23 ms·

'Cancel Culture' Comes to Science?

212 points by dmagee 7y ago

downerending 7y ago
One of my guilty pleasures is finding someone on the web saying something foolish and engaging them in debate. Rather than cancel these guys, wouldn't it be better to have a few well-prepared opponents attend and do the same? (Isn't that how science is supposed to work?)
- xenadu02 7y ago
  This is just conservatives trying to subvert the free market. There is no such thing as "cancel culture". People have always avoided doing business with people they find objectionable. The world has always worked that way. Conservatives are trying to suppress the ability to freely associate and choose whom you do business with because they don't want to suffer any consequences for their behavior or beliefs - also something that has never existed in the history of the world.
- qqqwerty 7y ago
  Debates can make for great entertainment, but are a poor forum for establishing truth and fact. Case in point, the 'cancel culture' argument is designed to shift the debate away from the science and instead focuses the debate on the 'character' of the scientists. So instead of arguing about the facts of climate change (which at this point are hard to refute), we are arguing about whether its okay for scientists to try and boycott right wing conferences. That debate is a little more complicated and nuanced, enough so that the right leaning audience can walk away feeling like they have some ground to stand on. The point isn't to prove that climate change doesn't exist. It is to merely sow enough doubt in the minds of enough people to keep climate change action out of reach for the politicians.
  - downerending 7y ago
    It's not the kind of evidence I prefer, but people who concentrate on ad hominem attacks do effectively provide evidence in favor of their targets' position.
StanDavis 7y ago
non-paywall: https://usf.news/the-americas/northern-america/united-states/cancel-culture-comes-to-science/ https://usf.news/the-americas/northern-america/united-states...
neonate 7y ago
http://archive.md/I8yLE http://archive.md/I8yLE
alevskaya 7y ago
Some relevant context here contesting this view: https://twitter.com/lteytelman/status/1216770668475252738 https://twitter.com/lteytelman/status/1216770668475252738
- euroPoor 7y ago
  Wanted to post exactly this. WSJ doing some terrific propaganda here.
  - wayoutthere 7y ago
    It's been sad to watch such a storied institution reduced to another Murdoch mouthpiece over the last 10 years. The WSJ never had much of an ideological bent other than "capitalism" until News Corp took over.
    - camjohnson26 7y ago
      Murdoch could’ve spiked the Theranos story that led to its collapse and cost him millions, but he didn’t.
      - not2b 7y ago
        Spiking that story would have delayed Theranos's collapse a bit (it isn't like if one news organization doesn't report a story no one else will ever find it), but had Murdoch spiked the story and unloaded his stock while it was still worth a lot, he could have been in legal trouble for trading on inside information, something only sources within the company knew. This kind of spiking backfires badly when discovered (NBC blocking Ronan Farrow because they had their own related problems, he wound up taking the story elsewhere).
        susijdjdjxa 7y ago
        Trading based on inside information? This is verging on “not even wrong”. Are you aware that Theranos was not a public company?
devpts11 7y ago
The circular firing squad modality is due to the infantilism academia coddled.
roenxi 7y ago
The line between genius and madness is famously thin and there is no way to distinguish a room full of cranks from a room full of enlightened scholars without listening carefully and weighing up what gets said. And of course one side straight up lying is a fairly useful indicator. So I suppose as long as these people are trying to tell the truth as they see it good luck to them. But articles like this are fundamentally a cross between advertising and propaganda so aren't much use to the general public. There is a dire need for some political balance in academia as it is a sheltered institution that by and large doesn't have to deal with the cost of things in the same way as broader society does; so it is good to see someone pushing the right wing as long as they are playing by the rules of honesty and citation which is what academics is about.
tkyjonathan 7y ago
Where has this been since 2015?
- sandoooo 7y ago
  Cancelled, I suppose.
allovernow 7y ago
While this explicit cancel culture has been slow to arrive, this is exactly the kind of traditionally left leaning activism which has gradually come to infest almost all of academia (and to a lesser but growing extent, industry). The result is an extremely strong, emergent cultural pressure against certain results and certain questions, which has been holding back a wide range of fields and ensuring pursuit of severely one sided science for decades. Our understandings of intelligence, social dynamics, genetic influences on behavior, sexually dimorphic psychology and performance, climate change, et al. are mired by unspoken taboos, not because certain lines of inquiry are logically unsound, but because they may uncover results which run contrary to socially acceptable, but ultimately poorly or un- justified assumptions about reality and human nature. More importantly, a subset of results may justify certain traditionally right leaning beliefs, and so certain necessary research topics are effectively forbidden. Please understand, I'm not suggesting choosing between left and right, only pointing out that the bias is pervasive and undeniable. The results are less effective social and economic policy, and poorer research in general, as incentives are no longer aligned with classical goals of objective knowledge discovery.
- sandoooo 7y ago
  On the other hand, this suggests there are low-hanging fruit in those areas. The trick is to find one that will produce money for you as a researcher/investor even if it's an unpopular opinion (i.e. not reliant on investment / cooperation from mainstream players). Suggestions? Related, what's the best way to short cancel-culture-heavy endeavors? Seems like it predicts a much higher chance of failure in the long term.
- zzzcpan 7y ago
  > this is exactly the kind of traditionally left leaning activism > ensuring pursuit of severely one sided science for decades More like a government level effort, not some random left leaning activism infesting science. So this is the social and economic policy they want.
- xenocratus 7y ago
  I've been brewing in my own rage for this for a while, thank you for spelling it out.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
robomartin 7y ago
