Tag: science

The war on free expression

The principled defenses have failed. The attempts to ignore it have failed. The attempts to placate have, predictably, failed. The only way to shut down the “army of self-appointed militants who see themselves as the guardians of correct thinking” is hit back twice as hard and hold the SJWs completely accountable to their own rules.

When Professor Tim Hunt, the Nobel Prize-winning biochemist, recently addressed a major conference in Seoul about women in science, he said he had three problems with ‘girls in laboratories’, namely that: ‘You fall in love with them, they fall in love with you, and when you criticise them, they cry.’

As a media storm erupted, Hunt insisted that his remarks were made in ‘a totally jocular, ironic way’.

But none of that matters to today’s self-righteous crusaders against offensive opinions, for whom language is never a laughing matter. Professor Hunt was immediately surrounded online by an outraged Twitter mob demanding his head on a pike.

These boycott-and-ban zealots are not content with exercising their right to criticise somebody who makes an offensive joke. Quivering with self-righteous indignation, they want to silence those who fail to conform to their group-think.

In this case, their bullying worked. The scientific authorities immediately caved in. Not only was Hunt forced to resign from his post at University College London, but he was also dismissed from the science committee of the European Research Council.

So biochemistry loses a brilliant pioneer, while we lose more ground to the forces of oppressive censorship.

For the saga of Tim Hunt’s downfall is just the latest example of how a culture of verbal prohibition is taking over society, led by an army of self-appointed militants who see themselves as the guardians of correct thinking.

If you don’t want to see more Nobel Laureates like Tim Hunt and James Watson hounded from science, more innovators like Brandon Eich hounded from tech, then you should endorse the Tor Books boycott and force the SJWs to realize that they will be held twice as accountable for their every joke, every tweet, every Facebook comment, and every personal statement as they hold everyone else.

Scientistry is not scientody

And as for those who claim that I am anti-science because I am anti-corrupt scientistry, I’ve got two appeals to scientific authority that will trump yours right here:

In the past few years more professionals have come forward to share a truth that, for many people, proves difficult to swallow. One such authority is Dr. Richard Horton, the current editor-in-chief of the Lancet – considered to be one of the most well respected peer-reviewed medical journals in the world.

Dr. Horton recently published a statement declaring that a lot of published research is in fact unreliable at best, if not completely false.

“The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness.”

This is quite disturbing, given the fact that all of these studies (which are industry sponsored) are used to develop drugs/vaccines to supposedly help people, train medical staff, educate medical students and more.

It’s common for many to dismiss a lot of great work by experts and researchers at various institutions around the globe which isn’t “peer-reviewed” and doesn’t appear in a “credible” medical journal, but as we can see, “peer-reviewed” doesn’t really mean much anymore. “Credible” medical journals continue to lose their tenability in the eyes of experts and employees of the journals themselves, like Dr. Horton.

He also went on to call himself out in a sense, stating that journal editors aid and abet the worst behaviours, that the amount of bad research is alarming, that data is sculpted to fit a preferred theory. He goes on to observe that important confirmations are often rejected and little is done to correct bad practices. What’s worse, much of what goes on could even be considered borderline misconduct.

Dr. Marcia Angell, a physician and longtime Editor in Chief of the New England Medical Journal (NEMJ), which is considered to another one of the most prestigious peer-reviewed medical journals in the world, makes her view of the subject quite plain:

“It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of the New England Journal of Medicine”

I note that it isn’t any of the pro-vaxxers, the climate change scammers, the “I fucking love science” crowd or the True Believers in evolution that are calling out this vast quantity of scientific fraud, but rather the science skeptics, like me, who have repeatedly and reliably observed that the human element of the profession has indelibly tainted all confidence in the process.

And then recall that this is what Sam Harris believes can and should replace philosophy and traditional morality as an effective guide to human behavior.

SCIENCE is not science

Whatever happened to the idea that science is self-correcting?

Over the past few days a scandal has begun to plague political science. A UCLA graduate student, Michael LaCour, appears to have faked a data set that was the basis for an article that he published in the highly prestigious journal Science. I have examined a second paper by LaCour. As I’ll explain, I’m convinced that it also is the product of faked results.

