The fact is, as you've pointed out, that people naturally have different preferences. However, those preferences are at the same time shaped by one's cultural surrounding -- nature versus nurture. If one's culture explicitly discriminates who can do what based on traits that are unrelated to natural preference and competence, then the participation rates you claim to be evidence of preference are fundamentally unnatural.
This is not hard to understand.
Many people do in fact experience such discrimination. The effect of this discrimination is unknown, but that is the whole point of being open to understanding these issues. While there is no such thing as solving discrimination (because of the imperfect nature of humans), investigating these issues may in fact lead to better matching of individuals to productive and preferred roles in society.
There is just as much overhead cost for a black history major as there is for a math major.
This may be true for math. This is definitely not true for other engineering majors. One component (though perhaps not as substantial of a part of the overhead as one would think) is the difference in salaries for instructors and professors in engineering majors. Engineering professors typically make 30%-40% more than their equivalent counterparts in other departments.
But if they tax all and then decide afterwards which programs get the money collected based on political pressure we'll end up with a bunch of "coal science" programs and black history graduates.
I have absolutely no idea who you are, so I hope this comes across only as gentle advice. I strongly suggest that you do not single out black history out of the variety of cultural histories (or just history in general) as an exemplar of a worthless major. There is no technical approach that can demonstrate that black history is worthless and given the sensitivity around black culture (FYI, I am black) you just can't win making a statement like this one. Of course that is, unless, your goal is to divide opinion versus making an educated technical argument.
This sort of awareness is the problem with the tech community. The rest of your post has a very reasoned solution. In fact, I would say you sound like a very sharp guy, perhaps even a technical badass. However, the only other community where badassery clearly trumps politics is finance. Nobody likes finance. Without a nurturing connection to society and its current non-technical concerns (no matter how irrelevant they may seem), finance has been relegated to ruining the world by working on problems that people have decided have no societal value. The tech community's path to maximum impact includes at least some basic understanding of how people from different cultures perceive our culture and changing our attitudes about statements like this would be a step in the right direction.
This has already been done, see Microsoft Research.
MSR has received some serious scorn from traditional academics, especially in the systems and programming languages communities because, frankly, they are wildly successful in both scale (# of publications) and impact (they have produced some popular research and industry tools).
The reason why is because they have more people, more money, and more time (no need to teach). The one thing they are missing is sustained cheap labor: students (read interns) typically spend no more than 3 months on a project.
Only 4 GB of RAM for the Air? Even your bottom-barrel throwaway laptop from Walmart tends to have at least 4 GB of RAM, let alone a laptop you're going to be paying $1K for.
What? Thrun didn't even go to Stanford until 2003. Not to knock Thrun, but to suggest that the department hadn't already gone down that path is
an insult to quite a few equally amazing professors in the department who had been doing statistical methods before this arrival.
You are right. Entities can't cooperate without shared communication. And communication between entities is only as secure as the communication contract between them. Hence, it is entirely plausible for a hacker to compromise one entity and use its communication contract to compromise another entity--IF the contract allows for it.
For instance, the contract could still certainly allow an entity to pass arbitrary pieces of code for another entity to run or allow an entity to change an arbitrary memory location in another, but this would either be a design decision (and a poor one at that) or due to a vulnerability in the implementation of the communication contract. Address space isolation removes from the communication contract the ability to twiddle any/all of another entity's bits modulo the explicit implementation of this capability or vulnerabilities in the communication contract. The latter is certainly a concern, but now our trusted base is reduced to the design and implementation of the communication contract as opposed to the sum of functionality in both entities.
Address-space isolation for reliability and security is at least as old as Mach (25 years?) and it only claims to be more secure and not a panacea.
Slashdot Mirror
Or perhaps because women who have wanted to work in health or flight have been historically relegated to secondary roles.
Even with a cursory Google search you could read up and inform yourself about actual examples and why anti-discrimination laws we created (from 1971 no less!): http://scholarship.law.berkeley.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2664&context=californialawreview
The fact is, as you've pointed out, that people naturally have different preferences. However, those preferences are at the same time shaped by one's cultural surrounding -- nature versus nurture. If one's culture explicitly discriminates who can do what based on traits that are unrelated to natural preference and competence, then the participation rates you claim to be evidence of preference are fundamentally unnatural.
This is not hard to understand.
Many people do in fact experience such discrimination. The effect of this discrimination is unknown, but that is the whole point of being open to understanding these issues. While there is no such thing as solving discrimination (because of the imperfect nature of humans), investigating these issues may in fact lead to better matching of individuals to productive and preferred roles in society.
That would be a net gain for society.
There is just as much overhead cost for a black history major as there is for a math major.
This may be true for math. This is definitely not true for other engineering majors. One component (though perhaps not as substantial of a part of the overhead as one would think) is the difference in salaries for instructors and professors in engineering majors. Engineering professors typically make 30%-40% more than their equivalent counterparts in other departments.
But if they tax all and then decide afterwards which programs get the money collected based on political pressure we'll end up with a bunch of "coal science" programs and black history graduates.
I have absolutely no idea who you are, so I hope this comes across only as gentle advice. I strongly suggest that you do not single out black history out of the variety of cultural histories (or just history in general) as an exemplar of a worthless major. There is no technical approach that can demonstrate that black history is worthless and given the sensitivity around black culture (FYI, I am black) you just can't win making a statement like this one. Of course that is, unless, your goal is to divide opinion versus making an educated technical argument.
This sort of awareness is the problem with the tech community. The rest of your post has a very reasoned solution. In fact, I would say you sound like a very sharp guy, perhaps even a technical badass. However, the only other community where badassery clearly trumps politics is finance. Nobody likes finance. Without a nurturing connection to society and its current non-technical concerns (no matter how irrelevant they may seem), finance has been relegated to ruining the world by working on problems that people have decided have no societal value. The tech community's path to maximum impact includes at least some basic understanding of how people from different cultures perceive our culture and changing our attitudes about statements like this would be a step in the right direction.
This has already been done, see Microsoft Research. MSR has received some serious scorn from traditional academics, especially in the systems and programming languages communities because, frankly, they are wildly successful in both scale (# of publications) and impact (they have produced some popular research and industry tools). The reason why is because they have more people, more money, and more time (no need to teach). The one thing they are missing is sustained cheap labor: students (read interns) typically spend no more than 3 months on a project.
Only 4 GB of RAM for the Air? Even your bottom-barrel throwaway laptop from Walmart tends to have at least 4 GB of RAM, let alone a laptop you're going to be paying $1K for.
It also comes in a configuration with 8GB.
What? Thrun didn't even go to Stanford until 2003. Not to knock Thrun, but to suggest that the department hadn't already gone down that path is an insult to quite a few equally amazing professors in the department who had been doing statistical methods before this arrival.
You are right. Entities can't cooperate without shared communication. And communication between entities is only as secure as the communication contract between them. Hence, it is entirely plausible for a hacker to compromise one entity and use its communication contract to compromise another entity--IF the contract allows for it.
For instance, the contract could still certainly allow an entity to pass arbitrary pieces of code for another entity to run or allow an entity to change an arbitrary memory location in another, but this would either be a design decision (and a poor one at that) or due to a vulnerability in the implementation of the communication contract. Address space isolation removes from the communication contract the ability to twiddle any/all of another entity's bits modulo the explicit implementation of this capability or vulnerabilities in the communication contract. The latter is certainly a concern, but now our trusted base is reduced to the design and implementation of the communication contract as opposed to the sum of functionality in both entities.
Address-space isolation for reliability and security is at least as old as Mach (25 years?) and it only claims to be more secure and not a panacea.
oops. posted anonymously