Comment by YeGoblynQueenne | Hacker News Reader

Comment by YeGoblynQueenne | Hacker News Reader

YeGoblynQueenne

>> Last week, Nature, one of the top scientific journals in the world, ran a review written by Lise Eliot of Gina Rippon’s new book, The Gendered Brain: The New Neuroscience that Shatters the Myth of the Female Brain

For the record, I posted that article on HN 9 days ago. It was almost immediately flagged (going by the fact it collected 18 points). This one seems to have lasted at least twice as long - and I don't understand why. In terms of a controversy, an article in Nature is the definition of an uncontroversial, respected source, whereas Quillette is rather the exact opposite. If a serious debate can be had, it should be over an article on Nature, not an article on Quillette.

I don't want to put this in words like "why was my article downvoted", which would sound too much as if I'm nursing some kind of petty grudge, but the same thing has happened to other articles I've posted previously on matters of gender equality in the sciences, while, for example, articles about James Damore are left alone. Is James Damore less controversial than Gina Rippon?

I must say that I do get a strong feeling that one side of this issue is treated very differently than the other by a significant proportion of users on HN.

A lot of articles on gender get the same flagging treatment. (FWIW Damore is far from uncontroversial here on HN.) I suspect sometimes the flagging treatment is because these articles can attract heated (often emotional) debate, and this might be why some flaggers flag them, to avoid that and just stick to tech stuff.

That said I’m always interested in seeing these articles and debates myself, mostly because it’s a pretty important issue in tech and we won’t resolve it if we don’t talk about it. But it’s hard to do.

This post may have survived this long just by luck, I wouldn’t read to much into it.

But you can certainly talk about it here now since this article is in response to your article. (One question I might’ve asked about your original would be, if male and female brains are really the same then how come rates of certain mental illnesses vary so much between the sexes?)

Edit: I realized I originally wrote “far from contoversial” it should be “uncontoversial” but I think that was understandabld from the context.

>FWIW Damore is far from controversial here on HN.

Just to be clear, in what way? Anti-Google pro-Damore I presume?

From what I’ve seen (so it’s anecdotal) they seemed to attract emotional debate, and lots of downvotes, and flags, and people making throwaways before commenting, etc. In that way controversial. To my mind when you see lots of downvoted comments it’s a pretty good sign of a controversial topic because I never usually see that on purely tech topics ok HN. From which I infer on tech topics a bad comment doesn’t get upvoted and sinks because good comments rise. On non tech topics like gender comments (bad or good) can quickly be grayed out by downvotes. I suppose it might be an interesting hypothesis to test somehow if historical HN posts could be classified into topic and we had the voting and flagging data.

While this subject could be interesting, it always degenerate into culture wars (one side vs the other) which could be considered flamebait:

> Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

One solution for this could be to talk about the subject at a more abstract level than an example.

Does Hacker News have enough users who are knowledgeable about neuroscience to sustain an evidence based discussion of this topic?

Quite a few of my submissions related to sexuality got flagged (e.g. the Dating for Nerds, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15372552). While I didn't like it, I understand the motivation - it attracts the wrong kind of discussion (flame wars, us vs them holy crusade, etc; certainly to kind or illuminating).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com