How does access to the database work? Do scientists request specific types of data which are sent to them if their proposal is approved? Do they get temporary access keys to look stuff up?
I'm wondering how plausible it would be for someone to pirate/copy the database and replicate it elsewhere anonymously kind of like sci-hub. Which would be more or less plausible depending on who has how much access to the database.
Access is by study or study subset and so would require a massive distributed project of requests that were falsified or a big internal wikileaks style breach. That would really suck for all the patients who were generous enough to share their data with the assumption it would be protected. I think it is a Bad Thing to be avoided.
Probably. In addition to the damage to those specific individuals, it would make it significantly harder to convince future patients to commit to similar projects. But on the other hand, it would reduce barriers to scientific progress and the authoritarian control of elite institutions from being able to arbitrate which topics are and are not within the Overton Window of Science.
I assume a theoretical leaker would leak anonymously, but I guess if the data set is unique to that study then they could deduce it, unless a bunch of them were combined and mixed together, maybe with some stochastic omissions to further obfuscate what the original data looked like. A deadman's switch might work, where the data gets uploaded to the internet and made public like 10 years later.
But you're right that there would also be the issue that nobody could publish results using the leaked data.
This is very disappointing. Polygenic screening is going to need this kind of data linking genes and IQ if it's ever going to work well; it would be ironic and shameful if the NIH, by attempting to hide gene-to-IQ associations, ended up sabotaging the very groups such a censorship regime was meant to protect.
Society is fixed, but biology is mutable, and this is only going to become more true as AI foundation models bring more of biology under our explicit and direct control. If any one group did end up being lower-IQ than others, that is the group that has by far the most to gain from this kind of technology and (by extension) from this kind of research.
I don't have access to a financial breakdown of the kinds of studies that feed into this database so I admit this is somewhat me talking out of my ass, but the sequencing costs involved are pretty low these days. I'd guess the cost of computation might even be comparable to running the SNP panels (maybe 25-50$ per sample in bulk, or even 70-100$ per sample in bulk if you just want full genome data).
The real cost is the army of nurses, doctors and scientists doing more or less unpaid labor for career advancement and altruistic reasons; doing this as a private company would be staggeringly expensive unless your scale is much smaller, and either way, any kind of payout from this data would be dubious. Getting the demographic and phenotypic data to associate with the genetic data is an enormous pain in the ass between IRBs, patients who are unreliable and disinterested in giving you data, making sure you're following all the regulations around PII, etc. Not to mention the fact that half the population hates the medical-industrial complex right now and is unlikely to cooperate on any kind of large scale project.
Ideally, we'd all be genome sequenced at birth and our medical records would be entered into a centralized system where researchers could access de-identified data. The ML folks and data scientists would be able to tease out a remarkable number of associations that we just don't have the power for right now. Although maybe we've just circled back to square one, where that centralized system would decide what you can do with it's data...
I have helped prep data for NHLBI. Basically it is just taking existing study data then standardizing and anonymizing it for inclusion into NHLBI. The idea is to retain the data that's already been gathered for future use.
I found this disappointing, but not infuriating, until I realized that NIH is a taxpayer-funded organization. Why can't this data be in the public domain?
If so, then unvaccinated individuals dying, humans wiping other species or other ethnicity is evolution too.
Dysgenics happening now doesn't occur is a stateless society. It's happens with governments which ban many things and implement income redistribution, and also governments cooperate on wide scale to prevent many things.
Evolution doesn't have a 'job', it's a mindless process that doesn't care about human values. Eugenics is merely about guiding the process to achieve results in accordance with human values. Currently, evolution is selecting for low intelligence, social malignancy, and poor immune systems, among a very long list of other undesirable things. So it would accord with my values to have a eugenics program correct for this. The future I would desire would initially look like Israel — a nation with a mere ten million relatively intelligent souls and yet also with a space program. But the sky's the limit. Who knows what wondrous societies would be possible if intelligence were pushed higher than even the Jews'?
