You realize there's actually a severe gender imbalance in tech and most high paying careers, right?
You realize you are privileged, in so many ways, whether or not you want to recognize it, right?
You realize you are privileged, in so many ways, whether or not you want to recognize it, right?
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13832368 and marked it off-topic.
This is the other source of alienation. Enforcing guilt onto someone based on how they were born (e.g. Gender, race). The last time I checked, this is outright bigotry. How about this, instead of trying to say that everyone is guilty, highlight that everyone has potential to be guilty, and a few are utilizing this so called birthright of privilege to exploit minority groups. Men have been lining up to be allies, and groups are right alongside them telling them they are not good enough.
http://www.nber.org/digest/sep03/w9873.html
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09500693.2015.11...
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/04/upshot/the-measuring-stic...
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/04/upshot/the-measuring-stic...
And as I said in another comment, it's not an on-off switch. "Male privilege" doesn't mean "your life must be great", it means on average you have more and better opportunities that may or may not result in a better life. There are obviously many other factors in and out of your control, so just being male is not enough to guarantee comfort and happiness, but it's still worth recognizing the marginal advantages.
I think your defending language is sloppy here: ""Male privilege" doesn't mean "your life must be great", it means on average you have more and better opportunities that may or may not result in a better life."
That's not what it is supposed to mean at all, it's supposed to mean men on average (not you as a man on average) have better opportunities etc., and that on observing that you are a man, knowing nothing else about you, I can infer in a bayesian way that you are more likely than not to have better opportunities etc. There are many things I can infer depending on what my priors are and what I learn about you. But when dealing with individuals, priors on such broad factors like race/gender/religion become useless very quickly since you learn so many more specific details about the individual that are far more important than those broad attributes. Additionally not all attributes have the same distribution. So what if the average man has more opportunities etc. if when you look at the distribution no individual man fits the average? Distributions matter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anscombe's_quartet
Drilling into the concept, "privilege" is nothing more than "attributes" we happen to find external positive correlations for. There are many, many such attributes, people are multi-dimensional complex beings, and there are many attribute combinations that interfere both constructively and destructively. What annoys me more than "privilege" advocates focusing so much on broad attributes like gender (and trying to instill feelings of guilt -- you might not do it but it is very common) is ignoring the equally valid concept of "detriment" (except sometimes in the special case of having "not this privilege"), i.e. attributes for which you can find negative correlations. Note that many attributes have both! Being tall is nice because you can reach high things, but sucks because flying anywhere is basically mini-torture. And there are many more positive and negative correlations I can list, just for being tall. This gives me prior information for inference when I observe a tall person, but my inferences should not be very strong because of all the other attributes I don't know about or am not considering.
I guess I don't really see where we disagree. Of course there's more to life than your gender, of course other things matter, of course these various attributes are complicated and aren't purely beneficial. None of this means we have to stop talking about gender, it's not like nobody talks about class and education and culture and whatever else. All of it matters, we should talk about all of it.
Can you expand on this point:
> So what if the average man has more opportunities etc. if when you look at the distribution no individual man fits the average?
I haven't really done any statistics since high school so I'm probably missing your point.
I don't think we should stop talking about gender, or class, or race, but we ought to be more careful about it, especially when we try to assign causes, and especially when we talk about individuals. Focus more on ethos and logos. Use full data sets, talk about positive and negative, talk about interference both constructive and destructive. Make predictions and update when your predictions are falsified. Make predictions about data before you look at the data to see if your priors are well-calibrated. Talk about consequences more than feelings.
For the last point, it's mostly a complaint about using a (mean) average for everything without considering whether the underlying distribution makes such a statistic worthwhile to use or not. Consider a block of houses valued roughly the same amount, then some rich dude comes in, knocks one down, builds a towering mega-house that hits the limits of what is legally allowed, and then sells it to some other rich dude. His house has bumped the (mean) average house value of the neighborhood up considerably, but no house in the neighborhood is actually worth the average. Talking about the (mean) average is then pretty useless, and no one is (literally) going to buy into one of the normal houses being worth the average of the neighborhood. The median average is much more useful, at least for property values. But even then you'll want to look at the full distribution to say whether the median is really more useful or not, and when you're buying or selling a specific individual house, you're going to want even more details about that specific house that could drastically change the valuation one way or another.
