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Comment by mikeash | Hacker News Reader

That really is the crux of the matter. Everyone should be given an equal chance with no prejudice, and then if population differences still emerge, that's OK.

Unfortunately there isn't much room for this middle ground. People who want to acknowledge sex difference want to use sex as a filter, e.g. "no women in combat roles." People who want to give everybody a chance also want to even things out, e.g. "Allow women in combat roles, and lower the standards for women so they have just as much of a chance as men have."

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> Everyone should be given an equal chance with no prejudice,

Agreed. But the way it tends to work is that if (say) 60% of all engineers are men and the rest are women, then a man more closely fits the idea of an engineer that those people who are in charge of giving the chances have in mind, and so they're more likely to prefer a man to a woman.

You sort of run into this chicken/egg problem though: are women underrepresented in engineering because of what I described above (bad), or do they actually have equal opportunities and simply aren't choosing to become engineers (okay), OR do they actually have equal opportunities and are simply not choosing to be engineers just because the profession currently comprises mostly men and they feel discouraged when they see that, even though they're otherwise interested (bad), or etc. etc.

> simply aren't choosing to become engineers (okay)

It is not certain that this choice is OK, though. While the causes of gender disparity are undoubtedly complicated, there seems to be some persistent factor in engineering & technology that results greater disparity than in other fields like medicine and law. It is unlikely that current participation levels are at their natural equilibrium; the gender distribution was more balanced in the past than it is today. The problem is not merely that women may "choose" not to enter (or that they choose to leave and not return) engineering, but that the status quo of the community might be actively driving them away. Engineering & tech have a reputation for allowing behaviors and personalities that would not be tolerated in other fields that are more gender balanced.

Finding the natural gender distribution in tech will require actively changing the culture to make it more inclusive and inviting, not merely removing explicit barriers to entry for women.

Yeah, I agree. Whatever the causes are, the best thing we can do is make the tech culture such that as many people as possible feel included as long they choose to be a part of it, so the decision to pursue it or not comes down to personal interest and nothing more.

Engineering and tech have a reputation for tolerating people (with "non-normal" characteristics), so we need active change to be more inclusive...

I hesitate to bring up extreme cases, but the relationship between social darwinism and the rise of the nazi party make many people, including myself, very hesitant to speak about differences in sex etc. Not because we deny their existence, but because we've seen how far large groups of uninformed electorate can be persuaded into supporting some scary stuff because of it. It's just a very tricky subject when it comes to the masses.

EDIT: Clarified to social darwinism from darwinism.

It's not the masses you need to be worried about, hiou. It wasn't the masses gassing people by the millions... it was the elites, who got a few people to go along with them. "The masses" organize poorly... it's the people who are smart enough to successfully do something with their bad idea, but not smart enough to see through the bad idea, that must be feared.

The deep-rooted fear of academia isn't that the masses may do something stupid with the idea of gender differences... it's the fear that they, the academics, will do something stupid. (Again. Although, not the same literal people, of course.)

Did you really manage to blame academics for the Holocaust in a mere four sentences? That's really impressive!

It's not just "academics". It's anyone who can take an idea and successfully run with it, without stopping to notice all the signs that are yelling at them "Stop! This isn't working as you expected!" Academia merely happens to have a large concentration of such people, for structural reasons. (The "ivory tower" is a real effect, and it is both a good thing because it permits concentration and focus, and a bad thing, because it begets people too stuck in their theories and smart enough to "explain away" anything, until it is much too late.)

This is not something "the masses" do, because "the masses" do not have the ability to successfully run with an idea and gather enough power to impose it.

It's not just the holocaust, either. There's a huge history of 20th-century "social engineering" that rather a lot of people would rather forget, because it pretty uniformly went badly. See also "eugenics" for another reason that academics are afraid to think too hard about how people may be different or how genes may determine things about people... and not entirely without reason. "The masses" did not impose eugenics. In fact a lot of eugenics had to be hidden from the masses.

