>If this was an academic paper then maybe but it's a comment on a forum on a website and life is too short to marshal supporting evidence for every stated opinion.

The reason academic papers require rigour is because such rigour is necessary to make a convincing argument. Without rigour, people end up just talking past, misunderstanding or shouting at eachother; nobody's going to convince someone else to change their mind just by stating an opinion.

>So I put it to you again, do you agree with the statement or do you disagree?

Personally, I agree that science is not a perfect meritocracy, but I'm not convinced it's due to discrimination by scientists: I've never met a scientist I could imagine making a hiring decision based on race. If there is a problem I'd suspect it's due to other factors; if there are fewer people with a particular characteristic studying science in university or high school, then seems like the root cause of that would be the real problem. You can't expect scientists to hire a certain percentage of people with that characteristic if the percentage of science graduates with that characteristic is much lower.

I made a similar point in another comment below but I'll repeat it here. I think it's unlikely you provide supporting evidence every time you make a factual claim because if you did it would be astonishingly laborious to carry out any kind of conversation.

And a brief look at your post history shows many examples of statements unaccompanied by supporting evidence.

As laudable as your sentiments are, they are rather unrealistic. We make unsupported claims all the time because normal human communication is not the same thing as rigorous chains of deductive statements.

If you look at the original post I was responding to, it asked the post it was responding to to supply scientific evidence to refute the claim it was making. It's one thing to make unsupported statements, it's another thing entirely to make an unsupported statement then claim the burden of proof is on somebody else to supply scientific evidence to refute one's claim (a claim for which no evidence has been provided).

> I've never met a scientist I could imagine making a hiring decision based on race.

Do you mean "race would never have any effect on their hiring decision" - even unconsciously? There's a fairly robust body of work on the topic of unconscious bias that would have to be almost entirely invalid for that statement to be true.

>Do you mean "race would never have any effect on their hiring decision" - even unconsciously?

By "making a decison based on race" I mean making a conscious decision in which race is a significant factor. If you want me to be more specific, I'll restate that as: in my estimation, any racial bias that may exist among the scientists I've met is not significant enough to in aggregate result in a difference greater than 1% in the ratio of people of any particular ethnicity hired compared to people of other ethnicities. I'd suspect other biases have far greater effect, e.g. against people from no-name universities.

I find your answer confusing. You initially clarify that you're talking about conscious decisions but your later claim is broad enough to include both conscious and unconscious bias.

I might agree that conscious racial bias is rare but I would find it harder to accept that unconscious racial bias is as uncommon as you claim. Does that sound reasonable?

If no evidence is presented, the argument is invalid. This also applies to forums.

I highly doubt that you apply this principle consistently yourself. In fact I just skimmed your comment history and there's a wealth of arguments presented without supporting evidence.

Very true. But you made a controversial statement without backing it up. Then you replied with a typical "just a forum" excuse. Which probably means: You can't find sources to back up your statement, or available sources contradict your statement.

If someone wants a source to my comments, I'll provide it as best I can.

> But you made a controversial statement without backing it up.

1. I didn't make the original statement

2. The reason I became involved in this debate is because the original statement seemed very far from controversial to me and I was rather dumbfounded that anyone felt the need to ask for supporting evidence.

The original claim was "things are not where they should be" and the context was "a person's ability to practice science to the best of their potential" irrespective of their nationality, gender, ethnicity etc.

For this to be controversial someone would have to be making the rather extreme counter-claim that scientific achievement is based solely on ability.

You can see by the reponses that this is quite controversial.

Maybe, but the burden of proof lies with the person who made the argument. ("things are not where they should be")

> You can see by the responses that this is quite controversial.

I don't think the tangent this discussion has taken is any indication that the original claim was controversial - merely that it's very easy to get bogged down in meta-discussions that detract from the actual issue being discussed. I don't think anyone could reasonably dispute the original statement - unless their interpretation of it was wildly different to mine. If that's the case then it's not lack of supporting evidence that's the problem - it's clarity of communication.