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Comment by Thriptic | Hacker News Reader

Typically intent and ramifications. I don't think it's a problem to point out that there are measured differences in the sexes; truth is truth if they've got high quality data to back up assertions.

The danger is twofold. First, people forget that these are population level trends and that it is bad reasoning to automatically assume every individual in a given group conforms with these trends. Second, a lot of people believe dumb and backward ideas about other groups, and they'll twist and cherry pick the data to try to back up their biases without the nuance of presentation shown here. In fact, most of the articles broaching this topic are doing so from a position of malice rather than truth seeking; trying to justify some sort of discrimination or poor treatment of another group.

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>The danger is twofold. First, people forget that these are population level trends and that it is bad reasoning to automatically assume every individual in a given group conforms with these trends.

Yet it is equally bad reasoning to ignore the prior as it is to refrain from updating it. One form of foolishness will find you unpersoned, the other such mental handicap allows one to signal great virtue. As it takes great moral restraint to distrust your lying eyes.

We are in interesting ideological waters. The great taboo of our age is quantifying human capability, precisely when our tools have never been sharper.

Cognitive genomics is joining this strange fray. Extremely politically incorrect truths are beginning to stumble reluctantly out of the field. The confirmation of a dysgenic trend in Iceland is one of the milder examples:http://www.pnas.org/content/114/5/E727. Much more controversial truths are yet to come.

One wonders how much truth our mental Lysenkoism will survive. It has resisted all reason so far, so one must bet it will continue.

If you measure a minuscule rate across a generational timescale and then seek to promote it as "substantial on an evolutionary timescale" then you're no longer doing science. It's another version of the typical science journalism and market hucksterism of the "if these trends continue" argument. Will this trend continue on an evolutionary time scale? Our biological history suggests that it will not, and nothing but our ill-examined fears suggests that it will.

What this paper does successfully do is find faint evidence that gives comfort to the old trope of "poor/stupid/brown/religious people have more babies than rich/smart/white/enlightened people, therefore the world is doomed because they shall inherent the earth."

However, the problem with this is not the correct observation that people who produce more offspring increase their genetic contribution to future generations, the problem is the inability to imagine a 'we' that includes the 'poor/stupid/brown/religious' people that the speaker is 99.9999% identical to and the projection of an imagined social & cultural defeat of the individual (who is going to experience a very thorough personal defeat at the hands of senescence, in short order, no matter what) by people who 'look different' onto the reality of what is actually going on to the human genome over the far vaster timescales of actual genetic change.

On the other hand, it's pretty prejudiced to assume that say, male software engineers are on average more sexist than other professions, just because there are fewer women in software engineering.

People (especially on the left) seem to make that assumption more often than assuming that say, female teachers are more sexist, even though the gender skew in teaching is just as bad.

I don't see how this contradicts what I said? My statement would agree with you.

Interesting phraseology there. Truth is truth ... unless it supports "dumb and backwards ideas", in which case it's being twisted and/or cherry picked?

(I'm not picking on your viewpoint in particular; all sides do exactly the same thing.)

Not at all. At the end of the day the truth is the truth regardless of whether we like it or not. An idea isn't dumb or backward if it has proper validation.

The problem is that most people bringing this up are not doing so in an intellectually rigorous way. They are coming to the table with a pre-existing conclusion and then trying to fit data to support that conclusion. Both sides do this in fact, and approach / intent matters because doing this creates bias even if people try to stay neutral. That is a poor way to try to discover or talk about the truth. That's what I mean to say.

That's not at all what he said. What he said was "truth is truth if they've got high quality data to back up assertions," and "a lot of people believe dumb and backward ideas about other groups, and they'll twist and cherry pick the data to try to back up their biases without the nuance of presentation shown here." The difference is clear enough that your response appears a bit twisted and cherry-picked.

I have no idea why anyone could think that such a vastly sweeping generalization such as "all sides do exactly the same thing" might be anything other than false, but what is contrasted here is exactly two instances, two sides, in which people are not doing exactly the same thing. There is, on the one hand, the careful presentation of nuanced data in good faith — without a witting ulterior motive — and on the other hand, the selection of data on the basis of its ability to appear supportive of an a priori conclusion, something that can be done unwittingly, but which is just as often done wittingly.

Well, he followed that up with "twist and cherry pick the data". Certainly, truth is truth and "dumb and backwards" is misused to dismiss truths that go against a given sensibility regardless of whether the sensibility itself is actually rooted in truth. But the concern here has to do with cases of unjustified presumptions about particular people based on group membership.

What I found problematic is the phrase "automatically assume every individual in a given group conforms with these trends." In the context of this study, clearly, we all know that not everyone does conform. That's why people will describe men who exhibit typically feminine behavior as effeminate and women who exhibit typically masculine behavior as butch.

The question is what is the relation between statistical typicality and normativity? I would say that statistics carried out responsibly and in a broader context involving causal explanation can greatly aid in distinguishing properties from mere accidents, that is, traits proper to and (formally) causally entailed by a given sex versus traits are not intrinsically related to sex. So in the first case, we may speak of defective males and females. For instance, a male born without a penis or a female born without a uterus are defective in relation to the norm that follows from the sex. This is different than the case of a man or woman without the capacity for speech, where speech is proper to humans by virtue of being human, not something particular to a sex. These stand in opposition to traits that might only deserve a relative ranking (inferior and superior in some respect or in relation to some end, but not defective per se and further still not sex-specific). Similar things may be claimed w.r.t. so-called personality differences.

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