rev_bird

Oh! A moderator! How nice of you to arrive. No need to worry, I won't be coming back.

>I would like to offer another point of view

Honestly, I don't give a shit about "another point of view," and that you think it matters here is a great illustration of why women would run for the hills, whichever hills don't have you on them.

This is not about someone's experience as a "social reject," this isn't about sad boys not being cool in high school because they like comic books. This is about women wanting a place to talk to other women about an experience that they feel isolates them from their male colleagues. That men sometimes feel lonely too has nothing to do with it.

This is nonsense, you're comparing "let's chat with each other" with lynchings.

Problem: Women feel they don't have anyone to talk to about their experiences as a woman in tech.

Solution: Increase their access to people they can talk to about their experiences as a woman in tech. Like, say, an online community.

>Tech pushes many people out, male and female. Even if the men in tech are the same, what about the men who would like to be in tech but were pushed out? Or are all men the same?

I'd wager most men "pushed out" of tech weren't fleeing sexism and gender-based isolation. This whole thing seems like looking at a team of 10 -- nine men and one woman -- and, when the woman says, "Gee, it'd be nice to have another woman to talk to," responding by saying "Well how about you just talk to us nine guys instead? Wouldn't that be just as good?"

That's not the real question, you're pretending context doesn't matter. What's your argument? Women say "I enjoy having a place to communicate with other women in a place that feels safe from male interference," and your response is "Let me into the women's bathroom"?

This seems like a disingenuous decontextualization of what was said. Your link to dictionary.com says this:

>to initiate or precipitate (a chain of events, scientific reaction, psychological process, etc.)

"Psychological process," in this case, is what I was talking about, and what I think the original commenter was referring to. "Trigger warnings" aren't warning you that you might feel "anything that will cause a reaction," they're to help people suffering with PTSD avoid having a panic attack.

I agree that the colloquial definition is trending the way you describe, and I think it's irresponsible to just sit and watch it happen without speaking up in favor of the more specific psychological definition.

The only way you'd be able to say "groups like this won't fix feelings of isolation!" is if you ignored all the women in this comment section saying it has definitely helped their feelings of isolation. Which I guess might be kind of the point.

How convenient that pointing out discrimination ends up getting painted as bigotry. Do you think colleges having black student unions is "bigotry" too?

You know how right now you're offended, and feeling left out just because of your gender? That's how some women in tech feel all the time.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16160940

I disagree that white nationalists have a similar view, though it's interesting that someone linked to a forum where women can feel safe from attack in discussions and we're currently debating their similarities to neo-Nazis.

The white nationalist stance (in general) is that racial hegemony, with their group at the top of the heap, is the preferential state of affairs. The stance of this group, as far as I can tell, is that gender equality is the preferential state. Those seem like very different things.

As I noted above, "advantage" was the wrong word, my apologies. There's tons of information out there about the disproportionate number of men working in tech, to say nothing of the salary discrepancies that cause so much drama here.

At the end of the day, women say they feel that they feel isolated by an industry that is overwhelmingly male, and that being able to connect with other women and discuss their experiences is a valuable way to stay in a career that they might otherwise bail on. I'm inclined to believe them.

>Why would fighting racism with racism or sexism with sexism be a productive method of correcting imbalances? Wouldn't that just fuel and maintain the disdain between groups?

Is this the "all lives matter!" response to this project? It's not a crime to point out that some groups are poorly represented in an industry. Are you saying the solution to "hey, women feel isolated in the tech industry" is to say "Well, let's figure out how to include men too"? If women felt like their discussions were being treated fairly in public forums, they'd have stayed in them.

>What problem is this intended to solve that isn't solved by moderation policies and forum culture?

I think this comment thread is a pretty good illustration of the problem. A group of women are saying, "hey, we think this is a beneficial project, for this reason and this other reason," and a bunch of men are saying "WRONG it's pretty much white supremacy except against men." Forums reflect their membership -- in an industry dominated by men, discussions will be slanted away from positions held by women unless compensatory measures are taken.

You're conflating "excluded from a web forum" with "excluded from society." The whole point of groups like Leap is BECAUSE those members want everyone working together -- they're not in their clubhouse plotting the deportation of men, they're trying to figure out how to get on even footing in an industry that has been hostile to women for years.

>Your community's design actively fosters hate and exclusion due to something I can not control.

The tech community fosters hate and exclusion of women due to something THEY can't control. This is an attempt to remedy some of that.

>A group does not "want" anything.

I disagree. A group of women is saying they feel marginalized and want to develop a community of support. Men, particularly ones in this awful comment section are saying "NO FAIR!!!" Those seem like groups, and they clearly want things.

>Wouldn't Leap be unfair in the same way?

