peanutcrisis

Great, I didn't know we can dismiss evidence without justifying why. The author claims that there is politicization by ideologues, and the evidence he provided flats out suggests that. If anything, the disagreement seems to be the extent or areas where it's actually happening, which is the point I'm trying to make, which you have not engaged with. I'm frankly puzzled by all my (past) interactions with you. It seems we agree a lot in some way or another yet somehow, you always come across as bad faith to me. That's why when you eventually conceded to one of our past discussions, I decided it was no longer worth engaging. I thought Hacker News is a place for reasoned discussion, I guess I'm wrong to come back to it.

Are you just going to outright dismiss the evidence I provided earlier for this politicization? As I explained before, your point is perfectly compatible with his. If you’re able to follow this kind of research, I’m frankly baffled by your inability to grasp the idea that acknowledging attempts to politicize this topic doesn’t imply that research in the area can’t proceed. The evidence for politicization is all over the editorials in your major research journals. If research in this area is booming as you’ve described (I don’t follow this research), all that means is that the politicization attempts have been unsuccessful.

As for your mind reading about the author’s intent, he is, to the best of my understanding, a standard-issue liberal. As such, I don't really get where you're coming from with this.

Did you read this piece in good faith? I don’t see the authors having the blind spot you claim they have.

They made their case for a gametic definition of sex by explaining how the other definitions you’ve proposed are downstream of it. Along the way, they also explained how the gametic definition provides a certain generality that explains a lot of phenomena, both within and across species. As such, it seems they did make a solid case for the gametic definition of sex. Given that the definitions you favor are subsumed under theirs, why should they acknowledge yours?

While I acknowledge that the definitions you proposed could be useful in other areas of biology in an operational sense, that doesn’t make them the right definitions for describing and explaining what’s true about reality. This is akin to classical mechanics—it’s wrong, but the fact that it’s a good approximation of reality for many engineering use cases means it’s still useful. Again, wrong or incomplete as an explanation for aspects of reality, but still useful for the task at hand. The authors are evolutionary biologists, they care about the definition that best describes and explains a certain aspect of reality. A developmental biologist or a doctor might use your definitions because they’re good enough approximations that simplify the task at hand.

Furthermore, what makes you think they wouldn’t change their mind about the number of sexes if you were able to present the existence of a third gamete? Their definition permits that. In fact, they were explicit in stating that nature doesn’t have to stick with two discrete gametes, but that’s what we’ve ended up with. They don’t take this result for granted either, citing both observations and mathematical models to explain why we end up with two gametes. Why there are two gametes, no more, no less, is an open question. They explicitly quoted Ronald Fisher on this. That alone should tell you evolutionary biologists don’t take the binary for granted, which makes your accusation that they’re biased by “common sense” rather suspect.

You go on to grant that their definition could account for a hermaphrodite as a third sex, then accuse them of bias for their supposed unwillingness to do so. You also fault them for failing to account for sterility. All of this stems from your failure to understand the gametic definition of sex. If you did, three things should be apparent. First, the existence of a third gamete doesn’t imply that such an organism is a hermaphrodite. Second, a hermaphrodite fits well into their definition, being an organism with the floor-plan to produce both gametes. Third, the gametic definition is concerned with which floor-plan(s) an organism is instantiated with, not whether they can actually produce the corresponding gametes. Accusations should come only after a sincere effort to understand the other side. The ones you’ve made suggest a poor understanding of their points, not flaws in the points themselves. You accused them of being ideologues, but your misunderstanding here makes me question what’s actually going on; is the article too challenging for you, or are you the ideologue acting in bad faith?

Out of respect, I’m inclined to think you’re acting in bad faith here, and your subsequent accusations follow the same pattern. As such, rather than engaging further, I hope my comment helps signal to others that your response is woefully unreliable and that they should read the article directly instead.

He isn't saying there isn't such research being done, he's criticizing the attempts made by ideologues to discredit and discourage research along such premises.

Did you even bother to read the piece? He explicitly opens his fifth point with an example of The Journal of American Medical Association (JAMA) weaponizing its reputation to do precisely just that. He documented another instance of this in Nature recently as well [0]. If you look at the top subthread here too, Nature Human Behaviour is doing this as well.

