And that's the problem I've got with a bunch of the attacks I'll commonly see that are based on privilege: the entire idea is that "well, no, that cool hack doesn't count somehow, because you're a member of $MALIGNED_GROUP". We've finally found a group of people that will actually base how awesome we are based on our code, and suddenly these newcomers want to butt in and tell us that isn't a valid idea? It's like these folks never read The Conscience of a Hacker.
You know why Sandi Metz is awesome? It's because she writes awesome code.
You know why Alan Turing was awesome? It's because he wrote awesome code.
You know why James Mickens is awesome? It's because he has amazing satire of hard problems in computer science.
The fact that we don't celebrate those people because of their biological traits or social status, and instead do so because of their accomplishments, is a feature, not a bug.
I think that that's kind of the key issue a lot of these folks are running into, and because they tend to come from very communication-privileged backgrounds (e.g., dedicated social-media mouthpieces, very organized mass-media representation, etc.) hackers tend to fare poorly when they misinterpret why they aren't welcomed. They easily get to portray us as creeps and bigots because they get to choose from patterns of representation that (taken out of context) look very much like bigotry and because they get to pick from people whose social skills and identity are not always attuned or even aware of the prevailing social conventions.
No reasonable hacker, I believe, wants there to be fewer people of $MINORITY in developer positions--at the same time, you'll never get that hacker to suggest we censor the existing culture or forcibly inject more $MINORITY into the space. "They should make their bones, same as we did", the hacker will hold. They'll then be decried as $MINORITY_PERSECUTOR.
It's a problem, but only insofar as we're willing to let them continue framing the discussion. Maybe if we can make them understand that we aren't against diversity, but that we are against cultural manipulation, we can get somewhere.
Edit: I can't resist positing this quote. It makes me feel understood. It would make me feel safer if it were acknowledged by the other party during debates: "The voices clamouring for change offer us no money, a social role reversal back to “disempowered outsider,” and a status demotion to “likely sexual predator.”"
Edit 2: If anyone here has data, it seems like a lot of communication about feminism in IT started circa 2013 (e.g. the controversy on Paul Graham [1], which probably provoked the Female Founders Conference in 2015). It would be nice if someone made a blogpost about that and explained what that year changed in the geek culture.
[1] http://www.thewire.com/technology/2013/12/paul-graham-revive...
Like a lot of these essays it long winding, full of generalizations and in-group cultural references which makes it hard work to disassemble and disagree with. And most of those that disagree passionately enough with this to do it wouldn't be regulars at HN.
One of the few concrete things in this article is how "we won the cryptowars". Which isn't very convincing these days.
...right in front of our very noses at this moment is something very interesting:
me atleast I don't have a clue what gender most nicks here on HN belong to. And I don't care. The same way I don't care about the gender of our UX designer only that she did awesome work.
- well, maybe I actually loved the fact that we had a coding eclipse-wielding mother-of-three on our team.
And before "you" [1] come telling me that this just shows how I'm biased because I'm impressed by a mom coding, -No! I don't think they cannot, but every statistic tells us they don't usually code.
[1]: yeah I saw you coming, you are kind of predictable
I'm not implying that anyone of these particular commenters are sexist or bigots, or aren't making decisions solely based on merit. I'm saying that we as a group, be that either widely defined as humans in general or narrowly defined as a certain group of nerds, tend to not notice our biases when we make decisions. We may believe that we are making a choice based on the absolute best merit based criteria, but often we don't realize our choice was highly tinted by learned bias.
I myself try to disregard my learned biases, but often don't realize I failed until after the fact. We need more people who don't care about gender, race, social status, etc when making hiring decisions. Studies have shown that when identifying markers are removed from resumes and job applications, the considered pool of applicants become more diverse. A good start is people who are at least aware of their own biases.
Too often we use statistics to enforce our bias. "Well, moms statistically don't code, so we won't take seriously this mother who does".
> I myself try to disregard my learned biases, but often don't realize I failed until after the fact.
Part of being human and why we should be very careful to judge. I'm in the same place.
Equality is a bullshit term. It does not exist in reality. It's an illusion, a joke.
See what I did there? You've got to explain why you think it's a bullshit term--because as an ideal, it's a damned sight more useful than whatever else people are pushing.
- Because measuring only at the finishing line while ignoring how far people have had to come is in fact unequal, not equal treatment.
- Because the concept victim-blames those who aren’t allowed/enabled/supported to succeed according to it.
- Because it's a really astounding statistical anomaly that all those "meritocratic" communities "who don't care about gender etc." are in practice ridiculously less diverse than the population in general.
