throwaway4666

You will find that 'some races just have the dumb SNPs, you know' is indeed a fringe and unserious position often posited by Pioneer Fund recipients (you know, the organization founded in the 30s for the 'purpose of race betterment' that literally inspired Hitler) to justify that we abandon all welfare and remedial programs toward the poorer demographics. If that's not scientific racism, I wonder what's your definition of it.

Seeing how African populations are extremely diverse and we're just seeing the extent of it I would refrain from making such definitive statements.

To repeat, interest in human populations and such phenotypic differences does not imply scientific racism once you realize the basic scientific principle that humans are animals and consider how animals exist in populations with phenotypic differences.

That's a needlessly stilted PR-like statement that basically hides the meat of the whole 'controversy': behavioral and IQ differences between populations and their genetic origins. Khan has a position, mainstream scientists another. Oftentimes fallacious arguments are invoked involving 'but look at domestic animal breeds' (not unlike your repeated admonition that 'humans are animals' which I will assume is just a boring triviality on your part for the sake of charity).

Scientific racists don't use such crass words like 'inferior', they'd rather say 'have a lower mean IQ and impulse control due to genetic differences'

Yeah I'm not saying literally everything in the article is trash, my thought process basically went as follows:

"Wait this is an elementary mistake. Also he's not really up to date on the science. Who wrote this again? That name rings a bell...oh dear..."

The science is constantly evolving to this very day on the supposedly 'trace levels' of Neanderthal DNA in Africans (especially as we gather a more diverse range of cohorts) so I'll leave it at that.

I just want to comment on this: opposing 'scientific racism' is an ideological claim now?! The dude has a pretty large record making claims about race and IQ and 'human biodiversity', works in an industry that's banking heavily on grifting money out of rich people with PGSes, and mainstream scientists debunking it are the ones being ideological? I feel like I'm dreaming here, imagine a Philip Morris lobbyist accusing you of being 'ideological' when you point out flaws in their 'actually cigarettes are pretty good for you' studies. (Wait, that actually happened)

Ah, he also believes in "Ashkenazi IQ" stuff. And is best friends with Greg Cochran who thinks homosexuality is caught by germs. Very instructive stuff

Yes, this is the usual precanned retort when faced with the fact that one's fringe viewpoint isn't in line with the mainstram science. It's not an argument though, in that it doesn't tilt the balance of probabilities (from a Bayesian point of view) away from the initial prior (i.e. the fringe is likely wrong and experts are likely right - note that I said likely, not 100%, like a good Bayesian). If anything, his elementary mistake about Crick, his failure to stay up to date with recent findings about African DNA, and motivated agenda with roots in scientific racism are tilting in the opposite direction.

Multiple inaccuracies there.

Crick and Watson certainly didn't discover DNA as the substrate for Mendelian inheritance, that was known long before. They (in collaboration with Rosalind "don't talk to me about this woman" Franklin) discovered its 3D structure.

Africans do have Neanderthal DNA, up to 0.3%.

The post tries very hard to make it look like 'Out of Africa' is wrong and not the mainstream accepted by the majority of scientists. Admixture doesn't change that.

Also, isn't Razib Khan a "scientific racist"? (Protip: when someone's wiki page has a 'Controversies' tab it doesn't look good) I remember him being huge into 'HBD' despite not being credentialed in any way beyond dropping out of his PhD program to get in on the 'consumer genomics' grift. Not a good look imo.

If you want a real overview of current population genetics check out Graham Coop's lectures, he's a prominent professor in the field and his teaching materials were inspirational for many people. Alas, he does not have a substack, neither does he make contrarian takes for a living (probably due to having a real job)

You have put a lot of thought in your post and I actually agree with most of it but I just want to interject about a few things:

-Darwin, Mendel etc. are seen as foundational because we as humans need plucky heroes in our narrative of history. But they are anything but. Natural selection did not spontaneously arise as an idea when Darwin put it into written words. Early farmers, herders and semi-nomadic gatherers knew all about artificial selection (which is just natural selection speeded up and driven by humans) and have been doing it for thousands of years, so the knowledge was definitely out there. There are also quite a few ancient texts conjecturing that "man came from apes and the more primitive lifeforms" etc. Of course this is not proper wording for a modern educated scientist, but again, the ideas were there. Only, Darwin was the first person with a name (and what's more, a Western and English name) to notice it, and so he became a legend. Anonymous accounts don't.

