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Comment by DeusExMachina | Hacker News Reader

As a European, I keep getting baffled about how out of hand these things seem to be in the USA.

I live in the Netherlands, a very open-minded country with same-sex marriage, equal rights and were women seem to me to be even slightly more dominant over men (but this is just my perception).

All this without safe spaces, forced quotas at conferences, codes of conduct and people that police every word you say. There are laws against harassment of course, and that's enough.

Of course, it's not perfect, but there are rarely if ever any big incidents due to discrimination (to my knowledge).

Looking at the USA instead I see people getting offended pretty much for anything. As a consequence discussion gets neutered to the point where everybody is afraid to express even small controversial ideas or make the next "dongle" joke for the fear of repercussions.

I have also seen a lot of videos of people getting beaten in the streets for holding up signs with which "offended" people did not agree. Is that freedom of speech? We had such things in our history in the "old continent" and they were definitely not called this way.

This is one of the big reasons that always kept me away from the USA, even for short trips at conferences. Here in Europe to me it feels much safer and open minded, with all the flaws and imperfections that there might be.

View on HN

I definitely agree with this view, and it's perhaps also why I really can't understand choices like these, to cancel an event, because of the genders of the people speaking? Why does that even matter?

If what another commenter mentioned[0][1], that they did blind-reviews of the papers, then this is actually quite appalling to me and sends the reverse signal that we don't really care about your paper, as long as you fill up our quota.

I also deeply believe that this is inherently the wrong way to fix this kind of problem. It's like treating symptoms instead of actually treating the underlying disease. If the papers accepted were all male, then why not ask "why was it only papers from men that were qualified enough?" or "why did only men submit papers for our event?". If the former is true than we need effort into investigating why more women aren't writing these papers (be it quality or just plain quantity), and if the latter then look into the marketing/awareness on the paper submitting process.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14480918

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14481098

EDIT: Included links to the comments that mentioned the blind-reviews.

Semi-related: While I haven't seen it, I saw an interview with Jordan Peele about the movie "Get Out". He mentions that he wanted to tackle the fact that while Obama definitely helped the US move to less racist tones, it was never really solved, it is just there hiding under the skin with super-awareness to not be racist, which arguably is not the desired effect - there shouldn't be awareness at all about race period. I feel like this effect is somewhat similar to what is happening here, and the fact that the US is not able to hold any reasonable discussion at all on these topics doesn't make me optimistic on their capability to handle these issues. I feel like PC culture is causing way more harm than good.

</rant>

PC culture is a frustrated reaction to how fucked up America is with regard to race. Look at the income/health statistics between blacks and whites, or go live in an inner-city. It's mind blowing. It's a problem we created as a society and we're not doing anything to fix it. So we've resorted to counting the number of different color people at coding conferences.

It's a reaction that only makes the problem worse.

Imagine the reaction if a group of male organizers had decided too many women were speaking, and you'll understand how other people feel about this decision.

When sexism like this is tolerated it only discredits any claim that equality and fairness are the goals.

There is a difference between superficial equality and structural equality. Consider a society where 50% of tech CEOs and programmers were women, but it was socially acceptable to deny any given woman or man a job based on his or her gender. Such a society would have structural equality but not superficial equality.

What you're talking about is superficial equality. Your point is correct within that narrow context, but I don't think superficial equality is all that interesting.

That's equality of outcome though, which is often terrible.

I want a society where everybody gets an even shot, at which point I find it highly unlikely we'd end up at 50/50 - given programming has been both male-majority and female-majority over time I'm damned if I know in which direction it'd fall, but 50/50 usually means "you have forced people to be here who would've been better/happier somewhere else" and my feminism involves the radical notion that women have agency too.

The equality of outcome versus equality of opportunity distinction is a cop-out. If you have real equality of opportunity then you should expect equality of outcome,[1] unless there is biological reason why women/black people/etc want to be left out of well-paying secure careers, or can't hack it in those careers. Maybe that's true, but it's an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary proof.

The fact that programming has been both male-majority and female-majority at different times proves my point, and undermines yours. There is nothing inherent about it that makes women select into or out of it. Society pushed women into it back when it was a low status profession and now pushes women out of it now that it's a high status profession.

[1] When people say equality of opportunity they really mean something well short of that. Equality of opportunity means that's if you take a sample of say 1,000 kids, they should experience extrinsic forces over their lifetime that aren't correlated with race/gender/etc. I.e. some kids might have it easier because they have rich parents and some kids might have it harder because they have poor parents, but there shouldn't be a systematic pattern to those forces. But when people invoke "equality of opportunity" I am skeptical they mean doing something about the fact that statistically a random black kid is going to grow up in a household that only makes 60% as much as the one a random white kid would grow up in.

