This is in Nature Human Behavior. This is a social science/psychology journal, a field which is suffering from the reproducibility crisis, perhaps worse than any other field. So, any result in this field should be viewed with significant skepticism. This is true for research into population group differences, and extremely true for IQ research into race, which is almost hopelessly noisy and confounded. It is a simple and obvious fact that population group differences in intelligence are noisy and confounded. In fact it is far stronger a fact than any of the actual results from this research.
Second, research results in population group differences are social poison. They are memetic viruses that fuel violent extremism. The murderer of 10 people in Buffalo directly cited human behavior research in his manifesto. Extremist racist groups regularly discuss this research. This is a fact.
So we have a dangerous combination: weak research that destroys societal bonds. This should be handled with care, and extra consideration should be given to whether the tenuous, fallible results from this research will result in violence.
This isn't fucking Orwell, its people trying to make sure that dogshit research in their journal doesnt get cited by mass shooters.
IQ research is the one area in social sciences that does not suffer from reproducibility crisis. You're clearly not against it because of reproducibility; you are against it because it goes against your ideological worldview.
> Second, research results in population group differences are social poison. They are memetic viruses that fuel violent extremism.
We had a full summer of violent riots because of the "Black Lives Matter" ideology. Are we going to ban research that studies police treatment of different races too?
> IQ research is the one area in social sciences that does not suffer from reproducibility crisis.
This isn’t true. Areas like psychophysics have similar extremely high reliability. Economics did quite well compared to political science and sociology. Social psychology and personality psychology were and are unusually bad.
Wikipedia says violence broke out a day after the George Floyd incident [1]:
> After the main protest group disbanded on the night of May 26, a much smaller group, numbering in the hundreds, spray-painted the building, threw rocks and bottles, broke a window at the station, and vandalized a squad car. A skirmish soon broke out between the vandals and protesters trying to stop them. At around 8 p.m., police fired tear gas and rubber bullets at demonstrators, some of whom had thrown water bottles at police officers.
That was long before Trump was taking any action. Let's not give a bad politician credit he doesn't deserve.
Not so fun fact: on May 29th in Chicago, the address with the highest number of arrests by far was at Trump tower, against peaceful protesters. Then the police department lied about the number of arrests that happened for looting, saying that there were more arrests for looting than protesters.
If you're looking to build a better understanding of what happened, you might want to reconsider using wikipedia as your source and try to find local news that takes a critical look at policing.
> on May 29th in Chicago, the address with the highest number of arrests by far was at Trump tower, against peaceful protesters.
I am not surprised that the one place in town which has a strong connection to a sitting US president who is considered racist by protesters is a protest, and thus an arrest hotspot. I see no proof that the arrest was made against peaceful protesters.
Other sources, by the way, speak of 108 arrests, mostly related to property damage and violence [1]
> If you're looking to build a better understanding of what happened, you might want to reconsider using wikipedia as your source and try to find local news that takes a critical look at policing.
I prefer a source that at least tries to be unbiased to a source that makes it very clear it doesn't care about unbiased at all.
The source you quote makes claims, but does not show data to back them up. Their analysis - and they admit that themselves - is based on incomplete data.
Heh. I'm the reporter who did the analysis and I absolutely assure you the data was not incomplete. Where in the article was that said? Maybe I'm missing something, but I've spent many hours looking at the arrests in those early days and I can't recall anything that I'd call "incomplete".
The reporting we did at Chicago Reporter was effectively in response to what was said in past reporting (like the one you link), which solely relied on the narratives given by the police, rather than actual thorough analysis. Our analysis found CPD's narrative about the number of people arrested for looting vs protesters to be completely false. CPD agreed that their original narrative was wrong.
Mind you, whenever you see anything about the protests from David Brown, remember: he said he's seen no evidence of kettling of protesters in August 2020[1], despite overwhelming information pointing otherwise, including video of CPD surrounding protesters. I'm not sure I'd trust anything quoted from Brown in that article.
Edit: if you want to look at the data yourself, here [2] you go. They remove the address info in this data, but journalists/students/nonprofits have access to an "authorize-only" version that has address info.
> The Reporter does not have access to the arrest narratives, so our analysis includes crimes that could be considered looting in the context of a protest, but may also be everyday crimes like burglary.
This becomes particularly interesting because only two paragraphs further up, it is pointed out that police was able to - and likely did - arrest groups of people based on the same narrative.
