[1] https://www.cshlpress.com/default.tpl?cart=17625586661954464...
Edit: Watson is also personally responsible for convincing one of the most unethical and conniving scientists I know to go into science rather than medicine, so I have additional reasons to be suspicious, given assholes propagate assholes. If you're a Crick, for God's sake, stop taking pity, and don't tolerate Watsons even if you feel bad for them or they treat you in particular very well, have some standards and be a Stoner.
Someone publicly known?
Who are you referring to in this?
Will check this out and see how it measures up to my favorite book on the topic, The Gene: An Intimate History [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gene:_An_Intimate_History
He spoke at an event hosted by my company, once. He was pissed at Alec Baldwin, and devoted some time to calling him names. We were all looking at each other, going “WTF?”. He was supposed to be talking about using our microscopes, which never came up. It was a lot more like listening to Grandpa complaining about “kids these days,” after getting into the schnapps.
Have a friend that retired from CSH, a few years ago. Watson was a familiar presence, there; even after his Fall From Grace, which came about 20 years late. He used to live like a prince, on campus. Not sure if he was still there, before he went into hospice.
Most folks had a lot of difficulty with him, but he was a money magnet. They put up with his stuff, because he was such a good fundraiser.
It’s amazing how forgiving we can be, when money is to be made.
Oh? Care to reveal your stake in the success of the book?
I've always wanted to see how the structure maps to x-ray diffraction pattern in Photograph 51. Pretty neat!
Especially when the accomplishment is built on basically stolen/unacknowledged work. I’d rather have more Rosalynd Franklin in the world than more James Watson.
Ask yourself why we talk so much about Franklin and so little about Gosling. Perhaps the world is, in fact, NOT as discriminatory against women as you think.
(There is also plenty of evidence that Franklin could be quite unpleasant. If that tarnishes Watson, then it certainly also tarnishes her. What is good for the gander is good for the goose.)
If we accepted peoples’ completely biased views of what makes a human “good”, that’s how I’d respond. But we don’t, which is why that would be a ridiculous response - just as ridiculous as pretending that being a meanie-head makes you a “bad person”.
Such childish playground logic exuberantly deployed in the pursuit of defending an unrepentant flaming racist asshole.
Do you always get so triggered when people call out racists that you're compelled to reflexively leap to their defense for some reason?
"I know you are but what am I" was funny when Pee-Wee Herman said it ironically and comedically, but not when you do.
We as a society should prioritize valourzing the non-assholes who do great things over the assholes who do great things.
I'm not trying to criticize those people or imply anything about them. But in my experience a lot of assholes kind of fly under the radar because they're not in the public eye and no one speaks up.
I personally know LOTS of brilliant people in the bay area tech scene who are not assholes, and are wonderful kind people, so if you only know assholes, you're hanging out with and licking the boots of the wrong people, and that's your problem, and you should re-think who your friends and heros are.
And I flagged your comment for accusing me of licking boots. You don't even know me. Do better.
I wonder if conflating assholery with talent or accomplishment is particularly common in bay-area start up culture.
Just seemed like a fun thought experiment.
People save other people's lives all the time. We hear about it and also would hear about people dying in the attempt and yet.. Don't hear much about it.
The less assholes you have to deal with in your day to day affairs the better off you are.
If the goal of the collective action is to cancel anyone who (like Watson did) asserts that one race of people is on average less intelligence than another race, then say so.
He seemed to have been basing the comments on IQ tests, which are not really a good way of comparing groups of people with different cultures or education. They score an individual within a group of comparable individuals.
It is worth noting that if he had made the same statement in the first half of the 20th century it would have been mainstream science, but even then it was not so much supported by evidence but supported by a lack of evidence showing otherwise.
That is a very misleading statement. Height differences within sexes are also greater than between sexes, and yet most men are taller than most women.
It should be noted that Watson knew this hence why he was focused on the one thing you can say very definitely about black people in America, that they have darker skin then white people and thus was trying to tie melanin to to intelegence.
However, in the end there was a 18 point IQ difference, at age 17, between the adopted white children (105.5) and the adopted black children (83.7). Half white/black children fell almost exactly in between (93.2). The study also had some interesting accidental (?) control variables in that some children had been racially misclassified, but their IQs ended up aligning with their race rather than their identity.
Of course one can still argue that this is environmental, by appealing to e.g. prenatal or social biases and the like, but I think there is no evidence based argument that there is no difference between races, even when every effort is made to eliminate as many viable environmental factors as possible. Obviously the mean doesn't define the individual. There are plenty of high IQ black individuals, and plenty of low IQ white individuals. But group differences are nonetheless very real.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnesota_Transracial_Adoption...
Leaving aside the question of what IQ actually measures, the authors of the single study you cite interpret the results as inconclusive due to confounding factors. The mainstream position in biology is that race is not a biological concept [1]. It seems that you are trying to argue that there is some immutable difference between races, a position usually described as scientific racism. As you are not aware of evidence-based arguments against scientific racism, there are studies showing a reduction of the "Racial IQ Gap" [2], as well as papers reviewing scientific racism in the literature [3] where it is argued that much contemporary research promoting ideas of immutable racial differences fail to meet evidentiary and ethical standards.
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11291859/ [2] http://www.iapsych.com/iqmr/fe/LinkedDocuments/dickens2006a.... [3] https://psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2Famp0001228
The authors of the study itself say that it "provide[s] little or no conclusive evidence for genetic influences underlying racial differences in intelligence and achievement."
> "The test performance of the Black/Black adoptees [in the study] was not different from that of ordinary Black children reared by their own families in the same area of the country. My colleagues and I reported the data accurately and as fully as possible, and then tried to make the results palatable to environmentally committed colleagues. In retrospect, this was a mistake. The results of the transracial adoption study can be used to support either a genetic difference hypothesis or an environmental difference one (because the children have visible African ancestry). We should have been agnostic on the conclusions."