-Likewise, there's absolutely no way the Odin guy was the first to come up with the idea of fecal transplants. He's just the first public figure that you've heard of who did, because he's flashy and fancy and trendy and lives in a fancy and trendy place where all the fancy and trendy people congregate. Even excluding the studies suggesting it prior to his stunts, people knew for a while that farm kids eating soil (dirt) from time to time turned out to be suspiciously healthy for their gut.

So I maintain my previous assumption, that biohacking is largely a grift that attempts to repackage previously obtained knowledge from more obscure and less widely acknowledged (read: non-American, non-Western, etc.) sources and fashion it into a cool-looking product to swindle rich people out of their money.

The scientific world doesn't need biohackers, stunt-pullers and other grifters, it needs to acknowledge the humble and the lesser-known and the anonymous common knowledge.

Peer-review has its problems but I don't think the solution is 'we need more people carelessly injecting themselves and others with things with unknown effects'. I think the covid crisis aptly showed that the 'plucky outsider that defies a reactionary authority' archetype doesn't actually exist in real life. And biohacking itself is largely a grift.

Good for him. I still have no idea what that website is for and why people use it in earnest (i.e. not for joke or 'bit' accounts like dril)

The main reason for me is that Ubuntu somehow breaks at every major upgrade, while Mint doesn't. That and Cinnamon, of course.

We don't really know how feasible multithreading is, but the community suspects at least some tasks could be computed on different threads, such as e.g. the pathfinding stuff that one of the worst offenders when it comes to FPS.

DF is much more forgiving and easier than it used to be. Follow the wiki, setup DFHack for a lot of bugfixes and UI improvements and you're pretty much set. You don't even need Therapist anymore when you have the in-game labor manager. Yeah there's a bit of fiddling involved but I can't possibly believe this can be a problem for Hacker News readers.

Funny how you seem unable to conceive of a people that doesn't have a concept of numbers ;-)

He's hinted that he could release the sources if the Steam/Itch sales make enough money that he could stop worrying about the stability of his income in the long term. The worry was that if DF got open-sourced and forked, people would give more money to the forked, polished version as opposed to the one version Toady is working on, but he wouldn't mind if he had enough money in the long term.

You'd be surprised at how popular Stalin seems to be in Russia and Central Asia countries. Forgot the link but I read that 45% of Russians have a positive opinion of him. Yes he did all those atrocities but more importantly he brought national pride. After all, he did win WW2 and turned the country into a world superpower that rivaled with the US for decades. As time passes the memories of the atrocities fade and the national pride grows. Just like the French praise Napoleon who led hundreds of thousands of young men to their deaths in ruinous wars, the British praise Churchill who orchestrated a famine that killed millions of Bengali people, Americans praise the slave-owning founding fathers, etc.

You'd be surprised at the number of "basic phenomena" that turned out to have cultural origins. Look up the language of the Piraha people, who famously does not contain any concept related to numbers or counting (because they have no use for it and introducing it would disrupt the trades they have), among many other things.

Also, cursorily reading a study that contradicts one's preconceptions and going like "nah, my gut feeling doesn't agree with it" is so quintessentially Hacker News ;-)

I didn't say GWASes were useless, just that it's absurd to consider them to be a 'revolution'. The actual revolution would be second- and third-generation sequencing which enabled GWASes and a bunch of much more useful things. GWAS is, in effect, just a bunch of correlations. It's just the very starting point to an actual scientific analysis, because 'you have to start somewhere'. If you don't go beyond and investigate, you're not doing science. Everyone in the genomics community agrees to this, and literally every paper that investigates the causes of genetic diseases goes in the introduction like 'GWASes sure look nice but we still have no idea how things work with them so in this paper I present a method to do...' I notice you failed to address many of the spurious correlations drawn by the GWAS bot or the A. thaliana vs. GDP prediction. That it doesn't raise any red flag to you doesn't speak well as to your ability to approach the field of genomics.

