posted on June 27, 2018 02:10 AM by
u/brokenAmmonite
21
u/brokenAmmonite28 pointsat 1530065593.000000
idk if this is the right subreddit for this but it at least seems
topical, given that it involves STEM and HBD.
i find this perennial debate particularly irritating because CS used
to be female-dominated, before there was a push from male engineers
to get women out of the field.
I'd be thrilled personally if the sneering grew to encompass STEMLords/ladies in general. Rationalists are kinda the purified apex of a lot of the same thought patterns that many a STEMLord already has--disregard for other people's emotions, an unfounded intellectual superiority complex that consistently underestimates the difficulty and pre-existing scholarship of other fields, a certain humorlessness and inability to deal with ambiguity...and above all, a narrow and reductionist worldview.
This is petty, but I really hate how for some of my other STEM/-adjacent friends, I have to work sooooo hard to get any personal details out. Like I have this one programmer friend who I've known for five years, but I had no idea he played guitar until I mentioned I was taking lessons. Five years of hanging out, and going hey how ya doing? Not once did he ever say, oh yeah, just learned a new song. Wanna go to this open mike? Nope. Nope. Five years of going, hey how ya doing, and never getting anything back more than "good." Never getting anything back, actually, unless I talked about how Haskell was beautiful. ffffff
Haskell is a pretty great programming language. The problem is not thinking, "Hey, Haskell is pretty great," because it is a very beautiful language, in the way there is profound beauty in mathematics.
The problem is -- something else.
Honestly, I'm hesitant to summarize, but I think "the problem" is a combination of rigid, inflexible thinking (without the self-awareness that one can compensate for one's inclination toward black/white thinking), combined with garden variety resentment against women.
Oh please. Plenty of people are neurodiverse and they don't act like this. Certainly ASD (along with ADHD) can lead to rigid, inflexible thinking, but many who are not "diagnosable" show similar traits, and many with a diagnosis (including me: ADHD) learn to recognize their own limitations and to compensate.
So please cut it out with the abelism.
As for appropriate subreddits to post it to, there's also /r/circlebroke2, the general "reddit is shitty and it offends me and I need to complain" subreddit. Though the mods are weird and need to shill their Discord server constantly and the user base had (still has?) a sizable number of tankies.
It's totally consistent to believe that capitalism really fucking sucks but also that for better or worse we're stuck with it now. It's a hell of a lot more effective to try and make the system as humane as possible instead of endlessly relitigating the fucking cold war of all things.
/r/circlebroke was created as a reaction to [faces of atheism](https://www.reddit.com/r/MuseumOfReddit/comments/38i8se/the_faces_of_atheism/). Essentially, /r/atheism circlejerked so hard that not even /r/circlejerk could outjerk them. [Hence, /r/circlebroke was created](https://www.reddit.com/r/circlejerk/comments/qf9s6/it_has_been_fun_everyone_but_its_over_well_just/c3x8ylh/?context=1) to complain about things happening on reddit.
It turns out that reddit, in general, was very left-leaning at the time, much more than now. This naturally meant that /r/circlebroke posts were quite conservative. Additionally, /r/circlebroke required "effort posts", i.e. self posts with walls of text, outlining what the circlejerk is and how it's terrible.
/r/circlebroke2 was created as an alternative where people don't need to make effort posts, and it ended up more left-leaning than /r/circlebroke.
/r/circlebroke has also died down significantly due to the mods just closing it for the duration of summer 2016, because reddit in general is terrible during the summer holidays. This led to many people leaving it or moving over to /r/circlebroke2.
youre a week late fam
also
> What changed? Well, male programmers wanted to elevate their job out of the “women’s work” category. They created professional associations and discouraged the hiring of women. Ads began to connect women staffers with error and inefficiency. They instituted math puzzle tests for hiring purposes that gave men who had taken math classes an advantage, and personality tests that purported to find the ideal “programming type.” Frink writes: "According to test developers, successful programmers had most of the same personality traits as other white-collar professionals. The important distinction, however, was that programmers displayed “disinterest in people” and that they disliked “activities involving close personal interaction.” It is these personality profiles, says Ensmenger, that originated our modern stereotype of the anti-social computer geek."
in other words, fuck off nerd
I think that one has a much simpler explanation and it's not only STEMlords who do it, but they just have less self-awareness about how silly they sound. The simple explanation is that millennials are really uncomfortable talking about themselves or their peers as adults, and *woman* is too adulty while *girl* is insultingly childish, but there's no maturity-neutral word for female humans like there is for male humans (*guys*), thus they reach for a term used by police and zoologists.
