6 ms·

Reminds me a lot of Beware the Man of One Study by Scott Alexander https://www.lesswrong.com/s/BQBqPowfxjvoee8jw/p/ythFNoiAotjvuEGkg https://www.lesswrong.com/

Reminds me a lot of Beware the Man of One Study by Scott Alexander https://www.lesswrong.com/s/BQBqPowfxjvoee8jw/p/ythFNoiAotjvuEGkg https://www.lesswrong.com/s/BQBqPowfxjvoee8jw/p/ythFNoiAotjv...

mannykannot 4y ago
Perhaps one should also beware of the study by one man. I have a vague recollection of hearing that, at the time Turing was expressing his opinion of telepathy, there seemed to be experimental evidence for it, but it turned out that all the evidence came from one person, using unsound methods (including, IIRC, counting "one before" or "one after" guesses as successes if the results had higher than the expected frequency of one of those outcomes.) Tentatively, that person may be Joseph Banks Rhine.
- googlryas 4y ago
  Yes - I had to read into that part of Turing, since I had never previously come across his views on ESP, but it seems like his error was not that he believed the statistics to be more powerful than they were - but rather he was too credulous in believing there weren't charlatans intentionally fudging the stats in order to help their point. Basically - the stats were powerful, but they were just fake.
giraffe_lady 4y ago
- Marinus 4y ago
  Thats a liber and a smear. I expect better of HN.
- Veen 4y ago
  > isn't he a eugenicist? No. Although the term is widely abused and misapplied, so he might fall within whatever definition of eugenicist you're working with.
  - zehaeva 4y ago
    "No, but maybe for various definitions of the word" is a hilarious take. Maybe letting people know for what definitions he might qualify?
    - Veen 4y ago
      My understanding is that he believes people should be able to exert some level of control over the genetics of their offspring, but that he is strongly opposed to any type of coercive eugenics. Some people would consider him a eugenicist because of his position.
      - tartoran 4y ago
        > exert some level of control over the genetics of their offspring Isn’t that what choosing a partner to start a family with does?
        Dudeman112 4y ago
        Yes, but doing it naturally and unconsciously makes it not evil There can be no public sanity regarding anything that was done by people in the wrong side of fresh (historical) memory
        Johanx64 4y ago
        Doing things unconsciously doesn't make them less evil, if anything it's worse. Arguably the worst things are completely natural and unconscious. Natural selection by itself is very brutal, and often slow process, and doesn't always optimize for traits you yourself find desirable. As far as sexual selection is concerned, it is very often conscious. In other words, there's nothing inherently wrong about eugenics. The wrong part is coercing people doing or not doing things.
        bryanrasmussen 4y ago
        certainly, and you've chosen your blonde, blue-eyed partner attentively, but those traits are recessive, so when you find that your children will not have them you want to abort and try again. slippery-sloping the ideas of control very quickly leads to nightmarish scenarios, of course slopes tend not to be slippery just because we fear they may be, but sometimes the slipperiness of a slope will seem not a problem until the right social movement comes along and takes advantage of it, best to be prepared is the pessimist's take.
- arolihas 4y ago
  I'm sorry I wasn't aware of any of that. I think the post I shared is fairly innocuous though and doesn't promote or contribute to an agenda of ethnic cleansing.
- lliamander 4y ago
  Almost certainly not in the sense that most people might object to (so you are committing the "Non-central Fallacy"). And your distrust sounds franlky paranoid.
- nnq 4y ago
  "Eugenics" is a wide term. What part of it are you against strongly enough to completely condemn anyone involved with the idea? At the most basic romantic selection level we're all doing it after all... it's how evolution works.
- nonameiguess 4y ago
  There is no interpretation I can think of whereby Alan Turing or Daniel Kahneman could be considered eugenicists, so I have to assume you mean Scott. And no, Scott is not a eugenicist. He's a psychiatrist who is also extremely critical of statistical deficiencies and cognitive biases, especially as they play out in social science research and science journalism, so that is his goal with all of these think pieces on why some headline making the rounds is probably wrong. Not much different than Andrew Gelman in that respect, though far more of an amateur, that is, Scott is very far from an expert in statistics, though he's pretty good at reading scientific research. What I imagine you've heard is people who have seen the way he treats his comments section and his approach to discourse as a commitment to hearing all sides. Before he went to Substack, he took down his blog because of a NY Times hit piece alleging he supported Charles Murray, which wasn't really true, but he was critical of universities not allowing Charles Murray to speak. He is also fairly known for his "tend his