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You're probably new to HN, so you might not have seen all the other stories about sexism posted in the last year or so. A single story like this doesn't prove

You're probably new to HN, so you might not have seen all the other stories about sexism posted in the last year or so. A single story like this doesn't prove anything, but the flood of stories just like that paint a pretty clear picture. At some point you can no longer say: "This is an isolated incident".

verroq 9y ago
I'm not new to HN, I've been here for far longer than you have. And yes some of those stories have merit, but this is not one of them.
- aepiepaey 9y ago
  (account age is not a good proxy for "time on HN")
  - always_good 9y ago
    But "you're probably new to HN [lil fella, but here's how it's been]" is a tacky, low-effort quip especially towards an account over 8 years old.
TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
A flood of stories on the internet doesn't necessarily prove much either. When there are billions of people on the internet, there could easily be a vocal minority that doesn't represent the majority.
geezerjay 9y ago
> A single story like this doesn't prove anything, but the flood of stories just like that paint a pretty clear picture. A flood of biased anecdotes doesn't become truth or facts after a given count. Oponionated militants don't define reality. Your comment indicates a profound lack of ratinal and objective thinking.
hueving 9y ago
The plural of anecdote is not data. We need real stats about this because individuals complaining vastly outweighs the silent remaining ones. There are enough murders every day to cover the front page of hacker news with a story about each one. It doesn't mean murder is a rampant problem in our society.
- UncleMeat 9y ago
  We have real stats. Hundreds, if not thousands of studies. But those get this identical reaction.
  - Chris2048 9y ago
    > Hundreds, if not thousands of studies That you personally know of, despite citing even one?
- dahart 9y ago
  > The plural of anecdote is not data. We need real stats about this There are mountains of real stats. Have you tried to look? All you have to do is google "sexism statistics". The first hit for me has a link to a real study about online interactions: http://www.pewinternet.org/2014/10/22/online-harassment/ http://www.pewinternet.org/2014/10/22/online-harassment/ > There are enough murders every day to cover the front page of hacker news with a story about each one. It doesn't mean murder is a rampant problem in our society. What a strange statement. Since there are enough murders every day to cover the front page of HN, doesn't that prove it's a problem? If sexism covered the front page of HN every day, would that mean it's less of a problem than it is now? Murder is a rampant problem in our society. There are entire countries with less than one tenth the murder rate of the U.S. Are you suggesting that because the problem is everywhere, it's not a problem?
Sir_Substance 9y ago
>At some point you can no longer say: "This is an isolated incident". The problem with this is there's really no such thing as an "anti-sexism" story. No one posts news about how they worked at a company and everyone was just a normal person. That's not news, that's just life. It happens all the time, and in fact it's probably happening right now within a few hundred meters of almost everyone reading the post, yet it will never make the news. Moreover, the vast majority of news articles on this site are analyzable as containing an absence of sexism, but that's not an "anti-sexism" story either. What I'm trying to get here is that the signal you are listening to is unidirectional. If you're incrementing a mental counter of "how many sexism-related articles have I seen" without any way of decrementing it then yeah, eventually you'll hit a number you dislike. That's not because there's any meaning behind your metric though, it's just because you've structured your metric in a way that means given infinite time, you'll hit /all/ the positive integers. Anyway, that doesn't mean that sexism isn't a major problem. But it does mean that you, jakobegger, don't know if it's a major problem or not.
skookumchuck 9y ago
The daily newspaper has stories that are interesting because they aren't happening to nearly everyone. They give people a very skewed impression of how likely they are to happen to them. The newspaper rarely bothers to write stories about things that are likely to happen to you, like dying from a hospital mistake, car crash or a drowning. The risk of dying in a terrorist incident in the US is essentially zero, but you'd never know that from the flood of newspaper stories about it.
Pica_soO 9y ago
The flood of stories only tells me "We want the power these organizations wield" to have everyone walking on eggshells and start a rioting mob towards anyone not paying respect to the social priest caste.
Chris2048 9y ago
Believing things based on quantity of internet articles on the topic is how fake news works. If a proper study of incidents like this is done, with good stats relating to the totality of incidents in context - i.e that takes into account the full picture, we could then conclude something.

verroq 9y ago

I'm not new to HN, I've been here for far longer than you have. And yes some of those stories have merit, but this is not one of them.

aepiepaey 9y ago
(account age is not a good proxy for "time on HN")
- always_good 9y ago
  But "you're probably new to HN [lil fella, but here's how it's been]" is a tacky, low-effort quip especially towards an account over 8 years old.

