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Comment by jimbokun | Hacker News Reader

Bias may be unavoidable, but it should be rooted out to the greatest extent possible. This is a core principle central to human advancement. It is central to the scientific method, and liberal societies generally.

Fringe positions can be revolutionary and important. More often, they are reactionary and not well thought out. There is nothing wrong with advocating for a fringe position. But you better have the intellectual goods, and not just win arguments by default by suppressing dissent.

The latter is activism. Controversy should mean giving opposing view points a fair shake and judging between them by the strength of the data and arguments supporting them. Not by university administrations unilaterally deciding and declaring dissent as "unsafe" for the students who don't want to be exposed to anything that challenges their world views.

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I think it's important to understand what bias is. Bias is not having an opinion. Bias is when several particulars to you influence your opinions in ways that don't reflect certain values, like the common good, truth, accurate representations of the matter, or similar values. I also think conveying certainty when there is none is a form of bias (when advocating for change, for example), as is equally advocating for absolute ignorance where there are some principles we can have confidence is.

That's different from neutrality, which for me is avoiding expressing opinions at all. I think neutrality is valuable if otherwise dialogue would be misinterpreted or cause conflict. Conversations need a well moderated (safe, welcoming, with vigilance for good-faith discussion) and freely exchanging environment to be productive, otherwise I think neutrality is the best option. Neutrality is also a good option when there are different cultural notions/opinions that can coexist without coming into conflict (this is a case where promoting uniformity and uniform agreement can be harmful, I believe! -- like, we don't need to agree that basketball is superior to football or something like that).

The issue here is Overton Window.

> Bias may be unavoidable, but it should be rooted out to the greatest extent possible

That's not the way I'd phrase it. Bias should aim towards truth.

Unbiased signal treats Young Earth Creationism and the geologically- and astronomically-rooted theory of long time as equivalently valid viewpoints.

The bias should be, for hard sciences, on the scientific method and evidence-based reasoning.

I don't know man?

Maybe for math and science you can do this? But history, is bias and indoctrination.

What Germans learned about WWII during the 70's and 80's was significantly different than what, say, Russians or Americans learned about WWII during the 70's and 80's. And what Russians and Americans learned about WWII was slightly different from each other as well.

Even within a nation. In Florida slavery will be taught more as a precursor to legal immigration, in Minnesota it will be taught as an evil and an affront to humanity.

History all depends on what you want to indoctrinate the kids with. Which, in turn, all depends almost totally on your bias.

You do not need bias to win the case for the Earth being >6,000 years old. An unbiased presentation of the empirical data at our disposal is sufficient to make that case very strongly.

> The bias should be, for hard sciences, on the scientific method and evidence-based reasoning.

That is the opposite of bias.

There's an old saw in the AI community about Minsky talking to a student training a tic-tac-toe neural net. When he asked why the net was randomly-wired initially, the student responded that they didn't want it to have preconceptions of how to play. Minksy responded that it still had preconceptions; we just didn't know what they were.

Eliminating bias is a mu-goal. An unbiased electrical pin isn't a perfect signal; it's a floating input, passing along whatever radio flux slips through it. Our goal is always to seek out the right biases.

I must be missing something; doesn't everyone already think their biases are the right biases?

Generally. But some people are correct in that opinion and some are incorrect.

We can fool ourselves frequently. Nature cannot be fooled.

I'm not convinced.

Homo sapiens have had access to nature for 160,000 years. We've spent a lot of time thinking we've folded nature when we had no right to. Why should I think now is any different?

if one believes in objective reality, it stands to reason that it is possible for a person to believe things that match to that reality and it is possible for a person to believe things that do not match to that reality.

My claim is we should bias towards believing things that match to reality. Seeking "unbias" is seeking ignorance.

I've given up that people are capable of understanding basic concepts like operationalization let alone identify when and where they are doing it in their day to day life. The closer someone positions themselves as a rationalist, the further they are from understanding how they are participating in the collective action of coloring reality with their biases.

