I posted this to garner some discussion but wanted to be clear it's not an endorsement. The new IRB ethics guidelines Nature is pushing here is absurd and would be a disaster in my opinion.
> Editors, authors and reviewers will hopefully find the guidance helpful when considering and discussing potential benefits and harms arising from manuscripts dealing with human population groups categorized on the basis of socially constructed or socially relevant characteristics, such as race, ethnicity, national or social origin, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, religion, political or other beliefs, age, disease, (dis)ability or socioeconomic status.
How do you effectively discuss, and communicate, that for example sickle cell anaemia or lactose intolerance affects people of African descent, or skin cancer is prevalent in people of European ancestry? And that poor and badly educated people are susceptible to bad diets, lifestyles and medical issues that are a consequence of that?
> harms arising from manuscripts
I'm pretty sure the readership for papers in Nature is pretty low, and already read by a target audience of academics that already use a scientific dialect that doesn't cause 'offense'. Scientific language is terse and unambiguous for a reason. Efficient and precise transfer of ideas. "Go the shops and get a loaf of bread. If there are eggs, get a dozen".
"Offense" in 2022 is the social construct here. Not age, or disease, or origin.
> How do you effectively discuss, and communicate, that for example sickle cell anaemia or lactose intolerance affects people of African descent, or skin cancer is prevalent in people of European ancestry? And that poor and badly educated people are susceptible to bad diets, lifestyles and medical issues that are a consequence of that?
Don't worry, it says in the guidelines that race and ethnicity aren't real:
> Race and ethnicity are sociopolitical constructs. Humans do not have biological races, at least based on modern biological criteria for the identification of geographical races or subspecies.
This, of course, is going to be Good News to people of African descent (where sickle cell anemia is ~20x more likely in black newborns than white [1]), Ashkenazi Jewish people (at higher risk for a number of different genetic illnesses [2]), or pretty much every non-white person with lactose intolerance [3]...just to name a few examples.
Everyone is of African descent, depending on how far back you look. So it's a rather vague term, and becoming less useful over time as previously distinct groups become more intermixed.
In studies of conditions like sickle cell anaemia or lactose intolerance or skin cancer it would probably be more useful to relate those to particular genotypes and/or phenotypes rather than relying on which "race" field each experimental subject selected on the intake form.
I was waiting for the first person to say this, which is why I explicitly wrote "black" when describing the disproportionate rates of sickle cell in black children vs. white children. This isn't some rhetorical game. We know what "race" is, intuitively, and we know that it correlates strongly with real-world biological outcomes.
These guidelines are gaslighting people into ignoring broadly useful categories because we don't have a reductive way of defining them. We don't have a biological test that defines race (yet), ergo, it doesn't exist. Except that's wrong. It's absurd.
> In studies of conditions like sickle cell anaemia or lactose intolerance or skin cancer it would probably be more useful to relate those to particular genotypes and/or phenotypes rather than relying on which "race" field each experimental subject selected on the intake form.
If we could do that -- relate the (known) gene for sickle cell to some other "genotype" that captures the racial bias we know exists -- we'd have a strict biological definition for race, wouldn't we?
Aside from that, we know the "phenotype" that correlates with the illness. Black people have it, at high rates.
Black isn't a "race", it's a social category. You can't actually be serious? In America, black includes people of Caribbean descent, people from South America, African-Americans, someone that stepped off a plane from Ethiopia. It's a completely meaningless term in regards to science. You can't actually be serious?
"Blind isn't an actual biological condition, it's a social category"
The same thing can be different categories. Black is social category, and is also a very well defined biological state of the most visible organ in your body, and is associated with certain genes. Instead of repeatedly stating the name of those different genes every time you say something about them, you can simply say the name of the most visible marker of them and still be correct the vast majority of time.
The notion was that a "race" is something of such significant scientific relevance, that not being able to use "Black" to refer to a "race" would be a disservice. But you aren't here saying Black is a race, it is a "defined biological state of the most visible organ in your body". Okay, what does that have to do with race? Did you not understand my previous post explaining that "people who are socially considered Black" is basically a useless scientific criteria outside of its social circumstances?
You seem a little bit more focused on repeating some rhetorical dunk you read somewhere online than actually understanding what is being discussed. Take a moment and actually consider what I'm writing. To repeat the example that I gave before, research on Ashkenazi Jewish diseases is not hindered by calling it research on the specific haplotype group that it is. The poster that brought up Ashkenazi Jews is misunderstanding if not disingenuous. I think you also don't get the difference between what a haplotype group is in this context, and your concept of "race".
If the biological state is "very well defined" then please point us to the definition. Is it based solely on skin hue and reflectance, or are there other factors? Do some people in South Asia with very dark skin meet that definition or are they excluded?
I'm not just trying to be argumentative here. If scientists want to produce high quality, reproducible research then they must precisely define their terms. They can't just assume that everyone has the same understanding and knows what they mean.
> "Blind isn't an actual biological condition, it's a social category"
Uh, this is actually true. Blindness is a legal definition not a medical condition. There are numerous medical conditions that can lead to a person being legally blind.
Those people have a shared biological lineage, with only a relatively short period of differentiation — while they have radically different cultures.
What you’re describing is “black” being useless as a social construct (ie, I know nothing about their culture) but useful medically/scientifically (ie, there’s groupings of medical conditions correlated with that lineage).
I would go so far as to say only racists use “black” as a social construct — and project that the medical groupings are the same.
Are you taking about scientific research (as per the original article) or healthcare delivery? Medical researchers should take the take the time to be precise about characterizing their subjects, and rely on subject-reported demographic data as little as possible. Practitioners and public health have to take a more pragmatic approach, and rely on generalizations for the sake of convenience. Those are different use cases with different best practices.
Actually, sickle cell anemia is disproportionately high only in specific populations of black people. The black race is more genetically diverse than all other races combined. Race has a very poor basis in science vs specific genetic lines correlated with specific geographical regions of genetic drift.
> Actually, sickle cell anemia is disproportionately high only in specific populations of black people.
I wouldn't be surprised if we had, by this point, some more specific way of breaking down the susceptible population (other than the gene itself, which we know). It doesn't change the broader point that, breaking things down by "race" alone, we see huge, impactful differences.
Even in drug development, there's a huge push to break down clinical trials by gender and race, because not all drugs work the same in different ethnic populations. By these guidelines, I guess we're not allowed to do that? Race doesn't exist!
When breaking phenomenon down by race it’s important to differentiate phenomenon caused by sociological perceptions of race and actual biological effects of genetic drift, which are distinctly different. I never said race doesn’t exist I merely said it has a poor genetic basis when we can study the actual sub populations of genetic geographic locale. It’s important to test drug trials across different races in the sense that it’s important to try to capture effects across multiple ethnic populations, but in reality race is merely a poor but easy metric to do. Like I said, black people have more genetic diversity than any other race combined. Sub Saharan African has more drift from Aboriginal Australian than White Norwegian, even though the first two groups are both considered black.
To be clear: the sickle cell trait appears elevated in sub-Saharan Africa and descendants from that area. This also means for example black people from Somali aren’t really affected even though Somali is part of the African continent. Does this help clarify my point?
To do you the favor, as ashkenazi jew (at higher risk for a number of different genetic illnesses) nothing about my understanding of this is predicated upon the concept of a race. That there is a genetically distinct haplotype group that corresponds to many folk that share these traits with me, is sufficient. By the way, I don't think "African descent" is a race by any means of my understanding of the word...
If that's the case I'm sure you can provide a link to a dictionary stating as much. In reality, such haplotype groups, when they even exist, do not correlate with what people call "race".
You mean one of the politically activist dictionaries like Webster, which have lately frequently changed the definition of words like "racism"? I'm sure if it becomes an issue they'll change their definition of "race" too, if they haven't already.
And sure, not all races correspond directly to a specific HG, but all races have clear genetic differences which can be identified and classified purely mechanically. Multi-locus fixation clustering is an example of one such mechanical procedure. Unsupervised, something like k-means will generate racial groups equivalent to the ones humans come up with intuitively.
In your case, the HG in question obviously corresponds to one such cluster.
Well I don't think you'd find a dictionary that ever used that definition, because it's not the definition. And it has nothing to do with your allegation that dictionaries are woke and changing.
I grant you that "Ashkenazi Jew" is not a race by any conventional definition. But no, there's no "genetically distinct haplotype" that defines it. It's "Jews from central and eastern Europe", vs. those from Africa, the Middle East and Spain. [1]
It's a broad, vague category, that is nonetheless sometimes still useful. Just like race. We don't pretend that Ashkenazi Jews don't exist, or are verboten from polite discussion because they are a "social construct."
> By the way, I don't think "African descent" is a race by any means of my understanding of the word...
Well, yeah. I pulled my punches there. I should have just said "black people", but even I felt squeamish about it. A great example of how this stuff confuses language and makes science harder.
That is not what these "guidelines" do. I quoted the part where they deny that race is biological at all. There is simply no other way to read the words. Once again:
> Race and ethnicity are sociopolitical constructs. Humans do not have biological races, at least based on modern biological criteria for the identification of geographical races or subspecies.
This is simply false. It's fiction. A substitution of political ideology for fact. People are attempting to turn "we don't have a precise test for race" into "race does not exist". Even ignoring the fact that today anyone can go to 23andMe and get a genetic test that will assign them a percentage composition by race / ethnic group, it's obvious that race is a useful, if imprecise, real-world categorization. We can acknowledge this without being discriminatory.
This entire conversation is the equivalent of someone claiming that water was a "sociopolitical construct" before scientists knew what atoms and elements were, because we couldn't define it chemically. If HN existed in the pre-times, you'd have people chiming in that "other clear liquids exist and can be confused with water! the classification is incomplete!" as proof of claim.
Is that false? It seems to me to be the current scientific consensus.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3737365/ - "Genetic data sets are used to see if biological races exist in humans and in our closest evolutionary relative, the chimpanzee. Using the two most commonly used biological concepts of race, chimpanzees are indeed subdivided into races but humans are not."
> it's obvious that race is a useful, if imprecise, real-world categorization. We can acknowledge this without being discriminatory.
The approach of genetic scientists seems to be to use the words "ancestry" or "population", which do not risk as much ambiguity or overlap with the meaning of "race" as applied to other species.
>This entire conversation is the equivalent of someone claiming that water was a "sociopolitical construct" before scientists knew what atoms and elements were
A more accurate comparison is that of scientists deciding that Pluto isn't actually a planet, because it no longer meets the criteria. There was a bit of a stir about this but eventually it's been accepted, and rightly so as linguistic precision is a good thing!
Read the links. Because those aren't providing evidence for the claim. They're just repeatedly asserting what I've already told you is faulty reasoning: we don't have a precise genetic definition of "race" today, therefore it doesn't exist.
That's wrong. Regarding the specific papers:
The first explicitly admits that race exists in the opening sentence (oops), then proceeds to say "the two most commonly used biological concepts of race" don't work in humans, therefore race doesn't exist ("There are no objective criteria for choosing one adaptive trait over another to define race. As a consequence, adaptive traits do not define races in humans.")
This is exactly the fallacious thinking I'm calling out. Great example.
The second is not a paper at all, but still admits that there's at least some biological basis for race, even though it's not precise. That's fine -- I'm not claiming it is precise:
> Research indicates that the concept of “five races” does, to an extent, describe the way human populations are distributed among the continents—but the lines between races are much more blurred than ancestry testing companies would have us believe
The third is saying that a single, specific measurement of genetic diversity fails to define race. Again, that's fine. Saying "test X doesn't define race" != "race does not exist":
> These limitations on FST are demonstrated algebraically and in the context of analyzing dinucleotide repeat allele frequencies for a set of eight loci genotyped in eight human groups and in chimpanzees. In our analyses, estimates of FST fail to identify important variation.
Overall, these illustrate exactly what I've said: race is clearly real and we know it when we see it, but it's not precise, and we don't have a biological test that defines it. Those who extend this to "race is a sociopolitical construct" are engaged in a through-the-looking-glass form of motivated reasoning. And it's a very convenient form of reasoning, because if you make it "wrong" to say that race exists, you prevent anyone from doing the research that might produce such a test.
The guidelines include the qualifier "at least based on modern biological criteria". This is true: if you use the modern biological criteria for race, then there is only one human race.
Nobody just says that "observable differences in humans are rarely genetically related to actual genetic differences", they say "race has absolutely no meaning in humans - but here in animals it means exactly what lay-people mean when they say it".
The elites are panicking about the perceived mental limits of the commoners. Normals know the limits of the words they use and actual bigots won't be deterred.
No one is saying it has absolutely no meaning. They're saying that its meaning has its basis in culture rather than in biology.
If you were to collect the DNA of every living human today and send the information to an alien species, would they say "aha, this clearly falls into five (or however many) pretty distinct categories"? Would anyone be able to tell them how to delineate those categories? Based on what I've read, I don't think so, which implies that what is meant by "race" is more cultural than biological.
It feels like this need to over-moderate use of this word is projection from people who grew up with a specific light/dark skin divide that also mapped nearly perfectly onto actual prejudice and inequality. The USA is like that episode of star trek where people were white on one side and black on the other.
People use the word like "are the dutch racially tall or is it their diet?" and nobody means or takes offense.
I doubt this has much to do with US culture or any specific country. Nature is a German/British enterprise. The trend away from using "race" in genetics research appears to be a global thing.
> No one is saying it has absolutely no meaning. They're saying that its meaning has its basis in culture rather than in biology.
And that is 100% false. It's obviously biological in basis. It has useful meaning outside of "culture". We just don't have a reductive definition that satisfies the people who aspire to police our thoughts and language...and science.
I'm not naïve about this. There's obviously this bad history where bigots tried to come up with "biological" arguments that some races were superior to others. It's ugly and wrong. But it's just as wrong to go to the opposite pole of the debate, and try to pretend that race is not a thing at all. Both positions are soft-minded extremism.
We can accept that race is a real, biological thing (however fuzzy), and still say that race isn't a value judgment.
The overwhelming impression that I'm getting every time I look into this is that the concept of "race" is outliving biological meaning or usefulness when applied to humans. Fine if you think that's "obviously" false, but science has a very long list of things that initially appear obvious but are dropped as understanding grows and/or terminology becomes more precise. Invoking obviousness isn't very convincing at this point.
> they say "race has absolutely no meaning in humans - but here in animals it means exactly what lay-people mean when they say it"
Weird hill to stand on in a thread that started with me saying that race is a cultural concept that has little to no utility in science outside of its cultural context, lawtalkingguy.
"Humans do not have biological race" is correct if and only if you change the definition of "race" to whatever definition these academics have made up expressly to make the statement true.
If you use any definition that wasn't specifically concocted to make the statement true (i.e. any definition used by normal people or by actual scientists doing real work, say prior to 1990), it remains false.
What is the implication here, that geneticists decided in 1990 to pack in "real work" in order to work up a grand conspiracy to wipe out an entire concept?
I think if you were doing scientific work in this area, you would want political cover.
"I'm just studying why people whose ancestors grew up in one area are more likely to have a certain gene than people whose ancestors grew up in a different area. It has absolutely nothing to do with race".
No, I'm just guessing that the inflection point of productive scientists being financially displaced by useless academia career optimizers was some time in the last few decades.
Yeah, I agree that's what's probably going on here. Being nincompoops, they've likely redefined "biological race" to mean something tautological, like this:
> biological race is a collection of N genes that clearly separate all races; no such set of genes exists, therefore biological race doesn't exist.
Academics love this kind of stuff. The danger is that this up-is-down wordplay works its way into things that actually matter. Then it's (quite literally) Orwellian. I guarantee that the panel of clerics at Nature won't be so precise in their application of the funhouse rules when it's in their ideological interest to ignore them.
"Black people" isn't a genetic category either. So maybe you should follow these oh-so Orwellian ethics guidelines and define what you mean by that and note whether it was a class that was self assigned by the group or by yourself or third parties and how that assignment was made.
> Don't worry, it says in the guidelines that race and ethnicity aren't real:
Personally I find this criticism incredibly disingenuous. It sets up a strawman and doesn't even bother to consider the author's reasoning.
To be clear, I don't really mind whether "race" is a suitable word to descibe ethnic groups, heritage or whatever, nor do I know much about genetics.
No one would deny that the examples you mention aren't real. I'm not making an argument either way, but if someone were, it's easy to think of potential starting points. Such as, Historical reasons based on connections to racisms or eugenics. Maybe even biological/genetics reasons, like being based too much off of external characteristics leading to incorrect assumptions about heritage. Perhaps these terms over simply something with too many contributing factors to be useful without misinterpretation.
Wikipedia's descriptions of both suggest that the author's description is, at the very least, not uncommon.
> Race and ethnicity are sociopolitical constructs. Humans do not have biological races, at least based on modern biological criteria for the identification of geographical races or subspecies.
The first sentence is a liberal shibboleth: it has no more meaning than "colors (of light) are social constructs", or "embryos are sovial constructs." People will go to war over whether and where the lines of "sociopolitival constructs" get drawn...
...and the second sentence is that war, attempting to deny that genetic or biological information can inform sociopolitical categorizations.
The second sentence is a statement of fact in the world of genetics, phylogeny, and taxonomy. Your criticism of it tells me you are not adequately knowledgeable about these areas of science to participate in this conversation at the level required.
My point is that all three statements are true, but that in the later two cases the otherwise "socially constructed" boundaries are so useful and so meaningful to people that to say they "don't exist" is very odd.
There is no clear boundary between blue and green (and some cultures have a word for green-blue), but nobody goes about saying that "colors don't exist."
Ditto embryos. Genetics, phylogeny, and taxonomy provide definitions, which are socially constructed based on ground truth and utility for purpose. Each definition is "socially constructed" but to say the categories "don't exist" because they are socially defined is nuts.
Scientific language is terse and unambiguous for a reason. Efficient and precise transfer of ideas. "Go the shops and get a loaf of bread. If there are eggs, get a dozen".
I genuinely don't understand what is so problematic about this article. Is the article's guidelines even binding in the first place? Many here seem to be saying that this editoral is promoting censorship, but that's not my interpretation at all. It just seems to be encouraging "respectful, non-stigmatizing language to avoid perpetuating stereotypes", avoid conflating different but similar terms and in particular asking people to be really clear about categories pertaining to people to avoid "potential misuse" by the media. All of this seems reasonable to me, and also good science.
While I haven't checked the codes of ethics cited in sociology or anthropoly, the article suggests that their recommendations aren't completely original. Obviously, since I've not looked into this, I'm not making any claims about this particular point.
While I admit that I did not read the full article in detail, since a number of people here are mostly discussing the fourth paragraph, or are discussing the first sentance on race, I wonder how many have actually read this properly.
Science is only objective. But scientists are subjective and biased. The paper is not speaking about how people feel, they are speaking on the subjectiveness of scientists leading to the harm of minority people.
Politicians and populists pushed out false information, and then squashed anyone that tried to argue against the state as "radical", "harmful" and "against progress and science" at the point of a gun, refused to let people ask questions or have dissenting views which led them to the next step of being allowed to exterminate undesirables because no one was allowed to argue because "The Science was settled"
We could of course also talk about how the centralized control of the science of genetics in the Soviet Union led to mass famines that killed millions and anyone who disagreed was put to death.
It seems to me the problem isn't and never has been science, it is when a single institution, society, or government gets to dictate what "truth" is and "the science is settled" at the point of a gun, not that science gives us answers we don't like.
>Politicians and populists pushed out false information, and then squashed anyone that tried to argue against the state as "radical", "harmful" and "against progress and science"
I agree. This was a political problem which the article is actually trying to address.
> It seems to me the problem isn't and never has been science, it is when a single institution, society, or government gets to dictate what "truth" is...
This is not what the article is advocating.
This seems very rational to me, for example:
"Authors should use the terms sex (biological attribute) and gender (shaped by social and cultural circumstances) carefully in order to avoid confusing both terms. "
Certain lanes of inquiry that Nazi scientists engaged in were engaged in by many non-Nazi scientists. For example, craniometrics, despite it being now pretty conclusively shown to make no difference, was pursued as a science in both Germany and everywhere else. Just because its claims were untrue does not mean that those who honestly pursued it were not scientists. I mean, the hypothesis that head size affects brain size and thus intelligence makes intuitive sense. Those scientists who pursued such lines of inquiry and did so honestly and truthfully, and arrived at the proper conclusions based on the data (which many did), faithfully engaged in 'science'.
Of course, manipulating data for political ends is wrong, and using any evidence you collect to advocate for the slaughter or imprisonment of innocent people is also wrong, but these are philosophical, ethical, moral, and religious questions, not scientific ones.
There is a place for ethics in science... namely in the means in which one applies the scientific method (especially when experiments concern humans or animals). However, the data generated by the scientific method, if examined without bias, even if they're unpleasant, do not cause harm. The question of what to do with any unsavory facts is a question for ethics, philosophy, and religion.
Human-created science carries human biases and so does engineering and even math which is supposed to be pure and objective.
James Burke presented this idea really well in episode 10 of The Day The Universe Changed. Biases sneak in when you decide what you're studying, how you're studying it, how you collect data, how you interpret the data, etc.
The process itself might be unbiased, but that doesn't mean the application of that process is devoid of bias. Anyone remember the stanford prison experiment, the machine learning chatbot that 4chan turned to racism, or however many AIs people have designed that have looked at data and drawn racist conclusions?
Are these things racist because racial stereotypes are objective immutable facts, or because the bots don't understand the context of those stereotypes?
It's probably prudent to figure out the answer to that question before publishing. At least present a few hypotheses to explain the results.
Maybe, but how much does that matter? If the bias of these scientists is leading them to publish incorrect or low quality research, then Nature should reject it on the grounds that it's bad science. The fact that Nature feels the need to publish this is basically an admission that the political ideology of their leadership is not able to stand up to scientific scrutiny.
> What do you think happened in Nazi Germany?
Probably something a lot like this: Powerful institutions sacrificing objectivity to push propaganda and ideology
Yet, people can be harmed indirectly. For example, research may — inadvertently — stigmatize individuals or human groups. It may be discriminatory, racist, sexist, ableist or homophobic. It may provide justification for undermining the human rights of specific groups, simply because of their social characteristics. [..] Advancing knowledge and understanding is a fundamental public good. In some cases, however, potential harms to the populations studied may outweigh the benefit of publication.
"The teachings of the Church must not be undermined by heliocentrism or evolution research, so findings in those areas will be strictly filtered for heresy before publication.
But those findings that support the Church will be permitted, and loudly trumpeted as scientific proof of our dogma."
Well connected - and I think this comparison is becoming more apt each passing day.
These statements and policies are just so… egotistical… for lack of a better word. What happens when we stop agreeing on what the “good” is? How can you claim to respect all humans when you don’t respect the human cognitive ability to disagree?
Exactly, the process of applying scientific results to human society falls well within the realm of politics. We should not allow scientific bureaucrats to have a say in the kinds of policies implemented, but rather limit their contribution to answering empirical questions based on inquiries presented by actual politicians.
Which minority making up 13% of the population ...
One can lie with facts quite easily.
It used to be that liberals could explain this. Somehow in the last 10 years the current crop of policy leaders decided this is too hard to explain so instead we would ban wrong think and everything will be hunky dory.
I don't think this is true. I think a lot of people were insulated from information that created a perception for them that those disagreements didn't exist.
A lot of people are surprised to find out that people who don't live near them don't share their values.
Oh, that was always true. It just wasn’t possible for those people to spend all day yelling at each other for it.
The context of the disagreements was largely limited to newspapers and politicians. Some assumption of professionalism, editing and journalistic integrity was included with nationwide dialogues.
The internet, Twitter, political amplification, bot amplification, media consolidation, etc have made it 1000x worse.
Before, you could disagree on a topic and go about your day. Now you are beaten over the head with every topic constantly to remind you how much you disagree with it.
Some people could disagree on a topic and go about their day. That isn't true for everyone. One person's disagreement is another person's human rights.
A lot of people prefer the comfort of ignorance to the discomfort of that knowledge.
And other people just pretend and seek attention, taking the tiniest discomfort and screeching “human rights! human rights!” left right and centre. All while every government institution and corporation bends over backwards to please them.
A lot of people prefer the comfort of ignorance to the discomfort of that knowledge and even more prefer the comfort of their self made moral high horse from which they chastise everyone they deem unfit.
> I don't think this is true. I think a lot of people were insulated from information that created a perception for them that those disagreements didn't exist.
This is correct. The take away is something more along the lines of: when people don't know they disagree and therefore don't define themselves in terms of disagreement and further structure their lives around disagreement, they more readily work together; disagreements aren't attacks on personal branding/identity.
"A lot of people are surprised to find out that people who don't live near them don't share their values."
Maybe. I feel like those people might be living under a rock. With all the media today it seems unlikely that an individual isn't attacked on at least one belief. I know I see constant attacks on my beliefs.
The problem is that with fast transport, we are extending many laws to the larger geographic area (state or national level), which means increasing the size of the negatively affected groups since we are not homogeneous.
Everyone's gonna tell you this is fully explained by nostalgia and various cognitive biases, actually, cuz that's what we do hyea. But I'll back you all day. I know they literally can't hear it, but I always have the urge to tell Gen Y and later that for a minute in the mid-late 90's we had this shit mostly, not totally - that'll never happen - but mostly figured out. And then they blew it all up, and damned us all to hell. And they'll never, ever know that it happened.
I would go further and say we actually do have quite a bit of hard evidence that societal disagreements were more civil several decades ago. Bipartisan legislation, violent threats against public figures, mass murders, and attempts to violently overthrow an election have all gotten objectively worse since the rise of the internet.
I don't know how much the internet has caused this deterioration, but it is strongly correlated.
Which is a weird phenomenon in and of itself right?
The amount of political violence pre-internet is just an order of magnitude higher than today’s. Most young people (millennials, Gen Z) are completely unaware - unless you studied this stuff - that e.g. the Senate building was bombed in 1983 by a bunch of leftists upset over the US’s involvement in Lebanon.
This is to say, I’m skeptical of the argument that the internet has made things worse. Definitely not better, maybe not worse.
I think it depends how you look at it. The intensity of the conflict has diminished, but I think the scope of the conflict has increased. There are fewer bombs going off, but there seems to be a lot more family estrangement due to political differences.
The partisan lines in my extended family haven't changed for as long as I can remember, but there are fewer get-togethers and more political arguments at the dinner table when they do happen. The aunt and uncle that once were my god parents have now stopped talking to my parents; nobody's political opinions changed but differences in opinion that were once barely worth mentioning are now considered actually evil.
I think it depends on what's considered political. Family estrangement due to religious differences (such as marrying a catholic) was so commonplace it was practically a sitcom joke. There was also family estrangement about potentially dating outside your race.
Heh, my family is mixed Lutheran and Catholic, but that's not the line it split along. My mother and her sister are Lutheran, while their husbands are Catholics. I'm aware of this social schism only in the academic sense; it's not something I've ever personally seen or experienced.
These are people who more or less believe the same sort of thing, but disagree about which party will best implement it. It's a difference that used to not matter very much; my cousins were raised almost identically to me and my siblings. There is no real difference in social or economic class, lifestyle, or community. Simply partisan affiliation.
I should clarify that I'm inquiring whether or not not dating based on religion or race is considered political, because if it is, it brings into question the idea that estrangement for political reasons is a relatively new phenomenon. It might be better to suggest estrangement for political party affiliation might be relatively new.
I mostly agree with this. I think we can describe it as: vertical conflict has decreased (kinetic action up and down the political spectrum), while horizontal conflict has increased (passive action across the political spectrum). Things like actual assassination attempts against major figures in government (Justice Kavanaugh's assassination attempt notwithstanding) are not as common today as they were 40-50 years ago, while separation from peers for political reasons is much more common.
See also the pro-Puerto Rican independence terrorists who in the 1950s a) invaded the Capitol (!) to try to assassinate Congressmen, and b) invaded the temporary White House to try to assassinate Harry Truman (!!). Completely forgotten about in popular memory, despite their murdering law enforcement in the process.
You say objectively, so where's your data? I must be very hard to measure pre-internet violent threats. I know someone who personally told me he'd kill George Bush if he had the chance. That won't be in your records, so how can you measure it?
Just looking at the 90s to today is ignoring an awful lot of context about what political tensions in the US actually used to look like.
Just over 100 years ago, political disagreements in West Virginia over unionization led to a full-scale paramilitary battle at Blair Mountain [1], with upwards of 13,000 people involved and complete with the anti-unionization side bringing in private planes as improved bombers.
> I know they literally can't hear it, but I always have the urge to tell Gen Y and later that for a minute in the mid-late 90's we had this shit mostly, not totally - that'll never happen - but mostly figured out.
I disagree. We didn't have it figured out - it just did not get on many folk's radar because of the differences in network effects prior to the internet. If you were a lonely kid in a farming town who wanted to dress and act like someone from the other biological gender you were shamed or shunned or cut-off. You were the weird one in your town. And that was something that everyone - EVERYONE - else in your town, no matter how empathic or sympathetic, would agree upon.
People who were "odd" just didn't know they could expect a better world. If you were coloured you just sucked up the jokes. If you were gay you hid - or you ran away to places where the network effects were more beneficial. You just dealt with it, and left the normal people to the belief that shit was figured out.
Except for us spectrum types - from about 1997 onwards EVERYONE wanted a piece of us.
Yes, outcasts used the internet to find and support each other online. And we noticed this great thing quite a while ago. But it seems only more recently did we also become aware of the other side... it similarly boosting toxic communities, isolated echo chambers, etc.
If someone wanted to, lets say, "make love with toasters", he'd be looked at weird and gotten over it in the days before the internet. Now he'll find supporting communities and guidance on how to do so...
So yeah, we didn't "have it figured out" and in many aspects, online communities do provide great benefit. But i wonder, if they still are, once all is added up.
This post here is still engaging in armchair psych diagnosis. No behavior, regardless of what it is, is regarded as clinical pathology if it doesn't harm others or the individual.
Someone living a functional, happy, fulfilling life, while having sex with toasters as their main sexuality is a functional, happy person. There is no problem there.
Whereas someone doing this and say, neglecting other life functions, or injuring themselves, or reporting it as a compulsion they would like to stop, has now met the very base level criteria to be regarded as having a mental pathology.
