CharonY

When it comes to things where all humans are socially characterized in the modern world, there is no neutral as such. Typically majority folks consider themselves the most neutral in any given context as their opinion is most commonly reflected by those around them. This is a bit what the paper describe as the invisibility of whiteness, when applied to a majority white community. But even on a more philosophical level, there is no true neutrality on matters that involve some sort of opinion (and there is an argument to be made that it might even extend to so some degree to seemingly "objective" measures) personal bias will play a role. This is the essence of what implicit bias is about, but I suspect it can be easily expanded to other issues.

The issue I am seeing is the overly broad use of terms. Discrimination can range from not liking certain folks to, as in this example, outright slavery. The effects on people are not the same. It is also not only about past issues, but rather about what is happening right now. The focus on the past really again implies that somehow things were fixed, but if you look at a wide range of outcomes (socially, economically, health-wise) we see in many countries still a heavily racialized differential outcome. Meaning that there is something going on that still sorts people according to race, even if as a society folks have decided to not do that anymore. These mechanisms (or systems) are often invisible as they do not necessary name groups specifically. Now reparations are a different matter, as here we talk about direct compensation of governmental injustices. And I am not sure why this is so controversial as they are being done already. These are specific and directed, such as compensation of the German government for victims of the holocaust, Canada has paid descendants of Chinese workers who were charged head taxes (https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/chinese-head-tax-in-canada). The US and Canadian Chinese exclusion act won't pay out any redress, mostly because while not lawful, there were not specific victims. Potential reparations for slavery could vary, depending on context. In the UK, slave owners were paid reparations to compensate for their loss of slaves during abolition. For the reverse, there are still discussions about the case, but there is apparently resistance in even investigating these in detail. One economic argument is that workforce and money was forcefully extracted from individuals under a governmental system. As such descendants of slaves might be owed compensation. But this is a rather specific issue. And then you start conflating the issues again (governmental acts). Italian and Irish immigrants were (to my knowledge) not target of specific laws and regulations but were victims of individual (or societal) bigotry. These would not fall under the reparation issue as such. But perhaps more importantly, they were not systematically (mechanistically) denied power, as evidenced by their rise in influence and subsequent control of important roles and positions and power in society. If we look at the very same outcomes they do not fare differently than white folks at this point. So the system is not sorting them out anymore, as opposed to others. This is in fact a good example why calling every discrimination equal is just not helpful. The point is that we need to identify the invisible parts and dismantle them in order to put everyone on the same start line, as you are in favour of. The issue is that the machine is complex and for some, historic events have been the main factor that their starting line is still drawn way back. The proposal is then to put them forward (as a band aid) so that despite all other existing issues, they at least start closer to the same line as others.

A couple of things that I am going to address later, but this here is quite important to highlight. Plus it created zones that are racially segregated with lack of all kinds of services especially in predominantly black areas. These include good schools, groceries, administrative services, medical access and so on. These has huge knock-on effects on a lot of aspects, ranging from health to financial success. Due to the past regulations, they do not have the funds to simply move away, too. Similar effects are seen in indigenous communities (though quite a few are slowly building their way out). There are also rules and regulations that are not laws, but which can impact individual success if they are not addressed by law. A long standing example are dress codes, which basically have banned natural hair of black people. Without laws counteracting this type of frequent discrimination, black folks would need to spend a lot of time, effort and the use of rather unhealthy chemicals or basically be clean shaven to be able to work in what is deemed a professional setting. There a lot of these things around and pointing them out and trying to address them invariably upsets folks as it goes against the status quo. What is annoying is that these types of band-aids are disproportionately criticized if there are, in any way imperfect. Yet, for some reasons keeping the rules that are known to be harmful (to some) on the books is somehow acceptable? One should also state that in principle these issues are not unique to the US. They have manifested in different ways in different countries and are perhaps not as much created by law (or as blatant as the Jim Crow laws). And again, being racist is not the same as having a system that discriminates in whatever form by race.

