[FRIAM] culture vs things (was: capitalism vs. individualism)

[Prof David West]

Software development (not computer science or software engineering) should be the most "people" oriented profession out there. Software is written collaboratively by people. Software affects every aspect of other people's lives: work, play, love, ... . More software failures are caused by people, or more accurately by lack of understanding of people.

Sarcasm ahead:
People are harder than "things" and the "boys" that made computer science and software engineering what it is today, are afraid of the hard stuff. 

At the end of WWII, England was the most advanced country in the world in terms of computer/software technology. And there were far more women in the field than men.  A government edict drove the women from the discipline (actually made it semi-illegal to hold jobs in the field). Et Voila — England lost the lead and is a relative backwater.

davew



On Mon, Nov 11, 2019, at 5:13 PM, glen∈ℂ wrote:
> Yes! Along the same lines of communities policing themselves, 
> pluralists are at risk of runaway relativism. I was reading this 
> article 
> <https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/nov/02/smashing-the-patriarchy-why-theres-nothing-natural-about-male-supremacy> recently and was taken aback by this excerpt:
> 
> > Steven Pinker, for instance, has argued that men prefer to work with “things”, whereas women prefer to work with “people”. This, he said, explains why more women work in the (low-paid) charity and healthcare sector, rather than getting PhDs in science. According to Pinker, “The occupation that fits best with the ‘people’ end of the continuum is director of a community services organisation. The occupations that fit best with the ‘things’ end are physicist, chemist, mathematician, computer programmer, and biologist.”
> 
> I'm distressed by *celebrity*. But I don't draw a clear distinction 
> between the cultural (aka "people") and the natural. I've forgotten who 
> introduced me to it. But I like the concept of the "naturfact" ... like 
> "artifact", but a found thing modified or remade by us ... partly 
> synthetic, partly natural ... part thing, part "people". It's this 
> mixing of the 2 categories that makes me interested in "stigmergy". One 
> person's purely synthetic "city" is another person's purely natural 
> habitat.
> 
> When I hear people seemingly committed to an obviously incompetent and 
> corrupt person like Trump, no matter what he says or does, I can't help 
> but think their commitment is purely a cultural commitment. They, like 
> me, don't see a sharp distinction between natural things and cultural 
> things. So, since they're part of my "tribe", I feel a special 
> responsibility to criticize them and argue the complement: that there 
> *is* a difference between real things (like facts) versus spun 
> narratives or "cults of personality" (wherein both Trump and JFK are 2 
> peas in a pod, regardless of any other differences).
> 
> 
> 
> On 11/11/19 3:26 AM, Prof David West wrote:
> > The most distressing, to me, aspect of what is happening is that the discussion - rational on both sides, critical of both sides, has been reduced to a pretty much exclusive focus on one office and one individual. It is impossible to have an informative discussion about actions taken by the individual, in historical context, in terms of philosophy, policy, and context.
> > 
> > I was speaking recently with a friend whose profession is political historian. She was comparing Trump and JFK with regards actions in the areas of nepotism (and generally trusting family and "cronies" over political professionals) and the intelligence community (both men spoke ill of it and ignored it). Interesting stuff, but she could not imagine such a discussion getting attention, or getting published, in today's black and white rhetorical context.
> 
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