This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
This is overstating the case even though it is directionally correct. I can’t disprove your claims about the blogs, mostly because trying to Google anything about women in tech is a shitshow, so I’ll grant that. But there are obviously women with GitHub accounts, and I’d be willing to bet money that female Google engineers have actual open-source contributions.
The field is heavily skewed, not absolutely skewed.
Yes, I exaggerated for dramatic effect, but I think the field is more heavily skewed than you imagine.
It's true that tech firms like Google sometimes hire women to work on open-source projects like Chromium, so technically there are female open-source contributors. But since these women don't haven an intrinsic interest in the field they're not really going to push the boundaries, which really is necessary for other people to follow your work.
It's like going to a tech convention where someone hired a bunch of booth babes to improve the gender ratio, but at the end of the day, the most interesting conversations happen in the hotel lobby, after the women have gone home, because nobody paid them to stay and they have better things to do with their evening than talk to a bunch of nerds about a topic that's boring to them.
Open source software development is still based very much around passion. Linus Torvalds famously announced Linux with “I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu)”. Terry A. Davis developed TempleOS because God commanded him to; it's an extremely impressive project that, unlike Linux, is used by nobody. It seems like only males take on projects like this: things nobody asked for and that do not come with the promise of a reward. Is there literally a single female person on the planet who would consider creating an operation system from scratch just as a hobby?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link