This is a war every philanthropist should be waging. Calling Bill Gates and Warren Buffet and all others : please make science Free, Forever, For Everybody. There's no bigger creator of human development opportunities than free science (imho). More than a decade? ago, Bill Gates freed the Feynman lectures, only to lock it in Microsoft's Adobe Flash-competing technology, silverlight. Now do it properly : make it free…
The War to Free Science
21–30 of 35 posts
Re: The War to Free Science
#22Re: The War to Free Science
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is this related to the subject of the article somehow?
An example is Vox's current tirade against YouTube with the goal of censoring certain creators in the name of one-sided "inclusivity." What happens when Vox aims their influence at scientific publications publishing research with uncomfortable implications? For example, the genetic factor in IQ, violence, and development. That's all I'm saying. I don't think their proclivity for censorship will merely stop at social…
Besides, these distributions are such that they can only ever matter in the large, as in "explain other large-scale social phenomena"; they don't tell you ANYTHING about any individual person that you couldn't garner way more easily and more reliably within a few seconds of interaction or even observation.
Most people (as in 99.999%) who bring up "race-IQ" connections as if they were some sort of forbidden truth are either white supremacists or clueless memebots, spreading a memetic infection of white-supremacist origin without even realizing that this is what they're doing. It's pure race baiting and white supremacy, not a serious attempt at social debate.
Re: The War to Free Science
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
Question - what makes sci-hub.now.sh, which is essentially acting as a kind of manual DNS, more resilient to censorship than the actual DNS system that necessitates all these ever-changing links? And can we automate it?
The actual DNS system is vulnerable to domain registrar takedown requests.
Re: The War to Free Science
#25While open access seems great, and the reasoning behind it is inline with my ideals, I still have problems with "gold" OA, which seems to be what is being referred to within this article: >Put another way: Publishers are still going to get paid. Open access just means the paychecks come at the front end. Firstly, the fees imposed by journals are thousands of dollars, which is far too much for many researchers to pay.…
Unfortunately the term Gold Open Access has been co-opted by the publishers. When the OA movement was using the term, they meant "published open access by the publisher, rather than posting alternative editions elsewhere (Green OA)". The publishers then started using it to mean author-pays Open Access. Thus, when OA advocates use the term Gold OA, that gets interpreted the way you do above - whereas they usually inte…
Re: The War to Free Science
#26I heard arguments where US Government employees were working on creating open access policies for the research they funded. People would lament, "Nobody will work with us if we force them to make their research open access." I would reply, "Who are they going to work with? The US Government is the only place with these big piles of money. Yes, they will take a principled stand until their next mortgage payment is due…
This issue could be solved over night if the USFG (NSF/NIH/DoD) stepped in and said "all publications supported by our grants must be published open access and we'll pay no more than $N/page in publishing fees."
Re: The War to Free Science
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
An example is Vox's current tirade against YouTube with the goal of censoring certain creators in the name of one-sided "inclusivity." What happens when Vox aims their influence at scientific publications publishing research with uncomfortable implications? For example, the genetic factor in IQ, violence, and development. That's all I'm saying. I don't think their proclivity for censorship will merely stop at social…
This is stuff that's severely misrepresented by the alt-right. Yes, there are statistical variations in IQ and criminality across social groups. No, there's no consensus whatsoever that all or even most of that is due to any sort of "genetic factor", and the plausible contribution of something like that is well within the "too small to matter" range! Besides, these distributions are such that they can only ever matte…
I'm happy to address your comment though, because I'd like to relieve you of the mental gymnastics you're engaged in:
> there's no consensus whatsoever that all or even most of that is due to any sort of "genetic factor", and the plausible contribution of something like that is well within the "too small to matter" range!
Where did you get this information? A quick glance at the "Heritability of IQ" Wikipedia page [1] clearly states that "the heritability of IQ for adults is between 57% and 73% with some more-recent estimates as high as 80% and 86%."
There are probably hundreds of twin/adoption/family studies on the heritability of IQ within and between races. This is simply one of the most researched topic in this field, and claiming that it's "too small too mater" and "there's no consensus whatsoever" seems disingenuous to me.
