When Nerds Collide (2014) | Hacker News Reader

When Nerds Collide (2014)

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328 pointsforgottenpass342 comments

This article is so spot on and covers many of the things that have bothered me for years about people who try to join nerd communities and then immediately start complaining about "inappropriate behavior" (eg the dongle thing). Yes, there are cases where there is real inappropriate behavior surrounding positions of power in corporate or workplace settings, but in the community at large and in the communal and public spaces that we now interact no one individual should ever be allowed to determine what is appropriate (much less attack people for their supposed transgressions). We all left the world of "appropriate" because we found it a) useless and b) oppressive. The fact that our conversations are now public means that, if someone goes looking for something to be offended by they are going to find it, and then they play the primate power game and we're back to Cardinal Richelieu: "Give me 6 lines written in the hand of the most honest man and I will see him hanged."

That said, this does paint reality for those who do honestly want to see more women involved in tech etc. My take home is that if you keep trying to push on people who intentionally leave "appropriate" communities behind because they don't care about those things and find them oppressive, then you are simply going to drive them to leave again and you will have to start all over again.

edit: Actual take home. The only way forward is REAL tolerance for all kinds of behavior and a good faith attempt to see people in context.

Uhm, I’m real confused. Why do you talk about “try to join nerd communities” with regard to the dongle thing? Do you know something we don’t?

That seems more like a policy of exclusion from your side – ala obviously a real nerd wouldn’t ever find something inappropriate or be clumsy in how they complain about something.

This whole thing is a way of cordoning yourself off, isolating yourself from criticism, shunning others, excluding others. It’s so, so weird. And hateful.

Speak for yourself, it was clear to me what he meant and you're putting words in his mouth.

I feel there's a lot of 'no true Scotsman' in the article and throughout the comments here.

I can't tell if your last line is flagged with /s but all I will say that it perfectly illustrate the lack of tolerance that drives nerds away. I'm going to generalize here. The description of nerd withdrawal that you give actively implies that the nerd has aggressively attacked someone by TRYING NOT TO BE SEEN. The nerd is trying to avoid conflict because it is a giant waste of time and frankly is pretty depressing. This behavior is the interpreted exactly as your last line reads as "hateful" and "weird." This interpretation leads to a personal attack from the afflicted whereas the nerd was simply trying to avoid any of this. It is like saying that nerds should know better when the stereotype that is forced upon them (often correctly) is that they are often utterly unaware of their affect on other people. That the afflicted does not have the empathy to recognize the crippling social ineptness (in the eyes of appropriate society) of the nerd leads to directed attacks (often call bullying in the rest of the world). When a nerd withdraws it is directed at no one. I am NOT giving the nerd an out for bad behavior. I am saying that nerds often speak their minds without stopping to check who is listening because they don't do the primate thing of checking to see who is going to beat their ass every time they speak and they intentionally formed their own society so they didn't have to. Most nerds will apologize if someone reminds them that other people near by might not feel comfortable hearing certain discussions, but don't be surprised if some of them ask why that someone was listening in the first place.

tl;dr Generalization: Nerd withdrawal is rarely directed at anyone, it is a defence mechanism. Responses to nerd withdrawal or nerds expressing themselves (in their blithely unaware way) are often direct attacks on the nerd. This asymmetry is what drives me nuts.

Some scumbag got a guy fired by publicly shaming him on twitter for making a joke to his friend in a private conversation. That is one of the most hostile, weird, and hateful ways I've ever seen someone behave.

It's a perfect example of counter-productive, oppressive behavior that was outlined in this article. Do you think getting that guy fired is going to suddenly change his sense of humor? Not likely. If anything, it's going to poison his view of feminists in the field by coloring them all as psychopaths willing to do anything to push an agenda rather than focus on the actual technology the community was originally built around.

Hold on. The only scumbag that got the guy fired was his employer. Will your boss fire you if you get harassed on Twitter?

Yes, if someone launches an Internet lynch mob of social justice warriors at me that threatens the business, of course I would be fired.

No company wants to be perceived as "the place that employs the most-hated sexist in the world" if they depend on selling to regular people. An Internet lynch mob can ruin SE rankings, launch DDoS attacks, etc. Anything that attracts one is a liability.

It would never have reached the proportions it did if it wasn't for all the people "defending" the guy and then keep bringing it up time and time again to make an argument.

You got it kind of backwards.

He was already fired by the time the "East side of Internet" reacted.

As for this being brought up again and again: it is a very good example and I can't recall the person in question ever coming up with a real apology.

That is of course a very stupid behaviour of such company - by letting someone go because of SE rankings or DDoS attacks of angry, misguided crowd, you're just showing that this is a great way to influence you. So the next time the misguided crowd wants you to fire someone? They'll find something to get themselves offended about, get angry and DDoS you.

Companies are inherently shortsighted and beholden to their customers and shareholders (in public companies). Prolonged social attacks against a company may drive customers away or drop stock value, both of which negatively impact the company (and more importantly management) far more than letting one employee go. This probably significantly harms employee morale, but I doubt that's their primary concern.

I know the reasoning, but I suspect it's based on wrong assumptions. Management is afraid of taking a stand and doing the right thing, even though it would most likely end up well for the company, not bad. I see this as risk aversion.

From http://www.esquire.co.uk/culture/books/7933/exclusive-extrac... which was linked here not long ago:

I asked Hank if he found himself behaving differently since the incident. Had it altered how he lived his life?

“I distance myself from female developers a little bit now,” he replied. “I’m not as friendly. There’s humour, but it’s very mundane. You just don’t know. I can’t afford another Donglegate.”

So I guess it poisons his view of the entire gender.

So I guess it poisons his view of the entire gender.

It's pleasing to think that ineffective activism is zero-sum. In reality a lot of people have been turned off to ideas that fit their principles and ideals. Getting them back is going to take much more work than it would have taken to appeal to their principles before they got burned.

Orrrrr it brings him into line with appropriate workplace expectations in a world not dominated by dudes.

Honestly I'm pretty happy if dudes like that stay the fuck away from me. Sounds like a win-win!

> Some scumbag got a guy fired by publicly shaming him on twitter for making a joke to his friend in a private conversation. That is one of the most hostile, weird, and hateful ways I've ever seen someone behave.

A conference attendee overheard another conference attendee making dick jokes in a public space at a conference, violating the terms of the CoC that he'd agreed to before attending. She reported him and posted it on her Twitter feed, complaining about it. He was reprimanded by the conference organizers, and apologized

When he returned to his work, he was fired—and he immediately posted to HN that she'd gotten him fired. He found a new job, while she was subjected to two years of personal threats, identity theft, employer-targeted DDoS attacks, and chan grief. She still is to this day.

If you think that reporting someone for violating an conference code of conduct is the 'most hostile, weird, and hateful' way you've ever seen someone behave, you aren't watching very closely.

There's more to it than that.

  1. The words were never meant for her
  2. She didn't contact him, maybe she misheard?
  3. She was, in fact, way more powerful than him (privilege)
  4. She has a history of being a professional victim
  5. -and a history of making similarly bad jokes herself, publicly

It's an odd definition of personal privilege you have, where the privileged person suffers two years of harassment and abuse, and the person without privilege immediately returns to a lucrative career.

It's also an odd definition of professional victim, where publicly being a 'victim' results in you getting booted out of the profession.

I don't want to comment on the event itself here -- but I think that the aftermath, and the continued reaction to it, say a lot of sad things about the tech community.

> It's an odd definition of personal privilege you have,

Which is most privileged:

  * Developer evangelist vs developer-on-the-floor
  * 10 000 twitter followers vs nothing

> It's also an odd definition of professional victim, where publicly being a 'victim' results in you getting booted out of the profession.

Why she was booted from her profession was because she misused her position, -in a way that caused significant harm to the employer.

>"Why she was booted from her profession was because she misused her position," And if you take that at face-value, it's ironically, the very thing that feminists are supposedly fighting against in terms of sexism in the workplace.

You agree to a Code of Conduct like you agree to an EULA

Wait wait wait. Hacker culture is all about radical honesty and voicing your opinion without regard to hurting others feelings... Except when its a woman voicing an opinion about something she finds offensive.

I don't see anything what you describe as inherent and necessary to nerd culture.

What you want is an abrasive culture and I oppose that.

I certainly never "left the world" and certainly not because I found all those things useless or oppressive.

I can still nerd out on a multitude of subjects from music to board games to digital culture and I do prefer to do it with people that don't use this culture as a reason to be terrible to other people.

I run 3 meetups (one of them now the biggest NoSQL UG for one technology in Berlin), organised 8 very well-received conferences and moderated multiple bulletin boards. All are nerdy to the core - and are successful because you can expect not to be met with aggressiveness. Our credo is that the baseline to attend is interest in the subject. Anything else is hindering.

Your nerdiness is definitely not mine.

I don't want to get into the nerd vs geek debate here but my interpretation of TFA was that it was specifically talking about the types of people that simply didn't want to play the social hierarchy game. Just being interested in and doing nerdy/geeky things does not place you in that group (unfortunately the terminology we have does a poor job of distinguishing this).

I also don't think there is any implication that I want an abrasive culture. I do not think that early google style corporate culture is a good thing. I think we need to dissociate nerds behaving badly from simply not picking up on social signals or not caring about them. The reason I say this is because when you treat someone as a villain who is simply thinking out loud you basically stop any potential for real dialogue in its tracks.

> Just being interested in and doing nerdy/geeky things does not place you in that group (unfortunately the terminology we have does a poor job of distinguishing this).

The two groups are not identical, but the probability of being uninterested in playing the hierarchy game increases significantly when conditioned on being a nerd (and even more so, being in the infosec scene, where the author and I spend most of our time) to the point that they dominate the social scene.

I'm not sure what you mean. The "infosec scene" has always had stricter social codes than any other form of hacking.

What you want is an abrasive culture and I oppose that.

Why? Why can't hyperion2010, or anyone else, have an abrasive culture if they want to?

There is nowadays some controversy about, best as I can tell, gamers who like abrasive gaming, ie. shoot and insult each other. I can see how one might not want to participate, but why the need to force them to stop? Wouldn't leaving them to it be a reasonable solution?

If some nerds prefer a different code of conduct than you, can you really oppose that? Do you really think you can or should go into their group and tell them how they should behave?

What happened to live and let live?

The problem here is that hacking, gardening or whatever else people do is not "owned" by those who practice it currently or did before others and neither should it be. If they wanted to start their own Abrasive gardening club, where they would be abrasive to each other, then not many people would complain. I don't think it would be healthy, but they are free to do so.

What they aren't free to do without push-back is to tell others who want to do gardening that they should tolerate their abuse. I agree with Angorak that there is nothing in what we do that would require people being assholes which is why I, too, find it unacceptable.

> What they aren't free to do without push-back is to tell others who want to do gardening that they should tolerate their abuse. I agree with Angorak that there is nothing in what we do that would require people being assholes which is why I, too, find it unacceptable.

The real problem is that there is no coherent definition of abuse and people who are better at playing the social game use that skill to define everything as abuse which they do not like / undermines their status. And that is what the article calls out in the context of 'nerds', 'nerd culture' and 'newcomers' (or at least that is my interpretation of it)

That's exactly the reason why I put up CoCs for example - we define what is inacceptable in a certain space and put it in clear writing to avoid gaming. It binds the organizers as much as the attendees. It cuts out the play. For example, CoCs for dating environments look very differently then those for confs. (did you know there are cuddling meetups and they have very strict rules to ensure people feel comfortable?)

There are many abusers that are quite good at the "social game" you describe, by exploiting insecurities about rules, especially in their absence. Saying they are "bad at the game" is actually one of the standard plays (and terribly harmful to those that are _actually_ "bad at the game").

The solution is not "there are no rules", but "we have rules here and others here". We need more spaces with with different sets of rules, where everyone can nerd out in their fashion, not chaos.

The problem about society is that you can't cut out social interaction from humans. Any attempt to do so is doomed in my opinion.

The way I see it, any space with written rules (e.g. CoCs) are essentially spaces with restrictions that dilute cultures so that several cultures with a narrow shared interest can mingle productively. Codes of Conduct are essentially anti-cultural for the sake of achieving collaboration between cultures that share a common interest. This isn't a bad thing. It's certainly productive in ways and produces something of value, but it is necessarily limiting of cultures (and sub-cultures).

The moment you're thinking in dichotomous terms like "the organizers" and "the attendees", you're not talking about culture. The moment you cut out the play, you're not talking about culture. Every culture has varying degrees of play (that go well beyond the amount of play allowed by any CoC I've seen), and that play is acceptable but only known to members of whatever in-group is in question. Introducing rules that eliminate the play inherent in cultures is okay when you do so for the purpose of letting members of disparate cultures to interact safely with each other. The big concern hackers have and that the author of the article we're discussing is getting at, is that the values from which CoCs are fashioned are fine within the confines of the events where they are enforced, but when those values are foisted upon every hacker and nerd sub-culture (including the abrasive ones) and attempts to squelch the diversity of cultures, then it no longer represents intersectionality inclusive of weirdos.

    The problem about society is that you can't cut out social
    interaction from humans. Any attempt to do so is doomed in
    my opinion.

Exactly. CoCs cut out many types of interaction by humans. That's okay and that's good. The problem is when the values that led to those CoCs are indiscriminately applied to everyone that participated in an event even when they no longer are participating in an event. One sub-culture might be abrasive. It's good that that abrasiveness is not allowed in shared spaces like meetups and conferences, since it allows those without the capacity to handle abrasiveness to participate. It ceases to be good when people try to enforce those values against people even outside venues that proscribe CoCs.

    What you want is an abrasive culture and I oppose that.

It's fine to oppose when such opposition is limited to venues like meetups and conferences, but universal opposition applied at all times and all places, is inherently not inclusive of abrasive people.

highly relevant: http://marc.info/?l=linux-kernel&m=137392506516022&w=2

> The moment you're thinking in dichotomous terms like "the organizers" and "the attendees"

Hold it right there. I run the space, I raise the money, I sign the contracts, I'm can be held responsible if someone misbehaves (morally and legally) and I'm the person that doesn't watch the talks, but uses them as a time where they can actually make sure that the next person has their time and the tables are clean?

And "organizer" and "attendee" is a dichotomy? Both are roles and forcibly assuming that everyone plays the same role is harmful.

The idea is that you can do whatever you want at a conference you run...and so can I.

I think that CoCs are not bad, but the question asked by the article or rather the problem found is: Who writes the CoCs? Who is "we"? My understanding of the article is that there's a "weirdo nerd" group, which has their CoCs. These are rather loosely defined (the weirdos like it this way) and build the status quo (because the weirdos were there first, they defined the space, they wrote the first CoC). Now, various groups of newcomers - all better versed in the social game than the original CoC authors - join this space and start a "war of CoCs". Every new subgroup says "We and ONLY WE have the right to push CoCs", while the next subgroup cries foul, because in their world only THEY are the final arbiters of the CoCs. That's why we are both right on the point of "good at the game": Some groups use the "we are bad at the game, so don't bother us" tactic and try to win the war that way. Another group is more direct and uses the "we are good at the game, so listen to us" tactic, another group uses a third tactic. All abuse their skills for their own purposes. But that is not the point.

The point is: In the end none of these group has a right to redefine the CoCs. They've joined a space which has been built by the "weirdo nerds" for their purposes and has the CoCs those deemed fair. Joining this space was no problem, the "weirdo nerds" welcomed them (or didn't bother to say: GO AWAY, both interpretations are acceptable), but now they try to dominate this space by abusing their skills in the "game of social skills" and rewrite the spaces CoC to one they like more and that's neither fair nor right.

The answer to this is really simple: the people running the space. Run you own space, have your own CoC. Done.

If you can't get enough people to stand up and say "we're running a conference for tough as nails abrasive people, make sure you come in armored clothing", that might be a description of a problem.

This is flat out wrong. If a group of people start a hacking or gardening social subculture, then it is "owned" by them. If people start a goth subculture, others who join subsequently don't have a right to say "I don't like all the make up and candles and satantic stuff. If you want to start another club and call yourselves by a different name, that's fine. But you don't 'own' being goth."

If someone doesn't like the mood and tone of a given culture, they can start their own club or practice the activity without taking part in the social culture. They don't have to right to demand that everyone else change because their sensibilities are offended. If the members of a culture want to change to be more inclusive, then that's their decision. It has to be internal, not forced on them by pushy new members.

