This argument reminds me of string theory: it is internally consistent, but non-falsifiable.
But this isn't true. Even if we can't control the way children are raised, there really is a wide variety of cultures out in the world, with different sorts of gender norms. You can study sociological norms just the same ways you can study language. You don't get the apples to apples comparison that is ideal to have, but how else can you look at this sort of stuff?
No one has given a good reason why these fields should NOT be so lopsided, either.
Right, but as i pointed out above, if you assume that women and men are mostly the same (which i do think is a fair thing to say, even if there are differences), then the naive assumption is that there would be a fairly even distribution, even if it was a little lopsided not 70%+ biases. Even if you don't think it's a problem, why isn't there more curiosity as to what it is about our society that causes this (i say this, because there are people who seem outraged at the fact that such questions are even brought up).
And, just to point out again, these are positions of wealth and power. I mean that's the whole notion of the glass ceiling right? Business and technology are huge drivers of the economy, and biased for men (and increasingly business becomes more and more about technology as well). I mean, it's hard to work for women (as a group) to work way up to the top of the corporate ladder, if there are things keeping them off the lower rungs right?
You are clearly posting from a position of ignorance, and an inability to reason, because you have fallen prey to the same logical fallacies i mentioned in my grandparent post.
Ignorance: Sex is biologically determined. Gender is not. Women and men are physiologically different. Those physiological differences are not sufficient to explain the disparity between salaries and positions that exist between men and women in the western world.
Inability to Reason: If society influences what girls think and what they want, if you talk to girls who have been so influenced, they will in fact tell you what they think and want, i.e. how they have been socially influenced. This again is circular. Interrogating people as to what they want to do is not going to help you figure out this situation, because their very existence is informed by these cultural norms. Neither is forcing anyone to pick a career field going to help anyone. This isn't about forcing individuals into a life of servitude to something they don't want to do. This is about having a society that does not bias girls and guys so badly that they polarize fields like nursing, or computer science. No one has given a good reason why these fields should be so lopsided in terms of sex. All the reasons that are given are circular ones.
Posting before fully digesting! Sorry, i thought you were claiming that women were risk-averse. Once you get into the "big leagues" business is very much about risk, and risk management. The really high powered jobs out there are extremely insecure in that way. If you're the CEO or CIO of a company and you fuck up bad, it's going to become very apparent fairly quickly. Otherwise rescind the rest of my previous post.
Why do you think that women are on a whole risk-averse? Do you think that's true in general? I don't. I've known a lot of risk-oriented women. There are even stereotypes of such women. Etc Etc Etc. It seems like you're making an unsupported blanket generalization.
Who said that life shouldn't be fair? Or that we shouldn't try and make it fair?
Way to non-sequitor.
Gender is socially determined. Physiology is something that determines sex.:P No one is claiming that the physiology of women and men is the same. However the difference in cognitive abilities between men and women are not sufficient to explain the wide gap in job and salary equality. Can we agree on that?
That's funny, i've never seen any such research. Have you? I don't even see why you could assume such a ridiculous thing. Women and men aren't separate species, first off. Second, men all carry an X chromosome passed on by their mothers, which they in turn pass to their daughters. Women carry two X chromosomes, one of which passes to both their male and female offspring. So your premise is ridiculous. There's so much intermingling between male and female genetics, that it's absurd on it's face.
The problem is not what individuals choose. This is the mistake that everyone makes. I'm not interested in forcing people into fields they don't want to go into. I want to know why they chose the fields they do. Why is there a gender disparity. It's great that there are women in biotech. Why aren't there more women in Computer Science? What is it about math or computer science that makes it different from biotech? From the perspective of philosophy of science, the fields are similar enough that they fall under the same sort of development. What is it then about the sociology of these fields, that make women so preferentially choose one over the other? A naive distribution based on roughly equal sexes would assume that you'd have an even distribution wouldn't it?
Parent post is ridiculous. Men are perceived as better at math, have been allowed higher education for centuries before women were even perceived as being intellectually capable of higher education. For crying out loud, women weren't deemed intelligent enough to vote until the 1920s in the U.S.A.
