I certainly don't agree with the troll you responded to, but I can't agree with much of what you've stated either:
Just look at Hedy Lamarr. She wasn't just an A-list actress - she also invented and patented, among other things, spread-spectrum communications - in 1941.
Just look at Hedy Lamarr. She wasn't just an A-list actress - she also co-invented and patented, among other things, a specific, mechanical way of doing spread-spectrum communications - a technology that was used during WWI, was published about in 1908, had been experimented on before that.
So you're willing to exaggerate her accomplishment, hide the man who did the work with her, and imply that it was "before it's time"? If you need to distort the facts that much just to get a "top ten" list of female STEM contributors, isn't that an argument against women in tech?
And after that barrage of misinformation, you want us to just trust you when you say that questions about Ada Lovelace and Marie Curie's second prize are illegitimate? That they could only come from sexism against women - not because people have been pushing to exaggerate women's accomplishments, and not just normal controversies? Seriously?
Glaring proof of such prejudice was infamously provided by Lawrence Summers,... “issues of intrinsic aptitude.”
More than a decade ago one guy gave a speech that you managed to quote-mine four words from (out of a 79-word sentence), and then describe with bad-sounding adjectives! With standards that low the creationists are right - Darwin clearly didn't think the eye could evolve!/s
He started his speech by stating that it was an "attempt at provocation", started the sentence you quote-mined with "So my best guess, to provoke you...", and followed that sentence with "I would like nothing better than to be proved wrong...". OMG, such misogyny!
I'm not sure if that's the right name for it, but:
Someone thinks that A is possible, and B is possible. Both can't be true, so they can be dismissed as having a 'paradox'.
The simulation argument relies on 'our descendants' only - AIs, aliens, dinosaurs simulating an alternate history where an asteroid hit, etc. wouldn't work.
All simulations exactly match the real world, if AI didn't run amok there, nobody would ever simulate that scenario.
I'm almost certain there are more issues with that (rather short) footnote.
No, no, no. That's the path to wrongthink, citizen!
First, sexism has always been defined as "prejudice plus power" (don't trust your faulty memory!) which women don't have by definition. I know, some bigots think that the ability to get people fired for citing the scientific papers of our enemies counts as "power", but they'll all be reeducated soon enough.
Second, for the purposes of insulting men, men and women are different. For all other purposes, they're the identical. Some brainwashed males might think that this is a contradiction, but feminist quantum mechanics proves that this is perfectly consistent. Like the proclamation says, all humans are equal, but some are more equal than others.
Don't worry - I too struggled with my own belief in objective rationality, but in the end, I have come to love Big Sister.
Statistically speaking, men are more likely to commit rape and murder than women, but you don't see anyone coming to the conclusion that all men should be forced to wear chastity belts and banned from own guns.
... but we do accept that as part of the reason for why there are more men in prison than women.
On the other hand, women's differing attitudes and behavior are not accepted as even a partial reason for why there are fewer women in STEM fields.
could it be because women are punished for not being agreeable more than men? That's a fairly well established phenomenon, backed up with studies and copious evidence.
Yes, women are pressured to be agreeable, mostly by other women, mostly in social contexts (not professional), but it's extremely unlikely to explain more than a small part of the difference - just like pressure on men to take risks and not show weakness is only culture somewhat exaggerating natural (average) inclinations.
And if you insist on looking for social/cultural reasons, why can't the differences in personality be because of pressure on men? There's overwhelming evidence that men are judged based on success (especially financial) far more than women are. So with more evidence of a much stronger social pressure, why couldn't it be that men are punished for not being disagreeable (being weak, losers, pathetic) that causes the difference?
the wrongthink in this case was not at all sensible and in fact quite retarded
Even taking the most negative view supported by the facts, the worst he possibly could be 'guilty' of is misunderstanding Wikipedia articles with hundreds of citations of peer-reviewed literature. I'm sure you've done worse nearly every day of your life.
Yes - you made the claim, and in an extremely vague way, so the ball is in your court to clarify and back up your case. But so far:
it's the natural order of things
The only place he uses any version of the word 'nature' is in "Be open about the science of human nature."
non-whites
The only place he discusses race is where he points out Google's differing treatment of races.
inferior
The word does not appear in the document.
pseudo-scientific research
You mean his citations, which all seem to be clarification of definitions, pointing out social trends, or Wikipedia articles with copious references to peer-reviewed literature?
