galacticpony2

> This attempt at summarizing the research is innumerate, disconnected from empirical data, and offensive.

Maybe you should elaborate on why it is innumerate and disconnected. As for calling it "offensive", that's entirely irrelevant. It outs you as somebody who is more interested in silencing people than debating them on more objective merits.

> Research on gender and IQ does not show that "there exist fewer females with high IQ"

Research does show that there exist fewer females at either ends of the distribution and more towards the center, compared to males.

http://www.aei.org/publication/statistical-tests-shows-great...

This does mean that there exist fewer female individuals with exceptionally high or exceptionally low IQs. That is indeed how statistics work.

If you want to contest that the research is flawed and that the result is wrong, do that. If we suppose the data is valid, then my conclusion is sound.

> And there are an enormous number of women in STEM: the concern is that there are few of them in computer science.

The broader concern is STEM, not just computer science. Sure, there's an enormous amount of women in STEM, there's also an enormous amount of men in STEM and if you put both in relation, the relative amount of women in STEM is quite low (compared to other fields).

The only real argument here is how much (if any) of that is due to causes that aren't social.

No, I'm not. I didn't mention the word "biological", I'm not making any claim on what the underlying reasons for the distributions are. Does it have to be "clean" anyway? What does "clean" even mean? Do you believe society creates this distribution? If so, I'd be interested by which mechanism.

Secondly, heritability may only account for 40-60%, but that's more than zero. Now, how many percentage points do you suppose could be influenced by diversity programs over at Google?

First of all, you didn't answer my question. Where is your research that brings evidence to support your prediction? Sociology in particular isn't very diligent in actually applying the scientific method.

Secondly, you're making an "argument from authority", which is an intellectual embarrassment. Scientific knowledge is not based on consensus, but on evidence. The theory behind climate change is not supported by the amount of scientists that "believe" in it, but by the evidence they bring forth.

> Maybe it's one thing that the more concerning elements of the left are aggregated into certain universities, but it is something else to also exist in the services and companies most everyone relies on (and that has control over their information flow).

Well, where do you suppose all these students go to, once they leave college? Many of them end up in leading positions of HR, management, marketing and media. They are a cultural elite.

Meanwhile, the STEM people end up mostly as cogs in the machine. They generally don't become influencers beyond the confines of their particular field.

Ironically, the same people arguing for freedom of enterprise might be the ones needing worker protection laws for freedom of conscience.

You know, I for one maintain that he shouldn't have to do any of these things to avoid getting fired and getting branded a sexist by the dishonest media. But that's exactly what happened. Being more scientific wouldn't have helped him one iota. Keeping his mouth shut would've helped.

> When conditions are set that reduce or control for these social factors (including implicit bias) the differences in performance that James Demore attributes to "biological" factors disappear.

That's a bold prediction supported by no real-world evidence whatsoever. Where's your control group? Where's the retort society that has all this bias removed or even quantified?

Of course societal effects affect the outcome of a person's career, but the idea that there is absolutely zero influence of biological differences is pure dogma. However, it's convenient (if not imperative) to believe, if you're a strong social constructivist.

Given how strongly he's had his view misrepresented, I don't think giving references would've helped him. He was very careful to pick his words, to no avail.

It's the science itself that these people don't want to accept, if it doesn't support their idea that people and society are malleable enough to solve all these unequal distributions.

You probably heard of research that shows that the female population clusters towards to the mean in various features, IQ being one: http://socialdemocracy21stcentury.blogspot.com/2017/06/why-a...

If we suppose that being successful in STEM correlates strongly with a high IQ, the mere fact that there exist fewer females with a high IQ would be one reason why there would be fewer females in STEM. That's just an objective, logical conclusion. Another logical conclusion would be that no diversity program could change this discrepancy.

The sound way to challenge this would be to challenge the research here, i.e. the foundation of the argument, instead of persecuting a person making such an argument. In other words: "Don't shoot the messenger".

When people say "orwellian", they're often thinking "1984".

I'm thinking "Animal Farm". It's a process, a takeover of the mind. It doesn't start with government and doesn't end at government.

To be fair, it's not "orwellian" in literally every sense of the word, that was just a figure of speech.

It's not news though. I've positioned myself squarely on "the left" without much of a thought before the Brendan Eich case. Then I discovered that "the left" has no intellectual integrity whatsoever. The dishonesty has become unbearable. They turn you into a straw man and then ostracize you, just like a cult. You have to constantly police your own thought, lest you say something that can be used against you in the worst possible way, by someone who doesn't like you. It's "orwellian" in every sense of the word.

