[neekleer]

One problem is that tenure and standing for established scientists no longer afford any of the expected protections. James Watson was not discredited but promptly fired and "disgraced" for stating a well-supported scientific finding in abrupt layman's terms for an interview. The minds of cancel culture would probably say they gave this dinosaur enough chances to fade away, but he wouldn't. If they do want scientists to be free to investigate the genetic and other bases of IQ further in order to find better answers, then it seems like they want scientists to first find a way to talk about it publicly without specifying the categories or where members of a category tend to fall on the scale.

There is a chilling effect on various lines of inquiry. For now, you can claim the information is out there, but any further writings could become more esoteric or limited. In the case of IQ, I don't think certain people want scientific answers as to why. They would rather assume IQ is highly malleable while they run social and economic experiments to find ways to equalize it and other factors that predict success.

[dang]

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22051823.

The race IQ war is never going to go anyplace good for this site, and it attracts hard-core ideologues who proceed to do hard-core ideological battle, which is off topic here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[neekleer]

Of course, the parent comment to mine broached the subject. I guess that person's statement should stand, and there will be no way to address it.

[dang]

We moderate not so much by comment as by subthread. That wasn't the only thing the parent was talking about, and there was at least one other subthread in reply that wasn't as bad. This one, however, definitely went way into classic flamewar hell. Nothing about this is going to get resolved on HN, only talking points thrown back and forth by the already-dedicated, while everyone else tunes out.

[stenl]

James Watson - who was as close to royalty as you can get in science - worked very long and hard to get himself fired. It wasn’t just ”an interview”, but a lifetime of racism and sexism. Lior Pachter has a handy collection of quotes with links to sources: https://liorpachter.wordpress.com/2018/05/18/james-watson-in...

[dennis_jeeves]

I read the quotes in the links. None of that to me constitutes as 'racism' and 'sexism' as commonly defined. They are just plain observations which incidentally resonates with my own observations. Of course your average person out there will construe all his statements as being racist and sexist.

You could argue that some of his statements are bad jokes, but that is subjective.

To quote the guy 'rob' who made the comment on June 4, 2018 at 5:22 am :

------------------------------------------

Is he an old man? Yes. Does he not know when to keep his mouth shut? Yes. Are some of his views outdated? Yes. Get over it. 90% of the planet is as bad as him, if not worse. And 90% of your views will be outdated too in 20 years.

This never-ending desire of "the left" (which includes most of academia) to feel offended is far more damaging than the ramblings of an old man.

------------------------------------------

[ilikehurdles]

You mean to tell me an old man who grew up in even more racist and sexist societies, making racist and sexist "jokes", is not racist because he is old and this used to be normal?

We all know plenty of old racist men like this. Hell, some of the more civilized (your definition of "left") people may have acted like this as children or young adults.

Some of us also know better men than this. Better ones who find most of that page pretty despicable in any context. Are you stating what it seems you are -- that the better ones are wrong because they do not observe the these things that resonate with you?

I think you should seriously re-evaluate your observations if half of those quotes are things you hold true, let alone all of them.

Also, why don't you spend some time to expand on rob's comment. What _about_ his views is so outdated? What _about_ him being old makes him hold those views and "open his mouth" to express them? See, many on the planet are over him and his kind. We thank him for his contribution, but it's time he got off the stage. There's hardly room for 90% of the planet on it.

Perhaps the people who worship the egos of "outdated" and "bad" "old" people lacking in self control should recognize the fact that they worship the weakness of, in your commenters words, the bottom 10th percentile of people.

[Chris2048]

I don't really trust the selective quoting of that blog, e.g:

quote: “Some anti-Semitism is justified”

full quote: “Should you be allowed to make an anti-Semitic remark? Yes, because some anti-Semitism is justified. Just like some anti-Irish feeling is justified. If you can’t be criticized, that’s very dangerous. You lose the concept of a free society.”

They pounced on the unfortunate and/or unusual use of the word "justified", where the full context makes it clear he's talking about what you should be allowed to say, not what is correct. He means its existence in public discourse is "justified".

[fishnchips]

Wow, I never realized the extent of it!

[l0000p]

But you're just assuming that he is wrong based on your own presumptions without any actual knowledge about the subject.

The question is who is most likely to be right, a nobel prize winning Ph.D. specialized in molecular biology, genetics and zoology, who worked 20 years at Harvard etc, etc....or you.

This is exactly the problem of cancel culture.

