It seems like Google has made it clear that their work environment is definitively hostile towards anyone who dares question feminist dogma.
You know that bit in the manifesto where he described neuroticism as a female trait? Well you've kind of disproven that with this comment (as did he with the manifesto, to be fair.
Hmmm... you're speaking to an atheist with a bisexual girlfriend right now. You know the phrase "when you assume, you make an ass out of U and me"...? Well, it's half-right, at least.
Yeah Google is so toxic to white males that they are currently being investigated by the government for hiring too many of them.
But that only makes it worse! I mean, it's an environment that's toxic to white males, and it's full of them! That means they're all getting poisoned! Poisoned, I tell you!
He makes the case that the notion of equity or equality of outcome in all sectors is a dangerous one.
Perhaps it is, but it is equally dangerous - if not more so - to assume that all current differences between sectors is due to genuine sex differences. Certainly, the toxic sexism of Uber isn't and shouldn't be the norm, and it's an environment that is actively hostile to women who had already expressed an active preference to be there. Uber's problems with the retention of women is demonstrably due to the work culture, not the nature of the work itself (women who leave Uber tend to find employment doing similar work for someone else rather than retraining in a so-called "feminine" profession).
But lets assume for a moment that the low representation of woman in tech is due to sex differences and preferential tendencies for different types of career. Would this tell us that there's nothing that needs to change? I don't believe so. Software development is non-diverse not just in terms of demographics, but also in a fundamental "way-of-thinking" way. All our coding paradigms are.... actually, we only have one coding paradigm, don't we? and everything that tries to be another paradigm is just a kludge that assumes the people using it are basically C-like procedural programmers to start off with.
Google is one of the worst offenders for C-centrism, and with Go they've taken C and made it even less friendly to non-C brains. I give you... for.
One thing that distinguishes Open University, is their active research into new teaching methods. While they _used_ to do lectures, they don't appear to do that any more, and with more modern methods, they're considered world leaders in research into how to teach effectively.
Yep. And everyone continues to ignore the OU. Flipped classrooms = lectures. Coursera/Udacity replace lectures with.... short lectures. No-one attempts to follow the OU's model.
There are medical schools in the UK that have been doing this sort of thing for years now, although rather than "cases" they present "case-studies", and ask their classes to work through them. In other words the students are doing exactly what they would once they become doctors, in a safe environment, where no-one is reliant upon their calculations or diagnoses, and where the outcomes are known, and can be discussed in detail at the end. Initial indications are that this involved form of learning is far superior to a chalk and talk lecture covering the same subject matter.
Sorry, but "active learning" has had all the meaning buzzworded out of it. "Active learning" was supposed to be that all learning is active, and no learning is passive. Learning is an active process in the student's brain -- you don't just hear stuff and have it stick, and people who appear to do so are just very very efficient at processing input.
A lecture is active learning if the listener is really thinking about what's coming in, but that takes a particularly skilful lecturer. But a class with "activities" isn't necessarily "active" if the students can complete the task without engaging their brains.
The original point of "active learning" as I understand it was exactly the opposite of this -- stop thinking about changing what happens on the outside so much and start thinking about what happens inside.
Nonsense, diversity does not benefit anyone. And ther are no any different learning styles etc. It's all bs.
Learning styles are BS, in the sense of "visual learner", "auditory learner", "kinaesthetic learner". But if you look at the faculty in any given university, you'll find a lot of personality traits that appear to be high-functioning autistic spectrum. The whole system of universities is a self-selecting system, where only the people who are comfortable with the teaching style go on to make a career in it. And so it continues.
Which isn't to say there's anything wrong with ASD -- quite the opposite. We've come a long way as a society thanks to the minority who genuinely think different, in a neurological sense. Just that we need to expand our horizons and get better at teaching neurotypical people too.
Just imagine if they put that much effort into learning Evolution instead of fairy tales......
Not all religious people are against evolution. If you want to avoid the fringes of Christianity rejecting science, stop presenting this false dichotomy -- it's this that drives religious people away from science.
