from Hacker News

'Cancel Culture' Comes to Science?

by dmagee on 1/14/20, 10:36 PM with 321 comments

  • by jacobmoe on 1/15/20, 1:52 AM

    What appears to have happened here was that a climate denialist group that deliberately use "NAS" to confuse people into thinking they are receiving an invitation to speak at a conference by the National Academy of Sciences, was called out by an open science advocate who himself felt mislead. Then the Wall Street Journal was snookered into publishing an editorial because they'll publish pretty much anything that claims to be about "cancel culture". And now we're here debating how some tweets mean science has been ruined by cancel culture warriors or whatever. The irony is that the person being "canceled" is exactly the person being accused of it.

  • by mayniac on 1/15/20, 1:11 AM

    > " By Peter W. Wood"

    > " Mr. Wood is president of the National Association of Scholars. "

    Of course the person being "cancelled" would write an opinion piece on "cancel culture".

    One person criticised his event on twitter and he wrote an opinion piece on WSJ about how he's being persecuted. This seems incredibly childish to me. Especially considering the original tweet* got under 100 retweets and about 130 likes.

    Honestly, I feel like this is more likely to be advertising for the conference than an actual complaint about "cancel culture". Nothing here is noteworthy in any way.

    *https://twitter.com/lteytelman/status/1215380405597065216

  • by alevskaya on 1/14/20, 11:35 PM

    Some relevant context here contesting this view: https://twitter.com/lteytelman/status/1216770668475252738

  • by waylandsmithers on 1/15/20, 3:17 AM

    A point I've heard Neil deGrasse Tyson make a few times is that despite the fact that Edwin Hubble was a heinous racist, that should have no bearing on the validity of his scientific contributions.

    I have a feeling that with sufficient rabble rousing a twitter mob could figure out how to get the name of the space telescope and constant changed.

  • by downerending on 1/15/20, 12:15 AM

    One of my guilty pleasures is finding someone on the web saying something foolish and engaging them in debate. Rather than cancel these guys, wouldn't it be better to have a few well-prepared opponents attend and do the same? (Isn't that how science is supposed to work?)

  • by vajrabum on 1/15/20, 1:16 AM

    The term cancel culture like political correctness is a PR term and an effective one. For global warming 1st year college physics is enough to tell that global warming is in fact real and pretty much all the cranks are on the well funded fossil fuel side. And then there's the likelihood that man created global warming will put an end to the human race.

    Like the tabacco industry, maybe dissing these folks and giving them a hard time is in fact a good idea and also like tobacco pushback comes from older folks and the industry. In the former case it's a conservative form of ignorance. I've been smoking my whole life and it hasn't killed me yet or in this case I've been driving my whole life and it never caused any harm. In the latter case, it's psychopathic opportunism.

    Meanwhile Australia and California (in season) are burning.

  • by LennyTeytelman on 1/15/20, 8:05 PM

    I'm Lenny Teytelman, the target of this article. I'm the CEO and cofounder of protocols.io, an open access platform to improve reproducibility of published research. Accelerating science has been my mission for the past eight years.

    The claims in this piece of "cancel culture" and fear of disagreement on my part are utter nonsense.

    This National Association of Scholars is a group using the legitimate reproducibility discussion to undermine the EPA and climate research.

    I've warned people not to attend this conference because 7/21 total speakers are climate change deniers and 0 are climate experts. My full response is here: https://twitter.com/lteytelman/status/1216770668475252738.

    Lenny Teytelman, Ph.D. CEO, protocols.io

  • by dmode on 1/15/20, 10:13 AM

    Interesting complain by the author. I checked out the Twitter account of National Association of Scholars (the organization the author belongs to) and it is just straight up propaganda with a false veneer of science. No wonder people are warning others

  • by neonate on 1/14/20, 11:30 PM

  • by zaarn on 1/15/20, 8:07 AM

    There is a fairly good piece from the youtuber Contra, it's about 2 hours and goes fairly well into the details of Cancel Culture and how the author was herself cancelled after showing a <10 second clip of a specific person in a +1 hour video. I can certainly recommend it.

  • by michalf6 on 1/15/20, 6:54 AM

    Herbert Marcuse's essay "Repressive Tolerance" is required reading when discussing these issues, it's where it all started:

    https://www.marcuse.org/herbert/publications/1960s/1965-repr...

