Demoted and Placed on Probation
quillette.com
quillette.com
The recommendations of the university working group seem similar. Well-intentioned people can reach different conclusions on these things, but none of them are egregiously unreasonable. You don't have to use the BMI exercise; there are enough other exercises that solve the goal of inputting some numbers and calculating a simple formula based on them. None of them are even at the level of saying, you must teach a thing you don't believe. (He's not even, say, a biology professor asked to teach/not teach evolution. He's a computer science lecturer, and none of these recommendations are about the facts of computer science itself.)
As a professional software engineer, if I picked a fight about the coding guidelines, I would in fact be spending a significant amount of my political capital. If I find something very important, it's possible I can slowly try to convince people of one thing, and have it reflect positively on me. But if I picked a pointless fight - like saying that we should standardize on double quotes in Python instead of single quotes - my management would be right to question whether I was more interested in doing my job or in getting my way.
And if I were to say that I wanted to work on "heterodox engineering," I would be surprised if my management did not question whether I was in the right role. By his own admission, this man's "best teaching" is in areas entirely unrelated to computer science - why is he confused about having trouble getting tenure in a school of computer science?
For all that Quillette seems to dislike professional victims, they appear to have published one.
This is the core of the opposition between being an employee and being a professional, such as a professor, a priest, a judge, or a doctor. The professions answer to a higher authority than those who pay them, and this is essential to their role. In the case of professors, part of this is codified in the norm of “freedom of inquiry”, which has been central to the modern conception of the University for centuries.
It is unsurprising that the dominant paradigm of wage labor attempt to erase and co-opt the pre-capitalist institution of the professions, obliterating it as an outdated or worthless obstacle and even attempting to appropriate its terminology. But I think the existence of professional institutions like the academy and the judiciary has done a fair bit of good, and replacing them with wage labor is a perilous enterprise.
To be clear, you are not a professional software engineer. You are an employee, directed by management. That is the opposite. That is why you do not enjoy the autonomy that professors are struggling to retain. Your plight is regrettable, and condemning others to it would be not only regrettable but potentially catastrophic.
It's certainly reasonable for him to want to be a "professional," and from his teaching statement and his desire to teach honors classes about Haidt instead of intro classes about programming, that seems like exactly what he wants. I, too, would like to be a "professional." But he doesn't get to just be one merely because he wants to be one, any more than I can.
It is true that tenure is a much more effective protection, and this is perhaps a major reason that managerialists have shifted more and more of the teaching load to adjunct faculty over the last four decades. Unquestionably someone designing a new introductory course, as the author claims to have done, would have been tenured or tenure-track faculty at any US University in the 1950s, 60s, or 70s. That is, as defined by his teaching responsibilities, he is very much a professor or assistant professor according to the traditional definition.
It does seem to be correct that he is in fact vulnerable to political interference with his freedom to teach. But what we are debating is whether it would be better if he were more vulnerable to it or less so. Your position seems to be that it would be better if he were more vulnerable to it because that would make him more like you. My position is that it would be better if he were less vulnerable to it because historically that kind of thing has led to disasters like Lysenkoism and the failure of the Nazi atomic bomb program.
Which gets to the heart of the problem: there isn't a meaningful sense in which any of the decisions he objected to were related to a "freedom of inquiry" about computer science or even about programming. It would be one thing if he said, I don't think we should be teaching students this programming language or this material or this approach to concepts, I think we should be teaching another way. (For instance, he could have written something like https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/12/29/the-perils-of-java... .) I would agree with you that such decisions should be the purview of a tenure-track professor and not school administrators, and I would even agree with you that the growth of adjunct roles is an attempt to take such decisions out of the hands of professors. His objections were of a different category entirely. He objected to how he perceived universities to be coddling students, to how he doesn't recognize certain words as part of the English language, etc. It's a pretty motte-and-bailey argument to say that academic freedom also protects a professor's right to ignore any direction about teaching from university administration.
Suppose a tenured professor says, I don't think students learn well in the mornings in a classroom setting, I wish to teach at 10 PM at the pub, and I don't care what time and room these managerialists have assigned me to. Students will meet me where I say they'll meet me, or they'll fail the class. Would you say that the professor (who may genuinely believe this is a better teaching environment) is protected in this decision by "freedom of inquiry"?
That's basically all Quillete is. It's "contrarian" by definition, which leads to a lot of similar complaints by authors across the site.
> Allowing students to work together in a group for part of their grade instead of requiring them to complete all graded work individually.
> A reduction in the amount of effort expended pursuing cheating cases by 50 percent even though there has been no reduction in cheating cases.
Can somebody explain to me how these recommendations will make the course more inclusive/diverse, I fail to see the connection?
It’s only natural for various minority groups to ultimately attack what they perceive to be the primary instrument of discrimination against them: judging them on their ability.
However well-intentioned this might seem, the results can be pretty awful. In some cases, the person was hired for their first job, flamed out completely, and had to find a job in an unrelated industry. It's a terrible thing to go through.
I tried several majors in college and had the good luck to wash out almost immediately in the early coursework. If I hadn't, I might have ended up in a career I hated, dragging down those around me. It's hard to love your work if you don't have the skills for it.
