2. 75% of teachers are women, 97% of coal miners are men - certain professional aspirations attract certain people. When people talk about equality of outcome, does it have to be 50-50 male-female, equally split amongst all demographics and income levels, and if so, what possible realistic path is there to achieve it? On the other hand, I am sure most people in the modern world (especially the young ones) support equal opportunity, so it seems like this is becoming less of an issue.
I see what you're saying though - for example, is Kanye responsible for people committing anti-Semitic hate crimes while yelling "Kanye 2024"? There are also obviously many current event and historical examples of speech escalating to violence, but in a place of learning there should be freedom to consider all ideas and freedom to distinguish good from bad ones.
Escalation from speech to physical harm can come in many forms. Like you said, Kanye 2024+antisemitism is a form of stochastic terror, using one persons speech to convince others to cause physical harm. But it can also be emotional abuse that is often not seen by many people that can lead to self harm. Or most simply, it can just be escalation of emotions that leads to mutual physical aggression.
With regards to equality, I don’t think it means that demographics should be evenly split. For one, that’s impossible given the large number of demographics and population variances. But I also think it’s more than equal opportunity.
Equal opportunity only tracks the opportunity to get a job at a superficial level. There’s also the pushing out of non-majority demographics through compounded aggressions. This is quite trackable in many companies and colleges as you can see big differences in percentage shares between career milestones (each year in university, or promotions in companies), but very few companies post it. Netflix and Apple have fairly good reports here
So to that end I’d posit: even if we’ve become better about equality, and agree we should have equal opportunity, are we actually setting up our systems to measure whether we’re being honest about it?
We do have the tools: anonymize the application process. The way to find out if you're orchestra auditions are biased is to put a veil between the musician and the judging panel. In tech, the way to find out if your interviews are biased is to mask the gender of the applicants. Some companies are already doing this: https://interviewing.io/blog/voice-modulation-gender-technic...
It’s all well if we’re hiring tons of diverse juniors. But if we push them out unknowingly before they grow their careers ,we’re not really helping that much
If we're talking about the tech specifically, there's compelling evidence that poverty and lack of education attainment is a barrier for BIPOC people entering tech. But it's exceededingly hard to make that argument for women's underrepresented. Women are actually overrepresented in university. There's a strong argument to be made that women actually have more opportunity to enter tech than men. Rates of harassment in tech are actually lower than on plenty of female-dominated industries like education and administration [1]. The claim that women are being "pushed out" lacks a lot of substance.
1. https://www.workingnowandthen.com/blog/workplace-sexual-hara...
Instead of focusing on just women, extend it to any demographic.
The issue of attrition/inequity in minorities (whatever they may be) within a workplace is easily trackable within companies by looking at the makeup at various seniority milestones.
Again, the few companies that publish this data (Apple and Netflix come first to mind) show there’s inequity in the approaches that exist , but most importantly it also shows that you can’t just view total makeup as the metric but need to break it down into career milestones , and across corporate divisions to really understand the problem space.
Again: equality doesn’t start and end at hiring.
At my previous workplace we instituted minimum representation quotas for underrepresented demographics (we used euphemism for them, of course, "equity standards" and "inclusion targets"). The hiring rates increased, but then so did attrition rates. Similar things happened, but in reverse, when California banned racial discrimination in state universities. Admission rates for underrepresented minorities went down, but then the graduation rates rose. Perhaps increase attrition isn't solved by pursuing identical outcomes, it's solved by instituting blind hiring akin to blind orchestra auditions.
That men are found more guilty of murder is irrelevant to this discussion . The only relevant discussion is whether men are more likely to be found guilty of murder for a similar crime. The former is not bias, the latter is. However the former may be caused by systemic biases that put men in more likely scenarios to commit violent crimes. This is all high level of nuances that need to be understood, versus just saying “this is the way because it’s the way”
You keep fixating on very broad strokes, especially gender. You keep also missing the point of the not just focusing on intake. I’ve spelled that out multiple times, but you keep returning to intake.
There isn’t a point to continuing this discussion because you aren’t willing to even address the actual point of the discussion.