With power comes the power to screw up. Academics have a lot of power. It would be strange if they'd never screwed up.

Academics have approximately zero power. This is the craziest conspiracy theory I've seen in a while, because it's just so obviously wrong. Oh yes, college professors need to be kept in check because otherwise they'll go out and kill all the Jews. WTF?

Go research where Lenin came from. Go research who did eugenics, and where they got their ideas from. Go research the origin of a lot of the Nazi figures and where their ideas came from. (Not just Hitler.)

Express all the humorous strawmen you like. How do you think these things happen? In the 20th century, the only bad social engineering event I can think of that could even remotely be considered the outgrowth of a broad movement of the masses is sort of Nazi-ism. Everything else was led by somebody with an idea from academia. "The masses" don't originate many ideas, and in the era of the all-powerful State (which the 20th century is firmly in), "the masses" don't run around committing genocide, or doing any of the things they may have done in previous social systems, because all that power is now reserved to the State.

And the State and academia have always been attached at the hip, as they are today. How else would it be? Do you think it's some sort of bizarre coincidence that the dominant ideology of academia today and the dominant ideology of the State are exactly the same? Of course they are... they're causally connected. (Where do the "technocrats" in technocracy come from? Certainly not the farm!)

As for this being "conspiracy" theory... no, it's just an understanding of how the world actually works. It may happen to explain this opinion of mine, but that's only because as a ground fact of the current world it explains lots of things. Academics wield power through the State. It's clear as daylight... it would be some sort of bizarre theory that they don't. What would that even look like?

Oh yes, the dominant ideology of academia is the same as that of the state, which is why academics universally agree that anthropogenic global warming is real while the government can't even agree on whether climate is changing at all, let alone the cause. This must be why universities are chronically underfunded and professors are constantly scrambling for their next research grant. This must be why roughly nobody in the top levels of government has so much as a PhD. The tight link between the two explains why governments persist in outlawing drugs even though research shows it's more effective to legalize them. I could go on, but I think you get the idea.

Looks to me like Lenin graduated from university but didn't go anywhere near an advanced degree. I'm not sure which Nazis you're referring to but I'm not aware of a particularly large number of university professors among the ranks of the top Nazis.

I agree with mikeash on this. It's not the academics that are committing crimes. And anyway, I'm tired of people telling me whether a certain idea is right or wrong. I just want to hear the evidence, and I think that's how most "academics" are.

You don't understand, recognizing sex differences leads to industrial-scale mass murder, just like it has in every human society that has ever recognized sex differences. Wake up sheeple!

No No No! I thought it was NOT recognizing sex differences that leads to industrial scale mass murder!

Now I'm confused. Not really, because this thread is nonsense -- confirmation bias mixed with absurdity.

"Academics have approximately zero power."

Sure, academic don't rove about with black helicopters and guns, but academia has the ear of industry, politics and government for good reason. Applied academics has the ability to predict outcomes, grow economies, win wars and generate massive revenues.

But it also has the ability to go horribly wrong. It's undeniable that Nazi eugenicists modeled their ideology after the American eugenics movement, encouraged by American academics and NGOs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_eugenics#Origins_in_the_w...

Nothing is as powerful as an idea whose time has come. Even a bad idea.

Some academics have the ear of powerful people. Some don't. Like in any other field.

Academia tends to be where far-out ideas come from, just because it's an environment that encourages it. Some of those ideas will be discovered by people in power and used to shape policy. Other will not. To blame academia for this or point to this process as evidence that academics are powerful seems an awful lot like being afraid of language because language can be used to convince people to do bad things.

I agree. Language is just a form of communication, it can be used or misused.

It would be a fiction to downplay the power of academics in modern society. Academics has the power to mold and frame the minds of the next generation of leaders, alter government policy and to influence an entire populace from childhood.

I see your point that academics has been demonized at times, however I think it's more appropriate to judge it on outcomes.

What is the relationship between darwinism (what a ridiculous term, by the way) and the rise of the Nazis?