People aren't bothered as much by infectious diseases as in the past so the selection for disease resistance is probably lessened, and we can expect immune systems to weaken or become dysfunctional due to random drift. We have basically removed all selection pressures other than fecundity for modern-day humans, so everything that evolution used to optimize for besides fecundity will be expected to decline.
Weakening selection for a trait isn't same as selection for lower values of a trait (as with "too stupid to use contraception => more children"). I think SMV is still selected and I think immune system somehow influences SMV.
it's a mindless process that doesn't care about human values.
Yes, that's kind of my point. Evolutionary fitness has fuck all to do with whatever traits you might prefer. Thus I ask you the same questions I asked @Westerly
Who do you think you are to impose your values on evolution?
Humans inevitably impose themselves on the natural world in pursuing their goals, so I would say that I am simply a human who has systematized this particular matter and sees value in bringing evolution, like other natural processes, under human cultivation. The values would have to do with wanting to see generally positive, virtuous behaviors increased in their distribution and negative behaviors decreased, and ultimately this would be because I would rather live in the resultant world rather than our present, declining one, so it would be about serving myself.
I’m nobody special, but neither is the guy that decides we need to have a policy ensuring no children starve, but his policy shapes evolution just the same. Nearly every policy that touches on life and death is influencing evolution whether you like it or not. At least we can acknowledge that and bring it into the discussion of tradeoffs. Instead you seem to just want to stick your head in the sand and pretend our actions have no effect on evolution.
I don’t seek to impose any values. I’m not arguing for sterilizing Africans or whatever you think I’m angling towards. I’m just trying to explain eugenic/dysgenic to someone that seems to be willfully misinterpreting it
Suppose we made a policy all children will be provided the necessities of life (food, medicine, shelter, whatever). This would be selecting for those who have the most children regardless of their ability to provide for them. So I mean in a sense this would be “evolution doing its job”, insofar that it was maximizing reproductive success given the situation.
But I think most would consider it dysgenic, because “has children beyond their personal means to provide” would seem to be an undesirable trait to most. To some extent we can control the environment within which “evolution does its job”, so what kind of evolution will the environment we’ve created lead to? A kind we want? Or a kind we don’t want? So the label of dysgenic or eugenic is just passing a value judgment on the results of evolution given the environment parameters we control.
I would think most evolutionary changes would not be value-neutral, so every change to the environment that affects evolution could be considered either eugenic or dysgenic. I guess you might disagree here if you consider all or most things to be value-neutral, but I think most would disagree
If an organization is "in the X business" just because data it produces could, by some third party, be used to justify X, isn't funding something could cause Y an even stronger connection? Yet NIH funded viral research in Wuhan, increasing the risk of a global pandemic.
It's looking more and more like genetic engineering is the only viable way to close racial SES gaps. Ironically, the NIH is fighting to preserve racial inequalities while proclaiming its intent to narrow them.
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
Jiro 2yr ago·Edited 2yr ago
I suggest you speak plainly.
Fine I believe that you and other HBDists are motivated less by a desire of truth than by a desire to see your preexisting prejudices validated and that the refusal of others to provide you with that validation results in indignant anger.
Fine I believe that you and other HBDists are motivated less by a desire of truth than by a desire to see your preexisting prejudices validated and that the refusal of others to provide you with that validation is indignant anger.
Does it include Scott
I suspect that race issues helped lead to the discrediting of IQ tests which helped lead to college degrees as the sole determinant of worth which helped lead to everyone having to go to a four-year college which helped lead to massive debt crises, poverty, and social immobility (I am assuming you can fill in the holes in this argument).
I think they’re correct that “you are racist and sexist” is a very strong club used to bludgeon any group that strays too far from the mainstream – like Silicon Valley tech culture, libertarians, computer scientists, atheists, rationalists, et cetera. For complicated reasons these groups are disproportionately white and male, meaning that they have to spend an annoying amount of time and energy apologizing for this. I’m not sure how much this retards their growth, but my highball estimate is “a lot”.
and Gwern?
the massive fall in genome sequencing costs means that large human datasets will be produced, and the genetics directly examined, eliminating entire areas of objections to the previous heredity studies. And at some point, some researcher will manage the study - some group inside or outside the USA will fund it, at some point a large enough genetic database will be cross-referenced against IQ tests and existing racial markers.
