Satoshi Kanazawa is a bad boy. He studied the actual responses of 20,000 people to a survey and found that Asian males and African-American females had the fewest dates in US colleges.
The answer, he said, is that they are less attractive. You know what happened next. He was accused of being an evil, sick, racist, sexist, dwarf. He relates his experience below:
“In April 2011, I attended a seminar on the topic of the sexual and “hookup” behavior of American college students. The seminar speaker had data, collected from online surveys conducted over a decade, from nearly 20,000 respondents from 20 different universities, on all aspects of their dating and sexual behavior.
“One of the findings that she presented – but could not explain – was the consistent pattern that, on all university campuses in the United States, black female and Asian male students had the fewest dates and sexual partners. I was very intrigued by the finding and wanted to explain it. (It’s in my nature as the Scientific Fundamentalist that I cannot leave any interesting empirical finding unexplained. I have to explain everything.) My initial suspicion was that this might be because black females and Asian males were less physically attractive than their competitors. Thus began my scientific interest in race differences in physical attractiveness. As Paul Harvey used to say, “And now you know the rest of the story.”
“Very curiously and quite coincidentally, in the past 12 months, there have been at least three articles, published in highly prestigious, peer-reviewed scientific journals, which confirm all of my conclusions and speculations in my original blog post last year.
“Ultimately, however, it doesn’t matter, because this is no longer about empirical facts or scientific truths. It’s a matter of emotions and feelings, history and culture. What I have learned in this ordeal is that, in the Year 2011, there are certain questions that scientists may not ask, or, more accurately, for some questions, there are certain answers that scientists must a priori preclude from consideration. There are certain conclusions that scientists may not reach about some groups of people. Many commentators have pointed out in vain that, using exactly the same data and exactly the same statistical methods, I have also shown that women are significantly more physically attractive than men and black men are significantly more physically attractive than nonblack men. Few complained about these findings, because they are not politically incorrect.
“In the real world in which we live today, not in the ideal world envisioned by David Hilbert, certain questions may still not be asked, and certain conclusions may still not be reached. It’s a very difficult world for the Scientific Fundamentalist. E pur si muove.”
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“E pur se muove” – (it should be “eppur si muove”) means “and yet it moves”, and is what Galileo is said to have uttered to the Inquisition after he was forced to recant his heretical view that the earth and other planets went around the sun.
We tend to think we are more enlightened than those silly cardinals of the benighted Roman Catholic Church, who condemned Galileo for his Copernican solar system. This is nonsense. One of these days the Church of Political Correctness will be disgraced as thoroughly by one of its future martyrs as Galileo has disgraced the Catholic Church, and the disgrace will last as long as the one the Roman Church engendered when it held the heliocentric universe to be a heresy.