The Glade 4.0

When someone hears that primitive savages in X part of the world used Y to treat Z symptoms, a researcher will perform a chemical analysis of Y. That's not the same thing as being "busy researching folk medicine." The only way you get from point A to point B is by listening to snake oil salesmen peddling their latest unregulated health supplement. Furthermore, we do not take Y and test it in a live human displaying Z symptoms. That would be irresponsible, because although occasionally Y does indeed turn out to treat Z symptoms, that is by accident not any great wisdom on the part of the ancients. It typically turns out that Y contains some quantity of a specific chemical already known to modern medicine to treat Z, but it contains this chemical in random and irregular concentrations.

As for using folk lore as a starting point in glaciology, the problem is that those tribal tales are undocumented and uncorroborated. This is a stark contrast to the laws of modern physics and chemistry, which are very well documented and readily available to the student of glaciology. Before using any folk tales in their work, the researcher would have to prowl the tundra interviewing tribe after tribe to tease out which tales contain a nugget of truth and which are the ramblings of a madman after a particularly heavy dose of the local hallucinogen from the spirit tent. What the researchers would be doing has a name, it's called "cultural anthropology," and they has their own university department and research budget.

Would the researchers find something useful if they engaged in cultural anthropology? They might. They'll also find a lot of crap, and good luck figuring out which is which. So what they do is they use the method that's been working to advance the frontiers of human understanding for thousands of years. They use the scientific method. If what they find corroborates some ancient folk lore, then bully for the indigenous tribes.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

I don't disagree with any of this.

However, the paper goes further than that and attempts to discuss some sort of "feminist" perspective on glaciology - I think, it's mostly so inane that I can't be entirely sure. It appears to be one of two things:

Either the case is being made that a "feminist" perspective gives the locals their due in terms of recognizing that their knowledge and observations of their environment can be a starting point for research or;

Somehow a "feminist" form of research on glaciers would give a better result or at least a different "perspective" of some sort or other. There was a mention of glaciers as an "endangered species" at some point. While if glaciers are shrinking or disappearing I imagine that there might be some loose analogy there, I simply cannot imagine that the concepts of biology and ecology can be picked up wholesale and dropped onto geology or climatology - and especially not by some humanities type who knows little about either field simply moving terminology around.

In the former case, it's a matter of feminists/"gender studies" types trying to perpetuate the fiction that feminism has anything to do with equality, through the bizarre method of claiming to give a "voice" to primitives on the matter of a particular natural feature, which is supposed to be co-equal with "Western" research because reasons.

In the latter case it's a matter of using glaciers as a way for feminists/"gender studies" people to obliquely complain that science and research reach conclusions that don't agree with the feminist "perspective" - that is to say, science isn't acceptable unless it comes to conclusions politically acceptable to these people. This is obviously something they'd rather not come right out and say for obvious reasons.

This is exactly the sort of nonsense that produces problems like we see at Mizzou, Yale, and a number of other campuses around the country. Impressionable teenagers matriculate to universities where the faculty considers this sort of crap to be legitimate academics.

Coro, you've graduated more recently so maybe you can shed some light but I recall that engineering and other science-type curricula when I was in school had "weed-out" courses for Freshmen and to a degree Sophomores. I imagine this is still the case? And do the "humanities" have any demanding "weed out" courses before one goes on to get a degree in "gender studies"? Or do the "weed-outs" still go on to study Business, while "gender studies" is the dumping ground for people that were too terrified to even attempt calculus?

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

In the case of many species, including homo sapiens, Nature herself has often been a sexist *****. Since the facts, themselves, can be unfair to females (and males, for that matter, but disadvantages held by the privileged don't count), some "feminists" have decried fact-gathering as a misogynist enterprise, as if somehow reality can be bent to the will of the social justice warrior rather than the physical laws of the universe.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

The Humanities have courses designed to weed out undesirable students, especially since the work load increases dramatically as you approach major level courses. In English, for example, it's not uncommon to read 15-18 novel length primary texts in a 16 week semester. That doesn't include the requisite journal articles and theory pieces for research papers. The higher you go, the more demanding the course work becomes. That's true of almost any major.

