None the less, scientific studies are the best we have
"Best we have" doesn't justify a small confidence interval. If there no good evidence available on a topic the right thing to do is to be uncertain.
it's not like there's a shortage of studies finding evidence of the sort of sex bias we're discussing
The default way to act in those situations is to form your opinions based on meta-analysis.
I conjecture that, ironically, if Google measure again, they'll find that GPA became a better predictor of job success when they stopped using it as an important metric for selecting candidates.
You basically think that a bunch of highly paid staticians make a very trivial error when a lot of money is at stake. How confident are you in that prediction?
If there is no good evidence available on a topic the right thing to do is to be uncertain.
I agree. (Did I say something to suggest otherwise?)
The default way [...] is to form your opinions based on meta-analysis.
Given the time and inclination to do the meta-analysis (or someone else who's already done the work), yes. Have you perchance done it or read the work of someone else who has?
How confident are you in that prediction?
Not very.
[EDITED to fix a punctuation typo]
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.