The Science article purportedly showed that personalized, door-to-door canvassing is effective at changing political views. LaCour and his co-author, Don Green of Columbia University, enlisted members of an LGBT organization at UCLA to contact voters who had earlier indicated on a survey that they opposed gay marriage. The article shows, based on follow-up surveys, that the LGBT door-to-door canvassing had a significant effect in shifting voters toward pro-gay-marriage views.

Two graduate students at UC Berkeley, however, had significant difficulties in replicating the study. They called the private firm that LaCour had supposedly enlisted to conduct his survey. The firm, however, said that it did not conduct such a survey. LaCour had also reported to the grad students the name of an employee of the survey firm with whom he worked. The firm, however, said that it had no records of such an employee ever working at the firm.

After confronting his coauthor, Green requested that Science retract the article. LaCour still stands by his results. Science, faced with this dilemma, has not (yet) retracted the paper.

That pretty much settles the question of whether Science concerns scientody – the scientific method – or scientistry – the scientific profession. An “editorial expression of concern” is not sufficient. The study could not be replicated and there is evidence that the first study was not legitimate. Therefore, a reputable publication that was actually dedicated to scientody would retract the study immediately pending further evidence of its replicability. Science is observably not such a publication.

Especially when the man who developed the method that researcher utilized has come out very strongly against the legitimacy of LaCour’s work:

I think the bulk of the evidence suggests that LaCour faked at least some of the results of this second paper. Not only would I be willing to bet on this conclusion, I would be willing to give 10:1 odds on it. Still, I’m not certain, and I would be hesitant to give 100:1 odds. And I would refuse to give 1,000:1 odds.

Regardless, I am certain that LaCour faked the results of the original paper—the one published in Science. I predict that UCLA will refuse to award him a PhD, and I predict that Princeton will retract the assistant professorship that it offered him. I predict that UCLA or Princeton or both will conduct an investigation. I suspect that they will find that LaCour faked results in a few papers, not just one.

But the most damning thing, as far as the credibility of Science goes, is this observation, “It is very rare for political scientists to have our results mentioned alongside results from the “hard” sciences.” So why, then, was this apparently fraudulent paper selected for such unusual publication in the first place?

The Excluded

This concept of intellectual exclusion may help explain why the credentialed elite are so often at odds with me. They can’t believe I am willing and able to challenge them so successfully, and I can’t believe what clueless idiots they are despite their credentialed positions of intellectual authority. It explains an awful lot; I thought they were smarter than they apparently are:

The probability of entering and remaining in an intellectually elite profession such as Physician, Judge, Professor, Scientist, Corporate Executive, etc. increases with IQ to about 133. It then falls about 1/3 by 140. By 150 IQ the probability has fallen by 97%! In other words, a significant percentage of people with IQs over 140 are being systematically and, most likely inappropriately, excluded from the population that addresses the biggest problems of our time or who are responsible for assuring the efficient operation of social, scientific, political and economic institutions.

“Over an extensive range of studies and with remarkable consistency, from Physicians to Professors to CEOs, the mean IQ of intellectually elite professions is about 125 and the standard deviation is about 6.5.  For example, Gibson and Light found that 148 members of the Cambridge University faculty had a mean IQ of 126 with a standard deviation of 6.3.  The highest score was 139.”

“From a theoretical standpoint, democratic meritocracies should evolve five IQ defined ‘castes’, The Leaders, The Advisors, The Followers, The Clueless and The Excluded. These castes are natural in that they are the result of how people of different intellectual abilities relate to one another.  This is based on research done by Leta Hollingworth in the 1930’s and the more recent work of D.K. Simonton.”

“Leta Hollingworth studied profoundly gifted children.  She reported them as having IQs of 180+, which was a R16 score.  As such, on today’s tests this equates to 159+.  Her conclusion was that when IQ differences are greater than 30 points, leader/follower relationships will break down or will not form.  It establishes an absolute limit to the intellectual gulf between leader and followers.”