I can read the same study and wonder if the reason why women are neurotic and agreeable is because men are that aggressive and how that dynamic has worked out on a cultural level.
Which is the first reasonable response I've heard. And I could counter by pointing out that it's still an existing general sex difference rather than sexism in the industry, or with studies of how people are kinder to women and protect them from aggression and how culture (in general) acts to amplify almost any existing sex difference. Then you could come up with a response, and the next thing you know we'd be having a rational discussion.
But we can't have that, because the opening move of everyone on your side (including you) was you misrepresentation, lying, badmouthing and name calling.
Personal biases are hard to kick when reading the research.
Yeah, I wish people like you could get past it./snark But we're all only human, right?:(
cites Wikipedia articles as sources, many of which have been flagged for problematic and incorrect sources
Really? Let's look at one central to his argument - say 'Sex differences in psychology' - I see flags for needing non-primary sources, and ones for needing clarity and expansion,... nothing about being 'incorrect'...
Oh, gee. Should have seen 'problematic and incorrect' and realized you meant 'for my personal beliefs'.
you cannot make a claim, cite an unreliable source
Which you avoided by not citing anything at all. Setting a standard for others that you fail at even more than they do - not the best move in an argument.
(a) The woman engineer who's paid less and insists that people citing scientific research after being asked for their opinion constitutes a 'hostile work environment'
(b) the male engineer who responds to a request for dialog about diversity with an essay citing more than two dozen sources and supports increasing diversity in a more effective way
It's objectively better to support B, but since one side can't stop lying they'll mindlessly go with A, regardless of the facts.
The purpose of this town hall is to help Google PR and to show they are acting 'responsibly' to ensure a hostile work environment for those who wrongthink.
This person clearly contributes to a workplace toxic to women. Don't you think Google trying to deal with that toxicity is well within their rights?
I don't care too much about what one lower-ranking person's cherry-picked opinion is, what I care about is the company's response:
we want to continue fostering an environment where it's safe to engage in challenging conversations in a thoughtful way. But, in the process of doing that, we cannot allow stereotyping and harmful assumptions to play any part. One of the aspects of the post that troubled me deeply was the bias inherent in suggesting that most women, or men, feel or act a certain way. That is stereotyping, and it is harmful.
The first thing I get from that is that any explanation for a gender disparity that includes biology or general societal attitudes are off the table. It doesn't matter that hormones affect everything from sexuality to risk-taking, it's off the table, period. It doesn't matter that almost all the people working at Google who wear makeup or skirts are women, suggesting that the same generally-ignored and non-industry-specific (and probably not even directly job-related) pressures could possibly affect how women approach work is off the table as well.
The second thing is that what they're suggesting is that views to my right should be silenced, while views to my left must be allowed. While I don't know a thing about sociology, or why women get paid less, or why there are fewer women are in STEM fields, I do know which side in this is suppressing facts harder than creationists. If the objective fact that 'women work less overtime' can't be mentioned in the discussion, even as part of the discussion of 'sexist family pressures' as a factor in how women work, you simply aren't interested in the truth.
So to emphasize the GP:
While equal opportunity is a good thing, enforcing equal numbers in such a situation is about the worst thing you can do.
Damn straight - and it's not a 'conversation' if some people aren't allowed to talk.
Cell phones and wifi are not banned in Europe and never were...
I never said that they... oh. Sorry if that phrase being part of the analogy (the "the equivalent of" part) wasn't clear.
As a software developer at an agricultural equipment company (no, we don't have anything to do with seeds, let alone GMOs), I was trying to communicate what an equally absurd position against computers would look like - and I couldn't communicate the scope of the issue without including the context that the technology has already been banned in many places.
If I'd said something like "Imagine if Europe bans all encryption outside the military (which some people want to do), to the point where even making a custom binary format is considered terrorism, and you start saying things like 'encryption is bad because it causes crib death' ". Would that have been clearer?
Do you think that people would be rotating crops more without GMOs? Or are you misusing the term "mono crop".
GMO is bad because resistance to herbicides induces over-use of them.
