Begging for people to acknowledge that this was the election the Democrats won...

CSH fired him, he still basically lived on or directly near the grounds and he was still riding around on his golf cart, picking up distinguished scholars and sharing racist garbage with random PhD students. He faced no consequences in life - it’s a shame that in death it’s the same. /fin

I was at LMB a few years ago and people I met said he still gave talks there and he’d say on stage that Franklin was basically a tech and that black people were less intelligent, and everyone would politely applaud, privately disagree, and take pics with him. They also said that even after 7/n

How many great minds did he drive out of science? And because of his spreading of racist pseudoscience, how many people outside of his direct sphere of influence were affected? We can never know but I suspect that in the end he had a net negative impact on mol bio. 6/n

How much damage did Watson do? Had he worked with Franklin instead, how much further and faster could they have gone? Had he not made labs so staggeringly toxic for women, people of color, Jews, had he not explicitly discriminated against them, how many more great scientists would we have today? 5/n

People say something along the lines of, how many Einsteins die, today, in poverty? How many brilliant minds never have the chance to achieve their potential and help humanity, because they are deprived of the circumstances which allow for this? I great question to ask here is - 4/n

Lots of people are sharing this thread and saying it’s “nuanced” and “informative” but it isn’t when Jeremy leaves out that Watson defended anti-semitism and said that we should find the “homosexual gene” to allow women to abort gay babies in utero, and all the other garbage he said! 3/n

You can’t treat him as a great scientific genius if he spent the majority of his career and life saying things that were totally fake and made up in service to hateful ideology. He spread lies, lies that flew in the face of real genetics, to support the exclusion and suffering of others 2/n

In Germany (as an example) the education was more standardized in gymnasium (hs). I went to Uni there and realized they also learn way more than we do in hs - you can’t assume US college freshmen know very basic skills like college level essay writing. That’s what GenEds are for.

One thing genEds do is catch everyone up to a certain basic level of knowledge - in the US high schools teach radically different things. In principle this makes sure everyone has the same baseline and thus a similar chance at success with their majors/electives.

It isn’t too early to say: the technology that is allowing people to cheat through all of their classes and learn nothing is bad. It’s unethical to sit back and wait for this to be quantitatively proved one day, when it’s obviously happening rn. Anyone who works with college student sees this daily.

Even accepting the premise that AI produces useful writing (which no one should), using AI in education is like using a forklift at the gym. The weights do not actually need to be moved from place to place. That is not the work. The work is what happens within you.