Earlier quoted context omitted.
IQ itself is not even close to science in the sense of physics, chemistry, or even biology. Psychology as a whole is disreputable, literally half its studies fail to replicate. You might as well flip a coin. Sure, IQ is the best that we have. But it's terrible.
IQ and the rest of psychometrics replicates, as does personality psychology. Massive sample sizes, people strongly motivated to get things right and generations of intelligent people trying to prove them wrong, many of whom have gone into psychometrics themselves have ensured that psychometrics has very sound backing. Saying psychology as a whole is disreputable is just anti-intellectual know nothingism. The divide b…
Online activists are silencing us, scientists say
231–240 of 421 posts
Re: Online activists are silencing us, scientists say
#232Earlier quoted context omitted.
I completely agree with you, but our society has such a stigma around mental illness that if you tell someone their back pain is caused by repressed emotions, you get what happens in the article.
> if you tell someone their back pain is caused by repressed emotions, you get what happens in the article. But...you would (or could?, or should?) never tell someone that, because how would you know? Maybe there is some link but to conclude that it could be the case is pretty silly. So it's not like that's a stigma, it's just a statement not based in fact that evokes a strong reaction because you're telling someone…
I used "you" in the wrong way here. You == qualified medical people, such as in the article. Not you == oneself/one.
Re: Online activists are silencing us, scientists say
#233Earlier quoted context omitted.
One plausible candidate is which continent a particular individual’s ancestors came from. That’s something that can be tested for with relative ease. > Ancestry informative marker sets for determining continental origin and admixture proportions in common populations in America > ... A comprehensive set of 128 AIMs and subsets as small as 24 AIMs are shown to be useful tools for ascertaining the origin of subjects fr…
A genetic test to see whether someone has ancestry from Melenasia or Sudan or Scotland is likely to give a different result than casual visual classification. The latter is what we commonly call "race".
I can tell the difference between German and Irish people at better than chance and you think people can’t tell the difference between Melanesians, Caucasians and Sub Saharan Africans? Bone structure, skin tone, hair colour and hair texture don’t give as much information as a whole genome sequence but telling the difference between an East Asian and a West Eurasian isn’t rocket surgery. By the same token it’s not hard to tell the difference between an Ethiopian and a Nigerian, or a Swede and a Spaniard, on average.
Re: Online activists are silencing us, scientists say
#234This is sad. Unfortunately we have some people who put their beliefs and politics above science and will actively act against investigation only because a line of inquiry could result in evidence against their view. It comes from both the left and right depending on the topic. It’s not simply dissent it also is about pressuring institutions to not fund certain areas of investigation which is a very detrimental conseq…
Unfortunately we have some people who put their beliefs and politics above science and will actively act against investigation only because a line of inquiry could result in evidence against their view. You say that's people putting beliefs and politics above science, but while that's a rational thing to suggest there are two problems with it. Firstly, a lot of issues don't and can't have any scientific rationale beh…
While there may be evidence that diversity leads to better decision making, this isn't it. It's a marketing piece for a company that sells a decision making co-working platform. Direct from the white paper:
"The study was able to measure when teams made better decisions by tracking how often the decision maker changed their mind based on the input of the team. This is presumed to be a better decision since the Cloverpop process ensures that decisions are well framed with clear goals, adequate information and multiple alternatives to avoid groupthink."
In other words, this study defines better decisions as ones which make their product relevant, which unless you're a Cloverpop marketing exec, probably isn't a good metric.
Re: Online activists are silencing us, scientists say
#235Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is significantly more genetic variety in the single black "race" than all others put together. You could try dividing blacks into three or twelve different races but those lines are quite difficult to draw. Any statement which considers black a single race and white and Oriental distinct is automatically suspect.
> There is significantly more genetic variety in the single black "race" than all others put together. You could try dividing blacks into three or twelve different races but those lines are quite difficult to draw. Not only that, people want to continue using the existing (extremely flawed) categories, and that's where it leads you to problems. "More genetic variety in a single race than between races" is a great arg…
> When you discover that some "race" is underrepresented in some field, it's completely possible that a major cause is that the median in that arbitrarily defined racial category is below the median in another arbitrarily defined racial category.
It's possible, yes. It's also possible that perceptions of race influence the subjective decisions that drive those outcomes. How would you determine causality?
Eg, you could try sending employers identical resumes with "black sounding" and "white sounding" names and measuring callback rates. This has been done: https://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2015/mar/15...).
There are likely many factors in racial disparities, but this appears to be one of them.
