The UCSB shooter--an Aspie with a rant against women

Post Reply New Topic

I'm pretty sure the rocket graph was post-explosion, but yeah, that was for sure a horror. No, they put together a mishmosh of tables, some of them only marginally related to the problem, and did a fine job of obscuring it. It's a chronic problem in sci/eng, people mumbling to themselves and expecting the audience to be hanging out in their brains, ready to catch the meaning. Unfortunately, if you don't practice communicating with audiences and it doesn't come natural, you're unlikely to figure it out when it counts. Just takes too long.

Part of the problem was that the NASA managers actually needed them to make a coherent case. You'll see the same thing if you watch sci-friendly Congressional members talking to scientists/sci-mgmt people about funding. You can ramble at the friendly rep all you want about the wonders of your science, but he has to be able to explain why more money should happen even though it looks like you've sunk 17 years and got nothing.

Not my own Thiokol story, btw, that's Tufte's, in, I think, Visual Explanations. Very nicely put together and has a much-needed critique of Feynman's O-ring show, too.

After reading the last few pages I have to ask: what does most of this have to do with the phyco who shot all those people?

The technical term is "thread-drift."

But people have got some pretty interesting discussion going, especially Nobody Knows and Tarantella.

phyco's algae, totally different topic.

It sounds to me as though the engineer who found the problem was frank with NASA staff about it, and downright blunt with his boss about his follow-up (bolded sections). He pushed the issue hard enough to override management decisions and make them conspicuously uncomfortable. As far as I can tell, the engineer did his job - and then some. If anyone mumbled at subsequent NASA meetings, it was probably under orders.

Last edited by NobodyKnows on 29 Jul 2014, 10:59 pm, edited 3 times in total.

I meant phycho. My mistake

The issue is that one may not be able to get results for 50 years meaning it could take a long time to obtain results. Congressional members want things short term.

The problem with your argument is evident in the above quotation. Anecdotal evidence means nothing. You cannot extrapolate from one person's experience and conclude that it applies to the over 7 billion people who are alive.

Everybody makes broad generalizations about groups of people based on personal experience or conventional wisdom. It is part of human nature. However, to assert that these broad generalizations are true without quantitative data backing you up is simply to state an opinion, not fact. If you state something forcefully as if it is a fact, don't you think you should have more than just anecdotal evidence to back it up? I don't think you are aware of your biases or where you stand in society as compared to others. Your experience is unique to you based on your age, what part of the country you grew up in, what career path you chose, what education you received, who your friends were, etc. There is no guarantee that your experience is typical. You are a college professor who (if I am not mistaken) helped write a standardized test. I think you know what I am talking about. It is basic Research 101 stuff. Hypothesis --> set up experiment to test hypothesis --> assume hypothesis to be false until the qualitative data proves that the hypothesis is true.

You ought to check out Tufte's treatment -- it's a pretty crushing demo of failure to communicate. The engineer was frank, very frank -- but not in terms persuasive or particularly meaningful to the NASA staff. He knew perfectly well what he meant. He just didn't know how to sock NASA in the eye with it, which meant his argument came down to "trust me, I'm an engineer, I know what these tables mean". And, given the stakes at NASA, that wasn't enough. Given the pressures to launch, he had to come up with something that said unmistakeably, in terms anyone, including journalists, could recognize: If you launch, the nation's schoolchildren will likely watch Mrs. McAuliffe die. I don't know that it even occurred to him that this was his job.

I meant "mumbling" metaphorically. Scientists/engineers failing to recognize they're talking to themselves & largely incomprehensibly to anyone who's not in their brain or working at their side. It's a serious problem, impedes too much work.

Last edited by tarantella64 on 30 Jul 2014, 12:27 am, edited 1 time in total.

Not all feminists hate men. My definition of a feminist is a person who believes in empowering women and actively seeks to do so. According to that definition, I am a feminist, have been for a long time.

Where did you get all of these conspiracy theories from about feminists?

Yes. But if you want the money from Congress -- and, if you're a scientist, you do -- you have to be more persuasive than "science takes a long time". A good rep/senator will help coach the scientists into producing useable rhetoric.

arguing based on anecdotal evidence again...this time lack of anecdotal evidence.

Your experience is not the measuring stick of everyone else's reality.

That's all true. However, three decades is a long time to go knocking around in the world, and while my sample is surely skewed, it's very far from homogenous. It's also not small, nor is it limited to people I know personally. So I'm guessing this is somewhat better than "my sister's baby" or "none of my classmates". And while some of my experience has been unusual, it's far from unique. Would I claim it suits Boo's territory, no. But the US? In a broad socioeconomic swath, removing the religiously conservative? I bet it's not totally out in space.

Still missing the point.

depends on the branch of psychology

But you are doing that. You have been doing that repeatedly. Every time you say "women" this or "men" that, you are generalizing your experience to everybody. Your experience isn't even representative of the U.S., let alone "men in general" or "women in general".

When you make any statement about "men" or "women", that includes people of all ages all over the globe. Hell, you can't even speak for women outside of your cohort or socioeconomic or ethnic/racial background within the U.S. because social norms vary within the U.S. based on age, socioeconomic status, and race/ethnicity. The U.S. is too diverse of a place to make any kind of generalizations about mating behavior.