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Comment by octokatt | Hacker News Reader

Correct. The question OP asked is much broader than what the paper's subject matter, and does not support evidence for the conjecture.

Instead of asking again "maybe men just outcompete women because they have an inherent advantage", can we please just not do this. Again.

It's become really disheartening to see this question being asked, because of a long history of infantilizing women and misusing science to prove it.

Even if we're talking about population-level differences. I'm asking for empathy here, because every time a gender study comes up, it seems like someone again needs to ask if women really deserve an equal role at the table, as historical leaders or scientists, as part of humanity.

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“For many traits, males show greater variability than females” - first sentence in the paper’s abstract.

What “many traits” do you think are being referenced?

I’ve worked with many female engineers who are unquestionably smarter than I am. I’m married to one. Of course we are talking population-level differences, and I’m not suggesting that women shouldn’t be included in any table based upon meritocracy.

That doesn’t negate the fact that a president of Harvard was forced to step down for having a hypothesis that there could possibly be a gender difference explained by variance. Now that his hypothesis has a glimmer of possibly being supported by research, again, it continues to be vilified.

I’m asking for a world where a scientist can freely propose a hypothesis and not be forced to step down. Anything else is driving the anti-enlightenment.

Lawrence Summers is the Galileo of our time.

1. Summers is not a neuroscientist. He is an economist, and he is ill equipped to make any meaningful claims about this.

2. Proposing a hypothesis is not doing science. Science would involve actually testing a hypothesis by applying rigorous and reliable methods that suit the phenomenon being investigated, verifying the validity of results, interpreting the results and having the results reviewed by peer experts.

3. Summers’ remarks were merely pulled out of his ass and we’re in no way informed by any scientific process.

4. He has crucially undermined the work of countless women working as scientists at Harvard, and therefore failed in his duties as leader of that world class institution.

4. He resigned as a result of a no-confidence vote from the faculty (i.e. all the smart people who work at Harvard), which underscores how shitty he was at his job and how dumb his remarks were.

> Lawrence Summers is the Galileo of our time.

5. lol

You can take any amount of scientific evidence that there are population level differences and there will still be someone who will discard it like it does not matter at all.

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