>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.
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.