Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

'Cancel Culture' Comes to Science?

wsj.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 368 posts

Re: 'Cancel Culture' Comes to Science?

#171

Post by steveeq1 »

rsj_hn wrote: post #103
dtoma wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the use about a study on _correlation_ between these two things? You could also have a study on correlation between IQ and poverty, IQ and access to education... Not to mention, what's the point of IQ anyway? Maybe no one is picking up the subject because it would be a waste of time?

Waste of time, huh? You have differences in IQ between black, hispanic, white, and asian americans leading to very big differences on, say, standardized math and verbal tests. Now, the teachers are accused of racism, because their black students are scoring much lower than their asian students. Then they are judged unfairly and put into the impossible situation where they are expected to graduate students with no tes…

Kind of reminds me of real science vs social science:

https://thefederalistpapers.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/6...

Re: 'Cancel Culture' Comes to Science?

#172

Post by BurningFrog »

spicymaki wrote: post #161
barry-cotter wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we’re not going to find research because it’s useless that’s the humanities gone. All of the topics you mentioned have been done and are being done. The point of IQ research is that it effects real life outcomes that we care about, like health, education, social status, criminal behavior, STI status, having children outside marriage, many others. If two groups are assumed to be identical but they have different ou…

Funny how environment is continually dropped from the conversation of race in favor of heritability. You note that there is now East African dominance in marathon running. That has not always been the case however. As East Africans were provided opportunity to compete on a level playing field their talents whether inherited, conditioned by demand, and/or environmental were demonstrated. Now there is intense competiti…

> West Africans and East African are of the same race

They have similar skin color, but that doesn't mean they're particularly closely related.

Black Africans have the by far biggest genetic diversity of any population. This is because our species evolved there, and has had the longest to develop variations. By contrast, the rest of humanity comes from relatively small populations of Africa emigrants.

As it happens the best long distance runners come from an region in East Africa, while the best sprinters come from a region in West Africa. This includes US sprinters.

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/04/wh...

Re: 'Cancel Culture' Comes to Science?

#173

Post by ajross »

xyhopguy wrote: post #155
rsj_hn wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Waste of time, huh? You have differences in IQ between black, hispanic, white, and asian americans leading to very big differences on, say, standardized math and verbal tests. Now, the teachers are accused of racism, because their black students are scoring much lower than their asian students. Then they are judged unfairly and put into the impossible situation where they are expected to graduate students with no tes…

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41588-018-0147-3

tl;dr for those who didn't read: they looked at genes (SNP's really) instead of "race" and found... a 7-10% correlation with cognitive performance (that is, 7-10% of the difference in individuals scores is determined by the differences in the genome subset studied).

Yet you look at "race" (a social construct that itself correlates at best with about 50% actual genetics) and see a much larger effect. That by itself should immediately put this "black people are dumb" notion to bed (i.e. even if it's measuring something, it's clearly not measuring heritable diferences!). But instead everyone just doubles down on the nonsense, because the science is "polluted by cancel culture" or whatever.

And that's what this opinion piece is. It's an attempt by the political right (the Journal's editorial page is increasingly skewed these days -- most papers at least pretend to have a diversity of viewpoints) to explain away the science they don't want to be true by attacking "science" as a field.

Re: 'Cancel Culture' Comes to Science?

#174

Post by dragonwriter »

allovernow wrote: post #19

While this explicit cancel culture has been slow to arrive, this is exactly the kind of traditionally left leaning activism which has gradually come to infest almost all of academia (and to a lesser but growing extent, industry). The result is an extremely strong, emergent cultural pressure against certain results and certain questions, which has been holding back a wide range of fields and ensuring pursuit of severe…

> Our understandings of intelligence, social dynamics, genetic influences on behavior, sexually dimorphic psychology and performance, climate change, et al. are mired by unspoken taboos

Perhaps, but all the spoken taboos—that is, the concrete examples of things which are cited as being supposedly taboo to address in research—are, it turns out, actually quite well covered in the literature (sometimes, they are things one side would like to be true that are consistently refuted by empirical research, sometimes, as is the case with race/IQ correlation, they are facts both opposing sides acknowledge but each side prefers a different explanation for, and where one side, rather than acknowledging the dispute over the explanation, prefers to pretend the other side denies the phenomenon, and sometimes there is some other dynamic at work, but its pretty much never that the research either isn't done or is suppressed.)

Re: 'Cancel Culture' Comes to Science?

#175

Post by [deleted] »

barry-cotter wrote: post #94
alasdair_ wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I'm not suggesting choosing between left and right, only pointing out that the bias is pervasive and undeniable. Can you point to specific examples of this where the science is actually robust and well documented but has somehow been blocked from being published or otherwise stopped due to this pervasive bias?

You’re asking people to prove a negative, and also assuming that there’s no chilling effect as people learn that certain topics are not a good idea if you want a career. The premier example of robust, well documented science with vociferous opposition has to be intelligence. Besides scholars with a fiercer attachment to their politics than the truth like Gould you also have introductory psychology textbooks that go o…

[deleted]

Re: 'Cancel Culture' Comes to Science?

