MSU Vice President of research & innovation Steve Hsu has been forced to resign
infoproc.blogspot.com
infoproc.blogspot.com
"I've always said that I'm agnostic on whether... so there are observed test score differences between groups, I think that's clear, you can't deny that.
The causality of that, whether it's partially due to genetics, I've always been agnostic on. Not because I think it's impossible, but because it's such a charged thing we should really make sure the science is solid before we speculate. We shouldn't randomly speculate on something that sensitive.
But even just not being willing to categorically rule out that God could have created us with average group differences has gotten me into trouble. And I think that's just absurd. So for someone to attack me for saying 'We don't know the answer to this question, let's do the science first and then talk about it.' Even that position is actually not tenable in the current social justice warrior political climate."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=58&v=XHUSl9FLAmE...
https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2020/06/twitter-attacks-and-de...
"My personal opinion about it is:
A) I hope it's not true. I would much rather live in a world where there are not big group differences.
Number 2) I understand why it's a sensitive issue. Because it was used in a way to oppress people for a long time. So I'm not blind to that.
Number 3) I am a scientist. So when I say something like 'The results of the studies do not allow us to come to a high confidence conclusion about it.' That's what I'm going to say. So I've been attacked because I haven't been willing to categorically rule something out, which I think is absurd..."
"The scores are, as you say, you do the tests, you find differences. However there are differences in average environment that these people experience. So the really difficult statistical question is, is it the difference in average environment these people experience, or is it genes. And it's a very difficult question..."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGQdq8mOEd8
https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2020/06/twitter-attacks-and-de...
This is why these questions are deemed dangerous. They have the possibility of challenging and upsetting deeply held beliefs and narratives. What is there to fear but an observation and the data it’s based on?
There is everything to fear. This is one issue for which a definitive answer (if not the correct one) could be catastrophically damaging to relations between humans forever.
In this matter, ignorance is bliss.
The ignorant may keep the bliss. We are not served by putting our heads in the sand for the sake of political correctness.
Hiding science is not the way you attack bigots; you attack their immoral views directly.
My partner and I used IVF to have our first child. We had several fertilized embryos result. We were given the option of DNA sequencing and implanting embryos that met our genetic criteria. We didn't opt for it, but if we decide to have additional children and the data showed we could select for traits that were important to us (intelligence, height, athletically predisposed), I would absolutely opt for it. You want the best for your children (in my experience), and this is yet another selector in life to give them every advantage.
So, I do keep these things in mind. This research is going to occur (if not in the US, likely China), regardless of the uncomfortable feelings of vocal opponents. Get comfortable or get left behind.
Gwern has a nice article on embryo selection: [0] I think the summary is "it has moderate-to-large effects, and might be worth the money today, and almost certainly will be worth the money in ten years".
You treat existing humans with the utmost of respect, but you also target maladies so future humans have better quality of life (including a lack of disabilities).
[1] https://rarediseases.info.nih.gov/diseases/browse-by-first-l...
Yes. I understand the fear and loathing some people feel, but I've been watching this research area for the past decade or so — it might move around, but it's not being shut down.
I note that we don't have issues with men being over-represented on the other side of the curve (mental issues, violence, etc.) We're not calling the police "systematically sexist" despite the fact that most of the police shooting victims are men, for example. There is no call to have gender equality in prisons or mental hospitals.
[1]: https://i.redd.it/cc8wtw97vo931.jpg
I would be just as upset if a smallpox researcher agreed to be interviewed by someone interested in reintroducing smallpox to the public, and seeing the researcher giving them the scientifically accurate information about how to do it.
There is indeed such a difference. Some clarifications:
(1) That's not Hsu.
(2) That's not an academic.
(3) You're not in a position to divine whether or not there was intent to harm in that tweet (re. "trying to harm").
(4) It's a safe bet that no one was harmed by that tweet.
(5) For cognitive democracy[1] to work in a free society, the possibility of marginally hurting someone's feelings can't be grounds to silence people.
[1]: https://crookedtimber.org/2012/05/23/cognitive-democracy/
You have it backwards. The privileged are losing their privileges, and desperately seeking to find ways to justify why they should remain privileged. It is these people who desire to find evidence that proves their existing deeply-held belief that they're special, because "god" made them so and that others are genetically inferior.
Basically, a small +-5 IQ point difference doesn't change the big picture that much - still most people between 80 and 120, and some outliers below and above that.
Genes within a single species' gene pool follow a Poisson distribution because they are randomly permuted [1][3][4], assuming the pool is large enough. This means that often, some genes will be popular for no good reason; that is, these popular genes are cosmetic. When, for example, most people in the world follow one of several popular skin-coloration patterns, that does not therefore imply any sort of fitness function is selecting for skin colors, because the null hypothesis that they are randomly permuted has so little problem explaining how they could arise without any effect on fitness.
These questions aren't dangerous because they somehow subvert existing institutions, but because they're a direct introduction to ethnofascism via eugenics. We should roundly not just reject them based on empirical observations and data, but also based on theory and modelling; this is because we can then use contraposition to flip around various deductions. For example, people often ask whether "race" affects "intelligence" and point to survey data which shows correlations; using contraposition, and understanding that "race" is a social construction, we can refute the idea that "intelligence" is innate and suggest instead that it is tied to socioeconomic status or quality of education or other confounders.
I would end with a question: What observations and data, exactly, are you looking at? What conclusions have you drawn? Can we use contraposition to flip around any of those conclusions and find deeper or simpler truths?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_drift
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_drift#Wright.E2.80.93F...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedigree_collapse
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisson_distribution
[4] https://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/2019/12/random_permutat...
> I would end with a question: What observations and data, exactly, are you looking at? What conclusions have you drawn? Can we use contraposition to flip around any of those conclusions and find deeper or simpler truths?
None. I'm arguing that if Professor Hsu wants to model an experiment and a thesis, collect data, arrive at a conclusion, and publish a paper, that should be absolutely fine and provoke no outrage, even if some feel "that's a direct introduction to ethnofascism via eugenics". Let the reader of the paper be the judge if it's "ethnofascism". I'm prioritizing the scientific method over hurt feelings.
