I have a CS degree. As part of that, I had to take quite a few humanities courses, do a lot of reading and research on other topics.
The psychology that you take in CS is entrance level. It is the scientific part, about perception and groupings and such.
There is another level when you fill an entire study with it. You can go the clinical path (two friends of mine did that) which is basically where doctors go. This part also is reasonably well understood and has a mostly sound scientific basis.
Or you can go the humanities path and then it becomes a wild mix of dogma and bullshit. There are extensive articles around (Google is your friend) about how most of the studies don't replicate, almost none of the studies replacate outside the lab, and how deeply ethics commissions and gender studies have applied a chokehold to necessary research.
Here is an incomplete list of study fields with obvious blind spots:
Psychology - around half their studies do not replicate, still cannot explain basic phenomena of daily life, increasingly infused with politics, hindered by ethics (not a bad thing, but a fact) to conduct important research
Economics - reductionist approach to humans, has no concept of basic facts of human life (e.g. altruism), in the real world economists are as often wrong as they are right, mass blindness to black swans, has led us into the financial crisis
Gender studies and its relatives - has taken its own subject and turned it into a mixture of politics, bullshit bingo and sanctuary for rejects. Fundamentally flawed and unscientific to the core.
No, thanks. We don't need any of these people anywhere. Most of them are already doing enough damage as they are. "Diversity" is a bullshit term when it is enforced, because it is becoming the exact thing that it pretends to combat - exclusion. "sorry, we already have three black people, we need an asian person now". And the rallying cry of "needs more diversity" has become a synonym for "we are jealous that something in the real world actually works without us being involved".
Didn't we already have this 30 years ago? It was called CyC, a program of the U of Texas, if I recall correctly, and it had exactly this goal, except that they called it "general background knowledge" and not "common sense".
As I recall, the software eventually could read and understand newspaper articles, but didn't progress beyond the understanding of a pre-teen child.
We are pretty much on the same page here and differences between studies are normal. We both agree that the difference isn't large enough to justify Social Justice Warrior style sweeping adjustments.
I didn't say it was simple, I could say you could simply use the performance. Estimating what exactly the performance is, is job-specific. Some jobs are easy to measure (if your job is to sell cupcakes, the number of cupcakes you sell is your performance). Some jobs are difficult to measure (if your job is being a firefighter, what exactly is your performance?).
That is why I consistenly say to use proper measurements or stop pretending. If you can't measure someones contribution, don't replace your ignorant by made-up numbers, but admit that their contribution is too hard for you to measure.
For any specific case, with a lot of effort you can create a measurement. Whether or not that is worth it is a good question.
"Proper metrics" that cannot be gamed are very expensive.
Yes, true.
But if you don't use proper metrics, then you shouldn't be using metrics at all. It's a scam to reward the executives with seven- or eight-digit bonuses based on what is essentially made-up numbers. It's likewise a scam to reprimand or fire people on the same basis.
As I said in another comment: Measure properly or don't measure. Both is fine with me. But don't measure bullshit and then claim that you are rewarding performance. That's like measuring the air temperature in your car, multiplying it by the tire pressure and showing it as velocity on the speedometer.
The proper metrics do, of course, depend on the exact job that is being done. They would be quite different for the CEO and the cleaning lady.
That it is a hard problem doesn't mean going "nah, it's so difficult, let's not do it" is the right answer.
Because if you give up on metrics, then at least be honest all the way through and admit that you cannot properly evaluate the contribution of a person to the company, and then stop giving them bonuses or reprimands based on some made-up numbers.
That is fine with me as well.
Measure or don't measure. But if you measure, measure properly.
There were more recent studies that address this problem.
As far as I remember, when you account for all these mistakes, there is still a gender pay gap. Only it is on the order of low single digit percents (2%, 4%, depending on the study).
Well, you could simply use the performance of people, instead of the judgement of said performance by others. Of course, that would require you to introduce proper metrics. Which is something that a lot of managers resist in this field as soon as it applies to "thinking jobs". I wonder if the fact that the group includes their own jobs has any influence on that distaste.
I'd just change a bunch of rejected female resumes to say they were male and see if they got accepted and vice versa.
This exactly. Do it both ways. Make some male profiles female and some female profiles male and check what happens.
Then identify other gender-typical features, one by one. Gaps in the CV (pointing to child raising times), remove any written text (gender styles of writing), etc.