Not saying for a moment that this conference is authoritative at all. Let's get that out of the way first. Is it possible for both sides of this matter to be right and wrong? Absolutely, and that is mostly the case. This, because of how f'd-up this climate change thing has become. It's a mess of indescribable proportions. Why are deniers right? Well, they are not. There's no denying this. Where they are right is in the outcome they are helping create: Taking action to "save the planet" is going nowhere. How are deniers wrong? Well, their belief system is completely skewed and devoid of scientific support. They believe in a fantasy they have woven over time. OK, then. Why are proponents right? Well, because climate change is real. We have irrefutable data going back 800,000 years to show how things used to be on earth and how we influenced things in the last, say, 200 years. One look at atmospheric CO2 concentration and it is impossible to argue against it. And that's just the start. How are proponents wrong then? Well, because they have turned this thing into an ugly combination of politics and religion. It's as irrational as can be and EVERYONE is lying through their teeth. The greatest lie is that we can actually "save the planet". It's an absolute pile of manure. Politicians are the worst. They are using climate change as a battering ram to drive votes. And 100% of what they say are lies. And 100% of what they want to do is pointless and maybe even dangerous. OK, you might say: That's crazy! What proof do you have to support this? Easy: Exactly the same proof we have to show climate change is real. That is 800,000 years of atmospheric CO2 data resulting from ice core sampling. This is the point where people don't bother to do the work and either dismiss or attack the messenger (rather than to think, follow the argument and actually apply a bit of critical thinking). Step 1: Check out the graph for the last 800,000 years of CO2 fluctuation. Here it is: https://cdiac.ess-dive.lbl.gov/images/air_bubbles_historical.jpg https://cdiac.ess-dive.lbl.gov/images/air_bubbles_historical... Here's the source: https://cdiac.ess-dive.lbl.gov/trends/co2/ice_core_co2.html https://cdiac.ess-dive.lbl.gov/trends/co2/ice_core_co2.html Step 2: Print that graph or open it in Photoshop and fit lines to the up and down cycles. Step 3: Measure the slopes for up and down cycles of approximately 100 ppm of CO2 change Step 4: Average the ups and average the downs. What I get, in rough strokes, is (roughly): 25,000 years for a 100 ppm increase 50,000 years for a 100 ppm decrease Step 5: Stop and think about this: That, what you just calculated, is the NATURAL RATE OF CHANGE OF ATMOSPHERIC CO2 WITHOUT HUMANITY AND OUR TECHNOLOGY ON THE PLANET. That is crucial, absolutely crucial, in understanding just how ridiculous this has become. It means the following: IF WE LEAVE THE PLANET IT WILL TAKE 50,000 YEAS FOR ATMOSPHERIC CO2 TO DECREASE BY 100ppm What does that mean? It means you are not going to fix it by: - Switching to renewable energy sources everywhere on the planet - Eliminating all fossil fuel-based transportation - Switching the entire planet to electric cars - Carbon tax credits - Eliminating all plastic - Taking humanity --all 7 billion of us-- back to medieval times - Destroying the economies of every developed and developing nations You are not going to fix it even if you do all of the above and more. Why? BECAUSE, EVEN IF YOU DO ALL OF THE ABOVE AND MORE, IT DOES NOT EQUAL ALL OF HUMANITY LEAVING THE PLANET. Please think about this for more than a moment so you can start pushing for real conversations based on the truth rather than the ridiculous fantasies being pushed by both sides. This is beyond silly now. It's tragic. We know that the natural down-slope rate of change is in the order of 50,000 years for 100 ppm without humanity, factories, cars, planes, etc. What politicians and zealots are talking about is achieving somewhere in the order of 1000x better performance while all 7 billion people, our cities, factories, technology, etc. remains on the planet. I mean, you don't need to do any math to understand how silly this is. All you have to do is look at these graphs, look at the rate of change and ask: How are we going to do 1,000 times better? How are we going to do that without using unimaginable amounts of energy and resources to the point that we are far more likely to kill everything on the planet than fix it. These are planetary scale problems that require beyond planetary scale energy and resources to "fix". The sooner we start talking about the realities of climate change --that we can't fix it or "save the planet"-- and stop being hysterical about it, the sooner we can start talking about how to live with it and improve things to the extent possible. Which also means both sides will meet somewhere in the middle. BTW, this does not mean we should not clean-up our act at all. We should. All we have to do is stop lying about the reasons for it. There are plenty of legitimate reasons to live in cleaner cities with renewable power sources, climate change and saving the planet just happen to not be among them, not if we want to talk about reality vs. fantasy. BTW, don't take my word for it. Read this for an insight into how futile some of these crazy ideas actually are. This is from Google Research: https://storage.googleapis.com/pub-tools-public-publication-data/pdf/43326.pdf https://storage.googleapis.com/pub-tools-public-publication-... Prediction: Nobody is going to take the time to consider the above, much less do the work and understand. And by that I mean not one person from either side of the argument. Nobody seems to care about the truth, particularly not scientists who depend on bullshit grants and don't dare bring up the fact that we are wasting valuable time and resources focusing on nonsense. There's big money and great power to be had by riding the gravy train of lies on both sides. Sad. Truly sad.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
elfexec 7y ago
Aren't a lot of topics already taboo in science/academia? I'd say cancel culture has been in science for a while now. Afterall it is part of academia. Didn't a female brown university professor's study on transgenders get "canceled" because it offended some people not too long ago? Didn't Bret Weinstein, a biology professor, at some college in oregon get "canceled" not too long ago? Didn't Jordan Peterson get "canceled" not too long ago? Academia and journalists have been canceling people for a while now. Was WSJ asleep for the past decade?
- n4r9 7y ago
  Not sure about the first example, but Bret Weinstein was fired because his behaviour didn't reflect his employer's values, not because of the science he was doing. I also don't think Peterson is having particular difficulty doing scientific work, nor is the actual research he does "taboo".
  - elfexec 7y ago
    > Not sure about the first example If you are that well versed in the lives of weinstein and peterson, you most definitely are aware the first. But being as woke as you are, you probably can't admit it to yourself. > but Bret Weinstein was fired because his behaviour didn't reflect his employer's values, not because of the science he was doing Weinstein wasn't fired, he resigned after getting a settlement from his university since the university couldn't provide for his safety from racist mobs. > I also don't think Peterson is having particular difficulty doing scientific work, nor is the actual research he does "taboo". You don't think? I suspect Peterson would disagree. You sure his research into political correctness, authoritarianism, identity politics, evils of postmodernism, etc aren't "taboo"? If it wasn't taboo, jordan peterson wouldn't be so well known. He'd be just another no-name professor somewhere in canada. Instead of saying racism, hate and cancel culture is bad, you are defending racism, hate and cancel culture. Which may get support and upvotes in echo chambers online, but is laughed at in the real world. Reality will ultimately trump fantasy.
