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The purge of German science in 1933

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Re: The purge of German science in 1933

#241

Post by xhkkffbf »

bergen wrote: post #122
cedilla wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Verbally smacked down? Yes. But it's absurd to even compare this to the purges in China, Germany and Russia, were people were literally killed to death. Also, while everyone has the right to argue anything, no one has the right to have the merits of their effort evaluated. When you go on and tell everyone here that ROT13 is as secure as RSA-2048, everyone will rightly laugh at you without considering your reasoning.

Not arguing with your point but “killed to death” sounds like an awesome metal band name

And then there was that classic movie, "Murder By Death."

Re: The purge of German science in 1933

#242

Post by wolverine876 »

nec4b wrote: post #231
wolverine876 wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What in a 'woke' ideology has denied basic, consequential science?

Woke people believe math is racist. They get people banned or fired from universities. I mean there have been N-treads about the latest woke idiocy on campuses across the states here on HN, why are some people always pretending it doesn't exist?

> Woke people believe math is racist.

Could you give us an example? I know about racism issues associated with math education, but I've never heard that 'mathematics is racist'.

> They get people banned or fired from universities.

What does that have to do with denying or rejecting science? Also, sometimes people get fired for legitimate reasons; the fact that they were fired is not a sign of problems.

> I mean there have been N-treads about the latest woke idiocy on campuses across the states here on HN, why are some people always pretending it doesn't exist?

I'm sure you know that there are powerful tides of misinformation and disinformation on the Internet - about climate change and vaccines, for example. Lots of repetition doesn't make something true. In fact, science is founded on the opposite: One person's verifiable facts are believed before the entire world's repetition.

Re: The purge of German science in 1933

#243

Post by reissbaker »

paganel wrote: post #161
reissbaker wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jews not "being a thing" in Europe from the 1200s until the 1800s is so preposterously wrong it's hard to know where to start. The Spanish expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, with the subsequent very famous Spanish Inquisition, might be a decent place to start reading. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expulsion_of_Jews_from_Spain Spain is about as West as you can go and still be in Europe... And where do you think…

I didn't count the current territory of Spain up until the late 1400s as "proper" Western European, in fact most of the histories of Spain do not dwell on the history of Al-Andalus in the 14th century for too long, if at all. > Spain is about as West as you can go and still be in Europe... Geographically, of course, but in this type of historical discourse geography isn't the ultimate decider. Notice how Northern cou…

This is once again so wrong it's incredible. History of Spain not including 1492, the year Columbus set sail? Really? The beginning of European colonialism of the Americas is ignored by "most of the histories" of Europe and Spain?

By the way, historians refer to 1400s as the 15th century, not the 14th century. FYI. That's how century counting works.

And there was no Al Andalus at that point, either; the last trace of Muslim rule, the Emirate of Granada, had lost nearly all of its territory before surrendering their final fragment in January of 1492.

Re: The purge of German science in 1933

#244

Post by reissbaker »

Kranar wrote: post #230
reissbaker wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I linked to a lot of resources that cover the points you're trying to make and IMO it'd be worth reading them if you want to have an informed discussion of antisemitism, e.g. antisemitic events that occurred hundreds of years prior to the 19th century and are viewed by mainstream scholarship as being part of European antisemitism that directly led to the Holocaust.

When you say a lot , do you just mean the three Wikipedia articles? Because I looked at them and they reaffirm what the other person is saying, that there is a distinction between anti-Judaism and antisemitism. In fact right in the very link you post it states: >The development of racial and religious antisemitism has historically been encouraged by the concept of anti-Judaism, which is distinct from antisemitism its…

If you could read past the first paragraph you would find:

> Although the term "antisemitism" did not come into common usage until the 19th century, it is also applied to previous and later anti-Jewish incidents. Notable instances of antisemitic persecution include the Rhineland massacres in 1096; the Edict of Expulsion in 1290; the European persecution of Jews during the Black Death, between 1348 and 1351; the massacre of Spanish Jews in 1391, the crackdown of the Spanish Inquisition, and the expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492; the Cossack massacres in Ukraine, between 1648 and 1657; various anti-Jewish pogroms in the Russian Empire, between 1821 and 1906; the Dreyfus affair, between 1894 and 1906; the Holocaust by Nazi Germany during World War II; and various Soviet anti-Jewish policies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitism

