| Maybe background plays a role here. My perspective is that I used to think like you growing up as a Creationist, and I can't see a major difference between the arguments OP is making and the arguments that were made to me by members of my church. I used to be highly dismissive of group consensus, I used to say that if you couldn't explain your point in a way that convinced me in specific, that I didn't care how many people agreed with you. I now think that consensus is an important metric that should be at least considered, particularly in areas where I am not an expert. Of course, we've seen areas where the broader scientific community was wrong. Before race science became a fringe argument used by fringe segregationists, it was a generally accepted conclusion. But again, underconfidence is just as dangerous as overconfidence. You can't pick one, you have to reject both. > you reached your conclusions based on the output of the academic system (presumably). At the end of the day I have to base my conclusions on something, and I think basing them on scientific output is a better place to start than basing them on ideology. Even from the much more subjective metric of "do I trust the communities who argue for this", climate-science doubters and gender-science doubters don't come out looking well. During the early rise of neural networks, where consensus was that this was extremely promising for AGI, I could find neutral, intelligent people that I respected who disagreed with that conclusion. That made me feel much more confident rejecting the general consensus myself. On the subject of gender-science, I can't find the same number of quality defectors. To me, the people saying that race/gender are heavily tied to IQ look a lot like Creationists, and I ain't getting pulled into that trap again. |
I'm curious what led you away from creationism. Was it purely a matter of observing most people aren't creationists and deciding to go with the crowd? Or did people argue with you about it (perhaps implicitly via things you read or watched) and you came to realise the arguments didn't hold water?
Given no competing evidence against it, I'm happy to go with the apparent consensus on a topic, especially if it doesn't matter to me. Where there's disagreement combined with a question that matters though, argument-by-apparent-consensus doesn't do it for me anymore.
Partly this is because of what I saw in the Bitcoin community. That whole community lost its mind after a small minority of people hijacked the communication channels, started deleting any posts they disagreed with and loudly insisted that their (crazy, unsupported) views were actually the scientific consensus, that anyone who disagreed was either uninformed or - when they couldn't quite get away with that argument - simply in a tiny minority and should be ignored. None of that was true but because concepts like "consensus", "intellectual minority", "edge of science" etc are totally subjective they were able to effectively create in people's minds that belief despite that it was false.
I see a lot of that sort of behaviour in academia now. There are people who say, wait a minute, does that claim stack up? And in response what they get is "Shut up, you aren't qualified to have an opinion, 97% of scientists all agree so they can't be wrong". Such claims of consensus usually fall apart when examined, but you can't get the word out because those same people are doing everything they can to silence disagreement.
That's why I don't think we can really trust much academic output. The signs of groupthink are all there. Note: I distinguish between science and academia. Lots of great science is done by corporations, e.g. in the field of AI. It's the institution of academia that has the problems, not science as a concept.
To me, the people saying that race/gender are heavily tied to IQ look a lot like Creationists, and I ain't getting pulled into that trap again.
Look in what way? The people I've seen say that are all scientists or people quoting them. I don't like these conclusions either, because I'd like to believe my own intelligence or IQ is related to hard work and not DNA. As would everyone! But I can't just blow the people off who have research showing these things because of how they look. Surely that'd make me the whatever-ist?