How to educate me about prejudice in the open-source community
esr.ibiblio.org
esr.ibiblio.org
If your culture makes it hard for people to enter, then demanding that people prove they belong to it before they can comment on their difficulties is an immunization strategy.
Demanding strong evidence for the difficult to measure impact of social habits of the in-group on outsiders is a good way to eliminate debate.
What he is saying is reasonable for dealing with discrimination within the scene (and particularly point 5 is very important). It is useless when talking about the place of the scene within wider society. Why are girls less likely to develop interests in computers? I doubt that this has anything to do with actual sexist judgements within the scene. But I do believe that it has a lot to do with the overall social norms of the scene being aligned with male gender roles. Ideally we just get rid of gender roles, but we are far from that. In the meantime we need practical solutions.
Finally and most importantly: The idea that the open source community is so meritocratic as to be immune to biases that have repeatedly been shown to exist, for example in academic mathematics, is ignorant at best. Wilfully so at worst. It shows an anti-scientific mindset on this particular question that belies the "show me the evidence" rhetoric.
YES VERY MUCH THIS!
People do make false accusations. But you know what is a lot more common than that in the world at large? Actual discrimination.
The problem is that most of the time Person A discriminates against Person B, Person A will swear up and down they have done nothing wrong and had no ill intent. That is what makes it such a difficult issue and one where people need to be open minded when hearing from people who do not share their life experience or social status.
It's a lot more healthy and beneficial in my view to approach any complaints with an open mind. Obviously in the end we have to try to come to terms with the facts, but when you put up a bunch of barriers before a victim can even be heard you are protecting the status quo. Which probably sounds great if you are a person who is really comfortable, but might not be so great for someone else.
This is really all that should need to be said. Anyone who takes ESR's claims of mental illness of accusers for granted but refuses to accept the claims of those who experience discrimination is part of the problem.
Obviously ESR is not a socially normal person. Most people can see that from his history and I don't want to beat him up for that because I don't think it's his fault: He just came that way. This post is still utter trash though and an example of the sort of attitude that pushes women and minorities out of the community.
That hardly means all genders and minorities are equally welcome, however. If you've ever been to a tech conference as a moderately attractive woman, you'd know how unappealing these communities can be at times.
Seriously though, this is a post by self-appointed "elder" ESR telling women and minorities what is and isn't discrimination, that things they've experienced almost never really occur, how they're individually unimportant, and that most people who complain are mentally disturbed, drama queens, or political carpetbaggers. If you cannot understand why this article is a perfect example of the problems in the community, I can't help you.
You're inventing an anecdote and using "can be at times" to weasel out of making an actual statement.
It's amusing because that's actually even mentioned in the article:
> It isn’t sufficient to say, for example, “Women (or black people, or gays) can’t get their patches accepted, or are sexually/racially taunted on forums.” and then wave your hands as though the accusation itself is to be treated as evidence and anyone demanding specifics is part of the problem.
What statement do you want me to make? That I've experienced discrimination? Okay, "I've experienced discrimination." Are you happy now?
> It's amusing because that's actually even mentioned in the article
Yes, in a way that DEMONSTRATES THE PROBLEM. Instead of trusting that most people who claim discrimination are actually experiencing discrimination, ESR is demanding they submit forms in triplicate that somehow prove it beyond a shadow of a doubt so high elder ESR will spend his precious time fixing the issue. Most women and minorities do not make shit up for the sake of taking advantage of Eric Fucking Raymond. If many people are telling him there are issues, there are issues.
This is actually probably why ESR wrote this article. You saying that you've "experienced discrimination" doesn't mean that I'm obligated to take your claim at face value and it especially does not mean that there is a systematic problem related to your experience.
ESR isn't saying that racism, sexism, whatever other crappiness don't existing in the world, he's saying that for the sake of the open source community, it's very important to be sure that there's a fire when you scream it, lest people stop responding to the word "fire."
> Instead of trusting that most people who claim discrimination are actually experiencing discrimination, ESR is demanding they submit forms in triplicate that somehow prove it beyond a shadow of a doubt so high elder ESR will spend his precious time fixing the issue.
In America, if you go to the police to report a crime, they will consider your claim based on how realistic it seems and if there is any preliminary evidence. When the court becomes involved, the evidence is scrutinized. Are you suggesting that this is the wrong way to do things? Would you prefer to be in a world where feelings and claims are more important than evidence?
> Most women and minorities do not make shit up for the sake of taking advantage of Eric Fucking Raymond. If many people are telling him there are issues, there are issues.
Again:
> Third: show me your evidence. I want to see evidence of specific harm, attack, or attempts to exclude, on identifiable victims, by identifiable perpetrators. It isn’t sufficient to say, for example, “Women (or black people, or gays) can’t get their patches accepted, or are sexually/racially taunted on forums.” and then wave your hands as though the accusation itself is to be treated as evidence and anyone demanding specifics is part of the problem.
I can't believe how quickly this article has become useful.
No, that's not what he's saying. He's saying that most people who claim prejudice are "mentally disturbed, drama queens, and political carpetbaggers" and calling for people to be thrown out of the community.
> In America, if you go to the police to report a crime, they will consider your claim based on how realistic it seems and if there is any preliminary evidence. ... Would you prefer to be in a world where feelings and claims are more important than evidence?
What the hell are you talking about? In this post, ESR is claiming the open source community is practically magically immune to prejudice because of "hacker culture" even though it is somehow an issue in industry, academia, and everywhere else. The idea that a community overwhelmingly populated by white males is free of prejudice is ridiculous: It would be totally unlike every other such community that exists.
