Hacker News Reader

Comment by dmvaldman | Hacker News Reader

This is so embarrassingly bad...it starts bad, and then gets worse... examples:

He discredits one of Sandberg's scientifically verified claims that women take criticism worse than men, by referencing "as John Ioannidis notes, “Most Published Research Findings are False.”

Yet he begins his review with a US News report:

"This US News article describes research that found that, among college graduates, left-handed men earned 20 percent more than right-handed men."

Talk about a bayesian paradox here. It's easy to prove people wrong (and right) when you believe A and ~A.

I could go on, it gets much worse. Does he really think Harvard uses the same internet bandwidth for their particle physics dept and the dorms? Ugh...

View on HN

This is bad???

Sandberg confirms that “A is Average” at Harvard. Her brother David, a neurosurgeon whom Sandberg admires because currently “he splits child care duties with his wife fifty-fifty”, was also a Harvard undergrad. He takes “a class in European intellectual history”, skips all but two lectures and all but one book, gets tutored for three hours and receives an A for the semester (p32-33). The guy’s success is attributed to the general confidence of men. Sandberg does not consider how likely it is that her brother’s confidence would have resulted in an A in a physics class at Caltech.

Yes it is. Because Sandberg never says she admires her brother because of that fact. She says she admires her brother, and then states that fact about the brother. Greenspun is the one who makes the false connection. Here is the full quote:

I should have understood that this kind of self-doubt was more common from females from growing up with my brother. David is two years younger than I am and one of the people in the world whom I respect and love the most. At home, he splits child care duties with his wife fifty-fifty; at work, he's a pediatric neurosurgeon whose days are filled with heart wrenching life-and-death decisions…

With Greenspun's logic, you could equivalently claim Sandberg admires her brother because he is a neurosurgeon.

You seem to be misreading a lot of the article. To be expected really, it's quite full of sarcasm and dry wit, which doesn't come across via text particularly well.

example? that quote is from the book btw, not the article.

Actually the point Greanspun (not Greensburg) is trying is whether her brother confidence

     would have resulted in an A in a physics class at Caltech.

That may be his point. My point is that he stitches together falsehoods to evoke emotional responses in his readers.

>He discredits one of Sandberg's scientifically verified claims that women take criticism worse than men,

I don't know about the "scientifically verified claim". In general, scientific claims made in scientific journals are nuanced, and context sensitive. I would be wary of a lay person with a particular position weaving attributions to journal papers indiscriminately in their essays. Furthermore, Humanities research is notoriously error-prone and lacking in rigor. In this respect, I'd say Greenspun is probably close to the truth.

that's not the point. saying left-handed people make 20% more than right-handed people is equally (if not much more) dubious.

you can't argue that someone's references are possibly fabricated, and then support your own point with your own "scientific" reference.

really it comes down to: if you ever find yourself arguing that someone's references are likely wrong because they are in the humanities... well...that's a conversation ender.

and i have a phd in math. believe me sometimes humanities people rub me the wrong way. but i would never make a general statement like that, and especially not to "prove a point."

it's the refuge of a scoundrel.

> saying left-handed people make 20% more than right-handed people is equally (if not much more) dubious.

That was his point! Sheryl Sandberg has a particular thesis and cherry picked some numbers from some study to support her assertion. He mocked this by cherry picking another. I'm pretty sure he doesn't particularly know (or care) if right-handed people are more successful in their careers.

This may be fair or it may be unfair criticism, but the fact that Sandberg threw a whole bunch of references in doesn't automatically mean her assertions are supported by science.

>if you ever find yourself arguing that someone's references are likely wrong because they are in the humanities... well I just want to punch you in the face really..

Your reading comprehension is suspect. I certainly didn't argue this, and neither did Greenspun.

> that's not the point. saying left-handed people make 20% more than right-handed people is equally (if not much more) dubious.

The sentence before that is "Hardly anybody knows anything about why some workers succeed more than others." His citation of the US News report is meant as an example that there is a lot of confusion on the subject. He is using it specifically to illustrate that dubious claims are flying around.

This is why I unsubscribed from Greenspun's blog a long time ago (that and him deleting my comments); he makes some good points (Sandberg is indeed extremely exceptional and much of her views are ludicrous), but he buries them in a sea of bias and partisanship.

Easy exercise for readers: go through this post and a few previous posts, and count every use of 'meta' points like Ioannidis's paper against a claim. Notice any patterns?

And then there are the gratuitous digs...

> Sandberg identifies the same tendencies for underlings in a bureaucracy to hold their tongues that Max Weber noticed 100+ years ago (p85; no reference to Weber).

And why should there be any reference at all, Phil? Most people never read a page of Weber, and it's not an observation which requires uniquely keen insight or experience...

Philip Greenspun used sarcasm. He knew all the tricks, dramatic irony, metaphor, bathos, puns, parody, litotes and satire.

He knew all the tricks, etc."

Apropos: Monty Python's "Piranha Brothers" sketch, specifically, @ 1:35 of part 2 (but watch it all):

Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=64aVHzoSdaI

Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aihjThGabYY

(Or you can just read it:

http://pianosa.com/pic/sketches/piranha.htm )

It's super effective.

ah. so being methodically retarded is all part of his plan. how clever!

In the quote about right-handed men, I think you missed the following parenthetical phrase: "(and as noted below (Ioannidis), this result is itself probably false)"? It's not (A and ~A), it's the same thing in both statements (i.e. published studies aren't reliable).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com