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James Watson: Scientist loses titles after claims over race
Nobel Prize-winning American scientist James Watson has been stripped of his honorary titles after repeating comments about race and intelligence.
In a TV programme, the pioneer in DNA studies made a reference to a view that genes cause a difference on average between blacks and whites on IQ tests. Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory said the 90-year-old scientist's remarks were "unsubstantiated and reckless". Dr Watson had made similar claims in 2007 and subsequently apologised.
He shared the Nobel in 1962 with Maurice Wilkins and Francis Crick for their 1953 discovery of the DNA's double helix structure.
Dr Watson sold his gold medal in 2014, saying he had been ostracised by the scientific community after his remarks about race. He is currently in a nursing home recovering from a car accident and is said to have "very minimal" awareness of his surroundings.
Previously: Disgraced Scientist is Selling his Nobel Prize
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Kell on Monday January 14 2019, @05:51AM (6 children)
I don't see UBI as a panacea for getting people into work. I rather see it as a solution to future social strife caused by automation. Consider this: as companies replace workers with automation, the costs of goods will decline, but so too will workers' ability to pay for them. The low cost of goods is meaningless if you have no money at all. This is further exacerbated when real estate cartel behaviour locks low-earners out of owning property. If your workers cannot gain employment because they are incapable of being retrained (either from being too poor or too old), then that person is basically cut out of the market for labour and thus have no way to support themselves. They cannot afford land, and thus cannot even subsistence farm. Desperate unemployed people - especially young ones - are a perfect formula for social strife.
The wealthy have their needs met by automated services and high-income technical professionals who can still demand a livable wage; they have no need or motivation to share the massive productivity of automated factories with people outside of the economic system. As a society, we have a choice: we can either share our productivity with people who cannot (and who maybe never will) contribute economically, or else let them starve/riot/etc until they die out. Just as with people too sick or injured to work, we use tax money to provide welfare to give them a means to live. A form of governmental charity. So too, when automation eventually renders people unable to work we will be obliged to provide for them. Hand-wringing moralising how "if we don't make them work, they'll be lazy" is puritan nonsense that only values someone because of their utility. We should help people not because they 'earned it', but because to do otherwise is monstrous. Otherwise, we are tacitly accepting that their own humanity is by itself no merit to live.
So, to me UBI is more about providing a means for non-wealthy people to be supported and have a fraction of the industrial output of society. An alternative approach, if you prefer, is to require that some minimum fraction of all corporations be publically owned and that fraction of productivity or dividends be used to support the population. There is no argument I can think of that can justify why, in an age of almost limitless production capacity, only a handful of humans should benefit at the expense of the rest of mankind.
Scientists ask questions. Engineers solve problems.
(Score: 1) by Sulla on Monday January 14 2019, @06:42AM (3 children)
Who automation thing is pretty terrible. In around a decade some 30 million truck drivers are going to need new jobs.
Me I'm trying to buy land so at least my kids can be dirt farmers.
Ceterum censeo Sinae esse delendam
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday January 14 2019, @07:13AM (2 children)
"Fucking you, got mine" at the wannabe stage.
Good luck, eminent domain laws are there to make sure those who can pay more for that patch of dirt will get it.
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by Oakenshield on Monday January 14 2019, @03:26PM
The way I see it, OP is allocating his resources based upon long term needs as opposed to short term gain. Your vitriol is unwarranted. Would you be happier if he had said, "fuck the future, I'm buying a new iPhone" instead?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 14 2019, @04:04PM
I always felt that using eminent domain for private sector things was a HUGE mistake. That precedent should have never been made.
I understand that the government must sometimes have a specific plot of land for a public works projects (discontinuities in roads are not great), but unless the land will become public, eminent domain should not be allowed to be invoked.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 14 2019, @11:43PM (1 child)
What is the way out of a UBI if it doesn't work as advertised. As is the fate of so many good intentioned programs?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 15 2019, @02:08AM
Are you suggesting that if people are given free money they will adjust their lifestyle to the lowest income bracket and never search for work or have a job and be on holiday for the rest of their lives just sitting at home watching Netflix or camping forever?
Nooooooooo
say it ain't so
surely humanity is better than that