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Before You Get Too Excited About That GitHub Study
- Analemma_ 11y agoI'm usually the first person fawning over any new SSC post, but by his own admission here he's just regurgitating the points from the original HN thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11074587 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11074587). Putting too much stock in this post is kind of "training on your validation data", as it were.
- parennoob 11y agoHe's also doing the yeoman job of pointing out how rabidly the media will seize upon this sort of study (which a lot of people have identified as having serious flaws) and put up broadly general headlines that "fit the narrative", like this one: "Suck It Dudes. Science Proves Women Are Better Coders." (http://gizmodo.com/suck-it-dudes-science-proves-women-are-better-coders-1758825800 http://gizmodo.com/suck-it-dudes-science-proves-women-are-be...) I mean, I know that Gizmodo is not exactly the pinnacle of responsible journalism, but as mentioned in the article, the Guardian, the BBC, and Business Insider are not doing much better.
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- ufmace 11y agoIt's at least a useful service to pull all of the good points regarding the validity of the statistics and what they really say into one place and drop the outrage. As seems typical with this sort of study, it's easy to reinterpret and cherry-pick things to say that it proves whatever you want it to say, but it seems that it doesn't really say much of anything conclusively.
- kaonashi 11y agoWhat the world really needs is more dudes taking the devil's advocate position on sexism issues.
- ve55 11y agoYes, that would work out really well for them.
- douche 11y agoWhat the world needs is less journalism that picks any available thread out of ambiguous research to push their pet agendas. It's not just the "SJW-types", it's an across-the-board problem. It generates clicks and grabs eyeballs... Calling that bullshit out is a worthy cause.
- Moshe_Silnorin 11y agoHe's not playing devils advocate, he's accurately interpreting the study.
- araneae 11y agoMy sarcasm detector isn't operational; if serious, why more dudes as opposed to dudettes?
- jm_l 11y agoScott (author) critiques bad statistics; that's all there is to it. He admits all the time that critiquing studies that are in favor of his beliefs makes him feel like a bad person, but altogether Scott is "in favor of niceness" and it shows in his writing. Scott ends up defending the fringe simply because they get the worst arguments thrown at them the most often.
- protomyth 11y agoWhat the world really needs is more truth being spoken regardless of any physical or social characteristic of the speakers. Any action based on lies or misinterpretations damages the world. What the world needs is less people calling out others for who they are as opposed to the what they said.
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- chroma 11y agoHmm... odd. Despite a decent number of upvotes, my earlier submission of this link[1] never made it to the front page. I thought it was flagged down by users, but maybe not? Edit (after downvotes): Jeez, I was just curious, not accusing. 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11092049 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11092049
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- brighteyes 11y agoThis study, and the news articles about it, say a lot more about attitudes towards software developers, than it does about software developers themselves. And those attitudes are disturbing. They describe the industry as a terrible, sexist place, even though the actual study shows the exact opposite. This isn't just insulting to us software engineers, which it definitely is. It's also making the problem worse. Why should women be interested to join a field that is described as horrible to them?
- BogusIKnow 11y ago1. "Our analysis (..) shows that women are harder on other women than they are on men. Men are harder on other men than they are on women.” 2. Not peer reviewed. 3. The confidence intervals may overlap. 4. Graphs all have non zero base lines.