Interesting, I hope they do in-depth study. I wonder how they'd deal with this issue from that article.
"But what is also obvious is that it can be very difficult to untangle mom and dad’s contributions because they tend to track together in age. Older dads tend to have children with older moms."
What astounds me is that the human brain doesn't even know it works (at least consciously). Your brain tells your body what to do, but your consciousness has no idea how.
<rant>
For me, that's what's so amazing about neural networks! If you could ask an individual neuron why their f(x) is the way it is, they probably would only be able to tell you that "that gets the result the brain wants". They're like individual computers, yet they can't work alone; only when put together does what they're doing make sense.
1. Evolution saw no need for it; knowing how our eye's classify light signals into objects and figure out depth etc are not important to survival. What is important is knowing exactly if you are looking at a predator as soon as possible.
2. Too much data for consciousness to handle; There is something like 1 million connections between each eye and the brain alone. Then there is all the parallel processing that must take place to match what we are seeing to the right memory. This process reduces the all the incoming signals to a single variable such as 'car', 'red' etc which can then be passed to our simpler, serial experience of reality.
3. A bit more 'out there': The physical dimension we inhabit is the result of the intersection between two planes, time and space, that seem to stretch to infinity in both directions (no beginning and no end). You could also say this for your own thoughts; do you truly know when a thought begins, or when it ends (no longer part of the brain)? We seem to exist in the middle of these planes, and perhaps that is all that is possible for the conscious experience (meaning, being part of the process of 'seeing' is just not possible).
4. Consciousness wasn't supposed to happen as living organisms do not need it to survive and reproduce. But since humans are so successful: "It's a feature, not a bug!"
My personal belief is that evolution moved from the slowly iterating biological cycle to a much more rapid external augmentation cycle.
We moved to evolving tools that augment our other natural capabilities when it became faster and more effective to focus on making better tools than better humans.
While most of the time, ideas in my head are extremely cohesive, there are times when they are not. For one, while talking to myself, I refer to myself as a we. In other situations, primarily ones of brainstorming, I can definitely feel multiple "quadrants" of my brain initiating different ideas. The reason I feel they are different consciouses is because each idea is driven by different motivations. Some of these are good ideas, some are bad, some are moral, some are immoral. We mostly come to a consensus in fractions of a second, but sometimes its long and drawn out. Like any good team, we ensure everyone is heard and respected, we understand that there will be disagreements and we won't always get our way. Some of us never get our way. But overall we(I) seem to work well with all of the other versions of myself. Lol, at least for now. There are definitely parts of me which are very upset with the consensus to write this post.
I think you just don't hear a lot about it, and people don't acknowledge it much in themselves, because of the stigma/demonization of multiple personality disorders. For me, as long as I(we) can pass the Turing Test of Normality, I don't really mind that my brain works the way it does. If anything, I quite like the way it works.
That's interesting. I, don't "talk" or "think aloud" in my head myself. At all. Ideas just snap into focus at once immediately. Same goes for when I'm trying to figure out a puzzle or when programing.
At the moment I learn something new it just snaps into place at once and the knowledge is integrated on the spot.
Also English is a foreign language for me and the same goes for my native language. Whole concepts emerge as I'm trying to do or say something and then I have to put them into words(in either language).
Sometimes the process of talking is excruciatingly slow and interferes with my thoughts. I find that I can type a lot faster and that helps a little.
This is true for me, but only for domains I know very well. The less I understand the problem, the more I have to think in my head. But there is a mode that I make use of frequently when I want the best answer I can currently produce - I just have to quiet my mind, and the best available answer immediately bubbles to top of mind.
My theory is that we can have several conscious thoughts at once but most of us suppress this most of the time because without a clear "winner thought" that gets the attention and gets to decide what reality is and gets to control the body, you'd end up with what people with schitzophrenia or other psychoses have...
I'd also bet that the first "human-type & human-level" AI will be quire insane by human standards at least if we don't get this inner attention focusing part right from the first time. Considering that this insane AI will also get super-human pretty fast, I'm pretty scared of what it would do before it gets itself to some sort of inner equilibrium or "sanity"...
I like the term from the Halo series for that kind of AI: 'rampant' / 'rampancy'. It's sort of like having a terrible 2-year-old that happens to be inside of a virtual world, on the internet, thinking at super-human speed.
We should probably make that internet uplink mostly mirror-down libraries only.
Perhaps we do! How do you know that your autonomic nervous system isn't consciously regulating your breathing, digestion, and heartrate, blissfully unaware of the less important unconscious processes that acquire food and move about. (I wrote a science fiction story along these lines once, that was described by readers as "uh... interesting, I guess.")