What lets you assert that? There are most certainly genetic clusters that correspond to "races" - that's how sites like 23andMe work, after all. And these variations aren't just "melanin content" or "nose structure" - the obvious one is sickle-cell anemia, but a lot of other genetic disorders are racially correlated too.
Second, those drift differences are largely cosmetic, and cosmetic on average. Both properties follow from differences being Gaussian distributed with respect to fitness; the typical drifted gene is neither especially fit nor especially unfit.
Third, as gene pools grow, the ability to control for fitness on a per-gene basis shrinks exponentially, so that the behavior of the pool is like a random permutation. To see this, imagine a picky procreator choosing from a list of suitors by genetic partition; at each stage, they will reject some suitors who have the wrong allele. The pool randomly combines each pair of alleles (because it is deep enough to hold every viable combination), so each rejection removes roughly the same proportion of suitors every time. Thus, a linear list of picked alleles requires an exponentially-large list of suitors to choose from!
Aside: This third fact is why breeding dogs gives us pugs with their poor breathing and also why breeding tends to give us lots of hip dysplasia across different breeds. We can only positively select for a relatively small handful of traits and alleles, and each selection allows thousands of selfish genes to join the entourage, giving us patterns of unwanted gene expression.
None of these facts preclude services like 23andMe; we can certainly write down lists of clustered alleles which correspond to drifted genes, and use that information to correlate people with the geographic history of their ancestors, on a probabilistic basis. (Remember, large gene pools are randomly permuted, so these services must be probabilistic.)
None of these facts preclude some genes from being selected for fitness, either. Let's examine sickle-cell anemia more closely. Sometimes a mutation can improve an allele's fitness when one copy of the gene is present, but two copies results in a poor allele. Sickle cell is a very good example of this. Having one copy gives the "sickle cell trait", which resists malaria. It has a bunch of other minor health effects, positive and negative, but resisting malaria is sufficient to allow the gene variant to stay in the gene pool.
What I'm saying is that, just because some people have sickle-cell anemia, that doesn't therefore change the fact that people are all of the same species. If folks want to talk about which individual genes they have, then they should do that, and not talk about race, because genes only stick together in geographic clusters probabilistically, due to drift.
This makes absolutely no sense. Either we can investigate some issues, or we can't. @markdown is a bit more honest when they say we should not research the issue at all, because the answer is very unpleasant. But note that race is only the ultimate taboo in the west; researchers elsewhere, in particular in China, will continue this research. And I think it's worth having people in the west researching this area, so they understand this research and can, indeed, challenge it when necessary.
I do not want to shut down research, but I do want to point out that the research which contradicts Hsu is already done and the theories which explain why he is wrong are already understood.
Nothing is ever really settled. And certainly not that topic in particular. How could it be, considering how controversial it is? (This very topic is another proof.)
>the fact that race is a social and cultural construction rather than some genetic reality
That is an absurd claim. I'm well aware of the sensitivity around this topic. I wish we could research it freely, but I can see why people get very agitated about certain findings. I can see why it's unpleasant. Still, just like you can't research dermatology, immunology and other fields of medicine without taking race into account (the idea that racial differences are only skin deep completely breaks down when it comes to finding bone marrow donors), if it turns out that there are also racial difference in cognitive or behavioral traits, it's important to know for research on diseases like Alzheimer, or indeed for research on psychology, sociology, etc.
> That is an absurd claim.
Indeed. Idpol/woke ideology posits one outlandish race-realist conception of race to use as a strawman in order to claim that race is but a social construct, and simultaneously advances another (implicitly race-realist) conception of race that's shallow and incoherent in order to license its moral claims. It's a mechanism of manipulation.
"Race" is an ambiguous term — it has to be operationalized to be used coherently. There's a sense of the term that describes a social reality and another that describes ancestry groupings.
This is a great primer for anyone who's interested:
https://www.amazon.com/What-Race-Four-Philosophical-Views/dp...
I think he doesn't go far enough. Its not enough to just "not speculate," you have to also be responsible with how you use your reputation as a researcher in the field. As an analogy, it doesn't matter how principled or academic a political philosopher's belief in state's rights is, he'll lose his credibility if he agrees to speak at a bunch of racist confederate organizations. Even if he sticks to a boring non-racist script.
There is a movement out there seeking to drape their racist ideas in the trappings of science and reason. This researcher knows this. He ought to view it as his responsibility to make sure his good name is not attached to that movement. He could stay completely inside his ivory tower until he has the solid science, or he could heavily screen the media he speaks to. He has very clearly failed in that responsibility by going on Mr. "Humanity is not a single species[1]" Molyneux's show and saying that he thinks appealing to the environment as an explanation for group differences in IQ is a-scientific.
[1] https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/indi...
I think you're saying the following:
Even though you do not necessarily consider him guilty of racism by association with Molyneux, the fact that some people consider him guilty of racism by association is enough for him to have committed an act worthy of public shame.
If that's true, then call it guilt through association, but to my mind it's a distinction without a practical difference.
I have heard Molyneux's fans say to me that they were drawn to Molyneux's racist ideas "because he just applies science" and pointed to Hsu's interviews (and others) as evidence of this. Hsu enabled that not by association in general, but in this specific form of association which some people have interpreted as endorsement.
There are plenty of other professions with ethics rules prohibiting certain associations due to how those associations may be perceived, e.g. large companies have antitrust guidelines that prohibit associations that may cause the perception of anti-competitive behavior.
The problem is that he was largely removed for refusing to lie about the state of the science. But the state of the science is not politically acceptable.
So I think we got fundamentally different things from that article. You see "between-population differences aren't genetic". I see "we don't know if between-population differences are genetic or environmental, and with our techniques we don't think this is knowable". Which, funnily enough, matches this quote of Hsu's pretty strongly (quoted elsewhere in these comments)
> "I've always said that I'm agnostic on whether... so there are observed test score differences between groups, I think that's clear, you can't deny that.
> The causality of that, whether it's partially due to genetics, I've always been agnostic on. Not because I think it's impossible, but because it's such a charged thing we should really make sure the science is solid before we speculate. We shouldn't randomly speculate on something that sensitive.
> But even just not being willing to categorically rule out that God could have created us with average group differences has gotten me into trouble. And I think that's just absurd. So for someone to attack me for saying 'We don't know the answer to this question, let's do the science first and then talk about it.' Even that position is actually not tenable in the current social justice warrior political climate."
