I assume your choice to describe average HR reps as “clueless ladies” isn’t meant to suggest that you respect e.g. women software engineers on your team any less. But if the gender of the clueless HR employees isn’t relevant, why mention it? Maybe worth reflecting on whether calling them clueless ladies rhetorically emphasizes their cluelessness
The OP should have left off "ladies" as that was unnecessary -- clueless is a sufficient descriptor for many people in many roles (whether genuine behavior, strategic fiefdoming, or learned helplessness).
I read the original comment as implying that the average HR person reviewing your resume will be a clueless woman. Not as implying that only women work there or that people of other genders working there are more clueful.
The comment is open to interpretation, and you are free to interpret it in a less charitable way. The ambiguity is absolutely something we can and should criticize the comment for
The distribution in other categories is fascinating, and HN doesn't format tables well.
Though "saving a click" typically refers to spammy clickbait news articles that bury the lede, which a statistical table directly relevant to the conversation does not qualify as.
I’m not sure the percentage of companies that use software for highlighting candidates, but Anthropic almost certainly does and this [2] source says 75+% do.
So since men wrote the software that didn’t highlight the candidate, is it the clueless men that caused this?
Yes - people in HR departments are often female and often clueless, but I don't see the parent denying this. The wording of OP connected both though, which is sexist and can be considered "evil".
Funny enough, I see this whole framing as sexist itself.
Nobody would have bat an eye if he said "clueless guys" or "clueless gents", and given the prevalence of women in HR, that wording would actually have more chances of having a sexist background to it.
“guys” is gendered but is very often used to mean a general group.
>given the prevalence of women in HR, that wording would actually have more chances of having a sexist background to it.
The reason there are more women than men in HR is clearly because the men they do hire are too clueless and get fired faster. Ever have an HR department with all men? Most dysfunctional department I’ve ever interacted with! “Clueless HR men” is just redundant. The ~25% that exist are DEI hires. So it wouldn’t be sexism, it would be reality.
You‘re right, but that just reflects the structural sexism in our society while the wording by the op was intentional (I suppose. If not, I might as well be more sexist then he is).
After years hearing justly about bad things perpetrated by males as a class, without any concerns about generalizations, I think we are mature enough to also call for responsibility in the other side of the aisle.
Having a free pass for doing evil stuff is what gave man their bad rep, should we now for equity give women a pass to become the new slave lords?
Nopes, nothing to the ladies in general nor any other gender in general. Just a shortcut to my own negative experience with HR by example. English is my foreign language and in my country we are not that allergic to terminology. But clueless processors stay as valid… regardless of particular denomination.
A dead project that has been replaced with a fork with a different name? Maybe I’m missing something but this really doesn’t seem so bad as far as name collisions go
Yeah I realized that as I went to the site. Egg on face, I'm a big disgrace... (etc etc). Also boo to me for going against the "site vibes" here. I will admit I could have been a bit more chill about the issue.
On a full keyboard it’s not too bad—just hold alt and tap 0151 on the numpad. Honestly I wish it was harder to type for stylistic reasons—it would help cure me of my em-dash addiction
Why do you find it believable that they asked for government intervention to protect "the innocent" as opposed to simply acting to protect their own private financial interests, which seems to be the simplest explanation?
I'm not even convinced that the depositors made whole here were innocent--they accepted a known risk by exceeding the risk-free FDIC limit. The sad part is that in our society, we have no qualms about literally turning working people out into the street when they make financial missteps, but the already-wealthy receive prompt intervention from the highest levels to protect them and other wealthy people from the consequences of their investment decisions.
What argument is really left for this kind of intervention, besides appeals to the trickle-down system where the rich must be vigilantly protected since the rest of our society is set up to be disrupted when they fail. The whole system is morally and politically bankrupt.
> Why do you find it believable that they asked for government intervention to protect "the innocent" as opposed to simply acting to protect their own private financial interests
They are the innocent party here though (well, except for maybe Peter Thiel). The depositors didn't cause this problem.
Very funny to me that on the way out of the room Wittgenstein allegedly "clapped the two examiners [Bertrand Russell and G.E. Moore] on the shoulder and said, 'Don't worry, I know you'll never understand it.'"
