The only meaningful distinction I've seen after spending time investigating the two and why some choose one over the other, is the underlying philosophy of each. With Python, there's almost always a "right" way to do a particular thing, an attitude of choosing the best practice summed up in the adjective "pythonic". Ruby follows Perl's TIMTOWTDI line, with a very flexible syntax that allows for a variety of ways to accomplish a particular end. So mainly, it's a temperament thing: coders who like a flexible tool that allows them to find 'clever' solutions prefer Ruby; coders (like me) who like for there to be a best practice, and don't break the rules without a decent reason to do so, prefer python.
A good snapshot of the difference was in Zed Shaw's now disappeared rant about Ruby, where what set him off was finding a bunch of hacks injected into a logging library he was using, and realizing that he was not only going to have to inject his own, but that this was expected and commended in the community. The idea that there should be a stable API forming the basis of a contract with the programmer was looked down upon by Rubyists, causing Shaw to dismiss them as cowboys and amateurs.
So this is, like, two days of training in how to foil a hijacking with a gun? This really seems like a plausible scenario, to take 13 million Americans (the number of CAMs needed to cover a year's flights, assuming each flies 10 times per year), the vast majority of them not military or law enforcement, give them a weekend seminar on using a gun on an airplane without killing civilians or causing enough damage to the plane to make it crash?
Even then, you're talking about an expense of 13 billion dollars to train a year's flight's worth of CAMs. That's about twice the TSA's entire budget.
That can certainly happen on a small scale, but I think it would be near impossible for a terrorist mastermind to ensure that every "CAM" on a specific flight was one of his guys.
The initial suggestion was that we take regular passengers, train/certify them, and let them carry guns. By definition, then, you're giving a terrorist mastermind the opportunity to stack a flight. First, you need 13 million CAMs a year--I doubt it would be difficult to slip 10 through the cracks in that certification program. Second, if all 10 book tickets on the same flight, then you've got your 10 CAMs on the flight--but even nine or eight or seven is good enough to provide overwhelming firepower against the real CAMs.
As I mentioned above, when you get on a plane, you have a 0.000000008% chance of dying due to terrorist attack. And you want to spend at least 13 billion dollars a year preventing that from happening, at substantial risk of accidents and other issues that come up around guns? It's not that guns are particularly unsafe, it's that the sheer numbers in order to keep this program going are absurd--both the cost and the risks of air-rage or armed drunkenness.
Every day there are 37,000 commercial flights in the U.S. (13.5 million per year). So you need 135 million passengers to go through training--well, let's say that it's regular travelers who go through training, taking multiple flights per year, say 10, so you only need 13 million people to be trained to carry a firearm safely and use it effectively in such a situation.
That seems unrealistic to me, but lets keep going. The cost of such training alone would be pretty large, I'd imagine. More problematic to me, though, would be getting some level of assurance that among the 370,000 daily "Civilian Air Marshals" (CAMs), there are no drunks, psychotics, people who's wife left them for the mailman that morning, or just plain idiots with Rambo fantasies ready to start shooting if an orthodox Jew starts praying in Hebrew for a safe flight--or people that I, a terrorist mastermind, have sent through the program so they get a special pass that lets them board an airplane with a gun (or get one handed to them as they take their seat). Heck, if we're relying on regular air travelers, all I have to do is stack one commercial flight with 10 men, all CAMs who are armed, and then you not only have no CAM protection, but you've actually facilitated my hijacking of the flight.
I think your stats are way off. The chance of an airliner going down from a terrorist attack is more like 10% per year.
I have no idea where you get this number from, but let's run with it. The odds of an airline terrorism incident are 10% per year. That means that, per flight, the odds are 1 in 135,000,000--about 0.000000008%. I couldn't easily find the odds of being murdered by a serial killer, which is very rare, but the odds of being struck by lightning are 1 in 576,000.
With 370,000 people every day carrying a gun on a flight, what do you estimate the odds are of an in-flight suicide, incident of air rage, or simply an accidental discharge?
Actually, these guys are pretty stupid. First off, guys you can talk into a suicide attack aren't the brightest bulbs; secondly, there's not a lot you can talk into a suicide attack.
