General > General Technical Chat
Diversity, Equity and Inclusion
Simon:
--- Quote from: Ed.Kloonk on August 19, 2022, 09:31:25 pm ---
--- Quote from: Simon on August 19, 2022, 09:20:57 pm ---
--- Quote from: wraper on August 18, 2022, 11:37:33 am ---
--- Quote from: T3sl4co1l on August 18, 2022, 04:35:29 am ---Oh yeah, this thread is going to go over well, I can smell it... :popcorn:
Jordan Peterson, besides generally saying many words with little substance, is widely critiqued and discredited, especially for his association to the alt-right in recent years. Which tells you all you really need to know about his followers. Anyway, some salient points here:
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Criticized by woke media. He is not associated with alt-right which is another lie. Also far-left really like killing a character of anyone they do not like by naming them alt-right.
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The confusion here is really simple. Jordan Paterson is willing to say the uncomfortable stuff and is often quoted by the alt-right as they superficially misunderstand what he is saying or selectively quote him and live under the illusion that he is on their side as they cannot actually understand what he is saying.
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Keep in mind the right whingers(sic) gave JP a break from harsh criticism when he got sick. But he's overdue having his wings clipped.
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I've watched various people try to put words in his mouth. I gave up watching that channel 4 interview, I rather think less now of the female interviewer. There was this pattern of not giving him a chance to answer once she realized he had an argument, it was all "so you think...... about this other thing.... what is you one ward answer" We have come to a position where you have to be able to give a 3 word answer to a complex question or one that needs context or you are written off.
I suspect that as he has become a bit of a star now some of his later stuff may be more entertainment purposes, maybe he has run out of things to say but needs to keep switching it up a bit in order to keep people interested. This is the problem when your income depends on something like this.
I listened to an interview with Martin Lewis, the UK's money saving expert. He wrote an even handed article on Brexit laying out the pro's and cons of each aspect. For transparencies sake he explained that given all that he had said for his particular circumstances he would vote remain. He was asked to be on a TV debating show and was asked if he wanted to be on the for or against panel. He said that he did not want to be on either, he wanted to be independent and simply answer to the facts. They refused to take him having been very keen to have him because in their view there was no even handed debate, it was half a panel for and half against. Never before did I realize that someone else thought the same as I do!
Nominal Animal:
--- Quote from: pcprogrammer on August 20, 2022, 03:42:42 pm ---
--- Quote from: Nominal Animal on August 20, 2022, 03:05:03 pm ---I would like to draw your attention to the parallels in academia, how the quality of research has dropped during the last two decades, because of the skewed pressure applied by the administration. The quality of a paper does not matter, only the number of publications does. This has lead to a huge increase in retractions and errors, and what is called the "reproducibility crisis": it looks like increasing amounts of the "results" cited in peer-reviewed articles are actually completely manipulated garbage, in the hopes of ensuring funding.
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A friend of ours worked as an administrator for an university professor doing research on Alzheimer's and there it was somewhat normal practice to put out as much publications as possible to secure funding. The content did not matter that much, as long as the money kept pouring in. This was maybe a decade ago, and I guess it is still common practice.
It does show what is wrong with capitalism. Everything is driven by money. Can't come up with a better system though, because all the other ones we know of are also flawed.
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No, it has nothing to do with capitalism, and everything to do with the metrics used to measure performance!
I definitely support competition (a market economy, if you will) between scientists, and definitely also in engineering too. The problem is that the metrics are shifting away from the work and work product itself, into secondary or even completely unrelated things that the administration finds preferable.
In a very real sense, it is anticapitalistic and socialist, because it is effectively insisting that the individual performance does not matter, that it is those secondary things –– like the number of publications; if that was an actual goal, wouldn't it be easier to set up your own publication and just publish absolutely the shit out of everything? –– that are somehow more important. You know, like your abilities and knowledge does not matter, that your worth as a scientist of engineer is somehow defined by your immutable characteristics like the color of your skin, the structure of your genitals, and so on.
I have always considered this a crisis of leadership. That instead of taking responsibility, administration and business executives do not want to deal with the social pressure, and are completely willing to run the science/business to the ground, if it means they themselves will be generously compensated and will remain unscathed, and to hell with their underlings/workers; they will just have to fend for themselves, as this isn't a daycare anyway.
