Dr Vera Rubin's three basic assumptions, that I've verified (well, the first and last, I yield to the census people for the second):

1) There is no problem in science that can be solved by a man that cannot be solved by a woman.

2) Worldwide, half of all brains are in women.

3) We all need permission to do science, but, for reasons that are deeply ingrained in history, this permission is more often given to men than to women.

(via https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/12/26/507022497/vera-rubin-who-confirmed-existence-of-dark-matter-dies-at-88)

@taoeffect They had a section about that on the results page—basically, order does matter but only a bit: https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/faqs.html#faq6

"One very common question is about the order of the parts of the IAT. The answer is yes, the order in which you take the test can influence on your overall results. But, the effect is very small."

I don't usually have a lot of hope, but I'd hope that they'd control for this obvious issue and I was glad they had.

@taoeffect Sorry just saw this.

Ya, I don't have reason to doubt that ordering at least doesn't move the results much, and as a population study, it's pretty definitive that there's awful bias.

But it's frustrating that people (including the authors) present it as a good way to measure *your personal N=1 bias*, which, if your experience generalizes, it isn't.

(In general, population results are useful—"% risk of cancer"—but most people want a personalized answer—"MY risk of cancer".)

@taoeffect Oh how pernicious! So on the population-scale ordering might not make a big difference but on an N=1 level, treating the test as a personalized result (which the site definitely suggest you do, right?, the StackOverflow blogger was shocked with his results, and one of the FAQs is "What can I do about an implicit preference that I don’t want?"), ordering might make the results too noisy to be of any use 😩. They probably shouldn't market a population research tool for personal uses…

@22 I was intrigued so I tried to do the test but it made my browser crash on the very final submit. When I restarted it said that my session had timed out. 😭

@22 That said, my main problem with the test was that I kept on putting Geology under Arts :/

@wim_v12e but see Greg’s discovery and our discussion at https://mstdn.io/@taoeffect/99932063183837447

In a nutshell, we hypothesize that individual N=1 personal results might be very noisy (which does not subvert the population-level finding, that bias is endemic).

@brennen thanks for reaching out, I appreciate it!

I agree that there's a ton of rule wankers. It drives me crazy—I would love to mark comments as not helpful/nice.

I also, in the p2p spirit, offer to peer-review any question you might think about asking on StackOverflow. I realize most my suggestions would be like "Make sure you preempt the snark by saying 'X/Y/Z aren't related, here's why'", which is symptomatic of culture problems, but I hope I could improve the question at least a bit.

@brennen But I'm not sure the points/metric/gamified aspect of it is the problem. Compare StackOverflow to Wikipedia, in terms of how contributors are treated. SO actually has a feedback mechanism that lets (some) people learn how to do it and get value out of asking & answering. On Wikipedia—no points, no trophies, no feedback, no way to learn, just reverted edits and frustrated ex-editors.

Would you agree with this assessment, and the general idea that points might not be the problem here?

@22 i'd certainly agree that there are social problems in wikipedia editing, and that they manifest somewhat differently. to be fair, i'm really not sure about points as the center of the thing, though at this point i think i have at least a mild bias against designs that're focused on up/down vote mechanics.

wikipedia doesn't have _points_ as such, but it does have a great deal of procedure and rules-lawyering is not uncommon.

@22 in the end it may be just be that there is a system to manipulate and power/territory of some sort to be accumulated that leads to these behaviors. which is a hard problem to solve for anybody in the business of making systems. :)

as to asking questions, i doubt i'll ever become involved in SO, though i use it in read-only mode almost daily. it mostly feels healthier to me to talk technical things over with colleagues and write documentation in places i control for myself.

@22 (but i do thank you for the offer, re: question submitting.)

@brennen Thanks for these thoughtful and cogent responses. Slightly unrelated—one thing that kind of forces me to answer questions on StackOverflow is questions from students whose professors are obviously awful and who just need one or four ideas presented to them (or two or six wrong ideas removed) for them to make rapid strides. There are people without colleagues to bounce ideas off of, and when they show up on SO, I'm moved by their plight to try and help—sympathy miseducation's victims 🙃

@brennen Like Tetlock says, questions and answers are both very hard to get right :) power/territory seem inevitable when you have a real system to make/run, but mayyybe we can apply some p2p decentralized magic (à la Beaker Browser et al.) to it: think about how search engines work: we type in questions (sometimes generic like 'jay-z' meaning 'what this jay-z thing', sometimes exact: 'why should you not be buried with feet facing north') and they suggest pages with answers. Can we invert this?

@brennen I mean, when we write blog posts/articles/code/etc., we have in mind someone who arrives there through a web search, with a question. We should be able to formalize that—have a system that publishes people's questions (think Quora) and let people publish blog posts etc. specifically answering that; with version control and permalinking and backups (combining Wikipedia and Archive.org).

@brennen Then, as you encounter questions/answers, you can up/downvote them, publishing your vote on ActivityPub, thus helping people in your network improve their ability to find questions and answers.

