Whatever people think of Lasker (Cremieux) and his views, isn't data being available to all interested parties the best way to find the truth?
The article mentions this towards the very end:
Adam Candeub, the top lawyer at the Federal Communications Commission, wrote a law review article in 2024 criticizing the N.I.H.’s discouragement of stigmatizing research. He compared it to the persecution of Galileo.
“A liberal society should support the search for truth,” Mr. Candeub wrote, “regardless of how uncomfortable and unsettling that truth turns out to be.”Other answers: if placebos work, why would we restrict peoples choice and their dissemination?
Because placebos rarely are innocent in often they become avoidant measures away from empirical science.
Your view point is a local minimum in that you want to ignore societal impact. One of those impacts is using valid data to tout pseudoscientific methods.
We know GIGO but the general populace does not
You should use the samw logic ans find yourself arguing against vaccinea and herd immunity.
How is that relevant? Is Lasker seeking to (let alone succeeding at) suppressing voices that disagree with his own?
He might not engage with his critics (e.g. David Bessis) but AFAICT he's not doing anything to suppress them.
1. This research may prove that there are significant intelligence differences by race.
2. Public knowledge of this fact could lead to discrimination on an individual level based on group membership.
3. This is bad for society.
4. Therefore we should not conduct research down this path.
1. Race science has never demonstrated real impacts on Society.
2. Society funds research to find real impacts on Society.
3. Racists want to coninue to do #1 despite never demonstrating real impacts on Society.
I mean, go on king, collect your own data on Phrenology, but don't get mad if the rest of us don't give you our head measurements.
They have interests, that align with funding, which aligns with actionable data. And they follow them.
So who would even do such research? The best you could find is some meaningless difference in mean scores that is likely swamped by environmental factors. And the fact that "race" is far fuzzier than our intuition leads us to think (it turns out we're very good at applying racial labels to people, that genetically are simply not so clear especially at the edges of categories).^*
So it's hard to fund research with no purpose, that scientists aren't particularly interested in conducting. Instead [GWAS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genome-wide_association_study) studies answer more useful questions that are actionable (you can do a genetic test and calculate a risk in principle).
* I'll clarify this statement because it's a common misconception. There are clearly genetic differences between racial groups. But they are complex statsical genetics that are impossible to cleanly pin down without large levels of miscategorization. And GWAS studies are answering the question which genes are associated with cognition and disorder.
But that's not what happened. They didn't just decline to fund such research. The NIH banned it on their data set even if you had your own funding. You don't explicitly ban things that people are not interested in doing. e.g. the NIH doesn't ban using the data set to perform research on astrology. If I want to do research on the difference between Libras and Scorpios and I come up with the money, the policy is "OK, you do you."
The rule usually applied to datasets with broad consent is the surprise principle. Even if you have consent if the person is subsequently surprised by how it was used it's not informed consent.
To put it simply, how do we get samples from marginalised groups if we plan to allow to use that data for them to be marginalised?
If the NIH didn't actively oppose it how can they expect to get more participants ?
But the article is also about groups engaging in academic dishonesty to bypass NIH policy. It really makes me question their motives and that they aren't simply scientists seeking truth.
> To put it simply, how do we get samples from marginalised groups if we plan to allow to use that data for them to be marginalised?
You said in your previous comment above that these categories aren't useful anyway, which brings up some questions:
1. If that is the NIH's opinion, then why did they label the data with those categories?
2. If these categories are actually not useful, then why should I care if the dataset isn't balanced between members of those categories?
> But the article is also about groups engaging in academic dishonesty to bypass NIH policy. It really makes me question their motives and that they aren't simply scientists seeking truth.
To the contrary, I consider any such restriction on the topic of research to be fundamentally unscientific and I mistrust any scientist who feels an ethical obligation to comply with such political censorship.
If a scientist wants to do the research then they can pursue it and find a journal to publish it in. The reputable journals are unlikely to find it of interest unless it was a huge effect size. But we know any effect size must be tiny hence the need for a huge dataset.
They'd have to take samples and basically tell the person the intension was to check if some races were genetically inferior let's see how well they do with recruitment. I wouldn't give a sample.
Or just do a GWAS study and then develop metrics for estimating risk for individuals which can make use of ethnicity.