> Edit: if you want to look at the data yourself, here [2] you go. They remove the address info in this data, but journalists/students/nonprofits have access to an "authorize-only" version that has address info.
I wish journalists would give that information - link to sources of their articles - with the articles, especially when working for clearly opinionated media. It increases trust and reliability imho.
It feels like you're just searching for things to dislike.
I'm not sure what your point about the narratives is or how that makes the analysis "limited". The charge is clear enough. Funny enough, the reason that CPD failed to accurately count the number of looters is because they basically did a grep of "protester" in their narrative logs, rather than looking at the charge itself. And again -- CPD agreed with us that their numbers were wrong and ours were correct.
> I wish journalists would give that information
heh. The actual source was an API that we had access to. What I linked wasn't the original source. The API isn't something we could link to. In fact, after we published that article, they shut it down so that we nor other journalists could access it!
And dude. You're preaching to the choir about the reliability shit. Your feelings towards journalists should be directed towards editors, not journalists.
There was an actual "white supremacist" that smashed windows and spray painted "free shit for everyone zone" on the side of a building while the crowd called him out as an agent provocateur, so...
> The man whose cell phone records were sought is said to be a member of the Hells Angels motorcycle gang and “known associate” of the Aryan Cowboys white supremacist prison gang based in Minnesota and Kentucky. He was photographed with a group wearing Aryan Cowboy leather vests in Stillwater harassing a Muslim woman on June 27 of last year, according to the search warrant.
> The search warrant sought the suspect’s cell phone activity and cell tower “pings” on the day of the AutoZone incident. The man, who has a lengthy criminal history, did not return a phone call seeking comment.
That's an easy one. America has had a couple of centuries of systemic racism keeping majority-black communities poor, uneducated, and not particularly fearful of prison (relative to majority-white communities). When you combine that poverty with an easy opportunity to loot something valuable in a situation where there's a perception of not being caught due to the chaos, people will loot things. There will have been poor white people in the videos you watched, but your biases mean you focused on the black people instead.
That's not a suggestion that you're racist. It's simply that you've grown up in a society where white people are literally considered superior. The white supremacy is all around you. You don't notice it in the same way you don't notice the air you breathe. When someone points it out though, you should probably listen at least, even if you choose not to act.
Also, it's not Trump's fault. It goes back far further than Trump. He's simply a clever grifter who found a way to capitalize on it. His family is the better part of $3bn richer since his presidency...
>It's simply that you've grown up in a society where white people are literally considered superior. The white supremacy is all around you. You don't notice it in the same way you don't notice the air you breathe. When someone points it out though, you should probably listen at least, even if you choose not to act.
I'm Bulgarian. We've been slaves longer than the trans-atlantic slave trade existed. Up until 45 years ago we were a puppet state of the USSR with zero political rights. Don't fucking lecture me how privileged I am. And you'll notice that despite being significantly poorer than even poor Americans, we don't riot and loot and burn buildings every time there is a political controversy.
I've been to those protests. 3 hours of football hooligans and extreme nationalists cannot compare to however many months BLM was. I wouldn't call it rioting and there definitely wasn't any looting or burning buildings.
So don't tell me that it's the same, because it isn't. It's possible to air your grievances in a civilized manner, without stealing sneakers.
And you'll notice that despite being significantly poorer than even poor Americans, we don't riot and loot and burn buildings every time there is a political controversy.
Guess what keeps those black neighbourhoods poor? Lack of progressive taxation, which also impacts poor people of all other colors as well, including whites.
Many Americans are obsessed with race, but really the main source of inequality is money these days. Fix the money issue and all poor people will benefit, including minorities. Take more money from the rich and use it to fund public services, education regardless of people's skin color.
Now, obviously black people are poor because of historical actions which might count as "white supremacy" (like trans-atlantic slave trade), but you don't fix the issue by blaming white people, you fix it by taxing the rich.
If you look at the historical record, the people working to stop progressive taxation were openly racist, and used that to get poor white people to support the policies.
So, white supremacy lead directly to lots of poor white people getting hurt, just like the civil war killed a whole bunch of poor white people.