But that's the bar: going through the DSM and matching symptoms doesn't make for a diagnosis if the symptoms don't cause the person unhappiness, or those who interact with them danger or harm.
I wouldn't call being on the receiving end of racial slurs for dating outside your "race", being shunned for being queer, and other such things mere "disagreements". (This was me, as a teen, in the 90s).
It is really easy to romanticize the past, back when you were younger and just didn't have the same grasp of the world. Especially if you had a decent enough life at the time.
> So instead how about this theory: the internet in general was pretty wealth-marked in 1998 (far more than we realized, with our American mythology of universal white suburban middle-classness and “global village” Internet mythology) BUT, of people who were more wealthy in 1998, the most likely to NOT have internalized upper-class practices were the grandfathers from the “Silent” or “Greatest” generations before the postwar “mass middle class”. Our parents were beavery professionals who settled into the suburban cocoon, we knew we were destined for glory (or at least selective colleges) from birth, but THEY were socialized into some pool hall, street gang, farmhand, enlisted man kinda culture where boldness of assertion counted more than patient derivation from shared principles.
> And if the Anglophone internet is ::gestures:: like this now maybe it’s cause it’s less of a professional-class preserve? The dividing line maybe being smartphones where “people on the internet” went from “people who specifically spend $X/mo on it as luxury” to “people with telephone service”? That’s a real possibility, that for all the “Global Village” stuff the wondrous effect of the ‘90s internet was to create a cultural space that was MORE gatekept by wealth and education.
> That’s… kind of depressing, though. “Haha you thought the world was getting better because you were eliminating elitist barriers but actually it’s cause you were making them higher, which is good because the poor and non-elite are disproportionately idiots with worthless ideas and to the extent they’re on top of things the thing they’re on top of is undermining the basis of a good society, and anyway those times were a phenomenon of a narrow early adopter base and you’ll never ever get them back unless you make the non-elite economically and politically irrelevant.”
> Depressing but very well precedented, that’s exactly the arc newsprint, radio, and TV followed before.
Right, social media is the updated form of sensational headlines selling newspapers. And such headlines have always played on difference, resentment and moral values. And the more glaring and outrageous they are the more business profits from them.
This is a serious issue for society to resolve, especially given the clear evidence that many people cannot distinguish sensationalism from fact and are thus influenced by it.
Given the billions of dollars profit involved and the social media addiction problem it has to be one of the most intractable problems of our age to solve.
> many people cannot distinguish sensationalism from fact and are thus influenced by it.
People are generally punished throughout their lives for being ignorant. But lack of comprehension is sometimes feigned. Some people test the tolerance of their behaviour.
The existence of propanda is at once a difficult problem and a profitable problem. There is no bright side to propaganda.
In cases where people are materially punished for their bad behaviour, they shut up and pay attention. I think it likely that future social-media business will require user accounts to have verified identities and users to accept responsibility by risking direct, personal financial loss for their behaviour.
People may call this tyranny, but in fact it's how society works despite their resentment.
People always say this. But I have a hard time believing things weren't more divisive, say, during The Vietnam War.
The internet makes conflicts more visible. It also attenuates them, so fewer people get killed. Physical conflict is transformed into digital conflict.
I’m specifically talking about the 90s and not all pre-internet time periods.
Cold War was over, Berlin Wall came down, Gulf War was over on almost the first day thanks to stealth technology. Comedy was at a high point, music was diverse and fun.
There was a lot more happy and a lot less angry in people.
Speaking of which-- what ever happened to the guy who did the "women be shoppin'" Def Jam parody in the nutty professor? I remember he appeared on some talk shows at the time but it's as if he dropped off the face of the earth in the 2000s, 2010s and the past year.
Whoever he was, 90s comedy was surely the pinnacle by any measure I can think of.
No, there is no universal "good" otherwise wars would not occur. The American Civil War and WW2 are pretty classical examples of massive disagreements over the legitimacy of certain classes of humans. Had those wars not ended the way they did, black people would still be property, and Jews, Romani, and LGBT people would have been exterminated. There are still people who wish that we lived in that alternative history. Democracy is always a compromise, and when that breaks down, you get wars.
You are conflating object and subject... the thing and its perception. Good can exist even as we disagree over its definition. Some people are simply right, and some are simply wrong. We are not gods.
Not likely. Slavery had already disappeared in the Northern states due to its inefficiency and internal contradictions. Secession was an attempt to prop up slavery by isolating it economically. It was never going to work.
Slavery as an institution disappeared in other countries around the same time.
It was free markets that destroyed slavery, as slavery simply could not compete with free labor, and slavery was incompatible with industrialization.
In the South, by 1860, the only industry where slavery was still profitable was cotton, and that was coming unglued.
> slavery was incompatible with industrialization.
From what I understand, early industrialization gave a temporary boost to slavery. The cotton gin and textile factories greatly increased demand for cotton at a time when industrialization had not yet addressed the harvesting of cotton in the fields.
The cotton gin did indeed revive slave produced cotton when it came out. But it was hardly industrialization. It was a hand cranked box. But that was not enough by mid century, and the slave economy was foundering again.
Eli Whitney's patent depicts a hand-cranked cotton gin, but I believe by the mid 19th century they were making much larger cotton gins powered by water wheels or animal power (e.g. four mules walking around a shaft.) And on the cotton consumption side of the industry, mechanized thread spinning and power looms were by then a mature technology. The industrialization of textile industry began in the 1700s, particularly in the UK where they imported huge quantities of southern cotton.
The textile industry was being industrialized - but it wasn't being operated by slaves. An educated workforce is needed to operate industrial machinery, and it was illegal to teach slaves to read.
Industrialization and slavery are incompatible.
Forced labor has never been able to compete with free labor.
I guess my point is that industrialization doesn't/didn't occur uniformly across entire industries; some aspects of industries were mechanized before others, temporarily increasing demand for manual labor in the per-industrialized segments to keep up with the machines. Textile factories create demand for field workers, steel mills and steam engines create demand for coal miners, railways create demand for workers that lay rail, etc.
Another example, in an alternate timeline perhaps, might have been the development of the western territories. Instead of Chinese immigrants building most of the rail, it probably could have been a very profitable venture for slave owners. Slave labor was used for railway construction in the south, so it's not far-fetched.
I agree that slavery was destined to lose in the end, but I don't think industrialization is a direct path to the economic obsolescence of slavery, because slave labor can compliment partial industrialization.
I seriously doubt slaves would have been profitable for the western railway. Blasting tunnels was very skilled work, and very dangerous. Would you want slaves, who hated your guts, handling nitroglycerin? You'd need as many armed guards as slaves.
Presumably the blasting itself could have been done by specialist free men. But the blasting itself is only a small part of the process. First you need to drill the holes by hand, that means beating a rock drill with a hammer for hours, just for a single hole, and you need dozens of holes for one blast, countless thousands if you're trying to go through a mountain.
There were steam powered machines for drilling rock at this time, but they were cumbersome and temperamental, most of the drilling was still done by hand. Hence the folklore of John Henry racing a power drill to see who could work faster. I believe most of the drilling in the west was done by hand, by Chinese immigrants.
Then there is the matter of the rubble. Explosives only break the rock, who hauls that broken rock? That's more manual labor.
The nitroglycerin would be of necessity readily available. Do you really want your slaves around this stuff? Think they might steal a bit and put it in the overseer's tent at night? You'd have to spend more money on armed guards and manacles than just hiring free men. Slaves were also costly to buy.
One small note: LGBT people can not be exterminated in the same sense as other minorities, since new LGBT people will always born, regardless of how many of us would be exterminated, up to and including 100%.
I'm still not sure what you're trying to say. My first guess is that climate change deniers are the biggest culprits of trying to make science fit a contradictory world view, and my second guess would be anti-vaccine advocates.
In philosophy good is known as a simple notion, that is it cannot be reduced further. We cannot define its length, breadth etc., even adding very or little to it doesn't put a measure on it. Saying '0.5' or '10%' of good is essentially meaningless.
Good and bad, etc. are metaphysical constructs and thus we have a fundamental problem when using these terms in connection with Science which intrinsically and inextricability measurement-driven.
We need to be very careful using these terms when we're referring to or discussing Science and scientific research or conflict will be inevitable.
> In philosophy good is known as a simple notion, that is it cannot be reduced further
That is the position of some philosophers – it is G. E. Moore's famous doctrine that the good is simple, undefinable, irreducible to anything non-ethical – which Moore defended through his "open question argument", a staple of undergraduate introductory courses on the philosophy of ethics. However, it is worth pointing out that far from all philosophers agree with that position–indeed, my armchair impression is that, in contemporary academic philosophy, objectors to Moore's position outnumber his supporters.
> Saying '0.5' or '10%' of good is essentially meaningless.
That's another topic of philosophical dispute. Many classical utilitarians were quite convinced it was meaningful to speak in that way – hence Jeremy Bentham's felicific calculus. I believe that approach has few supporters in contemporary philosophy – but, while there is widespread agreement it is a failure, there is far less agreement on exactly why. And, Bentham's felicific calculus is not entirely dead – outside of philosophy, it is the direct intellectual ancestor of the economist's utility function.
Having been brought up on G.E. Moore's Principia Ethica not to mention the work of Russell and Whitehead I'd have to say what I said as a first-pass comment.
However I agree with you, things are never quite as simple as they seem when one grinds them fine, also time and ideas move on. In discussions such as this I like to use the analogy of Newton's Laws of Motion which after hundreds of years still work well for 'everyday' use but they're all but useless in other endeavors such as our phones' GPS - to get there we had to progress through Lagrangian and Hamiltonian mechanics to Relativity over several hundred years. The same applies to philosophy and philosophical argument and it's why I find it so interesting.
As you're aware, like other disciplines, philosophy is built on earlier work - from the Ancient Greeks through Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, Hume and so on, so it's not unreasonable to expect philosophy to have moved on from G.E. Moore's time. Nevertheless, I had to start somewhere and Moore's points are reasonably relevant.
In the light of modern-day thinking it's not unreasonable to examine Bentham's and Mills' ideas and philosophers should continue to do this no matter the era they're working in. That said, it's not a matter of discarding old ideas but that of refinement.
we cannot deprecate utilitarianism ideas without taking into account what they have contributed to both philosophy and to the world in a practical sense - as clearly all modern cities incorporate utilitarian principles to varying degrees. If we are to deprecate them then we must give explicit arguments for doing so. As you correctly point out we should question Bentham's felicific calculus and similarly I'd add to that the then notion of measuring 'happiness' in units of utiles and 'unhappiness' in even less familiar disutiles.
It made sense to use these calculi in Bentham's time. Then the conceptual framework encapsulating the notion of utility would have been better understood and appeared more useful if there were ways to measure the effectiveness of its outcomes. Nowadays we've moved on for reasons too complex to discuss here and I won't mention them as they will be familiar to you.
Anyone who would insist in trying to do quantitative measurements in this now-simplistic and anachronistic framework would seen a little daft. So quo vadis? Let's look at a parallel: physics has moved on from the Newton's comparatively simple notion of force to the more sophisticated useful concepts of energy and momentum, similarly so too has philosophy but unlike physics, it has yet to come to any widely accepted conclusions in this particular matter.
I believe Bentham and Mills were on the right track however, they were bedeviled in their efforts (as we still are) to 'quantify' abstract notions - those that we're taking about here. Putting a 'measure' on abstract notions is needed if we're to put them to practical use in the real world. (Perhaps we should wheel in A.J. Ayer or his modern cohorts here for we've a language/nomenclature problem: people need to have a comprehensive understanding of any new language - i.e.: the meaning of any new definitions.)
Thus, for this purpose, it seems logical to me to separate the 'theoretical' approach of Moore, Russell, Whitehead et al from this new thought, and it needs to be a radical break. Berkeley's questioning the existence of the quad's tree or Russell's questioning the reality of the table at which he's sitting through doubts about the viability of his sense datum have no place here.
(Physicists didn't make progress in QFT (part of Quantum Mechanics) until they learned to solve seemingly intractable math issues such as 'infinites' (akin to dividing by zero). This was a damned hard effort and took many years but it on...
> In discussions such as this I like to use the analogy of Newton's Laws of Motion which after hundreds of years still work well for 'everyday' use but they're all but useless in other endeavors such as our phones' GPS - to get there we had to progress through Lagrangian and Hamiltonian mechanics to Relativity over several hundred years. The same applies to philosophy and philosophical argument and it's why I find it so interesting.
This is where I don't agree. Philosophy and physics are very different.
In physics, at some point certain major theories become established and universally accepted. Pretty much all physicists accept Einstein's theories of relativity as correct–up to the limits of our current ability to test them.
By contrast, in philosophy, professional consensus is vastly more elusive than in physics. The same debates rage from generation and generation, without ever coming to any clear resolution. This is especially true when it comes to highly controversial areas such as ethics:
Are moral statements cognitive or non-cognitive? If cognitive, is their truth objective or subjective? If objective, is the ground of their objectivity natural, non-natural, or supernatural? And, if their truth is objective, which proposed normative ethical theory best approximates that truth: Utilitarianism? (Act, rule or preference?) Deontology? Virtue ethics? Natural law theory? Some combination of two or more of them? Something else entirely?
Philosophy, as a field, is nowhere near reaching consensus on those questions, and consensus seems just as far away now as it did a century ago, and will probably seem just as distant a century from now.
That's not to say no issues ever get resolved. The IEP reports [0] that "...philosophers seem to have reached a consensus... that indirect doxastic voluntarism is true" – and I have no reason to doubt its report. But indirect doxastic voluntarism (that we have some measure of indirect voluntary control over what we believe) is not an especially interesting doctrine. The far more interesting question of direct doxastic voluntarism (whether, at least in some cases, we have the ability to make a direct voluntary choice of what to believe) – is as disputed as it ever was.
Another example of a resolved issue – during the 1950s and early 1960s, logical positivism was enormously popular in (Anglophone) academic philosophy. However, consensus was soon reached that, at least in its classical "meaningfulness is verifiability" formulation, it is a self-refuting position – by the 1970s, essentially everyone had moved on from it, and that consensus has endured from then until now. So, at least occasionally, professional consensus can emerge either that (a) some minor theory is true, or (b) some major theory is false. But consensus on the truth of major theories seems to perennially escape us – quite unlike the case of physics.
> rather it's the milieu in which they're now operating which is seemingly putting strictures on what they do. Like fashion, a set of cultural boundary conditions is determining what they actually do in practice. (BTW, I accept with Academia in the horrible state it's currently in at present that challenge is more than unusually difficult.)
One philosopher might be a moral anti-realist, who believes that morality is simply a subjective expression of emotional attitudes. Another may be a moral realist, yet be convinced that morality can be objectively defined in terms of some theory of the natural sciences (such as evolutionary psychology). A third may be a divine command theorist, convinced that morality can be objectively defined as obeying God's will (as revealed in the Bible or Quran or whatever). All three have reasons to reject Moore's positions, but those reasons are rather different in each case. So the fact that Moore's position is widely disputed, is not a sign of "groupthink". (For what it's worth, I p...
Thank you for your reply. I realized that to respond to your comment in a way which would ensure I wasn't misunderstood meant that my usual HN style would be inappropriate, and for that I'd have to adopt the discipline's more formal nomenclature. As that needed a carefully-worded reply I put it aside for consideration, regrettably however I forgot about it until this moment. I've also just now realized that I'm close to the timeout limit for comments to this story and I reckon I at least owe you the courtesy of an acknowledgment, hence this rushed comment.
In philosophy (at least in my experience) documenting one's words so they aren't misinterpreted can take an inordinate amount of time, therefore this isn't the detailed reply that I'd have liked to have written. It, however, will have to do. Anyway, HN isn't the right place for ongoing philosophical discussions because of its timeouts. That also brings me to one of my pet subjects about all online forums that I'm familiar with and that's that they become long and unwieldy in very short order, thus late entries, irrespective of merit, are often depreciated or ignored. It's an ongoing grouping problem [Gestalt laws, etc.] of significant proportions which remains to be solved.
You're right, getting a consensus in philosophy is more difficult than in science. However, I'd also argue that in science a consensus is often difficult to achieve—that is, until there's a good understanding of the physics involved and sometimes that takes centuries to achieve. Nowadays, the leading edge of physics is pretty much a 'bleeding' edge, as it can hardly be said that there's any widespread consensus about how to progress forward and make truly significant advances. Especially given that not much progress has been made since the general agreement about the Standard Model of some 40-plus years ago and that recent LHC experiments haven't much changed the situation.
We don't know each other nor do we have knowledge of each other's background and experience, thus pitching comments at each other until that info is synced makes communication somewhat hit-and-miss. Moreover, it's made considerably worse due to philosophy's many and diverse fields. As you've likely gathered, whilst I've studied the subject it's not my daily bread and butter. Mostly it's been science/technology that's kept me off the street, thus it would be fair comment to say that I'm unlikely to be up to speed in many of philosophy's specialist branches.
However, I've found that all the branches of philosophy I've studied—analytic, political, ethics/moral philosophy, formal logic, etc. and even existentialism—have benefited me greatly, especially so in that they've prevented me from forming strictured or dogmatic ideas about any one aspect of the discipline. It seems to me that in philosophy it's necessary, in fact almost essential, to be open and flexible to new and changing ideas, however that doesn't mean that one has to dispense with or change one's understanding of its fundamental foundations.
That said, given my background and introduction to the subject, my roots are principally in the analytic tradition. I'm old enough to have watched Bertrand Russell on television on many occasions as a youngster and I was impressed with the clarity, precision and succinctness of what he said. In hindsight, it's clear to me that Russell's influence on me at that young age was very significant and lasting, and thus it's why I studied philosophy.
Those roots and that analytic background is why I'd differ from your comment that 'philosophy and physics are very different', some aspects of philosophy are different to physics and others not so much so. Here, it is essential to be very specific in one's definitions and to carefully detail the scope of one's argument...
> Take the Many Worlds theory of Quantum Mechanics
Some will say that, to be strictly correct about terminology, QM is a theory, but many worlds is an interpretation of it. The theory belongs to physics proper; the interpretation belongs, not to physics, but rather to its allied discipline, the philosophy of physics. (Many extra-philosophical disciplines have allied subfields of philosophy – philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of science, philosophy of biology, philosophy of law, philosophy of politics, philosophy of medicine, philosophy of psychiatry, philosophy of education, etc, etc, etc.)
These interpretaions belong in "philosophy of physics" rather than "physics proper", because (1) they are (at least for now) untestable in practice; (2) the mathematics is (largely) the same. Something like string theory is more "physics proper" than "philosophy of physics", because even though (1) is also true for it, (2) is false.
But, not everyone is so careful about the boundary between "physics" and "philosophy of physics". Your example of physicists who say "philosophy has nothing to say to them" and then embrace many worlds is an example.
> The same goes goes for logic's acceptance into philosophy, Russell argued that that logic was actually an aspect of mathematics and that basically it didn't belong in philosophy
We can study logics as formal mathematical systems, and to that extent logic indeed forms part of mathematics (mathematical logic). However, while the mathematical study of logics is a vast topic – if we ask the question "does this mathematical logic accurately model how (some aspect of) human thought actually functions, or ought to function"? – that question is beyond the proper bounds of mathematics – and that's where the boundary lies between philosophical logical and mathematical logic.
> After reading your reply, it's clear to me that we have somewhat different philosophical outlooks
I get somewhat pedantic about precise conceptual distinctions (including trying to correctly deploy "the discipline's more formal nomenclature", as you put it), but I feel like you treat these distinctions in a more impressionistic way than I do. I think that's one difference between our approaches.
> If perchance we ever managed to spend an afternoon together discussing philosophy then I'd reckon we'd get along just fine.
>research may — inadvertently — stigmatize individuals or human groups. It may be discriminatory, racist, sexist, ableist or homophobic. It may provide justification for undermining the human rights of specific groups, simply because of their social characteristics.
Do these people think there are motherfucking X-Men living among us who we want to save from stigma? These kinds of statements read like the authors don't actually believe people are meaningfully equal.
Exactly. What happens when some research may feel socially dirty but is actually a huge boon to some group? I can’t stand the privilege required to say you know better for some other group. Let groups of people stand up for themselves and call out BS when they see it. How can the hegemony possibly understand the feelings of minority groups?
> Do these people think there are motherfucking X-Men living among us
In fact, there are. You know, we all have genetic differences, and most studies do not account for these genetic differences. So a medicine that helps one person might cause drug induced Lupus in another.
Lithium is a good example of this stigma. I have Schizoaffective Bipolar Disorder and Lithium is constantly forces on me even though it does not work. I am what they call a "Lithium Non-Responder" and this has bee shown to be linked to varying genetics.
The stigma is that researchers still think there is only one genetic human.
And what do you think the X-Men was about? It was about genetic difference and mental health. It is about trying to have people see that we have value that others cannot see because all they see is the illness.
Yes, been there. It gave me lupus symptoms. I have much better luck eating only seafood and no plant oils. These omega 3's inhibit these sodium channels as well as the calcium channels implicated in mood disorders.
It strikes me as a tricky set of not always terribly related concepts. As a Christian I believe all human beings are equal in inherent dignity. As an American who likes the Anglo-American legal tradition I believe that all people ought to be equal before the law, even though that’s observably not the case. As someone who has performed hundreds of tech interviews and worked in this industry a long time, I don’t believe people are remotely close to equal in developer ability or productivity and I don’t see any way they could be made to be without bringing high performers down to the lowest common denominator.
"These kinds of statements read like the authors don't actually believe people are meaningfully equal."
Right. Which is the problem. If differences between humans were down near the noise threshold, none of this would be an issue. What qualities should be valued or devalued, rewarded or punished, is an ethical and political issue. Measuring them is a scientific one. "Nature" is, supposedly, in the science business.
> In some cases, however, potential harms to the populations studied may outweigh the benefit of publication.
I see a counterfactual claim ("may outweigh") and therefore an opportunity for some causal identification, i.e. a scientific answer!
An RCT would be ideal, but we might also look to the literature on attitude change in general to see how new information impacts discourse and attitudes. Here's a few things off the top of my head:
I think that in general, researchers find racial/prejudicial attitudes very resistant to change, either in an anti-prejudicial or "confirm my existing biases" direction...
Moreover, how can any of these be enforced, and by whom? At least you know who your church authority figures are and who to criticize. Where do we even start if we let Twitter outrage decide whether science is potentially harmful and should be allowed or not?
This is worse than religion because it’s pretending to be rational. And many many people will be fooled.
>This is worse than religion because it’s pretending to be rational. And many many people will be fooled.
I hate to make the comparison because it's such a trope, but, IMO this is one of the most insidious things the Nazis did to indoctrinate the population:
They did things like send people into schools and they would cherry-pick the weakest, least intelligent, least-liked Jewish kid they could find and set him alongside the most athletic, attractive, smart, well-liked Aryan looking kid.
They'd bring them both up in front of the class and from that point on, they'd use "scientific" discussion and observation of their qualities to convince the kids that the Aryan kids were superior in every way. I'll tell you what, I was a pretty savy independent thinker and empathetic kid, but I really think I might have fallen for that type of technique, masquerading as science.
Guarding against overgeneralization is not something we need new scientific heresy rules to prevent. It's already part of being a good scientist. It's also a subjective bar, and adding "inappropriate" to that makes it entirely fungible.
Moreover, I've spent the last 2+ years horrified by how willing "scientists" have been to generalize to wild real-world conclusions from miniscule data based on Twitter outrage, so I have zero faith that a board of clerics is going to use these rules with magnanimity. Whichever political faction that controls the board will be tempted to define "inappropriate" to mean "whatever conclusion we don't like".
Just to make it concrete: run an RCT that shows that masks don't have any effect on Covid transmission? Good luck getting that published in a top journal, even today. With these new rules, literally anyone who doesn't like the conclusions will claim that the result is an "overgeneralization". There will be no study large enough to satisfy the clerisy...unless The Science says something approved, of course.
---
Edit: and lest you think I am exaggerating with my example, consider the following, directly quoted from the new guidelines:
> Harms can also arise indirectly, as a result of the publication of a research project or a piece of scholarly communication – for instance, stigmatization of a vulnerable human group or potential use of the results of research for unintended purposes (e.g., public policies that undermine human rights or misuse of information to threaten public health).
They're literally saying that they're open to censoring research that might be "misused" to "threaten public health". And they've defined it broadly enough that pretty much anything that displeases "a vulnerable human group" can be covered. Convenient.
Good thing this practice has since ceased, and is entirely absent from movies and news reporting, where care is taken that even the most maligned groups are represented by, well, representative individuals, instead of cherry-picking the most unlikable members.
No, but the trappings of science have been used to dress the new religion of the west. Same old shit, we just don’t call it god now, we call it “the science”.
We are romans in the early 5th century. What’s coming won’t be pretty.
Isn’t it crazy how easy it is to see but how inevitable the outcome ultimately is? Why must future generations repeat the mistakes of the past? This is the human condition.
It's too powerful of a manipulation and control tool for the elites to just give up on. If we can just replace "god says" with "science says" and have the same result of getting the sheep in line, then of course it will happen.
Our technology has improved, but our brains? We've still got the same brains. Still susceptible to the same biases and fallacies now as we were two thousand years ago.
Specifically, we have to look at Rome cira 306 to 337 AD to understand when the floodgates opened and were never able to be closed again. Once that sort of thing happens, there's no going back. From there, the moral decay sets in and the writing is on the wall.
Is it not? I certainly don't know or understand even a fraction of what would be considered established science, but if a credible expert tells me that something is supported by established science I will believe it over something like religious dogma. I consider myself to be a "believer" in science.
Science exists in a perpetual state of being supported or challenged by evidence. If the clergy ("credible expert", Nature) make it impossible to challenge the orthodoxy ("established science") then it _is_ dogma.
By being a "believer" in science as you've laid it out, you aren't believing in science as a process, but science as an institution.
>Science exists in a perpetual state of being supported or challenged by evidence
One problem with that. Some sciences, particularly soft or social sciences cross broadly into culture and "ways of life". There are certain things today that cannot be questioned without getting shouted down or deplatformed. So challenging the current widely held scientific facts can be career ending.
That's why there are quite a few people who don't consider some of such fields sciences. I have half a heart to agree with that stance. That's not to say those fields don't have value, but science is the process of building reproduceable, falsifiable evidence. If you can't do that, then you aren't practicing science.
There's clearly some cache to calling your field a science, because we see it so often. They'll even emulate Sciencey Things to maintain the illusion, but like you say, they don't produce testable, falsifiable models. Political Science is a perfect example of a study that's very far from a real science.
Actual science will accept when it's been proven wrong. Much of we have these days isn't that. And that includes many folks working in what would be considered the hard sciences.
"Believe" is an overloaded word. In one sense, it's simply the content of your mental state. In basic epistemology, Knowledge is defined as "Justified True Belief", i.e. when your mental state matches the actual state of the world for the "right" reasons (this is surprisingly tricky to make formal, see [1])If your head is a memory cell, your beliefs are the actual 0s or 1s inside it.
In other senses, "beliefs" are an identity, and some people like to think theirs are more based on science than others. "Believing" in science amounts to adhering to a broad package of ethical and lifestyle choices that references science to various degrees, their followers believe this gives them more legitimacy than other lifesyles or ethics systems, but the actual degree to which they are justified by science varies enormously.
To take 2 extremes :
(1) Taking a stance against fossil fuel is "believing in science" because (good, credible) science says those increase carbon footprint which in turn disrupts the climate in a huge variety of ways, technically this doesn't necessarily imply to oppose fossil fuel as science doesn't have normative component (science doesn't care - in the strictest sense - if human civilization is destroyed or signficantly harmed), but with only an additional few, normally agreed-upon, assumptions you can get there.
(2) Taking a stance against biological-women-exclusive sports is "believing in science" according to the stance followers because a few studies of shaky foundations and questionable funding says there is no unfair advantage to those who had male puberty, although there are tons of other studies that disagree.
Those who say (loudly) they "believe in science" are usually using "believe" in the non-philosophical sense, and the viewpoints they love to push most are usually (2)-like rather than (1)-like.
So far as I can tell, the Gettier problem is exactly the same as "I believe in Science" - There's a fallacy of false equivalence in "X is a justified argument, X||Y is therefore justified because of the justification in X", or something like that, I'm not sure what to call that fallacy.
When you evaluate the truth of the whole argument, you'll find that it's not a "Justified True Belief" because the truth does not flow through the justified prepositions.
There are extremely few things (if any) we can know for certain. Thinking in terms of boolean logic like this appears very primitive to me.
In my opinion, the only rigorous way to improve our knowledge, is to employ Bayes Theorem, and Bayesian thinking in general.
You and I may have different prior on a topic. We may see the same evidence, but end up believing different things because of the prior. As long as we state the prior, that is good and fair. If the evidence contradicts my prior, I should lower the confidence I have in my belief, even if the prior was big enough that I still believe the same thing.
Unfortunately, what often happens, is that people lock themselves into believing things absolutely. If you lock some prior probability to 1, Bayes' Theorem has n way to let you update that belief.
This is especially common when it comes to beliefs related to religion and identity. In fact, this is one way to define religious belief. Anything you believe that you will NOT stop believing regardless of evidence, could be defined as religious.
If you believe in God, and we discover that Heaven is not on the other side of the starts, the believer just modifies non-core parts, and claims that "God is everywhere and nowhere".
If belief in racist oppression is what defines you, and you find that most individuals are not individually racist anymore, you can just introduce "Structural Racism" that claims that hard work, staying married and maths are racist.
The question is how do you define bad results if you include provisions for socially constructed feelings about whether results are socially and politically correct or not.
I hope hope hope hope hope underneath all the crummy filler language and what appears to be rationalization for a distinctly unscientific expansion of editorial discretion to suppress unsightly factual results, Nature is simply saying: don't study social constructs, it's not scientific, a phrase with which I think I loosely agree (without deeper thought as to whether there are valid situations to study socially constructed groups that can't be better expressed by studying the non-social-construct characteristic).
If that's all this is, I think we'll be fine. But I have a real hard time believing that Nature would allow a paper that found there to be cognitive discrepancies between people with genealogical lineages that closely align to the socially constructed races, under these new guidelines, since arguably the "effects on society" might be negative.
