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[rohezal]

James Damore (evolutionary biologists phd student from Havard) wrote a nice essay about sexual dimorphism, which got him fired from google:

Differences in distributions of traits between men and women (and not “socially constructed oppression”) may in part explain why we don’t have 50% representation of women in tech and leadership.

https://firedfortruth.com/


A well researched article about gender imbalance can be found on Slate Star Codex. TL DR: It is very likely that women as a group have more members who care about persons / living things and men as a group have more members who prefer things / concepts. There is a strong correlation between prenatal testosterone and interested in things. Women with a high prenatal testosterone production due to a genetic mutation (CAH), are more likely to be interested in things.

In their own study, they compare 125 such women and find a Things-People effect size of -0.75 – that is, the difference between CAH women and unaffected women is more than half the difference between men and unaffected women. They write:
The results support the hypothesis that sex differences in occupational interests are due, in part, to prenatal androgen influences on differential orientation to objects versus people. Compared to unaffected females, females with CAH reported more interest in occupations related to Things versus People, and relative positioning on this interest dimension was substantially related to amount of prenatal androgen exposure.

Jobs which are prefered by more women than men are btw. not always paid worse.

Whenever I ask this question, I get something like “engineering and computer science are two of the highest-paying, highest-status jobs, so of course men would try to keep women out of them, in order to maintain their supremacy”. But I notice that doctors and lawyers are also pretty high-paying, high-status jobs, and that nothing of the sort happened there. And that when people aren’t using engineering/programming’s high status to justify their beliefs about gender stereotypes in it, they’re ruthlessly making fun of engineers and programmers, whether it’s watching Big Bang Theory or reading Dilbert or just going on about “pocket protectors”.
Meanwhile, men make up only 10% of nurses, only 20% of new veterinarians, only 25% of new psychologists, about 25% of new paediatricians, about 26% of forensic scientists, about 28% of medical managers, and 42% of new biologists.
Note that many of these imbalances are even more lopsided than the imbalance favoring men in technology, and that many of these jobs earn much more than the average programmer. For example, the average computer programmer only makes about $80,000; the average veterinarian makes about $88,000, and the average pediatrician makes a whopping $170,000.

Contra Grant On Exaggerated Differences

I. An article by Adam Grant called Differences Between Men And Women Are Vastly Exaggerated is going viral, thanks in part to a share by Facebook exec Sheryl Sandberg. It’s a response to an e…

slatestarcodex.com

Noticing that there is not a 50% male / female ratio and claiming "this is because of invisible sexism" is sexism of the gaps. It is like the "god of the gaps". If you get sick, it is because god made you sick, because you have broken his laws. You come to wrong, harmful conclussions, because you used superstition or conspiracy theories instead of science.

Or if you want a more modern, even worse example. "The economy is failing and we don't why. It must be because of the jews of the gaps". This lead to 6 million dead jews, a world war and a terrible regime. And it is quite frightening that woke academia will publish a chaper of "Mein Kampf" if you switch "jews" to "straight, white males" and the "arian race" to "women of color".

“Feminist Mein Kampf” or “FMK”

Title: Our Struggle is My Struggle: Solidarity Feminism as an Intersectional Reply to Neoliberal and Choice Feminism

Status: Accepted

Purpose: To see if we could find “theory” to make anything grievance-related (in this case, part of Chapter 12 of Volume 1 of Mein Kampf with fashionable buzzwords switched in) acceptable to journals if we mixed and matched fashionable arguments.

Private Site

 

[netcat]

Over the years working in corporate technology I have seen many women given clear preferential treatment. I have observed this first hand in Silicon Valley and Wall St. firms alike. The corporate world is desperate to appear diverse, and for engineering jobs I believe the bar is lower for women. Maybe it's really that other characteristics are considered. Well that's not fair! Who cares. I myself have given preference to female job candidates. I want to work with more women. These observations are for lowly programmers not the board of directors, for which I myself definitely don't have enough testosterone.

 

[Null]

This lead to 6 million dead yews, a world war and a terrible regime.

Mystery solved, it was Hitler up to his old tricks.

