You can add location information to your Tweets, such as your city or precise location, from the web and via third-party applications. You always have the option to delete your Tweet location history. Learn more
Apparently, plenty of people understood this tweet to mean Dawkins is in favor of eugenics. This type of mistake happens alot. Some people I know say that Dawkins should have expected/mitigated that. I disagree. I think it's the audience's job to work to understand the speaker.https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins/status/1228943686953664512 …
This tweet is to lay out my own opinion on this category of error, which I may call "the is-ought confusion", so that you can choose whether or not to be friends with me. I'm not very interested in the specifics of this particular example.
It's both, of course, but the more wide-spread the medium the more the onus is on the audience - the speaker cannot adjust the message to specific groups when it's the same message sent to everyone.
Can we then call this the “is-ought mistake” where a writer is meaning what is, and the audience mistakenly assumes an ought
While I would generally agree with you, I think this is poorly worded. The whole thing hinges on the word "work". He later explains he meant you could breed humans to be better at something specific. But on this tweet, it could be interpreted to mean "work as a policy"
Which is not what he meant, but "work" in this tweet is so vague it was not hard to predict how it could be read. Pile up on that that eugenics is as loadef as a thing can be, and that's Dawkins has a specific reputation, both of which he should know, and I think that's his fault
Nobody really thinks he's in favor of it. They just think it's cringe.
The thing is, Dawkins is wrong when he says that eugenics would work. Yes, if tall people were forced to hook up only with other tall people for many generations, the average height of their descendants would likely go up. But that's not what eugenics is.
Eugenics was an actual pseudoscience, as fully fleshed-out as astrology or phrenology. And as articulated, and as practiced on a mass scale in real life, it could not and did not work because it contradicted basic principles of inheritance.
No, a lot of biologists are calling him out because eugenics is wrong and *also* does not 'work.'
Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.
