Somebody passed me an article about women in STEM. I've been thinking about this, just a little bit, recently. But only from having been provoked by a lot of the squishy soundbites about 'women in politics' in the just-ending campaign season. Whenever somebody *looks backward* and says something to the effect that 'women should be 50% of X by now' and then they *look forward* and say X should be more women-friendly or whatever prescription they have - this is a problem. The problem is that if men and women are different, and women are historically not in X, maybe that difference is completely reasonable, and the woman-friendly prescription is bad advice. I say that is something completely different from gender discrimination.
I'm going to give an egregious example but I think it applies broadly. If you are an engineer and you love science, then you will be called a geek. If you cannot handle being called a geek, then you are not passing the existential bar. Dealing with everything that can go wrong in X activity is what makes those people Xers. If you don't want to get beat into the gang, then you can't get into the gang. It doesn't matter that the peripheral activity is not a material requirement. There are no material requirements, there just is what is. I'm also thinking with the film 'Fury' in mind. It doesn't matter how you feel about killing Germans. When you're an allied soldier, that's your job. Do the work.
'STEM' is a neologism - a marketing effort to attract people into something good. That marketing and all the diversity balancing is not what makes an Engineer an Engineer. It is, as DeGrasse-Tyson put it, the unwavering desire to do the work above all. *Above all*. If doing the work is not worth getting called names, if the output of the hostile workplace is not worth doing the work, then you're not a worker.
Everything in life conspires towards your death. Fire never stops burning flesh. People are never not envious and slippery. The smallest sub-atomic particle works to avoid detection and control. Every chess game is zero-sum with all the pieces in plain view. These are conditions which cannot be negotiated into submission, and some not even into temporary abeyance.
- F=MA
- W=FD
- Effort > Explanation
Get busy living, or get busy dying.
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