In Finland, this applies to software engineering and IT projects, most definitely. As I've mentioned, only about a third of large, multimillion IT projects ever complete producing an useful result. Yet, somehow, that is not a problem: the same people running those projects to ground keep getting new jobs, again and again, as if utter failure is somehow never their fault.
The question is, what to do to 1) protect oneself against being captured by this, and 2) how to help others being captured by this kind of destructive patterns?
pcprogrammer:
--- Quote from: Nominal Animal on August 21, 2022, 09:08:11 am ---
--- Quote from: pcprogrammer on August 20, 2022, 03:42:42 pm ---
--- Quote from: Nominal Animal on August 20, 2022, 03:05:03 pm ---I would like to draw your attention to the parallels in academia, how the quality of research has dropped during the last two decades, because of the skewed pressure applied by the administration. The quality of a paper does not matter, only the number of publications does. This has lead to a huge increase in retractions and errors, and what is called the "reproducibility crisis": it looks like increasing amounts of the "results" cited in peer-reviewed articles are actually completely manipulated garbage, in the hopes of ensuring funding.
--- End quote ---
A friend of ours worked as an administrator for an university professor doing research on Alzheimer's and there it was somewhat normal practice to put out as much publications as possible to secure funding. The content did not matter that much, as long as the money kept pouring in. This was maybe a decade ago, and I guess it is still common practice.
It does show what is wrong with capitalism. Everything is driven by money. Can't come up with a better system though, because all the other ones we know of are also flawed.
--- End quote ---
No, it has nothing to do with capitalism, and everything to do with the metrics used to measure performance!
I definitely support competition (a market economy, if you will) between scientists, and definitely also in engineering too. The problem is that the metrics are shifting away from the work and work product itself, into secondary or even completely unrelated things that the administration finds preferable.
In a very real sense, it is anticapitalistic and socialist, because it is effectively insisting that the individual performance does not matter, that it is those secondary things –– like the number of publications; if that was an actual goal, wouldn't it be easier to set up your own publication and just publish absolutely the shit out of everything? –– that are somehow more important. You know, like your abilities and knowledge does not matter, that your worth as a scientist of engineer is somehow defined by your immutable characteristics like the color of your skin, the structure of your genitals, and so on.
I have always considered this a crisis of leadership. That instead of taking responsibility, administration and business executives do not want to deal with the social pressure, and are completely willing to run the science/business to the ground, if it means they themselves will be generously compensated and will remain unscathed, and to hell with their underlings/workers; they will just have to fend for themselves, as this isn't a daycare anyway.
In Finland, this applies to software engineering and IT projects, most definitely. As I've mentioned, only about a third of large, multimillion IT projects ever complete producing an useful result. Yet, somehow, that is not a problem: the same people running those projects to ground keep getting new jobs, again and again, as if utter failure is somehow never their fault.
The question is, what to do to 1) protect oneself against being captured by this, and 2) how to help others being captured by this kind of destructive patterns?
--- End quote ---
I see your point. It is a different take on capitalism then I had in mind. It being the driving force to make money and not the competitive drive between making better and cheaper products to win market share.
There are always different interpretations possible for a term. Take communism, China is pointed to as being a communistic country, but in the basics it is not. It is more a party ruled dictatorship. True communism is very different. Same for democracy. A true democracy can never work, where the greater public has to vote on every issue that comes along. But this is all semantics.
In an ideal world where money would not be an issue and science would not be dependent on it, it could be about science and science alone, but then personal ego's come into play, as they do now too, and turns things into shit again.
With world population growing and more and more people are lead into science without a real affinity with the subject it waters down, and we get what we see now.
Your take on it being a "crisis of leadership" fits the bill for me. It is indeed annoying that the leaders, despite running a business into the ground, still walk a way with lots of money and are employed somewhere else to do it all over again. And society is fine with it, as long as their personal lives are not affected to much.
An argument I heard of lately, that is used to justify the big companies making lots of profit, is that these profits are paying for your pension, because pension funds invest in these big companies. In it self not a bad thing, but the fact that there is such a big difference between the workers salaries and that of the leaders feels bad. I don't feel it to be in balance with the actual work load and stress of the job to justify this difference.
