Unsurprisingly the discussion of biological differences between the genders and races is fiercely opposed by the leftist academia, but the ‘Greater Male Variability Hypothesis’ (GMVH) recently triggered a very illuminating look at the state of science. Georgia Tech Professor Emeritus of Mathematics Theodore P. Hill recently wrote about his experience attempting to get a paper published in an article titled "Academic Activists Send a Published Paper Down the Memory Hole."Article: https://quillette.com/2018/09/07/academic-activists-send-a-published-paper-down-the-memory-hole/Your support is essential to Freedomain Radio, which is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by making a one time donation or signing up for a monthly recurring donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
So this is from the website, Q-U-I-L-L-E-T-T-E dot com, published September 7th, 2018.
Academic activists send a published paper down the memory hole and written by Theodore P. Hill.
Very interesting.
So much in this particular document that's well worth having a look at.
So, I've talked about this in the show before.
There are a number of different perspectives on this.
I'm going to take the mainstream one at the moment.
It's called the Greater Male Variability Hypothesis, or G-M-V-H, or G-M-V. So, it says that there are more idiots and more geniuses among men than among women, right?
So, you think of the bell curve, and for men, it's kind of flatter, right?
More geniuses, more idiots.
For women, it's kind of more vertical, right?
They cluster a little bit more around the middle.
And this hypothesis is over a hundred years old, Darwin's research on evolution, according to the article.
In the 19th century found that although there are many exceptions for specific traits and species, there is generally more variability in males than in females of the same species throughout the animal kingdom.
And this has been reported in species ranging from adders to sockeye salmon to wasps and orangutans as well as humans.
Multiple studies have found that boys and men are overrepresented at both the high and low ends of the distribution in categories ranging from birth weight and brain structures and 60-meter dash times to reading and mathematics test scores.
There are significantly more men than women, for example, among Nobel laureates, music composers, and chess champions, I guess the old high IQ, high cognitive ability occupations, and also among homeless people, suicide victims, and federal prison inmates.
Now, homeless people...
Let's be brutally frank, shall we?
Which is, you know, the old saying that a woman can always land on her back.
It's hard for a woman to end up homeless because she can always end up trading romance for a roof over her head.
As far as suicide victims go, of course, some smart people do kill themselves.
Federal prison inmates, I guess those include financial people who've...
Run these kind of Ponzi schemes and so on.
So, I don't know.
It's hard to say that the second category all includes low cognitive ability, although definitely criminality has a sweet spot around IQ of 85.
So, if this is valid, and the data seems to be fairly incontrovertible, this guy is saying, okay, why males in many species might have evolved to be more variable than females?
So he tried to find a scientific explanation.
He wanted to not prove or disprove that the hypothesis applies to human intelligence or any other specific traits or species, but simply to discover a logical reason that could help explain how gender differences in variability might naturally arise in the same species.
Now, obviously, my untutored outside view is fairly simple, that Women almost always reproduce, men often didn't reproduce, and therefore competition for men for access to female eggs is very high, and therefore a scattershot approach, given that women are in the privileged position of choosing, right? Men propose, women dispose, men ask for the date, women say yes or no.
That higher variability is going to be better and also then generally improves the pool as a whole because, you know, one man can impregnate 100 women and so if you have a very high quality man, then you will end up with him impregnating more women and therefore the gene pool is going to improve as a whole, blah, blah, blah, right? So that's my particular approach to it, but anyway.
So he came up, this guy, came up with, he calls it a simple intuitive mathematical argument based on biological evolutionary principles, and he enlisted a guy named Sergei Tabachinov.
Sorry, Tabachinov.
I'll just call him Sergei for now, professor of mathematics at Pennsylvania State University.
So fleshed out the model, and then they did a preprint on an open source, open access mathematics archives in May of last year.
And so people got kind of interested.
Wow, this is great. This is fantastic.
Let's go, right? So then Sergei and the writer here decided to try for publication in the Mathematical Intelligencer, the journal, and there's a viewpoint section in it which specifically welcomes articles on contentious topics.