That doesn't mean that everyone with fringe views is a great scientist, of course.
But I don't see why that would disqualify him.
Otherwise, I have no background or in fact interest about whether or not Steve Hsu was a good VP of research and innovation. The reason given for why he's being fired for this position has nothing to do with his performance, good or bad, and has everything to do with his research. Since he his tenured, they can't fire him for his research, so they found an other way to punish him. That's low.
Don't like his facts/scientific methods/conclusions? Fight them with other facts and methods and conclusions!
When you try and suppress the scientific method (especially in the age of the internet), you give the conspiracy theorists and white supremacists ammunition for a new generation of recruits. "Here are the facts they are hiding from you!"- they'll say. Fight ideas with better ideas, not by firings.
>However, these categories overlap & are all rooted in Hsu’s beliefs in innate biological differences between human populations, especially regarding intelligence --an unscientific position which makes him unsuited to direct a research institution’s funding or its graduate studies
Humans are, biologically, extremely diverse. Visible attributes, disease risk, geometry of the physical body, etc. Some groups are more prone to certain genetic disease risk factors, for example.
Doesn't it follow that the brains of different groups of humans might group into certain traits, including intelligence?
I'm asking in all sincerity. I'd love to hear if there's some evidence that my thinking is wrong.
[1] https://twitter.com/GradEmpUnion/status/1270829006439485441
Wanna bet? I think most intelligence researchers would disagree with you, and IQ is predictive of life outcomes.
There are areas where you can find fault with Hsu's work, but I don't think "IQ approximates g, and g is real" is one of them.
For that matter... If a population was killed according to a trait, wouldn't that make it more likely for there to be genetic causes of group differences in that trait?
Wow, that's... Misguided. Most intelligence research doesn't have to do with genetics at all, to start with. Second, twin studies have shown that intelligence is highly heritable, with about half of variance explained by genetics (and half "non-shared environment", also known as random chance) - we might not know what genes are responsible, but you don't need to know the genes to compare identical and fraternal twins. Finally... IQ is real is one of a very small number of psychology studies that reproduces consistently, so the normal "psychology is bunk" objections don't apply.
Heritability does not imply the existence of a genetic mechanism. Twin studies have a number of flaws that further demonstrate my points about standards of methodology that geneticists wouldn't touch with a ten foot pole. Even not taking into account stuff like equal environment assumption, identical twins simply do not have the same DNA. Yes, even identical twins, look it up. There are also a number of things that are heritable without involving a genetic mechanism at all, such as the various microbiomes or epigenetics. And of course there are things like transmission of de novo mutations over up to two generations (e.g. affecting germinal cells of one's fetus).
Regarding the 'IQ is the best finding we have on psychologist' point. Being the best in a field that's a largely grift doesn't make one any less of a grift. IQ (and g) still has flaws that no one in the hard science would consider it. For instance, it is gaussian for no reason and despite most social outcomes performances being fat-tailed, meaning the theoretical covariance between IQ and any kind of relevant task is undefined (and its in-sample variance finite but meaningless). There's also zero neurological or genetic data confirming the existence of g, making it a purely imaginary construct that only exists in the minds of psychologists. That this is the best they can come up with just speaks even worse of the field as a whole.
...I think you're missing how twin studies work, here. Yes, they can't distinguish between epigenetic and genetic traits, but they DON'T require twins to have identical genetics, and DON'T require equal environments. Specifically, they work by
1. Measuring the correlation in identical twin IQs (or other traits)
2. Measuring the correlation in fraternal twin IQs (or other traits)
3. Comparing the correlations. If identical twins have a 50% correlation and fraternal twins 25%, well...
Identical twins not having identical genetics makes it harder to find genetic influence, but doesn't make it impossible. (it just means that the twins share 99.9...% of varying DNA instead of 100%, which is still far above fraternal twins and enough to establish a difference) And the reason you use twins is to control for varying environments. (And for that matter both identical and fraternal twins will share germinal cells/microbiomes/etc, too)
Yes, it's fuzzier than a physics experiment. But it's certainly not worse than "this gene causes a 0.1% increase in the chance of breast cancer".
The current argument is weasly though, approaching it as follows:
Race is a social construct and not a genetic one. Humans exist on a genetic spectrum. Therefore you can't box humans into distinct groups there. Therefore racial differences are moot.
This is based off the grad student unions linked sources. It's also weasly as all fuck. Race may be a social construct, but it does correlate strongly with a number of genetic factors. As such, race serves as an aggregate variable for a large quantity of genetic variation. And it can be shown that between populations of different race, there's an observable difference at a genetic level.
In this guy's, case, it is arguable if he's in the field. He seems to have already made up his mind on it, he's just out to find proof of his hypothesis. This is in principle fine, but he should acknowledge that by choosing to study this field, he excludes himself from any position where he's in charge of teaching or training people - he seems to sincerely believe that some of them are dumber by their nature, that seeems like a massive conflict of interest to me.
TLDR:
A very long, rambling blog post that essentially says "yeah there's probably genetic differences related to IQ among groups of humans but...", then proceeds to dismiss anyone who disagrees with them as part of "a vocal fringe of race pseudoscience".
The “long, rambling blog post” outlines a number of pieces of evidence that say it’s highly unlikely there are meaningful differences, and because of population stratification, stuff like GWAS (that Hsu uses) can’t give us a lot of info. Look, if you have questions or doubts about these criticisms, you can ask and people will take those questions seriously. Ewan Birney is a world class geneticist that leads Europe’s leading institute on the subject. He’s writing a blog post for lay people to help them understand the complexities. What you wrote in response just shows how blinded you are in just discounting other arguments.
Look, I don’t know who you are; you can look me up (https://www.octant.bio/biosri).. but maybe when most experts in a field are saying one thing, and one person on the fringe is saying another... you at least owe it to yourself to understand the dominant viewpoint. It’s easy to find my email, or Ewan’s or many other researchers that take a lot of time answering questions. Quantitative genetics is complicated and in that blog post he’s trying to break down the major ways people get this stuff wrong; including Hsu. But in general, most on this site thus far have a viewpoint that is set in stone, hold their nose, and think an entire community is really stupid and politically correct. Anyways, if you are not a layperson I apologize and as a researcher, you can always just publish your findings, and the community and I can learn from them.
