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East Asian personality may stem from Ice Age Siberia 20000 yrs ago

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Re: East Asian personality may stem from Ice Age Siberia 20000 yrs ago

#31

Post by shermantanktop »

tredre3 wrote: post #7
shermantanktop wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it? Maybe this is just a terrible paper that reads like 19th century theories about Aryans. Those responses sound like they are pointing to a climate of intellectual repression, but...there's a reason we don't have endowed chairs in phrenology or palmistry or astral projection. And if someone proposed such a thing, the responses might not look too open-minded. As they say, it's good to be open-minded, but not so o…

What you're doing by comparing it to phrenology and astral projection is just reductio ad absurdum. It's not controversial that some personality traits might have genetic roots. It's also not controversial that humans who evolved in different regions have slightly different genetics. His research combines the two.

He's setting up a choice between the content of his paper vs. intellection repression. And I'm choosing not to take the bait. It's possible that he is experiencing intellectual repression AND his paper is not great.

Re: East Asian personality may stem from Ice Age Siberia 20000 yrs ago

#32

Post by rawgabbit »

like_any_other wrote: post #14
shadowgovt wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, I don't follow. The man has no track record of previous research and applied to several Ph.D programs; of course he was rejected. Good on him for sticking with his hypothesis far enough to research it thoroughly, write it up, and publish it in a peer-reviewed journal, and now that he has done that work, he might start to turn heads in a Ph.D program. But otherwise, rejection from Ph.D programs after applying w…

> The man has no track record of previous research and applied to several Ph.D programs; of course he was rejected. He was specifically told he was rejected for doing forbidden research. Sure he might have been rejected anyway even if he had been researching something else, but let's not overlook the reasons he was given.

Or it could be they found his hypothesis completely without merit.

Although I found his paper interesting, he handwaved Confucianism away as the explanation for East Asian personality traits.

No matter the origins of Confucianism, it was the Chinese state religion for almost two thousand years and heavily influenced Korea, Japan, Vietnam etc.

Re: East Asian personality may stem from Ice Age Siberia 20000 yrs ago

#33

Post by J_McQuade »

zasz wrote: post #20

I too have read Never in Anger, the ethnography mentioned in this blog post, and the way I found it was by reading a survey of egalitarian societies called Hierarchy in the Forest, by Christopher Boehm. Many of the personality traits that the author seems to think are special about people who share the East Asian phenotype are actually common amongst fiercely egalitarian societies. It is normal to highly police socio…

As a Brit, I thought "are they just describing the 'stiff upper lip' or something?".

Which is doubly odd, because here that is more associated with upper-middle-classes. That cold stoicism that causes people to act 'gentlemanly' regardless of circumstance, or parents to pressure their children to be upwardly mobile, generals to describe an unwinnable position as "a bit of a pickle" etc. etc.

In Britain this is definitely seen as a class characteristic rather than a climatic one (we all live in a similarly temperate environment).

Re: East Asian personality may stem from Ice Age Siberia 20000 yrs ago

#34

Post by shadowgovt »

harvey9 wrote: post #15
shadowgovt wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, I don't follow. The man has no track record of previous research and applied to several Ph.D programs; of course he was rejected. Good on him for sticking with his hypothesis far enough to research it thoroughly, write it up, and publish it in a peer-reviewed journal, and now that he has done that work, he might start to turn heads in a Ph.D program. But otherwise, rejection from Ph.D programs after applying w…

If the issue is his credentials why was there so much mention of the topic of research being a problem? Your post seems disingenuous.

The only source we have for the contents of those rejection letters is excerpts from the individual rejected.

I don't think we can extrapolate from that data set alone.

Re: East Asian personality may stem from Ice Age Siberia 20000 yrs ago

#35

Post by like_any_other »

shadowgovt wrote: post #23
like_any_other wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The man has no track record of previous research and applied to several Ph.D programs; of course he was rejected. He was specifically told he was rejected for doing forbidden research. Sure he might have been rejected anyway even if he had been researching something else, but let's not overlook the reasons he was given.

Sure, but that doesn't really modify the point. Those fields are "forbidden" (the publication of his paper demonstrates they are not; they are unpopular having generated significantly negative outcomes and no shortage of dead-ends) for a reason. "The secret to my radiation-proof space suit was interspersing microscopic mercury-selenium pellets in the fabric of the suit with quantum properties that match the wavelengt…

Yes, thinking evolution affects humans is as ridiculous as putting mercury into clothes, and evolution in general has been nothing but dead ends.

Re: East Asian personality may stem from Ice Age Siberia 20000 yrs ago

#36

Post by jhanschoo »

nis0s wrote: post #17

The claims are poorly substantiated, it’s not enough to make assumptions about something and read about it. You must directly validate a claim by rigorously defining the traits in question, and then find some way to perform measurements—indirect evidence isn’t appropriate to make statements about psychological and personality similarities. Note that genetic testing or evidence will be insufficient for proving the typ…

> The claims are poorly substantiated, it’s not enough to make assumptions about something and read about it.