    - n4r9 7y ago
wedn3sday 7y ago
> Our list of speakers includes no women. (All declined our invitations.) The fact that every woman they invited declined to give a talk is a huge red flag.
- mayniac 7y ago
  Could be a red flag but it's not possible to know unless you can find out the number of women who were invited, the number of men who were invited, and the ratio of men/women in the field. Maybe they invited a reasonable number of women but they all had scheduling conflicts. Depends on the numbers.
pje 7y ago
>An unhappy side effect of the digital age is “cancel culture.” i.e. "I am uncomfortable with large amounts of people telling me I'm an asshole."
- MockObject 7y ago
  Cancel culture is when people are actually canceled: when accounts are shut down, people are fired, bank accounts closed, people are blacklisted. Actual material damages. Trivialization does not serve your point.
  - pje 7y ago
    Yes it does
  - downerending 7y ago
    And sometimes the targets are driven to suicide, their friends and families left to grow up and live on without them. Even if everything being asserted against them is true, the penalties rarely seem fitting for a civilized society.
    - pje 7y ago
      Look, I don't disagree with you. But you're talking about this like power™ doesn't exist. Like, who do you think will have more leverage in this situation you describe? A woman whose employer is a man?
    - MockObject 7y ago
      > Even if everything being asserted against them is true, the penalties rarely seem fitting for a civilized society. Indeed, that's the consensus that we arrived at after the Hollywood red scare. But each generation believes their crises are exponentially worse than anything previously witnessed, excusing extreme measures.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- 7y ago
mayniac 7y ago
> " By Peter W. Wood" > " Mr. Wood is president of the National Association of Scholars. " Of course the person being "cancelled" would write an opinion piece on "cancel culture". One person criticised his event on twitter and he wrote an opinion piece on WSJ about how he's being persecuted. This seems incredibly childish to me. Especially considering the original tweet* got under 100 retweets and about 130 likes. Honestly, I feel like this is more likely to be advertising for the conference than an actual complaint about "cancel culture". Nothing here is noteworthy in any way. *https://twitter.com/lteytelman/status/1215380405597065216 https://twitter.com/lteytelman/status/1215380405597065216
- ilikehurdles 7y ago
  Opinion piece author, an anthropology PhD holder, has been pushing climate change denialism and attacking individual scientists via his NAS organization since 2009. He did the same thing to another scientist in 2011[1]. The publications he lists on the Federalist Society make his other agendas very clear. And yes, this is plain as day advertising and deception. [1]:https://www.desmogblog.com/sites/beta.desmogblog.com/files/bottling.nonsense.pdf https://www.desmogblog.com/sites/beta.desmogblog.com/files/b...
  - mayniac 7y ago
    His articles on the Federalist for anyone who's interested https://thefederalist.com/author/peterwood/ https://thefederalist.com/author/peterwood/ The paper, along with some really basic googling, raises a big red flag over NAS's impartiality. Namely that: * NAS was founded by a conservative * Its president is conservative * Its funders are conservative * Its board is full of conservatives * It frequently uses conservative (arguably far-right) catchphrases like "defending western civilization" * Often pushes conservative viewpoints such as climate scepticism * Other conservative organisations call NAS conservative Yet despite all that NAS, or at least Peter W Wood, consistently claim they are not a conservative organisation. This is completely absurd. Definitely an advert and no sane person should trust anything that Wood is saying here.
    - 7y ago
vajrabum 7y ago
The term cancel culture like political correctness is a PR term and an effective one. For global warming 1st year college physics is enough to tell that global warming is in fact real and pretty much all the cranks are on the well funded fossil fuel side. And then there's the likelihood that man created global warming will put an end to the human race. Like the tabacco industry, maybe dissing these folks and giving them a hard time is in fact a good idea and also like tobacco pushback comes from older folks and the industry. In the former case it's a conservative form of ignorance. I've been smoking my whole life and it hasn't killed me yet or in this case I've been driving my whole life and it never caused any harm. In the latter case, it's psychopathic opportunism. Meanwhile Australia and California (in season) are burning.
jacobmoe 7y ago
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 claims to be about "cancel culture". And now we're here debating how some tweets mean science has been ruined by cancel culture warriors or whatever. The irony is that the person being "canceled" is exactly the person being accused of it.
- nl 7y ago
  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-scholars-reproducibility/ https://undark.org/2018/04/18/national-association-of-schola...
waylandsmithers 7y ago
A point I've heard Neil deGrasse Tyson make a few times is that despite the fact that Edwin Hubble was a heinous racist, that should have no bearing on the validity of his scientific contributions. I have a feeling that with sufficient rabble rousing a twitter mob could figure out how to get the name of the space telescope and constant changed.
tawm 7y ago
'Culture War' Comes to HN?
neekleer 7y ago
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 to be free to investigate the genetic and other bases of IQ further in order to find better answers, then it seems like they want scientists to first find a way to talk about it publicly without specifying the categories or where members of a category tend to fall on the scale. There is a chilling effect on various lines of inquiry. For now, you can claim the information is out there, but any further writings could become more esoteric or limited. In the case of IQ, I don't think certain people want scientific answers as to why. They would rather assume IQ is highly malleable while they run social and economic experiments to find ways to equalize it and other factors that predict success.
- stenl 7y ago
  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-his-own-words/ https://liorpachter.wordpress.com/2018/05/18/james-watson-in...
  - l0000p 7y ago
    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 an expert and somehow think he is now wrong. 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 care? Even though your ability to judge the correctness of this research is the same as the race-related studies.
michalf6 7y ago
Herbert Marcuse's essay "Repressive Tolerance" is required reading when discussing these issues, it's where it all started: https://www.marcuse.org/herbert/publications/1960s/1965-repressive-tolerance-fulltext.html https://www.marcuse.org/herbert/publications/1960s/1965-repr...
