https://twitter.com/adriarichards/status/312265091791847425

I have trouble seeing her shaming behavior as anything more than self-serving drama.

She argues that the joke was offensive. Her evidence was that she was offended. Evidence that her concept of offendedness is flawed does argue against the offensiveness of the joke.

Had she asked three people sitting near her if they were offended, and they had said yes, then she would no longer be a part of the argument and her hypocracy would not be relevant. But she didn't so it is.

Plenty of people are claiming it wasn't sexism, but it seems like it's not a large enough number of people for you to dismiss her hypocrisy as irrelevant.

The causal network looks like this:

       S->O
       |
       V
    D->A
    |
    V
    H
    
    S=sexism
    O=other people being offended
    A=Adria being offended
    D=Adria being dishonest
    H=Adria being hypocritical

It's like how flying saucer cultists being visibly crazy is evidence against flying saucers if their statements were the evidence in the first place, but if you had actual radar tracks, then it wouldn't matter.

It does seem to me that when you say A is evidence for S, even though your diagram only has S -> A, that you're just affirming the consequent. That is, given P -> Q and Q, claiming P is true.

So, my position is, she's a hypocrite, she got offended, obvious character flaws, etc. But whether or not there was sexism can only be determined by looking at both sides of the description of events that we have. For the most part, it seems people are saying that it isn't sexism, and that it would have to be specifically degrading to women.

I don't think the flying saucer analogy applies, because nobody is disputing the events that took place, people are only disputing whether there was sexism, i.e. what the meaning of the events was. To me it's more like, crazy person sees something fly overhead, claims it was a flying saucer and the beginning of an alien invasion, and proceeds to escalate the situation, when everyone else who looks at the data after the fact says it was just a plane.

At any rate, barring a conversion one way or the other to the truth of A -> S and !A -> !S, I think this is at a standstill, but it was an interesting discussion, so thanks.

As for concluding !S, most statements aren't sexist. In the absence of meaningful evidence for S, we should conclude !S (or rather, p(S)<.1).

I understand and agree with your analysis except for one point: as I understand it, the exact text of the joke has not been published, sadly preventing post mortem evaluation.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5398681

http://butyoureagirl.com/14015/forking-and-dongle-jokes-dont...

However, if that description isn't enough (it is for me), I'd much rather accept Adria's oversensitivity and injustice-seeking behavior as applicable character flaws. As opposed to her hypocrisy, those things really do make her a bad judge of what is and isn't sexist, because they generate false positives.

Her hypocrisy is also galling because of her response to the events, but that still doesn't affect her claim that she took appropriate action, because it's a generic claim about any woman in that situation, and doesn't rely on any of her character flaws.

Okay, that is as refined as it gets for me, I think. I did come to see how I was implicitly accepting an ad hominem argument without realizing it (the one about oversensitivity), so thanks again.

I think her position, which was originally extremely weak, has been reinforced by the large misogynistic response. She's a public speaker, and once people forget about her offense, she'll roll this into five years of lunches, keynotes, corporate re-education, and books.

This backlash has given her a level of credibility as an expert on gender-based harassment that she would not be able to attain on her own merits. She needs no academic background after this. She needs no list of petty "I thought of a four year old girl..." stories.

Waaaait a second... isn't that http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirming_the_consequent?

(H -> !S) -> (!H -> S) // false (this is what you mean)

(H <-> !S) -> (!H -> S) // true

But besides being wrong, I guess I was also hinting at something else, which is that if you accept this one fallacy (tu quoque), you are probably implicitly accepting this other fallacy (I think it might have a different name than affirming the consequent, but they're related). That wasn't clear with my use of the phrase "subtle implication" and I didn't realize this either.

It doesn't matter who said the offensive comments. It's true that they're all offensive. It does matter that he apologized, and she didn't. That shows a profound lack of moral judgement, or an inability to be self reflective, or a hostility for the truth.

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

Ad hominem does not require the accusations to be baseless; it's usually more effective if they aren't. It's true that she appears to have character flaws and is apparently hypocritical. I personally don't respond well to blatant hypocrisy either. However, the fallacy is to connect the hypocrisy to the question of whether or not the guys were being sexist and whether her outburst was appropriate. That question can be answered on its own. I'm not standing up for what she did here, but it's more like, if I did the same thing as her but wasn't a hypocrite, would that be okay? I hope not.

To further refine the point (possibly what you meant in your penultimate clause), it's not ad hominem when the attack on the man in question is germane.

If I say "I am a good candidate for US President", and you say "You don't even know how many US States there are", it's an attack on me ("the person", that is the arguer), but it's totally relevant, and thus not an ad hominem attack in the sense of the logical fallacy.

