> " 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

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.

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.

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

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

https://usf.news/the-americas/northern-america/united-states...

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.

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

More troubling is his claim that they are "weaponizing" reproducibility against climate change. Doesn't that raise a red flag? If you're worried that reproducibility poses a problem for something, doesn't that mean you might just a little bit probably have beliefs not based on reproducible science, but on faith? And that the irreproducible science has a chance of being wrong?

I'm not trying to deny climate science, I think it's real. But it seems like there's a real problem with this person's stance and how they're trying to argue and obstruct.

I'm kind of a believer that people can think for themselves. Let anybody attend anything - if it's a science convention that isn't promoting science it seems like it's not going to get very far, no protesting required.

Who are these people who feel that simply listening to someone speak is equivalent to endorsing them?

>The @NASorg [National Association of Scholars] sounds like the National Academy of Science, but it's not.

>The conference they are organizing has 21 speakers. Of them, 7 are hard core climate change deniers and 0 are climate experts.

Sounds like a pretty shady group to me.

# Nasorg sounds like NAS and could be mistaken for it.

# Nasorg is conservative and have published material with conservative slant.

# 7 out of 21 speakers are climate denialists.

# Therefore it is righteous to deplatform them.

Agree or disagree with the event's motivations, trying to get it shut down is an outright attack. Defending against that publicly, like this article seems so do, is warranted and not an attack on Mr. Teytelman.

Perhaps, but all the spoken taboos—that is, the concrete examples of things which are cited as being supposedly taboo to address in research—are, it turns out, actually quite well covered in the literature (sometimes, they are things one side would like to be true that are consistently refuted by empirical research, sometimes, as is the case with race/IQ correlation, they are facts both opposing sides acknowledge but each side prefers a different explanation for, and where one side, rather than acknowledging the dispute over the explanation, prefers to pretend the other side denies the phenomenon, and sometimes there is some other dynamic at work, but its pretty much never that the research either isn't done or is suppressed.)

Can you point to specific examples of this where the science is actually robust and well documented but has somehow been blocked from being published or otherwise stopped due to this pervasive bias?

I have been hearing for a long time about how scientists are scared to question climate change, or gender differences between men and women. From what I've seen, the reality is that there are pretty clear conclusions that we can draw in those areas: that climate change is human-caused and dangerous, and that purely biological, mental differences between men and women are usually overstated.

Frankly, I don't think that there's a particularly strong culture in science that is scared to ask those questions, and while cancel culture is a real thing, I don't think it's a real problem here. I do think there's a culture at the edge of science that doesn't like the answers researchers have found, and that is aggressively underestating the degree of confidence in those answers in the hopes that certain debates can be prolonged forever rather than used to influence policy changes right now.

In other words, pervasive doubt can be just as dangerous and just as politically motivated as pervasive certainty. There are certain topics (such as climate change) where we effectively know the right answer. Of course we never reach 100% certainty, of course there are areas where we want to learn more, but we're a heck of a lot closer to 100% certainty than we are to 50% certainty.

Because of that, some of the taboos you notice on the far-edges of the scientific community are actually justifiable defensive measures -- because running the clock down while introducing impossible standards of certainty is an effective strategy to circumvent scientific and social progress. We saw this happen with the sugar industry, we saw it happen with the tobacco industry, we saw it happen with race science, and we're seeing it happen today with gender studies, climate science, and anti-vaxers.

If you were to look at the subjects I just listed to pick out a common theme or lesson, I would say that it is, 'beware isolated demands for scientific rigor, particularly when those demands are selectively applied in ways that benefit a political or socioeconomic status quo.'

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_long_march_through_the_ins...

What this article and other "dark web" people are doing is trying to play the victim and contriving a boogeyman. Just because science isn't shouting "omg women are inherently submissive" and "oh black people are better suited to manual labor", "dark webbies" make it sound like someone is suppressing research into any such area. Finally, climate change is real and people should get over it. If you look within the scientific community there's a huge range of diversity on opinions on every issue, including climate change. It's just not of the type "dark web" enthusiasts would like it to be because it's constrained by actual facts and not fantasies.

