Atheists

"Is the democratic form of government successful in all parts of India? But the solution to the problems of democracy is more democracy. There can be no democracy in India unless you erect a plurality of democratic structures to underpin democracy, like the village cooperative which is a people’s institution."

"He was one of the most towering Indians to live in Independent India."

"Over the last 20 years India’s milk production has tripled; it has increased from 20 million tonnes per annum to 60 million tonnes per annum.... Dairying has become the largest rural employment scheme in this country. And the government has had very little to do with it, even though we are a government institution."

"Operation Flood has three major achievements to its credit: making dairying India’s largest self-sustainable rural employment program; bringing India self-sufficiency in milk production; trebling the nation’s milk production within a span of two and half decades to make India the world’s largest milk producer."

"Through Operation Flood, milk has been transformed from a commodity into a brand, from insufficient production to sufficient production, from rationing to plentiful availability; from loose unhygienic milk to milk that is pure and sure, from subjugation to as symbol of farmer’s economic independence, to being the consumer’s greatest insurance policy for good health."

"Amul Dairy is a manifestation of what can happen when farmers assert themselves, fight for a cause."

"The idea of setting up the NDDB was to replicate the Anand pattern in very state, in order to promote to genuinely farmer-owned cooperatives that would procure, process and markethis prime produce."

"With liberalisation and globalisation, it seems to me, India's national boundaries have ceased to exist."

"Dairying as Instrument of Change Kurien said. True development must be such that it brings the modernization process to the service of our majority, namely the rural poor. It must bring to these people not only the pittance which they need for their humble diet but also the means where by they can act together to obtain for themselves the benefits of modern science and organization and in that process the means whereby they can build for themselves, in every village, a society which is at peace with itself, concerned with its neighbours and able to see a bright for all its children."

"Dr Kurien was an outstanding and innovative manager and an exceptional human being. His contribution to the welfare of the farmer and agricultural production and development of the country is immeasurable. Dr Kurien was an icon of India's cooperative movement and the dairy industry."

"Milk is a highly perishable commodity, which is in short supply in summer and in excess supply in winter . The market can not contract and expand according to supply, therefore, you need balancing facilities. And once you have these balancing facilities, which you enable to carry forward the winter production and capture the market, procurement falls into your laps. This was the objective and methodology of Operation Flood."

"We must build on the resources represented by our young professionals and by our nation’s farmers. Without their involvement, we cannot succeed. With their involvement we can not fail."

"Where you have the will you have the skill; study, search, practice application; healthy irreverence; look for the kink in the thing, be curious."

"Our laws have our mindset negative, dishonest, unproductive, obstructionist and indisciplined. [Kurien says] we must liberate our resources. Economic liberalization is aimed at liberating our material resources. Economic liberalization is aimed at liberating our material resources. We need to liberate our mental resources, viz. the mindset, from our anti-national and anti-work ethic labour laws."

"I had the benefit of background and infrastructure, success would have come rather easily and my independent contribution would not have been easily measurable. Here there was so much to be done - how could I not try? I had a trained butler. Mumbai was close. The Mathais were there but I would stay at the Taj for Rs 50 per night. I could afford it because in Anand I had no expenses at all. **When asked why with aristocratic background how reconciled to stay in a garage."

"I am a servant to the farmers."

"While II was looking for a good enough excuse to run away from Anand; I was befriended by Tribhuvandas Patel, the young cooperative chairman and almost without realizing it I began to share his dream of building a strong organization that would free the farmers from clutches of the middle man. In one of my weaker moments I accepted |w:Tribhuvandas Kishibhai Patel|Tribhuvandas’s]] suggestion that I work for the nascent Kaira Cooperative. I have never regretted that decision in my 33-year career as an employee of the farmers."

"Gifts can be dangerous and make a nation dependent on foreign aid. They can scuttle dairy development here."

"[Mr Kurien] engineered the white revolution in India and made India the largest milk producer of the world. He is recognised as the man behind the success of the Amul brand."

"I am glad that there are people like you in this country to do things that you"

"Behind the the scenes of the fantastic success of Operation Flood is the nearly invisible skillful guding hand, vision and the brilliant mind and the unique management skill of Kurien."

"[O]ne of the main moral foundations of the women’s liberation movement – and indeed of all liberation movements – is the idea that individuals should be treated fairly and equally, and that unjust barriers should be removed. A policy that advantages members of one demographic group over those of another necessarily abandons those principles. In doing so, it risks leaving the women’s movement without one of its main moral foundations."

"Why should any individual woman today be advantaged over any individual man just because other men were advantaged over other women in the past? Reversing historical injustices does not erase them; it merely adds to the total number of injustices in the world. The question we face today, therefore, is this: Is the appropriate response to injustice to try to eliminate it, or to turn it on its head?"

"[I]t is not only men who may be harmed by preferences and quotas. In a number of ways, women could be harmed as well. To begin with, such policies could cast a shadow of doubt over women’s genuine accomplishments."

"Several studies have concluded that tests of implicit bias (in particular, the Implicit Association Test or IAT) have poor test-retest reliability, and fail to predict discriminatory behaviour. Furthermore, though interventions may change people’s implicit biases to some degree – or do so, at least, in the short-term – the effects of such changes on behaviour are trivially small or non-existent, even in the immediate wake of the intervention."