---
It gets back to the main issue here. You can't expect an open and good faith discussion on this topic when any one can suffer major career and other consequences for not adopting the politically correct view. And indeed extremely compelling evidence to the contrary of such is immediately met with a mixture of logically flawed arguments (e.g. - various groups have suffered tremendous discrimination with no apparent impact on IQ or later achievement, Jews being the obvious example) and ad hominem.
The study results are obviously not what the author's expected to find, which left them in a very difficult place. I think that is also why this was the last effort to try to experimentally prove that genetics don't matter. This is also likely why they continue to insist that the almost exactly ~20% of the mixed race individuals were misclassified by accident. Had they shown an environmentally favorable argument, I suspect it would have been revealed as a rather cleverly concocted control group. As is, it's extremely difficult to explain this (the mixed race individuals believed they were black and appeared as such, yet tested in accordance with their genetics) with a typical environmental argument.
Every single parent wants the best for their kids and would do anything for this. We, socially, already spend an obscene amount of money on education and other factors meaning government support to try to turn this viability into a reality would be through the roof - including in endless support on promising research along these lines. And keep in mind this isn't only for black families - there's a significant IQ deficit between whites and East Asians as well, for instance.
But where are these exciting studies on the verge of revolutionizing society? They do not exist. It's kind of like cold fusion. The latest science and research on this topic doesn't really matter. People want to find it and have been searching for decades with promising leads that go nowhere. But if one day they do, you'll know, because it will be something that would have dramatic implications for all of humanity.
Here you said:
> If it helps, you can think of my opposition to the notion that blacks are somehow intellectually inferior to whites as religious, and you might just as productively spend your time trying to convert me to Zoroastrianism.
Someone even mentioned that this was falsifiable:
> His admission really is incredibly revealing, and refreshingly, even depressingly honest. He's literally saying no amount of reason or evidence could change his mind on a matter that is obviously (in principle) falsifiable. I think it's safe to say that, so far as full contact with reality is concerned, he is a lost cause.
Anyways, I am just interested if you have changed your mind, and you are now treating this as falsifiable or if it is impossible to convince you with any evidence. I think this is useful information for anyone debating you in good faith.
In addition to being rude, it isn't even logically coherent. What I do or do not thing about racial supremacy has nothing to do with the very answerable question about whether behavior and molecular genetics research regarding intelligence is being published.
Btw, I just remembered that comment from reading that thread recently. I obviously didnt pour through 10 years of one HN’s most prolific posters.
Either work on behavioral genetics (including behavioral genetics through the lens of racial groups) is being produced by serious scientific groups or it isn't. It is, as you can trivially verify. Ergo, the claim I made in the post I responded to is falsified. What you think about me doesn't enter into it.
So too it goes with the things I said about the MTAS: it does in fact have a small sample, it does in fact have issues with controls (look where they got the adoptees from), it does predate a large amount of scientific work on inherited environment, gene/environment interaction, and epigenetics.
Even a hereditarian wouldn't make the claim the parent commenter made, that MTAS is the last word on this question.
In fact, given the falsity of claim the parent commenter made on this kind of work being suppressed, it would be weird if it was the last word on the question: scientists have spent 20 years drilling into this, and the result has, among other things, been the "Missing Heritability Problem". You don't even have to know anything specific about MTAS to get the problem with the claim on this thread.
It is kind of like the oddness of British prime ministers kneeling to the king and such, but a US anarchronism.
Which is what we see here - people trying to put some sort of scientific veneer to their racism. I don't even know where to start - they seem to think you can boil a brain down to a number and then rank them, in addition to some hand wavy notion that this has nothing to do with education but is 100% genetics (whatever this magical "IQ" number is which boils the billions of neurons in a human brain to one magic number). It is obvious from the outside,from outside the US, but permeates a sheltered, de facto segregated US in the throes of attacking DEI and making America great again like the days of Jim Crow (or even slavery). Obvious to most non-Americans but kind of invisible to upper middle class white Americans who grew up in de facto segregated suburbs.
Jim Watson was, from my view, emotionally stuck in the fourties. Even if it was true, you wouldn't tell a female grad student to their face that they belong in the kitchen. Yet he did say that (less than 15 years ago) to one of my former colleagues.
For me, I work usally with the assumption: "Even if there existed small differences IQ between races explained by genetics, it never tells you something about the individual before you."
Would you say this is a valid belief?
"Even if there was small differences in honesty caused by being a Spaniard, it never tells you something about the individual before you."
When there is no actual evidence of Spaniards being dishonest and the only people making the argument seem to already have a beef with the people of Spain.
Even if there is a connection between skin colour and IQ (which there is not, as far as I know) you'd still need to judge people on their individual merit. It's all about "on average, black people have a lower IQ". Even if true, you can't do anything meaningful with that in any liberal merit-based democracy. White people from rural Alabama might also score lower on IQ tests than white people from NYC. When pressed, even the racist assholes posting in this thread will admit that James Mickens is way smarter than the average white programming/computer scientist (never mind funnier). He certainly is smarter than me and I'm white enough to get sunburns in Ireland.
I would say the entire focus on connection between race and IQ is almost entirely prejudice because it just doesn't matter. Barring than the occasional well-intentioned misguided soul, if you dig in to all the people focused on it then it rarely takes long to find some genuinely racist things well beyond their so-called "just looking at the objective facts".
I guess those so rabidly claiming that people are no allowed to study connection between race and "intelligence" are too dense to see their own biases and axioms.
SAT + GPA are proxies for "IQ stuff" and are highly predictive of future academic success:
https://international.collegeboard.org/toolkit/sat-policy/un...
Second nobody said the SATs don't measure something, but that something is ability to take an SAT test which is highly predictive of how well you can take other tests. Which as our society puts lots of stock into tests isn't nothing but it's not measuring anything inate.
The closest thing is Franklin's Photograph 51 which took about 100 hours to compile and then took another year to do all the calculations to confirm the position of each atom.
