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Comment by jayGlow | Hacker News Reader

Does he not meet the criteria of a famous professor?

Maybe you could start with an actual practicing scientist. One problem you're going to run into here is that, as I said, this is an active area of study. If these papers are firing offenses, someone ought to be telling HR.

Person 1: give me an example of someone who was kicked out of academia for uncomfortable truths.

Person 2: [gives examples]

Person 1: oh ho! But those people are not in academia any more! They're not "practicing scientists"!

Person 2: ...

Yes, me and my Calvinball rule of "actual scientist prevented from publishing on this subject".

There's a kind of Schneierism thing that happens in these threads; like: I could ask, ok, name a scientist practicing in this field. They exist, but they don't have names your 3rd grade science teacher knows.

...I don't think Watson was kicked out for "uncomfortable truths", but because his conclusions kept overstepping the evidence he presented, and in particularly sexist or racist ways.

Again, to be explicit: he did not establish that his claims were true.

That is why it's quite worthwhile to ask if Watson is the best example available. The guy was pretty openly and casually sexist, and his racism wasn't much better.

Even stipulating the imprecise language here, he couldn't "establish that his claims were true", because he did not work in these fields. This is a pop science argument where any "scientist" can just "do science" to answer deep or controversial questions, but obviously that't not how science actually works. His racist comments pertained to several highly specialized fields of study, none of which he worked in. You might as well have asked Neil DeGrasse Tyson.

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