I used to say that rationalists are people who think they are Spock, but are actually Data. Now I say that rationalists are people who think they are Spock, but are actually Quark.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DLVjwMlUIAAzv5U.jpg
and that women have a higher drive for work-life balance and less
drive for status
Why won’t any of these fucking fools read some ethnographies before
pontificating about what’s hardwired and what’s not? Women work their
asses off, and always have.
While there’s such a thing as human nature, it is infinitely more
flexible than most of these dorks think. Here’s a link to a pop science
description of a hunter-gatherer tribe where the men are such good
fathers, they let their babies suck on their nipples:
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2005/jun/15/childrensservices.familyandrelationships
That’s certainly how it seemed to Professor Barry Hewlett, an
American anthropologist who was the first person to spot male
breastfeeding among the Aka Pygmy people of central Africa (total
population around 20,000) after he decided to live alongside them in
order to study their way of life more closely. By the time he noticed
that babies were sometimes being suckled by their fathers, it wasn’t as
stunning a revelation, however, as it might have been had he spotted it
going on in the breastfeeding room at Mothercare in Manchester.
What’s fascinating about the Aka is that male and female roles are
virtually interchangeable. While the women hunt, the men mind the
children; while the men cook, the women decide where to set up the next
camp. And vice versa: and it’s in this vice versa, says Hewlett, that
the really important message lies. “There is a sexual division of labour
in the Aka community - women, for example, are the primary caregivers,”
he says. “But, and this is crucial, there’s a level of flexibility
that’s virtually unknown in our society. Aka fathers will slip into
roles usually occupied by mothers without a second thought and without,
more importantly, any loss of status - there’s no stigma involved in the
different jobs.”
I bet none of these momma’s boys have ever considered that women need
work-life balance more because they’re always expected to do the
housework and childcare too, but of course, that’s not “work” to these
dumbasses.
Finally, I want these dorks to go outside on a long-ass camping trip.
Try chasing down a moose for lunch, and tell me, if you survive, whether
you still think the skills and mindset necessary to be a hunter are
necessary for STEM.
> Why won't any of these fucking fools read some ethnographies before pontificating about what's hardwired and what's not?
Ethnography is cultural Marxist pseudoscience, unless it was written by Napoleon Chagnon, then it's Science^TM .
Chagnon not too popular amongst most anthropologists, I take it? I thought his work amongst the Yanomami was kinda discredited because they're not a pre-contact people and have been fighting all sorts of battles to protect their turf for a long time, but I don't know much else about him.
Not entirely, but certain claims have been shown to be clearly false. One of the most important, for his arguments with regard to warfare, was his study that alleged the deadliest killers (unokai) had higher fitness, which was shown to lack proper methodological controls by Brian Ferguson. Many claims against him were fabricated by Patrick Tierney -- never read Darkness in El Dorado as a non-fiction book. Here's a somewhat brief summary:
https://www.livinganthropologically.com/brian-ferguson-napoleon-chagnon/
oh, just try going to sci-hub again and searching the url again. people donate their accounts to sci-hub to use. you happened to get someones that expired. if you reload sci-hub and try again youll get someone elses account
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/00/11/12/reviews/001112.12horgant.html
> Over the past half-century, anthropologists scrutinizing far-flung people have become increasingly pessimistic about the possibility of complete objectivity. They agonize over ''the observer effect,'' their version of the physicists' uncertainty principle: the mere presence of a tape-recording, note-scribbling stranger among an isolated people alters their behavior. The anthropologists usually have subtle psychological effects in mind. But consider the following encounter: a military helicopter bearing the anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon and a television crew suddenly looms above a remote Amazonian village, whipping roofs off huts and sending baskets and hammocks flying. As women and children run screaming into the jungle, tribesmen hurl rocks and sticks at the chopper, eventually driving it away. Now *that* is an observer effect.
