8 ms·

Honest question, the general physical differences between the sexes or even races are undeniable, so why is it so taboo to talk about the differences that almos

Honest question, the general physical differences between the sexes or even races are undeniable, so why is it so taboo to talk about the differences that almost certainly exist in our minds?

foolrush 8y ago
Given that "race" is a social construct... https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2018/04/race-genetics-science-africa/?beta=true https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2018/04/race-gen...
- oh_sigh 8y ago
  Could an alien with no human social constructions differentiate between Bantu people and historically native Irish people?
  - dagw 8y ago
    They could also easily differentiate between brown eyed and blue eyed people. The social construct part comes in when you try to explain why one differentiation is more 'important' than the other.
    - googlryas 8y ago
      "eye color is a social construct" and "the importance of eye color is a social construct" are two completely separate ideas. OP clearly states '"race" is a social construct'.
      - pjc50 8y ago
        Eye color is a social construct because color is a social construct. The presence of the genes for coloration is the only unambiguous thing, and even then it's vulnerable to all sorts of anomalies in gene expression (heterochromia, chimericism etc)
        googlryas 8y ago
        Color is not a social construct.
        pdkl95 8y ago
        Yes, it is. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMqZR3pqMjg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMqZR3pqMjg
        googlryas 8y ago
        I thought you might be going there with that. That is how our learning teaches us to classify colors into finite groups(/names). That does not mean that color itself is a social construct.
        Turing_Machine 8y ago
        Right. Not having specific names for two colors is an entirely different thing from being unable to recognize that one color is different to the other.
      - monadgonad 8y ago
        > "eye color is a social construct" and "the importance of eye color is a social construct" are two completely separate ideas. And that's the point. In ths case, "race" is equivalent to "the importance of eye colour", because "race" is the importance and social meaning we build around certain genetic differences.
        oh_sigh 8y ago
        If race is equivalent to the 'importance of eye color', does that mean 'the importance of race' is the 'importance of the importance of race'? Why does race automatically have some kind of value judgement associated with it but eye color does not? Just because people have used it as a standard of other-ness in the past doesn't mean that the qualities have ceased to independently exist.
  - Symmetry 8y ago
    They certainly could. But they wouldn't group Khoisans and Bantus together as "Black" compared to the Irish person being "White". Traditional racial categories fail to carve reality at the joints and modern geneticists will always use terms like "ancestry" rather than "race" because the later just has too much baggage to deal with.
- kgwgk 8y ago
  Animal taxonomy is also a social construct: phylum, class, order, family, genus, species are all labels that we have created and not an intrinsic property of animals.
  - rubatuga 8y ago
    That last bit isn’t true, species are not a social construct.
    - kgwgk 8y ago
      They are to some extent: there are hybrids, rings, and other edge cases.
- faissaloo 8y ago
  Social constructionism isn't an argument, some social constructs are more useful than others so you need to argue why race is not a useful social construct (which I happen to agree with)
jmcgough 8y ago
Because we have a long history of using differences as a justification for subjugation.
- oh_sigh 8y ago
  So according to you, this is the field that science is not allowed to peer into, but research into weapons of war such as artillery, attack aircraft, biological weapons, nuclear weapons, etc are all just fine? But watch out - racism and sexism are the true threats to our species and not a nuclear holocaust. Are anatomists who study how to classify ancient skeletons as male or female contributing to this system of subjugation?
  - scott113341 8y ago
    I don't think jmcgough made such a claim, just offered an explanation for "why is it so taboo to talk about the differences..."
    - googlryas 8y ago
      Can you study something if you can't talk about it openly? Or, if one and only one conclusion is acceptable to be reached? I'll admit that OP didn't directly make this claim, but it seems like a reasonable conclusion from their post that they believe this is a dangerous topic to study because of the possibility of bad people using science badly.
      - jmcgough 8y ago
        I'm not saying that it shouldn't be discussed or studied, but that knee-jerk reactions to the topic are understandable. It's similar to the german ban on depictions of the nazi party - there are some discussions that can be healthy and useful, but rarely are because of the strong emotions they stoke.
        oh_sigh 8y ago
dvfjsdhgfv 8y ago
> the general physical differences between the sexes or even races are undeniable This was a case some decades ago. Read the introduction to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_(human_categorization) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_(human_categorization) - even the use of the word "race" is problematic today.
- oh_sigh 8y ago
  Could we use the word 'breed' then, instead of race? I guarantee you that if you showed me a mixed room of hundreds of native Danes and Sentinelese - I could classify them as easily as one could classify chihuahuas vs great danes.
  - charlesism 8y ago
