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James Watson has died

nytimes.com

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Re: James Watson has died

#291

Post by tptacek »

inglor_cz wrote: post #282
pazimzadeh wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see what your definition of 'political taboo', which seems to be related to top-down restrictions on speech or behavior, has to do James Watson's remarks. There are few explicit or implicit rules about making racist claims that don't incite violence/hatred in most western countries (unlike the example you gave in Iran), or if they are, Watson didn't seem to suffer much for 'breaching the taboo'. Watson was sh…

"I find it interesting" Certainly sounds like a personal jab, but HN is based on good-faith discussion, so I won't dig deeper into it. If you are interested in my motivation, it is not building a ladder of world's populations according to IQ and boasting about being somewhere in the upper half. I am more concerned with the fact that such taboos are slowing down our research of natural intelligence to a crawl. The Wes…

If you are interested in my motivation, it is not building a ladder of world's populations according to IQ and boasting about being somewhere in the upper half. I am more concerned with the fact that such taboos are slowing down our research of natural intelligence to a crawl.

Be specific. What specific research questions are you claiming have been slowed, and in what ways?

Re: James Watson has died

#292

Post by DonHopkins »

EnPissant wrote: post #263
tptacek wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm having trouble even parsing what your comment is claiming that I believe, but either way, this thread is dealing in falsifiable statements, not psychoanalysis. Is this research being suppressed, so that new new science can be done it, thus justifying the claim that a study last updated over 20 years ago is dispositive of racial/genetic/intelligence causality? No, it is not.

From this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9674992 Here you said: > If it helps, you can think of my opposition to the notion that blacks are somehow intellectually inferior to whites as religious, and you might just as productively spend your time trying to convert me to Zoroastrianism. Someone even mentioned that this was falsifiable: > His admission really is incredibly revealing, and refreshingly, eve…

As long as you're going back that far in his posting history, why don't you defend some of Eric Raymond's racist quotes that he posted? I bet you really love ESR.

Re: James Watson has died

#293

Post by LarsDu88 »

griffzhowl wrote: post #182
LarsDu88 wrote: post #71

Years ago I had the pleasure of sitting in on one of his talks on longevity. Other than the casual racism and sexism (Watson is the only person in my entire life I've seen say racist things about Irish people), he made a big comment on Linus Pauling's obsession towards the end of his life regarding Vitamin C consumption. The main idea is that primates such as humans and chimps lost the ability to synthesize vitamin C…

> primates ... lost the ability to synthesize vitamin C eons ago, and as a result evolved excellent color vision for finding fruits I have a feeling this must be the other way around. The ancient primates had a diet high in fruits, which is why they could survive without harm when the gene for synthesizing vitamin C mutated into a non-functional form. They must have had the colour vision for detecting ripe fruits bef…

This is probably the more likely scenario, but it's really a chicken or the egg problem.

Hopefully some molecular clock based research will iron out which one came first.

Re: James Watson has died

#294

Post by ecoled_ame »

DonHopkins wrote: post #212
ecoled_ame wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

demonizing anyone shouldn’t be done. it makes the demonizer demonic.

You know you're just virtue signaling that you're demonic yourself with that statement, hypocritically telling somebody not to do something that you're doing yourself. Such childish playground logic exuberantly deployed in the pursuit of defending an unrepentant flaming racist asshole. Do you always get so triggered when people call out racists that you're compelled to reflexively leap to their defense for some reaso…

no, i’m just helping a guy out who’s being mean online.

Re: James Watson has died

#296

Post by griffzhowl »

LarsDu88 wrote: post #293
griffzhowl wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> primates ... lost the ability to synthesize vitamin C eons ago, and as a result evolved excellent color vision for finding fruits I have a feeling this must be the other way around. The ancient primates had a diet high in fruits, which is why they could survive without harm when the gene for synthesizing vitamin C mutated into a non-functional form. They must have had the colour vision for detecting ripe fruits bef…

This is probably the more likely scenario, but it's really a chicken or the egg problem. Hopefully some molecular clock based research will iron out which one came first.

I don't think it's a chicken or egg problem. We still have the non-functional form of the gene for synthesizing vitamin C in our genomes. It's been identified, and the mutation which knocked out it's functionality is known. This was a single event. If the primate who had this variant didn't already have a diet high in vitamin C, it wouldn't have survived. And since their diet was high in vitamin C, they obviously had the sensory apparatus necessary for detecting the food sources

Re: James Watson has died

#297

Post by metalliqaz »

Dig1t wrote: post #275
tgv wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't read the link, as the post has been deleted, but even when everything in a text is factually correct, it still can be misleading. Fact-checking by an LLM is however not acceptable to many. They have no responsibility, and Grok is known to have explicit biases.

