151–160 of 181 posts
"Silicon Valley" is a workplace, and it's generally considered rude to bring your political views into the workplace. Everyone has met the very passionate on both the left and the right, and having someone stand outside your cube or in the lunch line trying to "win" you over to their view just isn't conducive to getting your work done and making money.
FTFY
There's a big difference between ideas that weaken minorities, and ideas that weaken majorities, because you get blowback for different reasons. When you attack minorities the people that get upset with you, are people that are worried that weakening an already weak group is a bad thing. When you attack majorities however, you get blowback from the people that are afraid to lose their power. I agree that there are pr…
(I'm going to assume from context you don't mean minority as in population, but rather power dynamics as you talk about for the rest of the post.) The problem distinguishing stronger and weaker sides is that there isn't an objective metric that both sides can agree on. The reason gender issues are so prevalent on this list and are such a hot topic is exactly because it is a debate about which side is weaker, about wh…
For instance, when talking about skewed power dynamics when it come to gender, you could look at the number of men vs. women in management positions. Being able to fire someone is a form of power. Or you could look at raw salaries, and say that money is a form of power. And so on. Would make many discussions a lot clearer.
For those who have never been to US, and just reading news and watching TV on it, it surely is a place full of controversy.
As a matter of fact, I am starting to see this isn't US only at all. It is the same with UK on certain issues ( Mainly Brexit ) but in typical Brit fashion they seems to be much more sensible about it when people disagree.
What happens to the old days where we agree to disagree. Take it on the chin, put a smile on your face and walk away?
This isn't just social media's echo chamber, a lot of people seems to want to blame them. But i think the social media only amplify the problem. Not the course of it.
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The thing is you are free to hold and expose extreme views - and I strongly support your right to do so and not to be subject to persecution from the state for doing so. However I also have the right to not associate with you if I think that you are a dick.
Ugh, so done with this xkcd. Ignoring people who we don't agree with is how we got to a place where supporting your political party was more important than having an ideology you could morally justify. I personally lean fairly far to the right but I spend a lot of time listening to NPR, reading slate, and other pretty lefty publications. When I talk to people who only consume one side of the media, whether it's right…
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> If it exists "It" being a biological basis for romantic behavior? We've survived this long without know how, or if, biology determines our current romantic behavior, I think we'll be okay. We're not going to go extinct because everyone is fucking robots.
Do we? Because I see no evidence of the opposite. Also, culture (and sociology for the matter) is biologically determined.
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> It's as if once we allow these facts into the argument, Right, facts. Most of the biological arguments are very touchy-feely. But .. we can see differences in MRI between gays and straights (or men and women, or some other divide du jour)! That's to be expected. Unless your equipment is broken. But the facts that patterns in the brain has established doesn't tell us anything how, or why, they developed. Scan a prof…
"does that mean black people are more suited to be piano players" Maybe I'm misunderstanding things, but if some statistical factor was identified with predictive power, does that not literally mean that generally they'd be more suited to be piano players? This isn't some argument about philosophically what constitutes a piano player. If this were true, you'd expect on average that this group has a higher proportion…
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This leaves me wondering: What do you consider to be the right context for public debates about these thorny issues? What besides communicating with each other about those issues will move us forward? I don't think they will go away by themselves and I agree that some cannot be resolved, but then we should politely agree to disagree, after having explained our reasoning for each other's viewpoints, no? Disclaimer: I…
It depends of the issues we are talking of. What I'm saying is that introducing biology at this point in the debate, by looking if the inequality is "natural" because phenotype A or chromosome B gives you some edge or not in science or other discipline, is kind of irrelevant given the weight of culture in our societies. I find it even dangerous because I don't think a lot of people are ready to understand the subtlet…
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> It's as if once we allow these facts into the argument, Right, facts. Most of the biological arguments are very touchy-feely. But .. we can see differences in MRI between gays and straights (or men and women, or some other divide du jour)! That's to be expected. Unless your equipment is broken. But the facts that patterns in the brain has established doesn't tell us anything how, or why, they developed. Scan a prof…
"does that mean black people are more suited to be piano players" Maybe I'm misunderstanding things, but if some statistical factor was identified with predictive power, does that not literally mean that generally they'd be more suited to be piano players? This isn't some argument about philosophically what constitutes a piano player. If this were true, you'd expect on average that this group has a higher proportion…
Depending on exactly what you mean by "predictive". You can identify someone as more likely to be a piano player while the person may not be more suited to be one.
The example was meant to be illustrative of a confounding effect, but perhaps a better one could have been chosen.
Interesting thing is about gender and technology jobs. In „evil“ Iran, about 50% of students of computer science are women. Being a female software developer is common. Cousin of my wife is a programmer, another female friend of the family is a IBM mainframe programmer(now retired), my wife is an engineer with interest in computer science. So its not all about „brain structures“, it is about society. When Iran can do…
http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagger... - in particular see Iran vs Sweden, how more egalitarian cultures show more gender difference for occupations