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A comment on Why I won’t give talks about being a woman in tech. Parent comment

Re:Why I won’t give talks about being a woman in tech by runeks on Wednesday July 20, 2016 @02:43PM (#12131427) 

    > If you are a member of a disadvantaged group, you often do
    > not have the ability to identify as a professional first and 
    > a group member second. That is the effect of being disadvantaged. 
    > Other people will make your life seem primarily about being a group 
    > member.
The only power other people have over you is the ability to alter your thoughts. Thoughts, however, can be ignored. Some thoughts are just harder to ignore than others, but practice makes perfect. So while it is possible for other people to instill a thought in your mind of who you supposedly are, when you are aware of this thought, you have the choice of whether or not you want to believe it. Caveat: the pleasant feelings associated with identifying with a positive thought also disappear.
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Re:Why I won’t give talks about being a woman in tech by beevai142 on Wednesday July 20, 2016 @03:41PM (#12131849)
Other people have power to not hire you, fire you, not offer you opportunities to advance, not invite you to the "old boys club" to network etc. Add to that your caveat, and good luck with that.
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Re:Why I won’t give talks about being a woman in tech by runeks on Wednesday July 20, 2016 @04:17PM (#12132149)
Every human being has the ability to not hire someone else, thankfully. How difficult life would be if we had to hire everyone we met.

With regards to having the right to fire people you've previously hired, I think that's justified. In places like Italy, where they make it hard to fire someone once hired, youth unemployment is abnormally high, because it's quite natural to shy away from entering into a contract you can't get out of.

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Re:Why I won’t give talks about being a woman in tech by rhizome on Wednesday July 20, 2016 @05:08PM (#12132526)
This doesn't account for the fundamental attribution error.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error

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Re:Why I won’t give talks about being a woman in tech by runeks on Thursday July 21, 2016 @01:20AM (#12134905)
The "fundamental attribution error" is a symptom of the very issue it itself is trying to solve: too much thinking. Thinking about why we think too much won't get us closer to a solution.

The fundamental problem is believing every thought that pops into your mind. We do that when we're not conscious of thought. Whether a compulsive thought concerns "internal characteristics of a person" or "external factors of a situation" is not relevant.

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Re:Why I won’t give talks about being a woman in tech by rhizome on Thursday July 21, 2016 @04:25PM (#12139769)
No. The FAE essentially says that choice is stronger than luck. You can't choose your way to becoming the King or Queen of England and you can't choose your way out of being a black person in the US (e.g.'s all). Every point in your comment depended on choice, without considering that intractable circumstances that everybody lives within, for good or bad.
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Re:Why I won’t give talks about being a woman in tech by runeks on Sunday July 24, 2016 @02:08AM (#12152403)
If you can't stop thinking about the intractable circumstances of your life, the problem is with your inability to stop thinking, not with the supposedly intractable circumstances of your life.

Life is inherently intractable. If you can't stop thinking about this fact, you indeed do have a problem.

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