How optimistic they were.
So there's this editor-in-chief, the intelligence, her name is Marjorie Wickler Senekal, a professor emeritus of mathematics and the history of science at Smith College.
She liked it and she said, no problem with the controversy.
In principle, she told Sergei in an email, I'm happy to stir up controversy and few topics generate more than this one.
After the Middlebury fracas in which none of the protesters had read the book they were protesting, we could make a real contribution here by insisting that all views be heard and providing links to them.
Now, She suggested that they mention Harvard President Larry Summers, who was swiftly defenestrated, I think that was, well, I know what the word means, but I think they're referring to his firing, in 2005, for saying that the greater male variability hypothesis might be, might be, a contributing factor to the dearth of women in physics and mathematics departments at top universities, right?
It's a big question. If being, so physics has the highest IQ on average of University disciplines followed by philosophy.
And if it takes a super high IQ to get to the top of a physics and mathematics department, and if the greater male variability hypothesis says that there are going to be very few women at the very top end of the IQ spectrum, then this would explain why this is not occurring, why there are few women in these top things.
And it also, again, explains why fewer women are homeless and so on, right?
And also the fact that women generally prefer to get into people disciplines, into language disciplines, and so on.
And we know this is true because as an economy becomes more free, women tend to cluster more towards interaction, people, and language disciplines rather than, say, computer science and so on.
And he said it might be a contributing factor or not.
This explains everything, but it just might be something that explains some of it.
Smoking crater. And he had to flee the social justice warriors, which only, of course, emboldens the social justice warriors.
So anyway, the article was accepted.
It was scheduled to appear in the International Journal's first issue of 2018, with an acknowledgement of funding support to my co-author from the National Science Foundation.
All normal academic procedure.
You know, thanks to God and the NSF. So, after the article was accepted and scheduled to be published, the James Damore fracas emerged, and you can check out my interview with the fine Mr.
Damore on this very channel.
And he said that, James Damore said that several innate biological factors, this is from the article, several innate biological factors, including gender differences in variability, might help explain gender disparities in Silicon Valley high-tech jobs.
Right? High-tech jobs.
Spatial reasoning, mathematical reasoning, and a willingness to work with things and computers and objects rather than with people.
Yeah, of course, of course, of course it has something to do with it.
And then James Damore was unjustly and wrongly fired, and he's currently in hot pursuit of Google for justice.
So then what happened was the guy's co-author Sergai posted a pre-print of our accepted article on his website.
It's like laying out the honey and waiting for the ants.
On August 16th, this was last year, a representative of the Women in Mathematics chapter in his department at Penn State contacted him to warn that the paper might be damaging to the aspirations of impressionable young women.
As a matter of principle, she wrote, I support people discussing controversial matters openly.
At the same time, I think it's good to be aware of the effects.
You know that thing where you say, whatever someone says before the word but, you can just safely discard.
And this, that's a big question.
And I am the father of a very gifted and precocious young lady, and...
You know, it takes a lot to battle your way to the top of academia.
You know, it takes a lot of assertiveness, not even sometimes to dismiss the power of aggression.
It's a lot of battling for men and for women because these are plum jobs with lots of prestige, lots of time off.
You get conferences in exotic locations.
You get sabbatical years and you get paid a truly unholy amount of money for...
Well, sometimes it could be argued, not a lot of hours actually teaching and all that.
So they're very, very plumb positions.
And so lots of people are battling to try and get a hold of them.
So if you are a brilliant, mathematically inclined young woman, of course there's going to be a battle.
And so the idea that someone says, well, there could be some biological influences and so on, well, I give up.
I mean, come on! Everything that is quality, that is hard to get, that is a value in life, is a battle.
I mean, good lord, try and say, let's say you want to bring philosophy to the masses and talk about reason and evidence in a generally accessible context.
Let's say you want to do that on the internet.
It can be quite a battle.
In fact, you can get a lot of trolls, you can get a lot of hatred, you can get a lot of bad press, you can get a lot of lies.
I mean, it can be a real battle.
