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Comment by bglazer

This is in Nature Human Behavior. This is a social science/psychology journal, a field which is suffering from the reproducibility crisis, perhaps worse than any other field. So, any result in this field should be viewed with significant skepticism. This is true for research into population group differences, and extremely true for IQ research into race, which is almost hopelessly noisy and confounded. It is a simple and obvious fact that population group differences in intelligence are noisy and confounded. In fact it is far stronger a fact than any of the actual results from this research.

Second, research results in population group differences are social poison. They are memetic viruses that fuel violent extremism. The murderer of 10 people in Buffalo directly cited human behavior research in his manifesto. Extremist racist groups regularly discuss this research. This is a fact.

So we have a dangerous combination: weak research that destroys societal bonds. This should be handled with care, and extra consideration should be given to whether the tenuous, fallible results from this research will result in violence.

This isn't fucking Orwell, its people trying to make sure that dogshit research in their journal doesnt get cited by mass shooters.

parent bglazer 4 years ago

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