This is why most organizations take a blind eye when popular people in their community behave badly; if they even so much as give them a three-month ban from the forum, people will keep bringing it up years later.
The argument you are making here is incredibly disingenuous.
The facts matter. Tim Peters did not behave badly. The reasoning given for his suspension misrepresented the apparent evidence, vaguely alluded to unproven private activity, and alleged harm in clearly benign actions.
I claim that I, too, did not behave badly. In particular, in "recommending" my ban, the Code of Conduct Work Group (which is unelected, and has considerable crossover with paid PSF staff; and to my understanding gets paid in some circumstances for code of conduct enforcement work even as the actual core developers are almost all volunteers) made bizarre mischaracterizations of my complaints — going so far as to falsely ascribe to me terminology that I do not use on principle.
You, specifically, should know about these sorts of things because you comment in these discussions all the time. For example, you participated in https://discuss.python.org/t/shedding-light-on-a-three-month... and your posts there demonstrate intimate familiarity with the situation, with quotes like "I suppose I have to point out that “This whole debacle…” wasn’t referring to just Tim personally and not just this one bylaw change but rather referring to, well, gestures to the last two months." (I remember reading that post, not logged in of course, back when you made it.)
You have seen the list of charges in https://discuss.python.org/t/three-month-suspension-for-a-co... so I think you reasonably should understand my position: to the extent that the referents of any of these actions were ever identified, the description is either nonsense or does not point at anything any reasonable person could consider actionable. If you disagree, please be concrete. The entire reason for the "endless litigation" you have repeatedly complained about is the lack of anyone on your side making any clear, understandable argument that anything Tim Peters did at any point was actually wrong. The closest I've seen to such an argument comes from ... Tim Peters (https://tim-one.github.io/psf/meaculpa), and frankly I think it's far too self-effacing.
This is why folks can't take yall seriously when discussing code of conduct. This person has a history of being shitty, and they used the CoC to enforce a (temporary!) ban, citing the rules he violated. If the CoC didn't exist, you'd be screaming "he didn't do anything wrong", but obviously, according to the well posted rules, he did, and they enforced those rules for the good of the community.
The reality of the situation is that yall don't want to be excluded from communities for being racist, misogynistic, or creepy.
It's been over a year, and they still haven't provided any tangible examples to support their claims. The best they could come up with was something like "he used the wink emoji" I think. There have been hundreds of posts, and many community members have demanded either evidence to back up those accusations or a public apology to Tim and their removal. But of course, those people are racist, misogynist, or creeps so nothing came out of it.
The steering committee folks sound like a microcosm of a communist poliburo. Aiming for who can be the most offended over imaginary slights.
I'm glad as An American tax payer that we're not funding an organization with such petty politics and discriminatory behaviors.
Tim sounds similar to John Carmack recent she post about Meta:
> I wish I could drop (so many of) my old internal posts publicly, since I don’t really have the incentive to relitigate the arguments today – they were carefully considered and prescient. They also got me reported to HR by the manager of the XROS effort for supposedly making his team members feel bad
Not having such a committee in power and most likely no COC. The FSF's Kindness COC sounds good though.
Within perl we treated conference abuse privately in a seperate nonpublic group, but never mailinglist outbursts. This group had no power over anyone else. Esp. over devs with different opinions, who critized core devs over their work.
Glad to hear one programming community is handling the issues in what sounds like a healthy way.
It also requires actual human effort though, so it's difficult to do. People hate doing difficult things and prefer to be part of "witch hunts" because they're easy IMHO. Discussion and discourse is key.
I've come to the conclusion that this is how it needs to work:
1. As the first person on the project, assume BDFL status and prepare to act that way as soon as you consider accepting a PR.
2. As a person, make sure you strongly understand what your moral values are, and why you hold them.
3. Proactively write your own Code of Conduct from scratch. It's important to have one so that you will not be pressured to use someone else's. It's important to ensure that it reflects your own values, not those of some activist organization (or another project that has been co-opted). Make it simple, but feel free to refer to additional documents. https://compass.naivete.me/ can be considered an example (this is not an endorsement, and again my recommendation is to write it yourself from scratch).
4. Do not have an "Enforcement Procedures" document, and actively reject any such proposal. The interpretation of your code of conduct should be apparent from the text itself, given a reasonable-person standard; you do not need to try to formalize the notion of a reasonable person.
5. If people think you are being unreasonable in your project governance, take that discussion somewhere else.
6. Remember at all times that everyone is free to fork your project. If people wish to do this over a governance dispute, it would be better for it to happen now than later. Do not try to prevent this from happening: do not attack the efforts of others (as has happened to XLibre), and also do not negotiate with others out of fear that they might start a fork. If they start a fork it is of no concern to you.
7. Only dictatorships and democracies are stable. While you are in charge, power rests only in those you directly appoint, and you may revoke this if necessary. When you are ready to leave, unless you have in mind a 100% trusted successor, ensure that your replacement is elected and that the project has a charter such that power can only rest with elected individuals.
Asking for the right one-size-fits-all system skips doing the systems thinking up front.
A failure mode with a lot of community management systems is that they're adopted because they have a general vibe of keeping the bad people out. And that vibe will see any criticism of the community management document/team/actions as a way to sneak the bad people in.
Imagine I told you I found a rando discord server dedicated to a tabletop RPG I love, but complained that the moderation team was a clique. I claimed that I feel forced to fit in by pandering to their sensibilities and biting my tongue on other topics even if they're just flat out provably wrong. Nobody would assume I'm just salty because I secretly want to post porn, cuss and be racist in #general. Because we all know discord mods are notoriously petty tyrants.
Now give that discord community a github page and copy-paste in an HR document. The way expectations snap into treating them like levelheaded professionals with unassailable intentions and righteous goals is the reason this topic always goes nowhere.
If Tim Peters has a "history of being shitty", I'd expect Wikipedia to mention it. But his article is clean, if not golden https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Peters_(software_engineer).
The only thing I've heard is that he's a bit neurodivergent/socially awkward, which I thought we were suppose to be welcoming and inclusive of.
The reality is that you may be confusing a victim with your political enemies.
I wouldn't expect it to show up on their Wikipedia page, because Wikipedia has a high barrier for what they consider reliable information, and they wouldn't use email list postings, or personal accounts of behavior in what they'd include. This person isn't really relevant enough for his behavior to show up in the news.
But, the employees at the foundation, who are responsible for keeping the community healthy, and for enforcing policies, would absolutely take complaints, then use personal accounts, email list history, chat history, and such. It's effectively like how HR works.
> The only thing I've heard
Right, because you're talking to the wrong people, and you're ignoring the fact that he has had folks complain about his behavior, and you're also ignoring his email list and chat history, which you could go look at.
You're acting like this is some kind of witch hunt, when it's simply "HR" enforcing "employment handbook" standards. It just happens to be that this is a set of volunteers, rather than employees.
> and you're also ignoring his email list and chat history, which you could go look at.
I'm not the person you replied to but I've just spent a bunch of time looking at (what seem to be) the relevant posts on https://discuss.python.org/, along with a couple of external posts about the ban, and I've yet to find anything that looks like a pattern of shitty behaviour on the part of Tim Peters. I wasn't previously aware of him and I obviously may have missed something important, so I ask this in good faith: can you point to some of the specific emails/chats you had in mind? (I'm happy not to argue the point if you'd prefer not to; I'd just like to see the strongest anti-Peters evidence.)
I was looking for a credible source, which you have not supplied.
The threads you've waved at do not show Tim to be the "racist, sexist or creep" that you've insinuated. Rather, they show a committee that can't handle questions, abuses its own rules, and hides behind HR & secret "complaints".
Of course, that's just my opinion from skimming. It'd be better to have someone credible give honest evidence, instead of someone defaming & blaming while projecting their bigotry onto others.
> because you're talking to the wrong people, and you're ignoring the fact that he has had folks complain about his behavior, and you're also ignoring his email list and chat history, which you could go look at.
Can you provide any concrete evidence of wrongdoing whatsoever?
For example, Mr. Peters has published comments of his that were removed from the pertinent discussions, and I can vouch for their accuracy from my own recollection. (Since the Discourse forum can also be used via mailing list, and emails cannot be un-sent, presumably many other people can corroborate via their own local backups, too.) Can you find anything in them to suggest wrongdoing?
Not wrongdoing, but maybe sealioning and other forms of light trolling with plausible deniability. Maybe others grew a bit tired of this and he wouldn't change his behaviour.
The fact that there is no official concrete list of bannable posts suggests there are no standalone posts to look at and be like "wow, how come he's not banned yet". On the other hand I know people who walk a very tight line and find loopholes in every rule, and mods have a very hard time "officially" banning those types (even for a short time to help them reflect on their behaviour). Maybe it was like a town where the main bully met unfortunate circumstances and all twenty witnesses haven't actually seen anything for some reason.
Okay, but can you provide any concrete examples of anything objectionable whatsoever?
> The fact that there is no official concrete list of bannable posts suggests
No; it suggests that he did nothing wrong. Which he didn't.
> On the other hand I know people who walk a very tight line and find loopholes in every rule, and mods have a very hard time "officially" banning those types
I observed him throughout the entire exchange. He did nothing wrong.
ryan_lane claims to know things here, but refuses to cite anything. Because, I contend, there is nothing to cite.
Yes, Mr. Peters apparently has a personality that rubs certain people the wrong way, and over time they get the impression of wrongdoing. I find this impression to be completely unreasonable. But more importantly, the Python Code of Conduct explicitly to "be respectful of differing viewpoints and experiences" and "show empathy towards other community members"; and the way that people find fault with Mr. Peters demonstrates nothing of the sort. It is rather about seeking uncharitable interpretation, which goes so far as to state overt falsehoods.
Also: speaking from personal experience as a moderator, "skill issue tbh". At any rate, despite its length, the Python Code of Conduct is not a bunch of legalese in which people might be able to find "loopholes". The judgment of whether someone is playing along is appropriately subjective, as it needs to be for such matters.
The problem is that it isn't being applied fairly. Not even remotely.
> Maybe it was like a town where the main bully met unfortunate circumstances and all twenty witnesses haven't actually seen anything for some reason.
The PSF goes out of its way to avoid this circumstance with its reporting and incident-handling procedures. It goes so far (which is part of the problem) that they explicitly use it to justify a refusal to show any kind of evidence, even in cases where nobody in the discussion can imagine a way that the evidence could identify a reporter.
Definitely true. Wikipedia has sensitivities reflecting their most dedicated (& extremely online) administrators. Alert & keen for some topics while inert & hostile to others.
I use their bias sometimes for detection. For example, the GP here advances a melodramatic allegation, which someone from their Wikipedian tribe would certainly have documented-- if the evidence aligned with their bias.
The reality is that they go after intelligent people and political opponents on specious grounds because they are jealous and want to preserve their own power.
You can dig up any number of posts on anyone, as Richelieu has pointed out pre-Internet.
No, he does not. He has been a pillar of the community since the beginning, and well loved by many. He has also been trusted with various forms of moderation authority in the past, and his decisions were respected at the time.
> and they used the CoC to enforce a (temporary!) ban, citing the rules he violated.
Please read https://discuss.python.org/t/three-month-suspension-for-a-co..., and then https://tim-one.github.io/psf/crimes.html . Mr. Peters is, if anything, overly self-critical here. He quite frankly did nothing wrong. The supposed "rule violations" include things that no reasonable person could actually object to, as well as complete mischaracterizations of the observable facts. In some places, multiple points appear to refer to the same action. In some places it's unclear what is referred to and there has never been any official explanation. In no case is any evidence provided.
> If the CoC didn't exist, you'd be screaming "he didn't do anything wrong"
I am saying it (your use of the word "screaming" here is demeaning, substance-less rhetoric) because it is in fact the case. Many of the cited "violations" don't actually go against the Code of Conduct (https://policies.python.org/python.org/code-of-conduct/), even if they were true and accurate.
> but obviously, according to the well posted rules, he did
It is not obvious, because it is incorrect.
> and they enforced those rules for the good of the community.
No useful purpose was served by this suspension.
> The reality of the situation is that yall don't want to be excluded from communities for being racist, misogynistic, or creepy.
This accusation is baseless, incorrect, and offensive.
> No, he does not. He has been a pillar of the community since the beginning, and well loved by many.
These are not mutually exclusive states. If anything, it has improved my esteem of PSL that they were willing to hold one of their "inner circle" up to scrutiny.
Even Linus Torvalds came around to the idea that he was a great software engineer and a mean individual to interact with. There's room for improvement in most if not all of us. I'm impressed at both Tim and the PSL for being able to disagree, go through a suspension, and come to terms. It's the kind of potential for growth that makes it a comfortable ecosystem to work in.
> The supposed "rule violations" include things that no reasonable person could actually object to
The problem with the "reasonable person" standard is that it's subjectivity masked in objectivity; we don't poll ten thousand people to decide what "reasonable" looks like. It's another term for "common sense," and... Common sense moves. Common sense said slavery was fine three hundred years ago. Common sense said homosexuality was an abomination sixty years ago. Common sense said you could be as awful to interact with as you wanted as long as you were making software people craved thirty years ago. We grow and change.
You implicitly claim (in a snarky way) that the actions taken against Mr. Peters were justified. So yes, it absolutely is your job, if you intend for others to take you seriously (https://duckduckgo.com/?q=burden+of+proof+philosophy).
> You're welcome to draw your own conclusions from the public record as I have.
I have. They oppose yours.