Also, anyone with a basic knowledge of movie history knows that the claim that WWII did a lot for the women's movement knows what happened after the war, when men came back to the US, and collectively expected women to get back in the kitchen and cook them some dinner (A League of Their Own anyone?).
Also, it's not about exposure, it's about societal encouragement. If women aren't perceived as meticulous, or intelligent, or strong willed enough generally to be put in charge of business machines (and that's what they were originally, devices for another male dominated field), then they'd be passed up for promotions they were capable of, and thus would have remained as secretaries, or at best analysts. Hence explaining, why they didn't move into the new and fancy IT systems as they were developed (developed mainly by men i might add).
Even if there are substantial differences between guys and girls brains, i've yet to see any compelling analysis of why this would lead to the gender distribution that we have today.
I'm not arguing that people are tabula rasa, and all equal when they start out. What i'm saying is that there is no compelling reason why sex should be the determining factor in any given child's life. The range of cognitive abilities cuts across sex, and does not correlate with it. So, given that fact, the massive wealth disparity between women and men must as a result, be something that is socially determined.
Furthermore, i think it's irresponsible to downplay developmental factors. Only people who are poorly versed in human development think that our lots in life aren't also due to developmental factors (i.e. economists). Geneticists, biologists, and social scientists alike are all willing to agree on the hugely important role that childhood development has on how people turn out.
Ehh, bullshit. My daughter simply isn't interested in tech even though I encourage her. My son might be, or he might not..
This is wishful thinking. Parents play an important role in their children's development but not the sole role. Your children are influenced by other people's children, who are in turn influenced by their parents and the like. So, it's very possible that whatever motivating you do for your kid can be undone if they spend most of their time playing with kids who have "Math is Hard" barbie dolls.
Just look at language development. How man 1st gen native born American kids speak english with the accent that their peers have, not the accent their parents have?
First, IT and Business are perceived as high salary, and high opportunity. The fact that there are not more women in the field means that the perceived driver of the economy is largely devoid of women. Or, in other words, men make the bulk of the wealth in the world, even though i find it highly unlikely that this is solely based on merit (in fact, if you look at things like Enron and WorldCom, it is definitely not the case). This seems unfair to me at least.
Second, all of the arguments i hear about this are circular. The claim is that women do not wish to be in IT or Engineering because their gender does not predispose them to these fields. The problem is that gender is socially determined, and not an individually determined predisposition. So, the argument goes, women are not interested in IT because nobody taught them to be interested in IT. Nobody teaches women to be interested in IT, because they think that IT will not interest women.
.
It's an invalid argument.
Re:Performance, anyone?
on
Lisp and Ruby
·
· Score: 1
Ruby manages to be slower than PHP, and sometimes considerably, which is a true achievement (I can say, as a PHP developer, unfortunately).
What are you trying to do with Ruby that's making it so much slower than PHP?
The great computer language shoot out seems to indicate it's very close (i.e. PHP only performs >5x better than ruby on one task), although ruby's memory usage seems to be regularly better.
This just isn't true.
History may be written by the victors, but that has no bearing on truth. The Soviet Union spent decades rewriting history but once it collapsed people started uncovering the truth again. You can bury the truth, but you can't make it up.
Same thing's happening to Bush and the neo-con spin machine. They're coming apart at the seams, and there's too much truth for the spin machines to bury.
What a terrible article, the historical facts about Sealand are plagiarized directly from wikipedia.
Wikipedia:
In 1978 Dutch and German businessmen, who were on Sealand to discuss a business deal, kidnapped Roy's son. However, they were overpowered, and held as prisoners of war before eventually being released.[2]
ABCNews Online:
Four years later, Dutch and German businessmen on Sealand to discuss a business deal kidnapped Roy's son but were overpowered and held as prisoners of war before eventually being released.
Wikipedia:
In 1968 Britain's Royal Navy attempted to evict Roy Bates but was unsuccessful.
ABCNews Online:
Britain's Royal Navy attempted to evict him the following year but were unsuccessful.
