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Nobel Disease

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Re: Nobel Disease

#131

Post by shuwix »

ciropantera wrote: post #7

A lot of these aren't "strange or scientifically unsound ideas" but downright racism. Whether Nobel prize recipients are less or more racist than their contemporaries is debatable but I'm not sure they fit the same category as "believed in ghosts" or "claims to have talked to a fluorescent racoon".

Yes, reality is racist. Statistics is racist. Nobel prize laureates are racist.

Whole science is racist ... it's totally inaccessible to people with IQ 2 standard deviations below average.

Re: Nobel Disease

#132

Post by Jyaif »

cestith wrote: post #123
Jyaif wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we eliminate a gene that causes bad thing to happen, this kind of eugenics would fall into the Utilitarian model, among others.

Would you propose selective breeding, selective sterilization, selective euthanasia, war, genetic engineering, or what to eradicate such a gene? What single gene that only causes bad things to happen do you have in mind? Are you sure it doesn’t also control unrelated activity that’s helpful to the population?

Under the utilitarian ethics model, everything from embryo screening to selective breeding/sterilization and genetic engineering would do the trick.

As to what specific gene or sets of gene in mind to alter, that depends on what you define as "bad things" and what is possible.

From a rapid google search, Cystic Fibrosis seems like a candidate.

Re: Nobel Disease

#133

Post by dyauspitr »

johnsmith1840 wrote: post #128
tpm wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a pretty rough but decent way How, exactly, would we know it's a decent way? I suspect it's not really about "race" which is full of wrong meanings; it's just that "race" in the US mostly also means genetically close populations, like black people originally coming through slave trade from one of a few places in Africa and therefore sharing some similar traits. But if you scaled research to a representative sample…

I mean a black looking person complains about a problem and you instantly can guess that because he's black and something is more common you can come to a conculsion faster. It's not "science" but don't doctors do this stuff like every single day?

What exactly is black though? Is it just dark skin or is it specifically those with African genetics? Because you have dark skinned people in Australia, Papua New Guinea, Southeast Asia, India, etc. Those people are very genetically dissimilar from Africans. In fact, in many cases, more dissimilar than someone from Africa and someone from Europe.

Re: Nobel Disease

#134

Post by cestith »

Jyaif wrote: post #132
cestith wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you propose selective breeding, selective sterilization, selective euthanasia, war, genetic engineering, or what to eradicate such a gene? What single gene that only causes bad things to happen do you have in mind? Are you sure it doesn’t also control unrelated activity that’s helpful to the population?

Under the utilitarian ethics model, everything from embryo screening to selective breeding/sterilization and genetic engineering would do the trick. As to what specific gene or sets of gene in mind to alter, that depends on what you define as "bad things" and what is possible. From a rapid google search, Cystic Fibrosis seems like a candidate.

Selective breeding or selective sterilization fail under Fairness, Rights, and probably Common Good. Maybe you’d get a pass with embryonic screening, but you’re fall afoul of other considerations there. Preselection of specific eggs and sperm before fertilization might clear most of those hurdles. So unless you get everyone to measure by only one ethical measurement, you’ve lost right out of the gate.

Genetic engineering is probably acceptable to most under all five. You’d probably still have ethical arguments. GE has ethical arguments raised against it in general, but let’s not go into the baby and bathwater arguments here. Editing genes in a fertilized egg or a blastomere has different ethical implications than doing gene editing in a fully born person. It’s different for a patient who can consent and for a child, too.

Cystic fibrosis usually leaves men mechanically sterile, although not carriers and men with CF can still have children through medical/surgical interventions. Its complications are ever more treatable. There are over 2500 known mutations of this gene, accounting for about 30 different disorders including CF. Which mutations would you screen for? Who among the population would you screen - known carriers? People with any CF in their extended family? Everyone?

Re: Nobel Disease

#135

Post by Alpha3031 »

CalRobert wrote: post #118
datsci_est_2015 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I mean, if we wanted every human on Earth to be over 6' tall, we could just cull the short ones (or stop them from reproducing), and this is scientifically valid, but, of course, evil. What's scientifically valid about that? What part of the scientific process is being utilized? What hypothesis is being tested? If you're implying that people would start to be taller because we are culling short people, then you're…

I guess I misunderstood the meaning of the term eugenics because I thought it was very much intentional artificial selection applied to humans. To reiterate - I do not support this! I think it's evil! but isn't that basically what it is?