The two "quotes" in my comment:
>>[...] that essentially says "yeah there's probably genetic differences related to IQ among groups of humans but..." [...]
English isn't my first language, but it's crystal clear that this isn't a direct quote but is a summary of my thoughts on their argument.
>>[...] "a vocal fringe of race pseudoscience".
If you read your own link you would know that this is a direct quote.
But please, continue to educate me on punctuation.
>What you wrote in response just shows how blinded you are in just discounting other arguments.
That's rich coming from someone who started their comment with "Lol; what I thought." And someone who started their first reply to my original comment by questioning my sincerity.
>But in general, most on this site thus far have a viewpoint that is set in stone, hold their nose, and think an entire community is really stupid and politically correct.
Where could they possibly get that idea? (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23585765)
Finally, what was the point of trying to flex your credentials? You spent an entire comment reinforcing the idea that academics like you "have a viewpoint that is set in stone, hold their nose, and think an entire community is really stupid and politically correct."
anyways, the flex is because you now know who I am and what I research. If you have serious questions about the above topics... the same topics for why most people don't take Hsu seriously, feel free to email them to me. In the meantime, I am laughing because you were anything but sincere.
And you have no reply to my criticisms of your sarcastic, ad hominem filled reply.
>>You spent an entire comment reinforcing the idea that academics like you "have a viewpoint that is set in stone, hold their nose, and think an entire community is really stupid and politically correct."
Look in the mirror once in a while.
I know what it's like to achieve an extremely high level of expertise in a narrow field; I've done it myself. It forever blinds you to the way a novice sees the same field.
If you've ever wondered why there's increasing skepticism of academia, you should read your comments again. They are nasty, sarcastic, and dismissive.
I'll paste this one more time because I think you need to seriously consider that you are exhibiting exactly the behavior that you're accusing others of:
>[...] have a viewpoint that is set in stone, hold their nose, and think an entire community is really stupid and politically correct.
I don't quite understand what the point is. The main crux of it seems to be "argument by obfuscation", a lot of deferral to (scientific) authority and a lot of "sophiscated" words (hoping that the reader will also defer to authority).
The author seems to argue something like: we can't know this because (1) genetics are complicated, (2) we don't have enough data, (3) the data that we do have is hard to understand, and (4) even if we could draw conclusions from the data, we couldn't generalize them on other populations. This seems like a coop-out - I'm 100% that in the future, we'll have more data, and we'll have better tools to understand the data, so whatever conclusions we make, will be that much more certain.
Also, part of the author's argument seems to be "there wasn't significant evolutionary pressure on these traits". So what? Obviously there are differences in traits that have no evolutionary pressure (e.g. why do SE Asians have slanted eyes? was there some evolutionary pressure for that?), there's lack of differences even when there is evolutionary pressure (e.g. female sex selection seems to prefer height, yet non-Dutch Europeans and SE Asians are smaller; in addition, the latter haven't developed ability to digest milk after infancy, despite presumably the same evolutionary pressures); finally, there's traits that do conform to evolutionary pressure, including all of the ones I highlight above (tall Dutch, smart Jews, fast Kenyans). Either different populations face different evolutionary pressures so have developed different traits, or all populations face the same evolutionary pressures and some have failed to develop some traits. In any case, it's more than possible that there are population-wide differences even in heritable IQ, and we just can't confirm or deny that yet (we already know there are "sub-population-wide" differences, e.g. Ashkenazi Jews).
Part of the authors argument is also that because most studies are done on Europeans, they can't be generalized. Again, irrelevant. The examples I pointed out are "within population" - Kalenjin run faster than other Kenyans, Dutch are taller than other Europeans, Ashkenazi Jews are smarter than other Europeans and other Jews.
The author also argues that it's somehow invalid to exclude recent "immigrants" when studying a population. Why? Obviously if I study Ashkenazi Jew IQ, I'd exclude other (non-Jewish) Europeans, as well as non-Ashkenazi Jews (e.g. Sephardi) and those who are not genetically Ashkenazi Jews (e.g. people who recently converted to the religion). I can't see how that would be "unscientific".
> it is virtually inconceivable that the primary determinant of racial categories – that is skin colour – is strongly associated with the genetic architecture that relates to intelligence.
The author either lacks imagination, or his/her imagination is stifled by political correctness. We know this claim is false, as "race" is associated with height (Europeans are on average taller than SE Asians - and I looked up Japan specifically, a first-world country, so don't "nutrition" me), which is also a complex trait.
To conclude, there's only 3 possible answers to the question of "Why are Ashkenazi Jews smarter?": (1) They aren't. (2) It's (mostly) genetic. and (3) It's mostly not genetic (nutrition, culture, etc.). I don't see the author's incoherent rambling (you can see that I've become more and more disappointed by the article as I read it) arguing in either of these directions, in particular I don't see any argument to dismiss (2), except a few weak sauce non-arguments that I criticize above. I also don't see anything against Steve Hsu's argument, which is basically that IQ & height are at least partially genetic, we'll soon be able to predict them from genes, then we'll be able to use it in embryo selection.
Therefore, I'm going to summarily dismiss your argument and disregard other sources you suggest, unless you can come up with a short counterargument to (2) above that doesn't fail in the silly ways as this article does.
Edit: This isn't to say that I'm not open to other explanations... Maybe Kalenjin just are training better. Maybe Ashkenazi just are rearing their children better. Maybe the Dutch are eating the right food that makes them grow taller. But I find that unlikely (their secrets would have gotten out already) and in any case, I'm mainly just saying that we can't dismiss either explanation.
1. 'evolutionary pressure on traits' -> so what? It's important, because we are usually much better powered at detecting purifying selection in traits.
2. As for the slanted eyes: why do you think there was no pressure? Assortative mating is a thing.. it's very prevalent in visible traits and really makes this hard.
3. Preference for height... umm ok - this is weird. There are plenty of known examples for purifying height selection in either direction. However, these are rare variants and not the major driver of height variation within bigger populations. Height is actually a good example for looking at variation within populations: https://elifesciences.org/articles/39702 Basically it says that population stratification is a major problem for things that are easily measurable like height (unlike intelligence, which is much harder to measure and way more likely to have known social covariates).