This could be a really cool toy to figure out some of the recruiting prejudices and understand what the gender gap actually is. Because we already know it is not just gender. It is also experience and other life choices that are indirectly influenced by gender.
I even forgot that existed. It was actually a great game and so much fun.
I sometimes miss these short, straightforward, sit-down-and-play games that were typical for the C64. There are a few such games for consoles, typically under the "party game" category, but even most of those require you to go and set up characters and players, enter names, watch some intro video, bla bla bla.
I was talking about hardware based attacks, not software. Spyware and admin rights don't apply. Google "evil maid".
The probability is significantly above zero if you look at the threats of an international company that has people travelling to other countries who are known to engage in industrial espionage, such as China or the USA. It is one threat among many, but it is a threat.
In a corporate context, if you have non-IT personel travelling to places like China then yes, this is the kind of thing that you need to think about.
Just because something does not affect you, personally, does not mean it's not a real concern. I'm personally unconcerned with the danger of dying from drinking cleaning fluid, but I still support the idea of putting child-proof caps on them.
From a security perspective, I'm quite fond of the fact that nobody can open my notebook in the hotel room while I'm at dinner and install something malicious. If this is done well, it could obsolete a whole lot of hardware-based threats.
There is the "right to repair" angle as well and I agree with that. There's just two perspectives.
The old adage is true, competition is good, but too much competition is bad and leads to market fragmentation.
That is wrong.
What is bad is exclusion, not competition.
The more companies manufacture a gadget, the more choice you have, the more they all are under pressure to improve efficiency (so they can offer lower prices) and to innovate (so they can offer new features), all in an effort to stand out from the crowd.
This works for smartphones, for cars, for almost all consumer gadgets, because all smartphones use the same carriers and WLAN and Bluetooth. All cars use the same roads and the same single-digit number of types of fuel. All electronic gadgets have the same power connectors. All washing machines take the same washing powders or liquids. You get the idea.
If you bring a smartphone that only communicates with other smartphones of the same type to the market, and somehow manage to get a double-digit percentage of consumers to buy it, and then two competitors do the same - then you have market fragmentation. But the cause is not that there are three competitors, the cause is that they are not interoperale.
The subscription service model is one of those business models that has market fragmentation at its core. It wants to be customer-hostile. Forcing as many people as possible to subscribe to your channel, perfectly well knowing that this will make them unsubscribe from competitors, is the business model.
From a consumer perspective, the only solution is to pressure those companies into abandoning a customer-hostile business model and force them into an interoperable model.
Funny how people without arguments still feel the need to post something, so they go and make it personal - against a person of whom they know two data points - an arbitrarily chosen name and a sequential number.
Come on, try harder. If you want to attack a person, you should at least aim in the general direction of an actual person, not a string and an int.
If you think that trying to punish them economically will crush them, remember that Russians managed the longest run of any Communist country and the self-inflicted economic misery it brings. They're too proud to capitulate to western demands and they've been through worse economically and within recent memory for many of their citizens. Open up markets to them and create better economic opportunity and many of them are likely to act on that. It won't eliminate the troll farms, but it will make them more expensive, or subject them to outsourcing.
Also remember that the West does not utterly dominate world trade anymore.
When European products disappeared from the shelves in Russia, there were empty shelves for a few weeks. Then they filled back up with asian products. A new trade deal was made with China. The rubel which had fallen to almost 1:100 to the Euro recovered back to 1:60 (the best course I remember is 1:45, so 1:60 is almost pre-sanction levels).
The sanctions harm Europe more than Russia. A lot of Greece farmers saw their exports disappear, a lot of German tech companies the same.
Because our perception of social disfunction is caused by disagreement over a movie.
And not, say, a broken healthcare system, a broken pension system, corrupt and stupid politicians, the church abusing small kids and then covering it up, the media actively, openly and much more aggressively reinforcing the split of society into camps, the economy being plundered by banks and the super-rich or everyone with a buck to make denying or opposing climate change.
Or any of the other issues of the day that nobody, least those whose fucking job it is, taking care of.
Sure, of all the real issues that divide and threaten society, a paid army of trolls picks movie reviews as their choice weapon to destabilise western society.
Slashdot Mirror
I have a CS degree. As part of that, I had to take quite a few humanities courses, do a lot of reading and research on other topics.
The psychology that you take in CS is entrance level. It is the scientific part, about perception and groupings and such.
There is another level when you fill an entire study with it. You can go the clinical path (two friends of mine did that) which is basically where doctors go. This part also is reasonably well understood and has a mostly sound scientific basis.
