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So much wrong with this comment. First of all, you need to go do some remedial math. The percentage of DWTS watchers who are women is no predictor of what wom

by jholman 13y ago

So much wrong with this comment. First of all, you need to go do some remedial math. The percentage of DWTS watchers who are women is no predictor of what women do. This fallacy is called confusion of the inverse, and it's a probabilistic variant of the better-known converse error. Second, even if 99% of women were to be DWTS fans, it has no bearing on anigbrowl's comment. The reason that "while your wife watches DWTS" is part of the problem (as anigbrowl identified) is that it implies that (watching DWTS) is to women as (checking out 1130 sims) is to men. It implies that in situations where men do interesting tech things, women watch TV (I assume "DWTS" is some kind of TV?). It's basically a put-down against women collectively. Note that if someone were to be putting down humanity collectively, I wouldn't complain. Third, "politically correct" is a label principally used by reactionary dullards to dismiss arguments or objections that they see as excessively leftist. It's equivalent to calling someone a commie. Mind you, some people are communists, some people are knee-jerk excessive leftists, etc... but if that's true in a particular situation, you can just explain why it's true. Calling it "political correctness" is just a lowbrow dismissal. That's a lot of incorrectness for one 20-word sentence.

philwelch 13y ago
First, Dancing with the Stars is one of the highest rated shows on TV; the fact that it has a 2/3 women audience indicates that very many women will make the time to watch it. Second, setting aside households with two TV's, only one spouse can enjoy passive entertainment at a time. Presumably while we watch football, women can do something fascinating and productive. Third, political correctness is a phenomenon of white liberal prigs who go out of their way to take offense because they have nothing useful or productive to contribute to the public discourse. Of course they would react unkindly to being called out on it but I would advise you not to take their defensive lashing out at face value.
- jholman 13y ago
  To the first, IF as you say it's 2/3 women, and IF as one short Google search suggested to me it has around 13M viewers, and IF we agree that those are all in the US and the US has around, what, 100M adult women?... then that's 8% of those adult women watching it. If those 13M include people outside the US, then it's lower than 8%. Apparently 92% of women do not watch DWTS. In response to the second, I don't understand your point at all. Help me out here? As to the third, I agree that there certainly exist some fools, most of them white and liberal (and maybe prigs?), who have a mental pattern wherein they make knee-jerk complaints about certain behaviour being offensive, without having a well-considered ethical system that justifies this complaint, instead using these complaints to signal their belonging to a certain social clique. If that's what you mean by political correctness, I agree that it exists, and is odious. Whether or not such fools object to your remarks should be entirely beneath you, however. So raising the potential political incorrectness of your remark appears, to me, to be saying "I'm going to use this straw-man argument to attack those who disagree with me". And this is why I brought up the fact that it's a lowbrow dismissal, and suggested that on those rare occasions when the label does fit, you can instead construct an independent explanation of what's wrong with the political correctness.
  - henderson101 13y ago
    I don't want to defend a sexist comment, but I think the point the opposing comment was making was that of the viewership of DWTS, 2/3 are women - so, 2/3 of 13M, not that 2/3 of the US population watch DWTS. I think that thread of your comment is looking for a fight where one probably doesn't exist. It's also not sexist to identify a specific TV show with a female demographic. Second point was pretty easy to understand - if a household has 2 adults and 1 TV, only one Adult at a time can watch their preferred TV shows. If there is a second TV, possibly more, the Adults stand a fair chance that they will be able to watch their shows.