Erg, i've mixed my metaphors. I will attempt to be more clear
In the event that there is insufficient evidence to make informed decision, a good scientist should admit the fact that they don't know, because nobody knows. This is the problem with Colin Powell's testimony before the U.N. Bad, uninformend research. But then, nobody really knew what was going on in Iraq.
In the event that there is plenty of information to make informed decisions, a good scientist should be right. I.e. the things they say should conform to the body of data that exists. I.e. the planet is warming at a rate that we have never seen before, and have no record of ever having occurred (ice caps melting faster than anybody predicted, average surface temperatures increasing, etc).
In either case, the merits of their arguments does not rest upon the strength of their character. It rests upon what they've said.
I'd argue that being right is an important part of being a good scientist. What i mentioned above is not the exclusive set of properties that one needs to be a good scientist. Also, in the event that there isn't enough evidence to make an informed decision, then yeah, scientists are going to have a success rate similar to anybody else's random guessing, because, well, nobody has the information to make an informed decision.
The problem is when there is a large body of information available which is disregarded for political expedience.
And once again, it's not about the individual scientist. It's about whether the argument the scientist makes holds together (and this requires an entire community to evaluate). Or to put it in a more policy-oriented context, it's not about how popular and well-liked Colin Powell is, or how right he thinks he is, it's about how bad his intelligence research is.
Would you care to back up that statement for me? Because my university forces it's students, even the scientists, to take a number of writing courses which are focused specifically on the construction of arguments and the identification of fallacious reasoning. And that doesn't count the courses that each major requires. I'll also note that my university also happens to be the largest university in the United States, and bears a good deal of similarity in curriculum to other large state schools, so you'll have to excuse me if i am skeptical of your claim.
The obnoxious part about straw-man arguments like parent's post is that it is premised on the very problem that scientists and realists are so pissed off about.
A culture of fact isn't predicated on the specific individuals involved. The point is to leave behind cults of personality, and focus on the content of what is said. Good scientists* don't want to be celebrities, or rock-stars. They don't want people to follow everything they do. They don't want hoards of groupies or worshipers. They want people to learn about and understand the things they're making decisions about.
[* note i said good scientists. There are plenty of scientists who want to be celebrities or rockstars. But that's for the sake of their own ego, not for the advancement of science]
I think this is a slightly uncharitable view of their motivations. I don't think that celebrities think that they're entitled to an opinion because they're famous. It's probably that they think they've got a venue to communicate with a whole lot of people, so they may as well use their celebrity to actually do something (as opposed to solely for self-aggrandizement).
The problem is that there is no consequence for them when they say shit that's flat out wrong. Their careers don't ride on their knowledge of quantum mechanics, or a nuanced understanding of the consequences of Colonialism.
Another thing that people seem to forget is that everybody is wrong about something. It's just that nobody listens to scientists about anything except science, so the things that scientists are wrong about aren't as important, because nobody hears about them. People broadcast everything celebrities say, so obviously you're going to get all the noise, as well as whatever signal may be there.
Remember, her family and friends haven't seen Nina Rieser since September. Her children are in the custody of the State of California (doesn't that sound pleasant). Typically one doesn't have a long taxing battle over divorce proceedings and then abandon your children to the state (one that it appears your husband would be willing to fight, possibly kill over).
Skepticism is a good thing, but i find that conspiracy theories in this particular case are pretty far fetched.
Just to name a recent scandal, what about Democratic Representative William Jefferson who had his house and his congressional office raided by the FBI. There are Democrats who get tagged with the "corruption" label as well. The only difference right now is that the Republicans are in fact more corrupt right now (in part due to the fact that Republicans had entirely kicked the Democrats out of power, anything that's happened recently is most definitely the responsibility of the Republicans).
Meh, i wasn't clear enough. Self-reporting is terribly ineffective. Even testing done by another person can be biased, which is why things like Double Blind testing methodology exists.
