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This is topical because "The Imitation Game" has been in the news and movie theaters recently: I come from a Soviet immigrant family whose stance on all things
by YuriNiyazov 12y ago
This is topical because "The Imitation Game" has been in the news and movie theaters recently:
I come from a Soviet immigrant family whose stance on all things LGBTQ is predictably conservative. Sometime in high school, as part of my interest in CS, I read Turing's life story. The story of a man whose contributions were fundamental to my chosen field being persecuted due to his sexual orientation cinched my views on the matter: talent and contribution are everything, the rest is private and irrelevant.
- serve_yay 12y ago> talent and contribution are everything, the rest is private and irrelevant Indeed. However, sometimes this viewpoint is considered "erasure" -- if I say your sexuality/gender/ethnicity is irrelevant to code, that's really me eliminating it from the picture of who you are as a person. It's an interesting conundrum, because while these things shouldn't get in the way, at the same time, we want people to feel comfortable. We don't want people to feel that they must downplay or cover up parts of themselves. So we want to care about these things, but caring about them too much is bad also (because then we'd be fetishizing).
- Kalium 12y agoThere's a basic conflict between people who consider identity contextually relevant and people who consider identity universally relevant. To the former group, all that matters is that you did good work, full stop. To the latter group, that's erasure.