> The Foundation laid it out pretty clearly when they suspended him
No, they absolutely did not. The claims made by the Code of Conduct Work Group did not stand up to even basic scrutiny. I have already cited that link repeatedly within the thread, and contrasted it with Mr. Peters' analysis (https://tim-one.github.io/psf/crimes.html).
To take just one example, as an objective matter of fact, not only did he not "use" the "potentially offensive language or slurs" referred to, he did not even write them out. (Also, I disagree that the word in question is a "slur".) He also as an objective matter of fact did not claim that the skit was funny, but rather that SNL generally was funny in that time period. And even that claim had a clear ironic meaning; the underlying point was that social norms change over time, which was relevant to the discussion.
There is simply no way that any reasonable person who is paying attention could come to the conclusion that this was somehow endorsing the use of such language. The only reasonable underlying logic I can fathom for the objection is "when discussing an incident where someone used a naughty word, thou shalt not provide information that might assist the reader in figuring out what word it was". But I can't fathom a good moral reason for that, nor can I fathom a reading of the Code of Conduct which actually supports that.
I can make similar arguments about every single point on the list. The findings were utterly absurd, and the action unjust.
For that matter, in private discussion (as well as from some of what is said on the above-linked site) I have determined that Mr. Peters is in fact far more sympathetic to the social views of the Code of Conduct Work Group than I am. (I consider a large part of their expressed worldview to be frankly unjust and bigoted.)
They won't listen to you anyway and everything will be dismissed. I remember when zahlman first came to HN, they always participate in threads adjacent to cultural wars and specifically around Python community. Like, religiously so.
> I remember when zahlman first came to HN, they always participate in threads adjacent to cultural wars and specifically around Python community. Like, religiously so.
I came here because I learned that an incident that I was personally connected to (which also happens to relate to this very thread) was being discussed: i.e., the 3-month suspension of Tim Peters.
These topics are only "adjacent to culture wars" insofar as the enactment of the ban could only possibly be explained by culture-war beliefs of those doing the banning. This clearly led them to make many objectively false statements. In particular, they claimed that he had "used" offensive language that he didn't even write out; and suggested that he was defending the use of such language (by "finding it genuinely funny") when he was in fact agreeing that it should not be used, in the middle of citing a previous moderation action where he agreed that it should not be used. (In doing so, they misrepresented the antecedent of "finding it genuinely funny".)
I "religiously" look for discussion of Python and participate in it. The most popular threads, and thus the ones you are most likely to see, are often ones that involve a culture-war angle; such is the nature of Internet discourse. I'm not going to shy away from that discussion when it concerns Python, because I really like Python and I want to see it flourish; and I consider that actions such as the unjust suspension of Mr. Peters interfere with that.
> They won't listen to you anyway and everything will be dismissed.
This is false and hurtful, and you reasonably ought to know so from your own claimed first-hand experience. Like, the above is not at all a long response by my standards. Replying like this takes effort and careful consideration of what people are saying.
Many of the comments here are disappointing. Regardless of your opinion of the PSF or its leadership, you should be opposed to this kind of clawback threat because it nakedly represents an attempt to place a non-profit in a double bind: even attempting to comply with these requirements would allow a politicized IRA to claim that the PSF is failing to uphold its stated mission.
Organizations should avoid funding by the government whenever possible. It creates incentives for the organization to align with the politics of the government. I am all for this outcome, as it’s a net win for PSF and any organization that can fund itself
But if they don't get it from the government, they'll get it somewhere else, and then that will create incentives for the organization to align with the politics of whoever gives them the money. There's no escaping the implicit dependence that comes with accepting money.
I think we just need to reduce the amount of discretion involved in government action of all kinds.
> There's no escaping the implicit dependence that comes with accepting money.
And, at least, the government was elected and has votes to back its political power.
Other sources usually use money to back their political power, which is another problem altogether - political power should NEVER come solely from money.
Regardless of how you feel about the nature of government funding, you should be able to cogitate a strong argument for the U.S. government not playing “gotcha” games with its funding.
The problem is that the population of the US is itself polarized, and different factions want the government to be doing extremely different things with its funds. If faction A has successfully gotten the US federal government to fund something for a long time, and faction B hates that thing, campaigns on ending the funding, and then does end it once they win an election and take power - then a demand for the US to not play gotcha games with its funding is isomorphic to a demand from political faction A to keep some of their preferred policies in place even though they are not currently in a position of electoral power.
Yes, outcomes like these are the best way to avoid dependency on a central authority. I’m more for moving away from the ability of such authorities to exercise such power, rather than hoping they don’t abuse it. They certainly will eventually
> you should be opposed to this kind of clawback threat because it nakedly represents an attempt to place a non-profit in a double bind
The clawback is this sentence, yes? "NSF reserves the right to terminate financial assistance awards and recover all funds if
recipients, during the term of this award, operate any program in violation of Federal anti-
discriminatory laws or engage in a prohibited boycott."
How exactly is "you must follow anti-discrimination law" a "naked" attempt at a double-bind?
(And, um, I'd be more worried about that "prohibited boycott" thing. It's mentioned explicitly in the sentence with the clawback, and I don't see where it's defined.)
Boycotting Israel, for example, is a prohibited boycott.
This is a little-known but long-established part of US policy; see https://www.bis.doc.gov/index.php/enforcement/oac for more details. My employer actually has a reminder in the legal trainings of our corporate responsibilities under these policies (and yes, it rubs me the wrong way).
The evidence strongly suggests to me that the PSF knew, or reasonably ought to have known, the terms of the agreement months ago, which makes the current activity read very much like a publicity stunt (after realizing they wouldn't be able to take the money).
We are talking about a grant here. I can't see anything wrong with offering someone money that comes with strings attached, when you don't owe anything in the first place. Especially when the offer is being made generally rather than targeting anyone in particular.
In my assessment, the "stated mission" reflects politics that indirectly resulted in harm to me personally, perpetrated by the PSF's Code of Conduct Work Group. The way that this "mission" is presented is in line with common statements that the administration has identified as discriminatory, and I believe they are justified in coming to that conclusion. The PSF represents it as something simple and agreeable; but while I indeed agree with the idea they represent it as, in practice I have seen it mean something very different, and objectionable. In making this representation I find that they commonly insinuate salacious, untrue things about people with value systems like my own, and I consider that representation to be simply dishonest.
The Work Group in question has a document of "Enforcement Procedures" for the Code of Conduct. I determined that these procedures may lead to making decisions that directly contradict what the Code of Conduct says. When I pointed this out, I was baselessly accused of citing previous (unspecified) moderation action against me as examples of the phenomenon that the Code of Conduct forbids but the Enforcement Procedures require ignoring. In so doing, it was proposed that I characterized these actions in terms that I explicitly reject using. (In fact, the main point of my post was to reject the term — as it is one commonly used in strawman representations of my position.)
> The evidence strongly suggests to me that the PSF knew, or reasonably ought to have known, the terms of the agreement months ago
I have firsthand knowledge of the NSF grant in question, but not the PSF’s participation in it. It would not remotely surprise me that they didn’t know about these terms, because there’s a large amount of paperwork and process involved and much of it predates the current administration.
> which makes the current activity read very much like a publicity stunt (after realizing they wouldn't be able to take the money)
I mean, I think the PSF has very explicitly communicated their intent to use the grant’s withdrawal as a fundraising opportunity. That doesn’t strike me as unreasonable, it’s what I would do in their situation to make the best of things.
(I don’t know about you or what you’ve been through, so I don’t have opinions there. But nothing about the PSF’s behavior here appears facially incorrect or unreasonable to me.)
It’s been disappointing to you for at least a decade and yet you keep using it? Blink twice if the mods have been keeping you imprisoned in the server closet and forcing you to speak to them in Arc
Culture wars are intentionally engineered by the rich to distract everyone else from forming class solidarity against them. And it is amazingly effective.
No, people actually disagree about cultural changes. Not sure what kind of world model you must have in order to believe that ANY society wouldn't suffer from "culture wars" as it evolves. I suppose you believe that the entire prohibition episode in US history was also orchestrated by "the rich"?
Struggling over cultural changes is a real phenomenon and sometimes even worth engaging in.
But ultimately, ideas are secondary to matter. Most people on this planet work for the profits of a very small group. If they weren’t divided, they could easily defeat that small group and organise society for the benefit of the majority.
As Warren Buffet said, class warfare is happening and his class is winning. We should all internalise that and engage in class struggle.
I mean...this thread joins the dozens of others in recent memory that has turned into a war-zone, filled with disposable throwaway accounts and bad faith downvoting that will almost certainly go unpunished.
Considering the kind of money behind YCombinator, they're not exactly beating the rap.
Immediatly though of donating > $1.5M to remove that indentation hell.
What do you mean it's in their values?
More seriously, I can only respect someone (natural or legal) who refuses 7 figures for their values, which ever those might be and whether I share them or not.
Many people here have pointed out in response to flagged comments that the decision was legalistic, bureaucratic and self-preserving. I.e., the PSF did not want to enter a territory where it might be forced to repay the grant.
The money was earmarked for PyPI and the refusal did not impact those who have other positions in the PSF. In 2020, when it was politically safe, the PSF made several BLM support statements. There are no statements about people of color in Gaza or extrajudicial killings off the Venezuelan coast in 2025.
Moreover, they got political capital from this action for an organization that was/is severely damaged by the ruthless and libelous leadership. And they prepare for another pendulum swing that might materialize in the 2026 midterms.
There are two huge problems with these highly intrusive grant requirements that are different than previous Admin's DEI statements (which people sometimes point to, in a "what about ..."):
- they apply to _all_ of the org's activities, whereas previous statements only applied to the grant itself (it had to be used in X way) ; this is what PSF found untenable
- the gov can claw back the money if they deem you were violating the reqs pretty much as their discretion; while this might seem unlikely, the Trump admin is highly aggressive towards universities, withholding funding in a way that has not been done before under a bogus excuse of anti-semitism. It shows they will have their way and there's nothing you will be able to do about it.
If people don't stand up to this sort of gov behavior, it emboldens them to take it to the next level and make even more demands, as universities are discovering.
When did "woke" - i.e. "awake and not closing ones eyes to the problems in the world" become some sort of slur ? What does it say about people that use it as such?
I can’t remember the exact date. It’s all part of a “tradition” since at least the 90s. First things were PC, then there were SJWs, then woke, then DEI. Who knows what they will call it next. It’s always complaining about the same thing, just with new verbiage.
The problem is that they went too far. Over-correction is a thing.
Instead of getting distracted by what is a slur and who is using it, focus on the meat of the matter, which is discrimination in all forms beyond merit. Anyone distracting from the core topic is a part of the problem.
Discrimination is not bad in itself. A scientific approach is to apply discrimination over biased sample to compensate the bias. The difficulty is how to compensate fairly. And when you compensate fairly, you will have people who will say you compensated too much and other people who will say you compensated too little.
When I look at the other opinions and values of the majority of people who say that DEI compensate unfairly and too much, I either see that 1. they don't even accept to consider that maybe there was a bias, 2. they also defend policies quite marked politically. These two things make me think there is not really a compensation that it is too big, and that it is just the people who have different values that say they disagree. If it was indeed unfairly balanced, they would be more "pro-DEI on principle" that would react on the dysfunction. (not saying they don't exist, but they are just too few)
If they actually wanted to correct the bias, they would push for standardized testing. Instead, they parasitically push for their own positions, salaries, and to put on good theater. I see the difference and I am not amused.
So what you are saying is that you see a bias against males, or a bias in "pro-DEI" people's behavior.
But where is your standardized testing to prove that? Does it mean that you are not interested in finding the correct correction, but rather to push for a situation that profit you (either because it is directly advantageous, or because it says that "your side" is right and "their side" is wrong)?
This is what I don't understand. Saying "bias = 0" is as much a critical decision as saying "bias = 17". But it looks like people can both say "they say there is a bias of 17 but they don't test it enough to my eyes so they are bad, we should act as if the bias was 0, and I don't do any testing but it is ok because my critics against them don't apply to me".
(edit: also, I think that your argument "standardized testing" is just in bad faith. A lot of DEI policies come with method to measure the impact and process to adapt the correction level based on how things evolved. You may not like these methods, but these methods would simply not even exist if indeed they were not interested in finding the correct correction. It feels like it's an easy argument "they do stuff, but let's just decide it does not count unless I arbitrarily decide it does")
To espouse DEI already is going too far. Isn't this something they do?
Don't they favor females instead of males?
A better question is: why does Python even need the PSF staff? I am not convinced it does. The staff use donations to pay themselves salaries, to achieve what exactly that is so necessary? Do they even do any of the technical work?
It's not the source of the funds, it's that the government grant wanted to force a change of how the foundation does things, especially inclusion and outreach efforts.
1) The grant was for a specific, bounded project, but the anti-DEI terms would have applied to all activities of the Foundation, regardless of whether they were funded by the grant. (Which isn't to say that those terms would have been acceptable even for a single project, but having them apply to unrelated activities is even worse.)
2) The terms of the grant included a clawback clause - if, in the administration's eyes, the Foundation did anything to "advance or promote DEI", the grant would be rescinded, and the Foundation would be required to repay any money they had already spent. Given the size of the grant relative to the Foundation's budget, this was an unacceptable risk.
No. The specific point is "They do not, and will not during the term of this financial assistance award, operate any
programs that advance or promote DEI, or discriminatory equity ideology in violation of Federal
anti-discrimination law".
That rebranding of DEI is hilariously childish in an entertaining way, while deepening my loathing for the people behind it. I respect the choice to refuse those terms. Even organizations that aren't heavily focused on/invested in outreach and inclusion should refuse to accept those terms.
