5 ms·

As a former researcher I am not surprised to see another nation capitalizing on the counter-productive politicization of US science. I used to be a researcher

As a former researcher I am not surprised to see another nation capitalizing on the counter-productive politicization of US science. I used to be a researcher and writing proposals suddenly started taking up much more time around 2010 to 2013 because each grant became much smaller. Each grant also became more specific in what science you were expected to produce, which essentially made us all contractors for NSF plus DOE and winning a grant was sometimes more about politics than producing excellent scholarship. This pushed a lot of great scientists out of the field. After I left research radical leftists started a more expansive politicized attack on science that is further politisizing who gets tenure or grants essential to making scientific progress. - Biology as a subject is the most affected right now [1], because biology shows that there are biological differences that contribute to individuals choices in a way that invalidates the univariant equity doctrine political explanations. Women on average does are as capable as men in the sciences, but they differences in choices increase the more equal the societies are. - Science as a competence hierarchy is under attack by the equity initiatives [2], making it so that the most important factors for getting grants and tenure is often not competence. The fact is unfortunately that these programs have been shown to not increase the production of great science [3]. Moreover, these efforts further demoralize and alienate scientists. We should at this point not be under any doubt that unless we defeat the politicization of science the US will not remain competitive. We should ask ourselves if we want to be equal on a sinking ship or make life better by allowing everyone to compete as individuals regardless of which identity you think they belong to. [1] https://quillette.com/2018/10/18/trans-activists-campaign-against-terfs-has-become-an-attack-on-science/ https://quillette.com/2018/10/18/trans-activists-campaign-ag... [2] https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/04/when-will-the-gender-gap-in-science-disappear/558413/ https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/04/when-wil... [3] https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/04/when-will-the-gender-gap-in-science-disappear/558413/ https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/04/when-wil...