Re: The purge of German science in 1933

#245

Post by matheusmoreira »

octopoc wrote: post #238
pasabagi wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you'd have to be a bit of an expert to understand these results, just because of words like 'intelligence', that could mean anything, really, and I think accounting for 20% of the 50% heritability of intelligence is not exactly blowing the question out of the water. All the same, I guess I am out of date (in 2017, they were getting 1% - perhaps in 2030, they will be up to 50%? Or back down to 2%?) In general,…

True, intelligence is not simple. But no matter how complex it is, the difference between an IQ of 100 and an IQ of 70 is undeniably a difference in intelligence. The difference between a society with an average IQ of 100 and a society with an average IQ of 70 is one of intelligence. That's why, for example, any policy that allows emigrations from IQ 70 societies to to Western countries, which usually average around…

It would be a bad policy... If the people of those western countries were having children. They aren't. They need those immigrants.

There is no nation without natalism.

Re: The purge of German science in 1933

#246

Post by matheusmoreira »

devjab wrote: post #57
xyzelement wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW in the current time we definitely encounter "wrong physics" in places where science and politics intersect. EG - a scientist can easily get smacked down for being "a climate change denialist" or an "antivaxer" or a similar unpalatable label way before the merits of their effort are evaluated.

There are no scientific merits for being an antivaxer though. You can certainly have egotistical reasons but the herd immunity created through general vaccination isn’t just a theory anymore. I’d be more curious as to how anti-vaccine agendas ever became a thing. With a lot of these things like climate change, there are clear economic forces which will pour “tobacco is healthy” amounts of money into pushing whatever…

> I’d be more curious as to how anti-vaccine agendas ever became a thing.

It's simple. They don't trust authorities on the subject. They don't trust authorities in general. They feel lied to and manipulated. In many ways, that's the fault of the authorities. They are prone to simplifying things in order to get their consent.

During the pandemic I witnessed government officials proclaiming that there were no risks associated with the vaccines. That's just false.

Everything is a risk/benefit calculation. There is no 0% and no 100%. Things are vastly more complex than they seem to be. Yet these authorities insist on simplifying things for the layman in order to manufacture consent for their public policies.

These people aren't stupid. They will find out. When they do, they will never listen to you again. They will actively resist you.

Re: The purge of German science in 1933

#247

Post by EnigmaFlare »

defrost wrote: post #201
EnigmaFlare wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree it's not conclusive, so I shouldn't have said "false", but the FBI says it was most likely a lab leak [1]. Your article starts by calling it a "false myth" so they're clearly still in the political partisanship trap whatever the outcome of some bet. Anybody who's certain it was of natural origin is just being fooled by the news and some prominent scientists who made some intentionally misleading statements. […

From your link: underscoring a divide in the US government as the majority of the intelligence community still believes that Covid either emerged naturally in the wild, or that there is still too little evidence to make a judgment one way or another. "My article" isn't mine, it's an article discussing a lengthy technical debate recently held on the merits of zoonotic origin Vs Lab leak origin cases with a great many…

It's not a strawman, it's your real man. It's the first sentence in the article you cited.

The conspiracy I'm talking about is the one described here: https://www.bmj.com/content/374/bmj.n1656

"For most of 2020, the notion that SARS-CoV-2 may have originated in a lab in Wuhan, China, was treated as a thoroughly debunked conspiracy theory."

which identifies the misinformation's origin here:

"Shortly after the pandemic began, Daszak effectively silenced debate over the possibility of a lab leak with a February 2020 statement in the Lancet.2 “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that covid-19 does not have a natural origin,” "