And I know people who would ignore the science and fight to the metaphorical death to suppress that type of information regardless of the terminology used. So, understandably, I'm not super confident this will be handled carefully and appropriately. Notice there is no burden of proof or scientific rigor required to determine that the effects some some research are negatively impacting society. A presumption that they might is all that's needed. I worry scientific pursuit will suffer.
> Nature is simply saying: don't study social constructs, it's not scientific, a phrase with which I think I loosely agree
A lot of the time, when someone in the Humanities use the term "Social Construct" they mean a categorization scheme that have overlapping categories, especially when used by someone in a way they don't like.
Someone with some level of understanding of natural science knows that this problem apply applies to a multitude of category schemes, if not most. In biology, one could argue that our definition of a "species" is a social construct. Even alive today, there are plenty of animals that exist on a continuum between different "species", and over evolutionary time, every living organism exists on this same continuum, and at the start, there were even no clear distinction between living and non-living.
The person in the Humanities like to use the word "essentialism", while still giving Humans special knowledge, when in reality we all live on a continuum that includes monkeys, fish, rocks and oceans. We're all recombinations of atoms and ions.
Still, there ARE clear and real patterns in this madness, and most of science is precisely about understanding these patterns. While we DO exist on a continuum, most of the continuum is empty, and especially if we consider only one snapshot of time.
A biologist can talk about "tigers" without making an effort to consider ligers and tigons, or pre-historic ancestors of modern-day tigers that were similar but not identical to modern tigers.
Biologists will also use the terms male and female tigers, knowing that the intermediaries are vanishingly rare. The continuum between them is there, but mostly empty.
Or a physicist may even speak about a "red" laser, knowing perfectly well that the wavelength used to separate "red" from "orange" is a "human construct".
So, if someone claims that "biological sex" is a human construct, they may be correct in some uninteresting way, but are primarily just obfuscating.
I guarantee you that if the guideline documents in TFA came to the attention of Twitter, they'd already be dated, and somebody would start righteous-indignation-tweeting to get their personal army to boycott Nature until they change it to say what the mob wants it to say. And I'm not being flip. For once.
Many religions start out pretending to be rational. It just so happens that a millennium or two later, science may have advanced to a point where religion starts to look more and more allegorical.
>>Advancing knowledge and understanding is a fundamental public good. In some cases, however, potential harms to the populations studied may outweigh the benefit of publication<<
Are they really advocating for self censorship in the sciences? And when the whims of societal taste turn or, God forbid (and yes, I put this with all irony intended), Twitter decides it doesn't like an opinion for five minutes... does science self censor then as well?
> Shor, citing research by Princeton political scientist Omar Wasow, suggested that these incidents could prompt a political backlash that would help President Donald Trump’s bid for reelection. At the same time, he noted that, historically, nonviolent protests had been effective at driving political change “mainly by encouraging warm elite discourse and media coverage.”
If people are truly worried about electing people like Donald Trump they'll broaden education and, in particular, education in the hard sciences like maths and computer science to bolster critical thinking and logic. At that point we won't elect reality show hucksters who blatantly lie and foment sedition.
That's a fascinating paper. There are a couple of issues I take with it. Their dismissal of recruitment of engineers because they use them recklessly in terror attacks doesn't seem to hold much water. If They were recruited on the promise of heaven by Jihad, then logically, they would want to die by Jihad. And the small sample size, plus their own mentioned Saudi Exception seem to flaw their own paper, even to them.
But it's still fascinating and a great paper, thank you for sharing! Plus the over representation of both Nazis and Islamist terrorist groups is fascinating. I'm completely geeked out! Thanks again!
There could be straightforward explanations, such as: People from poor countries are more likely to study fields that are seen as pragmatic, meritocratic, and lucrative, and where jobs don't require things like mastery of English, or family connections.
Perhaps, but I suspect that the orderly personality type that often contributes to people studying engineering can, in excess, lead to a totalitarian world view.
"If people are truly worried about electing people like Donald Trump they'll broaden education and, in particular, education in the hard sciences like maths and computer science to bolster critical thinking and logic. At that point we won't elect reality show hucksters who blatantly lie and foment sedition."
If our choices at election time continue ro be between a shit sandwich and a shit sandwich without the bread, we will continue to have similar issues. Lesser of two evils and all that.
Ps which one has the bread is just a matter of perspective for each individual.
We should get past the belief that those who aren’t on our political side are just lacking education and not thinking properly.
You might despise the candidate (and to my opinion most candidate can be despised in many ways), but that doesn’t put all their voters at the candidate’s level, nor preclude supporters from “using” their candidates to push a specific aspect.
To me that’s the lesson times and times again, when we think some candidate is obviously non viable and we’re just dumdfounded as they’re elected.
Indeed. This religionization of political beliefs where everyone must be without sin lest they be thrown into the pit has time and again handed elections to awful people and driven wedges further between people who really aren't all that different.
I understand your point and it's well taken. Just to point out, as I feel I misspoke or was mischaracterized by my statement, because I hold the Republicans in disdain doesn't mean I hold any less disdain for the Democrats. I haven't seen any shortage of political hucksters on the stage, "he who must not be named" (for fear of moderation) is just the latest example.
Sorry if I came off as a single sided zealot =) I, like most people, just want a little compromise and moderation, and most of all respect out of my politicians. What I don't want is fealty to a political party first, like a bunch of gang bangers.
The galling thing about this was that he was fire by a white-controlled organization for saying “people think rioting is bad.”
Rioting continued and democrats didn’t stand up and say “rioting is bad,” and as a result of that rioting the criminal justice movement was set back a decade.
I have a white friend who once asked me “why do you always sound like you’re defending my racist uncle?” (I think I made some comment about understanding where Trump voters are coming from re: immigration since people in my own home country would think the same way.) And I’m thinking “why do your views on race and immigration seem to be a proxy for your conflict with your uncle?”
The only reference to Twitter on the page is in the footer "Follow us on Twitter" which links to https://twitter.com/NatureHumBehav. Where are you getting this Twitter stuff from?
There is a difference here. One was to maintain the power of a theocracy while the other is to protect the lives of individuals. Is it the right course of action? I don’t know but the motivations are definitely not analogous.
A theocracy is nothing more then a "protect the rights of individuals" for contract safety (marriage), primitive justice and against more then absolute ruler overreach, going heywire and corrupt.
This whole machine will reincarnate again and again though. With fairytale or without, the part of society not trusting the judical system to uphold contracts and social safety, will make there voices heard in pseudo religion after pseudo religion.
Let me venture into the testable area. I venture the guess, that the more reliable and longer existing a states social safety net is, the more religion will be absent from its society. It should also corellate with reliability of the justice system.
Salvation of every last immortal human soul was a deep and abiding concern of the church. A lot more so than the "woke" of today who would happily brand newborn babies of the wrong color into oppression hierarchies.
> "The teachings of the Church must not be undermined by heliocentrism or evolution research, so findings in those areas will be strictly filtered for heresy before publication."
This is actually a bit of a historical myth that due to anti-religious bias prevails widely.
Contrary to widespread belief, the works of Charles Darwin were never on the Catholic Church's Index of Forbidden Books, nor did the Catholic Church ever state that Evolution as a theory could not be believed, but rather emphasized that a few specific theological events (a garden in which man fell) must remain, though the lead-up to those events was not rigidly defined. This is also why a Catholic priest is responsible for the Big Bang theory.
As for heliocentrism, this is also baloney as it was initially proposed by Nicolaus Copernicus, who was not censored for his beliefs[1], and also served as a Catholic canon (religious member but not necessarily a priest). This idea was backed by Galileo using astronomy, however, Galileo was tried for writings other than his heliocentrism that were arguably heretical (including attacks on the Pope within his work) and not necessarily for the heliocentric view itself, as seen by the Church making Copernicus mandatory reading in some universities for astronomy courses.
[1] The Roman Inquisition would later censor it for a short time, however, their main requirement was that it definitions be changed from fact to theory, and the Roman Inquisition actually used 13 mathematical arguments of their own from the astronomer Tycho Brahe, versus only 4 theological ones. The Spanish Inquisition never censored the book. Even though Brahe was later proven incorrect in his arguments, he was still one of the most accurate astronomers of the era, and Johannes Kepler (of the Kepler Space Telescope fame) would later use his measurements to create the 3 planetary laws of motion. In any event, it would appear that this censorship of Copernicus requiring revisions before publications was due to Copernicus' overconfidence in potentially erroneous mathematics, rather than a theological dispute.
Try here for a purely academic overview (no religious Catholic websites or other "biased" commentators for this), that was also very recent. There are plenty of other sources, but this was just what I found first that was academic in scope.
I would also recommend reading about Nicolas Copernicus (geocentrism before Galileo), as well as Georges Lemaître (Catholic Priest who had idea for Big Bang), and Gregor Mendel (before Evolution, experiments with Genetics).
Example:
"In Spain, new cosmological discoveries and ideas were discussed at both the universities and at the Casa and Consejo. For example, Jerónimo Muñoz (ca. 1520–1591), who taught astronomy and mathematics at the universities of Valencia and Salamanca, was one of the many European scientists to observe and write about the supernova of 1572. For Muñoz, the supernova challenged the Aristotelian notion that change was impossible in the celestial realm. In some of his unpublished work and letters to other European astronomers like Tycho Brahe (1546–1601), he espoused an understanding of the relationship between the celestial and terrestrial realms drawn from Stoic philosophers. He denied the existence of celestial orbs and instead asserted that the planets moved through the heavens like birds through the air or fish through the water. He also discussed Nicolaus Copernicus’ (1473–1543) heliocentric system with his students, although he did not endorse it (Navarro-Brotóns 1995, 57). In fact, as Victor Navarro-Brotóns has shown, “the work of Copernicus circulated freely in sixteenth-century Spain, where its technical and empirical aspects were greatly admired and used” (Navarro-Brotóns 1995, 63). In 1561, the statutes of the University of Salamanca specified that in the second year of the astronomy course the professor must teach either “the Almagest of Ptolemy, or its Epitome by Regiomontanus, or Geber, or Copernicus,” and that the students could vote on which text they wanted (Navarro-Brotóns 1995, 55). In 1594, these statutes were amended and the teaching of Copernicus was made mandatory, no longer subject to the vote of the students (Navarro-Brotóns 1995, 59). The 1594, statutes were reproduced with no change in 1625, despite the prohibition of Copernicus’ work by the Roman Inquisition in 1616 (Navarro-Brotóns 1995, 60). In fact, De revolutionibus was “never placed on any Spanish Inquisitorial index” (Navarro-Brotóns 1995, 63), which does not mean Spanish astronomers were free to adopt heliocentrism but does indicate that it was possible to teach and discuss Copernicus in Spanish universities. As Navarro-Brotóns notes, only one Spanish scholar, Diego de Zúñiga (1536–1597), is known to have actually endorsed the Copernican system. Others used the Prutenic tables, which were calculated using Copernicus’ mathematical models, and other parameters drawn from De revolutionibus, in much the same way that Copernicus was taught at the University of Wittenberg (Navarro-Brotóns 1995, 59; Westman 1975). Finally, interest in Copernicus spread outside universities, because the Prutenic tables and other technical aspects of Copernicus’ work had applications in navigation. For example, Juan Cedillo Diaz (ca. 1560–1625), who studied at Salamanca and became chief cosmographer at the Consejo de Indias and professor at the Mathematical Academy in Seville in 1611, made a free Spanish translation of the first three books of Copernicus’ De revolutionibus sometime between 1620 and 1625 (Granada and Crespo 2019; Navarro-Brotóns 1995, 63; Esteban Piñeiro and Gómez Crespo 1991)."
Bearing False Witness: Debunking Centuries of Anti-Catholic History - https://smile.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1599474999 is a good overview with lots of references for further research.
For heliocentrism the article "The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown and Down-and-Dirty Mud-Wrassle" by Michael F. Flynn from the Jan/Feb 2013 issue of Analog is pretty good. Here's a scan online [1].
The Church's position at the time was that God made the universe, and if empirical evidence from observing that universe clearly showed that it did not work the way the Church thought the Bible said it worked, then the Church must have misinterpreted the Bible.
Galileo's problems came from a combination of several factors, none of which stem from proposing a non-geocentric universe.
1. Galileo's heliocentric theory wasn't actually better at explaining observations than geocentric theories were. Galileo, like the Church believed in an intelligently designed universe created by an all-powerful God. He believed that such a God would choose laws of physics that were beautiful and elegant.
Where his heliocentric approach would require something non-beautiful or inelegant to fit observation he dismissed the observations as optical illusions or observational error.
It's commonly believed that the moons of Jupiter and the phases of Venus rule out geocentric theories, but that is not quite correct. They rule out the Ptolemaic system which was the leading geocentric theory, but they do not rule out the Tychonic geocentric system.
2. He had a very big ego.
3. He was an asshole. He was very intolerant and rude to his rivals and to those he considered to be his inferiors. And thanks to that big ego "inferiors" included pretty much everyone else.
4. He was a celebrity who was regularly invited to hang out with the rich and powerful.
5. He had an atrocious sense of politics. He either failed to realize or ignored that some of the people he was an asshole towards had the wealth and power to make his life miserable if he didn't stop being an asshole toward them.
Another good introduction is "Worldviews" by Richard DeWitt. It's a introductory book on the philosophy of science but a big part of it discusses this.
without handy references, I believe that part of the significance of Church dogma on stars and celestial mechanics, was that astronomy was widely practiced by many civilizations to varying rigorous results, but that science and most all abstract learning was also connected to religious or mythological meanings. Different societies, in particular the overall Muslim world of today, viewed the movements of the stars and planets with different meanings, which sometimes were taken very seriously. This connects to the imagery of the three wise men at christian nativity, who follow a star but give their gifts to the newborn.
Social prestige associated with higher learning was a subject of rivalry and competition, as most things were in those places at that time it seems.
I've been reading some old books lately including:
* From Atomos to Atom
* From Alchemy to Chemistry
* The Main Currents of Marxism Part 1 (not about Marxism - just a bunch of, mostly Christian, philosophers)
* The Skeptical Chemist
* Some of Descartes' work
I've noticed two notable things. First, the early Christian thinkers were _extremely_ logical. They did not shy away from human observation and philosophy, they embraced it. They spent a a majority of their study time reconciling human knowledge with scripture to try and understand their place in the world. Churches sponsored a lot of this research and invested heavily in making their religions consistent with human knowledge.
Second, not only did the church invest heavily in making their religion consistent with human knowledge, all of humanity did the same. So much effort went into reconciling the early greek philosophers with modern observation and religion. From medicine, to law, to religion, to alchemy - everything was very inter-dependent and few (if any) bodies of knowledge could stand on their own, they appealed to facts from diverse philosophies to justify their stances.
You see a pattern in the 1500s-1700s where, in a very short period of time, humans got _very good_ at attaching philosophy to physical phenomenon and reconciling what was observed with what they believed. During this period, pretty much every branch of human understanding underwent unprecedented massive paradigm shifts. Huge amounts of what was "known" were, fairly quickly, toppled when extremely foundational beliefs were questioned (i.e. the 3 element theory vs. the 4 element theory). A lot of folks were fairly invested in what they "knew" and didn't react well to the rug being pulled out from under them. It wasn't just "the church" that had a bad reaction to some of these thinkers; medicine rejected many early scientists like Paracelsus (generous to call them scientists) striping them of their credentials, jobs, etc.
I guess what I'm learning is that European history was a lot more messy than I thought it to be (shocker, I know). And it's really fascinating seeing these currents of thought develop over time. It's pretty amazing that it took us nearly 2000 years to question Aristotle and, once we did, the rapid progress that followed. It's only been about 400 years since we thought maybe there were 3 elements instead of 4, and we are already seriously considering colonizing another planet.
Arthur Koestler in "Sleepwalkers" cites numerous criticisms from Vatican backed scholars that strongly suggest even though Copernicus may not have faced the unbridled legal wrath of the Church, that his career and reputation were severely tested for doing so.
See my comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32597071 for information about how Copernicus was received academically from an academic's point of view. Also worth recognizing is that it was Protestants, not Catholics, who were by far the harshest towards Copernicus, as Copernicus was harshly mocked by Luther and his predecessor Melanchthon.
Melanchthon:
"Some people believe that it is excellent and correct to work out a thing as absurd as did that Sarmatian [i.e., Polish] astronomer who moves the earth and stops the sun. Indeed, wise rulers should have curbed such light-mindedness."
"The eyes are witnesses that the heavens revolve in the space of twenty-four hours. But certain men, either from the love of novelty, or to make a display of ingenuity, have concluded that the earth moves; and they maintain that neither the eighth sphere [the celestial sphere] nor the sun revolves. … Now, it is a want of honesty and decency to assert such notions publicly, and the example is pernicious."
Luther:
"People gave ear to an upstart astrologer who strove to show that the earth revolves, not the heavens or the firmament, the sun and the moon….This fool wishes to reverse the entire science of astronomy; but sacred scripture tells us [Joshua 10:13] that Joshua commanded the sun to stand still, and not the earth."
Also recognize your book is from 1959, before the internet, before many books were digitized, and before many of these things were debunked.
I'm a person of faith. At the same time, we point out that the religion of "scientism" exists whether people admit it or not, especially when they claim that they "believe in science". Correct faith and science are not contradictory. And those people mix up belief in the unseen with blind faith without proof or evidence.
I think your view on this is being influenced by the limitations of the language you're using.
When a religious person says they "believe" something, it means they operate as if it were true even though they have no evidence to indicate it as such (a.k.a. the god of the gaps).
When a scientist says they "believe" something, it means all evidence gathered so far indicates that it is true, but if more data comes in and a different conclusion is drawn, then the belief should be abandoned.
These are two entirely different concepts, but in English we tend to just say "believe". The scientific "belief" is more akin to a mathematical theorem:
- if X, then Y
- All data indicates X is probably true, so for now I believe Y.
- New data indicates X is probably false, so I no longer believe Y.
And of course when you're engineering something, it's not that simple because you need contingencies. X may have a 99% chance of being true, but you still need to have a plan for for that 1% case.
None of this is something that religion considers whatsoever; with religion, a belief is true and anything contrary to that belief is considered false, even if that thing is a measurement of reality itself. There are still huge swaths of people who believe a person thousands of years ago was immaculately conceived, walked on water, turned water into wine, all things that you and I know are inconsistent with reality. But all contrary evidence simply doesn't matter, the "belief" remains. This is the antithesis of science.
> When a religious person says they "believe" something, it means they operate as if it were true even though they have no evidence to indicate it as such (a.k.a. the god of the gaps).
In practice religious (or spiritual) people are a rather diverse bunch and it's not all that helpful to paint with too broad of a brush.
I will point out that in at least Christian theology, "faith" and "trust" are basically synonyms. In the original Greek of the New Testament, it's literally the same word.
In that sense, making choices based on trust in God or making decisions based on trust in science are really fairly similar. And quite often they're not contradictory either.
For example, both science and scriptures say worrying is bad for you, so someone can try to minimize worry based on faith in science and faith in scripture simultaneously.
I'll also point out that a lot of the "scientific" objections to religions boil down to metaphysical disagreements about the nature of observation of the nature of a (notional, at least) deity. I put "scientific" in scare quotes because science itself only makes sense given some assumptions, like the axiom that it's reasonable to assume things do not exist until it's definitely proven they do. That's a valid opinion, but it's not scientific as such. Another common assumption is that a creator and a fossil record (for instance) are somehow incompatible. As if a creator can create the cosmos but a fossil record is a bit much somehow.
Anyway, I think folks would find each other more thoughtful and reasonable if they'd take some time to listen more. There are lots of misconceptions in all directions in these discussions.
Yet your opinion falls in the same criteria on limitations of the language you're confining it to. "believe in science" can mean what you said, i.e "it means all evidence gathered so far indicates that it is true, but if more data comes in and a different conclusion is drawn, then the belief should be abandoned"; however, it was also exemplified during COVID as "You're not allowed to question it no matter what merit you have, no matter how logical and methodical your perspective is and regardless of the content of your argument; science is untouchable". The latter is absolutely a religion, but worse, it is a religion that's masquerading as real science, the former, dictating public policy. Far more dangerous and destructive than your run of the mill religion/faith.
>"You're not allowed to question it no matter what merit you have, no matter how logical and methodical your perspective is and regardless of the content of your argument; science is untouchable"
Is this what happened, though? Outside of the politicization of COVID, the majority of the conversation that was anywhere near this was more simply "if you are going to question the people who are providing evidence, you must provide evidence to the contrary". It wasn't that science was untouchable and the change in guidance proves that not only was that not the case but it was shown that science was not untouchable and regularly changed with new information so long as that information was backed by evidence.
Absolutely, here is Stanford Prof that was cancelled. All of his viewpoints were grounded in science, but he was skeptical and simply raising the concerns such as "There is no high quality evidence for masks and we should conduct further studies" (Emphasis mine, he didn't say there was no evidence, just not good enough). Worth watching his interviews on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpnbMIOvbjc
That's not how evidence works. He either needs to show evidence that they don't work or he has to show why their evidence is unsatisfactory. Based on that video, he's done neither. Saying "nuh uh, your evidence is bad" is not an argument against the evidence.
> was immaculately conceived, walked on water, turned water into wine, all things that you and I know are inconsistent with reality.
All those things are completely consistent with reality. Every year there are virgin births[0] (not immaculate conceptions[1], which is a term specific to the birth of the Virgin Mary herself), water turning into wine[2], and people walking on water[3].
I think what you mean is, the specific details of those miracles, as described in the Bible, have not been observed since, and they would have required a succession of extremely improbable quantum events. No one disagrees with the notion that those events were scientifically unlikely, but unlikely events are still consistent with reality.
Or gamblers, or entrepreneurs. I don't know why you'd single out schizophrenics. Well, actually I do know why, but I still don't think it's a reasonable example for you to highlight.
It's a totally different level. Believing a shitty product will make a successful entry on the market does require some level of self-delusion, but nothing like believing a cluster of extremely low probability hypothesis about the world. The closest comparison to that, again, is a schizophrenic.
He isn't predicting the future, he is reflecting on the past. Is it likely that all of those unlikely events will happen to the next person born? Definitely not.
Is it possible that they happened to one of the billions of people who lived? Yes. Even more so if that person happens to be God incarnate who created the universe.
In fact, the chances of these highly unlikely events actually goes up if you consider the person claimed to be God and did miracles to demonstrate his divinity - highly unlikely events is the exact thing you would expect from someone proving to be God
> highly unlikely events is the exact thing you would expect from someone proving to be God
That's circular reasoning. "I believe a extremely low probability event because that's what we should expect from the entity I believe in". If I go with that, I can create any weird belief.
You're right. People forget things like: Jesus' disciples witnessed his miracles and wrote about them, other nonbiblical scholars wrote about Jesus and his miracles, there was recorded evidence to his death, there were witnesses to his ascension, 11 of the 12 apostles died for believing that Jesus was God (the 12th was Peter, marooned on Patmos, also for believing Jesus was God)
None of those things are true. The earliest known manuscripts of any biblical text post-dates Jesus by 300 years. There are no eyewitness accounts in existence. Non-biblical scholars did not write about Jesus and the only mentions that we have of his existence are from someone who was shown to forge documents (Josephus) and Roman documents using general terms that refer to a criminal as "someone claiming to be the Messiah" rather than a specific person who was making those claims. We have no evidence that any of the apostles actually existed or died for believing anything.
> The earliest known manuscripts of any biblical text post-dates Jesus by 300 years.
It's easy to make bold statements, but that definitely doesn't match what most historians, Christian and secular, claim. (And I believe several of your other claims have been largely discredited, even by secular historians.)
Bart Ehrman, a New Testament historian who is well known for his critical eye on this stuff (he was a Christian but later became an atheist), dates the NT books between 50 and 120 AD, and from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Testament, the latest date scholars give is 150 AD. Other scholars date the NT books from between 70 and 90 AD.
The 300 AD date you're referring to may be when the New Testament was approved as "canon" by the church. Again from that Wikipedia article:
> The earliest known complete list of the 27 books is found in a letter written by Athanasius, a 4th-century bishop of Alexandria, dated to 367 AD. The 27-book New Testament was first formally canonized during the councils of Hippo (393) and Carthage (397) in North Africa.
> By the time of Justin Martyr (ca. 100-165 AD) and Irenaeus (ca. 130-202 AD) we find extensive quotations from New Testament books; while the First Letter of Clement, addressed to the church in Corinth, quotes Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians.
>Bart Ehrman, a New Testament historian who is well known for his critical eye on this stuff
He is not known for any such thing. Ehrman's claims are all on the historical chain of evidence for the books, not whether the books are true accounts. I'm very familiar with his work. In fact, in his book "How Jesus Became God", he suggests that there's no evidence at all, historically speaking, that Jesus ever even claimed to be the Son of God or anything supernatural and that, if he did exist, he was just a preacher. Jesus was not mentioned by any of his contemporaries or the Romans at all and they kept excellent documentation of official events of their empire.
Either way, by your own admission, there were no eyewitnesses. If the books are dated 120 years after the birth of Jesus, then the people that wrote them were not around when those events occurred.
Also, your evidence is simply showing that the books existed. It doesn't prove or support the idea that the events in them were true. Your argument here is akin to saying that Ghostbusters is a true story because it takes place in NYC and that's a real city that exists now.
Quoting a book as evidence that the book is true is tautological.
> Quoting a book as evidence that the book is true is tautological.
I wasn't arguing that the books were true. I do believe that, but you'll note my reply above simply tries to show that your bold claim that "the earliest known manuscripts of any biblical text post-dates Jesus by 300 years" is widely discredited.
I didn't "admit there were no eyewitnesses" at all -- my response wasn't related to that. Overall it seems like your reply had very little to do with my response above?
Yes, you did admit that there were no eyewitnesses. You stated:
>Other scholars date the NT books from between 70 and 90 AD.
Jesus lived to be 35 years old. Even if you take the most supportive version of this statement, the earliest NT book was written over 35 years after Jesus' supposed death and there's no evidence to support the idea that they were written between those dates. Even the Wikipedia link that you sent says that there's no evidence for it:
>The New Oxford Annotated Bible states, "Scholars generally agree that the Gospels were written forty to sixty years after the death of Jesus. They thus do not present eyewitness or contemporary accounts of Jesus's life and teaching."
I'm not a Christian, but it is a fallacy to assume that the only way to arrive at truth is through controlled repeatable experiments. Watch this lecture to get a more nuanced view on the subject: https://youtu.be/If3cNUixEBM
> When a religious person says they "believe" something, it means they operate as if it were true even though they have no evidence to indicate it as such (a.k.a. the god of the gaps).
That is not true. As I pointed out, belief in the unseen, with evidence, is very different from believing without evidence.
Check out this lecture for a more detailed and nuanced explanation[1]. It details some of the inherent limitations of science.
Tell me how your believe is better than someone else's 'blind faith'?
Science is falsifiable - anything pushed forward by science has a way to be disproved built in (other wise it is not science). That's important because then you can update your worldview based on new evidence.
For the same to be true of religion - it must be falsifiable: it MUST have a way to disprove itself via experimentation... oh wait... the (Christian version) does...
Go do this test: "Kings 18:20-40": When you've soaked your bull in water and it doesn't magical catch fire by praying... I'll be waiting. (Or I'll be waiting video proof of the Christian god - that should be repeatable by many people... right?)
MAKE THE BULL CATCH FIRE WITH YOUR PRAYERS OR GTFO WITH YOUR NONSENSE
Just because that prayer lead to a miracle in the past, doesn't mean you can demand that God grants the same miracle again in different circumstances. That's trying to treat God as something like an appliance rather than an agent, and even an appliance would have instructions for when it would work.
If I may reverse the burden of proof, and be equally unreasonable, let me say that if you think that there is no afterlife, then you should go kill yourself. You're going to die at some point anyway, and this way you'll get your answer right away. It's a 100% falsifiable position, but unfortunately very few people who have done the necessary experiment have been able to communicate their findings to the scientific community afterwards.
>Just because that prayer lead to a miracle in the past, doesn't mean you can demand that God grants the same miracle again in different circumstances.
Why not? If a god has shown that they can intervene in the physical world we live in, why shouldn't we be able to test that?
This assumes the presupposition that god exists and is real which, as is the entire point of this thread, relies on a belief without evidence. You can't use the actions of a "god" as evidence for the existence of that god without evidence of those actions.
I'm not about to watch a 50 minute video to find out something that I already know. The entire premise of a biblical/textual god is based on the idea that there is no evidence and that's why "belief" and "faith" are required. Unless you have specific evidence, the initial statement stands.
You do realize that in verse 40 the unbelievers were slaughtered, right? Can I pick a miracle with less severe consequences?
Let's do Luke 5:4-8
Jesus tells fishermen to cast their nets and catch 2 boat loads of fish. Before you discount this miracle, I'll point out that Simon believed Jesus was God after this - but watching Jesus heal people is Ch 4 didn't convince him.
Great. Now for the miracle. It's at the nearest grocery store. In the fish department.
Beautifully put. What I loved about science growing up is that it valued truth and knowledge (or such was the impression I had of science in history). If someone argues for self-censoring truth/knowledge to avoid XYZ values today, they would've been the same people to argue self-censoring the truth about heliocentrism yesterday. It's a tragedy to see science fall prey to dogmatism and I hope we can see some kind of new field emerge that has the courage to pursue truth first and worry about implications second.
The first part is just basic science: don't draw generalized conclusions from data that was poorly sampled.
But I agree the second part is questionable. Scientists shouldn't decide whether something is right or wrong. They just conduct experiments, gather data, draw conclusions, and share the results. Obviously they should consider the ethical impacts of conducting their experiments, but beyond that, all valid conclusions should be welcome.
Yeah I never really got the whole "ableist" thing; for example, obviously someone who can't see is less capable of performing visual tasks than someone who can. Does that mean shipping a device with a screen is ableist because not everyone can take advantage of the fact that it has a screen?
I know many people that are sensitive on this issue and none of them would call that ableist.
I'm sure they exist but focusing on the extremes of a movement don't do anyone any favors
For example, most people on this site are a fan of open source. How would they feel if anytime the subject came up people talked only about the ideas of Stallman?
> I know many people that are sensitive on this issue and none of them would call that ableist.