I hypothesize that this is tied to our small working memory. Introspection suggests to me that working memory does not only hold small items of data, but is also where pointers into bigger networks must be anchored. When I'm thinking about a problem or project, my mind's eye saccades around the small features of the problem, but it still feels like those features are being swapped into working memory.
Forget internal organs, it amazes me that scholarship in the 15th century was completely ignorant the clitoris. From Wikipedia
> Gabriele Falloppio (discoverer of the fallopian tube), who claimed that he was the first to discover the clitoris. In 1561, Falloppio stated, "Modern anatomists have entirely neglected it ... and do not say a word about it ... and if others have spoken of it, know that they have taken it from me or my students"
Yea, especially for common disorders like Polycystic Ovary Syndrome and Endometriosis. We don't know why they happen and our treatments are surprisingly meager considering how many women are affected in total.
That study showed a "link" (i.e. correlation) between hormonal contraception and first diagnosis of depression or use of antidepressants. That's not the same as showing the pill causes depression! Even the study authors explicitly say that more study is needed before we can definitively say there is cause and effect.
It's difficult to truly prove, but many women have noticed this and complained about it. It is only now that they are finally actually looking in to the possibility.
I find it incredibly ironic that people take it as a given that women's hormones might affect moods (PMS, anyone?), but then brush off women's concerns that taking large doses of female hormones might --in fact!-- have an affect on mood.
To be clear, I'm not denying the possibility that hormonal birth control can cause depression or that many women experience problems while on it (I've heard similar complaints to what you're describing). What I'm commenting on is your misrepresentation of what the study is "proving".
Not to keep arguing a dead point, but the word I cared about was "causes" not "show". The study shows pretty definitively ("proves") that a correlation exists. It does not show that hormonal birth control causes depression.
Regardless, I appreciate that you're making an effort to be careful. I've just been seeing this particular study making the rounds on Facebook and I felt like I needed to point out what the study actually says.
Regardless of semantics, I'm glad you see it being shared on Facebook. I really hope it inspires women to stop taking their pills and go all Lysistrata until there is more research done and/or a better solution is invented. I mean, it's the same thing that was invented back in the 1960s. There's been very little progress.
I wish they could invent something semi permanent for men. Then we could cease having the current child support debates. Temporary vasectomy would be awesome for the world.
Feminism is not about egalitarianism. Saying that is the equivalent of responding "All Lives Matter!" to BLM.
I'm not saying that Yahoo did something right or wrong (maybe qualified women started to flock to yahoo because of its female CEO? Who knows! I will let the justice system sort that one out). But I really dislike feminism constantly being watered down to mean anything other than "the advancement of women."
Like, women have a lot of issues across the globe. Women get acid thrown in their faces, get denied education, etc. etc. Feminism is about stopping all of that, NOT about egalitarianism. There's already a word for egalitarianism, why the need to make feminism mean that, too?
Oh don't even get me started on front end development. A few times I've actually had the opportunity to make some really brilliant JavaScript optimizations only to have any performance gain made totally irrelevant by business loading up the page with a ton of totally non-performant ads.
I am glad she mentioned how awful it is to have only one female employee.
I was the only woman in an office. One of my co workers made a pretty horrific comment (not about me, but about women in front of me). Someone went to HR and we had sensitivity training...but everyone assumed it was me because I was the only woman. Maybe I SHOULD have gone to HR, but I didn't want to because I feared being the obvious complainant. Which I ended up getting the side-eye for anyway.
I realized I would much rather work somewhere with at least 2 other women.
I'm not sure how much this has to do with quantity of x as opposed to quality of x.
I've worked in small teams where I was the only Asian person among a team of white men, and I neither noticed any hints of racism nor sexism.
I've also worked in teams where it's been highly diverse in ethnicity though not gender, and again, never noticed any hints of sexism.
Though I have certainly worked in a company with a number of women, including a female co-founder/CEO who was absolutely sexist... against women. I'm not suggesting women are bad CEO's or that diversity is bad, I'm saying that from my experience, it hasn't been about the diversity of the team so much as the type of people in the composition.
Also from my POV, I'm not sure how having a random % of women makes more or less sense than a random % of black people or Latino's. Like if a company is predominantly composed of white men, does adding a white female make it more diverse than adding a black man?
I don't see what this has to do with my comment. I didn't say all men are sexist or all teams are sexist, just stated that there is safety in numbers.
You're lucky nobody said something racist about Asians when you were the only Asian. Otherwise, you would have been in the same situation. But that's it: luck. It could happen to anyone and then the workplace could turn hostile.
