“Feminism as a movement for political
and social equity is important, but
feminism as an academic clique
committed to eccentric doctrines
about human nature is not. Eliminating
discrimination against women is
important, but believing that women
and men are born with
indistinguishable minds is not.
Freedom of choice is important, but
ensuring that women make up exactly
50 percent of all professions is not.
And eliminating sexual assaults is
important, but advancing the theory
that rapists are doing their part in a
vast male conspiracy is not.”
I think this is a fallacy. the olden days were way worse. to put in presepective Carrots improving vision is propaganda created by the british yet see how many people believed it. Humans inventing and accepting fake beliefs to comfort themselves was never a new thing. Governments gaslighting its own citizens is communist party 101.
People always want to believe that yesterday was better and blame their problems on the new.
"The University of Melbourne recently advertised for three senior positions in mathematics intended for women. Their argument is that, by underrepresenting women on the faculty, they are not providing adequate support and representation for female students in mathematics (and by extension other STEM fields)."
So their argument is that female teachers teach feamle students better. So in this line of reasoning, traditional schools that separate by gender are better? Way to go full circle.
That's not my takeaway. My takeaway is that with few to no female faculty, female students may feel that they don't belong in the field; that they have no role models; or that they just don't have anyone to talk to about succeeding as a woman in a male-dominated field.
It has nothing to do with their being more effective at teaching the students (though there's no reason to think they'd be less effective either) and everything to do with helping the students feel like they belong in the department at all in order not to repel female students from the field.
I don't know. Maybe. What's your argument that we shouldn't?
I'm not ready to argue that this is the best possible way to go about things. I just don't agree that it implies that those doing the hiring necessarily think segregation is more effective for teaching.
I always understood it just by saying "Okay, if we take the last item and the first (so n+1), and then the second to last item and second item (so n-1 + 2 = n + 1), etc, we get to the middle in n/2 times. If it was odd, we have an extra n/2. But trying it out on a few series, and it's obvious it works out each way, odd or even, to n/2 * (n + 1).
That's the sum of all integers on the complex plane, solved using an analytical continuation of the Riemann zeta function at -1 (fwiw, by the same definition, the sum of 13, 26, 39...inf is also -1/12).
It's disingenuous to assert that is same as the sum of that infinite series without the associated caveats. By the definitions of infinite series that we all learned in calculus, that is a divergent series with no sum.
Edit: Wolfram Alpha[0] has a good graphic showing why this series converges to -1/12 (the one with the red line, drawing a peach-like shape). It also gives an intuition as to how complex numbers are influencing the results despite being omitted from the equation.
It depends on how you define the summation of infinite series. With the standard convergence type definitions you are correct. But it is possible to define this sum in a consistent way (e.g. Ramanujan summation or Riemann Zeta analytic continuation) as shown in Hardy's “Divergent Series”. The cost is that they have properties like rearranging the order of the terms gives a different result. Apparently this sum can come up in Quantum Field Theory when calculating vacuum force between two conducting plates.
~ STEVEN PINKER