PSF has withdrawn $1.5M proposal to US Government grant program

The PSF itself is an activist pro-DEI/partisan organization. If US federal money is going to go to an activist organization no matter what, I would prefer that it does to one that denounces DEI rather than supports it.

> one piece of evidence I find very convincing is the observation that non-human primates exhibit the same sorts of gendered behavior with toys that human children do (females wanting to treat any kind of toy as a doll, males wanting to treat any kind of toy as a tool, etc.).

This is actually why I don’t think the differences are mostly social: there’s a lot of evo-psych speculation which gets widely referenced in casual discussion but when you look at the details turns out to be much weaker. For example, that famous Hines 2002 study about vervet monkey toy preference relied on grouping toys into categories based on human leanings: a police car was masculine while a cooking pot feminine despite no vervet monkey ever associating a pot with mother’s home cooking, and the effect went away when they used other groupings (e.g. animate or inanimate objects).

What’s especially missing in these cases are controlling for social differences (e.g. any claims about women being innately worse at engineering need to center an explanation for the much lower gap in Soviet states which made an effort for gender neutrality) and attempting to explain how very complex behaviors reduce to the trait being studied. For example, a male vervet monkey preferring a police car to a cooking pot is a considerable remove from a Google software engineer or CS degree and there is usually an enormous amount of hand-waving trying to connect the two.

When I worked for a neuroscience lab years ago, this came up in conversation a bit and basically everyone thought there were innate cognitive differences but that they’d be low-level and relatively small: e.g. testosterone makes a big difference for things like grip strength and there are clearly low level anatomical differences but higher-level cognitive abilities depend on many factors and the unusual plasticity of our brains is an enormous confound. This gets harder the more advanced the skill you’re talking about: e.g. a question like whether a group of boys performed better at 3-D rotations is due to biology or because they’ve been encouraged to play with building toys and games is a already a hard research topic but looking at things like success as an engineer or scientist is orders of magnitude harder because it combines a range of different skills and the metrics are harder to quantify.

> This is actually why I don’t think the differences are mostly social: there’s a lot of evo-psych speculation which gets widely referenced in casual discussion but when you look at the details turns out to be much weaker. For example, that famous Hines 2002 study about vervet monkey toy preference relied on grouping toys into categories based on human leanings: a police car was masculine while a cooking pot feminine despite no vervet monkey ever associating a pot with mother’s home cooking, and the effect went away when they used other groupings (e.g. animate or inanimate objects).

It's certainly possible that particular study had limitations or was otherwise bad. This is a hard thing to study rigorously. My understanding wasn't that the primates were choosing toys based on gender association in (some) human societies, it's that they were playing with the same physical objects in gendered ways. And this is consistent with the anecdotal observation about human children I've heard from many parents that girls like to play with any toy as if it is a doll whereas boys like to play with any toy as if it is a tool or a gun; girls being given toy cars and then tucking them into a toy bed as if they were a doll, etc.

> What’s especially missing in these cases are controlling for social differences (e.g. any claims about women being innately worse at engineering need to center an explanation for the much lower gap in Soviet states which made an effort for gender neutrality) and attempting to explain how very complex behaviors reduce to the trait being studied. For example, a male vervet monkey preferring a police car to a cooking pot is a considerable remove from a Google software engineer or CS degree and there is usually an enormous amount of hand-waving trying to connect the two.

I don't think I would claim that women are innately worse at engineering (and I think that "engineering" is a broad enough field with enough subspecializations that it's difficult to judge engineering skill in a way that is both objective and useful). I'd claim that women are systematically less interested in the kinds of highly technical systems-focused work we associate with fields like software engineering. In other words, I think that both men and women can be taught to program a computer and do software engineering, but that men (really AMAB people, I think transwomen pattern like cis men in this respect) are much more likely to be deeply interested in programming computers and voluntarily spend a lot of time doing it to the exclusion of other things, which eventually caches out in programming as a whole being a very male-skewed field.

I think the lower gender gap in the Soviet Union and other mid-20th-century Communist states is explained by exactly what you said, explicit social and political pressure for gender equality. I also suspect that even in the Soviet system, there might have been more equal numbers of men and women doing STEM work or programming work specifically, but (at least as far as computer programming goes), males were systematically more intrinsically interested in and energized by the actual programming, whereas the women were more likely to just be doing their jobs and feeling like they would rather be spending their time doing something else. The Soviet system was in any case characterized by a large amount of state control over how people worked, in ways we generally find authoritarian today, and it's not a model I would like to see modern US employment policy follow.

> When I worked for a neuroscience lab years ago, this came up in conversation a bit and basically everyone thought there were innate cognitive differences but that they’d be low-level and relatively small: e.g. testosterone makes a big difference for things like grip strength and there are clearly low level anatomical differences but higher-level cognitive abilities depend on many factors and the unusual plasticity of our brains is an enormous confound. This gets harder the more advanced the skill you’re talking about: e.g. a question like whether a group of boys performed better at 3-D rotations is due to biology or because they’ve been encouraged to play with building toys and games is a already a hard research topic but looking at things like success as an engineer or scientist is orders of magnitude harder because it combines a range of different skills and the metrics are harder to quantify.

