Honest question, the general physical differences between the sexes or even races are undeniable, so why is it so taboo to talk about the differences that almost certainly exist in our minds?
1. Look at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17949340 for a more detailed account of what happened. This specific story is not a case of taboo, it's a case of attempting to publish something that's not science in a science journal, being of course rejected, and reframing the rejection as a taboo.
2. It can be discussed, but this kind of discussion invariably attracts people who are not there to discuss, but only to impose their political/social views. Some because they feel that it's a good opportunity to attack women, some because they feel that the conversation is going to end up being an attack on women regardless. In either case, it's pretty much guaranteed to degenerate into anything but a meaningful conversation.
3. Also, it took us millennia to accept that maybe women are just human beings, after all, and some people still can't accept that, so maybe our society just isn't mature enough yet to have that conversation.
Maybe once humanity has finally mastered the fine art of polite, meaningful conversations on Twitter and Facebook, things will be better :)
edit Reworded a bit.
Basically you're telling us that "maybe" you should have the power to censor us. For some values of (you, us).
Maybe not. Definitely not.
(I also think that you're factually wrong in 1)
I really just have no words for how terrible this idea is and how angry it makes me. We could have had an industrial revolution thousands of years ago, massively increasing human welfare, but for a paranoid and secretive thinking that made it impossible to build a real scientific community, test ideas, and find the ones that worked.
These "scientific guild" ideas are the ones that condemned humanity to thousands of years of pointless alchemy while people died of cholera in filthy streets.
To want to return to this medieval mindset is inexcusable. It's ignorant. It's anti-humanism.
Look: any time you have to ask yourself "should we deliberately lie to the public about reality?", take a step back and consider whether you're actually the villain from the history books.
It's The Holy Inquisition, crowdsource edition.
I think a major part of the extremism that seems to be slowly gripping America is largely because a lack of any dialogue between sides that disagree. Instead people surround themselves with 'safe' voices and fall deeper and deeper into the bowels of their own view system, which also tends to correspond to a fall further and further from anything resembling reality.
Another example would be religion. Religion is quite dangerous and is now dying in the western world. But it's not dying because people stopped talking about it. Far from it -- to this very day we have god on all of our money, kids pledge allegiance to a nation under god, you swear oaths on a religious text under god, and so on. The reason it's dying is because people actively talk about it and advocates for religion are at a loss for a rational and compelling argument in favor of it.
1. We can still agree that men and women are humans and that we all deserve ways rights
2. The inevitable differences maybe show that men are less capable than women in a variety of fronts (wouldn't that be great for women's rights?).
3. Once a lie has been installed into every boy and girl, raising the truth will only become more and more difficult.
Making a decision to disseminate a lie constitutes gaslighting in the way that people will have hunches and experiences that society can suddenly deny. Speaking up will get you instant attention and result in a wreck for ones career. We are already seeing this today. I couldn't imagine posting this opinion except anonymously.
But that's generally not what's being argued. What's usually being argued is something more like "it is incontrovertibly and undeniably proven beyond all doubt that evolution has deeply and unalterably hard-wired female humans not to be as good as male humans at programming computers, and therefore it is an inescapable conclusion that we should stop caring whether men outnumber women among computer programmers, and we should immediately cease all efforts to teach/encourage more women to be computer programmers."
I'm not even exaggerating. This is why people want to make these kinds of "well, women and men are different, you know" arguments. The "well, women just aren't as good at this" or "well, women just aren't as interested in this" arguments have been tried in multiple fields, and have fallen over flat in the face of actual empirical evidence over and over and over. But people keep desperately trying to revive them and say "Ah, but this field is different! The females really are inferior and less interested in our field, and we have science truths to back it up!"
Also, here's a takedown from someone who just did basic math back during the initial burst of drama around Damore's "diversity memo". It's very hard, once you check the math, to accept that we have any basis for asserting that observed ratios of men and women in STEM have a biological basis:
https://twitter.com/search?f=tweets&q=from%3Awikisteff%20sin...
That's a link to a date-based search. Scroll until you see "if there were large biological gender differences in STEM, you'd see it", and then start reading up from there for the replies.
