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Sex and STEM: Stubborn Facts and Stubborn Ideologies

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Re: Sex and STEM: Stubborn Facts and Stubborn Ideologies

#101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facts are used as evidence, which he what he did. There's nothing wrong with that. If you have a better explanation then let's hear it but all you said was that you believe it's "probably socialized" based on what exactly? This article explains in great detail how that is not the case in any significance and there are even examples where men and women have been socialized oppositely and still end up choosing typical…

Just because you provide sources doesn't mean your sources are relevant to your argument or good sources. Go look at his memo. It is paragraph after paragraph with his beliefs on the matter and then a link to some source which you are supposed to check out. He often doesn't bother explaining how those sources are relevant. That's why it is bad. Just because you've got sources doesn't mean you are saying anything usef…

It's not a scientific paper, it was an internal memo shared with a few colleagues. Also that's how evidence works, you make a narrative and support it with references. What else would you do?

No society has lasted tens of thousands of years and many were in complete isolation which already says something about how the same roles formed again and again. Also we see the same thing in animals.

Re: Sex and STEM: Stubborn Facts and Stubborn Ideologies

#102
post #57

It’s important to investigate this topic from various perspectives, and the text contains a couple of important points (which of course are not new to anyone who’s been following this debate). However, right at the beginning, this is really a bad argument: “There is particular concern about the lack of women in prestigious STEM fields, such as Ph.D.-level faculty positions, but surprisingly there is no concern about…

> Thus gender imbalances [in lower-level technical jobs] don’t have the same supposed impact and perpetuating effect on structural imbalances as those in high-level fields . Others have commented in this thread how gender-biased attitudes towards engineering fields are present even in young children. There's an obvious connection between this and the fact that when you're a child most of the adults you met in your ev…

Or cool dude teaching them at school. More men at education -> more positions in tech for women. As well as more women looking for these positions.

Can't wait for the next campaign to make men 50:50 in kindergardens and schools!

Re: Sex and STEM: Stubborn Facts and Stubborn Ideologies

#103
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So it's normal and ok if being wrong got him fired? No matter, as that isn't what got him fired. He was fired because it's good optics in this climate. And I'm asserting the climate isn't good.

Does suggesting that feminism, the civil rights and the LGBT movement are actually jewish-marxists plots to destroy American capitalism in a memo about diversity you distribute at work count as "being wrong"? I mean it is wrong of course. It doesn't even make sense. Which gender Tim Cook prefers to see naked seems unrelated to running an efficient supply chain for one of the largest corporations on the planet. But ge…

He comes off as a reactionary, for sure. Before someone calls out you for strawmanning, he does go there:

Communism promised to be both morally and economically superior to capitalism, but every attempt became morally corrupt and an economic failure. As it became clear that the working class of the liberal democracies wasn’t going to overthrow their “capitalist oppressors,” the Marxist intellectuals transitioned from class warfare to gender and race politics. The core oppressor-oppressed dynamics remained, but now the oppressor is the “white, straight, cis-gendered patriarchy.”

His entire memo is a distillation of reactionary talking points. That overall impression rather than any single argument is probably what pissed off a lot of his coworkers because these battles are much older than him.

Re: Sex and STEM: Stubborn Facts and Stubborn Ideologies

#104
post #2

From my experience location dependence is the greatest obstacle for women to join high earning STEM jobs. With paygap women find it more difficult to live in expensive cities. Also remote work allows more life balance for care givers (who are mostly women). It should be seen as sexism, if company does not offer remote jobs.

Are you saying that men pay less for housing in the expensive cities?

Re: Sex and STEM: Stubborn Facts and Stubborn Ideologies

#105
post #98
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many girls decide at around age 12 that a better life strategy is for them to get a husband that will do all the heavy lifting. This obviously worked for thousands of years and is likely a result of evolution and specialization. I always admire when I meet an independent woman that rejected this conditioning but it's very rare :( Maybe there should be a better approach to early-teenage girls to help them to make a di…

Independent non-family women lead to less children. Thus society as a whole has motive to lead girls towards this specialization.

This could be the culprit - those women, that became independent removed themselves and their traits from genetic pool due to not having children or having fewer of them. That might also explain persistence of religions that emphasize sexual relationships for reproduction only and banning abortions, as it leads to higher probability of carrying on with one's genotype. So what we are observing could be some stochastic optimum in some game theory of natural conditions. A question is if our civilization that could seemingly solve cutthroat problems of the past leading to brutal competition like food scarcity will have completely different, stable stochastic optima. I guess we will see (or generations after us).