I think this overton window keeps shifting and there is no one courageous to say "No, this is unreasonable". It is not just happening in this one instance but the entire culture; we have now instituted things like "birthing persons". We can't even call "Fathers" and "Mothers" anymore. We are too coward to speak up and risk our jobs. The chilling effect is real.
This house of cards is going to fall hard and fast.
This reminds me of the short story in “I, Robot” (Asimov) about the robot who could read people’s minds.
The robots in that world were hard-coded to be incapable of injury humans, and the mind-reading robot considered emotional damage “injury”. Of course the robot got into a paradox where it had to hurt someone’s feelings, so it just…died.
Perhaps it's wise for everyone to carefully distinguish physical injury versus emotional damage. Perhaps it is true that we can tie ourselves into knots if we treat emotional damage as completely equivalent to physical injury. And, perhaps also, notorious serial sexual harassers groping apparently hundreds of women (such as our man Asimov) have something of a vested interested in teaching us all that emotional damage in important ways doesn't count.
What's interesting to me, revisiting Asimov after medical school, is that we are unable to create a workable definition of pain that is absent an emotional component. This is of course not to claim there are no important ways that physical violence and non-physical emotional harm differ.
I think that's a pretty unreasonable comparison. There's a difference between religious dogma which makes claims about reality, and norms or ethics. Discrimination and harm as discussed in this document isn't about factual findings, but is about "superiority or inferiority of one human group over another" (i.e. a value judgement), "the rights and dignities of an individual or human group" (i.e. social norms and conventions), "text or images that ... disparage" (again, value judgement), "embody singular, privileged perspectives" (an issue of viewpoint, not disagreement about facts in reality).
None of these prevent researchers from sharing their evidence-based conclusions, only the projection of value, status, dignity, or privilege onto those findings. As a society, we can agree to be civil, respectful and uphold particular values while we investigate objective reality.
Trying to claim that an ethical stance for non-discrimination is equivalent to creationism or geocentrism is making type error; one makes claims about norms and how we should behave, and one makes claims about how the world works whether irrespective of our beliefs or behavior.
But that’s not what the quoted text is saying. It’s saying research whose outcomes could be “harmful” (where the definition of “harmful” is very broad) may have harms that “outweigh” the benefits… implying it shouldn’t be done.
And now you’ve attached a high leverage handle to research allocation/gatekeeping and put it in deeply politicized hands that don’t care about the research.
The question isn't whether abeppu's stance is valid, the question is: does their stance fully encompass the argument.
elefanten appears to be suggesting abeppu's stance is a Motte - that they're arguing a more defensible position (you shouldn't be able to publish research claiming one race is superior to another) rather than the real Bailey (anything deemed "harmful" can be filtered from scientific literature). The difference between these two arguments is pretty significant.
> And now you’ve attached a high leverage handle to research allocation/gatekeeping and put it in deeply politicized hands that don’t care about the research.
It's the editorial board of a journal. Gatekeeping published research is literally their job, always has been. And I think it's fair to conclude from their vocation that they care more about the research and less about the politics than all the non-scientists who've chimed in to express disagreement with the politics of their decision...
Comparing an article outlining bunch of guidelines about language and requests to be careful and clear about sampling to the medieval Catholic Church is no more reasonable than comparing everyone decrying the concept of ethical barriers to research to Dr Mengele.
> And I think it's fair to conclude from their vocation that they care more about the research and less about the politics than all the non-scientists who've chimed in to express disagreement with the politics of their decision...
No, it's not fair to conclude.
A lot of us as practitioners in the field (engineers, data scientists, etc) must daily confront the conflict between social expectation (from managers, customers, etc.) and reality. On the other hand, an academic occupying a largely bureaucratic role within institutions that suffer from severe political monoculture might very well care more about their social standing than truth.
Anyone who has been paying attention will know the subtext of these guides. It is not an unreasonable assumption to see this as targeting legitimate scientific research that undermines the present political zeitgeist.
I think that specific quote is actually ambiguous, as 'research' doesn't make a clear separation between the actual investigation and evidence vs the researcher's presentation of them. I think your characterization (about advocating that some research itself should not be done) is not actually what the document says.
So far as I can see, it's focused on _publication_ of particular _content_ (read: text) describing research.
> In some cases, however, potential harms to the populations studied may outweigh the benefit of publication.
> editors reserve the right to request modifications to (or correct or otherwise amend post-publication), and in severe cases refuse publication of (or retract post-publication)
So far as I can see, they're not advocating for new restrictions on what research ethically can be done, but they're saying that publication can on its own cause harms. And they seem to be focused on how findings are framed and communicated, rather than the objective content of the findings, with the implication that a suitably written article using respectful language would be considered publishable.
> authors should use inclusive, respectful, non-stigmatizing language in their submitted manuscripts.
> Biomedical studies should not conflate genetic ancestry (a biological construct) and race/ethnicity (sociopolitical constructs)
> Authors should use the terms sex (biological attribute) and gender (shaped by social and cultural circumstances) carefully in order to avoid confusing both terms.
So far as I can tell, e.g. one could study sex-linked difference in brain development, and find that one group is faster/more accurate/whatever on some task with subjects in an lab conditions, and so long as one (a) consistently distinguishes whether one is referring to sex or gender and (b) uses respectful and non-stigmatizing language, it would not be found to be unpublishable on these ethical grounds. But if in a conclusion section after having looked at sex differences, one throws out a broad gender stereotype "..and this validates the common belief that women are terrible at X", editors are entirely within their rights to insist on a modification.
This seems entirely reasonable, and is a kind of natural cover-your-ass stance for the modern era, where if they let through some great, ground-breaking research with a single racist or misogynist or homophobic statement tacked in somewhere, inevitably that part will be trotted out by trolls and politicians insisting that their weird stance is backed by science because of one line in a Nature article they didn't actually read.
This strikes me as an incredibly bad faith interpretation of the article. I do not understand how this widespread determination to pretend that scientific research is "just another religion" got so popular but I do understand the practical effect is to convince people that their superstitions are as valuable as research, which is just going to lead to another Dark Ages. Nevertheless, your immediate leap to political conspiricy is tiring, irrelevant, and ultimately pointless.
Science (as in organized, rigorous research efforts) has had a problem with respecting human rights for most of its history. This ethical guidance is here to prevent horrible shit like the Stanford Prison Experiment, the Operation Upshot-Knothole downwinders, the CDC Tuskegee Study, and so forth. The sociopathic robots who believe that research must ignore human dignity in order to be valid are not correct. There is still room in research to treat human beings like human beings, regardless of the destructive paranoia currently en vogue on web forums.
The statement from Nature has been very carefully worded.
The quote in the parent comment seems to suggest that perfectly valid scientific findings should be withheld if there is a possibility that bad people would misuse them. The consequence of this of course would be a complete victory of "Blank Slate"[1] Dogma (because any scientific finding that finds differences between social groups could be misused to undermine the human rights of one group).
And yet the statement never quite explicitly says findings should be withheld only because they could be misused. Rather it says that research that contains contain hate speech, etc. should perhaps not be published. It says authors should consider the potential harm of their research, and so on.
The intended result I think is a sort of chilling effect with plausible deniability. It pleases the inquisition, and at the same time leaves the scientists with a remainder of self-respect. I am not sure how long this delicate truce can last.
“Researchers should be free to pursue lines of inquiry and the communication of knowledge and ideas without fear of repression or censorship. At the same time, they have the ethical obligation to uphold intellectual integrity and avoid preventable harms that may arise in the course of research or its communication.”
Alternatively, it could be saying a lot of bullshit gets published because people are incentivized to publish crap research (see replication crisis). So, if you know it’s crap and it’s also likely to be harmful perhaps consider before you publish it.
And that’s the thing, if you assume the worst interpretation possible you can be offended by anything.
My charitable interpretation is that Nature is just reminding the academic community that you can’t research social constructs because they’re all made up and the points don’t matter, use more “scientific” terms, plz.
But then why write what was wrote? Why build up a “science can be socially harmful” thesis and then argue that may and could should govern is and does? Science should always be accurate. Nature didn't just learn this, that’s been the status quo all along.
The only reasonable interpretation is that Nature is defending a change.
To your example: you don't need social constructs to explain the replication crisis (“studies that leverage socially constructed ideas can be replicable). You don’t need social harm either (non-replicable studies that are socially good exist).
You said it best yourself: if you assume the worst interpretation possible, you can be offended by anything.
Nature is asking researchers to assume the worst interpretation of their results and, if it would be socially harmful, please not to publish them. And BTW you were wrong to ask the question in the first place since social constructs are post modern and reject western liberal interrogation.
Imagine the confusion that would result by future CRISPR modifications to adults that would increase intelligence by replacing genes found in less intelligent people with genes found in more intelligent people. Imagine if those genes are only found in certain races. I guess we can't have that according to the journal's rules, can we? You will simply not be allowed to research or publish that because it would break the "blank slate" narrative even though it would provide a huge benefit to humanity.
I don’t see why you’d need to consider race at all in this scenario? You find intelligence genes in some people, give them to others. Anything to do with race would seem to be an unnecessary extra step.
You’re arguing from a false premise. The Race to DNA link is weak. You get correlation easy enough, but the only time genes are race specific is when they only show up in a single family or similar tiny fraction of a population.
This shouldn’t be surprising when people for example categorize someone with 3 white grandparents and 1 black grandparent as black.
> perfectly valid scientific findings should be withheld if there is a possibility that bad people would misuse them.
This approach basically means that each and every scientific finding should be withheld (better yet, never produced) because chances are high that a bad actor would try to use it for evil purposes.
Mathematics has run into it with encryption: for fundamental reasons, it cannot be made hard only against bad guys, but penetrable to law enforcement.
We should stop any progress if we want to guarantee that any new evil would never apper. The promise of the progress is that it brings more good than evil, more jet liners than jet fighters.
This alarmist comparison of yours would impress basically no one who has studied in relevant fields, such as bioethics. The relationship between ethics and research has a fascinating and sobering history, one full of richness, horror, and a good deal of quiet ego shattering awe at all the multitude of different ways of being human we have previously organised to eradicate.
The calls you see for greater attention to be paid to ethics in research are not coming from a sense of obsequioous piety and genuflection toward establishment interests wielding political power, but the exact opposite—a call to consider the effects on groups not wielding power, such as different minorities—and obscuring this crucial difference, the way your analogy does, comes pretty close to leaving your readers less informed about the issue of research ethic rigor than they were before encountering your comment.
Bioethics researchers are regularly coming across questions like this one:
Gay and lesbian people are no longer considered as having a disease or disorder by any reputable medical organisation, are experiencing, broadly, a widening acceptance from different societies and their governments. At the same time, there several prominent nations attempt to criminalise, suppress, ostracise and otherwise punish people for being gay or lesbian.
Suppose tomorrow a set of genes are discovered that are strongly or even absolutely predictive of homosexual orientation. What would that look like for our society, when people could say have an embryological test that indicates whether their fetus is gay or not. Would we allow terminating pregnancy on the basis that the parents don't want to have a gay or lesbian child? What would the outcome of having a 'gay test' availble look like in the hands of oppressive regimes, like the Russian Federation. Would having that technology spark a literal genocide of sexual minorities there?
Perhaps you feel you can dismiss this as maybe you (mistakenly or not) picture your own country as unlikely to regress to legally enabling persecution of gay or lesbian people, and think issues outside your own country don't matter. I can tell you there is basically no country in the world that people in the trans community would feel safe in, if we took my above example of 'suppose someone invented a genetic test for being gay or lesbian' and replaced that hypothetical example to detect trans people and/or gender dysphoria instead.
If a group has power to prevent other people from writing or saying things about them that they do not like, even otherwise legitimate scientific findings in a scientific journal, I would say it is proof that they DO have power.
Kind of like how Putin and Xi are able to prevent citizens in their respective countries to write bad things about them.
> Would we allow terminating pregnancy on the basis that the parents don't want to have a gay or lesbian child?
Let's assume we're both pro choice, why should a mother be forced to carry a child in her womb that she doesn't want to give birth to?
How would sexual orientation be different from having an abortion after getting pregnant because it contradicts with her vacation plans, career or maybe the father was not one she wanted to have babies with?
Ok, I do know why, because it's the same as when people do not want to allow abortion when a baby is likely to have Down's syndrome or some other condition when born, as it is seen as invalidating the identity of those who already born with the same condition.
In my opinion, though, as long as we prioritize the interests of the mother (lets say that most will do that at least for the first trimester), the mother should decide what conditions are justifiable for having the abortion.
Moving beyond the abortion issues, in the hypothetical above there’s a real chance various regimes would do blood work on their living populations and kill or imprison non-out LGBT people (plus whatever straight people get included due to measurement error).
Knowing that this outcome is likely, is it ethically responsible to publish?
With all due respect, I don't buy your premise. There is a handful of places in the world (mostly in the Middle East) that have the death penalty for homosexual practice, as it is seen as a sin. But in the cases I know, it is sin as a sin for being a voluntary act, not because it's in the DNA.
The abortion case is at least realistic. A lot of parents go through the effort of having children at least partly because they want to perpetuate the family line. Whether or not you respect such a goal, for someone with such a goal, it is more likely to happen if your children are straight.
You can also imagine the opposite case. A lesbian couple that WANT to have only female, lesbian daughters, and wanting to abort fetuses that are unlikely to match that pattern. Should that also be illegal?
At the very least those regimes would likely target additional surveillance towards people genetically predisposed to homosexuality. That’s oppressive in and of itself.
And that surveillance would thus catch and punish more people.
To flip things around, would it be justifiable to enable a society to punish voluntary acts of heterosexuality? Voluntary acts feel much less voluntary when they are extraordinarily self-actualizing.
I’m not informed enough about selective abortion to offer good thoughts. I tend to believe if a metric is not allowed for selection for one direction it shouldn’t be allowed in the other.
> At the very least those regimes would likely target additional surveillance towards people genetically predisposed to homosexuality. That’s oppressive in and of itself.
Ok, now you're becoming reasonable
> To flip things around, would it be justifiable to enable a society to punish voluntary acts of heterosexuality?
Some of those same countries do exactly that. What do you think happens to a woman in Iran who has sex outside of marriage?
Anyway, why should a few crazy countries like that determine what can be published in Nature? If there are low-hanging fruits that they can abuse to persecute people, they will just fund the studies domestically.
But honestly, this sounds just like paranoia. The real discussion is about the parent not wanting to give birth to a kid with trait X.
I feel like you've interpreted my comment mainly by the diving into the ethical content of the specific example I was using.
The point of my example, if I was unclear, was that ethical questions very demonstrably arise from scientific discovery, and demonstrably arise from the availability of technology. This point should be considered pretty hard to dispute. That being the case, when we see scientists getting together among themselves to try to better establish what responsibilities they have or do not have, that's broadly a good thing.
Could such a policy be misused in a bad way? Sure, absolutely, do doubt it could. But to me it seems historically illiterate that so many readers here immediately picture that "scientists decide they should have an ethics policy" could be used in harmful ways but these same readers struggle to picture that scientific discoveries themselves or technologies relating to these could also be used in harmful ways, and if so, whether that places ethical obligations on anybody at any point.
Perhaps, too, it ought to be considered that "scientists shouldn't decide to develop an ethics policy" is also a position itself, one that could also pretty obviously be used in harmful ways as well.
You know any time someone says "Although [academic] freedom is fundamental, it is not unbounded.", watch out!
It's a common trope many use to slowly whittle away freedoms. A more accurate rephrasing would be "Your rights are all ready limited, so limiting them more shouldn't cause any concern,"
It's lazy thinking, because whatever limitations are in place today, have no bearing on the validity of the limitations the author is proposing - those should be viewed independently and skeptically.
What people don't realize is that when your freedoms are taken away, it's not some evil dictator yanking them from your clutches and you are beaten down by armed thugs, it's you and fellow citizens willfully giving them up for "the greater good".
Regardless of the rest of this conversation, we should at least ban the publishing of obvious bullshit with no attempt to establish causality as science. This is in that category.
I'm not entirely sure what point you're trying to make here.
If you read carefully I'm actually not proposing any specific course and I think the reality will be nuanced and highly context-specific.
What I am opposing is the idea that researchers should be completely disinterested in, even ignore, what other elements are interested in their work and how they might use it.
The consensus in this comment section is that that sort of ignorance is itself an ideal, and I think that's very wrong and has lead to obvious harms in the past. Research on any domain of human activity is a political act and produces a political product, the researchers need to be aware of that and actively participate in that part of the process as well. Wishing or pretending it were otherwise is dangerous.
> What I am opposing is the idea that researchers should be completely disinterested in, even ignore, what other elements are interested in their work and how they might use it.
Why?
> The consensus in this comment section is that that sort of ignorance is itself an ideal, and I think that's very wrong and has lead to obvious harms in the past.
You think that because you have biases, like all humans do. You say harms can arise. Let’s try to do an exercise. It’s the late 40s early 50s and research is finally starting to show there are, in fact, no real biological races of humans. We are one human race. The dutiful scientist at that time considers the society he is in, the notions of morality he has and decides it would be harmful to publish his research. Who knows what some crazy extremists will do with this fact. They might give the blacks rights, they might rile them up, they might they might even allow miscegenation! Bear in mind, all these were societal harms at that time!
Is this the future you wish? Or this scenario doesn’t count because it’s the wrong politics? Have we found the end all be all of morality and must now protect it at all costs, even from facts if need be?
> Research on any domain of human activity is a political act and produces a political product, the researchers need to be aware of that and actively participate in that part of the process as well
I disagree. The way I see it, there is no politics in science. Science is not a set of beliefs. It’s a process. It’s a method of observing empirical reality and producing methods to describe it.
> Wishing or pretending it were otherwise is dangerous.
Okay. Then let's censor science, and put an asterisk next to every published study: "If the results had been different, they would not have been published."
And when someone claims "research shows your prejudice is unfounded", one can justifiably answer with "because the findings have been cherry-picked to support a pre-determined conclusion. So I will trust my gut instinct, because the scientists have admitted their research is subordinate to propaganda."
Though I have a feeling social science will try to be very discreet about what kind of filtering they're doing, and will hope that, when they disseminate findings they like, that we will have forgotten they're self-confessed propagandists first, and scientists second.
sadly, what is called a fact is a malleable thing in the hands of the ill-intentioned, and all too many bigots are more than happy to pass off pseudo-science as the real deal. "science" isn't some abstract thing, it's composed of people and their actions, and as i think every adult will recognize, people can be turbo-shitty. like every other human endeavor, it deserves a close eye and critical thought. (i say this as a big fan of science in general and a degree-holder in the physical sciences.)
If the science is bad, then the science is bad. If you do good science and find a result that doesn't fit your preconceived ideas of right and wrong, that doesn't make the science bad. You don't need to be concerned with the ethical impact of the truth, but you do need to be concerned with the ethics of your process.
I don't understand what the actions of pseudo-science bigots has to do with someone who is doing real science. Idiots will be idiots regardless of what real science says.
The point is that results can be true and correct even if you dislike them. Conversely they can be false and incorrect even if we like them. How could you miss that and instead jump to this snarky response?
Sorry, this is completely off topic. Why aren't you using capital letters? I've seen this trend starting to gain more traction and it makes no sense to me.
The textual medium of the internet has allowed for the creation of differing written registers. You may have learned to write in a "standard way" in school that implicitly established itself as "the right way to write." What was left out was an analysis of the socio-linguistic component (probably because you were in 5th or 6th grade and this topic is addressed much later in specialized courses).
Proper or "improper" writing can signal formality and casualness and that sort of casualness is how I read the response. For example, I deliberately pick a register when I consider the audience I'm addressing and use it as a tool to convey side-band information. You may have seen social media posts where nearly every word is suffixed with an emoji. I'd consider this its own register. While I might use all lowercase in a text message or on a discord server, I'd likely only expect to read an emoji-laden message on Facebook or Twitter. Also if it came from me, it would probably look sarcastic as that's not a register I typically use.
Either way, people can do this accidentally, purposefully, or sometimes as a function of the medium. Eg: I can't write in an emoji-laden register here because HN strips emoji. An entire register, simply, and absolutely inaccessible. We probably agree that it doesn't fit the tone of the site, but still, we can imagine how the texture of the site would change if it was allowed and the pros and cons of that decision.
I see it as pure laziness. The purpose of writing is to communicate and exchange information. Just like misformatting some markup language will result in communications errors, so will not writing proper English with an English-reading audience.
Emojis are different; they're an addition, meant to convey extra meaning or information that's difficult to convey with pure text. Omitting capitals doesn't do this; it just makes the text harder to read.
Your points are duly noted. However; may I suggest you write in a more formal register? Your prose reflects the lack of effort with which I am displaying by using this very form of writing. A higher degree of effort on your part will demonstrate the level of commitment to the written word that this audience expects. Please respond in kind.
People have been writing like this for like 25 years. You see it on subcultures all over the internet. HN is a bastion of formal pedantry, so it’s a bit more uncommon here, but it’s been a thing for a long time.
I think there is a lot more nuance than people admit. Lets take an example of we have a deadly disease spreading through the population (much more deadly than covid) . Let's say a scientist finds out that the disease is primarily (exclusively) spread by red haired people. Should they just publish the finding? The fact becoming openly known might lead to mobs of people chasing red hairs and locking them up or even lynching them.
A better way is likely to quietly talk to the authorities first.
Another example could be that there is some disease that is entirely harmless but 100% infectious and deadly to some group (e.g. Black people). Now should that research just be released into the public? This might encourage some groups to purposefully infect these people, thus putting them in significant danger.
I admit these are somewhat hypothetical scenarios, but you said the truth should always come up,. I just give counterexamples. I'm sure we had many situations where resesearch was suppressed in reality for some reason or another.
If the fact brought about by science leads one group of people to kill another, we are faced with a political decision. Do we allow this or do we stand against it.
We need the separation of science and politics. Otherwise, important facts will be politically suppressed and falsehoods will be presented as truth for political gain.
It’s a story as old as the world, I don’t understand why so many people still want to mix those two.
I don't think you can separate science from politics. The scientific method that relies on repeatable experimental results is just a workaround for the general problem that the search for knowledge is done by highly opinionated, stubborn, egotistical, and very biased human beings. When people become scientists they don't lose those attributes, it's just that reproducibility of results act as a check on their biases. You can't remove politics from science without removing people from science. Even if the methodology is good, the question of which hypotheses are worth pursuing and which experiments should be done is political.
That said, I think scientists should be given pretty wide latitude to explore wherever their curiosity leads them, and results shouldn't be rejected from publication without really good reasons that go beyond "the results of this experiment make us uncomfortable". (Though as a practical matter, research that doesn't serve some political or social objective probably isn't going to get funding.)
You can’t remove politics from the people practicing science. Because they are people. But science it’s self is a process. It does not have, by definition, political inputs or outputs.
> the question of which hypotheses are worth pursuing and which experiments should be done is political
In a sense yes, but it also proves my point.
The example I think of is this. For the sake of argument, imagine there is a left leaning scientist and a right leaning one and they study economic differences between ethnic groups. The left leaning scientist will have political biases, politics, etc, because he is human, and guided by these biases he makes the decision to hypothesise the economic differences are caused by systemic inequality. This is indeed an example of a political choice guiding the scientific process.
I think that is perfectly fine. I don’t see this as “politics being in science” I see this as “politics being in humans practicing science”.
Now, coming back to the right leaning scientist, he too has biases and politics and a sense of morality etc because he is human. Also guided by these things he hypothesises economic differences between ethnic groups are caused by innate biological differences.
Just like the left scientist, I think this is fine. This is politics in the human practicing science, not politics in science directly.
Where politics in science appears is, if the prevalent political system discourage research into innate biological differences between humans and interferes in the scientific process to prevent researcher into this topic.
And that is what I have a problem with. And that is exactly what is being done through guidelines like this.
> the results of this experiment make us uncomfortable
I think we both know that is exactly how these rules will be used.
The question is where and how do you draw the boundary for censorship? If you can't use science to draw the boundary, what is left? Let humans with their own biases do it? This inevitably turns into dictatorship.
You can come up with hypotheticals where truth strategy may harm some people.
But censorship strategy is guaranteed to harm more people in the long run.
Also your hypotheticals can be easily countered:
> disease that is entirely harmless but 100% infectious and deadly to some group (e.g. Black people). Now should that research just be released into the public? This might encourage some groups to purposefully infect these people, thus putting them in significant danger.
Let's say you decided to censor your research. And then few years later the groups that you mentioned got lucky enough to discover the same disease. Now, because your research wasn't public, the world was not able to develop a cure.
You don't need to make up a hypothetical disease. Just look at the current monkeypox situation with health authorities waffling on how best to message that 98% of cases are in men who have sex with men.
It's simultaneously totally relevant information from a public health standpoint while also being stigmatizing. Completely ignoring the facts/suppressing that info to avoid stigma would contribute to greater spread within and outside of that community, and is irresponsible. Nuance, indeed.
You mean in the United States. Monkeypox isn't a MSM disease worldwide. And you should perhaps look at the case trends in countries where children have started going back to school.
And France. And Spain. And the UK. Basically everywhere that it wasn't previously endemic it's 95%+ MSM cases. It isn't 100%, nor is it only sexually transmitted. But burying our heads in the sand to overlook obvious facts and preventing messaging to at-risk communities out of sensitivity is contributing to _why_ there are cases in kids at schools.
Ah, we've already tried this! Check out the early history of HIV in SF - scientists/doctors/politicians knew how it was spread and refused to do or say anything lest they further stigmatize the gay community, which was disastrous to the actual gay community.
This is incorrect. Politicians and doctors refused to do very much about it because gay lives weren’t considered worth saving. Before the viral factor was discovered it was believed it was literally divine punishment to kill gays.
Those sorts of hypothetical "facts" don't just happen though. At best there might be some research indicating a very high correlation between hair colour and level of infectiousness. But just as often as not it turns out not to be the straightforward connection an initial finding might suggest. So there's no reason to withhold publishing of the results of such research, but every reason to ensure that new research is presented in a way that makes it clear that they're new preliminary findings that are likely to be overturned as more research is done and better understanding is achieved. If that still sets the mobs loose then your only option is government intervention to protect the victims. Suppressing knowledge about the real world is not a feasible long (or even medium) term strategy anyway - it's there to be discovered by anyone and everyone.
Those are terrible examples. In both cases you're advocating to keep vital information about how a disease works and spreads hidden in order to protect the social standing of an ethnic group while that very group is most at risk.
Heck this isn't even an hypothetical scenario, you'd suggest we should have kept secret the ways in which monkeypox spreads?
>I think there is a lot more nuance than people admit. Lets take an example of we have a deadly disease spreading through the population (much more deadly than covid) . Let's say a scientist finds out that the disease is primarily (exclusively) spread by red haired people. Should they just publish the finding?
Yes, they should.
>A better way is likely to quietly talk to the authorities first.
OK - talk to the authorities first, and then publish the results.
>Another example could be that there is some disease that is entirely harmless but 100% infectious and deadly to some group (e.g. Black people). Now should that research just be released into the public?
Yes, it should.
>I admit these are somewhat hypothetical scenarios, but you said the truth should always come up,. I just give counterexamples.
You didn't give counter-examples. You gave examples of times where the information should be shared with the public and then asserted that it shouldn't for .. I don't know what reason.
Here's a pragmatic reason for sharing truthful information with the public: If you want the population to trust public health officials, public health officials need to trust the public with the truth.
I don’t think a lot of scientists and health officials realize that their work is two sided. ESP if you’re working with public health the other side is who you view as the unwashed masses. You don’t get to make commandments
Maintaining trust with the public is the most important thing to do, and the best way to do that is transparency.
All the games about if we “should tell people xyz” needs to end if these institutions want to rebuild their credibility with the broader public.
The cdc is at least being retrospective but it seems like nature has gone the opposite way and are institutionally entrenching this idea that the public can’t be trusted with the truth.
The article draws the comparison with the ethics of doing science on human subjects. We mostly agree in principle, that some science simply shouldn't be done if it harms human test subjects[1], even if it would produce important scientific output. We're willing to make that trade-off because the cost outweighs the potential results. The article simply extends this principle to harms done to humans that are not test subjects.
What alternative are you suggesting? That the public be lied to? Misled? "Despite report, this disease is not primarily spread by red hair people"?. Then what happens when the truth does get out? Who do you think the public believes then?
It was pretty clear this approach was used during Covid. "You don't need to wear a mask", "Covid vaccines prevent infection" are just a couple claims that were made "for the public's own good".
Then when people found out they were lied to, they were then skeptical of everything said thereafter.
The two major vaccines - Pfizer and Moderna, never tested for infection prevention. There was literally no data to even say if they did or didn't prevent infection.
You can look up the clinical trial endpoints. Patients were only tested for infections if they experienced symptoms. I believe it was only AZ or J&J that regularly tested to capture any effect on infection rate.
But it was stated several times "The vaccine will stop you from getting Covid". Why? Because if you tell people "Well, the vaccine won't stop you from getting it, but it will make it less likely you'll get really sick", they thought people wouldn't take it.
I didn't mention COVID. You're focusing on COVID vaccines because that is the anti-vax cause at the moment.
It's the case with ALL vaccines that they don't provide 100% protection. They are still incredibly useful for preventing infection, reducing the severity of disease and preventing further transmission.
Btw, vaccines work by clearing infection quickly, not preventing infection. The virus infects you and begins to multiply. Whether your body has the antibodies to recognize the virus determines whether you will suffer from illness or be well.
You suggested that the COVID vaccine was somehow bad for being like every other vaccine. I'm suggesting that you need to learn about vaccines and get vaccinated.
> The fact becoming openly known might lead to mobs of people chasing red hairs and locking them up or even lynching them.
You missed this small little thing called Rule of Law, which - in any polity worth living in - bans vigilante justice and forming mobs to punish people without trial.
You also missed this other small little thing called the Internet, where you can publish a paper on arxiv for free without review, or post its PDF link on 4chan completely anonymously. Together "Red-Haired People Spread Disease" being a fact, and thus is almost certainly being discovered independently by several labs and institutions at the same time, this will ensure that the truth will come out, and much faster than you think. The only difference is if the public hears it from your institutions first, i.e. your legitimacy and credibility in the public eye.
