EfficientSyllabus
No bio...
User ID: 827
EfficientSyllabus
1yr ago
Feminists who still understand gender as the roles you mention are fringe today and labeled TERFs. Yes, originally gender studies was about these roles and women's place in society etc, but today's woke gender concept is something else. The whole point was that these gender roles are something you are pushed into by your social setting, not something you choose based on your unique snowflake personality quirks. The original goal wasn't to tell people "hey, you don't like the roles/social expectations put on you? Then you aren't actually a woman/man!" but to allow women and men more flexibility in shaping their roles to their personality and temperament without anyone denying that they can live like that as women/men.
Interestingly enough, a significant chunk of the Hungarian left (including a massively popular leftist YouTube show) are also with that earlier definition and are woke-critical/gender-critical. It would be worth a post sometime I think.
EfficientSyllabus
1yr ago
Is your gender the social expectation from you or is it your inner feeling?
Does someone who doesn't conform to "current gender norms" have a different gender then?
EfficientSyllabus
1yr ago
Programming is hard to fake. In most school subjects it's enough to know the "teacher's password", so memorization (of facts or algorithmic processes to solve one of a few types of problems that are likely to be in the test) is a decent strategy for getting good grades.
In programming, you have to problem-solve, face uncertainties, without an option to bullshit your way out of it (the code either compiles or not, it either crashes or not, and the computer doesn't care about your emotional state or your deadline or whatever).
I think the necessary relentlessness and intrinsic motivation required is comparable to playing musical instruments or sports. And incidentally, it's mostly boys who spend insane amounts of time on practicing the guitar or football or yoyo or skateboarding or even video games etc. without any external pressure from parents and teachers.
If you don't give a shit about playing the guitar, and have no aptitude for it, a private tutor will similarly have a very hard job to try and teach you to play.
It's impossible to teach things like this, it's only possible to learn them. By that I mean that the action has to come from the learner. The teacher can't actively put anything in the learner's brain. You can lead a horse to water and so on.
Intelligence surely is a factor here but it's not the only one. I know intelligent people who are not obsessive tinkerers and less intelligent ones who constantly muck around with some stuff, building various kludge and messing with their car, building stuff around the house, repairing this or that in a custom way etc. This itch to make things is a big component in who will actually learn to program and who won't.
EfficientSyllabus
1yr ago
High status respected people have to lead and these people will follow. Once the avocado toast people can be sure that being unworried about covid doesn't mean you're a Nazi or Qanon or anti-science guy, they will go along. At this point some are still very afraid of being seen as part of that "misinfo" cluster if they aren't worried about covid enough, the cluster that includes things like climate change denial, Russia stuff, etc. But once it's announced that The Science now actually says XYZ, they will accept it too. They are just taking a bit longer, like that Japanese soldier on that island who "fought" WWII even decades after it ended.
They cancelled a pile of math...
Clearly they didn't. They "canceled" actions of people for (to them) socially relevant reasons.
This kind of "they canceled math" reminds me when pirates said that "a number was banned", meaning that the sharing of an encryption key was banned (my point is independent of agreeing with that ban), or "I just used words" or "I just moved a mouse and clicked on things". Or saying "it's just pixels" if you were caught with CP.
(Another somewhat similar trick is "no person is illegal", making it seem as if someone who uses the phrase "illegal immigrant" meant that the person themselves is illegal besides being an immigrant, when clearly it means a person who immigrates illegally. The person isn't illegal, but their actions are. Similarly here, it's not the math that is canceled but an action performed through math.)
It's an annoying rhetorical tool. It's not "just" that, and the fuss isn't about that "just" part but the consequences, the context, the intent, the usage, etc. Everything is, at the end of the day, "just" something. A bomb is just some chemicals, just some molecules. Everything is just a bunch of quarks and electrons and so you can make any action sound absurd.
EfficientSyllabus
1yr ago
You don't need all the racism and plantation aspects to explain the disappearance of dialects. The same is happening in many European countries with no such history. Dialect is associated with peasants, low skill workers, poor and uneducated people, etc. Probably due to infrastructure, media, urbanization, telecommunications, but also standardized schooling etc.