> In this “systemic racism” frame and with an understanding of the pre-existing condition of racial wealth disparities, the “anti-tax” shift of the U.S. tax system from more to less progressive comes into focus as a current manifestation of relentless racism. Beginning in the early 1980s, our tax systems have become less progressive. “Anti-tax” fervor took root with caps on property taxes in California in 1978 and the Reagan tax cuts in the early 1980s, and it has steadily flourished. Congress has decreased wealth taxes along with top marginal income tax rates. State and local governments have reduced reliance on income and property taxes, replacing them with increased sales and other consumption taxes.
> The “anti-tax” movement and economic inequality go hand in hand. Leading economists identify decreased progressivity in the tax system as an important cause of rising economic inequality. High-income earners who are taxed at lower rates are able to add more to their wealth every year compared to low-income earners. “Anti-tax,” it turns out, is less about taking the burden of taxation off of everyone and more about shifting that burden away from wealthy taxpayers who can, for example, choose to domicile in states that raise revenues through (regressive) sales rather than (progressive) income taxes.
You mentioned your question is serious. I'm assuming you want a serious answer. For others reading this: please assume positive intent for OP and my self. There is no need for flame wars.
Studies are important for police racism because: collecting data on who, when, and why can help us resolve the racism. To be specific, not all police are racist. A study could help identify who is more likely to be racist. Then we decide do we retrain these people or fire them or... something else. Meanwhile, we keep the other police or have them train the racist police.
Thanks for actually taking me seriously but I think you missed my point.
I understand what's the point of a study. I'm just saying there's probably no real need for a "study" to know which departement or service is racist. It's more a will to act and how that's lacking, not one more study. It's also because acting is not easy : when money is low you get 'not the best people' and they still have to do a hard job against criminals, so there's is also sort of a need to protect them when they make mistakes or when you know they won't change who they are, to still have SOME job done in the meantime.
life and people management isn't easy and, i don't think, solved by 'studies'
> You're clearly not against it because of reproducibility; you are against it because it goes against your ideological worldview.
Please avoid ad hominem arguments like this. They are unlikely to convince anyone, and on a topic as sensitive as this might be interpreted as personal attacks.
Your comment would have been more useful if you had restricted yourself to responding to GP's argument that the data is too noisy and confounded to draw serious conclusions.
That's not what an ad-hom attack is. An ad-hom would be insulting the poster they were replying to. This is at worst making an incorrect guess at their ideology, but more likely than not, it's a correct guess.
Hmm, no. Quoting Wikipedia [0], ad-hom "refers to a rhetorical strategy where the speaker attacks the character, motive, or some other attribute of the person making an argument rather than addressing the substance of the argument itself. The most common form of ad hominem is "A makes a claim x, B asserts that A holds a property that is unwelcome, and hence B concludes that argument x is wrong". "
The person's ideology is precisely an "attribute of the person making an argument". The sentence I responded to basically states that "A is not making their argument because it's true, but because of A's unwelcome characteristic." This is pretty much textbook ad-hominem.
> This should be handled with care, and extra consideration should be given to whether the tenuous, fallible results from this research will result in violence.
What is "results in violence" though? One person's violence would be another person's justice.
I think trans activism with kids is a severe violence. Would research in allowing transgenderism for children be considered violence or not in your eyes? I'm sure there's people on both sides of the fence, so who would be the one to gatekeep?
Most transgender studies come from the same "reproducibility crisis" and largely the same branch of social/psychology science.
So to put in effect that "we are allowed to suppress science depending on who it affects" would be a bad precedent for when "the other side" gets in power.
> I think trans activism with kids is a severe violence.
You think trans activism is equivalent to shooting someone?
I mean, i think most people are going to dismiss you as crazy if you think words and ideas of any form are equivalently violent to shooting someone in the head. At the very least you would need to back up such a radical proposition with some very compelling arguments.
Epic straw man. Is your counter argument so poor that you must resort to defeating a comically false version of what OP said? Where in the world does shooting someone in the head come in based on what OP said?!?
Person was responding to a comment that mentioned shooting, and proposing an alternate situation. One presumes they are claiming the alternate situation is equivalent or their comment makes no sense as a response to the previous comment they were replying to.
Yes,in extreme cases psychological abuse can be worse than physical violence, but you kind of need to back up what you're talking about is such a case *.
Its sort of like if you said, beans are just as bad as being shot, then later clarified that you are talking about fatal food poisioning from bad beans. I mean, i guess technically fatal food poisioning is about as bad as being shot, but if you just say "beans are like being shot" without qualification, people are going to think that's a crazy statement, because it is.
