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'Cancel Culture' Comes to Science?

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321–330 of 368 posts

Re: 'Cancel Culture' Comes to Science?

#321
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Warning: I am not a climate scientist. However, I have to disagree that humanity has to leave the planet, or that it's impossible to fix. I will agree that it's very unlikely to be fixed or mitigated to a decent amount before disaster happens, but that's because of politics and human stupidity, not because it's not possible. More CO2 in the atmosphere doesn't have to equal higher average global temperatures. CO2 hold…

You misunderstood. I didn't say we have to leave the planet. What I am exposing in the data is that we know how atmospheric CO2 would decrease if we did (and took all of our toys with us). The answer is simple: We cannot fix this. Because any attempt would require energy and resources beyond planetary scale. Which means we are far more likely to kill everything on this planet than to fix it. I am not a climate scient…

The entire problem with your logic is that you're assuming that humans will not and cannot do anything at all to change carbon levels, aside from relying on natural processes. That's completely ridiculous. Any attempt to fix the problem has to involve artificial actions: carbon sequestration, solar shades, etc.

Your entire mentality is "it took X years for nature to do this, so it'll take X years to undo it by natural processes, and oh yeah, we have to actually undo it so everything goes back exactly the way it was, instead of just making the end result satisfactory". This isn't helpful at all. As I pointed out before, we can reduce the amount of sunlight using solar shades; we don't actually need CO2 levels to go back to pre-industrial levels. We just need to prevent the temperature from rising so much, while we figure out how to deal with the CO2.

>This is equivalent to trying to remove smoke from your kitchen with a small fan while you continue to burn the food you are cooking on the frying pan. You just can't do it.

Yes, you really can. With a fan powerful enough, and a vent hood, you absolutely can. It really doesn't take that much, and it depends on how much smoke you're producing, but you seem to think you need a turbojet engine to clear the air in a small kitchen from a small cooking fire, and you really don't.

>If you want it done faster you have to stop cooking and use a much larger fan (more energy).

Here's the part you're not getting. The amount of energy you need to run a vent fan isn't anywhere near the amount of energy unleashed by your cooking fire. Even better, if you constrain the air supply, the fire burns itself out quickly, or at least is prevented from producing as much smoke.

>It's actually the most common sense science I've seen in a long time.

I've noticed that people who throw around the term "common sense" a lot do so because they really don't understand things very well, and think their intuitive understanding suffices, when in fact it doesn't.

Re: 'Cancel Culture' Comes to Science?

#322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's been sad to watch such a storied institution reduced to another Murdoch mouthpiece over the last 10 years. The WSJ never had much of an ideological bent other than "capitalism" until News Corp took over.

Murdoch could’ve spiked the Theranos story that led to its collapse and cost him millions, but he didn’t.

That still feels like a "wheels of capitalism" thing -- the writing was on the wall and someone else would have run the Theranos article if the WSJ hadn't. But the overall editorial tone went from centrist to hard-right in the course of a decade, to the point it's not taken seriously as a financial publication anymore.

Re: 'Cancel Culture' Comes to Science?

#323
post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That Noah Carl one is interesting, hadn't heard about that. The Cambridge college actually conducted a formal investigation with a panel led by a Professor, and published a statement [0] explaining their decision to retract the fellowship. The reasons cited were lack of research ethics and integrity in Carl's work, poor scholarship, and the risk of the college being used as a platform to promote racist views. Frankly…

Yeah, if you get to pick the committee you can get them to report whatever you want, whether you explicitly instruct them as to what to find or not. Read his work for yourself and come to your own conclusions. His research gate profile. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Noah_Carl His website. https://supportnoahcarl.com/ > Since I was fired, over 600 academics have signed a petition supporting me , and several lea…

> if you get to pick the committee you can get them to report whatever you want

That's sometimes true, but I'd need more than that to suspect it in this case. The committee was chaired by a senior, tenured life fellow, and perhaps I'm biased as it's my alma mater, but Cambridge tends to be pretty insulated from cultural whims.

As the other reply pointed out it's not really reasonable to expect someone to become proficient in a body of scientific work in order to make an opinion, moreoever the great majority of his research gate articles require the text to be requested.

Unless something further comes to light I'm not yet persuaded that this is a miscarriage of justice or scientific suppression.

Re: 'Cancel Culture' Comes to Science?

#324

One of my guilty pleasures is finding someone on the web saying something foolish and engaging them in debate. Rather than cancel these guys, wouldn't it be better to have a few well-prepared opponents attend and do the same? (Isn't that how science is supposed to work?)

Debates can make for great entertainment, but are a poor forum for establishing truth and fact. Case in point, the 'cancel culture' argument is designed to shift the debate away from the science and instead focuses the debate on the 'character' of the scientists. So instead of arguing about the facts of climate change (which at this point are hard to refute), we are arguing about whether its okay for scientists to tr…

It's not the kind of evidence I prefer, but people who concentrate on ad hominem attacks do effectively provide evidence in favor of their targets' position.

Re: 'Cancel Culture' Comes to Science?

#325
post #54

>An unhappy side effect of the digital age is “cancel culture.” i.e. "I am uncomfortable with large amounts of people telling me I'm an asshole."

Cancel culture is when people are actually canceled: when accounts are shut down, people are fired, bank accounts closed, people are blacklisted. Actual material damages. Trivialization does not serve your point.

And sometimes the targets are driven to suicide, their friends and families left to grow up and live on without them.

Even if everything being asserted against them is true, the penalties rarely seem fitting for a civilized society.

