Randy Olson

> "Students, prisoners, pacifists and whistle-blowers"---at least two of these, students and whistle-blowers, have been primarily attacked by the leftist university administrations and the current American executive, also on the left.

What you call "left" in this argument is actually centre right. Sorry but the left barely exists in the US, compared to other nations. Your confusion is probably due to the binary party system where, interestingly, 0 = 1.

Anyhow, though they share some common grounds, the left is not and cannot be "liberal". (For example, no leftist would argue for the corporatization of free speech in their right minds, as you did in your liberalist comment, excusing it as "not perfectly ideal".)

For classical leftism, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marxism

For modern leftism, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Left

> leftist university administrations and the current American executive, also on the left

Leftist university administrators do not exist in the US. No leftist university administrator would take an active (pro/supporting) role in a system that depends on the exploitation of adjunct faculty, the active sabotaging of unions by universities, and the overall commodification[1] of education.

The current American executive is not leftist either, as demonstrated by their trend towards building a surveillance system for elitist / corporate US dictatorship.

In light of the above, you are in no position to call any article "idiotic."

edit: [1]…

To add to andylei's comment, I've pasted my own reply from Randal Olson's follow-up article (http://www.randalolson.com/2014/06/15/the-double-edged-sword-of-gender-equality/#comment-2051):

I agree that men and women most likely do make different career choices. Yet, choices aren't made in a vacuum.

We have a culture that reinforces ideas of innate gender roles. Little boys are told every day that they need to be tough when they get hurt, that they shouldn't be a crybaby. Little girls are told that they can't handle rough housing, that math is too hard for them. Little girls are told they should be friendly and "nice", that they should play well with others and build communities, mediate between friends. Little boys are told that they need to be responsible and be able to take care of people.

These attitudes are shifting. I am glad that they are shifting. When we tell boys and men that they have to be tough, we create a culture that makes it harder for men who are struggling with things things like depression and addiction to seek help or even admit that they have a problem to their friends. When we tell girls and women that they are weaker and less capable in certain fields, they begin to internalize those values. They begin to believe that they really aren't cut out for it, that it is too hard.

There is a lot more that can be said on this topic, and to some degree it can be debated about just how "innately" different men and women are. However, the problem is that this…

> Sure, but it seems more than a little convenient that the male-chosen professions seem to generally pay significantly more, on average, than the female-chosen ones.

They don't. Most men have to work in order to earn money and attract a partner. You think all of us love sitting in open offices, following our Scrum Master? Of course not, we just don't have the luxury, as do women, to follow our 'passions' in lower paying jobs. We can't marry a breadwinner too easily. We don't receive subsidies from the state, unlike women who are a net tax loss. We aren't able to attract a mate simply by being young, as can women, due to biological differences between genders.

In Scandinavia, where salaries are progressively taxed and women have tons of opportunity to do what they want, women still choose not to sit in front of computers all day. Why the hell would they if everyone's salary is essentially equalized, regardless of whether you're a part-time teacher, social worker or a talented computer engineer working 60/hours a week. All salaries are taxed down to a median $75K / year, with the same health insurance, subsidized parental leave, etc.

Thus, Scandinavian women follow their 'passions' which is what most Western women do, as we see from their choices in college majors, all of which are unarguably 'easier' but pay less. If society were to equalize my salary at $75K year whether I coded all day or worked for a charity or NGO or a music teacher or artist or actor, I'd dump my…

It's a somewhat interesting read, but one that I cannot agree with the conclusions as the author seems to have not bothered to read up on the data with regards to gender ratio in other careers.

For example the following claim made by the author:

>Women are less likely to be interested in programming than men. But if you ban the smart women from every other occupation – well, they’ll take it. Once you unban them, they’ll go to other things they like more, like being veterinarians (80% women) and forensic scientists (74% women). My guess is in 1980, neither of those careers had many women in them. Where did all those super-smart women who now dominate the fields come from? Probably places like schoolteaching and programming!

Can have doubt immediately cast on it by examining the percentage of women graduates by all degree types [1]. If we presume this to be true, then in the 80s we should see a large tick up in other degrees followed by a large tick down in computer science. And well, the data doesn't exactly support that. In fact, Computer Science is one of the few that bucks the trend of the other degrees. His entire argument essentially boils down to 'women are interested in these degrees, and men are interested in these degrees' which is a soft-argument saying that genetic or gender-related differences is why we see such large disparities between various careers. He handwaves away the statistic relating to the drop in the 80s, which makes me have trouble taking him…

check out this article that was posted here a while back
https://www.randalolson.com/2026/02/07/the-are-you-sure-problem-why-your-ai-keeps-changing-its-mind/

The article's main idea is that for an AI, sycophancy or adversarial (contrarian) are the two available modes only. It's because they don't have enough context to make defensible decisions. You need to include a bunch of fuzzy stuff around the situation, far more than it strictly "needs" to help it stick to its guns and actually make decisions confidently

I think this is interesting as an idea. I do find that when I give really detailed context about my team, other teams, ours and their okrs, goals, things I know people like or are passionate about, it gives better answers and is more confident. but its also often wrong, or overindexes on these things I have written. In practise, its very difficult to get enough of this on paper without a: holding a frankly worrying level of sensitive information (is it a good idea to write down what I really think of various people's weaknesses and strengths?) and b: spending hours each day merely establishing ongoing context of what I heard at lunch or who's off sick today or whatever, plus I know that research shows longer context can degrade performance, so in theory you want to somehow cut it down to only that which truly matters for the task at hand and and and... goodness gracious its all very time consuming and im not sure its worth the squeeze

> Girls are discouraged from pursuing math and hard sciences through pre-college education, explicitly, culturally, and socially. The social blockers between girls and engineering are particularly acute compared to those between them and law or medicine. You can look at college degree numbers for example. Women now outnumber men when it comes to college enrollment and graduation, but women are far more likely to pursue "soft sciences" like psychology or sociology.

This point keeps getting brought up, but the actual statistics are quietly ignored.

Women make up over 40% of math and statistics graduates; A majority of accountants and biologists are women; Chemistry majors are evenly split between the genders.

If girls are socially discouraged from pursuing math and hard-sciences, why does this not actually manifest itself across fields requiring math and hard science? Does a math major require less mathematics than an engineering one? Is accounting not mostly about math and numbers any more? Are chemistry and biology no longer considered hard sciences?

I'm not saying the cause is necessarily not societal pressures, but this popular assertion being repeated ad-nausea seems to be, at best, incomplete. Women that have been told their entire lives that math is for boys seem to have no problem pursuing a higher-education in math in droves;…