Class action suits rarely (never?) help the actual victims.
Sure, and locking drunk drivers up rarely (never?) brings back people killed by drunk drivers.
Stop thinking of class action lawsuits as something the individuals "win" to make things all better.
Class action lawsuits ARE an effective tool in preventing otherwise omnipotent mega-corporations from trampling all over consumers, and they're one of the very few that don't depend on bribable politicians or idiotic voters.
Certainly that can't be because of biological differences
I'll bite: why not? The Fields medal limits to under 40, I've heard it pointed out on Slashdot that most mathematicians who have made substantive contributions did so by age 30. It's not universally true but still a strong trend.
With women and people of color, the argument is they are discouraged from entering fields dominated by white dudebros. Maybe that's true of old fogeys too, I could see that, but there should be older employees there who were younger when they were hired. I have no idea if that's the case at google.
My point is, no one is saying "biological differences are never significant." People ARE saying "Biological differences between men and women and people of color and white dudes have not been proven to be significant." Because they haven't despite centuries of scientists attempting to prove it.
This, despite other professors saying his paper represents the current science...Am waiting for you to actually post a scientific rebuttal.
...are YOU going to? Which professors do you speak of?
What claims are backed up by science?
“Women generally have a stronger interest in people rather than things, relative to men”; and that this may “in part explain why women relatively prefer jobs in social or artistic areas.” He suggests that female extraversion tends to be “expressed as gregariousness rather than assertiveness,” which helps explain why women have a harder time “asking for raises, speaking up, and leading.”
That all sounds like pop psych crap, not anything that has quantifiable data behind it. I'm not sure what I'd search for in pubmed or even google to come up with real scientific literature reviewing that.
"Trump voters" can avoid discrimination by not advertising they voted for him. Women and people of color cannot simply avoid detection. The adults in the room don't care about diversity for diversity sake, they care about hiring the best and the brightest.
Even ex-google douche realizes this which is why a focus of his 10 page rant was "Women aren't the best or the brightest."
This isn't a GMO issue. This is an issue with the herbicide. The crops are engineered to be resistant to it, but it's still the chemical that is the problem, not the plants or their genetics.
He IS working to close the digital divide. By making sure those of us in the city have only one ISP to choose from at dialup speeds for insane prices, there will no longer be any divisions between us and people who choose to live a hundred miles from the nearest town.
He IS looking to protect consumers from the evils of watching too much porn. If we're allowed to download more than a gigabyte of data a month, it will just be unrealistic porn which will warp our sexuality.
He IS hoping to improving the agencies operations. There will be more people to collect bribes. Plus, what if Pai is on vacation when comcast calls and says they want this or that regulation eliminated? This way someone will be there to answer the phone.
Seriously, set a baseline for "neutral" and show us what you mean. Someone completely free of any bias.
If you can't find any, then maybe we should admit that it's not inherently bad when news has bias. We should stop looking for that unicorn and instead admit that it's a degree of bias, not the existence of bias, that matters. CNN's bias and Fox news' bias are not equally bad just because they both exist.
If the best defense of something you can come up with it is "they haven't passed a law against it," then that should be a sign you should consider NOT DEFENDING IT.
It is unlikely to be illegal everywhere. Medical tourism is already a big business.
Sure, but we were talking specifically within the US here. CRISPR clinics elsewhere may pop up, but that was going to be true no matter what we did in the US, and would have been true even if the current study hadn't been done.
Why should the government be making that decision instead of leaving it to informed individuals and their doctors?
The ethics discussion panels I was talking about are being done by scientists and doctors, not the government. I believe medical boards which issue and can revoke medical licenses are made up of doctors, the ones making the medical guidelines too. So "the government" in this case WOULD be the informed individuals and doctors.
What is wrong with gene editing to fix pimples, if the treatment is proven safe and effective? Severe acne can be emotionally devastating, and have physical consequences such as secondary infections.
