Satoshi Kanazawa rehabilitated by the Cathedral
I was reading The Economist yesterday, amusingly checking out what the Cathedral and its minions are up to these days. I checked in vain for any news about Kate Rothschild, but it seems the family won't touch the subject. Oh well.
I did find something amusing though, if totally unrelated. An interview with Satoshi Kanazawa! Yes, Kanazawa the evolutionary psychologist. He used to have a very good blog at Psychology Today, titled “The Scientific Fundamentalist”. Well he titled it wrong. Last year he was expelled, widely denounced and lynched in the internet for daring to write a blog post about the fact that black women are considered ugly by most races. Besides being true, Kanazawa is the first guy who wouldn't want to talk about race and sex, he being an Oriental man, whose odds in the sexual marketplace are almost as bad as black women's. But he is a fundamentalist for truth, so he wrote it. Well, the other, real deal fundamentalists cracked down and sent him to exile.
I l... l.... love Big Brother
I thought he had been Watsoned for good, but hey, here he is in the Pravda of the powers that be. He even got a big picture of himself taken. It does look a bit forced though, like the face that Winston Smith would put in front of his party superiors. I wonder what did he have to do to get exonerated. Has he been seen in public with a black woman recently? Perhaps he has been forced to screw Michelle Obama and write a report on how now he knows that race doesn't exist.
The interview though is quite good, a very to the point talk about Kanazawa's most famous theory, namely that general intelligence (g) can be defined as the ability to deal with evolutionary novel situations, i.e. things that didn't happen often in humanity's ancestral environment. He argues that the dumbest of dumb people are perfectly equipped with the skills to live in the African savannah, mainly feeding oneself, finding a hot mate and screwing her. Intelligent people though are more likely to have problems finding mates, to drink alcohol, to do drugs, to listen to instrumental music, to enjoy reading, etc. All things that didn't exist in the savannah.
I was going to write that his theory is way too simplistic, but then I remember reading that 24% of american college grad women had experienced anal sex, but only 17% of high school grads. So perhaps there is something to it. Smart people are more consistently weird, but in my experience the degree of weirdness doesn't quite correlate with the IQ level (meaning a 140 IQ person isn't consistently weirder than a 130). Or does it? His point that dumb people are better parents also sounds forced. The dumbest people on earth, Australian abos, routinely raped and ate their children. Kanazawa argues that smart people have less children so that makes you a worse parent. He could have just said that dumb people have more kids, which is true, than use the phrase "better parents“, which is too open to interpretation. But he had to say so I guess. Now that I think about it, that's the price he had to pay for his rehabilitation. The whole interview is about "the disadvantage of smarts". Which is another way of saying "IQ doesn't exist", i.e. "we're all the same", i.e. "the social engineering programs we fund with your taxpayer's money are going to continue and all my friends and family will be hired by them and there's nothing you can do about it."
Still I'm glad to see him back. I have a particular appreciation for him for being a born and raised japanese scientist who has made it abroad, and can actually speak English! That's as rare, no, much rarer, than a beautiful black woman. So cheers for Kanazawa.
UPDATE: Here's another recent video by Kanazawa: We haven't evolved in 10.000 years. Perhaps Greg Cochran and Henry Harpending might want to have a word with him. Is this another surrender to the Progressive creed? Say it ain't so.
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replyPoor Dr. Kanazawa. I think that academia in a modern popular government (especially the social sciences) is a very hard place to be honest, since its function is the production of lies. I'm surprised he didn't get chowed earlier. BTW, I've always thought that 1984 would have made for a great musical. "Don't put the rat cage, Don't put the rat cage, Don't put the rat cage On my faaaaaace!" With some dancing numbers. The guys from South Park would probably do a bang-up job.
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I really don't see Cathedral thinking in here (besides the implicit aetheistic assumption). "Because reproductive success is the ultimate goal of all living organisms" If you start from that premise, the whole article makes sense. He doesn't deny IQ or what it means (functionally). He simply evaluates reproductive success as the one and only metric. If that's your metric, IQ definately seems to get in the way. It's a fundamentally aethiestic believe that life itself is only a means to an end of reproducing. Liberalism, of course, doesn't even go that far. In liberalisms view the goal isn't to reproduce, but to flood the brain with the positive chemicals that we are designed to release in connection to reproduction among other things, through any means necessary. If actual reproduction can be cut out of the equation that's fine too. Happy brain chemicals, not reproduction, is the goal of their materialism. So in this sense Kanazawa shares the belief that there is no higher form of life as a result of God's existance (God is dead). They just have different conclusions based on that similarity. Of course maybe I'm being to had on Kanazawa. In several of his articles he notes that, "there is a difference between 'is' and 'ought'." So his description of reproduction as the highest metric may be an 'is' description rather then an 'ought' moral statement. It is important for those that believe in morality (which is only possible in a religious framework) to be able to differentiate between 'is' and 'ought'. Those that can't become science and reality hating fundamentalists.
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Cathedral thinking is implicit when The Economist publishes you. Just think how a liberal would think after reading this. The most likely conclusion would be: "yeah smart people suck, blacks are more vibrant and so deserve AA" Kanazawa doesn't think that way. He most probably thinks that high IQ people's trouble mating should be compensated by some eugenic policy. But he can't go that far writing in Pravda, can he?
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I only watched about half that video. Enough to realize that Kanazawa just doesn't know much about how human evolution or evolution in general works. He badly needs to read the Cochran and Harpendig book, "The 10,000 Year Explosion".
Kanazawa's wiki page says that after the Black chicks are ugly incident: "An internal LSE investigation found that Kanazawa had brought the school into disrepute and prohibited him from publishing in non-peer-reviewed outlets for a year". It sort of admits that the whole peer review system is a means of thought control.
Well, duh. Given that the function of academia in our society is to tell the press and government what to think and what ideals to hold, it would be very dangerous to just have any loose cannon with a Ph.D. popping off with anything that came to mind. The Soviets had party meetings where the personal conduct of Comrade Ivanov would be on the agenda, too. Of course the system isn't perfect and some slip through the cracks (Cochran, for instance,) but if you piss off the powers that be, they will crush you. Look at Summers, Watson, etc.