  • by StanDavis on 1/14/20, 11:00 PM

  • by allovernow on 1/14/20, 11:58 PM

    While this explicit cancel culture has been slow to arrive, this is exactly the kind of traditionally left leaning activism which has gradually come to infest almost all of academia (and to a lesser but growing extent, industry). The result is an extremely strong, emergent cultural pressure against certain results and certain questions, which has been holding back a wide range of fields and ensuring pursuit of severely one sided science for decades. Our understandings of intelligence, social dynamics, genetic influences on behavior, sexually dimorphic psychology and performance, climate change, et al. are mired by unspoken taboos, not because certain lines of inquiry are logically unsound, but because they may uncover results which run contrary to socially acceptable, but ultimately poorly or un- justified assumptions about reality and human nature. More importantly, a subset of results may justify certain traditionally right leaning beliefs, and so certain necessary research topics are effectively forbidden. Please understand, I'm not suggesting choosing between left and right, only pointing out that the bias is pervasive and undeniable.

    The results are less effective social and economic policy, and poorer research in general, as incentives are no longer aligned with classical goals of objective knowledge discovery.

  • by neekleer on 1/15/20, 6:46 AM

    One problem is that tenure and standing for established scientists no longer afford any of the expected protections. James Watson was not discredited but promptly fired and "disgraced" for stating a well-supported scientific finding in abrupt layman's terms for an interview. The minds of cancel culture would probably say they gave this dinosaur enough chances to fade away, but he wouldn't. If they do want scientists to be free to investigate the genetic and other bases of IQ further in order to find better answers, then it seems like they want scientists to first find a way to talk about it publicly without specifying the categories or where members of a category tend to fall on the scale.

    There is a chilling effect on various lines of inquiry. For now, you can claim the information is out there, but any further writings could become more esoteric or limited. In the case of IQ, I don't think certain people want scientific answers as to why. They would rather assume IQ is highly malleable while they run social and economic experiments to find ways to equalize it and other factors that predict success.

  • by robomartin on 1/15/20, 12:24 AM

    Not saying for a moment that this conference is authoritative at all. Let's get that out of the way first.

    Is it possible for both sides of this matter to be right and wrong?

    Absolutely, and that is mostly the case.

    This, because of how f'd-up this climate change thing has become. It's a mess of indescribable proportions.

    Why are deniers right?

    Well, they are not. There's no denying this. Where they are right is in the outcome they are helping create: Taking action to "save the planet" is going nowhere.

    How are deniers wrong?

    Well, their belief system is completely skewed and devoid of scientific support. They believe in a fantasy they have woven over time.

    OK, then.

    Why are proponents right?

    Well, because climate change is real. We have irrefutable data going back 800,000 years to show how things used to be on earth and how we influenced things in the last, say, 200 years. One look at atmospheric CO2 concentration and it is impossible to argue against it. And that's just the start.

    How are proponents wrong then?

    Well, because they have turned this thing into an ugly combination of politics and religion. It's as irrational as can be and EVERYONE is lying through their teeth.

    The greatest lie is that we can actually "save the planet". It's an absolute pile of manure.

    Politicians are the worst. They are using climate change as a battering ram to drive votes. And 100% of what they say are lies. And 100% of what they want to do is pointless and maybe even dangerous.

    OK, you might say: That's crazy! What proof do you have to support this?

    Easy: Exactly the same proof we have to show climate change is real. That is 800,000 years of atmospheric CO2 data resulting from ice core sampling.

    This is the point where people don't bother to do the work and either dismiss or attack the messenger (rather than to think, follow the argument and actually apply a bit of critical thinking).

    Step 1: Check out the graph for the last 800,000 years of CO2 fluctuation. Here it is:

    https://cdiac.ess-dive.lbl.gov/images/air_bubbles_historical...

    Here's the source:

    https://cdiac.ess-dive.lbl.gov/trends/co2/ice_core_co2.html

    Step 2: Print that graph or open it in Photoshop and fit lines to the up and down cycles.

    Step 3: Measure the slopes for up and down cycles of approximately 100 ppm of CO2 change

    Step 4: Average the ups and average the downs.

    What I get, in rough strokes, is (roughly):

    25,000 years for a 100 ppm increase

    50,000 years for a 100 ppm decrease

    Step 5: Stop and think about this:

    That, what you just calculated, is the NATURAL RATE OF CHANGE OF ATMOSPHERIC CO2 WITHOUT HUMANITY AND OUR TECHNOLOGY ON THE PLANET.

    That is crucial, absolutely crucial, in understanding just how ridiculous this has become.