> Incredibly, this 1991 incident is one of the more benign observer effects uncovered by Patrick Tierney in ''Darkness in El Dorado.'' Tierney's exhaustively reported book exposes the horrendous scientific and journalistic exploitation of the Yanomami, the most studied and vilified tribe in the history of anthropology. For more than 30 years, these diminutive rain-forest dwellers — who live in villages scattered across Venezuela and Brazil — have served as the archetype of the ignoble savage. The Yanomami were hardly pacifists, but Tierney makes a powerful case that they were much less ignoble and savage than the scientists studying them.
[Edit to add, in Chagnon's defense](https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/the-weird-irony-at-the-heart-of-the-napoleon-chagnon-affair/)
> I was still working on my review of *Darkness* when I received emails from five prominent scholars: Richard Dawkins, Edward Wilson, Steven Pinker, Daniel Dennett and Marc Hauser. Although each wrote separately, the emails were obviously coordinated. All had learned (none said exactly how, although I suspected via a friend of mine with whom I discussed my review) that I was reviewing *Darkness* for the *Times*. Warning that a positive review might ruin my career, the group urged me either to denounce *Darkness* or to withdraw as a reviewer.
> I responded that I could not discuss a review with them prior to publication. (Only Dennett persisted in questioning my intentions, and I finally had to tell him, rudely, to leave me alone. I am reconstructing these exchanges from memory; I did not print them out.) I was so disturbed by the pressure from Dawkins *et al*—who seemed to be defending not Chagnon so much as the sociobiology paradigm—that I ended up making my review of *Darkness* more positive. I wanted *Darkness* to be read and discussed, to get a hearing. After all, Tierney leveled what I found to be credible accusations against not only Chagnon but also other scientists and journalists.
[...]
> [W]hen I interviewed him for "The New Social Darwinists," a critique of evolutionary psychology published in *Scientific American* in October 1995[, Chagnon] said he was disturbed at the degree to which some sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists downplayed the role of culture in human behavior. I said he sounded like Stephen Jay Gould, a vehement critic of genetic explanations of human behavior. I meant to goad Chagnon with the comparison, but he embraced it. "Steve Gould and I probably agree on a lot of things," Chagnon said. I included this quote in "The New Social Darwinists."
Whether or not Chagnon was "right", which I don't know, which is not to say that serious serious questions were not rightly raised, and whether or not he was wronged (which as far as I know he really was at least once), his unpopularity amongst certain people, and the friendliness of his analyses to certain dogmas were and are a pretty powerful simulacram to employ as a smokescreen in debates about the status of academia and the status of certain ideas in academia, hence /u/snugglerific's point that as long as it's Chagnon, ethnography is a method "we" can get on board with.
Exactly, ethnography is pseudscience unless someone does it while making noises about sociobiology and the corruption of the discipline. Unlike the dork web, though, he at least has legitimate claim to being the target of a bullshit smear campaign.
idk if this is the right subreddit for this but it at least seems topical, given that it involves STEM and HBD.
i find this perennial debate particularly irritating because CS used to be female-dominated, before there was a push from male engineers to get women out of the field.
[deleted]
Why won’t any of these fucking fools read some ethnographies before pontificating about what’s hardwired and what’s not? Women work their asses off, and always have.
While there’s such a thing as human nature, it is infinitely more flexible than most of these dorks think. Here’s a link to a pop science description of a hunter-gatherer tribe where the men are such good fathers, they let their babies suck on their nipples: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2005/jun/15/childrensservices.familyandrelationships
I bet none of these momma’s boys have ever considered that women need work-life balance more because they’re always expected to do the housework and childcare too, but of course, that’s not “work” to these dumbasses.
Finally, I want these dorks to go outside on a long-ass camping trip. Try chasing down a moose for lunch, and tell me, if you survive, whether you still think the skills and mindset necessary to be a hunter are necessary for STEM.