It is a model of the Age of Enlightenment marketplace of ideas

This is what an intellectual discussion should be.  Scott Alexander is the author of the late lamented blog Slate Star Codex and its replacement Astral Codex Ten.  ACT was created on Substack to put it beyond the direct reach of raging mobs of CRT/SJ ideologues insistent on denying human rights (particularly free speech) to those with whom they disagree.  Alexander is a psychiatrist and member of the rationalist community.  He writes about a wide range of topics such as effective altruism and artificial intelligence but the reality is that he writes more about what he finds puzzling or intellectually unexpected than he does about particular topics.

And when he writes, he does deep research and brings a habit of counterintuitive insights to the topic.  

On both platforms, he has built a large following of fully engaged commenters whose discussions are sometimes even more insightful than the original post.  It is the apotheosis of Age of Enlightenment free thought and free speech, following logic, experience and evidence across multiple fields of expertise to arrive at conclusions, tentative or otherwise.  Which is why it was so alarming when the New York Times sought to do an attack piece on Alexander.

I am a big fan of Scott Alexander.

Noah Smith, not so much.  Bright?  Certainly.  And a decent writer but lacking the verb and sheer intellectual curiosity of Alexander.  Also, too much a scion of the mainstream media, firmly committed to most the fashions and fads of the Mandarin Class and therefore more fettered in his thinking, unwilling to risk his social standing.  At least, that is my cold impression.  Because the ordinariness of his pieces and the consistency with which he adheres to the old nostrums of the socialist left, I do not read him with great frequency.  

Recently, Smith reposted a piece of his from 2013, How successful are Jews really? by Noah Smith.  

It is an age old question, Why are Jews so successful?  And it is part of a larger issue in which I am interested; Why are there periods of exceptional epistemic cultural blossoming?  For example Greece from 550-450BC, Scotland from 1750-1850, Japan from 1850-1950.  You find these periods of florescence scattered through history.  Sometimes they are largely singular defined periods as with Scotland - among the poorest and least developed nations, a sudden ascendence to the front ranks of civilization and then a reversion to historical mean.  Then there are those nations where there seem to be multiple waves of blossomings such as England (1650-1950) or Netherlands or Japan.  Certainly the US from 1750-2021.

Is it just circumstantial?  Is it perhaps culture?  Religion?  Institutions?  The happenstance of the coincidence of incredibly bright individuals?  Geography?  

We don't know.  It is certainly multi-causal and quite likely there is a degree of circumstantial uniqueness among the examples.  But an endlessly intriguing question.

In the case of Jews, their success has usually been ascribed to hereditarian causes (high IQ) and to cultural constructs which favor success.  

Smith is staking out the ground that Jews are not particularly special in the first place (both Smith and Alexander are Jewish) and that the appearance of excess achievement can be explained by selective immigration, urbanization, asymmetric identification of who is Jewish, temporary group effects and temporary country effects.

Smith makes some interesting points but I am strongly inclined towards the culture and hereditarian argument.  I do not find Smiths argument that there is no excess success to explain and his dismissal as merely the artifact of selective immigration, urbanization, etc. particularly convincing.  Some interesting points, but no more.  

Alexander saw this reposted article and constructed his own post, Contra Smith On Jewish Selective Immigration by Scott Alexander.  As is his wont, Alexander gets specific and data oriented.  He doesn't just deal in words, he deals in measured realities. 

Noah Smith asks whether Jews are really disproportionately successful.

(in case it shapes the way you read any of this, both he and I are Jewish)

By the numbers, it would seem they are. US Jews have a median household income about 50% higher than US Christians, a net worth about 6x that of Christians, and are about twice as likely as Christians to make more than $100K/year. They're about twice as likely as Christians to get college degrees, and about 15x more likely to win Nobel prizes. These numbers are of about the same magnitude as the gap between blacks and whites, so if you take those numbers seriously, you should probably take these ones seriously too.

But Noah wonders if this really needs an interesting explanation, or if it's just a series of boring things on top of each other. 

Alexander then addresses each of the five explanations offered by Smith as to why the appearance is not real or why it has an ordinary explanation.  Read Alexander's article for the details.  His response is full of links and explications, data, on-the-one-hand and on-the-other-hand.  It is reasonably typical of his writings.  You can't help but learn something new, both factual and interpretive, whether you agree with him or not.

