Interesting Links for 14-02-2016

[andrewducker]

• Clark Kent is a master of improv
  • superman comics
• Before You Get Too Excited About That GitHub Study On Sexism In Technology
  • technology sexism research
• What if we changed "pandering to [group]" to "being enjoyable for people who are not me."
  • funny society games
• Write code that is easy to delete, not easy to extend
  • programming advice
• Supporting a

Comments

[kalimac]

1) I like the idea of setting your boundaries fully. When I propose a joint activity, e.g., suggesting a restaurant to eat at, I count on the other person to tell me clearly whether it's a subject of enthusiasm, acceptable, tolerable, or none of the above, because that tells me whether and how hard I should look for alternatives (e.g. restrictions on timing, place, or the needs of other persons in the party

[alitheapipkin]

I was right there with the author taking apart that GitHub research until the last paragraph before the ETA:
Every time I say I’m nervous about the institutionalized social justice movement, people tell me that I’m crazy, that I’m just sexist and privileged, and that feminism is merely the belief that women are people so any discomfort with it is totally beyond the pale. I would nevertheless like to re-emphasize my concerns at this point.

Okay, so the media made an appalling job of interpreting and reporting some un-peer-reviewed research probably written by undergrads. How precisely is concluding from this that all cries of sexism in tech are a feminist conspiracy any more reasonable??

[xenophanean]

Yeah, I had exactly the same reaction to this. It's strange to carefully debunk someone else's work for not doing their homework, and then come out with something completely insubstantiated in the conclusion.

I asked him about this directly, and after a bit of arguing, he went into a lot more detail about why he thinks this, specifically:
http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/02/12/before-you-get-too-excited-about-that-github-study/#comment-325869

Be warned, the time-stamp on his post is 3:30am so his views expressed there may be a bit more extreme than normal.

[alitheapipkin]

Ah, I ran out of giving-a-toss about his opinion fairly quickly (a skim reading suggests it's all based on US-only stuff and selective evidence) but thanks anyway!

[steer]

It's sort of annoying that the article positions itself as a take down of the study (which is actually pretty good IMHO) but is in fact a take down of reporting about the study.

[woodpijn]

Love the cat valentines, especially the "space for my body here" one.

[andrewducker]

I thought they were a nice mixture of silly and painfully accurate :-)