It's just a superstition. I give demos all the time, and I hate it when I do a test run and people tell me how awesome it's working. Tell me afterwards, you'll jinx it if you tell me before. It doesn't actually work that way, but hot damn it feels like it does.
And the demos I give don't put anyone's lives at risk!
That's a very important distinction that the "easy-mode" metaphors don't really take into account. A good word for it is "intersectionality" (though please note that many people will define intersectionality as only applying to marginalized groups): it's the various ways all of one's "labels" (gender, class, ethnicity, race, etc) interact, and it's something to keep in mind while having these discussions.
The reason is that there isn't one axis along which we can measure "more" or "less" oppressed or disenfranchised. Men tend to lose custody battles more frequently, for instance.
That said, you can still look at a group of people and say something along the lines of "in such-and-such context, members of the first group tend to be more successful at this goal than members of a second group". Phrasing it this way, I think, tends to deflect the "us-vs-them" or "men-vs-women" mentality that crops up fairly often in these discussions (especially when they take place online, where anonymity and lack of non-textual clues make it more difficult to have a civil conversation).
The point of all this is this: if you are a man, you are more likely to kill yourself or be homeless, and that is a HUGE PROBLEM. If you are a black man, by some accounting, you are more likely to be raped than a white woman (because black men are disproportionately sent to prison), and that is a HUGE PROBLEM. But neither of these problems make the discrimination faced by women in the STEM fields less of a problem, it just means that we have many huge problems on our hands.
When you are a member of group A, and group A tends to be more successful than group B (so, male programmers as group A and female programmers as group B), I think it is your obligation to ask _why_ there is this statistical skew, and if the answer is "systematic discrimination due to power imbalance", work to correct it, irrespective of how your group fares in other such comparisons. That doesn't mean that your group faring poorly in these comparisons is not unfair, because it totally is. It just means that there is a complex web of privileges* and disadvantages that we _all_ need to help untangle.
(*You didn't think I was going to get through five paragraphs about identity politics without whipping out the P-word, did you?)
I take a fair amount of offense at this statement. I am stating that, given that the word "freedom" is commonly being used not as a word, but as a political catch-phrase with multiple, often contradicting meanings, I prefer to clarify the usage, either by substituting it with another word, or defining carefully what one means by "freedom". Far from attempting to redefine "freedom", I am attempting to _totally ban its usage goddamn it_, since, as you have pointed out, its definition has been co-opted to mean something entirely alien to its original meaning.
Edit:
To clarify, when I said ban, I was exaggerating. I am not supporting literally banning the word "freedom", nor sending anyone to the gulags. I simply would prefer if people were to choose other, more exact, less politically-charged words in the place of "freedom".
Can we stop saying things like "more freedom"? Freedom is really poorly defined even to an individual, and tends to lead to sentences like "they hate our freedom".
You could very well argue that freedom means absolutely no laws, absolutely no government, no public sector, period. You could also very well argue that freedom means being able to be confident that you have access to medical care, education, and child-support regardless of who you are, or your income level.
Freedom doesn't actually _mean_ anything anymore, it's just a political catch-phrase.
Can I rephrase your post and say "less government support would scare Francois..."?
If I just got really freaking lucky with my predictions yesterday, then there's no reason to imagine I would get really freaking lucky again. Over time, my average accuracy would become the mean of the distribution.
On the other hand, if I actually _am_ good at making predictions, then I will continue to make good predictions.
The point is that a lot of the time immigrants who received Anglicized names did so not because they chose to, but because they happened to get an immigration officer who gave them an Anglicized spelling on Ellis island.
That's a little unfair. I work at an 30-year-old engineering company with the most market share in our field. If my company goes down, that's probably because someone did something illegal, or entire economies of multiple countries have just bellied-up. I take very minimum risks in that regard. A new start-up, though? Much higher risk of failure.
We use way more information than just binocular disparity to construct our stereopsis. Since we extensive experience in our environment, we can use relative sizes of known objects, atmospheric blurring, occlusions, we can move our head and see the apparent shifts of objects, etc. The triangulation provided by our two eyes is not the most powerful of our methods to estimate depth.
These techniques are very hard to reproduce, however. Artificial 3D sensors lean pretty heavily on some sort of triangulation, because it can be formulated mathematically.
"C developers tend to think on micro-optimizations and Assembly level before writing any line of code, even when it doesn't matter at all for the problem being solved."
Um, citation, please? Speaking as, you know, an actual C developer working in a company full of actual C developers, I would say that "bad C developers tend to think on...", etc. There are times when we need to use assembly and micro-opts, but trust me, no one ever wants to.
Though I agree that C++ would be a better language without the backwards compatibility constraint.
I'm not sure that either side is exactly lacking in money or political power. One of the characteristics that many of the tea party members share is a skepticism with regards to climate change (or global warming), and the tea party has a lot of money and political power.
That doesn't affect who is right, of course. But everyone on both sides of this debate seems to have this notion that their side is the scrappy underdog going against a political and corporate behemoth manipulating the truth for profit.
Nothing, and I'm not sure what the "correct" representation would be. However, I do not believe the representation we have now indicates a field with an equal barrier for entry for a man and a woman who have the same skill set, motivation, and intelligence.
http://www.kurzweilai.net/singularity-q-a