Not to mention that this is common distraction used since, well, probably ever. "Look there are folks doing silly things in the name of *thing*, therefore let's disregard *thing*". It is unfortunately an efficient way to handwave away structural issues. The interesting bit is that I am hearing the same thing since the 80s and at the same time folks are claiming every time that in the last decade or so the issues are fixed and a ton of progress has been made. However, if things were already fixed, how the heck did they perceive progress?

And ironically this is not what the original paper was about, suggesting that it is even easier to find articles complaining about non-existent complains of racism. I.e. saying that folks complain too much about racism apparently makes good click bait (not to mention that it has a l9ng tradition).

Isn't it just a visualization tool and isn't the DE calculations done by Limma and other tools? I would assume that the plot would then be based on whatever those are spitting out, unless you can set how you want to transform the data. But that should be in the original paper.

You are missing the point that the race is still ongoing and folks still deal with running from behind. Based on your argument of "equal outcome" it seems to me that you deem the situation being equalized but at the same time you dismiss outcomes as a measure. Perhaps to address the issue, the idea of equity is not that everyone achieves exactly the same outcome. Rather, the idea is that the distribution of outcomes is going to be at least comparable between groups. Now, if you say we should not distinguish based on racial features, yet racial groups have worse outcomes still, what would be the reason if not racialized issues with the system? This goes actually to the above, there is an assumption that unequal outcomes are not a caused by a bias in the system, but because something inherent to a particular group. And yes, age is a discriminator for organ donation, which implies that you are alright with certain forms of discrimination. So if you are alright with using such information to bias against folks, why not use the same to benefit certain folks? (I can follow up with examples of racial bias in medicine and the systemic issues there in a bit, if there is interest, but I think for this discussion TheVat's example is easier to follow.

Historically the A was used for average intensity (MA-plot were originally used for microarrays back in the days). As they are also used for sequencing analyses, my assumptions that these are normalized read counts of sorts (unit free probably). But my suggestion is to track down the paper where the tool is being described.

I mentioned a couple of times before that racism is not a vacuum issue. If the system works the same for everyone, it would not matter that much if some folks for some reason dislike certain races or consider them inferior. It would be an issue akin to social status, accents or other identifiers. The real issue is if there is a system in place that in conjunction with these features leads to uneven outcomes. If folks don't get jobs because of their accents or skin color. And if you look at the system and measure outcomes, like for example life expectancy, lifelong income and so on, we still see that the system sorts according to race, gender and associated lines. I have mentioned the example a couple of times already, but there is a system that scores potential organ recipients according to a variety of factors including long-term benefit. If you look at the outcome, you see that black folks are much less likely to be recipients. So we have a (mostly) race-free system, but it is systematically biased against black folks. So what would you think is the right approach? Accept that the worse outcome is just the way it is, or would you change the system? What if the change requires adjustment for race? Do you think that in this system preferring a white person is the same as preferring a black person? If so, do how do you come to the conclusion? Would you just ignore the outcome and decide that the process is all that counts? One big issue with the arguments brought forward is that they seem to imply that all discriminatory barriers are gone and only of historic interest and that none of that has any bearings on the current situation, which is just ignoring the reality of things (not to mention that these things have been brought up again and again in various threads and even acknowledged before apparently being forgotten again).

I also wanted to add that these discussions often read like a failure of semantics and/or logic. Essentially the argument seems to be that racism caused issues, so anything that integrates race would be racist and therefore continue to cause issues. In my mind it is a bit like saying that poverty caused by redistributing wealth upward, cannot be solved by changing the redistribution of wealth, as this is what caused the issue in the first place. As such, it seems that the only solution is to keep the status quo, which seems counterintuitive.

While I cannot really comment on the physicist part, I would like to add that one should have realistic expectations regarding potential research positions, especially if one is interested in a particular field. There are not a lot of permanent research focused positions out there (and those that are are disproportionately competitive). So it is good to keep that in mind and look for career paths early on.

