Unreal. The woke movement really excels at the soft bigotry of low expectations. Why engage in the hard work of coalition building required to actually fix schools and expand economic opportunity when you can either dupe or shame people into accepting shoddy education as anti-racism work? I've seen documents being pushed in my own workpl…
Unreal. The woke movement really excels at the soft bigotry of low expectations. Why engage in the hard work of coalition building required to actually fix schools and expand economic opportunity when you can either dupe or shame people into accepting shoddy education as anti-racism work? I've seen documents being pushed in my own workplace that describe everything from science, reason, time, math, and punctuality as white supremacy culture. It's runaway Lysenkoism.
"Why engage in the hard work of coalition building required to actually fix schools and expand economic opportunity when you can either dupe or shame people into accepting shoddy education as anti-racism work?"
AGH THIS HURT TO READ ... damn, this is dead on. And we say it's the right that refuses to invest in schools!
The left also hates standardized testing, which is all that allows a lot of underrepresented people to get into college. Instead of fixing schools and preparing those kids for the test and subsequently for college itself, best to get rid of the test.
Of course, once that happens, then it's back to money, connections, and who you know, which is pretty convenient for the trust-fund wokeists, innit?
Exactly. It's not as though industries won't figure out how to identify people with real skills. What rational person doesn't see that coming? Reason isn't white supremacy culture, it's a universal BS detector. That's why it has to go, right?
And in the absence of ways to identify people with real skills, they'll just fall back on what they did before: money and connections. And underprivileged people will be right back at square zero.
I once almost leapt through the screen on the professional social media site that everyone uses when I saw JPL putting out some "women in STEM" bullshit that advertised that they had lots of careers for people who suck at math!
Which will of course solve the problem of massive pipeline leakage of women in STEM!
Cuz chicks can't do math, y'see.
Let's leave the existence of massive misogyny in STEM fields unremarked upon, and just reassure those silly girls that you can be stupid and still work at JPL.
It still cranks my blood pressure to think about it.
The idea that there is ‘massive misogyny’ in tech, is just PC nonsense. If you doubt this try reading “Contra Grant On Exaggerated Differences” (https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exaggerated-differences/). The presence or absence of women in tech is a function of interest, not discrimination. Here is a good quote from Scott Alexander.
“And if your answer is just going to be that apparently the negative stereotypes in engineering were stronger than the negative stereotypes about everything else, why would that be? Put yourself in the shoes of our Victorian sexist, trying to maintain his male privilege. He thinks to himself “Well, I suppose I could tolerate women doctors saving my life. And if I had to, I would accept women going into law and determining who goes free and who goes to jail. I’m even sort of okay with women going into journalism and crafting the narratives that shape our world. But women building bridges? NO MERE FEMALE COULD EVER DO SUCH A THING!” Really? This is the best explanation the world can come up with? Doesn’t anyone have at least a little bit of curiosity about this?”
Read it all. Women don’t go into engineering (notably software engineering) because they don’t want to (not interested), not because of ‘massive misogyny’. There is actually a funny quote about this.
"The question of why more women don't choose careers in engineering has a rather obvious answer," she says: "Because they don't want to.""Wherever you go, you will find females far less likely than males to see what is so fascinating about ohms, carburetors, or quarks," said Hausman at the April symposium, sponsored by the National Academy of Engineering. "Reinventing the curriculum will not make me more interested in learning how my dishwasher works."
Young girls are encouraged to play with dolls and look nice. Boys get building toys and fun machines that move. That's enough to explain the differences later in life.
I forgot to mention one other piece of salient data. That would be the tragic story of David Reimer. David Reimer was raised as a girl, but always felt he was a boy (which he was). For better or worse, sexual identity is deeply ingrained. It goes way beyond giving trucks to boys and dolls to girls. Of course, the David Reimer story is just an anecdote. However, there are many, many similar stories.
PT, Sadly, you aren't keeping up with the current research on this subject. A few notes.
