Comment by narrator | Hacker News Reader

Comment by narrator | Hacker News Reader

I'm going to annoyingly meta on this one because I'm feeling really philosophical today.

There is a constant dissonance in the western world between assumptions about "ideal" or "moral" statistical probability distributions and actual statistical probability distributions over a large sample size when it comes to any politically sensitive topics like the one implied in the article (i.e women having an interest in science and technology).

This happens over and over again. There are thousands of articles a year on this kind of thing and millions of human years spent mulling why the ideal curve doesn't match the actual curve. It's the perfect topic for non-productive rambling because it's always dissonant and it never goes anywhere.

The dear reader probably already knows this, but to the idealist, the ideal always equals the actual in a just world and evidence of a mismatch is evidence of injustice. Those who accept or tolerate the actual not matching the ideal are presumed to support injustice.

These arguments are endlessly repeated. Nevertheless, seemingly endless repetition is a very effective means of political discourse. I realized this most profoundly when studying religious texts. Points that are intended to be remembered are mentioned over and over again to the point of mind-numbing boredom. Repetition is good for remembering and people only believe what they can remember. Thus the most effective strategy of any activist is to repeat their message over and over again and have the adherents do the same and approve the same and ostracise those who criticize and those who don't care, thus spreading the idea through the society via social psychological principles and the pure intellectual brute force of repetition.

What we are experiencing is a particular flavor of secular religion called "cultural Marxism". Marxists believe that social forces are best understood through a model of class conflict.

Economic Marxists explained the ills of society through the conflict between rich capitalists and the poor working proletariat. The rise of the middle class threw it a curve ball that it couldn't explain and it fell out of favor (outside of the Soviet union and American academia).

Cultural Marxism uses the same conflict between dominant class and under class to explain social pathologies in the under class. Thus, we all hear about statistics where under classes are not meeting the same performance as the upper class, with the implication that it is the upper class's fault. This is called "oppression".

So we know that women make less than men, but we don't hear much about how men are falling behind in college degrees and high-school education because this does not fit the Marxist narrative.

Furthermore, when there is an underrepresentation of an underclass in some desirable area, we take that to be de facto evidence of oppression (nobody cares that there are no female garbage collectors or miners). We all except the collective guilt for the sins of our class and nobody questions whether or not the Marxist narrative might just be fundamentally flawed.

Modern academic feminism and racial theories are based on Marxist models, which causes them to make many errors of reasoning IMO. There is also a lot of data that they can not explain. For example, racial Marxists have no problem explaining why some minority races do worse in school than white children (oppression!). But I've yet to hear an explanation from a Marxist as to how other minority groups (Asians) do way better than white children.

This is where I was a few years ago. You've found the enemy and it's Marxism.

However, Marxism is just an abstraction that is related to the underlying epistemological disease of the modern era which is that we use statistics to prove our assumptions regardless of an actual identified mechanism of the phenomenon. We discard the search for the theory because it's hard and we've become accustomed to believing hand-wavy explanations for fields or social phenomenon we are not experts in. Arguably, nobody is an expert here though because there is lots of murky data about these particular topics that is widely dispersed and subject to heavy confirmation bias by researchers.

Instead of looking for the "why" we cargo cult and focus on the other side. IMHO, it's better to understand the "why" whether it's the why of the "ideal curve activist" or the meta-why of the observer of the "ideal curve activist" or the meta-meta-why of me observing your understanding of the issue. However, figuring out the "why" and seeing through statistical "facts" is the only way to really improve our understanding.

In the natural sciences this is easy. We have the scientific method. In the social sciences there is endless opportunity for subtle errors or coming to conclusions that are incorrect occasionally due to error but usually due to sometimes carefully constructed but almost always omission filled perceptions of reality.

I actually think social science is one area which got it right by, in most cases, recognizing it own imperfections. Some people tend to take things for truth when it's rely more of a concept or a foundation for discussion. The only person who seem to be sure is the one studying just enough to make up their mind.

Where I really see a problem is where social sciences interact with natural science and acts as a natural science in the eye of the beholder, which happens in macro economics and even sometimes in things like programming methodology.

I actually think an honest reading of statistics undermines the Marxist worldview, as with the examples I mentioned.