    > if you showed me a mixed room of hundreds of > native Danes and Sentinelese - I could classify them What relevance does that have? Could you reliably tell a Dane from a Greek? How about a Sentinelese from a Pakistani? When people say "race" is a social construct, they don't - well, unless they're morons - mean that people aren't more different, the more distantly-related they are. It's the categories that are the social construction. Because anyone who really thinks about it carefully enough, can see those categories are arbitrary. If history had been a bit different, and we hadn't come to lump brown- and blue-eyed people into the same "race," you might have written this... > if you showed me a mixed room of hundreds of > native Brundanes and Bladanes - I could classify them
    - googlryas 8y ago
      > What relevance does that have? It shows, at least in this contrived example, that the information is present in the individuals and not in the brain of the classifier. I don't understand your last point. Is it wrong to say that I could extremely accurately classify blue and brown eyed people?
      - charlesism 8y ago
pk3469 8y ago
Uncomfortable answer: because the SJW movement is rabidly attacking anyone who dares to even state these facts. This is causing moderate people to stay quiet on the issue while the SJW movement expands and gains more ground, which in turn allows them to attack individuals for even less controversial claims. Race and gender are nothing but social constructs. Anyone who disagrees is dismissed a misogynistic Nazi. I've experienced this with a close friend who is trans. I supported them all the way, until one day they told me I'm a hateful person because I don't want to stop using the gendered pronouns 'he' and 'she' when referring to everyday people in everyday settings.
Arnt 8y ago
Because the differences are small. Insignificant. If you take some group of 1000 people which has been selected in some way that skews towards intelligence, you might find that the men have IQ 105.14 on average and the women 105.13. Like, wow. You can find groups with bigger differences if you're willing to pick an obscure group, but then you have a bigger but more obscure difference. If you talk about that you risk attracting the companionship of people who need to get a life, or sounding like one of those people.
- buboard 8y ago
  it's all about the edges of distribution though. If equality of the means mattered, countries across the world would be very similar economically, which unfortunately is not the case.
  - Arnt 8y ago
    It's ALL about the edges? What does that mean? What are the edges, and why does nothing else matter?
    - imron 8y ago
      The entire greater male variability theory (which is what is under discussion here) It claims that while averages for men and women are the same, you get more men at the high IQ end of the spectrum and also more men at the lower end of the IQ spectrum (which balance out the average). The whole argument is predicated on what happens at the edges of the normal distribution, not what happens at the center.
    - Knuffer123 8y ago
      I believe he refers to the fact that all "important" positions are selected from the bottom/top tier. We don't imprison random people from the population, we imprison the most aggressive (in case of violent crime at least). We hire people with top IQ for engineering and science related endevours. We promote people who work the hardest ("industriousness") The most ambitious people get the top jobs. It doesn't matter if on average two groups are the same for those qualifiers, if only the top 1% are selected, then you would expect which ever group has the flattest bell-curve distribution (and thus more "on the edge") to be over-represented (whether it is gender, "race", age). If it isn't, then racism/sexism/whateverism is at work. Caveat: with top IQ in engineering, an important factor that only people who "like things more than people" apply, other way around for loads of other fields.
tarsinge 8y ago
Bad timing. The hot issue today is overcoming discriminations and social pressure, which to my knowledge dwarf any physical effects. That doesn't mean that these research should not be discussed, but I can understand why introducing a side discussion is frowned upon, because that's not the kind of subtle analysis that you'll get in click-baity links and twitter posts. In this very particular context, if I had to choose between publishing a theorical scientific paper on marginal physical effects and undermining efforts for a better society having effects on real people, I may hesitate.
- buboard 8y ago
  > The hot issue today is overcoming discriminations and social pressure, which to my knowledge dwarf any physical effects That is an extremely unscientific statement, let alone logically false. It's impossible to attach a moral value to any scientific finding anywhere, especially a priori. There are always both good and bad consequences, impossible to predict. And if you are coming to science with a predefined set of results you find acceptable, you 're not a scientist, period.
  - tarsinge 8y ago
    Sorry maybe my sentence wasn't clear, my point is that we can't be naive and discuss these kinds of scientific results in a vacuum ignoring their misinterpretation in a related public debate. Quite the contrary, I don't see how it's scientific to draw conclusions from these specific results to the general state of society, something that unfortunately will happen.
    - Rivers68 8y ago
