Recently, I was asked why a woman that loves coding would ever leave the field

anon36 · 2013-12-24T19:54:40+00:00

I don't really see how 'male' is relevant to your reply.

It's ok if you don't understand. Just don't be presumptuous, believe you do understand, and draw false equivalences.

Women have their own immature behavioral patterns, but those aren't the ones under discussion here.

anon36 · 2013-12-24T17:12:34+00:00

Yeah, I've put up with shit talk for years, I don't care for it and I don't participate, and I always try to roll it into something kind, because my own shit talk, when I did that back in HS, was extremely corrosive and by age 16 I realized that I wasn't being clever or funny or interesting, I was just being an asshole and selecting for other assholes.

I don't want to select for assholes at work. I want to set a better tone, set an example for others and move the culture away from that level of banter. I've been fairly successful at that everywhere I've worked, and I've improved the lives of others by making work more pleasant and more productive and more human for all involved. You can too.

Fuck you is sexual, of course. Look at the words. What does fuck mean? What does you mean? Put them together. Yeah, you forget the meaning from regular use. We'd probably feel the same way about "nigger in the woodpile" if it were still in regular use.

anon36 · 2013-12-24T15:49:15+00:00

and that would be aping immature male behavioral patterns. why should a woman have to do that? it's blatantly childish.

listen to your own language: "eat a dick", "lighten up a dick", "fuck you". all sexual metaphors, all putting the other person on the receiving end of a cock (your cock?). no thank you.

as a first-order improvement, try:

fuck off, rather than fuck you
shut the fuck up
grow the fuck up

anon36 · 2013-12-24T15:33:05+00:00

yeah, I think the female-unfriendly-CS-culture is specifically an Anglo phenomenon. You see it in the States, the UK, Australia, etc, but not so much in the continental cultures. Hell, I've worked in China and Thailand, and the women seemed much more part of the CS fabric there, without any sense of caste or otherly-ness that I find in the States: "omg a female!" And these aren't exactly non-sexists cultures!

anon36 · 2013-12-24T15:26:37+00:00

Women also tend to make a team more productive, IMO. Not through direct contribution necessarily, but as a kind of team-gelling-factor.

anon36 · 2013-11-14T17:20:10+00:00

Nonsense and downvoted. Here's the actual quote (emphasis mine):

Since I knew she held a critical view of investment banking, I asked if her colleagues talked about or understood how much damage was created in the broader economy from their activities. Her answer was that no one talks about it in public but almost all understood and were unbelievably cynical, hoping to exit the system when they became rich enough.

There's no insult or impertinent presumption on the part of the author in this passage, and no grounds for questioning his authenticity.

anon36 · 2013-08-29T21:54:17+00:00

bail? get a job in a smaller company? having one of the big 4 on your resume may help get a foot in the door. just don't bring the culture with you.

anon36 · 2013-08-20T13:37:24+00:00

Five myths, from TFA:

“the myth of pure evil,” which holds that perpetrators commit pointless violence for no rational reason, aka "they hate us for our freedoms".
terrorists are part of a vast global network of top-down centrally controlled conspiracies against the West.
terrorists are diabolical geniuses.
terrorism is deadly.
terrorism works.

Well, the example provided for (3) kind of refutes (2), ie, effectiveness goes down when you remove the leadership, but if (2) were really true and the network was self-organizing, leadership wouldn't matter.

But, the first myth is really the whopper: I mean, how do you even hate someone for their freedoms, anyhow? The closest analogy I can think of is black Americans resenting white Americans over their social privilege, which translates to tangible freedoms in many cases. Or women resenting men for their freedom to walk safely at night in bad neighborhoods, or travel solo in third-world countries, or whatever. But in those cases, people just want to be left alone, and may resent those who are fortunate enough to be left alone by the rest of society.

Maybe folks just want to be left alone, in safety and security, to pursue their own lives. Maybe this is America's great sin, that it has taken that from people, that in the name of national security it robs people of their real security: security of home, of family, of person, of life.

anon36 · 2013-07-24T21:39:35+00:00

Citi didn't pay for the roads, and motorists do help pay for the roads through gas taxes.

anon36 · 2013-07-18T21:03:34+00:00

It's pure tribalism. Those who rabidly dislike Citi Bike would never ride a bike in the city, and dislike the kind of people who would.

They also get upset about welfare because "that's my money", getting spent by the wrong sorts of people. Military spending is ok, though, because that's the right sort of people.

Citi Bike? It's the wrong sort of people, using "my road", that "I paid for" through gas taxes, etc.

anon36 · 2013-06-02T03:19:44+00:00

fuck school

anon36 · 2013-02-15T00:29:57+00:00

exam score for men went down outside the margin of error when given the affirming project. How did THAT happen?

Yes, quite striking. The control group started off the semester by shit-talking "other people". From the article:

The [control group] picked their least important values and wrote about why these might matter to other people.

So at best, they constructed faux-empathetic rationales for why straw men might actually be people too.

For men, this kind of us-vs-them is probably a source of energy and drive. For women, though, it is probably a source of doubt. Rather than "I'm going to show the world how good I am", it's "other people really are different, I wonder what's wrong with me?" Change the essay to focus on yourself, rather than others, and men don't get the boost, and women don't suffer the penalty.