I linked to two discussions of the ethics. Steven Pinker can easily be contacted online, as can George Church and the other people weighing in on the ethics. They've discussed at length their ethical concerns. You can read them online. You can probably get in contact with them and raise these points at any future ethics meetings, or write opinion articles for science magazine or other journals if you want.
If you're actually asking and not just trying to make a point lazily, I'd say because that's unethical for reasons discussed at length elsewhere, and you should start reading the two links I provided. I'm not going to do your homework for you.
OJ was not licensed to do anything you're talking about by a medical board.
Doctors wouldn't be able to advertise superhuman babies services and keep their licenses and access to the facilities they'd need to do this work. It's much more regulated than using a knife and gloves like OJ did, and can't be done in as much secret or quickly.
The government of Germany engaged in eugenics, therefore our government will approve crispr use for making superhumans?
Ugly truth of Germany was that a good number of Germans were totally in favor of genocide at that time. I don't see that level of support for making designer babies here in the US now. And, if most people are convinced designer babies are a good thing, it's going to happen anyway. What's the alternative? Burning all knowledge of CRISPR? Little late for that.
Edit gene blah to fix pimples... whoops that gives you an automatic heart attack at age 30.
TLDR: it will be illegal to perform the type of edits you're worried about.
Doctors doing this to people would be legally required to follow ethics guidelines. Researchers in lab don't have to since they're not doing research on people*.
Those ethical guidelines were already being debated heavily when it was even more hypothetical than it is now. Steven Pinker is probably the most gung ho guy for "do germline editing" and even he seems to suggest no edits for purely cosmetic reasons. The guidelines will be codified into policy for clinics wanting to do this in people. The safe money is that they specifically ban any edits that aren't correcting life-threatening conditions like cystic fibrosis. I would bet that there will be a short list of conditions and mutations that would be approved for correction. These would be well documented mutations that are purely negative, and the fixes approved will be restoring it to "normal" sequences.
I would bet my house that human augmentation, making embryos that are better faster stronger (Work is never over) than normal would not be allowed in the US in the foreseeable future.
"What could go wrong" is that the editing could fail in some cases, and you'd abort the pregnancy, much like people do now when they discover via amniocentesis that their embryos have life-ending mutations.
Also superhuman zombie babies could destroy the earth like in "I am Legend" only with smaller vampire creatures. In movies which will inevitably be made.
(* Any pro-lifers out there wanting to debate this off-topic point are free to instead yell it into the wind and get it out of their system faster)
And it's not exactly an unsolvable problem anyway. Have the government send birth control over there. Women will use it. Want to decrease it further? Have the government work to fund schools for women over there.
Lotta dudes online seem to think the people they don't care much for are just bound and determined to reproduce like bunnies no matter what and are totally befuddled as to why people they do care for are reproducing slightly slower. It's really not hard, nor does it require horrors like raising their standard of living up to ours in all other ways.
Okay, walk scientists around the world through this and you'll solve one of the major problems with science today. I was only pointing out the problem is not that we have a bad magic number, I was pointing out scientists are lazy when it comes to things outside their area of expertise.
And then people wonder why the credibility of published science has been called into question so much recently.:-(
No, we don't wonder, it's because of a lack of reproducibility. Well, that and political agendas. The problem is understood and agreed upon generally. Agreeing on a solution is where things go off the rails. Saying "This magic number is no good, we should use THIS MAGIC NUMBER" is what I have a problem with.
They better conduct more research before doing it on humans.
Using... what? They just did mice. Primate studies for medicine are being ended, and chimps live about 60 years, so that would be way too long to study aging in them. Organisms lower than mice are useless for studies of high brain function.
They're hoping to start clinical trials. The early phases start out small and cautious and build up in terms of risk. Phase zero will test "doses" too small to do anything helpful in 10 people. I don't know what that would be with a biologic like stem cells, maybe just a few cells which would be labeled for proliferation in some way. Phase one will test slightly more to find the minimum "dose" that could help. Phase three is testing more.