I agree that these are interesting and complex questions that cognitive scientists should attempt to study to the best of their ability. I don't think there's a reason to assume that boys are encouraged to play with building toys and games, rather than innately choosing to do this to the exclusion of other types of play - certainly it's as likely to be innately biological as being good at 3-D rotation itself is.

TQ has damaged acceptance for LGB, and we pay the price while they move on to the next fun trend.

  > I'm saying it's not just tech, it's becoming everything.

I'm in agreement with you. I've said in the past on HN that I think we've created an economy of lemons. So you're not alone. I think tech has definitely facilitated this[0,1]

  > Interestingly the "solution" that e-commerce seems to have settled on is "free shipping with free returns". This limits the damage of buying a lemon, since the customer can just send it back

As far as I'm aware, Amazon doesn't really practice this anymore. I wouldn't call it "free" as the shipping is amortized into the price now (a lot like credit card fees). But also my understanding is that if you send stuff back enough that they'll ban you from doing this.

Not to mention that the inconvenience itself creates enough friction that people are just more likely to keep garbage. Especially if it is very cheap. I think this was also true with physically purchased items but just that the rate of "false positives" was lower since you could physically inspect them.

  > This is the crux of the issue. I don't see that as an issue of "management" really though.

It is definitely a complex issue and I don't want to create too much simplification. I agree that it goes all the way up the chain, each step having more and more slip.

But I think something that is more actionable and that we as the developers and engineers can address is recognizing that we had a shift in culture. There used to be some contention between the managers and engineers. It was adversarial by nature. While I think that creates friction, that this was a beneficial feature, not a flaw[2]. To be a tad over simplified, the engineer's focus is on the product. When push comes to shove, profits get sacrificed in order to ensure the quality of the product. On the other side the business people take the opposite role. This contention helps navigate the complex setting where we need to create good products but also stay in business. If the engineer gets to much weight then the business goes under while trying to fix all the problems. Perfection cannot exist, so the endeavor can be endless[3], and the business fails. On the other hand, if the business people have too much weight then they'll ship the lowest quality product that customers will still buy. The contention often resolved around what "minimum viable product" actually meant. To the engineer, it is a product that generally works in the sense of the intended design. To the business person, it is what the customer will buy.

The shift I've seen is that I see fewer and fewer engineers care deeply about the product. They aren't personally vested in it, beyond a monetary sense. When I've talked to others about bugs which should be reasonably quick to resolve I find more often the response is "but what's the (monetary) value in that?" This is not our job as an engineer! Our focus is on the product. It may be the job of the engineering manager to make that argument to the business side if the solution is going to take long enough, but I've seen this response given to bugs that may take only a few hours to fix or even have a PR already set up! To me, this is insane.

Don't get me wrong, I love that coding pays very well, but that's not why I do it. There's plenty of other ways to make money, and make even more. My cousin sells insurance and spends all his days golfing, eating at country clubs, and makes over $300k/yr[4]. My neighbor is a plumber who started his own business and hires guys starting at $100k/yr and they provide on the job training. There's a lot of ways to make good money. The reason I do this work is because I enjoy the work. Because I can take pride in this type of work. Because I'm good at it. Because I can finish my day or a project and take pride in my accomplishments. But I feel that this is the shift. Coding is not just for nerds anymore. Many coders now care about money first and product second (if at all). The "tech bros". I wouldn't mind them so much if they just didn't need to justify their mindset and interfere with mine. I feel that's part of the problem. They've become the dominant force in the coding world and normalized the exaggeration of their abilities that they believe they are the best. Like what, we send people through months of interviews, to do tons of leetcode and standardized tests to what... end up with shit work? I don't think we're hiring "the best". I think we're wasting money.

I think we fix these issues by pushing back a bit more. Explain why the manager's idea of a MVP is not a real MVP. Support our coworkers who raise these concerns in a meeting. Just a small comment will do. Push back against the engineers who offer overly simplified solutions and promises that lead to tech debt. To remember that we can both make good money and good products at the same time. To remember that pushing back is not disloyalty to the company. That pushing back is in fact loyalty to the company, because we do it because we care about what is being made.

There's no easy fix here, but I think there are things we can do and we should be more open about this culture shift. I grew up dreaming of the Sci-Fi utopia of Star Trek and of Asimov. I got into STEM because I wanted to help create that world. Is that no longer our goal? Do we really believe this goal is at odds with making a good living?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44069062

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44018803

[2] I think we believed it to be a flaw. Certainly management did as it is employees undermining them. Engineers see it as a flaw too because they have to spend time arguing and it is frustrating. Easier to just shut up and get paid, right?

[3] I think all but junior engineers understand this. I hate the phrase "don't let perfection be the enemy of 'good enough'" because the contention was never about perfection. The contention was about what is 'good enough'. The phrase shuts down that conversation, which is an important one.

[4] I don't intend to say his work is easy. It is easy to look at what he does and think he doesn't work hard. But I've seen him in action and it is clear he has honed his skills.