Or you can go the humanities path and then it becomes a wild mix of dogma and bullshit. There are extensive articles around (Google is your friend) about how most of the studies don't replicate, almost none of the studies replacate outside the lab, and how deeply ethics commissions and gender studies have applied a chokehold to necessary research.
Here is an incomplete list of study fields with obvious blind spots:
Psychology - around half their studies do not replicate, still cannot explain basic phenomena of daily life, increasingly infused with politics, hindered by ethics (not a bad thing, but a fact) to conduct important research
Economics - reductionist approach to humans, has no concept of basic facts of human life (e.g. altruism), in the real world economists are as often wrong as they are right, mass blindness to black swans, has led us into the financial crisis
Gender studies and its relatives - has taken its own subject and turned it into a mixture of politics, bullshit bingo and sanctuary for rejects. Fundamentally flawed and unscientific to the core.
No, thanks. We don't need any of these people anywhere. Most of them are already doing enough damage as they are. "Diversity" is a bullshit term when it is enforced, because it is becoming the exact thing that it pretends to combat - exclusion. "sorry, we already have three black people, we need an asian person now". And the rallying cry of "needs more diversity" has become a synonym for "we are jealous that something in the real world actually works without us being involved".
Didn't we already have this 30 years ago? It was called CyC, a program of the U of Texas, if I recall correctly, and it had exactly this goal, except that they called it "general background knowledge" and not "common sense".
As I recall, the software eventually could read and understand newspaper articles, but didn't progress beyond the understanding of a pre-teen child.
We are pretty much on the same page here and differences between studies are normal. We both agree that the difference isn't large enough to justify Social Justice Warrior style sweeping adjustments.
I didn't say it was simple, I could say you could simply use the performance. Estimating what exactly the performance is, is job-specific. Some jobs are easy to measure (if your job is to sell cupcakes, the number of cupcakes you sell is your performance). Some jobs are difficult to measure (if your job is being a firefighter, what exactly is your performance?).
That is why I consistenly say to use proper measurements or stop pretending. If you can't measure someones contribution, don't replace your ignorant by made-up numbers, but admit that their contribution is too hard for you to measure.
For any specific case, with a lot of effort you can create a measurement. Whether or not that is worth it is a good question.
I am looking forward to being enlightened about a generic measurement that applies with no regards to position or context.
"Proper metrics" that cannot be gamed are very expensive.
Yes, true.
But if you don't use proper metrics, then you shouldn't be using metrics at all. It's a scam to reward the executives with seven- or eight-digit bonuses based on what is essentially made-up numbers. It's likewise a scam to reprimand or fire people on the same basis.
As I said in another comment: Measure properly or don't measure. Both is fine with me. But don't measure bullshit and then claim that you are rewarding performance. That's like measuring the air temperature in your car, multiplying it by the tire pressure and showing it as velocity on the speedometer.
The proper metrics do, of course, depend on the exact job that is being done. They would be quite different for the CEO and the cleaning lady.
That it is a hard problem doesn't mean going "nah, it's so difficult, let's not do it" is the right answer.
Because if you give up on metrics, then at least be honest all the way through and admit that you cannot properly evaluate the contribution of a person to the company, and then stop giving them bonuses or reprimands based on some made-up numbers.
That is fine with me as well.
Measure or don't measure. But if you measure, measure properly.
There were more recent studies that address this problem.
As far as I remember, when you account for all these mistakes, there is still a gender pay gap. Only it is on the order of low single digit percents (2%, 4%, depending on the study).
Well, you could simply use the performance of people, instead of the judgement of said performance by others. Of course, that would require you to introduce proper metrics. Which is something that a lot of managers resist in this field as soon as it applies to "thinking jobs". I wonder if the fact that the group includes their own jobs has any influence on that distaste.
I'd just change a bunch of rejected female resumes to say they were male and see if they got accepted and vice versa.
This exactly. Do it both ways. Make some male profiles female and some female profiles male and check what happens.
Then identify other gender-typical features, one by one. Gaps in the CV (pointing to child raising times), remove any written text (gender styles of writing), etc.
This could be a really cool toy to figure out some of the recruiting prejudices and understand what the gender gap actually is. Because we already know it is not just gender. It is also experience and other life choices that are indirectly influenced by gender.
I even forgot that existed. It was actually a great game and so much fun.