This assumption completely disregards the measurable advantage men have in the tech community. If you have identical programs, one for a historically disenfranchised group, and one for the group that's been in power for decades, only one of those programs is shitty.

edit: "Advantage" was a poor choice of words, but since it's been quoted in replies I'll leave it. I meant something more like "given the gender disparities in the tech community."

>I am a bit triggered.

This is tangential to your point, but I'm pretty sure what you're referring to isn't being "triggered." It's, I don't know, disagreeing? It has a specific and important definition, and it seems to be getting thrown around in other scenarios, to the detriment of those with PTSD.

https://www.webmd.com/mental-health/what-are-ptsd-triggers

I agree that the odds of "society" dissolving are very small. However, the penalty for encountering a blizzard without preparation -- maybe not having enough food to eat full meals for, say, a week -- is FAR lower than then penalty for encountering armageddon without preparation. I'm not saying you're wrong, but if the fall of civilization is 1,000 times less likely, and the consequences are 1,000 times worse, the calculus gets a little more complex.

Degrees of suffering! How many people in Norway died from not being able to afford a trip to the hospital? How many medical bankruptcies have there been on that entire continent? Any at all?

Sorry, I realize now that I may have sounded sarcastic. I really was curious, this makes sense. Thanks for responding.

>could likely launch a cubesat with some sort of bacterial payload that would eventually get to Mars

Curious how this might work, given the energy required not only to escape Earth's orbit, but to get into another one around Mars and crash into it. It's my understanding that cubesats don't have anything that could do any of that stuff, and a larger craft doing the heavy lifting would be way more complicated.

This isn't what happened at all, and I suspect you know that. For starters, the dossier wasn't the beginning of the investigation, as we've seen in multiple articles that came out over the last few weeks. Also, Trump was NEVER "wire tapped," unless you are privy to information the rest of the world doesn't have, and the only reason his "associates" were caught up in surveillance reports is because they called criminals who were already under surveillance. It's like if the FBI is wire-tapping Al Capone, and you called Al Capone. Sure, you'd get listened to, but they aren't tapping YOU.

The cop said it wasn't her fault, she didn't do anything wrong, but ALSO that "you need to make sure that you never do this again." How is she supposed to do that? The cop is pretending to absolve her of guilt while explicitly saying she is somehow in control of an uncontrollable situation.

It's true, I really can't understand that. If the person wasn't at fault, if they were just in the wrong place at the exact wrong time, you'd just hate them forever?

>In British civil law, the driver is always culpable in an accident involving a minor, even if sober and below the speed limit, which I was.

This seems like a weird construct, particularly given that minors do such stupid things. Two of them, together, literally ran into traffic, and the default is "blame traffic"?

I think the idea is that if you're happy throughout life, you will be happy, or at least content, on your deathbed. The "deathbed life analysis" is the thought exercise some people use to evaluate the long-term utility of decisions that seem to have obvious short-term benefits.

What do you think ADHD is? You say it's "definitely not some kind of genetic defect of the prefrontal cortex or anything of that sort," but there's been growing evidence of exactly that for a long time now:

> New high-resolution, three-dimensional maps of the brains of children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) indicate significant and specific anatomical differences within areas of the brain thought to control attentional and inhibitory control systems, compared with brain scans of children without ADHD... The reductions in size of prefrontal regions observed by Sowell and her colleagues are consistent with other reports of reduced frontal lobe volumes in children with ADHD. The more advanced imaging methods and analysis used in the current study, however, suggest that those reductions are localized to more inferior aspects of the prefrontal regions than was previously realized.[1]

> In instances where heredity does not seem to be a factor, difficulties during pregnancy, prenatal exposure to alcohol and tobacco, premature delivery, significantly low birth weight, excessively high body lead levels, and postnatal injury to the prefrontal regions of the brain have all been found to contribute to the risk for ADHD to varying degrees.[2]

> Recently, neuroimaging has led to several important advances in the understanding of the neurobiology underlying the clinical picture of ADHD, and demonstrates a clear brain basis to the disorder in regions involved in attention, and executive and inhibitory control. Furthermore, transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) has provided evidence that intracortical inhibition, as indexed by the immature ipsilateral motor cortex, normalises with psychostimulant treatment. There is an exciting confluence between emerging studies in basic neurobiology and the genetic, neuroimaging, and neuropsychological analyses of ADHD.[3]

[1] https://psychnews.psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/pn.39.1.0...

[2] http://www.chadd.org/understanding-adhd/about-adhd/the-scien...

[3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3016271/

It wasn't until we learned my great-grandmother's Hebrew name (last year!) that we made a connection between that and a Yiddish lullaby my grandmother used to sing to my sister. Long story short our best theory is that it was passed down from my great-great grandmother, who was born in the 1870s.

>If you are black, your ancestors were not vikings any more than my ancestors were Zulu warriors.

This seems to be disproving a statement the author didn't make. He was specifically talking about people of European descent.