Cracking jokes at the unfairness as a way to swallow it is very different than cracking jokes as a way to point out how unfair it is to others. I'm not exactly sure which you mean, but it seems like the former, and that is depressingly jaded.
I find the existential dread caused by acknowledging the unfairness a good motivator to try to improve things. There will always be randomness, but life doesn't have to be as deeply flawed as it is today
I think it's more that humor provides a great vehicle to commiserate with the pain of
others, and to explore our own pain semi-safely as well. It's almost always pro-social expression, and is equally so whether it's directed at
vain rulers or fickle rolls as fate. It can indeed drive social change (and usually with less violence than fear or anger), but that's not the only reason to embrace humor.
The universe really is funny. It's absurd in so many ways, and the flaws are so obvious, so persistent, and in such contrast with certain authentically sublime experiences and emotions... Until death and pain are no longer mandatory elements of human existence, it will indeed be deeply flawed.
> but this critic is almost certainly making perfect the enemy of good in pursuit of an ideal.
Yes, because "good" means preventable poverty related deaths by the millions because it is not profitable to do anything about it \s. Good for you != good, but it is easy to look past that when it isn't right in your face
You're right. It's incredibly easy to ignore things that aren't immediately in front of me. Like the human rights abuses ongoing in China, which aren't really part of my immediate daily life and I don't generally think about much.
With that said, is it possible that this passage could be interpreted more charitably? Perhaps some might read it as a comment on how demanding perfection can cause more negative effects while seeking to prevent negative effects.
For example, where might our technology be if our species had refused to extract or smelt metals until we had the ability to do so without any emissions of any sort?
It's not about what real preventable human tragedies can be averted, but aren't, because of the evils of human greed you wisely point to. It's about accepting that imperfect improvements to alleviate human pain and reducing human lives lost can, sometimes, be preferable to hoping for perfection at some future date.
But how would our species conceive of the idea of emissions and the effects thereof without first creating emissions and observing their effects?
I think the issue has more to do with the Cassandra effect and the tendencies of some to not consider or want to act on potentially catastrophic situations if they believe it imperils their own more immediate well-being or status.
It's true. It's impossible to take seriously every warning. Every potentially catastrophic situation has to be evaluated on the risks and benefits.
And, well, sometimes the people making those choices are wrong. Or shortsighted. Or egotistical. Or afraid for their own comfort, power, and privilege.
At the same time, I still don't take the warnings of the flat-earthers particularly seriously, so perhaps not all warnings of potentially catastrophic situations are equally credible. As opposed to how seriously I take the warnings of climate scientists.
I read How To Make Friends And Influence People. Then I threw out all the fluff about genuine connection, and realized that people only actually care that you make them feel like they've been understood. This is the implicit thesis of the book, once you realize that a decades-dead author cannot possibly have a genuine two-way emotional connection with you.
In practice, this tends to mean telling people they're right a lot. Then you imply they have the wonderful, glorious opportunity to become more right. Then you remind them of how right they are. If this sounds exhausting, well, it is. But it also matches the structure of my previous comment.
Profit is achieved primarily by selling people goods.
people want cheap meat, coffee and toys.
We found ways to give people that.
There are other effects where corporations cheat the laws, corrupt government, and pillage the environment - true.
But the system has always been about you and me getting more choice and more options at better prices.
Your toothpastes offer different flavors, and come in a magic immortal material called plastic which costs nearly nothing to make and is better for our environment than using tin tubes.
Profit has many ills, as single numbers often do - they reduce complex decisions down to a simple number.
That’s the magic of it all. We don’t have to examine the calculus of our morality when buying a pixel or an iPhone.
We just have to Examine the price.
I think we have to come to terms with the fact that humanity as a distributed entity, is not a moral organism.
Profit is just a way to reduce complexity. We have a society that reflects this because our reality is such.
Which is why many of the popular solutions today are prices which reflect carbon costs.
You're making too many assumptions in almost every statement here. If you're going to continue with this line of thinking then please back it up with evidence.
Indeed. We need a new and more comprehensive set of metrics by which we measure value add or success.
When considering how successful a thing, a person, or a project is, innovation and market success certainly should be weighted heavily but we really need some other metrics to include.
It's really not. People take jobs for all sorts of reasons. They are answerable to their friends, family, community etc. If that were the case, why would people be resigning from Google over moral issues?
This person is saying is that our economic system incentivizes profit, not that it mandates it for every agent. So while a few relatively well-off, well-educated, and principled Googlers can quit over perceived injustice, many people either can't economically justify such a choice, don't know enough to know that there's a problem with their work, or simply don't care and take the money over morals.
And furthermore, when was the last time you saw someone held to account for their job title? I've done that and every time it results in me alienating someone, because no one wants to lie to themselves and be forced to answer that they work at Raytheon because they think that's the way to do good in the world.
No, they said our society and economic system incentivize profit over all else. Neither of those things are true.
