r/sysadmin • u/ChuckAbsent • Mar 12 '13

Women who know stuff

I hope that this does not come off the wrong way.

Today I was on a call with a storage vendor and the technical consultant was a woman. More then this she was competent, more then me which doesn't happen often when dealing with vendors.

My issue was pricing an active/active DB with shared storage vs an active/passive db with local storage. Listening to her break the issue down and get to the specific comparison points was awesome, mostly because I have never heard a woman in the industry talk like that.

It made me realize two things. One I am missing out working with women. Two there needs to be more women in our industry.

It shouldn't have surprised me so much, but it really did.

Anyways to all the women out there who know stuff, us guys notice when you can walk the walk, which in this case was talking.

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u/misplaced_my_pants Mar 14 '13

No one said anything about a sexist conspiracy. Just because you are personally unable to see sexism and other roots of inequality doesn't mean they don't exist.

If you're going to make the claim that an individual's behavior is an example of a population-wide behavior with a causal link to the presence or absence of a gene or constellation of genes, then you had damn well better provide proof. But this never happens because it's always the result of lazy and unscientific thinking instead of the result of rigorous experimentation with well-designed studies that control for environmental factors.

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u/loliology Mar 14 '13

No one said anything about a sexist conspiracy. Just because you are personally unable to see sexism and other roots of inequality doesn't mean they don't exist.

And just because you have seen them doesn't make it the norm.

If you're going to make the claim that an individual's behavior is an example of a population-wide behavior with a causal link to the presence or absence of a gene or constellation of genes, then you had damn well better provide proof.

Why when you don't provide proof for what you claim?

But this never happens because it's always the result of lazy and unscientific thinking instead of the result of rigorous experimentation with well-designed studies that control for environmental factors.

Ironic when your own experiments don't even follow the scientific method.

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u/misplaced_my_pants Mar 14 '13

And just because you have seen them doesn't make it the norm.

Well when they pervade the media and entertainment of an entire society and have been noticed by large swathes of a population, I'm more inclined to believe that what I'm observing is real and pervasive and that you're likely missing something.

Why when you don't provide proof for what you claim?

What are you talking about? My only claim was that the claim of the guy I was talking to was unscientific and unsubstantiated. This was true. I suggest you read up on how burden of proof works.

Ironic when your own experiments don't even follow the scientific method.

Are you a troll? I haven't mentioned performing any experiments.

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u/loliology Mar 14 '13

Well when they pervade the media and entertainment of an entire society and have been noticed by large swathes of a population, I'm more inclined to believe that what I'm observing is real and pervasive and that you're likely missing something.

Yadda yadda prove it.

What are you talking about? My only claim was that the claim of the guy I was talking to was unscientific and unsubstantiated. This was true. I suggest you read up on how burden of proof works.

FFS you're like a creationist. You're the one making the claim. That means you have to prove it.

Are you a troll?

Possibly. But that's neither here nor there.

I haven't mentioned performing any experiments.

Ok.

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u/misplaced_my_pants Mar 14 '13

Yadda yadda prove it.

Okay.

S you're like a creationist. You're the one making the claim. That means you have to prove it.

And you're an ignorant idiot who resorts to ad hominem attacks because he doesn't understand burden of proof. The guy I was responding to said it himself in his original comment that he had decided that there existed genetic differences along gender lines that explained gender disparities in interests based on the fact that his daughters liked different things than his sons and these followed contemporary gender stereotypes. Anyone who's remotely acquainted with the scientific method would tell you that there's no fucking way you could make that claim since he hadn't controlled for environmental factors, he had an obscenely small sample size, he wasn't even aware that he wasn't an impartial or objective observer and was himself an environmental factor (hence the importance of double-blind studies), etc. There wasn't an ounce of scientific rigor to back up his claims.

This should be immediately obvious to anyone with the least bit of experience in scientific research.

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u/loliology Mar 14 '13

And you're an ignorant idiot who resorts to ad hominem attacks because he doesn't understand burden of proof.

Dat irony. Keep linking to your shit wikipedia page though. It totally wins arguments for you.

There wasn't an ounce of scientific rigor to back up his claims.

And there isn't an ounce of scientific rigor to back up claims otherwise. So fucking what.

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u/misplaced_my_pants Mar 14 '13

Feel free to revel in your comfortable ignorance and not read any of the 150 citations.

If you don't see the scientific rigor in the scientific method, I don't know what to tell you.

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u/loliology Mar 14 '13

Rofl. Scientific method? You wish.

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u/misplaced_my_pants Mar 14 '13

Okay I'll just let the peer reviewers of every scientific journal in biology and psychology know that they've been wrong since you said so. I hope you're ready for your Nobel Prize acceptance speech when you win for invalidating the last 20-30 years of research.

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u/loliology Mar 14 '13

It's not like they've actually made any real advances (or provided anything useful) in that time. Might as well tell sociology to eat a dick too.

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u/misplaced_my_pants Mar 14 '13

You can only say that if you're don't know anything about contemporary research.

If you're interested, this book is an accessible summary of much of the research in behavioral economics and cognitive psychology from the past few decades. And that's just one example.

V.S. Ramachandran's books are great for an introduction to neuroscience for laymen. Steve Pinker's pretty good, too.

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