Well, people actively try to maintain cannabis, but you don't see it growing wild everywhere. People actively try to destroy poison ivy; if the government was in on that, it would be like cannabis but extinct.
First, I live in a city 15 miles wide with 14 coal power plants, some of which output 2400 megawatts. Mercury and other nasty shit are not enjoyable to inhale. I pay about $5-$20/mo more for solar-wind-hydro power ($20 if I have a $500 electric bill for 2400kWh of electricity use) because it saves a few tonnes of CO2 put into the air per year, which in turn comes from about four times as much coal (when you take out all the mercury and sulfur and add in twice as much oxygen, you get CO2).
Second, more CO2 in the atmosphere causes plants to grow faster. Some faster than others. Because of the greater concentration of CO2, poison ivy in particular grows ridiculously fast: there is three times as much and it grows twice as fast as it did in 1500. It's fucking everywhere. I'm about ready to take a crate of the shit into the senate and burn it to demonstrate its use as a makeshift biological weapon if it'll get the US to pass a law to exterminate it off the face of the planet. Seriously, marijuana? They banned the wrong fucking plant! THC isn't the thing they should be worried about; it's Urushiol that needs to not exist anymore!
I'm on the US East Coast and we've had 3 feet of snow around this time of year before, but now it's 13-15C. Over the past 3-4 decades, this has happened a handful of times. 30 years ago we had winters that were basically spring time in December. Back in 1992 my parents still couldn't account for it, so one year it kept getting -4C one day and 15C 3 days later back and forth and they're like "HOW IS IT THIS WARM?!" "It was like this in 1984, and 1976..." "IT'S COLD IN DECEMBER!!!"
Well, all the other planets in the solar system started warming up too, so some people concluded that the sun is getting hotter. Others concluded orbital eccentricity.
It's not the "against the law" part. It's the way he said it, like if we knew, we'd find him and hang him, Internet anonymity not providing any protection. He's not afraid of the police; he's afraid of everyone.
In Europe, people who are attracted to children are counseled and given therapy to enable them to more strongly select for adult relationships. People who cannot, or who aren't attracted to adults, are given drugs (like Alan) to neuter their libido.
In the US, they're beaten--sometimes to death--and the perpetrators get minimal sentencing. They're beaten by the police, dragged off to jail, mistreated, raped and beaten in the holding cells, then mocked in court by the judges and demonized by the prosecution, then thrown in jail where they're again beaten and raped. If they're found innocent, the whole thing is a permanent blot; they need to pack up and find a new life, because no one will ever forgive them for... a crime they never committed.
I can't imagine that happening if you screw your sister. Or your dog. Or get a sex change. Plenty of people will be grossed out, some might react harshly, maybe even with violence; but the whole of society will not turn against you in such an extreme. I can't think of anything that does that, nor any reason why someone would act so guarded.
The moon example was probably semi-backwards. We developed a lot of rocket tech that's been reused there; it may have been reused for military applications during the development of space faring technology, rather than after. The point still stands, though: We built dangerous tools, we used them for other things than just what we said we wanted them for.
The big problem with surveillance as a tool is this same human nature: it will be abused, eventually. The slippery slope fallacy is an interesting one, because it's a fallacy of application: that A can lead to B does not mean A *will* lead to B; however, it is entirely plausible that A does indeed lead to B. In this case, that people are wholly opposed to surveillance means that the government trying to leverage surveillance as a tool is risky: if the people find out there is surveillance, they will be angry and there will be consequences. If we get people used to surveillance, then we can start justifying it steadily; they will also be less enraged when we start openly using it to arrest "bad people" "for the public good". These are well-founded psychological and sociological concepts.
That's one of the things that makes these arguments so damned volatile: the juxtaposition between "A will lead to B" and "that's a slippery slope, which is a fallacy". The real fallacy is that the slope isn't always slippery; but many are convinced that the slope doesn't exist, and thus that you can just put a wall between A and B. The rest of us argue that you should just cut out the cause entirely, because it's easier and more reliable than trying to control the effect--often arguing that the effect is so hard to control that it's essentially impossible, and thus A absolutely *will* lead to B eventually.
