drabbiticus

> Mott and Bailey. This image is not pornography. It's a tasteful head shot. You're introducing any discussion of pornography.

Mott and Bailey. I can also name drop logical fallacies to no purpose. This image, though cropped, is from Playboy and the full image features a clearly nude women shot from the back and exposing her buttocks. Your quibble over a specific categorization again misses the forest for the trees. Women are saying that this image makes them feel uncomfortable due to its origins, and there is no technical reason that it needs to remain in the test set or the curricula. There are many suitable alternatives that would not have this problem.

>>[minor point - if you are a legal stickler, use of the Lena image was also done in infringement of copyright. > > If you are a legal stickler, or even just support basic rights, fair use is integral to the research process. [1]

Honestly the smart thing to do here is to not engage with your point, as again, it is minor and not actually relevant to the thrust of the conversation. If you want to treat my decision to not push further into this as a moral win, enjoy it.

I wouldn't be surprised if in certain social groups or contexts there are people who choose to toss the word "ethics" around very loosely and completely incorrectly. However, there is an entire serious study of ethics and ethical frameworks that is not simply about reinforcement of existing power structures and I would encourage you to broaden your education.

It feels like you and many other commenters have missed the broad general point to focus on the proverbial trees. I am replying to this comment because it is at the top of the HN comments at the time of this reply.

It is a part of computing history that computer scientists at a respected educational institution chose to use a cropped version of a nude Playboy image as part of a test suite for the development of JPEG. Part of that history is that in the 1970s someone felt it was appropriate to openly bring a copy of Playboy into the office and the response to that was to use something from it for an image test suite [1]. You are personally welcome to feel about it however you will.

However, many women are stating that the continued inclusion of a Lena image in test suites and as an important part of computing history makes them feel unwelcomed in tech spaces. As a hypothetical, perhaps you are a straight male. Imagine for a moment that computer science was instead historically dominated by gay men, and that they had decided to use images from gay pornography as part of the JPEG test suite. Suppose that gay men continued to be highly represented within the computer science workforce, and that in order to learn about JPEG compression, you also had to be confronted by those images in a computer science lecture hall in 2023 while surrounded as a straight individual by a room full of gay men. Suppose you hear even one classmate who feels comfortable, in this professional setting, commenting that "they could use some company like that around here" and hearing a few classmates chuckle around that.

Computing and computing literacy are such useful skills today. There are a myriad of tasks where even basic programming literacy would allow you to automate things and make you more efficient in your endeavors. More broadly as a society, we are leveraging machine learning models in so many contexts, and these have been shown to encode the societal biases which were present in their training sets. Representation across all axes of identity allow everyone an equal footing to advance in this technical skillset and also increases the chances that we identify when computing technologies are encoding bias in harmful ways. These women are saying that there are many things which can be done to improve the representation of women within tech spaces, and that removing Lena from curriculums and test suites does zero technical harm while increasing inclusivity. That is the ethical judgement at stake - to what extent do our current practices harm inclusivity and affect the likelihood of encoding harmful biases in the technology we develop now and in the future?

[minor point - if you are a legal stickler, use of the Lena image was also done in infringement of copyright. This is such a non-point in the actual discussion of the campaign, but it seems like a lot of comments basically fall along the line of "this is legal so whatever" and if you want to argue on this perceived technicality, it isn't even correct.]

[1] http://www.lenna.org/pcs_mirror/may_june01.pdf

You could call it a hack, but it's also the standard way that lots of asian families make rice if they don't have a rice cooker and how I've done it ever since moving into an apartment and didn't want a bulky machine in limited counter space.

For a comedic take see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45wHe9KdmrQ for How to Cook Perfect Rice by Jo Koy

Similar project in python if that's your jam:

https://pypi.python.org/pypi/quantities

The system is shitty for everybody and an appeal to a common humanity is absolutely critical for any reasonable expectation of humane social structures.

However, to suggest that the experience of the system is the same for everybody is naive at best. I read task_queue's comment more as the following:

"Societal structures do not change until those with more (social, political, economic, etc) power experience the inconvenience and injustice that people without the power to effect change experience on a more regular basis. That this is true is unfortunate."

Actually this is a question I asked myself a lot growing up. When I rephrased the question as "Is it really a meritocracy if everyone is judged by the same standard but have different access to resources?" I began to feel that in certain contexts positive discrimination can play an important role.

A similar (facetious) situation would be if you were comparing two soccer teams. The first team has to learn soccer by itself and is frequently told that it would be better off learning some other sport. The second team is coached by a good coach who encourages them and gives them specific drills and feedback to help them improve in the skills in which they are deficient. When they have a game (or several), a contest of merit, most of the time the second team will win. But is this really the way to get the best soccer players? It is quite possible that some of the players from the first team would have been better than those in the second if they had had access to the same resources.

Obviously the ideal solution is to get everyone a great coach and support them, but what do we do about the ones who already had to go it on their own? If we are hosting a soccer training camp and really want the overall soccer training system to be "fair" and "merit-based" doesn't it make sense to consider how far someone has come in relation to what resources they've been able to obtain? Or do we continue to give the camp coaching resources to those who already had great coaching and deny those resources to those who didn't?