I think the difference there that goth is a subculture, while tech and software development is a job. Sure, there's also various subcultures in the software development industry, but there isn't one big subculture there. There's the abrasive brogrammers, there's the sensitive political correctness advocates, there's the quiet nerd that just wants to be left alone, there's the hiring manager looking for new employees, etcetera. All of those people are different, unlike goths which is a more clearly defined subculture.

Maybe the analogy would be a goth at an alternative conference, where you have emos, punk, neon-hair cyberpunk people, SM enthousiasts, etcetera. What's acceptable for one subculture (say, smoking in public, to use the South Park stereotype) may not be appropriate for the other.

Software development is a job, but the original post wasn't talking software development. It's talking about being a nerd. Sure, I have nerd "creds" and could easily fit in with any stereotypical group, but I don't claim any nerd status nor appear like it to the outside observer. I not gonna tell my group of friends to stop playing DnD or making shitty jokes no matter how embarrassing it is in public, and I expect the same courtesy. The problem I see is that folks seem to have this idea that they have a right to never feel offended. Well tough shit, you don't. You shouldn't be harassed, but if you don't find a group of folks ideals to your liking, well that's just life. Again, we're not talking professional lives here, but that of a subculture. Unfortunately, the problem is an overlap of folks who can't maintain a professional demeanor.

> I think the difference there that goth is a subculture, while tech and software development is a job.

And here I think is the crux of the problem; it's what the article was about. Tech became mainstream, and attracted people who look at it as a job. From the point of view of us native nerds, we became colonized and are being pushed back from the thing we built as our little place in the universe where we would feel safe from the society calling us "weirdos". It's not just a clash of cultures, it feels like an invasion - contemporary tech industry is not the place it used to be. As a native tech nerd I honestly feel threatened by it.

Damn well said!!! Thanks ;)

We wanted to make tech be ever more awesome, we told everyone we knew how cool it is, regardless of whether they were interested.

We asked for this, whether we like it or not :)

> We asked for this, whether we like it or not :)

Yes, unfortunately we did. We dreamed for an amazing world, but it's not what we got when the world joined in.

I think we got an amazing world :)

We democratised technology. We built a global IP network-of-networks and used it to connect a UNIX-like kernel in everyone's pocket, in a way that serves and delights them.

I distinctly remember a large family gathering in summer 2010 where I expected the usual pattern of sitting in a corner of the garden with the handful of other techie cousins, discussing whatever was new in our world. Instead, I had people coming and asking me if I was holding an iPad, and if they could play with it. That was a profound moment for me, it told me that we'd really achieved something special - a form of cutting edge technology that wasn't something non-techies ignored until they were forced to use it for work or banking or some other mundane task. Instead, they were drawn to it with the same fascination and wonder that I have always been. For that moment, everyone present, was a geek. I loved it.

Have some of the complex technical things that I once held as "mine" become dulled by the need to serve the masses? Of course. If that annoys me from a philosophical or technical perspective, my best choice is to forge ahead again and find a niche equivalent, or build something for myself.

In many cases, I welcome it, because something that I once had to invest time and effort into, is now smoothed over and shifts into the background, making time for me to focus on something else.

Thank you for your comment and your perspective. You literally just made me smile and feel very warm feelings inside.

Yes, this is the amazing world we wanted. :).

> Have some of the complex technical things that I once held as "mine" become dulled by the need to serve the masses? Of course. If that annoys me from a philosophical or technical perspective, my best choice is to forge ahead again and find a niche equivalent, or build something for myself.

> In many cases, I welcome it, because something that I once had to invest time and effort into, is now smoothed over and shifts into the background, making time for me to focus on something else.

Here you captured what I never could in words, so again - thank you. It's exactly what I feel - as cool tech I held as "mine" became mainstream, it also became dulled. I know it's an irrational feeling, but I do have it. But as you say, the best thing to do is to move on, find a new frontier, a new niche, and live there, until it again becomes common, and you can go even further. That is the beauty of progress!

Thinking more about it, I realize you're right. We have that amazing world. But with it, unfortunately, we once again exposed ourselves to the people who reject us and want to bully us. I'm not sure what to do about it. Should I escape even further, into another niche, one that hasn't been tainted by the culture of dishonesty and signalling games yet? It's getting harder and harder, because now everything is on the Internet, and the bullies move at the speed of light.

waaaah

I don't understand this US vs THEM mentality. Yes, you were the nerd that might have been excluded from other people's world because they didn't deem you 'cool enough'.

But now you are excluding others from joining your world. Are you not as bad as the people who made you feel displaced?

Why not take the stance that you can be better?

Because they're not joining, they're invading, and we have all the reasons to feel afraid that we will get pushed out again. And honestly, I'm fine with the fact that tech has grown beyond the culture that created it. I'm uncomfortable that what this "extended tech industry" produces is often a bastardization of what we so loved and cared. I get it, different priorities, I'm fine with that too.

What I am not fine with is the cultural invasion, the people suddenly appearing, realizing there is more of them than us "weirdos" and telling us "this is our field now, you are outnumbered, you must conform to our standars". "OK, join our field; the good land is rich, and can provide for everyone. But why won't you let us live in peace, why you need to keep bullying us?".

This US vs THEM mentality is something that was not created by "weird nerds" - all those nerds wanted was to be accepted. But we had to escape, because mainstream society doesn't accept our way of thinking (curiosity, intellectual interests, intellectual honesty) and bullied us. It's them who started it, and it's them who are invading our safe harbour again.

And it probably would still be fine if social justice crowd just stayed away.

Anyway; the article explained it very well, actually.

So, how come a lot of those projects creating those shifts are run by long-standing community participants? Are they traitors?

> And it probably would still be fine if social justice crowd just stayed away.

I have no sympathy if you feel uncomfortable or threatened by people who expect you to treat others with respect, especially when you use terms like "invading" and prop yourself up as a paragon of intellectual pursuits.

> if you feel uncomfortable or threatened by people who expect you to treat others with respect

That's not the people I'm talking about. Social justice crowd is the exact oposite of treating others with respect. And by their actions they are exacerbating the very problems they claim to fight against.

> when you use terms like "invading"

That's what it feels like.

> prop yourself up as a paragon

Well, I played Paragon Shepard, for what it's worth.

I grew up as nerd and was bullied both emotionally and physically (although less so physically than others probably). Since i have have some small understanding of what it's like to feel excluded, I welcome all folks involved in social justice into our nerdy communities.

I've always been a nerd. From birth. From the ugly glasses and the math team and the BBSs on. From dumpster-diving for computers because I couldn't afford them. From emacs vs vi.

I'm also female. I don't like being pushed out of my own d*&mned nerdy home by people who think I'm invading because I happen to stand up for myself.

Heres a dirty little secret about "real nerds". As far as bullying and exclusion goes, they give as good as they get. I knew some so called nerds in high school who were picked on. I knew more who socially isolated themselves by being arrogant jerks to everyone else, especially those they considered to be of lower intelligence. I dont fit the real nerd stereotype. I played football and I don't like dnd. I resent the notion that I am some kind of brogrammer picking on the poor helpless nerds. Who is really picking on who here? If it truly is about the code, as the author states, then why should this bs about authentic nerd culture even matter?

> I knew more who socially isolated themselves by being arrogant jerks to everyone else, especially those they considered to be of lower intelligence.

I knew people like that too, though I can't tell how often it was because they were just jerks with technical interests, and how much it was a defense mechanism, trying to maintain a little bit of self-esteem while being constantly bullied.

> I dont fit the real nerd stereotype. I played football and I don't like dnd. I resent the notion that I am some kind of brogrammer picking on the poor helpless nerds. Who is really picking on who here?

I don't think that was the message coming from the article. Most of the hardcore nerd circles I know would happily accept you and wouldn't mind you like football and are not into DnD. But usually this doesn't work the other way - your DnD-playing football-agnostic nerd gets picked on and called a "nolife".

> If it truly is about the code, as the author states, then why should this bs about authentic nerd culture even matter?

Because the author states that the nerd culture is (among other things) about "the code over status games".

>I knew people like that too, though I can't tell how often it was because they were just jerks with technical interests, and how much it was a defense mechanism, trying to maintain a little bit of self-esteem while being constantly bullied.

Yeah well 9 times out of 10 the "jocks" who bullied the "nerds" were doing it out of a deep seated insecurity too. Just because someone self identifies with a subculture does not mean they are any less capable of being an asshole.

The article presents a huge falsification of history. I dare to say that most of the technical development was made by people who doesn't fit into the narrow definition of "nerd" as presented.

The impression I got when I got started in technology two decades ago was that being weird was accepted because we all liked technology. Not that you had to be weird to like technology. Heck, today you don't even have to like technology. Just know the right cultural-references and you're in.

> From the point of view of us native nerds

I can't stand nativism anywhere I smell it.

Don't read politics into a simple phrase. Cf. "digital native".

Stop trying to make yourself one dimensional. Existence precedes essence. You aren't a nerd, you're just a dude, that does nerdy things sometimes. The things you do aren't you, and you aren't them. If other people want to do the things you do it does not detract from your enjoyment of them one iota, unless you're so self absorbed you can't enjoy it without exclusivity.

grow the fuck up.

As I tried to explain in comments downthread, it's not about being detracted from enjoyment because new people are arriving to the scene. It's about that what was once a refuge from bullies is no more, because the safe harbour became mainstream interest, and now "weirdos" are being pushed back again by the society that requires you to conform to its definition of "normal life" and "normal interests".

> grow the fuck up.

I always say I'm 5 years old, and I like it that way.

Yeah but you feeling threatened by newcomers to the industry is no different than my old white grandfather feeling threatened when hispanics move next door. The tech industry was the one place where you felt accepted. Isn't it selfish to deny that acceptance to others?

Only dogs bark at strangers. The rest of us say "welcome."

> I think the difference there that goth is a subculture, while tech and software development is a job.

To you, it's a job. To me, it's one of my many hobbies that I enjoy doing. It just turns out that there's more demand in the business world for software engineering than there is for admiring artwork of anthropomorphic creatures or swinging swords around.

Thirding what my sibling commenters are saying, just for the additional data point.

The article was about hackers, the set of outcasts that self-identify based on rough consensus and running code and merit. The article wasn't about hackers, the buzzword that is good to have on your meetup and LinkedIn profile.

Such is the extent of the appropriation of hacker culture--there is this weird notion that workplace professionalism (whatever that is) somehow now has to be embraced by people claiming to be hackers. It's bullshit.

That's why I moved to "maker" if I absolutely have to pick a one-word label. So it goes.

I was and still am involved in the "maker culture" thing and from what I see, the term "maker" is already dead as well. Media found it, it became a popular label, and now everyone who knows which side of duct tape is sticky is a "maker". And don't get me started about the events. What do startups showcasing their newest commercial 3D printers have to do with "making" again?

http://www.theonion.com/articles/us-dept-of-retro-warns-we-m... Appropriate onion article if you change some nouns :) Can't disagree with you, sadly.

In general: If you're an outcast and you don't ostracise yourself from a community that has grown large, you are not really an outcast.

In detail: Hackers can't complain that their movement has grown and developed facets they don't like. Hackers are mischievous, hackers are smart, hackers are always ahead of the pack discovering and inventing cool new things. Therefore, hackers, by their very self-definition, can't be called hackers anymore, they must have moved on elsewhere and developed new labels for themselves. If they haven't, and have become complacent and jaded with newcomers, they have ceased to be true hackers.

(I use "they", because one should never self-apply the term hacker :)

The people who claim "hacking" today didn't start it. In fact "hacking", to the extent it ever had a common definition, has changed to accommodate the people that are more interested in being part of some culture rather than having an interest in technology.

I think it's substantially different if that subculture operates in an open environment that encourages participation.

If you want to have a private, invite-only community that has strict rules of abrasive (or other) behaviour, that is also possible.

If, however, you run around the world telling everyone how amazing your culture is, how it's producing things that will change all our lives, how it's great for getting a well paying career, etc, etc, all of which the hacking culture has done, then you have nobody to blame when people start paying attention. We asked for all of this, and we reap the rewards, good and bad.

I recommend you to attend a meeting like the Wave Gotic Treffen in Leipzig. You'll see exactly those things happen and it's called "generation change".

My other pet project for a long time was moderating a metal board - what do you think happened when people came up with Nu Metal? It was an outrage.

> If they wanted to start their own Abrasive gardening club, where they would be abrasive to each other

If a few people founded a company like this and became successful, some people who joined later would complain about the abrasiveness.

And if the complainants happened to be from certain "protected classes", abrasiveness would be legally prohibited.

Replace "company" with "tech industry" and it's exactly what happened.

I don't necessarily disagree with you, blfr... but:

If people like hyperion2010 or others want an abrasive culture, why can't they take what they dish? Why is it so ok for someone to call me a c*&t but I can't say the words "male privilege"?

Because they're on the inside and you're on the outside.

Is she? Why?

An insider can make any comments they like about an outsider (up to the point where the comments themselves become problematic to other insiders), but an outsider cannot say anything negative about the group or any of its members without being perceived as attacking the group and all of its members.

Basic in-group/out-group dynamics.

No, that I get and understand. I meant, why is she in the out-group? Or, more precisely, how do you know she is in the out-group?

The one is a personal insult that can be brushed off. The other is an accusation of unfairness in the entire system.

Are you surprised that the system (and the people within it) reacts to broad-based accusations about its structure, rather differently from how it reacts to angry beefs between individuals?

On a structural perpetuation-of-the-organism level, no: you make a good point. On a personal level, I do find it weird that people take critiques of a system more personally than personal insults. We were all born into a system that we didn't create; we reshape it through the actions in our lives.

We do take what we dish all the time, what we pretty much never dish is public and directed attacks on individuals (or other social attacks of which there are many, such as spreading rumors). If I'm in a room with someone that is continually spouting off about all men being sexist pigs and making period jokes I really don't care, that is their prerogative and I have no right to stop them much less publicly attack them (nor do I feel the need, but that is another issue altogether).

Absolutely. If someone doesn't like the abrasion, all they have to do is not participate in the activity. Not play the games, not go to the con's, not get a job in the industry.

Let them take up knitting.

How are any of these activities improved by an abrasive culture?

The only thing it creates, ultimately, is the endgame of the Geek Social Fallacies: a place where the only people left all have nasty personalities and no social connections to any other kinds of people.

http://www.plausiblydeniable.com/opinion/gsf.html

If you haven't been in an environment where everybody is tolerated -- you're really missing out. I've been lucky enough to work on projects where programming nerds mingle with visual artists, mechanics, hardware hackers, fashionistas, musicians, and more, and it's amazing. And furthermore, it's not like we're watching what we say all day. In my experience, if you have a baseline where everyone knows they are accepted and have recourse to call someone out, then there's lots of "inappropriate" humor.

Sounds more like you do professional get-togethers than nerdy stuff. People behave more like "at work" at those meetups and conferences.

I used to run eurucamp (I'm on a hiatus), which is a very affordable summer community conference at a lake with impromptu bike rides, canoeing, parties and lots of visitor participation. We have only 1 invited speaker (keynote). We have people setting up podcasts programs for the whole conference just as a _community effort for fun_.

On the peak, we ran a 5-day conference set with a one week program around it only on voluntary work.

We currently have an attendance that is very diverse (we don't count) and we worked for that a lot.

It couldn't be any less professional and if it can, we'd like to remove that.

http://2014.eurucamp.org/concept/

The Elasticsearch usergroup is run at a small community-driven coworking space (and existed before Elastic, the company) and the Rust usergroup definitely has no professional outset.

I also ran devrooms on FOSDEM.

One of the meetups the Ruby Berlin e.V. runs (the governing body for all of this) has _3 full talks_+Lightning talks every month, without any company involvement other then providing rooms.

Suits are really of no interest to me in this case.

Also, I'd like to say that I'm not discussing from a theoretical point here - I've been doing community work for more then 10 years and have put all the things I say here into production at some point and in multiple contexts. With measurable successes and failures.

I don't say you're an impostor :)

I just say all this sounds more like "conference" (= prof) than "hacker space" (= hobby)

Both can be fun.

I'm from Stuttgart and going to the Shack is a whole different experience than going to any meetup or conference.