I have to link you to that, because the thread was in reply to, disagreeing with, and debunking a tweet that's now deleted, and that apparently breaks Twitter's threading. The deleted tweet being debunked, for what it's worth, is from a user whose Twitter bio says she is "founder and editor" of Quillette, the site hosting the claims of the author of the "uncomfortable truth" paper this HN thread is about.
Also, the measurable physical differences in the brain structure of women and men are there but totally insignificant with regards to intelligence.
Side note, there is no way measuring intelligence based on a MRT-scan of ones brain.
Also, history might help, humanity had some bad experience with People judging stuff like intelligence based on visible physical differences. I suggest to leave These questions to actual neuro-scientists and not People who tried to apply mathematics to a question they didn't really understand in the first place.
Also, if you take boxing athletes are put into different weight classes. Making it rather futile to tell if Floyd Mayweather or Anthony Jushua is the better boxer, right?
Also, out of experience, These differences are much less pronounced if do not only look at Olympia-Level individuals. But I digress.
'There is not a gender skill gap when it comes to using technology' is a very different argument to 'certainly is that the physical differences betwen individuals regardless of sex are bigger than those between sexes'
Also, I stand by by the argument that the difference betwen individuals is bigger than between sexes. Taking the extreme edge cases will of course show a certain tendency, right? But I did not considere Sports or stuff like that when I first posted.
So, instead of declaring my Argument having crumbled, why didn't you just ask which diferences I referred to?
And by the way, always bringing up the same Arguments (Sports for pure physics and chess for "IQ") whithout further Analysis of how the coresponding data is measured and what could have caused the differenmces doesn't help any discussion.
https://neurosciencenews.com/brain-scan-intelligence-9477/
It's not especially accurate but it does work.
But I wasn't aaware of that development, so thanks for pointing it out!
Another thing is the sciences which deal with these matters are highly politicized. It's always been hard to establish facts on empirical results alone because they are not purely sciences, they keep a lot of "art" in them.
If you take some group of 1000 people which has been selected in some way that skews towards intelligence, you might find that the men have IQ 105.14 on average and the women 105.13. Like, wow. You can find groups with bigger differences if you're willing to pick an obscure group, but then you have a bigger but more obscure difference.
If you talk about that you risk attracting the companionship of people who need to get a life, or sounding like one of those people.
It claims that while averages for men and women are the same, you get more men at the high IQ end of the spectrum and also more men at the lower end of the IQ spectrum (which balance out the average).
The whole argument is predicated on what happens at the edges of the normal distribution, not what happens at the center.
We don't imprison random people from the population, we imprison the most aggressive (in case of violent crime at least).
We hire people with top IQ for engineering and science related endevours.
We promote people who work the hardest ("industriousness")
The most ambitious people get the top jobs.
It doesn't matter if on average two groups are the same for those qualifiers, if only the top 1% are selected, then you would expect which ever group has the flattest bell-curve distribution (and thus more "on the edge") to be over-represented (whether it is gender, "race", age). If it isn't, then racism/sexism/whateverism is at work.
Caveat: with top IQ in engineering, an important factor that only people who "like things more than people" apply, other way around for loads of other fields.
/apologies to Garrison Keillor
edit:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Wobegon#The_Lake_Wobegon_...
(and yes Keillor's "Lake Wobegon" stories [ibid.] are hilarious)
Therefore, if on some metric, you have two groups who are average but one with greater deviation, and then you select among the top 5% of the combined group, you will select more of the group with greater deviation even though the groups are average. You can test this with simulations if you want.
This isn't much of a problem until you apply it to everyday demographics, at which point it can result in uncomfortable conclusions.
Why would you look at the average?
Lots of jobs have an IQ floor.
The FIDE gap is not one that can be hand waved away as under-representation or discrimination or anything else. There are clearly differences between genders and races, and sometimes they are clearly significant. Whatever your views may be regarding how society should treat those differences, don't insult your own intelligence by claiming they don't exist.
If we took 1000 random 5 year olds and subjected them to 3 years of Magnus Carlsen style coaching I'm confident there would be no "FIDE gap."
Just how are These differences affecting the way a given Person can function in today's highly technical world? Except purely physical sports, at the very high end Level of athletes, that is? And even there athletes are not just devided by sex but also weight in case of martial arts.
