A Soccer Con Man Who Couldn't Play the Game
atlasobscura.com
atlasobscura.com
Here's a description of an ex colleague of mine:
- Asked me after 7 years about whether a system existed that could tell you the state of the code at a given time. You know, because it's inconvenient saving different versions in separate files.
- Can't do anything other than changing literals without breaking it.
- Can't tell you what the difference between an object and a class is.
- Pretends his job is higher level than coding.
- Since he can't do anything, goes to meetings explaining how he's the architect behind it all. And gets credit for it.
However come meeting time, would be very vocal about random technologies -- we'd talk about spawning a process and he'd chime in how you can do this complicated kernel trick with signals, or shared memory and whatnot. At first everyone was impressed. Heck, I was.
After a while nobody saw any results from him though. When came time to show his results he started to claim to have health issues. So was gone for a while.
After a couple of months the manager caught on and kept assigning him different tasks hoping they'd finally find something he's good at. Would get as simple task, yet instead of just doing it, he would re-frame as some complicated theoretical problem, which needed research and the solution needed something like P vs NP solved in order to deliver it. Not sure if someone in the end explicitly told him that "Look Pete, it is a test function, just write the test function. You don't have to solve P vs NP to do it". (Pete is not his real name)
But yeah he was invited to depart, after collected a nice salary for about a year. He's probably at another company now doing the same thing.
There was this company (shall remain nameless) where the product was always "around the corner". Just one more week or two! Yes it doesn't work right now, but these are minor things, let us iron out the final bugs!
This went on for almost two years.
Leadership being non-technical, they didn't know whether what the "technical team" was telling them is true or not. They couldn't check, but were not idiots, so eventually suspected bullshit. So they hired us as "crisis consultants", to do an audit and put things back on track.
Needless to say, we had to scrap everything. Which, it turns out, was about half a dozen unfinished PHP scripts and some apache configs... the result of ~4 man-years of work!
The main employee squirmed and lied and lashed back during meetings. Not a pleasant experience at all. For anyone involved. When the true horror of the situation became apparent, they had to be let go.
Of course, this "worked out" only because we had the leadership's full backing (they really felt more shameful than angry, on account of their mismanagement), and because we could stand our ground technically. Now what to do if you're a grunt employee, without good access to leadership, observing such bullshit unfold... difficult. Chances are, the bullshitters are better at politics & smooth talking than you are, so confrontations are risky.
This is exactly the reaction I'd expect from a good manager. Work the problem and see if you can fix it instead of blaming people for things.
I suppose I'm always willing to give people the benefit of the doubt, but of course only to a point.
After joining things were as expected but after a few weeks we noticed that he was rarely around after lunch and never around after lunch on a Friday.
We would email him at those times deliberately to catch him out and I recall starting to put sticky notes on his laptop "Came to see you a X time". He would come back and just dump all the notes in the rubbish and claim he never got them. He would often claim to be working from home, despite his laptop being on his desk and usually closed. He would also never responding during those times to email or IM.
A classic seagull manager he would appear when something went wrong, making a lot of noise, writing a lot of emails and then vanishing. He would also be sure to be seen when something was delivered often staying back late on those times.
It got so bad one friend of mine started tracking when he was around and then tracking when one of his relatives died. During his tenure the following incidents occurred,
- Hot water system blew up. 4 times. He had pictures which he would show all the time.
- Uncles, aunts, and various over family members died to the total of 20 individuals.
- Our time tracking him showed him to be in the office less than 15 hours a week on average.
We started to suspect he had a second job and was pulling the same con on them. This was never proved, but we did find someone who had worked with him previously and they reported the same behavior.
The worst thing was it was raised with management at least several dozen times and nothing ever happened. He managed to pull this scam off for 4 years. I could not believe the waste of money this guy was, literally $500,000 burnt on a useless individual.
We saw everything from completely non-functional code, to doesn't handle negatives or signal failures/triply nested for-loops respectively(partial credit OFC), to picture perfect code w/ multiple tests.