Wittgenstein is generally considered to be one of most important philosophers of the 20th century, if not the most important. Analytic philosophy has largely lost interest in Russell's works (Kripke was far more important and is generally considered the person who "cleaned" a lot of Russell's deadend projects), while analytic and "continental" philosophy still avidly discuss Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, and the fallouts from that work were a profound reassessment and shake up of philosophy. Russell is probably more well known nowadays as a popularizer of certain ideas in philosophy, as a general interest and political writer, and as a philosopher that typified the particular era in which he wrote, and less so for the actual philosophical ideas he sought to argue for. His History of Western Philosophy book for instance is quite famously bad.
Most people today would question if Russell should be put in the same sentence as Wittgenstein.
Not based on the Tractatus, however. Which had it's moment but it contains some of the greatest boners ever written. The confusion of probability with simple logic trees is beyond hilarious from a modern perspective.
Don’t worry, the reassessment which happened to Russell will undoubtedly befell Wittgenstein when the time has come. Both worked on the fairly uninteresting part of philosophy anyway.
"When Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus was originally published—in German in 1921, and in English in 1922—Bertrand Russell was much better known. In fact, Wittgenstein relied on Russell to get his manuscript published in the first place, and it was Russell’s introduction to the Tractatus that encouraged publishers to consider accepting it at all. While Wittgenstein was grateful for Russell’s efforts, he was dismayed by his introduction, feeling that not even his former professor understood him. For Russell’s part, he was by this time exhausted by his relationship with the young Austrian who had been his student at Trinity in the years leading up to the First World War." [1]
That's not true--the moderator said she refused to acknowledge non-binary people by their pronouns if they use a singular "they" because of an ideological objection to their gender identity.
I am non-binary and use they/them pronouns, and while I'm not bothered when people avoid my pronouns e.g. by using my name instead, it's another thing entirely to assert that someone who doesn't consider non-binary identity valid "believes in helping the LGBTQ+ community but differed in how to do so."
Simply avoiding being rude (by deliberately using the wrong pronouns) is the baseline for respect, literally the least you can do. To "help" implies to support--if you support our community please use our correct pronouns and correct other cis people who misgender trans folks in your presence, don't merely humor us.
Why does your personal conviction supersede that of those who do not agree with the non-binary classification of gender? Is it not valid to be offended over being forced to conform to minority views which are deeply rooted in politics and justified with a potentially exaggerated narrative of victimhood?
These modern ideas are far from confirmed scientific fact. Yes, there some sort of a spectrum, but just as the entire concept of "gender" is a social construct, the real argument is over the definition of the construct, and one could argue that truly "non-binary" or transgender individuals form a tiny cluster of outliers near the plane separating conventional male and female grouping. If that is the case, I personally find it offensive to afford such a tiny minority such a disproportionate amount of power by allowing it to shape thought through language policing.
The idea of intersectionality is mathematically equivalent to reducing an extremely high dimensional space, that of human physiology and behavior, to a simplified subset with fuzzy clusters separated by an arbitrary number of hyperplanes (gay, black, trans, etc). The particular modern formulation is one of an infinite number of possibilities, and it isn't fair to pick a handful of tiny minority clusters from this particular basis by those with vested interests, claim that those in particular are oppressed, and then afford them what are actually special priveledges under the guise of equality. Particularly when this mindset bleeds into politics and industry, it just comes off as a blatant powergrab for people who have defined their own social construct in a manner that benefits themselves.
This is why identity politics drives populations apart. The space of human nature is sufficiently high dimensional that it is impossible to divide it into priveledged clusters without picking what amount to arbitrary favorites.
To be clear, we are talking about professional settings here. No one is taking away your right to misgender someone at a bar (even though you'd be a giant asshole for doing so). A professional setting like Stack Exchange or a workplace is very different from a bar, though.
Monica has a purely grammatical objection to the use of singular they. I believe that objection to be unjustified (for etymology pedantry reasons), but it's not born out of malice or the rejection of people's identities. I don't agree with Monica on this point, but she has never used her position as a moderator to hurt people in this way. She wouldn't be the sort of person to use neopronouns if she were inclined to do this.
And, to my knowledge, she has never knowingly used the wrong pronouns for a user of the site, which is more than can be said for most people.
Please don't selectively apply standards. You should be equally outraged at the other >30% of the population who fail this test – if you're not, stop slandering Monica.
It would have been better to say that she has an ideological objection to using they/them pronouns (rather than non-binary identity), so I'll concede that point.
But the thrust of my post is that it's wrong to describe her as someone who is helping the LGBTQ+ community, just in a different way, and I stand by that. She said in her statement that she "write[s] in a gender-neutral way specifically to avoid gender landmines".
