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Right, and unwillingness to consider the possibility of group differences comes from a quasi-religious devotion to the blank slate model of human nature. The way radical egalitarians see it, we're not only equal in dignity, but in potential.

That's a pretty view, but it's inconsistent with reality, and radical egalitarians need to come up with increasingly implausible explanations to explain everyday circumstances that make perfect sense once you drop the blank slate model.

Favoring fair outcome over having fair rules is against everything I believe. We should not strive for a participation trophy culture.

Why are you using biased mathematics? If statistics and the scientific method (the tools through which dead white men continue to colonize) give us obviously problematic results, we should abandon them in favor of a method of inquiry that promotes social justice.

Evolutionary biology is absolutely a hard science. It's rooted in both empirical evidence and models derived from statistics and game theory.

You haven't presented an argument: you've presented a fear-based assertion. I absolutely disagree that it is ever better not to know. Every single time someone has made that argument and tried to enforce it, it's retarded our progression as a species.

The Catholic Church in medieval Europe did tremendous harm, and all it was trying to do was save our immortal souls. It was doing good work. It was better not to know, right? How much progress might we have made in mathematics had Hippasus not been murdered for providing the existence of irrational numbers?

People who share your views do us all tremendous harm. We could make life better for billions of people if we gave up our taboos on researching ourselves.

That said, I do appreciate the honest. It's not often that I see people out right admit to wanting to ban certain lines of research. Your doing it is refreshing.

Willful ignorance of the natural world has never led to anything good for humanity. That we have to ban certain lines of inquiry because we might not like the answers is positively medieval. As a technologist, I find the idea abhorrent.

So it's okay to conduct research so long as you like the findings? Read the books mentioned in this thread and others. IQ is 60-80% heritable. Of course there are environmental effects (consider, say, fetal alcohol syndrome), but for the most part intelligence is strongly heritable, and intelligence (or whatever you want to call g) is strongly correlated with life outcomes. These are facts. If you think that facts go on to "prove" the "inferior[ity]" of certain groups, that's a problem with your interpretation. It's easier to just deny the facts, isn't it?

I do have high hopes for what we can "do about it". These hopes rest on genetic modification. There's no reason in principle that the next generation, or the one after that, couldn't be made all geniuses. It'd solve a huge number of problems. But first we have to recognize the fact that intelligence is largely hereditary!

My gut supports group differences in intelligence. As Heinlein once wrote, if intelligence weren't heritable, you could teach calculus to a horse. It takes the entire intellectual edifice of modern radical egalitarianism to rob people of their common sense.

It's like trying to debug a SIGSEGV when you hold an unshakable religious belief that a certain pointer cannot be NULL. If your debugger tells you it's NULL, the debugger is biased, or at least is unconsciously exhibiting its page table privilege. If a colleague tells you that the pointer is NULL, he's a bigoted memoryist. You try to fix the SIGSEGV by renaming variables, refactoring functions, or changing data structures, but all you do is make the program slower and more complicated, and the damn thing still crashes.

In the end, customers are unhappy, you can't ship, and you lose your job because you don't allow yourself to see what's blindingly obvious and in front of your nose.

That's what the western world's identity politics fad feels like. The science tells us that there are important group differences. As long as we don't allow ourselves to see them and instead attack people who show them, we're not going to get anywhere.

Well, hypervisors and OS kernels are largely mirrors of each other, and it doesn't make architecturally to have both. Some people, like the creator of this project, favor squeezing out the OS kernel. Other people, like the LXC people, prefer squeezing out hypervisors and letting OS kernels do it all. Both suck. All software sucks. Software is hell. Every moment is a living nightmare of pain.

Low-carbohydrate diets are supposed to decrease calorie intake without reducing satiation. They've been around for 50 years. They may work for individual people, but they do not work at scale as a public health measure.

Why is this concept so difficult to get across? There are _constant_ advertisements in every medium for weight loss programs of every sort. We've already explored the entire parameter space of dieting. Tweaking the food mix and saying, "No. This time we have the perfect mix to keep you health and full!" isn't science. It's quackery that belongs on the cover of Cosmo.

You know what works in reality?

  * Amphetamines
  * Nicotine
  * 2,4-Dinitrophenol
  * Gastric surgery of various sorts
  * Cancer

Of course none of these things is an effective public health measure. (Although there's some evidence that e-cigarettes aren't quite as carcinogenic as regular cigarettes, but might still deliver all of nicotine's benefits.)

You know what might actually work?

  * Pigovian taxes on high glycemic index food and drink
  * A ban on food advertisement
  * Portion size regulation
  * Weight-based airfare

But these are all unpopular, because they contravene the pretty little dogma that we all have enough willpower within ourselves to accomplish our goals. Sometimes we need an external kick in the ass.

It's time we stop pretending that yelling at people about diet and exercise is going to make a bit of difference. We might as well yell at the sea and tell it to stop rising.

Your comment is constructive and contributes to the conversation.

That's true. These plans, properly followed, work as advertised. That's physics. The trouble is that most people do not follow this plans, and after 40 years of trying to show otherwise, we now know that this situation isn't going to change.

Why is it that so many people are completely oblivious to the limits of human psychology? Telling people to eat less doesn't work. We need to try other public health measures.

Yes, that's you. Go outside. Look around. Do you think we _as_ _a_ _population_ can maintain diets? The existence of rare outliers (and anorexics) does not disprove the bloody obvious conclusion that at population scale telling people to eat less has no effect on how much they actually eat.

