I think if you do further research, you will find out that social science has a different level of rigor from actual science. Finding tons of research suggesting that "women are more nurturing by nature" or that "conservatives are more motivated by fear" or "too much television makes you dumber" is not the same as finding tons of research showing gravitational waves exist.
Measuring correlation is not the same thing as proving causation.
We're a sexually dimorphic species. On average, women have larger breasts than men, on average, men are stronger than women. On average, etc. Nobody questions these statements. Why is it so hard to accept that our predispositions are different on average as well?
It's not hard to accept that they *could* be different on average. In fact it is very unlikely for them to be exactly equal among any 2 populations that are not selected randomly. But you need to actually do science. Some people have done some of this science, and offered some evidence to suggest that some conclusions are more probable than others. This is far from conclusive scientific proof of anything beyond a correlation.
Also, simply saying that we expect men and women to be different just because the odds they are the same on average at anything is incredibly low, does not actually give you any insight into the level of the effect of biological gender on psychology, or even whether men or women in general will have more or less of any given trait.
Our bodies are different, and the brain is part of the body. Occam's razor suggests that the truth is the simplest explanation: Our predispositions (which are a product of the brain), are different.
Our bodies are indeed different. It's easy to use Occam's razor. But Occam's razor is not science. Occam's razor is often right, but science is about figuring out what is true in a way that doesn't fall into the pitfalls (i.e. cognitive bias, logical fallacies, etc), that common sense does. Science is what we use to (to paraphrase Feynman) to prevent us from lying to ourselves.
Saying something could be true is different than saying something is true.
Here's a thing: Nobody doubts the Maternal Instinct that women have. That right there is a clear example of a mental trait that women have on average more than men. This is not rocket science.
Yeah, noticing a correlation is not rocket science. Measuring something like the affect of gender on height is hard enough when you try to account for confounding factors like race, differences in level of nutrition, societal effects like body shaming, etc. And these are the difficulties you run into when measuring a trait that is easy to measure (height). Now you switch to something that is hard to measure (i.e. psychological traits), and this task becomes orders of magnitude harder.
Maybe it was common sense that smoking caused lung cancer. It took science 50 years to prove it. The people who thought smoking caused cancer in 1950 were right in some sense, but I would argue that this was just due to luck, rather than any sort of scientific knowledge.
Even if it were the case that the author is actually incredibly misogynistic, and this memo was carefully designed to be a trojan horse to normalize views that naturally lead to misogyny (and I'm not saying it is or it isn't, but I didn't read it that way), it is still intellectually dishonest to call this memo anti-diversity. You can present your case for why you think the subtext is anti-diversity and misogynistic, but you don't get to present the subtext as text and still claim to be playing by the rules of honest discourse.
Citations to scientific literature != scientific fact. Also, correlation != causation. There is no doubt evidence suggesting the claims made in the paper. Proving a specific causal relationship between gender and psychological characteristics would be prohibitively hard to do even if we had the political motivation to actually do the necessary science. But as it stands, a lot of this stuff is in the squishy world of social science which is not as scientifically rigorous as, for example, quantum mechanics.
1. There is scientific evidence to suggest that the biology of gender plays a role in psychology of individuals.
2. There is scientific evidence to suggest that societal conditioning based on gender plays a role in psychology of individuals.
3. We know exactly the role that the biology of gender plays in the psychology of individuals. (e.g. we can predict with very good accuracy how analytical vs. artistic someone is/will be given a blood sample).
4. We know for a fact that biology plays an insignificant role in psychology. All the perceptible differences we see are a result of social constructs.
Here are some claims. The first 2 are very plausible (maybe even fact at this point). 3, and 4 require a lot more evidence to become a scientific fact.
I think the author of the memo, is somewhere between 1 and 3, and pointing out the limitations of currently available science on the subject is a perfectly legitimate criticism.
I was referring to the term "social justice" as the thing that "social justice warriors" are fighting for (whatever that may be in actuality). And I was not advocating for or against social justice because the concept is so vague as to possibly encompass everything I believe in or everything I am against depending on whose definition we are using.