Lots of people make principled decisions every single day. You think only rich engineers can afford to put morals over money, and everyone else is selling their soul for a paycheck? Where do you live?
If businesses are exempt from satisfying social needs, is the expectation that the government (through legislation) and private citizens (by voting) are responsible for addressing them? Basically just regulate businesses with the expectation that they have no social conscience and hope legislation is enough to prevent them from taking actions that damage society?
If businesses are exempt from satisfying social needs, is the expectation that the government (through legislation) and private citizens (by voting) are responsible for addressing them?
They aren't exempt from serving any social needs -- that's taking what I said further than I said it. Business do serve many social needs. They just can't serve every social need. They are a limited institution with a limited function.
It's not just government and individual people that come together to make a robust society that can counterbalance business interests; and business, government and the individual are not all we have at our disposal to meet the broad challenge of maintaining a just, livable and inspiring society. The wide variety of "civil society" institutions that, at one time, characterized the American polity -- unions & professional associations, men's and women's organizations, benevolent societies, church groups and religious federations -- are important avenues to political participation outside of (a) government, (b) the individual and (c) business. Francis Fukuyama, in Political Order & Political Decay, highlights the great significance of civil society organizations in the survival of democracy in America,
and the eventual adoption of it in England, Denmark and many other countries.
Basically just regulate businesses with the expectation that they have no social conscience and hope legislation is enough to prevent them from taking actions that damage society?
They need to be regulated so as to (a) "...prevent them from taking actions that damage society" and (b) encourage them to stick closer to action that is beneficial to society. Were businesses to determine on their own what those things mean, it would effectively be undermining the political will of the rest of society. Businesses are paid to do a job.
Please consider that your reply was a little exaggerated, taking what I said further than I said it. This is quite characteristic of American politics at present; and perhaps of hacker politics in general. It doesn't serve us, though: it neither helps us to understand one another, nor to come to a workable agreement that improves public life.
Ones that actually work as intended in the general case, and don't frequently malfunction by getting a bunch of people exiled, consigned to real poverty, or killed?
So, if you would love to clear up the misconceptions, actually answer all of the questions you listed? The only one you answered is about discounts for your product.
Humanitarian use: see below about 100 years ago vs. today.
Quality of people: that's why Space is free.
What's design's ethical imperative: also, see below about 100 years ago vs. today.
Founders of push notification companies: Ask the CEOs of Leanplum/Marketo/Intercom/Vizurly/Kahuna why they haven't released an antidote for push notifications? Please. Try to get them to talk about it.
> Is it such a huge deal that most women are not interested in technology?
If this is because they have been systematically discriminated against in tech and primed at a young age with BS like "cars are for boys and dolls are for girls" then yes, absolutely this is a huge deal. If it just so happened that they were not interested because they don't have the "technology gene" then this would not be a big deal, but that is nonsense and all the evidence points to the former.
That is patently false, and you should not make factual claims under these circumstances. These claims add to the noise, not the signal.
The scientific evidence for innate psychological differences between girls and boys is overwhelming. There is a clear scientific consensus on this. I cannot fathom how this can still be controversial.
Specifically about your "cars vs dolls" example, I'll give you two quotations right of the bat:
- Shown two pictures, one of a mobile (physical-mechanical object) and one of a face (social object), there is a clear gender difference how much a child will look at the mobile vs face. (Yes, boy likes mobile, girl likes face.) In newborns btw. so that is hardly an artifact of human societal norms. [1]
- Offered a choice between a toy truck and a doll, there is a clear gender difference how much an adolescent will play with the truck vs doll. (Yes, boy likes truck, girl likes doll.) In monkeys btw, so that is hardly an artifact of human societal norms. [2]
You are correct that narrowly speaking, it is false to say that "all evidence" points in any one direction.
However, your claim that there is a "overwhelming", "clear scientific consensus" is lacking in citations, your one broken link to what I assume was supposed a scientific study and one link to a pop science blogpost (which links only to other posts on the same blog and not any actual scientific papers) notwithstanding.
In fact the overwhelming scientific consensus is that the opposite is true. Check out this blogpost with working links to 22 different peer-reviewed scientific papers on how social priming can differentially affect how men and women, or white students and black students, etc perform at various academic and cognitive tasks (there are actually 27 links to such papers but 5 are broken; there are also links to 9 more scientific papers besides, just to flesh out the argument): http://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/picture-yourself-as-a-s...
I challenge you to find working links to 22 different peer-reviewed scientific papers arguing that women's underrepresentation in STEM is not due to systemic discrimination but is explained wholly by other factors such as innate psychological differences.
In fact, I'll give you a head start. The blogpost I linked to already links to 6 such papers, so if you can find 16 more, I'll concede that maybe there isn't the scientific consensus I thought there was.
The scientific consensus is real, it's just not the one you seem to make it out to be. It's about the claim that there are "innate psychological differences" between boys and girls. I did not claim that these differences are solely responsible for 100% of observable statistical variations between genders. To try to ascribe all effects to a single set of causes, be it nature or nurture, is really a fool's errand. The blank slate is out of the window. Humans come into the world primed, and boys and girls are primed differently.