 

[λ the β-Redex Reducer]

Also, people who care about diversity never look at the whole picture. What other jobs are dominated by men? Garbageman, mine worker, construction worker, etc. Most nasty jobs are dominated by men too, saving women the trouble because someone has to do it. Is there a secret boy club for those jobs too? Or maybe it is due to the secret girl club tricking men into taking low-paying dangerous dirty jobs.

Anyway, to bring it back to RMS, him being a greasy dirty old fat man does not bother me (except that I am afraid he might die anytime, I wish he would take better care of his health) because I do not care about diversity. I do not even care about his other ideologies, even though I strongly disagree with some on them. One of the best things of RMS is that he is great at keeping his ideologies separate. If he does such a great job at keeping his other ideologies separate from his libre software work, then why would we want to pull those irrelvant ideologies in? Just agree to disagree for the good of libre software. You probably disagree with everyone that you know on some things. The capability to agree to disagree and to keep ideologies separate is important because as humans we need it in order to work together without needing a hive mind. It is like a triangle. Having critical thought, working together, not agreeing to disagree; you can only pick 2 of those 3 at most. Which one do you want to drop? Personally I pick "not agreeing to disagree".

 

[Confuzzled]

That's fascism. I'm sure there are lots of white papers about its dynamics.

Popper's tolerance paradox applies.

 

[Binky]

Perhaps of interest, the view of a real live woman in tech:

 

[rohezal]

She has some very good points and it was pretty insightful to listen to her. Two things were wrong afaik.

First: allowing a toy for an other gender is troublesome in both ways. Not only for girls ("this is a boys toy, since it is a hammer"). I would even argue that a boy, who plays with dolls, gets more problems. Or a company who sells a make up doll for boys. Tucker Carlson would fantasize about the trans invasion of toys the instant he hears about it.

Second: The split in interest happen not in high school but way before.

Might girls be worried not by stereotypes about computers themselves, but by stereotypes that girls are bad at math and so can’t succeed in the math-heavy world of computer science? No. About 45% of college math majors are women, compared to (again) only 20% of computer science majors. Undergraduate mathematics itself more-or-less shows gender parity. This can’t be an explanation for the computer results.

Might sexist parents be buying computers for their sons but not their daughters, giving boys a leg up in learning computer skills? In the 80s and 90s, everybody was certain that this was the cause of the gap. Newspapers would tell lurid (and entirely hypothetical) stories of girls sitting down to use a computer when suddenly a boy would show up, push her away, and demand it all to himself. But move forward a few decades and now young girls are more likely to own computers than young boys – with little change in the high school computer interest numbers. So that isn’t it either.

So if it happens before middle school, and it’s not stereotypes, what might it be?

One subgroup of women does not display these gender differences at any age. These are women with congenital adrenal hyperplasia, a condition that gives them a more typically-male hormone balance. For a good review, see Gendered Occupational Interests: Prenatal Androgen Effects on Psychological Orientation to Things Versus People. They find that:

Consistent with hormone effects on interests, females with CAH are considerably more interested than are females without CAH in male-typed toys, leisure activities, and occupations, from childhood through adulthood (reviewed in Blakemore et al., 2009; Cohen-Bendahan et al., 2005); adult females with CAH also engage more in male-typed occupations than do females without CAH (Frisén et al., 2009). Male-typed interests of females with CAH are associated with degree of androgen exposure, which can be inferred from genotype or disease characteristics (Berenbaum et al., 2000; Meyer-Bahlburg et al., 2006; Nordenström et al., 2002). Interests of males with CAH are similar to those of males without CAH because both are exposed to high (sex-typical) prenatal androgens and are reared as boys.

Females with CAH do not provide a perfect test of androgen effects on gendered characteristics because they differ from females without CAH in other ways; most notably they have masculinized genitalia that might affect their socialization. But, there is no evidence that parents treat girls with CAH in a more masculine or less feminine way than they treat girls without CAH (Nordenström et al., 2002; Pasterski et al., 2005). Further, some findings from females with CAH have been confirmed in typical individuals whose postnatal behavior has been associated with prenatal hormone levels measured in amniotic fluid. Amniotic testosterone levels were found to correlate positively with parent-reported male-typed play in girls and boys at ages 6 to 10 years (Auyeung et al., 2009).

