CERN cuts ties with 'sexist' scientist Alessandro Strumia

As I read it, that site does not rebut any of the claims of particlesforjustice. It attacks a few sources used by particlesforjustice in defense of the claim that discrimination exists in STEM and potentially explains the reason why some groups perform more poorly. Granting, for argument, that those attacks are valid and the sources don't claim what they're being used to claim, that still does not rebut Strumia's argument. Indeed, justiceforstrumia says, "They object to Strumia's talk for 'mining' and 'misrepresenting' data, but their own case suffers from comparable flaws." In other words, perhaps Strumia's argument was flawed and so is the rebuttal; that still leaves us nowhere.

The remainder of justiceforstrumia is a digression about James Damore, tribalistic thinking, why socialism is bad, horseshoe theory, the "war on gamers" (I'm not making that up, that's the exact title of a source offered by justiceforstrumia), and the importance of falsifiability. This would be interesting if at some point we got to the question of whether Strumia's claims were falsifiable or not, and whether particlesforjustice had in fact managed to prove them false, but the site never gets there.

Assuming the sources offered by particlesforjustice in claims 1, 3, and 4 are invalid, claims 2, 5, 6, 7, and 8 still stand. A coherent rebuttal would either say why those claims are invalid, or why those claims are inaccurate depictions of what Strumia said. Saying "You can't say person X's claims wrong, actually the whole ideology of science is broken and falsifiability is important" is not scientific debate; it is itself ideology. Saying "Here, let us determine whether these claims are false, through analysis and argument of the claims themselves and not their speakers" would be scientific debate.

(Who wrote this site, btw? Is it from a scientist, or just someone random on the internet? It doesn't seem like it's written with the same understanding of scientific debate as particlesforjustice, so I'm trying to make sense of it.)

The cartoon "deriding women campaigning for equality in science" is 5th from the bottom. It shows women at a 'major/career fair' choosing to join gender studies instead of STEM fields. It then shows those same individuals later complaining about a lack of women in STEM. I would not consider this in any way whatsoever impairing equality of opportunity. Far from it, it demonstrates an extremely important point about utilizing the opportunities that you have.

The only other cartoon he had was of one woman telling another who was bringing in a volcano to a science fair that "science is male dominated! they'll never accept you, you'll be harassed!" The slide then asks whether the purpose of this rhetoric is to get more women into STEM or to try to indoctrinate individuals into an ideology.

[1] - https://drive.google.com/file/d/1c_NyUhOZ8erdqU2AGZJZtNfFeA9...

However, I do not agree that the science is ambiguous here and I am very open to anything to the contrary. I can offer specific studies, but I'm fairly sure you'd agree that the more we reveal through genetic research, the greater a role it seems to play in practically everything. Yet there is the issue that many critical genetic factors are unevenly distributed and have very high rates of heritability. What gives reason to believe that it might be that people are "identically capable" in spite of this?

One final point I'd add is that in society power was traditionally not driven by assumption of power, but by power itself. Whichever group was able to prove itself smarter, more powerful, etc than another group had a tendency of imposing its will on the 'weaker' group. Power was rarely given, but often taken. This trend only came to a rapid freeze since the birth of nuclear weapons which have rather revolutionized the notion of power. In a world without nuclear weapons we would not have this unsteady "balance" of power between Europe, China, Mideast, US, and each of their respective allies.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19346228 and marked it off-topic.