Your position is not only ridiculous virtue signaling but you are also creating a scary world where the messenger is more important than the message.
As an experimental LHC physicist myself, his use of statistics is either naive (understandable, he’s a theorist) or negligent. He used his mathematical background to appear knowledgeable despite there being huge flaws in his “evidence”.
I laughed at this for a solid minute. Statistics is something that theoretical particle physicists frequently and flagrantly ignore, to the point where experimentalists have to be super careful in how we present our results.
If you'd review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and take the spirit of this site more to heart, we'd be grateful. Here are some other links that might help with that:
https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/hackernews.html
"It's comments like yours..." followed by "ridiculous virtue signaling." And he's the one "fueling" shit?
When you throw accusations like that — demonstrably ignorant of what the term even means — you straight up forfeit any claim to being the aggrieved party.
This kind of accusation of "virtue signaling" implies that the thing being done to "signal" some "virtue" is done purely to send that signal. That makes it a morally empty act, because its only motivation is to advertise one's moral stance (which stance, by implication, is not acted upon in any way but that advertising); you are clearly and specifically saying that the behavior is otherwise void — that its only value is the perception of having the "virtue" in question it's intended to engender.
I'm sure that pattern of behavior exists, and might even be common. The readiness with which it's bandied about, however, is, in my nontrivial experience engaging online, more or less invariably intended to make the person holding the stance in question and their arguement appear weaker, by attributing to them a compromised motivation. It does not open discussion up; it shuts it down.
I genuinely wonder if you happened to read the article shared here, yesterday, "Our Culture of Contempt", or the discussion that ensued, because this is as stark an example of "motive attribution asymmetry" as any I've encountered in recent memory on HN.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19339240
> The guy is a physicist, he is way more qualified than any sociologist to deal with statistics.
This is laughably wrong, in so many ways.
EDIT: Phrasing.
He expressed many opinions but reading the article none of the controversy was about facts. He just claimed that his opinions about women being worse at physics research were facts and wrongly used the male variability hypothesis to try and justify that.
Please don't fall for his claim that he was just presenting facts.