Comment by jwarden | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jwarden | Hacker News Reader

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The statement from Nature has been very carefully worded.

The quote in the parent comment seems to suggest that perfectly valid scientific findings should be withheld if there is a possibility that bad people would misuse them. The consequence of this of course would be a complete victory of "Blank Slate"[1] Dogma (because any scientific finding that finds differences between social groups could be misused to undermine the human rights of one group).

And yet the statement never quite explicitly says findings should be withheld only because they could be misused. Rather it says that research that contains contain hate speech, etc. should perhaps not be published. It says authors should consider the potential harm of their research, and so on.

The intended result I think is a sort of chilling effect with plausible deniability. It pleases the inquisition, and at the same time leaves the scientists with a remainder of self-respect. I am not sure how long this delicate truce can last.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blank_Slate

“Researchers should be free to pursue lines of inquiry and the communication of knowledge and ideas without fear of repression or censorship. At the same time, they have the ethical obligation to uphold intellectual integrity and avoid preventable harms that may arise in the course of research or its communication.”

Alternatively, it could be saying a lot of bullshit gets published because people are incentivized to publish crap research (see replication crisis). So, if you know it’s crap and it’s also likely to be harmful perhaps consider before you publish it.

And that’s the thing, if you assume the worst interpretation possible you can be offended by anything.

My charitable interpretation is that Nature is just reminding the academic community that you can’t research social constructs because they’re all made up and the points don’t matter, use more “scientific” terms, plz.

But then why write what was wrote? Why build up a “science can be socially harmful” thesis and then argue that may and could should govern is and does? Science should always be accurate. Nature didn't just learn this, that’s been the status quo all along.

The only reasonable interpretation is that Nature is defending a change.

To your example: you don't need social constructs to explain the replication crisis (“studies that leverage socially constructed ideas can be replicable). You don’t need social harm either (non-replicable studies that are socially good exist).

You said it best yourself: if you assume the worst interpretation possible, you can be offended by anything.

Nature is asking researchers to assume the worst interpretation of their results and, if it would be socially harmful, please not to publish them. And BTW you were wrong to ask the question in the first place since social constructs are post modern and reject western liberal interrogation.

> perfectly valid scientific findings should be withheld if there is a possibility that bad people would misuse them.

This approach basically means that each and every scientific finding should be withheld (better yet, never produced) because chances are high that a bad actor would try to use it for evil purposes.

Mathematics has run into it with encryption: for fundamental reasons, it cannot be made hard only against bad guys, but penetrable to law enforcement.

We should stop any progress if we want to guarantee that any new evil would never apper. The promise of the progress is that it brings more good than evil, more jet liners than jet fighters.

Imagine the confusion that would result by future CRISPR modifications to adults that would increase intelligence by replacing genes found in less intelligent people with genes found in more intelligent people. Imagine if those genes are only found in certain races. I guess we can't have that according to the journal's rules, can we? You will simply not be allowed to research or publish that because it would break the "blank slate" narrative even though it would provide a huge benefit to humanity.

I don’t see why you’d need to consider race at all in this scenario? You find intelligence genes in some people, give them to others. Anything to do with race would seem to be an unnecessary extra step.

You’re arguing from a false premise. The Race to DNA link is weak. You get correlation easy enough, but the only time genes are race specific is when they only show up in a single family or similar tiny fraction of a population.

This shouldn’t be surprising when people for example categorize someone with 3 white grandparents and 1 black grandparent as black.

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