In other words, if the zeitgeist is ever to change, someone has to go against it, often at personal cost. We should be grateful some people have a compulsion to speak up even when it costs them personally.
That's a huge insult directed at exactly the student they claim to be supporting.
As many here can attest, we already have a significant problem with people passing through CS/etc programs and coming out the other end without being able to write a fizz-buzz off the top of their heads. Looking at current curricula, it strikes me as noticeably dumbed down, compared to the no-name program I went through several decades ago.
One wonders how history would've turned out if Galileo had followed your advice? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_affair
And the idiot got himself killed for it :-)
This guy is saying "I believe X" and is fighting really hard for his beliefs. Instead of addressing whether it's valid/worthy, you're insulting his intellect for standing up for what he believes in a way you consider not-savvy.
What really stands out to me is how he addressed the honestly pretty tame feedback he got on his class. A whole committee was put together and came back with recommendations on some pretty minor things he could do to better foster a sense of inclusivity and his response was nah I'd rather not. I'm not at all surprised at the result. Regardless of what his article said, the reaction to it, or his actual credentials as an instructor he showed the administration very clearly with his actions that he has literally no interest in trying to make the department an inclusive environment. And that's ultimately the entire point. They are trying to make CS as accessible as possible and this guy is fighting them tooth and nail at every step because what...?
I mean the last sentence is just a ridiculous take as a teacher. A) Yeet is now a word in the english dictionary. New words are created all the time and the definitions of existing ones change to match the context in which they are used in modern times. B) Making the pretty minimal effort, of referring to someone in the way in which they'd like to be addressed is literally such a low bar, that refusing to do so quite frankly makes you an asshole. C) He uses the word antifragile, which is not a universally recognized english word. It's a term coined by a professor in a book in 2012.
The suggestions included some that just seemed like "make your class easier", I can see how a diversity panel telling him how to grade his class would be annoying.
> A relaxation of grading on coding style.
> Allowing students to work together in a group for part of their grade instead of requiring them to complete all graded work individually.
> A reduction in the amount of effort expended pursuing cheating cases by 50 percent even though there has been no reduction in cheating cases.
There were some that he easily could have done, like just buying some seminar for his TAs and using a different problem:
> Training for TAs in inclusion and implicit bias.
> Review of all course materials for inclusiveness. For instance, of a lecture that involves calculating body mass index (BMI) using guidelines from the National Institutes of Health, the report noted that it “seems insensitive to present students with a program that would print out that some of them are ‘obese’ while others are ‘normal.’”
There's no reason not to make an effort to use more names in examples and even just a quick "I've always said you guys, I'm making an effort to say folks but old habits die hard" probably would have at least shown he cared enough to make people happy.
That's one nutty request amid a bunch of more-or-less-reasonable ones. (The requested reduction in pursuing cheating cases was just as nutty, TBH.) It tells you a lot about how politicized this whole thing is, but it's not like we didn't know that already. Overall, the article author seems a bit too emotionally involved himself, in a way that's pretty hard to make sense of as just caring about good CS 101 teaching.
I was an RA years ago when this stuff was being incubated by residence life. A lot of it is really reasonable but I just remember everything being punctuated with insanity and it being so difficult to even get through to people pushing it.
We had to do one on one's with our residents, in our rooms (I forget the phrasing but it was "safe-space"esque) and some of the questions we had to ask were about sexuality. These were due within the first month, so imagine being a freshman, and your RA pulls you into your room for a scheduled meeting and then starts asking you questions about your sexuality. I was just like, maybe as an optional meeting after we actually know these people but this is so unprofessional and uncomfortable. I ended up just reading the questions I wasn't explicitly going to ask at an all hands meeting and saying "I'd love to discuss these things with you one on one but I am not going to force you to talk to me about them" and even that when I turned in my one on one reports with those questions blank for basically everyone was a huge issue (I can't remember what happened to me but I remember meeting with some director, my manager and the person above my manager).
So yeah, he explicitly said "I'm not even trying to compromise" - so we already know his mind space. Can't really defend that. But I at least know why he's so angry about the whole process because I know how those discussions go.
It came to a head in a 400-level class, and the professor handled it by making the midterm and final extra credit, and giving everyone an A who showed up to every class, deducting a letter grade per absence, unless the student demonstrated that they were observing some religious or cultural observance in the university’s list of approved things. (Which included everything from major holidays to observances of Norse religious events)
That professor was able to get away with that because she had tenure and followed the letter of the law with respect to grading. Whatever the content of the argument, lecturers are serfs in the academic hierarchy and have agency or freedom. They get abused and fired every few years anyway, so if you’re in that position STFU or get drummed out.
Why would I hire a group who only got through their qualifications by cheating? Sounds like it may lead to more discrimination than it solves...
I see absolutely no reason why the addition of a sentence to the header of the syllabus would be onerous.
Demonstrably: Yes, or they wouldn't be asking for it.
> How does this make any sense?
It costs you nothing, or so close to nothing that there's no effective difference, and a whole heap of people appreciate it. And, in this instance, it also allows you to keep your job. It's a net positive for all involved.
Do you have a particularly good argument for anyone not doing it? (Slippery slopes need not apply.)