>Grok is known to have explicit biases Wikipedia is known to have explicit biases, which is the entire point of the Grokipedia project. >Fact-checking by an LLM is however not acceptable to many. Sort of a Luddite mentality to dismiss information without even reading it just because a technology you don't like was involved in its production.

We know that Grok, like other LLMs, is trained on data that is not held to any rigorous standard of knowledge like exists in the fields of journalism or academia.

There is no reason to think that such a system is even capable of determining truth. At best, we might be able to say that it reflects a consensus of opinion, but even that is a stretch given the nature of these systems.

And that ignores the fact that we know that these products are designed to be sycophantic to their users/operators. That is not a recipe for objective knowledge. Especially given what we know about Grok (meddling by Musk).

And to cap it all off, for all of Wikipedia's real or perceived flaws, all of the decision making is done in public view. This is very much not the case with Grok.

It's dystopian and obviously so. Your comment about "Luddite mentality" is farcical on its face. Of you, I might say something like... "techbro mentality", or maybe even something less flattering.

Re: James Watson has died

#298

Post by foxglacier »

pazimzadeh wrote: post #266
foxglacier wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He was right. The research does show black people are genetically less intelligent than white people, and nobody has ever found it to be otherwise. There's really no reason at all to think all races might be equal in intelligence. That's pure political bias with no basis in science. Why mention genetic diversity? Spell out your logical steps instead of just stating isolated facts and leaving others to guess what you'…

"the research" where is this research > Why mention genetic diversity? honestly, just think about it a little longer

A good one is the Minnesota Trans-racial Adoption Study. Bit it's not hard to find more. It was a very popular research topic a few decades ago.

> honestly, just think about it a little longer

It's arrogant of you to assume that more thinking will lead to your thinking. It's possible that I did think of your idea and dismissed it as wrong, or that you and cogman10 have different ideas without realizing it. So you should say what you mean if you want to communicate that.

I did think about it enough to realize that all non-human life collectively has more genetic diversity than humans, yet every single other species has less intelligence. So more diversity doesn't necessarily mean equal intelligence.

Re: James Watson has died

#299

Post by Dig1t »

metalliqaz wrote: post #297
Dig1t wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Grok is known to have explicit biases Wikipedia is known to have explicit biases, which is the entire point of the Grokipedia project. >Fact-checking by an LLM is however not acceptable to many. Sort of a Luddite mentality to dismiss information without even reading it just because a technology you don't like was involved in its production.

We know that Grok, like other LLMs, is trained on data that is not held to any rigorous standard of knowledge like exists in the fields of journalism or academia. There is no reason to think that such a system is even capable of determining truth. At best, we might be able to say that it reflects a consensus of opinion, but even that is a stretch given the nature of these systems. And that ignores the fact that we kn…

Your point about Wikipedia being out in the open is correct and fair. Grokipedia should do the same. Grokipedia is at version .1 and they have stated the intention is to open source it, so it seems obvious that it will be similarly open.

Just because it’s done in the open doesn’t mean it can’t have some pretty bad biases though. Just looking at the set of allowable sources shows pretty extreme bias to begin with. The type of people who self select to become Wikipedia editors (just like Reddit mods) skew heavily on many topics, and there isn’t much effort to correct for it.

Again though, you are not pointing out anything wrong with the information presented itself, only the fact that you don’t like the person/technology compiling the information.

Re: James Watson has died

#300

Post by Dig1t »

DonHopkins wrote: post #209
tgv wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't read the link, as the post has been deleted, but even when everything in a text is factually correct, it still can be misleading. Fact-checking by an LLM is however not acceptable to many. They have no responsibility, and Grok is known to have explicit biases.

> Grok is known to have explicit biases And of course a pro-white-supremacist biased LLM is going to falsely exonerate a racist like James Watson with the same pro-racist biases that Elon Musk programmed it with. And timonoko also regularly posts Grok generated AI slop bullshit, and even pretends to be a FORTH programmer by having Grog generate code that doesn't do anything like what he claims it does, which should b…

James Watson just stated that intelligence and race are related. Something that every normal person knows and experiences regularly. Calling things that you don’t like racist doesn’t work anymore, nobody cares.

There is so much anti white hatred present in media, many people yearn for a source of information to correct for it.

One example just this week the economist published this wonderful headline:

>With Trump and Vance in power, many pro-natalists believe this is the moment to jump-start baby-making. But some critics see pro-natalism as part of an insidious project to create a whiter America

There are hundreds of headlines like this present in publications that are in Wikipedia’s allowable sources list. We are happy to have a source to correct for its bias.

You did not address any of the actual information presented, only the fact that you don’t like the people/technology used to create it, which kind of makes my point.

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