221–230 of 280 posts
Does anyone feel anti-social after a full day of programming? I always suspected that programming can temporarily reduce empathy at the end of the day. I don't have asperger's but I often feel a lot closer to that after a really intense day of speaking a machine's language.
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I took a quick look at the ASQ test mentioned in the article [1]. A lot of the things in there, I would have answered "definitely agree" when I was a teenager. Sometime in college, I forced myself to socialize, and did everything I could to learn what I needed to fit in. For example, I learned from the internet to dress and care for myself so I didn't look like a 17 year basement nerd, and a bunch of other things I g…
Your score was 34 out of a possible 50. Scores in the 33-50 range indicate significant Austistic traits (Autism).
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Some prominent examples of the lack of due process and mob-like behavior below, and this is just the top of the iceberg. Edit: My exact point is that in these cases it seems like the employer in question announced that they believed the accuser before looking into both sides and the evidence. As a disclaimer I don’t know the truth of Smiley’s or Lizza’s cases; I don’t have enough detail to form an opinion. And yet, t…
You didn't address my questions. You've given some instances where you don't believe you have enough information to draw a conclusion, but where you also admit you don't have all the information that the employer did. Is your claim that PBS, the New Yorker and the NYT did not investigate? In other words, why is your reaction to take Lizza or Smiley at their word when they say that their employer is lying, but not tak…
How is one supposed to come back from your employer making these kind of statements while you are being investigated?
## Edit: @joshuamorton Can't reply to your comment below so doing it here.
Honest question: We have three threads here where we engage in discourse, and I want to ask you a question from my experience of it. If you have already made up your mind and are not willing to engage with any evidence that shows that you might be wrong, why do you engage in discourse at all?
I see this pattern all over social media and to me it just seems like identity grand standing and a declaration that you believe in the dogma of that identity. Neither helps facilitate a productive discourse.
>autism spectrum disorder, the ratio between men and women sits somewhere between 5:1 to
>3:1. We also know that men and women’s interests diverge in ways that are congruent with
>Baron-Cohen’s systematising- empathising spectrum. Women overwhelmingly prefer working
>with people, and have “artistic” and “social” vocational interests, and men
>overwhelmingly prefer working with things and have “investigative,” “enterprising,”
>“realistic,” and “conventional,” interests.
I feel, after having worked with kids (boys and girls) with Asperger's, that we as a society have historically missed (or dismissed) the signs of Asperger's in girls, and have done them a disservice in life by not helping them with those challenges. This book opened my eyes to some of the specific problems that girls (particularly young ones) face:
https://www.amazon.com/Aspergirls-Empowering-Females-Asperge...
I realize that only recently have we begun treating boys who are on the spectrum, and I'm happy about that, but we need to do better with girls and young women as well.
> He said that society increasingly sees groups instead of individuals, to the extent that group rights may supersede individual rights in all sorts of contexts, including politicised work environments. Because contemporary moral codes delineate women as vulnerable or marginalised, we stop seeing them as individuals with unique talents and idiosyncrasies, but as representatives of a victimised class. The reverse is t…
Please don't take HN threads on generic ideological tangents. Didn't we just discuss this? They lead to the same few black holes over and over again—as demonstrated below.
> He said that society increasingly sees groups instead of individuals, to the extent that group rights may supersede individual rights in all sorts of contexts, including politicised work environments. Because contemporary moral codes delineate women as vulnerable or marginalised, we stop seeing them as individuals with unique talents and idiosyncrasies, but as representatives of a victimised class. The reverse is true of men. Because women are now a victimised class, men are increasingly seen as victimisers, irrespective of their individual attributes or actions.
If you don't like discussions on this topic, then perhaps you should stop allowing such topics on this site.
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Plenty of level-headed people on the right see things exactly that way too. What kills us, or at least me (I'll identify for the purpose of this argument), is trying to figure out why people "on the left" are so focused on fixing the symptoms by way of "reverse discrimination" (i.e. affirmative action) instead of focusing on ensuring that we continue to see people as unique individuals instead of–what we feel is the…
The reason is because you really can't change hearts. "Metoo" is the sort of thing that is slowly changing attitudes around sexual assault, but such movements aren't easy to enact. Changing hearts is hard. Black slaves were liberated at the end of the civil war, but after the reconstruction, we had to wait almost 100 years before the civil rights movement ended Jim Crow, and even today, there are persistent racial is…
Practically no one supports sexual assault. We abhor it, that's why the legal punishment for rape is so severe, why many lynchings of black men were about rape accusations, etc. Sexual assault has thrived in some places - like parts of Hollywood - despite that, not because of it.
Equality for black people was completely different from that: 100 years ago, very few people believed black people were equal or could be equal. It's only recently that the majority position sees things that way, and there are still notable minorities who disagree.
And that's why "changing hearts" isn't the issue here. You already have the hearts of the public, which sees rape as evil. What MeToo achieved was to show that that thing we all hate exists in more places than we thought.