Obviously weighted very far to "completely non-functional code". It boggles my mind the amount of "programmers" who literally can't.
The workload was enough that we needed to hire another developer, so we lined up a couple of people for interviews. As the most senior technical person on the team (with two whole years experience) it fell to me to try and hire someone. I had barely had any technical interviews, let alone interviewed someone, so I did what anyone who read Jeff Atwood's blog would do. I used FizzBuzz.
Then and now, I still feel it's a poor way to judge someone's programming ability. It judges your ability to know the modulus operator above anything else. However, it did seem to weed out most of the people who came for the job. We had people with eight years experience and significant experience in what we did that couldn't get as far as the for-loop. I asked a couple of super basic questions to judge their knowledge (how do you guys deploy code at your current job? difference between a class and an object? etc), and nearly everyone answered these, but FizzBuzz was solved by only one person, even when they were allowed to use any language they want. We ended up hiring this guy, and he's still there (well, at the company they acquired them shortly after I left). We're still friends, and I consider him to be a rock solid developer whom I would hire again.
I've not used it since, but I've worked with a number of developers in the past few years that have walked into a job with nothing more than a CV of impressive words and a memorised list of answers to the kind of questions you see on the first page of a "developer interview questions" Google search. My favoured approach has been a relaxed conversation in a cafe and a task to build something, done either at home or in the office, but I often wonder whether I'd be better off just going back to FizzBuzz.
What absolutely shocked me when I first started using it is that it normally takes them 10 minutes for them to decide to insert any form of debugging code, and many try and not talk to me - despite introducing the problem as "a quick debugging task which we hope will show your willingness to talk problems over".
Of course the man that took the biscuit was the one who, after I introduced the problem boldly stated "This is obviously a complex problem. If I had more time I would be able to solve it for you". No.
I requested a meeting with the director, and explained to him that despite being very new in the job, I suspected the guy was indeed completely incompetent, didn't have any experience of what we were working on and that me being an expert, it was pretty easy for me to realize he didn't know anything about what he was talking about. I emailed him proof that he had at least lied about the work he had done on a task... But the guy still managed to survive the first 3 months, so was 'hired'...
I told the director that I couldn't work with him at all, as I thought he was just a hindrance -- I emailed several times detailed reports to show he was completely incompetent at programming, and was just lying about stuff he did do....
The guy still stayed 18 months in the company, and he eventually left by himself.
After he left, I inherited his 'work' and proved in about 20 minutes that he had completely faked a demo he had done of a feature he was supposed to work on... The code wasn't there at all, they had been conned.
Thing is, said guy probably picked up some extra lingua to put into his CV for the next 'job' he'll go into...
I haven't, and I don't understand how people like that get and retain jobs without having some other "in" to exploit the system.
Their resume is so good. They worked at top companies. Nobody wants to insult them with some simple test of programming basics during interview, so they rather ask them what was it like working in the Big Companies. After some chit-chat, they get the job. The company thinks they're lucky to have hired someone that smart.
> ...and retain jobs
Inertia, lack of communication inside the company, etc. Those people are usually also very friendly and soon learn who reports to whom and how to hide the fact that they aren't contributing anything useful.
So, bad processes and cultish worship of certain companies.
> Inertia, lack of communication inside the company, etc. Those people are usually also very friendly and soon learn who reports to whom and how to hide the fact that they aren't contributing anything useful.
So, more bad processes.
I know my responses are bordering on flippant, but having come up from the real engineering world I don't see how these things happen for any reason other than companies in this industry are not run nearly as well as their management thinks.
Having non-technical management interview and assess technical hires is a serious process error. If you are hiring someone, regardless of what it is for, and you task someone with evaluating that candidate in an area the interviewer knows little to nothing about you have screwed up royally and need to fix your process. I haven't seen that happen in a real engineering company, at least not for technical roles.
