Gifted Bulletin Board

Welcome to the Gifted Issues Discussion Forum.

We invite you to share your experiences and to post information about advocacy, research and other gifted education issues on this free public discussion forum.
CLICK HERE to Log In. Click here for the Board Rules.

Links


Learn about Davidson Academy Online - for profoundly gifted students living anywhere in the U.S. & Canada.

The Davidson Institute is a national nonprofit dedicated to supporting profoundly gifted students through the following programs:

  • Fellows Scholarship
  • Young Scholars
  • Davidson Academy
  • THINK Summer Institute

  • Subscribe to the Davidson Institute's eNews-Update Newsletter >

    Free Gifted Resources & Guides >

    Who's Online Now
    0 members (), 167 guests, and 10 robots.
    Key: Admin, Global Mod, Mod
    Newest Members
    parentologyco, Smartlady60, petercgeelan, eterpstra, Valib90
    11,410 Registered Users
    March
    S M T W T F S
    1 2
    3 4 5 6 7 8 9
    10 11 12 13 14 15 16
    17 18 19 20 21 22 23
    24 25 26 27 28 29 30
    31
    Previous Thread
    Next Thread
    Print Thread
    Page 4 of 9 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
    Joined: Feb 2010
    Posts: 2,639
    B
    Member
    Offline
    Member
    B
    Joined: Feb 2010
    Posts: 2,639
    Originally Posted by chay
    I probably should just walk away here but ugggg.

    Originally Posted by Bostonian
    Given that men in business settings often discuss sports to break the ice, it could help both men and women to know a little about sports to fit in in industries where men currently predominate. Is it sexist to say that?

    Depends on what you mean by "help". If help means that they will be able to engage in meaningless small talk, sure go for it. If "help" means that they need to do it so they won't be passed over for a promotion because they can't name the starting line up and spout sports facts then I'm going to go with that being sexist (unless you're talking about a job in the sports industry).
    The way it works, of course, is not that people are promoted in non-sports companies directly based on sports knowledge, but that people who are more popular and who have bonded with their co-workers are more likely to be promoted to leadership positions. In some environments, being able to talk about sports (and playing sports such as golf or being on the company softball team) helps accomplish that.

    Joined: Aug 2013
    Posts: 448
    C
    Member
    Offline
    Member
    C
    Joined: Aug 2013
    Posts: 448
    Originally Posted by Bostonian
    The way it works, of course, is not that people are promoted in non-sports companies directly based on sports knowledge, but that people who are more popular and who have bonded with their co-workers are more likely to be promoted to leadership positions. In some environments, being able to talk about sports (and playing sports such as golf or being on the company softball team) helps accomplish that.
    I guess I should count myself lucky that I've always been in companies that promote people based on their technical and managerial competencies instead of shared interests. I don't need my manager or subordinates to understand and discuss my interests to develop a great professional relationship with them. If we bond over sports, fine but surely that can't be the only way especially for someone with great interpersonal skills and leadership capabilities.

    Joined: Oct 2011
    Posts: 2,856
    Dude Offline OP
    Member
    OP Offline
    Member
    Joined: Oct 2011
    Posts: 2,856
    Certainly anybody who who can't find anything to talk about other than sports is severely lacking in basic social skills.

    Joined: Sep 2007
    Posts: 3,296
    Val Offline
    Member
    Offline
    Member
    Joined: Sep 2007
    Posts: 3,296
    Originally Posted by madeinuk
    But the arguments I see above just do not fly for me. Sure. On average girls and boys have equal ability in Maths but if you head out into the RHS you reach a point where high scoring boys outnumber high scoring girls. That is empirical fact and this gap has persisted despite oodles of encouragement to bring girls along.


    Personally, I do not buy into college for all nor do I support forcing talented boys out of STEM so their places can be taken by less able girls in order to artificially impose gender parity in any given STEM discipline.

    Perhaps there's a failure of imagination here.

    Overall, "math talent" is and has been defined by men for a very long time. Highly capable tends to mean really good with a certain skill set, like solving problems quickly on competition exams. Or being able to shut up and calculate and not waste time asking questions about why it works (google it). Perhaps this skill set is something men do well. Perhaps there are other skill sets in mathematics and physics that women do better at. Perhaps these skill sets would lead to new discoveries.

    Now, at this point, I suspect that some readers are snorting and thinking, "Math is the most objective of all disciplines. It's obvious what's important."

    To this I ask: important to who? And how is this defined?