Watson and Crick (without the consent of Franklin) saw this Photograph, did some quick analysis, and came up with a couple of models that could match Franklin's photograph. Watson and Crick were already at work trying to crack the model of DNA, but once they got access to Franklin's work, it became the entire basis of their modeling. After about 2 months of this they finally found the double helix structure that matched Franklin's findings.
I doubt Crick was on LSD for an entire 2 months. Perhaps he was tripping when he first viewed the photograph?
In any case, while Franklin certainly didn't get along with Watson, she was close friends with Crick and his wife Odile up to her death and in fact lived with the Cricks when she was undergoing treatment for her cancer [2]. This would be hard to square with the idea that she thought Crick had "stolen" "her" data,
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Gosling [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Mad_Pursuit
As for why Franklin and Watson didn't get along, you can get some idea from Watson's own writings -- Watson liked to talk and joke around and Franklin wasn't interested in that sort of thing, at least not during work hours.
But we are not talking their later work. The issue under discussion is their DNA structure work, and for that Watson wa the main one in their collaboration.
> Watson liked to talk and joke around ...
This euphemistically dances around the issue.
Psychedelic proponents like to claim that LSD helped Francis Crick discover the double helix, but every time I go looking for a source it's a circular web of references and articles that cite each other or, at best, claim that Crick mentioned to a friend that LSD helped him.
I need to re-read his book
> During a symposium held for centenarian Albert Hofmann, Hofmann said Mullis had told him that LSD had "helped him develop the polymerase chain reaction that helps amplify specific DNA sequences".
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_Kekulé#Kekulé's_dream
What should be the outcome or even content of such debate? They existed; they were great and terrible; they are dead. Given the usual inability of mankind to deal with nuance, some will hate them and some will worship them.
In general, it can be expected that people who really shift the scientific status quo will score low on agreeableness. It usually means trampling on someone else's theories and results.
We are not talking about disagreeableness that causes someone to pursue an unconventional path to discovery. We are talking about cheating, pure and simple. I hope you are not claiming that science rests on such behavior.
Franklin's experimental data wasn't the only key experimental data, but it was pivotal.
Franklin could have elucidated the structure of DNA herself, but she was working on other problems.
Watson and Crick were head's deep in the problem and were building stick figure models of all the atoms and bonds. They synthesized the collection of experimental measurements they had to correct and confirm their model.
At the time, scientists already suspected a corkscrew structure but there was disagreement between what that looked like or whether it was double or triple helixed.
Franklin's key experiments resulted in the Photograph 51 that almost single-handedly proved the structure. Before Franklin could publish her data, Wilkins—without the consent or knowledge of Franklin—took that photo and showed Watson. Watson later stated that his mouth dropped when he saw the photo. It proved to him the double helix structure and that guided the rest of their modeling/work. At that point they knew what they were proving. Two months later they'd advanced their model far enough and rushed to publication before Franklin could be credited with her own work
Not only did they use Franklin's work without her consent, not only did they not credit her, but they even belittled her in their books and talks. They even referred to her as "Rosy", a name she never used herself.
Wilkins was "second-in-command" to Randall, developed the DNA structure project, and convinced Randall to assign more people to work on it. Randall then hired Franklin, reassigned Gosling, the graduate student who had been working with Wilkins, to Franklin, and told Franklin that Wilkins would simply be handing over his data to her and that she would subsequently have full ownership of the project. Randall didn't tell Wilkins any of this of course, so a lot of hard feelings developed between Franklin and him. The situation got worse when Wilkins tried to get sample from external collaborators to continue working on the project himself and Randall forced him to hand over one of the samples to Franklin. Franklin finally got sick of Randall herself and left, leaving Randall to turn over all the data to Wilkins, who then went to talk about his pet research interest with Crick, a personal friend of his. Wilkins then recused himself from Crick's paper, feeling he hadn't contributed enough to it. He also worried publicly to others that maybe he had been unkind and driven Franklin out, having minimal insight into Randall's tactics, which are unfortunately common in the field. When they're being used on you by someone skilled in them, it's often hard to realize, and you end up being resentful of the person you're being pitted against until one of you leaves and you suddenly have clarity because the stress of the situation is suddenly reduced.
> she didn't realize its significance or implication.
That does not change the fact that they plagiarized and cheated. They could have collaborated with her and/or credited her
The man just died and it's as if you're trying to pry the Nobel Prize from him.
Franklin didn't know what she had. If she did, she would have been working on it.
In a moment of supreme clarity, the universe revealed itself. Watson and Crick knew immediately the photo would cut down their search space from alternative structures. They still had work to do, because the Angstrom length data is not a model by itself. It just constrained the geometry for the bonds and electrochemistry.
When men have had their scientific advances plagiarised, stolen, claimed from them in the same quantity as non-men, sure, but that's like saying "you're complaining that I stole a million pounds but they stole a can of coke!" Nonsense whataboutism.
If anything though I think the real problem is actually being inverted. At the time when women began pushing or being pushed into industry and academia, why did we value industry and academia over what the women were doing at the time? Caring for children seems pretty important, and outsourcing that to under-resourced strangers and in many cases foreigners as we do today is quite odd when you think about it.
(Bonus points if you know even 3 of those without looking them up)
Marion Donovan appears to have invented a "diaper cover" among other things, her patent then being ignored by several companies. Unfortunate, but I've never heard of whoever supposedly stole credit for that ground-breaking invention either, so it hardly seems relevant. I'd hope in the age of Ali Express and Temu that I don't need to point out how often men's patents get ignored.
I had heard of Nettie Stevens. Her work was not stolen, she published after Edmund Beecher Wilson.
Vera Rubin presented the very controversial theory of dark matter. Given that she worked closely with a male collaborator, Kent Ford, who co-authored many of her papers, it seems more likely that their work was overlooked due to initial resistance to the theory itself.
Lise Meitner was a Jew in Nazi Germany.
Alice Ball's work seems to have been stolen after she died in isolation in a leprosy colony. I'd never heard of Arthur Dean either.
