20 ms·

To do better science, admit that you’re not objective

111 points by tacon 7y ago

generationP 7y ago
Start with yourself perhaps. The pigeonholing of heritability studies with eugenicist policy is something laughable to everyone who isn't utterly beclouded by FUD. And great job avoiding to refer to Noah Carl by name, because just imagine someone googling for it and actually checking up on the description ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noah_Carl https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noah_Carl ).
- scott_s 7y ago
  > The pigeonholing of heritability studies with eugenicist policy Where does the author do this?
  - dekhn 7y ago
    "As I found while writing my 2019 book Superior: The Return of Race Science, geneticists today rightly treat eugenics as a laughable proposition, and the concept of biological race — the belief that humans can be subdivided into distinct groups with meaningful differences between them — as easily debunked nonsens" Many studies cluster people with different genetic histories into groups with meaningful differences. This is important (for example) when treating people with different genetic histories for disease. AFAICT the article's author gets genetic history and social race mixed up, which does nothing to help their article's point.
    - throwaway6449 7y ago
      Race isn't well-defined. You can't just wave it away with "uhh some PCA/STRUCTURE plot yields clusters so race is real", that's not how popgen or phylogeny works. Nor can you get away with "butbut muh genetic diseases!" when these involve only a few genes that make up a tiny fraction of one's genome. Of course modern scientists in relevant fields know this, that's why race has been discontinued as a concept even though some people (old school doctors or taxonomists or pioneer fund recipients) haven't gotten, or perhaps don't want to get the memo.
  - generationP 7y ago
    The author either treats it as inevitable that legitimate human biodiversity research will lead to heavy-handed eugenic policy, or pretends to do so for cheap rhetorical scoring. Try re-reading her argument without taking this causation for granted, and you'll see it doesn't hold up; she is blaming scientists -- and even claiming their science to be debunked -- for on political consequences that she is speculating their research will have.
- xyzzyz 7y ago
  Unlike Saini, Carl is a scientists who publishes science, while Saini is a journalist who published pseudoscientific drivel designed to push her agenda, which she blatantly admits in her Nature piece above. Real scientists like Carl, or, say, David Reich, recognize her garbage for what it is. She interviews him for her book, and is shocked to learn that the super star Harvard geneticist doesn’t share her absurd positions on biological origins of race, or lack thereof. Saini belongs to a group which in turn Reich calls out in his book for obfuscating, rather than illuminating the issue of the biological origin of correlations between ancestry and phenotypic traits different than the melanin levels. The best example is how Saini in her book completely uncritically and unironically uses Lewontin’s 1972 argument that there can be no significant differences between populations, because majority of variance is within group and not between groups. Bringing this up and not even discussing obvious counterarguments shows that it’s not science that’s being done, but rather agenda pushing. This is of course par for the course, as Lewontin himself was also quite open about the fact that for him, science is only a tool to push his view on how society should be run, and if science disagrees, so much worse for science.
  - throwaway6449 7y ago
    Lol Carl is a hack and he got fired because of that. Reich didn't remotely say things racist wanted to hear. Meanwhile Saini's books got inputs and reviews from all prominent scientists in the field (Graham Coop, Ewan Birney etc.) none of which are HBD proponents. HBD proponents and Pioneer Fund recipients like to cry that they're being silenced when the reality is that they suck at science and don't like being called out. From Kanazawa's "the earth is flat" paper to evopsychologists literally admitting in the acknowledgement sections that they had no idea how to look up things in gene ontology databases and had to ask an actual biologist to do it on the condition that their name wouldn't be associated to their work, everything about the HBD clique transpires hackery and fraud.
    - xyzzyz 7y ago
      > Reich didn't remotely say things racist wanted to hear. I don't care much who those racists are, or what they wanted to hear, but at least Reich's positions shocked Saini herself, by being clearly and explicitly against the crap she was pushing in her book: > At the same time he thinks some categories may have more biological meaning to them. Black Americans are mostly West African in ancestry and white Americans tend to be European, both correlating to genuine population groups that were once separated at least partially for seventy thousand years in human history. “There’s a long time separating these two groups,” Reich says. “Enough time for evolution to accumulate differences. We don’t know very much about what those differences are because we’re still at the beginning of collectively trying to identify biologically what differences do.” > He suggests that there may be more than superficial average differences between black and white Americans, possibly even cognitive and psychological ones, because before they arrived in the United States, these population groups had this seventy thousand years apart during which they adapted to their own different environments. Reich implies that natural selection may have acted on them differently within this timescale to produce changes that go further than skin deep. He adds, judiciously, that he doesn’t think these differences will be large—only a fraction as big as the variation between individuals, just as biologist Richard Lewontin estimated in 1972. But he doesn’t expect them to be nonexistent either: as individuals we are so very different from one another that even a fraction of a difference between groups is something. > They are words I never expected to hear from a respected mainstream geneticist. I know that Reich is not a racist. Indeed, like Cavalli-Sforza, he believes that if race research is done, it will only further demolish old prejudices. (...) > Though Reich sees the racists as factually wrong, he also sees some antiracists—those who insist that we are all exactly the same underneath—as not having the full facts either. “It’s a little bit painful to see very well-meaning people saying things that are contradicted by the science, because we want well-meaning people to say things that are correct,” he says. “The way I see what’s going on in this world right now, there are racist people that are just perpetrating falsehoods, and just representing the science in incorrect ways, tendentious ways in order to achieve certain goals. And then there’s people whose perspective on the world I agree with who are actually saying things that are technically incorrect.” Reich means here people like Saini herself. > Reich is technically correct that there could be more profound genetic differences between population groups than we are aware of at the moment. But to date, no scientific research has been able to show any average genetic differences between population groups that go further than the superficial, such as skin color, or that are linked to hard survival, such as those that prevent a geographically linked disease. This is, of course, utterly false, and Reich in his book brings up multiple examples of exactly that. This argument is literally God-of-the-gaps: sure, there might be average genetic differences in skin color, or height, or athletic ability (oh wait, sorry, I forgot that Saini denies that too, even as she watches Olympic finals in 100 metre dash), or disease resistance, or low oxygen environment adaptation, or this, or that, but overall, there are no non-superficial differences in the non-superficial things we actually care about. Yeah, right. > There is no variant of any gene that has been found to exist in everyone of one “race” and not in another. This is rhetorical trick of saying something true, and yet completely irrelevant, par for the course for agenda pushing activists. This is also true, for example, for domestic dogs and wild wolves -- are there no significant differences in average traits between the two as well? Will chihuahua overcome the social construction of its "race", and fit right in a wild wolf tribe? Is the greyhound's speed just a matter of the family environment it grew up in? These arguments as applied to humans are just as absurd as applied to dogs, and the only reason they aren't laughed out of serious discussion is that we want them to be true. David Reich of course recognizes reality for what it is, and is not going to obfuscate the truth just to achieve the social goals he desires: unlike Saini, he understands that the public trust in science is a result of precisely such brutal honesty and courage of taking reality for what it is, and not for what we wish it was. As such, he is repulsed by Saini's approach to kill it, gut the carcass and wear its skin to fool people for the real thing. People might be fooled at the distance, but when you come closer to investigate, you immediately see that it's not science, but only a simulacrum thereof. Butchering your dairy cow might feel good for a while, but sooner than you think you have neither meat nor milk. Saini of course doesn't care, because she's not a scientists, she's a journalist and a writer, and she has no skin in the game.