    Sure, shut up and calculate has led to amazing new technologies. But it hasn't led to a single revolutionary-type discovery that breaks the old model. It can't, because by definition it sticks to the existing model. New discoveries come from strange and mysterious places.

    There are giant glaring holes in physics (and in math IMO) that won't be solved by keeping your gob shut and solving the differential equation. Yet we stick to this approach, reward its master craftsmen, and dismiss anyone else as lacking the requisite "talent."

    Also, lots of things have been obvious, from the earth's position at the center of the universe to the fact that women can't be doctors or much of anything beyond nurses, teachers, and mothers ... or the eternality of [insert dead movement].

    But you argue, "None of that stuff was based on empirical data! It was all based ignorance and prejudices!" To which I reply, how do you know that you aren't suffering from the same problem? And where is the empirical data showing that an approach to mathematics that rewards a certain skill and ability set is the only way? Because, right now...it is the only skill set that will get you anywhere, as those who don't have it are "less able."


    In general, when one group sets self-serving standards for X, it's dishonest to claim that people in another group don't qualify to do X. But it's a good tactic for maintaining position as the alpha group, which is a common human trait. Prejudice is eternal, and it's always easy to create another reason for why the other group isn't as good or is just plain wrong. Just ask the anti-vaxxers. They're experts at being ignorant (though they don't know it).




    Last edited by Val; 04/04/18 02:16 PM.
    Joined: Feb 2010
    Posts: 2,639
    B
    Member
    Offline
    Member
    B
    Joined: Feb 2010
    Posts: 2,639
    Originally Posted by Val
    Originally Posted by madeinuk
    But the arguments I see above just do not fly for me. Sure. On average girls and boys have equal ability in Maths but if you head out into the RHS you reach a point where high scoring boys outnumber high scoring girls. That is empirical fact and this gap has persisted despite oodles of encouragement to bring girls along.


    Personally, I do not buy into college for all nor do I support forcing talented boys out of STEM so their places can be taken by less able girls in order to artificially impose gender parity in any given STEM discipline.

    Perhaps there's a failure of imagination here.

    Overall, "math talent" is and has been defined by men for a very long time. Highly capable tends to mean really good with a certain skill set, like solving problems quickly on competition exams. Or being able to shut up and calculate and not waste time asking questions about why it works (google it). Perhaps this skill set is something men do well.
    A very different manifestation of math talent is creating new math -- proving theorems, which mathematicians do. Almost all of the great mathematicians have been men. According to what definition of math talent have women been as accomplished as men?

    Joined: Oct 2011
    Posts: 2,856
    Dude Offline OP
    Member
    OP Offline
    Member
    Joined: Oct 2011
    Posts: 2,856
    In all the history of dog racing, very few cheetahs have won, therefore dogs are faster than cheetahs?

    Joined: Nov 2012
    Posts: 2,513
    A
    Member
    Offline
    Member
    A
    Joined: Nov 2012
    Posts: 2,513
    Originally Posted by Dude
    In all the history of dog racing, very few cheetahs have won, therefore dogs are faster than cheetahs?

    No, Dude. The cheetahs have merely been running in a style that doesn’t approximate accepted “top dog-ness”. Kindly disregard the notion of their superior speed and individual predatory capacity in the wild, as “real” predatory superiority is based on a construct wholly dissociated from actual predatory skill that supports survival. Silly Dude, it’s all about the mechanical rabbit.


    What is to give light must endure burning.
    Joined: Nov 2012
    Posts: 2,513
    A
    Member
    Offline
    Member
    A
    Joined: Nov 2012
    Posts: 2,513
    Originally Posted by Bostonian
    Originally Posted by Val
    Originally Posted by madeinuk
    But the arguments I see above just do not fly for me. Sure. On average girls and boys have equal ability in Maths but if you head out into the RHS you reach a point where high scoring boys outnumber high scoring girls. That is empirical fact and this gap has persisted despite oodles of encouragement to bring girls along.


    Personally, I do not buy into college for all nor do I support forcing talented boys out of STEM so their places can be taken by less able girls in order to artificially impose gender parity in any given STEM discipline.

    Perhaps there's a failure of imagination here.

    Overall, "math talent" is and has been defined by men for a very long time. Highly capable tends to mean really good with a certain skill set, like solving problems quickly on competition exams. Or being able to shut up and calculate and not waste time asking questions about why it works (google it). Perhaps this skill set is something men do well.
    A very different manifestation of math talent is creating new math -- proving theorems, which mathematicians do. Almost all of the great mathematicians have been men. According to what definition of math talent have women been as accomplished as men?

