I sympathize with your reaction. But one can go overboard with this: if the heuristics disqualifying potential sources for a view are too aggressive, then no one will be qualified to present that view, even if it turns out to be right. For instance, the disqualifying description of Summers in the above comment is questionable:
Larry Summers...He’s not a famous… expert in...really anything else. He’s mostly famous for is this speech,
He won the John Bates Clark medal, awarded to the best economists under 40, basically the Fields medal of economics. He is almost universally acclaimed as brilliant within the economics profession, was Clinton’s Secretary of the Treasury, a major economic adviser for the Obama administration, and Chief Economist of the World Bank.
He’s not a famous geneticist
Is that your real objection? Both James Watson and Francis Crick, who shared the Nobel Prize for their work on the DNA double helix, have expressed pro-eugenics positions, and the view that genetic explanations of ethnic differences in IQ are plausibly to likely significant. I.e. the most famous geneticists ever. Will Shockley, who won a Nobel in Physics for invention of the transistor, also got in a lot of trouble for pro-eugenics positions, and his views on race and IQ. Would you be OK with comments linking to and citing them on their controversial views? Or discussing the reactions to those views?
I sympathize with your reaction. But one can go overboard with this: if the heuristics disqualifying potential sources for a view are too aggressive, then no one will be qualified to present that view, even if it turns out to be right. For instance, the disqualifying description of Summers in the above comment is questionable:
Take a look at his wikipedia article.
He won the John Bates Clark medal, awarded to the best economists under 40, basically the Fields medal of economics. He is almost universally acclaimed as brilliant within the economics profession, was Clinton’s Secretary of the Treasury, a major economic adviser for the Obama administration, and Chief Economist of the World Bank.
Is that your real objection? Both James Watson and Francis Crick, who shared the Nobel Prize for their work on the DNA double helix, have expressed pro-eugenics positions, and the view that genetic explanations of ethnic differences in IQ are plausibly to likely significant. I.e. the most famous geneticists ever. Will Shockley, who won a Nobel in Physics for invention of the transistor, also got in a lot of trouble for pro-eugenics positions, and his views on race and IQ. Would you be OK with comments linking to and citing them on their controversial views? Or discussing the reactions to those views?