In other words, more than a few PhDs at elite universities are more than two standard deviations below me in IQ terms. And here I am supposed to be impressed by a Bachelor’s degree in Philosophy of Language from a second-tier Midwestern university? In fact, given the ability of the Ilk and my Vile Faceless Minions to not only follow my lead in a disciplined manner but also correctly anticipate my intentions without having them explained, the evidence would tend to suggest that the mean intelligence of the regulars here is higher than the Cambridge faculty.

Based on my interactions with “intellectually elite professionals” this doesn’t shock me, although I’m a little surprised that both the mean and the ceiling as as low as they are.

So it should be no surprise that I’ve been “systematically and, most likely inappropriately, excluded” from the science fiction community, as its mean is probably around 1.5 standard deviations below the university professors. (Although in my estimation there are a few SF people with whom I have interacted who clearly have IQs over 139.) But in most instances, the intellectual gulf is simply too great.

Garth Zietsman has said, referring to people with D15IQs over 152, ‘A
common experience with people in this category or higher is that they
are not wanted – the masses (including the professional classes) find
them an affront of some sort.’  While true, it is more likely a symptom
than a cause of the exclusion.  We need to understand why they are an
affront.

I can tell him that. People who work very hard and spend years in order to climb to what they regard as the pinnacle of achievement actively resent those who can simply leap up to the peak. And because their knowledge is hard won, they tend to cling to it much more tenaciously than the more intelligent individual who is no more tied to one piece of information than the next. What makes it worse is that they cannot fathom that the more intelligent individuals do not think like they do.

Members of high IQ societies, especially those that require D15IQs above
145, often comment that around this IQ, qualitatively different
thinking emerges.  By this they mean that the 145+ D15IQ person doesn’t
just do the same things, intellectually, as a lower IQ person, just
faster and more accurately, but actually engages in fundamentally
different intellectual processes.  

I’ve been pointing this out for years, if you recall. But because I don’t think like the less intelligent, I am regularly labeled everything from stupid to racist. In my experience, the 150 IQ individual does not resent the
individual with the 160 or the 175 IQ, and this may be because being above 145, we all tend to engage in similar thought processes, albeit with different capabilities. The 135 IQ individual dislikes
and fears the 150+ individuals, while the 115 IQ individual either
doesn’t believe the 150+ individuals exist or blithely insists that they are crazy.

That’s
why I despise midwits. You simply can’t talk to them. They don’t even
try to understand you, but instead move to disqualify you as fast as they can. I have much more sensible conversations with
people in the 75 to 100 range than I do with most in the 105 to 120
range. The 125 to 140 crowd is okay as long as they don’t have an
inferiority complex, but when they do, they’re the biggest annoyances of
all.

People with D15IQs over 150 are effectively ‘The Excluded’, routinely
finding their thoughts to be unconvincing in the public discourse and in
productive environments.  If placed in a leadership position, they will
not succeed.

Now you know why I have such an allergy to being asked to lead in any way, shape, or form. In any event, this may be one of the more interesting aspects of Brainstorm (a reminder, there are 20 places left for the Wednesday session at 7:30 PM Eastern), as even those who aren’t +3SD or higher are, at least, open in principle to the wild and crazy thoughts being expressed by the higher intelligences. If we can figure out how to best harness a community of High IQ Excluded, we should be able to come up with more than a few interesting projects.

I $*%*ing LOVE science

Never, ever believe anyone who says I do not love and adore science. Because this.

There are several studies showing that when people drink coffee, they have a lower risk of dying from a range of serious diseases. A groundbreaking study, the largest of its kind, was published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2012: In this study, 402,260 individuals between 50 and 71 years of age were asked about their coffee consumption. The results were fairly remarkable… after following the people for 12-13 years, those who drank the most coffee were significantly less likely to have died.

Do you know what this means? DO YOU KNOW WHAT THIS MEANS? It means I HAVE to drink one more cup of coffee a day. For my health. I won’t say this is the greatest day of my adult life, but it’s up there.

I cannot believe people genuinely doubt the existence of God or believe there is some sort of conflict between faith and science. This scientific study clearly indicates that there is a God and He wants us to be happy.

Did I mention that I love science?

First red wine, then dark chocolate, now this. If they discover that wargames and books are similarly beneficial, I’m going to live to be 200.

