Comment by antipc | Hacker News Reader

Comment by antipc | Hacker News Reader

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Hi, you appear to be brainwashed by the PC establishment. Try this experiment: attempt to think for yourself for a few months. (Try out the craziest thoughts! If they're 'scandalous' you don't have to run them by other people, just evaluate them for yourself.)

Also, think critically about the people who promote these views. Most of them aren't very smart (in the sense that a tenured professor with awards can still be an idiot), or have a vested interest in promoting these views (typically racial).

Here's the first Google hit I could find disproving your joke. Someone else can find a blog post where a lesbian buys her daughter a firetruck and the girl begins to nurse the firetruck.

The world evolves in a certain way for a reason. Do you think this is the first era in which people thought that everyone might be equal? This is the first era in which we've had the luxury to attempt the experiment. The results are in: people aren't equal. Pack it up and go home. We're all tired of hearing this drivel.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/boys-like-blue-gir...

I don't think dilanj is suggesting that no biologically driven differences exist. I think that the argument is that at MIT there's a preselected, science focused group of women, who have their professional involvement with math decrease dramatically as they enter the working world and need to support themselves. There's a strong, though not certain case for a cultural effect here.

And by the way, on color?

"In Western culture, the practice of assigning pink to an individual gender began in the 1920s. From then until the 1940s, pink was considered appropriate for boys because it was the more masculine and decided color while blue was considered appropriate for girls because it was the more delicate and dainty color. Since the 1940s, the societal norm apparently inverted so that pink became appropriate for girls and blue appropriate for boys, a practice that has continued into the 21st century"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pink

In response to the blue/pink thing, there's always some set of societal discriminators between boys and girls (and later, between men and women), and to a one, they seem to me to be completely arbitrary. Shoulder pads, now a staple of women's fashion, didn't use to be such http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoulder_pads_(fashion) , and long hair used to be seen as dreadfully un-masculine.

Frankly, I like to try and buck this kind of thing. I have long hair (longer than most of the women I know), and carry around a pink DS... not much, but it's a start.

And by the way, on color? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pink

Did you check the references cited by that paragraph?

women, who have their professional involvement with math decrease dramatically as they enter the working world and need to support themselves. There's a strong, though not certain case for a cultural effect here.

It would be interesting if this phenomenon were correlated with 2D:4D ratio, wouldn't it? http://www.google.com/search?q=steve+sailer+finger+length

Even more interesting; the erudite scholars vanguard inquiry into the nature of a gay germ: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=steve+sailer+gay+ge...

Brilliance. To be cited in Nature, surely.

What, pray tell, is this "PC establishment?" It is odd to see such a concept invoked to defend a set of societal stereotypes, when "PC" is intended to raise images of, well, societal stereotypes. As other commenters have pointed out, the blue/pink thing is relatively recent, so it can't be "anti-PC" to insist that blue and pink are somehow inherently tied to gender.

Really, what it comes down to in my book isn't that people are equal because it's politically correct, or even that people are equal at all. It's that we should judge people for their acts, not their gender, race, sexual orientation or whatever else. If a particular woman is worse at mathematics than average, then so be it. If another particular woman is better than average, let's celebrate that for what it is.

The PC line is that everybody is equal, and if there are measurable differences between groups then it is due to white male heterosexual upper class capitalist oppression.

Except for the greater percentage of males who are on low tail of the intelligence curves or are in jail. Then it's just deserts.

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