There's a difference between claiming that there are no difference and critically examining specific claims to see how well supported they are by the scientific evidence. The book review you linked to appears to fall in that tradition of critically examining claims and looking at sources of systemic error.

> At the very least, no-one ever got fired for claiming there are no differences.

Nobody has been fired for relevant scientifically-supported claims, either. What has happened is that some guys have spouted off outside of their areas of competency and tried to avoid the consequences by handwaving something about engaging in science. Science is a tool for becoming less-wrong over time, not a get-out-of-jail-free card.

Look at e.g. Damore's memo. It was relevant and cited peer reviewed research in support of its claims. Whether those claims were true is another matter, but they were "scientifically supported" by any sensible standard. Yet he was fired, while all the people claiming the exact opposite, even when they did not cite any research, and just as much "outside their areas of competency", were not.

In that sense, you're very much correct - if you say something sufficiently unpopular, no matter how well scientifically supported, science won't act as a get-out-of-jail-free card, and won't save you from the backlash. At best it might provide a Nobel prize you can sell for cash when things get dire.

Odd, but I saw videos of Google and YouTube execs soon afterwards talking at conferences saying some of the same things that were somehow so terrible in the Damore memo.

In particular, they stated that they were doing about as well as the education pipeline could allow, and they also speculated that there might be changes to the work environment which could make jobs more desirable to women.

Linking a study about toy preferences in monkeys (no matter its merits) is a long way from supporting the claim that Google’s management stats were just reflecting a shortage of qualified people.

That hardly strikes me as an intellectually robust summary of the memo.

Try going through it to extract a coherent thesis and then look for the citations, noting how few of them there are at all, how many are secondary sources, and especially how big the gaps are between the things being claimed and what the cited evidence actually supports. Damore is not a very good writer but he’s proficient in the Gish Gallup – if you’re not reading carefully easy easy to careen from point to point without asking how well each one is argued.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagge...

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2018/09/sexism-inflation.html

Here's an interview by James Damore by feminist LianaK:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SFLoKa8FdA

He's not a monster or a raging sexist. He and his memo certainly didn't warrant the hysterical mass staying-home that happened shortly after the media kerfuffle. (In retrospect, I'm actually happy the whole reaction happened, though it is a shame an innocent man lost his job. This event can be preserved for future generations and studied and evaluated for what it really was -- and for how ridiculous and dishonest it was.)

I have serious doubts that my interests were given to me socially. I have always liked the color and flavor orange, I have always liked chocolate (one of my best friends does not), I have always wanted to take things apart to figure out how they worked... the latter led more or less "naturally" to programming (especially after taking my first programming class and realizing I LOVED it). What if it turned out that the "urge to take things apart and learn how they worked", at some very low level, was more of a male thing? Why would that be so bad? That doesn't mean that equivalently-interested women need be held back in any way/shape/form (because, duh, they shouldn't!)

Stop right here. You're already describing a high-level skill, an extremely high-level skill. What does grandparent have to say about this?

>high-level cognitive skills represent years of practice so even if you did find, say, a difference in the size of a brain region you would still want to study whether that's innate or simply reflecting that people who do something a lot develop capacity for it

So we see that the very question you are asking is precisely what grandparent is calling out as impossible to get some kind of direct access to in the first place. Why?

>because the brain is famously plastic

The brain, by the definition of its form, doesn't leave an audit trail, so by definition, _we cannot ask the kinds of questions you want to ask_, questions that, obviously, many many people _want_ to ask, _unless_ we somehow develop a way to backtrack the brain's _inline mutation_, which doesn't look likely. But ethical and political discourse is not designed to _wait_ until we have all the information to even make answering the questions they pose possible, questions which make _presumptions_ in the _absence of knowledge_, presumptions they can't actually cash the check for.

Science has _bounds_; ethico-political discourse does not. They are not composable types.

You ask, "Why would that be so bad? "

But we can't even begin to access the _conditions_ for even getting the presumption to be true, so what other value is there left for a question which is own shaky epistemological ground? What is the value of _supposing_ that it is true?

> What is the value of _supposing_ that it is true?

The problem is that the (calling it this for effect) "blank-slate hypothesis mafia" is assuming that it is NOT true.

If what you say is valid, then NO SIDE should be taken seriously until more evidence comes in.