4. In general, you aren't even understanding the simplified responses that the authors are trying to explain, but also can't seem to grasp there might be more that you are not understanding – and just ascribe things to lack of imagination or political correctness of the authors.. who are world class geneticists. You can lead a camel to water...
If I understa correctly, your point is that there are things that are easy to see (matters for sexual selection) and/or measure (matters for science) and IQ is neither... but those aren’t the only causes of genetic differences? You also have survival pressure (presumably running faster would be here) and just random drift as well (presumably that’s how slanted eyes and blond hair first developed). You didn’t answer which of the options I listed regarding Jewish IQ is correct. Alternatively, why are humans smarter than chimps?
Also, regarding your (4), scientists are notorious for submitting to pressure from the wokeness mob, and in touchy subjects like genetics in particular, so it’s not an unreasonable assumption on my part.
Maybe a news article like https://www.wilx.com/content/news/MSU-Vice-President-of-rese... or https://statenews.com/article/2020/06/asmsu-advocates-call-t... or https://www.lansingstatejournal.com/story/news/2020/06/15/mi...
His firing was called for here: https://twitter.com/GradEmpUnion/status/1270829003130261504
(from link 1)
This isn't "mob rule," this is the reasoned opinions of skilled scientists saying that Hsu's political opinions are 1) not backed by the science, and 2) establish strong ground to believe that he will not use his position of power fairly.
People have a right to be judged fairly in their careers, and those in leadership positions should not be unfairly prejudiced by bad beliefs. It might be fine for a tenured physics professor, but it's not OK for somebody making hiring and promotion decisions.
This is tribal mob rule under the guise of a sophisticated intellectual rationalization.
i don't know much about the situation but your comment about people not calling out others for years doesn't mean things worth calling out someone for didn't happen...
Just searching academics I follow, the one thread that popped up from a year ago was this https://twitter.com/Graham_Coop/status/1132105378668326912
In which it seems many of these criticisms were well known at least a year ago. I hadn't previously followed this, but it seems like this was probably a case of the dam finally bursting.
I also have friends on the faculty. This is the dam bursting and should have happened a long time ago.
If you are not a scientist and did not bother to find out what the day was about, why are you prejudging it?
This is the same problem, by the way, as the people tweeting #DefundPolice who get upset at people who think they want to abolish the police entirely. The word “defund” means to remove funding for, not to reduce funding for. It’s the height of arrogance to come up with a slogan either intentionally or accidentally using a word to mean something totally different from what it actually means, and then get upset that I am not willing to learn more about a movement that is effectively engaged in trolling.
I do not believe that there can be any productive conversation unless you decide to seek truth instead of seeking validation of your preconceived notions.
If people should be fired or removed from a position that’s fine, I don’t know Hsu beyond his blog. But this is a method that is dangerous to societal function.
We have gotten to the point where no matter what you say or do, there is always a victim ready to complain.
And now it’s even worse, if science doesn’t back our political beliefs or feelings , let’s just shut down science!
Those in leadership positions for a scientific position should not forge their beliefs on the political zeitgeist, but on sound methods and the data stemming thereof.
https://sites.google.com/view/petition-letter-stephen-hsu/ho...
Signatures include:
Scott Aaronson
Scott Alexander
Sam Altman
Linda S. Gottfredson, Professor Emeritus, University of Delaware, Past President of the International Society for Intelligence Research
Jonathan Haidt, Professor, New York University Stern School of Business, USA
Geoffrey Miller
Steven Pinker, Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology, Harvard University
Robert Plomin, Professor, Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, King’s College Londonhttps://sites.google.com/view/petition-letter-stephen-hsu/ho...
Here's a letter from a professor at the university:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1bNPOlcphtKfqoDThfdsYTL65...
https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2020/06/twitter-attacks-and-de...
Does anyone have more information for the opposing side?
Seems pretty terrible that people can take things you said over the years out of context and destroy your reputation.
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/17/magazine/the-happiness-co...
But there have been one or two notable personnel changes at the NYT since that piece on the rationalists, and we're in the midst of a moral panic / cancellation frenzy.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/08/opinion/sunday/weird-chri...
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/27/opinion/nazi-sympathizer....
https://twitter.com/gradempunion/status/1270829003130261504
laughable stuff. not just sad but seriously and broadly concerning that this kind of uninformed knee-jerk response gets taken seriously
https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2005/06/02/...
Also worth nothing that Unz is himself of Jewish ancestry.
If the author's claims are true, I can hardly MSU for the decision.
A geneticist hosting and associating with a white supremacist and being a holocaust denier are not exactly the sort of academic liberty we should be standing up for.
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/06/28/morris-de...
It's really important to keep in mind the political economy of NGOs these days — it goes a long way to explaining current events.
"Hsu praised Unz for writing an article entitled “The Myth of American Meritocracy.” In the “Primary Bibliography” of that article Unz cited works by notorious scientific racist, Steve Sailer, two books by segregationist writer Nathaniel Weyl, and a book by Richard Lynn, well-known for his sloppy research on race, on “Jewish Intelligence and Achievement.” Lynn’s book was published by Richard Spencer, an alt right organizer of the deadly “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville.
Years later, when Hsu hosted Unz on his podcast, Hsu describes Unz as “an old friend of mine.” Unz,the like Hsu was trained as a theoretical physicist. He also put his IQ as 214 on a job application once, which seems to impress Hsu. Me, I’d wonder about the kind of person who would claim such a thing since such "
That article says that a large part of why US university admissions aren't purely merit based... is that jewish students were better qualified, and university administrators didn't want a primarily-jewish student body, leading to changing admissions standards in the 1920s. He might cite people you're calling neo-nazis, but the article didn't seem anti-jewish to me at all.
EDIT: yeah, reading further... Ugh. Not exactly friendly, even if he doesn't seem to be insinuating we should fire up the ovens. (basically summarizable as "jews are now admitted at many times the rates they should be if you extrapolate from things like test scores, national merit scholars, or other academic-only criteria")
Are these facts?
EDIT: It's sad that the notion of factualness gets constantly downvoted on HN, on an article about a science. Where will we be two or three years down the road?
