4 ms·

"Stroll through an engineering office and you are likely to hear the (mostly white, mostly male) denizens making statements" Wait, what? Why would the author g

by kache_ 7y ago

"Stroll through an engineering office and you are likely to hear the (mostly white, mostly male) denizens making statements" Wait, what? Why would the author go so far to generalize something like that based on sex and race?

smt88 7y ago
Overconfidence is absolutely generalizable to men, which I say as a man. As for the author, I understood the sentence to refer to a lack of diversity in engineering offices.
culturestate 7y ago
It’s not really a stretch to suggest that your average engineering office is mostly white and mostly male. Unnecessary, perhaps, but not inaccurate.
- hgasd 7y ago
  It is also not a stretch to suggest that women are not participating much in OSS for free or that garbage men are only white men in my city, yet who dares to do so in public?
lognp 7y ago
For agitprop to work, it needs to be repeated daily. Only that way people can forget that men have built the whole software infrastructure for free that other people are now getting rich from.
brigandish 7y ago
To imply, without the subtelty that might justify such hubris, that they are the ones who are truly above this, because they are just so damned woke. It reminds me of George Orwell's classic observation (one of many, let's give credit to those who really deserve it) in The Lion and the Unicorn[1]: > England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality. In left-wing circles it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman and that it is a duty to snigger at every English institution, from horse racing to suet puddings. It is a strange fact, but it is unquestionably true that almost any English intellectual would feel more ashamed of standing to attention during ‘God save the King’ than of stealing from a poor box. No longer is it only an English disease, millenarianism has spread worldwide and become (ostensibly) a distaste for whiteness and masculinity. There was at least some justification in being against nationalism in Orwell's time, none I can see in this irrational racism-and-sexism-as-self-flagellation for this period. [1] http://orwell.ru/library/essays/lion/english/e_eye http://orwell.ru/library/essays/lion/english/e_eye

by kache_ 7y ago

smt88 7y ago

Overconfidence is absolutely generalizable to men, which I say as a man. As for the author, I understood the sentence to refer to a lack of diversity in engineering offices.

culturestate 7y ago

It’s not really a stretch to suggest that your average engineering office is mostly white and mostly male. Unnecessary, perhaps, but not inaccurate.

hgasd 7y ago
It is also not a stretch to suggest that women are not participating much in OSS for free or that garbage men are only white men in my city, yet who dares to do so in public?

lognp 7y ago

For agitprop to work, it needs to be repeated daily. Only that way people can forget that men have built the whole software infrastructure for free that other people are now getting rich from.

brigandish 7y ago

To imply, without the subtelty that might justify such hubris, that they are the ones who are truly above this, because they are just so damned woke. It reminds me of George Orwell's classic observation (one of many, let's give credit to those who really deserve it) in The Lion and the Unicorn[1]: > England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality. In left-wing circles it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman and that it is a duty to snigger at every English institution, from horse racing to suet puddings. It is a strange fact, but it is unquestionably true that almost any English intellectual would feel more ashamed of standing to attention during ‘God save the King’ than of stealing from a poor box. No longer is it only an English disease, millenarianism has spread worldwide and become (ostensibly) a distaste for whiteness and masculinity. There was at least some justification in being against nationalism in Orwell's time, none I can see in this irrational racism-and-sexism-as-self-flagellation for this period. [1] http://orwell.ru/library/essays/lion/english/e_eye http://orwell.ru/library/essays/lion/english/e_eye