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This is in Nature Human Behavior. This is a social science/psychology journal, a field which is suffering from the reproducibility crisis, perhaps worse than an

• deleted 4y ago
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• dissent 4y ago
  The Orwellian bit comes once the quality gates are in place and get subverted for political means. But even if that doesn't happen, I disagree strongly. Extremism doesn't need scientific backing and never has. They'll take it if convenient, but they can quite easily justify their actions without it. Truth and critical thinking are the solution, not the cause.
  • pj_mukh 4y ago
    Extremism doesn’t need scientific backing to exist but it does need scientific backing to make the center complacent. The shooting was a good example but a better example is an extremist takeover of the government buoyed by a complacent public swindled by flimsy science. It’s happened before, it’ll happen again.
    • dissent 4y ago
      Could you not argue that religious teaching should be suppressed since it often stands in opposition to fact, therefore is responsible for misinformation leading to violence? (and let's face it, that's probably pretty hard to argue against)
      • trasz 4y ago
        What’s wrong with suppressing religious “teaching”? Let me remind you that freedom of religion was mostly about freedom from religion.
        • dissent 4y ago
          Don't mistake me for a religious person. I think it's the bane of mankind. My point is that despite this, trying to ban it is counter productive.
          • trasz 4y ago
            Banning harmful behavior promoted by religion can be quite productive. Hate speech laws are one example. Barring religiously-affiliated institution from government money is another.
  • willis936 4y ago
    Psychology has always been rife with political fanatics. Since its inception there have been loud cranks using pseudoscience for the express purpose of influencing social policy. It is still happening today. Just look at Joseph H. Manson.
    • dissent 4y ago
      My position is that the problem lies with the listener, not the speaker. I looked up Joseph H. Manson. At a glace that looks like exactly what OP was talking about.
• strken 4y ago
  If extremely sexist groups were discussing PCOS as proof of the inferiority of women, would it therefore be a good idea to assess all research involving ovaries and refuse to publish anything that made PCOS seem harmful?
  • FabHK 4y ago
    In case you didn't know, like me: Polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) is a hormonal disorder common among women of reproductive age.
• kromem 4y ago
  Ah yes, because the best way to get groups to not spout misleading rhetoric is to unabashedly bias the publications in the other direction. Giving validity to the claim that a particular perspective is being actively suppressed historically works out great in reducing that viewpoint... Maybe they'd be better off restricting publishing to studies reproducing earlier results or meta-analysis, encouraging more rigorous standards without legitimately adding a bias. But if this is genuinely about reducing racist or sexist misappropriation of research to legitimize those views, this is exactly the sort of measure that is going to backfire by giving the broad lack of supporting evidence for those positions a legitimate claim of explicit censorship. It no longer matters if there are barely any reproducible results supporting their views, as pointing out that asymmetry is rendered an argument from silence in the face of active censorship. This is a bad idea coming from a good place.
  • hikingsimulator 4y ago
    Extremists may use whatever they want to justify their means, but shody science can make people become radical, radicalized, and then extremists. It's a gradual change that can be enabled by many things. What the article says is not to make science, and especially the field in question, one of those triggers.
    • Jensson 4y ago
      > but shody science can make people become radical If Nature said they won't publish shoddy science nobody would have minded.
• marsven_422 4y ago
• vasco 4y ago
  Bad people will use whatever they have at hand to justify their actions. If there wasn't a paper to discuss there would be something else. That being said it's a disaster how many people go into social sciences and waste their lives on useless research.
• Aunche 4y ago
  • jjcon 4y ago
    I’m not sure that downvoting (disagreeing - by common usage though it shouldn’t necessarily be that way) is the same as calling for the censorship of.
• dudeinjapan 4y ago
  Rather than suppressing research, wouldn't a simple primer on "why the paper shouldn't be used for hate" suffice, similar to the warning label on a pack of cigarettes? (Unlike cigarettes which are universally harmful, it's unlikely these papers do any real harm to an educated reader. They are only harmful when used completely out-of-context by a moron.) There is some grand irony that hate groups point to racial differences in "intelligence" specifically. I doubt the members of these groups are in the upper tail of the bell curve...
  • _ofdw 4y ago
    I think it's equally dangerous to write off extremism as the product of stupid people. Hitler certainly wasn't a dunce, for example.
  • dariosalvi78 4y ago
    I read that this is the intention, so when some content that can be used for harm (in a discriminatory or racist way for example), authors should make all the needed considerations, including confounding factors, in their research and their paper. For example, say someone publishes statistics about school grades and race, and, maybe unsurprisingly, black people in the US turn out to have lower average grades, what does that say about black people? Here lies the responsibility of the researcher to make it clear that the problem is social rather than genetical, either using statistical means to remove confounders, or by highlighting this when discussing the numbers. Actually unless the purpose of the research itself is to extract those social differences, why would you stratify your cohorts by race in the first place? Even seemingly innocuous decisions, like stratifying (because, why not?, you have the data) may have consequences, or may hide biases, if they are not considered with care. Ask anybody doing ML how confounders are behind every corner in whatever messy human data you collect! Then there are other topics which specifically look into, say, sex and brain composition etc. Those may be scientifically sound, but ethically more controversial. I am happy I don't work in that field...
