Conciousness. Includes a whole "Physical approaches" thing which not only doesn't reflect the mainstream scientific/physics view. It doesn't even mention it. The mainstream view being that conciousness is an emergent phenomenon of ordinary normal biochemical processes in the brain, and that quantum mechanics is not required to explain it, and has nothing to do with it really.
The other ones I don't know much about, but since I have a shelf or two covering this particular topic, let me comment.
I personally agree that the useful explanation for consciousness is likely to come out of treating it just another pile of biological goop, albeit very specially structured goop. But as yet, that explanation doesn't exist. It will be decades, at least, before we find one and build the kind of consensus and body of supporting hard data that surrounds, say, evolution or atoms.
But even once all hard scientists are pretty happy with that approach, there's still another huge effort needed to put together a framework that so beautifully subsumes other schools of thought on consciousness that philosophers, priests, and yogis will accept it, too. (For more on this, see E. O. Wilson's Consilience.) Only then will you be able to trim this article down to something a physicist will be truly happy with. For now, calling consciousness an emergent phenomenon of ordinary biology is just a lot of handwaving.
As to your particular quibble, it seems like the main problem is just the title of that section. There's a whole section titled "Cognitive Neuroscience Approaches" that seems to be the main collecting point for modern hard-science approaches to consciousness. Your problem could be solved by changing the title of the other section to "Alternative Physical Approaches" or adding a single sentence saying that the vast majority of scientists favor an approach rooted in cognitive neuroscience. If that will solve your problem, then you should go solve your problem.
In any critique of Wikipedia, it's important to remember that an open encyclopedia has to fairly represent all major points of view. You and I share a view that we think will probably win out in the end, just like, say, the germ theory of disease. But it hasn't won yet.
I think most of your criticisms are due to the fact that direct democracy is rather new.
This could be, but I still think we shouldn't adopt more of it until we see how to make it work well.
So you're not smart enough to understand current legislation in order to vote on it. Well, after it is passed by your representative, you are expected to follow it. How can you be smart enough to follow it, but yet not be smart enough to create or vote on it?
It's not a question of smarts.
With sufficient time, I could become an expert on a handful of the issues. With sufficient resources, I could even hire a staff of experts and cover everything pretty well. But not everybody can hire a staff: you run out of people. So delegating to a person with a staff of experts seems like a reasonable approach.
Then all I have to do is judge the track records of a relatively small number of individuals. Instead of figuring out the details of all future policies, I take advantage of the ease of hindsight and see how well they've done running things in the past.
Of course, there are other approaches that might be workable, and when you've gotten one going smoothly, let us know.
. Direct Democracy is where citizens can directly propose and vote on legislation, making representatives redundant.
If they do that, I'll up and move to a republic.
Living in California, known for its frequent use of direct democracy via ballot initiatives, it's obvious to me that more direct democracy would not improve things. There are a whole host of reasons, but let's pick two:
First, modern issues are complex, and most voters aren't willing to put in the time to study things. I'm on the high end of the bell curve when it comes to time put in prepping for a vote, and I still feel unprepared to judge some of the issues that get handed over to me. TV advertising often wins the day.
Second, direct democracy often produces relatively fragmented, incoherent results. California's tax collection and state budget process is royally screwed up, in large part due to direct democracy The people vote to limit taxes in various ways. Then they vote to set aside specific chunks of revenue for certain high-profile things. Low-profile but important things get short shrift, and rigid ballot-imposed rules limit flexibility in the face of emergencies and changed circumstances.
Thanks, I'm happy to delegate most of this work to smart people and let 'em get on with it. There are ways to improve our democracy, but more direct democracy doesn't help.
very often such disputes force the inclusion of some far-out whacko idea with no credibility
Very often? You could be right, but I haven't come across that very much. Could you list some examples?
Other collaborative bodies of work?
on
IMDb Turns 15
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· Score: 1
One of my favorite things about the Internet is how is allows the aggregation of small amounts of end-user work into large, impressive things. IMDB is one of my favorite examples of this, along with FreeDB and Wikipedia. And the Web 2.0 trend is pushing this further, with, e.g., Flickr's collaborative photo library.
What other collaborative favorites like IMDB do people have?
