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Comment by lostlogin | Hacker News Reader

It’s presumably easier to get accepted if your first work is good, original and presented by a member of the establishment.

I wonder what progress humans would have made if an inclusive approach had been taken a few hundred or thousand years earlier?

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Good luck as a man without pedigree or means to get your research noticed, much less published, translated, and promoted by leading scientists.

If you're talking about scientific research especially, not much because it was not a shortage of people that limited research.

> I wonder what progress humans would have made if an inclusive approach had been taken a few hundred or thousand years earlier?

You're wondering how much value was lost by ignoring what was -- by your own hypothesis -- unoriginal, shoddy work?

Or work that was interesting but was authored by someone lacking inside connections?

How did you arrive at this conclusion?

lostlogin's explanation of why women really were excluded from the scientific establishment, despite the fact that Jeanne Villepreux-Power had no trouble becoming one of the establishment's most established members, was that her work was good.

If that's what it takes, the implication is that all you're missing when you indulge in exclusionary systems is the bad work. How much of a loss is that?

I see, you have a issue with understanding logic. In this case we have an illustration of the fact that A => B != B => A

Armies got a lot better when the officers stopped being restricted to the nobility. This was forced on European armies by the slaughter of the nobility in WW2.

The subtext of the movie "The Blue Max" was about commoners becoming acceptable as fighter pilots because the knights were wiped out.

P.S. It's a tragedy that an excellent movie like TBM is not available on bluray. Sigh.

> P.S. It's a tragedy that an excellent movie like TBM is not available on bluray. Sigh.

I was curious, and it looks like it had a Blu-ray release, but it was a limited production run. I guess they decided to constrain supply in order to get a high price.

https://www.blu-ray.com/movies/The-Blue-Max-Blu-ray/87746/#O...

Thanks. I just bought it! Woo-hoo!

Always looking forward to Stachel showing us some real flyink!

> This was forced on European armies by the slaughter of the nobility in WW2.

History is a bit more complicated.

History is always complicated. But you're free to provide nuance.

Well for starters the first modern European army with commoner officers was France's when it had to take on all of Europe in 1790. So dating it to WWII is being more than a century late.

Yes. And nobility was going out of fashion in most of Europe after WWI at the latest. Eg in Austria you weren't allowed any titles at all anymore.

Though if you concentrate on Germany, because of the smaller armed forces demanded by the Versailles treaty, you probably did have a higher proportion of noble officers during the Weimar Republic.

Some countries, including - regrettably - my own are still solidly stuck in the past on this.

If you focus on Britain only then this was effectively turned around with the Cardwell reform of 1871: https://victorianweb.org/history/armyrefs.html (and you can find examples going back to the 17th century where "commoners" became officers in areas where competence was considered more important than anything else). As for the rest of Europe, that happened long before WW2 as well. Did you mean to write WW1? Even at that time nobility didn't have much to do with the army in most of Europe.

Yeah, I meant WW1. Sorry about the mistake.

Now that's a claim that I wouldn't have nearly as much beef with as the version with WW2.

I made a mistake. I meant WW1.

I feel like we'd be super advanced if we'd just stop arguing about petty shit.

> I feel like we'd be super advanced if we'd just stop arguing about petty shit.

If everyone always agreed, science and technology would stagnate. Disagreement drives advancement.

Please, explain how disagreement over petty shit drives advancement. By my understanding, petty shit is of no value, and thus unimportant to advancement of anything but resentment and dismissal, and indeed is an inhibitor of progress. (Irony acknowledged.)

One man's petty garbage is another man's sacred ox?

your name is 'moistly', was that petty at the time - just curious because it's ironic.

It’s ironic? How so? ELI5 please.

Anyhoo, I chose “moistly” because his reaction to saying the word was hilarious, because it’s completely unlike other aliases here, and because it’s one of those words that everyone feels a little squeamish about, like “lugubrious”, “bulbous”, “phlegm”, “orifice”.

The week to week grind in academia, disagreements included, is typically petty shit to people outside of a very niche subfield.

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