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The Empathy Gap in Tech: Interview with a Software Engineer

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Re: The Empathy Gap in Tech: Interview with a Software Engineer

#261

Post by belorn »

lazyasciiart wrote: post #163
dcow wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Eye for an eye punishment is not very left-wing. If one person takes everything from another person by killing them, is it left politics to do collective punishment based on class, race or gender? No. We punish the guilty as humanely as possible and accept that there will always be some number of bad actors and those individuals should be addressed.

Utopian racial blindness is good when dealing with crime. We don't want police to look at race and do affirmative action. We don't want insurance or bankers looking at race or gender and do affirmative actions. We even have explicit laws forbidding judges to look at race when determining recurrence risks (through what they use now has some major flaws that acts as proxy for race).

Discrimination is wrong. Like theft and murder it need to be stopped and have the guilty charged and judged. Discrimination is a crime. We would be abhorred if affirmative action was openly (officially) used to address any other crime, so why should discrimination be any different?

Re: The Empathy Gap in Tech: Interview with a Software Engineer

#262

Post by kazinator »

danieltillett wrote: post #48
kazinator wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Survival on planet Earth has critically depended on lazy thinking: generalizing from incomplete scraps of information, and acting in real-time.

Maybe I am just being an old-timer grouch, but it seems to be getting worse. As people attention is diverted from one topic to another with increasing speed, avoiding lazy thinking gets harder and harder. We do still need to fight against it :)

What is there to fight? You will never have all the data to make a perfect decision, and even if you have all the data you can possibly have, you don't know which evaluation functions are the right ones to use that will work in your favor.

These are fundamentals of the Universe, as such.

Re: The Empathy Gap in Tech: Interview with a Software Engineer

#263

Post by imtringued »

pjc50 wrote: post #197
asabjorn wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yes, that is not a very safe way to drive.

Re: The Empathy Gap in Tech: Interview with a Software Engineer

#264

Post by ataturk »

Niksko wrote: post #8

This article is going to rub lots of people the wrong way, I suspect, but it's level headed, well reasoned and well written. Although I ultimately disagree with some of the conclusions drawn at the end, (particularly: > 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.…

It has the appearance of being level-headed and well-reasoned, but I am not so sure that it is. The evidence the author provides is weak--vague assertions about being picked on in school and a self-administered test? That's not a reliable diagnosis, that is self-congratulatory hokum.

I understand that people want to diagnose themselves and that many aspire to some kind of victimhood because it is fashionable, but there's no possible way that our society has that many people with Asperger's or Autism, and certainly not in functioning roles! This whole "on the spectrum" thing is nonsense. Either you are mentally debilitated to the point where you can't get by in regular social interactions, or you are a functioning human being that has the intelligence to improve your social skills if you choose to work on that.

There's a lot of different issues at play. We react negatively to negative stimuli. If you are bullied and have generally negative experiences socially at a young age, you are more likely to be withdrawn. That doesn't mean you have Asperger's--rather, it means that people are assholes!

I have personally had to deal with horrible shit and horrible people in my life. I was withdrawn as a youth. It took me a long time to realize the goodness in life and work around the dipshits who caused me untold problems. To this day, I don't like people, I don't like crowds, I could give a crap about what your problems are. Not Asperger's, though. Married 15 years, raising two kids, been successful in my career. Not Asperger's, and likely neither are you, so stop searching for excuses and just accept the fact that people are mostly crappy to each other as that is the Human Condition.

The guy at Google was right, btw. PC has gone too far. Feminism has brought us to the point of self-destruction. If women want to compete in the workplace, then compete and let's stop all the affirmative action because all it ends up ever being is reverse-discrimination. Given the opportunity, anyone will take a leg up any way they can get it via gaming the system. Feminism and cultural Marxism are just more gamification.

Re: The Empathy Gap in Tech: Interview with a Software Engineer

#265

Post by justherefortart »

QML wrote: post #250
justherefortart wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sweet, I got 34 as well. I'm going to sub that for my ACT score now :-)

Isn't there bias with self-diagnosing yourself though?

