The expectation that a majority of people should change their behavior to accommodate a few is just as absurd as forcing the few to change their behavior. That's my point which apparently you couldn't see due to your white helm obstructing your vision.
Actually, what you seem to be saying is that those two propositions are not equally absurd -- that forcing the few to change their behavior is perfectly fine, and asking the majority to budge an inch is preposterous. Which is very convenient for you, since you happen to belong to that majority group. If I'm misunderstanding your position, please clarify.
This makes me realize another good retort: "Are you (the hiring manager) passionate about management?"
Are you always looking to drive the project to success? Do you know how to enable your team to meet expectations in a normal, 40-hour work week? Are you committed to professional development for your team members so they can chart their own courses for their careers? Do you consider offering average salary and benefits "not good enough?"
Or you really just asking for more from your people than you are willing to deliver yourself?
So what you are saying is let the minority of people be them selves while requiring the majority of people to change who they are to accommodate the minority.
Not exactly. Everyone is different from the group in some way. Everyone needs to adapt to fit in. Yet everyone is entitled to be himself. There are limits to how much we can ask people to change their behavior, but either 0% or 100% are unacceptable.
What I really think is that white males have to adapt to the workplace, too. Race and gender are far from the only factors that influence people's communication styles, work habits, mannerisms, and expectations. For some, the experience of having to conform is uncomfortable, and they resent it, and get aggressive and demand instead the world conform to them. Like you're doing. Where did you get so self-entitled?
For a person that seems to want gender equality you seem to be using a lot of gender stereotypes.
That's the risk one takes when answering a question like "what is the difference between women and men." I said I'm not an expert and only telling you what I remember experts saying. There is a subtle point, though, on which I want to insist: to say there is no difference between population A and population B is the same as saying population B must conform 100% to the expectations of population A. Leaving gender aside for a moment, I think we can agree that someone from a rural upbringing can be expected to be a little different from someone with an urbringing, or someone from the West Coast is probably a little different from someone from the East Coast. Americans who go to work in the UK often struggle to fit in due to cultural differences. I don't think it's insulting or denigrating or sterotyping to try to enumerate what those differences are.
The issue of women in STEM is just a sub-category of the broader issue of diversity in the workplace. It would be great if everyone could be themselves and not have their career suffer for it. I think you and I are coming from the same place on that point. All I'm trying to say is that everyone has to conform a little bit in order to succeed, and the greater the differences between an individual the norm of the group, the harder it is to conform.
That pressure is called life, in other fields women don't have problems competing and STEM fields are no different.
STEM is a little different in that the gender imbalance is stronger -- and that's only true in certain areas of STEM. Biology and neuroscience have more women than engineering.
The difference between you and I is that I think women are more then capable of succeeding with out everyone else stopping what they are doing to help a person that is more then capable of succeeding on their own.
I'm not saying that women need help, actually. I'm saying everyone needs to be judged objectively on performance, and there are unconscious biases that get in the way of that. The more homogeneous the workforce, the more persistent those biases are.
I once had the pleasure of working with a male intern from a certain country in sub-Saharan Africa. Great guy, smart, hard-working, fast learner, funny, and *extremely* polite. For one reason or another, he was very different in his mannerisms from the other males on the team. He was very passive, very deferential. If you gave him any criticism, including constructive criticism, he would avert his eyes and apologize. In order to advance in my workplace, he was sooner or later going to have to learn how to argue with his boss. When I knew him, he seemed a long way off from that point. But the expectation in my workplace was you have to stand up for yourself, and it was clear that in his background and upbringing, he'd not been taught how to do that.
If the attitude of my team had been, "fuck it, he has to act like everybody else because that's how we do it," I think he would have had a lousy internship. But instead what people did was recognize his differences and meet him halfway. Instead of expecting him to butt into a conversation, people would pause and ask him directly, "what do you think?" When he gave a presentation, people didn't interrupt, they held questions till the end. Over the few months he appeared to become more confident, at least more used to our styles of communication, and he fit in better.
That's an extreme example, but it's what I'm talking about. Let people be themselves and be willing to change our behavior a little to help them fit in.
You seem to think that all men are the same, that being a sociopath comes naturally to them, that working long hours and getting stressed is fun for them, that they don't want time with their families?