It might be theoretically possible for people to inch toward objective reality, I've never seen it work in practice. It's a failed ideology and for some reason folks believe that this, the millionth time, it's going to work.

This is one of those issues where I find myself both disagreeing and sympathizing with everyone involved. We desperately need collective truth, reconciliation and forgiveness on a societal level. Without that, these issues are just going to get worse and worse as all sides continue yelling at each other and we all retreat inside of our protective bubbles. The supposed woke mind virus has equally infected the left and the right, which increasingly mirror each other in their demonization of the other side and unwillingness to engage in good faith. No one is immune, not least those who claim to be above the fray.

> But you better have the intellectual goods, and not just win arguments by default by suppressing dissent. / The latter is activism.

Isn't that what conservatives are actively, openly doing everywhere - suppressing dissent in libraries, universities, business (ESG, DEI, etc.), society, courts, political protest, media - suppressing liberal dissent?

It's tough to call DEI "dissent" when it is broadly mandated by HR departments, university administrations, and in many cases state law.

It's an interesting question (and I upvoted you, though I'm the GP):

First, dissent is mostly about speech, IMHO, and DEI is only incidentally about speech. But let's look at it as an act that contests the status quo.

The point of DEI is to change the status quo, in which power, status, wealth, and freedom are distributed disproportionately to white males. A widespread belief (that I share, but I'm trying to examine this neutrally) is that it's largely due to racism and sexism that are historic, current, and systemic [0]. The whole point of DEI is to change that.

DEI has been embraced by many in power, making it an odd 'dissent', though maybe that's just a successful dissent - it's an generations-old dissent that people finally came around to. At the same time, it's still a dissent against the many status quo powers that are fighting against DEI.

[0] By 'systemic', I mean it's a product of a system that nobody quite chooses, but as long as everyone keeps operating it, it produces these results. For example, disproportionate hiring of white males could be because hiring is based on your personal network, which is based on who you work with, etc., and it becomes circular. People don't have to be seeking racist outcomes to produce them.

I'm having a hard time parsing this. Is your claim that ESG, DEI, etc are part of conservatives suppressing liberal dissent?

I mean that the suppression of those things is part of conservatives suppressing liberal dissent.

I see the problem; I'll fix it. Thanks!

Conservatives have very little control or influence over libraries, universities, business HR programs, or the broad media (excluding some notable explicitly conservative outlets).

But yes, the ham fisted attempts by conservative politicians to combat purported progressive censorship...with conservative censorship...is equally bad.

Republican legislatures have been banning books from libraries. Libraries are government institutions. State universities are also government institutions. Florida has been forcing state schools, stifling the speech of the faculty on exactly what this article is about.

Has Florida been banning books from universities?!

"Schools" usually means K-12 schools.

> Conservatives have very little control or influence over libraries

Conservatives have banned books from libraries across Florida and Texas (and other states)

> universities

Conservatives have compelled universities to reverse hiring decisions (at U. NC and one of the TX schools at least), end programs (e.g., Harvard's disinformation program), driven out university presidents (Harvard, Penn), and much, much more. In Florida they've banned certain ideas, they've undermined entire schools where they didn't like the politics.

> business HR programs

Conservatives have caused a huge pullback in DEI programs in the corporate world.

> broad media (excluding some notable explicitly conservative outlets).

That's a major exception: Fox News is by far the most popular news channel in the US; the Wall Street Journal is by far the dominant US publication for business.

> the ham fisted attempts by conservative politicians to combat purported progressive censorship

What does banning books and ideas from education have to do with combating censorship?

As others have said, we all have biases, but it seems that American Conservatives are tripped up by them more in an academic context than other groups.

It is not controversial in academia that the Earth is on the order of billions of years old, animals change over time via evolution, or that carbon dioxide has a greenhouse effect. And yet within the American political context, they are controversial.

That you cannot name any similar biases by people on the left...clearly shows where your biases lie.

Indeed, I am not aware of instances where the left disagrees so ardently with firmly established science. There are certainly some disputes where the science gets a bit more squishy, but frankly there's a reason that I was driven away from Christianity by right-wing ideologues who also denied science.

