Has an uncomfortable truth been suppressed?

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.

https://quillette.com/2018/09/07/academic-activists-send-a-p...

I live in the UK, in the EU. Here, it's illegal to ask candidates questions about their race, religion, age, marital status, family planning etc. As it is illlegal to advertise jobs to "white male 30 yrs old" etc.

Of course, people still do stuff like that- e.g. I've been asked about my age a couple of times and apparently it's common to be asked about whether you're planning to have children soon, by interviewers, though this has never happened to me (so it might depend on the industry).

I feel as though somehow the West (as a civilization) has become overcome with embarrassment at what it did in the past (to Africans, Native Americans, and Asians, in particular) and now, instead of moving on and pursuing reconciliation in good faith, we have decided the only recourse is to obsess about how we are the enemies of civilization. Future? What future? We did so much bad stuff in the past. How could we take any pride in who we are? We're still so racist, sexist, etc. Nevermind the fact that modern life owes a great debt to the West (aircraft, antibiotics, modern representative government, etc.)

There are serious problems facing the world today (climate change potentially a existential threat to our species). If you look at the past few centuries, you would think that it is precisely the West that has the institutions and paradigms to address those problems. I'm not saying China isn't destined for great things, or won't contribute to addressing the problems. But imagine what China could do if it worked hand in hand with a 21st century USA that was as determined to end climate change as the 20th century USA was to end various infectious diseases (polio, tuberculosis, measles, for example) or put a man on the moon. Our team is losing the basketball game because one of our star players is at home moping about a mistake he made last season. It's societal narcissism, and, instead of helping "the Rest" (to use Niall Ferguson's shorthand for non-Westerners), it serves no one.

My point is: we need to see we are sick as a society. We are too preoccupied by things that happened in the past. Isn't this the lesson of at least one of the great classical tragedies? Why did Romeo and Juliet die? Because their families were stuck in the past and couldn't see that the future was more important than their petty feuds. There's no question we should continue to mind how we treat others (women, immigrants, people from other ethnicities), but we also (in the US, say) need to rediscover a sense of shared national heritage and purpose. History did not, as Fukuyama says, end with the destruction of the USSR. Surely, now that the USSR is gone, the interesting (and peaceful!) work should begin. Instead we're bickering amongst ourselves?