Problem and a real challenge.
It's worth it because philosophy is important and I will spend myself to the bone marrow in pursuit of spreading reason and evidence, but it's a lot of battle.
And if someone says ahead of time, you know, it's going to be really tough.
It's like, good, because that means when I break through there'll be even less competition.
So the idea that some woman wants to become a top mathematician but then reads some article and then says, well, that's it, I'm not going to do it, doesn't make any sense to me.
I mean... What are you gonna say?
What are you gonna do? Yeah! The other thing, too, that's interesting is you could really make the case the other way, too, and very justly and reasonably, because if you tell young women, let's say they wanna be physicists or mathematicians, you tell young women, There's so much sexism in this discipline.
In academia, there's so much anti-woman sentiment.
There's so much sexism.
There's an old boys club. They just wring their penises like a moat around the golden treasure of academe, right?
If you tell women that there's just massive amounts of sexism, wouldn't you consider that kind of discouraging to young women?
Whereas if you say, no, if you have the ability...
You can get there. Statistically, fewer women have that very high super top physics and math ability than men, but if you have the ability, it's just and it's fair.
Isn't that encouraging?
Don't you want to say, oh great, then sexism isn't as big a factor.
So therefore, I can go and achieve it if I score well on the test.
If I do well, if I, you know, I can do it.
So these guys, I think, are making a very strong case as to why women should not be afraid to enter this field.
They should, of course, track their marks, track their scores, see how well they do.
But if they run into trouble, saying it may not be sexism, but it also might be some of this other stuff, is actually kind of encouraging because there's not this big giant wall of prejudice, right?
You know where there is a big giant wall of prejudice?
Let's say that you're a free market guy, you're a small government guy, you like objectivism and so on, and let's say that you go into Canadian academia, or let's say that you go into the Canadian art scene by...
Being one of a thousand people picked to go to the National Theatre School in Montreal.
And there's quite a lot of prejudice there, and it's not due to lack of ability.
So there is real prejudice, and the prejudice is against empirical objective, anti-postmodernist, anti-left-wing, anti-socialism, anti-communist, anti-collectivist thinkers.
Massive amounts of prejudice, and it's not...
Due to lack of ability, it is just bigotry against small government people.
Whereas in this case, they're saying the lack of representation of women at the highest level is not really due to sexism.
It's due to these biological perhaps, and whether they're socialized or biological, it's still what you have to deal with, right?
So I think this actually could be, you could strongly argue that this encourages women to go into these kinds of fields.
So anyway... Ah, so, this woman, the representative of the Women in Mathematics, Wim Chapter, she says, while she was obviously able to debate the merits of our paper, she worried that other, presumably less sophisticated readers,
quote, will just see someone wielding the authority of mathematics to support a very controversial and potentially sexist The phrase potentially sexist, do you know what it is?
Actually, do you know what it isn't?
An argument. Is it true?
Is it valid? Is it factual?
Is it supportable? Is it empirical?
Is it logical?
Is it internally consistent?
Potentially sexist set of ideas.
So if nature in her infinite wisdom has given the greater male variability hypothesis more free rein and clustered women more around the center of various bell curves, then what you're saying is mother nature is sexist.
In other words, you're saying biology, reality, evolution is sexist.
Genetics are sexist.
Anyone have a problem with that other than me?
I'm sure. So anyway, this woman in charge of women in mathematics, a few days later, she again contacted Sergei on behalf of WIM and invited him to attend a lunch that had been organized for a, quote, frank and open discussion, end quote, about our paper.
He would be allowed 15 minutes to describe and explain our results, and this short presentation would be followed by readings of prepared statements by WIM members and then an open discussion.
We promise to be friendly, she announced, but you should know in advance that many, most of us have strong disagreements with what you did.
Now that's an interesting way to phrase it.
Not strong disagreements with your data.
Not we found flaws in your research.
Just the fact that you did it is a problem.
That's not science. You understand?
That's not math. That's not science.
So this woman is saying, how dare you imply that women aren't as competent at math and science, and she basically wants to pull him in for...
