To do better science, admit that you’re not objective
nature.com
nature.com
No one is counting on your work being perfect. Science is a communal activity that self-corrects in the long-term.
To put it another way, here's Cormac McCarthy:
> You know, you always have this image of the perfect thing which you can never achieve, but which you never stop trying to achieve. But I think ... that's your signpost and your guide. You'll never get there, but without it you won't get anywhere.
More from the article:
> As I found while writing my 2019 book Superior: The Return of Race Science, geneticists today rightly treat eugenics as a laughable proposition...
If eugenics doesn't work then how come every single Border Collie is smarter than every single English Bulldog?
> ... and the concept of biological race — the belief that humans can be subdivided into distinct groups with meaningful differences between them — as easily debunked nonsense.
You can divide humans into whatever groups you like based on whichever criteria you like. The question is whether those groupings are useful and sometimes...they are. Whether you call those groupings "races" or something else is a semantic argument.
Dawkins: It’s one thing to deplore eugenics on ideological, political, moral grounds. It’s quite another to conclude that it wouldn’t work in practice. Of course it would. It works for cows, horses, pigs, dogs & roses. Why on earth wouldn’t it work for humans? Facts ignore ideology.
https://mobile.twitter.com/richarddawkins/status/12289436869...
Crazy woke activitists like this author is not qualified to speak for science. They think if something is politically wrong must also be scientifically wrong. It is not.
Yes, we breed animals and direct their evolution.
In all his examples, the animals are more fragile and less able to survive independently than they were before.
That is pretty much the opposite of what eugenics aims at and is exactly one of the problems it is criticized for.
Dawkins can be a fool sometimes.
Just because you can breed fragile animals for narrow purposes does not mean you can breed a better human.
If removed the word "better" would it significantly change your opinion? I'm kind of at a loss for what I'm not understanding.
Note that your whole argument hinges purely on the meaning of the word "better". Once you rephrase the issue in terms of "can we bread a human that's more like X or less like Y", the answer is "obviously, yes". Your whole argument is based on some subjective judgement as to whether these are "better", but it is completely irrelevant insofar as answering the question whether artificial selection in humans is possible, and whether it could significantly affect trait distributions -- the answers to these questions are yes, and yes.
By the way, we are already breeding humans more fragile, precisely due to increase in medical state of art. If medicine technology helps significant number of humans to survive and reproduce that otherwise wouldn't have, and it clearly and obviously does so, it will result in observable increase in traits that would significantly decrease the fitness in the context outside of human civilization, just the same as farm animals. I don't think that this complex issue of not just letting those people die without reproducing can be neatly wrapped up in a single word "better", but make no mistake: selection for more fragile humans is very much happening, right now.
It’s not Eugenics if it doesn’t involve someone’s idea of what is ‘better’. In that instance it’s just genetics.
Given that we are already producing humans who are more fragile, it’s easy to see that further directed evolution could push us more in that direction.
Civilization itself has many fragilities, which we are currently insulated from to the degree that we ourselves are anti-fragile. It’s easy to see that directed breeding could lead to a more fragile civilization.
That would be a failure of eugenics. Dawkins foolishly oversimplifies and fails at his argument because he doesn’t take the time to understand the meaning of the word.
It is not at all obvious how we could avoid this failure. Dawkins silly examples actually show the direction to the failure mode, not the direction to successful eugenics.
There are literally dozens of arguments as to why 'eugenics' (beyond very basic hanging fruit like eliminating monogenic diseases etc.) wouldn't work and doesn't make sense to begin with and many of them have been spelled out in the tweet's replies and blog posts, I'll let you do your homework.
So it does work.
This statement is worse than wrong; it's nonsense.
Even if you come up for some very specific metric of intelligence that you think is valid (which will always involve the use of some limited test constrained by subjective considerations) you're still wrong! Not every single Border Collie will perform better than every single English Bulldog, at best you will find some consistent comparison between averages, which is absurdly far from the same thing.