I know it's hard to sympathise with Ralsky, but this could also happen to many other people if they are sued by the RIAA or MPAA, using exactly the same legal principle.
The solution to victimless crimes isn't to protect criminals who cause harm; it's to revise the laws so they're worth respecting.
As for murderers...generally, pistols and shotguns aren't essential to your livelihood, and they can kill others. Computers are essential to IT businesses such as Ralsky's, and they can't injure anyone.
You're not quite grasping the analogy. Ralsky, a convicted felon, has set up a giant spam operation. The feds convinced a judge that in addition to all of the moral lines he's crossed, he's also crossed some legal ones. The computers are the tools used in his criminal enterprise, and they also contain evidence of his crimes.
It's rather clear that the intent was to stop him, not to determine his compliance with laws.
They've already determined to a judge's satisfaction that he's probably not complying with the laws. What's wrong with stopping him from continuing to break the law?
Much as it's great to see a suspected criminal arrested for sending this crap out, there's no chance that it'll actually made any significant dent in the torrent of spam flowing through mail servers every day.
I doubt that. Spamhaus estimates that a couple hundred people are responsible for most of the world's spam. If spammers are regularly arrested and sent off to jail, my guess the bottom-feeders doing it will return to embezzlement, pigeon drops, and selling Herbalife. They've just picked spamming because the risk/reward ratio is currently better.
Seriously -- whether you like Ralsky or not, this practice of seizing computer equipment is probably unconstitutional. He is being deprived of his property and his ability to make a living, without due process of law.
Yes. Next thing you know, when they arrest murderers, they'll take away their guns! That's a clear violation of the second amendment. If we allow that to happen, next thing you know the UN will swoop in with their black helicopters and steal our precious bodily fluids. They must be stopped!
Re:Government ideas to counter terror
on
Google Terror Threat
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· Score: 3, Insightful
And anyone caught looking up popular destinations only in Google Maps, is headed to Guantanamo.
the most ultimate economy shattering that has been delivered in the history of the world [...] IBM, Dell, HP, Compaq, Microsoft, all the banks in America, all the airlines in America - they are all heavily over-invested in having moved their tech centers to India
You must be kidding.
Most of what has been moved there is customer support, with some fraction of software development. Operations and core data all lives in the US. Offshored software development projects are most likely to be big ones, so the effect of any Indian work stoppage would be spread out over the next 18 months. And the loss of remote "customer service" would probably increase productivity here as people stopped spending 30 minutes on hold and 15 minutes talking to some chump to find out they're screwed; instead they'd just accept it up front.
Its a great resume builder and I am guessing this is just a temp job anyway. So once it feels stable, find another job. Then you can make more money when they contract you to fix, upgrade, redesign, or want to scale it.
Yes. These guys shouldn't be focusing much on getting internal corporate credit for it. What they can get out of this is
time spent on something that doesn't rot their brains
good on-the-job training
a slim possibility of getting real programming jobs in the company
a resume item that will let them apply for a programming job elsewhere
a recommendation letter that will get them seriously considered elsewhere
But yes, their bosses will probably get a lot of the credit. Traditional corporations can be thought of a feudal empires. Once you're a knight with success in many glorious battles, the nobles will take you seriously. But a customer service rep in the warehouse equates to some peasant cleaning out stables. One day you might be a mighty knight, but for now you're dressed in rags and covered in horse shit, so nobody's going to listen to you. Make your bosses look good, and they can help you get promoted to squire. That's no great shakes either, but at least it's on the way to becoming a knight.
And yes, I agree that this sucks, but hopefully it sucks less than spending the rest of your life doing customer service.
Why should we pay to educate people when other countries are willing to educate them for us?
Two reasons:
First, democracy depends on an educated populace, and a lot of the important issues of our day require a good scientific grounding to understand.
Second, undereducated workers leads to lower productivity, and thus decreased wealth. Without that wealth, we won't be able to hire the best and brightest from around the world. Especially since many of the brightest are motivated less by money than by achievement. Why would they want to work around and for a bunch of uneducated boobs?
While it's fun to bash the liberals for political-correctness, you're very wrong about the roots of censorship.
