151–160 of 368 posts
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?)
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Murdoch could’ve spiked the Theranos story that led to its collapse and cost him millions, but he didn’t.
Spiking that story would have delayed Theranos's collapse a bit (it isn't like if one news organization doesn't report a story no one else will ever find it), but had Murdoch spiked the story and unloaded his stock while it was still worth a lot, he could have been in legal trouble for trading on inside information, something only sources within the company knew. This kind of spiking backfires badly when discovered (…
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> The debate was called for by opposition parties after evidence came to light that a paper critical of carbon emissions trading was being suppressed This is disappointing but it's not climate change censorship, it's ETS (as a solution to carbon emissions) censorship. Edit - And he was probably wrong anyway, look at the results of the ETS in action: https://www.climatecouncil.org.au/resources/climate-cuts-cov...
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?
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 going to need more examples.
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"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.
> Every result ever has pointed that all races and genders are equally "intelligent" and well-suited to the same tasks. This isn’t true. Ashkenazi Jews and East Asians have higher IQ scores than whites. Male and female scores on IQ tests are identical by construction. They have different scores on the component sub tests. http://www1.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints/1997mainstrea... Mainstream Science on Intelligen…
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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…
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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?
Well IQ is an attempt to measure the mythical G (general intelligence, if there is such a thing), and more studies in that direction would allow you to better control for various factors relating to G, and figure out what interventions are best for increasing G. I'd personally consider those other studies to be more important than race and IQ, and certainly more palatable. I think it's possible that the race/IQ facto…
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How about a correlation between IQ and race. It seems that no one will touch the subject out of fear the it would end their career.
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 absolutely does, which is why medical practitioners ask for race. Different races have different susceptibility to various medical conditions, for genetic reasons (even if we don’t understand the causal mechanisms yet).
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Originally you said "Conservation of Energy is an ass. It does not care one bit. Which means we can't solve a problem with less energy than what went into creating it in the first place." Enhanced silicate weathering is a way to draw down atmospheric CO2 with less energy than went into creating the problem. Still, perhaps it will never be deployed on a large scale if people find the proposal too scary. That's one of…
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,…
I'm not sure what you are trying to recall, but this is incorrect as written. The atmosphere stays well-mixed up to about 100 kilometers:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homosphere
Any silicate weathering process that binds CO2 at the Earth's surface will also remove atmospheric CO2 that exists at 30 km from the surface.
The atmospheric CO2 excess was created by generations of humans all over the world. Barring breakthroughs like self-replicating machinery, fixing it will also require global scale efforts over multiple generations. I am not optimistic about people even starting serious efforts toward that end in my lifetime. My pessimism is more because of the misaligned incentives than the huge numbers involved.
If you told an engineer 150 years ago that the world would burn over 4 billion tons of coal in 2013, and asked them to plan how that would happen, it would seem impossible too. Nobody could really plan an endeavor of such scale. And in fact it didn't come from one globally coordinated plan, just a set of incentives that diffused globally. Sadly for the climate, the incentives to stop burning fossils do not spread as easily as the incentives to start.
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This guy's Twitter thread doesn't seem like a great defense, because he doesn't make any specific scientific claims. It's all just ad-hominem that this org are "climate deniers." More troubling is his claim that they are "weaponizing" reproducibility against climate change. Doesn't that raise a red flag? If you're worried that reproducibility poses a problem for something, doesn't that mean you might just a little bi…
> Who are these people who feel that simply listening to someone speak is equivalent to endorsing them? There are certain topics that are so settled, that to engage with anyone with a contrary view is tantamount to giving them credibility and a platform to reach the uninformed. Some topics simply don't have "both sides" in any meaningful sense. Flat eartherism, Holocaust denial, and antivaxxerism are ones that immedi…
Flat Earth though seems pretty valuable to me. It's an intellectual exercise to argue a challenging position, and to do so you must learn the evidence you're arguing against. Until flat Earth advocates start getting into NASA or something I can't see how they're doing any harm.
In general, I tend to think that even if some ideas are toxic and should be kept from children or the mentally disturbed, there's nothing wrong with discussing ideas of any kind between people speaking peacefully and consensually.
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How about a correlation between IQ and race. It seems that no one will touch the subject out of fear the it would end their career.
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.
Comparing genetic ancestry and self-reported race/ethnicity in a multiethnic population in New York City
Self-reported race/ethnicity is frequently used in epidemiological studies to assess an individual’s background origin. How- ever, in admixed populations such as Hispanic, self-reported race/ethnicity may not accurately represent them genetically because they are admixed with European, African and Native American ancestry. We estimated the proportions of genetic admixture in an ethnically diverse population of 396 mothers and 188 of their children with 35 ancestry informative mark- ers (AIMs) using the STRUCTURE version 2.2 program. The majority of the markers showed significant deviation from Hardy–Weinberg equilibrium in our study population. In mothers self-identified as Black and White, the imputed ancestry proportions were 77.6% African and 75.1% European respectively, while the racial composition among self-identified His- panics was 29.2% European, 26.0% African, and 44.8% Native American. We also investigated the utility of AIMs by showing the improved fitness of models in paraoxanase-1 genotype–phenotype associations after incorporating AIMs; however, the im- provement was moderate at best. In summary, a minimal set of 35 AIMs is sufficient to detect population stratification and estimate the proportion of individual genetic admixture; however, the utility of these markers remains questionable.