'Cancel Culture' Comes to Science? • Hacker News Board

Re: 'Cancel Culture' Comes to Science?

#281

Post by modo_mario » Wed, Jan 15, 2020, 11:06 AM UTC

frogger23129 wrote: post #248

rfdbsd wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You clearly didn't even read these wikipedia pages. Although they are about two different publications (one from 2002 and the other from 2006), each book is basically the exact same, and the latter presents the exact same flimsy evidence as the former. Also, from the contents of these very same wikipedia articles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IQ_and_the_Wealth_of_Nations#R... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IQ_and_Glo…

I am aware that some people dispute it, but the fact is that IQ scores are consistently lower for some races. Similar studies have been done and always reach the same conclusions. No one has been able to refute the raw data and it is easily replicated. The differences are self evident when comparing cities such as Lagos or Zimbabwe versus Hong Kong. Also observe that the Jews are extremely over represented in the lis…

> The differences are self evident when comparing cities such as Lagos or Zimbabwe versus Hong Kong.

And nobody denies it. Yet plenty would ask to what extent and how has nutrition, education (notably during development), and other environmental factors have been factored in trying to draw conclusions from that.

India for example tends to score lower and that despite no lack of genetic intermingling with surrounding areas yet should anyone trying to find a cause not consider for example iodine deficiency which is more common there?

Re: 'Cancel Culture' Comes to Science?

#282

Post by dennis_jeeves » Wed, Jan 15, 2020, 11:08 AM UTC

stenl wrote: post #224

neekleer wrote: post #210

One problem is that tenure and standing for established scientists no longer afford any of the expected protections. James Watson was not discredited but promptly fired and "disgraced" for stating a well-supported scientific finding in abrupt layman's terms for an interview. The minds of cancel culture would probably say they gave this dinosaur enough chances to fade away, but he wouldn't. If they do want scientists…

James Watson - who was as close to royalty as you can get in science - worked very long and hard to get himself fired. It wasn’t just ”an interview”, but a lifetime of racism and sexism. Lior Pachter has a handy collection of quotes with links to sources: https://liorpachter.wordpress.com/2018/05/18/james-watson-in...

I read the quotes in the links. None of that to me constitutes as 'racism' and 'sexism' as commonly defined. They are just plain observations which incidentally resonates with my own observations. Of course your average person out there will construe all his statements as being racist and sexist.

You could argue that some of his statements are bad jokes, but that is subjective.

To quote the guy 'rob' who made the comment on June 4, 2018 at 5:22 am :

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Is he an old man? Yes. Does he not know when to keep his mouth shut? Yes. Are some of his views outdated? Yes. Get over it. 90% of the planet is as bad as him, if not worse. And 90% of your views will be outdated too in 20 years.

This never-ending desire of "the left" (which includes most of academia) to feel offended is far more damaging than the ramblings of an old man.

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Re: 'Cancel Culture' Comes to Science?

#283

Post by l0000p » Wed, Jan 15, 2020, 11:15 AM UTC

dragonwriter wrote: post #273

l0000p wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you're just assuming that he is wrong based on your own presumptions without any actual knowledge about the subject. The question is who is most likely to be right, a nobel prize winning Ph.D. specialized in molecular biology, genetics and zoology, who worked 20 years at Harvard etc, etc....or you. This is exactly the problem of cancel culture. Just because he points out something you don't like you're suddenly a…

> The question is who is most likely to be right, a nobel prize winning Ph.D. specialized in molecular biology, genetics and zoology, who worked 20 years at Harvard etc, etc....or you. Or we could, instead of argument to authority, look at the actual research in the field, which doesn't support Watson's conclusions. (Neither does it strongly support their negation.) And Watson's expertise is in the low-level mechanic…

What is interesting here is that you disregard authority for results you disagree with and quotes authority for results you agree on. It sounds like your emotions are deciding which results you find 'correct'. This is the exact problem we're discussing.

Re: 'Cancel Culture' Comes to Science?

#284

Post by l0000p » Wed, Jan 15, 2020, 11:17 AM UTC

saagarjha wrote: post #255

l0000p wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you're just assuming that he is wrong based on your own presumptions without any actual knowledge about the subject. The question is who is most likely to be right, a nobel prize winning Ph.D. specialized in molecular biology, genetics and zoology, who worked 20 years at Harvard etc, etc....or you. This is exactly the problem of cancel culture. Just because he points out something you don't like you're suddenly a…

> The question is who is most likely to be right, a nobel prize winning Ph.D. specialized in molecular biology, genetics and zoology, who worked 20 years at Harvard etc, etc....or you. It doesn't really matter either way when you're pushing your opinions and anecdotal opinions as fact. > What about double helix? Is he wrong about that too? Based on what? Why don't you have an opinion about that? Because you don't car…

So somehow, without any deep knowledge of any of these subjects, you're able to determine that one statement is correct and the other is not. I'm doubting that this is based on anything else than emotions.

Re: 'Cancel Culture' Comes to Science?

