Kathy Sierra On The Primer On Sexism Discussion

I'm curious just which attributes you think are more equal than others.

    Percent of adults with hearing trouble: 16.2%
    Percent of adults with vision trouble: 9.4%
    Percent of adults unable (or very difficult) to walk a quarter mile: 7.3%
    Percent of adults with any physical functioning difficulty:  15.6%

Overall, 16% of adults aged 18 years and over experienced some hearing difficulty without a hearing aid (defined as ‘‘a little trouble hearing,’’ ‘‘moderate trouble,’’ ‘‘a lot of trouble,’’ or ‘‘deaf’’). Men were more likely to have experienced hearing trouble than women.

The report is interesting. http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/disable.htm

I object to framing the debate as a "handicap", because I've found that whenever you start identifying something as a handicap it tends to become one. (Edit: shit, just reread the thread and I did that. Poor word choice on my part.) My own experience is race; my father was sure that the reason that he kept getting passed over for promotions was because he was non-white, and as a result, he ignored all the other possible reasons that were under his control. I've been very careful not to identify myself in racial terms since, because I don't want to give those stereotypes power over me.

I read Kathy's account of being oblivious to all the little microaggressions going on around her. I explicitly made a different choice: I knew from the beginning that there may be people who see me as "just a programmer" or "not leadership material" or "socially awkward nerd" or "undateable" because physically I look Asian. And so I figured I'd work on the parts that I could change, and everything else is somebody else's problem. They're entitled to whatever preconceptions they have; if that's a problem, I can go find other people to interact with.

I really like that Kathy came here to clarify that she was sharing her personal experience, just as Laura shared hers, and now I'm sharing mine. Isn't the meta-problem here that we don't see each other as individuals, and that it's all the "1%" and the "99%" and the "51%" and the "49%"? And I think that if there're specific policies that make it easier for 51% of the population, that's a good thing. But that doesn't make it a handicap, nor should they be a protected group exempt from the same standards we apply to anyone else, nor should we forget that there are all sorts of other axes that we can categorize people by, and some of them have it a lot easier than others.

http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=12062&page=R1

I've also had people tell me that the civilians who died in the WTC attacks deserved it because America is evil and imperialistic in its dealing with other countries. This [HARD-MODE!!] metaphor has gone over great with this same crowd, not so much with me, who thinks the people who are dead got a game over and aren't really playing on any difficulty anymore.

Also without reproduction nobody would be here.

Imagine all the men born in German and Great Britain eighteen years before WWI. Just as they were graduating secondary school they would have been drafted and forced to kill each other in some of the most horrible battle conditions in recorded history. Does lying in a waterlogged trench, dying slowly over three days of a gut wound sound like a privilege?

Men currently account for 92% of occupational deaths in the US. Imagine what it was like a century ago, before occupational safety standards. A coal miner in 1910 had the privilege of being able to vote and to wear pants but his wife had the privilege of not being crushed to death in a poorly supported tunnel or dying of black lung.

Men have far higher rates of mental illness and drug addiction. Men are more likely to attempt suicide and more likely to succeed. Men who are victims of rape or domestic abuse are often ridiculed. At least one study showed 40% of domestic abuse victims are men. The majority of US rape victims are men. Unemployment rates are currently higher among men.

Imagine you're a woman and you really like small children and want to work in a career with them. That's perfectly acceptable.

A man doing the same thing is constantly viewed with suspicion and often faces false accusations.

You say men have the advantage of being treated with respect but I think that is highly dependent on the circumstances.

I will readily admit that the greatest factors that have affected my life are random. We all play the birth lottery but I don't see your ranking of various characteristics as justified or useful.

To me it just seems like a way to dismiss people and their achievements because of things beyond their control.

A large number of those problems are of the form "I prefer people of my race, but there aren't very many of them. Oh noes." If you have narrow preferences of any sort, racial or otherwise, your life will be harder. Big surprise.

Should I feel doubly awesome because people thought I was a smart hotshot dev even while I suffered from these horrible problems?

The discussion of "privilege" , like so many things, is corruotd and drowned out by extremists, so its salient points get lost.

Similarly, I (original Primer author) did a poor job making it clear that I never meant to suggest that every woman has this problem. The goal was to inform people that this is happening and this is a problem, even though you _probably were not seeing it_. Kathy’s experience and post are a very personal revelation of the painful journey of discovery (of this fact) that she went through.

