Beware the Pretty People • Hacker News Board

Re: Beware the Pretty People

#31

Post by yummyfajitas » Sun, Mar 01, 2015, 5:19 AM UTC

majormajor wrote: post #10

yummyfajitas wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is an important thread connecting the two: In the context of diversity in tech, nerds are a subculture dominated by White males. This culture has a misogynistic dark side... This is a popular and powerful attack line used by "pretty people" seeking power in tech. It's used to demonize the old guard. When the old guard tries to intellectually dispute it, as is their custom, one can then attack their person direc…

Eh, I feel like a lot of that is an overreaction. The sort that makes it hard to have an honest discussion about stuff like diversity from either side. For instance, I've done a lot of interviewing with the Google-type whiteboard coding questions, and all it's really told me is that they don't show crap for how good they're going to be at their everyday job (e.g. will this person consistently submit un-tested code to…

The sort that makes it hard to have an honest discussion about stuff like diversity from either side.

I have no desire to prevent an intellectual discussion. Quite the opposite - as one of the nerds, I strongly favor a fact based argument over the status competition that this topic usually drives.

Re: Beware the Pretty People

#32

Post by swatow » Sun, Mar 01, 2015, 5:25 AM UTC

hackuser wrote: post #26

yummyfajitas wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is an important thread connecting the two: In the context of diversity in tech, nerds are a subculture dominated by White males. This culture has a misogynistic dark side... This is a popular and powerful attack line used by "pretty people" seeking power in tech. It's used to demonize the old guard. When the old guard tries to intellectually dispute it, as is their custom, one can then attack their person direc…

Discriminatory behavior (sexist, racist, etc.) often persists, in my experience, because the perpetrators don't realize what they are doing. It's not that they think, 'I want to exclude women from tech jobs'; they blindly follow old patterns of hiring and other behavior. Humans naturally are very egocentric and have to work to see things from others' perspectives. When they do, they change; most people don't want to…

>Here's an intellectual way to approach the problem: Stepping back from our society, in some meritocratic system why would 38% of a population[1] produce 90%[2] of the winners? And is it coincidence that the 38% group has controlled power, wealth, and privelege for hundreds of years, and still does in most other situations (governnment, non-tech business, etc.)?

That is actually the least intellectual way you could approach the issue. You are relying on people self-censoring (and we may see some downvotes to provide some real censorship). But I will give you the uncensored answer. There are, in fact, a number of possible reasons apart from the one you have in mind. Here are some.

1) Tech is meritocratic so it attracts men who are less physically attractive or socially capable, because they mainly need technical skill. This in turn makes the field less attractive to women.

2) Tech is a monotonous job with low social status, and so it attracts people driven by ambition and desire for money, who tend to be male.

3) Women are fundamentally less interested in technology because they prefer fields with human interest (though this doesn't explain the gap between programming and, for example, math or physics).

I have only really addressed the gender issue above, but I think that's enough to critique your original way of phrasing the problem.

Re: Beware the Pretty People

#33

Post by mahyarm » Sun, Mar 01, 2015, 5:29 AM UTC

majormajor wrote: post #10

yummyfajitas wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is an important thread connecting the two: In the context of diversity in tech, nerds are a subculture dominated by White males. This culture has a misogynistic dark side... This is a popular and powerful attack line used by "pretty people" seeking power in tech. It's used to demonize the old guard. When the old guard tries to intellectually dispute it, as is their custom, one can then attack their person direc…

Eh, I feel like a lot of that is an overreaction. The sort that makes it hard to have an honest discussion about stuff like diversity from either side. For instance, I've done a lot of interviewing with the Google-type whiteboard coding questions, and all it's really told me is that they don't show crap for how good they're going to be at their everyday job (e.g. will this person consistently submit un-tested code to…

If you've done those white board interviews, you'll realize there are also a lot of general software opinion questions, and those are supposed to measure what I call, the 'gives a shit' factor. 'Gives a shit' is stuff like testing your code, caring about writing stuff in a readable manor, caring about solving the general solution vs. mindless copy paste and so on. Depending on the interviewer, it can be %50-%80 of the interview.

