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We Must Defend Science in the Face of Political Attacks

blogs.scientificamerican.com

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Re: We Must Defend Science in the Face of Political Attacks

#71

Post by bluGill »

kaitai wrote: post #62
bluGill wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What value is in that mathematical papers though? Most of it is correct within itself, but useless for anything real world and always will be. There is only so much labor we have as society. We need to make choices as to what we do. If everybody was willing we could dedicate society to just math. People can sleep under their desk at work, eat the mass produced cafeteria food, never watch sports, just work eat sleep.…

Mathematics is surprisingly useful. You've used your credit card online -- where'd that encryption algorithm come from? "Useless" math. You've booked a flight online -- where'd that schedule come from? Uh, math again: all that optimization, those traveling salesman problems. Right now I'm doing all sorts of work studying risk in financial networks, studying public health, all using math that was considered "pure" jus…

I didn't argue all math is useless. I argued a lot of it is

Re: We Must Defend Science in the Face of Political Attacks

#72

Post by mises »

kaitai wrote: post #68
mises wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with calling something biased is that it carries a connotation of racism. There is a difference between disparate impact and disparate treatment, to use Eric Holder's terminology. I don't think humans are "projecting their own experiences", I think that the dataset that is fed to algorithms over-represents whites because they constitute a larger portion of the population. It may also over-represent asians…

"Biased" still has real statistical meaning. It is unfortunate that people treat these problems with an aim to justifying their virtue rather than creating a product that works (not saying you are doing this, just commenting that often the reaction is about personal virtue rather than actual technical accuracy). It is not more difficult to make a facial-recognition algorithm work on black people -- or Asian people, t…

It might actually be more difficult. There have been cases where soap dispensers didn't work on blacks because more infrared was absorbed. Not saying it's not solvable, but it's possibly harder. I guess you're right that you could make different models and use the correct one based on race. Correct me if I'm wrong, I'm no expert, but could this be solved by adding an extra layer to a neutral network?

Re: We Must Defend Science in the Face of Political Attacks

#73

Post by tzs »

Mikeb85 wrote: post #39

So the solution to bias in the sciences is to double down on bias? Make sure only the bias you support is present? > Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, Ph.D. is a marine biologist and founder of Ocean Collectiv, a consulting firm for conservation solutions grounded in social justice. Literally a think tank trying to advance scientific policies based on politics.

There's a difference between choosing which areas of science to support based on non-scientific criteria such as your politics (which is what it sounds like she is doing), and trying to stop science from happening or supporting anti-science because your politics are not consistent with science.

Take conservation. There might be several ways to approach a given conservation problem, all of which are scientifically sound. It is then a political question which to use. Her answer to that question would presumably be one that advances social justice...but unless she would also falsely claim that others are not scientifically valid, or would also try to stop research into the other methods, her position and actions are not a political attack on science.

Re: We Must Defend Science in the Face of Political Attacks

#74

Post by xamuel »

chris_mc wrote: post #69
xamuel wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a really interesting way of looking at things. How do you reconcile that with the notion of Darwinian evolution? Is it not true that individual organisms are born with small mutations which make them more or less suitable for an environment, and that over long time periods, the ones who are more suitable for an environment will flourish in that environment? Are you suggesting the individual could reverse a det…

Are you fucking saying that Darwinian evolution is the cause of underrepresented minorities in white collar jobs? What fucking planet are you from?

Please don't use foul language. I'm genuinely interested in komali2's answer. I'm not pulling some rhetorical trick or something. Please follow HN guidelines and give fellow commenters the benefit of the doubt. There are obviously many causes of under-representation of minorities, not least of which is that if they were more fully represented, then that would help them to pass their genes along and thus over a long period of time, they would cease to BE minorities to begin with.

Re: We Must Defend Science in the Face of Political Attacks

#75

Post by malvosenior »

chris_mc wrote: post #70
malvosenior wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But there's nothing inherently preventing the poorer kid from doing just as good, if not better, a job. Maybe, maybe not. I say this as a poor person who often out competes people with much more privileged backgrounds. There are plenty of "stereotypical poor people" that will never be as good as those who grew up with healthy diets, education, parental supervision... Yes, I've done well but I was always in the top…

Just because you didn't need uplifting doesn't mean others don't need it. Your "bootstraps" argument is such BS.

You did not refute any of my points. Do you really think lowering the barrier of entry for poor people then giving them on the job training will bring them to the level of people that are already high performing? Companies do not have the resources to make that happen as it would require decades of training, education, therapy, life adjustments... just to get to the same level as some people have coming through the door (including some poor people who were self driven).