Where does that raw interest come from? Humans are highly social creatures and children show signs of learning socially very early so it requires a great deal of care to distinguish between a correlation and the underlying cause. If something is social behaviour, that means that we can also question whether it's worth continuing.

> What if it turned out that the "urge to take things apart and learn how they worked", at some very low level, was more of a male thing? Why would that be so bad? That doesn't mean that equivalently-interested women need be held back in any way/shape/form (because, duh, they shouldn't!)

The problem is that the latter part is really hard to actually deliver: historically that meant that girls were actively discouraged or prevented from being interested in things which are identified as male but even without overt prevention social pressure is a real problem — maybe nobody tells someone directly “you can't do this” but if the image of programming is “you'd be the only girl” or the widespread “only nerdy boys like this” trope that's going to have an impact, and one which will probably start well before anyone is, say, picking a major in college. It doesn't even need to be conscious — maybe nobody actually thinks negatively but they just assumed that, say, a bright high school student would be more interested in biology than math or CS and never really even suggested the latter. Maybe at some point they give up after being asked again why they're doing something associated with the other gender, which is tiring even if it's not intended to be mean.

Those social factors are all around us and the only thing which seems to work is actively correcting against them so that every kid has as wide a range of opportunities open to them.

Isn't that the precise question that science is trying to answer, but which is being disputed by people who do not like the answers?

> Humans are highly social creatures and children show signs of learning socially very early so it requires a great deal of care to distinguish between a correlation and the underlying cause

Sure. And you'd also have to distinguish things like hormones... would those be categorized as "nature" or "nurture"? If you categorize them as "nurture" then it would give more credence to the blank-slate hypothesis, since there are definite, measurable changes to physique and behavior from having a higher blood testosterone level, for example.

> The problem is that the latter part is really hard to actually deliver: historically that meant that girls were actively discouraged or prevented from being interested in things which are identified as male

This is sort of a "they can't handle the truth" argument, or perhaps a "guilty until proven innocent" argument, which I don't like. But it is an argument. I guess... It's also an appeal to tradition fallacy- it's quite possible that times have changed and that, more generally, everyone is supported in whatever interests them, way more than it was in "those times", regardless of any emerging scientific info about correlations to gender.

> but even without overt prevention social pressure is a real problem

So is the Petrie multiplier: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petrie_multiplier

We should then teach young people not to care about conformity, then. I didn't... My Pascal class in high school (this dates me... this was the late 80's) had 1 woman and myself, and she was awesome. (She's a doctor now.)

> Maybe at some point they give up after being asked again why they're doing something associated with the other gender, which is tiring even if it's not intended to be mean

As a guy I often meet other guys, and the usual guy thing is to talk about sports, which I have pretty much zero interest in. When I was younger, they would give me shit about it (oh jesus, having flashbacks to bad trading of baseball cards, etc.), but as an adult, guys sense when that's not your thing and move onto other topics. I don't think we'll ever completely escape the "jerky kid" element to social pressure, perhaps because part of what it means to be human seems to be to learn how not to be an asshole. :)

> and the only thing which seems to work is actively correcting against them so that every kid has as wide a range of opportunities open to them

Well that's the catch- what is the best way to "actively correct against them"? Some might say "enforcement" (quotas, etc.) but I don't think that's fair, my way would be "teach people not to care one bit what others think about their interests because they are YOUR interests."

Science does investigate all sorts of questions and there isn’t exactly a movement to shutdown neuroscience and psychology research. What there is a reaction to are people claiming to know the answer to these big field-defining questions, which conveniently says that their politics are the only right position, and otherwise claiming the mantle of science while acting contrary to how actual science is supposed to work. Sometimes that includes criticism of scientific figures but that’s when they aren’t doing good science: nobody would question that James Watson is a real scientist but the criticism he gets today isn’t for asking unpopular questions but for falling so short of the standard. Had he wanted to do real research into intelligence and genetics he’d have had no shortage of resources and collaborators but he wouldn’t have the big dramatic claims, just more slow progress chipping away at one of the hardest problems in the world.

If science is still trying to find the answers, then the people who claim to know what the science proves merely have an agenda.

And it's the agenda that people don't like, the attempt to write all differences between gender, particularly in terms of social and business roles, off as genetics.