throwGuardian 7y ago
Science, facts and meanings of words have all been cancelled You can do this experiment right now: type "Men can" in Google, and see the suggestions it returns. If you disagree with them, you're with 99.9% of humanity, and with science. So how did the suggestion return an absurdity on Google - the AI ethics committee at Google have cancelled facts, and manually edited the response to this suggestion (as against the typically automated responses curated via page-rank + AI). Welcome to 2020 - where words, facts and science have no meaning
zaarn 7y ago
There is a fairly good piece from the youtuber Contra, it's about 2 hours and goes fairly well into the details of Cancel Culture and how the author was herself cancelled after showing a <10 second clip of a specific person in a +1 hour video. I can certainly recommend it.
anglercut 7y ago
The most valuable research on the topic of chilling effects has been done by Heterodox academy[1]. I especially recommend their recent article on "seizing the means of knowledge production"[2], because it explains how we got here and provides examples of some sort of suspension of skepticism: «For instance, training on microaggressions, white privilege, implicit bias (coined in 1993, fyi), etc. were institutionalized in the private sector, and even among government agencies, well before there was any kind of robust empirical literature validating these constructs or showing that the proposed interventions would be effective. Indeed, the available empirical evidence now suggests that there are deep problems across the board with these ideas and approaches (here, here, here, here, here, here, here for more on this point). However, these frameworks and interventions are already so deeply entrenched – including within institutions of higher learning — that the empirical research is now almost entirely beside the point». Of course, this open-mindedness was more than matched by extreme suspicion and demand for rigour in the other direction[3], which we also see here. Also consider that personal views of experimenters affect what results they get, with a very large effect size – larger than most effect sizes actually discovered in social science[4], which, given political leanings in sciences such as psychology[5] and the replication crisis, makes one wonder how much trust should be given even to actual long-standing scientific arguments against politically unpopular ideas. But such arguments make an incredibly small contribution to the intellectual rejection of this research. To people who argue on the topic of race & intelligence (which is indeed the most obvious, the most politicized, but not the only point of contention), bringing up arguments like "research did not control for environmental differences" or "g factor is meaningless" or "IQ tests are not fair", I want to say: you know almost nothing on the issue, you don't understand how little you know[6], and the fact that you perceive yourself as knowing enough to make confident judgements is precisely the testament to the power ideology has over popular reporting. But it does not yet have equal power over science, which is why actual researchers have views very different from yours[7], and of course all these criticisms were understood, and many addressed, decades ago, e.g.: «A 1999 literature review re-examined the conclusions of Bias in Mental Testing using new data. It concluded that empirical evidence strongly supported Jensen's conclusion that mental tests are equally valid measures of ability for all English-speaking people born in the United States. The review further argued that misinformation about bias in IQ tests is very pervasive, and thus it is important for the empirical data in this field to be clearly conveyed to the public»[8]. If you wish to learn about it, better read «The Neuroscience of Intelligence» by Richard J. Haier from Cambridge University Press, 2016[9], it's an excellent summary. Don't rely on Youtube videos and opinionated blog posts. I could go on and on. But in general, HN's reaction to this topic is disappointing: obviously intelligent, well-meaning and skeptical people straining their eloquence to rationalize what amounts to journalists' ignorant, unhelpful [10] and politically biased[11] opinion on science, all (I presume) out of unconscious desire to not have a stain on one's career or being considered morally corrupt. So it goes. 1: https://heterodoxacademy.org/about-us/ https://heterodoxacademy.org/about-us/ 2: https://heterodoxacademy.org/seizing-means-knowledge-production/ https://heterodoxacademy.org/seizing-means-knowledge-product... 3: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10699-015-9421-3 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10699-015-9421-3 4: http://www.lscp.net/persons/dupoux/teaching/JOURNEE_AUTOMNE_CogMaster_2011-12/readings_deontology/Rosenthal_1994_interpersonal_expectancy_effects_a_review.pdf http://www.lscp.net/persons/dupoux/teaching/JOURNEE_AUTOMNE_... 5: http://heterodoxacademy.org/2015/09/14/bbs-paper-on-lack-of-political-diversity/ http://heterodoxacademy.org/2015/09/14/bbs-paper-on-lack-of-... 6: http://www.gwern.net/Mistakes#iq-race http://www.gwern.net/Mistakes#iq-race 7: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289619301886 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016028961... 8: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bias_in_Mental_Testing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bias_in_Mental_Testing 9: https://www.amazon.com/Neuroscience-Intelligence-Cambridge-Fundamentals-Psychology/dp/110746143X https://www.amazon.com/Neuroscience-Intelligence-Cambridge-F... 10: http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/09/inequality-gifted-programs-schools-testing/405013/ http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/09/inequal... 11: https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2004/jun/22/20040622-085207-8465r/ https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2004/jun/22/20040622-08...
dmode 7y ago
Interesting complain by the author. I checked out the Twitter account of National Association of Scholars (the organization the author belongs to) and it is just straight up propaganda with a false veneer of science. No wonder people are warning others
erland 7y ago
It's funny that this is posted on HN since places on which you cannot speak any controversial opinions are the main way in which CC spreads. HN being one of those places by design.
LennyTeytelman 7y ago
I'm Lenny Teytelman, the target of this article. I'm the CEO and cofounder of protocols.io, an open access platform to improve reproducibility of published research. Accelerating science has been my mission for the past eight years. The claims in this piece of "cancel culture" and fear of disagreement on my part are utter nonsense. This National Association of Scholars is a group using the legitimate reproducibility discussion to undermine the EPA and climate research. I've warned people not to attend this conference because 7/21 total speakers are climate change deniers and 0 are climate experts. My full response is here: https://twitter.com/lteytelman/status/1216770668475252738 https://twitter.com/lteytelman/status/1216770668475252738. Lenny Teytelman, Ph.D. CEO, protocols.io

