zlacker

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+(OP)
> “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_...

>>alex_y+(OP)
The faculty got him out because he riled them, e.g. by insisting they ought to actually put effort into teaching undergrads. They looked for a pretext, and they found it.

Just like in that Oppenheimer movie. A sanctimonious witch hunt serving as pretext for a personal vendetta.

(Note that Summers is, I'm told, on a personal level, a dick. The popular depiction is not that wrong on that point. But he's the right pick for this job -- see my other comments in this thread.)

>>alex_y+(OP)
To be honest, one reason I like Summers as a choice is I have the impression he is willing to be unpopular when necessary, e.g. I remember him getting dragged extremely heavily on Twitter a few years back, for some takes on inflation which turned out to be fairly accurate.

>>noneth+I
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?

>>noneth+I
Shh. Only some truths should be spoken aloud. You clearly deserve to lose your job if you speak one of the other truths that offends people.

>>alex_y+(OP)
a huge player in preventing derivatives regulation leading up to 2008 now helps steer the ship of AI oversight. I'm speechless.

>>alex_y+(OP)
Could have been worse, they could have picked Larry David, would fit the clown-show of the past weekend.

>>alex_y+p2
>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.

>>AuryGl+y3
One should also be careful to claim that the dominant group is inherently superior. There are a lot of, uh, counter examples.

Calling this a truth is pretty silly. There is a lot of evidence that human cognition is highly dependent on environment.

>>alex_y+E5
He didn't claim they were superior. He said they deviate more from the mean, in both directions.

For example, there are a lot more boys than girls who struggle with basic reading comprehension. Sound familiar?

>>noneth+I
This is the scientific consensus btw.

There are also more intellectually challenged men btw, but somehow that rarely gets discussed.

But the effects are quite small, and should not dissuade anyone to do anything IMO.

>>MVisse+h7
The consensus appears to be somewhat less than a consensus.

Here is a meta analysis on the subject: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3057475/

>>alex_y+p2
Sorry, you don't get to decide which thoughts are wrongthink and verboten.

>>TMWNN+W8
I’m not suggesting that I get to decide or whatever, and I am absolutely happy there is reasoned discussion of cognition.

I do however expect the boards of directors of important companies to avoid publicly supporting obviously regressive ideas such as this gem.

>>alex_y+(OP)
If Larry correctly said that men and women are different, i see nothing wrong here.

>>0xDEAF+i2
No, his predictions in 2021 were not accurate. He gave 33% chance of three different things happening, and then none of them happened!

>>logicc+u5
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".

>>Racing+sc
It looks like he said, specifically:

> "...[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..."

Sheesh, of all the things to be cancelled for...

>>alex_y+ia
You're happy there is reasoned discussion, but the idea is, in your view, "regressive" whether it's true or not?

>>mvdtnz+uh
True is a bit of a stretch here right?

>>0xDEAF+i2
This Summers?

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/06/larry-summers-was-wr...

https://prospect.org/environment/2023-11-20-larry-summers-in...

>>alex_y+E5
There's a lot of evidence that not having two X chromosomes is less stable, leading to...irregularities. That sword cuts both ways.

I don't like ignorance being promoted under the cloak of not causing offense. It causes more harm than good. If there's a societal problem, you can't tackle it without knowing the actual cause. Sometimes the issue isn't an actual problem caused an 'ism,' it's just biology, and it's a complete waste of resources trying to change it.

>>logicc+a5
Larry David is never wrong on these things, you can trust him.