It's a news story about a health patient, yet Naomi seems to expect NPR to act as Martha's personal insurer and care advocate. Would it have been better if NPR didn't publish it at all? Then Naomi would never have been given the chance to virtue signal for exposure. Lose-lose.
In this case plenty of other news outlets have covered her in their articles about Martha: https://www.wired.co.uk/article/iron-lung-maker-community
As far as "tech/white/male", you really only have to read the comments people post in any thread about her on Reddit to figure that one out. I can't even imagine what her inbox must look like.
> She has only a handful of collars left. "I really am desperate," she says. "That's the most scary thing in my life right now — is not finding anybody that can make those collars."
Naomi does a lot of interesting work and is snubbed quite a lot. She made it quite public that this was happening and yet NPR still snubbed her.
From the point of view of M.L., she is maybe one of several that promised to help but could do it (not a fault of Naomi Wu of course, but of those that first contacted her for help and then left things unfinished), so it doesn't surprise me that she was not mentioned.
> bringing a Twitter personality into a story that's not really about her?
Wu was already involved in this. Per her comments she'd already sent packages of collars to be tested and altered / fitted.
Hell, mentioning that there was a volunteer / grassroots effort to produce new collars would have been more honest than the article going "collars where?"
It's NPR. There's no excuse for poor sensationalist journalism even from them.
This is such a ridiculous, asinine, and outright wrong assertion that it warrants no reasoned response.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29023822 also broke the site guidelines. That's not cool, regardless of how bad other comments are or you feel they are.
Would you please review them and take the intended spirit of this place more to heart? We'd appreciate it.
You also broke the site guidelines by crossing into personal attack below: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29025655
We're trying to avoid this kind of thing here, so if you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and take the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
Get off your high horse.
Is NPR obligated to mention all failed attempts to acquire new collars? It seems unlikely they excluded this information because of Naomi's gender or race.
It's great that Naomi donated successfully before and has tried to again, but as you noted she's received plenty of positive media from her donations already.
[1] - "I just could not get anyone to visit her and do final fitting and troubleshooting on the collars I had manufactured for her." - https://twitter.com/RealSexyCyborg/status/145289590785527398...
It's amazing to me how people will bend their principles because they admire someone.
Dale Dougherty later posted an open letter in apology.
As a community we are not really a suit and tie sort of affair. Whether that means a bikini, a nice cotton henley or your favorite cyberpunk cosplay - who cares?
In a similar vein, if I wanted to make a YouTube channel that appeals to true hackers, I might stop shaving and showering for a few days and wear the hoodie. That sounds like a great marketing strategy to stand out from the boring suit & tie crowd ;)
EDIT: Marketing agencies already beat me to it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FcLsNOMqyD8
One of the traditional hacker values is personal agency - doing things because you like them, not to fit in or sell.
In general we need to take people at their word and not supply our own beliefs. We diminish ourselves when we minimize the agency of others.
You will have a difficult time navigating the real world if you approach public personas with such a trusting approach.
"I just want you to know I’m not a pedophile" Jeffrey Epstein
"I did not have sexual relations with that woman" Bill Clinton
"I'm a benevolent dictator." Harvey Weinstein
In my opinion, Wu is a public persona, too, because the majority of her income directly depends on the public's perception of her. Also, her influencer marketing with the Creality printer brand is probably conditioned on her presenting in a certain way. So regardless of whether she dresses that way for guys or for girls, I'd argue that my point still stands: She made a calculated decision to publicly present herself in that way and given that she appears to be highly intelligent, she was probably aware of the consequences (including male attention) beforehand.
In case this hasn't been explained to you yet: Someones fashion choices are not an excuse to behave inappropriately or give them unwanted advances. If she wants to dress that way and someone behaves inappropriately towards her, the issue isn't with her.
Also, calling herself sexy and wearing a bikini is specifically aimed at males, so no defense of her should include the phrase "white male". Of course most people paying attention to anything she does are male--she's doing that deliberately!
Finally, the Halo Effect is a thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo_effect
I think this part of her complaint with western media is legit. They all just assume that she’s doing it for the views. Ignore the gay and lesbian scene in Asia entirely to come up with a fake narrative. Completely ignore that she has done some good work just because of the way she looks. Then go on and on about inclusivity and LGBT rights.
Even Adam Savage’s Tested.com seems to have snubbed her. They requested a few CR-30s be sent over for review but then <some shenanigans> And the review never came and I guess they never sent them back to her.
Calling yourself "sexy" and dressing in a bikini appeals to males, and males greatly outnumber lesbians, and that will lead to lots of male twitter followers who would not follow her if all she had were her actions and words. She can't not know this stuff.