I said only that censorship efforts also come from the left, which even by your sources, is demonstrably true. You'll note that item number 5 on the ALA Most Frequently Challenged Books list is Huckleberry Finn, which in recent years has generally been challenged from the left.
I agree that the majority of censorship efforts currently come from the political right, but no political group should pretend that it's only *other* people who would ever try to suppress information. Inappropriate use of power is a *human* problem, not a conservative or liberal problem.
how does that affect the bulk of scientific research? It doesn't, so quit whining. [...] there just isn't much societal or monetary reward for people to enter research fields.
You're so close to connecting the dots on this one. Let me help a bit.
Talking to friends in grad school, it turns out that part of the lack of societal reward is the low public respect they see toward scientific methods or expert opinion. Evolution is as fundamental to biology as electrons are to chemistry, but they see the president and a host of other leaders wanting to "teach the controversy," a fictional controversy which has shakier evidence than what the UFO nuts use. Ditto for religious intervention in public health and medical research.
As to monetary rewards, they see cuts in basic science funding, and increased career risk for anybody who does science that might challenge right-wing views on a host of topics from climate to drug prohibition.
The religious right isn't the only segment of the right behind this, but it's certainly part of it. Personally, I think it shouldn't be; there are plenty of scientists who are also Christians.
information censorship in libraries and textbooks is nearly always driven by the religious zealots
That's a little strong; censorship efforts also come from the left, but more around issues of race, gender, and religion. Zealotry is an equal-opportunity annoyer.
Hmmm... I tend to judge a publication on their stories where I know the topic well. That The Economist and the New York Times handle high-tech stories well makes me trust them more on other things. Is the rest of the Fox News tech coverage this dubious?
What I am trying to say is that if you take the easy way out and just say that someone is where they are because of the circumstances that they were born into you immediately take away their personal responsibility and shift the blame to society.
Yes, and if I were to do that, that would be unproductive, as certain outcomes of the War on Poverty show us. However, I never used the term "because", and I never suggested that circumstances are everything. It's a big contributory factor, though. My respect for human potential doesn't require me to leave people to stew in mitigatable bad circumstances that are a legacy of historical discrimination.
Indeed, I feel like providing equal opportunities to all is, in addition to being morally right, the best way to remove will-sapping excuses that keep people from building up a sense of personal responsibility. If we don't want people to blame their failures on an unfair society, perhaps we should act to reduce the more egregiously unfair aspects of society.
I took the black-white IAT, and as predicted by myself I had a slight preference to whites over blacks, just as I also found that I have a slight preference to young over old.
And you noted, I hope, that most takers had a preference more than slight.
The "American abroad" thing has nothing to do with being white or male, and everything to do with country of origin.
Sorry, but I interpret my experiences differently. In the country I was in, whiteness was a big deal: people of european ancestry were and are the elite, and most of the poor people there are visibly ethnically different. And the high status of males in Latino cultures is too well documented to argue with. Since nobody knew I was American until I opened my mouth, I had plenty of opportunity to see how the factors interacted.
Because it was a different kind of racial and gender discrimination than I grew up around, it stood out to me, and helped me see things in a new light when I got home.
As far as the shaved-head thing goes, are you not aware of the existence of skinheads? Since most shaven-headed whites for the last 30-40 years have been white supremacists, I don't know why you're surprised.
I live in San Francisco, where I don't think I've ever seen a skinhead. Shaven-headed guys here are generally stylish, gay, or both. But you miss my point entirely: even if people did think I was a skinhead, they probably didn't think that of my black friend, who got the same treatment but a lot more of it.
blaming the school system or a person's way of life kind of takes away their free will. If you want an example of someone who worked hard despite the environment they were born in look here.
Regardless of race, it's demonstrably true that people in shitty circumstances are statistically less likely to achieve all sorts of things than people in swell ones. Noting this fact doesn't take away anybody's free will.
Indeed, I'd suggest improving the circumstances of our fellow citizens so they have more opportunities, more choices is the thing that shows the more respect for their free will. I think we should do this regardless of race. But given the obvious racial disparities and the results of things like the Implicit Association Test, which shows that most Americans who believe they have no racial bias actually do, I can see the reasoning behind race-based preferences.