Some real world examples: in the mid-2000s being a "Googler" was a straight pass by some to thinking you were some wizz-bang amazing programmer. Because Google only hired the best and brightest, right?
Then you work with some of them and realize they they were nothing more than a smart college kid who got lucky with who hired them and were terrible programmers. They were juniors at best, but now with the ego of RMS.
The same happened for a while with "Game Producers" from Zynga, when they were riding high and had a better reputation. The trouble was that Zynga had a policy of rapid promotion so you got "Producers" and "Studio Leads" who couldn't last 5 minutes outside of Zynga. That wasn't always the case, but it happened enough that it actually became something of a black mark in the industry.
It's the day to day on the job tasks where the lack of skill becomes really apparent.
On a similar basis, I once worked on a codebase where someone had implemented strftime, poorly, a few different ways, and also come up with several replacements for strptime, all of which had subtle bugs and none of which worked the same.
Given only the information you provided, I would hesitate to mock them, for fear they might make something really cool.
To add additional details, for those who might draw amusement and/or wisdom: In all cases the input/output date/time strings had the same format. Further, a number of the bugs were due to half-implemented reinventions of atoi being involved -- and atoi was definitely available, as one of the reinventions used it! Finally, in at least one case there was a Y2100 problem.
I'd tend to make this re-rolled atoi a wrapper around strtol/wcstol.
Ouch! TIL. You'd think by now I wouldn't be surprised by such things, and yet, somehow I was...
But 1000 lines?
var x = JSON.parse(fs.readFileSync('filename.json'));Did he try to write a complete JSON parser from scratch?
I actually can program, and implemented some stuff in that company (moving the whole codebase from svn to git and educating everyone, for example). But then I got into depression because of family issues, and just couldn't write a single line of code for an entire month. I kept giving excuses, inventing all kind of bullshit to cover it, and felt even more depressed because of it — so when they finally fired me, I was relieved.
Now when I see guys who're doing this all the time, I can't help but imagine what's going through their head all the time and in what an awful state they must be in.
You let him get credit for 7 years?
I have seen it first hand, someone managed to convince a few investors who were old and not very quick thinking that they should invest in his company.
The product idea was just awkward and made up. It was as if someone is given a 5 minute task to quickly think of a startup idea.
But he was a good smooth talker, so millions of dollars later down the drain, with a private office in the Valley, he can now claim he was a serial entrepreneur, CEO, mentor. He'd go to all meetups and give talks. Would publish a blog post here and there so he was also an "author".
Every time he was asked to present his product or asked when it was going to be shipped, he'd claim he saw this trendy technology at a meetup (last was some container thing) and claimed he needed to rewrite his stack using that to go "faster". That lasted for close to 5 years.
People claim it was a failure. I claim it was a major success for him. He's probably off to the next adventure. Not bad overall. Ride the hype and you'll make it!
Bit the same for quick thinking. Learned quick thinking many times result in sloppy thinking.
So maybe the investors were just not fit to be investors at what ever age?
Sorry it did sound bad the way I put it. But I've know the group of people for 10 years or so and have seen decline in their decision making in that time. It might not be true in general but it seemed like it was true there.
At some point they stopped following technology. So someone friendly and smooth talking who knows how to throw some technical / startup terms came and took their money. They also thought of thesmelves as little Mark Cubans or Marc Andreessens. Someone knowing how to play to that image was well positioned to trick them.
Although I guess if the fans are happy, the money is well spent...?
That theory doesn't fit with the narrative that well, but if there's one thing we know for sure about him it's that he knows how to spin a good story to the media.
[1] http://globoesporte.globo.com/futebol/noticia/2011/05/briga-...
Separating the reality from the fantasy is difficult when the sources from the period can't be relied upon: the Globo article also includes an clipping from a Brazilian newspaper - presumably written by one of his journalist friends - discussing him being the top scorer in the French third tier in 86/7! Which I'm pretty sure he wasn't. Various accounts of him as a footballing charlatan have this stint in France as a brief year in the middle of his career or an extended stint in its twilight; have his career begin as a promising teenager or as a 23 year old socialite. Attempts to total up his career appearances seem to agree he played in around 30 first team matches for professional clubs but disagree about whether these were only overseas or mostly in Brazil
Above all, even in the internet age you can see why some of his taller stories might have been believed...