There is the problem that doctors taught by working through case studies and classroom exercises tend to get good diagnoses by subjecting the patient to lots of tests and sending lots of samples to labs. Doctors taught in a more traditional way tend to provide quicker and cheaper treatment.
The traditionally-taught doctor's diagnosis process is something like: 1) does it look like a textbook common case? If yes, treat it as such, and ask the patient to come back if the treatment isn't effective, if no, 2) does it look like a textbook serious illness? If yes, get some kind of treatment in place and put the tests through immediately. This means that most patients get treated instantly, because most patients have the most common diseases. People with the most serious illnesses also get treated quickly, because the doctor is always looking out for diseases that might kill.
For the investigatively-taught doctor, these people end up waiting longer for treatment, as the doctor is waiting for half-a-dozen tests coming through, and in countries without state healthcare, the patient will be paying extra for this slower service.
The non-traditional style is quicker at getting diagnoses for uncommon-but-not-fatal diseases, as their tests usually cover that, but for overall effectiveness, these are the least important category of patient.
No, it really doesn't. "Active Learning" tends to mean that you studies the material beforehand (read the book, watched an online lecture, whatever)
"Active learning" means absolutely nothing, because *everyone* uses it to mean something different.
The origin of the term is the fairly straightforward argument that there is no such thing as "passive learning" -- you cannot simply receive knowledge, your brain must be actively processing the input for it to be learnt.
However, that doesn't mean "no lectures", because a skilled lecturer will always word things in such a way as to make the listener think about what he's saying, and that is a form of active learning. Rhetorical questions are a great tool to make lecture-based learning active, because the listener's brain wants to answer (even though it can't) and starts dredging up every bit of information it has on the topic, and the lecturer's own answer can then be related to and integrated with that information.
Fiddling with the surface form of education can have great effects in the immediate term, but if we want our teachers to become better teachers in the longer term, we need to start thinking below the surface.
The default position is that we have only the visa waiver agreements we had in place before joining the EU, which means a lot of places will need visas that don't currently. Right now, we don't appear to be negotiating these. Until we negotiate, we have nothing.
I don't think there's going to be any long-term issue on visitor visas, but it's going to be a massive headache for people wanting to work abroad -- as an English teacher, I've got good reason to be concerned. The specific problem for me and thousands like me is that everyone would prefer teachers from the US, but the hassle of sorting out working visas is more than most schools can be bothered with, so they settle for people from the UK and Ireland. But once teachers from the UK need visas... well, it'll be just as easy to recruit an American, and the students will be happier with that.
Really, all of those would need a visa? I'm from the US, I've been to most of those countries and I've never needed a visa. And the US isn't part of the EU. We've just had to go through customs.
By default, yes.
The UK has very few visa waiver agreements in place, mostly relying on the EU agreements.
On leaving the EU, it's not likely we will have any visa waiver agreements in place with our former partners, and many of our non-EU agreements may well also lapse.
Imagine if your state ceded from the union. Would you still have visa-free travel? No -- it would have to be negotiated.
Here in the US, I'm wondering what the big deal is for requiring an passport to move between sovereign countries over there?
I thought that was pretty much the norm for most of the world....?
As another poster has already said, you should be thinking in terms of states.
One of the reasons for the US's global dominance in the 20th century was the size of the country, and the amount of economic activity that could be carried out within its borders. Free movement of workers between states allowed the workforce to move very rapidly, and any "goldrush" (Detroit becoming "motor city", the birth of Hollywood) saw mass migrations from all over. Now imagine what would have happened in Hollywood if anyone who wasn't Californian wasn't allowed in without a lengthy immigration process that couldn't be started until they had a job -- it would have been very different.
Think about all the noise over H1B, and imagine if Microsoft had to apply for an H1B to hire anyone not born in Washington State.
Imagine Google applying for H1Bs for all their staff not born in California.
And imagine all the people in the Grain Belt who would have highly restricted choice of profession, because they're not allowed to move to where the work is.