That notwithstanding, I wouldn't think of claiming that societal norms do not at all affect outcomes. Because it would be next to impossible to prove, and I'd give it a rather low a priori probability. Just what these effects really are and how big they are is a matter of ongoing debate. C.f. "The Norway Paradox".
As noted by the other reply to GP, even if your links worked and were to actual, peer-reviewed scientific papers, they do little to support the argument that women's underrepresentation in STEM is not due to systemic discrimination. I think it would be an uphill battle for you to argue that they count towards the 16 in my challenge.
I don't think it makes that claim? Clearly women can be capable and competent software engineers. I think the study was showing there is an inherent preference for different interests among large population of the sexes and then people who are concerned about the gender gap take this study to argue that the differences (and others) may manifest later in life as choices in career path.
It's good to hear that. I guess that was a communication problem then. I'd be careful with any kind of hyperbole on the net because, just as with sarcasm, it will be taken seriously. People will read what you wrote and take it straight and it will mislead and confuse them.
So I guess we're roughly on the same page then, that the observable variation in outcome is caused by a mix of innate and societal factors, and the real discussion to be had is about how to tease them apart and quantify their respective contributions?
There is an interesting documentary called "The Norway Paradox"[1] that explores why do we see a much higher rate of gender segregation in developed countries. The thesis the documentary advances is that there are indeed innate differences between the sexes, and with higher freedom that can be found in advanced societies, the people are freer to choose a job that fits their innate tendencies rather than be forced into something else by economic or social circumstances.
Another video worth watching on this subject is the debate between Steven Pinker and Elizabeth Spelke on The Science of Gender & Science[1] which was held in the wake of the Larry Summers controversy at Harvard in 2005. They both make many good points, and it is clear that while discrimination exists, it is probably not adequate to explain outcomes which are aligned with innate preferences and distribution of specific skills.
That question appears to be addressed in the post to which you are responding. I won't be as bold as some to lay causation purely on biological differences, maybe there could be some factor we're not accounting for on why socially flattened societies tend to have larger exaggerations in traditional gender roles. However, if your policy platform wants to push equality of outcome for career paths on the sexes then this deviation from expectation should be disconcerting.
I have 1 son and 2 daughters, and I have plenty of nieces and cousins. The personality of each child has a bigger impact on how they behave than I had imagined. And also, boys are way different than girls. They are equal, but they are different none the less.
So instead of trying to throw them all in one pile and expect to have a 50-50 men-women working in technology, accept the difference, and let any person decide what they want to do in their lives.
Boys are different than girls. They are equal, but different. If you can't accept this, then I can imagine you have all kinds of diversity problems where you expect that everyone is the same, likes to do the same things, etc.
I recall a funny answer when one of my computer science professors asked "What can we do so that more girls sign up of Master in Computer Science". One smart guy answered: "Make sure it has less to do with computers". (In US you would probably get kicked out of the university because someone felt offended, or that it's a sexist remark)
Women are very welcome in technology, I worked with a lot of very nice and smart women, and had one of the best managers that was a woman and mother of 2 kids. But why do you expect that the average woman will have as much interest in technology as the average man?
You might be interested in this blogpost which cites 27 different peer-reviewed scientific papers supporting an argument that social priming can explain much of observed gender gaps in STEM (and another 9 more scientific papers just to flesh out the argument): http://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/picture-yourself-as-a-s...
> "Make sure it has less to do with computers"
> someone felt that it's a sexist remark
Ignoring for a moment whether that's "sexist", can we agree that if those 27 scientific papers are to be believed, such remarks directly hurt women in computer science who would otherwise be do better?
This has been proven false several times. Men and women are also biologically different. This doesnt mean they're limited in capability but that they have slight natural biases. Why is this such a hard reality to accept?
Obviously they are biologically different! That is not the question. The question is: Do these differences make women less interested in tech, or are there less women in tech because experiences they have had since birth make them feel unwelcome or unable.
This isn't quite true. It is up to your issuer if they decide to approve the transaction despite failing AVS or CVV checks. Often they will decline the authorization, but depending on their risk signals, might decide to approve it. Then, the merchant (or the processor they are using) can decide if they want to let the transaction go through despite the failed checks, or call it a decline and reverse the authorization, which removes the pending charge. Crappy terminals might cause the pending authorization to sit there for 1-3 days by delaying or not sending the reversal, but in general that shouldn't be the case.
alternate facts strike again. in the old days we called this 'government propaganda'. Let people have 'free speech' but publish the party line in the news.
I can't speak for this book, but Michael Hartl's rails tutorial is what got me addicted to programming, and is largely responsible for me switching majors to CS during my undergrad and getting into the industry. He is a great technical author. Give him your money.
I find the existential dread caused by acknowledging the unfairness a good motivator to try to improve things. There will always be randomness, but life doesn't have to be as deeply flawed as it is today