spangry

That would certainly upset one of my preconceived notions about this whole affair. Could you provide a source on that?

So, because the cause is uncertain, we should not discuss female under-representation in software development at all?

Sure, and that's not an argument I'd make. But, as Damore suggested in his memo, mightn't these innate differences mean that women are less likely, on average, to prefer careers in software engineering? And mightn't these innate differences also explain why women are strongly over-represented in certain other professions like nursing (91%), elementary and middle school teaching (81%) and social work (80%)?

> but they're particularly off putting to women.

This is the crux of the issue. For this to be true, it must also be true that men and women are, at least in some ways, intrinsically different (otherwise why would these things pose a greater challenge for women relative to men)?

If making a mess is what gets you fired, shouldn't google have gone after whoever leaked the memo, instead of Damore?

What country is this? In my country (Australia), the percentage of licensed female architects is around 20%, and this percentage seems to be about the same in the USA and UK. Europe seems a little better with around 30% female representation.

Quite so: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits#Ge...

"A study of gender differences in 55 nations using the Big Five Inventory found that women tended to be somewhat higher than men in neuroticism, extraversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness. The difference in neuroticism was the most prominent and consistent, with significant differences found in 49 of the 55 nations surveyed."

I found the xenophobia thing quite interesting : "In addition, the behavioral immune system appears to contribute to xenophobia and ethnocentrism. One implication is that these prejudices tend to be exaggerated under conditions in which people feel especially vulnerable to the potential transmission of infectious diseases."

I wonder if we'll see a rise in xenophobia, and consequent long-term shifts in government policy, due to COVID-19?

Here's one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVDPVBZF2Xg

Here's an interesting reference (viruses): https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030438941...

And more generally (bacteria): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimicrobial_copper-alloy_tou...

EDIT: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimicrobial_properties_of_co...

The original was about quantitative easing: https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/781/373/b1e...

8chan

Why trust the authors of rationalwiki over the author of those Quillette articles? As you yourself asked: Who is more credible? How are we sure which one is? Perhaps nothing is knowable, and you should never believe anyone about anything ever.

At this point I think I'm going to bow out of this conversation. Good luck on your quest for objectivity!

There are a number of things you could do. You could look for corroborating accounts. For example (note these are a three part series written by the same person):

https://quillette.com/2019/02/17/a-witch-hunt-on-instagram/

https://quillette.com/2019/06/07/instagrams-diversity-wars-r...

https://quillette.com/2019/07/28/knittings-infinity-war-part...

You could gather and directly examine evidence yourself:

https://fringeassociation.com/2019/01/07/2019-my-year-of-col...

https://fringeassociation.com/2019/01/07/2019-my-year-of-col...

Ultimately I guess you have to make your own judgement of what kind of ideas and behaviour you deem 'reasonable'. The difficulty, I suppose, is if you yourself are caught up in one of these purity spiralling communities. It's hard to maintain objectivity in such a situation. Delusional people don't know that they're delusional. People caught up in a cult don't think they're in a cult.

I've seen people only come to understand how insane things are when the mob finally turns on them, but by then it's too late to get out unscathed.

I agree that these folks are probably acting with good intentions. And that can actually make the situation worse. This CS Lewis quote comes to mind: "Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."

> ...very human tendency to chafe at any perceived condescension.

> If people in the US primarily voted the issues (that matter and affect them) instead of on the basis of nonsense, Democrats would win by a landslide.

> The real fools are the people who continue to fall for this shit.

Gosh, it's hard to see where people get the impression that they're being condescended to. It's a pity they're so easily manipulated into voting against their own best interests.

I'm trying to figure out the appropriate discount rate and methodology that governments should use when doing cost-benefit analysis of big expenditure projects (e.g. infrastructure). It would seem that economists have been arguing about this for many decades now with no end in sight.

There are some interesting value-judgements that have to be made here (e.g. do we value the consumption of future generations more/less than present consumption?), so I suspect there will never be an objective answer to this question.

