[j-nsp] MX304 - Edge Router

[Saku Ytti]

On Thu, 26 Oct 2023 at 07:45, Mark Tinka via juniper-nsp
<juniper-nsp at puck.nether.net> wrote:

> While there are some women who enjoy engineering, and some men who enjoy
> nursing, most women don't enjoy engineering, and most men don't enjoy
> nursing. I think we would move much farther ahead if we accepted this,

> If you look at the data, on average, 70% of new enrollments at
> university are women, and 60% of all graduands are women. And yet, 90%
> of all STEM students are men, while 80% of all psychology students are
> women. Perhaps there is a clue in there :-)...

Even if you believe/think this, it is not in your best interest to
communicate anything like this, there is nothing you can win, and
significant downside potential.

I believe the question is not about what data says, the question is,
why does the data say that. And the thesis/belief is, data should not
say that, that there is no fundamental reason why the data would say
so. The question is, is the culture reinforcing this from day0,
causing people to believe it is somehow inherent/natural.

>From scientific POV, we currently don't have any real reason to
believe there are unplastic differences in the brain from birth which
cause this. There might, but science doesn't know that. Scientifically
we should today expect very even distribution, unless culturally
biased.


But of course inequality, inequitability is everywhere, not an
hyperbole, but you can't compare anything on how we choose who does
what and come up with anything that resembles fair distribution. Zip
code has a lot of predictive power where you'll end up in your life,
and that is hardly your fault or merit. Top level managers are not
just disproportionately men, but they are disproportionately men with
+1.5SD height, and there is no scientific reason to believe zip code
or height suggests stronger ability.

It is just a really unfair world to live in, but luckily I am on the
beneficiary side of the unfairness, which I am strong enough to
accept.

I have a curious anecdote about discriminatory outcomes, without any
active discrimination. I think it's easier to discuss as it doesn't
include any differences in the groups of people really. In Finland a
minority natively speaks Swedish, majority Finnish. After 1000 years,
the minority continues to statistically have better education, live
longer, have more savings and higher salary. For this particular
example, only rationale I've come up, which could explain it, is that
the Swedish speaking minority choose other Swedish speaking people as
their peers, so they feel lower sense of accomplishment performing at
Finnish speaker mean level, which causes them to push themselves
little bit further to achieve same satisfaction level as Finnish
speaking majority would feel at lower level of accomplishment. Causing
it to perpetuate indefinitely despite having 'fixed' all active
discriminatory biases since forever. That is, if you ever create,
through any mechanism at all, some biasing between groups, this bias
will never completely go away.


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  ++ytti