I sometimes miss these short, straightforward, sit-down-and-play games that were typical for the C64. There are a few such games for consoles, typically under the "party game" category, but even most of those require you to go and set up characters and players, enter names, watch some intro video, bla bla bla.
https://archive.org/details/d6...
doesn't seem to work for me, though. YMMV
I was talking about hardware based attacks, not software. Spyware and admin rights don't apply. Google "evil maid".
The probability is significantly above zero if you look at the threats of an international company that has people travelling to other countries who are known to engage in industrial espionage, such as China or the USA. It is one threat among many, but it is a threat.
In a corporate context, if you have non-IT personel travelling to places like China then yes, this is the kind of thing that you need to think about.
Just because something does not affect you, personally, does not mean it's not a real concern. I'm personally unconcerned with the danger of dying from drinking cleaning fluid, but I still support the idea of putting child-proof caps on them.
If your threat model contains only one threat, it is defective.
The "evil maid" attack category actually is a thing.
From a security perspective, I'm quite fond of the fact that nobody can open my notebook in the hotel room while I'm at dinner and install something malicious. If this is done well, it could obsolete a whole lot of hardware-based threats.
There is the "right to repair" angle as well and I agree with that. There's just two perspectives.
Didn't read any of their papers, but I do wonder if they tested it on long texts and not just notes.
I can imagine that it would help with short text fragments. I can't imagine it helps with a book.
Some streaming services are getting smarter and allowing an offline mode.
Absolute requirement for me. Until last year (and possible again in the future) a good portion of my video watching was done on trains or airplanes.
The old adage is true, competition is good, but too much competition is bad and leads to market fragmentation.
That is wrong.
What is bad is exclusion, not competition.
The more companies manufacture a gadget, the more choice you have, the more they all are under pressure to improve efficiency (so they can offer lower prices) and to innovate (so they can offer new features), all in an effort to stand out from the crowd.
This works for smartphones, for cars, for almost all consumer gadgets, because all smartphones use the same carriers and WLAN and Bluetooth. All cars use the same roads and the same single-digit number of types of fuel. All electronic gadgets have the same power connectors. All washing machines take the same washing powders or liquids. You get the idea.
If you bring a smartphone that only communicates with other smartphones of the same type to the market, and somehow manage to get a double-digit percentage of consumers to buy it, and then two competitors do the same - then you have market fragmentation. But the cause is not that there are three competitors, the cause is that they are not interoperale.
The subscription service model is one of those business models that has market fragmentation at its core. It wants to be customer-hostile. Forcing as many people as possible to subscribe to your channel, perfectly well knowing that this will make them unsubscribe from competitors, is the business model.
From a consumer perspective, the only solution is to pressure those companies into abandoning a customer-hostile business model and force them into an interoperable model.
Funny how people without arguments still feel the need to post something, so they go and make it personal - against a person of whom they know two data points - an arbitrarily chosen name and a sequential number.
Come on, try harder. If you want to attack a person, you should at least aim in the general direction of an actual person, not a string and an int.
Even the trolls used to be better.
Don't tell him not to short! I rely on such idiots to sometimes drive the price down so I can snatch up a few more stocks below market value.
If you think that trying to punish them economically will crush them, remember that Russians managed the longest run of any Communist country and the self-inflicted economic misery it brings. They're too proud to capitulate to western demands and they've been through worse economically and within recent memory for many of their citizens. Open up markets to them and create better economic opportunity and many of them are likely to act on that. It won't eliminate the troll farms, but it will make them more expensive, or subject them to outsourcing.
Also remember that the West does not utterly dominate world trade anymore.
When European products disappeared from the shelves in Russia, there were empty shelves for a few weeks. Then they filled back up with asian products. A new trade deal was made with China. The rubel which had fallen to almost 1:100 to the Euro recovered back to 1:60 (the best course I remember is 1:45, so 1:60 is almost pre-sanction levels).
The sanctions harm Europe more than Russia. A lot of Greece farmers saw their exports disappear, a lot of German tech companies the same.
Because our perception of social disfunction is caused by disagreement over a movie.
And not, say, a broken healthcare system, a broken pension system, corrupt and stupid politicians, the church abusing small kids and then covering it up, the media actively, openly and much more aggressively reinforcing the split of society into camps, the economy being plundered by banks and the super-rich or everyone with a buck to make denying or opposing climate change.
Or any of the other issues of the day that nobody, least those whose fucking job it is, taking care of.
Sure, of all the real issues that divide and threaten society, a paid army of trolls picks movie reviews as their choice weapon to destabilise western society.
Obesity ?