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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Does this person think that STEM jobs are the only ones that involve computers?
I wouldn’t be surprised. Nor would I be surprised if they think STEM = computer science/programming. A certain type of dude who interacts a lot with computers can’t see beyond the machine to any other field. The type of dude whose thought process in regard to a career goes, “I play games a lot and I know a good game from a bad one; therefore I shall make games as my career since I already have expertise in this field.”
@Ohlmann:
Hmm. I suppose a working definition of “truth” might be that a statement that, if believed, allows its receiver to make more accurate predictions of their own future observations is truthful, and the greater this effect, the more truthful or precise it is. One that would, if believed, result in its receiver’s predictions losing accuracy is a falsehood. So, more truthful = improves the predictive power of recipient’s model of the world more.
That definition doesn’t then apply to statements of a purely mathematical sort, such as “2 + 2 = 4”, as separate from statements about a world in which one lives and makes observations. The notion of “truth” typically used in pure mathematics is that the statement, when added to the model, doesn’t make it cease to be consistent, or, especially, adding its negation would. The latter case means the statement is provable within the model. When the former applies but not the latter, Gödel incompleteness has struck. And in that event, if the model is used to try to make predictions about the world, there will be things that are beyond its scope to predict. One can only observe and then add more axioms to make a wider scope model, or construct an entirely separate model for these other phenomena (but then there can be difficulty reconciling the two models later, in situations where they both would apply — as witness the current situation with general relativity and quantum field theory).
Applying that definition of truthfulness to some examples:
“The sun will rise at 7:33 AM tomorrow.” The recipient may observe the eastern horizon at that time, expecting a sunrise. If it does occur at that time, the statement was truthful. If they are disappointed, the statement was not truthful.
“There once was a dinosaur with a tail at least six meters long.” This statement is about the past, so how can it affect a prediction? But consider that a consequence of its being true is that one should be able to visit a museum, or do some digging in the right spot, and find a dinosaur fossil with six meters or more worth of tail vertebrae. Perhaps more troubling, replacing the six with a much larger number results in a statement that is probably wrong, but may not be falsifiable. It’s possible for some outlier in tail length to have lived but not left a fossil behind. Depending on the exact number, it can perhaps be judged implausible, or even model-inconsistent; a tail light-years long would have required more carbon to construct than the entire Earth contains, and likely more time than the whole duration of the Mesozoic to grow, so is impossible.
Science, of course, tries to deal only in falsifiable-in-principle statements, and is skeptical of claims about e.g. dinosaur tail lengths until a fossil is found that proves the claim. There’s perhaps a version of incompleteness here. Some statements are clearly falsifiable: there is some observation that can be made, perhaps involving an artificial experimental setup and perhaps just naturalistic, that may expose the statement as false. The statement makes a negative prediction: that a certain thing will not be found, no matter how hard one looks. Those statements, when true, rule out broad classes of phenomena as impossible. They narrow down greatly “which world are we living in”. Statements that make solely positive predictions are often much less useful even when they are true, as well as being hard to falsify. They do, however, rule things in when a proving example is found. Any feat performed by nature somewhere in the animal kingdom can, in principle, be duplicated by an engineered machine (and on a reasonable amount of renewable energy, even); Apatosaurus proves that a biofuel-powered truck with a decent cargo weight and volume capacity is possible, at least if one does not need it to move with great haste. Indeed, it proves that such a truck can be constructed that will operate autonomously, and when combined with observations of ants following pheromone trails carrying food to their nest, that that truck can be programmed to deliver boxes from a warehouse to a store, or whatever, and not just to graze to refuel itself unattended. A lot of cell biology amounts to existence proofs for certain classes of nanotechnology, including cheap bulk production of arbitrary-sequence proteins and various modifications into glycoproteins (so, a tabletop drug factory that produces inexpensive generic insulin, HGF, or thousands of other things, and even a programmable one, ought to be doable in any universe where livers and spleens exist, and should be able to run on a few dozen watts of power and a not-excessive flow of water and feedstock materials; Star Trek food synthesizers likewise, though perhaps not as fast as in Star Trek).
Minor bone to pick
I’d say it proves that a biofuel powered conveyance capable of moving itself is possible, and ixnay the decent cargo weight.
Unless we can prove that apatosaurus also hauled around a backpack of cargo.
I’m not convinced that the energy savings of not needing to forage or reproduce would be adequate to offset the additional weight of carrying an adequate supply of their own fuel + cargo load.
We’re a ways out from even that still.
As someone who couldn’t hack marine biology because the price of admission was too costly, and as a rookie engineer, I do deeply love the whole ‘natural selection has been poking at designs for how to do things for eons’ vibe, though.
Nature’s made some cool stuff. Also some weird stuff.
If anyone needs a goofy coffee table book on that vein, “WTF Evolution” is a great one.
