Why? Should anyone who researches something suddenly turn into an entrepeneur? A venture capitalist? It's reasonable to point out things that could theoretically be business opportunities and not immediately register a startup.
In one of the most progressive industries, in one of the most progressive states, in one of the most progressive countries in the world?
I keep hearing people saying things about progressives, that they aren't, that they're fascists, etc. This argument is based on the idea that progressivisim is exactly what it says on the tin, and, speaking as a progressive, that isn't necessarily the case. Someone who is a true progressive and works for improvements in society is likely to specialize. That's reasonable; we all have to specialize. I have a certain list of organizations I contribute to, rather than to every worthwhile cause I run into. This means that it's easy to develop blind spots.
A feminist might wind up in effect working for the rights of white middle-class women. Nothing wrong with that, since there's improvements that can be made, but said feminist might not be improving the lives of poor women. In a group, blind spots can develop. There's lots of people whose focus is racial discrimination who will concentrate on blacks and disregard Native Americans in general.
Therefore, a progressive industry in a progressive city in a progressive state in a progressive country can easily foster unfair discrimination. Sometimes a belief that one is progressive will reinforce one's blind spots.
Obviously, disparities can have reasons behind them, and the reasons can be good. However, we've looked at a lot of inequality-of-outcome cases and found inequalities of opportunity behind them. I'm interested in getting those cases investigated, not in coming up with equality of outcome (which is a stupid idea).
Actually, I'm not all that interested personally in the gender disparity in directors or mechanics. I believe both should be looked at, but (specialization again!) I'm not going to sweat it.
When you're working with top actors, and they are not performing according to your vision, you need to be able to be confrontational.
No, actually, you need to have a way to get them to go along with your vision. Confrontation is one such tool, but hardly the only one. Persuasion based on social skills far beyond mine (which isn't exactly a high bar) could work as well. There are times when confrontation will work, and times when subtle persuasion will work, and I can't see either of them working all the time.
As a general rule, software developers aren't that interested in being paid a lot. Sure, we'd all like more money, but it turns out not to be a real motivator. Its main effect on morale is as demotivation: if a developer thinks he or she is underpaid, he or she will think he or she is disrespected, and morale drops.
If the employer has compensation based on transparently reasonable criteria, the employee will not feel personally underpaid. It's a good method to avoid the bigger problem while losing the much less important benefits.
In other words, the systemic bias had its effect without the necessity of any personal bias.
Let's get specific. I'm a software developer. That's what I'm paid for. I'm supposed to produce good software and not be a disruptive influence in the social dynamics. That's what my pay should be based on, since it's my contribution to the company.
Now, saying that my pay should be based on my negotiation ability, my ability to make humans do what I want, is saying that my actual ability at the job is less important than other skills. As it happens, I'm ASD. This might well help me as a software developer, but hinders me in actual negotiation with humans.
You're implying that people who don't negotiate aggressively don't deserve more pay. In some cases, this is reasonable, since businesses do need good negotiators. In many, it isn't, since negotiation ability doesn't necessarily have anything to do with job performance. In this case, why should a harder negotiator get paid more? The negotiator doesn't bring more relevant ability to the company, after all?
And, if pay shouldn't be based so heavily on negotiation ability, there's no reason why men should make more because they negotiate harder.
People tend to favor people who resemble themselves. If the old guard is almost completely men, they'll probably promote men over women.
Lots of people believe in gender roles that say that men should be in charge. If person A tells person B what to do, then person A should be a man, and if not person B shouldn't be.
Directors progress based on their success. This means that it's basically determined by who gets a chance to succeed. If there's a strong preference for selecting unknown male directors over unknown female directors, then men have a much better chance to succeed, since they have a much better chance of being able to try, and so they have a much better chance to become successful and known. If people tend to expect men to be better directors than women, that's going to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
That's three possible things off the top of my head. I don't know exactly what's going on, and I don't have the information to figure it out. All of those factors could be in play without any conscious sexism, and we have historical examples of the first two.
Does anybody with mod points understand the first thing about sexual harassment and rape?
Suppose an actress was presented with the choice of having a good role and sex with Weinstein, or neither. Having sex with Weinstein and then reporting him for rape seems to me the worst of both worlds. It's hard to prove rape.