On the one hand, I'm glad your military looks after ex-service personnel to some extent, but I am concerned that it disproportionately incentivises poor people to put their lives on the line as the only way out of the intergenerational poverty trap....
America in the 1950s was 93% white. So you're saying those people lived lives of joy and luxury off the backs of the other 8%? Man, those minorities back then must have been literally superhuman to maintain that kind of productivity.
But only approximately 50% male, and the GP did mention sexism. Historically, female labour has been economically undervalued, and there has been a persistent myth that in ethnically European cultures, women "don't work". That has only been true for the wives of the elite, and even in the households of the elites there are more women who work (i.e. servants) than women who don't. And these women rarely were given enough money to live independent lives, forcing them to live in tiny "apartments" in the eaves of their workplaces. Meanwhile, in the real world, the "farmer's wife" did as much work as "the farmer", but still that's the way they were talked about.
In societies without any notion of economics, there's typically a division of labour such that women are responsible for the vast majority of the tribe's calorific intake (they're the farmers) while the men are resposible for providing the bulk of the protein (hunting) and the majority of the construction work. But somehow, putting money into the equation makes the small field at the back of the house "not work".
They have removed ungodly levels of factory workers. While the big thing people talk about with outsourcing and such, the US is still the worlds 2nd biggest manufacturer behind only China and set to overtake them by 2020. The manufacturing did come back, the jobs vanished into nothingness though and will not be coming back and even abroad, their automation is removing more and more workers from it as well at every wage.
This brings a weird ethical angle to "buying locally". (I'm not in the US, but it's a similar situation in Europe.)
We're supposed to welcome automation because it brings manufacture "home", but if it doesn't bring work, is it really benefiting the local economy in any real way? There's probably more work in logistics and warehousing for imports than there is in manning local factories these days....
There's an easy solution to all this quantum mechanics. Read a Physics textbook*. And realize this is all nonsense.
* I refer here to a physics textbook written in the first half of the 20th century or earlier, when all physics textbooks considered the universe deterministic -- I.e. before people realised there was such a thing as quantum mechanics.
On a radio program today someone stated money was ultimately a way to transfer debt. If I have money, ultimately that means someone owes me work. To a degree I can randomly choose who that someone is depending on my needs. If, in an extreme case, all the work is being done by robots, nobody would owe anyone any work, money would no longer represent anything and banks would go out of business, which is not something bloody likely for them to let happen.
We've successfully changed the mindset of society to the point where value is effectively divorced from labour. The "debt" that money represents is more about material goods these days than labour. One of the cause of stinginess and miserism is the idea that money has become seen as an object. Some people end up spending more time on doing things themselves to avoid "losing" their favourite possession (filthy lucre) than is really worth it. Spending a day to save an hour's wage is economically stupid, but many human beings do it.
While I am sure it's a thrill to someone to come up with their own "computer language" it is pretty much a pointless exercise.
Let's be honest, pretty much all computer languages since the first one, and especially the more recent ones, last 20 years are merely repeats of the same stuff.
Same loops, same if statements, same function calls, same everything.
There are probably no two popular programming languages that are merely different syntax for the exact same set of base concepts. Each language designer chooses the most important concepts to explicitly encode, and which to force the programmer to deal with.
Neither the similarities or the differences between languages show the whole exercise as pointless.
Yes, but what do you want from a beginner language? You want something that makes life easy by making complex problems simple.
I don't know anything that does better than Python in that regard, because of the way it handles lists. Every other language I've looked at either makes list handling more complicated or makes everything else more complicated. But any task worth automating involves problems best conceptualised as list problems.
There are lots of things I don't like about Python, and I often find myself using the very ugly for i in range(len(name_of_list)): but for the most part it really gets to the heart of making computing meaningful, rather than a constant struggle with esoteric explicit sets of commands.
Its weakness as a beginner language is that professional programmers are going to be expected to deal with esoteric explicit sets of commands, so follow up with a different language in second year.
Slashdot Mirror
It seems like Google has made it clear that their work environment is definitively hostile towards anyone who dares question feminist dogma.
