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Comment by UnoriginalGuy | Hacker News Reader

The word "fact" is used extremely loosely in this article. While the first "fact" is in fact factual it then very quickly goes down the rabbit hole of personal opinion/perspective.

By the time we get to "fact 3" the author isn't even pretending any more and the "fact" is just a bizarre "you're a mathematician, you can solve this!!1!" point...

I'm happy to have a discussion about gender politics/equality, this article is just a very poor starting point for such a discussion.

This is nothing more than a rant, pretending to be something more.

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Oh come on, just substitute rebuttal or response for fact. Do you dismiss a FAQ because the questions aren't actually asked frequently?! I think we should be discussing the actual content, not the form of presentation.

But I did criticise the content? Everything after the first paragraph is directly criticising the content.

I'd say you dismissed the content, but I'd also say that, in your own words, you did it by going down "the rabbit hole of personal opinion/perspective" ...

Which is to say, you can't have much of a discussion if you only allow a recital of facts.

That's a common trope now in the political discourse. Since mere opinion journalism got almost completely consumed by partisan hackery, in the search for credibility and reader's trust a new crop of opinion writing has emerged - the "fact checking". Some time ago, you would write "my political opponents claim A, but my opinion is B, and here are the arguments supporting it". Now, you write: "Myth: A. Fact: B. Resolution: my political opponents are liars-liars-pants-on-fire".

You might be interested that this is such a common way to derail conversations about privilege that it's made part of 'Derailing for Dummies'.

http://birdofparadox.wordpress.com/derailing-for-dummies-goo...

That web-site's tone is more than a little offensive. If you're going to sink that low that quickly I'm just going to outright refuse to have a discussion with you at all.

So, that website pulls my least favorite "social justice" trick: pretending that every oppressive action is willful and premeditated. A lot of those issues are very, very subtle from a privileged POV, and it doesn't do a damn bit of good to pretend otherwise.

Given that the author is a senior mathematician and cites studies freely means that at least part of what you linked to doesn't apply.

However, I think that the use of 'Fact' as a section heading was more a rhetorical device than anything else/

You might be interested that 'Derailing for Dummies' is nothing but a rhetorical escape hatch, used mainly to declare victory without actually making a logical argument.

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Escape_hatch

That's an extremely shallow criticism of the article. It uses the Myth/Fact device which is quite common in articles, read then as Point/Counterpoint or something if you must. But let's talk about the content, not the style.

Common != right. Spam is common too :) If you write an opinion piece, there's nothing shameful in that, but it's not a fact. Word "fact" used to have meaning...

If you'd take a look you'd find that most any word is used extremely loosely. That's why dictionaries contain vague circumscriptions of words, often listing as many as 20 overlapping and/or separate word senses. Which is not to deny that people operate with the idea that words have a definite, literal meaning (perhaps even neatly delineated with necessary and sufficient conditions), it's just not the reality.

So yes, when a particular use of a word is common, it's very hard to argue it's not right, because there are no facts to point at, only an idea in someone's head (but who's to say who is right?), or some historical data (but languages change, and prima facie that's neither good nor bad).

The article is so shallow its self that I didn't feel it deserved my time for a deep criticism.

The author just stop justifying their points after the first couple. It is like they starting writing a really good piece, then got two "myths" in and then switched to random opinion mode.

The underlying issues do deserve discussion though whether or not the quality of writing (in a blog post) meets your personal standards.

Of course they do. Sexism is a very real issue. It is an issue that directly impacts people's lives.

However I've been to this rodeo before many times, and unfortunately if you get drawn into a discussion that is, at the foundation, based on personal opinion/perspective then you never get anywhere.

You need to try and stick to the science. When the study that the author used as their first point was published there was some great discussion that focused around the science of sexism.

Even the first fact is a bit biased. In controlled experiments that rarely go beyond changing names on resumes, you observe bias against women.

When you observe actual practice (with official and unofficial AA, hiring committees, and of course various statistical problems), you tend to observe bias in favor of women.

http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=12062&page=R1

The picture of what real life looks like is far from clear.

The benefit of an article like this is that it makes you think about your own actions in a new way. Your are making it about politics by choice. Considering how embedded sexism is that would be a bad choice. Does this match your own experience or not? Is your desire for facts merely confirmation bias for your own anecdotal views.

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