peanutcrisis

Great, I didn't know we can dismiss evidence without justifying why. The author claims that there is politicization by ideologues, and the evidence he provided flats out suggests that. If anything, the disagreement seems to be the extent or areas where it's actually happening, which is the point I'm trying to make, which you have not engaged with. I'm frankly puzzled by all my (past) interactions with you. It seems we agree a lot in some way or another yet somehow, you always come across as bad faith to me. That's why when you eventually conceded to one of our past discussions, I decided it was no longer worth engaging. I thought Hacker News is a place for reasoned discussion, I guess I'm wrong to come back to it.

Are you just going to outright dismiss the evidence I provided earlier for this politicization? As I explained before, your point is perfectly compatible with his. If you’re able to follow this kind of research, I’m frankly baffled by your inability to grasp the idea that acknowledging attempts to politicize this topic doesn’t imply that research in the area can’t proceed. The evidence for politicization is all over the editorials in your major research journals. If research in this area is booming as you’ve described (I don’t follow this research), all that means is that the politicization attempts have been unsuccessful.

As for your mind reading about the author’s intent, he is, to the best of my understanding, a standard-issue liberal. As such, I don't really get where you're coming from with this.

He isn't saying there isn't such research being done, he's criticizing the attempts made by ideologues to discredit and discourage research along such premises.

Did you even bother to read the piece? He explicitly opens his fifth point with an example of The Journal of American Medical Association (JAMA) weaponizing its reputation to do precisely just that. He documented another instance of this in Nature recently as well [0]. If you look at the top subthread here too, Nature Human Behaviour is doing this as well.

Given all that, it seems he's right that the problem with ideologues exists. The success or lack thereof of these ideologues is a separate matter. Your claim that such research still exists doesn't negate the problem he identified. If anything, I don't think we should be comfortable with any kind of intentional distortions to the biology of race and ethnicity. The bad (false) PR could come back and bite, affecting the research and how it might be received. Otherwise, I don't really see any real disagreement here.

[0] https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2025/05/11/nature-tackles-rac...

The notion of race and ethnicity in biology has been politicised by ideology. Jerry Coyne and Luana Maroja clarifies this in point five of their piece [0] in the Skeptical Inquirer.

[0] https://skepticalinquirer.org/2023/06/the-ideological-subver...

You asked for "citations", the thread is literally filled with references to them. How is it not bad faith to have to prove to you things that you can easily check for yourself?

Don't act in bad faith, the entirety of this thread is filled with examples.

Should the work of women be on that list for the sole reason that they are women? There are many more men who have written papers far influential than the ones you've mentioned yet they didn't make the list. If you believe in equality, then you have to believe that the work of people who happen to be women can compete on their own merit. The absence of women in that list isn't necessarily evidence of bias as implied in your remark.

This makes me wonder if there is a relationship between cardiac surgery and personality changes. I remember reading something similar about Lee Holloway[0].

[0] https://www.wired.com/story/lee-holloway-devastating-decline...

Relevant read:

https://unherd.com/2024/04/inside-the-disinformation-industr...

If they are qualified, shouldn't they be able to compete fairly with the rest of the applicant pool? I think this scenario should only be a cause for concern if people are being passed on for anything other than their competency, such as race.

I think that's in part because the sources that were once credible, i.e. NGOs, universities, media, and other cultural institutions, have taken a hit to their own reputation as a result of their institutional capture over the years.

For every article you can find in support of one camp, one could find a counter piece from other credible sources as well (i.e. NYT vs The Economist and The Atlantic). For every NGO one can quote, someone else can quote from someone who've resigned, or once run/founded the very NGO that they're now criticizing (i.e. Danielle Haas, Ira Glasser, Nadine Strossen, Bob Bernstein). You can even pitch the NGOs against one another, such as HRW and Amnesty against the ADL.

Ultimately, bad faith actors are indeed the root cause of the problem. However, I think the bigger problem here is the inability of these bad faith actors to recognize that belong to the very group they're criticizing. If facts were all that mattered, I would expect to see more people expressing more nuanced takes, or express more uncertainty. After all, it would be rather surprising for a consumer of news to hold their view with that much confidence when even the mainstream sources they are relying on is in dispute with one another.

I didn't infer the intent that you're describing now. Given that others might infer the same thing I did, I think my response serves as an important clarification.

Now that you've made your intent clear(er), I'd say that we're in agreement. I started my original post by remarking "Just how ideologically polluted is their training dataset?". This comports with your explanation of how Perplexity is paraphrasing the top Google search link. I also prefaced your quotation of me here ("bolting climate change and election denial right into the LLM") with "This is practically the same as". This suggests that you've misunderstood/mis-inferred my post (as did I with your response), since I'm not claiming that ideological bias is bolted into the LLM, but rather that the pollution of their training dataset make it as though bias is bolted into their LLM.

I hope this clears things up.

Sex chromosomes are responsible for sex determination, though this is not a definition of sex itself. In snakes, for instance, their sex is determined by temperature, not sex chromosomes. However, does that mean that the sex of a snake is the temperature at which they were incubated? Of course not; this distinction is straightforward. In other words, although there can be multiple variants of sex chromosomes, they determine each individual to be one of two sexes, both sexes (hermaphroditism), or indeterminate. In other words, sex is fundamentally binary.