Shouldn't science always, without any exception, be viewed in isolation from the past and politics?
I feel like the only reason this idea that science shouldn't revolve solely around the practice of the scientific method, and the observation and application of the results of experimentation, is being entertained is because people are posting these viewpoints in high-profile places like Nature.
Speaking of "isolation from the past", the linked opinion piece doesn't cite a single reference other than the author's own pop-sci book. An interesting decision for sure.
Try telling that to Galileo.
Only if it isn't practiced by scientists, who have a past and politics. Or funded by institutions that also have a past and politics.
What is so special about politics that science must ignore it?
Politics is the art of running a Polis (a city, or in modern times the state). The question of "what is good for the state" is a political one.
If you go by the first two definitions then brining politics is helpful. If you go by the third, then politics is decidedly unhelpful.
"Better" could probably even be quantified in a helpful way if desired.
Politics are just another human factor. Stimulus and response. Can also be quantified if addressed situationally. As a catch-all it's a low-leverage descriptor though.
I like that the author is at least talking about this. It could lead to a system-level improvement.
> models that reflect reality
Or models that elegantly allow for multiple perspectives while contributing to a desired outcome. Reality when held up as an accountability target opens up a bit of a can of worms, starting with the subjectivity question: Whose reality? Or which reality? Humans are remarkable in their ability to create, entertain, use, and appreciate even conflicting models of reality.
Where does the author do this?
Many studies cluster people with different genetic histories into groups with meaningful differences. This is important (for example) when treating people with different genetic histories for disease. AFAICT the article's author gets genetic history and social race mixed up, which does nothing to help their article's point.
Real scientists like Carl, or, say, David Reich, recognize her garbage for what it is. She interviews him for her book, and is shocked to learn that the super star Harvard geneticist doesn’t share her absurd positions on biological origins of race, or lack thereof. Saini belongs to a group which in turn Reich calls out in his book for obfuscating, rather than illuminating the issue of the biological origin of correlations between ancestry and phenotypic traits different than the melanin levels.
The best example is how Saini in her book completely uncritically and unironically uses Lewontin’s 1972 argument that there can be no significant differences between populations, because majority of variance is within group and not between groups. Bringing this up and not even discussing obvious counterarguments shows that it’s not science that’s being done, but rather agenda pushing. This is of course par for the course, as Lewontin himself was also quite open about the fact that for him, science is only a tool to push his view on how society should be run, and if science disagrees, so much worse for science.
HBD proponents and Pioneer Fund recipients like to cry that they're being silenced when the reality is that they suck at science and don't like being called out. From Kanazawa's "the earth is flat" paper to evopsychologists literally admitting in the acknowledgement sections that they had no idea how to look up things in gene ontology databases and had to ask an actual biologist to do it on the condition that their name wouldn't be associated to their work, everything about the HBD clique transpires hackery and fraud.
I don't care much who those racists are, or what they wanted to hear, but at least Reich's positions shocked Saini herself, by being clearly and explicitly against the crap she was pushing in her book:
> At the same time he thinks some categories may have more biological meaning to them. Black Americans are mostly West African in ancestry and white Americans tend to be European, both correlating to genuine population groups that were once separated at least partially for seventy thousand years in human history. “There’s a long time separating these two groups,” Reich says. “Enough time for evolution to accumulate differences. We don’t know very much about what those differences are because we’re still at the beginning of collectively trying to identify biologically what differences do.”
> He suggests that there may be more than superficial average differences between black and white Americans, possibly even cognitive and psychological ones, because before they arrived in the United States, these population groups had this seventy thousand years apart during which they adapted to their own different environments. Reich implies that natural selection may have acted on them differently within this timescale to produce changes that go further than skin deep. He adds, judiciously, that he doesn’t think these differences will be large—only a fraction as big as the variation between individuals, just as biologist Richard Lewontin estimated in 1972. But he doesn’t expect them to be nonexistent either: as individuals we are so very different from one another that even a fraction of a difference between groups is something.