> I am not aware of instances where the left disagrees so ardently with firmly established science

Let me introduce you to the "lab leak hypothesis", which was decried as racist for years by prominent Democrats and scientists. It lost this reputation around the time that another prominent liberal (Jon Stewart) saw fit to mock its detractors on national TV a while back. This was not firmly established science at first, but those on the left made impossible to even discuss in mixed company, which shut down the conversation and any rational investigations.

For other examples, check out Vinay Prasad's writings. He's a Bernie supporter, a UCSF professor, and the rare progressive who is willing to call out hypocrisy and graft even when it appears on the left.

Indeed, I do not think that there are firmly established facts as to the origin of Covid-19.

One firmly-established fact is that it was not unreasonable to consider the lab leak hypothesis. This fact was anathema in progressive circles.

And to me, as a Chinese-American person, it was insulting (and a bit bizarre) to insist that it's "racist" to say the virus leaked from a lab, rather than having spread via an unsanitary wet market. But this was the party line, and many people toe'd it for years.

Prasad clearly has another agenda or two to serve.

I have wondered about this, but the most I've come up with is that he is making a name for himself as a heterodox thinker. This would incentivize him to be critical of orthodoxies in medicine/higher education, and could explain why he takes some of the positions he has taken.

On the other hand, it seems that there almost zero medical professionals on the left who are interested in debating him and showing how he has been wrong about various topics. He calls for universities to host debates on these topics of public concern, but pretty much no one is willing to do it. This makes me think it is somewhat less likely that he is just completely wrong, and more likely that he is the one saying that various (naked) emperors have no clothes. I'm sure he's not always right, but much of what he says seems quite plausible to me (a fairly well-educated person with some understanding of statistics).

I'd love to know where folks have mounted successful critiques of his work, or if he has any conflicts of interest that he doesn't mention.

I have seen a number of pieces claiming that there are no biological differences between men and women that would lead to men having a clear cut advantage in athletic competitions.

I remember reading something like that in The Atlantic which was roundly criticized because it was stupid. August thought The Atlantic may be, I don't consider it a scientific publication; what articles are you referring to?

What published scientific articles cite the age of the Earth as 6000 years?

Cranks exist across the political spectrum.

There are many people in my life (that I care about and respect) who believe in young earth creationism; I do not believe it’s actually a fringe belief in the US.

That said, I do not believe they would do well in a science/academic role because it shows a clear disregard for many separate academic disciplines at this point. And these religious views are not evenly distributed across the political spectrum.

Ok, sure.

I don’t think people who believe there are no significant biological sex differences should be in a science/academic role either.

I think one would be hard-pressed to find anyone who claims there are no significant differences (at some point, the question reduces to one of definition).

The argument is over what those differences are, how much they matter (i.e. a 1% difference in the mean? Who cares), and how malleable they are given modern medical science.

(And that's before one gets on the topic of whether those differences should imply a societal structure that pigeon-holes people based on their biological sex).

I’ve never met anyone who has said this, and I’ve worked in quite left wing spaces for a long time. I believe you may have fallen for some caricature or other of the left. I’ve no doubt someone has said that, but I think you’d find that belief in bigfoot or flat earth is more common, because it’s quite apparent to most that there are indeed differences between sexes. I think what tends to trip people up are what I call “dude looks like a lady” situations where people, either through accident of birth or other means, appear androgynous; it seems gender is more of a bimodal distribution rather than a strict binary. Again, this seems rather apparent to me just having met some people who don’t exactly fit the mold, but apparently this is also something of a political controversy.

To be fair, the way I read what Yale is trying to do, we would get rid of the deluge of nonsensical garbage that we've been subjected to for the past few decades. Peer review would be reinstituted in its original form. The bar gets wayyy higher. And your activities become activism when you don't have the independent replications to back up your assertions.

This could be a Godsend with respect to stopping the assault on science. Conservatives would be very unlikely, for instance, to get their "studies" independently replicated by non conservatives.

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