An open letter on E.O. Wilson's legacy
razib.substack.com
razib.substack.com
Liu Cixin lived through that period, which inspired one of the scenes he wrote in the Three Body Problem. In it, a physics professor is submitted to a struggle session by his students for teaching counter-revolutionary science (relativity and quantum mechanics) and beaten to death.
While this story is fictionalised, it certainly was no exaggeration of the climate at the time.
What happened in China during the Cultural Revolution is on such a different level of awfulness it just isn't even the tiniest bit comparable to anything controversial or problematic happening in West right now. Even today what is happening in China, and even the freer parts like Hong Kong, is still far removed from issues in the West. Even as a "thin end of the wedge" argument it's just weak.
It hurts legitimate and necessary criticism of actual authoritarian countries and it hurts legitimate and necessary criticism of real issues (such as that raised in the article above) in free, Western countries.
There is a nice sort of proportionality to how everything is hysterically overdone and out of proportion!
That said everything is on a sliding scale here, and the worst enforcement of orthodoxy on the mildest offenders can certainly be compared to much lesser attacks if they stem from similar impulses.
If you cannot make a comparison of this sort then the world would be a place with unconnected events and patterns, and no real way of defining or discussing how situations move from a not bad condition to a very bad one, or in the other direction.
There would never be such a thing as warning signs or worrying trends, because those things would not be relatable to absolutely awful things they might lead to.
Conversely if you were living with awful things there would be no reason to discuss how they could improve, because the improved version of life would not be comparable. How can you make legitimate and necessary criticism of actual authoritarian countries if you cannot compare bad with less bad?
When I looked more deeply in to it, the only mentions of people being held hostage came from far right sources, such as the youtube channel you linked, with little credibility.
Watching recordings of what happened it's hard to take you seriously when you say people are being held hostage.
It can simultaneously be true that the West is a long way from communism and that these scenes look a lot like what happened in times when communism was seriously tried. These are the same dynamics that got out of control and into the halls of power.
Which is not at all surprising given how many young people in the West like to style themselves as Marxists.
But historically it doesn't seem to lead to much else when adopted by a society wholesale.
That's right. People are being beaten to death, locked up in labor camps, mysteriously vanished and worse, all because they don't bow down to people who think there are different metrics worth using at least some of the time when judging science (or anything else). It's absolutely terrifying!
(+) and let's not overlook that UPenn is actively considering changing tenure rules just because a poor law professor made some actually racist remarks. Labor camps could be here by 2023!
This is definitely true, for a less-charged example:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/17/world/europe/serbia-media...:
> BELGRADE, Serbia — When Covid-19 reached Eastern Europe in the spring of 2020, a Serbian journalist reported a severe shortage of masks and other protective equipment. She was swiftly arrested, thrown in a windowless cell and charged with inciting panic.
> The journalist, Ana Lalic, was quickly released and even got a public apology from the government in what seemed like a small victory against old-style repression by Serbia’s authoritarian president, Aleksandar Vucic.
> But Ms. Lalic was then vilified for weeks as a traitor by much of the country’s news media, which has come increasingly under the control of Mr. Vucic and his allies as Serbia adopts tactics favored by Hungary and other states now in retreat from democracy across Europe’s formerly communist eastern fringe.
> “For the whole nation, I became a public enemy,” she recalled.
> Serbia no longer jails or kills critical journalists, as happened under the rule of Slobodan Milosevic in the 1990s. It now seeks to destroy their credibility and ensure few people see their reports.
> That's right. People are being beaten to death, locked up in labor camps, mysteriously vanished and worse, all because they don't bow down to people who think there are different metrics worth using at least some of the time when judging science (or anything else). It's absolutely terrifying!
FYI, "reminiscent" does not mean "exactly identical in all respects."
"Rebuttals" like yours are obnoxious, because you can always find some difference in a comparison. If there's some merit to the comparison, you shouldn't try to knock it down as you did. You've accurately noted that the current social justice movement lacks the violence of the Cultural Revolution, but that does not mean it doesn't have other similarities. IIRC, it was far more common for the Red Guards to harass their opponents than it was for them to beat and kill them.
But it also doesn't mean that the fact the I can use similar terminology to describe the Cultural Revolution and today (because of the broad meaning of various words in most human languages) implies that they are in fact meaningfully related, either.
In some ways they are meaningfully related, in some ways they aren't. That's the point. And the relation is not "because of the broad meaning of various words," since (for instance) they both contain instances of energetic radical youth movements seeking to enforce, with little tolerance for dissent, some orthodoxy on the wider society, etc.