You know, what sounds like a very watered-down version of some re-education camp coming out of Chairman Mao, and she's not actually providing him any counter-arguments to his science and his math.
How dare you say that women aren't as good sometimes at math and science at the very top level, and I'm going to tell you that what you did is sexist and problematic without giving you any rebuttal to your math and science.
Hmm. September 4th, this is last year, Sergai sent the author a weary email.
The scandal at our department, he wrote, shows no signs of receding.
Which means it gets support from the highest levels, I think, almost always the case.
So... At a faculty meeting the week before, the department head had explained that sometimes values such as academic freedom and free speech come into conflict with other values to which Penn State was committed.
Inclusiveness for things that aren't scientific, apparently.
A female colleague had then instructed Sergei that he needed to admit and fight bias, adding that the belief that, quote, women have a lesser chance to succeed in mathematics at the very top end is bias.
And again, this confusion between collectives and individuals is really quite weary.
It's really quite weary.
So, every individual woman has a great chance to succeed if she has the ability and she has the drive and she wants to do it.
And given all of the affirmative action and support and so on, she's got a really, really good chance.
But if you zoom out, women as a whole are going to be underrepresented at the highest levels and the lowest levels.
Of course, no one complains about the lowest levels because that's just men suffering, you see?
So... Just saying that something is bias.
If it's mathematically and statistically supported, it's bias to reject it.
You understand? So, the writer says, Sergey said he had spent endless hours talking to people who explained that the paper was bad and harmful and tried to convince him to withdraw my name to restore peace at the department and to avoid losing whatever political capital I may still have.
Ominously, quote, analogies with scientific racism were made by some.
I am afraid we are likely to hear more of it in the future.
Now, scientific racism, this is the race and IQ stuff that I've talked about with a number of experts on this show.
So it's bad and harmful.
It's wrong think. It's unthink.
It might be demotivating for people.
It's bias. It's sexist.
Just one... One wee criterion that is missing, which is, is it true?
Is it valid? Is it supported?
Is it logical? Well, I guess it's more than one, but they're all kind of the same thing.
So the writer, the following day, wrote to three organizers of the WIM lunch, ooh, I lost my appetite already, he said, and offered to address any concrete concerns they might have with our logic or conclusions or any other content.
Ah, you see, that's your problem.
You're trying to offer to address any concrete concerns with logic or conclusions.
So he never received a response.
So then, September 8th last year, Sergei and the author were ambushed by two unexpected developments.
First, NSF. Non-sufficient funds for free speech.
National Science Foundation wrote and said, Can you remove the acknowledgement for NSF funding?
Right! Now!
Now! Now! Okay, well, all right.
I think we can understand why they wanted that.
Now, they said, well, the paper was unrelated to Sergei's funded proposal, and then under Freedom of Information requests, they found that that was something else, and of course, it was basically, our concern is that this paper appears to promote pseudoscientific ideas that are detrimental to the advancement of women in science and at odds with the values of the NSF. So,
a rigorous scientific mathematical paper is at odds with the values of the National Science Foundation.
Well, of course.
Of course. So then, the editor-in-chief of Mathematical Intelligencer, there's Marjorie Senecal, notified us that with deep regret she was rescinding her previous acceptance of our paper.
Several colleagues, she wrote, had warned that her publication would provoke extremely strong reactions.
And there existed a, quote, very real possibility that the right-wing media may pick this up and hype it internationally.
Yeah, because, you know, who doesn't just curl up on a Friday night with a mathematical paper and just go to town?
So, basically, this might contribute to an important discussion in the world that And we can't have that now.
We can't have that.
Crazy. So, the rejection of an already accepted paper.
This guy says, in my 40 years of publishing research papers, I had never heard of the rejection of an already accepted paper.
And, of course, this is to help remind other people not to pursue this topic either, right?
Like, these guys are the canaries in the coal mine that says, none shall pass, right?
So, other people... We'll be less likely to, quote, waste their time pursuing stuff that is actually relevant to important discussions in society, might actually help people.