armatav 7y ago
"When science is viewed in isolation from the past and politics, it’s easier for those with bad intentions to revive dangerous and discredited ideas." Shouldn't science always, without any exception, be viewed in isolation from the past and politics? I feel like the only reason this idea that science shouldn't revolve solely around the practice of the scientific method, and the observation and application of the results of experimentation, is being entertained is because people are posting these viewpoints in high-profile places like Nature.
- generationP 7y ago
  I think good points can be made in favor of not ignoring the context when (a) the science cannot be evaluated independently (so you have to take it on trust or ditch it), or (b) there are reasons to suspect publication bias (i.e., results are reported/published more if they fit certain biases). So yes for many parts of biology and psychology, but no for maths or much of the hard sciences (at least not the older stuff that has been repro'd many times). Speaking of "isolation from the past", the linked opinion piece doesn't cite a single reference other than the author's own pop-sci book. An interesting decision for sure.
  - a1369209993 7y ago
    If it can't be evaluated independently it's not science. At all. The defining feature of science, as opposed to superstition and recieved "wisdom" is that you don't have to take it on trust. (If it's merely difficult to evaluate independently, it might be legit, but you should still be suspicious of it.) Publication bias is admittedly more a problem.
    - generationP 7y ago
      Yeah, I should have said "infeasible to evaluate".
- danharaj 7y ago
  Qq, are you a scientist? Have you personally observed or have been involved with science as it is actually done?
sago 7y ago
I don't disagree with the article. But I have a long-standing problem with this post-modern representation of 'objectivity' as binary. Yes, the tiniest bit of subjectivity makes something nonobjective. Okay, there is absolutely nothing objective. But things can be more objectively true than others. Science is more objective than theology. A spherical Earth more than a flat one. Treating objectivity as binary, to constantly make the point that nothing is objective, invites the conclusion that everything is equally subjective. Which is nonsense. I'd like to see us move beyond this black and white model. Post-modernism made some good points (e.g. that those who claimed we could get to 100% objectivity were wrong). But being post-post-modern isn't the same as rejecting them all.
- scott_s 7y ago
  And I don't disagree with what you said. But I don't think most of it applies to what the author said: I don't believe she is a post-modernist, nor do I think she subscribes to the simplified view of objectivity that you presented. Her point is not about things being subjective, but people.
- salty_biscuits 7y ago
  Weird to say post modernism. Post modernism started as post structuralism, which is all about critiques of false binaries...
- baddox 7y ago
  I think what you're describing is close to scientific fallibilism. As a fallibilist I can maintain that there is objective truth, and that I can learn objective truth, but that I can always make errors, and there's no technique that can guarantee that there are no errors in my understanding. This seems like a pretty reasonable way to frame methods of reason like science and philosophy. For instance, it offers a good explanation for why the scientific method is so effective, even though the explanation may differ from a lot of scientists' philosophy of science which does claim to offer methods which if followed precisely can give guarantees about objective truth.
- dekhn 7y ago
  I think it's easier to just sort of think of this like probability and statistics. I start with an assumption: the universe does exist, it's real, and humans can perceive the real universe, although likely with a bunch of filters and biases. Then I also assume that through careful work (identifying filters and biases, setting up good processes to avoid them) we can see the real universe in a truthful way (Plato's cave allegory, and Descartes' Great Deceiver are both interesting explorations into the limits of this idea). I figure if either of those assumptions is violated (for example if there is some sort of Great Deceiver) we can't really supercede them. Then, based on those assumptions, I mainly focus on empiricism combined with high quality experimental technique, and a relentless drive to reduce variables which don't contribute directly to the system under study. Think of Galileo's experiment dropping two balls of different mass. When he conducted it in air, if he had used a feather, many people would conclude that heavier objects fall faster. But if air effects are excluded (in vacuum), we can see that feathers fall at the same velocity as heavy balls. This requires some leaps of intuition and also some very careful experimental setup. Once you've got to that point, you're well set up to start using the great tools of science: microscope, telescope, spectroscope, precision clock. Those immediately give you access to a whole collection of additional high quality data that is not directly available to our senses and intuition. They allow you to collect additional data, and help make confusing things like diseases and stars make a lot more sense (germ theory of disease, our sun is a star that is just very close, and our sun is composed of elements that exist on earth). Much of what science then studies is as close to objective as we can realistically get- I don't worry too much that gravity, space, time, etc are significantly different from how we perceive them in 4d (it would be interesting if our mental filters really do warp the real universe in a way that we see a very false representation of it). Once you've reached that point you can build satellites and reduce the likelihood a flat earth compared to a oblate spheroid model. But then it starts to get hard: you will discover relativity and quantum mechanics, both of which are not intuitive and in fact completely counter all our normal expectations. yet they are key theories that help us make and improve technologies like GPS and transistors! Right now some of the most interesting questions in science are about things we don't have any good experimental apparatus to probe. QM is a great example- we can do all sorts of amazing things with QM in the lab, but our brains can't wrap around the underlying physics at all. Is QM the theory wrong? Is there a better theory, one that's more intuitive and consistent with our daily lives? Probably not; as much as I like the idea of a deterministic universe, it's just an unlikely hypothesis to test. I don't think post-modernism really was the origin of the idea that objectivity was an ideal, not a real. I think most empiricists have implicitly assumed that we have to work really hard to not fool ourselves. I once saw an interesting talk, where the presenter didn't understand the difference between relativism and relativity. So they argued that their cosmology (native american) was just as valid as Einstein's theories. I can't really see that as true. I think under any reasonable subjective determination, empirically determined theories of cosmology will do a better job of explaining the observed universe than a spiritually derived one. I recently learned of a term, "scientism" (after being accused of it while arguing with a religion and philosophy professor who likes to mix buddhism and christianity).
asurty 7y ago
This reminds me of a first year engineering philosophy course I took where the prof spent a good chunk of it trying to tell us there is no such thing as 100% objective research then proceeding to tell us that our grades were 100% objective after people complained about divergence between course averages according to teaching assistants. :'D
- fdgfhgjhkj 7y ago
  You clearly learned nothing in that class.
smitty1e 7y ago
Well, we really have to scuttle the English language and Roman alphabet, for reasons that should require no explanation among the truly woke.
LifeLiverTransp 7y ago
