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Has an uncomfortable truth been suppressed?

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Re: Has an uncomfortable truth been suppressed?

#31

Post by Yoric »

frebord wrote: post #6

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?

Three answers to this.

1. Look at 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.

Re: Has an uncomfortable truth been suppressed?

#32

Post by buboard »

Arnt wrote: post #28
frebord wrote: post #6

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?

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…

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.

Re: Has an uncomfortable truth been suppressed?

#33

Post by Arnt »

buboard wrote: post #32
Arnt wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

It's ALL about the edges? What does that mean? What are the edges, and why does nothing else matter?

Re: Has an uncomfortable truth been suppressed?

#34

Post by doombolt »

doombolt wrote: post #30

He's not criticizing the mathematical model, rather the application of this model to modern human society, which is something that nobody ever claimed. Straw man and a bad one at that. He does have some arguments but math is nowhere found, making this a joke of a refutation.

E.g. do you want a real eye opener?

In a monogamous society, given that Darwin's observation about increased male variability holds, when partitioning by desirability, women in the top half will have access to males with desirability greater than their own, while women in the bottom half will only have access to males with desirability worse than their own.

Go figure.

(There's a lot of assumptions here but none of them particularly unrealistic).

Re: Has an uncomfortable truth been suppressed?

#35

Post by buboard »

frebord wrote: post #6

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?

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.

Re: Has an uncomfortable truth been suppressed?

#36

Post by TangoTrotFox »

dvfjsdhgfv wrote: post #17
frebord wrote: post #6

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?

> 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) - even the use of the word "race" is problematic today.

There have been numerous studies comparing genetic ancestry to self identification of race with an effectively perfect mapping. Here [1] [2] are a couple of papers. The reason there are not more papers is because the data here is not even remotely ambiguous. Your position is a semantic strawman -- it claims race references something other than ancestry, and then goes on to argue that that 'something' does not exist. It is the most classical form of a strawman - set it up and burn it down. Race, both in denotation and connotation, is a reference to genetic ancestry.

[1] - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1196372/

[2] - https://jmg.bmj.com/content/47/12/835

Re: Has an uncomfortable truth been suppressed?

#37

Post by googlryas »

scott113341 wrote: post #27
oh_sigh wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I don't think jmcgough made such a claim, just offered an explanation for "why is it so taboo to talk about the differences..."

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.

Re: Has an uncomfortable truth been suppressed?

#38

Post by hef19898 »

doombolt wrote: post #34
doombolt wrote: post #30

He's not criticizing the mathematical model, rather the application of this model to modern human society, which is something that nobody ever claimed. Straw man and a bad one at that. He does have some arguments but math is nowhere found, making this a joke of a refutation.

E.g. do you want a real eye opener? In a monogamous society, given that Darwin's observation about increased male variability holds, when partitioning by desirability, women in the top half will have access to males with desirability greater than their own, while women in the bottom half will only have access to males with desirability worse than their own. Go figure. (There's a lot of assumptions here but none of th…

Well, it always strikes me how well educated people with a lot of Knowledge in their domain (assuming that point is valid for the majority on Hacker News) have the tendency to totaly over-simplify other scientific fields. In this case evolution, biology and statistics. So what actually happened to humility, scientific literacy and honest curiosity?

Not sure if it was intended, but your second post comes across as Sexist and trying to reason this with bad science.

Re: Has an uncomfortable truth been suppressed?

#39

Post by hef19898 »

TomK32 wrote: post #26
elchief wrote: post #11

> the idea that some huge percentage of males are simply not desirable enough (as we shall see, the paper requires this percentage to be over 50) to have a chance of reproducing bears no relation to the world as we know it In early humans only the top 16% of males mated Most people mate now, due to religious/society-enforced monogamy https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2833377/

Looking at my grandfather's generation, two of his brothers fell in the war, another two never had children of their own at died of old age in the same (big farm) house they were born and living all their life. math checks out.

Anectodes are bad samples, just saying...

Re: Has an uncomfortable truth been suppressed?

#40

Post by imron »

Arnt wrote: post #33
buboard wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's ALL about the edges? What does that mean? What are the edges, and why does nothing else matter?

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.

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