Of course Google throws their employees under the bus for the sake of defending their "diversity" facade.

Thanks James, for being the canary in the goldmine.

> What is the distinction you want me to make? That it has a different icon in your OS task bar?

That's one! So, it's already not exactly the same. Figuring out the rest shall be left as an exercise to the reader.

> My argument is that by sharing resources with the browser they're running anyway, that the battery/CPU/RAM drain will be reduced. A browser is a lot of overhead and using less browsers at once is always good.

You are describing one trade-off. Your argument is valid, but if you follow the links you yourself posted, it's not actually the browser engine that does all the draining, it's the content it is running (i.e. you can disable some functionality and the problem is mitigated). The base RAM overhead of running Electron compared to something like Qt isn't that big either.

> Users generally expect that when they download a desktop application, that it's native, has minimal overhead and performs well.

I don't think that's true, but even if it was, so what? Users need to lower their expectations.

> But that's exactly what you're getting when they're run as Electron apps.

Well, no it isn't. If you can't even make that distinction, then having any further conversation with you is going to be pointless.

I suppose you would welcome the use of progressive web apps, but those haven't yet "arrived". If they did, I might argue for using them over things like Electron.

> The problem is that the complaints of CPU, RAM and battery degradation are valid complaints.

Many complaints about web technology are valid, that doesn't mean they invalidate its use. The reality is that even a company like Spotify would rather drain its users batteries than develop native apps. It's a tradeoff.

If Spotify followed through with your advice, those users should not be offered a desktop app at all, they should be forced to only use the website and have their browser drain the battery instead. You're effectively arguing for less choice when a native app is not an option. That doesn't make sense to me.

> If you're going to put in the effort to write a proper desktop application with native components through Qt, .NET, Java or OpenGL or something, go ahead but please don't bother with webapps with a browser wrapper, just leave them on the web where they belong. If you need a little more integration, do it with a browser extension.

Yeah... no. I'm not that fond of using Electron apps (Atom, Slack...) myself, but I absolutely don't want them in a browser window. Writing a "native" application simply isn't an option in many cases.

> The top comment on any news article or discussion forum being something other than "great, another unnecessary Electron app that'll waste my CPU, RAM and battery".

So what? There's the same handful of curmudgeons posting that comment everywhere. That doesn't mean they're valuable as a demographic. It depends on the market of course, but if your application solves a problem that nothing else solves as well (as it should), then running on Electron is not a dealbreaker. Most ordinary users can't tell and don't know to care.

No offense, but what makes you think (potential) customers like you are so valuable that serving their pet peeves becomes a sane business decision?

Everyone is moving to web technology because it cuts down on cost on many fronts, not because it's the better technology. Finding web developers is easy and using Electron (etc) gives free cross-platform support, which is very valuable. It's all about economics, not quality.

The tool that does the minification isn't necessarily the same tool that does the concatenation.

Here's a very lengthy discussion on how the very popular minifier UglifyJS (version 1) originally removed trailing semicolons, causing this exact problem: https://web.archive.org/web/20130319222210/https://github.co...

In the real world, it's irrelevant what tools could be reasonably expected to do. What matters is what they actually do. Expecting your tools to insert semicolons for you is the path that leads to peril.

> bundling is not just concatenation, and certainly not in the "common" case.

Fair enough, the common case is minification and concatenation. Or what else is it? The problem with the semicolon remains.

> Please have a look all the popular libraries and frameworks and their codebases[1], then tell me you still think your assessment of the Javascript community is at all fair.

Yes, it is.

https://hackernoon.com/how-it-feels-to-learn-javascript-in-2...

The common case of "bundling" is just concatenating files, which works fine if people add their damned semicolons.

To quote the author: "not using any semicolons at all is a very popular trend in JS these days, so it is very possible this problem might happen in the real world"

This is the crux of the problem. Javascript programmers often follow trends, not sane practice. Looking at the code, for some reason there's a semi-colon before "require" invocations as well.

I don't even know what to say, at this point. Everyone is fired.

> If we wanted to forcefully distribute the money while leaving the people at the top intact (let's call this "blunt force redistribution") such that the current top 10% has 10% of the wealth, then each person in the bottom 90% would receive $208,000 on average.

They would receive assets valued at 208,000$ at current (arguably inflated) prices, most of it not being cash. You might expect the biggest expropriation in US history to be somewhat upsetting to the markets.

Now that we've established an upper bound, maybe we can talk about what percentage of that money can realistically be taken and what problems it could actually solve.

