Gongol.com Archives: December 2024
December 15, 2024
Don't leave talent on the sidelines
An approving profile of Pearl Young, the first woman to work in a technical role at the predecessor to today's NASA, notes that her gender made her a target for supervisors in the 1930s who complained of her attitude. "Attitude", of course, is the kind of complaint that is just plausible enough that it can't be dismissed out of hand, but it's vague enough that it can't really be proven either true or untrue. ■ It's generally worth noting who is so insecure in their status that they turn to non-falsifiable complaints about others in order to try to hold on to their own positions. Young's co-workers might have been aggrieved by a workplace attitude, but they also might have resented seeing a woman competing with them in the workplace. ■ Few things seem more likely to reflect the actual state of nature than to assume that raw talent is distributed widely throughout the human population. It would be close to madness to assume that any gender, ethnicity, or other inborn trait puts any individual closer to some kind of special claim to genius than any other. ■ This means that the bigger the net cast by a society to try to capture great talent, the more of it they should find. Arbitrarily and systemically excluding women from the scientific and technical fields, as was a widespread practice in the US until not all that long ago, was an incredibly stupid "own-goal". And yet it's still practiced by some of our rivals yet today. ■ For instance, China still doesn't have more than a handful of women in its space program, even in 2024. This doesn't mean they would be better off with a system of quotas to raise that number; the disparity is the evidence of some much deeper problems. ■ But if a group is selected from a large population that ought to have widely-distributed talent and the resulting picks look badly skewed to the notable exclusion of significant groups, then it's a strong symptom that the selectors are probably leaving much of the available natural talent on the sidelines.