Which is only even possible for herbicide-related traits, and why refuges are required, and why new traits dealing with different herbicides are developed - and this has also been a (minor, manageable) issue ever since we had herbicides.
GMO is bad because GMO has been used to have plants make toxins. So GMO food can contain poison.
BT is toxic only to insects, and is frequently used by organic farmers.
And there are no regulations about this or any other use of GMO.
Are you insane? You don't believe that the USDA, FDA, and EPA regulate GMOs?
GMO is bad because it has been used to make kill-genes, even if only in the lab, and between that and mono-crop the results of a wide-spread release could cause massive destruction.
So something that hasn't existed outside a lab, of a company that has pledged never to use it, that farmers don't want, if it became very common in farming, might, in a sci-fi scenario in your head, cause 'massive destruction'. Do you fear a robot uprising as well?
GMO is bad because Monsanto claims it's harmless, and when Monsanto says something, the opposite is more likely true.
Non sequitur.
But the pro-GMO crowd doesn't talk about the reasonable objections. Instead, it's all about the strawman.
Right, the "Frankenfood" fear-mongering didn't really exist.
I don't mean to be rude, this is probably one of the most well-written anti-GMO screeds I've seen, but it's still all just the equivalent of saying "computers are bad because they give off radiation (radio waves), increase our carbon footprint, and can be used to make military drone strikes" in a world where cell phones and wifi are banned in Europe because of brain-cancer worries and 'it caused my headaches'.
So, and how does then the legitimated use work?
With your explanation no farmer could use the seeds.
The same way a publisher gets the right to make copies of a book - they make a deal with the person who owns the rights. This goes back to what you said about needing to buy and license - you don't need to buy, but you do need a license.
It's the same as (say) Harry Potter - you can get the books any of they ways you can get paper, or water, or any other commodity, but you can't photocopy them and sell them, or sell derivative works (movies, an illustrated version of the books, a new book with the same characters/setting/etc) without permission. That's how JK Rowling can make money off the the stories she wrote, and why only one publisher got to make books and only one studio got to make movies.
By planting seeds you bought, regardless from the producer or a third party that bought them from a the producer, you hardly infringe a patent.
After all that is their intended purpose. There would be a patent violation if I would use monsantos seeds to breed a new kind of plant.
That's the 'blame-the-bean' defense and would undermine the entire purpose of patenting anything that can self-replicate. You might as well argue that you didn't steal a car, but only pushed some buttons and pedals and the car moved on its own. Or that requiring me to burn all of my newspapers immediately after printing them doesn't really infringe on my freedom of the press since I did get to print whatever I wanted. I'm sorry, but that's just childish.
Or do they argue, that you not only have to buy the seeds but also require a license to plant them?
You don't have to buy the seeds - just like books you can buy them, get them as a gift, or pick them out of a ditch - all of that is fine. But you can't go on to grow/print and then sell your own copies - that violates the creator's exclusive right to make copies for a limited time.
Actually it was not a cross pollination, some seeds of surrounding fields dropped on his fields. So he lost his farm for a couple of random plants. Not for a paten violation...
Vernon Hugh Bowman bought the seeds as commodities - not as something to be planted. Then he tested them to see if some were resistant to pesticide, and they were. Then he grew them, and then planted a second generation of them. Then he sold the resulting crop. This wasn't about 'a couple of random plants' - this was someone who deliberately went out of their way to knowingly make money off of someone else's patented seeds.
The court ruled that, just like any other patented item, he could do pretty much anything he wanted with them after they were sold except make copies for profit.
Well, we do make up the axioms, but the conclusions that are derived from them seem to be discovered - e.g. human beings invented numbers and operations relating them, but given those definitions it's a fact that there's no largest prime.
Slashdot Mirror
Just look at Hedy Lamarr. She wasn't just an A-list actress - she also invented and patented, among other things, spread-spectrum communications - in 1941.
Just look at Hedy Lamarr. She wasn't just an A-list actress - she also co- invented and patented, among other things, a specific, mechanical way of doing spread-spectrum communications - a technology that was used during WWI, was published about in 1908, had been experimented on before that .
So you're willing to exaggerate her accomplishment, hide the man who did the work with her, and imply that it was "before it's time"? If you need to distort the facts that much just to get a "top ten" list of female STEM contributors, isn't that an argument against women in tech?