Just because fewer blacks are taking advantage of education doesn't mean that it's not available for them. Despite the numbers being lower, they do not receive less education, fewer take advantage of it.
Any proof for that?
And even if you're right, or if we accept your definitions so you end up right, it raises the question of why. If that's also related to our long history of discrimination, perhaps we should do something about it.
Of course, I'd suggest that you're not right at all. A lot of blacks live in big cities with terrible school systems that declined rapidly when white people, forced to integrate, moved out to the suburbs and took the tax base with them. It'd be no surprise that going to lousy elementary, middle, and high schools leaves you unprepared or disinclined to take a swing at college. Say that's merely a matter of personal preference on their part is sweeping quite a lot under the rug.
Why does it matter? I thought we were supposed to be racially unbiased and "color blind" these days.
It matters because a) it's one way to find out if we're succeeding, and b) people considering entering a field find it more comfortable if there are already people like them in it.
I don't see that at all. He spoke of his own personal experience, saying that he could think of only one notable non-white OSS developer, and asking for more. Racism isn't about noticing the very existence of race, it's about irrational bias based on it.
Making a compleatly unfounded statistic remark about racial participation in "IT/OSS/Web/CS" projects is calling for more uninformed bable and flames.
Go back and read the post again. He made no such remark. Was this some cleverly ironic demonstration of uninformed babble?
This is the most racist comment I have seen in this story so far. [...]The comment that you make that I have to disagree with most is the "less college education".
Sorry, but you're flat out wrong on this one. In 2004, 84.8% of white people graduated from high school, and 26.8% had a bachelor's degree. Whereas only 73.5% of black people graduated from high school, and only 14.4% had bachelor's degrees.
[...] As a black person I would've had my entire education paid for, but as a white person I had to take out large student loans. As a black person I would've even been able to get into college with lower test scores and a lower GPA. Despite what you may think, as a white person I am discriminated against by the laws and policies in the US.
Yes, that's because we white people said, after centuries of terribly deleterious discrimination, "Hey, let's see if we can even thing things up a bit." Whether or not that was (or remains) a good way to solve the problem is a topic of much debate. But given that roughly half as many black people end up with four-year degrees, it seems quite a stretch to suggest that there is no problem.
Slashdot Mirror
Conciousness. Includes a whole "Physical approaches" thing which not only doesn't reflect the mainstream scientific/physics view. It doesn't even mention it. The mainstream view being that conciousness is an emergent phenomenon of ordinary normal biochemical processes in the brain, and that quantum mechanics is not required to explain it, and has nothing to do with it really.
The other ones I don't know much about, but since I have a shelf or two covering this particular topic, let me comment.
I personally agree that the useful explanation for consciousness is likely to come out of treating it just another pile of biological goop, albeit very specially structured goop. But as yet, that explanation doesn't exist. It will be decades, at least, before we find one and build the kind of consensus and body of supporting hard data that surrounds, say, evolution or atoms.
But even once all hard scientists are pretty happy with that approach, there's still another huge effort needed to put together a framework that so beautifully subsumes other schools of thought on consciousness that philosophers, priests, and yogis will accept it, too. (For more on this, see E. O. Wilson's Consilience.) Only then will you be able to trim this article down to something a physicist will be truly happy with. For now, calling consciousness an emergent phenomenon of ordinary biology is just a lot of handwaving.
As to your particular quibble, it seems like the main problem is just the title of that section. There's a whole section titled "Cognitive Neuroscience Approaches" that seems to be the main collecting point for modern hard-science approaches to consciousness. Your problem could be solved by changing the title of the other section to "Alternative Physical Approaches" or adding a single sentence saying that the vast majority of scientists favor an approach rooted in cognitive neuroscience. If that will solve your problem, then you should go solve your problem.
In any critique of Wikipedia, it's important to remember that an open encyclopedia has to fairly represent all major points of view. You and I share a view that we think will probably win out in the end, just like, say, the germ theory of disease. But it hasn't won yet.
I think most of your criticisms are due to the fact that direct democracy is rather new.
This could be, but I still think we shouldn't adopt more of it until we see how to make it work well.
