Skepchick is a group blog on skepticism, science, atheism, and feminism, with posts on internet culture and misleading studies.
HN commenters cite it to debunk clickbait coverage of studies, explain the Dunning-Kruger effect, and discuss Popper's paradox of tolerance.
I was a physics teacher in Australia and the UK from 2015 to 2021. I wrote a comment about teaching in a boys' school yesterday, but most of my career was spent in girls' schools, due partly to the Vogonic culture of the NSW Department of Education and Training.
There were many 'get girls into STEM' initiatives, and they all felt very tokenistic and superficial. They were science-themed, but none of them got at the guts of STEM.
In Australia, physics - in the schools that offer it - is taught by chemistry or biology teachers who've been given a physics textbook. In the private boys' schools, there's a cadre of actual physicists, but they're old men on the verge of retirement; students in government schools, systemic Catholic schools and private girls' schools get a very un-mathematical physics education, if their school offers a specialised physics course at all.
The end result of this is the propagation of a very misleading view of STEM to girls. All the high-paying STEM jobs are in those fields that have a rigorous mathematical formalism - physics, computer science, engineering - but our STEM outreach programs ended up pushing girls towards 'soft science' careers in biology. I understand that there are now so many bio lab workers in the UK that they're now on minimum wage.
If we really want to encourage women and girls to take up high-paying STEM careers, we need to be demonstrating and teaching the cognitive styles that underlie success in mathematics. At the moment,…
Wow. That license asserts that Taiwan is part of China, requires you to “respect social ethics and moral standards”.
It also forbids several specific uses, and they’re not what you might think on a naive reading of the English translation.
When the CCP says “terrorism”, they’re justifying their genocidal policies towards ethnic and religious minorities
https://www.hrw.org/report/2021/04/19/break-their-lineage-break-their-roots/chinas-crimes-against-humanity-targeting
When the CCP says “misinformation”, they’re rewriting history to ignore Tiananmen Square. https://www.britannica.com/event/Tiananmen-Square-incident
When the CCP says “national security”, they condemning people like Naomi Wu who don’t fit cleanly into their worldview
https://skepchick.org/2023/08/maker-naomi-wu-is-silenced-by-chinese-authorities-and-why-i-blame-elon-musk/
Quotes:
> “Laws and Regulations” refers to the laws and administrative regulations of the
mainland of the People's Republic of China (for the purposes of this Agreement
only, excluding Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan).
> 1) Your use of the Yi Series Models must comply with the Laws and Regulations as
well as applicable legal requirements of other countries/regions, and respect
social ethics and moral standards, including but not limited to, not using the
Yi Series Models for purposes prohibited by Laws and Regulations as well as
applicable legal requirements of other countries/regions, such as harming
national security, promoting…
http://skepchick.org/2014/01/grantland/
Uses of the Word “Mistake:” 15
Uses of the Word “Mistake” in Reference to Actions on the Part of Grantland
Writers & Editors: 14
Uses of the Word “Mistake” in Reference to the Actions of the Outraged: 1
Compliments Given to Grantland Writers & Editors: 12
Manic Pixie Dreamgirl-Esque Words Used to Describe the Late Dr. V: 5
Total Sentences: 214
Sentences Mostly About Dr. V: 9
Mentions of the Motivations and Feelings of Grantland Writers & Editors: 23
Mentions of the Mean Things Others Have Done: 17
Mentions of the Sad Feelings of Grantland Writers & Editors: 9
Mentions of the Sad Feelings of Dr. V’s Family & Friends: 1
Mentions of Dr. V’s Feelings, Any Kind: 0
Instances of “Apolog[y/ize]:” 3
Instances of “Sorry”: 1
Instances of the Word “Sorry” Directed at Anyone But Caleb Hannan: 0
Don't believe the clickbait titles. It's nothing earth shattering or unexpected.
From Skepchick: "This study also can’t speak to the frequency of female hunters: “80%” is a binary number, meaning that it only tells us that at some point 80% of these societies showed evidence that yeah, women here actively track, locate, and kill animals for sustenance. It doesn’t mean they did a greater or even equal amount of hunting as men. It only supports what seems to have become a pretty well-accepted fact: many modern hunter-gatherer societies, and probably many ancient ones, don’t or didn’t have strict gender roles that would forbid an able-bodied person from doing whatever they can do to help the health and safety of the larger community. " https://skepchick.org/2023/06/did-a-new-study-debunk-man-the-hunter-not-quite/
https://web.archive.org/web/20190929045043/https:/twitter.com/RichardDawkins/status/1178170072537264129
https://web.archive.org/web/20190929094120if_/https://twitter.com/saeen90_/status/1178242652468400128
But I don't really care about his views on biological genders, but what relevant point did he have when writing this message down in the blog post?:
https://skepchick.org/2011/07/the-privilege-delusion/
He's become a political agitator, and increasingly rarely a scientist.
This is not meant to say "stick to science", but if he wants to be political, I'm going to criticize is politics, because they suck and he does deserve scorn for them.
Maybe as an old guy don't tell a woman that her experience is wrong.
I don't think that this is a radical "post-modernist" idea.
most comic book artists and writers are male, most readers are male, a big chunk are teens, and males like pretty/nude/curvaceous females, most teen males likes big breasts and many teen females want to have big breasts
The TV show Mad Men is set in the early 1960s USA, when the same thing could be said of the professional world. "Everyone who works here is men, our clients are men, our customers are men" etc. And yet there was a lot of discrimination and sexism then. And things have changed (in the professional business world) then.
the college/PC/lesbian/feminist litmob doesn't care about that, then it's not talked about
Sure they do. Here's a series of blog posts about how twilight has terrible characters. http://skepchick.org/2011/11/twilight-breaking-wind/