Hacker News Reader

Comment by erfgh | Hacker News Reader

If it is known that most discoveries are made by males it is reasonable to give larger weight to new male-done research, if the only thing that is known about the researchers is their gender and if the reader is not enough of an expert on the subject matter to treat it 100% on its own merit.

I don't see this "bias" as inefficient or counter-productive. It is just an artifact of the way you designed your flawed experiment.

To find any real bias you would have to assure the subjects that the researchers were equally accomplished.

View on HN

Even if one sex was 10x as likely as the other to produce good research, it is still sexist bias to judge research on the basis of the author's sex. Fairness and meritocracy mean everyone gets a chance; no one should be stopped from succeeding because they belong to a low-performing group.

I think it's safe to say that this study can be treated as an anecdote because we don't know the effect size or exact methodology and it was never peer-reviewed. And I'd agree with your point if we were talking about the Nobel prize study, which evaluates people as individuals. But arguing that 'real bias' is bias that doesn't come from empirical evidence doesn't make a whole lot of sense- all bias comes from empirical evidence of varying quality.

> To find any real bias you would have to assure the subjects that the researchers were equally accomplished.

What do you mean? I think you didn't understand the experiment. Subjects were shown the same text with, at random, a male name, female name, or initials. These names were not real researchers, nor familiar to the subjects.

> If it is known that most discoveries are made by males it is reasonable to give larger weight to new male-done research

I'm sure you can see the two different fallacies in this short sentence:

- There have been more male researchers than female, therefore more "discoveries" were made by men than women. No shit. This does not mean male researchers are better than female, obviously.

- There are more men being researchers therefore men's research should be given more weight therefore there are more men researchers therefore...

You will find it beneficial to learn what a "prior probability distrubution" is.

It's actually you who doesn't understand probabilities. If a woman is twice as likely to make a discovery but women are only 5% of researchers, then it's both true that:

1. most discoveries are made by males

2. it is reasonable to give larger weight to new female-done research

contradicting you point.

But you pulled those number out of thin air. The fact of the matter is that if I pick one research paper at random out of all the papers written by men and I pick another research paper at random out of all the papers written by women the former will be of higher average quality.

Did you just pull that out of thin air?

You will find it beneficial to learn about "selection bias".

> If it is known that most discoveries are made by males it is reasonable to give larger weight to new male-done research

No it isn’t. Dont you see this is just circular reasoning?

An experiment like OP's would 100% show bias. There weren't multiple researchers, each reader read the exact same paper, but with a different gendered (or non-gendered) name as the author.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com