"When science is viewed in isolation from the past and politics, it’s easier for those with bad intentions to revive dangerous and discredited ideas." Turns out the ideas are revived anyway. Humanitys vaccacination of horrible memories fails after 3 generations, no matter what measures are taken to keep it alive. Then when this happens, you are left standing there defending civilization, with sloppy dogma and in desperatly dependant on those who can seemingly "restore" civil society and peace by mass-bribery aka surplus distribution. If those years would have been used to progress instead, poking into the complexity the no-mans-land between "dangerous ideas" one would at least still have scientific credit to ones defense. I for years tryied to discuss with both sides the idea that "mental" health problems, are actually evolutionary adaptions to situations occuring in the cycle of strife, ancient society spend most of its time in. Most discussions ended in "racist" shouts from left (cause this idea suggests that specialization can accumulate within a society if it is stuck in cyclic history- and a specialization wants to keep its optimal environment). And pure hatred by the right wing for the atrocious suggestion that they might actually be nothing special at all (just a relatively human universal warrior caste brought forth by epi-genetic stress) and theire protest are mainly against effects (refugees, civil war, etc.) caused by themselves and there propagation of there very own ideal environment. If we could stand for example the idea a "scout" phenotypus of human exists, you could appreciate the power education can have on such a human beeing. There is actually only years of school (no matter what grades) and a loving stabilizing environment between a rambling story teller beneath a bridge and a grammy-clinging story writer before a notebook. Enemys everywhere was once useful for some parts. Politics should include the craft, to create the most powerfull constellation from these diffrent parts, working in harmony. Leviathancybernetics! If we have to have manipulation, at least make it a factory creating a thousand Musks. If we could accept that we can not percieve neural complexity, because our brains only make flat copies - we could stop making foolish one size fits all laws and rulings. Stopping to demand from one what s/he can not be, and help another to become what is easy for one. Instead, well you know what we have instead. Well intentioned helplessness and bad intentioned tribalism. But i digress.. this could have been such a nice flamewar, to roast advertisement marsh-mellows on.
leftyted 7y ago
Nah. Do your best to be objective. The work you accomplish while attempting objectivity will be better than the work you would have accomplished while attempting to account for your lack of objectivity. No one is counting on your work being perfect. Science is a communal activity that self-corrects in the long-term. To put it another way, here's Cormac McCarthy: > You know, you always have this image of the perfect thing which you can never achieve, but which you never stop trying to achieve. But I think ... that's your signpost and your guide. You'll never get there, but without it you won't get anywhere. More from the article: > As I found while writing my 2019 book Superior: The Return of Race Science, geneticists today rightly treat eugenics as a laughable proposition... If eugenics doesn't work then how come every single Border Collie is smarter than every single English Bulldog? > ... and the concept of biological race — the belief that humans can be subdivided into distinct groups with meaningful differences between them — as easily debunked nonsense. You can divide humans into whatever groups you like based on whichever criteria you like. The question is whether those groupings are useful and sometimes...they are. Whether you call those groupings "races" or something else is a semantic argument.
- datashow 7y ago
  "geneticists today rightly treat eugenics as a laughable proposition"? Really? This author is not qualified to speak for geneticists. Dawkins: It’s one thing to deplore eugenics on ideological, political, moral grounds. It’s quite another to conclude that it wouldn’t work in practice. Of course it would. It works for cows, horses, pigs, dogs & roses. Why on earth wouldn’t it work for humans? Facts ignore ideology. https://mobile.twitter.com/richarddawkins/status/1228943686953664512 https://mobile.twitter.com/richarddawkins/status/12289436869... Crazy woke activitists like this author is not qualified to speak for science. They think if something is politically wrong must also be scientifically wrong. It is not.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - vikramkr 7y ago
    Yes, scientifically rigorous does not equal moral. And the eugenics debate is coming up in a different form now with Gene therapy. From a moral perspective, I don't know of any genuine and sincere arguments that we should not genetically engineer an infant who was born with a devastating genetic disease. If we can cure sickle cell for example, we of anything have a moral imperative to. But, that technically lies under the umbrella of eugenics. It raises questions of what is a disease - if blue eyes (or, more realistically, dark skin) lead to discrimination in society, is that enough of a disadvantage to be worth engineering a child to have brown eyes or white skin? In general the consensus is no. So where is the middle ground? Or, is it a false question and fixing sickle cell is not even on the same sliding scale as changing skin color? We don't know the answers yet, but these are active moral and ethical questions that are technically under the umbrella of eugenics that we need to answer.
dekhn 7y ago
This article contains an almost certainly incorrect assertion: "As I found while writing my 2019 book Superior: The Return of Race Science, geneticists today rightly treat eugenics as a laughable proposition, and the concept of biological race — the belief that humans can be subdivided into distinct groups with meaningful differences between them — as easily debunked nonsens" Race (the social construct) is a proxy which only loosely correlates with genetic history. But, generally scientists believe that genetic history does allow for distinct groupings with meaningful differences. A simple example would be northern europeans with genetic differences that allow adults to drink lactose from animal milk without getting sick (an example of mutation natural selection). It's not even controversial that higher skin melanin (associated with "black" or "dark" skin) is protective against higher solar radiation, again this is somethign that is part of genetic history, and also gets convolved with "race" frequently. Nothing I said above is eugenics as practiced by Galton (whom we also have to thank for many important scientific contributions which last to today), or the scientists at Cold Spring Harbor Lab. They are cold, hard facts supported by immense data and are generally accepted within the field.
- thaumasiotes 7y ago
  > Race (the social construct) is a proxy which only loosely correlates with genetic history. The correlation is not loose -- it is extremely tight. For example, take this study: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1535610818303799 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S153561081... > To avoid confusion, in this manuscript, we categorize genetic ancestry as EA, AA, EAA, and NA, and self-identified race from TCGA as White, Black, Asian, and American Indians, and Alaska Natives. For patients with race information in TCGA, we observed that 95.6% of categorizations based on the k-NN algorithm following principal-component analysis (PCA) were consistent with race, suggesting that race and genetic ancestry identified by our approach appear to be highly correlated across TCGA patients. Or this much bigger one: https://sci-hub.tw/https://www.cell.com/ajhg/fulltext/S0002-9297(19)30338-6 https://sci-hub.tw/https://www.cell.com/ajhg/fulltext/S0002-... > Among nearly 202,000 individuals with SIRE [self-identified race/ethnicity], 1,079 (0.53%) had GIA [genetically-inferred ancestry] strongly indicating a different racial/ethnic group. These aren't two loosely correlated concepts; they're one and the same.
serioussecurity 7y ago
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1540-5 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1540-5
RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y ago
What does “better” mean? Is it science that produces results that you like? It is science that produces that produces useful technologies. Or is it science that produces models that reflect reality. If you go by the first two definitions then brining politics is helpful. If you go by the third, then politics is decidedly unhelpful.
- themodelplumber 7y ago
