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Comment by spookyuser | Hacker News Reader

So true, I thought the last paragraph of the article was particularly apt.

>When journalistic institutions widely publicize material of this sort, only to abdicate the vital work of rigorously addressing its substance, they make its least plausible claims more likely to be normalized. They leave the project of assessing its merits and flaws to Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, and other venues where the loudest voices tend to prevail, instead of offering their own careful reporting and expert analysis.

I buy this point so much because after reading about the controversy on the crazy 1000 comment thread here on HN and the other threads on reddit, there was no top level comment that made the same well reasoned claims this very article did, which IMO is so far the best I have read about the whole debacle. This is what journalists doing their job looks like.

View on HN

Yes, and exacerbating the problem is that the original memo, even with its citations included, was sloppy and not rigorous, and should have been like shooting fish in a barrel for all the media covering it.

But instead most of the media coverage seemed to be coming from a frame of, "don't validate fringe viewpoints by actually addressing their arguments", rather just ignore their arguments and use other tactics to undermine them. That strategy may have worked in the pre-Internet age, but in the Internet age it risks putting you on the wrong side of "first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.". In the Internet age the correct strategy for dealing with the fringe is directly addressing and discrediting their reasoning early, before they can create an echo chamber feedback loop.

But traditional media seems slow in general to realize that, in the Internet age, the fringe eventually defines the center unless stopped early. This episode appears to have been another manifestation of that.

It wasn't an academic paper, it was an internal memo posted to a discussion forum. Even then, it was well structured, moderating in its commentary, and peppered with links to support its arguments.

This sort of criticism seems like motivated reasoning to me, and only comes out when current progressive dogmas are being challenged. When HN applies a scalpel the way you describe to the opposite viewpoint, often supported only with anecdotes, out come the complaints how people's lived experiences are being ignored, how it's proof of a cultural problem, and so on. Not to mention the flagging. It's rigor for thee and not for me.

The media and Google are the echo chamber when it comes to this topic, that's been demonstrated plenty. If they were capable of intellectually reasoning about it, they wouldn't be lumping together reasonable criticism with that of the fringe in the first place.

>It wasn't an academic paper, it was an internal memo posted to a discussion forum. Even then, it was well structured, moderating in its commentary, and peppered with links to support its arguments.

I'm all for challenging the orthodoxy, any orthodoxy, and I sense the gender diversity one has been constructed on not perfectly rigorous foundations and deserves to be challenged. But when you challenge an orthodoxy, fairly or not you're held to a higher standard of rigor, simply as a matter of effectiveness - come up short and you're easily discredited and dismissed. It's like you have to have PhD or equivalent level knowledge of something before your critiques can't be dismissed out of hand. That's at least part of what happened here, the memo just wasn't at that level, and thus was easily dismissed. Maybe the author will now use his in/fame/my to write a more comprehensive and rigorous paper (or book deal) on the topic.

>This sort of criticism seems like motivated reasoning to me, and only comes out when current progressive dogmas are being challenged. When HN applies a scalpel the way you describe

Repeat after me: "HN is not one person or one voice". At least some of us here apply this standard to everything.

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