Contra my previous post, it's kind of wild that NYC's Gifted & Talented program no treatment effect on standardized math test scores. 1/

Meanwhile supporting a man who started a war no wanted to cover up what’s in the Epstein files is apparently cool with all of you. Self righteous hypocrites.

Putting it on the record that court-packing is my red line for supporting a Democratic candidate for president, short of Trump running for an illegal third term. A shame because Buttigieg would otherwise be among the more tolerable ones. But if it's him, I'm voting R, even Vance.

I said *some* liberals exhibit motivated reasoning *around IQ,* ironically because it flatters their self-image as rational, dispassionate empiricists, dunking on hysterical, emotional leftists. To which Jesse responds, snidely, ‘oh, the hysterical leftists thinks *we’re* irrational? Hah!’ Of course this supports my exact point; I made a specific claim about what I believe motivates *some* liberal pundits to hold incorrect beliefs *about IQ and heredity* specifically. I actually made no claim as to a *general epistemic character* of liberals, or of leftists, and I didn’t position leftists as resolutely empiric and skeptical (anyone who follows me knows I would never do this; I am constantly haranguing my fellow leftists for insufficient empiricism). But instead of disagreeing with the specific claims I made—even snidely or rudely, that would be fine—Jesse *substitutes* for different claims entirely. Ones I didn’t make. He ridicules the premise that a leftist could ever criticize liberals for insufficient empiricism, an excess of ideological/social pressure, etc. He’s turning it from a debate about a specific issue into a debate about generalized archetypes. Liberals are correct because they are liberals. Leftists are incorrect because they are leftists. An individual leftist critiquing certain liberals on grounds of insufficient empiricism is facially absurd, to Jesse, because the categories don’t match. The liberal category/archetype is the rational one, and the leftist category/archetype is the emotional one. These archetypes override the individual case. Ironically, this is exactly what I’m critiquing—that a certain kind of liberal pundit, like Jesse here, is so convinced by this archetypical dynamic (the rationalist lib debunking the hysterical leftist), this kind of moralized narrative, that they let themselves sometimes be seduced into empirically wrong positions when it flatters this self-image. When it confirms the archetype and the stock narrative. If emotional leftists refuse to engage with IQ arguments empirically and try to shut it down with taboo, then the liberal can come in and fulfill their archetypal role as the dispassionate nerd. The narrative fits expectations. Therefore, the hereditarian position must be correct—because it fits the liberal’s mental model of lib-left disagreement, and their self-image as defenders of rationality against moralism and ideology. Of course, this is not *actually* an empirical basis for belief. It’s just negative polarization.