    By the definition of “creating new math”, there aren’t many male mathematicians, either, and that’s under a legacy of female under-education or outright suppression of education. That’s hardly a compelling argument in favour of male math supremacy.

    I suppose there aren’t many illustrious female Popes, either, so case closed!


    What is to give light must endure burning.
    Joined: Feb 2010
    Posts: 2,639
    B
    Member
    Offline
    Member
    B
    Joined: Feb 2010
    Posts: 2,639
    Originally Posted by Dude
    Sorry, Bostonian, but your obsession with genetics aside, the differences in STEM participation do not match any distribution of assessed math or spatial ability, and the vast differences between the two distributions have almost entirely social explanations.

    Most notably, those differences have grown significantly wider over a very short time, so we can be absolutely certain that evolution had nothing to do with it:

    https://qz.com/911737/silicon-valle...of-computer-game-marketing-20-years-ago/

    American students take math throughout their twelve years of schooling, but instruction in computer science is much more limited. My eldest son has been programming since he was about 8 and knows Java, Javascript, C, C++, Python, and Octave. He has completed his first MOOC on machine learning (by Andrew Ang -- good course) and will soon start a second. He has installed and run Linux and built computers in collaboration with his male friends. He has gotten to gold level at USACO and will take the AP Computer Science exam this year as a 10th grader. He has been a TA for a programming class and interns as a programmer. He has attended computer camps in the summer. At one camp where there probably about 50 students, he said there were no girls. He did have a roommate from Russia.

    There are many students of both sexes who will not have had much exposure to computer science upon reaching college. My middle son and my daughter have done little so far. But of the students who have been tinkering and learning for a decade before starting college, I bet the vast majority are male. People considering CS as a major in college may be discouraged by the presence of classmates with far more experience than them. I don't see what is stopping more girls from doing the kinds of things my eldest son has, other than a general lack of interest, but they are not, in large numbers.

    Paul Graham, founder of successful start-up accelerator Y Combinator, said this:

    Quote
    Does YC discriminate against female founders?

    I'm almost certain that we don't discriminate against female founders because I would know from looking at the ones we missed. You could argue that we should do more, that we should encourage women to start startups.

    The problem with that is I think, at least with technology companies, the people who are really good technology founders have a genuine deep interest in technology. In fact, I've heard startups say that they did not like to hire people who had only started programming when they became CS majors in college.

    If someone was going to be really good at programming they would have found it on their own. Then if you go look at the bios of successful founders this is invariably the case, they were all hacking on computers at age 13. What that means is the problem is 10 years upstream of us. If we really wanted to fix this problem, what we would have to do is not encourage women to start startups now.

    It's already too late. What we should be doing is somehow changing the middle school computer science curriculum or something like that. God knows what you would do to get 13 year old girls interested in computers. I would have to stop and think about that.

    Joined: Oct 2011
    Posts: 2,856
    Dude Offline OP
    Member
    OP Offline
    Member
    Joined: Oct 2011
    Posts: 2,856
    Bostonian, all you've done is prove that you didn't bother to read, and that Paul Graham isn't informed on the subject, either. Because I gave two links upstream that already answered this question. The title of one of them: "Silicon Valley’s gender gap is the result of computer-game marketing 20 years ago." So it seems pretty obvious that one way you get 13 year old girls interested in computers is to market games to them. And if Paul were hanging out with 13 year old girls, he would know that, unlike when Paul and I were teens, they're already playing them.

    Rather than let you continue to hijack the thread with bad arguments in defense of an untenable position (Archie Bunker was a buffoon even in his own time), I'm more interested in anecdata, as I described in the OP. As you've already outed yourself as proto-human, please share with us how those attitudes have shaped your own children's confidence and interests (or lack thereof) in STEM pursuits.

    Page 4 of 9 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

    Moderated by  M-Moderator 

    Link Copied to Clipboard
    Recent Posts
    Testing with accommodations
    by aeh - 03/27/24 01:58 PM
    Quotations that resonate with gifted people
    by indigo - 03/27/24 12:38 PM
    For those interested in astronomy, eclipses...
    by indigo - 03/23/24 06:11 PM
    California Tries to Close the Gap in Math
    by thx1138 - 03/22/24 03:43 AM
    Gifted kids in Illinois. Recommendations?
    by indigo - 03/20/24 05:41 AM
    Powered by UBB.threads™ PHP Forum Software 7.7.5