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?