But if it becomes the default for the 56 million GitHub developers, is it really freedom of speech?
I don't disagree with renaming the default branch and I've been using the name develop as the default branch for 2 years now, but I am still not sure that changing it globally on a global platform qualifies as "good behaviour".
Edit:
If you disagree, can you please write a comment stating why you do?
It would be very helpful, if I am saying something obviously wrong I would love to understand why.
Did you just guess at what it's about out of thin air with absolutely no context of your own?
Because it's very clearly not about GitHub and branch names - it's the ongoing thing with Pedro Domingos.
If you don't know, best to not just guess especially when it's a contentious subject where people are already clearly super frought. That's probably why you got down-voted heavily.
Seeing the name of Pedro domingos and how he got cancelled for expressing his views in the recent incident involving Google and timnit gebru, makes me think it's probably related to that.
How specifically was he canceled? I ask because googling him he seems gainfully employed... are his papers being rejected? Did something else happened?
This began from a controversy where Anima Anandkumar (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anima_Anandkumar), Director of AI at nvidia, posted a list of people she blocked on Twitter, encouraging her followers to "cancel" them. I wrote more about this and linked to her tweets in a past discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25419871, but Anima Anandkumar has since deleted her tweets and then her account.
One of her targets is Pedro Domingos, who is a professor at the University of Washington and a well-known expert in the space (he authored "The Master Algorithm"). Domingos is also known for being against the infiltration of "woke" culture into academic institutions, because it corrupts the purity of research and introduces political biases. This came up recently because NeurIPS (an AI conference) is going to require an "impact statement" for all submitted research papers, which has raised concerns about political bias at the conference, since researchers will likely include pandering progressive impact statements just to get through the process without controversy. Anandkumar has been one of the prominent activists pushing for NeurIPS to include impact statements, and was formerly involved in a campaign to push NeurIPS to be renamed from NIPS to NeurIPS (https://www.wired.com/story/ai-researchers-fight-over-four-l...).
There's a few things that vary from editorialization to simple inaccuracy.
> This came up recently because NeurIPS (an AI conference) is going to require an "impact statement" for all submitted research papers, which has raised concerns about political bias at the conference
Is sort of true. It already did require these statements this year. And while there was some "concern", I'd say that most of it was from, like, Domingos and random HN commenters. I don't think there was any serious concern about this. But that's mostly semantic I admit.
I also think that
> Director of AI at nvidia, posted a list of people she blocked on Twitter, encouraging her followers to "cancel" them.
Is a mischaracterization. See the long thread here[0] in reply to this user, where I ask for the specific actions Anandkumar took that were problematic. Despite a long conversation with multiple people, the only concrete thing anyone brought up that was "problematic" appears to have been HN editorialization, and not actually a thing Anandkumar herself said.
The context about this being related to Domingos and Anandkumar's disagreement is all almost certainly true. But for example, I don't know what in particular GP means when they say "Anandkumar (who tried to cancel him)". I doubt you do either, and if pressed, I'm not sure that GP could give a definition that should elicit concern. They had a disagreement on twitter. She's since apologized for making anyone feel uncomfortable. He has not, despite calling people "deranged", accusing Anandkumar of watching too much internet porn, and various other things.
Now watch these scientists being cancelled for speaking up.
Cancel culture doesn’t accept any arguments - that’s the whole point of the cancel culture - you don’t discuss with the opponent, instead you ask a platform, where the interaction happened, to ban the opponent.
I thought cancel culture was also not buying stuff from companies you think are not acting ethically. You might agree it’s good to “cancel” facebook by not using their product?
The parent comment seems to be speaking about cancel culture more generally though:
“Cancel culture doesn’t accept any arguments - that’s the whole point of the cancel culture”
I’d argue that’s not the point of cancel culture. I think cancel culture is the result of unethical actors not getting punished by the people in charge any more. The only way you can punish them is to not buy their products.
>The only way you can punish them is to not buy their products.
I'm sure that's related to the definition of cancel culture in some contexts, but none of the people signing or intended to be swayed by this letter sell any products. This letter is specifically talking about academic bullying as a means of intellectual suppression. That has little if anything to do with products like Facebook, I really don't see the connection.
I'm surprised that this basic foundation of the popularity of "cancel culture" doesn't get pointed out more. It's dead obvious, and something virtually everybody can sympathize with, whether they admit it or not - but people want to find other, more easily attackable qualities to describe cancel culture as being "about". Like most topics that consist mostly of irrational side-taking, it would be a lot less messy to just criticize specific examples, instead of making it into culture war on purpose by forcing it into the mold of the monolithic "them" vs the monolithic "us".
The word "cancel culture" is really a red herring - what this letter is talking about is how academics get frozen out if they get in trouble for saying things they shouldn't.
Who gets to define what an academic shouldn't say ? While there might be a consensus we could come up with, the problem with cancel culture is that it will seemingly be used to cancel any little thing that displeases SJWs _regardless_ of whether what was said is actually _not_ *phobic and whether or not it is objectively demonstrable and / or a reasonable hypothesis / statement.
That is what is outrageous to many; the over-abuse of this tactic against just about anyone all the time. The most maligned figure I can think of is Jordan Peterson ; please explain in an articulated fashion WITH SOURCES why you don't like the guy ? I have seen so much false and distorted stuff about the dude it's not funny.
These are exaggerations. It sounds like you're harboring an irrational hatred for "SJWs", and are using misdeeds conceivably attributable to that group, however you define it, to rationalize the delegitimisation of anybody who seeks to expose harmful behavior.
The lead of this open letter effort Pedro Domingos has stoked controversy on twitter [1] for the last few months. The replies are also critical of his behavior.
Emailing the mods about dupes using the footer Contact link ensures that they see and respond to the report, as opposed to comments that may be interpreted by an algorithm as reason to keep it on the front page.
> No individual should suffer harassment or attack based on their personal or political views, religion, nationality, race, gender, or sexual orientation
sigh One of those things is not like the others. I agree that people should not be hounded out of science. That means not publishing papers, articles or comments to the effect that "women can't do science" or bell curve arguments about some races being less intellectually capable than others. That is also hounding people out of science.
I see a couple things that are choices. A couple that are innate. A couple that are considered sensitive information, and a couple that are public information. No one of these things sticks out to me as different from the others.
Doesn’t that prevent a lot controversial discussions of those topics? Eg what if these things are true or potentially true? Do we just put a blanket ban on publication?
>> That means not publishing papers, articles or comments to the effect that "women can't do science" or bell curve arguments about some races being less intellectually capable than others.
Suppose you manage a school district and you find that, after controlling for socio-economic income, your students' SAT scores are drastically predicted by race. Suppose you don't publish it, because you fear it might be used as fuel for some racist. What if it turns out that a geographic area that happened to correlate with race was getting an inferior water supply with lead in it, and because nobody was willing to look any further, the problem went on for an extra decade before being fixed?
You've created a false dichotomy. Publishing a study that concludes that racial background correlates with SAT score isn't controversial. Pretty much everyone agrees that this is the case today.
Publishing a study that concludes that, because of this, black people are innately less intelligent than others (and not, for example, that environmental or social factors are to account), would be controversial.
>> Publishing a study that concludes that racial background correlates with SAT score isn't controversial
That's how science should operate. The comment I was responding to seemed to indicate such statements were problematic, even without attributing the cause to innate biology.
It doesn't though. The GP comment is about (mis)attributing causation.
"Women can't do science" and "bell curve arguments about some races being less intellectually capable than others" are both causal arguments. "The SAT exhibits racial bias" is an observational statement. You took the GP's argument about causal misattribution and turned it into one about hiding observational conclusions, but that wasn't present in the original comment.