Please tell me how society "pushes women out" of programming. I've only seen women being pushed toward programming. It's up to the individual woman to choose programming - just like it's up to the individual man to want a degree in, say, clinical psychology. The only pressure I've seen is that of the gender majority. Men and women tend to overlook careers where there is a majority consisting of the opposite sex. It's not society's job to equalize gender ratios and yes there are real differences between men and women. It's not true that if there's a majority gender in a field it must be because of discrimination.

> When people say equality of opportunity they really mean something well short of that

I don't.

Why is equality of outcome terrible, per se?

Because it is ambiguous goal which under any reasonable interpretation has massive consequences and major unintended side-effects. My favorite sport is basketball. What is the 'equality of outcome' in the context of the NBA? Is it that players are evenly distributed across gender lines? Across economic lines? Across national lines? Across racial or ethnic or religious lines? In our society, it would probably be understood that NBA should be proportionally represented by each identity group. So you should see 70% white players, 15% hispanic players, 12% black players, 5% asian players. Is that the right solution? But is the fact that black Americans dominate the league actually a problem? And what the heck are you supposed to do to fix it?

The other point is that in a free society, you cannot guarantee equality of outcome because people are going to make personal choices that will be magnified and influenced by whatever sub-culture they are immersed in. Professional basketball in the early days was over-represented by Jews, because it just so happened that interest in the game went viral in that sub-culture.

Tech has an over-representation of men because it grew out of a particular nerd sub-culture. There's nothing wrong with doing outreach to get non-traditional sub-groups developing an interest in programming, just like there's nothing wrong with the NBA running clinics in China to get Chinese kids into basketball. But it's not racism that the demographics are the way they are! In a free society you should expect that!

> So you should see 70% white players, 15% hispanic players, 12% black players, 5% asian players. Is that the right solution? But is the fact that black Americans dominate the league actually a problem? And what the heck are you supposed to do to fix it?

Arguably yes. The NBA itself is an irrelevantly tiny portion of the economy. But it creates a huge pressure on African American kids to focus on being successful through sports instead of academic pursuits.

>Arguably yes.

What do you mean "arguably yes"? What are we losing by having blacks be over-represented in the NBA?

>But there is a huge pressure on African American kids to focus on being successful through sports instead of academic pursuits.

BY WHO??! Who are these individuals who are pressuring black kids to focus on sports instead of academics?!? I have never met such a person.

Professional Hockey is dominated by White Canadians and Russians. Baseball is over-represented by Latino/Hispanic players. Asians, who are 5% of the US population, account for almost 25% of all Physicians. Which industry has this perfect ratio of races that should serve as a model for us all. And you conveniently side-stepped the issue of 1) why it is race/ethnicity where proportionality should be prioritized over (for example) religion, and 2) is it even reasonable to expect that such a ratio to be achievable in a society where people are free to choose and 3) what the heck is the actual gain to society if it is versus the cost of brainwashing people to want things they don't actually want.

> BY WHO??! Who are these individuals who are pressuring black kids to focus on sports instead of academics?!? I have never met such a person.

How much do you know about the personal experiences of African American teenagers?

>How much do you know about the personal experiences of African American teenagers?

How much do you? How much do middle-class black Americans in New York know about the personal experiences of poor black teenagers in rural Louisiana? How much do you know of the personal experiences of second generation Polish Americans in Chicago? Or recent Chinese immigrants in San Francisco? Or poor White Protestants in Appalachia.

What is your point?

My point was based on personal experience. You're the one who said you don't know anyone encouraging black kids to pursue success through sports. How is that opinion supposed to carry any weight if you wouldn't be in a position to know about it even if it were happening?

This thinking is exactly the problem. "There are a lot of people with dark skin in basketball, your skin color is looking like theirs, therefore your path to success must be basketball". But the solution you seem to be implying is even worse - "ok, we succeeded in convincing you your skin color determines your path in life. Congrats to us. But now we'll close this path for you because we already have too many people looking like you there, so no success for you, sorry". Both ways of thinking are idiotic and both if followed can ruin people's lives. We need less of that, not more.

Great. Now convince all the black teenagers living in the same segregated neighborhoods black people lived in a century ago (because it was illegal for them to live in the other side of this or that road) that skin color doesn't determine their path in life.

I can't, of course. But it's not about me, is it? It's about how to fix it. And I think getting out of "race determines everything" mentality is part of fixing it, regardless of what I personally can or can't do. Yes, there was a lot of harm and injustice done to black people in the US in the past, and some of it continues even to this day. It must be fixed. I haven't seen an instance of concentrating on racial quotas fixing it though. I don't think racism can be fixed with racial quotas.