1) in the trust-Bush example, anyone who actually, properly learned “how to sense when other people have a depth of knowledge or experience that is unavailable to you” would have sensed that Bush was full of shit, didn’t know what he was doing, and was a terrible person to have in charge. Honing that skill is incredibly valuable in life, precisely because it protects you from having to blindly trust anyone based on a claim (accurate or not) that they know what they're doing.

2) This is not theology at all. Theology is about accepting a claim despite your inability to rationalize it, or accepting it precisely because your ability to rationalize it is broken or flawed—and both being in the realm of deities.

What erikpukinskis was describing is the process of cultivating empathy and trust, in face of the acknowledgement that your perceived reality is not necessarily accurate (which it isn’t for anyone on the planet). He's saying that there are a lot of smart people who simply cannot believe that “something” is truly happening if they have no personal experience with that “something”, and may, as a result, deny the reality that is that “something”.

And he’s saying that, for him at least, it was necessary to learn to accept these things as true, first, before being able to figure out and rationalize them on his own, later, without having to be personally exposed to the problem for it.

And that’s called empathy, not theology.

There are volumes of feminism that I understand, and could explain to you, in purely rational terms. The vast, vast bulk of beliefs I have that are considered "feminist" fall into this category. So no, I don't think feminism is an exercise in blind faith.

Provisional reliance on the beliefs of trusted second parties is only one of my many ways of knowing.

I also object to calling it "blind faith" because it's not blind. I've vetted the source. It is a kind of faith. Maybe you can call it "provisional faith". If there is solid evidence I certainly use that first. But in many cases there is no evidence. For example, when someone says they were raped I will rarely ever see any conclusive "evidence" one way or the other, so any evidence-based approach to understanding will fail.

Firstly theology isn't a good comparison because god isn't a concept that can be 'experienced' or disproved. The issues that feminists talk about are generally not like this: if you really want to know how much more physically threatening the world seems as a woman, one could feasibly have a sex change operation or similar to allow you to experience the world as a woman. Or if you aren't so arrogant as to discount all knowledge that you didn't directly experience yourself, you could ask a large number of women and see what they have to say.

Secondly, you seem vastly ignorant about epistemology and how science works in general. Ultimately it very much is a system of trust in people and institutions. Your categorising of knowledge into "theology" and "real knowledge" based on one requiring faith is a false dichotomy.

I can only imagine how awful it must be to know you in real life if you never trust a single thing other people say to you without verifying it yourself (that is my way of saying you are a terrible human being).

If you are wrong because of things you cannot know from personal experience, as long as your opinions are formed from personal experience they will be incorrect. So, seek out other people's experiences even if, especially if, they conflict with your own.

Though now I'm starting to sound like a stoner. "Broaden your mind, dude..."

> To put it into an extreme example

Please don't.

It means no more -- or less -- than that. Just one person's story. That I changed MY views in no way means anyone else will. Had I thought this through, I would not have written it because you're absolutely right -- it was not useful.

for anyone wondering what the context was, the basic point was that it is extra information and so is useful.

You would be taken more seriously if you provided a well-reasoned response based on facts rather than throwing out opinions like "for every woman that really experiences sexism, there are two that exaggerate their circumstances".

You are setting up a simplistic straw man and arguing that because you believe you have "seen some very average women programmers get hired into high positions just to fill diversity quotas" (how do you KNOW this, btw?) that reverse-sexism is rampant. You do not acknowledge that your understanding of their promotions could be limited, that they might have other skills besides simply programming, or what the position actually required.

Because of these things it's very hard to take you seriously, and if you have a habit of doing these things, I understand why someone would dismiss you as a troll.

It would be more interesting if you argued in a reasoned matter acknowledging the variety of experiences in the real world, instead of drawing generalizations from a few things you have seen.

I'm sure there are plenty of studies about the rates at which gender-related behaviors are considered inappropriate. Sexism isn't a new issue. Universities have entire departments dedicated to this sort of thing.

This is ridiculous. I can't affect Saudi Arabia's cultural norms. I can affect the tech industry's cultural norms, and it's my responsibility to do so when those norms are harmful.

It was more about sexual assault, and it was more about behavior at parties than at DEFCON. I know the line blurs, but once alcohol is served, it is hard to say the event is a professional and reputable one.