Patri Friedman

So we have a way to get to false but desirable conclusions when science shamefully insists on revealing distasteful truths?

It is very easy to make scientific blunders that lead to false conclusions. The liberal arts can warn us about certain classes of those.

In this case, awareness of the long history of scientific errors going unexamined when they reinforce existing prejudice could be valuable.

(@pboothe says that these folks trained their AI on data where criminal photos were mugshots and non-criminal ones were corporate photos.)

Perhaps this paper, despite bravely publishing heresy, is wrong. But I bet most condemning it do so b/c it's heresy, not b/c it's wrong.

It is not actually a coincidence that "condemning the heresy" turned out to be right. Many orthodoxies encode valuable heuristics.

It is *reasonable* to demand greater care and stronger evidence for claims that match patterns known to have often led to mistakes before.

Sure. But the general pattern also supports the idea that standards required for claims related to recent disasters tend to be unreasonable