Discrediting your opposition is much easier than refuting them
I suppose it depends on your measure of success. If you measure of success is that most people agree without ever having read the memo, that's one thing. If your measure of success is avoiding a bunch of liberal intellectuals pointing out the dishonesty of people on their own side (e.g. like me), then maybe it's not such a great strategy afterall. And you don't have to be that much of an intellectual to read an 8 page paper.
I do recall gamergate. And it seemed to me that there was a lot of nonsense going on on both sides. Maybe one side was more dishonest and the other side was more obnoxious, but it was hard to sort it all out by the end.
My take away, is don't pick a side. Or at least don't be loyal to any side. You can work with people on issues you agree about, and abandon them on issues you disagree on.
I agree with this author that diversity of thought is more significant than physical diversity, but I also believe you don't shouldn't have a right to employment. I think employers should be allowed to make little ideological echo chambers, and fire those who make them uncomfortable. I supported Mozilla's right to fire Brendon Eich for his anti-gay marriage beliefs.
I guess I disagree with the author that diversity of thought is always beneficial. I think it is sometimes detrimental. I think it is important to have the right to your thoughts/speech (immunity to legal consequences), which is different than the right to express those thoughts with immunity from all social consequences. Maybe being anti-diversity (at the level of a team) when it comes to ideas is a good thing in some circumstances, because those differences are *so* significant, and be pro-diversity when it comes to race and gender *because* those differences are insignificant.
Maybe that's a criticism I would offer for the liberals... It's ok to be non-inclusive in certain circumstances, but be honest about it. Let's not resort to changing definitions of words to get the outcome we want.
It could be right. I don't think we have enough evidence to say conclusively which psychological features are caused by which biological sources, and which are caused by societal norms. I think it is maybe a bit irresponsible to present them as fact rather than a plausible hypothesis.
You can also be right, but for the wrong reasons. For example, it could be the case that women do prefer non-tech jobs, but that this preference is from social conditioning rather than biology.
I read an article (the article that actually lead me to the memo in the first place) a couple days ago that I think summed it up best. I honestly can;t remember the source (it was from facebook). It said something like "If you read this memo and agreed with everything in it or nothing in it, you probably aren't good at thinking.
I think this is a bit extreme. I think it's a good thing google is trying to be more inclusive. Did they go a little overboard, into being less inclusive? Maybe. But that's the nature of inclusiveness.
Lot's of things work this way. Freedom. You want people to have freedom. Should people have the freedom to hinder the freedom of others? No, that's too much freedom.
At some point including people becomes non-inclusive. There is an inherent limit to inclusiveness, and when you hit that point, you can only become more exclusive
The memo talked about being dispassionate and looking to results when making decisions, and not moralizing positions. I agree with this. But if you look at what Google is doing, it is exactly that. What is the better result? Losing one engineer (and maybe an accompanying lawsuit), or losing all the SJW employees and customers?
What would be the point of taking a stand against social justice in the name of truth and diversity of thought? Would it be to make more money? No. It would be because it is "the right" thing to do (i.e. moralizing the issue), exactly what the author of the memo advised against.
I think there are probably some very good and legitimate criticisms that can be made of this memo. I am not even necessarily opposed to this engineer being fired.
But why lie about the contents of the memo? I am very sympathetic to the idea that diversity is a good thing (as apparently the author of the memo was as well), but I am completely turned off by the fact that the strategy utilized by "the other side" (not the other side from me... yet) is to lie about what's in it.
It is not anti-diversity. Maybe it's wrong. But it being wrong doesn't make it automatically anti-diversity. Redistributing this falsehood is intellectually dishonest.
I don't want to be on a side that's wrong. I also don't want to be on a side that's dishonest.
Trump won a 1/3 of California. A lot of people in (especially rural) California do love trump.
Almost 1/2 of texas voted against trump.
There are no red states or blue states. There are non-swing states that still contain large populations of both parties, that have clear (albeit slight) majorities. Our election system incentivizes winner take all systems for distributing state electors to presidential candidates.
The actual political divide is between rural and urban areas.