garden" thing on his own blog, which means he favors people who are polite in the way they comment over people who don't hold abhorrent points of view. For instance, his blog is about the only non-explicitly racist place you'll still see Steve Sailer on a regular basis, who is definitely a eugenicist. But to Scott, he doesn't really mind if you spend 90% of your commenting effort over several decades committed to the real problem with America being that our worst cities are overrun with genetically inferior black people, just so long as you're polite about it and don't start fights in his comments. The unfortunate side effect of this that I don't think Scott has ever grappled with and maybe never will now that he's making money from it is that his blog has gradually fallen prey to the Gab/8chan effect that being the last person to tolerate bad people means your blog is going to become overrun with bad people. His comments sections have tremendously deteriorated over the years because of that. Everybody is very polite and friendly with each other while discussing incel theory and the problems of low IQ in the global south. That said, Scott himself still overwhelmingly writes about nerd topics, like his absolute obsession with prediction markets. It's practically every other post. Just avoid the open thread posts that where the comment direction is entirely driven by the audience rather than by him selecting a topic. And, I guess for completeness, I believe someone on Twitter once posted "evidence" of Scott admitting in private that he believed blacks were genetically predisposed to low IQ. He has never publicly said anything like that, so I guess take the word of some random person on the Internet that produced a collection of pixels with whatever size grain of salt you think that warrants.
- tablespoon 4y ago
  > isn't he a eugenicist? I know everyone loves to "separate the artist from the art" or w/e but that one thing really does make me distrustful of every single other thing he writes. What are his goals, how does this fit into them. IIRC, he's not a eugenicist, but shares one of their big assumptions (that intelligence is heritable and some ethnic groups are smarter than others).
  - astrange 4y ago
    His commenters are the kind of people who have decided this: > that intelligence is heritable and some ethnic groups are smarter than others is true because if it was true, Berkeley feminists with humanities degrees wouldn't want to admit that, and they find those people annoying, therefore the option that makes you go "well we just have to face the facts" must be the case. Of course, the first part of the sentence doesn't imply half the things they think it does, certainly doesn't imply the second, and even then the implications "…and it must be genetic" "…and there's nothing we can do about it" "…and that's why we're more virtuous than those other people" would not necessarily be true. (Genetics, like social sciences, doesn't produce reliable results because it uses observation studies and hasn't heard of the credibility revolution thing yet. Intervention studies are either beyond our capabilities or would be unethical to do.)
- dekhn 4y ago
  If by "he" you mean Turing, then no, not in the sense that Pearson, Galton, or Fisher would be considered eugenicists today. Nor in the sense that Charles Davenport, who ran CSHL and the Eugenics Office, would be considered a eugenicist today. Not sure about Alexander, I don't really pay attention to what he writes about medical biology.
- msla 4y ago
  Just to nail down what people around here define as eugenics: Is Dor Yeshorim eugenicist? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dor_Yeshorim https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dor_Yeshorim > Dor Yeshorim (Hebrew: דור ישרים) also called Committee for Prevention of Jewish Genetic Diseases, is a nonprofit organization that offers genetic screening to members of the Jewish community worldwide. Its objective is to minimize, and eventually eliminate, the incidence of genetic disorders common to Jewish people, such as Tay–Sachs disease. Dor Yeshorim is based in Brooklyn, New York, but has offices in Israel and various other countries. [snip] > In both the Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jewish communities, there is an increased rate of a number of genetic disorders such as Tay–Sachs disease, an autosomal recessive disorder that goes unnoticed in carriers, but is fatal within the first few years of life in almost all homozygotes. (The exception is the rare adult-onset Tay–Sachs, which is normally not fatal but is incapacitating.) [snip] > Dor Yeshorim screens only for recessive traits that give rise to lethal or severely debilitating disorders, providing prophylactic, rather than diagnostic services. They do not screen for disorders arising from dominant gene mutations, as these cannot be prevented by informed mate selection. Only conditions which can be reliably reported as a positive or negative genetic match are tested.[8] In short, they're trying to use selective breeding to remove certain genetic traits from the population.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