I can't imagine where you got that idea. It's kind of the opposite of what I think, actually. I guess you don't actually care what I meant, and would rather argue against some imaginary position you assign to me because it's easier to attack. Go play that game by yourself.
The research I've read indicates men are more overtly competitive, more direct in their speech and especially in how they give instructions and feedback, and are less sensitive to nonverbal cues than women. Men are inclined to see women as indecisive because they exhibit male dominance behaviors more weakly. But I'm not a psychologist, so unqualified to give a full answer. I believe the differences are cultural, not physiological, but that doesn't make them less real.
What is this pressure that forces women to think like men in the STEM fields?
Basically, the pressure to compete against male peers for job openings, promotion, and funding.
My point is not about whether women are "degraded," but how easily they fit in. Difficulty fitting in is bad for someone's job satisfaction, career growth, and professional network. Do you agree that women have a hard time fitting in to the IT workplace, or at least that if they did, that would be a problem?
Idk what you bring to the table with your argument other than the victim card.
That's because we're not communicating very successfully, yet. I chose to respond to your comment not because I want to argue with you in particular, but because I hear similar remarks quite often. I think your tone was nastier than it had to be, but ultimately the argument that women don't deserve special treatment is solid, at some level. It proceeds from a sense of fairness, and fairness is what this discussion of women in STEM is all about. So the discussion is, "what does fairness to women in STEM look like?" If we can figure that out, then we can maybe make adjustments in how we prepare women for STEM careers, or something.
The names you call me don't make me wrong. And you didn't respond to the question -- how would your career be affected if your work environment were more like your home environment?
I am a woman, therefore I deserve special treatment. All men have it easy because they are men.
Have you stopped to consider how your workplace and career would be different if all your instructors, colleagues, and entire management chain were women? And, every time you pointed out that you should not be expected to think and behave exactly like them, they mocked and derided you for "demanding special treatment?"
Umm, I doubt that. Every car I've ever owned, going back to 1990, has had all-season tires. The car I bought in North Carolina came with all-season tires. I am sure some companies still make specialized snow tires, but regular people in regular places (outside the mountains and south of Alaska) generally don't change their tires every winter like my parents used to. They don't have to.
However, even with all-season tires, I would have a tough time driving through 2-3 inches of slush and snow. The reason we Northerners think it's easy to drive in the snow is that the Highway Department makes sure there is never more than a quarter inch of the stuff on the actual road surface.
The articles are reposted from both the right and left points of view, and readers can at least get an occasional bit of perspective from "the other side".
The comments help with that, too. Especially when the commenters are willing to engage with people who disagree. That happens here more often than most places I've seen.
I don't think that represents the mentality of society as a whole. Just the media, because their financial incentive is to lock in an audience by tailoring their message.
The sooner we realize that's poison to civic discourse, the faster we'll get back on track to a functioning democracy.
Seems likely that this is the article. If so, I've only read the abstract so far, but TFS seems to misrepresent the authors' conclusion.
TFS claims:
the first Americans, who allegedly hunted them to extinction. But a new study points to climate and environmental changes instead.
whereas the abstract says:
Chronological data,Sporormiella abundance, genetics, and paleoclimatic data
suggest megafauna populations declined prior to human colonization and people were only briefly
contemporaneous with megafauna. Local Paleoindians may have only delivered the coup de grace to
small scattered and isolated populations of megafauna.
In other words, the authors are not saying humans were not involved in the extinctions. They are saying human predation cannot be the *sole* cause.
Unfortunately TFA is Slashdotted, so an informed discussion of the actual science will not happen today.
Before reading this study, I was learning heavily to the human-predation side of the debate, because as I understand it multiple climate zones of North America were affected simultaneously and over a very short time period that happens to coincide with the development of Clovis spearpoints.
No doubt the researchers have a rebuttal for this explanation, but like I said... it's slashdotted.
My understanding, and I'm not a lawyer (and if I were it would not make me automatically right), is that the restriction being applied to Coursera is export-control law. This is a set of laws that says you can't share details of certain technologies such as missiles, nuclear reactors and bombs, and even the advanced materials required to make such things, even though such information is not classified.