Just because he points out something you don't like you're suddenly an expert and somehow think he is now wrong.

What about double helix? Is he wrong about that too? Based on what? Why don't you have an opinion about that? Because you don't care? Even though your ability to judge the correctness of this research is the same as the race-related studies.

[dragonwriter]

> The question is who is most likely to be right, a nobel prize winning Ph.D. specialized in molecular biology, genetics and zoology, who worked 20 years at Harvard etc, etc....or you.

Or we could, instead of argument to authority, look at the actual research in the field, which doesn't support Watson's conclusions. (Neither does it strongly support their negation.)

And Watson's expertise is in the low-level mechanics of heredity; it's less relevant to broad population psychometry and the analysis of heredity of traits measured through such psychometry than is, say, a bachelor's degree in any of the social sciences.

> What about double helix? Is he wrong about that too?

By “he” do you mean Rosalind Franklin? But, no, of course that's not wrong, it's been extensively confirmed.

[Chris2048]

> By “he” do you mean Rosalind Franklin?

"he" obviously refers to the person you've been talking about: Watson.

[l0000p]

What is interesting here is that you disregard authority for results you disagree with and quotes authority for results you agree on. It sounds like your emotions are deciding which results you find 'correct'. This is the exact problem we're discussing.

[dragonwriter]

> What is interesting here is that you disregard authority for results you disagree with and quotes authority for results you agree on.

What is interesting here is that you have an obviously pre-conceived argument and simply invent false facts (such as the appeal to authority I did not make anywhere) to fit it when reality doesn't supply them for you.

[l0000p]

You're showing a curious case of projection. I'm not presenting any arguments in favor of Mr Watson's research, I'm pointing out that you are not basing your opinion on all available facts since you're arguing for censorship of research you disagree with for emotional reasons. And in turn, you accuse me of inventing facts that you're not willing to examine yourself. How curious.

[saagarjha]

> The question is who is most likely to be right, a nobel prize winning Ph.D. specialized in molecular biology, genetics and zoology, who worked 20 years at Harvard etc, etc....or you.

It doesn't really matter either way when you're pushing your opinions and anecdotal opinions as fact.

> What about double helix? Is he wrong about that too? Based on what? Why don't you have an opinion about that? Because you don't care? Even though your ability to judge the correctness of this research is the same as the race-related studies.

How exactly is this relevant?

[nl]

The question is who is most likely to be right, a nobel prize winning Ph.D. specialized in molecular biology, genetics and zoology, who worked 20 years at Harvard etc, etc....or you.

Lior Pachter (who that link was from) is a Professor of Computational Biology at CalTech. His other post about Watson is good too: https://liorpachter.wordpress.com/2014/12/02/the-perfect-hum...

But you don't need to steal a Nobel prize to recognise racism. And yes, "scientific" racism is wrong as in incorrect, as any honest search will show.

[GoblinSlayer]

>And yes, "scientific" racism is wrong as in incorrect, as any honest search will show.

Not at all, proof of absence is famously difficult.

[anglercut]

No, his other post is hot garbage. He's using his knowledge, wit and ability to obfuscate, ridicule and discredit the information critical to our well-being as a species – all the while committing character-assassination. It's honestly despicable. Let's look at it closer.

> One of Watson’s obsessions has been to “improve” the “imperfect human” via human germline engineering. This is disturbing on many many levels. First, there is the fact that for years Watson presided over Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory which actually has a history as a center for eugenics. Then there are the numerous disparaging remarks by Watson about everyone who is not exactly like him, leaving little doubt about who he imagines the “perfect human” to be. But leaving aside creepy feelings… could he be right? Is the “perfect human” an American from Chicago of mixed Scottish/Irish ancestry? Should we look forward to a world filled with Watsons?

Then he brings up the topic of "good" and "bad" SNPs and seques into an inane argument about ethnicity of perfect human: «since many disease SNPs are population specific», "admixed" Puerto Ricans are superior. But that's working backwards from the conclusion, not a knockdown argument against Watson's dream. To wit: Watson is racist and racists are obviously wrong, therefore we should renounce research into human germline engineering. Most damningly, Pachter poisons the well of engineering by tying it to eugenics with nothing but guilt by association.

