jsnx

I'm not sure that men's willingness to make things that people want really sets them apart from women. Across cultures, women play an important (and often exclusive) role in the economy -- drying fish or tending sheep or what have you.

Women rarely played a role in the macro-economy, true enough; but for much of history, trade within a village was for more valuable than trade between villages or nations. It's misleading to suggest that the present worthlessness of small scale trade implies the past worthlessness of women as economic engines.

A cornerstone of the male networks the author describes are put downs, and in my conversations with women who have technical degrees, they often say they couldn't handle the culture not because of the work but because of the constant jockeying for status.

Yeah, work really hard, innovate and get nowhere!

The author overstates some of his claims. For example, European women made excellent contributions to herbal medicine -- the only medicine around -- until the rise of 'scientific' medicine, which caused as much as harm as good for much of its early history. The author claims that medicine was all men's doing.

This tendency to overstatement manifests as a pervasive one cause fallacy. There are many reasons for womens' and mens' relative different status -- some long term and unchanging (the politics of birth), some short term and malleable (prejudices relating to relative intellectual capacities), many in between these extremes. The author acknowledges the manifold causes of gender differences only to dismiss them -- and the motivating factors for women's cultural creation are left unexplored.

Why can't we just have an internet FS? Compile all the apps down to a few common byte code formats and allow for namespace control via chrooting and similar mechanisms. No more web browser! We'd need to make symlinks more powerful, to enable opening a connection -- but there'd be little in the way of special UI required.

An operating system is a lot of things -- it would be more precise to talk about a "web userland".

There isn't a formal process leading to creation or innovation; and doubtless, there is not a formal process to train creators or innovators. Mentorship is the way to go -- put your computer away and work with a child.

That has much to do with connections as it has to do with ability.

Public education isn't for the children -- it's for the market.

A modest amount of public education protects against small scale market inefficiencies -- quacks selling poison, the illiterate being defrauded by their employers -- thus liberating a lot of spending power which is gobbled up by large scale, centralized market inefficiencies -- the myth of cancer treatment, the American college system, the legally sophisticated defrauding their employees.

There is no incentive for the really wealthy -- the people with the people's taxes, their work hours, their confidence -- to put money into education that would only make them harder to control.

Knowledge arises as a sort of after thought, and scholarship is a hobby; only in cases where the information asymmetry can be turned to advantage -- in religion, in technology, even in education itself -- does the scholar become a professional. Maybe the wise would be better off hiding their talent instead of making it available for institutional use?

No, that's not the ubermensch mentality -- I'm talking about folks who think they've found the ubermensch. (Usually, the ubermensch is white.)

I don't see any reason to choose between ynews and reddit. The level of technical dialogue here is better, no question -- and for awesome lolcats and social interest anecdotes, like http://politics.reddit.com/goto?id=2g6mu, there's reddit.

A bikeshed (from a discussion on the FreeBSD mailing list -- see http://www.bikeshed.com/).

Are you implying that my reaction to genetic determinism is just a result of my uncritical acceptance of liberal, academic mores?

Personally, I think racism is more socially acceptable than most of us would like to admit. I've met people who left research in biotech because the ubermensch mentality was so pervasive there.

There is little evidence that social behaviours are transmitted genetically -- but you need only examine the history of Buddhist monasticism to realize that social behaviours can be transmitted, with extreme uniformity, in the absence of consanguinity. Why do people fall back on genetic determinism? It has a lot to do, I think, with logical positivism -- something that is very attractive to academics of every persuasion, except those close enough to its roots (physicists) to understand its limitations.

It's also interesting that the same pattern did not show up in Japan or China. Why? Were the rich there not genetically superior enough?

This is blasphemous! The rich are genetically superior to the poor...

The idea that behaviours run in families is not unreasonable, but I don't see why the author looks to genetics for that mechanism.

This piece is both well informed -- there are certainly no factual errors -- and vitriolic beyond belief. What is anyone supposed to take away from the author's attack on partial evaluation, for example? The author seems to suggest -- but does not say -- that function composition would be better handled by writing even more functions and passing around lists of function pointers.