I think they're talking about social darwinism. The idea that "survival of the fittest" can be naively applied to politics is a pretty easy way to convince people to commit genocide.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Darwinism

It appears you're right. However, I find it puzzling that it's mentioned here, since the gulf between "there are some genetic differences between the sexes" and "let's attempt to improve the human gene pool by murdering any group we find displeasing" is so great that they barely have any relationship at all.

It's not about murdering people. The problem is, if you support policies that disadvantage people based on their genetics, you can gradually dehumanize those people. The (real) disadvantages of that outweigh the (supposed) advantages.

OK, but the gulf between that and "there is some genetic differences between the sexes" is still so large that you'd need a powerful telescope to see from one to the other.

And people with sexist and racist tendencies have those telescopes glued to their face.

As much as I disagree with your overall viewpoints, I'll agree on this one you have here. For a lot of individuals, the gap that you mention is huge such as to not have an immediate, explicit effect, and for one particular reason:

Something as simple as validating and completely "accepting" the notion that "there is[sic] some genetic differences between the sexes" requires individuals to throw out entire swathes of subsequent ideas/notions/etc, if we were to be logical about things. I.e. You now have "Men and women are equal but ..." or "Men and women are equal except when...", instead of the pure and logically consistent "Men and women are equal".

If you ask me, the entire thing (sex-differences topic) is starting to smell full of tiny errors and corner-cases. Perhaps we're on the verge of a paradigm shift happening once people clarify their ideas, without exceptions and acceptable-errors:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradigm_shift

Equality isn't about people being literally identical. Nobody actually believes that. There are troubling facts like how men as a rule have a really hard time becoming pregnant that nobody denies.

Equality is about equal treatment. It's about judging the individual on their own merits, not some group they happen to belong to. "Men and women are equal" doesn't mean women are equally muscular and men can have babies. It means that when writing a law, selecting an employee, or counting a vote, you don't change your approach based on whether the person is a man or a woman.

There is nothing wrong with saying, for example, most of our warehouse workers are men because more men are able to do the heavy lifting required. There's nothing unequal about that. What equality demands is that you never say, I will not consider you for a warehouse job, regardless of your actual strength, because you are a woman and all women are too weak for it.

It's not actually that complicated IMO.

But if you are disadvantaging people that have objectively inferior genetics? Do you actually lose anything? Otherwise, are those people taking advantage of medical advances that prevent their deficiencies from being fatal?

What does "objectively inferior" mean?

Celiacs, for instance, seem to be a group that in previous generations succumbed to their condition, if not directly than indirectly because of general unfitness. To be honest, as a survivor of childhood lymphoma, I ought to be dead, had I been born even 25 years earlier. I question whether my genetics have enough offsetting benefits to counter that predisposition to life-threatening cancer for any of my offspring.

Advanced medical care is part of the environment in a first-world country now. I'm sure a fish would think us genetically inferior for our dependence on air to live, but we don't see it that way. A dependence on advanced medical care is ultimately no different. Assuming civilization doesn't collapse, I'd expect various dependencies on medical treatment to gradually arise in the population, but there's nothing objectively wrong with that.

There's also the eugenicist argument that the undesirables shouldn't be permitted to procreate.

For example, Margaret Sanger didn't want to round up people and exterminate them but she did want to keep them from reproducing.

Given that procreation requires one man and one woman to participate, it's going to be really hard to practice eugenics based on genetic differences between the sexes.

Have you ever heard of sex-selective abortions?

Did you miss China during the "one-child" policy era[1]?

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-child_policy#Effect_on_inf...

Sex-selective abortion is not eugenics. Nobody with even the most cursory understanding of human reproduction thinks that you'll permanently alter the gene pool by selecting one sex over another. This is totally unrelated, and I'm rather sad that I managed to get not one but two replies bringing it up, as if it were somehow relevant. The quality of this discussion is just astonishingly bad.