Apatosaurus carried around its own fuel refinery. Obviously if we feed our truck a pre-refined biofuel product that weight and volume can be replaced with cargo. Likely quite a bit of weight since it’s very likely said fuel refinery included gizzard stones.
boy this is giving me ugly flashbacks to my parents being mad at me for being trans, among numerous other reasons, because they think my odds of getting employment as a physicist were actually better as a woman…
why?
because quotas.
I mean, sure, I’m working my ass off here and actually have about a 50% chance of graduating summa cum laude, but yeah, it’s all about the “quotas” I’ve never heard anything about.
I’m sad there aren’t more women in my major though. We’re down to about 1 in 8. And my favorite professor is the only woman in the physics faculty…..
Eh, still not convinced. Maybe I just play with way too many heavy things, but cargo is complicated.
The nice thing about apatosaurus is that (despite the internal refinery), the entire beastie is packaged up in a nice and convenient lump.
A cargo conveyance needs to have the big open areas where the cargo can go, and the weight to support the structure is non-trivial.
Like, for a dorky little bridge crane, the weight increases roughly parabolically with unsupported span, because to keep the middle from breaking due due to bending stresses, a lot more reinforcement is required. And, for the apatotruck, deck or hold reinforcement is extra weight to carry.
Unless we can get the cargo load to be the supporting structure for the cargo conveyance, the empty volume or greater flat surface area requirements will stay problematic.
I’m a skeptic, I guess.
It’s still a beautiful idea! It’s a beautiful dream to work towards! But I’m not convinced we can use it as a “This is definitively possible, for sure” metric.
I saw a feasibility study on all this…
I’m on an interface team that’s roughly 50/50 men and women (if anybody identifies as another gender, I haven’t heard about it, but they could be keeping their head low), and … yeah, the kind of work we do is a team effort. We work on our own projects, but we reach out to each other on a regular basis. The men aren’t considered automatically superior due to their gender – in fact, just today our manager recommended a guy reach out to one of the women on the team because she has more experience with a particular vendor’s interface. And the guy was willing to do so because he’s not a blinkin’ idjit with his pride wrapped up in his gonads.
Surplus, sorry if it seems like I’m stepping on your toes or anything.
Honestly, I just saw a chance to make an archeology pun AND talk about my favorite subjects and so I ran with it. I’m legit glad you started this tangent, because it’s fun to think about!
But, I want to make sure my enjoyment doesn’t come off as boxing your ears and saying you’re a fool for bringing it up, because that is not true.
If I’m just being paranoid and you’re enjoying discussing complications, let me know? Because I can come up with complicating factors for all sorts of things!
If I’ve been a great big meanie, I’d kind of also like to know, because I probably need to work on that.
@Nequam
That is awesome. My siblings and I would have been tickled pink if one or more of my sister’s Barbies said things like “Vengence is mine!”
STEM careers are so filled to the brim with the most despicable kind of misogynists that it is easy to see why there aren’t any more women in it.
I went to the top university in my country, and we had an interfaculty sports competition every year. And every year, without fail, the engineering faculty (90% male) would come over to the law faculty, which had the highest percentage of women, and taunt them with misogynist chants, if not outright slurs, slut-shaming and sexual harassment.
When publicly called out on it on facebook they downplayed it as just “teasing”. Oh but the minute a girl told them to “domesticate” their “animals” they lost every last crumb of their shit and cried about misandry and being “de-humanized”.
What is worse, the more I have interacted with that faculty the more I’ve come to realize it even has professors who blatantly espouse and spread Nazi rhethoric and propaganda, as well as other dubious bullshit such as Evo-psych. One of these “specimens” (meaning a tenured professor here) went on to stalk one of my friends on facebook, and continued to post reactionary comments on his facebook wall (my friend is gay and the professor definitely did not take kindly to him spreading the “gay agenda”, as he would routinely let him know).
What makes it worse is that he would not stop, despite being asked to and debunked time and time again. When I took up the cause of refuting his bullshit, he would then victimize himself and scream about cancel culture or other dubious bullshit, as well as “progressive fascists”.
Lastly, I had another school friend who went to the most prestigious engineering faculty in the country. She was considered to be fairly attractive in school and was top of the class, so of course she was constantly stalked and harassed by incels. And even though she ended up dating and marrying a “geek” who was, by all means, not conventionally attractive in any way, these assholes were still bitterly complaining about “nice guys” not being given a chance.
@ nequam
Thank you also for that link. I learned a new word; subvertising.
Some friends and I have been doing that for years; but I didn’t know that’s what it was called. We weren’t being political though, just silly. The best one a mate did was on a poster on the Underground trains to Heathrow. There was one for an airline advertising for pilots. He changed the bit about the benefits to “No background checks; no medical!”
