3 ms·

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 wh

by 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.
  - doombolt 8y ago
    So many people have zero understanding of mathematical modelling but insist that they're in position to judge research in this area from moral standpoint. It's The Holy Inquisition, crowdsource edition.
TangoTrotFox 8y ago
In my opinion not discussing things because you think the topic is going to be potentially harmful, or discussion 'impolite', is regressive. Those are the very things that most need active and open discussion. Otherwise it's akin to aiming to have kids never do drugs by never talking about them, or when you do talk about them to present them as caricatures that anybody with an ounce of grey matter can realize is out of touch with reality. D.A.R.E., for instance, actually resulted in higher drug use among participants! I think a major part of the extremism that seems to be slowly gripping America is largely because a lack of any dialogue between sides that disagree. Instead people surround themselves with 'safe' voices and fall deeper and deeper into the bowels of their own view system, which also tends to correspond to a fall further and further from anything resembling reality. Another example would be religion. Religion is quite dangerous and is now dying in the western world. But it's not dying because people stopped talking about it. Far from it -- to this very day we have god on all of our money, kids pledge allegiance to a nation under god, you swear oaths on a religious text under god, and so on. The reason it's dying is because people actively talk about it and advocates for religion are at a loss for a rational and compelling argument in favor of it.
- pk3469 8y ago
  This censorship 2.0 mindset has permeated even HN, the supposed bastion of rationality. No discussion, no counter argument, just downvotes for posts like this. Anyone who's expressed this kind of opinion has probably seen their score fluctuate between double digit positives and negatives until finally settling into downvoted flagged state. This is clearly a divisive topic, but the censorship side is dominant.
reversecs 8y ago
The idea that we need to establish consensus on a false truth before we can reveal a real truth doesn't make sense to me. 1. We can still agree that men and women are humans and that we all deserve ways rights 2. The inevitable differences maybe show that men are less capable than women in a variety of fronts (wouldn't that be great for women's rights?). 3. Once a lie has been installed into every boy and girl, raising the truth will only become more and more difficult. Making a decision to disseminate a lie constitutes gaslighting in the way that people will have hunches and experiences that society can suddenly deny. Speaking up will get you instant attention and result in a wreck for ones career. We are already seeing this today. I couldn't imagine posting this opinion except anonymously.
- ubernostrum 8y ago
  We can agree that there are differences between the average male human and the average female human, sure. But that's generally not what's being argued. What's usually being argued is something more like "it is incontrovertibly and undeniably proven beyond all doubt that evolution has deeply and unalterably hard-wired female humans not to be as good as male humans at programming computers, and therefore it is an inescapable conclusion that we should stop caring whether men outnumber women among computer programmers, and we should immediately cease all efforts to teach/encourage more women to be computer programmers." I'm not even exaggerating. This is why people want to make these kinds of "well, women and men are different, you know" arguments. The "well, women just aren't as good at this" or "well, women just aren't as interested in this" arguments have been tried in multiple fields, and have fallen over flat in the face of actual empirical evidence over and over and over. But people keep desperately trying to revive them and say "Ah, but this field is different! The females really are inferior and less interested in our field, and we have science truths to back it up!" Also, here's a takedown from someone who just did basic math back during the initial burst of drama around Damore's "diversity memo". It's very hard, once you check the math, to accept that we have any basis for asserting that observed ratios of men and women in STEM have a biological basis: https://twitter.com/search?f=tweets&q=from%3Awikisteff%20since%3A2017-08-09%20until%3A2017-08-10&src=typd https://twitter.com/search?f=tweets&q=from%3Awikisteff%20sin... That's a link to a date-based search. Scroll until you see "if there were large biological gender differences in STEM, you'd see it", and then start reading up from there for the replies. I have to link you to that, because the thread was in reply to, disagreeing with, and debunking a tweet that's now deleted, and that apparently breaks Twitter's threading. The deleted tweet being debunked, for what it's worth, is from a user whose Twitter bio says she is "founder and editor" of Quillette, the site hosting the claims of the author of the "uncomfortable truth" paper this HN thread is about.

by Yoric 8y ago

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.
- doombolt 8y ago
  So many people have zero understanding of mathematical modelling but insist that they're in position to judge research in this area from moral standpoint. It's The Holy Inquisition, crowdsource edition.