So you're not smart enough to understand current legislation in order to vote on it. Well, after it is passed by your representative, you are expected to follow it. How can you be smart enough to follow it, but yet not be smart enough to create or vote on it?
It's not a question of smarts.
With sufficient time, I could become an expert on a handful of the issues. With sufficient resources, I could even hire a staff of experts and cover everything pretty well. But not everybody can hire a staff: you run out of people. So delegating to a person with a staff of experts seems like a reasonable approach.
Then all I have to do is judge the track records of a relatively small number of individuals. Instead of figuring out the details of all future policies, I take advantage of the ease of hindsight and see how well they've done running things in the past.
Of course, there are other approaches that might be workable, and when you've gotten one going smoothly, let us know.
. Direct Democracy is where citizens can directly propose and vote on legislation, making representatives redundant.
If they do that, I'll up and move to a republic.
Living in California, known for its frequent use of direct democracy via ballot initiatives, it's obvious to me that more direct democracy would not improve things. There are a whole host of reasons, but let's pick two:
First, modern issues are complex, and most voters aren't willing to put in the time to study things. I'm on the high end of the bell curve when it comes to time put in prepping for a vote, and I still feel unprepared to judge some of the issues that get handed over to me. TV advertising often wins the day.
Second, direct democracy often produces relatively fragmented, incoherent results. California's tax collection and state budget process is royally screwed up, in large part due to direct democracy The people vote to limit taxes in various ways. Then they vote to set aside specific chunks of revenue for certain high-profile things. Low-profile but important things get short shrift, and rigid ballot-imposed rules limit flexibility in the face of emergencies and changed circumstances.
Thanks, I'm happy to delegate most of this work to smart people and let 'em get on with it. There are ways to improve our democracy, but more direct democracy doesn't help.
very often such disputes force the inclusion of some far-out whacko idea with no credibility
Very often? You could be right, but I haven't come across that very much. Could you list some examples?
One of my favorite things about the Internet is how is allows the aggregation of small amounts of end-user work into large, impressive things. IMDB is one of my favorite examples of this, along with FreeDB and Wikipedia. And the Web 2.0 trend is pushing this further, with, e.g., Flickr's collaborative photo library.
What other collaborative favorites like IMDB do people have?
I know it's hard to sympathise with Ralsky, but this could also happen to many other people if they are sued by the RIAA or MPAA, using exactly the same legal principle.
The solution to victimless crimes isn't to protect criminals who cause harm; it's to revise the laws so they're worth respecting.
As for murderers...generally, pistols and shotguns aren't essential to your livelihood, and they can kill others. Computers are essential to IT businesses such as Ralsky's, and they can't injure anyone.
You're not quite grasping the analogy. Ralsky, a convicted felon, has set up a giant spam operation. The feds convinced a judge that in addition to all of the moral lines he's crossed, he's also crossed some legal ones. The computers are the tools used in his criminal enterprise, and they also contain evidence of his crimes.
It's rather clear that the intent was to stop him, not to determine his compliance with laws.
They've already determined to a judge's satisfaction that he's probably not complying with the laws. What's wrong with stopping him from continuing to break the law?
Much as it's great to see a suspected criminal arrested for sending this crap out, there's no chance that it'll actually made any significant dent in the torrent of spam flowing through mail servers every day.
I doubt that. Spamhaus estimates that a couple hundred people are responsible for most of the world's spam. If spammers are regularly arrested and sent off to jail, my guess the bottom-feeders doing it will return to embezzlement, pigeon drops, and selling Herbalife. They've just picked spamming because the risk/reward ratio is currently better.
Seriously -- whether you like Ralsky or not, this practice of seizing computer equipment is probably unconstitutional. He is being deprived of his property and his ability to make a living, without due process of law.
Yes. Next thing you know, when they arrest murderers, they'll take away their guns! That's a clear violation of the second amendment. If we allow that to happen, next thing you know the UN will swoop in with their black helicopters and steal our precious bodily fluids. They must be stopped!
And anyone caught looking up popular destinations only in Google Maps, is headed to Guantanamo.