You very well may have a study that shows women produce a fraction of the science men do, maybe even per-capita, and that's not sexist per your own comment. You agreed it's only sexist if it attributes it to innate biology.
I'm done responding to you though because you're tone is confrontational and emotional.
Yes, because "women can't do science" and "women produce less scientific output" are different. There first is casual. The second is observational. (I guess you could make a semantic argument that "can't do science" means like "are unable to due to environmental factors" and is thus also ultimately observational, but that's not particularly convincing in the context of scientific research).
> That means not publishing papers, articles or comments to the effect that "women can't do science" or bell curve arguments about some races being less intellectually capable than others. That is also hounding people out of science.
Science is better served when such papers are published, and then are debunked using scientific standards of inquiry.
Proving those views wrong is much more powerful than censoring them -- anytime someone puts forward those views we can now say "nope, that's been debunked, here is an article that proves it wrong."
Censorship creates a chilling effect on science in general. People will be afraid to do gender or IQ studies. Some of those studies might end up with results that are true, but not politically popular at the time.
We should not forget that scientific orthodoxy was racist not that long ago. If scientific journals had been censored in the early 1900s, for example, anti-racist papers would have been suppressed. Today is no different -- many of our current scientific views are likely to be disproved 100 years from now, but only if we allow contrary views to be published.
> Science is better served when such papers are published
Your argument is so broad that you will insist that flat-earth, young-earth creationists ("YEC"s), and other crack-pot pseudosciences be accepted as if they were serious and reasonable.
Where should a YEC get to publish their papers? If the paper isn't accepted (because it's contrary to all evidence and has no strong evidence to support it), do you call that decision "censorship"? In 100 years do you expect that we might discover the YECs are right?
And yes, people are "afraid" now to do YEC studies because of the effects of being laughed at for crackpot science and denied funding.
Thing is, when YECs manage to get something published (sometimes by subterfuge), yes, there are articles debunking them. But that doesn't matter because YECs use the publication itself as evidence that their ideas are accepted as scientific. Their goal is to be treated as an equal ("teach the controversy"), not do good science, and their real audience isn't the scientific readership.
We see that as well with "bell curve arguments about some races being less intellectually capable than others", where the goal is not to be intellectually honest (See Shaun's video essay at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBc7qBS1Ujo which goes deep into some of the dishonesty) but to provide a veneer of scientific-ness to justify racist policy decisions.
Thing is, we do allow contrary views to be published. But they have to be supported by evidence. And the evidence that (for example) "women can't do science" isn't there.
If the view is easy to persuasively debunk, why not? Will use a smidgeon of an expert's time and help a lot of people. If the view is not easy to debunk, maybe it is worth an extended discussion? Seems win win either way.
This argument has been had many times. It's easy to pervasively debunk flat eartherism, or anti-vax conspiracies. Yet those ideas continue to be pervasive in particular subpopulations.
When people want to hold a view, out-sciencing them won't work.
Ultimately
> Will use a smidgeon of an expert's time and help a lot of people.
Yes, if you have to spend all your time responding to cranks, you'll have no time to be productive, and you'll embolden the cranks. Bullshit is produce to spew than to refute, so trying to counter bullshit with intellectual honesty is a loosing proposition. At some point you have to set a bar for bullshit, and ignore anything below the bar. The bullshit-artists call that "censorship", because at that point they've lost and the only way they can continue to spew bullshit is to find popular support with contrarians or free-speech absolutists who don't actually have a deep knowledge or care about scientific discourse.
Have you ever tried arguing with someone who is not only incorrect about literally every claim they’ve made, but whose grasp is so bad that their claims are mostly incoherent if you know what the words mean?
I once made the mistake of “debating” with a fundamentalist young-Earth Baptist Creationist who set up a microphone and speaker in the middle of Cambridge some time around 2008. He said too many wrong things too quickly for me to actually counter them all.
One that still sticks in my mind was him saying “Ladies and Gentlemen, I have found the kernel of this man’s beliefs. Either you believe in eternal energy or eternal God.” - literally every part of that sentence is false, but the dumb was too shocking for me to respond to.
Given what I know now, I think he technically blasphemed against his own faith multiple times… but I don’t think I convinced anyone who was on the fence.
It's worthwhile to develop both rhetoric and logic. Such people will not go away because you don't like them, and certainly not if you censor them. How do you think the Protestant reformation happened in the first place?
To publish or not should be based on cogency of argument, not whether the subject matter is popular or not. So if YEC can make a good argument, then they should have the opportunity to publish.
Yes, if that is the reason, but not if their work is rejected merely if it is YEC.
I recently saw a paper get accepted by a biology journal, and then rejected because the editors found out the authors were associated with intelligent design. That is inappropriate in my opinion.
The ones I've heard about ("accepted by a biology journal, and then rejected because the editors found out") are usually due to subterfuge or some undermining of the system.
Eg, using terms that obfuscate the YEC aspects of the paper, which isn't obvious enough for the reviewers to understand what it actually means.
There are also journals which accept anything, with little or no review (eg, some conference papers) and societies which allow their members to publish anything, and use post-publication review to retract papers.
Or sometimes someone with YEC beliefs gets editorial control and start green-lighting YEC papers not on merit but because of those personal beliefs.
Can you point to the incident?
Do you think it was rejected merely because it was YEC? Or because the evidence presented didn't actually support a YEC claim?
(FWIW, this paper wasn't retracted, but that detail isn't that important. It's also an ID paper, not a YEC one; both are part of creationalism and the difference isn't important enough for the point of this discussion.)
The key questions are: Do you think it was controversial merely because it was on ID? Or because the evidence presented didn't actually support a ID claim?
It appears that paper falls solidly in my description of how such works get into print, eg, cherry-picking quotes:
1) added the keywords "intelligent design" after editorial review
2) "naive to the point of being silly"
3) "I can only speculate, but inattention to the details and unfamiliarity with the references might have played a role [in how the article made it into print]."
I don't follow why hiding references and names should matter, if that is even what was done. Shouldn't the content of the paper be paramount? It looks like a paper was accepted based on its own merits and then disowned when the editors discovered it may be associated with an unpopular viewpoint. I have no idea why that is acceptable in a professional venue.
To answer your question "Shouldn't the content of the paper be paramount?" directly, NO!
If the conclusions of the paper have already been demonstrated to be incorrect, but the authors both know those objections and leave out discussion of them, then it's a seriously flawed paper.
Reviewers and editors cannot catch all merit-less papers. The acceptance system is based on a system of trust, including trust that the authors have highlighted possible flaws in their argument. There's also the post-publication review process, including retractions.
Moreover, most reviewers will not have experience with creationist literature (because it's a pseudoscience with no predictive ability), so are not likely to notice a paper which uses certain terms which only have meaning to creationists.
For example, "design" could mean "the result of natural evolutionary processes", but to a creationist it might mean the design of a creator, that is, as short-hand for "intelligent design."
Had they used "intelligent design" at the start, it would have helped the reviewer understand the context. Leaving that out until after the review process ended makes me suspicious that this omission was deliberate.
To elaborate on my comment, if you've read the paper, they have a large section devoted to fine tuning, intelligent design, and the surrounding criticisms and responses, all with explicity references to the main authors, such as Dembski, and their works. I'm not really grasping how your comment is addressing the paper and the reason for the warning notice.
> William Dembski, who mainly belongs to the frequentist’s school in statistics, regards the fine-tuning argument as suggestive, as pointers to underlying design.
Dembski's "design" is specifically "intelligent design". The blurb for the book cited starts. 'How can we identify events due to intelligent causes'.
