throwaway4666

You will find that 'some races just have the dumb SNPs, you know' is indeed a fringe and unserious position often posited by Pioneer Fund recipients (you know, the organization founded in the 30s for the 'purpose of race betterment' that literally inspired Hitler) to justify that we abandon all welfare and remedial programs toward the poorer demographics. If that's not scientific racism, I wonder what's your definition of it.

Seeing how African populations are extremely diverse and we're just seeing the extent of it I would refrain from making such definitive statements.

>To repeat, interest in human populations and such phenotypic differences does not imply scientific racism once you realize the basic scientific principle that humans are animals and consider how animals exist in populations with phenotypic differences.

That's a needlessly stilted PR-like statement that basically hides the meat of the whole 'controversy': behavioral and IQ differences between populations and their genetic origins. Khan has a position, mainstream scientists another. Oftentimes fallacious arguments are invoked involving 'but look at domestic animal breeds' (not unlike your repeated admonition that 'humans are animals' which I will assume is just a boring triviality on your part for the sake of charity).

Scientific racists don't use such crass words like 'inferior', they'd rather say 'have a lower mean IQ and impulse control due to genetic differences'

Yeah I'm not saying literally everything in the article is trash, my thought process basically went as follows:

"Wait this is an elementary mistake. Also he's not really up to date on the science. Who wrote this again? That name rings a bell...oh dear..."

The science is constantly evolving to this very day on the supposedly 'trace levels' of Neanderthal DNA in Africans (especially as we gather a more diverse range of cohorts) so I'll leave it at that.

I just want to comment on this: opposing 'scientific racism' is an ideological claim now?! The dude has a pretty large record making claims about race and IQ and 'human biodiversity', works in an industry that's banking heavily on grifting money out of rich people with PGSes, and mainstream scientists debunking it are the ones being ideological? I feel like I'm dreaming here, imagine a Philip Morris lobbyist accusing you of being 'ideological' when you point out flaws in their 'actually cigarettes are pretty good for you' studies. (Wait, that actually happened)

Ah, he also believes in "Ashkenazi IQ" stuff. And is best friends with Greg Cochran who thinks homosexuality is caught by germs. Very instructive stuff

Yes, this is the usual precanned retort when faced with the fact that one's fringe viewpoint isn't in line with the mainstram science. It's not an argument though, in that it doesn't tilt the balance of probabilities (from a Bayesian point of view) away from the initial prior (i.e. the fringe is likely wrong and experts are likely right - note that I said likely, not 100%, like a good Bayesian). If anything, his elementary mistake about Crick, his failure to stay up to date with recent findings about African DNA, and motivated agenda with roots in scientific racism are tilting in the opposite direction.

Multiple inaccuracies there.

Crick and Watson certainly didn't discover DNA as the substrate for Mendelian inheritance, that was known long before. They (in collaboration with Rosalind "don't talk to me about this woman" Franklin) discovered its 3D structure.

Africans do have Neanderthal DNA, up to 0.3%.

The post tries very hard to make it look like 'Out of Africa' is wrong and not the mainstream accepted by the majority of scientists. Admixture doesn't change that.

Also, isn't Razib Khan a "scientific racist"? (Protip: when someone's wiki page has a 'Controversies' tab it doesn't look good) I remember him being huge into 'HBD' despite not being credentialed in any way beyond dropping out of his PhD program to get in on the 'consumer genomics' grift. Not a good look imo.

If you want a real overview of current population genetics check out Graham Coop's lectures, he's a prominent professor in the field and his teaching materials were inspirational for many people. Alas, he does not have a substack, neither does he make contrarian takes for a living (probably due to having a real job)

You have put a lot of thought in your post and I actually agree with most of it but I just want to interject about a few things:

-Darwin, Mendel etc. are seen as foundational because we as humans need plucky heroes in our narrative of history. But they are anything but. Natural selection did not spontaneously arise as an idea when Darwin put it into written words. Early farmers, herders and semi-nomadic gatherers knew all about artificial selection (which is just natural selection speeded up and driven by humans) and have been doing it for thousands of years, so the knowledge was definitely out there. There are also quite a few ancient texts conjecturing that "man came from apes and the more primitive lifeforms" etc. Of course this is not proper wording for a modern educated scientist, but again, the ideas were there. Only, Darwin was the first person with a name (and what's more, a Western and English name) to notice it, and so he became a legend. Anonymous accounts don't.

-Likewise, there's absolutely no way the Odin guy was the first to come up with the idea of fecal transplants. He's just the first public figure that you've heard of who did, because he's flashy and fancy and trendy and lives in a fancy and trendy place where all the fancy and trendy people congregate. Even excluding the studies suggesting it prior to his stunts, people knew for a while that farm kids eating soil (dirt) from time to time turned out to be suspiciously healthy for their gut.

So I maintain my previous assumption, that biohacking is largely a grift that attempts to repackage previously obtained knowledge from more obscure and less widely acknowledged (read: non-American, non-Western, etc.) sources and fashion it into a cool-looking product to swindle rich people out of their money.

The scientific world doesn't need biohackers, stunt-pullers and other grifters, it needs to acknowledge the humble and the lesser-known and the anonymous common knowledge.

Peer-review has its problems but I don't think the solution is 'we need more people carelessly injecting themselves and others with things with unknown effects'. I think the covid crisis aptly showed that the 'plucky outsider that defies a reactionary authority' archetype doesn't actually exist in real life. And biohacking itself is largely a grift.

Good for him. I still have no idea what that website is for and why people use it in earnest (i.e. not for joke or 'bit' accounts like dril)

The main reason for me is that Ubuntu somehow breaks at every major upgrade, while Mint doesn't. That and Cinnamon, of course.

We don't really know how feasible multithreading is, but the community suspects at least some tasks could be computed on different threads, such as e.g. the pathfinding stuff that one of the worst offenders when it comes to FPS.