Sexual harassment is rife in the sciences, finds landmark US study
nature.com
nature.com
It's sick, and pushed me out of 'that' academia. I don't want to be a part of an institution that is built on empowering literally the worst, least altruistic, most exploitative people that ever lived. These people also necessarily suck at science.
I'm done with it, the institutions need to be torn down and rebuilt. It's all bullshit. The process of doing science (the journals), the institutions, the incumbents. It has all got to go.
I'm going to do science. But on my own terms.
My new purpose in life is to take the energy I would have put into science, use it be clever and generate as much capital as possible - so I can participate in our democracy and create the institution I want to be part of.
Join me. Quit your job, start a company. Burn it all down.
One of my PIs, who was doing this, had a term for his publishing strategy: "salami publishing". You try to cut as thinly as possible your research and publish as many papers on it as you can. That's actually less harmful than the real problem which is that the papers were just rubbish and people in the lab seemed to all kind of know, but disliked discussing it.
What the hell are you even writing?
My PI at Janelia once dismissed a proposal I had for an 'unsexy' but pragmatic tool that probably everyone in the building would have used. I was told it would 'do nothing for his career'.
That was pretty depressing.
Large parts of these papers are boilerplate or duplicated between papers. This wastes the time of the reader even if they try to identify where the new parts are. Plus, the papers are published in 5 different journals or conferences and might not even cite each other, so you often aren't even aware of all of the pieces.
It would basically be the classical reviewing process in real time on every sentences.
In my opinion, "salami" papers go in that direction. Facts, premises and results are decoupled to more units, which can be independently claimed and proved.
Current papers are too fragmented, and primarily accumulate knowledge in those humans that actively participate in the field. By them reading the papers, evaluating and combining them. To transfer that knowledge to someone new is a process measuring in multiple years (ie a PhD). And when a person then ultimately exits their field, a lot of the accumulated understanding is lost.
As a compromise in the meantime, it might be better to encourage more short papers which avoid the boilerplate parts. This would make salami slicing your papers more acceptable as you wouldn't be expected to write a full length paper, which encourages salami slicers to pad their papers.
The French "Comptes Rendus" journal works like this, and I consistently find the papers I've encountered in it to be an efficient use of my time.
How does one detect junk science paper other than being skilled enough to have produced the bad science if the first place?
I'm still a grad student, but am definitely considering pursing my own goals once I finish. Fortunately the finical barriers are not insurmountable for some really interesting fields.
And hopefully, be the owner of the next broken institution (aka: Google, Facebook, ...).
I totally agree with you, but I see this as a simple cycle.
Albeit one we currently lack the tools to seriously tackle.
It's ridiculous that politicians and not physicists and complex systems theorists set policies in our society. We need to start viewing the economy like we view biology and understand on a deeper level the effects policies we put in place will have _before_ enacting them. Corporations are literally organisms and have agency.
It's not rocket science - if bribery is legal and corps can improve their bottom line by changing the law they _will_. They must. Or a competitor will and put them out of business.
Your politician _can't_ serve your interest, he has to keep being a politician first.
The world is pretty scary right now - corporate interest is unchecked and in danger of fucking up our societies for good.
This is how the world crumbles. Not with a bang or a whimper but by everyone 'just trying to get by'.
Pitchforks people. Pitchforks.
Design the incentives right for politicians and watch as self-organization works its magic.
This is where our physics fails us. We're great at predicting the behavior of systems with a small number of interacting degrees of freedom. But for systems with a huge number of interacting degrees of freedom (everything around you) we're hooped - the math is intractable to existing techniques. New approaches are required.
There _are_ some overarching principles for complex systems (namely self-organization). But they have not been well-developed.
It isn't easy to fix because nobody has total power over the system in order to fix the bad incentives.
[1] http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
Hey, I'm interested in this. I already quit my (non-science field) job and started a company. :-) But I'm just getting started on science. I'm using scientific principles, but I want to advance my practices.
From what I can tell so far, measurement-based or evidence-based science (hard science) is inextricably linked with the concept of society, because "that good which can be packaged and successfully transmitted across a network of social bonds" is really the main goal measuring systems serve.
Unfortunately, measurement science is also extremely shallow by its objective nature and facilitates what might be called "information pornography" when it has become too far removed from the subjective realm. Because measurement is also the art of using labels for things, the definition of (and blind spot of) "science" within this kind of institution I'm reading about would lean hard toward "labeling".
