FreeThought Blogs

> I think that perhaps our views of the world are slight off-kilter/incompatible.

Yeah, possibly. I blame LessWrong fatigue. It's an entire site made of handwavy claims that, no matter how far you trace back through the links, never quite actually get backed up. So I tend to be harsh on similar claims, particularly when they appear to be from that sphere (judging by the buzzword "sufficiently advanced AI", which is in practice used to put forward outlandish claims and then try to reverse the burden of proof).

I actually started reading the site because of a friend who was getting into cryonics. I'd hitherto been neutral-to-positive on the idea, but the more I investigated it the more I went "what the hell is this rubbish." (Writeup is at http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Cryonics which is a very middling article, and is still about the best critical article available on the subject ...) The handwavy claims are endemic, quite a few rely on effective magic (actual answers from cryonicist: "But, nanobots!" or "sufficiently advanced AI") and it really is largely just ill-supported guff, even if I'm being super-charitable to the arguments. Extracting a disprovable claim is nearly bloody impossible itself.

> As to your claim of being able to 'turn back time', don't we do this all the time?
>If we look at the link we've both referenced, say we had two pictures of the last milliseconds of the book falling, and we knew the exact time between when these pictures were taken then we can…

Google News, with some custom sections to emphasize news about science and technology and about education, and the many friends I have on Facebook, who post interesting links regularly. I follow several blogs and other websites with regular news updates, especially about science. When I really want to research a subject in depth, I go straight to the academic libraries of my alma mater university across town (now often via its extensive subscriptions to databases that I can access from home with user authentication I gain through an affiliation with that university). For articles to look at for submission to Hacker News, I

1) make sure to have a science section in my Google News set-up, and additionally use Google News and Google Scholar keyword searches to check submissions by other users to HN,

2) follow the recommendations of certain key Facebook friends of mine who are either professional scientists, science writers, or science educators,

3) daily read Science-Based Medicine

http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/

(I don't submit to HN from Science-Based Medicine every day, but I have found some GREAT articles there over the years)

4) daily read Why Evolution Is True

http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/

(which sometimes has personal posts by the site owner but also has EXCELLENT posts by him and by guest posters on cutting-edge science issues, some of which I post directly and some of which lead to professional journal articles I post directly)

5) daily read…

As you yourself have implied, creationist books also have 'hundreds of footnotes to refereed publications.' ;)

I have a hard time trusting Pinker's views, or most of the work of evolutionary psychology. They in general do not seem to understand evolution. That is, they seem to think that everything is an adaptive result of specific evolution, and don't consider the idea that some mechanisms are neutral with respect to selection. I also believe they have make conclusions based on insufficient evidence.

My own experiments with genetic algorithms show just how much crap there can be, which has nothing to do with evolutionary fitness. But I at best dabble in evolutionary biology (my own work is related to small-molecule chemistry, and my training is in structural biophysics, so only tangentially related to evolution).

Instead, see http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2013/07/28/tackling-pinkers-defense-of-evolutionary-psychology/ and http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2013/07/15/when-in-doubt-just-question-the-motives-of-evolutionary-psychology-critics/ for the comments of an evolutionary biologist commenting on evolutionary psychology, and on Pinker in specific.

"Take a look at [them]—you might be surprised at what you find." ;)

Quoting from the latter:

> Have I ever said that we shouldn’t study gender or racial differences? No. We know there are going to be differences. The catch is that they have to be studied very, very well, with rigor and careful analysis,…

This article is a waste of time at best and a deliberate misdirection at worst. Focusing on the (alleged) leaker and ignoring the content of the leak is a classic propaganda tactic. Right at the beginning we see this claim in defense of the CIA program:

This is not dragnet mass surveillance of the kind more often associated with the National Security Agency. These are hacks, or “exploits,” designed for individual targets.

Perhaps the most news-making program in that leak was something called "Marble Framework", and as I recall NSA whistleblower Bill Binney talked quite a bit about it in relation to Russiagate. I don't care about Russiagate, so let's search Google with 'verbatim' (under tools) on.

binney "marble framework" CIA -russiagate

So, here we get a lot of interesting results and a description of Marble Framework. Here's one source for example, not sure I agree with their characterization of Binney, who was at least trying to be responsible and follow the laws that banned mass domestic warrantless collection, and who seems like a decent person (plus B-tree tutorial) but at least this source discusses the central matter:

https://freethoughtblogs.com/stderr/2017/04/14/why-cia-and-nsa-tool-leaks-matter/

> "Description: The Marble Framework is designed to allow for flexible and easy-to-use obfuscation when developing tools. When signaturing tools, string obfuscation algorithms (especially those that are unique) are often used to link malware to a specific…

> we do very little to try to steer the reproductive outcome / health of our own species. [...] we do almost nothing to ensure a positive genetic future for ourselves.

Yeah, we probably don't want to try that. The genetic health of a species can basically be defined by its genetic diversity. That aggressive breeding of domestic animals and plants leads them to be really vulnerable to disease or parasites. Any attempt to exert "control" of our genetic future is likely to reduce our genetic diversity, not expand it.

One of the great things about modern medicine is that it allows people with some genetic variations that would have killed them in earlier times, to live productive lives today. And one of those variations might be the key to surviving (or even curing) some future disease that could otherwise devastate humanity.

Also, as PZ Myers recently pointed out, when it comes to genetics everything is so intertwined and interdependent that we can't really know how things are going to turn out, and the law of unintended consequences is pretty much guaranteed to lead to catastrophe.

"It seems to me, rather, that it shows that you can’t decide ahead of time what traits are desirable, but that they have to emerge organically in concert with other properties of the organism"[0]

[0] http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2016/07/12/how-eugenics-fails/

Zucker was a hack who's popular with people like this because he believed that not trying to actively force kids not to be trans was morally equivalent to turning them trans, ran his clinic accordingly and gave it a veneer of scientific respectability when the scientific community wouldn't touch it. Just following up and seeing what happens is the mainstream approach he rejected. I had a look at some of his research and every time, there was a huge unbridgable gap between the conclusions he drew - which, naturally, supported his own existing beliefs about trans people - and the actual evidence he had.

This idea that dubious work driven by the researchers' existing anti-trans beliefs is the real science and that anyone who disagrees with it is therefore attacking science is, sadly, fairly common: http://freethoughtblogs.com/atg/2016/08/07/academic-transphobia-the-persistence-of-the-activists-vs-science-false-dichotomy/