I don’t know when the definitive paper will come out, if it’ll be this year, or by 2020, although I would be surprised if there was still nothing by 2030; but it will happen and it will happen relatively soon (for a debate going on for the past century or more). Genome sequencing is simply going to be too cheap for it to not happen. By 2030 or 2040, I expect the issue will be definitively settled in the same way earlier debates about the validity of IQ tests were eventually settled (even if the public hasn’t yet gotten the word, the experts all concede that IQ tests are valid, reliable, not biased, and meaningful predictors of a wide variety of real-world variables).
Edit: originally I linked, but I decided against it for now. While it's technically publically available, one only as an archive and second, on someone else's website...
I'm sure he means the NIH people are revealing the secret bad opinions they hold. If they didn't hold them, they wouldn't be worried about the data getting out. /s ;)
I wonder if you, Hlynka, will ever get to reveal something new and surprising about yourself to your own mind.
Such as the fact that your credentials of a no-nonsense Southerner tough guy who's calling out literal Nazis and Monarchists on their "blue tribe leftism" are making an increasingly funny combination with your support of censorship and propaganda by big government agencies, committed in service of an extreme Marxist egalitarian theory.
Such as the fact that your credentials of a no-nonsense Southerner tough guy who's calling out literal Nazis and Monarchists on their "blue tribe leftism" are making an increasingly funny combination with your support of censorship and propaganda by big government agencies
I see a stark difference between being angry about being silenced, and being angry about someone else's silence. The HBDists might feel that the NIH has a obligation to support them, but do they? This is the kind of thing I'm talking about when I talk about inferential distance. What some might call "valuing objective truth" others might call "compelled speech", where do you draw the line?
Edit: and for what it's worth I actually make a conscious effort to avoid being clever, ironic, or anything else which granted has gotten me in trouble on occasion but also means that my mind is essentially an open book.
Patronizing and unnecessarily personal. You can call out what you see as a discrepancy in someone's stated beliefs without making it about them personally.
There's been a lot of this lately, and it's not good. We didn't move here just so people can rehash their petty personal grudges from times of yore.
Why does Hlynka get a lifetime pass for bad faith, low effort, uncharitable takes, namecalling, “hbdtards”, you name it? I guess he is just treated as a fixture at this point, but if he were a new user he’d have caught a ban already
Granted, but I protest Hlynka's confrontational attitude on this issue. You could have modded him for darkly hinting and not speaking clearly in this case.
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
HlynkaCG 2yr ago·Edited 2yr ago
By complaining about Lysenkoism, people do indeed reveal that they care more about some notion of truth than the goal of socialism, which is politically erroneous. They show their essentialist counter revolutionary tendencies. These ought to be corrected by force if we are to achieve socialism.
Never mind that nature is counter revolutionary, it too shall bend to us, as Chairman Mao himself has decreed.
I don't really agree with that. I don't have any real love for HBD, but IMO science is about the pursuit of truth. People should be free to advance theories, no matter how implausible or distasteful I may find them, if they can provide the proof to back them up. If it turns out they're right, then we need to face that with our eyes open rather than trying to shut them down by saying "ha you can't have the data, sucks to suck".
On top of that, as @Conservautism pointed out the NIH is a branch of the federal government. As a taxpayer, I don't want them to have any ability to deny access to their datasets. I paid for that, and I expect it to be publicly available.
People should be free to advance theories, no matter how implausible or distasteful I may find them
But should they be required to advance theories? Because that is what this is ultimately about. HBDists' anger at the NIH for declining to help them push their agenda.
That is not at all what is happening here. If the NIH lets people use data, it isn't "helping them to push their agenda". It's simply providing neutral access to a public resource. And yes, a public agency should be required to provide anyone access to this public resource.