  We talk a lot about bad science, so I would guess that the opposite of that is what the author may be talking about. Which is probably a good idea, since bad science sucks and it's getting more air time than it used to. "Better" could probably even be quantified in a helpful way if desired. Politics are just another human factor. Stimulus and response. Can also be quantified if addressed situationally. As a catch-all it's a low-leverage descriptor though. I like that the author is at least talking about this. It could lead to a system-level improvement. > models that reflect reality Or models that elegantly allow for multiple perspectives while contributing to a desired outcome. Reality when held up as an accountability target opens up a bit of a can of worms, starting with the subjectivity question: Whose reality? Or which reality? Humans are remarkable in their ability to create, entertain, use, and appreciate even conflicting models of reality.
class4behavior 7y ago
Subjectivity is not the core of the problem but the disregard of the importance of reason. It is the idea that a philosophical conclusion is the same as a political position and that any political thought itself is inherently justified which is false.
austincheney 7y ago
While I think of article as basic common sense I can see how people generally fail at this. I used to be the A/B test engineer for Travelocity. Here are some of the motivations I have observed that introduce bias generally (not just in science): Passive * communication style * a lack of self-reflection * inadequate tests * dishonesty (cognitive complexity) Active * prejudice * dominance * dishonesty (lying) I often found that people are rarely introducing bias intentionally, though that does happen. The reasons people attempted to intentionally introduce bias was generally a way to improperly persuade people for a variety of unrelated motivations. Bias can be as simple as confusion as to a goal, such as when a person states one thing but is actually hoping for something different. This is a disconnection between a person's goal and the terms with which they are willing or capable to express that goal. Reasons for that disconnect could be offense or cultural conventions. This is more easily observable in children who haven't yet mastered the communication skills to mask this confusion. Sometimes bias creeps in because a person has a strong opinion of a subject and instead of attempting a proof to qualify or disqualify their position on the subject they will shift the evidence as necessary to manipulate an audience. This is common in politics, particularly when the audience themselves are preferentially biased to the emotionally loaded language they are hearing over any complete or partial evidence supporting that language. To some degree this sort of political manipulation is also most commonly unintentional, though it appears exceedingly intention coming from many career politicians. Most frequently people introduce bias casually to achieve a form of social agreement, because facts and evidence are less important, to many people, than kindness and conformance. There is a sort security provided from achieving stronger social bonds even if that means shifting ground to conform to a different set of norms and values preferred by a group. You wouldn't think any of this line of thinking would enter science or experimentation, especially when those conducting the experiments are experienced professionals, but it does. I have learned through other professional experiences that objectivity is a personality trait that can be tested for and measured. Objective personality types are rare. Everybody else needs defined boundaries and everybody needs some manner of peer review.
- rolltiide 7y ago
  there.is.nothing.wrong.with.a.passive.communication.style change my view
crimsonalucard 7y ago
How can I trust such an admission of non-objectivity if the admission itself isn't scientifically verified or objective?
chromanoid 7y ago
Isn't this called second-order cybernetics (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-order_cybernetics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-order_cybernetics)?
sebastos 7y ago
Wokeness has basically become a religion. Wokeness begins, just like many religions, with an original, unforgivable sin. That ultimate trespass becomes the lens through which all of modern life is viewed, no matter how remote it sits in the past. Like a religion, wokeness can't help but try to insert its core values of humility and service of the Higher Purpose into everything, no matter how inappropriate. Its adherents are pushy about how they want you to think, and what they want you to value, because they believe there is a higher truth that pervades any worldly endeavor. It has certain non-negotiable tenets, which it refuses to compromise on despite the massive cognitive dissonance required to achieve such a stance amidst the avalanche of evidence against them. If scientific or practical empiricism seems to conflict with these pre-commitments, they will muddy the water and move the goalposts. And of course, woke disciples reserve the right to be massively offended if you blaspheme against one of these core principles. Wokeness is perfectly eager to put its hand out to the state to get a leg up on its authoritarian, missionary purpose. But they do this because, like any other religion, they know that this will be best for all of us in the end. And just like other religions, I imagine it finds comparisons of this sort to be absurd; of course all of _those_ religions are evil, they're the wrong ones! Wokeness, just like a religion, gathered a following based on some fundamentally decent ideas that lie near its center. But they come packaged with a one-size-fits-all worldview that tries to bite off far, far more than it can chew. Just like a religion, it doesn't necessarily reflect overmuch about its practitioners that they have converted. That fact indicates at most a slight inclination towards credulity and collectivism, as opposed to individualism and free thinking. But just like religion, it could just as easily represent the bad luck of growing up in the wrong area, or with the wrong parents, or perhaps just bad enough circumstances to need that kind of structure and externally-sourced meaning. It seems that the agenda to put the whole world off of religion has not been as successful as the average coastal intellectual might have thought. I can't help but wonder whether we will be subject to the same ebb and flow of authoritarianism that generations of Judeo-Christian and Islamic constituencies exercised in the past. The church bumping against truth is a story as old as time, but it seems like it's harder than we thought to really learn that lesson. Here we have a classic piece of Woken apologia trying to square classic Woken ideals with the reality that there are groupings of genes amongst people. It wants to smuggle faulty, incomplete understanding of genetics to avoid the evidence written on the wall. It's not doing this for a nefarious purpose - the Woken believe that all men and women should be treated equally, which is a noble ideal. But the reason they think this is derived from a deeper truth, which is that all men and women are fundamentally born as the same creature, and then shaped purely by experience. They believe that because It Is Written. Because that is True, things get tricky when they try to square the Truth with the reality that there are non-trivial separations of historical development in the human genome, and those genetic lines end up looking different because of the forces that shaped them along their unique genetic history. Of course this is common sense - anybody can tell that there are distinct groupings of slightly-phenotypically-different people in the world, and the science confirms this intuitive fact. So the Woken need to muddy the water by reminding us the limits of our knowledge. What really counts as a race - can you count me all the races? What are the motivations of these so-called scientists trying to prop up the "theory" of race, a theory that need I remind you became intimately linked to the Nazis? When you read something like this, try to picture a Creationist with the same general motives. The Creationist's letter wants to smuggle a faulty, incomplete understanding of biology to avoid the evidence written on the wall that evolution is real. It's not doing this for a nefarious purpose - Creationists believe that we should all love and respect our fellow man. But the reason they think this is derived from a deeper truth, which is that men and women are God's people, made in God's image, as documented in the Bible. They believe that because It Is Written. Because that is True, things get tricky when they try to square the Truth with the reality that the evidence for the nature of evolutionary history is written everywhere, and the fossil record plainly confirms this. Of course, this is common sense - anybody can see the inevitability of evolution once it's explained to them. So the Creationists need to muddy the water by reminding us of the limits of our knowledge. How many of these connecting fossils have we really found? What are the motivations of these so-called scientists trying to prop up the "theory" of evolution, a theory that need I remind you, was intimately linked with Social Darwinism?

