@DaseindustriesLtd comments on "Culture War Roundup for the week of October 31, 2022

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 31, 2022

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DaseindustriesLtd late version of a small language model 2yr ago

Global Ancestry and Cognitive Ability

Note that the anti-HBD crowd (i.e. the Turkheimer side of the debate) have put in some effort to make the author of this publication Bryan J. Pesta, a tenured professor (!), unemployable. I've mentioned this in my first response to tailcalled, but some choice quotes from a Chronicle article praising the cancellation, to understand how the perception of ambiguity in this topic is maintained, indeed how the sausage gets made. It reads very much like a 30's Pravda report on courageous pioneers catching and handling a villain wrecker kulak to the authorities, Scooby Doo style, but that's the clownish reality of the American academia.

Liam O’Brien was a master’s student in political science at Cleveland State University in 2019 when a screenshot from a new article, titled “Global Ancestry and Cognitive Ability,” crawled across his Twitter feed.

To the untrained eye, the abstract was highly technical. “Using the ancestry-adjusted association between MTAG eduPGS and g from the monoracial African-American sample as an estimate of the transracially unbiased validity of eduPGS (B = 0.124),” the authors wrote, “the results suggest that as much as 20%-25% of the race difference in g can be naïvely explained by known cognitive ability-related variants.”

The argument dressed up in that statistical jargon? That Black people are genetically disposed to be less intelligent than white people.

O’Brien was disturbed to see that debunked racial-hierarchy arguments popular in the late 19th and early 20th century had a toehold in modern academe. Scientifically rigorous research arguing that intelligence is inherited is itself controversial, but few geneticists take seriously the claim that intelligence is racially linked.

His dismay turned to outrage when he discovered that one of the authors, Bryan J. Pesta, was a tenured professor in Cleveland State’s business school. His home institution was essentially providing a soapbox for racist pseudoscience.

O’Brien had a history of political activism, so he did what came naturally, talking to students and professors about Pesta’s article, and trying to get him censured. [...]

A look at Pesta’s RateMyProfessors page shows students generally rated him very highly, describing him as “hilarious,” “interesting,” and “easy.” One warned: “If you’re easily offended, you might not like some of his jokes, especially when he compares certain graphs to phallic symbols.” But none of the 74 reviews complains about racism.

The Chronicle reached out to 10 Black students who graduated from the business school with bachelor’s or master’s degrees in 2022. Of the three who replied, none said they were familiar with Pesta.

“Literally 100s of Black students have taken my classes,” Pesta wrote in an email to The Chronicle. “I’ve won merit pay for teaching many times. I was regard [sic] as among the best teachers in the business college.”

“If I were racist, or even overly political,” he wrote, “I submit I would have been exposed by now.” [..]

Many racial hereditarians present their claims as widely accepted but deliberately suppressed facts in the scientific community. They blame the political correctness of academe for their difficulty publishing in well-respected journals.

Their critics argue that shoddy scholarship and a refusal to account for developments in the study of genetics keep racial hereditarians marginal. Even respected scholars who believe genes play a role in intelligence argue that the role of environmental factors is too complicated and profound to disentangle. Behavioral geneticists like Kathryn Paige Harden and Eric Turkheimer repudiate the idea that IQ differences between races are rooted in genetics. [..]

For “Global Ancestry and Cognitive Ability,” in 2019, Pesta had three co-authors: Jordan Lasker, John G.R. Fuerst, and Emil O.W. Kirkegaard. The Chronicle attempted to contact all of them via publicly listed email addresses, but received no replies.

[a section on trying to find their vulnerabilities]

Thomas E. Schläpfer, a research clinical psychiatrist at Germany’s University of Freiburg who studies interventional biological psychiatry, took charge of the journal in 2020. He said he had been unaware until contacted by The Chronicle of Pesta’s publication or any problems with his brief tenure as editor.

After reading Pesta’s article, he wrote, “While the scientific methods sound impressive, I find the hypothesis both ludicrous and demeaning.” [...]

O’Brien, the political-science graduate student, tried not to let Pesta’s work go ignored. He gathered students from various activist groups to make an action plan. One group put out an email blast inviting interested students to a Zoom meeting on the subject.