Agreed, this is the future, ie. Decentralization. I must admit, the term "decentralize" directly conjures up a vivid, bright high resolution image of a day trading megalomaniac crypto-bro living in Miami pumping iron and taking testosterone supplements. It is kinda like how Hitler ruined a mustache style however gorgeous that damn mustache is. Folks, decentralization is cool when centralization is not viable, tenable or stable.
I don't think this is the right way to think about this.
The editors of a journal do screen the articles that get published. Their criteria are hidden. They do not need to justify in any way why the accept or reject a submission. The process is entirely opaque. Scientists are thoroughly obsessed with publishing in top tier journals in many important fields, like biomedicine, so the whims of the editors are extremely influential. Here we have the faceless editors at least specifying some of the criteria they will be using. This is beneficial. We can now discuss and critique these criteria. We can also, if we disagree, choose not to publish in these journals, or post on twitter that our article was rejected on these grounds.
So overall, I think this is a net win.
The Nature Publishing group is not science. Science will survive whatever self-righteous fad the Nature editors decide to champion next week.
If you want to criticise anyone, criticise the post-war generation of academics who have allowed journals to have too much power and landed us in this stupid soul crushing arrangement we have today.
Imagine if we devoted a tremendous amount of resources to studying whether being left or right handed increased your chances of transmitting COVID. Then millions of people online start citing scientific papers saying that right handed people spread COVID more often. Then some left handed people attack right handed people (similar to how Asian Americans are being brutalized in public during the pandemic). The point is that choosing to study the differences in certain demographic groups makes a big assumption that it's important to study the groups for whatever reason.
Sounds like you're trying to censor information by dismissing the left/right hand hypothesis as "unrealistically stretched".
To put it another way: the way you feel about studying handedness being linked to COVID is the way I feel about studying an assumed link between race and "intelligence". It's not "otherwise interesting" at all. It's ignorant at best.
But if you did notice a subgroup/IQ correlation would you ignore it? Because I wouldn't ignore a handedness/sickness correlation. You can't fix what you don't measure and investigate.
You're ASSUMING that race could be linked to "intelligence", that it's important to study, just like I was ASSUMING that handedness might have something to do with spreading COVID. There is clear bias introduced by what we think is important to measure.
You could also become some kind of “hate researcher” if you wanted to. Pick a group of people you don’t like(ethnic, socio, political, whatever), and start hammering out publications on their IQ, epidemiology, sociopolitical beliefs, etc. Maybe do a bit of P-hacking to make the deleterious stuff really pop out. Eventually you’ll have a nice corpus of literature out there framing your target group as stupid, disease ridden and ignorant.
Yes, exactly. Then you could write popular opinion books about the studies which flesh out the conclusion. Then it could be a motivating tool for an entire political party. You could go on tour to promote your "controversial" books. People will say that the facts must be heard and both sides should be represented.
Enrico Fermi comes to mind:
“Whatever Nature has in store for mankind, unpleasant as it may be, men must accept, for ignorance is never better than knowledge.”
It's interesting that the linked policy says almost the exact opposite of Fermi's statement, implying that ignorance is sometimes better than knowledge: "...considerations of harm can occasionally supersede the goal of seeking or sharing new knowledge, and a decision not to undertake or not to publish a project may be warranted."
I know the people behind statments like these are coming to it with extremly unintelligent and bad faith definitions and intentions, but the actual words are actually correct. If you had the option to delay humanity's discovery of atomic bombs to late 20th century or after, and therefore delay any substantial deep understanding of the atomic physics beneath, you would probably do it. If you had the atomic bomb, you probably wouldn't have shared it with Stalin's USSR or Hitler's Germany and, for that matter, Roosevelt's USA. If you had known in 1990 that the WWW would be used to spread propaganda and track dissidents, you would have probably liked to delay it till more security and decentralization is built in from the outset. This is a very well-discussed topic in philosophy of science and technology and good sci-fi.
Fermi was probably talking about inevitable things, e.g. if climate is already worsening beyond human limits it's always good to know even if it's too late to do anything. But if knowledge (or our pursuit of it) would lead to new dangers, its perfecly reasonable to (try) to limit knowledge and its spread or pursuit.
The dishonesty of the -ve IQ people behind attitudes like the criticized is that they see danger in everything and use moral panic to enforce views. If the actual "dangers" they are freaking out about are legitimate, they would have been justified to supress (non-violently) science and technology)
> If you had the option to delay humanity's discovery of atomic bombs to late 20th century or after, and therefore delay any substantial deep understanding of the atomic physics beneath, you would probably do it.
The alternative was 20-30 million more dead people via conventional means. There were many teams around the world working to build the bomb. One always wonders about the German team and why they were not first - and I"m glad they were not.
> One always wonders about the German team and why they were not first - and I"m glad they were not.
In regards to this, I believe they were on the right path but they were split in to three groups across Germany. They shared the radioactive material and because of this weren't able to achieve fission (?) due to not having enough material in one spot. Thank $diety for that.
If you don't want philosophy of science, don't comment on an article about the philosophy of science? This isn't some fringe topic for "woke" people, philosophy is fundamental to science and has been from the beginning. It's questions from everything like "what even counts as science" to scientific ethics, to "what is the purpose of science". It's not always about ethics, in fact the 20th century philosophy of science debates were dominated by more practical topics like realism vs instrumentalism.
You cannot just dismiss something you've never heard of and have no idea about
Philosophy of science, however, is a well established, important, and fascinating field. Keywords: Positivists/Viennese circle, Karl Popper and falsification, Feyerabend and Against Method, Thomas Kuhn and The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, W. V. Quine and the Two Dogmas of Empiricism, the Science Wars.
Thanks for the Mayo recommendation. I am currently going through her Statistical Inference as Severe Testing, and find it very tiring. So far very little is about actual statistics and the meat of disputes, but rather about meta questions and the he-said, she-said of those disputes. Maybe the prior book Error and the Growth of Experimental Knowledge is a better exposition of the ideas?
I got mich out of it, but only on the meta level also. Afair she never goes into technical detail of e.g. Neyman Pearson, but covers things like how to overcome the Quine-Duhem-problem with statistics, or how to stengthen Popper’s theory.
But on that level I learned a lot, and it trickles down to what is important in actual experimental design and why.
I don't blame them for not wanting what appears to be a mix of philosophy into science though - in the same way it is understandable that people who never knew what suffrage was would oppose women's suffrage because they think it involves torment. Ignorant but understandable. Unfortunately, philosophy has a long history of actively defining itself as willfully not referencing reality for validation. Not wanting that mixed with science is understandable even if rooted in ignorance.
Knowledge itself is inevitable. You cannot control every single person's desire to know more and advance knowledge. I lived in 1980's Romania and the state tried everything it could to suppress knowledge about the outside world. People still found out things they were not supposed to know about. (An ironic example - the Romanian religion scholar Mircea Eliade died in exile during the 1980s. The Romanian state did not mention anything... and the next morning everyone was talking in the bus and at my high school. We were not even supposed to know this person existed...)
I don't know if you realize, but you are cherry picking the subjects which we can talk about (climate change) versus the subject which we cannot talk about (nuclear power, WWW).
>If you had the option to delay humanity's discovery of atomic bombs
Humanity's discovery of atomic bombs wasn't published, though. It was demonstrated in terrifying fashion when they were first used. Worse, the first atomic bomb project was actually carried out by Nazi Germany, not the United States, and might have succeeded if not for sabotage campaigns and the collapse of the German economy. And weapons research is a well-known risk since the invention of the arquebus around 1400, when early gun manufacturers jealously guarded their secrets with state encouragement. It's true that we avoid research into novel biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons, with a possible fourth "computational" coming into focus, but we do this by avoiding the research itself, wherein the ends are obvious from the beginning, not refusing to publish a finding because you don't like what it said.
>Fermi was probably talking about inevitable things, e.g. if climate is already worsening beyond human limits it's always good to know even if it's too late to do anything. But if knowledge (or our pursuit of it) would lead to new dangers, its perfecly reasonable to (try) to limit knowledge and its spread or pursuit.
Yes, it's like teaching small children how to make poisons and bombs. It's really much better that children be kept ignorant of such things: this knowledge isn't going to help them, or the world, it's only going to cause problems. Adult humans really aren't any better; they're just bigger children.
Why would I need to make bombs when I could just collect the remains of the new years celebration from the road every first January? My parents made sure we had oversight and knew what we were dealing with even if it was only the fun small stuff (that could still burn your face off).
> It's really much better that children be kept ignorant of such things: this knowledge isn't going to help them, or the world, it's only going to cause problems. Adult humans really aren't any better; they're just bigger children.
Yeah, because accidentally mixing cleaning supplies in a way that creates a toxic gas cloud is really better than knowing that common household items can kill you if you aren't careful. Or getting monoxide poisoning because no one told you that using gas grills inside can kill.
Yeah, keep the kids ignorant of dangerous aspects of the world. If they are lucky they will die well before they have to navigate the world on their own.
On the other hand, nuclear physics is also used for things like treating cancer.
In that sense it's the perfect analogy: you don't really know where your research will end up. Did Rutherford split the atom to cure cancer? No, of course not. Most (or all?) people working on particle physics in the early 20th century would have been quite surprised to learn it would be used as such down the line.
> If you had the atomic bomb, you probably wouldn't have shared it with Stalin's USSR or Hitler's Germany and, for that matter, Roosevelt's USA
If I felt that it was plausible that the genocidal regimes of the USSR or Nazi Germany could have developed such a bomb (which was the case): yes, I absolutely would have shared it with the US.
As a counterexample, physicists did use particle physics for medical purposes very early on- E.O. Lawrence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Lawrence#Reception
was using it for cancer treatments of various kinds in the 30s.
> If you had known in 1990 that the WWW would be used to spread propaganda and track dissidents, you would have probably liked to delay it till more security and decentralization is built in from the outset
The premise is interesting, but at least decentralization was really there at the outset. It is just that market forces shrinked it. I honestly don't know what would have been the best medicine to prevent this. During the 90s I felt there was a larger emphasis on protocols, that almost disappeared during the 00's.
> e.g. if climate is already worsening beyond human limits it's always good to know even
Climate wouldn't have been worsened as much as it did without the technological advances provided by science. It's really, really difficult to cut the Amazonian forrest down using just axes and horse-drawn carts, but once you got mechanised stuff (with the help of science) then it becomes exponentially easier to do it (think just how much science went into the fabrication of bitumen/asphalt, once you have bitumen roads going into and out of the Amazon things get exponentially easier for those who are in the business of cutting trees in there).
Which is to say that I fail to understand how come some of us still believe science and technology can get us out of this mess when it was science and technology that brought us here.
To be clear, I also fully acknowledge that without science and technology our lives would have been way harder, for most of us life wouldn't have been possible at all: without science we would have had no green revolution, which means we still would have had famines around the world, never mind that the green revolution caused a lot of environment-related nasty things, so it's not always black and white.
> For an example, the US just sent $50 billion to Ukraine. Imagine what 50, $1,000,000,000 science grants could accomplish.
Not sure your example is clearly bad priorities. (Though generally I think the US wastes too much on the military.) What's the worst case scenario when the money is defending Ukraine instead of science?
Science funding won't as help much if there's an unchecked bully marching across Europe.
Perhaps you can ELI5 because I was under the impression Ukraine was a sovereign nation. Free to pursue any alliances it wishes. And that its 1991 borders were acknowledged in exchange for yielding nuclear weapons to Russia.
Speaking as a Russian who grew up in the 90s, NATO was never a real threat to post-Soviet Russia. Our "national patriot" political faction made it into a threat in its propaganda because they needed an existential enemy to build their ideology up on.
You need to read “The Beginning of Infinity” by David Deutsch. It will help clear up all the muddled thinking I see going on when I read those lines of yours.
The only reason we know that atomic physics leads to mass destruction is because we followed through with the R&D. We only know that the web is used to spread propaganda and track dissidents because we developed it so far for these problems to develop.
You can't block technology based on understandings of consequences that you dont gain until the technology matures. We can't see the future.
there is a difference between science, as in "understanding nature" and technology, which is about exploiting that knowledge for building something useful. Knowing everything about the atom is harmless, using that knowledge to build an horrendous weapon is evil.
Also, knowing everything about the atom does not affect our behavior, except through technology. Social sciences are more problematic though because they are about us, as part of nature sure, but in the social context we live, which can be affected by what we know about it. So proper considerations must be made when designing the research questions and methods, and when discussing the results.
The only bad faith actor reaching unintelligent definitions here is the one projecting them unto others.
Hiding this knowledge from the world doesn’t make it not exist. It just makes people less prepared for when malicious actors use it against them. You promote ignorance as a solution to technical problems. I don’t.
Well, sometimes information can cause harm. For example, revealing a terminal diagnosis to a patient could lead to suicide.
I don't think science should be censored, scientific inquiry should continue with integrity regardless of what people think. What I think is people who can't handle it should not have access to the truths revealed. I generally believe in unrestricted free information but I've been rethinking that for certain cases.
It's not just gender identity. I've seen similar behavior in other groups such as obese people revolting against the "oppressive" science documenting the numerous risks associated with being overweight because it supposedly causes society to marginalize them.
And that's what led to ethics rules that said you can't do that. You'd think you wouldn't need to write it down, but we did and we do.
> By then, 28 patients had died directly from syphilis, 100 died from complications related to syphilis, 40 of the patients' wives were infected with syphilis, and 19 children were born with congenital syphilis.[15]
> The 40-year Tuskegee Study was a major violation of ethical standards,[13] and has been cited as "arguably the most infamous biomedical research study in U.S. history."[16] Its revelation led to the 1979 Belmont Report and to the establishment of the Office for Human Research Protections (OHRP)[17] and federal laws and regulations requiring institutional review boards for the protection of human subjects in studies.
I know about Tuskegee. That's a clear example of what not to do. Just one of many documented cases of criminal abuse of human beings. Stuff like this is the reason why informed consent is an absolute requirement these days.
What I meant to say is I'd think twice before telling a depressed patient with a history of suicide attempts about a diagnosis of terminal illness.
That seems oversimplified. If an individual or organisation collects or creates "information", they could/should consider not only what a thief might do with the information, but what they're collecting it in the first place and why. If they know potential dangers, they share at least some responsibility for future damage. If they haven't considered the dangers, this is negligent (mitigated by the act of sincere consideration, not by what dangers were discovered).
Intention exists separately from information (in this context) but they are not independent, they're connected.
A silly example: Let's say someone at Facebook realises they could predict with high confidence the chance of a user voting in favour of extremist political candidates. This is new information, and Facebook has decided to create it. Once created, it could do harm. At this point, saying "information doesn't kill people, people kill people" is a useless abstraction. Sure, it might be "true" in a limited interpretation, but that interpretation doesn't help anyone.
(From an excess of caution, I've constrained the definition of "information" above as something like "information created or collected by humans and our systems". This is to exclude exotic-but-true consideration of literally anything in the universe as "information" e.g. tumours, magnetars, etc etc.)
This is correct and completely irrelevant in the real world. It is similar to numbers cannot cause harm. Information and numbers are nothing more than interlectual constructs, patterns, or platonic ideas.
But collecting information can enable as much harm as collecting some numbers. For example the Nazis started with collecting information about the racial status of as many people as possible, see [1]. The collected information was later used to decide who to deport and kill.
Although, this is another example of humans causing harm, it also shows why collecting information is not harmless. Although the information itself cannot cause anything. It simply has no agency, so it can neither harm nor heal people. But it can enable both.
I think the "in the wrong hands" part of your statement actually backs up what he was saying. The information by itself is useless unless someone ACTS upon it.
> Well, sometimes information can cause harm. For example, revealing a terminal diagnosis to a patient could lead to suicide.
That is arguably, depending in the diagnosis, a good example of a time where suicide may be the good option, where postponing death magnifies suffering, and the only reason to keep the poor patient alive is essentially because we're too busy selfishly thinking about avoiding our own pain of loss to permit them to erase their agony.
Fermi's quote is not acceptable for publication in Nature according to these new guidelines because he centered on the "men" privileged group and excluded "woman, non-binaries, ..." non-privileged groups.
this is a moral judgement and a strong claim. I can think of a few types of knowledge off the top of my head that aren't making the world a better place
Something like learning how to tie a noose: this is (in most cases) bad knowledge. This isn't something anyone should learn unless they need it for something that isn't its best known purpose
when it comes to something like race/gender/etc, I can't think of one positive usage of that kind of knowledge, if we can even call it that. I'd argue that even the idea of race/gender/etc is against the goal of equality and if we want true equality these ideas need to be discarded
The knowledge of how to tie a noose hurts no one. Knowledge in and of itself is harmless at rest. As with all knowledge it’s what you do with it. Keeping people in the dark is an immoral solution to evil.
What knowledge is "in and of itself" means nothing because it exists in a context, the only thing that matters in the case of knowledge (or anything) is what's done with it and how it is useful
And AR-15s hurt no one. Yet they are purposed to have massive killing power against humans, and massively amplify the damage a single ill person can do. Hypothetically there could be some type of weapon that once discovered could end all life on this planet. If that weapon was trivial to build, it would take 1 person with that knowledge to end eveything. Human knowledge is a human construct, and shouldn’t be thought about in absolutes.
Well, I for one think “the goal of equality” should be discarded. People are to be treated equally and we already have the declaration of universal human rights as a foundational and international document for that.
If you want people to end up all “being equal” to one another you will just end up on the farm, where all animals are equal but some are more equal than others.
Also, I think it quite amusing that you call what Fermi said “a strong claim” and a “moral judgement” and a few lines down you have the audacity to say that certain “ideas need to be discarded”. First of all, some of the “ideas” you talk about are indeed facts. And then who on earth do you think you are to tell other people what they may think of?
I'm not talking about leveling, I'm talking about something more like job applications that are completely race-sex-etc blind, where that signal isn't even allowed into the mix. I think that in a truly meritocratic system you'll see a diverse representation. No, it might not be perfectly diverse, but it would lead to more (and fairer) diversity and not less
In the international FIDE list of chess grandmasters, 39 out of 1953 are female. That’s 2%. And while I’m certain that there’s some icky misogynistic men who have made some decisions in that regard, I’m equally certain that we will never see the ratio being fifty-fifty. Not even close.
That being said, I really don’t care what we will see or what the outcome will be in a truly meritocratic system. I’m just interested in the merit.
You are conflating knowledge and arbitrarily constructed definitions. My understanding of knowledge is that it is based in some objective ground rather than a changeable definition.
Race and gender are social constructs, not objective facts of reality. I agree though, discard social constructs.
The noose knot is very similar, if not exactly the same, as several fishing knots[1].
Also, in a rational society, the goal isn't blanket "equality". People are not equal. I'll never have a career as a basketball player.
Equality of opportunity is the goal, not equality of outcome.
Equality of outcome arguments generally boil down to some derivative of "we should take from group a and give to group b, and I should be the one to oversee this".
That would defeat the purpose. The whole point is to have rules vague enough that they can be selectively applied whenever there's an angry mob on Twitter that has to be appeased, while still saying "hey, we're just following our policy".
Right. Like many commenters on this thread, people tend to pick apart these types of messages from these now-woke institutions from a logical perspective, which is a huge mistake. These are effectively religious tenets; they aren't issues of logic but issues of faith.
I think that most of these types of guidelines and rules are written with good intent, but intent is what ruins good science.
Science, as a method, works when you have a hypothesis, but when that hypothesis isn't supported by your findings you can't just discard the findings and go "well I'm still pretty sure I was right anyway."
If you find something you disagree with to be true, that makes the science even more important to share! Other people can start to look at what you've seen and get more details and finer understanding.
The only 'good' intent in science is to pursue empirical truth based on the application of the scientific method. Every other intent is questionable, and certainly if one is following it, soon deviates from the realm of 'science'.
This whole "having good intentions" as justification for anything scares the living crap out of me. I really believed we for once learned from history. Even letting the non trivial problem of defining what is "good" aside, intentions and results are very very different things. Intentions describe your own story for your actions. Its about how your see yourself. That has no impact on the result in reality. Valuing intentions instead of outcome is actual insanity.
And it only got worse once i realized that this isnt some kind of horrible stupid accident but people do this to deal with an utterly horrible reality they cant cope with anymore. So they just gave up on reality and instead focused on a story they can tell themselves to feel good despite reality.
edit: Just to point it out, even if both of those very obvious fundamental problems would be addressed, what would be left would be "the ends justify the means". Its utterly horrific from which ever angle you look at it.
You're more charitable than I am. I think these things are written with a mindset of "how far can we push this/what can we realistically get away with?"
This would not only destroys woke research but pro-woke as well because if you are guaranteeing publication bias you can't trust the research either way.
This is also a boon to racists who never have to defend themselves against science again.
"Yeah that study shows that Hispanic immigrants don't commit more crimes, but it's against the rules to publish anything else"
At a very simple level, it’s akin to not yelling bomb in a theatre since it would be faster and more efficient for everyone to evacuate in an orderly manner without being informed of the bomb. I feel like our society does require some gatekeepers and can’t be run well if it’s just vocal collectives yelling at each other.
The next step then is the government deciding what will harm us, so we can be protected. And then you got a very nice little fascist country that runs perfectly, and the trains run on time to move all those harmful people away from where good people live. Out of sight, out of mind.
And as time progresses, new laws are no longer common sense ("don't steal, don't murder"), but become increasingly cumbersome, while still acceptable ("don't drive a vehicle unless we license you for vehicle use") and ultimately problematic ("You can't own sulphuric acid"). Before too long, laws become criminal, and those must not be obeyed ("You have to believe this or that, or at least shut up about what you really think, because doing otherwise may hurt people").
Too many laws make everyone a criminal, for eventually, everyday, innocent behaviour becomes criminalised.
When you arrive at thoughtcrime, it already is too late.
>I feel like our society does require some gatekeepers and can’t be run well if it’s just vocal collectives yelling at each other.
I'm glad you recognize in yourself that you can't be trusted with certain information and you need, personally, a big brother to lie to you. You do you. I'd appreciate if you didn't make the same assessment about me, and others.
Reading back, I'm actually genuinely interested to know why you want a third-party 'gatekeeper' to protect you personally from certain kinds of (uncomfortable) scientific facts. I don't judge, you can make that decisions for yourself, but why do you personally want to write that blank-check to a third-party, so that they decide what scientific facts you should or shouldn't be allowed to learn? Maybe you can elaborate?
Because I’ve come to the realization that there maybe some people that have the time, drive and intelligence to look at all the facts and come to the “right” decision but in the overwhelming number of cases people don’t want to do this exercise and will rely on frameworks provided. If one isn’t provided they’ll come up with their own and there’s no guarantees any of it will work out for the good of society.
This coupled with the fact that there is currently a firehose of “information” that I doubt even people with the best of abilities and intentions can adequately grok if they’re not specifically paid for the time to think about them.
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[ 0.98 ms ] story [ 375 ms ] threadI appreciate you calling it out greatly, they've been circling the drain but wow.
How do you effectively discuss, and communicate, that for example sickle cell anaemia or lactose intolerance affects people of African descent, or skin cancer is prevalent in people of European ancestry? And that poor and badly educated people are susceptible to bad diets, lifestyles and medical issues that are a consequence of that?
> harms arising from manuscripts
I'm pretty sure the readership for papers in Nature is pretty low, and already read by a target audience of academics that already use a scientific dialect that doesn't cause 'offense'. Scientific language is terse and unambiguous for a reason. Efficient and precise transfer of ideas. "Go the shops and get a loaf of bread. If there are eggs, get a dozen".
"Offense" in 2022 is the social construct here. Not age, or disease, or origin.
Don't worry, it says in the guidelines that race and ethnicity aren't real:
> Race and ethnicity are sociopolitical constructs. Humans do not have biological races, at least based on modern biological criteria for the identification of geographical races or subspecies.
This, of course, is going to be Good News to people of African descent (where sickle cell anemia is ~20x more likely in black newborns than white [1]), Ashkenazi Jewish people (at higher risk for a number of different genetic illnesses [2]), or pretty much every non-white person with lactose intolerance [3]...just to name a few examples.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/sicklecell/features/keyfinding-tr....
[2] https://www.gaucherdisease.org/blog/5-common-ashkenazi-genet...
[3] https://medlineplus.gov/genetics/condition/lactose-intoleran....
In studies of conditions like sickle cell anaemia or lactose intolerance or skin cancer it would probably be more useful to relate those to particular genotypes and/or phenotypes rather than relying on which "race" field each experimental subject selected on the intake form.
These guidelines are gaslighting people into ignoring broadly useful categories because we don't have a reductive way of defining them. We don't have a biological test that defines race (yet), ergo, it doesn't exist. Except that's wrong. It's absurd.
> In studies of conditions like sickle cell anaemia or lactose intolerance or skin cancer it would probably be more useful to relate those to particular genotypes and/or phenotypes rather than relying on which "race" field each experimental subject selected on the intake form.
If we could do that -- relate the (known) gene for sickle cell to some other "genotype" that captures the racial bias we know exists -- we'd have a strict biological definition for race, wouldn't we?
Aside from that, we know the "phenotype" that correlates with the illness. Black people have it, at high rates.
The same thing can be different categories. Black is social category, and is also a very well defined biological state of the most visible organ in your body, and is associated with certain genes. Instead of repeatedly stating the name of those different genes every time you say something about them, you can simply say the name of the most visible marker of them and still be correct the vast majority of time.
You seem a little bit more focused on repeating some rhetorical dunk you read somewhere online than actually understanding what is being discussed. Take a moment and actually consider what I'm writing. To repeat the example that I gave before, research on Ashkenazi Jewish diseases is not hindered by calling it research on the specific haplotype group that it is. The poster that brought up Ashkenazi Jews is misunderstanding if not disingenuous. I think you also don't get the difference between what a haplotype group is in this context, and your concept of "race".
I'm not just trying to be argumentative here. If scientists want to produce high quality, reproducible research then they must precisely define their terms. They can't just assume that everyone has the same understanding and knows what they mean.
Uh, this is actually true. Blindness is a legal definition not a medical condition. There are numerous medical conditions that can lead to a person being legally blind.
Those people have a shared biological lineage, with only a relatively short period of differentiation — while they have radically different cultures.
What you’re describing is “black” being useless as a social construct (ie, I know nothing about their culture) but useful medically/scientifically (ie, there’s groupings of medical conditions correlated with that lineage).
I would go so far as to say only racists use “black” as a social construct — and project that the medical groupings are the same.
I wouldn't be surprised if we had, by this point, some more specific way of breaking down the susceptible population (other than the gene itself, which we know). It doesn't change the broader point that, breaking things down by "race" alone, we see huge, impactful differences.
Even in drug development, there's a huge push to break down clinical trials by gender and race, because not all drugs work the same in different ethnic populations. By these guidelines, I guess we're not allowed to do that? Race doesn't exist!
To be clear: the sickle cell trait appears elevated in sub-Saharan Africa and descendants from that area. This also means for example black people from Somali aren’t really affected even though Somali is part of the African continent. Does this help clarify my point?
This is what race means. You are taking the same referent and giving it a different designator.
And sure, not all races correspond directly to a specific HG, but all races have clear genetic differences which can be identified and classified purely mechanically. Multi-locus fixation clustering is an example of one such mechanical procedure. Unsupervised, something like k-means will generate racial groups equivalent to the ones humans come up with intuitively.
In your case, the HG in question obviously corresponds to one such cluster.
It's a broad, vague category, that is nonetheless sometimes still useful. Just like race. We don't pretend that Ashkenazi Jews don't exist, or are verboten from polite discussion because they are a "social construct."
> By the way, I don't think "African descent" is a race by any means of my understanding of the word...
Well, yeah. I pulled my punches there. I should have just said "black people", but even I felt squeamish about it. A great example of how this stuff confuses language and makes science harder.
[1] https://www.cancer.gov/publications/dictionaries/genetics-di...
> Race and ethnicity are sociopolitical constructs. Humans do not have biological races, at least based on modern biological criteria for the identification of geographical races or subspecies.
This is simply false. It's fiction. A substitution of political ideology for fact. People are attempting to turn "we don't have a precise test for race" into "race does not exist". Even ignoring the fact that today anyone can go to 23andMe and get a genetic test that will assign them a percentage composition by race / ethnic group, it's obvious that race is a useful, if imprecise, real-world categorization. We can acknowledge this without being discriminatory.
This entire conversation is the equivalent of someone claiming that water was a "sociopolitical construct" before scientists knew what atoms and elements were, because we couldn't define it chemically. If HN existed in the pre-times, you'd have people chiming in that "other clear liquids exist and can be confused with water! the classification is incomplete!" as proof of claim.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3737365/ - "Genetic data sets are used to see if biological races exist in humans and in our closest evolutionary relative, the chimpanzee. Using the two most commonly used biological concepts of race, chimpanzees are indeed subdivided into races but humans are not."
https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2017/science-genetics-res... - "In the biological and social sciences, the consensus is clear: race is a social construct, not a biological attribute."
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/48157/pdf - "none of the race concepts is compatible with the patterns of variation revealed by our analyses."
> it's obvious that race is a useful, if imprecise, real-world categorization. We can acknowledge this without being discriminatory.
The approach of genetic scientists seems to be to use the words "ancestry" or "population", which do not risk as much ambiguity or overlap with the meaning of "race" as applied to other species.
>This entire conversation is the equivalent of someone claiming that water was a "sociopolitical construct" before scientists knew what atoms and elements were
A more accurate comparison is that of scientists deciding that Pluto isn't actually a planet, because it no longer meets the criteria. There was a bit of a stir about this but eventually it's been accepted, and rightly so as linguistic precision is a good thing!
That's wrong. Regarding the specific papers:
The first explicitly admits that race exists in the opening sentence (oops), then proceeds to say "the two most commonly used biological concepts of race" don't work in humans, therefore race doesn't exist ("There are no objective criteria for choosing one adaptive trait over another to define race. As a consequence, adaptive traits do not define races in humans.")
This is exactly the fallacious thinking I'm calling out. Great example.
