Jason H (24 October 2018 17:09) > - Is "Sceintific racism" actual racism or just statistics?
If it's racism, it's racism, however qualified. Extrapolation from populations to individuals misuses statistics. It isn't scientific, it just abuses tools lifted out of science. > I really want to know where we are with James Damore because I thought > his paper was well-researched with a scientific basis? I had to look that name up. While no source is unbiased, I'll take [0] as a tolerable source. They do, at least, have a fairly solid understanding of what science is (and isn't). * [0] https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/James_Damore Apparently he fails to understand the difference between very minor statistical differences between broad populations and the details of individuals. Specifically: though the proportion of women who are good at certain tech jobs might be marginally smaller than the proportion of men who are, a recruiter who has the economic power of Google and commits to recruiting equally should be able to do so, without compromising its recruitment standards, provided there aren't *other factors* at play that prevent it from doing so. The crucial detail here is that Google employs a tiny proportion of the population from which it could draw recruits. So half of Google's relevant technical staff - which is how many women Google would need to hire to meet the given goal - fits well within the available pool of suitably-skilled women. Google would (in this hypothetical world) have to work a little harder and pay a little more (but it's only a little, since the statistical effect is quite small in fact) to find the women than to find the men, but it's not short of applicants and Google, in particular, has expertise in the field of selecting the best few from a plethora of candidates - at least when it comes to pointing one at web pages. The fact that Google doesn't manage to hire equally many good women as men in various tech positions *is* evidence that there are other factors at play, aside from the scientific evidence of very minor differences in aptitude (mostly stemming from differences in interest). It is, furthermore, patently clear that the world does have other factors that contribute to the gender divide in various jobs. When boards are dominated by men, it is no great surprise that women aren't as widely represented in upper management, from the ranks of which most boards are drawn, to take just one example. But this is something of a digression. > Having been interested in software from a very young age, and later > specifically Open Source, one thing that appealed to me was that it > was a meritocracy. Well, many software practitioners at least aim to make software projects meritocratic. However, their ability to do so may be compromised by social dynamics (and economics) in various ways. > The best code survives, your code contributions are limited only by > your code being the best. If those evaluating how good something is are, unwittingly, operating in an environment that some folk find hostile, those folk get driven off and the evaluators fail to see how good their contributions would have been, if they'd only felt at ease. The aim of a code of conduct is to avoid that. I endure rudery from others moderately calmly, partly because I come from a highly-privileged background that gives me the confidence to not worry that the rudery will actually cause problems I can't handle. I prefer, and usually manage, to work in environments in which I and those around me don't need to endure such rudery - partly because, while I can endure it, I don't like it; but also because I don't want others to be driven away, whose contributions I might welcome. There may be bad codes of conduct out there; please don't let that put you off trying to think about what a good code of conduct would look like. In particular, note that there are some "entrenched interests" that don't seem to like codes of conduct; and they've taken pains to talk up the misadventures of groups struggling to make them work. Other groups, garnering far less publicity, have bumbled along quite happily for years with codes of conduct that seem to work fine. So please don't just write off the code of conduct as a bad plan; try to help us make a good code of conduct and a good process around it. In particular, please at least read it before criticising it, Eddy. _______________________________________________ Development mailing list Development@qt-project.org http://lists.qt-project.org/mailman/listinfo/development