Group chat doesn't work on your phone?

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but I'm afraid that those aren't friends.

Actually, Yes. I have dated in the modern world (four to three years ago when facebook was at its peak). When denied facebook details (username, whatever) potential mates became more interested in me! There's a very good reason for this - women looking for a stable relationship are frequently turned off by attention-whores. Telling women that I don't do facebook merely increased my desirability as long-term partner.

You do realise that women face around double the risk of domestic violence, including rape, from the other women in the relationship, right? At this point, there have been more women who have raped their intimate partner than there have been actual physical violence resulting from #gamergate trolls.

Where's the mods when you need them - parent is right on the money. This whole uproar is over something that may happen, but which, as far as I can tell, has never actually happened. When the odds are that low it seems a bit of a tempest in a teacup.

All of us were outcasts in high school, which is why we ain't buying this bullshit of "women in tech are treated differently".

I'm curious - where in Southern Africa where you? I'm in South Africa and have vacationed just about everywhere here and never found a place that only had a few people that spoke english.

Your point is probably where all these "get girls into tech" issues stem from. Men get into tech, find out that there's little to no socialising and are okay with it. Women get into tech, find out that there's little to no socialising and feel "left out".

What makes you think that the current advertisements are excluding/less attractive to females? And what is so special about females that you need a different environment to function in? You are insulting both men and women in one go, and you don't even notice...

No. You're incorrect - from this link:

"In statistics, regression toward (or to) the mean is the phenomenon that if a variable is extreme on its first measurement, it will tend to be closer to the average on its second measurement—and, paradoxically, if it is extreme on its second measurement, it will tend to have been closer to the average on its first."

This definition is directly contradictory to what you thought the definition was.

It is not ad hominem to point out that you are making a mistake even HS students don't make. And your error of understanding is not just with "regression to the mean", it's with all the other linear algebra and statistics and logic mistakes you've made over the course of this thread. Be happy that I'm only pointing out one of them - I flat out ignored the incorrect logic statement you posted earlier. For a refresher logic course, you can see this - first semester notes. Note that this particular document was been online since around 2006 so you've had plenty of time to read it if the information was not available elsewhere.

Once again I must point out that stringing together random terms you found on wikipedia is no substitute for actually knowing the subject.

There is no such requirement. Who gave you the idea that regression to the mean only applies to "statistically insignificant trends" (you made that up too, by the way - there's no such thing. "Statistical significance" applies to the testing of a null hypothesis)

None of what you said makes sense - did you only just now look up statistics on wikipedia? You said above that regression to the mean does not apply, and now you say that the central limit theorem applies - those things go together (something you won't find out by skimming wikipedia, I'm afraid). Oh sure, you've thrown in some other words you don't understand, like Gaussian, but you still got the most elementary thing wrong - Regression to the mean applies whenever the central limit theorem applies.

I briefly taught both logic and statistics at a university, do you want me to try to find my old notes so you can quickly clue up on what all these things mean, and why your logic is off? Skimming wikipedia whenever you encounter a new term is not really a good way to learn anything, and it's obvious to those in the field when we meet the people who just skimmed for keywords.

All that proves is evidence of a decline. Nothing more.

Nope, there are more (which, had you bothered to even read my post you would have seen) such as regression to the mean (which was illustrated in my previous post).

That is not a proof; I'm sorry, but that "proof" above really would be laughed off any respectable journal. Natural factors cannot be disproved of this because the current situation may be a regression to the mean (only one of several possible explanations).

Please read my post again - just because I cannot conclusively prove that unicorns don't exist doesn't imply that your claim that they do exist must be true. In the same vein, just because I cannot conclusively prove the nature argument that doesn't imply that your nurture argument must be true. Science does not work that way - Just because A is unproven does not imply that B is proven.

No, there doesn't. You keep claiming this, and you repeatedly claimed that there are several peer-reviewed studies to support this position but you have yet to post a link to any of them.

Because there is no evidence for A, you should assume that B is correct? My word...

The claim I made is contradictory to what you believe. You believe a claim was made over the capability of females, I corrected you and said that GP made no such claim. Let me refresh ... you said (repeatedly, but I'll just quote the one post here):

I replied with

You are making an argument against a strawman. GP (that you replied to) never said anything about capability. No one brought capability into it but you.

There is no evidence of that, none that I could find at any rate, so if it exists please post a link.

There are two questions there. Firstly, there is a ton of evidence that natural factors (as you use the term) are responsible for the majority, if not all, of the motivations humans experience; the exceptions are few and far between. For the second part, I've not seen nor heard of any study that found that CS, in particular, was an exception to this rule. You are welcome to find and post a link to evidence that the characteristic "motivation to do CS" is an exception.

However, science is not performed by "proving" a hypothesis, but by failing to disprove a hypothesis. Falsifiability. Let's start with an example:

The claim/assertion: Women are not entering CS due to societal influence
How can we prove this wrong? What experiment can we run which, if successful, shows that the statement is incorrect? Perhaps we could raise the experimental group of children in gender neutral isolation and leave the control group in the real world? That won't pass ethics review but it's a good start. Another option that won't pass ethics review is to forcefully raise the experimental group of children as the opposite gender in isolation from the real world and leave the control group in the real world.