Re: We Must Defend Science in the Face of Political Attacks

#76

Post by xamuel »

kaitai wrote: post #67
xamuel wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would it take for you to falsify your stance? If nothing can make you falsify it, then that's not science, that's pseudoscience. Unconscious bias entering AI is bad. But consider this scenario. Imagine for decades, there's been a chemical leak in Cleveland, which has been causing people there to become worse at math. An AI detects that people from Cleveland are worse at math. Do you just throw the data away beca…

This is a straw man argument. It's easy to find examples of algorithms that are biased -- let's just look at facial recognition. Sure, there are situations like what you describe, but are you going to argue then that dark-skinned women really must be men, or more manly, or something, just because Amazon's facial recognition algorithm has trouble with dark-skinned women? The parent is not making a "scientific" claim.…

I'm not saying no biased algorithms exist. I'm just saying, we shouldn't throw away what initially appears to be discriminatory bias, we should instead ask, "what caused this?" And that goes no matter what color of skin is represented on the dev team.

Re: We Must Defend Science in the Face of Political Attacks

#77

Post by fromthestart »

chris_mc wrote: post #69
xamuel wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a really interesting way of looking at things. How do you reconcile that with the notion of Darwinian evolution? Is it not true that individual organisms are born with small mutations which make them more or less suitable for an environment, and that over long time periods, the ones who are more suitable for an environment will flourish in that environment? Are you suggesting the individual could reverse a det…

Are you fucking saying that Darwinian evolution is the cause of underrepresented minorities in white collar jobs? What fucking planet are you from?

Is it really so outlandish to suggest that populations have diverged cognitively after tens-hundreds of thousands of years of separation? Or are you really that determined to pretend that all population differences just stop at the shoulders?

The consistently different outward expression of genetic variation among populations is obvious - skin color, height, weight, fat proportion, hair type, eye color, predisposition to disease - everything is influenced by our genes. But you don't think you're performing Olympic level mental gymnastics in pretending that a structure as complex as the brain isn't deeply influenced by heritable genes?

You cannot judge plausibility by convenience. Nature is cruel, and your outrage is inappropriate.

Re: We Must Defend Science in the Face of Political Attacks

#78

Post by chris_mc »

xamuel wrote: post #74
chris_mc wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you fucking saying that Darwinian evolution is the cause of underrepresented minorities in white collar jobs? What fucking planet are you from?

Please don't use foul language. I'm genuinely interested in komali2's answer. I'm not pulling some rhetorical trick or something. Please follow HN guidelines and give fellow commenters the benefit of the doubt. There are obviously many causes of under-representation of minorities, not least of which is that if they were more fully represented, then that would help them to pass their genes along and thus over a long p…

No, I will not be civil with someone saying, literally, that minorities are less genetically able to do certain jobs. Fuck off.

Re: We Must Defend Science in the Face of Political Attacks

#79

Post by chris_mc »

malvosenior wrote: post #75
chris_mc wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just because you didn't need uplifting doesn't mean others don't need it. Your "bootstraps" argument is such BS.

You did not refute any of my points. Do you really think lowering the barrier of entry for poor people then giving them on the job training will bring them to the level of people that are already high performing? Companies do not have the resources to make that happen as it would require decades of training, education, therapy, life adjustments... just to get to the same level as some people have coming through the d…

HN is such a cesspool of ignorant fucks like yourself, get fucked and die.

Re: We Must Defend Science in the Face of Political Attacks

#80

Post by physicsyogi »

bluGill wrote: post #53
Gravityloss wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably if you spend enough time and effort you can find something political in, say, the mathematics papers written by any given university research team on any given year. But if a politician advocates for teaching that Pi is exactly three, in my opinion that's on a whole different level. Your post advocates for false equivalence, in a somewhat indirect manner. We get to "all science is politicized". And then the…

What value is in that mathematical papers though? Most of it is correct within itself, but useless for anything real world and always will be. There is only so much labor we have as society. We need to make choices as to what we do. If everybody was willing we could dedicate society to just math. People can sleep under their desk at work, eat the mass produced cafeteria food, never watch sports, just work eat sleep.…

It can be difficult to predict whether a given research topic will be useful or not in the future. It's easy when something is developed with an application in mind. It can be far more difficult for "pure math". There are plenty of examples of math that we don't have an application for today becoming very relevant in the future. For example:

- Fast Fourier transform (Gauss discovered and didn't publish it b/c he thought it wasn't very useful. Others rediscovered it later.) - Number theory was considered useless for a long time, now it's used for cryptography

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