They are all hobby, on top of my work time. Many of the attendees are there for fun, especially on eurucamp, off their own pocket. Obviously, 3 days of meeting with 300 international people isn't going to be all random (even things like the CCC only _seem_ hackish).

I do help and attend spontanous meetups of all forms and fashions as well - still, they all have rules and they are all better for it.

> What you want is an abrasive culture and I oppose that.

I agree.

I prefer to use the term "nerd" to mean that type of abrasive person and "geek" as someone who is enjoys the same interests but is not interested in point-scoring and other aspects of that abrasive culture.

I have no experience in this, but I don't feel like anything from the article is "abrasive", or even really anything from the previous poster you replied to.

Sidenote: The word "hacker" doesn't seem to mean anything anymore, it has been used in so many different ways that it has become too ambiguous. I personally like the phrase "weird nerd" better, because it might be a little more specific, and it is how I feel. (Probably doesn't help that I don't have the skills that seem to go along with "weird nerds"/"hackers".)

The dongle thing didn't take place at a "nerd community" event, but at a professional conference. The problem, as it where, is that computers and programming is no longer the exclusive domain of the so called "nerd" and I don't think we should make joining a subculture a prerequisite for joining a career path.

I don't think anyone required anyone else to join that subculture when making that joke to their friend.

The dongle "thing" did not take place at a nerd community nor a professional conference. It took place in a private conversation between two people who happened to be at a professional conference.

The distinction is the same as if they were seated in a coffee shop. Conversations there are between private people, not with some coffee shop "audience". People who listen in to such conversation, and worse, reacts to it, are doing something which polite people consider very rude.

What Donglegate did is reveal how many different takes there are on what constitutes public, and how unwilling people are to discuss it.

I'm not sure where I stand on this issue of conversation privacy in public spaces, but I will say that at worst the individual should have called the people making jokes out at the time and suggested that their conversation was not appropriate in context. To passively aggressively take to twitter to gather a mob strikes me as total overkill.

I think you got it backwards. The "dongle thing" is about a feminist bully, not about two guys making a harmless joke. The consensus is that Adria was the problem here, how anyone could come to a different conclusion is beyond me.

I'm willing to stack my geek credentials against anyone, and I'm not in your consensus. Lots of people aren't. You might be inside a filter bubble.

I don't agree with what Adria did, in that she shamed these guys on Twitter, and furthermore, she's doubled down on some conspiracy theories afterwards. And maybe she has an itchy trigger finger on what might constitute a hostile environment.

But, the issue of hostile environments -- as created through a shared culture of sexualized talk -- that's real. The best intervention I think, would have been to talk to those guys. If she didn't feel comfortable confronting them, she was also justified in taking it to the PyCon organizers.

If I remember correctly, she made a joke about male genitalia on twitter just a few days beforehand.

Adria just made a tweet, repeating their words; the real problem was the internet hordes on both sides of the debate that went at all parties involved's throats. That was the real escalation. The problem is the huge audience, where one tweet can reach millions of people, each with their own opinion and the ability to voice it instantly, within seconds. It's dangerous, really.

I'm in "nerd culture". If it's too brittle to fit the needs of people in it, to hell with it. Change or die.

I'm reminded of Grigori Perelman's critique of mathematicians: "But almost all of them are conformists." "It is not people who break ethical standards who are regarded as aliens. It is people like me who are isolated."

If anyone of us is a nerd and can't improve their own culture, GTFO. And take your "dongles" and Big Bang Theory goofiness with you. No special privileges for those who simply preceded others temporally. Dinosaur.

> Change or die.

Change or be killed, at your hands, it sounds like.

Can you blame people for fighting back against that?

Or "nerd culture" could eliminate you and all the others trying to force change. There's no evidence that you are anything but a oxygen waster, so why should it hold back when you attack first?

> Dinosaur.

Personal attacks are not allowed on Hacker News.

Re: the dongle incident, the woman involved has been in the community for years. Why this "people who try to join" and "immediately start complaining" business? You're distorting the facts.

I'm not quite as socially oblivious as the original writer. I do agree with her that being completely oblivious to social cues is really useful for women in tech. However, you can't turn off that fact that many women are pretty conscious of social cues.

If "no one should ever be allowed to determine what is appropriate", why don't you guys just lighten up and deal with what women say at face value? Why do you take it so personally? You can't tell me it's inappropriate after a statement like you just made!

> people who try to join nerd communities and then immediately start complaining about "inappropriate behavior" (eg the dongle thing)

You seem very sure about when Adria Richards (the lady involved in "donglegate") "tried" to join the nerd community. And yet you're wrong.

Here's a partial bio from a recent article:

"She was introverted, smart, and "weird" (according to the other kids)—a burgeoning nerd.

By age 17, she'd fallen in love with computers. A year later, she was working at Geeksquad, employee #26, and she absorbed everything she could about hardware, operating systems, and networks. That summer, she registered her first domain name for a client for whom she was building a website, and learned about DNS. She buried herself in books and scoured websites, learning new things and trying them out, relying on friends whose parents had more resources to get access to hardware."

http://www.shakesville.com/2015/02/the-falsest-of-false-equi...

Is the dongle thing even remotely defensible? She got a man fired over a private conversation. One of the rules of civilized behavior is that you don't do that.

What exactly did she do? I recall she complained on Twitter, and exercised her freedom of speech to express her opinion. A number of people shared that opinion and also spoke freely about their opinion.

In the fullness of time, his employers acted like craven cowards and sacked him. Did she sack him? No.

Was he scarred for life? Ostracized? No, he found work again quickly. But what happened to her? A bunch of other people exercised their freedom of speech and shared their opinion of her choices, and she was also fired. Was she ostracized? Yes. People said things like, “She should never work in tech again.”

To anyone on the outside of that incident, it’s quite obvious that the treatment of the two persons involved was completely asymmetrical, especially considering that what she did was express an unpopular opinion.

Which is something that hackers, especially hackers here, often say is something that ought to be protected. But there’s always the weasel words that “speech has consequences,” which mean that in reality, “privilege” is being insulated from those consequences, and lack of privilege is being exposed to the maximum consequences.

Getting back to your rules, she didn’t get anyone fired. She spoke out about something that was said in a public place loudly enough for her to hear it.

I’ll gladly defend that. There is nothing remotely civilized about saying that she shouldn’t be allowed to object to anything she hears, or express her opinion about how a civilized society should respond.

White males do that all the time. Why is a black, Jewish female not afforded the same option?

> What exactly did she do? I recall she complained on Twitter, and exercised her freedom of speech to express her opinion.

She took his photo and shared it on twitter. That's as good as calling him out by name.

> Was he scarred for life? Ostracized? No

That's not how he describes it.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/15/magazine/how-one-stupid-tw...

Search the page for "Santa Clara"

> To anyone on the outside of that incident, it’s quite obvious that the treatment of the two persons involved was completely asymmetrical, especially considering that what she did was express an unpopular opinion.

And what was he doing, besides expressing an unpopular opinion?

> There is nothing remotely civilized about saying that she shouldn’t be allowed to object to anything she hears

Of course she should be allowed to object. She should also be sensible enough to recognize that including the identity of the individual in the objection is the same as asking the public at large to take action against the individual.

Free speech does not mean free from consequences. Both parties learned that in spades.

"That's as good as calling him out by name."

As far as I know the guys name was not widely, if at all, published.

Yes, his name has been carefully kept out of public discussions. This is the patriarchy protecting his reputation while repeating the complainant's name as often and as widely as possible to make sure that anyone who dislikes what she did has a target for criticism and/or abuse while the people who dislike what he did don't.

He didn't ask for his name to be published and she outed him under her real name on her employer's Twitter account. 'The patriarchy' is not conspiring against her to keep her name public, it's just maintaining the status quo.

Hahaha the patriarchy! How much of your day do you spend feeling oppressed?

when did this site become a radfem hub?

Exactly. And I'll add that a private conversation is one thing. A conversation had in the middle of a crowd is another. And it's another still when that crowd is at a convention with a code of conduct and the conversation violates it.

I think the article mentions how in the good old days, conventions didn't have (or need) codes of conduct and a politically correct squad on standby to escort people out of the building if they made innocuous jokes that anyone turning on the TV to watch a sitcom gets peppered with (followed by laugh tapes to make sure people understand that it was supposed to be funny).

What was said code of conduct? Saying things in a certain tone of voice is not allowed? Referring to a dongle as being big is not allowed? Their claimed violation was all very up for debate TBF.

The good old days? Seriously? Hearkening back to a mythical golden age is your response?

This is the code of conduct: https://us.pycon.org/2013/about/code-of-conduct/

In particular, I think this was the part that was violated: "All communication should be appropriate for a professional audience including people of many different backgrounds. Sexual language and imagery is not appropriate for any conference venue, including talks."

The jokes were about forking and big dongles; they were obvious sexual references. The maker of the joke, the overhearer, and the people running the conference all agreed that it was a code of conduct violation, so there's nothing really up for debate about that.

That you don't understand why these codes were created or what practical benefit they have means little other that you haven't taken the time to learn anything before opening your mouth.

Apparently the reference to "forking" and "dongles" could be considered sexual, if you squint enough. Never mind that it was a private conversation and Richards wasn't a part of it - she needed to get her outrage quota for the day so she photographed the jokers and tweeted it to tens of thousands of people with her martyrdom narrative appended.

>What exactly did she do? I recall she complained on Twitter, and exercised her freedom of speech to express her opinion.

What she did was escalate, and that unwisely.

She added identifying info. Anyone familiar with the internet knows what can happen.

Say I'm wrong, and that she never meant for it to get so out of hand. Where was her defense of mr-hank? She could have stopped the madness or even reversed it after the fact with the right blog post. Perhaps she felt culturally unsafe in a big conference room surrounded by a bunch of white male Christian programmers, but when you complain, and someone gets fired over it, turns out you had more power than you thought, and with that comes responsibility.

In short: she started a lynch mob fight, and lost.

How about you don’t tell me what I’m going to say in response to you, and then you don’t argue with yourself?

What I’ll actually say is that you appear to have decided that she got what she deserved, and everything you’re arguing is post-facto reasoning to rationalize the decision you’ve already made.

I might as well have a discussion with a volleyball.

He didn't say what you were going to respond.

"Say I'm wrong, and that she never meant for it to get so out of hand." Is him saying "let's assume I'm wrong, and etc etc"

Comparing people with a volleyball, on the other hand, is pretty clearly an insult/ad hominem.

I think the problem with the whole event in the end was that people don't think too highly of other people's privacy anymore - posting someone's picture or even using someone's real name on the internet was unheard of and Not Done ten years ago, nowadays people just do it because IDK, they haven't gotten their required 100 tweets / day yet or something.

In that very article I linked to she points out that it was his employer that fired him, apparently because loudly making rude jokes at a conference while representing them was considered the last straw.

Have you ever complained about any employee at any time for any reason? Does that make you an uncivilized beast?

She got a man fired over a private conversation. One of the rules of civilized behavior is that you don't do that.

Briefly ignoring both that she did not "get [him] fired" and that your definition of "private conversation" apparently extends to "conversation in a public place that others can easily hear", there are plenty of obvious situations in which a private conversation can and should result in consequences (sexual harassment and threats being clear examples).

Your position on the rules of civilized behavior is incoherent.

She didn't get the man fired, mainstream values got the man fired. In retaliation the hacker community did the same thing and got her fired. Sadly individuals will always get hurt when ideologies clashes.

It was a public conversation.

Tried to publicly shame someone, and it backfired spectacularly.

I agree with you—she wasn’t an outsider trying to join the group. She’s a real nerd, culturally. But this is exactly what I (and many nerds) don't care about. I don't care whether Adria Richards is in the in-group or the out-group. I care about her ideas. I care about her code. So far I’ve only seen her ideas, and her ideas include feeling like her life was threatened because of a “dongle” joke. That’s not a scathing review of her as a person—I’m not reviewing her as a person. I’m reviewing her idea. Her idea is just wrong. Everyone has a few wrong ideas—it’s not a big deal.

At the core of the issue of women in tech is a belief that women’s ideas are as good as men’s ideas—on average, women produce as high a percentage of good ideas (and bad ideas) as men. So we want to include women because of their ideas, because we care about their ideas and not who they are.

I don’t know the solution to this problem.

But the solution being proposed in the Adria Richards debate is that Adria Richards was threatened because of who she was. But she wasn’t threatened, she just felt threatened. People are saying we should listen to these feelings and include people like Adria Richards who feel threatened when they aren’t being threatened. It’s an attempt to place her within the group based on who she is, in direct opposition to the fact that her idea, in this case, is wrong. THE ENTIRE POINT of including women is THEIR IDEAS. Holding up someone whose idea was wrong as the poster child for gender equality in tech is diametrically in opposition to why anyone in tech wants to include women in tech.

Not only is this not a solution to the first problem, it directly breaks the ideology that makes tech culture something worth joining.

If we’re going to treat women’s ideas as equal to men’s, that includes treating women’s bad ideas as equal to men’s bad ideas.

I think if you talk to any of the women I’ve worked with, they would describe me as an ally. I’ve called out coworkers on saying sexist things, in front of other people. But I want to solve the problem of there not being many women in tech, not create spaces where people can’t validate ideas because of who said them. If we do that, we’ll just be creating terrible tech companies where women work but ideas can’t be validated, and all the real technologists will move to real tech companies that have no women. A false solution is no solution.

Talking of "false", you know that you just made up the bit about Adria feeling her life was threatened by the dongle jokes, right? She tweeted that it was " not cool" and against the code of conduct.

To be clear, she was literally, actually, threatened with death (amongst other things) after it blew up in the media.

I'm kind of intrigued what the next, easily disproved lie is going to be on this topic.

"“You felt fear?” I asked.

“Danger,” she said. “Clearly my body was telling me, ‘You are unsafe.’”

[...]

“You talked about danger,” I said. “What were you imagining might…?”

“Have you ever heard that thing, men are afraid that women will laugh at them and women are afraid that men will kill them?” she replied. “So. Yeah.”

from http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/feb/21/internet-s...

Quoting a witty Margaret Atwood line two years after the fact is not the same as saying "my life was threatened by someone". She's clearly describing a physical reaction to anxiety, hair standing up on her neck at the thought of a confrontation, which reminded her of school. If not she could have answered the simple question "You felt fear?" with "Yes, I feared for my life".

That seems an excessively charitable interpretation.

You can read her own blog post, that she wrote immediately after the incident, but before all the media hullabaloo started up:

http://butyoureagirl.com/2013/03/18/forking-and-dongle-jokes...

Who's interpretation fits better? The "I was literally threatened with death" version or the "I was anxious because I was confronting people who were behaving boorishly"?

At best you can claim that 2 years after the fact she suddenly decided that she was threatened with death, and just happened to announce this new interpretation in an article that she is on record (in the article I previously linked to in another comment) as feeling misrepresented by the author of.

"What could be worse than someone taking what you've told them and portraying you as the aggressor? It was a sucker-punch to the gut. This is what Jon Roson's article in the NYTimes did. I simply become an agitator affecting the man's life, no more, no less."

So, no, I don't think I'm being very charitable in my interpretation.

hsod quoted what I was referring to, and whether you buy my interpretation or not, what I said was not an "easily disproved lie".

Also, hsod didn't even quote the entire thing, and context only makes it look worse for her. The interviewer gave her plenty of chances to clarify her position, that the quote was just talking about anxiety. But she stuck to what she said. She definitely believed that she was in physical danger.

This is pretty warped.

If we want all people to turn up with their ideas, we have to create an environment where all people feel comfortable being present and expressing their ideas. We have mainly done that for white dudes with reasonable levels of social capital. I'd like to do it for everybody.

The feeling of being a visibly different minority in a crowd can be unsettling. (As a white guy I experience it rarely, but when it happens, I notice the difference acutely.) This is true regardless of actual risk. But women are currently at higher risk of all sorts of predatory behavior: creeps, stalkers, harassers, sexual assaulters, rapists. I personally expect that a sexualized environment will increase those risks. But even if they don't, suddenly having your context shifted from, "professional who likes to code thinking about code" to "fuckable prey for the predators in the crowd around you" is problematic.

Our choices are either to give up and have those people mainly stay away or to work on creating a safe space so that everybody can attend. There is no middle path here. Pycon explicitly chose the latter.