212 points by dmagee 7y ago

One of my guilty pleasures is finding someone on the web saying something foolish and engaging them in debate. Rather than cancel these guys, wouldn't it be better to have a few well-prepared opponents attend and do the same? (Isn't that how science is supposed to work?)

xenadu02 7y ago
This is just conservatives trying to subvert the free market. There is no such thing as "cancel culture". People have always avoided doing business with people they find objectionable. The world has always worked that way. Conservatives are trying to suppress the ability to freely associate and choose whom you do business with because they don't want to suffer any consequences for their behavior or beliefs - also something that has never existed in the history of the world.
qqqwerty 7y ago
Debates can make for great entertainment, but are a poor forum for establishing truth and fact. Case in point, the 'cancel culture' argument is designed to shift the debate away from the science and instead focuses the debate on the 'character' of the scientists. So instead of arguing about the facts of climate change (which at this point are hard to refute), we are arguing about whether its okay for scientists to try and boycott right wing conferences. That debate is a little more complicated and nuanced, enough so that the right leaning audience can walk away feeling like they have some ground to stand on. The point isn't to prove that climate change doesn't exist. It is to merely sow enough doubt in the minds of enough people to keep climate change action out of reach for the politicians.
- downerending 7y ago
  It's not the kind of evidence I prefer, but people who concentrate on ad hominem attacks do effectively provide evidence in favor of their targets' position.

StanDavis 7y ago

non-paywall: https://usf.news/the-americas/northern-america/united-states/cancel-culture-comes-to-science/ https://usf.news/the-americas/northern-america/united-states...

neonate 7y ago

http://archive.md/I8yLE http://archive.md/I8yLE

alevskaya 7y ago

Some relevant context here contesting this view: https://twitter.com/lteytelman/status/1216770668475252738 https://twitter.com/lteytelman/status/1216770668475252738

euroPoor 7y ago
Wanted to post exactly this. WSJ doing some terrific propaganda here.
- wayoutthere 7y ago
  It's been sad to watch such a storied institution reduced to another Murdoch mouthpiece over the last 10 years. The WSJ never had much of an ideological bent other than "capitalism" until News Corp took over.
  - camjohnson26 7y ago
    Murdoch could’ve spiked the Theranos story that led to its collapse and cost him millions, but he didn’t.
    - not2b 7y ago
      Spiking that story would have delayed Theranos's collapse a bit (it isn't like if one news organization doesn't report a story no one else will ever find it), but had Murdoch spiked the story and unloaded his stock while it was still worth a lot, he could have been in legal trouble for trading on inside information, something only sources within the company knew. This kind of spiking backfires badly when discovered (NBC blocking Ronan Farrow because they had their own related problems, he wound up taking the story elsewhere).
      - susijdjdjxa 7y ago
        Trading based on inside information? This is verging on “not even wrong”. Are you aware that Theranos was not a public company?

devpts11 7y ago

The circular firing squad modality is due to the infantilism academia coddled.

roenxi 7y ago

The line between genius and madness is famously thin and there is no way to distinguish a room full of cranks from a room full of enlightened scholars without listening carefully and weighing up what gets said. And of course one side straight up lying is a fairly useful indicator. So I suppose as long as these people are trying to tell the truth as they see it good luck to them. But articles like this are fundamentally a cross between advertising and propaganda so aren't much use to the general public. There is a dire need for some political balance in academia as it is a sheltered institution that by and large doesn't have to deal with the cost of things in the same way as broader society does; so it is good to see someone pushing the right wing as long as they are playing by the rules of honesty and citation which is what academics is about.

tkyjonathan 7y ago

Where has this been since 2015?

sandoooo 7y ago
Cancelled, I suppose.

allovernow 7y ago

While this explicit cancel culture has been slow to arrive, this is exactly the kind of traditionally left leaning activism which has gradually come to infest almost all of academia (and to a lesser but growing extent, industry). The result is an extremely strong, emergent cultural pressure against certain results and certain questions, which has been holding back a wide range of fields and ensuring pursuit of severely one sided science for decades. Our understandings of intelligence, social dynamics, genetic influences on behavior, sexually dimorphic psychology and performance, climate change, et al. are mired by unspoken taboos, not because certain lines of inquiry are logically unsound, but because they may uncover results which run contrary to socially acceptable, but ultimately poorly or un- justified assumptions about reality and human nature. More importantly, a subset of results may justify certain traditionally right leaning beliefs, and so certain necessary research topics are effectively forbidden. Please understand, I'm not suggesting choosing between left and right, only pointing out that the bias is pervasive and undeniable. The results are less effective social and economic policy, and poorer research in general, as incentives are no longer aligned with classical goals of objective knowledge discovery.

sandoooo 7y ago
On the other hand, this suggests there are low-hanging fruit in those areas. The trick is to find one that will produce money for you as a researcher/investor even if it's an unpopular opinion (i.e. not reliant on investment / cooperation from mainstream players). Suggestions? Related, what's the best way to short cancel-culture-heavy endeavors? Seems like it predicts a much higher chance of failure in the long term.
zzzcpan 7y ago
> this is exactly the kind of traditionally left leaning activism > ensuring pursuit of severely one sided science for decades More like a government level effort, not some random left leaning activism infesting science. So this is the social and economic policy they want.
xenocratus 7y ago
I've been brewing in my own rage for this for a while, thank you for spelling it out.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