      Your second sentence seems rather terrible to me. Of course, it's not scientific if Fox News takes Hill's article and uses it to justify "bad things" (e.g. less advocacy for women in the work place and academia). However, Fox News is not a scientific organization so the "not scientific" label is tautological. What you are saying seems to be, "Don't do science on gender differences because if you do the other side will take it and use it to justify atrocities." Is it our (day) job to fight the political battles of the world? No, it's our job to do science. To start with, frankly, as a society it's high time we told our journalists to stop mucking around in our research journals. Today I will wake up and see how scientists discovered that coffee is terrible for my health, and then tomorrow I will hear that scientists are concerned I'm not drinking enough coffee. The problem isn't the scientists. The problem is journalists who don't know when to publish a scientific article (i.e. when there's a major breakthrough, and then only tentatively; or after a new theory or discovery is thoroughly understood). Routine papers, no matter how thrilling, should not be commented on in the media. That has nothing to do with what we do as scientists: we should continue to try to publish our incremental achievements. It has to do with our responsibilities as citizens. It's high time we all (not just scientists) made it clear this behavior from journalists is embarrassing as well as meddlesome. Secondly, when we act as though certain ideas are "dangerous," we embolden our political opponents and we also teach our students/children that those ideas are very likely to be true. Nuance says that women can have on average lower IQs than men and we can still treat them like our metaphysical and political equals. When we act as though that's impossible, we show our opponents how weak our leadership really is. We also suggest to our students that perhaps the truth is other than what we, the scientists and academicians, are saying. Dangerous to whom?, they might rightly ask. Those for whom the status quo is most beneficial? Is that more likely to be the professor or the student? In short, I don't think it's naive to discuss academically the variability hypothesis or other politically contentious topics without regard for the negative societal impacts. Those impacts are not our bailiwick. The real question is: does our side ("the left," say, or your favorite political party) have the strong institutions and grassroots network to resist when others want to pervert our discussions or research? One thing will not end: the other side will continue to try to push its agenda, and sometimes, as I already alluded to, this will constitute atrocities, big or small. Therefore, we need a strong community and real leadership to counteract this. That is not the purview of our scientific life. It is part of our civic life, one which I find lately is being neglected more and more (and not just by scientists). In the US, the Republican Party is apparently quite good at rallying its people and getting them out to vote. It also has few scruples where spreading misinformation or hateful rhetoric is concerned. What compounds this and makes it worse is the Democratic Party acts as though various fashionable ideas in or around social science ("white privilege," "unconscious bias," "microaggressions") and certain social questions (acceptability of homosexuality, deference owed to questions of race) were God given and don't require campaigning or explanation. On the contrary, as someone in math, I have never been schooled in what can be done to cure unconscious bias, for instance, or whether or not psychologists have any evidence to suggest talking about unconscious bias will do anything other than p*ss off a lot of otherwise sympathetic people. If Democrats or social scientists or whomever care so much about some of these issues, the politically practical and, indeed, moral thing to do is to really spend the time bringing people over to their side. As far as I'm concerned, this is not being done, but instead the work has been replaced by a combination of social media outrage and "public shaming" and belittling idealogical opponents by making references to obscure studies the vast majority of us have not been educated well enough to understand. (With regard to referencing an obscure paper or five, see my discussion of journalists getting out of our research journals. I am beginning to feel the same should apply to good faith conversations between non-experts.) Please, understand me. There is doing science and then there is doing politics. No question, if you are doing difficult science on biology or sociology, that only adds to the weight of your political duties. However, that is not an excuse to abandon the science (or relegate some of it to the dangerous pile) altogether.
Yoric 8y ago
Three answers to this. 1. Look at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17949340 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17949340 for a more detailed account of what happened. This specific story is not a case of taboo, it's a case of attempting to publish something that's not science in a science journal, being of course rejected, and reframing the rejection as a taboo. 2. It can be discussed, but this kind of discussion invariably attracts people who are not there to discuss, but only to impose their political/social views. Some because they feel that it's a good opportunity to attack women, some because they feel that the conversation is going to end up being an attack on women regardless. In either case, it's pretty much guaranteed to degenerate into anything but a meaningful conversation. 3. Also, it took us millennia to accept that maybe women are just human beings, after all, and some people still can't accept that, so maybe our society just isn't mature enough yet to have that conversation. Maybe once humanity has finally mastered the fine art of polite, meaningful conversations on Twitter and Facebook, things will be better :) edit Reworded a bit.
- doombolt 8y ago
  > so maybe our society just isn't mature enough yet to have that conversation. Basically you're telling us that "maybe" you should have the power to censor us. For some values of (you, us). Maybe not. Definitely not. (I also think that you're factually wrong in 1)
  - quotemstr 8y ago