Heaven forbid, heaven forbid, you as an intellectual do something that benefits humanity as a whole, and having this kind of contribution...
To a very powerful discussion about sexism and representation, this is a hugely important contribution.
Heaven forbid you do something that is not an internal ookie-kookie circle jerk of wasting taxpayers' money.
So she said, he emailed the professor in charge of the journal.
She said, I didn't receive any criticisms on scientific grounds, but she was just afraid of the reaction that the paper would elicit.
Because, you see, diversity is a strength.
It's going to be great having all these new people in science.
It's going to be fantastic.
I can't wait.
So, anyway, the alternative was interesting.
So the editor-in-chief proposed that Sergei and the author participate in a roundtable discussion of a hypothesis argument, the proceedings of which the intelligence it would publish in lieu of our paper.
Well, that's... Interesting.
It's like how, you know, like me and other people are always introduced with some sort of negative adjective in the mainstream media.
Like, you can't just say, well, he argues for this, or he's committed to this, or this is his position on this.
It's always got to be like, bleh, bleh, bleh, some negative adjective, because heaven forbid people be able to come to their own conclusions.
And this is not how science works, right?
You come up with a hypothesis, you write it up, it's peer-reviewed, it gets published, and then other people can rebut it.
But the idea that you publish only the debate, well, it just means that they're afraid that the audience might be exposed to ideas, which means that they have no trust in their audience.
So the women, I mean, it's technical people, right?
It's professionals in mathematics who would read this journal, and some of whom would be women.
So are these women saying that these women can't handle, can't process, can't analyze, can't rebut this kind of argument?
That seems very sexist to me.
Very odd. So what happened?
So there's this woman named Amy Wilkinson, a senior professor of mathematics at the University of Chicago.
And she had become aware of this paper written to the journal to complain.
Now this I find fascinating.
This woman, Wilkinson, then enlisted the support of her father, a psychometrician and statistician, and wrote to the intelligence or at his daughter's request to express his own misgivings, including his belief that, quote, this article oversimplifies the issues to the point of embarrassment.
I don't know if she's a feminist, but running to your father...
Does not seem very empowered to me.
I'm just putting that out here.
It does not seem like the height of empowerment to me.
My daughter grows up and wants me to come in and fight on her behalf and be like, you're a big girl.
You want this fight?
Then you should take this fight. So then Professor Senecal said, oh, come and...
He said to the woman's father, come and participate in the proposed round table.
And then he said, nah...
He said that, quote, others are more expert on this than he is.
So anyway. So this guy wrote polite emails to Wilkinson and her father saying, I'm going to revise the paper for resubmission elsewhere.
Help me make it better.
Criticisms or suggestions, right?
You've gone behind my back to try and, I guess, quash the publication.
So help me improve it.
Of course, you get no reply, right?
Ah, anyway, you can read this in more detail, but it's really, it's powerful, very, very important stuff.
So, Sergei, the guy who had, and another colleague who'd done computer simulations, he said, at this point, faced with career-threatening reprisals from their own departmental colleagues and the diversity committee at Penn State...
See, diversity now does not include science.
As well as displeasure from the NSF, Sergei and his colleague who had done computer simulations for us withdrew their names from the research.
And this guy, I love this sentence.
This guy's great. He says, fortunately for me, I am now retired and rather less easily intimidated.
One of the benefits of being a Vietnam combat veteran and former U.S. Army Ranger, I guess.
So I continued to revise the paper and finally posted it on the online mathematics archives.
So then, the plot continues, the plot thickens.
October 13, 2017, I guess a lifeline appeared.
Igor Riven, an editor at the widely respected online research journal, the New York Journal of Mathematics, got in touch with me, learned about the article, and says, yeah, I'll take a look, right?
So, he duly submitted the author, duly submitted a new draft, this time as the sole author, and after a very positive referee's report and a handful of supervised revisions, This guy wrote to confirm publication on November 6th, 2017.
Relieved that the ordeal was finally over, I forwarded the link to interested colleagues.
Hmm. So, it's online and it's going to be published November 6th.
