Or - none of the above? How do you choose which are important and which aren't? Or which come before the others? Do you dump a Catholic man to get another atheist who happens to be a woman? How do you choose between a Francophone young man, and an anglophone old man?
Or maybe it would be good to view individuals as individuals and not pre-judge people based on their DNA?
I work in conditions very similar to what he mentioned.
I work with several people remotely, have for months, have made paying projects, haven't heard their voices ever (or even seen photos of them in some cases).
Thinking on it, in some cases I literally don't know the person's ethnic background. One of my guys could be black or white or Indian and I wouldn't know. Even his name is a strange three-letter thing I haven't heard before. Huh.
The Soviet pattern is reproduced today in places like Iran, where many more women study engineering.
Meanwhile, in Scandinavia, the traditionally-female professions like nursing are even more female-dominated than in the USA.
The trend seems to be: The freer the society, the less women are entering the tech workforce and the more they choose traditionally feminine work.
This even applies in the time-trend in America, where women in tech has reduced significantly since the 80's, while feminism has only become more dominant and wealth has increased.
There is no way to measure (or even define?) "benefiting the field".
For example, women leave the workforce earlier and more often. So we now get less work years per education year in these fields. Benefit? Not from the POV of the person paying for all this education and these services.
I think what you said about height might be a bit off since you're dismissing the possibility that tall people actually are better at their jobs.
E.g. looks and facial symmetry both correlate with fertility and IQ, probably through the mechanism of mutational load. So you could say, "good looking people make more money" as an example here, but the effect could be from IQ because they actually do go together.
The same could be happening for height. This may be the reason people instinctively are attracted to tall people.
Because of how gaussian distributions work, the differences at the outlying values are huge even for small differences in the average.
For example, men are taller than women in general, but of course some men are taller than some women.
But at the extreme heights, the ratio between men and women becomes stagger. At 6 feet tall, men outnumber women 30:1. At 6'3", 2000:1.
Now apply this to tech. If we imagine a relatively elite job, like being a professional programmer with significant responsibility, that is the kind of thing only someone at the extreme end of the bell curve of tech-proclivity is going to do. But because of the way gaussians work at extreme values, even if women on average have similar tech-proclivity to men, at that high level the ratio of men:women could be huge.
All this could just be due to a simple misunderstanding of the math of a bell curve distribution and how it works at the ends of the spectrum.
People don't give (or often even know) the real reasons they do things.
Steeped in a culture of sexism accusations, it's not surprising that you'd hear reports of sexism from women leaving the industry.
A man doing the exact same thing (and many men do leave tech) would say their boss was an asshole, or they hated the hours, or whatever. Women are prodded and trained to interpret exactly the same circumstances as sexism.
Of course this doesn't mean there isn't sexism. But it does mean that you can't just "figure out the reason that they left by asking them".
>the people in it suck, the government they built sucks, and the ideals they aspire to suck, and that the solution is to deal out cruelty to the right kinds of people.
Amazing reality inversion.
Trump never said anything like any of these. He has said politicians and the political class suck. Not 'Americans'.
Hillary and others on that side consistently say Americans suck (deplorables), US traditional culture is evil and racist, etc.
Absolutely people should be allowed to say what they want without consequences.
That's what freedom means. It means freedom from consequences. If there are heavy consequences, you don't have freedom. Otherwise you can say that North Koreans have freedom of speech too - they just have to deal with the "consequences".
This "freedom from speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences" thing is so patently bizarre.
What the heck can "freedom" possibly mean besides freedom from consequences?
I used to think that way but over time I've moved much more toward the conclusion that the great mass of people really are not mentally prepared to make decisions in a modern idea marketplace.
Working through the haze of media manipulation is an extremely complex task. It requires a ton of interest, time, effort education, IQ and mental discipline. Most people don't have a chance to resist society-wide campaign of lies; they're absurdly outmatched.
This is the same reason we have enforced pension plans, etc. You could just say people should save their own money. That would work fine for me and you. But most people just don't have the mental context to delay gratification that long. Their brains are not adapted and not equipped for the modern world.
So it's wrong to feed them socially-destructive lies, for the same reason it's wrong to feed a dog well-labeled poisonous meat.
Parent is not complaining about how FB affects him personally and directly, but about how it is affecting society.
Perhaps you have the mental context and farsightedness to just not log on. But, you still have to deal with the large scale socio-political consequences of the fact that billions of others can't resist logging on, can't resist the clickbait, or don't understand why they should.
Even more so given that the people involved in Gamergate are young people forming political views that they'll hold for a long time.
When a young person develops a view that "the media lie constantly and see you as an enemy if you disagree about any tiny thing", that can bed in and last a long time through someone's life. Once trust is gone like that, how can the media redeem itself with someone?
I think this is going to have very long-reaching consequences, decades into the future. There is a growing, persistent constituency of young people who are richly informed by alternative information sources (youtube, online communities, personal experience) whose first exposure to mainstream media is to learn that they're self-indulgent, lying, moralizing bullies.
This is still going on today. See the recent saga with PewDiePie being slagged as a neo-nazi. His response video has 12M views, a lot of those are 13-16 year olds learning to never trust the media, especially when they call people racist.
It's like when you yourself are involved in something and see it grossly, maliciously misrepresented in media. You lose trust in media that way. Gamergate was basically that happening with thousands of people, because all of them had personal experience with gaming and knew how it actually works.
That's actually a good point. Everyone is incompetent; we just don't have a way of filtering that in our leaders. Possibly because the people selecting those leaders are incompetent too. It's incompetence all the way down.