On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 10, 2014 2:35 UTC (Fri) by jackb (guest, #41909)
In reply to: On the sickness of our community by ras
Parent article: On the sickness of our community

Lennart Poettering complaint's aren't all that different Kathy's. All the elements are there - abuse, threats, lies. But unlike Kathy, Lennart continues to function well in the environment. I don't want to be unkind to Lennart, but my guess is this is because he doesn't posses the depth of empathy Kathy obviously has.

Alternate theory: it's culturally acceptable for men to learn how to become "hard targets" to protect themselves from sociopaths.

Women are more likely to be "soft targets" because any time the subject of learning better mental self-defence techniques is raised it's immediately followed by accusations of "victim blaming."

Those accusations and the self-censorship they provoke, of course, only serve to benefit one group.

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On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 10, 2014 4:30 UTC (Fri) by alankila (guest, #47141) [Link] (4 responses)

Innate sex differences could be at play. Women appear to be more fearful than men. This sort of thing could be because women's weaker physical strength. Evolution could drive such change by making you take potential threats more seriously.

There is also a debate involving neurochemistry here. Are people who are unable to resist temptations somehow weaker in will power, or is it just that they experience the temptations strongly? Similarly, if a person appears to be courageous in face of danger, is he brave, or just incapable of feeling appropriate level of fear?

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 13, 2014 16:58 UTC (Mon) by b3nt0box (subscriber, #98698) [Link] (3 responses)

Wow. Arguments like that are abstract thought exercises at best.

Social influences are far more impactful on people's responses. The innate differences between the sexes that you mention sound more like rationalizing social norms than some real evolutionary diference.

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 16, 2014 10:28 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (2 responses)

> thought exercises at best.

NO NO NO.

My wife has Parkinson's. It upsets her perception of reality. That's basically a shortage of the nerve-signalling chemical dopamine, and it has well-recognised effects.

Testosterone makes people more aggressive, and presumably is very important both in that and in controlling peoples' response to aggression. Put two testosterone-fuelled people in a room and you probably won't get a fight, but the atmosphere will be very aggressive.

I don't know enough about oestrogen to make the equivalent comment but gender differences are very important. I suspect if you did a profiling exercise, you'd actually find are far better match of the passive/aggressive spectrum with testosterone levels than with gender, but then you find a fairly close match with testosterone levels and gender.

You can't say "individual differences are more important than gender" when gender provides a massive bias to those individual differences. You're almost certainly right to claim that gender is not a DIRECT influence, but it has a very strong second-level influence.

Which is why Lennart could shrug it all off - he's probably high testosterone. Kathy couldn't - and she could well have had less testosterone than the average female. (Which is why some - high testosterone - women don't have any difficulty coping.)

(And it wouldn't surprise me if many of these assholes are beta or gamma males - they're high-testosterone in the company of an even-higher testosterone individual.)

Cheers,
Wol

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 20, 2014 15:51 UTC (Mon) by nye (subscriber, #51576) [Link] (1 responses)

>Testosterone makes people more aggressive

Nope. Aggression *causes* increased testosterone production, so they are strongly correlated, however testosterone does *not* cause aggression.

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 21, 2014 16:02 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Quite. Threaten someone's children and you'll probably trigger an aggressive response, even -- perhaps especially -- if female. (Of course, women do have some circulating testosterone, just as men have circulating oestrogen, but the levels are *much* lower.)

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 28, 2014 23:39 UTC (Tue) by njs (subscriber, #40338) [Link]

Seriously? WTF is your suggestion for "better mental self-defence techniques" that will fix the problems of being suddenly (a) unemployable, and (b) receiving a constant stream of credible threats of violence against your family? Will "better mental self-defence" make the police take these kinds of things seriously? (They don't.) Will "better mental self-defence" magically make employers stop believing slanderous rumours about what a "slut" someone is? As Kathy Sierra documents, her main troll was widely celebrated by tech luminaries after admitting what he'd done.

Women get attacked harder then men (because it's easy to find men willing to dogpile on women online), and they're softer targets because the *people around them don't back them up*.

(And anyway, I get why being a stone-cold hardass is a reasonable requirement if you want to be, like, a marine or something, but why is it a reasonable requirement for writing init systems or writing chatty blog posts about learning Java?)

(Oh right, and on your other point: the reason you get accused of "victim blaming" is because you make arguments like this that are based entirely on your vague impressions of how things work and ignoring a bunch of well-documented facts you can't be bothered to read about, and then somehow come to the erroneous conclusion that the *major* problem is something that the victim should have differently, like improve their "mental self-defence". I.e., you're blaming victims for not controlling things that are outside their control. It's a pretty simple and descriptive term really; it only sounds like some Machiavellian ploy because you can't be arsed to learn how uninformed you are. The result isn't "censorship" any more than it's censorship to suggest that people might want to slow down before suggesting on LKML that the kernel would be much more awesome if they rewrote it in JavaScript, or that if you go ahead anyway then you might be disappointed by the response.)