Three days later, however, the paper had vanished.
It had been unpapered, unpersoned, it had gone down the memory hole!
Winston Smith had scratched it with a bad pencil and flushed it down a tube.
Now, what's remarkable...
So the paper had vanished, and then a few days later, a completely different paper by different authors appeared at exactly the same page at the same volume where mine had once been.
Interesting. So, Amy Wilkinson, the mathematician earlier who ran to her father, turns out, you see, Amy Wilkinson is married to Benson Farb, a member of this NYJM editorial board.
So, I guess first she ran to her daddy and then she ran to her hubby to get things done.
Again, I'm not sure that that's specifically what I understand by feminist empowerment, but again, I could be entirely mistaken.
It's just my thought.
So, the paper, according to these complaints from this woman's husband, was politically charged and pseudoscience and a piece of crap!
And by encouraging the journal to accept it, Riven had violated a scientific duty for purely political ends.
Hmm. Why is the word projection floating through my mind?
I'm sure for no reason in particular.
So then this guy, the author of the article in question and of this particular article is kind of in a bind.
So he says, look, if the deletion is permanent, it's an impossible situation for me.
Right? Because you have to sign a copyright form declaring that the Article has not been published elsewhere.
And so if it has been published elsewhere, he can't republish it.
So by accepting it, they've got a monopoly over the article.
Therefore, he can't take it anywhere else.
So Steinberger replied later that day, half his board, he explained unhappily, had told him that unless he pulled the article, they would all resign and, quote, harass the journal, end quote, he had founded 25 years earlier, quote, until it died, end quote.
Faced with the loss of his own scientific legacy, he had capitulated.
A publication in a dead journal he offered wouldn't help you.
It's really quite something.
So he talks to colleagues none of them had ever heard of a paper in any field being disappeared after formal publication.
And that is very unusual.
Yeah, if a formally refereed and published paper can be...
It can later be erased from the scientific record and replaced by a completely different article without any discussion with the author or any announcement in the journal.
What will this mean for the future of electronic journals?
So, he says, meanwhile, Professor Wilkinson had now widened her existing social media campaign against the intelligence or to include attacks on NYJM and its editorial staff as recently as April of this year, I guess 2018, she was threatening Facebook friends with unfriending unless they severed social media ties with Riven.
It does not seem to me a specifically mathematical rebuttal of the article in question.
So then, I mean, this sort of grim and fairly appalling ending to all this kind of stuff, and you can read sort of the end of it as far as...
Free speech goes and all of that, but this is really some truly remarkable stuff in that at least there's a place where you can get this information out.
And it is.
It's terrifying stuff. It's terrifying stuff.
This capitulation, to what I view at least as this kind of bullying, is a disaster.
And what it means, of course, is that academia becomes increasingly irrelevant because...
I know this from my own channel, my friends.
Questions about genetics, questions about intelligence, questions about gender or sex-based differences and racial differences and so on.
Very, very important.
Absolutely essential for the discussion that we have about society.
I also do understand the position of the women and the men who were fathering them and married to them who fought this guy.
So just to help you understand where they're coming from, this is very, very important.
So they believe that all differences in outcomes are the result of prejudice.
All differences in outcome are the result of prejudice.
Now, if that's the case, then anyone who tries to ascribe any other cause for differences in outcome is excusing and downplaying and therefore supporting bigotry, sexism, racism, and so on.
on.
So from this, like, if you take this as the central star of your mental solar system, then this is how it plays out.
So just to really, really understand this thinking.
Because they believe that they're completely in the right and that they are fighting bigotry and they are maintaining the avenue for women to succeed in sciences and they are fighting sexism and bigotry and prejudice because this central principle.
All differences in outcome, differences in outcomes on IQ tests between East Asians, between Caucasians, between Hispanics, between blacks are all the result of prejudice slash environment.
All differences in outcome for women in terms of the wage gap are the result of sexism and sexism alone, not the result of women choosing lower paid professions, not the result of any of this Kind of stuff to do with variability.
