I also happen to work with biologists and I found no such thing as you describe. People aren't afraid to talk about sex differences. There's no hidden truth that everyone speaks in undertones about and is scared of mouthing out loud. People don't mindlessly transpose what they know about their model organisms to humans. People don't buy into evopsych crap either. (There's a reason evopsych papers have trouble even making it into PNAS.) The community isn't filled with Damores either. So maybe you could clarify what you're talking about because I seem to have lost you there.
"It works in a close animal" is a necessary though far from sufficient condition for "it" working in humans. The point of doing animal trials is to filter out drugs that don't even fulfill that condition. Look at the "in mice" twitter account. How many potential Alzheimer treatments and cures for cancer have been touted in the last decade that proved effective in mice? How many of them turned out to be promising in humans? You need to keep that ratio in mind whenever you feel like conjecturing something.
And keep in mind we're talking here about behavioral differences driven by possibly the most complex organ that diverged the most from other animals'.
I mean, people being wrong about biology is ok, the issue is when the discussion devolves into some of the touchier subjects and suddenly everyone larps as a scientist. "Do you have citations for that?" "There is a widely accepted consensus that..." "It's not just my opinion, it's science."
This is very strange because in technology threads where actual experts chime in, no one acts like that. People share their experiences about using such-and-such stack, sometimes with very strongly worded and passionate opinions but never with the pretense of scolarship or "quest for truth". Imagine how bewildering it'd be if people cited publications from "The Journal of Serverless Stacks" (IF=1.4) in lieu of experience sharing.
Lol I've heard so many times about the conspiracy of biologists who are afraid to "tell the truth" about sex differences. Everyone is like Damore, cowing in front of the SJW crowd and afraid to be fired4truth. The reality is much more tame.
The crux of the matter (and potential controversy) is not about sex differences in plants or C. elegans. Most biologists I've met who study algae or polar bears usually limit their expert opinion on those species. It's really about transposing such knowledge to humans, where we don't have that level of bottom-up insight for a variety of reasons ranging from "humans are complicated", "most of what works in other species doesn't work in humans" (see: 99% of drug trials) to "you can't just open up people's brains to see what they're made of".
Yeah there are a few bioinformaticians around - but they're few and far between and are often graduate students or candidates. Contrast with the diversity of tech profiles you find on here, from 60 year old COBOL veterans to ex-Googlers or the creators of frameworks, and all the founders.
I think there's a difficulty in that you can't just do biology from your garage, even bioinformatics. The standards have shifted, and most of the low-hanging fruit has been picked. You either need to generate original data yourself with costly experiments, collaborate with people who have done so, or explore enormous amounts of data with costly compute. To meet these requirements you need to be affiliated to an institution, i.e. work within the system. (An exception would be Googlers and other such people who already have access to the compute for some reason)
Perhaps the whole thing is ripe for disruption, but so far all I've seen is repeated variations on xkcd #1831.
HN is notoriously bad at anything related to biology, evolution, and genetics. It's a combination of this (https://xkcd.com/1831/) and this (https://xkcd.com/793/) comic. People there are also fond of finding a bunch of psychology papers that confirms existing biases.
There's also a misleading phenomenon where many of the fields whose "experts" chime in on these questions are called evolutionary psychology or behavioral genetics, making you think that these fields are related to biology and enjoy the same methodological standards of rigor as well as the same consensus from biologists. In reality these fields approach the questions from psychology, and that one field is known for having a bunch of practices, biases and motivated reasoning that'd make many a biologist reluctant to touch it with a ten feet pole.
It's very elegant to see the sleight of hand in action: someone makes a claim about sex, arguing it's a biological reality, and when challenged backs up their claim with a psych paper from a field that disguises as one from biologists and pretends that his claim enjoys a widespread consensus among actual scientists (as opposed to just psychologists). Hence, the claim isn't ideologically motivated, it's just science. Beautiful
The end goal is to finally kill local storage and have everything as a service, on the cloud. This way tech companies will finally take back the control on their users they have so foolishly relinquished in the 70s.
Because moxie told me it's bad since it doesn't use secret chats by default. All the features in the world that no other messenger remotely approaches still don't make it usable when you actually have to manually toggle a button to start a secret chat with someone. The horror!
The idea that a "scientific consensus" exists on IQ makes it sound like stronger than it actually is - the field of psychology is much less rigorous than actual hard sciences and the bar to clear is very low there. That IQ is universally accepted among psychologists despite a number of very obvious glaring flaws is more damning against psychologists than adding to the credibility of the concept.
Magnus is so incredibly strong that people think he's about to decline when suffering one (1) loss from another rising star in a niche online format. This is like when Capablanca didn't lose a single game between 1917 and 1924 and everyone acted like "the Schachmachine ist kaputt" when he broke his streak. The fact is that competition is incredibly tough and differences betwene player levels are imperceptible to all but the very most trained eyes. In fact that's why championships need so many games and tie-breakers - the people are so equal in ability that the most likely result from a match between to top level players is a draw.
Chess is one of the few fields where dominance can easily stretch into several decades - if you're a young prodigy you may breach into top level in your teenage years and last well until your 50s or 60s. Of course you won't be #1 this whole time (check out Lasker's longevity though) but you will always remain a top contender.