'Cancel Culture' Comes to Science? • Hacker News Board

Re: 'Cancel Culture' Comes to Science?

#191

Post by Nasrudith » Wed, Jan 15, 2020, 5:33 AM UTC

Animats wrote: post #141

nitwit005 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A racial label doesn't tell you much of anything about their underlying ancestry or genetics. Here in the US you can easily find people who identify as white or black who have a mix of European, African and Native American ancestry. There are people looking for genes influencing intelligence, which is a more practical thing to look for.

It's been tried using 23andMe genetic data for over a million people.[1] No one gene seems to have a large effect, “Yet when we analyze the combined effects of many genetic variants, taken together they can predict the length of a person’s formal education as well as demographic factors.” [1] https://blog.23andme.com/23andme-research/massive-study-on-t...

Well yeah - at that point you could trivially start mapping relations in those groups which to families who are advantaged materially or culturally in the sense that nine year olds usually only have access to genetics textbooks and latest papers lying around their home if their parents are genetics professors.

I am pretty sure the British royal family has distinctive combinations of genes which are of course strongly correlated with a college education!

Re: 'Cancel Culture' Comes to Science?

#192

Post by voxl » Wed, Jan 15, 2020, 5:34 AM UTC

mindfulhack wrote: post #90

etrautmann wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, this particular example is a group of partisan trolls looking to discredit science through quasi intellectual seeming “conferences” which bait this particular response

I don't care what context I'm in. allovernow's comment made sense at face value and I couldn't agree with it more.

So you don't care about evidence at all, rhetoric and troll testimony are sufficient for you to double down on your preconceived beliefs.

Re: 'Cancel Culture' Comes to Science?

#193

Post by mikedilger » Wed, Jan 15, 2020, 5:34 AM UTC

danShumway wrote: post #72

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…

There are two possible dangers that you can fall into with science. One is to assume a conclusion with such force that it causes you to avoid certain questions or to suppress certain research. The other danger is to be so fascinated with doubt or so averse to a particular outcome that you ignore consensus, and place less weight than you should on the obvious conclusion that research is pointing to (and yes, I think t…

Scientific and social progress should continue with the near certainties we already have -- I think we are in agreement here. So long as we don't cancel contrarian scientists. We need to accept their long-shot research and be grateful for it, because we cannot predict ahead of time which one of them will turn out to be correct, as long as they couch their statements when they present them publicly. As a defender of free speech, I think that if some people want to believe in the long shots, they are making that ill-advised decision for themselves. When it comes to anti-vaxxers, they shouldn't have that choice as the effect is upon all of us. If a voting majority choose to believe the ill-advised long shot research then something is definitely broken, but it's not the existence of long-shot research. I won't pretend to know what that 'something' is.

Re: 'Cancel Culture' Comes to Science?

#194

Post by ajross » Wed, Jan 15, 2020, 5:46 AM UTC

rsj_hn wrote: post #189

ajross wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sh…

Wow, that's misleading. They found specific 10 SNPs (single nucleotide polymorphisms) which they identified as relevant to intelligence and for these 10, a 7-10% effect . This type of research is very useful for trying to identify specific genes responsible for X but not for the effect of all genes on X. The generally accepted range for genetic influences is much higher -- say 50% to 2/3 although we know little as to…

They identified 10 specific related SNPs on the X chromosome as part of a side study. The study itself was of 1271 sites. That number is right there in the first sentence of the abstract! And the summary sentence is awfully clear: "A joint (multi-phenotype) analysis of educational attainment and three related cognitive phenotypes generates polygenic scores that explain 11–13% of the variance in educational attainment and 7–10% of the variance in cognitive performance".

Who's being misleading here? That "generally accepted range" you're trying to invoke is precisely was is being studied here. And it was wrong, largely because the people generally accepting it were confusing social factors with genetic ones.

Re: 'Cancel Culture' Comes to Science?

#195

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Jan 15, 2020, 5:49 AM UTC

steveeq1 wrote: post #171

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…

Kind of reminds me of real science vs social science: https://thefederalistpapers.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/6...

[deleted]

Re: 'Cancel Culture' Comes to Science?

#196

Post by wutbrodo » Wed, Jan 15, 2020, 5:51 AM UTC

alasdair_ wrote: post #56

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…

>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 for examples where science is robust and well-documented but has been _blocked_ from being published? You understand that this is effectively an unanswerable question, right? How would anyone here come to know about such findings if they existed, and further know that they well-documented _despite their not being published_?

