What you should understand is: most geneticists wouldn't have had the balls to write this even though it's obvious to them. Someone did have the courage to write it. Now wrap your head around what they wrote.
Please don't regurgitate common talking points about academia issues if you're just trying to score points in support of a fringe political position, that's not at all the direction we (as scientists that are critical of academia) want to go.
The filtering you refer to may be useful[1] when looking at bulk lists of papers (e.g. when sitting on a hiring committee), but this is an example where the article has already been curated for our attention, namely: by being upvoted on Hacker News. You can still choose to filter it out, but it's silly to write comments attacking the paper based on the journal's impact factor. Better to grapple with the paper's actual scientific content.
[1] (Useful in the same tragedy-of-the-commons way that it's "useful" to leave a picnic ground without cleaning up after yourself.)
On HN curation: while I certainly look up to this community when it comes to coding, technology and latest new software tools in general, I'm sorry to say the standards are not even remotely up to par when it comes to genomics. I assume it's because neither the mod team nor the majority of the community has a relevant background, and it's perfectly understandable. It does mean however that I, more often than not, encounter some pretty egregious stuff on here, especially when some dreaded words like "evolution" or "heritability" get mentioned. I sometimes try to chime in (and keep in mind I'm no authority beyond being a rando who happens to work in the field and knows plenty of people more qualified than me) but sometimes the disconnect between HN discussions and actual scientific community discussions is unreal.
On the paper itself: I didn't only mention its IF and voiced other concerns further in the thread. Ultimately there's a limited amount of time one may allocate to reading papers when there are literally millions of the damn things.
The idea here is to exchange information thoughtfully and to treat others kindly even when they are ignorant or wrong. If you know more, share some of what you know in a way that the rest of us can learn from. Don't post comments to put others down or bash their views.
We don't have these rules for ethical reasons or because we think it's good to be wrong. It's just that we want this place to stay interesting, and when internet users flame each other, that destroys the forum and causes smart people to leave. We want to avoid that scorched-earth outcome.
If science does care about the JOURNAL impact factors too much, why then, as a consequence, would everyone publish in low impact factor journals?
-Journal is completely obscure to the genomics community
-No causal genetic mechanism is shown, everything is shoved into a "heritability" black box that some people seem to think is like your video game character starting stats or something
-Authors don't have a genetics background
-It's not my field, but there appears to be a wealth of literature on how fertility rates decrease in history, none of them involving "heritability" and little is done to address, reconcile or unify that
-There does seem to be darker political overtones that are exacerbated by commenters, leading me to think the arguments are not being made in good faith
Journal IF is just a (flawed) heuristic but in this case it sets a low prior and the "updates" didn't help
Are we reading the same comments section? Which specific comments are you talking about? The comments section I read seemed quite apolitical, except for this particular sub-thread.
>Low-IF journals are easier to publish to by definition.
It might be true that Low-IF journals in general are easier to publish to, but that's not true "by definition". By definition, Low-IF journals are journals whose papers are less-cited (this is an oversimplification, of course). For example, IF tends to vary a lot by field, so in your comment where you casually dismissed anything with IF<4 as a joke, you inadvertently dismissed whole entire fields. For example, one of the absolute top math journals, the "Annals of Mathematics", has an IF of 3.027. I can assure you, it's much harder to publish in the Annals of Mathematics than in a typical genetics journal with an IF of >=4.
> Are we reading the same comments section? Which specific comments are you talking about? The comments section I read seemed quite apolitical, except for this particular sub-thread.
Please.
>> Low-IF journals are easier to publish to by definition.
> (...) By definition, Low-IF journals are journals whose papers are less-cited (this is an oversimplification, of course). For example, IF tends to vary a lot by field, so in your comment where you casually dismissed anything with IF<4 as a joke, you inadvertently dismissed whole entire fields. (...)
Accepted. So in this specific case, do we talk about a journal in a field where an IF of 4 is low or high?
No, you please. I'm genuinely trying to reach a better understanding of your side. What comment did you think was the most political, outside of this sub-thread? Was it the one by car12 [1] which pointed out a quantitative observation about Muslim fertility rates and imagined a future where Islamic parties gain a bigger voice in politics through demographics? If so, what is it about that that's so political? Or if not that, then can you point to another comment that you think was particularly political?
This is also a good one:
> If an antibiotic doesn't wipe out its target, then its target's numbers will be devastated in the short-term, but in the long-term, its target will evolve immunity to the antibiotic and ultimately recover.
> If you think about it, contraceptives are extremely similar to an antibiotic whose target is human beings. We're still living in the short-term when the antibiotic seems to be effective.
Without any further detail or reasoning, just by "thinking about it" (whatever the author meant by that, he did not elaborate), the author draws a pretty extreme conclusion. This seems to be a rather unscientific, political attempt to reply to the original question:
> If this is true, then how do they explain population stabilization in, e.g., Europe, and other developed areas? Why shouldn't what worked for Europe work for the rest of the world?
Just because there's a political party committed to believing "the sky is red" doesn't make it political to say "the sky is blue".