Obviously, people never ask for things they don't actually care about.
IMO this is intended as something that is both unreasonable to include AND hard to object to on any grounds but reasonableness and practicality. "Don't you care about indigenous peoples, or are you some kind of racist?" And so it provides the ability to continue objecting to someone's behavior even if they make all the other requested changes.
If we operate under the assumption that not every single person asking for a statement of acknowledgement is acting under bad faith, it's important to note that you haven't actually presented any reason about why it would be unreasonable to include.
Without a cogent argument against the inclusion of the statement, it's very sensible to point to the refusal to include the acknowledgement, and say "this person is refusing to do this simple kindness we have asked for, which makes him a bit of a jerk".
A large part of it is that in the US (which is where this professor is located), the preferred nomenclature is "American Indian" or "Native American". (According to CGP Grey [0], the closer you get to a reservation, the more likely it is that "American Indian" or just "Indian" is the preferred term) Either way, "Indigenous Peoples" seems to be more of a Canadian or Australian thing, and I've never seen it used to refer to people in the states. This would imply that the request isn't actually coming from the tribes in question.
And IMO it would be unreasonable to include for the same reason that a discussion of set theory would be inappropriate in a history course covering the "New World" in the 1400s, even ignoring the fact that the term is wrong.
> And IMO it would be unreasonable to include for the same reason that a discussion of set theory would be inappropriate in a history course covering the "New World" in the 1400s, even ignoring the fact that the term is wrong.
"Set Theory" has no overlap with "New World history", I agree. The Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science & Engineering has a very real-world overlap with the land on which it is built.
It might be the catch-all term! But you generally don't use catch-all terms when talking about specifics - it'd be like asking for a memorial for the Europeans who landed at Plymouth Rock. Yes, they were Europeans! But saying that, instead of 'British' or 'Pilgrims' or whatever, would be weird. I stand by my thought that if this was being pushed by the tribe in question, it would either mention the tribe by name or use American Indian.
Also, "Native Americans" refers to all the native peoples of the new world, while "American Indian" is restricted to those located within the US.
> "Set Theory" has no overlap with "New World history", I agree. The Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science & Engineering has a very real-world overlap with the land on which it is built.
New World history has plenty of overlap with many things that could be called "western civilization", though. Perhaps a better comparison would have been to teaching the US constitution, since that's what enabled the society that they're learning New World history within. Or how electrical power generation works, since presumably all the study materials required electricity in distribution/production. IMO those are both at least as significant an overlap as the fact that they happen to occupy the same land.
As for the second point you're making. I'm sorry, and I may be being obtuse right now, but I am struggling to parse how this is an argument against including an acknowledgement statement (in CS specifically or anywhere else).
Perhaps that's the case in Australia, but that term is very rarely used in the US. As the parent states, it's "Native American" or "American Indian" when reaching for a catch-all, followed by a tribe name when specifics are required. "Indigenous people" just isn't used really at all here.
You think the solution is being obnoxious and doing that in such a way that is literally exact same amount of effort as just being nice?
Then, your imaginative response when someone points out that everything you are suggesting is shitty behaviour, the answer is to point back at them and say "no you"?!
Of course. After all, 'malicious compliance' is a relative term; the alternative is to ignore the request altogether and do nothing at all!
I would appreciate it if you could rewrite all your HN posts to exclude the use of "you" and rather use alternate grammatical forms.
It's not a big job really, so you shouldn't have any possible reason not to comply.
Sure. When people are trying to sabotage his courses by continuously injecting their political, highly leftist and non-CS-related agenda into it, his response should be as malicious as humanly possible.
What's next? Should we let flat-earthers dictate how we teach science?
Being compelled to include something you may not actually agree with is onerous.
And it opens the door for other things to included as well. What if two different groups of student activists demand that you include contradictory statements?
I can understand why an instructor would opt to not include ANY political statements.
Additionally, combined with the request for more group work it may be a case where people are working in groups on individual work which isn't in and of itself cheating, but may have been treated as such. At my university it was encouraged for people to work in groups on those type of assignments so that people could help each other and remove some of the burden from professors and ta's
I suppose working while attending classes might make office hours difficult but study groups easier. What we can’t know is if he was summarizing for effect and he left out their rationale, or if these suggestions came to him this arbitrarily.
Mostly I get a vibe that he’s decided to die on this hill and he’s being stubborn and on some level enjoying the “persecution”. We all do things that feed our own narrative and don’t really provide any other payoff. My self sabotage has never been this public.
Wow, racist much?
We've already had to ask you this, coincidentally even using a similar analogy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20580702. No more firebombs, please.
Since you bring it up, I'm guessing you felt that the "calling out your peers" aspect was a mitigating factor. The thing is, your comment didn't say anything about that, and readers have no way of knowing. Intent doesn't communicate itself, so the burden is on the commenter to disambiguate.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....
I can appreciate the irony of discussing a guy who is being recalcitrant on the subject of how words or examples make others feel and then doing the same thing. Have a good Sunday.
Do you really believe the student group and union would have been happy with this? I find that unbelievable. They would have decried the attempt to feed them some "easy" things and not follow through on the real issues.