I'm hugely sorry for posting all this to you, I'm sure it makes negative-1000% sense, but your comments were magic and contemplating them made this crazy hare-brained scheme materialize :P I will clean it up and write up a proper something about it.

@22 i look forward to reading it. :)

@wim_v12e http://pgbovine.net/tech-privilege.htm

@wim_v12e Wow. After all these years, reading Dr Guo’s experience there sends chills of recognition down my spine.

“Instead of facing implicit bias or stereotype threat, I had the privilege of implicit endorsement. For instance, whenever I attended technical meetings, people would assume that I knew what I was doing (regardless of whether I did or not) and treat me accordingly.”

😱

@22 Ah, I see, so because of your being Asian, people automatically assume you are good at tech?
The reason for my question is, is there then no such thing as "European/American/Australian/... tech privilege"?
I'm trying to see how this relates to my situation.

@wim_v12e I gather that white man tech privilege is also very big (in my experience not as big as Asian man tech privilege, if I can extrapolate from my experience—I remember being called out exactly one time in my career for not having a clue what I was talking about, my white male colleagues much more).

Like Guo says, (maybe) you and (def) I faced far fewer microaggressions and overt hostility in school and early career than our female, black, gay, trans, &c. colleagues.

@wim_v12e I am absolutely not someone who has “grit”. If I faced any of the difficulties that my spouse (embedded engineer) or black or gay colleagues faced in electrical engineering or software dev, I would have dropped out long long ago and pursued a career with less pain.

Instead I was given all the space and encouragement needed to figure out FFTs, SVDs, MPI, SIMD, etc., at my slow plodding easily-distracted pace, and fell in love with tech. It makes me mad and sad.

@wim_v12e Ah, I forgot that in a follow up blog post, Guo describes his interview with a national radio show:

http://pgbovine.net/tech-privilege-NPR-interview.htm

(Not as essential as the original http://pgbovine.net/tech-privilege.htm of course)

And there the interviewer asked if he was grateful for the privilege he received. Which tells me they didn’t understand the problem well. How can I be grateful that I was born with the characteristics that society associated with coders? While others *better* than me are routinely dismissed?

@22 I suppose from a selfish perspective you could be grateful to society for making your life easier compared to that of others.

Anyway, I understand now what you mean, your privilege is specifically for tech. Mine of course is for almost everything, which is really sad.

@wim_v12e I usually think that privilege hurts those who have it just as much as those who lack it, directly (inaccurate self-image) and indirectly (society's loss of talent and skill)?

I hesitate to think that those with privilege have easier lives—that may derive from general Buddhist principles I subscribe to (everyone feels their life's suffering equally intensely, except Buddhist sages: apparently they feel everyone else's suffering 🙃).

@wim_v12e And actually, no, when I say "Asian tech man privilege", I don't at all mean to say, 'I have privilege but its circumscribed to tech'—that might be true perhaps?, but then again, I'm a tall, skinny, healthy, light-skinned dude with PhD parents, I'm pretty aware that I have privilege in spades outside tech too. Reginald Braithwaite (awesome JavaScript dev/author) on this: https://twitter.com/raganwald/status/750028776549920768

I just mean, "I don't just have tech privilege, I have *ASIAN MAN* tech privilege 🧞‍♂️!"

@22 Well, all my life I have been told that for one reason or another *I* have it easy 😐. But what I meant is, as you say, a person with privileges gets a lot of slack, fewer barriers, so easier in that sense. Of course it does not mean they're happier, or that they don't have to work hard.

@22 What puzzles me regarding this privilege: I teach students from all over the world, and it is certainly not the case that I or my colleagues automatically assume that the male Asian students will do well, nor that the female students would not do well. Our evidence points in the other direction.

@wim_v12e yes it’s very ignorant and unjust, like all discrimination—having a prior on a person’s ability/behavior based on some visible group marker, and possibly never updating those beliefs, instead of just having uninformative priors and evaluating evidence as it arrives, looking for the good & bad both in each person.

I sometimes think we’re so close to defeating discrimination, between object lessons on its destructiveness and the benefits of openness and the usefulness of meditation but…

@wim_v12e @22 I'm British Asian and I don't see it as much in education or healthcare industry in UK (both of which are very multicultural) but have encountered it in "normal" social settings - including routinely being mistaken for a *medical* professional, to the point I ended up having to suggest appropriate first aid for a lass who took too many drugs at a party (at least she survived)

@vfrmedia @22 Based on observation I'd say there is more bias amongst our students than amongst the academics. We definitely have our share but on the whole academia is strongly merit-based. The bias issue is a bit different from the privilege issue, of course: most academics will be from privileged backgrounds.

@wim_v12e Ugh, I can guess that being told you've had it easy your whole life is very very obnoxious. That is exactly the same thing my spouse (a woman) complained about too: “you’re the diversity hire”, “your boyfriend helped you with your your homework”. The worst I got of that was my mom saying “eat your lima beans, kids are starving in Africa!” Which wasn’t even in the same league.

Thanks for reminding me about this. For me privilege was silent (Guo). I will remember for others it’s not.