In this case, (A) is surveillance, and (B) is a classical surveillance state (KGB, 1984, North Korea, etc.). Psychological, sociological, and economic factors make it ridiculously difficult for a society to accept (A) and ultimately reject (B); it's much easier for society to reject (A) and neutralize the impact of (B). Accepting (A) means that you are continuously facing pressure from the attempted manifestation of (B); rejecting (A) means the attempt to manifest (B) continuously faces the risk of discovery, and thus any exercise of any power gained by the secret manifestation of (B) faces pressure of public scrutiny because some people will wonder if actions like (B) indicate that (B) is a real thing, thus (A) is a real thing, thus requiring pitchforks and torches and blood running in the streets.
If the public accepts a surveillance state, you only have to not shake the cage too hard... at first. If the public rejects a surveillance state, you need to keep your surveillance secret, and need to worry about taking any action based on your surveillance because it may expose said secret. Rejection puts more power in the hands of society; acceptance makes it impossible to avoid a surveillance state in the long run. (It's impossible because all the things that a society physically can do to avoid it will be eroded and abandoned, similar to how a self-maintaining system is technically capable of repairing a range of damage that it was never programmed sufficiently to analyze and thus will never actually do so.)
Additional risk of arrest. Society fails to enforce laws that are unimportant in situations that are not harmful: we don't have RFID on every 25 cent pack of gum to detect theft because we don't care if you shoplift a 25 cent pack of gum... unless we notice, and then we'll probably throw you out of the store rather than call the police. Society goes apeshit on you if you murder someone and the police will not stop looking for you EVER. This self-governing nature is important to a self-governing people in so many ways.
Economically, the cost of so much surveillance puts a drain on society, weakening it. This eventually translates into poverty, hunger, sickness, and death for more than zero people in society.
From a civil rights perspective, the government can use its surveillance assets to attack political opponents, dissidents, and others it doesn't like. It can look up protesters and draw up all kinds of history, showing minor crimes no one actually cares about and then enforcing the maximum punishment. It's also possible to use a lot of circumstantial evidence to construct a crime where none exists, and make it logically consistent enough to get a sure-fire conviction: you can destroy people with a fantasy. Real court cases generally work that way, except the crimes are probably real; but the evidence is often stuff that, under "wild circumstances", could occur normally. The reality is that your life has so much stuff in it that I could construct a huge string of coincidental evidence and it would look ridiculous if you tried to argue it was all coincidence; if it seems more sensible that it's all connected to a crime that it logically outlines, you're going to jail.
There's also the whole fear of simply not knowing. Maybe your government has secret police browsing the surveillance. They identify you as a risk, and you're murdered in the street by some homeless guy. Allegedly homeless guy. Who is allegedly incarcerated afterwards.
Risk, repeatability, emergent situations. Your argument is that it won't happen just because it happened before; the argument in place is that the tools being implemented are an enabler and the probability is a function of availability x time, thus eventually it *will* happen and the question is how long before then. There's also a high chance that it will happen *soon*, and doubling the time of "soon" just rolls the dice repeatedly until your unlucky number comes up.
Man on the moon, curing cancer, and old age are emergent situations. Things change. The problem is overall human nature doesn't change; access to tools changes. Man built great big rockets that could land on the moon... and promptly used the technology to build great big rockets that could nuke the other side of the planet.
The next 9/11, like the previous one, will be another black swan. I don't know what will happen, but the day before it happens the entire possibility of whatever it is that does happen will be patently inconceivable and you will be laughed at and ridiculed by the entire fucking world if you try to tell them it could happen. Eleven hours later, people will swear there were all these indicators that didn't exist and that it was totally predictable and obvious even though it wasn't, and then they'll do all kinds of shit to prevent it from happening again even though it won't.
Uh. Absolute beginners 30 years ago learned on Unix. 20 years ago I learned on DOS with QBASIC. An absolute beginner could get by well with a Linux command shell and the Mug of VI Reference, along with some Python books.
I believe that's a matter of exhaustion. Both genders are suited for scientific study--men and women both work well in groups, and scientific study is a group thing. The bias toward males creates a sort of male-perspective in the scientific community. Too much order: everything begins to level. If it were all women, it would have leveled in some other way.