Is that the same type of design as the authors mean? Let's go back to the long discussion of what 'design' means:
> A design is a specification or plan for the construction of an object or system, or the result of that specification or plan in the form of a product. ... Humans have a powerful intuitive understanding of design that precedes modern science. Our common intuitions invariably begin with recognizing a pattern as a mark of design.
So, is DNA a 'specification or plan for the construction of an object'? For many proteins it certainly is. So, is DNA a design? According to this definition, yes!
But Dembski's argument is that there must an intelligent designer. While biologists often use phrases like "evolution designed" to describe the results of standard evolution.
Picking one paper from a Google Scholar search, https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-642-71152-7_... says "Immunology is frequently the prisoner of its own semantics. Evolution designed an immune system equipped to recognize all foreign antigens, the structure of which it cannot know in advance." Or in a summary from https://stm.sciencemag.org/content/5/202/202ec148.short "In modern times, we turn up the thermostat if we’re cold, but evolution designed our bodies to acclimate to cold temperatures and maintain euthermia (normal body temperature) without the assistance of external climate control."
Neither claim an intelligent designer involved, so that "powerful intuitive understanding of design" must include designs that were not created by a designer, yes?
Which means that Dembski's use of the term 'design' is not shared by the general readership a biology journal, and omitting the qualifier intelligent design when talking about Dembski's work is a form of white-washing - just like I described when I wrote 'most reviewers ... are not likely to notice a paper which uses certain terms which only have meaning to creationists'.
You write 'they have a large section devoted to ... intelligent design, and the surrounding criticisms and responses'.
I see one paragraph which specifically calls out intelligent design. The next paragraph is on William Dembski. Is Dembski's work specifically ID? Then why wasn't Dembski's earlier work described that way?
I looked at (Olofsson, 2008). It says outright "In a way, the ideas in The Design Inference and No Free Lunch are examples of an exaggerated belief in mathematical methods in the sciences." And cites other publications describing problems in Dembski's work.
The third and last paragraph in this section claims that Dembski's work has been re-formulated as ASC, and implies that the re-formulation overcomes those criticisms.
You should probably read more of the article to get a better idea of what the authors are arguing. They are making a fine tuning argument like Barrow and Tipler. Barrow and Tipler wrote a whole book on the fine turning of cosmological constants, and it was well received. The whole article provides the theoretical background for fine tuning arguments, and the main evidence they rely on are the big name ID proponents: Dembski, Behe, Axe, Sanford. In fact, the article is absolutely chock full of references to peer reviewed ID articles. They call out ID by name multiple times, and explain its connection to their work, and state that the results imply intelligent agency. For example,
"Axe also elaborates on the massive improbabilities of anything like functional proteins arising by natural selection (Axe, 2016). The search space turns out to be too impossibly vast for blind selection to have even a slight chance of success. The contrasting view is innovations based on ingenuity, cleverness and intelligence."
I really don't see any sneakiness going on here.
Also, is it normal to respond to blog post criticisms in a journal article? Otherwise, I'm not sure why you think it is a problem the journal authors didn't respond to blog posts. I've not seen such a requirement before, and I've spent a fair amount of time in academia. On the other hand, from what I see, the authors do respond to published criticisms of ID theory, e.g. papers by Wilkins, Elsberry and Olofsson. So, at least regarding your concern they do not mention the criticisms of ID and provide responses, hopefully this should set you at ease.
Finally, the authors explain why they think ASC overcomes, or at least addresses the previous criticism of ID:
"However, it is hard to apply to many interesting biological applications or contexts, because a huge number of potential but unknown scenarios may exist, which makes it difficult to phrase a null hypothesis for a statistical test."
with the fact that ASC is measured in regards to a specific probability distribution:
"ACS incorporates both Shannon and Kolmogorov complexity measures, and it quantifies the degree to which an event is improbable and follows a pattern."
and this approach is further improved by a later result they mention by Montañez. At any rate, I recommend giving the article a careful read before coming to conclusions.
So, I still do not understand why it is within normal scholarly protocols to post a warning about the article. It is very forthright about its ID connection, in fact forming almost the entirety of the paper around ID arguments and authors, addresses criticisms, cautions about its own conclusions, and seems to be pretty mathematically rigorous and written by well credentialed authors.
I did give it a careful read, and dislike how you assume I did not.
As the rebuttal paper puts it, "neither fine-tuning nor intelligent design is required when sample spaces are viewed through the lens of evolutionary dynamics."
I agree. Where in their paper do they consider this standard criticism to ED, and point out that the criticism is un-founded?
Indeed, as they themselves point out (when talking about the creation of the universe, "A probabilistic argument presumes adequate knowledge of (the limits on) the space of possibility. It presupposes that current knowledge provides an accurate, unbiased statistical account of, or means of determining, what may or may not happen by chance." And we don't have that, so can't use this approach to determine if there was intelligent design.
Where has ASC been shown to be an effective of model for evolutionary processes? The relevant paper by Montañez says:
> Following Behe, let us say a system is irreducible if it contains at least three well-matched components that contribute necessarily to a core function, such that removal or mutilation of any of the components causes the system to cease functioning with respect to the core function.
That is a definition, which is good enough for a mathematical model. But does it model biology? No!
It's well-known that evolutionary systems may lead to such systems, therefore the existence of irreducible complexity in a given biological system does not mean evolution couldn't have happened, or that intelligent design must have occurred.
So how does ASC connect to the goals of this paper? Shrug. You're the one who read it carefully enough, yes?
As to "is it normal to respond to blog post criticisms in a journal article".
Why are you even asking that question? My pointing to a blog post was because it was easy to find. I am not an expert in pseudo-scientific research fields like ID or YEC, nor am I an expert in the counter-refutations of that research.
Are you saying that no such counter-arguments have been published in the scholarly literature? Or are you saying that you will ignore me unless I can point to specific literature?
I never would have heard of these ID arguments and authors had I not been following the blog of an evolutionary biologist for 15+ years who has a special interest in pointing out flaws in creationist arguments. Do you really think most biologists are trained to recognize ID authors, or understand when "design" is meant to only mean "intelligent design"?
Sorry for offending you. It is just incorrect to say only two paragraphs of the paper deal with ID. From my read through, almost the entire paper is reliant upon various ID literature and arguments, which is called out explicitly. It is not subtle in the slightest.
I get the paper's arguments are debated by biologists. But I still don't understand how this at all relates to the big disclaimer about the authors' connections and claiming because of these connections the paper is not suitable for publishing in the journal, which they have published after a peer review. Makes no sense to me, and I'm really not tracking your explanation.
> Do you really think most biologists are trained to recognize ID authors, or understand when "design" is meant to only mean "intelligent design"?
Why do biologists have to be trained to recognize ID authors? They don't have to be trained to recognize information theorists, or computer scientists, or any other hosts of independent disciplines that could be relevant to biology. And don't the authors clearly point out they are intending 'design' in the sense we attribute to humans, i.e. intelligent designers? Seems that way to me. Sorry, I am dense, I am really not understanding your point. It sounds to me like you want to imply some sort of deception on the part of the authors, but for all the reasons I've stated, this is entirely non obvious to me, and the journal's disclaimer still comes across as light censorship in the form of well poisoning, so I will have to disengage from this discussion. I wish you well.
My comment gave the reasons for why not, so I don't know what more you want.
And you didn't answer my questions: Where should a YEC get to publish their papers? If the paper isn't accepted (because it's contrary to all evidence and has no strong evidence to support it), do you call that decision "censorship"? In 100 years do you expect that we might discover the YECs are right?
Experience with YECs, flat-earthers, and the like show that it's far more than "a smidgen of an expert's time". As you yourself pointed out, it requires learning a different set of rhetorical skills than are needed for a scientific paper.