Look at it counterfactually: If there were a large number of competent people willing to die while causing damage and casualties, the U.S. would be over, a 'V for Vendetta' totalitarian state trying desperately to thwart weekly or daily attacks.
Imagine what you could do with 100 guys. On each Saturday you send one to a public gathering place to shoot it up or blow himself up. First Saturday, a matinee feature of a Disney movie in Milwaukee; second Saturday, a food court in Tulsa; third Saturday, the security line up at Portland's airport; fourth Saturday, well, I doubt you'd find anyone on the streets anywhere, so you send him to a group home for retarded children. If your objective was to 1) get on the news, by 2) causing casualties, to 3) make people scared for their safety and angry that their government can't protect them, then it wouldn't be all that hard.
The point is that, if you really wanted to, and had the manpower available, you could easily accomplish real terror that topples a government after forcing it into tyranny. Therefore, I doubt they have the manpower or the brainpower, and the fact that they keep trying idiot attacks like this reinforces the point--they keep going for big symbols that really accomplish little but layering on the inconvenience for all of us.
As I pointed out in another response, 15,000 people are killed every year in the U.S. by drunk drivers. The liguor and entertainment industries are vastly more effective at killing Americans than terrorists are.
Right. When Mark Sanford confessed to his Argentinean love affair, David Vitter confessed to multiple uses of prostitutes, and Larry Craig was busted in an airport bathroom looking for anonymous gay sex, Faux News correctly identified all of them as Democrats.
Here's a tough argument to throw at them: in 2005, there were 15,000+ deaths from drunk driving in the U.S. (of whom at least 35% were sober victims, so 5,000+ totally innocent people killed); that number is from a steady decline of 26,000+ in 1982. In other words, drunk drivers are still killing the equivalent of 5 9/11s every year.
Every dollar of security spent on preventing another 9/11 instead of attacking drunk drivers (and you should include the cost of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq) is a dollar that could have been used to educate people on drunk driving, fund sobriety checkpoints, or install a breathalizer lock on the ignition of every car of the U.S. But why would we do that when we can harass guys with beards on planes who like to pray for a successful flight?
2.5.2.1 Innocent passenger shot is actually an orthodox Jew praying in Hebrew; shooter's "hero mode" triggered by hearing something that wasn't English coming from someone who's not obviously a redneck.
2.6.1 Terrorist network hacks remote detonation device, explodes all air traffic simultaneously.
Right, because the amount of damage this guy did would have been much less with 10 people shooting at him in the crowded cabin.
If for no other reason, this would be an absurdly expensive measure (Air marshals only staff between 1 in 4 and 1 in 10 randomly chosen flights) for something that's statistically less likely than you getting struck by lightning while being murdered by a serial killer.
Well, I did RTFA. His view that the commercialization of math is somehow wrong, that money is an offensive form of compensation for mathematical success, is idiosyncratic but not especially insightful ethically (if it's not outright mistaken); I wouldn't call it genius of moral philosophy. People will study and try to understand his proof, regardless of whether or not he takes a position teaching it; there's even a good argument to be made that he, the one person who clearly understands his proof, could do much good by accepting a position at a prestigious university because then he can help others to study and understand it.
I'm not saying he's a bad person. I'm saying his position on money and math is very narrow and eccentric. I don't see how this corresponds to ethical genius. You clearly do. Please explain it to me.
Well, by all means then, master, please enlighten me. How is refusing either lucrative positions or the prize in his particular context somehow ethically praiseworthy rather than simply eccentric?
How is Perelman ethically genius? Refusing to take money (or lucrative positions) for solving hard math problems seems, ethically, neither good or bad.
I feel like I'm arguing against a creationist who thinks he's got a bunch of knock-down arguments against evolution; except every one he raises, the correct response is "that's not what evolution says... do you even know what you're arguing against?"
So, the old 'reparations' argument? Or are you justifying outright retribution?
I don't know what you're talking about here. I haven't suggested reparations or retribution. I suggested that you were actually a bit close to 'getting it'--understanding why feminists are feminists.
You're also completely ignoring the chivalry and chattel status women had. In return, they were shielded from the harshest elements of life during those times.
