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Comment by mikeash | Hacker News Reader

Nearly the whole conversation here is about how terrible it was to update the list to include some women.

Imagine if instead of "women" it was something else. Maybe, "Why didn't you include any Soviet filmmakers?" Or, "What about Alfred Hitchcock?" Or maybe, "You should include some films from the silent era." And imagine Spike Lee took those suggestions and said, you know what, you're right, I should include some films from the silent era, there's some great stuff in there.

Would you be just as upset about Spike Lee bending to his critics instead of sticking to his guns in that case? Or would you see that maybe there is some merit in this sort of back-and-forth? Would you accept a suggestion for "silent films" but rail against a suggestion for "films by female directors"? If so, why is that, exactly? Does the merest suggestion of political correctness shut off your thinking?

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The reason it irks me is because it has nothing to do with the quality of the film, which this list is ostensibly based on. What if the suggestion was, "There aren't enough movies that start with the letter F, Spike you should add some so as not seem letterist."

Taking the sex of the director, or writer, or lighting tech, into account weakens the list because you're introducing noise into your criteria.

>quality of the film, which this list is ostensibly based on.

No, the list is of "must watch" films for aspiring artists. Certainly quality will be a factor, but artistic diversity is far more important. A crappy film that demonstrates a unique style of direction is far more important than more high quality examples of common styles.

And when seeking artistic diversity, it's not unreasonable to suggest that lack of diversity of artists might indicate oversights.

Maybe it strengthens the list by getting him to consider things he didn't previously consider.

Everyone loves to assume the worst, here. The original list was apparently perfect, and any change is an adulteration. I wonder why?

Most commenters seem to be assuming that he took his original criteria seriously and the result happened to be one that some people found offensive. I think that's assuming the best. Meanwhile, those offended seem to be assuming the worst - some sort of bias.

>Most commenters seem to be assuming that he took his original criteria seriously ... Meanwhile, those offended seem to be assuming the worst - some sort of bias.

Firstly, I'm not offended by the original list, and I don't think many people were. Most people arguing here are offended by the reaction to the additions.

But more importantly, I don't think someone has to be biased to simply not think of particular films when compiling his list, nor do I think one has to be "not taking it seriously" in order to do so.

Nobody is without bias. Assuming bias is only the worst if you assume it's conscious bias that they refuse to acknowledge or resist.

Thanks for making this comment. I'm not sure I understand whose side you're on, but personally, this sort of debate really irks me.

Are people seriously conveying that Lee purposely left out women? Would you purposely leave out female authors if someone asked you to name your favorite 10 books? It's just ridiculous.

It seems to me that people are looking to create issues where there are none. I'm not sure this can even be called "political correctness." It's something even worse.

My position is that at least some of the criticism was warranted, and there's nothing wrong with responding to such criticism with an update.

I don't know if the critics were implying that Lee purposely left out women. But the fact is that he left out women. I assume totally by accident. When this was pointed out, I imagine his reaction was something like "whoops, slipped my mind."

I agree that people are looking to create issues where there are none. It's happening right here with all the people complaining about "PC run amok" and whatnot. A guy released a list, people thought the list was incomplete and suggested changes, the guy sees merit in the suggestion and makes changes. Whoopdie-do. The only reason anti-PC warriors are upset is because the changes involved including women.

> Obviously, if the witches had any power whatsoever, they wouldn't waste their time gallivanting around on broomsticks, fellating Satan and cursing cows with sour milk. They're getting burned right and left, for Christ's sake! Priorities! No, they'd turn the tables and lay some serious voodoo on the witch-hunters. In a country where anyone who speaks out against the witches is soon found dangling by his heels from an oak at midnight with his head shrunk to the size of a baseball, we won't see a lot of witch-hunting and we know there's a serious witch problem. In a country where witch-hunting is a stable and lucrative career, and also an amateur pastime enjoyed by millions of hobbyists on the weekend, we know there are no real witches worth a damn.

(http://goo.gl/n05lEn)

Soon they'll protest college rankings. Princeton shouldn't be in the top 10 because one of its buildings is named after a racist. Stanford should be knocked out because it's only 6.5% Latino. Et cetera.

Since I made the initial comment, I'll reply.

> Would you be just as upset

If by "just as upset", you mean "not upset at all, but rather curious", then yes, I would be exactly as upset.

> Would you be just as upset about Spike Lee bending to his critics instead of sticking to his guns in that case?

I would wonder why he changed a list of something entirely personal to him after some people pointed out that he didn't include any films from the silent era. I am equally curious as to why the reply was "oh yeah, here are five films from women", rather than "oh yeah, I forgot a bunch of stuff, some including women". If anything, it sounds a bit patronizing to women filmmakers, that they're included as an afterthought.

A satisfying (to me) reply would be "holy shit guys I had a brain fart and was only thinking of men when compiling the list and completely forgot about my favorite female filmmakers, here they are, sorry about that, wow".

You may not be upset, but a quick glance at the comments shows a ton of people who are quite upset that Lee responded to this criticism the way he did.

You wonder why he changed a list of something personal to him after people gave him additional food for thought? Are your opinions so set in stone? If you compiled a list of top programming language features, could you not even conceive of adding more entries to it after publishing it and having people make suggestions? Why do people expect this stuff to be carved in stone from the beginning?

Your hypothetical reply looks a lot like his real reply to me.

I can definitely conceive of adding more features, but I can't conceive of adding more features that begin with a certain letter, since that has no bearing on whether they are good features or not.

Imagine if letter bias was extremely common in society, to the extent that you find yourself unconsciously applying it yourself even if you don't want to. Would you still hold that stance?

You mean in a "wait I totally meant to add these features but didn't initially consider them because they started with the letter z" way?