Injecting an undiffferentiated cell that can turn into cancer is a well known hazard these researchers all are aware of. The gold standard test for pluripotent stem cells is their ability to make tumors when you inject them into mice. They've had decades to come up with solutions to those problems. That the researchers want to proceed with clinical trials suggests they've found a way to deal with that problem. Or they're crazy or want to lose a ton of money I guess.
Anyway, there is always risk involved in developing new medicine. You can't ever completely prove some treatment is safe in humans doing only tests in mice and cells in a dish. You eventually need to try it in humans, it might kill them, but that's why you do mouse studies first and then test it in a small number of willing humans.
A lot of those costs are due to things the process could possibly fix. TFS mentions it keeps them physically and mentally fit longer. Care for elderly who are mentally unable to care for themselves is obviously quite a bit more difficult (read: expensive). Someone who can ring the bell when they need help getting to the toilet may be a burden, but it's vastly better than someone who can't.
Same with the physically fit part. If this implant lets your parent walk up and down the stairs, that's much better than if they can't.
Cancer, osteoporosis, diabetes and a lot of other medical conditions are still going to be expensive, sure, but solving for assisted or total care would still dramatically reduce costs.
I'd be surprised if it was anywhere near 56%. I'm a biologist, I don't understand P values, but I am aware that they shouldn't be the gold standard. Ideally scientists in all the different fields would use the statistics that make the most sense for their specific study, and would take the time to figure that out, and reviewers would read up on statistics and think themselves about what statistics would make the most sense for that case.
P0.05 is used everywhere because that simply won't happen. Scientists who aren't statisticians care passionately about only their topic and it isn't statistics. If anyone tries to use something else, everyone including reviewers will demand they use what everyone else uses anyway.
Interesting point. I'd be surprised if some VC had not suggested, anonymously or not, that that was a reason. However I would note that they're looking at TEAMS which have women on them. If a team of four dudes is statistically more likely to get funded than a team of four dudes and a woman, then there's really not much logic to it.
But is it reality? Hell yes.
I'm glad you're convinced of your own thesis there?
And on a side note, if you really want to march in favor of women's rights on Market Street in SF, start with protesting against women's situations in the Middle East or Africa. They are far more worse than here in the U.S.
That's a false dichotomy. And that would be ineffective if not counterproductive, and everyone knows it. I mean, our war campaigns are counterproductive and that's just "drop bombs and bad guys die." Americans going over to the middle east and saying "Treat your women better" is sure to backfire spectacularly even if the language and cultural issues were sorted out. There are simpler ways of saying it, like "And feminists can go jump off the golden gate bridge."
Are you reading the same comments I am? It seems pretty clear that a ton of dudes are more than willing to accept what you're suggesting, without needing evidence.
I know, apologies for being unclear. I'm saying "People are biased is a simpler explanation (particularly when we already know people are biased) than 'women are inferior at this'."
"This study has flaws, therefore I'm going to believe the exact opposite of their conclusions."
Based on that you might as well say this study shows that companies with a women in lead position comes up worse ideas then a team of all men.
Well, occam's razor would suggest no, especially given that numerous other studies have demonstrated that people are often biased against women. And the study notes that the success rate varies between states. So your alternative hypothesis is that magically, VCs are immune from biases that are well documented, and it's just women from some states have worse ideas that men in their groups accept.
Also, startups aren't all about ideas. Often they have very little to do with ideas and more to do with credentials of the founding team.
Is there an available data-set of companies that attempted to gain funding and didn't, let alone their gender breakdown? I tried to start a company briefly and received no funding. It's not a formalized process, there wasn't a department of startups we had to get a license from. The only way you'd know it ever happened is if you talked to one of the four or five people involved in our pitch.
The fact that you say "SJW" suggests to me you're already biased against the conclusions from the start. There are probably VCs who care less about "mens rights" and that nonsense and more about making money, they might be interested in being aware they and their competitors might have a bias even if the study is not the word of god.
Slashdot Mirror
Class action suits rarely (never?) help the actual victims.
Sure, and locking drunk drivers up rarely (never?) brings back people killed by drunk drivers.