Basically, as soon as they sent the letter with all those over-the-top descriptions of the prof's behaviour, they were in a corner and couldn't have accepted anything less than a dismissal.
I’d really like to see some more info from the Allen group about how study groups improve inclusivity rather than reducing it. That wasn’t my experience in school at all, and I feel like I’ve always been waiting for someone to call them out as favoring a certain type of student.
I don’t know that I trust the author to relate that info if it was in fact already provided. We have an unreliable narrator. It makes him look more sympathetic to summarize them in this terse form, and we don’t have the source material.
It might not be a huge effect, but not exposing students to this puts them at a subtle disadvantage to those who were. And the idea that these decisions should be dictated by some committee from elsewhere in the university is absurd.
* A relaxation of grading on coding style - In the real world you will be expected to adhere to a prescribed coding style. Getting students used to this is not a bad thing. This is equivalent to docking points from students who refuse to learn how to use git.
* Allowing students to work together in a group for part of their grade instead of requiring them to complete all graded work individually. - This is a request to make the curriculum easier and does not appear to be related to inclusion.
* A reduction in the amount of effort expended pursuing cheating cases by 50 percent even though there has been no reduction in cheating cases. - This is a request to make the curriculum easier and does not appear to be related to inclusion.
* The addition of an indigenous land acknowledgement to the syllabus. - This is far outside the scope of a CS course.
* The use of gender-neutral names like Alex and Jun instead of Alice and Bob. - As long as you are using a variety of names, this seems redundant.
* An avoidance of references that depend on cultural knowledge of sports, pop culture, theater, literature, or games. - Using these is meant to be engaging and many students like it. As long as you don't need prior knowledge of history or knowledge of the reference to solve the problem then I don't see what the issue is.
* The replacement of phrases like “you guys” with “folks” or “y’all.” - "You guys" is universally understood to be gender neutral. Taking issue with this seems pedantic.
* A declaration of instructors’ pronouns and a request for students’ pronoun preferences. - Asking for students' pronouns is good practice and the professor should use them if provided. It is unreasonable to demand that professors provide theirs. It should be understood that if pronouns are not explicitly stated then individuals wish to go by their biological pronouns.
Out of all the suggestions that were made, this is the one that's perhaps most relevant to inclusion and getting more women to code, actually. It's well-known that women are on average more social than men, more open to working with people than things, and less approving of solitary activities like being a traditional lone "rockstar coder".
Of course, most work requires a lot more collaboration, and CS departments could do more to help train up those skills.
And yet if this professor used a statement like that as an explanation for why fewer women code than men, he would suffer the consequences, name calling, and firing.
Alice and Bob are actually standard names for cryptography, though. They weren't names that this professor plucked out of thin air. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_and_Bob
If he had pulled the names from a hat, it would be trivially the case.
I must be misunderstanding this. If I were teaching a class, am I really expected to solicit every single student for what their preferred pronouns are?
I'm fine with people's pronouns, but it is so rare, how does it make sense to ask everyone?
I actually know a trans person, and she told me that she hates how some people are constantly drawing attention to trans people.
One thing he said that sounded completely outrageous though was that the inclusivity committee asked "A reduction in the amount of effort expended pursuing cheating cases by 50 percent even though there has been no reduction in cheating cases."
That's crossing a huge line in my opinion.
So for the school to be "more inclusive", more of that demographic needs to pass. And then we just have to stop catching them while cheating.
This is typically the error where people force-optimize for the numbers asked alone, instead of thinking about what they can do to make those metrics appear naturally.
And as usual the results are just bonkers.
Relaxing efforts to pursue cheating? Lowering grading standards? It is very clear that the committee looked at which demographics were not doing as well in his classes as they would like, and came up with some recommendations to change that.
We are seeing a trend in academia, where your class/race/ethnicity/social group membership should mean more in terms of what is owed to you, than your academic merit. Women being given bonus points to enter STEM degrees at University of Sydney is one such insane example.
I find it very disingenuous when people look at an article like this, think the points raised by the college/university aren't that bad, and then refuse to consider the underlying motives for the college to make these recommendations.
Also, for English, new verbs and nouns are constantly made. Not pronouns. [0]
Also, the cheating thing is ridiculous, full stop. I’d have a hard time dealing with folks like that as well.
[0]: https://www.thoughtco.com/what-is-closed-class-words-1689856
I don't understand how this relates to inclusivity.
With the help of a code formatting tool both are perfectly capable of working in industry and I haven't seen any particular correlation with actual ability to write software, but one of them is going to get much better grades than the other in a class that grades on code style.
Whatever point one occupies in these spaces, in whatever region sectioned off by the major divides, it's uncomfortable to have an article in one's face that comes from an opposing sector. Every one of us has this experience. Even users who identify with occupying no such region have this experience—maybe most of all, since they don't want to see any of these, whereas most of us quite like the ones from the spaces we identify with. I don't think there's any way out of this conundrum. We all have to tolerate that discomfort if we're to survive as a whole community. Indeed it seems to me that tolerating such discomfort is the essence of tolerance. Fortunately it's a skill that can slowly be learned, so the hopeful view is that we're slowly learning it together.