TangoTrotFox 8y ago

In my opinion not discussing things because you think the topic is going to be potentially harmful, or discussion 'impolite', is regressive. Those are the very things that most need active and open discussion. Otherwise it's akin to aiming to have kids never do drugs by never talking about them, or when you do talk about them to present them as caricatures that anybody with an ounce of grey matter can realize is out of touch with reality. D.A.R.E., for instance, actually resulted in higher drug use among participants! I think a major part of the extremism that seems to be slowly gripping America is largely because a lack of any dialogue between sides that disagree. Instead people surround themselves with 'safe' voices and fall deeper and deeper into the bowels of their own view system, which also tends to correspond to a fall further and further from anything resembling reality. Another example would be religion. Religion is quite dangerous and is now dying in the western world. But it's not dying because people stopped talking about it. Far from it -- to this very day we have god on all of our money, kids pledge allegiance to a nation under god, you swear oaths on a religious text under god, and so on. The reason it's dying is because people actively talk about it and advocates for religion are at a loss for a rational and compelling argument in favor of it.

pk3469 8y ago
This censorship 2.0 mindset has permeated even HN, the supposed bastion of rationality. No discussion, no counter argument, just downvotes for posts like this. Anyone who's expressed this kind of opinion has probably seen their score fluctuate between double digit positives and negatives until finally settling into downvoted flagged state. This is clearly a divisive topic, but the censorship side is dominant.

reversecs 8y ago

The idea that we need to establish consensus on a false truth before we can reveal a real truth doesn't make sense to me. 1. We can still agree that men and women are humans and that we all deserve ways rights 2. The inevitable differences maybe show that men are less capable than women in a variety of fronts (wouldn't that be great for women's rights?). 3. Once a lie has been installed into every boy and girl, raising the truth will only become more and more difficult. Making a decision to disseminate a lie constitutes gaslighting in the way that people will have hunches and experiences that society can suddenly deny. Speaking up will get you instant attention and result in a wreck for ones career. We are already seeing this today. I couldn't imagine posting this opinion except anonymously.

ubernostrum 8y ago
We can agree that there are differences between the average male human and the average female human, sure. But that's generally not what's being argued. What's usually being argued is something more like "it is incontrovertibly and undeniably proven beyond all doubt that evolution has deeply and unalterably hard-wired female humans not to be as good as male humans at programming computers, and therefore it is an inescapable conclusion that we should stop caring whether men outnumber women among computer programmers, and we should immediately cease all efforts to teach/encourage more women to be computer programmers." I'm not even exaggerating. This is why people want to make these kinds of "well, women and men are different, you know" arguments. The "well, women just aren't as good at this" or "well, women just aren't as interested in this" arguments have been tried in multiple fields, and have fallen over flat in the face of actual empirical evidence over and over and over. But people keep desperately trying to revive them and say "Ah, but this field is different! The females really are inferior and less interested in our field, and we have science truths to back it up!" Also, here's a takedown from someone who just did basic math back during the initial burst of drama around Damore's "diversity memo". It's very hard, once you check the math, to accept that we have any basis for asserting that observed ratios of men and women in STEM have a biological basis: https://twitter.com/search?f=tweets&q=from%3Awikisteff%20since%3A2017-08-09%20until%3A2017-08-10&src=typd https://twitter.com/search?f=tweets&q=from%3Awikisteff%20sin... That's a link to a date-based search. Scroll until you see "if there were large biological gender differences in STEM, you'd see it", and then start reading up from there for the replies. I have to link you to that, because the thread was in reply to, disagreeing with, and debunking a tweet that's now deleted, and that apparently breaks Twitter's threading. The deleted tweet being debunked, for what it's worth, is from a user whose Twitter bio says she is "founder and editor" of Quillette, the site hosting the claims of the author of the "uncomfortable truth" paper this HN thread is about.