Really? Well, here’s a funny thing: I recall some quite vigorous discussions of Nisbett’s Geography of Thought by the academics on the HBD listserv back in the day”€”the day, I mean, that dawned and dusked a decade or so before the Kos guy even heard of HBD. (If I wanted to be really snotty I might add that I have published two, count ‘em two novels populated almost entirely by Chinese people. But of course I am too modest to indulge in such flagrant self-promotion.)

“T,” the guest blogger at NextLevelUp, took a different tack. (And a longer one. He was just clearing his throat with that 1,900-word part 1. He followed it up with a 3,600-word part 2 and supplemented both parts with long responses in the comment sections! I am very much obliged to the friend who recently alerted me to the abbreviation “€œtl;dr.”)

What did he have to say? As I’ve just intimated, I didn’t read more than a portion of it”€”life’s too short”€”but I have it on good authority that the nub is: HBD-ers are white male losers who are ashamed of themselves for not living up to the superiority they claim for their race.

Does T actually know any HBD-ers? I know a couple of dozen. I’ve known some of them since the days of the listserv. (They included more than one female”€”here’s one“€”and more than one nonwhite”€”ditto“€”and a couple of self-made millionaires.) I’ve hobnobbed with HBD proponents for over a decade: stood on platforms with them, argued with them, fallen out and made up with them, stayed over at their houses, and got drunk with them once or twice. And this twerp, who can barely name one, is telling me about their personality issues? Pfffft.

It is in any case the lowest, most disgraceful kind of invective to accuse your opponent of mental illness. “€œI and other right-thinking people disagree with you. Therefore you are mentally sick.”€ A riposte on the same deplorable level would be: Well, maybe you are just a canting coward. As Mencius Moldbug said in a different context, speaking of the theories of Kevin MacDonald:

I admire conviction, I despise cant. Anti-Semitism was cant in Munich in 1936, or in 1886 for that matter. It is cant in Tehran today. In California in 2007, it can be nothing but conviction.

More robustly: Knowledge is knowledge and bears no necessary relation to the knower’s personality. There is a deep and fascinating branch of mathematics named Teichmüller Theory. Oswald Teichmüller was a passionate Nazi, last heard of fighting for Hitler’s Germany on the Eastern Front in 1943. I suppose T believes that Teichmüller Theory must therefore be invalid. If he’d like to discuss the issue with some actual mathematicians, I’d be happy to make the introductions.