I hate it when governments do this, and they seem to do it a lot. The socially optimal price is the marginal cost of providing the service. In this case, the marginal cost is essentially 0 so the search should be free. They're leaving welfare gains on the table by setting such a ridiculous price.

Genuinely curious, what is "the Chinese way"?

If you read the sentence before the one you very selectively quoted, or even just completed the very sentence you quoted, it becomes clear the sentence is talking about the US presidential election, not the German one: "That’s a paltry sum for Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, who finds himself in the greatest crisis of his career over the company’s role in Russia’s meddling with the U.S. election. While the Russian episode involved ads bought under false identities by people with Kremlin ties, the AfD campaign was completely different—the party literally walked through Facebook’s front door and introduced itself, a strategy Harris Media intends to repeat."

Why do you find this story scary? It seems like a sensible way for a political party to get votes: profile your current supporters, find other people who fit that profile, convince those people to vote for you too.

As for Russian interference, the article you linked to says this: "The Russian meddling that German state security had been anticipating apparently never materialized. Instead, the foreign influence came from America."

You'd think it would be fairly easy to control for population density. However the study abstract indicates the only other confounding variable they controlled for was 'temperature'.

EDIT: And the link between cities and higher crime seems to be well known and well studied. Here's what a quick google turns up: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/250109?seq=1#metadata_i...

I'm curious, how far does your belief in freedom of association extend? Should a business be allowed to refuse service to someone because they are black, for example? Does your answer change depending of whether that business has many competitors (e.g. a cake shop) or is a near-total monopoly (e.g. google)?

Won't this just make Twitter even more of an echo chamber?

Very interesting. Here is a list of the 5 articles from that discussion:

· Johnson, Brian D., Eric A. Stewart, Justin Pickett, and Marc Gertz. (2011) Ethnic threat and social control: Examining public support for judicial use of ethnicity in punishment. Criminology, 49(2), 401-441.

· Stewart, Eric A., Ramiro Martinez, Jr., Eric P. Baumer, and Marc Gertz. (2015) The social context of latino threat and punitive Latino sentiment. Social Problems, 62(1), 69-92.

· Mears, Daniel P., Eric A. Stewart, Patricia Y. Warren, Miltonette O. Craig, and Ashley N. Arnio. (2019) A legacy of lynchings: Perceived black criminal threat among whites. Law & Society Review, 53(2), 487-517.

· Stewart, Eric A., Brian D. Johnson, Patricia Y. Warren, Jordyn L. Rosario, and Cresean Hughes. (2019) The social context of criminal threat, victim race, and punitive black and latino sentiment. Social Problems, 66(2), 194-221.

· Stewart, Eric A., Daniel P. Mears, Patricia Y. Warren, Eric P. Baumer, and Ashley N. Arnio. (2018) Lynchings, racial threat, and whites’ punitive views toward blacks. Criminology, 56(3), 455-480.

All centre around racial issues in the criminal justice context.

It's quite shocking that the editor in chief of the 'Criminology' journal seems unconcerned about papers in his journal that rely on fabricated data. It calls into question the veracity of all papers published in his journal. Does anyone have any insight into criminology as an academic field?

White liberals have strongly negative in-group bias: https://www.tabletmag.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/AA2.jpg

Just to add to your point, per unit subsidies can also cause negative prices.

Wholesale electricity price spikes happen in Australia too. For example, spot prices in Victoria hit $14,500/Mwh in January this year: https://www.aer.gov.au/communication/wholesale-electricity-p...

It is simple supply and demand. Electricity generation at any given point in time must be sufficient to meet demand for electricity, otherwise blackouts occur. When you introduce intermittent generation sources into the market, like solar and wind, it becomes more difficult for this matching to occur as generation output is weather dependent. Consequently, you get times in the wholesale market where a confluence of factors momentarily drive up wholesale prices: wind stops blowing, sun stops shining and demand spikes due to it being the middle of a hot summer day (e.g. middle of the day in January, which is summer in Australia, so everyone turns on their A/C). Prices shoot up until it entices other generators to make up the shortfall (e.g. gas turbine operators).

Which electoral laws did they break?