SJW science

Whether they call themselves scientists or science fiction writers, the lesson, as always, is this: SJWs always lie. Robert Trivers writes about Stephen Jay Gould, an evolutionary biologist he quickly learned was strongly inclined towards intellectual fraudulence and faux scientific fakery:

Many of us theoretical biologists who knew Stephen personally thought he
was something of an intellectual fraud precisely because he had a
talent for coining terms that promised more than they could deliver,
while claiming exactly the opposite….

Recently something brand new has emerged about Steve that is astonishing. In his own empirical work attacking others for biased data analysis in the service of political ideology—it is he who is guilty of the same bias in service of political ideology. What is worse—and more shocking—is that Steve’s errors are very extensive and the bias very serious. A careful reanalysis of one case shows that his target is unblemished while his own attack is biased in all the ways Gould attributes to his victim. His most celebrated book (The Mismeasure of Man) starts with a takedown of Samuel George Morton. Morton was a scientist in the early 19 th Century who devoted himself to measuring the human cranium, especially the volume of the inside, a rough estimate of the size of the enclosed brain. He did so meticulously by pouring first seeds and then ball bearings into skulls until they were full and then pouring them out and measuring their volume in a graduated cylinder. He was a pure empiricist. He knew brain size was an important variable but very little about the details (indeed, we do not know much more today). He thought his data would bear on whether we were one species or several, but in any case he was busy creating a vast trove of true and useful facts.

I love these people—they work for the future and gather data whose logic later generations will reveal. Precisely because they have no axes to grind or hypotheses to prove, their data are apt to be more reliable than the first wave after a new theory. I have benefitted from them in my own life, most memorably when I was shown a large and accurate literature on ratios of investment in 20 ant species, gathered long before anyone appreciated why these facts might be of some considerable interest, as indeed they were.

In any case, Morton grouped his data by population according to best estimates of gross relatedness, Amerindians with Amerindians, Africans with Africans, Nordic Europeans with Nordic, and so on. It is here, Gould alleged, that all sorts of errors were made that supported preconceived notions that among the smaller cranial capacity (and therefore stupider)) peoples would be Amerindians and Africans. For example, Gould claimed that Morton made more subgroups among Nordic people than tropical ones, thus permitting more of them to be above norm, but in fact, the opposite was true. Morton reported more Amerindian subsamples than European and routinely pointed out when particular Amerindian subsamples were as high or higher than the European mean, facts that Gould claimed Morton hid.

In other cases, Gould eliminates all samples with less than four individuals in order to reduce the number of sub-samples with only one sex—a statistically meaningless goal but one that happened to be biased in his favor and permitted him to make additional errors in his favor by arbitrarily eliminating some skulls while including others. If you are comparing group means, you may not wish to use means of less than four, but if you are adding up sub-samples to produce a larger sample, there is no reason not to aggregate all data. Morton is made to look careless and incorrect when it is really Steve who is arbitrarily biasing things in his own favor.

There is an additional contrast between Morton and Gould worth noting. To conjure up Morton’s mistakes, Gould lovingly describes the action of unconscious bias at work: “Morton, measuring by seed, picks up a threateningly large black skull, fills it lightly and gives a few desultory shakes. Next, he takes a distressingly small Caucasian skull, shakes hard, and pushes mightily at the foramen magnum with his thumb. It is easily done, without conscious motivation; expectation is a powerful guide to action.” Indeed it is, but careful re-measures show that Morton never made this particular mistake—only three skulls were mis-measured as being larger than they were and these were all either Amerindian or African.

The same can’t be said of Gould. He came across distressingly objective data of Morton, and by introducing biased procedures (no sample size below four) he was able to get appropriately biased results. And by misrepresenting the frequency of Nordic vs Amerindian subpopulations, he was able to create an illusion of bias where none existed, by mere emphatic assertion (no one bothered to check).

Where are the unconscious processes at work here? Is Steve flying upside-down on auto-pilot, unconsciously making the choices (substitute Nordic for Tropical, delete all samples smaller than four) that will invite the results he wants while hiding his bias? Is the conscious organism really completely in the dark while all of this is going on? Hard to imagine—but at the end the organism appears to be in full self-deception mode—a blow-hard fraudulently imputing fraud, with righteous indignation, coupled with magnanimous forgiveness for the frailties of self-deception in others.