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That, plus even when it comes to social research the facts often do not bear out the complaints of feminists - or to the degree that they do they're part of a much more complex overall situation. A perfect example is the "wage gap" that shrinks from 30 cents to 5 cents when all other factors are equal. That 5 cents also is taken out of the context of the death gap - men are about 11 times more likely to be killed on the job than women.

Bringing that up is verboten to feminists and gender studies types because it threatens the narrative of female victimhood.

Think about that - evidence that indicates women are not actually victims must be suppressed because it might harm the fight to stop the victimization of women. If the windmill is removed, what will they tilt at?

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

I can certainly see that being the case in places like English which are long-established and obviously valid areas of academic study - languages are the way we communicate and can be approached rigorously.

However:

A) I don't see that being the case in more recent arrivals, such as the plethora of <victimhood> studies areas, where an "undesireble" student seems to be one that does not hold the same opinion as the faculty
B) Why would you place weed-out courses LATER in the curriculum rather than earlier? (This is not to say reading 15 novels in 16 weeks is not a challenge; just that it isn't exactly weeding people out if its in the 3rd year rather than the first)
C) Outside of academia itself, where is the actual market for this sort of thing?

Or, to put it in more personal terms:

I've always had a level of regret for not sticking with engineering which I didn't because I was at the time far more interested in ROTC than my actual degree, and psychology was easier and had more girls.

After talking with (among other people in my regular life) Coro, and seeing the value in being able to write code I'm almost certainly going to go back to school this coming year for another degree in something technical; computer science and electrical engineering being on the short list. I can certainly learn the syntax of code, but I can already see where I need to seriously refresh and expand on my math background, since it's been 20 years since I took Calculus - it strikes me that to really put programming skills to use you need the underlying math background.

Why would I even consider anything in the humanities at this point? Or, for that matter, even things like an MBA seem as if they're designed to draw in and churn out students as rapidly as possible and I am not sure I would have learned anything in the process. Where would the value be for me at 40 years old if I were to go back and get a degree in anything not STEM-related?

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Diamondeye:

Most schools require 2 years of English Language and Literature courses for everyone, not just English majors. Composition 1, Composition 2, World Lit, American Lit, British Lit. That's 15 semester hours dedicated to English in almost every program under the sun.

As for majoring in the humanities, I didn't recommend it to Coro, I probably won't recommend it to you. While English actually has job markets at the end of a four year degree, they're mostly writing and editing related -- notoriously difficult fields to break into and advance in. Other humanities degrees are less likely to get you a job in the real world, unless the requirement is any degree. Majoring in the humanities is something you do if you want a Ph.D. and to teach, or perhaps go to Law School. It's not something you do if you want a career that has clear developmental paths and progress. STEM majors are being pushed hard, but you need to choose your program wisely. Avoid degree mills and find a strong program.

As for Victim Politics Degrees, they have their place. Some scholars in those fields actually produce valuable knowledge and information; a lot don't. I know I tire of feminist theory a lot faster than most people, but that's probably because I'm a misogynistic pig seeking to entrench the patriarchy.

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This is not quite what DE was asking about.

I will grant you that this practice does weed out undesirable students. However, what you describe sets the criteria for a desirable student equal to, "Receptive to the professors' favorite brand of schlock."

What DE refers to is the STEM departments setting the criteria for a desirable student equal to, "Able to perform basic calculus operations."

To answer the question, I don't know what is available in the Humanities curricula that would qualify as a STEM-style weed-out course. I would venture to say that they don't have any. You have to remember that this is the home of everyone who went to college because you have to go to college to get a decent job these days, and what you major in doesn't matter. This is where universities focused their efforts to milk the federal financial aid budget. The last thing they want is students dropping out because it was too hard.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

It's quite true that there are professors who actively invoke their biases in the classroom. I try to avoid such things. Students should be free to think for themselves. Prejudicing students with my own theoretical bents or judging them relative to my proclivities is a bad idea. Of course, I wish more professors thought that way.