> They are words I never expected to hear from a respected mainstream geneticist. I know that Reich is not a racist. Indeed, like Cavalli-Sforza, he believes that if race research is done, it will only further demolish old prejudices. (...)
> Though Reich sees the racists as factually wrong, he also sees some antiracists—those who insist that we are all exactly the same underneath—as not having the full facts either. “It’s a little bit painful to see very well-meaning people saying things that are contradicted by the science, because we want well-meaning people to say things that are correct,” he says. “The way I see what’s going on in this world right now, there are racist people that are just perpetrating falsehoods, and just representing the science in incorrect ways, tendentious ways in order to achieve certain goals. And then there’s people whose perspective on the world I agree with who are actually saying things that are technically incorrect.”
Reich means here people like Saini herself.
> Reich is technically correct that there could be more profound genetic differences between population groups than we are aware of at the moment. But to date, no scientific research has been able to show any average genetic differences between population groups that go further than the superficial, such as skin color, or that are linked to hard survival, such as those that prevent a geographically linked disease.
This is, of course, utterly false, and Reich in his book brings up multiple examples of exactly that. This argument is literally God-of-the-gaps: sure, there might be average genetic differences in skin color, or height, or athletic ability (oh wait, sorry, I forgot that Saini denies that too, even as she watches Olympic finals in 100 metre dash), or disease resistance, or low oxygen environment adaptation, or this, or that, but overall, there are no non-superficial differences in the non-superficial things we actually care about. Yeah, right.
> There is no variant of any gene that has been found to exist in everyone of one “race” and not in another.
This is rhetorical trick of saying something true, and yet completely irrelevant, par for the course for agenda pushing activists. This is also true, for example, for domestic dogs and wild wolves -- are there no significant differences in average traits between the two as well? Will chihuahua overcome the social construction of its "race", and fit right in a wild wolf tribe? Is the greyhound's speed just a matter of the family environment it grew up in?
These arguments as applied to humans are just as absurd as applied to dogs, and the only reason they aren't laughed out of serious discussion is that we want them to be true. David Reich of course recognizes reality for what it is, and is not going to obfuscate the truth just to achieve the social goals he desires: unlike Saini, he understands that the public trust in science is a result of precisely such brutal honesty and courage of taking reality for what it is, and not for what we wish it was. As such, he is repulsed by Saini's approach to kill it, gut the carcass and wear its skin to fool people for the real thing. People might be fooled at the distance, but when you come closer to investigate, you immediately see that it's not science, but only a simulacrum thereof. Butchering your dairy cow might feel good for a while, but sooner than you think you have neither meat nor milk. Saini of course doesn't care, because she's not a scientists, she's a journalist and a writer, and she has no skin in the game.
1. That there are population (not race, these are not the same thing and only ever overlap by happenstance) differences in some critical traits for survival is old news. These traits are few and far between and have been the subject of extremely strong selective pressure. They're also subject to evolutionary convergence. For this reason they can't be a good proxy for classifying populations phylogenically, even though they do come up in medicine. Also, because of the very one-dimensional and extreme selective aspect of it, it is highly dubious that very complex traits (let alone undefined traits like "intelligence") could be involved.
2. That you lump up artificial selection for a single purpose and natural selection (which Darwin specifically coined as opposed to the artificial selection we do on animals) shows you have a very limited understanding of how, well, evolutionary genomics works. You can't treat selective breeding the same way you treat natural selection. You need to look up basic concepts before we have a reasonable discussion.
3. You keep thrashing Saini but you haven't addressed the fact that her books have received inputs and feedback from many prominent people in the field. I asusme you're not a specialist so surely your first reflex should be to assume the people she's thanked in the foreword know what they're doing as their daily job.
I have no idea what HBD is, but you keep repeating it, and ascribing a "proponent" label to me. Can I ask you to explain my position to me, so that I know better what I'm guilty of?