In response to the criticism of Lewis et al, the keeper of Gould’s Tomb—his longtime editor at Natural History, Richard Milner—had some choice comments in defense of Stephen. Gould acted with “complete conviction and integrity” (that is, with full self-deception). “He was a tireless crusader against racism in any form.” (In what way is misrepresenting the true facts about population differences—and then hiding this misrepresentation—a contribution to anti-racism?) And then, fully in flight, he says that any bias was “on the side of the angels”. Who of us is in any position to say what is on the side of the angels? We barely know what is in our own self-interest.

Quelle surprise. Anti-racism is intrinsically anti-science.

SJW is anti-science and anti-mathematics

SJWs are against more than mere fun. They also oppose science as well as math in the form of probability. Mike Cernovich drops relevant statistics on those who have attempted to attack him over daring to mention scientific hate facts.

In a post about HIV I observed, “Straight men do not contract HIV.” I did not push a narrative. I did not share what I heard on some news channel or learned from a nit-wit teacher.

Rather, I analyzed data from the United States Center for Disease Control. When you look at CDC data, you notice something.

Where are all of the straight white male HIV infections?

Relying on CDC data is considered racist and homophobic, as morons believe a scientific judgment is a moral one. Zealots are simply unable to look at scientific questions with a scientific lens and moral questions with a moral lens.

Cernovich points out that even in the impossible event that every single man with HIV is honestly reporting his sexual activity (impossible because we already know it is not true), “According to a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association, men almost never get HIV from women. A healthy man who has unprotected sex with a non drug-using woman has a one in 5 million chance of getting HIV. If he wears a condom, the odds drop to one in 50 million.”

To put it in perspective:

  • Killed by a Dog:     1 in 103,798
  • Killed by Lightning: 1 in 136,011
  • Contracting HIV: 1 in 5,000,000

The point isn’t that this means straight men should run around freely fornicating, it is that one can NEVER, EVER trust anything an SJW says about ANYTHING. They are all about the narrative, not the truth, not the science, not the statistics, not the probabilities and most certainly not the history.

Evolution and the problem of time

I always find it amusing when someone who has credentials in a subject, but is at a distinct disadvantage in IQ terms tries to tell me that I don’t know what I’m talking about. You may recall that over the years, I have repeatedly asked various evolutionary True Believers a very simple and straightforward time-based question, to which there absolutely must be an answer, and they not only have been unable to answer it, but frequently tried to deny it was either a) relevant or b) possible, thereby demonstrating that they don’t understand ANYTHING about their own faux-scientific faith. But the speed of evolution, and of the underlying mutations, is absolutely central to understanding the theory, as well as determining whether it is total nonsense or not:

Mathematicians keep refining π even though they know it to more than 12 trillion digits; physicists beat themselves up because they cannot pin down the gravitational constant beyond three significant figures. Geneticists, by contrast, are having trouble deciding between one measure of how fast human DNA mutates and another that is half that rate.

The rate is key to calibrating the ‘molecular clock’ that puts DNA-based dates on events in evolutionary history. So at an intimate meeting in Leipzig, Germany, on 25–27 February, a dozen speakers puzzled over why calculations of the rate at which sequence changes pop up in human DNA have been so much lower in recent years than previously. They also pondered why the rate seems to fluctuate over time. The meeting drew not only evolutionary geneticists, but also researchers with an interest in cancer and reproductive biology — fields in which mutations have a central role.

“Mutation is ultimately the source of all heritable diseases and all biological adaptations, so understanding the rate at which mutations evolve is a fundamental question,” says Molly Przeworski, a population geneticist at Columbia University in New York City who attended the Human Mutation Rate Meeting….

A slower molecular clock worked well to harmonize genetic and
archaeological estimates for dates of key events in human evolution,
such as migrations out of Africa and around the rest of the world.
But calculations using the slow clock gave nonsensical results when
extended further back in time — positing, for example, that the most
recent common ancestor of apes and monkeys could have encountered
dinosaurs. Reluctant to abandon the older numbers completely, many
researchers have started hedging their bets in papers, presenting
multiple dates for evolutionary events depending on whether mutation is
assumed to be fast, slow or somewhere in between.

