6 ms·
Ignore the fact that it was the Monty Hall problem- everyone on HN has played that topic back and forth ad nauseum. But look at the real story here: thousands
by mabbo 8y ago
Ignore the fact that it was the Monty Hall problem- everyone on HN has played that topic back and forth ad nauseum.
But look at the real story here: thousands of men going out of their way to write letters- not quick 5 minute emails, but paper letters with envelopes and stamps- to tell a woman she was wrong. If it had been a man writing the article, would it have gotten the same reaction? I doubt it.
In my view, this is the crux of the gender problems we see in tech today. Certainly not as strong (one hopes) but certainly the same weird psychological problem that so many of us seem to have to some degree requiring men to tell women when they're wrong, but not care when men are. 'GamerGate' and the various witch hunts around that topic is a great example. It's fine if a man sucks at his job, but if a woman does and it's a role that society has labeled 'for men', suddenly it's an emotion-driven attack that must be defended vigorously.
We need to see this and watch for it if we're ever going to end it.
- ModernMech 8y agoIt wasn't just any woman, it was a threatening woman -- the "smartest" woman. They were so eager to prove her wrong, they didn't stop to even spend 5 minutes to brute force the problem. She seemed intuitively wrong, they couldn't even consider that the "world's smartest woman" saw something they, exalted PhDs, did not.
- zzt 8y agoIndeed, and we still see the same behaviour in many male-oriented public forums, including this one. And of course the subsequent denial of their own sexist and misogynistic behaviour. "It was nothing to do with her being a woman!" they will cry, ignoring the unconscious bias that led them to such an angrily disproportionate response in the first place.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- ModernMech 8y agoYeah, I'm pretty sick of it to be honest. The culture in silicon valley and its online reflections is pretty toxic and off putting.
- slededit 8y ago> But look at the real story here: thousands of men going out of their way to write letters- not quick 5 minute emails, but paper letters with envelopes and stamps- to tell a woman she was wrong. If it had been a man writing the article, would it have gotten the same reaction? I doubt it. My experience with the internet is that people just can't help themselves to point out when somebody is wrong - man or woman. Sometimes going as far to write what could be considered full essays complete with citations. Its just another anecdote but I don't think its at all obvious its because of gender. People just like feeling smart.
- ModernMech 8y agoYes, but most people don't cite a man's gender or appearance as a reason for his wrongness. Just from the sampling in the article we have two good examples of criticisms a man will never see: > Maybe women look at math problems differently than men. > You are the goat! I'm sure there were many others.
- bayesian_horse 8y agoI have heard the occasional comment about men being too irrational...
- Confusion 8y agoWe don't know the samples in the article are representative of the feedback. In fact, I would expect the authors to cherry pick the feedback for entertainment purposes. I believe the OP is right, but providing uncontroversial evidence of that is hard. You need a thorough classification of the feedback in a number of sufficiently comparable cases, involving both men and women, to provide hard evidence. And even with hard evidence in hand the conclusions could be ignored; cf. climate change. This isn't a debate that can be settled by rational evidence.
- ModernMech 8y agoHave you ever seen a woman's inbox? This scientist got 10,000 pieces of hate mail. Going by what I know about the kinds of e-mails women receive on the daily, it's safe to assume a good 2000 of those messages were misogynistic. It's just how the world works. We can all pretend like we don't have uncontroversial evidence and that we'll never know if her identity as a female really affected the response. That's pretty much the status quo. Or we can not be blind and see what's happening right in front of us.
- gedy 8y ago> If it had been a man writing the article, would it have gotten the same reaction? I doubt it. Based on what? I hear this only brought up in the media reaction of "men try and prove smart woman wrong!"
- malvosenior 8y agoGamergate wasn't about telling a women that she was wrong. It was gamers reacting to disdain and collusion from the journalists that were covering their industry. The "Gamers are Dead" articles were authored by many different journalists, not just women. Perpetuating the narrative that it was an attack on women is exactly they type of behavior that keeps Gamergate alive.
- FranzFerdiNaN 8y agoGamergate was most definitely about harassing women. "Ethics in games journalism" was the excuse for lengthy, focussed harassment campaigns against specific women who dared criticise videogames. If it really was about ethics in videogame journalism it wouldn't have started with a review about a free game.
- malvosenior 8y agoFully disagree. That review was done without the disclosure that the reviewer and reviewee were at the very least good friends. That is ethics in journalism 101. The circling the wagons of journalists defending this poor reporting and actually attacking gamers is what Gamergate was about.
- zzt 8y agoHarassing women was just another game for these troublemakers. A reasonable person would have stopped and reconsidered their behaviour, but these were not reasonable people. It was nothing to do with ethics anyway, that was just the excuse. How ethical is it to participate in a sustained campaign of harassment?
- malvosenior 8y agoPointing out hypocrisy and unprofessionalism is not harassment.
