5 ms·

> "One interpretation of this result is that the adoption of the screen lowered the average quality of female auditionees in the blind auditions. Only if we can

> "One interpretation of this result is that the adoption of the screen lowered the average quality of female auditionees in the blind auditions. Only if we can hold quality constant can we identify the true impact of the screen." There's something of a repeating theme lately. Study of blind interviews/tests in various fields => women found to underperform despite experimental controls and expectations => commentary and authors grasp at straws to explain the result with anything but the fact that perhaps men and women don't have the same performance envelope in every walk of life. How many more of such studies and straw-grasping explanations will we have to go through before someone considers occam's razor?

CathedralBorrow 7y ago
Would you care to enlighten us with the truth?
- taneq 7y ago
  They're suggesting that women, on average, just aren't as good as men at some things (and vice versa): > perhaps men and women don't have the same performance envelope in every walk of life
  - mafuy 7y ago
    No, they are suggesting that the top performing women just aren't as good as the top performing men. A small but important difference. I believe what they said is right. At the same time, I also believe that the worst performing men perform worse than the worst performing women - males have a wider spread of ability.
- jabgrabdthrow 7y ago
  He’s just rejecting the null hypothesis, asking for a working theory in its place is a bit of a rhetorical fallacy
- d0mine 7y ago
  even if the average might be the same, the tails of the distribution may differ e.g., IQ distribution https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2015/10/02/sorry-girls-but-the-smartest-people-in-the-world-are-all-men/ https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2015/10/02/sorry-girls-bu... (a man is more likely to be a fool or genius)
fenomas 7y ago
> How many more of such studies and straw-grasping explanations will we have to go through I don't follow. If GP's comment had ended with the bit you quoted then it might just be a straw-grasping explanation, but the rest of the comment says the study authors tested whether the explanation was true, and found that it was. That is, they suspected their result was due to sampling bias, found a bias in the data, and found that removing the bias reversed the result. If that's an accurate description of what happened, it doesn't sound much like grasping at straws.
- kuzehanka 7y ago
  The first rule of experiment design is to state your hypothesis and controls upfront, and test only according to those. You don't get to update those parameters after the test is complete. Failing to reject the null hypothesis but then saying 'if <alternative hypothesis picked with knowledge of result> is true then <result> would make sense' is not science. This claim is useless non-information after the results are known. This is a completely new claim that must be validated with a new study designed around it. Maybe this alternative hypothesis is true, maybe it isn't. Hindsight of the original experiment's data can never shed light on that. Trying to pass off a revisionist hypothesis with advance knowledge of results, is very much grasping at straws. Reduced to the absurd, its as if someone predicted a coin flip would land on heads, and then revised their reasoning after seeing it land on tails and told you that their method of predicting coin flips was right all along except for that little <sampling bias/whatever>. I hope this is clear and makes sense, because this is one of the fundamental pillars of the scientific method. You state a hypothesis, then you test, then you arrive at a conclusion. You don't start with a conclusion and then revise your hypothesis to match it after knowing the outcome of the test.
  - fenomas 7y ago
    > Trying to pass off a revisionist hypothesis with advance knowledge of results I think you're reading too much into the "first they found X but then they found Y" narrative in the top comment of this thread. There's nothing like that in the actual paper - the authors start with one hypothesis, gather the data, do a bunch of regressions and whatnot, and report all the results. Then their overall conclusion is that the balance of the evidence supports their hypothesis, but they note all the caveats. There's no revisionism or changing of hypotheses or whatever, that I can see.

CathedralBorrow 7y ago

Would you care to enlighten us with the truth?

taneq 7y ago
They're suggesting that women, on average, just aren't as good as men at some things (and vice versa): > perhaps men and women don't have the same performance envelope in every walk of life
- mafuy 7y ago
  No, they are suggesting that the top performing women just aren't as good as the top performing men. A small but important difference. I believe what they said is right. At the same time, I also believe that the worst performing men perform worse than the worst performing women - males have a wider spread of ability.
jabgrabdthrow 7y ago
He’s just rejecting the null hypothesis, asking for a working theory in its place is a bit of a rhetorical fallacy
d0mine 7y ago
even if the average might be the same, the tails of the distribution may differ e.g., IQ distribution https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2015/10/02/sorry-girls-but-the-smartest-people-in-the-world-are-all-men/ https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2015/10/02/sorry-girls-bu... (a man is more likely to be a fool or genius)

fenomas 7y ago

> How many more of such studies and straw-grasping explanations will we have to go through I don't follow. If GP's comment had ended with the bit you quoted then it might just be a straw-grasping explanation, but the rest of the comment says the study authors tested whether the explanation was true, and found that it was. That is, they suspected their result was due to sampling bias, found a bias in the data, and found that removing the bias reversed the result. If that's an accurate description of what happened, it doesn't sound much like grasping at straws.

kuzehanka 7y ago
The first rule of experiment design is to state your hypothesis and controls upfront, and test only according to those. You don't get to update those parameters after the test is complete. Failing to reject the null hypothesis but then saying 'if <alternative hypothesis picked with knowledge of result> is true then <result> would make sense' is not science. This claim is useless non-information after the results are known. This is a completely new claim that must be validated with a new study designed around it. Maybe this alternative hypothesis is true, maybe it isn't. Hindsight of the original experiment's data can never shed light on that. Trying to pass off a revisionist hypothesis with advance knowledge of results, is very much grasping at straws. Reduced to the absurd, its as if someone predicted a coin flip would land on heads, and then revised their reasoning after seeing it land on tails and told you that their method of predicting coin flips was right all along except for that little <sampling bias/whatever>. I hope this is clear and makes sense, because this is one of the fundamental pillars of the scientific method. You state a hypothesis, then you test, then you arrive at a conclusion. You don't start with a conclusion and then revise your hypothesis to match it after knowing the outcome of the test.
- fenomas 7y ago
  > Trying to pass off a revisionist hypothesis with advance knowledge of results I think you're reading too much into the "first they found X but then they found Y" narrative in the top comment of this thread. There's nothing like that in the actual paper - the authors start with one hypothesis, gather the data, do a bunch of regressions and whatnot, and report all the results. Then their overall conclusion is that the balance of the evidence supports their hypothesis, but they note all the caveats. There's no revisionism or changing of hypotheses or whatever, that I can see.