|
|
|
|
|
|
by reversecs
2838 days 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. |
|
|
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%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.