J_S_Bach wrote:Perhaps not talking down to other posters could yield better results. Perhaps coming from points of assumed superiority is one of the reasons we have trouble having healthy, constructive discussions. When spoken to as equals people often don't feel like they're being attacked and better discussion is possible.
The reason we're having trouble having healthy, productive discussions is that you want us to treat the opinions of someone who does not believe sociology is a science as valid during discussion of a sociological phenomenon.
I started out this discussion treating people as equals, and the first response to that essay was someone ignoring the information I had presented. Instead, they stated unsupported opinions and straight up called information I pulled from a Stanford article about the history of gender and computing a "conspiracy theory."
That was the first attack in this debate.
Now, my original post did summarize some information in an active, lively tone, but I didn't think I said anything particularly untoward in that original link dump post. It was the socio-historical equivalent of someone on tumblr saying "the McCarthys were dicks;" talking about terrible historical realities with jocular ire. Because there were, for real, several professional organizations who believed that since women's work is often devalued, if programming continued to be seen as women's work it would be less respected than it would be otherwise and... instead of working to eliminate sexism, they worked to eliminate women from their field, freeing up more jobs for men within their social circle. That's a literal boys' club who literally purchased ads and established tests that sought to place more people in their circle into positions previously held by women. There's also evidence that answers for the main programming evaluation tests were obtained by fraternities early in their use, and the purpose of those banks of fraternity tests were to give the men who belonged to those fraternities a literal advantage over others. That's another literal boys' club, taking deliberate action to literally cheat women out of programming jobs. Most of these facts can be found by following the link in that original post, though I'll admit the first link was a Smithsonian analysis of a Stanford summary of research in the field, but the book where it's most thoroughly documented is not available for free online. I took it out of my library a while ago, though, and you may be able to too.
Or maybe you view the fact that I say "sometimes people think they're being unbiased, but they're not!" as an attack. Well... it's not an attack. The fact that most people are not conscious of unconscious bias and internalized social norms is well-documented. It's like the classic study from the 80s where they found that 93% of drivers consider themselves above average. Our inability to accurately assess our own skills and our own biases is called the
bias blind spot. So from the standpoint of someone in the social sciences, "I don't think I'm biased, therefore I don't think bias exists in my field" demonstrates a clear lack of understanding of a fundamental scientific principle in the relevant field.
There's no good way to tapdance around that. It's as facepalm-y to someone in the social sciences as someone saying "dinosaurs are basically just big crocodile lizards who died like a million years ago, right?" would be to someone in archaeology. I imagine an archaeologist who heard someone say that might end up using... sarcasm. Dramatic irony. All the tricks!
Now, there's no shame in thinking that the dinosaurs were lizards. There is SOME shame in walking into a discussion where people are talking about how we've found closer links between dinosaurs and birds than ever before, and saying "I don't think that's true. Dinosaurs aren't birds, they're lizards!"
Saying "Huh, I used to think Dinosaurs were lizards. Can you explain why people think they're birds now?" is far better for everyone involved, there's no shame in having outdated or inaccurate information, as long as you're willing to learn. But that's not what happened here. If people had said "I don't notice much overt sexism at all, is there something I'm missing?" or "I'm not sure why you think there was a deliberate plan to push women out of programming, care to elaborate?" we wouldn't be having this problem.
A lot of scientists think that the social pressure to humor the guy who shows up and says "Can we stop talking about birds? The book I had when I was eight said Dinosaurs are LIZARDS" is harmful to scientific debate, especially in the US. Some people even think that attitude is responsible for the low level of awareness of certain scientific phenomena in the US. What's more, we're beginning to believe this may be because men are rewarded socially for this kind of behavior - entering a conversation confidently attempting to dominate it with his viewpoint, even if it's not the more informed one. This leads to less aggressive guys getting less opportunity to contribute to discussions. If we stop socially rewarding people who attempt to dominate conversations with unsupported arguments based on unfounded self-confidence in the universal correctness of their own views, we might hope to give everyone a chance to compete and reduce our tolerance for people going on shows and just... saying things that aren't facts, while another guy says things that ARE facts.
The other half of the problem is that women or less aggressive men have been taught to do the opposite: to not speak up, even when they possess expertise. So a friend of mine proposed the rule of science politeness: if you enter a conversation about a field of study where you aren't up to date with the research, and you have a differing view, demonstrate an awareness of that when you speak.
Let's say you guys were having a conversation about, I don't know, building a top-of-the-line streaming PC. I don't know anything about that, so I wouldn't come in here and say "I heard you should ustream on the twitches! Make sure to have MANY RAM." But if the conversation went into more familiar waters and someone said "get an AMD processor instead of an intel" I wouldn't say "Intels are better," even if I think they are based on something I read a few years ago. Instead I'd say "Huh, a few years ago I heard intels are better, did something change?" That allows me to make my opinion clear and offer information, but I'm not behaving as if I have up-to-date expertise in a field I'm only marginally familiar with.
Basically, I'm bad at tolerating those who enter a scientific conversation without acknowledging that it's possible others might have more expertise. I have even less patience for those who both state unsupported non-facts and mock people who disagree with them. I think that behavior is associated with maladaptive social norms that we need to eliminate in favor of a conversational style more based on honestly assessing one's own level of expertise and sharing information based on that assessment.
Still, I probably would have been a little gentler if I hadn't been called a conspiracy theorist first.