And after that barrage of misinformation, you want us to just trust you when you say that questions about Ada Lovelace and Marie Curie's second prize are illegitimate? That they could only come from sexism against women - not because people have been pushing to exaggerate women's accomplishments, and not just normal controversies? Seriously?
Glaring proof of such prejudice was infamously provided by Lawrence Summers, ... “issues of intrinsic aptitude.”
More than a decade ago one guy gave a speech that you managed to quote-mine four words from (out of a 79-word sentence), and then describe with bad-sounding adjectives! With standards that low the creationists are right - Darwin clearly didn't think the eye could evolve! /s
He started his speech by stating that it was an "attempt at provocation", started the sentence you quote-mined with "So my best guess, to provoke you ...", and followed that sentence with "I would like nothing better than to be proved wrong...". OMG, such misogyny!
Police Allegedly Arrest UK News Photographer For Standing In A Field
For the crime to alleged, it would have to be:
Police Arrest UK News Photographer For Allegedly Standing In A Field
And what they really meant was that they weren't sure what crime prompted the arrest:
Police Arrest UK News Photographer, Allegedly For Standing In A Field
The fallacy of all or nothing?
I'm not sure if that's the right name for it, but:
I'm almost certain there are more issues with that (rather short) footnote.
*What*!? Is this language?
Technically, yes. But if you state it more clearly the logical fallacies become more obvious.
Isn't that a sexist statement?
No, no, no. That's the path to wrongthink, citizen!
First, sexism has always been defined as "prejudice plus power" (don't trust your faulty memory!) which women don't have by definition. I know, some bigots think that the ability to get people fired for citing the scientific papers of our enemies counts as "power", but they'll all be reeducated soon enough.
Second, for the purposes of insulting men, men and women are different. For all other purposes, they're the identical. Some brainwashed males might think that this is a contradiction, but feminist quantum mechanics proves that this is perfectly consistent. Like the proclamation says, all humans are equal, but some are more equal than others.
Don't worry - I too struggled with my own belief in objective rationality, but in the end, I have come to love Big Sister.
Statistically speaking, men are more likely to commit rape and murder than women, but you don't see anyone coming to the conclusion that all men should be forced to wear chastity belts and banned from own guns.
... but we do accept that as part of the reason for why there are more men in prison than women.
On the other hand, women's differing attitudes and behavior are not accepted as even a partial reason for why there are fewer women in STEM fields.
Do you see the problem?
could it be because women are punished for not being agreeable more than men? That's a fairly well established phenomenon, backed up with studies and copious evidence.
Yes, women are pressured to be agreeable, mostly by other women, mostly in social contexts (not professional), but it's extremely unlikely to explain more than a small part of the difference - just like pressure on men to take risks and not show weakness is only culture somewhat exaggerating natural (average) inclinations.
And if you insist on looking for social/cultural reasons, why can't the differences in personality be because of pressure on men? There's overwhelming evidence that men are judged based on success (especially financial) far more than women are. So with more evidence of a much stronger social pressure, why couldn't it be that men are punished for not being disagreeable (being weak, losers, pathetic) that causes the difference?
the wrongthink in this case was not at all sensible and in fact quite retarded
Even taking the most negative view supported by the facts, the worst he possibly could be 'guilty' of is misunderstanding Wikipedia articles with hundreds of citations of peer-reviewed literature. I'm sure you've done worse nearly every day of your life.
I read his article. Did you?
Yes - you made the claim, and in an extremely vague way, so the ball is in your court to clarify and back up your case. But so far:
it's the natural order of things
The only place he uses any version of the word 'nature' is in "Be open about the science of human nature."
non-whites
The only place he discusses race is where he points out Google's differing treatment of races.
inferior
The word does not appear in the document.
pseudo-scientific research
You mean his citations, which all seem to be clarification of definitions, pointing out social trends, or Wikipedia articles with copious references to peer-reviewed literature?
I can read the same study and wonder if the reason why women are neurotic and agreeable is because men are that aggressive and how that dynamic has worked out on a cultural level.
Which is the first reasonable response I've heard. And I could counter by pointing out that it's still an existing general sex difference rather than sexism in the industry, or with studies of how people are kinder to women and protect them from aggression and how culture (in general) acts to amplify almost any existing sex difference. Then you could come up with a response, and the next thing you know we'd be having a rational discussion.
