Sister blog of Physicists of the Caribbean in which I babble about non-astronomy stuff, because everyone needs a hobby

Friday 11 August 2017

Google's sexist memo is sexist, says biologist

Here we have a genuine expert in the field presenting their commentary. An evolutionary biologist, not a certain popular female theoretical physicist. Here's the TLDR from the article, but it's well worth reading in its entirety.

Yes, men and women are biologically different — which doesn’t mean what the author thinks it does.

The article perniciously misrepresents the nature and significance of known sex differences to advance what appears to be a covert alt-right agenda. More specifically, it :
-argues for biologically determined sex differences in personality based on extremely weak evidence
-completely fails to understand the current state of research on sex differences, which is based in neuroscience, epigenetics and developmental biology
-argues that cognitive sex differences influence performance in software engineering, but presents no supporting evidence. Available evidence does not support the claim.
-fails to acknowledge ways in which sex differences violate the narrative of female inferiority; this shows intellectual dishonesty
-assumes effective meritocracy in its argument, ignoring both a mountain of conflicting scientific literature and its own caveats (which I can only assume were introduced to placate readers, since their incompatibility with the core thesis is never resolved)
-makes repugnant attacks on compassion and empathy
-distorts and misuses moral foundations theory for rhetorical purposes
-contains hints of racism
-paradoxically insists that authoritarianism be treated as a valid moral dimension, whilst firmly rejecting any diversity-motivated strategy that might remotely approach it.
-ultimately advocates rejecting all morality insofar as it might compromise the interests of a group.

https://www.quora.com/What-do-scientists-think-about-the-biological-claims-made-in-the-anti-diversity-document-written-by-a-Google-employee-in-August-2017/answer/Suzanne-Sadedin

1 comment:

  1. so this is one of "those" claims..I wonder for how long will the field deny the stereotype based growth/education jumping straight to the status quo which is a stereotype on its own...

    ReplyDelete

Due to a small but consistent influx of spam, comments will now be checked before publishing. Only egregious spam/illegal/racist crap will be disapproved, everything else will be published.

Philosophers be like, "?"

In the Science of Discworld books the authors postulate Homo Sapiens is actually Pan Narrans, the storytelling ape. Telling stories is, the...