You could consider the actress a prostitute, I suppose, but consider what that means about Weinstein, that he'd force women into prostitution for the sake of their careers. That's the sort of thing bad pimps do, and I didn't notice you blaming him.
Gender, as used by feminists, is a social construct. If you look at different cultures in different times, you'll find a lot of variation in gender roles. Gender is a social construct. It's obviously partly dependent on biology, but so is all of human society.
There first is that men grew up with sci fi and comic books and most women didn't.
That's WAY overgeneralizing. Most boys back in my high school were't interested in science fiction, and some of the girls were. Comic books were much more heavily boy-oriented, but even today there's lots of science fiction movies that have nothing to do with comics. Over the past decade or so, Marvel has been coming out with a lot of quite successful comic book movies, but there's still been other science fiction movies.
Another thing that's going on is that most female directors are products of liberal Western feminist thought. They are therefore desperately unqualified to represent gender on screen
In other words, there's absolutely nothing unbiased about this post. You're assuming that you're right, and that a statement that liberal Western feminist thought is completely wrong, to the point where you think you can toss it out there unquestioned.
In their minds men and women are interchangeable.
In which case you haven't been reading female-written fiction or watching female-directed movies or paying attention to any actual liberals or feminists, because that's not true. The quote 'Very few jobs require a penis or a vagina, and the others should be open to anyone" refers to equality of opportunity in employment.
You go back no further than the 1950s. The 1950s had already had a shot of women's lib during wartime, when women had to perform a lot of traditionally male jobs, and in general did well at them. GP's claim of "maybe two women out of 100 published authors" certainly isn't true in the Twentieth Century, but was at least closer in the Nineteenth, and may have been true in the Eighteenth.
GP claimed that "there are more women published than men", and you went immediately to best-seller lists as measures of how many published authors there are. That's not going to tell you anything about authors in general.
Women control much of the discretionary spending in our society, and women read a lot more than men.
What you're saying here is that free market forces favor women as writers, since women tend to buy more books, so publishing in general would be slanted towards books that attract women by the very nature of free enterprise, and would probably try to attract women as authors.
Women are highly subsidized as both authors and consumers of books by men and by the state.
And now you're claiming that the results of a market preference (established above) have to be due to market subsidies. Read your first quote. Men aren't subsidizing them, since women are providing the bulk of the money. Publishing is not inordinately state-supported.
That doesn't prove that women are overall more talented at writing books, let alone that women are statistically as capable as men as producing great literature.
So, it's fine for you to claim that men are better authors than women, but when someone comes up with any possible evidence that you're wrong you're not going to consider it. Right.
For a guy who doesn't hang around with feminists, and who can't even be bothered to read his own cites to see what they mean, you sure say a lot of things. You're defending toxic masculinity in its clearly toxic form. You are making an unsupported claim about equal opportunity that can be trivially disproved in minor ways. You are claiming that the existing disparities are due to something you're willing to accept, without establishing that.
because men supposedly suffer from "toxic masculinity"
Men also suffer from erectile dysfunction in far greater numbers than women do.
Some men exhibit "toxic masculinity". The phrase may be misleading, but it describes some unpleasant behavior, which includes establishing dominance over women for the sake of establishing that dominance.
Okay, so you don't talk to feminists, but you have no difficulty in telling us what they say? And if it's different from all the actual feminists that some of us on Slashdot talk to, we're automatically wrong? I have no doubt that there are some feminists who prefer their men to be wimpy and obsequious. However, I have never talked to one, and it's contrary to the mindset of the feminists I know.
Your link is to an article that, basically, assumes that men should not dominate women. It denies that men should be superior to women. That's as far as it goes in man-woman relationships. Now, you could argue that that's the case now, or that the reasoning in that article is ridiculously wrong, but reread that article until you understand what the author wants. The author wants men to not dominate or rape women. If you think that a man who isn't "wimpy and obsequious" will dominate relationships and tell women what to do, you're part of the problem.
they keep misattributing the effects of male competitiveness to some unjust patriarchal power grab.
You seem to think that those are two entirely separate things. There can be an unjust patriarchal power grab that's caused by male competitiveness. Perhaps the men are competing by showing off obedient wives and daughters. It's happened enough historically.