Would you support 50% gender equality of speakers at a conference?

Would you support limiting professional teams from hiring black people to allow for a certain number of Asians?

Would you support universities reducing their intake of Jewish students to stop over-representation?

Would you support hospitals hiring a maximum 5% Asian doctors?

> But is the fact that black Americans dominate the league actually a problem?

It's a symptom of one.

> And what the heck are you supposed to do to fix it?

Deal with the problems that deny so many black youth any better opportunities than the lottery-ticket of aiming for success in sports.

Because it reduces people to a set of identity classes that fill respective identity checkboxes. I.e. if it happens that on conference there is 10 good presentation submitted from class X but only 2 from class Y, and the quota is half-half, you would either reject 8 good presentations or add 8 crappy ones, just to fill identity checkboxes and achieve equality of outcome. Or cancel the conference altogether.

The true equality would be when the conference organizers see 12 good presentations, and don't even think to dig into what identity class they represent (unless the conference is specifically organized to represent identity classes). When did you last seen statistics about hair color or eye color of conference presenters? How about blood type? Maybe AB- people are underrepresented? You get the idea.

If green eyed people had been systematically oppressed until recently and still made a fraction of the money brown eyed people do as a result, you'd see statistics about eye color at conference presentations.

Define "recently. Neither women nor blacks nor catholics nor jews have been systematically oppressed in the US in my lifetime, or yours, or most of the potential presenters. If you are conservative about it you can claim discrimination up until the 1960s - which is 50 years ago, hardly "recently".

> Neither women nor blacks nor catholics nor jews have been systematically oppressed in the US in my lifetime

If you are ever so slightly open-minded about it you could consider black Americans to still be systematically oppressed by the criminal justice system. Read a bit about the criminalisation of marajuana, sentencing procedures, the industrial prison complex etc..

Equality of outcome as a goal is terrible because it's the enemy of equality of opportunity. "Everybody is denied their agency" would be equal, perhaps, but isn't part of any feminist vision I choose to align myself with.

What is the "structural inequality" in this case? That there are more men than women in tech? If so, what is the 'structure' that causes this inequality?

Turtles, all the way down.

----

Or to be less glib, that's a great question, and like many, not simple to answer well.

Mostly, it seems like a lack of positive reinforcement and role models (leading to self selection out at early ages), mixed with sexism in a a variety of forms (leading to lack of opportunities, or hostile environment and self selection out at later ages).

But that's an oversimplification.

If women don't choose to go into tech, that's their own choice.

It's not as if men went into tech because of positive social reinforcement for being a nerd.

There's still a social stigma attached to it, which I'd love to see change, but it affects both men and women.

It's a choice, but it's not the same choice. When a woman signs up to be an engineer, she's signing up for long hours debugging segfaults, just like a man. But unlike a man, she's signing up to spend four years in school being one of the handful of women in her class, then entering a workforce with the likes of Uber, etc. There signing up for a life of awkward encounters with coworkers, supervisors who try to date female employees, limited support networks, etc.

None of that stopped women from entering law, medicine, business, etc.

Tech isn't new. Why haven't women chosen to enter tech in the same numbers they've chosen other male-dominated fields?

> None of that stopped women from entering law, medicine, business, etc.

As to law, it didn't happen by magic. After openly excluding women into the 1970s, law schools and law firms made concerted efforts to increase the representation of women. Large law firms not only track demographic information for hiring and promotions, they disclose it to legal publications who report on it. These days much of it has become self reinforcing. Frat culture has a hard time surviving in an environment where a big chunk of the clients are women (a quarter of existing Fortune 500 CLOs and a third of new ones are women).

That's all true of tech as well. People should seriously ask why women aren't choosing tech careers, because the "old boys club" or "frat culture" explanation isn't at all unique to tech.

There is not a stigma against "in tech". There was never a stigma against it, really.

And yes, men largely do get into stem fields because there is huge positive reinforcement and many positive role models.

>There is not a stigma against "in tech". There was never a stigma against it, really.

Yeah. Traditionally all the cool kids were the math and computer whizes with glasses and pocket protectors - not the star football player. Yeah. Got it.

>And yes, men largely do get into stem fields because there is huge positive reinforcement and many positive role models.

Uh huh. Can you quantify that? Or did you just sit down and think really really really hard about it so it must be true.

>and many positive role models

Is that actually a real problem? Are you saying a white kid will be dissuaded from playing basketball, or even being an NBA fan because the best players are black?

In similar spirit, are you really trying to argue that a young girl will not be able to be inspired by Woz, or Jobs, or Elon Musk because they are men? What dystopian, ugly world are you living in?