Notably, I don't believe this effect relies on both men and women being able to do something. I've long believed women were ill-suited as computer programmers: you get a few that can do it and they do it well, but most of them are bluntly disinterested; and a disinterested programmer cannot write good code. I also took notice in the way female programmers operate on problems: differently. That's the full extent of what got my attention; I never really had any interest in distilling it down to a self-help book for programmers. "Try thinking like a woman"? Really now.
The impact of adding a skilled female programmer to a programming team is very visible: it lubricates the process. I've since been able to better understand why, and generalize the effect. Essentially, group problem solving and decision making capitalizes on the differing perspectives of individuals in the group. Placing ten men into a group will generate a garden variety of ideas during brainstorming, as well as a particular range of perspective on what's important and how to evaluate those ideas. Decisions are made based on that range of perspective, and the result of engineering--an iterative process of developing, evaluating, selecting, and implementing alternatives--are carried in that perspective.
Adding a woman increases dissent.
Ten women will act like ten men, but unlike ten men: they will make decisions based in a different range of perspective, selecting from ideas generated from a different garden variety. Nine men and one woman will have nine men plus a woman spewing out different ideas none of those nine could come up with, analyzing different considerations from a completely different perspective, and generally increasing the amount of information on the table.
The slowing of scientific study by men and the influx of women into the field seems to suggest that we've exhausted the line of thinking that a pure male scientific base can provide. Scientific research is a very merit-based crowd: you don't get in unless you impress people with your ideas. In a healthy all-male scientific body, there's plenty of new territory on the table and lots of room to come in with new ideas that are aligned with existing ideas--this impresses people because you're advancing current work. Dissenting views annoy people because progress is being made and you sound stupid with your wild theories. As the all-mail scientific body becomes unhealthy--as progress slows--dissenting views become more attractive because they provide a different direction that allows for more progress. This is two-fold: the dissenting view may provide a solution; alternately, learning that an idea is wrong still provides new information and lets you better analyze the problem in front of you. So the eventual exhaustion of a monoculture of thinking leads to the acceptance of new cultures of thinking into the process--women suddenly start sounding a whole lot smarter because they're bringing new, fresh ideas to a field that's starting to stall and go stale.
A 10%-90% mix either way should function relatively similarly: as long as there's at least 10% of both genders in any given idea-generating group, they should have an optimal impact. Obviously 50-50 maximizes this effect probabilistically (you do have the chance of women who think like men and men who think like women, after all; as well as idiots who simply don't think), but it's not entirely necessary.
A bi-gendered scientific community will retain a healthy prospect for scientific advancement. We also need a healthy economy to back it.
Actually, no. False equivalence is a logical fallacy; however, this isn't false equivalence. The argument was thus: boys seem to prefer one type of social behavior (interaction with certain toys) over another type of social behavior (interaction with other toys); girls seem to act in a partial inverse (they like some of the same things, but like some of the things boys don't, and dislike some of the things boys like). The illustration with toys shows interests following a masculine-neutral-feminine scale; it is logical to conclude that other interests--such as career choice, hobbies, and so on--could follow a masculine-neutral-feminine scale.
This effectively debases the argument that girls do NOT prefer computer science careers less than boys; it does not support the argument that girls DO prefer computer science careers less than boys, but it does illustrate that the phenomena we are observing may, in fact, be just normal behavior. That shifts the burden of the argument: now instead of arguing that the playing field is unlevel, you have to explain why you think girls *want* to be computer programmers and auto mechanics in the first place.
Maybe it's that we're just not as sensitive and don't give half a shit? Remember we also look down on people who cry $3 billion lawsuit because they've been called a racial epithet or had their butt swatted at while waitressing tables.
This whole thing is stupid. As you've observed, women gravitate less toward a certain field, more toward others. Men gravitate less toward daycare and more toward bashing shit with a hammer. Investing a tremendous amount of energy gets one or two anecdotes of "wow! This gave me the confidence to stop being shy and get into the field I really wanted to be in, but thought nobody would accept me for, and it's fantastic!" Guess what? Those success stories won't start just rolling in when you "get it right"; they're outiers.