It's fundamentally unknowable how much science is being denied the imprimatur of good science for ideological reasons while "actually" being good science. The best you can hope for is examples that meet a lower, more reasonable bar that point to problems in the culture of academia, from which you can extrapolate chilling effects.

There are examples of things like this, as in Case & Deaton's description[1] of the reaction to their study on declining mortality amongst US whites:

> Deaton: Anne presented the first paper once and was told, in no uncertain terms: How dare you work on whites. Case: I was really beaten up. Deaton: And these were really senior people. Case: Very senior people.

This example is just off the top of my head, and it's a blatant example of a study that _isn't even saying anything that taboo_, except among those whose brains have been thoroughly liquefied by politics. If examples as dramatic as this exist, at well-known, highly-regarded institutions, for a paper _published by a Nobel Laureate_, it's not unreasonable to conclude that there's some degree of unobservable cases that were actually successfully blocked, along with chilling effects changing the direction of research in the first place.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/04/06/how-d...

Re: 'Cancel Culture' Comes to Science?

#197

Post by 0xy » Wed, Jan 15, 2020, 5:57 AM UTC

flukus wrote: post #153

0xy wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given he was bullied and harassed, do you think someone could oppose climate change at CSIRO and not be bullied and harassed? ETS and climate change are inextricably linked and related. If the establishment cannot even handle dissent on solutions, how could they handle dissent on the actual problem?

It's a single incident, have you got any evidence of a trend? Considering the next conservative government cut funding to the CSIRO, particularly in climate science areas is there any evidence that it's about the report itself or is it just about not pissing off the current government? Considering how heavy handed the climate deniers have been ( https://www.miamiherald.com/news/state/florida/article129837... ) you're…

Just curious, would you trust a scientific organization that would compromise scientific ethics including censorship and bullying at the whim of the current government in order to preserve their funding?

I'm not sure if you're defending or supporting CSIRO here. Bending to the whims of the government is reprehensible for an "independent" organization.

Also, consider the words of the scientist who was censored: "Managers said it was a political hot potato — too political to publish". [1]

So CSIRO is acting politically, using bullying and harassment to force censorship.

I don't see why I should have to prove a trend, I've already shown the chilling effect they intended. [2] Speak against the political grain, and get severely punished personally and have your career ruined. This means politics is driving climate science through intimidation.

Honest question: do you think anyone would put their livelihood, career and reputation on the line to question the political status quo after someone was publicly executed for doing so?

[1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2017-05-02/csiro-missing... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chilling_effect

Re: 'Cancel Culture' Comes to Science?

#198

Post by kortilla » Wed, Jan 15, 2020, 5:59 AM UTC

scythe wrote: post #22

sandoooo wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since twitter is horrible on mobile, here's a summary: # Nasorg sounds like NAS and could be mistaken for it. # Nasorg is conservative and have published material with conservative slant. # 7 out of 21 speakers are climate denialists. # Therefore it is righteous to deplatform them.

># Therefore it is righteous to deplatform them. It's not "deplatforming" when your objection to someone speaking is about what they're saying. An organization pushing climate change denial should not be treated as credible because climate denial is not science . Anyone who has even the faintest experience with physicists -- anyone who has sat in a room full of them -- knows that there are thousands upon thousands of…

> never about climatology

Bullshit. They look down their nose at climatology just like any other science without any experimental validation of theoretical models (a.k.a soft science).

Re: 'Cancel Culture' Comes to Science?

#199

Post by sysbin » Wed, Jan 15, 2020, 6:07 AM UTC

alasdair_ wrote: post #56

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…

>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?

The only thing coming to my mind for a possibility to this question is any type of research that would be for pro-assisted-suicide. Research promoting positives of assisted suicide for people with illnesses or disabilities. That type of thing likely was held back by certain ideologies rooted in culture. I'm not sure if it can be proven and makes me think the question is very difficult to prove.

Re: 'Cancel Culture' Comes to Science?

#200

Post by netsharc » Wed, Jan 15, 2020, 6:07 AM UTC

Fishysoup wrote: post #108

allovernow wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hell, look at the insane , wholly unscientific public crucification of James Watson for commenting, totally reasonably, on this very subject. Stripped of a Nobel prize for suggesting that two and two may equal four. Find me one credible media outlet which even questioned such treatment! Edit: sorry, I misread a headline about him losing the prize, it read stripped of "honors". Point still stands.

"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.

The fact that your comment is gray means to me there are a lot of racists on HN. Sigh...

And worse, they're thinking they're not racist because they think they have scientific backing for their beliefs..