And, as always, there is a lively and data-filled and argument-rich discussion among Alexander's commenters which defend, expand or attack Alexander's points.

After the first round, you have Smith's position that Jews are not particularly unique and there is not much to be explained beyond ordinary things like selection and urbanization.  Alexander's position fortifies with data the argument that there is an exceptional performance which does need explanation and then uses further data to undermine Smith's five explanations.  

Importantly, though, he notes:

Noah concludes:

Now, I'm not saying that these factors explain 100% of Jewish overachievement. I'm simply saying that A) all of these factors make the original hypothesis of Jewish special-ness seem somewhat less interesting, and B) some, though not all of these factors will tend to bias upward any statistical measures of Jewish achievement.

And I'm not saying they explain zero of it. Both of us agree that they explain somewhere above zero and less than 100% of Jewish overachievement. So how come I'm arguing with Noah?

Noah admits that his goal is to make the hypothesis of Jewish specialness sound "less interesting". I'm against this. I would like it to remain interesting and something that people pay attention to.

It is a good clarification.  I still think that there is a real phenomenon to be explained and that Alexander has significantly the better argument in the first round.  But why does Alexander think it important for Jewish specialness to remain interesting?  

Why? The Standard Model of American Ethnicity says that there are whites and non-whites, whites are rich, non-whites are poor, and this is because of structural racism where whites are oppressing everyone else. Reality gets beaten and twisted until it can be shoehorned into this model - gifted programs that are 80% Asian "perpetuate whiteness", etc. The reality is that every ethnic group is different from every other ethnic group, including in socioeconomic status, with white people usually somewhere around the middle.

Click to enlarge. 

(source: Zach Goldberg)

If you dismiss every group that does better than whites, then you can tell a story where all inequality is caused by white people controlling everything and creating covert structures/institutions that favor whites. If you don't dismiss those groups, the story becomes harder. Anti-Semites had their own story about problems caused by Jews controlling everything and creating covert structures/institutions that favored Jews. Nowadays we rightly reject that story. But in order to continue rejecting it, we have to come up with strained explanations to make Jewish achievement less interesting, because we've already committed to using the structural racism explanation for every group difference that seems relevant to us. 

I would have put it differently, but I broadly agree.  We have allowed an intellectually vacuous notion (all group differences can only be explained by structured discrimination) to preclude real investigation about those differences and what might be done to allow more people to flourish to a greater extent.  The solution lies not with outlawing structural discrimination.  There is precious little evidence of such structural discrimination we have wasted decades and billions to no consequence on solving the problem of ill-defined and poorly evidenced structural discrimination.   

But like any good Age of Enlightenment conflict of ideas, you don't just end with the declaration of ideas.  You argue them.  Smith comes back with A response to Scott Alexander on Jewish achievement by Noah Smith.  He starts off with a clarification about what it is he thinks they are arguing about.  

First, a quick word about how I think about this issue. Scott writes:

Noah admits that his goal is to make the hypothesis of Jewish specialness sound "less interesting". I'm against this. I would like it to remain interesting and something that people pay attention to.

In fact, that is not my goal. It was merely my conclusion, after hearing about Jewish achievement for pretty much my entire life and finally sitting down to think about it carefully.

I am not sure that that is a meaningful distinction but it is worth noting.

The rest of his responding article is this time more substantive than the initiating essay.  There are occasional links and data and deeper consideration of the relative merits of ideas.  

On the whole, Smith scores a few points and refines a few conclusions.  There is some contributive merit to his five theses.  I think selective immigration is weak but contributive.  Urbanization and asymmetric identification of who is Jewish might be real but I suspect relatively weak effect sizes.  Temporary group effects and temporary country effects?  More open to these ideas but warrants more investigation and reflection.  

Overall, though, I think Alexander holds the high territory in this argument.  Culture and hereditarian influences cannot be ignored and probably are the biggest explanatory components.  See Zach Goldberg's essay which provides very substantive evidence of this.  

Overall, regardless of the relative probabilities of the respective arguments and the precision and competency with which those arguments are made, we are left with two very bright individuals disagreeing about something important, engaging with their respective ideas in rational and civilized ways to the benefit of all.  It is a model of the Age of Enlightenment marketplace of ideas.  We need more of this rather than ideological fervor, vituperative essays and ad hominem arguments.  A breath of fresh air is this discussion between Scott Alexander and Noah Smith.