The Google Gender & Diversity Furore

So much UK media traffic this morning. The basic “tech” news story. All the original story links below. Lots of social media feeding the PC side of it that the the guy that wrote it must have had a sexist / racist agenda. Some, but not so many including myself, pointing out he has some valid points – about gender differences – and his sacking was a PC agenda. Damage limitation for a large corporation.

Same old, same old. Hot on the heels of the Beard / Taleb Roman ethnicity “unpleasantness”.

Particularly picked-up on Alom Shaha’s thread that cheerleading public science communicators are feeding (are part of) science geek culture over-selling science facts to those with bigoted agendas or merely careless inhuman “scientism”. Published stuff treated as facts to be deployed in any cause. Hear, hear! A large part of my agenda here.

Uncritical reading of science “fact” AND “PC motives” I say.

BUT, so many cheerleading in response to his thread are the PC mob denigrating the author and (his) motives.

Not had chance to digest the whole yet – hence the raw links below – but there really are important and valuable gender brain-mind differences. (OBVIOUSLY massively plastic and largely developed by education and culture, but valuable to properly recognise. As I said to Alice Roberts, largely is not all. Small differences ARE significant, by definition, and valuable to evolution, by definition. To deny is part of a PC agenda to MAKE gender insignificant.) I last fell foul of this responding to the Alice Roberts / Michael Moseley Horizon piece (reshown on BBC4 TV recently), where Alice adopted the PC line and Michael didn’t. She tells me he’s changed his mind since, but I’d guess that’s about the communication line, not the facts. He’s not responded recently.

Part of the problem with people being terrified to acknowledge the facts, is the slippery slope / thin end of a wedge mentality, but it’s part of a wider scientism agenda, greedily objectively reducing mind and will (of any gender) to mere illusion, and corrupting proper brain-mind understanding as a whole. Which is where my original interests in gender differences lie. But PC politics is killing real science. (A claim that goes back to Brandon Carter and his Anthropic warnings, if not Galileo before him, but we digress too far.)

Those original links TL/DR (yet):

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Post Note:

And by way of balance this thread ..

Still baffled by how much of a PC furore this largely non-contentious piece has caused.

And this thread is a more believable balance. Being right isn’t always appropriate, Political Correctness has an original valid purpose in guiding what’s appropriate to say where, long before it became a pejorative jibe. The problem is when PC becomes a bar on expressing things at all, such that actual facts get overlooked, ignored or forgotten entirely.

In fact this is my main “scientism” agenda. That somehow good science is good full stop. Being true, in some objective sense, doesn’t give science the right to trump all other considerations. Thanks for that reminder.

And finally ….

OK, just one more – science is not truth … pity about the Evo Psych tag line.

And another …. stick to what you’re good at, girls.

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