Does this exclude ideas? I guess, in a sad and limited sense of the term "ideas". Pycon's limited the acceptable content thusly: "All communication should be appropriate for a professional audience including people of many different backgrounds. Sexual language and imagery is not appropriate for any conference venue, including talks."

Does this mean you can't talk about your favorite masturbation techniques on stage? Sure. But seriously, why would you? What sort of incredible idea exchange are we missing out on here by saying that a Python conference has to be about Python? If you also want to talk about sex, there are conferences about that. There's even a well-established conference about sex and technology. [1]

What you're refusing to connect here is what happened to Adria before and after she posted a tweet about a Code of Conduct violation. She was harassed and threatened; her employer was attacked, harming their business. These are all crimes, and they're crimes for a reason. You might not see the connection, but to me (and I'm sure to any woman in tech) it's pretty obvious: men willing to attack women are part of the tech community. They could be anybody. [2]

She surely knew that there could well be predators in that crowd. And the moment the context is sexualized is the moment that she has to start paying attention to that rather than the content. This is true for anybody, but it is especially true for people who have been traumatized in the past. And given the stats on sexual assault, there are guaranteed to be women like that at any significant conference.

So I'm firmly on the side of codes of conduct because I don't want a random grab-bag of ideas at a conference. I want a specific curated set of good ideas. And if that means people have to save their weak sex jokes and their pictures of porn stars for a few hours until they're somewhere else, I'm fine with that.

[1] http://www.monochrom.at/arse-elektronika/

[2] This basically makes you and me and any dude in a crowd Schroedinger's Rapist: http://kateharding.net/2009/10/08/guest-blogger-starling-sch... http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Schr%C3%B6dinger%27s_Rapi...

Note:

"The only way forward is REAL tolerance for all kinds of behavior and a good faith attempt to see people in context."

This only applies when a member of the group has been caught doing somethings stupid. If someone "trying to join" the group has complaints, there is no need for tolerance. "Nerd culture", for example, has its own standards of "appropriate".

Out of interest, how would you apply the above to Brendan Eich?

That is a sad case of people proving that once the tables got turned the once who once was oppressed will happily deny others the right of free speech.

And, the majority, the ones who care less about right and wrong as long as they are on the correct side, will happily follow along, just as they did when Catholics ruled, just as they did when White Straight ruled.

The right to free speech doesn't mean the right to not face any social consequences for your speech.

Funny that you should bring that up: Until recently it was the other way around - tell someone you aren't straight and risk losing the job.

Why is it suddenly be acceptable the other way around?

Telling someone you're straight and supporting oppression of not straight people are two completely different things.

It's interesting which way the double standard swings on this; for instance, the McCarthy-era Hollywood blacklist was exactly the same kind of "social consequence".

FWIW I'd apply a "does it affect how they behave at work?" test.

If I had a very good developer who was perfectly courteous and professional at work but in his spare time was (say) a member of the Westborough Baptist Church or the Socialist Workers Party I'd not be concerned.

I wouldn't as well, but as soon as that developer would become representative of my company and people would start to bring it out in connection to the company, I'd start to worry about my image.

For your typical standard worker it doesn't really matter what he/she does outside of work, as long as it doesn't damage the company - which is pretty hard unless you really try, since nobody outside gives a damn about some noname employee. For someone very high in hierarchy it actually becomes much easier to damage it, so you have to draw a line somewhere. If your company, supposed to promote messages of equality and taking pride of its supposed openness, elects someone who actively supported means of oppression against minorities as its representative and people start to react, there might be something worth reconsidering in this situation.

It's definitely spot-on. I think it has a great example of anti-feminist/male-privileged mindset:

> Desire for civility and freedom from objectification is "censorship"

> Wanting to not support misogynists/rape apologists/rape denialists/sexual predators is worse than the soviets

> My fear of social ostracism is as or more valid than your fear of being raped

> My chosen "identities" are as important as the assigned social castes you've been placed in and are violently oppressed into staying in

> Not having friends in high school is the same as being a woman, or black

Eventually feminism will win; anti-racism will win; these are inevitabilities we can trace from the first slave revolts in Sumeria to John Brown to the Black Panther Party to even Barack Obama, in his own way. The ratchet of history turns only ever in one direction. Reactionaries howl over lost ground, but they'll never reclaim it.

I eagerly await this world, where finally we will have real hackers, hackers that bring their skill to bear against real enemies, fight real battles, and are strong, rather than weak, building on a foundation of just conflict between the oppressors and the oppressed, rather than being mentally locked in the 3rd grade in the moment of shame when their lunch money was taken.

One day the creeps will be gone. Only the strong will survive. Choose your side wisely, for you can only be on one side of history, and one it has left you behind you will be behind it forever.

>Trying to convince hacker culture to change its norms by appealing to progressive values alone won’t work. You’re going to have to appeal to hacker values, and nobody’s done that yet.

If progressive values are not hacker values, the hacker values will be, should be, and must be destroyed.

I agree with you 100%, but I feel the need to point out that you can still be a "weird nerd" and have progressive values. I do not think hacker values and progressive values are mutually exclusive, but I think they are orthogonal.

Some of the weirdest nerds I know are more progressive than I am, and I'm pretty good at checking my biases and listening to people unlike myself.

I agree completely. In fact, I think that the only hacker values that are true hacker values are progressive, and that the people invoking "hacker values" to justify misogyny, objectification and sexualization of women, etc., are going against hacker values in a truly insidious way.

But if anyone thinks otherwise, they should know they are on the losing side of history in every regard.

What on Earth did I just read... Please tell me that this is a sarcastic comment, because otherwise I can't even begin to address the amount of hostility it advocates. Read seriously, this shows exactly the cancer that is eating tech right now, a memeplex built on signalling and lack of any honesty or civility.

Typical privileged male trying to talk over a woman in tech's lived experience. Instead of screaming at her that she's wrong about everything, how about listening for once?

How about the reverse? It's SJW types that shout and don't listen. Everything has a good solution when two sides are willing to listen to one another.

I think your point is discrete by creating a dichotomy in which you are either "right" or "wrong" while i'd err on the side of "the world is more complicated than it looks".

You can't really win, but slowly morph the world from one view to another. In the process, your perception of what is right or wrong changes and thus, the terminal position is never the one you initially expected.

One thing I'm willing to bet on is that any extreme position will be seen as wrong 50 years from now on. The hive mind of the western global village might sway 180 degrees, like it did on the question of race in the 20th century. From genes to apology. But the "intellectual" belief about race is perhaps still as wrong as ever, and we understand comparatively little about its position in society.

Likewise, we don't have any clue how the human mind is affected by being closely connected through the internet. Or for the fact that the private individual was eradicated for the public group. Or for the total persistence of information from every human being connected via IP-addresses to everyone else in the ultimate peer-to-peer network ever envisioned.

It is so easy to blame someone as a reactionary who won't understand the position to which the world moved. But reality is perhaps that they have seen things oblivious to everyone else.

In other words, I think the human society is so complex we don't really understand how little we understand of it.

> If progressive values are not hacker values, the hacker values will be, should be, and must be destroyed.

To presume that every aspect of your value system is superior to every aspect of everyone else's value systems is both astoundingly arrogant and also authoritarian. Improvement of societal values can't come about without minority groups being allowed to practice alternative value systems, as abhorrent as they might seem to the mainstream. As long as these groups aren't dramatically harming someone (ie: slavery, killing homosexuals etc) then I don't see what the problem is with this. The progressive values you espouse would have likely been popularly embraced much sooner had society not used it's force to clamp down on people practicing alternative values; yet now that your value system is gaining societal support, you are suggesting that society do the exact same thing to different people employing alternative values.

I would encourage you to be a bit more open minded. You might find that elements of hacker culture's or other cultures' values are superior to elements of your value system, and fuse those aspects into your existing values to make a superior system. At the very least, if progressive values are universally superior to hacker values then they will naturally win out over time. There is no need to to advocate the silencing of dissenting voices.

Progressive values are in fact the minority. Most people on hacker news (for example, but also in the world at large) do not believe women have rights to bodily integrity, to be respected as people rather than sex objects, and to be comfortable in their communities. This thread from yesterday is a great reminder of that, to anyone who thinks HN is some egalitarian utopia: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9168299

In order to have any concept of morality, we must presume that every aspect of our value system is superior to every aspect of any other value system. But this isn't a negative. It isn't ~presumptuous~ to believe that murder and torture and rape are wrong. Likewise, supporting these things is not some mere "alternative" that should be encouraged by some moral-relativist position that all forms of society are equally preferable.

The universe is not fair. There is no law of physics that naturally leads to good triumphing over evil. The history of humanity is the story of the slow climb of our species out of the darkness, away from tyranny and patriarchy and towards freedom for everyone, but this has not come for free. The road to freedom is mortared with the blood of freedom fighters, from Joan D'Arc to John Brown to Bobby Seale to Martin Luther King Jr. to Malcolm X to Andrea Dworkin. In order to continue this slow climb, we have to fight. There is no alternative. This article and the voices supporting it here are evidence of the backslide that would occur if ever we stopped.

It's laughable to suggest that patriarchy doesn't harm people. Read the thread I linked and the comments if you think otherwise. Every rape joke/rape denial is one more brick in the wall of PTSD facing one quarter of women. Every dongle joke is one more pane in the glass ceiling protecting the good ol' boys club. You have the luxury, the privilege, of pretending these things don't exist because you are a member of the social class committing these oppressions. With your silence, you become complicit; and you are not even silent.

It's comforting to know that I'm not alone among hackers. There is no intrinsic aspect of hackerdom that demands being creepy or misogynistic. And one day, just as there are few hackers that are KKK members or Nazis, there will be few hackers that are misogynists. Because the ratchet of history only ever turns in one direction, and once this ground is lost to you it will be lost forever.

Wanted to chime in and thank you for your posts in this thread -- good, insightful, correct stuff.

I'm optimistic -- while there's a lot of noise and badness right now, ten years ago people weren't even talking about these problems in the tech community. Imagine where we'll be in another decade.

Where are all the misogynists in said thread? All I see is a bunch of nerds arguing about semantics. Just because some of them don't think that a certain behavior constitutes rape doesn't mean that they actually condone said behavior. I believe that almost everyone in that thread thinks that the man should be put behind bars for a long time.

What I (and probably many other nerds) don't get is why feminists are so adamant in calling all sex related crimes "rape", does it really matter if a person gets X years in prison for sexual abuse instead of X years in prison for rape? And how is it obvious that arguing for one of the sides equals being a misogynist who thinks that women shouldn't have rights to bodily integrity?

>Wanting to not support misogynists/rape apologists/rape denialists/sexual predators

"Rape apologist" is the left wing version of "terrorist sympathizer"

What an amazingly succinct description of political theatrics, I'm going to borrow that phrase.

The article we're discussing, which you consider "a great example of anti-feminist/male-privileged mindset", is written by a woman. Perhaps she's some sort of self-hating misogynistic woman in your eyes, but she is a woman in technology.

One of the biggest frustrations to me, and I do believe this is a new thing, is people with evangelistic universalist worldviews joining these groups and expecting everybody to conform to it. I feel like "nerd culture" was partially defined by being made up of the parts left out of mainstream, inherent heterogeneity, rather than a positive set of things, so arguing you're right and I'm wrong and that's that, is highly alien. There is a lot of talk about how as nerd interests have become mainstream, the disdain many nerds have for this is a sign of their elitism or desire to just be different. But I think also it is because before it was mainstream, you only got viciously judged by the outgroup, so you could at least go "fuck them, they didn't like me anyway" and keep doing your own thing. Now you have people who consider themselves part of that ingroup telling you you're doing it wrong and bringing all their social jostling into the group with them trying to make it act the way they want. I don't think people are exaggerating when they feel like their groups are being "taken over."

My disdain has always been for social rules that never made sense - i.e. in order to be liked, you have to look good, dress in a certain way, talk in a certain way, belong to certain groups. I don't want to be different, it isn't my desire to be seen as a geek, however it pisses me off that people judge books by their covers and in order for me to follow rules, well, those rules have to make sense.

For the project I'm working on, I often go in dressed with jeans and teeshirts or hoodies in rooms filled with black suits and ties. I do not have fashion preferences, all that I desire is for the clothes I wear to be comfortable. And I don't give a fuck about the company's dress code, because in the grand scheme of things, they hired me to produce value and not to look good.

To me your comment, the article and these trends with cool/weird geeks, nerds, hipsters or what have you, do not make sense. It's because if there are two things that define me is (1) that I have an obsession with building software and (2) that I don't really give a fuck about anything else, to the point that it actively hurts my personal life. Am I a cool geek, a weirdo, a nerd? Point is, I don't really care, never did.

> Am I a cool geek, a weirdo, a nerd? Point is, I don't really care, never did.

Thank you. Personally, I find this desire to put everyone into neat categories depressing.

http://xkcd.com/1220/

> I do not have fashion preferences, all that I desire is for the clothes I wear to be comfortable. And I don't give a fuck about the company's dress code, because in the grand scheme of things, they hired me to produce value and not to look good.

I grew up with the same thoughts and just didn't care about dress. Only when studying psychology did I realize why we judge a book by its cover, and have begun trying to incorporate this into my daily life enough to be a better fit in normal society. The problem is that now, since I had to view this from such a technical point of view, as this is something that I don't just 'get' like most people, I am viewed as manipulative by others. Of course, pointing out that they dress to manipulate the opinions of others, just without needing to put as much thought into it because it is something they 'get' doesn't help.

I just don't like the symbolism of wearing a noose around my neck. Suits are OK, choking hazards not so much (and yes, the normal necktie knot can choke you).

I hate to post the "I agree" comment, but this article is too valuable in my opinion to just leave with no comment so here are a couple of quotes that put some of my feelings into words very accurately:

Both groups [geek feminists and brogrammers] are latecomers barging in on a cultural space that was once a respite for us, and we don’t appreciate either group bringing its cultural conflicts into our space in a way that demands we choose one side or the other. That’s a false dichotomy, and false dichotomies make us want to tear our hair out.

I’m not claiming that’s entirely rational, because fear isn’t rational, but it sure does explain the response to being told that our culture is broken and must be adapted to accommodate the very people who rallied it into being by shunning us from theirs.

Trying to convince hacker culture to change its norms by appealing to progressive values alone won’t work. You’re going to have to appeal to hacker values, and nobody’s done that yet.

leading with “there are more of us than there are of you, so you have to change to accommodate us” is, hands down, the best way to ensure that your carefully constructed appeal will fall on deaf ears.

We made these communities to escape the people that tried to force their norms and values on us, who tried to pass judgement on us and ostracise us because of our differences. So it should be obvious why we circle the wagons when someone comes with accusations, demanding access to our group and insinuating that our reluctance to accept them is due to something wrong with us, something bad that we have done. They are acting exactly like the kind of people we're trying to keep out. I'm not saying we're perfect and have no biases of our own, but trying to force your way via moral or social might is not going to work.

Another good passage -

Humans are social animals, and part of what makes a social species social is that its members place a high priority on signaling their commitment to other members of their species. Weirdoes’ priorities are different; our primary commitment is to an idea or a project or a field of inquiry. Species-membership commitment doesn’t just take a back seat, it’s in the trunk with a bag over its head.

Unfortunately, it seems that respecting other subcultures and believing you have the one true just culture are incompatible beliefs.

I don't think most hackers believe they have the one true culture. I think it's more like, this is the culture we chose. Other cultures are great. They aren't for me, but more power to them. Just please don't come and try and change hacker culture just because we're popular now.

I wasn't referring to hackers as believing we have the one true just culture.

"Respecting" a belief or believer is not the same thing as "agreeing" with that belief, even if they do tend to correlate.

Very true! That said, I tend to think that respecting a culture means understanding that it exists and not attempting to invade its spaces.

> When weird nerds watch the cool kids jockeying for social position on Twitter, we see no difference between these status games and the ones we opted out of in high school. [...] “corporate culture” that’s as loudly promoted and roughly as genuine as the “school spirit”

These bits resonated with me more than I had expected. The declaration "life is not like high school" is only partially true. College offers a temporary respite since are significantly more likely to be around people with a distinct interest in building things and learning things, in an environment where the "politics" are somewhat restrained.

