Elsewhere (269)
Douglas Murray on utopian thinking and ineradicable vices:
To ‘destroy’ misogyny (or, for that matter, its opposite – misandry) you would have to arrive at a time when nobody of either sex… felt any need to seize on a secondary characteristic as a way to push their primary dislike. All divorces would have to go swimmingly. Men would pay alimony only with pleasure and enthusiasm. Conversely, any woman who caught their husband cheating would have to say: “Well that was just my husband: I wouldn’t want to express any conclusions about men in general.” Perhaps this is desirable. But achievable? Hardly. The trouble is some people – including some of the most powerful people on the planet – seem to believe otherwise.
Madison Breshears on overlooked gender gaps:
What, if anything, do ballet and tech have in common? The obvious answer is that both fields show highly disproportionate gender distributions. Less acknowledged but no less relevant is this uncomfortable commonality: Both are industries where it pays to be in the sexual minority. I know, because I was a ballet dancer for 16 years. In the ballet world, men’s unfair advantage in hiring and casting is as widely understood and as rarely acknowledged as is the rampant anorexia. A less skilled male dancer is more likely to land a role or get a job than a female dancer of comparable skill. Due to the scarcity of men, the hurdles to a professional career are distinctly lower than they are for most women. Anyone who says something similar about women in the tech industry does so at their own peril.
Duke Pesta and Dave Huber on “white privilege” shaming rituals:
There was a case at San Diego State University, where students were given extra credit for determining their level of “white privilege.” This was part of my own experience. We did a thing called a “privilege walk,” where you’re asked a bunch of questions designed to give the result the creators’ wanted. It gets a little ridiculous, in that one of the questions says, “I grew up in a two-parent household,” as if that’s some kind of inherent [white] privilege, doing the right thing.
And Jordan Peterson on IQ and its distribution:
Conservatives like to think there’s a job for everyone if people would just get off their asses, and liberals think that you can train anyone to do anything. No, there isn’t a job for everyone, and no, you can’t train everyone to do everything. The armed forces has done a lot of work on IQ and they started back in 1919. A law was passed as a consequence of that analysis that it was illegal to induct anyone into the armed forces who had an IQ of less than 83. Why? All of that effort put in by the armed forces indicated that if you had an IQ of 83 or less, there wasn’t anything that you could be trained to do in the military that wasn’t positively counterproductive. So how many people have an IQ of 83 or less? Ten percent of us. Now, if that doesn’t hurt you to hear, then you didn’t hear it properly. Because what it implies is that, in a complex society like ours, there isn’t anything for 10% of the population to do.
As usual, feel free to share your own links and snippets, on any subject, in the comments.
chrononormativity
Even back in the 1970’s I knew people who peddled those sorts of excuses: “We indigenous people just experience time differently, and you cannot expect us to be punctual.” Which perhaps explains why they were only marginally employed.
Another example of people who reject “normative” notions of time:
Frederick Law Olmsted, in “The Cotton Kingdom”, relates how an immigrant in the American Deep South in the first half of the 19th Century, arranged with a local man to build him a house. Months went by, and the man did not begin work, or do anything to show that he was preparing to do so. Finally, the immigrant gave up and hired somebody else to build it. At this the first man became furious–his “honor” had been impugned, don’t you know–and the immigrant heard that he and some friends were going to grab their rifles and teach him a lesson.
Now, wait just one big fat minute…
can make fat known in unusual ways.
Well. If that ain’t a tempting offer, I don’t know what is.
Marin man represents himself in rape case, says he’s innocent because accuser is ‘300 pounds’
According to the story, the judge in charge is already apparently having reactions of Bloody Hell, and I am the one who has to operate this train wreck in progress!!
“…because women couldn’t sing the low tones…”
The bigotry of low expectations?
Where is a good transwoman when you need one?
Why not simply harangue the audience about their oppressivist assumptions about what music should sound like?
“Truck driver. Concrete layer. Changing tyres. Anything requiring more patience than skill.”
Posted by: Chester Draws | April 17, 2018 at 16:16
Ride with an over-the-road trucker some time. It takes adaptability to changing conditions to get loads delivered on time, and there’s a lot of pressure to get loads delivered on time. It takes imagination and decent memory to concoct a mental map of the area you are operating in to minimize delays. Steering 80,000 pounds down the Grapevine on Interstate 5 in California at night takes more skill than one would think. Some of the certifications, such as HAZMAT, aren’t just handed out.
Having said that, I went looking for average IQ by occupation, and discovered Audacious Epigone has cobbled something together:
Average IQ by occupation (estimated from wordsum scores)
I leave it here in aid of the conversation.
Why not simply harangue the audience…?
Because this is Arguments. Abuse is down the hall.
Why not simply harangue the audience about their oppressivist assumptions about what music should sound like?
Clive James visits the Paris Opera House.
—If not the Paris Opera.
pst314,
< OCD > Would you do me a favour? When you’re posting a comment, would you add a line between the italicised quote and whatever follows it, so that it’s easier to read and matches the general format? It’ll save me manually adding a space every time, in a doomed attempt to keep the place looking tidy. < /OCD >
Ta.
David,
Sure thing. I’d been intentionally omitting such blank lines with the thought that readers might prefer compactness so that more comments fit on the screen, but anticipations of others’ preferences are often inaccurate.
Oh, and by the way, it’s not OCD. It’s CDO, so that the letters are in alphabetical order AS THEY SHOULD BE.
can make fat known in unusual ways.
I am suddenly very thankful that physical objects cannot be sent through the intertubez.
[ Resumes organising vast hairbrush collection. ]
Because this is Arguments. Abuse is down the hall.
