221–230 of 231 posts
I can't give a cite for the following I read it in either a newspaper or magazine probably 30+ years ago. There was a school district in a small town that for the first time gave IQ tests to all of the children in some younger age group, I think around 7 or 8. The results showed a several point difference between the white kids and the Black kids. The district wrote this off as due to cultural bias in the tests. One…
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There's a new drug emerging from Berkeley and a company spawned from there called HOPO [1]. The drug is a chelator that has a special affinity for heavy metals in the lanthanide group, which happen to be some of the more toxic metals. This includes gadolinium, which is found in MRI contrast agents, and has been known to cause many-year retention in the bones and skull [2] from just a single dose. "The chelating agent…
You should look at how those molecule look in 3d, it's amazing: it's like there is a slot just to capture a specific atom.
I've recently bumped into the YouTube channel ChubbyEmu. Medical ER case analysis by a real doctor on real cases. Think Doctor House, but not over the top and with lots of really well explained medical knowledge. He's got one on a lead poisoning case: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qHxEjINCAg
There's a new drug emerging from Berkeley and a company spawned from there called HOPO [1]. The drug is a chelator that has a special affinity for heavy metals in the lanthanide group, which happen to be some of the more toxic metals. This includes gadolinium, which is found in MRI contrast agents, and has been known to cause many-year retention in the bones and skull [2] from just a single dose. "The chelating agent…
I found others while googling
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This is an excellent cautionary tale against lazily attributing politically inconvenient data to testing bias (which remains fashionable). It may seem like an easy way out, but it also offers an excuse to simply ignore the problem, which perpetuates it.
It isn't necessarily just laziness. The first step to fixing the problem means accepting the results, which in this case meant accepting a certain racial group of (silently lead-poisoned) kids had measurably lower intelligence. I don't think I need to explain why that is a minefield.
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Living in lead-rich environments is an example of systemic oppression, iiuc. There is a lot of nuance lost in any generality but in this case I do not believe it is a misattribution as much as it is an incomplete descriptor
The problem with using lead-rich environment as an example of systemic oppression, and the reason why activists are taking very little about lead these days, is that unlike “systemic oppression”, lead exposure is something very concrete, and it can be tested and studied. We did a lot of studies, in fact, on this particular issue, and the results are pretty clear: differences in lead exposure explain very little fract…
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You should look at how those molecule look in 3d, it's amazing: it's like there is a slot just to capture a specific atom.
Any resources on how can I view this in 3D? Not acquainted with that world.
I found others while googling
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Steven Pinker is right in this regard and so was Plato: … The doings of Cronus, and the sufferings which in turn his son inflicted upon him, even if they were true, ought certainly not to be lightly told to young and thoughtless persons … they are stories not to be repeated in our State …
I had always thought Plato's argument was a reductio ad absurdum. Looking at it now, it seems he WAS actually arguing FOR censoring stories of the bad behavior of the gods AND FOR censoring Homer's Odyssey. Sigh.
Our state is built on the narratives of democracy and equality thus while those factors have ability to undermine the narrative (as we've seen in not so distant history) we have to censor them and do the research behind closed doors, otherwise we risk more damage than any possible benefit.
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I mean in an interview Steven Pinker himself said there’s some things that we may not want to know, because if the parameter is wholly outside of human control it’d just contribute to racism and serve no useful purpose. Also even if a study found parameters like that, it would never be published as the scientists career would absolutely be ruined.
There's no such thing as a parameter that's "wholly outside of human control" when you account for technological change. If there's an easy way of providing a free +1 INT, +1 WIS boost to a non-trivial chunk of the population via, let's say, tailored mRNA vaccine injections, I'd sure want to know about it!
mRNA can change gene expression locally for limited time, enough to train your immune sysem but not for permanent changes. CRISPR can make permanent changes but but for now only to few cells in vitro, not to whole organism. Even the Chineese CRISPR modified twins are mosaics of modified and unmodofied.