The second is not a paper at all, but still admits that there's at least some biological basis for race, even though it's not precise. That's fine -- I'm not claiming it is precise:
> Research indicates that the concept of “five races” does, to an extent, describe the way human populations are distributed among the continents—but the lines between races are much more blurred than ancestry testing companies would have us believe
The third is saying that a single, specific measurement of genetic diversity fails to define race. Again, that's fine. Saying "test X doesn't define race" != "race does not exist":
> These limitations on FST are demonstrated algebraically and in the context of analyzing dinucleotide repeat allele frequencies for a set of eight loci genotyped in eight human groups and in chimpanzees. In our analyses, estimates of FST fail to identify important variation.
Overall, these illustrate exactly what I've said: race is clearly real and we know it when we see it, but it's not precise, and we don't have a biological test that defines it. Those who extend this to "race is a sociopolitical construct" are engaged in a through-the-looking-glass form of motivated reasoning. And it's a very convenient form of reasoning, because if you make it "wrong" to say that race exists, you prevent anyone from doing the research that might produce such a test.
The elites are panicking about the perceived mental limits of the commoners. Normals know the limits of the words they use and actual bigots won't be deterred.
If you were to collect the DNA of every living human today and send the information to an alien species, would they say "aha, this clearly falls into five (or however many) pretty distinct categories"? Would anyone be able to tell them how to delineate those categories? Based on what I've read, I don't think so, which implies that what is meant by "race" is more cultural than biological.
People use the word like "are the dutch racially tall or is it their diet?" and nobody means or takes offense.
And that is 100% false. It's obviously biological in basis. It has useful meaning outside of "culture". We just don't have a reductive definition that satisfies the people who aspire to police our thoughts and language...and science.
I'm not naïve about this. There's obviously this bad history where bigots tried to come up with "biological" arguments that some races were superior to others. It's ugly and wrong. But it's just as wrong to go to the opposite pole of the debate, and try to pretend that race is not a thing at all. Both positions are soft-minded extremism.
We can accept that race is a real, biological thing (however fuzzy), and still say that race isn't a value judgment.
Weird hill to stand on in a thread that started with me saying that race is a cultural concept that has little to no utility in science outside of its cultural context, lawtalkingguy.
If you use any definition that wasn't specifically concocted to make the statement true (i.e. any definition used by normal people or by actual scientists doing real work, say prior to 1990), it remains false.
"I'm just studying why people whose ancestors grew up in one area are more likely to have a certain gene than people whose ancestors grew up in a different area. It has absolutely nothing to do with race".
> biological race is a collection of N genes that clearly separate all races; no such set of genes exists, therefore biological race doesn't exist.
Academics love this kind of stuff. The danger is that this up-is-down wordplay works its way into things that actually matter. Then it's (quite literally) Orwellian. I guarantee that the panel of clerics at Nature won't be so precise in their application of the funhouse rules when it's in their ideological interest to ignore them.
Personally I find this criticism incredibly disingenuous. It sets up a strawman and doesn't even bother to consider the author's reasoning.
To be clear, I don't really mind whether "race" is a suitable word to descibe ethnic groups, heritage or whatever, nor do I know much about genetics.
No one would deny that the examples you mention aren't real. I'm not making an argument either way, but if someone were, it's easy to think of potential starting points. Such as, Historical reasons based on connections to racisms or eugenics. Maybe even biological/genetics reasons, like being based too much off of external characteristics leading to incorrect assumptions about heritage. Perhaps these terms over simply something with too many contributing factors to be useful without misinterpretation.
Wikipedia's descriptions of both suggest that the author's description is, at the very least, not uncommon.
The first sentence is a liberal shibboleth: it has no more meaning than "colors (of light) are social constructs", or "embryos are sovial constructs." People will go to war over whether and where the lines of "sociopolitival constructs" get drawn...
...and the second sentence is that war, attempting to deny that genetic or biological information can inform sociopolitical categorizations.
My point is that all three statements are true, but that in the later two cases the otherwise "socially constructed" boundaries are so useful and so meaningful to people that to say they "don't exist" is very odd.
There is no clear boundary between blue and green (and some cultures have a word for green-blue), but nobody goes about saying that "colors don't exist."
Ditto embryos. Genetics, phylogeny, and taxonomy provide definitions, which are socially constructed based on ground truth and utility for purpose. Each definition is "socially constructed" but to say the categories "don't exist" because they are socially defined is nuts.
I can't tell if this was tongue-in-cheek, but I've only ever heard that as an example of unclear communication: https://old.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/2z83kl/a_wife_sends_...
This reminds me of the HN threads on programmer jokes. ;-)
While I haven't checked the codes of ethics cited in sociology or anthropoly, the article suggests that their recommendations aren't completely original. Obviously, since I've not looked into this, I'm not making any claims about this particular point.
While I admit that I did not read the full article in detail, since a number of people here are mostly discussing the fourth paragraph, or are discussing the first sentance on race, I wonder how many have actually read this properly.
Science should not care one whit about humans or what we want/think/feel.
We should respect people, there's a huge difference.
As far as I'm concerned, this is the final nail in the coffin for nature magazine or whatever they call themselves now.
This entire blog post is them contradicting themselves repeatedly.
What do you think happened in Nazi Germany?
We could of course also talk about how the centralized control of the science of genetics in the Soviet Union led to mass famines that killed millions and anyone who disagreed was put to death.
It seems to me the problem isn't and never has been science, it is when a single institution, society, or government gets to dictate what "truth" is and "the science is settled" at the point of a gun, not that science gives us answers we don't like.
I agree. This was a political problem which the article is actually trying to address.
> It seems to me the problem isn't and never has been science, it is when a single institution, society, or government gets to dictate what "truth" is...
This is not what the article is advocating.
This seems very rational to me, for example:
"Authors should use the terms sex (biological attribute) and gender (shaped by social and cultural circumstances) carefully in order to avoid confusing both terms. "
Of course, manipulating data for political ends is wrong, and using any evidence you collect to advocate for the slaughter or imprisonment of innocent people is also wrong, but these are philosophical, ethical, moral, and religious questions, not scientific ones.
There is a place for ethics in science... namely in the means in which one applies the scientific method (especially when experiments concern humans or animals). However, the data generated by the scientific method, if examined without bias, even if they're unpleasant, do not cause harm. The question of what to do with any unsavory facts is a question for ethics, philosophy, and religion.
Facts don't kill people. People do.
James Burke presented this idea really well in episode 10 of The Day The Universe Changed. Biases sneak in when you decide what you're studying, how you're studying it, how you collect data, how you interpret the data, etc.
The process itself might be unbiased, but that doesn't mean the application of that process is devoid of bias. Anyone remember the stanford prison experiment, the machine learning chatbot that 4chan turned to racism, or however many AIs people have designed that have looked at data and drawn racist conclusions?
Are these things racist because racial stereotypes are objective immutable facts, or because the bots don't understand the context of those stereotypes?
It's probably prudent to figure out the answer to that question before publishing. At least present a few hypotheses to explain the results.
Maybe, but how much does that matter? If the bias of these scientists is leading them to publish incorrect or low quality research, then Nature should reject it on the grounds that it's bad science. The fact that Nature feels the need to publish this is basically an admission that the political ideology of their leadership is not able to stand up to scientific scrutiny.
> What do you think happened in Nazi Germany?
Probably something a lot like this: Powerful institutions sacrificing objectivity to push propaganda and ideology
"The teachings of the Church must not be undermined by heliocentrism or evolution research, so findings in those areas will be strictly filtered for heresy before publication.
But those findings that support the Church will be permitted, and loudly trumpeted as scientific proof of our dogma."
These statements and policies are just so… egotistical… for lack of a better word. What happens when we stop agreeing on what the “good” is? How can you claim to respect all humans when you don’t respect the human cognitive ability to disagree?
Thanks for posting.
One can lie with facts quite easily.
It used to be that liberals could explain this. Somehow in the last 10 years the current crop of policy leaders decided this is too hard to explain so instead we would ban wrong think and everything will be hunky dory.
This has lead to such hilarious things as people publicly saying how thankful they are to have 4 jabs and getting covid: https://twitter.com/AlbertBourla/status/1559145992594784256 after saying the vaccines are 100% effective: https://twitter.com/AlbertBourla/status/1377618480527257606
Did we ever agree? I always felt like Democracy is some kind of status quo between the incompatible.
We had disagreements, but nothing compared to what we see today.
A lot of people are surprised to find out that people who don't live near them don't share their values.
The context of the disagreements was largely limited to newspapers and politicians. Some assumption of professionalism, editing and journalistic integrity was included with nationwide dialogues.
The internet, Twitter, political amplification, bot amplification, media consolidation, etc have made it 1000x worse.
Before, you could disagree on a topic and go about your day. Now you are beaten over the head with every topic constantly to remind you how much you disagree with it.
A lot of people prefer the comfort of ignorance to the discomfort of that knowledge.
A lot of people prefer the comfort of ignorance to the discomfort of that knowledge and even more prefer the comfort of their self made moral high horse from which they chastise everyone they deem unfit.
This is correct. The take away is something more along the lines of: when people don't know they disagree and therefore don't define themselves in terms of disagreement and further structure their lives around disagreement, they more readily work together; disagreements aren't attacks on personal branding/identity.
Maybe. I feel like those people might be living under a rock. With all the media today it seems unlikely that an individual isn't attacked on at least one belief. I know I see constant attacks on my beliefs.
The problem is that with fast transport, we are extending many laws to the larger geographic area (state or national level), which means increasing the size of the negatively affected groups since we are not homogeneous.
Edit: why disagree?
I don't know how much the internet has caused this deterioration, but it is strongly correlated.
The Tulsa massacre.
Emmett Till
Murders have dropped every decade for the last five.
The amount of political violence pre-internet is just an order of magnitude higher than today’s. Most young people (millennials, Gen Z) are completely unaware - unless you studied this stuff - that e.g. the Senate building was bombed in 1983 by a bunch of leftists upset over the US’s involvement in Lebanon.
This is to say, I’m skeptical of the argument that the internet has made things worse. Definitely not better, maybe not worse.
The partisan lines in my extended family haven't changed for as long as I can remember, but there are fewer get-togethers and more political arguments at the dinner table when they do happen. The aunt and uncle that once were my god parents have now stopped talking to my parents; nobody's political opinions changed but differences in opinion that were once barely worth mentioning are now considered actually evil.
These are people who more or less believe the same sort of thing, but disagree about which party will best implement it. It's a difference that used to not matter very much; my cousins were raised almost identically to me and my siblings. There is no real difference in social or economic class, lifestyle, or community. Simply partisan affiliation.
This has to be fascist propaganda because we know for a fact that Jan 6 was the first time the Capitol was ever attacked.
Just over 100 years ago, political disagreements in West Virginia over unionization led to a full-scale paramilitary battle at Blair Mountain [1], with upwards of 13,000 people involved and complete with the anti-unionization side bringing in private planes as improved bombers.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain
That's because white people violently killed, lynched, and massacred everyone that dared to cause "trouble" prior to the Civil Rights Movement.
I disagree. We didn't have it figured out - it just did not get on many folk's radar because of the differences in network effects prior to the internet. If you were a lonely kid in a farming town who wanted to dress and act like someone from the other biological gender you were shamed or shunned or cut-off. You were the weird one in your town. And that was something that everyone - EVERYONE - else in your town, no matter how empathic or sympathetic, would agree upon.
People who were "odd" just didn't know they could expect a better world. If you were coloured you just sucked up the jokes. If you were gay you hid - or you ran away to places where the network effects were more beneficial. You just dealt with it, and left the normal people to the belief that shit was figured out.
Except for us spectrum types - from about 1997 onwards EVERYONE wanted a piece of us.
If someone wanted to, lets say, "make love with toasters", he'd be looked at weird and gotten over it in the days before the internet. Now he'll find supporting communities and guidance on how to do so...
So yeah, we didn't "have it figured out" and in many aspects, online communities do provide great benefit. But i wonder, if they still are, once all is added up.
Someone living a functional, happy, fulfilling life, while having sex with toasters as their main sexuality is a functional, happy person. There is no problem there.
Whereas someone doing this and say, neglecting other life functions, or injuring themselves, or reporting it as a compulsion they would like to stop, has now met the very base level criteria to be regarded as having a mental pathology.
But that's the bar: going through the DSM and matching symptoms doesn't make for a diagnosis if the symptoms don't cause the person unhappiness, or those who interact with them danger or harm.
Dalibaner sighted
It is really easy to romanticize the past, back when you were younger and just didn't have the same grasp of the world. Especially if you had a decent enough life at the time.
The world has made progress since you were a teen, but there is also an atmosphere of fear that the world is starting to backslide.
> And if the Anglophone internet is ::gestures:: like this now maybe it’s cause it’s less of a professional-class preserve? The dividing line maybe being smartphones where “people on the internet” went from “people who specifically spend $X/mo on it as luxury” to “people with telephone service”? That’s a real possibility, that for all the “Global Village” stuff the wondrous effect of the ‘90s internet was to create a cultural space that was MORE gatekept by wealth and education.
> That’s… kind of depressing, though. “Haha you thought the world was getting better because you were eliminating elitist barriers but actually it’s cause you were making them higher, which is good because the poor and non-elite are disproportionately idiots with worthless ideas and to the extent they’re on top of things the thing they’re on top of is undermining the basis of a good society, and anyway those times were a phenomenon of a narrow early adopter base and you’ll never ever get them back unless you make the non-elite economically and politically irrelevant.”
> Depressing but very well precedented, that’s exactly the arc newsprint, radio, and TV followed before.
https://kontextmaschine.tumblr.com/post/185164859368/your-gr...
In the past, people's resentment was mostly expressed in casual ways because a society tends to suppress crazy behaviour.
But the social media business profits from this social resentment.
This is a serious issue for society to resolve, especially given the clear evidence that many people cannot distinguish sensationalism from fact and are thus influenced by it.
Given the billions of dollars profit involved and the social media addiction problem it has to be one of the most intractable problems of our age to solve.
But solve it we must.
People are generally punished throughout their lives for being ignorant. But lack of comprehension is sometimes feigned. Some people test the tolerance of their behaviour.
The existence of propanda is at once a difficult problem and a profitable problem. There is no bright side to propaganda.
In cases where people are materially punished for their bad behaviour, they shut up and pay attention. I think it likely that future social-media business will require user accounts to have verified identities and users to accept responsibility by risking direct, personal financial loss for their behaviour.
People may call this tyranny, but in fact it's how society works despite their resentment.
The internet makes conflicts more visible. It also attenuates them, so fewer people get killed. Physical conflict is transformed into digital conflict.
Cold War was over, Berlin Wall came down, Gulf War was over on almost the first day thanks to stealth technology. Comedy was at a high point, music was diverse and fun.
There was a lot more happy and a lot less angry in people.
It really was.
Speaking of which-- what ever happened to the guy who did the "women be shoppin'" Def Jam parody in the nutty professor? I remember he appeared on some talk shows at the time but it's as if he dropped off the face of the earth in the 2000s, 2010s and the past year.
Whoever he was, 90s comedy was surely the pinnacle by any measure I can think of.
In the 90s, it was just easier to remain in a comfortable bubble of ignorance of just how violently people disagreed.
Today, the reality of the discord is shoved in our faces every day.
Glad someone picked that out.
Not likely. Slavery had already disappeared in the Northern states due to its inefficiency and internal contradictions. Secession was an attempt to prop up slavery by isolating it economically. It was never going to work.
Slavery as an institution disappeared in other countries around the same time.
It was free markets that destroyed slavery, as slavery simply could not compete with free labor, and slavery was incompatible with industrialization.
In the South, by 1860, the only industry where slavery was still profitable was cotton, and that was coming unglued.
From what I understand, early industrialization gave a temporary boost to slavery. The cotton gin and textile factories greatly increased demand for cotton at a time when industrialization had not yet addressed the harvesting of cotton in the fields.
Industrialization and slavery are incompatible.
Forced labor has never been able to compete with free labor.
Another example, in an alternate timeline perhaps, might have been the development of the western territories. Instead of Chinese immigrants building most of the rail, it probably could have been a very profitable venture for slave owners. Slave labor was used for railway construction in the south, so it's not far-fetched.
I agree that slavery was destined to lose in the end, but I don't think industrialization is a direct path to the economic obsolescence of slavery, because slave labor can compliment partial industrialization.
There were steam powered machines for drilling rock at this time, but they were cumbersome and temperamental, most of the drilling was still done by hand. Hence the folklore of John Henry racing a power drill to see who could work faster. I believe most of the drilling in the west was done by hand, by Chinese immigrants.
Then there is the matter of the rubble. Explosives only break the rock, who hauls that broken rock? That's more manual labor.
"We" always agree on what the good is. If YOU don't agree, well, we'll have to sort that out, won't we?
A. I am right and you are evil. Age old conflict resolution method.
Now I'm not exactly sure why the side which is currently stoking the culture war is also the one that's disarmed itself, but here we are.
Who are you referring to?
Unfortunately it's not only limited to the left wing of the political spectrum.
(Who was later stabbed to death.)
People with the same ideologies flocks together. So when conflict of interest happens, each flock believes that
> "We" are good and "they" are evil. > "We" are right and "they" are wrong.
Good and bad, etc. are metaphysical constructs and thus we have a fundamental problem when using these terms in connection with Science which intrinsically and inextricability measurement-driven.
We need to be very careful using these terms when we're referring to or discussing Science and scientific research or conflict will be inevitable.
That is the position of some philosophers – it is G. E. Moore's famous doctrine that the good is simple, undefinable, irreducible to anything non-ethical – which Moore defended through his "open question argument", a staple of undergraduate introductory courses on the philosophy of ethics. However, it is worth pointing out that far from all philosophers agree with that position–indeed, my armchair impression is that, in contemporary academic philosophy, objectors to Moore's position outnumber his supporters.
> Saying '0.5' or '10%' of good is essentially meaningless.
That's another topic of philosophical dispute. Many classical utilitarians were quite convinced it was meaningful to speak in that way – hence Jeremy Bentham's felicific calculus. I believe that approach has few supporters in contemporary philosophy – but, while there is widespread agreement it is a failure, there is far less agreement on exactly why. And, Bentham's felicific calculus is not entirely dead – outside of philosophy, it is the direct intellectual ancestor of the economist's utility function.
However I agree with you, things are never quite as simple as they seem when one grinds them fine, also time and ideas move on. In discussions such as this I like to use the analogy of Newton's Laws of Motion which after hundreds of years still work well for 'everyday' use but they're all but useless in other endeavors such as our phones' GPS - to get there we had to progress through Lagrangian and Hamiltonian mechanics to Relativity over several hundred years. The same applies to philosophy and philosophical argument and it's why I find it so interesting.
As you're aware, like other disciplines, philosophy is built on earlier work - from the Ancient Greeks through Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, Hume and so on, so it's not unreasonable to expect philosophy to have moved on from G.E. Moore's time. Nevertheless, I had to start somewhere and Moore's points are reasonably relevant.
In the light of modern-day thinking it's not unreasonable to examine Bentham's and Mills' ideas and philosophers should continue to do this no matter the era they're working in. That said, it's not a matter of discarding old ideas but that of refinement.
we cannot deprecate utilitarianism ideas without taking into account what they have contributed to both philosophy and to the world in a practical sense - as clearly all modern cities incorporate utilitarian principles to varying degrees. If we are to deprecate them then we must give explicit arguments for doing so. As you correctly point out we should question Bentham's felicific calculus and similarly I'd add to that the then notion of measuring 'happiness' in units of utiles and 'unhappiness' in even less familiar disutiles.
It made sense to use these calculi in Bentham's time. Then the conceptual framework encapsulating the notion of utility would have been better understood and appeared more useful if there were ways to measure the effectiveness of its outcomes. Nowadays we've moved on for reasons too complex to discuss here and I won't mention them as they will be familiar to you.
Anyone who would insist in trying to do quantitative measurements in this now-simplistic and anachronistic framework would seen a little daft. So quo vadis? Let's look at a parallel: physics has moved on from the Newton's comparatively simple notion of force to the more sophisticated useful concepts of energy and momentum, similarly so too has philosophy but unlike physics, it has yet to come to any widely accepted conclusions in this particular matter.
I believe Bentham and Mills were on the right track however, they were bedeviled in their efforts (as we still are) to 'quantify' abstract notions - those that we're taking about here. Putting a 'measure' on abstract notions is needed if we're to put them to practical use in the real world. (Perhaps we should wheel in A.J. Ayer or his modern cohorts here for we've a language/nomenclature problem: people need to have a comprehensive understanding of any new language - i.e.: the meaning of any new definitions.)
Thus, for this purpose, it seems logical to me to separate the 'theoretical' approach of Moore, Russell, Whitehead et al from this new thought, and it needs to be a radical break. Berkeley's questioning the existence of the quad's tree or Russell's questioning the reality of the table at which he's sitting through doubts about the viability of his sense datum have no place here.
(Physicists didn't make progress in QFT (part of Quantum Mechanics) until they learned to solve seemingly intractable math issues such as 'infinites' (akin to dividing by zero). This was a damned hard effort and took many years but it on...
This is where I don't agree. Philosophy and physics are very different.
In physics, at some point certain major theories become established and universally accepted. Pretty much all physicists accept Einstein's theories of relativity as correct–up to the limits of our current ability to test them.
By contrast, in philosophy, professional consensus is vastly more elusive than in physics. The same debates rage from generation and generation, without ever coming to any clear resolution. This is especially true when it comes to highly controversial areas such as ethics:
Are moral statements cognitive or non-cognitive? If cognitive, is their truth objective or subjective? If objective, is the ground of their objectivity natural, non-natural, or supernatural? And, if their truth is objective, which proposed normative ethical theory best approximates that truth: Utilitarianism? (Act, rule or preference?) Deontology? Virtue ethics? Natural law theory? Some combination of two or more of them? Something else entirely?
Philosophy, as a field, is nowhere near reaching consensus on those questions, and consensus seems just as far away now as it did a century ago, and will probably seem just as distant a century from now.
That's not to say no issues ever get resolved. The IEP reports [0] that "...philosophers seem to have reached a consensus... that indirect doxastic voluntarism is true" – and I have no reason to doubt its report. But indirect doxastic voluntarism (that we have some measure of indirect voluntary control over what we believe) is not an especially interesting doctrine. The far more interesting question of direct doxastic voluntarism (whether, at least in some cases, we have the ability to make a direct voluntary choice of what to believe) – is as disputed as it ever was.
Another example of a resolved issue – during the 1950s and early 1960s, logical positivism was enormously popular in (Anglophone) academic philosophy. However, consensus was soon reached that, at least in its classical "meaningfulness is verifiability" formulation, it is a self-refuting position – by the 1970s, essentially everyone had moved on from it, and that consensus has endured from then until now. So, at least occasionally, professional consensus can emerge either that (a) some minor theory is true, or (b) some major theory is false. But consensus on the truth of major theories seems to perennially escape us – quite unlike the case of physics.
> rather it's the milieu in which they're now operating which is seemingly putting strictures on what they do. Like fashion, a set of cultural boundary conditions is determining what they actually do in practice. (BTW, I accept with Academia in the horrible state it's currently in at present that challenge is more than unusually difficult.)
One philosopher might be a moral anti-realist, who believes that morality is simply a subjective expression of emotional attitudes. Another may be a moral realist, yet be convinced that morality can be objectively defined in terms of some theory of the natural sciences (such as evolutionary psychology). A third may be a divine command theorist, convinced that morality can be objectively defined as obeying God's will (as revealed in the Bible or Quran or whatever). All three have reasons to reject Moore's positions, but those reasons are rather different in each case. So the fact that Moore's position is widely disputed, is not a sign of "groupthink". (For what it's worth, I p...
In philosophy (at least in my experience) documenting one's words so they aren't misinterpreted can take an inordinate amount of time, therefore this isn't the detailed reply that I'd have liked to have written. It, however, will have to do. Anyway, HN isn't the right place for ongoing philosophical discussions because of its timeouts. That also brings me to one of my pet subjects about all online forums that I'm familiar with and that's that they become long and unwieldy in very short order, thus late entries, irrespective of merit, are often depreciated or ignored. It's an ongoing grouping problem [Gestalt laws, etc.] of significant proportions which remains to be solved.
You're right, getting a consensus in philosophy is more difficult than in science. However, I'd also argue that in science a consensus is often difficult to achieve—that is, until there's a good understanding of the physics involved and sometimes that takes centuries to achieve. Nowadays, the leading edge of physics is pretty much a 'bleeding' edge, as it can hardly be said that there's any widespread consensus about how to progress forward and make truly significant advances. Especially given that not much progress has been made since the general agreement about the Standard Model of some 40-plus years ago and that recent LHC experiments haven't much changed the situation.
We don't know each other nor do we have knowledge of each other's background and experience, thus pitching comments at each other until that info is synced makes communication somewhat hit-and-miss. Moreover, it's made considerably worse due to philosophy's many and diverse fields. As you've likely gathered, whilst I've studied the subject it's not my daily bread and butter. Mostly it's been science/technology that's kept me off the street, thus it would be fair comment to say that I'm unlikely to be up to speed in many of philosophy's specialist branches.
However, I've found that all the branches of philosophy I've studied—analytic, political, ethics/moral philosophy, formal logic, etc. and even existentialism—have benefited me greatly, especially so in that they've prevented me from forming strictured or dogmatic ideas about any one aspect of the discipline. It seems to me that in philosophy it's necessary, in fact almost essential, to be open and flexible to new and changing ideas, however that doesn't mean that one has to dispense with or change one's understanding of its fundamental foundations.
That said, given my background and introduction to the subject, my roots are principally in the analytic tradition. I'm old enough to have watched Bertrand Russell on television on many occasions as a youngster and I was impressed with the clarity, precision and succinctness of what he said. In hindsight, it's clear to me that Russell's influence on me at that young age was very significant and lasting, and thus it's why I studied philosophy.
Those roots and that analytic background is why I'd differ from your comment that 'philosophy and physics are very different', some aspects of philosophy are different to physics and others not so much so. Here, it is essential to be very specific in one's definitions and to carefully detail the scope of one's argument...
Some will say that, to be strictly correct about terminology, QM is a theory, but many worlds is an interpretation of it. The theory belongs to physics proper; the interpretation belongs, not to physics, but rather to its allied discipline, the philosophy of physics. (Many extra-philosophical disciplines have allied subfields of philosophy – philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of science, philosophy of biology, philosophy of law, philosophy of politics, philosophy of medicine, philosophy of psychiatry, philosophy of education, etc, etc, etc.)
These interpretaions belong in "philosophy of physics" rather than "physics proper", because (1) they are (at least for now) untestable in practice; (2) the mathematics is (largely) the same. Something like string theory is more "physics proper" than "philosophy of physics", because even though (1) is also true for it, (2) is false.
But, not everyone is so careful about the boundary between "physics" and "philosophy of physics". Your example of physicists who say "philosophy has nothing to say to them" and then embrace many worlds is an example.
> The same goes goes for logic's acceptance into philosophy, Russell argued that that logic was actually an aspect of mathematics and that basically it didn't belong in philosophy
We can study logics as formal mathematical systems, and to that extent logic indeed forms part of mathematics (mathematical logic). However, while the mathematical study of logics is a vast topic – if we ask the question "does this mathematical logic accurately model how (some aspect of) human thought actually functions, or ought to function"? – that question is beyond the proper bounds of mathematics – and that's where the boundary lies between philosophical logical and mathematical logic.
> After reading your reply, it's clear to me that we have somewhat different philosophical outlooks
I get somewhat pedantic about precise conceptual distinctions (including trying to correctly deploy "the discipline's more formal nomenclature", as you put it), but I feel like you treat these distinctions in a more impressionistic way than I do. I think that's one difference between our approaches.
> If perchance we ever managed to spend an afternoon together discussing philosophy then I'd reckon we'd get along just fine.
Yes. Who knows, maybe some day we shall.
Do these people think there are motherfucking X-Men living among us who we want to save from stigma? These kinds of statements read like the authors don't actually believe people are meaningfully equal.
In fact, there are. You know, we all have genetic differences, and most studies do not account for these genetic differences. So a medicine that helps one person might cause drug induced Lupus in another.
Lithium is a good example of this stigma. I have Schizoaffective Bipolar Disorder and Lithium is constantly forces on me even though it does not work. I am what they call a "Lithium Non-Responder" and this has bee shown to be linked to varying genetics.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4814312/
The stigma is that researchers still think there is only one genetic human.
And what do you think the X-Men was about? It was about genetic difference and mental health. It is about trying to have people see that we have value that others cannot see because all they see is the illness.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20167245/
It strikes me as a tricky set of not always terribly related concepts. As a Christian I believe all human beings are equal in inherent dignity. As an American who likes the Anglo-American legal tradition I believe that all people ought to be equal before the law, even though that’s observably not the case. As someone who has performed hundreds of tech interviews and worked in this industry a long time, I don’t believe people are remotely close to equal in developer ability or productivity and I don’t see any way they could be made to be without bringing high performers down to the lowest common denominator.
Right. Which is the problem. If differences between humans were down near the noise threshold, none of this would be an issue. What qualities should be valued or devalued, rewarded or punished, is an ethical and political issue. Measuring them is a scientific one. "Nature" is, supposedly, in the science business.
Denial is not a river in Egypt.
I see a counterfactual claim ("may outweigh") and therefore an opportunity for some causal identification, i.e. a scientific answer!
An RCT would be ideal, but we might also look to the literature on attitude change in general to see how new information impacts discourse and attitudes. Here's a few things off the top of my head:
* https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/692739
* https://alexandercoppock.com/graham_coppock_2021.html
* https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev-psych-...
I think that in general, researchers find racial/prejudicial attitudes very resistant to change, either in an anti-prejudicial or "confirm my existing biases" direction...
This is worse than religion because it’s pretending to be rational. And many many people will be fooled.
I hate to make the comparison because it's such a trope, but, IMO this is one of the most insidious things the Nazis did to indoctrinate the population:
They did things like send people into schools and they would cherry-pick the weakest, least intelligent, least-liked Jewish kid they could find and set him alongside the most athletic, attractive, smart, well-liked Aryan looking kid.
They'd bring them both up in front of the class and from that point on, they'd use "scientific" discussion and observation of their qualities to convince the kids that the Aryan kids were superior in every way. I'll tell you what, I was a pretty savy independent thinker and empathetic kid, but I really think I might have fallen for that type of technique, masquerading as science.
