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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

by 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.

by dcow 4y ago

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.