Nature Human Behaviour has a new editorial that has to be read in full to understand what’s going on in academia today, Science must respect the dignity and rights of all humans. But this section jumps out for an intersection of vacuousness combined with expansiveness:

Yet, people can be harmed indirectly. For example, research may — inadvertently — stigmatize individuals or human groups. It may be discriminatory, racist, sexist, ableist or homophobic. It may provide justification for undermining the human rights of specific groups, simply because of their social characteristics.

Along with other Springer Nature colleagues, we led the development of new guidance that addresses these potential harms and is incorporated in our research ethics guidance. This guidance extends consideration of the principles of ‘beneficence’ and ‘non-maleficence’ — key elements of all ethics frameworks for research with human participants — to any academic publication.

…

Editors, authors and reviewers will hopefully find the guidance helpful when considering and discussing potential benefits and harms arising from manuscripts dealing with human population groups categorized on the basis of socially constructed or socially relevant characteristics, such as race, ethnicity, national or social origin, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, religion, political or other beliefs, age, disease, (dis)ability or socioeconomic status.

In this guidance, we urge authors to be respectful of the dignity and rights of the human groups they study. We encourage researchers to consider the potential implications of research on human groups defined on the basis of social characteristics; to be reflective of their authorial perspective if not part of the group under study; and to contextualise their findings to minimize as much as possible potential misuse or risks of harm to the studied groups in the public sphere. We also highlight the importance of respectful, non-stigmatizing language to avoid perpetuating stereotypes and causing harm to individuals and groups.

Advancing knowledge and understanding is a fundamental public good. In some cases, however, potential harms to the populations studied may outweigh the benefit of publication. Academic content that undermines the dignity or rights of specific groups; assumes that a human group is superior or inferior over another simply because of a social characteristic; includes hate speech or denigrating images; or promotes privileged, exclusionary perspectives raises ethics concerns that may require revisions or supersede the value of publication. For example, the guidance helps in considering whether it is ethically appropriate to question a social group’s right to freedom or cultural rights, above and beyond any considerations of scientific merit.

On the one hand, this is only formalizing the current culture of science. Most young researchers are highly sensitive to these issues, and the older ones who are not will eventually leave the field. But there is some disturbing stuff in there: “may decline publication (or correct, retract, remove or otherwise amend already published content).” You read that right, they reserve the right to expurgate already published literature (it’s mostly online/digital now).

To some extent, there have always been lines in scientific research. The question is where you draw the line. The sorts of people who write up these sorts of editorials live in a monoculture, where everyone agrees on the same values, and what is, and isn’t, licit. They aren’t given to reflecting on the historical precedent for the patterns that self-censorship takes.

Right now the public, and elites, give broad license to academics to publish whatever they want. Despite some political objections to research, the broadly understood idea is that science, and scholarship, by its nature will push the boundaries, even blaspheme, in the quest for truth. This is not always comfortable, but it has paid massive dividends to our civilization. It’s a bargain that the public makes, funding research out of the government budget, even though science is something many of them view ambivalently (but everyone likes nice gadgets!).

Most Americans don’t have strong opinions about physics or geology. But they do have opinions on morality and ethics. If scientists now begin to explicitly admit that they are engaged in a highly moralistic enterprise, expect that the public will also offer up their opinion as a rejoinder.

In the near term, most of the scientists who sign on to these sorts of statements are worried about things like studying group differences in intelligence or sexual orientation. But avoiding this is to some extent a fait accompli. Social norms will prevent this stuff from being explored too much I believe (at least in the West). But that’s not the case in other characteristics, because scientists are not sensitive to everything, because not everyone is part of their ingroup.

Here’s a concrete example. What if researchers find that not only is strong religiosity and social conservatism correlated with lower IQ, but that the same GWAS hits that predict lower IQ also predict religiosity and socially conservative viewpoints? Most scientists don’t know strongly religious people or social conservatives, but I do, and I kow they are a bit offended by these sorts of findings. But, they also understand that science is in the game of truth, not sparing their feelings, sentiments and self-image. Usually, they will concede the research is a legitimate enterprise even if they balk at accepting the specific results.

Now, imagine a future where scientists are quite open that their findings must aim to elevate rather than denigrate. Religious and socially conservative people will feel denigrated, and perhaps they’ll hold scientists to account based on their own avowed values. I doubt most scientists will react positively since they don’t view these groups as legitimate victim categories, but as groups that align with oppressors (honestly, some probably start out thinking “let’s study these evil people and see if we can fix them!”). They will ignore their complaints. Will these groups have any recourse? Of course, once science becomes polarized, then funding will be under consideration. Once scientists give up their moral legitimacy as cold hard practitioners of truth, as opposed to social and political creatures, then it is in the realm of the latter that the game will be played.