People can't accept that most women just don't want to be construction workers, auto mechanics, or computer programmers, while men generally find interest in these things. They want to "level the field", force women into it, make it look "fair" and "even". And they justify it by pointing at a handful who were forced out and going, "See?! 90% of women WANT to do this, but they just can't! THEY CAN'T! WE WON'T LET THEM!"
It's bunk. What next? Do you want to find a way to make women fathers?
Part of hacker culture is isolationism and personal growth. Hackers are most interested in philosophy over religion, and tend to prefer things like Buddhism or Sikhism (less likely, but less generally known--everyone knows something about Buddhism) over Christianity because of the higher philosophical focus--oh sure, 90% might not convert to a new religion, but they'll take an interest in the ideals; most religious people have little interest in their own religion and actively distance themselves from other religions, because ignorance is the greatest shield to protect your beliefs.
Because of this, hacker culture doesn't much support spectator sports. Watching sports is a waste of time; participating in spectator sports is just a machismo show. This results in the interesting phenomena that many opt instead for martial arts--not gym rat weight lifting, but things like Aikido or Judo, Kung Fu, MMA. Other frequent interests include sports like bicycling, hiking, climbing, things that one can do in a group or competitively but which provide the ability to meter yourself. How far can you bike? Can you make it up that mountain? Can you make it up a V7? Group activities often focus on the phenomena of cooperation rather than competition.
The obvious result is that "kicking the nerds around" can be quite dangerous.
Guys are dumb. Girls are psycho. It's how the world works. And yes, if you show up to a sausage party and you're one of like three females there out of 50 attendees... THERE'S THE BEEF!
OK so essentially the safety device is too sensitive. Fail-safe, that's acceptable. They could build them to not throw under constant load, but they'd risk not throwing under constant fire-causing load.
Apollo was problem solving. None of the stuff cited here is "agile" and this is all bullshit. Real PM is a lot of boring technical skills... fun to do, boring to watch.
Slashdot Mirror
Great men do not seek power; they have power thrust upon them.
Well, people actively try to maintain cannabis, but you don't see it growing wild everywhere. People actively try to destroy poison ivy; if the government was in on that, it would be like cannabis but extinct.
It is incredibly easy to be smarter and more moral than anyone in the executive, judicial, and legislative branches of the government.
Sometimes you need to detonate the on-site warhead.
No, it's the earth's tilt on its axis. It's summer right now in Australia.
Who gives a shit? We have two real problems:
First, I live in a city 15 miles wide with 14 coal power plants, some of which output 2400 megawatts. Mercury and other nasty shit are not enjoyable to inhale. I pay about $5-$20/mo more for solar-wind-hydro power ($20 if I have a $500 electric bill for 2400kWh of electricity use) because it saves a few tonnes of CO2 put into the air per year, which in turn comes from about four times as much coal (when you take out all the mercury and sulfur and add in twice as much oxygen, you get CO2).
Second, more CO2 in the atmosphere causes plants to grow faster. Some faster than others. Because of the greater concentration of CO2, poison ivy in particular grows ridiculously fast: there is three times as much and it grows twice as fast as it did in 1500. It's fucking everywhere. I'm about ready to take a crate of the shit into the senate and burn it to demonstrate its use as a makeshift biological weapon if it'll get the US to pass a law to exterminate it off the face of the planet. Seriously, marijuana? They banned the wrong fucking plant! THC isn't the thing they should be worried about; it's Urushiol that needs to not exist anymore!
I'm on the US East Coast and we've had 3 feet of snow around this time of year before, but now it's 13-15C. Over the past 3-4 decades, this has happened a handful of times. 30 years ago we had winters that were basically spring time in December. Back in 1992 my parents still couldn't account for it, so one year it kept getting -4C one day and 15C 3 days later back and forth and they're like "HOW IS IT THIS WARM?!" "It was like this in 1984, and 1976..." "IT'S COLD IN DECEMBER!!!"
Well, all the other planets in the solar system started warming up too, so some people concluded that the sun is getting hotter. Others concluded orbital eccentricity.
It's not the "against the law" part. It's the way he said it, like if we knew, we'd find him and hang him, Internet anonymity not providing any protection. He's not afraid of the police; he's afraid of everyone.
In Europe, people who are attracted to children are counseled and given therapy to enable them to more strongly select for adult relationships. People who cannot, or who aren't attracted to adults, are given drugs (like Alan) to neuter their libido.