> 1. That there are population (not race, these are not the same thing and only ever overlap by happenstance) differences in some critical traits for survival is old news. These traits are few and far between and have been the subject of extremely strong selective pressure.
These things are simply not true, and Reich is pretty clear about it in his book. There are tons of papers about that too. You can keep repeating it, and Saini can keep repeating it, but it won't make it any more true. The papers won't just disappear. Common conception of race matches the ancestry extremely well. There are average differences found in many traits, many of which didn't see "extremely strong selective pressure". Reich brings up evidence for selection for taller height in northern Europeans in his book: what was "extremely strong selective pressure" there? Or, for that matter, what was the extremely strong selective pressure to select for short height in various Pygmy populations?
The above is bunch of falsehoods, and anyone who has any familiarity with recent (and not so recent) results in genetics and heritability is perfectly aware of that.
> 2. That you lump up artificial selection for a single purpose and natural selection
You're welcome to explain where I "lump" them, and what it actually means, because this is simply a contentless attack that's designed to deflect the attention from the core of the argument.
> (which Darwin specifically coined as opposed to the artificial selection we do on animals) shows you have a very limited understanding of how, well, evolutionary genomics works.
You can, and in fact, you do. Price equation simply doesn't care about what causes the generation-to-generation selection, for example. Again, this is a contentless attack on my imputed knowledge of the field.
> You keep thrashing Saini but you haven't addressed the fact that her books have received inputs and feedback from many prominent people in the field.
Of course I addressed that. For example, she received input from Reich, who trashes her argument. I also mentioned that some people in the field are also twisting science to further their political causes, and this has been true at least since Lewontin and Gould, and probably much earlier.
> I asusme you're not a specialist so surely your first reflex should be to assume the people she's thanked in the foreword know what they're doing as their daily job.
I don't trust Saini to accurately relay what she was told, because what she is saying is clearly against the understanding in the field, and as Reich's points out, many people in the field are in the business of obfuscating science themselves.
Just because we couldn't isolate it doesn't mean it's not there (or wasn't there in the past). Also, Pygmies and Northern Europeans are very niche populations with little extant diversity compared to the rest of mankind.
>The above is bunch of falsehoods, and anyone who has any familiarity with recent (and not so recent) results in genetics and heritability is perfectly aware of that.
Idk what to tell you. It's literally my job to work in this kind of stuff. As in, I get paid for working in this, I clock in, have coffee with, have lunch with, clock out and sometimes binge drink with people who get paid for doing this as well. Feel free not to believe me but at this point it's just useless to fling "no you're the one who's wrong" one more time.
>Common conception of race matches the ancestry extremely well.
Common conception of race isn't well-defined and changes depending on culture and whatever the researcher had in mind when they wrote their paper, I'm not surprised it fits whatever they think it is.
>Price equation simply doesn't care about what causes the generation-to-generation selection, for example.
Models have evolved a little bit since the 19th century. In practice you don't model artificial selection the same way you do with natural selection, the latter is much messier.
>Of course I addressed that. For example, she received input from Reich, who trashes her argument. I also mentioned that some people in the field are also twisting science to further their political causes, and this has been true at least since Lewontin and Gould, and probably much earlier.
You conveniently ignored Birney and Coop's approval. Also the fact that you're bringing up Gould and Lewontin for no apparent reason, just to trash them, as well as the useless snark when pretending to not know, not even google the term HBD, leads me to think you just want to rehash the old wars of the 1990s and aren't in fact debating in good faith. So much for 'obsfuscating science' indeed.
As I said, the God-of-the-gaps argument.
> Also, Pygmies and Northern Europeans are very niche populations with little extant diversity compared to the rest of mankind.
How is this in any way relevant to what I said? I brought these two just as examples. I could bring you examples like these all day long, despite Saini confidently stating these don't exist.
> It's literally my job to work in this kind of stuff. As in, I get paid for working in this, I clock in, have coffee with, have lunch with, clock out and sometimes binge drink with people who get paid for doing this as well. Feel free not to believe me but at this point it's just useless to fling "no you're the one who's wrong" one more time.