That makes sense and is a great point. My point, however, was not that we should demonize those who do go into fields that stereotypically/socioeconomically favor them. I sincerely hope it did not come across that way. Rather, we should be encouraging those who do have an interest in fields that do not stereotypically favor them to explore those interests. If we can do that, we will have a more equal gender split that will help to break stereotypes by providing more role models. Even if they don't go into those fields, we will have created a culture in which that choice was made solely on the basis of their passions, goals and abilities.

I have never been harassed about being a man for my interest in computer science, biology, chemistry, physics or engineering (in which I ultimately majored). This is a good thing. Many women who have had an interest in those fields have experienced harassment or discrimination because of their gender. Some have also been fortunate enough to have been spared. Some men have probably been harassed for being one of the many men in STEM/ET as if their interest is their fault. Harassing anyone for wanting to explore their passions is unequivocally wrong.

There isn't a big push to get women onto construction sites because of cultural beliefs about what men and women do. This is harmful to both men and women. In this case, women are believed to be less physical able to keep up with the demands of manual labor on a construction site. Add in the fact that manual labor is often perceived as "lower class" and it makes a certain amount of sense those who are fighting for female equality would start with jobs in fields that carry social prestige. When you feel like you aren't getting enough of the cow/steak, why would you fight for the hooves? Stigma against "low class" jobs also needs to stop - these are very important tasks that we entrust people with.

I am sure that there are some women who might want to go into construction who are turned away by site managers who don't believe a women can perform as well or that they will be a "distraction" on male-dominated worksites. I am sure that a few more might have been turned away by a few bigots who aggressively treat them as though they don't belong on site.

[edits below] Just wanted to add that it is also easier to fight a fight based on the idea that women are just as smart as men, but relatively harder to fight the fight that women are just as strong as men. Even if many women are stronger than many men, in aggregate men do have the biological advantage with regards to strength.

Awesome! I am glad that you help to normalize people in those positions. I definitely agree that better role models is one of the biggest things we can do and ultimately is the best solution, albeit one that will mostly effect the long-term.

I am a little confused about your first paragraph. I agree that it is patronizing to decide what some else should choose for a career and I hope that I didn't give that impression. Similarly, societal pressure does come largely from individual actions, but I don't think that it is wrong to identify problematic individual actions. Of course we should help those who are bigoted to understand the hurt that they are causing. It's an application of the golden rule (one statement of which is "don't do unto others as you would not have done unto yourself"), and so individual choices which cause harm to others should be overruled.

Note - obviously this is a simplification and it is often difficult to determine what choices will hurt whom and to whose benefit. The world isn't black and white and I acknowledge that.

To add to andylei's comment, I've pasted my own reply from Randal Olson's follow-up article (http://www.randalolson.com/2014/06/15/the-double-edged-sword...):

I agree that men and women most likely do make different career choices. Yet, choices aren't made in a vacuum.

We have a culture that reinforces ideas of innate gender roles. Little boys are told every day that they need to be tough when they get hurt, that they shouldn't be a crybaby. Little girls are told that they can't handle rough housing, that math is too hard for them. Little girls are told they should be friendly and "nice", that they should play well with others and build communities, mediate between friends. Little boys are told that they need to be responsible and be able to take care of people.

These attitudes are shifting. I am glad that they are shifting. When we tell boys and men that they have to be tough, we create a culture that makes it harder for men who are struggling with things things like depression and addiction to seek help or even admit that they have a problem to their friends. When we tell girls and women that they are weaker and less capable in certain fields, they begin to internalize those values. They begin to believe that they really aren't cut out for it, that it is too hard.

There is a lot more that can be said on this topic, and to some degree it can be debated about just how "innately" different men and women are. However, the problem is that this viewpoint considers things in the aggregate. In life, you are an individual. That means that you should be able to deviate from what "men" are like or what "women" are like just because that is the way you are. So why do we tell little girls and little boys that they should be one way? If there is a difference between men and women, then we should be able to just let that difference exist, without trying to shape people to fit into our view of what those differences might be.

In general, as humans, we like to categorize things. This has been an immensely useful skill. It underlies most of our science and most of understanding of the world. It is fundamental to computer science since it allows us to do things like DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself) and OO (Object-oriented). The problem is that when we see fields that are largely male dominated or largely female dominated, many people draw conclusions about what men and women are like. Relatively few stop to consider what societal pressures might have shaped the decisions of the people who enter these fields. They chalk it up to innate differences between men and women. And then they question people who don't fit into those molds that they have created in their own minds.

Think back to those male nurses and female coders that we keep talking about. They don't seem to fit into a mindset that says that men prefer to do things like code and women prefer to do things like caregiving. People express surprise and sometimes even censure because these people don't fit. If we push men out of nursing, we have an even more female-dominated nursing population. We reinforce the idea that women are caregivers. Because why else would so many nurses be women? We've created a cycle. This is why I get concerned when the fields are so disproportionate. It's not just that men and women are making different choices. It's that we have created attitudes that reinforce those choices and make it harder for people to make different choices. It makes it harder for people to succeed when they make a choice that strays from our mental guidelines.

Again, sorry for the wall of text. Have another kitten: http://imgur.com/gallery/KWDadE1