This is not to say that scientists were ever objective. They’re human. But in past generations, there was a sense that in some cases, in some instances, they had to put aside their views. To give a concrete example, I know the case of an eminent geneticist who spoke in front of a conservative group, even though his own politics leaned toward socialism.  My understanding is that when queried about this choice he stated that he believes in setting aside politics when it comes to science. Today this would be seen as a regressive viewpoint. Most young geneticists would I’m sure avoid speaking in front of a conservative group.

My cousin Shoma was obsessed with Antoine Lavoisier. She had a bunch of books about him as a teen. I know this because I visited Bangladesh at 12 and there were all these Lavoisier books strewn across her bedroom. In 2004, I went back to visit my cousin in Dhaka, and by then she was working as a computer engineer. That was her undergraduate degree. But she had a master’s in physics, and her concentration was in cosmology (that is, she wrote her thesis on that topic).

I asked her about it, and she said it was Lavoisier in the back of her head. He was such a great scientist whose life was cut short by the Revolution, and one of her main inspirations in science as a young person. She knew ultimately she’d go the practical route and work with computers (she now has a high-level job at a Malaysian company and commutes back to Bangladesh), but she did the master’s degree because of her early passion for basic science drawn from this long-dead Frenchman. She had to honor it before life’s responsibilities made it impossible.

I bring up this anecdote because it’s pretty understandable for me. I too admired the dead white men of science. I didn’t care they were dead or white or men. I cared about their science. This is perhaps an old-fashioned view, but many of us still hold it. Today many people talk about things like “representation” and seeing people who “look like them” in positions of science and power. I understand, it’s very human.

But there is a world out there. That world doesn’t care about human skin color, ancestry, social status, religion, or sex. The world is what it is. That’s what scientists traditionally focused on, even though scientists were of this world, this social world, and so they sometimes missed the mark. But over the last few years, I feel many younger scientists now believe that it wasn’t missing the mark, that science’s social aspect must be embraced as a good, not as an accident that has to do with our frail humanity rather than the great science we aspire to.

But here we are. Dissenters. I am one of those, and I doubt I’ll ever change my mind. I also doubt my cousin, a hijab-wearing Asian Muslim woman, would disagree with me. Whatever ideological differences we may have, we agree about what science should be.

I’m still broadly supportive of the heuristics and biases program. I still think Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment and Thinking, Fast and Slow are worth reading. This sort of stuff is based on deep-seated elements of human cognitive neurological architecture. They’re not fabricated out of whole cloth.

But, the replication crisis has been a total disaster for huge swaths of science, and that’s probably a good thing.

BuzzFeed came out with a review of l’affaire Ariely and there’s not much there beyond what you could find in social media. Many of the researchers did not respond to calls for interviews, which I think is reasonable, since they are speaking directly in their own words on Twitter and their websites. This is better than talking to the media, which is going to twist their comments to fit some narrative. The interesting thing about BuzzFeed’s piece is it reminds us of the period in the late 2000’s when pop-social science was huge and massive inferences were generated by small (or now we know fraudulent) data. Perhaps we’ve at least moved on beyond that?

And yet let me point you to my previous post on testosterone. On Twitter, a correspondent argued that Matt Walker’s Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams is just as bad. So perhaps it didn’t get better?

Many years ago I suggested to Ta-Nehisi Coates that he should interview Neil Risch after Coates waxed on about race and biology. He subsequently did so. The reason I suggested that Coates talk to Risch is that Risch convinced me rigorously that racial categories mapped onto genetic realities in a useful fashion in the early 2000’s. For example, here is the 2002 first-author paper from him, Categorization of humans in biomedical research: genes, race and disease:

In our view, much of this discussion does not derive from an objective scientific perspective. This is understandable, given both historic and current inequities based on perceived racial or ethnic identities, both in the US and around the world, and the resulting sensitivities in such debates. Nonetheless, we demonstrate here that from both an objective and scientific (genetic and epidemiologic) perspective there is great validity in racial/ethnic self-categorizations, both from the research and public policy points of view.

And yet, to my surprise, people have quoted the Coates’ interview of Risch to show how race has no biological basis. Zach Beauchamp of Vox once asked me “did you see the Coates interview of the geneticist?” to argue for why race has no biological basis, and I responded, “I recommended Coates interview Risch, so yes.”

