7 ms·

Moreover, how can any of these be enforced, and by whom? At least you know who your church authority figures are and who to criticize. Where do we even start if

by dcow 4y ago

Moreover, how can any of these be enforced, and by whom? At least you know who your church authority figures are and who to criticize. Where do we even start if we let Twitter outrage decide whether science is potentially harmful and should be allowed or not? This is worse than religion because it’s pretending to be rational. And many many people will be fooled.

Enginerrrd 4y ago
>This is worse than religion because it’s pretending to be rational. And many many people will be fooled. I hate to make the comparison because it's such a trope, but, IMO this is one of the most insidious things the Nazis did to indoctrinate the population: They did things like send people into schools and they would cherry-pick the weakest, least intelligent, least-liked Jewish kid they could find and set him alongside the most athletic, attractive, smart, well-liked Aryan looking kid. They'd bring them both up in front of the class and from that point on, they'd use "scientific" discussion and observation of their qualities to convince the kids that the Aryan kids were superior in every way. I'll tell you what, I was a pretty savy independent thinker and empathetic kid, but I really think I might have fallen for that type of technique, masquerading as science.
- SubiculumCode 4y ago
  and this is, if you read the actual guidelines proposed, exactly what they are guarding against: inappropriate overgeneralization.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - timr 4y ago
    Guarding against overgeneralization is not something we need new scientific heresy rules to prevent. It's already part of being a good scientist. It's also a subjective bar, and adding "inappropriate" to that makes it entirely fungible. Moreover, I've spent the last 2+ years horrified by how willing "scientists" have been to generalize to wild real-world conclusions from miniscule data based on Twitter outrage, so I have zero faith that a board of clerics is going to use these rules with magnanimity. Whichever political faction that controls the board will be tempted to define "inappropriate" to mean "whatever conclusion we don't like". Just to make it concrete: run an RCT that shows that masks don't have any effect on Covid transmission? Good luck getting that published in a top journal, even today. With these new rules, literally anyone who doesn't like the conclusions will claim that the result is an "overgeneralization". There will be no study large enough to satisfy the clerisy...unless The Science says something approved, of course. --- Edit: and lest you think I am exaggerating with my example, consider the following, directly quoted from the new guidelines: > Harms can also arise indirectly, as a result of the publication of a research project or a piece of scholarly communication – for instance, stigmatization of a vulnerable human group or potential use of the results of research for unintended purposes (e.g., public policies that undermine human rights or misuse of information to threaten public health). They're literally saying that they're open to censoring research that might be "misused" to "threaten public health". And they've defined it broadly enough that pretty much anything that displeases "a vulnerable human group" can be covered. Convenient.
- tarakat 4y ago
  Good thing this practice has since ceased, and is entirely absent from movies and news reporting, where care is taken that even the most maligned groups are represented by, well, representative individuals, instead of cherry-picking the most unlikable members.
  - jtbayly 4y ago
    I assume you're being facetious?
  - wizofaus 4y ago
    Hey at least Stranger Things had one semi-likable Russian.
    - 8note 4y ago
      Stranger things has had many likeable Russians though?
      - HideousKojima 4y ago
        Ok 2 now
      - wizofaus 4y ago
        For sufficiently small values of "many" and broad definitions of "likeable", perhaps...
  - thisiscorrect 4y ago
    https://mobile.twitter.com/StupidWhiteAds https://mobile.twitter.com/StupidWhiteAds https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hvNNtBmA3SQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hvNNtBmA3SQ
mizzack 4y ago
> And many many people will be fooled. At least you can spot the acolytes with "I believe in Science" bumper stickers and yard signs. Science is not a belief system.
- throwawayacc2 4y ago
  No, but the trappings of science have been used to dress the new religion of the west. Same old shit, we just don’t call it god now, we call it “the science”. We are romans in the early 5th century. What’s coming won’t be pretty.
  - dcow 4y ago
    Isn’t it crazy how easy it is to see but how inevitable the outcome ultimately is? Why must future generations repeat the mistakes of the past? This is the human condition.
    - mosdave 4y ago
      first as tragedy, then as farce
    - anonporridge 4y ago
      Because religion is the opiate of the masses. It's too powerful of a manipulation and control tool for the elites to just give up on. If we can just replace "god says" with "science says" and have the same result of getting the sheep in line, then of course it will happen.
    - MichaelCollins 4y ago
      Our technology has improved, but our brains? We've still got the same brains. Still susceptible to the same biases and fallacies now as we were two thousand years ago.
  - kelseyfrog 4y ago
    Specifically, we have to look at Rome cira 306 to 337 AD to understand when the floodgates opened and were never able to be closed again. Once that sort of thing happens, there's no going back. From there, the moral decay sets in and the writing is on the wall.
BurningFrog 4y ago
It can be enforced by Nature refusing to publish papers with bad results, obviously.
- dcow 4y ago
  Shouldn't nature already be doing that? The question is how do you define bad results if you include provisions for socially constructed feelings about whether results are socially and politically correct or not. I hope hope hope hope hope underneath all the crummy filler language and what appears to be rationalization for a distinctly unscientific expansion of editorial discretion to suppress unsightly factual results, Nature is simply saying: don't study social constructs, it's not scientific, a phrase with which I think I loosely agree (without deeper thought as to whether there are valid situations to study socially constructed groups that can't be better expressed by studying the non-social-construct characteristic). If that's all this is, I think we'll be fine. But I have a real hard time believing that Nature would allow a paper that found there to be cognitive discrepancies between people with genealogical lineages that closely align to the socially constructed races, under these new guidelines, since arguably the "effects on society" might be negative. And I know people who would ignore the science and fight to the metaphorical death to suppress that type of information regardless of the terminology used. So, understandably, I'm not super confident this will be handled carefully and appropriately. Notice there is no burden of proof or scientific rigor required to determine that the effects some some research are negatively impacting society. A presumption that they might is all that's needed. I worry scientific pursuit will suffer.
  - trashtester 4y ago
    > Nature is simply saying: don't study social constructs, it's not scientific, a phrase with which I think I loosely agree A lot of the time, when someone in the Humanities use the term "Social Construct" they mean a categorization scheme that have overlapping categories, especially when used by someone in a way they don't like. Someone with some level of understanding of natural science knows that this problem apply applies to a multitude of category schemes, if not most. In biology, one could argue that our definition of a "species" is a social construct. Even alive today, there are plenty of animals that exist on a continuum between different "species", and over evolutionary time, every living organism exists on this same continuum, and at the start, there were even no clear distinction between living and non-living. The person in the Humanities like to use the word "essentialism", while still giving Humans special knowledge, when in reality we all live on a continuum that includes monkeys, fish, rocks and oceans. We're all recombinations of atoms and ions. Still, there ARE clear and real patterns in this madness, and most of science is precisely about understanding these patterns. While we DO exist on a continuum, most of the continuum is empty, and especially if we consider only one snapshot of time. A biologist can talk about "tigers" without making an effort to consider ligers and tigons, or pre-historic ancestors of modern-day tigers that were similar but not identical to modern tigers. Biologists will also use the terms male and female tigers, knowing that the intermediaries are vanishingly rare. The continuum between them is there, but mostly empty. Or a physicist may even speak about a "red" laser, knowing perfectly well that the wavelength used to separate "red" from "orange" is a "human construct". So, if someone claims that "biological sex" is a human construct, they may be correct in some uninteresting way, but are primarily just obfuscating.
psyc 4y ago
I guarantee you that if the guideline documents in TFA came to the attention of Twitter, they'd already be dated, and somebody would start righteous-indignation-tweeting to get their personal army to boycott Nature until they change it to say what the mob wants it to say. And I'm not being flip. For once.
trashtester 4y ago
Many religions start out pretending to be rational. It just so happens that a millennium or two later, science may have advanced to a point where religion starts to look more and more allegorical.