111 points by tacon 7y ago

Start with yourself perhaps. The pigeonholing of heritability studies with eugenicist policy is something laughable to everyone who isn't utterly beclouded by FUD. And great job avoiding to refer to Noah Carl by name, because just imagine someone googling for it and actually checking up on the description ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noah_Carl https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noah_Carl ).

scott_s 7y ago
> The pigeonholing of heritability studies with eugenicist policy Where does the author do this?
- dekhn 7y ago
  "As I found while writing my 2019 book Superior: The Return of Race Science, geneticists today rightly treat eugenics as a laughable proposition, and the concept of biological race — the belief that humans can be subdivided into distinct groups with meaningful differences between them — as easily debunked nonsens" Many studies cluster people with different genetic histories into groups with meaningful differences. This is important (for example) when treating people with different genetic histories for disease. AFAICT the article's author gets genetic history and social race mixed up, which does nothing to help their article's point.
  - throwaway6449 7y ago
    Race isn't well-defined. You can't just wave it away with "uhh some PCA/STRUCTURE plot yields clusters so race is real", that's not how popgen or phylogeny works. Nor can you get away with "butbut muh genetic diseases!" when these involve only a few genes that make up a tiny fraction of one's genome. Of course modern scientists in relevant fields know this, that's why race has been discontinued as a concept even though some people (old school doctors or taxonomists or pioneer fund recipients) haven't gotten, or perhaps don't want to get the memo.
- generationP 7y ago
  The author either treats it as inevitable that legitimate human biodiversity research will lead to heavy-handed eugenic policy, or pretends to do so for cheap rhetorical scoring. Try re-reading her argument without taking this causation for granted, and you'll see it doesn't hold up; she is blaming scientists -- and even claiming their science to be debunked -- for on political consequences that she is speculating their research will have.
xyzzyz 7y ago
Unlike Saini, Carl is a scientists who publishes science, while Saini is a journalist who published pseudoscientific drivel designed to push her agenda, which she blatantly admits in her Nature piece above. Real scientists like Carl, or, say, David Reich, recognize her garbage for what it is. She interviews him for her book, and is shocked to learn that the super star Harvard geneticist doesn’t share her absurd positions on biological origins of race, or lack thereof. Saini belongs to a group which in turn Reich calls out in his book for obfuscating, rather than illuminating the issue of the biological origin of correlations between ancestry and phenotypic traits different than the melanin levels. The best example is how Saini in her book completely uncritically and unironically uses Lewontin’s 1972 argument that there can be no significant differences between populations, because majority of variance is within group and not between groups. Bringing this up and not even discussing obvious counterarguments shows that it’s not science that’s being done, but rather agenda pushing. This is of course par for the course, as Lewontin himself was also quite open about the fact that for him, science is only a tool to push his view on how society should be run, and if science disagrees, so much worse for science.
- throwaway6449 7y ago
  Lol Carl is a hack and he got fired because of that. Reich didn't remotely say things racist wanted to hear. Meanwhile Saini's books got inputs and reviews from all prominent scientists in the field (Graham Coop, Ewan Birney etc.) none of which are HBD proponents. HBD proponents and Pioneer Fund recipients like to cry that they're being silenced when the reality is that they suck at science and don't like being called out. From Kanazawa's "the earth is flat" paper to evopsychologists literally admitting in the acknowledgement sections that they had no idea how to look up things in gene ontology databases and had to ask an actual biologist to do it on the condition that their name wouldn't be associated to their work, everything about the HBD clique transpires hackery and fraud.
  - xyzzyz 7y ago
    > Reich didn't remotely say things racist wanted to hear. I don't care much who those racists are, or what they wanted to hear, but at least Reich's positions shocked Saini herself, by being clearly and explicitly against the crap she was pushing in her book: > At the same time he thinks some categories may have more biological meaning to them. Black Americans are mostly West African in ancestry and white Americans tend to be European, both correlating to genuine population groups that were once separated at least partially for seventy thousand years in human history. “There’s a long time separating these two groups,” Reich says. “Enough time for evolution to accumulate differences. We don’t know very much about what those differences are because we’re still at the beginning of collectively trying to identify biologically what differences do.” > He suggests that there may be more than superficial average differences between black and white Americans, possibly even cognitive and psychological ones, because before they arrived in the United States, these population groups had this seventy thousand years apart during which they adapted to their own different environments. Reich implies that natural selection may have acted on them differently within this timescale to produce changes that go further than skin deep. He adds, judiciously, that he doesn’t think these differences will be large—only a fraction as big as the variation between individuals, just as biologist Richard Lewontin estimated in 1972. But he doesn’t expect them to be nonexistent either: as individuals we are so very different from one another that even a fraction of a difference between groups is something. > They are words I never expected to hear from a respected mainstream geneticist. I know that Reich is not a racist. Indeed, like Cavalli-Sforza, he believes that if race research is done, it will only further demolish old prejudices. (...) > Though Reich sees the racists as factually wrong, he also sees some antiracists—those who insist that we are all exactly the same underneath—as not having the full facts either. “It’s a little bit painful to see very well-meaning people saying things that are contradicted by the science, because we want well-meaning people to say things that are correct,” he says. “The way I see what’s going on in this world right now, there are racist people that are just perpetrating falsehoods, and just representing the science in incorrect ways, tendentious ways in order to achieve certain goals. And then there’s people whose perspective on the world I agree with who are actually saying things that are technically incorrect.” Reich means here people like Saini herself. > Reich is technically correct that there could be more profound genetic differences between population groups than we are aware of at the moment. But to date, no scientific research has been able to show any average genetic differences between population groups that go further than the superficial, such as skin color, or that are linked to hard survival, such as those that prevent a geographically linked disease. This is, of course, utterly false, and Reich in his book brings up multiple examples of exactly that. This argument is literally God-of-the-gaps: sure, there might be average genetic differences in skin color, or height, or athletic ability (oh wait, sorry, I forgot that Saini denies that too, even as she watches Olympic finals in 100 metre dash), or disease resistance, or low oxygen environment adaptation, or this, or that, but overall, there are no non-superficial differences in the non-superficial things we actually care about. Yeah, right. > There is no variant of any gene that has been found to exist in everyone of one “race” and not in another. This is rhetorical trick of saying something true, and yet completely irrelevant, par for the course for agenda pushing activists. This is also true, for example, for domestic dogs and wild wolves -- are there no significant differences in average traits between the two as well? Will chihuahua overcome the social construction of its "race", and fit right in a wild wolf tribe? Is the greyhound's speed just a matter of the family environment it grew up in? These arguments as applied to humans are just as absurd as applied to dogs, and the only reason they aren't laughed out of serious discussion is that we want them to be true. David Reich of course recognizes reality for what it is, and is not going to obfuscate the truth just to achieve the social goals he desires: unlike Saini, he understands that the public trust in science is a result of precisely such brutal honesty and courage of taking reality for what it is, and not for what we wish it was. As such, he is repulsed by Saini's approach to kill it, gut the carcass and wear its skin to fool people for the real thing. People might be fooled at the distance, but when you come closer to investigate, you immediately see that it's not science, but only a simulacrum thereof. Butchering your dairy cow might feel good for a while, but sooner than you think you have neither meat nor milk. Saini of course doesn't care, because she's not a scientists, she's a journalist and a writer, and she has no skin in the game.