    That's truly astounding to me about this affair is that so many people --- here, on the Quillette thread, and in other forums --- have plainly stated that there are some truths that need to be kept from the public for their own good, sequestered in "scientific guilds" until the public is "ready". I really just have no words for how terrible this idea is and how angry it makes me. We could have had an industrial revolution thousands of years ago, massively increasing human welfare, but for a paranoid and secretive thinking that made it impossible to build a real scientific community, test ideas, and find the ones that worked. These "scientific guild" ideas are the ones that condemned humanity to thousands of years of pointless alchemy while people died of cholera in filthy streets. To want to return to this medieval mindset is inexcusable. It's ignorant. It's anti-humanism. Look: any time you have to ask yourself "should we deliberately lie to the public about reality?", take a step back and consider whether you're actually the villain from the history books.
buboard 8y ago
It is taboo because things like IQ matter, economically. In the past, height and brawn would be seen as equally significant discriminators, but we have grown over that as cultures. In the future, AIs will make us all equally dumb and intellectually lazy, then we can get over it. Another thing is the sciences which deal with these matters are highly politicized. It's always been hard to establish facts on empirical results alone because they are not purely sciences, they keep a lot of "art" in them.
hef19898 8y ago
One reason certainly is that the physical differences betwen individuals regardless of sex are bigger than those between sexes. Also, the measurable physical differences in the brain structure of women and men are there but totally insignificant with regards to intelligence. Side note, there is no way measuring intelligence based on a MRT-scan of ones brain. Also, history might help, humanity had some bad experience with People judging stuff like intelligence based on visible physical differences. I suggest to leave These questions to actual neuro-scientists and not People who tried to apply mathematics to a question they didn't really understand in the first place.
- mg96226 8y ago
  If the differences between sexes are less impactful than differences between individuals, why is virtually every olympic sport segregated by gender, with significant deltas in performance at every part of the performance distribution? Why are purely intellectual competitions like chess also segregated by gender due to a performance disparity?
  - hef19898 8y ago
    As stated in a different post, there are differences. Of course there are. My Point is that in a world in which Technology and the capability of using said Technology is getting the deciding factor the physical differences between sexes are getting less relevant. Also, if you take boxing athletes are put into different weight classes. Making it rather futile to tell if Floyd Mayweather or Anthony Jushua is the better boxer, right? Also, out of experience, These differences are much less pronounced if do not only look at Olympia-Level individuals. But I digress.
    - mg96226 8y ago
      That is not what you wrote in the gp post. You specifically referred to physical differences and now you're back-pedalling because that argument crumbled. Stop and read what you're writing. All you have to offer are personal anecdotes and personally biased speculation which is contrary to trivial evidence. A rational person would re-evaluate their beliefs at this point. 'There is not a gender skill gap when it comes to using technology' is a very different argument to 'certainly is that the physical differences betwen individuals regardless of sex are bigger than those between sexes'
mattmanser 8y ago
Undeniable? No. Amongst the other issues stated, this isn't necessarily a physical difference, it could be purely a societal one. All these studies suffer from a bias that we can't get rid of unless we assume it's not true for a few generations, namely is the effect due to nature vs nurture. Whether it's race or sex, if society favour one race or sex over the others, how can we ever know if it's due to something in the genes, or due to the general favours, special treatment or encouragement that particular sections of society receive that caused the imbalance? If you are told while young that you should be a house proud parent rather than a DIY parent, a Princess instead of a Knight, a Hostess rather than a Pilot[1], of course these "undeniable" differences are going to emerge. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/aug/22/sexist-tui-airways-crew-gave-different-badges-to-girls-and-boys https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/aug/22/sexist-tui-air...
- olleromam91 8y ago
  But why would a society favour one race or sex over another in the first place? Where does this bias originate?
  - mattmanser 8y ago
    Because a particular group entrenches themselves in power.
root_axis 8y ago
Saying "the differences between the races are undeniable" is a tautology; races are a construction based on observable differences, it could not be any other way. The ill-defined phenotypical traits that are used to group people into the various races only account for the minuscule fraction of their DNA that can be discerned with the naked eye.
- pl1234 8y ago
  Genotypic differences usually correlate strongly (although not always) with phenotypic differences. Continental races can easily be distinguished on phenotype alone.
JoeAltmaier 8y ago
Because minds are plastic and can be trained and acculturated. And because all minds are worthwhile beings. To start ranking and rating them is no more productive than it is at company-review time. Its unproductive, caustic and demeaning. And generally tiny differences are blown up into rationalizations for vast discrimination schemes by people with an agenda.

