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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
The 75th World Science Fiction Convention (commonly known as WorldCon) is being held this weekend in Helsinki, Finland. The convention is where the annual Hugo Awards are presented, and today, the convention announced the latest recipients.
This year, women almost completely swept the Hugo Awards, taking home the top prizes for literature in the science fiction community. That's particularly notable, given how the awards have been increasingly recognizing works from female and minority creators. The trend prompted a counter-movement from two group of fans, the self-described "Sad Puppies," and their alt-right equivalents, the "Rabid Puppies." These groups gamed the awards and forced a slate of nominees onto the Hugo ballot in 2015, prompting widespread backlash within the wider genre community. Another award, the Dragon, faced similar issues earlier this week when several authors asked to pull their nominations over concerns about Puppy interference and the award's integrity.
This year's sweep by female creators seems to be a strong repudiation of anti-diversity groups. 2017 also marked the year the ceremony earned its own award: a representative from the Guinness Book of World Records certified that the Hugos are the longest-running science fiction awards ever.
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 0, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 16 2017, @09:46AM (22 children)
This just shows that there are more feminine writers than men currently. When it comes to employment, awards, salary etc, it is all okay as long as a quota system is not used. In this kind of contexts quota systems are just evil.
Let me show you why quotas are evil. For example, among computer scientists, most seem to be men as until now very few women have had interest to study computer science. Now imagine one Gaussian curve for how skilled people are. Most will be average, which is why the Gaussian curve is highest in the middle. Then we have extra ordinary good ones to the right, they are fewer so the curve goes down. The same we have for the bad ones to the left.
If there are much fewer women than men, and a quota system is used, it means all women get employed, also the worst from the curve, while if there is too many men, maybe only the very best men will get employed. Some of the average men will not even get a chance, even if they are better than the worst woman to get employed.
So, while on average both men and women might be the same skilled, a quota system forces in the less qualified women also. The result is that SJW goes crazy when they see that men advance more than women and that men get more paid than women.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Nuke on Wednesday August 16 2017, @11:13AM
You have stated the bleedin obvious in a very long-winded way. You are right, but anyone who cannot see this is deliberately not seeing it.
Some years ago I did cycle road racing in the UK. At the time hardly any women regularly did such racing - probably no more than 20 nationwide; this comapred with around 10,000 men. When it came to the Olympics or World Championships teams of about 5 or 6 (I cannot remember the exact number, but around that) of each sex were entered. So a woman rider only needed to be among the best 25% to become an Olympian, but a man had to be among the best 0.1%.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Wednesday August 16 2017, @11:24AM (15 children)
The argument for positive discrimination is that the pool of talented is the same as the pool of talented majority - but the talented are not very good at demonstrating their talent in interviews etc due to societal factors. So one should increment the "score" that get in interview to offset societal bias.
I don't know how "they" estimate or measure such a societal bias. It feels a bit woolly, but I can think of examples where I have been subconsciously biased again and I'm sure it happens to most people.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Wednesday August 16 2017, @12:16PM (1 child)
Oh dear, SN ate my angle brackets. Sigh,
(Score: 2, Informative) by JNCF on Wednesday August 16 2017, @01:48PM
FYI, < makes a < and > makes a >. Off-topic as fuck, so no karma bonus.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by FakeBeldin on Wednesday August 16 2017, @02:14PM (12 children)
Another "the argument for positive discrimination" is that society is skewed a certain way which is not providing everyone equal chances, which means society loses out. To address that, we're giving some who we believe had lesser chances a leg up. Maybe to help society address the imbalance now, (so society starts winning now), maybe to act as rolemodel / inspiration / refutation of lesser chances, so as to inspire a new generation to be less skewed, so society starts winning later.
I can certainly agree with the premise and I'll also agree that giving someone a leg up might potentially be of benefit to a future generation - extremely woolly, but I do see the potential there.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday August 16 2017, @02:52PM (10 children)
Nah. Nothing is gained by embracing mediocrity over greatness. Losing out on the greatness that was passed over is all that's accomplished. Society is in fact poorer for any discrimination, no matter the reason.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1) by j-beda on Wednesday August 16 2017, @03:24PM (9 children)
That might be correct if we had good definitions and measurements of what exactly constitutes "mediocrity" and "greatness", but we don't. The measures we use to select people for promotion, acceptance to programs, or for awards are very poor, and are hugely infleuenced by things that almost everyone agrees should be unrelated to the purpose of the selection. Putting a different name on the top of a college paper has an impact on how it is graded. Putting a different photograph on it has similar effect. The font choice of your resume effects selection.