Yes, I too find it easy to avoid doing research when I assume what that research is going to find out ahead of the time.
But NIH understably will not share a dataset that the contributors wouldn't want to used in this way.
But if you're a researcher in this domain just go get your own dataset. You'll have to tell the potential contributors you will allow research that might stigmatize them.
Good luck with recruitment.
It you don't think you could recruit for that study because participants would find it objectionable then you can't demand access to NIH dataset.
Ethically it's that simple.
But I went to the ABCD Study web site, and read the article they link about ethical use of data (Responsible use of population neuroscience data: Towards standards of accountability and integrity).
I didn't get the impression that consent (for this study or future ones) is the reason they gatekeep the data.
The article I mentioned was written only recently (2024): https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11959870/
In a statement, Lyric Jorgenson, associate director of science policy at the N.I.H., said the agency had taken steps to protect the ABCD Study. It has introduced a new online portal requiring users to complete training on responsible data use and to “pass a knowledge test prior to accessing the data.”
They have an online training and everything!
"(a) all federally funded health research should empower Americans through transparency and open-source data, and should avoid or eliminate conflicts of interest that skew outcomes and perpetuate distrust;"
It's funny because this guy is center-left, he just happens to actually be intellectually honest.
Anyhow, either we do science or we just admit that we don't like the social implications of the evidence. Trying to hide data and gaslight the public isn't science.
Right, right... Rehabilitation of eugenics in 3, 2, 1... Nothing new here, Hitler did follow the "social implications of the evidence"... after all, a whole bunch of esteemed scientists and Nobel laureates hailed eugenics as the best thing after sliced white bread, Hitler did quite a bit of slicing of that material himself. No, he didn't invent his theory, he simply followed accepted science.
> Trying to hide data and gaslight the public isn't science.
There isn't much that resembles science in social academia, data isn't science and the prediction of the so-called "social" sciences have been disastrously wrong all along.
Data isn't evidence ether - you have to have a theory within a science with a sound methodological foundation before you can treat data as evidence. We don't have that now and we've never had it, the few meager attempts were politicized and bastardized in their infancy.
> It's funny because this guy is center-left, he just happens to actually be intellectually honest.
Center-left? Like all Democrats in Congress who joined the fifty-odd Republicans to vote for letting the government remotely mess with your car while you drive?
At the time of a real shooting war in the streets in Minneapolis they seized the opportunity to put some more shackles around public's ankles.
There isn't left, right or center in US party politics - only Orwellian-left theater vs Orwellian-right theater in service of forces who view the public as sheep to be sheared.
Eugenics was flourishing during Hitler's time, he loved it, it was the foundation and the excuse for his believes.
Make sure you research on the science and history of eugenics instead of seeking support for your prejudice about it. Of course, it's a shameful example of accepted but disastrous "science", which social scientists, media and politicians don't like to talk about. They always have many theories, to provide room for plausible deniability, but eugenics was accepted no less than any other social theory at the time.
That theory was significantly expanded later and used by politicians in the US to justify forced sterilization of Irish and black women (not sure about others - DO research"),
It was also used and adapted by Hitler to justify his racial believes and policies.
No one considers eugenics science NOW, but it was considered science back then and we're commenting on modern scientific studies that would be adopted wholesale by the eugenics scientists of the time.
It doesn't matter what you call it, if it walks like eugenics, if talks like eugenics it is eugenics even if that word was thrown out as politically inconvenient. Go back to my first comment in this thread and understand it in this light.
> Just because some guy in the 1800s said it was science doesn't make it so.
It continued well into 1900's up until WW2 and it was a social theory as scientific as any other at the time, otherwise it would not be used for justification of government policies.
And another one: http://doi.org/10.46469/mq.2023.63.3.2
And another one: https://europepmc.org/article/ppr/ppr518324
But it's obvious that races do have genetic differences.
The way scientists resolve this conflict is to bypass race entirely. And focus on genetics.
Genome wide association studies (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genome-wide_association_study) is the answer.
You create statistical models from large caches of genetic data and find association's. Then you can provide a risk score for an individual and if you want estimates based on ethnicity.
It's the genetic test that makes it useful like Duffy Null testing before starting people or African descent on Clozapine, HLA-B*1502 testing before starting Asians on Carbamazpine.