I find it funny that you're claiming institutional authority from an anonymous throwaway account. That's not quite how authority works. You cannot just say that you have it, you need to credibly signal it in a non-falsifiable way.
> Common conception of race isn't well-defined and changes depending on culture and whatever the researcher had in mind when they wrote their paper
Same argument is true for dog breeds, and yet people have no difficulty distinguishing a chihuahua from a greyhound. Just like Saini, you keep saying things that are true, but irrelevant, hoping to deflect the attention from the core argument without having to actually address it.
> Models have evolved a little bit since the 19th century.
There were no real models of population genetics in 19th century to speak of. It was basically pioneered by Ronald Fisher in the 1920s. The Price equation I mention was published in 1970s. You'd have known that if you were the expert you claim you are, but as it turns out, you can't even be bothered to consult Wikipedia.
> Also the fact that you're bringing up Gould and Lewontin for no apparent reason, just to trash them
I'm bringing up Lewontin, because Saini brings up Lewontin. I'm also bringing up Gould, because the duo is a famous pair of agenda-pushers in this very field in the name of science.
> as well as the useless snark when pretending to not know, not even google the term HBD
I'm still waiting for you to explain the wrongthink I'm accused of.
> leads me to think you just want to rehash the old wars of the 1990s and aren't in fact debating in good faith.
It's Saini that wants that, of course. By the way, this is another contentless attack designed to deflect attention. I can't help but notice that in the whole thread, you haven't cited a single scientific finding, not a single one indeed. You just keep deflecting, attacking my perceived lack of credentials, while claiming institutional authority from an anonymous throwaway account, accusing me of some wrongthink you cannot even be bother to describe, asking me to consult google what I'm guilty of instead, and at the very end you have the gall of accusing me of not debating in good faith.
Passive
* communication style
* a lack of self-reflection
* inadequate tests
* dishonesty (cognitive complexity)
Active
* prejudice
* dominance
* dishonesty (lying)
I often found that people are rarely introducing bias intentionally, though that does happen. The reasons people attempted to intentionally introduce bias was generally a way to improperly persuade people for a variety of unrelated motivations.
Bias can be as simple as confusion as to a goal, such as when a person states one thing but is actually hoping for something different. This is a disconnection between a person's goal and the terms with which they are willing or capable to express that goal. Reasons for that disconnect could be offense or cultural conventions. This is more easily observable in children who haven't yet mastered the communication skills to mask this confusion.
Sometimes bias creeps in because a person has a strong opinion of a subject and instead of attempting a proof to qualify or disqualify their position on the subject they will shift the evidence as necessary to manipulate an audience. This is common in politics, particularly when the audience themselves are preferentially biased to the emotionally loaded language they are hearing over any complete or partial evidence supporting that language. To some degree this sort of political manipulation is also most commonly unintentional, though it appears exceedingly intention coming from many career politicians.
Most frequently people introduce bias casually to achieve a form of social agreement, because facts and evidence are less important, to many people, than kindness and conformance. There is a sort security provided from achieving stronger social bonds even if that means shifting ground to conform to a different set of norms and values preferred by a group.
You wouldn't think any of this line of thinking would enter science or experimentation, especially when those conducting the experiments are experienced professionals, but it does. I have learned through other professional experiences that objectivity is a personality trait that can be tested for and measured. Objective personality types are rare. Everybody else needs defined boundaries and everybody needs some manner of peer review.
change my view
Assuming you are defining "passive communication" the way the parent comment does, the answer seems clear: passive communication does not engage, examine or disclose its beliefs, but instead papers over their existence and applies them indiscriminately. The passivity of that communication is rooted in tone, but not about conflict avoidance or politeness as the examples listed under active communication suggest - rather, it's a tone of wheedling insistence, if such a racy and vivid metaphor can be accurate.