1. Newborns children (1 day old) show rather typical male/female interest patterns. The boys are already more interested in things and the girls are more interested in people. This fits rather well with a genetic model of sex-related interests and blows up the “cultural discrimination” model.
2, The juvenile forms of other primates behave much like human children. Male juvenile primates play with trucks. Female juvenile primates play with dolls.
3. In countries with less sex discrimination, children’s toys are just as sex differentiated as anywhere else. The nurture model suggests that children are socialized into specific sexual roles. Toy choices presumably reflect the nurture patterns of each society and culture. As such, it would be reasonable to expect that toys in countries with less sex discrimination would be less sex specific than societies with more sex discrimination. However, this turns out not to be the case.
Since 2000, American (and Western) society have moved radically to the “left” (the identity politics left, not the economic left). Cultural explanations of sex differences have become ever more commonplace and the associated ideology has been ever more rigidly enforced. Conversely, the scientific community has moved the other way. The volume of scientific data showing large, genetic differences has relentlessly grown to the point that anyone even trivially familiar with the literature finds “cultural explanations” laughable.
Basically, the political system has dug in with “The Sun orbits the Earth and you will pay dearly for daring to disagree” while the scientific community has embraced “men are from Mars, women are from Venus”. Consider the Larry Summers imbroglio. The math and science faculties supported him. The Liberal Arts faculties wanted him out. You would think that the accuracy of his comments might be relevant to a school with Veritas on its seal. You would be wrong.
Peter Schaeffer: "Women don’t go into engineering (notably software engineering) because they don’t want to (not interested), not because of ‘massive misogyny’. There is actually a funny quote about this."
Agree. That's what the science says (and we don't want to be science deniers, do we :-). )
The Scandanavian experiences in egalitarian upbringing of children - where boys and girls are treated as much alike as possible in order to ensure that females are empowered to enter fields traditionally considered to be male fields (STEM) - shows just the opposite: the differences between male and female career selection is (counterintuitively) greater than in societies in which no special effort is made. (That was quite a surprise.)
Those results have been replicated many times across cultures.
(The assumption was that within the total human population the "biology of preference" is identical in males and females and any differences in occupation/career choices are due to cultural influences. This was an erroneous assumption.)
While the "bell curves" of male and female preferences ("things" at one end and "people" at the other) overlap hugely, it turns out that males are more interested in "things" and females in "people" irrespective of culture. Also, males are more physically aggressive while females tend to be more verbally aggressive.
These differences are the product of evolution.
These preference differences matter especially at the extremes of the overlapping bell-shaped curves: males, as a population (and accross cultures), being more interested in "things" means they are more likely to enter STEM fields, while females are more likely to enter fields that are more people-oriented.
Similarly, males being more physically aggressive means they are more likely to end up in the slammer for acts of violence than females.
Sorry, but facts are facts, even if they are not PC, even if you don't like them. A few quotes may help you understand this.
Orwell - “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows”
John Adams - “Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence”
Philip Dick - “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away”
This seeming demand that everyone is exactly the same and is capable or desirous of the exact same things denies each of us our uniqueness, and hence snuffs out whatever undiscovered things that could flower from that uniqueness. It’s beyond great that those ladies were so inclined to accomplish what they did in that situation, but that doesn’t mean that all women are exactly similarly capable or inclined. If you are saying keep that space wide open for the women that are capable of such accomplishments, then I’m all in. But there is this implication that all women deserve that space at all times, unrestrictedly regardless of their limitations or capacities and without having to prove anything. Which is quite the opposite of what those women did.
Scott Alexander addresses this point directly. Computers were one of the first fields open to women. When other fields opened up, women went else. The decline in female employment in computers, was a consequence of better opportunities elsewhere and a female preference for working with people rather than things. See “Contra Grant On Exaggerated Differences” (https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exaggerated-differences/)
I agree with your statement "no white math any more than there is gender math". However, lots of people don't. The deeper idea is that competence counts and can be measured. For better or worse (worse clearly), the "woke" reject that idea. For better or worse (worse clearly), they regard that idea as a 'white' idea and are opposed to it.