Stop thinking of class action lawsuits as something the individuals "win" to make things all better.
Class action lawsuits ARE an effective tool in preventing otherwise omnipotent mega-corporations from trampling all over consumers, and they're one of the very few that don't depend on bribable politicians or idiotic voters.
Don't think they're effective in instilling fear in corporations? Then explain to me why equifax is so desperately trying to avoid them that they tried the laughably bad tactic of forcing people to give up their right to it to know if they had been hacked? Just as an extra "LOL fuck you"?
Class action lawsuits aren't to make everything right again, legal punishments never do.
Save speeches about democracy and elections for when we have a president who most citizens actually voted for.
Certainly that can't be because of biological differences
I'll bite: why not? The Fields medal limits to under 40, I've heard it pointed out on Slashdot that most mathematicians who have made substantive contributions did so by age 30. It's not universally true but still a strong trend.
With women and people of color, the argument is they are discouraged from entering fields dominated by white dudebros. Maybe that's true of old fogeys too, I could see that, but there should be older employees there who were younger when they were hired. I have no idea if that's the case at google.
My point is, no one is saying "biological differences are never significant." People ARE saying "Biological differences between men and women and people of color and white dudes have not been proven to be significant." Because they haven't despite centuries of scientists attempting to prove it.
Lost our sense of humor about whether our democracy was hijacked?
This, despite other professors saying his paper represents the current science...Am waiting for you to actually post a scientific rebuttal.
...are YOU going to? Which professors do you speak of?
What claims are backed up by science?
“Women generally have a stronger interest in people rather than things, relative to men”; and that this may “in part explain why women relatively prefer jobs in social or artistic areas.” He suggests that female extraversion tends to be “expressed as gregariousness rather than assertiveness,” which helps explain why women have a harder time “asking for raises, speaking up, and leading.”
That all sounds like pop psych crap, not anything that has quantifiable data behind it. I'm not sure what I'd search for in pubmed or even google to come up with real scientific literature reviewing that.
"Trump voters" can avoid discrimination by not advertising they voted for him. Women and people of color cannot simply avoid detection. The adults in the room don't care about diversity for diversity sake, they care about hiring the best and the brightest.
Even ex-google douche realizes this which is why a focus of his 10 page rant was "Women aren't the best or the brightest."
This isn't a GMO issue. This is an issue with the herbicide. The crops are engineered to be resistant to it, but it's still the chemical that is the problem, not the plants or their genetics.
He IS working to close the digital divide. By making sure those of us in the city have only one ISP to choose from at dialup speeds for insane prices, there will no longer be any divisions between us and people who choose to live a hundred miles from the nearest town.
He IS looking to protect consumers from the evils of watching too much porn. If we're allowed to download more than a gigabyte of data a month, it will just be unrealistic porn which will warp our sexuality.
He IS hoping to improving the agencies operations. There will be more people to collect bribes. Plus, what if Pai is on vacation when comcast calls and says they want this or that regulation eliminated? This way someone will be there to answer the phone.
Who is exactly neutral?
Give me a neutral source.
On anything.
Seriously, set a baseline for "neutral" and show us what you mean. Someone completely free of any bias.
If you can't find any, then maybe we should admit that it's not inherently bad when news has bias. We should stop looking for that unicorn and instead admit that it's a degree of bias, not the existence of bias, that matters. CNN's bias and Fox news' bias are not equally bad just because they both exist.
If the best defense of something you can come up with it is "they haven't passed a law against it," then that should be a sign you should consider NOT DEFENDING IT.
It is unlikely to be illegal everywhere. Medical tourism is already a big business.
Sure, but we were talking specifically within the US here. CRISPR clinics elsewhere may pop up, but that was going to be true no matter what we did in the US, and would have been true even if the current study hadn't been done.
Why should the government be making that decision instead of leaving it to informed individuals and their doctors?
The ethics discussion panels I was talking about are being done by scientists and doctors, not the government. I believe medical boards which issue and can revoke medical licenses are made up of doctors, the ones making the medical guidelines too. So "the government" in this case WOULD be the informed individuals and doctors.
