There are a few scientific topics that are too easily manipulated by bad actors who ignore all the nuance. You have to tread very, very carefully on those and ask yourself what good vs. what harm can come from it. We know from history that giving opportunist leaders a chance to classify humans into distinct sub-groups based on intelligence and other key traits ends in catastrophe.
I understand what you are saying and I don't disagree with the idea that bad actors will use science in bad ways.
But I think going down this path of denying (or hiding) science that can be used for bad ideas ends up causing (rightly, imho) a distrust of science -- which is far worse.
A distrust of science (not saying it was caused by this particular issue) is how we ended up with so much anti-vax sentiment in the US. And that is the reason we are seeing outbreaks of diseases that used to be minimal.
I think if you want people to "trust the science", you have to trust the people.
it seems like you are simultaneously arguing for a science that holds itself outside public opinion, and one that is beholden to it.
no, wait, I get it.
all scientists should expect mistrust because of perceptions of bias of any of them, regardless of how well founded. that seems at the very least unproductive.
> it seems like you are simultaneously arguing for a science that holds itself outside public opinion, and one that is beholden to it.
Apologies if I did a bad job explaining my opinion. But I was attempting to argue the exact opposite of that.
My view is that science should be the search for truth. And that if the truth is inconvenient for some political (or other) reason, so bet it. The truth is the goal. Full stop.
My feeling is that if scientists stop pursuing truth in cases where it doesn't fit their politics, they will (rightly, IMHO) lose the trust of the public. (Of course, in particular, those in the public who have different politics.)
so, because science as whole is not pursuing the idea that people with different genetics as a population are inferior in some ways to others with sufficient vigor, that we should expect a justifiable general distrust of science including completely unrelated results like global warming. I don't see how this is prescriptive in any way, except maybe to ... I guess find scientists that are will to accepting funding for ideas that are popular with some people? do you think that would help if they found those ideas to be meritless? or even if they didn't?
Unironically yes. Because it means that scientists are willing to lie or suppress results that offend their moral and poltical sensitbilities, and this should affect your credence in literally any scientific result reported by the institutional scientific research system.
Both sides of this thread are arguing based on fantastical versions of scientific practice that fit their priors. Scientists aren't avoiding studying this for fear of the harm it would do; they're not avoiding it at all.
It doesn't necessarily mean they lie or suppress results, it can just mean they don't pursue areas of study where the outcome is either a) nothing happens or b) bad actors use your results to "other" a whole group of people. What good can come from yet another study on race and IQ? Be specific.
Just saying, "We should do science for science's sake" is not enough. We've done that. Go read The Bell Curve and knock yourself out. What people like you seem to want is continued, motivated hammering of the issue.
you're asking science to give you some excuse for treating some people worse than others. maybe that's just not a very well formed question for a scientist to answer. if we just strip away the race nonsense and ask a more .. meaningful question like 'what is the genetic basis for intelligence', then no one is shirking that question because of what the answer might be. its just a really hard and also pretty fuzzy question.
but you still won't be satisfied with the answer, because even if one set of genes gets you 5% more 'intelligence' score, that still doesn't justify a apartheid state. do you think we should have different rules for people with different IQ scores?
you're saying that because science as a whole isnt particularly interested in assuming _your_ biases, that the whole enterprise is meaningless and corrupt, and thus we can't trust anything those white coats say.
Corporate software in general is often chosen based on the value returned simply being "good enough" most of the time, because the actual product being purchased is good controls for security, compliance, etc.
A corporate purchaser is buying hundreds to thousands of Claude seats and doesn't care very much about percieved fluctuations in the model performance from release to release, they're invested in ties into their SSO and SIEM and every other internal system and have trained their employees and there's substantial cost to switching even in a rapidly moving industry.
Consumer end-users are much less loyal, by comparison.
> This reminds me of when a coworker left to go help develop Technicolor's (yes, that Technicolor) new social media platform.
Random semi-related memory unlocked:
I briefly worked at Technicolor along with most of the people who were at Chumby Industries when it imploded.
As part of the wind-down of Chumby a deal was struck for Technicolor to take on most of the employees to help build MediaNavi, a Netflix-competitor streaming service. We Chumby hires were mostly focused on working on client-side technology to build the streaming service into early "Smart TVs".
It was a complete disaster and I only lasted there about 3 months. Almost everyone I know that made the transition had left within 6-8 months.
I'm pretty sure this is a few years before Technicolor tried the social media thing.
Yeah this. If I don't buy the new iPhone XX.0 but instead wait for XX.1, which could include software and hardware fixes, does that make me a free rider?
> If I don't buy the new iPhone XX.0 but instead wait for XX.1, which could include software and hardware fixes, does that make me a free rider?
Yes, that's what free-riding is.
And the major problem, which the article touches on but doesn't do much to explore, is that if you characterize this as "responsible behavior", it will automatically cause itself to fail, because all of the benefits come from free-riding. The only benefit of waiting is that other people might not do it, and those people will drive improvements. If everyone waits, the only thing that happens is that (1) improvements will take longer to be developed, and (2) everyone experiences exactly the same problems as they would have if no one waited. There's no benefit, but increased cost.
Imagine you and everyone you know are inside a minefield. You need to leave, because you have no water.
Does waiting until enough people have killed themselves to establish the outline of a safe path out make you a free-rider?
What is there to be gained by instituting a waiting period before any attempt to leave?
I've exercised from 6am to 9pm and everywhere in between. At least for me, it's just about getting into a habit and letting your body know this is the time of day we're going to be active.
I never felt like I had more energy in the morning, afternoon, or night. But if I tried to work out in the afternoon when I was in the 6am habit, I felt completely dead.
Until just a couple years ago I would regularly read comments complaining when a website doesn't work because the hacker browses with javascript disabled, for example.
This isn't the early-adopter crowd: it's the refuses to even be a late-adopter crowd.
It is the crowd that understands what parts are functional and in fact chooses security over the dancing bears of the world. It isn't an aversion to tech, it is an aversion to doing things which are worse. In this case massive bloat, ads, and tracking of websites which does the opposite of serving the user when they're just looking for text.
Adoption of technology shouldn't be a binary of 'use it for everything/refuse to use it for anything'.
How about we just let nature take its course and rely on developers' laziness, one of the virtues of a good programmer?
I go to ChatGPT for basically any annoying code snippet and even functions now. I'm done ever having to guess at map reduce syntax again, or trying to remember if slice mutates the target array.
I'm messing with with codex more and more. But I still don't trust it to design features for me. Maybe in 6 months, I will. Is it really that important to force developers NOW to get to a place they'll get to in a few months anyway, assuming the hype is real?
It is not even laziness at this point. There is so many conflicting and convoluted config formats and utilities (especially in the javascript ecosystem) that if you made it your mission to know it all, you would literally spend your whole life on it.
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