What about ISIS? IF the US has nukes, then ISIS has a right to have them too right? What matters most is complete fairness to all the psychopathic murderers.
Do you not check whether a phone has a user-replacable battery, before you buy it?
No, but it's because I've never had the problem of being unable to replace a battery. My problem is usually that around the time the battery dies, something else also ends up breaking (e.g. the GPS, the Cell radio, etc).
I'm actually thinking about replacing the battery in my nexus 6p as we speak, but I might also just buy a new pixel 2 when those come out.
I bet the greedy MBAs love you. Tell me, do you buy a new car every couple of years?
I probably would if they were 100x cheaper, and every time I got a new one, it was twice as good as my last one. Wouldn't you? It's all about weighing the cost of fixing something vs. the cost of buying a new one, and the relative difference in value of those to propositions.
I actually do spend a lot of time recycling old things rather than buying new ones (e.g. washers, dryers, electronics with blown capacitors or broken solder joints, etc). Smartphones are just not something I think are worth repairing in most cases (there are of course exceptions).
My desktop, is a 9-year-old Core2 duo with 3 gigs ram, running linux, and still going strong. My ADSL router will be 10 years old this fall.
Good for you. I also have a Core2 Duo running linux as my raid NAS. I don't have a bunch of old routers because they don't support high wifi speeds which have become standards recently.
Right now, they're adding bling, and removing the good stuff...
* Apple removed the earphone jack
* Apple removed microSD slot
* Apple does everything it can to remove the possibility of jailbreaking
That's "deprovement", not "improvement".
It sounds like maybe Apple is doing that. But I don't buy apple products. I bought 1 ipod like 15 years ago, and it was only after I found out I could hack to play unencrypted mp3s.
Why do low end phones run on older versions of android? Because it's cheaper. If we start requiring phones to be secure (i.e. running on versions of android that are not obsolete, either by forcing manufacturers to support newer android versions or forcing google to support older versions of android), then those phones will not be so cheap anymore.
Maybe it's a good idea to force people to buy more expensive phones by forcing them to pay the cost for better security. People don't always know what they want, and even when they do, they don't always want the right things.
Right, so I don't see how making them liable for damages they are already liable for would help. It would seem that insecure IoT deviecs don't actually cause that much damage (yet), and maybe it's not really worth the added cost of regulation until there is more damage.
The batteries on older phones die after like 3 years. Google doesn;t want to spend money supporting older devices that few people still own and use. Maybe google is purposefully making them to fail after a few years, but I've had like 3 nexus 5's and a nexus 4 that are all broken now.
I don't really have that much of a problem buying a new phone every couple of years, and I'd rather Google focus their time and money on current devices.
I don't think I would appreciate this strategy for all devices (i.e. desktop computer components, routers, etc), but I think smartphones are in a different category. They are improving so rapidly. Maybe if the rate of their improvement slows down, it'll make more sense investing in longer lifespans for these devices.
What is an impeachable offense? It turns out it's anything that enough people in the house and senate think is impeachable. The senate vote for conviction in an impeachment is also a vote. The fact that the term impeachment technically means "the trial" and not "the conviction" does not meaningfully change any arguments. All you need to do is substitute the word "impeachment" with the word "conviction" and it becomes a little bit clearer if everyone already knows we are referring to a conviction as a result of an impeachment. It is not a mystery why "impeachment" became an informal substitute for "conviction as the result of an impeachment".
We may find that the people that stayed are the unsung heroes leaking the terrible things they did, and providing a check against the administration from from doing even more terrible things, than they would otherwise.
You need to learn about impeachment. It's political not legal. Evidence is only required for criminal prosecution.
Impeachment is the vote to remove the president from office and conviction is one potential outcome of that vote. Bill Clinton didn't receive that particular outcome, but the general consensus is that Nixon would have, which is why he resigned.
Slashdot Mirror
I think if you do further research, you will find out that social science has a different level of rigor from actual science. Finding tons of research suggesting that "women are more nurturing by nature" or that "conservatives are more motivated by fear" or "too much television makes you dumber" is not the same as finding tons of research showing gravitational waves exist.
