was watching idk watch the video by philosynoir about the racialization of pit bulls and saw this discussion happening in the comments
this is such a perfect example of something I am often trying to articulate to people--the more blunt and violent expressions of people's beliefs in eugenics and race science are often revealed in how they discuss domesticated animals.
you will hear people talk about "pure breeding" or about personality being genetic or openly and uncritically advocating for "mercy killing" as the solution to disability, etc.
these beliefs do not stay contained to conversations on other animals. if you believe this is how life works & buy into these forms of bioessentialist genetic valuation, and you understand humans are also living beings, then you will apply these things to humans too.
one cannot believe in eugenics in one area and have it stay there. it always becomes the "common sense" applied to all sorts of areas of life, from the interpersonal to the international.
New research successfully proves that bone density does not determine floating ability, challenging decades of harmful misconceptions.
A landmark study has debunked the long-held belief that people of African, Caribbean and Asian heritage cannot float due to "heavy bones," after 93% of participants successfully floated for two minutes following proper instruction.
It is interesting that "redheads need up to 20% more anaesthesia" is one of the bits of race science accepted in the mainstream. At first it just comes across as a bit of wacky trivia about an already-kinda-wacky small demographic ("those soulless gingers, they sure do have a temper/are sexually promiscuous/like converting to Islam haha"), but it turns out to actually be a shockingly direct and well-understood biological pathway, as far as they go, from skin and hair pigments to the nervous system? The mutation in the MC1R gene is responsible for red hair by causing the body to only be able to produce pheomelanin instead of melanin... but it turns out this lowers production of proopiomelanocortin, which lowers levels of alpha-melanocyte-stimulating hormone, which reduces activation of melanocortin-4 receptors, which derepresses mu-opioid receptors in the brain and elevates overall basal pain thresholds in some ways but also makes them need more anaesthesia? That's actually crazy and no one really cares or realizes the possible implications? It's almost as if there were reports of a successful Ahnenerbe expedition to Agartha but it's just accepted as scientifically true, you don't even have to go to the dubious blogs for it?
Business school professors trained an AI to judge workers’ personalities based on their faces
I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me TODAY (Feb 17) for an event at KEPLER'S in MENLO PARK with CHARLIE JANE ANDERS and TOMORROW (Feb 18) for an event with WIL WHEATON in LA. More tour dates here.
Theory-free inference is a hell of a drug. For years, Big Data advocates – the larval form of today's AI weirdos – have insisted that if you have enough data, you can infer causal relationships between complex phenomena without ever having to understand how x causes y, and thus, we can slay the dread "correlation is not causation" beast.
This is cousin to Milton Friedman's famous economic catechism:
Truly important and significant hypotheses will be found to have "assumptions" that are wildly inaccurate descriptive representations of reality, and, in general, the more significant the theory, the more unrealistic the assumptions (in this sense)
AI turns out to be a great tool for creating plausible statistical correlates of imaginary phenomena. Remember the guy who claimed to have invented Machine Learning Gaydar by analyzing the faces of gay people and comparing them to straight people? Same dude later claimed to have invented an AI that could guess, from your face, whether you were a Republican or a Democrat:
This is just AI Phrenology, a continuation of the "scientific racism" movement that was invented to provide a justification for colonialism, slavery, genocide and eugenics. It imagines that there are invisible genetic traits that determine things like your ability to be a good boss, or whether you will cheat on your partner, or whether you are destined to be rich. It's a kind of cod-scientific astrology, where you get to declare yourself to have been born with "good blood" that destined you to rule over others.
Amazingly, this "scientific" philosophy has somehow managed to thrive after the rise of computational genomics, the science that analyzes population-scale genetic surveys to identify whether there is any genetic basis for the idea of "races" (and other cherished distinctions of the "human diversity" movement) have been shown to have no discernible basis in, you know, genetics.
As Adam Rutherford – a superb science communication and accomplished computational genomist – writes in his 2020 book How To Argue With a Racist, nearly everyone on Earth is descended from the same tiny group of survivors of a couple of severe genetic bottlenecks, the exception being Africa, where there is far more genetic diversity than in the rest of the world:
A Swede and an Australian Aboriginal person are more closely related than two members of the different groups of San people. If genes were the dispositive factors in human personality and accomplishment, we'd expect to see far more variance in the outcomes of African people than we do between, say, Inuit people and Italians. And yet, somehow people who all live in the same society, facing the same structural challenges of post-colonialism, international looting, and a global IP regime that denies them the ability to manufacture their own medicines and fix their own equipment produces people with remarkably similar outcomes. Meanwhile, it's surprisingly easy to predict the life outcomes of people from very different societies, based on those societies' position in the global hierarchy.
