Martin Fowler: The Fallacies and Reprocussions of Diversity Imbalance

The worst things humans have ever done to each other have all centered around the notion of "meaningful group variations within the human species". Without hard science, it's a scary and dangerous place.

If we assume there aren't any differences between men and women, but speculate on what the world would look like with significant differences, what would the distributions be like (as compared to today).

On the reason why, I would say the level interest is very tied up with ability in any case. What is more innate ability probably causes interest. I don't think it is a scientific statement to say it is only a social phenomenon (or vica-versa).

Eg: You can make an argument for or against a mixture of two things in differing ratios, but the moment you use the words "balanced" and "unbalanced" to represent the two states, the it is harder to argue for the "unbalanced" side. Likewise for "core" vs "surface" (de Bono's example) Who would want to argue against balance, 'core', or in this case, "diversity"?(What are you, some kind of bigot?).

"Diversity" is automatically assumed to be a positive, before the argument on whether it is desirable begins, and there isn't a value neutral or value positive word that is its opposite.

Specifically in this post, there are plenty of value laden words - 'diversity', 'meritocracy' etc put together to slant in a particular direction. Not much solid argument or content there - the power of the argument comes instead from the values attached to the specific words used, which makes it a bit iffy - Martin is a gifted writer and clear thinker - this just isn't one of his better efforts.

[Due Disclosure: I know Martin from my days at ThoughtWorks. I respect him immensely and think he is a very impressive person, who has given me a lot of very useful advice on many occasions.]

Yes there is. It biases our thinking.

Here is a non-controversial example of this: "Millikan measured the charge on an electron...got an answer which we now know not to be quite right...It's interesting to look at the history of measurements of the charge of an electron, after Millikan. If you plot them as a function of time, you find that one is a little bit bigger than Millikan's, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, until finally they settle down to a number which is higher.

Why didn't they discover the new number was higher right away? It's a thing that scientists are ashamed of - this history - because it's apparent that people did things like this: When they got a number that was too high above Millikan's, they thought something must be wrong - and they would look for and find a reason why something might be wrong. When they got a number close to Millikan's value they didn't look so hard. And so they eliminated the numbers that were too far off, and did other things like that..."

(The narrative comes from Richard Feynman.)

If we look on some hypothesis extra critically, and others only reasonably critically, we will bias our views towards the beliefs which we apply less scrutiny to.

(See also this discussion, where I defend a paper claiming to prove the existence of ESP: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2068699 )

I can't see any reason why being genuinely good at math is more important to effective programming than being good at chemistry (layers and sequence), biology (complex systems) or languages (building meaning from abstract or incomplete signals). You do not need to be good at late high-school math to understand Big-O.

I suspect people who are good at or passionate about math are far more likely to stroke their ego with premature optimisation.

Also, there's a vast difference between aptitude for maths, and performing well in maths tests. Attention to detail, regard for the education system, interest in the topic all play a part.

    > There is evidence women avoid computing because
    > they are intolerant of geeks