The point here should be clear: of course it isn't sexual harassment. Yet the data shows that even that limited form of negative interaction can have a substantial impact on performance. A fortiori you'd expect the same thing for more serious situations.

Beware the man of one study who uses that study for conclusions concerning different phenomena. That's not how evidence works, the correct Bayesian update "a fortiori" on different behavior would be negligible. How does that even work, "if they are sexually messaged they do worse on math tests"?

Huh? First of all, it is highly likely that what happened with Lewin went well beyond any sort of mildly sexual chat messages. Second, the primary argument isn't even about that but the claim that in general, sexual harassment shouldn't be a high priority.

Hello there "mildly", I didn't see you in my original quote. That must be because you came out of thin-air. It can be explicit enough to fit right into some Gangsta rap song, it's still a chat message which shouldn't be discussed in the same breath as e.g. violent sexual assaults.

I reject logic along the lines of "A belongs to B, C belongs to B. We should deal with A because C is really serious, and we'll transfer that association with seriousness to A via B". If you want to talk about men staring at women, and what policies and punishments we should have for that, we can do that. Or for when an authority figure writes sexual messages to a college student. These are neither in kind nor in degree the same thing as many other forms of assault, sexual or otherwise.

You probably agree, so let's not strawman "sexual harassment shouldn't be a high priority" out of "sexual chat messages shouldn't be a high priority". Don't slippery-slope your way from "men staring at women" to sexual harassment as a whole (including e.g. violent rape), these are different problems requiring different solutions and most importantly different amounts of societal attention and anxiety.

Missing the point. It may not be a minor causal node.

What you said was "Sure, but it doesn't need to be substantially worse as a whole to have a disparate impact. Sexual harassment can combine with other problems (e.g. a pre-existing gender imbalance as well as larger cultural issues)" which I understood as "even if the difference was minor, combined with other factors the overall impact can be large". If you only intended to say "if it is a significant causal link on its own, it is a significant causal link on its own", that would merely be a tautology and a reminder that we disagree on #1.

If you think this sort of thing is important then why don't you go around telling everyone who talks about celebrities or Hollywood movies or whatnot how they are wasting their time?

Those topics don't replace other policy initiatives, elections aren't decided on who liked which movie best. There is an ever dwindling budget of attention for "this is unjust and must be changed" issues, and it's that budget which is spent on the 'rampant sexual harassment' chimera. I feel similarly when the news cycle about a climate conference rapidly shifts to some celebrity wedding, or when a candidate's "celebrity endorsements" outweigh his/her fiscal policies. That is my main objection, though I certainly don't enjoy the divisive toxic climate that's created as a side effect of the prominence of the topic.

Yes, there are small, specific groups that have interests which are counter to the interests of the general population for specific issues. But none of those will see eye-to-eye on the same issues.

They don't have to. It is convenient for all elites who have a disproportionate share of (capital/influence/market share in their sector/etc.) to not see that redistributed. Since such massive undertakings for the public good are the domain of politics, one would predict that elites take great care to capture the political parties. And that's precisely what we observe. Yes, many of them have different aims (Google versus the MPAA, etc.), but all of them profit from the public spotlight being on something more inconsequential to their interests, not their privileged position specifically.

I am however curious if you've been subject to unwanted sexual attention from people in a position of power.

Is this where my opinion is only valid if I have the right gender and am a rape survivor or something? Because you probably haven't been exterminated by an unfriendly AI to date, yet you presumably care about that risk.

And what makes you so confident that in the actual situation in question that this was so mild that anyone who reatced can be labeled as engaging in hysterics while being a fragile flower?

Ahem, would you read the grandparent comment again? These were general recommendations on how to increase STEM enrollment. The "The first step (to get people in the STEM fields)" should have clued you in on that. It was not meant to refer to someone "in the actual situation", least of all the student in question.

Is this so you can go off saying "that guy called people who were harassed or who engaged with the situation 'fragile flowers'", because in that case this discussion would be worthless?

It would be preposterous to put someone who received online harassment from an old MIT professor, probably in a different state, in the same category as e.g. victims of traumatic physical rape and then discuss the topic 'as a whole'. Again, Worst Argument In The World if there ever was one. Have you ever seen TwitchChat? So many future PTSD victims!

Is your primary problem simply that it happened to become a news story?

My problem is that the topic dominates public discourse to an unwarranted degree. As Time Magazine and RAINN succinctly put it: "It's time to end rape culture hysteria", see also Myth 4 in this Time article. The degree to which public perception is overemphasizing the topic is actively harmful, including to prospective female STEM students. Men at playgrounds being reported to the police for being potential pedophiles is a new phenomenon, arising out of the general hysteria about the "sexual harassment/violence"-boogeyman.

MIT taking down the videos was a reaction to get ahead of the inevitable media attention and head off any potential reputational shitstorm. In absence of such societal hysteria, the videos would not have been taken down. This is nothing but a cover-your-ass kneejerk reaction, which isn't even unreasonable given that MIT is reacting to the toxic public discourse on the topic, which is the root problem for the video removal.