Another brilliant insight from the alternate reality known as the Men Going Their Own Way subreddit: the definitive answer to the question of why there are relatively few women in STEM fields.
Our MGTOW brain genius figures that it’s because they can’t use their sexy feminine wiles to manipulate computers the way they can manipulate men.
ZarBandit explains:
Once you understand that most women have one tool in their toolbox: manipulation, you might have an idea why they don’t do stem. You can’t manipulate computers into doing what you want. A mathematical proof can’t be manipulated into being correct.
As far as I can tell, the only thing that will get a computer doing what I want is for me to shut it off and turn it on again.
However, softer science subjects that involve teamwork are infested with women because they can manipulate group dynamics. Coding is a solitary pursuit. Mathematics is one of the most solitary of the sciences. I know of a Mathematics dept where a homeless man lived there for a year and no one noticed.
I’m not sure that’s making the point you want it to, dude.
She’ll never be the best scientist or thinker. But she can be the best manipulator, especially in a group of men. Queen bee. There are plenty of drones who will work for her.
Besides, “thinking too much gives you wrinkles”.
I’m pretty sure the real reason a lot of women stay away from STEM is that they don’t want to be surrounded by idiots like this.
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Yeah, as a STEM major in college (before we called it that), the classwork required and then the demands of the job are easy compared to having to put up with assholes like this. So many of them. SO MANY.
I’d like the ghost of Admiral Hopper to come punch out this creep. And that attractive woman who famously posed next to the stack of code printout that was as tall as her which she wrote to get Apollo to land on the moon.
Now I’m wondering about the hygiene and attention to detail of that math department. If you can’t tell a homeless guy from one of your peers, what other things are you going to overlook?
And I’m sure this ZarBandit is totally in STEM himself…
I’m probably the least socially adept in my engineering office, and I’m pretty much the only one who LIKES calculation packages.
And take it from me; people do try to manipulate math into saying what they want it to say. It’s all in the assumptions!
Start with a bad assumption (or back calculate to find the value you really WANT to assume and then pour through the literature or the specification for any way you can justify it being what you want, even if you really shouldn’t) and you can do perfectly reasonable math that has a bs output. Like, “oh, I just have to have my stress 2 ksi lower, if I just assume this efficiency is 0.95 instead of 0.97 and voila proposal perfect!”
Don’t trust anyone who thinks math, logic, and programming are impossible to manipulate and are the ultimate arbiters of all truths.
Like, and a base level yes. But also no. Maybe abstract algebra, but math used for design and final algorithms? Certainly no.
@GSS ex-noob:
I’d like the ghost of Admiral Hopper to come punch out this creep. And that attractive woman who famously posed next to the stack of code printout that was as tall as her which she wrote to get Apollo to land on the moon.
Ooh! Can Ada Lovelace join the party?
Says someone who has coded professionally for zero days out of the last 2 trillion.
[Got beaten to the punch about Grace Hopper. But still!]
My grandma is way smarter than this guy
@Miri:
Is this the link you intended?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_L._Osofsky (And I bet her career path was six miles through the snow and uphill both ways.)
The Apollo lady you’re referring to is Margaret Hamilton. I know your intention was good, but maybe looking up her name would’ve been better than describing her as “that attractive woman”?
As the soon-to-be only female programmer (technically CS researcher but let’s not split hairs, this guy won’t understand the difference) in a team of 25 I’m sad that I… can’t manipulate them? Because we’re all alone together, I guess? What the what? The only other woman on the team before I got there (who is leaving in a week) was the acknowledged C++ expert and wrote published international standards for the language. All the men came to her for C++ help. I’m sure she was just manipulating them into… making her have more work helping them? The best-laid schemes of mice and women gang aft a-gley…
And a solitary pleasure ?
As Creep Dyke said, this person may never had worked in a team. Or maybe no team wanted this person.
While it is not impossible for a person alone to program a small software – or even a big one if this person is some kind of genius -, this is clearly not the standard, at least in the working world.
@FMO
Yeah, is my link not working? (I’m on mobile so my link takes me to the wikipedia app, not the website)
And since she went to and taught at Ithaca, it was more like uphill both ways in the drizzle lol
Agh, my brain isn’t working. My mother went to Ithaca, not grandma. So yeah, uphill both ways in the snow, as far as career paths went.
Tell me you don’t know anything about science or scientists without telling me you don’t know anything about science and scientists.
