site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 24, 2022

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

20
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Kathleen Booth, early British computer scientist, died one month ago on Sept 29 at the age of 100. The Register published an obituary for her titled "RIP: Kathleen Booth, the inventor of assembly language."

One month later, yesterday, a link to the obituary was the top (I think) post 1, 2 on both Hacker News and Reddit's programming subreddit

Many of the commenters lamented that they had never heard of this highly influential person, and other commenters suggested that the reason most people hadn't heard of her is because she was a woman.

Ironically, I would contend, the only reason we are hearing about her is because she was a woman.

Calling her the inventor of assembly language may be a stretch. One HN comment points out that the IEEE has already given a computer pioneer award to David Wheeler for inventing the first assembly language in 1949.

You can read her 1947 paper and decide if the table at the end counts as the first assembly language. It is a numbered list of 25 operations, a symbolic description of their action, and in a few cases an English description of their operation. It is, at least superficially, similar to the list of 30 operations Wheeler created for the EDSAC.

Ran out of time to delve into:

  • Grace Hopper falsely being credited for inventing COBOL

  • If Ada Lovelace invented programming, and if she did but no one knew about it and it didn't influence anyone else, should we credit her?

  • Booth's credit being recently discovered/promoted in 2018 Hackaday article

  • Margaret Hamilton being the only programmer popularly known for Apollo work, despite leading a small team of 3 people.

  • Hamilton and Booth both marrying their bosses.

  • All of these women being impressive in their own right, and exaggerating their contributions for Girl Power is a disservice to them.

The etiology of the gender achievement gap has been debated considerably. Boys and girls test roughly the same in terms of IQ, and in elementary school and even up through college, females tend to outperform males. Yet something changes after college. Obviously, parental obligations. But I wonder if it can be explained by other factors, such as personality. Some have posited that men are more interested in 'things' whereas women are more interested in people. Maybe men are better at entering flow states and concentrating, which is necessary for success at competitive, cognitively demanding activities , whereas women get distracted too easily.

IQ tests are gender-normed. They're the same for boys and girls because they're forced that way.

Wait, please explain. How are things gender normed? How are the scores manipulated?

The people who designed the original IQ tests included a balance of (I forget the specifics, take these as possible examples) spatial-reasoning tasks which men are better at, and conditional hypothetical verbal problems which women are better at. The number of each kind of question is calibrated such that men and women will both get an average score of 100. But it's a kludge; IQ tests could be more sensibly understood as "intelligence test to grade women against other women" and "intelligence test to grade men against other men" smushed into the same paper.

They did this because they couldn't be bothered to do two separate normalisation operations, but their laziness has had the tragic knock-on effect of giving entire generations the chronic misconception that women are as smart as men.

From what you've said it sounds like IQ is a grab-bag of different things. What does "women are as smart as men" mean? Are you saying:

  1. men & women have "different" intelligences (your post is phrased far more controversially) or;

  2. do IQ tests weight verbal questions more than spatial ones? (are there any other interpretations than the one I'm thinking of??)

I mention question weights because this guy sounds knowledgeable.

Might this be testable?

IQ is valuable as it tracks actual intelligence fairly closely; if you are good at IQ-test-style puzzles you're very likely actually intelligent. This will be detectable in other things like complex creative tasks, and even practical areas like average income, crime rate, and so on. If the test was biased towards one gender by adding questions that the gender did better at, but weren't as strongly correlated with actual intelligence, you'd expect their IQ scores to be less correlated with the downstream effects of intelligence itself than it is for the other gender.

(Theoretical example: If men were a lot dumber than women in general, one could add "ability to lift weights" or the like to the IQ tests until both genders had the same average score. This would however result in IQ no longer being able to predict the ability of men to e.g. lead a company, like it still would for women.)

I don't follow, why give preference to spatial-reasoning tasks when defining who is smarter? Why not the one at which women are better?

I don't follow, who exactly is preferencing [whichever one men were better at] tasks? The IQ test designers didn't preference them, they finely balanced them against the [whichever one women were better at] tasks.

I'd be fascinated to know how men-smart (spatial) the average woman is, and how women-smart (verbal) the average man is.

Also to what degree each correlates to the positive traits IQ is usually held to be associated with (health, income, etc.)