Not in a good way. There seems to be some indication these are all women.
Most murdered women in the world were killed by domestic violence:
[rant]
I assume everyone has seen the cool Black hole pictures that were released recently? A good reminder of why the internet is awful. A young lady (MIT graduate) has become the front figure for the project, being (from what I understand) the main developer of the algorithm involved - although - as with almost all significant science projects, this was a team effort. Bouman points this out herself.
But the idea that a woman can become the face of a significant scientific accomplishment is apparently unthinkable to some men. To the point that people are apparently spending time digging through the public git records of the project in order to discredit her. It’s so bad that one of her co-workers (who they’re trying to give the credit) has had to go out with a disclaimer.
The one redeeming part of this discrediting effort, is that the people doing this are (as usual) displaying their own stupidity. One of their claims is that Andrew should get the brunt of the credit because he wrote 850,000 lines of code. Except… he really didn’t (and anyone with actual software development competence would have recognized this right away).
Of course, the people who join into this kind of campaign, are the same one’s who’ll go “lol, there are no women in science”. But yeah - that’s not surprising, when every time credit is being given to a woman for an achievement, the reactionary response is to try and belittle, harass, or (in this case) straight up erase her contribution.
[/rant]
Not sure where I was going with this, but it just makes pissed and annoyed that we’re still dealing with this in 2019 in the Western world.
What’s bizarre about this is that women are almost always better university students on average. In engineering classes even if only 10% of the students were female they were always in the top 50% or above. The worst students were always guys. There’s absolutely nothing about capacity that “obtains” as the philosophers like to say in any modern context.
I really think we’re experiencing (as I like to see it, and am probably the only one to be frank) something like a resurgence of sophistry and the temptations of Parmenidism, which for some reason is particularly appealing to male ways of thinking, and which some women have pointed out in their “rejection” of logic. By construction of logical frameworks which supposedly prove or disprove a proposition shit men today try to “prove” that women are inferior of the “If A and If B Then C” sort of thinking.
Parmenidies and the sophists basically believed that nothing was true except that which you could argue, (basically the operational thinking of lawyers) and for some reason today lots of these alt-men types will spend hundreds of hours digging through whatever data they can find to “prove” their proposition. Essentially by overwhelming their targets with “data” they “prove” that women are inferior to men.
Why exactly they do this is a more complicated question. I don’t remember guys being like this when I was growing up, although I’m sure were all sexist in a lot of ways, but I don’t remember this angry targeted obsessiveness. Somehow these guys have become convinced that women’s equality is some kind of grand conspiracy and they are the heroes pointing out the empress has no clothes.
I like that she’s the face of the project. Let her go on all the interviews, get all the book deals, win all the awards. She’s young, make her famous now so she becomes an institution by the time she’s 50. Our kids need her more than some other generic scientist they’d never relate to anyway. The best way to get revenge on the guys maliciously searching for facts about her involvement is to double-down, make it official, and see her reap the most recognition for her work.
I approve, with the exception that this is a massive collaborative effort with many deserving recipients of credit. But making her the face of it is the right thing.
You say that as though there hasn’t been a concerted anti-feminist ideological propaganda effort for the last 40 years. All that time and effort is finally paying off; when you were young it had barely gotten off the ground.
I’m not so sure it’s quite so straightforward.
Back in the 90s most girls I knew rejected the label of “feminist” because they thought being a feminist meant being anti-feminine. The bra-burning, man-hating, not-shaving type of woman that dressed in men’s clothes was a “feminist” to them and the opposite of what they wanted to be. (Many of them now have completely changed their minds of course).
I don’t remember feminism being seen really as having much intersection with male concerns at all. The 90s were also famous for their “girl power” stuff in music and popular culture in the second half of the 90s such as Buffy or that witch movie, ect., which was all for mass consumption but apparently had a long tail of influence.
Once social media took off and was really taken over by and for women, the modern kind of feminism, hardened and refined by social media into easy to understand and communicate catch phrases and concepts (and these concepts gestating and getting hashed out in women’s departments for a couple of decades) has made most socially connected women self-identify as feminist today.
If most young women were anti-feminist in the 90s and the new generation of women are pro-feminist today, it doesn’t seem like anti-feminism over the decades (if true) shows signs of working. I think anti-feminism by young men today connects up with the 4chan, conspiratorial, “dark web” sort of disestablishment counter-culture that prides itself on “hard truths” and “anti-PC”, combined with angry, bored young men having lots of time and little to do.
For sure there’s a lot of this going on, but I think it’s also tied to this whole “know your place” thing that is happening right now. For some people, they think: we let you out of the home, let you be musicians, veterinarians, assistants, and nurses, but now you want to be in charge of stuff, get paid the same, and discover new things? Sorry, girls, that’s a bridge too far.
To these guys they see everything as a zero-sum game. If a woman gets credit for this photo, then there’s some man out there who truly deserves it who isn’t getting what he should.
It’s all just so toxic, and the internet’s combination of anonymity and ease of finding people who share your terrible views makes it worse.
In a thread on another issue, women’s competence in science came up. I brought up other reasons than science for the observed disparity … and just saw this:
The title is a bit misleading. It is about specifically a set of lawsuits against Salk for gender discrimination, and the descriptions of why that happened fit my experience in the field, elsewhere, a while back.
Same in tech.
Yay Apple, and THE ALGORITHM
Good for him for caring. Great to see it posted here too thus, more people caring.
It’s hard for me to reconcile the fact that after all of this, they still want to do business with Apple/Goldman Sachs and use the card.
Protest to the point its slightly inconvenient. i.e moan a bit on socmedia and hope it goes viral.
Its not as if he’s boycotting credit cards even. Its just too much effort to switch providers. I presume he’s not in the “bad credit/debt so stuck with a handful of sharks” situation because its Apple and GS.
If you walked away from every business that discriminated based on race or sex or any other illegal thing, there wouldn’t be many companies left. Yes, it happens that often, either with customers or internally with employees. What he wants is change, and if all this can be validated… this might even lead to that.
I get that argument, and can even be sympathetic to it in most cases… but we’re talking about a status symbol credit card here. It’s not like they’re being turned away from healthcare or basic services. There are (probably) hundreds of other cards available that are reasonable substitutes.
To me, their behavior signals that they care enough to complain, but not enough to take any action - so why should Goldman/Apple do anything?
From another article it does appear GS is being investigated which is good and will hopefully lead to a change.
I don’t think it’s okay to discriminate, and that includes caring even if it’s not a basic need item. It’s illegal for one thing, and it needs to stop whether someone else thinks it’s a luxury or not. Social Media is still a form of action, and since we’re talking about it, that’s working.
Credit card algorithms are weird. I’ve had the reverse version of the OP. My wife has been home with the kids for 17 years, so we live on what I make. However, she is one who gets the much higher limits on cards, receives invites for exclusive travel cards, etc. Not sure why since our credit scores are nearly identical.
It wouldn’t surprise me at all if there is an inherent bias against women in their systems, but there is also a lot of weirdness.
Credit score has very little to do with tax returns or where you live. It has everything to do with a demonstrated history of paying back credit on time, and your own personal income factors in to some extent as well. I get that it’s dumb, but it’s little to do with Apple and something that’s been going on for a while. I hate the credit rating agencies as much as the next guy but this is weirdly targeted.
I believe that the NY AG is actually investigating this now, because it would be illegal.