Citing science as a defense against the current cultural paradigm is inciting a flamewar.
How the mighty have fallen.
I actively steer young entrepreneurs away from YC and HN, as it has become incredibly in tune with the echo chamber of the radical political ideologies of our time. I don't understand how this behavior encourages clear and logical thinking or produces successful entrepreneurs.
I would appreciate a response on this topic dang, as I am sincerely amazed by your response to the parent's comment.
EDIT: In case anyone wants to start asking for citations, it is equivalent to asking for citations regarding the heliocentric model of the solar system. R/K selection theory, sexual dimorphism, and sex specialization are such well understood topics as to be assumed common knowledge among any educated biologists. It only speaks to the individual's naivete when they bring up the citation requirement.
Citations are used for new and ground breaking research, not for common scientific knowledge that has been in the mainstream for a hundred years. I am constantly amazed by the sheer ignorance of the HN crowd on this extremely well understood science.
I'm always willing to help clarify how HN works, but the first four sentences of your comment are such wild projections that it's hard for me to read your request as serious. And then you posted https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11226294, which flagrantly violates everything HN stands for.
It takes a lot of energy to post these responses, and it's hard to justify that investment when you're not making any effort to be civil, and when instead of open-mindedness you display only a desire to score ideological points.
I have a policy to return hostility in kind. The commenter DanBC was being vulgar without making any points, so I decided to respond in a manner befitting his tone.
But since you seem to be a levelheaded individual, I would like to seriously discuss the suppression of critical thought on Hacker News, and why moderators such as yourself enforce it ruthlessly.
Let's start with the parent comment:
>When those gender roles are all but constant across countless independently developed cultures existent over tens of thousands of years, with distribution of visible physical traits to match them, it's pretty safe to assume that they're baked into our DNA and not some random whim of western culture. Imagine how long a tribe with male caretakers and female warriors (who it cannot be argued are not on average significantly smaller and weaker than men) would survive against a tribe of male warriors and female caretakers. There are species with much less divergence in biology between males and females. We would not have evolved to have such divergence if it were not useful for our fitness to have distinct fighter/protector and caretaker roles. Indeed as K-strategists that take a very long time to mature, having dedicated caretakers was an extremely useful evolution.
There is absolutely nothing controversial about this statement to a trained biologist. In fact, you could not get through an undergraduate degree in biology if you did not understand sexual dimorphism, r/K selection theory, and the sexual specialization that results. As such, there is nothing political about the statement. It is merely a statement of the current scientific understanding of the evolutionary history of homo sapiens.
Now let's look at your response:
>This turn into generic gender-war predictably degenerated into yet another tedious spat. Perhaps elsewhere on the Internet there is a spot where people haven't had enough of these yet, but HN isn't one. Note the guidelines: "Please avoid introducing classic flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say about them."
So, the statement of scientific consensus stated by the original comment is labelled by a moderator as "gender-war" which "predictably degenerated into yet another tedious spat." And you summarise with saying HN has had enough, and the debate is to be ended.
So I just want to be clear, which branches of evolutionary biology, and science in general, are off limits to discuss on HN? And how does censoring known science help critical thought and discussions regarding the current entrepreneurial markets in tech?
Thank you for your time.
EDIT: to address your final statement:
>It takes a lot of energy to post these responses, and it's hard to justify the investment when you're not making any effort to be civil, and when instead of open-mindedness you display only a desire to score ideological points.
It is a bold assertion that stating known science is "a desire to score ideological points." This line of thinking demonstrates more about the reader, and less about the material. Evolutionary biology is not an ideology, it is a science. Stating it does not make one an ideologue, but an empiricist.
In that case you can't comment here. "But he started it" is an acceptable excuse neither from 5-year-olds nor from HN commenters. It always feels like the other person started it and did worse.
> I would like to seriously discuss the suppression of critical thought on Hacker News, and why moderators such as yourself enforce it ruthlessly
This is obviously just polemic, and boilerplate at that. We might as well "discuss" whether I've stopped beating my wife.
Ideological harangues have no place on this site, so please don't post any more of them.
As I pointed out in another comment in this thread, in this past 24 hours Dang has been attacked in a similar way from someone on the opposite side of this debate to you.
