epi8

> Also, be sure you're in a dense urban environment.

Why?

It's just a superstition. I give demos all the time, and I hate it when I do a test run and people tell me how awesome it's working. Tell me afterwards, you'll jinx it if you tell me before. It doesn't actually work that way, but hot damn it feels like it does.

And the demos I give don't put anyone's lives at risk!

That's a very important distinction that the "easy-mode" metaphors don't really take into account. A good word for it is "intersectionality" (though please note that many people will define intersectionality as only applying to marginalized groups): it's the various ways all of one's "labels" (gender, class, ethnicity, race, etc) interact, and it's something to keep in mind while having these discussions.

The reason is that there isn't one axis along which we can measure "more" or "less" oppressed or disenfranchised. Men tend to lose custody battles more frequently, for instance.

That said, you can still look at a group of people and say something along the lines of "in such-and-such context, members of the first group tend to be more successful at this goal than members of a second group". Phrasing it this way, I think, tends to deflect the "us-vs-them" or "men-vs-women" mentality that crops up fairly often in these discussions (especially when they take place online, where anonymity and lack of non-textual clues make it more difficult to have a civil conversation).

The point of all this is this: if you are a man, you are more likely to kill yourself or be homeless, and that is a HUGE PROBLEM. If you are a black man, by some accounting, you are more likely to be raped than a white woman (because black men are disproportionately sent to prison), and that is a HUGE PROBLEM. But neither of these problems make the discrimination faced by women in the STEM fields less of a problem, it just means that we have many huge problems on our hands.

When you are a member of group A, and group A tends to be more successful than group B (so, male programmers as group A and female programmers as group B), I think it is your obligation to ask _why_ there is this statistical skew, and if the answer is "systematic discrimination due to power imbalance", work to correct it, irrespective of how your group fares in other such comparisons. That doesn't mean that your group faring poorly in these comparisons is not unfair, because it totally is. It just means that there is a complex web of privileges* and disadvantages that we _all_ need to help untangle.

(*You didn't think I was going to get through five paragraphs about identity politics without whipping out the P-word, did you?)

"such as yourself"

I take a fair amount of offense at this statement. I am stating that, given that the word "freedom" is commonly being used not as a word, but as a political catch-phrase with multiple, often contradicting meanings, I prefer to clarify the usage, either by substituting it with another word, or defining carefully what one means by "freedom". Far from attempting to redefine "freedom", I am attempting to _totally ban its usage goddamn it_, since, as you have pointed out, its definition has been co-opted to mean something entirely alien to its original meaning.

Edit: To clarify, when I said ban, I was exaggerating. I am not supporting literally banning the word "freedom", nor sending anyone to the gulags. I simply would prefer if people were to choose other, more exact, less politically-charged words in the place of "freedom".

Can we stop saying things like "more freedom"? Freedom is really poorly defined even to an individual, and tends to lead to sentences like "they hate our freedom".

You could very well argue that freedom means absolutely no laws, absolutely no government, no public sector, period. You could also very well argue that freedom means being able to be confident that you have access to medical care, education, and child-support regardless of who you are, or your income level.

Freedom doesn't actually _mean_ anything anymore, it's just a political catch-phrase.

Can I rephrase your post and say "less government support would scare Francois..."?

Who judges if the essay is good?

Running this on the client side would require a C++ compiler in javascript, right? I don't know much about web dev.

If I just got really freaking lucky with my predictions yesterday, then there's no reason to imagine I would get really freaking lucky again. Over time, my average accuracy would become the mean of the distribution.

On the other hand, if I actually _am_ good at making predictions, then I will continue to make good predictions.

The point is that a lot of the time immigrants who received Anglicized names did so not because they chose to, but because they happened to get an immigration officer who gave them an Anglicized spelling on Ellis island.