Re: Online activists are silencing us, scientists say
#236Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unfortunately we have some people who put their beliefs and politics above science and will actively act against investigation only because a line of inquiry could result in evidence against their view. You say that's people putting beliefs and politics above science, but while that's a rational thing to suggest there are two problems with it. Firstly, a lot of issues don't and can't have any scientific rationale beh…
You know, I think science is a lot more capable of converting "is" into "ought" than it is commonly given credit for. I think there's room for a kind of "moral pragmatism". After all, our morals all came from somewhere - some type of reasoning drove their creation, be it conscious or evolutionary. There's a rock bottom, and science can expose contradictions between our core axiomatic beliefs, and our more shallow cac…
Is that a Newtonian moral imperative, a quantum moral imperative, or a relativistic moral imperative? Science can help optimise toward a pre-existing ought (the moral imperative not to kill, for example) but it has nothing to say about what should be a moral imperative in the first place.
Re: Online activists are silencing us, scientists say
#237Over the next 20 or so years, expect a lot of syndromes/conditions to be reclassified, as Michael Sharpe puts in the article, as "biological condition[s] that can be perpetuated by social and psychological factors.". I struggled with RSI for a couple of years until I read John Sarno's "The Mind-Body Connection" on the recommendation of someone from HN. Sarno's thesis is that many chronic pain conditions (those withou…
> those without a clear physical mechanism, such as RSI or chronic back pain But RSI has a clear physical mechanism. I don't know as much about chronic back pain, but considering how much physical stuff there is in our back, I'd assume it's similar. Or does "physical mechanism" mean something other than it seems to mean?
Yeah, "clear physical mechanism" is a hole I could drive a truck through. Clear to whom? And what does "clear" have to do with "verified through rigorous scientific exploration of this and competing hypotheses"? As Mencken said, "Explanations exist; they have existed for all time; there is always a well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong."
My experience with most serious medical things is that doctors have a clear general-audience explanation, because part of their job is making patients feel like they understand what's going on. But if you get into the details, the good doctors will say, "Well, actually, the picture is much murkier, but here's what we know based on studies X, Y, and Z, but there's a lot yet to learn."
Back pain in particular is an area of open dispute. Many people have many theories, all of them very hard to test. When I was dealing with back pain, a spine-center doctor recommended a book called "Treat Your Own Back" [1]. It was hugely helpful to me. And in it, the doctor explains that he hit upon his method because a patient came in, used a piece of equipment that was set up totally the wrong way, and said, "Gosh, doc, that was great!" It led him to reexamine what he had been taught about backs, coming up with a different "clear physical mechanism" to explain a common class of pain.
That we are still figuring something out does not mean it's psychosomatic. It doesn't mean it's not, but a doctor suggesting otherwise is doing the medical equivalent of "god of the gaps" theology, where anything mysterious is attributed to your preferred cause.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Treat-Your-Back-Robin-McKenzie/dp/095...
Re: Online activists are silencing us, scientists say
#238Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There is significantly more genetic variety in the single black "race" than all others put together. You could try dividing blacks into three or twelve different races but those lines are quite difficult to draw. Not only that, people want to continue using the existing (extremely flawed) categories, and that's where it leads you to problems. "More genetic variety in a single race than between races" is a great arg…
> it's completely possible that a major cause is that the median in that arbitrarily defined racial category is below the median in another arbitrarily defined racial category. Sure, possible, in the sense of theoretically possible. But very unlikely as socioeconomic factors potentially dwarf all of the aggregate group differences.
Sure. The issue is the difference that remains even after you [at least attempt to] control for socioeconomic and other factors.
Re: Online activists are silencing us, scientists say
#239Earlier quoted context omitted.
What, genetically, is a race?
An ethnic grouping (not necessarily skin color). There was a movement in the 90s to get rid of the word "race" because scientists said all humans are basically the same. However, that movement has dwindled because we are discovering some important differences between ethnic groups. Such as: * Blacks are more sensitive to salt * Blacks are at a greater risk of glaucoma * etc
Humans are not "basically the same" but humans are also not easily divided into a couple of genetically separate races. Many black Americans, for example, have white ancestors. And black Africans are genetically far more diverse than the entire rest of mankind put together. There are people with every possible skin colour between black and white. Our insistence on drawing a handful of arbitrary lines between them is cultural, and not based on a clear genetic separation.
That said, skin colour does have some physiological impact: darker skin blocks the impact of the sun on our skin, which is great for preventing sunburn (and skin cancer, I think?), but reduces the amount of vitamin D our skin creates, and vitamin D deficiency can have an impact on all sorts of things (no idea if glaucoma is one of them). That makes it a trait, though, not a race.
Re: Online activists are silencing us, scientists say
#240Earlier quoted context omitted.
Forearms are anatomically distinct from the brain.
Yes...and yet, no. The brain controls the muscles that constitute your forearm. It’s not impossible to imagine that some sort of central nervous system dysfunction could make your arm go stiff. Limb rigidity is a classic symptom of Parkinson’s disease, for example, and its cause is several steps removed from motor cortex. Even the wrinkling of your fingers when they’re wet involves the nervous system: https://www.ncb…
Definitely. The now [flagged] comment I was responding to was completely over-the-top and utterly lacking in nuance hence my dismissive response of a similar nature.