Also, some of the information in the article strains credulity: Without balls to practice with, the team was restricted to doing a physical training session. They had no balls to train with?? I've seen some down-and-out footballers, and somebody always had an extra ball or two in the car.
...because he had just kicked them all into the stands. I think the point was, he kicked the balls away so he wouldn't be embarrassed in front of his new fans.
And these guys most certainly knew he was a fraud. If i recall correctly, they outright admitted so in the brazilian articles I read about his guy. They just didn't care because he was part of the gang.
Might not have been a con as such, but amusing none the less.
It looks like this guy took some advantage of this "Brazilian factor", although it hardly explains his stints at huge clubs like Botafogo etc. in Brazil itself!
All this and now, working at top tech company.
I guess it's nice to learn that despite technology opening up the doors to so many other cons, it also closes the doors to some older avenues. I'd venture a guess that the former significantly outweighs the latter, which is too bad, but oh well.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elmyr_de_Hory
Orsen Welles did a great movie on him and fakery in general - http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gIVgUjj6RxU
The question of who are the real fakers in the art world, the forger or the critics who are duped and swear that a painting is authentic.
The tragedy of Elymr was that he was a great painter but no one cared for his original works and he was much more successful as a forger. The same for Clifford Irving, ironically, who wrote Elymr's biography.
Irving wrote a fake biography of Howard Hues or something along those lines.
(Asking for a friend, as they say.)
>Brazilian soccer star Carlos Kaiser had it all: exclusive contracts with popular teams, money, fame, and women.
I normally don't point out things like this, because hyper-sensitivity to things that are often considered "offensive" when they really aren't can be annoying. But I can't see how to interpret this other than "women" being a possession.
To be fair, the author isn't likely being malicious, and I think he just means that he's receiving the attention of lots of women. Such attention is, arguably, an "object" in the sense of a commodity in the social marketplace ("that guy has a lot of women" is often seen as a compliment whether you like it or not). But still, I'm surprised at how much the author's choice of words bothered me. I don't even identify as a feminist in the traditional sense....shrug.
To describe somebody as 'having' women is often accurate and useful - I do not see why this should be penalised.
Now what does confuse and upset me is the way in which we rarely describe women as being able to have lots of men - the slut problem.
Enjoying regular sex and really exploring it, like any other hobby, seems incredibly reasonable. Hoping to enjoy lots of sex sounds like something anybody should want, and I don't see why this is limited as a descriptor for men only.
In short, pretty much everybody likes a good fucking - why are we afraid to say it?
We do describe women, in a positive way, as being able to have lots of men -- we just call them suitors. We correctly identify that having lots of men that want to marry you is a rare gift, and that having lots of women that want to have sex with you is a rare gift. Having casual sex with a lot of men is not a difficult feat to achieve, so why would you expect anyone to glorify anyone for being able to do it?
Once the "object" is "defiled" it is shamed, but the men are not defilable because they're not objects! They can't be defiled because it's not their job to be objects for others. Like, if I sleep in a set of sheets, and then you go to sleep in the sheets, you might say the sheets are defiled. But in no world do you say either of us are defiled. Society currently treats women like bedsheets, to put it lightly.
Women are only praised for getting "suitors," so people who ask them to be their girlfriends, and people who ask them to marry them. But if you follow that model, women have no agency. There's no agency in waiting for men to ask. Again, they're just objects.
And people take this all as normal?! That a man having sex never treats the man as an object of pleasure, but as a taker of pleasure? And women are just pleasure-giving commodities? That's exactly the problem.
I don't think people care that much about what they're praised for, but more that they are seen as whole people instead of objects without agency.