by dcow 4y ago

Enginerrrd 4y ago

>This is worse than religion because it’s pretending to be rational. And many many people will be fooled. I hate to make the comparison because it's such a trope, but, IMO this is one of the most insidious things the Nazis did to indoctrinate the population: They did things like send people into schools and they would cherry-pick the weakest, least intelligent, least-liked Jewish kid they could find and set him alongside the most athletic, attractive, smart, well-liked Aryan looking kid. They'd bring them both up in front of the class and from that point on, they'd use "scientific" discussion and observation of their qualities to convince the kids that the Aryan kids were superior in every way. I'll tell you what, I was a pretty savy independent thinker and empathetic kid, but I really think I might have fallen for that type of technique, masquerading as science.

SubiculumCode 4y ago
and this is, if you read the actual guidelines proposed, exactly what they are guarding against: inappropriate overgeneralization.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- timr 4y ago
  Guarding against overgeneralization is not something we need new scientific heresy rules to prevent. It's already part of being a good scientist. It's also a subjective bar, and adding "inappropriate" to that makes it entirely fungible. Moreover, I've spent the last 2+ years horrified by how willing "scientists" have been to generalize to wild real-world conclusions from miniscule data based on Twitter outrage, so I have zero faith that a board of clerics is going to use these rules with magnanimity. Whichever political faction that controls the board will be tempted to define "inappropriate" to mean "whatever conclusion we don't like". Just to make it concrete: run an RCT that shows that masks don't have any effect on Covid transmission? Good luck getting that published in a top journal, even today. With these new rules, literally anyone who doesn't like the conclusions will claim that the result is an "overgeneralization". There will be no study large enough to satisfy the clerisy...unless The Science says something approved, of course. --- Edit: and lest you think I am exaggerating with my example, consider the following, directly quoted from the new guidelines: > Harms can also arise indirectly, as a result of the publication of a research project or a piece of scholarly communication – for instance, stigmatization of a vulnerable human group or potential use of the results of research for unintended purposes (e.g., public policies that undermine human rights or misuse of information to threaten public health). They're literally saying that they're open to censoring research that might be "misused" to "threaten public health". And they've defined it broadly enough that pretty much anything that displeases "a vulnerable human group" can be covered. Convenient.
tarakat 4y ago
Good thing this practice has since ceased, and is entirely absent from movies and news reporting, where care is taken that even the most maligned groups are represented by, well, representative individuals, instead of cherry-picking the most unlikable members.
- jtbayly 4y ago
  I assume you're being facetious?
- wizofaus 4y ago
  Hey at least Stranger Things had one semi-likable Russian.
  - 8note 4y ago
    Stranger things has had many likeable Russians though?
    - HideousKojima 4y ago
      Ok 2 now
    - wizofaus 4y ago
      For sufficiently small values of "many" and broad definitions of "likeable", perhaps...
- thisiscorrect 4y ago
  https://mobile.twitter.com/StupidWhiteAds https://mobile.twitter.com/StupidWhiteAds https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hvNNtBmA3SQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hvNNtBmA3SQ