Of course, they same idea exists in many places (China, Japan, Asia generally, etc.) and is not 'white' by any means. However, the "woke" view it as 'white' and oppose it correspondingly.
I should note that idea that competence is a primary virtue is actually a somewhat modern (enlightenment) idea. For most of human history, the social standing of your parents (hereditary class) was far more important then mere competence.
Of course, race was also considered to more important than competence for most of human history.
It is a said (but true) comment on the "woke" that they have adopted some of the worst ideas in human history and rejected some of the best.
Software used to be the absolute domain of women when it was seen as unworthy clerical work. Computer hardware was the more masculine money subject.
Of course, once it became obvious that software was a massive hotbed of innovation, women were forced out until now we have earnest idiots writing columns and books on how the "female brain" can't handle programming. (Thankfully, no one told Ada Lovelace that.)
And now, JPL and other STEM installations are busy advertising no-math-required careers to attract women ... it's enough to drive you bats.
Scott Alexander addresses this point directly. Computers were one of the first fields open to women. When other fields opened up, women went elsewhere. The decline in female employment in computers, was a consequence of better opportunities elsewhere and a female preference for working with people rather than things. See “Contra Grant On Exaggerated Differences” (https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exaggerated-differences/). Women were never 'forced out'.
If women supposedly prefer to interact with people, then what were those women doing in the discipline in the first place? Are you unable to accept the very real fact that there are such things as introverted women? Seriously, that's not uncommon by any means -- not even a minority. Good lord.
From the BBC, "where the truth goes to die". Let me quote (again) from Scott Alexander.
"Computer programming was originally considered sort of a natural outgrowth of being a secretary (remember, 77% of data entry specialists are still female today, probably because it’s also considered a natural outgrowth of being a secretary). Women had lots of opportunity in it, and a lot of women who couldn’t break into other professions naturally went into it. From a Smithsonian article on the topic, my emphases:
As late as the 1960s many people perceived computer programming as a natural career choice for savvy young women. Even the trend-spotters at Cosmopolitan Magazine urged their fashionable female readership to consider careers in programming. In an article titled “The Computer Girls,” the magazine described the field as offering better job opportunities for women than many other professional careers. As computer scientist Dr. Grace Hopper told a reporter, programming was “just like planning a dinner. You have to plan ahead and schedule everything so that it’s ready when you need it…. Women are ‘naturals’ at computer programming.” James Adams, the director of education for the Association for Computing Machinery, agreed: “I don’t know of any other field, outside of teaching, where there’s as much opportunity for a woman.”
Then people let women become doctors and lawyers, so a bunch of the smart ones went off and did that instead."
Oh and Scott Alexander has some more up-to-date data on the UK.
"In Britain, where 8% of high school computer students are girls".
I guess the UK must be some hotbed of sexism. Scott Alexander (again).
"Why is this? It’s a very common and well-replicated finding that the more progressive and gender-equal a country, the larger gender differences in personality of the sort Hyde found become. I agree this is a very strange finding, but it’s definitely true. See eg Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Sex Differences In Big Five Personality Traits Across 55 Cultures:
Previous research suggested that sex differences in personality traits are larger in prosperous, healthy, and egalitarian cultures in which women have more opportunities equal with those of men. In this article, the authors report cross-cultural findings in which this unintuitive result was replicated across samples from 55 nations (n = 17,637).
In case you’re wondering, the countries with the highest gender differences in personality are France, Netherlands, and the Czech Republic. The countries with the lowest sex differences are Indonesia, Fiji, and the Congo."
I guess the UK must be far more sexist than Indonesia, Fiji, and the Congo.
“Lysenkoism”. Nice. Just finished second volume of Stalin bio by Kaplan I believe. Amazing amount of destruction can be produced by belief in a mistaken ideology
As an ideology, it’s primary driver is obviously resentment. That road is always a dead end. Usually into a brick wall at whatever speed it’s adherents can work it up to until it crashes- even more severely damaging all of the people it was supposed to “help.”
