I wonder if it's similar to how we look down on e.g. string theory, except I don't know if that's an apples to apples comparison given that we haven't seen any string theory apples yet :-)
EG - a scientist can easily get smacked down for being "a climate change denialist" or an "antivaxer" or a similar unpalatable label way before the merits of their effort are evaluated.
But that's probably nothing compared to the narrow band of tolerable science when it comes to questions of race or ethnicity. Anything that could be construed as people of some descent being "inferior" in any aspect is pretty risky to publish.
There's the Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study. The authors found a politically incorrect result and tried to cover it up by inventing a new hypothesis (which they hadn't tested) after they'd collected their data.
I also read a fairly comprehensive secondary research paper trying to support the no-biological-differences theory and when it came to Ashkenazi Jews, they admitted the only plausible explanation was genetic superiority.
This is an area where the science all points in one direction but popular opinion is in the other direction. People don't look at the research. Probably because they don't want to understand, they just want to spread their political ideology. Nobody, as far as I know, has ever shown that no races are inferior.
I'm sure you know how unscientific IQ tests are, I'm surprised that's what you're bringing up here as being "good science" being shut down politically. Just trying to correlatw the two tests they used is absolutely subjective, I would take a step back and reexamine the parts of those studies that convinced you of whatever beliefs you have - it seems like a shoddy foundation.
There's honestly no evidence for the environmental-only theory of intelligence. That's the popular politically correct belief but every study I've ever seen or heard of either fails to support it or supports the opposite.
Common misconception, sadly untrue. There are known genetic predictors of intelligence, they're just not simple genes that the layman can wrap his head around.
All the same, I guess I am out of date (in 2017, they were getting 1% - perhaps in 2030, they will be up to 50%? Or back down to 2%?)
In general, I don't think there's any problem with saying some traits we call intelligence are heritable and that has a genetic component. I'm less sympathetic to the idea that intelligence is a simple scalar (the Q in IQ) or a quantity that should be used to prejudge candidates for given technical or social tasks. I mean, if somebody is good, does it matter that they are dumb as hell? I certainly would rather a talented dumbass than a useless genius as a coworker.
The difference between a society with an average IQ of 100 and a society with an average IQ of 70 is one of intelligence. That's why, for example, any policy that allows emigrations from IQ 70 societies to to Western countries, which usually average around 100 IQ, is a bad policy for those Western countries.
There is no nation without natalism.
Strong claim, hard no.
In 20th century scientific records that's about the difference between pre WW German country schools and the same regions in the later part of WWII under siege and under supplied.
That large difference has been attributed to nutrition rather than intelligence given the same genes, the same schools, the same society, etc.
> True, intelligence is not simple.
At yet there you are, mere sentences later, over simplying it and ignoring significant confounding factors. Deliberate malfeasance, oblivious blind ignorance, ... ?
> The genetic variation across one race (say black) is much greater than the variation between races.
Why did you say that? Are you implying that there must be a wider range of IQs among various ethnicities within a race than between races? That's not a logical conclusion. Do you have some other chain of logic in mind?
By the way, I only use the word race loosely. I really mean ethnicity. Although the findings do still broadly apply to the classic 3-ish races.
No, ethnicities are absolutely not just administrative or cultural groupings. You've clearly done no research into this topic whatsoever and are just repeating some misinformation you got fooled by. Even the classic races which are unnecessarily crude by modern standards do actually partly correspond to distinct genetic groups. We can now classify ethnicities at a much finer level of detail and they're still distinct genetic groups.
Ironically given the article this is under, IQ was considered to be dirty Jewish science by the Nazis, probably because it showed Jews to be superior.
Honestly, you just sound like you're a racist. Which is sad, but it's also indicative of a lack of common sense that you expect the universe to conform to your prejudices.
You must also think scientists don't believe in the distinction between planets and dwarf planets, or even stars. Yes it's an arbitrary classification, but it's still useful.
You're thinking is just like the people in TFA. Rejecting some science for arbitrary and nonsensical political reasons. You've replaces dirty Jewish science with dirty racist's science.
where the bulk of scientists agreed in various ways that the confounding problems made it exceedingly implausible that differences were either entirely genetically based or entirely environmentally based?
> This is an area where the science all points in one direction but popular opinion is in the other direction.
Or maybe an area where the science is inconclusive but personal opinion shades the reading and subsequent presentation?
"entirely environmentally based" is the popular and un-scientific belief that I disagree with. So you agree with me?
I used to teach science and would tell students not to give life advice to the reader, because that's what we were supposed to teach them. But then all these climate change papers started doing just that. It's equivalent of ancient mathematicians saying "glory to the king" in their work and reveals that the authors are bound by a conflict of interest and can't be expected to do honest work.