I'm pretty sure the cool kids in my school did individual sports (golf, tennis, track), were in 2-3 AP classes, and aced their SATs. So that'd depend on where and when you are.

There's absolutely a stigma against not confirming to prevailing norms, which is a bit of a different discussion. Also the mess that is putting hundreds or even thousands of adolescents in a confined space with minimal oversight.

>Uh huh. Can you quantify that? Or did you just sit down and think really really really hard about it so it must be true.

Why did you get into it?

>Is that actually a real problem?

Yes. Though, representation generally is probably a better way to have said it. Though availability of role models and mentors with similar life experience is a factor as well.

>Are you saying a white kid will be dissuaded from playing basketball, or even being an NBA fan because the best players are black?

Fandom and participation aren't the same things, and while there's some overlap between former participation and later fandom in sports, it's far from 1 to 1.

I'm not sure if white kids would be discouraged due to lack of representation in the NBA. All other things being equal, yes, that's a likely outcome. But all other things are not equal. Race and sports in the US is an interesting topic in its own right.

>In similar spirit, are you really trying to argue that a young girl will not be able to be inspired by Woz, or Jobs, or Elon Musk because they are men?

Not at all. But a lack of representation has a few different impacts. At the personal level, individuals find it easier to identify with folks who they see as being like them. What exactly like them means varies, but the younger the child, the less abstract they tend to be. Second, parents and teachers are influenced by lack of representation, so it feeds back into a loop of lack of community encouragement, which doesn't help.

>What dystopian, ugly world are you living in?

The same one as you, of course.

Really what I'm getting at, there is no 'structural racism' in this case. You cannot point at a law, or mandate, or policy that actively discriminates against an ethnicity, race, or gender. The best you can do is give some hand-wavy argument that 'unconscious biases' are driving racist actions without knowledge of the person - but what is a person supposed to do with that? They are racist in such a secret way that even they are unaware of it? Total garbage.

What is your explanation for the underrepresentation of black people and women in engineering besides structural racism and sexism? If the answer is "self selection," explain to me what could possibly cause women and black people to self-select out of high paying interesting jobs?

>What is your explanation for the underrepresentation of black people and women in engineering besides structural racism and sexism?

Null hypothesis. YOU are making an unsubstantiated claim. What is YOUR proof of this structural racism. And feel free to define your terms, because I have no effin clue what 'structural racism' is.

Here's an alternative explanation, people are influenced by the sub-cultures they are in and ideas that go viral in one sub-culture, may not go viral in another. In the early 1900s professional basketball was dominated by Jews. Why basketball? I don't know. It just happened to strike a chord with that specific population, in that specific time.

I'm not saying this is the reason, but what it is, is an example that YOU have to dismiss or account for to prove YOUR claim.

>If the answer is "self selection," explain to me what could possibly cause women and black people to self-select out of high paying interesting jobs?

An average salary for a radiologist is $350,000/year. Why aren't you a radiologist? I'll tell you why I'm not. I would rather shoot myself than spend the amount of time it takes to become a radiologist because I have no interest in it. I have no interest in memorizing massive amount of latin names and reading volumes of biology and anatomy text books. Similarly, if you don't love programming, programming is an insanely boring and tedious profession. You may sit in-front of a computer screen for days trying to find a bug that occurs sporadically under some very specific conditions. I find that fun, others who have no interest in it will want to shoot themselves too.

So to answer your question: "I don't know" but if your criteria is human irrationality, I can go on and on and on and on... Why are middle-class kids borrowing hundreds of thousands of dollars to go to private liberal arts colleges with no real hope of landing a job that will provide them an income to pay of those loans? Come to think of it, why do humanities degrees even exist? Why do people buy lottery tickets when investing the equivalent money will net them a significantly higher return rate?

Humans are not rational agents. We're driven by emotion.

We known several things as fact. We know overt and open oppression of black people happened as recently as the 1970s and 1980s. (I'd say it's still happening, but the fact that it did happen in the recent past is indisputable.) And we know that black households make only 60% as much at the median as white households. All I'm doing is suggesting a causal relationship between the two.

Since you reject my hypothesis, I'm asking you to suggest an alternative. And your alternative appears to be, "I don't know why, but for some reason black people just don't like money." Which doesn't make any goddamn sense. Sure individuals are different, but why would we expect groups of people to have such distinct preferences? To me your theory smacks of rationalization.

That's surely a factor, but there are many other factors that have to be considered: the stigma against "acting white", Democratic benefit programs that breed dependency and make wealth building almost impossible, violence, fatherless families [1]. The opportunities for success exist; now, it's up to people to work for success.

1: http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2013/jul/...

>Since you reject my hypothesis

I reject your hypothesis on the basis that you have provided no evidence.