Are you at all overweight right now? (The majority of Americans are.) so, your claim is self-refuting.

There are lots of approaches to eliminating excess CO2 that we could talk about if people like you didn't reflexively smear technology as some great devil. Voluntary CO2 emission reduction looks so far like a doomed effort that goes against every incentive built into human nature.

And the universal increase in obesity in the west doesn't matter? The idea that voluntary dietary restrictions might have any effect on public health is ludicrous. If that strategy could work, it would have already worked. Do you think many obese people _want_ to be obese?

If there had been a major war, you'd have seen them come right back. It's not as if the Japanese simply forgot how to make the things during the Edo period.

> The public is scared of genetic engineering.

And nuclear power, and geo-engineering. Public hysteria is placing us at great risk on numerous fronts. Ultimately, though, I'm optimistic. Not once in human history has anyone been able to suppress technology once it became both possible to make and profitable to produce. In this instance, the Chinese will probably beat us to gene therapy technology, and we'll desperately play catch-up once we see the difference it makes in life outcome.

Do you have any idea how difficult it is to actually maintain a low-calorie diet? It's simply not a realistic option for most people. Yes, with sufficient willpower, it'd be possible in theory, but that's like saying that unaided human flight is possible with sufficient muscular power. Dietary restriction just isn't in us.

> Your cells dividing indefinitely is not the opposite of aging, it's cancer.

Look at it this way: the Hayflick Limit on cellular replication limits act as a fail-safe in case other growth inhibition mechanisms fail. If a liver cell decides that it wants to be its own immortal organism but doesn't express telomerase, it won't get very far in its enterprise. The replication limit makes it more likely that we'll survive to reproductive age.

On the other hand, the Hayflick Limit kills us. Evolution doesn't care much about this side effect, but we do. If we can suppress cancer other ways --- or hell, even if we can't --- NOPing out the Hayflick Limit safety code is worthwhile.

You have to admit that FDA approval can be onerous, and that a "mad scientist" way of demonstrating technology can be an effective way to build public demand.

Consider another technology: safe, effective, and reversible male birth control [1]. It's been used in India for decades, but happens to be illegal in the US right now due to the slow and expensive nature of the approval process.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reversible_inhibition_of_sperm...

> And better metrics, such as mapping human networks from email exchanges

I don't think this metric survives Goodhart's Law. It's too easy to game.

> I guess the condensed version would be: understand humans better.

It's not that simple.

> Once you actually decide to take responsibility for your own speech.

I accept responsibility for the content of my speech. I do not accept responsibility for feelings of offense others may feel in response to my speech. It's not my job to manage their emotional state.

> On the contrary, most of those who are interested in addressing gender imbalances in fields like computer science are simultaneously interested in addressing the gender imbalances in "unsexy" jobs, since these are just two sides of the same coin.

That's another claim that, if true, would be pretty, but happens to be false. (Just like "men are mean to women in technology and so keep them out of the field.") It's just another bromide to smooth over unpleasant reality.

A Google News search for "women in technology" yields 61 million results. A Google News search for yields 1.5 million. There's nowhere near as much attention to getting men into traditionally women's roles as there is increasing the number of women in technology.

> CS culture is one which is overtly and unnecessarily hostile to women...men frequently engage in behaviors that are hostile, threatening, and demeaning to women

Many people repeat this claim, but I don't think it's true.

He means Model View Culture: [1] https://modelviewculture.com/

I think.

> I'd say the next big battle in workplace equality is going to focus on treating introversion fairly.

What do you think such an effort would look like? One problem is that in big companies, it's frequently not enough to do good work. To get recognition, you have to _advertise_ that you're doing good work.

> bitch

Unfortunately, that's how college kids talk. I wish they wouldn't be so crude, but the language isn't CS-specific. That women in general are doing so well in college in general relative to men suggests crude language on the part of college men is not a serious problem. In the professional world, that kind of denigration would be completely unacceptable.

> Also, let me tell you this story of two friends I knew who applied at a certain internet start-up on Market Street in San Francisco in 2014

I don't think it's reasonable to generalize from this anecdote. Maybe he aced his interviews and she flubbed them.

I think part of the devaluation of emotion is the nature of the work. The computer doesn't care that you've had a bad day. The computer doesn't care that your kid is sick. The computer doesn't care that you're behind on your mortgage, or that your partner left you, or that you could really use a hug. The computer is a cruel adversary, and to beat it, you need to discard emotion (at least temporarily) and embrace its cold, logical way of reasoning about the world. You need to beat it at its own game.

Is it any wonder that we programmers tend to view logical reasoning as more useful than emotional reasoning?

You're right that "pundit class" is too inflammatory. I've edited my comment.

> Should I believe that there's no systematic discrimination? How would I be confident that there's not any?

Nobody can prove the absence of systemic discrimination. You also can't prove the absence of lizard people. The burden of proof rests on those making the positive claim. Look at how the technology industry tries very hard to attract women. Look at the outreach programs, the hackathons, and the scholarships from dozens of foundations and open source projects. Look at the mentorship programs available for women. That's some evidence _against_ systemic bias.

Now look at evidence _for_ systemic bias _other_ than the gender disparity itself. We're left with, what, rugs about meritocracy and a few off-color comments about dongles in a private conversation between two friends at a conference?

I just don't think the non-gender-disparity evidence is strong enough to support a claim of bias.

> should I discourage her from a field in technology because she likely has some otherwise hidden trait that will make her less useful or successful?

You should introduce her to many fields and let her decide which one interests her most.