Sunday, October 21, 2018

Scientists stay quiet about population differences

Amy Harmon writes in the NY Times:
[name redacted] is a black high school student in Winston-Salem, N.C., who does not appear in my article on Thursday’s front page about how human geneticists have been slow to respond to the invocation of their research by white supremacists.

But the story of how he struggled last spring to find sources to refute the claims of white classmates that people of European descent had evolved to be intellectually superior to Africans is the reason I persevered in the assignment, even when I felt as if my head were going to explode. ...

But another reason some scientists avoid engaging on this topic, I came to understand, was that they do not have definitive answers about whether there are average differences in biological traits across populations.
She goes on to say that the leading geneticists are unwilling to explain publicly whether the white supremacists are right or wrong.

She did find some who were eager to rebut the white supremacists in trivial ways. For example, she says that white supremacists claim that only European whites can digest milk in adulthood, while geneticists say that there is also an obscure African tribe of dairy farmers than can also do it.

This issue appears to have been precipitated by Elizabeth Warren having a DNA test to prove something about her. Maybe next she will try to show that she has the genes for a higher IQ that she needs to be President.

The real issue with Warren is not whether she has any Mexican DNA, or whether Harvard will admit to giving her racial preferences. Harvard never admits to racial preferences, even tho a current lawsuit is exposing lots of racial preferences.

The real issue is why Warren is embarrassed to be white. She seeks status in the Democrat Party, and that party stands against whites. So Warren must pretend to be non-white.

There is something seriously wrong with a white women who is embarrassed to be white. And there is something wrong with a party that requires some non-white DNA to get ahead.

Meanwhile, the NY Times argues:
To get a handle on what automated fake-news detection would require, consider an article posted in May ...:
The Boy Scouts have decided to accept people who identify as gay and lesbian among their ranks. And girls are welcome now, too, into the iconic organization, which has renamed itself Scouts BSA. So what’s next? A mandate that condoms be made available to ‘all participants’ of its global gathering.
Was this account true or false? Investigators at the fact-checking site Snopes determined that the report was “mostly false.” But determining how it went afoul is a subtle business beyond the dreams of even the best current A.I.
Actually, this is easy for current AI technology.

The article says that it is hard to identify the story as fake news because all the elements of it are true. Leftists want to label it as "mostly false" because it mocks liberal Jewish-promoted values. The Facebook AI programs will just block news that mocks the leftist agenda. FB can do this today.

Update: The NY Times has now redacted the name of the black high school student, so I am doing that also. Apparently he doesn't want to be cited as someone confused by conflicting claims by geneticists. In particular, the article quotes him as saying “It’s convincing me of things I really don’t want to be convinced of.”

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