[j-nsp] MX304 - Edge Router

[Mark Tinka]

On 10/26/23 08:02, Saku Ytti wrote:
> 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.

As you can probably tell, I am not terribly politically correct :-). The 
coddle culture we live in today only ends up creating a generation that 
will not be competitive in the open market, because whether we like it 
or not, only competence gets compensated.

You really can't force people to give you their money for a poor, 
expensive job done, much as we may believe it should be the case. 8th 
place trophies should never be a model.
> 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.

The reason the data should not say that is because there has been a 
serious amount of investment in creating scientists, engineers, 
mathematicians, technologists, CEO's and inventors from the female 
community over the past couple of decades. And yet, all the metrics 
still show that women are "under-represented" in these areas.

So the explanation ends up going back to "upbringing, cultural 
socialization, oppression by men, e.t.c.". After all, if a woman has the 
opportunity to do male-dominated jobs or study male-dominated subjects, 
why wouldn't she, for whatever reason that may or may not be useful to 
her own person? After all, nothing screams equality like doing exactly 
what men can do, or what women can do.

In other words, the idea that women (and little girls) may not have any 
personal interest in things that men are inherently interested in is 
completely inconceivable.
> >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.

When we refuse to believe that, in general, men prefer building things 
and women prefer dealing with people, we are essentially trying to fix 
innately biological differences with culture. And while culture, on 
paper, sounds and feels good because it either elicits emotion (instead 
of logic) or results in censorship (instead of discourse), more often 
than not, biology always wins out. It's a bit like weight loss... you 
may starve yourself to lose excess body fat, but eventually, hunger 
always wins. So you need another strategy, one which maximizes weight 
loss, but without leaving your ravenous.

The sad part is that by the time biology takes over, it is too late for 
the individual to benefit from a different decision they could have 
taken, earlier on in life. And what is worse for the next generation, is 
that those poor outcomes that afflict the individuals in their mid-40's 
or later, are never communicated down to the kids... because if that 
happens, the simulation that culture trumps biology would inevitably 
crumble. And that's just bad for business...

> 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.

Well, the problem comes with how we define "fairness". If we say 
fairness is both men and women should have access to the same 
opportunities, that is fine. But if we say that fairness is both men and 
women should have the same outcomes, that becomes problematic. If equal 
outcome worked, half of all CEO's would be women, as much as half of all 
coal miners would be women. It's not like there is a shortage of 
corporations or mining companies looking to fill half of their staff 
with women... and yet they do not. Instead of looking deeply into why 
that is, popular culture will simply chalk it down to anything other 
than "opportunity" and "personal interest", e.g., being passed over, 
sexism, racism, pay gap, e.t.c.

Moreover, since the "pay gap" suggests that women will earn less than 
men in any field where both are employable, you'd think that those 
companies would be 90% female-dominated, as they would be a lower 
cost-to-company. But again, that is not happening... why? It certainly 
can't be the combination of personal interest + meritocracy, can it :-)?
> 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.

This is not surprising at all, actually.

Save for a few groups of people, if you are an "endangered" species, you 
have significantly more incentive to thrive so that your group can 
survive. Societies are built such that minorities will never be able to 
set national policy. So the only option you have left to avoid 
extinction is to be competent.

It is also quite normal for groups of people to gravitate to each other 
for mate selection and community generation. Again, it comes back to 
giving your species and DNA the best chance of survival.

I would liken your anecdote to a small group of Afrikaners who live in 
their own "country" in South Africa called Orania:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orania

While a lot of South Africans take issue with these Afrikaner's choice 
to live on their own, it makes perfect sense to me. The Afrikaans 
culture, which is a descendant of 1600's Dutch culture, lives on only in 
the Afrikaners who are alive today. Afrikaners form less than 6% of the 
South African population of 60 million people, so they have all the 
incentive to not only mate and commune with one another, but to also be 
competent.

If they want to do that on their own and are not disturbing or hurting 
any other group in the process, what is the problem?

Would it be fair to force them to dilute their culture and history just 
for political and social expediency? Or would that be unfair?

To come back around to your anecdote, in the case of extremely 
egalitarian societies like Finland (and Scandinavia, in general), the 
data clearly shows that as equality among the sexes gets closer to 
parity, the wider the biological differences that manifest. In other 
words, the more women have a "free choice" in Scandinavia, the less they 
choose what would be considered "male" choices. This would not be the 
case in, say, Tanzania, where a woman is more likely to find herself 
driving a long distance truck to earn a living because it's about survival.

Mark.