Where risks are lower you can do crude heuristics like calcium channel blockers before ace inhibitors for black people.
But just having people check a box in a questionnaire and doing their IQ is just pointless scientifically.
The tone was not "these are breakthroughs to look forward to"; rather, "things are coming that people we disagree with are going to exploit, but they are nonetheless real". Another interpretation would be "please don't yell at us for discovering these things".
terminalshort•1w ago
762236•1w ago
conception•1w ago
blargthorwars•1w ago
terminalshort•1w ago
If it isn't a scientifically valid concept, then why did the NIH label the genetic data by race?
just_once•1w ago
amanaplanacanal•1w ago
The sickle cell stuff is likely related to the fact that most "black" people in the US are descended from slaves that pretty much all came from the same small region in West Africa.
terminalshort•1w ago
just_once•1w ago
dragonwriter•1w ago
The construction of race at any given time and place will tend to have non-zero correlation with genetic frequencies, in part by chance and in part because it is usually largely (but not entirely) drivn by appearance which is to some degree associated with some aspects of underlying genetics.
> e.g. black people are much more likely to have the genetic disease sickle cell anemia.
People with ancestry in sub-Saharan Africa (and within that, even more West Africa), India, the Middle East, and Mediterranean are more likely to have the gene that provides malaria resistance with one copy and sickle cell disease with two than other populations.
While the highest incidence group is also commonly “Black” in most constructions of race, a lot of the American perception of it as a nearly exclusively Black disease is because the population perceived as Black in the US is heavily drawn from West Africa, and the US population also underrepresents other populations in which it is more common than average AND does not include, and may not construct as Black, populations constructed as Black elsewhere in the world where it is not common.
terminalshort•1w ago
And when the science on race and intelligence came out, the response of the scientific community was not "your categories are bad, and here is my study on intelligence that actually uses scientifically valid genetic groupings." It was "any further science on this subject will not be funded and if you express disagreement it will risk your career."
conception•1w ago
And are you sure there aren’t studies on genetic groupings and intelligence? That seems quite a claim.
amarcheschi•1w ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Diversity_Foundation
edit since i was feeling really daring today i found an old archived page of a wiki holding a lot of interesting thoughts from him, such as eugenics to prevent the loss of western civilization, and other points that at this point you should imagine. link: https://web.archive.org/web/20250416005529/https:/rationalwi...
inshard•1w ago
https://grokipedia.com/page/OpenPsych
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenPsych
amarcheschi•1w ago
terminalshort•1w ago
rf15•1w ago
bryanlarsen•1w ago
Or more accurately, if it were genetic the races would look very different.
The genetic diversity of "black" alone exceeds the rest of the world combined.
So you have two choices:
1. Everybody is black.
2. The other races roughly stand, but there are dozens of different black races.
Or you can be more accurate and say race is cultural.
terminalshort•1w ago
yed•1w ago
terminalshort•1w ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cluster_analysis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplogroup
yed•1w ago
inshard•1w ago
terminalshort•1w ago
jyscao•1w ago
While genetic diversity between races are from selection. Thus the inter-racial genetic differences are more likely to manifest in trait differences that humans find more meaningful (which I use purely in a descriptive manner, not prescriptive), such as physiological (medical, metabolic), psychological & behavioral (personality), cognitive (intelligence), and of course physical (appearance, athletic).
The intra-racial differences that arise from genetic drift result in things that are still tangible genetic differences, e.g. ABO blood group frequencies, but don't map well onto characteristics that human societies place emphasis on as much.
And to address your point that:
>The genetic diversity of "black" alone exceeds the rest of the world combined.
This is because the level of genetic diversity as influenced by genetic drift is primarily a function of population size, and Africa being the origin of the Homo sapien species, and probably the Homo genus as a whole, has always had the highest level of effective population size. Thus genetic drift in Africans is least likely to be able to cause allele fixation on particular genes, and so such diversity is better preserved. But as already mentioned, these forms of genetic diversity is less likely to impact the observed traits that most humans, both academics/social scientists and your average joe, find "meaningful".
DeathArrow•1w ago
Is this also true for other mammals such as cats, dogs, pigs, cows, horses?
bryanlarsen•1w ago
tptacek•1w ago