Prof. Emily M. Bender(she/her)2d ago

Veatch: “What was really surprising to me during my initial dive into all of this was how, when you look at the question of superintelligence as a documentarian or journalist, it doesn’t take long before you smack your forehead into the low doorframe of race science, because it’s baked into this technology”

I love this metaphor because of how it speaks to the contortions people (here: AI boosters) go through to ignore/pretend not to notice the race science.

https://www.theverge.com/entertainment/897923/ghost-in-the-machine-valerie-veatch-interview

The gen AI Kool-Aid tastes like eugenics

Ghost in the Machine — out on Kinema March 26th — director Valeria Veatch speaks with The Verge about gen AI’s roots in eugenics.

The Verge
Show threadCurtAdams2d ago
@emilymbender Is there a better term than "race science"? 'Cause it sure ain't science.
Show threadJoan of Contention 😷

@CurtAdams

Pseudo-science.

@emilymbender

Mar 22 at 12:28amWeb
Show threadsome kind of orange shape19h ago
@clickhere @CurtAdams @emilymbender Race science is bad science, but I think excluding it from the category of science entirely only helps other scientists feel better. Any time a social scientist uses IQ for anything, their science is bad in the same way.
Show threadJoan of Contention 😷16h ago

@clayote Oh it absolutely is pseudo-science - as in, just plain baseless, evidence-free quackery.

There's plenty more that can join it in that categorisation, certainly, but that doesn't change a thing about it.

@CurtAdams @emilymbender

Show threadsome kind of orange shape16h ago

@clickhere @CurtAdams @emilymbender I don't think "evidence-free" is correct, either

It's not good evidence, and it doesn't prove what he thinks it does, but my eugenicist neighbor had all kinds of factoids about which ethnic groups had the best feet for swimming, who's got the highest incidence of autism, and so-on

We arrived at the view of eugenics as pseudoscience only by doing science better than that, and it should make us humble: which of my beliefs are just as shaky? Perhaps it's not just that intelligence isn't coded by particular genes, but that the concept of "intelligence" doesn't make sense?

Any working scientist today who believes in the luminiferous aether is a quack, but that's not true of the scientists who believed it in the 17th century.

Show threadJoan of Contention 😷15h ago

@clayote

I'm not interested in apologia.

@CurtAdams @emilymbender

Show threadsome kind of orange shape15h ago

@clickhere @CurtAdams @emilymbender I'm not saying any of this to defend eugenics! I hated that neighbor and I'm glad he's gone.

What would it accomplish if we succeeded at getting everyone to refer to race science some other way? The current crop of race scientists call their field "human biodiversity," anyway, so I don't think it would discourage them.

Show threadCurtAdams15h ago
@clayote @clickhere @emilymbender Race "science" is bad science because the whole concept of race turned out to have no biological basis. "Science" is a term implying there is evidence and functional analysis, and using it gives race "science" credibility it doesn't deserve, and that influences laypeople (and thus voters and influencers) in a bad way.
Race pseudo-science is a reasonable descriptive term.