Would society be worse off if we doubled the number of "competent" scientists, and halved the number of "geniuses"? Perhaps, but I suspect we would actually be better off - most of the science work I am familiar with was largely advanced by the crowd of plodders rather than the flashes of brilliance. If Einstein had died in childhood, others would very likely have produced the same work in a similar timeframe.
Our focus on finding "the best" in a group and advancing them I think is completely misguided in light of the impossiblity of actually deciding on what "the best" means, and on actually measuring it even if we knew what it was.
We might be able to broadly decided if members of a group meet minimum preparation standards (such as for acceptance to a training program/college/etc. with limited numbers of positions), but to more closely rank the members in order 1, 2, 3, etc. is just not possible on a consistent basis. To dole out the limited positions to those who have made the cut based on things beyond the unreliable rank ordering seems perfectly acceptable - even random selection from the pool makes some sense. Yes it sucks to not get one of the positions, but it sucks for everyone in the pool who doesn't get a position.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Wednesday August 16 2017, @04:29PM (3 children)
most of the science work I am familiar with was largely advanced by the crowd of plodders rather than the flashes of brilliance. If Einstein had died in childhood, others would very likely have produced the same work in a similar timeframe.
I seriously doubt it. I think a lot of science and technology really depends on a "flash of brilliance" to get to the next stage, because the plodders are generally content to stick with what they know and not challenge prevailing norms and conventional wisdom too much. But the plodders are needed to take the revolutionary stuff the brilliant people come up with and refine it and develop it into more useful forms. The plodders won't come up with the brilliant ideas, but they'll accept them once they're exposed to them, and do the hard work needed to advance them further. They each serve an essential purpose.
(Score: 2) by FakeBeldin on Thursday August 17 2017, @09:56AM (2 children)
With regards to Einstein's relativity theory:
- Galileo already had discussed relativity [tau.ac.il].
- Lorentz had already figured out contraction due to velocity [wikipedia.org] - which strongly suggests a link between time and space.
- The Michelson-Morley experiment [wikipedia.org] had paved the way for Lorentz transformation [wikipedia.org], which paved the way for special relativity (which paved the way for general relativity).
In other words: special relativity was brewing around the start of the 20th century. Add to that:
- The perihelion procession of Mercury was by Einstein's time well-documented, and clearly observations were not in accordance with Newtonian gravity.
- The development of special relativity in 1905
and you start wondering about incorporating gravity into special relativity.
(that feat was much more remarkable than special relativity, by the way. Much less "shoulders of giants" to stand on -- but raising the question was obvious)
With regard to the photoelectric effect (for which Einstein was awarded a Nobel prize):
- it was a clearly defined open problem
- it used Planck's discovery of E = h v (which basically started quantum mechanics) to explain this effect.
Are Einstein's results less remarkable for these reasons? I don't believe so - this is just putting his achievements in (some of) their proper historical context. It's beyond remarkable what he has achieved - but so are the achievements of other scientists from his day, less well-known today.
(Case in point: Wolfgang Pauli explained [wikipedia.org] why you don't fall through a chair, even though there's all this open space in atoms making up the chair and making up you. It also happens to explain why neutron stars aren't black holes.)
Moreover,
At the start of the 20th century, there were a few experiments scientists could perform in a reasonably simple lab that they could not explain. Moreover, it was still possible for an exceptionally smart person to know a lot of/most/all of known physics. Compared to contemporary research, some of the significant questions that arose back then were relatively obvious: "why does Mercury not move the way it should?" "Why does electricity come out of this experiment in the wrong way?" etc.
Right now, a lot of well-publicized physics research involves things happening far in outer space (gamma ray bursts) or in big friggin' machines on Earth (LHC, ITER, NIF). None of which a research team could easily take home and play with.
Oh, and
Depends on your definition of brilliant. Maxwell did brilliant work in electromagnetism. His results were wonderful... and more or less unusable.
Along comes Oliver Heaviside, who reorganises [wikipedia.org] Maxwell's results into the four famous Maxwell equations. That reorganisation may have been "plodding" work, but without that work Maxwell's results would have remained unused by most physicists.