In the US, they're beaten--sometimes to death--and the perpetrators get minimal sentencing. They're beaten by the police, dragged off to jail, mistreated, raped and beaten in the holding cells, then mocked in court by the judges and demonized by the prosecution, then thrown in jail where they're again beaten and raped. If they're found innocent, the whole thing is a permanent blot; they need to pack up and find a new life, because no one will ever forgive them for ... a crime they never committed.
I can't imagine that happening if you screw your sister. Or your dog. Or get a sex change. Plenty of people will be grossed out, some might react harshly, maybe even with violence; but the whole of society will not turn against you in such an extreme. I can't think of anything that does that, nor any reason why someone would act so guarded.
Pedophile identified.
The moon example was probably semi-backwards. We developed a lot of rocket tech that's been reused there; it may have been reused for military applications during the development of space faring technology, rather than after. The point still stands, though: We built dangerous tools, we used them for other things than just what we said we wanted them for.
The big problem with surveillance as a tool is this same human nature: it will be abused, eventually. The slippery slope fallacy is an interesting one, because it's a fallacy of application: that A can lead to B does not mean A *will* lead to B; however, it is entirely plausible that A does indeed lead to B. In this case, that people are wholly opposed to surveillance means that the government trying to leverage surveillance as a tool is risky: if the people find out there is surveillance, they will be angry and there will be consequences. If we get people used to surveillance, then we can start justifying it steadily; they will also be less enraged when we start openly using it to arrest "bad people" "for the public good". These are well-founded psychological and sociological concepts.
That's one of the things that makes these arguments so damned volatile: the juxtaposition between "A will lead to B" and "that's a slippery slope, which is a fallacy". The real fallacy is that the slope isn't always slippery; but many are convinced that the slope doesn't exist, and thus that you can just put a wall between A and B. The rest of us argue that you should just cut out the cause entirely, because it's easier and more reliable than trying to control the effect--often arguing that the effect is so hard to control that it's essentially impossible, and thus A absolutely *will* lead to B eventually.
In this case, (A) is surveillance, and (B) is a classical surveillance state (KGB, 1984, North Korea, etc.). Psychological, sociological, and economic factors make it ridiculously difficult for a society to accept (A) and ultimately reject (B); it's much easier for society to reject (A) and neutralize the impact of (B). Accepting (A) means that you are continuously facing pressure from the attempted manifestation of (B); rejecting (A) means the attempt to manifest (B) continuously faces the risk of discovery, and thus any exercise of any power gained by the secret manifestation of (B) faces pressure of public scrutiny because some people will wonder if actions like (B) indicate that (B) is a real thing, thus (A) is a real thing, thus requiring pitchforks and torches and blood running in the streets.
If the public accepts a surveillance state, you only have to not shake the cage too hard... at first. If the public rejects a surveillance state, you need to keep your surveillance secret, and need to worry about taking any action based on your surveillance because it may expose said secret. Rejection puts more power in the hands of society; acceptance makes it impossible to avoid a surveillance state in the long run. (It's impossible because all the things that a society physically can do to avoid it will be eroded and abandoned, similar to how a self-maintaining system is technically capable of repairing a range of damage that it was never programmed sufficiently to analyze and thus will never actually do so.)
Additional risk of arrest. Society fails to enforce laws that are unimportant in situations that are not harmful: we don't have RFID on every 25 cent pack of gum to detect theft because we don't care if you shoplift a 25 cent pack of gum... unless we notice, and then we'll probably throw you out of the store rather than call the police. Society goes apeshit on you if you murder someone and the police will not stop looking for you EVER. This self-governing nature is important to a self-governing people in so many ways.
Economically, the cost of so much surveillance puts a drain on society, weakening it. This eventually translates into poverty, hunger, sickness, and death for more than zero people in society.
From a civil rights perspective, the government can use its surveillance assets to attack political opponents, dissidents, and others it doesn't like. It can look up protesters and draw up all kinds of history, showing minor crimes no one actually cares about and then enforcing the maximum punishment. It's also possible to use a lot of circumstantial evidence to construct a crime where none exists, and make it logically consistent enough to get a sure-fire conviction: you can destroy people with a fantasy. Real court cases generally work that way, except the crimes are probably real; but the evidence is often stuff that, under "wild circumstances", could occur normally. The reality is that your life has so much stuff in it that I could construct a huge string of coincidental evidence and it would look ridiculous if you tried to argue it was all coincidence; if it seems more sensible that it's all connected to a crime that it logically outlines, you're going to jail.