> I have gone out of my way to explicitly talk about consistent outcomes however, and where a discrepancy is found, to understand why.
My point is that the burden of proof is on the person alleging discrimination to prove that an inconsistent outcome stems from bias. You've concluded that this disparities means underrepresented groups are bing "pushed out" on account of this unequal outcome.
This is a big leap in logic, and instead of actually trying to substantiate your claims you're saying I'm not addressing your point. I fully acknowledge your point: some other discrimination outside the scope of the hiring process, or whatever else we're talking about, is having an effect. And my point is that you're merely postulating this as fact and doing nothing to substantiate this statement.
What am I missing? You say I'm missing your point, so please explain what I'm missing.
Curious why you're implying your statistic implicitly and naturally leads to the truth of the statement "certain professional aspirations attract certain people (of specific gender)"
Correct my addition of "specific gender" if that wasn't your intention, but it seems what you're implying - that the reason 97% of coal miners are men because men prefer to be coal miners and women don't.
I disagree completely. I think there's probably far, far more reasons behind the statistic "97% of coal miners are men." Luckily for you, I think our society has trained us to nod our heads and think that your statistic makes "common sense," that's a distinct advantage, despite the fact that your proposition is really lacking in logical, deductive, contextual, or evidential rigor. Watch what happens when I make a similarly non-rigorous statement: Actually, 97% of coal miners are men because the people that hire for the job hold the mistaken, antiquated especially with modern technology, belief that men are more capable of the job because "men are stronger than women."
If I had made my argument as such like you have, I bet I'd get a whole stream of comments demanding I demonstrate the hiring bias with evidence, sources, that would challenge my idea, even try to show that men on average are stronger than women (without of course then completing the other half of the argument, demonstrating that greater raw strength leads to greater outcomes in coal mining).
You were replying to:
> Similarly how do they stop majority dominance
So, given that your answer is "common sense," and my argument is "yup, that's majority dominance, men hiring men," I repeat our OP's question: "How do you stop majority dominance when the conservative argument (yours) is so integrated into our social fabric that it goes unchallenged?"
My follow-up is why is the reaction to people protesting the people that make these types of speeches (such as arguing that men are better at a given job than women) so much stronger than the reaction by the mainstream media and the university heads to the person actually making the speech? Especially when those protesting have the much stronger argument that the defense of the bigot is actively contributing to the continuance of unequal opportunity for people (solidifying the "common sense" idea that women don't make good coal miners).
just stop.
everyone understands why care givers _tend_ to be women and race car drivers _tend_ to be men.
If you want to argue with a specific example, fine, but don't act as if there isn't well known precedent for this. The onus is on YOU to explain the difference away to something other than personal choice.
I’d actually like you to explain this beyond a loose and implicit “everyone understands why”.
The old saying goes, assumptions make an ass out of U and I, and I don’t think the “why” of the matter is shared between everyone.
I don't.
Would that be
* the natural order of things,
* God's plan,
* the end result of iterative bias such as that which gave us the L-chirality Vs D-chirality of amino acids | sugars,
* something else?
A bot will never understand in the same way that they'll never understand when I say "everyone understands why water tastes so good". It's just a part of the human condition that everyone picks up on by the very act of existing.
The vast majority of humans grew up around other humans, and these things get learned as a part of that. "Everyone understands how a hug feels".
I'm sorry that you're a bot, but I'm also not going to bother trying to explain something that will never be understood no matter how much I try.
Perhaps at some point ChatGPT will become good enough to better understand the human condition, but we're definitely not there yet.
At least outline your reasoning for what you think everybody understands.
Bear in mind I'm an intelligent human outside of your parochial bubble.
You don't want to learn or engage in meaningful discourse. You just want to be right.
What's funny is it's not even historically accurate: your "universal human" interpretation of masculine / feminine binary is simply not universal by any stretch of the imagination.
Look how easy this was, I googled "examples of non gender binary societies" and got a listicle with ten examples you can go learn more about: https://screenshot-media.com/politics/lgbtqi-rights/non-bina...
Let me know when you decide to join the conversation that's actually going on.