I'm not a right-winger and I'm not dismissing the statistic. The statistic is correct. The question was "why aren't wages tied to productivity?".

The answer is, an employer will only pay as much as necessary, even if workers become more productive. That's just common sense.

An increase in productivity correlates with an increase in wages only if market demand supports it. An increase in productivity combined with stagnant demand will reduce the amount of labor required, increasing the supply of labor, lowering its price. Is that not obvious?

Ponchaud's book was not full of errors, it was based on accounts that were (at the time) unverifiable and Chomsky went on to question their credibility.

For an outline of the points brought forth, you may read this: http://www.paulbogdanor.com/chomsky/wma.html

What the article you linked refers to as "full of errors" was in fact a review of the book by Jean Lacouture.

You're missing the point entirely. I'm not saying inequality doesn't exist. Of course it exists.

I'm asking again: What happens if we take the wealth not just from the top 1%, but the top 10%, then spread it among the rest? How much does everyone get? Would it be a life-changing amount of money?

First of all, I'm talking about the inequality of income between the super-high-earners (1%) and the rest. Those people are not the ones pricing everyone else out of housing.

Secondly, it's not true that rent/house prices increased sharply everywhere, nor is it entirely due to income inequality between high-earners and low-earners.

For one, we had and have a lot of real estate speculation (a correction of which we experienced in 2007) but we also have policies and regulations in place that ensure the market can not provide for affordable housing. What prevents construction of an apartment highrise in the middle of San Francisco? It ain't neoliberalism, that's for sure...

Not really. He was - as always - exaggerating the ills caused (directly or indirectly) by "western imperialism" while simultaneously dismissing the reports of the atrocities by communist regimes as "propaganda".

When the truth came out, his opinion did not need to change. Rather, he would point out that he was right in his position with the "information available at the time".

Well, those 1% could in theory have 99.99% of all income. So the justification that "because it's only 1%" (of people) is wrong.

In fact, neither the median nor the average supports my point, but the share of the income total of those 1% relative to the sum of all incomes.

I doubt Chomsky really has any ideals at this point. Politically, he's been occupied with relativism for decades, the utility of which is questionable.

He's a master of weasel language, to the effect that he can deny ever having made a solid statement about anything. You'd be hard pressed to ever find a quote of him saying what "should be" in clear, actionable terms. You will however find post-hoc rationalizations, in abundance. He has extraordinary hindsight.

Planned obsolescence is an interesting topic, but suffice it to say that while I do own a handful of decades-old appliances that still work, they did cost much more at the time. It also depends on the brand. Some will offer warranties at a premium. You have the choice, as a consumer.

Another question is: Do you really want to use the same appliance for decades?

The problem of the low-end worker who is stuck with an ever-shrinking amount of jobs with no career-prospects is, of course, very real. However, neoliberalism itself isn't to blame and leftist policy isn't the cure.

> Why couldn't they be on par with the rise in productivity?

Because wages are tied to supply and demand, not productivity. Increased productivity will rather lower wages.

> Yes, quite frequently. Here's an article with numbers and a graph

Same fallacy with the percentages: The top 1% clearly got their wages raised (CEOs etc), but in broader terms it doesn't matter much, because it's only 1%. In absolute terms, the sums are not that large relative to the sum of the wages of everyone else. It's a psychological problem, because people don't like income inequality, but economically, it doesn't make much of a difference. This is where the left steps in to gain political capital from a non-issue.

Percentages are misleading. Going from 1$ to 10$ is a 1000% increase, yet it's not significant.

Do the math again, this time with actual dollar amounts, then try again. Take all the money the top 10% have, then spread it among the rest. Also remember, you can only do that once.

Two points that keep coming up:

"Real wages have gone down"

Well, how high should they have risen? They can't rise indefinitely. Yet, the products you can buy for the same money have vastly improved. What car could you buy for (the equivalent of) 10,000$ in 1979? Would you trade? All sorts of goods have become either cheaper or better, or have literally come into existence.

Now, you will blame the rise of Chinese manufacturing on these improvements, but then please also consider how much wages have improved for the Chinese. The standard of living is rising across the board, across the globe.

"It all goes in the pockets of a few super-rich"

It's repeated like a mantra on the left, but when do they ever show you the actual numbers? Do yourself a favor and take all the wealth and all the income of the top 10% and distribute it across the other 90%. Now tell me, has the wealth and income gone up dramatically for those 90%? Wealth/Income inequality is a psychological problem more so than an economic one.

Mind that the "clockspeed" is noted as 100khz.