There's also the whole fear of simply not knowing. Maybe your government has secret police browsing the surveillance. They identify you as a risk, and you're murdered in the street by some homeless guy. Allegedly homeless guy. Who is allegedly incarcerated afterwards.
Risk, repeatability, emergent situations. Your argument is that it won't happen just because it happened before; the argument in place is that the tools being implemented are an enabler and the probability is a function of availability x time, thus eventually it *will* happen and the question is how long before then. There's also a high chance that it will happen *soon*, and doubling the time of "soon" just rolls the dice repeatedly until your unlucky number comes up.
Man on the moon, curing cancer, and old age are emergent situations. Things change. The problem is overall human nature doesn't change; access to tools changes. Man built great big rockets that could land on the moon... and promptly used the technology to build great big rockets that could nuke the other side of the planet.
I have a speech.
The next 9/11, like the previous one, will be another black swan. I don't know what will happen, but the day before it happens the entire possibility of whatever it is that does happen will be patently inconceivable and you will be laughed at and ridiculed by the entire fucking world if you try to tell them it could happen. Eleven hours later, people will swear there were all these indicators that didn't exist and that it was totally predictable and obvious even though it wasn't, and then they'll do all kinds of shit to prevent it from happening again even though it won't.
Uh. Absolute beginners 30 years ago learned on Unix. 20 years ago I learned on DOS with QBASIC. An absolute beginner could get by well with a Linux command shell and the Mug of VI Reference, along with some Python books.
I believe that's a matter of exhaustion. Both genders are suited for scientific study--men and women both work well in groups, and scientific study is a group thing. The bias toward males creates a sort of male-perspective in the scientific community. Too much order: everything begins to level. If it were all women, it would have leveled in some other way.
Notably, I don't believe this effect relies on both men and women being able to do something. I've long believed women were ill-suited as computer programmers: you get a few that can do it and they do it well, but most of them are bluntly disinterested; and a disinterested programmer cannot write good code. I also took notice in the way female programmers operate on problems: differently. That's the full extent of what got my attention; I never really had any interest in distilling it down to a self-help book for programmers. "Try thinking like a woman"? Really now.
The impact of adding a skilled female programmer to a programming team is very visible: it lubricates the process. I've since been able to better understand why, and generalize the effect. Essentially, group problem solving and decision making capitalizes on the differing perspectives of individuals in the group. Placing ten men into a group will generate a garden variety of ideas during brainstorming, as well as a particular range of perspective on what's important and how to evaluate those ideas. Decisions are made based on that range of perspective, and the result of engineering--an iterative process of developing, evaluating, selecting, and implementing alternatives--are carried in that perspective.
Adding a woman increases dissent.
Ten women will act like ten men, but unlike ten men: they will make decisions based in a different range of perspective, selecting from ideas generated from a different garden variety. Nine men and one woman will have nine men plus a woman spewing out different ideas none of those nine could come up with, analyzing different considerations from a completely different perspective, and generally increasing the amount of information on the table.
The slowing of scientific study by men and the influx of women into the field seems to suggest that we've exhausted the line of thinking that a pure male scientific base can provide. Scientific research is a very merit-based crowd: you don't get in unless you impress people with your ideas. In a healthy all-male scientific body, there's plenty of new territory on the table and lots of room to come in with new ideas that are aligned with existing ideas--this impresses people because you're advancing current work. Dissenting views annoy people because progress is being made and you sound stupid with your wild theories. As the all-mail scientific body becomes unhealthy--as progress slows--dissenting views become more attractive because they provide a different direction that allows for more progress. This is two-fold: the dissenting view may provide a solution; alternately, learning that an idea is wrong still provides new information and lets you better analyze the problem in front of you. So the eventual exhaustion of a monoculture of thinking leads to the acceptance of new cultures of thinking into the process--women suddenly start sounding a whole lot smarter because they're bringing new, fresh ideas to a field that's starting to stall and go stale.
