<story><title>To do better science, admit that you’re not objective</title><url>https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00669-2</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>leftyted</author><text>Nah.  Do your best to be objective.  The work you accomplish while attempting objectivity will be better than the work you would have accomplished while attempting to account for your lack of objectivity.&lt;p&gt;No one is counting on your work being perfect.  Science is a communal activity that self-corrects in the long-term.&lt;p&gt;To put it another way, here&amp;#x27;s Cormac McCarthy:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; You know, you always have this image of the perfect thing which you can never achieve, but which you never stop trying to achieve. But I think ... that&amp;#x27;s your signpost and your guide. You&amp;#x27;ll never get there, but without it you won&amp;#x27;t get anywhere.&lt;p&gt;More from the article:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; As I found while writing my 2019 book Superior: The Return of Race Science, geneticists today rightly treat eugenics as a laughable proposition...&lt;p&gt;If eugenics doesn&amp;#x27;t work then how come every single Border Collie is smarter than every single English Bulldog?&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; ... and the concept of biological race — the belief that humans can be subdivided into distinct groups with meaningful differences between them — as easily debunked nonsense.&lt;p&gt;You can divide humans into whatever groups you like based on whichever criteria you like.  The question is whether those groupings are &lt;i&gt;useful&lt;/i&gt; and sometimes...they are.  Whether you call those groupings &amp;quot;races&amp;quot; or something else is a semantic argument.</text></comment>
<story><title>To do better science, admit that you’re not objective</title><url>https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00669-2</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>asurty</author><text>This reminds me of a first year engineering philosophy course I took where the prof spent a good chunk of it trying to tell us there is no such thing as 100% objective research then proceeding to tell us that our grades were 100% objective after people complained about divergence between course averages according to teaching assistants. :&amp;#x27;D</text></comment>