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How misogyny helped me beat the market I had a problem - figure out how to make money off the stock market. Luckily I was part of a culture - a privileged myso

How misogyny helped me beat the market I had a problem - figure out how to make money off the stock market. Luckily I was part of a culture - a privileged mysoginist racist evil culture - which recognizes that there is an objective reality that can be approximated by concrete models and empirical corrections. So I did some bayesian stats and came up with a moneymaking stat arb strategy. That's about as reasonable an argument as the one contained in the OP. It occasionally brushes against reality (e.g. feminist critiques of analytic philosophy and objectivity [1]) but really just attributes intellectual success to an unrelated ideology. That said, I'm upvoting this in the hopes that someone can steelman her argument, which could be interesting. The aforementioned steelman should hopefully also reject my argument. [1] http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/femapproach-analytic/#FemCriAna http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/femapproach-analytic/#FemC... http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminism-epistemology/ http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminism-epistemology/

arjie 12y ago
Steel man. Interesting: http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Steel_man http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Steel_man . Sort of an idea in the vein of (but stronger than) the Principle of Charity.
- yummyfajitas 12y ago
  Yes, the steelman is a stronger variation of the typical principle of charity. It goes beyond interpreting your opponent's argument as strongly as possible, all the way to actually fixing your opponent's argument. It's a great technique, one that I'm not as good at as I'd like to be. On the one hand, arguments supporting feminism that I see tend to be vacuous and borderline dishonest (case in point: this article). But there are sufficiently many smart and honest people who buy into the general theory that it's hard for me to completely reject it. That's why I'm so curious in threads like these, and why I'd love to see a steelman. Some good steelmen would allow me to draw a reasonable conclusion about the theory itself, rather than merely it's vocal proponents. I could then safely either accept or reject it.
- jessaustin 12y ago
  ISTM that term could stand some improvement before being used in a feminist discussion.
Uhhrrr 12y ago
One thing to note is that the particular problem was known, but all the solutions involved suffering: "“Switch to a slower directory-based method,” or “Use a file size hack that had bugs,” or any number of other unhelpful things". Maybe this comes from a macho sensibility. Another example is the problem that it's easy for a noob or fat-fingered typist to type "rm -rf *". The current solution is "lump it". Maybe women are more likely to weight things in favor of not blowing things up (data from actual women needed), and feminism is required to give equal weight to that viewpoint. Many maybes here. I am spitballing too.
- arjie 12y ago
  You want to allow rm -rf * (shell globbing happens first, so rm cannot know it was called with ). You also want to allow rm -rf ./ but you don't want to allow rm -rf / *. And that's where `--preserve-root` comes in, which is default now I believe. EDIT: How annoying. The asterisk makes emphasis weirdly.
- simoncion 12y ago
  rm -rf * is a power tool. Because of its usefulness, you don't remove the blade from a circular saw. You do, however, put a hand-guard on the blade to prevent catastrophic accidents. Note that rm -rf / requires --no-preserve-root to remove / on most (all?) distros. The shitty performance of atime is shitty performance, rather than a useful attribute of the tool.
hashbanged 12y ago
The OP responded. Basically, linux needs feminist spaces because FOSS communities are traditionally sexist spaces where their contributions are not welcome. The point isn't that no one else could have had the idea, that's absurd. The point is that no one had until that point, so it wasn't trivial. It's the banal idea that if we have spaces where marginalized groups are able to contribute without all of the extra baggage associated with being a part of the group. In the FOSS community, you face extra criticism as a woman.
- yummyfajitas 12y ago
  I'm confused - did the traditional "go upstream to Linus" community reject her patch? Or did she somehow get a patch into the kernel via a sidechannel through linuxchix? Near as I can tell, this was merely a case of the "hyper male sexist" community letting good code speak for itself.
  - LyndsySimon 12y ago
    I understood the article to be saying that the values that the author identified with the LinuxChix community assisted in bringing the issue to their attention, helping them understand that the use case didn't require the performance penalty that atime represented at the time.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
DanBC 12y ago
Here you are yet again "just asking question" on a post about women. It is never ever the other way around. You simply never make questions the other way. I have to point this out because you claim to be unaware of it and you claim to be even handed in your questioning.
- yummyfajitas 12y ago
  I don't understand. What is the "other way"? Are there posts claiming that other political/philosophical ideologies (I guess one that is "opposite" to feminism) result in feats of systems programming? If so, the only reason I haven't asked is that I've never seen them. This is in fact the first article I've seen online making a "political ideology X => programming feat Y" assertion. I have, on one occasion, asked someone in person a similar question about his Objectivist principles. His justification was about as weak as the one given here. Last time you claimed I never asked questions the "other way" on a different topic, I pointed out explicitly cases where I did: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8372354 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8372354

arjie 12y ago

Steel man. Interesting: http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Steel_man http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Steel_man . Sort of an idea in the vein of (but stronger than) the Principle of Charity.

