I can't take any of this seriously so long as any research on race and intelligence continues to be banned as heresy rather than being discussed scientifically.
It seems weird for the government to collect data useful for research, but then to gate access based on the viewpoints of potential users. This restriction doesn't support the search for truth.
Whatever people think of Lasker (Cremieux) and his views, isn't data being available to all interested parties the best way to find the truth?
The article mentions this towards the very end:
Adam Candeub, the top lawyer at the Federal Communications Commission, wrote a law review article in 2024 criticizing the N.I.H.’s discouragement of stigmatizing research. He compared it to the persecution of Galileo.
“A liberal society should support the search for truth,” Mr. Candeub wrote, “regardless of how uncomfortable and unsettling that truth turns out to be.”
In a statement, Lyric Jorgenson, associate director of science policy at the N.I.H., said the agency had taken steps to protect the ABCD Study. It has introduced a new online portal requiring users to complete training on responsible data use and to “pass a knowledge test prior to accessing the data.”
The White House already committed to open-sourcing all such datasets:
"(a) all federally funded health research should empower Americans through transparency and open-source data, and should avoid or eliminate conflicts of interest that skew outcomes and perpetuate distrust;"
> Jordan Lasker, who often writes about race and intelligence under the name Crémieux
It's funny because this guy is center-left, he just happens to actually be intellectually honest.
Anyhow, either we do science or we just admit that we don't like the social implications of the evidence. Trying to hide data and gaslight the public isn't science.
The simple answer is that Race science is pointless because race is not a clean objective concept. We are fooled by our remarkable capability to assign racial labels into thinking it must be simple to cleanly deduce race from a generic test.
But it's obvious that races do have genetic differences.
The way scientists resolve this conflict is to bypass race entirely. And focus on genetics.
You create statistical models from large caches of genetic data and find association's. Then you can provide a risk score for an individual and if you want estimates based on ethnicity.
It's the genetic test that makes it useful like Duffy Null testing before starting people or African descent on Clozapine, HLA-B*1502 testing before starting Asians on Carbamazpine.
Where risks are lower you can do crude heuristics like calcium channel blockers before ace inhibitors for black people.
But just having people check a box in a questionnaire and doing their IQ is just pointless scientifically.
There was a 2018 op-ed in the Times <https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/23/opinion/sunday/genetics-r...> by a geneticist, warning society that at that moment, and increasingly in the next few years, his field would find things about humans that people wouldn't like to hear. Things like, racial differences are real, intelligence is mostly inherited, etc. (Bonus: Men and women are different, and there are only two sexes.)
The tone was not "these are breakthroughs to look forward to"; rather, "things are coming that people we disagree with are going to exploit, but they are nonetheless real". Another interpretation would be "please don't yell at us for discovering these things".
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 22.2 ms ] threadWhatever people think of Lasker (Cremieux) and his views, isn't data being available to all interested parties the best way to find the truth?
The article mentions this towards the very end:
In a statement, Lyric Jorgenson, associate director of science policy at the N.I.H., said the agency had taken steps to protect the ABCD Study. It has introduced a new online portal requiring users to complete training on responsible data use and to “pass a knowledge test prior to accessing the data.”
They have an online training and everything!
"(a) all federally funded health research should empower Americans through transparency and open-source data, and should avoid or eliminate conflicts of interest that skew outcomes and perpetuate distrust;"
It's funny because this guy is center-left, he just happens to actually be intellectually honest.
Anyhow, either we do science or we just admit that we don't like the social implications of the evidence. Trying to hide data and gaslight the public isn't science.
And another one: http://doi.org/10.46469/mq.2023.63.3.2
And another one: https://europepmc.org/article/ppr/ppr518324
But it's obvious that races do have genetic differences.
The way scientists resolve this conflict is to bypass race entirely. And focus on genetics.
Genome wide association studies (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genome-wide_association_study) is the answer.
You create statistical models from large caches of genetic data and find association's. Then you can provide a risk score for an individual and if you want estimates based on ethnicity.
It's the genetic test that makes it useful like Duffy Null testing before starting people or African descent on Clozapine, HLA-B*1502 testing before starting Asians on Carbamazpine.
Where risks are lower you can do crude heuristics like calcium channel blockers before ace inhibitors for black people.
But just having people check a box in a questionnaire and doing their IQ is just pointless scientifically.
The tone was not "these are breakthroughs to look forward to"; rather, "things are coming that people we disagree with are going to exploit, but they are nonetheless real". Another interpretation would be "please don't yell at us for discovering these things".