Unreal. The woke movement really excels at the soft bigotry of low expectations. Why engage in the hard work of coalition building required to actually fix schools and expand economic opportunity when you can either dupe or shame people into accepting shoddy education as anti-racism work? I've seen documents being pushed in my own workplace that describe everything from science, reason, time, math, and punctuality as white supremacy culture. It's runaway Lysenkoism.
"Why engage in the hard work of coalition building required to actually fix schools and expand economic opportunity when you can either dupe or shame people into accepting shoddy education as anti-racism work?"
AGH THIS HURT TO READ ... damn, this is dead on. And we say it's the right that refuses to invest in schools!
The left also hates standardized testing, which is all that allows a lot of underrepresented people to get into college. Instead of fixing schools and preparing those kids for the test and subsequently for college itself, best to get rid of the test.
Of course, once that happens, then it's back to money, connections, and who you know, which is pretty convenient for the trust-fund wokeists, innit?
Eliminating legacy admissions is such obvious low hanging fruit.
Exactly. It's not as though industries won't figure out how to identify people with real skills. What rational person doesn't see that coming? Reason isn't white supremacy culture, it's a universal BS detector. That's why it has to go, right?
And in the absence of ways to identify people with real skills, they'll just fall back on what they did before: money and connections. And underprivileged people will be right back at square zero.
I once almost leapt through the screen on the professional social media site that everyone uses when I saw JPL putting out some "women in STEM" bullshit that advertised that they had lots of careers for people who suck at math!
Which will of course solve the problem of massive pipeline leakage of women in STEM!
Cuz chicks can't do math, y'see.
Let's leave the existence of massive misogyny in STEM fields unremarked upon, and just reassure those silly girls that you can be stupid and still work at JPL.
It still cranks my blood pressure to think about it.
The idea that there is ‘massive misogyny’ in tech, is just PC nonsense. If you doubt this try reading “Contra Grant On Exaggerated Differences” (https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exaggerated-differences/). The presence or absence of women in tech is a function of interest, not discrimination. Here is a good quote from Scott Alexander.
“And if your answer is just going to be that apparently the negative stereotypes in engineering were stronger than the negative stereotypes about everything else, why would that be? Put yourself in the shoes of our Victorian sexist, trying to maintain his male privilege. He thinks to himself “Well, I suppose I could tolerate women doctors saving my life. And if I had to, I would accept women going into law and determining who goes free and who goes to jail. I’m even sort of okay with women going into journalism and crafting the narratives that shape our world. But women building bridges? NO MERE FEMALE COULD EVER DO SUCH A THING!” Really? This is the best explanation the world can come up with? Doesn’t anyone have at least a little bit of curiosity about this?”
Read it all. Women don’t go into engineering (notably software engineering) because they don’t want to (not interested), not because of ‘massive misogyny’. There is actually a funny quote about this.
"The question of why more women don't choose careers in engineering has a rather obvious answer," she says: "Because they don't want to.""Wherever you go, you will find females far less likely than males to see what is so fascinating about ohms, carburetors, or quarks," said Hausman at the April symposium, sponsored by the National Academy of Engineering. "Reinventing the curriculum will not make me more interested in learning how my dishwasher works."
Young girls are encouraged to play with dolls and look nice. Boys get building toys and fun machines that move. That's enough to explain the differences later in life.
I forgot to mention one other piece of salient data. That would be the tragic story of David Reimer. David Reimer was raised as a girl, but always felt he was a boy (which he was). For better or worse, sexual identity is deeply ingrained. It goes way beyond giving trucks to boys and dolls to girls. Of course, the David Reimer story is just an anecdote. However, there are many, many similar stories.
PT, Sadly, you aren't keeping up with the current research on this subject. A few notes.
1. Newborns children (1 day old) show rather typical male/female interest patterns. The boys are already more interested in things and the girls are more interested in people. This fits rather well with a genetic model of sex-related interests and blows up the “cultural discrimination” model.
2, The juvenile forms of other primates behave much like human children. Male juvenile primates play with trucks. Female juvenile primates play with dolls.
