Maybe instead of constantly castigating white men for the way they were born, spend it on English lessons so you don't write like a fucking high schooler. Just a thought.
Schools no longer teach proper grammar, style, formatting. It is infuriating. I deal with creatives that want to be authors and screenwriters and the amount of them that don't even understand how a book or a screen/stage play is formatted is amazing. It is at the point where I sometimes wonder if they have ever read a book at all. That is how bad the formatting is.
A couple years ago I got an email from my alma mater soliciting feedback for their "Professional Responsibilities in Engineering" course. When I took that course the focus was "you have a responsibility to do proper risk assessment and design beyond strict requirements so you don't kill people, and this responsibility to your fellow citizens is greater than a particular job or even your own career". In my opinion this is where an engineer's responsibility should start and stop: excel at your craft so people benefit from your work, and don't betray the trust the people implicitly place in you and your work.
They were trying to shoehorn "Diversity and Inclusion" into this course. I gave my feedback that a greater focus should be on analyzing and assessing risk (because this is a skill inadequately taught at pretty much all levels of engineering and is a core component of engineering where lives may be at stake), but I got the sense I was "shouting into a hurricane" despite the respect I have for the professor who taught the course.
Let's just say I'll become very nervous driving over bridges and flying in airplanes around the time I retire.
Before the Viaduct in Seattle closed whenever I drove under it there was always a thought in the back of my mind that said "if there's an earthquake right now my life ends" because it was the same design as the one that collapsed in Oakland in the '89 quake.
Isn't engineering a giant risk management excercise?
Yes. For everything (planes, trains, and automobiles) there will be some combination of failures where if it occurs everyone dies. The trick is to make that so unlikely to occur that you'd have to really fuck up for that to have happened. Which is why, when you read something like a plane crash report, it's never one thing that goes wrong but a combination of things (which sometimes occur over years) that leads to disaster.
There are very specific processes people use to assess risk in a formal way, but they aren't really taught in school. And even when you know how to do it there's a fair amount of subjectivity involved unless there are objective regulatory requirements you have to meet (in which case you don't want to ask how the "objective" regulatory requirements were determined any more than you would want to ask how the sausage you're eating was made).
For certain classes of problem having some amount of diversity when developing a solution can provide some variation in test inputs if the requirements aren't fully understood. For example, if you are developing a speech recognition system, having developers with different accents can help the system deal with those different accents early in the development cycle instead of later in the testing cycle.
There is also something to be said about different people having different thought processes for approaching a given problem, though that isn't guaranteed just by virtue of their skin color or genitals.
That said, if you are aware that these sorts of problems exist you can plan your development/test cycle without needing diversity in your engineers. In my example you could solve the problem by having non-engineers with different accents provide sample audio of themselves speaking. The benefit of this approach is that it is more reproducible and allows for a consistent test suite as you make changes/improvements. The risk is you don't always know the full scope of these sorts or problems/variations early in the development cycle, and they may be costly to address later on.
Personally I wouldn't go out of my way to make a "diverse" team of engineers to mitigate that type of problem. I'd rather have a non-diverse team of competent engineers I could trust to ensure the requirements were as comprehensive as possible and minimize the number of "hidden" requirements to be discovered as development progressed.
People don't have different thought processes, especially not as a function of race. What some people have are non-normal perspectives, however those people are nearly always either very very stupid or very very smart. Hence non-normal. Human beings nearly all think and solve problems similarly--it's part of what makes us all the same species. Our cognitive algorithms are basically pre-programmed.
For example: Cats don't push. Really--watch how cats play and interact with objects. Cats can scoop and pull. However, do not push. Even the typical "Cat Pat" is just the first stage of a scoop or a gentle smack.
Humans similar in that we have particular thinking and problem solving aparati that are literally baked into our hardware. Anybody who tells you that a black woman has a different way of problems solving is lying. She doesn't. She's human like the rest of us. A man from Sudan will jury rig the same solutions to his problems as a man from Bolivia if he is given the same tools or is in the same environment.
I'll agree that there's a degree of genetics at play, but I'm a strong supporter of the idea that culture drives a large portion of behavior. Have you seen what passes for black culture in the U.S.? Awful stuff, I can't imagine the state of my mind if I had been raised on that. One could argue that only a lost cause would willingly remain under the influence of a destructive culture, but I was a kid once and know there's only so much agency you can expect until a certain point in maturity is reached. More simply, no one can be expected to choose a better option unless the subject actually understands that they can choose.
It gets difficult to decipher the cultural influence web when it comes to figuring out why so many whites want to kneel, so I understand that it's an unattractive stance to a lot of people. An oversimplification is that we have multiple cultures at work that support the idea of "the strong must serve the weak".
The reason there is a lack of diversity in STEM is due to the fact that certain ethnic groups and women do not, as a whole, have interest in these fields.
But 90 engineers in my place are black i.e indians and pakis So why would you give anti racism training to black people (who we all know cant be racist) ?
Maybe instead of constantly castigating white men for the way they were born, spend it on English lessons so you don't write like a fucking high schooler. Just a thought.
Didn't you get the memo? Proper English is racist now.
Schools no longer teach proper grammar, style, formatting. It is infuriating. I deal with creatives that want to be authors and screenwriters and the amount of them that don't even understand how a book or a screen/stage play is formatted is amazing. It is at the point where I sometimes wonder if they have ever read a book at all. That is how bad the formatting is.