That would be funny if the feds hadn't told cops to be on the lookout for people carrying almanacs. Or if they weren't hassling casual photographers everywhere.
the most ultimate economy shattering that has been delivered in the history of the world [...] IBM, Dell, HP, Compaq, Microsoft, all the banks in America, all the airlines in America - they are all heavily over-invested in having moved their tech centers to India
You must be kidding.
Most of what has been moved there is customer support, with some fraction of software development. Operations and core data all lives in the US. Offshored software development projects are most likely to be big ones, so the effect of any Indian work stoppage would be spread out over the next 18 months. And the loss of remote "customer service" would probably increase productivity here as people stopped spending 30 minutes on hold and 15 minutes talking to some chump to find out they're screwed; instead they'd just accept it up front.
Yes. These guys shouldn't be focusing much on getting internal corporate credit for it. What they can get out of this is
But yes, their bosses will probably get a lot of the credit. Traditional corporations can be thought of a feudal empires. Once you're a knight with success in many glorious battles, the nobles will take you seriously. But a customer service rep in the warehouse equates to some peasant cleaning out stables. One day you might be a mighty knight, but for now you're dressed in rags and covered in horse shit, so nobody's going to listen to you. Make your bosses look good, and they can help you get promoted to squire. That's no great shakes either, but at least it's on the way to becoming a knight.
And yes, I agree that this sucks, but hopefully it sucks less than spending the rest of your life doing customer service.
Why should we pay to educate people when other countries are willing to educate them for us?
Two reasons:
First, democracy depends on an educated populace, and a lot of the important issues of our day require a good scientific grounding to understand.
Second, undereducated workers leads to lower productivity, and thus decreased wealth. Without that wealth, we won't be able to hire the best and brightest from around the world. Especially since many of the brightest are motivated less by money than by achievement. Why would they want to work around and for a bunch of uneducated boobs?
At the end of the day, these small angry loud voices are not ruling the country.
Sorry, you must have missed the news on this one. It turns out they are.
While it's fun to bash the liberals for political-correctness, you're very wrong about the roots of censorship.
I said only that censorship efforts also come from the left, which even by your sources, is demonstrably true. You'll note that item number 5 on the ALA Most Frequently Challenged Books list is Huckleberry Finn, which in recent years has generally been challenged from the left.
I agree that the majority of censorship efforts currently come from the political right, but no political group should pretend that it's only *other* people who would ever try to suppress information. Inappropriate use of power is a *human* problem, not a conservative or liberal problem.
how does that affect the bulk of scientific research? It doesn't, so quit whining. [...] there just isn't much societal or monetary reward for people to enter research fields.
You're so close to connecting the dots on this one. Let me help a bit.
Talking to friends in grad school, it turns out that part of the lack of societal reward is the low public respect they see toward scientific methods or expert opinion. Evolution is as fundamental to biology as electrons are to chemistry, but they see the president and a host of other leaders wanting to "teach the controversy," a fictional controversy which has shakier evidence than what the UFO nuts use. Ditto for religious intervention in public health and medical research.
As to monetary rewards, they see cuts in basic science funding, and increased career risk for anybody who does science that might challenge right-wing views on a host of topics from climate to drug prohibition.
The religious right isn't the only segment of the right behind this, but it's certainly part of it. Personally, I think it shouldn't be; there are plenty of scientists who are also Christians.
information censorship in libraries and textbooks is nearly always driven by the religious zealots
That's a little strong; censorship efforts also come from the left, but more around issues of race, gender, and religion. Zealotry is an equal-opportunity annoyer.
Hmmm... I tend to judge a publication on their stories where I know the topic well. That The Economist and the New York Times handle high-tech stories well makes me trust them more on other things. Is the rest of the Fox News tech coverage this dubious?
What I am trying to say is that if you take the easy way out and just say that someone is where they are because of the circumstances that they were born into you immediately take away their personal responsibility and shift the blame to society.
Yes, and if I were to do that, that would be unproductive, as certain outcomes of the War on Poverty show us. However, I never used the term "because", and I never suggested that circumstances are everything. It's a big contributory factor, though. My respect for human potential doesn't require me to leave people to stew in mitigatable bad circumstances that are a legacy of historical discrimination.
Indeed, I feel like providing equal opportunities to all is, in addition to being morally right, the best way to remove will-sapping excuses that keep people from building up a sense of personal responsibility. If we don't want people to blame their failures on an unfair society, perhaps we should act to reduce the more egregiously unfair aspects of society.
