anothercomment

"a gender-biased abstract composition of fields"

What does that even mean? Do you mean things like not counting medicine as STEM, because more women than men study it?

Yeah the boys have the same bad math teachers.

My experience with fake news on social media so far was that somebody always stepped up to point out it is fake.

No such mechanism in traditional media. In my country sometimes news outlets can be forced (by law) to publish a correction of a false story, but it is usually done in small print and gets hushed over.

In my country (Germany) I don't get the impression that the official news sources (state sponsored media and established newspapers) are impartial. At the same time massive efforts to censor social networks are underway, camouflaged as "fighting hate speech". Hate speech is conveniently vague and boils down to "disagreeing with the official party line". There are no courses to appeal against this censorship, in fact, no real accountability for the people doing the censoring.

To me therefore such articles are merely a smear campaign in support of impeding censorship.

I really don't see how the public is supposed to be better informed without social media. In some countries it is even worse, when the people who get elected for government also happen to be the owners of the major media outlets (like Berlusconi in Italy).

I think I also saw a paper debunking the filter bubble thesis (as in people still get so see other viewpoints), but I am too lazy to Google it.

Even without social media, people create their own filter bubbles by only consuming media that aligns with their views. I suspect in the US, Democrats rarely watch Fox News?

"threaten democracy" as in "people may vote for somebody I don't like".

The full HN dataset is also on Google Big Query: https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/public-data/hacker-news (updated daily)

Even some movies about the male giants would be a start (I guess there was one about Turing, but I haven't seen it).

Otoh maybe the subject doesn't lend itself so much to movie making, as most of the action happens inside of people's heads. So far the movies that have been made seem to focus on some other drama going on in the depicted person's lives.

Now I have to ask: to lenders of college tuition consider the subject the borrower chooses? I am just curious - or is it generally the government that does the lending? Otherwise I would be curious to know how lenders see the earning prospects of different majors.

Funny, as I have sometimes thought of going to college as a kind of counterargument to the efficient market hypothesis. Since going to college or not is an investment decision, it seemed that going to college is obviously the better decision. Except, apparently it isn't.

Hm, I always guessed that the brain simply goes by a kind of "maximum information gain" approach, picking out the features that tend stick out most to distinguish things. If unused to, skin color sticks out extremely, so the signal it generates would drown out the other signals.

But that is just a guess and might also go against the findings of the article, which I haven't fully understood yet.

In any case it seems to me that the brain is optimized for processing certain features, as apparently there are people who are unable to recognize faces (face blindness).

Hm, I wonder if there is a inverse correlation between number of JavaScript frameworks and enrollment numbers :-)

Actually, you are only dreaming this :-)

Ordinary household lighting is more and more being replaced by LEDs, though.

Not sure that helps much. At worst, people will start guessing and perhaps suspect the wrong people. And many people can probably identified from the context. Furthermore, there can be no defense against the accusations.

But people get angry and want to insult each other. Sure, it would be nicer if they wouldn't, but it is not in itself related to racism or sexism. I guess the unwarranted insults are often the most annoying, because there is no possible counter.

One problem I have with these list is, as you say, they make it seem as if there is a huge problem with people being harassed. I am not convinced that is true, because the context is missing. Like how many people work for Google, how many incidents are there per month, and how many of these incidents even warrant a complaint?

There is already a debate about the "princess" incident. Eventually somebody will make statistics about that list, and the "princess" incident will be counted as a harassment incident along the lines of grabbing somebodies ass or blackmailing them for sex over losing their job. That seems very misleading.

Also, I'd argue the existence of such a list is already harassment of a lot of people. If now you have to watch your back for every comment, it doesn't make for a very pleasant work day.

I can not judge if "princess" was harassment or not, because we lack context - and so do the readers of the list. It could be friends who habitually edge each other on, like calling a vegetarian "princess" to probe their determination. Or it could be said with disdain, Redneck style (anybody who doesn't eat meat can't amount to much). We don't know. But everybody now has to worry about their words being taken out of context and glued to the wall.

They just call people what the suppose annoys them most. That is why they call women cunts and men gay or sexist or whatever. Would you say sexism is only over when men are being called cunts and bitches?

Actually it seems to me Nigger is a lot softer than Hitler. It basically means "black person I don't like because they are black". Hitler means "psychopathic mass murderer".