I am not entirely sure where the issue is. These types of compensation (e.g. victims of Nazis) have been successfully done in the past. One could squabble about the precise mechanism, but it does not seem like fundamental issue. And again, this is an issue of not looking at the big picture. What search committees are doing is not a blanket discrimination against overrepresented folks. Basically, the system is already set up to benefit certain folks (hence the overrepresentation) and if we just continue, there is no good reason to believe that this will revert itself. I.e. despite there not being an over discrimination, the system remains discriminatory. There are many reasons for that, ranging from bias to structural issues that won't be addressed if there are not enough participants form the affected groups. Also note, that as you mentioned, all decisions are discriminatory, as positions are limited. So you rank folks according to something. And as we all know, there is no clear objective ranking of folks (if we are really honest). Now what is not happening is that folks are hired just because of their ethnicity or gender. Rather, among a qualified pool of applicants, the committee might find that they lack representation of a given group which could support their mission and decide to hire accordingly (again, among a group of qualified candidates). Educationally this is really important, as in natural sciences, female authority persons are still underrepresented and you often see that in attitudes among the students (despite the fact that female students are overrepresented in some disciplines). If we state that all discrimination is bad, then obviously hiring procedures don't make sense, and we should just implement lotteries. If we state that only racial discrimination is bad then, (and it goes a bit to the paper in question in OP) then we first need to see what kind of racial discrimination is still baked into the system. Just because we do not perceive it as present, it does not mean it is not there. It just means we assume it to be the norm, which is what hurt folks. The loud supremacist racism is also bad, of course, but they are visible and can often be addressed directly. Implicit bias and systemic discrimination is a different, and arguably more urgent matter. It is like only focusing on furuncles, because they are ugly and visible, while ignoring chronic heart disease.

Not necessarily. The bit that is missing is the aspect of systemic racism, where differential outcomes are baked into the system. Unless these are all abolished and all (or at least most) disadvantages are removed (e.g. certain races are not mostly contained in underserviced areas), race-based adjustments are basically a crude band-aid to address the systemic issues. It is really not a symmetric issue. If it was, being racist would not even be a problem anymore (except for not being socially acceptable) and we would not look at differential outcomes. The issues are ingrained and generationally perpetuating. That being said, one could of course try to find a finer grained adjustment, but typically that requires too much effort for most folks, so we are then back to either crude band-aids or pretending that there are no issues to address. Two folks do the same thing, one is successful, the other is not. Fine, randomness is part of the system. A few million folks do the same thing. Some are thriving, others are failing badly. Now you look at skin color and you realize that despite all other things being equal, way more folks with darker skin color are ending up in the bad outcome bin. Is that good? The historic explanation of these outcomes was simply that black folks are dumber and make bad decisions. The more data was collected, the less likely this explanation is. So research has now focused on systems rather than just individual decisions that may affect outcomes and many elements have been rather robustly identified contributing to these issues. Many of them because many seemingly race-neutral laws, rules and practices, are in fact disadvantaging certain parts of the population, for example. I will also add that "racism" has been a bit of a problem in common usage as folks often think about what it means in very different ways. Without properly defining the context, it easily becomes a semantic battle.

If scientists wanted to make money, most would not be scientists in the first place.

That does not follow. Folks with imposter syndrome assume that everyone around them is more capable than themselves and therefore feel that they are imposters. If the baseline assumption was the abilities are the same, they would not feel that way. The rest does not make much more sense to me, either.

Sorry, no. We need to use babies to produce vaccines.