By the way, scientists tend to be left-leaning in general. It's not like there's some force out there "pushing them" to act like lefties. And no, the general leftward tendency of scientists doens't negatively impact research, because science isn't political. Climate change isn't a political issue, and neither are any of these other so-called "points". Science is about learning how nature works. The scientific establishment certainly has some flaws, most notable being the publish-or-perish regime that dominates many fields. But this dark web stuff is total nonsense that's only there to justify shitty beliefs or make people feel special and part of some "cool", "rebel" outsider group without having to put any work in.

Edit: oooh looks like i made some dark webbers salty. Downvote as many comments as you want, everyone is onto this charade. If you care about objectivity, fairness or justice then stop looking for boogeymen and easy narratives and focus on trying to make a difference for people who need help.

A bunch of liberals at American universities isn't enough to completely throw off something like climate change or genetic influences on behavior. A lot of eyes have looked at a lot of data.

So why do taboos against topics like race and gender biology exist?

Tell me why the gate is there.

So... the correct results that are being suppressed all skew to the political right and in favor of established social order? Really? You're sure that's not itself an observer bias?

The trick is to find one that will produce money for you as a researcher/investor even if it's an unpopular opinion (i.e. not reliant on investment / cooperation from mainstream players).

Suggestions?

Related, what's the best way to short cancel-culture-heavy endeavors? Seems like it predicts a much higher chance of failure in the long term.

> ensuring pursuit of severely one sided science for decades

More like a government level effort, not some random left leaning activism infesting science. So this is the social and economic policy they want.

Once you start trying to attack climate change, you lose all your credibility. This is something that has MOUNTAINS of evidence that is quite clear and gets even clearer with the passage of time.

The race IQ war is never going to go anyplace good for this site, and it attracts hard-core ideologues who proceed to do hard-core ideological battle, which is off topic here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Even Watson admitted, before being fired, that the last straw that did that wasn't a well-supported scientific finding.

> In the case of IQ, I don't think certain people want scientific answers as to why

The people that don't want the answers as to why are the people that are busy trumpeting any reported finding of correlation that fits their political narrative, no matter how thinly supported, and insisting that it must be an inherent racial difference. The rest of the world is very much interested in both testing the correlations and seeking causal explanations.

It's quite obvious they don't want that, so they can continue to stretch the remaining gaps in knowledge enough to fit the entire blank slate hypothesis inside.

However, I have to disagree that humanity has to leave the planet, or that it's impossible to fix. I will agree that it's very unlikely to be fixed or mitigated to a decent amount before disaster happens, but that's because of politics and human stupidity, not because it's not possible.

More CO2 in the atmosphere doesn't have to equal higher average global temperatures. CO2 holds in energy from the Sun. So the answer is simple: decrease the amount of sunlight. There's already ideas of how to do this, such as "solar shades". Basically, put a bunch of things in orbit that block some of the Sun's light, so less of it strikes the atmosphere. Now, even with the higher levels of CO2, less energy is entering the system that will be retained by the greenhouse effect. Of course, planetary engineering ideas like this are megaprojects and would require huge amounts of money to do, and probably international coordination, which seems unlikely given the terrible state of world politics at the moment.

In other words, it's easy to talk about a solution, any solution, in isolation of what it would really take to deploy it at a scale massive enough to affect planetary level changes. Think about all of the equipment, transportation, processing, people, energy, etc. We literally can't think about things at these scales.

To go back to my super-simple argument about how the planet behaved without us polluting it further. It typically took absolutely massive storms for tens of thousands of years to reduce CO2 by 100 ppm. I use 50,000 years as an average of sorts, but the reality is that the range extends all the way out to 100,000 years for 100 ppm.