This is just... I don't know what you're talking about. Your view of history is absurdly oversimplified and inaccurate.
I doubt the author was considering the fact that men work more hours than women do and take the lions share of the dangerous work.
What does this have to do with my link or the general stat? The woman in question got paid more and got more respect when her customers thought she was a man. It had nothing to do with hours worked or the danger level, and neither does the general stat, which is that women simply get paid less for doing the same work.
Like I said, you're ignoring the sacrifices men have made for women and society as a whole during that time.
Men made those sacrifices because it kept them in power, not because they had some chivalrous idea about how they needed to sacrifice. Nevermind. You've got a really messed up view of history and gender relations.
If your definition of feminism is that 50/50 is the 'correct' result
It's not. I never said it was.
the net result is that men should put up, shut up, and let women do what they want, at mens' expense if necessary.
Yeah, okay, your persecution complex is out of control here. No one, least of all feminists, is saying that this is how it should be.
Why should men behave any differently if women are around?
We shouldn't behave differently because women are around. We should grow the fuck up ourselves and act like adults. The fact that we tend to give ourselves a pass on being adults when women aren't around doesn't mean our behaviour is okay.
Comparing geek behavior to 'the locker room in grade nine' is a blatant ad hominem.
Not when prominent members of the Rails community use porn to illustrate a talk on using a database.
If a non-50/50 distribution is due to people expressing their own career preferences (whether influenced by biology or simply their personal tastes), free from discrimination, then that's perfectly acceptable.
I agree it's perfectly acceptable, but "free from discrimination" is the glaring loophole in that statement. We have a long and very sexist history that we've only recently started to unravel--we've gotten rid of laws that are openly discriminatory, but we're just starting now to tease out all the social ways in which we continue to discriminate.
And when studies show that there are low level, statistical differences between male and female brains, that strikes me as a pretty weak counter to the now-obvious idea that when there are large gender imbalances, it's probably sexism at root. Part of that is because it's not obvious to me that a difference in aptitude for spatial reasoning translates to "men are better programmers than women"; part of that is the fact that no profession is particularly dominated by one or two single aspects of cognition--every successful professional is so because they have a variety of useful skills they apply in their job; and a big part of that is the understanding that it take a few generations of people growing up not thinking bigoted bullshit before we start to get it out of our system.
I posted this link below, but it's worth reposting here: This woman is a freelance writer who'd peaked, until she started a second freelance business where she appeared to be male. Suddenly, she's getting more jobs, people are treating her better, she's being paid more, and her clients treat her as having more expertise. A better illustration of how we still live in a sexist society I haven't found.
In a world without sexism, it wouldn't surprise me to find gender imbalances between various professions. I don't deny that there are differences that could ultimately translate to women being more numerous in some areas and less numerous in others.
The point that got me started on this was that apparent differences between men and women are being used to justify gender imbalances in professions today, when we do live in a world that was very (and still is often) sexist. A variable difference in one's spatial reasoning based on one's hormone levels isn't obviously going to translate to "men are generally better programmers than women", and there are much more obvious and well-demonstrated reasons, social and historical, why women are less numerous in some fields than others.
What's going on is that tired stereotypes are being given a sheen of sophistication with science papers that don't really support the stereotype, to justify a status quo that's worth challenging but makes people like most of the posters here on./ kind of uncomfortable because it suggests that there might be something wrong.
BTW, I caught the dig. What I didn't catch was where I said (or implied) that total equality in the form of a perfect 50/50 split in every sphere of human activity was required.
Okay, so you've demonstrated that different hormonal balances influence different basic functions that brains normally do. You haven't responded to my observation about the logical gap between that, and disproportionate gender imbalances in various professions, nor the more obvious social and historical causes of those imbalances, nor the reason why I would want to campaign for men to carry fetuses.
tell you what, have you watched tv recently? misandry is everywhere. it's become part of the cultur-norm.
Take that feeling you have of suffering because popular culture depicts you as something you don't like. Now imagine it being ten times worse and true through centuries, if not millenia, of our culture. Now you're getting an idea of what women have gone through historically.
your link demonstrates a single example concerning a single person.
