811–820 of 882 posts
This is silly. Don't reduce me to some risk averse weakling because I'm not willing to put my neck out for strangers for little to no reward. If you're like that, and you regularly go to Africa to help people, more power to you. I'm not. Most people are not.
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While there's something to your comment, and I fully recognize I was in the wrong here, I would still have a really hard time believing in a constant murmur of bad behavior. Give credence enough to investigate and consider much more fully that I would have previously, absolutely, but I draw the line before "believe." Maybe that's just semantics.
Yep. What I'm saying we should learn from this, and Uber, and all the rest is that we should treat "a constant murmur" as much stronger evidence than we currently do. (Not necessarily a slam dunk - but, in Bayesian terms, it should shift your priors much more now than it would have before these stories came out.) Edit: Although really, what stronger evidence will you ever get? I suppose you could get a personal accou…
* One needs real and credible evidence to carry through with depriving another person of any liberty or property.
* Probable cause never trumps or adds to evidence -- if you investigate and find nothing, that's it.
One of the most confusing and unfortunate memes of the past year is this "believe women" stuff, because it confuses strong suspicion with proof. If these cases show us anything, it's that there is plenty of real and credible evidence -- no need to go on intuition or suspicion.
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It's pretty bad in IT. Maybe worse than most other major industries today.
> Maybe worse than most other major industries today. Many people say this but I wonder why they believe it.
Women are almost exactly half of the workforce in the US, but hold only 25% of the jobs in computing. So that would imply the industry is worse than average. And the trend is going the wrong way: women were a much bigger presence in tech 20 years ago. IMHO, stories like the ones in this article are very common and are a major reason why. And that hurts everyone who works in tech.
Moreover, the fact that other industries may also have a gender problem in no way excuses what's going on in the linked article.
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> This is people being assholes because they know they can get away with it. Nope. These people are being assholes because they ARE assholes. Never attribute to rational decision making what can be attributed to rotten character.
> These people are being assholes because they ARE assholes. Never attribute to rational decision making what can be attributed to rotten character. This kind of thinking is even worse than what they did, because it crystalizes them into some of their decisions and deprives them of being human. While their acts are bullying, harassment, etc., this characterization is not that different to labelling a race inferior (o…
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Donglegate wasn't about false accusations, though. It was about a woman publicly shaming two other attendees for what she considered inappropriate jokes in a public setting and then being caught in the blowback when other people were unhappy with how she handled the situation. Her accusations were factual, although there was discussion about whether they were valid. Also, the people who agree that her accusations wer…
I was responding to this too: >The people getting in trouble right now are not the borderline cases of someone saying an awkward comment here or there. >Also, the people who agree that her accusations were valid, are also likely the people who think that their behavior was indicative of them being serial harassers. Which is completely unreasonable. Do you remember what she complained about them saying? Dongles and fo…
But cases like are few and far between.
And IMO the majority of people on the internet were supportive of the guy who got fired, and also thought it was bullshit.
The woman who started the whole drama received way worse retaliation from the Internet mob (which was partially deserved) and got fired as well, so it was tit for tat at least, although that of course doesn't fix the damages.
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People make mistakes. Sometimes those mistakes go back years, and sometimes a sudden traumatic event can snap someone out of the patterns of behavior they fell into. The point is that it's probably a mistake to treat him the same way you'd treat certain kinds of felons. Part of that is to give him an opportunity to contribute in a positive way to the world, like everyone else. If he's genuine, then isn't there some w…
THIS IS NOT A MISTAKE! He didn’t spill milk. He didn’t pick the wrong wine for dinner. He knew exactly what he was doing. He knew it was wrong. He did it anyway. I’m sorry, but I just cannot stand so many people having this “boys will be boys” attitude toward this.
Isn't someone who is too stupid to realize they're harassing their business partners unqualified for the job?
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> This is people being assholes because they know they can get away with it. Nope. These people are being assholes because they ARE assholes. Never attribute to rational decision making what can be attributed to rotten character.
People aren't archetypes or labels; that's too black & white, un-nuanced thinking. Psychological and sociological reseach proved most people act however they're expected to within a given power dynamic circumstance, except for a few outliers which will go their own way, for anti- or pro-community. This wrong "bad apples" analogy as it applies to police or genocide perpetrators also is dangerous because it's simply un…
Let's use this opportunity to clean out the stink. Including the fact that https://www.linkedin.com/in/jsmarr/ made Friendster (somewhat) popular by taking users registrations to hack into other user accounts. Register your email and password here: Now we will use your registration details on the major sites to scrape all the data we can. Huge violation that Joseph Smarr has never answered for.
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This article, and this conversation is about one pathology. You bring up a different one and say "we should treat them equally!" - that's not very different from the "all lives matter" bullshit. Sexism and discrimination of women in tech industry is a massive problem. What you described probably exists in some cases, but is not a) related to the problem at hand and b) orders of magnitude less profound. By bringing it…
Everyone keeps mistaking my meaning. I'm not trying to excuse the behavior or say that it's okay. I've repeatedly condemned it. But we need to decide what we want as a result of bringing this kind of behavior out into the open. Do we want to punish and ostracize the guilty or do we want to minimize the occurrence of this behavior going forward? If it's the former, then by all means get out your pitchforks and we can…
There was never any suggestion that any of the men in the article observed some woman "dating up" and as a consequence of that felt justified to grope or send inappropriate messages to the women in the article.
The men in the article themselves did not even try to portray their alleged actions as justifiable, or excuseable by association with any other past behaviour. They either admitted their behaviour was wrong or denied they ever behaved in this manner.
And yet, here you are relating a story about a woman you once saw "dating up" to try and explain those men's behaviour as something else than a simple mistake that should not be repeated.
How is this useful, exactly? In what way does it contribute, besides changing the subject and trying to shift the blame on the people who, in the article, were reportedly subjected to undeniably inappropriate behaviour?