robomartin 7y ago

Not saying for a moment that this conference is authoritative at all. Let's get that out of the way first. Is it possible for both sides of this matter to be right and wrong? Absolutely, and that is mostly the case. This, because of how f'd-up this climate change thing has become. It's a mess of indescribable proportions. Why are deniers right? Well, they are not. There's no denying this. Where they are right is in the outcome they are helping create: Taking action to "save the planet" is going nowhere. How are deniers wrong? Well, their belief system is completely skewed and devoid of scientific support. They believe in a fantasy they have woven over time. OK, then. Why are proponents right? Well, because climate change is real. We have irrefutable data going back 800,000 years to show how things used to be on earth and how we influenced things in the last, say, 200 years. One look at atmospheric CO2 concentration and it is impossible to argue against it. And that's just the start. How are proponents wrong then? Well, because they have turned this thing into an ugly combination of politics and religion. It's as irrational as can be and EVERYONE is lying through their teeth. The greatest lie is that we can actually "save the planet". It's an absolute pile of manure. Politicians are the worst. They are using climate change as a battering ram to drive votes. And 100% of what they say are lies. And 100% of what they want to do is pointless and maybe even dangerous. OK, you might say: That's crazy! What proof do you have to support this? Easy: Exactly the same proof we have to show climate change is real. That is 800,000 years of atmospheric CO2 data resulting from ice core sampling. This is the point where people don't bother to do the work and either dismiss or attack the messenger (rather than to think, follow the argument and actually apply a bit of critical thinking). Step 1: Check out the graph for the last 800,000 years of CO2 fluctuation. Here it is: https://cdiac.ess-dive.lbl.gov/images/air_bubbles_historical.jpg https://cdiac.ess-dive.lbl.gov/images/air_bubbles_historical... Here's the source: https://cdiac.ess-dive.lbl.gov/trends/co2/ice_core_co2.html https://cdiac.ess-dive.lbl.gov/trends/co2/ice_core_co2.html Step 2: Print that graph or open it in Photoshop and fit lines to the up and down cycles. Step 3: Measure the slopes for up and down cycles of approximately 100 ppm of CO2 change Step 4: Average the ups and average the downs. What I get, in rough strokes, is (roughly): 25,000 years for a 100 ppm increase 50,000 years for a 100 ppm decrease Step 5: Stop and think about this: That, what you just calculated, is the NATURAL RATE OF CHANGE OF ATMOSPHERIC CO2 WITHOUT HUMANITY AND OUR TECHNOLOGY ON THE PLANET. That is crucial, absolutely crucial, in understanding just how ridiculous this has become. It means the following: IF WE LEAVE THE PLANET IT WILL TAKE 50,000 YEAS FOR ATMOSPHERIC CO2 TO DECREASE BY 100ppm What does that mean? It means you are not going to fix it by: - Switching to renewable energy sources everywhere on the planet - Eliminating all fossil fuel-based transportation - Switching the entire planet to electric cars - Carbon tax credits - Eliminating all plastic - Taking humanity --all 7 billion of us-- back to medieval times - Destroying the economies of every developed and developing nations You are not going to fix it even if you do all of the above and more. Why? BECAUSE, EVEN IF YOU DO ALL OF THE ABOVE AND MORE, IT DOES NOT EQUAL ALL OF HUMANITY LEAVING THE PLANET. Please think about this for more than a moment so you can start pushing for real conversations based on the truth rather than the ridiculous fantasies being pushed by both sides. This is beyond silly now. It's tragic. We know that the natural down-slope rate of change is in the order of 50,000 years for 100 ppm without humanity, factories, cars, planes, etc. What politicians and zealots are talking about is achieving somewhere in the order of 1000x better performance while all 7 billion people, our cities, factories, technology, etc. remains on the planet. I mean, you don't need to do any math to understand how silly this is. All you have to do is look at these graphs, look at the rate of change and ask: How are we going to do 1,000 times better? How are we going to do that without using unimaginable amounts of energy and resources to the point that we are far more likely to kill everything on the planet than fix it. These are planetary scale problems that require beyond planetary scale energy and resources to "fix". The sooner we start talking about the realities of climate change --that we can't fix it or "save the planet"-- and stop being hysterical about it, the sooner we can start talking about how to live with it and improve things to the extent possible. Which also means both sides will meet somewhere in the middle. BTW, this does not mean we should not clean-up our act at all. We should. All we have to do is stop lying about the reasons for it. There are plenty of legitimate reasons to live in cleaner cities with renewable power sources, climate change and saving the planet just happen to not be among them, not if we want to talk about reality vs. fantasy. BTW, don't take my word for it. Read this for an insight into how futile some of these crazy ideas actually are. This is from Google Research: https://storage.googleapis.com/pub-tools-public-publication-data/pdf/43326.pdf https://storage.googleapis.com/pub-tools-public-publication-... Prediction: Nobody is going to take the time to consider the above, much less do the work and understand. And by that I mean not one person from either side of the argument. Nobody seems to care about the truth, particularly not scientists who depend on bullshit grants and don't dare bring up the fact that we are wasting valuable time and resources focusing on nonsense. There's big money and great power to be had by riding the gravy train of lies on both sides. Sad. Truly sad.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

elfexec 7y ago

Aren't a lot of topics already taboo in science/academia? I'd say cancel culture has been in science for a while now. Afterall it is part of academia. Didn't a female brown university professor's study on transgenders get "canceled" because it offended some people not too long ago? Didn't Bret Weinstein, a biology professor, at some college in oregon get "canceled" not too long ago? Didn't Jordan Peterson get "canceled" not too long ago? Academia and journalists have been canceling people for a while now. Was WSJ asleep for the past decade?

n4r9 7y ago
Not sure about the first example, but Bret Weinstein was fired because his behaviour didn't reflect his employer's values, not because of the science he was doing. I also don't think Peterson is having particular difficulty doing scientific work, nor is the actual research he does "taboo".
- elfexec 7y ago
  > Not sure about the first example If you are that well versed in the lives of weinstein and peterson, you most definitely are aware the first. But being as woke as you are, you probably can't admit it to yourself. > but Bret Weinstein was fired because his behaviour didn't reflect his employer's values, not because of the science he was doing Weinstein wasn't fired, he resigned after getting a settlement from his university since the university couldn't provide for his safety from racist mobs. > I also don't think Peterson is having particular difficulty doing scientific work, nor is the actual research he does "taboo". You don't think? I suspect Peterson would disagree. You sure his research into political correctness, authoritarianism, identity politics, evils of postmodernism, etc aren't "taboo"? If it wasn't taboo, jordan peterson wouldn't be so well known. He'd be just another no-name professor somewhere in canada. Instead of saying racism, hate and cancel culture is bad, you are defending racism, hate and cancel culture. Which may get support and upvotes in echo chambers online, but is laughed at in the real world. Reality will ultimately trump fantasy.
  - n4r9 7y ago

wedn3sday 7y ago

> Our list of speakers includes no women. (All declined our invitations.) The fact that every woman they invited declined to give a talk is a huge red flag.

