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Comment by thatthatis

Just positing that these things _might_ be true and should be investigated was a key factor in Larry Summers getting drummed out of his position as President of Harvard.

The world at large isn't ready to hear these statistics, and overall that is probably a good thing. We shouldn't accept these disparities as driven by natural forces until we've tried everything we can imagine to try to bring the differences in line.

Over the course of history, far more bad has been wrought by assuming differences were innate than assuming they were the result of bias. Given that, we should assume and act as though differences are due to bias long after the differences are well proven to be natural. It is a case where being wrong in one direction is not very costly, but being wrong in the other direction (and thus institutionalizing bias) is disastrous.

Tldr: we should err on the side of caution.

parent thatthatis 13 years ago

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