I took the black-white IAT, and as predicted by myself I had a slight preference to whites over blacks, just as I also found that I have a slight preference to young over old.
And you noted, I hope, that most takers had a preference more than slight.
The "American abroad" thing has nothing to do with being white or male, and everything to do with country of origin.
Sorry, but I interpret my experiences differently. In the country I was in, whiteness was a big deal: people of european ancestry were and are the elite, and most of the poor people there are visibly ethnically different. And the high status of males in Latino cultures is too well documented to argue with. Since nobody knew I was American until I opened my mouth, I had plenty of opportunity to see how the factors interacted.
Because it was a different kind of racial and gender discrimination than I grew up around, it stood out to me, and helped me see things in a new light when I got home.
As far as the shaved-head thing goes, are you not aware of the existence of skinheads? Since most shaven-headed whites for the last 30-40 years have been white supremacists, I don't know why you're surprised.
I live in San Francisco, where I don't think I've ever seen a skinhead. Shaven-headed guys here are generally stylish, gay, or both. But you miss my point entirely: even if people did think I was a skinhead, they probably didn't think that of my black friend, who got the same treatment but a lot more of it.
blaming the school system or a person's way of life kind of takes away their free will. If you want an example of someone who worked hard despite the environment they were born in look here.
Regardless of race, it's demonstrably true that people in shitty circumstances are statistically less likely to achieve all sorts of things than people in swell ones. Noting this fact doesn't take away anybody's free will.
Indeed, I'd suggest improving the circumstances of our fellow citizens so they have more opportunities, more choices is the thing that shows the more respect for their free will. I think we should do this regardless of race. But given the obvious racial disparities and the results of things like the Implicit Association Test, which shows that most Americans who believe they have no racial bias actually do, I can see the reasoning behind race-based preferences.
Just because fewer blacks are taking advantage of education doesn't mean that it's not available for them. Despite the numbers being lower, they do not receive less education, fewer take advantage of it.
Any proof for that?
And even if you're right, or if we accept your definitions so you end up right, it raises the question of why. If that's also related to our long history of discrimination, perhaps we should do something about it.
Of course, I'd suggest that you're not right at all. A lot of blacks live in big cities with terrible school systems that declined rapidly when white people, forced to integrate, moved out to the suburbs and took the tax base with them. It'd be no surprise that going to lousy elementary, middle, and high schools leaves you unprepared or disinclined to take a swing at college. Say that's merely a matter of personal preference on their part is sweeping quite a lot under the rug.
Why does it matter? I thought we were supposed to be racially unbiased and "color blind" these days.
It matters because a) it's one way to find out if we're succeeding, and b) people considering entering a field find it more comfortable if there are already people like them in it.
This "ask slashdot" story is racist on itself.
I don't see that at all. He spoke of his own personal experience, saying that he could think of only one notable non-white OSS developer, and asking for more. Racism isn't about noticing the very existence of race, it's about irrational bias based on it.
Making a compleatly unfounded statistic remark about racial participation in "IT/OSS/Web/CS" projects is calling for more uninformed bable and flames.
Go back and read the post again. He made no such remark. Was this some cleverly ironic demonstration of uninformed babble?
This is the most racist comment I have seen in this story so far. [...]The comment that you make that I have to disagree with most is the "less college education".
Sorry, but you're flat out wrong on this one. In 2004, 84.8% of white people graduated from high school, and 26.8% had a bachelor's degree. Whereas only 73.5% of black people graduated from high school, and only 14.4% had bachelor's degrees.
[...] As a black person I would've had my entire education paid for, but as a white person I had to take out large student loans. As a black person I would've even been able to get into college with lower test scores and a lower GPA. Despite what you may think, as a white person I am discriminated against by the laws and policies in the US.
Yes, that's because we white people said, after centuries of terribly deleterious discrimination, "Hey, let's see if we can even thing things up a bit." Whether or not that was (or remains) a good way to solve the problem is a topic of much debate. But given that roughly half as many black people end up with four-year degrees, it seems quite a stretch to suggest that there is no problem.