>I'm asking you to suggest an alternative

An alternative to what? Why there are less black people and women in tech than there are Asians and whites? I don't know. It could be any number of reasons and none of them may have to do anything with racism or misogyny. You can't just prove your assertion by saying "well i can't think of anything else it could be therefore racism must be the cause".

>And your alternative appears to be, "I don't know why, but for some reason black people just don't like money."

Your paraphrasing of a position I put forward is disgusting. It isn't at all what I said. At all.

You also missed my point. I'm not saying I believe my alternative. I have no evidence for it just like you don't have any for yours. I put it out there to demonstrate that there are potential alternatives that would need to be taken into account.

>Sure individuals are different, but why would we expect groups of people to have such distinct preferences

That's a good question. A type of question that one could study and get a Masters for or a PhD. Certainly there is plenty of precedent at least when it comes to tastes in movies, music and food. So why would you just dismiss it out of hand and blame racism?

> Mostly, it seems like a lack of positive reinforcement and role models

If one presupposes that men and women are literally just the same. As in they have the same distribution of proclivities and personality traits across their gender this would be the most logical conclusion to reach.

As an aside. Anyone ever heard of David Reimer? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Reimer

I appreciate your concern Mr. Hashem, but I doubt you had anything to do with the state of our society in the USA. Racial problems were baked into the cake here, so to speak.

Insofar as being "fucked up with regards to race." I've heard there are literal open market slave auctions going on in the Middle East.

Israel is ethnically cleansing Palestiniens.

India has a brutal caste system.

That's all worse than section 8 housing IMHO.

They've realised now (or maybe still don't realise) a blind review of papers isn't what they wanted.

The US is currently deep in a dark age. With a country this big, it may not be obvious as everything is mostly operating as it was in the past, only slowly failing over time. If you look closely, however, you can see that we have pretty much given up on education, science, and the pursuit of truth. Actually, you don't have to look very close anymore at all; it's beyond obvious. We make a big deal out of people graduating high school, a feat that I have no doubt certain non-human primates are qualified for at this point given how much we've dumbed down our education. We have no problem churning out uneducated fools, so why would we expect these fools to be knowledgable when softer topics like "diversity" are so much easier to tweet about? I'm not saying diversity is not a worthy pursuit, far from it, but the way these people are pursing it is indeed foolish and dumb. It's a step above anti-vaxers and climate change deniers, but now we're just splitting hairs on what constitutes stupid.

Come now. What would you say to an academic who didn't want to go to the whole of Europe, just because he saw some scary news about something that happened in Prague once?

The US is a huge, multifaceted place, and like anywhere so large, you will find things both awful and wonderful. But life is a lot less chaotic than the news agencies claim. And the histrionic folks, while loud, are a lot fewer in number than the amount of airtime their doings get would have you believe.

tl;dr- Come on over, the water's fine. You'll probably make some friends. Everybody wins.

I second the line of thinking, but please rein in the TSA a bit. That's literally the only thing I'm scared about going to US. All the other things seem like a purely local phenomena that shouldn't be generalized to the whole 300M country. But I am scared I'll get into trouble on the border because of my HN and Facebook posts (e.g. against US drone strikes).

> That's literally the only thing I'm scared about going to US

Don't be. TSA is stupid theater, they suck, but probability of anything happening to you is very low. Probability of anything beyond mild irritation happening to you - unless you one of high profile people that Powers That Be have a beef with - is vanishingly low.

Yes, it still happens - millions pass through TSA every day, and you'd have a number of cases where usual silliness rises to the level of dangerous idiocy, and these cases would be widely publicized and criticized, as they should be. But pure numbers game suggests your chances of becoming one of those is very small. If you take some basic precautions - like not standing out too much, being polite and not arguing with them, however stupid the proceedings look, etc. - even smaller.

In fact, on my latest travels, I personally have had much more irritating experience with London security that with TSA. On top of everything TSA does (which they did too), London people were severely understaffed for some reason, but if you think that made them move at anything faster than a glacial pace, you'd be so wrong. They were so Zen I'd be envious if I wasn't so concerned about missing my flight because they need to swab my books and slooowly bring it to some mysterious machine and slooowly come back and so on... But still it wasn't much more than mild annoyance summarily.

> But I am scared I'll get into trouble on the border because of my HN and Facebook posts (e.g. against US drone strikes).

Nobody cares. Really. They don't have resources to read every HN thread.

Yeah, there's no way I'm going to defend the TSA's methodologies. They a pain to deal with.

The good thing I'll say is that somewhere around 57 million people visited the US last year. 99.9%+ had no trouble other than long lines and the general frustration that comes with long distance travel. So your fears, while completely understandable, are also very, very unlikely to cause any actual trouble.