mizzack 4y ago

> And many many people will be fooled. At least you can spot the acolytes with "I believe in Science" bumper stickers and yard signs. Science is not a belief system.

throwawayacc2 4y ago
No, but the trappings of science have been used to dress the new religion of the west. Same old shit, we just don’t call it god now, we call it “the science”. We are romans in the early 5th century. What’s coming won’t be pretty.
- dcow 4y ago
  Isn’t it crazy how easy it is to see but how inevitable the outcome ultimately is? Why must future generations repeat the mistakes of the past? This is the human condition.
  - mosdave 4y ago
    first as tragedy, then as farce
  - anonporridge 4y ago
    Because religion is the opiate of the masses. It's too powerful of a manipulation and control tool for the elites to just give up on. If we can just replace "god says" with "science says" and have the same result of getting the sheep in line, then of course it will happen.
  - MichaelCollins 4y ago
    Our technology has improved, but our brains? We've still got the same brains. Still susceptible to the same biases and fallacies now as we were two thousand years ago.
- kelseyfrog 4y ago
  Specifically, we have to look at Rome cira 306 to 337 AD to understand when the floodgates opened and were never able to be closed again. Once that sort of thing happens, there's no going back. From there, the moral decay sets in and the writing is on the wall.

BurningFrog 4y ago

It can be enforced by Nature refusing to publish papers with bad results, obviously.

dcow 4y ago
Shouldn't nature already be doing that? The question is how do you define bad results if you include provisions for socially constructed feelings about whether results are socially and politically correct or not. I hope hope hope hope hope underneath all the crummy filler language and what appears to be rationalization for a distinctly unscientific expansion of editorial discretion to suppress unsightly factual results, Nature is simply saying: don't study social constructs, it's not scientific, a phrase with which I think I loosely agree (without deeper thought as to whether there are valid situations to study socially constructed groups that can't be better expressed by studying the non-social-construct characteristic). If that's all this is, I think we'll be fine. But I have a real hard time believing that Nature would allow a paper that found there to be cognitive discrepancies between people with genealogical lineages that closely align to the socially constructed races, under these new guidelines, since arguably the "effects on society" might be negative. And I know people who would ignore the science and fight to the metaphorical death to suppress that type of information regardless of the terminology used. So, understandably, I'm not super confident this will be handled carefully and appropriately. Notice there is no burden of proof or scientific rigor required to determine that the effects some some research are negatively impacting society. A presumption that they might is all that's needed. I worry scientific pursuit will suffer.
- trashtester 4y ago
  > Nature is simply saying: don't study social constructs, it's not scientific, a phrase with which I think I loosely agree A lot of the time, when someone in the Humanities use the term "Social Construct" they mean a categorization scheme that have overlapping categories, especially when used by someone in a way they don't like. Someone with some level of understanding of natural science knows that this problem apply applies to a multitude of category schemes, if not most. In biology, one could argue that our definition of a "species" is a social construct. Even alive today, there are plenty of animals that exist on a continuum between different "species", and over evolutionary time, every living organism exists on this same continuum, and at the start, there were even no clear distinction between living and non-living. The person in the Humanities like to use the word "essentialism", while still giving Humans special knowledge, when in reality we all live on a continuum that includes monkeys, fish, rocks and oceans. We're all recombinations of atoms and ions. Still, there ARE clear and real patterns in this madness, and most of science is precisely about understanding these patterns. While we DO exist on a continuum, most of the continuum is empty, and especially if we consider only one snapshot of time. A biologist can talk about "tigers" without making an effort to consider ligers and tigons, or pre-historic ancestors of modern-day tigers that were similar but not identical to modern tigers. Biologists will also use the terms male and female tigers, knowing that the intermediaries are vanishingly rare. The continuum between them is there, but mostly empty. Or a physicist may even speak about a "red" laser, knowing perfectly well that the wavelength used to separate "red" from "orange" is a "human construct". So, if someone claims that "biological sex" is a human construct, they may be correct in some uninteresting way, but are primarily just obfuscating.

psyc 4y ago

I guarantee you that if the guideline documents in TFA came to the attention of Twitter, they'd already be dated, and somebody would start righteous-indignation-tweeting to get their personal army to boycott Nature until they change it to say what the mob wants it to say. And I'm not being flip. For once.

trashtester 4y ago

Many religions start out pretending to be rational. It just so happens that a millennium or two later, science may have advanced to a point where religion starts to look more and more allegorical.