Many of the attendees were familiar faces. But one, who joined the call under a pseudonym and left his camera off, made organizers wary. He said he was an undergraduate but offered little else by way of introduction. After some prodding, he messaged one of the organizers his CSU email address, which contained his last name: Fuerst. The organizers shut down the meeting, then reconvened among themselves. They had been infiltrated. If Fuerst knew they were going after Pesta, then Pesta himself surely also knew.

But across the country, geneticists at other universities had set in motion institutional processes focused not on Pesta’s racist claims but on his violation of the norms and regulations of academe.

He had already been on one geneticist’s radar when “Global Ancestry and Cognitive Ability” was published in Psych.

Luke Miller (a pseudonym) is an early-career scientist who has long been rankled by racial hereditarians. As a geneticist, he said, he feels a responsibility to combat the harm done by the fringes of the scientific community. (The Chronicle has used a pseudonym for Miller and left some other early-career researchers in this article unnamed because they fear professional repercussions.) [...]

More alarmingly, the paper cited data from the National Institutes of Health’s Database of Genotypes and Phenotypes (dbGaP). The federal agency has strict controls governing who may use its data and how. It struck Miller as improbable that the NIH had given Pesta’s paper the green light, or would have even given him access to the data, if the agency had known what he planned to do with it.

Miller was tapped into a network of researchers across the country who felt similarly about hereditarianism. Together, four of them combed the methodology section of Pesta’s article and compiled evidence that he had violated NIH policies.

According to the paper’s methodology section, the data was uploaded to at least two servers: the Michigan Imputation Server, a University of Michigan program that deduces genes that haven’t been included in a sample; and HIrisPlex-S, a web application that deduces phenotypes like eye, hair, and skin color from genetic data. While only Pesta received permission to use the NIH data, and named none of his co-authors in the requests, Miller said he and the other whistle-blowers had inferred that others would have had to have access to it to do the analysis the paper described. [...]

Taylor works on an NIH-backed project called the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis. His work uses genetic data from across ethnicities to look at risk factors for cardiovascular disease. The painstaking approval processes he and his colleagues must go through — applying for IRB approval for every study, taking yearly refresher courses on the ethics of using human subjects, and signing data-use agreements — is “cumbersome in many ways,” he said.

”We complain about it to each other as well, but it’s necessary,” he added. Such safeguards in human research came about because of past abuses that poisoned many people’s faith in medical research. They’re designed to ensure that scientists don’t use subjects’ personal information in ways they would find abhorrent.

The letter set a June 2021 deadline for the university to destroy all initially approved copies of the genetic data and find out whether any unapproved copies of the data had been made. The agency also revoked Pesta’s permission to use NIH data for any existing projects, and banned him from obtaining any NIH data for the next three years. [...]

According to a letter sent to Pesta by the then provost, Laura Bloomberg — who has since been tapped as CSU’s president — the university confirmed the NIH’s findings. It also found Pesta had lied to a staff member in CSU’s research office when he said the data would be kept in a university-owned laptop and he would be the only one with access.

Pesta said he had requested and received approval from both Cleveland State and the NIH to store the data on a home computer.

“Those bastards totally ignored me when I pointed it out,” he added.

Bloomberg ultimately found that Pesta’s conduct had damaged the university’s reputation and could impede other professors’ ability to do research.

Cleveland State declared that Pesta had been incompetent or dishonest in teaching or scholarship; neglected his duty, and engaged in personal conduct that substantially impaired the fulfillment of his institutional responsibilities; and interfered with the normal operations of the university. The letter declared Bloomberg’s decision to fire Pesta.

Pesta was officially fired on March 4, 2022, two and a half years after his article was published.

etc.

Due to some issues I haven't had the opportunity to engage with the HBD/PNH discussion or indeed to read themotte recently.

Context

Bernd Fighting algorithmic racism like John Henry DaseindustriesLtd 2yr ago · Edited 2yr ago

That reads like satire, but only a hack would actually name the chief commissar "O’Brien."

And there are people who will look you in the eye and not just defend this behavior, but threaten you for questioning it. Vile.

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