I wouldn't go so far as "I totally meant to." More like, "On further reflection, these features starting with the letter Z have merit and belong on my list."

I don't know, I find it completely foreign because I rarely know who directed a film. Of course, Spike Lee would know, but I don't know if the gender of the director would affect his opinion of a movie that much. That's what I find improbable in this specific case.

> since that has no bearing on whether they are good features or not.

This isn't a list of "best movies", it's a list of "movies aspiring directors should see". I have to imagine that such a list would strive to show all the diversity that exists in the film-making world, not just the ones held up as empirically "best".

Pretending that normative thinking didn't exist doesn't make it so, and doesn't help discriminated groups. In fact, it's part of the problem.

Silent films is a genre of movies, but is "films by female directors" also a genre? It could be, but I would instantly question how we define a genre then.

Would "films by insert sexual orientation directors" also be a genre? What about "films by left handed directors"? The simpson had a whole episode about discrimination against people with blond hair, so what about "films by blond directors"? I don't think i have ever said that a list of movies should directors with any specific attribute, nor that would I ever say that it shouldn't.

Why is "a genre" fair game, but "a kind of director" not?

Lets compare Hollywood movies with bollywood, two genre and two locations. Historically, a Hollywood movie is a movie made in Hollywood for an american audience, and bollywood is movies made in Inida for an Indian audiences. However, film makers in Hollywood has done Bollywood movies in Hollywood, and Indian movie makers has made Hollywood movies in India.

Can a male director make a "film by female director"? if not, then its not a genre. female directed and male directed style of movies could become a genre, and then we would see female directors make male directed styled movies, and male directors make female directed styled movies. The question is how we would define that style, specially if we want to avoid sexist generalization.

Bollywood genre is categorized by a movie with a lot of songs and dances, love triangles, comedy and dare-devil thrills are all mixed up in a three-hour extravaganza with an intermission. Bollywood plots have tended to be melodramatic.

How would you describe the female directed genre as?

> Imagine if instead of "women" it was something else. Maybe, "Why didn't you include any Soviet filmmakers?" Or, "What about Alfred Hitchcock?" Or maybe, "You should include some films from the silent era."

I think there'd be a similar response.

The people who've made the response have done so on the view that whatever was on Lee's original list was what he considered the important films (for the purpose of that list), and on the view that if there weren't films that meet some criteria on that list it wasn't because he just didn't consider any films of that sort.

Really, you think that "You should include some films from the silent era" followed by "You're right, I've revised the list to include some silent films" would make it to the front page of Hacker News and spawn a huge, vitriolic discussion?

I find this hard to imagine, myself.

I do think people would object to it, doing so on the view that he would have already considered silent films and didn't think any of them should make the list, and that now he was just bowing to external pressure.

I'm sure some people would object to it, but you wouldn't see anything like the craziness we're seeing here. A few uptight nitpicky people would say "he shouldn't have done that!" and then it would die.

It's not uptight to object when someone is (as far as we know) expressing their honest, fair opinion and they're pretty much forced to change their expression of that opinion.

[EDIT. I want to add a bit more. A person's list of their important films for aspiring directors is just one tiny part of all their views. A person can think that women have faced a lot of sexism, and that this has prevented many women from directing films -- and that if that sexism hadn't existed we'd have many more excellent films by female directors -- while at the same time thinking that, out of all the films that have been made so far, the ones that they think are most important for aspiring directors to see is this set, which just happens to not include any films directed by females.]

EDIT 2: In response to mikeash's reply, that would be assuming that Lee has a bias against films directed by women. Would you care to explain how you think he managed to overlook those films in the first place? It may well be that he does have such a bias. And if so, that's a shame. But then think what that would mean: it would seem to mean that he has suddenly been able to overcome that bias, and see things fairly - something which, unfortunately, rarely happens.

> Would you care to explain how you think he managed to overlook those films in the first place?

Because he's human?

I'm baffled by the number of people who seem to think any individual, even a talented director, is somehow able to bring to mind all films that meet a particular criteria, with such absolute precision that a film's exclusion from the initial list is a definitive statement that he considers it unworthy.

It's typical hacker absolutism. You see it everywhere. The very notion of subjectivity is rejected because it's too difficult to deal with.

It shows up all the time in discussions of hiring diversity. A large number of people assume that hiring decisions are done by making a perfect ranking of all candidates by ability, then choosing the one at the top. Any deviation means you're getting someone suboptimal. Thus, any hiring diversity initiative necessarily means a decrease in worker quality.

Same thing here. Spike Lee created an exact, perfect list of films that exceed some threshold. Altering it afterwards means the list is no longer perfect.

As far as we know, the revised list is also their honest, fair opinion.

People are just arbitrarily declaring the original list to be the One True List, and the revised list to be a forced change.

It could just as easily be that the original list was not completely thought out, and the revised list is the true reflection of Spike Lee's views.

Why do people insist on only considering the first possibility? Why assume that this change was forced?

  > Nearly the whole conversation here is about how 
  > terrible it was to update the list to include some 
  > women.

Yes. And it's a really, really boring conversation as well. It tends to devolve into mathematical/logical-type arguments that seem to imply that there are "solutions" to messy things like relationships, emotions and perceptions.

I just flag these stories and hope others do the same.

Women are people, not a genre.

What's your point?

That it's a false equivalence. You're being a bit facetious here, it was obvious what the above poster was alluding to.

Of my three hypothetical scenarios, one is people, one is a person, and one is a timeframe. None are genres. So I have no clue what they're alluding to. Maybe you're a better mind reader than I am.

Already I am confused: are women the same as men, that is, they make the same kind of movies. In which case, why explicitly include them? Or are they different from men and make different movies? Then perhaps he simply didn't like them as much? (Just pointing out why that kind of discussion/criticism rarely has a positive outcome).

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