Andrew Sullivan not allowed to tweet the wrong science

But do Twitter outrages about off-narrative science work on net?

The main function of angry activist people on Twitter is to limit the discourse to within the limits they find acceptable. Since Twitter and other social media have mostly left-wing users, and leftist users are more politically active, and get banned for their political activism less often, their politics dominates the platform. As such, when a big account tweets something that is far off-narrative, this will get viciously attacked. Unless the target is very steadfast, they will often cave under this pressure. We've seen Claire Lehmann of Quillette cave before when she was pressured on Henry Harpending, an illustrious anthropologist. He was one of the researchers behind the famous Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence study, that we partially confirmed back in 2019, and independently by Davide Piffer soon afterwards in 2019. Harpending's mistake was to talk honestly about Africans at some obscure conference, and this of course is a grave crime in the current regime:

Still, Lehmann left up her original tweets. This is not the norm. People usually delete them to make the attacks stop, as the attackers of course do not bother reading any follow-ups. Attacks on a tweet usually happen by quote-tweets by big attack accounts. I've had my fair share of these, but here in this post I will talk about the one that happened to Andrew Sullivan when he dared to tweet our recent economic growth study:

The case study is significant due to him having 280k followers, making this one of the largest accounts to have tweeted our recent work. After receiving tons and tons  screenshots of RationalWiki with the usual denouncements and lies about me, he caved. But it took him about 10 days, so I think he did well. Tweets do not get much attention later in their lifespan anyway, so holding out 10 days means one has gotten nearly 100% of the attention that tweet could deliver. Here's the apology and deletion tweet:

His reply is to a Cathryn Townsend. She's one of those socialist anthropologists who talk about Science Says all day long, while having no scientific talent at all.

She doesn't have a Google Scholar, and her ResearchGate is laughable for a senior researcher:

According to her Linkedin, she was a PhD student at University College London from 2010-2014, so she has been a researcher in science for about 13 years, and yet has produced about 11 works, less than 1 per year. Somehow she still became a "Research Associate at Baylor University", because of course, she received the socialist and the woman bonus in the hiring committee.

Ironically, the paper that Cathryn linked to in order to make her case is a preprint, that is, a non-peer-reviewed study by her friend Rebecca Sears, another anthropologist high in socialism, and with some halfway decent research skills. For people who talk so much about peer review and Proper Science, they don't seem to mind when it's their own stuff. Of course, on this blog we know that peer review isn't magic. In fact, it is kinda bad, maybe overall net negative compared to the alternative of editorial review.

Overall, it is not entirely clear what these Twitter outrages do on net. They do frequently cause people to backtrack on topics. However, they also provide a lot of attention to the things socialists want to censor, making it easier to find out what the forbidden topics are. In this way they might often function as an own-goal Streisand effect. Our economic growth paper certainly benefited from their outrage, so: thank you!

As for Sullivan, he seems determined to bring these issues into the forefront. Just a few days later, we can find him tweeting this rhetorical-ish question about race gaps, citing blogpost by Steve Hsu (who was also cancelled for crime think):