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One for the timelineOne for the timelinePosted Dec 6, 2010 4:14 UTC (Mon) by BrucePerens (guest, #2510)In reply to: One for the timeline by mjg59 Parent article: The dark side of open source conferences
my first assumption isn't that the men in question are borderline spectrum, it's that society as a whole is pretty bad at enforcing reasonable behaviour standards. The assumption here is that the only reason people do perform bad behavior is that society does not completely enforce a specific rule against it. It seems to be ignoring the potential of socializing people to act in a moral and equitable fashion even in the absence of the violent compulsion of law.
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One for the timeline Posted Dec 6, 2010 4:30 UTC (Mon) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link]
...whereas your assumption is that people engage in sexual harassment because they lack empathy? That would be a solid and reasonable position if it weren't contradicted by reality. For the most part people either engage in sexual harassment because they're unaware of strong social prohibitions against it (primarily because there *aren't* strong social prohibitions against it yet), or because they're bad people. An anti-harassment policy means the first group has no excuse, and makes it easier to get rid of the second.
Working with people with empathy disorders to improve their social abilities is a wonderful goal and, having spent a couple of years doing so in the past, I wholeheartedly approve of any effort to do so. I also wholeheartedly approve of work to reduce our society's dependence upon oil. I think they're pretty much equally relevant to the problem that the parent article discusses.
One for the timeline Posted Dec 6, 2010 6:11 UTC (Mon) by BrucePerens (guest, #2510) [Link] or because they're bad people. Right. How do bad people happen? Especially regarding this particular crime, which isn't an economic one. It's not because we don't do a good enough job of enforcing behavioral rules. It's because they get bad parental examples and bad social education.
One for the timeline Posted Dec 6, 2010 12:56 UTC (Mon) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link]
You seem to be arguing by assertion rather than citation, but where do empathy disorders come into it?
One for the timeline Posted Dec 6, 2010 19:48 UTC (Mon) by Zomb (subscriber, #23391) [Link]
Agreed. While Bruce is mostly right about the social education and the results for the personal skills of many engineers, his conclusion is based purely on correlation. Which is not an appropriate way to find a proof; in fact, it doesn't usually prove anything.
Correlation "analytics" found that computer gaming is the main and only cause of school rampages, or that we need more (sea) pirates in order to get the climate stable again.
One for the timeline Posted Dec 8, 2010 8:46 UTC (Wed) by k8to (subscriber, #15413) [Link]
Let it go, please.
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