It would be different if he came out now and said "here are the things I said then, here's why I said them, and here are the reasons those were problematic and wrong; I no longer align myself with those views." But instead, he dug in his heels saying that this comes down to suppressing scientific inquiry for ... not buying into eugenics.
It’s a valid research subject, and like all research subjects, it could be wrong.
If people think some questions are too dangerous to ask, just admit that and be honest. Instead of just calling it problematic because it’s a potentially uncomfortable subject.
In which he downplays racial bias in police shootings: https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2020/06/re-post-joe-cesario-on...
In which he says lack of segregation is the reason for racial underperformance: https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2020/03/claude-steele-on-chall...
Interview with an open white supremacist, check: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stefan_Molyneux
It seems you don’t feel that’s an acceptable question to ask: is racial bias in police shooting real?
I’d call that a dangerous question to ask, and try to answer honestly, because it could get a person fired.
Secondly, he doesn't particularly discuss it with respect nor realism. However, let's assume for the sake of discussion that we have the same view on that.
What about the second and third ones?
The science clearly shows there is not much bias, he did not downplay anything.
> lack of segregation is the reason for racial underperformance
Where?
> Interview with an open white supremacist
Lots of people interviewed with Molyneux, this doesn't prove anything.
I think this is pretty much corroborated by this scientific review in Slate star codex: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/25/race-and-justice-much-...
Even more shockingly, you can interview with someone because they actually share some interest in what you research or do, and still not be in agreement with the interviewer's platform, as is the case in the linked interview.
Edit: removed section on 'misleading narratives' as, truthfully, I don't know enough about this specific case to comment much on it other than it has the hallmarks of a political hit job.
Let me fix your summaries:
> In which he downplays racial bias in police shootings
In which a guest on Hsu's podcast, psychologist Joe Cesario, presents in detail his research, some of which is experimental, demonstrating no racial bias in police shootings (not the case in police interactions in general though).
> In which he says lack of segregation is the reason for racial underperformance
In which a guest on Hsu's podcast, Claude Steele, a[n African American] social psychologist, discusses his research in detail and his [African American] co-host, Corey Washington, discusses his daughter's educational experience. (And in which no one suggests that racial segregation in education would be desirable.)
> Interview with an open white supremacist
Interview with a YouTube personality who's also had Noam Chomsky and Peter Boghossian on his show, e.g.:
Do you have real examples? These types of accusations are meaningless without real data. If they are real, I'd like to know the actual threats.
In the same sense of "hack" used in "Hacker News", sure, perhaps.
A pattern that's repeated itself multiple times in the history of science is mathematicians and theoretical physicists showing up in other fields and making groundbreaking discoveries that end up re-orienting the field.
It's not at all surprising that incumbents would object to the competition, fault the 'interlopers' for not working within accepted paradigms, or just not have the background to fully understand their projects in the first place.
If you want to ask these kinds of questions, you need to be sure that you can't be accused of a conflict of interest, Hsu's done, basically the exact opposite of that, and intentionally associated himself with some really uncomfortable people. That context has the consequence of throwing Hsu's motives into question as well.
There are multiple ways of operationalizing the notion of race. Some are prima facie invalid (usually these are used as straw men), some (as in the idpol/'woke' ideology's case) are incoherent and shallow but have political currency, and the rest are all valid within some range, conditional on context.
This is a great resource if you're interested:
https://www.amazon.com/What-Race-Four-Philosophical-Views/dp...
That is, race realism isn't "race exists", but that "black people have lower average IQs due mainly to genetics and so the status quo today is explained perfectly by genetic, and not environmental causes".
Such views are contradicted by most available evidence.
You are incorrect. If 'race realism' has taken on that meaning in some discursive communities, understand that there are other understandings of the term.
Race realism is a descriptive claim that race has some basis in reality. There are no inherent normative implications to race realism.
Again, see the link in the preceding. In particular I recommend Chapter 3: "How to be a biological racial realist", by Quayshawn Spencer
Id refer you to the order of the definitions. Race realism as used in the scientific community may have a different connotation and definition, and is perhaps the reason why racists adopted the term, but no I'm not at all incorrect here about how the term is understood when used in a layperson context by people who are informed about race discussion.
> If 'race realism' has taken on that meaning in some discursive communities, understand that there are other understandings of the term.
Please remember that I said "race realism" and not race realism. And understand that I'm not uninformed here.
To reiterate, I'm not saying that scientists who research race are racist, I'm saying that if you research race and aren't a racist, you need to be extra careful to make that clear. Otherwise, as a pragmatic point, you'll end up like Dr. Hsu even if you are simply naive, and as a moral point, your naiveté will be used by actual racists to help legitimize their standpoint. That's why they self describe as "race realists", so they can say "look we're just like these other scientists who are studying race".
If you don't want your work and your authority to be coopted by racists, you need to proactively prevent them from doing so. Hsu did exactly the opposite and gifted actual racists his position and legitimacy. That's a problem no matter what his personal beliefs are.
The first:
> Please remember that I said "race realism" and not race realism.
Here is what you said:
>> Race realism is, by definition an extremist view.
The second:
> And understand that I'm not uninformed here
That you have to assert that, and actually go the trouble of asserting it at all, suggests you're willingly choosing to be incompletely informed.
Between the both of these, you don't seem to be engaging in good faith — you're attempting to manipulate. You are justly ignored.
> because their research will be used by "race realists" to push forth their theories.
> suggests you're willingly choosing to be incompletely informed.
I cannot imagine what strange interpretation of the universe leads you to conclude that.
Not picking a side on this particular issue, but we're definitely seeing this kind of tactics unfold on multiple fronts.
It is? I still don't see one meaningful example, and you didn't give any either.
I don’t see anything wrong with trying to understanding genes enough to make embryo selections to improve offspring for example.
It's not. It's purely media manipulation over the past few years that has some people conditioned to reflexively associate "eugenic" with creeping Nazism.
Consider this, from 2005:
https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2005/06/02/...
Herman and Chomsky describe this dynamic well in Manufacturing Consent.