Honest question, the general physical differences between the sexes or even races are undeniable, so why is it so taboo to talk about the differences that almost certainly exist in our minds?

foolrush 8y ago

Given that "race" is a social construct... https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2018/04/race-genetics-science-africa/?beta=true https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2018/04/race-gen...

oh_sigh 8y ago
Could an alien with no human social constructions differentiate between Bantu people and historically native Irish people?
- dagw 8y ago
  They could also easily differentiate between brown eyed and blue eyed people. The social construct part comes in when you try to explain why one differentiation is more 'important' than the other.
  - googlryas 8y ago
    "eye color is a social construct" and "the importance of eye color is a social construct" are two completely separate ideas. OP clearly states '"race" is a social construct'.
    - pjc50 8y ago
      Eye color is a social construct because color is a social construct. The presence of the genes for coloration is the only unambiguous thing, and even then it's vulnerable to all sorts of anomalies in gene expression (heterochromia, chimericism etc)
      - googlryas 8y ago
        Color is not a social construct.
        pdkl95 8y ago
        Yes, it is. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMqZR3pqMjg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMqZR3pqMjg
        googlryas 8y ago
        I thought you might be going there with that. That is how our learning teaches us to classify colors into finite groups(/names). That does not mean that color itself is a social construct.
        Turing_Machine 8y ago
        Right. Not having specific names for two colors is an entirely different thing from being unable to recognize that one color is different to the other.
    - monadgonad 8y ago
      > "eye color is a social construct" and "the importance of eye color is a social construct" are two completely separate ideas. And that's the point. In ths case, "race" is equivalent to "the importance of eye colour", because "race" is the importance and social meaning we build around certain genetic differences.
      - oh_sigh 8y ago
        If race is equivalent to the 'importance of eye color', does that mean 'the importance of race' is the 'importance of the importance of race'? Why does race automatically have some kind of value judgement associated with it but eye color does not? Just because people have used it as a standard of other-ness in the past doesn't mean that the qualities have ceased to independently exist.
- Symmetry 8y ago
  They certainly could. But they wouldn't group Khoisans and Bantus together as "Black" compared to the Irish person being "White". Traditional racial categories fail to carve reality at the joints and modern geneticists will always use terms like "ancestry" rather than "race" because the later just has too much baggage to deal with.
kgwgk 8y ago
Animal taxonomy is also a social construct: phylum, class, order, family, genus, species are all labels that we have created and not an intrinsic property of animals.
- rubatuga 8y ago
  That last bit isn’t true, species are not a social construct.
  - kgwgk 8y ago
    They are to some extent: there are hybrids, rings, and other edge cases.
faissaloo 8y ago
Social constructionism isn't an argument, some social constructs are more useful than others so you need to argue why race is not a useful social construct (which I happen to agree with)

jmcgough 8y ago

Because we have a long history of using differences as a justification for subjugation.

oh_sigh 8y ago
So according to you, this is the field that science is not allowed to peer into, but research into weapons of war such as artillery, attack aircraft, biological weapons, nuclear weapons, etc are all just fine? But watch out - racism and sexism are the true threats to our species and not a nuclear holocaust. Are anatomists who study how to classify ancient skeletons as male or female contributing to this system of subjugation?
- scott113341 8y ago
  I don't think jmcgough made such a claim, just offered an explanation for "why is it so taboo to talk about the differences..."
  - googlryas 8y ago
    Can you study something if you can't talk about it openly? Or, if one and only one conclusion is acceptable to be reached? I'll admit that OP didn't directly make this claim, but it seems like a reasonable conclusion from their post that they believe this is a dangerous topic to study because of the possibility of bad people using science badly.
    - jmcgough 8y ago
      I'm not saying that it shouldn't be discussed or studied, but that knee-jerk reactions to the topic are understandable. It's similar to the german ban on depictions of the nazi party - there are some discussions that can be healthy and useful, but rarely are because of the strong emotions they stoke.
      - oh_sigh 8y ago

dvfjsdhgfv 8y ago

> the general physical differences between the sexes or even races are undeniable This was a case some decades ago. Read the introduction to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_(human_categorization) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_(human_categorization) - even the use of the word "race" is problematic today.