In more gender equal societies, men and women self-segregate into different jobs more, not less.
Can you demonstrate this deductively, logically, or with evidence?
I googled your proposition and came up with no obvious study you must be thinking about. Can you link it, please?
My point is also to reject the restrictive assignment of people based on primary sexed attributes. Sorry, you've got a vagina, you can't drive a racecar good. Seems insane to me. Typically when people talk about "certain professional aspirations attract certain people," it's not out of a desire to help people find roles in society that align with their gender identities, it's to enforce cultural stereotypes and maintain, in the case of our society, usually patriarchal hierarchies. Not always, sometimes it's matriarchal ones (such as regarding custody of children). This is to me distasteful and I strongly push for people to justify their positions when they could lead to this enforcement, even if it isn't their intention.
> reject the restrictive assignment of people based on primary sexed attributes.
That's not what happens or how it works. People largely self-segregate by choice.
> it's to enforce cultural stereotypes and maintain, in the case of our society, usually patriarchal hierarchies.
Actual evidence for this?
There is a much higher degree of correlation between personality types and occupation/pay - so for example, one actionable change might be to challenge young girls to develop assertiveness and other useful personality traits. It seems like teaching kids that "if you don't achieve your dreams it's because the cultural majority and/or patriarchy held you down" is not going to translate to any useful skill in approaching the world, and only serves as an easy excuse for them to throw out rather than actually address personal shortcomings.
Without teachers, we cannot uphold our civilization, and clearly from the pandemic, teachers are absolutely considered essential workers to parents. However, society is still unwilling to pay for that because it's women doing the work
If 80% of your farming community is mexican, why shouldn't their values be more highly reflected?
This is completely natural, it's reality and the way of the world. It's like arguing that a dog shouldn't be a pack animal. Maybe, but they are.
Dogs aren’t pack animals. They’re social animals. The pack animal theory it outdated and based on incorrect science+observations.
Here’s just one post on the matter https://www.lecaacademy.com/post/the-myth-of-pack-training-f...
That a particular field has a high majority, may intuitively seem like it’s a better field for that majority if you’re just casually observing, but deeper studies often show that there are tons of systemic factors that go into it.
Are most farm hands Mexican because they’re drawn to it culturally? That may be the repeated observation of the person looking at it without much to gain from being part of it.
However once you start looking into it, you’d see the systemic issues that led to it like ethnic discrimination at higher level jobs and the network effect of hiring.
Similarly for women trying to enter tech. There may be systemic issues keeping them out, but going by “90% of software engineers are men, so it must be because they’re more drawn to it” really doesn’t allow for women trying to enter the field to make changes to policies etc that disadvantage them unfairly.
This is the danger of majority rule. It’s why it took so long for many rights to be won by disenfranchised minorities.
The rest of your post is just trashy thinking. If you believe the ratio of men to women is not due to personal choice, that's a claim YOU need to back up. I don't have to back up the assumption that it's personal choice, especially against someone who is, when you boil it all down, saying that it _IS_ personal choice, but that they were manipulated into that personal choice.
Where is all the angst over the lack of female loggers?
This exists for all trades. Logging just isn’t that visible to most people so it’s not one that’s brought up as often.
You’re conflating many many points in your arguments. You also have yet to say why you think people are drawn to certain trades but keep expecting others to put up more and more evidence.
A more plausible explanation is that men prioritize earnings more than women. The reality is that most women still expect to marry a man that outearns them. Men are keenly aware of this understand that their marriage prospects are reduced if they don't get a well paying job. Hence why men tend to take riskier jobs, and jobs with longer hours.
When you look at, say, Canada or Western Australia things are different; here (W.Aus) we move in excess of 800 million tonnes per annum (that's iron ore alone) with a bit over 18% of women in the mining work force [1] - driving trucks, operating diggers and loaders, manageing, as geologists, etc.
[1] https://www.miningnews.net/leadership/news/1400133/mining-st...
The point is that there are fields that naturally attract a specific gender and what (if anything) should be done about it.
* " fields that naturally attract a specific gender " or, more accurately, fields that until recently only hired a specific gender regardless of who was attracted to the field.
