Aporia was recently invited to a small gathering of researchers. Among them was Emil Kirkegaard, a social geneticist and dissident scientist.
At the top of Emil’s first Google page is a link to a curious profile on a website called RationalWiki. It is full of lies and tendentious half-truths designed to discredit him and his research.
It is run by a psychology professor in New Mexico (USA) called Trent Toulouse. He works at New Mexico Community College and is part of the mostly pseudonymous team running the RatWiki organization, the organization that owns and runs the website. It works on the standard Wikipedia format, where they let anyone edit, at least in theory. This community-sourced material status gives them a kind of legal liability cop-out for the material they host, in the same way that YouTube isn't responsible for the comments people post.
This radical left website — formerly a bastion of New Atheists — exploits its suspiciously high Google ranking to demean anybody who researches controversial topics and gets the “wrong” answers. Despite the obviously polemical nature of its profiles, some people take the website seriously.
The RationalWiki editors know this. They relish the rhetorical power of confirming their ideological prejudices under the banner of the legitimacy-conferring word “Wiki.” Many people, including many journalists, think that RationalWiki is Wikipedia, which is surely not an accident.
Although both Bo Winegard and Noah Carl have RatWiki pages (as does Aporia itself), Emil’s is something else. So we asked Emil to tell his story about the damage it can cause to scholars and outlets interested in controversial topics.
Note: this isn’t about any particular scientific claim of political belief. And you do not have to agree with the average Aporia article to find RationalWiki despicable. This is about free speech and free inquiry. It's about the pursuit of truth.
The best way to discover the truth is to explore topics intrepidly, forwarding arguments and evidence. And this is exactly what enemies of free inquiry like RationalWiki try to prevent. They make the impersonal world of science the very personal world of ad hominem attacks and slanders.
This short film is possible thanks to our paid Substack supporters. If you think this work is important, please consider becoming a paid supporter after watching — the link is below the video. And if you’d like to find more about Emil, click on the link to his Substack below the video.
RationalWiki has, since at least 2014, been one of those sites where the branding is exactly backards: It isn't in the least concerned with rationality, nor is it actually an open wiki.
Kirkegaard is indispensable. Keep telling the truth.