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Comment by Cozumel | Hacker News Reader

This is a subject no-one dare broach without getting labelled 'racist' or a 'white supremacist' etc. People need to be free to pursue science free of political and social ideology.

Are all people equal? No. Should all people be treated equally? Of course. That's the distinction a lot of these people don't make, the article is all 'yap, yap yap' and very light on facts.

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this is the really important part. that as part of a civil society we are all expected to behave to the same basic standard and can expect the same basic treatment (rights).

whether we are disabled (as a genotype or a phenotype), what we believe in, who we choose to associate with, how we spend our time, etc

without this you don't have much. given this its all academic, which is just fine

We should also make a distinction between science as it pertains to things like physics and chemistry, and the "science" of things like IQ tests which, though they may technically follow a scientific method, are heavily skewed by social factors and are far less likely to represent any kind of universal truth.

and the "science" of things like IQ tests

Why the quotes? Are you just generally down on the social sciences?

To put it nicely, it's easy to see that the social sciences are a lot harder to get right and verify than the natural sciences. Oh, and it doesn't help that it's much easier to be biased about topics in social science.

Perhaps you would find the original article https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2017/5/18/15655638/charles-... has the weighty facts that this response-to-criticism lacks.

I strongly disagree with the rationalist fallacy that science must progress unfettered by social or political 'ideology'. The very notion that science is ideologically blanched, that it exists in some asocial vacuum, is naive at best, disingenuous at worst, and misguided always.

To paraphrase John Wheeler on spacetime: Society tells science how to move; science tells society how to curve.

If you go this route, then you have no leg to stand on to criticize Trump if/when he defunds NASA climate science and mandates teaching Creationism in public schools. After all, he is just guiding science by his idealogy. Are you also against the "March for science?"

I honestly think that Trump is the application of postmodern concepts to politics on an unrelated precedented level and many people on the left who supported these ideas find them horrifying when they are used to bolster positions that are not theirs.

So the only possible positions are the extremes? By acknowledging that science and society have an unavoidable structural relationship you give yourself a framework for developing tools to improve that relationship. There are plenty of problems with anti-science politics and the antidote is not to insist that they should just leave science alone just because.

You want science better represented in society and politics? Get more scientists involved in society and politics. http://www.314action.org/home

Can you explain how you want science to be influenced by "social or political ideology"? Do you just mean developing weapons during wartime and medicine during epidemics, or something beyond that?

Those examples you give are good large-scale ones. But the impact of society on science is universal and pervasive, down to the observational biases of the individual humans handling instruments. It is a major project within science to eliminate subjective biases in research, right? That wouldn't be necessary if it wasn't universal and pervasive.

As far as how I 'want' it to be influenced, I think civil society should be entitled to discuss the implications and validity of research that is done (in this case, racial or ethnic factors in 'standardised', culturally based tests of 'intelligence'), as well as set large scale priorities as to where effort should best be focused, like in your examples.

I don't believe that distinction is possible. Advocates of "race realism" often make the following argument:

> Race X has lower intelligence and higher aggression > Therefore, we must take measures against X to prevent them from committing crimes or making bad decision.

Consider the case of the mentally disabled. They have custodians that can make decisions for them, such as what they must do, where they must live, and what they must avoid.

The line that race realists typically cross, is that they extrapolate supposed IQ differences and start treating people of other races as if they are mentally disabled (i.e. not giving them rights).

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