I am a gay man. I grew up Christian, but ended up rejecting the Christian faith initially due to incompatibilities with my church and my sexuality. Over time it became more ideological (I dislike binary moral systems) but that's irrelevant.
In my experience, my original church (certainly not all of Christianity) chose to reject people of my orientation. They express intolerance to the highest degree. So, as a gay man, should I respond in turn and completely cut all Christians out of my life, declaring them all intolerant?
Of course not.
You see, Christianity actually preaches tolerance. Not all Christians follow this to the same degree, but Christians are taught to love their neighbors, even the gentiles, and especially the tax collectors, prostitutes, and folks that the rest of society would choose to reject on principal. Even if I disagree with the teaching as a whole, there's a ton of good moral lessons to be had within that book. It is generally useful as a means of teaching a system of right and wrong, through parables and stories, even if some of its teachings disagree with my personal world view.
I think it's dangerous to reject other people entirely just because you choose to reject one of their beliefs. We may find it easy to label people and sort them into boxes, but it's easy to lose track of the humanity underneath those labels. So, yes, I will choose to tolerate people whose beliefs I strongly disagree with, because that one belief does not solely define them as a person. Even if we fundamentally disagree on something as core to my being as who I choose to love, we can still have an interesting discussion and gain perspective through that discourse. I value that discourse far too much to reject any person on the misguided notion that they are somehow "wrong" or "flawed." They are simply different. And if I want them to tolerate me, the very least I can do is agree to tolerate them in return, whether we like each other or not.
You've set up a straw man. Identifying as Christian does not make someone intolerant. Many people who identify as Christian are intolerant of people who identify as gay.
Discrimination against the first group due to the actions of the second is unfair. But refusing to engage with the second group is completely reasonable.
Otherwise you allow intolerance toward gay people to be legitimized. That can lead to an erosion of rights. It's literally dangerous in the long term.
Hrm... I suppose I have. The parent appears to be using a quote (from Karl Popper) that I've not heard before, so clearly I misread the intended nuance. Now that I'm reading through the philosophical context of that quote, I can see that I overreacted.
Thanks for the clarification; I now have much food for thought to chew on.
Being intolerant might feel good, but it will never win the day.
> His story about being gay seems to me an example of that.
In my experience as a queer woman, there are a lot of extremely misogynistic gay men, so I'm not sure that excuses anything.
Re the author's story, it's not that it excuses anything; it's just that it's an additional aspect. When articles like this are also about personal experience, they hold more information, and posts with more information seem to support better discussion.
There are plenty of respected neo/conservative outlets (or as Quillette calls itself, "centrist"); I don't think this framing is right.
The Economist gets onto the front page of HN frequently, and they're the first to admit they're in the center of the spectrum.
https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2013/09/02/...
The Wall Street Journal does as well, and they not only are openly conservative, but also controlled by the same man who runs FOX News.
Quillette, however, seems to be based on airing rage-bait. If you look at the front page of it, there are two types of article: first-person storytelling using deliberately inflammatory and confrontational wording and structure, and articles on trends that use the same, covered elsewhere less-controversially.
There are thousands of outlets covering the beats that Quillette does, including many outlets on the same side as Quillette, and most of those outlets don't get the same outrage that Quillette does, because Quillette's concern seems to lie with working social media outrage into mass viewership.
When headlines are filled with phrases like "Brave New World" and "the Decline of Excellence" and article previews stuffed with things like "manufactured rape crisis," it's apparent that they're aiming for outrage marketing rather than articles that can stand on their own merits.
While I'm not sure what the solution is, I think editorializing the titles of certain Quillette articles might help.
Whatever the opposite of Quillette is, it doesn't belong here either. The problem isn't about discomfort with exposure to the opposing sector. It's about bad-faith content generating bad-faith threads that make demands on good commenters who could make better contributions elsewhere on HN.
Please reconsider.
Most perplexing is that someone cited users writing long comments as some sort of problem. So, it turns out that complex subjects generate more discussion?
I’m not even sure what comments people are finding so offensive in this thread that you feel the need to blacklist the source. tptacek has trashed Quillete as a whole many times in the past, so I think it’s safe to say that his opposition extends much further than “makes for bad comment threads”, and is a little closer to your initial assessment of being uncomfortable with ideas from an opposing sector, which is pretty much nailed it.
http://www.paulgraham.com/trolls.html
There are two senses of the word "troll." In the original sense it meant someone, usually an outsider, who deliberately stirred up fights in a forum by saying controversial things. [1] For example, someone who didn't use a certain programming language might go to a forum for users of that language and make disparaging remarks about it, then sit back and watch as people rose to the bait. This sort of trolling was in the nature of a practical joke, like letting a bat loose in a room full of people.
The definition then spread to people who behaved like assholes in forums, whether intentionally or not. Now when people talk about trolls they usually mean this broader sense of the word. Though in a sense this is historically inaccurate, it is in other ways more accurate, because when someone is being an asshole it's usually uncertain even in their own mind how much is deliberate. That is arguably one of the defining qualities of an asshole.