* the words
* the voice
* body language
Truth only occurs when those three layers are in agreement. This means people are frequently untruthful and generally unaware of just how obvious their lack of candor is to somebody who listens well. Since you are usually not in full cognitive control over your voice and body language, and sometimes even over your words, most of your communication will be passive regardless of your intentions and level of control. It takes a higher state of awareness to be a good liar and that can really age a person.
Yes, the tiniest bit of subjectivity makes something nonobjective. Okay, there is absolutely nothing objective. But things can be more objectively true than others. Science is more objective than theology. A spherical Earth more than a flat one.
Treating objectivity as binary, to constantly make the point that nothing is objective, invites the conclusion that everything is equally subjective. Which is nonsense. I'd like to see us move beyond this black and white model. Post-modernism made some good points (e.g. that those who claimed we could get to 100% objectivity were wrong). But being post-post-modern isn't the same as rejecting them all.
This seems like a pretty reasonable way to frame methods of reason like science and philosophy. For instance, it offers a good explanation for why the scientific method is so effective, even though the explanation may differ from a lot of scientists' philosophy of science which does claim to offer methods which if followed precisely can give guarantees about objective truth.
I start with an assumption: the universe does exist, it's real, and humans can perceive the real universe, although likely with a bunch of filters and biases. Then I also assume that through careful work (identifying filters and biases, setting up good processes to avoid them) we can see the real universe in a truthful way (Plato's cave allegory, and Descartes' Great Deceiver are both interesting explorations into the limits of this idea).
I figure if either of those assumptions is violated (for example if there is some sort of Great Deceiver) we can't really supercede them.
Then, based on those assumptions, I mainly focus on empiricism combined with high quality experimental technique, and a relentless drive to reduce variables which don't contribute directly to the system under study. Think of Galileo's experiment dropping two balls of different mass. When he conducted it in air, if he had used a feather, many people would conclude that heavier objects fall faster. But if air effects are excluded (in vacuum), we can see that feathers fall at the same velocity as heavy balls. This requires some leaps of intuition and also some very careful experimental setup.
Once you've got to that point, you're well set up to start using the great tools of science: microscope, telescope, spectroscope, precision clock. Those immediately give you access to a whole collection of additional high quality data that is not directly available to our senses and intuition. They allow you to collect additional data, and help make confusing things like diseases and stars make a lot more sense (germ theory of disease, our sun is a star that is just very close, and our sun is composed of elements that exist on earth).
Much of what science then studies is as close to objective as we can realistically get- I don't worry too much that gravity, space, time, etc are significantly different from how we perceive them in 4d (it would be interesting if our mental filters really do warp the real universe in a way that we see a very false representation of it).
Once you've reached that point you can build satellites and reduce the likelihood a flat earth compared to a oblate spheroid model. But then it starts to get hard: you will discover relativity and quantum mechanics, both of which are not intuitive and in fact completely counter all our normal expectations. yet they are key theories that help us make and improve technologies like GPS and transistors!
Right now some of the most interesting questions in science are about things we don't have any good experimental apparatus to probe. QM is a great example- we can do all sorts of amazing things with QM in the lab, but our brains can't wrap around the underlying physics at all. Is QM the theory wrong? Is there a better theory, one that's more intuitive and consistent with our daily lives? Probably not; as much as I like the idea of a deterministic universe, it's just an unlikely hypothesis to test.
I don't think post-modernism really was the origin of the idea that objectivity was an ideal, not a real. I think most empiricists have implicitly assumed that we have to work really hard to not fool ourselves.
I once saw an interesting talk, where the presenter didn't understand the difference between relativism and relativity. So they argued that their cosmology (native american) was just as valid as Einstein's theories. I can't really see that as true. I think under any reasonable subjective determination, empirically determined theories of cosmology will do a better job of explaining the observed universe than a spiritually derived one.
I recently learned of a term, "scientism" (after being accused of it while arguing with a religion and philosophy professor who likes to mix buddhism and christianity).