While it is possible that some of Coursera's subjects pertain to science and technology that falls under the ever-expanding scope of export-control law, it is hard to imagine how everything it teaches falls into applicable categories.
Like many laws, export-control laws seemed like a good idea at the time. Selling missile and bomb secrets during the Cold War would probably not have been good. And like many laws, some jackass with an axe to grind -- in this case someone who hates Iran, Syria, and Cuba -- has decided to use that law to shut down free speech and free commerce and, you know, freedom.
In my opinion, the world has changed in two ways since the law was passed. First, the Internet has made it basically impossible to stop the flow of information, so quit trying. Second, oppressive jackasses like the official who demanded Coursera block Iran and Syria are now the biggest threat to American freedom (in hindsight, they always were, which I thought is why we have a Bill of Rights). So both the law, and the people who are applying it, are stupid and need to be changed.
Seriously, a fancy jig to get just one nutrient back sounds like a money grab rather than a working whole system.
Sewage treatment plants are not the only application of the technology. In principle, if phosphorus can be recovered cheaply enough, it could be extracted from agricultural runoff before that runoff enters the ecosystem.
People have been complaining forever about Congress doing nothing about the NSA's egregious overreach. This is just a gesture, but it's a gesture in the right direction.
Best case, Obama ignores the letter, then Congress gets royally pissed off and does something with more teeth.
I was talking with my parents about what it was like growing up in rural America in the 1930s and 1940s. One of the things they said had changed a lot was how much they used to make for themselves, compared to today: made their own clothes, baked their own bread, everyone had a garden and canned their own vegetables, and so on.
Later generations have bought increasingly more stuff ready-made. When my kids go to college they will probably not even know how to cook unless they make a concerted effort to learn before then. This is a consequence of an expanding industrial base and a more efficient market. It's cheaper to buy things than to make them, if you place a monetary value on your time.
I would also point out that our standard of living is quite a bit higher than it was then. Cheap goods have their advantages.
The maker movement, it seems to me, is partly about reclaiming the ability to make things for yourself. It's asserting the idea that stuff you make yourself can be better suited to your needs that what the consumer-oriented mass market supplies.
I don't think it requires that everyone be able to do everything for himself. It encourages that everyone be able to do something for himself.
Well, the Feds needed another backdoor. That Fourth Amendment thing really gets in the way of building up an impressive arrest record and getting promoted. You can't play the terrorism card *all* the time. People might catch on.
Only if you accept that it's okay to toss the Constitution out the window any time "national security" is invoked. Granted that that is the position of the current (and last several) administrations, but that doesn't mean it's true.
Right, though I'd add it's not only the administration that takes that position. Congress and the courts have been willing accomplices, and an alarming number of ordinary citizens think "national security" is more important than "civil liberties." What should and should not be justified under the rubric of "national security" is still a separate discussion from the scope under which that rubric applies.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, what you seem to be saying is that those two propositions are not equally absurd -- that forcing the few to change their behavior is perfectly fine, and asking the majority to budge an inch is preposterous. Which is very convenient for you, since you happen to belong to that majority group. If I'm misunderstanding your position, please clarify.
This makes me realize another good retort: "Are you (the hiring manager) passionate about management?"
Are you always looking to drive the project to success? Do you know how to enable your team to meet expectations in a normal, 40-hour work week? Are you committed to professional development for your team members so they can chart their own courses for their careers? Do you consider offering average salary and benefits "not good enough?"
Or you really just asking for more from your people than you are willing to deliver yourself?
Not exactly. Everyone is different from the group in some way. Everyone needs to adapt to fit in. Yet everyone is entitled to be himself. There are limits to how much we can ask people to change their behavior, but either 0% or 100% are unacceptable.
What I really think is that white males have to adapt to the workplace, too. Race and gender are far from the only factors that influence people's communication styles, work habits, mannerisms, and expectations. For some, the experience of having to conform is uncomfortable, and they resent it, and get aggressive and demand instead the world conform to them. Like you're doing. Where did you get so self-entitled?