Given that the people on news.YC have historically/are generally acting in good faith, it only takes a handful of people acting in bad faith to generate large amounts of comments from users who aren't, and that takes effort from them that would likely be better served elsewhere, just to maintain the quality of discussion on the site. Refuting people acting in bad faith isn't enjoyable, and likely hurts the reticence rate of the site in the long term for users acting in good faith, who are exactly who you want to keep.
After all, Graham himself notes that DH6. refutations are the most desirable, and a person can only reasonably write so many of those a day. Wasting multiple ones on those acting in bad faith hurts the quality of the site for everyone, including the people acting in bad faith.
http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html
This article was, taken most generously, DH4, with a strong case for being DH3. Frequently, Quillette articles are nothing past DH2.[1] Refuting it and some of the bad faith comments in this thread, we see multiple DH5s and DH6s (of course, there are also some DH3s and DH4s and what looks to be a couple of DH1s). Noticeably, there are few comments on the side of the author that are multiple lines long, including in response to multiple DH6s. 'kragen's comments are the only DH5s and DH6s I see on the author's side in this thread, and they're hardly on topic.
Even users like 'sneak, who aren't particularly left or liberal, chimed in to note how unreasonable the author seemed to be, not on the ground of morality or "ideological grounds," as you put it, but practicality: it's not a matter of what you can't say, it's a matter of the quality of disagreement it's at, and the quality of disagreement it generates. Even if the point is entirely valid, if it's presented with a sufficient agitation-to-substance ratio, it's probably not right for news.YC.
To quote our venerable moderator, "Not only were many high-quality stories being overlooked, probably most of the finest submissions—the out-of-the-way, intellectually interesting, totally unexpected submissions that make for the best of HN—were getting ignored." Given that there's so much high-quality, intellectually-stimulating information on the WWW, and that there are hundreds of high-quality submissions to news.YC a day that are buried, it barely makes sense to keep as light a touch on downweighting that news.YC does, and it doesn't make sense at all when an article won't make for good discussion.
In fact, Paul Graham also notes that this exact type of thread is cancerous to the quality of discussion, and should only really be left alone when of particular value to hackers. Notice, here, that 'tptacek is consistent with his position in this thread, and once more, it's absolutely about how much it lowers the quality of discussion and brings undesirable users:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6157895
Quillette is arguably at the zenith of producing this type of article: the marketing technique is masterful and impressive, but it's not fit for HN, and doesn't generate good discussion.
He went on about this often before he left the site almost entirely, so you don't have to take that as a one-off admission, either:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
The correct place for Quillette articles is probably twitter, which is where Paul Graham shares them now in lieu of here:
I don't believe so: the current moderation of news.YC make their own decisions (not just saying 'dang solely because I'm not sure if 'sctb is actively partaking in moderation, just doing technical work now for the site, or none of the above), and 'pg (as far as I'm aware) doesn't really interact with the site in any capacity at this point.
No need to accuse the site's moderation of doing something bad for Graham's sake: he's a/they're very sensible and nice person/people, and very good at his/their jobs, at that.
I do think there was a valid case for not punishing the site too hard at first: seeing what kind of discussion it generates over a statistically-relevant amount of articles is useful for figuring out how to handle these cases going into the future, and of course on the principle that blacklisting domains should be a last-resort option. I think 'dang has elaborated a bit on his reasoning already, and there's no reason to take him at anything but face value.
However, I think that time has passed somewhat, and as you can see later, 'dang is re-evaluating it now, so there's no need to worry. The site's in good hands.
The idea that one of the country's best CS programs is (or is considering) lowering its degree standards matters for us here on HN. This article is worthy and worth our consideration.
I don't mind saying "ya'll", but policing the vernacular of an individual based on their sexual organs is fairly concerning.
I don't generally hassle people about such things, but I'm pretty darn sure there are people who are not me who think it is masculine and would hassle people about it.
I used to routinely use y'all online in a forum where I was intentionally emphasizing my Southern identity to more clearly distinguish between singular "you" and plural "you."
I've had a class in linguistics. I grew up in a bilingual home. I'm not uninformed about the fact that local colloquialisms exist, language is alive and evolving.
I think of "guys" and "you guys" as both masculine. I don't generally hassle people about such things.
Evidence that I don't generally hassle people about such things:
https://witnesstodestruction.blogspot.com/p/it-seems-my-sile...
I am unlikely to do so, in part because of negative experiences from a very toxic forum where I was treated like absolute shit.
Please note that I'm backing up someone else's claim about this being a phenomenon. I'm telling you they aren't making that up. There are Americans who view that as a masculine term. I'm actual living proof this is not a bullshit claim.
Sorry you are having such a big problem accepting that.
No need to make this personal with your last sentence.
Someone other than me noted that this is a phenomenon in some parts of the US. I posted to support that assertion. You have made multiple comments telling me I'm wrong about this when my claim is "I, personally, fit the profile" and you keep citing general usage.
I may be "wrong" by some metric or other to see it as masculine, but I'm living proof some Americans do, in fact, view it that way. You do appear to be having some trouble accepting that assertion, given that you basically are trying to tell me I'm wrong about my testimony about my opinion about the phrase, which really is quite baffling to me that anyone would try to tell me that.
The women I work with use this phrase probably more than anyone else I work with, so there’s not much practical for me to take away from this exchange.