Now imagine taking all of that and proposing that we are going to do the same in 50 or 100 years, without leaving the planet, without shutting down every form of transportation, without killing every industry on the planet and without reducing population to medieval levels. That is a tall order. It's one thing to run a little microscopic test (when compared to planetary scale everything is microscopic), quite another to have the audacity to claim we know what will happen if we take it global. We could create quite an ecological mess.

The things you mention we could have done. I don't think they would have made any difference. I mean, not in terms of atmospheric CO2 concentration. Human life, definitely. One of the things I learned --and I can't remember it accurately-- is that CO2 in the atmosphere "sticks" and is hard to mitigate. The idea is that anything we do at ground level will have zero impact past a certain altitude. We can certainly burn stuff and have the CO2 go up and circle the globe but we can't easily pull it down from 10, 20 or 30 km of altitude.

That's what a lot of these simplistic conversations miss. When I say it will take an astronomical amount of energy and resources I am thinking about a process that has to reach out and grab CO2 going up tens of kilometers into the atmosphere all around the globe. We just can't do this by installing solar panels, sprinkling the beaches with chemicals, banning coal and gasoline powered vehicles and devolving into the middle ages. This is a very tough problem and one that likely has no human-scale solution, both in terms of time and resources.

That said, I don't think this is reason for depression. Imagine for a moment if we agreed on this idea that we just can't fix it. What would our conversations turn to then? Improving human life? Developing technologies to help us live with the coming changes? Cleaning-up our act to improve life locally? That and more.

I would imagine the narrative would change radically. For one thing, we would stop hearing from ignorant politicians, celebrities, deniers and zealots. Researchers would be able to work on real research rather than having to get on the bandwagon for fear of never having access to research grants and opportunities. There is no telling what advances we might make if we just stopped the insanity this has become and allowed facts, reason and real unencumbered science and engineering to float to the top. Utopia, I know.

Excellent example! I'm no climate scientist, but I am a former geoscientist, and as it happens, all of our estimates for historic atmospheric conditions are based on various proxies which in turn are rooted in assumptions. Let's take a look at ice cores, for example. The theory is that bubbles of gas are trapped during solidification and a very strong assumption is that gas ratios do not change through processes like diffusion while the ice changes state through gradual burial over thousands of years. Now I could not find any literature after a cursory search questioning or even exploring such assumptions. But it is a fact that at least one other indicator contradicts estimates from ice cores. Plant stomata overreport historic CO2 concentrations relative to ice cores.

Now, a hypothetical thought experiment: suppose a scientist is able to obtain funding for and completes research which suggests that ice cores actually underestimate peak CO2 concentrations, indicating that modern levels are actually not as unprecedented as commonly believed. Which scenario do you think is more plausible:

1. The paper is published and the field of climate scientists, quite entrenched in a particular dominant viewpoint, become much more sceptical.

2. The scientist is shunned, if they even find an outlet willing to publish, for being a denier, and their career is jeapordized.

Remember, scientists need to eat too.

I do not wish to turn this into a debate about climate science. But there are other perfectly valid indicators, hard to find in "prestigious" journals, which are in desperate need of scrutiny but are not explored because people who spend their best years pursuing a PhD are unlikely to risk destroying their careers and losing their jobs when they have safer questions to ask. That's a large component of this emergent pressure to research in a particular safe direction.

Honestly, given the massive uncertainty that we deal with in geoscience, with strong economic pressures to be precise (oil wells are expensive) it is extremely difficult for me to see the same wildly uncertain proxies, models, and technologies being used to justify unquestionability of facts in climate science, particularly considering the risks of overestimating warming are far lower than drilling a $200MM dry hole. Climate is a massive, complex, chaotic system which we have only recently begun studying, and requires enormous infrastructure for data collection, processing, and modeling, the latter of which cannot be empirically verified. To believe that the science is settled and beyond questioning is naive. CO2 levels are rising, but how far this deviates from the norm and how bad it may ultimately be for humans and animals is still an open question.

