He doesn't, but he does qualify as someone on the receiving end of content-free smears and libels, and 'eugenicist' is a useful term of abuse if you want to convince others that someone is a bad person.
My understanding is that he believes people should be able to exert some level of control over the genetics of their offspring, but that he is strongly opposed to any type of coercive eugenics. Some people would consider him a eugenicist because of his position.
I do consider that eugenics, but I just wouldn't use that term because people's brains turn off when they hear that term. It's a useful term if we want to discuss social policy, but only if people have the emotional reservoir for nuance.
All societies practice eugenics to some extent, whether in banning relatives from marrying, choosing abortion when the child would have terrible life conditions, or selecting mates based on biological traits like beauty.
From the first paragraph of Wikipedia:
> Eugenics (/juːˈdʒɛnɪks/ yoo-JEN-iks; from Ancient Greek εύ̃ (eû) 'good, well', and -γενής (genḗs) 'come into being, growing')[1][2] is a set of beliefs and practices that aim to improve the genetic quality of a human population,[3][4] historically by excluding people and groups judged to be inferior or promoting those judged to be superior.[5] In recent years, the term has seen a revival in bioethical discussions on the usage of new technologies such as CRISPR and genetic screening, with a heated debate on whether these technologies should be called eugenics or not.[6]
If history, the source of the definitions of all words, has defined eugenics to mean men with mustaches filling out charts about which women are contributing the most to "race improvement," then it would probably be best to accept that's what it means.
> In recent years, the term has seen a revival in bioethical discussions on the usage of new technologies such as CRISPR and genetic screening, with a heated debate on whether these technologies should be called eugenics or not.
This contention referenced by Wikipedia shows that the debate goes well beyond Nazis. There's no other convenient non-euphemistic word for this concept.
Why don't we call the evil uses of the ideas of heredity "eugenics," and call the good uses of DNA science, "genetic medicine." Plenty of other words have good/evil divides, like "surgery" vs. "assault with a deadly weapon."
certainly, and you've chosen your blonde, blue-eyed partner attentively, but those traits are recessive, so when you find that your children will not have them you want to abort and try again.
slippery-sloping the ideas of control very quickly leads to nightmarish scenarios, of course slopes tend not to be slippery just because we fear they may be, but sometimes the slipperiness of a slope will seem not a problem until the right social movement comes along and takes advantage of it, best to be prepared is the pessimist's take.
If by "he" you mean Turing, then no, not in the sense that Pearson, Galton, or Fisher would be considered eugenicists today. Nor in the sense that Charles Davenport, who ran CSHL and the Eugenics Office, would be considered a eugenicist today.
Not sure about Alexander, I don't really pay attention to what he writes about medical biology.
Almost certainly not in the sense that most people might object to (so you are committing the "Non-central Fallacy"). And your distrust sounds franlky paranoid.
I'm sorry I wasn't aware of any of that. I think the post I shared is fairly innocuous though and doesn't promote or contribute to an agenda of ethnic cleansing.
> isn't he a eugenicist? I know everyone loves to "separate the artist from the art" or w/e but that one thing really does make me distrustful of every single other thing he writes. What are his goals, how does this fit into them.
IIRC, he's not a eugenicist, but shares one of their big assumptions (that intelligence is heritable and some ethnic groups are smarter than others).
His commenters are the kind of people who have decided this:
> that intelligence is heritable and some ethnic groups are smarter than others
is true because if it was true, Berkeley feminists with humanities degrees wouldn't want to admit that, and they find those people annoying, therefore the option that makes you go "well we just have to face the facts" must be the case.
Of course, the first part of the sentence doesn't imply half the things they think it does, certainly doesn't imply the second, and even then the implications "…and it must be genetic" "…and there's nothing we can do about it" "…and that's why we're more virtuous than those other people" would not necessarily be true.
(Genetics, like social sciences, doesn't produce reliable results because it uses observation studies and hasn't heard of the credibility revolution thing yet. Intervention studies are either beyond our capabilities or would be unethical to do.)
> Dor Yeshorim (Hebrew: דור ישרים) also called Committee for Prevention of Jewish Genetic Diseases, is a nonprofit organization that offers genetic screening to members of the Jewish community worldwide. Its objective is to minimize, and eventually eliminate, the incidence of genetic disorders common to Jewish people, such as Tay–Sachs disease. Dor Yeshorim is based in Brooklyn, New York, but has offices in Israel and various other countries.
[snip]
> In both the Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jewish communities, there is an increased rate of a number of genetic disorders such as Tay–Sachs disease, an autosomal recessive disorder that goes unnoticed in carriers, but is fatal within the first few years of life in almost all homozygotes. (The exception is the rare adult-onset Tay–Sachs, which is normally not fatal but is incapacitating.)