IQ tests were originally used to look for issues in cognitive functions. Accordingly, studies have shown stronger correlation between IQ scores and cognitive abilities in the lower IQ score regimen than in the higher. Pretty much no one believes that, at least not if you mean that everyone performs equally. If that was the case no test would ever make sense. The big questions really are what we measure with tests (the Flynn effect being one of the factors that are not trivial to explain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect) , how we actually define intelligence (i.e. what do we mean if we use the term, and in which context) and how does it correlate with cognitive function and performance. The fact that there are a lot of discussions surrounding the issue among experts, indicates that the matter is far more complicated than one might assume from cursory reading on that matter and it is therefore questionable to build too many assumptions on these shaky foundations.

I don't get why they would mention Merkel? The relationship between her and Putin was notoriously tense. The only think I could think of is that her government opposed NATO membership for Ukraine to prevent escalation in 2008 (and considering the political instability in Ukraine at that time, one could argue either way, I guess). Fun Merkel quote on Putin: That was following an incidence where Putin allegedly let his dog in, as Merkel was known to be afraid of dogs. Trump and many GOP cronies, on the other hand...

There have been a boom for carbon capture technologies for a little while now. The issue I have is that they often ride the "magic bullet" mentality where tech somehow will solve all the problems we have neglected to address for decades or centuries and all without having to put effort in. While their implementation in plants fore example seems to have benefits, I suspect that the promise to effect ratio for implementation at scale is still a bit off. But the same line easy solutions thinking is what is popular with folks like Musk.

We have two threads with this idea, but there are a couple of issues and the math is rather meh on the net benefit. But one important bit is that the biomass needs to be long-term sequestered in order to be removed from the atmosphere. If there is more biomass turnover (e.g. fish or repeated cycle of biomass to active zones) then CO2 will be released again. While it might not be a net release per se, it can reduce the capacity of the ocean to sequester CO2 (which is dependent on the partial pressure of CO2 at the surface). But it does sound saner than using nukes.

At 300C a pizza would fully cook (and subsequent burn) within 3-4 minutes, usually. So baking them in that temp for 20 mins seems a bit off. I suspect that there is some mistranslation going on, as the recipe also calls for yeast despite being yeast-free (microwaving water to lukewarm is typically also for activating yeast, so double-weird). Water (or rather steam) is often used to create the characteristic crust on baguettes (or what you can find in buns in Europe) as well as help with the rise in the early phase of baking. Commercial bread ovens (in Germany at least) typically have a steam function for that purpose. Not sure if already mentioned, but for bread you would generally want "strong" flour (i.e. protein content of >10%). Also as John already noted, freeze-thaw cycles damages cells, but not quantitatively (i.e. only a proportion at any given time).

Kneading helps to form a matrix that gives the bread enough structure once yeast does its things. Without kneading, you can have a similar effect with a wetter dough and let the fermentation process to happen very slowly. So the assumption I had earlier is that if freeze no knead dough, you will collapse whatever happened in the first rise and structurally it might not recover as there is not enough activity left in the yeast. A kneaded bread might be more resilient and even with less yeast activity one might retain some fluffiness (I would assume).

There was a German satirical comedy about 10 years ago where Hitler was the protagonist. It was rather successful, IIRC. If anything, I am a bit worried that the new generation does not realize the horrors to the same degree, especially with political party (the AfD) repeatedly trying to downplay the horrors of Nazism. There was already an investigation for antisemitism because of the use of balloons shaped like pigs with the Star of David. One additional issue is that the concert was located at a place (the Festhalle) where in 38 Jews were rounded up and transported to concentration camps, where they were murdered. But the court allowed the concert to go ahead as they ruled that the performance did not glorify Nazism or identified with Nazi ideology. That being said, I assume that some critics, including the International Auschwitz committee may have continued to push different angles.

In Germany it has become more acceptable to use Nazi imagery for artistic purposes, but glorification is still a hard line.

So they should be more politically correct ;)? But yes there has always been a risk if one wades into public discussions especially if one is not trained to navigate public opinion. That being said, I think we are still struggling how to navigate the whole social media landscape, which expands these types of issues from celebrities to regular folks (who definitely don't have PR folks working for them).