For example, some scientists have claimed that the heritability of blacks is significantly lower than that of whites [2], and this is due to poverty, the history of slavery, etc. This was addressed by Osborne [3] with his Georgia Twin Study comparing 123 black and 304 white pairs of twins (12-18 years old). Osborne used three different aptitude tests and found an overall heritability of 50% for both blacks and whites. Another study done by Rowe [4] studied the correlations of background variables and outcome measurements using cross-sectional correlational matrices with both independent variables (homes, peers) and outcomes (achievements, criminality). The black and white matrices were almost identical.
The scientific consensus is that IQ (specifically g) is both environmental and genetic.
> Besides, these distributions are such that they can only ever matter in the large, as in "explain other large-scale social phenomena"; they don't tell you ANYTHING about any individual person that you couldn't garner way more easily and more reliably within a few seconds of interaction or even observation.
I totally agree with you here. You can't judge an individual by group averages.
I should also add, I'm not saying people are subject to a kind of race/IQ determinism. But in large-scale, yes these things matter.
> Most people (as in 99.999%) who bring up "race-IQ" connections as if they were some sort of forbidden truth are either white supremacists or clueless memebots, spreading a memetic infection of white-supremacist origin without even realizing that this is what they're doing. It's pure race baiting and white supremacy, not a serious attempt at social debate.
This appears to me as an attempt to discredit those with uncomfortable arguments. If the truth is uncomfortable, we still have to address it and pursue it. There are people who dedicate their entire academic career to studying these questions, with the goal of people discussing and arguing over their work.
The science shows that there are racial differences in IQ. In fact, it also shows that east Asians and Ashkenazi Jews on average have much higher IQ scores than whites. Am I a Jewish-supremacist for bringing that up?
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ
[2]: https://brocku.ca/MeadProject/Cooley/Cooley_1897.html
[3]: https://www.gwern.net/docs/genetics/heritable/1980-osborne-t...
Re: The War to Free Science
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
An example is Vox's current tirade against YouTube with the goal of censoring certain creators in the name of one-sided "inclusivity." What happens when Vox aims their influence at scientific publications publishing research with uncomfortable implications? For example, the genetic factor in IQ, violence, and development. That's all I'm saying. I don't think their proclivity for censorship will merely stop at social…
This is stuff that's severely misrepresented by the alt-right. Yes, there are statistical variations in IQ and criminality across social groups. No, there's no consensus whatsoever that all or even most of that is due to any sort of "genetic factor", and the plausible contribution of something like that is well within the "too small to matter" range! Besides, these distributions are such that they can only ever matte…
People like you are why we can't have a serious discussion about anything nowadays. You instantly try to shut down any discussion by "alt-right" or "white supremacist" attacks.
Unfortunately for you, I'm not white or a white supremacist, so your ad hominems don't work on me so you'd better find another tactic.
For all the nonsense about "alt-right", it's the "alt-left" extremists that I fear as the alt-left extremist seem to have control over media and power.
Sure, this topic is "severely" misrepresented by the alt-right, but it's also "severely" misrepresented by the alt-left. The alt-right wants to pretend it is pervasive and all-important. The alt-left wants to pretend it doesn't matter and doesn't tell us anything of use. Well here is a shocker. Both of you guys are wrong. The alt-right and alt-left is wrong.
The only difference is that the alt-left are trying to stifle research, debate and discussion because the alt-left extremists have more power. Hopefully that doesn't last much longer as sane people wrest control from the alt-left extremists.
I swear, the feeble minded always use "alt-right" and "white supremacist" as a crutch because they can't accept facts, data and truth.
Re: The War to Free Science
#29I heard arguments where US Government employees were working on creating open access policies for the research they funded. People would lament, "Nobody will work with us if we force them to make their research open access." I would reply, "Who are they going to work with? The US Government is the only place with these big piles of money. Yes, they will take a principled stand until their next mortgage payment is due…
Seriously. This issue could be solved over night if the USFG (NSF/NIH/DoD) stepped in and said "all publications supported by our grants must be published open access and we'll pay no more than $N/page in publishing fees."
Re: The War to Free Science
#30Elsevier seems to be a slowly self-correcting problem.