Even in traditionally "male" Domains like warfare a smaller size can be an Advantage. Take pilots of certain combat helicopters, if you are to big you can't fly them because you simply don't fit in the cockpit.
After almost 20 years of living with a woman 30cm smaller than myself, I can't make a long list of such effects. I easily reach some high shelves that my wife can't, I can see over most parked cars before crossing the street so I have a better view of the traffic, and she can snuggle under the bed cover but I cannot. That's about it. We're an easily noticeable couple and that thing about crossing the street was a big surprise, but if you ask about significant differences I have to say, no, not really.
I'm sure the answer is different in some special contexts, perhaps garment production. But you asked me.
When the man walks into a room and finds there is someone of his height, or someone even taller present, the man begins to feel a sense of insecurity about this challenger. Suddenly he isn't the tallest guy in the room. It feels like a threat, it feels like competition.
I know this is a general feeling for certain. These men don't walk around thinking they are better than everyone else because they are taller but when they finally encounter someone of their height they are really sensitive to their presence.
I can't imagine women feel the same way. I've actually heard that women have insecurity about being too tall. If ones security about they masculinity and femininity can be shaken by their height, but in totally different ways, there might be something real about it. I do know that a lot of guys are excluded from the saying pool because of their height, and I know a lot of women value height in attraction.
The correlation of testosterone, power, and height in men are all in alignment. It's part of a male concept.
The infamous David Reimer case is a great example of how boys and girls are just different. David adopted all of the male stereotypes even though he was being raised as a girl with hormone therapy, psychological reinforcements (to try to teach and convince him he was a girl) from toddler through primary School. He still wouldn't conform and his brother knew something was wrong. When they found out it was an experiment the brother killed himself and David began to identify as a man again, he even went on to marry a woman. He killed himself in his 40s I believe.
The idea of a convenient truth and inconvenient truth need to be considered. I see it so much today that people are willing to twist facts and blow up supporting minutia to convince themselves that men and women have equal capabilities and have equal values as human beings (atleast evolutionarily).
All these studies suffer from a bias that we can't get rid of unless we assume it's not true for a few generations, namely is the effect due to nature vs nurture.
Whether it's race or sex, if society favour one race or sex over the others, how can we ever know if it's due to something in the genes, or due to the general favours, special treatment or encouragement that particular sections of society receive that caused the imbalance?
If you are told while young that you should be a house proud parent rather than a DIY parent, a Princess instead of a Knight, a Hostess rather than a Pilot[1], of course these "undeniable" differences are going to emerge.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/aug/22/sexist-tui-air...
In this very particular context, if I had to choose between publishing a theorical scientific paper on marginal physical effects and undermining efforts for a better society having effects on real people, I may hesitate.
That is an extremely unscientific statement, let alone logically false. It's impossible to attach a moral value to any scientific finding anywhere, especially a priori. There are always both good and bad consequences, impossible to predict. And if you are coming to science with a predefined set of results you find acceptable, you 're not a scientist, period.
Quite the contrary, I don't see how it's scientific to draw conclusions from these specific results to the general state of society, something that unfortunately will happen.
To start with, frankly, as a society it's high time we told our journalists to stop mucking around in our research journals. Today I will wake up and see how scientists discovered that coffee is terrible for my health, and then tomorrow I will hear that scientists are concerned I'm not drinking enough coffee. The problem isn't the scientists. The problem is journalists who don't know when to publish a scientific article (i.e. when there's a major breakthrough, and then only tentatively; or after a new theory or discovery is thoroughly understood). Routine papers, no matter how thrilling, should not be commented on in the media. That has nothing to do with what we do as scientists: we should continue to try to publish our incremental achievements. It has to do with our responsibilities as citizens. It's high time we all (not just scientists) made it clear this behavior from journalists is embarrassing as well as meddlesome.
Secondly, when we act as though certain ideas are "dangerous," we embolden our political opponents and we also teach our students/children that those ideas are very likely to be true. Nuance says that women can have on average lower IQs than men and we can still treat them like our metaphysical and political equals. When we act as though that's impossible, we show our opponents how weak our leadership really is. We also suggest to our students that perhaps the truth is other than what we, the scientists and academicians, are saying. Dangerous to whom?, they might rightly ask. Those for whom the status quo is most beneficial? Is that more likely to be the professor or the student?
