Hacker News Reader

Comment by yummyfajitas | Hacker News Reader

Something I'm curious about. Most of the internet rage I tend to become aware of is generated by social justice warriors. I ran into them myself a couple of weeks ago - angry, but unable to clearly express why:

http://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2014/equal_weights.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7945058

The article here provides a similar set of examples. The only example I can think of that doesn't fit this pattern is "dog poo girl" from Korea ( http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/dog-poo-girl ).

Does this anecdotal correlation reflect a trend, or is it merely the result of filtering and me being in the wrong circles? Data on this would be pretty awesome.

View on HN

Offendedness and rage as a mechanism to feel belonging and community?

One of the things that I an curious about a certain infamous image board is the "troll as artform" idea. It encourages the user to wonder whether the other person is actually angry, pretending to be angry, intentionally provoking anger in others, or doing a combination to see what happens.

Euphoria and celebration also serve as mechanisms to feel belonging and community. This seems like the other side of the same coin.

Look over your facebook or twitter feed whenever some significant event happens -- the Hobby Lobby court decision, a vote on same-sex marriage, even a sporting event. People will, for the most part, divide into camps of rage or euphoria. There's very little recognition of the validity of other points of view, very rarely mixed feelings, and often rejection of any facts that might potentially support another conclusion. In my experience, those who express any sort of nuance or recognition of key points from multiple sides tend to be treated disrespectfully (not merely argued with, but mocked, insulted, unfriended, stuff like that.)

It's as if everyone has been taught to act like an extremist troll in order to avoid the ire of extremist trolls.

Actual social justice 'warriors' should be anti-capitalist and committed to enforcement of identity politics with authoritarian zeal. They can only gain victories against their own political allies on the so-called left so focus activism on controlling university staff recruiting, campus funding decisions, campus behavior bylaws, banning books from campus libraries/bookstores, banning music and films by appealing to regulatory authorities or by harassing large companies with public shaming campaigns to have somebody fired even though their own anti-capitalist ideology should be in conflict with working with a corporate HR dept.

The social justice student society on my campus literally marched into the campus library, seized and burned books in the parking lot that they said encouraged colonialism.

Excerpt from the post that apparently attracted the "social justice warriors":

> I'm currently dating two lovely women, Svetlana and Elise. Unfortunately continuing to date both of them is unsustainable so I must choose one. In order to make such a choice, I wish to construct a ranking function - a function which takes as input the characteristics of a woman and returns as output a single number. This ranking function is meant to approximate my utility function - a higher number means that by making this choice I will be happier. If the ranking closely approximates utility, then I can use the ranking function as an effective decisionmaking tool. In concrete terms, I want to build a function f:Women→ℝ which approximately predicts my happiness. If f(Svetlana)>f(Elise) I will choose Svetlana, and vice versa if the reverse inequality holds.

Yeah I don't think readers who disliked your choice of "models" necessarily count as "social justice warriors." I figured the post itself was just meant to troll people in an attempt to show how superior your powers of logic and math were.

People complaining about nonexistent sexism on the interwebs are, almost by definition, social justice warriors.

If you read the post, you'll find it answers a strange math puzzle. That's it's purpose. The example is given simply so that a reader can more easily understand what's going on.

Yeah, see...no one questions that it purports to be about mathematics. The problem that some seem to have is, what does math have to do with lingerie models? I can't speak for the other machine-learning amateurs, but I found your "real world" example to be unhelpful in explaining the math...maybe because I couldn't get past my preconception that choosing between just two prospective dating partners is in many ways, not a problem that calls for machine learning. And maybe your retort would be, "Well duh, the checklist theory outlined here could be applied to a large group of prospective suitors to efficiently filter them"...well, then why was that not the example to begin with? Because even a sample of, say 10, would seemingly render the example checklist to be non-decisive...which then leads to the question of how to efficiently pick binary features that are relevant to the decision-making process...because it seems kind of a no-brainer to argue that you shouldn't apply a ML-algorithm to a sample size of 2.

Now, if you had consistently referred to the setup of dating lingerie models as you explained the math, then maybe you could more believably argue that, "Hey, lingerie models make this math easier to understand"...but you didn't. You discard the scenario quite early on, which makes some people think that the scenario was a bit gratuitous, as if the author's intent is to subtly say, "Hey, I'm not only a math genius, but I can appreciate a hot woman!"

Which, sure, isn't the kind of sexism that 19th-century-era women faced, but it also doesn't seem to add to any kind of mathematical understanding.

maybe because I couldn't get past my preconception that choosing between just two prospective dating partners is in many ways, not a problem that calls for machine learning.

Actually, the difficulty was that you couldn't get past your preconception that the post was about machine learning. I didn't claim anywhere that I was writing about ML. The section entitled Why not use machine learning (TM)? may reduce your confusion.

In any case, only one of the complaints about the post was even remotely as articulate as yours (which is quite orthogonal to the "sexism" and "racism" claims).

Which, sure, isn't the kind of sexism that 19th-century-era women faced, but it also doesn't seem to add to any kind of mathematical understanding.

The clause about sexism in this sentence confuses me. It implies, without actually stating, that the post does contain sexism but of a different sort. Could you clarify?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com