Can you provide a concrete example from the paper?

Re: East Asian personality may stem from Ice Age Siberia 20000 yrs ago

#37

Post by dwater »

like_any_other wrote: post #29
dwater wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me personally I require more evidence than a few quotes that do not appear to actually be direct quotations to accept his conclusion that the reason he was rejected was PhD programs were too "woke". It is possible, but it's also possible that he misunderstood what they were trying to tell him.

Here is the additional (circumstantial) evidence you requested: The leading journal Nature Human Behaviour recently made this practice official in an editorial effectively announcing that it will not publish studies that show the wrong kind of differences between human groups. [..] the National Institutes of Health now withholds access to an important database if it thinks a scientist’s research may wander into forbi…

I can't find a publicly available copy of the Nature Human Behavior editorial. If you can share it I'd be happy to read it and form an opinion on it. I personally won't take City Journal's opinions at face value.

Re: East Asian personality may stem from Ice Age Siberia 20000 yrs ago

#38

Post by nis0s »

jhanschoo wrote: post #36
nis0s wrote: post #17

The claims are poorly substantiated, it’s not enough to make assumptions about something and read about it. You must directly validate a claim by rigorously defining the traits in question, and then find some way to perform measurements—indirect evidence isn’t appropriate to make statements about psychological and personality similarities. Note that genetic testing or evidence will be insufficient for proving the typ…

> The claims are poorly substantiated, it’s not enough to make assumptions about something and read about it. Can you provide a concrete example from the paper?

> Testing this hypothesis requires (a) understanding human psychosocial adaptations to arctic environments, (b) showing that East Asians and Inuit possess these traits, and (c) making the case that the existence of these traits in modern East Asians is primarily the result of natural selection and/or gene–culture coevolution having acted in the Late Pleistocene on East Asians’ ancestors rather than other factors.

That’s the main part of the paper, and what follows is essentially a literature review, which is an inherently flawed way to prove a hypothesis.

A hypothesis is a testable claim, which can be independently verified if it is validated. There is no process in the paper, other than a review of other literature, to substantiate the paper’s new claims. So, this person is essentially doing science journalism, not science.

I think the two main problems are that they didn’t provide sufficient work for (b) or (c), but they’re laboring under the misconception that a background review of literature is enough. But instead a background review is used to justify the structure of measurements and analysis which usually follows in scientific papers. So, the claim is poorly substantiated.

Re: East Asian personality may stem from Ice Age Siberia 20000 yrs ago

#39

Post by hagbard_c »

dwater wrote: post #37
like_any_other wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here is the additional (circumstantial) evidence you requested: The leading journal Nature Human Behaviour recently made this practice official in an editorial effectively announcing that it will not publish studies that show the wrong kind of differences between human groups. [..] the National Institutes of Health now withholds access to an important database if it thinks a scientist’s research may wander into forbi…

I can't find a publicly available copy of the Nature Human Behavior editorial. If you can share it I'd be happy to read it and form an opinion on it. I personally won't take City Journal's opinions at face value.

I found their policy after a very quick search on the 'net so I'll share it with those who for whatever reason can not or do not want to perform this search:

https://www.nature.com/nathumbehav/editorial-policies/ethics...

This is quite a long piece of text so I won't quote it - just read it. It does support the premise of that City Journal article in that NHB will not publish research which they deem to trespass on 'forbidden territory' regardless of the scientific validity of such research.

Re: East Asian personality may stem from Ice Age Siberia 20000 yrs ago

#40

Post by dwater »

hagbard_c wrote: post #39
dwater wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't find a publicly available copy of the Nature Human Behavior editorial. If you can share it I'd be happy to read it and form an opinion on it. I personally won't take City Journal's opinions at face value.

I found their policy after a very quick search on the 'net so I'll share it with those who for whatever reason can not or do not want to perform this search: https://www.nature.com/nathumbehav/editorial-policies/ethics... This is quite a long piece of text so I won't quote it - just read it. It does support the premise of that City Journal article in that NHB will not publish research which they deem to trespass on '…

I found that page, but it is labelled as editorial guidelines and not an editorial article, which is what I was expecting to find from the previous description. From my reading then, what is being labelled here as "forbidden territory" is this:

"Non-maleficence and beneficence are two fundamental principles in research ethics requiring the maximization of benefits and minimization of potential harms. These principles form a core part of general frameworks for the ethical conduct of research across the sciences and humanities (for example, The World Medical Association Declaration of Helsinki; The Belmont Report; the International Ethical Guidelines for Health-related Research Involving Humans; Ethics in Social Science and Humanities)."

Which I see as more along the lines of the Hippocratic Oath rather than totalitarian thought crime. If this self-described neophyte didn't understand the risks for harm created by his research, that's his fault and not that of the PhD programs.

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