thisiszilff

I've always seen these rules as defaults. If you break them with a purpose then it can work, but otherwise they form a good basis for your writing.

You would think that we might one day get past this whole "strong vs weak" rhetoric, but therein lies the problem: we exit from the state of nature only to recreate those same conditions in a slightly more civil form.

I don't know, that's why the point is relevant. Were I to know then that would be my cross to bear and I could work towards that. I don't know where you live, but where I live I'm seeing a steady decline in quality of life and increased mental health problems in youth mainly related to anxiety about their future. A high paying career isn't a question of simply working hard for them, not is it available to all them. Many of them live with the risk of dipping into poverty at any moment and their safety nets have been chipped away over the years to be ineffective. They don't see a clear path to home ownership and many of them are straddled with debt for a degree that they now find out isn't particularly useful. They are in all cases set up to have worse lives than their parents. Aside from that they live with the looming specter of environmental disaster and political structures unable to effectively deal with the problems of the future. It isn't a question of wanting to change things so much as recognizing that things cannot continue as they've been. I'm not saying people shouldn't be getting jobs and pursuing economic stability, but that we have to be willing to rethink those systems to be sustainable.

The improvements that our country needs are broad structural improvements that prepare us for where we are and where we're going. The idea of "bear your cross and accept suffering without malice" makes sense, but it also tends towards championing individuals as both causes of their problems and the ones capable of solving them. It IS a great philosophy when there is some meaning to your suffering, when your cross is something you want to carry, but these days that philosophy ends up sounding like "shut up and get a job" in an rapdily changing era where we have to rethink our basic societal organization and our attitudes towards work. It's an attitude that reinforces ones adherence to the status quo rather than recognizing that what worked for our parents doesn't necessarily work for us.

I don't think the author denied any of that history. The fundamental question posed is why do we see 50/50 male/female in tech as some kind of gold standard to known we've reached gender equality, and why does that discussion often revolve around getting more underrepresented segments of the population to participate in tech.

Fundamentally the whole gender equality thing is about whether any given individual feels that they can live their life to its full potential. If those potentials were to differ in the large between men and women then that is fine.

Alternatively what if the problem had a lot more to do with how ingrained the drive for status is in men compared to women? That women are underrepresented because they're more likely to want work-life balance and they're competing with a horde of men willing to be miserable for years to attain status. The problem in that case isn't that there are too few women, but that there are too many men.

It seems to be saying that left bias is "people prefer to cooperation over pure self-interest/working on their own." Obviously sometimes cooperation is in your self-interest, but its the difference between thinking that employees will do what's best for the company and employees will do what's best for themselves. The right bias is that they are primarily self-interested while the left is that they see the groups interests as a priority.