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Comment by notliketherest | Hacker News Reader

Stopped reading at the line: "A few students—all of them white guys, Wu remembers—would hang around to ask about the research and to probe for flaws in its design. Wu still didn’t believe in ESP, but she found herself defending the experiments to these mansplaining guinea pigs."

Blatant sexism and rasicm against white males might be okay to idiot millennials but to me it's not okay. This is what a constant focus on "white injustice against minoritys everywhere!!" has done to our society. Casual sexism and racism is totally okay, as long as it's directed against the perpetrators of sexism and racism? Slate / Huffington Post / other outlets are full of this garbage.

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> Blatant sexism and rasicm against white males might be okay to idiot millennials

This breaks the HN guidelines, which ask you not to introduce classic flamewar topics. This sort of ideological ranting is never interesting, never goes anywhere good, and is plainly off-topic here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

I recommend this read, "White Fragility": http://www.overcomingracism.org/resources/White-Fragility.pd...

Why are these off-topic posts in every submission today, did Mozilla sponsor another outreach?

I don't think it's fragility to fight against the slightest racist comments. I think it's the way every race should be. Nobody should have to 'endure' racist speech in the news articles they read, that's the goal any race should be striving to achieve. Just because it's not as bad as other hate speech doesn't mean it's not racist.

What's sexist or racist in there? The only thing I see that might qualify is "mansplaining," and it's really mild.

Why is it in the article in the first place?

Why does it matter that Bem is Jewish, or that the people probing for issues in the studies methodology were white men?

Because details are interesting. Bem being Jewish adds some color. That all the people probing for issues were white men is a really interesting remark. Why would that be the case? Are white men particularly skeptical, or more willing to rock the boat? These are legitimate, interesting questions that we'd lose out on if they had omitted that description.

If they are legitimate and interesting questions, why aren't they probed further? They're throwaways.

In the article, describing Bem as a 'gentle Jewish kid from Denver who didn't care for sports' plays on a racial archetype in order to flesh out a character for the reader, but what does it have to do with his potentially fudging his data and changing the replication requirement in social sciences?

We could remove every bit of detail that doesn't directly relate to the conclusion of the article, but that would completely change its character. You seem to be applying newspaper standards to an article that doesn't even attempt to conform to those standards.

I am applying the standards of well written and organized thought to it, which should apply here.

What... isn't okay about this? It's a description of the interviewee, you don't have to agree with it.

It is completely out of place in this article and blatantly stereotyping. Just because some situation happens to fit a trendy topic like "mansplaining white males" doesn't mean it has to be explicitly pointed out.

It's not stereotyping to mention that a particular group of people actually predominantly or entirely consists of a certain race or sex.

I'm not a native English speaker, so I had to look it up, but I think I'm using the word correctly:

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/stereotype#English - A person who is regarded as embodying or conforming to a set image or type.

Which requires there to be some set image or type for the person to match. It would be stereotyping if the article was implying that white men are usually mansplaining skeptics or something of that nature. But merely stating the fact that this particularly group was actually all white men isn't stereotyping.

that's actually exactly what stereotyping is. so if you agree with the statement in the article then you must agree with all the other stereotypes out there.

Then you missed the whole point of the article. (SPOILER: The mansplainers were correct).

it's slate, what do you expect. garbage.

Exactly where I stopped too.

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