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.
> “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.
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.
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?
>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.
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".
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.)
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.
> "...[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..."
Kind of a shocking choice.