EfficientSyllabus
1yr ago
The next obvious culture war front has been opened by the Hungarian government. After importing the immigration, race, gender topics, they have to keep up with American CW discourse on abortion too. It's the hip new thing to discuss since the overturning of Roe. The state-of-the-art polarizing issue, proven to work in America.
Hungary enshrines 'fetal heartbeat' abortion law
Under the new law, doctors must also issue a report that records that the pregnant woman was presented "with the factor indicating the functioning of fetal vital functions in a clearly identifiable manner."
This has been a long time request by the far right Our Homeland Movement, but apparently such laws exist also in the US.
I don't care about abortion. I don't think Orban cares about it either. It's purely about sowing division and polarization. Orban is happy to push the exact buttons that will trigger the left, in a predictable way. But what's the point? I can see two things: an attempt at distraction from the exploding inflation and utility price hikes, in violation of their election promises, or it's about pandering to Republicans (see CPAC, Tucker Carlson) in hopes of not-sure-what, by doing things that are legible to Americans. It's not like Americans would understand the significance of the local CW stuff, so it has to be photogenic sexy up to date topics of the day for the American right to care.
I hope gun control/freedom won't be the next thing coming up. Because now almost all other American CW fronts have been imported.
EfficientSyllabus
1yr ago
In Hungary, the culture war angle seems a bit different than that. Here academic (usually leftist) linguists emphasize descriptivism and that no dialect should be stigmatized, there is no single correct way to speak, the standard language is more like customs of clothing while real language is organic and biological. I generally agree by the way. There's even a term, linguicism to describe prejudice against non-standard speakers, which may prevent people from getting hired etc. While there's a connection to the topic of Gypsies, these linguists also speak out in favor of not shaming non-Gypsy Hungarians for their dialect, inclusivity etc.
Why doesn't it work out like that in Germany?
EfficientSyllabus
1yr ago
As far as I can tell, the entire idea of rewarding winners in a competition has to do with spiritual merit, like determination, or how hard someone practiced
No, spectators want to see someone being excellent, beat world records, and show the peak of human performance. Because we like to watch greatness. Yes, effort factors into it, determination etc, but nobody gives a damn if all that hard effort didn't result in actually being excellent. All that sort of stuff would just be niceties, participation trophy, consolation prize.
EfficientSyllabus
1yr ago
My working theory on diets is that the default unconscious diet is so shit that the sheer fact that you do any diet will bring improvements because you pay attention to what you eat and you probably won't mindlessly eat the junkiest junk. The rest is window dressing to make it stick, by making it personal, important, moral, emotional, identity-forming, you-are-a-good-person-for-doing-this stuff.
This doesn't mean there are no biological differences between diets, but when a normal person picks up any diet, it will probably be an improvement. Just like there can be differences among the effectiveness of different exercises, aerobic, anaerobic, different workout programmes with flame wars between their fans, but all of them are an improvement over the default sedentary lifestyle.
EfficientSyllabus
1yr ago
Pretty sure there were male "nurses" (caregivers to sick people) all throughout history. There are lots of tasks involved that need physical strength, carrying and lifting patients, restraining aggressive ones, etc.
EfficientSyllabus
1yr ago
Maybe examine the source of your anxiety and the assumptions behind them. Tribal feelings are probably natural/ingrained but what the tribe is is cultural. For some reason you learned to associate tribe with skin color/race. If a bunch of Bulgarians moved into your neighborhood and stayed in their circles, cooked and ate Bulgarian food, spoke Bulgarian on the street, etc. would you feel less anxious because they are white? How about Arabs who are white-passing? I guess it isn't exactly about skin color, but level of cultural integration and connectedness to other parts of society as opposed to people living in culturally segregated parallel societies. Or perhaps about the level of education among the different groups. (But if it really is about race, I would say you've become - perhaps unconsciously - racist.)
There's nothing wrong with wishing for a united, high-trust community in your town or city as opposed to splintered ethnic or racial tribes being in conflict with each other. But how would you feel about the future if it consisted of people of various racial and ethnic background living together, regularly interacting and sharing a base culture, attaining similar levels of education etc.?