Contra Grant On Exaggerated Differences

I. An article by Adam Grant called Differences Between Men And Women Are Vastly Exaggerated is going viral, thanks in part to a share by Facebook exec Sheryl Sandberg. It’s a response to an e…

slatestarcodex.com

An other thing is, the people are not blank slates. A lot of our character is formed by our upbringing, but your genes have also a say. To claim "girls as a group have higher neuroticism on average only because of their upbringing" is plainly wrong. Girls on average may have a higher neuroticism because of their upbringing but also does the world wide population XX have a higher neuroticism than world wide population XY. It is very likely that there are some biological factors involved.

People who claim that there is no evolution based sexual dimorphism in humans, deny science like (christian) people who claim that there is no evolution at all.

 

[FBnil]

You can (often) work with people you don't like, you can argue with people you don't want to marry, and you can like people you would never want to work with.

+insightful

Barbie is the most popular doll of all time. I challenge my daughter (who is not white) on the matter. She just likes her.

I've got some books of barbie where she plans, fixes, directs many things. The books are for forming independent "I can solve this" attitudes for girls.
The barbie movies however are very dumbed down.

I bought mine this set:

Page Not Found - Aliexpress.com

She was fascinated with the portable radio. And played a lot with the car, stacking sirene, lights and propeller, and inverting the polarity changed the car's direction (and also the doublesided ledlight that gives red one way and green the other). But there is also a normal led, which, if flipped, is a light detector, and so you have a car that runs only when you shine a light on it.

First: allowing a toy for an other gender is troublesome in both ways. Not only for girls ("this is a boys toy, since it is a hammer"). I would even argue that a boy, who plays with dolls, gets more problems. Or a company who sells a make up doll for boys. Tucker Carlson would fantasize about the trans invasion of toys the instant he hears about it.

Mine just wants everything on TV and everything that other girls (friends) also have. So in a sense, they homogenize. (Just like I did when I was small and got my C64... suddenly the whole street had C64. Or jojo's or bicicles or skates, etc).
Make up for boys is not uncommon. It's not for looking more pretty, but to transform the face (cat whiskers, dracula/zombie and such). It could lead to grimage and making Orc masks and what not. Happened to a friend who had a big sister that did not only have pink makeup.
But you are right that there are some non-unisex toys. I remember playing dolls with girls. I had to bring my Army guy toy (similar to a G.I.JOE), because all they had were female dolls. So the game was basically: Wake up with my soldier. Go off somewhere far away to "work" (and basically sit about 10 minutes in the corner, bored, while the girls played together). Then after waiting a long time, I could come back and got dinner and then I had to sleep, which was also "do not change the story" (so basically I was told when and what to say, play and go). So playing with other boys was more fun, to be honest. But once you are a bit older it becomes more fun as you start sharing common interests. We made magazines, made shows, recorded tapes with stories and jokes. That's where engineering skills start. Press rewind while recording and the tape records faster (so you get lowpitched voices) or use an eraser and a steady hand to slow down the recording (so you get highpitched voices). Then use a second tapedesk to mix in background music, while doing all the stories and record over small pieces to "fix" the story (very rudimentary editing). But that goes better with boys because girls rather do drawing (making covers for magazines and that sort of thing... visual things). I found one thing we could all do: Design your own board games. Got to play fantastic ones from that era. I still have my "Vamps, BloodFeud" board somewhere. But lost all the cards that were for it. We used up a lot of expensive A4 paper that was actually for the typing machine (It was thicker than todays printer paper).

in 2021 I play computergames with my child: Foxyland2 and other 2 player games.

 

[Null]

So the game was basically: Wake up with my soldier. Go off somewhere far away to "work" (and basically sit about 10 minutes in the corner, bored, while the girls played together). Then after waiting a long time, I could come back and got dinner and then I had to sleep, which was also "do not change the story" (so basically I was told when and what to say, play and go)

Sounds like good practice for adult life.