yummyfajitas 12y ago
Yes, the steelman is a stronger variation of the typical principle of charity. It goes beyond interpreting your opponent's argument as strongly as possible, all the way to actually fixing your opponent's argument. It's a great technique, one that I'm not as good at as I'd like to be. On the one hand, arguments supporting feminism that I see tend to be vacuous and borderline dishonest (case in point: this article). But there are sufficiently many smart and honest people who buy into the general theory that it's hard for me to completely reject it. That's why I'm so curious in threads like these, and why I'd love to see a steelman. Some good steelmen would allow me to draw a reasonable conclusion about the theory itself, rather than merely it's vocal proponents. I could then safely either accept or reject it.
jessaustin 12y ago
ISTM that term could stand some improvement before being used in a feminist discussion.

Uhhrrr 12y ago

One thing to note is that the particular problem was known, but all the solutions involved suffering: "“Switch to a slower directory-based method,” or “Use a file size hack that had bugs,” or any number of other unhelpful things". Maybe this comes from a macho sensibility. Another example is the problem that it's easy for a noob or fat-fingered typist to type "rm -rf *". The current solution is "lump it". Maybe women are more likely to weight things in favor of not blowing things up (data from actual women needed), and feminism is required to give equal weight to that viewpoint. Many maybes here. I am spitballing too.

arjie 12y ago
You want to allow rm -rf * (shell globbing happens first, so rm cannot know it was called with ). You also want to allow rm -rf ./ but you don't want to allow rm -rf / *. And that's where `--preserve-root` comes in, which is default now I believe. EDIT: How annoying. The asterisk makes emphasis weirdly.
simoncion 12y ago
rm -rf * is a power tool. Because of its usefulness, you don't remove the blade from a circular saw. You do, however, put a hand-guard on the blade to prevent catastrophic accidents. Note that rm -rf / requires --no-preserve-root to remove / on most (all?) distros. The shitty performance of atime is shitty performance, rather than a useful attribute of the tool.

hashbanged 12y ago

The OP responded. Basically, linux needs feminist spaces because FOSS communities are traditionally sexist spaces where their contributions are not welcome. The point isn't that no one else could have had the idea, that's absurd. The point is that no one had until that point, so it wasn't trivial. It's the banal idea that if we have spaces where marginalized groups are able to contribute without all of the extra baggage associated with being a part of the group. In the FOSS community, you face extra criticism as a woman.

yummyfajitas 12y ago
I'm confused - did the traditional "go upstream to Linus" community reject her patch? Or did she somehow get a patch into the kernel via a sidechannel through linuxchix? Near as I can tell, this was merely a case of the "hyper male sexist" community letting good code speak for itself.
- LyndsySimon 12y ago
  I understood the article to be saying that the values that the author identified with the LinuxChix community assisted in bringing the issue to their attention, helping them understand that the use case didn't require the performance penalty that atime represented at the time.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

DanBC 12y ago

Here you are yet again "just asking question" on a post about women. It is never ever the other way around. You simply never make questions the other way. I have to point this out because you claim to be unaware of it and you claim to be even handed in your questioning.

yummyfajitas 12y ago
I don't understand. What is the "other way"? Are there posts claiming that other political/philosophical ideologies (I guess one that is "opposite" to feminism) result in feats of systems programming? If so, the only reason I haven't asked is that I've never seen them. This is in fact the first article I've seen online making a "political ideology X => programming feat Y" assertion. I have, on one occasion, asked someone in person a similar question about his Objectivist principles. His justification was about as weak as the one given here. Last time you claimed I never asked questions the "other way" on a different topic, I pointed out explicitly cases where I did: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8372354 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8372354