I only mentioned my gender due to the larger context of the discussion. The implication is there are women who, like me, view "guys/you guys" as masculine and (unlike me) would make a big deal out of it. This seems pertinent to the piece being discussed and wasn't intended to suggest anything about women generally, much less women you personally know in meat space.
Can you confirm without ambiguity whether you are indeed talking about the same topic as me?
I lived in Mississippi for four years and they definitely took offense in the small town I was living in. The size of the community might also be relevant. I’m not an ethnolinguist, so can’t really comment on why it is or isn’t.
Take the map for what its worth, I guess. It doesn’t comment on what people think about the word itself, just how they don’t use it very much.
I'm just wondering if there are areas where "you guys" can't be used to refer to arbitrary-gender-makeup groups (as opposed to areas where it's just less common than other phrases accomplishing the same purpose). I haven't personally encountered such an area, but I accept and acknowledge that you have.
I do think this topic is complicated by the ease of conflating current usage (how is "you guys" used today?) with ideal usage (is this really a phrase whose usage we want to promote and accept in the future?). I personally have no problem making an effort to phase out "you guys." It's not something I feel attached to, and I can see that it carries unnecessary baggage.
"So tell me about the guy you married?"
And see how much sense that makes. "Guy" and "guys" as a catch-all is outmoded. As someone said, the plural reinforces the male-as-default.
Yes, words have meaning that change depending on context. That's how English works. It's a bit like how "man" can be used to mean the entirety of the human race, but "man" is in no way a gender neutral term.
To the same end, "guy" is considered by some to be quite gendered, and "guys" is often not, but even with the plural, asking a heterosexual man "how many guys have you slept with?", is often perceived very differently to asking "when did you guys get married?"
The problem here is that the first question, sans context, is going to be interpreted by a number of people to be exclusively male, and essentially never interpreted as exclusively female.
This isn't pedantry, it's just the way the word is perceived.
You admitted, yourself, that the word itself it gendered.
The fact that it is default-male and used as neutral is the entire argument.
"you guys" is two words, and when used together is entirely different than the single word "guys". Otherwise people would just use "guys".
Your argument seems to be that the inclusion of the 2nd-party plural "you" somehow removes the gendered nature of the word, which is not the case for this word or for any other.
I assume you believe that "boys" is gendered, and I assume you will admit that "you boys" is still gendered.
You admit that "guys" is gendered, but you will not admit that "you guys" is still gendered, without being able to provide any sort of evidence as to why.
The second case is identical to the first, the only difference being your specific idiolectical definition, which unfortunately is not generalisable to the English language as a whole.
These are accepted grammar rules. "you guys" as a second-person plural term is accepted as gender-neutral. "guys" in the third-person is not.
Arguing that the 2nd-person usage is not neutral is the new challenger position and you would need to provide the argument for why the accepted usage should change for the rest of us.
Also just because it's generally been a non-gendered term doesn't mean prevailing opinion hasn't changed. There is a lot of talk around changing the norms in which masculine terms are considered the default. Both in english speaking languages and others (e.g. See LatinX)
A survey of straight men. They're asked two questions in a randomized order.
A. "Is 'guys' gender neutral?"
and
B. "How many guys have you slept with?"
Care to make a wager on how often the (B,A) group will agree with you?
A person who believes that the gender gap in computer science is solely because Men and Women are different is not the sort of person I want teaching introductory computer science classes. It excuses the status quo, and does not demand that the people making the claim try to improve one iota.
---
I went back and read the "Why Women Don't Code" article by the same author. It is not about why women don't code; it is a piece about the 'culture wars.' There are some charts, but then they're 'backed up' with unsubstantiated claims like,
>"Men disproportionately respond to economic incentives, so they are more likely to respond favorably to reports of high salaries for tech workers. Women tend, on average, to be more risk averse, and are more likely to respond strongly to negative stories about dwindling job prospects in tech."
These sort of UNSUBSTANTIATED sexist generalisations are exactly why he needs a different job.
The field of gender studies is chock full of "men this, women that" generalisations. Where do you think terms like "mansplaining" come from? Yet gender studies professors keep their jobs.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6417700/
> We find strong evidence that incentives have differential effects on the effort allocation decisions of men and women
As the research suggests, this starts in kindergarten and is driven by women since they are most likely over represented in the work force. Nobody chose to do it, habits die hard though.
But to call for someone to get fired for just saying that seems like quite the reach.
What if it's true?
Not is it true, not how morally bad is this, not how do you or "women" feel about it (using quotes because implying women as a group share such a feeling and that you know what it is sounds just bizarre on the face of it.)
So you don't want people who deal with facts and science to do teaching. Gotcha.
And I'm sure that in that debate, the author of an article titled "Why Women Don't Code" was outspoken in his defense of judging people as individuals rather than by some group identity…
Do you think it would be impossible for the perfect uber-individualist to ever make the statement "men play more basketball than women"?
When uttered by a teacher, it can easily be taken to have an implied "therefore I'll make less of an effort teaching them, or to encourage their career".
If somebody had said 40 years ago that "men play more soccer than women", this would have been correct as an empirical statement. However, it was also invariably taken as a normative statement, and subsequently less resources and encouragement were expended on women. And when the genders were later put on more equitable footing, the empirical fact turned out to be quite malleable.
