Mga app ng Google
Pangunahing menu

Post a Comment On: Steve Sailer: iSteve

"A $1,185.00 book on "The Philosophy of Race""

37 Comments -

1 – 37 of 37
Blogger gwern said...

It's just pricing bots fighting each other on Amazon; you only have to sell one or two such books to eek out a profit. Don't think too hard about it.

9/26/13, 9:07 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

A lot of it seems to be about racism, not race.

9/26/13, 9:11 PM

Blogger Assistant Village Idiot said...

Gee, it's a nice long one. You must get a lot for your money with that, huh?

9/26/13, 9:20 PM

Blogger Aaron Gross said...

Kitcher's 2007 article isn't available for free. So, anybody care to post his definition of race? (My blind prediction: that it was not as much like Steve Sailer's as he thinks it was, that it was along the lines of "ancestral clade.")

9/26/13, 9:25 PM

Anonymous Ian said...

I don't want to live in the same society as these people.

9/26/13, 9:35 PM

Anonymous Bobby said...

Seems like one could just type "Race is a social construct" into google and save a bunch of money.

9/26/13, 10:30 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Can't wait till they have to get real jobs

9/26/13, 10:40 PM

Anonymous eah said...

A perhaps related excerpt from a post at Mangan's: Only 40 to 45% of science journal articles are ever even cited. I can imagine it is less than that for papers in the social sciences. Ahem.

9/26/13, 10:55 PM

Anonymous DYork said...

Is there even ONE essay that doesn't fundamentally divide the world and theories about the world as being Bad Whitey versus Good Blacky/Good "people of color"?

I'll bet not one.

How's that for diversity (of opinion).

9/26/13, 11:00 PM

Anonymous Nanonymous said...

Kitcher's 2007 article isn't available for free.

The very first hit in Google:
web.mit.edu/writing/2009/June/Does_Race_Have_a_Future.pdf

"The notion of race is thus that of an inbred lineage ... That notion is available for generating infraspecific units within any species, including Homo sapiens. About a decade ago, I proposed that this was the way to make sense of
race as a biological category."

9/26/13, 11:27 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

It's just pricing bots fighting each other on Amazon; you only have to sell one or two such books to eek out a profit. Don't think too hard about it.

The high price is listed on the publisher's site. It's slightly cheaper on Amazon.

9/27/13, 12:14 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Anonymous said:It's just pricing bots fighting each other on Amazon; you only have to sell one or two such books to eek out a profit. Don't think too hard about it.

The high price is listed on the publisher's site. It's slightly cheaper on Amazon.

.................................................................................

This modern classic is likely priced so high because institutional buyers purchase things with other people's money. University libraries pay dearly for all kinds of overpriced crap that no one else wants.

-The Judean People's Front

9/27/13, 1:00 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

The first thing that came to mind when I saw this post was the old joke that an audit of the pentagon's bar tab is sure to reveal a few $300 screwdrivers.

-The Judean People's Front

9/27/13, 1:16 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Amazon offers a 18% discount. $976.86. Pretty good deal.

9/27/13, 1:20 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

(My blind prediction: that it was not as much like Steve Sailer's as he thinks it was, that it was along the lines of "ancestral clade.")

Or not.

9/27/13, 2:32 AM

OpenID staffanspersonalityblog said...

I noticed that one lecture was held at Sodertorn, Sweden. It's kind of our equivalent of your Oberlin. The president of Sodertorn has written a publication on how textbooks in physics are biased in favor of men. For instance she quotes one that mentions that Mars is named after the Roman warrior god. What girl would ever care for physics after hearing that?

9/27/13, 4:03 AM

Anonymous SFG said...

The other books in the series have similar prices. As some of the other posters suggest, they're probably ripping off institutional libraries. I recall reading journals were quite expensive for a library as well.

9/27/13, 4:04 AM

Anonymous SustainableDiversity said...

This book appears to be a few hundred pages of unadulterated nonsense. Unfortunately it is precisely bilge like this that shapes the opinions and worldviews of otherwise intelligent people. I think that the majority of people just dont realize yet that just because something is in print or on TV doesnt mean that it is well intentioned or even factually correct. (actually it took me a pretty long time to learn this as well. Its pretty traumatic realizing that your entire worldview that you have grown up in is pretty much a fraud and a manipulative swindle)

9/27/13, 4:09 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Didn't appear to be a single instance of scientific inquiry about genetics and race. It was all about citing what Heidegger or Hannah Arendt or Spike Lee had to say about race.

