zlacker

>>staran+(OP)
Larry Summers? He has no technical experience, torpedoed the stimulus plan in 2008, and had to resign the Harvard presidency following a messy set of statements about ‘differences’ between the sexes and their mental abilities.

Kind of a shocking choice.

>>alex_y+96
> “There is relatively clear evidence that whatever the difference in means—which can be debated—there is a difference in the standard deviation and variability of a male and female population,” he said. Thus, even if the average abilities of men and women were the same, there would be more men than women at the elite levels of mathematical ability

Isn’t this true though? Says more about Harvard than Summers to be honest.

https://www.swarthmore.edu/bulletin/archive/wp/january-2009_...

>>noneth+R6
A control group is kind of unimaginable right? And even if you could be sure of this conclusion, is it helpful or beneficial to promote it in public discourse?

>>alex_y+y8
>And even if you could be sure of this conclusion, is it helpful or beneficial to promote it in public discourse?

It's absolutely helpful for mental health, to show people that there's not some conspiracy out to disenfranchise and oppress them, rather the distribution of outcomes is a natural result of the distribution of genetic characteristics.

>>logicc+Db
This is not an accurate description of causation and can't be, because there are more steps after "genetics" in the causal chain.

It's also unimaginative; having a variety of traits is itself good for society, which means you don't need variation in genetics to cause it. It's adaptive behavior for the same genes to simply lead to random outcomes. But people who say "genes cause X" probably wouldn't like this because they want to also say "and some people have the best genes".