I think that people assuming that the appearance of their thinking = thinking is one of the worst philosophical mistakes that one can make.
You quote Plato with the allegory of the cave. That allegory is him patting himself (and all other "Philosophers") on the back being like "well, if you use dialectics which involves a back and forth between smart people for the purpose of finding truth, than those who have been more rational and dialectical are objectively more fit to rule because the see reality for what it is". This is notably the first written, non-religious justification of authority and hierarchy on the grounds that "the stupid farmers should not rule because they are stupid and don't see reality for what it is"
Why should I assume that the appearance of rationality describes reality? Why should I assume that the laws of thought correspond to the material world? I'm tired of listening to folks tell me that we can metaphysical prove Aristotle's the physical existence of the laws of logic (law of identity, law of excluded middle, law of double negation elimination) when it's so bloody easy to find counterexamples. Here's an easy one: "This sentence is false"
This is why global optimization methods like Simulated Annealing or Genetic Algorithms rely so heavily in efficient exploration of a state space, and why they can easily solve adversarial reinforcement learning problems that backprop techniques (get "global solution" by moving closer to locally better solutions) fail at (the cart hill climbing problem being the classic one)
I'm willing to believe that there are local "solutions" which appear to get better solutions to a problem than random, but I have no reason to believe that my solutions which appear better correspond to actually better solutions (I may have failed at evaluating the correct measure of "good") , or even that by moving towards the appearance of a better solution that it gets me closer to the global solution (which is why backprop fails on cart hill climbing)
tl;dr the post modernists are right on this one and science needs to immediately dispel it's platonic rationalist roots because it's basically just applying backprop (Plato would call it the "dialectic") to a philosophical problem and hoping that human thoughts gets us closer to truth because it appears rational to us. Yeah, actually, you should put the astrik on all science that says "may not actually correspond to truth because we don't know what truth is"
Wokeness begins, just like many religions, with an original, unforgivable sin. That ultimate trespass becomes the lens through which all of modern life is viewed, no matter how remote it sits in the past. Like a religion, wokeness can't help but try to insert its core values of humility and service of the Higher Purpose into everything, no matter how inappropriate. Its adherents are pushy about how they want you to think, and what they want you to value, because they believe there is a higher truth that pervades any worldly endeavor. It has certain non-negotiable tenets, which it refuses to compromise on despite the massive cognitive dissonance required to achieve such a stance amidst the avalanche of evidence against them. If scientific or practical empiricism seems to conflict with these pre-commitments, they will muddy the water and move the goalposts. And of course, woke disciples reserve the right to be massively offended if you blaspheme against one of these core principles. Wokeness is perfectly eager to put its hand out to the state to get a leg up on its authoritarian, missionary purpose. But they do this because, like any other religion, they know that this will be best for all of us in the end. And just like other religions, I imagine it finds comparisons of this sort to be absurd; of course all of _those_ religions are evil, they're the wrong ones!
Wokeness, just like a religion, gathered a following based on some fundamentally decent ideas that lie near its center. But they come packaged with a one-size-fits-all worldview that tries to bite off far, far more than it can chew. Just like a religion, it doesn't necessarily reflect overmuch about its practitioners that they have converted. That fact indicates at most a slight inclination towards credulity and collectivism, as opposed to individualism and free thinking. But just like religion, it could just as easily represent the bad luck of growing up in the wrong area, or with the wrong parents, or perhaps just bad enough circumstances to need that kind of structure and externally-sourced meaning.
It seems that the agenda to put the whole world off of religion has not been as successful as the average coastal intellectual might have thought. I can't help but wonder whether we will be subject to the same ebb and flow of authoritarianism that generations of Judeo-Christian and Islamic constituencies exercised in the past. The church bumping against truth is a story as old as time, but it seems like it's harder than we thought to really learn that lesson.