armatav 7y ago

"When science is viewed in isolation from the past and politics, it’s easier for those with bad intentions to revive dangerous and discredited ideas." Shouldn't science always, without any exception, be viewed in isolation from the past and politics? I feel like the only reason this idea that science shouldn't revolve solely around the practice of the scientific method, and the observation and application of the results of experimentation, is being entertained is because people are posting these viewpoints in high-profile places like Nature.

generationP 7y ago
I think good points can be made in favor of not ignoring the context when (a) the science cannot be evaluated independently (so you have to take it on trust or ditch it), or (b) there are reasons to suspect publication bias (i.e., results are reported/published more if they fit certain biases). So yes for many parts of biology and psychology, but no for maths or much of the hard sciences (at least not the older stuff that has been repro'd many times). Speaking of "isolation from the past", the linked opinion piece doesn't cite a single reference other than the author's own pop-sci book. An interesting decision for sure.
- a1369209993 7y ago
  If it can't be evaluated independently it's not science. At all. The defining feature of science, as opposed to superstition and recieved "wisdom" is that you don't have to take it on trust. (If it's merely difficult to evaluate independently, it might be legit, but you should still be suspicious of it.) Publication bias is admittedly more a problem.
  - generationP 7y ago
    Yeah, I should have said "infeasible to evaluate".
danharaj 7y ago
Qq, are you a scientist? Have you personally observed or have been involved with science as it is actually done?

sago 7y ago

I don't disagree with the article. But I have a long-standing problem with this post-modern representation of 'objectivity' as binary. Yes, the tiniest bit of subjectivity makes something nonobjective. Okay, there is absolutely nothing objective. But things can be more objectively true than others. Science is more objective than theology. A spherical Earth more than a flat one. Treating objectivity as binary, to constantly make the point that nothing is objective, invites the conclusion that everything is equally subjective. Which is nonsense. I'd like to see us move beyond this black and white model. Post-modernism made some good points (e.g. that those who claimed we could get to 100% objectivity were wrong). But being post-post-modern isn't the same as rejecting them all.

scott_s 7y ago
And I don't disagree with what you said. But I don't think most of it applies to what the author said: I don't believe she is a post-modernist, nor do I think she subscribes to the simplified view of objectivity that you presented. Her point is not about things being subjective, but people.
salty_biscuits 7y ago
Weird to say post modernism. Post modernism started as post structuralism, which is all about critiques of false binaries...
baddox 7y ago
I think what you're describing is close to scientific fallibilism. As a fallibilist I can maintain that there is objective truth, and that I can learn objective truth, but that I can always make errors, and there's no technique that can guarantee that there are no errors in my understanding. This seems like a pretty reasonable way to frame methods of reason like science and philosophy. For instance, it offers a good explanation for why the scientific method is so effective, even though the explanation may differ from a lot of scientists' philosophy of science which does claim to offer methods which if followed precisely can give guarantees about objective truth.
dekhn 7y ago
I think it's easier to just sort of think of this like probability and statistics. I start with an assumption: the universe does exist, it's real, and humans can perceive the real universe, although likely with a bunch of filters and biases. Then I also assume that through careful work (identifying filters and biases, setting up good processes to avoid them) we can see the real universe in a truthful way (Plato's cave allegory, and Descartes' Great Deceiver are both interesting explorations into the limits of this idea). I figure if either of those assumptions is violated (for example if there is some sort of Great Deceiver) we can't really supercede them. Then, based on those assumptions, I mainly focus on empiricism combined with high quality experimental technique, and a relentless drive to reduce variables which don't contribute directly to the system under study. Think of Galileo's experiment dropping two balls of different mass. When he conducted it in air, if he had used a feather, many people would conclude that heavier objects fall faster. But if air effects are excluded (in vacuum), we can see that feathers fall at the same velocity as heavy balls. This requires some leaps of intuition and also some very careful experimental setup. Once you've got to that point, you're well set up to start using the great tools of science: microscope, telescope, spectroscope, precision clock. Those immediately give you access to a whole collection of additional high quality data that is not directly available to our senses and intuition. They allow you to collect additional data, and help make confusing things like diseases and stars make a lot more sense (germ theory of disease, our sun is a star that is just very close, and our sun is composed of elements that exist on earth). Much of what science then studies is as close to objective as we can realistically get- I don't worry too much that gravity, space, time, etc are significantly different from how we perceive them in 4d (it would be interesting if our mental filters really do warp the real universe in a way that we see a very false representation of it). Once you've reached that point you can build satellites and reduce the likelihood a flat earth compared to a oblate spheroid model. But then it starts to get hard: you will discover relativity and quantum mechanics, both of which are not intuitive and in fact completely counter all our normal expectations. yet they are key theories that help us make and improve technologies like GPS and transistors! Right now some of the most interesting questions in science are about things we don't have any good experimental apparatus to probe. QM is a great example- we can do all sorts of amazing things with QM in the lab, but our brains can't wrap around the underlying physics at all. Is QM the theory wrong? Is there a better theory, one that's more intuitive and consistent with our daily lives? Probably not; as much as I like the idea of a deterministic universe, it's just an unlikely hypothesis to test. I don't think post-modernism really was the origin of the idea that objectivity was an ideal, not a real. I think most empiricists have implicitly assumed that we have to work really hard to not fool ourselves. I once saw an interesting talk, where the presenter didn't understand the difference between relativism and relativity. So they argued that their cosmology (native american) was just as valid as Einstein's theories. I can't really see that as true. I think under any reasonable subjective determination, empirically determined theories of cosmology will do a better job of explaining the observed universe than a spiritually derived one. I recently learned of a term, "scientism" (after being accused of it while arguing with a religion and philosophy professor who likes to mix buddhism and christianity).

asurty 7y ago

This reminds me of a first year engineering philosophy course I took where the prof spent a good chunk of it trying to tell us there is no such thing as 100% objective research then proceeding to tell us that our grades were 100% objective after people complained about divergence between course averages according to teaching assistants. :'D

fdgfhgjhkj 7y ago
You clearly learned nothing in that class.

smitty1e 7y ago

Well, we really have to scuttle the English language and Roman alphabet, for reasons that should require no explanation among the truly woke.

