| HN Mirror

The dude literally writes articles in which his sole citations are from phrenology-level studies that had been long debunked, killed, and buried by the scientific community that he has found and decided to present to his naive 'rational' audience as though it has something of value to say.

At the end of the day, if you are just some guy interested in the very notion of administering a test to determine, "objectively" the "intelligence" of entire swaths of people, and you take a kind of perverse interest in genetics, clearly, you hope to do something with that information. The very interest in the subject stems from a deeply problematic tendency in human beings and their subjugation of others (see biopower). A more nuanced and arguably more "rationalist" and "first principles" view would actually question the validity of the concept of "IQ" and unitary, decontextualized intelligence in the first place, but since Alexander is not that smart, he doesn't realize this and isn't actually capable of examining the water he's swimming in. Just for kicks, I picked a recent article of his at random and here's the second and third paragraph:

> Starting in the 1970s, the pendulum swung the other way. Twin studies shocked the world by demonstrating that most behavioral traits - including socially relevant traits like IQ - were substantially genetic. Typical estimates for adult IQ found it was about 60% genetic, 40% unpredictable, and barely related at all to parenting or family environment.

> By the early 2000s, genetic science reached a point where scientists could start pinpointing the particular genes behind any given trait. Early candidate gene studies, which hoped to find single genes with substantial contributions to IQ, depression, or crime, mostly failed. They were replaced with genome wide association studies, which accepted that most interesting traits were polygenic - controlled by hundreds or thousands of genes - and trawled the whole genome searching for variants that might explain 0.1% or even 0.01% of the pie. The goal shifted toward polygenic scores - algorithms that accepted thousands of genes as input and spit out predictions of IQ, heart disease risk, or some other outcome of interest.

You should always ponder why someone is exploring what they are exploring, communicating what they are communicating. Why does Alexander have such a peculiar interest in IQ and genetics? Why does he put some abstract definition of "intelligence" on a pedestal? Does he hope to pursue eugenic ends? Does he hope we can find some way to make the populous as a whole "more intelligent"? Did somebody just bully him really bad?

The guy is a neofascist control freak who wants to live in a neat world in which predetermined attribute values justify his attitudes toward various classes of people. I'll never understand why anyone reads his garbage. It's not even entertaining or interesting. It is literally a guy with no credentials navel gazing his way toward an wholly retrogressive, amoral, and colorless social philosophy. It's claptrap.

Then there's this, from another randomly selected article:

> I hate to rag on wokeness further in the Year Of Our Lord 2025, but they’re still the best example I’ve ever seen. You weren’t supposed to defend racists. And so:

> “Hey everyone, Joe Target shouted a racial slur and punched a black guy in the face because he hates minorities so much! This proves that we need hate crime legislation immediately!”

> “But if you read the article, you’ll see they were both really drunk, the black guy insulted Joe’s wife, it was an ordinary bar fight, and there’s no reason to think race was the precipitating factor”.

> "So you’re saying it’s okay and not racist at all to shout a slur at a black person and punch him in the face?”

> “I was just saying that it didn’t seem to immediately be motivated by racism, and should probably be filed under other social problems like drunkenness and violence.”

> "So are you denying that racism exists and causes harm?”

> Well, no. But if your only real point is that racism exists and causes harm, you could have said that racism exists and causes harm, and that wouldn’t have been a lie. Instead you chose to talk about how Joe Target punched the black guy because of racism. Presumably you thought that point made your argument stronger than it would have been if you’d just said that racism existed - maybe 5% stronger. If that’s true, then that extra 5% argument strength is illegitimate, and it’s every honest person’s duty to take it away from you. If you’re allowed to have it, then eventually we escalate all the way to the point we actually escalated to, where people have said in all seriousness that Trump might try to put all minorities in camps and murder them.

Notice that he's arguing against some made-up straw man he fabricated, not actual recorded instances of issues that have occurred (just like Bill Maher's approach to "wokeness"). Not to mention, the whole premise and argument is mind-numbingly stupid, tedious, and relies on percentages pulled from the ether for no apparent reason. If we want to talk about low IQs, we'd better start with Alexander and his audience.

Substantive issues aside, he isn't even an engaging writer. There is nothing in this writing that is stylistically impressive, engaging, or memorable. Are we seriously looking to a guy who likes to pepper in percentages because they have some kind of fetishistic appeal to him for writing advice?