[snip]
> Dor Yeshorim screens only for recessive traits that give rise to lethal or severely debilitating disorders, providing prophylactic, rather than diagnostic services. They do not screen for disorders arising from dominant gene mutations, as these cannot be prevented by informed mate selection. Only conditions which can be reliably reported as a positive or negative genetic match are tested.[8]
In short, they're trying to use selective breeding to remove certain genetic traits from the population.
There is no interpretation I can think of whereby Alan Turing or Daniel Kahneman could be considered eugenicists, so I have to assume you mean Scott. And no, Scott is not a eugenicist. He's a psychiatrist who is also extremely critical of statistical deficiencies and cognitive biases, especially as they play out in social science research and science journalism, so that is his goal with all of these think pieces on why some headline making the rounds is probably wrong. Not much different than Andrew Gelman in that respect, though far more of an amateur, that is, Scott is very far from an expert in statistics, though he's pretty good at reading scientific research.
What I imagine you've heard is people who have seen the way he treats his comments section and his approach to discourse as a commitment to hearing all sides. Before he went to Substack, he took down his blog because of a NY Times hit piece alleging he supported Charles Murray, which wasn't really true, but he was critical of universities not allowing Charles Murray to speak. He is also fairly known for his "tend his garden" thing on his own blog, which means he favors people who are polite in the way they comment over people who don't hold abhorrent points of view. For instance, his blog is about the only non-explicitly racist place you'll still see Steve Sailer on a regular basis, who is definitely a eugenicist. But to Scott, he doesn't really mind if you spend 90% of your commenting effort over several decades committed to the real problem with America being that our worst cities are overrun with genetically inferior black people, just so long as you're polite about it and don't start fights in his comments.
The unfortunate side effect of this that I don't think Scott has ever grappled with and maybe never will now that he's making money from it is that his blog has gradually fallen prey to the Gab/8chan effect that being the last person to tolerate bad people means your blog is going to become overrun with bad people. His comments sections have tremendously deteriorated over the years because of that. Everybody is very polite and friendly with each other while discussing incel theory and the problems of low IQ in the global south.
That said, Scott himself still overwhelmingly writes about nerd topics, like his absolute obsession with prediction markets. It's practically every other post. Just avoid the open thread posts that where the comment direction is entirely driven by the audience rather than by him selecting a topic.
And, I guess for completeness, I believe someone on Twitter once posted "evidence" of Scott admitting in private that he believed blacks were genetically predisposed to low IQ. He has never publicly said anything like that, so I guess take the word of some random person on the Internet that produced a collection of pixels with whatever size grain of salt you think that warrants.
> Before he went to Substack, he took down his blog because of a NY Times hit piece...
That's a distortion. He took down is blog because the NYT journalist planned to use his real name, which is their typical practice. They didn't even have to break confidence to find it out, because he had publicly made the link in published work. This was also before he (or anyone else) saw the article. He and his fans seem to be under the false impression that their extremely-online internet-forum mores apply to all of society, and were outraged.
It's also an exaggeration to call the article a "hit piece." It wasn't glowing fluff, and that's all. I don't think he and his fans would have been satisfied with anything except an uncritical report of how they see and understand themselves.
No reporter is forced to out someone by “typical practice”, it’s a deliberate action. Revealing Scott’s identity only added heat to the story, not light.
That's a list of seven things, over a time period spanning 50 years. More than half appear to be cases where the person or their family were in legitimate physical danger. In all listed cases, it's the author's identity that was kept secret, not the subject of an article.
> No reporter is forced to out someone by “typical practice”, it’s a deliberate action.
In cases like Scott Alexander's, they're not compelled to hide anyone's identity either.
> Revealing Scott’s identity only added heat to the story, not light.
Maybe in the mind of his fans, but obviously not in the reporter's view. And frankly, all the "heat" came from Alexander's reaction and that of his fans.
> He has never publicly said anything like that, so I guess take the word of some random person on the Internet that produced a collection of pixels with whatever size grain of salt you think that warrants.
You're claiming they faked that? That's silly. Scott's main purpose in life is being extremely nice to various weird irrelevant species of right-wingers in his comment sections; when he writes a post about politics the main thesis is that you too should also calm down and be extremely nice to them, which is why he makes the posts so long you'll forget what you were upset about by the time you finish reading them.
When it comes to say, Berkeley feminists, who are occasionally mean to him in real life, he's never nice to them and calls them practically Voldemort (direct quote).
He also likes to occasionally quote his irrelevant right-wing friends like Moldbug (or Charles Murray), ostensibly to write responses taking them down, but of course if we all just ignored them they'd go away and the main reason to write any kind of response to them is to let people know they exist.
As previously stated I think you should ignore everyone from Berkeley or else they'll make you join their polycule and discuss AGI alignment all day.