Most social change movements have similarities. The civil rights movement, the anti-slavery movement, the women's suffrage movement, the equal rights movement ... these all have similarities with the Chinese Cultural Revolution. It is precisely because they lack the violence that equating them to the CCR is a distraction and also poses its own dangers.
Yeah, but isn't it obvious that some are more similar than others? Did the woman's suffrage movement deface monuments or have the ability to enforce some of its ideological orthodoxy outside of its own activist institutions? There's obviously more similarity between the Cultural Revolution and the current social justice movement than they're both "social change movements."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Olds
> The first things to change were the names of streets and stores: "Blue Sky Clothes Store" to "Defending Mao Zedong Clothes Store", "Cai E Road" to "Red Guard Road", and so forth. Many people also changed their given names to revolutionary slogans, such as Zhihong (志红, "Determined Red") or Jige (继革, "Following the Revolution").[5]
> Other manifestations of the Red Guard campaign included...harassment of people, such as intellectuals,[8] who defiantly demonstrated the Four Olds.[4] In later stages of the campaign, examples of Chinese architecture were destroyed, classical literature and Chinese paintings were torn apart, and Chinese temples were desecrated.[5]
> ...This statue of the Yongle Emperor was originally carved in stone, and was destroyed in the Cultural Revolution. A metal replica is in its place.
Not every "social change movement" does stuff like these examples, but they all have parallels in the current social justice movement.
The activists have not taken to beating to death landlords, but that is only a function of their not possessing the same level of social support as Red Guards did, but even without that they are capable of some level of harm. Don't mistake the lack of violence from a wolf in a cage as evidence of its benignity.
We live in a society where large corporations can destroy (or save) the economy of an entire town with a single investment decision. We live a society where a single corporation's employment policies dictate the life experience of more than 1.25 million people. We live in a society that spends that 10% of all federal income on the military (more than half of all discretionary spending), and that routinely launches disastrous wars overseas. A world in which the behavior of fossil fuel extraction industries threatens the current structure and distribution of contemporary human civilizations, yet they are largely beyond control. I could go on.
In the midst of all this, the idea that a small number of people who have a different idea of what constitutes justice and equality, most of them college age or not far from it, somehow represent an existential threat to the pursuit of life, liberty and happiness is just laughable to me.
Anyway, I would not say they represent some sort of existential threat. Cultural winds can blow in either direction, and while they could become worse, it could also blow over and become a curiosity for the history books akin to a left wing version of the Red Scare. But that notwithstanding, my overall point is that these activists exhibit a similar attitude as Red Guards, even if they lack the same environment. The problem is not that they have 'a different idea of what constitutes justice and equality', it is that they have allowed ideology to subordinate both reason and empathy, so they see their political opponents as less than human, treat them as such, and cannot be persuaded otherwise.
I feel pity more for them than fear, however. Infighting is the nature of all political movements, and when you have such a worldview, it does not end well for you. For example, later in the novel, the former Red Guards meet with the physicist's daughter years later. In the intervening years, they had fallen out of favour and become some of the rusticated youth, being sent down to the countryside to work and living a subsequent life of hardship. And while I'm sure she's doing quite fine financially at the moment, I can't help but draw a similarity with Lindsay Ellis's experience getting cancelled apparently for saying that one TV show resembled another. Logically, of course, I'm sure you'll say she has little to worry about in terms of her livelihood, but that really is beside the point.
It's quite literally a mindless zombie remnant of the actual Cultural Revolution ideology of Lin Biao and the criminal Gang Of Four. That whole ideological memeplex was taken up by young radical leftists throughout the West in the late 1960s and 1970s. A generation has passed, and now those leftist students have grown up and become respected "liberal" and "progressive" leaders. Do the math, it's not rocket science.
Arguing that an idea is wrong because it "lends support to scientific racism" is unscientific. To argue against an idea, demonstrate why it's wrong or offer a better alternative. "That's racist" is neither a scientific argument nor a serious one.
Since racism is itself not a scientific concept, arguments about this sort of thing are inherently never going to be scientific, but rather always political/philosophical. There's absolutely nothing wrong with Gould, Lewontin (or Wilson) engaging in such debates, which are as at least as important (and possibly more directly impactful) than the scientific ones.
Political/philosophical debates do not involve questions of demonstrable "right" or "wrong", but rather are a stage for beliefs about the world and different notions of utility. You don't settle them by "demonstrating why it's wrong", or by "offering a better idea".
It isn't fruitful when one side is arguing science and the other is arguing politics.
You see, Wilson, like Gallant in Highlights magazine cartoons, was someone who looked at the evidence, and used logic and the scientific method to lead him to his conclusions. He only sought the truth. Which in his case, was that the white race is superior to the black race.
Gould and Lewontin were like Goofus. They were just engaging in academic politics.