... But afterwards, back in the "Real World", some of the same high-school factors return, as you see an increase in the social and financial predators, parasites, and empire-builders.

> We don’t always live up to this value as well as we should[...] In our ideal world, though, your identity and personal history are orthogonal to your commit history.

To use an analogy, this is like the ideals of "rule of law" or "freedom of speech" in various countries. Even when there are chronic violations in practice, it's still hugely important and valuable that the culture still holds it up as a goal. Even among two nations equally authoritarian in practice, the one where the population all knows and recites the social-mores of democracy is much much better-off and more likely to achieve them.

The creation and maintenance of a widely-believed idea (especially one which is sometimes inconvenient to individuals and institutions) represents an enormous and ongoing investment in collective effort and willpower.

The fact that we even have a collective shared-ideal of "we judge you by your work" is an achievement worth celebrating and continuing, even if we individually fail at it, or even fail at it a lot.

It's not just an eloquent defense of hacker culture. It's a pointed assertion that there is such a thing as hacker culture. Both groups the piece concerns itself with don't seem to really be aware that they're invading someone else's cultural safe space.

(I've edited my post for clarity, sorry if my "TLDR" implied I was trying to summarize the whole article rather than just my own rambling.)

I agree with respect to the overall piece, what I meant was that the "code is no respecter of persons" section is mainly reacting to "nerds in their boys-only treehouse"-type accusations.

It's not a defense of the behavior, of course, but a defense of the culture occurs in: "Yes, people do bad things, but it's despite the unifying cultural ideals, not because of them."

Even if a bad actor finds rationalizations or excuses for a common-behavior, on the whole you have the option of making an appeal to the common-ideals.

The fact that we even have a collective shared-ideal of "we judge you by your work" is an achievement worth celebrating and continuing, even if we individually fail at it, or even fail at it a lot.

And that's the problem I've got with a bunch of the attacks I'll commonly see that are based on privilege: the entire idea is that "well, no, that cool hack doesn't count somehow, because you're a member of $MALIGNED_GROUP". We've finally found a group of people that will actually base how awesome we are based on our code, and suddenly these newcomers want to butt in and tell us that isn't a valid idea? It's like these folks never read The Conscience of a Hacker.

You know why Sandi Metz is awesome? It's because she writes awesome code.

You know why Alan Turing was awesome? It's because he wrote awesome code.

You know why James Mickens is awesome? It's because he has amazing satire of hard problems in computer science.

The fact that we don't celebrate those people because of their biological traits or social status, and instead do so because of their accomplishments, is a feature, not a bug.

I think that that's kind of the key issue a lot of these folks are running into, and because they tend to come from very communication-privileged backgrounds (e.g., dedicated social-media mouthpieces, very organized mass-media representation, etc.) hackers tend to fare poorly when they misinterpret why they aren't welcomed. They easily get to portray us as creeps and bigots because they get to choose from patterns of representation that (taken out of context) look very much like bigotry and because they get to pick from people whose social skills and identity are not always attuned or even aware of the prevailing social conventions.

No reasonable hacker, I believe, wants there to be fewer people of $MINORITY in developer positions--at the same time, you'll never get that hacker to suggest we censor the existing culture or forcibly inject more $MINORITY into the space. "They should make their bones, same as we did", the hacker will hold. They'll then be decried as $MINORITY_PERSECUTOR.

It's a problem, but only insofar as we're willing to let them continue framing the discussion. Maybe if we can make them understand that we aren't against diversity, but that we are against cultural manipulation, we can get somewhere.

"we aren't against diversity"..."they should make their bones, same as we did" sounds like it could come from any all white male institution. The problem is, we as humans prefer to surround ourselves with people just like us, sometimes that means same race, sometimes same religion, or gender, or political views, and often it happens subconsciously, choosing the person closer to our ideal without us even realizing we're penalising the "other" in ways that we don't penalise those like us. This is what diversity is (or should be) fighting against, it really is trying to make it merit based which goes against our survival instincts, even those of the "nerds".

> "we aren't against diversity"..."they should make their bones, same as we did" sounds like it could come from any all white male institution.

It could... if you choose to cast it that way. It could also come from any self-selecting group where the selection process is part of the group identity.

Group identity isn't just a matter of waking up one day, declaring yourself a member of $GROUP, and $GROUP being obliged to accept you.

It's less "we aren't against diversity" and more "diversity is orthogonal to what we care about", I think.

I think this is exactly it. Thank you.

I don't disagree, but quite often $GROUP lies to itself about who and how it accepts those into the $GROUP.

And let's be honest, this isn't a problem if the $GROUP is a bunch of people hanging out in their living room or grabbing a beer once a week, but it does become a problem when the $GROUP is making hiring decisions or when $GROUP decides to harass someone online. Then it is those subconscious selectors that define the group and its members more than the how the $GROUP thinks it defines itself.

I think that's an effective commentary on how those outside the group see it defined, rather than one on how the group defines membership.

It's also a commentary on the limits of certain political lenses.

I can't convince you, and it doesn't matter whether you believe me, when I say that it doesn't matter to me about your race or sex or whatever, I am still going to think your cool hack is a cool hack. That's just how it is. I know not everyone does work this way. But I think it's counterproductive to try to tear down and erase this entire value system. In the worst case it's an imperfectly met ideal, but that's no reason to abandon it.

I will absolutely believe you. I will take your word until your actions show me otherwise.

What value system is being destroyed or abandoned? Surely not one where a person is judged by merit and not by what group they do or don't belong to. At least not by me or anyone I've ever heard about.

Now there are people that are trying to destroy the value system that professes to be based on merit but is in reality based on discrimination, privilege and/or internal groupthink by a narrowly defined group. But if you truly believe in merit above everything else, I would think you would welcome the downfall of these false meritocracies.

Just because it's less than the perfect meritocracy we would like does not mean we wish to tear it all down. As most software engineers learn, perfect is the enemy of better.

Might I suggest you re-read the article? This point is addressed.

>This is what [the forces of D]iversity [are] (or should be) fighting against, it really is trying to make it merit based which goes against our survival instincts, even those of the "nerds".

How exactly do you expect a group to react when you push against its survival instincts?

Feminism is accused of this most often, so I'll use it as an example: some have accused the feminist movement of sexism because it simultaneously claims the sanctity of women-only "safe spaces" while simultaneously fighting against the existence of male-only institutions. I don't want to pass a verdict on that so much as point out that that is what the article is talking about:a safe space for nerds.

Well, I would say that first, the threat feminists are often fighting against is the threat of bodily harm and behavior that leads to bodily harm (1 out of 6 women has been the victim of an attempted or completed rape¹). Compare this to the threat that nerds are fighting against today, the threat of having to accept those that they deem unworthy.

Secondly, I'm not arguing nerds shouldn't have a safe space. But that safe space shouldn't be at the expense of diversity in the workplace (hired on merit) or online public spaces (where everyone should be treated with respect regardless of the merit metric). That safe space doesn't preclude nerds from learning basic social skills in order not to harass members of the opposite sex while at work (or really anywhere). Just like nerds shouldn't be harassed at school or work, they shouldn't harass people then hide behind the excuse that they are allowed because they're socially awkward nerds who don't know any better. And I say this as a socially awkward nerd.

¹https://www.rainn.org/get-information/statistics/sexual-assa...

edit: the comment this was a reply to was deleted....

I don't assume you harass people, sexually or otherwise, and never stated that you did. And from my experience, nerds tend to be less "harassy" than the general male population. But just because you want to ignore that sexual harassment is a problem even among the nerd population doesn't mean I will.

> But that safe space shouldn't be at the expense of diversity in the workplace (hired on merit)

What's your opinion on affirmative action?

> or online public spaces (where everyone should be treated with respect regardless of the merit metric).

This is bullshit. I have told one person on this site that I hoped that they died in terrible pain and that it took years because I meant it. Their opinion was vile and I would have said it to their face if they had been in front of me when they said it. Social opprobrium is a tool. There are people whose views I find abhorrent, who I hate and detest, personally. For a feminist perspective on this see the below link.

http://geekfeminism.org/2013/09/05/tone-policing-a-tool-for-...

re: barry-cotter

affirmative action: I believe is a necessary evil as white society has refused to correct the wrongs of the past. After 400+ years of systemic physical and economic oppression you can't just expect to say "we're now going to treat you as equals" and everything is ok. That is not to say improvements haven't been made but when power structures are designed to suck the economic and physical power from one group of people still today (i.e. Ferguson, MO), then drastic measures are necessary. I'd prefer a merit based system, but a true merit based system should provide equally safe and secure environments for all citizens to thrive.

> or online public spaces (where everyone should be treated with respect regardless of the merit metric). This is bullshit.

Yeah, I agree. It is more wishful than true. I would say everyone should be treated with respect up and until, but then it is always a question of who is measuring. But it doesn't take much for some real vile shit to bubble up unfortunately. Sometimes it's just the edge cases (usually blamed on a small minority of the group), but often it comes from the middle as well or is representative of the groups mindspace.

(If all that makes sense. It's 5am and I'm still up working so I may just be rambling).

a true merit based system should provide equally safe and secure environments for all citizens to thrive

Incorrect. The best and worst part of a meritocracy is that, if you don't have merit you don't belong.

There is no obligation to "all citizens". Now, the corollary to this is that, if a citizen proves their merit, they must be rewarded for it, because that's the social contract in play.

But, there is no reason that the system has to reward unproven individuals just because of some diversity quota...in fact, that's a really good way of destroying the ecosystem (same point made in article) because it undermines the very philosophy the group is predicated upon.

Yes, true if speaking of a pure meritocracy. I was more imagining something close to our current society but merit based (one where people aren't just discarded for lack of certain merits).

I don't disagree that a system has to reward unproven individuals. My point in most of these comments is that we, no matter how much we say we are choosing based solely on merit or production, most often are not. We are a bundle of overt and hidden biases.

>Well, I would say that first, the threat feminists are often fighting against is the threat of bodily harm and behavior that leads to bodily harm

Good ol manspreading, such a threat, very scary.

As to the rape statistics, those numbers are highly inflated and less inflated numbers show that men are almost as likely (if not equally) to face sexual violence (but far less likely to report it and far more likely to have it dismissed) and that men are more likely to face physical violence.

>the threat of having to accept those that they deem unworthy

This is a deceitful caricature of the threat being faced by nerds.

>preclude nerds from learning basic social skills in order not to harass members of the opposite sex

And here the blame is placed on nerds who have tried to isolate themselves because of a large inability to learn such social skills. Some can't learn, others can learn but it is exhausting to imitate the skills for an 8+ hours. Some may even get the basics, but every once in a while they still commit some social transgression they don't understand. So they made safe spaces... which happened to become profitable because some of what they did in those spaces had great business potential. And now they being invaded by profit-chasers and blamed for the social weirdness that they already did the best they could to get remove from others having to experience.

>As to the rape statistics, those numbers are highly inflated and less inflated numbers show that men are almost as likely (if not equally) to face sexual violence (but far less likely to report it and far more likely to have it dismissed) and that men are more likely to face physical violence.

Mind showing evidence that these numbers are highly inflated?

>And now they being invaded by profit-chasers and blamed for the social weirdness that they already did the best they could to get remove from others having to experience.

Yeah, talking about really scary threats here, that is much worse than the threat of rape. This implication that anyone who now enjoys what was only once enjoyed by "nerds" are profit-chasers is a much bigger caricature than self selecting nerds.

If you're under 30 you've spent most of your life in a world surrounded by the internet, computers, and tech. Of course people are going to be attracted to these jobs that used to be the domain of nerds, and some are carpetbaggers, but others, even if they seem too "fashionable" or "social" are just doing what nerds have been doing (and what everyone has been doing) forever, they are following their own interests. It just so happens those interests are now the same as yours.

>Mind showing evidence that these numbers are highly inflated?

For starters, look at recent CDC studies in the last 5 years. Pay extra attention to how most cases of a woman forcing a man to have sex are not classified as rape (which means the summaries about rape are way off). There are other resources that I don't currently have on hand about how they are over inflated, but one recent story was about how over inflated they are on college campuses. Another, especially for attempted rape, is to look into the use of date rape drugs and how rare they actually are used compared to how often women think they have been used.

I will look into the CDC studies and their possible shortcomings.

While you are at it, why not also treat yourself to a look into the:

- 92% of split families where the mother (not the father) receives custody

- 63% longer prison sentences that men are given for committing the same crimes as women

- 76% percent of homeless who are male

- the disparity between workplace injury/death between the genders

- the vastly less federal medical funding that goes into men's health issues vs. women's health issues

- how the gender wage gap is eliminated when factoring in personal preference and number of hours worked

- who dies during war

- the requirements for men to vote vs. women (hint: what MUST men do when they turn 18?)

Or don't look into any of this - you'll get more Patreon bux if you stick with the "Man = Oppressor : Women = Perpetual Victim" narrative!

Sounds damning. But some of that is because women are not allowed in the places men are. So the cart before the horse.

Also, I understood that most medical studies are about men, not women. Not understanding that item about medical funding.

More on medical research disparity:

http://www.martynemko.com/articles/should-we-pay-more-attent...

Women are allowed everywhere men are, they have been since 1968:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_Protection_Clause

Don't be silly. Laws aren't what allows or denies women to the highest boards of big companies. Principally because men prevent it.

No, and this distinction is essential: You're welcomed based on what you can do and not on what you are. "white male" is un-meritocratic, is something you "are", and not something you can "make" by talent and effort. "code" is cold, hard, unforgiving ("you can't argue with a root shell"), and meritocratic. She's saying: Nevermind who you "ARE", you're welcomed if you can "PRODUCE" (great code). That's exactly the antithesis of what you're implying with "white male" or "black female" or "$X $Y". The mere fact of using "$X $Y" or $MINORITY should give you a hint of how much this concepts are considered. If something fits in a variable, is waaay less important than the algorithm, it is just content, a parameter, "Lorem ipsum" if you like it.

Meritocracy is a bullshit term. It does not exist in reality. It’s an illusion, a joke.

True, but I've noticed programming like some of the other STEM fields are a lot harder to fake skills than some other fields.

I'm not saying its impossible to fake development skills, just saying its harder than some other fields. I think primarily due to the fact computers are not forgiving, but require pure logic.

It's actually an ideal. Ideals also don't exist in reality. The difference is that ideals are generally held to be worth striving for in spite of that.

Actually it’s used as a bludgeon to kill all debate, not something to strive towards. The point that’s always made is that something already is this magical and perfect meritocracy with the selection process already working perfectly. The term meritocracy is thrown into the faces of those that question the selection process as a defense of the selection process. Perfectness is just assumed, not something to be strived for. Your statement makes just no sense at all when considering the context in which meritocracy is typically used when defending exclusionary selection processes. It’s downright absurd.

And that’s even ignoring all the grave moral quandaries you get into when you base who can participate on merit – if that is even possible and if you can even coherently define what the hell merit means. Merit is hard to nail down and as such can be easily used as a convenient tool for exclusion.

In light of the long and heated debates about how to best conduct job interviews (nobody knows, really!), often seen right here on HN, this all is especially absurd. It seems that put into a slightly different context (of a job interview) everyone knows that selection processes are frail, complex, complicated things, hard to get right – and even at its best you will make mistakes. Selection processes are fucking hard to get right. Doesn’t everyone know that? How, in that context, can you then turn around and claim that there is no issue because meritocracy. It sounds like a bad joke. A horrible joke, one that kills all debate about selection processes and how we can improve them (or even where selection is necessary and where not and based on what and how and how we should deal with the frailty and difficulty of evaluating human fucking beings.)

So, bad example of interviews: the reason we know they are broken is because the code doesn't work.

Look, the entire hacker thing comes down to: does the code work? If it does, you're fine. If it doesn't, you're not. The computer sure as day doesn't care about the particulars of the person who generated the source code for the hack, so why should we?

Everything else is FUD, spread by people that are fools, well-meaning but not understanding, or both.

Don't try to bring in the baggage of other failed "meritocracies" into this, because we can actually, objectively, test whether or not the code works.

No, if it does work people will tell you that your code just sucks and is really awful and bad and you are terrible and suck at this …

Your perspective here is absurdly reductionist and doesn’t reflect any reality anyone lives in. It’s not that simple, it just is not.

These are the people arguing about fucking spaces vs tabs and you are going to try to honestly tell me that all that matters is whether the code works. Are you serious?! Like, actually, really serious?

