Oddbean

I used to keep a list as cancel culture started ramping up, but then I stopped because it was clearly happening too quickly for me to keep up. I'm guessing there are close to a hundred thousand people now. Nonetheless, here are some names I jotted down over the years. I cannot vouch for any of these people. Being on the list just means they lost something (job, social media, bank account, etc) based on their political opinion voiced via free speech which was not in violation of any written policy (e.g. when it comes to social media). I have some data on some of these stories, but not for all of them. Some of them have died since, several have committed suicide, others begged to be let back into society and turned into cancellers themselves. So like I say, being on this list does not mean I vouch for them in any way, and many names I don't recognize. Aaron Kindsvatter Alan Dershowitz Alessandro Strumia Alex Jones Alice Dreger Ashutosh Jogalekar Bari Weiss Bret Weinstein Brian Lieter Brian Peckford Candace Owens Charles Murray Chris Hedges Christina Hoff Sommers David Starkey Debra W Soh Don Brash Donald Trump E.O.Wilson Eric Lander Erika Christakis Faith Goldy Gary Garrels Gavin McInnes Gordon Klein Harald Uhlig Isabella Chow James Damore James Watson John C Dvorak Jordan Peterson Lauren Southern Lawrence Krauss Lawrence Summers Lindsay Shepherd Lisa Littman Mark Knight Mary Spellman Matthew Hubbard Mehgan Murphy Mike Adams Noah Carl Philippe Rushtin Rebecca Tuvel Richard J Hernstein Rick Metha Roland G Fryer, Jr. Ron Sullivan Sergei Tabachnikov Stacy Brown Stephen Molyneux Steve Hsu Steven Galloway Steven Pinker Teresa Nielson Theodore P Hill Tiffany Riley Sir Tim Hunt William A Jacobson

Humans are not born as tabula rasa. Our behaviors are partially genetically determined. But we are born with a very high level of plasticity allowing us to configure to our cultural norms and the local langauge, for example. Lewontin and Gould were afraid of the social implications of this knowledge, that it would be used as an excuse by racists to terminate certain genetic lineages, and they thought they were doing the right thing by denying the truth, especially given that the holocaust was just 30 years prior to this debate. But denying an inconvenient truth doesn't make it go away.

Twin studies bear this out. It is sometimes suprising how similar twins separated at birth are, even though they had very different cultural upbringings. So E.O. Wilson's rejection of tabula rasa was correct, and the "International Committee Against Racism" was over-the-top, cocksure and wrong. Yet if you search the Internet for E.O. Wilson you'll find many writings about how he was a bad man, how he promoted "scientific racism." The modern (mostly American) movement to reject inconvenient truths and replace them with desires (for that is my best description of what is going on) is naturally detrimental and destructive and is the root cause of America's slow but inexorable downfall.