Easy case to win when one side is all science and logic and the other is "political". Not sure why everyone hasn't come around.
You've been asked several times to provide a quote from Wilson's published works where he said this, both in this thread and previous ones.
So far you have not.
I think you should either provide such a quote or retract this claim.
When Edward O. Wilson published Sociobiology, it generated a firestorm of criticism, mostly focused on the book's final chapter, in which Wilson applied lessons learned from animal behavior to human society. In Defenders of the Truth, Ullica Segerstrale takes a hard look at the sociobiology controversy, sorting through a hornet's nest of claims and counterclaims, moral concerns, metaphysical beliefs, political convictions, strawmen, red herrings, and much juicy gossip. The result is a fascinating look at the world of modern science.
Segerstrale has interviewed all the major participants, including such eminent scientists as Stephen Jay Gould, Richard C. Lewontin, Richard Dawkins, John Maynard Smith, Nobel Laureates Peter Medawar and Salvador Luria, and of course Edward Wilson. She reveals that most of the criticism of Wilson was unfair, but argues that it was not politically motivated. Instead, she sees the conflict over sociobiology as a drawn-out battle about the nature of "good science" and the social responsibility of the scientist. Behind the often nasty attacks were the very different approaches to science taken by naturalists (such as Wilson) and experimentalists (such as Lewontin), between the "planters" and the "weeders." The protagonists were all defenders of the truth, Segerstrale concludes, it was just that everyone's truth was different.
It's available in some university libraries, used from Amazon for about $60, or as a PDF from here: https://b-ok.cc/book/2325442/6946b3.
I reckon you're correct. Unfortunately, it seems we are again entering an age when opponents of those with views or ideas attack the actual person rather than debate the ideas themselves.
We could been forgiven for thinking that this was just a passing phase when such attacks ocured in social media, Facebook etc., but when an associate professor who holds a very prominent and responsible position in public life and who uses the pages of Scientific American to attack an eminent person who is now dead and who can no longer defend himself, then I'd say such attacks are here to stay.
Most thinking people would find such attacks abhorrent. How we change the public discourse back to a more even keel is an unanswered question.
This false dichotomy is key to the false comparisons with Lysenkoism, etc. E. O. Wilson did not represent all scientists even during his working career and many of the people criticizing him are also scientists using their scientific expertise. The author of the Scientific American piece is “an associate professor in the Family Health Care Nursing Department and a clinician-scientist at Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health at the University of California, San Francisco.” — hardly a political apparatchik. Some of the most outspoken criticisms of his work came from Richard C. Lewontin (a population geneticist) and Stephen Jay Gould (a paleontologist).
Similarly, Razib Khan is someone who is at least comfortable using his expertise in forums which do not shy away from race politics — for example, he lost a contract writing for The New York Times when his regular contributions to Taki's Magazine, a very conservative venue which was at least neo-Nazi-adjacent (Richard Spencer was the managing editor). That doesn't mean that we should dismiss Khan's writing entirely but we should recognize that he's a human rather than the objective voice of science and his work also needs to be read with an understanding of how his political positions influence it.
Hardly Wilson's peer either, and the article shows this quite clearly.
> Some of the most outspoken criticisms of his work came from Richard C. Lewontin (a population geneticist) and Stephen Jay Gould (a paleontologist).
Yes, criticisms of the substance and inferences like any good scientist would focus on, not thinly veiled accusations of racism.
Whether you find her politically correct isn’t relevant to the topic at hand: she’s clearly qualified to participate in a scientific discussion.
No, her remarks about the normal distribution disqualified her from all scientific discussion.
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2021.6757...
(and, for that matter, did you notice the clever way in which Razib said it was nonsense but didn't directly address or show any signs of understanding the argument? He was hoping that you'd have a good sense of righteous indignation and roll right past that without pausing to ask whether things like human cognition might not be as simple as the length of a cucumber.)
The normal distribution does not entail there is any such concept as a "default human".
Furthermore, that paper shows the corrupt logic inherent to a lot of woke criticism. You're tarred as a racist if you claim there are biological differences between races, while these same people cry that existing science is racist because it's not accounting for the biological differences between races.
Yes, the one which was in a peer-reviewed journal. If it was so roundly condemned you should have no trouble doing more than drive-by accusations.
McLemore didn't see fit to do more than drive by accusations of Wilson, so I'm not sure why I should bother extending her more courtesy than she extended to the recently deceased.
Other scientists have already commented on this widely anyway, so you can find them if you're actually interested.
And she doesn't even use that confusion to make any sensible point. The rest of that paragraph is just a rehash of the paper's argument. I don't "understand" why McLemore inserted this guff about normal distributions, but if I had to guess, she might have done it to strengthen the link between what Wilson wrote about and what the paper is criticising – not by reasoning, but by wordplay.