You know that bit in the manifesto where he described neuroticism as a female trait? Well you've kind of disproven that with this comment (as did he with the manifesto, to be fair.
Hmmm... you're speaking to an atheist with a bisexual girlfriend right now. You know the phrase "when you assume, you make an ass out of U and me"...? Well, it's half-right, at least.
Yeah Google is so toxic to white males that they are currently being investigated by the government for hiring too many of them.
But that only makes it worse! I mean, it's an environment that's toxic to white males, and it's full of them! That means they're all getting poisoned! Poisoned, I tell you!
I think masculinity is more about sprouting vast thickets of hair from all over.
And yet the "back, crack and sack wax" is a thing. Ouch!
He makes the case that the notion of equity or equality of outcome in all sectors is a dangerous one.
Perhaps it is, but it is equally dangerous - if not more so - to assume that all current differences between sectors is due to genuine sex differences. Certainly, the toxic sexism of Uber isn't and shouldn't be the norm, and it's an environment that is actively hostile to women who had already expressed an active preference to be there. Uber's problems with the retention of women is demonstrably due to the work culture, not the nature of the work itself (women who leave Uber tend to find employment doing similar work for someone else rather than retraining in a so-called "feminine" profession).
But lets assume for a moment that the low representation of woman in tech is due to sex differences and preferential tendencies for different types of career. Would this tell us that there's nothing that needs to change? I don't believe so. Software development is non-diverse not just in terms of demographics, but also in a fundamental "way-of-thinking" way. All our coding paradigms are.... actually, we only have one coding paradigm, don't we? and everything that tries to be another paradigm is just a kludge that assumes the people using it are basically C-like procedural programmers to start off with.
Google is one of the worst offenders for C-centrism, and with Go they've taken C and made it even less friendly to non-C brains. I give you... for.
Incidentally, have you ever read this paper...?
One thing that distinguishes Open University, is their active research into new teaching methods. While they _used_ to do lectures, they don't appear to do that any more, and with more modern methods, they're considered world leaders in research into how to teach effectively.
Yep. And everyone continues to ignore the OU. Flipped classrooms = lectures. Coursera/Udacity replace lectures with.... short lectures. No-one attempts to follow the OU's model.
There are medical schools in the UK that have been doing this sort of thing for years now, although rather than "cases" they present "case-studies", and ask their classes to work through them. In other words the students are doing exactly what they would once they become doctors, in a safe environment, where no-one is reliant upon their calculations or diagnoses, and where the outcomes are known, and can be discussed in detail at the end. Initial indications are that this involved form of learning is far superior to a chalk and talk lecture covering the same subject matter.
Kirschner, Sweller and Clark disagree with you on that.
Sorry, but "active learning" has had all the meaning buzzworded out of it. "Active learning" was supposed to be that all learning is active, and no learning is passive. Learning is an active process in the student's brain -- you don't just hear stuff and have it stick, and people who appear to do so are just very very efficient at processing input.
A lecture is active learning if the listener is really thinking about what's coming in, but that takes a particularly skilful lecturer. But a class with "activities" isn't necessarily "active" if the students can complete the task without engaging their brains.
The original point of "active learning" as I understand it was exactly the opposite of this -- stop thinking about changing what happens on the outside so much and start thinking about what happens inside.
Nonsense, diversity does not benefit anyone. And ther are no any different learning styles etc. It's all bs.
Learning styles are BS, in the sense of "visual learner", "auditory learner", "kinaesthetic learner". But if you look at the faculty in any given university, you'll find a lot of personality traits that appear to be high-functioning autistic spectrum. The whole system of universities is a self-selecting system, where only the people who are comfortable with the teaching style go on to make a career in it. And so it continues.
Which isn't to say there's anything wrong with ASD -- quite the opposite. We've come a long way as a society thanks to the minority who genuinely think different, in a neurological sense. Just that we need to expand our horizons and get better at teaching neurotypical people too.
Just imagine if they put that much effort into learning Evolution instead of fairy tales......
