And yet another effort to make science beholden to political ideology
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Circling the Drain
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Circling the Drain
I'm always still in trouble again
"You're by far the worst poster on TWeb" and "TWeb's biggest liar" --starlight (the guy who says Stalin was a right-winger)
"Overall I would rate the withdrawal from Afghanistan as by far the best thing Biden's done" --Starlight
"Of course, human life begins at fertilization that’s not the argument." --TassmanTags: None
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Ok, this is a pretty bad essay, because nowhere in it do I see a discussion of the problem that the Nature Human Behavior policy is meant to address. I'd argue that it's impossible to have a discussion about policy if you don't fist understand what the policy is attempting to accomplish. The author of the essay wants you to believe that it's about ideology because, hey, rage clicks. It's not, and that misdirection obscures a complicated and extremely difficult issue. There's a strong reason to be suspicious of the author's motives, which I'll come back to at the end.
To discuss what's going on, i'm going to back away from the ideology to start and try a hypothetical. What if some scientific methodology - a technique or instrument or what have you - repeatedly produced unreliable results? To the extent that, every couple of decades, it forced a field to acknowledge that a lot of the work that was done was unreliable, and we need to re-evaluate lots of results that were widely accepted. These included results that caught the public's attention, influenced policy and education, and so on, and so caused real harm.
If, in the present, there were some researchers who said "hey, that instrument - we've figured out how to make it work effectively this time!" Would it be appropriate for other people in the field to treat that claim skeptically? Maybe hold its use to a higher standard of evidence? Maybe suggest it be validated in some experiments that didn't have policy implications before it was used widely? Whether or not you think any of these things are appropriate, I hope you can at least see that there's a reasonable argument to be made there. (Again, as I said at the top, it's complicated.)
The non hypothetical issue at play here is when issues of race and gender come in contact with research on things like human health and behavior. In these cases, the faulty instrument has been the human brain. Multiple times over the last few centuries, people have convinced themselves they were doing solid science when, in retrospect, it was clear that they were being driven by their own biases. We've done horrific harm in the name of what people thought was scientific - I hope in this crowd I don't have to go through all of the voluminous historical examples. (If it's a subject that interests you, there's a book that I highly recommend that covers some of this ground.) Suffice it to say that it's still a problem - MDs routinely screw up the treatment of black patients due to folk beliefs about race that have no basis in biology, to give but one example.
So, here we are today, with our newly found ability to study genetics on the level of the entire genome, and people are more or less saying "we're sure we'll get it right this time." And that appears to be what the journal's editors are trying to address - saying they will add some additional layers of skepticism. Is this the right way to go about that? Does the language used by the journal editors make the issues clear? My personal opinion is "probably not and no". But I think straw-manning the entire attempt and dismissing it as woke ideology taking over a journal is just as unhelpful as anything the editors wrote - probably worse, because there's reason to believe that it was done intentionally.
Which finally brings us around to why I question the motivations of the author of the Quilette piece. One bit of the piece that stood out was where he said "Those who write candidly about sex and population differences, such as David Geary or Charles Murray, routinely preface discussion of their findings with the unambiguous declaration that empirical differences do not justify claims of superiority or inferiority." I don't know Geary, but Murray I'm well aware of. He's the author of the book The Bell Curve, which argues that African Americans (among other groups) are doomed by genetics to, on average, be left out of the cognitive elite. Except the book is garbage - actual human geneticists explained to him all the errors he had made, and his response was to ignore all the criticism, dismissing it as simply political correctness. (Something that should feel familiar to anyone who's followed the ID movement.) Murray's work is used extensively by racists to both recruit others and to justify their own behavior. Murray is aware of that as well.
I don't know what's in Murray's head, so I can't say that he's a racist. What I can say is that his behavior is difficult to distinguish from that of racists, and they consider him an ally.
All of that is pretty easy to find, yet the author of the Quilette piece seems to act as if Murray's statement about his own intentions is all that needs to be said - his actual behavior is irrelevant. Which suggests that he's either a fan of Murray's, or cares so much about making an argument that he's willing to gloss over the truth to score points. A quick check of the Quilette author's past writing shows that the former is true, and he has promoted the work of Murray and people who are clearly associated with white nationalism. So, I think the motivation for writing this piece is pretty self explanatory.
Anyway, I think all this is unfortunate. I don't know what's the best way of handling research where human biases have made so much past work consistently unreliable. It's an interesting question! But it looks like everyone involved here just wants to use that question as an excuse to make larger statements on unrelated issues."Any sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from trolling."
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