I’m a woman in STEM. The last semester I was in college, two of my professors were women. (Of course, I’m trans, so I don’t count to him.)
@Mabret
The C++ expert I mentioned is actually also trans, but I only know that because I’m not stupid and someone dead named her by mistake (it was actually a mistake and not malicious, but extremely poorly done, what if I was an asshole?), so I’m currently pretending like I don’t know that because I think it’s the right thing to do until she says something to me of her own choice and/or wears some kind of statement item?
In any case, do any women in STEM really count? You know we all faking, probably got a beta locked up somewhere doing the work for us.
@Miri:
If I’m not being rude to ask, is your name a Star Trek: TOS reference?
So I’m not a STEM major (I chose humanities over a place in forensic sciences cause ya can’t manipulate corpses, I guess…?), but I am alive and have an – admittedly superficial – interest in science but this whole thing makes me think of whenever I’m reading articles on whatever subject, I feel like the comment section is crawling with people (and I’ll assume it’s over 90% guys) who’ll always find a way to somehow make a point about how Math > Physics > Engineering are the scienciest of all sciences cause FACTS leave no room for INTERPRETATION and humanities pull shit out of thin air. And every time I’m like… what does that have to do with the artice/ video whatever? And how come you people seem to think that empirical social research doesn’t have a working epistemological toolset?
@ Contrapangloss: I watched a lecture by Sabine Hossenfelder about beauty in physics theory a while ago, where she basically “attacked” some of the core assumptions in physics (the lecture was in German, but she’s got an english youtube channel that’s more focused on popular science topics). As I understood it she argued that: criteria can be postulated into the theory with the whole purpose of making it elegant. Now I don’t have the scientific knowledge to check up on her argument with, but the comment section was ridiculous. There were many people who found her points quite interesting and sounded like they knew what they (and she) were talking about. But there was also a huge load of people who made no real counterarguments but mainly attacked her personally and used outright dumb sexist arguments.
I kinda love the whole irony of that. Female scientist argues that male physicists just manipulated theories till they looked “pretty”. Dudes scream about how she’s got no idea what she’s talking about and look at her hair and women be manipulative bitches anyway -.-
Near as I can remember it, it were about 70% women doing Biochem at the same time as me. Would have been fun if I weren’t already wed 😛
I’ll second that, I may not have studied math and programming, but I did a crap ton of logicand its relationship to math and logic (There’s a lot of logicians in history who started out as mathematicians. The overlap is really strong there) and it really is the assumptions that shape the outcome.
Immanuel Kant (aside from the categorical imperative which is moral philosophy) was also famous for his antinomies proving two opposite beliefs through logic and ‘common sense’ assumptions (which is why his biggest work is called ‘the critique of pure reason’. Pure reason isn’t all that reliable as a method to get to truth).
@FMO
Kinda? I’m not a huge fan of my birth name (Miriam), but I started going by Miri a little before I came across that particular episode. It certainly isn’t a downside imo.
As a professional software dev, I think this whole posturing is a pretty good indicator that a) the poster is not working as a team, and b) that no team would want to work with him.
There is a (thankfully) dying breed of developers like this. The wannabe rockstar and “code guru” type. Jacks of all trades who imagine themselves masters of all trades. People who believe such a thing as a 10X developer exists, and is something to aspire to.
I do consulting work, and identifying such rockstars is sadly a part of my daily business. They may be smart, but they are a net detriment to their employers. Usually, we find a nice pasture for them to play on where they can be kept away from damaging the actually important topics.
So in essence this feeeeeemale is manipulating the workforce, yes. She is manipulating you to allow everyone else to get on with work. Congrats, you caught me. Have a nice make-work project to enjoy until you eventually retire. Must be nice having that level of privilege, but I’d rather have a work that makes me feel like I contributed something, have regular interactions with other people, learn and grow from and alongside them.
@Battering Lamb:
The most it can do is tell you about the space of all possible internally-consistent worlds. Only observational data can tell you which one of those you’re in … or at least narrow it down to a subset.
Mathematics isn’t a solitary pursuit. Software engineering even less so. And as a software engineer, I can ensure you a good portion of my working is manipulating people into thinking the program do what they want.
The only sort of point is that since the automatic proof prover exists, there’s less manipulated mathematic results.
I’m not sure if this is a maths question or a psychology one; but as we have lots of clever people here perhaps there’s some overlap…
But anyway, why do musicians count in songs as “1,2,3,4…” whereas dancers use “5,6,7,8…”?