A great deal has been written about both of these cases, mostly looking at the way public education is organised in these countries. A major point of interest in the US was the poor performance of the US in Finland a point of interest was Finland’s excellent performance. The Sailer example is about the PISA international student assessment studies. I’ll give two examples of how this works, one of which is from Sailer, and the other I noticed myself (I’m sure I’m not the first one to notice it). The result is that for some major contemporary questions, Sailer is able to get 80% of the right answer by extremely simple methods, while scores of intelligent, hard-working writers flounder around hopelessly, unable to use ideas about human biodiversity. Satoshi Kanazawa is perhaps a fair comparison. Just pretty direct and matter-of-fact about some things that are literally unspeakable in most polite circles. By that I don’t mean that he’s particularly hateful or mean-spirited about ethnic groups – far from it. Sailer’s reputation is already so trashed that he doesn’t appear to self-censor much (it also helps that he’s an American – no way could you legally write his stuff in Finland). While he’s a good enough journalist on his own strength, what really makes Sailer stand out is that he has practically no competition in his chosen subfield. I can’t think of anyone else who is able to do that with non-fiction contemporary journalism. The cult following appears to be big enough to sustain his work mostly via donations – on his blog where most of his stuff appears, which is free to read, he’ll ask for money a couple of times a year. He also writes some pretty good movie reviews and sports journalism (alas, often about boring things like baseball). He’s what you might call a quantitative journalist, specialising in using sociological and psychometric data to explain large social phenomena. race and intelligence and other human biodiversity topics, and mostly doesn’t come down on the side of the angels. Sailer is generally under the mainstream radar because he writes about some of the most flammable topics out there – eg. I’ve been reading his stuff for 3-4 years now, and I have to say he ranks right up there with my favourite active journalists.
Not in the sense of “writes about cults”, but “underground hit” – which is a strange thing for a publicity-based professional like a journalist to be. Steve Sailer is a cult journalist on the Internet. Steve Sailer and the cheat code to journalism Remember blogging? Here’s a 12 year old blog by a Finn who used the name Sam Hardwick:
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