> Hsu’s beliefs in innate biological differences between human populations, especially regarding intelligence --an unscientific position which makes him unsuited to direct a research institution’s funding or its graduate studies
I can see why this belief is controversial and in an ideal world I wish everyone was born exactly the same. However I don't think applying strong scientific research and methods to try and answer this hypothesis is necessarily wrong. Unless it has already been proven otherwise in which case I am unaware of the research.
In pretty much every study within group differences are far and away more massive that between group differences. Unlike other things like height, eye colour, or facial hair growth, intelligence is highly variable even between identical twins. The genetic link seems weak at best.
It’s also more or less impossible to study with great accuracy - you’re trying to study how race affects intelligence, but how do you correct for non-biological factors? Race is deeply intertwined with economics, education, nutrition, healthcare, and every other aspect of society and culture. Any study you do, regardless of results, will have a mountain or potentially over corrected or under corrected factors.
Finally, what are we even studying? Defining intelligence is a nightmare, and a quick glance at history shows how the definition of intelligence has changed over time and between cultures. Trying to look at how race’s biological factors affect intelligence irrespective of sociological factors is in many ways a fool’s errand - the very definition of intelligence is wrapped right up in those sociological factors!
You are perpetuating what’s known as Lewontin’s fallacy.
This claim is extremely narrowly true: clustering on a 1-dimensional fixation index is insufficient to reliably mechanically classify race. If you don’t know what that means, stop trying to use this claim in your arguments.
Here’s what it doesn’t mean: it doesn’t mean that there aren’t significant population-level phenotypic differences between ethnic groups. These differences can include intelligence (and 30 years of twin studies suggests they probably do).
But it does mean that we don't have any evidence for this claim.
> (and 30 years of twin studies suggests they probably do).
This would be a great place for a citation. I'm wondering how a twin study is going to show the effects of genetics on intelligence. As GP suggests, twin studies show differences in intelligence between even identical twins raised in the same household, so Amy conclusions from whatever study you're referencing would need to show statistically significant variation controlling for the noise.
If you actually care, just google it. There are dozens of great large-n metastudies. Chances are you don’t care (mostly based on the fact that you clearly haven’t googled it already), so I have to be jealous of my time - sorry.
> would need to show statistically significant variation controlling for the noise.
Obviously g-factor researchers have thought of this. Current best estimates place 60-80% of human intelligence variance as being genetically heritable.
It would have taken you less time to post a single link than to write your response, so I don't buy the time excuse.
> Obviously g-factor researchers have thought of this. Current best estimates place 60-80%
I'm aware. You claimed that twin studies (which control for race by comparing between people of the same race and are usually limited to small sample sizes) have revealed racial ethnic differences in g controlling for the environmental factors.
This claim is questionable on its face. Your heritability claim is much less contentious, but heritability of g and race correlation of g, controlling for environmental factors, are very different claims.
This took me literally 10 seconds to find.
Adult intelligence is ~80% heritable. There is >1stddev difference in mean intelligence between many ethnic groups. (Do you need me to provide a citation for this as well, or can you google it this time?) Do the math. What should your bayes factor be on this being environmental?
You can also find studies that specifically try to find environmental causal factors on intelligence - the effect sizes for identifiable factors (like poverty, or other common scapegoats) are laughably small. Once again, feel free to google this.
I’m sorry if I come across as hostile by asking you to look things up, but usually when people demand citations for things that A) they should already know if they’re debating about this and B) are easy to find, I have to assume they’re trying to waste my time and/or arguing from bad faith.
I asked specifically for you to justify the original claim, that there are phenotypic differences between ethnic groups that include intelligence, as supported by twin studies. That's a very specific and as far as I know very unfounded claim.
Edit: to humor the question: https://www1.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/30years/Rushton-Jense...
The conclusions in this paper should have been expected give the explanation I already gave.
And that paper, which I'm familiar with, doesn't address many of the modern criticisms of such theories that are based on the idea of "g" being socially constructed/influenced in the first place. (nor does it actually do much, if anything, to support the original claim you made: not all of their conclusions are phenotypic in nature, at a minimum, sections 3, 7, 8, 9, and 11 can be explained culturally despite what the paper says).
I'd suggest "Reconciling IQ Gains and Heritability", or "Race, IQ, and the search for statistical signals associated with so-called “X”-factors", which notes as a semi-conclusion that we know of environmental factors that have clear and demonstrable causal effect on IQ. We know of no specific genes that have this effect. So concluding that a bunch of individual genes have small effects is actually less supported than the similar claim that a bunch of individual societal/environmental factors have impact. Both of these are more recent than the paper you cite, and could be seen as academic responses to perceived flaws.
What an absurd claim! This is specifically the hypothesis that the last several decades of twin studies is designed to test. You are either ignorant of this body of research or you are being disingenuous. We can distinguish between these two cases because adopted twins and siblings have highly correlated genetic factors and weakly correlated environmental factors.
I notice that you keep avoiding the absurd improbability of environmental factors mediating bulk racial differences given the magnitude of population-level differences and the relatively small fraction of variance attributable to environment - but you seem desperate not to acknowledge the latter.
We can't, and the papers I cite give a highly coherent explanation for this, a phenomena called cultural filtering.
Like I said, I suggest you go and actually read recent papers instead of relying on a survey paper from fifteen years ago that relies on actual research older than many of the professors publishing this stuff today.
It's not worth having this conversation is you're unrolling to engage with modern research, and it'll just devolve into an ideological flamewar, which dang prefers us not to have. So again please read some modern research. Or don't, but don't claim this stuff is settled when your are a decade out of date.
"Race, IQ, and the search for statistical signals associated with so-called “X”-factors":
A) no non-paywalled sources, so I'm suspicious if you even read it
B) written by a philosophy professor, not a scientist, with no scientific background
C) the argument of this paper, as far as I can tell from the abstract, is "the pure-environmental hypothesis is nonfalsifiable", i.e. completely useless
I would critique it more if I could actually read it.
"Reconciling IQ Gains and Heritability" - this isn't actually a paper, it's just a section in some article. Where did you even find this? It barely shows up on the internet - your comment is the third result. In any case, it A) doesn't seem to support your claim, and B) doesn't strike me as especially compelling research - they're just summarizing some thoughts about the Flynn effect.
This further increases my confidence that you are arguing in bad faith.
> the papers I cite give a highly coherent explanation for this, a phenomena called cultural filtering.