Persuit of truth is important, but so is keeping a lid on data which can be misused. As far as I know, there's data that Joe Public just can't get about nuclear weapon internals, for example. I suppose they're treating 'which genes make you smart anyway' as similarly hazardous research. I can't blame them.
Persuit of truth is important, but so is keeping a lid on data which can be misused.
Can I see a cost-benefit analysis on whether it's worth it to keep that particular data secret? Even a very handwavy one?
Of course I can't, and it's because of a rather fundamental reason: having anything like that in public betrays the very truth it was intended to conceal. If you publicly claim that the public can't see data X because it might lead to the harmful belief in the conclusion Y, the public will assume that the conclusion Y is true based on your claim. So you need to equivocate and obfuscate.
Worse, since such decisions are made by nominally democratic institutions they can't be made even in secret, because if someone leaks the meeting notes it would be a huge scandal. So they aren't made rationally at all.
Consider for example the messaging "masks don't work, you should not buy masks so that there's enough left for doctors" from the early Covid days. Oh if only there were a behind-closed-door meeting between various senior WHO and CDC officials where they decided that they must lie to the public to address the mask shortages and this particular lie is the best they could do and it's worth it even taking into account long term consequences for trust in institutions.
I conjecture that such a meeting couldn't have happened because nobody wanted to destroy their career by calling for it and speaking plainly in case it's leaked. I point out that now when you can think about clearly it for five minutes it's obvious that the adopted policy was extremely stupid, proves that there was no such meeting, the policy was a result of bureaucrats acting on pure instinct, wink-wink nudge-nudge, no conscious deliberation at all.
So IMO this is the main problem with "keeping a lid" on things: unless you know exactly what you're doing (such as in not publishing nuclear weapon technologies), object-level lies infect all meta-levels, if you lie about the existence of certain data you have to lie about lying about that, and about whether you would lie in such situations, and so on. Which not only produces much more and much more dangerous lies that you'd initially expect, but also prevents you from thinking rationally about whether it's actually worth it.
I blame them for that, because this isn't nuclear weapons data or even close to it. It's not, in fact, dangerous in any way. They are simply trying to close off research they are ideologically opposed to, and that is about as against the spirit of science as one can get.
That's very dramatic and all, but not really the basis for sound public policy. Anyone can claim that (thing they don't like) is dystopian. That doesn't justify saying "no, the truth in this case could be too dangerous so we won't allow anyone to seek it".
How is denying people the data they need to conclusively bury the conspiracy theory that whites are keeping black people down because of their unconscious racism helpful ?
The assumption promoted at US taxpayer's expense is that whites are subconsciously evil and oppressing blacks. The rhetoric allowed is .. worrying.
But allowing the claims that whites are conspiring or unconsciously cooperating in keeping blacks down - that is not supposed to lead to any problems ?
This is a wild supposition. What they're preventing is embryo selection for intelligence, or worse, people monkeying around with CRISPR. If it prevents HBD studies that's just icing.
They aren't preventing embryo selection for intelligence, though. CRISPR is of no use for anything serious, you can remove point defects with it but the error rate is abysmal so doing anything affecting many genes is impossible.
I suppose they're treating 'which genes make you smart anyway' as similarly hazardous research. I can't blame them.
I can. If society makes policy on the supposition that all groups have the same inborn potential to develop their cognitive ability (or worse, the supposition that all groups have the same average cognitive ability, IQ test results be damned), then someone must be to blame for the unequal societal outcomes between groups, and modern-day witch-hunters will cause more and more damage to society, inflicting ever worse punishments on the successful, and, as their actions continue to fail to equalize societal outcomes, they can be expected to get ever more confused and angry at how powerful and well-hidden the witchcraft must be, until we reach truly civilization-crashing levels of war on competence. Egalitarian ideology in a non-egalitarian reality is dangerous, and we would do better to be willing to face the truth, whatever it turn out to be.
Perhaps, but they also aren't using assertions about nuclear weapon details to justify public policy that disadvantages me based on my immutable characteristics.