• Santanlan 4y ago
  So instead of debunking or raising the bar of research into race, gender, sex, and more we should just not have any research into it? Isn't this just going to fuel that kind of "research" in other places but then stand uncontested? Might sound good in a meeting but doubt this is the way to go...
• drekipus 4y ago
  > This should be handled with care, and extra consideration should be given to whether the tenuous, fallible results from this research will result in violence. What is "results in violence" though? One person's violence would be another person's justice. I think trans activism with kids is a severe violence. Would research in allowing transgenderism for children be considered violence or not in your eyes? I'm sure there's people on both sides of the fence, so who would be the one to gatekeep? Most transgender studies come from the same "reproducibility crisis" and largely the same branch of social/psychology science. So to put in effect that "we are allowed to suppress science depending on who it affects" would be a bad precedent for when "the other side" gets in power. Or do you not agree?
  • guelo 4y ago
    [flagged]
    • GameOfFrowns 4y ago
      [flagged]
      • rhcom2 4y ago
        Those links don't support any of your claims. Child grooming is a real thing and the right wing media has now made it a new insult for LGBT people or behavior they don't agree with, something you're clearly participating in. The article from out.com even details the harassment this kid has dealt with from conservatives.
  • andreskytt 4y ago
    Exactly. Anything novel is, by definition, risky. Therefore any and all research has the potential to harm people. What the article says is, that there is an apparently all-knowing group of people, who will decide, where an article lies on a scale between abstract algebra and direct calls to genocide in terms of its impact on people. Oh, and the same group of people is also directly interested in publishing (so they’ll have to let _some_ papers through) as well as being part of the scientific community preparing the papers. So a massive conflict of interest. What could possibly go wrong?
• AgentME 4y ago
  It frustrates me how in many discussions people act as if certain controversial research is always obviously correct and objective science up against inherently anti-science people tearing it down. Not at all! Plenty of it is of science specifically known to be done badly, presented badly, in a field with regular systematic issues. If a field is regularly producing these inaccurate results with bad social side effects, it's not out of line to tell people in the field to pay more attention to these things.
  • Jensson 4y ago
    If it is bad science then just reject it for being bad science. Don't reject it for not catering to your special interests group.
    • mike00632 4y ago
      The study of racial differences is famous for being bad science.
      • nomel 4y ago
        Unless it can help improve treatments: https://nyulangone.org/news/popular-hypertension-drugs-linked-worse-heart-health-outcomes-hypertensive-african-americans-compared-whites https://nyulangone.org/news/popular-hypertension-drugs-linke...
        • mike00632 4y ago
          This isn't an effort that the Right can use to proclaim racial superiority. Understand the difference?
• yes_really 4y ago
  IQ research is the one area in social sciences that does not suffer from reproducibility crisis. You're clearly not against it because of reproducibility; you are against it because it goes against your ideological worldview. > Second, research results in population group differences are social poison. They are memetic viruses that fuel violent extremism. We had a full summer of violent riots because of the "Black Lives Matter" ideology. Are we going to ban research that studies police treatment of different races too?
  • irrational 4y ago
    • istinetz 4y ago
      I have seen several videos of entirely black crowds looting stores. How is this Trump's fault? How is this "pure white supremacy"?
      • onion2k 4y ago
        How is this "pure white supremacy"? That's an easy one. America has had a couple of centuries of systemic racism keeping majority-black communities poor, uneducated, and not particularly fearful of prison (relative to majority-white communities). When you combine that poverty with an easy opportunity to loot something valuable in a situation where there's a perception of not being caught due to the chaos, people will loot things. There will have been poor white people in the videos you watched, but your biases mean you focused on the black people instead. That's not a suggestion that you're racist. It's simply that you've grown up in a society where white people are literally considered superior. The white supremacy is all around you. You don't notice it in the same way you don't notice the air you breathe. When someone points it out though, you should probably listen at least, even if you choose not to act. Also, it's not Trump's fault. It goes back far further than Trump. He's simply a clever grifter who found a way to capitalize on it. His family is the better part of $3bn richer since his presidency...
• FFRefresh 4y ago
  How can you be sure any research won't result in violence? How do you establish whether a given piece of research/data will result in violence? Is your basic operating model for this: "Never show any data that shows there are group differences, because it can be used by violent extremists"? If that is your operating model, do you support getting rid of ANY data out there that shows differences between groups in ability/behavior, as it could result in violence? For instance, should we ban all public violent crime reporting, if that showed group differences, as it would be something used by those violent extremists you mention? diu vivere tabula rasa!