Moreover, I've spent the last 2+ years horrified by how willing "scientists" have been to generalize to wild real-world conclusions from miniscule data based on Twitter outrage, so I have zero faith that a board of clerics is going to use these rules with magnanimity. Whichever political faction that controls the board will be tempted to define "inappropriate" to mean "whatever conclusion we don't like".
Just to make it concrete: run an RCT that shows that masks don't have any effect on Covid transmission? Good luck getting that published in a top journal, even today. With these new rules, literally anyone who doesn't like the conclusions will claim that the result is an "overgeneralization". There will be no study large enough to satisfy the clerisy...unless The Science says something approved, of course.
---
Edit: and lest you think I am exaggerating with my example, consider the following, directly quoted from the new guidelines:
> Harms can also arise indirectly, as a result of the publication of a research project or a piece of scholarly communication – for instance, stigmatization of a vulnerable human group or potential use of the results of research for unintended purposes (e.g., public policies that undermine human rights or misuse of information to threaten public health).
They're literally saying that they're open to censoring research that might be "misused" to "threaten public health". And they've defined it broadly enough that pretty much anything that displeases "a vulnerable human group" can be covered. Convenient.
At least you can spot the acolytes with "I believe in Science" bumper stickers and yard signs. Science is not a belief system.
We are romans in the early 5th century. What’s coming won’t be pretty.
It's too powerful of a manipulation and control tool for the elites to just give up on. If we can just replace "god says" with "science says" and have the same result of getting the sheep in line, then of course it will happen.
By being a "believer" in science as you've laid it out, you aren't believing in science as a process, but science as an institution.
One problem with that. Some sciences, particularly soft or social sciences cross broadly into culture and "ways of life". There are certain things today that cannot be questioned without getting shouted down or deplatformed. So challenging the current widely held scientific facts can be career ending.
Actual science will accept when it's been proven wrong. Much of we have these days isn't that. And that includes many folks working in what would be considered the hard sciences.
In other senses, "beliefs" are an identity, and some people like to think theirs are more based on science than others. "Believing" in science amounts to adhering to a broad package of ethical and lifestyle choices that references science to various degrees, their followers believe this gives them more legitimacy than other lifesyles or ethics systems, but the actual degree to which they are justified by science varies enormously.
To take 2 extremes :
(1) Taking a stance against fossil fuel is "believing in science" because (good, credible) science says those increase carbon footprint which in turn disrupts the climate in a huge variety of ways, technically this doesn't necessarily imply to oppose fossil fuel as science doesn't have normative component (science doesn't care - in the strictest sense - if human civilization is destroyed or signficantly harmed), but with only an additional few, normally agreed-upon, assumptions you can get there.
(2) Taking a stance against biological-women-exclusive sports is "believing in science" according to the stance followers because a few studies of shaky foundations and questionable funding says there is no unfair advantage to those who had male puberty, although there are tons of other studies that disagree.
Those who say (loudly) they "believe in science" are usually using "believe" in the non-philosophical sense, and the viewpoints they love to push most are usually (2)-like rather than (1)-like.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gettier_problem
When you evaluate the truth of the whole argument, you'll find that it's not a "Justified True Belief" because the truth does not flow through the justified prepositions.
In my opinion, the only rigorous way to improve our knowledge, is to employ Bayes Theorem, and Bayesian thinking in general.
You and I may have different prior on a topic. We may see the same evidence, but end up believing different things because of the prior. As long as we state the prior, that is good and fair. If the evidence contradicts my prior, I should lower the confidence I have in my belief, even if the prior was big enough that I still believe the same thing.
Unfortunately, what often happens, is that people lock themselves into believing things absolutely. If you lock some prior probability to 1, Bayes' Theorem has n way to let you update that belief.
This is especially common when it comes to beliefs related to religion and identity. In fact, this is one way to define religious belief. Anything you believe that you will NOT stop believing regardless of evidence, could be defined as religious.
If you believe in God, and we discover that Heaven is not on the other side of the starts, the believer just modifies non-core parts, and claims that "God is everywhere and nowhere".
If belief in racist oppression is what defines you, and you find that most individuals are not individually racist anymore, you can just introduce "Structural Racism" that claims that hard work, staying married and maths are racist.
The question is how do you define bad results if you include provisions for socially constructed feelings about whether results are socially and politically correct or not.
I hope hope hope hope hope underneath all the crummy filler language and what appears to be rationalization for a distinctly unscientific expansion of editorial discretion to suppress unsightly factual results, Nature is simply saying: don't study social constructs, it's not scientific, a phrase with which I think I loosely agree (without deeper thought as to whether there are valid situations to study socially constructed groups that can't be better expressed by studying the non-social-construct characteristic).
If that's all this is, I think we'll be fine. But I have a real hard time believing that Nature would allow a paper that found there to be cognitive discrepancies between people with genealogical lineages that closely align to the socially constructed races, under these new guidelines, since arguably the "effects on society" might be negative.
And I know people who would ignore the science and fight to the metaphorical death to suppress that type of information regardless of the terminology used. So, understandably, I'm not super confident this will be handled carefully and appropriately. Notice there is no burden of proof or scientific rigor required to determine that the effects some some research are negatively impacting society. A presumption that they might is all that's needed. I worry scientific pursuit will suffer.
A lot of the time, when someone in the Humanities use the term "Social Construct" they mean a categorization scheme that have overlapping categories, especially when used by someone in a way they don't like.
Someone with some level of understanding of natural science knows that this problem apply applies to a multitude of category schemes, if not most. In biology, one could argue that our definition of a "species" is a social construct. Even alive today, there are plenty of animals that exist on a continuum between different "species", and over evolutionary time, every living organism exists on this same continuum, and at the start, there were even no clear distinction between living and non-living.
The person in the Humanities like to use the word "essentialism", while still giving Humans special knowledge, when in reality we all live on a continuum that includes monkeys, fish, rocks and oceans. We're all recombinations of atoms and ions.
Still, there ARE clear and real patterns in this madness, and most of science is precisely about understanding these patterns. While we DO exist on a continuum, most of the continuum is empty, and especially if we consider only one snapshot of time.
A biologist can talk about "tigers" without making an effort to consider ligers and tigons, or pre-historic ancestors of modern-day tigers that were similar but not identical to modern tigers.
Biologists will also use the terms male and female tigers, knowing that the intermediaries are vanishingly rare. The continuum between them is there, but mostly empty.
Or a physicist may even speak about a "red" laser, knowing perfectly well that the wavelength used to separate "red" from "orange" is a "human construct".
So, if someone claims that "biological sex" is a human construct, they may be correct in some uninteresting way, but are primarily just obfuscating.
Are they really advocating for self censorship in the sciences? And when the whims of societal taste turn or, God forbid (and yes, I put this with all irony intended), Twitter decides it doesn't like an opinion for five minutes... does science self censor then as well?
https://www.vox.com/2020/7/29/21340308/david-shor-omar-wasow...
> Shor, citing research by Princeton political scientist Omar Wasow, suggested that these incidents could prompt a political backlash that would help President Donald Trump’s bid for reelection. At the same time, he noted that, historically, nonviolent protests had been effective at driving political change “mainly by encouraging warm elite discourse and media coverage.”
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/european-journal-of-...
But it's still fascinating and a great paper, thank you for sharing! Plus the over representation of both Nazis and Islamist terrorist groups is fascinating. I'm completely geeked out! Thanks again!
If our choices at election time continue ro be between a shit sandwich and a shit sandwich without the bread, we will continue to have similar issues. Lesser of two evils and all that.
Ps which one has the bread is just a matter of perspective for each individual.
The competitors last round were shit sandwich vs shit sandwich you haven't tried yet.
You might despise the candidate (and to my opinion most candidate can be despised in many ways), but that doesn’t put all their voters at the candidate’s level, nor preclude supporters from “using” their candidates to push a specific aspect.
To me that’s the lesson times and times again, when we think some candidate is obviously non viable and we’re just dumdfounded as they’re elected.
Sorry if I came off as a single sided zealot =) I, like most people, just want a little compromise and moderation, and most of all respect out of my politicians. What I don't want is fealty to a political party first, like a bunch of gang bangers.
Rioting continued and democrats didn’t stand up and say “rioting is bad,” and as a result of that rioting the criminal justice movement was set back a decade.
In Minneapolis now Ilhan Omar barely won her primary because she wants to defund the police and even Black people want more cops: https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/minneapolis-polic...
Whenever science attempts to prop up political regimes by obscuring the truth, then tragedy and travesty occurs.
The only way I can interpret their statement is that harmful truths actually do exist, they're known, but we must ignore them.
This whole machine will reincarnate again and again though. With fairytale or without, the part of society not trusting the judical system to uphold contracts and social safety, will make there voices heard in pseudo religion after pseudo religion.
Let me venture into the testable area. I venture the guess, that the more reliable and longer existing a states social safety net is, the more religion will be absent from its society. It should also corellate with reliability of the justice system.
This is actually a bit of a historical myth that due to anti-religious bias prevails widely.
Contrary to widespread belief, the works of Charles Darwin were never on the Catholic Church's Index of Forbidden Books, nor did the Catholic Church ever state that Evolution as a theory could not be believed, but rather emphasized that a few specific theological events (a garden in which man fell) must remain, though the lead-up to those events was not rigidly defined. This is also why a Catholic priest is responsible for the Big Bang theory.
As for heliocentrism, this is also baloney as it was initially proposed by Nicolaus Copernicus, who was not censored for his beliefs[1], and also served as a Catholic canon (religious member but not necessarily a priest). This idea was backed by Galileo using astronomy, however, Galileo was tried for writings other than his heliocentrism that were arguably heretical (including attacks on the Pope within his work) and not necessarily for the heliocentric view itself, as seen by the Church making Copernicus mandatory reading in some universities for astronomy courses.
[1] The Roman Inquisition would later censor it for a short time, however, their main requirement was that it definitions be changed from fact to theory, and the Roman Inquisition actually used 13 mathematical arguments of their own from the astronomer Tycho Brahe, versus only 4 theological ones. The Spanish Inquisition never censored the book. Even though Brahe was later proven incorrect in his arguments, he was still one of the most accurate astronomers of the era, and Johannes Kepler (of the Kepler Space Telescope fame) would later use his measurements to create the 3 planetary laws of motion. In any event, it would appear that this censorship of Copernicus requiring revisions before publications was due to Copernicus' overconfidence in potentially erroneous mathematics, rather than a theological dispute.
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-30833-9_...
I would also recommend reading about Nicolas Copernicus (geocentrism before Galileo), as well as Georges Lemaître (Catholic Priest who had idea for Big Bang), and Gregor Mendel (before Evolution, experiments with Genetics).
Example: "In Spain, new cosmological discoveries and ideas were discussed at both the universities and at the Casa and Consejo. For example, Jerónimo Muñoz (ca. 1520–1591), who taught astronomy and mathematics at the universities of Valencia and Salamanca, was one of the many European scientists to observe and write about the supernova of 1572. For Muñoz, the supernova challenged the Aristotelian notion that change was impossible in the celestial realm. In some of his unpublished work and letters to other European astronomers like Tycho Brahe (1546–1601), he espoused an understanding of the relationship between the celestial and terrestrial realms drawn from Stoic philosophers. He denied the existence of celestial orbs and instead asserted that the planets moved through the heavens like birds through the air or fish through the water. He also discussed Nicolaus Copernicus’ (1473–1543) heliocentric system with his students, although he did not endorse it (Navarro-Brotóns 1995, 57). In fact, as Victor Navarro-Brotóns has shown, “the work of Copernicus circulated freely in sixteenth-century Spain, where its technical and empirical aspects were greatly admired and used” (Navarro-Brotóns 1995, 63). In 1561, the statutes of the University of Salamanca specified that in the second year of the astronomy course the professor must teach either “the Almagest of Ptolemy, or its Epitome by Regiomontanus, or Geber, or Copernicus,” and that the students could vote on which text they wanted (Navarro-Brotóns 1995, 55). In 1594, these statutes were amended and the teaching of Copernicus was made mandatory, no longer subject to the vote of the students (Navarro-Brotóns 1995, 59). The 1594, statutes were reproduced with no change in 1625, despite the prohibition of Copernicus’ work by the Roman Inquisition in 1616 (Navarro-Brotóns 1995, 60). In fact, De revolutionibus was “never placed on any Spanish Inquisitorial index” (Navarro-Brotóns 1995, 63), which does not mean Spanish astronomers were free to adopt heliocentrism but does indicate that it was possible to teach and discuss Copernicus in Spanish universities. As Navarro-Brotóns notes, only one Spanish scholar, Diego de Zúñiga (1536–1597), is known to have actually endorsed the Copernican system. Others used the Prutenic tables, which were calculated using Copernicus’ mathematical models, and other parameters drawn from De revolutionibus, in much the same way that Copernicus was taught at the University of Wittenberg (Navarro-Brotóns 1995, 59; Westman 1975). Finally, interest in Copernicus spread outside universities, because the Prutenic tables and other technical aspects of Copernicus’ work had applications in navigation. For example, Juan Cedillo Diaz (ca. 1560–1625), who studied at Salamanca and became chief cosmographer at the Consejo de Indias and professor at the Mathematical Academy in Seville in 1611, made a free Spanish translation of the first three books of Copernicus’ De revolutionibus sometime between 1620 and 1625 (Granada and Crespo 2019; Navarro-Brotóns 1995, 63; Esteban Piñeiro and Gómez Crespo 1991)."
The Church's position at the time was that God made the universe, and if empirical evidence from observing that universe clearly showed that it did not work the way the Church thought the Bible said it worked, then the Church must have misinterpreted the Bible.
Galileo's problems came from a combination of several factors, none of which stem from proposing a non-geocentric universe.
1. Galileo's heliocentric theory wasn't actually better at explaining observations than geocentric theories were. Galileo, like the Church believed in an intelligently designed universe created by an all-powerful God. He believed that such a God would choose laws of physics that were beautiful and elegant.
Where his heliocentric approach would require something non-beautiful or inelegant to fit observation he dismissed the observations as optical illusions or observational error.
It's commonly believed that the moons of Jupiter and the phases of Venus rule out geocentric theories, but that is not quite correct. They rule out the Ptolemaic system which was the leading geocentric theory, but they do not rule out the Tychonic geocentric system.
2. He had a very big ego.
3. He was an asshole. He was very intolerant and rude to his rivals and to those he considered to be his inferiors. And thanks to that big ego "inferiors" included pretty much everyone else.
4. He was a celebrity who was regularly invited to hang out with the rich and powerful.
5. He had an atrocious sense of politics. He either failed to realize or ignored that some of the people he was an asshole towards had the wealth and power to make his life miserable if he didn't stop being an asshole toward them.
[1] https://faculty.fiu.edu/~blissl/Flynngs.pdf
Social prestige associated with higher learning was a subject of rivalry and competition, as most things were in those places at that time it seems.
* From Atomos to Atom
* From Alchemy to Chemistry
* The Main Currents of Marxism Part 1 (not about Marxism - just a bunch of, mostly Christian, philosophers)
* The Skeptical Chemist
* Some of Descartes' work
I've noticed two notable things. First, the early Christian thinkers were _extremely_ logical. They did not shy away from human observation and philosophy, they embraced it. They spent a a majority of their study time reconciling human knowledge with scripture to try and understand their place in the world. Churches sponsored a lot of this research and invested heavily in making their religions consistent with human knowledge.
Second, not only did the church invest heavily in making their religion consistent with human knowledge, all of humanity did the same. So much effort went into reconciling the early greek philosophers with modern observation and religion. From medicine, to law, to religion, to alchemy - everything was very inter-dependent and few (if any) bodies of knowledge could stand on their own, they appealed to facts from diverse philosophies to justify their stances.
You see a pattern in the 1500s-1700s where, in a very short period of time, humans got _very good_ at attaching philosophy to physical phenomenon and reconciling what was observed with what they believed. During this period, pretty much every branch of human understanding underwent unprecedented massive paradigm shifts. Huge amounts of what was "known" were, fairly quickly, toppled when extremely foundational beliefs were questioned (i.e. the 3 element theory vs. the 4 element theory). A lot of folks were fairly invested in what they "knew" and didn't react well to the rug being pulled out from under them. It wasn't just "the church" that had a bad reaction to some of these thinkers; medicine rejected many early scientists like Paracelsus (generous to call them scientists) striping them of their credentials, jobs, etc.
I guess what I'm learning is that European history was a lot more messy than I thought it to be (shocker, I know). And it's really fascinating seeing these currents of thought develop over time. It's pretty amazing that it took us nearly 2000 years to question Aristotle and, once we did, the rapid progress that followed. It's only been about 400 years since we thought maybe there were 3 elements instead of 4, and we are already seriously considering colonizing another planet.
Melanchthon:
"Some people believe that it is excellent and correct to work out a thing as absurd as did that Sarmatian [i.e., Polish] astronomer who moves the earth and stops the sun. Indeed, wise rulers should have curbed such light-mindedness."
"The eyes are witnesses that the heavens revolve in the space of twenty-four hours. But certain men, either from the love of novelty, or to make a display of ingenuity, have concluded that the earth moves; and they maintain that neither the eighth sphere [the celestial sphere] nor the sun revolves. … Now, it is a want of honesty and decency to assert such notions publicly, and the example is pernicious."
Luther:
"People gave ear to an upstart astrologer who strove to show that the earth revolves, not the heavens or the firmament, the sun and the moon….This fool wishes to reverse the entire science of astronomy; but sacred scripture tells us [Joshua 10:13] that Joshua commanded the sun to stand still, and not the earth."
Also recognize your book is from 1959, before the internet, before many books were digitized, and before many of these things were debunked.
When a religious person says they "believe" something, it means they operate as if it were true even though they have no evidence to indicate it as such (a.k.a. the god of the gaps).
When a scientist says they "believe" something, it means all evidence gathered so far indicates that it is true, but if more data comes in and a different conclusion is drawn, then the belief should be abandoned.
These are two entirely different concepts, but in English we tend to just say "believe". The scientific "belief" is more akin to a mathematical theorem: - if X, then Y - All data indicates X is probably true, so for now I believe Y. - New data indicates X is probably false, so I no longer believe Y.
And of course when you're engineering something, it's not that simple because you need contingencies. X may have a 99% chance of being true, but you still need to have a plan for for that 1% case.
None of this is something that religion considers whatsoever; with religion, a belief is true and anything contrary to that belief is considered false, even if that thing is a measurement of reality itself. There are still huge swaths of people who believe a person thousands of years ago was immaculately conceived, walked on water, turned water into wine, all things that you and I know are inconsistent with reality. But all contrary evidence simply doesn't matter, the "belief" remains. This is the antithesis of science.
In practice religious (or spiritual) people are a rather diverse bunch and it's not all that helpful to paint with too broad of a brush.
I will point out that in at least Christian theology, "faith" and "trust" are basically synonyms. In the original Greek of the New Testament, it's literally the same word.
In that sense, making choices based on trust in God or making decisions based on trust in science are really fairly similar. And quite often they're not contradictory either.
For example, both science and scriptures say worrying is bad for you, so someone can try to minimize worry based on faith in science and faith in scripture simultaneously.
I'll also point out that a lot of the "scientific" objections to religions boil down to metaphysical disagreements about the nature of observation of the nature of a (notional, at least) deity. I put "scientific" in scare quotes because science itself only makes sense given some assumptions, like the axiom that it's reasonable to assume things do not exist until it's definitely proven they do. That's a valid opinion, but it's not scientific as such. Another common assumption is that a creator and a fossil record (for instance) are somehow incompatible. As if a creator can create the cosmos but a fossil record is a bit much somehow.
Anyway, I think folks would find each other more thoughtful and reasonable if they'd take some time to listen more. There are lots of misconceptions in all directions in these discussions.
Is this what happened, though? Outside of the politicization of COVID, the majority of the conversation that was anywhere near this was more simply "if you are going to question the people who are providing evidence, you must provide evidence to the contrary". It wasn't that science was untouchable and the change in guidance proves that not only was that not the case but it was shown that science was not untouchable and regularly changed with new information so long as that information was backed by evidence.
All those things are completely consistent with reality. Every year there are virgin births[0] (not immaculate conceptions[1], which is a term specific to the birth of the Virgin Mary herself), water turning into wine[2], and people walking on water[3].
I think what you mean is, the specific details of those miracles, as described in the Bible, have not been observed since, and they would have required a succession of extremely improbable quantum events. No one disagrees with the notion that those events were scientifically unlikely, but unlikely events are still consistent with reality.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parthenogenesis [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immaculate_Conception [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irrigation [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowshoe
We name people who overly act on this premisse as schizophrenics.
Is it possible that they happened to one of the billions of people who lived? Yes. Even more so if that person happens to be God incarnate who created the universe.
In fact, the chances of these highly unlikely events actually goes up if you consider the person claimed to be God and did miracles to demonstrate his divinity - highly unlikely events is the exact thing you would expect from someone proving to be God
That's circular reasoning. "I believe a extremely low probability event because that's what we should expect from the entity I believe in". If I go with that, I can create any weird belief.
Allegedly. No evidence to support this claim exists.
I believe Jesus was God because he claimed to be God. Also, the "unlikely events" (aka miracles) don't disprove he existed and was God.
Other people have claimed to be God, too. They were either lying or were crazy. Jesus was neither.
It's easy to make bold statements, but that definitely doesn't match what most historians, Christian and secular, claim. (And I believe several of your other claims have been largely discredited, even by secular historians.)
Bart Ehrman, a New Testament historian who is well known for his critical eye on this stuff (he was a Christian but later became an atheist), dates the NT books between 50 and 120 AD, and from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Testament, the latest date scholars give is 150 AD. Other scholars date the NT books from between 70 and 90 AD.
The 300 AD date you're referring to may be when the New Testament was approved as "canon" by the church. Again from that Wikipedia article:
> The earliest known complete list of the 27 books is found in a letter written by Athanasius, a 4th-century bishop of Alexandria, dated to 367 AD. The 27-book New Testament was first formally canonized during the councils of Hippo (393) and Carthage (397) in North Africa.
See also the first answer here: https://www.quora.com/Was-the-first-gospel-written-300-years... and https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/blog/how-new-testament-w... which notes that:
> By the time of Justin Martyr (ca. 100-165 AD) and Irenaeus (ca. 130-202 AD) we find extensive quotations from New Testament books; while the First Letter of Clement, addressed to the church in Corinth, quotes Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians.
He is not known for any such thing. Ehrman's claims are all on the historical chain of evidence for the books, not whether the books are true accounts. I'm very familiar with his work. In fact, in his book "How Jesus Became God", he suggests that there's no evidence at all, historically speaking, that Jesus ever even claimed to be the Son of God or anything supernatural and that, if he did exist, he was just a preacher. Jesus was not mentioned by any of his contemporaries or the Romans at all and they kept excellent documentation of official events of their empire.
Either way, by your own admission, there were no eyewitnesses. If the books are dated 120 years after the birth of Jesus, then the people that wrote them were not around when those events occurred.
Also, your evidence is simply showing that the books existed. It doesn't prove or support the idea that the events in them were true. Your argument here is akin to saying that Ghostbusters is a true story because it takes place in NYC and that's a real city that exists now.
Quoting a book as evidence that the book is true is tautological.
I wasn't arguing that the books were true. I do believe that, but you'll note my reply above simply tries to show that your bold claim that "the earliest known manuscripts of any biblical text post-dates Jesus by 300 years" is widely discredited.
I didn't "admit there were no eyewitnesses" at all -- my response wasn't related to that. Overall it seems like your reply had very little to do with my response above?
>Other scholars date the NT books from between 70 and 90 AD.
Jesus lived to be 35 years old. Even if you take the most supportive version of this statement, the earliest NT book was written over 35 years after Jesus' supposed death and there's no evidence to support the idea that they were written between those dates. Even the Wikipedia link that you sent says that there's no evidence for it:
>The New Oxford Annotated Bible states, "Scholars generally agree that the Gospels were written forty to sixty years after the death of Jesus. They thus do not present eyewitness or contemporary accounts of Jesus's life and teaching."
It's not true.
From this we can infer that Jesus had two X chromosomes, and was therefore a trans man.
That is not true. As I pointed out, belief in the unseen, with evidence, is very different from believing without evidence.
Check out this lecture for a more detailed and nuanced explanation[1]. It details some of the inherent limitations of science.
[1] https://youtu.be/If3cNUixEBM
Science is falsifiable - anything pushed forward by science has a way to be disproved built in (other wise it is not science). That's important because then you can update your worldview based on new evidence.
For the same to be true of religion - it must be falsifiable: it MUST have a way to disprove itself via experimentation... oh wait... the (Christian version) does...
Go do this test: "Kings 18:20-40": When you've soaked your bull in water and it doesn't magical catch fire by praying... I'll be waiting. (Or I'll be waiting video proof of the Christian god - that should be repeatable by many people... right?)
MAKE THE BULL CATCH FIRE WITH YOUR PRAYERS OR GTFO WITH YOUR NONSENSE
If I may reverse the burden of proof, and be equally unreasonable, let me say that if you think that there is no afterlife, then you should go kill yourself. You're going to die at some point anyway, and this way you'll get your answer right away. It's a 100% falsifiable position, but unfortunately very few people who have done the necessary experiment have been able to communicate their findings to the scientific community afterwards.
Why not? If a god has shown that they can intervene in the physical world we live in, why shouldn't we be able to test that?
> He cannot be questioned about what He does, but they will ˹all˺ be questioned.
-- https://quran.com/21/23
I posted this lecture in another post, it's a good starting point: https://youtu.be/If3cNUixEBM
Let's do Luke 5:4-8
Jesus tells fishermen to cast their nets and catch 2 boat loads of fish. Before you discount this miracle, I'll point out that Simon believed Jesus was God after this - but watching Jesus heal people is Ch 4 didn't convince him.
Great. Now for the miracle. It's at the nearest grocery store. In the fish department.
But I agree the second part is questionable. Scientists shouldn't decide whether something is right or wrong. They just conduct experiments, gather data, draw conclusions, and share the results. Obviously they should consider the ethical impacts of conducting their experiments, but beyond that, all valid conclusions should be welcome.
This seems like an implicit denial that people can have different abilities.
There's even dystopian sci-fi with that theme: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Bergeron
The worst part is that they've infected organisations who have huge amounts of power over the population.
I'm sure they exist but focusing on the extremes of a movement don't do anyone any favors
For example, most people on this site are a fan of open source. How would they feel if anytime the subject came up people talked only about the ideas of Stallman?
I think this overton window keeps shifting and there is no one courageous to say "No, this is unreasonable". It is not just happening in this one instance but the entire culture; we have now instituted things like "birthing persons". We can't even call "Fathers" and "Mothers" anymore. We are too coward to speak up and risk our jobs. The chilling effect is real.
This house of cards is going to fall hard and fast.
The robots in that world were hard-coded to be incapable of injury humans, and the mind-reading robot considered emotional damage “injury”. Of course the robot got into a paradox where it had to hurt someone’s feelings, so it just…died.
What's interesting to me, revisiting Asimov after medical school, is that we are unable to create a workable definition of pain that is absent an emotional component. This is of course not to claim there are no important ways that physical violence and non-physical emotional harm differ.
None of these prevent researchers from sharing their evidence-based conclusions, only the projection of value, status, dignity, or privilege onto those findings. As a society, we can agree to be civil, respectful and uphold particular values while we investigate objective reality.
Trying to claim that an ethical stance for non-discrimination is equivalent to creationism or geocentrism is making type error; one makes claims about norms and how we should behave, and one makes claims about how the world works whether irrespective of our beliefs or behavior.
And now you’ve attached a high leverage handle to research allocation/gatekeeping and put it in deeply politicized hands that don’t care about the research.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motte-and-bailey_fallacy
The question isn't whether abeppu's stance is valid, the question is: does their stance fully encompass the argument.
elefanten appears to be suggesting abeppu's stance is a Motte - that they're arguing a more defensible position (you shouldn't be able to publish research claiming one race is superior to another) rather than the real Bailey (anything deemed "harmful" can be filtered from scientific literature). The difference between these two arguments is pretty significant.
It's the editorial board of a journal. Gatekeeping published research is literally their job, always has been. And I think it's fair to conclude from their vocation that they care more about the research and less about the politics than all the non-scientists who've chimed in to express disagreement with the politics of their decision...
Comparing an article outlining bunch of guidelines about language and requests to be careful and clear about sampling to the medieval Catholic Church is no more reasonable than comparing everyone decrying the concept of ethical barriers to research to Dr Mengele.
No, it's not fair to conclude.
A lot of us as practitioners in the field (engineers, data scientists, etc) must daily confront the conflict between social expectation (from managers, customers, etc.) and reality. On the other hand, an academic occupying a largely bureaucratic role within institutions that suffer from severe political monoculture might very well care more about their social standing than truth.
Anyone who has been paying attention will know the subtext of these guides. It is not an unreasonable assumption to see this as targeting legitimate scientific research that undermines the present political zeitgeist.
So far as I can see, it's focused on _publication_ of particular _content_ (read: text) describing research.
> In some cases, however, potential harms to the populations studied may outweigh the benefit of publication.
> editors reserve the right to request modifications to (or correct or otherwise amend post-publication), and in severe cases refuse publication of (or retract post-publication)
So far as I can see, they're not advocating for new restrictions on what research ethically can be done, but they're saying that publication can on its own cause harms. And they seem to be focused on how findings are framed and communicated, rather than the objective content of the findings, with the implication that a suitably written article using respectful language would be considered publishable.
> authors should use inclusive, respectful, non-stigmatizing language in their submitted manuscripts.
> Biomedical studies should not conflate genetic ancestry (a biological construct) and race/ethnicity (sociopolitical constructs)
> Authors should use the terms sex (biological attribute) and gender (shaped by social and cultural circumstances) carefully in order to avoid confusing both terms.
So far as I can tell, e.g. one could study sex-linked difference in brain development, and find that one group is faster/more accurate/whatever on some task with subjects in an lab conditions, and so long as one (a) consistently distinguishes whether one is referring to sex or gender and (b) uses respectful and non-stigmatizing language, it would not be found to be unpublishable on these ethical grounds. But if in a conclusion section after having looked at sex differences, one throws out a broad gender stereotype "..and this validates the common belief that women are terrible at X", editors are entirely within their rights to insist on a modification.