Self-reporting is so bad because humans only have access to the inner workings of their faculties at a certain level of granularity. Researchers can bias subjects towards the result they hypothesis they support (consciously or subconsciously) in a single blind experimental setup, which is why double blind experiments are done for tests where there are important motivational factors to take into account (i.e. no drug company wants their tests to fail FDA approval testing)
Human introspection is terribly inaccurate. Self-reporting is not effective, especially when it comes to psychometric testing. The things that humans do to bias studies are so subtle that they often don't know they're doing it. That's why Double Blind testing methodology exists.
Well... no we shouldn't complain when someone incorporates good ideas into their product.
I think that complaining might be warranted when someone only improves their product by incorporating other people's ideas. Thus far i really haven't seen anything that compels me to try vista. That's not true of when i switched from XP to OSX (and i'm still quite happy with the balance of unix-y-ness, and gui-y-ness, which i wasn't getting from linux [don't get me wrong, i like linux, and it's useful, but i didn't like it as a desktop]).
That's not to say that Vista will be a terrible horrible operating system or whatever, and microsoft does seem to be making improvements at a glacial pace, but... i just feel like vista should be greeted with a yawn.
Slashdot Mirror
Odd, because P.T. Barnum probably never said that.
Right, but as i pointed out above, if you assume that women and men are mostly the same (which i do think is a fair thing to say, even if there are differences), then the naive assumption is that there would be a fairly even distribution, even if it was a little lopsided not 70%+ biases. Even if you don't think it's a problem, why isn't there more curiosity as to what it is about our society that causes this (i say this, because there are people who seem outraged at the fact that such questions are even brought up). And, just to point out again, these are positions of wealth and power. I mean that's the whole notion of the glass ceiling right? Business and technology are huge drivers of the economy, and biased for men (and increasingly business becomes more and more about technology as well). I mean, it's hard to work for women (as a group) to work way up to the top of the corporate ladder, if there are things keeping them off the lower rungs right?
You are clearly posting from a position of ignorance, and an inability to reason, because you have fallen prey to the same logical fallacies i mentioned in my grandparent post.
Ignorance: Sex is biologically determined. Gender is not. Women and men are physiologically different. Those physiological differences are not sufficient to explain the disparity between salaries and positions that exist between men and women in the western world.
Inability to Reason: If society influences what girls think and what they want, if you talk to girls who have been so influenced, they will in fact tell you what they think and want, i.e. how they have been socially influenced. This again is circular. Interrogating people as to what they want to do is not going to help you figure out this situation, because their very existence is informed by these cultural norms. Neither is forcing anyone to pick a career field going to help anyone. This isn't about forcing individuals into a life of servitude to something they don't want to do. This is about having a society that does not bias girls and guys so badly that they polarize fields like nursing, or computer science. No one has given a good reason why these fields should be so lopsided in terms of sex. All the reasons that are given are circular ones.
oops!
Posting before fully digesting! Sorry, i thought you were claiming that women were risk-averse. Once you get into the "big leagues" business is very much about risk, and risk management. The really high powered jobs out there are extremely insecure in that way. If you're the CEO or CIO of a company and you fuck up bad, it's going to become very apparent fairly quickly. Otherwise rescind the rest of my previous post.
Why do you think that women are on a whole risk-averse? Do you think that's true in general? I don't. I've known a lot of risk-oriented women. There are even stereotypes of such women. Etc Etc Etc. It seems like you're making an unsupported blanket generalization.
Way to non-sequitor.
Gender is socially determined. Physiology is something that determines sex.
That's funny, i've never seen any such research. Have you? I don't even see why you could assume such a ridiculous thing. Women and men aren't separate species, first off. Second, men all carry an X chromosome passed on by their mothers, which they in turn pass to their daughters. Women carry two X chromosomes, one of which passes to both their male and female offspring. So your premise is ridiculous. There's so much intermingling between male and female genetics, that it's absurd on it's face.
Please, go read a basic textbook on biology.
The problem is not what individuals choose. This is the mistake that everyone makes. I'm not interested in forcing people into fields they don't want to go into. I want to know why they chose the fields they do. Why is there a gender disparity. It's great that there are women in biotech. Why aren't there more women in Computer Science? What is it about math or computer science that makes it different from biotech? From the perspective of philosophy of science, the fields are similar enough that they fall under the same sort of development. What is it then about the sociology of these fields, that make women so preferentially choose one over the other? A naive distribution based on roughly equal sexes would assume that you'd have an even distribution wouldn't it?