And that takes a lot of time. (And it seems you have no experience in dealing with crackpots to know this.)
A scientist who enters a "debate" with a creationist, but who is not trained in the specific rhetorical techniques (eg. "Gish gallop", as another commenter pointed out) is going to get trounced - because scientists aren't trained in dealing with charlatans, and rhetorical style can trump competence.
As a result, charlatans gain fame for being able to out-debate a scientist. I'll stress this point, the point of these crackpot publications and "debates" is NOT to advance science but to establish credentials as being a viable alternative.
It appears you, like me, disagree with twblalock's broad statement "Science is better served when such papers are published, and then are debunked using scientific standards of inquiry." and have the position more like "only good arguments warrant publication".
I'm perfectly fine with that latter viewpoint and don't see where we have any disagreement.
Perhaps, although I see people claim the latter when it seems they are more rejecting a position or conclusion merely because they already disagree with it, or are worried about implications of the argument.
It's hard to know what you mean without a concrete example.
twblalock's argument appears to be that editors are obligated to publish all pseudoscience dreck in order to refute it.
Now, there are plenty of pseudoscientific beliefs which are widely held, but are clearly not backed by evidence.
Consider Hollow Earth theory - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollow_Earth - which is outright untenable; there is no evidence in favor of it and plenty of evidence against it.
Why should I worry about implications of a Hollow Earth when there are so many other more interesting things to worry about?
Going back to pjc50's comment, I am convinced by the evidence that 'bell curve arguments about some races being less intellectually capable than others' are bunkum. To start with, the genetic evidence over the last decades shows that the human-constructed concept we call "race" has no real biological basis. (Racial classifications is another pseudoscience. I linked to a video with more discussion about the flaws in the Bell Curve book.)
The evidence is so overwhelming that, like the evidence against YEC or Hollow Earth theory, it's not worth my time to engage in the topic, much less worth my time to develop the specific rhetorical skills to engage charlatans, frauds, grifters, and true-believers at their game.
There are certainly some who do that, and I commend them for fighting the good fight. But when a YEC proponent presents a tired argument like "If Human Beings Evolved From Monkeys Then Why Are There Still Monkeys?" or "Evolution Is Only A Theory" for the n-th million-th time - I don't have the patience. And neither do science journal editors, who use their freedom of association to decide to not publish a given paper.
I'll now focus on the word "censorship". You must be aware that supporters of pseudoscientific beliefs have all manner of ways to publish their works, hold meetings, get on TV shows, build museums, and more. So by "censor" you are not meaning censorship in any of its usual senses.
I think you mean something more like "there's an obligation to let the honorable opposition speak, in order that truth may ring out." But a YEC isn't there for the scientific truth but rather wants to be treated as honorable (even though it isn't!) in order to influence policy goals in favor of a certain religious viewpoint. I believe by jumping right to "censorship" instead of starting with "maybe it doesn't actually have merit", you end up supporting bad science.
I think there exist objective standards of good argumentation, and any viewpoint that makes an honest attempt to abide by said standards should get a fair hearing, despite what people may think about the conclusion and consequences. Much of today's status quo exists precisely due to that liberty, so for the status quo to turn around and deny it to others they dislike is extremely hypocritical.
As a concrete example, let's stick with YEC. There are very successful scientists with credentials from top institutions that believe the evidence supports the YEC position. They argue for YEC not for religious reasons, but for honest intellectual reasons. It is worth giving such arguments a fair hearing, regardless of whether they are flawed.
"They argue for YEC not for religious reasons, but for honest intellectual reasons."
Who? And what are their arguments?
And how have their arguments not been given a fair hearing and found lacking? (See http://talkorigins.org/indexcc/list.html for a list of common creationist arguments and their rebuttal.)
John Sanford is one I know of. He is inventor of the gene gun and his work on population genetics convinced him that the genome must be devolving, something he called genetic entropy. This led him to reject atheism and adopt YEC.
> This idea is unsupported by available evidence. In laboratory experiments, viruses saturated with mutations do not go extinct.[10] Sanford also misuses Kimura's mutation distribution; Kimura excludes beneficial mutations because they would have too large an effect, not an insignificant one.[11] Sanford has refused to acknowledge this problem, even after being directly confronted with Kimura's own words.[12] Further, Sanford's assertion that there are virtually no selectable beneficial mutations is contradicted by examples of exactly that, such as lactase persistence in humans,[13] or tetherin antagonism in HIV-1 group M Vpu.[14]
To elaborate on my comment, per our original question whether there are respectable scientists who hold non status quo positions for scientific reasons, my example of Sanford as a YEC who holds the position for scientific reasons seems to still stand. It is not uncommon for scientists to disagree, so I am unsure what your quote is demonstrating regarding our original question.
Just to outline the discussion up till now, I maintain that even non status quo views should be given a hearing, if they proceed by well established criteria for good argumentation. You questioned whether any such people/arguments exist, and if so whether they are in fact being unduly censored. I offered the biological fine tuning paper and Sanford as ID and YEC (in turn) examples to support my claim there are well argued minority views held by otherwise highly intellectually respectable individuals that are currently being censored, unjustly in my opinion.
It is really not clear to me from that wiki article you posted that Sanford's view has been refuted. I took a look at Kimura's paper, and it seems the wiki author either didn't read it or didn't understand Kimura's argument.
"Sanford also misuses Kimura's mutation distribution; Kimura excludes beneficial mutations because they would have too large an effect, not an insignificant one."
This makes it sound as if Sanford is excluding beneficial mutations because otherwise they would disprove his 'genetic entropy' thesis since they are very beneficial and outweigh the amassing of negative mutations.
However, from what I can understand of the original paper, Kimura actually excludes beneficial mutations from his model because they do not match the empirical data, and thus must be much less beneficial or common than his model requires. Here's the cite from his paper:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC383841/
From the abstract:
"The situation becomes quite different if slightly advantageous mutations occur at a constant rate independent of environmental conditions. In this case, the evolutionary rate can become enormously higher in a species with a very large population size than in a species with a small population size, contrary to the observed pattern of evolution at the molecular level."
From the beginning:
"Note that in this formulation, we disregard beneficial mutants, and restrict our consideration only to deleterious and neutral mutations. Admittedly, this is an oversimplification, but as I shall show later, a model assuming that beneficial mutations also arise at a constant rate independent of environmental changes leads to unrealistic results."
And near the end of the article:
"To make our analysis complete, let us investigate how the evolutionary rate is influenced by assuming that a certain fraction of mutations are advantageous....This means the rate of evolution can become enormously high in very large populations, kg being directly proportional to Ne, contrary to actual observations."
Kimura is saying that beneficial mutations do not follow his model, because they must be much less common than his model requires, so he excludes beneficial mutations. This sounds to me consistent with what Sanford is saying, unless I am misunderstanding something. If you come to a different understanding of Kimura, please let me know.
At any rate, it is not intellectually dishonest for scholars to disagree. There is no requirement that scholars must agree with the status quo. In fact, that's anti thetical to the entire scientific project. Intellectual dishonesty consists of things like knowingly making logically fallacious arguments and falsifying evidence, none of which it is obvious, at least to me from the wiki article you posted, that Sanford is doing. So it is unclear to me why he should not be regarded as an intellectually honest YEC, and have his views respected as such. I am happy to be convinced otherwise.
>> That means not publishing papers, articles or comments to the effect that "women can't do science" or bell curve arguments about some races being less intellectually capable than others. That is also hounding people out of science.
I disagree with this: why is it hounding people out of science?
Let's say I publish a paper that literally says "Gender/race/whatever can't do science" or "Group X has N points lower IQ than group Y at the mean".