Do you have any plausible explanation for women being uninterested or untalented in directing? Otherwise, I find a 98% sex preponderance to be odd. With such a discrepancy, I want to know why.
We know that discrimination based on gender has existed for a long time in this country, and I can find examples of it happening still. We know that people can consider themselves progressive and still have blind spots. We know that people often look at the status quo and think it natural.
Personally, I hang around with leftists, and you don't (as you said), so you'll understand that I think my observations are more reliable than yours. If you don't associate with feminists, you're getting your information from people who want to sell something. Ideally, it's people who want to report accurately and sell your eyeballs. There's plenty of organizations with more sinister purposes.
Using the Steele dossier is reasonable. Relying on it is not.
The idea is that a FISA request is supposed to stay secret. The problem here is Republicans publishing selected information for partisan gain. If the warrant application stays secret, nobody knows about what role the Steele dossier played. If it becomes public knowledge, then everybody knows what role it played, and can decide for themselves whether it was used appropriately. As it is, information was leaked to foster one particular viewpoint.
The lesson is, I suppose, that the FBI needs to stop telling Republicans what's going on.
Investment can get awful close to gambling sometimes. If you invest in ten risky businesses, and nine just crash and one returns twenty times your investment, you're well ahead. You probably want to make sure that the company is actually doing something potentially profitable, and that there's at least plausible path between where they are and profitability.
For a growth company, P/E isn't a fundamental, which it is for more established companies. If it's got a stable business, that's great, but that's not as important as you might think. Right now, I have investments in a company with a P/E of over 60. It's been doing profitable business for many years now, and is established in its field. It's also on a rapid growth trajectory. If the growth were to stop today, the company would continue to be in business for the foreseeable future, and would have good profits. Without growth, the price would drop to a P/E ratio of 20 or so, which means I'd lose about two-thirds of my investment (well, on paper anyway, since I didn't pay anywhere near current price for my shares). The difference between losing two-thirds of my investment and all of my investment isn't really all that great.
They have other evidence that, if they'd found it earlier, would have marked the guy as a suspect, such as his location at the times of the crimes. Enough further evidence to warrant a conviction? I don't know.
The summary described police looking for a suspect. That's not a prosecutor's fallacy. If the prosecutor tried presenting the DNA as the only evidence, and insisted that it was definitive, that would be the prosecutor's fallacy.
Slashdot Mirror
Why? Should anyone who researches something suddenly turn into an entrepeneur? A venture capitalist? It's reasonable to point out things that could theoretically be business opportunities and not immediately register a startup.
I keep hearing people saying things about progressives, that they aren't, that they're fascists, etc. This argument is based on the idea that progressivisim is exactly what it says on the tin, and, speaking as a progressive, that isn't necessarily the case. Someone who is a true progressive and works for improvements in society is likely to specialize. That's reasonable; we all have to specialize. I have a certain list of organizations I contribute to, rather than to every worthwhile cause I run into. This means that it's easy to develop blind spots.
A feminist might wind up in effect working for the rights of white middle-class women. Nothing wrong with that, since there's improvements that can be made, but said feminist might not be improving the lives of poor women. In a group, blind spots can develop. There's lots of people whose focus is racial discrimination who will concentrate on blacks and disregard Native Americans in general.
Therefore, a progressive industry in a progressive city in a progressive state in a progressive country can easily foster unfair discrimination. Sometimes a belief that one is progressive will reinforce one's blind spots.
Obviously, disparities can have reasons behind them, and the reasons can be good. However, we've looked at a lot of inequality-of-outcome cases and found inequalities of opportunity behind them. I'm interested in getting those cases investigated, not in coming up with equality of outcome (which is a stupid idea).
Actually, I'm not all that interested personally in the gender disparity in directors or mechanics. I believe both should be looked at, but (specialization again!) I'm not going to sweat it.
No, actually, you need to have a way to get them to go along with your vision. Confrontation is one such tool, but hardly the only one. Persuasion based on social skills far beyond mine (which isn't exactly a high bar) could work as well. There are times when confrontation will work, and times when subtle persuasion will work, and I can't see either of them working all the time.
Not necessarily.
As a general rule, software developers aren't that interested in being paid a lot. Sure, we'd all like more money, but it turns out not to be a real motivator. Its main effect on morale is as demotivation: if a developer thinks he or she is underpaid, he or she will think he or she is disrespected, and morale drops.