Oh, and by the way, it’s not OCD. It’s CDO, so that the letters are in alphabetical order AS THEY SHOULD BE.
Oh, is this the 5-minute argument, or the full half hour?
” All of that effort put in by the armed forces indicated that if you had an IQ of 83 or less, there wasn’t anything that you could be trained to do in the military that wasn’t positively counterproductive… Because what it implies is that, in a complex society like ours, there isn’t anything for 10% of the population to do.”
I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that Jordan Peterson’s lack of military experience is showing.
Consider a hypothetical example. Say, a regiment needs five new truck drivers. Well, they don’t get trained in batches of five, but that’s ok, because there are fifty regiments, and they together they need forty drivers. So far, so good. You get 40 recruits, put them through 8 weeks boot camp, so they know one end of the rifle from the other, and then send them to 8 weeks heavy vehicles training.
Where does the IQ factor in? If you’ve got 2 of those 40 who are on the slow side, what’s the boot camp instructor going to do? He can’t skip material, he can’t slow the pace for everyone, he can’t give them private lessons. He can’t keep just the slow guys for the extra two weeks they need to master the basics, because another boot camp is starting for 40 cooks. He has to flunk them, and then they either drop out, or repeat the camp, which is wasteful. Either way, he’s short 2 drivers. Much easier to set a minimum standard on the intake, to reduce these problems.
Now, the same guy who flunked out of boot camp because he needed 10 weeks to learn to tie his bootlaces properly instead of just 8 – he goes to the nearest supermarket to get a job stocking shelves. The manager who hires him finds out the hard way that he needs 5 days instead of 4 to get the hang of it, but that’s not a high price to pay. And he successfully performs a useful task for society.
In other words – the military sets a minimum IQ standard because it processes men in large batches. It is wrong to treat it as a minimum standard for productive labor in civilian life.
Overlord #73, that’s a useful insight. I think it must be a factor, although I think that the weeding out process also serves the general rule that “learns too slow in basic training = will learn too slow later, too”.
Military vehicle drivers perform first line maintenance on their vehicle, which requires them to read and follow instructions as well as filing out various maintenance forms (with their written instructions to read and follow as well).
However, the late Jerry Pournelle told a story of using relatively low IQ people as circuit board QA inspectors. They did a better job than the high IQ people that were mistakenly selected to do the work since they did not find that work boring.
Hmm. Slow news day, Sky?
“Clive James visits the Paris Opera House.”
This line has been rattling around my memory all that time, and I’d forgotten where it came from:
Good old Clive. Much missed. And the great thing about him was that nobody could accuse him of being an ignorant curmudgeon. He knew his stuff. I often wonder what he’d have to say about the sort of goings-on discussed round these parts.
(A few moments later…) It’s doubly worth it for his interview with a young Béatrice Dalle in French he “learned from a videotape of Edward Heath”. She’s turned out, over the years, to be as daft as a box of frogs, but damn she was hot back then.
Cow orker dates from pre -web Usenet, at least.
Like so many things ( e.g. “teh”) it started as a typo.
We want pictures of the vast, or at least half-vast, hairbrush collection!
A selfless and fulfilling career.
‘Miss Lee, of Chelsea, west London, is unapologetic about seeing the men behind their wives’ backs, insisting she helps their marriages by providing them with release from the stresses of married life.’
But cracks soon show.
She said: ‘Why pay for an expensive foreign holiday when you can get your lover to do so? That sums up my attitude.’
I thought that is what pubs are for, to talk about life and fill your lungs with others’ smoke?
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5628761/Serial-mistress-tells-luxury-holidays-married-men.html
The manager who hires him finds out the hard way that he needs 5 days instead of 4 to get the hang of it, but that’s not a high price to pay.
I’m going to go out on a limb here and say your lack of experience running a small business is showing.
I can’t point to just one area of this page so you’ll just have to enjoy the whole thing: https://work.qz.com/1237723/silicon-valley-needs-to-set-quotas-to-solve-its-diversity-crisis/
The amount of justification going on there about why what they’re doing is inclusive and fair when you’d think their suggested hiring practices are quite discrimiatory is pretty impressive if just for the mental gymnastics required to have come up with it all.
The thing I don’t get about the diversity in STEM thing is that every place I’ve worked would hire a woman techo in a heartbeat whenever they could find them. I’ve worked with plenty of female programmers, and plenty more QA, pre-sales and marketing women. There doesn’t seem to be any conspiracy to shun women… there just isn’t as many women want to do this job as men. Oracle is basically run by a woman, and has been for years. Safra Catz is not to be messed with.
But if you want to put yourself out of the running for a job, I think a great way to go about it would put the fact that you’re a member of Lesbians Who Tech on your resume. That would put me on alert to a troublemaker immediately.
There was a similar article in the NYT recently about a women who “felt she had to share how she’d got her coding job in about 2 months after attending a code camp”. She went on and on about how awesome and efficient her job search technique was before revealing her final job actually came about from a lead at a woman-only tech meet-up/job fair. That’s nice and all but it wouldn’t have worked for more than half the tech-job-seeking population.
Christ I’m sick of these diversity-mongers.
I’m going to go out on a limb here and say your lack of experience running a small business is showing
I interpreted that in light of the difficulty of finding good workers: All too often, learning just a little slower, but on the other hand being conscientious, may prove acceptable albeit far from ideal.
“When you’re posting a comment, would you add a line between the italicised quote and whatever follows it, so that it’s easier to read and matches the general format?”
SIR, YES SIR! (in memory of the recently deceased R. Lee Emery)
SIR, YES SIR! (in memory of the recently deceased R. Lee Emery)
Aren’t you still alive . . . ?