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I don't think that NIH wants to be in the Eugenics business, so they're taking steps to avoid it.

  • -22

I don't think that NIH wants to be in the Eugenics business, so they're taking steps to avoid it.

Indeed, and in complaining about it I think people are revealing more about themselves than they they are their opposition.

  • -31

I don't really agree with that. I don't have any real love for HBD, but IMO science is about the pursuit of truth. People should be free to advance theories, no matter how implausible or distasteful I may find them, if they can provide the proof to back them up. If it turns out they're right, then we need to face that with our eyes open rather than trying to shut them down by saying "ha you can't have the data, sucks to suck".

On top of that, as @Conservautism pointed out the NIH is a branch of the federal government. As a taxpayer, I don't want them to have any ability to deny access to their datasets. I paid for that, and I expect it to be publicly available.

Persuit of truth is important, but so is keeping a lid on data which can be misused. As far as I know, there's data that Joe Public just can't get about nuclear weapon internals, for example. I suppose they're treating 'which genes make you smart anyway' as similarly hazardous research. I can't blame them.

  • -19

Persuit of truth is important, but so is keeping a lid on data which can be misused.

Can I see a cost-benefit analysis on whether it's worth it to keep that particular data secret? Even a very handwavy one?

Of course I can't, and it's because of a rather fundamental reason: having anything like that in public betrays the very truth it was intended to conceal. If you publicly claim that the public can't see data X because it might lead to the harmful belief in the conclusion Y, the public will assume that the conclusion Y is true based on your claim. So you need to equivocate and obfuscate.

Worse, since such decisions are made by nominally democratic institutions they can't be made even in secret, because if someone leaks the meeting notes it would be a huge scandal. So they aren't made rationally at all.

Consider for example the messaging "masks don't work, you should not buy masks so that there's enough left for doctors" from the early Covid days. Oh if only there were a behind-closed-door meeting between various senior WHO and CDC officials where they decided that they must lie to the public to address the mask shortages and this particular lie is the best they could do and it's worth it even taking into account long term consequences for trust in institutions.

I conjecture that such a meeting couldn't have happened because nobody wanted to destroy their career by calling for it and speaking plainly in case it's leaked. I point out that now when you can think about clearly it for five minutes it's obvious that the adopted policy was extremely stupid, proves that there was no such meeting, the policy was a result of bureaucrats acting on pure instinct, wink-wink nudge-nudge, no conscious deliberation at all.

So IMO this is the main problem with "keeping a lid" on things: unless you know exactly what you're doing (such as in not publishing nuclear weapon technologies), object-level lies infect all meta-levels, if you lie about the existence of certain data you have to lie about lying about that, and about whether you would lie in such situations, and so on. Which not only produces much more and much more dangerous lies that you'd initially expect, but also prevents you from thinking rationally about whether it's actually worth it.