[shermantanktop]

Is it? Maybe this is just a terrible paper that reads like 19th century theories about Aryans. Those responses sound like they are pointing to a climate of intellectual repression, but...there's a reason we don't have endowed chairs in phrenology or palmistry or astral projection. And if someone proposed such a thing, the responses might not look too open-minded.

As they say, it's good to be open-minded, but not so open-minded that your brain falls out.

[tredre3]

What you're doing by comparing it to phrenology and astral projection is just reductio ad absurdum.

It's not controversial that some personality traits might have genetic roots. It's also not controversial that humans who evolved in different regions have slightly different genetics.

His research combines the two.

[shadowgovt]

But at first glance at the thesis of the research project, there's every reason to doubt the two combined would make any sense here. Among the immediate initial questions it raises is "Most East Asians don't live in subzero temperatures any more, so why do they still act that way?"

One has to remember how many absolute crackpots institutions of higher learning have write in every year. Now that he's done the heavy lifting on his own, there's a paper that can be discussed, but no shame on any institution that saw a nobody in the field coming in with an idea likely to fail to hold any water that went "Yeah, we're going to invest zero resources into that."

Comparison to phrenology, for an unknown quantity, isn't absurd; it's kind of the status quo for universities getting solicitations from strangers. That channel of communication is where the perpetual motion machines, time cubes, and proposals to go find the resting place of Atlantis come from.

[baq]

Yeah but ‘racism bad’ and even suggesting that race might have any meaningful impact on anything at all is unacceptable politically, even if obviously true or impossible to disprove.

[shermantanktop]

He's setting up a choice between the content of his paper vs. intellection repression. And I'm choosing not to take the bait. It's possible that he is experiencing intellectual repression AND his paper is not great.

[like_any_other]

It's not really a 'climate', but official policy that that area of research is off-limits, to the point that tax-funded genetic datasets are withheld if it is suspected one is doing said research: https://www.city-journal.org/article/dont-even-go-there