Hacker News Reader

Comment by mike00632 | Hacker News Reader

Imagine if we devoted a tremendous amount of resources to studying whether being left or right handed increased your chances of transmitting COVID. Then millions of people online start citing scientific papers saying that right handed people spread COVID more often. Then some left handed people attack right handed people (similar to how Asian Americans are being brutalized in public during the pandemic). The point is that choosing to study the differences in certain demographic groups makes a big assumption that it's important to study the groups for whatever reason.

View on HN

You could also become some kind of “hate researcher” if you wanted to. Pick a group of people you don’t like(ethnic, socio, political, whatever), and start hammering out publications on their IQ, epidemiology, sociopolitical beliefs, etc. Maybe do a bit of P-hacking to make the deleterious stuff really pop out. Eventually you’ll have a nice corpus of literature out there framing your target group as stupid, disease ridden and ignorant.

Yes, exactly. Then you could write popular opinion books about the studies which flesh out the conclusion. Then it could be a motivating tool for an entire political party. You could go on tour to promote your "controversial" books. People will say that the facts must be heard and both sides should be represented.

That sounds like an unrealistically stretched hypothetical to justify not pursuing otherwise interesting scientific avenues.

Sounds like you're trying to censor information by dismissing the left/right hand hypothesis as "unrealistically stretched".

To put it another way: the way you feel about studying handedness being linked to COVID is the way I feel about studying an assumed link between race and "intelligence". It's not "otherwise interesting" at all. It's ignorant at best.

But if you did notice a subgroup/IQ correlation would you ignore it? Because I wouldn't ignore a handedness/sickness correlation. You can't fix what you don't measure and investigate.

You're ASSUMING that race could be linked to "intelligence", that it's important to study, just like I was ASSUMING that handedness might have something to do with spreading COVID. There is clear bias introduced by what we think is important to measure.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com