It seems that no matter how far we try to outrun the subjective, qualitative realm, our caricatures of it are really what haunt us most about it. So to sum up, what I'm looking for is reasonable measurement-based science _in society_ linked up with deep, high-quality subjective science.
Does any of this ring any intuitive bells with you? I am looking not for yin to win over yang, but for ways as a _non-professional scientist_ to meaningfully combine these aspects--to link up with others who are willing to philosophize, theorize, take measurements, remain open to new ideas, etc. within a framework that is not so swayed by some of the shallower measuring incentives, but still meets reasonably high standards.
Would love to get your thoughts--thanks for your comment and sorry to hear about your experiences at the institution in question.
Edit: I think there is still a role for engineering academics. The most successful ones that I have seen are those that are motivated by chasing down specific scientific questions and developing technology that will enable them to find answers.
Of course, the usual solution to that issue is to formalize and robotize the process of research, which is probably what the world is slowing tending to.
When you're an international student on the F1 visa, it's not that easy. The moment you're out of school, you have to get back to your home country. Basically, you can swallow it and shut up for 5-n long years, or go home dishonored and waste at least n years (n = number of years you have been in grad school) of your life.
Either way, you're fucked.
The invisible college was started in the 1600s by Robert Boyle (of Boyle's law), as an alternative to the corrupt academy of his time, which cared more about authority than reason and evidence. The invisible college went on to invent peer review.
Now peer review has spread throughout the academy! But corruption has exploited its weaknesses and we need to build a new system, outside the academic walls, to usher in the next era of science.
Please talk with us at the new invisible college. We have a new system for peer review. It isn't yet published but it's ready for discussion.
toomim@gmail.com
Can't say I'm a fan of websites that require JS to do anything, unfortunately, but I'll check it out more closely when I get the time.
If the client-side JS is a dealbreaker, let's talk about it -- we can build a server-side renderer.
Alright, so how does it work? For me, I'm on contract consulting for a few months a year and the rest of the time I spend doing research. Now, there are number of difficulties with this approach. Namely, it helps to work in a field that generates enough money to support myself for the rest of the year. Though it varies by field, I believe this has been far easier for me since I carry a Ph.D, which adds credibility on contracts. Second, I don't get to simply do research the rest of the year since it's also important to do product and client development to stay in business. Third, while consulting can pay well, it's also volatile. I've been in business full time for more than five years, so it has worked well enough, but I probably would not operate in the same manner if I had a family. That said, I've been able to look into and master many things that I would have never been able to while working in a traditional academic environment.
In short, I've been able to make this work by consulting to buy back my time. I do think there are other models to making this work and if anyone else has been successful doing independent research I'd love to hear how.
In addition to consulting I'm also considering the following:
- being an expert witness (a type of consulting)
- translating papers and books (worked for Julian Barbour during the cold war, but I'm not qualified and don't suspect there is great demand)
- being a lecturer or adjunct at a university (In my field it's about 10K USD per class best I can tell. My goal with this would be to help smooth out your income if consulting is too volatile. Also gives you access to university resources.)
- writing technical books (unlikely to be enough on its own, but I'm looking more into people who have done this)
- teaching workshops/short courses (Works for Edward Tufte. If books can be pirated easily then it might be best to give away the PDFs for free, sell hard copies, and make most of the money with workshops.)
- science journalism (probably a dead end)
- open source (D. Richard Hipp seems to have an interesting approach)
- donations/crowdfunding (probably not sufficient but worth looking more closely at)
- small grants (my advisor recommended this)
I worked in games for a while, and I'd not be surprised to see that industry have a #metoo moment sometime over the next few years. We're just starting to see individuals called out in some of the more progressive studios [1], I suspect this is just the tip of the iceberg.
[1]https://waypoint.vice.com/en_us/article/yweqk5/harebrained-s...
"Findings and Conclusions" sections are too long to summarize.
excerpt from the "Students" section:
KEY TAKEAWAYS
• Overall, 20.0 percent of the students surveyed reported experiencing sexual harassment perpetrated by a faculty or staff member.
• Female students (22.0 percent) and students who endorsed a gender other than male or female (46.3 percent) had significantly higher incidence rates of sexual harassment by faculty/staff, compared with male students (15.3 percent).
