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Comment by aaron-lebo | Hacker News Reader

It was widely condemned.

The document has been inaccurately labeled (I've seen a Slate op-ed making statements that are blatantly false) , but the people who are acting like it is some kind of academic work have apparently never done academic work.

The guy took a few academic sources and mixed in stuff from the New York Post. It's not well sourced. What people do see is an academic study linked and say "see, this is scientific", but most people aren't trained to read that literature so it's just psuedo-scientific garble.

Why is the tech world turning itself upside down for a mediocre undergrad paper?

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> it's just psuedo-scientific garble

As Julian Assange pointed out, it's been reviewed by a professor of social psychology, a PhD in personality psychology, a professor in evolutionary psychology, and a PhD in sexual neuroscience and in large part it checks out.

http://quillette.com/2017/08/07/google-memo-four-scientists-...

> Why is the tech world turning itself upside down for a mediocre undergrad paper?

Precisely because it accurately reflects the world, but we're seeing a strong backlash to it from a certain segment of the population.

> a professor of social psychology, a PhD in personality psychology, a professor in evolutionary psychology, and a PhD in sexual neuroscience

Only one of these is qualified to comment on biological claims.

But all of them are qualified to comment on the differences between the two genders.

Debatable. I would exclude the EvoPsych chap from being qualified to comment on anything, personally, and the other two would need to show quite strongly that they weren't coming at this from a position of anti-SJW/snowflake commentary that they've previously demonstrated.

But all four are (in my opinion, whatever that may be worth) qualified to comment on psychological claims, which is more what the paper was about.

This doesn't change the fact that psychology is a very fuzzy science with lots of room for ambiguity and subjectivity. The human brain is among the most complex computing devices known to humans, and it's one which humans had no real part in designing; psychology basically amounts to reverse-engineering a convoluted and obfuscated closed-source program running on an entirely-undocumented computing platform. Oh, and the software - and even hardware - in question is constantly rewriting itself as part of the way it processes inputs.

Our understanding of psychology is changing constantly as a result; information from even as little as a decade ago is fraught with inaccuracies revealed since, and information from today will almost certainly be invalidated - whether in part or entirely - within the next decade.

Put simply: just because these authorities have validated the paper in question does not make that validation - or the paper - actually correct.

Well obviously Assange is an expert on the matter.

No one is claiming that Assange is an expert on the matter.

Thanks for the link, the analysis by Geoffrey Miller is quite remarkable.

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