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I agree with the general point here and it's a good concept to keep in mind. Where Scott and I disagree is that 'sexual harassment in silicon valley' strikes m
by setgree 9y ago
I agree with the general point here and it's a good concept to keep in mind.
Where Scott and I disagree is that 'sexual harassment in silicon valley' strikes me as a different phenomenon: preference falsification [0], or 'private truths, public lies' (which is what Timur Kuran called his book about it). It's a model for why some regimes seem to fall very suddenly, and the intuition is: even if people publicly don't oppose something, they might privately all (or mostly) oppose it, but could be waiting for a certain threshold of their peers to say something before they speak out. When someone does speak out, you see a sudden cascade of dissenting opinion from people who were just waiting for these first mover(s), whereas it would have seemed before that everyone supported the status quo.
In this model, all a revolution takes is for someone to get fed up enough to make the costs of dissent seem really low (like Mohammed Bouaziz, the vendor who set himself on fire in Tunisia in 2010). For the subject at hand, I think Susan Fowler was someone whose threshold for speaking out was zero people, but once people saw her dissent, they too were willing to voice their private beliefs.
So people aren't going actively looking for sexual harassment -- rather, it's always been there, and now we're seeing private dissent made public.
I readily admit that one could make this same argument about undocumented immigrants and crime.
[0] https://www.jstor.org/stable/2232928?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents https://www.jstor.org/stable/2232928?seq=1#page_scan_tab_con...
- the_watcher 9y agoI don't know if he disagrees with you. I read his list as simply a list of examples he could think of where you might see someone describe something as "the rise of <problem>", regardless of whether it's a problem at all or whether it's always been a problem that is just now being called out.
- simplicio 9y agoYea, the post seems a little confused. I don't think most people talking about sexism in Silicon Valley or racism at Starbucks or crime by illegal immigrants are claiming a new or rising epidemic. They're claiming to be drawing attention to long existing problems. Of course one can argue the degree to which these problems are real or not, but Scott seems to be trying too hard to find recent "Summer of the Shark" examples that will push peoples political buttons, at the cost of confusing what he's talking about. People discussing voter fraud, school shootings and campus speech issues, on the other hand, do tend to claim there's a recent "epidemic" regarding the issues, and thus seem better examples of what Scott want's to discuss.
- Zanni 9y agoI believe, in this context, that he's not dismissing the reality of sexism in Silicon Valley so much as suggesting it's not worse than other industries but getting a lot more attention than other industries right now. The SlateStarCodex post he links to [1] is really worth reading and makes the same point more effectively. [1] http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/09/16/cardiologists-and-chinese-robbers/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/09/16/cardiologists-and-chine...