That's the risk one takes when answering a question like "what is the difference between women and men." I said I'm not an expert and only telling you what I remember experts saying. There is a subtle point, though, on which I want to insist: to say there is no difference between population A and population B is the same as saying population B must conform 100% to the expectations of population A. Leaving gender aside for a moment, I think we can agree that someone from a rural upbringing can be expected to be a little different from someone with an urbringing, or someone from the West Coast is probably a little different from someone from the East Coast. Americans who go to work in the UK often struggle to fit in due to cultural differences. I don't think it's insulting or denigrating or sterotyping to try to enumerate what those differences are.
The issue of women in STEM is just a sub-category of the broader issue of diversity in the workplace. It would be great if everyone could be themselves and not have their career suffer for it. I think you and I are coming from the same place on that point. All I'm trying to say is that everyone has to conform a little bit in order to succeed, and the greater the differences between an individual the norm of the group, the harder it is to conform.
STEM is a little different in that the gender imbalance is stronger -- and that's only true in certain areas of STEM. Biology and neuroscience have more women than engineering.
I'm not saying that women need help, actually. I'm saying everyone needs to be judged objectively on performance, and there are unconscious biases that get in the way of that. The more homogeneous the workforce, the more persistent those biases are.
I once had the pleasure of working with a male intern from a certain country in sub-Saharan Africa. Great guy, smart, hard-working, fast learner, funny, and *extremely* polite. For one reason or another, he was very different in his mannerisms from the other males on the team. He was very passive, very deferential. If you gave him any criticism, including constructive criticism, he would avert his eyes and apologize. In order to advance in my workplace, he was sooner or later going to have to learn how to argue with his boss. When I knew him, he seemed a long way off from that point. But the expectation in my workplace was you have to stand up for yourself, and it was clear that in his background and upbringing, he'd not been taught how to do that.
If the attitude of my team had been, "fuck it, he has to act like everybody else because that's how we do it," I think he would have had a lousy internship. But instead what people did was recognize his differences and meet him halfway. Instead of expecting him to butt into a conversation, people would pause and ask him directly, "what do you think?" When he gave a presentation, people didn't interrupt, they held questions till the end. Over the few months he appeared to become more confident, at least more used to our styles of communication, and he fit in better.
That's an extreme example, but it's what I'm talking about. Let people be themselves and be willing to change our behavior a little to help them fit in.
Be careful what you wish for.
I can't imagine where you got that idea. It's kind of the opposite of what I think, actually. I guess you don't actually care what I meant, and would rather argue against some imaginary position you assign to me because it's easier to attack. Go play that game by yourself.
The research I've read indicates men are more overtly competitive, more direct in their speech and especially in how they give instructions and feedback, and are less sensitive to nonverbal cues than women. Men are inclined to see women as indecisive because they exhibit male dominance behaviors more weakly. But I'm not a psychologist, so unqualified to give a full answer. I believe the differences are cultural, not physiological, but that doesn't make them less real.
Basically, the pressure to compete against male peers for job openings, promotion, and funding.
That's because we're not communicating very successfully, yet. I chose to respond to your comment not because I want to argue with you in particular, but because I hear similar remarks quite often. I think your tone was nastier than it had to be, but ultimately the argument that women don't deserve special treatment is solid, at some level. It proceeds from a sense of fairness, and fairness is what this discussion of women in STEM is all about. So the discussion is, "what does fairness to women in STEM look like?" If we can figure that out, then we can maybe make adjustments in how we prepare women for STEM careers, or something.
The names you call me don't make me wrong. And you didn't respond to the question -- how would your career be affected if your work environment were more like your home environment?
Have you stopped to consider how your workplace and career would be different if all your instructors, colleagues, and entire management chain were women? And, every time you pointed out that you should not be expected to think and behave exactly like them, they mocked and derided you for "demanding special treatment?"
Umm, I doubt that. Every car I've ever owned, going back to 1990, has had all-season tires. The car I bought in North Carolina came with all-season tires. I am sure some companies still make specialized snow tires, but regular people in regular places (outside the mountains and south of Alaska) generally don't change their tires every winter like my parents used to. They don't have to.
However, even with all-season tires, I would have a tough time driving through 2-3 inches of slush and snow. The reason we Northerners think it's easy to drive in the snow is that the Highway Department makes sure there is never more than a quarter inch of the stuff on the actual road surface.