Yes that is what the equal protection clause is. Equity policies try to go beyond that by instituting "reverse racism" (which is really just racism) or any of a variety of other sort of policies that actively harm majority groups to try to force some kind of equitable representation.
I'm a straight white dude living in the United States. I'm as much part of the "majority" as one could possibly be, and this sentiment always confounds me.
Never once in my 20+ years working for corporations and government contractors, including companies with very strong DEI programs, have I ever felt excluded or marginalized. And I've never witnessed "reverse racism" (which is a totally absurd name for what would just be racism).
What I have experienced, several times, is people who look like me thinking I'm one of the boys, and flat out telling me they don't hire woman because they "cause too much drama", or only hire women they want to have sex with. And those are just two examples of dozens. Thanksfully those situations have plummeted over the years.
You flat out will not get an equitable work environment if you don't place a focus on it.
Exactly in the same boat here. At an old job I once had one of the most useless people in the office, in a 1-1 meeting, tell me that the black people in the office were only being hired for DEI/nepotism (he didn't say "black people"). He felt comfortable saying this to me because I look like him, which means that other folks in the office obviously share his mentality.
Wait till you get old, as everyone will. Also, because you personally haven’t experienced something yet is not that relevant.
Remember the story about enforced diversity statements at universities, and the ex-soviet math teacher warning against them? I do and it was discussed here.
YMMV: I haven’t seen age discrimination from people who seriously supported DEI: quite the opposite, they are generally summed up as “hire people who can do the job” which doesn’t exclude age.
I have seen it from the same types of people who oppose DEI: born affluent, convinced that anyone who can’t retire at 45 chose not to, etc.
I restarted my career in my 30s. I'm literally working in a field right now where people almost half my age are at the same level I am, and people my age or younger are my boss. Have never had a problem all through the career transition.
I'm not just saying me personally. I'm saying I have never even heard a creditable case of "reverse discrimination" in all my years, across all my colleagues.
DEI initiatives seek to put minority groups on the same level as majority groups. So they get the same consideration as everyone else, not more consideration. If that bothers you I don't really know what to tell you.
You don’t hear about the vast majority of discrimination instances because one simply doesn’t get hired. Often on purpose, “no culture fit” can’t be proven.
You have and will experience it, though usually won’t know. Thinking it doesn’t happen is very naïve.
I mean in this case I think it's fairly useful. I'm the exact demographic supposedly impacted by this. I've work for corporations for 20+ years, and watched the culture shift around me. I have friends and colleagues in several different industries. I've been a hiring manager for years. In all that time, literally the only complaints I've heard directly, or from people I know, are people complaining they can't be racist/sexist anymore.
For the record though, I'm 100% sure a white person hasn't gone a job because of their skin color. People suck, and that doesn't stop being true because of skin color or gender. My point is that DEI isn't some grand conspiracy against white people. They're for the most part well meaning policies intended to equalize a playing field that has been fundementally uneven for essentially all of human history.
As mentioned elsewhere, like Agile… it’s not hard to take a good idea and twist it into something bad, in fact happens often. My first reply has examples.
I haven’t seen or heard of any professional rascism, sexism, etc directly with my own senses either—in my whole life. Does that mean they don’t exist? Of course not, but that’s what your statements above sound like. “I haven’t seen => doesn’t exist.”
Of course it exists. Anytime you give people power someone is going to abuse it. That's never going to go away. And the people who are going to abuse that power will do it regardless.
I and people I know have directly observed racism/sexism in our careers, and they have without fail been exactly what DEI initiatives are intended to help prevent.
If someone is using DEI initiatives to abuse their power, that should be dealt with, obviously. But that's not indicative of some conspiracy.
I suspect if I ran down the extremely long laundry list of terrible things done by big corporations you wouldn't argue all corporations should be abolished.
These ideas already existed, as EOE and affirmative action. I support the first, and could support the second in limited cases. As a nationwide movement of unlimited scope and allegiance statements—definitely not. The incentive for favoritism is just too high.
The solution to dead laws is remove any chance of them being enforced? The solution to ageism is to make policies that attempt to enforce the laws and human rights illegal? Really? Thankfully nobody has made it illegal to do Agile correctly rather than following the tautological Official Agile Process(tm).
Some for me. I worked at a university ground zero for the ‘woke’ wave and I never once had trouble getting hired or advancing as a straight white guy. These people keep shouting DEI! DEI! And I have no ideas what their fucking problem is.
Gaslighting is their whole thing. Lying about absolutely everything means gradually ordinary people have no idea that facts are true or even what could distinguish a fact from an opinion.
This only stops working when it bumps into Mother Nature's laws rather than man's laws, so that's what you have to focus on with these people. It's brutal but it's entirely impartial, they can tell Fox News that black is white and up is down, but Ma doesn't give a shit, and they hate that. Who does she think she is?
An argument is a connected series of statements intended to establish a definite proposition... A contradiction is just the automatic gainsaying of anything the other person says.
"No State shall ... deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws"
Not only is the PSF not subject to this clause, the only subject to the clause are governments and the PSF is not even capable of violating it. In what way would DEI programs violate this clause?
This is completely wrong. The equal protection clause, and the constitution as a whole, describes the rights of individuals as well as the structure and limits of the government. Individuals and companies are, in a literal sense, completely incapable of violating the Constitution, unless they are acting on behalf of the government.
It's the same reason that you have absolutely no right to free speech in the workplace. The first amendment applies only to governments.
The idea that helping specific people is somehow running afoul of the equal protection clause is a fucking joke. It's like saying you can't setup a charity organization for the poor and disadvantaged unless you also donate equally to wealthy billionaires, lest you be engaging in "economic discrimination".
That would indeed be economic discrimination. And it is a normal thing commonly practiced. Demanding you buy an expensive ticket in order to enter a venue is economic discrimination. Economic class is not protected.
It is the diacrimination based on protected classes like race and sex that people have a problem with.
> It is the diacrimination based on protected classes like race and sex that people have a problem with.
Well, its discrimination based on protected classes that has a higher legal bar to be acceptable to the government defining those classes, but protected classes (even in the US) differ between states and between the states and the federal government and, even within the same jurisdiction, for different kinds of activities.
But, no, what is more restricted by law and what people have problems with are not the same thing! Many people have problems with discrimination on bases which are not currently protected classes, and many people endorse discrimination on bases which currently are protected classes.
Is it legal to pay people based on the radius of their right eye iris with 500lumen 27" display placed 1M in front of them? Or blood type? Or armpit hairiness? Or maybe tongue length?
This is a half joke comment, I'm actually wondering - what can you discriminate on generally in US? (and where you draw the arbitrary line (not saying other countries are better/worse)).
> I'm actually wondering - what can you discriminate on generally in US?
In the US, it’s legal to discriminate on pretty much any basis, with the right justification. What the justification required is (which can be "none at all" for certain cases), however, depends on, besides the basis for discrimination, some combination of:
(1) Are you the federal government, a state (including any subdivision) government, or a private actor (and, in the latter case, are you acting as a contractor for the federal or a state government), and
(2) What is the function (employment, sales of goods or services, government benefits, etc.) for which you are discriminating?
If you mean, what can you discriminate on with no special justification at all, well:
(1) If you are a private actor, almost any basis which does not have an explicit legal restriction applicable to the function you are discriminating with regard to, and if the function isn't a narrow (but signficant) set of functions—the big ones being employment, housing, or a function considered a "public accommodation"—that is pretty much every basis.
(2) If you are the government actor (state or federal), almost no basis at all: while it is a low bar, pretty much every act by which the government discriminates is subject to, at a minimum, what is called the "rational basis test" (this is a consequence, essentially, of jurisprudence apply the due process clauses of the 5th and 14th Amendments and the equal protection clause of the 14th), which requires that the discrimination have a legitimate public purpose and some rational relationship to that purpose.
But to answer comprehensively is...well, a lot more complicated (and different, because of varying state law protections, in each state in some regards.)
Thank you for taking the time to answer me. So it seems like if there is a reasonable correlation with a protected class and no real relation to the job, you can still be liable.
This has come up in cases where, for example, machine learning (or even heuristics) were used to sort candidates and the algorithms were discovered to be discriminating based on things like name or zip code, which in the US correlate heavily with race and cannot be used as discriminators for that reason (the court does not turn a blind eye to the notion "Well, Your Honor, technically we weren't discriminating against race, we were discriminating against people named 'Jaqualin'...").
IIUC, precedent is that is incumbent upon the organization using machine learning to confirm that their system hasn't come up with a novel proxy for one of the protected classes and is using that proxy to violate discrimination protections.
It's not just about transgender people. When you have a tech organisation and say "all our members are old white guys... maybe there's something that keeps others away from us? let's make sure there are no barriers", you're engaging in DEI.
Remember when the government went anti-DEI crazy and started covering displays of influential women and people of colour at places like NSA? That kind of decision maker may be handling the PSF's grant.
> It's not just about transgender people. When you have a tech organisation and say "all our members are old white guys... maybe there's something that keeps others away from us? let's make sure there are no barriers", you're engaging in DEI.
I would like to see this kind of thing treated, socially and legally, as equivalent to saying "This tech organization has a lot of Jews... can we do something about that?" (Indeed, many of the exact same people who are classified as white men who are disproportionately present in tech organizations by DEI advocates are also Ashkenazi or Sephardic Jews, and the DEI advocates are treating their white male identity rather than their Jewish identity as politically salient). If some organization refuses to refrain from treating the disproportionate presence of white men in some organization - or the assumed disproportionate presence of white men - as a problem, I think it's reasonable for the US federal government to refuse to give them grant money.
You must understand the difference between those two statements, I refuse to believe that you do not, so this response is more aimed toward people that might not realize what you’re doing here. There is a vast difference between “all” and “a lot of”.
To solve the “all” problem, none of those people need to be removed from the organization. It merely states that diversity is good. To solve the “a lot of” problem necessitates getting rid of those members.
This is fundamentally why one is discriminatory and the other is not.
Yes, once we end up in a situation where majority of companies are run by Jews and alternatives are worse, it's harder to function in the society as not a Jew, we're facing decades long discrimination in different aspects of life, and individual action in response to incidents of discrimination is not enough... then I sure hope dei will concentrate on societal change to help non-Jews.
Would everyone agree with that definition, though? It seems like discussions around DEI tend to go in circles, because proponents see bad implementations as not really DEI, and opponents see good implementations as not really DEI either.
I recently read in the local news that some city department, in order to comply with anti-DEI stuff, was changing its name to remove the word 'diversity'... and nothing else. DEI has no legal definition. It feels like the new "woke", where the actual meaning is irrelevant, and its only real purpose is tribalistic social signalling.
By accepting the grant they are giving themselves a legal responsibility to “not do DEI” where the government arbitrarily decides what DEI is. Even something like employing a trans software engineer or talking about the impact Python is having in POC communities could be considered reason to go after PSF legally or rescind the grant. It’s just not worth the risk for the reward.
That’s really the problem: the grant comes with vague terms covering the entire organization, which could be arbitrarily redefined at any time in the future. It’s like signing a contract to deliver a product without any clauses protecting you if the client keeps changing their mind.
Naming things is hard. Yet we deal with lots of other vague concepts without losing our minds. There are some extreme voices, but somehow I've never heard anyone actually digging deeper into the issues to describe dei as just tribalistic signalling. When you strip out everything else, maybe that's a sign you lost all nuance?
In development we'd just accept it as normal to say "Putting each literal value in its own module is not a reasonable application of modular design." without claiming that the name "modular design" is now misunderstood and irrelevant.
> It's not just about transgender people. When you have a tech organisation and say "all our members are old white guys... maybe there's something that keeps others away from us? let's make sure there are no barriers", you're engaging in DEI.
Yeah and that's obviously problematic, because the common way that's implemented is a either a whole lot of strange brainwashing courses or active discrimination against "old white guys".
> the common way that's implemented is a either a whole lot of strange brainwashing courses or active discrimination against "old white guys"
Are the common, strange brainwashing courses in the room right now?
This is obviously a bad faith take - trying to prevent anyone from even saying, let alone promoting, diversity because sometimes people discriminate (which is already illegal) is absurd even without acknowledging that discrimination happens already. This argument looks a LOT like "keep discriminating against people that aren't like me".
Constructive criticism for good faith people out there reading this who are concerned about "DEI" causing discrimination -- acknowledge all discrimination is bad and take a real stab at working on it as a whole. If your only "attempt" to prevent discrimination is speaking up against people trying to include more diverse sets of people in programming communities then you're doing it wrong (and showing your ass).
The PSF withdrew their application for the grant from the US government after being presented with terms that included "do not, and will not during the term of this financial assistance award, operate any programs that advance or promote DEI, or discriminatory equity ideology in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws", which conflicts with their mission statement: "The mission of the Python Software Foundation is to promote, protect, and advance the Python programming language, and to support and facilitate the growth of a diverse and international community of Python programmers."
> "… to support and facilitate the growth of a diverse and international community of Python programmers."
I feel like statements like this are fundamentally vague. What does "supporting" the growth of a diverse and international community look like? Is it different from "facilitating the growth of" such a community? Without concrete definitions I feel like both sides are talking past each other. I would love to see concrete definitions and would be grateful to anyone who can give me sources from either side.
it the previous hn post, tbe major topic was that the government could claw back its money with any flimsey premise, about anything the organization does or people related to it do, and not specific to the project the grant was for
like, somebody going to a "women in tech" conference could result in suddenly having to find millions in cash to pay back the government.
Guido has been fairly vocal about mentoring exclusively women in Python, because he's of the opinion that they need the help much more than men as far as breaking into the industry.