I suppose she referenced it because she hoped people would assume that an article on an important topic wouldn't just be thrown around by the same author as a citation in support of total nonsense. But people who assumed that would be wrong.
Questioning the idea of a "default human" is fine. Saying that the normal distribution implies the idea -- this is nonsense.
1. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2021.6757...
Whatever the merits of that argument, that's not what the SciAm article was claiming -- which was a either ignorance or a deliberate confusing of the popular and technical meanings of the word "normal". She might as well said that magnetic fields have to do with the plots of land farmers grow crops on because they are both "fields".
Wilson's peers were people who studied ants and other insects, or maybe people who write popular science.
If he wants to jump into his views of the human brain, she is as much a peer as he is.
But, I'm curious. What would have helped the Soviet Union from forming? Was there a solution?
Large-scale invasion by the rest of Europe in support of the White Army, potentially. Hard to imagine Europe having the stomach for it after WW1 though.
The so-called normal distribution of statistics assumes that there are default humans who serve as the standard that the rest of us can be accurately measured against.
When she so casually misinterprets normal distribution in medical application in SciAm, what stop her from brining this notion into the classroom. And this is how we end up with Lysenkovschina, but in medicine instead of agriculture.
I have been very lucky that the majority of my friends and acquaintances hold diametrically opposed political views from me, as this has allowed me to watch this very phenomenon unfold on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, etc. The most incredible platform to watch this on is TikTok - if one doesn't purposely engage with opposing viewpoints, one's "For You Page" will be nearly entirely filled with shorts confirming your existing ideological biases. The only remaining few percentage points of content will be extremely popular Toks, which are almost always non-political trending memes, such as dances.
I think the algorithms serve their masters.
You are likely right as those involved will probably dismiss any criticism. However, I believe the authors of this open letter probably want their position put on the record for posteriorly.
However, such is the outrage against Scientific American and Associate Professor McLemore that this open letter may have a life of its own.
The outrage was palpable 14 days ago with the HN story The Demise of Scientific American and many of those who posted shared the same discust. The public release of this open letter signed by many prominent people will probably reinforce this view and give the matter a continued existence in the public domain.
I've posted a link to the earlier HN story below.
> Associate Professor McLemore
It's embarrassing that someone with the special kind of bold stupidity that Monica McLemore displays is credentialed in anything. It certainly does no favors to the credibility of Nursing as a field.
(There is a possibility of massive influx of young men from Africa and Asia into Europe, which would replenish the potential, but that does not concern the USA.)
[0] https://blogs.worldbank.org/developmenttalk/youth-bulge-a-de...
40-y.o. somethings are less militarily capable and, these days, usually fat. They will stick to their keyboards.
But yeah, all that hate worries me as well.
> (There is a possibility of massive influx of young men from Africa and Asia into Europe, which would replenish the potential, but that does not concern the USA.)
Didnt this basically happen in 2015
You can't really have a civil war without an economic crisis, and the one thing all the helicopter COVID money guaranteed was not having a massive economic crisis. See Kazakhstan; it's been somewhat unfree for years, but the thing that triggered fighting in the streets was a spike in energy prices.
However I do think there's a risk of more political violence around elections. Eventually some group is going to bring guns to a government building and refuse to leave.
The open letter wasn't penned to end up on a blog post. The goal was to be printed in Scientific American: But the editor-in-chief was a coward:
> Today, after sitting on our rebuttal to Scientific American’s prominent reappraisal of Wilson for eight days (curious given that the original article was rushed out within three days of his death) editor-in-chief Laura Helmuth wrote to officially reject it.
I'll also add that it tries very hard to pin you to a 'side'. I work in politics and am thoroughly disgusted by every major political faction right now, so the only political TikToks I like watching are shitposts or political humor. TikTok doesn't understand this, and I've noticed that whenever I dislike something political and serious, TT very quickly tries to serve me up political and serious videos from the opposite side of the aisle.
What I’ve notice is that twitter definitely seems to think I support a particular side of Australian politics. But it has it slightly wrong (I dislike both major parties and their policies) and so it’s attempts are all the more grating.
It may be difficult for the younger generation to really grasp how important a single magazine or newspaper could be back then, with today's overabundance of information channels. Most of them, if they exist at all, are now a pathetic shell of their former selves.
So did I, and it is a sad day that it's come to this. SciAm and other technical mags were my lifeblood as a teenager. When the monthlies were due I'd race to the newsagent after school and occasionally when one was late I'd fret in disappointment.