Measuring correlation is not the same thing as proving causation.
We're a sexually dimorphic species. On average, women have larger breasts than men, on average, men are stronger than women. On average, etc. Nobody questions these statements. Why is it so hard to accept that our predispositions are different on average as well?
It's not hard to accept that they *could* be different on average. In fact it is very unlikely for them to be exactly equal among any 2 populations that are not selected randomly. But you need to actually do science. Some people have done some of this science, and offered some evidence to suggest that some conclusions are more probable than others. This is far from conclusive scientific proof of anything beyond a correlation.
Also, simply saying that we expect men and women to be different just because the odds they are the same on average at anything is incredibly low, does not actually give you any insight into the level of the effect of biological gender on psychology, or even whether men or women in general will have more or less of any given trait.
Our bodies are different, and the brain is part of the body. Occam's razor suggests that the truth is the simplest explanation: Our predispositions (which are a product of the brain), are different.
Our bodies are indeed different. It's easy to use Occam's razor. But Occam's razor is not science. Occam's razor is often right, but science is about figuring out what is true in a way that doesn't fall into the pitfalls (i.e. cognitive bias, logical fallacies, etc), that common sense does. Science is what we use to (to paraphrase Feynman) to prevent us from lying to ourselves.
Saying something could be true is different than saying something is true.
Here's a thing: Nobody doubts the Maternal Instinct that women have. That right there is a clear example of a mental trait that women have on average more than men. This is not rocket science.
Yeah, noticing a correlation is not rocket science. Measuring something like the affect of gender on height is hard enough when you try to account for confounding factors like race, differences in level of nutrition, societal effects like body shaming, etc. And these are the difficulties you run into when measuring a trait that is easy to measure (height). Now you switch to something that is hard to measure (i.e. psychological traits), and this task becomes orders of magnitude harder.
Maybe it was common sense that smoking caused lung cancer. It took science 50 years to prove it. The people who thought smoking caused cancer in 1950 were right in some sense, but I would argue that this was just due to luck, rather than any sort of scientific knowledge.
Even if it were the case that the author is actually incredibly misogynistic, and this memo was carefully designed to be a trojan horse to normalize views that naturally lead to misogyny (and I'm not saying it is or it isn't, but I didn't read it that way), it is still intellectually dishonest to call this memo anti-diversity. You can present your case for why you think the subtext is anti-diversity and misogynistic, but you don't get to present the subtext as text and still claim to be playing by the rules of honest discourse.
Citations to scientific literature != scientific fact. Also, correlation != causation. There is no doubt evidence suggesting the claims made in the paper. Proving a specific causal relationship between gender and psychological characteristics would be prohibitively hard to do even if we had the political motivation to actually do the necessary science. But as it stands, a lot of this stuff is in the squishy world of social science which is not as scientifically rigorous as, for example, quantum mechanics.
1. There is scientific evidence to suggest that the biology of gender plays a role in psychology of individuals.
2. There is scientific evidence to suggest that societal conditioning based on gender plays a role in psychology of individuals.
3. We know exactly the role that the biology of gender plays in the psychology of individuals. (e.g. we can predict with very good accuracy how analytical vs. artistic someone is/will be given a blood sample).
4. We know for a fact that biology plays an insignificant role in psychology. All the perceptible differences we see are a result of social constructs.
Here are some claims. The first 2 are very plausible (maybe even fact at this point). 3, and 4 require a lot more evidence to become a scientific fact.
I think the author of the memo, is somewhere between 1 and 3, and pointing out the limitations of currently available science on the subject is a perfectly legitimate criticism.
I was referring to the term "social justice" as the thing that "social justice warriors" are fighting for (whatever that may be in actuality). And I was not advocating for or against social justice because the concept is so vague as to possibly encompass everything I believe in or everything I am against depending on whose definition we are using.
Discrediting your opposition is much easier than refuting them
I suppose it depends on your measure of success. If you measure of success is that most people agree without ever having read the memo, that's one thing. If your measure of success is avoiding a bunch of liberal intellectuals pointing out the dishonesty of people on their own side (e.g. like me), then maybe it's not such a great strategy afterall. And you don't have to be that much of an intellectual to read an 8 page paper.