Yes, I think the inequality inherent to the relationship between men and women will inevitably result in people being impressed by certain accomplishments when done by men and other accomplishments when done by women.
>The reason society praises men getting sex is because women are / have been historically treated in part as objects of pleasure / things to be won / conquests.
Don't you think it has more to do with the fact that it's difficult to convince a lot of women to have sex with you?
>Once the "object" is "defiled" it is shamed, but the men are not defilable because they're not objects!
If it turns out that either A) women having casual sex is bad for society or B) women having the sorts of personality traits that lead them to have lots of casual sex is bad for society, is shaming not an appropriate tool to improve society? As far as defiling goes, do you believe that sex has the same effect on women that it has on men and that the sort of personality traits that cause a woman to seek out sex with men other than a life partner are the sort of personality traits that men find desirable in life partners?
Don't you think it has more to do with the fact that it's
difficult to convince a lot of women to have sex with you?
is shaming not an appropriate tool to improve society
do you believe that sex has the same effect on women that
it has on men and that the sort of personality traits that
cause a woman to seek out sex with men other than a life
partner are the sort of personality traits that men find
desirable in life partners?
Generalizing about the effects of sex on men vs women is pointless; sex means something different to every person and affects every person differently.
It's difficult in the sense that not a lot of people can do it.
>It's bad for society to oppress classes of people based on their gender (discrimination). Shaming people for their gender in the name of "improving society" is pretty ludicrous.
Why is it "ludicrous" for society to discourage women from engaging in certain behaviors, if it turns out that it's bad for society if women engage in those behaviors? That sounds eminently reasonable to me.
>What I believe is that people (but mainly men) should not look for sex toys as life partners.
Should they not look for chaste women as life partners, if it turns out that marriages to chaste women end up being the most successful? Should society not then encourage women to be chaste, if society cares about how many marriages end up being successful?
>Generalizing about the effects of sex on men vs women is pointless; sex means something different to every person and affects every person differently.
Why is it pointless? If casual sex tends to have some particular effect on men and some other effect on women, or if it turns out that the sort of personality traits that lead a woman to engage in casual sex tend to be different from the sort of personality traits that lead a man to engage in casual sex, why is it not reasonable for men to treat women who have casual sex differently from how women treat men that have casual sex? If the effect of casual sex on women tends to make them less desirable life partners in the opinion of men, why is it not reasonable for men to discourage women from engaging in casual sex if those men are primarily interested in long term relationships?
Why is it "ludicrous" for society to discourage women from
engaging in certain behaviors, if it turns out that it's bad
for society if women engage in those behaviors? That sounds
eminently reasonable to me.
Should they not look for chaste women as life partners, if
it turns out that marriages to chaste women end up being
the most successful? Should society not then encourage
women to be chaste, if society cares about how many
marriages end up being successful?
You also fail to define successful marriage: you could mean if they successfully rear children, or you could mean they are happy long term, or you can mean any other number of things. To encourage systemic behavior on poorly defined things like this leads to people getting hurt. In this case, it means women not having the same rights as men. And not only that: men with what are considered more feminine characteristics sometimes suffer similar consequences. Feminism is a misnomer; gender equality benefits both men and women because gender is not a binary and all men are not the same and all women are not the same.
You keep saying "if x turns out to y" but we don't have such data. Either say something or don't, that's why it's pointless. I think you'll find that there are actually no hard and fast rules like the ones you say we should consider may be the case, and that people actually occupy a very diverse spectrum. As such social policy should be as permissive as possible to avoid hurting classes of people not considered the "majority."
We don't let foreigners vote because, generally speaking, their interests are less closely aligned with the best interests of the country compared with citizens. Should we let foreigners vote now?
Certain racial minorities tend to come from poorer backgrounds, so we mandate that they receive certain advantages in hiring and college admissions and so on. Should affirmative action be ended?