You're right, I reckon it is difficult for younger generations to grasp not only how important magazines were to us but also many other aspects of life back then. Trying to put the zeitgeist of an earlier era on a young head never works thus the younger generation has to work things out for itself. If we could accurately convey a past ethos then we probably wouldn't have any more wars but then we would never develop as a species either - it's the two-edged sword problem.
Back to SciAm. Unfortunately I've had the impression for quite some time that the mag is near its end. I've seen this happen too many times previously with others that have had a long illustrious lineage. For some reason their editorial quality goes down followed by the circulation, they're then sold off and the new owners have no intrinsic interest in their subject matter, they then lose more and spiral further downward until they're soon defunct.
Still, I hope I'm wrong about SciAm.
So did I. SciAm today is a travesty, and it has been for years. I canceled my subscription in (IIRC) the late 1990s.
S1R- Steven Rose notes in his recent letter (Nature 22 January, p.335) that a National Front journal New Nation has claimed to find support for racism in my writings on sociobiology, as well as in those of Dawkins and Maynard Smith. Rose calls on the latter two authors to dissociate themselves from such misuse, although curiously he does not extend the same invitation to me. To keep the record straight, I am happy to point out that no justification for racism is to be found in the truly scientific study of the biological basis of social behaviour. As I stated in On Human Nature, "I will go further and suggest that hope and pride and not despair are the ultimate legacy of genetic diversity, because we are a single species, not two or more, one great breeding system through which genes flow and mix in each generation. Because of that flux, mankind viewed over many generations shares a single human nature within which relatively minor hereditary influences recycle through ever changing patterns, between the sexes and across families and entire populations" . lf there is a possible hereditary tendency to acquire xenophobia and nationalist feelings, it is a non sequitur to interpret such a hypothesis as an argument in favour of racist ideology. It is more reasonable to assume that a knowledge of such a hereditary basis can lead to the circumvention of destructive behaviour such as racism, just as a knowledge of the hereditary basis of haemoglobin chemistry and insulin production can lead to the amelioration of their pathological variants. l now call on Professor Rose to consider these and similar arguments raised in my writings. It is my hope that he will not confine himself, as he has in the past, to arguments that link sociobiology to racism and thus to continue to abet the very misuse which he piously claims to deplore.
EDWARD0. WILSON Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA"
Whether they are held in lay or scientific forums, this statement is central to many of the arguments over racism.
The key issue in this sentence is its initial point, which is that we still do not know whether the human race has any hereditary tendency to acquire xenophobia.
We need to determine for certain whether this is in fact true or otherwise. Guessing one way or other not only doesn't help but it also fuels the fires of those on either side of the debate. If we know the answer for certain then it's much easier to set a course to remedy the situation.
If we are to make real progress then I believe it's cucial that we determine the facts and we need to do immediately. In the earlier posts some 14 days ago on SciAm and E.0.Wilson I made the following point:
"As discussion and debate over gene expression has been in the high-stakes category both in the scientific community and across much of humanity for decades it would ultimately make sense to get to the scientific truth of the matter. If it eventuates and we learn for certain that human genes are in fact able to express themselves in ways that the vast majority of us humans now find morally repugnant and that such expression manifests in actual behaviour then as a species we'd be forced to deal with the problem head-on rather than sweep it under the carpet (as we now seem to be doing)."
there is also Graeber & Wengrow's recent highlighting of Gregory Bateson's term "schizmogenesis", which is fundamentally a precursor to xenophobia. It refers to the tendency of subsets of human societies above a certain size to find ways to differentiate ("schism") themselves from others. We also have no idea if this is an inbuilt tendency and to what extent it may vary due to genetics.
Again, it highlights the very 'fragility' and sensitivity of any such discussions, and that we've still no idea of whether humans have this inbuilt tendency or not leaves us with big problems. The fact that the very mention of the word 'race' in many quarters will bring wrath down upon one is, in my opinion, unhealthy for society but that's the world that we live in (and clearly it makes life difficult for researchers).
The fact that raceism is still so widespread and pervasive I've a sneaking suspicion that humans may have some inbuilt tendency. My worry is if this turns out to be so then I think that all hell will break loose. I don't reckon the world is ready for such discussion.
Edit: I wonder if others share the same suspicions as me and it's the fear of the fact being verified beyond reasonable doubt that's the underlying reason for why discussions about race have become such a taboo.
As mentioned, I've since done some checking Graeber & Wengrow and Bateson's 'schizmogenesis'. Downloaded and finished reading one of G & W's papers available online and although not directly relevant it gives me food for thought.
Also, I note their new book The Dawn of Everything which seems relevant. Bit pricey, but probably worth it seeing it's quite a tome at 703 pages.
Again, thanks for the info.
