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[Reelya]

Where I did get riled up was all those "gamers suck" editorials in places like gamasutra. Sure, go after people who did harass people, but it's ridiculous to attack an entire class of people who are in actuality more diverse than the mainstream (nearly 50% of gamers are female, and minorities make up a disproportionate share of the gamer community) and label them all cis white male scum. At that point you're just offending people who hadn't had any involvement in the whole shitstorm.

So yeah, both sides did actual fuel the flames here. "gamers" however were not a side, they were one of the targets.

[Baffler]

Fortunately, a high-level cyberpunk dystopia is pretty much impossible because it requires incredibly competent corporate operators. A few of those arise in reality, but they tend to end up legendary and unmatchable. Most corporate bodies are driven either by a gestalt of nobody or a couple of very, very out of touch and delusional folks.

Human failings, thankfully enough, typically affect the wretched as much as the virtuous.

That... applies equally well to government officials. It takes much less talent to maintain authority than to establish it.

[Reelya]

I should see about a gender thread but for now:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-30/bilnd-recruitment-trial-to-improve-gender-equality-failing-study/8664888

Government mandated gender-blind recruitment initiative backfired in Australia. With genders obfuscated from the recruitment process, women were less likely to be hired / promoted, so they've been ordered to nix the policy.

A measure aimed at boosting female employment in the workforce may actually be making it worse, a major study has found.

Leaders of the Australian public service will today be told to "hit pause" on blind recruitment trials, which many believed would increase the number of women in senior positions.

...

The trial found assigning a male name to a candidate made them 3.2 per cent less likely to get a job interview.

Adding a woman's name to a CV made the candidate 2.9 per cent more likely to get a foot in the door.

"We should hit pause and be very cautious about introducing this as a way of improving diversity, as it can have the opposite effect," Professor Hiscox said.

The problem was that the blind trial assumed that hiring managers were being biased against women, but the fact is every manager is in fact aware of the diversity issue and will get points with their higher-ups if they improve diversity in their work unit. But the whole thing does seem like self-serving logic. Neutrality is equality, until it gives men a boost, in which case non-neutrality is equality. Very ... "objective" of you.

Personally, I would say to roll out gender-blind trials everywhere. If we're going to have that, then it's absolutely ridiculous if we selectively apply gender-blind recruitment only where it's shown to benefit one gender over the other. At that point it's completely not about fairness or overcoming recruiter biases anymore, it's about building bias into the system deliberately.

[Sergarr]

The problem that they're trying to fix is this:

Men continue to outnumber women at senior ranks of the public service, despite vastly outnumbering men at the rank-and-file level.

So we're not at the "women run the world" stage yet.

[Reelya]

The problem that they're trying to fix is this:

Men continue to outnumber women at senior ranks of the public service, despite vastly outnumbering men at the rank-and-file level.

So we're not at the "women run the world" stage yet.

People at senior ranks tend not to have any time for anything else, they're single-minded career oriented workaholics who don't have any time for their own families. Many critics of the issue point out that these people are actually pretty unbalanced. They're a tiny subset of the population, an outlier, and if you look at a whole range of metrics, more men tend to be outliers (idiots or geniuses, workaholics or slackers) than women who are demographically clustered in the center.

Women tend to be more focused on a good work/life balance. The issue is that many organizations actively try to recruit and retain women for senior levels, but there just aren't enough interested applicants.

Sure, we could talk about adding in flexi-time and family-friendly policies to encourage more women there. but the fact is they are competing with single-minded testosterone fuled career dudes who don't give a shit about any of that and just work, work, work. It's like saying you want to be a part time olympic athlete. Sure ... you can train for the olympics part time, but don't then gripe that you didn't get a medal. Because you're up against people going 100% flat out.

[martinuzz]

So you're saying we should give all women testorsteron supplements?

[Reelya]

Nope, but there are actual studies linking testosterone levels to variations in stock trading success:

https://www.livescience.com/4894-testosterone-fuels-stock-market-success.html
http://www.cnbc.com/2015/07/07/hormones-affect-stock-traders-and-the-risks-they-take-study.html

Another video I was watching showed that disagreeable people tend to survive better as managers than agreeable people. Because managers tend not to be liked because of decisions they were required to make. And women score higher on measures of agreeableness than men do. Basically, more men couldn't give a fuck if anyone likes them, as long as they are "respected" (you don't have to like someone to respect their authority or knowledge).

And remember this isn't about people as a whole, it's about outliers. High level managers etc are a tiny, tiny fragment of the population. Even if everything evens out at the level of the entire population (averages in general), the outliers on any specific trait aren't guaranteed to be 50/50 male/female.

[wierd]

RE: Testosterone shots

No, that is silly.

There are two potential solutions:

1) Increase the number of senior employees and reduce the expected performance level, rather than expect everyone to be workaholic slaves with no life, so that people with moderate life balance requirements can reasonably hold the positions, which will increase desirability of the positions to rank and file women.

2) Accept that women tend to be less willing to become slaves to the machine/married to work, and accept the skewed upper management numbers.

Really, those are the breaks yo. Unless you want to try for the absurd #3:

3) Re-engineer society so that being the woman who misses their kids' school programs, and is not there for their kids (instead of the workaholic dad) is highly desirable and considered feminine.


Testosterone shots are a "What is this, I dont even!?" thing.

[martinuzz]

but the fact is they are competing with single-minded testosterone fuled career dudes who don't give a shit about any of that and just work, work, work.