To be fair to Beauchamp, Risch pulled his punches and told Coates what he wanted to hear on the whole.  Rather than telling Coates things that Risch himself had said earlier, he dodged and soothed. This really disappointed me, but live and learn. Many academics do this. The post-modernists were unfortunately very correct about the social conditioning of science. There is no way that a researcher would publish what Risch published today. Because Risch is very progressive and rather old he won’t get “canceled” for his earlier work, but I wouldn’t be surprised if some scientists demand retractions at some point of these publications, since they inject thought-impurities into the citation stream. Though only a minority of scientists today accept that results should serve “social justice,” these are much bolder and more courageous than the silent majority, who will accept the lies so long as they are left alone. I know this because many of the latter are my friends, and all are of course cowards when it comes to public action as opposed to private grumblings.

This is on my mind because for various reasons I stumbled upon this paper, Migration and diversity in Roman Britain: A multidisciplinary approach to the identification of immigrants in Roman York, England, and it reminded me of the debate between Mary Beard and Nassim Taleb. To not put too fine a point on it, Taleb was pretty much right, and Beard was almost certainly defending a position she knew to be wrong, but which she thought was politically more palatable.

Because of modern political needs, there tends to be an overemphasis on the number of people of Sub-Saharan African ancestry in the Roman world. Or, as we’d say today, Black people. The reality is that most Sub-Saharan African ancestry in the Mediterranean world seems to date to the period after Islam and the rise of substantial south to the north slave trade (though not all). Though there were recognizably Sub-Saharan people in Classical Antiquity in the Roman Empire, they seem to have been somewhat rare, with the possible exception of Upper Egypt.

The abstract of the paper says, “The results of the craniometric analysis indicated that the majority of the York population had European origins, but that 11% of the Trentholme Drive and 12% of The Railway study samples were likely of African descent.” More from the text:

To investigate the degree and patterning of cranial variation in the two samples, the cranial measurements were compared to Howells’ (1973, 1995) worldwide reference populations using FORDISC 3.0, discriminant functions software (Jantz and Owsley, 2005). It is understood when using these multivariate analyses that similarity to a reference population does not indicate a specific identity or origin, but rather a physical affinity to the closest population based on a morphometric comparison of the unknown cranium.

Whenever I dig deep into the scholarly citations arguing for a large number of Sub-Saharan African people in the Roman world it’s always morphometrics. Basically, “skull-science.” This is ironic in light of the Left-wing meme that any discussion about race is “skull-science.” But these morphometric studies often seem to have low power and precision. Remember the weird inferences about the skull of Kennewick Man? The science wasn’t “wrong,” it was just weak. And the conclusions reached are often wrong or even random. If you want to find a bunch of East Asians or Sub-Saharan Africans in the Roman world, I’m sure some morphometric analyses will support that bizarre conclusion.

What’s going on here? The truth doesn’t matter, all that matters is “winning” the argument. Even caliper-wielding skull scientists are good “allies” as long as they come to the “right” conclusions.

Where does this leave us? The point of scholarship is that facts are facts, no matter whether they support a particular argument at hand.  Beard should simply have admitted that it was unlikely that a person with such dark skin would have been a prominent Roman Briton because there were very few people with such dark skin in the Roman world at the time. Beard should also not have speculated that Septimius Severus may have been very dark-skinned, because that seems very unlikely, as his background was a mix of colonial Italian and Punic. Neither of these groups is brown, let alone black, in complexion.

Beard is a PhD historian. A nerd. Her job is to say “well actually….” In the 2000’s this was a meme. The know-it-all neck-beard fedora-wearing type. These virgins are annoying, but that’s the point. They annoy you with inconvenient facts in a world where facts matter. Other people will be cool. They will conform. But the nerd says what is true. Or so it was…

The age of the fedora is over, and the neck-beards have mostly bent the knee. I’m sad that Beard, the nice person, seems to have plainly submitted herself to the shibboleths of the age. But then, with that in mind, is it surprising that someone as disagreeable as Taleb would be the one to assert the most likely truth?

I like to point out that I was pretty much in total shock in the middle of February of 2020 when science-Twitter was spending its time “taking down” Richard Dawkins over his comments on eugenics when coronavirus was starting to be a major concern. After all, shouldn’t scientists be focused on the facts that might actually endanger us, rather than a passing controversy that will no doubt fade? Actually, no. “Dunking” on Dawkins was the socially normative act. Focusing on coronavirus might make people think you are crazy, and you wouldn’t want people to think that, would you?