mayniac 7y ago
Could be a red flag but it's not possible to know unless you can find out the number of women who were invited, the number of men who were invited, and the ratio of men/women in the field. Maybe they invited a reasonable number of women but they all had scheduling conflicts. Depends on the numbers.

pje 7y ago

>An unhappy side effect of the digital age is “cancel culture.” i.e. "I am uncomfortable with large amounts of people telling me I'm an asshole."

MockObject 7y ago
Cancel culture is when people are actually canceled: when accounts are shut down, people are fired, bank accounts closed, people are blacklisted. Actual material damages. Trivialization does not serve your point.
- pje 7y ago
  Yes it does
- downerending 7y ago
  And sometimes the targets are driven to suicide, their friends and families left to grow up and live on without them. Even if everything being asserted against them is true, the penalties rarely seem fitting for a civilized society.
  - pje 7y ago
    Look, I don't disagree with you. But you're talking about this like power™ doesn't exist. Like, who do you think will have more leverage in this situation you describe? A woman whose employer is a man?
  - MockObject 7y ago
    > Even if everything being asserted against them is true, the penalties rarely seem fitting for a civilized society. Indeed, that's the consensus that we arrived at after the Hollywood red scare. But each generation believes their crises are exponentially worse than anything previously witnessed, excusing extreme measures.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
7y ago

mayniac 7y ago

> " By Peter W. Wood" > " Mr. Wood is president of the National Association of Scholars. " Of course the person being "cancelled" would write an opinion piece on "cancel culture". One person criticised his event on twitter and he wrote an opinion piece on WSJ about how he's being persecuted. This seems incredibly childish to me. Especially considering the original tweet* got under 100 retweets and about 130 likes. Honestly, I feel like this is more likely to be advertising for the conference than an actual complaint about "cancel culture". Nothing here is noteworthy in any way. *https://twitter.com/lteytelman/status/1215380405597065216 https://twitter.com/lteytelman/status/1215380405597065216

ilikehurdles 7y ago
Opinion piece author, an anthropology PhD holder, has been pushing climate change denialism and attacking individual scientists via his NAS organization since 2009. He did the same thing to another scientist in 2011[1]. The publications he lists on the Federalist Society make his other agendas very clear. And yes, this is plain as day advertising and deception. [1]:https://www.desmogblog.com/sites/beta.desmogblog.com/files/bottling.nonsense.pdf https://www.desmogblog.com/sites/beta.desmogblog.com/files/b...
- mayniac 7y ago
  His articles on the Federalist for anyone who's interested https://thefederalist.com/author/peterwood/ https://thefederalist.com/author/peterwood/ The paper, along with some really basic googling, raises a big red flag over NAS's impartiality. Namely that: * NAS was founded by a conservative * Its president is conservative * Its funders are conservative * Its board is full of conservatives * It frequently uses conservative (arguably far-right) catchphrases like "defending western civilization" * Often pushes conservative viewpoints such as climate scepticism * Other conservative organisations call NAS conservative Yet despite all that NAS, or at least Peter W Wood, consistently claim they are not a conservative organisation. This is completely absurd. Definitely an advert and no sane person should trust anything that Wood is saying here.
  - 7y ago

vajrabum 7y ago

The term cancel culture like political correctness is a PR term and an effective one. For global warming 1st year college physics is enough to tell that global warming is in fact real and pretty much all the cranks are on the well funded fossil fuel side. And then there's the likelihood that man created global warming will put an end to the human race. Like the tabacco industry, maybe dissing these folks and giving them a hard time is in fact a good idea and also like tobacco pushback comes from older folks and the industry. In the former case it's a conservative form of ignorance. I've been smoking my whole life and it hasn't killed me yet or in this case I've been driving my whole life and it never caused any harm. In the latter case, it's psychopathic opportunism. Meanwhile Australia and California (in season) are burning.

jacobmoe 7y ago

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 claims to be about "cancel culture". And now we're here debating how some tweets mean science has been ruined by cancel culture warriors or whatever. The irony is that the person being "canceled" is exactly the person being accused of it.

nl 7y ago
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-scholars-reproducibility/ https://undark.org/2018/04/18/national-association-of-schola...

waylandsmithers 7y ago

A point I've heard Neil deGrasse Tyson make a few times is that despite the fact that Edwin Hubble was a heinous racist, that should have no bearing on the validity of his scientific contributions. I have a feeling that with sufficient rabble rousing a twitter mob could figure out how to get the name of the space telescope and constant changed.

tawm 7y ago

'Culture War' Comes to HN?

neekleer 7y ago

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 to be free to investigate the genetic and other bases of IQ further in order to find better answers, then it seems like they want scientists to first find a way to talk about it publicly without specifying the categories or where members of a category tend to fall on the scale. There is a chilling effect on various lines of inquiry. For now, you can claim the information is out there, but any further writings could become more esoteric or limited. In the case of IQ, I don't think certain people want scientific answers as to why. They would rather assume IQ is highly malleable while they run social and economic experiments to find ways to equalize it and other factors that predict success.

stenl 7y ago
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-his-own-words/ https://liorpachter.wordpress.com/2018/05/18/james-watson-in...
- l0000p 7y ago
  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 an expert and somehow think he is now wrong. 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 care? Even though your ability to judge the correctness of this research is the same as the race-related studies.

michalf6 7y ago

Herbert Marcuse's essay "Repressive Tolerance" is required reading when discussing these issues, it's where it all started: https://www.marcuse.org/herbert/publications/1960s/1965-repressive-tolerance-fulltext.html https://www.marcuse.org/herbert/publications/1960s/1965-repr...