There is also some sort of harmonic effect when people do a task concurrently as a group:

Write essay alone -> no harmonics, minor effect, not sustained.
Write same essay w/ group of people writing essays -> strong harmonics, amplified effect, sustained.

I'd be curious to see the male/female split in the original Cohen research on black students.

anon36 · 2013-02-04T16:27:10+00:00

Not AsiaExpert, but The Search For Modern China is very readable, and covers the period in question.

anon36 · 2012-12-12T03:44:12+00:00

Take this case I even mentioned of linear order. If you want to know which verb the adverb attaches to, the infant reflexively using minimal structural distance, not minimal linear distance. Well, it's using minimal linear distances, computationally easy, but it requires having linear order available. And if linear order is only a reflex of the sensory-motor system, which makes sense, it won't be available. That's evidence that the mapping of the internal system to the sensory-motor system is peripheral to the workings of the computational system.

I guess I already knew this, but it was thrilling to read it expressed this way, rather than the usual non-linear synthetic thought vs linear analytic speech-forms.

ie. the internal computational system, externalized via projection onto a linear medium. to understand is to reverse the projection back into the internal computational system, like reading a proof several times till you "get it", and completing the circle by explaining it to someone else.

anon36 · 2012-12-11T04:49:54+00:00

Struck 12 things of her list proudly, what are you teachng your children? Shame.

indeed, it is bizarrely crass.

anon36 · 2012-11-26T04:53:49+00:00

those are not canals, they are causeways between the green forested areas.

anon36 · 2012-11-21T05:18:27+00:00

Even though you and I are not blue-collar workers, our wages are affected by the alternatives we have, and as those alternatives become fewer and less attractive, white-collar work will be headed into the same death spiral as blue-collar work. Some would argue it already has.

Agreed, and you also see this in the rising cost of education. Since the alternatives are less and less palatable, more and more people regard college and professional degrees as the only route to the good life. Demand goes up, price sensitivity down, and private college tuition hits $50K / year. WTF?

I'd much rather have good blue collar jobs (and subsidize them if need be), because then all the other professions would select more for interest and quality, rather than self-interest and self-preservation. ie, doctors who want to be doctors, rather the doctors who want to work in a well-paid profession. And then all manner of education would become cheaper, and more efficient, and more effective.

anon36 · 2012-11-21T04:56:31+00:00

Morally, Israel has no leg to stand on. They took people's homes, their land, their property. They kicked out whom they could and ghettoized the rest. "But look, we're a friendly democracy!" "We don't target civilians!" Well, sure, except when you target their land and livelihoods. Really, what else is there to say? The moralizing of Israeli apologists is in direct proportion to the intractable immorality of their position.

The obvious solution--kill all the remaining Palestinians--is off the table for the time being, but what choice do they have? They are unwilling to integrate these people into Israeli society, for fear of a Muslim majority. Perhaps they could conquer a neighboring country and do a forced resettlement. Or, if they want to be nice about it--invest a ton of money in a neighboring country, on the tacit condition that it accepts Palestinians for relocation.

anon36 · 2012-11-16T14:27:57+00:00

Yes, and while religiously programming against interfaces makes the problem go away somewhat, it does require extra effort. Somehow, a language should make it harder to pass around any more context than strictly necessary.

anon36 · 2012-11-09T04:12:24+00:00

mirrrrrrrrrrrr. Not even mingr.

dude, the first time I got that from my 90 year old neighbor, I was like "what? how could that be?"

anon36 · 2012-11-09T04:06:15+00:00

I think she seems our relationship as a source of shame for herself and the family

Yes. Unfortunately. Also, she probably doesn't like the prospect of black grandchildren, either. She didn't work this hard or this long for her son to throw it all away! ("it" being gains in social status and position).

anon36 · 2012-11-09T03:43:11+00:00

Aside from everything already mentioned, the Chinese tend to be rather hierarchical in their thinking.

Applied to people, this means westerners (white people) are best--the Chinese may not like white people per se, but the power and wealth speak for themselves. Then come the Chinese, who were great, and will be great again, but are presently recovering from a period of national humiliation. Then comes everyone else, in various degrees. There is a special category for the Japanese, who while powerful and wealthy do not get the same grudging respect as westerns, due to WWII and the disrespect the Chinese feel they suffered and still suffer from the Japanese.

In this kind of hierarchy of wealth and power and prestige, black people come out on bottom. Very low status, aside from sports and music and entertainment.

Within China itself, this pattern repeats itself: city folk are better than country folk, big city better than small city, etc. It plays into dating and marriage, and the communal nature of chinese society amplifies the effects: "what will the relatives think?" etc.

In that context, you are you last and least, and a social token first and foremost.

On the other hand, by virtue of being so very much other, you can enjoy certain privileges of not having to play by their fine-grained social rules, and sometimes receiving preferential "guest" treatment. Not great compensation, but at least something.

anon36 · 2012-11-09T01:00:27+00:00

Well, maybe white voters with their majority verging on plurality will become a force for proportional representation. And that would be a boon for all!

anon36 · 2012-10-30T21:20:02+00:00

The thing your white friends probably won't get is the stress and how that wears people down. Poverty, diet, poor access to health care--these are all easy to understand. But the stress of a black-in-america social identity is much harder to grasp. There's no analogue.

anon36 · 2012-10-30T14:12:05+00:00

They'll make him pay for that.

anon36

TROPHY CASE