Who does that keep out of the field? And how? I think it keeps nobody out of anything.
Unlike the cancel-culture playbook (call their boss, name and shame, call the cops citing emotional violence, etc.) publishing a paper like that has virtually no effect on any members of the group in question.
What would that mean, refusing to hire associate professors with a history of calling for institutions to refuse to hire associate professors with histories of calling for things? Sounds paradoxical to me.
It seems impossible that anybody could really have both thoughts at once: That some of the things these victims do are not bad enough to be worthy of the social consequences, and also, the people amplifying those social consequences are bad enough to be victims of those same consequences.
I come from the country that put Galileo's books on the "Index Librorum Prohibitorum".
I don't believe canceling culture is culture, even when the culture being canceled is bad.
It's much better to make them illegal, like we did in Italy with facism and nazism, than to "cancel" them.
They are still available as a subject of study, they haven't been cancelled, they have been found inappropriate and as such only a minority still believes that they've been made illegal in absence of good motivations, because anybody can check what are the reasons why it happened.
But the majority of people that were fascist before the war ended in Italy haven't suffered discrimination for being wrong, after it was obvious they were.
‘Cancel culture’ is fundamentally volatility in the lines between a disagreeable opinion and an abhorrent one. In the past, cancel-worthy offenses were generally scandalous behaviors as dictated by more religious and conservative social forces.
I doubt the authors of the letter would so vigorously defend against the ‘cancelling’ of advocates of genocide, exploitation of minors, or cannibalism.
And where are the footprints of this supposed cancellation sasquatch anyway? Brendan Eich? Doesn’t seem to be doing that poorly to me.
OK this is the cynic inside me talking, but let's suppose for a moment you are a Chinese(or Russian) geopolitical strategical planner. The current cancel culture is a gift from the gods, you send several undercover agents over there, and help to amplify this ridiculous state of affairs, start cancelling "dangerous" scientists or lines of research and help your country to gain long-term scientific and technological advantage over a society more interested on the correct number of new genders or on what is the minimum % needed of women speakers in a conference in order to not boycott it.
Oh, we have trouble in the USA?? After really thinking about it very hard, our conclusion is that it must be the evil work of corrupt foreign powers. CoMmUniSm!!!
Textbook example ^ and right on the money, I think. You barely even have to send anyone " over there " just take what they produce and roll with that. Free goodies. Of course if you have a few idle provocateurs, it's probably a good return on investment.
Honest question ; why is this thread [flagged] ? I get the answer might be obvious and disappointing, but surely the thread is not being cancelled right ?
I wish we had a better working definition of “cancel culture” because it seems to encompass everything from boycotting advertisers, to organizations restricting individuals access to “neutral” platforms... to firing individuals for their views
Another possibility is that political topics (in this case "cancel culture") tend to be controversial enough, to be flamebait, that these topics tend to get flagged
Duplicate discussions don't seem to be an issue (I see a lot of them, and someone usually posts a hint to previous discussions). It's also not an arbitrary "political" topic, but a request of recognised computer scientists to the Association for Computing Machinery. If everything would be flagged that anyone could get upset about, soon we wouldn't be discussing anything at all.
If a story has had significant attention in the last year or so, we bury reposts as duplicates. After a year (or so), it's fine, and that's why you're seeing links to previous discussions.
106 comments
[ 0.18 ms ] story [ 185 ms ] threadBut if it becomes the default for the 56 million GitHub developers, is it really freedom of speech?
I don't disagree with renaming the default branch and I've been using the name develop as the default branch for 2 years now, but I am still not sure that changing it globally on a global platform qualifies as "good behaviour".
Edit:
If you disagree, can you please write a comment stating why you do?
It would be very helpful, if I am saying something obviously wrong I would love to understand why.
Thanks!
Because it's very clearly not about GitHub and branch names - it's the ongoing thing with Pedro Domingos.
If you don't know, best to not just guess especially when it's a contentious subject where people are already clearly super frought. That's probably why you got down-voted heavily.
One of her targets is Pedro Domingos, who is a professor at the University of Washington and a well-known expert in the space (he authored "The Master Algorithm"). Domingos is also known for being against the infiltration of "woke" culture into academic institutions, because it corrupts the purity of research and introduces political biases. This came up recently because NeurIPS (an AI conference) is going to require an "impact statement" for all submitted research papers, which has raised concerns about political bias at the conference, since researchers will likely include pandering progressive impact statements just to get through the process without controversy. Anandkumar has been one of the prominent activists pushing for NeurIPS to include impact statements, and was formerly involved in a campaign to push NeurIPS to be renamed from NIPS to NeurIPS (https://www.wired.com/story/ai-researchers-fight-over-four-l...).
This new letter to ACM was already discussed on Hacker News (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25575321). The letter includes Domingos as an initial signatory, and the group the letter is being sent to (Communications of the ACM) lists Anima Anandkumar (who tried to cancel him) on their Editorial Board (https://cacm.acm.org/about-communications/editorial-board/).
This seems like an interesting and relevant comment. Are there factual inaccuracies? Do you disagree with the characterization of Anandkumar?
It would be useful to know what's wrong, as this comment will otherwise be pretty strongly informing my opinion on this topic.
Surely this is why - there's nothing else subjective in the post.
> This came up recently because NeurIPS (an AI conference) is going to require an "impact statement" for all submitted research papers, which has raised concerns about political bias at the conference
Is sort of true. It already did require these statements this year. And while there was some "concern", I'd say that most of it was from, like, Domingos and random HN commenters. I don't think there was any serious concern about this. But that's mostly semantic I admit.
I also think that
> Director of AI at nvidia, posted a list of people she blocked on Twitter, encouraging her followers to "cancel" them.
Is a mischaracterization. See the long thread here[0] in reply to this user, where I ask for the specific actions Anandkumar took that were problematic. Despite a long conversation with multiple people, the only concrete thing anyone brought up that was "problematic" appears to have been HN editorialization, and not actually a thing Anandkumar herself said.
The context about this being related to Domingos and Anandkumar's disagreement is all almost certainly true. But for example, I don't know what in particular GP means when they say "Anandkumar (who tried to cancel him)". I doubt you do either, and if pressed, I'm not sure that GP could give a definition that should elicit concern. They had a disagreement on twitter. She's since apologized for making anyone feel uncomfortable. He has not, despite calling people "deranged", accusing Anandkumar of watching too much internet porn, and various other things.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25576053
It's a cesspool of lunatics.
Cancel culture doesn’t accept any arguments - that’s the whole point of the cancel culture - you don’t discuss with the opponent, instead you ask a platform, where the interaction happened, to ban the opponent.
>calls for academic boycotts, attempts to get people fired, inviting mob attacks against ‘offending’ individuals, and the like.
These are all referring to the many coming down on the few, not the other way around.
I’d argue that’s not the point of cancel culture. I think cancel culture is the result of unethical actors not getting punished by the people in charge any more. The only way you can punish them is to not buy their products.
I'm sure that's related to the definition of cancel culture in some contexts, but none of the people signing or intended to be swayed by this letter sell any products. This letter is specifically talking about academic bullying as a means of intellectual suppression. That has little if anything to do with products like Facebook, I really don't see the connection.
I'm surprised that this basic foundation of the popularity of "cancel culture" doesn't get pointed out more. It's dead obvious, and something virtually everybody can sympathize with, whether they admit it or not - but people want to find other, more easily attackable qualities to describe cancel culture as being "about". Like most topics that consist mostly of irrational side-taking, it would be a lot less messy to just criticize specific examples, instead of making it into culture war on purpose by forcing it into the mold of the monolithic "them" vs the monolithic "us".