legionof7 8y ago
I don't think biology explains away the gender gap.
- asabjorn 8y ago
  How do you then explain that the gender gap increase the more equal countries are [1, 2]? This doesn't mean that one gender is more capable than the other, women actually do as well on average in the sciences as men, but it seems to indicate that the genders does not make the same choices if social or economic limitations are removed. Also, why are the choices women make in countries like Norway inferior to the choices they make in less gender equal countries? [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more-gender-equality-the-fewer-women-in-stem/553592/ https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more... [2] https://phys.org/news/2018-10-personality-differences-sexes-largest-gender.html https://phys.org/news/2018-10-personality-differences-sexes-...
- adrianN 8y ago
  Just hinting that biology might explain some of the variation is becoming taboo.
- candiodari 8y ago
  I think the main reason there is so much opposition is what happens when it does. Then there is no reason to change the laws/policies (because they don't override how humans are built). That means there is no reason for the careers of politicians and activists and no money for the initiatives to fix it. So it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. In practice, of course, biology explains a large portion of differences between humans, both where it pertains to gender, and where it pertains to race. There are a few "forbidden truths" for them: 1) That there are in fact biological reasons for some aspects of a gender gap. 2) More general there are reasons for discrimination in certain limited cases (it used to be the case that the law had specific exceptions for diversity regulations. The big example given was "no cripples in the emergency response team in the fire department" (I think you can imagine why). That was a valid discriminatory demand that could be put in job applications) 3) There can be no differences in the source population (because ... well if you calculate it out specifically, then the Bay Area is not racist in hiring at all. But wait ! Why are there soooo few blacks working for the Bay Area tech companies ? Why so many Asians ? Well ... those values are very close to what you'd expect them to be if well-established (but heavily denied) racial differences in intelligence are taking into account and one assumes that when silicon valley invites 10 people to compete for a job, they hire the smartest) So in order to have "equality", defined as "distribution in the winners of competitions is the same as the distribution of participants" you can't have even tiny differences at all in the population beyond their proportion of the population, otherwise that'll never happen. Unfortunately there's another problem here (see next point) Of course the whole reason different races exist is to have them be different. I mean from the perspective of evolution, which while it isn't a conscious entity, does have both the means to change humans and a reason to do so (a goal to achieve). This means races/genders don't just differ in skin color, they differ in anything. Obviously the skin is one important difference, but it is just one component of profound differences in energy regulation of the body, which affects nearly everything relating to energy use in the body, which ... even affects brain size. Specifically one big difference between races is how much energy gets dedicated to body temperature maintenance (cooling and warming are different systems, so that's 2 separate things), digestion, muscles/movement, and ... yes ... how much energy gets dedicated to thinking, and even the balance between cortex and neocortex. And if it favors the cortex, that is just not going to help out your chess game. It even affects how big you are on average (of course bigger = everything requires more energy, because the human body is not that different from a robot. Fortunately bigger requires exponentially more energy, so the differences there can't be that big) 4) The effect of average differences on competitions. Specifically, say you have group 1 and group 2, and they compete. Let's assume N(100, 10) distribution. Let's say group 1 has a x% higher average, how often would a one-on-one competition between a member of group 1 and group 2 end in favor of the member of group 1 ? Let's call that value y. for x = 1%, odds of group 1 winning = 53.01% for x = 2%, odds of group 1 winning = 55.57% for x = 5%, odds of group 1 winning = 64.04% for x = 10%, odds of group 1 winning = 76.08% for x = 20%, odds of group 1 winning = 92.19% And if you have repeated competitions (you only advance to the next round if you win round 1, and there's N rounds) ... it gets pretty bad pretty rapidly. So unfortunately competition amplifies small differences in averages. Although this is to be expected, this is why natural selection works.
john_moscow 8y ago
>We should ask ourselves if we want to be equal on a sinking ship or make life better by allowing everyone to compete as individuals regardless of which identity you think they belong to. I think, there's a very solid cause behind it. Most of "competing individually" is essentially making different decisions and benefiting/losing from the consequences. Except over the past few decades our society has automated/protocolized those decisions away. We follow rules and documented best practices (or just let a database search figure out the right thing for us) much more than we have to improvise. So the society is looking for alternative planes for people to compete and ironically, due to our sense of compassion, the competition shifted to demonstrating that you suffer more than your peers. I'm afraid, this is also responsible for declining willingness of westerners to make families/raise kids.
- asabjorn 8y ago
  I think if we were all the same and we could use a few group identities to understand individuals you would be right. However, maybe there is a great deal of variety within us that is not expressed because of the measures applied in the name of compassion and equity. The sta The equity agenda is inherently a very pessimistic agenda in the same way that communism is pessimistic. It assumes that our current tangible as well as intangible resources is a good approximation of what can be, and I think we over the last 100 years have proven that this is not true.
lifthrasiir 8y ago
On [1], I found that tptacek's commentary [4] was much helpful to shape my own opinion about it. At the very least I believe the Quillette article is inadequate as an example of, say, biology under the leftist attack. [4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17949340 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17949340
- asabjorn 8y ago
  I think the problem with tptacek's explanation is that it does not address the larger context of how certain topics have become sacred in academia [5], and how breaking or criticising these sacred ideas leads to an outsized reaction. Do you think the reaction was focusing on merits and that it was not an outsized reaction due to someone violating something sacred? Lets dig more into evidence of suppression of biological research: How would you then explain the reactions to anyone stating the biological fact that human gender is overwhelmingly bimodal with almost everyone being male/female [1], suppression of research into intelligence [2], or the diversity pledges some candidates now have to write before becoming professors [3]. The grievance studies hoax proved how grievance studies is acting like ideological whitewashing of extreme political ideas that would be unacceptable otherwise [4]. These ideas are used to justify political actions in universities and in culture to suppress sacrilegious ideas [5], and it is a concept of sacred only a small very loud minority of progressives believe in and these comprise 8% of the population [6]. Personally I find the radical leftist explanation of these two incidences unconvincing: - it seems like the opposition to McKinnon’s paper was argued primarily from a moral angle due to his violation of some progressive sacred principles, and other explanation does not seem to explain the size of the response - The reaction to the grievance studies hoax was that peer review is flawed and them still claiming that it is fair to use favored political views as a valid criteria of what should be publishing of papers of very poor scholarship. This does not engage with the real very disturbing conclusions of this study, and the fact that their hoax papers in addition to winning prices within grievance studies are also indistinguishable from other scholarship regularly published there. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6phePAZueQw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6phePAZueQw [2] https://jordanbpeterson.com/transcripts/douglas-murray/ https://jordanbpeterson.com/transcripts/douglas-murray/ [3] https://www.thecollegefix.com/ucla-to-require-diversity-pledges-from-professors/ https://www.thecollegefix.com/ucla-to-require-diversity-pled... [4] https://areomagazine.com/2018/10/02/academic-grievance-studies-and-the-corruption-of-scholarship/comment-page-1/ https://areomagazine.com/2018/10/02/academic-grievance-studi... [5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gatn5ameRr8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gatn5ameRr8 [6] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/large-majorities-dislike-political-correctness/572581/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/large-majo...

