Saturday, February 10, 2018

Why do evo-psycho bros hate Head Start so much?

Since the evo-psycho bros and their allies like to share their tales of woe with Stefan Molyneux we can get further insight into their views. Although I'm not going to lie, it is a chore to watch Molyneux videos which are extremely tedious. It's even worse to have to relisten to passages in order to transcribe them. Ugh.
The evo-psycho bros' Criminal Justice division are ambitious to create a biosocial criminology system:
We have also published papers that have clearly violated the liberal ethos of academia. Our work, along with the work of our friend and colleagues, has examined the rather important role of genetic influences on human behavior, including criminal behavior (Beaver et. al, 2013b; DeLisi et al, 2014), and various traits such as impulsivity and low self-control (DeLisi et al., 2010; Wright et al, 2012).
Indeed, we and our colleagues have been instrumental in creating an arm of criminological study called “biosocial criminology.” 
One of the beliefs of the biosocial criminologists is that black people are genetically less intelligent and more inclined to criminality than other "races." We've already seen that evo-psycho bros don't actually have any clear definition of race and the number of given races changes at their whim but they don't let that stop them from assigning people to these amorphous categories however it suits them.
And they know which ones are the most criminal, genetically:
The connection between race and criminal behavior is clearly complex and involves a range of historical, social, psychological and individual variables. Evolution however, provides a powerful mechanism to understand the development of human races and the distribution of traits and behaviors within and across races. It helps explain why races would appear and under what conditions races would appear. It helps to explain why certain traits would be beneficial and why these traits such as higher IQ, would be unequally distributed across races. Moreover evolutionary theory helps explain why race-based patterns of behavior are universal, such as black over-involvement in crime. No other paradigm organizes these patterns better. No other paradigm explains these inconvenient truths.
Notice they don't mention economics. And although they do mention "historical" variables they don't actually consider them. They give lip-service to complexity and then throw away anything that makes the issue complex.

Kevin M. Beaver appeared on alt-right Stefan Molyneux's Youtube channel twice, once in May 2015 and again in May 2016 and it is the later one under consideration. Here it is.



First it's important to point out that Molyneux will pull any old thing out of his ass and claim it is true. And he says it was such absolute conviction that unless you're already inclined to doubt him you probably would just accept what he says.

In this video at 45:20 Molyneux says:
It's a little tougher to explain that East Asian babies are born later than white babies who are born later than black babies.
Actually data shows that Black and Asian babies are both born earlier than white babies. A 2004 study on differences in gestation by ethnic group found:
...normal gestational length is shorter in Black and Asian women compared with white European women and that fetal maturation may occur earlier.
Not content to get small things wrong Molyneux gets onto Head Start, the absolute favorite social welfare program for evo-psycho bros to hate, a tradition that goes back to Arthur Jensen who was bashing it by at least 1973
Molyneux 


The frustrating thing for me is what is it a hundred billion dollars that was spent on Headstart which was an attempt to make sure that all ethnicities end up doing as well in school where there were very short-term temporary gains that faded out relatively quickly... what's so frustrating is the degree to which out of this hypersensitivity actual facts are being withheld...


Beaver 

I agree and if you look at these programs whether they're prevention or rehabilitation programs is that they are not very effective.
As usual, Molyneux is full of shit.
In 2009, David Deming evaluated the program, using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. He compared siblings and found that those who attended Head Start showed stronger academic performance as shown on test scores for years afterward, were less likely to be diagnosed as learning-disabled, less likely to commit crime, more likely to graduate from high school and attend college, and less likely to suffer from poor health as an adult.[18]
Now we don't have very high standards for Stefan Molyneux since he's a professional alt-right racist,  but Kevin M. Beaver is the Judith Rich Harris Professor of Criminology at Florida State University.

But Beaver doesn't correct Molyneux's misstatements, he rolls right along with them.
At the end of the video (55:38) Molyneux informs us Beaver's claims about the innate criminality of blacks must be accepted or not only is the problem of black criminality not going to get better, it's going to get worse. He tells his followers to spread the word:
...it's not going to spread through the media who seem to stick their pikes against empiricism due to the Leftist fascination with economic determinism... so it is going to spread because we have this venue on the Internet...
Beaver: ...I think what's important from a scientific perspective... is objective research where we are able to evaluate data and analyze data , pursue any kind of research question we want and then have the merits of our research evaluated, not based on whether the findings make us happy...
As we have seen Beaver gets his research from the white supremacist Pioneer Fund (via The Bell Curve) a fact that the evo-psycho bros simply refuse to acknowledge as an empirical reality.

And as far as Beaver's concern for actual data we've seen his approach:
In all of my research, I have analyzed secondary data which has only included self-identification of race/ethnicity.  As a result, I was never able to examine ancestry based on genetic testing.
So it's especially amusing for him to sermonize on data and objectivity.

As always, the real issue for the evo-psycho bros is Leftists and  their incomprehensible predilections, whether it's their paranoid egalitarianism or their "fascination with economic determinism."

And that's how you throw out all considerations of economics and claim that the reason blacks have issues with poverty and crime is due to their own faulty genetics.
So exactly how much economic data are Beaver and the other evo-psycho bros dismissing? Let's talk about the data of slave economics next.