100% agreed. And I definitely don't mean it as an excuse. Just an explanation for why conspiracy is unnecessary.
12 karma · joined May 28, 2010
If you really can't get over your feelings of personal insult and your need to defend white men, then please go back and substitute "part of the socially dominant racial group" for "white" and "part of the socially dominant gender group" for "men". In US history, those terms are equivalent. If you don't like that, talk to the founding fathers who set it up that way.
The reason it's material here is that a large portion of Twitter abuse is related to this. You can look at famous incidents, for example. Leslie Jones received a giant wave of racist, sexist abuse: https://www.thecut.com/2016/08/a-timeline-of-leslie-joness-h...
And the company admitted they had failed massively: https://people.com/movies/twitter-ceo-jack-dorsey-speaks-out...
You could also look at the differential experience of white men versus others on Twitter. E.g.: https://www.theroot.com/twitter-has-a-serious-harassment-and...
Note also your standard here. You, a white man, refuse to accept that race or gender could be relevant to a social problem until other people take the time to spoon-feed you. Why isn't it your job to know something about American history? Why isn't it your job to learn about the problem of online abuse before deciding that the privilege afforded to white men couldn't possibly be the relevant? Answer: because you were raised to believe that whiteness and maleness were the default and were good. So you choose that as your supposedly neutral stance, and require others to prove you wrong.
The true neutral stance would either be "I don't know about this problem and would like to learn" or "let's assume that online culture has some relationship to the existing offline social dynamic".
The problem is not the genetic characteristics of whiteness or maleness. It's that they grew up in a society that favors whiteness and maleness, and is much more accepting of the abuse of people who aren't so favored. If Twitter had started in China, where the Han are favored over ethnic minority groups like Tibetans and the Uyghur, it would be the same dynamic but with different ethnic groups.
Of course, tech is disproportionately white and male, so it's entirely unsurprising that HN readers have risen up en masse to defend the honor of white men. It exactly proves the point. White men will say that fighting abuse is important. But when they have to show their real priorities by how they allocate time and effort, actually understanding the abuse problem and how it disproportionately effects minorities comes well after defending their own interests.
(And: Yes yes, not all white men. Generalizations are general statements that may or may not apply to an individual.)
This is nothing particularly new. It's the history of America, which was founded by and for white men, and whose story can be told as white men slowly and reluctantly giving up their power.
If "many (most) 'white men' do in fact care", history doesn't really demonstrate that. Not, at least, in terms of doing anything about it. This is not particularly shocking; people care more about problems they experience, and less about problems that happen to benefit them.
We need only look at how the majority of white men supported a blatant racist and sexist for president. And who continue to support him despite (or because) that has only become more clear.
This Philosophy Bites episode on "Categorizing Mental Disorders" has some good material on the topic: http://philosophybites.com/2016/01/steven-hyman-on-categoris...
And there's a lot of good work under the label "medicalization of deviance".
I should also add that the psychiatrist could be wrong about the thoughts, but still might be correct about the feelings that flow from the thoughts.
As I progressed in my treatment for social anxiety, I realized the more appropriate emotional reaction to generalized government data collection was not personal anxiety, in that nobody was actually likely to look at my data or use it against me. I still have my recognition that it's a political danger and my anger about government overreach, but in retrospect I see my anxiety about surveillance as inappropriate, and related to my generally excessive anxiety reactions.
In other words, a financial trade isn't a bet on your insight. It's a bet that your insight is sharper than the person on the other side of the trade.