And that’s even ignoring all the grave moral quandaries you get into when you base who can participate on merit – if that is even possible and if you can even coherently define what the hell merit means. Merit is hard to nail down and as such can be easily used as a convenient tool for exclusion.
In light of the long and heated debates about how to best conduct job interviews (nobody knows, really!), often seen right here on HN, this all is especially absurd. It seems that put into a slightly different context (of a job interview) everyone knows that selection processes are frail, complex, complicated things, hard to get right – and even at its best you will make mistakes. Selection processes are fucking hard to get right. Doesn’t everyone know that? How, in that context, can you then turn around and claim that there is no issue because meritocracy. It sounds like a bad joke. A horrible joke, one that kills all debate about selection processes and how we can improve them (or even where selection is necessary and where not and based on what and how and how we should deal with the frailty and difficulty of evaluating human fucking beings.)
People fuck up all the time. I would never claim that there's no issue because we already have a meritocracy. We don't. We will never have one. Like a lot of ideals it's something worth looking at by comparison, to decide how closely we want to model our actions on it.
Look, the entire hacker thing comes down to: does the code work? If it does, you're fine. If it doesn't, you're not. The computer sure as day doesn't care about the particulars of the person who generated the source code for the hack, so why should we?
Everything else is FUD, spread by people that are fools, well-meaning but not understanding, or both.
Don't try to bring in the baggage of other failed "meritocracies" into this, because we can actually, objectively, test whether or not the code works.
Your perspective here is absurdly reductionist and doesn’t reflect any reality anyone lives in. It’s not that simple, it just is not.
These are the people arguing about fucking spaces vs tabs and you are going to try to honestly tell me that all that matters is whether the code works. Are you serious?! Like, actually, really serious?
If you had working code--and it was elegant, and easy to maintain, and fixed a real problem--I find it unlikely that you were put down by people that really grok being a hacker. I'm sorry for your experience there.
And before you point out that that definition allows me to neatly exclude the people that make hackers look bad--well, that's kinda the point. Similarly, I try not to judge all MRAs by the ones that make death threats, nor feminists by those that are rabidly opposed to transwomen.
Wow. I mean, it’s right there. Right there! Suddenly it’s no longer black and white.
I'm not saying its impossible to fake development skills, just saying its harder than some other fields. I think primarily due to the fact computers are not forgiving, but require pure logic.
It could... if you choose to cast it that way. It could also come from any self-selecting group where the selection process is part of the group identity.
Group identity isn't just a matter of waking up one day, declaring yourself a member of $GROUP, and $GROUP being obliged to accept you.
And let's be honest, this isn't a problem if the $GROUP is a bunch of people hanging out in their living room or grabbing a beer once a week, but it does become a problem when the $GROUP is making hiring decisions or when $GROUP decides to harass someone online. Then it is those subconscious selectors that define the group and its members more than the how the $GROUP thinks it defines itself.
It's also a commentary on the limits of certain political lenses.
How exactly do you expect a group to react when you push against its survival instincts?
Feminism is accused of this most often, so I'll use it as an example: some have accused the feminist movement of sexism because it simultaneously claims the sanctity of women-only "safe spaces" while simultaneously fighting against the existence of male-only institutions. I don't want to pass a verdict on that so much as point out that that is what the article is talking about:a safe space for nerds.
Secondly, I'm not arguing nerds shouldn't have a safe space. But that safe space shouldn't be at the expense of diversity in the workplace (hired on merit) or online public spaces (where everyone should be treated with respect regardless of the merit metric). That safe space doesn't preclude nerds from learning basic social skills in order not to harass members of the opposite sex while at work (or really anywhere). Just like nerds shouldn't be harassed at school or work, they shouldn't harass people then hide behind the excuse that they are allowed because they're socially awkward nerds who don't know any better. And I say this as a socially awkward nerd.
¹https://www.rainn.org/get-information/statistics/sexual-assa...
Good ol manspreading, such a threat, very scary.
As to the rape statistics, those numbers are highly inflated and less inflated numbers show that men are almost as likely (if not equally) to face sexual violence (but far less likely to report it and far more likely to have it dismissed) and that men are more likely to face physical violence.
>the threat of having to accept those that they deem unworthy
This is a deceitful caricature of the threat being faced by nerds.
>preclude nerds from learning basic social skills in order not to harass members of the opposite sex
And here the blame is placed on nerds who have tried to isolate themselves because of a large inability to learn such social skills. Some can't learn, others can learn but it is exhausting to imitate the skills for an 8+ hours. Some may even get the basics, but every once in a while they still commit some social transgression they don't understand. So they made safe spaces... which happened to become profitable because some of what they did in those spaces had great business potential. And now they being invaded by profit-chasers and blamed for the social weirdness that they already did the best they could to get remove from others having to experience.