FYI, I note Graeber features again in posts to a current HN story titled "Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan shaped modern politics" - The New Statesman. (That one's no problem, I've still my Leviathan text from my student days.) :-)
As someone working in population genetics I feel our best argument against “scientific racism” is simply that our social/genetic/environmental diversity is our greatest strength against our future known and unknown challenges. Embracing that diversity is the best chance we have of finding the right tools to succeed.
Reminded of their reading of a (fiction) Wilson book decades ago, and inspired by something else, the author wrote essentially a three-message Twitter thread, tacked on a few decorative sentences, and was published. Next to no research, no review of the literature, no consultation with relevant scholars. A bit like this comment, but given the blessing of a national science magazine.
Further examination reveals the SciAm article's author had a previous publication in SciAm on a public health topic. Can someone use "nepotism" in a sentence?
Smear campaigns spread as wild as misinformation. Oh yes, that is BECAUSE they’re both misinformation!
"Why the Term ‘JEDI’ Is Problematic for Describing Programs That Promote Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion"
Subtitle: "They’re meant to be heroes within the Star Wars universe, but the Jedi are inappropriate symbols for justice work"
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-the-term-jedi...
(A separate submission has been flagged but I hope this comment is allowed. It's a very funny/depressing piece that deserves to be better known.)
Of course, when it comes to adoption of Star Wars and Harry Potter expressions, Disney and WB are likely to throw all their might at preventing it.
You mentioned "gaslighting". That's from a movie too.
Edit: the "gaslighting" comes from their article, too.
Well, clearly these men are horrible racists as well.
Obviously I kid but it is truly frustrating how immune to logic or deeper analysis the current social justice movement is.
Maybe I just feel this because I hate moralizers, even if I agree mainly with the moral views they espouse. (though not agreeing with the moral attacks on Wilson, it seems a real perfect being the enemy of the good type attack - spearheaded by the self-righteous and opportunistic)
Or the ability.
I’m always amazed at the depth, intricacy and durability of the worldviews people adopt just so they can tell themselves a pleasant narrative about some unpleasant reality.
I'm not sure what you're trying to say here but I can assure you that ethics and morals underpin societies, without them they would fall apart.
It's hard to see how you can come to the conclusion that one cannot hold both moral views and still be a good scientist or technical person.
Some of the greatest scientists have held extremely moral values and they've commented on them widely in public. Take Albert Einstein and Leo Szilard for instace. They were great scientists and they held very strong moral principles - specially over the Atom bomb.
On the other hand, one of their colleagues, an equally brilliant scientist, Edward Teller, one of the developers of the hydrogen bomb, thought little of morals and by many accounts was a rather despicable person. (BTW, he also shafted his equally famous colleague Robert Oppenheimer who never fully recovered from Teller's slander.)
Another despicable bastard was the brilliant chemists, Fritz Haber. He got the Nobel prize for the fixation of nitrogen (production of ammonia) for fertilizer which went on to provide food for millions. However, Haber had SFA morals, he went on to develop chemical weapons in WWI and the day after his wife, also a chemist, shot herself out of desperation for what he had done, he went off to the Western Front to install those diabolical weapons.
Lesson: don't generalize.
but nonetheless you decided to write at length about it ending with a >Lesson: don't generalize.
Ok then.
>It's hard to see how you can come to the conclusion that one cannot hold both moral views and still be a good scientist or technical person.
It's hard to see how you cannot be sure what I was trying to say AND reach such a definite and wrong conclusion as to what it was nonetheless.
when I said >>the people who devote so much of their time to ethical and moral purity, and searching out failings in others
I have to admit that I probably put too much work on that ', and searching' and I did use the word moralizer later which, I think in usage generally emphasizes the especially in the first entry here https://www.dictionary.com/browse/moralizer "to reflect on or express opinions about something in terms of right and wrong, especially in a self-righteous or tiresome way." but which obviously can also be used without the reference to self-righteousness.
That is to say that people who expend a lot of effort not just in being morally correct, which I suppose everyone should give some consideration to, but also hunting out the flaws in other people are probably too busy to do much good in other things.
I submit that Einstein was not a moralizer in the common understanding of that term, although he was concerned with morality, and he did not hunt out other people to spend his time correcting their morality, especially not in the years when he did his most important work.
Lesson: only end with a lesson if you feel that you understand what is being communicated, and if you do feel that you understand it don't say otherwise as that is likely to create misunderstandings for others.
This a strong comprehensible statement which you do not negate. As you've not negated or otherwise qualified it elsewhere, then it's a reasonable assumption that this is an actual affirmation of what you believe. On this alone I'm justifified in making my comments.
"...and science used to draw the immoral conclusions."