What is wrong with gene editing to fix pimples, if the treatment is proven safe and effective? Severe acne can be emotionally devastating, and have physical consequences such as secondary infections.
I linked to two discussions of the ethics. Steven Pinker can easily be contacted online, as can George Church and the other people weighing in on the ethics. They've discussed at length their ethical concerns. You can read them online. You can probably get in contact with them and raise these points at any future ethics meetings, or write opinion articles for science magazine or other journals if you want.
If you're actually asking and not just trying to make a point lazily, I'd say because that's unethical for reasons discussed at length elsewhere, and you should start reading the two links I provided. I'm not going to do your homework for you.
OJ was not licensed to do anything you're talking about by a medical board.
Doctors wouldn't be able to advertise superhuman babies services and keep their licenses and access to the facilities they'd need to do this work. It's much more regulated than using a knife and gloves like OJ did, and can't be done in as much secret or quickly.
The government of Germany engaged in eugenics, therefore our government will approve crispr use for making superhumans?
Ugly truth of Germany was that a good number of Germans were totally in favor of genocide at that time. I don't see that level of support for making designer babies here in the US now. And, if most people are convinced designer babies are a good thing, it's going to happen anyway. What's the alternative? Burning all knowledge of CRISPR? Little late for that.
Sure, but that will happen no matter what scientists and doctors here in the US do, so what's your point?
Edit gene blah to fix pimples... whoops that gives you an automatic heart attack at age 30.
TLDR: it will be illegal to perform the type of edits you're worried about.
Doctors doing this to people would be legally required to follow ethics guidelines. Researchers in lab don't have to since they're not doing research on people*.
Those ethical guidelines were already being debated heavily when it was even more hypothetical than it is now. Steven Pinker is probably the most gung ho guy for "do germline editing" and even he seems to suggest no edits for purely cosmetic reasons. The guidelines will be codified into policy for clinics wanting to do this in people. The safe money is that they specifically ban any edits that aren't correcting life-threatening conditions like cystic fibrosis. I would bet that there will be a short list of conditions and mutations that would be approved for correction. These would be well documented mutations that are purely negative, and the fixes approved will be restoring it to "normal" sequences.
I would bet my house that human augmentation, making embryos that are better faster stronger (Work is never over) than normal would not be allowed in the US in the foreseeable future.
"What could go wrong" is that the editing could fail in some cases, and you'd abort the pregnancy, much like people do now when they discover via amniocentesis that their embryos have life-ending mutations.
Also superhuman zombie babies could destroy the earth like in "I am Legend" only with smaller vampire creatures. In movies which will inevitably be made.
(* Any pro-lifers out there wanting to debate this off-topic point are free to instead yell it into the wind and get it out of their system faster)
Fertility rates in developing countries are already falling.
And it's not exactly an unsolvable problem anyway. Have the government send birth control over there. Women will use it. Want to decrease it further? Have the government work to fund schools for women over there.
Lotta dudes online seem to think the people they don't care much for are just bound and determined to reproduce like bunnies no matter what and are totally befuddled as to why people they do care for are reproducing slightly slower. It's really not hard, nor does it require horrors like raising their standard of living up to ours in all other ways.
Okay, walk scientists around the world through this and you'll solve one of the major problems with science today. I was only pointing out the problem is not that we have a bad magic number, I was pointing out scientists are lazy when it comes to things outside their area of expertise.
And then people wonder why the credibility of published science has been called into question so much recently. :-(
No, we don't wonder, it's because of a lack of reproducibility. Well, that and political agendas. The problem is understood and agreed upon generally. Agreeing on a solution is where things go off the rails. Saying "This magic number is no good, we should use THIS MAGIC NUMBER" is what I have a problem with.
They better conduct more research before doing it on humans.
Using... what? They just did mice. Primate studies for medicine are being ended, and chimps live about 60 years, so that would be way too long to study aging in them. Organisms lower than mice are useless for studies of high brain function.