    - jholman 13y ago
      > I don't want to defend a sexist comment Okay, fair enough, understood, and I'll direct my response to my disagreement about the math of it. Why would it matter that 2/3 of DWTS viewers are female? Suppose that I publish a fanzine called "jh's dumb stuff", for which 100% of the readers are female (that's right, my mom is the only reader). Would it make sense to say "you can look at this awesome thing while your wife reads 'jh's dumb stuff'"? No. The relevance, here, is that original oafish-seeming comment was "while your wife watches DWTS", which appears to imply that it's typical for wives to do that. And, based on the stats I could find, it is NOT typical for wives to do that. Over 90% of American women do not watch the show, right? Mathematically, the fact that 2/3 of DWTS viewers are female is just not relevant.
      - philwelch 13y ago
        A specific event doesn't have to have >50% probability to work as an evocative example. For Christ's sake, you're missing the forest for a quarter square inch of bark on one particular tree.
  - philwelch 13y ago
    Likewise, you can probably construct a more sophisticated argument than calling people "reactionary dullards", but you curiously choose not to. Somehow that isn't a lowbrow dismissal.
- derleth 13y ago
  > Third, political correctness is a phenomenon of white liberal prigs who go out of their way to take offense because they have nothing useful or productive to contribute to the public discourse. If you've defined it that way, of course that'll be how you see it and nobody will shake your conviction. This makes conversations with you on the topic as dull as someone who doesn't grasp enough statistics to understand trivial errors, but so be it. The rest of the world has a more nuanced take on it, which begins with the idea that being rude to people who lack relative power in a given situation is still morally wrong and tactically quite stupid.
- seszett 13y ago
  > Second, setting aside households with two TV's, only one spouse can enjoy passive entertainment at a time. Presumably while we watch football, women can do something fascinating and productive. I happen to enjoy watching the same shows and movies my wife watches on TV, and I somehow assumed it was true of the majority of couples.
  - philwelch 13y ago
    Do neither of you ever watch anything the other doesn't care for, or do you just choose to put up with stuff you wouldn't otherwise watch for the sake of spending time together? With my wife I have maybe an 80-90% overlap in what we like to watch but the other 10-20% we can each generally do our own thing while the other one watches something.
- anigbrowl 13y ago
  First, Dancing with the Stars is one of the highest rated shows on TV; the fact that it has a 2/3 women audience indicates that very many women will make the time to watch it. Indeed so, but it doesn't follow that they are watching it instead of writing code, which implication was what I objected to in the first place; although it wasn't malicious, it was a lazy piece of stereotyping that I didn't feel was appropriate in the context of a discussion about sexist stereotyping. Second, setting aside households with two TV's, only one spouse can enjoy passive entertainment at a time. ??? Third, political correctness is a phenomenon of white liberal prigs who go out of their way to take offense because they have nothing useful or productive to contribute to the public discourse. Oh noes, you have outed me! I shrivel up in the face of your freethinking ways. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_correctness http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_correctness
  - philwelch 13y ago
    Well most TV shows air at a particular time of day, so if you watched it you presumably wouldn't be coding at that particular time of day, either. Women code while their husbands watch football.