Reminds me a lot of Beware the Man of One Study by Scott Alexander https://www.lesswrong.com/s/BQBqPowfxjvoee8jw/p/ythFNoiAotjvuEGkg https://www.lesswrong.com/s/BQBqPowfxjvoee8jw/p/ythFNoiAotjv...

mannykannot 4y ago

Perhaps one should also beware of the study by one man. I have a vague recollection of hearing that, at the time Turing was expressing his opinion of telepathy, there seemed to be experimental evidence for it, but it turned out that all the evidence came from one person, using unsound methods (including, IIRC, counting "one before" or "one after" guesses as successes if the results had higher than the expected frequency of one of those outcomes.) Tentatively, that person may be Joseph Banks Rhine.

googlryas 4y ago
Yes - I had to read into that part of Turing, since I had never previously come across his views on ESP, but it seems like his error was not that he believed the statistics to be more powerful than they were - but rather he was too credulous in believing there weren't charlatans intentionally fudging the stats in order to help their point. Basically - the stats were powerful, but they were just fake.

giraffe_lady 4y ago

Marinus 4y ago
Thats a liber and a smear. I expect better of HN.
Veen 4y ago
> isn't he a eugenicist? No. Although the term is widely abused and misapplied, so he might fall within whatever definition of eugenicist you're working with.
- zehaeva 4y ago
  "No, but maybe for various definitions of the word" is a hilarious take. Maybe letting people know for what definitions he might qualify?
  - Veen 4y ago
    My understanding is that he believes people should be able to exert some level of control over the genetics of their offspring, but that he is strongly opposed to any type of coercive eugenics. Some people would consider him a eugenicist because of his position.
    - tartoran 4y ago
      > exert some level of control over the genetics of their offspring Isn’t that what choosing a partner to start a family with does?
      - Dudeman112 4y ago
        Yes, but doing it naturally and unconsciously makes it not evil There can be no public sanity regarding anything that was done by people in the wrong side of fresh (historical) memory
        Johanx64 4y ago
        Doing things unconsciously doesn't make them less evil, if anything it's worse. Arguably the worst things are completely natural and unconscious. Natural selection by itself is very brutal, and often slow process, and doesn't always optimize for traits you yourself find desirable. As far as sexual selection is concerned, it is very often conscious. In other words, there's nothing inherently wrong about eugenics. The wrong part is coercing people doing or not doing things.
      - bryanrasmussen 4y ago
        certainly, and you've chosen your blonde, blue-eyed partner attentively, but those traits are recessive, so when you find that your children will not have them you want to abort and try again. slippery-sloping the ideas of control very quickly leads to nightmarish scenarios, of course slopes tend not to be slippery just because we fear they may be, but sometimes the slipperiness of a slope will seem not a problem until the right social movement comes along and takes advantage of it, best to be prepared is the pessimist's take.
arolihas 4y ago
I'm sorry I wasn't aware of any of that. I think the post I shared is fairly innocuous though and doesn't promote or contribute to an agenda of ethnic cleansing.
lliamander 4y ago
Almost certainly not in the sense that most people might object to (so you are committing the "Non-central Fallacy"). And your distrust sounds franlky paranoid.
nnq 4y ago
"Eugenics" is a wide term. What part of it are you against strongly enough to completely condemn anyone involved with the idea? At the most basic romantic selection level we're all doing it after all... it's how evolution works.
nonameiguess 4y ago
There is no interpretation I can think of whereby Alan Turing or Daniel Kahneman could be considered eugenicists, so I have to assume you mean Scott. And no, Scott is not a eugenicist. He's a psychiatrist who is also extremely critical of statistical deficiencies and cognitive biases, especially as they play out in social science research and science journalism, so that is his goal with all of these think pieces on why some headline making the rounds is probably wrong. Not much different than Andrew Gelman in that respect, though far more of an amateur, that is, Scott is very far from an expert in statistics, though he's pretty good at reading scientific research. What I imagine you've heard is people who have seen the way he treats his comments section and his approach to discourse as a commitment to hearing all sides. Before he went to Substack, he took down his blog because of a NY Times hit piece alleging he supported Charles Murray, which wasn't really true, but he was critical of universities not allowing Charles Murray to speak. He is also fairly known for his "tend his garden" thing on his own blog, which means he favors people who are polite in the way they comment