They're hoping to start clinical trials. The early phases start out small and cautious and build up in terms of risk. Phase zero will test "doses" too small to do anything helpful in 10 people. I don't know what that would be with a biologic like stem cells, maybe just a few cells which would be labeled for proliferation in some way. Phase one will test slightly more to find the minimum "dose" that could help. Phase three is testing more.
Injecting an undiffferentiated cell that can turn into cancer is a well known hazard these researchers all are aware of. The gold standard test for pluripotent stem cells is their ability to make tumors when you inject them into mice. They've had decades to come up with solutions to those problems. That the researchers want to proceed with clinical trials suggests they've found a way to deal with that problem. Or they're crazy or want to lose a ton of money I guess.
Anyway, there is always risk involved in developing new medicine. You can't ever completely prove some treatment is safe in humans doing only tests in mice and cells in a dish. You eventually need to try it in humans, it might kill them, but that's why you do mouse studies first and then test it in a small number of willing humans.
A lot of those costs are due to things the process could possibly fix. TFS mentions it keeps them physically and mentally fit longer. Care for elderly who are mentally unable to care for themselves is obviously quite a bit more difficult (read: expensive). Someone who can ring the bell when they need help getting to the toilet may be a burden, but it's vastly better than someone who can't.
Same with the physically fit part. If this implant lets your parent walk up and down the stairs, that's much better than if they can't.
Cancer, osteoporosis, diabetes and a lot of other medical conditions are still going to be expensive, sure, but solving for assisted or total care would still dramatically reduce costs.
I'd be surprised if it was anywhere near 56%. I'm a biologist, I don't understand P values, but I am aware that they shouldn't be the gold standard. Ideally scientists in all the different fields would use the statistics that make the most sense for their specific study, and would take the time to figure that out, and reviewers would read up on statistics and think themselves about what statistics would make the most sense for that case.
P0.05 is used everywhere because that simply won't happen. Scientists who aren't statisticians care passionately about only their topic and it isn't statistics. If anyone tries to use something else, everyone including reviewers will demand they use what everyone else uses anyway.
But is it reality? Hell yes.
I'm glad you're convinced of your own thesis there?
And on a side note, if you really want to march in favor of women's rights on Market Street in SF, start with protesting against women's situations in the Middle East or Africa. They are far more worse than here in the U.S.
That's a false dichotomy. And that would be ineffective if not counterproductive, and everyone knows it. I mean, our war campaigns are counterproductive and that's just "drop bombs and bad guys die." Americans going over to the middle east and saying "Treat your women better" is sure to backfire spectacularly even if the language and cultural issues were sorted out. There are simpler ways of saying it, like "And feminists can go jump off the golden gate bridge."
Are you reading the same comments I am? It seems pretty clear that a ton of dudes are more than willing to accept what you're suggesting, without needing evidence.
I know, apologies for being unclear. I'm saying "People are biased is a simpler explanation (particularly when we already know people are biased) than 'women are inferior at this'."
Based on that you might as well say this study shows that companies with a women in lead position comes up worse ideas then a team of all men.
Well, occam's razor would suggest no, especially given that numerous other studies have demonstrated that people are often biased against women. And the study notes that the success rate varies between states. So your alternative hypothesis is that magically, VCs are immune from biases that are well documented, and it's just women from some states have worse ideas that men in their groups accept.
Also, startups aren't all about ideas. Often they have very little to do with ideas and more to do with credentials of the founding team.
Is there an available data-set of companies that attempted to gain funding and didn't, let alone their gender breakdown? I tried to start a company briefly and received no funding. It's not a formalized process, there wasn't a department of startups we had to get a license from. The only way you'd know it ever happened is if you talked to one of the four or five people involved in our pitch.
The fact that you say "SJW" suggests to me you're already biased against the conclusions from the start. There are probably VCs who care less about "mens rights" and that nonsense and more about making money, they might be interested in being aware they and their competitors might have a bias even if the study is not the word of god.