This makes little sense to me (thus my 'not sure' point). What immoral conclusions can be drawn from science and how are they directly connected or relevant to the first part of your sentence?
The only way I can read or interpret this is that you are making some general reference to some amorphous group who draws undefined immoral conclusions from science.
In essence, the subject of your sentence has no predicate, instead it has some undefined and unrelated one from somewhere else (perhaps you studied APL and it's beyond my comprehension).
It is not my intension to be confrontationist but my previous reply was based on what I read into (or perceived from) your first post. Sorry about that.
did you read the article under discussion? I know we are supposed to assume that people have but as you are not reading or interpreting what I say that I think would be reasonably clear from reading the article, I sort of think I have to ask.
So let's try to clarify my mysterious statement:
"the people who devote so much of their time to ethical and moral purity, and searching out failings in others, probably do not have the time to develop the technical competence required to comment on the underlying data and science used to draw the immoral conclusions."
searching out failings in others - quite clearly this means the moral failings of others.
if someone has a 'moral failing' they are immoral.
the article is addressing an attack against a famous scientist who recently died, the attack asserted he was immoral because of views or statements that they had based on reviewing the scientific output of said dead scientist.
The attack in short asserted that he was an immoral man and that he had drawn immoral conclusions from his science.
I would think a passing familiarity not just with the article but just the various comments in this post would lead one to assume that the 'immoral conclusions' under discussion are not those of some amorphous group but rather those of E. O. Wilson. I must now reiterate my opinion that Mr. Wilson was not immoral in case you decide that is what I am trying to communicate, and I must now do so because I am really uncertain as to what you would decide I meant about anything. If I told you the sky was blue I worry you might cry foul because there is no sky that has ever been diagnosed with depression.
Finally the article that protected the reputation of Wilson found numerous technical and scientific inaccuracies in the attack, the attack was quite comprehensive but technically poor. Why would someone put so much effort into attacking a scientist's moral failings, using the science as evidence, but not have the technical chops to take apart the science.
So the people who do the moralizing would be people who write attacks of the sort discussed in the article this post was about, the immoral conclusions of the science would be the conclusions attackers claim was drawn by the science under attack, and I state the supposition that these attackers 'probably do not have the time to develop the technical competence ' because the defense shows they did not have the technical competence but also because I feel, as was evidently the case here, that they do seem to expend a lot of effort on making these attacks and it is a well-known fact of reality that if one spends all one's time doing one thing, such as defending one's posts on HN, one cannot do other things, such as write the article on assistive technology glossaries I should be working on.
on edit: changed amoral to amorphous, guess I wrote to quickly with a daughter complaining at me the whole time because she's on Roblox timeout.
If you are going to write a letter like this don't put this: "Scientific American published a bewilderingly flimsy opinion piece" in sentence 2. Instead write "we strongly disagree with some of the conclusions of your piece".
The whole letter reads like a polemic attack on the editorial department of Scientific American.
It would have been quite possible to have taken the arguments in this piece and written a firm rebuttal that gave an alternative view and set our the weaknesses in the published op-ed - and I suspect it would have been published in its entirety.
It really doesn't. The letter addresses the points raised by the author of the original piece.
Your comment is bizarre because it is so at odds with the actual contents of the letter.
As I understand it, the furore here is over SciAm having published the article - not just that the article exists or that people disagree with it. If the authors of the open letter felt the article was substantive but wrong, I imagine they'd have written the kind of letter you're suggesting.
That's because it is. Any magazine that purports to be informing the public about science should never have published the original article. It is in fact an opinion piece, and an ill-informed one at that.
I agree that a magazine is unlikely to publish an article that attacks its own editorial policies, but that doesn't make the magazine right.
I have already had my say about setting the record straight in the light Monica R. McLemore viscous attack on E.O. Wilson in an earlier HN story so there is no point repeating it here.
For the sake of completeness I'd suggest readers of this page take a look at those posts and consider them an adjunct to these ones:
All HN posts to the story The Demise of Scientific American: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29778348
My own critical post about Associate Professor McLemore is here:
Probably the laziest reject I've ever read. If she wanted him to rework some points, I guess it could be done, but rejecting it really sends a message.
If you are an articulate original thinker, I think one is morally obligated to respond to rhetorical bullying. The more coarse the ideological reasoning, the greater the obligation. Poppers paraphrase about not tolerating intolerance is nothing but a zero sum first movers advantage game, and it isn't a principle so much as a cheap strategy designed to exploit collegiality and agreeableness.
The strategy of this current crop is incrementalism, where making absurd claims about small or distant things lets people think it doesn't matter because they're small or distant, when in fact, we've tolerated absurdity. It's a distraction theft, where your attention is focused on the small or distant thing, and you ignore that they have stepped into your domain and suddenly you have elevated a bully to an equal by arguing with them.