* to be clear im talking hypothetically. I don't agree that "trans-activism" (whatever the fuck that means) is violence in any way shape or form.
Trans people are being systematically oppressed. New laws are being made to single them out and ban them from public life. Characterizing healthcare for trans people as "violence" is rather disgusting attempt to further marginalize them by denying them medical services.
The Conservative push to make trans people the new Boogeyman is absolutely wretched.
> Most transgender studies come from the same "reproducibility crisis" and largely the same branch of social/psychology science.
No, this is wrong. A lot of the research into trans healthcare comes from endocrinology, not psychology. Psychologists are not prescribing meds or performing surgery.
Well words like "transgenderism" don't even mean anything and are just far-right buzzwords to scare people like you, so consider first looking into what's informing your worldview. It's certainly not anything approaching objectivity
Don't know where you get that idea, honestly. A lot of trans people certainly think that, but there is definitely no consensus within the trans community about the definition of gender. Personally I even subscribe more to performativity (mostly as described by Judith Butler) than any other theory. But also I don't care that much about gender philosophy.
My "transgenderism ideology" is quite simple: other people's gender or presentation is none of my business and everyone deserves the same basic human rights. If that's dogma, okay I guess
I assume you mean medical transition, since socially transitioning--such as by changing your name and pronouns--would generally be considered performing a gender even if that doesn't involve changing things like clothing and behaviours (e.g. cis tomboys and femboys exist and are performing the gender they were assigned at birth, just not in a typical way)
Next transgenderism dogma: Socially transitioning being a thing.
I don't believe that wearing specific clothes and demanding she/her pronouns from other people makes me less male than i happened to be. Or more female. Nor do i believe this applies for other people or sex swapped.
> just not in a typical way
We are in a post-enlightenment democracy. You can just do atypical things. And it doesn't make you more or less female or male or transitioning or anything like that. Not everything will fit into words, but that's the nature of things.
> You can just do atypical things. And it doesn't make you more or less female or male or transitioning or anything like that.
...yes
That's why I said cis tomboys are still girls and cis femboys are still boys (not sure what the enlightenment or democracy have to do with this discussion)
> I don't believe that wearing specific clothes and demanding she/her pronouns from other people makes me less male than i happened to be. Or more female. Nor do i believe this applies for other people or gender roles swapped.
I can see this discussion won't go anywhere if you're not willing to justify your beliefs, and if you're going to continue insisting that trans people are a monolith. And at the same time imply the tired and untrue claim that trans people deny biology (no one thinks swapping clothes changes your sex characteristics). When we say socially transitioning, we just mean performing gender in a different way, it's just being contrarion to say it's "not a thing", this is probably one of the few objectively true things about trans people.
And it's contradictory to claim that gender performativity is correct, and then later also claim that your performance of gender does not change your gender. Pick a side
Exactly. Anything novel is, by definition, risky. Therefore any and all research has the potential to harm people. What the article says is, that there is an apparently all-knowing group of people, who will decide, where an article lies on a scale between abstract algebra and direct calls to genocide in terms of its impact on people. Oh, and the same group of people is also directly interested in publishing (so they’ll have to let _some_ papers through) as well as being part of the scientific community preparing the papers. So a massive conflict of interest. What could possibly go wrong?
And don't forget, they are also extremely politically invested. Many sociologists get into the field explicitly to "fight racism" or what have you, and the vast majority of the field is very left-leaning.
Being trans is not novel. The recent scaremongering about trans people is what's new. Previously people being gay was the end of the world. Now that homosexuality is more acceptable bigots are focusing on trans people to use as a punching bag.
Those links don't support any of your claims. Child grooming is a real thing and the right wing media has now made it a new insult for LGBT people or behavior they don't agree with, something you're clearly participating in.
The article from out.com even details the harassment this kid has dealt with from conservatives.
Ah yes, because the best way to get groups to not spout misleading rhetoric is to unabashedly bias the publications in the other direction.
Giving validity to the claim that a particular perspective is being actively suppressed historically works out great in reducing that viewpoint...
Maybe they'd be better off restricting publishing to studies reproducing earlier results or meta-analysis, encouraging more rigorous standards without legitimately adding a bias.
But if this is genuinely about reducing racist or sexist misappropriation of research to legitimize those views, this is exactly the sort of measure that is going to backfire by giving the broad lack of supporting evidence for those positions a legitimate claim of explicit censorship.
