5 ms·
statistical correlation can be substituted for fact Well let's stop this Science nonsense and get on with full blown Political Correctness as our guide to the
by crusso 13y ago
statistical correlation can be substituted for fact
Well let's stop this Science nonsense and get on with full blown Political Correctness as our guide to the future we're heading toward.
- masklinn 13y agoThat's got nothing to do with PC or any such nonsense, it's got to do with you taking as your starting point that it's possible to reduce highly complex, multivariate and environmentally influenced phenotypes down to useful genotypes. Your comments are essentially daily mail fare.
- Dylan16807 13y agoanigbrowl's comment argued that correlations were bad, and did not mention whether useful ones were possible. Blame them for bringing up political correctness, not crusso.
- anigbrowl 13y agoThis is news to me.
- Dylan16807 13y agoWould you care to provide your interpretation of "Now imagine that your genetic testing service has a data breach and suddenly you have immense difficulty getting hired, getting credit, or getting a table in a restaurant."
- anigbrowl 13y agoThe meaning of that is self-evident - you could be discriminated against because people considered you to be untrustworthy due to the results of the test mentioned in the preceding sentence. Where you and crusso see political correctness - perhaps in the belief that I'm describing such a test as a proxy for some identity group - what I'm actually concerned about is the accuracy and/orpredictive power of such tests. I really doubt that you would be OK with finding yourself on the receiving end of such an evaluation.
- Dylan16807 13y agoI see arguing against the test because of possible discriminatory uses as an argument of political correctness. Maybe we have different definitions.
- eruditely 13y agoObviously you're just dragging your feet here. He is not saying whether the discrimination itself is correct, but that if the validity of the tests is not correct this can lead to incorrect discrimination here, the chance of this data ruining someones life in the wrong hands is very high.
- Dylan16807 13y agoAvoiding performing measurements because you're worried about how the results could possibly be misused is a political motivation, not a scientific one. I'm just trying to argue in favor of this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6794926 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6794926 , not about whether doing the testing is a spectacularly good idea.
- eruditely 13y agoThe primary concern is fragility, not in truth-space. Scientists have ethical responsibilities and pretending that this isn't true is probably how NSA mathematicians justify their work.