One of my main beefs is the mismatch between the headline "Brilliant Thinkers ..." and the contents of the page. If they had labeled their page accurately "Brilliant Female Thinkers..." I would be less annoyed, but they sneaking their biased filter in under a headline likely to attract more readers than the page's content would if accurately described.

> All that matters is whether the content is useful to the reader.

I find it remarkably useless, especially considering the shallow exploration of the scientists' processes.

> Reducing this website to “performative sexism” feels reductive and pointless.

I was talking about the web page, not the site. And if a page is biased, or employs false advertising to attract clicks, it is right to call that out.

You say that your colleague's diversity-focused activity gets results, and my question is: what results? A more diverse body of students studying neurology? And if that is the answer, then who cares? What is your argument that increased diversity makes neurology or science better?

If diversity is your objective function, fine. But there are other goals to pursue, and which should be pursued in academia by faculty. I think diversity is very far from what should be the top priority.

The advantage of diversity is that it is an easy metric to understand, pursue and make gains in.

It would be great if educators they could separate the search for truth from the search for "justice". Many can't. Fields in which facts only exist to support justice narratives probably don't belong in university at all.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_overproduction

We create small, smart cadres of people who watch power and wealth pass them by, and they advocate to overturn the system driving their envy.

Another neat thing about the "bus stop" was that the phone booth gave you no way to dial. There was no number pad. You'd pick it up, and the call would go straight to the operator, because neither she nor you actually knew what was going on. That is, the phone was a very old one, built for a system that relied on operators to "put you through". I remember calling the school to tell them I had arrived, and having to wait for the operator to find the right instructions in the manual to do that. Even then, there were only a few of those phones left in the US.

Deep Springs is on a different track, but not a totally dissimilar one. That is, the school has been attempting to feminize for decades, a process that culminated in its conversion to co-education in 2018 after a long legal battle. I get the school's newsletters and see occasional land acknowledgements penned by privileged people of color, which tracks with a known trend in US liberal arts colleges.

But the real shift at DS, triggered by co-education, seems to be that it's less hard-core. One person called it "Benningtonization". The boys and girls all hive off into pairs, and the communal life of mind and labor and governance shrinks as it cedes ground to America's default version of life together, the romantic couple.

But the school has gone through many phases. This is no doubt a temporary one.

Chips that break away from those standards have little chance of success.

Hardware is only as useful as the software that can run on it. Radically new hardware requires rewrites of certain layers of that software. Ain't nobody got time for that, unless they can be assured that there will be a large number of companies and customers who need software to run on the new hardware.

https://www.amazon.com/History-Warfare-John-Keegan/dp/067973...