It no longer matters if there are barely any reproducible results supporting their views, as pointing out that asymmetry is rendered an argument from silence in the face of active censorship.
Extremists may use whatever they want to justify their means, but shody science can make people become radical, radicalized, and then extremists.
It's a gradual change that can be enabled by many things.
What the article says is not to make science, and especially the field in question, one of those triggers.
The Orwellian bit comes once the quality gates are in place and get subverted for political means.
But even if that doesn't happen, I disagree strongly. Extremism doesn't need scientific backing and never has. They'll take it if convenient, but they can quite easily justify their actions without it. Truth and critical thinking are the solution, not the cause.
Psychology has always been rife with political fanatics. Since its inception there have been loud cranks using pseudoscience for the express purpose of influencing social policy. It is still happening today. Just look at Joseph H. Manson.
My position is that the problem lies with the listener, not the speaker. I looked up Joseph H. Manson. At a glace that looks like exactly what OP was talking about.
Extremism doesn’t need scientific backing to exist but it does need scientific backing to make the center complacent.
The shooting was a good example but a better example is an extremist takeover of the government buoyed by a complacent public swindled by flimsy science. It’s happened before, it’ll happen again.
Could you not argue that religious teaching should be suppressed since it often stands in opposition to fact, therefore is responsible for misinformation leading to violence? (and let's face it, that's probably pretty hard to argue against)
Banning harmful behavior promoted by religion can be quite productive. Hate speech laws are one example. Barring religiously-affiliated institution from government money is another.
Rather than suppressing research, wouldn't a simple primer on "why the paper shouldn't be used for hate" suffice, similar to the warning label on a pack of cigarettes? (Unlike cigarettes which are universally harmful, it's unlikely these papers do any real harm to an educated reader. They are only harmful when used completely out-of-context by a moron.)
There is some grand irony that hate groups point to racial differences in "intelligence" specifically. I doubt the members of these groups are in the upper tail of the bell curve...
I read that this is the intention, so when some content that can be used for harm (in a discriminatory or racist way for example), authors should make all the needed considerations, including confounding factors, in their research and their paper.
For example, say someone publishes statistics about school grades and race, and, maybe unsurprisingly, black people in the US turn out to have lower average grades, what does that say about black people? Here lies the responsibility of the researcher to make it clear that the problem is social rather than genetical, either using statistical means to remove confounders, or by highlighting this when discussing the numbers. Actually unless the purpose of the research itself is to extract those social differences, why would you stratify your cohorts by race in the first place?
Even seemingly innocuous decisions, like stratifying (because, why not?, you have the data) may have consequences, or may hide biases, if they are not considered with care. Ask anybody doing ML how confounders are behind every corner in whatever messy human data you collect!
Then there are other topics which specifically look into, say, sex and brain composition etc. Those may be scientifically sound, but ethically more controversial. I am happy I don't work in that field...
How can you be sure any research won't result in violence? How do you establish whether a given piece of research/data will result in violence?
Is your basic operating model for this: "Never show any data that shows there are group differences, because it can be used by violent extremists"?
If that is your operating model, do you support getting rid of ANY data out there that shows differences between groups in ability/behavior, as it could result in violence? For instance, should we ban all public violent crime reporting, if that showed group differences, as it would be something used by those violent extremists you mention?
> This chapter shows that the right wing's essentialized construct of the Jew as criminal in the Weimar period was translated into policy and action in Germany after 1933. Until 1938, when the Nazis unequivocally embraced the guiding principle that “The Jew is outside the law,” they often took pains to charge individual Jews with specific crimes, usually focusing on technical aspects of tax laws and currency-exchange regulations. On the one hand, they sought to exploit the racist agenda and traditional anti-Semitic stereotypes. On the other, they wanted to give the impression that the Nazi State was simply zealous in applying the letter of the law.
If extremely sexist groups were discussing PCOS as proof of the inferiority of women, would it therefore be a good idea to assess all research involving ovaries and refuse to publish anything that made PCOS seem harmful?
It frustrates me how in many discussions people act as if certain controversial research is always obviously correct and objective science up against inherently anti-science people tearing it down. Not at all! Plenty of it is of science specifically known to be done badly, presented badly, in a field with regular systematic issues. If a field is regularly producing these inaccurate results with bad social side effects, it's not out of line to tell people in the field to pay more attention to these things.
So hypothetically, say the reasearch is well founded, reproducible, gold standard, etc.