In short, I don't think it's naive to discuss academically the variability hypothesis or other politically contentious topics without regard for the negative societal impacts. Those impacts are not our bailiwick. The real question is: does our side ("the left," say, or your favorite political party) have the strong institutions and grassroots network to resist when others want to pervert our discussions or research? One thing will not end: the other side will continue to try to push its agenda, and sometimes, as I already alluded to, this will constitute atrocities, big or small. Therefore, we need a strong community and real leadership to counteract this. That is not the purview of our scientific life.
It is part of our civic life, one which I find lately is being neglected more and more (and not just by scientists). In the US, the Republican Party is apparently quite good at rallying its people and getting them out to vote. It also has few scruples where spreading misinformation or hateful rhetoric is concerned. What compounds this and makes it worse is the Democratic Party acts as though various fashionable ideas in or around social science ("white privilege," "unconscious bias," "microaggressions") and certain social questions (acceptability of homosexuality, deference owed to questions of race) were God given and don't require campaigning or explanation. On the contrary, as someone in math, I have never been schooled in what can be done to cure unconscious bias, for instance, or whether or not psychologists have any evidence to suggest talking about unconscious bias will do anything other than p*ss off a lot of otherwise sympathetic people. If Democrats or social scientists or whomever care so much about some of these issues, the politically practical and, indeed, moral thing to do is to really spend the time bringing people over to their side. As far as I'm concerned, this is not being done, but instead the work has been replaced by a combination of social media outrage and "public shaming" and belittling idealogical opponents by making references to obscure studies the vast majority of us have not been educated well enough to understand. (With regard to referencing an obscure paper or five, see my discussion of journalists getting out of our research journals. I am beginning to feel the same should apply to good faith conversations between non-experts.)
Please, understand me. There is doing science and then there is doing politics. No question, if you are doing difficult science on biology or sociology, that only adds to the weight of your political duties. However, that is not an excuse to abandon the science (or relegate some of it to the dangerous pile) altogether.
This was a case some decades ago. Read the introduction to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_(human_categorization) - even the use of the word "race" is problematic today.
> if you showed me a mixed room of hundreds of
> native Danes and Sentinelese - I could classify them
When people say "race" is a social construct, they don't - well, unless they're morons - mean that people aren't more different, the more distantly-related they are. It's the categories that are the social construction. Because anyone who really thinks about it carefully enough, can see those categories are arbitrary.
If history had been a bit different, and we hadn't come to lump brown- and blue-eyed people into the same "race," you might have written this...
> if you showed me a mixed room of hundreds of
> native Brundanes and Bladanes - I could classify themIt shows, at least in this contrived example, that the information is present in the individuals and not in the brain of the classifier.
I don't understand your last point. Is it wrong to say that I could extremely accurately classify blue and brown eyed people?
> not in the brain of the classifier.
> to say that I could extremely accurately
> classify blue and brown eyed people?
The point isn't that everyone's eye color is the same. It's that the classification is arbitrary.
I'm saying a belief in distinct "races" of people is bogus.
Is your stance in life that, if some information has been used in the past for bad purposes, we must pretend like it doesn't exist so those bad things don't happen again?
First introduced in the 1780s by members of the Göttingen School of History,[4] the term denoted one of three purported major races of humankind (Caucasoid, Mongoloid, Negroid).[5] In biological anthropology, Caucasoid has been used as an umbrella term for phenotypically similar groups from these different regions, with a focus on skeletal anatomy, and especially cranial morphology, over skin tone.[6] Ancient and modern "Caucasoid" populations were thus held to have ranged in complexion from white to dark brown.[7]
I live in the UK, in the EU. Here, it's illegal to ask candidates questions about their race, religion, age, marital status, family planning etc. As it is illlegal to advertise jobs to "white male 30 yrs old" etc.
Of course, people still do stuff like that- e.g. I've been asked about my age a couple of times and apparently it's common to be asked about whether you're planning to have children soon, by interviewers, though this has never happened to me (so it might depend on the industry).
The point is that there is a lot of people who do care about race, not just US cops.
https://race.bitc.org.uk/sites/default/files/kcfinder/files/...
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2018/04/race-gen...