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Comment by WesternStar | Hacker News Reader

I suppose it is fair to say speech of those in leadership positions with executive power is chilled by this. I think that's how its supposed to be though. Part of being in leadership is managing relationships with stakeholders. Part of it is being beyond reproach. Undisclosed conflicts of interest on published papers is not a small thing for an Executive at a university. Being responsible in an academic honesty sense is important in that position I think.

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> Part of it is being beyond reproach

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.

He seems out of step with scientific consensus--but he wasn't removed as faculty, but rather from an admin position.

Scientific consensus is pretty heavily on the side of "50+% of within-group variation in intelligence is genetic, the remainder is non-shared environment" (in the US, barring known negative confounders such as fetal alcohol syndrome), and as far as I know the science on between-group variation is still very much undecided, but genetic components are as far from ruled out as you can get. But that debate won't be settled until you can 1) find the environmental differences that lead to IQ differences between groups, including (IIRC) in adopted children, 2) show that IQ tests only correlate with g within ethnic groups, but not across them, or 3) decode the genetic basis of IQ and show how differing frequencies explain group differences. Which is going to take a number more years, no matter which it ends up being.

Nope. He has a very fringe view on the state of the science. His conclusions from his work have been widely considered wrong.

Fringe view among geneticists, or fringe view among the public? (And honestly, I'd like to see those criticisms - I'd hate to be defending a guy who's genuinely wrong instead of just politically incorrect, which has been the impression I've had so far from SSC and elsewhere)

Amongst geneticists. If you want to learn more you can read here: http://ewanbirney.com/2019/10/race-genetics-and-pseudoscienc...

> IQ scores are heritable: that is, within populations, genetic variation is related to variation in the trait. But a fundamental truism about heritability is that it tells us nothing about differences between groups. Even analyses that have tried to calculate the proportion of the difference between people in different countries for a much more straightforward trait (height) have faced scientific criticisms. Simply put, nobody has yet developed techniques that can bypass the genetic clustering and removal of people that do not fit the statistical model mentioned above, while simultaneously taking into account all the differences in language, income, nutrition, education, environment, and culture that may themselves be the cause of differences in any trait observed between different groups. This applies to any trait you could care to look at – height, specific behaviours, disease susceptibility, intelligence.

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."

Most great scientists initially have fringe views that eventually become undergraduate textbook stuff.

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.

Disqualify him from being a professor? He’s still a tenured full professor with a nice salary. He’s just no longer in charge of all research at the university.

That's not the point. On this particular sub-thread we're discussing his research. You said he has fringe views. I'm just saying that it does not disqualify his research per se.

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.

Agreed and of course. He can and should continue his research as a well paid full professor at MSU, which I assume he will. He gets a lot of attention for doing so. Otherwise he’d just be a random really bad quantitative geneticist you’ve never heard of that thinks that no one else but him understands L2 regression.

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