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SIGINTA_SANTA  2yr ago (city-journal.org)   3522 thread views

Don't even go there: NIH blocks access to genetics database

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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.

Indeed, and in complaining about it I think people are revealing more about themselves than they they are their opposition.

  • -31

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.

What exactly do you think people are revealing about themselves?

I suggest you speak plainly.

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.

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...

Scott, maybe.

Gwern, almost certainly.

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

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.

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.

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.

  • -19

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.

I would say that moves towards a GATTACA world are dangerous.

  • -12

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.

  • -14

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.

The scenario I'm envisioning involves ill-advised embryo modification. It's entirely possible to introduce a shitty but not embryo-fatal mutation.

More comments

so is keeping a lid on data which can be misused

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.

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.

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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