (-7% in one year, and that’s counting all the mudskins), so much for breeder selection kek.

To make my point clearly : 3/4 of the bloggers/ex-bloggers in the HBD community should be put up against a wall and executed for wasting our time with hypotheses that are elegant but totally crap in reality because they are based on three shitty graphs with dubious correlations. Apart from Spandrell, who has the good sense to have reflections that are less focused on numbers (and therefore more sustainable), and perhaps Arctotherium, the rest is midwit shit.

Why is he so mad? Put up against a wall and shot? It’s giving ressentiment. Although there’s a kernel of truth here. We can’t always be right, and there’s a real dearth of good theory in HBD. I’ve tried to remedy this but there’s only so much I can do.

I think he likes people who agree with him and dislikes people who say things he doesn’t already want to here. That’s because I’ve not found much substance in Spandrell, other than saying what dissident right people already thought, and I’ve written before on the logical flaws in Arctotherium’s writings. The thing is that Arctotherium is very “based”, so someone who wants to hear preconceived political slogans doesn’t mind the fact that his claims don’t always…

Replies (11)

FFederalAgent
#22

Will you ever publish an ideological turning test for mutational load? I think Caplan talks about this. It seems that critics often misunderstand the theory.

Leon Vossreply to #22
#24

Link? I know ideological turing test means being able to ape a position you disagree with, without a reader being able to tell you actually disagree with it. So basically the same as steel manning. I could do a steel man / ITT of the anti ML case, I guess.

FFederalAgentreply to #24
#26

https://www.econlib.org/archives/2011/06/the_ideological.html I’d consider ML on IQ and mental illness (obesity is basically a mental illness as well) well established. The only studies on leftism are done by you since no one else is interested in testing the theory. I guess they could argue that the causal effect size is lower but critics like Seb always bring up the most irrelevant points.

Leon Vossreply to #26
#27

The theory is too mathematically complex for a lot of people who are used to scatter plots. It’s like responding to wave theory of light with “but my flashlight beam looks straight, explain that!”

A. Smith
#43

Spandrell blocked me on twitter for saying he has the cultural takes of a 13 year old in a t shirt and fedora from 2011.

Also I’ve seen you try to say that mutational load explains social collapse in societies that hadn’t developed modern medicine to preserve weaker infants. Do you stand by mutational load as a factor in the fall of Rome?

Also how is mutational load not lifted from the autistic English guy who lives in England and more generally not just a basic inference anybody who believes in HBD would make rather than a new theory?

Leon Vossreply to #43
#63

Also I’ve seen you try to say that mutational load explains social collapse in societies that hadn’t developed modern medicine to preserve weaker infants. Do you stand by mutational load as a factor in the fall of Rome?

Yes because it’s not just infants, it’s all-cause mortality before reproduction that must decline. The Romans were the wealthiest and most peaceful civilization of all history before modernity, so it’s plausible this declined enough to induce genetic changes which led to the fall of the empire.

Also how is mutational load not lifted from the autistic English guy who lives in England and more generally not just a basic inference anybody who believes in HBD would make rather than a new theory?

Because I added theory and evidence to it, and it’s a minority position in HBD. I stand on his shoulders, for sure, but in science that’s not “lifting from.”

A. Smithreply to #63
#71

Think of your own plight. Your helplessness in the face of the world. You are by your own assessment living proof that quality manpower cannot resist massive social forces. Social dynamics are extremely powerful. They are a sufficient explanation for the rise and fall of human populations. While Mutation Load Theory claims extraordinary power to the degree of being the only necessary factor to understand the fate of populations while being extremely hard to defend across all contexts you would wish to apply it.

As far as I know Dutton never tried to apply his ‘mutant’ hypothesis to pre-modern populations, likely because he is smart enough to recognise the absurdity trying to map such extraordinary trajectories in the fates of peoples to the miniscule possibilities of pre-modern power over mortality.

Is there anything wrong with the old Gobineau suggestion that high populations outbreed, have their fertility depressed by the demands of civilisation, and die in extreme pursuits their nature compels them towards?

I mean I know what the biggest problem with that is. You haven’t found a way to pin your name on top of the position yet.

You are the most egregious engagement-whore in the entire HBD-sphere by far. You are also just very, very bad at it. Your last twitter run was so ludicrous that you got yourself banned (using memes you didn’t create, which you in fact lifted from humanitiesfags you fight with as usual) swinging for the FYP with no regard for your beloved ‘science’ in the slightest.

The most disgusting thing you ever did was try to pin a couple of meaningless brain studies onto the work of John Gatto. But enough of that now.

HBD can only be reduced to factoids because that’s all that it actually has to offer the world. It does not in itself demand any specific actions or politics or classes of activity. And it also is a rather intellectually sterile field. It does not offer the world any novel theories which could not be inferred by intelligent men before we had the tools and data of the last few decades.

You are not here because you like science. Nobody is. HBD is a rabbit a certain kind of autistic likes to chase. It got bigger than it should have during a period of good faith engagement from the right when we were trying to put forward data to support obviously correct positions people didn’t want.

You are an outlier case. An actual dysfunctional narcissist out for a rockstar short path to notoriety. Everywhere you go intellectuals and open minded thinkers reject you as a vulgar absurdity. And still you’re here. Why? What science do you have? A chop-shopped thesis of sweeping biological determinism you refuse to test against anything but kiddie pools of safe data when what is obviously demanded is organic attempts at application against historic cases and parallel populations.

Were medieval peasants mutants compared to their rulers? Renaissance urban poor against nobles? Which populations had the capacity to achieve Mutation Load before modernity? How much thought have you put into this? Have you ever convinced anybody but naive irrelevant HBD groupie spergs so dumb they’d give you 500 dollars for HBD Academy membership that this theory is anything but complete and utter piss?

This is not a ‘midwit’ thesis. Midwits are not real. This thesis is BAD. It is NOT a product of scientific inquiry. It is clearly a product of a deformed personality attempting ego therapy.

This is the HBD sphere’s real problem.

A. Smithreply to #73
#74

This extremely loose and haphazard application to history is exactly the kind of weak and utterly unscientific thinking that poisons the whole project. He obviously hasn’t thought of how this theory could apply to different historical contexts. He just wanted to staple his name and “his theory” to a subject of popular speculation. A serious investigation would have more elaborate positions not just on this but other historic cases.

Or more seriously, would simply not risk tainting the theory by touching the pre-modern world. I offered him an out here but he can’t resist the opportunity to be right and the most advanced thinker on literally everything, no matter how bad an idea it is to wade into the subject at hand with what he has. This is how we got ‘Powerology’.

A. Smithreply to #75
#76

I didn’t introduce the theory to pre-modern populations. He did. The fact he had done so I found potentially discrediting. Was willing to write it off as a mistake made in a moment of excitement. But no, apparently it’s a conviction that holds. And also one with no real thought behind it. This is “science”.

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