Those 0.1% mean absolutely nothing. There was a comment months ago right here in HN about a guy who owned a secure email provider who had his throwaway Android device confiscated, and who was interrogated for 8 hours on the topic of "give us access to your private email admin panel". He refused and was smart enough to not bring any way of unlocking his admin access with him (whitelisted IPs and/or physical keys which he left at home). He described the interrogators as very angry and that they "advised" him to immediately go back.

We get it, people who comment on sweet puppy Instagram posts aren't under threat. Sure. But the IT folk, especially people having access to sensitive information or white/black hats can definitely expect a plethora of insolent questions at the airport, asked in small creepy rooms somewhere at the back, from people who refuse to even identify themselves. Is that even legal?

Shall we also mention the looming danger of own laptops being banned on flights? Either use a Chromebook-like device (which, I have no doubt, will steal your private data, why else would they setup such a honeypot anyway) or GTFO, that's USA's policy.

I've made up my mind. I am not going to the USA for now. There's undoubtedly a huge pool of interesting people who can make some of my business dreams come true there but I am not sure being recorded in an unofficial "special target" list for life and having my devices every time I go confiscated is worth it. I'd say no.

(I exaggerate a bit of course, but to the average guy like myself losing even a $250 throwaway device is something that I will feel.)

> who owned a secure email provider

So he probably was on some kind of a radar. Are you? Then you concern is completely warranted. Are not? Then it's not.

It's a slippery slope kind of situation. Once they start doing it and see they can get away with it, then they start widening the circle.

I'm not advocating or defending them. Of course they should be called out on any case of abuse, and aggressively. With that, you also need to rationally evaluate if your personal probability is high enough to worry about it (especially to the point of not visiting a country just because of that), and for most people it just isn't.

That doesn't really do it for me. Isn't the level of government mistrust and "dissent in speach" you regularly encounter on HN, extremely high on HN compared to the average US visitor?

Like, at levels only seen in 1 out of every 100,000 visitors, making it quite likely you'll be one of the 0.1-% percent if you hold these extreme viewpoints?

The sort of stuff you see here wouldn't even wiggle the needle.

Ok, thanks for the numbers. That feels much better than what I was lead to believe happens at the borders all the time.

0.01% of 57 million people still means 5,700 people were harassed, largely unnecessarily.

The TSA and immigration officers at points of entry are nearly as bad as people make them out to be. It's a little like judging Chicago as a war zone based on stats from a very narrow geographic area with high violent crime rates: it isn't representative -- it's just that nobody ever gets "outraged" over the times they are treated well by customs/immigration/TSA. It's the same thing as tourists avoiding France because of terror incidents when in fact tens of millions safely visit France every year.

Criticism of TSA are certainly fair, but as someone that flies to the US from Europe monthly, the fears are definitely overblown.

Seriously, don't sweat it. The fears are overblown and not based on any actual data other than anecdotes from highly vocal bloggers/etc.

About 1 million visitors a day enter the US through airports in the US and about 360 are denied entry -- most of those because they had prior visa violations that deemed them inadmissible and others because they didn't have a valid visa. So 0.03% denied entry. In the U.K., that percentage is about 0.02%, just for comparison.

>The TSA and immigration officers at points of entry are nearly as bad as people make them out to be.

I think you're missing a 'not' in there somewhere. :)

As we know from history, and as was confirmed during the debacle over "naked scanners", TSA and such institutions will never, ever yield an inch. At best we can hope for a side step.

Very unlikely that they would care. Frankly, they don't have the resources to care about people (including myself) who protest and don't like drone strikes. The TSA is annoying but the worst part is just long lines.

That is probably the reality over there. But the perception from Here is definitely different.

That's what every American says.

I didn't live here until I was a teen, and I spent my childhood in Southeast Asia.

I've also lived for years at a time in a half-dozen other countries around the world.

So far, there's no other country I would rather live in than the USA. YMMV, and I respect that.

But please also consider that I am speaking from relevant experience.

I agree 100%. If I'm paying for a conference I want the best speakers and content - if you can deliver that with diversity I'm all for it. If you're number one priority is diversity and it means your content and speakers are sub-par, I'm going to stop coming.

I think the more important issue is to make sure you selection committee is not biased. While it might be nice to have a selection committee made up with the front-page names in the start-up industry, you'd probably be better off skipping those that act more like fraternities.

The U.S. faces challenges the Netherlands does not. Take race for example. One out of every eight Americans are here because their ancestors were slaves. That's not the distant past. Heck, many people today are fighting for the right to commemorate the pro-slavery side of that story. More recently, if Bill Gates had been born in the south, he likely would have gone to a racially-segregated school. And the effects of that are felt today. Black households, for example, have a median income of just 60% as much as white households.

