My friends wife is an F16 fighter pilot. I was surprised to find that out. Truth is I should not have been surprised, but it went against the patterns I'm used to seeing.
I wonder if that's at play here?
Awful lot of words you used to avoid typing "sexism". Hide behind whatever phrasing you prefer, but automatically assigning a person gender roles out of intellectual laziness embodies sexism.
It's thoughtful, and while he's using different language, describing his approach here as "hiding" is pretty ungenerous. I'd guess that you're used to people being kinda shitty about this stuff, and so you saw someone say something that could be part of some ugly apologetics and just went with your heuristics.
(edit) Also, let me add, sometimes it's easier to talk about the mechanisms of sexism rather than the phenomenon. Ideologically I'm super anti-racist/homophobic/sexist/patriarchy/capitalist blah blah blah but talking about those things straight out often feels like the worst place to have a productive conversation from. Compare "The prison industrial complex is a function of white supremacy", vs, "dang, it's messed up that people of color on average get way harsher sentences for the same crime." Context is very important, of course, but sometimes using a lot of words is better communication.
Like it or not, our brains are wired to be able to ignore unusual cases and save complete analysis of each and every situation. This course of evolution may be why you and I are able to post on this website, after all. Sexism, racism an any other form of discrimination are made of this. That's very sad, yes.
I want to make another point. Sexism is refusing to aknowledge the possibility for a woman to be technical, for exemple. Assuming she probably isn't is not sexism, it is an often-correct assumption. This doesn't make the man (or the woman) who makes this assumption a monster.
So I understand women's frustrations very well as I can be the one discriminated in various other situations, but don't blame it too quickly on people. Blame it first on evolution, the same evolution that allows you to not think to much about it when you have to breathe.
It's both.
related - one of the things I hate about hn is people whining "that's an appeal to authority, that's a logical fallacy, how dare you say you would believe a 50 year old hr manager about workplace customs over my 13 year old sister!" Technically they're correct, if I were invested in the argument I should follow up both proposals equally and not just dismiss one. But in real life, ain't nobody got time for that, and we use heuristics instead. The trick is identifying the biases I'm using as a heuristic, and also identofying which of these heuristics are hurting other people and when it is worth doing the long route of checking each argument - for the cocktail party example, would it kill people to just ask a woman what she does, even if they probably aren't in tech?
Having intent behind it just makes it worse, really. And "intent" is difficult to define.
https://medium.com/best-thing-i-found-online-today/8178b2794...
Here, I'll even save you the trouble of clicking:
To be direct: Pattern recognition is bullshit voodoo pseudo-science masquerading as objectivity and meritocracy. It’s sexism, racism, ageism, homophobia, and xenophobia dressed up as science. It sickens me.
"So pattern recognition is a useless heuristic made up by a group of rich white men as a way to quantify something"
If that statement isn't racist, biased, and, well, just quite mean really, then I'm not sure what is.
Racism (sexism/classism/etc) is not about race (sex/class/etc). It's about power. For this reason alone (let alone all the other good ones), there is no symmetry in these biases (e.g. the false equivalence of misogyny and misandry).
The popular, and dictionary, definition of "racism" is "hatred or intolerance of another race or other races".
there is no symmetry in these biases (e.g. the false equivalence of misogyny and misandry)
It does not mean that there is never a case of sexism against men or racism against whites. What it means is that you cannot simply flip mysogyny and misandry, or racism against minorities and racism against majority. One major reason is the power imbalance - you can read more about it online but the simplest example I can offer is that of sexual harassment where the power imbalance is essential to the problem, i.e. a lowly employee asking for a date with their boss is a fundamentally different problem than a powerful boss asking for a date with their employee. Another reason is systemic vs. individual discrimination - again, other people explain it better than I ever could but a very simple example would be that everyone across the board, meaning men and women both, discriminate against equally-qualified resumes with female names on them, evidencing that our whole culture is systemically sexist in one direction.