But admitting in public that you are giving preferential treatment to anyone other than white men is an instant rage-boner for the Trump administration.
> But admitting in public that you are giving preferential treatment to anyone other than white men is an instant rage-boner for the Trump administration.
I (a white man) would be upset at preferential treatment of white men. Or white women. Or black men. Or anyone. Where's the "judging by the content of their character" that the social justice movement (rightly) called for? I don't see it much these days.
> But admitting in public that you are giving preferential treatment to anyone other than white men is an instant rage-boner for the Trump administration.
Admitting in public that you are giving preferential treatment to white men is an instant rage-boner for most of Trump's opponents and also every previous US presidential administration and prestigious institution for as long as I've been alive. If individuals in their private capacity want to do preferential treatment for specific demographic categories, they can do so; but I don't want them to get government grants that comes out of my taxes for it.
Please please please insist your government money stop being spent for all the other discrimination going on. I don't think python grants should be anywhere near the top of that list.
Yeah Python grants are small potatoes. Things like https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2025/5/28/dei-rise-and-fa... , which involves threatening federal funding to Harvard in a way that induced them to make at least some DEI-related policy changes, is a much bigger priority.
Still, just because grants to open-source programming language foundations aren't the most important federal government spending priority, doesn't mean I want the federal government to remove the no-DEI condition on federal grant money.
2014 was years before it became a mainstream cry to treat trans women as cis women. I didn’t really hear or notice this until the late 2010s.
I also believe the trans community hurt itself and its own members by pushing this narrative/falling into this trap, though things like the bathroom bill made it inevitable?
Perhaps it’s old fashioned, but what I believe is an acknowledgement and celebration of differences. What the new generation pushed is hiding those differences; by pretending there are none.
It’s much harder to argue against “let’s all agree we’re all human and make this work”.
> 2014 was years before it became a mainstream cry to treat trans women as cis women. I didn’t really hear or notice this until the late 2010s.
That's because somehow you only managed to notice the protests against the rollback of protections by those favoring discrimination but somehow missed the long push for those protections that led up to the federal policy wins (many of which were in 2014, specifically) including:
* Executive Order 13672 (explicitly prohibiting discrimination on gender identity or sexual orientation for federal agencies and federal contractors)
* Formal DoJ guidance that discrimination on the basis of gender identity was included within the scope of sex discrimination prohibited by Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964—an interpretation later validated by the US Supreme Court in Bostock v. Clayton County, 590 U.S. 644 (2020).
* A wide array of regulatory and administrative actions by other federal agencies, mostly applying the same logic as the DoJ guidance referenced above to other existing sex-discrimination provisions in law an regulation.
In the past no one cared about cis or trans because it didn't matter, but they found how it could be used for political leverage to divert attention away from more important things like the actual quality of work.
In the 2010s there was a sort of emancipation for trans people, and you could see them more and more often being openly involved with open source software. It is only natrual to want to turn open source communities to be explicitly accepting.
Not convinced trans (especially trans women) weren't already over-represented prior as open source allows low barriers to join and anonymity on top of predominantly male (and trans women) + young.
You may not be convinced but I am simply stating my experience. I would be open to proof of the opposite. This is also seen in other open source adjacent communities around the world (eg: hacker conventions)
> In the 2010s there was a sort of emancipation for trans people, and you could see them more and more often being openly involved with open source software
It was "your" claim about others and in general ("you could see"), i.e., not mine or your anecdotal awareness.
> I would be open to proof of the opposite.
It's on you to prove LGBT, especially T, weren't already over-represented (versus typical population) in open source prior to the 2010s.
I think this sub-thread (specific: trans) on Python Foundation's DEI (general) got supercharged with a claim that Hillary would've championed trans rights. To me, she was always very transactional and would've adopted "rainbow capitalism" approaches that optimize branding premiums with little substance.
Meanwhile, trans rights have always been a favorite of marxists as an in-direct tool to attack capitalism (nuclear family, property rights, etc.)
Worse than that, they've been a favorite for men to attack women. It's the most sexist policy for a long time, harking back to an era of misogyny that should have long since been left behind.
> It wasn't exactly the Streisand effect, but I remember thinking the whole flourishing of trans rights and acceptance between 2017 and 2021 never would have happened if Hillary had won. Is there a name for this phenomenon?
2017-2021 wasn't a flourishing of trans rights and acceptance, it was the big wave of active discrimination by, particularly, state-level Republican governments against previous progress in that dimension. That made the issue more visible, but specifically because it was the exact opposite of a flourishing of trans rights and acceptance.
But, sure, it probably would have looked a bit different if there had been a federal administration likely to defend rather than abandon that progress (but it probably still would have happened.)
> 2017-2021 wasn't a flourishing of trans rights and acceptance, it was the big wave of active discrimination
Right, I didn't make the point clearly enough, I meant that pushback and resistance to what you mentioned created more net sympathy and progress. My hypothesis is that the ugliness of the extremism turns off all but their base.
I don't understand the implication of your first sentence.
The NC Bathroom Bill passed in March 2016, and it had an immediate flurry of corporate backlash that lasted to the partial repeal in 2017. The bill was part of a growing amount of anti-trans rhetoric (and legislation) from the Republicans starting a few years before. But it was the first bathroom bill AFAICT.
Are you saying that the Republicans would have been less likely to pass that bill under a Clinton presidency? If so, what's the extraordinary evidence for that?
Alternatively, if you are saying they would have been more emboldened to pass it, are you suggesting that the backlash would have been smaller under a Clinton presidency? That's in the realm of possibility, but again what's the evidence here? Obama had already shifted to supporting gay marriage before the relevant Supreme Court case (probably due to Biden's gaffe of pre-emptively announcing his own support for it). So I just don't see why you would assume a Clinton presidency would effectively muzzle support for trans rights in this case, or have any effect whatsoever on the NC Bill and its aftermath.
Yes, if the running government is seen to be anti-trans, it makes sense that trans supporters will show more support.
Likewise for every topic that is under contest, including right wing topics.
As an aside, I'd say calling it "the Streisand effect" could be seen to be hinting that if people just stopped support trans so strongly, there would be less backlash. That might be true, but given trans people have historically suffered abuse, it would be risky for trans supporters to let things settle and hope for the best.
I think "The US government is too unpredictable at this time to be a trustworthy source of funding" is actually pretty in-touch with reality, unfortunately.
“Inclusive” - meanwhile, I’ve not felt comfortable at a PSF-sponsored event since 2013, when people started losing their jobs for barely off-color jokes… and for reporting them.
PlayHaven's CEO implied their reasons to fire the employee who made inappropriate jokes at PyCon were not the jokes alone. Most people assumed SendGrid would not have fired the employee who attempted public shaming if she instead reported the jokes. And how were PSF responsible for what PlayHaven and SendGrid did?
What is it that you say on a regular basis that makes you feel like you need to walk on eggshells?
As I've said many times in the comments. I have 20+ years experience working for corporations. All through the me too wave, the increase focus on DE&I, and the general move to try and be less exclusionary. I've worked with woman, gay people, trans, and people of just about every ethnicity you could think of. Never once, in all those years, have I ever feared for my job or felt excluded.
Literally the only people I have ever heard complain are the ones I know for a fact tell racist and sexist jokes because they always felt comfortable enough around me to tell them.
If the fact that we are a bit more mindful about being racist and sexist in the work place bothers you, I think you may need to look inward at your own behavior. Not outward.
This is exactly the kind of dishonest manipulative baiting that makes people feel uncomfortable. Absolutely nothing InvertedRhodium said was in any way racist, and your allegations otherwise are both wholly devoid of evidence and against the community standards here.
If you can't make your point without leveling extreme and baseless allegations at fellow posters, that's a good sign that your point is without merit.
I didn't say he was a racist. But we are talking about feeling excluded in environments where the primary change has been it's not longer acceptable to tell racist/sexist jokes or make disparaging comments about others based race/sex/ethnicity.
People have had three opportunities now to give concrete examples of behavior that should be acceptable and makes them feel excluded or like they need to walk on eggshells. Nobody has offered a single thing.
So point blank: What can you not say or do in these environments for fear of reprisal?
Don't agree with the comments above and generally support DEI initiatives, but I also have an example.
A new DEI director joined a previous employer and started a mandatory survey to affirmatively label everyone's trans status. Whatever you entered would be used to auto-update your public info page with details on whether you identified as trans or not, with no opt out. I hope I don't have to explain why that's ill-considered at best.
Anyway, refusing to fill it out immediately escalated to a disciplinary meeting with the director.
This isn't a good example, because this isn't "walking on eggshells", this is an example of a misguided policy that has unintended consequences, and in your own example, when they understood the unintended consequences, they removed this.
Sure, this person was probably bad at their job, and that's problematic, but this isn't an example of someone being fired because they said something non-problematic.
Correct, they didn't remove the policy or change their views on the surrounding context of the disciplinary meeting. They simply understood the issue after it was explained to them. It's not a high bar.
The director was a trans woman themselves, just not good at their job. At least they recognized the issue when was pointed out to them in that meeting, but this was just the tip of the iceberg for silly changes they pushed.
> where the primary change has been it's not longer acceptable to tell racist/sexist jokes or make disparaging comments about others based race/sex/ethnicity.
This is simply untrue. Such conduct was already completely and utterly unacceptable prior to "DEI", for decades. These policies have instead enabled disparaging comments about others based on race/sex/ethnicity — in particular, accusing people belonging to certain such groups of being inherently whatever-ist (see for example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWoC90bbsdo), while defining away discrimination perpetrated against them (to move back towards the original topic, this claim was repeated many times in the discussion of the removal of references to "Strunk & White" in PEP 8).
> What can you not say or do in these environments for fear of reprisal?
For example, I doubt that you could refuse a request to state your "preferred pronouns", or critique the idea of making such requests or normalizing the culture around them.
I did. I don't have my pronouns in my email or my bio at work. Nobody gives a shit.
For the record, it's not because I have any particular issue with trans people. If they want to put that info in their bio, or other people do, that's fine. I'm just not interested.
So is your assertion that trans people don't exist? Or it isn't a real thing? And you think it's unfair that you don't feel comfortable talking about that at work? Just for clarity.
> So is your assertion that trans people don't exist? Or it isn't a real thing?
No; and it makes so little sense to hypothesize that on the basis of what I actually wrote, that I cannot take seriously the possibility that you want to discuss this in good faith.
First, gender is an identity marker, and I broadly agree with https://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html . The entire point of the feminism I was steeped in from early childhood is that sex is supposed to be one of the least interesting things about me. As I grew up and became educated about the existence of transgender people (starting in the 90s, BTW), naturally I figured that the same applies to gender as considered separately from sex.
Second: as a matter of ideology, I consider that people, on an individual level, should not be compelled to see others as those others see themselves, and certainly should not be compelled to express a particular view of others. That violates my conception of freedom of speech philosophically (and many have made the legal argument as well).
Those two points tie together: the social contract in play here is that you don't have to care about things that we agreed are a priori uninteresting about me, and therefore I should have the same freedom. The "pronoun culture" violates that contract. (N.B.: this culture is not just about asking people for third-person pronouns; it's about normalizing the act of proactively stating them in an introduction.)
This is not the same as the expectation of various social courtesies, because those concern face-to-face interaction. That is: if you tell me "my pronouns are...", my thought process is that this has no bearing on how I interact with you. When I speak with you, I will refer to you as "you", just as you would to me. The pronouns described are third-person; if you expect me to use them, you are inherently placing an expectation on conversations that do not involve you. (I am unaware of any world language with gendered second-person pronouns, and am happy not to speak any.)
I have had many activists try to tell me that they don't know me but they're sure I use third-person pronouns all the time in group conversations, to refer to members of the group who are present but who I'm not speaking to directly. I have tested this and they are wrong. It does happen rarely in groups of close friends where there is absolutely no question of gender. But even then, I disagree that "I discovered that someone in my group sees me as having a gender other than what I personally identify with" can be considered a form of oppression, or even an objective matter. The activists cannot have it both ways: if "gender" is something that people are free to "identify with", which leaves no identifiable or externally verifiable signs, then it cannot also be a natural fact about the world. Gender identity and gender expression are separate, and the latter is not fully under our control.
If you say that I should prioritize what others tell me over what I can directly observe, you are trying to control me (or enable others to control me). It is exactly the same as if you demanded that I agree that others are physically attractive if they believe themselves to be so.
> Why would you refuse a request to state your preferred pronouns?
Because I reject the underlying conceptual framework, as well as the worldview that makes such a "preference" important or valuable.
> If you're asked and refuse to say, how are people to know which ones to use?
By making their own judgement, as is everyone's natural right.
It is simply not reasonable to demand that others see you as you see yourself. It is correct and just that people are permitted to see others as they will.
When we speak of "pronouns" in this context, we speak of third-person pronouns. Therefore, it is inherent to the concept that I am not privy to the discussion when they are used to refer to me. To refer to others in third person, knowingly, in front of them, is in my view at least unprofessional and likely rude — as it entails speaking on that person's behalf.
If someone guessed wrong (say you had long hair and they assumed you were a woman therefore and used female pronouns when you use male pronouns for yourself), would you correct them?
If not, you're quite unusual but I can't argue that.
As it happens, I do get thus misidentified (per my self-perception) fairly often, because I use a female-presenting avatar on some social media (it relates to prior work). If I notice, and it seems like the other person might care, I do explain; but this is never with any offense (because I have taken none) but only amusement or confusion ("zahlman" matches s/(?<!wo)man/ and I'm not looking at my own avatar generally). I can't recall anyone ever persisting in such "misgendering", but I would not care.
