Speaking as someone who did upvote the comment because the data was interesting- there are serious issues here. I’ve seen stuff on VDARE which involved very poor presentation or evaluation of data, and the motivation for it was pretty apparent. The signal to noise ratio there is extremely bad, and there’s a lot that’s just out and out racism in the strong sense of thinking that members of minority groups are of less moral value.. The post you set was quite interesting. But frankly, whenever I see something from there I have to doublecheck the data to make sure they aren’t screwing up in some way. For simple matters of signaling, if I were to link there I’d include a note of the form “yes, this website is full of racists but in this case their summary data is pretty accurate.” Steve himself seems to be pretty tonedeaf- I suspect a lot more people would listen to him if he didn’t post stuff on such overtly racist locations.
Steve himself seems to be pretty tonedeaf- I suspect a lot more people would listen to him if he didn’t post stuff on such overtly racist locations.
In the 1990s and early 2000s, he was writing for respectable mainstream conservative papers. The trouble is, once you’ve written too openly about certain topics, you will be ostracised from the respectable media, and these limits of acceptability are getting ever stricter and narrower. And once you’ve been placed under such ostracism, unless you’re willing to restrict yourself to writing for free on your personal blog, you can only write for various disreputable outlets where you’ll have to share the URL or column space with less seemly people.
The fake data usually is the most interesting, in so much as ‘interesting’ is a measure of surprise or confirmation. Also before saying ‘it is pretty accuarete’, the actual accuracy (vs the sources etc, or vs whenever they did the study at all) got to be evaluated. Usually people say ‘pretty accurate’ about stuff like this whenever it simply looks plausible to them.
I’ve seen stuff on VDARE which involved very poor presentation or evaluation of data, and the motivation for it was pretty apparent. The signal to noise ratio there is extremely bad
I’m not sure you saw my point here. Yes VDARE is a politically oriented site, its goal being immigration restriction thus duh some people with racist attitudes are probably writing for it. Selectively applying such standards for the discussion of some policy issues seems like a bad idea. I can see your point if I was citing someone with a very poor reputation who happens to be right, but I don’t at all agree citing someone who is ok when it comes to data and its interpretation, who happens to have written for a magazine that sometimes isn’t ok.
Speaking as someone who did upvote the comment because the data was interesting- there are serious issues here. I’ve seen stuff on VDARE which involved very poor presentation or evaluation of data, and the motivation for it was pretty apparent. The signal to noise ratio there is extremely bad, and there’s a lot that’s just out and out racism in the strong sense of thinking that members of minority groups are of less moral value.. The post you set was quite interesting. But frankly, whenever I see something from there I have to doublecheck the data to make sure they aren’t screwing up in some way. For simple matters of signaling, if I were to link there I’d include a note of the form “yes, this website is full of racists but in this case their summary data is pretty accurate.” Steve himself seems to be pretty tonedeaf- I suspect a lot more people would listen to him if he didn’t post stuff on such overtly racist locations.
In the 1990s and early 2000s, he was writing for respectable mainstream conservative papers. The trouble is, once you’ve written too openly about certain topics, you will be ostracised from the respectable media, and these limits of acceptability are getting ever stricter and narrower. And once you’ve been placed under such ostracism, unless you’re willing to restrict yourself to writing for free on your personal blog, you can only write for various disreputable outlets where you’ll have to share the URL or column space with less seemly people.
The fake data usually is the most interesting, in so much as ‘interesting’ is a measure of surprise or confirmation. Also before saying ‘it is pretty accuarete’, the actual accuracy (vs the sources etc, or vs whenever they did the study at all) got to be evaluated. Usually people say ‘pretty accurate’ about stuff like this whenever it simply looks plausible to them.
I’m not sure you saw my point here. Yes VDARE is a politically oriented site, its goal being immigration restriction thus duh some people with racist attitudes are probably writing for it. Selectively applying such standards for the discussion of some policy issues seems like a bad idea. I can see your point if I was citing someone with a very poor reputation who happens to be right, but I don’t at all agree citing someone who is ok when it comes to data and its interpretation, who happens to have written for a magazine that sometimes isn’t ok.