    It means the following: IF WE LEAVE THE PLANET IT WILL TAKE 50,000 YEAS FOR ATMOSPHERIC CO2 TO DECREASE BY 100ppm

    What does that mean?

    It means you are not going to fix it by:

        - Switching to renewable energy sources everywhere on the planet
    - Eliminating all fossil fuel-based transportation
    - Switching the entire planet to electric cars
    - Carbon tax credits
    - Eliminating all plastic
    - Taking humanity --all 7 billion of us-- back to medieval times
    - Destroying the economies of every developed and developing nations
    You are not going to fix it even if you do all of the above and more.

    Why?

    BECAUSE, EVEN IF YOU DO ALL OF THE ABOVE AND MORE, IT DOES NOT EQUAL ALL OF HUMANITY LEAVING THE PLANET.

    Please think about this for more than a moment so you can start pushing for real conversations based on the truth rather than the ridiculous fantasies being pushed by both sides. This is beyond silly now. It's tragic.

    We know that the natural down-slope rate of change is in the order of 50,000 years for 100 ppm without humanity, factories, cars, planes, etc.

    What politicians and zealots are talking about is achieving somewhere in the order of 1000x better performance while all 7 billion people, our cities, factories, technology, etc. remains on the planet. I mean, you don't need to do any math to understand how silly this is.

    All you have to do is look at these graphs, look at the rate of change and ask: How are we going to do 1,000 times better? How are we going to do that without using unimaginable amounts of energy and resources to the point that we are far more likely to kill everything on the planet than fix it.

    These are planetary scale problems that require beyond planetary scale energy and resources to "fix". The sooner we start talking about the realities of climate change --that we can't fix it or "save the planet"-- and stop being hysterical about it, the sooner we can start talking about how to live with it and improve things to the extent possible. Which also means both sides will meet somewhere in the middle.

    BTW, this does not mean we should not clean-up our act at all. We should. All we have to do is stop lying about the reasons for it. There are plenty of legitimate reasons to live in cleaner cities with renewable power sources, climate change and saving the planet just happen to not be among them, not if we want to talk about reality vs. fantasy.

    BTW, don't take my word for it. Read this for an insight into how futile some of these crazy ideas actually are. This is from Google Research:

    https://storage.googleapis.com/pub-tools-public-publication-...

    Prediction: Nobody is going to take the time to consider the above, much less do the work and understand. And by that I mean not one person from either side of the argument. Nobody seems to care about the truth, particularly not scientists who depend on bullshit grants and don't dare bring up the fact that we are wasting valuable time and resources focusing on nonsense. There's big money and great power to be had by riding the gravy train of lies on both sides. Sad. Truly sad.

  • by elfexec on 1/15/20, 12:46 AM

    Aren't a lot of topics already taboo in science/academia? I'd say cancel culture has been in science for a while now. Afterall it is part of academia.

    Didn't a female brown university professor's study on transgenders get "canceled" because it offended some people not too long ago?

    Didn't Bret Weinstein, a biology professor, at some college in oregon get "canceled" not too long ago?

    Didn't Jordan Peterson get "canceled" not too long ago?

    Academia and journalists have been canceling people for a while now. Was WSJ asleep for the past decade?

  • by tkyjonathan on 1/14/20, 11:45 PM

    Where has this been since 2015?

  • by tawm on 1/15/20, 5:21 AM

    'Culture War' Comes to HN?

  • by roenxi on 1/14/20, 11:43 PM

    The line between genius and madness is famously thin and there is no way to distinguish a room full of cranks from a room full of enlightened scholars without listening carefully and weighing up what gets said. And of course one side straight up lying is a fairly useful indicator.

    So I suppose as long as these people are trying to tell the truth as they see it good luck to them. But articles like this are fundamentally a cross between advertising and propaganda so aren't much use to the general public. There is a dire need for some political balance in academia as it is a sheltered institution that by and large doesn't have to deal with the cost of things in the same way as broader society does; so it is good to see someone pushing the right wing as long as they are playing by the rules of honesty and citation which is what academics is about.

  • by erland on 1/15/20, 11:50 AM

    It's funny that this is posted on HN since places on which you cannot speak any controversial opinions are the main way in which CC spreads. HN being one of those places by design.

  • by wedn3sday on 1/15/20, 12:47 AM

    > Our list of speakers includes no women. (All declined our invitations.)

    The fact that every woman they invited declined to give a talk is a huge red flag.