Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | like_any_other's commentslogin

Apparently a judge denied his asylum application (he's Venezuelan, and entered the US under Biden) [1]. It's unclear how exactly his detention is related to his denied asylum and attempts to remain in the country despite it. The NYT, naturally, omits all of that.

[1] https://abc7ny.com/post/dylan-lopez-contreras-nyc-high-schoo...


> You trust your pilot to do their job

In this case, the "pilot" (the combined media and researcher science communication system) is deliberately steering the plane into the side of a mountain. A coin flip would do a better job. They've burned their credibility to the ground, and you're trying to repair it by invoking other professions that haven't done so.


Okay, I’ll bite. Who exactly is “they”? How have they burned their credibility to the ground? And how does reading scientific papers yourself address this issue if in your telling it was created by people who are no better than a coin flip?

Well, this study and the BBC's reporting on it (ignoring the misleading title) isn't quite as bad as worse-than-coin-flip, but the study from my other comment [1] is worse-than-coin flip - not only did they fail to adjust for birth weight, they even cut out data they didn't like [2]. So "they" varies by field, institute, and researcher.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47431120

[2] https://dailycaller.com/2025/03/31/exclusive-researchers-axe... (every claim the article makes is backed up by attached FOIA'd documents, so you don't have to take the Daily Caller at their word if you don't trust them)


Okay, let’s even grant you both studies at face value based on your description.

Are two studies enough to “burn their credibility to the grounds”?

Science is a process, not individual studies. Your daily caller article is actually a good example of this. It is a replication study that disproves the original study. This is how science is supposed to work; not by hinging on one individual paper (as influencers and cranks do) but on the sum total of the scientific literature. (well in this case you need less papers if you can prove obvious mistakes or misconduct)

The process cannot guarantee that every single paper is True. But, if followed, it guarantees that in time it will self correct.


> For example, failing to control for obvious confounders in observational data is likely to produce biased results. If we like the direction of this bias, we can do less adjustment for confounders.

For example, the study showing that having a white doctor increased mortality of black babies didn't correct for birth weight - once that was done, the effect disappeared (and media interest waned): https://www.wsj.com/opinion/justice-jacksons-incredible-stat...


> "What do we do about it?"

I'd suggest something like banning algorithmic amplification - your feed is posts of people you follow and nothing else. But that's not what will happen. What will happen is there will be [1] vague laws about preventing vague "harm", written to give legal teeth to the Overton window. Not in those words, but companies that would go against it will be mired in lawfare, while those that comply will be allowed to grow.

And if you complain, they'll motte-and-bailey you - you're not in favor of "harm", are you? We're not an authoritarian speech police, we only seek to protect people from "harm".

[1] Or rather, are - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Safety_Act_2023


Even if it had been patented, patents from the 1950s would have long expired. In fact, patents from 2005 would have expired - the US patent term is only 20 years.

Didn't know that, thanks. Although 20 years seems too much for some things, especially computer-related fields that move much quicklier than other fields. But now pretty much everything depends on or runs on computers so 20 years seem too much. I don't know if I phrased it correctly, but I mean to say that before computers, things moved much more slowly. Even a century for a patent would've been fine 500 years ago, but now almost every field has been changed by computers in the past few decades and will change even more rapidly. Letting 1 company have the advantage for 20 whole years now is much more impactful than it must've been before.

I don't have examples of tweets handy, but here are stickers that get you 2 years in UK jail: They reportedly contained slogans such as “We will be a minority in our homeland by 2066”, “Mass immigration is white genocide”, “intolerance is a virtue” and “they seek conquest not asylum.”

Sources:

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-leeds-68448867 (does not quote a single sticker that he was jailed for)

https://www.gbnews.com/news/sam-melia-free-speech-activists-...


Ahh, the famous "criminal damage is tweeting" case

"putting stickers on things is criminal damage deserving of prison time" is no better of a position

But we should probably pay attention to what was written on the stickers.


America literally jails people for quoting the US president

The UK jails people for extreme incitement


Extreme incitement to changing government immigration policy.

Der Sturmer had no impact either?

> You missed 'warrentless' in your summary. It's sort of important.

