Did anyone else find the banner at the top of the article (about preferring secondary and tertiary sources to primary ones) more interesting (about the problems with wikipedia) than the article itself?

Actually, Big Pharma would LOSE billions if it works. There are only a few anti-virals, and none of them work well, and most need to be used in combinations.

This is also not a blue sky hunt, he has a mechanism, and just needs to fine tune the hydrogenation or delivery method.

from Wiki "DRACO is selective for virus-infected cells. Differentiation between infected and healthy cells is made primarily via the length and type of RNA transcription helices present within the cell. Most viruses produce long dsRNA helices during transcription and replication. In contrast, uninfected mammalian cells generally produce dsRNA helices of fewer than 24 base pairs during transcription. Cell death is effected via one of the last steps in the apoptosis pathway"

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

Whether a discussion is useful depends on the results of the discussion. There are a lot of true things you can say that don't advance a discussion into a direction that leads to a positive outcome.

People could discuss cognitive biases in a really stupid and irrational way that would make it unproductive? If that's what you mean, then, yeah. Of course.

It wasn't a discussion of how implicit bias works but an uncited assertion that it has effects in certain conditions.

Yeah? It wasn't really the format for a CFAR plug.

That might be true but it's not what the LW mission of rationality that's about systematic winning is about. I understand the mission to be about finding thinking strategies that lead to making winning decisions.

Right. Like approaching policy debates with a reduction in mind-killedness. Acknowledging implicit bias is a great step.

You can also look at the decision making literature and see what saying "everyone has biases" does to a person self awareness of their own biases. It generally does little.

It does more than not acknowledging people are biased—this was literally what Clinton's critics said in regard to her comment. They essentially denied that implicit bias exists.

You seem to making a black or white argument that Clinton's comment isn't useful because it's not that useful—it won't solve anything or make rationality win U.S. policy on this issue. I am not under the illusion her one sentence will un-mindkill U.S. politics. I'm merely contrasting the (a) acknowledgement of bias with (b) being apparently unaware that it exists.

A is better than B.

Someone did a article about creating a Kickstarter that actually issued shares in a company if they went over big.

If it was a tax deduction if it failed, but allowed for a gain, then it might be a way to do projects that were popular with people, but not attractive to Big Pharma or VC.

You could even have "Hackerspaces" that brought together teams just to do projects. If they included housing, it would be a great way to give postdocs some work, and some visibility while they wait to get into a static lab.

The video is somewhat odd in that he claims Descartes had no problem with experiments, but I recall the philosopher proposing rules which contradicted experiments and hand-waving this by appealing to the impossibility of observing bodies in isolation.

In any case, Hakob does make clear that Descartes used a more Aristotelian method as a rhetorical device to persuade Aristotelians. (In effect, he proved the method of intuitive truth unreliable by producing a contradiction.) I don't believe his work includes any workable method you could use to do science, while Newton's rules for natural philosophy seem like an OK approximation.

The fact that a claim is true doesn't automatically mean that it's useful to discuss it.

It doesn't? In what way would it not be useful?

I think it's extremely useful to discuss how the brain you are using to solve problems has flaws that may be inhibiting you from solving those problems, or even recognizing the problems accurately. (It's why I was on LW originally...)

(Maybe you're using "automatically" here as a qualifier to make your statement technically correct—Is that what you mean? Like, people could discuss cognitive biases in a really stupid and irrational way that would make it unproductive? If that's what you mean, then, yeah. Of course.)

No, it's not an admission of Clinton that her maps have errors.

It's not? I thought she said we all (i.e. humans) have implicit biases? Wouldn't that include Clinton?

I think we discussed this previously on LW. In general the argument isn't convincing in his case.

Gilead made 20$ billion with a drug that cures one virus. If a pharma company would think that his approach has a 10% of working to cure all viruses spending 100$ million or more would be very interesting for traditional pharma companies under the current incentive scheme.

Why do you think that [Clinton speaking of implicit bias seems to be a way to advance the discussion to something more rational]?

Because people have implicit cognitive biases. It's useful to discuss them.

Peoples' cognitive maps aren't the territory. And people aren't always conscious of the mistakes. Further, many people I've heard discuss politics in this election cycle seem unaware that there even could be errors in their map.

Instead of arguing over our competing maps, one good first step is to acknowledge our maps have errors, which is what I think Clinton's line about "implicit bias" did.

It was poor wording on my part when I wrote "the contexts under which the adjustment was made". The spirit of my point is much better captured by the word "applied" (vs. made). That is, it looks like a balanced reading of stereotype literature shows that people are quite good in their judgments of when to apply a stereotype. My point is therefore a bit more extreme than it might have appeared.

I would think that many sociologists would say that many people who are racist and look down on Blacks are racists because they don't interact much with Blacks.

I agree with this and would add that such perceptions of superiority could be amplified by other members of the community reinforcing those judgments.

If the adjustment was made during a time where the person was at an all-White school, the interesting question isn't whether the adjustment performs well within the context of the all-White school but whether it also performs well at decisions made later outside of that heterogeneous environment.

To get a little deeper into this topic, I should mention that our stereotypes are conditional and, therefore, much of the performance of a stereotype depends on applying it in the proper contexts. Of the studies looking at when people apply stereotypes, they tend to show that they are used as a last resort under conditions in which almost no other information about the target is available. We're surprisingly good at knowing when a stereotype is applicable and seem to have little trouble spontaneously eschewing them when other, more diagnostic information is available.

My off-the-cuff hypothesis about students from an all-white school would be that they would show racial preferences when, say, only shown a picture of a black person. However, ask these students to provide judgments after a 5-minute conversation with a black person or after reviewing a resume (i.e., after giving them loads and loads of information) and race effects will become nearly or entirely undetectable. I don't know of any studies looking at this exactly and urge you to take my hypothesis with a grain of salt, but my larger point is this: You might be surprised.

We also have a great deal of evidence for past failures of scientific racism, which has set my prior for the next such theory very low.

I'm not sure what you mean here. How are you defining scientific racism and how is it relevant to what we're talking about?

As a general query to other readers: Is it bad form to just ignore comments like this? I'm apt to think it unwise to try to talk about this topic here if it is just going to invoke Godwin's Law.