For all I know, countless people refer to me with female pronouns in discussions I can't observe. I get the impression that many people are constantly bothered by such a possibility. I only ever think about it when this exact discussion comes up, and then I simply do not care. I consider that the people in those discussions have the absolute right to do so.
Speaking of which, I have had this exact discussion many times in the last several years, and it's only because of the asking-about-pronouns culture that this is possible. In the decade or more that I knew transgender people in my life before that, none of this mattered and I could get on with my life, and have the same friendly relations with transgender people as cisgender people. There is more social friction now than there was then.
> For all I know, countless people refer to me with female pronouns in discussions I can't observe.
Do you think you might feel differently on the topic if they did it continuously in discussions you can observe and when you tried gentle correction you were met with overt hostility?
The situation you describe is entirely inconceivable. I have knowingly had transgender people in my life for about two decades. I have never seen a "gentle correction" "met with overt hostility". I have only ever seen acrimony in explicit debate spaces, when people chose to make object-level examples of themselves for emotional appeal. And people simply do not "continuously" refer to other parties to the discussion in third person, at all.
> What is it that you say on a regular basis that makes you feel like you need to walk on eggshells?
For example, the things James Damore said, that resulted in his firing and which were blatantly misrepresented all over social media and journalism — to the point of people directly quoting things and then asserting that the quote means something other than its actual meaning.
> Never once, in all those years, have I ever feared for my job or felt excluded.
Not even when people assert that discrimination against your kind doesn't count as X-ism?
> Literally the only people I have ever heard complain are the ones I know for a fact tell racist and sexist jokes because they always felt comfortable enough around me to tell them. If the fact that we are a bit more mindful about being racist and sexist in the work place bothers you
You directly equivocate here. If they are telling racist and sexist jokes "around you", that is not doing so "in the work place". Moreover, if they "feel comfortable enough around you to tell them", that requires that you aren't objecting to it.
I've been working for 20 years, I've watched the landscape transform around me.
Those were jokes/comments made to me in the workplace back when it was more acceptable. Those same people went on to complain they couldn't do that anymore.
As for Damore, I'm not going to debate the merit of that memo. But even the NLRB thought he went beyond projected speech, saying his memo was "harmful, discriminatory, and disruptive"
I’m not willing to provide examples, because they would identify me. I’m not willing to identify myself because I’m not comfortable doing so.
Your response - “You're saying you feel excluded because you can't tell racist jokes?” - is a sufficient example of my point. Not only did I not imply that, but “racist jokes” aren’t even relevant to the conversation.
I refuse to defend myself against completely unfounded allegations.
For someone upset about having to worry about offending people in the workplace, you sure get offended easily.
I was primarily being hyperbolic. My main point is that generally people who are upset are upset that they can no longer say or do objectionable things in the workplace. Meanining every single person I have ever met in real life that complains about this stuff are the same ones who say horribly racist/misogynistic/homophobic stuff.
I'm asking, in all sincerity, what is one example of something you think is perfectly reasonable that you now have to avoid saying. Just one single example. I'd be thrilled if I could get one, because not only have I not seen one in this thread, but I have never seen one from anyone since this became a talking point years ago. It doesn't have to relate specifically to your workplace, you can generalize enough that it wouldn't be clear who you are or where you work.
> I'm asking, in all sincerity, what is one example of something you think is perfectly reasonable that you now have to avoid saying
At one point, one of my social media profile began with “Father, husband, […]” - basically a list of the things that are most important to me. I was berated online for this after responding to a post by someone by offering a suggestion to a technical problem. This was about a month before PyCon, and both I and that person were in attendance. They made reference to their “joke” in a very public way - at least two others who had participated in the thread online were there, and they laughed and continued to name the entire list that my profile contained.
To be clear - I was not inferring that they were making fun of me, this was in direct response to a question I had asked during the Q&A portion of a talk. They were loud enough that the speaker called for quiet because they were unable to hear the following question.
I attempted to file a complaint following the PSF process, and was told “since this happened off-site, there’s nothing we can do.”
The following day the same person referenced that someone had tried to attempted a complaint about them, calling it “fragile masculinity”.
There have been other instances, one of which was significantly more serious and resulted in a close friend of mine leaving software engineering as a career entirely. I will not share that one - there’s no benefit to doing so, it would hurt my friend if they were to be reminded of it, and it would very likely identify me.
It means that you were not really looking, because you could easily find examples that caused the chilling effect (even if it did not cause the firing, but a simple HR talk).
How about you check the content of DEI indoctrination classes, what constitutes offense? Like 2 people talking and the 3rd overhearing is a violation. Like not playing with the fantasies and embracing reality is a violation. Being against (the "wrong one") discrimination is a violation. Like communicating too much with a woman is a violation as is talking too little. Don't let me started on a microaggression BS. In general, it is a violation if any delusional person decides to be offended, no matter the reality.
Did you know that liking progress, efficiency, technology, as well as simply being on time is a core of white suppremacy culture that is improperly and racially being imposed on the Black population? Now that you know (like we estsblished, the opinion of only one minority person like myself is enough to make it a fact) that you are a racist, you must repent.
Your clear dishonesty and bad-faith acting is what causes people to not engage you, not the lack of examples.
I have taken the classes and it really isn't as hard to follow the guidelines as you seem to be painting it.
> Like 2 people talking and the 3rd overhearing is a violation
This is the principle that "locker-room talk" in the workplace is not okay, and that's a good principle. Yes, it's not okay to have a "just us guys" conversation because the content of the conversation is not acceptable in the workplace. The fact a third-party overhearing it gets it reported isn't the issue.
> Like not playing with the fantasies and embracing reality is a violation
You'll have to be more specific about what fantasies you mean. I'm pretty sure I know, but you are continuing to dance around it and your reluctance to name words strongly suggests you know your opinion is unwelcome in polite society.
> Being against (the "wrong one") discrimination is a violation
Again, you'll have to be more clear. Sounds like you're toeing the line Damore toed before Google fired him.
> Like communicating too much with a woman is a violation as is talking too little
Neither of these are violations, and I don't think I know how someone concludes they are.
> Don't [g]et me started on [] microaggression BS
Microaggression theory is grounded in research dating back to the 1970s. Do you have some specific concerns with the research or its interpretation? The theory seems pretty sound from where I sit, but maybe I've missed something.
> Did you know that liking progress, efficiency, technology, as well as simply being on time is a core of white suppremacy culture that is improperly and racially being imposed on the Black population?
That's not at all what anyone has said. You are misinterpreting several layers of information that suggest to me that your frustration is second-hand. I'm going to have to call for a "cite your sources" on this claim.
> In general, it is a violation if any delusional person decides to be offended, no matter the reality.
> Like not playing with the fantasies and embracing reality is a violation.
What does this even mean? Can you give me one specific concrete example of what you want to say in the workplace that you think will end up in a conversation with HR?
I have gone through literally all the same corporate training everyone else has for 20 years across 5 different companies. I have always worked in fairly diverse places, and have never once experienced what you're talking about.
No, people feel excluded because they are falsely accused of "telling racist jokes" when they objectively do nothing of the sort, meanwhile the people next to them are openly racist (and claim that they are not being racist because their actions are excluded by definition) without penalty.
Also as a reminder: in 2013 at PyCon, Adria Richards overheard people who weren't speaking to her and didn't know she was there, took offense to what they were saying, and ignored all official procedure to complain about it publicly on Twitter instead. That's why people were upset at her.
It might just be useless. Maybe 50% of woman are not as interested in the same topics as 50% of the man. Maybe it's ok and natural that man and woman have other talents / interests / perception / interpretation of things etc. Maybe we can appreciate our differences instead of forcefully trying to mold everything into the same shape?
These policies aren't about perfectly equal representation. It's about equal opportunity. That women you want to do the job get equal opportunities to men.
"Just asking questions" sounds innocent until you see that the questions being asked have insinuations behind them. He was asking questions that implied that women and non-white people are less intelligent.
Phrasing outright racism/sexism in the form of a question seems to make it OK with other folks who tend to share the same mindset, but it isn't (and shouldn't be) effective in the workplace.
The devil doesn't need an advocate; especially not in a workplace.
> He was asking questions that implied that women and non-white people are less intelligent.
His questions did not carry any such implication and that is a blatant misrepresentation of the argument he was making. I've been over this so many times in the past and I keep being told that the words I read don't mean what they very obviously mean. (I'm accustomed to that being called "gaslighting" when it goes the other way, inaccurate as that is.)
They quote the key points more or less accurately, although it must be noted that Damore's reference to "neuroticism" referenced an established concept in psychology and psychometrics (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroticism); this does not correspond to a lay understanding, and it is simply factually incorrect to say that he described women as "more neurotic".
Note that Wikipedia endorses Damore's claim there: "A research [sic] over large samples has shown that levels of neuroticism are higher in women than men.[25]" Similarly, greater variability in male IQ is backed by research. Findings like these adequately support the core of Damore's argument, i.e. that disparate outcomes in race- and gender-blind processes do not evidence any form of unconscious bias and do not demonstrate any moral failing in the hiring process.
The NLRB's findings refer to a supposed "effort to cloak with 'scientific' references and analysis", scare quotes theirs, as if to imply that the findings are not backed by science or that appeals to science are being used fraudulently here. Both are false. Similarly, the NLRB claims that Damore invoked "stereotypes" (their word, not scare quotes) in presenting this analysis, which is also false.
The NLRB further supposes that remarks such as the ones they quoted, were somehow "discriminatory and constituted sexual harassment". I find the claim of discrimination specious. Observing that one population demonstrates a wider range of capability than another in certain standardized testing, is not discriminating against either group, especially when no claim is made about mean ability. As for "sexual harassment", I genuinely cannot understand how any reasonable person could ever have alleged this in good faith. There is no flirtation here, no attempt at intimidation, no intent to offend or degrade, nothing. What Damore said, objectively, was no more "sexist" than observing that men are taller than women on average (Cohen's d of 1.86, by the way: https://copernicanrevolution.org/psychology-of-gender/sex-di...). Putting this in the same category as unwanted sexual advances is beyond ludicrous.
The NLRB finally notes that "Numerous employees complained to the Employer that the memorandum was discriminatory against..." All people who made such complains were objectively incorrect in their assessment. The words cited, nor anything else in the memo, plainly do not support such a conclusion.
Essentially, they haven't actually done any "interpretation" here; they have simply made absurd assertions about the effect of the material, in support of absurd assertions made by Damore's coworkers — which assertions are based on a reading that is at best rendered inaccurate by ideological blinders.
I think a reasonable person can conclude that what Damore did was de-facto engaging in harmful stereotypes, even if he believed he was creating a grounded argument from science.
> As for "sexual harassment", I genuinely cannot understand how any reasonable person could ever have alleged this in good faith
"Since Suzy is a woman, she is more neurotic than Bob" is also sexual harassment, just in terms of legal definitions. Not all sexual harassment is of the "I want intercourse" kind.
> What Damore said, objectively, was no more "sexist" than observing that men are taller than women on average
So it turns out that if you go around saying "Well of course Suzy's short, she's a woman," that is sexual harrassment. And while Damore didn't single out any specific coworker, he made clear that he was approaching working with his colleagues from a framework that made assumptions about them based on gender, and that made working with him dicey (especially at Google, where management roles shift so fluidly).
I think a piece of the puzzle you're missing is this: the law doesn't always trust science. And the law has reason not to. Eugenics was a science. Phrenology was a science. Race essentialism was a science. Science hasn't always pointed the way towards truth in all cases, and the law's method of finding fact differs from the scientific method with good reason. If something's scientifically true and a Title VII violation... it's a Title VII violation.
> All people who made such complains were objectively incorrect in their assessment. The words cited, nor anything else in the memo, plainly do not support such a conclusion.
When nearly everyone in a population group is making the same claim about their own emotional state... Wouldn't the "reasonable person" principle conclude that, from a legal standpoint at least, the claim should be accepted true for a reasonable person in that population?
Just to sum up: I propose that people should be able to make statements they reasonably believe are true, where they proactively bring evidence and apply suitable disclaimers ("It was later updated with a preface affirming the author's opposition to workplace sexism and stereotyping.[19]"), and clearly have no intent to offend; and that it is not fair that they could lose their jobs over it when they say these things as part of explicitly solicited feedback.
I disagree, because I believe racists reasonably believe (as per their own framework) that racism is hard science. There is a nonzero amount of culture-shaping in the Civil Rights Act, and that was by design. It did draw a line in the sand and say "This category of behavior, regardless of its connection to or detachment from reality, is no longer acceptable, and we will use force of law to make it so."
Damore made the mistake of failing to realize that an American place of employment is not the agora. Given a couple opportunities to adjust his flight plan, he decided to stay the course. He was free to do so but he became a walking Title VII violation when he did and too much of a liability for Google to continue to employ.
On the plus side, I hear he landed on his feet so it all worked out in the end.
But in what way do you conclude that he is a racist? If you're just stating facts about the general differences between man and woman, and aren't necessarily making any conclusions about any particular person. In what step of the process do you say it becomes racist?
And I don't believe a reasonable person can conclude that someone believes things like "women score higher on the psychiatric test for neuroticism" and then sets that belief aside when evaluating the behavior or performance of women on their team.
What do you mean? There is a statistic that's been supposedly well studied, and it concludes some differences between woman and man. Now you say as soon as you accept that statistic, you cannot set that aside when you're evaluating individuals?