Parent post is ridiculous. Men are perceived as better at math, have been allowed higher education for centuries before women were even perceived as being intellectually capable of higher education. For crying out loud, women weren't deemed intelligent enough to vote until the 1920s in the U.S.A.
Also, anyone with a basic knowledge of movie history knows that the claim that WWII did a lot for the women's movement knows what happened after the war, when men came back to the US, and collectively expected women to get back in the kitchen and cook them some dinner (A League of Their Own anyone?).
Also, it's not about exposure, it's about societal encouragement. If women aren't perceived as meticulous, or intelligent, or strong willed enough generally to be put in charge of business machines (and that's what they were originally, devices for another male dominated field), then they'd be passed up for promotions they were capable of, and thus would have remained as secretaries, or at best analysts. Hence explaining, why they didn't move into the new and fancy IT systems as they were developed (developed mainly by men i might add).
Even if there are substantial differences between guys and girls brains, i've yet to see any compelling analysis of why this would lead to the gender distribution that we have today.
I'm not arguing that people are tabula rasa, and all equal when they start out. What i'm saying is that there is no compelling reason why sex should be the determining factor in any given child's life. The range of cognitive abilities cuts across sex, and does not correlate with it. So, given that fact, the massive wealth disparity between women and men must as a result, be something that is socially determined.
Furthermore, i think it's irresponsible to downplay developmental factors. Only people who are poorly versed in human development think that our lots in life aren't also due to developmental factors (i.e. economists). Geneticists, biologists, and social scientists alike are all willing to agree on the hugely important role that childhood development has on how people turn out.
Just look at language development. How man 1st gen native born American kids speak english with the accent that their peers have, not the accent their parents have?
First, IT and Business are perceived as high salary, and high opportunity. The fact that there are not more women in the field means that the perceived driver of the economy is largely devoid of women. Or, in other words, men make the bulk of the wealth in the world, even though i find it highly unlikely that this is solely based on merit (in fact, if you look at things like Enron and WorldCom, it is definitely not the case). This seems unfair to me at least. Second, all of the arguments i hear about this are circular. The claim is that women do not wish to be in IT or Engineering because their gender does not predispose them to these fields. The problem is that gender is socially determined, and not an individually determined predisposition. So, the argument goes, women are not interested in IT because nobody taught them to be interested in IT. Nobody teaches women to be interested in IT, because they think that IT will not interest women. . It's an invalid argument.
This just isn't true. History may be written by the victors, but that has no bearing on truth. The Soviet Union spent decades rewriting history but once it collapsed people started uncovering the truth again. You can bury the truth, but you can't make it up. Same thing's happening to Bush and the neo-con spin machine. They're coming apart at the seams, and there's too much truth for the spin machines to bury.
Wikipedia: ABCNews Online: Wikipedia: ABCNews Online:
Someone needs to be fired.
Erg, i've mixed my metaphors. I will attempt to be more clear
In the event that there is insufficient evidence to make informed decision, a good scientist should admit the fact that they don't know, because nobody knows. This is the problem with Colin Powell's testimony before the U.N. Bad, uninformend research. But then, nobody really knew what was going on in Iraq.
In the event that there is plenty of information to make informed decisions, a good scientist should be right. I.e. the things they say should conform to the body of data that exists. I.e. the planet is warming at a rate that we have never seen before, and have no record of ever having occurred (ice caps melting faster than anybody predicted, average surface temperatures increasing, etc).
In either case, the merits of their arguments does not rest upon the strength of their character. It rests upon what they've said.
I'd argue that being right is an important part of being a good scientist. What i mentioned above is not the exclusive set of properties that one needs to be a good scientist. Also, in the event that there isn't enough evidence to make an informed decision, then yeah, scientists are going to have a success rate similar to anybody else's random guessing, because, well, nobody has the information to make an informed decision.
The problem is when there is a large body of information available which is disregarded for political expedience.