If you do either of the above (somehow you managed to sneak it past ethics review) and at the end of the decades long experiment you find that there is a 50:50 ratio of genders in CS in the experimental group, then congratulations - you failed to prove the assertion incorrect so some weight may be added to your assertion. Doesn't mean that your claim is correct, only that the attempt to prove it wrong failed. Only after many varied repeated (and replicated) falsifying attempts can you start calling your hypothesis "commonly accepted" (still not a "fact" though).

This is the biggest reason that SJW's run into the ire of many respectable scientists. Just because studies have failed to prove the "genetic reason" they make the assumption that the "environmental impact reason" must be true. They fail to realise that the failure to prove/disprove a claim doesn't lend weight to any opposing claim. I.e. failing to prove that nature is the reason doesn't automatically make the nurture claim true.

You repeatedly make the same claim. Your basic claim is: Since [whatever year you choose] women in CS has declined, then you go on to make the incorrect leap that due to human biology/physiology/psychology not changing significantly, the decline MUST be attributable to nurture and not nature. That is the basic argument most SJW's make and it is wrong from just about any conceivable viewpoint other than the political ones.

Just because human biology/physiology/psychology hasn't changed, that in no way, shape or manner suggests that the reason for the decline is nurture. For example,

it could simply be that the relative popularity of CS amongst women in [whichever year you chose] was down to nurture. Maybe women were pressured into those roles - heaven knows that women in the past were under a lot more pressure than women today.

Or maybe women today are free to choose what they want to do, women in [your chosen year] were not.

Or maybe it's due to some physiological characteristics that have changed.

Or maybe the women didn't change, it might have been the men that have changed in biology.

Or maybe it is due to nurture, but not the way you think (perhaps treating the boys and girls gender-neutrally leaves them with different preferences).

Or maybe ....

The trouble with the "it's nurture, dummy" arguments is that there is no evidence for it. To get the required evidence would require breaking quite a few research ethics rules along the way. There are way too many alternatives for anyone to say that, conclusively, it must be nurture, and not nature. The reverse argument applies.

You never even read my post above where I said it's already common knowledge that men and women are mostly equally capable, I doubt you are going to read the links I posted. I predicted you will ignore them, and you did.

I never made this claim, I made the claim that women are motivated differently to men. I provided a peer-reviewed study (see link in previous post) that back this up. I claimed that motivation is a big factor in performance in science and then provided a peer-reviewed study that supported that claim. Seriously, read the studies.

Besides, you made the claim (numerous times in this thread) that there was peer-reviewed research supporting your position, so now show us that peer-reviewed research. I haven't seen any, not in my time as a scientist with access to just about all the journals there were and not in any time after that.

What the fuck? Where did I try to convince you to do that? You want to lazily sit at your desk till a female techie comes to you? That's nonsense. Nothing in what I said prevents you from going out and finding a female techie.

Nope, depression quest was developed using "an open source tool for telling interactive fiction stories" (their own description). For the record, this is something my (almost) eight year old son has done numerous times. Doesn't make him a techie. Makes him a story-teller.

Using a word processor to write an eBook doesn't make you a kindle-programmer, it makes you an author.

Are you seriously too lazy to even see who made the original claim? I made no such claim.

That's not what you claimed - you claimed the existence of peer reviewed studies backing up your point, I asked for a citation. Instead of posting a single line citation you post a multi-paragraph explanation of why a citation isn't needed. You do more damage to your own argument than I could ever do.

Just FYI, before you make any more stupid claims to scientists about what we think, here is what peer-reviewed studies look like (and these are all in support of my argument that males and females have different motivations):

Significant difference in motivation between sexes,

Motivation difference in sex responsible for differing levels of performance,

Motivation primarily responsible for differences in performance in the sciences,

In fact, amongst scientists this is already well-known, you can find literally hundreds of peer-reviewed properly done and replicated studies that show that:
a) Women and men are mostly equally capable at all cognitive tasks, and
b) Women and men are almost always motivated by different things, and
c) Motivation is the primary indicator of performance in scientific fields.

Here, check for yourself

The problem, in my not so fucking humble scientist opinion, is that people like you don't have a clue about all the research that exists because:
a) You aren't scientists, you don't want to be scientists and it's too much work to think like one,
b) You have a different agenda to push, and common scientific knowledge like I posted above goes against what you feel should be correct, so you ignore it when you find it, just like you will ignore the above research (and the hundreds of papers that deal with this).

That paper, which I've already read BTW, doesn't add to your argument in any way. In fact, quote the section that you *think* adds to your argument from that paper. There is not mention of artificial barriers, only strategies of increasing female representation - in fact, that's what the entire paper is about: how to increase female representation. Unluckily for you, since that paper was published it was found that none of those strategies had a significant effect on increasing female representation.

So, you've cited a paper that doesn't bolster your argument, that deals with strategies to change the proportions AND those strategies haven't actually worked in the long term.

Well done! That's quite a hat trick of inaccuracy that you've managed.