Comment by tajen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tajen | Hacker News Reader

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> is misinformation some sort of virus that slowly spreads

We're paying the lack of accuracy in "scientific truth". Journalists and political groups (on the Liberal side, especially) aren't innocent here.

I see that a lot with feminism.

For example: Scientific studies such as "Women in average are able to execute a parallel task in 169s, while men are able to execute in 177s" transforms into "Women 'better at multitasking' than men, study finds"[1]. Wait, what? 169s vs 177s!? Which serves the political group of feminists (hence, my stance about Liberals).

It is also widely accepted that women are paid less than men. When we dive into studies, we don't find a 30% difference; We find a heavy distortion and fact extraction, so that the worst possible interpretation of the scientific study becomes the headline of the article, and that helps liberal political groups to make us believe that women have a worse situation than men. Which, of course, conveniently forgets to mention that far more men are killed, homeless (2x in France), beaten up, harassed or commit suicide (3x in France) than women, and more are workaholics, which justifies a part of the pay difference.

I've talked about feminism but the same un-demonstration can be made about other groups targeted by the new wave of politics (=Trump).

Any normal person would be legitimate to disbelieve journalists, political groups and scientists who forget to mention some interesting fact that completely overturns the picture: 169s vs 177s means that a large part of men performs better than a large part of women on this test.

Maybe a lesson is, Liberals may have gone so far in misreporting science that they've discredited science altogether?

[1] "Women 'better at multitasking' than men, study finds" – http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-24645100

This is the sort of generic flamewar tangent that I pray every day will not happen on HN today. Whimsical, specific tangents are fine, but opening a portal to a black hole is not ok. Please don't do this again.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13007570 and marked it off-topic.

It didn't take long for someone to be a living example of what op is talking about.

Exactly. This constant badgering about "liberals" and "cucks" and other crap is a sterling example of being detached from reality.

This isn't about teams, this isn't about cheering for your "side" to win. Things like climate change shouldn't be a contest to see which worldview shouts the loudest.

Maybe it's attention deficit, drowning in information, that causes people to subconsciously demand over-simplified explanations.

Maybe fix the BBC article instead of complaining about the messenger?

See? You keep at it. At what point I said the BBC article is to blame? That was you.

You are making strong claims without supporting evidence or data.

You mention things like "when you dive into the studies" yet you don't show us and we have to believe you.

What makes you different?

Also I might be slightly biased against someone who starts claiming everyone else is pushing an agenda against him. It is an irrational bias, I admit, because of how I despise the far right / white supremacism. Again, this is irrational from my side as you might not be even close to that group, but you sounded very close to it: the chosen example, the insistence on a world wide agenda against your kind, the lack of supporting proof / evidence and your follow up that didn't make a lot of sense to me (might be my poor grasp of English language).

Either way, I hope you're not offended and that you can see where I'm coming from and how your comment was perfect to illustrate op's claim.

The proof of misinformation is the BBC article itself: It starts with an inconclusive study and ends with a definitive title.

I could provide you with the hundreds of papers I've once stumbled upon[1], but it would be useless in convincing you because you don't acknowledge that articles like the BBC one discredits science.

[1] Actually they're all printed under my desk. They undemonstrate every argument of the feminists. And no-one wants to review them because they (like you) don't agree with the conclusion. That's science in reverse: "Women are oppressed, everyone knows it, so arguments against women can't be reasonably true". If you accept to start with "Are women oppressed?", comme to my place and we'll review my documents together. In the meantime the BBC article is a fine example of what is wrong with science.

It seems we're very far from each other and you have clearly made your mind up already.

That BBC article is fairly correct on what you claim false. A group solving problems in 169ms is better than another one doing it in 177ms. On average. But you seem to want to dismiss some things to support your agenda.

I don't know mate. I'm a male and I see almost daily situations where women can't feel comfortable. You might not want to consider them oppressed, but holy smokes they have to go through leaps of shit.

Again, I'm not trying to convince you. It's just my anecdotal experience, which seems supported by studies. Of course you might have the opposite experience and can dig up supporting studies.

I understand that you have no opinion about this particular topic, and I like that you are trying to understand how a supposedly educated person can reach the conclusion I reach. By the way, thank you.

> A group solving problems in 169s is clearly better than a group solving problems in 177s.