Re: The purge of German science in 1933

#248

Post by Kranar »

reissbaker wrote: post #244
Kranar wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you say a lot , do you just mean the three Wikipedia articles? Because I looked at them and they reaffirm what the other person is saying, that there is a distinction between anti-Judaism and antisemitism. In fact right in the very link you post it states: >The development of racial and religious antisemitism has historically been encouraged by the concept of anti-Judaism, which is distinct from antisemitism its…

If you could read past the first paragraph you would find: > Although the term "antisemitism" did not come into common usage until the 19th century, it is also applied to previous and later anti-Jewish incidents. Notable instances of antisemitic persecution include the Rhineland massacres in 1096; the Edict of Expulsion in 1290; the European persecution of Jews during the Black Death, between 1348 and 1351; the massa…

No dispute about that, antisemitism as a term to describe persecution of Jews certainly is used to apply to instances that took place 1000s of years ago. That does not mean that antisemitism didn't change, with different forms emerging with different excuses. Hatred of a group of people often precedes rationales for that hatred, excuses are made after the fact.

That doesn't change the fact that hatred towards Jews as a race, hatred towards them on the basis of their birth, their intrinsic nature, as opposed to on the basis of their religion or as a culture, emerged in the 19th century. In almost all of the instances you mention prior to the 19th century, with the exception of the Cossack uprising, conversion from Judaism to Christianity would have spared you. The Cossack uprising and in particular the Khmelnytsky Uprising was not on racial grounds, it was on mercantile grounds and opposed to Jews on the basis of their status as tax collectors as well as propaganda about their collaboration with Polish nobility. Certain Jewish communities seen to have not been involved in either aspect were spared, indicating that the hatred towards Jews was not based on race.

In Nazi Germany, if you were considered a Jew by race, nothing you did could have spared you. Nothing.

Re: The purge of German science in 1933

#249

Post by EnigmaFlare »

pasabagi wrote: post #138
EnigmaFlare wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IQ test have genuine predictive power when applied to large groups. So no, they're not unscientific. In fact, the idea of IQ tests being useless or culturally biased is a now-outdated excuse that people used to use to justify the different results between ethic groups. It's now well accepted that different ethnic groups have different average IQs, and that IQ is a useful predictor of various life outcomes. What the p…

In general the thing people find obnoxious about this kind of argument is that both 'race' and 'IQ' have their origin in eugenics, but are meaningless in genetics. The genetic variation across one race (say black) is much greater than the variation between races. There are no well-established genetic predictors of IQ. So, even if you do find evidence that there is a statistical correlation between these two unscienti…

Finding evidence to be obnoxious because of political associations is anti-science. You could make a moral argument that humans shouldn't be allowed to know certain things because we can't be trusted with that knowledge, but that's separate from trying to understand reality.

> The genetic variation across one race (say black) is much greater than the variation between races.

Why did you say that? Are you implying that there must be a wider range of IQs among various ethnicities within a race than between races? That's not a logical conclusion. Do you have some other chain of logic in mind?

By the way, I only use the word race loosely. I really mean ethnicity. Although the findings do still broadly apply to the classic 3-ish races.

Re: The purge of German science in 1933

#250

Post by EnigmaFlare »

te_chris wrote: post #177
pasabagi wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In general the thing people find obnoxious about this kind of argument is that both 'race' and 'IQ' have their origin in eugenics, but are meaningless in genetics. The genetic variation across one race (say black) is much greater than the variation between races. There are no well-established genetic predictors of IQ. So, even if you do find evidence that there is a statistical correlation between these two unscienti…

This guy clearly is just trying to bang on about racial superiority but coaxing it in terms of "they won't let us say the thing". Your response neatly shuts him down. Well done.

Shut me down by saying false things? Why do you believe IQ is unscientific? It's routinely used by scientists for science and has falsifiable predictive power, which distinguishes it from unscientific things like astrology and homeopathy. Race isn't unscientific either - even if we're talking about the classic 3 races (which is not actually how people use the word anyway), they do in fact correspond to broad common genetic histories. Yes, they're an artificial classification people invented, but species are also an artificial classification. Neither is capable of classifying every individual and neither is unscientific because both are well enough defined to be useful to make predictions from.
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