Why is it necessarily a bad idea to base social policies on generalizations of groups of people? If the generalizations are correct, why is it automatically bad to take them into account when deciding policy? In what other circumstance is it a good idea to discard correct information when making decisions?
>Society should care about the rights of the individual to freedom and happiness to live their lives: equally, without regard to gender.
We all sacrifice some of our freedoms to make society a better place. Why should society not be allowed to take gender into account when making policies, if gender is actually relevant to the policy?
>You also fail to define successful marriage:
Generally speaking I mean they produce children that become productive members of society.
>To encourage systemic behavior on poorly defined things like this leads to people getting hurt.
Ignoring facts also leads to people getting hurt.
>You keep saying "if x turns out to y" but we don't have such data.
I'm not going to bother getting into specifics because it sounds to me like you wouldn't change your mind even if I provided such data. It sounds to me like you believe it's morally wrong in and of itself to hold men and women to different standards, even if there is good reason to do so.
>I think you'll find that there are actually no hard and fast rules like the ones you say we should consider
You're saying there is no statistical relationship between, say, the amount of casual sex people have and any other statistic that society has an interest in increasing or decreasing?
We don't let foreigners vote because, generally speaking,
their interests are less closely aligned with the best
interests of the country compared with citizens. Should we
let foreigners vote now?
Now, treating foreigners poorly because you think they're poorer or stupider than you or that their culture is inferior is why we have a lot of hate in the world -- that's an example of society choosing behavior / shaming based on generalization. And clearly that's not a good thing.
Certain racial minorities tend to come from poorer
backgrounds, so we mandate that they receive certain
advantages in hiring and college admissions and so on.
Should affirmative action be ended?
And so the same is with society: we should err on the side of respect and open-mindedness rather than trying to shoehorn everyone into boxes / classifications of our own imagination.
We all sacrifice some of our freedoms to make society a
better place. Why should society not be allowed to take
gender into account when making policies, if gender is
actually relevant to the policy?
Generally speaking I mean they produce children that become
productive members of society.
Ignoring facts also leads to people getting hurt.
In the world you propose, people can say "well statistics show they have higher divorce rates or children make less when they grow up" and use that as a reason to shame gay marriage. And in that world you'll fail to account for the myriad of reasons why that's a flawed notion.
Even if statistics show something, it doesn't mean we should act on it. We don't always know why things are and the various causes, so as soon as you try to blame it on poorly-defined blurry groups such as race and gender, you begin to encroach upon irrational territory. Basing decisions off intractable data is terrible.
I'm not going to bother getting into specifics because it
sounds to me like you wouldn't change your mind even if I
provided such data. It sounds to me like you believe it's
morally wrong in and of itself to hold men and women to
different standards, even if there is good reason to do so.
I think of law and society norms as being a shitty x-dimensional linear classifier, and people y-dimensional points, where y >>> x. This is where my disdain for your "data" arises: where you assert you can say some facts for "all women vs all men" and I'm saying you just can't. As far as reason goes, burden of proof is on the hypothesis.
Statistics also can be interpreted with a high degree of variability. So even if my premise was incorrect, and you did "have the data," we'd have to have a conversation about how you're interpreting it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operationalization
^ Turns out with most things regarding people we cannot directly measure / find metrics. Instead we have to satisfy ourselves with operationalizations. So yeah, forgive my skepticism when you claim to have enough data to know the effects of gender norms on societal health when you haven't even done step 1, defining how these things are measured and accounting for confounders.
You know what you can measure? Suffering. You can talk to women and people of color and realize that there are systemic flaws that really hurt people. And you can act on that data, because it's not abstract. You can be kinder.
You're saying there is no statistical relationship between,
say, the amount of casual sex people have and any other
statistic that society has an interest in increasing or
decreasing?
Equality for all people regardless of gender, ethnicity, or sexual orientation, is an ideal. If you don't believe in it, we're going to disagree, because it speaks to the core of what we feel is "good for society" or a "good society." If you think of life as an optimization problem, you can think of sum(ideals) as the objective function.