My link is a very good illustration of something that's been widely true and statistically demonstrated repeatedly for many decades: That women get paid less than men for doing the same work.
..and of course, those 'inconsequential' decisions can only be of detriment to women. Never to men.
That's not what I said. It's obvious that men suffer from sexism too. We die at twice the rate from stress-induced heart attacks as women; we commit suicide at four times the rate. Women, however, have borne the greater brunt of those individually inconsequential decisions over time, and still bear the brunt disproportionately.
so men need to be more like women so that women feel accepted? Don't you see the inherent hypocrisy here?
I didn't say that either. You continue to have a very skewed view of what feminism is and what men should do about it. We don't need to act like women. We just need to act like men who are out in public, rather than in the locker room in grade nine.
M2F lose some spatial ability and gain insight into peoples' facial expressions and empathy.
I hope you won't be offended if I ask you to cite something that says this.
It isn't black and white, but there's no point in denying it.
Who's denying it? My observation is that it's not obvious that low level differences appearing in graphs are the reason there are gender imbalances in certain professions, especially in light of more obvious social and historical reasons that lack any ongoing justification.
I suppose next you'll go campaigning for men to carry the fetus part time.
"Other things being equal" (or "ceterus paribus", if you want to sound pompous) is a term of art in philosophy, not an observation about the real world. It just means "considering this thing alone", basically.
The idea that logical women should distribute evenly across logical professions is a consequence of the stereotype that people distribute themselves according to their disposition. Men are more disposed to logic, so men dominate logical professions; women are more disposed to emotion, so they dominate emotional professions. Considering that stereotype by itself, there's no reason to suppose that logical women wouldn't also distribute evenly, since the underlying premise is that people do so naturally. Yet logical women don't distribute evenly, which demonstrates the falsity of the original premise by assuming it's true and concluding something false from it.
Haven't heard about the push to "Title IX" science programs?
No, but I have heard of various affirmative action programs being removed, stopped, or prevented by the courts. The days of quota systems are long over.
her situation doesn't justify the blatant misandry that modern feminism has become
I think you know very little about feminism because feminism is far more man-friendly these days than it was in decades past.
I just meant the legal battles are over. women are equal citizens.
As my link demonstrates, equal in law and equal in fact are very different things. All that woman had to do to increase her business, improve her business relationships, and make more money, was appear as a man. That's raw sexism right there, and nothing that can be legally addressed because individually her clients probably don't even think they're preferring a male to a female. Lots of the sexism that remains, exists in the aggregate. It's not about woman-haters foaming at the mouth, it's about many people making apparently inconsequential choices that are only obviously sexist considered altogether.
The livescience article does this to men, claiming that the 'stereotypical' male-created physical and social environment is somehow caustic to women entering the field, and therefore sexist. This is feminist propaganda.
It's not propaganda if it's true, and as our experience of other fields like medicine shows, when you remove socially sexist barriers, women participate as equals, in (or approaching) equal numbers, and with equal competence.
That right there, disqualifies most comp-sci people from the field of medicine:)
Agreed:)
You've illustrated my point, though, that women can participate in equal numbers in technical fields, just because success in technical fields is not solely defined by a logical mind. Just as medicine requires people skills, so does programming--my experience both as an IT consultant and a coder in a large corporation reflect that. The aspie-wannabes could meet requirements, but it was the good programmers who could also interact as normal people who got ahead because they could code and communicate with people outside their sphere of expertise.
whereas comp.sci related jobs, are usually anti "work with people" jobs.
To a degree, but this is changing. I'm a consultant, and my people skills are an absolutely crucial part of my success. Programmers on teams also find that being able to communicate well is an invaluable asset.
For a lot of decades, computer skills were rare enough that simple expertise was sufficient. That's no longer the case, and I think the reflexive defense of obvious sexism in technical fields is the dying gasp of the anti-social geek who's evolutionary niche is being taken away.
Assumign his stereotype hold strue, there would still be a portion of women who elevate logic above emotion. Now, there is nothing to say that those select women would distribute evenly between all professions that elevate logic above emotion.