Nominal Animal:
--- Quote from: pcprogrammer on August 21, 2022, 09:37:14 am ---I see your point. It is a different take on capitalism then I had in mind. It being the driving force to make money and not the competitive drive between making better and cheaper products to win market share.
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Yes. In my view, the driving force is the demand, and the unfortunate fact is that us humans don't want better products, we want cheaper products.
I've heard time and time again, how people first buy cheap tools, become dissatisfied with them, and end up having to buy the expensive tools anyway.
If you have to buy cheap work shoes every year at a price of X, when proper work shoes costing 3X would last four years, you're wasting money irrationally. Us humans have to spend effort to be rational, because our instincts and biological tendencies are stronger than we think.
(That –– it being somehow okay to completely reject rationality and logic in favour of emotions and perceptions and personal beliefs –– is in my opinion a bigger danger to science and engineering than D-E-I is: the latter affects the humans doing the work, but the former rejects the entire fields themselves.)
--- Quote from: pcprogrammer on August 21, 2022, 09:37:14 am ---In an ideal world where money would not be an issue and science would not be dependent on it, it could be about science and science alone
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Nah.. As you say, we'd find some other way to turn it into shit anyway. I'm fine with science being tied to money. It's just that the metric used to tie the two together has to be something useful, something verifiable, and not some emotive D-E-I thing.
, but then personal ego's come into play, as they do now too, and turns things into shit again.
With world population growing and more and more people are lead into science without a real affinity with the subject it waters down, and we get what we see now.
--- Quote from: pcprogrammer on August 21, 2022, 09:37:14 am ---Your take on it being a "crisis of leadership" fits the bill for me. It is indeed annoying that the leaders, despite running a business into the ground, still walk a way with lots of money and are employed somewhere else to do it all over again. And society is fine with it, as long as their personal lives are not affected to much.
--- End quote ---
The Twitter-Elon Musk ongoing debacle is an example of how these things will go on in engineering companies, if not stopped in time.
You'll have very weird biases, like entire product lines being canceled because they used a component whose manufacturer used a conflict mineral sourced from a war zone. That component manufacturer will not be targeted at all, however; only the product line will be. And the executives will be Teflon-shielded from any repercussions of their actions, because of course they will be, and line engineers and designers will be thrown to the wolves.
Am I exaggerating? That is exactly what is happening to scientists. University admins are sitting in their towers completely untouched, and throwing individual professors to the wolves to keep themselves safe.. At most, they will fire them and let the university lawyers fight a long, protracted battle against unlawful dismissal, because the entire point is to minimise the risk to administration. To hell with the university itself, if the admin is protected, safe, and well compensated. How the hell did they manage to raise themselves above the purpose of the organization in the first place?
Here in Finland, executive officers in larger companies have already managed to do the same, with boards being basically cross-populated with friends, so that no matter what happens, the executive officers will be handsomely compensated even if they royally fuck up. We saw that with Nokia first-hand.
--- Quote from: pcprogrammer on August 21, 2022, 09:37:14 am ---An argument I heard of lately, that is used to justify the big companies making lots of profit, is that these profits are paying for your pension, because pension funds invest in these big companies.
--- End quote ---
Ah, the good old "too big to fail" argument. It does not explain why the pay and bonuses for the executives is basically independent of the company bottom line.
I suspect it is the same as a Finnish politician recently admitted. Because joining the EU massively increased the pay for Finnish politicians, they now are so far above the median income, that they really lose touch with the real life of an average citizen when they start getting the political pay grades. They immediately jump to the top 10% of yearly wages, and that skews their view; their values change.
They say that power corrupts, but I think more importantly, unearned income makes one completely blind to others' efforts.
Which all comes back to the individual fairness arguments I keep repeating...
pcprogrammer:
--- Quote from: Nominal Animal on August 21, 2022, 10:08:37 am ---They say that power corrupts, but I think more importantly, unearned income makes one completely blind to others' efforts.
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Money is far more a corruption motivator then power. And don't forget with money you can buy power, and also sway justice to some extend.
But that might open the other can of worms I mentioned earlier, about lady justice being blind. >:D
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