Given all that, it seems he's right that the problem with ideologues exists. The success or lack thereof of these ideologues is a separate matter. Your claim that such research still exists doesn't negate the problem he identified. If anything, I don't think we should be comfortable with any kind of intentional distortions to the biology of race and ethnicity. The bad (false) PR could come back and bite, affecting the research and how it might be received. Otherwise, I don't really see any real disagreement here.

[0] https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2025/05/11/nature-tackles-rac...

The notion of race and ethnicity in biology has been politicised by ideology. Jerry Coyne and Luana Maroja clarifies this in point five of their piece [0] in the Skeptical Inquirer.

[0] https://skepticalinquirer.org/2023/06/the-ideological-subver...

You asked for "citations", the thread is literally filled with references to them. How is it not bad faith to have to prove to you things that you can easily check for yourself?

Don't act in bad faith, the entirety of this thread is filled with examples.

Should the work of women be on that list for the sole reason that they are women? There are many more men who have written papers far influential than the ones you've mentioned yet they didn't make the list. If you believe in equality, then you have to believe that the work of people who happen to be women can compete on their own merit. The absence of women in that list isn't necessarily evidence of bias as implied in your remark.

This makes me wonder if there is a relationship between cardiac surgery and personality changes. I remember reading something similar about Lee Holloway[0].

[0] https://www.wired.com/story/lee-holloway-devastating-decline...

Relevant read:

https://unherd.com/2024/04/inside-the-disinformation-industr...

For the race-essentialist practices described by the original poster, Yascha Mounk's "The Identity Trap," published in 2023, and interviews with Coleman Hughes regarding his college experience at Columbia are insightful resources.

To delve into the philosophical roots that lead to the type of absurd reasoning mentioned by the original poster, "Cynical Theories" by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay, released in 2020, is recommended. Despite Lindsay's more recent radical stance, the book provides a critical exploration of these theories. It is also heavy on citations.

For the kind of misconduct in higher education described by the original poster, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) or the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) serve as reliable references. There's no lack of explicit anti-semitism on campus.

The discussion around "woke" culture is often muddled by attempts to obscure its existence, framing it as merely an extreme right-wing concern. For those who genuinely want a quick way to challenge their priors regarding "woke" being some kind of "right-wing" thing, you should give this short piece[0] a read. Does it comport with your notion of "right-wing"? If not, you should start questioning those who use "right-wing" as a boogeymen to convince you that there isn't a radical ideology who've created newspeak for their brand of racism, sexism, whatever-ism.

[0] https://helenpluckrose.substack.com/p/defining-woke-and-woke...

If they are qualified, shouldn't they be able to compete fairly with the rest of the applicant pool? I think this scenario should only be a cause for concern if people are being passed on for anything other than their competency, such as race.

I think that's in part because the sources that were once credible, i.e. NGOs, universities, media, and other cultural institutions, have taken a hit to their own reputation as a result of their institutional capture over the years.

For every article you can find in support of one camp, one could find a counter piece from other credible sources as well (i.e. NYT vs The Economist and The Atlantic). For every NGO one can quote, someone else can quote from someone who've resigned, or once run/founded the very NGO that they're now criticizing (i.e. Danielle Haas, Ira Glasser, Nadine Strossen, Bob Bernstein). You can even pitch the NGOs against one another, such as HRW and Amnesty against the ADL.

Ultimately, bad faith actors are indeed the root cause of the problem. However, I think the bigger problem here is the inability of these bad faith actors to recognize that belong to the very group they're criticizing. If facts were all that mattered, I would expect to see more people expressing more nuanced takes, or express more uncertainty. After all, it would be rather surprising for a consumer of news to hold their view with that much confidence when even the mainstream sources they are relying on is in dispute with one another.

I didn't infer the intent that you're describing now. Given that others might infer the same thing I did, I think my response serves as an important clarification.

Now that you've made your intent clear(er), I'd say that we're in agreement. I started my original post by remarking "Just how ideologically polluted is their training dataset?". This comports with your explanation of how Perplexity is paraphrasing the top Google search link. I also prefaced your quotation of me here ("bolting climate change and election denial right into the LLM") with "This is practically the same as". This suggests that you've misunderstood/mis-inferred my post (as did I with your response), since I'm not claiming that ideological bias is bolted into the LLM, but rather that the pollution of their training dataset make it as though bias is bolted into their LLM.

I hope this clears things up.