  • ZeroGravitas 4y ago
    https://academic.oup.com/california-scholarship-online/book/20722/chapter-abstract/180096331?redirectedFrom=fulltext https://academic.oup.com/california-scholarship-online/book/... > This chapter shows that the right wing's essentialized construct of the Jew as criminal in the Weimar period was translated into policy and action in Germany after 1933. Until 1938, when the Nazis unequivocally embraced the guiding principle that “The Jew is outside the law,” they often took pains to charge individual Jews with specific crimes, usually focusing on technical aspects of tax laws and currency-exchange regulations. On the one hand, they sought to exploit the racist agenda and traditional anti-Semitic stereotypes. On the other, they wanted to give the impression that the Nazi State was simply zealous in applying the letter of the law.
• bawolff 4y ago
  So hypothetically, say the reasearch is well founded, reproducible, gold standard, etc. If you think it would be ok then, why are we talking about "dignity" when instead we could have the less controversial statement "science research must not be dogshit quality". If you don't believe so, why are we talking about quality?
• nathias 4y ago
  Even if this was true what you are describing is impossible to predict. School shooter are not scientists and don't comprehend anything past basic stuff served to them by the media. Doing research with these condiderations in mind probably fuels extremism much more and makes people (justifiably) sceptical of science in general.
• throwawaylinux 4y ago
  Sorry you feel that way, I prefer to trust the science.
• winReInstall 4y ago
  Now, imagine, real good research (Data-mining/AB-virtual-experiments) being done, with FG cooperate DBs containing the behaviour of almost all of western humanity. One can imagine the bombshells on which Google and Facebook (and others with acccess Palantir) are sitting quietly right now. And while the racists and ideologists might use parts of the results to go at each others throats, the truth might even be more weird, turning humanity into a fully self aware grandfather clock, knowing what makes it tick, but unable to stop it. The fact that Thiel just looked at it, and went full support of totalitarian decline, cause it can not be prevented anyway, gives you an idea on how total of a defeat through knowledge awaits in those DBs.
• raxxorraxor 4y ago
  IQ tests are also unreliable by design. They might work once, but you get different results depending on the test subject was challenged by questions and problems of similar design. Highlighting that fact would be helpful and expose such tests as nothing but maybe a rough estimate. Your education is probably more important for that than your capacity to solve problems. Additionally those that focus on these numbers seem to not be the ones that score particularly well here. And in the end "science" that asserts it can determine intellectual capacity of a group is most likely wrong. That said, you should NEVER censor yourself because someone could perhaps misinterpret your finding for their own perverted goals. That would undermine science itself and it isn't worth it. > This isn't fucking Orwell, its people trying to make sure that dogshit research in their journal doesnt get cited by mass shooters. This is the wrong approach.
  • FabHK 4y ago
    > IQ tests are also unreliable by design. I doubt that they are specifically designed to be unreliable.
    • trasz 4y ago
      They aren’t; it’s just that we don’t even know what IQ is, so measuring it is naturally questionable.
    • raxxorraxor 4y ago
      Perhaps unreliable is the wrong description. There are significant limitations and these are generally acknowledged. You can do different IQ-Tests and you will notice a steady increase in your score over time, because you learn about the structure of problems they ask about. Ideally IQ-Tests are systematically different that this would not apply but it isn't possible to create them this way. Your training about similar problems in the past will have significant influence on the score. That does not mean that your intellectual capacity is higher/lower to someone with a different score. Another weakness is the focus on speed or solved problems per time unit. This is also just an estimate and to latest discoveries about intellectual capacity a very rough one. For example there is a corridor of a certain reading speed that correlates with intelligence. But especially at the upper end which also includes more or less average reading speed this correlation vanishes. Same is true with the comparatively easy problems of IQ-Tests. The score might be an estimate, but as it I would call it an unreliable estimate. The limitations of them are intrinsic to the way they work.
• dusted 4y ago
  > Second, research results in population group differences are social poison. They are memetic viruses that fuel violent extremism. The murderer of 10 people in Buffalo directly cited human behavior research in his manifesto. Extremist racist groups regularly discuss this research. This is a fact. Am I paraphrasing correctly: "Some bad people react badly to research results in this field, so there should be no research in this field" ?
• parkingrift 4y ago
  Good grief I can’t believe you are serious. Mass shootings almost never happen, and when they do they aren’t because of bad research. It’s almost comical that you believe extremists are scouring scientific journals to fuel their hatred. Censorship has never worked, but oh don’t worry in this circumstance it will definitely work. Because reasons.
  • geoduck14 4y ago
    I wonder if research into the frequency and severity of mass shootings would be permitted into the journal - or if it would be blocked because it might promote harm
• rosmax_1337 4y ago
  >Second, research results in population group differences are social poison. They are memetic viruses that fuel violent extremism. The murderer of 10 people in Buffalo directly cited human behavior research in his manifesto. Extremist racist groups regularly discuss this research. This is a fact. I am unable to write something to argue against this point because it would lead to this account being banned. I am unable to publish a paper on Nature that argues against the common beleif of racial equality. I am unable to use most modern communication media to do any of these things. Why do people resort to violence?