oh_sigh 8y ago
Could we use the word 'breed' then, instead of race? I guarantee you that if you showed me a mixed room of hundreds of native Danes and Sentinelese - I could classify them as easily as one could classify chihuahuas vs great danes.
- charlesism 8y ago
  > if you showed me a mixed room of hundreds of > native Danes and Sentinelese - I could classify them What relevance does that have? Could you reliably tell a Dane from a Greek? How about a Sentinelese from a Pakistani? When people say "race" is a social construct, they don't - well, unless they're morons - mean that people aren't more different, the more distantly-related they are. It's the categories that are the social construction. Because anyone who really thinks about it carefully enough, can see those categories are arbitrary. If history had been a bit different, and we hadn't come to lump brown- and blue-eyed people into the same "race," you might have written this... > if you showed me a mixed room of hundreds of > native Brundanes and Bladanes - I could classify them
  - googlryas 8y ago
    > What relevance does that have? It shows, at least in this contrived example, that the information is present in the individuals and not in the brain of the classifier. I don't understand your last point. Is it wrong to say that I could extremely accurately classify blue and brown eyed people?
    - charlesism 8y ago

pk3469 8y ago

Uncomfortable answer: because the SJW movement is rabidly attacking anyone who dares to even state these facts. This is causing moderate people to stay quiet on the issue while the SJW movement expands and gains more ground, which in turn allows them to attack individuals for even less controversial claims. Race and gender are nothing but social constructs. Anyone who disagrees is dismissed a misogynistic Nazi. I've experienced this with a close friend who is trans. I supported them all the way, until one day they told me I'm a hateful person because I don't want to stop using the gendered pronouns 'he' and 'she' when referring to everyday people in everyday settings.

Arnt 8y ago

Because the differences are small. Insignificant. If you take some group of 1000 people which has been selected in some way that skews towards intelligence, you might find that the men have IQ 105.14 on average and the women 105.13. Like, wow. You can find groups with bigger differences if you're willing to pick an obscure group, but then you have a bigger but more obscure difference. If you talk about that you risk attracting the companionship of people who need to get a life, or sounding like one of those people.

buboard 8y ago
it's all about the edges of distribution though. If equality of the means mattered, countries across the world would be very similar economically, which unfortunately is not the case.
- Arnt 8y ago
  It's ALL about the edges? What does that mean? What are the edges, and why does nothing else matter?
  - imron 8y ago
    The entire greater male variability theory (which is what is under discussion here) It claims that while averages for men and women are the same, you get more men at the high IQ end of the spectrum and also more men at the lower end of the IQ spectrum (which balance out the average). The whole argument is predicated on what happens at the edges of the normal distribution, not what happens at the center.
  - Knuffer123 8y ago
    I believe he refers to the fact that all "important" positions are selected from the bottom/top tier. We don't imprison random people from the population, we imprison the most aggressive (in case of violent crime at least). We hire people with top IQ for engineering and science related endevours. We promote people who work the hardest ("industriousness") The most ambitious people get the top jobs. It doesn't matter if on average two groups are the same for those qualifiers, if only the top 1% are selected, then you would expect which ever group has the flattest bell-curve distribution (and thus more "on the edge") to be over-represented (whether it is gender, "race", age). If it isn't, then racism/sexism/whateverism is at work. Caveat: with top IQ in engineering, an important factor that only people who "like things more than people" apply, other way around for loads of other fields.

tarsinge 8y ago

Bad timing. The hot issue today is overcoming discriminations and social pressure, which to my knowledge dwarf any physical effects. That doesn't mean that these research should not be discussed, but I can understand why introducing a side discussion is frowned upon, because that's not the kind of subtle analysis that you'll get in click-baity links and twitter posts. In this very particular context, if I had to choose between publishing a theorical scientific paper on marginal physical effects and undermining efforts for a better society having effects on real people, I may hesitate.