I'll stop there as this will take forever otherwise. What you have listed seem to be extremely tenuous as evidence of gender bias - one can quite easily hop on Google and find plenty of examples of stolen inventions, from automatic windscreen wipers to Facebook.
And by today's standards, I mean those applied to everyday scientists, not the "important" ones that should not be disturbed.
A terrible person indeed.
"We are much indebted to Dr. Jerry Donohue for constant advice and criticism, especially on interatomic distances. We have also been stimulated by a knowledge of the general nature of the unpublished experimental results and ideas of Dr. M. H. F. Wilkins, Dr. R. E. Franklin and their co-workers at King’s College, London."
[1] https://dosequis.colorado.edu/Courses/MethodsLogic/papers/Wa...
[2] https://www.sciencenews.org/article/rosalind-franklin-dna-st...
I am a man who did his PhD in the 2000's. If my supervisor took my data and went on publishing them under his name, not only would I have kicked him in the ass publicly, but I would make my personal vendetta to crap his academic life.
She was a woman (with a not-so-nice character), in the 50s, so this would not have flown, obviously.
Let's not pretend he was not a crappy person in the name of a virgin academic world.
Setting your bizarre ranting aside, you appear to have misread - Franklin was the supervisor. It was her PhD student Raymond Gosling who took Photo 51:
As for "bizarre ranting" - I guess you have never had anything you did credited to somebody else. Good for you (seriously), but in that case please do not comment about the emotions of others.
If you did and think this is fine - well we live in different worlds then.
Well, froth away. Watson and Crick discovered the structure of DNA and appropriately credited Dr. R. E. Franklin (not "Rosy") in their paper.
It does not matter that she was a woman - should they have stolen from a man (which here is also the case) they would have been thieves as well.
Do not put completely useless gender craziness in this. We are talking about one scientist using dirty methods to hide another scientist.
I took that as an accusation of misogyny and I'm unclear how else it could be interpreted. Watson named her as Dr. R. E. Franklin, so it can't be him that was being impugned.
Please also note the frothy inability to type - have I replicated that?
> don't deem worthy
Deem worthy of what?
You are demonstrating my point perfectly. You have no interest in what these women did (or did not) do, what their achievements actually were (and they certainly had them), they're simply a totem that you elevate beyond reason as proof of what a Very Nice Guy you are.
> as if you have them written down on an enemies list
This is in addition to his stolen work of course.
The fact that he dies does not, fortunately, clear his name.
The main idea is that primates such as humans and chimps lost the ability to synthesize vitamin C eons ago, and as a result evolved excellent color vision for finding fruits and in some cases hunting other animals. Pauling supplemented his diet assiduously with Vitamin C and lived to be 93 years old.
Watson has now beaten this record. Maybe it was the Vitamin C, but maybe it was the casual racism and objectivation of female coworkers and subordinates... Who knows?
Linus Pauling was also famously in favor of eugenics directed at African Americans, proposing things like compulsory sickle cell anemia testing for African Americans and forehead tattoos for carriers of the sickle cell gene. So maybe not a surprise that James Watson would vibe with Linus Pauling's legacy.
Dor Yeshorim is Hebrew for "upright generation" (a reference to a Psalm), and I always thought that was a pretty eugenics-y sounding name. Of course attempting to influence which people have children with which other people in order to avoid genetic problems is a type of eugenics, just one that seems reasonable in light of the fact that it does seem to have greatly reduced the prevalence of Tay-Sachs sufferers.
They also don't get it tattoed on their forehead against their will.
I would still take that over being an unaccomplished nobody getting sidetracked with baseless medical quackery.
Society tends to transfer skills/talent/achievement/luck in one field and assume those attributes hold good in all fields because they were successful in one area, even if there is no justification, so their beliefs tend to carry lot more weight and influence than the average joe and hold the field back.
Talented people when sidetracked may no longer be as effective contributors, for example Einstein's dogmatic beliefs in aspects of quantum mechanics or similar other topics likely partially contributed to his diminished contributions in later part of his life.
Ideally the best case is balance between being courageous to hold any kind of belief strongly even if its not conventional wisdom, but also at the same be willing to change in the face of strong evidence.
>diminished contributions in later part of his life
Whew, that's a wild one.
I would have thought of all examples this would be less controversial, it had nothing to do with politics or ideology or religion, it was an entirely technical belief, he felt chasing.
In an alternative reality he may have switched to another area of study after hitting dead ends with unified theory with better results.
It is not for us to say or expect what luminaries do, it is privilege for us they do share anything at all, but it is not also true we do lose a bit when such brilliant minds do get sidetracked ?
There's also the extremely important EPR paper from 1935, twenty years before his death. He certainly didn't stop producing useful science just because he felt it was a good idea to explore ideas that didn't work out.
What is truly embarrassing is stuff like this:
I kept away from political examples as it inevitably gets contentious[1]
I was just trying to highlight the challenge that talented would have on one hand have strong faith in their intuition at the same time be able to change their mind when presented with overwhelming evidence.
[1] still got downvoted smh
Einstein was merely talking about looking after your people. Carl Sagan as well. The government is there to ensure the system is running healthy and enables its citizen to thrive and prosper. But instead we have a system that is extractive and funnels resources and power to the top.
Einstein was basically warning about what is happening now. We are the richest country in the world yet we let ppl die or starve if they don’t have money.
Our system does not follow capitalism the way it was defined. It’s been totally corrupted by the Epstein class and if people don’t push back against this corruption then we are straight to a future as depicted in Elyisium.
"Einstein concludes that these problems can only be corrected with a planned economy where the means of production are owned by society itself"
"Nevertheless, it is necessary to remember that a planned economy is not yet socialism. A planned economy as such may be accompanied by the complete enslavement of the individual. The achievement of socialism requires the solution of some extremely difficult socio-political problems: how is it possible, in view of the far-reaching centralization of political and economic power, to prevent bureaucracy from becoming all-powerful and overweening? How can the rights of the individual be protected and therewith a democratic counterweight to the power of bureaucracy be assured?"