#285

Post by makomk » Wed, Jan 15, 2020, 11:19 AM UTC

speedplane wrote: post #269

thu2111 wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well covered relative to what? The problem is you don't know how much research into taboo topics would exist in an academic environment where freedom of speech was actually respected. It could be double, triple or 10x what we see today. Or it could be equal. However, it would be strange to assume it's equal given the very public mob mentality and academic "executions" for conservative thought, the many testimonies fr…

> To me it's obvious there are areas that are under-researched by academia. ... Climate change skepticism. Why would anyone research "climate change skepticism" and not just "climate"? The very idea of a discipline with "skepticism" in it's name suggests that there is an existing answer that someone is looking for, whereas the whole point of science is to keep an open mind. Nobody researches "physics skepticism", the…

That's sort of the trouble - mainstream climate change research seems to be lacking skepticism when it comes to claims that we're all doomed. For example, there was a paper in Nature which claimed the oceans were soaking up 60% more heat than previously thought, which implied CO2 caused much more warming than previously estimated. This made it onto most of the world's news and HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18352506 It should've caused skepticism, since it used a weird indirect method to estimate something that was measured directly and contradicted both the direct measurements and the models. It didn't. It took some of those academic outsiders to spot that they'd screwed up the error bounds and, in fact, this weird method wasn't able to measure ocean heating accurately enough to contradict the existing measurements. The researchers did at least admit some of their errors, which is not something that can be relied on in any field.

The HN comments are quite amazing in retrospect too. Lots of comments proclaiming our doom, with tthe topmost one starting "yet more bad news on the climate change front", one not-particularly-insightful downvoted comment at the bottom suggesting that a 60% change in an important measurement shouldn't inspire confidence in climate science's accuracy.

Re: 'Cancel Culture' Comes to Science?

#286

Post by nl » Wed, Jan 15, 2020, 11:29 AM UTC

anglercut wrote: post #276

nl wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question is who is most likely to be right, a nobel prize winning Ph.D. specialized in molecular biology, genetics and zoology, who worked 20 years at Harvard etc, etc....or you. Lior Pachter (who that link was from) is a Professor of Computational Biology at CalTech. His other post about Watson is good too: https://liorpachter.wordpress.com/2014/12/02/the-perfect-hum... But you don't need to steal a Nobel prize…

No, his other post is hot garbage. He's using his knowledge, wit and ability to obfuscate, ridicule and discredit the information critical to our well-being as a species – all the while committing character-assassination. It's honestly despicable. Let's look at it closer. > One of Watson’s obsessions has been to “improve” the “imperfect human” via human germline engineering. This is disturbing on many many levels. Fi…

I don't think Watson is after some narrow, technical relationship between a particular gene and a particular ability. Instead, he make wide, unconstrained and unscientific generalisations which can only be defended by shrinking what he says.

To quote Watson: “I think now we’re in a terrible sitution where we should pay the rich people to have children.. if we don’t encourage procreation of wealthier citizens, IQ levels will most definitely fall.”

Now, any non-indoctrinated human can understand that the issue of "perfect" phenotype is not about modern groups at all;

TO be clear - it is Watson who is making racial arguments about Irish, Black and Jewish "races".

The whole point is what you are saying - the "perfect" human isn't about racial selection. It's Watson's clear racism (and he admits he is racist!) that makes it so dangerous.

This isn't some indoctrination thing - it's anyone who has read the Nazi or Communist "scientific" justifications of their theories that should hear alarms.

Re: 'Cancel Culture' Comes to Science?

#287

Post by thu2111 » Wed, Jan 15, 2020, 11:31 AM UTC

refurb wrote: post #146

Gabriel_Martin wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really, this is a tired trope, climate change mostly boils down to well-established physics relating to energy transference which is pretty consistent to my understanding, here's Nasa also saying as much: https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2943/study-confirms-climate-mo...

What's a tired trope? Back in 2014, Nature did an entire series of articles that attempted to explain the "global warming pause".[1] And now, recent articles claim there never was a pause.[2] So it's apparent there is disagreement even among those scientists who are firm believers in global warming. [1] https://www.nature.com/collections/sthnxgntvp [2] https://insideclimatenews.org/news/18122018/global-warming-h...

Well, it's actually much worse than that. We expect disagreement in science on the interpretation of data. What we don't expect is disagreement about actual measurements, especially not for something as basic as temperature. It's not like the disagreement here is about the output of a particle accelerator, it's literally about "what was the temperature in the recent past" which should be well beyond any controversy or disagreement.

The problem with our societies approach to climatology is anyone who scratches the surface of this field sees problematic practices, but the moment they try and talk about it legions of what can only be described as true believers attack them and do everything they can to shut them down and destroy them completely. Our societies discussion about climate has become totally unhinged. You now see important people who seem to literally believe the world will end in just a few years or decades. There's absolutely no reason to believe this, yet any attempt to bring the discussion back down to earth via actual scientific discussion is attacked as "denialism".

Re: 'Cancel Culture' Comes to Science?

