"The great idiot of social science" has been fired from BigThink

[orcenio]

Satoshi Kanazawa is a evolutionary psychologist who was fired from the blogging site Psychology Today two years ago for causing an internet firestorm by claiming to have “proven Black women to be objectively ugly”. His cites completely unsupported his sexist/racist claims, but he became somewhat of a internet troll-celebrity (Black Women Less Attractive - Is the Outrage Due to Flawed Researched or Political Correctness?). As a result his university also forbade him from posting in non peer-reviewed forums for a year.

When his probation period ran out he was picked up by the blogging site Big Think which caused a lot of annoyance there. Well, today I’m happy to report that after 7 months Big Think has dropped the troll for lack of scientific rigour.

Over the past few months, across various social media platforms, and also from the mouths of some of our own bloggers, I have listened to a sustained critique of Kanazawa’s presence on Big Think. Indeed I think it a testament to our commitment to intellectual openness that we allowed the discussion to play out on Big Think’s pages, in the form of blog posts, and on our social media platforms.

The most compelling arguments have cited numerous examples of faulty science in Kanazawa’s body of work, and the growing consensus in the evolutionary psychology community that his research is a poor representation of the field. This is particularly concerning given the fact that the core message of Kanazawa’s blog is that his work represents empirically correct science, and that his claims are unassailable on that basis.