I googled the author and this came up as one of the first results:
"Cofnas formerly studied under Neven Sesardić. Like Sesardić, he identifies as a proponent of hereditarianism and "racial realism" (a term used by white nationalists like David Duke as well as the HBD online movement). He argues human races are valid biological categories against the scientific consensus they're not; he disagrees with the American Association of Physical Anthropologists (2019) Statement on Race and Racism"[0]
(EDIT: I'm aware the source above isn't totally unbiased but I couldn't find anything else about this guy!)
I couldn't find much more besides that he's a philosophy PhD candidate. [1] I suspect he doesn't have the education or credentials to truly study this matter (biology, genetics, neuroscience, etc) and this essay seems to mostly be an argument on the morality of studying these, not the actual science as it has been discovered thus far.
We are profoundly unprepared to delve into such research, in a manner akin to, say, a preschooler attempting to study the structure and process behind the creation of a photorealistic 3DCG scene. They can recognize colors and how they delineate objects, fine. Can they speak to the technical details of the rendering pipeline? How light works, in the abstract? Do they have an understanding of perspective? Of the underlying math involved?
In so-called "group differences in intelligence," can we define intelligence satisfactorily? Can we define the "groups"? We understand what a gene is and broadly how it contributes to an organism's physiology, but in complex phenomena such as intelligence, can we yet track how each gene contributes? Can we even break down intelligence into its phenotypical building blocks? Do we even know if it's an additive system, in the manner implied? Or is it perhaps more convoluted, with "helpful" genes in one context "hurting" in others?
I'd argue that we're simply not technically equipped to come to any meaningful conclusions, or even to inquire forthrightly, in regard to intelligence, except in the broadest and most surface-level terms, in that the unseen mechanisms driving our models are far more complex than we can see from our current perspective.
And god forbid anyone involved in either effort is "colorblind."
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[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 22.6 ms ] thread"Cofnas formerly studied under Neven Sesardić. Like Sesardić, he identifies as a proponent of hereditarianism and "racial realism" (a term used by white nationalists like David Duke as well as the HBD online movement). He argues human races are valid biological categories against the scientific consensus they're not; he disagrees with the American Association of Physical Anthropologists (2019) Statement on Race and Racism"[0]
(EDIT: I'm aware the source above isn't totally unbiased but I couldn't find anything else about this guy!)
I couldn't find much more besides that he's a philosophy PhD candidate. [1] I suspect he doesn't have the education or credentials to truly study this matter (biology, genetics, neuroscience, etc) and this essay seems to mostly be an argument on the morality of studying these, not the actual science as it has been discovered thus far.
[0]https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Nathan_Cofnas [1] https://philpeople.org/profiles/nathan-cofnas
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/02/the-unwelcome-r...
https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2018/may/02/why-gen...
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/may/18/race-science-o...
In so-called "group differences in intelligence," can we define intelligence satisfactorily? Can we define the "groups"? We understand what a gene is and broadly how it contributes to an organism's physiology, but in complex phenomena such as intelligence, can we yet track how each gene contributes? Can we even break down intelligence into its phenotypical building blocks? Do we even know if it's an additive system, in the manner implied? Or is it perhaps more convoluted, with "helpful" genes in one context "hurting" in others?
I'd argue that we're simply not technically equipped to come to any meaningful conclusions, or even to inquire forthrightly, in regard to intelligence, except in the broadest and most surface-level terms, in that the unseen mechanisms driving our models are far more complex than we can see from our current perspective.
And god forbid anyone involved in either effort is "colorblind."