141–144 of 144 posts
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Does it matter where the monopoly came from? Honest question, I’m genuinely unsure myself
Easy answer: yes it does. Think of something else like monopoly: money. Does it matter where your money came from? A drug network killing teenagers across the country or selling iphones to rich people. One makes you a criminal, the other makes you Steve Jobs.
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And, to be clear, my point isn’t that you should just trust me but that to a first approximation the average person has no way to distinguish between two random people on the internet. Telling them to do more work seems futile since nobody has time to do that for more than a small number of topics in the news.
I think both of you guys are partially correct, which was my original point. I never said the Google guy was correct or wrong. In fact, parts of it makes sense and parts of it doesn't. What irritates me is that people are making a huge fallacy. For example two people can have a whole set of arguments that conflict with one another. Let's assume we can absolutely measure whether a statement is absolutely correct or no…
Giving someone like that your attention is simply increasing the distraction level. It would be much better to get someone qualified — in this case, say, a neuroscientist or cognitive psychologist — who can do a better job representing that position.
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> Manifesto Guy was backed up by actual scientists who spoke out to say he'd got the science right, he provided many citations of scientific papers, Thanks for inadvertently providing a great example for why this is so hard: what you said is wrong but recognizing that requires time – simply reading that turgid slog of an essay, recognizing the difference between a blog post or option piece (i.e. most of his citations…
No, it wasn't wrong. I studied psychology myself years before the Google blowup and similar studies were in the course. The idea that there are biological differences that cause differences in interest is entirely uncontroversial and frankly also common sense. Alternative explanations for why girls don't study computer science are all absurd. But it's clear that we've reached a point where agreeing on basic scientifi…
Defining your personal political viewpoints as “basic scientific facts” is why you're having such a hard time understanding this.
Should you want to talk about science, here would be a few places you could start:
1. What is Damore's thesis, anyway? Simply extracting a coherent theory from that essay would be good for making sure you're talking about the same thing as everyone else.
2. What data supports that position? (Peer-reviewed journals, not “frankly also common sense”)
3. How can you test that theory against the data? In particular, actual science is falsifiable and it'd be really important to find ways a speculative theory could be disproven.
For example, if I'm reading “The idea that there are biological differences that cause differences in interest is entirely uncontroversial and frankly also common sense. Alternative explanations for why girls don't study computer science are all absurd.” correctly, you're making a broad claim that differences in the current makeup of CS participation can be explained by biology.
Looking at that like a scientist rather than a fundamental would reveal a few things to test:
1. Has it always been like that? 2. Is it like that in similar fields? 3. Is it like that in other cultures? 4. What skills could explain that gap? 5. Are there reliably measured differences in those skills? 6. Can we measure a difference in performance in those skills due to biological differences as opposed to socialization and practice?
https://www.nsf.gov/statistics/nsf13327/content.cfm?pub_id=4... shows a big problem for a biological claim since the big drop in CS participation from the mid-80s onward is orders of magnitude too rapid to be explained by evolution, and since that trend has not been present in other demanding fields we'd need an explanation for while e.g. CS is so much more specialized than medicine, math, chemical engineering, etc.
Similarly, actual studies have shown that e.g. mathematical skills are extremely close (http://psycnet.apa.org/record/2010-22162-004) so you're left needing to demonstrate that CS is so highly dependent on specific skill performance that anyone not performing at the extreme upper bound of the distribution cannot compete. This is especially unlikely when looking at the larger software engineering field given how multidisciplinary that is.
Finally, we'd be left needing to demonstrate that these unspecified critically important skills are actually innately determined rather than the product of practice. Simply linking e.g. the ability to rotate 3D models mentally would require more work to tell you whether that was innate or simply an uneven distribution of people who'd previously practiced that skill.
> You even called it a "turgid slog of an essay", well revealing that you can't even separate the quality of writing from the ideas a piece of writing expounds.
Or, if you care about the real answer, that it's merely the latest in a long line of people jumping into a long-running debate without having done their homework and being surprised when “You're wrong and I'm right” doesn't get more respect. It's like coming into a discussion of evolutionary biology and going “Hey, have you ever thought about how this violates the 2nd law of thermodynamics?” like you're the first person who's ever had that idea.