Who gets to define what an academic shouldn't say ? While there might be a consensus we could come up with, the problem with cancel culture is that it will seemingly be used to cancel any little thing that displeases SJWs _regardless_ of whether what was said is actually _not_ *phobic and whether or not it is objectively demonstrable and / or a reasonable hypothesis / statement.
That is what is outrageous to many; the over-abuse of this tactic against just about anyone all the time. The most maligned figure I can think of is Jordan Peterson ; please explain in an articulated fashion WITH SOURCES why you don't like the guy ? I have seen so much false and distorted stuff about the dude it's not funny.
>against just about anyone all the time
These are exaggerations. It sounds like you're harboring an irrational hatred for "SJWs", and are using misdeeds conceivably attributable to that group, however you define it, to rationalize the delegitimisation of anybody who seeks to expose harmful behavior.
[1] https://twitter.com/pmddomingos/status/1344215079890272257
sigh One of those things is not like the others. I agree that people should not be hounded out of science. That means not publishing papers, articles or comments to the effect that "women can't do science" or bell curve arguments about some races being less intellectually capable than others. That is also hounding people out of science.
I see a couple things that are choices. A couple that are innate. A couple that are considered sensitive information, and a couple that are public information. No one of these things sticks out to me as different from the others.
I completely agree on the topic, but why shouldn't they be published and disproved by someone else with better arguments?
Bad science has always been fought with good science.
Suppose you manage a school district and you find that, after controlling for socio-economic income, your students' SAT scores are drastically predicted by race. Suppose you don't publish it, because you fear it might be used as fuel for some racist. What if it turns out that a geographic area that happened to correlate with race was getting an inferior water supply with lead in it, and because nobody was willing to look any further, the problem went on for an extra decade before being fixed?
Publishing a study that concludes that, because of this, black people are innately less intelligent than others (and not, for example, that environmental or social factors are to account), would be controversial.
That's how science should operate. The comment I was responding to seemed to indicate such statements were problematic, even without attributing the cause to innate biology.
"Women can't do science" and "bell curve arguments about some races being less intellectually capable than others" are both causal arguments. "The SAT exhibits racial bias" is an observational statement. You took the GP's argument about causal misattribution and turned it into one about hiding observational conclusions, but that wasn't present in the original comment.
I'm done responding to you though because you're tone is confrontational and emotional.
Science is better served when such papers are published, and then are debunked using scientific standards of inquiry.
Proving those views wrong is much more powerful than censoring them -- anytime someone puts forward those views we can now say "nope, that's been debunked, here is an article that proves it wrong."
Censorship creates a chilling effect on science in general. People will be afraid to do gender or IQ studies. Some of those studies might end up with results that are true, but not politically popular at the time.
We should not forget that scientific orthodoxy was racist not that long ago. If scientific journals had been censored in the early 1900s, for example, anti-racist papers would have been suppressed. Today is no different -- many of our current scientific views are likely to be disproved 100 years from now, but only if we allow contrary views to be published.
Your argument is so broad that you will insist that flat-earth, young-earth creationists ("YEC"s), and other crack-pot pseudosciences be accepted as if they were serious and reasonable.
Where should a YEC get to publish their papers? If the paper isn't accepted (because it's contrary to all evidence and has no strong evidence to support it), do you call that decision "censorship"? In 100 years do you expect that we might discover the YECs are right?
And yes, people are "afraid" now to do YEC studies because of the effects of being laughed at for crackpot science and denied funding.
Thing is, when YECs manage to get something published (sometimes by subterfuge), yes, there are articles debunking them. But that doesn't matter because YECs use the publication itself as evidence that their ideas are accepted as scientific. Their goal is to be treated as an equal ("teach the controversy"), not do good science, and their real audience isn't the scientific readership.
We see that as well with "bell curve arguments about some races being less intellectually capable than others", where the goal is not to be intellectually honest (See Shaun's video essay at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBc7qBS1Ujo which goes deep into some of the dishonesty) but to provide a veneer of scientific-ness to justify racist policy decisions.
Thing is, we do allow contrary views to be published. But they have to be supported by evidence. And the evidence that (for example) "women can't do science" isn't there.
When people want to hold a view, out-sciencing them won't work.
Ultimately
> Will use a smidgeon of an expert's time and help a lot of people.
Yes, if you have to spend all your time responding to cranks, you'll have no time to be productive, and you'll embolden the cranks. Bullshit is produce to spew than to refute, so trying to counter bullshit with intellectual honesty is a loosing proposition. At some point you have to set a bar for bullshit, and ignore anything below the bar. The bullshit-artists call that "censorship", because at that point they've lost and the only way they can continue to spew bullshit is to find popular support with contrarians or free-speech absolutists who don't actually have a deep knowledge or care about scientific discourse.
I once made the mistake of “debating” with a fundamentalist young-Earth Baptist Creationist who set up a microphone and speaker in the middle of Cambridge some time around 2008. He said too many wrong things too quickly for me to actually counter them all.
One that still sticks in my mind was him saying “Ladies and Gentlemen, I have found the kernel of this man’s beliefs. Either you believe in eternal energy or eternal God.” - literally every part of that sentence is false, but the dumb was too shocking for me to respond to.
Given what I know now, I think he technically blasphemed against his own faith multiple times… but I don’t think I convinced anyone who was on the fence.
So if YECs don't make a good argument, they shouldn't be accepted for publication in a scientific journal, and therefore it's not censorship, right?
I recently saw a paper get accepted by a biology journal, and then rejected because the editors found out the authors were associated with intelligent design. That is inappropriate in my opinion.
Eg, using terms that obfuscate the YEC aspects of the paper, which isn't obvious enough for the reviewers to understand what it actually means.
There are also journals which accept anything, with little or no review (eg, some conference papers) and societies which allow their members to publish anything, and use post-publication review to retract papers.
Or sometimes someone with YEC beliefs gets editorial control and start green-lighting YEC papers not on merit but because of those personal beliefs.
Can you point to the incident?
Do you think it was rejected merely because it was YEC? Or because the evidence presented didn't actually support a YEC claim?
The key questions are: Do you think it was controversial merely because it was on ID? Or because the evidence presented didn't actually support a ID claim?
It appears that paper falls solidly in my description of how such works get into print, eg, cherry-picking quotes:
1) added the keywords "intelligent design" after editorial review
2) "naive to the point of being silly"
3) "I can only speculate, but inattention to the details and unfamiliarity with the references might have played a role [in how the article made it into print]."
If the conclusions of the paper have already been demonstrated to be incorrect, but the authors both know those objections and leave out discussion of them, then it's a seriously flawed paper.
Reviewers and editors cannot catch all merit-less papers. The acceptance system is based on a system of trust, including trust that the authors have highlighted possible flaws in their argument. There's also the post-publication review process, including retractions.
Moreover, most reviewers will not have experience with creationist literature (because it's a pseudoscience with no predictive ability), so are not likely to notice a paper which uses certain terms which only have meaning to creationists.
For example, "design" could mean "the result of natural evolutionary processes", but to a creationist it might mean the design of a creator, that is, as short-hand for "intelligent design."
Had they used "intelligent design" at the start, it would have helped the reviewer understand the context. Leaving that out until after the review process ended makes me suspicious that this omission was deliberate.
> William Dembski, who mainly belongs to the frequentist’s school in statistics, regards the fine-tuning argument as suggestive, as pointers to underlying design.
Dembski's "design" is specifically "intelligent design". The blurb for the book cited starts. 'How can we identify events due to intelligent causes'.