 

[Linux-SWAT]

FSF Management Team Resigns, as FSF Now Seeks 'Improved Transparency' - Slashdot

Richard Stallman's name has now been taken off the official web page of the steering committee for GCC, reports IT Wire. But they also note new changes this week in the management team of the Free Software Foundation: A statement from [FSF executive director John] Sullivan, deputy director...

news.slashdot.org

 

[FBnil]

The problem with Cancel Culture is that their intimidation methods are so strong that supporters of the canceled person are afraid they'd be canceled as well, and resign in order to not receive the backlash for years to come. (add "McFly Chicken soundeffects")

It reminds me of store owners putting certain slogans on their store window, in an attempt to not get their shop destroyed.

 

[FBnil]

There used to be more of them, but now he's been abandoned and is now all on his own.
This is the movie of a man struggling to fight the FSF (F*ck Stallman Federation) with his metallic pleasurecards he can throw as shuriken.
And he will make sure that our implanted microchip in our foreheads at least run free software.
Driven by jealousy because he did not get to ride the Lolita Express he will point out to the world that it is using an OS (Windows) that was made by someone that DID ride the LolitaExpress several times; and the world won't care.
Filling his war coffins with money he got from giving away beer: "Free ass in beer" (no wonder the beer is free if someone put their bum in it).
And he's got a Electric Particle Gun (fallic symbol) that shoots st Ignucius fire (very similar to st elmo's fire) rendering all hardware fried (that's why there is a shortage of microchips) but electroshaving all men in the process.
When you are in his graps, he will hug you (the horror).
Rated R for Rapey.

.
Made this thing back in 2016. Did not match because the Pandora has 2 blobs, which means RMS would never use it.
About the original poster: There were only 3 of the 4 ghostbusters on the poster. They left out Winston (the black guy).

 

[Linux-SWAT]

Results of Debian Vote On Stallman To Be Known By April 17 - Slashdot

New submitter juul_advocate shares a report from iTWire: The outcome of a general resolution proposed by the Debian GNU/Linux project, to decide how to react to the return of Free Software Foundation founder Richard Stallman to the board, will be known on April 17, with voting now underway. The...

linux.slashdot.org

 

[FBnil]

Results of Debian Vote On Stallman To Be Known By April 17 - Slashdot

New submitter juul_advocate shares a report from iTWire: The outcome of a general resolution proposed by the Debian GNU/Linux project, to decide how to react to the return of Free Software Foundation founder Richard Stallman to the board, will be known on April 17, with voting now underway. The...

linux.slashdot.org

I love the mentality of slashdot. "Less OSI is better" and calling out on the weaselwords "cannot effectively lead". From the other poll results, I feel like a big chunk supports RMS or don't care much, and the smaller group is anti.
I read all the Debian posts. Although some plea to keep Debian out of the mess and focus on, well, Linux, most seem to want to have "Debian" sign the letter. Which reminds me of what Slack and Suse and so on are doing (hopefully ignoring this mess).

This still reminds me of paid people, actually promised to be payed, to bid a certain agenda:

I suspect there is a money trail in this anti-RMS movement too.

 

[Linux-SWAT]

It's been some years that I found the Slashdot articles to be a bit biased, and sometimes even pro-m$ or pro-apple.
But it's still linking to very informative content.

Yeah, manipulating people is so easy, this Shakespeare film adaptation is quite convincing:

Coriolanus (film) - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[FBnil]

argh... typo... will fix later.

 

[levi]

Statement of FSF board on election of Richard Stallman — Free Software Foundation — Working together for free software

RMS addresses the free software community — Free Software Foundation — Working together for free software

 

[johnicboom]

Post from RMS to the community:

RMS addresses the free software community — Free Software Foundation — Working together for free software

 

[Linux-SWAT]

Third time's a charm:

RMS addresses the free software community — Free Software Foundation — Working together for free software

 

[johnicboom]

Third time's a charm:

Oh, didn't see that levi linked both. Sorry!