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>> we would especially love insights from include women (cis & trans), nonbinary folks, people of color > Oh. Well this is weird. They seem like awfully indire
by Certhas 9y ago
>> we would especially love insights from include women (cis & trans), nonbinary folks, people of color
> Oh. Well this is weird. They seem like awfully indirect measurements of relevant skills and perspective
It might be indirect, but if the empirical evidence says they are under represented, then there is a reason for that. Asking for their perspectives is a sensible way to investigate what the reason may be.
Let's be clear, I don't think it's necessarily within the Rust communities power to change these reasons. If mothers tell their daughters that programming is for boys [1], and discourage them from spending all their time at the computer, then that would be expected, somewhere far down the road, to lead to an under representation of women. That's hard to fix, and it's not something the Rust community can do much about, given that none of the mothers involved would have ever heard of Rust to begin with.
But maybe there will also be some ways to be more welcoming, and I'd expect that to overlap somewhat with the latter points (that you approved off) that have a more clear cut causal hypothesis associated to them. If you were discouraged from playing around with programming as a kid, you'll likely have ended up learning programming later in life. If you were socialized to avoid conflict, then a high conflict environment will be a turn off. Asking what makes it better for people with a different background has the potential to make it better for people who might not share the background, but the handicaps it confers.
[1] http://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~abaron/downloads/Croft_Schmader_Block_Baron_PsySci2014.pdf http://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~abaron/downloads/Croft_Schmader_Bl...
- teacup50 9y ago> Asking for their perspectives is a sensible way to investigate what the reason may be. Is it? Why? When patients visit the ER, they often believe that whatever change in their diet that they're aware of and focused on -- like eating cabbage last week -- must be the cause of their ailment. When parents had their children diagnosed with autism, they cast their net for the nearest change to be blamed ... and found vaccines.
- tpush 9y agoAhem, what? Are you really saying underrepresented people don't know why they don't contribute to a project they maybe would have?
- Karunamon 9y agoAbsolutely. People don't always know at a conscious level why they do or don't do things. It's part of the reason why user surveys are a poor substitute for telemetry on how an app is actually used in the real world. ..except that here, we haven't worked out the brain-computer interface yet.
- Certhas 9y agoEvery doctor will begin by asking: What is wrong. The final diagnosis is not necessarily what the patient thinks it is, but it would be grossly negligent to not ask the patient about all information they think might be relevant.
- teacup50 9y agoThey ask what the symptoms are. They do not ask the patient to determine what the cause is. Rust's methodology suffers from severe self-selection bias and politically motivated thinking. It will unerringly produce the answers its creators want to hear; if it does not, the methodology and subject selection will "corrected" to produce such answers.