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Comment by amichail | Hacker News Reader

Only two in the list are women. However, one could argue that almost all programmers will be women in the far future.

That's because as AI becomes more sophisticated, programming will become more like teaching.

And teaching is something that mostly interests women today.

It's pretty funny. If we accept your assumptions, we can conclude that most programmers in the far future will be AIs. No idea if those AIs will be male or female; more wild speculation is always welcome.

What if the AI were like a human child in intelligence? In that case, it would not be capable of teaching/programming at a high level of sophistication.

That's a pretty scary mental image: a caring woman teaches a tender childlike AI for its boring future job as an ERP system. Perhaps we should rethink the plan.

I think I'm beginning to see where your bias sits. It would appear that in your mind the people that take care of children are 'all women' and that therefore a 'young ai' will be dealt with exclusively by women until they are old enough to go into the real world.

May I ask you what your cultural background is ?

May I ask you what your cultural background is ?

No.

Fair enough ;)

Probably smart, you wouldn't want anyone making assumptions about you based on prejudicial stereotypes. Ahem.

I found the remarks to be so far off the beaten path that I was wondering if culture might be a factor here.

Some things that seem strange to me might make perfect sense to someone with a background sufficiently different from mine.

Some remote family member of mine for instance firmly believed (deceased) that women 'have their place', and with that he definitely didn't mean university.

I found that a pretty bizarre statement (even as a kid) but in light of his particular cultural background I find it easier to accept that that was his point of view.

Culture excuses prejudice?

It can at least explain it. Just like you'd have to adjust your reference frame a bit if you were presented with someone from a culture other than your own.

[personal information redacted] edit replacement: amichail's posted his own information fairly prominently; I think his refusal to explicitly state his cultural background was rhetorical. I consider a psuedonym like "cousin_it" to be private, but a real name like "jaquesm" or "amichail" a public statement of identity. end edit replacement. I was curious enough to look it up because he posted the exact same comments on reddit a day or so ago.

Hm, maybe we need privacy guidelines at HN. Let people disclose information on their own terms.

I join stse in saying that the stalking was uncalled for: amichail had clearly indicated his desire for privacy by the time you made this comment. I'd also like the people who upvoted khafra to +5 to provide some sort of explanation, because this behavior seems to me more actively harmful than amichail's purported sexist remarks. I often express opinions that people may not like; am I to take that people will cyber-stalk me for that? Do you want HN to become this kind of place?

Edit: khafra, thanks a lot for editing the post. This reaffirms my faith that HN is an exceptionally good online community.

I'm off several minds on this:

1) if you make remarks online you always have to remember that you are speaking 'in public' and that anybody that wants to know more about you probably can and will.

2) that the timing of the disclosure was less than elegant to put it mildly, he already said 'no', that should have been enough (it was for me).

3) that the same thing happening on reddit several days ago apparently is what drove Khafra to wonder just like I did if this might be a cultural thing. If someone makes a point out of continuously harping on a very controversial opinion then that will make people curious about you. Still, point (2) holds strong and that should not have been done. I don't know if Khafra can still remove the post but if I were him I would do so.

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/9itx5/why_progr...

Learning disability?

> However, one could argue that almost all programmers will be women in the far future.

I find that hard to believe.

> And teaching is something that mostly interests women today.

I'm all for more balance but to either relegate women to teaching because 'that mostly interests women' (for which I have no evidence, my classes were pretty much 60/40 men/women, with the men predominant in the maths/physics/chemistry department, but that was a while ago) or to assume that men are not interested in it (they are), whichever way I slice it I can't make much sense of it.

Would you mind explaining ?

Men (and women) become professors to do research -- not to teach. In fact, top research universities try to minimize the undergraduate teaching that professors have to do.

You should probably stop with the sweeping sexist generalizations now.

(Parent comment originally said just 'men'. Since been edited to include women :/ )

The mission of a university - and of everybody in it, from the janitor to the director - is to further our collective knowledge.

That means that every professor, whether teaching, researching or both, irrespective of their gender is engaged in this. Some professors put the accent on research, others spend as much of their time teaching as they can, for most of them it is a mix.

I do not see any argument why men or women would be predisposed to go one way or the other.

My suspicion is that you have some bias that you should get rid of to see things more in perspective.

Maybe this is your personal experience (which is always a possibility) but the world is a very large place and very few generalizations hold if you have a large enough sample.

Yours will almost certainly not stand the test of being exposed to the world the way I see it.

Sweeping sexist generalization: women dominate schoolteaching more because they like children than because they like teaching.

Schopenhauer would agree with you. He says that women are so good with children because they are so childlike themselves.

Surprising. I always thought that people found their own gender to be more childlike. (Children are open books, but the other gender is always mysterious.)

WHAT???

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