I'm not sure how much this has to do with quantity of x as opposed to quality of x.
Quantity matters. Everything is contextual. If one is in a "hypo-minority" situation, then one is more likely to stand out. Being unique can be nice, but being irrevocably marked as unique, with no respite can feel like being trapped. Being singled out is simply more likely if you are truly singular.
Like if a company is predominantly composed of white men, does adding a white female make it more diverse than adding a black man?
I think that very much depends on the people involved. So in this, you are right. But quantity does matter a lot.
> I've worked in small teams where I was the only Asian person among a team of white men, and I neither noticed any hints of racism nor sexism.
I don't think your situations are comparable. Women are ~50% of the population and sexual undertones have nothing to do with ethnicity, but everything to do with gender.
Also, I think it is MUCH more likely for a team to have only one woman than only one Asian. From my experience working as a dev in the US, anyway.
At any rate, I've never been on a team that didn't have several Asians. But I've had many co workers tell me they've never worked with a woman before (which in itself is awkward to hear unprompted, haha).
Thanks for pointing out that race and sex are not comparable. It's true, they really aren't.
I'm sorry that happened but I don't think it's indicative of some trend in the industry.
I've been a minority almost my entire life. Most of the issues with being a minority are not really present on software engineering teams. The demographics are too widespread.
There is no in-group. I would estimate 50-60% of software engineers are immigrants. That group is further segmented by country of origin. Everyone is different from each other.
Country of origin transcends both gender and race in terms of shared experiences and commonalities. American born people of all races and gender are more likely to befriend each other than to befriend a person who speaks broken English.
This diversity on software engineering teams minimizes the effects of being different because everyone is different from each other.
Software engineers also tend to be more introverted and immigrants are more polite (due to unfamiliarity with American culture).
For people to make inflammatory comments and get away with it, they need to have allies and be part of an in-group. These prerequisites are much more difficult to fulfill as a software engineer.
Software engineering is one of the best professions to be a minority in.
There is always an in-group, it's just a matter of which one. I have worked at places where I was part of the in-group, and places where I wasn't. Sometimes it was nationality. Others, the school you came in. The gender divide is not a big issue in some places, while in others I've ended up talking to HR about harassment that I saw in front of my own eyes. I've been the shoulder to cry on, literally, in one of those cases. And don't get me started with discrimination due to sexual orientation.
It's really easy to know when you are not part of the majority though: When you don't see any differences and everything looks cheery and happy, congratulations, you are not treated as a minority.
We can't really boats about the industry when we have 15% women and about under 10% African-American. I've worked at a place where we had a large architecture meeting: 25 architects, zero women. The company boasted 50-50 gender split, but with vert few exceptions, you could make a great guess of role and gender. Guess that men sitting in an engineering pod are developers or managers, and that women are either QA or systems analysts, and you'll get it right. The testers had the same CS background as the developers, except they were paid a good 30% less. The rest of the women came from recruiting and HR. You could also guess which department they worked on just by looks too.
I know four women that have dropped out of software engineering in the last year, just because the toll of being treated differently made them lose any love they had for the industry, and are now doing jobs that pay way less, but where they don't have to work twice as hard as a man to get half the recognition. One of them is rather unattractive by your typical standards. When she quit her last job, many people didn't even know she had been working there for years: She might as well have been socially invisible.
Maybe you've been very lucky in your career, and haven't seen the discrimination, or maybe you really are part of the in-group and don't know about it.
> We can't really boats about the industry when we have 15% women and about under 10% African-American.
Disagree. We have amazing contributions from a variety of people from Europe, South America, and Asia. It's not perfect, and it should get better, but it's nothing to be ashamed about.
It's interesting how the NBA happily celebrates black culture and black people who represent their game despite the fact that they are overrepresented relative to the general population, but the tech industry basically never celebrates the contributions from a variety of immigrants and non-whites in its own industry.
This argument (or more specifically, personal accounts) doesn't really respond to the original argument about a high % of immigrants.
Why is there always an in-group?
What is the in-group of a place with:
- 10% Asian Americans
- 10% Indian Americans
- 10% various white European immigrants
- 15% Indian immigrants
- 20% Asian immigrants (14% Chinese, 4% Korean, 2% other)
- 25% white Americans
- 5% Black/Hispanic Americans
- 5% Black/Hispanic immigrants
(With 10% females spread among those race/country lines)
What I see happen is that the various groups separately cluster based on country of origin. None of the groups are dominant, so no one person (even a leader of a group) will feel comfortable making inflammatory remarks.
Many times everyone on the team is introverted and no groups form at all.
