So we're augmenting the flow: now not only will I get "Greetings Dear, I am Ivan Ilych of the First National Bank of Nigeria" but also "Warning from Operation Eagle Claw: You may have been pwn3d!" And no doubt, "Warning from Operation Eagle Claw: You have been pwn3d. Your identity has been stolen by a Nigerian scam syndicate. Please verify your identity by sending us your SSN and we will fix everything."

What matters isn't whether you can come up with a quantitative measure for whether there is sexism. What matters is whether women have a hard time in an environment due to their own observations.

Forget placing blame. That's only really important if you're trying to punish someone.

Rather, look for a solution. I have found that it is not really that difficult to listen to complaints and problems and to try to be sensitive to perceived issues without compromising my honour.

You can think of this as risk management. There might be sexism that you can't see. If there isn't and you don't act, then no problem. If there isn't and you do act, again, the actions required are pretty insignificant and will probably make you a better person anyway, but certainly nobody loses much. If there is and you do act, everyone wins big! If there is and you don't act, then the consequences are truly too horrible to comprehend (like: you'll have to date women who just don't appreciate love poems written in perl. Or, if you're feeling empathic today, a lot of women made miserable by feeling unwelcome when they seek a community of fellow geeks). So, given observation noise, what's the most sensible course of action?

Why is this a big deal?

Farmers dump fertiliser into the ocean. This creates blooms and subsequent dead zones. The farmers aren't punished.

The fisheries of most countries are under-regulated, leading to extinctions. The fishermen and the responsible governments aren't punished.

We all dump CO_2 into the air. This changes the pH of the ocean, acidifying it drastically and causing massive extinctions. It also changes the temperature of the earth, destroying ecosystems and having devastating effects on water flow patterns. We are not punished.

Likewise mercury, and a thousand other toxins. We dump so much Hg into the water that health researchers highly recommend limiting intake of higher-order consumers like salmon. Who is punished?

The mafia dump toxins into the ocean. WHO CARES? We have proven time and again that we don't care about the health of the oceans. We already know that governments want more excuses to punish other forms of organised crime. What's new?

Well, sure. Come up with a refutable hypothesis and test it. FOR SCIENCE!

emkyooess is right but I'm going to try to spell it out more clearly (or at least more verbosely and less Godwiny):

If you are part of an organisation, and that organisation is doing something immoral, and you follow along, then you are part of the transgression. A member of any group is a part of that group. Duh, but people who are "just doing their job" are every bit as much part of what gets done as the people pulling the strings.

To put it another way: you are responsible for your actions even if you're getting paid.

In the USA and in many other countries, women/girls are getting fatter (so are men, but that's orthogonal to the discussion). Fatter has at times past meant more beautiful (at least to painters who appreciate curves) but by today's standards fat is bad. Of course, fat is also known to be unhealthy, and I'd love to know how intellectual knowledge of health plays into attraction.

I suspect that this has a great deal to do with wealth. When most people had to work the fields, white skin and fat and some other things were signs of wealth, and were therefore attractive. Now that everyone works indoors and only the educated and rich bother with food made of animals and plants rather than with growth hormones and hydrocarbons, sports, travel, active hobbies, or at least fake it with gym memberships, the poor get fat and white and the rich get thin and tanned. I know that men are supposed to appreciate "fitness to bear children" rather than "wealth", but I suspect that men are also attracted to upper-class women...?

Another thing occurs to me: the link between social class/education level and number of children is well established--the upper classes have many fewer children for reasons other than how attractive they are. Perhaps the measure of "how many children you have" has some serious problems. Did anyone here actually read the study and find out whether they normalised for education level?

I honestly don't know whether Paul's "argument" is better than what you call "blind faith".

He's at least trying. He makes an argument that is missing some pieces, and he touches upon what those pieces need to look like. It may be easier to refute "The mind is immortal because it's not in the same condition as the liver" than "We have souls." He even points out that he doesn't have that piece and suggests a future research direction, which is consistent with good science!

But then he goes on to say that while he can't prove his hypothesis, he still believes it, and moreover he wants to persuade others to believe it despite the glaring lack of evidence--because "there is no credible evidence to the contrary." That is unfortunate.

So after a bit of good observation, he resorts to making a more precise but still untestable claim, and asks people not to try to help him investigate this fascinating question further, but to accept the untestable claim because it's shiny. That's consistent with what I think of as faith.

Is that the gist? If not, sorry!

That makes sense. But I take issue with people who claim to belong to some group that has a doctrine--for example, that if your child disobeys you then you should stone him to death--and then put qualifiers on it, like "oh, well, that wasn't meant to be taken literally--it's just a metaphor." If a religion has a doctrine and you pick and choose and interpret and modify, then how are you a part of that religion?

What you're doing there is having a brain. You are a spiritual person seeking some sort of guidance, and you read widely and think for yourself. You've decided that some of Catholicism is good and some of Zoroastrianism is good and some of FSM is good, and you're constructing your own personal spirituality with your brain. It's not coming from a religion; it's coming from your own thoughts, and religions are nothing but sources of inspiration.

Why then do you call yourself Christian? You're not Christian if you disagree with chunks of Christian doctrine. Not that it's really possible to write down what most kinds of Christianity's doctrines are, although with Catholics you can always ask the Pope--that religion was clever enough to include an oracle.

Amongst people with brains, being able to say you believe something because it feels right, and maybe cite a few sources, is usually enough, but the fact that you're citing Christian sources doesn't make you Christian, does it? If you read the Qu'ran one night and suddenly start citing that instead but your beliefs haven't changed, are you now Muslim?

Sorry, what is my opinion? That defending one untestable theory at the expense of another is bullshit? Given that there is no way to justify a preference between untestable theories besides wishful thinking, my "opinion" is just a pretty conventional definition of bullshit.

Sorry, I'm not quite sure what you're getting at here. The theory of gravitation makes predictions. My alternative theory of gravitation is that you'll fall sideways--now go and figure out which is correct. Further, it's easy to test Newtonian gravity vs. Einsteinian gravity and determine which is more correct.

I don't understand. If you can demonstrate that it is correct, then how is it "faith"?

I'm glad you refer to religious experts--rather than invoking some random superbeing--as the good authority. That's the first step. The second step is understanding what makes someone a religious expert--it's not exactly divine inspiration. The third step is left as an exercise to the reader.

Religions do disagree. They can't all be right. If you have faith, then by definition your opinion is untestable (if you could test it it wouldn't be faith, but science). So any claim about which religion is correct is, by definition, bullshit.