legionof7 8y ago

I don't think biology explains away the gender gap.

asabjorn 8y ago
How do you then explain that the gender gap increase the more equal countries are [1, 2]? This doesn't mean that one gender is more capable than the other, women actually do as well on average in the sciences as men, but it seems to indicate that the genders does not make the same choices if social or economic limitations are removed. Also, why are the choices women make in countries like Norway inferior to the choices they make in less gender equal countries? [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more-gender-equality-the-fewer-women-in-stem/553592/ https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more... [2] https://phys.org/news/2018-10-personality-differences-sexes-largest-gender.html https://phys.org/news/2018-10-personality-differences-sexes-...
adrianN 8y ago
Just hinting that biology might explain some of the variation is becoming taboo.
candiodari 8y ago
I think the main reason there is so much opposition is what happens when it does. Then there is no reason to change the laws/policies (because they don't override how humans are built). That means there is no reason for the careers of politicians and activists and no money for the initiatives to fix it. So it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. In practice, of course, biology explains a large portion of differences between humans, both where it pertains to gender, and where it pertains to race. There are a few "forbidden truths" for them: 1) That there are in fact biological reasons for some aspects of a gender gap. 2) More general there are reasons for discrimination in certain limited cases (it used to be the case that the law had specific exceptions for diversity regulations. The big example given was "no cripples in the emergency response team in the fire department" (I think you can imagine why). That was a valid discriminatory demand that could be put in job applications) 3) There can be no differences in the source population (because ... well if you calculate it out specifically, then the Bay Area is not racist in hiring at all. But wait ! Why are there soooo few blacks working for the Bay Area tech companies ? Why so many Asians ? Well ... those values are very close to what you'd expect them to be if well-established (but heavily denied) racial differences in intelligence are taking into account and one assumes that when silicon valley invites 10 people to compete for a job, they hire the smartest) So in order to have "equality", defined as "distribution in the winners of competitions is the same as the distribution of participants" you can't have even tiny differences at all in the population beyond their proportion of the population, otherwise that'll never happen. Unfortunately there's another problem here (see next point) Of course the whole reason different races exist is to have them be different. I mean from the perspective of evolution, which while it isn't a conscious entity, does have both the means to change humans and a reason to do so (a goal to achieve). This means races/genders don't just differ in skin color, they differ in anything. Obviously the skin is one important difference, but it is just one component of profound differences in energy regulation of the body, which affects nearly everything relating to energy use in the body, which ... even affects brain size. Specifically one big difference between races is how much energy gets dedicated to body temperature maintenance (cooling and warming are different systems, so that's 2 separate things), digestion, muscles/movement, and ... yes ... how much energy gets dedicated to thinking, and even the balance between cortex and neocortex. And if it favors the cortex, that is just not going to help out your chess game. It even affects how big you are on average (of course bigger = everything requires more energy, because the human body is not that different from a robot. Fortunately bigger requires exponentially more energy, so the differences there can't be that big) 4) The effect of average differences on competitions. Specifically, say you have group 1 and group 2, and they compete. Let's assume N(100, 10) distribution. Let's say group 1 has a x% higher average, how often would a one-on-one competition between a member of group 1 and group 2 end in favor of the member of group 1 ? Let's call that value y. for x = 1%, odds of group 1 winning = 53.01% for x = 2%, odds of group 1 winning = 55.57% for x = 5%, odds of group 1 winning = 64.04% for x = 10%, odds of group 1 winning = 76.08% for x = 20%, odds of group 1 winning = 92.19% And if you have repeated competitions (you only advance to the next round if you win round 1, and there's N rounds) ... it gets pretty bad pretty rapidly. So unfortunately competition amplifies small differences in averages. Although this is to be expected, this is why natural selection works.

