The account that made that comment is a frequent poster in mens rights & friends subreddits, and probably should not be taken without a SUBSTANIAL grain of salt (particularly given the lack of any data to back it up)
You mean besides the Planet Money episode, which was well-researched and extensively sourced, with interviews of people who actually study the issue and are not radical mens' rights advocates?
Goes to credibility. When you're talking about a post with zero evidence presented, sometimes it really is more believable coming from Neil Degrasse Tyson versus the guy who believes in Timecube.
He posted some evidence. Not a lot, but some. More than his detractors here have posted so far. There's also more in that reddit thread, it looks like.
I'm not saying he's right, but it does no one any favors to slam someone instead of refuting their argument.
He posted a link to an n-gram search, which is like me posting a picture of a flower to prove that the sky is blue. The data cited is not germane to the quesiton.
To wit: one would expect that n-gram search to look the same whether or not data processing was a CS subdiscipline, because data processing dropped in relevance as digital systems became the primary source of truth. Therefore, it is not evidence either way for the claims the comment made.
This is only really true in a purely logical argument. In rational arguments, like the one we're having now, source does affect posterior expectation. That is, someone of unimpeachable character and a history of reliability saying "F" ought to increase your posterior expectation that F. Conversely, someone with deeply questionable character and reliability will affect your posterior expectation of F much less, or perhaps even decreasing the expectation if you sense a motive for skewing the truth.
The source does matter. It is not irrelevant, nor is it an "attack" in the traditional sense to offer evidence that the source might be lying or misguided.
