On 10/26/23 08:02, Saku Ytti wrote:
Even if you believe/think this, it is not in your best interest to
communicate anything like this, there is nothing you can win, and
significant downside potential.
As you can probably tell, I am not terribly politically correct :-). The
coddle culture we live in today only ends up creating a generation that
will not be competitive in the open market, because whether we like it
or not, only competence gets compensated.
You really can't force people to give you their money for a poor,
expensive job done, much as we may believe it should be the case. 8th
place trophies should never be a model.
I believe the question is not about what data says, the question is,
why does the data say that. And the thesis/belief is, data should not
say that, that there is no fundamental reason why the data would say
so. The question is, is the culture reinforcing this from day0,
causing people to believe it is somehow inherent/natural.
The reason the data should not say that is because there has been a
serious amount of investment in creating scientists, engineers,
mathematicians, technologists, CEO's and inventors from the female
community over the past couple of decades. And yet, all the metrics
still show that women are "under-represented" in these areas.
So the explanation ends up going back to "upbringing, cultural
socialization, oppression by men, e.t.c.". After all, if a woman has the
opportunity to do male-dominated jobs or study male-dominated subjects,
why wouldn't she, for whatever reason that may or may not be useful to
her own person? After all, nothing screams equality like doing exactly
what men can do, or what women can do.
In other words, the idea that women (and little girls) may not have any
personal interest in things that men are inherently interested in is
completely inconceivable.
>From scientific POV, we currently don't have any real reason to
believe there are unplastic differences in the brain from birth which
cause this. There might, but science doesn't know that. Scientifically
we should today expect very even distribution, unless culturally
biased.
When we refuse to believe that, in general, men prefer building things
and women prefer dealing with people, we are essentially trying to fix
innately biological differences with culture. And while culture, on
paper, sounds and feels good because it either elicits emotion (instead
of logic) or results in censorship (instead of discourse), more often
than not, biology always wins out. It's a bit like weight loss... you
may starve yourself to lose excess body fat, but eventually, hunger
always wins. So you need another strategy, one which maximizes weight
loss, but without leaving your ravenous.
The sad part is that by the time biology takes over, it is too late for
the individual to benefit from a different decision they could have
taken, earlier on in life. And what is worse for the next generation, is
that those poor outcomes that afflict the individuals in their mid-40's
or later, are never communicated down to the kids... because if that
happens, the simulation that culture trumps biology would inevitably
crumble. And that's just bad for business...
But of course inequality, inequitability is everywhere, not an
hyperbole, but you can't compare anything on how we choose who does
what and come up with anything that resembles fair distribution. Zip
code has a lot of predictive power where you'll end up in your life,
and that is hardly your fault or merit. Top level managers are not
just disproportionately men, but they are disproportionately men with
+1.5SD height, and there is no scientific reason to believe zip code
or height suggests stronger ability.
It is just a really unfair world to live in, but luckily I am on the
beneficiary side of the unfairness, which I am strong enough to
accept.
Well, the problem comes with how we define "fairness". If we say
fairness is both men and women should have access to the same
opportunities, that is fine. But if we say that fairness is both men and
women should have the same outcomes, that becomes problematic. If equal
outcome worked, half of all CEO's would be women, as much as half of all
coal miners would be women. It's not like there is a shortage of
corporations or mining companies looking to fill half of their staff
with women... and yet they do not. Instead of looking deeply into why
that is, popular culture will simply chalk it down to anything other
than "opportunity" and "personal interest", e.g., being passed over,
sexism, racism, pay gap, e.t.c.
Moreover, since the "pay gap" suggests that women will earn less than
men in any field where both are employable, you'd think that those
companies would be 90% female-dominated, as they would be a lower
cost-to-company. But again, that is not happening... why? It certainly
can't be the combination of personal interest + meritocracy, can it :-)?
I have a curious anecdote about discriminatory outcomes, without any
active discrimination. I think it's easier to discuss as it doesn't
include any differences in the groups of people really. In Finland a
minority natively speaks Swedish, majority Finnish. After 1000 years,
the minority continues to statistically have better education, live
longer, have more savings and higher salary. For this particular
example, only rationale I've come up, which could explain it, is that
the Swedish speaking minority choose other Swedish speaking people as
their peers, so they feel lower sense of accomplishment performing at
Finnish speaker mean level, which causes them to push themselves
little bit further to achieve same satisfaction level as Finnish
speaking majority would feel at lower level of accomplishment. Causing
it to perpetuate indefinitely despite having 'fixed' all active
discriminatory biases since forever. That is, if you ever create,
through any mechanism at all, some biasing between groups, this bias
will never completely go away.
This is not surprising at all, actually.
Save for a few groups of people, if you are an "endangered" species, you
have significantly more incentive to thrive so that your group can
survive. Societies are built such that minorities will never be able to
set national policy. So the only option you have left to avoid
extinction is to be competent.
It is also quite normal for groups of people to gravitate to each other
for mate selection and community generation. Again, it comes back to
giving your species and DNA the best chance of survival.
I would liken your anecdote to a small group of Afrikaners who live in
their own "country" in South Africa called Orania:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orania
While a lot of South Africans take issue with these Afrikaner's choice
to live on their own, it makes perfect sense to me. The Afrikaans
culture, which is a descendant of 1600's Dutch culture, lives on only in
the Afrikaners who are alive today. Afrikaners form less than 6% of the
South African population of 60 million people, so they have all the
incentive to not only mate and commune with one another, but to also be
competent.
If they want to do that on their own and are not disturbing or hurting
any other group in the process, what is the problem?
Would it be fair to force them to dilute their culture and history just
for political and social expediency? Or would that be unfair?
To come back around to your anecdote, in the case of extremely
egalitarian societies like Finland (and Scandinavia, in general), the
data clearly shows that as equality among the sexes gets closer to
parity, the wider the biological differences that manifest. In other
words, the more women have a "free choice" in Scandinavia, the less they
choose what would be considered "male" choices. This would not be the
case in, say, Tanzania, where a woman is more likely to find herself
driving a long distance truck to earn a living because it's about survival.
Mark.
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