Bernd
Fighting algorithmic racism like John Henry
Evinceo 2yr ago
Yes, we all know how you think science should work at this point. If all the expensive data collection is just used to launder arbitrary moral decrees, wouldn't reading seabird entrails work just as well for a fraction of the cost?
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Notes -
How does access to the database work? Do scientists request specific types of data which are sent to them if their proposal is approved? Do they get temporary access keys to look stuff up?
I'm wondering how plausible it would be for someone to pirate/copy the database and replicate it elsewhere anonymously kind of like sci-hub. Which would be more or less plausible depending on who has how much access to the database.
Probably. In addition to the damage to those specific individuals, it would make it significantly harder to convince future patients to commit to similar projects. But on the other hand, it would reduce barriers to scientific progress and the authoritarian control of elite institutions from being able to arbitrate which topics are and are not within the Overton Window of Science.
I assume a theoretical leaker would leak anonymously, but I guess if the data set is unique to that study then they could deduce it, unless a bunch of them were combined and mixed together, maybe with some stochastic omissions to further obfuscate what the original data looked like. A deadman's switch might work, where the data gets uploaded to the internet and made public like 10 years later.
But you're right that there would also be the issue that nobody could publish results using the leaked data.
Your mean publications in scientific journals?... ... one can publish anonymously.
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This is very disappointing. Polygenic screening is going to need this kind of data linking genes and IQ if it's ever going to work well; it would be ironic and shameful if the NIH, by attempting to hide gene-to-IQ associations, ended up sabotaging the very groups such a censorship regime was meant to protect.
Society is fixed, but biology is mutable, and this is only going to become more true as AI foundation models bring more of biology under our explicit and direct control. If any one group did end up being lower-IQ than others, that is the group that has by far the most to gain from this kind of technology and (by extension) from this kind of research.
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What would be the time and cost of creating a similar dataset?
I don't have access to a financial breakdown of the kinds of studies that feed into this database so I admit this is somewhat me talking out of my ass, but the sequencing costs involved are pretty low these days. I'd guess the cost of computation might even be comparable to running the SNP panels (maybe 25-50$ per sample in bulk, or even 70-100$ per sample in bulk if you just want full genome data).
The real cost is the army of nurses, doctors and scientists doing more or less unpaid labor for career advancement and altruistic reasons; doing this as a private company would be staggeringly expensive unless your scale is much smaller, and either way, any kind of payout from this data would be dubious. Getting the demographic and phenotypic data to associate with the genetic data is an enormous pain in the ass between IRBs, patients who are unreliable and disinterested in giving you data, making sure you're following all the regulations around PII, etc. Not to mention the fact that half the population hates the medical-industrial complex right now and is unlikely to cooperate on any kind of large scale project.
Ideally, we'd all be genome sequenced at birth and our medical records would be entered into a centralized system where researchers could access de-identified data. The ML folks and data scientists would be able to tease out a remarkable number of associations that we just don't have the power for right now. Although maybe we've just circled back to square one, where that centralized system would decide what you can do with it's data...
I have helped prep data for NHLBI. Basically it is just taking existing study data then standardizing and anonymizing it for inclusion into NHLBI. The idea is to retain the data that's already been gathered for future use.
I'm very much opposed to the restrictions FWIW.
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I found this disappointing, but not infuriating, until I realized that NIH is a taxpayer-funded organization. Why can't this data be in the public domain?
I wonder if a suit could be brought over this.
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I don't think that NIH wants to be in the Eugenics business, so they're taking steps to avoid it.
If you're not in the Eugenics business, you're in the Dysgenics business. You don't get to not play the game.
Dysgenics is nothing more than a sneer-word for evolution doing it's job, CMV.
If so, then unvaccinated individuals dying, humans wiping other species or other ethnicity is evolution too.
Dysgenics happening now doesn't occur is a stateless society. It's happens with governments which ban many things and implement income redistribution, and also governments cooperate on wide scale to prevent many things.