3. In countries with less sex discrimination, children’s toys are just as sex differentiated as anywhere else. The nurture model suggests that children are socialized into specific sexual roles. Toy choices presumably reflect the nurture patterns of each society and culture. As such, it would be reasonable to expect that toys in countries with less sex discrimination would be less sex specific than societies with more sex discrimination. However, this turns out not to be the case.
Since 2000, American (and Western) society have moved radically to the “left” (the identity politics left, not the economic left). Cultural explanations of sex differences have become ever more commonplace and the associated ideology has been ever more rigidly enforced. Conversely, the scientific community has moved the other way. The volume of scientific data showing large, genetic differences has relentlessly grown to the point that anyone even trivially familiar with the literature finds “cultural explanations” laughable.
Basically, the political system has dug in with “The Sun orbits the Earth and you will pay dearly for daring to disagree” while the scientific community has embraced “men are from Mars, women are from Venus”. Consider the Larry Summers imbroglio. The math and science faculties supported him. The Liberal Arts faculties wanted him out. You would think that the accuracy of his comments might be relevant to a school with Veritas on its seal. You would be wrong.
Peter Schaeffer: "Women don’t go into engineering (notably software engineering) because they don’t want to (not interested), not because of ‘massive misogyny’. There is actually a funny quote about this."
Agree. That's what the science says (and we don't want to be science deniers, do we :-). )
The Scandanavian experiences in egalitarian upbringing of children - where boys and girls are treated as much alike as possible in order to ensure that females are empowered to enter fields traditionally considered to be male fields (STEM) - shows just the opposite: the differences between male and female career selection is (counterintuitively) greater than in societies in which no special effort is made. (That was quite a surprise.)
Those results have been replicated many times across cultures.
(The assumption was that within the total human population the "biology of preference" is identical in males and females and any differences in occupation/career choices are due to cultural influences. This was an erroneous assumption.)
While the "bell curves" of male and female preferences ("things" at one end and "people" at the other) overlap hugely, it turns out that males are more interested in "things" and females in "people" irrespective of culture. Also, males are more physically aggressive while females tend to be more verbally aggressive.
These differences are the product of evolution.
These preference differences matter especially at the extremes of the overlapping bell-shaped curves: males, as a population (and accross cultures), being more interested in "things" means they are more likely to enter STEM fields, while females are more likely to enter fields that are more people-oriented.
Similarly, males being more physically aggressive means they are more likely to end up in the slammer for acts of violence than females.
JFWIW.
You have GOT to be kidding me.
Sorry, but facts are facts, even if they are not PC, even if you don't like them. A few quotes may help you understand this.
Orwell - “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows”
John Adams - “Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence”
Philip Dick - “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away”
I left one important quote out.
Earl Landgrebe - "Don't confuse me with the facts."
This seeming demand that everyone is exactly the same and is capable or desirous of the exact same things denies each of us our uniqueness, and hence snuffs out whatever undiscovered things that could flower from that uniqueness. It’s beyond great that those ladies were so inclined to accomplish what they did in that situation, but that doesn’t mean that all women are exactly similarly capable or inclined. If you are saying keep that space wide open for the women that are capable of such accomplishments, then I’m all in. But there is this implication that all women deserve that space at all times, unrestrictedly regardless of their limitations or capacities and without having to prove anything. Which is quite the opposite of what those women did.
Scott Alexander addresses this point directly. Computers were one of the first fields open to women. When other fields opened up, women went else. The decline in female employment in computers, was a consequence of better opportunities elsewhere and a female preference for working with people rather than things. See “Contra Grant On Exaggerated Differences” (https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exaggerated-differences/)
I agree with your statement "no white math any more than there is gender math". However, lots of people don't. The deeper idea is that competence counts and can be measured. For better or worse (worse clearly), the "woke" reject that idea. For better or worse (worse clearly), they regard that idea as a 'white' idea and are opposed to it.
Of course, they same idea exists in many places (China, Japan, Asia generally, etc.) and is not 'white' by any means. However, the "woke" view it as 'white' and oppose it correspondingly.