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Yes, I had to take courses of this nature at the time. I didn't find them to be especially challenging or even interesting; to the degree that they weeded anyone out it was people that fundamentally didn't want to be in college or go to class at all and would have failed almost any course. I don't know if things have changed in the last 20 years or so though.



Well, in the event that I get tired of, or can't continue in my current career (my left shoulder, in particular, has some things to say about that and the right one has its grouchy moments too) I want to have some marketable skills. To use Coro as an example, he works on electrical motors. It seems to me that working on actual things that do stuff is a lot more likely to be consistently marketable than anything to do with law or writing. I'd much rather go off and design cruise missiles for Raytheon than chase ambulances.

As to the program, it would be the University of Texas.



That descriptor seems to apply to literally everyone these days so you're in good company.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Based on recent events at campuses everywhere it seems that the professors in question have created a monster that has, in some cases, turned on them.

Mizzou is allegedly looking at a 25% enrollment drop and a $32 million budget shortfall this year. I wonder if maybe they'd have been better to suck down the revenue loss from their football team refusing to play.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

It's highly likely that Trump wins at this point. Dem turnout is very low and disillusioned Sanders supporters are going to spite themselves by staying home in the general. Rep turnout is very high and even a significant number of evangelicals are voting for Trump. I'd never have guessed that this demographic would turn up and vote for someone with a questionable pro-life record, in addition to being twice divorced and marrying a woman half his age, but here we are. There's no way the Dems win with low turnout plus their biggest question mark staying home against high turnout with the biggest question mark actually showing up. The Norpoth model predicts a 97% chance of a Trump victory.

For once, I agree with your analysis. Good job.

I would not have guessed evangelicals would go for Trump in the numbers they have, but it's clear in retrospect why they have:

A) The states where Trump has beat Cruz among evangelicals are the states where Hillary Clinton has absolutely trashed Bernie Sanders among blacks; 8 or 9 to 1 in most cases. While she was expected to comfortably win black votes in those states, the margin should not have been that high. Blacks who are not going to Clinton are quite possibly going over to Trump and then being counted as "evangelicals" since the press does not really bother to measure the black Republican vote or the Democrat evangelical vote in primaries.

This might sound unlikely, but there's been some pushback to the notion of "Hillary's Firewall" in the south; at least some blacks have taken exception to the way the press and the Democrats referred to it in a particularly crass and unsubtle manner this season. It's much like the Albright/Steinem incident of "now you ladies just go vote for Hillary or else." except that it was part of the regular coverage over time rather than a single sound bite. Trump's anti-immigration stance also appeals to blacks in a way the Democrats would prefer not to acknowledge.

B) Evangelicals are not just evangelicals - like other demographics they are not all, or even mostly, single-issue voters. Economics beats social issues for most of them because evangelicals want to feel economically secure as much as anyone else does.

C) They are not fooled by Trump's hilarious attempts to claim to be a serious Christian - he may be a Presbyterian in name but he pretty clearly only started caring about representing it when it was convenient for the election. A lot of Evangelicals are looking at that and realizing they are way better off voting for a candidate that essentially promises to leave them alone and make the government leave them alone than they are holding out for someone that promises pie-in-the-sky fantasy of getting the gay marriage decision walked back. That candidate is not going to win.

Trump is appealing because he takes the issue off the table for the Democrats. Evangelicals are coming to realize they've been played by both parties - Republicans promise them social conservatism they can't deliver (either they lose the election or conveniently forget about it once in office because they don't support it); Democrats want to appeal to them as poor, working class voters, but then want to demonize them as bigots - while getting a free pass for only rather abruptly deciding to be in favor of same-sex marriage or LGBT rights in the last few years. Both Clinton and Obama have gotten free passes on their past opposition to gay marriage, much in the same way Democrat politicians used to get free passes for being Klan members.