I mean, yeah of course, in a way statistics give us bias about everything. Just like a woke kind of bias will also affect someones perception. That's just always going on. But that doesn't mean we can't realise that every individual is unique, and can be a unique asset in a company / project / whatever?
I know I said I was done, but I do review my own comment history and what you've said (to a third party) here is so fallacious I feel compelled to interject.
Zeroth, statistical results like this are not at all like the "scientific racism" of the past. They are well accepted across a broad field of study and have shown themselves to be useful in understanding human behaviour. (Admittedly, a psychiatric evaluation is not a precise measurement. But it is not fundamentally based on a flawed assumption, and it is not being conducted by people with an axe to grind.)
First, OCEAN traits are basic material in psychology. By your argument, nobody with a relevant degree should be allowed to be employed anywhere; but they learn (not "believe") these things exactly because it makes them more qualified for their intended career path. It's the same as how doctors nowadays are expected to understand how culture mediates responses to pain, or how men's and women's health care facilities have proven themselves necessary (as has the need to disentangle what's caused by physiology or hormones from what's caused by psychology).
Second, Damore obviously understood the material he presented reasonably deeply. Nobody who looks into the psychiatric tests on that level would misunderstand what they mean. And, I mean, really, this is such an incredibly tangential thing to actual work. If I thought you belonged to a group with more propensity to self-doubt (I'm still not exactly being scientific here, but that's closer to what I've understood from my own reading), are you really saying that this would prevent me from fairly "evaluating your behaviour or performance"? The quality of your code doesn't change because of how you felt about it when you committed it.
Third, this is a claim that Damore fully understands as a statistical claim about the general population. He knows very well, and he makes it very clear that he knows very well, that this does not transfer to "women on one's team"; and furthermore he didn't argue that trait neuroticism makes people unfit for purpose (as above). The entire point of the argument is to explain why women disproportionately don't apply for the job, and thus relieve Google of the moral burden of correcting for that. (But he even offered suggestions for what they could do instead!)
Throughout all of that, Damore makes it abundantly clear what he's trying to debunk — the idea presented in the tl;dr: "Extreme: all disparities in representation are due to oppression". If disparities in representation aren't caused by something purely external to the group (what "oppression" means), then they must be caused by something at least partially internal: i.e., a statistical group difference. And Damore is really making the mildest possible arguments about such differences. If you consider this objectionable, then logically you require everyone to believe that every group is statistically identical to every other group in every aspect except the one that defines the group (or at least: in every aspect relevant to performance in any job, etc.); that this is something that must be true a priori and cannot in principle be falsified even by actually doing the statistical work; and that disagreement is thoughtcrime. This is not a strawman; your argument requires this level of absolutism, because otherwise it is not fairly engaging with what Damore actually said.
> If I thought you belonged to a group with more propensity to self-doubt (I'm still not exactly being scientific here, but that's closer to what I've understood from my own reading), are you really saying that this would prevent me from fairly "evaluating your behaviour or performance"? The quality of your code doesn't change because of how you felt about it when you committed it.
Quality of code is by no means the only, or even dominant, evaluation metric for Google performance reviews. There is significant opportunity for bias in how those evaluations work, and that is by design; an engineer that puts out pristine code but shirks oncall duties, responds poorly in performance reviews, is hostile to their coworkers, or pushes blame while pulling credit, is not ready for higher ladder rungs. It's one of the reasons performance reiviews are done by peers, so that being stuffed in a team with a bad manager is less likely to hamstring one's career. But, that does mean that if you're on a team with someone perceived to be sexist (here, I mean "believes different sexes have different inherent natures of behavior"), it sows a lot of doubt in their ability to objectively evaluate you.
I don't think Damore intended to create an uncomfortable working environment, but he did, sadly.
There's an interesting book, "The Myth of the Rational Voter," that touches upon how higher education (in economics, in the case of that book) influences one's political views. Damore may not have been scientifically wrong, but if he's expected to keep working with people who haven't been read-in on the science and don't agree with it even when they are... He made a career-limiting mistake suggesting that the company's approach should pivot to that avenue of research's conclusions. I think he made the mistake honestly, but it was incompatible with his continued employment and he didn't back down when that was made clear.
To answer your question more directly: "Yes. If I were working with a coworker that I know has publicly and thoroughly quoted science that indicates men are categorically more impulsive than women and he gives me, a man, a bad performance review, I would wonder if he did because he doesn't think men have the self-control to make good leaders." That's the hostile work environment, sadly.
> He knows very well, and he makes it very clear that he knows very well, that this does not transfer to "women on one's team"
Two issues with this in practice:
1) If it doesn't transfer to women on one's team, then why was it relevant?
2) If it applies specifically to the general population, than why was it relevant? Google already isn't hiring from the general population.
If that's actually the argument he put on the table, he committed a category error that undermined the whole exercise, which makes it more suspicious when he doesn't back down.
> If you consider this objectionable, then logically you require everyone to believe that every group is statistically identical to every other group in every aspect except the one that defines the group (or at least: in every aspect relevant to performance in any job, etc.); that this is something that must be true a priori and cannot in principle be falsified even by actually doing the statistical work; and that disagreement is thoughtcrime.
You have the meat of the situation yes. Title VII does make that assumption, and does not tolerate working protected-category differences into how employees are treated. I believe Damore was trying to make an argument merely regarding Google's diversification initiatives, but the argument he made had immediate implications for the current workforce (it's not like individuals from the categories with the personality traits Damore's manifesto suggests magically stop being of that category when they are hired, and I think reasonable people made that inference whether it was intended). There is a non-specious argument to make that the Civil Rights Act is behind the science (although, as I've noted previously, any claim it is should be treated with maximum scrutiny given where "the science" has led society in the past in this problem domain).
... but it is the law of the land, and as consequence, one cannot be "just asking questions" about protected categories in an employment environment without career risk.
> To answer your question more directly: "Yes. If I were working with a coworker that I know has publicly and thoroughly quoted science that indicates men are categorically more impulsive than women and he gives me, a man, a bad performance review, I would wonder if he did because he doesn't think men have the self-control to make good leaders." That's the hostile work environment, sadly.
1. Okay. So the psychologists deserve a lifetime of unemployment for daring to choose that major. Understood.
2. This is, as far as I can tell, the same form of argument as: "Yes. If I were working at a company that I know has publicly discussed and implemented DEI policies that argue for hiring people on the basis of traits other than their ability to do the job, and I saw a coworker do a bad job, I would wonder if that coworker were an unqualified 'diversity hire'." This is, to my understanding, one of the arguments that got Charlie Kirk shot; as it's one of the ones people cite when trying to justify the shooting.
But that argument is more coherent, because it considers the effect of hiring policy on hiring, rather than the effect of statistical traits of the general population on hiring. And because it considers job performance as evidence of job aptitude, rather than misrepresenting a statistical difference as a "categorical" one and then making an interpretation about personality traits as they correspond to job aptitude. (Part of the memo was specifically about how to prevent personality traits from interfering with job aptitude, coming from a belief that they don't inherently.)
> one cannot be "just asking questions" about protected categories
Again: his feedback was explicitly solicited. It is extraordinarily unjust to solicit feedback but punish people for saying things you don't want to hear. This is in fact a hallmark of the sorts of authoritarian regimes Damore complained about.
> it's not like individuals from the categories with the ... traits ... magically stop being of that category when they are hired
No, but if the trait is relevant to job performance, then they do stop having that trait when they are hired, because the hiring process filters for it. That's the point. Damore repeatedly, explicitly stated throughout the memo that such stereotyping is inappropriate. It represents ignoring evidence you already have. "You are in a group that tends to X, therefore you are X" is false logic that Damore calls out as false logic. It is being projected onto him by the complainants. Reasonable people did not make that inference, because the inference is not reasonable — because it is not backed by logic, nor is it compatible with the principle of charity that is expected of reasonable people. Coming to these sorts of conclusions requires many unreasonable acts, such as repeatedly ignoring explicit disclaimers.
> So the psychologists deserve a lifetime of unemployment for daring to choose that major.
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize." People who have studied psychology and wish to work in an American workplace are welcome to do so. If they suggest modern psychological science indicates that Title VII is based on flawed reasoning and their coworkers have reason to believe they will act on that belief in an official capacity, that creates a hostile work environment. American businesses are not the places to lab-test OCEAN trait averages as policy guidance.
You have stated several times that Damore stated that wasn't his intent. I know he stated that (sidebar: one of the reasons this topic triggers my interest is I was there). I think, unfortunately for him, his protests failed the credibility test, fair or unfair that may be. He hadn't earned a benefit of the doubt from his colleagues (to be fair to him, "colleagues" is a very wide net the way Google organized itself back then; they were still acting like a small company in terms of organization when they employed over 50,000 people, and I think the experience with Damore was a nail in the coffin for their "big company with small-company ideals" model).
> publicly discussed and implemented DEI policies that argue for hiring people on the basis of traits other than their ability to do the job
I've seen this criticism in a couple of dimensions and I won't claim it doesn't happen, but (perhaps surprisingly) I agree with you to an extent. I'm not in favor of hiring people who can't do the job because they have other traits. Broadly speaking though, DEI initiatives are predicated on the core notion that most candidates are actually interchangeable, and if you don't back-stop in your company culture regular human biases, companies will hire more people who look, act, and think like them over equally-qualified people from different backgrounds. That's not the same thing as intentionally hiring unqualified people for a role; for most roles, strict stack-ranking of candidates is actually impossible because the responsibility domain is too broad.
> Again: his feedback was explicitly solicited
You are 100% correct, and I think Google as an org learned a valuable lesson about message channels in this story. There is also the dimension worth noting that the decision to keep it in house was taken out of both Google and Damore's hands because someone leaked the whole topic to the public, which thoroughly tied Google's hands; Damore's conduct in the public eye read worse than it did internally, so Google was faced with significant blow-back if they decided to go to bat for the guy at that point. It is entirely possible one of his coworkers did that on purpose, and that can be interpreted as malicious (... on the other hand, if the story is "Once the public knew about it, Google couldn't do anything but fire him..." Maybe the conduct was firing-worthy? All subsequent formal inquiry seems to concur it was).
> Reasonable people did not make that inference, because the inference is not reasonable
I think you make a reasonable case here, but unfortunately, I don't think the public agrees and we end up on the rocks of "reasonable person principle" again. If most of the public's interpretation doesn't fit the "reasonable person" standard, democracy as an experiment is a bit failed, yeah?
> such as repeatedly ignoring explicit disclaimers.
If you believe the disclaimers, you arrive at different conclusions than if you don't. Sadly for Mr. Damore, I think most people just didn't.
> I think a reasonable person can conclude that what Damore did was de-facto engaging in harmful stereotypes, even if he believed he was creating a grounded argument from science.
No, a reasonable person cannot do so, because this is a matter of fact. This conclusion is incompatible with what the word "stereotype" means. Objectively, an empirically backed statistical trend is not a stereotype. Again, this is like using the word" stereotype to describe the statement "on average, men are taller than women".
It is not a question of Damore believing he was creating a grounded argument from science. It is a question of the objective fact that he was doing so.
> And while Damore didn't single out any specific coworker, he made clear that he was approaching working with his colleagues from a framework that made assumptions about them based on gender
No. His framework does not "make assumptions about them", i.e. about individuals. It highlights things that are known to be true as statistical patterns. He was explicit in noting that he does not use these statistics to prejudge people, for example:
> Many of these differences are small and there’s significant overlap between men and women, so you can’t say anything about an individual given these population level distributions.
He was explicit that his purpose in highlighting the statistics is to refute an argument he saw being made that a disparate outcome evidenced a bias. He offered an alternate explanation for the outcome.
To say that this is wrong is to say, in effect, that he is not allowed to hold the view, never mind express it. And it is to say that no refutation of the argument presented could be tolerated.
That is not how healthy discussion works. And as I recall, Damore's feedback was part of a program explicitly soliciting this sort of feedback.
Also notable, Damore also claimed (again correctly, again backed by statistical evidence) that women show on average higher openness and extraversion (other OCEAN traits) on the same studies where they show higher neuroticism. Nobody objected to that. Because the objection was rooted in emotional affect and a knee-jerk reaction to a word without understanding the underlying concept or caring about the evidence presented.
> Wouldn't the "reasonable person" principle conclude that,
I don't see why:
> In law, a reasonable person or reasonable man is a hypothetical person whose character and care conduct, under any common set of facts, is decided through reasoning of good practice or policy.[1][2]
I don't agree that the people in question were conducting themselves in anything like that manner.
> His questions did not carry any such implication and that is a blatant misrepresentation of the argument he was making.
I also read through this in-depth at the time, and yeah, he definitely did carry such implication. Hiding it through quoting bad science doesn't aid his cause.
He's a racist and a sexist, and he's just good at doing in a quasi-grey area, so that other racists can rally behind him. It's effectively the alt-right playbook, as the alt-right is just a "more commercially friendly KKK".
> and yeah, he definitely did carry such implication.
I have read through it many times. Such inferences require wilful misinterpretation.
If you disagree, please feel free to email me for further discussion. I use this username, on the Proton email service (specifically the one with a two-letter TLD).
> Hiding it through quoting bad science doesn't aid his cause.
The science he cited is not bad; it is well accepted in the relevant fields. For example, the "people vs things orientation" point is general knowledge in the field; it's a highly reproducible result with one of the largest effect sizes in all of behavioural science (see e.g. https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/01/gender-imbalances-are-..., section 2).
> He's a racist and a sexist
The memo does not describe, or attempt to describe, any form of racial difference, whether hypothetical or measured. The only mentions of race are in reference to the existing Google policy, which is unavoidable insofar as that policy explicitly takes race into consideration. There is not even a remotely plausible basis for describing anything written here as racist, and you reasonably ought to understand this from your claimed "in-depth" reading.
