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Comment by jnovek | Hacker News Reader

Why all the wasteful discussion about gender politics? Read the last sentence of the abstract —

“Overall, these results show how sex differences can manifest unexpectedly, highlighting the importance of sex as a factor in the design and analysis of perceptual and cognitive studies.”

...which implies that some studies in the past may be in error because they didn’t take into account otherwise innocuous differences in behavior between the sexes.

This is cool and interesting, right? Good, then take the gender politics chat back to reddit where it belongs.

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> Why all the wasteful discussion about gender politics?

As pointed out downthread, the way we get out of such wasteful (meta-)discussions is by not starting them.

This is cool and interesting, right? Good, then take the gender politics chat back to reddit where it belongs.

A part of the point of such discussion is precisely that such ideas and questions are cool and interesting, and that anxiety and ideological extremism is unnecessary, counterproductive, and an overreaction.

Let's all just be moderate and nuanced in our views of complex and nuanced fields of study, like biology.

I’m pretty much just trying to say, “Let’s talk about the science.”

Of course here I am, with the top post at the moment being a non-accretive meta-discussion about gender politics. I guess I’ll go upvote all the people who are talking about cool science stuff. :-)

You may not have meant it as such but -- Good, then take the gender politics chat back to reddit where it belongs -- may have been taken as a call to sequester undesirables and thereby censor unwanted opinions.

I’m pretty much just trying to say, “Let’s talk about the science.”

Generally speaking, if you would like there to be discussion of the science, it works vastly better to lead by example and think of something meaty and meaningful to say about that instead.

"Why all the wasteful discussion about gender politics? Read the last sentence of the abstract"

Other comenters seem to be making wild statements about gender differences, extrapolating from a small result, and using this to support their other unsubstaiated biases.

It's interesting. Take all new results with a grain of salt. Replication needs to happen before trusting this result, let alone understanding what it means.

That quote doesn't seem to be particularly political. It's just saying including sex is important. Even the implication you read into it is not particularly political.

Sorry if I wasn’t clear — “gender politics” is the discussion of the societal role of gender, it doesn’t imply politics in the sense of government and leadership.

What I’m getting at is that there’s a perfectly interesting article which my have revealed a tiny croute about study inaccuracies — a pretty big discussion for the last few years — and for some reason almost all the comments so far are about the comparatively uninteresting realm of gender politics.

>Good, then take the gender politics chat back to reddit where it belongs.

How about taking your superiority complex elsewhere? I'm willing to bet that 90% of the HN audience uses reddit in some capacity.

Would it shock you to learn that there are other communities on the internet that have great discussion? Some even make fun of HackerNews for the misperception that the discourse here is superior.

Reddit has https://www.reddit.com/r/genderpolitics , HN doesn't. Ergo Reddit seems to be a better place for gender politics chat.

It is a social truism that people tend to want to talk to their current social circle, regardless of topic. Telling people to take it Reddit because it has a subforum for the topic amounts to saying "The reputation and relationships you've spent years building in this community are irrelevant. Go start over with learning the culture etiquette and people over there." It ignores the reality that jumping into a new forum to spout off on a highly controversial topic typically goes south in short order. It isn't generally well received and doesn't generally result in meaty meaningful discussion.

There is no reason at all such discussions cannot be had here.

This line of thinking leads for example to studies on differences in risk-taking behavior between genders, which then leads to people saying "of course most companies are run by man, because men being more risk-taking start more companies". This kind of sexist thinking has no place in academia.

The solution is to fix bad conclusions (preferably by showing them to be bad, with data), not to restrict inquiry to subjects that could be interpreted in ideologically unfavorable ways.

In that example we should take issue with the conclusion that it justifies the prevalence of male founders rather than taking issue with the study in the first place.

It leads to that only if your agenda is to go there. If your agenda is to figure out how to make life better for people generally, it can lead to discussions of "Given that women tend to have this trait or circumstance that hinders their performance in our current cultural paradigms, what might work better to help them accomplish X, Y or Z should they so desire it?"

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