Actually, the stereotype does say that logical women would distribute evenly across logical professions, other things being equal. This is the flaw of the stereotype: it argues that women are professionally distributed according to the degree that they're logical, so being less logical, there are less women in logical professions. If the stereotype is true, then logical women should be likewise predictably distributed.
What's happening now, and what these articles are suggesting, is some kind of proactive quota system that 'values' femininity over getting the job done well.
You're imagining things. I've never seen anyone seriously suggest a quota system in technical fields.
Anyway, judging one's attributes as they relate to the job at hand is perfectly justified imo.
Absolutely, if by "one" you mean the individual, and not just the exemplar of their gender.
Assuming that any uneven distribution across a population implies bigotry is itself a bigoted outlook. It implies that the dominant population selected against unlike-kind because of the desire to be around like-kind using irrelevant attributes while ignoring other possibilities (like self-selection on the part of the minority population).
There's nothing bigoted about empirically observing that the dominant group has done a particular thing for a particular reasons, just like there's nothing wrong with empirically observing that the basic structure of men's and women's brains is different in a statistically significant way. Empiricism isn't bigoted.
Slashdot Mirror
Reduced waste is one of the reasons for using Thorium: Not as much, and it decays to safe levels in decades, not centuries.
The only meaningful distinction I've seen after spending time investigating the two and why some choose one over the other, is the underlying philosophy of each. With Python, there's almost always a "right" way to do a particular thing, an attitude of choosing the best practice summed up in the adjective "pythonic". Ruby follows Perl's TIMTOWTDI line, with a very flexible syntax that allows for a variety of ways to accomplish a particular end. So mainly, it's a temperament thing: coders who like a flexible tool that allows them to find 'clever' solutions prefer Ruby; coders (like me) who like for there to be a best practice, and don't break the rules without a decent reason to do so, prefer python.
A good snapshot of the difference was in Zed Shaw's now disappeared rant about Ruby, where what set him off was finding a bunch of hacks injected into a logging library he was using, and realizing that he was not only going to have to inject his own, but that this was expected and commended in the community. The idea that there should be a stable API forming the basis of a contract with the programmer was looked down upon by Rubyists, causing Shaw to dismiss them as cowboys and amateurs.
So this is, like, two days of training in how to foil a hijacking with a gun? This really seems like a plausible scenario, to take 13 million Americans (the number of CAMs needed to cover a year's flights, assuming each flies 10 times per year), the vast majority of them not military or law enforcement, give them a weekend seminar on using a gun on an airplane without killing civilians or causing enough damage to the plane to make it crash?
Even then, you're talking about an expense of 13 billion dollars to train a year's flight's worth of CAMs. That's about twice the TSA's entire budget.
The initial suggestion was that we take regular passengers, train/certify them, and let them carry guns. By definition, then, you're giving a terrorist mastermind the opportunity to stack a flight. First, you need 13 million CAMs a year--I doubt it would be difficult to slip 10 through the cracks in that certification program. Second, if all 10 book tickets on the same flight, then you've got your 10 CAMs on the flight--but even nine or eight or seven is good enough to provide overwhelming firepower against the real CAMs.
As I mentioned above, when you get on a plane, you have a 0.000000008% chance of dying due to terrorist attack. And you want to spend at least 13 billion dollars a year preventing that from happening, at substantial risk of accidents and other issues that come up around guns? It's not that guns are particularly unsafe, it's that the sheer numbers in order to keep this program going are absurd--both the cost and the risks of air-rage or armed drunkenness.
Every day there are 37,000 commercial flights in the U.S. (13.5 million per year). So you need 135 million passengers to go through training--well, let's say that it's regular travelers who go through training, taking multiple flights per year, say 10, so you only need 13 million people to be trained to carry a firearm safely and use it effectively in such a situation.
That seems unrealistic to me, but lets keep going. The cost of such training alone would be pretty large, I'd imagine. More problematic to me, though, would be getting some level of assurance that among the 370,000 daily "Civilian Air Marshals" (CAMs), there are no drunks, psychotics, people who's wife left them for the mailman that morning, or just plain idiots with Rambo fantasies ready to start shooting if an orthodox Jew starts praying in Hebrew for a safe flight--or people that I, a terrorist mastermind, have sent through the program so they get a special pass that lets them board an airplane with a gun (or get one handed to them as they take their seat). Heck, if we're relying on regular air travelers, all I have to do is stack one commercial flight with 10 men, all CAMs who are armed, and then you not only have no CAM protection, but you've actually facilitated my hijacking of the flight.