You can argue that she isn't deliberately appealing to men, but at some point, "in the knowledge that" is indistinguishable from "deliberately" by anyone who can't read minds.
But what does that have to do with the work she does? And why is that her problem? Given the snubs she’s received, I’d argue that her appearance actually costs her. If she looked more like the western ideal of a female lesbian hacker she’d get more work and sponsorships.
She's doing something that makes it look like she's gaining fans for reasons unrelated to the quality of her work. People will be skeptical of the work of a person who trades on something other than her work.
After all this time the media, popular personalities, maker communities that espouse inclusivity didn’t once look at her work? Got the first mass produced Infinite Z printer to market - still skeptical? Got Chinese companies to comply to open source licenses - still skeptical? Makes a bunch of stuff - still skeptical?
Naomi certainly does seem right that all these communities are judging her on her appearance.
Women who are attracted to women exist. It's possible to think that yourself is sexy without desiring external attention. What you're doing here is projecting and victim-blaming.
I think that honestly underestimates the amount of work that goes into being a consistently successful tech-themed content creator: Wearing a bikini isn't enough to brave competition and short-lived attention spans in that space. Being attractive helps in media, for sure, but you can't go on without putting work into the essential content for very long.
P: "you really only have to read the comments in pretty much every thread about her to figure that one out. I can't even imagine what her inbox must look like."
And to P I'd like to reply that I agree with GP: It appears to me that she has voluntarily joined fighting the anti- white/male fight.
No. She expects a reputable news outlet to fact check their own story, especially since they covered most of the same information the Wired article did 4 years ago - which, naturally, mentioned Wu.
There could be all sorts of reasons NPR didn't mention Naomi. How did Martha get the collars before Naomi's donation? How many years of collar donations/purchases is NPR obligated to mention in their article? Is there anyone else outraged they didn't get mentioned for providing collars years ago?
No I think Wu just expects [0] NPR not to ignore relevant facts to construct a misleading narrative.
> Then Naomi would never have been given the chance to virtue signal for exposure.
Naomi Wu is hardly lacking in exposure opportunities or the ability to exploit them, so even if the basic false dichotomy you propose wasn't false, it wouldn't really be lose-lose for NPR and Wu. (NPR and Martha maybe, since the exposure, even starting in the misleading form NPR presented it, does probably make it more likely that her issue gets resolved, but that's where the false dilemma comes into play, since the story didn't actually have to be misleading.)
[0] in the normative, but emphatically not the predictive, sense of the word.
So yeah, she has a humongous chip on her shoulder, and maybe she gets carried away with that anger, but the chip on her shoulder comes from some legitimate grievances.
Regardless, she has a lot of respect in the maker space because she's one of the few people who says "oh yeah, we can jump in and come up with help for this medical/prosthetic problem" and doesn't half-ass it. She's very specific about that - this is one of those cases where Minimum Viable Product is unacceptable, these items need to stand up to real life and 24/7 contact with human skin.
Even more, Martha herself commented on her video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4VKZTmTP7oY&lc=UgyYG8WsY8fN4...
I think it's fair to discuss NPR as propaganda here.
> And of course- when someone does something, but they aren't the right kind of someone let's pretend her name did not come up at the top of the search when you fact-checked this story right @NPRHealth ? Just say you want a straight white American tech bro to do it.
NPR is rife with bias, if you know how to look for it. I recommend reading Propaganda by Ed Bernays & then thinking about why the people who make huge donations to NPR make those donations (IMO, it's because NPR largely exists to reinforce the existing social structure).
At which point you're going to have a serious confirmation bias problem. How would I know that I know how to look for it? Easy: I found some.
"If only you'd open your eyes and look for the truth!" is kinda how that comes across to me.
Can you expound on this? I have come to a similar observation, but would be interested in hearing what specifically they’re reinforcing.
ETA (since I'm rate-limited...):
> Do tell us more about NPR's liberal bias.
Sure. By telling these kind of fables about how global capitalism is actually good for everybody, they're trying to prevent growing class consciousness that would eventually force fundamental, revolutionary change to how we allocate resources.
Oh wait, you thought I was to the right of NPR? Sorry, no, that probability distribution is barely distinguishable from Nazism at this point. Also no one to the right of NPR would ever use the term "third-way" in criticism of it.
YES. I love NPR as a news source, because of the oddball stories they cover. But they are solidly, solidly in the 'bootlicker' camp when it comes to how great and exceptional international businesses are at solving humanities problems.
And yeah, it sounds like NPR should have picked up on the maker community here. Articles which precede this one by years bring up Naomi Wu. https://www.wired.co.uk/article/iron-lung-maker-community
Given this, I think it's fair for Ms. Wu to have a hot take on this.