throwGuardian 7y ago

Science, facts and meanings of words have all been cancelled You can do this experiment right now: type "Men can" in Google, and see the suggestions it returns. If you disagree with them, you're with 99.9% of humanity, and with science. So how did the suggestion return an absurdity on Google - the AI ethics committee at Google have cancelled facts, and manually edited the response to this suggestion (as against the typically automated responses curated via page-rank + AI). Welcome to 2020 - where words, facts and science have no meaning

zaarn 7y ago

There is a fairly good piece from the youtuber Contra, it's about 2 hours and goes fairly well into the details of Cancel Culture and how the author was herself cancelled after showing a <10 second clip of a specific person in a +1 hour video. I can certainly recommend it.

anglercut 7y ago

The most valuable research on the topic of chilling effects has been done by Heterodox academy[1]. I especially recommend their recent article on "seizing the means of knowledge production"[2], because it explains how we got here and provides examples of some sort of suspension of skepticism: «For instance, training on microaggressions, white privilege, implicit bias (coined in 1993, fyi), etc. were institutionalized in the private sector, and even among government agencies, well before there was any kind of robust empirical literature validating these constructs or showing that the proposed interventions would be effective. Indeed, the available empirical evidence now suggests that there are deep problems across the board with these ideas and approaches (here, here, here, here, here, here, here for more on this point). However, these frameworks and interventions are already so deeply entrenched – including within institutions of higher learning — that the empirical research is now almost entirely beside the point». Of course, this open-mindedness was more than matched by extreme suspicion and demand for rigour in the other direction[3], which we also see here. Also consider that personal views of experimenters affect what results they get, with a very large effect size – larger than most effect sizes actually discovered in social science[4], which, given political leanings in sciences such as psychology[5] and the replication crisis, makes one wonder how much trust should be given even to actual long-standing scientific arguments against politically unpopular ideas. But such arguments make an incredibly small contribution to the intellectual rejection of this research. To people who argue on the topic of race & intelligence (which is indeed the most obvious, the most politicized, but not the only point of contention), bringing up arguments like "research did not control for environmental differences" or "g factor is meaningless" or "IQ tests are not fair", I want to say: you know almost nothing on the issue, you don't understand how little you know[6], and the fact that you perceive yourself as knowing enough to make confident judgements is precisely the testament to the power ideology has over popular reporting. But it does not yet have equal power over science, which is why actual researchers have views very different from yours[7], and of course all these criticisms were understood, and many addressed, decades ago, e.g.: «A 1999 literature review re-examined the conclusions of Bias in Mental Testing using new data. It concluded that empirical evidence strongly supported Jensen's conclusion that mental tests are equally valid measures of ability for all English-speaking people born in the United States. The review further argued that misinformation about bias in IQ tests is very pervasive, and thus it is important for the empirical data in this field to be clearly conveyed to the public»[8]. If you wish to learn about it, better read «The Neuroscience of Intelligence» by Richard J. Haier from Cambridge University Press, 2016[9], it's an excellent summary. Don't rely on Youtube videos and opinionated blog posts. I could go on and on. But in general, HN's reaction to this topic is disappointing: obviously intelligent, well-meaning and skeptical people straining their eloquence to rationalize what amounts to journalists' ignorant, unhelpful [10] and politically biased[11] opinion on science, all (I presume) out of unconscious desire to not have a stain on one's career or being considered morally corrupt. So it goes. 1: https://heterodoxacademy.org/about-us/ https://heterodoxacademy.org/about-us/ 2: https://heterodoxacademy.org/seizing-means-knowledge-production/ https://heterodoxacademy.org/seizing-means-knowledge-product... 3: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10699-015-9421-3 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10699-015-9421-3 4: http://www.lscp.net/persons/dupoux/teaching/JOURNEE_AUTOMNE_CogMaster_2011-12/readings_deontology/Rosenthal_1994_interpersonal_expectancy_effects_a_review.pdf http://www.lscp.net/persons/dupoux/teaching/JOURNEE_AUTOMNE_... 5: http://heterodoxacademy.org/2015/09/14/bbs-paper-on-lack-of-political-diversity/ http://heterodoxacademy.org/2015/09/14/bbs-paper-on-lack-of-... 6: http://www.gwern.net/Mistakes#iq-race http://www.gwern.net/Mistakes#iq-race 7: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289619301886 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016028961... 8: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bias_in_Mental_Testing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bias_in_Mental_Testing 9: https://www.amazon.com/Neuroscience-Intelligence-Cambridge-Fundamentals-Psychology/dp/110746143X https://www.amazon.com/Neuroscience-Intelligence-Cambridge-F... 10: http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/09/inequality-gifted-programs-schools-testing/405013/ http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/09/inequal... 11: https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2004/jun/22/20040622-085207-8465r/ https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2004/jun/22/20040622-08...

dmode 7y ago

Interesting complain by the author. I checked out the Twitter account of National Association of Scholars (the organization the author belongs to) and it is just straight up propaganda with a false veneer of science. No wonder people are warning others

erland 7y ago

It's funny that this is posted on HN since places on which you cannot speak any controversial opinions are the main way in which CC spreads. HN being one of those places by design.

LennyTeytelman 7y ago

I'm Lenny Teytelman, the target of this article. I'm the CEO and cofounder of protocols.io, an open access platform to improve reproducibility of published research. Accelerating science has been my mission for the past eight years. The claims in this piece of "cancel culture" and fear of disagreement on my part are utter nonsense. This National Association of Scholars is a group using the legitimate reproducibility discussion to undermine the EPA and climate research. I've warned people not to attend this conference because 7/21 total speakers are climate change deniers and 0 are climate experts. My full response is here: https://twitter.com/lteytelman/status/1216770668475252738 https://twitter.com/lteytelman/status/1216770668475252738. Lenny Teytelman, Ph.D. CEO, protocols.io