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tnone | 8 years ago
This sort of criticism seems like motivated reasoning to me, and only comes out when current progressive dogmas are being challenged. When HN applies a scalpel the way you describe to the opposite viewpoint, often supported only with anecdotes, out come the complaints how people's lived experiences are being ignored, how it's proof of a cultural problem, and so on. Not to mention the flagging. It's rigor for thee and not for me.
The media and Google are the echo chamber when it comes to this topic, that's been demonstrated plenty. If they were capable of intellectually reasoning about it, they wouldn't be lumping together reasonable criticism with that of the fringe in the first place.
SkyMarshal|8 years ago
I'm all for challenging the orthodoxy, any orthodoxy, and I sense the gender diversity one has been constructed on not perfectly rigorous foundations and deserves to be challenged. But when you challenge an orthodoxy, fairly or not you're held to a higher standard of rigor, simply as a matter of effectiveness - come up short and you're easily discredited and dismissed. It's like you have to have PhD or equivalent level knowledge of something before your critiques can't be dismissed out of hand. That's at least part of what happened here, the memo just wasn't at that level, and thus was easily dismissed. Maybe the author will now use his in/fame/my to write a more comprehensive and rigorous paper (or book deal) on the topic.
>This sort of criticism seems like motivated reasoning to me, and only comes out when current progressive dogmas are being challenged. When HN applies a scalpel the way you describe
Repeat after me: "HN is not one person or one voice". At least some of us here apply this standard to everything.