To bring it back to the case at hand, if someone says "Adria's wrong that it's offensive, because if she says that then she's a hypocrite, because she says offensive things", that's tu quoque (and yes, ad hominem). Murderers are not incapable of identifying other murderers!

But for one thing, ericb makes a good point that hypocrisy is suggestive that she might not have been genuinely offended, which plays some role in this story.

Moreover, hypocrisy plays a complicated and not-entirely-fallacious role in circumstances where we disagree about acceptable behaviour. If Adria's claim is that double-entendres are inherently unprofessional behaviour, but I disagree, one basis for disagreement is to cite community standards, and Adria's own behaviour seems likely to be behaviour that she will accept as not-abhorrent. She could argue "yeah, it was repugnant of me to do that, just as it was repugnant of this man to make a dongle joke", which would mean she was a hypocrite, but the hypocrisy would not affect her argument (unless some other part of her argument required her to assert that she's a virtuous person). Or she could argue that only privileged groups can offend (as she apparently has about racism, much as this argument disgusts me), and insofar as she was persuasive about this, she might evade the accusation of hypocrisy and also the impact on her argument.

I assert that it's a sign of mental laziness to hold hypocrisy as a great evil, in general. I think evildoers who think their transgression is evil are less evil than evildoers who think it's just fine and facilitate it in others. Even though the former are hypocrites and the latter are not. (And if, at some point, I accuse someone of hypocrisy, it will make the preceding statement by me no less true!)

The inconsistency claimed here was an argument against the credibility of the claimed offense. "Offense" is not a objective conclusion of a rational argument, it is a subjective state. Inconsistency in the part of the person claiming the subjective response is a legitimate basis for challenging the claim of offense, and isn't a form of ad hominem fallacy because it isn't challenging the argument being made because of the hypocrisy of the arguer, it is challenging the fact claim in the premise of the argument, by presenting factual evidence.

Remember when we meet the Lion in the Wizard of Oz? Hyper-aggression and hyper-sensitivity go hand in hand. It doesn't make the hyper-sensitivity untrue in some way, but it also doesn't positively or negatively affect any arguments the Lion might have about the existence of abuse - they'll hold water on their own if they can.

I mean, the whole purpose of argument is objective reasoning, right? I thought this was primarily a discussion about whether or not there was sexism involved. All we can really say subjectively is that she got offended and apparently overreacted. Whatever she claims her emotions to be, they are valid claims.

Right, like Joan of Arc's [1] was, after she got burned at the stake.

[1] http://imgur.com/JnZLsju

> "That we occasionally violate our own stated moral code does not imply that we are insincere in espousing that code."

You can read the full segment on hypocrisy here: http://steveedney.wordpress.com/2006/11/08/hypocrisy-relativ...

Me too because hypocrisy is clearly a form of intellectual dishonesty in itself and I don't want to lose time with intellectually dishonest people. As simple as that.

If someone I know is a torturer and doesn't know I know it and tells me: "torturing people is bad", I'm not going to argue with him. I'm not going to think: "his point may be wrong because he's intellectually dishonest so torturing may actually be acceptable".

No, actually I'd disrespect this person even more: a first time because he's a torturer and a second time because of his hypocrisy.

I've got zero things to learn from such person, no matter how true or wrong their poisonous words are.

There are way enough knowledgable and honest people out there to learn things from.

Please do continue to use it.

F^ck hypocrites.

I think I understand where you are coming from, but personally, by your definition, I don't know anyone who's not a hypocrite.

It's just a simple fact that the conscious mind is not in 100% control of an individual for every minute of their life, and furthermore, that even if it was in control, that it would never make a decision that was contrary to some position they've espoused in the past.

Point is, maybe ease up on people a little. Hypocrisy should be limited to people who espouse one thing publicly, and espouse the opposite thing privately. Not merely laps in the application of an honestly held belief.

But at a "hacker" thing (DC7-13, etc.), not at a developer conference or professional event. There probably is some evolving standard of conduct now that things which were formerly mostly underground are now essentially big business.

No?

Oh, I guess it isn't the same thing at all then.

Nobody dragged Adria anywhere and forced her to listen to the penis jokes. She just overheard them behind her. The chances of me overhearing that group of people on my way to the bathroom are comparable to the chances of me overhearing the penis jokes. It might be even more likely that I'd overhear the Cards Against Humanity game.

Although her hypocrisy has no bearing on the sexism question, it doesn't stop it from being hypocrisy. Granted, her name probably doesn't need any more smearing, but boy did she keep asking for it - ass clowns? Really?