alt Hacker NewsPoliticization of science is never good.
The "pots aren't people" wave wouldn't be problematic per se (e.g. obviously a lot of non-Latin ethnicities adapted Roman way of life), rather because it sought to be the dominant theory.
We have a very similar "intelligence and nature-vs-nurture" situation in biology, caused by the very same thing - defeat of the Nazis, which made some ideas extremely dirty and other ideas very attractive.
This has an interesting consequence in that we do not know much about natural human intelligence today, which is coming back to bite us in the age of emerging artificial intelligence. The topic of human intelligence has been a political minefield for nearly a century now. It is probably safer and easier to study intelligence of octopuses and crows than that of humans. You're definitely freer from political repercussions there.
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Lysenkoism predates the defeat of the nazis and it's pretty much the same pseudoscientific dismissal of nature for ideological reasons.
To be honest, I'm more interested in what ideology/religion lead to the Yamnaya Y line taking over a continent in a timespan of over thousands of years to almost utter replacement despite of the fact that, in the end, the "invaders" were almost identical to the "invaded", than I am in elucidating whether Llama 3 being less performant than Gemma 4 in benchmarks is due to the training corpus or the architecture.
I don't feel like being racist either way.
>(e.g. obviously a lot of non-Latin ethnicities adapted Roman way of life),
If you wanna tell the romans to GFY you're gonna have to adopt a lot of the structures that make them competitive in order to resist them. There's a fairly large "you wrestle the pig you get shit on you" factor going on.
> We have a very similar "intelligence and nature-vs-nurture" situation in biology, caused by the very same thing
no we don't. intelligence isn't racial..