#176

Post by tasogare »

stephencanon wrote: post #120
tenpies wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not even race, but just suggesting that evolutionary psychology is a valid scientific field can get you crucified in some circles. Somehow the human brain avoided all sexual selection forces, environmental pressures, and even difference between the sexes; but everything else in our bodies was at the complete mercy of these factors.

But evo psych isn't a valid scientific field; there's no way to go back and conduct experiments to validate hypotheses. It's a bunch of nonsense just-so stories that appeal to people's existing biases. It's horoscopes-and-crystals-woo dressed up in the language of science.

The point is that brain is an organ like any others, and thus also affected by the evolutionary pressure. Nothing is truly equal at birth between humans (or animals) except for twins so it’s really specious to consider that intelligence, which is based on a physical organ, is somehow magically exactly the same for everyone. And once the fact that there is indeed individual variations is accepted, it’s not too far stretched to understand why there could be a different average intelligence between population.

The second thing is most people interpret mean (average) wrongly. It does not mean that every individual of group X is less intelligent than group Y. If all those activists had a better mathematical education they could probably deal better with the facts instead of harassing people who state them.

Re: 'Cancel Culture' Comes to Science?

#177

Post by Can_Not »

tasogare wrote: post #163
Fishysoup wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Two and two may equal four" being a bunch of nonsensical racist slandering based on no evidence. Every result ever has pointed that all races and genders are equally "intelligent" and well-suited to the same tasks. And trust me, there's been no lack of racist scientists. It's just that bullshit doesn't stick.

Yes, intelligence is 100% environmental and cultural factor, that’s why genetic affliction such as the Down syndrome has absolutely no effect whatsoever on the subject intelligence... It’s incredible how far some people will bury their head from evidences because of their ideological beliefs. On the contrary, when some facts put a positive light on certain groups (for instance the better maximal physical performance)…

Strawman aside, down syndrome is just as common in black people as it is in white people, so you know, nobody was denying genetics play a role, they're just pointing out there isn't a proven correlation between "the white gene" and IQ like so many racism apologists want to believe.

Re: 'Cancel Culture' Comes to Science?

#178

Post by BurningFrog »

ajross wrote: post #136
allovernow wrote: post #19

While this explicit cancel culture has been slow to arrive, this is exactly the kind of traditionally left leaning activism which has gradually come to infest almost all of academia (and to a lesser but growing extent, industry). The result is an extremely strong, emergent cultural pressure against certain results and certain questions, which has been holding back a wide range of fields and ensuring pursuit of severe…

> Our understandings of intelligence, social dynamics, genetic influences on behavior, sexually dimorphic psychology and performance, climate change, et al. So... the correct results that are being suppressed all skew to the political right and in favor of established social order? Really? You're sure that's not itself an observer bias?

> skew to the political right and in favor of established social order

One interesting difference between the left and the rest of us:

The left is proud that it's fighting the power.

To the rest, the left is the power!

In SJ terms, how you think of what the left does depends a lot on if you see it as punching up or down.

Re: 'Cancel Culture' Comes to Science?

#179

Post by robomartin »

philipkglass wrote: post #158
robomartin wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point is that you can't just look at chemical reactions. How much will it take in energy and resources to make it happen? That's where Conservation of Energy becomes an ass. In other words, it's easy to talk about a solution, any solution, in isolation of what it would really take to deploy it at a scale massive enough to affect planetary level changes. Think about all of the equipment, transportation, processing,…

One of the things I learned --and I can't remember it accurately-- is that CO2 in the atmosphere "sticks" and is hard to mitigate. The idea is that anything we do at ground level will have zero impact past a certain altitude. We can certainly burn stuff and have the CO2 go up and circle the globe but we can't easily pull it down from 10, 20 or 30 km of altitude. I'm not sure what you are trying to recall, but this is…

Well, destruction (burning stuff) is always easier and cheaper than cleaning it up. So what we did over 150 years, while not of a scale imaginable back then, isn't a surprise.

It's getting late. I'll check out your link later. I probably didn't word my statement correctly.

BTW, I appreciate the conversation. It is very --very-- rare that someone would engage in a mutual exploration of ideas with any degree of intelligence and critical thinking on this topic. More often than not people attack each other from opposite extremes, down-vote anyone they don't agree with into oblivion and nobody learns a thing.

BTW #2, I actually want someone to show me that I am wrong. I don't like my conclusion. I just can't find any real holes in it. And down-votes do exactly nothing towards solving that problem.

Re: 'Cancel Culture' Comes to Science?

#180

Post by wesleywt »

shard972 wrote: post #122
Fishysoup wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Two and two may equal four" being a bunch of nonsensical racist slandering based on no evidence. Every result ever has pointed that all races and genders are equally "intelligent" and well-suited to the same tasks. And trust me, there's been no lack of racist scientists. It's just that bullshit doesn't stick.

Oh here comes the racist brigade to yell down moral proclamation upon the unwashed masses. You know what, who cares if Watson was a flaming racist? He has done more than almost any other person to save the lives of millions of Africans but he makes one opinion about intelligence and hes slagged off and completely discredited? Cancel culture has been in science a lot longer than people know.

Should someone be excused from dubious behaviors because he did one thing in his youth? The DNA model would have been elucidated by someone eventually. I also doubt it helped 'millions' of Africans.
Post reply on HN