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This part really needs some context/sources. Anyone know which studies he’s talking about?
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Science became a new religion. Instead of saying "shut up god made it that way" you say "shut up science says it's that way". You can find hundred of studies to support your arguments, no matter what they are, it's even easier if you don't actually read the studies and stop at the summaries made by popular medias.
> You can find hundred of studies to support your arguments, no matter what they are. I think that simply incorrect, assuming 'studies' != Youtube videos. I know because I've been involved in internet arguments where I've gone looking for studies and found my own argument is incorrect/poorly supported.
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>It's just naive to pin something as complex as depression No it's not. Twin-based heritability studies show depression risk has about 10% heritability across all cases and 50% heritability among severe cases. There is a genetic component to the disease. That complexity is mediated by dozens of genes, but each one gene contributes a percentage to that heritability. Single genes can and will be found which link genoty…
You don't think you're mixing up "heritable" with "genetic" here? In my family, liking the Yankees is highly heritable across generations, but my grandfather would've laughed in your face if you claimed it was genetic.
"Heritable" in this context is a term of art. It is a statistic (H squared) that describes the amount of a phenotype that is transmitted from generation to generation. This value broadly describes the amount of a phenotype which can be ascribed to genetics compared to environment without linking it to any known genes or genomic elements. It is a classical technique that was primarily used before we were able to sequence DNA. This is usually figured out by using "twin studies" which are able to quantify inheritance by comparing two individuals with the same genetics.
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Elon Musk is basically completely unrelated to science. His projects timetables even more so if it's even possible to be less related to science.
Not really true. Tesla is at the forefront of applying machine learning in real-world settings. It's definitely not unrelated to science, in my opinion. If autonomous driving in 2020 is on the timetable, Karpathy (Head of AI) is probably confident that it is possible. Musk is very aggressive on timelines (but always wraps it in "it is probable that", which to him is cautious but to which translates to almost certainl…
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> what you refer to is not Science,its pseudoscience. Pretty much any crap gets published these days, review standards are abysmal and there is hardly any replication. That's like the argument that USSR was not real communism, etc. At some point, science is as science does. There's no some holier, better checked, domain of practice. It is what it is, and it sometimes has replication, more often than not it doesn't.
No, science is always science. Just because the media portrays certain things as "scientific truth" (or, for that matter, scientifically unsure) doesn't make it so. Indeed, even if scientists claim something bogus, that doesn't make it science. So...actually, yeah, it's a lot like the argument that the USSR wasn't real communism, any more than the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is democratic. People claim it t…
> ...what bothers me isn’t just that people said 5-HTTLPR mattered and it didn’t. It’s that we built whole imaginary edifices, whole castles in the air on top of this idea of 5-HTTLPR mattering. We “figured out” how 5-HTTLPR exerted its effects, what parts of the brain it was active in, what sorts of things it interacted with, how its effects were enhanced or suppressed by the effects of other imaginary depression genes. This isn’t just an explorer coming back from the Orient and claiming there are unicorns there. It’s the explorer describing the life cycle of unicorns, what unicorns eat, all the different subspecies of unicorn, which cuts of unicorn meat are tastiest, and a blow-by-blow account of a wrestling match between unicorns and Bigfoot.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/05/07/5-httlpr-a-pointed-rev...
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> You can find hundred of studies to support your arguments, no matter what they are. I think that simply incorrect, assuming 'studies' != Youtube videos. I know because I've been involved in internet arguments where I've gone looking for studies and found my own argument is incorrect/poorly supported.
I'd say it depends on the topic, and it depends on the standard you hold the papers in question to. For instance, I can find you a paper showing almost anything you like in the field of nutrition in terms of what people should eat. It'll even hold up in the abstracts. Whether it holds up beyond that can get complicated, though; I've lost count of things like "a study that X intervention is good in 20 rats over 5 days…
Odd that this article cites Scott Alexander as if that is the name of a real psychiatrist, > “What bothers me isn’t just that people said [the gene] mattered and it didn’t,” wrote the psychiatrist Scott Alexander in a widely shared blog post. Scott Alexander is the pen name of a person running a blog who claims to be a psychiatrist, and AFAIK, his authenticity is not proven due to his anonymity.
His identity is hardly a deep secret; anyone who really cares can find it out, and verify his credentials. (Not that those credentials are really relevant here, no?)
Well, who is he then?
The article doesn't actually say anything about what these 1000 research papers actually claimed to show. It's entirely possible that most of them were negative results, there's no way to tell from the text of the article. It strongly implies that this is the case, but it doesn't actually say so. This is a significant omission for an article whose thesis is that these 1000 papers constituted a "house of cards."
[UPDATE]
"Sometimes the gene was linked to depression; sometimes it wasn’t. And crucially, the better the methods, the less likely he was to see such a link."
Seems to me like this is science working exactly as it is supposed to (except for the possible suppression of earlier negative results, but that's a known broad problem that has nothing to do with this particular gene study).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, science is always science. Just because the media portrays certain things as "scientific truth" (or, for that matter, scientifically unsure) doesn't make it so. Indeed, even if scientists claim something bogus, that doesn't make it science. So...actually, yeah, it's a lot like the argument that the USSR wasn't real communism, any more than the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is democratic. People claim it t…
The argument that the USSR wasn't really communism isn't a semantic argument of "yeah it was a marxist utopia" but rather one of whether we support governments claiming to be communist. We don't have an example of successful communism, while we do have examples of successful science.
Not that I'm saying you haven't encountered the reverse; I'm quite willing to believe that people who run in other circles (or make other claims) encounter different arguments. But yeah, I see the "we shouldn't want communism/socialism, it killed millions of people under Stalin" argument all the damn time.