Seems like those that strongly oppose #UFoI are the most toxic, and appear to have not read the proposal in the first place.. simply following along with someone else’s opinion. Much of that toxicity & hate seems to be aimed at one person, and to that the whole of #qoto.
Whether you like or dislike @freemo or #qoto because it has a Q in it—or whatever your flavor of opinion is—it’s completely irrelevant as an argument.
@Darkayne @freemo My issue with #qoto is all the emphasis on not censoring "unpopular" ideas. Lots of ideas are unpopular because they're discredited, and many discredited ideas are also flypaper for bigots - Holocaust denial, race science, flat-earthism, etc. Debating these topics isn't going to bring forth any new insights, it just gives plausible deniability to bigots so they can spread their ideology in a way that appears civil if you don't know which dog whistles to listen for.
🇳🇱
All of those examples are explicitly against the rules and we explicitly state as such.
yikes
but anyway, they're not preventing research in like the genomics of ethnic groups, simply that "race science" as in racialism is just racism in a vaguely scientific coat of paint
i tend to err on the side that if we knew what was wrong we could fix it but people don't like that idea either.
The science cheerleaders REALLY hate data availability, it seems.
They must be hiding something.
@freemo @Moon @chjara
the bottom line for me is that i am not going to treat different groups like i suspect thy have deficiencies, that is a problem.
the bigger issue in tying genes to iq kinda stuff is how, even under a consistent environment, there's pretty no such thing as a "good gene" or a "bad gene" because what a given gene does also depends on the environment of other genes (like what a for loop does depends on what's inside it, compounded out to the worst mess of side-effect-ridden spaghetti you've ever seen
see e.o. wilson in on human nature. he's like "obviously the goal of eugenics is a good thing, to remove bugs that cause human suffering and help us reach our full potential" and trying to think seriously about how to do that, but has to admit:
"""
Like Sisyphus rolling his boulder up and over to the top of the hill only to have it tumble down again, the human gene pool creates hereditary genius in many ways in many places only to have it come apart the next generation. The genes of the Sisyphean combinations are probably spread throughout populations. For this reason alone, we are justified in considering the preservation of the entire gene pool as a contingent primary value until such time as an almost unimaginably greater knowledge of human heredity provides us with the option of a democratically contrived eugenics.
"""
human rights violations aside, the methods enacted in the 20th century would at best (after many generations) produce something like domesticated dogs, with certain "desirable" features balanced against a proliferation of heightened disease and injury risks, and the reduced genetic diversity would also mean fewer opportunities for those rare genius combinations to appear. the sort of data sets and computational power needed to calculate an "ideal" genome are still far off SF stuff, and, given combinatorial explosion, they maybe always will be
there are arbitrarily many ways to reach the same end result (no need to minimise kolmogorov complexity
and for each of these different ways, what changing a particular component does to the end result will be different
was curious-looking yesterday "autism and stature", and seems very messy range of like "average seems 'normal', but maybe extremes are more common? some guys growing very large heads? or maybe small heads? or taller than usual outliers but average normal height?" etc, can see that like if you have changes that do a range of different things elsewhere in development they can have similar outcomes in this one respect you're studying
※ minimise to kolmogorov complexity
※ will be different → can be different
@freemo @Darkayne Where? What I see on the Qoto About page is that y'all don't allow "hate speech" but also won't "censor unpopular ideas". In my experience (and the experience of a lot of marginalized people), places with policies like these tend to give a pass to people who want to "debate" things like race science as long as they don't say any slurs, while people who point out bigotry are often banned for being "uncivil".
@SamuelBepis @freemo @Darkayne FWIW, I've been on QOTO a month now and haven't seen any race science or bigotry. The few moderation decisions I've seen have been thoughtful and nuanced.
@freemo isn't always the best at clearly communicating his intentions, but from everything I've seen so far, his heart appears to be in the right place.
As a member of the LGBTQ community, I never felt anything less than welcomed on QOTO. And, if I had to describe the tone of my Local feed here, it's mostly STEM-related material, but of the few political-or-politics-adjacent posts I see, the vast majority seem to be left-leaning.
I don't know where this dramatic characterization of QOTO being a hive of right-wing disinfo and bigotry comes from, but it really doesn't seem to have any basis in reality.
Its actually much more sinister than you might think...
A guy named snow joined out instance quite some time ago. Long story short turned out he was a literal Nazi and got suspended.
He then had a vandetta for at least a year against QOTO. At one point he announced he was going to defame us by create a cohort of alts on LGBTQ servers and start posting lies.. he recruited a handful of other Nazis to do this, again, all in public (see attached).
Anyway, it worked, most of the lies you hear about QOTO are complete fabrications started by snow or one of his alts... now a year later those lies snowball and get exagerated and ... well here we are.
Where? Here is a direct quote from our ToS:
We do not allow people to disseminate ideologies that are abusive or violent towards others. Demonstrating support for or defending ideologies known to be violent or hateful is a bannable offense. This includes, but is not limited to: racial supremacy, anti-LGBTQ or anti-cis-gender/anti-straight, pro-genocide, child abuse or child pornography, etc. While we recognize questions and conversation regarding these topics are essential for a STEM community, in general, doing so in bad faith will result in immediate expulsion.
The examples you gave explicitly fall under “asking questions in bad faith”.
are you suggesting we should ban people simply for having unpopular opinions?
I understand the value of heuristics, but they're imperfect, and can lead to mistakes that end up promoting injustice. time and again, I've seen nuance such as standing for human rights of horrible human beings, and debating of scientifically relevant taboos, be mistaken for bigotry.
attempting to walk the fine line in which hate speech is ruled out but nuance and scientific debate can take place is quite a challenge, and people pressed for time in a culture of thoughts that can be expressed in 140 characters seem IMHO too ready to shoot when heuristics triggers. that is IMHO not a good trend for nuanced debate, for science, nor for social justice.
the NIH explicitly forbids genomic research in to races so its sort of hilarious to claim its a solved issue https://www.city-journal.org/nih-blocks-access-to-genetics-database