To make this concrete: Weinstein had enough influence in Hollywood and the media to quash stories about his crimes. But once enough women spoke up, the public became aware, and quickly hated Weinstein. The problem was awareness, and the victims fixed that.
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Plenty of level-headed people on the right see things exactly that way too. What kills us, or at least me (I'll identify for the purpose of this argument), is trying to figure out why people "on the left" are so focused on fixing the symptoms by way of "reverse discrimination" (i.e. affirmative action) instead of focusing on ensuring that we continue to see people as unique individuals instead of–what we feel is the…
Why affirmative action? Because if one person takes everything from another person, is it fair to say "you know, that was bad, and it shouldn't have happened, but since that's in the past we should just make sure that we treat both of them the same now"? (I will also note that all the work I see being done to end 'regular' discrimination, a.k.a get to the state where we do see people as individuals and don't act base…
I feel like I'm not being very clear. Here's the reality: the world isn't fair. Let that sink in for a little bit because it's pretty sobering.
The world is not fair.
This is the resting state of the world. Why though? Why is the world not fair? That's a pretty dumb thing to say when our constitution demands all humans are created equal.
We are /created/ equal. We do not die equal. Not in the sense of how we lived our lives. To die equal means we all lead pretty boring lives. We all got good institutually respected jobs. We all suffered the same and we all experienced the same joys in exactly the same amounts and in exactly the same ways. We all liked the same things and given the same set of opportunities made the same choices. It is not human. It is machine.
"Welcome to the jungle. We've got fun and games."
Snap back to reality—what is institutional racism? Well it's defined as a discrepancy between desired and empirical outcomes, but only if that discrepancy negatively impacts a minority group. How can we possibly control for a perfect society when we can't even formulate a consistent definition of the issue let alone agree on a desired outcome? We have literally defined our society as racist and so as long we have diversity and inequality, racist we will be: oh there goes gravity.
On the right we are more optimistic. We believe in giving everyone a fair foundation. We want the rules applied equally to all. We care less what crazy interesting, happy, sad, angry stories get told along the way so long as they are told bay all. And that is life.
To answer your question: yes. Treat both the same. I very strongly disagree with punishing future generations for the transgressions of their ancestors. The correct response is to punish the people who acted intolerably and reset the playing field.
It's fruitless and silly to pick and choose who does and does not deserve empathy. And it just makes people angry when they don't get their perceived share. Empathy is a framework for understanding the paths others have taken, understanding their plight. It's not a finite resource we must regulate and dish out with politics.
This essay is a plea for people to stop treating an industry like it's their social battleground demanding universal empirical equality in a way that destroys its ability to be logical, meritocratic, and empathetic towards people on the spectrum.
Unfortunately, that is the consequence of affirmative action. And even though I suspect you will continue to advocate for it, at least take this opportunity to try and have a little empathy yourself. People who disagree with affirmative action don't do so because they lack empathy. They do so because they do not wish to ration empathy and they feel the lick of discrimination such a mindset breeds.
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You didn't address my questions. You've given some instances where you don't believe you have enough information to draw a conclusion, but where you also admit you don't have all the information that the employer did. Is your claim that PBS, the New Yorker and the NYT did not investigate? In other words, why is your reaction to take Lizza or Smiley at their word when they say that their employer is lying, but not tak…
My exact point is that in these cases it seems like the employer in question announced that they believed the accuser before looking into both sides and the evidence. How do you think this does not illustrate that? How is one supposed to come back from your employer making these kind of statements while you are being investigated? ## Edit: @joshuamorton Can't reply to your comment below so doing it here. Honest quest…
Your evidence for this is solely a statement from the "accused". I'm not saying that they're lying, but that it is in their best interest to say the exact same thing no matter what the truth is. In other words, without any additional context, a person saying "this negative thing is a lie" is exactly what you'd expect them to say, whether or not it was actually a lie.
So no, if the only evidence for the employer not "looking into both sides and the evidence" is that the person who got fired claimed that, I don't find that alone at all a reliable claim in the absence of any corroboration.
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Don't you think its a bit odd to try to compensate for implicit bias with explicit bias? To me it seems unlikely that bigotry, sexism and racism will be fixed by more of the same.
If you have a car that pulls to the right, you can compensate for this by steering to the left. If the car is in fact travelling straight down the road while you're doing this, and a backseat driver says "you're pulling to the left, that's not a safe way to drive", are they correct?
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The better alternative would be to improve the situation where the original injustice occurs, not sometime later in the pipeline. E.g. affirmative action in university admissions assumes that members of traditionally underprivileged groups did not have the opportunity to display their full potential and will have higher peak performance than their current scores suggest. While this is true on average and affirmative…
It would be a better alternative, but we can't go back in time and stop the Dred-Scott v. Stanford or just generally stop the enslavement of Africans in America. Also, things like universal free college, more funding of public schools, end to segregation would do a lot to "fix things," and that's why I fight for such things. Affirmative action is one of the weakest things we can do, but it's what we have now and I su…