I can't find this term anywhere in these papers (or elsewhere).
I have access to many paywalled articles.
> "Reconciling IQ Gains and Heritability" - this isn't actually a paper, it's just a section in some article.
Ah you're right, I meant to cite that section of the larger article, but the wider article is rather well cited.
> phenomena called cultural filtering
tl;dr: The idea is that culture magnifies any underlying genetics. The example given is two siblings/twins separated at birth, both are taller than average. As a result, they both end up playing basketball and being better than average as children, and as a result attend basketball camps. They both get good training and end up as college basketball players.
The question is to what extent culture serves to magnify any underlying differences. And whether different culture(s) can magnify these differences in different ways.
This sounds like irrelevant bikeshedding between genotypes and phenotypes. It also doesn't have any bearing against my claims, c.f. my original comment about "significant population-level phenotypic differences between ethnic groups".
Of course it does: if the only concrete support for phenotypic differences is based on twin data (or similar), and that data is subject to magnification due to cultural factors, the underlying phenotypic impact is smaller.
No one in this thread questioned this (keep in mind stereotype threat is a phenotypic difference). If that's the only claim you're making, I'm not sure why you felt the need to cite Rushton of all people, who was specifically arguing that these differences were genotypic in nature.
Furthermore, the paper you cite doesn't even deny that different groups test consistently differently. Furthermore, it also explicitly states studies of test bias have consistently shown negatives.
I also strongly oppose the conflation of population level metrics with individual level metrics.
Ignorance is never the correct answer no matter how unpleasant some bit of knowledge is.
Whether the answers come back in your favor or not, having the answer is better than not having the answer, or worse, only some people having the answer and not everyone else.
This guy might indeed harbor odious intentions, but some of these arguments are not holding water on their own.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashkenazi_Jewish_intelligence
"The mean correlation of IQ scores between monozygotic twins was 0.86, between siblings 0.47, between half-siblings 0.31, and between cousins 0.15."
There's a class of under-researched things that we know too little about, but for political reasons, no one can research. Anything around genetic traits of races, differences between men and women, research around causes of LGBT orientations and identities that could lead to preventing people from being LGBT.
These aren't even the ethically hard ones like genetic modifications in humans. These are just political suicide.
1. He wasn't forced to resign. He was requested to resign by the president of MSU.
2. He's still a tenured professor, and he will be returning to that role.
3. The group trying to oust him is the GEU (Graduate Employees Union, affiliated with the AFL-CIO), which represents 1200 graduate assistants at the University.
Apparently Dr. Hsu has made some controversial statements about genetics. The GEU's accusations appear to be about perceived racism.
One of Dr. Hsu's sins was appearing on a program with Stephane Molyneux, a conservative commentator whom they call "a white supremacist". I've watched several of Molyneux's programs and he is hardly a racist. Conservative and white, yes. I guess that's bad enough these days.
From his Wikipedia page:
Stefan Basil Molyneux (/stəˈfæn ˈmɒlɪnjuː/; born September 24, 1966) is a Canadian far-right, white nationalist[2] podcaster and YouTuber who is known for his promotion of scientific racism and white supremacist views.
Molyneux is described as a leading figure of the alt-right movement by Politico and The Washington Post, and as a far-right activist.[8][9][10][11] Tom Clements in The Independent described Molyneux as having "a perverse fixation on race and IQ".[12]
The Freedomain internet community which Molyneux leads has been described as a cult, and Molyneux has been described as a cult leader, using cult indoctrination techniques on his followers.
Molyneux is a proponent of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_genocide_conspiracy_theo...
I did find this, from Molyneux:
"It’s interesting that if you don’t have a uterus, you can’t have an opinion on women’s issues, but you can compete in women’s sports."
Apparently this is offensive to SPLC?
This is my point: almost no one really cares what is true or not, including acknowledging the shades of grey that exist everywhere in the complexity of reality. It's simply how the human mind works.
https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2020/06/twitter-attacks-and-de...
I’m going with he is in way over his head, and didn’t know who this guy was who interviewed him, or is lying. 10 minutes of research in 2017 easily would have shown this.
The racist part is pretending that it's still an open question. It isn't. There is no measurable biological relationship between race and intelligence.
There has been a massive amount of research into what influences "intelligence", and the sum of it makes it clear that environmental factors easily have a significant enough effect to explain differences in scores between racial groups on different metrics.
Someone might bring up the fact that often even when controlling for factors like education and family income, the racial gap narrows but might not disappear completely. The response is that it is fundamentally impossible to fully control for the effect of race on the environment someone grows up in. Even when absolutely every other factor is identical, a white person and a black person are not going to have the same environment because their race constantly affects how the rest of the world interacts with them.
Essentially: We know environmental factors can affect any given metric of intelligence on a magnitude consistent with racial performance gaps on those metrics. Proof of this can be found in things like the fact that average IQ scores have increased over time, and the average IQ of black people in the 1990s was equivalent to the average white IQ in the 1940s. Biology does not change in 50 years so the improvement must be entirely from changes in environmental factors.
In addition, race itself intrinsically has a significant effect on one's environment. Those two facts alone are enough to make it clear that any hypothetical biological component is too insignificant to be measured.
I know HN has a bit of an issue with JBP, but look at the this here yet again and think for yourselves.
+ That you are now more visible and you don't have the luxury of anonymity any more, and that this is just an inherent part of the bargain in taking on more responsibility, that now every little thing you say will be held against you by someone somewhere, and that now that you are part of the public face of your larger organization, it may at any time decide your affect on it's image is more important than any other thing about you.
It's not that you can't still hold positions, it's just that you can't still hold them for free.
You know you can disagree with ideas that offend you, right?
But even if there was an injustice here, there are far greater injustices in the world, done to people who don't wield any power, who are just trying to get by. People who are denied even a modicum of self-determination, let alone power.
The Visigoths didn't bring down Rome. By the time they were on the scene Rome was a house of cards.
At some point an organised advanced threat, or a disorganised mob, will attempt to take down a truly bad individual or group, who will retaliate in a truly disastrous way.
Of course, this is inevitable given enough time.
My concern now is that we are on a collision course with history, we can see that, and we appear to have no idea how to course-correct.