Re: 'Cancel Culture' Comes to Science?

#326
post #249
post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He wasn't commenting on which factors cause difference in test scores. He was simply saying that the test scores are different. But it's become an unfortunate pattern that when people bring up the difference in scores, other people (like you) presume that mentioning the correlation data itself is akin to arguing that they are caused by genetic factors, and then attack them for not mentioning the environmental factors…

This is disingenuous. Did you miss where he mentioned "whites" without any context of location/upbringing/...

There you go again, attacking him for not mentioning the environmental factors.

You are too predictable. You just did exactly the behavior I criticized, in response to my critique!

Re: 'Cancel Culture' Comes to Science?

#327
post #167
post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'Dr. Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health, said that most experts on intelligence “consider any black-white differences in I.Q. testing to arise primarily from environmental, not genetic, differences.” Dr. Collins said he was unaware of any credible research on which Dr. Watson’s “profoundly unfortunate" statement would be based.' [0] I think this video [1], does a good job of attacking…

Dr. Francis is either unfamiliar with, or being profoundly misleading of, expert opinion, as surveys show: "In the current study, EQCA experts wereasked what percentage of the US Black-White differences in IQ is, in their view, due to environment or genes. In general, EQCA experts gave a 50–50 (50% genes, 50% environment) response with a slight tilt to the environmental position (51% vs. 49%; Table 3). When EQCA expe…

While the quote you pulled from that survey seems to contradict what Dr. Collins said in his statement, the two sentences before that one seem more problematic for the idea that there's even a difference in IQ that can be attributed to race:

"There was little to no support for separate subgroup norms for different racial, ethnic, or social groups or for people with different nationalities (natives vs. immigrants), with the percentage of experts favoring separate norms below 25%.

There was no clear position among experts regarding environmental and genetic factors in the US Black-White difference in intelligence."

Maybe Dr. Collins rubs shoulders with experts other than those surveyed here, who knows.

Looking at the SD in the survey responses suggests that the position of the researchers polled in this survey wasn't accurately represented by the quote you posted.

The example you use to critique the video I posted is also not very generous, and is a pretty lame rebuttal to what was a very extensive attack on the ideas presented in "The Bell Curve". Do you have any critiques on the more relevant points that the video actually makes? E.g. what is intelligence anyway and how can it be measured, if at all? Or, presuming that IQ is an accurate measure of intelligence, then how to square the supposition the Bell Curve makes about an idiocracy-style drop in IQ points with the Flynn effect?

Another relevant question is what exactly is the scientific support for "race" as anything other than a meaningless label[0]? For example, in the interview of Charles Murray conducted by Sam Harris for his podcast, Murray used Barack Obama as an example of a typical black man, saying that, and I'm paraphrasing, even supposing that there is a difference in IQ between the races, it wouldn't justify denying a job to someone like Barack Obama if he came in applying for one. But, like, why is Obama black and not white? Have you seen a picture of Obama's mom? She's the whitest white lady from Kansas. I was recently working on some cancer project and I had a spreadsheet of the subjects' self-reported race, as well as genetic ancestry results showing the percentage of African ancestry and European ancestry. Some of the respondents who self-reported as African American had 97% European ancestry.

[0] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2018/04/race-gen...

Re: 'Cancel Culture' Comes to Science?

#328
post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

James Watson - who was as close to royalty as you can get in science - worked very long and hard to get himself fired. It wasn’t just ”an interview”, but a lifetime of racism and sexism. Lior Pachter has a handy collection of quotes with links to sources: https://liorpachter.wordpress.com/2018/05/18/james-watson-in...

Well, let's just pick one example of a supposedly absolutely reprehensible and wrong statement in that collection. > “The one aspect of the Jewish brain that is not first class is that Jews are said to be bad in thinking in three dimensions.. it is true” – Watson > Sorry but these are racist and misogynist in a direct way. In what high school were you taught to read deliberations about Jewish brains as “rude comments…

Slightly below average is not bad.

The median Ashkenazi Jew is not all Jews.

Watson implied the difference is innate. Wikipedia does not.

Re: 'Cancel Culture' Comes to Science?

#329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IQ has been rigorously statistically proven as a very reliable predictor. This is often disputed by impulsively triggered non-experts browsing chat forums, but not by serious academics.

> IQ has been rigorously statistically proven as a very reliable predictor. You're right, it rigorously shows how well you will do on IQ tests. That's a real useful metric, now isn't it? > This is often disputed by impulsively triggered non-experts browsing chat forums, but not by serious academics. This is often upheld by people with latent fascist sentimentalities that there is some genetical component that makes o…

> [IQ] rigorously shows how well you will do on IQ tests. That's a real useful metric, now isn't it?

Surely IQ is measuring something useful if it correlates so well with things like job performance, school performance, income, and crime? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient#Social_c...

Re: 'Cancel Culture' Comes to Science?

#330
I'm Lenny Teytelman, the target of this article. I'm the CEO and cofounder of protocols.io, an open access platform to improve reproducibility of published research. Accelerating science has been my mission for the past eight years.

The claims in this piece of "cancel culture" and fear of disagreement on my part are utter nonsense.

This National Association of Scholars is a group using the legitimate reproducibility discussion to undermine the EPA and climate research.

I've warned people not to attend this conference because 7/21 total speakers are climate change deniers and 0 are climate experts. My full response is here: https://twitter.com/lteytelman/status/1216770668475252738.

Lenny Teytelman, Ph.D. CEO, protocols.io

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