Evangelicals have figured out they're a boogeyman for one party and a target for vote-pandering for both, so the guy that is essentially saying "I'll make people leave you alone" is appealing.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Along the same lines:

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/433091/stem-fields-women-courses-competition

http://nsuworks.nova.edu/tqr/vol21/iss1/9/

What business she has even researching how STEM is taught is difficult to imagine.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

No matter who wins... we all lose.

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Holy shitsnacks!

I haven't read the paper, but I'm going to give her the benefit of the doubt and assume that "less competitive" doesn't mean "easier" and actually means not forcing your grades to fit a bell curve such that a third of your class is guaranteed to fail and if you want an A it doesn't mean learning the material to an objective standard, but simply learning it better than 90% of the class.

Assuming you're correct, this would have absolutely zero to do with feminism, women, or anything remotely gender-related. If you're in the bottom third, you're in the bottom third.

It still does not answer the question of why non-STEM people think it's their business to police how STEM fields are taught.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Man, education majors think it's their business to police how everything is taught.

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The idea is that men are much more competitive than women and thus making grading into a competition where there are winners and losers gives them an unfair advantage. Remember that if a class is strictly bell curved it turns all other students into your enemies and makes sabotaging others a viable method of improving your own grade, because your grade improves if theirs get worse. It also discourages collaborative learning because if everyone improves their knowledge of the material, you've all wasted your time because all your relative ranks haven't changed. I don't personally know for sure if this environment actually benefits men over women but it's certainly not SJW craziness to suggest it.

Like so many other topics where I speak authoritatively, you can either believe me or not. Suffice to say, I have been involved in more STEM classes than most of the population of Earth. The segment of humanity that has been involved with equal or greater number of university-level STEM classes is pretty much limited to post-graduate STEM degree holders, and generally by virtue of having taught classes.


Yes, it is SJW craziness to suggest it. The idea is complete and utter horseshit.

First off, while I understand you have your personal drum to beat about bell curved grading, and I do not doubt that you personally have been subjected to it, this is not the norm for STEM curriculum.

Even if it were the norm, this does not give men an unfair advantage. Academia is set up to favor women. It begins in early childhood. The behavior of little girls is the gold standard for elementary and middle schools. Boys are judged based on their ability to conform to the behavior of girls. Their grades suffer at all levels because the educational system views them as defective girls. Any bell curve grading system is thereby going to favor girls, because the girls are doing the things the teachers like and are receiving top marks. If there is a limited number of top marks, they will be going primarily to girls.

It's important to understand that for the vast majority of scholastic pursuits, knowledge of subject matter is not the criteria for success. Pleasing the teacher is. You don't get A's for knowing the material, you get A's for doing the things your teacher likes, and doing things exactly the way your teacher showed you. If your teacher showed you an incorrect method, and you practice the correct method, you will lose marks because you did not do what your teacher taught you - this is the basis for our current elementary and secondary mathematics education, Common Core. Again, mastery of material is not the primary determining factor for top marks, teacher-pleasing is. In any environment where top marks are limited, girls are advantaged because teacher-pleasing behavior comes naturally to girls. That girls may find competition distasteful does not disadvantage them, because they are pleasing the teacher and getting those top marks regardless.

Now, where girls run into trouble in STEM is that teacher-pleasing only carries you so far. In STEM, there are objective correct and incorrect answers. If you have a correct solution, your teacher-pleasing behavior is irrelevant. Teacher-pleasing therefore only becomes important for obtaining partial credit. The teacher-pleaser will be more likely to get partial credit, and will get greater amounts of it. In an environment where problems are very difficult, being more likely to get higher amounts of partial credit is still an advantage. However, it can only carry you so far. This is where a lot of girls falter. They show up to class every day, they ask questions, and they do everything exactly like the teacher said, but they just can't seem to get the answers right. They're used to getting A's because the class is subjective. The STEM class is objective, so they get a C. Girls then leave STEM to get A's in other majors. Straight A's look better on resumes.