john_moscow 8y ago

>We should ask ourselves if we want to be equal on a sinking ship or make life better by allowing everyone to compete as individuals regardless of which identity you think they belong to. I think, there's a very solid cause behind it. Most of "competing individually" is essentially making different decisions and benefiting/losing from the consequences. Except over the past few decades our society has automated/protocolized those decisions away. We follow rules and documented best practices (or just let a database search figure out the right thing for us) much more than we have to improvise. So the society is looking for alternative planes for people to compete and ironically, due to our sense of compassion, the competition shifted to demonstrating that you suffer more than your peers. I'm afraid, this is also responsible for declining willingness of westerners to make families/raise kids.

asabjorn 8y ago
I think if we were all the same and we could use a few group identities to understand individuals you would be right. However, maybe there is a great deal of variety within us that is not expressed because of the measures applied in the name of compassion and equity. The sta The equity agenda is inherently a very pessimistic agenda in the same way that communism is pessimistic. It assumes that our current tangible as well as intangible resources is a good approximation of what can be, and I think we over the last 100 years have proven that this is not true.

lifthrasiir 8y ago

On [1], I found that tptacek's commentary [4] was much helpful to shape my own opinion about it. At the very least I believe the Quillette article is inadequate as an example of, say, biology under the leftist attack. [4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17949340 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17949340

asabjorn 8y ago
I think the problem with tptacek's explanation is that it does not address the larger context of how certain topics have become sacred in academia [5], and how breaking or criticising these sacred ideas leads to an outsized reaction. Do you think the reaction was focusing on merits and that it was not an outsized reaction due to someone violating something sacred? Lets dig more into evidence of suppression of biological research: How would you then explain the reactions to anyone stating the biological fact that human gender is overwhelmingly bimodal with almost everyone being male/female [1], suppression of research into intelligence [2], or the diversity pledges some candidates now have to write before becoming professors [3]. The grievance studies hoax proved how grievance studies is acting like ideological whitewashing of extreme political ideas that would be unacceptable otherwise [4]. These ideas are used to justify political actions in universities and in culture to suppress sacrilegious ideas [5], and it is a concept of sacred only a small very loud minority of progressives believe in and these comprise 8% of the population [6]. Personally I find the radical leftist explanation of these two incidences unconvincing: - it seems like the opposition to McKinnon’s paper was argued primarily from a moral angle due to his violation of some progressive sacred principles, and other explanation does not seem to explain the size of the response - The reaction to the grievance studies hoax was that peer review is flawed and them still claiming that it is fair to use favored political views as a valid criteria of what should be publishing of papers of very poor scholarship. This does not engage with the real very disturbing conclusions of this study, and the fact that their hoax papers in addition to winning prices within grievance studies are also indistinguishable from other scholarship regularly published there. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6phePAZueQw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6phePAZueQw [2] https://jordanbpeterson.com/transcripts/douglas-murray/ https://jordanbpeterson.com/transcripts/douglas-murray/ [3] https://www.thecollegefix.com/ucla-to-require-diversity-pledges-from-professors/ https://www.thecollegefix.com/ucla-to-require-diversity-pled... [4] https://areomagazine.com/2018/10/02/academic-grievance-studies-and-the-corruption-of-scholarship/comment-page-1/ https://areomagazine.com/2018/10/02/academic-grievance-studi... [5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gatn5ameRr8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gatn5ameRr8 [6] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/large-majorities-dislike-political-correctness/572581/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/large-majo...