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Comment by Phary | Hacker News Reader

A thought experiment. I am an academic. I post the material below on the internet using my real name.

"there are more male geniuses in society than women because men are subject to more variability in terms of IQ. In other words, while men had more people at the tail ends of the IQ bell curve, women were more likely to have average IQ scores."

What will happen to my career ?

Larry Summers did that. Within 13 months, he was forced to resign from his job....

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a more interesting thought experiment is what would happen if you described the same phenomenon, framed in a way which superficial and reactive people would agree with rather than disagree with:

"there are more male dunces in society . . . in other words, women were less likely to be dunces."

my guess is that it wouldn't be very destructive to your career at all -- but maybe i'm wrong on that point. of course, if i'm right, this effect would be entirely a result of incomplete or incorrect interpretation of the principles by the readers.

I would suggest a look at Excellence Without a Soul by Harry Lewis (sometime dean of Harvard College) before you conclude that it was only those comments that lost Summers his job.

Actually, I think that makes it even worse. That is, Summers was unpopular with particular groups for a bunch of different reasons, so he was eventually fired for the pretense of having the audacity to say that the possibility that innate gender differences could account for an imbalance in the sciences should be studied.

Regardless of what you think of Summers, read the exact transcript of what he actually said at that conference. The fact that he was fired for what he said should be incredibly shameful for Harvard.

What does this have to do with being an academic? Does this change if you're a notable employee of a company? I don't think so. If you are in a situation where your personal reputation effects the reputation of your employer then you need to take that into consideration when you speak publicly.

It's specifically about being an academic because this is the comment thread discussing: https://www.bbc.com/news/education-46146766

So far, J. Peterson (who's famously reported similarly) has retained his academic position.

Even the wording of your comment proves the parent's point.

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