I'm sure this is a relatable sentiment to cisgender people who's main engagement with the trans community is anxiety about making mistakes. But this can't be compared to the marginalization trans people face. One way that non-binary people are denied space in our culture is by being erased. It's not a high crime to go out of your way to avoid our pronouns like this, but by doing so Monica is someone who is doing the bare minimum of avoiding offense--she is not helping or supporting non-binary people or fostering their inclusion.
Despite the implication of your reply I am actually not outraged that she could continue to be a Stack Exchange moderator, that seems fine. But I am intransigently against the vision of LGBTQ+ allyship laid out in the GGP, where being a supporting helper just means not being hostile.
Trans people are fighting for our lives in society right now, it would really help if people could find it in themselves to pick the right side, use our pronouns in public, and build the cultural space for us to exist in normalcy, instead of only think about this issue when twitter "activists" have "gone too far" by criticizing someone they like.
You've lumped several things that differ hugely in seriousness together into one package and asked everyone to pick sides.
How about if I don't accept your packaging of related issues. Are you insisting that I'm therefore not allowed to pick the side of transgender people?
From a purely strategic level - how best to achieve the worthy aim of improving the lot of transgender people - this strikes me as a mistake. I think the outcome will be worse than a more tolerant approach to forming an alliance.
(How ironic that I ended up using the word "tolerance" in trying to explain that... )
Can you cite that first sentence? I have never seen that PoV from Monica. IIRC the issue was that she preferred to use a gender-less style of writing even when someone preferred a specific pronoun. More to the point she didn't refuse to do anything, she was asking clarification questions in a private chat room.
> the moderator said she refused to acknowledge non-binary people by their pronouns if they use a singular "they" because of an ideological objection to their gender identity.
Yeah, but unlike management, you can start an opposition caucus in your union, do organizing, win an election, and reform bad union leadership.
We just have such low awareness in the US about what unions are and how they work that we take self-serving, collaborationist, timid union leadership as a fact instead of something we can and should urgently struggle to change.
my parents had to be part of the union (USSR, so no choice).
Union leaders decide who goes on vacation, when and where (e.g. paid trips to beautiful Crimea).
Also, of course, who is paid what amount.
Of course, if you aren’t relative/friend of union leaders you get none of the perks. f@&&k that
Oh well, it worked out badly in one context so that means it can never work in any context. On the other hand, when capitalism works out badly for people that's just how things are and nobody is to blame.
The unions are democratic institutions that represent the self-organization of working people. If the current leadership of a union is bad (and in many cases it is) it should be campaigned against, voted out, and replaced. Giving up on the idea of a union because you don't like who's been elected to run it is self-defeating.
One of the major differences between US unions and the rest of the world is a ~50 year old legal hangover related to racism. US unions used to be allowed to moderate their support for members (as in “Joe Bag-O-Donuts is a detriment to the company and should never have been hired”). Unfortunately, many unions used that discretionary capacity to refuse to support their African-American members. It went all the way to the USSC, but the upshot is that US unions are required to have a more antagonistic relationship with management because they can’t endorse throwing out dues paying members.
Ok, now what if that is not possible, and the rest of the workers have extremely bad positions, and it is not possible to convince them to change their mind?
Do you understand now why decentralization of power can have its uses?
Does anyone have any insight about what kind of jobs are out there for people with the kind of skills demonstrated in this post?
I have a lot of data exploring, cleaning and visualizing skills, python/SQL skills and experience using it to make business decisions, but this type of thing falls short of what most people would consider "data science"
Agreed. And I definitely make no claims about this being earth-shattering "data science". I just happened spend a few hours over the weekend making some plots and commenting about what I saw with some Python tools.
I'll also state that I am neither a data scientist nor a statistician. I'm a Python application engineer with a background in mechanical engineering, so that might help set the context a bit more.
Most companies don't need "earth-shattering 'data science'", they need a way convey a narrative with their information and maybe try to deduce something from it.
I work as a programmer at an architecture company and we do visualizations like this all the time for campus classroom usage for example. Is it groundbreaking? Of course not, but it helps the clients and designers a ton.
Its much more likely that the critical or cynical response to alturism by wealthy individuals and corporations is political than psychogical. What I see is ordinary people railing against a system where millions of people work multiple jobs for starvation wages and no benefits while other have amassed wealth on a scale never before seen in human history. When our supposed billionaire entrepreneur betters and even those same corporations make "alturistic" charitable donations, the response is skepticism and political anger, not envy.
"Explaining" your political opponents arguments as an envious psychological response is a political smear, not a neutral analysis.