Not all religious people are against evolution. If you want to avoid the fringes of Christianity rejecting science, stop presenting this false dichotomy -- it's this that drives religious people away from science.
There is the problem that doctors taught by working through case studies and classroom exercises tend to get good diagnoses by subjecting the patient to lots of tests and sending lots of samples to labs. Doctors taught in a more traditional way tend to provide quicker and cheaper treatment.
The traditionally-taught doctor's diagnosis process is something like: 1) does it look like a textbook common case? If yes, treat it as such, and ask the patient to come back if the treatment isn't effective, if no, 2) does it look like a textbook serious illness? If yes, get some kind of treatment in place and put the tests through immediately. This means that most patients get treated instantly, because most patients have the most common diseases. People with the most serious illnesses also get treated quickly, because the doctor is always looking out for diseases that might kill.
For the investigatively-taught doctor, these people end up waiting longer for treatment, as the doctor is waiting for half-a-dozen tests coming through, and in countries without state healthcare, the patient will be paying extra for this slower service.
The non-traditional style is quicker at getting diagnoses for uncommon-but-not-fatal diseases, as their tests usually cover that, but for overall effectiveness, these are the least important category of patient.
No, it really doesn't. "Active Learning" tends to mean that you studies the material beforehand (read the book, watched an online lecture, whatever)
"Active learning" means absolutely nothing, because *everyone* uses it to mean something different.
The origin of the term is the fairly straightforward argument that there is no such thing as "passive learning" -- you cannot simply receive knowledge, your brain must be actively processing the input for it to be learnt.
However, that doesn't mean "no lectures", because a skilled lecturer will always word things in such a way as to make the listener think about what he's saying, and that is a form of active learning. Rhetorical questions are a great tool to make lecture-based learning active, because the listener's brain wants to answer (even though it can't) and starts dredging up every bit of information it has on the topic, and the lecturer's own answer can then be related to and integrated with that information.
Fiddling with the surface form of education can have great effects in the immediate term, but if we want our teachers to become better teachers in the longer term, we need to start thinking below the surface.
I don't think there's going to be any long-term issue on visitor visas, but it's going to be a massive headache for people wanting to work abroad -- as an English teacher, I've got good reason to be concerned. The specific problem for me and thousands like me is that everyone would prefer teachers from the US, but the hassle of sorting out working visas is more than most schools can be bothered with, so they settle for people from the UK and Ireland. But once teachers from the UK need visas... well, it'll be just as easy to recruit an American, and the students will be happier with that.
Visa waiver programmes are not guaranteed.
Really, all of those would need a visa? I'm from the US, I've been to most of those countries and I've never needed a visa. And the US isn't part of the EU. We've just had to go through customs.
By default, yes.
The UK has very few visa waiver agreements in place, mostly relying on the EU agreements.
On leaving the EU, it's not likely we will have any visa waiver agreements in place with our former partners, and many of our non-EU agreements may well also lapse.
Imagine if your state ceded from the union. Would you still have visa-free travel? No -- it would have to be negotiated.
Here in the US, I'm wondering what the big deal is for requiring an passport to move between sovereign countries over there?
I thought that was pretty much the norm for most of the world....?
As another poster has already said, you should be thinking in terms of states.
One of the reasons for the US's global dominance in the 20th century was the size of the country, and the amount of economic activity that could be carried out within its borders. Free movement of workers between states allowed the workforce to move very rapidly, and any "goldrush" (Detroit becoming "motor city", the birth of Hollywood) saw mass migrations from all over. Now imagine what would have happened in Hollywood if anyone who wasn't Californian wasn't allowed in without a lengthy immigration process that couldn't be started until they had a job -- it would have been very different.
Think about all the noise over H1B, and imagine if Microsoft had to apply for an H1B to hire anyone not born in Washington State.
Imagine Google applying for H1Bs for all their staff not born in California.
And imagine all the people in the Grain Belt who would have highly restricted choice of profession, because they're not allowed to move to where the work is.
On the one hand, I'm glad your military looks after ex-service personnel to some extent, but I am concerned that it disproportionately incentivises poor people to put their lives on the line as the only way out of the intergenerational poverty trap....