Sure, but the BBC article is titled "Women 'better at multitasking' than men", which is a deformation. I would have no problem if the BBC article were "Women were 4.6% than men on a given multitasking test", because it would communicate how small the difference is.

If I remember I discovered the article because of a BuzzFeed share titled something like "Yet another scientific study found that women are more clever than men, but they are still grossly underpaid", which is no less a stretch than the BBC article. Every word is factually correct, but they far from describe reality. Studies don't find that women are paid .77 per $1, if you take the time to read more than the title: That's an average all jobs confounded. When a study neutralizes by field, education, experience both in career and in the job, and time spent at work, they are fair to my eyes, but I havent found any yet. Averaging female factory workers with startup founders doesn't mean anything, but that becomes the headline of the newspapers and becomes an unquestionned truth, unfortunately.

The fact that you "can imagine how women can be harassed at work" is the result of hundreds of newspapers making the same mistake in article titles: Have we equally researched and communicated whether men are subject to male-specific difficulties? What if we found a relationship between x3 suicide rate, x2 homelessness rate and x17 prison rate and being a male? Would you start doing something if there was a link? What if we gave funding for those studies a much as we give funding for woman-specific studies?

If we could apply pure scientific rigor to analyzing males as much as women, I would bet my whole life's savings and 60% of all my future salaries that we'd find men are subject to more violence, physical and emotional, and more unfairness than women. If any day you start opening this can of worm, you'll notice that people don't accept your results, saying "because you have a grudge against women".

If everyone could react to the title of such BBC articles by protesting for misrepresentating the study, then the science itself would get more credit.

Hey, thank you for sharing your opinion.

You seem to be abusing of whataboutism and straw manning in your comment. It's difficult to discuss when the goal posts are moved :)

In any case, I especially wanted to follow up on two things: your assumption that I think women are harassed at work based on articles is wrong on so many levels. I do have family, friends, colleagues and I see them suffering struggles that I or other male friends or colleagues don't have to go through. I see this with my own eyes.

The second is that you say males suffer more violence than women do. Yes, that's true. Who are however the ones causing such violence? But that doesn't change things. Men have been abusing their superior physical power to abuse women during history and even today in almost every part of the world.

None of that undermines you as a person for being a white male. I am fully aware of the rampant numbers on male depression and suicide rates. I am also aware that males feel often less inclined to look for help when in trouble, including extreme situations like being raped.

It is however the very same ideology that ostracise women the ones that will put pressure on you to "man up" and call you a pussy, a loser and a failure if you can't get a promotion, a submissive girlfriend or sustain a big stereotypical family with your salary.

The very same people that cause your biggest worries are the same people that tell you the rest are to blame for those. Please take a moment to think about why there's so much psychological pressure on men to be career successful... It's the same root cause that ostracises women.

We're in this together, please don't give hate a chance.

PS: I'm not surprised an educated person can share your opinion. It has nothing to do with studies and knowledge. I don't live in a ivory tower :-)

In my case, the worst psychological trauma (because we have to call it what it is) were given by women. Specifically, one at high school and one who was my girlfriend. Society hasn't punished those women, and when I seeked for help, society (my mother, colleagues, friends, psychologists) didn't believe the trauma was that big, they just encouraged me to get over it.

So yes, I agree the bro attitude is what caused society to tell me that. I agree we need to ditch it. But as it stands, society ditches the bro attitude only when a woman is the victim. A man who doesn't want the car that goes with the job isn't a real man, while it's ok for women. Society specifically helps women because they're shy and too unconfident to be promoted as managers, but not men with the same traits.

That's why we need to fix prejudices like "All women are victims", "Women are paid .77 per dollar" or "Women are more clever than men". We need to remove the gender from those sentences. "Weak people are psychologically harmed at home", "Unconfident people aren't promoted despite better skills", "Shy people are paid less than their peers", etc. It's ok if those happen to be 95% women: Let's help people based on their weakness, not based on their gender.

About hate: Well the damage is done, so what you want from me is that I pardon women. It's not time to do it, when most party still propose even more advantages for women without acknowledging male-specific difficulties. As soon as equality for men is a right, I'll forgive what I've been through.

It's fine to post about your personal experiences when they're relevant to a good conversation, but not as part of off-topic ideological rants. The latter are not ok here; please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13011538.

Hey, as we're way off-topic, feel free to hit me up on my profile's email address if you'd like to talk.

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