A good society to me is one in which everyone has the same civil liberties to life and happiness. Physical life is not fair (you may be born with a disease and I may not, born rich vs born poor, etc) but that doesn't stop us from saying that fairness is a virtue worth pursuing where we can. Do we at least agree on that?
In the US, there are millions of permanent residents who live here and pay taxes but can't vote. Should they be allowed to?
>Clearly we should seek the most accurate classification and base policy on that.
The accuracy of the classification system is not the only concern. At the very least, the cost of classifying individuals will always be a factor.
>Are you saying women should sacrifice being treated as people with agency to make the world a "better place" ?
Do we not all sacrifice some of our freedoms to make the world a better place?
>Better for who?
Future generations.
>I won't agree with that and you wouldn't have data to support it.
It doesn't matter if the data exists or not; your ideology has told you a priori that it can't exist.
>Furthermore, assuming that you can know all the facts leads to people getting hurt.
In what other cases are we held to this high standard, that we must know all of the facts before we can take action? All we can ever do is use the facts we have to make reasonable guesses about what policies we should have. You seem to have made up your mind that it's fundamentally impossible to gather enough facts for us to know that not holding different genders to different standards will hurt people more than holding different genders to different standards.
>For example, many in society used to say homosexuals can't raise children as well as straight couples
What is the point in this anecdote, other than to suggest that because people who disagreed with you once used statistics wrong, other people who disagree with you cannot use statistics correctly?
>Even if statistics show something, it doesn't mean we should act on it.
Then what should we act on? What your feelings tell us?
>poorly-defined blurry groups such as race and gender
Gender is not blurry for the vast majority of people.
>where you assert you can say some facts for "all women vs all men" and I'm saying you just can't.
I've asserted no such thing, nor do I think any such thing. If you believe I have said such things, then you haven't been paying attention, and this discussion cannot possibly be useful to anyone. I have always spoken about women in general and men in general, understanding fully that what I'm saying does not apply to every single woman or every single man.
>Equality for all people regardless of gender, ethnicity, or sexual orientation, is an ideal.
It's not the only ideal, by any means, and the relative importance of that ideal is a matter of personal opinion.
>worth pursuing where we can. Do we at least agree on that?
It sounds to me like, for you, "where we can" means "irrespective of any other concern". I can't agree with that.
In the US, there are millions of permanent residents who
live here and pay taxes but can't vote. Should they be
allowed to?
The accuracy of the classification system is not the
only concern. At the very least, the cost of
classifying individuals will always be a factor.
Do we not all sacrifice some of our freedoms to make
the world a better place?
Future generations.
The status quo for women blows.
In what other cases are we held to this high standard,
that we must know all of the facts before we can take
action?
What is the point in this anecdote, other than to
suggest that because people who disagreed with you once
used statistics wrong, other people who disagree with
you cannot use statistics correctly?
Then what should we act on? What your feelings tell us?
Gender is not blurry for the vast majority of people.
>where you assert you can say some facts for "all women vs all men" and I'm saying you just
can't.
I've asserted no such thing, nor do I think any such thing.
Should they not look for chaste women as life partners,
if it turns out that marriages to chaste women end up
being the most successful?
Why is it "ludicrous" for society to discourage women
from engaging in certain behaviors, if it turns out
that it's bad for society if women engage in those
behaviors?
if it turns out that the sort of personality traits
that lead a woman to engage in casual sex tend to be
different from the sort of personality traits that lead
a man to engage in casual sex, why is it not reasonable
for men to treat women who have casual sex differently
from how women treat men that have casual sex?
I have always spoken about women in general and men in
general, understanding fully that what I'm saying does
not apply to every single woman or every single man.
It's not the only ideal, by any means, and the relative importance of that
ideal is a matter of personal opinion.
It sounds to me like, for you, "where we can" means "irrespective of any other concern". I can't
agree with that.
