From my purist position, everything scientists say, qua scientists, can only be true or false or somewhere in between. No other criteria besides the truth should matter or be applied in evaluating scientific theories or conclusions. They cannot be “racist” or “sexist” or “reactionary” or “offensive” or any other adjective. Even if they are labeled as such, it doesn’t matter. Calling scientific theories “offensive” is like calling them “obese”; it just doesn’t make sense. Many of my own scientific theories and conclusions are deeply offensive to me, but I suspect they are at least partially true.
Once scientists begin to worry about anything other than the truth and ask themselves “Might this conclusion or finding be potentially offensive to someone?”, then self-censorship sets in, and they become tempted to shade the truth. What if a scientific conclusion is both offensive and true? What is a scientist to do then? I believe that many scientific truths are highly offensive to most of us, but I also believe that scientists must pursue them at any cost.
That would be much more convincing coming from literally anyone other than Kanazawa. It takes very little charity to interpret his critics as saying, not “Your theories are inherently racist” but “Your theories are only some of many compatible with your findings; you are privileging them because you are biased in favor of hypotheses that postulate certain races naturally do worse than others”.
I don’t know what to learn from the quote. It’s literally true, but it’s also clearly unhelpful, since Kanazawa writes this while following non-truth-seeking algorithms. Maybe the moral is “If someone calls you a mean name, address the content of the criticism and not whether the mean name applies”, or maybe “Don’t be a giant flaming hypocrite”.
--Satoshi Kanazawa
That would be much more convincing coming from literally anyone other than Kanazawa. It takes very little charity to interpret his critics as saying, not “Your theories are inherently racist” but “Your theories are only some of many compatible with your findings; you are privileging them because you are biased in favor of hypotheses that postulate certain races naturally do worse than others”.
I don’t know what to learn from the quote. It’s literally true, but it’s also clearly unhelpful, since Kanazawa writes this while following non-truth-seeking algorithms. Maybe the moral is “If someone calls you a mean name, address the content of the criticism and not whether the mean name applies”, or maybe “Don’t be a giant flaming hypocrite”.
He isn’t a great scientist in my mind since he seems to often just lazily reverse stupidity, but it was a good quote.