On 04/11/2014 11:27 AM, Marcus G. Daniels wrote:
On 04/11/2014 10:43 AM, glen wrote:
Well, most of us, I think, agree that symmetry with respect to female
and male compensation is a good symmetry. So, there's one example.
The problem there is gender culture, and the objectionable enduring
aspects of that could be eliminated with some biochemical tuning.
Weaken or strengthen certain drives, and watch the whole social fabric
change. Maybe give tax incentives for tuning one's own sex hormone
mixture toward a socially optimal levels. Professional body builders
and models could get exceptions, that sort of thing..
That's overshooting just a bit... too easy of a target to knock down
because too few people would volunteer.
A better option would be simply to incentivize various demographics to
change their context in calculated ways. For example, we could pay some
of the members of Flux to move down to Austin for a year. We could take
data from them here, then take the same or equivalent data from them in
their new context down in Austin. Such a controlled experiment would
help us understand gender culture without invasive biochemical tuning.
(We're limited in the extent to which we can control for the
non-invasive tuning like eating too much Tex-Mex, of course.) I know
I'd volunteer for such studies... though not to Austin or Silicon
Valley... but almost anywhere else. (Whether my relationships with
others would survive such context-breaking is another matter... we'd
have to insist on controls much like those used for clinical trials.
e.g. If you've been in such a study in the past 5 years, you're
disqualified.)
The real problem, though, doesn't lie so much in our not doing such
experiments. The problem lies in how we analyze and curate the results.
Psychology and sociology seem a bit impoverished in their ability to
collect and reduce data for consumption by, say, legislators. With
better databases, we might see more quantitatively falsifiable models
emerge, from which we can better design experiments like that.
Moving away from something like a hacker space, we could consider groups
like Alcoholics Anonymous. Apparently, there are all sorts of
specialized groups, some of which are open to anyone waltzing in and
some of which are closed and new attendees have to be vetted. One
example is the women only group.
http://leavingaa.com/have-you-been-13th-stepped/ In such cases, openness
can be a very bad thing. In order to support symmetry and give
particular women just as much chance to use whatever tools such groups
might provide, closing the meetings is useful. The same might be said
of, say, City Councils or criminal trials. Some such meetings are
closed in order to support symmetry and avoid the asymmetries amplified
by openness.
In any case, it seems like a no-brainer to conclude that not all
openness is always a good thing.
--
⇒⇐ glen
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