TheAdamAndChe 9y ago

A flood of stories on the internet doesn't necessarily prove much either. When there are billions of people on the internet, there could easily be a vocal minority that doesn't represent the majority.

geezerjay 9y ago

> A single story like this doesn't prove anything, but the flood of stories just like that paint a pretty clear picture. A flood of biased anecdotes doesn't become truth or facts after a given count. Oponionated militants don't define reality. Your comment indicates a profound lack of ratinal and objective thinking.

hueving 9y ago

The plural of anecdote is not data. We need real stats about this because individuals complaining vastly outweighs the silent remaining ones. There are enough murders every day to cover the front page of hacker news with a story about each one. It doesn't mean murder is a rampant problem in our society.

UncleMeat 9y ago
We have real stats. Hundreds, if not thousands of studies. But those get this identical reaction.
- Chris2048 9y ago
  > Hundreds, if not thousands of studies That you personally know of, despite citing even one?
dahart 9y ago
> The plural of anecdote is not data. We need real stats about this There are mountains of real stats. Have you tried to look? All you have to do is google "sexism statistics". The first hit for me has a link to a real study about online interactions: http://www.pewinternet.org/2014/10/22/online-harassment/ http://www.pewinternet.org/2014/10/22/online-harassment/ > There are enough murders every day to cover the front page of hacker news with a story about each one. It doesn't mean murder is a rampant problem in our society. What a strange statement. Since there are enough murders every day to cover the front page of HN, doesn't that prove it's a problem? If sexism covered the front page of HN every day, would that mean it's less of a problem than it is now? Murder is a rampant problem in our society. There are entire countries with less than one tenth the murder rate of the U.S. Are you suggesting that because the problem is everywhere, it's not a problem?

Sir_Substance 9y ago

>At some point you can no longer say: "This is an isolated incident". The problem with this is there's really no such thing as an "anti-sexism" story. No one posts news about how they worked at a company and everyone was just a normal person. That's not news, that's just life. It happens all the time, and in fact it's probably happening right now within a few hundred meters of almost everyone reading the post, yet it will never make the news. Moreover, the vast majority of news articles on this site are analyzable as containing an absence of sexism, but that's not an "anti-sexism" story either. What I'm trying to get here is that the signal you are listening to is unidirectional. If you're incrementing a mental counter of "how many sexism-related articles have I seen" without any way of decrementing it then yeah, eventually you'll hit a number you dislike. That's not because there's any meaning behind your metric though, it's just because you've structured your metric in a way that means given infinite time, you'll hit /all/ the positive integers. Anyway, that doesn't mean that sexism isn't a major problem. But it does mean that you, jakobegger, don't know if it's a major problem or not.

skookumchuck 9y ago

The daily newspaper has stories that are interesting because they aren't happening to nearly everyone. They give people a very skewed impression of how likely they are to happen to them. The newspaper rarely bothers to write stories about things that are likely to happen to you, like dying from a hospital mistake, car crash or a drowning. The risk of dying in a terrorist incident in the US is essentially zero, but you'd never know that from the flood of newspaper stories about it.

Pica_soO 9y ago

The flood of stories only tells me "We want the power these organizations wield" to have everyone walking on eggshells and start a rioting mob towards anyone not paying respect to the social priest caste.

Chris2048 9y ago

Believing things based on quantity of internet articles on the topic is how fake news works. If a proper study of incidents like this is done, with good stats relating to the totality of incidents in context - i.e that takes into account the full picture, we could then conclude something.