You know you’re dealing with QUALITY science when scientists start substituting variables for concrete numbers depending upon what they want the results to be. Here is the money quote: “The fact that the clock is so uncertain is very problematic for us,” he
says. “It means that the dates we get out of genetics are really quite
embarrassingly bad and uncertain.”

As I have repeatedly predicted, genuine genetic science is eventually going to kill evolution by natural selection deader than phlogiston or the Flat Earth theory.

Didn’t he see Serenity?

Stephen Hawking is a good example of why scientists should not be allowed to vote, let alone set government policy:

The human failing I would most like to correct is aggression. It may have had survival advantage in caveman days, to get more food, territory or partner with whom to reproduce, but now it threatens to destroy us all. A major nuclear war would be the end of civilisation, and maybe the end of the human race.

This is idiotic. It isn’t human aggression that threatens to destroy us all, it is science and scientists. Hawking demonstrates a complete inability to correctly utilize basic logic.

Scientists created the threat. Rather than work to remove the threat, some of the very people who created it now want to EXPERIMENT WITH THE ENTIRE HUMAN RACE in order to do something that won’t remove the current threat and might well create some that are even worse.

Scientists love to posture as if they are the good guys responsible for saving the human race, but they are the party primarily responsible for endangering it in a variety of ways.

The Neanderthal theory of intelligence

It’s going to become very, very hard to dismiss the genetic basis for intelligence, or its implications for racial policies, if it is eventually determined that average intelligence is essentially a proxy for a population group’s greater or lesser amount of Neanderthal DNA:

Researchers also have found a peculiar pattern in non-Africans: People in China, Japan and other East Asian countries have about 20 percent more Neanderthal DNA than do Europeans.

Last year, Sriram Sankararaman, a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard Medical School, and his colleagues proposed that natural selection was responsible for the difference. Most Neanderthal genes probably had modestly bad effects on the health of our ancestors, Dr. Sankararaman and other researchers have found. People who inherited a Neanderthal version of any given gene would have had fewer children on average than people with the human version.

As a result, Neanderthal DNA became progressively rarer in living humans. Dr. Sankararaman and his colleagues proposed that it disappeared faster in Europeans than in Asians. The early Asian population was small, the researchers suggested, and natural selection eliminates harmful genes more slowly in small groups than in large populations. Today, smaller ethnic groups, like Ashkenazi Jews and the Amish, can have unusually high rates of certain genetic disorders.

Joshua M. Akey, a geneticist at the University of Washington, and the graduate student Benjamin Vernot recently set out to test this hypothesis. They took advantage of the fact that only some parts of our genome have a strong influence on health. Other parts — so-called neutral regions — are less important.

A mutation in a neutral region won’t affect our odds of having children and therefore won’t be eliminated by natural selection. If Dr. Sankararaman’s hypothesis were correct, you would expect Europeans to have lost more harmful Neanderthal DNA than neutral DNA. In fact, the scientists did not find this difference in the DNA of living Europeans.

Dr. Akey and Mr. Vernot then tested out other possible explanations for the comparative abundance of Neanderthal DNA in Asians. The theory that made the most sense was that Asians inherited additional Neanderthal DNA at a later time.

In this scenario, the ancestors of Asians and Europeans split, the early Asians migrated east, and there they had a second encounter with Neanderthals. Dr. Akey and Mr. Vernot reported their findings in the American Journal of Human Genetics.

We shouldn’t get too carried away with a scientific hypothesis that merely happens to be in line with some computer modeling; if I was inclined to that sort of thing I’d be deeply concerned about global warming. But it is a little ominous; those who think that the third world invasion of the West is harmless should keep in mind the lesson of the Neanderthals. They may have been smarter, but they’re not around anymore and Homo sapiens sapiens is.

For all we know, there were once Neanderthals who claimed any Neanderthal who thought those nice Homo Sapiens who moved into the cave next door would be a problem were sub-speciesist, and besides, weren’t their spiced triceratops eggs ever so tasty?