Now I'm not saying that my 4 years studying philosophy was a complete waste BUT....at some point (the day I took up my roommate suggestion that I read Konrad Lorenz' "On Aggression" and Tinbergen etc.) I realized that I had been shortchanged. What does Heidegger have to say about race that makes him worth listening to? Or Arendt? They aren't Natural Scientists and even if they were, much water has flowed under the bridge since they lived and breathed. This is precisely why I didn't go on to grad school in the humanities and decided to get another bachelors but this time in the a hard science.

9/27/13, 5:20 AM

Anonymous BB753 said...

Anything by Cornell West is worth over 1,000 bucks. Even his rap recordings. Lol!

9/27/13, 5:25 AM

Anonymous candid_observer said...

The great thing about the former Soviet Union was that the propaganda was free.

It is an injustice inherent to our system of capitalism that only the elites can afford our propaganda.

9/27/13, 7:25 AM

Anonymous Mr. Anon said...

It costs alot to be properly ill-informed.

9/27/13, 7:31 AM

Anonymous candid_observer said...

Kitcher is a heavyweight?

You wouldn't know it by reading his article, or indeed anything he has had to say about the concept of race.

His argument in this article is impressively weak. It really amounts to little more than the assertion that we can't talk about race among human beings because it's dangerous. This is so even if it is perfectly legitimate to talk about races of other species under the same set of biological facts.

Wow, we really needed some deep philosophical thinking for that breathless insight. I'm sure that if Kant is turning green in his grave, it's from envy.

9/27/13, 9:05 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

One reason the civic conscious like public libraries and require universities to have libraries is to funnel money to select authors, newspapers, and thinkers.

I keep wondering why the kiddos today need paper textbooks? But the conclusion I reach is that the textbook is the way the system can make money, it has nothing to do with what the best way to deliver a string of characters and maybe so diagrams and pictures is.

9/27/13, 10:28 AM

Blogger james wilson said...

Every one of these people except West can be cured by spending one year inside a re-education camp, say, NE D.C. or Detroit.

9/27/13, 10:50 AM

Anonymous Henry Canaday said...

"Kitcher doesn't exist"
- Race

9/27/13, 11:32 AM

Blogger pat said...

I offered this advice before but I'll repeat it again.

Steve Sailer - you should publish a selection of his old columns as a Kindle book. Cochran and Harpending published a bunch of their old blog posts as a Kindle book called West Hunter (the same name as their blog). The relevant fact is - I bought that Kindle book. It didn't cost much and I didn't have to drive to a book store or wait for UPS. This is the ideal medium for impulse purchasing.

The 'Blogs to Books' route seems painless. Ann Coulter writes a column once a week. She periodically binds together about twenty of them and has them published. This is a relatively simple way to create a book on public policy topics. But it still requires dealing with a traditional publisher with their proofreaders and typesetters. But it also requires a book tour. Most authors just aren't magnetic enough to merit five minutes on 'Morning Joe' much less 'Jay Leno'.

But a Kindle book can be launched effortlessly.

Last year I would have said that a Kindle was just another techie fad like 3D. I had a real Kindle and I had tried to read some books on it but it was a miserable experience. But then I got a 10" Google Nexus tablet. The Nexus has very high resolution and a large reading surface.

Coulter's books cost about $18 in hardback, $12 in paperback and $9 in Kindle. 'West Hunter' sells for only $4 as a Kindle book. That's less than a magazine. You could put out a book on education and sell it for $5. Or race, or several other topics.

I was considering to do this myself before I decided to make movies instead.

Albertosaurus

9/27/13, 11:42 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Anonymous BB753 said..."Anything by Cornell West is worth over 1,000 bucks. Even his rap recordings. Lol!"

I had a girlfriend about 15 or so years ago that really wanted me to read Cornell West. She was an extremely attractive tall blonde (from Norway but lived in the US since she was 10 or so). She was extremely intelligent. I met her when we were attending the same top 10 bschool (she was far brighter than I was).

