Has an uncomfortable truth been suppressed? • Hacker News Board

Re: Has an uncomfortable truth been suppressed?

#171

Post by olleromam91 » Mon, Sep 10, 2018, 5:13 PM UTC

mattmanser wrote: post #105

frebord wrote: post #6

Honest question, the general physical differences between the sexes or even races are undeniable, so why is it so taboo to talk about the differences that almost certainly exist in our minds?

Undeniable? No. Amongst the other issues stated, this isn't necessarily a physical difference, it could be purely a societal one. All these studies suffer from a bias that we can't get rid of unless we assume it's not true for a few generations, namely is the effect due to nature vs nurture. Whether it's race or sex, if society favour one race or sex over the others, how can we ever know if it's due to something in t…

But why would a society favour one race or sex over another in the first place? Where does this bias originate?

Re: Has an uncomfortable truth been suppressed?

#172

Post by olleromam91 » Mon, Sep 10, 2018, 5:25 PM UTC

jerkstate wrote: post #23

here's a genetics paper that covers this topic: https://investigativegenetics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.... Issues with the paper and its relevance to the platform it was published in notwithstanding, I think that we have two highly politicized sides, one wishing to promote a finding of "this is how things have been through history" as "this is the way things ought to be" (The MI staff expressed this concern), an…

Sometimes it feels like we are in competition to claim that we are the least fortunate of all sub-groups. Not future focused at all.

Re: Has an uncomfortable truth been suppressed?

#173

Post by quotemstr » Mon, Sep 10, 2018, 5:48 PM UTC

hef19898 wrote: post #118

Symmetry wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought that scientists had just devised a way to determine fluid intelligence at least from an fMRI scan? https://neurosciencenews.com/brain-scan-intelligence-9477/ It's not especially accurate but it does work.

If your error margin is still bigger the scale of what you want to measure... But I wasn't aaware of that development, so thanks for pointing it out!

Plenty of instruments extract useful signals from below the noise floor. (See deep space communication with Voyager.) The idea that you can't do anything of "your error margin is...bigger than the scale of what you want to measure" is mathematical nonsense.

Re: Has an uncomfortable truth been suppressed?

#174

Post by ArchTypical » Mon, Sep 10, 2018, 5:51 PM UTC

> wouldn’t that suggest that males would have a much higher selection pressure to become more desirable than females?

I would think they would want to be more variable as conditions are variable (and therefore fitness criteria are variable). This is such a chaotic theory, that no amount of mathematics could categorize it in a definitive way.

Re: Has an uncomfortable truth been suppressed?

#175

Post by oh_sigh » Mon, Sep 10, 2018, 7:01 PM UTC

monadgonad wrote: post #119

googlryas wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"eye color is a social construct" and "the importance of eye color is a social construct" are two completely separate ideas. OP clearly states '"race" is a social construct'.

> "eye color is a social construct" and "the importance of eye color is a social construct" are two completely separate ideas. And that's the point. In ths case, "race" is equivalent to "the importance of eye colour", because "race" is the importance and social meaning we build around certain genetic differences.

If race is equivalent to the 'importance of eye color', does that mean 'the importance of race' is the 'importance of the importance of race'?

Why does race automatically have some kind of value judgement associated with it but eye color does not? Just because people have used it as a standard of other-ness in the past doesn't mean that the qualities have ceased to independently exist.

Re: Has an uncomfortable truth been suppressed?

#176

Post by oh_sigh » Mon, Sep 10, 2018, 7:02 PM UTC

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #127

oh_sigh wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could we use the word 'breed' then, instead of race? I guarantee you that if you showed me a mixed room of hundreds of native Danes and Sentinelese - I could classify them as easily as one could classify chihuahuas vs great danes.

Actually, Danes and Sentinelese would both be classified as belonging to the same, Caucasoid, race. From the Wikipedia article on Caucasian race : First introduced in the 1780s by members of the Göttingen School of History,[4] the term denoted one of three purported major races of humankind (Caucasoid, Mongoloid, Negroid).[5] In biological anthropology, Caucasoid has been used as an umbrella term for phenotypically s…

According to an outdated anatomical taxonomy from the 1700s.

Re: Has an uncomfortable truth been suppressed?

#177

Post by oh_sigh » Mon, Sep 10, 2018, 7:07 PM UTC

pjc50 wrote: post #68

oh_sigh wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could we use the word 'breed' then, instead of race? I guarantee you that if you showed me a mixed room of hundreds of native Danes and Sentinelese - I could classify them as easily as one could classify chihuahuas vs great danes.

How about instead you try to distinguish between a Tutsi and a Hutu, or a Serb vs a Croat? Because in both cases wars of mass murder have recently been fought over those differences.

Both of your examples are people who even 1000 years ago were considered the same. Tutsi and Hutu differ based on essentially their social class and profession(pastoralist vs farmer), and for Serb and Croat their religion.

Is your stance in life that, if some information has been used in the past for bad purposes, we must pretend like it doesn't exist so those bad things don't happen again?

Re: Has an uncomfortable truth been suppressed?

#178

Post by oh_sigh » Mon, Sep 10, 2018, 7:07 PM UTC

jmcgough wrote: post #157

googlryas wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you study something if you can't talk about it openly? Or, if one and only one conclusion is acceptable to be reached? I'll admit that OP didn't directly make this claim, but it seems like a reasonable conclusion from their post that they believe this is a dangerous topic to study because of the possibility of bad people using science badly.

I'm not saying that it shouldn't be discussed or studied, but that knee-jerk reactions to the topic are understandable. It's similar to the german ban on depictions of the nazi party - there are some discussions that can be healthy and useful, but rarely are because of the strong emotions they stoke.

Ok. As long as we agree that the information is may actually be there - but it is too scary to look at. My only argument was that the information actually exists.

Re: Has an uncomfortable truth been suppressed?

#179

Post by oh_sigh » Mon, Sep 10, 2018, 7:10 PM UTC

charlesism wrote: post #104

googlryas wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What relevance does that have? It shows, at least in this contrived example, that the information is present in the individuals and not in the brain of the classifier. I don't understand your last point. Is it wrong to say that I could extremely accurately classify blue and brown eyed people?

> not in the brain of the classifier. Sure, but you can see physical differences between your paternal and maternal grandfather, too, even if your culture considers them the same "race." > to say that I could extremely accurately > classify blue and brown eyed people? And why not classify them as deep blue, light blue, hazel, and deep brown? Or blue, gray, and brown? Etc. The point isn't that everyone's eye color is…

I'm not arguing that race is a useful basis for determining someone's value in society, or anything like that. Merely that it actually does exist, and different peoples at this point in history have vastly different lineages.

Re: Has an uncomfortable truth been suppressed?

#180

Post by hackinthebochs » Mon, Sep 10, 2018, 7:17 PM UTC

kaitai wrote: post #162

hackinthebochs wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would be very cautious citing that paper. They draw some very strong conclusions based on unsupported assumptions and evidence of dubious significance from populations with unusual cultural features. > Therefore, we conclude that both variance and [variance ratio] in mathematics performance vary greatly among countries. Confirming our earlier finding ([21]), we also conclude that [variance ratio] is reproducibly es…

What's so unusual about Muslim countries? or countries with high inequity? They seem to collectively have a pretty big share of human population. Don't fall into the WEIRD trap (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic).

Because these countries also have very unusual patterns regarding education. Some examples mentioned in the study were non-normal distributions of scores, and a large percentage of religion-focused schooling.

If we're trying to draw conclusions about innate differences operationalized as distribution test scores, any kind of biased schooling undermines the ability to draw conclusions from that population.