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When Nerds Collide (2014)

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Re: When Nerds Collide (2014)

#161

Post by TeMPOraL »

leereeves wrote: post #119
samastur wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem here is that hacking, gardening or whatever else people do is not "owned" by those who practice it currently or did before others and neither should it be. If they wanted to start their own Abrasive gardening club, where they would be abrasive to each other, then not many people would complain. I don't think it would be healthy, but they are free to do so. What they aren't free to do without push-back is…

> If they wanted to start their own Abrasive gardening club, where they would be abrasive to each other If a few people founded a company like this and became successful, some people who joined later would complain about the abrasiveness. And if the complainants happened to be from certain "protected classes", abrasiveness would be legally prohibited.

Replace "company" with "tech industry" and it's exactly what happened.

Re: When Nerds Collide (2014)

#162

Post by bkirwi »

reitanqild wrote: post #142
eaton wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Some scumbag got a guy fired by publicly shaming him on twitter for making a joke to his friend in a private conversation. That is one of the most hostile, weird, and hateful ways I've ever seen someone behave. A conference attendee overheard another conference attendee making dick jokes in a public space at a conference, violating the terms of the CoC that he'd agreed to before attending. She reported him and post…

There's more to it than that. 1. The words were never meant for her 2. She didn't contact him, maybe she misheard? 3. She was, in fact, way more powerful than him (privilege) 4. She has a history of being a professional victim 5. -and a history of making similarly bad jokes herself, publicly

It's an odd definition of personal privilege you have, where the privileged person suffers two years of harassment and abuse, and the person without privilege immediately returns to a lucrative career.

It's also an odd definition of professional victim, where publicly being a 'victim' results in you getting booted out of the profession.

I don't want to comment on the event itself here -- but I think that the aftermath, and the continued reaction to it, say a lot of sad things about the tech community.

Re: When Nerds Collide (2014)

#163

Post by CurtMonash »

leereeves wrote: post #117
jnbiche wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. 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 "ele…

I think the author actually meant the social-mores of classical liberalism (freedom of speech, etc), which protect, imperfectly, from both regal tyranny and the tyranny of the majority.

I don't think we need to go off on the tangent of fake vs. real democracy here.

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.

Re: When Nerds Collide (2014)

#164

Post by TeMPOraL »

hueving wrote: post #113
Potando wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hold on. The only scumbag that got the guy fired was his employer. Will your boss fire you if you get harassed on Twitter?

Yes, if someone launches an Internet lynch mob of social justice warriors at me that threatens the business, of course I would be fired. No company wants to be perceived as "the place that employs the most-hated sexist in the world" if they depend on selling to regular people. An Internet lynch mob can ruin SE rankings, launch DDoS attacks, etc. Anything that attracts one is a liability.

That is of course a very stupid behaviour of such company - by letting someone go because of SE rankings or DDoS attacks of angry, misguided crowd, you're just showing that this is a great way to influence you. So the next time the misguided crowd wants you to fire someone? They'll find something to get themselves offended about, get angry and DDoS you.

Re: When Nerds Collide (2014)

#165

Post by john_butts »

anon4 wrote: post #120
hueving wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some scumbag got a guy fired by publicly shaming him on twitter for making a joke to his friend in a private conversation. That is one of the most hostile, weird, and hateful ways I've ever seen someone behave. It's a perfect example of counter-productive, oppressive behavior that was outlined in this article. Do you think getting that guy fired is going to suddenly change his sense of humor? Not likely. If anything,…

From http://www.esquire.co.uk/culture/books/7933/exclusive-extrac... which was linked here not long ago: I asked Hank if he found himself behaving differently since the incident. Had it altered how he lived his life? “I distance myself from female developers a little bit now,” he replied. “I’m not as friendly. There’s humour, but it’s very mundane. You just don’t know. I can’t afford another Donglegate.” So I guess i…

Orrrrr it brings him into line with appropriate workplace expectations in a world not dominated by dudes.

Re: When Nerds Collide (2014)

#166

Post by thret »

wcummings wrote: post #137

I didn't go to public school, is it really as 80's-teen-movie-tropes as pieces like this make it sound? It's just really hard for me to take seriously.

I can really only speak for the guys, but certainly at my school it was very much like that. Broadly speaking, sports, smokes, geeks, money. They each had their own click and hung around well defined areas during lunch and recess for obvious reasons.

Re: When Nerds Collide (2014)

#167

Post by neilk »

MrBuddyCasino wrote: post #94
dagw wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The dongle thing didn't take place at a "nerd community" event, but at a professional conference. The problem, as it where, is that computers and programming is no longer the exclusive domain of the so called "nerd" and I don't think we should make joining a subculture a prerequisite for joining a career path.

I think you got it backwards. The "dongle thing" is about a feminist bully, not about two guys making a harmless joke. The consensus is that Adria was the problem here, how anyone could come to a different conclusion is beyond me.

I'm willing to stack my geek credentials against anyone, and I'm not in your consensus. Lots of people aren't. You might be inside a filter bubble.

I don't agree with what Adria did, in that she shamed these guys on Twitter, and furthermore, she's doubled down on some conspiracy theories afterwards. And maybe she has an itchy trigger finger on what might constitute a hostile environment.

But, the issue of hostile environments -- as created through a shared culture of sexualized talk -- that's real. The best intervention I think, would have been to talk to those guys. If she didn't feel comfortable confronting them, she was also justified in taking it to the PyCon organizers.

Re: When Nerds Collide (2014)

#168

Post by jschwartzi »

arrrg wrote: post #108
lucio wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, and this distinction is essential: You're welcomed based on what you can do and not on what you are . "white male" is un-meritocratic, is something you "are", and not something you can "make" by talent and effort. "code" is cold, hard, unforgiving ("you can't argue with a root shell"), and meritocratic. She's saying: Nevermind who you "ARE", you're welcomed if you can "PRODUCE" (great code). That's exactly the an…

Meritocracy is a bullshit term. It does not exist in reality. It’s an illusion, a joke.

It's actually an ideal. Ideals also don't exist in reality. The difference is that ideals are generally held to be worth striving for in spite of that.

Re: When Nerds Collide (2014)

#169

Post by john_butts »

Am I misreading the Japan thing? Like, it's not hard to imagine that there would be candidates that would be immediately excluded based on surname alone without even getting into race or gender - is this "fair" or "unfair", or is it just the way things are? Is the latter(est) the analogy we're supposed to take from this?

Re: When Nerds Collide (2014)

#170

Post by TeMPOraL »

RKoutnik wrote: post #29

I was shocked, visibly, when I found out that no one at the first startup I worked at played tabletop RPGs. I was shocked again when they looked down on me because I did. In a city that prides itself on "weirdos", I was the wrong kind of weird. In college I poured over Steven Levy's Hackers , hoping one day I would be able to meet the tech elite. I jumped at the first chance I got to work out here, hoping I'd finally…

Visit a local hackerspace; there's much better chance of finding actual hackers there.
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