A mockery of science

Very scary stuff about "transforming" science



The most frightening parts in my mind is how to implement this scheme.

Encouraging more women in the applied sciences is fine. As an engineer I've worked with female engineers and while there were less of them, they were often more competent than their male counterparts. Given, that they were often more interested on average than the more numerous males were.

But if you mandated quotas or ratios how would you force compliance? The Section 9 method would have the number of male engineers limited to keep funding from being cut.

Retention is also a problem. Once you have the "proper" number of women (or whatever other "group" one wants) how do you ensure that the ratio is maintained? People will drop out as the curriculum advances.

One can see the problems emerging from a "vigorous and transformative" methods.

The article also motions why there's no cause to push the amount of males in the Humanities to parity with the number of women.

There's also an upsetting undercut to the need to change "Culture of Science". That it needs to be more flexible and less competitive and driven.

It's not enough that largely unscientific people want to force the numbers of scientists and engineers into some arbitrary ratio, but they also want to change the nature of how science works. It shows a tremendous ignorance of how research, scientific methodology, and applied science work.

Science and engineering are very difficult and technical for a reason, but it's not like reality is important to these social engineers.