Re: Sex and STEM: Stubborn Facts and Stubborn Ideologies

#106
post #74

This is a "culture war" topic, let's prepare for the shitshow in the comments. I'd like to offer some advice to make things go a bit more smoothly. There's a widespread view that all beliefs are political, you can't be apolitical, and anyone arguing for a belief opposing yours must be an enemy. To me, that view is pretty much a type error. Beliefs are value-neutral. Only arguments for or against beliefs can be politi…

some arguments are rational while other arguments are political These attributes are mostly orthogonal though. Most evidence, even if conclusive, will show that certain approaches benefit one group more than some others. There is no such thing as purely evidence-based policy, because there is no agreement on what to optimize for. I think this whole evidence-based fad completely misses the point. It insinuates that th…

[deleted]

Re: Sex and STEM: Stubborn Facts and Stubborn Ideologies

#107
post #43

This is a "culture war" topic, let's prepare for the shitshow in the comments. I'd like to offer some advice to make things go a bit more smoothly. There's a widespread view that all beliefs are political, you can't be apolitical, and anyone arguing for a belief opposing yours must be an enemy. To me, that view is pretty much a type error. Beliefs are value-neutral. Only arguments for or against beliefs can be politi…

> Beliefs are value-neutral. Only arguments for or against beliefs can be political or not. I wonder why you didn't go a step further to postulate "only actions can be political or not". Of course argument is action, but it could be claimed that only argument qua action is political.

Because actions are downstream from beliefs, while arguments are upstream of beliefs. I prefer to fix bugs upstream.

Re: Sex and STEM: Stubborn Facts and Stubborn Ideologies

#108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just because you provide sources doesn't mean your sources are relevant to your argument or good sources. Go look at his memo. It is paragraph after paragraph with his beliefs on the matter and then a link to some source which you are supposed to check out. He often doesn't bother explaining how those sources are relevant. That's why it is bad. Just because you've got sources doesn't mean you are saying anything usef…

It's not a scientific paper, it was an internal memo shared with a few colleagues. Also that's how evidence works, you make a narrative and support it with references. What else would you do? No society has lasted tens of thousands of years and many were in complete isolation which already says something about how the same roles formed again and again. Also we see the same thing in animals.

[deleted]

Re: Sex and STEM: Stubborn Facts and Stubborn Ideologies

#109
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So it's normal and ok if being wrong got him fired? No matter, as that isn't what got him fired. He was fired because it's good optics in this climate. And I'm asserting the climate isn't good.

Does suggesting that feminism, the civil rights and the LGBT movement are actually jewish-marxists plots to destroy American capitalism in a memo about diversity you distribute at work count as "being wrong"? I mean it is wrong of course. It doesn't even make sense. Which gender Tim Cook prefers to see naked seems unrelated to running an efficient supply chain for one of the largest corporations on the planet. But ge…

I've never seen anyone interpret any of that. Also has nothing to do with civil rights but was talking about men and women liking different things, so forcing them in equal ratios does more harm than good.

What exactly didnt make sense to you with that?

Re: Sex and STEM: Stubborn Facts and Stubborn Ideologies

#110
post #36
post #26

This reminds me of something I was thinking about earlier today. It's well known that men generally are stagnating economically, while women are catching up. In many metro areas, single women out earn single men. And so I came across this paper[0], which had some interesting research about that. And what struck me was this: there's an explicit assumption that men have worse socio-emotional skills than women, and that…

Lest we forget, it isn't only charismatically-challenged unfortunates like Damore who get thrown under a tank for daring to speak 'out of turn' wrt the social justice narrative. Just two hours ago, I happened to re-read the various vicious hit pieces written about Paul Graham several years ago, after he had the gall to speak his mind about representation. These are the times. Everywhere I look online, it's men vs. wo…

This “war” has been going on for centuries. The difference is that white men were totally dominating it until recent times, and a lot of them really don’t like that they may need to adapt behavior. African Americans had a right side of the street to walk on within the last 2 generations, for risk of being lynched. You better believe they’ve been parsing every word out of their mouths, not for fear of being labeled a mean word, but for fear of being killed, or having their families killed.

The “freedom of speech”, or freedom to loudly espouse any idea, has only ever truly existed for some small segment of the population. And it’s never been a problem for any of these squalking idiots. Until now, go figure.

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