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https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/16/open-thread-156-25/

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Normally this would be a hidden thread, but I wanted to signal boost\xa0this request for help\xa0by Professor Steve Hsu, vice president of research at Michigan State University. Hsu is a friend of the blog and was a guest speaker at one of our recent online meetups \u2013 some of you might also have gotten a chance to meet him at\xa0a Berkeley meetup\xa0last year. He and his blog\xa0Information Processing\xa0have also been instrumental in helping me and thousands of other people better understand genetics and neuroscience. If you\u2019ve met him, you know he is incredibly kind, patient, and willing to go to great lengths to help improve people\u2019s scientific understanding.

Along with all the support he\u2019s given me personally, he\u2019s had an amazing career. He started as a theoretical physicist publishing work on black holes and quantum information. Then he transitioned into genetics, spent a while as scientific advisor to the Beijing Genomics Institute, and helped discover genetic prediction algorithms for gallstones, melanoma, heart attacks, and other conditions. Along with his academic work, he also sounded the alarm about the coronavirus early and has been helping shape the response.

This week, some students at Michigan State are trying to cancel him. They point an interview he did on an alt-right podcast (he says he didn\u2019t know it was alt-right), to his allowing MSU to conduct research on police shootings (which concluded, like most such research, that they are generally not racially motivated), and to his occasional discussion of the genetics of race (basically just repeating the same \u201cvariance between vs. within clusters\u201d distinction everyone else does, see eg\xa0here). You can read the case being made against him\xa0here, although keep in mind a lot of it is distorted and taken out of context, and you can read his response\xa0here.