Shubley

So is the lock on your front door.

As far as I'm concerned, diversity for the sake of diversity is a noble goal.

Diversity of what?

Age? Political stance? Language? Accent? Socioeconomic status? Wealth? Religion? Food preference? IQ? Personality traits?

Or - none of the above? How do you choose which are important and which aren't? Or which come before the others? Do you dump a Catholic man to get another atheist who happens to be a woman? How do you choose between a Francophone young man, and an anglophone old man?

Or maybe it would be good to view individuals as individuals and not pre-judge people based on their DNA?

I work in conditions very similar to what he mentioned.

I work with several people remotely, have for months, have made paying projects, haven't heard their voices ever (or even seen photos of them in some cases).

Thinking on it, in some cases I literally don't know the person's ethnic background. One of my guys could be black or white or Indian and I wouldn't know. Even his name is a strange three-letter thing I haven't heard before. Huh.

So yeah, you can work like this.

The Soviet pattern is reproduced today in places like Iran, where many more women study engineering.

Meanwhile, in Scandinavia, the traditionally-female professions like nursing are even more female-dominated than in the USA.

The trend seems to be: The freer the society, the less women are entering the tech workforce and the more they choose traditionally feminine work.

This even applies in the time-trend in America, where women in tech has reduced significantly since the 80's, while feminism has only become more dominant and wealth has increased.

Food for thought.

There is no way to measure (or even define?) "benefiting the field".

For example, women leave the workforce earlier and more often. So we now get less work years per education year in these fields. Benefit? Not from the POV of the person paying for all this education and these services.

I think what you said about height might be a bit off since you're dismissing the possibility that tall people actually are better at their jobs.

E.g. looks and facial symmetry both correlate with fertility and IQ, probably through the mechanism of mutational load. So you could say, "good looking people make more money" as an example here, but the effect could be from IQ because they actually do go together.

The same could be happening for height. This may be the reason people instinctively are attracted to tall people.

Let's compare this to height as you did.

Because of how gaussian distributions work, the differences at the outlying values are huge even for small differences in the average.

For example, men are taller than women in general, but of course some men are taller than some women.

But at the extreme heights, the ratio between men and women becomes stagger. At 6 feet tall, men outnumber women 30:1. At 6'3", 2000:1.

Now apply this to tech. If we imagine a relatively elite job, like being a professional programmer with significant responsibility, that is the kind of thing only someone at the extreme end of the bell curve of tech-proclivity is going to do. But because of the way gaussians work at extreme values, even if women on average have similar tech-proclivity to men, at that high level the ratio of men:women could be huge.

All this could just be due to a simple misunderstanding of the math of a bell curve distribution and how it works at the ends of the spectrum.

Not really; I've got a multimillion dollar company started with personal savings.

And even leaving aside companies - it doesn't cost anything to contribute to FOSS projects.

People don't give (or often even know) the real reasons they do things.

Steeped in a culture of sexism accusations, it's not surprising that you'd hear reports of sexism from women leaving the industry.

A man doing the exact same thing (and many men do leave tech) would say their boss was an asshole, or they hated the hours, or whatever. Women are prodded and trained to interpret exactly the same circumstances as sexism.

Of course this doesn't mean there isn't sexism. But it does mean that you can't just "figure out the reason that they left by asking them".

You're mind reading the worst possible intentions.

This is the exact opposite of the principle of charity.

Why insist on mind reading evil from people who vehemently state other ideals?

By your mindset, you'd mind read Churchill and FDR - the defeaters of Nazis - as Nazis themselves.

Similarly, we could mind read leftist parties as a having the real goal of dissolving and erasing the white race. And your political mirrors do this.

Or you'd see BLM as a black supremacist movement.

Double standards.

Land really isn't that valuable. You can build a great country without it. See Israel or Japan or SK or HK or Singapore.

Its the people and way of life that matter. Primary resources can be bought.

In fact land can be a hindrance when it induces Dutch Disease.

The slave holding states are now the poorest and were under-industrialized even during the Civil war.

The correlation between historical slavery and industrialization/modern wealth is negative.

Not really difficult to disentangle.

And theres Canada.

Absolutely people should be allowed to say what they want without consequences.

That's what freedom means. It means freedom from consequences. If there are heavy consequences, you don't have freedom. Otherwise you can say that North Koreans have freedom of speech too - they just have to deal with the "consequences".

This "freedom from speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences" thing is so patently bizarre.

What the heck can "freedom" possibly mean besides freedom from consequences?

Wouldn't it be a lot more feasible to just make the datacenter on the shore and make a liquid coolant loop that cools in the water?

Like the Toronto office towers.

I used to think that way but over time I've moved much more toward the conclusion that the great mass of people really are not mentally prepared to make decisions in a modern idea marketplace.

Working through the haze of media manipulation is an extremely complex task. It requires a ton of interest, time, effort education, IQ and mental discipline. Most people don't have a chance to resist society-wide campaign of lies; they're absurdly outmatched.

This is the same reason we have enforced pension plans, etc. You could just say people should save their own money. That would work fine for me and you. But most people just don't have the mental context to delay gratification that long. Their brains are not adapted and not equipped for the modern world.

So it's wrong to feed them socially-destructive lies, for the same reason it's wrong to feed a dog well-labeled poisonous meat.

Parent is not complaining about how FB affects him personally and directly, but about how it is affecting society.