buboard 8y ago
> The hot issue today is overcoming discriminations and social pressure, which to my knowledge dwarf any physical effects That is an extremely unscientific statement, let alone logically false. It's impossible to attach a moral value to any scientific finding anywhere, especially a priori. There are always both good and bad consequences, impossible to predict. And if you are coming to science with a predefined set of results you find acceptable, you 're not a scientist, period.
- tarsinge 8y ago
  Sorry maybe my sentence wasn't clear, my point is that we can't be naive and discuss these kinds of scientific results in a vacuum ignoring their misinterpretation in a related public debate. Quite the contrary, I don't see how it's scientific to draw conclusions from these specific results to the general state of society, something that unfortunately will happen.
  - Rivers68 8y ago
    Your second sentence seems rather terrible to me. Of course, it's not scientific if Fox News takes Hill's article and uses it to justify "bad things" (e.g. less advocacy for women in the work place and academia). However, Fox News is not a scientific organization so the "not scientific" label is tautological. What you are saying seems to be, "Don't do science on gender differences because if you do the other side will take it and use it to justify atrocities." Is it our (day) job to fight the political battles of the world? No, it's our job to do science. To start with, frankly, as a society it's high time we told our journalists to stop mucking around in our research journals. Today I will wake up and see how scientists discovered that coffee is terrible for my health, and then tomorrow I will hear that scientists are concerned I'm not drinking enough coffee. The problem isn't the scientists. The problem is journalists who don't know when to publish a scientific article (i.e. when there's a major breakthrough, and then only tentatively; or after a new theory or discovery is thoroughly understood). Routine papers, no matter how thrilling, should not be commented on in the media. That has nothing to do with what we do as scientists: we should continue to try to publish our incremental achievements. It has to do with our responsibilities as citizens. It's high time we all (not just scientists) made it clear this behavior from journalists is embarrassing as well as meddlesome. Secondly, when we act as though certain ideas are "dangerous," we embolden our political opponents and we also teach our students/children that those ideas are very likely to be true. Nuance says that women can have on average lower IQs than men and we can still treat them like our metaphysical and political equals. When we act as though that's impossible, we show our opponents how weak our leadership really is. We also suggest to our students that perhaps the truth is other than what we, the scientists and academicians, are saying. Dangerous to whom?, they might rightly ask. Those for whom the status quo is most beneficial? Is that more likely to be the professor or the student? In short, I don't think it's naive to discuss academically the variability hypothesis or other politically contentious topics without regard for the negative societal impacts. Those impacts are not our bailiwick. The real question is: does our side ("the left," say, or your favorite political party) have the strong institutions and grassroots network to resist when others want to pervert our discussions or research? One thing will not end: the other side will continue to try to push its agenda, and sometimes, as I already alluded to, this will constitute atrocities, big or small. Therefore, we need a strong community and real leadership to counteract this. That is not the purview of our scientific life. It is part of our civic life, one which I find lately is being neglected more and more (and not just by scientists). In the US, the Republican Party is apparently quite good at rallying its people and getting them out to vote. It also has few scruples where spreading misinformation or hateful rhetoric is concerned. What compounds this and makes it worse is the Democratic Party acts as though various fashionable ideas in or around social science ("white privilege," "unconscious bias," "microaggressions") and certain social questions (acceptability of homosexuality, deference owed to questions of race) were God given and don't require campaigning or explanation. On the contrary, as someone in math, I have never been schooled in what can be done to cure unconscious bias, for instance, or whether or not psychologists have any evidence to suggest talking about unconscious bias will do anything other than p*ss off a lot of otherwise sympathetic people. If Democrats or social scientists or whomever care so much about some of these issues, the politically practical and, indeed, moral thing to do is to really spend the time bringing people over to their side. As far as I'm concerned, this is not being done, but instead the work has been replaced by a combination of social media outrage and "public shaming" and belittling idealogical opponents by making references to obscure studies the vast majority of us have not been educated well enough to understand. (With regard to referencing an obscure paper or five, see my discussion of journalists getting out of our research journals. I am beginning to feel the same should apply to good faith conversations between non-experts.) Please, understand me. There is doing science and then there is doing politics. No question, if you are doing difficult science on biology or sociology, that only adds to the weight of your political duties. However, that is not an excuse to abandon the science (or relegate some of it to the dangerous pile) altogether.

Yoric 8y ago

Three answers to this. 1. Look at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17949340 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17949340 for a more detailed account of what happened. This specific story is not a case of taboo, it's a case of attempting to publish something that's not science in a science journal, being of course rejected, and reframing the rejection as a taboo. 2. It can be discussed, but this kind of discussion invariably attracts people who are not there to discuss, but only to impose their political/social views. Some because they feel that it's a good opportunity to attack women, some because they feel that the conversation is going to end up being an attack on women regardless. In either case, it's pretty much guaranteed to degenerate into anything but a meaningful conversation. 3. Also, it took us millennia to accept that maybe women are just human beings, after all, and some people still can't accept that, so maybe our society just isn't mature enough yet to have that conversation. Maybe once humanity has finally mastered the fine art of polite, meaningful conversations on Twitter and Facebook, things will be better :) edit Reworded a bit.