Mining in Australia originally didn't hire outside of specific racial groups either, save for extremely manual jobs of an expecially back bracking nature, this changed in the 1970s to a degree and we slowly see advancement into more technical roles.
> Repercussions for harmful or bigoted speech, as well as escalation of responses. For example what if a person or group is being bullied but it’s claimed under free expression?
> What happens when things escalate between parties beyond just words but physical harm?
I don't really understand why this is even a question? Physical assault is not only contrary to MIT's rules, it is a crime. This statement and principle is totally orthogonal to the principle of free expression.
EDIT: I suppose you could mean something more like incitement/inducement to physical harm. But, of course, that is also a crime.
> 2. Similarly how do they stop majority dominance and snowballing into group think? E.g if there are way more men or women in a program and they use their larger numbers to amplify their freedom of expression in a way that affects the others. That then risks reducing the number of the minority demographic as they slowly get pushed out, leading to largely heterogeneous programs.
This is a strange view to me. Is the underlying premise here that there are things that the majority believes, but that would be harmful to say? If so, how did we come to this conclusion and what strange things could be believed by the majority of students/faculty but are too dangerous to speak? Certainly we could point to historical examples of things people in say, the 1950s, believed that we might consider dangerous or harmful to say today. But people from the 1950s would never have chosen to ban those ideas.
In other words, nearly by definition, it is never the preferred expressions of the majority that are getting regulated. If it were a majority view, it wouldn't be considered harmful by the regulators. The viewpoints having their speech regulated are always going to be in the minority and unpopular. If it's not a majority that believes these things, then there should be no reason to be concerned about majority dominance.
The power to regulate expression is just that - power. If you are truly concerned about concentration of power and the protection of minority interests, there is no greater threat to that than the regulation of expression. Tautologically, it will always be those in power that write the speech codes.
2. You balance it by allowing free speech and encouraging robust debate rather than demanding loyalty tests or speech codes. Restricting speech or telling people that they "can't say that" is an excellent way to result in groupthink; encouraging free speech and especially a culture of free speech that respects differences is the best way to prevent one-sided groupthink. Such one-sidedness has many negative consequences, including (but not limited to) ineffective actions, alienating wider groups of people, supporting bad science, and limiting the scope of discovery and study.
The first doesn’t really have good frameworks outside of hate speech or discrimination against protected classes. Everything else is generally company or code of conduct based, which at least to my reading, don’t fit within their definition of freedom of expression.
The second doesn’t actually address the balance at all. Different courses have significant demographic biases, most noticeably gender and ethnicity. that means that the majority group has a naturally amplified freedom of expression when it comes to any topic of debate. Do the minority demographics get equal time to voice their views if there are fewer of them? How do you avoid being drowned out? This isn’t exclusive to gender but also just general opinions like abortion. Freedom of expression has to come with stricter requirements for courtesy imho and more rigour for factual analysis. But those would then impede on freedom of expression.
I still feel that freedom of speech and expression are paradoxes as long as unbalanced power dynamics can exist.
There are plenty of ways for an outnumbered group to still have its voice heard, from speaking at public meetings to writing opinion columns to being active on social media. Or in academia, they can start their own journals, organize their own conferences, etc. Dissenting opinions in court rulings are excellent examples of including the minority opinion as well.
If anything, supporting freedom of speech and expression protects those who are in the minority more than adding more restrictions on speech (since, as other comments have pointed out, who gets to decide what speech to censor? it's those with the power on campus).
Is that not the very definition of democracy? Majority rule easily and frequently overrides and marginalizes minorities. Its kinda the point.
Of course specific minorities have gained mind-share over the years with the majority, and thus become "in the majority". Usually this takes the form of a growing acceptance that others, although different, are still people.
Women have had the vote for barely 100 years. Civil rights. Gay rights. Marriage rights, and so on.
It seems like every era brings a new fight, a new minority to hate, fear, ignore, accept and embrace. The old-guard has a moral panic, wails about their "way of life", but alas they are the minority, so eventually get shouted down.