I think your stats are way off. The chance of an airliner going down from a terrorist attack is more like 10% per year.
I have no idea where you get this number from, but let's run with it. The odds of an airline terrorism incident are 10% per year. That means that, per flight, the odds are 1 in 135,000,000--about 0.000000008%. I couldn't easily find the odds of being murdered by a serial killer, which is very rare, but the odds of being struck by lightning are 1 in 576,000.
With 370,000 people every day carrying a gun on a flight, what do you estimate the odds are of an in-flight suicide, incident of air rage, or simply an accidental discharge?
Actually, these guys are pretty stupid. First off, guys you can talk into a suicide attack aren't the brightest bulbs; secondly, there's not a lot you can talk into a suicide attack.
Look at it counterfactually: If there were a large number of competent people willing to die while causing damage and casualties, the U.S. would be over, a 'V for Vendetta' totalitarian state trying desperately to thwart weekly or daily attacks.
Imagine what you could do with 100 guys. On each Saturday you send one to a public gathering place to shoot it up or blow himself up. First Saturday, a matinee feature of a Disney movie in Milwaukee; second Saturday, a food court in Tulsa; third Saturday, the security line up at Portland's airport; fourth Saturday, well, I doubt you'd find anyone on the streets anywhere, so you send him to a group home for retarded children. If your objective was to 1) get on the news, by 2) causing casualties, to 3) make people scared for their safety and angry that their government can't protect them, then it wouldn't be all that hard.
The point is that, if you really wanted to, and had the manpower available, you could easily accomplish real terror that topples a government after forcing it into tyranny. Therefore, I doubt they have the manpower or the brainpower, and the fact that they keep trying idiot attacks like this reinforces the point--they keep going for big symbols that really accomplish little but layering on the inconvenience for all of us.
As I pointed out in another response, 15,000 people are killed every year in the U.S. by drunk drivers. The liguor and entertainment industries are vastly more effective at killing Americans than terrorists are.
Right. When Mark Sanford confessed to his Argentinean love affair, David Vitter confessed to multiple uses of prostitutes, and Larry Craig was busted in an airport bathroom looking for anonymous gay sex, Faux News correctly identified all of them as Democrats.
Here's a tough argument to throw at them: in 2005, there were 15,000+ deaths from drunk driving in the U.S. (of whom at least 35% were sober victims, so 5,000+ totally innocent people killed); that number is from a steady decline of 26,000+ in 1982. In other words, drunk drivers are still killing the equivalent of 5 9/11s every year.
Every dollar of security spent on preventing another 9/11 instead of attacking drunk drivers (and you should include the cost of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq) is a dollar that could have been used to educate people on drunk driving, fund sobriety checkpoints, or install a breathalizer lock on the ignition of every car of the U.S. But why would we do that when we can harass guys with beards on planes who like to pray for a successful flight?
2.5.2.1 Innocent passenger shot is actually an orthodox Jew praying in Hebrew; shooter's "hero mode" triggered by hearing something that wasn't English coming from someone who's not obviously a redneck.
2.6.1 Terrorist network hacks remote detonation device, explodes all air traffic simultaneously.
Right, because the amount of damage this guy did would have been much less with 10 people shooting at him in the crowded cabin.
If for no other reason, this would be an absurdly expensive measure (Air marshals only staff between 1 in 4 and 1 in 10 randomly chosen flights) for something that's statistically less likely than you getting struck by lightning while being murdered by a serial killer.
Thank you. This does illustrate Perelman's state of mind much better than the article, and does seem admirable.
Well, I did RTFA. His view that the commercialization of math is somehow wrong, that money is an offensive form of compensation for mathematical success, is idiosyncratic but not especially insightful ethically (if it's not outright mistaken); I wouldn't call it genius of moral philosophy. People will study and try to understand his proof, regardless of whether or not he takes a position teaching it; there's even a good argument to be made that he, the one person who clearly understands his proof, could do much good by accepting a position at a prestigious university because then he can help others to study and understand it.