In my interview with Jeremy Kamil, I told him plainly that if researchers discovered a correlation between BLM protests and the spread of COVID-19 I doubt they would publish it. He’s disagreed. But I stand by my statement. When it comes to speaking “truth to power,” we know how things will shake out. If you want the intelligentsia to support you, be part of their tribe, or, force them through the threat of lictors. That is all there is to it.

The terms of the game to come are set. Now we wait for it to start, as old illusions are torn apart.

One of the reasons I started a Substack is to monetize my content. But another reason is also that I feel it’s time to start gating the truth and information. The world we thought we lived in isn’t the real world. Actually. Information is power. Don’t give away power. Use it. Wield it. Proscribe lest one be proscribed.

The time for the veil of ignorance is at hand. Don’t expect too many posts like this here anymore.

Note: A good friend, whose papers I’ve talked about, expressed shock to me that a prominent researcher who LARPs as an SJW on social media, is on the based-shitlordy side in private. My point to him: how do you think he got so prominent? Bend the knee to the regnant faith. They always will. Therefore, the solution is simple: kill the priests and burn the churches. They will worship at the new temples and bow down before idols, because that is the way of power and plenty. Fealty to truth does not bring one the accolades of one’s peers. Be popular.

People wonder at my cynicism. I have seen the heart of man, and it is craven.

Addendum: If there’s a pandemic in the offing, listen to Taleb, not Beard. He’ll say what he thinks, not what’s convenient.

A few years ago Armand Leroi wrote The Lagoon: How Aristotle Invented Science. Some people immediately made a critique that actually, science, as we understand it, is really the creation of early modern Europe. That Aristotle and his fellow Ancients, or physicians and astronomers of early medieval Islam, or the scholastics of the high Middle Ages, didn’t “really” do “science.”

I think most of us understand where this critique is coming from. But, even if you grant the objection if Aristotle was alive today, would he be a scientist? Of course, he would go into science! And, he would probably a good one. Perhaps a great one. Why? Because he had the curiosity, cognitive skills, and, there is a culture that would allow him to flourish. To me, the biggest difference between early modern Western science, as it emerged in the 17th and 18th centuries, and what came before, is that it was a cultural concert of thinkers, a vast constellation of minds and minions.

In contrast, much of ancient science was driven by singular geniuses.

This brings me to the massive replication effort that just got published:

We replicated 21 social science experiments in Science or Nature. We succeeded with 13. Replication effect sizes were half of originals. All materials, data, code, & reports: https://t.co/Uq1R5SUHNo, preprint https://t.co/aDEctL7yUx, Nature Human Behavior https://t.co/5VSJ86avAC pic.twitter.com/dVrSK922Cb

— Brian Nosek (@BrianNosek) August 27, 2018

There are lots of angles to this story. Mostly good. But Jonathan Haidt pointed out how important this makes collaboration and a culture of truth-seeking within the enterprise. Alexandra Elbakyan has stated that her scientific activism is driven by “communist ideals.” And though I dislike Communism, I do think there is something fundamentally communistic about science. In Uncontrolled Jim Manzi points out that within the world of science there are very strong norms about honesty. A major issue with scientific fraud is scientists are trusting.

But then there is the von Neumann factor: geniuses can accelerate and open up whole landscapes of research. They do a “different kind of science.” It’s less culturally embedded, and less social and incremental. They are the sparks which fly in the darkness. Ratiocination machines of a different kind and ken from mortal man.

The moral of the story, if there’s any, is that modern science is a synthesis of these two aspects. There is the “industrial” aspect of scale, efficiency, and incrementalism. One step at a time into the darkness, cautious and continuous. This is science that Adam Smith would be proud of. International, specialized, and efficient. Optimized.

And then there are the startling breakthroughs. Sometimes those breakthroughs are genius and insight. Consider the story of the emergence of String Theory outlined in Lee Smolin’s The Trouble with Physics. Smolin is a skeptic of String Theory, but in the book, he describes how rapidly it took the scientific world by storm, just by force of its insight and elegance.

In contrast, there are cases such as CRISPR, where several different groups seem to have “stumbled” onto it (this resembles the “rediscovery” of genetics in the early 20th century). The genius here is less in the humans than in what nature had invented, and what humans discovered through trial, error, and luck. Nevertheless, in a few years, CRISPR radically transformed the possibilities in “genetic engineering.”

Going forward, big collaborative science will keep lumbering on. It will play the role that it has played for decades, driving translation, laying the seedbed for innovation. Normal science. But every now and then a spark will fly, and a new flame will explode. Genius still has a role to play in the firmament of human advancement.