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Comment by malvosenior | Hacker News Reader

> It’s true that well-intentioned people do ask uncomfortable questions, but especially online they’re dwarfed by trolls and people arguing in bad faith.

Why is it trolling or arguing "in bad faith" to think that there are inherent differences in gender? The vast majority of people alive today believe this. People who attempt to back up their intuitive knowledge with science seem to be the opposite of trolls. It gets tiresome to have entire swaths of mainstream opinion labeled as "bad faith" (which ironically is bad faith).

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You’ve quoted a single sentence out of two paragraphs, and then extrapolated from that fragment something I didn’t actually say. Even putting it in as neutral and fair terms as I could, I should have guessed that anything on this topic would strongly resemble a Rorschach test to some. Please understand that since the thrust of my point was the futility of discussing this online, I’m leaving my response at this.

> People who attempt to back up their intuitive knowledge with science seem to be the opposite of trolls.

Consider the difference between seeing if your intuitions reflect science, and trying to justify your intuitions with science.

If you go looking for information that matches parts of your internal biases, can you reasonably say you would change your mind if you found information that conflicted your view? What if ten articles out of twenty reflected your view? What if one article out of twenty reflected your view? I think you should reread the portion of their comment about using science as a cudgel to see why it can be bad to consider intuition the guiding principle of research.

I think part of healthy debate (and its true value) is that the person with opposing views would also present science and data to back up their argument. Instead what we get is an instant fall back to "trolls, arguing in bad faith...". If you have data or research that backs up your position, you definitely should post it and compare it to any other data that comes from the opposing view.

And yes, I would change my mind if I was presented with credible evidence.

Because people who do so often ignore that variance is non-zero. Such as your comment, which makes no mention of it and focuses on mean differences. There's a lot more to the distribution of random variables.

Yes! People are each individuals. Just because the standard distribution of one group is slightly shifted one way or the other from the standard distribution of another group, doesn't allow you to say anything useful about the differences of individuals. Yes, there is a difference on average, but the overlap is way bigger than the difference.

Actually, I found evidence on my own that the overlap is bigger than the difference.

Want to know the absolutely delicious irony, here? I saw it in James Damore's memo.

> Yes, there is a difference on average, but the overlap is way bigger than the difference

Unless you have evidence to back this up, it sounds an awful lot like a "mere belief"

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