Actual post from Dec. 15 from one of the streams. This is a real topic. As far as promoting women and minorities even if their qualifications are not as good as the white male scientists, I am all for it. We need diversity at the lab and if that is what it takes, so be it. Quit your whining. Look around the lab, what do you see? White male geezers. How many African Americans do you see at the lab? Virtually none. LLNL is one of the MOST undiverse places you will see. Face it folks, LLNL is an institution of white male privilege and they don't want to give up their privileged positions. California, a state of majority Hispanics has the "crown jewel" LLNL nestled in the middle of it with very FEW Hispanics at all!
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This is out and out false. If you read these reports they do terrible statistics. They count a manager with 20 years experience in the same position to a manager with only 5 year as being the exactly the same. If you account number of year of experience such as comparing men and women with the same experience for the same position the gap goes away. Guess what there are more younger women in manger positions now than men. You need to compare men and women with the same age and some number of years of experience.
Of course it takes a somewhat more advanced analysis to do this and unfortunately so much of the social sciences completely lack any real understanding of statistical methods. This is way so often when you see these types of studies you simply cannot trust them. There is even a school of thought that social sciences is simply not at the level of other sciences and one should just dismiss the entire field. I am not sure if I would go that far but I would say the odds of these studies being accurate and far less than you would find in physical sciences.
If anyone is interested just google the "replication crisis" "P-Hacking" or "Retracation Whatch". My sense is the field is going to get worse, as you can take some data feed to an AI and look for a correction. If the correlation does not fit to what you want you either trim the data on some flimsily arguments or you run it on another AI. A sure giveaway this these studies are probably bs is that the never directly observe the claim. For example "Women are less represented in management positions" that raw data may be correct and is a real observation however the next step "This is due to sexism by cis men" does not logically follow. There could be a large number of other reasons, but these other reasons are never considered or no additional data is found to rule these out alternative explanations. This is standard way these studies are done. In many ways they are not even using scientific methods but try to sell themselves as science with all the rigor and methods.
4/15/2023 12:15 PM
Counter Point: McMillian, Nanos, Parney, Kuckuck, Brown, Knap, and Wallace Sure Budil is not on par with most of the quality of the past LANL and LLNL directors before 2000 but she is certainly as good and more qualified than most we have had the last 25 years. I would take Kim over these people any day and yes on paper she is more qualified than many of these and so far she has a done a better job than these people. In many ways I think she is better choice than Mason, but Mason seems to be doing a decent job.
By the way I am anti woke as they come but you should also be honest. Once you compare her to others the idea she was hired only because she was a women makes no sense once you look at her record and history.
4/16/2023 8:43 PM"
Not buying it. Kim is better than average than the LLNL and LANL directors in the last 20 years. You said she would not have this job if she was a dude. I disagree.
OK, you are joking of course. Workforce matters are not a performance report card metric in any direct or binding type of language. You can’t break a “law” that isn’t well defined or not defined at all. LLNS may be many things, but they are not sloppy with the terms of their contractual cash cow.
4/17/2023 4:23 PM
Standing down a lab for 6 months on utterly made reasons, publicly attacking the workforce, attacking the mission, and being so bad that the DOE had send in Captain Willard to remove you for using unsound methods is also not one the best decisions that a lab director has ever made. So keep that in mind next you think Kim made a bad decision.
"Captain Willard" and Nanos? hmm I think I understand now. Says a lot about what kind man Nanos is. I think it is closer to Conrads version of Heart of Darkness rather than Francis Ford Coppola's version. In the Conrad version Kurtz hates the natives and thinks of them of animals. Nanos thought of the same as the scientists at LANL.
Everyone gets everything he wants. I wanted a mission, and for my sins, they gave me one. Brought it up to me like room service. It was a real choice mission, and when it was over, I'd never want another.
I used to think if I died in an evil place then my soul wouldn't make it to heaven. Well, I don't care where it goes as long it ain't here.
Pretty strange. I think you might want to seek help.
4/22/2023 5:17 PM
My gosh, does anyone on this blog have any cultural literacy? I would have expected people working at LLNL or LANL to have some understanding of literature, art, and history. I am always shocked when someone makes a literature reference, quote, or comment about history that is followed up by some poster with a comment that shows an utter lack of knowledge or anything remotely intellectual.
Funny for you to be talking about "remote." Of course, your intellectuality is in your own mind only.
4/23/2023 5:30 PM
Sigh, this is the level of what we are dealing with. At some level communication is impossible once you are beyond one standard deviation from one another.
You are several standard deviations away from normal people. Might want to think about that. (Yeah, I understand you will now feel compelled to brag about that.)
One would expect LANL and LLNL people to have at least one standard deviation beyond the normal distribution. If that were the case, they would have some understanding of statistics, they would get literary references, and they would understand irony, sarcasm, or hypotheticals. The 6.21 PM poster is at least consistent, but I certainly hope he is not representative of the average LANL technical workforce.