Of course, but you try to answer the questions honestly. I took it as did my wife. I expected that I wouldn't score that high. She got a 17.

Re: The Empathy Gap in Tech: Interview with a Software Engineer

#266

Post by smsm42 »

klipt wrote: post #150
katzgrau wrote: post #81

From one of the comments (author, Nathan Spears): > People with Asperger’s can navigate social situations remarkably well after they learn “the rules” of social interaction. That's my experience. I too, was socially awkward kid who taught himself basic programming by reading computer manuals around the age of 10. I constantly got picked on though out elementary and middle school. In high school it got a little better…

> As an aspie, you're probably pretty damned good at actively learning the traits that seem to come naturally for other people. Makes me wonder how much of "neuro-diversity" is actually just "neuro-plasticity". Maybe many aspies are actually just "neuro-typicals" who were bullied and lost faith in social interactions, and thus spent much of their early life on geeky interests instead, developing better technical skil…

No, it's not just lost faith. It's about as true as saying somebody that can't run a mile under 5 mins or bench press 300+ pounds just "lost their faith in running and bench pressing" and that's the only reason ever.

Some things are just hard for some people. Or impossible. Some of them can be improved with training and practice, but not instantly and with a lot of effort. Some will forever take much more effort than for other people and leave one exhausted. Some may be just plain impossible. Some may be possible, but people may decide, rightly or wrongly, that they are so hard that the effort is just not worth it.

Re: The Empathy Gap in Tech: Interview with a Software Engineer

#267

Post by lazyasciiart »

yorwba wrote: post #192
joshuamorton wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not particularly. We do it all the time when the free market misses some context. I see no major difference between a carbon tax and an affirmative action policy. In both cases, the naively optimal action misses some important context, so the system is then tweaked to modify the outcome to take the external factors into account. Do you have any alternative that isn't isomorphic to affirmative action?

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…

> The better alternative would be to improve the situation where the original injustice occurs, not sometime later in the pipeline.

So, go back in time and ban redlining, to allow black families to live in the areas with better schools and build wealth through home ownership? Sweet bro.

Re: The Empathy Gap in Tech: Interview with a Software Engineer

#268

Post by lazyasciiart »

Veelox wrote: post #257
noobermin wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with your perspective is it's wrong. I don't mean to be mean to you, but it just isn't correct. The difference isn't culture, it's simply access to capital. Here's an enlightening video[0], a 12-minute video about the representation of black families in media. It touches on the myth of black fathers not being involved with their kids, which is a good example of false attitudes that lead people to blame "c…

I will be honest. I haven't watched the video yet, I will make another comment when I do. But a quick Google and I find[0] that 25% of white children and 67% of black children are raised in single parent homes. That seems like a lot if it is only access to captial and not culture. [0] http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2013/jul/...

Get back to us with some stats on relative likelihood of a black man and a white man going to jail when found with some weed, and see if you can figure out why that could be related to both lack of capital and single parent homes.

Re: The Empathy Gap in Tech: Interview with a Software Engineer

#269

Post by lazyasciiart »

dcow wrote: post #227
lazyasciiart wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Your worldview is pretty narrow, then. What you see as lack of desire for enacting social policy aimed at "fixing" implicit biases we see as acknowledging that in a truely diverse society we must tolerate and and navigate the inevitable biases at an individual human level and each one in a uniquely intimate way. In other words, in the US at least, you can't solve higher order human problems with government policy. Yo…

So are you denying the existence of individual acts of racism today, or praising them as wonderful examples of true diversity?

In the US at least, it pretty fucking explicitly does dictate one moral paradigm above others - ever heard 'we hold these truths to be self-evident"? And then there's something about people being equal and having rights and stuff. An entire moral paradigm.

Re: The Empathy Gap in Tech: Interview with a Software Engineer

#270

Post by pathseeker »

pjc50 wrote: post #197
asabjorn wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

If you have a car that pulls to the right, do you keep chopping parts off of the right side to make up for it?
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