Furthermore, exposure to a competitive atmosphere is good for college students. The job market is competitive. If you get a job, that means someone else didn't. Science itself is competitive because if you make a discovery first, you get credited for it. Collaborative is a big buzzword among liberal think tanks, but competitive doesn't mean you can't also be collaborative. Competition breeds creativity. Make no mistake, women are not strangers to competition, either. By the time you get out of college, women have been competing with each other for social status for at least fifteen years. In fact, my girlfriend explained to me not long ago one of her biggest joys of being an engineer in the United States was that she mostly worked with men, because men are courteous and respectful while women are catty ***** who fight all the time. I have also noticed that female supervisors tend to prefer male employees for the same reason.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

There is a truism in the Army about this:

If you have a company with a male Commander and a male First Sergeant, all other factors being equal they will get along.

The same is true with a female Commander and a male First Sergeant. It is also true with a male Commander and a female First Sergeant.

If both the Commander and First Sergeant are female, all other factors being equal, there are likely to be problems.

The military is not unlike your STEM education in that regard - the social environment has been tailored to advantage women, but readiness requirements - how many people have passed their PT test, how many went to the dentist, how many qualified with their rifle, etc. are highly objective.

This is why SOF units are so skeptical of the addition of women to their field. So far, they have been able to avoid most of the apparatus of the military that has been manufactured to solve the problems of women - and by problems, I don't mean actual sexual harassment or sexual assault or lack of equal opportunity. Those problems exist, but they are not problems unique to women or even primarily faced by them, nor nearly as widespread as the press and SJWs would have it. A gay male soldier is far more likely to face far more severe social issues with his peers - including his female peers - than a female is.

The belief amongst SOF troops is -once you get past the rather incoherent profane ranting of most of the enlisted portion, and some of the officers - that females who cannot meet their exceedingly demanding standards will use complaints about subjective discrimination and harassment to obfuscate failure at objective criteria.

This belief is not without merit. Females already do this in the regular portions of the military, and for the same "teacher-pleasing" reasons Coro specified. Female soldiers or cadets who lack aptitude can still succeed in training by saying and doing all the right, formulaic things to ROTC instructors or drill sergeants. When they don't do well at the objective portions, they can (to a degree) make up for that with positive ratings in subjective areas, such as leadership skills, where leading in the way the instructor says is the right way will get you high marks from that instructor.

It is not that females are any less able than males to succeed at common military tasks - indeed, it's entirely irrelevant. It's the fact that an avenue of complaint that can be exploited to distract from inadequate performance is available to females that simply isn't to men. Men simply will not be taken as seriously if they make such complaints. Women have other avenues of escape, such as pregnancy - units getting ready to deploy or even just go to a longer training exercise often see sudden spikes in pregnancies.

In SOF, the sheer difficulty of the training (in some cases we're talking about 10-20% pass rates, sometimes even lower) means an even stronger incentive to make complaints if one fails. This is likely to be pushed by the sort of person who will bewail the lack of 50% female SEALs while themselves finding JROTC too much of a challenge. The highly coveted nature of SOF status - Seal, Special Forces, Ranger, etc. and the opportunities for advancement make these highly desirable. There are plenty of people out there who want the honor, recognition, and status of wearing those tabs or that Budweiser symbol, but do not want to have to do what it takes to earn them, or live the lifestyle that goes after them.

For men, if you fail there's no stigma. Most people fail. Even trying is something of a badge of honor; very few people even want to TRY Ranger school. For women though, you don't have to admit failure. Failure is politically unacceptable after a certain threshold. If you don't want to admit that (like 90% of your classmates) you simply didn't have what it took, you don't have to. It must have been because you were a woman "invading a boy's club".

