Okay, Feminism, It’s Time We Had a Talk About Empathy (2013)

There are two assumptions between that claim that I don't think are proven: first, that a hostile environment in the tech industry can't have an indirect effect on young women considering a career in tech; second, that the cohort taking the AP Computer Science test is a close reflection of the tech workforce, and that an attrition rate can be meaningfully derived between the two.

The latter assumption in particular is one that I find highly dubious. This is only anecdotal, but I have noticed that many more of the women I meet in software started coding later in life than the men -- college or later. It's more likely to be a second or third career. Sometimes it was an aptitude discovered while working as non-technical staff at a software company. So an attempt to measure the effect of misogyny in the tech industry via attrition from AP Computer Science seems doomed from the start.

>When one side has a clear advantage, it is not.

So then women are the ones who need to follow that advice. One only needs to look at CDC studies to see the socially wide preferential treatment they receive to see how great an advantage it is. Oh, it is called 'benevolent sexism' in an attempt to paint it as bad, but when you take a look at society as a whole, it is clear which group is actually better off.

I think there's an interesting thought about intersectionality there. I am assuming your common objection is rudeness (that is, at least, mine). But there's some subtlety.

Linus is, by all reasonable measures, completely powerful at (I think) everything he wants to be doing. He's the only person with commit access to the Linux kernel. He works for a foundation named after himself whose primary goal is to employ him. When he yells at someone on a mailing list, it's doubly objectionable: first, for inherent human-dignity reasons of rudeness, and second, because he doesn't need to. To quote one of his former subsystem maintainers, "I've seen you be polite ... You just don't want to take the time to be polite to everyone. .... You are in a position of power. Stop verbally abusing your developers." If there's something he doesn't want in the kernel, he can just refuse to pull it. He doesn't need to get anyone's attention; he doesn't need to defend his point (there are plenty of good things that he's quietly refused to merge because he doesn't like them), he can just do what he wants. So the rudeness is gratuitous.

Shanley generally doesn't have those luxuries. She doesn't control the conversation on tech feminism, and she certainly doesn't control the culture of the Valley. When she's rude, it's often because that's the only way she can get attention. I actually think, if you read her tweets carefully, that she's very intentional in pushing the Overton window and making space for less-rude people to push their point. It's certainly possible she could accomplish her goals without rudeness, but she couldn't simply drop the rudeness the way Linus does.

(There are more things to consider here, like Linus still being in the industry and Shanley not. On the flip side, there's Shanley's treatment of people she works with and does have power over.)

If you consider those sorts of things and conclude that your problem is with the fundamental behavior of rudeness, or that neither form of rudeness is more defensible than the other, I don't think that's wrong at all. But if you haven't thought about it at all, and you look at Linus and say he's rude, and you look at Shanley and say she's rude too, I think your opinion is poorly informed, because they are coming out of very different places and they have very different intentions and effects.

More mindfulness, consideration and empathy would be great, and hopefully stop the endless tidal waves of bile that pours from SJWs who are more interested in being outraged than in actually making society better!

I agree with the initial thesis and would go so far as to say two of the top functions of 'education' are to create empathy for others and to create self-respect. However, I don't believe that the internet has made things worse; rather it has just uncovered what was already there. Also, trying to argue that our species reverts to the base programming is specious. If that were true, polygamy and murder would be the rule of law, if there were laws at all besides that of the fist. More citations are needed to justify that.

I do believe that the internet, like fire, can burn or heat our species. We learn, slowly, how to use this medium. I think that we are slowly bending towards justice, to borrow from MLK, but that it will take a long long time. Also, something that is always lost is the inherent entropy in the system, the chaos that comes to any complex network. Some amount of 'bad' will always be here, if only by the random chance of life. Most 'hatevists' have logical arguments, it's just that the lemmas and starting points are off or they have taken one wrong step that sent them spinning into hate and terror. Fixing those steps is arduous and energy intense, but necessary.

Hopefully, the tech will help us here. The massive amount of data that Google and the NSA collects could be put forth in an effort to study the mechanics of ethics and personalities. That, again, is fire, and in the wrong hands, it'll burn. But discovery is like that, and you have to see through the flames of chemical weapons and siege towers to get to fertilizers and the Hagia Sophia.