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Evolution doesn't have a 'job', it's a mindless process that doesn't care about human values. Eugenics is merely about guiding the process to achieve results in accordance with human values. Currently, evolution is selecting for low intelligence, social malignancy, and poor immune systems, among a very long list of other undesirable things. So it would accord with my values to have a eugenics program correct for this. The future I would desire would initially look like Israel — a nation with a mere ten million relatively intelligent souls and yet also with a space program. But the sky's the limit. Who knows what wondrous societies would be possible if intelligence were pushed higher than even the Jews'?
sorry, what?
People aren't bothered as much by infectious diseases as in the past so the selection for disease resistance is probably lessened, and we can expect immune systems to weaken or become dysfunctional due to random drift. We have basically removed all selection pressures other than fecundity for modern-day humans, so everything that evolution used to optimize for besides fecundity will be expected to decline.
Weakening selection for a trait isn't same as selection for lower values of a trait (as with "too stupid to use contraception => more children"). I think SMV is still selected and I think immune system somehow influences SMV.
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Yes, that's kind of my point. Evolutionary fitness has fuck all to do with whatever traits you might prefer. Thus I ask you the same questions I asked @Westerly
Who do you think you are to impose your values on evolution?
What values would you seek to impose?
Humans inevitably impose themselves on the natural world in pursuing their goals, so I would say that I am simply a human who has systematized this particular matter and sees value in bringing evolution, like other natural processes, under human cultivation. The values would have to do with wanting to see generally positive, virtuous behaviors increased in their distribution and negative behaviors decreased, and ultimately this would be because I would rather live in the resultant world rather than our present, declining one, so it would be about serving myself.
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I’m nobody special, but neither is the guy that decides we need to have a policy ensuring no children starve, but his policy shapes evolution just the same. Nearly every policy that touches on life and death is influencing evolution whether you like it or not. At least we can acknowledge that and bring it into the discussion of tradeoffs. Instead you seem to just want to stick your head in the sand and pretend our actions have no effect on evolution.
I don’t seek to impose any values. I’m not arguing for sterilizing Africans or whatever you think I’m angling towards. I’m just trying to explain eugenic/dysgenic to someone that seems to be willfully misinterpreting it
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Suppose we made a policy all children will be provided the necessities of life (food, medicine, shelter, whatever). This would be selecting for those who have the most children regardless of their ability to provide for them. So I mean in a sense this would be “evolution doing its job”, insofar that it was maximizing reproductive success given the situation.
But I think most would consider it dysgenic, because “has children beyond their personal means to provide” would seem to be an undesirable trait to most. To some extent we can control the environment within which “evolution does its job”, so what kind of evolution will the environment we’ve created lead to? A kind we want? Or a kind we don’t want? So the label of dysgenic or eugenic is just passing a value judgment on the results of evolution given the environment parameters we control.
I would think most evolutionary changes would not be value-neutral, so every change to the environment that affects evolution could be considered either eugenic or dysgenic. I guess you might disagree here if you consider all or most things to be value-neutral, but I think most would disagree
Two simple questions;
Who do you think you are to impose value judgments on evolution?
What values do you seek to impose?
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Yeah you do, it's called Natural Selection.
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If you are not the one deciding what genes are "good" and what are "bad", you are in the game, but as a ball, not as player or referee.
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If an organization is "in the X business" just because data it produces could, by some third party, be used to justify X, isn't funding something could cause Y an even stronger connection? Yet NIH funded viral research in Wuhan, increasing the risk of a global pandemic.
You could broadly say that NIH wants to be in the germs business but not the make people smarter business.
It's looking more and more like genetic engineering is the only viable way to close racial SES gaps. Ironically, the NIH is fighting to preserve racial inequalities while proclaiming its intent to narrow them.
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Indeed, and in complaining about it I think people are revealing more about themselves than they they are their opposition.
Finding links between IQ and genetics is crucial if we ever want polygenic screening for IQ to work well. Shouldn't we want smarter children?
What makes you think we want polygenic screening for IQ to work well? I sure as fuck don't.
Why? I feel that is an impulse worth exploring.