I also like making fake labels for art galleries. I don’t do the artworks; that wouldn’t be fair. But I do like making labels for things like scaffolding and fire extinguishers. Then hanging around and seeing if people start taking photos.
Made me giggle. Bout the only thing I’ve done in that sort of vein is adding a mistress stick figure to a guy’s car on our street. It were amusing – and audible for several miles – when his (third) wife finally noticed 😀
@Moggie:
I’ve had to do that before. On one of the earlier projects at my current job, I was trying to figure out a mess of poorly-structured and uncommented code, and went to as my supervisor if I could talk to the person who wrote this and whose name was in the comments. The response I got back from my supervisor was “He doesn’t work here anymore, and you’re looking at why.”
Granted, on that project it also turned out that the specification was insufficient. There was a requirement that a typical order should take less than a certain amount of time to parse, but no information on what sequence of requests was considered a ‘typical order’. Turned out that my guess was wrong, and one of the least-well-described sections of the spec was the one that was used the most often. (Basically a string database storage so that IDs could be used in place of the strings elsewhere.) That required some quick redesign, a B+-tree, and a PowerPoint presentation to teach people exactly how this setup now worked.
@ Threp
There’s a t-shirt place in Newquay that makes bumper stickers to order. So I got some saying “Cut police pay now” that I stick on cars that park inconsiderately.
MGTOW, like incels. act as though they were raised in a lab where they never encountered women outside of porn or bad movies about bimbos. It shocks ,e that they lack the fundamental understanding that women are human beings just like them. Surely they have female relatives, teaches, bosses and have seen women do all manner of professiond.
@Psmith: I used “attractive” on purpose, since incels are so shallow that they can almost maybe possibly vaguely imagine that women who aren’t conventionally attractive might be able to STEM a little. Now that everything’s all liberated.
But NO WAY could a woman who looked like that have done binary punch card stuff back before they were born!
She obviously used her feminine wiles on the 1’s and 0’s. Flirted with the Chad Hollerith cards. Seduced the Man in the Moon.
(And the women in “Hidden Figures” didn’t count for the obvious reason for the RWNJ, which seems to be most incels.)
As for them not understanding Malibu Stacy being satire, it’s well-known that the right-wing and humorless don’t get satire.
@Surplus: I want an Apatosaurus truck…
@Alan: …like you showed from that excellent documentary from when we were kids.
I’m sure you know the work of Obvious Plant.
@Threp: excellent!
Still boggling at the department who didn’t notice the homeless guy. The school I went to was so entirely STEM that I think you only needed about 4 courses of non-STEM to graduate, and I know the math department would still have taken far less than a year to figure out he wasn’t a student or staff.
@Seth S
Somehow I suspect if you were a cis dude your parents wouldn’t have been pressuring you to pretend to be a woman so that you could benefit from these mythical quotas. I’m sorry your parents are grasping at straws to justify being mad at you for being honest about who you are.
Good luck finishing your degree! I hope whatever comes next for you brings you joy.
Miggies are history illiterate. What a surprise. I read about Grace Hopper awhile ago and immediately thought of her work when I saw ZarBandit’s screed. Heddy Lamar would surely make many a miggie’s heads explode.
Everyone’s Erdos number is 0 because mathematics is a solitary pursuit.
Hedy! With the frequency hopping radio, and helping Howard Hughes with his airplane aerodynamics, and leaving her controlling Nazi husband (#1 of 5), and producing her own movies, and being a big star and gorgeous, all while being a Jewish immigrant woman!
If you are a miggie/incel, it should be a requirement that every time you use your cell phone, you have to listen to a speech by or about her.
[Sigh] Yes, back when I worked for the Royal Greenwich Observatory, the only way I could get the William Herschel Telescope to point inthe right direction was to wear loads of make-up and a low-cut blouse. I felt a bit silly getting dolled up like that at 8,000 ft in the middle of the night, but it was the only way to manipulate the computers. That and teh high-pitched, breathy, giggly voice.
And of course there was no teamwork. I totally hallucinated the night 5 of us crammed into the control room of the Jacobus Kaptyen Telescope to get 5 software packages talking to each other. (The JKT is a small telescope usually operated by one person. If one of us wanted to get to, say, the loo, the other four had to cooperate just to let them out of the room.)
My degrees are in Biology and Chemistry and I work in 3d art. I use a computer more now than I ever did in college, and now I even do some very basic scripting. I also spend more time alone now than I did then, working from my home workstation. So far the only manipulation my computer has required is with a screwdriver, when I assembled it in the first place.
Wait… If I wear more makeup, will my render engine go faster?
@ gss ex noob
Oh yeah; I love their stuff. Although sometimes it can be hard to tell them apart from things they genuinely sell in Poundland.
I also like this guy’s work.