And as I also said in that comment, if you knew what a decent and thoughtful person Dang is, and how deeply emotionally invested he is in making HN a place of civility and intellectually stimulating discussion, you'd be appalled at how cruel you and others have been to him in this thread.
To be fair to the person you are responding too, he is right: your totalitarian censorship was the primary reason I did not apply to Y combinator with my startup and refuse to comment on new threads, except on special circumstances such as this.
You are a petty tyrant, dang, working for an organization actively trying to push an agenda by suppressing reason and free speech.
So this is considered a proportionate response to a person's efforts to cultivate civil discussion and hold firm in the face of escalating incivility.
You may not be aware that HN is an independent arm of YC.
Yes Dang is a salaried employee of YC, but he's a talented programmer who could probably earn a much better living doing something else.
He does this job because he loves HN and is emotionally invested in making it a safe place for intellectually stimulating discussions.
You should consider that Dang gets comments that are equally vitriolic from people on the opposite side of this debate to you. He did in another thread in the past 24 hours. So this is nothing about pushing some YC-driven PC agenda.
This is simply about avoiding topics that give people license to co-opt science or any other justification to be mean to one another and degenerating out of control, just as this one has.
If you knew Dang and knew how burdened he was by the sense of obligation to this community (not to YC) to keep it a civil and intellectually stimulating place, you'd be devastated at what a cruel comment it is that you've made here.
I think (and hope) that's more to do with it being late in the thread and flying under the radar than any kind of endorsement from any significant portion of the community.
Skirmishes like this aside, on the whole I find things good and continually getting better here in terms of civility and interesting content.
But my God, what it must be like for Dan to have to go to sleep with the thought "today a person told me that he hopes I rot in hell because he disagreed with the way I went about trying to hose down a flame war".
Sexual dimorphism is real. Your impotent rage and ridiculous ideologies will never change that fact. I will be greatly amused by your kind's zealous need to tilt at windmills.
How interesting. So using a statistically significant population sample, there will be no phenotypic differences between carriers of X versus Y chromosomes?
If so, science has progressed quite far in the last few years that I've been away.
There won't be much difference beyond reproductive roles and other physical traits, but the brain doesn't seem to be affected all that much, no.
Basically, there's no gene for being a programmer just as there's no gene for being a (good/bad) parent. Why would Nature bother to pre-compute/compile all possible states/outcomes? Better to compute/compile the essentials for a living species then let the rest be handled by history.
Evolution stops specializing when said specialization offers no beneficial adaptation sufficient for the metabolic cost. It's why the vast majority of living organisms have much simpler brains, body plans, and even reproductive strategies. Humans and other similar animals are rare little things in the vast ocean of simpler, more elegant mutations.
Obama's first appointee to Treasury Secretary was Timothy Geithner. He took over from Paulson 6 days after Obama became president. That delay is maybe slightly unusual, but it hardly makes Obama responsible for the actions that Paulson took 6 months prior (I guess hiring Geithner indicates that Obama didn't have a problem with those actions, as Geithner was also one of the architects of the bailout).
You nailed it. I've been banging this drum for a decade. There is currently no feasible career that involves advancing humanity forward. Only different forms of plumbing the digital infrastructure which pay well.
Everyone I know wants to do research. No one wants to do it in academia, and no one wants to live below poverty levels.
The Star Trek economy is here, and it's here now. Basic income, flat-tax and publicly funded research infrastructure (e.g. Bell Labs) is the way forward. Asset bubbles, financial crookery, and trickle up economics are the way of the past.
Time to choose now. Sadly, as a scientist, I know this decision has already been made. Human greed is insatiable, and the top 0.1% won't be satisfied till they're the top 0.01%, and then the 0.001%, and then...
How can HN promote capitalism on one hand, and open borders on the other?
Open borders is the classic pre-cursor to a worldwide Tragedy of the Commons. Currently, we have problems keeping public parks clean. Imagine if all of the earth was a shared commons, and no group of people could restrict access to any plot of land. It would be chaos. I can think of no better way to destroy the world than open borders.
Look into tragedy of the commons, and see why this idea will never be feasible due to human nature.
Perhaps you can elaborate in how you see open borders as a case for tragedy of the commons? I do not mean that all plots of lands can be accessed by any individual, but more like any individual can access any jurisdiction of any country. A situation more akin to the EU, but in a global scale.
If it was accessing user data, of course he should be fired.