I'm not saying he's a bad person. I'm saying his position on money and math is very narrow and eccentric. I don't see how this corresponds to ethical genius. You clearly do. Please explain it to me.
Well, by all means then, master, please enlighten me. How is refusing either lucrative positions or the prize in his particular context somehow ethically praiseworthy rather than simply eccentric?
How is Perelman ethically genius? Refusing to take money (or lucrative positions) for solving hard math problems seems, ethically, neither good or bad.
I feel like I'm arguing against a creationist who thinks he's got a bunch of knock-down arguments against evolution; except every one he raises, the correct response is "that's not what evolution says... do you even know what you're arguing against?"
I don't know what you're talking about here. I haven't suggested reparations or retribution. I suggested that you were actually a bit close to 'getting it'--understanding why feminists are feminists.
This is just... I don't know what you're talking about. Your view of history is absurdly oversimplified and inaccurate.
What does this have to do with my link or the general stat? The woman in question got paid more and got more respect when her customers thought she was a man. It had nothing to do with hours worked or the danger level, and neither does the general stat, which is that women simply get paid less for doing the same work.
Men made those sacrifices because it kept them in power, not because they had some chivalrous idea about how they needed to sacrifice. Nevermind. You've got a really messed up view of history and gender relations.
It's not. I never said it was.
Yeah, okay, your persecution complex is out of control here. No one, least of all feminists, is saying that this is how it should be.
We shouldn't behave differently because women are around. We should grow the fuck up ourselves and act like adults. The fact that we tend to give ourselves a pass on being adults when women aren't around doesn't mean our behaviour is okay.
Not when prominent members of the Rails community use porn to illustrate a talk on using a database.
If a non-50/50 distribution is due to people expressing their own career preferences (whether influenced by biology or simply their personal tastes), free from discrimination, then that's perfectly acceptable.
I agree it's perfectly acceptable, but "free from discrimination" is the glaring loophole in that statement. We have a long and very sexist history that we've only recently started to unravel--we've gotten rid of laws that are openly discriminatory, but we're just starting now to tease out all the social ways in which we continue to discriminate.
And when studies show that there are low level, statistical differences between male and female brains, that strikes me as a pretty weak counter to the now-obvious idea that when there are large gender imbalances, it's probably sexism at root. Part of that is because it's not obvious to me that a difference in aptitude for spatial reasoning translates to "men are better programmers than women"; part of that is the fact that no profession is particularly dominated by one or two single aspects of cognition--every successful professional is so because they have a variety of useful skills they apply in their job; and a big part of that is the understanding that it take a few generations of people growing up not thinking bigoted bullshit before we start to get it out of our system.
I posted this link below, but it's worth reposting here: This woman is a freelance writer who'd peaked, until she started a second freelance business where she appeared to be male. Suddenly, she's getting more jobs, people are treating her better, she's being paid more, and her clients treat her as having more expertise. A better illustration of how we still live in a sexist society I haven't found.
In a world without sexism, it wouldn't surprise me to find gender imbalances between various professions. I don't deny that there are differences that could ultimately translate to women being more numerous in some areas and less numerous in others.
The point that got me started on this was that apparent differences between men and women are being used to justify gender imbalances in professions today, when we do live in a world that was very (and still is often) sexist. A variable difference in one's spatial reasoning based on one's hormone levels isn't obviously going to translate to "men are generally better programmers than women", and there are much more obvious and well-demonstrated reasons, social and historical, why women are less numerous in some fields than others.
What's going on is that tired stereotypes are being given a sheen of sophistication with science papers that don't really support the stereotype, to justify a status quo that's worth challenging but makes people like most of the posters here on ./ kind of uncomfortable because it suggests that there might be something wrong.
BTW, I caught the dig. What I didn't catch was where I said (or implied) that total equality in the form of a perfect 50/50 split in every sphere of human activity was required.
Okay, so you've demonstrated that different hormonal balances influence different basic functions that brains normally do. You haven't responded to my observation about the logical gap between that, and disproportionate gender imbalances in various professions, nor the more obvious social and historical causes of those imbalances, nor the reason why I would want to campaign for men to carry fetuses.
