systemstops

That was devastating to a summer camp that do so volunteer IT work for. By the time they called me, the data was long gone.

Maybe it will be a shot in arm for Wikipedia to make some needed reforms.

Yeah, I guess you're right - came out last night while I was sleeping.

I hope so, but that would require of rolling back some changes they made that led to ideological biases, which would be fought tooth and nail.

Grokipedia literally just came out a few hours ago. So this article was already in the can before they could even test it.

It's got some obvious bias right now, but some articles are already better than Wikipedia - for example on the origin of Covid. I'm not really going to trust either one of them for the foreseeable future.

It will get better. This is only version 0.1.

It's fine it this was some blog, but this is supposed to be "serious" journalism. It comes off as childish and unprofessional.

Calling people "Silicon Valley freaks" is really trashy.

Something similar that collects news from various sources, plus it adds social media context: https://truenorthnews.app/

Public policies were made (or justified) based on some of this research. People used this "settled science" to make consequential decisions.

Stereotype threat for example was widely used to explain test score gaps as purely environmental, which contributed to the public seeing gaps as a moral emergency that needed to be fixed, leading to affirmative action policies.

Those things were not done by awful people though - they all thought they were serving the public good. We only judge it as awful now because of the results. Nearly of these ideas (Lysenkoism I think was always fringe) were embraced by the educated elites of the time.

Is anyone tracking how much damage to society bad social science has done? I imagine it's quite a bit.

THOUSANDS of young girls were sexually exploited for YEARS and the government did nothing about it because they didn't want to appear to be racist. There is no equivalence with any of the "average" sex crimes that happen in modern advanced nations. There really is no equivalence with anything that has happened recently - it is a crime unique in its depravity.

Personally, I would rate the grooming gangs scandal as one of the worse things that happened to a western nation in decades. It literally made me sick to stomach when I read the details. I think the obsession is somewhat justified.

> I started working with folks from the UK right at the start when social media really took off, and I personally think that what ails the UK is the same as what ails the world. Too much social media.

There have been a number of public scandals regarding immigrant crimes, along with subsequent anti-immigrant riots started via social media and people being sent to jail for internet posts. Social media seems to be more of accelerant for social unrest than than the cause. For me (an outsider) observing the situation, it seems to be mainly caused by immigration.

Healthcare coverage generally comes with any fulltime job. It's cheap for individuals (I pay about $150/month) but gets more expensive with families, which is a real problem. Most medications are cheap. The only medications I've heard of that are expensive are new ones not yet approved by the insurer. I pay less than $10/month for my medications.

It's a social construct in the way that all categories are. The question is whether or not a category is useful. I'm saying there are genetic differences between groups, but our structuring of these groups is pretty flexible. There are genetic differences between "continental groups" but there is also a good amount of genetic diversity within sub-Saharan Africa populations because those people did not go through the genetic bottleneck that Eurasians did.

Our understanding of race have been historically contingent. Both the racial essentialism of the colonial period and the "we are all the same under the skin" anti-racism of post-WW2 were based more on political ideologies than reality.

Race is a social construct, but one loosely based on biological reality. As we unravel the mystery of human origins using ancient DNA, we are starting to get a better understanding of the how different groups came to be.

The idea what we are a homogenous species with no biologically important distinctions between groups - which became popular in the postwar period - is coming to end. But, we are also not returning to racial essentialism of the past. The new narrative of human differences will be far more complicated.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41588-025-02117-1

Sorry, not my intent to flamebait. I'll drop it.

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How would you know when the problem is solved though? If you look at average earnings of groups and correct for IQ, the gap disappears. If you want all groups to score the same on tests of cognitive ability, we've been trying to do that for decades with no success. Every attempt to create a test where all groups get the same average have failed. Sorry, it sucks, but it's the truth.

Both things can be true. That fact is that some groups that were discriminated against now thrive, and some don't (even after trillions of dollars in public spending). That is why cognitive testing is helpful at figuring out what is going on.

New ideas, such as the US was "founded on enslaved Black people" really only gained attention the last few years because of our inability to solve the gaps. People wanted an explanation, so the past had to be retconned. The other Anglo colonies - Canada, Australia, New Zealand - never had slavery and ended up about as well off as the US.

Based on the theory that gaps between groups are caused by systemic factors. The gaps exist, so an explanation and fix is needed, which is morally commendable. The problem is that the theory is far too overconfident and completely ignores the fact that the gaps also show up in cognitive testing.

People still argue what things made a small city state (Athens) suddenly become the cornerstone of western civilization. That fact is that we have these explosions of human potential where certain groups of people in certain environments make massive leaps, and we don't what the magic sauce is. It's great when it happens, but It's foolish to think that we can somehow socially engineer the same results through brute force, which is the problem with DEI thinking. That is also why so many companies are silently ditching those policies.

"If these are the conditions under which passionate creative problem solving thrives, then of course we must recover them to make software great again. But they are not."

This doesn't make any sense. Obviously those conditions lead to incredible thriving in the past. This guy is basically arguing that because it doesn't work now (in a super diverse globalized world) that it never actually worked.

These are the same kind of "they just got lucky" arguments I see constantly to downplay the achievements of any specific group of people.

Perhaps instead of fact checking, we could compare the previous narratives with known public knowledge of the events, to determine if the narratives provided an accurate view of reality. It is easy to distort the truth and still tell no lies.

Not sure why this is being downvoted. Here is summary of numerous articles warning that political advocacy by scientists would backfire.

https://open.substack.com/pub/unsafescience/p/we-tried-to-wa...

This is idiotic. Also I've heard this quote multiple times the last few days - is it some meme?

Wouldn't the ability to "ask the right questions" require that AI could update its own weights, as those weights determine which questions can be asked?