The question is: How credible is it that our world is one of them?
Making wrong arguments isn't good even if it leads to a true conclusion. I haven't argued that the world happens to be shaped a certain way. I argue that your arguments are wrong. LessWrong is primarily a forum for rational debate. If you arguing for a position that I believe to be true but make arguments that are flawed I will object. That's because arguments aren't soldiers.
On the matter of the extend of gender discrimination I don't have a fixed opinion. My uncertainty interval is pretty large. Not having a small uncertainty interval because you fall for flawed arguments matters. The fact that humans are by default overconfident is well replicated.
But if we become back to grades as a predictor: Google did find that academic performance is no good predictor for job performance at Google.
Google doesn't even ask for GPA or test scores from candidates anymore, unless someone's a year or two out of school, because they don't correlate at all with success at the company.
Of course Google won't give you the relevant data as an academic does, but Google is a company that wants to make money. It actually has a stake in hiring high performing individuals.
While we are at it, you argue as if scientific studies nearly always replicate. We don't live in a world where that's true. Political debates tend to make people overconfident.
I argue that your arguments are wrong.
It looks to me as if that's because you are treating them as if they are intended to be deductive inferences when in fact they are inductive ones.
At no point have I intended to argue that (e.g.) it is impossible that the results found in this study are the result of accurate rational evaluation by the faculty in question. Only that it is very unlikely. The fact that one can construct possible worlds where their behaviour is close to optimal is of rather little relevance to that.
...Google did find that academic perfor
I remember seeing a talk of the concept of privilege show up in the discussion thread on contrarian views.
Some discussion got started from "Feminism is a good thing. Privilege is real."
This is an article that presents some of those ideas in a way that might be approachable for LW.
http://curt-rice.com/quotas-microaggression-and-meritocracy/
One of the ideas I take out of this is that these issues can be examined as the result of unconscious cognitive bias. IE sexism isn't the result of any conscious thought, but can be the result as a failure mode where we don't rationality correctly in these social situations.
Of course a broad view of these issues exist, and many people have different ways of looking at these issues, but I think it would be good to focus on the case presented in this article rather than your other associations.