I was the author of the "contraceptives are like antibiotics" comment btw. The point wasn't to make any extreme conclusion (I admit I can see how it could be taken that way in e.g. an abortion debate, but only by reading words between the lines that simply are not there). The point of that comment was not to score points in any political debate but to suggest an intuitive way to think about the results of the paper. Some commenters make the error of extrapolating straight lines, essentially saying "We observe reverse-correlation between education and birthrates over several decades, therefore they must be reverse-correlated forever". I pointed out an example, in a similar context[1], where such linear thinking would be wrong ("We observe the bacteria numbers are declining, therefore they must continue declining forever").
[1] Similar in the sense that they both involve living populations, population growth and decline, growth and decline caused by particular changes, etc.
Just to clarify this. Why is the former political and the latter not? Because one is false, and one is true?
I would argue that something is scientific or political no matter if its true or false. What counts is the way you try to convince others that it is true. Just as an example:
> The point of that comment was not to score points in any political debate but to suggest an intuitive way to think about the results of the paper. Some commenters make the error of extrapolating straight lines, essentially saying "We observe reverse-correlation between education and birthrates over several decades, therefore they must be reverse-correlated forever". I pointed out an example, in a similar context[1], where such linear thinking would be wrong
Here, you do not really explain why the intuitive thinking used by other authors (extrapolation) is less valid than the intuitive thinking you suggest: you do not explain why the comparison between humans and bacteria in the area of reproduction is valid, given the huge differences between humans and bacteria.
So when you say that "I admit I can see how it could be taken that way in e.g. an abortion debate, but only by reading words between the lines that simply are not there", that is kind of true: it is about the words that are not there - the words you have to provide to explain why your theory might not be wrong.
In that example, I'd say neither one is political. Now, if the one side started saying "Blue-skyers should be deplatformed", THAT would be political.
>Here, you do not really explain why the intuitive thinking used by other authors (extrapolation) is less valid than the intuitive thinking you suggest
I suppose if you really want to get down to brass tacks, my "contraceptives are like bacteria" comment was an instance of paradeigma, a rhetorical procedure popularized by Aristotle in which one attempts to help guide one's audience by presenting analogous anecdotes.
The difference between that and the extrapolators is that the extrapolators, at least in most cases I think, are unaware that they are falling prey to an unjustified extrapolation. None of them have come out and explicitly defended the implicit logic "Inverse correlation for the past several decades => inverse correlation forever". If someone DID want to explicitly defend it, they might use paradeigma right back at me, saying something like, "The inverse correlation is like the sunrise. We've observed the sunrise for a long time, and the sun will certainly continue to rise". Of course, such a rhetorical maneuvre would be unlikely to win many debate points, because the audience isn't stupid and can clearly see that analogy's too much of a stretch!
>it is about the words that are not there
But then basically you can twist anything at all into being political. I could say "1+1=2" and you could say "That's political! You're trying to imply something about binary genders, since you didn't explicitly throw out a disclaimer that you aren't trying to imply something about binary genders!"
Not that I'm trying to accuse you of consciously doing that... I think I'm guilty, myself, of sometimes reading politics into things that are apolitical. It can be particularly tempting to subconsciously categorize threads into teams, like, "This guy is X party and is on my side", "This guy is Y party and is the enemy". I've been trying recently to stop doing that, because I believe if I can get past that, there's a lot to learn from the people I thought of as enemies.
> Just because there's a political party committed to believing "the sky is red" doesn't make it political to say "the sky is blue".
Now you say:
> In that example, I'd say neither one is political.
That seems to be a contradiction.
> The difference between that and the extrapolators is that the extrapolators, at least in most cases I think, are unaware that they are falling prey to an unjustified extrapolation.
Yes, and I pointed out that also you do not give an explanation of why your proposed comparison is justified or not. (I do not think we need to involve the term "paradeigma" here, we can just use "comparison")
>> it is about the words that are not there
> But then basically you can twist anything at all into being political.
I don't really see the relation between my and your statement. Very generally: putting out statements without explaining the underlying thinking/reasoning/data at least exposes you to the accusation of being political, or unscientific, sure. Giving more detail, being more transparent about your thinking, explaining underlying concepts/data makes it easier for others to follow your reasoning, but exposes you to someone pointing out a mistake in your thinking. But well, that is science.
> I could say "1+1=2" and you could say "That's political! You're trying to imply something about binary genders, since you didn't explicitly throw out a disclaimer that you aren't trying to imply something about binary genders!"
I do not think that "1 + 1 = 2" falls in the same category as "the reproductive behavior of humans and bacteria are comparable". Therefore, in the example you gave, the answer is actually the political statement, as it brings in the completely unrelated topic of "gender" that no one was talking about and that has nothing to do with anything, just to try to win an unwinnable argument.
Perhaps I over stated the case by saying inevitable. It's quite feasible that the consequences of highly fertile people overbreeding will be a reduction in civilizational complexity, which will lowerthe total population.
> If you accept the heritability for age at first birth has not been measured wrong, then the hypothesis put forth by this paper will come about.
First you argue that if the paper is right, the measurements must be right. Then you argue that if the measurements are right, the paper must be right. Both arguments seem illogical, especially when used in that combination.