Anecdata

Posted Jul 30, 2009 4:59 UTC (Thu) by Baylink (guest, #755)
In reply to: Anecdata by sumanah
Parent article: OSCON keynote: Standing out in the crowd

I like Hooters, too; they have a decent hamburger.

Again, anecdotes, the clever portmanteau title aside, are not data. I see an amazing number of what the Wikipedians would call weasel words in those summaries.

First, again: let's let out anything that involves a crime, ok? Murder is not sexist, no matter whom you kill.

Debian is a boys club. Yeah, so's NFL football. I got news for you: I ain't breaking into that club, no matter how much I try.

But that's not sexism.

I won't be hosting the View any time soon either. *That* *is* sexism.

The Warty Theme: both sexes include in the images; how is *that* sexist? Or are you implying that women don't enjoy looking at nekkid men; that's just a boys thing?

As for Lawrence Summers, he appears to be an equal opportunity offender; you know: a shithead.

Why should Launchpad not be permitted to require real names? Facebook, a much more intentional community always has; hell, even MySpace is now encouraging people to use their real names; the majority of the females I know on there do.

I guess my current crystallization of my point is that -- especially given that list -- I think there's some confirmation bias going on there in the definition of what constitutes "proof of sexism in the FOSS development community"... our original topic.

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Anecdata

Posted Jul 30, 2009 5:22 UTC (Thu) by xoddam (subscriber, #2322) [Link] (2 responses)

> let's let out anything that involves a crime, ok?
> Murder is not sexist, no matter whom you kill.

You have some data to back that up, Baylink? It's an appallingly ignorant falsehood. Much crime targets the weak (and weakens the targeted). An awful lot of violent crime is highly sexual.

Anecdata

Posted Jul 30, 2009 5:31 UTC (Thu) by Baylink (guest, #755) [Link]

A matter of your definitions of words.

But being sexual in its nature is does not make it sexist. Gay men kill one another for reasons of passion as well, and they're the same sex, and both minorities -- the same minority. That's a question of preference, not one of gender, per se. IMO.

Assuming that man on woman crime is the product of sexism is therefore in itself sexist behavior, precisely the point I (and one or two other commenters) have been making.

But here's a case in point:

Why am I worrying this bone? Because the process of argument, of getting all the various pros and cons out on the table is *fun*, the same reason hackers write code. But the intensity of the process has almost certainly scared off some other people with something useful to say, and I'd bet a lot of them are male...

We weren't doing that to drive them away... but that doesn't mean it might not happen.

It *also*, though, doesn't mean that that is *our* problem.

And as for someone's innuendo as to my posting count -- it's a conversation; I work a desk job, stay up nights, and get my comment notices on a Blackberry; it's not like I'm sitting here hitting Refresh every 30 seconds waiting for the next round...

Anecdata

Posted Jul 30, 2009 5:32 UTC (Thu) by Baylink (guest, #755) [Link]

Oh, and if you're sure it's a falsehood, why would you want data?