I do recall gamergate. And it seemed to me that there was a lot of nonsense going on on both sides. Maybe one side was more dishonest and the other side was more obnoxious, but it was hard to sort it all out by the end.
My take away, is don't pick a side. Or at least don't be loyal to any side. You can work with people on issues you agree about, and abandon them on issues you disagree on.
I agree with this author that diversity of thought is more significant than physical diversity, but I also believe you don't shouldn't have a right to employment. I think employers should be allowed to make little ideological echo chambers, and fire those who make them uncomfortable. I supported Mozilla's right to fire Brendon Eich for his anti-gay marriage beliefs.
I guess I disagree with the author that diversity of thought is always beneficial. I think it is sometimes detrimental. I think it is important to have the right to your thoughts/speech (immunity to legal consequences), which is different than the right to express those thoughts with immunity from all social consequences. Maybe being anti-diversity (at the level of a team) when it comes to ideas is a good thing in some circumstances, because those differences are *so* significant, and be pro-diversity when it comes to race and gender *because* those differences are insignificant.
Maybe that's a criticism I would offer for the liberals... It's ok to be non-inclusive in certain circumstances, but be honest about it. Let's not resort to changing definitions of words to get the outcome we want.
It could be right. I don't think we have enough evidence to say conclusively which psychological features are caused by which biological sources, and which are caused by societal norms. I think it is maybe a bit irresponsible to present them as fact rather than a plausible hypothesis.
You can also be right, but for the wrong reasons. For example, it could be the case that women do prefer non-tech jobs, but that this preference is from social conditioning rather than biology.
I read an article (the article that actually lead me to the memo in the first place) a couple days ago that I think summed it up best. I honestly can;t remember the source (it was from facebook). It said something like "If you read this memo and agreed with everything in it or nothing in it, you probably aren't good at thinking.
I think this is a bit extreme. I think it's a good thing google is trying to be more inclusive. Did they go a little overboard, into being less inclusive? Maybe. But that's the nature of inclusiveness.
Lot's of things work this way. Freedom. You want people to have freedom. Should people have the freedom to hinder the freedom of others? No, that's too much freedom.
At some point including people becomes non-inclusive. There is an inherent limit to inclusiveness, and when you hit that point, you can only become more exclusive
The memo talked about being dispassionate and looking to results when making decisions, and not moralizing positions. I agree with this. But if you look at what Google is doing, it is exactly that. What is the better result? Losing one engineer (and maybe an accompanying lawsuit), or losing all the SJW employees and customers?
What would be the point of taking a stand against social justice in the name of truth and diversity of thought? Would it be to make more money? No. It would be because it is "the right" thing to do (i.e. moralizing the issue), exactly what the author of the memo advised against.
I think there are probably some very good and legitimate criticisms that can be made of this memo. I am not even necessarily opposed to this engineer being fired.
But why lie about the contents of the memo? I am very sympathetic to the idea that diversity is a good thing (as apparently the author of the memo was as well), but I am completely turned off by the fact that the strategy utilized by "the other side" (not the other side from me... yet) is to lie about what's in it.
It is not anti-diversity. Maybe it's wrong. But it being wrong doesn't make it automatically anti-diversity. Redistributing this falsehood is intellectually dishonest.
I don't want to be on a side that's wrong. I also don't want to be on a side that's dishonest.
Thanks for whitesplaining his mansplanation.
Trump won a 1/3 of California. A lot of people in (especially rural) California do love trump.
Almost 1/2 of texas voted against trump.
There are no red states or blue states. There are non-swing states that still contain large populations of both parties, that have clear (albeit slight) majorities. Our election system incentivizes winner take all systems for distributing state electors to presidential candidates.
The actual political divide is between rural and urban areas.
What about ISIS? IF the US has nukes, then ISIS has a right to have them too right? What matters most is complete fairness to all the psychopathic murderers.
Do you not check whether a phone has a user-replacable battery, before you buy it?