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What exactly do you think people are revealing about themselves?
I suggest you speak plainly.
Fine I believe that you and other HBDists are motivated less by a desire of truth than by a desire to see your preexisting prejudices validated and that the refusal of others to provide you with that validation results in indignant anger.
Darkly hinting at a personal attack really is not fixed by openly making the personal attack.
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Does it include Scott
and Gwern?
Edit: originally I linked, but I decided against it for now. While it's technically publically available, one only as an archive and second, on someone else's website...
Scott, maybe.
Gwern, almost certainly.
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I'm sure he means the NIH people are revealing the secret bad opinions they hold. If they didn't hold them, they wouldn't be worried about the data getting out. /s ;)
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I wonder if you, Hlynka, will ever get to reveal something new and surprising about yourself to your own mind.
Such as the fact that your credentials of a no-nonsense Southerner tough guy who's calling out literal Nazis and Monarchists on their "blue tribe leftism" are making an increasingly funny combination with your support of censorship and propaganda by big government agencies, committed in service of an extreme Marxist egalitarian theory.
I see a stark difference between being angry about being silenced, and being angry about someone else's silence. The HBDists might feel that the NIH has a obligation to support them, but do they? This is the kind of thing I'm talking about when I talk about inferential distance. What some might call "valuing objective truth" others might call "compelled speech", where do you draw the line?
Edit: and for what it's worth I actually make a conscious effort to avoid being clever, ironic, or anything else which granted has gotten me in trouble on occasion but also means that my mind is essentially an open book.
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Patronizing and unnecessarily personal. You can call out what you see as a discrepancy in someone's stated beliefs without making it about them personally.
There's been a lot of this lately, and it's not good. We didn't move here just so people can rehash their petty personal grudges from times of yore.
Why does Hlynka get a lifetime pass for bad faith, low effort, uncharitable takes, namecalling, “hbdtards”, you name it? I guess he is just treated as a fixture at this point, but if he were a new user he’d have caught a ban already
He's caught his share of bans in the past. But everyone is essentially starting with a clean slate with the move.
No one's going to get banned because you don't like them, though.
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Granted, but I protest Hlynka's confrontational attitude on this issue. You could have modded him for darkly hinting and not speaking clearly in this case.
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By complaining about Lysenkoism, people do indeed reveal that they care more about some notion of truth than the goal of socialism, which is politically erroneous. They show their essentialist counter revolutionary tendencies. These ought to be corrected by force if we are to achieve socialism.
Never mind that nature is counter revolutionary, it too shall bend to us, as Chairman Mao himself has decreed.
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I don't really agree with that. I don't have any real love for HBD, but IMO science is about the pursuit of truth. People should be free to advance theories, no matter how implausible or distasteful I may find them, if they can provide the proof to back them up. If it turns out they're right, then we need to face that with our eyes open rather than trying to shut them down by saying "ha you can't have the data, sucks to suck".
On top of that, as @Conservautism pointed out the NIH is a branch of the federal government. As a taxpayer, I don't want them to have any ability to deny access to their datasets. I paid for that, and I expect it to be publicly available.
But should they be required to advance theories? Because that is what this is ultimately about. HBDists' anger at the NIH for declining to help them push their agenda.
That is not at all what is happening here. If the NIH lets people use data, it isn't "helping them to push their agenda". It's simply providing neutral access to a public resource. And yes, a public agency should be required to provide anyone access to this public resource.
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Persuit of truth is important, but so is keeping a lid on data which can be misused. As far as I know, there's data that Joe Public just can't get about nuclear weapon internals, for example. I suppose they're treating 'which genes make you smart anyway' as similarly hazardous research. I can't blame them.
Can I see a cost-benefit analysis on whether it's worth it to keep that particular data secret? Even a very handwavy one?
Of course I can't, and it's because of a rather fundamental reason: having anything like that in public betrays the very truth it was intended to conceal. If you publicly claim that the public can't see data X because it might lead to the harmful belief in the conclusion Y, the public will assume that the conclusion Y is true based on your claim. So you need to equivocate and obfuscate.