For logos, the parties involved need to understand statistical nuances and basic probability theory if they hope to use data and studies as evidence of anything in a serious manner, otherwise they're just using someone else's authority -- which isn't necessarily bad but it's important to know yourself when you have understood at least some of the details and can see the logic yourself versus taking the study authors' word for it, or worse the media's representation of it. Brighter folks should especially understand that deductive fallacies are not necessarily probabilistic fallacies (often they can be turned to probabilistic theorems) so that discussions can flow without someone raising a fallacy and declaring victory, ruining the conversation. Another important skill is the ability to assume the other side is right, or to assume their solution is implemented, and work through what you think the consequences are, the state-changes to the world, and see if you can find something that isn't desired or perhaps to your surprise cannot find anything really distasteful. This requires a solution to be sufficiently detailed, which is also helpful -- something to help clarification is to taboo words. When I see someone use 'fascist' in any context I just replace it with 'bad'; if I were actually arguing with them I'd ask them to taboo the word 'fascist' and describe their thing without that word. In tech I've seen some PMs throw around "machine learning" like it's some seasoning that can be applied to create their product, the engineers end up having to taboo "ML" in order to figure out what exactly they're implementing in order to do what.
Ethos is important because it will clarify everyone's relative personal experience, and if it's clear that's what is being done then we can stave off remarks like "anecdotes aren't data!" Similarly it can clarify people's moral perspectives. I don't find anything wrong with having vastly less (or even vastly more were that the case) women in STEM than men, knowing that you could avoid certain lines of argument and pursue others in some related discussion, but more importantly a conversation to tease out moral views lets each party know what the other considers a real issue or not and the level of urgency perceived. It would also be useful to try working out moral consequences to various actions. If you could implement some policy that would seem to benefit the welfare of ice rink sweepers everywhere right now, you might do it, but what if you had evidence from the future that the welfare of ice rink sweepers had actually decreased pretty steadily in the decades since the policy was introduced? Did you work through consequences, logical and ethical, out to at least one generation? (I always thought the Iroquois' seven generations was a bit excessive...)
If the goal is efficiently solving what you see are the big problems, you need to have power to implement a solution or influence over someone who does. You're mostly wasting time talking to small fry like me on the internet. Even if they might help come up with solutions, everyone's got solutions to things already, even if most of them won't work. But no matter, if you think you have a shot at fixing your issues, you need the ability to do the fix, even if you aren't confident what your fix is yet. Arguing through pathos works very well to get a large mass of people on your side, and having a large mass of people on your side is an effective way to get and use power. Then you either implement what you think is good or take some time to talk to the rational folks about what the best solution is and implement that. (Case study: Trump.)
I think you can recognize being privileged without feeling responsible (or guilty) for its existence.
For starters though, try this dumb little quiz (not that I expect it will change your mind):
Agree.
>You realize you are privileged, in so many ways, whether or not you want to recognize it
Have you met the person above to make that comment?
Low confidence/self-esteem is not a gender specific problem.
The "privilege" slinging used to belittle the accomplishments of people based on birth attributes _is_ rather obnoxious. To pretend that, for example, women are universally less privileged than men is of course ridiculous. Paris Hilton is clearly more privileged than a low-income boy growing up in Flint, Michigan.
But, there's a substantial amount of evidence that if you pair up a woman and man in the same situation, the man in contemporary society has a lot of intrinsic advantages. He has easier access to relevant education and social networks. His applications, work, and words are judged more highly simply for having a male name on them.
Are there no advantages women possess in contemporary society?
>He has easier access to relevant education
Women are significantly more likely to go be college educated than men. What "relevant education" are you referring to?
>His applications, work, and words are judged more highly simply for having a male name on them.
I agree! This is a complete embarrassment (especially in STEM fields).
edit: I want to be clear—I am in complete agreement that there are many problems women face in society (especially in the workforce). My grumble is the over-simplification of it. I think we'd be more effective in addressing these problems if we spoke accurately about them. Complaining about the privilege of people based on their DNA is not helpful.
So maybe it is a little more complicated than how you present it.
How?
Privige has nothing to do with it; for whatever reasons, women don't actually want to study tech fields. I actually find it pretty ridiculous and patronizing that people like you insist that there's something wrong with the world because women don't make the career choices you think they ought to.