But we can't have that, because the opening move of everyone on your side (including you) was you misrepresentation, lying, badmouthing and name calling.
Personal biases are hard to kick when reading the research.
Yeah, I wish people like you could get past it. /snark But we're all only human, right? :(
the white male engineer who thinks it's the natural order of things that non-whites and women are inferior, and cites pseudo-scientific research
He doesn't think anyone is inferior, and didn't cite any pseudo-science. I'm sorry, but you have no idea what you're talking about.
cites Wikipedia articles as sources, many of which have been flagged for problematic and incorrect sources
Really? Let's look at one central to his argument - say 'Sex differences in psychology' - I see flags for needing non-primary sources, and ones for needing clarity and expansion, ... nothing about being 'incorrect' ...
Oh, gee. Should have seen 'problematic and incorrect' and realized you meant 'for my personal beliefs'.
you cannot make a claim, cite an unreliable source
Which you avoided by not citing anything at all. Setting a standard for others that you fail at even more than they do - not the best move in an argument.
You have some issues with facts:
(a) The woman engineer who's paid less and insists that people citing scientific research after being asked for their opinion constitutes a 'hostile work environment'
(b) the male engineer who responds to a request for dialog about diversity with an essay citing more than two dozen sources and supports increasing diversity in a more effective way
It's objectively better to support B, but since one side can't stop lying they'll mindlessly go with A, regardless of the facts.
The purpose of this town hall is to help Google PR and to show they are acting 'responsibly' to ensure a hostile work environment for those who wrongthink.
we need to find a way to debate issues on which we might disagree
Without letting the people who disagree with me talk.
This person clearly contributes to a workplace toxic to women. Don't you think Google trying to deal with that toxicity is well within their rights?
I don't care too much about what one lower-ranking person's cherry-picked opinion is, what I care about is the company's response:
we want to continue fostering an environment where it's safe to engage in challenging conversations in a thoughtful way. But, in the process of doing that, we cannot allow stereotyping and harmful assumptions to play any part. One of the aspects of the post that troubled me deeply was the bias inherent in suggesting that most women, or men, feel or act a certain way. That is stereotyping, and it is harmful.
The first thing I get from that is that any explanation for a gender disparity that includes biology or general societal attitudes are off the table. It doesn't matter that hormones affect everything from sexuality to risk-taking, it's off the table, period. It doesn't matter that almost all the people working at Google who wear makeup or skirts are women, suggesting that the same generally-ignored and non-industry-specific (and probably not even directly job-related) pressures could possibly affect how women approach work is off the table as well.
The second thing is that what they're suggesting is that views to my right should be silenced, while views to my left must be allowed. While I don't know a thing about sociology, or why women get paid less, or why there are fewer women are in STEM fields, I do know which side in this is suppressing facts harder than creationists. If the objective fact that 'women work less overtime' can't be mentioned in the discussion, even as part of the discussion of 'sexist family pressures' as a factor in how women work, you simply aren't interested in the truth.
So to emphasize the GP:
While equal opportunity is a good thing, enforcing equal numbers in such a situation is about the worst thing you can do.
Damn straight - and it's not a 'conversation' if some people aren't allowed to talk.
We've heard about those technical challenges from Thunderf00t.
He is eating crow right now for some of his criticisms.
[citation needed]
But yeah, no need to explain what he got wrong, simply assert that he did and mock those who dared to ask serious questions. /s
Turns out, Musk hired smart people.
Turns out, smart people can be wrong. :)
Cell phones and wifi are not banned in Europe and never were...
I never said that they ... oh. Sorry if that phrase being part of the analogy (the "the equivalent of" part) wasn't clear.
As a software developer at an agricultural equipment company (no, we don't have anything to do with seeds, let alone GMOs), I was trying to communicate what an equally absurd position against computers would look like - and I couldn't communicate the scope of the issue without including the context that the technology has already been banned in many places.
If I'd said something like "Imagine if Europe bans all encryption outside the military (which some people want to do), to the point where even making a custom binary format is considered terrorism, and you start saying things like 'encryption is bad because it causes crib death' ". Would that have been clearer?
GMO is bad because of mono crop issues.