How does this affect a coding conference you ask? Because it affects everything. You don't do something like that as a society and expect that the consequences will disappear just a few generations after you stopped doing it.[1]

So yes, everyone in the U.S. is really sensitive, with good reason. Frankly it's a miracle that safe spaces and sensitivity training are the worst atonement we have to deal with. People in many regions of the world are fighting decades' long bloody wars over less egregious circumstances.

[1] In college I used to be anti-PC. Then when I was living in Atlanta, I walked across one of the streets that historically served as a dividing line for segregation: http://socialshutter.blogspot.com/2012/10/when-street-names-.... I went from my trendy white midtown neighborhood to a predominantly black very low income neighborhood. For me, it was a major "holy fuck everything is fucked up" moment.

With the risk of being downvoted, let me cite George Carlin regarding the "sensitivity training":

"Hey, if you need a special training to realize you can't shove large cumbersome objects up somebody's ass, then maybe you're too fucked up to be in the police force in the first place. ... Let's try something else -- intelligence and decency. You never can tell, it might just work, it certainly has never been tried before."

I feel that in such areas USA just refuses to acknowledge the existence of a very, very basic common sense.

I think it's better to cite and learn from people who actually have to deal with problems on the ground instead of those who have the luxury of earning money and fame by uttering platitudes complaining and pontificating about them.

You're vastly underestimating people's ability to learn about emotions, work, and life in general. It doesn't matter much in what area you're in -- when you're 35 and on, most people share a lot of common insights in many areas of life. One of the names for "common sense", I believe, although I am sure that partial definition is far from being precise.

Okay, so what do you do when people don't have intelligence and decency?

Carlin was referring to a specific case when a bunch of white cops sexually assaulted a black man with inanimate objects (translation: putting a metal tube in his ass).

Instead of these people being relentlessly persecuted and jailed, they received "sensitivity training".

So yeah, I'd sue them to hell and back, and will fire any person in the chain of command who even remotely resists that decision. Which of course wouldn't ever happen, for one reason or another. I don't know the reason(s) but it's baffling that these people actually ran free, don't you think?

The median net worth for whites is over 10 times that of blacks. I think that's a much more telling statistic than income.

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/12/12/racial-wealt...

It's social engineering meant to divide and weaken us, and a large portion of the country has fallen for it. Especially in Academia.

We are becoming crippled by our own will. It's sad to watch and the pendulum response was the 2016 election.

My problem with claims like these is that they imply intent, which implies a coherent (and nefarious) effort behind large social trends.

Who precisely is it that's doing this?

My first guess would be those involved in the trillion dollar diversity and inclusion industry.

How many departments of government, academia, and business are there today which depend on a continued societal belief in postmodernism's collectivist explanation of oppression and victimhood?

If humanity achieved the goal of absolute equality, would those currently employed in the diversity and inclusion industry simply find new careers or would they continue to find new ways to segment humanity into oppressors and victims in order to retain the power and salary they are accustomed to?

This is as specious as "well of course vaccines don't work--pharma doesn't make money if you don't get sick!" By this logic, any profession built on solving a problem can't be trusted. Car broken? Don't take it to a mechanic--they'll just make sure it breaks again! Free-market competition (even the regulated kind) solves this conflict of interests.

"Trillion dollar diversity and inclusion industry?" That's ~1/18th of the entire US GDP--which firms, etc., do you include in this sector of the economy? I can't think of a single example.

This is why it's hard to reason through these topics. Either I'm told it's verboten to even discuss the implementation details of equal-opportunity initiatives, or I'm told it's some vast global conspiracy master-minded by Pam in HR who, having apparently learned the secrets to controlling the national discourse, can find no better application for that secret than keeping her job in HR.

> All this without ... people that police every word you say.

Is that a joke? There are literally laws, with actual prosecutions, in the Netherlands designed to police every word you say.

[citation needed]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech#Netherlands

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/05/18/world/europe/sylvana-si...

http://www.armradio.am/en/2017/03/17/chairman-of-turkish-aze...

http://www.economist.com/news/international/21640748-netherl...

Not OP, not endorsing their opinion, just linking for info:

https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-press/2016/netherlan...

Just recently in Zurich somebody was sentenced to a fine for "like" on Facebook:

https://sg.news.yahoo.com/man-guilty-libel-over-facebook-lik...

