Please don't respond to a bad comment by breaking the site guidelines yourself. That only makes things worse.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: you've unfortunately been using HN primarily for ideological battle. That's not allowed, and we ban accounts that do it, regardless of what they're battling for or against. I've banned this account accordingly. For past explanations on this point see https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme....

> ~50% of the world population are women

yet 95% of the prison inmates are male. There are obvious differences on the extreme ends of the spectrum between males and females and the nobel price only considers extremes to begin with.

Your [2] source only mentions statistics since 2012. It's disingenuous to think this could spread down to 1901 if you wish to use the 1.8% as a point to argue.

Society was very different a hundred years ago. Women's access to education amongst other things has improved severely over time, and we do have seen an increase in female Nobel laureates compared to the earlier days.

It's a matter of time.

Sure, it doesn't spread down to 1901, but the uptick started around 1970s [1].

Anyway, my main rant was about the inefficiency of giving awards to "lone geniuses", at most three, of expecting said "lone wolves" to exist in the first place, and then comes the discussion if the wolves are male or not. Unfortunately it got derailed into talking about pseudoscientific scalars such as IQ and sex binaries.

[1] "large scale changes began around the 1970s", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_STEM_fields

Most Nobel winners get their prizes during their 60s-70s. It means that people who graduated in the 1970s are just starting to get their Nobels.

And the trend of aging winners continues as research become more complex and specialized and therefore requires more experience. The time between theory and the practical discovery (Nobel prizes are only for the latter) increase as experiments become more complex too. So much that it may become difficult for theorists to get a Nobel in their lifetime. That LK99 thing, if real, is more the exception than the rule.

True. That's why we probably need another mechanism for incentivizing high-risk/high-reward/multi-decennial research. Perhaps, even if LK99 is not real, something interesting will mutate out of it: some kind of platform merging arXiv, Twitch, Patreon, making the researchers to be more transparent, more willing to share partial results, failures, and even be rewarded to fail. Some time ago had this "fail database" in mind, where one would upload all the data of the experiments that didn't work. I see there is a "FailCon" [1].

[1] http://thefailcon.com/about.html

The other replies to this are making terrible arguments. The actual strongest case is that the Nobel prize is only given to extremely old people, which means it reflects the gender ratio of the field a few decades ago and not the current one.

Of course, they did give Donna Strickland a prize for the first paper she published as a grad student.

What isn't true? Is both the average and the variance of IQ in men/women identically equal? Why would we even expect it to be?

Is the likelihood of risk taking behaviour identically equal between men/women? Why would we even expect it to be?

Is the likelihood that a man/women will be identically equally interested in a career in the hard sciences? Why would we even expect it to be?

Nobody's clutching pearls or tone policing.

Your arguments aren't unique by a long shot; you're simply witnessing two seperate people who have been discussing technical matters since pre-WWW Usenet days observing there are hackers who have been making those arguments for 40+ years.

I can't speak for Don but for my part they got dull 35+ years back.

I'm sure you can find a rebuttal or reinforcement, whichever you need, elsewhere.