His research gate profile.

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Noah_Carl

His website.

https://supportnoahcarl.com/

> Since I was fired, over 600 academics have signed a petition supporting me , and several leading newspapers have published articles criticising the college’s decision. The support I’ve received so far has been incredible! But petitions and newspaper articles aren’t enough. If we want to safeguard academic freedom, and freedom of speech more generally, we need to start imposing real, material costs on the institutions that buckle under activists’ pressure.

[1] https://blog.23andme.com/23andme-research/massive-study-on-t...

Comparing genetic ancestry and self-reported race/ethnicity in a multiethnic population in New York City

Self-reported race/ethnicity is frequently used in epidemiological studies to assess an individual’s background origin. How- ever, in admixed populations such as Hispanic, self-reported race/ethnicity may not accurately represent them genetically because they are admixed with European, African and Native American ancestry. We estimated the proportions of genetic admixture in an ethnically diverse population of 396 mothers and 188 of their children with 35 ancestry informative mark- ers (AIMs) using the STRUCTURE version 2.2 program. The majority of the markers showed significant deviation from Hardy–Weinberg equilibrium in our study population. In mothers self-identified as Black and White, the imputed ancestry proportions were 77.6% African and 75.1% European respectively, while the racial composition among self-identified His- panics was 29.2% European, 26.0% African, and 44.8% Native American. We also investigated the utility of AIMs by showing the improved fitness of models in paraoxanase-1 genotype–phenotype associations after incorporating AIMs; however, the im- provement was moderate at best. In summary, a minimal set of 35 AIMs is sufficient to detect population stratification and estimate the proportion of individual genetic admixture; however, the utility of these markers remains questionable.

It absolutely does, which is why medical practitioners ask for race. Different races have different susceptibility to various medical conditions, for genetic reasons (even if we don’t understand the causal mechanisms yet).

I'd personally consider those other studies to be more important than race and IQ, and certainly more palatable. I think it's possible that the race/IQ factor has made that whole field untenable though.

I very much doubt it's because it's a waste of time, figuring out what interventions allow people to be smarter, to flourish, is pretty important. I'm pretty glad we got rid of lead paint, and leaded gasoline. That's a very visible and important intervention of the type that IQ research would help with.

A lot of related research goes on, but it seems like it very rarely touches directly on the subject of IQ. That being said it's understandable when any IQ researcher's research would be immediately weaponized by racists, no matter how useful it could be. Most of the examples you cite (race, education, economic background) would not be useful in-and-of them-self (at least in a just world) but would be useful to help control for those factors in other research.

The point of IQ research is that it effects real life outcomes that we care about, like health, education, social status, criminal behavior, STI status, having children outside marriage, many others.

If two groups are assumed to be identical but they have different outcomes one possible reason is discrimination. If they are not actually identical the difference can be real and not due to discrimination. East Africans are crushingly dominant in marathon running. This is not due to discrimination against non East Africans. If similar differences exist between different ancestry groups in intelligence you’ll see dramatic differences in outcomes. If they’re due to discrimination we can fix that. If not pretending they’re due to discrimination will just lead to a great deal of wasted effort.

Understanding correlation is the first step to understanding causation, and a statistically significant correlation, by definition, implies that it is unlikely that there is not a causal relationship, though the cause may not be directly between the two studied variables.

> You could also have a study on correlation between IQ and poverty, IQ and access to education...

You could and you do. Or (to pick a real example that came up near the top, by recency, of a Google Scholar search for race and IQ) of the correlations between IQ, sex, and maternal obesity, controlling for (among other factors), race differences in IQ, which requires first having studied the correlation between race and IQ.

> Maybe no one is picking up the subject because it would be a waste of time?

Maybe the story that no one is picking up the subject is just a lie easily refuted by searching Google Scholar.

It's academics. Whether or not there is a use isn't really an important factor. It is enough to be agglomerating facts.