If the employer has compensation based on transparently reasonable criteria, the employee will not feel personally underpaid. It's a good method to avoid the bigger problem while losing the much less important benefits.
Joel on Software has much more detail on this.
In other words, the systemic bias had its effect without the necessity of any personal bias.
Let's get specific. I'm a software developer. That's what I'm paid for. I'm supposed to produce good software and not be a disruptive influence in the social dynamics. That's what my pay should be based on, since it's my contribution to the company.
Now, saying that my pay should be based on my negotiation ability, my ability to make humans do what I want, is saying that my actual ability at the job is less important than other skills. As it happens, I'm ASD. This might well help me as a software developer, but hinders me in actual negotiation with humans.
You're implying that people who don't negotiate aggressively don't deserve more pay. In some cases, this is reasonable, since businesses do need good negotiators. In many, it isn't, since negotiation ability doesn't necessarily have anything to do with job performance. In this case, why should a harder negotiator get paid more? The negotiator doesn't bring more relevant ability to the company, after all?
And, if pay shouldn't be based so heavily on negotiation ability, there's no reason why men should make more because they negotiate harder.
There's a combination of factors here.
People tend to favor people who resemble themselves. If the old guard is almost completely men, they'll probably promote men over women.
Lots of people believe in gender roles that say that men should be in charge. If person A tells person B what to do, then person A should be a man, and if not person B shouldn't be.
Directors progress based on their success. This means that it's basically determined by who gets a chance to succeed. If there's a strong preference for selecting unknown male directors over unknown female directors, then men have a much better chance to succeed, since they have a much better chance of being able to try, and so they have a much better chance to become successful and known. If people tend to expect men to be better directors than women, that's going to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
That's three possible things off the top of my head. I don't know exactly what's going on, and I don't have the information to figure it out. All of those factors could be in play without any conscious sexism, and we have historical examples of the first two.
Does anybody with mod points understand the first thing about sexual harassment and rape?
Suppose an actress was presented with the choice of having a good role and sex with Weinstein, or neither. Having sex with Weinstein and then reporting him for rape seems to me the worst of both worlds. It's hard to prove rape.
You could consider the actress a prostitute, I suppose, but consider what that means about Weinstein, that he'd force women into prostitution for the sake of their careers. That's the sort of thing bad pimps do, and I didn't notice you blaming him.
Gender, as used by feminists, is a social construct. If you look at different cultures in different times, you'll find a lot of variation in gender roles. Gender is a social construct. It's obviously partly dependent on biology, but so is all of human society.
That's WAY overgeneralizing. Most boys back in my high school were't interested in science fiction, and some of the girls were. Comic books were much more heavily boy-oriented, but even today there's lots of science fiction movies that have nothing to do with comics. Over the past decade or so, Marvel has been coming out with a lot of quite successful comic book movies, but there's still been other science fiction movies.
In other words, there's absolutely nothing unbiased about this post. You're assuming that you're right, and that a statement that liberal Western feminist thought is completely wrong, to the point where you think you can toss it out there unquestioned.
In which case you haven't been reading female-written fiction or watching female-directed movies or paying attention to any actual liberals or feminists, because that's not true. The quote 'Very few jobs require a penis or a vagina, and the others should be open to anyone" refers to equality of opportunity in employment.
Okay, let's analyze your claims.
You go back no further than the 1950s. The 1950s had already had a shot of women's lib during wartime, when women had to perform a lot of traditionally male jobs, and in general did well at them. GP's claim of "maybe two women out of 100 published authors" certainly isn't true in the Twentieth Century, but was at least closer in the Nineteenth, and may have been true in the Eighteenth.
GP claimed that "there are more women published than men", and you went immediately to best-seller lists as measures of how many published authors there are. That's not going to tell you anything about authors in general.
What you're saying here is that free market forces favor women as writers, since women tend to buy more books, so publishing in general would be slanted towards books that attract women by the very nature of free enterprise, and would probably try to attract women as authors.
And now you're claiming that the results of a market preference (established above) have to be due to market subsidies. Read your first quote. Men aren't subsidizing them, since women are providing the bulk of the money. Publishing is not inordinately state-supported.
So, it's fine for you to claim that men are better authors than women, but when someone comes up with any possible evidence that you're wrong you're not going to consider it. Right.