You could also examine your beliefs about some sharp separation between white and non-white people, which is quite nonsense on a global view (but may be a good simplification in certain times and places, like the US some decades ago when most people were either descended from European immigrants or African slaves). White people are not "the same", the culture and people of the Nordics are quite different from the Mediterraneans, Slavic nations are different from the French or the English. The Greeks are pretty similar to Cypriots and Turks, who are not that dissimilar from people of the Levant and so on all the way. My point with this is two-fold, all whites are not that close to you as you may seem to think (eg I as a Hungarian don't feel more connected to a Spaniard than to a secular Iranian simply based on skin tone) and that non-whites aren't some homogeneous bunch either.
EfficientSyllabus
1yr ago
I'm saying that there's a separate personality trait that's something like the drive to make stuff despite failures, to not give up in the face of difficulty. And this is not always a Hollywood hero upward trajectory. One side of it is someone trying over and over with sub-par results or taking way longer than others with less stubbornness but more intelligence would. I know people who are relentless and put lots of energy into something fruitless and they aren't very skilled for it. They may build dangerous contraptions out of wood and metal but with lousy construction, inefficiently etc. They may obsess over reading history and politics and come out of it believing various pants-on-head tinfoil conspiracy theories, or may spend way too much time on building hopeless perpetuum mobile constructions etc.
Willingness to work hard (intrinsically driven industriousness, relentlessness, stubbornness) can be decoupled from intelligence. On the flip side, many intelligent people are lazy and coast along, wasting their potential.
I wonder if they would be okay with it if it (the rapper AI) was operated by black people. If yes, then it's not merely about the AI as an object or the math. You have to argue (and I don't think it's hard) that blacks don't have a monopoly on rap, it's not enough to say "hurr durr it's just math".
EfficientSyllabus
1yr ago
This is just so over the top in your face that it's either Photoshop (ie this exchange didn't actually happen with a real woman), or the woman is really really stupid to not realize that it's a picture taken from the web, but even so she is more likely to have thought that the bio was a sort of black humor to go along with.
I feel like people who take this image as proof of anything regarding women is just very out of touch with reality.
EfficientSyllabus
1yr ago
Are all these studies only about explicitly asking people about these things? Because then you don't measure who has in-group bias but who says that they have it. Maybe whites overall have been told more over childhood an later life that being a good person requires not having racial biases and when filling out surveys people may (perhaps subconsciously) not describe themselves but instead their good-person-ideal, or what they know they should be. Self knowledge is hard.
I'd be more convinced by studies that somehow measure people's behavior in the real world (I don't know, hiring stats or something, as an example) instead of just asking questions on paper.
EfficientSyllabus
1yr ago
1950s USA is this magical reference point for some reason, that justifies introducing a whole new concept called "gender". Actually that's not even surprising, I just wrote a comment on how we are stuck in the 60s on repeat, so yeah I guess comparing ourselves to one decade ago make sense.
This is where the discussion turns to "why do we expect programmers to be obsessive and do their profession also as a hobby when nobody expects that from accountants or civil engineers or surgeons or lawyers?" And some accusations that programming is toxic and elitist and exclusionary, biased towards basement dweller neckbeard incel nerd techbros who have nothing better in their lives than messing with a computer.
As this often comes up in discussions, I have tried to think it through and here's my current opinion. Those other jobs are perhaps less fun on the whole (fewer people enjoy them as a hobby). Those other jobs are also not available for practice for kids. At the same time I would expect that good professionals would tend to keep up with developments in their field even just out of interest. And the professional skills of engineers or mechanics of any sort probably correlate to how much they tinkered with things as kids. Whether this correlation is due to direct causation or the common-cause type is another question.
The complaints typically come from two places. One is DEI, the other is from older devs with families and outdated skills. Maybe a third one: accusing tech companies of implicitly requiring unpaid labor for skill development and exploiting the naive twenty something guys and depressing wages because "its supposed to be fun, here's some pizza and a ping pong table, now go make me some profits."
EfficientSyllabus
1yr ago
In machine learning the aim is to distinguish signal from noise, to extract things that will generalize to future data, as opposed to merely coincidental, contingent things that appear in the training data. This however leads to deeply philosophical issues that some engineer types tend to ignore out of a feeling of superiority over humanities types. It's not clear for example how to distinguish real, fundamental correlations from mere happenstance. For example one may say that a female US president is perfectly possible, it's not a logical contradiction. The fact that we haven't had one is just a contingent fact about our timeline so far. Or perhaps that the fact that black people currently commit more crimes is not an inherent property to them but a happenstance based on external conditions and so on.