Mind showing evidence that these numbers are highly inflated?
>And now they being invaded by profit-chasers and blamed for the social weirdness that they already did the best they could to get remove from others having to experience.
Yeah, talking about really scary threats here, that is much worse than the threat of rape. This implication that anyone who now enjoys what was only once enjoyed by "nerds" are profit-chasers is a much bigger caricature than self selecting nerds.
If you're under 30 you've spent most of your life in a world surrounded by the internet, computers, and tech. Of course people are going to be attracted to these jobs that used to be the domain of nerds, and some are carpetbaggers, but others, even if they seem too "fashionable" or "social" are just doing what nerds have been doing (and what everyone has been doing) forever, they are following their own interests. It just so happens those interests are now the same as yours.
For starters, look at recent CDC studies in the last 5 years. Pay extra attention to how most cases of a woman forcing a man to have sex are not classified as rape (which means the summaries about rape are way off). There are other resources that I don't currently have on hand about how they are over inflated, but one recent story was about how over inflated they are on college campuses. Another, especially for attempted rape, is to look into the use of date rape drugs and how rare they actually are used compared to how often women think they have been used.
- 92% of split families where the mother (not the father) receives custody
- 63% longer prison sentences that men are given for committing the same crimes as women
- 76% percent of homeless who are male
- the disparity between workplace injury/death between the genders
- the vastly less federal medical funding that goes into men's health issues vs. women's health issues
- how the gender wage gap is eliminated when factoring in personal preference and number of hours worked
- who dies during war
- the requirements for men to vote vs. women (hint: what MUST men do when they turn 18?)
Or don't look into any of this - you'll get more Patreon bux if you stick with the "Man = Oppressor : Women = Perpetual Victim" narrative!
Also, I understood that most medical studies are about men, not women. Not understanding that item about medical funding.
http://www.martynemko.com/articles/should-we-pay-more-attent...
Women are allowed everywhere men are, they have been since 1968:
What's your opinion on affirmative action?
> or online public spaces (where everyone should be treated with respect regardless of the merit metric).
This is bullshit. I have told one person on this site that I hoped that they died in terrible pain and that it took years because I meant it. Their opinion was vile and I would have said it to their face if they had been in front of me when they said it. Social opprobrium is a tool. There are people whose views I find abhorrent, who I hate and detest, personally. For a feminist perspective on this see the below link.
http://geekfeminism.org/2013/09/05/tone-policing-a-tool-for-...
I don't assume you harass people, sexually or otherwise, and never stated that you did. And from my experience, nerds tend to be less "harassy" than the general male population. But just because you want to ignore that sexual harassment is a problem even among the nerd population doesn't mean I will.
affirmative action: I believe is a necessary evil as white society has refused to correct the wrongs of the past. After 400+ years of systemic physical and economic oppression you can't just expect to say "we're now going to treat you as equals" and everything is ok. That is not to say improvements haven't been made but when power structures are designed to suck the economic and physical power from one group of people still today (i.e. Ferguson, MO), then drastic measures are necessary. I'd prefer a merit based system, but a true merit based system should provide equally safe and secure environments for all citizens to thrive.
> or online public spaces (where everyone should be treated with respect regardless of the merit metric). This is bullshit.
Yeah, I agree. It is more wishful than true. I would say everyone should be treated with respect up and until, but then it is always a question of who is measuring. But it doesn't take much for some real vile shit to bubble up unfortunately. Sometimes it's just the edge cases (usually blamed on a small minority of the group), but often it comes from the middle as well or is representative of the groups mindspace.
(If all that makes sense. It's 5am and I'm still up working so I may just be rambling).
Incorrect. The best and worst part of a meritocracy is that, if you don't have merit you don't belong.
There is no obligation to "all citizens". Now, the corollary to this is that, if a citizen proves their merit, they must be rewarded for it, because that's the social contract in play.
But, there is no reason that the system has to reward unproven individuals just because of some diversity quota...in fact, that's a really good way of destroying the ecosystem (same point made in article) because it undermines the very philosophy the group is predicated upon.
I don't disagree that a system has to reward unproven individuals. My point in most of these comments is that we, no matter how much we say we are choosing based solely on merit or production, most often are not. We are a bundle of overt and hidden biases.
What value system is being destroyed or abandoned? Surely not one where a person is judged by merit and not by what group they do or don't belong to. At least not by me or anyone I've ever heard about.
Now there are people that are trying to destroy the value system that professes to be based on merit but is in reality based on discrimination, privilege and/or internal groupthink by a narrowly defined group. But if you truly believe in merit above everything else, I would think you would welcome the downfall of these false meritocracies.