A couple years ago I got an email from my alma mater soliciting feedback for their "Professional Responsibilities in Engineering" course. When I took that course the focus was "you have a responsibility to do proper risk assessment and design beyond strict requirements so you don't kill people, and this responsibility to your fellow citizens is greater than a particular job or even your own career". In my opinion this is where an engineer's responsibility should start and stop: excel at your craft so people benefit from your work, and don't betray the trust the people implicitly place in you and your work.
They were trying to shoehorn "Diversity and Inclusion" into this course. I gave my feedback that a greater focus should be on analyzing and assessing risk (because this is a skill inadequately taught at pretty much all levels of engineering and is a core component of engineering where lives may be at stake), but I got the sense I was "shouting into a hurricane" despite the respect I have for the professor who taught the course.
Let's just say I'll become very nervous driving over bridges and flying in airplanes around the time I retire.
Don't drive under any bridges either.
Before the Viaduct in Seattle closed whenever I drove under it there was always a thought in the back of my mind that said "if there's an earthquake right now my life ends" because it was the same design as the one that collapsed in Oakland in the '89 quake.
Isn't engineering a giant risk management excercise? Anyone can build a bridge, but only an engineer can build a bridge that barely stays up.
Yes. For everything (planes, trains, and automobiles) there will be some combination of failures where if it occurs everyone dies. The trick is to make that so unlikely to occur that you'd have to really fuck up for that to have happened. Which is why, when you read something like a plane crash report, it's never one thing that goes wrong but a combination of things (which sometimes occur over years) that leads to disaster.
There are very specific processes people use to assess risk in a formal way, but they aren't really taught in school. And even when you know how to do it there's a fair amount of subjectivity involved unless there are objective regulatory requirements you have to meet (in which case you don't want to ask how the "objective" regulatory requirements were determined any more than you would want to ask how the sausage you're eating was made).
From Wiki, Russian Political Jokes:
"My wife has been going to cooking school for three years."
"She must really cook well by now!"
"No, so far they've only got as far as the bit about the Twentieth CPSU Congress."
It appears that the diversity brigade are fans of this modus operandi - whatever you learn, it's about
the Partyracism.I'm not an engineer, so can someone explain to me why a lack of diversity is a disadvantage from an engineering perspective?
Currently it just sounds like woke bullshit infiltrating STEM.
DIVERSITY IS OUR STRENGTH
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
MEN ARE WOMEN
For certain classes of problem having some amount of diversity when developing a solution can provide some variation in test inputs if the requirements aren't fully understood. For example, if you are developing a speech recognition system, having developers with different accents can help the system deal with those different accents early in the development cycle instead of later in the testing cycle.
There is also something to be said about different people having different thought processes for approaching a given problem, though that isn't guaranteed just by virtue of their skin color or genitals.
That said, if you are aware that these sorts of problems exist you can plan your development/test cycle without needing diversity in your engineers. In my example you could solve the problem by having non-engineers with different accents provide sample audio of themselves speaking. The benefit of this approach is that it is more reproducible and allows for a consistent test suite as you make changes/improvements. The risk is you don't always know the full scope of these sorts or problems/variations early in the development cycle, and they may be costly to address later on.
Personally I wouldn't go out of my way to make a "diverse" team of engineers to mitigate that type of problem. I'd rather have a non-diverse team of competent engineers I could trust to ensure the requirements were as comprehensive as possible and minimize the number of "hidden" requirements to be discovered as development progressed.
People don't have different thought processes, especially not as a function of race. What some people have are non-normal perspectives, however those people are nearly always either very very stupid or very very smart. Hence non-normal. Human beings nearly all think and solve problems similarly--it's part of what makes us all the same species. Our cognitive algorithms are basically pre-programmed.
For example: Cats don't push. Really--watch how cats play and interact with objects. Cats can scoop and pull. However, do not push. Even the typical "Cat Pat" is just the first stage of a scoop or a gentle smack.
Humans similar in that we have particular thinking and problem solving aparati that are literally baked into our hardware. Anybody who tells you that a black woman has a different way of problems solving is lying. She doesn't. She's human like the rest of us. A man from Sudan will jury rig the same solutions to his problems as a man from Bolivia if he is given the same tools or is in the same environment.
I'll agree that there's a degree of genetics at play, but I'm a strong supporter of the idea that culture drives a large portion of behavior. Have you seen what passes for black culture in the U.S.? Awful stuff, I can't imagine the state of my mind if I had been raised on that. One could argue that only a lost cause would willingly remain under the influence of a destructive culture, but I was a kid once and know there's only so much agency you can expect until a certain point in maturity is reached. More simply, no one can be expected to choose a better option unless the subject actually understands that they can choose.
It gets difficult to decipher the cultural influence web when it comes to figuring out why so many whites want to kneel, so I understand that it's an unattractive stance to a lot of people. An oversimplification is that we have multiple cultures at work that support the idea of "the strong must serve the weak".
Solid and sensible answer, thanks.
I don't take lectures on anti-racism from people who want me dead.
Or from anyone
Because searching for racism in every thing you see will surely end racism once and for all.
Especially when you narrow down the definition of racism so it's only applicable to one race, yay.
They have also widened the definition of racism considerably
The reason there is a lack of diversity in STEM is due to the fact that certain ethnic groups and women do not, as a whole, have interest in these fields.
Maybe they are too stupid?
Do you see the problem with super open ended questions designed to prey on empathy? They fall apart if the person lacks basic civil respect for you.
engineering: the study of bullshit communist psyops
people will die because of this
Anything said before the word "but" doesn't matter.
But 90 engineers in my place are black i.e indians and pakis So why would you give anti racism training to black people (who we all know cant be racist) ?
This world confuses me.
What school is this?
Women are comically easy to manipulate because of “feels”.