Is that the same type of design as the authors mean? Let's go back to the long discussion of what 'design' means:
> A design is a specification or plan for the construction of an object or system, or the result of that specification or plan in the form of a product. ... Humans have a powerful intuitive understanding of design that precedes modern science. Our common intuitions invariably begin with recognizing a pattern as a mark of design.
So, is DNA a 'specification or plan for the construction of an object'? For many proteins it certainly is. So, is DNA a design? According to this definition, yes!
But Dembski's argument is that there must an intelligent designer. While biologists often use phrases like "evolution designed" to describe the results of standard evolution.
Picking one paper from a Google Scholar search, https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-642-71152-7_... says "Immunology is frequently the prisoner of its own semantics. Evolution designed an immune system equipped to recognize all foreign antigens, the structure of which it cannot know in advance." Or in a summary from https://stm.sciencemag.org/content/5/202/202ec148.short "In modern times, we turn up the thermostat if we’re cold, but evolution designed our bodies to acclimate to cold temperatures and maintain euthermia (normal body temperature) without the assistance of external climate control."
Neither claim an intelligent designer involved, so that "powerful intuitive understanding of design" must include designs that were not created by a designer, yes?
Which means that Dembski's use of the term 'design' is not shared by the general readership a biology journal, and omitting the qualifier intelligent design when talking about Dembski's work is a form of white-washing - just like I described when I wrote 'most reviewers ... are not likely to notice a paper which uses certain terms which only have meaning to creationists'.
You write 'they have a large section devoted to ... intelligent design, and the surrounding criticisms and responses'.
I see one paragraph which specifically calls out intelligent design. The next paragraph is on William Dembski. Is Dembski's work specifically ID? Then why wasn't Dembski's earlier work described that way?
I looked at (Olofsson, 2008). It says outright "In a way, the ideas in The Design Inference and No Free Lunch are examples of an exaggerated belief in mathematical methods in the sciences." And cites other publications describing problems in Dembski's work.
The third and last paragraph in this section claims that Dembski's work has been re-formulated as ASC, and implies that the re-formulation overcomes those criticisms.
So, has it? It's not hard to find criticisms of ASC: http://theskepticalzone.com/wp/evo-info-4-non-conservation-o... and https://pandasthumb.org/archives/2019/12/...
"Axe also elaborates on the massive improbabilities of anything like functional proteins arising by natural selection (Axe, 2016). The search space turns out to be too impossibly vast for blind selection to have even a slight chance of success. The contrasting view is innovations based on ingenuity, cleverness and intelligence."
I really don't see any sneakiness going on here.
Also, is it normal to respond to blog post criticisms in a journal article? Otherwise, I'm not sure why you think it is a problem the journal authors didn't respond to blog posts. I've not seen such a requirement before, and I've spent a fair amount of time in academia. On the other hand, from what I see, the authors do respond to published criticisms of ID theory, e.g. papers by Wilkins, Elsberry and Olofsson. So, at least regarding your concern they do not mention the criticisms of ID and provide responses, hopefully this should set you at ease.
Finally, the authors explain why they think ASC overcomes, or at least addresses the previous criticism of ID:
"However, it is hard to apply to many interesting biological applications or contexts, because a huge number of potential but unknown scenarios may exist, which makes it difficult to phrase a null hypothesis for a statistical test."
with the fact that ASC is measured in regards to a specific probability distribution:
"ACS incorporates both Shannon and Kolmogorov complexity measures, and it quantifies the degree to which an event is improbable and follows a pattern."
and this approach is further improved by a later result they mention by Montañez. At any rate, I recommend giving the article a careful read before coming to conclusions.
So, I still do not understand why it is within normal scholarly protocols to post a warning about the article. It is very forthright about its ID connection, in fact forming almost the entirety of the paper around ID arguments and authors, addresses criticisms, cautions about its own conclusions, and seems to be pretty mathematically rigorous and written by well credentialed authors.
As the rebuttal paper puts it, "neither fine-tuning nor intelligent design is required when sample spaces are viewed through the lens of evolutionary dynamics."
I agree. Where in their paper do they consider this standard criticism to ED, and point out that the criticism is un-founded?
Indeed, as they themselves point out (when talking about the creation of the universe, "A probabilistic argument presumes adequate knowledge of (the limits on) the space of possibility. It presupposes that current knowledge provides an accurate, unbiased statistical account of, or means of determining, what may or may not happen by chance." And we don't have that, so can't use this approach to determine if there was intelligent design.
Where has ASC been shown to be an effective of model for evolutionary processes? The relevant paper by Montañez says:
> Following Behe, let us say a system is irreducible if it contains at least three well-matched components that contribute necessarily to a core function, such that removal or mutilation of any of the components causes the system to cease functioning with respect to the core function.
That is a definition, which is good enough for a mathematical model. But does it model biology? No!
It's well-known that evolutionary systems may lead to such systems, therefore the existence of irreducible complexity in a given biological system does not mean evolution couldn't have happened, or that intelligent design must have occurred.
So how does ASC connect to the goals of this paper? Shrug. You're the one who read it carefully enough, yes?
As to "is it normal to respond to blog post criticisms in a journal article".
Why are you even asking that question? My pointing to a blog post was because it was easy to find. I am not an expert in pseudo-scientific research fields like ID or YEC, nor am I an expert in the counter-refutations of that research.
Are you saying that no such counter-arguments have been published in the scholarly literature? Or are you saying that you will ignore me unless I can point to specific literature?
I never would have heard of these ID arguments and authors had I not been following the blog of an evolutionary biologist for 15+ years who has a special interest in pointing out flaws in creationist arguments. Do you really think most biologists are trained to recognize ID authors, or understand when "design" is meant to only mean "intelligent design"?
I get the paper's arguments are debated by biologists. But I still don't understand how this at all relates to the big disclaimer about the authors' connections and claiming because of these connections the paper is not suitable for publishing in the journal, which they have published after a peer review. Makes no sense to me, and I'm really not tracking your explanation.
> Do you really think most biologists are trained to recognize ID authors, or understand when "design" is meant to only mean "intelligent design"?
Why do biologists have to be trained to recognize ID authors? They don't have to be trained to recognize information theorists, or computer scientists, or any other hosts of independent disciplines that could be relevant to biology. And don't the authors clearly point out they are intending 'design' in the sense we attribute to humans, i.e. intelligent designers? Seems that way to me. Sorry, I am dense, I am really not understanding your point. It sounds to me like you want to imply some sort of deception on the part of the authors, but for all the reasons I've stated, this is entirely non obvious to me, and the journal's disclaimer still comes across as light censorship in the form of well poisoning, so I will have to disengage from this discussion. I wish you well.
And you didn't answer my questions: Where should a YEC get to publish their papers? If the paper isn't accepted (because it's contrary to all evidence and has no strong evidence to support it), do you call that decision "censorship"? In 100 years do you expect that we might discover the YECs are right?
Experience with YECs, flat-earthers, and the like show that it's far more than "a smidgen of an expert's time". As you yourself pointed out, it requires learning a different set of rhetorical skills than are needed for a scientific paper.
And that takes a lot of time. (And it seems you have no experience in dealing with crackpots to know this.)
A scientist who enters a "debate" with a creationist, but who is not trained in the specific rhetorical techniques (eg. "Gish gallop", as another commenter pointed out) is going to get trounced - because scientists aren't trained in dealing with charlatans, and rhetorical style can trump competence.
As a result, charlatans gain fame for being able to out-debate a scientist. I'll stress this point, the point of these crackpot publications and "debates" is NOT to advance science but to establish credentials as being a viable alternative.
So, will you answer my questions now?
I'm perfectly fine with that latter viewpoint and don't see where we have any disagreement.
twblalock's argument appears to be that editors are obligated to publish all pseudoscience dreck in order to refute it.