Naturally, I wasn't being serious. I was just responding to this with absurdism

[EnigmaticHat]

Nope, but there are actual studies linking testosterone levels to variations in stock trading success:

https://www.livescience.com/4894-testosterone-fuels-stock-market-success.html
http://www.cnbc.com/2015/07/07/hormones-affect-stock-traders-and-the-risks-they-take-study.html

Another video I was watching showed that disagreeable people tend to survive better as managers than agreeable people. Because managers tend not to be liked because of decisions they were required to make. And women score higher on measures of agreeableness than men do. Basically, more men couldn't give a fuck if anyone likes them, as long as they are "respected" (you don't have to like someone to respect their authority or knowledge).

And remember this isn't about people as a whole, it's about outliers. High level managers etc are a tiny, tiny fragment of the population. Even if everything evens out at the level of the entire population (averages in general), the outliers on any specific trait aren't guaranteed to be 50/50 male/female.

The research, detailed in the April 22 issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, focused on 17 male London financial stock traders for eight days. Testosterone levels fluctuate naturally with age (there's a surge during male puberty and a drop-off as men age) and as a result of daily encounters, such as competitive events and sexual behavior.

From the first study.  That is not a valid test for a lot of reasons.

The second one didn't even use a real stock market, and what it found was that testosterone = higher risk taking.  It made no statements about success.  What it did find is that testosterone shots effect people... like we already knew testosterone shots would effect people.  To quote the second test:

He added that the challenge is for financial firms to find ways of minimizing the impact hormones have on risk-taking and on optimism.

The researchers walked away from this viewing the testosterone shots as having a negative impact, not that we know because again, didn't use the actual stock market.

[Reelya]

Each trader's testosterone levels were higher on days when profits exceeded his one-month daily average than on other days.

^ This is what they measured.

Saying they took more risks is the part that is conjecture. They didn't measure "risk taking" they measured profits. But that could be explained away as testosterone rose in response to market success, so have some other research:

http://content.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1871066,00.html

In a study by scientists from the University of Cambridge, male City traders who had been exposed to high levels of testosterone in the womb were on average six times more profitable than those exposed to low levels of the hormone.

In the research, to be published Jan. 13 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a U.S. journal, scientists measured 44 male traders' second-to-fourth-digit-length ratio, which is otherwise known as 2D:4D and is an indicator of the effects of prenatal testosterone.

You can't get much more objective than that. They measured finger lengths to estimate pre-natal testosterone exposure, and found that those with high pre-natal exposure were 6 times more profitable than those with low pre-natal testosterone exposure. Try explaining this one away with societal expectations, because it's fairly certain every single one of these were white British male / middle class stock traders, and "relative finger length" isn't something that people are biased about.

The time article also clarifies that:

In a separate Cambridge study last April, traders with high morning testosterone levels recorded higher profits for the rest of that day than they did on days when their circulating testosterone level was low.

Showing that testosterone levels in the morning were predictive of profits later that day.

[Yoink]

As I ordered and waited for a burger in the CBD there was some (presumably drunk) dickhead singing popular songs extremely badly - not that the songsI  recognised didn't suck to begin with.
And people were egging the cunt on! So aggravating. Dude made even the usual talentless, amplified-acoustic-guitar whiners who make up the bulk of Melbourne buskers seem to sound good by comparison.

At least the guy playing where I am now played a Men At Work song, but after that earlier onslaught I can't tell if he's actually any good. Sounds great to my ravaged ears, but who even knows anymore.    


Edit: just had one of the strangest conversations I've ever had in my life. Certainly the strangest I've had whilst sober.

[Sergarr]

>in-game cutscene with a geographic map
>talks about Black Sea and Caucasus region
>highlights St.Petersburg and Arkhangelsk

It's literally one Google search away, you lazy gamedevs! It's not that hard!

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Don't blame them, blame Mercator.

[Flying Dice]

Found that sargon thing when looking at a Vox article and my reaction was "That gamergate thing is still bouncing around?"

Video games are an absurd issue war?

People gotta argue about something I guess. It started over accusations of sexism in games or something and it just spiralled from there, primarily between two parties. Basically it's like two SJWs went and clashed with each other.

It wasn't even anything like a ridculously sexist game sparking controversy or anything that would lead to productive discussion.

Not even. It was about corruption in gaming journalism which got sidetracked when an asshole broke up with his asshole girlfriend and said mean things about her, she said mean things back, and a bunch of moronic MRAs and third-wave feminists tried to take over gaming for their political bullshit while the latter used gamers as the scapegoat for all their moralizing hatred.

Actual gamers spent their time mocking the shit out of everyone involved because we'd already beaten senators and lawyers in the same sort of fight in the '90s and early '00s. Incidentally, if you look into the last hurrahs from the enemy camp there, you'll understand why so many 20-30 something gamers detest Hillary Clinton. So blatantly throwing us under the bus for political capital that when the winds shifted she didn't even have the decency to pretend to actually care about the issues while the true-believer types like Jack Thompson went down with their ship.

The main distinction between corrupt gaming journos and corrupt SJW gaming journos is that the former were doing it for kickbacks from devs and publishers while the latter were doing it for political purposes and to make dosh from the idiots that followed their every word.

How is the bolded part even corruption?  Journalism doesn't have to be neutral just because Reuters made that their standard and Fox News made it their slogan.

How is it dishonest to go into a field expressly intending to lie to and about your primary audience for the sake of achieving political goals and making money from stupid people?

Don't forget, they were still taking bribes. It's just that those tended to be in the form of political acceptance and public support for backing shitty content that passed the ideological litmus test rather than straight up transfers of wealth.

Any journalist who uses their position to spin coverage is corrupt if they're purporting to report facts but actually reporting based on who pays them under the table or what political position they support. S'like going into a medical field for the express purpose of shilling pharmaceuticals or encouraging people to not vaccinate their children.