[wycs]

Cochran is a genius, but not for everyone. There are certain facts that are taboo to acknowledge, possibly for good reasons. Cochran does not abide taboos. If you keep reading his stuff, it is very likely to shock and offend you.

[woodruffw]

Substitute "genius" with "scientific racist" and "facts" with "unsubstantiated claims about race and sex," and you've got the rest right.

Not everybody is interested in racist/anti-semetic canards[1][2] and claims about gay viruses[3].

[1]: https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2014/03/23/the-son-also-rises...

[2]: https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2018/04/08/live-not-by-lies/

[3]: https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2012/02/16/depths-of-madness/

[wycs]

Yes, I find those are extremely shocking and offensive.

[woodruffw]

And, more importantly, just plain incorrect.

We praise people for speaking truth to power, not for twisting the truth to fit a reactionary worldview.

[wycs]

We should praise people for speaking truth. Power has nothing to do with it. Cognitive genomics will confirm or disconfirm all the really shocking and offensive stuff very shortly. I have my priors and you have yours. We will see how it pans out.

In general we should do our best not to be offended by descriptive claims and hypotheses, as reality is not constrained by ideology, though we may pretend it is.

[eesmith]

5+6 = 11. Where's my praise? 9-5=4. I deserve more praise.

The cashier told me my bill was $4.33, just like it said on the display. I praised him for speaking truth.

Sarcasm aside, woodruffw's emphasis was on "truth", with the clear statement that Cochrane is not expressing truths but is making "unsubstantiated claims about race and sex" which are "just plain incorrect".

You earlier write that these are "facts that are taboo to acknowledge". If they are "facts", then why do we have to wait to "confirm or disconfirm all the really shocking and offensive stuff"? Shouldn't we have the facts already?

If we have to wait for confirmation then that's an hypothesis.

[iguy]

You have an infallible source for this correctness? Offensive to some, sure, not NYT material... that's OK.

We have a lot to learn about viruses. And viral-like ways in which life uses genetic material, that don't quite fit into how we're used to thinking. Probably he's wrong about this idea, but generating lots of such hypotheses & finding ways to test them seems like a great idea.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17540094

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16139798

[woodruffw]

Science isn't about infallibility, it's about overwhelming bodies of evidence supporting a conclusion inductively.

There is overwhelming evidence, anthropological and biological, that homosexuality is (at least!) as old as genetically modern humans. There is no evidence of any sort of exceptional origin for homosexuality in humans, especially in light of homosexual behavior in other species. The very idea of a dual (or multiple) emergence of homosexuality across species violates one of the central dogmas of genetics: that the parsimonious explanation is always preferable.

Spitting out a bunch of low quality hypotheses and then building the rest of your career on them (as Cochran did with his claims about Ashkenazi intelligence) is not how good science is done.

[iguy]

I think you may be responding to a stronger, clearly wrong, hypothesis... in which some virus landed on Haight-Ashbury in 1965? And this is kind-of what I'm arguing against -- ruling out a whole line of thought because you take offence at some version.

Every STD has a massive incentive to alter sexual behaviour. Some do: Syphilis makes you horny. And we probably haven't found all of them: if AIDS was no worse for you than Toxoplasmosis, would we have tracked it down? So maybe a whole lot of sexual behaviour is influenced by viruses, maybe in lots of animals. Where would you look to test this? At behaviours which don't seem obviously motivated by standard Darwinian concerns.

Certainly this is a tentative idea, nobody should get too attached to it. Probably there are people saying this more politely than Cochran. Some of us like the blunt style, it wastes less time.

[eesmith]

Do you consider them to be true? Because I don't.

If not, which "facts that are taboo to acknowledge" are you referring to?

[iguy]

Well said.

The trouble with social taboos (even ones that exist for good reasons) is that it can be hard to understand who's being polite, and who's just stupid. Many people are stupid about many things, after all, even when there are no reasons to pretend.

Thus it seems valuable that there are places outside of such conventions. The internet has been very good for this -- things once known only by academic specialists are now open to anyone interested. Sometimes you return to polite society able to better decode what people really know.