[Edit: I meant to specifically refer to communities on the scale of the open source community here. I don't meant to say a startup with five white male employees is somehow automatically problematic. When a large community is primarily composed of members that haven't experienced discrimination, they do tend to be bad at noticing the subtle effects of discrimination and the lack of obvious diversity does tend to make people feel unwelcome.]
This isn't about my feelings. Prejudice exists. Studies have shown prejudice exists. Something as simple as having a foreign-sounding name causes people to judge you as less trustworthy. The idea that this doesn't carry over to hackers is laughable.
Besides, this is not about going to the police and reporting a crime. This is about ESR denying the open source community has any problems that need addressing. This is ESR saying everything is 99.99% based on merit and everyone should feel welcome and almost everyone who doesn't is either mentally disturbed, a drama queen, or a political carpetbagger. It's ridiculous!
> I can't believe how quickly this article has become useful.
You are exactly the sort of problem we have to contend with. Keep taking ESR's claim about the mental illness of those who claim discrimination at face value while you refuse to even entertain our claims unless we have evidence sufficient for a jury trial. You're disgusting.
But for what it's worth -- yeah, I mentioned in another comment that I don't consider him an "elder", and the bizarre/alienating perspectives are the "why".
There are difficult conversations to be had about how we should go about being inclusive, and what exactly that should mean, but this post is a terrible starting point.
How do you proof that you didn't get a spot to speak at a conference because your equivalent work was valued slightly lower by some organizers, especially when the organizer was not aware they were making gendered assessments?
How do you measure people who decided not to engage with a particular community due to unnecessarily adversarial technical discussions. Especially before the background of women not interrupting men at nearly the rate as men interrupt women. This has nothing to do with the technical merits of what is said and everything with who gets to speak.
Whenever you measure these things using science you find that gendered behaviour is absolutely pervasive. Sometimes you learn that things aren't gendered in the way they first appear. For example it often turns out that women discriminate nearly as much as men do against other women. What we can't do is pretend all of that doesn't exist simply because the discrimination isn't manifesting itself as overtly and blatantly as it used to.
This is an important achievement by the way. The fact that overt blatant sexism is almost universally condemned is after all what makes the charge: "That's sexist!" so problematic.
The way I read what ESR wrote, if you have someone that has a demonstrable history of technical contributions (or per his second point, other interesting factors that make the person notable), then it's objective information that can be used when saying "wait, why isn't Person on the schedule?" Evidence is strong and interesting; identity politics or accusations, far less so.
> How do you measure people who decided not to engage with a particular community due to unnecessarily adversarial technical discussions. Especially before the background of women not interrupting men at nearly the rate as men interrupt women. This has nothing to do with the technical merits of what is said and everything with who gets to speak.
This is back in the realm of anecdotes. Men interrupt men. Women interrupt women. Vice versa. Some people are jerks, often on accident. ESR is talking about open source culture and, for most participation in it, people only know about your physical identity what you offer.
> Whenever you measure these things using science you find that gendered behaviour is absolutely pervasive.
If you can link provide actual evidence and not the kind of poor-method pseudo-science that comes out of gender studies, then I suspect this would fall into ESR's:
> If you pass all these filters, maybe you have something to teach me, and maybe you’ll get to see what I’m like when I am righteously pissed off because hacker norms have been violated in a serious way.
> This is an important achievement by the way. The fact that overt blatant sexism is almost universally condemned is after all what makes the charge: "That's sexist!" so problematic.
Speaking from my perspective, and not ESR's (or speaking from/to his article), this is where I think evidence and dispatching of witch hunts in tech is important -- give evidence of _real_ sexism in tech and we can fight it together. If it's constantly trying to blow something out of proportion for personal gain or is something entirely without evidence, "that's sexist!" is going to start falling on deaf ears.
There are plenty of studies that show that in collective discussions of womens qualifications are questioned more, but not in a gendered way. Questions like: What was the role of the supervisor in the thesis? are not sexist. That they are raised more with respect to women is.
I could spend an hour on google collecting studies (e.g. a meta study on interruptions [1] the studies on talking time are methodologically simpler and with very clear significance and large effect size, I am not aware of convincing criticism of the studies on the perception of interruptions, e.g. [2], a study that got some attention recently actually had the result that when it comes to interruptions, men interrupt women at about the same rate as women interrupt women, it's just that women interrupt men less Table 1 in [3], etc... again, the literature shows pervasive biases (some strong, some not) of a complex and varied nature). But honestly, I don't see the point, you just dismissed decades worth of studies out of hand. You called these studies anecdotes, but your gold standard of evidence seems to be individual events. When really we are in a much more subtle phase of the struggle for equality.
From your comment I don't think you really care about scientific evidence on this question. Or you haven't bothered educating yourself. Evidence of _real_ sexism is massive, and everywhere. It just doesn't look the way you (and maybe many a SJW, too) maybe imagine it to look. It doesn't show up (usually) in the form of individual events that can be proven to be sexist, but it shows up in social patterns all over the place.
[1] http://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1018802521676 [2] http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/si.1995.18.1.59?mag=man-... [3] http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0261927X14533197
https://books.google.de/books?id=nWf0AwAAQBAJ&lpg=PA68&ots=Z...
If you mean "evidence being desired is wrong", then please do not show up to serve on a jury.
Also, stop all of this talk about a jury. This is about addressing issues in a community. It's not a legal proceeding. OBVIOUSLY in a court of law we'd need strong evidence to convict someone, but we're not trying to convict an individual here. We're just trying to get people like you and ESR to stop claiming our experiences are either invalid because we're mentally ill or entirely constructed because we're trying to manipulate you. It's gaslighting exactly as ummnooo said.
I hadn't previously read his article on "kafkatrapping" (http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=2122), but it rings eerily true to how it feels to be the target of a manipulation attempt.