For a guy who doesn't hang around with feminists, and who can't even be bothered to read his own cites to see what they mean, you sure say a lot of things. You're defending toxic masculinity in its clearly toxic form. You are making an unsupported claim about equal opportunity that can be trivially disproved in minor ways. You are claiming that the existing disparities are due to something you're willing to accept, without establishing that.
Men also suffer from erectile dysfunction in far greater numbers than women do.
Some men exhibit "toxic masculinity". The phrase may be misleading, but it describes some unpleasant behavior, which includes establishing dominance over women for the sake of establishing that dominance.
You need to sit down and listen to a feminist sometime. Or read ooloorie's cited article. Find what they actually want. It isn't what you claim it is.
Okay, so you don't talk to feminists, but you have no difficulty in telling us what they say? And if it's different from all the actual feminists that some of us on Slashdot talk to, we're automatically wrong? I have no doubt that there are some feminists who prefer their men to be wimpy and obsequious. However, I have never talked to one, and it's contrary to the mindset of the feminists I know.
Your link is to an article that, basically, assumes that men should not dominate women. It denies that men should be superior to women. That's as far as it goes in man-woman relationships. Now, you could argue that that's the case now, or that the reasoning in that article is ridiculously wrong, but reread that article until you understand what the author wants. The author wants men to not dominate or rape women. If you think that a man who isn't "wimpy and obsequious" will dominate relationships and tell women what to do, you're part of the problem.
You seem to think that those are two entirely separate things. There can be an unjust patriarchal power grab that's caused by male competitiveness. Perhaps the men are competing by showing off obedient wives and daughters. It's happened enough historically.
Do you have any plausible explanation for women being uninterested or untalented in directing? Otherwise, I find a 98% sex preponderance to be odd. With such a discrepancy, I want to know why.
We know that discrimination based on gender has existed for a long time in this country, and I can find examples of it happening still. We know that people can consider themselves progressive and still have blind spots. We know that people often look at the status quo and think it natural.
Personally, I hang around with leftists, and you don't (as you said), so you'll understand that I think my observations are more reliable than yours. If you don't associate with feminists, you're getting your information from people who want to sell something. Ideally, it's people who want to report accurately and sell your eyeballs. There's plenty of organizations with more sinister purposes.
Using the Steele dossier is reasonable. Relying on it is not.
The idea is that a FISA request is supposed to stay secret. The problem here is Republicans publishing selected information for partisan gain. If the warrant application stays secret, nobody knows about what role the Steele dossier played. If it becomes public knowledge, then everybody knows what role it played, and can decide for themselves whether it was used appropriately. As it is, information was leaked to foster one particular viewpoint.
The lesson is, I suppose, that the FBI needs to stop telling Republicans what's going on.
Investment can get awful close to gambling sometimes. If you invest in ten risky businesses, and nine just crash and one returns twenty times your investment, you're well ahead. You probably want to make sure that the company is actually doing something potentially profitable, and that there's at least plausible path between where they are and profitability.
For a growth company, P/E isn't a fundamental, which it is for more established companies. If it's got a stable business, that's great, but that's not as important as you might think. Right now, I have investments in a company with a P/E of over 60. It's been doing profitable business for many years now, and is established in its field. It's also on a rapid growth trajectory. If the growth were to stop today, the company would continue to be in business for the foreseeable future, and would have good profits. Without growth, the price would drop to a P/E ratio of 20 or so, which means I'd lose about two-thirds of my investment (well, on paper anyway, since I didn't pay anywhere near current price for my shares). The difference between losing two-thirds of my investment and all of my investment isn't really all that great.
They have other evidence that, if they'd found it earlier, would have marked the guy as a suspect, such as his location at the times of the crimes. Enough further evidence to warrant a conviction? I don't know.
Having worked for over a decade in government, you're wrong.
If you've got an identical twin brother, you're immune from being convicted on DNA evidence alone.
The summary described police looking for a suspect. That's not a prosecutor's fallacy. If the prosecutor tried presenting the DNA as the only evidence, and insisted that it was definitive, that would be the prosecutor's fallacy.
Arson investigation techniques are real frightening, if you read up on them. So many false assumptions.
It would be nice if you'd notice things in the real world.