Sure, genetics play a role in shaping our outcomes. We are built out of the interactions between our genome and the physical and social world around us. But all evidence points to the social and physical factors grossly outweighing the genes. Back to astrology: distant celestial objects inarguably interact with us at our births and through our lives. Some infinitesimal tidal stress is exerted upon the Earth by other planets; photons streaming from faraway, long-dead stars shower down upon us. But the gravity exerted by, say, Saturn, on your body as you pass through the birth canal is less than the force exerted by the paper covers the midwife wears over her shoes in the birthing room. Sure, those disposable covers are a lot less massy than Saturn – but they're far closer, which matters when you're talking about forces that attenuate at the square of distance.
Genes play an important role in the development of your brain and the systems that regulate it, like hormones and nerve signals. But that role is clearly swamped by the role that the physical and social environment play as you grow up. You don't have "good blood" or "bad blood."
But people who believe in – and benefit from – social hierarchy have always yearned for a freestanding, objective basis for the fact that they have more and everyone else has less. That's the origin of "efficient markets hypothesis" (I'm rich because the market thinks I'm a good "capital allocater"), of "meritocracy" (if I'm rich, I must have merit), and "evolutionary psychology" ("Honey, it's not my fault I fucked my grad students – blame the bonobos!"):
Which brings me to this week's caliper-wielding AI: the "Photo Big 5" AI that can look at your face and predict whether you're going to be good at having an MBA:
This is the creation of four academics at elite institutions – however, their discipline isn't genetics. They're business school professors. They got a bunch of MBAs' self-assessed results on surveys of "Big 5 personality types" – itself a kind of astrological exercise with barely more rigor than, say, Meyers-Briggs – and then fed these results, along with the subjects' Linkedin profile photos and self-reported salaries and titles to an ML and produced – voila! – a machine that tells you whether you'll be a good manager based on your face!
This is an objectively very funny exercise, like AI Gaydar for middle-managers. They resort to some hilarious obfuscation:
Photo Big 5 exhibits only modest correlations with cognitive measures like GPA and standardized test scores, yet offers comparable incremental predictive power for labor outcomes.
In other words, we created a new random-number generator that is as bad at predicting your life-chances as the SATs or your GPA, two extremely bad ways of predicting your life chances – except to the extent that both numbers can be inflated if you start with a bunch of money and hire elite test-prep consultants. Good thing personal appearance has no correlates with wealth and there's no way to spend money to look more like a member of the elite? Naw, it must be the genetics underpinning the relationships between your "craniofacial features and behavior."
It's easy to see why AI is so tempting to people who want to incinerate any qualitative factors in a complex societal problem, transforming them into dubious quantitative residue that an algorithm can do math on:
It's junk science at scale, with a business model. The purpose of this automated eugenics is the same as every "rational" account of hierarchy in human history: to retroactively justify winners, and to condemn losers before the game even starts.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
My favorite Disco Elysium moment is when you get a lecture about in game races that lasts 30 real life minutes. The man telling you this projects an air of confidence and knowledge. Even if you don't believe in race science, this man clearly dedicated quite some time learning this much information.
After he is finished telling you the Kojko are inexplicably obsessed with potat, and calling you a member of the Ham Sandwich Race, you can ask where he learned this PhD level knowledge of races, to which he admits he just listened to talk radio a lot growing up.
Donald Trump's policies and executive orders don't make any sense ... unless you know the crazy conspiracy theories they're based on.
Michael Harriot at Contraband Camp:
During a Tuesday appearance on Fox News, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. went on a passionate tirade about diseases, the military and teenage boys’ low sperm counts.
The Daily Beast dutifully noted the misinformation in the statement, calling it a “bizarre rant.” The Economic Times described the premise of RFK Jr.’s hypothesis as a “wild claim.” Jezebel asked why the former drug addict who disposed of Yogi Bear’s body apparently wants more teen fathers. However, every single news outlet seemed to overlook one critical aspect of RFK Jr.’s worm-brained, science-less screed:
It was based on the “white genocide” theory.