I should note that idea that competence is a primary virtue is actually a somewhat modern (enlightenment) idea. For most of human history, the social standing of your parents (hereditary class) was far more important then mere competence.
Of course, race was also considered to more important than competence for most of human history.
It is a said (but true) comment on the "woke" that they have adopted some of the worst ideas in human history and rejected some of the best.
Software used to be the absolute domain of women when it was seen as unworthy clerical work. Computer hardware was the more masculine money subject.
Of course, once it became obvious that software was a massive hotbed of innovation, women were forced out until now we have earnest idiots writing columns and books on how the "female brain" can't handle programming. (Thankfully, no one told Ada Lovelace that.)
And now, JPL and other STEM installations are busy advertising no-math-required careers to attract women ... it's enough to drive you bats.
Oh, please.
Scott Alexander addresses this point directly. Computers were one of the first fields open to women. When other fields opened up, women went elsewhere. The decline in female employment in computers, was a consequence of better opportunities elsewhere and a female preference for working with people rather than things. See “Contra Grant On Exaggerated Differences” (https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exaggerated-differences/). Women were never 'forced out'.
Sorry, but women were forced out.
https://www.historyextra.com/period/20th-century/the-changing-role-of-women-in-british-computing/
If women supposedly prefer to interact with people, then what were those women doing in the discipline in the first place? Are you unable to accept the very real fact that there are such things as introverted women? Seriously, that's not uncommon by any means -- not even a minority. Good lord.
From the BBC, "where the truth goes to die". Let me quote (again) from Scott Alexander.
"Computer programming was originally considered sort of a natural outgrowth of being a secretary (remember, 77% of data entry specialists are still female today, probably because it’s also considered a natural outgrowth of being a secretary). Women had lots of opportunity in it, and a lot of women who couldn’t break into other professions naturally went into it. From a Smithsonian article on the topic, my emphases:
As late as the 1960s many people perceived computer programming as a natural career choice for savvy young women. Even the trend-spotters at Cosmopolitan Magazine urged their fashionable female readership to consider careers in programming. In an article titled “The Computer Girls,” the magazine described the field as offering better job opportunities for women than many other professional careers. As computer scientist Dr. Grace Hopper told a reporter, programming was “just like planning a dinner. You have to plan ahead and schedule everything so that it’s ready when you need it…. Women are ‘naturals’ at computer programming.” James Adams, the director of education for the Association for Computing Machinery, agreed: “I don’t know of any other field, outside of teaching, where there’s as much opportunity for a woman.”
Then people let women become doctors and lawyers, so a bunch of the smart ones went off and did that instead."
Oh and Scott Alexander has some more up-to-date data on the UK.
"In Britain, where 8% of high school computer students are girls".
I guess the UK must be some hotbed of sexism. Scott Alexander (again).
"Why is this? It’s a very common and well-replicated finding that the more progressive and gender-equal a country, the larger gender differences in personality of the sort Hyde found become. I agree this is a very strange finding, but it’s definitely true. See eg Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Sex Differences In Big Five Personality Traits Across 55 Cultures:
Previous research suggested that sex differences in personality traits are larger in prosperous, healthy, and egalitarian cultures in which women have more opportunities equal with those of men. In this article, the authors report cross-cultural findings in which this unintuitive result was replicated across samples from 55 nations (n = 17,637).
In case you’re wondering, the countries with the highest gender differences in personality are France, Netherlands, and the Czech Republic. The countries with the lowest sex differences are Indonesia, Fiji, and the Congo."
I guess the UK must be far more sexist than Indonesia, Fiji, and the Congo.
“Lysenkoism”. Nice. Just finished second volume of Stalin bio by Kaplan I believe. Amazing amount of destruction can be produced by belief in a mistaken ideology
As an ideology, it’s primary driver is obviously resentment. That road is always a dead end. Usually into a brick wall at whatever speed it’s adherents can work it up to until it crashes- even more severely damaging all of the people it was supposed to “help.”