That's the first time I have heard a right-winger try to claim the word "liberal" for himself instead of using it as an epithet.
The comments help with that, too. Especially when the commenters are willing to engage with people who disagree. That happens here more often than most places I've seen.
I don't think that represents the mentality of society as a whole. Just the media, because their financial incentive is to lock in an audience by tailoring their message.
The sooner we realize that's poison to civic discourse, the faster we'll get back on track to a functioning democracy.
Seems likely that this is the article. If so, I've only read the abstract so far, but TFS seems to misrepresent the authors' conclusion.
TFS claims:
whereas the abstract says:
In other words, the authors are not saying humans were not involved in the extinctions. They are saying human predation cannot be the *sole* cause.
Unfortunately TFA is Slashdotted, so an informed discussion of the actual science will not happen today.
Before reading this study, I was learning heavily to the human-predation side of the debate, because as I understand it multiple climate zones of North America were affected simultaneously and over a very short time period that happens to coincide with the development of Clovis spearpoints.
No doubt the researchers have a rebuttal for this explanation, but like I said ... it's slashdotted.
My understanding, and I'm not a lawyer (and if I were it would not make me automatically right), is that the restriction being applied to Coursera is export-control law. This is a set of laws that says you can't share details of certain technologies such as missiles, nuclear reactors and bombs, and even the advanced materials required to make such things, even though such information is not classified.
While it is possible that some of Coursera's subjects pertain to science and technology that falls under the ever-expanding scope of export-control law, it is hard to imagine how everything it teaches falls into applicable categories.
Like many laws, export-control laws seemed like a good idea at the time. Selling missile and bomb secrets during the Cold War would probably not have been good. And like many laws, some jackass with an axe to grind -- in this case someone who hates Iran, Syria, and Cuba -- has decided to use that law to shut down free speech and free commerce and, you know, freedom.
In my opinion, the world has changed in two ways since the law was passed. First, the Internet has made it basically impossible to stop the flow of information, so quit trying. Second, oppressive jackasses like the official who demanded Coursera block Iran and Syria are now the biggest threat to American freedom (in hindsight, they always were, which I thought is why we have a Bill of Rights). So both the law, and the people who are applying it, are stupid and need to be changed.
And the right to due process. It's hard to contest a demand for records when that demand is accompanied by a gag order.
Sewage treatment plants are not the only application of the technology. In principle, if phosphorus can be recovered cheaply enough, it could be extracted from agricultural runoff before that runoff enters the ecosystem.
People have been complaining forever about Congress doing nothing about the NSA's egregious overreach. This is just a gesture, but it's a gesture in the right direction.
Best case, Obama ignores the letter, then Congress gets royally pissed off and does something with more teeth.
Correction: I'm on the side you *claim to be on*.
I was talking with my parents about what it was like growing up in rural America in the 1930s and 1940s. One of the things they said had changed a lot was how much they used to make for themselves, compared to today: made their own clothes, baked their own bread, everyone had a garden and canned their own vegetables, and so on.
Later generations have bought increasingly more stuff ready-made. When my kids go to college they will probably not even know how to cook unless they make a concerted effort to learn before then. This is a consequence of an expanding industrial base and a more efficient market. It's cheaper to buy things than to make them, if you place a monetary value on your time.
I would also point out that our standard of living is quite a bit higher than it was then. Cheap goods have their advantages.
The maker movement, it seems to me, is partly about reclaiming the ability to make things for yourself. It's asserting the idea that stuff you make yourself can be better suited to your needs that what the consumer-oriented mass market supplies.
I don't think it requires that everyone be able to do everything for himself. It encourages that everyone be able to do something for himself.
Well, the Feds needed another backdoor. That Fourth Amendment thing really gets in the way of building up an impressive arrest record and getting promoted. You can't play the terrorism card *all* the time. People might catch on.
Maybe that's just an extraordinarily low bar.
Right, though I'd add it's not only the administration that takes that position. Congress and the courts have been willing accomplices, and an alarming number of ordinary citizens think "national security" is more important than "civil liberties." What should and should not be justified under the rubric of "national security" is still a separate discussion from the scope under which that rubric applies.