Do you think that people would be rotating crops more without GMOs? Or are you misusing the term "mono crop".
GMO is bad because resistance to herbicides induces over-use of them.
Which is only even possible for herbicide-related traits, and why refuges are required, and why new traits dealing with different herbicides are developed - and this has also been a (minor, manageable) issue ever since we had herbicides.
GMO is bad because GMO has been used to have plants make toxins. So GMO food can contain poison.
BT is toxic only to insects, and is frequently used by organic farmers.
And there are no regulations about this or any other use of GMO.
Are you insane? You don't believe that the USDA, FDA, and EPA regulate GMOs?
GMO is bad because it has been used to make kill-genes, even if only in the lab, and between that and mono-crop the results of a wide-spread release could cause massive destruction.
So something that hasn't existed outside a lab, of a company that has pledged never to use it, that farmers don't want, if it became very common in farming, might, in a sci-fi scenario in your head, cause 'massive destruction'. Do you fear a robot uprising as well?
GMO is bad because Monsanto claims it's harmless, and when Monsanto says something, the opposite is more likely true.
Non sequitur.
But the pro-GMO crowd doesn't talk about the reasonable objections. Instead, it's all about the strawman.
Right, the "Frankenfood" fear-mongering didn't really exist.
I don't mean to be rude, this is probably one of the most well-written anti-GMO screeds I've seen, but it's still all just the equivalent of saying "computers are bad because they give off radiation (radio waves), increase our carbon footprint, and can be used to make military drone strikes" in a world where cell phones and wifi are banned in Europe because of brain-cancer worries and 'it caused my headaches'.
So, and how does then the legitimated use work? With your explanation no farmer could use the seeds.
The same way a publisher gets the right to make copies of a book - they make a deal with the person who owns the rights. This goes back to what you said about needing to buy and license - you don't need to buy, but you do need a license.
It's the same as (say) Harry Potter - you can get the books any of they ways you can get paper, or water, or any other commodity, but you can't photocopy them and sell them, or sell derivative works (movies, an illustrated version of the books, a new book with the same characters/setting/etc) without permission. That's how JK Rowling can make money off the the stories she wrote, and why only one publisher got to make books and only one studio got to make movies.
By planting seeds you bought, regardless from the producer or a third party that bought them from a the producer, you hardly infringe a patent. After all that is their intended purpose. There would be a patent violation if I would use monsantos seeds to breed a new kind of plant.
That's the 'blame-the-bean' defense and would undermine the entire purpose of patenting anything that can self-replicate. You might as well argue that you didn't steal a car, but only pushed some buttons and pedals and the car moved on its own. Or that requiring me to burn all of my newspapers immediately after printing them doesn't really infringe on my freedom of the press since I did get to print whatever I wanted. I'm sorry, but that's just childish.
Or do they argue, that you not only have to buy the seeds but also require a license to plant them?
You don't have to buy the seeds - just like books you can buy them, get them as a gift, or pick them out of a ditch - all of that is fine. But you can't go on to grow/print and then sell your own copies - that violates the creator's exclusive right to make copies for a limited time.
if he bought the seeds and then panted them it hardly would be a patent violation in the rest of the world.
Even in Canada it wouldn't matter how you got them - if you make copies without permission, you're violating the patent.
Actually it was not a cross pollination, some seeds of surrounding fields dropped on his fields. So he lost his farm for a couple of random plants. Not for a paten violation ...
Vernon Hugh Bowman bought the seeds as commodities - not as something to be planted. Then he tested them to see if some were resistant to pesticide, and they were. Then he grew them, and then planted a second generation of them. Then he sold the resulting crop. This wasn't about 'a couple of random plants' - this was someone who deliberately went out of their way to knowingly make money off of someone else's patented seeds.
The court ruled that, just like any other patented item, he could do pretty much anything he wanted with them after they were sold except make copies for profit.
Well, we do make up the axioms, but the conclusions that are derived from them seem to be discovered - e.g. human beings invented numbers and operations relating them, but given those definitions it's a fact that there's no largest prime.
It's disappointing to me that we still use the word 'law' to refer to entirely different things:
1. Things humans make up that they then want other human beings to follow.
2. Things humans make up after observing something in order to describe it.
Descriptive laws and prescriptive laws are exact opposites, both chronologically and causally.