- 19,525
- 72,214
I don't understand why more women in tech is inherently a good thing. I'm not a fan of diversity for its own sake.
Butthurt white guys, an Asian virgin and an angry lesbian walk into a bar...
- Thread starter Balthazar_sl
- Start date
-
Guest, it's time once again for the massively important and exciting FoH Asshat Tournament!
Go here and give us your nominations!Who's been the biggest Asshat in the last year? Give us your worst ones!
Say you have 10 people working on a project that have very similar backgrounds, chances are they will come up similar solutions to a problem. Have 10 people with varied backgrounds, educations, genders, political views etc. your chances of having a larger set of solutions increases. Same goes with innovation, stagnation of a system is more likely to occur when you have a less diverse system.
Mist
REEEEeyore
- 31,202
- 23,387
Mist
REEEEeyore
- 31,202
- 23,387
Down the road in CS classes is mostly a bunch of arcane bullshit where everyone is equally lost, depending on the particular CS department's emphasis of computational theory vs practical programming. This specific experiment was to even out the advantages of prior exposure to the subject matter and nothing more.
khalid
Unelected Mod
- 14,071
- 6,775
Mist
REEEEeyore
- 31,202
- 23,387
This. There's a reason some of the best engineering programs use interdisciplinary teams even for high profile engineering and robotics competitions. CMU and Stanford in particular. Frequently, 3 engineers, a psychologist and a biologist build a better robot than a team of just 5 engineers.
iannis
Musty Nester
- 31,351
- 17,656
Basically we don't like your kind. As soon as we invent a sexbot and an artificial womb we will finally grant you your liberties.
And then that shit is gonna be ON.
Mist
REEEEeyore
- 31,202
- 23,387
Maybe some people are a little more lost than others, but generally there's very few/effectively zero hotshots with prior relevant experience in the subject matter the deeper you go into any academic programs that are focused on theory.
For instance, in 100-200 level CS classes you'll have plenty of people who've worked on databases, apps and websites. In 400 level CS classes you'll rarely have someone that's written their own compiler or protocol stack before showing up. Sometimes, sure, but by far the exception.
This experiment was about stoppingpeoplefrom being scared off from CS classes because they didn't do any programming before college. Some of those people just happened to be girls. This prior experience problem that's pretty unique to CS; ie: very few pre-law students have written their own interrogatory responses before going to college. And plenty of males are equally disadvantaged with a lack of prior experience, so it's not specifically a gendered problem. I know from helping tons of guildies with their CS homework over the years that not every male that signs up for a CS has done programming before.
Mist
REEEEeyore
- 31,202
- 23,387
Uh, yeah, as soon as it becomes possible to to easily inseminate an egg with the material from another egg, we'll just poison you, after we figure out who is going to kill all the spiders and change all the lightbulbs.
khalid
Unelected Mod
- 14,071
- 6,775
I don't understand what this has to do with advanced classes. Just because someone hasn't done compilers before they took a compiler class, doesn't mean they will be lost in it. Just because you haven't done topology before taking a class in it, doesn't mean you will be lost in it. If you already know the subject, taking it is essentially just an exercise in getting credit for it. Taking a class to learn something knew is basically the entire point.
Also, introductory CS classes that start with assuming zero programming knowledge are the norm to my knowledge. They aren't like mathematics where you are assumed to have learned college algebra before stepping into your first class. Even in the case where that is false, there would be courses available to catch you up.
This seems to come back to your premise that most students at your school need to "cheat" in order to get an undergraduate degree, which frankly doesn't sound plausible even at the worst of schools.
Cad
scientia potentia est
- 25,426
- 49,042
This comes back to Mist thinking everyone is stupid and needs hand holding. They need to be literally FORCED to behave how she thinks is appropriate.
- 19,525
- 72,214
Mist
REEEEeyore
- 31,202
- 23,387
Cheating is a massive, epidemic problem in all colleges by all the metrics we have for measuring it. Just fucking google the statistics if you don't believe me, since everyone in this thread seems to think that google is the arbiter of what is fact and what is not fact. It just happens to be particularly awful at my school.
That said, people are definitely scared off from classes when it seems like more than half the class is starting off on a much higher footing than you, especially if you're all graded on the same curve. I know my 200 level CS classes were all curve graded and less than a half of the starting enrollment finished the first class and less than a third of the remainder finished the second. In my experience, we started off with over 130 people in the program at CSC 110 and 14 finished CSC 212, Advanced Data Structures in Java, on their first try, and that class wasn't even 'hard.'
iannis
Musty Nester
- 31,351
- 17,656
Mists point holds up though. You can observe the exact same effect in yourself. It's just cross training. You do it in sport I understand, but what i'm familiar with is music.
An instrumentalist will generally become better if he adopts a secondary instrument. This can't be reduced totally to biochemistry and fine motor control and involvements between separate regions of the brain and root physical causes. Those things happen obviously, but something much more wonderful and less quantifiable happens as well.
An instrumentalist will generally become better if he adopts a secondary instrument. This can't be reduced totally to biochemistry and fine motor control and involvements between separate regions of the brain and root physical causes. Those things happen obviously, but something much more wonderful and less quantifiable happens as well.
khalid
Unelected Mod
- 14,071
- 6,775
Way to try and shift what you were saying. Yes, cheating is a massive problem at colleges. However, TO GET A DEGREE DOESN'T REQUIRE CHEATING. Students are not "forced" to cheat in order to simply pass. Now you might have a point that rampant cheating (and professors who ignore or don't care) can make it harder to get good grades, but to get a degree it is certainly not required.
Mist
REEEEeyore
- 31,202
- 23,387
Most people ARE pretty stupid. Smart people are rare.
84% of the population has 115 IQ or less, and 115 IQ is barely enough to handle the complex levels of thought required in many advanced fields. I mean, everyone here that work in science or tech or whatever professional field has plenty of stories about how the fact that many of the people around them are just not very smart. There's the 80/20 rule, 80% of the work in an office is done by 20% of the people, the other 80% being largely useless. And if the people around you don't seem like useless idiots to you, that means you're probably one of the useless idiots.
130+ is 2.7% of the population. The fact that smart people are rare is EXACTLY why prejudice and discrimination are bad. Any time an otherwise especially talented person (even if it's not raw IQ) gets discouraged from contributing because of something as inane as racism or sexism or whatever, all of society loses out on that person's potential contribution.
Mist
REEEEeyore
- 31,202
- 23,387
No, the main problem with rampant cheating is that it allows stupid people to bypass the filters in the system and get degrees. As long as the school gets paid, and the banks get repaid, no one gives a fucking shit. College is a pyramid scheme. And that's part why our modern society is filled with institutional failure.