Besides, this is again the "there is an asshole in Kansas" line of thinking. Just because you can find somebody, somewhere in the universe who is an asshole, it doesn't prove that everybody is an asshole.

The 77% number is specifically from the "official gender pay gap", presumably published by your national ministry of statistics or whatever (I am not from the US, but here in Germany the official ministry for statistics does the same). And that explicitly does not show 77 Cent to the dollar, as it does not compare people in the same jobs.

Anecdotes are also really misleading here: not everybody earns the same amount of money, so you can always find two people where one of the two earns more than the other. It doesn't mean anything. And as a male engineer I have also discovered before that somebody who seemed less qualified earned more than me. Renegotiate, or switch companies.

As for the Google spreadsheet, it is interesting, but I doubt it captures sufficient detail.

In fact, a often used trick with the gender pay gap (among other things) is to remove just enough detail to make it seem outrageous.

For example lets say pediatricians earn less on average than neurosurgeons, but more women become pediatricians then neurosurgeons (why is another matter). Now if you want to give the impression of sexist salaries, you don't publish the average income of male and female pediatricians and male and female neurosurgeons. You go one step back and publish the average salaries of male and female physicians. Just omit the details that could explain the differences in salaries, and you have shown your desired sexist wage gap.

(why pediatricians earn less than neurosurgeons: simple supply and demand).

What about people with red hair? I think they have a history of being bullied?

How do you ever criticize somebody in such a friendly office? I suppose the need just never arises, because HR only hires flawless, swell people to begin with? So that if ever somebody takes a disliking to somebody else, it must be because of racism or sexism?

The great thing is that there is more than one company, so people can choose their preferred environment. I suspect there are still many businesses were uniforms are the norm, so you can apply to one of those. You can wear your uniform, but you don't have to make all companies uniform.

False accusations are also harassment.

"women suffer the indignation of being paid $0.77 to every man's dollar of equal functional qualification level."

That is not the case, the gender pay gap does not compare salaries for equal job positions and qualifications.

And Trump was called Hitler, Idiot, Psychopath and all sorts of other things. Presidents simply attract some amount of hatred.

I would guess most subscribers simply like gossip and watching train wrecks.

"is facing growing pressure from diversity advocates and the media"

I don't think these entities should have the power to exert pressure.

At least the Jews seemed to have found a way around it, though - why were they successful? Did they build their own schools, or how did they do it? Afaik at least for some time they were banned from certain professions, which is why many become money lenders and became rich - might have been before the 20th century, though.

I don't know that much about the history of the US, but it seems Jim Crow laws were in effect till 1965? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Crow_laws

Women, as I said, had other things to do, before the invention of the washing machines.

The question remains, why not found a company hiring those supposedly cheaper workers, and blow the competition out of the water?

I suppose a company hiring only blacks in the early 20th century would have been unable to sell it's wares because of racism?

Are software developers on a "market for lemons"? Because employers presumably can't know how good a developer is, they bid too low, which in turn makes good developers avoid the market altogether? (ref https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons )

So why don't they apply for other jobs?

Also, there seems to be a market rate for developers, which is usually not a bad salary. What is the reasoning for assuming most of them are underpaid? Because a lot are 10 times developers?

Is it about information asymmetry, or worse, complete unknowns because even the developers themselves don't know how good they are?

Would helping developers discover how good they are help their cause? Do sites like HackerRank help, or are the problem sets not relevant enough to the real world?

There is a frustration among developers, I guess. But are there really a significant number of overqualified developers stuck in underpaid jobs? If so, is it because they undervalue themselves, or because there are too few employers willing to pay a lot of money? It seems if there were many employers willing to pay a lot for great developers, at least some of them would be able to recognize a given candidate? (Meaning, suppose there was an undervalued developer and he/she would apply to 100 companies, would none of the 100 recognize the greatness of the developer?)

I don't think that is the same thing - preventing Jews from visiting business schools is not amenable to market forces, if there is a law against Jews visiting schools. Women had other things to do - Black people were working, too, but I suppose they were also banned from getting a proper education and from doing certain jobs.

People returning from paternity leave are not banned from any jobs.

The question is still: why can businesses get away with paying less? It would seem that their demand for these workers is not high enough, or they can enough workers without the missing experience. Otherwise, they would be competing for these workers and wages would go up.