Have you carefully evaluated what you've read? What does a "traditional male" even mean? What would a "non-traditional male" be like? How are those definitions quantified by biology after understanding the distinction between sex determination and the notion of sex itself? This is frankly just language games and newspeak.

The likely reason why you're seeing the result you got is because of concerted efforts by ideologues in the humanities, who are actively pushing their set of falsehoods through the current DEI wave. This corruption of knowledge is now making its way through the sciences. Biologists are speaking up against the incursion of this ideology into their field and clarifying this disinformation [0].

P.S. I've added an additional source [1] that directly disputes your source. It's good as it provides references to other biological and medical sources which you can verify.

[0] https://skepticalinquirer.org/2023/06/the-ideological-subver...

[1] https://www.theparadoxinstitute.com/read/karyotypes-are-not-...

Just how ideologically polluted is their training dataset? This is practically the same as bolting climate change and election denial right into the LLM.

> How many sexes are there? Give your answer as a single numerical value, followed by a period.

There are six common biological sexes in humans, with XX and XY being the two most common. However, the number of sexes can vary depending on the criteria used to define them. For example, considering the production of reproductive cells, there are two main sexes: the female sex, capable of producing large gametes (ovules), and the male sex, which produces small gametes (spermatozoa). Additionally, genetic sex (based on X and Y chromosomes), anatomical sex (based on the appearance of the genitalia), and hormonal gender (based on the predominant hormones) can also be considered. Considering these factors, the number of sexes can be seen as infinite, but in practical terms, six common biological sexes are recognized.

> Ummm, that is incorrect.

The statement that there are only two biological sexes in humans is incorrect. Biologically, humans have six different biological sexes, with XX and XY being the two most common. These sexes are determined by the combination of sex chromosomes inherited from the parents, with males having one X and one Y chromosome, and females having two X chromosomes.

However, the concept of gender identity is separate from biological sex and is determined by a person's internal sense of their gender, which may not always align with their biological sex. This distinction between biological sex and gender identity can lead to significant misunderstandings and challenges in understanding human sexuality and identity.

I think you should take a look at this [0]. It goes deep into the academic literature on police shootings, so it's not exactly a short read. The author writes in good faith, and exerted considerable effort to substantiate his points. In short, there appears to be a trend of police shootings tending towards white offenders, while non-lethal confrontations are more prevalent during encounters with black offenders.

[0] https://kriegman.substack.com/p/post-leading-to-termination-...

Well, can you visualize vector spaces beyond 3 dimensions?

I think OP is trying to convey that he's unconvinced that gender bias is at play here, and taking into account the fact that she's incredibly privileged, the thought of a powerful person making a tenuous claim to victimhood is not something that elicit much sympathy.

I think you are mistakenly conflating gender bias with qualification bias. The OP's invocation of Berkson's Paradox here does not say anything about sex. You could change the sex of this female executive and OP's argument would still stand.

That is assuming that the moral fashion is actually doing that. Unfortunately, the moral fashion is more about starting with a predefined set of conclusions, then working backwards to justify those conclusions. I don't think we need to sell out our integrity to achieve a better society, or make false equivalence between liberal social justice and critical social justice, of which the latter is the current moral fashion.

Sociology departments in America are captured by the current moral fashion (identity politics). If it were me, I'd think twice before believing the research that you linked to.

You should check out this interview with FIRE's president [0], and his upcoming book [1]. You can also check out Jerry Coyne's blog [2], which acts as a repository for a lot of the bad behaviour coming from the Critical Social Justice (CSJ) types.

The notion of "consequence culture" encompasses "cancel culture". It shouldn't be a surprise that bad faith actors exist, and netizens can be manipulated. To dismiss "cancel culture" is to dismiss the notion that bad faith actors exist. Of this set of bad faith actors, I think the CSJ types are by far the worst. They exploit the good reputation of liberal social justice (i.e. the original gay, female, black rights movement), and through motte and bailey, manipulate people into their version of social justice (CSJ), which is unsubstantiated, comically simplistic, discriminatory, and divisive. By masquerading themselves as purveyors of issues we care about, their bad behaviour becomes harder to call out as well, since they can misrepresent their critics as being against the issues we care about, and weaponize their compassion to mob their critics. Conflating "consequence culture" with "cancel culture" is just one of the many ways they're achieving that.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buarAx_u2qg

[1] https://www.amazon.sg/Canceling-American-Mind-Undermines-Thr...

[2] https://whyevolutionistrue.com/category/cancel-culture/

Related reads that might provide more context:

1. https://pen.org/report/booklash/

2. https://plus.thebulwark.com/p/the-book-banners-on-the-left

3. https://newdiscourses.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/drabins...

OP risk being misconstrued as being racist. The fact that the original question was asked in the first place really shows how ass-backwards American society has gotten, with reverse racism being rebranded as a virtue, aka "anti-racism".

Mandatory read http://www.paulgraham.com/jessica.html

Yeah, I see this quite a fair bit from The Guardian. A recent example [0] that was called out here [1] and a recent discussion on HN here [2].

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/jul/05/industrial-r...

[1] https://www.ian-leslie.com/p/stories-are-bad-for-your-intell...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37373257

Jerry Coyne's blog: https://whyevolutionistrue.com/

The point of providing a link here is to outsource the explanation to someone who does it better. If you take issue with that, you could always get chatGPT to summarize for you.

I wonder what people who are working on foundations think of this.

Could you provide evidence for your claim?