by jholman 13y ago

philwelch 13y ago

First, Dancing with the Stars is one of the highest rated shows on TV; the fact that it has a 2/3 women audience indicates that very many women will make the time to watch it. Second, setting aside households with two TV's, only one spouse can enjoy passive entertainment at a time. Presumably while we watch football, women can do something fascinating and productive. Third, political correctness is a phenomenon of white liberal prigs who go out of their way to take offense because they have nothing useful or productive to contribute to the public discourse. Of course they would react unkindly to being called out on it but I would advise you not to take their defensive lashing out at face value.

jholman 13y ago
To the first, IF as you say it's 2/3 women, and IF as one short Google search suggested to me it has around 13M viewers, and IF we agree that those are all in the US and the US has around, what, 100M adult women?... then that's 8% of those adult women watching it. If those 13M include people outside the US, then it's lower than 8%. Apparently 92% of women do not watch DWTS. In response to the second, I don't understand your point at all. Help me out here? As to the third, I agree that there certainly exist some fools, most of them white and liberal (and maybe prigs?), who have a mental pattern wherein they make knee-jerk complaints about certain behaviour being offensive, without having a well-considered ethical system that justifies this complaint, instead using these complaints to signal their belonging to a certain social clique. If that's what you mean by political correctness, I agree that it exists, and is odious. Whether or not such fools object to your remarks should be entirely beneath you, however. So raising the potential political incorrectness of your remark appears, to me, to be saying "I'm going to use this straw-man argument to attack those who disagree with me". And this is why I brought up the fact that it's a lowbrow dismissal, and suggested that on those rare occasions when the label does fit, you can instead construct an independent explanation of what's wrong with the political correctness.
- henderson101 13y ago
  I don't want to defend a sexist comment, but I think the point the opposing comment was making was that of the viewership of DWTS, 2/3 are women - so, 2/3 of 13M, not that 2/3 of the US population watch DWTS. I think that thread of your comment is looking for a fight where one probably doesn't exist. It's also not sexist to identify a specific TV show with a female demographic. Second point was pretty easy to understand - if a household has 2 adults and 1 TV, only one Adult at a time can watch their preferred TV shows. If there is a second TV, possibly more, the Adults stand a fair chance that they will be able to watch their shows.
  - jholman 13y ago
    > I don't want to defend a sexist comment Okay, fair enough, understood, and I'll direct my response to my disagreement about the math of it. Why would it matter that 2/3 of DWTS viewers are female? Suppose that I publish a fanzine called "jh's dumb stuff", for which 100% of the readers are female (that's right, my mom is the only reader). Would it make sense to say "you can look at this awesome thing while your wife reads 'jh's dumb stuff'"? No. The relevance, here, is that original oafish-seeming comment was "while your wife watches DWTS", which appears to imply that it's typical for wives to do that. And, based on the stats I could find, it is NOT typical for wives to do that. Over 90% of American women do not watch the show, right? Mathematically, the fact that 2/3 of DWTS viewers are female is just not relevant.
    - philwelch 13y ago
      A specific event doesn't have to have >50% probability to work as an evocative example. For Christ's sake, you're missing the forest for a quarter square inch of bark on one particular tree.
- philwelch 13y ago
  Likewise, you can probably construct a more sophisticated argument than calling people "reactionary dullards", but you curiously choose not to. Somehow that isn't a lowbrow dismissal.
derleth 13y ago
> Third, political correctness is a phenomenon of white liberal prigs who go out of their way to take offense because they have nothing useful or productive to contribute to the public discourse. If you've defined it that way, of course that'll be how you see it and nobody will shake your conviction. This makes conversations with you on the topic as dull as someone who doesn't grasp enough statistics to understand trivial errors, but so be it. The rest of the world has a more nuanced take on it, which begins with the idea that being rude to people who lack relative power in a given situation is still morally wrong and tactically quite stupid.
seszett 13y ago
> Second, setting aside households with two TV's, only one spouse can enjoy passive entertainment at a time. Presumably while we watch football, women can do something fascinating and productive. I happen to enjoy watching the same shows and movies my wife watches on TV, and I somehow assumed it was true of the majority of couples.
- philwelch 13y ago
  Do neither of you ever watch anything the other doesn't care for, or do you just choose to put up with stuff you wouldn't otherwise watch for the sake of spending time together? With my wife I have maybe an 80-90% overlap in what we like to watch but the other 10-20% we can each generally do our own thing while the other one watches something.
anigbrowl 13y ago
First, Dancing with the Stars is one of the highest rated shows on TV; the fact that it has a 2/3 women audience indicates that very many women will make the time to watch it. Indeed so, but it doesn't follow that they are watching it instead of writing code, which implication was what I objected to in the first place; although it wasn't malicious, it was a lazy piece of stereotyping that I didn't feel was appropriate in the context of a discussion about sexist stereotyping. Second, setting aside households with two TV's, only one spouse can enjoy passive entertainment at a time. ??? Third, political correctness is a phenomenon of white liberal prigs who go out of their way to take offense because they have nothing useful or productive to contribute to the public discourse. Oh noes, you have outed me! I shrivel up in the face of your freethinking ways. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_correctness http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_correctness
- philwelch 13y ago
  Well most TV shows air at a particular time of day, so if you watched it you presumably wouldn't be coding at that particular time of day, either. Women code while their husbands watch football.