And once again, it's not about the individual scientist. It's about whether the argument the scientist makes holds together (and this requires an entire community to evaluate). Or to put it in a more policy-oriented context, it's not about how popular and well-liked Colin Powell is, or how right he thinks he is, it's about how bad his intelligence research is.
Really?
Would you care to back up that statement for me? Because my university forces it's students, even the scientists, to take a number of writing courses which are focused specifically on the construction of arguments and the identification of fallacious reasoning. And that doesn't count the courses that each major requires. I'll also note that my university also happens to be the largest university in the United States, and bears a good deal of similarity in curriculum to other large state schools, so you'll have to excuse me if i am skeptical of your claim.
The obnoxious part about straw-man arguments like parent's post is that it is premised on the very problem that scientists and realists are so pissed off about.
A culture of fact isn't predicated on the specific individuals involved. The point is to leave behind cults of personality, and focus on the content of what is said. Good scientists* don't want to be celebrities, or rock-stars. They don't want people to follow everything they do. They don't want hoards of groupies or worshipers. They want people to learn about and understand the things they're making decisions about.
[* note i said good scientists. There are plenty of scientists who want to be celebrities or rockstars. But that's for the sake of their own ego, not for the advancement of science]
I think this is a slightly uncharitable view of their motivations. I don't think that celebrities think that they're entitled to an opinion because they're famous. It's probably that they think they've got a venue to communicate with a whole lot of people, so they may as well use their celebrity to actually do something (as opposed to solely for self-aggrandizement).
The problem is that there is no consequence for them when they say shit that's flat out wrong. Their careers don't ride on their knowledge of quantum mechanics, or a nuanced understanding of the consequences of Colonialism.
Another thing that people seem to forget is that everybody is wrong about something. It's just that nobody listens to scientists about anything except science, so the things that scientists are wrong about aren't as important, because nobody hears about them. People broadcast everything celebrities say, so obviously you're going to get all the noise, as well as whatever signal may be there.
The murder was set up by the wife? :P
Remember, her family and friends haven't seen Nina Rieser since September. Her children are in the custody of the State of California (doesn't that sound pleasant). Typically one doesn't have a long taxing battle over divorce proceedings and then abandon your children to the state (one that it appears your husband would be willing to fight, possibly kill over).
Skepticism is a good thing, but i find that conspiracy theories in this particular case are pretty far fetched.
Whatever dude.
Just to name a recent scandal, what about Democratic Representative William Jefferson who had his house and his congressional office raided by the FBI. There are Democrats who get tagged with the "corruption" label as well. The only difference right now is that the Republicans are in fact more corrupt right now (in part due to the fact that Republicans had entirely kicked the Democrats out of power, anything that's happened recently is most definitely the responsibility of the Republicans).
Meh, i wasn't clear enough. Self-reporting is terribly ineffective. Even testing done by another person can be biased, which is why things like Double Blind testing methodology exists.
Self-reporting is so bad because humans only have access to the inner workings of their faculties at a certain level of granularity. Researchers can bias subjects towards the result they hypothesis they support (consciously or subconsciously) in a single blind experimental setup, which is why double blind experiments are done for tests where there are important motivational factors to take into account (i.e. no drug company wants their tests to fail FDA approval testing)
Human introspection is terribly inaccurate. Self-reporting is not effective, especially when it comes to psychometric testing. The things that humans do to bias studies are so subtle that they often don't know they're doing it. That's why Double Blind testing methodology exists.
So sorry, but you've missed the real point.
Well... no we shouldn't complain when someone incorporates good ideas into their product.
I think that complaining might be warranted when someone only improves their product by incorporating other people's ideas. Thus far i really haven't seen anything that compels me to try vista. That's not true of when i switched from XP to OSX (and i'm still quite happy with the balance of unix-y-ness, and gui-y-ness, which i wasn't getting from linux [don't get me wrong, i like linux, and it's useful, but i didn't like it as a desktop]).
That's not to say that Vista will be a terrible horrible operating system or whatever, and microsoft does seem to be making improvements at a glacial pace, but... i just feel like vista should be greeted with a yawn.