I have a feeling this must be the other way around. The ancient primates had a diet high in fruits, which is why they could survive without harm when the gene for synthesizing vitamin C mutated into a non-functional form. They must have had the colour vision for detecting ripe fruits before that.
It's a trait that some people of Irish descent, like Watson, share.
See also: self-deprecating humor Greek, Jewish, Italian, and members of other ethnicities are sometimes known for. The difference is that Watson just didn't care to read the room before letting loose.
How could it possibly be self-deprecating if he was specifically shitting on "Irish women"?
Oh my goodness, that's terrible. What racist things did Watson say about the Fighting Irish?
"Abraham Lincoln, president of the United States, dead at 56"
It's meant for headline brevity, replacing things like "has died at age 97" and is standard practice.
From just recently:
> James Watson, Co-Discoverer of the Structure of DNA, Is Dead at 97
> ‘90s rapper dead at 51: ‘He went out in style’
> Anthony Jackson, Master of the Electric Bass, Is Dead at 73
> Chen Ning Yang, Nobel-Winning Physicist, Is Dead at 103
> Ace Frehley, a Founding Member of Kiss, Is Dead at 74
> Ruth A. Lawrence, Doctor Who Championed Breastfeeding, Is Dead at 101
> Soo Catwoman, ‘the Female Face of Punk,’ Is Dead at 70
More famous headlines:
> Jimmy Carter, Peacemaking President Amid Crises, Is Dead at 100 [1]
> Nancy Reagan, Former First Lady, Is Dead At Age 94 [2]
> Dick Cheney Is Dead at 84 [3]
> Ozzy Osbourne Is Dead At 76 Years Old, Just Weeks After The Final Black Sabbath Concert [4]
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/29/us/politics/jimmy-carter-...
[2] https://www.scrippsnews.com/obituaries/nancy-reagan-former-f...
Claude Achille Debussy, Died, 1918.
Christophe Willebald Gluck, Died, 1787.
Carl Maria von Weber, Not at all well, 1825. Died, 1826.
Giacomo Meyerbeer, Still alive, 1863. Not still alive, 1864.
Modeste Mussorgsky, 1880, going to parties. No fun anymore, 1881.
Johan Nepomuk Hummel, Chatting away nineteen to the dozen with his mates down the pub every evening, 1836. 1837, nothing.
-- Michael PalinSeriously though: RIP to an incredible contributor to both Science & future of humanity.
There's the experimental data, and then there's the theoretical model.
Watson and Crick were already working on a theoretical double helix model prior to discovering Franklin's x-ray crystallography data, but at the time their model was wrong.
Franklin produced the x-ray crystallographic data that completed the picture and produced the correct working model. Franklin could have also figured out the double helix model herself using her own data and extensive crystallography background, but Watson and Crick were laser focused on only this one problem and beat her to it.
Franklin was robbed of the recognition she deserved, and Watson and Crick should have co-credited her at minimum. But it's incorrect to say that Watson and Crick weren't about to figure it out themselves.
Franklin tragically died of cancer a few years after the discovery and was ineligible to receive a posthumous Nobel Prize. She was only 37.
I wouldn't be so sure that Franklin would have figured out that DNA was an antiparallel double helix. She knew it was a helix from the fibre diffraction pattern, but I don't think just anybody would have had the insight W&C did about it being a double helix and antiparallel, which immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material. However, we can't know for sure.
Edit, in re-reading https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-01313-5 I see that she did suspect the DNA structure contained multiple chains. So my statement about about the double helix aspect was incomplete/incorrect.
Wilkins was her colleague but considered her an "assistant". That's why he felt entitled to take Franklin's Photograph 51 without telling her. It took Franklin another year or so complete the analysis of Photograph 51 and map the position of every atom. Watson and Crick used Photograph 51 (again, without Franklin's knowledge or consent) and did a quick analysis of the data that they used to build a few potential structures
Yes, it's possible Watson and Crick would've eventually arrived at the right answer but we really have no idea how far off they were. Franklin's work didn't just "support" their work. It was the very basis of it after that point.
Franklin's work on the structure of viruses also led directly to ANOTHER nobel prize of a colleague in 1982 (Aaron Klug). It's hard to understate how tremendous the impact of her work has been.
this is a preposterously reductive and dishonest account of what happened.
I believe this article has some updated results: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/25/science/rosalind-franklin... and it appears there was an earlier book before Dark Lady, referenced here: https://www.nytimes.com/1975/09/21/archives/rosalind-frankli...
If you want to attack Watson, his comments on race later in life is a better angle.
> Codiscoverer of Rosalind Franklin's notebooks.
Watson and Crick were already working on a double helix model. The crystallographic data helped them fit the puzzle pieces and confirm the model. You're discounting all of the work they put into it.
Having a diffraction picture of DNA helps, but you still have to put all of the residues in the correct places, understand the 5' to 3' alignment, work out how replication might work...
This is what the diffraction pattern gets you:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photo_51#/media/File:60251254_...
Now solve for the atoms and bonds.
You're making them out to be thieves.
If you were working on a theoretical model of an unknown molecule using primitive tools and somebody had data that could confirm your ideas and fix the kinks, wouldn't you want to see it so you could finish your work?
Watson, Crick, Franklin, and Wilkins were all talking to one another about their work. Franklin had dismissed Watson and Crick's previous molecular model as it was incorrect at the time. Franklin wasn't working on a molecular model of her own.
Watson and Crick were able to synthesize information from several labs and experimental sources, including Franklin's experimental data, and apply it to the problem they were directly working on in order to deduce the correct model.
Right place, right time, right problem, right context.
That Franklin died before she could win a Nobel Prize is tragic, but she wasn't the lone discoverer of DNA's structure.
I am genuinely curious, I could google it easily enough, but it's actually more interesting why people have a certain impression of things and how strongly they've interrogated the accuracy of that impression.
