Has an uncomfortable truth been suppressed? • Hacker News Board

Re: Has an uncomfortable truth been suppressed?

#51

Post by doombolt » Mon, Sep 10, 2018, 9:20 AM UTC

hef19898 wrote: post #46

doombolt wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a question of science. It's a question of math. Math is a model which allows you to over-simplify other scientific fields in the first place, and then devise solutions which turn out to be useful even in their over-simplified form. This is the reason for the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in natural sciences. However, here I'm not pushing any direct resemblance between model and any society anywhe…

Basing your "top half of females" behaviour on un-specified asumptions, failing to even hinting on what is "desirable" and then subjugating this model of society to some sort of statistical model was not my idea. nAgain not sure whether this was intentional or not or if I got your point wrong, after all we do not know each other. But again, that is to much oversimplyfication for my taste. Especially when mathematics…

Don't see why the math should be serving your taste.

Nowhere in my message I am applying mathematics to a domain. I'm just stating that such math exists. Applying, or not applying, them to any real society is left as an exercise for a reader.

Re: Has an uncomfortable truth been suppressed?

#52

Post by sebastianconcpt » Mon, Sep 10, 2018, 9:26 AM UTC

amelius wrote: post #50

Instead of focusing on a flawed paper, why not look for evidence that there is more variability in one of the sexes in the real world?

Because for the left, as long as they “work”, reality isn’t as valuable as narratives. They will pretend they honor reality until the arguments get cornered. Then they’ll fallback to their Postmodern anti-realist and anti-rational philosophy and find the next way to use victimhood to try to control the behavior of everybody else. All that with other’s people money, of course.

Re: Has an uncomfortable truth been suppressed?

#53

Post by kgwgk » Mon, Sep 10, 2018, 9:27 AM UTC

foolrush wrote: post #12

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?

Given that "race" is a social construct... https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2018/04/race-gen...

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.

Re: Has an uncomfortable truth been suppressed?

#54

Post by doombolt » Mon, Sep 10, 2018, 9:28 AM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #8

There is more going on than this. It's important to know a bit about the venues in question. Mathematical Intelligencer isn't really a journal at all; it's literally a magazine, carried on the shelves it bookstores. It runs some original research but also poetry and jokes and general cultural coverage. NYJM is, on the other hand, a serious (if online-only, lower-tier) theoretical mathematics journal. Ted Hill's paper…

Can you please add links for your pp. 1-4?

Otherwise it looks like you assume the result of this path without helping us actually walk it.

Re: Has an uncomfortable truth been suppressed?

#55

Post by charlesism » Mon, Sep 10, 2018, 9:42 AM UTC

oh_sigh wrote: post #19

dvfjsdhgfv wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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.

    > 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

Re: Has an uncomfortable truth been suppressed?

#56

Post by sheepmullet » Mon, Sep 10, 2018, 9:45 AM UTC

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…

> you might find that the men have IQ 105.14 on average and the women 105.13

Why would you look at the average?

Lots of jobs have an IQ floor.

Re: Has an uncomfortable truth been suppressed?

#57

Post by doombolt » Mon, Sep 10, 2018, 9:47 AM UTC

Yoric wrote: post #31

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…

> 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)

Re: Has an uncomfortable truth been suppressed?

#58

Post by dagw » Mon, Sep 10, 2018, 9:47 AM UTC

oh_sigh wrote: post #20

foolrush wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given that "race" is a social construct... https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2018/04/race-gen...

Could an alien with no human social constructions differentiate between Bantu people and historically native Irish people?

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.

Re: Has an uncomfortable truth been suppressed?

#59

Post by TangoTrotFox » Mon, Sep 10, 2018, 9:48 AM UTC

Yoric wrote: post #31

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…

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.

Re: Has an uncomfortable truth been suppressed?

#60

Post by googlryas » Mon, Sep 10, 2018, 9:55 AM UTC

dagw wrote: post #58

oh_sigh wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could an alien with no human social constructions differentiate between Bantu people and historically native Irish people?

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.

"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'.