> nobody cares that there are no female garbage collectors or miners

Just like nobody cares that there are very-few/no male prostitutes or strippers.

The underclass you speak of is split along gender lines too - unfortunately.

Prostitution and stripping can be very lucrative professions.

So can mining.

>nobody cares that there are very-few/no male prostitutes

Prostitution is very common in the gay and especially trans-gendered community. It may just take a different flavour of prostitution and a different sense of power balance.

Feminism split off from Marxism in the 2nd wave of the 60's/70's when it was decided that class based oppression is a derivative product of patriarchy. Gender took the center stage to class, race, and other forms of marginalization.

The discourse of modern day feminism is best characterized by writers like Michel Foucault. Where discourse is viewed as a postmodern power play. Where the logical validity of the discourse is secondary to the function it serves in power relations.

> Feminism split off from Marxism in the 2nd wave of the 60's/70's when it was decided that class based oppression is a derivative product of patriarchy. Gender took the center stage to class, race, and other forms of marginalization.

No, it didn't. Feminism predates Marxism ; certainly, some strands of feminism were informed by Marxism in some way, and certainly there is a school of Feminist criticism that largely follows the same dialectic model as Marxist criticism (with the same understanding of the label but replaces the central struggle of the classes with one of the sexes), which split off from Marxist criticism as you describe, and which suffers from the same problem as Marxist criticism in that it is essentially takes the preeminence of a certain struggle as revealed unquestioned truth and reinterprets the world in light of that revelation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-wave_feminism

I'm not sure what the point of that was. It doesn't contradict my point that feminism predates Marxism and was never subsumed by it (and, as such, could never "break off" from it), or that the description of "feminism breaking off from Marxism" with the so-called "second wave" and taking the analytical approach described in the post my earlier post responded to was more accurately a description of a particular school of Feminist criticism that was influenced by Marxist criticism.

"Cultural Marxism" is an ahistorical term and suggesting deracinated American nerds whining about "sexism in tech" are in any way successors to the likes of Stalin is absurd. Marxists viewed this kind of thing as an effort by bourgeoisie money-driven "democracies" to neutralize and discredit revolutionary consciousness. Marxist-Leninism, as it actually existed, was masculine, authoritarian, implicitly violent, autocratic, militaristic, and overwhelmingly white. They considered people who act like American liberals to be mentally ill or criminals.

The American Left are Jacobin libertines - they owe nothing in their program to Marxism.

The point is that Marxism "as it actually existed" isn't what this term is referring to. It's referring to Marxist theory, applied to dialectical struggles beyond just the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.

And Marxist theory is definitely not "masculine" or "authoritarian". Marx was always critical of the family and stressed the fact that marriage was a form of exploitation, famously comparing it to prostitution. This is why many Marxists have called for the abolition of the family, and why Marxist-Feminism exists -- it's just an extension of dialectical materialism with primacy placed on gender relations.

The idea of a normal vs ideal probability distribution makes me think about coin flips following the normal curve. The coins flip distribution over a large sample size will form a normal curve. The "ideal curve activist" will attempt to attract evidence for and possibly find ways to undermine the conspiracy of injustice that flipped the coins after they landed to some non-random pattern making the coin flip distribution appear to correspond to the actual curve.

How are these coins flipped back becomes the topic of interest for the serious activist. Many leads are followed, the evidence and the picture is always murky so suspicions turn to those who deny or ignore the injustice of the actual distribution curve. An odd thing then happens. Denigrating and dis-empowering those who dispute or ignore the ideal curve becomes the mechanism of activism due to the activist's exhaustion of and the murkiness of the task of looking for the assumed malicious coin re-flippers. The coin re-flippers may exist but they may also possess impunity or obscurity such that the activists fail to act against them but it's usually much easier for the activists to direct their energy against assumed shills or fellow conspirators who's proof of membership is their disbelief or disinterest in the ideal curve.

This article wasn't "there isn't a 50% gender split in IT, therefore something is wrong!", which is what you're alluding to, it was "this person was shamed away from their interests by their peers". The article doesn't talk about distributions at all.

Keep in mind that the audience often changes with each repetition.

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