[1]
Seems pretty clear that he thought black people had a genetic disadvantage compared to white people. And "all the testing" is simply wrong. What we've found is that Africa is the most genetically diverse area humanity has [2]. To generalize capabilities based on genetics is simply foolish as the pool is far more vast than what you'd find in England, for example.
[1] https://www.thetimes.com/uk/science/article/the-elementary-d...
AFAIK Africa has small pockets of very high diversity, but most Africans belong to the Nigero-Kordofan family which isn't very diverse at all. The groups that contribute to high overall diversity of the continent (Pygmies, the San) are very small, numbering in tens of thousands or so.
> Studies of genetic variation in Africa suggest that even though high levels of mixed ancestry are observed in most African populations, the genetic variation observed in Africa is broadly correlated with geography, language classification ... and subsistence classifications.
> For example, genetic variation among Nilo-Saharan and Afroasiatic-speaking populations from both Central and East Africa ... reflect the geographic region from which they originated, and generally shows a complex pattern of admixture between these populations and the Niger-Kordofanian speakers who migrated into the region more recently. Consistent with linguistic evidence regarding the origin of Nilo-Saharan languages in the Chad/Sudan border, the highest proportion of Nilo-Saharan ancestry is observed among southern Sudanese populations.
Why mention genetic diversity? Spell out your logical steps instead of just stating isolated facts and leaving others to guess what you're implying.
where is this research
> Why mention genetic diversity?
honestly, just think about it a little longer
This seems like a very, very odd statement. The genetic pool of Ashkenazi Jews is fairly small and nobody believes they’re not particularly intelligent.
The genetic pool of a single family of very, very bright people is even smaller still.
Next, we can discuss what percentage of intelligence is heritable. You’re going to be surprised.
If you fundamentally believe intelligence is solely linked to genetics, then trying to say a group with vast genetic diversity is all inferior is racist. A widely diverse genetic population will have a wide and diverse intelligence. You couldn't reasonably tell what any given individual or group could achieve because there's so much diversity.
> The genetic pool of Ashkenazi Jews is fairly small and nobody believes they’re not particularly intelligent.
This is widely disputed [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashkenazi_Jewish_intelligence
Strawman argument. I never said that.
>This is widely disputed.
No, it isn’t. You can plot ashkenazi Jews on a pct chart and their cluster is much tighter than the SNP distance between Norwegians and Swedish people. That means they have less genetic diversity, which is what you’d expect from a cohesive ethnic group.
Yes it is. See the linked wikipedia article to see a bunch of references to the dispute.
"he ignited an uproar by suggesting, in an interview with The Sunday Times in London, that Black people, over all, were not as intelligent as white people. He repeated the assertion in on-camera interviews for a PBS documentary about him, part of the “American Masters” series."
The point of my comment was that the current Western Civilization is so afraid of this hypothesis and its possible ramifications if it turned out to be even semi-correct, that it will try to destroy anyone who even dares to say it aloud, instead of approaching it without prejudice and studying it.
That is a political taboo, on the same level as saying "Allah probably does not exist" in Iran, "Ukraine is a separate nation which deserves sovereignty and our war against them is unjust" in Russia, or "Our government is neither very benevolent nor very capable and makes stupid mistakes" in China. And this taboo is mostly caused by US history of slavery and Western European history of colonialism and/or eugenics, but also by the current structure of politics. Much like the abovementioned taboos from Iran, Russia and China, its breach would undermine some political foundations.
It also has some consequences. We invest crazy amounts of money into artificial intelligence, but natural intelligence (and stupidity) is relatively underinvested, with the most interesting results coming from studies of corvids or octopuses. IMHO this is low-hanging fruit that we choose not to pluck, thus probably shooting ourselves in the foot when developing our own human potential.
I can't even tell what your suggestion is, what is the low-hanging fruit you are talking about? If you come out and say what your stance is (maybe you think we should genetically engineer babies to score higher on IQ tests?) then we could have a debate about the merits of those ideas. As it stands I have no idea what you're suggesting, which has the side effect of making you irrefutable I guess.
Your general analysis seems way off. Secular skepticism goes back a long time in Iran (way before the European Enlightenment), and few Iranians would be shocked to hear "Allah probably does not exist".
Here are some quatrains by Omar Khayyam (1048 CE) which are well known by everyone in Iran:
They say that in paradise there will be maidens with beautiful eyes,
There will be wine, milk, and honey.
If we have chosen wine and a beloved here, what’s the harm?
Since in the end, the outcome is the same.
The secrets of eternity neither you know nor I;
The solution to the riddle neither you find nor I.
There are inscriptions on the Tablet of Fate;
But when it comes to reading them, neither you can nor I.
When I was a kid, the general population of Czechoslovakia would not be shocked by a joke about stupid drunken Soviet Communists, but if someone snitched on you, that joke would still land you in prison.
As with Iran (and I noticed your Persian handle), I absolutely understand that there is a lot of agnostic and skeptical Iranians, but saying that Allah does not exist in front of some henchmen of the Islamic Republic will likely lead to trouble, am I correct?
the logical next step
Well, would it be? We're 100 years downstream from those times. It is a bit like saying that if a modern American city wants to reintroduce streetcars, it will logically resurrect the wooden boxes of the 1920s that will shake your bones whenever they accelerate.
As of now, we know preciously little about natural intelligence, and I personally don't believe that "ignorance is strength", neither am I a fan of fear masquerading as wisdom. We have likely missed some low hanging fruit because of our deliberate ignorance.
If we are slowly conquering cancer, which once seemed intractable, we could slowly conquer stupidity as well, but that requires knowing something about the subject first, instead of blindly trusting some faith.
It is well possible that 100 years from now, something like "glasses for the brain" will exist, something that sharpens your thought process much like glasses sharpen your vision. Of course that the road to this will be full of potholes, but we should try anyway.
so the idea that one subgroup of humans is superior to another
Why should higher intelligence be considered a basis for "superiority"? We don't consider richer, more beautiful or more eloquent people to be "superior" to the poorer or uglier ones, and we should treat differences in intelligence the same.