I think that those people will acknowledge that the formatting of the code is secondary to its working--once it works, the whitespace is just a matter of making it more presentable.

If you had working code--and it was elegant, and easy to maintain, and fixed a real problem--I find it unlikely that you were put down by people that really grok being a hacker. I'm sorry for your experience there.

And before you point out that that definition allows me to neatly exclude the people that make hackers look bad--well, that's kinda the point. Similarly, I try not to judge all MRAs by the ones that make death threats, nor feminists by those that are rabidly opposed to transwomen.

Elegant, easy to maintain, fixes a real problem …

Wow. I mean, it’s right there. Right there! Suddenly it’s no longer black and white.

Actually the corollary to my point is that there can never be a true meritocracy anywhere on the planet. It's impossible for exactly the reasons you've outlined. It doesn't mean it's not worth striving, but I do agree that anyone who tells you that they've done it has simply quit trying and is rationalizing that fact.

People fuck up all the time. I would never claim that there's no issue because we already have a meritocracy. We don't. We will never have one. Like a lot of ideals it's something worth looking at by comparison, to decide how closely we want to model our actions on it.

Diversity is a bullshit term. It does not exist in reality. It's an illusion, a joke.

Equality is a bullshit term. It does not exist in reality. It's an illusion, a joke.

See what I did there? You've got to explain why you think it's a bullshit term--because as an ideal, it's a damned sight more useful than whatever else people are pushing.

- Because the criteria of "merit" usually "just happen" to be a description of the people who get to define them and evaluate others.

- Because measuring only at the finishing line while ignoring how far people have had to come is in fact unequal, not equal treatment.

- Because the concept victim-blames those who aren’t allowed/enabled/supported to succeed according to it.

- Because it's a really astounding statistical anomaly that all those "meritocratic" communities "who don't care about gender etc." are in practice ridiculously less diverse than the population in general.

Thought exercise: reconcile concept of victim blaming with objective criteria-based meritocracy.

I understand what was being said. But in my experience many groups say this but in fact don't even come close to actually achieving it. Groups of white males have said this for a long time, "we are merit based, gender or ethnicity aren't considered during selection", but it just wasn't true. Much of the time it is a conscious decision to avoid the qualified diverse candidate, other times it isn't. Just because she or you say you are only choosing based on production doesn't make it so. She, you, or whomever is making the decision must look really hard at their own biases, if you can even see them (they may be obvious to anyone around you but hidden to your self).

> I understand what was being said. But in my experience many groups say this but in fact don't even come close to actually achieving it. Groups of white males have said this for a long time,

...right in front of our very noses at this moment is something very interesting:

me atleast I don't have a clue what gender most nicks here on HN belong to. And I don't care. The same way I don't care about the gender of our UX designer only that she did awesome work.

- well, maybe I actually loved the fact that we had a coding eclipse-wielding mother-of-three on our team.

And before "you" [1] come telling me that this just shows how I'm biased because I'm impressed by a mom coding, -No! I don't think they cannot, but every statistic tells us they don't usually code.

[1]: yeah I saw you coming, you are kind of predictable

That's great. If there were more people like you in positions of power we probably wouldn't be having this conversation.

I'm not implying that anyone of these particular commenters are sexist or bigots, or aren't making decisions solely based on merit. I'm saying that we as a group, be that either widely defined as humans in general or narrowly defined as a certain group of nerds, tend to not notice our biases when we make decisions. We may believe that we are making a choice based on the absolute best merit based criteria, but often we don't realize our choice was highly tinted by learned bias.

I myself try to disregard my learned biases, but often don't realize I failed until after the fact. We need more people who don't care about gender, race, social status, etc when making hiring decisions. Studies have shown that when identifying markers are removed from resumes and job applications, the considered pool of applicants become more diverse. A good start is people who are at least aware of their own biases.

Too often we use statistics to enforce our bias. "Well, moms statistically don't code, so we won't take seriously this mother who does".

Totally agree.

> I myself try to disregard my learned biases, but often don't realize I failed until after the fact.

Part of being human and why we should be very careful to judge. I'm in the same place.

Asians got in rather easily though so the effect of workplace biases can't be that hard to overcome. Why did they get accepted? Because they are awesome at tech! If women suddenly became as awesome at tech as Asians then they would get accepted as a group in a heartbeat.

I'm surprised there is so little controversy in this thread of HN. After all, most comments here confirm that we're a group and we like us as-is, or with very minimal changes, which is already a reluctance to diversity. On the one hand maybe the title didn't appeal for a pageview by the controversial types of feminigeeks [vocabulary from this article], and the other hand this is the kind of place where our culture gets shaped.

Edit: I can't resist positing this quote. It makes me feel understood. It would make me feel safer if it were acknowledged by the other party during debates: "The voices clamouring for change offer us no money, a social role reversal back to “disempowered outsider,” and a status demotion to “likely sexual predator.”"

Edit 2: If anyone here has data, it seems like a lot of communication about feminism in IT started circa 2013 (e.g. the controversy on Paul Graham [1], which probably provoked the Female Founders Conference in 2015). It would be nice if someone made a blogpost about that and explained what that year changed in the geek culture.

[1] http://www.thewire.com/technology/2013/12/paul-graham-revive...

I was equally surprised. The controversy is overwhelming and I loved her point about being against either brogrammers or feminigeeks does not make you the other. I feel like any conversation where everyone doesn't completely agree turns into accusations of privilege or sexism.

It's been going on for a lot longer than 2013. I was listening to a friend of mine complain about not being taken seriously and attracting a trail of irritating admirers when we were both undergraduates 15 years ago.

It's not controversial because it's largely confirms the view of nerds that "outsiders" agree with.

Like a lot of these essays it long winding, full of generalizations and in-group cultural references which makes it hard work to disassemble and disagree with. And most of those that disagree passionately enough with this to do it wouldn't be regulars at HN.

One of the few concrete things in this article is how "we won the cryptowars". Which isn't very convincing these days.

>> You know why Alan Turing was awesome? It's because he wrote awesome code.

Alan Turing is awesome, now. But he wasn't universally thought highly of at the time, was forcefully subjected to medical treatment for his 'condition', and was harassed and basically blacklisted in his professional and personal lives.

Yes, he was harassed and blacklisted by the insiders, the mainstream. Not by the hacker culture, which didn't really exist back then anyway.

We disagree on verb tenses of to be. :)

Anyways, all that other stuff doesn't matter, because he did great things.

The reason it's so important to us that we base our respect on his work and not his suffering is that, frankly, you can't argue with his work. Time may pass, and it may be fashionable/scientifically proven/theologically required to hate gays again and so we'll lose sight of his other issues--but the man's contributions will survive on their own merit. That is far better.

> the attacks I'll commonly see that are based on privilege

I'm going to make a small U-turn here (or if you prefer, be a devils-advocate) in favor of the privilege-focused-view, because when I owe allegiance to "good code", by extension I have to support good arguments that are "rhetorical code".

The version without obvious bugs goes something like this: "Yes, those people created awesome works, but they also had better access to resources, development tools, and teams of similar people."

Have you written awesome code? More specifically, are you known for having written awesome code?

If not, are you a part of hacker culture? If you are, why are you an "us" and not a "they"?

That resonated with me for completely different reasons. Most of the "extremely weird nerds" from my high school were people with pretty serious functional problems who never did make it anywhere. They are pretty much the forgotten ones.

The successful "nerds" were always at least introspective or 'ironic' and could function somewhat normally in social situations including attempting to play whatever status games that entails. Most of the programmers I've worked with are at best superficially-nerdy relative to how far some people can go.

A lot of this analysis suffers from pretty severe high-school politics category error. That guy from high school who had nothing going except being "good with computers" is probably not at all the same person who is 'brogramming' for a startup, for example. But no matter how much it is reframed, the social stigma of the lost ones is unescapable.

Then there's those of us who can do that for a limited amount of time before it overloads them - it's something that requires a lot of brain effort, and doesn't come natural.

Then again, I do stuff like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RnRSu9LjV7E

> Then there's those of us who can do that for a limited amount of time before it overloads them

Yep, AKA introverts with social skills. (Shyness is another possible axis.)

Personally, I feel the problems with buying into the big monkey hierarchy aren't that you can't be diplomatic or can't read social cues. The problems are that it is (A) a drain on your mental energy compared to being an extrovert and (B) feels like an endorsement of a system you'd rather not endorse.

Sure, and I understand that feeling very well :).

However, I'm referring more to the "nerds" who are not good at math (or standardized tests or study skills or etcetera). People tend to inaccurately conflate certain personality types with STEM smarties, which is really not fair to either group.

> Even among two nations equally authoritarian in practice, the one where the population all knows and recites the social-mores of democracy is much much better-off and more likely to achieve them.

This is off-topic, but I disagree strongly. Some of the very worst authoritarian countries (N. Korea, Iraq under Hussain, a depressingly large number of African countries) all share a total devotion to "democracy" and "elections". With the notable exception of dissidents, most citizens of these countries fervently tribute to these ideals, at least in public. I've been to a country like this, in Africa, and this isn't just an act. People actually believe in this democracy.

That said, I do support the shared ideal among hacker culture of "judgment by your work". However, I do strongly oppose the abrasive means by which people are told that their work isn't up to par in this same culture. It's cruel and unnecessary.

It is possible to both judge people by their abilities, and at the same time refrain from being abrasive or cruel toward people who fall short.

I think the author actually meant the social-mores of classical liberalism (freedom of speech, etc), which protect, imperfectly, from both regal tyranny and the tyranny of the majority.

I don't think we need to go off on the tangent of fake vs. real democracy here.

It is widely and correctly agreed that the "best" democracies have a combination of characteristics, including elections (so you can throw the bums out), personal liberties of the social kind, economic liberties, rule of law, etc. But it is fiercely debated -- to an extent irrelevant to this thread -- exactly which characteristics are most important, what constitutes having such a characteristic to excess, etc.

I was shocked, visibly, when I found out that no one at the first startup I worked at played tabletop RPGs. I was shocked again when they looked down on me because I did. In a city that prides itself on "weirdos", I was the wrong kind of weird.

In college I poured over Steven Levy's Hackers, hoping one day I would be able to meet the tech elite. I jumped at the first chance I got to work out here, hoping I'd finally find "my people" (substitute whatever pithy phrase you like). Hasn't worked out so far.

I'm in SF now and have been for a while. Where are you guys? All the meetups I've been to were fun (hard to turn down free pizza) but it seemed like everyone was more interested in collecting business cards than talking hacker-speak. Maybe I'm going to the wrong ones?

Yeah, that's SF. It's 80% posers, especially at meetups. The minority that are doing interesting things are, of course, not so easy to find. Work hard on your passions and eventually you'll meet likeminded people. (that's true no matter where you're located)

Just be glad you're there now, and not being forced by management to go to glitzy web parties in 1999. Those were insufferable.

SF has been 80% posers for decades. That's why the art and music scenes in SF are so bad. In NYC, they tell you if you suck. In LA, if you suck they don't call you back. In SF, there's no judgment or criticism, and you can suck forever.

Nobody cares about the art scene in SF vs NYC and LA. Take that discussion elsewhere.

That's not even art. HN appreciates art.

> I'm in SF now and have been for a while. Where are you guys?

At home, on Hacker News, rather than the bar and wishing for a gaming troupe? I don't do meetups. I am laying travel plans for DEFCON, though...

Meetups are not community events, they are recruiter events, full stop. Sorry :/

Same here. I moved to the bay area when SF was starting to put on suits and ties, I guess. For what it's worth the north bay is nice. Go to Sausalito, look at the houseboat marina. Some of the people there are fascinating.

Like everywhere else, though, two thirds of the people here made money and moved somewhere interesting and made it less interesting.

I'm in San Rafael fwiw. Nice quiet neighborhood, peek into people's back yards and you'll see a lot of arts and crafts.

Do something like a board game meetup, comics store events, play MTG at channel fireball, try to make friends at burning man. Or art things in oakland. There is also the SF Bay Area Reddit group too. Weird nerds don't necessarily code.

Yes, you are going to the wrong ones.

It would be super helpful if this comment was followed by a list of some good ones...

Sorry to hear that this has been the case. I've definitely experienced this as well. One of the things I've learned is that the best people in startups are the best at playing the game, not necessarily the smartest or most talented.

If you ever plan on putting together a board game meetup or something along those lines, shoot me an email. Would love to try and make it. Been wanting to try DnD recently as well. My email's zach@hackedu.us.

If you want to meet people "talking hacker-speak" in the Bay Area, then I would suggest that you go to events that would only attract that sort of person. In general this will mean shying away from events about technological pop-culture and instead focusing on the events that cover very specific and "boring" topics.

In your particular case, I would suggest going to events that focus on building things ("project nights", etc), events that cover a specific "unpopular" languages (Haskell, Clojure, Erlang), or events that feature talks from people who aren't "popular" but should be (Fabrice Bellard, Jan Hubicka, etc).

We need a meetup group dedicated to strategies for writing parsers. There is nothing 'hip' about that so it should flush out the standard meetup cruft (e.g. "my name is X, i'm a non-technical person looking for a technical cofounder").

I would come. I'm in the middle of a project involving a lot of parsing. Heck, I'd even speak.

This sounds amazing. How do I learn more?

Have you tried going to one of the many meetups for people interested in games, instead of going to meetups for people interested in startups?

http://www.meetup.com/find/?allMeetups=false&keywords=games&...

Beyond that, I don't know what to tell you, because I know plenty of people who play games in SF. They're all over -- seemingly every tech company out here has a game night. And I'm not someone who likes to play, so I have no particular reason to seek them out.

Make sure you're not falling into the comfortable, easy trap of Reverse Nerd Discrimination: these people don't fit comfortably within my own self-image as an outsider, so they must not be like me. There are a lot of True Nerds here who have outgrown the stereotypical image of what a nerd is supposed to look like.

Hint: startups are the new Dungeons & Dragons.

Hey I'm the co-founder and CTO of a VC'd D&D startup (YC 2016) would you like to come to our meetup???

If you cannot find the right meetup or hacker space, why not create your own? If I were in SF I'd probably visit Noisebridge. That would be nerdy enough for me, I guess :-)

Visit a local hackerspace; there's much better chance of finding actual hackers there.

People were shocked , visibly, at my current job when I told them I didn't really do a lot of programming in my spare time. I made sure to not mention it anymore to someone I don't know / trust very well there, they looked like I had breached some kind of unwritten rule or requirement to work for that company - an unvoiced "You have no passion for your job and you do not belong here", of sorts.

That wouldn't be something they could fire me over though, what I do in my spare time is my business, and we have laws that protect that kinda thing.

>"At a company the size of Google or even GitHub, you can expect to find as many varieties of cliques…"

>"Some hackers even argue for greater exclusivity, and curiously enough, many of those who do are also members of minority-by-birth groups. (I’d link to examples, but being caught between a minority-by-choice group and a minority-by-birth group means being extra careful about expressing unpopular opinions where anyone unsympathetic can hear you.)"

This reminded me recently when I was contacted by a Facebook engineering manager for some "Black Engineers in Tech" BS for some less than marginally interesting projects in the scheme of things. Do companies really have to resort to this type of pandering to attract "talent"?

I mean, after from C&D'ing a "hacker-esque" project I was working on (mining public urls on "open" graph and crowd-sourcing info about everyone, no log-in for engagement, public by default [opposite of facebook walled garden "connect the world" mantra]), suspending my account indefinitely, yet digging through their treasure trove of info to boost "Diversity" apparently so I can have the opportunity to become apart of the "Black" clique at FB NYC?

Yeah… fuck that.

But the proof can't be made. If you’re conditioned to feel like an outsider, you’re going to believe the rejection is always lurking around the corner, and the acceptance is never real, never complete. You’ll remain in sullen sureness that outside is where you’ve been placed — or you’ll keep testing, poking and prodding for the thing you could do that’s horrible enough to prove that you were never really welcome.

The word the author is looking for to distinguish "weird nerds" from "nerds" should never have been "weird" - the word is "wounded." And the wound is real, crippling, and unjustly dealt. Time doesn't heal all wounds. We shouldn't be looking to prove something that can't be proven; we should be looking to heal the wound, actually heal it, in all the generations of children to come. Or even, heavens forfend, stop it from being inflicted at all.