Worse, since such decisions are made by nominally democratic institutions they can't be made even in secret, because if someone leaks the meeting notes it would be a huge scandal. So they aren't made rationally at all.
Consider for example the messaging "masks don't work, you should not buy masks so that there's enough left for doctors" from the early Covid days. Oh if only there were a behind-closed-door meeting between various senior WHO and CDC officials where they decided that they must lie to the public to address the mask shortages and this particular lie is the best they could do and it's worth it even taking into account long term consequences for trust in institutions.
I conjecture that such a meeting couldn't have happened because nobody wanted to destroy their career by calling for it and speaking plainly in case it's leaked. I point out that now when you can think about clearly it for five minutes it's obvious that the adopted policy was extremely stupid, proves that there was no such meeting, the policy was a result of bureaucrats acting on pure instinct, wink-wink nudge-nudge, no conscious deliberation at all.
So IMO this is the main problem with "keeping a lid" on things: unless you know exactly what you're doing (such as in not publishing nuclear weapon technologies), object-level lies infect all meta-levels, if you lie about the existence of certain data you have to lie about lying about that, and about whether you would lie in such situations, and so on. Which not only produces much more and much more dangerous lies that you'd initially expect, but also prevents you from thinking rationally about whether it's actually worth it.
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I blame them for that, because this isn't nuclear weapons data or even close to it. It's not, in fact, dangerous in any way. They are simply trying to close off research they are ideologically opposed to, and that is about as against the spirit of science as one can get.
I would say that moves towards a GATTACA world are dangerous.
That's very dramatic and all, but not really the basis for sound public policy. Anyone can claim that (thing they don't like) is dystopian. That doesn't justify saying "no, the truth in this case could be too dangerous so we won't allow anyone to seek it".
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How is denying people the data they need to conclusively bury the conspiracy theory that whites are keeping black people down because of their unconscious racism helpful ?
The assumption promoted at US taxpayer's expense is that whites are subconsciously evil and oppressing blacks. The rhetoric allowed is .. worrying.
But allowing the claims that whites are conspiring or unconsciously cooperating in keeping blacks down - that is not supposed to lead to any problems ?
This is a wild supposition. What they're preventing is embryo selection for intelligence, or worse, people monkeying around with CRISPR. If it prevents HBD studies that's just icing.
They aren't preventing embryo selection for intelligence, though. CRISPR is of no use for anything serious, you can remove point defects with it but the error rate is abysmal so doing anything affecting many genes is impossible.
None of what you said will stop folks from trying, and some poor mutants who had no say in the matter will live with the consequences.
They'd not even be born, dude.
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We didn't invest scientists with the moral authority to decide what uses of knowledge are good.
Actually we did, you just weren't informed.
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I can. If society makes policy on the supposition that all groups have the same inborn potential to develop their cognitive ability (or worse, the supposition that all groups have the same average cognitive ability, IQ test results be damned), then someone must be to blame for the unequal societal outcomes between groups, and modern-day witch-hunters will cause more and more damage to society, inflicting ever worse punishments on the successful, and, as their actions continue to fail to equalize societal outcomes, they can be expected to get ever more confused and angry at how powerful and well-hidden the witchcraft must be, until we reach truly civilization-crashing levels of war on competence. Egalitarian ideology in a non-egalitarian reality is dangerous, and we would do better to be willing to face the truth, whatever it turn out to be.
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Perhaps, but they also aren't using assertions about nuclear weapon details to justify public policy that disadvantages me based on my immutable characteristics.
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What makes you think they don't want to be in the business, rather than wanting to be in it in secret, and with a monopoly?
You think the NIH is creating superintelligent superdoctors in secret?
No, just helping along with depopulation, and while the top of society has the most children.
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Yes, we all know how you think science should work at this point. If all the expensive data collection is just used to launder arbitrary moral decrees, wouldn't reading seabird entrails work just as well for a fraction of the cost?
Me in particular, or just people who aren't HBD enthusiasts?
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