Talk about cartoon villains!

You're adorable.

Given that the criteria I listed for "men who can't" have nothing to do with the criteria you used, your comment doesn't really make sense. But, what the heck, I feel charitable - please go ahead and feel like you told me off most righteously.

And, by the way - the "cartoon-quality villains" I "made up"? Read any story on slashdot that talks about women in tech or minorities in tech and tell me people exactly like the ones I used as examples of "men who can't" don't exist.

Men who can, do. Men who can't, blame women, feminists, people of color, H1Bs, and pretty much anyone but themselves.

So, I suppose if someone said they were going to rape and kill your family and then posted the address of your family and pictures of them you would just laugh that off as being completely absurd because, hey, it's online and there's no way online can ever affect the "real world"?

Because that's the context of this discussion. That's the kind of thing that has happened to many of the people who are receiving these threats, and I think it's perfectly reasonable to treat those threats the same as if they were delivered by any other medium, and I'd hope law enforcement would, too.

Online impacts offline all the time in a great number of ways, and only an idiot would imagine otherwise. There's a reason you and I and a great many people here are using pseudonyms and go out our ways to avoid giving out potentially identifying information and that's because we are damn well aware of the fact that people can and do reach out from online to fuck with people in very real ways.

You spent a non-trivial amount of time and effort fighting with trolls. Unless you're Thor Odinson and these are literal trolls, you lost just by engaging.

I don't mean to sound intolerably cruel and snide, but you're too ignorant to be taking part in this discussion, and the fact that your ignorance was modded insightful says loads about the person who modded you up as well.

There is a shortage of men in nursing (a lowish pay, low prestige field) and people are absolutely bothered by it and trying to remedy it. Just because you aren't aware of it doesn't mean it isn't a thing people are bothered by, and moreover, the arrogance you display in assuming that because you haven't heard of the issue means it doesn't exist is pathetic.

Further, women aren't being forced into tech, we're being pushed out of it by shitlords like you who assume we have a fundamental weakness that prevents us from being as good as men in the work. Do you not think that maybe - just maybe - the fact that you do think we aren't as naturally adept as men could be might influence the way you interact with women in the field vs. how you interact with men?

You aren't being cruel and snide, you're just ignorant and arrogant, and a fucking idiot on top of it because you're pretty clearly incapable of refraining from spouting off your factually incorrect opinion on the subject. If you would be honest with yourself, you'd see that, and you'd probably be pretty fucking ashamed of yourself.

Who am I kidding? People of your ilk aren't capable of feeling shame because feeling shame requires the ability to admit you could be wrong.

Because there's no value in overengineering things that are easy to replace and where the consequences of failure are trivial. Further, most people only need the features of their phones to be "OK" rather than "GREAT" and would rather carry one device rather than 10.

For some things - such as clothing or furniture, or items where there have literally been no earth shattering developments in the last 100 years (like, I dunno, silverware), it's okay to overengineer because doing so is actually efficient. I have a coat and a pair of boots that have lasted me 20+ years, some silverware that's maybe 200 years old, and the average of most of the "important" furniture in my home is over 75 years.

But my phone? I'm not a professional photographer. I'm not even an amateur photographer. I just want pictures I took of people and things and events I found worth photographing that are "good enough." I'm not doing professional video editing, so I just want a video cam that's good enough I can take footage of my dogs doing goofy stuff that I can send to my family. If I'm in a place where I'm watching movies or TV on my phone, it means I'm traveling and therefore unlikely to give much of a shit if the screen doesn't have perfect color fidelity or whatever because, well, there's a bunch of shit going on around me anyway. Ditto for music - why would I aim for some kind of audiophile's wet dream when likely the only time I'll be using my phone for music is when I'm out and about in situations where music quality isn't terribly relevant? Etc. and so on.

It's not that we don't value quality - I think we DO value quality very, very much - it's just that we can recognize that it's kind of stupid to waste time and money and effort on overengineering things that will be hopelessly outclassed in a few scant years.

Buy quality where it matters, buy cheap and replaceable where it doesn't.