I recently read one about childhood safety, and they said that following the government's safety rules was important, while also defining their own idea of what kinds of safety are valuable or harmful. If the government already knows better than you, why are you even researching this? It's obviously just some effort to pressure people into not making their own dangerous decisions. But again, that's not science, that's activism and non-objective.
Apparently, the study ran for decades, but the results were never published... it's unclear why but it seems plausible to me that, aside from the ethical concerns, the study came to uncomfortable conclusions about the polemic "nature VS nurture" debate. Initially, they show how all siblings in the study, despite the intentionally very different environments, all came to like and do the exact same things... but later in the documentary, it also shows there were differences enough that the similarities were only superficial (in what I can't see as anything other than trying to appease the "nurture" crowd - as there seems to be no justification for that, as much as I tried to find it in what was shown).
The documentary also mentions the study may even actually have been about the influence of different parenting styles on the children, or even about mental illness, given many of the participants in the study had biological parents who may have been mentally ill (who the hell would give up their children if they didn't have some serious mental issues?!), which again seems to point at trying to divert from the study findings in my opinion.
The documentary is a little sensationalistic as it tries to outrage the viewers instead of trying to understand the actual circumstances of the study (siblings were always separated at birth at the time in most adoption agencies, apparently, that was not the fault of the study), which is a pity but understandable as that makes for better entertainment which is what Netflix really needs for its viewers to be happy, but still it's well worth a watch.
These articles talk a little bit about the controversies:
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2208369-three-identical...
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/nov/11/nature-or-nu...
These always seem to miss the effect of nutrition (and other) in the womb, which is massive. You need nonidentical twins as controls.
It's a technical subject that does not immediately affect most of us on a day to day basis. It is not surprising that people would have poorly informed opinions on a topic they don’t really care about very much.
For what it’s worth, the average college educated liberal has a comparably abysmal understanding of climate change but their ideological judgement happens to be closer to reality on this one.
The sad part is any scientific topic that becomes politicized, becomes abyssal in terms of science. It is true of climate change, feminism before that, all the way back to 1500 and planets.
OTOH climate science as a field did already suffer from siege mentality before, whether justified or not, that did suppress rather than engage disallinged views.
(Fwiw my own not too informed view on the subject is we are heading for real disaster, we will and have postponed any real action until too late, but it will be the geo-engeneering grifters that will put the final nail in the coffin)
I’d be more curious as to how anti-vaccine agendas ever became a thing. With a lot of these things like climate change, there are clear economic forces which will pour “tobacco is healthy” amounts of money into pushing whatever makes them money. But then you have something like antivaxing which quite literally benefits nobody, because even the people who don’t want to put themselves at risk by getting vaccinated still sort of do so by collectively bringing back terrible diseases through their destruction of the herd immunity… but who could possibly gain anything from spreading this nonsense? “Yay, polio and the measles are back!!!”. Then you have the more harmless stuff like flat-earthers which also don’t really have any obvious driving force. But at least it’s harmless and sort of funny.
Anyway, I don’t think you really have a point with what you’re saying here. You can’t put anti-vaccinate “science” up for a discussion with real science because it’s utter nonsense. Similarly you can’t be a climate change denier, you’re free to argue about what causes the heat up, but you can’t deny that it’s been happening at a rapid pace since the Industrial Revolution, at least not with any pretence of doing science.
I think the cause might have been the polar opposite of a conspiracy: isolated, but similar, examples of opportunistic fraud. Soon after COVID-19 vaccines were developed, I saw lots of advertisements for pseudo-scientific remedies for COVID-19 - these were clearly intended to make some profit out of the public's justified concerns about mRNA technology.
However, once mRNA vaccines proved themselves to be not especially different in efficacy or danger from traditional vaccines, it makes sense that the vendors of pseudo-scientific remedies would seek to maintain the anxiety about vaccines somehow. Hundreds of self-serving quacks trying to keep their customers (and compensate for the shrinking size of their market!) would naturally result in self-sustaining movements of anti-vaxers. The persistent conflation of COVID-19 conspiracy theorists with civil liberties campaigners in some parts of the media would have benefited the quacks further, by making anti-vaxing seem more of a legitimate social movement than it actually was.
Remember when the correct belief about the origin of Covid was naturally occurring in an animal then spreading to people in a market? Turned out to be a big conspiracy and false. But the news kept telling people that because people had already formed political attachment to that belief.
Did it now?
Lableak truther loses $100,000 in his own debate https://www.protagonist-science.com/p/lableak-truther-loses-...
Even with money on the line and an arsenal of medical expertise and documents that's not a case that can be conclusively made.