And if you read carefully what that parent was responding to, it will make even more sense.
It never goes well because it goes into a corner of academia, takes a relatively new and by no means universally accepted redefinition and decides to not only add that definition to the word "racism" society-wide, but replace the existing definition entirely.
My personal opinion on the terms has gone back and forth so much that I don't even care about this pissing match anymore, but it's become clear to me why people aren't getting on board.
As if redefining instead of just adding a 2nd definition wasn't enough, what it attempts to define is already better known as "institutional racism," a subset of racism (where racism is just racial prejudice). If you don't see a new category being defined, it's hard to see the purpose of splitting these hairs as anything other than to redefine racial-prejudice-minus-power as something without the baggage the term "racism" carries around. It smacks of conversation re-framing through linguistic prescriptivism.
Or, occasionally it is interpreted less charitably. Someone does see a new category being codified, just not the one you want. They see it as a category of below-"racism" racism emerging that gives a pass to expressions of racism from traditionally disadvantaged groups, even in circumstances where the institutional racism isn't at play.
That's, frankly, bullshit. It about allocating power by race, etc., and is, therefore, necessarily about race (or whatever else defines the -ism in question) and power.
> there is no symmetry in these biases
There is a difference in effect (in a short time window, but see below) between whether the group favored is the currently in-power group or whether its an out-of-power group.
But there is a symmetry in essence. And, furthermore, the long-time-window effect of accepting racism (etc.) from below (or redefining the terms to exclude it) is a reversal in power structure in which the group whose bias has been licensed becomes the power group -- and is unlikely to suddenly renounce the bias that established that position in favor of the formerly-dominant and now subjected group.
That's pretty much exactly the case! Thanks for the great quote.
What motivates this toxic revanchist mindset that every single white man has homogenous and equally distributed power, simply due to being part of a group due to their skin color?
This type of identity politics is no different than Luce Irigaray claiming E = mc^2 is a "sexed equation" and that it privileges the speed of light. It is postmodern, Western-centric and extremist lunacy.
Ultimately though, most distressing is your sociopathy.
So it's not so much to ask that if you're a white man and you think something crappy about a woman or minority, that you might stop and ask yourself to validate that, or find a better way to explain or phrase it.
The same was true for Bill Gates. If you read his biography, when he was really young, people didn't even shake his hand when they met to talk. They didn't find out he was the CEO until like an hour into the meeting. And when they did, they were surprised.
Most rude people don't mean to be rude. They're just thoughtless. That doesn't make their behavior less rude.
For example, the zillion people who, upon learning I'm a computer guy, bust out their computer questions and put me on the spot to diagnose and possibly fix their issues. Are they just pattern matching? Sure. But are they also being thoughtless and self-centered? Definitely.
The problem isn't the pattern matching. Anything with neurons does that. It's the lack of consideration about how other people will feel.
For some reason those same men cry out for "rational discussion" unless it's about their own behavior, of course. They can somehow override most of their animal instincts to steal, fight, or fuck indiscriminately, but can't somehow find a way to overcome thinking a woman at a trade show booth can't possibly be an engineer.
So we're saying, either the person can overcome that thinking or they can't.
If they can, but choose not to, they're deliberately discriminatory.
If they can't overcome that thinking, we might want to have them institutionalized for anti social behavior, because what other animal instincts are they not able to overcome?
The point is to try to overcome making that match.
https://medium.com/best-thing-i-found-online-today/8178b2794...
To be direct: Pattern recognition is bullshit voodoo pseudo-science masquerading as objectivity and meritocracy. It’s sexism, racism, ageism, homophobia, and xenophobia dressed up as science. It sickens me.
Nice job in raising the level of discourse here.
all the links to reply to any comment are now gone. would you like a screen shot?
Hrm...sure it's not that you're trying to reply to a new comment (there is a delay before you can reply)
I understand your point. Unfortunately the way you made it makes you come across as an irrational individual.
https://www.google.com/search?q=fbi+profiling&ie=utf-8&oe=ut...
