This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
This would be fine if he had anything to back it up, but his only "evidence" is complaining that there are no Chinese Feynmans... but there aren't any Feynmans in the 21st century.
Incidentally, by my count 7 of the last 50 Nobel laureates in Physics and 3 out of 16 Fields Medal winners were Asian.
It's worth noting that this is roughly inline with Asian representation at Harvard today (14%) and most Nobel laureates were born before 1950 -- research labs weren't really accessible to a billion Asians then. So not sure how meaningful those numbers are in either direction.
(Side note: interestingly, Fields Medal winners cannot be older than 40).
This is cope, of course. Our Feynmans are called names like «Ilya Sutskever» and «Noam Shazeer», or if you want a Gentile, «Alec Radford». The focus of frontier research has shifted from bits to bytes and from public institutions to for-profit companies, while professional celebs have picked up the slack of mental representation for heroic figures. But sci-fi valorization of flashy fundamental physics results, partially driven by military agendas of the XX century and purely aesthetic raygun gothic midwittery, persists; and so people try to explain the non-real phenomenon of our era lacking Feynmans.
More options
Context Copy link
I noted that there is the question of whether he is right.
I guess the question so what is the right denominator for determine over or under representation.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link