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Comment by ceol | Hacker News Reader

/pol/ and /r/MensRights were invading sites during this time. I recall a handful of posts on both that directed users to HN. If you were active on HN during that whole fiasco, you'd remember the huge influx of new accounts that did nothing but "shitpost" in the submissions on here.

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Your commenting is bad because it implicitly takes not-universally-agreed-upon-statements as truth in backing other opinions. You could have said (in the GGP of this comment) that /pol/ and /r/MensRights were redirecting posters to the forum. Instead you have to go out of your way to say "misogynist groups" and "filth". That's not a good characterization of the influx of posters (if we go by the description you've just given) because the posters at those sites and coming from those sites do not form well-defined groups, and there's no need to call what they wrote "filth". What you're doing is baking hostility into any conversation that would happen with people that might disagree with you. You just did it again in your reply, saying that I should remember something I don't remember despite being active on HN at the time. Now any disagreement I might say about that notion of yours suddenly turns your comment into an attack against mine. You might have accidentally trained yourself into using these awful conversational technique because they result in you having the last word, or because of some other feelings.

I'm not sure how my reply to you baked hostility into it. I didn't mean to offend you by saying you should have remembered. It was a generic "you", not you specifically. My apologies if I did.

I say it was misogynist filth because it was. Not everyone's comment is equal. I'm not going to treat someone with respect if they spout garbage about how women have no place in programming; how men have "logical brains"; how they wish for the days when they could crack jokes about breasts without all those uppity 'females' ruining the place. A spade is a spade, and those comments were filth that didn't deserve the bytes they were served through. You might as well be asking me to be nice to the KKK as they claim black people are an inferior race.

I'm not sure what the point of your comment is, though. You're chiding me for attacking those groups and complaining that I'm setting up any child conversations to be hostile, but you use the last sentence of your reply to attack me, all while contributing... nothing. I mean, there's not really anything in your comment. Was there something I should be responding to, specifically?

While I certainly hope that all females who are qualified and interested find a welcoming home in computing, I am aware that there is social science research suggesting differences in the average cognitive abilities between men and women in some subdomains. This is not saying that only men can program, only that the proportions of the sexes that make good programmers may be different. Think of shifting of the mean of a normal distribution, like this[1].

So I suspect that in a perfect world with no discrimination the proportion of sexes in each field of work will not be equal, and this is important to keep in mind in industry self-flagellation sessions. Our industry is educated enough to buy heavily into feminism, but nature has a way of confounding all breeds of egalitarians.

The progressive explanation for these differences is that they are all culturally determined. I am not convinced that is a parsimonious explanation of the data. I suppose this makes me evil.

For what it's worth, there's also well documented cognitive differences in human subpopulations. Progressives also believe that these differences are all due to culture. I'm not convinced that human groups which evolved apart for 80,000 years in differing circumstances should be exactly equal in all ways modulo culture. Again, I'm evil. But also remember the overlapping bell curves. That's what I'm arguing the global distribution of talents in human subgroups looks like.

I haven't been to /pol or /r/mra much, but I suspect that they do deal in some suppressed truths in addition to a lot of adolescent noise and filth, if only because the forbidden truths are juicier.

[1] https://controls.engin.umich.edu/wiki/images/2/25/Overlap.gi...

Any person can be a good programmer, and the criteria for a good programmer changes each generation. Women were originally thought to be the better programmers because it was considered office-style busywork. Then it shifted to mathematicians, then to nerds, and now it's shifting to "anyone."

And yeah, you're evil — not because you believe those things (that would make you merely ignorant) but because you revel in the fact your beliefs are problematic.

But, much like your beliefs, your comment brings nothing to this discussion. It's a lot of unsourced, pseudo-scientific nonsense hidden behind a veil of verbosity.

The sources are out there, but you might not want to look. What is seen is not easily unseen:

http://hbdchick.wordpress.com/start-here/

http://jaymans.wordpress.com/hbd-fundamentals/

http://www.humanbiologicaldiversity.com/

And although the common insult for people interested in human biodiversity is "KKK", much of the research is not being done by white people. For example, the Chinese are investing huge sums of money into unraveling the genetic basis of intelligence. See: http://edge.org/response-detail/23838

I suppose this is all "filth that isn't worth the bytes its served through" though...

Careful, there.

Talking about biological differences upsets a lot of people and is very non-politically-correct.

The party line of the official 'social justice activist' seems to be that there exist no biologically determined differences between any subgroup of humans that you care to define, including between men and women.

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