Announcing Starfighter

I turned the page. The answer was, for the wind-up toy, "Energy makes it go." And for the boy on the bicycle, "Energy makes it go." For everything, "Energy makes it go." Now that doesn't mean anything. What they should have done is to look at the wind-up toy, see that there are springs inside, learn about springs, learn about wheels, and never mind "energy."...Now that doesn't mean anything. Suppose it's "Wakalixes." That's the general principle: "Wakalixes makes it go."...It's also not even true that "energy makes it go," because if it stops, you could say, "energy makes it stop" just as well.

I claim that this critique applies equally well to your use of the word "power".

And your comparisons to real sciences are quite inapt - again, as I've pointed out to you before, a discussion with tptacek on crypto or kasey_junk on high speed trading results in the aforementioned posters being very specific while their critics are vague. Kind of the opposite of what is happening here.

Note that you still haven't actually provided an experiment or measurement that could identify a successful yet powerless group (if such a thing existed), or vice versa.

In any case, I don't see how that critique applies to power at all, because, yet again, some of the mechanics involving power are well known and well documented. Nobody says "power makes it so". It's just that explaining the power dynamics of racial neighborhood segregation or sexism in tech would take dozens of pages.

It is not simply that "power is what drives women participation in tech down". I can trace a process -- some documented and some hypothesized -- starting with "classical" gender roles, through the massive transition in gender roles and general separation between the sexes that occurred in Victorian times (they had rooms in houses meant to serve men and rooms for women) and shapes society to this day, through the history of women in computing (starting with the transition of switchboards from being seen as a job for women to one for men), with the more general association of which jobs are for men and for women. That would take me about 50 pages, I guess. But power is the central mechanism. I'm not saying "power did it"; I can show how. Just not here.

> And your comparisons to real sciences are quite inapt

Well, I've been using metaphors, naturally. The intractable sciences are much more complex than physics, chemistry and even biology. There are no closed-form formulas in the social sciences; at least not yet.

> a discussion with tptacek on crypto or kasey_junk on high speed trading

Maybe they're just better communicators than me, and maybe HFT is more amenable to discussion in HN comments than the history of gender roles and the evolution of power in human society. However, if you have specific questions (and they would have to be more specific than "how come there are fewer women in tech") I could try to answer succinctly if it is at all possible. The problem is that these are things that are never even taught to first-year social sciences students (some are only taught in grad school), and unlike with HFT, I don't think you even have the basics.

For example, I don't know if you're at all familiar with the techniques used to study history or sociology, how historical documents are analyzed, how different societies are compared etc., and I really can't lay out an intro to social studies here (BTW, that Curtis Yarvin guy I told you about suffers from the same problem, except he considers himself knowledgable for some reason. His writings read like an Aristotelian scholar discussing quantum mechanics; he's completely ill equipped to handle the materials he's using, which is why he draws such ridiculous conclusions. Of the months spent teaching students simply how to approach reading documents, he doesn't even apply the very first lesson: classifying the genre of the document and identifying the intended audience and purpose)

Now, I'm sure that there are some introductory materials to gender studies that skip the basics of social science, but I doubt you'll find them convincing if you're not familiar with the methodology. If you are interested, I could try to find some online course in history or sociology that seems good, but my guess is that they won't get to gender roles in an intro course (and if they do, it will be by skipping the groundwork, which, again, will make it seem less convincing).

> Note that you still haven't actually provided an experiment or measurement that could identify a successful yet powerless group (if such a thing existed), or vice versa.

You still haven't provided an example of a planetary system whose planets revolve around a star due to a force other than gravity! Gravity is what makes planets revolve around a star, and power is the mechanism by which groups (and individuals) obtain success. Once in a while there are aberrations, to which I have provided examples: winning the lottery. Or, if California is covered by the ocean, then the very powerful people who live their might become extremely unsuccessful. Of course because that population is powerful, various disasters would probably be addressed by the government faster and with more rigor than in other parts of the US, but that may still happen.

Examples from the middle ages include grants of knighthood[1] as payment for some unusual service. While usually a knight would only come from wealthy or noble families (or at least a family with good connections) -- hence, from a position of some power -- sometimes knighthood was granted to brave foot soldiers -- i.e. people with little power. Sometimes, the title came with land (and the serfs that worked it, of course).

In non feudal societies, social mobility was usually achieved through money, although some classes were barred from obtaining any money whatsoever (slaves). You can see groups of immigrants, provided the host society did not block their steps too much, slowly gain money, and later recognition and connections. This process would often take several generations.

Analyzing those processes is helped by the fact that often you can observe power directly. Money and nobility titles are very conspicuous forms of power, easily measurable directly. More hidden forms of power such as connections can also be traced directly (a boy of low background would be taken to the home of a merchant as a gift to his parents in recognition of some service; this lets you trace connections across classes); charisma (which in the middle ages was a great way to attain power in religious circles) could be seen in some extraordinary ascetic acts[2] or visions[3]. The latter was one of the few ways women could rise to positions of power in medieval societies (see Joan of Arc), although others would be marrying, and surviving, a man of power. While it was often expected of widows to remarry, some medieval societies were surprisingly relatively accepting widows, recognized their independence, and allowed them to transact on their own.

[1]: http://www.lordsandladies.org/steps-to-knighthood.htm

[2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simeon_Stylites

[3]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucy_Brocadelli

>Effects of practice on the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale-IV across 3- and 6-month intervals. Estevis E1, Basso MR, Combs D.

A total of 54 participants (age M = 20.9; education M = 14.9; initial Full Scale IQ M = 111.6) were administered the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale-Fourth Edition (WAIS-IV) at baseline and again either 3 or 6 months later. Scores on the Full Scale IQ, Verbal Comprehension, Working Memory, Perceptual Reasoning, Processing Speed, and General Ability Indices improved approximately 7, 5, 4, 5, 9, and 6 points, respectively, and increases were similar regardless of whether the re-examination occurred over 3- or 6-month intervals.

> Practice Effects for the Stanford–Binet Intelligence Scales The Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scales—Fifth Edition (SB5) is a widely used assessment tool for measuring intelligence (Roid, 2003). According to Roid, a key advantage of this intelligence test’s most recent revision is that it includes improved lowend items for better measurement of young children or adults having mental retardation. Sbordone, Saul, and Purisch (2007) report that the range of the SB5 was expanded to allow the assessment of very low and very high levels of cognitive ability. Roid and Barram (2004) indicate that the practice effects on the SB5 were smaller than expected. For example, the nonverbal IQ of the SB5 showed shifts of only 2 to 5 points as compared to the 4 to 13 points on the Performance IQ of the Wechsler scales (i.e., the WAIS-III and WISC-III). Roid and Barram add that the lower shift, and thus practice effect, is even more notable given that the retest period for the SB5 was 5 to 8 days versus 23 to 35 days on average for the Wechsler scales.