"[T]he evidence for discrimination in STEM is considerably more mixed than is often assumed. Certainly, many studies have found evidence of anti-female discrimination in STEM. At the same time, however, many other studies have failed to find such discrimination, or have found discrimination in favour of women."

"Real-world data going back to the 1980s suggest that, although fewer women apply for jobs in fields such as maths, physics, chemistry, biology, and engineering, those who do apply are no less likely to be interviewed and no less likely to be offered the job. On the contrary, they are generally more likely to be."

"Most women do not want a career in STEM and nor do most men. Why should the small fraction of women who do want such a career be the same size as the small fraction of men? To put it another way, as long as everyone has the opportunity to pursue a STEM career, and as long as the selection process is fair, why would it be important to get as many women as men into jobs that fewer women want?"

"In the quest to promote women in STEM, academics and activists may sometimes inadvertently overstate the ubiquity of bias and discrimination against women in this sector. An unintended consequence may be to scare away some women who would otherwise be interested in a STEM career... If women are given the impression that the STEM workplace is a hotbed of sexism and an unwelcome place for women, many might quite understandably decide to look for other fields in which to make their mark."

"First, the claim is not that men perform better than women in every cognitive domain. On the contrary, men perform better in some domains whereas women perform better in others. The best-known examples are that men score higher than women on most tests of spatial ability, whereas women score higher than men on most tests of language ability, including verbal comprehension, reading, and writing... Second, even in areas where men do perform better, the claim is not that all men – or even most – perform better than all or most women. As with occupational preferences, members of both sexes vary enormously in every cognitive aptitude, and the distribution for men overlaps almost entirely with that for women. However, for some aptitudes, the distribution for one sex is shifted somewhat to the right of that for the other, such that the average score for the former is somewhat higher. In saying this, it’s worth stressing that the average score does not describe all members of the group, or even the typical member, but merely represents the central tendency within a broad array of scores. Most people fall above or below the average. Third, the claim is not that these cognitive sex differences are especially large. On the contrary, at the centre of the distribution, they tend to be quite small. The only reason they matter at all is that even small differences at the mean are associated with progressively larger differences the further from the mean one looks... Fourth, the claim is not that women lack the cognitive talents to make it in STEM. Most people lack the cognitive talents, and of those who do possess them, some are men and some are women."

"[A]mong the minority of people who possess exceptional mathematical abilities, the women are more likely to possess exceptional language abilities as well. This means that mathematically gifted women have more vocational options than their male counterparts, and consequently that fewer mathematically gifted women end up pursuing a STEM career. To the extent that this explains the gender gap in maths-intensive fields, the gap results not from mathematically gifted women having fewer options, but rather from them having more."

"[T]he same sex differences in occupational preferences have been found in every society where psychologists have looked for them. In one large study (N ≈ 200,000), Lippa found the differences in 53 out of 53 nations: a level of cross-cultural unanimity almost unheard of within psychology."

"[Sociocultural] explanations are vulnerable to a number of criticisms. To begin with, it is unclear to what extent current social influences actually point in the direction these explanations presuppose. According to one study, by four years of age, girls tend to assume that boys are academically inferior, and by seven, boys assume the same thing. Similarly, teachers tend to view their female students as superior at maths and reading, even when aptitude tests indicate that the boys are doing better. Popular culture often mirrors these trends, with girls depicted as academically superior to boys (consider, for instance, Bart and Lisa from The Simpsons, and Ron and Hermione from the Harry Potter series."

"[I]f we make the reasonable ballpark assumption that people working in a given field tend to come from the 25% of people most interested in that field, sex differences in occupational interests would account for the entirety of the engineering gender gap and much of the gap in science and mathematics."

"Sex differences in occupational preferences and priorities suggest one possible reason that more men than women go into maths-intensive STEM fields. The reason, put simply, is that more men than women want to go into these fields."

"[P]olicies that artificially engineer gender parity – financial incentives and quotas, for instance – could potentially lower aggregate happiness. To the extent that these policies work, they necessarily mean that some people will be funnelled into occupations that are less in line with their tastes and talents."

"[A] large meta-analysis by Xu et al. (N = 254,231) concluded that gay men tend to have spatial and linguistic abilities comparable to those of straight women, whereas lesbians tend to have spatial abilities comparable to those of straight men (but female-typical linguistic abilities)... Gay men were presumably subject to essentially the same gender-specific social forces as straight men, and lesbians the same gender-specific social forces as straight women. As such, the near-reversal of the usual spatial vs. language pattern is hard to reconcile with the claim that this pattern is due largely to social forces."

"Rather than the human brain evolving for God, God evolved for the human brain."

"As memetic evolution picked up steam, humans were transformed. No longer were we devices designed solely to pass on our genes. Suddenly, we became hybrid creatures, torn between passing on our genes and passing on our memes. This vision of our species helps to explain much of what most puzzled the alien scientist: our moral systems, our religions, our art and music and science. Cultural evolution is the key to unravelling the deepest mysteries of the human animal."