> he's just good at doing in a quasi-grey area,
There is nothing "quasi-grey" about it except among people who are looking for a reason to misinterpret it. As an objective matter of fact he did not say the harmful things attributed to him.
> so that other racists can rally behind him. It's effectively the alt-right playbook, as the alt-right is just a "more commercially friendly KKK".
This is completely unfounded assassination of character which does nothing except to reveal your own biases.
> There is not even a remotely plausible basis for describing anything written here as racist
The fact that plenty of people disagree with you doesn't support your argument.
It feels like you're being defensive here because you agree with his rhetoric and you don't want to consider yourself sexist or racist, because "that makes you a bad person". You can have racist, sexist thoughts, and maybe in other cases still generally be good in your actions. This doesn't define your core being, even if you still have hateful thoughts. You'll never be able to improve yourself if you're unwilling to have your beliefs challenged.
> This is completely unfounded assassination of character which does nothing except to reveal your own biases.
He's become a hero of the alt-right, specifically because his approach to this aligns with their playbook. It's not character assassination, it's truth. He's trying to phrase things in a palatable way, but his underlying message is that minorities and women don't belong in tech.
Though he said he doesn't support the alt-right, he went on a media tour after being fired, on alt-right platforms. This is also something that generally aligns with alt-right playbooks. Distance yourself in speech, but not in action.
> The fact that plenty of people disagree with you doesn't support your argument.
First off, no, you are the only one in the discussion who brought up any charge of racism.
Second, no, this is blatant argumentum ad populum fallacy.
Third, the fact that you apparently refuse to cite anything from the memo is telling. I know that you cannot cite anything from the memo to support a charge of racism because I have read the memo and it contains nothing that can support a charge of racism even in your ideological framework.
If you disagree, quote the part that you think does so. I will be happy to explain why it does not.
> It feels like you're being defensive here because you agree with his rhetoric and you don't want to consider yourself sexist or racist, because "that makes you a bad person".
I am correctly pointing out that he said nothing wrong, because I agree with what he said. I am not sexist or racist; those qualities are moral failings, and therefore having them does make someone a bad person. There is objectively nothing sexist or racist about what was said, and therefore objectively nothing sexist or racist about agreeing with it. I have carefully explained why, repeatedly, throughout the thread.
I am not "being defensive", as that term implies a feeling of guilt. I feel no guilt, because I have done nothing wrong, and believe nothing wrong. I feel annoyance, because you are trying to tell me objectively incorrect things that you reasonably ought to know are incorrect, and because you are attacking an innocent person (Damore) whom I care about (at least on a philosophical level).
> You can have racist, sexist thoughts, and maybe in other cases still generally be good in your actions. This doesn't define your core being, even if you still have hateful thoughts. You'll never be able to improve yourself if you're unwilling to have your beliefs challenged.
It comes across that you say this with the intent of "giving me an out", but really it just comes across as condescending. The only "hateful thoughts" I have in this regard are towards a) those who promote an altered, unjust definition of "sexism" and "racism" in order to rationalize harmful, sexist, racist, morally incorrect policies like DEI; b) those who make false presumptions about my mental state.
I have "had my beliefs challenged" constantly by people like you for well over a decade. "Having one's beliefs challenged" does not entail changing them. "Improving oneself" does not entail agreeing with your viewpoint, either. It entails refining one's ability to reject it. Because it is incorrect.
> He's become a hero of the alt-right, specifically because his approach to this aligns with their playbook. It's not character assassination, it's truth. He's trying to phrase things in a palatable way, but his underlying message is that minorities and women don't belong in tech.
> Though he said he doesn't support the alt-right, he went on a media tour after being fired, on alt-right platforms. This is also something that generally aligns with alt-right playbooks. Distance yourself in speech, but not in action.
All of this is complete unfounded nonsense, repeatedly and directly contradicted by what Damore actually said. You have not read the memo. You have looked at the memo, pulled out some words, and come to a conclusion driven by your own ideological biases. But your understanding of the meaning is objectively incorrect. What you are doing here is roughly equivalent to reading someone say "on average, men are taller and physically stronger than women" and saying "get a load of this person, who apparently doesn't think women should play sports". And then also extending the point to "minorities", based on absolutely nothing at all.
(If you dispute the claim that men are on average taller and physically stronger than women, please feel free to cite your studies.)
> "Please don't comment on whether someone read an article."
Damore's memo is not an article in this sense and it especially is not what OP submitted.
> "Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity."
Why do you present this criticism to someone who offers evidence, but not to the other party, who is making assertions directly contradicted by the evidence for the purpose of character assassination? How is it not "political or ideological battle" to accuse someone, without evidence and in clear contradiction of available evidence, of being a "hero of the alt-right" who is following their "playbook"?
Further: I explicitly offered to continue the conversation by email instead. I received no email, and received a comment reply. It is not fair or reasonable to castigate me for replying.
Further: this subthread started with scuff3d making the sarcastic remark "God forbid they stand up for people and fight for an inclusive work environment. How dare they!", uncharitably representing someone else's position and clearly intending "political or ideological battle". This then allowed for you to introduce Damore as a topic, in proposing that someone else's entirely reasonable positions were somehow harmful and implicitly justifying that they should have gotten Damore fired, an ideological position unrelated to the PSF except insofar as the underlying ideology is treated as a topic.
The paid staff are, broadly speaking, the ones enforcing the rules (and making PyCon happen). Almost all the actual development is on a volunteer basis, with people operating remotely and submitting PRs to GitHub (where the only people who ever act unprofessional are annoyed bug reporters). What "work environment"?
Software quality has been on a downhill trend that's steepened noticeably in the past ~15 years. Doesn't take a genius to put two and two together and see what's really happening but they'd rather we ignore the politically inconvenient elephant in the room.
Your downvotes don't matter, we see the truth regardless.
Please put two and two together for the rest of us clowns who can’t quite figure it out. State your beliefs plainly so we can come up with some solutions.
No, it's the focus on whatever rainbow-coloured culture war crap that has nothing to do with software engineering that's creating a distraction and allowing incompetence to thrive.
I don't care if developers are cis trans black white male female or dogs[1] if they are competent. But there seems to be a recent trend of some who cry discrimination when their sub-par work is called out.
> But there seems to be a recent trend of some who cry discrimination when their sub-par work is called out.
This sounds like you worked with or heard about 1 trans person who did shoddy work and now it's a "recent trend" that all trans software devs are saying it's discrimination.
Yeah, it's usually white guys complaining that they got passed over for some trans person or whatever who insist that there's discrimination when they get called out for sub-par work.
I actually think that part of the increased prevalence of trans women (i.e. AMAB people who identify as women) in the software industry, is AMAB people who would otherwise be considered men for DEI purposes changing their own conception of their own gender in a way that would make them be counted as women for DEI purposes. I don't think this is the only thing driving gender transition in a general sense, but I know a fair number of trans women and other AMAB genderqueer people in programming-adjacent spaces, and I suspect that the general cultural currents that incentivize gender-based DEI programs also affect people who are otherwise gender-questioning in some fashion.
----
"The doctors are sympathetic, and I think some of them even understand—regardless, they can offer no solace beyond the chemical. They are too kind to resent, but my envy is palpable. One, a trans woman, is especially gentle; perhaps because her own frustrations mirror mine, our cognitive distance sabotaging her authenticity."
- https://ctrlcreep.substack.com/p/knowing-ones-place
So your assertion is that trans people, gay people, people of color, and women are inherently worse at engineering jobs then straight white men, and companies/institutions that hire them are somehow producing worse software? Ignoring all other economic and technological trends that have materialized over the last two decades?
Also, just for the record, some of the most brilliant engineers I have worked with in my time fall into many of those categories.
Jumping in here. Nobody (or almost nobody) is saying that these demographics are inherently worse engineers. But the policies to promote them are inherently discriminatory. You can't promote people based on what they look like without compromising on other attributes like skill. There are companies out there literally saying "We need less white people" and listing off every possible demographic as "welcome" except for white men, in the job posting.
I remember attending a company meeting a few years ago where our Chief People Officer announced in front of everyone that a new C-level role was open to run our IT organization and that it was exclusively open to women of color.
I remember thinking to myself: "Woah, that's not only extremely illegal but also I potentially would qualify for such a role without said requirement. I wish I'd recorded that."
The person they hired ended up being a disaster in the two years she was with us and she hired an entire organization underneath her that was exclusively of her own ethnicity...and I don't mean her country but her own ethnic group within that country.
In some countries they've tried to mandate that some percentage of the executive board or C-level is women. That should be illegal. Businesses want the best people for the job. If women were actually discriminated against, a competitor could scoop them all up and make major profits. It's all political theater to get female votes at the expense of men and society as a whole.
> California passed Senate Bill 826 in October 2018, mandating gender diversity on the boards of public companies headquartered in California. The bill set deadlines in 2019 (for two women on five-person boards) and 2021 (for three women on seven-person boards).[66] It was challenged as unconstitutional on the grounds of violating equal protection.[67] The District Court ruled the challengers did not have standing, but was overturned by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. The District Court then denied a preliminary injunction. It is now pending another appeal.[68] A separate lawsuit found the law unconstitutional on May 13, 2022.[69]
> In 2020, California passed Assembly Bill 979, requiring publicly held companies headquartered in California to include board members from underrepresented communities. The law requires at least one director from an underrepresented community by the end of 2021, and up to three, depending on board size, by the end of 2022.[70] The term "underrepresented community" is defined as "an individual who self‑identifies as Black, African American, Hispanic, Latino, Asian, Pacific Islander, Native American, Native Hawaiian, or Alaska Native, or who self‑identifies as gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender."[71] The law was ruled unconstitutional on April 1, 2022.
Every single one of these policies that I've seen over the last 20 years, including my role as a hiring manager in my past career, were aimed at leveling the playing field and providing equal opportunities to people who aren't in the majority. The only effect I've seen is that now people who look like me actually have to compete with others.
Edit: For the record I'm asking for links from reputable companies who would realistically be setting the tone for the industry. Not some random ass listing for contract work.
Other companies I can think of are Google and Microsoft. Many huge open-source projects have openly promoted specific racial outcomes. I might dig up links later but if you actually care about this stuff, Lunduke is a great source of references.
>Every single one of these policies that I've seen over the last 20 years, including my role as a hiring manager in my past career, were aimed at leveling the playing field and providing equal opportunities to people who aren't in the majority.
That is how it's sold, but in practice it means you have to turn down perfectly good white people (especially white men) to get arbitrary demographic outcomes. If 13% of the population is black and almost none of them study engineering, you won't be able to get 13% representation without passing up on better white candidates. The same can be said about women and other minorities. Different demographics have different preferences and that is reflected in what they study and how hard they work at it. Yet we are supposed to think there is something nefarious if there is even a minor discrepancy in outcomes. Give me a break. This isn't the 1950s. Nobody would risk discriminating against a minority because it could cause a lawsuit. But discrimination against whites and men is not treated the same way, even when it can be proved positively. One of those 3 lawsuits against IBM was dismissed by an activist judge with a one-sentence non-explanation for example. If you complain about this stuff publicly your career is going to be damaged and everyone will at best think you are a bad sport.
You're specific statement was that companies were listing job postings saying white men weren't welcome. I don't see any evidence of that.
I'm going to try very very hard to ignore the fact it was James O'Keefe that "broke" that story. He's only one step above Info Wars when it comes to being a reliable source, and it's well established he doctors videos to fit his narrative.
But for the sake of argument, let's assume that IBM did do something illegal here: they deserve to be sued and the person who was discriminated against is entitled to some kind of compensation (regardless of race/gender). But that's hardly evidence of some grand conspiracy against white men.
But maybe we can approach this conversation from a different angle. You clearly have a different view from me, so let's try to build up from some common starting place
Would you say it's a reasonable assertion that someone born into immense wealth and privilege (regardless of race/gender/sexual orientation) has substantially more opportunities in their life then someone born in abject poverty?
>You're specific statement was that companies were listing job postings saying white men weren't welcome. I don't see any evidence of that.
Sorry, I don't have time to satisfy arbitrary demands like this. Job postings are ephemeral anyway. There have been articles written about this but I don't have links, and the way you're coming at me tells me you will never be satisfied.
>I'm going to try very very hard to ignore the fact it was James O'Keefe that "broke" that story. He's only one step above Info Wars when it comes to being a reliable source, and it's well established he doctors videos to fit his narrative.
O'Keefe did not originate this story. Lunduke gets a number of leaks himself. If you expect these maverick journalists to be well-liked, you're being totally unreasonable.
>But for the sake of argument, let's assume that IBM did do something illegal here: they deserve to be sued and the person who was discriminated against is entitled to some kind of compensation (regardless of race/gender). But that's hardly evidence of some grand conspiracy against white men.
CEOs of companies saying out in the open that they want more "representation" and that there are bonuses for hiring minorities not good enough? There are billions of dollars being spent specifically to attack whites and white men specifically, and to discourage whites from forming families. I'm not going to argue with you on this point. This should be rather obvious.
>Would you say it's a reasonable assertion that someone born into immense wealth and privilege (regardless of race/gender/sexual orientation) has substantially more opportunities in their life then someone born in abject poverty?
I know exactly where you want to take this and let me stop you right there. Would you agree that, assuming we are allocating financial assistance to poor people, that all equally poor people are equally deserving of help regardless of what they look like, or what is between their legs, or who they like to sleep with?