Beside selective abortion and embryo selection, it's already possible to derive gametes of both kinds from stem cells of arbitrary sex in mice, and it will most likely be possible to do the same with human cells soon.

Mice that descend from two males or two females have already been created in the lab.

You still need wombs, but they can be grafted and will probably be farmed from stem cells in the future too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uterus_transplantation#First_s...

And (at approximately same time) rejection of darwinism has stopped soviet regime from inducing famines, using slave labour and purges. Except it did not.

I think clear-headed thinking along with a moral foundation of compassion for everyone is going to work out better in the long-run than attempting to skirt around possible truths deemed 'dangerous'.

4th comment from the top of the thread and we've already reached Godwin's Law.

Have you ever wondered how the electorate becomes uninformed? Certain information is declared off-limits because of what it might make people think or do.

Don't read below the parent comment, the thread has devolved into an argument about Nazis.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law

> Unfortunately there isn't much room for this middle ground. People who want to acknowledge sex difference want to use sex as a filter, e.g. "no women in combat roles." People who want to give everybody a chance also want to even things out, e.g. "Allow women in combat roles, and lower the standards for women so they have just as much of a chance as men have."

I've literally never heard the latter argument made by any proponent of women in combat roles. The closest I've seen is calls for the requirements for certain combat roles to be reviewed for appropriateness to the real requirements of the specific role; most proponents of relaxing blanket restrictions on women in combat roles I've heard will explicitly accept that, for most roles, any reasonable set of standards will still make it easier for men.

Where have all the different standards for men and women in the armed forces come from, then? The Army and Navy both have different physical fitness standards for men and women. I didn't look up other branches but I don't expect them to be any different. I wouldn't expect there to be a big push for different standards because that's already where things are now.

> Where have all the different standards for men and women in the armed forces come from, then?

They came when women were first admitted to the armed forces at all, and are contemporaneous with the rules barring them from combat roles. They are not the product of pressure to include them in combat roles.

Roles (including, but not, AFAIK, limited to, combat roles) within the military can have physical standards above the minimum standard for the branch of service, and no one that I know of that has argued for removing the restriction on women serving in combat roles has advocated against gender-blind role-specific standards.

There are two separate reasons for fitness standards.

The first is the one you're probably thinking of - you need to be so strong or so fast in order to do your job.

The second is more subtle, along the lines of "we want soldiers to have the discipline and willingness to follow rules that physical fitness signals." This is why they want a drone pilot, for example, to meet physical fitness standards.

Really, the military should have three fitness standards: one for all male soldiers, one for all female soldiers, and another for the soldier's specific speciality.

That really is the crux of the matter. Everyone should be given an equal chance with no prejudice, and then if population differences still emerge, that's OK.

Yup. One of the things that annoys me most about prejudice and such is that it is inefficient. For a well-run and rich (economically, socially) civilization, we ideally want everyone to excel to the best of their best ability. To find the best use for everyone's talents. We want everyone to find their own niche, irrespective of their gender, race, orientation, etc.

Actually, I would say the vast majority of people not currently writing a post on an internet forum fall in some middle ground there. Like, the vast, vast majority.

Yes, but more and more, courts and laws try to enforce "equal outcomes" and not "equal opportunity."

Where do they do that? Even the notorious punching bag of Affirmative Action is intended to make up for prior bias, not force equal outcomes regardless of all merit. (Whether it actually does that is another question, but "try to enforce" is all about intent.)

Let's start with this NYTimes report about allegations of bias on teacher's qualification tests, because of the disparity in results:

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/08/nyregion/questions-of-bias...

You probably assume that the test is unbiased unless proven otherwise, and that any discrepancy is therefore likely to be actual differences in the underlying populations. The court is merely assuming the opposite: that discrepancies in the test results are a result of bias in the test itself unless proven otherwise.

They aren't trying to force equal outcomes, they're trying to make sure that if a test produces worse results for minorities then it had better be because of actual differences in the population and not subtle bias in the test.

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