Definitely the case over here.

And, I should be clear, for me as well. I happen not to have bad reactions to expressions of feminism - if I knew how I avoided that, believe me, I'd tell the world - but I carry those wounds from my childhood and they fuck up my life every day.

It's not always about just being wounded. Many became "weird nerds" because they don't like the tons of bullshit, politics and signalling games mainstream society lives and breathes. You can't "fix" them without destroying who they really are.

I say them, but I myself am a part of this group.

If, by your own admission, you just don't like something, you can't claim that "who [you] really are" is being "destroyed" if you're taught how to avoid injury in dealing with it. Your pet peeves are not a part of you.

It's not really a pet peeve, it's a difference in thinking and perceiving the world.

The point is, how do you know the difference between something that's "who you really are" and something that you simply feel discomfort around being asked to change?

A good question.

I can't talk for all "weirdos", but let me tell you about my personal fears.

I fear that I will have to give up my intellectual honesty. I fear that I will have to start caring about politics (which I consider waste of time and something that shows the worst parts of our nature). I fear that I will have to start playing signalling games. I fear that I will have to censor my words and my thoughts, so that I don't express an opinion that is unpopular this week (winds on the Internet change fast). I fear that I will have to accept and participate in absurdity and irrationality I try so hard to stay away from.

I'm a very open, tolerant and accepting person. Just like every other "weird nerd" I know. But the crowd that tries to overwhelm us is not open, not tolerant, despite waving the banner of "diversity" and "equality". I fear I won't be allowed to be a nice, honest, decent person with interest in technology anymore.

What I hear you saying is you personally identify with what you perceive as intellectual honesty, what you perceive as rationality, and the freedom to say whatever you want without worrying whether listeners will like it.

The trouble with such identifications, though, is they can lead to logical errors that make your life a lot worse, by causing you to feel as though a question about your intellectual honesty, rationality, or empathy is in fact a personal attack. This happens entirely unconsciously, and repairing it can seriously suck.

I could go into the ways in which I eventually learned that challenges to my own intellectual honesty and rationality ended up strengthening them both once I stopped reacting to those challenges emotionally and started choosing to believe in the good will of the people making them. But that might just be tedious; instead I will say that in my own life, waving the banner for diversity and equality has come along with being happier, feeling more decent, and being more energetically invested in technology than I was before.

> The trouble with such identifications, though, is they can lead to logical errors that make your life a lot worse, by causing you to feel as though a question about your intellectual honesty, rationality, or empathy is in fact a personal attack. This happens entirely unconsciously, and repairing it can seriously suck.

I agree. Thanks for a reminder.

> But that might just be tedious; instead I will say that in my own life, waving the banner for diversity and equality has come along with being happier, feeling more decent, and being more energetically invested in technology than I was before.

I agree. I like diversity and equality. But diversity means allowing different groups to coexist, and to tolerate people with different opinions and outlooks on life. I don't see "weirdos" trying to impose their own worldview on everyone - on the contrary, it's them who are being forced to conform to the rest. That is not diversity.

What is the specific thing you feel you're being forced to do?

This article is delightfully thoughtful. Her other post is also worth reading: https://medium.com/@maradydd/okay-feminism-its-time-we-had-a...

It makes me wonder though how much nerd culture is driven by forms of autism. Those wishing to end oppression women should be careful that they are not instead perpetuating the oppression of autistic people.

Those wishing to end oppression women should be careful that they are not instead perpetuating the oppression of autistic people.

A valid concern, but I think it's worth being careful not to lump all well-intentioned dissent onto the spectrum. I'd hate it if autism became a go to label for dismissal of social analysis that doesn't fit into someone's preconceived notions and narratives.

I have seen it a bit, and it's usually when people are locked into their ideological turf wars and get confronted with ideas that don't easily fit within that existing framework. It's ugly and presumes that non-complacence to norms that would prevent the idea from occurring is a sign of a neurological disorder and an excuse to dismiss the idea without giving it any thought.

I agree, her other post is also excellent.

I wonder if we could ever create a culture that doesn't oppress anyone (with the obvious exception of murderers, rapists, cannibals, etc). I hope so. But in light of our vast differences and the ease with which we hurt one another, I suspect we'll have to settle for a culture that doesn't oppress anyone too much.

Please, please, please do not help every nerd who experiences discomfort at being called out on sexism to believe they have some undiagnosed shadow syndrome and are being oppressed because of it. Please don't do that. If only because it would be profoundly disrespectful to people with real diagnoses.

There's a thoughtful treatment of this issue on the Geek Feminism wiki: http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Autism_is_to_blame

I am loathe to post an "I agree" comment here... but damn. This is a very well-said article and one I have tried to express many times but have failed over and over.

The "invaders" who claim to be socially liberal are actually authoritarian in nature, completely hypocritical by pushing so-called "tolerance" on those who received none by society's "normal."

Just a powerful essay.

The "invaders" who claim to be socially liberal are actually authoritarian in nature...

That's been true from the days of the Third International[1] to the Mozilla Foundation.[2]

[1] https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1919/apr/15.htm [2] https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2015/02/10/extension-signing...

Once upon a time, in a very small part of the developed world, there were a set of activities which provided identity and sense of belonging for introverted people who didn't otherwise fit with mainstream society. That ended up being called "nerd culture".

That "culture" is now prevalent in fields (like computing) that have moved from the fringe to the mainstream in the past decades. Many seem to find it worth preserving, even if that means perpetuating an abrasive and hostile environment.

I've always thought that I had ticked all the checkboxes to be considered a nerd and a hacker. Yet I don't recognise myself at all in the picture that the article paints, and I would not want to live and work in the environment that many here are advocating for.

The author outlines a description of a "hacker" that, to be honest, sounds more like "mildly autistic" to me:

"That guy in the group who stares at you without saying anything? He could be undressing you with his eyes, but I’d lay better odds that he’s paying attention, watching your actions and reactions to build a mental model of how it’s safe to interact with you."

The proportion of introverts (like myself) in the computing field is higher than in society as a whole. Some patience and understanding is therefore needed. But this does not justify treating people poorly because "those are our values and you are a foreigner". I fear that her arguments, well-intentioned as they may be, will do more harm than good.

I’m thrilled to bits that every day the power to translate pure thought into actions that ripple across the world merely by the virtue of being phrased correctly draws nearer and nearer to the hands of every person alive.

Whatever else this article brings, that was just beautiful. I'm shamelessly borrowing that for daily use.

I know, right? You could launch that armada of prepositional phrases into just about any conversation.

This is the sentiment that gets me out of bed and into work every day.

>Programming is an inherently constructivist discipline. A constructivist is like the archetypal Missourian: “Show me!”

Many "hackers" are unable to apply this principle to the field of business. They don't understand business, they aren't good at it, and therefore they see it as nothing more than empty headed self-promoters jockeying for social status, just like those "cool kids" who picked on them in high school. They do not understand that the prime directive of a business is to make money, and that doing so is always more important than quality engineering. Given that most hackers work for businesses, I think this is a large blind spot that leads to a lot of bitterness and feelings of exclusion.

The prime directive of a business is to serve the interests of its owners. That usually requires making money at some level, but making money itself may not be the prime directive. It's true that if a company is publicly traded, widely held, or principally owned by investors who choose it based on potential financial returns, the shared interests of its owners are likely to be limited to making money, but that isn't true of all businesses.

> The prime directive of a business is to serve the interests of its owners. That usually requires making money at some level, but making money itself may not be the prime directive.

And this is certainly true of some businesses. A few businesses. And they're fantastic to work for. But they're very rare in my (admittedly) limited experience.

If it seem the coding practices are inappropriately heaping on technical debt then there are two disagreements:

1. It looks like it will loose money in the long term and is therefore a poor decision even from a money stand point. This would create an impression empty-headed-ness.

2. Creating technical debt looks like at way to make a company appear superficially more valuable than it is by delivering a nonviable product whose real cost won't be realized until later (when the technical debt has to be paid). If this corresponds with funding raising, it creates an impression of dishonesty.

Likely as not these are miss-impressions. But they are deeper problems than "I didn't know companies were supposed to make money".

I get the business value of making money. What I have through with is that I have a big disagreement with business people how much technical debt costs in the long term. Also, I don't 'get' making money being such a big desire in and of itself. As they say, greed squared is evil.

It isn't such a blind spot. They may understand the "prime directive" pretty well and see how bullshit it is. It's a system of redistribution of scarce resources that most people got confused about and now play it as a game of its own. It's not the profit that should matter, but the value that is produced, the improvement of human condition.

Let's face it, 90% of companies in this industry produce nothing but meaningless bullshit. If you work at one of the few companies that is making the world a better place and not just selling ads, social media, games, or other diversions for rich people then my advice may not apply to you. I don't work for one of those companies, and I prefer to dispense with the notion that anything I'm doing is for the improvement of the human condition. It's about money, period, full stop.

> If you work at one of the few companies that is making the world a better place and not just selling ads, social media, games, or other diversions for rich people then my advice may not apply to you.

Unfortunately, I don't (and it depresses me). But then again, I treat my work as a neccessary evil, and I (try to) care about the product's face value, not underlying notion of it making money. That's for sales people to do; the best I can do is to make sure that what we build has at least some value to the end-user. It's about the attitude - when tasked to design a widget, do you primarily care about building a good widget, or performing a ritual of work that will bring the cash in?

That's a good point. Being a craftsman means caring about the quality of your work.

I don't think they're unable to - after all, high-volume trading algorithms were made by some of the brightest minds around. What I think is that at least for hacker culture, ethics plays a large part.

Linus didn't make Linux because he wanted to make money (he could've been as rich as Bill Gates by now if he played it right - his OS certainly grew much larger than Gates').

Phil Zimmerman didn't make PGP to make money, or maintain it for the past 25 years for that, he did it purely out of idealistic standpoints - and it required a mention in an interview and an internet donation drive for him to finally get some recognition for his work.

Snowden didn't release secrets to the public because he wanted to make money - he could've made a pretty penny selling them to Russia or the media or whoever, he didn't not release them because of loyalty to their country, ge released them because he thought it was the right thing to do, that mass surveillance was inherently wrong.

"The idea of anathematising all of a person’s good works because of something else they said or did is just as alien and repellent to us as our reaction is to someone who wishes Hacker News would die because Paul Graham is kind of a dick sometimes."

Ha, love this bit, bit wordy though. If you squint while you read, it sort of reads like a pg essay.

Where physically will weirdos live? The bay area was certainly a haven of which only a subset were technologist. And from that culture and thinking came many of the technical miracles of our age, many ideologically driven.

My concern is really painfully mundane: uncontrolled cost of living increase means there could never be a mass migration of free thinkers to the bay area today.

So individual programmers being gradually displaced in a technologist's social setting today is just a sliver of that larger displacement with its very basic cause.

I found the part of the article where it talks about the what if situation about Japan getting rid of work visa to be really interesting. Honestly it shocked me, and has changed the way I think.

Also I never thought of it this way, but feminism/brogrammers are super similar in the way they try to colonize nerd culture.

A lot of unskilled people are trying to get a career in tech for its perks. They are not good at it or as good as they should be for the industry standard. When they get called on it, they hide behind something like feminism.

Essentially it's all about grabbing power in our community via subversion rather than skill. And This is a problem because computer programming is intensely logical problem. It requires a lot of skill.

I'm glad I read this article, I feel like I understand people like Linus Torvald a little bit more.

Before all those late-night commercials in the late '90's ("Make $70K a year!!!") only people that were interested in computers chose a career in them. We make, on average, twice the national average (for U.S.) salary of our peers: people that want the bucks will move in, whether they enjoy bits and bytes or not.

TBF, software development itself is only a relatively small part of the whole tech industry - marketing, communications, recruitment, even food supply and whatnot are all part of it. Just because there's more people that want to work for one of the cool companies, doesn't mean they're actually infringing on the domain of the weird nerd hacker/programmer.

I didn't go to public school, is it really as 80's-teen-movie-tropes as pieces like this make it sound? It's just really hard for me to take seriously.

To an outside observer, no. The tropes are exaggerations. But to someone in public school at the time, it can certainly feel that way.

I can really only speak for the guys, but certainly at my school it was very much like that. Broadly speaking, sports, smokes, geeks, money. They each had their own click and hung around well defined areas during lunch and recess for obvious reasons.

Not everyone has had the same negative social experiences. I was very lucky to go to a school where being an outsider with nerdy interests was respected so long as you did it with passion, aspired to excellence, and were not afraid to show others what you found cool; and we were expected to have the same respect for the sportsmen, musicians, artists etc. In a sense we were all doing the same thing through different outlets. It's a culture I'm very proud to have been a part of and it produced some great people in many different fields. In contrast, in my programming niche, I frequently feel uncomfortable with the level of aggression and exclusion on display - every comment on a forum seems like you are exposing yourself to ridicule and judgement. Conversely, in pure maths forums, which I also participate in, the atmosphere is far more welcoming, open, patient and respectful of good work. I think the problem is that in computing it is far easier to be a dilettante and much harder to tell the difference. Yes, all communities will have their dicks, but responding with aggression and elitism pollutes the community for everyone and encourages hostile and collective responses from others: be sure that the dicks are a lot better at playing hardball and ganging up together than we are. Let's take some responsibility for creating communities we're proud to be a part of. Please.

There will always be bullies, it does not end at high school. Only thing nerd can do is to keep his cool, and not feed any trolls :-)

Or, you know, quick, reflexive, and measured (no overkill) retribution.

Stick a kitten's nose in their pee a few times and they'll learn to use the litter box.

That doesn't mean you hate or disrespect the kitten, it means you're applying a bit of punishment now to avoid bigger problems later.

This is true regardless of who's in charge for the simple reason that the carpet doesn't care who's in charge, if something pees on it, it will smell.

Am I misreading the Japan thing? Like, it's not hard to imagine that there would be candidates that would be immediately excluded based on surname alone without even getting into race or gender - is this "fair" or "unfair", or is it just the way things are? Is the latter(est) the analogy we're supposed to take from this?

The Japan analogy is more a reference to people of a completely different culture (like the US) going to Japan and making the Japanese adhere to their culture, instead of the other way around. It may not be a very accurate comparison though, and to extend on the analogy, if Japan was to open up its borders, they would have to adjust themselves.

Compare getting employees from India over to the US; there are some cultural differences that may be hard to work with / around, but both parties (employee/existing co-workers and the new foreign workers) will both have to adjust.

The brogrammers and geek feminists won. There's no turning back.

How does calling people 'brogrammers' in a derogatory sense make us any different than the supposed 'cool kids' that rejected us? Shouldn't we strive to be better than that?

(not saying that you are using the term 'brogrammer' like that, just posing a more general question).

Brogrammer is perhaps used for efficiency, so you don't have to write a 10 page screed as we just read (which was excellent by the way).

I don't think there's any way to say it in a non-derogatory way if the central message is derogatory. The article seemed to be saying, we have a culture, and if you people infiltrate it, there is a good chance you will ruin it. I happen to agree with him.

> I happen to agree with him.

Her, for whatever it's worth.

For an interesting experiment, show this article to the sort of people it's about. Don't tell them the author is an autistic woman. Observe their reactions. Then provide them that background and repeat observations.

I realized she was a woman from this line:

>There are progressive, libertarian, anarchist, moderate, communist, conservative, liberal, and reactionary hackers, just the same as can be said for women, bisexuals, Texans, or engineers who aren’t hackers.

The sentence only really makes sense if the final 4 traits are describing the author.

Meredith is a hacker under any definition. So that trait definitely is not descriptive of her.

I meant the 4 in the list (women, bisexuals, Texans, engineers).

The last item is "engineers who aren't hackers".

I have no idea if Meredith is bisexual or Texan.

It's probably most accurate to say that gender isn't a significant factor in my calculus of attraction. I was born in Houston, though, and lived there for 23 years.

For what it's worth, I don't recall intending anything in particular with that list of adjectives, but you never really know about authorial intent.

Here's what the sentence is saying:

There are people who aren't like me who are hackers. Also there are people who are like me who aren't hackers.

The list of people who aren't like her is: progressive, libertarian, anarchist, moderate, communist, conservative, liberal, and reactionary.

The list of people who are like her is: women, bisexuals, Texans, or engineers.

