windy wrote:Slate:
Stop Equating “Science” With Truth. Evolutionary psychology is just the most obvious example of science’s flaws.
By Chanda Prescod-Weinstein
Alternative headline: '"Science" is One Reason the Google Memo Happened.'
She has a point: no science -> no computers -> no Google -> no Google memo. Turing was probably a shitlord anyway.
It is impossible to consider this field of science without grappling with the flaws of the institution—and of the deification—of science itself. For example: It was argued to me this week that the Google memo failed to constitute hostile behavior because it cited peer-reviewed articles that suggest women have different brains. The well-known scientist who made this comment to me is both a woman and someone who knows quite well that “peer-reviewed” and “correct” are not interchangeable terms. This brings us to the question that many have grappled with this week. It’s 2017, and to some extent scientific literature still supports a patriarchal view that ranks a man’s intellect above a woman’s.
Doesn't science know it's the current year? :bjarte:
Rather depressing to see that a supposed "particle physicist" is incapable of reading that "Manifesto" - at least with any degree of honesty, or realizing that its author was not in the least ranking "a man’s intellect above a woman’s". He was rather clearly asserting normal population distributions for men and women with a substantial degree of overlap: lots of women are "smarter" than many men, and such distributions are based on a limited number of operational abilities to begin with and would probably change depending on both the precise set of tests selected and the weighting applied to them. Here's the actual graph he used; complete document with graphs, links, and citations
here:
https://video-images.vice.com/_uncatego ... 310-PM.png
Cathy Young sure wasn't much impressed with the article either and with good reason:
https://twitter.com/CathyYoung63/status ... 2501039104
I geddit that newsmagazines are supposed to print a spectrum of views - presumably they're not in the business of adjudicating truth claims. But one would think they would draw the line at flagrant misrepresentations.
And an interesting perspective on the corporate culture of Google in general:
THE GOOGLE GULAG
The internet cannot remain in the hands of a corporation that hates free speech.
August 9, 2017 Daniel Greenfield 181
.... And so Damore was fired for “advancing harmful gender stereotypes”. What were these stereotypes?
That the gender gap in coding could be explained because women are more interested in people and men are more interested in things. Women were more cooperative and he suggested and that the gender gap could be reduced by making “software engineering more people-oriented with pair programming.” ....
“Viewpoint diversity is arguably the most important type of diversity,” James Damore had argued.
But that’s not what the left means by diversity. At Google and everywhere else it means a plurality of people from different backgrounds, races, genders and sexual identities who agree with us.
It’s an artificial consensus that displaces the old democratic values of individualism and freedom. Instead it imposes a system of safe spaces that treat any dissent as an act of violence against the oppressed.
The gates of the internet cannot remain in the hands of a corporation intolerant of free speech. Google’s monopoly doesn’t only threaten the free market. It threatens freedom of expression on the internet.
It’s not just about James Damore. It’s about all of us.
Indeed.
Although, as a bit of a caveat, one might raise an eyebrow at Greenfield's "women are more interested in people and men are more interested in things" as that seems the same sort of categorical claim that has marred so many people's perceptions - misinterpretations, being charitable - of what Damore actually said. One might let Greenfield off the hook a bit since that
is the nature of stereotypes: tarring
all with a brush applicable only to
some. But it still should be emphasized that, as Damore argued or suggested,
more women might be interested in people than men are, and
more men might be interested in things than women are. But that hardly excludes or obviates the fact that
some women are more interested in things than many men are, and may well have a greater handle on them than many men do.
Lies, damned lies, and statistics. And an inability or an unwillingness to differentiate between metrics of classes and the specifics of various individuals within them.