>Maybe you've been very lucky in your career, and haven't seen the discrimination, or maybe you really are part of the in-group and don't know about it.
Ad hominem? I've been a minority in the most formative years in places where being different is tough and I understand the difficulties. I contrast the experience and demographics of work with those years.
The point is valid, but this obviously puts organisations trying to recruit their first female employees in a bit of a pickle. For the benefit of the common good (getting more small businesses and startups to hire more women) it might be better to asses a business's desired trajectory rather than its current state... right?
I've definitely interviewed female candidates for a small startup where they decided not to proceed once they found out they'd be the first woman on the team. I certainly don't hold it against them, but it really does make increasing diversity a lot harder if nobody is willing to be the first one.
It's a great example of how hard it can be to change the trajectory of systems even when everyone earnestly works towards change.
Huh - I wonder if you could use that as leverage during pay negotiation.
"Oh, you don't have any other women on staff? You need to know that thats going to be sort of rough for me, in complicated gross ways. I'll still do it, but only if you pay me an extra 10% compensation pay on top of what you were otherwise going to pay me. (Which you can stop doing as soon as you hire another woman)."
As a man, this would make me extremely uncomfortable for a lot of reasons. Not the least of which because it implies to me that you think all men are scummy creeps and that you need extra money to deal with us.
That's a hell of a reach from what she said, to put it mildly. To justify your inference she would need to be asking for extra money for dealing with any men, ever.
Yea that was an idea I got out of this that I think will take to heart, at the very least teams should have a couple of women in them, even if it might make one team all men (the 15% women in tech number is really annoying; the better solution would just be to have half of each team be women).
You should've laughed to divert any suspicions. When someone makes a racist joke about me I chuckle and wait for my turn. Because I don't want to watch what I am saying all the time. He did not make an attack, he lowered his shield. And then suffered the consequences.
Like, it was violent and creepy and Elliot Rodgers-esque. I would have looked like a psycho to the other co workers if I laughed. As it stands, the offending co worker looked like a psycho.
(He got fired. But I was a bit scared for my safety.)
If it was violent, creepy, and reminiscent of a mass-murderer comment directed towards women, I would think it a good thing that people would suspect you were the one to stick up for women, seeing as you had the most to fear from such a hateful person. It's a good thing that at least one person reported them, since the unfortunate human norm is for a bystander to ignore those in need of help / defense / solidarity.
If "everyone assumed it was you" and then gave you "the side-eye" for the consequences of this nasty person's comment's getting reported, fired, then this seems like clear signal that that workplace was no good in that way and it's time to find friendlier waters.
How do you think this would have gone differently had there been two more female employees? The hateful one would have kept a tighter lid on their true personality? The side-eye would have been more them vs us, or again, left thought but not expressed?
Lack of diversity doesn't suck assuming the company hired the best talent for the role. Diversity for the sake of diversity is horrible and makes you dislike the people for just being there
What pisses me off most about this is that people say the cops need these tools, etc. Well, how come the cops suck so much at their jobs?! No, I'm serious. My local PD is in the midst of a crime wave. They take many hours to respond, never actually catch anyone, catch the wrong people, act like idiots.
Wow, you are hateful people. I've been a woman walking around with unshaven legs -- men recoil with disgust, tell me I am a "hairy beast", etc. It's been this way since middle school.
Men are not the only ones to put up with disgust from the opposite sex. Dealing with this universal human experience should not make you "lose respect" for 50% of the population because we are not a homogenous lump, we are individuals and we are all different.
I'm sorry you had to endure such insults. My post wasn't written out of hatred and I apologize if it came off that way. Sometimes I let past issues get the best of me. But I really appreciate the way you describe it – "Dealing with this universal human experience".
I hope my manners didn't turn you off HN. It's a great community to be part of. You learn something new every day from developers of all walks of life! Please stick around, it's worth it.
Denying essential humanity to anyone is always and everywhere unacceptable. "Unattractive men are animals, not human beings" isn't provocative, it's totally beyond the pale.
If the essay called an ethnic or religious group animals, would you still link to it and characterize it as "interesting" and "provocative?"
In the context of the article, "animal" is meant to be understood as "something having non-human features". An ugly guy has both human and "non-human" features, so a mind is split in those both directions, and the split evokes the feeling of creepiness.
Just because you feel bad about something it doesn't mean it's false.
Well if saying anything you like as long as it is meant to provoke [a response] is acceptable, then let's have a few articles about why antisemitism is cool and how black people have low IQs. Or are those subjects that have been covered and people have been both prosecuted over and been fired from their jobs for?
Being provocative at least requires starting with an argument that can be defended.