Might I suggest you re-read the article? This point is addressed.
Alan Turing is awesome, now. But he wasn't universally thought highly of at the time, was forcefully subjected to medical treatment for his 'condition', and was harassed and basically blacklisted in his professional and personal lives.
Anyways, all that other stuff doesn't matter, because he did great things.
The reason it's so important to us that we base our respect on his work and not his suffering is that, frankly, you can't argue with his work. Time may pass, and it may be fashionable/scientifically proven/theologically required to hate gays again and so we'll lose sight of his other issues--but the man's contributions will survive on their own merit. That is far better.
I'm going to make a small U-turn here (or if you prefer, be a devils-advocate) in favor of the privilege-focused-view, because when I owe allegiance to "good code", by extension I have to support good arguments that are "rhetorical code".
The version without obvious bugs goes something like this: "Yes, those people created awesome works, but they also had better access to resources, development tools, and teams of similar people."
If not, are you a part of hacker culture? If you are, why are you an "us" and not a "they"?
The successful "nerds" were always at least introspective or 'ironic' and could function somewhat normally in social situations including attempting to play whatever status games that entails. Most of the programmers I've worked with are at best superficially-nerdy relative to how far some people can go.
A lot of this analysis suffers from pretty severe high-school politics category error. That guy from high school who had nothing going except being "good with computers" is probably not at all the same person who is 'brogramming' for a startup, for example. But no matter how much it is reframed, the social stigma of the lost ones is unescapable.
Then again, I do stuff like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RnRSu9LjV7E
Yep, AKA introverts with social skills. (Shyness is another possible axis.)
Personally, I feel the problems with buying into the big monkey hierarchy aren't that you can't be diplomatic or can't read social cues. The problems are that it is (A) a drain on your mental energy compared to being an extrovert and (B) feels like an endorsement of a system you'd rather not endorse.
However, I'm referring more to the "nerds" who are not good at math (or standardized tests or study skills or etcetera). People tend to inaccurately conflate certain personality types with STEM smarties, which is really not fair to either group.
I agree with respect to the overall piece, what I meant was that the "code is no respecter of persons" section is mainly reacting to "nerds in their boys-only treehouse"-type accusations.
It's not a defense of the behavior, of course, but a defense of the culture occurs in: "Yes, people do bad things, but it's despite the unifying cultural ideals, not because of them."
Even if a bad actor finds rationalizations or excuses for a common-behavior, on the whole you have the option of making an appeal to the common-ideals.
This is off-topic, but I disagree strongly. Some of the very worst authoritarian countries (N. Korea, Iraq under Hussain, a depressingly large number of African countries) all share a total devotion to "democracy" and "elections". With the notable exception of dissidents, most citizens of these countries fervently tribute to these ideals, at least in public. I've been to a country like this, in Africa, and this isn't just an act. People actually believe in this democracy.
That said, I do support the shared ideal among hacker culture of "judgment by your work". However, I do strongly oppose the abrasive means by which people are told that their work isn't up to par in this same culture. It's cruel and unnecessary.
It is possible to both judge people by their abilities, and at the same time refrain from being abrasive or cruel toward people who fall short.
It is widely and correctly agreed that the "best" democracies have a combination of characteristics, including elections (so you can throw the bums out), personal liberties of the social kind, economic liberties, rule of law, etc. But it is fiercely debated -- to an extent irrelevant to this thread -- exactly which characteristics are most important, what constitutes having such a characteristic to excess, etc.
These bits resonated with me more than I had expected. The declaration "life is not like high school" is only partially true. College offers a temporary respite since are significantly more likely to be around people with a distinct interest in building things and learning things, in an environment where the "politics" are somewhat restrained.
... But afterwards, back in the "Real World", some of the same high-school factors return, as you see an increase in the social and financial predators, parasites, and empire-builders.
> We don’t always live up to this value as well as we should[...] In our ideal world, though, your identity and personal history are orthogonal to your commit history.
To use an analogy, this is like the ideals of "rule of law" or "freedom of speech" in various countries. Even when there are chronic violations in practice, it's still hugely important and valuable that the culture still holds it up as a goal. Even among two nations equally authoritarian in practice, the one where the population all knows and recites the social-mores of democracy is much much better-off and more likely to achieve them.
The creation and maintenance of a widely-believed idea (especially one which is sometimes inconvenient to individuals and institutions) represents an enormous and ongoing investment in collective effort and willpower.
The fact that we even have a collective shared-ideal of "we judge you by your work" is an achievement worth celebrating and continuing, even if we individually fail at it, or even fail at it a lot.