If I want someone with the potential to be brilliant, I'd go for the candidate who, despite NOT immersing themselves in the field for the last 4+ years of their life has just performed as well as the candidate who has dedicated their education to the field.

Even if things weren't precisely equal, I'd be inclined to go with the person who isn't trained yet performed well enough to be considered for the job, since they clearly have a lot more potential to grow and clearly have a desire to learn on their own rather than just because they "had" to in university. That person might have some deficits, but they will very likely be able to remedy them, given their already demonstrated desire to learn on their own.

If I'm just hiring a cog and they need to hit a few boxes on a checklist in order to be slotted in to a role where brilliance would actually be harmfully disruptive, then sure, give me the person who treated university like a vocational training course, I guess.

Sorry, but no - I'm not responsible for other people's behavior, no matter how much you feel like I should be simply because I use the same term.

You've clearly got some issue with "feminism" and "feminists" - but it's not an issue I can help you with. .Not my monkeys, not my circus. Be well.

You and I have a very, very different understanding of what feminism is. You're coming at it from a direction and conceptualization of it that is, frankly, alien to me, and while I would love to have a discussion of the details and the genesis for those different approaches, I don't know if that would be terribly fruitful here.

You're basically trying to make me answer for things I've never said and beliefs I do not hold, but that happen to be held by people who use a term I use to describe my thinking. It's like asking a random "Christian" to justify and explain Westboro Baptist's behavior because they both think of themselves as "Christian" despite that term meaning vastly different things. Other than saying "some people are assholes" I really can't be bothered to try and explain their behavior and shrug.

What I can say is what *I* believe and what *I* subscribe to. For me, feminism is recognizing that there is a pervasive and harmful current in society along gender lines, and that it hurts EVERYONE, be they male, female or neither. It's not about victimhood, it's about recognizing that harm is being done constantly and wouldn't it be nice if we could stop hurting ourselves over stupid shit?

What do I mean by "harm"? Here:
Guy has kids, wife makes more money so he stays at home to watch the kids while he works. Guy would get a ration of shit from buddies and probably a great deal from himself. He's been taught his entire life that men work, that childcare is women's work and god forbid he not make at least as much if not more than his wife. That's INCREDIBLY harmful to him.

Guy loses his job. Guy has to take one that pays less. He now may see himself as less of a man because men are defined by their work in many ways; their value gets determined by what they make. Harmful.

Guy goes to see a movie, it's got a sad ending, he's bawling. Has to toughen up and say "it's dusty in here" or hide it, be ashamed of feeling something. Harmful.

Woman goes out to a bar and picks up a guy, they have sex. He's a stud, she's a slut. Harmful - to both parties, actually, since he's being defined by something stupid like his ability to find women to have sex with (making him less of a man if he fails) and she's being denigrated because she's having casual sex.

One common theme to all of these is that a man who doesn't act in a typically manly fashion is often insulted by being described as feminine, showing a general belief that "feminine masculine." Which is why many who try to address this harmful current in society: If feminine were seen as equal in status to masculine, there would be less damage done to ALL genders because it wouldn't be shameful to be more or less masculine or more or less feminine or to do manly things if you're a woman or womanly things if you're a man. Equal in status, not identical in function.

I guess that's the message one would get if they only look at the noisy assholes, but that's fair, since they are noisy assholes and make a disproportionate amount of noise. Fact is, though, that most feminists are actually just advocating for human rights for all.

Kind of like how one might get the impression that Slashdot is full of racist fucktards because a few noisy assholes are constantly posting crazy racist shit. Thing is, most people here are actually just nerds who want to discuss nerd stuff with other nerds, which is totally cool.

Or how one might get the impression that all gun owners are crazy morons with inadequacy issues who think it's somehow proving a point to get a bunch of yokels together and show up at various family restaurants armed to the teeth when public shootings are constantly being hyped up in the news. Fact is, most gun owners are just regular people who know how to comport themselves in public and don't think scaring the shit out of people is good pr.