- 8y ago
- tomohawk 8y agoI remember this incident well. Ascribing this all to gender seems like too broad of a brush, and with very little evidence to back it up either. There were likely a multitude of motivations for people to write in and correct her, but isn't it natural for us to want to take someone down a peg when they are advertised as "all that" (in this case - smartest person alive), and they seem obviously wrong about something? This is a statistics problem that many people who have had statistics training have been wrong about. Seems like the setup for a perfect storm.
- axaxs 8y agoPersonally, I don't think the larger response was because of gender. Well, a couple clearly were, but there's always outliers in any group. I think the vast majority were due to her status... the smartest person in the world. That leaves people chomping at the bit to disprove it and correct any little mistake. That exists in any field, sadly. Top draft picks are scrutinized every year in sports. Every presidential gaffe gets its own 'mightier than thou' correction article. Anecdotally, I knew a mechanic who couldn't wait to read ClickNClack to find any little mistake and claim superiority.
- cascom 8y agoFrom the article I think I only saw one comment that involved gender - I think it’s pretty unfair to ascribe gender motivation to many of the responses (as embarrassing to read as they are). Secondly, what is the implied norm that the author wants - you can’t disagree with someone of a different gender who has a higher IQ than you?
- _greim_ 8y agoAnecdotally, I suspect this pattern extends all the way back to childhood. The tendency I've seen, repeatedly, is that misbehavior and horseplay is tolerated in boys, or even encouraged, whereas retribution is swift when little girls step out of line. I've found this tendency in myself, sadly. When my girls misbehave, take stupid risks, boss other kids around, tear around the house and cause general mayhem, I have to consciously skew my responses back to the mean. Not that I think the world would be a better place if we raised everyone up as misbehaving man-children, but at least I want to level the playing field somewhat for my own girls.
- mirimir 8y agoYes, this was quintessentially sexist bullshit. It's so ubiquitous that there's a word for it -- mansplaining. But it's not just about gender. Consider the racism faced by so many Black mathematicians and scientists. And Indians, such as Jagadish Chandra Bose. Even Srinivasa Ramanujan, before his genius was recognized in the UK. But recall that Black men got human rights in the US before women did. And that corporations also got them before women did. So it's arguable that sexism runs deeper than racism. On the other hand, I cringe at "smartest woman". What does that really mean? It's like describing some hugely multidimensional thing with a few numbers. All we know is that she did extremely well at whatever tests were used. And we also know that many such tests are culturally biased.
- mindslight 8y agoActually yes, "a man" would. This is the same damned groupthink ignorance anybody intelligent gets when dealing with the less intelligent. It's fundamentally not about getting the right answer, but preserving monkeysphere group cohesion and hierarchy. In fact, I'd say the zeitgeist of casting everything in an identity politics narrative is in the same exact vein. It's a nice, simple, and wrong answer, but it does sort out who has committed to the group (ie religion). I'm certainly willing to posit that women are quite often on the receiving end due to many men immediately writing them off as lower status (likely in an attempt to keep from sliding further down the scale themselves), but I'm not signing up to drink divisive kool-aid that ultimately obscures the problem.
- qwerasdf1234 8y agoI'm fed up with the kind of thinking behind your comment. A man rejecting a woman's patch? Sexism! A man correcting a woman's misstatement of fact? Sexism! A man explaining a complex subject to a woman? Sexism! A man interrupting a woman? Sexism! A man giving "no hire" feedback? Sexism! Literally any situation where a woman feels bad? Gamergate. You don't want to solve any problems. You want to be angry. You want to see discrimination. You want to tell people how to live, speak, and think. And by God, if you need to misinterpret a situation to manufacture some kind of gender grievance that lets you do that, you will. You'll never be happy, because there is always a way to twist any interaction between a man and a woman such that the man looks guilty. For fuck's sake, the Monty Hall problem has nothing to do with gender, but you've decided to take an ideological shit in the comments anyway because you woke up this morning and decided that what you really need is some good old sanctimony. This kind of thinking is a plague. It's destroyed academia, and it's eating away at any remaining trust and good will in tech. Your ilk ruin the careers of good people trying to do the right thing just because you want to manufacture offenses and victims. Well, fuck your ideology. After decades of voting Democratic, I voted for Trump in 2016. There are millions of people like me. I know this message won't get through to you, but other people might see it and try to do fight in some way.
- justtopostthis3 8y agoPaper letters with envelopes and stamps were as ubiquitous in 1990 as email is today, and there have been plenty of articles in The Straight Dope where Cecil Adams - a fictional, but decidedly male identity - claims to have received letters telling him he's wrong "from every unemployed Ph.D. in North America, plus a few who aren’t unemployed."
- wizzard 8y agoI think plenty of people would have still written in but almost certainly the tone of the letters would have been different. Also, more people probably would have second-guessed their intuition, at least for a moment, and perhaps there would have been a few less letters.