Take that feeling you have of suffering because popular culture depicts you as something you don't like. Now imagine it being ten times worse and true through centuries, if not millenia, of our culture. Now you're getting an idea of what women have gone through historically.
My link is a very good illustration of something that's been widely true and statistically demonstrated repeatedly for many decades: That women get paid less than men for doing the same work.
That's not what I said. It's obvious that men suffer from sexism too. We die at twice the rate from stress-induced heart attacks as women; we commit suicide at four times the rate. Women, however, have borne the greater brunt of those individually inconsequential decisions over time, and still bear the brunt disproportionately.
I didn't say that either. You continue to have a very skewed view of what feminism is and what men should do about it. We don't need to act like women. We just need to act like men who are out in public, rather than in the locker room in grade nine.
I hope you won't be offended if I ask you to cite something that says this.
Who's denying it? My observation is that it's not obvious that low level differences appearing in graphs are the reason there are gender imbalances in certain professions, especially in light of more obvious social and historical reasons that lack any ongoing justification.
Why would I do that?
"Other things being equal" (or "ceterus paribus", if you want to sound pompous) is a term of art in philosophy, not an observation about the real world. It just means "considering this thing alone", basically.
The idea that logical women should distribute evenly across logical professions is a consequence of the stereotype that people distribute themselves according to their disposition. Men are more disposed to logic, so men dominate logical professions; women are more disposed to emotion, so they dominate emotional professions. Considering that stereotype by itself, there's no reason to suppose that logical women wouldn't also distribute evenly, since the underlying premise is that people do so naturally. Yet logical women don't distribute evenly, which demonstrates the falsity of the original premise by assuming it's true and concluding something false from it.
No, but I have heard of various affirmative action programs being removed, stopped, or prevented by the courts. The days of quota systems are long over.
I think you know very little about feminism because feminism is far more man-friendly these days than it was in decades past.
As my link demonstrates, equal in law and equal in fact are very different things. All that woman had to do to increase her business, improve her business relationships, and make more money, was appear as a man. That's raw sexism right there, and nothing that can be legally addressed because individually her clients probably don't even think they're preferring a male to a female. Lots of the sexism that remains, exists in the aggregate. It's not about woman-haters foaming at the mouth, it's about many people making apparently inconsequential choices that are only obviously sexist considered altogether.
It's not propaganda if it's true, and as our experience of other fields like medicine shows, when you remove socially sexist barriers, women participate as equals, in (or approaching) equal numbers, and with equal competence.
Agreed :)
You've illustrated my point, though, that women can participate in equal numbers in technical fields, just because success in technical fields is not solely defined by a logical mind. Just as medicine requires people skills, so does programming--my experience both as an IT consultant and a coder in a large corporation reflect that. The aspie-wannabes could meet requirements, but it was the good programmers who could also interact as normal people who got ahead because they could code and communicate with people outside their sphere of expertise.
To a degree, but this is changing. I'm a consultant, and my people skills are an absolutely crucial part of my success. Programmers on teams also find that being able to communicate well is an invaluable asset.
For a lot of decades, computer skills were rare enough that simple expertise was sufficient. That's no longer the case, and I think the reflexive defense of obvious sexism in technical fields is the dying gasp of the anti-social geek who's evolutionary niche is being taken away.
Actually, the stereotype does say that logical women would distribute evenly across logical professions, other things being equal. This is the flaw of the stereotype: it argues that women are professionally distributed according to the degree that they're logical, so being less logical, there are less women in logical professions. If the stereotype is true, then logical women should be likewise predictably distributed.
You've just demonstrated a reductio ad absurdum.
Nonsense. Sexism is alive and well
You're imagining things. I've never seen anyone seriously suggest a quota system in technical fields.
Absolutely, if by "one" you mean the individual, and not just the exemplar of their gender.
There's nothing bigoted about empirically observing that the dominant group has done a particular thing for a particular reasons, just like there's nothing wrong with empirically observing that the basic structure of men's and women's brains is different in a statistically significant way. Empiricism isn't bigoted.