I'm very glad this article was posted, and I hope the minority of people with the intellectual torque to beat this nonsense are encouraged to lean in to more public discourse.
“ the so-called normal distribution of statistics assumes that there are default humans who serve as the standard that the rest of us can be accurately measured against.”
This is so stupid that SciAm has lost any credibility even as mere divulgation.
― Anaïs Nin
Y es que en el mundo traidor
nada hay verdad ni mentira;
todo es según el color
del cristal con que se mira
"Dr. Monica McLemore's obit on E.O. Wilson was an unintentionally hilarious display of ignorance mixed with woke sanctimony.... The idea that scientific knowledge is "socially constructed" ... is categorically and demonstrably false."
In the past century we've seen many cases of strongly-held hypotheses causing contrary evidence to be ignored - and scientists with contrary hypotheses to be ridiculed, even ruined. Three examples: Wegner's plate tectonics, Bretz's catastropic floods, Cinq-Mars Bluefish cave dating. Eventually the first two were later adopted by the mainstream, their authors lauded.
So certainly, the prior 'scientific knowledge' -- passed along to trusting educators and their students as if it were 'gospel truth' (despite evidence to the contrary, and eventual overthrow) -- was demonstrably socially-constructed - and still is. One difference from the the dogmatic medieval era is fewer stake-burnings.
Then don't be fragile. Discuss, debate.
When people "self-edit" their opinions for fear of being attacked, then they have themselves to blame as well.
"the so-called normal distribution": calling something "so-called" is the sort of thing that creationists do when confronted by the facts of natural selection. It has zero content and if it says anything, it says "Ewww! I don't like all that yucky math!"
Well this is shocking, speaking ill of the dead like this.
It seems there's some secret list of things you're allowed to attack prominent dead scientists about.
Anyone got a copy of that list?
Can I also add that if one of your prominent motifs in your environmentalism is "certain people in specific areas of the globe should have less babies" then it's maybe not the great defence against charges of racism that you might think it is.
Hopefully that's something you are allowed to disagree with him on.
> It seems there's some secret list of things you're allowed to attack prominent dead scientists about.
Highlighting certain views that I scientist held to be problematic because they focussed their work to prove those views (e.g. Nazis and eugenics) is indeed "allowed". Using someone's death and your own ignorance of basic science, to promote your own political views, is not.
Given that, it's not as if there's any real charge of racism laid that would require a defence, and in fact the open letter does not use Wilson's environmentalism as a defence of this sort. Why then do you mention it in this connexion? Perhaps to introduce the 'motif' you mention, which despite being in quotation marks does not appear to be a direct quote.
What then, seeing as you have raised it, was the ideological content of Wilson's views on ecology and overpopulation? That population growth drives overexploitation of nature, with disastrous ecological consequences. This is opposed by those who view industry, not people, as the prime cause of overexploitation. The debate is roughly between those who would set aside and protect part of the Earth and those who see the Earth as already unnatural. Or "Half-Earth" vs. "the Anthropocene", to use each side's slogans. To be sure, some of the side opposed to Wilson have been known to attempt to racialise the views of the set-asiders. For an eloquent defence of Half-Earth against these and other ideological attacks, see "Half the earth for people (or more)? Addressing ethical questions in conservation" by Helen Kopnina. (PDF: https://scholarlypublications.universiteitleiden.nl/access/i...)
I suppose it took you five minutes or less to write your comment. That it took me half an hour to compose a sufficient reply is a fine demonstration of Brandolini's law, should any more such be needed. Just one more thing. E.O. Wilson's own words on whether population control should be imposed by anyone, on anyone:
"Should nations have a population policy? Should religions have a population policy? It seems to me that one is scurrying on the edge of fascistic ideas if one tells people how many children they can have, altering the entire nature of the society." From his interview at http://churchandstate.org.uk/2019/09/e-o-wilson-runaway-popu...
I can do no better than to ask anyone who makes it this far down the thread to read a few lines from her article and consider what counts for an ecofascist vibe in some circles. Or here is more Kopnina, this time a blog: https://blog.ecologicalcitizen.net/2020/11/09/reversing-ecof...
This recurs, repeatedly in the article. A bad thing happening to humans in poorer nations is recast as a necessary evil for the greater good of a wider, non-human world, which even if you accept it as an end goal is totally sidestepping the question of which specific humans will suffer.
They're not arguing that the things the critics bring up will not happen they just think it's ethically worth it if/when they do. They counter fears of genocide by saying there will be a bigger genocide of non-human animals and seem to openly admit that the poorer Humans need to suffer because it's politically impractical to get the rich to change their ways.