So I'm a Dutch-American dual citizen that has lived in both countries. I guess I was born to answer this question :)

A big hint to the difference is that my Black American friends spell it capital-B Black. Almost all of them live in, or are from, majority black neighborhoods. The majority listen to different music, and even have different diets compared to my white friends. They speak differently and have different names and are a distinct group of people. This isn't me making this up either; this is paraphrased from a Facebook post by an American Black friend of mine. There are large parts of the country where they can't rely on help from the police, and a significant portion of the country will actively hate them if they marry a non-Black person. I do have some black American friends that aren't like this. They spell it lowercase-b black, they live in mostly white neighborhoods, and aside from the color of their skin they are indistinguishable from another white person in that neighborhood. But those are a minority. The majority of Black Americans are capital-B Black, and they have much different lives because of it.

In the Netherlands however, there are no large Black neighborhoods. (There are "black neighborhoods" to some degree, but orders of magnitude smaller.) None of my black Dutch friends would "capitalize the B" so to speak. The average black Dutch person has a pretty similar life to the average white Dutch person: there wouldn't be much of a difference in where they live, their diets, or their schools. A black Dutch person won't have to worry that the police won't help them.

That can help you understand the race tensions in the US. To a somewhat lesser degree it can help you understand our LGBTQ+ and gender tensions. Sure, there aren't "female neighborhoods", but there are LBGTQ+ neighborhoods, and both women and non-straight people face discrimination. The Dutch women I'm friends with have pretty gender-mixed friends, while I'm usually the only male friend of the American women I've been friends with. The same for LGBTQ+ people - they tend to mostly make friends among themselves in the US, while my queer Dutch friends are mostly friends with straight people.

Basically, in the Netherlands everyone is the same, but in the US people form groups. A big reason for that is that the American groups formed out of necessity. If you were going to be killed for being gay, well it makes sense to have mostly gay friends. If you're going to be lynched because you're Black, well it makes sense to make friends with other Black people. The Netherlands experienced racial tensions to a much lesser degree, so these groups never formed.

As an American, I keep getting baffeled how opinions like GH's in this are so prevalent on the internet but rarely seem to occur in the real world. Please don't judge us on the acts of a few.

Gender equality in IT is a realistic important issue, but this is just taking it to a crazy level.

The issue is that here in the US we have an entitlement problem. Everyone feels entitled to everything. Even poor people feel like temporarily inconvenienced rich people, as the famous saying sort-of goes. We are also still obsessed with might making right, even at an individual level. America means guns and freedom and kicking everyone else's ass. It doesn't help that recentlyish our politicians feed this narrative by creating the worst us-vs-them chasm our nation has ever seen.

I think this is problematic, but I also think it's inherent in a society that truly wants to allow freedom of expression. Why do we still have the KKK in America? Why do we let things like Breitbart exist? In Germany they have restrictions on Nazi-related things and discussions, and they seem to have turned out pretty well. We need to hold the right people accountable when bad things happen, and pretty much up and down the whole chain, that doesn't happen, because freedom. Hell, we even have judges who have allowed "affluenza" to be used as a legal defense for things as heinous as rape.

Yeah it is out of control in America. Perhaps it's partly that young middle-class people are less wordly (less experience of other cultures) and thus more inclined to juvenile, over-the-top views. Perhaps it's a pendulum swinging a bit too far currently; it's a pretty huge change to have the degree of support for a socialist presidential candidate that we saw with Bernie Saunders.

> This is one of the big reasons that always kept me away from the USA, even for short trips at conferences.

That's just silly. The first bit of your post was good, but now you sound like someone who really needs to take themselves less seriously. You don't have to avoid going to a continent because you don't like the tone of their culture wars currently. There are plenty of people who think all sorts of shit there, and if you really can't find any people who live up to your European standards then how about going for the natural world etc? (European speaking here)

>>>I live in the Netherlands, a very open-minded country with same-sex marriage, equal rights and were women seem to me to be even slightly more dominant over men (but this is just my perception).

I can't comment on the present social climate or attitudes in NL generally, but the history seems pretty similar. Sufferage at about the same time, anyway.

Anyway, think about who is offending and being offended. No is being beaten in the streets for saying, "Actually, I think Bill Maher is the height of comedy."

Also, holding a sign that, explicitly or implicitly says, "I am inherently superior to you, and I fervently hope you will all die and come to ruin, what are you going to do about that, huh, <expletive>?" seems unlikely to be well received anywhere in the world.

How do we define the word "diversity" for a tech conference? Shouldn't it about the diversity of idea?

"a very open-minded country" cough Geert Wilders is the most popular politician in the Netherlands cough

He's also the most unpopular politician. What's your point?

That the Netherlands isn't as tolerant and open-minded as it seems to have fooled the rest of the world into thinking so. The man walks around calling Moroccans scum, even in Brexit Britain this would _never_ be tolerated.

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