LifeLiverTransp 7y ago

"When science is viewed in isolation from the past and politics, it’s easier for those with bad intentions to revive dangerous and discredited ideas." Turns out the ideas are revived anyway. Humanitys vaccacination of horrible memories fails after 3 generations, no matter what measures are taken to keep it alive. Then when this happens, you are left standing there defending civilization, with sloppy dogma and in desperatly dependant on those who can seemingly "restore" civil society and peace by mass-bribery aka surplus distribution. If those years would have been used to progress instead, poking into the complexity the no-mans-land between "dangerous ideas" one would at least still have scientific credit to ones defense. I for years tryied to discuss with both sides the idea that "mental" health problems, are actually evolutionary adaptions to situations occuring in the cycle of strife, ancient society spend most of its time in. Most discussions ended in "racist" shouts from left (cause this idea suggests that specialization can accumulate within a society if it is stuck in cyclic history- and a specialization wants to keep its optimal environment). And pure hatred by the right wing for the atrocious suggestion that they might actually be nothing special at all (just a relatively human universal warrior caste brought forth by epi-genetic stress) and theire protest are mainly against effects (refugees, civil war, etc.) caused by themselves and there propagation of there very own ideal environment. If we could stand for example the idea a "scout" phenotypus of human exists, you could appreciate the power education can have on such a human beeing. There is actually only years of school (no matter what grades) and a loving stabilizing environment between a rambling story teller beneath a bridge and a grammy-clinging story writer before a notebook. Enemys everywhere was once useful for some parts. Politics should include the craft, to create the most powerfull constellation from these diffrent parts, working in harmony. Leviathancybernetics! If we have to have manipulation, at least make it a factory creating a thousand Musks. If we could accept that we can not percieve neural complexity, because our brains only make flat copies - we could stop making foolish one size fits all laws and rulings. Stopping to demand from one what s/he can not be, and help another to become what is easy for one. Instead, well you know what we have instead. Well intentioned helplessness and bad intentioned tribalism. But i digress.. this could have been such a nice flamewar, to roast advertisement marsh-mellows on.

leftyted 7y ago

Nah. Do your best to be objective. The work you accomplish while attempting objectivity will be better than the work you would have accomplished while attempting to account for your lack of objectivity. No one is counting on your work being perfect. Science is a communal activity that self-corrects in the long-term. To put it another way, here's Cormac McCarthy: > You know, you always have this image of the perfect thing which you can never achieve, but which you never stop trying to achieve. But I think ... that's your signpost and your guide. You'll never get there, but without it you won't get anywhere. More from the article: > As I found while writing my 2019 book Superior: The Return of Race Science, geneticists today rightly treat eugenics as a laughable proposition... If eugenics doesn't work then how come every single Border Collie is smarter than every single English Bulldog? > ... and the concept of biological race — the belief that humans can be subdivided into distinct groups with meaningful differences between them — as easily debunked nonsense. You can divide humans into whatever groups you like based on whichever criteria you like. The question is whether those groupings are useful and sometimes...they are. Whether you call those groupings "races" or something else is a semantic argument.

datashow 7y ago
"geneticists today rightly treat eugenics as a laughable proposition"? Really? This author is not qualified to speak for geneticists. Dawkins: It’s one thing to deplore eugenics on ideological, political, moral grounds. It’s quite another to conclude that it wouldn’t work in practice. Of course it would. It works for cows, horses, pigs, dogs & roses. Why on earth wouldn’t it work for humans? Facts ignore ideology. https://mobile.twitter.com/richarddawkins/status/1228943686953664512 https://mobile.twitter.com/richarddawkins/status/12289436869... Crazy woke activitists like this author is not qualified to speak for science. They think if something is politically wrong must also be scientifically wrong. It is not.
- deleted 7y ago
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- vikramkr 7y ago
  Yes, scientifically rigorous does not equal moral. And the eugenics debate is coming up in a different form now with Gene therapy. From a moral perspective, I don't know of any genuine and sincere arguments that we should not genetically engineer an infant who was born with a devastating genetic disease. If we can cure sickle cell for example, we of anything have a moral imperative to. But, that technically lies under the umbrella of eugenics. It raises questions of what is a disease - if blue eyes (or, more realistically, dark skin) lead to discrimination in society, is that enough of a disadvantage to be worth engineering a child to have brown eyes or white skin? In general the consensus is no. So where is the middle ground? Or, is it a false question and fixing sickle cell is not even on the same sliding scale as changing skin color? We don't know the answers yet, but these are active moral and ethical questions that are technically under the umbrella of eugenics that we need to answer.

dekhn 7y ago

This article contains an almost certainly incorrect assertion: "As I found while writing my 2019 book Superior: The Return of Race Science, geneticists today rightly treat eugenics as a laughable proposition, and the concept of biological race — the belief that humans can be subdivided into distinct groups with meaningful differences between them — as easily debunked nonsens" Race (the social construct) is a proxy which only loosely correlates with genetic history. But, generally scientists believe that genetic history does allow for distinct groupings with meaningful differences. A simple example would be northern europeans with genetic differences that allow adults to drink lactose from animal milk without getting sick (an example of mutation natural selection). It's not even controversial that higher skin melanin (associated with "black" or "dark" skin) is protective against higher solar radiation, again this is somethign that is part of genetic history, and also gets convolved with "race" frequently. Nothing I said above is eugenics as practiced by Galton (whom we also have to thank for many important scientific contributions which last to today), or the scientists at Cold Spring Harbor Lab. They are cold, hard facts supported by immense data and are generally accepted within the field.

thaumasiotes 7y ago
> Race (the social construct) is a proxy which only loosely correlates with genetic history. The correlation is not loose -- it is extremely tight. For example, take this study: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1535610818303799 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S153561081... > To avoid confusion, in this manuscript, we categorize genetic ancestry as EA, AA, EAA, and NA, and self-identified race from TCGA as White, Black, Asian, and American Indians, and Alaska Natives. For patients with race information in TCGA, we observed that 95.6% of categorizations based on the k-NN algorithm following principal-component analysis (PCA) were consistent with race, suggesting that race and genetic ancestry identified by our approach appear to be highly correlated across TCGA patients. Or this much bigger one: https://sci-hub.tw/https://www.cell.com/ajhg/fulltext/S0002-9297(19)30338-6 https://sci-hub.tw/https://www.cell.com/ajhg/fulltext/S0002-... > Among nearly 202,000 individuals with SIRE [self-identified race/ethnicity], 1,079 (0.53%) had GIA [genetically-inferred ancestry] strongly indicating a different racial/ethnic group. These aren't two loosely correlated concepts; they're one and the same.

serioussecurity 7y ago

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1540-5 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1540-5

RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y ago

What does “better” mean? Is it science that produces results that you like? It is science that produces that produces useful technologies. Or is it science that produces models that reflect reality. If you go by the first two definitions then brining politics is helpful. If you go by the third, then politics is decidedly unhelpful.