There are few explicit or implicit rules about making racist claims that don't incite violence/hatred in most western countries (unlike the example you gave in Iran), or if they are, Watson didn't seem to suffer much for 'breaching the taboo'. Watson was shunned by the public and lost some scientific prestige/status because he didn't provide any evidence for his huge claims.
An editorial in Nature said that his remarks were "beyond the pale" but expressed a wish that the tour had not been canceled so that Watson would have had to face his critics in person, encouraging scientific discussion on the matter.
I think there's a big taboo against making huge claims that aren't supported by anything other than your own authority (such as Linus Pauling claiming that Vitamin C can cure cancer), and an even bigger taboo when those claims are explicitly ranking groups of humans on the basis of their genetics or even vaguely defined features like intelligence.
I find it interesting that you're spending so much time talking about the presence of this taboo but no time at all analyzing or evaluating the actual claims. Because if the claims are false, who cares if they're taboo? Are all taboos bad? Is it a good outcome if we get to a point where all countries have the same taboos?
> If we are slowly conquering cancer, which once seemed intractable, we could slowly conquer stupidity as well, but that requires knowing something about the subject first, instead of blindly trusting some faith.
First we need to have good definitions for intelligence or stupidity. I don't particularly like IQ as a proxy for overall intelligence but if you are defining it using IQ, scores are slowly improving at the population level with hispanics and blacks gaining on whites.
Future Cognitive Ability: US IQ Prediction until 2060 Based on NAEP https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4603674
Certainly sounds like a personal jab, but HN is based on good-faith discussion, so I won't dig deeper into it.
If you are interested in my motivation, it is not building a ladder of world's populations according to IQ and boasting about being somewhere in the upper half. I am more concerned with the fact that such taboos are slowing down our research of natural intelligence to a crawl.
The West is no longer a dominant civilization on this planet. The US seems to be very afraid of the possibility that Chinese AI research will overtake the American one. I find it very short-sighted that a similar concern is absolutely absent when it comes to natural intelligence research. There is a shitton of underdeveloped natural intelligence around as, and if our political adversaries manage to actually develop it first, the AI race may not matter at all.
Of course, that is a big "if", much like with railguns etc. Some technologies never bear fruit. But historically, we have seen extreme concentrations of brain power in some time-and-space limited regions (Hungarian "Martians"?), which indicates that there is a lot more underdeveloped talent than we think and that it could be, given the right methods, developed to overwhelming dimensions.
For Pete's sake, we cannot even recreate Bell Labs as they once were. No one precisely knows what was the actual magic that had them going, even though everyone has their favorite theory. It reminds me of alchemists doing experiments in the early 1600s. Aren't you a bit nervous about the fact that phenomena such as Bell Labs emerge on their own and disappear without us being able to create them on purpose? We must have wasted a lot of human potential by not knowing how to harness and develop top talents.
"analyzing or evaluating ..."
This is quite obviously a vicious circle. The topic of natural intelligence is taboo, scientists who try to attack it earnestly face a lot of hurdles in funding (see also [0], an interesting article), thus the amount of actual data is remarkably small, and, as you yourself say, even the definitions aren't really good. Which, in turn, leads a lot of people to cloak their disgust over the entire topic in a plausibly sounding word bubble like "there is not enough data, it is all so nebulous and murky, there is no sense in studying such a weird topic, don't spend any money on it and don't play with any dangerous hypotheses".
[0] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/09/13/can-progressiv...
Be specific. What specific research questions are you claiming have been slowed, and in what ways?
Note that I’m not saying the cause, merely that’s simply what the testing indicates and is a statement with a pure basis in fact.
There are different group averages in intelligence measurement and people have many feelings about why that is, but nobody credible disputes the mere existence of those data.
Anyways, that’s not in quotes so doesn’t answer the question.
Second, you’d need to prove it’s genetic and not due to socio-economic factors.
I’m assuming you’ve thought of this?
I know that Grok is meant to be the "uncensored, unbiased" version of LLMs. But the training data still reflects human bias, and there is definitely some irony in using an LLM for "objectivity." I do wonder what HN thinks about this though. Whether you can prompt an LLM to reflect more balanced takes that humans could do in controversial topics (assuming the LLM is "rooted" without a biased system prompt.)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44179381
https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=timonoko
timonoko:
FORTH ?KNOW IF HONK ELSE UP SHUT OFF FUCK AND THEN"Fact-checked by Grok"
So... it's a rip-off of Wikipedia edited by an LLM that was specifically designed for misinformation by the world's richest troll?
Do I have that right? Cancer.
It sounds like you consider it to be cancer because someone with whom you don’t agree is involved with it, but that doesn’t really provide a good reason why the article should be dismissed without even reading it.
Fact-checking by an LLM is however not acceptable to many. They have no responsibility, and Grok is known to have explicit biases.
Wikipedia is known to have explicit biases, which is the entire point of the Grokipedia project.
>Fact-checking by an LLM is however not acceptable to many.
Sort of a Luddite mentality to dismiss information without even reading it just because a technology you don't like was involved in its production.
And of course a pro-white-supremacist biased LLM is going to falsely exonerate a racist like James Watson with the same pro-racist biases that Elon Musk programmed it with.
And timonoko also regularly posts Grok generated AI slop bullshit, and even pretends to be a FORTH programmer by having Grog generate code that doesn't do anything like what he claims it does, which should be obvious if he even glanced at the code he was posting. I'd hate to see the kind of Grok-generated buggy crap he unwittingly checks into source code control.
It's strange that timonoko is so compelled to virtue signal so often that he shares Musk's and Grok's racist views. But at least now we know what kind of person he is.
> While his hope was that everybody was equal, he added, "people who have to deal with black employees find this is not true".
Yeah, pretty racist
This is the sort of turn-of-century Mr. Burns type racism that I don't think most Americans even remember.
Suppose for the sake of argument, there's a place where everyone has 10 IQ points less, on average, than the West.