Re: Beware the Pretty People

#34

Post by nostrademons » Sun, Mar 01, 2015, 5:30 AM UTC

rpcope1 wrote: post #16

It's funny, this article seems to be rather full of irony. At the beginning of the article, I started miss when a lot of the tech scene was a little more grass roots, but maybe that's just rose colored glasses. Obviously, things have gotten more sophisticated since the days of simple computers like the TRS-80 and while it's not possible to totally grep everything in a modern OS, I do miss some of the hacker ethos tha…

It's actually a lot easier to get started hacking now, in the age of Javascript and the web, than it was 25 years ago. I remember begging my dad to buy me Think Pascal when I got a computer so I could learn to program. Computers cost about $2500 then, and the compiler itself was about $200. Now one of the best languages to learn, Javascript, comes free with excellent developer tools in every web browser, which comes free with a computer that can be bought for I think the big problem is that this has reduced the barrier to entry to nothing, and so standards have gone way up. To do a professional-seeming webapp, it's not enough to hack out some HTML as a high-school student. You need a professional designer, and professional front-end engineer, and professional back-end engineer, etc.

Re: Beware the Pretty People

#35

Post by hackuser » Sun, Mar 01, 2015, 5:33 AM UTC

yummyfajitas wrote: post #6

swatow wrote: post #2

Funny how the nerd stereotype is used in different contexts. In the context of diversity in tech, nerds are a subculture dominated by White males. This culture has a misogynistic dark side, and it is important to show that you don't have to conform to this subculture to succeed in tech. However, in the context of the corporatization of tech, suddenly the nerds are the good guys. And funnily enough, nerd culture was a…

There is an important thread connecting the two: In the context of diversity in tech, nerds are a subculture dominated by White males. This culture has a misogynistic dark side... This is a popular and powerful attack line used by "pretty people" seeking power in tech. It's used to demonize the old guard. When the old guard tries to intellectually dispute it, as is their custom, one can then attack their person direc…

On meritocracy, including in tech:

"'Meritocracy' is not what you think: don’t forget about the 'ocracy'"

http://themonkeycage.org/2013/07/13/meritocracy-is-not-what-...

(The Monkey Cage is a/the leading blog on political science.)

Re: Beware the Pretty People

#36

Post by crazy1van » Sun, Mar 01, 2015, 5:35 AM UTC

"I believe capitalism is excellent … up to a point. (I don’t believe anyone who has travelled in the developing world as much as I have can reasonably think otherwise.)"

Is the author suggesting capitalism is doing good or bad things for the developing world?

Re: Beware the Pretty People

#37

Post by sounds » Sun, Mar 01, 2015, 5:37 AM UTC

rpcope1 wrote: post #16

It's funny, this article seems to be rather full of irony. At the beginning of the article, I started miss when a lot of the tech scene was a little more grass roots, but maybe that's just rose colored glasses. Obviously, things have gotten more sophisticated since the days of simple computers like the TRS-80 and while it's not possible to totally grep everything in a modern OS, I do miss some of the hacker ethos tha…

That edit is the part I wish had been your thesis. (Because now I feel like I have to write the following:)

There _is_ a unifying theme to the trends TechCrunch is writing about, but it's not what TechCrunch says it is. TechCrunch: "the establishment is flocking to the tech industry."

That's just the eternal september, ad infinitum. Hate being pushed out? So did the people _you_ pushed out, when you were annoying and first found IRC and you and your peers flooded all the old cool dives, driving hackers ever deeper underground.

The easy ways out don't work when you're faced with filtering out annoying newcomers. Some are fundametally wrong (racism is essentially a quick band-aid reaction to newcomers). Using money as a filter (country clubs) doesn't work either--there's always that annoying newly-minted millionaire who wants to break into your circle. Legislation to suppress young upstart competition even fails for the same reason: eventually your industry becomes so totally ossified that the whole thing can be toppled (US automakers).