Perhaps you have the mental context and farsightedness to just not log on. But, you still have to deal with the large scale socio-political consequences of the fact that billions of others can't resist logging on, can't resist the clickbait, or don't understand why they should.

Even more so given that the people involved in Gamergate are young people forming political views that they'll hold for a long time.

When a young person develops a view that "the media lie constantly and see you as an enemy if you disagree about any tiny thing", that can bed in and last a long time through someone's life. Once trust is gone like that, how can the media redeem itself with someone?

I think this is going to have very long-reaching consequences, decades into the future. There is a growing, persistent constituency of young people who are richly informed by alternative information sources (youtube, online communities, personal experience) whose first exposure to mainstream media is to learn that they're self-indulgent, lying, moralizing bullies.

This is still going on today. See the recent saga with PewDiePie being slagged as a neo-nazi. His response video has 12M views, a lot of those are 13-16 year olds learning to never trust the media, especially when they call people racist.

It's like when you yourself are involved in something and see it grossly, maliciously misrepresented in media. You lose trust in media that way. Gamergate was basically that happening with thousands of people, because all of them had personal experience with gaming and knew how it actually works.

Let's also not forget ageism, heightism, voice-ism (positive affect of rich voices).

That's actually a good point. Everyone is incompetent; we just don't have a way of filtering that in our leaders. Possibly because the people selecting those leaders are incompetent too. It's incompetence all the way down.

I'm sorry but this is pure myth. There has never been a human society where primary political/executive power was vested in women, except some developed and recent examples.

The idea of tribes controlled by women just never happened; not once. It's wishful revisionism motivated by modern politics.

Pinker discusses this a bit in this speech https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n691pLhQBkw

And of course other have noted the male dominance in pretty much all the similar primate species. Human are brute animals, nothing more.

And no, just because (pre)historically it was this way doesn't mean I'm saying it ought to be this way everywhere and forever. Natural != ideal.

Who says it's a noisy minority? I'm not talking about extremist actions like pulling fire alarms at university talks.

I'm talking about really basic things, like campaigning for more women to enter university (and not more men) despite the fact that women already greatly outnumber men in university. This isn't a fringe thing, it's core mainstream feminism. And it's exactly the opposite of "pushing for equality".

(You're right about Kim. Instead of writing his name, I should've written "North Korean government/society", to clarify that I'm talking about these groups and highlighting the gap between their stated principles and their actual actions.)

Ah, the old, "We can't say X about this group because doesn't apply to every single member" fallacy?

Of course we know you don't believe that, otherwise you'd be unable to have any opinion about any large social group (which would make it impossible to be a feminist, for example).

I only ask that you apply a single standard to your beliefs, instead of "general trends OK" for things you want to believe, and "one exception disproves any general statement" for things you want to disbelieve.

Having visited China, I can assure that it does exist.

As for 'generations behind', this is the whole point and the linchpin of global military stability.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham_T._Allison#Thucydides_T...

A movement is defined by what it does, not by the image it puts up when people question it.

The trick of throwing up a super-acceptable cover story when questioned, while returning to hate-oriented attack patterns when secure, is called the "motte and bailey doctrine":

http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/03/all-in-all-another-bric...

You can't just believe every movement is what they say. Otherwise we might as well say Kim Jong Un is a champion of economic equality, and Mexican drug cartels are brave militias defending the people.

A quantitative analysis reveals that immigrants, even illegal ones, tend to commit fewer crimes on a per-capita basis than their legal neighbors

I'd be interested in the source on that. I'm also curious if they're taking a blanket average, or if they account for the fact that a huge proportion of American crime occurs within a few square miles of blighted urban terrain in Chicago, DC, LA and Baltimore. For most people, such 'average' crime stats are irrelevant in the same way that skydiving death stats are irrelevant to someone who never skydives.

we are emotional animals and emotional experience matters too.

But which emotional experience matters?

There are millions of relevant emotional experiences being had. You can't relate to all of them on an emotional level. So, the only question becomes which emotional experiences you choose to privilege above all the others and synchronize your own emotions to.

As parent indicated, this ultimately means surrendering your own motivational choices to whoever has the power to put emotional imagery in front of your monkey brain.

You become a slave to power, used to fulfill the goals of others, tugged blindly toward the beliefs they choose by the leash of your own pathological empathy.

Stalingrad and Leningrad are not good examples. They both had other names before the Soviets did exactly what you're advocating and swept away history to make way for their new era of equality.

Bear in mind that this is contemporary writing. They likely wrote it in such a way with the goal of forming this comparison in your mind.

I think one needs to look at older writings to get a take that isn't designed to reinforce the constructed media narrative du jour.

Even then its hard to get decent info on this topic because its always been so morally charged. Nothing obscures reality worse than moral concerns.

Edit: I think you can also apply that description to several parties in the modern media environment.

The thing is, in a lot of ways those gender roles actually are universal. Not among individuals, of course, but among societies, there are no exceptions to these:

"M&F seen as having different natures" "F->M direct child care" "M->F more competitive" "M->F greater spatial range" etc

Steven Pinker talks about this (and much else) in this speech. Skip to 26:56 for this particular point. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n691pLhQBkw

An objective truth doesn't have to apply to every individual without exception, to be an objective truth. It just has to be a consistent trend. So M/F differences like the above really are objective truths, the same as "men are taller than women" or "cougars are more dangerous than goats".

(edit: this is not to say anything prescriptive about what ought to be done; it's simply a descriptive statement. Of course Pinker covers all this ground; I recommend the whole talk)