Hi Elliot,
On Wed, April 17, 2013 7:52 am, Eliot Lear wrote:
Dan,
On 4/16/13 2:00 AM, Dan Harkins wrote:
Under the belief of "garbage in, garbage out", I tend to lie on these
sorts of repugnant questions. I invite others to join me. The more
suspect the quality of the data, the less value it has. Dan.
Please don't. We are trying to understand who we are. Is that SO
unreasonable?
We already know "who we are". This question is trying to decide our
gender make up and nothing good can come of it.
It will provide more "evidence" for people to make use of logical
fallacies-- "if P implies Q then look we now have evidence of Q
therefore P"-- which really have no place in an organization devoted
to engineering.
And it will be used as a baseline for doing work towards some goal
that has not been justified, work whose very nature requires treating
people according to what they are instead of who they are.
Look, bias stinks and when it exists its stench is detectable. I don't
recall seeing any evidence of bias being presented on this list. And I
don't believe there is any problem has been mentioned that we had or
have that is caused by this predominance of white men. It's just been
stated as a problem itself. We must have less white men. Why? Because,
that's why.
This question is the first step down a path we really should not go
down. If I can't stop the question from being asked then all I can hope
for is that the resulting data are so obviously wrong that they will be
of no use to anyone-- e.g. Berlin registration is 63% female.
regards,
Dan.