Caveat: At the Dunning-Kruger scale of understanding physics, I'm probably at the bottom. So go out and read about this stuff yourself :)
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Thursday August 17 2017, @01:51PM (1 child)
I think this is going to come down to an argument over who's a "plodder" and who's "brilliant". You mention that several other prominent people were close to discovering what Einstein did; but weren't those people also possibly part of the "brilliant" group? I misworded what I said before with "I seriously doubt it"; what I really meant to dispute is the idea that physics would have developed Einstein's theories without someone as brilliant as Einstein, not Einstein himself. Sure, without him, some other brilliant person could have come up with it before long. But without any brilliant people, I'm not so sure. My claim is that the brilliant ones are necessary to make these big advances.
As for Heaviside, that makes a good case for my prior assertion that both types of people are necessary (if we assume that Heaviside really was a "plodder" and not at all "brilliant").
(Score: 2) by FakeBeldin on Thursday August 17 2017, @02:12PM
Ah, I believe we are actually agreeing :)
I guess I was putting the barrier for "brilliant" a bit high - but if this category encompasses the likes of Pauli, de Broglie, Lorentz, Born, Heisenberg, Bohr, Rutherford, etc, (all of whom were quite impressive) then yes, absolutely, without such folks, scientific progress would grind to a halt.
Just to be clear: I would not want to label Heaviside a plodder in general. His work in cleaning up the Maxwell equations can be considered "plodding" though (as I understand things).
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday August 16 2017, @06:59PM (4 children)
Yeah, that's word for word what I'd expect a jealous, mediocre person to say.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by FakeBeldin on Thursday August 17 2017, @09:58AM (3 children)
Care to comment on the contents of the presented argument?
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday August 17 2017, @11:44AM (2 children)
No. There's no arguing with a toddler throwing a fit and that's precisely what that "argument" amounted to.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Friday August 18 2017, @08:53AM (1 child)
A brilliant person would debate the logic, not attack the person making the argument. False logic methinks.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday August 20 2017, @03:42PM
Nah, there's no point in arguing with someone who believes nonsense like that. You're not going to win them over with logic because logic is not at home within their mind. Insult them and move on.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by SanityCheck on Thursday August 17 2017, @12:40AM
Except it's not skewed and it doesn't need correcting. All you are going to do is make everything shit and everyone unhappy. But keep cutting your nose to spite your face, I do not really care. I can pretty much just read old Sci-Fi instead of the turds being stamped out by the PC crowd.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 16 2017, @01:42PM (4 children)
From about 4 years of age boys focus on boy stuff and recognize girls as other (girls smell). Girls (or girls mothers) very quickly differential from boys and eventually dress, pluck, cut and paint their way to looking 'unlike men' as possible while maintaining facial symmetry. Men on the whole want to do things that men do. Dito for women. When women are shown to want to, or be able to do a job, boys will see this as what women do. Be it low or high status work, men will happily do something else, or nothing.
By the time all key positions a held by women via the HUGO quota system they'll be looking around and asking where all the men have gone and why there are no good men to marry any more.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 16 2017, @02:27PM
Not an issue. Most of the rabid feminists are either not marriageable material due to aesthetics and temperament or they are queer men who like to play dress up and pretend they are women. Either way, their prospects are minimal even with wide opportunities.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Wednesday August 16 2017, @06:14PM
asking where all the men have gone and why there are no good men to marry any more.
This won't be a problem in the near future: marriage rates are plummeting, and marriage will be mostly obsolete in a couple decades. The main problem here is how to keep the population size stable without the past incentives (/brainwashing) to convince people to "settle down" with someone they have a poor chance of really liking that much long-term and have kids. The answer, of course, is to transition to the society depicted in the brilliant visionary novel "Brave New World" by Aldous Huxley in 1949, but getting to that point from here may be rough.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 16 2017, @06:21PM
I, too, believe the Heavenly Father created us Male and Female, and not at all Gay, and that the reason for the existence of females is to become my spiritual wives, as many as possible, so that in the Future, if I am worthy, i can have my own planet Kolob. Peace be upon Joseph Smith, and Orson Scott Card.
(Score: 2) by dry on Thursday August 17 2017, @03:25AM
it's amazing what the marketers have done to childhood. At one time, kids were kids, usually dressed in white and not marketed to. This started to change in the latter part of the 19th century, accelerated with department stores which segregated boy from girl and really took off when Reagan vetoed a non-partisan law that would have regulated how TV marketed to children.