Now, any non-indoctrinated human can understand that the issue of "perfect" phenotype is not about modern groups at all; indeed, every human on the planet has a decidedly wretched genome. A word to Maynard Olson, one of the founders of the Human Genome Project:

> So, what have our first glimpses of variation in the genomes of generally healthy people taught us?... What is on the top tier? Increasingly, the answer appears to be mutations that are “deleterious” by biochemical or standard evolutionary criteria. These mutations, as has long been appreciated, overwhelmingly make up the most abundant form of nonneutral variation in all genomes. A model for human genetic individuality is emerging in which there actually is a “wild-type” human genome—one in which most genes exist in an evolutionarily optimized form. There just are no “wild-type” humans: We each fall short of this Platonic ideal in our own distinctive ways.[1]

It seems that Watson was correct again.

The degree to which we fall short, to which we are damaged by deleterious mutations, is hard to appreciate, but near-certainly astronomical. By helping to suppress this line of research with his non sequitur and vitriol, Pachter subjects future generations to an avoidable misery of historically known human condition. Gwern makes a compelling case for intelligence: «since existing differences in intelligence are driven so much by the effects of thousands of variants, the CLT/standard deviation of a binomial/gamma distribution implies that those differences represent a net difference of only a few extra variants, as almost everyone has, say, 4990 or 5001 or 4970 or 5020 good variants and no one has extremes like 9000 or 3000 variants—even a von Neumann only had slightly better genes than everyone else, probably no more than a few hundred. Hence, anyone who does get thousands of extra good variants will be many SDs beyond what we currently see. »[2]

But since so much is heavily hereditary, the same logic is true for longevity, willpower, general health, mental health, hedonic tone, beauty of course... Our descendants could be as Gods, way above ugly squabbles for ethnicity rankings that we have and Pachter is obsessed with – but only if some Professors of Computational Biology don't succeed at completely brainwashing people on fairly uncontroversial topic.

Article Pachter links to is also just opinionated blather and guilt by association:

> Watson then sought to pre-empt any scientific self-doubt: “We should be proud of what we’re doing and not worry about destroying the genetic patrimony of the world, which is awfully cruel to too many people,” he said. “We get a lot of pleasure from helping other people. That’s what we’re trying to do.” ... Making “better human beings” differs from making human beings better by curing their diseases. Making better human beings is more closely aligned with the old eugenics vision. The previous century’s eugenicists sought to breed better humans by promoting specific types.

Besides the heavy–handed implicit demand to clutch pearls at Watson's suggestion, I don't see how he is wrong or bad, and how the author is making an argument at all.

A community of hackers should be able to easily understand the eldritch horror or a long, highly redundant, 90% dysfunctional code that evolved by random alterations and no fitness function sans "can actually survive" running their entire biochemistry; as well as the potential for improvement here. But no, listening to politically motivated demagogues is more fun I guess.

It's a shame really.

1: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/331/6019/872.3 2: https://www.gwern.net/Embryo-selection#limits-to-iterated-se...

[nl]

I don't think Watson is after some narrow, technical relationship between a particular gene and a particular ability. Instead, he make wide, unconstrained and unscientific generalisations which can only be defended by shrinking what he says.

To quote Watson: “I think now we’re in a terrible sitution where we should pay the rich people to have children.. if we don’t encourage procreation of wealthier citizens, IQ levels will most definitely fall.”

Now, any non-indoctrinated human can understand that the issue of "perfect" phenotype is not about modern groups at all;

TO be clear - it is Watson who is making racial arguments about Irish, Black and Jewish "races".

The whole point is what you are saying - the "perfect" human isn't about racial selection. It's Watson's clear racism (and he admits he is racist!) that makes it so dangerous.

This isn't some indoctrination thing - it's anyone who has read the Nazi or Communist "scientific" justifications of their theories that should hear alarms.

[dragonwriter]

> James Watson was not discredited but promptly fired and "disgraced" for stating a well-supported scientific finding in abrupt layman's terms for an interview.

Even Watson admitted, before being fired, that the last straw that did that wasn't a well-supported scientific finding.

> In the case of IQ, I don't think certain people want scientific answers as to why

The people that don't want the answers as to why are the people that are busy trumpeting any reported finding of correlation that fits their political narrative, no matter how thinly supported, and insisting that it must be an inherent racial difference. The rest of the world is very much interested in both testing the correlations and seeking causal explanations.

[deogeo]

> If they do want scientists to be free to investigate the genetic and other bases of IQ further in order to find better answers

It's quite obvious they don't want that, so they can continue to stretch the remaining gaps in knowledge enough to fit the entire blank slate hypothesis inside.