If you think it would be ok then, why are we talking about "dignity" when instead we could have the less controversial statement "science research must not be dogshit quality".
If you don't believe so, why are we talking about quality?
Bad people will use whatever they have at hand to justify their actions. If there wasn't a paper to discuss there would be something else. That being said it's a disaster how many people go into social sciences and waste their lives on useless research.
>Second, research results in population group differences are social poison. They are memetic viruses that fuel violent extremism. The murderer of 10 people in Buffalo directly cited human behavior research in his manifesto. Extremist racist groups regularly discuss this research. This is a fact.
I am unable to write something to argue against this point because it would lead to this account being banned. I am unable to publish a paper on Nature that argues against the common beleif of racial equality. I am unable to use most modern communication media to do any of these things.
> Second, research results in population group differences are social poison. They are memetic viruses that fuel violent extremism. The murderer of 10 people in Buffalo directly cited human behavior research in his manifesto. Extremist racist groups regularly discuss this research. This is a fact.
Am I paraphrasing correctly: "Some bad people react badly to research results in this field, so there should be no research in this field" ?
IQ tests are also unreliable by design. They might work once, but you get different results depending on the test subject was challenged by questions and problems of similar design.
Highlighting that fact would be helpful and expose such tests as nothing but maybe a rough estimate. Your education is probably more important for that than your capacity to solve problems.
Additionally those that focus on these numbers seem to not be the ones that score particularly well here. And in the end "science" that asserts it can determine intellectual capacity of a group is most likely wrong.
That said, you should NEVER censor yourself because someone could perhaps misinterpret your finding for their own perverted goals. That would undermine science itself and it isn't worth it.
> This isn't fucking Orwell, its people trying to make sure that dogshit research in their journal doesnt get cited by mass shooters.
Perhaps unreliable is the wrong description. There are significant limitations and these are generally acknowledged. You can do different IQ-Tests and you will notice a steady increase in your score over time, because you learn about the structure of problems they ask about.
Ideally IQ-Tests are systematically different that this would not apply but it isn't possible to create them this way. Your training about similar problems in the past will have significant influence on the score. That does not mean that your intellectual capacity is higher/lower to someone with a different score.
Another weakness is the focus on speed or solved problems per time unit. This is also just an estimate and to latest discoveries about intellectual capacity a very rough one. For example there is a corridor of a certain reading speed that correlates with intelligence. But especially at the upper end which also includes more or less average reading speed this correlation vanishes. Same is true with the comparatively easy problems of IQ-Tests.
The score might be an estimate, but as it I would call it an unreliable estimate. The limitations of them are intrinsic to the way they work.
Now, imagine, real good research (Data-mining/AB-virtual-experiments) being done, with FG cooperate DBs containing the behaviour of almost all of western humanity. One can imagine the bombshells on which Google and Facebook (and others with acccess Palantir) are sitting quietly right now.
And while the racists and ideologists might use parts of the results to go at each others throats, the truth might even be more weird, turning humanity into a fully self aware grandfather clock, knowing what makes it tick, but unable to stop it.
The fact that Thiel just looked at it, and went full support of totalitarian decline, cause it can not be prevented anyway, gives you an idea on how total of a defeat through knowledge awaits in those DBs.
Good grief I can’t believe you are serious. Mass shootings almost never happen, and when they do they aren’t because of bad research. It’s almost comical that you believe extremists are scouring scientific journals to fuel their hatred.
Censorship has never worked, but oh don’t worry in this circumstance it will definitely work. Because reasons.
I wonder if research into the frequency and severity of mass shootings would be permitted into the journal - or if it would be blocked because it might promote harm
Even if this was true what you are describing is impossible to predict. School shooter are not scientists and don't comprehend anything past basic stuff served to them by the media. Doing research with these condiderations in mind probably fuels extremism much more and makes people (justifiably) sceptical of science in general.
Second, research results in population group differences are social poison. They are memetic viruses that fuel violent extremism. The murderer of 10 people in Buffalo directly cited human behavior research in his manifesto. Extremist racist groups regularly discuss this research. This is a fact.
So we have a dangerous combination: weak research that destroys societal bonds. This should be handled with care, and extra consideration should be given to whether the tenuous, fallible results from this research will result in violence.
This isn't fucking Orwell, its people trying to make sure that dogshit research in their journal doesnt get cited by mass shooters.