Comment by tjic | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tjic | Hacker News Reader

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> If it's not okay to say that men are better programmers simply because of their gender (it's not), then it's not okay to say it the other way around either.

God forbid that someone make an argument and try to support it with data, when one person has already decided for all of us what the correct conclusion is.

WT* ever happened to debate, intellectual discourse, and the marketplace of ideas?

This is one of the things that I find most disgusting about political correctness: that it tries to just wall off huge swaths of POTENTIAL CONCLUSIONS based on an argument that boils down to a misconstrued sense of manners (at best) or political preferences (at worst).

Want to say that ethanol is a stupid idea? THE DEBATE IS CLOSED - NO SERIOUS SCIENTIST BELIEVES THAT GLOBAL WARMING IS ANYTHING OTHER THAN A THREAT OF EXTINCTION.

Want to say that women and men have (a) different average heights; (b) different standard deviations in intelligence; (c) different hormone levels; (d) massively different thicknesses in their corpus collosums, and therefore one or the other might on average, make better programmers/accountants/engineers? THE DEBATE IS CLOSED. IT IS UNACCEPTABLE TO SPECULATE ON THIS TOPIC.

I call bullshit on that.

Intellectually honest people respond to facts and arguments with OTHER facts and arguments.

Intellectually dishonest people try to shut down debates using social control.

WilliamLP writes

"People need to stop writing shit like this"

That's the phrase of a bully, and/or a censor.

I think you have some interesting points. I'm going to play Devil's advocate:

An assumption that you make there is that all forms of social control used for discouraging debates/speculation on certain topics are inherently bad or stem from dishonesty. It could be that knowing in advance the emotional, legal, political, or otherwise time-wasting repercussions that a certain type of debate causes justifies avoiding the discussion altogether. None of us go after truth in a completely unbiased manner with no agendas whatsoever, though we may fool ourselves in thinking so.

There doesn't seem to be any disagreement about the social rule of not discussing politics or religion in this forum. We don't think of this as a moral rule, but then what are morals?

> It could be that knowing in advance the emotional, legal, political, or otherwise time-wasting repercussions that a certain type of debate causes justifies avoiding the discussion altogether

So person A, and B and C are interested in having a debate.

Person X "knows" that persons A,B,and C (and some bystanders) would be better off if they don't even speculate or speak on the topic.

...so person X responds "People need to stop writing shit like this" ?

My objections:

* Why should I accept person X's assertion that he knows - better than I do - what will make me happy, or what will waste my time ?

* If person X truly thinks that, he should make a compelling case, put it on up a website, and respond not with "People need to stop writing shit like this", but with "I think that this debate is fruitless and time-wasting - check out this blog post for why".

* Even if person X is right, for a large percent of people, trying to shut down speech "for someone's own good" is un-American, and illiberal. If it's done under the color of law it's called "prior restraint".

* Even if person X is right given the conditions on the ground, conditions change, and over time his flawless heuristic for when to force people to "to stop writing shit like this" will become more and more disconnected from reality. What's needed is a constant feedback loop that keeps in touch with reality. ...and "ongoing debate" is the name of the ongoing feedback loop.

Agreed. As Sophocles famously wrote: "Knowledge must come through action; you can have no test which is not fanciful, save by trial."

Whether the statement (that women are better programmers) is actually true, or whether it belongs to Paul Graham's set of things you can't say doesn't even matter here.

It was not presented as a nuanced statistical statement. (Ironically, in an article about how statistical statements need to be more nuanced!) It was presented as a boorish, stupid, and unsupported assertion completely irrelevant to the focus of the article.

There are a few "debates" which should be shut down using social control. Among them are the ones that attempt to box people in and remove their individuality by asserting that some subset of their humanity is the most important thing about them in some context.

You don't need to cite a blog post to do that. There also are many debates which for all intents and purposes are closed, and for which social control or even condescension are appropriate. (NO SERIOUS SCIENTIST BELIEVES THAT THE EARTH IS 6000 YEARS OLD, OR THAT MERCURY IN VACCINES COULD BE A CAUSE OF AUTISM.)

> God forbid that someone make an argument and try to support it with data

That's well and fine, but the author stated an opinion based on anecdotal evidence. On its own though, I think it's a really stupid thing to say but I think it fits fine given the tone of his rant.

While I do agree with your central point, I don't think there's any value in exploring whether or not women might make better programmers on average. If I were to hire someone, I'd base it on their past experience and how well the interview(s) went, not their race or sex. There's no harm in speculating and even doing the research if it interests one that much though, just like there's no harm in researching whether or not painting red stripes on your car will make it go faster.

> If I were to hire someone, I'd base it on their past experience and how well the interview(s) went, not their race or sex.

Absolutely. I agree 100%.

OTOH, discussing things in aggregates also makes sense.

If 4 out of 1,000 women would make excellent engineers, and 1 out of 1,000 men would make excellent engineers, and yet we see that the distribution of actual engineers is something other than 4:1, we should investigate.

If, OTOH, the numbers are 1 out of 1,000 and 10 out of 1,000 respectively, and the ratio of actual engineers is 1:10, then we might choose to spend less time and energy on the investigation.

Maybe it's because you're using a contrived example, but I don't quite agree. These sort of studies are usually undertaken at a higher, more abstract level. eg. How do various cognitive abilities differ between sexes? With the resulting data, we might be able to explain certain phenomena, or dispel certain stereotypes. But I don't think we're anywhere close to being in a position we can say x out y men/women would make excellent engineers. That kind of information is usually extracted from trend analyses (eg. studying the proportion of males/female engineers who are highly successful at their career vs those who aren't), and they're inherently skewed because of the nature of the society we live in.

If 4 out of 1,000 women would make excellent engineers, and 1 out of 1,000 men would make excellent engineers, and yet we see that the distribution of actual engineers is something other than 4:1, we should investigate.

We might want to investigate, but "should" is a strong word. There are all kinds of reasons why this could happen, and some of them might not need fixing.

It could be that the total number of people who would make excellent engineers is too low for the number needed, and that men (in your example) are more likely to make adequate or good engineers than women, even though women are more likely to make excellent ones.

It could be that women in general, in spite of being four times as likely to make excellent engineers, tend not to enjoy engineering for cultural or other reasons.

It could be that the women who would be excellent engineers are in the group that would be pretty good CEOs, and they all become CEOs because there's more money in it.

But you get my point: the failure of actual people to conform to the occupations that they would be best at is not, in and of itself, evidence of a problem.

It's wrong because it's a faulty abstraction.

It's generalising. That is, assuming that one or many things are one way just because some things are one way.

Just because one person is one way, doesn't mean they all are, or even mostly are.

I hope you now see why it is FUCKING STUPID TO BE A SEXIST, racist or any other kind of generalist.

Best regards, hugs, kiss, love,

ps. sorry for the non-capital PC parts.

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