Point here is that you (the general "you") would be well served to realize that if you're trying to dismiss a rather large segment of the population by using some kind of cartoonish stereotype, it might be worth looking at some of the quieter members of said group. Just sayin'.

The thing is, why should it matter if it's biology or a choice or a combination of both? We protect choices all the time. We protect biological destiny all the time. We protect things that are likely a mix of the two all the time. Why (other than that some people find it icky) should sexual orientation be any different?

People choose to follow a particular religion, and religious freedom is seen as a Good Thing in much of the western world. Yay tolerance for other people's choices.

People are born black, and racism is seen as a Bad Thing in much of the western world. Yay tolerance for other people's biology.

To be honest, as long as all parties are capable of and willing to consent, I don't give a fuck about who people fuck or why they fuck them. Maybe if I am one of the people involved in the fucking I might give a fuck, but really unless the "why" causes some kind of issue, I don't give a fuck. It might be of some academic interest, along the same lines as "why are some people left handed" but it seems like using "why" as a basis for tolerance or whatever is goofy.

Mind you, I agree with you that being gay is almost certainly very largely a result of biology, and I actually think that the people who are trying to do "conversion therapy" are monstrous just as it would be monstrous to try and get straight people to go gay. I'm just saying that choice or biology, people need to get the fuck over it and stop giving so much of a shit about other people's bouncy bouncy fun time.

Actually, hell let me throw a challenge at you:

Please explain the value in trying to understand gravity in a way that is general enough to also apply to numerous other fields that are deemed to "have value" but that excludes trying to understand human behavior.

If you can do so in a way that is meaningful and isn't intellectually dishonest I'll be surprised.

I use "probably" because I'm able to recognize the weaknesses and potential for flaws in the results inherent in any study that involves humans as the subjects and more importantly, the mind and behaviors. It's funny that you're taking someone being honest about known limitations of a field as somehow a bad thing. Instead of being intellectually honest and acknowledging that, should I have tried for rhetorical points and overstated my case?

As to your request for empirical evidence about the value of the experiments, you do understand that "value" is inherently subjective, right? There are plenty of people who find no value what-so-ever in science or any other intellectual pursuit (and we make fun of them here on /. quite frequently). Given this discussion, I'm quite certain that you and I ascribe different values to a great many things. I personally think there's a cost/benefit to any field of study, and that if the benefits outweigh the costs, there's value in that study. In this case, you may not find value in trying to understand why human beings do the things they do, and that's your right; I, however, do find value in trying to understand human behaviors. In fact, I find enough value in it that I'm willing to accept that the investigation into those behaviors will be challenging, probabilistic vs. deterministic, and often frustrating when compared to other disciplines.

The tl;dr thing is this: I find as much value in trying to understand gravity as I do in trying to understand why human beings do the things they do, even if it's a hell of a lot harder to design experiments and the results are a hell of a lot muddier when you involve subjects as complex as humans.

There's different levels of replication.

In physics, you can generally replicate an experiment vary precisely if you've got a handle on the factors that went into that experiment - control the environment, etc. You can have an almost perfect replication. Yay, science!

In social psychology research you can't ever even approach that same level of control over the environment the experiment takes place in. The subject will be different - even if it's the same subject used in the first experiment, because people change over time/exposure. The interviewer will be different because people change over time. The dynamic between interviewer and subject will be different. The history of the subject will be different as will the history of the interviewer as will the place the interview is taking place, etc. etc. etc.

The best such research can do is to either find that there is a tendency for x to happen in y circumstances, but it might not always be the case.

And, actually, there is a fair amount of basic replication that goes on in many psychological studies; when I was in the field working on studies we would routinely include certain basic measures that had been used in tens of thousands of studies before and compare anticipated vs. actual outcomes.

But even if it doesn't get replicated it actually has some value in that it would indicate that whatever the original experiment felt was a contributing factor to the main reported effect, a lack of easy replication under mostly similar circumstances indicates that that factor probably isn't as strong as hypothesized, and it cuts off a (probably) blind alley.