> especially coming from someone with "balls" in the name
Considering that's my name...
> i'm now not being allowed to reply.
Did someone prevent you from replying? Did your comment get deleted?
No one is preventing you from replying. You disagree with the above commented, I disagreed with how you came across.
> NOTHING about pattern matching is rational. So you have no right to expect rationality as a response.
How so?
Think that it's okay for TSA agents to search a 82 year old women, instead of say me (a dark ass dude who looks like a terrorist)? Should their sampling of passengers should be completely random?
People shouldn't denigrate anyone: women, men, minorities, or majorities.
Suggesting that it's ok to accept that automatically thinking a woman at a trade show is not an engineer is simply irrational. We are humans and with that comes the ability to override animal thinking. Dare I say, I expect the person to have that thought to override it, think rationally, and say something other than what most of them do? And is asking for that somehow in and of itself irrational? Look, having heard these bullshit arguments hundreds of times, I am right tired of having them. We've been discussing this issue long enough that the people who keep doing this, need to not be tolerated. We need to stop expecting those without power to always be the ones to take the high road.
Anger is a valid and rational response to continued discrimination. To say otherwise comes dangerously close to tone policing.
Agreed, mostly. What if it was a women who was dressed provocatively, i.e. a booth babe? Would that change the circumstance.
In the case of the main article, the woman at the trade show WASNT and engineer.
But that's beside the point.
Slight semantics here--I think it's okay to make assumptions. I don't think it's okay to make assumptions and then act upon them as if they're fact. Like, asking a women if she's in HR.
For example: if you saw two guys at a company booth, one guy who was slightly overweight, had a unkept beard, and wore a t-shirt that had the Perl deCSS code, and standing next to him, was someone in dockers, a button up shirt, and had a blackberry, you might make some snap assumptions.
> Anger is a valid and rational response to continued discrimination.
How so? Does it end the discrimination? Does it further your point?
I think being angry is a valid and healthy emotional response, but not a rational one.
I think the point here is that even if you (internally) make those assumptions, you shouldn't externalize them. Give everyone the benefit of the doubt, so to speak.
Though I agree with you. "Better for others to think you're an idiot, than to open your mouth and remove all doubt."
Regarding the two men, as I've said repeatedly on this thread, it's not the assumptions I'm making, it's the actions I take as a result. What I might do is look at both of them, for example, and say, "Who's the right person to talk to me about your APIs?"
Now regarding your question vis a vis the booth babe: booth babes are a terrible invention. they are a huge part of the problem. But I'll ask it this way: wouldn't you rather be known as a man who treats a booth babe like an engineer, than the douchebag who treats an engineer like a booth babe?
In general, when it comes to women (ahem and all other humans too) you're much more likely to get along with them if you treat them as if they have brains first.
Fair enough, I understand what you are getting at with labeling. When I say that, however it has nothing to do with you being a woman, and more to do with my fascination with irrational behavior in humans (as described by economists), and formal reasoning.
> wouldn't you rather be known as a man who treats a booth babe like an engineer, than the douchebag who treats an engineer like a booth babe?
Boom. Headshot.
I'm tired of hearing the same old excuses for discrimination, namely "pattern matching." It's bullshit. It's everywhere on this thread as it so often is when posts about discrimination and harassment reach any level of awareness on Hacker News. And while most of the time I generally ignore it, rolling my eyes and occasionally just become depressed as hell, sometimes I just get fed up and decide to call it out. Then I vent it out and get back to work. I don't care what you label it as, in fact the whole concept of labeling is precisely the issue.
Treat people with respect. That's all any of us want. But when we say that nicely we get ignored. When we say it strongly, we get labeled everything from bitch, to sociopath, to irrational, to whatever. There's no win. So I just say what I think and let the chips fall where they may. Upvote me, downvote me, I honestly do not give a shit.
If you really don't care, why even say this?
If someone just posted something, there is a cool down period before you can reply. Maybe that was the case.