Less than you would hope: https://web.archive.org/web/20140718122350/https://www.popeh...

Notably, a single secret warrant authorized the surveillance of everyone on the Verizon network:

That warrant orders Verizon Business Network Services to provide a daily feed to the NSA containing "telephony metadata" – comprehensive call detail records, including location data – about all calls in its system, including those that occur "wholly within the United States, including local telephone calls" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Foreign_Intellig...

I know those are about the US and this law is Canada, but the same things can happen.


> the conclusion is that theaters can’t operate in a way that wins my business

They can, if studios gave them a better deal: "Most if not all the ticket price goes directly into the studio's pockets."

That is not a fact of nature, but the studio's whim. If they want to drive theaters out of business and send all their customers to the pirate bay, they are more than welcome to.


I'm just glad this only applies to plants, and possibly animals, and not humans.

The argument against eugenics is not "it doesn't work even in theory."

Exactly.

It seems to be a law of HN that any discussion of genetics descends into a debate about the existence of übermensch and untermensch. :(


It's a law of discussion of human genetics that they are always smeared as about superiority. We can conserve and differentiate between wolf subspecies without being called Eurasian wolf supremacists. So clearly this 'misunderstanding' is deliberate.

You think it maybe applies to more than just eugenics? Perhaps to the dogma that we are all the same?

In fact, punctuated equilibrium is quite compatible with what you describe as "the dogma that we are all the same".

Punctuated equilibrium theory was proposed in the early 1970s by Stephen Jay Gould, who also wrote The Mismeasure of Man, a critique of biological determinism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punctuated_equilibrium


Yet punctuated equilibrium does not apply to cabbage, dog breeds, wolf varieties, and countless others. There are 37 subspecies of wolf, 10 of brown bear (yes, only brown bear. Other bears have their own subspecies each), and 47 red fox subspecies. Man alone is the great exception, unaffected by geographical separation and restricted gene flows.

> biological determinism

That term itself is a strawman - the argument is not that biology and genes fully determine behavior and life outcomes, merely that they affect it. As an aside, not only was Mismeasure of Man debunked (the skull measurements were not biased [1,2]), attacking craniometry in the era of genetics is like attacking alchemy. He should spend his time attacking PCA plots of the human genetic distribution [3]. Of course he does not, because he would prefer people remained ignorant of that.

It's sad that 166 years after On the Origin of Species, we still haven't accepted that we are not immune to natural selection.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mismeasure_of_Man#Reassess...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/14/science/14skull.html

[3] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Principal_compon...


> Of course he does not, because he would prefer people remained ignorant of that.

That's certainly one hypothesis, but here's an alternative one that I'd like you to consider: he's not doing that because he died in 2002. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Jay_Gould)

> Man alone is the great exception, unaffected by geographical separation and restricted gene flows

Extant bears have never invented the wheel, wolves spend more time eating horses than domesticating them, and despite what you might see on certain corners of the internet there has never been a vulpine Columbus. (To clarify, humans move around a whole lot more than most animals)


> he died in 2002

Cavalli-Sforza, Menozzi and Piazza measured genetic differences between human populations using the fixation index in 1994 [1]. He was not ignorant of genetics, he just chose to shift attention to craniometry instead. And even now that we have far better tools and knowledge, people choose to focus on outdated arguments instead, because they give the answers they want. E.g. by bringing up Gould when his work is no longer relevant.

> To clarify, humans move around a whole lot more than most animals

By what mechanism do you think the visible physiological distinctions between human populations arose? Clearly humans don't (or haven't up to very recently) moved around enough to even them out.

You think those are the only traits that haven't been evened out?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixation_index#Genetic_distanc...


> By what mechanism do you think the visible physiological distinctions between human populations arose?

Genetic drift, mostly, with some founder effect mixed in.


nervous laughter

> If it is artificial, whether it is a story someone wrote

Already illegal in Australia: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/australasia/sydney-... (don't hold your breath on it making any "banned books" lists)

People laughed at Indians believing photos stole one's soul, and now we have legislated even stupider behavior, without the excuse of ignorance.


Australia also believe that women with small breasts in porn causes people to become child abusers...

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: