That's a subtle subject change from the article itself to the inflammatory ideological climate, which guarantees a repetitive flamewar. Please don't do that on HN. We want curious conversation here.
Going on generic ideological tangents guarantee reruns of same-old, increasingly nasty, arguments, which is why the site guidelines ask users not to do that:
I asked a sincere question because I learned a lot of that stuff in evo psych classes in the 2000's (as a Psych major) and am a bit confused as to what has transpired the past few years to draw such negative attention from some circles. I did not intend to start an "ideological flamewar" and I apparently have much more faith in other HN users to conduct themselves with peace and patience when discussing... whatever the heck this is at this point. Sorry.
Typically intent and ramifications. I don't think it's a problem to point out that there are measured differences in the sexes; truth is truth if they've got high quality data to back up assertions.
The danger is twofold. First, people forget that these are population level trends and that it is bad reasoning to automatically assume every individual in a given group conforms with these trends. Second, a lot of people believe dumb and backward ideas about other groups, and they'll twist and cherry pick the data to try to back up their biases without the nuance of presentation shown here. In fact, most of the articles broaching this topic are doing so from a position of malice rather than truth seeking; trying to justify some sort of discrimination or poor treatment of another group.
>The danger is twofold. First, people forget that these are population level trends and that it is bad reasoning to automatically assume every individual in a given group conforms with these trends.
Yet it is equally bad reasoning to ignore the prior as it is to refrain from updating it. One form of foolishness will find you unpersoned, the other such mental handicap allows one to signal great virtue. As it takes great moral restraint to distrust your lying eyes.
We are in interesting ideological waters. The great taboo of our age is quantifying human capability, precisely when our tools have never been sharper.
Cognitive genomics is joining this strange fray. Extremely politically incorrect truths are beginning to stumble reluctantly out of the field. The confirmation of a dysgenic trend in Iceland is one of the milder examples:http://www.pnas.org/content/114/5/E727. Much more controversial truths are yet to come.
One wonders how much truth our mental Lysenkoism will survive. It has resisted all reason so far, so one must bet it will continue.
If you measure a minuscule rate across a generational timescale and then seek to promote it as "substantial on an evolutionary timescale" then you're no longer doing science. It's another version of the typical science journalism and market hucksterism of the "if these trends continue" argument. Will this trend continue on an evolutionary time scale? Our biological history suggests that it will not, and nothing but our ill-examined fears suggests that it will.
What this paper does successfully do is find faint evidence that gives comfort to the old trope of "poor/stupid/brown/religious people have more babies than rich/smart/white/enlightened people, therefore the world is doomed because they shall inherent the earth."
However, the problem with this is not the correct observation that people who produce more offspring increase their genetic contribution to future generations, the problem is the inability to imagine a 'we' that includes the 'poor/stupid/brown/religious' people that the speaker is 99.9999% identical to and the projection of an imagined social & cultural defeat of the individual (who is going to experience a very thorough personal defeat at the hands of senescence, in short order, no matter what) by people who 'look different' onto the reality of what is actually going on to the human genome over the far vaster timescales of actual genetic change.
On the other hand, it's pretty prejudiced to assume that say, male software engineers are on average more sexist than other professions, just because there are fewer women in software engineering.
People (especially on the left) seem to make that assumption more often than assuming that say, female teachers are more sexist, even though the gender skew in teaching is just as bad.
Interesting phraseology there. Truth is truth ... unless it supports "dumb and backwards ideas", in which case it's being twisted and/or cherry picked?
(I'm not picking on your viewpoint in particular; all sides do exactly the same thing.)
Not at all. At the end of the day the truth is the truth regardless of whether we like it or not. An idea isn't dumb or backward if it has proper validation.
The problem is that most people bringing this up are not doing so in an intellectually rigorous way. They are coming to the table with a pre-existing conclusion and then trying to fit data to support that conclusion. Both sides do this in fact, and approach / intent matters because doing this creates bias even if people try to stay neutral. That is a poor way to try to discover or talk about the truth. That's what I mean to say.
That's not at all what he said. What he said was "truth is truth if they've got high quality data to back up assertions," and "a lot of people believe dumb and backward ideas about other groups, and they'll twist and cherry pick the data to try to back up their biases without the nuance of presentation shown here." The difference is clear enough that your response appears a bit twisted and cherry-picked.
I have no idea why anyone could think that such a vastly sweeping generalization such as "all sides do exactly the same thing" might be anything other than false, but what is contrasted here is exactly two instances, two sides, in which people are not doing exactly the same thing. There is, on the one hand, the careful presentation of nuanced data in good faith — without a witting ulterior motive — and on the other hand, the selection of data on the basis of its ability to appear supportive of an a priori conclusion, something that can be done unwittingly, but which is just as often done wittingly.
Well, he followed that up with "twist and cherry pick the data". Certainly, truth is truth and "dumb and backwards" is misused to dismiss truths that go against a given sensibility regardless of whether the sensibility itself is actually rooted in truth. But the concern here has to do with cases of unjustified presumptions about particular people based on group membership.
What I found problematic is the phrase "automatically assume every individual in a given group conforms with these trends." In the context of this study, clearly, we all know that not everyone does conform. That's why people will describe men who exhibit typically feminine behavior as effeminate and women who exhibit typically masculine behavior as butch.