Not to do with the fact that women choose to have children and therefore are usually paid by men either directly as husbands or indirectly through the welfare state as taxpayers that this may have something to do with it.
Not because women generally score very high on agreeableness and in order to get to the top of any field I know.
You have to accept a certain amount of just people really, really disagreeing with you, fundamentally and foundationally disagreeing with you.
And of the big five personality traits, women score a little bit higher on neuroticism and agreeableness and so on, and that might interfere with some of their, you know, battle to the top of the mountain of bodies to get to the top of any profession.
And testosterone also can help drive that kind of assertiveness.
And so there's lots of very complex explanations.
Is there sexism? Sure, sure there is.
Absolutely. Is it the only explanation?
Of course not. There are many, many other factors which contribute to all of this.
But if you have this monodimensional, one answer explains everything.
Find a discrepancy between gender, between race, between you name it, right?
Then all... All of those discrepancies are the result of rampant prejudice.
Well, if that's the only thing that drives you, then anybody who comes up with any alternative explanations is excusing bigotry, sexism, racism, and prejudice.
They're justifying it. They are supporting it.
And therefore, because what they're doing is so immoral, you have this kind of temptation of the by any means necessary.
By any means necessary, you must prevent alternative explanations.
To the bigotry, sexism, racism explanation of all group differences.
And so you do have this, you know, this is why they're called social justice warriors.
It is a battle.
And it is a fundamentally collectivist battle.
It is an anti-scientific battle.
It is an anti-nuance battle.
I'm always very concerned when I come across people who have one explanation for incredibly complex social phenomenon, which...
Something like group differences in outcomes, very complex.
And you need to bring a lot of intellectual might and subtlety and nuance and weight to bear on these complex topics.
Just saying it's one thing that is not a rational position, not a reasonable position.
But it is a position that makes you feel like you're in the right and excuses what I consider to be pretty unjust attacks on other people.
So I don't know where this goes.
I don't know where this ends, but there has to be some kind of pushback against this bullying.
Those of us who genuinely want these problems to be solved, right?
And there are two ways that you can solve problems, right?
I mean, you can either find some solution that gets rid of the problem, or you can accept that the problem is to some degree beyond your control.
I mean, the fact that women choose people-centric rather than thing-centric occupations I mean, what do you force women to go take math and physics?
I mean, that would reduce their freedoms and their choices.
You know, it's that old saying, You know, God grant me the courage to change the things that I can, the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, and the wisdom to know the difference.
This is complex. There will be some things that we can do to close gaps.
There will be other things that we do which gives more freedom that widens the gaps.
And this is what's so fundamentally tyrannical about this position, this by any means necessary.
If in a state of freedom...
Gaps increase. If you look at the wealth gap, or the opportunity gap, or the access to technology and good healthcare gap between your average European king and peasant 500 years ago, it really wasn't that big a deal.
Like, it wasn't a huge gap.
The king had more to eat, for sure.
The king had a nicer palace, for sure.
The king had more access to horses, but they were all subject to the same tooth decay.
They were all subject to the same diseases.
They were all subject to the same weaponry and so on.
And so... When you have a non-free society, you can kind of close these gaps because nobody tries to achieve anything.
Socialism is the doctrine that everybody should be equally poor in misery, right?
Or equally rich in misery, I suppose.
And so if you can't make the short people taller, you can at least cut down the tall people.
And so if in a state of freedom, you end up with wider disparities between particular groups in a state of freedom, then if all disparities are evil, then freedom.
By revealing and allowing for these disparities.
Like if you have a free market, the smart people are gonna end up very rich, and the less intelligent people are gonna end up not so rich.
Over time, everyone gets better, for sure.
And it cycles, right?
If you don't like the current configuration of wealth in a free society, wait one generation and it will radically reshift, or sometimes not even just wait 10 years, it'll sometimes radically reshift.
But if freedom produces wide disparities in outcomes, And why disparities in outcomes are always the result of prejudice?
Then freedom promotes prejudice.
Freedom is prejudice. And therefore, to get rid of prejudice, you must also get rid of freedom.