Why else would she come up with 4 random traits? They obviously have something in common: they describe her.

The "who aren't hackers" part doesn't apply directly to engineers. It applies to the entire list. So if you were to parenthesize it to show precedence it would be "(women, bisexuals, Texans, or engineers) who aren’t hackers." Not "women, bisexuals, Texans, or (engineers who aren’t hackers)."

Oh, that makes more sense when it's parsed that way! English is often ambiguous. If you're familiar with Meredith's work, the fact that this thread is all basically because of a parsing error is all very funny.

That's a GREAT experiment. A hacker will not change his opinions on the article, either good or bad. He might even ask "so?". A non-hacker hating the article will mutate opinion, and now regard the piece as an inspiring essay from a challenged minority.

Exactly. I've conducted this experiment myself. One self-proclaimed geek feminist went from a very hostile reaction to what was perceived as something aimed at economic exclusion to a sympathetic reaction to a woman bemoaning assaults on the culture she values.

I had to do a double-take when the author was referred to as 'her' in the comments thread to be honest. I'm just used to articles like this, describing nerd culture and whatnot, to be written by men - the traditional nerd. That's probably part of the problem, really, expectations and stereotyping about gender (and race, and sexual orientation, and gender, and personality, etc etc etc)

Well that's a nice surprise.

It's not efficient. The word "Brogrammer" means "something something men I don't like for reasons I believe are their fault". It doesn't communicate anything, it just invites the reader to invent their own meaning, which has little to do with what the write was thinking.

The actual word was invented as a joke in a parody video, as a portmonteau of "bro" and "programmer". It then got picked up as an slur for "disliked man in the tech world".

I don't really use this word or feel the need to participate in discussions about people it represent, but for me, when I see it somewhere, "brogrammer" means an equivalent of "cool people" from high school. Existence of them became possible due to programming becoming lucrative, with plenty of easy learning material, and therefore, beneficial for people you wouldn't at all consider a nerd to learn. It's a programmer who comes from outside of nerd culture, who looks at it like a cool kid from high school looks at school nerds.

It has also a bit "hipsterish" connotation - brogrammer is someone who's "not really into it". "The true nerds" were programmers before it was cool.

At least that's how I understand this term. "disliked man in the tech world" is much too broad, as so called "brogrammers" are supposed to dislike "true nerds".

If we are interested in certain things that are not mainstream, and then other people who aren't really interested in those things come in and screw things up for interested people by acting in a selfish and conceited and exclusionary way, and we call those people jackasses or brogrammers or whatever, that doesn't make us the same as them. It's just an observation. And any culture worth its salt rejects forces actively trying to tear it down.

Really? I thought brogrammers were programmers that exercise and aren't introverted. Never really considered brogrammers to be a 'force trying to tear down programming'. At least that describes everyone I've ever met described that way, including some very talented, welcoming people.

Likewise, some of the most technically talented people in node identify as feminists.

Thinking about it (which I'm forced to because my Twitter timeline is full of this), I don't think anyone really is trying to tear down programming. I think the problem is the false narratives we tell ourselves about the other side.

"I thought brogrammers were programmers that exercise and aren't introverted."

I don't know how on earth you reached that bizarre conclusion. For starters, if that's what it means, then how would it be derogatory and then why would people be complaining about the word?

Respectfully disagree. There are other places to seek refuge, even if it has to be done on the down low and within the same industry.

Also, great article.

Indeed. The safe space may be intruded upon, but it was never the space that was important. A culture of makers can always make more.

... and with that victory, they have given rise to generations of new weird-nerds that no longer feel as much as outsiders.

Ok, I went there for the sake of the quote, but as someone who spent most of high-school maintaining an online forum about nerd topics on a Hardened Gentoo[1] Pentium III[2] server in the floor of his own bedroom; I still find I cannot quite empathize with the fear of "insiders"/"normals" that the OP talks about and which other comments seem to echo. Not saying I can't imagine it, or that it's not real, but it wasn't like that for me. In my experience: video-games were utterly mainstream, MTG/D&D where "a bit weird, but hey, to each their own", computer programming was cool (not a super popular hobby to pursue, but people seemed either neutral or genuinely impressed if you did).

Many of those cherished "hacker values"? They are now mainstream ideals: Net neutrality! Wikileaks! "I prefer texting than talking on the phone"! ;) Everyone I know is now in an online forum or another (Facebook/Twitter/Tumblr/Reddit). Not saying all of the values have been popularized, but many have. Our pop culture now a days makes more fun of jocks than of nerds. It has more nerd heroes (specially for middle-school/high-school aged kids) than "popular" heroes. Freaking LoTR is one of the biggest movie franchises of all times!

Besides, it's not like the groups have no intersection. Geek feminists often are or were at some point "weird-nerd" girls or "weird-nerd" guys that agreed that the world was, among all of its unfairnesses, biased to take male as the default. So we are not excluding just those "not from our tribe" (whatever that means), we are excluding "those from our tribe happen to be different from what we picture our tribe to look like". Even for those genuinely not part of the culture you might naturally want to associate with? Well, we still need to interact with and do business with them in a civilized manner. That's all any diversity advocacy I have ever read demands: not that you be friends with anybody, but that you be willing to interact respectfully with everybody.

"Brogrammer" is less well defined. But the most gym-going and adventurous friend I have is also among the most nerdy, smartest and occasionally painfully awkward people I know. Also, the most social person in my circle is a gregarious, party going, business savvy, MIT engineering trained woman that in the right crowd can make jokes consisting entirely of function plots.

There are no three cliques against other! There are many ideas, associated with different stereotypes, let's try not to pit armies of stereotypes against each other, and be open to the ideas! If that's not a hacker value, then I don't what is.

[1] Why Hardened Gentoo just to host a small PHP forum? Because it was there...

[2] Gives the age away fairly precisely, doesn't it?

This is exactly what I couldn't figure out how to say! Thank you.

It is a shame this comment is all the way down the page. It summarises my reaction to the article fairly accurately.

Yeah, tech went mainstream and blockbuster movies are made out of cult classic books. That's one of the points in the post, those things used to be signals of particular kind of person but are no longer.

There are no three cliques against other! There are many ideas, associated with different stereotypes, let's try not to pit armies of stereotypes against each other, and be open to the ideas!

In broad strokes I agree with you. For a few reasons, not the least of which because I don't exactly agree with the authors analysis. I differ from you in specific as there is a difference between being accepting of the ideas and people who live them, versus adopting it for myself. Being "open to" an idea means the former, yet often euphemistically implies the latter.

I see the author's point in the way people with more social power than myself ask for my conformity, to their benefit and my cost. It's framed so politely, everything is these days, but sometimes I don't want to adopt another persons standards. Only then do you see how serious they are about getting you to conform.

> Yeah, tech went mainstream and blockbuster movies are made out of cult classic books. That's one of the points in the post, those things used to be signals of particular kind of person but are no longer.

They were more than signals, they were the culture that reflected the values we identified with: the wonder of discovery, the beauty of places that didn't exist, the value of smarts and imagination. Those values are nerd values and are also mainstream values. It is a point of agreement for which we can all start to talk. I think most nerds I know define nerdom by what they like and the acceptance of obsessive liking of an idea, not by any other "kind of person".

> I see the author's point in the way people with more social power than myself ask for my conformity, to their benefit and my cost. It's framed so politely, everything is these days, but sometimes I don't want to adopt another persons standards.

That's usually fair. But what happens when what people are pointing out is that your standards are unjust and are harming them? It is one thing for people asking you to, say, dress in a suit and a tie (an arbitrary imposed standard that really couldn't matter less unless you want to impress the people who like suits). It is another when the standard they are asking you to adopt is "don't grope us, don't assault us, don't insult us, don't provide cover or plausible deniability to those who willfully grope us or assault us or insult us.". Taken to the hyperbolic extreme, if someone imposes on me from the outside the standard that I should not kill people (assuming it weren't already within my own personal standards), it is still an imposition, but one they are within their rights to make.

Social justice advocates really are as transparent as the name: they advocate for (social) justice. If your standards are unconventional but just, go ahead: you can be into D&D and feminist, you can be a furry and feminist, you can be an otaku and feminist[1], you can be into BSDM and feminist, you can be as weird as you wish to be and still treat people well even if awkwardly. You don't even need to be an advocate for gender equality, just do a good faith attempt at not perpetrating or upholding injustice. But if your standards are unjust or they facilitate injustice, why wouldn't people be allowed to point that out to you and request that you change them?

Keep in mind that often, nerd feminists are not insiders encroaching into the outsider's safe space, but outsiders within a larger group of outsiders, trying to avoid being harmed by manipulative people skilled in the culture of the larger outsider group. They are often those of us, that we are allowing to be bullied, by others "like us".

And, do people do unjust oppressive things in the name of justice and anti-oppression? Sure. Mob-mentality online shamming campaigns often are such injustice, at least when focused on individuals who are not powerful public figures (be it DongleGate or GamerGate, and I think there is still one of those that is far far worse). We should mention and call this out as well, but that doesn't mean that the points about there being injustice in nerd culture (as in pretty much any culture) are invalid.

[1] Do I even need to mention you can be a brony and feminist? ;)

And, do people do unjust oppressive things in the name of justice and anti-oppression? Sure.

So you're obviously aware why conversations about where the line between activism and asshole-ness is always turns to shit. You'll understand why I'm gonna bail on this conversation.

Ok, I don't need you to or expect you to reply. Just, consider this if you wish: when you are told that people are harmed by things other people in your community do, or things you might be doing without thinking, is it not worthwhile to listen?

Take this whole discussion, for example. My takeaways are that:

1) There is a group/generation/subset within nerd culture that has had "social norms" and "proper conduct" used as a weapon against them, in order to attack them over what they feel is unintentional social clumsiness or voluntary disregard of norms they don't agree with, without intent of harming anyone. I tend to trust what people tell me, so I now believe this is a significant grievance for a number of people. It was never quite as large a part of my own experience with nerdyness, but I acknowledge it has been for others.

2) Public shamming is an effective tactic (in pointing people to the existence of a problem), but also a terribly aggressive one towards the person being named. Specially if they are only been picked as an example of what is considered bad only because of how common the behavior is and the toll it exerts on people in aggregate, not just that particular instance. This is, by the way, a point I have seen made before, within activist communities. I'd still argue naming and shamming is a valid response in cases of obvious ill intent or physical harm (e.g. rape), but not for all types of "inappropriate behavior" (in which I am including unintentional or miss-measured psychological harm).

Could you, reciprocally, consider giving some though as to whether some of the things people label as unwelcoming, harmful or oppressive within a subset of nerd culture might be real grievances as well? How about considering whether the people exposing these grievances really come from outside the community, or from within? Or whether or not, if the grievances are real, they are right to demand that the culture addresses them?

And, while I stand by the point you quoted, I'd still wager more oppressive things happen in the name of "this is how we always have acted" and "you are not really part of this group", than in the name of anti-oppression.

No, they just moved in.

Given that those factions are mortal enemies, I don't think you can say they both won.

Since when is there such a thing as "weird nerds" and "cool nerds" ? I've never heard people identify as such. Methinks it an arbitrary distinction invented by the author, to support his argument. I'm still not sure what the argument is.

Also, since when do you have to join a nerd subculture to be accepted as a programmer? Since when is being a nerd and being a feminist mutually exclusive?

I don't get this article. And I don't get nerds.

As a "weird nerd", let me explain.

"Weird nerds" are the people who not so long ago were ostracized by society for their interest in science and technology. They weren't "cool", they weren't doing things that "cool" people do, so they were bullied. Many of them indeed became programmers and laid foundation of what is now the IT industry.

Then, tech became mainstream and seen as a very good career path. It started being "cool", so it attracted the "cool" people. As the nerd-type interests, like sci-fi, became less shunned by society, the industry started to fill with "cool nerds" - people who are nerdish, but not to the level of not being "cool".

You don't have to join a nerd subculture to be accepted as a programmer. On the contrary, majority of programmers employed today are not nerds or hackers. What has once been mostly a hobby, became a profession.

Or look at it in another way - "weird nerds" are usually the ones in real love with science and technology. "Cool nerds" are usually the ones for whom science and technology is just an occupation, a job.

I don't agree that the "cool nerds" are impostors and only do it for the attention. I think the difference is more a personality one - extroverts vs introverts. The former in the 'nerd' subculture is the type that goes to ALL the meetups, that likes networking, is highly active on social networking, etc etc etc, while the latter prefers to be left alone with his (literal) devices.

I didn't mean to say that "cool nerds" are impostors - they have every right and reason to be interested in technology, but the kind of deep love for technical interests seem to correlate more with "weird nerd" character traits. I might be wrong about the actual causation though. Introvert/extrovert seem to be correlated too, but not perfectly.

No, I get that the author is making that distinction between weird and cool. And I' get that you're making it. But this distinction... it's bullshit. Nobody identifies as weird or as cool. And being weird was never a prerequisite for being interested in computers . Most of all, being weird doesn't give anyone the right to exclude women, minorities, or even "cool" people from technology. I thought the hacking community was supposed to be inclusive!

I'm happy to see somebody discuss this on a deeper level. When one underprivileged group meets another underprivileged group we should be able to discuss what oppression is, how to relate these experiences to each other and how to reduce oppression for everybody.

Current social trends allow and encourage women to raise their oppression above any other form of oppression, as if no man ever got beat up after school or ridiculed for "playing with computers". It's the same excuse that marginalizes male rape victims if the perpetrator was male - or even if the perpetrator was female because "men".

So it has turned into a war of privilege, rather than a discussion of oppression. It's become "Feminist privilege" versus "Nerd privilege" versus "Male privilege". The fact that most nerds are men is just a distraction from the real discussion. The problem isn't the privilege - we're privileged to be alive, and that's a good thing rather than a bad thing.

The problem is the oppression, and "donglegate" and "gamergate" have oppression on both sides. Until we stop trying to raise any particular type of oppression onto a pedestal we aren't going to make any real progress. Let's stop talking about "privilege" and start talking about barriers to personal fulfillment.

This is a fascinating article! Fantastic

It's an interesting and complex subject but ultimately defining what makes a "true" nerd is a never ending debate. My professor in college was incredulous when he found out that I, a CS major, never watched Star Trek. The nerve!

I think this article is fantastic in its framework, but it's ultimately aimed at the wrong people.

The writer is assuming a powerful left-brain empathy that is characteristic of hackers ("I'd lay better odds that he’s paying attention, watching your actions and reactions to build a mental model of how it’s safe to interact with you."), yet is lacking in the invaders. The invaders are running a much simpler hardwired social strategy that assumes everyone is like them (even in response, there are plenty of comments insisting that hackers still unconsciously judge people by race in spite of most of our judgments being formed before we ever see someone. it's simple projection), and are not setup to understand those who are different. They cannot change, and consequently we will lose the social game of chicken every time.

What I'd really like to see/find/create/sustain is a community of people that are able to resist being distracted by the narrow trap of the social hierarchy - VC money, PR articles from companies, status-quo politics, proprietary Appoogle product/tech announcements, mass media human interest stories, etc. More similar to the Internet I grew up with, where objective technical merit was the ideal to strive towards, and being told to RTFM resulted in someone learning how to self-learn and ask intelligent questions rather than getting attention from writing clickbait on how they were offended. Maybe this is impossible because we've gotten too big/connected, or I personally could just be pitifully stuck in the rut that is HN and myopic from falling out of more specific technical tribes.

Maybe this is impossible and any such community is ultimately doomed to entryism. But articles such as this that take a stab at reifying the qualities of true hackerdom are necessary for us to reflect and understand exactly what is being lost and perhaps come up with ways to defend it in the large, rather than it surviving solely in narrow highly-technical communities.

(PS - a point i wanted to make elsewhere in the thread about the general article, but I will do here instead because it applies to my comment as well:

It is easy to phrase this issue in in binary us-vs-them hacker or not-a-hacker terms but the reality is continuous. So while it is nice to think in simpler terms, the topic is actually graver because any of us can be corrupted by social influences as well. The lure of wider acceptance, attention, fame, and/or money can lead us down the path of behavior that we despise - outrage fanning, user-disempowering platforms, working on surveillance tech, etc. The status quo's siren's song is becoming quite apparent right now as the (de)centralization pendulum starts to swing back and the trajectories of companies further diverge from those of free people.)

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