Anything that tries to blame present-day whites for crimes of the past is effectively collective punishment. Meanwhile, you can't even extract retribution from the children of convicted criminals at present, yet we are supposed to take the blame for a few individuals in the past based on the mere fact that they look like us? There is no evidence of widespread collusion against minorities at present. To the very limited extent you might argue that, I could argue that people of other demographics prefer their own consistently.
I don't actually want to continue this discussion lol. It's too tedious and I don't expect to convince you of anything based on how you write. But hopefully some of what I've said will lead you to reconsider some of your mainstream beliefs.
It's not an assumption, it's what the law says. In the US, in Canada and in every other sufficiently advanced nation.
If you disagree, it's because you disagree about what "level" means.
It's as the other poster says:
> There are companies out there literally saying "We need less white people" and listing off every possible demographic as "welcome" except for white men, in the job posting.
When you do this, the playing field is ipso facto not level. When you "welcome" people regardless of demographic characteristics, and refuse to take these characteristics into consideration in the hiring process the playing field is ipso facto level.
The law can say all kinds of things that aren't (scientifically) true. We can pass a law that says the sun revolves around the Earth, and it's legally true if we do.
I'd think if our backstop for understanding if a level playing field was created by the law is the law, we'd want to verify the claim by external signal such as outcome observation if we aspire to some objective assessment.
The law required you not to discriminate on the basis of sex etc.
I am the one saying that this is inherently fair, and that doing so produces a definitionally level playing field.
Because that's just true. That's how fairness works. Fairness is when you don't discriminate on the basis of things (here, race, sex etc.) irrelevant to the decision you're trying to make (here, suitability for the position). Bias is when you do.
Your definition of fairness suggests that when someone is born poor, suffers, and dies poor, and someone is born rich, gets to enjoy all the things wealth brings a person in life, and dies rich, even though they did nothing in particular to earn their station in life... That's fair.
I think civilizations have been struggling for several centuries with whether that's good enough. We are, in fact, coming up on the Christmas season for those who celebrate, and there's a pretty good story an Englishman wrote in the 1800s on this topic. Something about three spirits visiting and what a man's life comes to, even when he plays by every single written rule.
(You're hitting the nail on the head. Equality of opportunity vs. equality of possible outcome is the division in philosophy in this space. Are you familiar with the thought experiment Lyndon B. Johnson spoke of in 1965 about a relay race where the runners have unequal starting lines?)
> Your definition of fairness suggests that when someone is born poor, suffers, and dies poor, and someone is born rich, gets to enjoy all the things wealth brings a person in life, and dies rich, even though they did nothing in particular to earn their station in life... That's fair.
No. I said nothing of the sort.
What I said is that when those things happen, and then an employer disregards that history in the course of making a hiring assessment, the employer acted fairly.
It is not incumbent upon the employer to attempt to right prior injustices. It is in fact wrong to expect the employer to do so. Because the employer did not cause them.
> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
I am done with this discussion, in all sub-threads, because this is clearly going no where.
You didn't say it directly; your definition suggests it as a logical inference.
> The law required you not to discriminate on the basis of sex etc.
> I am the one saying that this is inherently fair
So if most men start on a playing field where they are wealthier and most women on one where they are poorer, a level playing field will tend to maintain that level of inequality, will it not? And by your definition that would e fair.
In fact, there'd be an interesting observable consequence of this scenario: were it truly level, one could begin to observe population-level phenomena like "women are just poorer; that's innate to them" and be correct in observation but with an error in causality; it's not so much "innate" as "initial conditions coupled with a lack of mobility."
If it were initial conditions and a lack of mobility... An un-level playing field would encourage more mobility, would it not? And if you made it un-level in the right way, perhaps you could start to zero out those initial-conditions effects?
There have always even been black women developers, perhaps not as many as the DEI-brainwashed would like, but that's fine because they're actually competent regardless of who they are.
The narrative that DEI causes unqualified people to be hired is just false fear-mongering.
I’ve been on several university hiring committees and the guidelines were always “if two candidates are equally qualified 1. Hire the veteran 2. Hire the minority” if a hiring committee chooses an unqualified individual to do a job that’s on them.
No proponent of DEI I’ve ever talked to in real life has said we should hire unqualified people to meet some quota.
Not true. Work for a large public tech multinational. We had a several year run where every time we tried to hire onto our team, HR would force severely unqualified people into our interview pipeline. Then after they failed the interview HR would stress that we should strongly consider hiring the person on DEI grounds. We don't do technical interviews on culture fit -- we've gone through significant effort to make sure our interviews are objective and generate good signal regardless of background.
None of these were junior positions, they were all basically senior and staff engineer positions, based on the nature/criticality of the work. We had to interview a wide variety of people all of whom had never had a professional software engineering role before and some who didn't even speak a language shared by any members on our team.
That could equally mean people of color were disproportionately laid off during COVID. I find it meaningless without any breakdown of what those hires were or any other factors that would help determine the base rate. If this and hand-waving about 'DEI is the context you need' is your whole argument, you're bad at statistics and analysis.
> "Major companies added more than 320,000 jobs to their U.S. workforces in 2021, and 94% of those went to people of color, according to Bloomberg."
Searching for the quoted sentence found a NewsNation article. The NewsNation article linked the Bloomberg article.[1]
The quoted sentence could create an impression 6% of newly hired workers were white. This would be incorrect. 2021 was the time of the Great Resignation. People who stopped working were older and white disproportionately. Both articles mentioned this. But not so clearly.
The Bloomberg article said 2021 hiring included hiring back people the companies laid off in 2020. The jobs eliminated in 2020 were lower paying jobs disproportionately. And the workers affected were non white disproportionately.
Amazon added over 200,000 jobs. This was over 60% of the total. Most were warehouse workers and drivers. Do you believe Amazon had diversity quotas for warehouse workers and drivers?
Both articles said remote work changed where companies hired people. Do you believe they did this for diversity or money?
Bloomberg's charts illustrated some of the problems of reducing the data to 1 or 2 numbers even if you ignore resignation. Nike decreased white people at all levels. This was because they decreased jobs at their Oregon headquarters. CVS's professional, managerial, and executive jobs hiring appeared to favor white people. Amazon's professional hiring appeared to favor Asian people.
The government shouldn’t be spending itself further into unsustainable debt. And state funding of private organizations will always be subject to the politics of the state, leaking those policies into the organizations they fund. Avoiding both is a net win for everyone, so this is a great outcome.
Funding supply chain security for one of the most popular open source ecosystems in the world isn’t even a rounding error on the budget.
The debt increases are a political choice: the budget was balanced at the turn of the century, which was used as the pretext for cutting taxes to a level which ensured the problems we’re seeing now based on highly unrealistic growth projections. Cutting all funding on open source, or science, or foreign aid, or even all of those combined is a drop in the bucket compared to our cost of healthcare being whole multiples higher than in our peer countries.
They announced grassroots donations for 10% of the total. That’s good, but still short of where it should be for something so popular.
I think of it like crime or natural disaster: a PyPI compromise could easily cause economic damages on the order of a bad storm or small terrorist attack. Collectively we spend billions trying to mitigate those societally rather than telling each person to defend themselves, and this feels like the same idea adapted to a different context.
I think you’ve badly misread the numbers here: donors have only covered a small fraction of what this NSF grant would have covered.
(And of course, it should go without saying that relying on the public to react to the government’s capricious behavior does not make for a stable funding situation for a nonprofit.)
Externalizing responsibility while taking the value of things and calling that a net win until the consequences come up seems short sighted.
Hopefully nobody else funds this critical infrastructure piece of both the government and private sector software world. Especially someone of a country/color/gender you don't like.
All they had to do, was say "yes, we'll take the DEI sign down, and reiterate that we accept and support everyone and don't discriminate." Heck they could have made their website background a flaming, dynamic, neon rainbow for all the government cared. A $1.5MM ideological mistake.
> This restriction would apply not only to the security work directly funded by the grant, but to any and all activity of the PSF as a whole. Further, violation of this term gave the NSF the right to “claw back” previously approved and transferred funds. This would create a situation where money we’d already spent could be taken back, which would be an enormous, open-ended financial risk.
This Admin has shown that it's willing to do/say what it wants; there is nothing to stop it from accusing PSF, without having to provide evidence, that it had violated the terms, and then take the money back. It's a risk they were right not to take.
I dug a bit more and see that PSF is so DEI oriented at the core, that it would have affected the way they literally operated: PyLadies, PyCon US diversity work, and active outreaches and other activities/groups for DEI. I also see that DEI is literally part of their foundational mission, and the other happens to be developing Python.
Python underwent one of the most poorly conceived backwards incompatible version updates of any language. I believe that it did irreparable damage to Python's position as an application making or web stack language.
Yet today, it is still one of the most popular languages out there. I believe you can place this popularity at the feet of its outreach programs, which parlaid into being able to find new niches which it is currently thriving in.
From all the surveys I've seen, the demographics of Python users haven't meaningfully changed over time. (And the core dev team is still over 90% male as best I can determine, although there doesn't seem to be an authoritative list.) It's far more plausible that the popularity owes to its viral success as a "glue" language in data analysis and "scientific" applications, which lead to familiarity and adoption for ML applications that are connected to today's AI hype. It also saw a boom during the COVID lockdown; and the choice of Python here can largely be attributed to network effects.
In short, languages like Perl and Ruby didn't have a NumPy equivalent (PDL doesn't appear to be on anything like the same level, and Numo is a newcomer), while languages like R and Julia don't have the same perception as general-purpose (i.e. suitable for integrating numerical computing applications into a wider context).
Python isn't in these niches because of demographic-specific outreach programs, as demonstrated by the demographics of the niches.
Also, the updates were not "poorly conceived", although they were initially released half-baked. If anything, they didn't go nearly far enough.
> It's far more plausible that the popularity owes to its viral success as a "glue" language in data analysis and "scientific" applications
I actually agree with you on this point. It's just that I believe that Python's focus on outreach is why it caught on in those applications in the first place. Without it, I feel like Python would probably occupy the same amount of mindshare of something like Ruby, and those niches it currently occupies would probably have been eaten by JavaScript.
It's certainly not because of any merits of the language itself as being newbie-friendly. I've had enough non-programmer friends and family asking me to explain why whitespace is used for blocks and the difference between using `==` and `is`.....okay I'm going to stop now before I start ranting.
> Also, the updates were not "poorly conceived", although they were initially released half-baked. If anything, they didn't go nearly far enough.
One fun little anecdote I love to throw around is that in the span of time that Python underwent a single seismic update, PHP underwent two, and did a much better job of enticing developers to make those jumps.
The difference is that PHP didn't break the entire universe at once, it just made small, backwards-incompatible changes that you could either shim, or rip through your project and do in-place fixes for. On the other hand, it also gave developers enormous carrots to entice them into upgrading - 5.3 had namespaces which allowed for clean code separation, and 7.0 was *significantly* faster. I hear PHP 8 now has a JIT compiler.
Meanwhile, it took forever for Python to give developers enough tooling to cleanly support Python 2 and 3 in one codebase, and it also lacked enough of a carrot to entice developers to upgrade. Projects like Mercurial thought that the upgrade was a complete waste of time and wish they had switched languages instead. The first Python version I was actually excited about was 3.5 because of type hinting and async/await, and there were still Python 2 holdouts up until the point when 2.7 was finally EOL.
So...."not far enough"....I beg your pardon? I feel like that would've gone even worse, and ended up in a repeat of Perl 6/Raku.
So many things could get flagged as "DEI" under this Admin:
- PyGirls: DEI
- Girls Who Code: DEI
- Free Intro to CS classes in poor neighborhoods: DEI
- Free Coding Camps for low income families: DEI
- Africa Kids Code: DEI
- Coding Classes in Spanish: DEI
etc.
- Not coding, but my kids' chess tournament organizers waive tournament fees for girls and kids from low income families: DEI
If the foundation's core mission is to promote and support Python to as many people as possible, that includes people who would not normally be taking CS classes in schools or have access to resources, then that is DEI.
> If the foundation's core mission is to promote and support Python to as many people as possible, that includes people who would not normally be taking CS classes in schools or have access to resources, then that is DEI.
No, it isn't. DEI, as applied to the PSF, entails promoting and supporting Python to not as many people as possible, by singling out specific groups.
> - PyGirls: DEI
> - Girls Who Code: DEI
I think you mean "PyLadies", but yes, these programs are inherently discriminatory. Their existence also perpetuates the harmful stereotypes that young women would require some sort of special help, or that they benefit from being segregated from young men in the learning environment. (Note that segregating women from men logically necessitates segregating men from women.)
And if you have a daughter, the existence of programs like this sends the message that you should choose her activities according to what society wants for her, not what she wants for herself. That denies agency, and is sexist.
> - Africa Kids Code: DEI
Obviously not.
> AfricaKidsCode was founded by Mangaliso Mokoape in 2018. It is an organization whose primary agenda is to drive digital skills education among young people on the continent through innovation.
I.e., it's meant for people who live in Africa. That isn't a protected characteristic and doesn't exclude, for example, white South Africans. Further, the program doesn't describe itself as having any particular diversity or equity goals.
> - Coding Classes in Spanish: DEI
No, of course not. No critic of DEI makes such arguments, and the Trump administration has not said anything that reasonably supports such a conclusion. Getting there requires conspiratorial thinking. Language is not a "protected characteristic" in US law, and associating it with protected characteristics in order to argue against the Trump administration is psychological projection.
> - Free Intro to CS classes in poor neighborhoods: DEI
> - Free Coding Camps for low income families: DEI
No, and supposing so requires psychological projection.
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