> Do you think it would be impossible for the perfect uber-individualist to ever make the statement "men play more basketball than women"?
As an individualist, one should always examine whether one extends the benefits of individualism to everyone, or whether one sees just one's own peers as individuals, while judging others as groups.
As another example of doubtful self awareness, the author mentions the enthusiastic reception of his "heterodox thinking" seminar — has he considered that receiving a perfect evaluation score (5 of 5) is NOT exactly evidence that the seminar has succeeded in instilling heterodox thinking in his students?
And, given said lack of self awareness, I would not surprised if the author's attitudes about gender had more of an influence on his treatment of students than he realizes.
> If somebody had said 40 years ago that "men play more soccer than women", this would have been correct as an empirical statement. However, it was also invariably taken as a normative statement, and subsequently less resources and encouragement were expended on women. And when the genders were later put on more equitable footing, the empirical fact turned out to be quite malleable.
It is not "invariably taken" as a normative statement, especially not when its normative interpretation is literally and explicitly disclaimed by the author.
What part of Reges' writing left you with this impression? He wrote the exact opposite:
> As a result, I am absolutely convinced that for many years there have been—and even today still are—many women who have not yet discovered the bright future they can have in the field of computer science. Half of the women in our undergraduate major are ‘interest changers,’ which means they weren’t intending to apply to the major when they started our first course. For men the figure is closer to 20 percent, so there is a big gender gap. In short, I have always been and continue to be a strong advocate of many aspects of the diversity agenda.
no but there's a really big difference between the trivial observation that more men play basketball or code and the conjecture about why that is the case, in particular when it comes to intellectual pursuits.
Discussions about the 'why' very quickly venture into personal beliefs as it's a hugely complex topic with lots of open questions, and in my opinion teachers who hold a lot of authority and can leave a lasting impression on students should probably avoid dabbling in conjecture when entire groups are involved.
There have been some studies done on testing the math performance of female students when they were told that girls score worse, and that fact alone had a measurable impact on the test performance. The same has been done with low-income groups and so on.
So even speculating from a position of authority can have a tremendous impact, I'm not sure it's the job of a CS teacher to publicly speculate about the motivation of entire groups of students.
And read the article here: https://quillette.com/2018/06/19/why-women-dont-code/
Preferences are strongly influenced by our culture. Just think about other areas; kids in Brazil are WAY more likely to be into soccer than a kid in the United States. Do people think this is because Brazilians have a genetic disposal to liking soccer? Of course not, if a kid born to American parents grew up in Brazil, he or she would be just as likely to 'prefer' soccer over other sports as any other kid in Brazil.
Preferences are shaped by our culture (and of course there is a genetic component), and there is no easy way to tease out what factors go into setting our preferences.
The only clear answer is that preferences are not set in stone at birth, and we shouldn't assume that differences in preferences between men and women will always remain static and shouldn't be talked about as being influenced by culture.
tl;dr you can't end the conversation by appealing to preference.
> They observed that the more that women have equal opportunities, the more they differ from men in their preferences.
I am not even arguing that sexes having different preferences is necessarily bad... I am simply arguing that preferences are heavily influenced by culture.
And psychologists have reported these preferences across very different cultures throughout the world.
It seems like you are stating what you'd like to think is true rather than drawing conclusions from the available evidence.
Men don't really have that choice, so naturally men are overrepresented in other life choices.
How many men do you know who planned to have a child and raise it on their own, without a mother, and therefore studied education and medicine to prepare to be a better primary caregiver? How could that even be made a viable option for men without forcing women to have children against their will?
To achieve true freedom of speech, we must be empathetic to those who are angry and listen to their stories and help wherever we can so they can accept their situation.
Which is something the professor didn’t do. Why did he post that article? He grouped a together people who may be marginalized by society and gave them a label. That’s not how you help people.
I hope the professor learns to be truly empathetic and people takes away the right lesson from this so that one day we may have true freedom of speech.
Quote: “The whole idea of affirmative action is that too few black students wouldn [sic] get in without racial preferences, so we need to lower the standard for them and accept that they will do worse academically,”
Quote: “geniuses are overwhelmingly male because they combine outlier high IQ with moderately low Agreeableness and moderately low Conscientiousness.”
Quote: “Are Women Destroying Academia? Probably,”
And since this teacher is tenured, he pretty much has to kill someone to get him out of that job. But keeping people like this one out of classrooms where they have dictatorial powers over grades is essential for all students to function. After all, he has said distinctly disparaging remarks against women, gays, and black people. Has he discriminated in his classrooms against them?
(0) https://www.idsnews.com/article/2019/11/professor-criticizes... (1) https://www.indystar.com/story/news/education/2019/11/24/eri... (2) https://www.chicagotribune.com/midwest/ct-iu-professor-eric-...
> I’m once again having private conversations behind closed doors in my office with closeted individuals […] They are deeply concerned about the university’s direction, but they are also afraid of jeopardizing their current or future job prospects. They also worry about losing friendships and professional relationships.
It's not enough to successfully design and run a CS curriculum. You also have to be a card carrying member of the pitchfork club.