No, but it's because I've never had the problem of being unable to replace a battery. My problem is usually that around the time the battery dies, something else also ends up breaking (e.g. the GPS, the Cell radio, etc).
I'm actually thinking about replacing the battery in my nexus 6p as we speak, but I might also just buy a new pixel 2 when those come out.
I bet the greedy MBAs love you. Tell me, do you buy a new car every couple of years?
I probably would if they were 100x cheaper, and every time I got a new one, it was twice as good as my last one. Wouldn't you? It's all about weighing the cost of fixing something vs. the cost of buying a new one, and the relative difference in value of those to propositions.
I actually do spend a lot of time recycling old things rather than buying new ones (e.g. washers, dryers, electronics with blown capacitors or broken solder joints, etc). Smartphones are just not something I think are worth repairing in most cases (there are of course exceptions).
My desktop, is a 9-year-old Core2 duo with 3 gigs ram, running linux, and still going strong. My ADSL router will be 10 years old this fall.
Good for you. I also have a Core2 Duo running linux as my raid NAS. I don't have a bunch of old routers because they don't support high wifi speeds which have become standards recently.
Right now, they're adding bling, and removing the good stuff...
* Apple removed the earphone jack
* Apple removed microSD slot
* Apple does everything it can to remove the possibility of jailbreaking
That's "deprovement", not "improvement".
It sounds like maybe Apple is doing that. But I don't buy apple products. I bought 1 ipod like 15 years ago, and it was only after I found out I could hack to play unencrypted mp3s.
Why do low end phones run on older versions of android? Because it's cheaper. If we start requiring phones to be secure (i.e. running on versions of android that are not obsolete, either by forcing manufacturers to support newer android versions or forcing google to support older versions of android), then those phones will not be so cheap anymore.
Maybe it's a good idea to force people to buy more expensive phones by forcing them to pay the cost for better security. People don't always know what they want, and even when they do, they don't always want the right things.
There certainly are. There are also a lot of people who are much poorer than me, spending more money on smartphones than I do.
Right, so I don't see how making them liable for damages they are already liable for would help. It would seem that insecure IoT deviecs don't actually cause that much damage (yet), and maybe it's not really worth the added cost of regulation until there is more damage.
The batteries on older phones die after like 3 years. Google doesn;t want to spend money supporting older devices that few people still own and use. Maybe google is purposefully making them to fail after a few years, but I've had like 3 nexus 5's and a nexus 4 that are all broken now.
I don't really have that much of a problem buying a new phone every couple of years, and I'd rather Google focus their time and money on current devices.
I don't think I would appreciate this strategy for all devices (i.e. desktop computer components, routers, etc), but I think smartphones are in a different category. They are improving so rapidly. Maybe if the rate of their improvement slows down, it'll make more sense investing in longer lifespans for these devices.
Aren't IoT manufacturers already liable for damages caused by their products? Are there any special exemptions from normal tort law for IoT devices?
What is an impeachable offense? It turns out it's anything that enough people in the house and senate think is impeachable. The senate vote for conviction in an impeachment is also a vote. The fact that the term impeachment technically means "the trial" and not "the conviction" does not meaningfully change any arguments. All you need to do is substitute the word "impeachment" with the word "conviction" and it becomes a little bit clearer if everyone already knows we are referring to a conviction as a result of an impeachment. It is not a mystery why "impeachment" became an informal substitute for "conviction as the result of an impeachment".
I don't know if Spicer can be funny on purpose.
Even though he golfs a lot, this doesn't prevent him from doing his job (i.e. tweeting).
We may find that the people that stayed are the unsung heroes leaking the terrible things they did, and providing a check against the administration from from doing even more terrible things, than they would otherwise.
Those 2 things are not mutually exclusive.
You need to learn about impeachment. It's political not legal. Evidence is only required for criminal prosecution.
Impeachment is the vote to remove the president from office and conviction is one potential outcome of that vote. Bill Clinton didn't receive that particular outcome, but the general consensus is that Nixon would have, which is why he resigned.
You don't have to show any of that stuff. You just need 2/3 of the senate to be willing to vote him out in exchange for a president Pence.