themodelplumber 7y ago
We talk a lot about bad science, so I would guess that the opposite of that is what the author may be talking about. Which is probably a good idea, since bad science sucks and it's getting more air time than it used to. "Better" could probably even be quantified in a helpful way if desired. Politics are just another human factor. Stimulus and response. Can also be quantified if addressed situationally. As a catch-all it's a low-leverage descriptor though. I like that the author is at least talking about this. It could lead to a system-level improvement. > models that reflect reality Or models that elegantly allow for multiple perspectives while contributing to a desired outcome. Reality when held up as an accountability target opens up a bit of a can of worms, starting with the subjectivity question: Whose reality? Or which reality? Humans are remarkable in their ability to create, entertain, use, and appreciate even conflicting models of reality.

class4behavior 7y ago

Subjectivity is not the core of the problem but the disregard of the importance of reason. It is the idea that a philosophical conclusion is the same as a political position and that any political thought itself is inherently justified which is false.

austincheney 7y ago

While I think of article as basic common sense I can see how people generally fail at this. I used to be the A/B test engineer for Travelocity. Here are some of the motivations I have observed that introduce bias generally (not just in science): Passive * communication style * a lack of self-reflection * inadequate tests * dishonesty (cognitive complexity) Active * prejudice * dominance * dishonesty (lying) I often found that people are rarely introducing bias intentionally, though that does happen. The reasons people attempted to intentionally introduce bias was generally a way to improperly persuade people for a variety of unrelated motivations. Bias can be as simple as confusion as to a goal, such as when a person states one thing but is actually hoping for something different. This is a disconnection between a person's goal and the terms with which they are willing or capable to express that goal. Reasons for that disconnect could be offense or cultural conventions. This is more easily observable in children who haven't yet mastered the communication skills to mask this confusion. Sometimes bias creeps in because a person has a strong opinion of a subject and instead of attempting a proof to qualify or disqualify their position on the subject they will shift the evidence as necessary to manipulate an audience. This is common in politics, particularly when the audience themselves are preferentially biased to the emotionally loaded language they are hearing over any complete or partial evidence supporting that language. To some degree this sort of political manipulation is also most commonly unintentional, though it appears exceedingly intention coming from many career politicians. Most frequently people introduce bias casually to achieve a form of social agreement, because facts and evidence are less important, to many people, than kindness and conformance. There is a sort security provided from achieving stronger social bonds even if that means shifting ground to conform to a different set of norms and values preferred by a group. You wouldn't think any of this line of thinking would enter science or experimentation, especially when those conducting the experiments are experienced professionals, but it does. I have learned through other professional experiences that objectivity is a personality trait that can be tested for and measured. Objective personality types are rare. Everybody else needs defined boundaries and everybody needs some manner of peer review.

rolltiide 7y ago
there.is.nothing.wrong.with.a.passive.communication.style change my view

crimsonalucard 7y ago

How can I trust such an admission of non-objectivity if the admission itself isn't scientifically verified or objective?

chromanoid 7y ago

Isn't this called second-order cybernetics (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-order_cybernetics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-order_cybernetics)?

sebastos 7y ago

Wokeness has basically become a religion. Wokeness begins, just like many religions, with an original, unforgivable sin. That ultimate trespass becomes the lens through which all of modern life is viewed, no matter how remote it sits in the past. Like a religion, wokeness can't help but try to insert its core values of humility and service of the Higher Purpose into everything, no matter how inappropriate. Its adherents are pushy about how they want you to think, and what they want you to value, because they believe there is a higher truth that pervades any worldly endeavor. It has certain non-negotiable tenets, which it refuses to compromise on despite the massive cognitive dissonance required to achieve such a stance amidst the avalanche of evidence against them. If scientific or practical empiricism seems to conflict with these pre-commitments, they will muddy the water and move the goalposts. And of course, woke disciples reserve the right to be massively offended if you blaspheme against one of these core principles. Wokeness is perfectly eager to put its hand out to the state to get a leg up on its authoritarian, missionary purpose. But they do this because, like any other religion, they know that this will be best for all of us in the end. And just like other religions, I imagine it finds comparisons of this sort to be absurd; of course all of _those_ religions are evil, they're the wrong ones! Wokeness, just like a religion, gathered a following based on some fundamentally decent ideas that lie near its center. But they come packaged with a one-size-fits-all worldview that tries to bite off far, far more than it can chew. Just like a religion, it doesn't necessarily reflect overmuch about its practitioners that they have converted. That fact indicates at most a slight inclination towards credulity and collectivism, as opposed to individualism and free thinking. But just like religion, it could just as easily represent the bad luck of growing up in the wrong area, or with the wrong parents, or perhaps just bad enough circumstances to need that kind of structure and externally-sourced meaning. It seems that the agenda to put the whole world off of religion has not been as successful as the average coastal intellectual might have thought. I can't help but wonder whether we will be subject to the same ebb and flow of authoritarianism that generations of Judeo-Christian and Islamic constituencies exercised in the past. The church bumping against truth is a story as old as time, but it seems like it's harder than we thought to really learn that lesson. Here we have a classic piece of Woken apologia trying to square classic Woken ideals with the reality that there are groupings of genes amongst people. It wants to smuggle faulty, incomplete understanding of genetics to avoid the evidence written on the wall. It's not doing this for a nefarious purpose - the Woken believe that all men and women should be treated equally, which is a noble ideal. But the reason they think this is derived from a deeper truth, which is that all men and women are fundamentally born as the same creature, and then shaped purely by experience. They believe that because It Is Written. Because that is True, things get tricky when they try to square the Truth with the reality that there are non-trivial separations of historical development in the human genome, and those genetic lines end up looking different because of the forces that shaped them along their unique genetic history. Of course this is common sense - anybody can tell that there are distinct groupings of slightly-phenotypically-different people in the world, and the science confirms this intuitive fact. So the Woken need to muddy the water by reminding us the limits of our knowledge. What really counts as a race - can you count me all the races? What are the motivations of these so-called scientists trying to prop up the "theory" of race, a theory that need I remind you became intimately linked to the Nazis? When you read something like this, try to picture a Creationist with the same general motives. The Creationist's letter wants to smuggle a faulty, incomplete understanding of biology to avoid the evidence written on the wall that evolution is real. It's not doing this for a nefarious purpose - Creationists believe that we should all love and respect our fellow man. But the reason they think this is derived from a deeper truth, which is that men and women are God's people, made in God's image, as documented in the Bible. They believe that because It Is Written. Because that is True, things get tricky when they try to square the Truth with the reality that the evidence for the nature of evolutionary history is written everywhere, and the fossil record plainly confirms this. Of course, this is common sense - anybody can see the inevitability of evolution once it's explained to them. So the Creationists need to muddy the water by reminding us of the limits of our knowledge. How many of these connecting fossils have we really found? What are the motivations of these so-called scientists trying to prop up the "theory" of evolution, a theory that need I remind you, was intimately linked with Social Darwinism?