So I read "Race Matters". It was complete gibberish and, after much suffering, I managed to finish. The "arguments" in the book consisted of him making one relatively minor assertion and from that drawing sweeping conclusions about society: A=B and B=C therefore the whole alphabet is racist.

The only black people she had ever met went to Exeter or Princeton with her. She honestly thought rap videos were meant to be parodies of how whites viewed blacks. I didn't bother trying to convert her.

That's what we're up against.

9/27/13, 12:22 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Wildly OT, but might be an interesting read to Steveites:

http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/identity_politics_is_killing_college_life/14066#.UkXdlGTF0Qg

9/27/13, 1:19 PM

Blogger C. Van Carter said...

To put how overpriced that book is in context note you can purchase an entry level Fart Bomb Bag for only $2.99.

9/27/13, 1:51 PM

Anonymous Wes said...

I always wonder about books like this: Does anybody actually read them? Oh, I know they are "read," sort of, by like-minded academics looking for impressive-sounding articles they can cite in their own work. But does anybody actually sit down and read this drivel for its own sake? Does anybody pick up a book like this and kick back with a glass of wine for a pleasant evening of intellectual stimulation?

How did we get to the point where we pay people to write things that nobody ever really reads? I don't mean things that are only read by highly-trained specialists — average readers would be baffled by the intricacies of chemical engineering, but I have no doubt that actual chemical engineers sit down and actually *read* headache-inducing stuff that is relevant to their discipline. I am fairly certain that nobody will ever read most of the essays in a spirit of serious inquiry.

9/27/13, 2:12 PM

Anonymous Magic Nuts said...

Well, at least they do potential buyers a favor and list Cornell West first. If he's who they lead with, how can anyone possibly think this will be anything other than PC fluff?

9/27/13, 4:13 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Re, Wes: There are plenty of essays in this collection in third-rate specialist journals that few people who are not leftist philosophers of race would read; but Part 5 (the part with Kitcher) appears to me to have several essays in top philosophy journals by respected philosophers.

I haven't read any of them, but (as a philosopher myself) given the time I would enjoy reading the Mallon, Andreasen, Kitcher, Haslanger, and Glasgow et al. I might after I have tenure and feel more free to write about these kinds of topics. And yes, I would read them in the spirit of serious inquiry. No doubt I would find much to disagree with in their essays, but these are serious philosophers and smart people, even if their ideological blinders are different from my own.

9/27/13, 5:25 PM

Blogger JR said...

A book on something that does not exist!

9/28/13, 2:01 AM

Anonymous Jules said...

No essays by Nevan Sesardic? Sounds like a rather one sided take on the subject.

http://www.ln.edu.hk/philoso/staff/sesardic/publications.html

9/28/13, 5:18 PM

Anonymous Alice said...

Wes,
I was a grad student in compsci at a top school in the US. The profs there were from MIT, IIT, Stanford, Technion, Cambridge. Grad students were from MIT, Technion, Harvard, etc. My research involved an arcane theory and proving certain narrow mathematical results. In this sub sub specialty, one result was a really big deal; every grad student could cite it. This result was published in a book written by the two Israeli authors who proved the result. This result was on page 11.

I bought the book to understand the proof, and to learn this subject better. Instead I learned that *no one* in my field in any CS dept in any country (other than the two authors) had ever read the book. That's why no one cited anything past page 11.

If it is that bad in cs, it is beyond terrible in humanities.

9/28/13, 8:20 PM

Anonymous Volund said...

Jules, let me second that. Nevan Sesardic's articles are must-reads for anybody interested in the scientific reality of HBD. But of even greater importance to HBD is the philosopher Michael E. Levin's luminous masterpiece from 1997, Why Race Matters. (Not to be confused with the similarly-titled piece of culture-bolshevik propaganda by Cornel West.) Levin not only exhaustively documents the global persistence of black cognitive and social dysfunctions, he rigorously demonstrates that a hereditary origin is the overwhelmingly probable explanation for their existence and robustness.

9/30/13, 4:37 AM

Comments are moderated, at whim.
You can use some HTML tags, such as <b>, <i>, <a>

Comment moderation has been enabled. All comments must be approved by the blog author.

You will be asked to sign in after submitting your comment.
OpenID LiveJournal WordPress TypePad AOL