over people who don't hold abhorrent points of view. For instance, his blog is about the only non-explicitly racist place you'll still see Steve Sailer on a regular basis, who is definitely a eugenicist. But to Scott, he doesn't really mind if you spend 90% of your commenting effort over several decades committed to the real problem with America being that our worst cities are overrun with genetically inferior black people, just so long as you're polite about it and don't start fights in his comments. The unfortunate side effect of this that I don't think Scott has ever grappled with and maybe never will now that he's making money from it is that his blog has gradually fallen prey to the Gab/8chan effect that being the last person to tolerate bad people means your blog is going to become overrun with bad people. His comments sections have tremendously deteriorated over the years because of that. Everybody is very polite and friendly with each other while discussing incel theory and the problems of low IQ in the global south. That said, Scott himself still overwhelmingly writes about nerd topics, like his absolute obsession with prediction markets. It's practically every other post. Just avoid the open thread posts that where the comment direction is entirely driven by the audience rather than by him selecting a topic. And, I guess for completeness, I believe someone on Twitter once posted "evidence" of Scott admitting in private that he believed blacks were genetically predisposed to low IQ. He has never publicly said anything like that, so I guess take the word of some random person on the Internet that produced a collection of pixels with whatever size grain of salt you think that warrants.
tablespoon 4y ago
> isn't he a eugenicist? I know everyone loves to "separate the artist from the art" or w/e but that one thing really does make me distrustful of every single other thing he writes. What are his goals, how does this fit into them. IIRC, he's not a eugenicist, but shares one of their big assumptions (that intelligence is heritable and some ethnic groups are smarter than others).
- astrange 4y ago
  His commenters are the kind of people who have decided this: > that intelligence is heritable and some ethnic groups are smarter than others is true because if it was true, Berkeley feminists with humanities degrees wouldn't want to admit that, and they find those people annoying, therefore the option that makes you go "well we just have to face the facts" must be the case. Of course, the first part of the sentence doesn't imply half the things they think it does, certainly doesn't imply the second, and even then the implications "…and it must be genetic" "…and there's nothing we can do about it" "…and that's why we're more virtuous than those other people" would not necessarily be true. (Genetics, like social sciences, doesn't produce reliable results because it uses observation studies and hasn't heard of the credibility revolution thing yet. Intervention studies are either beyond our capabilities or would be unethical to do.)
dekhn 4y ago
If by "he" you mean Turing, then no, not in the sense that Pearson, Galton, or Fisher would be considered eugenicists today. Nor in the sense that Charles Davenport, who ran CSHL and the Eugenics Office, would be considered a eugenicist today. Not sure about Alexander, I don't really pay attention to what he writes about medical biology.
msla 4y ago
Just to nail down what people around here define as eugenics: Is Dor Yeshorim eugenicist? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dor_Yeshorim https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dor_Yeshorim > Dor Yeshorim (Hebrew: דור ישרים) also called Committee for Prevention of Jewish Genetic Diseases, is a nonprofit organization that offers genetic screening to members of the Jewish community worldwide. Its objective is to minimize, and eventually eliminate, the incidence of genetic disorders common to Jewish people, such as Tay–Sachs disease. Dor Yeshorim is based in Brooklyn, New York, but has offices in Israel and various other countries. [snip] > In both the Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jewish communities, there is an increased rate of a number of genetic disorders such as Tay–Sachs disease, an autosomal recessive disorder that goes unnoticed in carriers, but is fatal within the first few years of life in almost all homozygotes. (The exception is the rare adult-onset Tay–Sachs, which is normally not fatal but is incapacitating.) [snip] > Dor Yeshorim screens only for recessive traits that give rise to lethal or severely debilitating disorders, providing prophylactic, rather than diagnostic services. They do not screen for disorders arising from dominant gene mutations, as these cannot be prevented by informed mate selection. Only conditions which can be reliably reported as a positive or negative genetic match are tested.[8] In short, they're trying to use selective breeding to remove certain genetic traits from the population.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]