>> Is that not the very definition of democracy? Majority rule easily and frequently overrides and marginalizes minorities. Its kinda the point.
Yes, so much this. And it's not even a bad thing. We need norms to be able to coexist, even if those norms are somewhat arbitrary and have space for improvement. Finding those norms through consensus and a majority is not the worst way to go.
Further more, some advanced ideas will stay in minority since the majority will not be able to comprehend them.
Basically the rule of majority will generally breed mediocrity in my opinion.
Exactly. For a couple hundred years _after_ US independence, the majority considered women to be second-class people. (quite a few still do.)
>> Basically the rule of majority will generally breed mediocrity in my opinion.
Mediocrity is the _goal_ - its not a bug its a feature. Spare us the rule of a person who considers them self to be exceptional.
Alas these days, democracy would do well to get mediocrity. Judging by some of the candidates in the last election, mediocre would have been a step up. (fortunately the voting public seemed to agree with me.)
In smaller groups, you may only have one or two people vs tens of others on each end of the topic.
All those victories you mentioned were the results of decades of slowly convincing people to a more accepting way of thought.
But when you have classes with very few members of any given demographic , there’s a higher chance of a specific point of view being shut out completely without merit .
I'd argue it gets worse the larger the group. Its very hard to change the direction of a large group because of inertia. Libertarianism has been around a while, but struggles to get traction when pitted against the established norms. Even if individuals are convinced, it's hard to convert enough individuals to matter.
>> or if everyone is subject matter experts
Again, a small group of experts doesn't necessarily create concensus. We saw that during the pandemic where each country, guided by experts, had such a variety of responses. Lock-out (new Zealand), lock down (China), carry on (Sweden), and innumerable random configurations (USA) all lead to different outcomes. Or did they? Sociologists will be dining out on this for decades.
Most functional democracies (I'm thinking company boards, member based clubs etc) understand nuance, and letting everyone win a bit, while finding compromises between majorities and minorities.
The explosion of insanity though (think QAnon) makes a mockery of the democratic process, and exposes the root flaw of group-think. What if the majority think Tom Hanks drinks the blood of sacrificed babies - what price democracy then?
I guess that goes back to my initial premise that “free speech” and “free expression” are poor descriptors, though I’m not sure what better ones would be.
People end up colloquially conflating them with absolute freedom , when outside of libertarians, most societies have rules around it.
I generally feel like codes of conduct are better than using terms like “free”. They denote nuance while allowing flexibility of the guidelines.
Easy. Deal with it in exactly the same way the government does.
All of these edge cases, and situations, and "where is the line?" Are all questions that have been discussed for centuries, in well published court cases that have gone to the supreme court.
I think the supreme court has done a good job, over the decades, of deciding what the line is for acceptable speech or not.
As such, other groups/platforms/large organizations should aspire to limit themselves to the same limits and actions that the government does, even though they are not the government.
> absolute freedom of speech has never really been a thing
It's not, but the best guideline we have, are what the courts have decided, IMO.
If the speech is legal, then allow it.
If it's not, then disallow it.
Or if some currently legal speech is so horrible that you think it should be disallowed, then go through the normal legal process, of making a law, and subject it to the appeals process, constitutional review, and all the checks and balances that go along with making speech illegal.
1. Repercussions for harmful or bigoted speech, as well as escalation of responses. For example what if a person or group is being bullied but it’s claimed under free expression? What recourse is allowed within the realms of their free expression? What happens when things escalate between parties beyond just words but physical harm?
2. Similarly how do they stop majority dominance and snowballing into group think? E.g if there are way more men or women in a program and they use their larger numbers to amplify their freedom of expression in a way that affects the others. That then risks reducing the number of the minority demographic as they slowly get pushed out, leading to largely heterogeneous programs.
I’m sure, or at least hopeful, that they cover it because it would be a ridiculous omission. However balance is tricky.
It’s why I typically don’t like using “free” as a descriptor often for freedom to do stuff. Society has tons and tons of limitations and absolute freedom of speech has never really been a thing, nor do I think it can/should be, because speech can have so many extreme consequences.