The Flynn effect is about 14 points over a few decades.
How do you square those things? Did the West not have a society a few decades ago? Is there some reason you can't have civilization with slightly dumber people? There was a time when kids were malnourished in the west, and possibly dumber as a result. Also, not everyone in society makes decisions. It tends to be very few people, and nobody thinks politicians are intelligent either.
I've never heard an explanation of intelligence that had any actual real-world impact on a scale that matters to society.
The explanation would have to have quite a lot of depth to it, as you have to come up with some sort of theory connecting how people do on a test to whatever you think makes a good society.
Here's the strategy chatgpt came up with (amongst many other):
What Not to Say (Avoid These)
Don’t describe intelligence or talent as intrinsic, innate, or permanent. This triggers resentment and identity defense.
Don’t use language that signals “I am ahead of you.”
Don’t use your advantage to win every interaction—save leverage for important conflicts.
People tolerate talent. They hate being made aware of being lower in the hierarchy.
_____
Is it possible the backlash to Watson could be viewed from this game theocratic perspective, and not that he was racist and wrong?
How many people died in wars in the 20th century? How many of them did NOT originate in Europe and Asia?
How much of climate change that has fouled up the earth we depend is NOT attributable to economic activity in the west?
Is there a western/Asian country where late-stage capitalism and the devaluation of of the common has not taken hold?
I could go on...
Are these evidence of intelligence? This is not a rhetorical question.
I'm not sure I understand your point around late-stage capitalism and the devaluation of the common...
Are you really arguing that the western world has not been more advanced?
Also, with climate change, may I remind you of quote from Agent Smith in the Matrix trilogy:
> I'd like to share a revelation during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species. I realized that you're not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed. The only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet.
Industrialization followed this pattern. Shitting where you live is a textbook case of stupid.
> The end result of it might not be desirable, but probably something these advance societies can deal with.
The people dying in extreme floods and fires tell me otherwise, and it's likely only going to get worse.
This part is (still) true. Is that fact racist?
Wilkins was the one who showed Franklin's Photograph 51 to Watson. This was without Franklin's consent and before her photographs were officially published. Watson and Crick then rushed to publish their findings before Franklin could
Said with irony? I mean, the guy was into eugenics—thought some races are smarter than others.
As for whether it's true or not, let's just say we don't know for sure because scientists either are not allowed or don't want to research this question.
Of course I'm being facetious. I know why. No one wants to ponder that because of the stigma, so everyone puts their head in the sand and avoids the uncomfortable.
If anything it's probably a healthy reminder that even "smart" people can have blinders on?
You do realize that picking a certain concept "intelligence", defining it to include certain characteristics, tying it to a certain notion of "fitness", defining "Asian", and finally, tying "asian" to "intelligence", are all matters of definition, choice, and perception and nothing fundamental about reality, right?
Race isn't biological, it's a social and political construct. The social and political construct known as "Asians" comprises about 60% of the global population. Also, IQ is not a measure of intelligence.
There are cultural reasons why some people in some "Asian" countries may do better on average in academics, such as stronger familial bonds, peer pressure and a greater cultural value placed on scholastic achievement, but that's far from proof that "Asians" are genetically and intellectually superior to other races, much less that therefore eugenics (and by extension the white supremacist ideology it was created to normalize, which ironically considered "Asians" to be subhuman) is "proven true."
People get cancelled not for saying that it is genetic, but for questioning whether it may be. Of course, we will never know if we're not allowed to ask. Cancel culture is anti-science.
Watson may have been racist, but questioning whether there is a relationship between genetics and intelligence by itself is not racism.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_intelligence#Research...
If you look at their source[0], there's no information about how they controlled for confounders (because it's impossible as they acknowledge[1].)
There's a strong correlation between "education of parents" and "SAT score"[2] which implies that family wealth is a strong contribution to a child's SAT score (something we all know anyway); that's also backed up by [3].
(I'd suggest that [4] also contributes to the positive correlation between familial wealth and test scores but perhaps in a more oblique "the higher goals are aimed at by kids who have the backing to contemplate them because of family support structure, tutoring, ability to pay for the degree(s), etc." way.)
(Similarly for [5], I suppose - there's a distinct correlation between what I'd say was "perceived difficulty of major" and the mean SAT scores. Again probably down to familial wealth, support, tutoring, etc.)
Someone who's an actual statistician would probably rip this apart much more thoroughly and with more rigour than I, of course.
[0] https://reports.collegeboard.org/media/pdf/2023-total-group-...
[1] "Relationships between test scores and other background or Evidence-Based Reading and Writing (ERW) and Math contextual factors are complex and interdependent. Caution is sections of each assessment in the SAT Suite: warranted when using scores to compare or evaluate teachers, schools, districts, or states, because of differences in participation and test taker populations."
[2] Bottom of page 4: "Highest Level of Parental Education"
[3] Bottom of page 5: "Median Family Income"
[4] Bottom of page 8: "Degree-Level Goal"
[5] Top of page 8: "Intended College Major"
There isn't even any concrete evidence that it's a good thing.
"Intelligence isn't genetic" is the left's version of creationism.
The claim is that race as commonly understood and defined (specifically by eugenicists like Watson) has no genetic basis, and therefore claims which follow from that definition such as "Asians have higher IQ" are not scientifically valid, and do not prove the validity of Watson's racial views.
For some reason sparkie just decided to reframe my comment around a claim I didn't make and now here we are litigating a "leftist" strawman.
I'm so tired.
So are you (probably). Do you think incest should be legalized?
> thought some races are smarter than others
What other conclusion can you reasonably come to based on the available data?
EDIT: Never mind, user krapp's comment is what I was reaching for, "Race isn't biological, it's a social and political construct."
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/PCA-clustering-Principal...
> krapp's comment is what I was reaching for, "Race isn't biological, it's a social and political construct."
Also he devoted the last 15 years of his life obsessed with longevity. Dude took anti-oxidants, tennis, and Vitamin C up the wazoo to keep living longer.