And it's OK to say a theoretical is unlikely. You can theorize that aliens are watching our every move, or that god exists, and I can't refute that, but it doesn't make me irrational to be skeptical. You make it sound like there's possibly a point where subjugating women might be good for the human race as a whole...but good luck finding well-scoped proof of that, that's just crazy.
I haven't proposed anything impractical now, have I? If everyone were more respectful of one another the world would be a better place, can we agree on that? In lieu of data that would say it's good for society for some people to be deprived of their rights, is it not OK to choose a sane default action (ideal, if you will)?
Isn't that what the naturalization debate is about?
They are not given the right to vote as well as a few other rights/privileges. If basing policies on generalizations is a 'bad idea', should we then give them the same rights/privileges as other people that live here and pay taxes?
Nope, future generations of men but not women if you make that assumption
The status quo for women blows.
In all cases where the potential for harm is very high and there exist alternatives.
The opposite of shaming women who do x doesn't have to be encouraging women to do x, it can be respecting them and allowing them to make their own choices. Path of least harm.
By this I mean characteristics you attribute to men do not apply to all men.
Don't you now?
By asking these you imply such data is possible to come by
and clearly that men and women are well-defined groups.
You're posing that these facts might exist, where they don't because the groups are not well defined to begin with.
that's just crazy.
If everyone were more respectful of one another the world would be a better place, can we agree on that?
In lieu of data that would say it's good for society for some people to be deprived of their rights, is it not OK to choose a sane default action (ideal, if you will)?
Incorrect. When slavery was legal, women had zero votes in and slaves had zero votes.
Presumably, you are confusing the 3/5 compromise -- by which slaves contributed to the representation of the states in which they were held -- with giving "votes" to slaves, but that's not correct (it just gave more power in federal government to the states in which they were held.) But, not only is that not correct, but since women were constitutionally "free persons" despite not being granted voting rights, they were counted as full -- not 3/5 -- people for representation. So if you are counting their contribution to their states representation as "votes" (which is, again, wrong) they would have more than slaves, not less.
That said, this does not invalidate and I still stand by my point.
To describe somebody as 'having' women is often accurate
and useful - I do not see why this should be penalised.
The language makes women sound like they are possessions.
Firstly I show how being grammatically in possession of something is not derogatory:
> I have friends
I then argue that this usage is in fact desirable
> To describe somebody as 'having' women is often accurate and useful
Which is followed by stating that I also consider the language to be one sided
> Now what does confuse and upset me is the way in which we rarely describe women as being able to have lots of men
So when you ask whether I can see that someone might find this language offensive I can only say "evidently". And when you state that we don't see women being described as having men I refer you to my earlier dismay. And when you state that the syntax of the language makes it look like women are possessions I wholeheartedly agree.
Can you see that removing reference to "a persons ability to access sexual gratification" is detrimental to the expressiveness of the language?
Firstly I show how being grammatically in possession of
something is not derogatory:
That is just what I meant. Justifying the usage as accurate and useful and grammatically correct doesn't take away from the point that someone can conceivably, justly, take offense to the language. It's valid for someone to feel the one-sidedness and inequality inherent to the statement.
Can you see that removing reference to "a persons ability
to access sexual gratification" is detrimental to the
expressiveness of the language?
I think you understand this, we just sit wanting different things. To my mind you are calling for the censorship of mens sexual desires to match.
In regards to finding a better way for the author to have said it, I imagine simply replacing 'women' with sex would be both more explicit and absent of trigger words.
the call for action validates the censorship of womens
sexual desires
Women are an underprivileged group right now, and nobody's "calling for censorship." I'm just asking for kindness. Is there anything wrong in hoping that people can be more kind?
There are many offensive things we avoid saying in general. It's not new, and it's not different to ask that people respect one another.
I must point out that the opening sentence is could be
seen as objectifying women
If you object to the relevance of this, you may be wise to consider there are female readers on HN and be gently reminded that the software community has a diversity & inclusiveness problem.
(I didn't downvote, by the way.)