If someone says just the word, it's hard to say if they mean just artificial selection, which can and is done to some extent today via genetic counselling by medical geneticists, coercive selection at a society-wide level advocated for by a certain social movement, and the social movement itself, which certainly held some pseudoscientific beliefs regarding how if we just did this and that, we could achieve genetic perfection and cure all social ills and all that. All of those things get called eugenics.

It's like how there's a difference between the medical study of nutrition and how some social media influencers will tell you if you eat X, Y and Z these are superfoods that will mean you will never get a cold for the rest of your life and it will cure cancer or some other nonsense.

Re: Nobel Disease

#136

Post by shuwix »

shuwix wrote: post #131
ciropantera wrote: post #7

A lot of these aren't "strange or scientifically unsound ideas" but downright racism. Whether Nobel prize recipients are less or more racist than their contemporaries is debatable but I'm not sure they fit the same category as "believed in ghosts" or "claims to have talked to a fluorescent racoon".

Yes, reality is racist. Statistics is racist. Nobel prize laureates are racist. Whole science is racist ... it's totally inaccessible to people with IQ 2 standard deviations below average.

Only thing stupid people are really good at is being butthurt.

Keep downvoting my comment because reality offends you. I really love the "level of thinking" that this will somehow hurt me.

Thank you for proving my point.

Re: Nobel Disease

#137

Post by holgerschurig »

dyauspitr wrote: post #46
ciropantera wrote: post #7

A lot of these aren't "strange or scientifically unsound ideas" but downright racism. Whether Nobel prize recipients are less or more racist than their contemporaries is debatable but I'm not sure they fit the same category as "believed in ghosts" or "claims to have talked to a fluorescent racoon".

The key point is it’s not just ethically wrong, but it’s not scientific because it’s subjective and has no basis in reality. For instance, you cannot use genetic studies to define a race because for instance, in Africa, you could have massive genetic diversity in people that are 200 miles apart. That doesn’t make them different races. If you did attempt to classify people into races based on something scientific like…

I think your argument starting with

> For instance, you cannot use genetic studies to define a race

is weak. For millennia we had phenomena that science couldn't describe. For many different reasons. One can now say that due to this the phenomena simply don't exists, since they didn't had a sound scientific understanding base. But that was obviously wrong.

To give you one of thousands example, think of how long it took science e.g. to understand lightnings. You could analyze the lightnings by form, and you ended up with thousands of forms. And then you could just say "Oh, this is so unscientific (because by some arbitrary limit reached), in reality lightning doesn't exist".

If some phenomena 1) isn't yet 100% scientifically described, then this is perhaps just a sign that science isn't far enough, hasn't used the proper methodology?

This is BTW a reason why I like the german word for science better than the english one. In german, it's "Wissenschaft" -> "knowledge creation". It's not "Wissenhab" -> "knowledge having". The word itself, unlike the english one, transports the idea that our knowledge is still limited. And that science is a process, not some achieved state.

1) "race" isn't just some old-white-man western concept. If you go to China, then you see that they also has such a concept --- and a quite strong one about "Han chinese". Or some african tribes, they even thought wars (Tuts & Hutu in Ruanda). Maybe race isn't a genetic concept, but a sociology one, e.g. because humans for whatever reason want to have an "us and they" thingy. In such a case searching for race genetics is simply the wrong methodology. Rendering the approach invalid, but nothing else.

Re: Nobel Disease

#138

Post by datsci_est_2015 »

CalRobert wrote: post #118
datsci_est_2015 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I mean, if we wanted every human on Earth to be over 6' tall, we could just cull the short ones (or stop them from reproducing), and this is scientifically valid, but, of course, evil. What's scientifically valid about that? What part of the scientific process is being utilized? What hypothesis is being tested? If you're implying that people would start to be taller because we are culling short people, then you're…

I guess I misunderstood the meaning of the term eugenics because I thought it was very much intentional artificial selection applied to humans. To reiterate - I do not support this! I think it's evil! but isn't that basically what it is?

I agree mostly with the other commenter that it’s like nutritionist vs health influencer.

But I’d also say that there’s an inherent bias to the word “eugenics” fundamentally: the implication that there are objectively good genetics and bad genetics for humans. In the extreme case there are genetic defects that cause stillbirth and put the mother’s life at severe risk, but this is almost never what is meant by usage of the word “eugenics”. Again, to conflate the two concepts is useful only to people who have caused immense human suffering.

Re: Nobel Disease

#139

Post by minifridge »

I am probably in the minority here, but I believe that scientists and researchers are allowed to hold unorthodox and even unscientific beliefs outside their domain expertise.

The deeper issue here I think is that they are being treated as gods after they are awarded this prize. And that's mostly a media/journalism problem and their values.

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