doombolt 8y ago
> so maybe our society just isn't mature enough yet to have that conversation. Basically you're telling us that "maybe" you should have the power to censor us. For some values of (you, us). Maybe not. Definitely not. (I also think that you're factually wrong in 1)
- quotemstr 8y ago
  That's truly astounding to me about this affair is that so many people --- here, on the Quillette thread, and in other forums --- have plainly stated that there are some truths that need to be kept from the public for their own good, sequestered in "scientific guilds" until the public is "ready". I really just have no words for how terrible this idea is and how angry it makes me. We could have had an industrial revolution thousands of years ago, massively increasing human welfare, but for a paranoid and secretive thinking that made it impossible to build a real scientific community, test ideas, and find the ones that worked. These "scientific guild" ideas are the ones that condemned humanity to thousands of years of pointless alchemy while people died of cholera in filthy streets. To want to return to this medieval mindset is inexcusable. It's ignorant. It's anti-humanism. Look: any time you have to ask yourself "should we deliberately lie to the public about reality?", take a step back and consider whether you're actually the villain from the history books.

buboard 8y ago

It is taboo because things like IQ matter, economically. In the past, height and brawn would be seen as equally significant discriminators, but we have grown over that as cultures. In the future, AIs will make us all equally dumb and intellectually lazy, then we can get over it. Another thing is the sciences which deal with these matters are highly politicized. It's always been hard to establish facts on empirical results alone because they are not purely sciences, they keep a lot of "art" in them.

hef19898 8y ago

One reason certainly is that the physical differences betwen individuals regardless of sex are bigger than those between sexes. Also, the measurable physical differences in the brain structure of women and men are there but totally insignificant with regards to intelligence. Side note, there is no way measuring intelligence based on a MRT-scan of ones brain. Also, history might help, humanity had some bad experience with People judging stuff like intelligence based on visible physical differences. I suggest to leave These questions to actual neuro-scientists and not People who tried to apply mathematics to a question they didn't really understand in the first place.

mg96226 8y ago
If the differences between sexes are less impactful than differences between individuals, why is virtually every olympic sport segregated by gender, with significant deltas in performance at every part of the performance distribution? Why are purely intellectual competitions like chess also segregated by gender due to a performance disparity?
- hef19898 8y ago
  As stated in a different post, there are differences. Of course there are. My Point is that in a world in which Technology and the capability of using said Technology is getting the deciding factor the physical differences between sexes are getting less relevant. Also, if you take boxing athletes are put into different weight classes. Making it rather futile to tell if Floyd Mayweather or Anthony Jushua is the better boxer, right? Also, out of experience, These differences are much less pronounced if do not only look at Olympia-Level individuals. But I digress.
  - mg96226 8y ago
    That is not what you wrote in the gp post. You specifically referred to physical differences and now you're back-pedalling because that argument crumbled. Stop and read what you're writing. All you have to offer are personal anecdotes and personally biased speculation which is contrary to trivial evidence. A rational person would re-evaluate their beliefs at this point. 'There is not a gender skill gap when it comes to using technology' is a very different argument to 'certainly is that the physical differences betwen individuals regardless of sex are bigger than those between sexes'

mattmanser 8y ago

Undeniable? No. Amongst the other issues stated, this isn't necessarily a physical difference, it could be purely a societal one. All these studies suffer from a bias that we can't get rid of unless we assume it's not true for a few generations, namely is the effect due to nature vs nurture. Whether it's race or sex, if society favour one race or sex over the others, how can we ever know if it's due to something in the genes, or due to the general favours, special treatment or encouragement that particular sections of society receive that caused the imbalance? If you are told while young that you should be a house proud parent rather than a DIY parent, a Princess instead of a Knight, a Hostess rather than a Pilot[1], of course these "undeniable" differences are going to emerge. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/aug/22/sexist-tui-airways-crew-gave-different-badges-to-girls-and-boys https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/aug/22/sexist-tui-air...

olleromam91 8y ago
But why would a society favour one race or sex over another in the first place? Where does this bias originate?
- mattmanser 8y ago
  Because a particular group entrenches themselves in power.

root_axis 8y ago

Saying "the differences between the races are undeniable" is a tautology; races are a construction based on observable differences, it could not be any other way. The ill-defined phenotypical traits that are used to group people into the various races only account for the minuscule fraction of their DNA that can be discerned with the naked eye.

pl1234 8y ago
Genotypic differences usually correlate strongly (although not always) with phenotypic differences. Continental races can easily be distinguished on phenotype alone.

JoeAltmaier 8y ago

Because minds are plastic and can be trained and acculturated. And because all minds are worthwhile beings. To start ranking and rating them is no more productive than it is at company-review time. Its unproductive, caustic and demeaning. And generally tiny differences are blown up into rationalizations for vast discrimination schemes by people with an agenda.