A 10%-90% mix either way should function relatively similarly: as long as there's at least 10% of both genders in any given idea-generating group, they should have an optimal impact. Obviously 50-50 maximizes this effect probabilistically (you do have the chance of women who think like men and men who think like women, after all; as well as idiots who simply don't think), but it's not entirely necessary.
A bi-gendered scientific community will retain a healthy prospect for scientific advancement. We also need a healthy economy to back it.
Actually, no. False equivalence is a logical fallacy; however, this isn't false equivalence. The argument was thus: boys seem to prefer one type of social behavior (interaction with certain toys) over another type of social behavior (interaction with other toys); girls seem to act in a partial inverse (they like some of the same things, but like some of the things boys don't, and dislike some of the things boys like). The illustration with toys shows interests following a masculine-neutral-feminine scale; it is logical to conclude that other interests--such as career choice, hobbies, and so on--could follow a masculine-neutral-feminine scale.
This effectively debases the argument that girls do NOT prefer computer science careers less than boys; it does not support the argument that girls DO prefer computer science careers less than boys, but it does illustrate that the phenomena we are observing may, in fact, be just normal behavior. That shifts the burden of the argument: now instead of arguing that the playing field is unlevel, you have to explain why you think girls *want* to be computer programmers and auto mechanics in the first place.
Well I can vouch for the doll thing. Boys do play with dolls.
My cousin didn't like her dolls. She grew her hair long and got an electric guitar. And a puppy.
Maybe it's that we're just not as sensitive and don't give half a shit? Remember we also look down on people who cry $3 billion lawsuit because they've been called a racial epithet or had their butt swatted at while waitressing tables.
This whole thing is stupid. As you've observed, women gravitate less toward a certain field, more toward others. Men gravitate less toward daycare and more toward bashing shit with a hammer. Investing a tremendous amount of energy gets one or two anecdotes of "wow! This gave me the confidence to stop being shy and get into the field I really wanted to be in, but thought nobody would accept me for, and it's fantastic!" Guess what? Those success stories won't start just rolling in when you "get it right"; they're outiers.
People can't accept that most women just don't want to be construction workers, auto mechanics, or computer programmers, while men generally find interest in these things. They want to "level the field", force women into it, make it look "fair" and "even". And they justify it by pointing at a handful who were forced out and going, "See?! 90% of women WANT to do this, but they just can't! THEY CAN'T! WE WON'T LET THEM!"
It's bunk. What next? Do you want to find a way to make women fathers?
Part of hacker culture is isolationism and personal growth. Hackers are most interested in philosophy over religion, and tend to prefer things like Buddhism or Sikhism (less likely, but less generally known--everyone knows something about Buddhism) over Christianity because of the higher philosophical focus--oh sure, 90% might not convert to a new religion, but they'll take an interest in the ideals; most religious people have little interest in their own religion and actively distance themselves from other religions, because ignorance is the greatest shield to protect your beliefs.
Because of this, hacker culture doesn't much support spectator sports. Watching sports is a waste of time; participating in spectator sports is just a machismo show. This results in the interesting phenomena that many opt instead for martial arts--not gym rat weight lifting, but things like Aikido or Judo, Kung Fu, MMA. Other frequent interests include sports like bicycling, hiking, climbing, things that one can do in a group or competitively but which provide the ability to meter yourself. How far can you bike? Can you make it up that mountain? Can you make it up a V7? Group activities often focus on the phenomena of cooperation rather than competition.
The obvious result is that "kicking the nerds around" can be quite dangerous.
Guys are dumb. Girls are psycho. It's how the world works. And yes, if you show up to a sausage party and you're one of like three females there out of 50 attendees... THERE'S THE BEEF!
African-Americans? ... you mean just Africans, right? Or negroes, or whatever we call them when they're not from Africa. Like Jamaicans.
OK so essentially the safety device is too sensitive. Fail-safe, that's acceptable. They could build them to not throw under constant load, but they'd risk not throwing under constant fire-causing load.
Apollo was problem solving. None of the stuff cited here is "agile" and this is all bullshit. Real PM is a lot of boring technical skills... fun to do, boring to watch.