Here we have a classic piece of Woken apologia trying to square classic Woken ideals with the reality that there are groupings of genes amongst people. It wants to smuggle faulty, incomplete understanding of genetics to avoid the evidence written on the wall. It's not doing this for a nefarious purpose - the Woken believe that all men and women should be treated equally, which is a noble ideal. But the reason they think this is derived from a deeper truth, which is that all men and women are fundamentally born as the same creature, and then shaped purely by experience. They believe that because It Is Written. Because that is True, things get tricky when they try to square the Truth with the reality that there are non-trivial separations of historical development in the human genome, and those genetic lines end up looking different because of the forces that shaped them along their unique genetic history. Of course this is common sense - anybody can tell that there are distinct groupings of slightly-phenotypically-different people in the world, and the science confirms this intuitive fact. So the Woken need to muddy the water by reminding us the limits of our knowledge. What really counts as a race - can you count me all the races? What are the motivations of these so-called scientists trying to prop up the "theory" of race, a theory that need I remind you became intimately linked to the Nazis?
When you read something like this, try to picture a Creationist with the same general motives. The Creationist's letter wants to smuggle a faulty, incomplete understanding of biology to avoid the evidence written on the wall that evolution is real. It's not doing this for a nefarious purpose - Creationists believe that we should all love and respect our fellow man. But the reason they think this is derived from a deeper truth, which is that men and women are God's people, made in God's image, as documented in the Bible. They believe that because It Is Written. Because that is True, things get tricky when they try to square the Truth with the reality that the evidence for the nature of evolutionary history is written everywhere, and the fossil record plainly confirms this. Of course, this is common sense - anybody can see the inevitability of evolution once it's explained to them. So the Creationists need to muddy the water by reminding us of the limits of our knowledge. How many of these connecting fossils have we really found? What are the motivations of these so-called scientists trying to prop up the "theory" of evolution, a theory that need I remind you, was intimately linked with Social Darwinism?
Race (the social construct) is a proxy which only loosely correlates with genetic history. But, generally scientists believe that genetic history does allow for distinct groupings with meaningful differences. A simple example would be northern europeans with genetic differences that allow adults to drink lactose from animal milk without getting sick (an example of mutation natural selection).
It's not even controversial that higher skin melanin (associated with "black" or "dark" skin) is protective against higher solar radiation, again this is somethign that is part of genetic history, and also gets convolved with "race" frequently.
Nothing I said above is eugenics as practiced by Galton (whom we also have to thank for many important scientific contributions which last to today), or the scientists at Cold Spring Harbor Lab. They are cold, hard facts supported by immense data and are generally accepted within the field.
The correlation is not loose -- it is extremely tight.
For example, take this study: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S153561081...
> To avoid confusion, in this manuscript, we categorize genetic ancestry as EA, AA, EAA, and NA, and self-identified race from TCGA as White, Black, Asian, and American Indians, and Alaska Natives. For patients with race information in TCGA, we observed that 95.6% of categorizations based on the k-NN algorithm following principal-component analysis (PCA) were consistent with race, suggesting that race and genetic ancestry identified by our approach appear to be highly correlated across TCGA patients.
Or this much bigger one: https://sci-hub.tw/https://www.cell.com/ajhg/fulltext/S0002-...
> Among nearly 202,000 individuals with SIRE [self-identified race/ethnicity], 1,079 (0.53%) had GIA [genetically-inferred ancestry] strongly indicating a different racial/ethnic group.
These aren't two loosely correlated concepts; they're one and the same.
one thing you'll learn in genetics is that it's all statistics; not all europeans are lactose tolerant, and not all africans are lactose intolerant. But the trends are consistent with natural selection via multiple experimental methods.
This article is the identity politics monstrosity coming to take more control.
And I think suggesting that people do human breeding for desired traits would probably still be fairly unpopular.
I think my post is still in some sense a refutation of the selected quote in the parent.
Not necessarily; Yao Ming seemed to be pretty popular.
...because? He comes from an intentional breeding program on the part of the Chinese government. What more do you want? There's a big difference between "what are we doing?" and "how much are we doing it?".