Fundamentally, anybody who doesn't get Arrow's Impossibility Theorem is going to fail. "When voters have three or more distinct options, no rank order voting system can convert the ranked preferences of individuals into a community-wide (complete and transitive) ranking while also meeting a pre-specified set of criteria." I would propose strengthening it to: any pre-specified set of criteria, at all, ever. In other words, you just can't have all three:

1. Purely democratic or meritocratic or whatever

2. Total transparency (of rules and laws)

3. Adaptation of the rules and laws

So you get this never-ending cycle: the hackers get together and make something really cool. They are able to work together. Then comes the flood of newbies. After things get overloaded, anybody actually contributing to the original project either sells out or goes deeper underground. The project coasts on autopilot until something breaks, then it crashes and burns.

It doesn't matter who the participants are, from simple rule-based sims up to human-level intelligence, the outcome is the same.

The exceptions, I think, prove the rule:

1. BSD and the Linux kernel -- essentially ruled by benevolent dictators.

2. Representative democracies -- they can work. I'm deliberately refusing to think about why here, since that's politics.

3. The internet. Not IP or the OSI model or the DNS system, but the idea that anyone, anywhere can conceive of an idea, and then communicate it nearly instantly. This includes a worldwide language (or tools to automatically translate), global comms and the hacks to circumvent state-sponsored net terrorism, the unwritten code of conduct that most netizens are guided by, the ability to search and explore, and on and on.

I think any good example would have some element of a social hack in it. The social hacks are the most interesting.

Re: Beware the Pretty People

#38

Post by rezendi » Sun, Mar 01, 2015, 5:37 AM UTC

crazy1van wrote: post #36

"I believe capitalism is excellent … up to a point. (I don’t believe anyone who has travelled in the developing world as much as I have can reasonably think otherwise.)" Is the author suggesting capitalism is doing good or bad things for the developing world?

Good. (Or at least that was the intent.)

Re: Beware the Pretty People

#39

Post by yummyfajitas » Sun, Mar 01, 2015, 5:39 AM UTC

hackuser wrote: post #26

yummyfajitas wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is an important thread connecting the two: In the context of diversity in tech, nerds are a subculture dominated by White males. This culture has a misogynistic dark side... This is a popular and powerful attack line used by "pretty people" seeking power in tech. It's used to demonize the old guard. When the old guard tries to intellectually dispute it, as is their custom, one can then attack their person direc…

Discriminatory behavior (sexist, racist, etc.) often persists, in my experience, because the perpetrators don't realize what they are doing. It's not that they think, 'I want to exclude women from tech jobs'; they blindly follow old patterns of hiring and other behavior. Humans naturally are very egocentric and have to work to see things from others' perspectives. When they do, they change; most people don't want to…

I wasn't defending any particular practice as being perfectly meritocratic. If you want to argue that a blind code test (or whatever) is more meritocratic than github code review, be my guest.

The point I'm making is somewhat different. The pretty people and the social justice types oppose the idea of meritocracy itself.

...in some meritocratic system why would 38% of a population[1] produce 90%[2] of the winners? And is it coincidence that the 38% group has controlled power, wealth...

Using google/twitter's easily googleable demographic numbers as representative, white males only make up about 42% of the "winners". Google/twitter are 60% white and 70% male, 70% of 60% is 42%. White males are only marginally overrepresented. It's actually Asian males who are wildly overrepresented - they make up 21% of google/twitter (70% of 30%) and 2.5% of the population. Are Asian males 8x more privileged than whites?

An alternate hypothesis is that merit is not uniformly distributed and Asian males simply have more of it. But that's where the "pretty people" will just call me a racist/sexist "creep" who can't get laid, and intellectual discussion stops.

Re: Beware the Pretty People

#40

Post by pnathan » Sun, Mar 01, 2015, 5:39 AM UTC

Personally, I like the vast majority of nerd culture as I received it. Lots of focus on text, do-o-cracy, intellectual games. ESR's "portrait of a hacker" harmonized with me well when I read it - it did not influence my life, but I found it to be pretty astute.

I am sad to see it passing, but I also know that Change Happens.