The idea that immigration policies, multiculturalism and easily available abortions were part of an international conspiracy to erase white Protestant men from the planet have floated around far-right extremist circles for years. Still, white genocide was just a little-known conspiracy theory bandied about by the alt-right until former Fox News host Tucker Carlson found out about it, under its new name:
The Great Replacement Theory
After inspiring mass murderer Dylann Roof, justifying a racial massacre in Buffalo, N.Y., and contributing to the rise of French politician Marine Le Pen, the rebranded white genocide dogma made its mainstream political debut with Donald Trump. White nationalists at the Unite the Right rally chanted “you will not replace us.” Replacement theory is the dirty little secret behind mass deportations, Trump’s pledge to build a Mexican wall and his concern for South African farmers. And according to recent reports, it’s why Trump has finally come up with a plan to make America great again.
He’s going to make more white people.
While individuals of European descent account for approximately 16% of the world’s population, the United States is only 58.4% white, a 21% decrease since 1980, when non-Hispanic whites made up 80% of the U.S. population. Between 2010 and 2020, the U.S. Census Bureau reports that the white community has experienced an 8.6% decline. At the same time, the number of multiracial Americans increased a whopping 276% (sorry, Dr. Umar).
On the bright side, non-Hispanic whites account for:
60% of people seeking fertility treatment
66% of newlyweds
66.4% of Fulbright scholars
70% of the rural population
57% of Trump voters
If these seemingly unconnected statistics seem arbitrarily chosen or random, they are not. The Trump administration is targeting these groups as part of an effort to persuade women to have more babies.
[...]
As crazy as it sounds, the presidential plan to address the white genocide is just one example of Trump basing political strategy on kooky, white-wing conspiracies. In fact, understanding obscure white supremacist ideology and exotic extremist dogma might be the only way anyone can comprehend the logic behind some of this administration’s most puzzling decisions.
[...]
The War on White Masculinity
Along with RFK Jr.’s claims about sperm, men’s rights activists argue that feminism, LGBTQ rights and DEI are part of an attack on white men. Supposedly, the plan to reduce white men to spermless, asexuals who can’t fight is lurking everywhere, from the COVID-19 vaccine to the military-industrial complex.
In fact, when discussing Project 2025, most reporters understandably overlooked a seemingly random statement in the Conservative Promise: “The Army no longer reflects national demographics to the degree that it did before 1974 when the draft was eliminated.”
What does that even mean?
For years, conservative media outlets, Nazis and men’s rights activists have been whining about the steep decline of white enlisted in the U.S. fighting ranks . That’s why Trump replaced the U.S. military’s Black and female leaders with less-qualified white men. It’s why Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth purged trans people from the military but re-enlisted 8,700 men who refused the COVID-19 vaccine. It’s why Hegseth, who doesn’t believe women should serve in combat roles, often uses the term “warfighters” to describe the military personnel he is most concerned about.
[...]
Race, Science and White IQ
Race science advocates like Peter Thiel, Elon Musk and Trump believe that race is not a social construct. According to this pseudoscience, white people are genetically more intelligent than “sub-Saharan Africans,” and that programs like affirmative action contradict the biological reality.
This is the real reason behind Trump’s anti-DEI campaign.
[...]
No list of conspiracy theories is complete without antisemitism.
While the Trump administration has followed the Project 2025 directive to dismantle government agencies and protocols that collect racial and ethnic data, the age-old belief in a Jewish conspiracy remains intact. When MAGA followers rail against “globalists” and the “deep state,” they mean “the Jews.”
The president regularly erupts into anti-semitic rants, even alleging that his Jewish son-in-law, Jared Kushner, was “more loyal to Israel than the United States.” The first Trump administration had an actual Nazi, and Jewish leaders have repeatedly called for Trump to fire senior White House adviser Stephen Miller. And, on Wednesday, the Trump administration texted faculty members at Barnard College to ask if they were Jewish. But perhaps no single person embodies the collective antisemitism of the Trumpworld more than one man:
George Soros.
According to MAGA , Soros is a Jewish supervillain who funded a migrant “caravan,” started Black Lives Matter, paid for the Ferguson uprising and was the mastermind behind the Jan. 6 attempted coup.
Several of Trump’s policies are inspired by far-right racist thinking (see “great replacement theory").
I need more fellow white people to learn about the history of "scientific" racism, eugenics, and phrenology because they are so important in understanding modern racism