Highly recommend reading Propaganda by Ed Bernays. I saw it recommended on HN years ago, so I bought and read it -- it really helped make me a smarter consumer of news.
How do you fact check whether someone can find something?
Their inability to find something doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. It just means that she personally can’t find them.
And the collars didn’t necessarily work either. They were shipped, not installed/tested. So the problem doesn’t seem to have been solved.
Looking at the top google hits and previous stories on your subject[0] seems like the bare minimum fact checking to do?
> And the collars didn’t necessarily work either. They were shipped, not installed/tested. So the problem doesn’t seem to have been solved.
Seems pretty logical that they'd have to be refined given they're made and shipped from china with no access to the iron lung or ability to travel back and forth personally. That's something the NPR journo could actually have assisted with.
[0] https://www.wired.co.uk/article/iron-lung-maker-community
That's not the job of the journalist! Are we to expect our journalists to solve the problems they report on? Should every story also turn the journalist into an advocate - be it legal, healthcare, employment, etc. - that works on their behalf?
I think there's room for critique here though the "assumption of bad faith" runs rampant in this discourse already. Yet critiquing the reporter for not acting as their personal local news network "Problem Solvers" segment isn't the real issue here.
Are you sure about that? Look at the pinned comment on the original video from 2 years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4VKZTmTP7oY
Then the accusation that this effort was omitted because she wasn't a white tech bro is out of left field and frankly, very unlikely. NPR regularly goes out of its way to provide viewpoints and credit well outside the "white tech bro" sphere.
Seeing as this is a 2021 story, either Martha did not receive the parts, the parts needed a revision or they did no research.
If the parts needed a revision, you would expect the story to say something like 'an entrepreneur has been working with Martha to create replacements but they are having trouble with final fitment.'
The article: She has only a handful of collars left. "I really am desperate," she says. "That's the most scary thing in my life right now — is not finding anybody that can make those collars."
Makes it sound like noone has tried to do anything. So that leaves someone who has tried to help with the feeling that they are being ignored either by malicious or incompetent.
There is no timeline or context given here. So I don't know who this person is, and what direct interaction they have or haven't had with person in that article. All I can see is that this is a YouTuber, with ~2k Twitter followers and the tagline "It's all about merit until merit has tits". Who is "working on it", but hasn't shipped the parts yet. And who feels that NPR (who probably doesn't know she exists) deliberately cut her out because she's "not a straight white American tech bro".
To me, that thread is Twitter in a nutshell. Off the charts narcism and self-promotion, revolving around race/gender-charged drama. There may be some information that I'm missing here. But if you're starting from a place of NPR being too right-wing or bigoted, then I've seen enough.
A 2017 Wired article https://www.wired.co.uk/article/iron-lung-maker-community states that Naomi was spearheading the effort then.
I deleted my account after I simply asked a question one day in a thread with a prominent startup founder who happened to be a Black woman. Someone else on her thread had stated that she was worried about encouraging her daughter to learn to code because she felt that nobody would hire her "due to the extreme racism that was obviously prevalent in tech." I simply stated that my company was trying hard to hire folks like her daughter, and asked what we could do to make people like her feel welcome and understand that it wasn't a problem at our company. Then the veil was pulled back on the performance. The questioner didn't really have a question. She simply posed it as a performance, and then I was mobbed with statements telling me that I needed to "Listen and let Black women speak." These narcissists aren't interested in solutions, only in gaining status in their silly, secular imitation of evangelical fundamentalist churches. Replace "Satan" with "toxic whiteness" and you have Dana Carvey's church lady on SNL in the 90's.
I think you read this wrong. She's following ~2k people, but she has 185.7K followers (and 1.46M subscribers on Youtube).
> There may be some information that I'm missing here.
Other posters have provided a bit more information that might change your interpretation of why Naomi tweeted this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29015822
> But if you're starting from a place of NPR being too right-wing or bigoted, then I've seen enough.
I agree with your assessment of Twitter being mostly self-promotion and race/gender-charged drama, but no-one said "right-wing." I don't think an accusation that any media outlet cuts out facts that don't fit their narrative can be dismissed out of hand these days, unfortunately. I don't have a strong opinion about NPR, but I can see how Naomi _might_ not fit in the narratives they try to push. But I acknowledge that I'm being a bit intellectually dishonest, I'm not bringing any evidence to bear here either.
Yes, I thought "typical Twitter" when I saw it as well. Small bits of interesting information, with a huge dose of identity politics mixed in.
https://twitter.com/RealSexyCyborg/status/145289814620013363...