"During the heyday of European colonialism, a number of indigenous groups came to the view that, if they had faith, the Europeans’ bullets couldn’t harm them. Needless to say, this meme had disastrous consequences. One group infected with the meme – the Mahdists of Sudan – lost 11,000 men in a single battle to the bullets of Kitchener’s army. This was bad for them obviously, but it was also bad for the meme. In effect, the meme removed itself from the meme pool through its effects on its hosts’ behavior."

"Whether a trait is natural or unnatural is irrelevant to the question of whether it’s good. Moral worth should be judged not in terms of the naturalness of a trait, but rather in terms of how that trait impacts the wellbeing of everyone affected by it. Thus, violence is natural but bad, medicine unnatural but good."

"It’s often a good idea to adopt the practices and beliefs of the people around you. For one thing, the people around you aren’t dead. If you do what they do – eat what they eat; avoid the dark alleys they avoid – you might continue not being dead as well."

"[This] paper has two main aims. The first is to examine the evidence that factors other than workplace discrimination contribute to the gender gaps in STEM. These include relatively large average sex differences in career and lifestyle preferences, and relatively small average differences in cognitive aptitudes – some favouring males, others favouring females – which are associated with progressively larger differences the further above the average one looks. The second aim is to examine the evidence suggesting that these sex differences are not purely a product of social factors but also have a substantial biological (i.e. inherited) component."

"Why should we put a statistical, collective goal – i.e., more equal sex ratios in STEM – above the happiness and autonomy of the flesh-and-blood individuals who constitute those collectives? Why should policy makers’ preference for gender parity take precedence over individual men and women’s preferences regarding their own careers and lives?"

"Members of both sexes can be found at every point on the things vs. people continuum; however, more men than women exhibit a stronger interest in things, whereas more women than men exhibit a stronger interest in people... To get an intuitive sense of the magnitude of the difference, if one were to pick pairs of people at random, one man and one woman, the man would be more things-oriented than the woman around 75% of the time."

"A growing body of work suggests that, in nations with greater wealth and higher levels of gender equality, sex differences are often larger than they are in less wealthy, less equal nations... [R]ather than being products of a sexist or oppressive society, these differences may be indicators of the opposite: a comparatively free and fair one. If so, this casts society’s efforts to minimize the sex differences in an entirely new light. Rather than furthering gender equality, such efforts may involve attacking a positive symptom of gender equality. By mistaking the fruits of our freedom for evidence of oppression, we may institute policies that, at best, burn up time and resources in a futile effort to cure a “disease” that isn’t actually a disease, and at worst actively limit people’s freedom to pursue their own interests and ambitions on a fair and level playing field."

"[W]e should strive to eliminate bias and barriers of every kind... What we would argue, though, is that even if this were achieved, STEM gender gaps would be unlikely to disappear given persistent sex differences in interests and other STEM-relevant traits – differences plausibly due in part to biological causes. The question, then, is: Would this necessarily be a problem? In our view, as long as unjust impediments are removed, and everyone is invited, it would not be. On the contrary, it would be unfortunate if, for all the talk of celebrating differences and diversity, we ultimately came to insist that justice requires sameness."

"Sex differences in various psychological traits – in particular, average differences in career-related interests – contribute more to STEM gender gaps than is often assumed. These differences are not due solely to learning, but have a biological component as well... Certainly, the evidence for a biological contribution is not beyond criticism. We suggest, however, that the totality of the evidence renders the Nurture-Only view considerably less plausible than the Nature-Plus-Nurture alternative. The evidence we find most compelling includes the stubbornness of the sex differences over time, even despite efforts to eradicate them; the cross-cultural consistency of the differences; the early appearance of some differences during development; evidence linking the traits in question to prenatal hormonal exposure; and in some cases, comparable differences in evolutionarily relevant nonhuman animals. Each of these findings would be more surprising if the relevant sex differences were due solely to culture than if biology were also involved. And although alternative explanations for any particular finding are always possible, the convergence of these very different lines of evidence adds up to a strong prima facie case for a non-trivial biological contribution."

"[I]t is widely accepted these days that people should be treated fairly and respectfully regardless of whether they buck the trend for their sex, and no ethical theory we’re familiar with implies that this is only the case if the trend in question is 100% environmental in origin."

"[A]lthough we agree that caution should be exercised in discussing biological explanations, we would argue that this is a specific instance of a more general truth, namely that caution should be exercised in discussing any explanations. It is not only biological explanations that can undergird harmful practices. Environmental theories of left-handedness and same-sex sexual orientation, for instance, have been associated with cruel and unnecessary interventions designed to eradicate these innocuous traits. Environmental theories of human sex differences, if taken to extremes, could potentially produce comparable harms. For example, if we assume that sex differences in career choice are necessarily evidence of bias and barriers, and never products of the freely made choices of those best-placed to make them, we may pathologise the decisions of individuals who take a gender-typical path, and enact progressively more coercive practices to eliminate the remaining gaps. Like earlier efforts to force people into the mould of traditional gender stereotypes, such practices may mean that some people are funnelled into careers that do not align well with their interests and inclinations."