America in the 1950s was 93% white. So you're saying those people lived lives of joy and luxury off the backs of the other 8%? Man, those minorities back then must have been literally superhuman to maintain that kind of productivity.
But only approximately 50% male, and the GP did mention sexism. Historically, female labour has been economically undervalued, and there has been a persistent myth that in ethnically European cultures, women "don't work". That has only been true for the wives of the elite, and even in the households of the elites there are more women who work (i.e. servants) than women who don't. And these women rarely were given enough money to live independent lives, forcing them to live in tiny "apartments" in the eaves of their workplaces. Meanwhile, in the real world, the "farmer's wife" did as much work as "the farmer", but still that's the way they were talked about.
In societies without any notion of economics, there's typically a division of labour such that women are responsible for the vast majority of the tribe's calorific intake (they're the farmers) while the men are resposible for providing the bulk of the protein (hunting) and the majority of the construction work. But somehow, putting money into the equation makes the small field at the back of the house "not work".
Not only that - programming has ALWAYS been an art.
It's not an art, it's better than that; it's a craft.
Having tried to maintain other people's code, I'd say a lot of it is reminiscent of Dalí or Picasso....
They have removed ungodly levels of factory workers. While the big thing people talk about with outsourcing and such, the US is still the worlds 2nd biggest manufacturer behind only China and set to overtake them by 2020. The manufacturing did come back, the jobs vanished into nothingness though and will not be coming back and even abroad, their automation is removing more and more workers from it as well at every wage.
This brings a weird ethical angle to "buying locally". (I'm not in the US, but it's a similar situation in Europe.)
We're supposed to welcome automation because it brings manufacture "home", but if it doesn't bring work, is it really benefiting the local economy in any real way? There's probably more work in logistics and warehousing for imports than there is in manning local factories these days....
There's an easy solution to all this quantum mechanics. Read a Physics textbook*. And realize this is all nonsense.
* I refer here to a physics textbook written in the first half of the 20th century or earlier, when all physics textbooks considered the universe deterministic -- I.e. before people realised there was such a thing as quantum mechanics.
On a radio program today someone stated money was ultimately a way to transfer debt. If I have money, ultimately that means someone owes me work. To a degree I can randomly choose who that someone is depending on my needs. If, in an extreme case, all the work is being done by robots, nobody would owe anyone any work, money would no longer represent anything and banks would go out of business, which is not something bloody likely for them to let happen.
We've successfully changed the mindset of society to the point where value is effectively divorced from labour. The "debt" that money represents is more about material goods these days than labour. One of the cause of stinginess and miserism is the idea that money has become seen as an object. Some people end up spending more time on doing things themselves to avoid "losing" their favourite possession (filthy lucre) than is really worth it. Spending a day to save an hour's wage is economically stupid, but many human beings do it.
While I am sure it's a thrill to someone to come up with their own "computer language" it is pretty much a pointless exercise.
Let's be honest, pretty much all computer languages since the first one, and especially the more recent ones, last 20 years are merely repeats of the same stuff.
Same loops, same if statements, same function calls, same everything.
There are probably no two popular programming languages that are merely different syntax for the exact same set of base concepts. Each language designer chooses the most important concepts to explicitly encode, and which to force the programmer to deal with.
Neither the similarities or the differences between languages show the whole exercise as pointless.
Yes, but what do you want from a beginner language? You want something that makes life easy by making complex problems simple.
I don't know anything that does better than Python in that regard, because of the way it handles lists. Every other language I've looked at either makes list handling more complicated or makes everything else more complicated. But any task worth automating involves problems best conceptualised as list problems.
There are lots of things I don't like about Python, and I often find myself using the very ugly for i in range(len(name_of_list)) : but for the most part it really gets to the heart of making computing meaningful, rather than a constant struggle with esoteric explicit sets of commands.
Its weakness as a beginner language is that professional programmers are going to be expected to deal with esoteric explicit sets of commands, so follow up with a different language in second year.