You're also wrong that the only thing of value is inferring "how genes work"

Yes it is, that's literally what genetics is about. Otherwise you're back to making a bunch of correlations. If you want a deep understanding of disease, design effective drugs, or even do proper gene editing, you have to understand what genes do. It seems ridiculous to have to say it.

By the way, what does '15% heritability' refer to?

It is what we in the less-rationalist circles refer to as a 'joke'.

There's no evidence all of this comes from cancel culture. As I said in a previous thread, the main doxxing comes from an alt-right dude who angrily posted Scott's personal info and clinic because he believed to be shadowbanned.

Seriously, look at Scott's post where he quotes disparaging opinions about him. You'd be surprised at how much of the vitriol comes from the alt-right, calling him limp-wristed, a beta cuck, as well as any number of Jewish slurs. And the alt-right does have a far more prominent record in actually killing people than blue-haired people on twitter.

'Predictive' is just a glorified word for 'correlating'. Staring at a bunch of correlations only gets you so far and doing only that certainly isn't science. If you have no idea how genes work you're going to be dismayed when all your fancy correlations don't work anymore, as people gathering genomic data from outside the European biobanks are starting to find out.

At no point did he mention cancel culture or 'the norm'. In fact, his argument entirely revolved around his relationship with his patients and that has little bearing on what he believes about the IQ of black people, since, as he says, his patients run the full gamut of the political spectrum (so any opinion would be controversial to some of them). It's more about the fact that psychiatrists are apparently supposed to act as blank slates to their patients and his blog contains a lot of deeply personal stuff. Even without the politics stuff it'd be a problem.

You're grasping at straws here. How do you even determine the size of the 'groups'?

Found it:

https://mobile.twitter.com/pastramimachine/status/1263937115...

Edit: if it doesn't work try this i guess? https://www.google.com/url?q=https://mobile.twitter.com/past...

It's not that hard to look up and prove you wrong mate:

https://www.euractiv.com/section/justice-home-affairs/news/f...

“In 2018, far-right terrorist attacks accounted for 17.2% of terrorist incidents in the West. By contrast, attacks by Islamist groups accounted for 6.8% of attacks, and attacks not attributed to any group accounted for 62.8% of incidents in the West,” the report has found.

Most terrorist attacks in the west are done by alt-righters though

The cost of many false negatives is an overall worse quality of life for everyone, especially for targeted groups, and the enactment of a massive surveillance apparatus to enforce that QoL degradation.

I still have no idea why people are making this whole thing about a political point or 'controversial opinions'. The facts are:

-The NYT wanted to write about SSC notably because SA warned about covid ahead of time, wrote a nice piece about the effectiveness of masks, etc.

-The NYT did not care enough about Scott's pseudonymity to keep it intact

-Scott, fearing that his relationship with his patients might be jeopardized if they got linked to his personal blog, deleted it.

Where do 'the mob' or 'controversial opinions' or 'ideological differences' factor in this at all? It is not 'the mob' that triggered this, in fact Scott upset a lot of people over the years with some of his articles and that hasn't deterred him from keeping them up blogging further. The NYT isn't reporting on the SSC commentariat's curious obsession with the IQ of black people either. So why do 90% of posts on here are making it about politics? If I were not charitable beyond reason I would start to believe HN's love of neutral, level-headed and impassionate discussion might be an act.

What does 'mob' mean and how does it differ from 'majority'? The fact that the speaker is not part of it, maybe?

The important part in your post is

They're often an early step

I think we're in agreement here, I'm just arguing that "woah, look at all those correlations" isn't a breakthrough or 'genomic revolution' in any sense of the word as far as our understanding of human genetics is concerned.