The question is what is the relation between statistical typicality and normativity? I would say that statistics carried out responsibly and in a broader context involving causal explanation can greatly aid in distinguishing properties from mere accidents, that is, traits proper to and (formally) causally entailed by a given sex versus traits are not intrinsically related to sex. So in the first case, we may speak of defective males and females. For instance, a male born without a penis or a female born without a uterus are defective in relation to the norm that follows from the sex. This is different than the case of a man or woman without the capacity for speech, where speech is proper to humans by virtue of being human, not something particular to a sex. These stand in opposition to traits that might only deserve a relative ranking (inferior and superior in some respect or in relation to some end, but not defective per se and further still not sex-specific). Similar things may be claimed w.r.t. so-called personality differences.
I speak only for myself. I find differences in human categories fascinating on some level, but I don't think we (humanity, HN, or even myself) are mature enough to discuss them without impacting the way we see and treat ourselves and others. Women score lower on math tests when reminded that they are women[0]. That's a horrible thing for a culture to do to an individual, and if women are sexist against themselves to the extent that it causes them to be worse at math then it seems obvious to me that men are expecting less of them as well (whether they're aware of it or not). I'm not saying discussion of gender differences should be censored, but I personally tend to not engage in them these days because I worry that propagating my views on gender differences will cause differences in both ability and treatment of individuals in ways that are hard to even measure or know whether you yourself are engaging in. This is one of those topics that might be best left to academics and future generations, depending on your goals and in what proportions you care about raw information v.s. treating humans kindly.
Thank you for bringing this up. The specific term, also a keyword in your linked paper, which describes this is "stereotype threat" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereotype_threat . I'm calling it out specifically only because it's handy to have a short phrase to describe the phenomenon, and I'm not sure if everyone is aware of it or not.
Because generally people use these kinds of articles to extrapolate from group to individual--and that's generally not a good idea.
Individuals break "typical" all the time.
If I'm interviewing you for a job, I shouldn't apply "group stereotype" as I'm specifically looking for your individual traits that break the norm. I don't want the "average" from your group--I probably want someone far from it.
> yes, women really are on average less suited for many technical pursuits, a conclusion which some people are simply unwilling to accept, even though such an assertion actually says little about individuals.
The discussion of nurture and nature here is extremely important. Also on the front page of HN today: an exposition of the treatment that young girls are subjected to on the internet. Girls are "nurtured" (abused) into the belief or understanding that they are first and foremost sex objects.
Of the women I work with: over 90% in technical roles were told that "math/science isn't for girls" by at least one teacher in grade school, around 70% were told something similar in university. Of those with PhDs, more than half were told that women aren't cut out for academia by their supervisor.
So whenever folks claim "even though such an assertion actually says little about individuals," it's ignorant, at best, to how our society talks about this.
I'm willing to accept that "on average" adult women aren't cut out for technical roles. But given my experience at the helm of university calculus classes, I must say that "on average," adult men aren't cut out for technical roles either. But unlike women, they haven't been told repeatedly by parents, teachers, advisors, pastors, supervisors, that they're incapable on account of their gender.
With all that "nurture" it's incredible that folks are inclined to make such strong assertions about "nature."
> Of those with PhDs, more than half were told that women aren't cut out for academia by their supervisor.
I want to respond to this but I'm having a hard time thinking of a response that isn't profane. I don't mean to aim my ire at you, the messenger, of course.
But seriously, is it really that bad? I mean when I did my degree ('74-'77 Exeter Uni., Physics) out of about forty of us only three got firsts and one was a woman, she went on to do a Ph. D. I'm pretty sure no one said any such thing to her.
Does it depend on which country you are in? I know of plenty of women in high technical positions in industry in Norway and I can't imagine that they suffer from this, at least not to that degree. I also can't imagine them suffering in silence.
Can you provide one modern scientific paper which examines how much nature, and not nurture, can have an effect on variations in achievement and participation in certain fields? Untill then one cannot handwave all inequities away as simply discrimination. Particularly when we have ample indirect proof that men and women are not equally able to perform certain tasks on average. This isn't a question of superiority, simply different adaptation after millions of years of sexually dimorphic evolution:
1. Male and female score distributions have different averages on certain tests, like spatial reasoning and verbal
2. Brain scans show different structure, which is used to identify trans individuals
3. Hormone concentrations and responses are different (particularly testosterone/estrogen)
4. Members of probably any other sexually dimorphic species, across the kingdoms will show different innate behaviors, and humans have inherited those millions of years of gender specialization - indirectly, wouldn't such innate preferences in humans, if they exist, predispose men and women to different skillsets, on average? Sure, the nature of human intelligence may make it that humans are the exception, but there are far too many other puzzle pieces to assemble before we can take that as fact.
This list is incomplete, and examples are easy to find. The only reason OP had to write such an article, stating what should be obvious, is that because of the pressures of recent politics, our society has come to conflate equality of opportunity with equality of outcome, a result of the denial of even the possibility that gender imbalance may occur in part or in whole without discrimination and bias. The socially acceptable position is that male and female abilities are distributed equally in the absence of social conditioning, and this is simply an unlikely condition if one looks at the facts. Not to say discrimination doesn't exist, but when we set parity quotas we entirely ignore nature in favor exclusively of nurture.
Consider also: if these abilities are normally distributed, as suggested by proxies like IQ, and there is a small difference, say of 5 points in means between men and women, the effects are going to be amplified at the outer edges of the normal curve and the higher average population will be substantially overrepresented a couple standard deviations out.