This seems entirely reasonable, and is a kind of natural cover-your-ass stance for the modern era, where if they let through some great, ground-breaking research with a single racist or misogynist or homophobic statement tacked in somewhere, inevitably that part will be trotted out by trolls and politicians insisting that their weird stance is backed by science because of one line in a Nature article they didn't actually read.
Science (as in organized, rigorous research efforts) has had a problem with respecting human rights for most of its history. This ethical guidance is here to prevent horrible shit like the Stanford Prison Experiment, the Operation Upshot-Knothole downwinders, the CDC Tuskegee Study, and so forth. The sociopathic robots who believe that research must ignore human dignity in order to be valid are not correct. There is still room in research to treat human beings like human beings, regardless of the destructive paranoia currently en vogue on web forums.
The quote in the parent comment seems to suggest that perfectly valid scientific findings should be withheld if there is a possibility that bad people would misuse them. The consequence of this of course would be a complete victory of "Blank Slate"[1] Dogma (because any scientific finding that finds differences between social groups could be misused to undermine the human rights of one group).
And yet the statement never quite explicitly says findings should be withheld only because they could be misused. Rather it says that research that contains contain hate speech, etc. should perhaps not be published. It says authors should consider the potential harm of their research, and so on.
The intended result I think is a sort of chilling effect with plausible deniability. It pleases the inquisition, and at the same time leaves the scientists with a remainder of self-respect. I am not sure how long this delicate truce can last.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blank_Slate
Alternatively, it could be saying a lot of bullshit gets published because people are incentivized to publish crap research (see replication crisis). So, if you know it’s crap and it’s also likely to be harmful perhaps consider before you publish it.
And that’s the thing, if you assume the worst interpretation possible you can be offended by anything.
But then why write what was wrote? Why build up a “science can be socially harmful” thesis and then argue that may and could should govern is and does? Science should always be accurate. Nature didn't just learn this, that’s been the status quo all along.
The only reasonable interpretation is that Nature is defending a change.
To your example: you don't need social constructs to explain the replication crisis (“studies that leverage socially constructed ideas can be replicable). You don’t need social harm either (non-replicable studies that are socially good exist).
You said it best yourself: if you assume the worst interpretation possible, you can be offended by anything.
Nature is asking researchers to assume the worst interpretation of their results and, if it would be socially harmful, please not to publish them. And BTW you were wrong to ask the question in the first place since social constructs are post modern and reject western liberal interrogation.
This shouldn’t be surprising when people for example categorize someone with 3 white grandparents and 1 black grandparent as black.
This approach basically means that each and every scientific finding should be withheld (better yet, never produced) because chances are high that a bad actor would try to use it for evil purposes.
Mathematics has run into it with encryption: for fundamental reasons, it cannot be made hard only against bad guys, but penetrable to law enforcement.
We should stop any progress if we want to guarantee that any new evil would never apper. The promise of the progress is that it brings more good than evil, more jet liners than jet fighters.
The calls you see for greater attention to be paid to ethics in research are not coming from a sense of obsequioous piety and genuflection toward establishment interests wielding political power, but the exact opposite—a call to consider the effects on groups not wielding power, such as different minorities—and obscuring this crucial difference, the way your analogy does, comes pretty close to leaving your readers less informed about the issue of research ethic rigor than they were before encountering your comment.
Bioethics researchers are regularly coming across questions like this one:
Gay and lesbian people are no longer considered as having a disease or disorder by any reputable medical organisation, are experiencing, broadly, a widening acceptance from different societies and their governments. At the same time, there several prominent nations attempt to criminalise, suppress, ostracise and otherwise punish people for being gay or lesbian. Suppose tomorrow a set of genes are discovered that are strongly or even absolutely predictive of homosexual orientation. What would that look like for our society, when people could say have an embryological test that indicates whether their fetus is gay or not. Would we allow terminating pregnancy on the basis that the parents don't want to have a gay or lesbian child? What would the outcome of having a 'gay test' availble look like in the hands of oppressive regimes, like the Russian Federation. Would having that technology spark a literal genocide of sexual minorities there?
Perhaps you feel you can dismiss this as maybe you (mistakenly or not) picture your own country as unlikely to regress to legally enabling persecution of gay or lesbian people, and think issues outside your own country don't matter. I can tell you there is basically no country in the world that people in the trans community would feel safe in, if we took my above example of 'suppose someone invented a genetic test for being gay or lesbian' and replaced that hypothetical example to detect trans people and/or gender dysphoria instead.
Kind of like how Putin and Xi are able to prevent citizens in their respective countries to write bad things about them.
> Would we allow terminating pregnancy on the basis that the parents don't want to have a gay or lesbian child?
Let's assume we're both pro choice, why should a mother be forced to carry a child in her womb that she doesn't want to give birth to?
How would sexual orientation be different from having an abortion after getting pregnant because it contradicts with her vacation plans, career or maybe the father was not one she wanted to have babies with?
Ok, I do know why, because it's the same as when people do not want to allow abortion when a baby is likely to have Down's syndrome or some other condition when born, as it is seen as invalidating the identity of those who already born with the same condition.
In my opinion, though, as long as we prioritize the interests of the mother (lets say that most will do that at least for the first trimester), the mother should decide what conditions are justifiable for having the abortion.
Knowing that this outcome is likely, is it ethically responsible to publish?
The abortion case is at least realistic. A lot of parents go through the effort of having children at least partly because they want to perpetuate the family line. Whether or not you respect such a goal, for someone with such a goal, it is more likely to happen if your children are straight.
You can also imagine the opposite case. A lesbian couple that WANT to have only female, lesbian daughters, and wanting to abort fetuses that are unlikely to match that pattern. Should that also be illegal?
And that surveillance would thus catch and punish more people.
To flip things around, would it be justifiable to enable a society to punish voluntary acts of heterosexuality? Voluntary acts feel much less voluntary when they are extraordinarily self-actualizing.
I’m not informed enough about selective abortion to offer good thoughts. I tend to believe if a metric is not allowed for selection for one direction it shouldn’t be allowed in the other.
Ok, now you're becoming reasonable
> To flip things around, would it be justifiable to enable a society to punish voluntary acts of heterosexuality?
Some of those same countries do exactly that. What do you think happens to a woman in Iran who has sex outside of marriage?
Anyway, why should a few crazy countries like that determine what can be published in Nature? If there are low-hanging fruits that they can abuse to persecute people, they will just fund the studies domestically.
But honestly, this sounds just like paranoia. The real discussion is about the parent not wanting to give birth to a kid with trait X.
The point of my example, if I was unclear, was that ethical questions very demonstrably arise from scientific discovery, and demonstrably arise from the availability of technology. This point should be considered pretty hard to dispute. That being the case, when we see scientists getting together among themselves to try to better establish what responsibilities they have or do not have, that's broadly a good thing.
Could such a policy be misused in a bad way? Sure, absolutely, do doubt it could. But to me it seems historically illiterate that so many readers here immediately picture that "scientists decide they should have an ethics policy" could be used in harmful ways but these same readers struggle to picture that scientific discoveries themselves or technologies relating to these could also be used in harmful ways, and if so, whether that places ethical obligations on anybody at any point.
Perhaps, too, it ought to be considered that "scientists shouldn't decide to develop an ethics policy" is also a position itself, one that could also pretty obviously be used in harmful ways as well.
It's a common trope many use to slowly whittle away freedoms. A more accurate rephrasing would be "Your rights are all ready limited, so limiting them more shouldn't cause any concern,"
It's lazy thinking, because whatever limitations are in place today, have no bearing on the validity of the limitations the author is proposing - those should be viewed independently and skeptically.
What people don't realize is that when your freedoms are taken away, it's not some evil dictator yanking them from your clutches and you are beaten down by armed thugs, it's you and fellow citizens willfully giving them up for "the greater good".
Science must be free from this nonsense, and just be science. What a joke.
Farmers must respect the dignity and rights of all humans.
> The TCP protocol must respect the dignity and rights of all humans.
Network Engineers must respect the dignity and rights of all humans.
> Cinema projectors must respect the dignity and rights of all humans.
Cinema owners must respect the dignity and rights of all humans.
I'm not entirely sure what point you're trying to make here.
What I am opposing is the idea that researchers should be completely disinterested in, even ignore, what other elements are interested in their work and how they might use it.
The consensus in this comment section is that that sort of ignorance is itself an ideal, and I think that's very wrong and has lead to obvious harms in the past. Research on any domain of human activity is a political act and produces a political product, the researchers need to be aware of that and actively participate in that part of the process as well. Wishing or pretending it were otherwise is dangerous.
Why?
> The consensus in this comment section is that that sort of ignorance is itself an ideal, and I think that's very wrong and has lead to obvious harms in the past.
You think that because you have biases, like all humans do. You say harms can arise. Let’s try to do an exercise. It’s the late 40s early 50s and research is finally starting to show there are, in fact, no real biological races of humans. We are one human race. The dutiful scientist at that time considers the society he is in, the notions of morality he has and decides it would be harmful to publish his research. Who knows what some crazy extremists will do with this fact. They might give the blacks rights, they might rile them up, they might they might even allow miscegenation! Bear in mind, all these were societal harms at that time!
Is this the future you wish? Or this scenario doesn’t count because it’s the wrong politics? Have we found the end all be all of morality and must now protect it at all costs, even from facts if need be?
> Research on any domain of human activity is a political act and produces a political product, the researchers need to be aware of that and actively participate in that part of the process as well
I disagree. The way I see it, there is no politics in science. Science is not a set of beliefs. It’s a process. It’s a method of observing empirical reality and producing methods to describe it.
> Wishing or pretending it were otherwise is dangerous.
For whom?
If you actually think that, you haven't been paying much attention to the behavior of the Twitter mob over the past few years.
And this guidance won't prevent people from thinking and spreading racist ideas, it'll just keep people from studying anything related race.
And when someone claims "research shows your prejudice is unfounded", one can justifiably answer with "because the findings have been cherry-picked to support a pre-determined conclusion. So I will trust my gut instinct, because the scientists have admitted their research is subordinate to propaganda."
Though I have a feeling social science will try to be very discreet about what kind of filtering they're doing, and will hope that, when they disseminate findings they like, that we will have forgotten they're self-confessed propagandists first, and scientists second.
How do you suppose it was proved incorrect?
If people can't question the current consensus because it might offend someone, then the current consensus cannot be improved or overturned.
Unironically this.
Science is here to present facts.
Politics is here to decide what we do with the facts.
Do not mix the two.
sadly, what is called a fact is a malleable thing in the hands of the ill-intentioned, and all too many bigots are more than happy to pass off pseudo-science as the real deal. "science" isn't some abstract thing, it's composed of people and their actions, and as i think every adult will recognize, people can be turbo-shitty. like every other human endeavor, it deserves a close eye and critical thought. (i say this as a big fan of science in general and a degree-holder in the physical sciences.)
I don't understand what the actions of pseudo-science bigots has to do with someone who is doing real science. Idiots will be idiots regardless of what real science says.
Proper or "improper" writing can signal formality and casualness and that sort of casualness is how I read the response. For example, I deliberately pick a register when I consider the audience I'm addressing and use it as a tool to convey side-band information. You may have seen social media posts where nearly every word is suffixed with an emoji. I'd consider this its own register. While I might use all lowercase in a text message or on a discord server, I'd likely only expect to read an emoji-laden message on Facebook or Twitter. Also if it came from me, it would probably look sarcastic as that's not a register I typically use.
Either way, people can do this accidentally, purposefully, or sometimes as a function of the medium. Eg: I can't write in an emoji-laden register here because HN strips emoji. An entire register, simply, and absolutely inaccessible. We probably agree that it doesn't fit the tone of the site, but still, we can imagine how the texture of the site would change if it was allowed and the pros and cons of that decision.
Emojis are different; they're an addition, meant to convey extra meaning or information that's difficult to convey with pure text. Omitting capitals doesn't do this; it just makes the text harder to read.
Dear respondent,
Your points are duly noted. However; may I suggest you write in a more formal register? Your prose reflects the lack of effort with which I am displaying by using this very form of writing. A higher degree of effort on your part will demonstrate the level of commitment to the written word that this audience expects. Please respond in kind.
Yours Truly,
kelseyfrog
Another example could be that there is some disease that is entirely harmless but 100% infectious and deadly to some group (e.g. Black people). Now should that research just be released into the public? This might encourage some groups to purposefully infect these people, thus putting them in significant danger.
I admit these are somewhat hypothetical scenarios, but you said the truth should always come up,. I just give counterexamples. I'm sure we had many situations where resesearch was suppressed in reality for some reason or another.
Politics deals with how we use those facts.
If the fact brought about by science leads one group of people to kill another, we are faced with a political decision. Do we allow this or do we stand against it.
We need the separation of science and politics. Otherwise, important facts will be politically suppressed and falsehoods will be presented as truth for political gain.
It’s a story as old as the world, I don’t understand why so many people still want to mix those two.
That said, I think scientists should be given pretty wide latitude to explore wherever their curiosity leads them, and results shouldn't be rejected from publication without really good reasons that go beyond "the results of this experiment make us uncomfortable". (Though as a practical matter, research that doesn't serve some political or social objective probably isn't going to get funding.)
> the question of which hypotheses are worth pursuing and which experiments should be done is political
In a sense yes, but it also proves my point.
The example I think of is this. For the sake of argument, imagine there is a left leaning scientist and a right leaning one and they study economic differences between ethnic groups. The left leaning scientist will have political biases, politics, etc, because he is human, and guided by these biases he makes the decision to hypothesise the economic differences are caused by systemic inequality. This is indeed an example of a political choice guiding the scientific process.
I think that is perfectly fine. I don’t see this as “politics being in science” I see this as “politics being in humans practicing science”.
Now, coming back to the right leaning scientist, he too has biases and politics and a sense of morality etc because he is human. Also guided by these things he hypothesises economic differences between ethnic groups are caused by innate biological differences.
Just like the left scientist, I think this is fine. This is politics in the human practicing science, not politics in science directly.
Where politics in science appears is, if the prevalent political system discourage research into innate biological differences between humans and interferes in the scientific process to prevent researcher into this topic.
And that is what I have a problem with. And that is exactly what is being done through guidelines like this.
> the results of this experiment make us uncomfortable
I think we both know that is exactly how these rules will be used.
You can come up with hypotheticals where truth strategy may harm some people. But censorship strategy is guaranteed to harm more people in the long run.
Also your hypotheticals can be easily countered:
> disease that is entirely harmless but 100% infectious and deadly to some group (e.g. Black people). Now should that research just be released into the public? This might encourage some groups to purposefully infect these people, thus putting them in significant danger.
Let's say you decided to censor your research. And then few years later the groups that you mentioned got lucky enough to discover the same disease. Now, because your research wasn't public, the world was not able to develop a cure.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
It's simultaneously totally relevant information from a public health standpoint while also being stigmatizing. Completely ignoring the facts/suppressing that info to avoid stigma would contribute to greater spread within and outside of that community, and is irresponsible. Nuance, indeed.
This is risky because the authorities are are almost certainly idiots.
Heck this isn't even an hypothetical scenario, you'd suggest we should have kept secret the ways in which monkeypox spreads?
Yes, they should.
>A better way is likely to quietly talk to the authorities first.
OK - talk to the authorities first, and then publish the results.
>Another example could be that there is some disease that is entirely harmless but 100% infectious and deadly to some group (e.g. Black people). Now should that research just be released into the public?
Yes, it should.
>I admit these are somewhat hypothetical scenarios, but you said the truth should always come up,. I just give counterexamples.
You didn't give counter-examples. You gave examples of times where the information should be shared with the public and then asserted that it shouldn't for .. I don't know what reason.
Here's a pragmatic reason for sharing truthful information with the public: If you want the population to trust public health officials, public health officials need to trust the public with the truth.
I don’t think a lot of scientists and health officials realize that their work is two sided. ESP if you’re working with public health the other side is who you view as the unwashed masses. You don’t get to make commandments
Maintaining trust with the public is the most important thing to do, and the best way to do that is transparency.
All the games about if we “should tell people xyz” needs to end if these institutions want to rebuild their credibility with the broader public.
The cdc is at least being retrospective but it seems like nature has gone the opposite way and are institutionally entrenching this idea that the public can’t be trusted with the truth.
Who will then have to create a public health campaign targeted at, for example, gay men, and everyone will learn of the research anyways.
Besides which, most countries are led by people who constantly leak secrets. It would get out long before any action could be taken.
The article draws the comparison with the ethics of doing science on human subjects. We mostly agree in principle, that some science simply shouldn't be done if it harms human test subjects[1], even if it would produce important scientific output. We're willing to make that trade-off because the cost outweighs the potential results. The article simply extends this principle to harms done to humans that are not test subjects.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unethical_human_experimentatio...
Which ones?
The church? Trump?
People have different authorities.
It was pretty clear this approach was used during Covid. "You don't need to wear a mask", "Covid vaccines prevent infection" are just a couple claims that were made "for the public's own good".
Then when people found out they were lied to, they were then skeptical of everything said thereafter.
It's a terrible approach.
You can look up the clinical trial endpoints. Patients were only tested for infections if they experienced symptoms. I believe it was only AZ or J&J that regularly tested to capture any effect on infection rate.
But it was stated several times "The vaccine will stop you from getting Covid". Why? Because if you tell people "Well, the vaccine won't stop you from getting it, but it will make it less likely you'll get really sick", they thought people wouldn't take it.
It's the case with ALL vaccines that they don't provide 100% protection. They are still incredibly useful for preventing infection, reducing the severity of disease and preventing further transmission.
Btw, vaccines work by clearing infection quickly, not preventing infection. The virus infects you and begins to multiply. Whether your body has the antibodies to recognize the virus determines whether you will suffer from illness or be well.
You missed this small little thing called Rule of Law, which - in any polity worth living in - bans vigilante justice and forming mobs to punish people without trial.
You also missed this other small little thing called the Internet, where you can publish a paper on arxiv for free without review, or post its PDF link on 4chan completely anonymously. Together "Red-Haired People Spread Disease" being a fact, and thus is almost certainly being discovered independently by several labs and institutions at the same time, this will ensure that the truth will come out, and much faster than you think. The only difference is if the public hears it from your institutions first, i.e. your legitimacy and credibility in the public eye.
So overall, I think this is a net win.
The Nature Publishing group is not science. Science will survive whatever self-righteous fad the Nature editors decide to champion next week. If you want to criticise anyone, criticise the post-war generation of academics who have allowed journals to have too much power and landed us in this stupid soul crushing arrangement we have today.
To put it another way: the way you feel about studying handedness being linked to COVID is the way I feel about studying an assumed link between race and "intelligence". It's not "otherwise interesting" at all. It's ignorant at best.
I guess he wasn’t talking about the magazine…
Fermi was probably talking about inevitable things, e.g. if climate is already worsening beyond human limits it's always good to know even if it's too late to do anything. But if knowledge (or our pursuit of it) would lead to new dangers, its perfecly reasonable to (try) to limit knowledge and its spread or pursuit.
The dishonesty of the -ve IQ people behind attitudes like the criticized is that they see danger in everything and use moral panic to enforce views. If the actual "dangers" they are freaking out about are legitimate, they would have been justified to supress (non-violently) science and technology)
The alternative was 20-30 million more dead people via conventional means. There were many teams around the world working to build the bomb. One always wonders about the German team and why they were not first - and I"m glad they were not.
> philosophy of science
Not sure what that is, but do not want.
In regards to this, I believe they were on the right path but they were split in to three groups across Germany. They shared the radioactive material and because of this weren't able to achieve fission (?) due to not having enough material in one spot. Thank $diety for that.
More info: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_nuclear_weapons_progr...
You cannot just dismiss something you've never heard of and have no idea about
Philosophy of science, however, is a well established, important, and fascinating field. Keywords: Positivists/Viennese circle, Karl Popper and falsification, Feyerabend and Against Method, Thomas Kuhn and The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, W. V. Quine and the Two Dogmas of Empiricism, the Science Wars.
Humanity's discovery of atomic bombs wasn't published, though. It was demonstrated in terrifying fashion when they were first used. Worse, the first atomic bomb project was actually carried out by Nazi Germany, not the United States, and might have succeeded if not for sabotage campaigns and the collapse of the German economy. And weapons research is a well-known risk since the invention of the arquebus around 1400, when early gun manufacturers jealously guarded their secrets with state encouragement. It's true that we avoid research into novel biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons, with a possible fourth "computational" coming into focus, but we do this by avoiding the research itself, wherein the ends are obvious from the beginning, not refusing to publish a finding because you don't like what it said.
Yes, it's like teaching small children how to make poisons and bombs. It's really much better that children be kept ignorant of such things: this knowledge isn't going to help them, or the world, it's only going to cause problems. Adult humans really aren't any better; they're just bigger children.
> It's really much better that children be kept ignorant of such things: this knowledge isn't going to help them, or the world, it's only going to cause problems. Adult humans really aren't any better; they're just bigger children.
Yeah, because accidentally mixing cleaning supplies in a way that creates a toxic gas cloud is really better than knowing that common household items can kill you if you aren't careful. Or getting monoxide poisoning because no one told you that using gas grills inside can kill.
Yeah, keep the kids ignorant of dangerous aspects of the world. If they are lucky they will die well before they have to navigate the world on their own.
In that sense it's the perfect analogy: you don't really know where your research will end up. Did Rutherford split the atom to cure cancer? No, of course not. Most (or all?) people working on particle physics in the early 20th century would have been quite surprised to learn it would be used as such down the line.
> If you had the atomic bomb, you probably wouldn't have shared it with Stalin's USSR or Hitler's Germany and, for that matter, Roosevelt's USA
If I felt that it was plausible that the genocidal regimes of the USSR or Nazi Germany could have developed such a bomb (which was the case): yes, I absolutely would have shared it with the US.
The premise is interesting, but at least decentralization was really there at the outset. It is just that market forces shrinked it. I honestly don't know what would have been the best medicine to prevent this. During the 90s I felt there was a larger emphasis on protocols, that almost disappeared during the 00's.
Climate wouldn't have been worsened as much as it did without the technological advances provided by science. It's really, really difficult to cut the Amazonian forrest down using just axes and horse-drawn carts, but once you got mechanised stuff (with the help of science) then it becomes exponentially easier to do it (think just how much science went into the fabrication of bitumen/asphalt, once you have bitumen roads going into and out of the Amazon things get exponentially easier for those who are in the business of cutting trees in there).
Which is to say that I fail to understand how come some of us still believe science and technology can get us out of this mess when it was science and technology that brought us here.
To be clear, I also fully acknowledge that without science and technology our lives would have been way harder, for most of us life wouldn't have been possible at all: without science we would have had no green revolution, which means we still would have had famines around the world, never mind that the green revolution caused a lot of environment-related nasty things, so it's not always black and white.
I can't understand the logic here. The progress of science isn't somehow dead. The problem is our priorities.
For an example, the US just sent $50 billion to Ukraine. Imagine what 50, $1,000,000,000 science grants could accomplish.
Not sure your example is clearly bad priorities. (Though generally I think the US wastes too much on the military.) What's the worst case scenario when the money is defending Ukraine instead of science?
Science funding won't as help much if there's an unchecked bully marching across Europe.
Here’s the president, himself, explaining what’s going on: https://www.newsweek.com/joe-biden-resurfaced-clip-russia-ba...
Edit: You can also go here and watch this: https://youtu.be/lX-K63pVPTM I still recommend the book though.
You can't block technology based on understandings of consequences that you dont gain until the technology matures. We can't see the future.
Also, knowing everything about the atom does not affect our behavior, except through technology. Social sciences are more problematic though because they are about us, as part of nature sure, but in the social context we live, which can be affected by what we know about it. So proper considerations must be made when designing the research questions and methods, and when discussing the results.
Hiding this knowledge from the world doesn’t make it not exist. It just makes people less prepared for when malicious actors use it against them. You promote ignorance as a solution to technical problems. I don’t.
I don't think science should be censored, scientific inquiry should continue with integrity regardless of what people think. What I think is people who can't handle it should not have access to the truths revealed. I generally believe in unrestricted free information but I've been rethinking that for certain cases.
It's not just gender identity. I've seen similar behavior in other groups such as obese people revolting against the "oppressive" science documenting the numerous risks associated with being overweight because it supposedly causes society to marginalize them.
In your example, I'd prefer chosing (assisted) suicide or not. Surely you're not doing me a favor by not letting me die how I want.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_Syphilis_Study
And that's what led to ethics rules that said you can't do that. You'd think you wouldn't need to write it down, but we did and we do.
> By then, 28 patients had died directly from syphilis, 100 died from complications related to syphilis, 40 of the patients' wives were infected with syphilis, and 19 children were born with congenital syphilis.[15]
> The 40-year Tuskegee Study was a major violation of ethical standards,[13] and has been cited as "arguably the most infamous biomedical research study in U.S. history."[16] Its revelation led to the 1979 Belmont Report and to the establishment of the Office for Human Research Protections (OHRP)[17] and federal laws and regulations requiring institutional review boards for the protection of human subjects in studies.
What I meant to say is I'd think twice before telling a depressed patient with a history of suicide attempts about a diagnosis of terminal illness.
1. https://www.statista.com/statistics/792317/medical-condition...
Intention exists separately from information (in this context) but they are not independent, they're connected.
A silly example: Let's say someone at Facebook realises they could predict with high confidence the chance of a user voting in favour of extremist political candidates. This is new information, and Facebook has decided to create it. Once created, it could do harm. At this point, saying "information doesn't kill people, people kill people" is a useless abstraction. Sure, it might be "true" in a limited interpretation, but that interpretation doesn't help anyone.
(From an excess of caution, I've constrained the definition of "information" above as something like "information created or collected by humans and our systems". This is to exclude exotic-but-true consideration of literally anything in the universe as "information" e.g. tumours, magnetars, etc etc.)
This line of thinking was used during the dark ages to argue against the spread of science vs. religion.
But collecting information can enable as much harm as collecting some numbers. For example the Nazis started with collecting information about the racial status of as many people as possible, see [1]. The collected information was later used to decide who to deport and kill.
Although, this is another example of humans causing harm, it also shows why collecting information is not harmless. Although the information itself cannot cause anything. It simply has no agency, so it can neither harm nor heal people. But it can enable both.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aryan_certificate
That is arguably, depending in the diagnosis, a good example of a time where suicide may be the good option, where postponing death magnifies suffering, and the only reason to keep the poor patient alive is essentially because we're too busy selfishly thinking about avoiding our own pain of loss to permit them to erase their agony.
this is a moral judgement and a strong claim. I can think of a few types of knowledge off the top of my head that aren't making the world a better place
Something like learning how to tie a noose: this is (in most cases) bad knowledge. This isn't something anyone should learn unless they need it for something that isn't its best known purpose
when it comes to something like race/gender/etc, I can't think of one positive usage of that kind of knowledge, if we can even call it that. I'd argue that even the idea of race/gender/etc is against the goal of equality and if we want true equality these ideas need to be discarded
If you want people to end up all “being equal” to one another you will just end up on the farm, where all animals are equal but some are more equal than others.
Also, I think it quite amusing that you call what Fermi said “a strong claim” and a “moral judgement” and a few lines down you have the audacity to say that certain “ideas need to be discarded”. First of all, some of the “ideas” you talk about are indeed facts. And then who on earth do you think you are to tell other people what they may think of?
I'm not talking about leveling, I'm talking about something more like job applications that are completely race-sex-etc blind, where that signal isn't even allowed into the mix. I think that in a truly meritocratic system you'll see a diverse representation. No, it might not be perfectly diverse, but it would lead to more (and fairer) diversity and not less
That being said, I really don’t care what we will see or what the outcome will be in a truly meritocratic system. I’m just interested in the merit.
Race and gender are social constructs, not objective facts of reality. I agree though, discard social constructs.
Also, in a rational society, the goal isn't blanket "equality". People are not equal. I'll never have a career as a basketball player.
Equality of opportunity is the goal, not equality of outcome.
Equality of outcome arguments generally boil down to some derivative of "we should take from group a and give to group b, and I should be the one to oversee this".
[1] https://www.knotsforfishing.com/hangmans-knot/
I demand an end to this harm.
https://twitter.com/sarahmei/status/1073251153360482304
Science, as a method, works when you have a hypothesis, but when that hypothesis isn't supported by your findings you can't just discard the findings and go "well I'm still pretty sure I was right anyway."
If you find something you disagree with to be true, that makes the science even more important to share! Other people can start to look at what you've seen and get more details and finer understanding.
And it only got worse once i realized that this isnt some kind of horrible stupid accident but people do this to deal with an utterly horrible reality they cant cope with anymore. So they just gave up on reality and instead focused on a story they can tell themselves to feel good despite reality.
edit: Just to point it out, even if both of those very obvious fundamental problems would be addressed, what would be left would be "the ends justify the means". Its utterly horrific from which ever angle you look at it.
This is also a boon to racists who never have to defend themselves against science again.
"Yeah that study shows that Hispanic immigrants don't commit more crimes, but it's against the rules to publish anything else"
I'm sure our demigods will gladly enlighten us with their wisdom to distinguish between misthoughts and correct thoughts.
So that when journalists claim to be following the science there will be no dissenting voice in research to disagree.
Those who defend opposing ideas will have no leg to stand on and will rightfully be labeled science deniers
Which should be people who broadly speaking share your political and ethical beliefs, yes?
And, if the gatekeepers are people with a different sense of morality, it is fascism and must be torn down in the name of freedom, correct?
Too many laws make everyone a criminal, for eventually, everyday, innocent behaviour becomes criminalised.
When you arrive at thoughtcrime, it already is too late.
And yet it moves.
I'm glad you recognize in yourself that you can't be trusted with certain information and you need, personally, a big brother to lie to you. You do you. I'd appreciate if you didn't make the same assessment about me, and others.
Reading back, I'm actually genuinely interested to know why you want a third-party 'gatekeeper' to protect you personally from certain kinds of (uncomfortable) scientific facts. I don't judge, you can make that decisions for yourself, but why do you personally want to write that blank-check to a third-party, so that they decide what scientific facts you should or shouldn't be allowed to learn? Maybe you can elaborate?
This coupled with the fact that there is currently a firehose of “information” that I doubt even people with the best of abilities and intentions can adequately grok if they’re not specifically paid for the time to think about them.