I think you are onto something—and I think there is a distinction here between “elites” and “rank and file”, so to speak. Not too surprisingly since these are people from very distinct backgrounds often anyway! I kind of shudder when I see high profile rationalists casually discussing betting or offering prizes of tens of thousands of dollars over small internet arguments, because it’s fairly obvious these people live in a completely different world than mine (where my wife would rightfully have my head if I spaffed half of my year’s salary for internet points). And having different material interests is fairly likely to skew your politics.
One more thing is that often the groups that you describe are most attracted to being libertarian—which is kind of a separate thing, but more right than left coded usually (though it’s the “laissez fair capitalism” kind of right, not the “round up the ethnic minorities and put them in camps” one).
There is a distinctive cluster of issues around “biodeterminism” on which these groups are very, very right-wing on average-eugenics, biological race and gender differences etc.-but on everything else they are centre-left.
This is kind of a key point because there’s also two dimensions to this. One is, “which statements about biodeterminism are true, if any?”, and the other is “what should we do about that?”. The first is a scientific question, the latter a political and moral one. But the truth is that because the right wing has offered some very awful answers to the latter, it has become an important tenet on the left to completely deny that any such statements could be true, which kind of cuts the problem at its roots. This is probably correct anyway for vastly disproved and discredited theses like “black people have lower IQ”, but it gets to the point of denying that IQ is inheritable or correlates at all with anything worth calling “intelligence”, which to me feels a bit too hard to believe (and even if it was—ok, so what is a better measure of intelligence? There has to exist one!).
And well, a community of high decoupling, high intelligence, science minded autists is probably the one that’s most likely to take issue with that. Though again it should be very wary of the risk of going down the lane of self-aggrandizement in which you fall for any supposed “study” more or less flawed that says that group so-and-so is just constitutionally stupid, no need to think any harder about why they do badly.
I think you are onto something—and I think there is a distinction here between “elites” and “rank and file”, so to speak. Not too surprisingly since these are people from very distinct backgrounds often anyway! I kind of shudder when I see high profile rationalists casually discussing betting or offering prizes of tens of thousands of dollars over small internet arguments, because it’s fairly obvious these people live in a completely different world than mine (where my wife would rightfully have my head if I spaffed half of my year’s salary for internet points). And having different material interests is fairly likely to skew your politics.
One more thing is that often the groups that you describe are most attracted to being libertarian—which is kind of a separate thing, but more right than left coded usually (though it’s the “laissez fair capitalism” kind of right, not the “round up the ethnic minorities and put them in camps” one).
This is kind of a key point because there’s also two dimensions to this. One is, “which statements about biodeterminism are true, if any?”, and the other is “what should we do about that?”. The first is a scientific question, the latter a political and moral one. But the truth is that because the right wing has offered some very awful answers to the latter, it has become an important tenet on the left to completely deny that any such statements could be true, which kind of cuts the problem at its roots. This is probably correct anyway for vastly disproved and discredited theses like “black people have lower IQ”, but it gets to the point of denying that IQ is inheritable or correlates at all with anything worth calling “intelligence”, which to me feels a bit too hard to believe (and even if it was—ok, so what is a better measure of intelligence? There has to exist one!).
And well, a community of high decoupling, high intelligence, science minded autists is probably the one that’s most likely to take issue with that. Though again it should be very wary of the risk of going down the lane of self-aggrandizement in which you fall for any supposed “study” more or less flawed that says that group so-and-so is just constitutionally stupid, no need to think any harder about why they do badly.