Ironically, you might even be right. The reason that particular boy's club does not want women around is that those same training requirements are there for a reason - a reason that involves potentially getting one's *** shot off. It is less about letting women in, than never being able to be sure if a female teammate really earned her status or not. STEM has similar issues. No one people working on projects involving potential danger that got there by exploiting fairness rules created by people who cringe at the thought of high school trigonometry.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

I'd just like to point out that even if the premises of Coro's argument are true, his conclusion doesn't follow from those premises. Even if our primary education system both emphasizes pleasing the teacher and favors the behavior of girls, this does not somehow result in those girls being disadvantaged in STEM fields. The boys are in the same system. If this system also teaches boys that they must subjectively please the teacher, then logically women should outperform men in STEM because they have both been taught the same thing but much more attention was paid to the girls. If on the other hand the education system teaches boys that objectivity is more important, well that means the feminists are right and our education system does favor men in STEM fields.

There's no way to structure this to get the result you want, and the whole thing seems like a red herring to distract from your real argument that women are naturally better than men at ingratiating themselves to authority figures, which accounts for their superior grades in subjective fields, while men are better at actually learning material and getting the right answers, which accounts for their superior grades in objective fields. In other words, despite the education system supposedly favoring women at every point, they still can't compete with men at actually learning material and have to resort to sucking up to get their marks.

As far as dealing with hard curved classes, yeah that happened to me. Organic Chemistry with a bunch of pre-meds. The professor hard curved the class because he pulled absolutely no punches with the material and using a regular grading system would have resulted in everyone failing. The highest score was a 59%, i got a 49% which was good for a B. But let me tell you, holy **** that experience did not inspire much confidence in the ethics of our future doctors. The pre meds lied to and tried to sabotage the others with absolutely no remorse.

That doesn't make any sense at all. The education system doesn't teach boys that objectivity is more important - the nature of STEM fields themselves impose that importance on the education system. No amount of educational technique can change how math or science work.

STEM fields appear to "favor men" because they neutralize female advantages, not because they actually give any to males. Females are used to having a social advantage over males in the classroom. By the time they arrive in college they have had 13+ years of being rewarded for applying female strategies to the social scene of the classroom. Males, on the other hand, have spent 13 years working in a social scene that (generally speaking) disadvantages their problem-solving approaches relative to those of females.

This is why Coro says women (and we're talking about smart women here; dumb people of either sex generally do not even approach STEM) take off for English and other such fields so often - They have had a certain approach - teacher-pleasing- reinforced for years, and when that doesn't happen any more, they get frustrated. Males will, in general, have been less successful at teacher-pleasing, and are more likely to be relieved that there is, in fact, a right or wrong answer to find.

The complaint of feminists is not that women are disadvantaged, its that their advantages are neutralized. This is the complaint of feminists in almost any context - any time women are not explicitly advantaged, they are being disadvantaged. This is why, for example, you'll see them object to a men's center on a campus even though there's a women's center because "We don't think they need that". If they are not allowed to both A) have a center and B) exercise veto power over one for men, that's disadvantaging them in their eyes.



No, that is not what he's saying. What he's saying is that women get frustrated and withdraw because the strategies their experiences tell them should work do not work in college-level STEM. The problem is that the education system encourages and reinforces the strategies of little girls from a very young age and tries to make little boys use the same ones.

Feminists are aghast at the idea of an education system that does not favor girls over boys. They do not know enough about STEM to understand that simply changing the nature of the instruction will not make it favor females in the same fashion as other fields, which is why they make such absurd demands. It's the nature of the field itself that causes that - there is simply a right or wrong answer.

Remember, we are talking here about people who, for the most part, got degrees in their own political beliefs. Being challenged - even in the form of having to explain why they think something without any disagreement- is an affront. Feminism is not about making an observation, then creating and testing a hypothesis. It's about the reverse - describing reality and then fitting observations to that description. If women are having trouble with science, or worse, if feminist ideas can't be verified scientifically in areas where they attempt to describe the observable, it MUST be because science is "patriarchal" or because a "feminist approach" would give another result. The idea that they could simply be objectively wrong is completely outside the political model they have convinced themselves constitutes legitimate education.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."