#288

Post by kojus » Wed, Jan 15, 2020, 11:39 AM UTC

allovernow wrote: post #148

stephencanon wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But evo psych isn't a valid scientific field; there's no way to go back and conduct experiments to validate hypotheses. It's a bunch of nonsense just-so stories that appeal to people's existing biases. It's horoscopes-and-crystals-woo dressed up in the language of science.

>there's no way to go back and conduct experiments Well then, you should probably throw out psychology, sociology, climate science, economics, and geology, among other fields, if you want to be consistent. Perhaps you've stumbled upon the distinction between hard and soft science.

As someone who studied cognitive science in college, I can tell you that reproductibility is a big concern among researchers not only in cognitive psychology, but also in the social, clinical and developmental subfields. Reproductibility is also a concern for serious sociologists, and I'm sure it's the same thing in most of the other disciplines you've listed.

By contrast, most of evolutionary psychology is hardly testable since it tries to extrapolate what constitutes human essence at this point primarily from observable human behaviors, which is might be more a function of our current environment rather than genetics. It can also be used politically to justify anything, from neo-Nazism to anarcho-communism.

Re: 'Cancel Culture' Comes to Science?

#289

Post by thu2111 » Wed, Jan 15, 2020, 11:40 AM UTC

speedplane wrote: post #269

thu2111 wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well covered relative to what? The problem is you don't know how much research into taboo topics would exist in an academic environment where freedom of speech was actually respected. It could be double, triple or 10x what we see today. Or it could be equal. However, it would be strange to assume it's equal given the very public mob mentality and academic "executions" for conservative thought, the many testimonies fr…

> To me it's obvious there are areas that are under-researched by academia. ... Climate change skepticism. Why would anyone research "climate change skepticism" and not just "climate"? The very idea of a discipline with "skepticism" in it's name suggests that there is an existing answer that someone is looking for, whereas the whole point of science is to keep an open mind. Nobody researches "physics skepticism", the…

Yes, I agree. That was poorly phrased by me.

What I mean is that academia finds it structurally impossible to do research that ends with the conclusion that maybe there's enough research done into something for now, that perhaps there's no problem that requires this sort of academic attention, or perhaps we lack the tools to make useful predictions in a field at the moment. There are no feedback loops.

Imagine you go into a very small, very closed field like climatology or economics, do some research, and your conclusion is this: "climate is too complex for us to model with any certainty, our data sets are corrupted and low quality, we really have no idea what's going on and can't fix this any time soon". Or even "the climate is changing but not in any actually problematic way, there's nothing to do here".

This may well be a legitimate or correct conclusion (for any field of science), but it's also a career-terminating one. Research into the question of how effective research can be just doesn't get done by academia because there's no ground truth end goal - research isn't a means to an end, as in the private sector. In academia research is itself the end.

This is what I'm trying to get at. To leave climatology for a moment, look at how long it took for replication studies in psychology to start at any scale, and how much science - for decades - has been found to be completely bogus. It's a staggering amount. Every time I read something about the replication crisis I'm stunned by the enormous scale, and how much more there seems to be to uncover. Academia has simply not been funding "psychology skepticism" and to a large extent still isn't. The production of large amounts of nonsensical research is guaranteed by the incentive structure of academia, in which research is entirely self-justifying and in which it doesn't pay to shoot down colleagues in your own field.

Re: 'Cancel Culture' Comes to Science?

#290

Post by nl » Wed, Jan 15, 2020, 11:42 AM UTC

jacobmoe wrote: post #93

What appears to have happened here was that a climate denialist group that deliberately use "NAS" to confuse people into thinking they are receiving an invitation to speak at a conference by the National Academy of Sciences, was called out by an open science advocate who himself felt mislead. Then the Wall Street Journal was snookered into publishing an editorial because they'll publish pretty much anything that clai…

Wow, I hadn't realized. How insidiously dangerous. Funded by the Charles Koch Foundation.

Kerry Emanuel, a climate scientist at MIT and former member of NAS, says he was initially drawn to the organization because he was worried about what he saw as a growing relativism in the academy, evident in the work of deconstructionist philosophers like Jacques Derrida. NAS seemed to be taking a stand against those intellectual currents, Emanuel said — though he adds that he eventually became concerned about the organization’s stances on climate change, especially during a much-publicized incident in which hackers stole thousands of emails from a group of climate scientists and accused them of misusing data.

In a 2010 article published on the NAS website, Emanuel described the event as “a scandal” — but he didn’t see it as a challenge to the scientific consensus on climate change. The National Association of Scholars, on the other hand, sought to extrapolate the Climategate incident “into a universal condemnation of the field,” Emanuel told me. “It was just patently disingenuous.”

He left the organization soon afterward.

“It sort of revealed them not to be what they claimed to be — people who stood for scientific truth and scientific integrity. It was just another organization that used that as a front,” Emanuel said. “They’re basically a political organization posing as an organization dedicated to free inquiry,” he added.

https://undark.org/2018/04/18/national-association-of-schola...