Your article starts by calling it a "false myth" so they're clearly still in the political partisanship trap whatever the outcome of some bet. Anybody who's certain it was of natural origin is just being fooled by the news and some prominent scientists who made some intentionally misleading statements.
[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2023/02/28/politics/wray-fbi-covid-o...
underscoring a divide in the US government as the majority of the intelligence community still believes that Covid either emerged naturally in the wild, or that there is still too little evidence to make a judgment one way or another.
You may feel the article is biased as the (qualified) author clearly thinks lab leak is an improbable origin, you can go to the actual debate record being discussed and judge whether that was a fair pitting of one viewpoint against another - great lengths were taken to ensure a fair playing field in a debate for a cash prize.
Nobody is certain .. that's your ongoing strawman in in all your comments here so far, but the probabilities with all things considered very heavily fall on the natural origin side.
The best arguments put forward for a lab leak being more likely failed to carry the day.
It's still possible just very unlikely and certainly not certain.
The conspiracy I'm talking about is the one described here: https://www.bmj.com/content/374/bmj.n1656
"For most of 2020, the notion that SARS-CoV-2 may have originated in a lab in Wuhan, China, was treated as a thoroughly debunked conspiracy theory."
which identifies the misinformation's origin here:
"Shortly after the pandemic began, Daszak effectively silenced debate over the possibility of a lab leak with a February 2020 statement in the Lancet.2 “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that covid-19 does not have a natural origin,” "
The motivation for anti-vaccine--and flat-earthers, for what it's worth--is basically the same thing as Q-Anon. It's all primarily based on feeding on peoples' feeling of a conspiracy against them. It's not being pro-measles, it's thinking that the vaccine is a cover for the government trying to collect your DNA or euthanize your children or something, and there are all too many grifters who are willing to ride the wave of such thinking and flog their own products on top of that. Don't use the government's cure for COVID, buy my COVID cure for only $50! And I'm not the government or an evil megacorporation, so you know I'm trustworthy.
> But at least it’s harmless and sort of funny.
It's... not really harmless. There's a path from the flat earth stuff to the January 6 riot.
Read pages 4,5,6 of this vaccine insert[1]. It seemingly says a large percent of infants have adverse reactions to vaccines (up to 85% for some vaccines and symptoms). An anti-vaxxer can say "I won't give my kid a shot that has a chance of causing an adverse reaction."
Do you say 50%, or do you dismiss their prior? At what point do you dismiss their prior or them, entirely? You don't have to dispute the mathematics, you just have to get bored with the impracticality of the question: it will never happen. Maybe they should flip that allegedly fair coin until it comes up heads (or tails) 99 times in a row and get back to us.
It's reasonable to ask what confounding factors are at play. It's reasonable to have a null hypoothesis.
It's simple. They don't trust authorities on the subject. They don't trust authorities in general. They feel lied to and manipulated. In many ways, that's the fault of the authorities. They are prone to simplifying things in order to get their consent.
During the pandemic I witnessed government officials proclaiming that there were no risks associated with the vaccines. That's just false.
Everything is a risk/benefit calculation. There is no 0% and no 100%. Things are vastly more complex than they seem to be. Yet these authorities insist on simplifying things for the layman in order to manufacture consent for their public policies.
These people aren't stupid. They will find out. When they do, they will never listen to you again. They will actively resist you.
Also, while everyone has the right to argue anything, no one has the right to have the merits of their effort evaluated. When you go on and tell everyone here that ROT13 is as secure as RSA-2048, everyone will rightly laugh at you without considering your reasoning.
And there are 7 bands that had a song like that [1]
[0]: https://www.metal-archives.com/albums/Murdered/Killed_to_Dea...
[1]: https://www.metal-archives.com/search?searchString=Killed+to...
Interestingly, I have more examples of the opposite: scientists being branded “climate alarmists” (even as their models consistently under-estimate global warming) or totalitarian control freaks (or some enlightened nonsense about being mindless followers of prominent Jewish people, very subtle that one) for saying that vaccines save lives.
Also, this has absolutely nothing to do with people getting actually killed or deported for their work, even though some loud mouths have a persecution complex.
the attacks come from different directions - climate alarmists attack comes from without the scientific community (political, corporate)
climate denialist or antivaxer attacks generally come from within the scientific community, generally from experts in the field from which results are being denied.
The people who then want to support climate denialism can then say the scientists are non-scientific because they are taking sides, providing another useful tool of attack.
We find them where they intersect with actual reality, because it's all just nonsense. Electrons and photons are not real. You won't ever get your quantum computer (at least not in that way), because the physics isn't real.