By the way, Saul Kripke just died a few days ago. He had a lot to say about necessity. I'm not convinced that the necessary vs contingent stuff (which goes back all the way to theological arguments) is actually all that meaningful but it's good to recognize that people have already discussed these sorts of things.
EfficientSyllabus
1yr ago
As an aside, SD can generate pictures of Mickey Mouse doing novel things, same with any Marvel characters and so on. If I'm not allowed to release a new cartoon of Mickey Mouse (or Batman) acting out a new story, are the SD authors allowed to release this model?
(This is a distinct topic from style.)
EfficientSyllabus
1yr ago
Intelligence is usually understood as an ability, the cognitive processing power, your ability to deal in abstractions and meta levels, notice patterns, keep more stuff in your working memory, etc. It's distinct from experience, lexical knowledge, amount of acquired skills etc.
If you don't want to use the word intelligence like this, then let's name my concept intelligence_2, and understand my statement as "intelligence_2 is a distinct trait from willingness to work hard from an intrinsic drive."
EfficientSyllabus
1yr ago
I've heard this all my life from teachers and professors. I went to university many years before covid and profs were always ranting about how unprepared our cohort was and how it was so different back in the day, and high school standards are falling off a cliff and they must offer all sorts of prep courses about stuff that used to be core high school material. And a few years before that, my high school teachers were ranting about how primary schools don't prepare students for high school any more and they must repeat primary school material during the first year. And this is in Hungary where there is no "customer mentality" in education like in the US.
The reality is, the fraction of capable people per cohort is fixed (or grows very slowly) over time, but more and more people are going to higher and higher educational levels. At that point it's basically inevitable that every new cohort looks less and less prepared and cannot learn the same material as the cohorts a decade prior.
I wonder if any such controversy or split exists outside the English-speaking countries. In languages where the spelling doesn't lag behind pronunciation by several centuries as it does with English, something like phonics seems just obvious. In my Hungarian school we first learned the vowels (as they are easy to pronounce in isolation), the teacher would show big cards with these letters, and we pronounced it out loud, she would show another letter and we'd pronounce that etc. (We'd also do exercises of circling pictures in a workbook whose name contains the new letter/sound that we just learned.) Then after learning the vowels, we learned each consonant and immediately combined them into syllables. E.g. lesson about the letter "b": teacher writes syllables on the chalkboard like "ba, bá, be, bé, bi, bí, bo, bó, bö, bő, bu, bú, bü, bű" and we'd go over them, entire class pronouncing them. Then she may ask if any of these are meaningful words by themselves. Or if we know any word that starts with any of these syllables. This seems closer to phonics than to whole word. Then gradually we'd move to longer words, then very short sentences, then longer sentences in large font, short stories etc.
I'm a bit confused on the whole-word method though. Does it mean that they simply don't have a dedicated class/timeslot for each letter, they don't say that "hey this is the letter b, the capital letter looks like B and the cursive handwritten looks like this and this". That they don't do syllables? That it's all just "here's the word 'hello' and we pronounce it as hello", before the kid was ever told that the letters h, e, l, and o are things? Seems very silly. English spelling is far from pronunciation but isn't so far...
EfficientSyllabus
1yr ago
I see it totally opposite. What they are doing is precisely not about canceling the math but the social context, the use. That people made a black man imitator robot, which they consider some kind of blasphemy/taboo, like depicting the prophet for Muslims or how some tribes don't want to be photographed. It's a sacred thing for them. Just like putting some fancy Native American headdress onto some random robot or scarecrow would probably be.
You can argue against that view and that it's bad to consider such things sacred. But it's strawmanning them to pretend that they are simply arbitrarily canceling a bunch of math. They are canceling the building of software tools that impersonate black rappers, as a legitimate endeavor out of quasi religious reasons.
This definition presupposes that these roles are all learned and are mere societal expectations (presumably arbitrary ones at that).
But actually the same thing that makes your body grow a penis or a vagina also affects the brain, the hormones etc. The gender-sex distinction is made up, it's not even possible to express it in any other language than English (other than outright loaning the word "gender" as is). Gender started out as a euphemism for sex, to avoid referring to the act of sex (before that, it only referred to grammatical categories). They should be nothing more than synonyms.
More options
Context Copy link