Now, there are plenty of pseudoscientific beliefs which are widely held, but are clearly not backed by evidence.
Consider Hollow Earth theory - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollow_Earth - which is outright untenable; there is no evidence in favor of it and plenty of evidence against it.
Why should I worry about implications of a Hollow Earth when there are so many other more interesting things to worry about?
Going back to pjc50's comment, I am convinced by the evidence that 'bell curve arguments about some races being less intellectually capable than others' are bunkum. To start with, the genetic evidence over the last decades shows that the human-constructed concept we call "race" has no real biological basis. (Racial classifications is another pseudoscience. I linked to a video with more discussion about the flaws in the Bell Curve book.)
The evidence is so overwhelming that, like the evidence against YEC or Hollow Earth theory, it's not worth my time to engage in the topic, much less worth my time to develop the specific rhetorical skills to engage charlatans, frauds, grifters, and true-believers at their game.
There are certainly some who do that, and I commend them for fighting the good fight. But when a YEC proponent presents a tired argument like "If Human Beings Evolved From Monkeys Then Why Are There Still Monkeys?" or "Evolution Is Only A Theory" for the n-th million-th time - I don't have the patience. And neither do science journal editors, who use their freedom of association to decide to not publish a given paper.
I'll now focus on the word "censorship". You must be aware that supporters of pseudoscientific beliefs have all manner of ways to publish their works, hold meetings, get on TV shows, build museums, and more. So by "censor" you are not meaning censorship in any of its usual senses.
I think you mean something more like "there's an obligation to let the honorable opposition speak, in order that truth may ring out." But a YEC isn't there for the scientific truth but rather wants to be treated as honorable (even though it isn't!) in order to influence policy goals in favor of a certain religious viewpoint. I believe by jumping right to "censorship" instead of starting with "maybe it doesn't actually have merit", you end up supporting bad science.
As a concrete example, let's stick with YEC. There are very successful scientists with credentials from top institutions that believe the evidence supports the YEC position. They argue for YEC not for religious reasons, but for honest intellectual reasons. It is worth giving such arguments a fair hearing, regardless of whether they are flawed.
Who? And what are their arguments?
And how have their arguments not been given a fair hearing and found lacking? (See http://talkorigins.org/indexcc/list.html for a list of common creationist arguments and their rebuttal.)
That's what I mean by a concrete example.
> This idea is unsupported by available evidence. In laboratory experiments, viruses saturated with mutations do not go extinct.[10] Sanford also misuses Kimura's mutation distribution; Kimura excludes beneficial mutations because they would have too large an effect, not an insignificant one.[11] Sanford has refused to acknowledge this problem, even after being directly confronted with Kimura's own words.[12] Further, Sanford's assertion that there are virtually no selectable beneficial mutations is contradicted by examples of exactly that, such as lactase persistence in humans,[13] or tetherin antagonism in HIV-1 group M Vpu.[14]
Just to outline the discussion up till now, I maintain that even non status quo views should be given a hearing, if they proceed by well established criteria for good argumentation. You questioned whether any such people/arguments exist, and if so whether they are in fact being unduly censored. I offered the biological fine tuning paper and Sanford as ID and YEC (in turn) examples to support my claim there are well argued minority views held by otherwise highly intellectually respectable individuals that are currently being censored, unjustly in my opinion.
I pointed out that Sanford's reasons do not seem to fall into that category, in that they have been refuted, and he continues.
Once they are given a hearing, and found wanting, do they get another hearing? And another? And another?
How many hearings is enough before we say it's no longer an honest reason?
You answer seems to be "as many as they want, otherwise it's censorship."
"Sanford also misuses Kimura's mutation distribution; Kimura excludes beneficial mutations because they would have too large an effect, not an insignificant one."
This makes it sound as if Sanford is excluding beneficial mutations because otherwise they would disprove his 'genetic entropy' thesis since they are very beneficial and outweigh the amassing of negative mutations.
However, from what I can understand of the original paper, Kimura actually excludes beneficial mutations from his model because they do not match the empirical data, and thus must be much less beneficial or common than his model requires. Here's the cite from his paper: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC383841/
From the abstract:
"The situation becomes quite different if slightly advantageous mutations occur at a constant rate independent of environmental conditions. In this case, the evolutionary rate can become enormously higher in a species with a very large population size than in a species with a small population size, contrary to the observed pattern of evolution at the molecular level."
From the beginning: "Note that in this formulation, we disregard beneficial mutants, and restrict our consideration only to deleterious and neutral mutations. Admittedly, this is an oversimplification, but as I shall show later, a model assuming that beneficial mutations also arise at a constant rate independent of environmental changes leads to unrealistic results."
And near the end of the article:
"To make our analysis complete, let us investigate how the evolutionary rate is influenced by assuming that a certain fraction of mutations are advantageous....This means the rate of evolution can become enormously high in very large populations, kg being directly proportional to Ne, contrary to actual observations."
Kimura is saying that beneficial mutations do not follow his model, because they must be much less common than his model requires, so he excludes beneficial mutations. This sounds to me consistent with what Sanford is saying, unless I am misunderstanding something. If you come to a different understanding of Kimura, please let me know.
At any rate, it is not intellectually dishonest for scholars to disagree. There is no requirement that scholars must agree with the status quo. In fact, that's anti thetical to the entire scientific project. Intellectual dishonesty consists of things like knowingly making logically fallacious arguments and falsifying evidence, none of which it is obvious, at least to me from the wiki article you posted, that Sanford is doing. So it is unclear to me why he should not be regarded as an intellectually honest YEC, and have his views respected as such. I am happy to be convinced otherwise.
I disagree with this: why is it hounding people out of science?
Let's say I publish a paper that literally says "Gender/race/whatever can't do science" or "Group X has N points lower IQ than group Y at the mean".
Who does that keep out of the field? And how? I think it keeps nobody out of anything.
Unlike the cancel-culture playbook (call their boss, name and shame, call the cops citing emotional violence, etc.) publishing a paper like that has virtually no effect on any members of the group in question.
Sometimes you just have to fight fire with fire.
I don't believe canceling culture is culture, even when the culture being canceled is bad.
It's much better to make them illegal, like we did in Italy with facism and nazism, than to "cancel" them.
They are still available as a subject of study, they haven't been cancelled, they have been found inappropriate and as such only a minority still believes that they've been made illegal in absence of good motivations, because anybody can check what are the reasons why it happened.
But the majority of people that were fascist before the war ended in Italy haven't suffered discrimination for being wrong, after it was obvious they were.
Cancel culture should be perhaps be renamed cancer culture, because history has shown that these things never end well.
(I happen to agree with the bans on Nazi symbology, but that has actual force of law and far more consequences than merely complaints on twitter)
I doubt the authors of the letter would so vigorously defend against the ‘cancelling’ of advocates of genocide, exploitation of minors, or cannibalism.
And where are the footprints of this supposed cancellation sasquatch anyway? Brendan Eich? Doesn’t seem to be doing that poorly to me.
Honest question ; why is this thread [flagged] ? I get the answer might be obvious and disappointing, but surely the thread is not being cancelled right ?
The term is "useful idiots". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useful_idiot
Depressing that this even has to be said. Reality has no obligation to be politically acceptable.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25597144
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25597142
Another possibility is that political topics (in this case "cancel culture") tend to be controversial enough, to be flamebait, that these topics tend to get flagged
This is in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html.
Scott Aaronson David J. Bruton Centennial Professor Department of Computer Science University of Texas at Austin
That's the guy who writes the quantum computing posts that regularly show up on the HN front page.
One way to find that out would be to look at https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=docs.google.com.
Another is HN search, of course. e.g. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...