Comment by phantom_of_cato | Hacker News Reader

Comment by phantom_of_cato | Hacker News Reader

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phantom_of_cato

> Again, politics is part of science.

But the question is: Should it be like that? Should we encourage or discourage that?

> (and can give you examples if you really want to read them)

Sure, I'd appreciate it. Especially if the articles/books covering them were not published in the recent years. I've read "Betrayers of the Truth" [1], so I know about the Piltdown Man [2] (which was apparently used to "prove" that earliest men were British), or that Cyril Burt [3] had most probably falsified data in his studies on heritability of IQ. Sometimes these exposés are themselves a tad biased though.

> some fringe gender science

It's not just social sciences, although they are much more affected. See the charts in the article linked in my original comment, for example.

And, IMO, it's not just a fringe part of gender studies. Its departments are essentially ideological think-tanks of the worst kind, with very little objective research being done by them.

> I don't see that much work like that anymore

But I'm sure you also know that there are certain things which are probably true, but almost no one would ever dare (or could) publish any kind of new evidence supporting them in the current climate.

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betrayers_of_the_Truth

[2]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piltdown_Man

[3]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyril_Burt

As it is inevitable that there is an influence, should we discourage or encourage misogynist, sexist, racist views? (or should we be very careful when we make claims about such views, in the past authors weren't careful and it led to a lot of misery ... kind of WW2 type of misery ...)

You didn't define worse ... For me the most obvious examples where science went wrong is probably eugenics and other Supremacist beliefs. People completely misrepresented Darwin. A lot of people died based on these misrepresentations.

What cannot be published today? I mean Journals like Mankind Quaterly still exist ... you find still a lot of horrendous, bad science and racist work out there. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mankind_Quarterly

It's harder to publish papers like that in Nature or Science (as the Scientific Consensus moved away from a flawed view), yet I would argue that's a good thing.

edit: typos

> As it is inevitable that there is an influence

The current homogeneous politicization of science certainly isn't inevitable, as there are periods of rapid scientific progress in the past when this situation did not exist.

> People completely misrepresented Darwin.

I think that's overly intellectualizing things. Ethnic conflict and genocide probably don't have much to do with people's understanding of science, as there are still ethnic strifes around word, even though discussion of many genetic differences among populations is now generally frowned upon in academia. [1] And there has been ethnic conflicts everywhere since the dawn of time, since way before modern science, Darwin, or the contemporary history of eugenics.

> What cannot be published today?

Things like arguments made in "The Bell Curve" [2], or even "The Blank Slate" [3]? You can't really make those kinds of arguments without getting in trouble.

> I mean Journals like Mankind Quaterly still exist

I'd never heard of that journal before, but with an impact factor of 0.194 [4], it's probably safe to say that it has no influence whatsoever on science in general. (perhaps appropriately, as you say, I have no idea about the quality of papers it publishes) I'm sure many personal blogs are more influential.

But do you think you could conceivably publish a paper in Nature which cites something from that journal in a noncritical way? The barrier isn't due to low quality or the authors being ideologues, as there are papers cited in Nature with both of those defects.

[1]: E.g. https://noahcarl.substack.com/p/theyre-coming-for-behaviour-...

[2]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bell_Curve

[3]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blank_Slate

[4] https://academic-accelerator.com/Impact-of-Journal/Mankind-Q...

The Nazis were not about Ethnic conflict, they believed to be the master race ... that's very different.

It's interesting you bring up Blank Slate and the Bell Curve. The first I agree with the second I find horribly flawed.

For [1] who are "They" in "They are coming for behaviour genetics"? Nobody in their right mind in the Sciences refutes that our genes and biology are the underpinning of our behavior and that these change in terms of populations .

I'm friends with way too woke Social Science majors and they have a copy of the "Blank Slate" on their book shelf (signed by Pinker) agreeing with this. Even Science and Nature do: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1075989

Can you find a biologist or behavior scientist who publishes in Nature/Science and believes in the blank slate (that genetics don't matter only education does)? I really doubt it, that would be absurd.

The problem is with the population, I doubt that the population can correspond to anything vaguely resembling a race concept. Here the Scientific establishment disagrees with the Bell Curve and for a good reason (as Melanin does not tell you much about other genes and our identical ancestors point is not so far out ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identical_ancestors_point ).

To the Bell Curve, it cites over 5 articles from the Mankind Quartely, the Journal you found so influence-less (non from higher impact journals). It also refers a lot to work from Arthur Jensen, he published a paper in the 60s about that differences IQ tests between black and whites might be because of genetics. In the 80s it was found out that the Pioneer Fund subsidized the work (grants for the works were more than a millon dollar). At the time of the writing there was no evidence to support Jensen's work. The authors knew that Jensen did scientific misconduct (with taking the money), yet didn't care ... There are more stories (also in terms of statistics) about the Bell Curve like that ... Bad Science, don't even need to address the flawed arguments ... If you cannot work on decent scientific methodology you are screwed. If you then complain that you are silenced or not taken seriously, you don't get any sympathy from me.

If there is an intelligence gene, where is it? Plomin (the professor whose book got critized in a Nature Review [1]) hasn't found it even though he put a LOT of effort in it. Shouldn't we call him out on that if he claims stuff that's not there (like the Nature review did)? Or should we just ignore it because we still believe in stuff that was published in the 1960 in Mankind Quaterly?

> But do you think you could conceivably publish a paper in Nature which cites something from that journal in a noncritical way?

No, because that journal has shown since the 1960 that it peddles racist pseudo science ... Yet, your statement that you cannot publish this stuff anymore is just not true. It becomes irrelevant because it's wrong (not because there's a secrete elite that does not want to talk about it).

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