One for the timeline [LWN.net]

One for the timeline

Posted Dec 5, 2010 19:50 UTC (Sun) by BrucePerens (guest, #2510)
In reply to: One for the timeline by paulj
Parent article: The dark side of open source conferences

Sure. If you look in my comments for the action I am calling for, it is childhood and early adulthood social education for healthy interaction between men and women who are peers in age and intellectual development. It is my firm belief that the crimes mentioned in the timeline are not committed by men who have ever learned to have a healthy social peer relationship with women, rather they are coming from men who objectify women, which is an illness brought about (IMO) by poor social education and probably bad parential examples.

I am not saying that the criminals have a diagnosable spectrum disorder. However, I think that as a class men who go in for programming may score lower on a scale of emotional maturity than the general population.

Computer programming, (and I guess science and engineering) provides a world of justice for the adept that does not exist in their human interactions. If you write your program correctly, it works, otherwise it doesn't. This is very attractive to folks who have much more difficulty finding justice in the world around them because their actions in that world do not result in the expected outcomes.

I think that as a class they might need some early remediation. That's all.

Thanks

Bruce

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One for the timeline

Posted Dec 6, 2010 9:00 UTC (Mon) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]

Whether you intend it or not, this still sounds like you're referring to ASD, because you're explicitly tying together the emotional disorders that might lead men to abuse women and the disorders that are more prevalent to programming, i.e. ASD.

Again, where is the evidence that these disorders intersect? Given that sexual abuse apparently occurs just as much outside of ASD-biased areas like programming conferences, indeed is likely far *more* prevalent outside (you yourself referenced the tailhook scandal). It's quite possible that, if anything, ASD-biased areas see *less* abuse. The connection you make (at least in the minds of a few readers, and not unreasonably) between abuse and ASD is both less than fully justified and somewhat prejudicial to ASDers, who may not to be blame for any of this.

I agree an ASD-biased area might have other social-interaction issues, that might lead to certain groups being under-represented (e.g. women). But we should be very careful about conflating things...

One for the timeline

Posted Dec 6, 2010 15:57 UTC (Mon) by BrucePerens (guest, #2510) [Link]

Well, the evidence is that these crimes are not committed by people with ASD, their tension level would be so high that they'd avoid the situation. So can you just assume I'm referring to something other than ASD?

One for the timeline

Posted Dec 6, 2010 16:14 UTC (Mon) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]

I might have assumed that, except you explicitly referred to those disorders peculiar to programmers - which would be ASD. Perhaps instead you could avoid that instead? :)