• Female medical and engineering students both reported significantly higher incidence of sexual harassment by faculty/staff (medical: 47 percent, engineering: 27 percent), compared with students enrolled in another major (i.e., sciences, non-STEM).
• Female students who experienced sexual harassment, compared with those who had not, generally reported worse physical and mental health outcomes, feeling less safe on campus, and higher levels across various indicators of academic disengagement.
* Among female STEM students, although white (non-Hispanic) students reported greater incidence of sexual harassment by faculty/staff, students of color and white Hispanic students who experienced sexual harassment by faculty/staff generally perceived their campus as less safe than the other female STEM students.
What we need to worry about is not trivial harassment, but the serious cases like staff sleeping with their students or continually propositing them with threats or inducements to their careers. Let's get away from a number grab and start focusing on the really bad first [1].
1. My personal experience is the Sciences are the least bad in regard serious harassment with the Arts the worst by a factor of 10x at least.
What is much more of a problem in academia is abuse of power. Academics have huge power and unfortunately far to many abuse this power at the expense of their students and postdocs.
Did they define what they called harassment?
Do you know if they broke all of these findings up by category and severity?
Independence in scientific direction? Yes. Independence in personnel management? No.
Is this possible?
A heavy, bureaucratic firing process protects underlings (somewhat) from abusive bosses, but at a cost of protecting incompetence. You'll see this in any big corporation, and a great many academic jobs as well.
The whole idea of tenure in academia is to protect academics from retaliation so they can speak freely. But their lab assistants and secretaries and such get no such protection.
I think it is quite rare to see grad students fired. Typically there are two strategies to get rid of a graduate student:
1) Just graduate them (either with a masters or with a undeserved PhD)
2) Make their lives miserable so they quit.
I don't think switching the source of funding for graduate to the department really prevents either of these from happening.
i) Admit tons of grad students, treat them like shit and just assume many will drop out/quit so you don't have to do any long term planning on resources/admissions.
ii) Plan projects and resources, vet candidates and treat grad students well. Attrition will be lower so this does allow for longer term planning. In addition, here the institution and department are involved in the planning/resource allocation and presumably personnel issues as well. In general culture will be professional.
IMO i) gives signals that harassment and other mistreatment is tacitly allowed. With ii) the grad students are valued and signal is given that this should be a professional environment. Another generalization, but I have observed American universities, especially engineering departments are close to i), European universities (some countries more than others) are closer to ii).
Not to say switching funding to the department is a solution, but a professor's power over the funding is definitely a significant problem and source of great risk for students who are being sexually harassed by their professors.
There's a fundamental organizational change that needs to happen within universities...
Also, funding comes straight from the professor. If your advisor decides they don't have funding, you're out of luck and working on the side, unless your department is nice enough to give you a teaching assistant job.
I just knew from a first-hand source, a very accomplished PI was suspended just a couple of weeks ago from the job held at a large research institute. He also had appointments at the two largest universities in the same state. The description was that he "stormed out of the building." Apparently, he (white male, eh) employs a number of postdocs from China and apparently made out/had sex with them. It was so ridiculous that there were witnesses of him pushing the postdoc-single mom baby's cart in the park. The reason is described in the article: If the postdocs want good recommendations, they better keep their mouths shut. Oh, and somehow, according to the same source (first-hand), reports of the sexual harassment from the PI was swept under the rug and was mysteriously disappeared before the #meeto movement.
As an international student, I understand how hard it is to change jobs as a student in F-1 visa in here. The visa situation for international students and postdocs made it especially easy to exploit those people. If you get kicked out of the lab you're currently in, you have extremely limited time to find a lab in the same university, otherwise, you will be kicked back to the home country. If you find out that you're not a good fit for the university then you're literally fucked -- you can't be employed, you can't have gap time to find another one. The only way is to find another university who is willing to adopt you first and then transfer. But heck, that's a catch-22: How can you find another university if you don't have a good recommendation?
Personally, I can attest to that visa situation from another angle. I have a very bad taste in my mouth the first week I worked for a public school as a grad student here. So before I entered grad school, I worked for a public educational institution in the US as an OPT student after receiving my bachelor's degree. They were grateful for the extra work I did for them before I departed for grad school, so they offered to pay me some trivial extra amount of money. So, to make sure everything was OK, I called up the international office in the new school to explain the situation. Not waiting for me to finish my sentence, they threatened to deport me because "I told you not to work on anything else when you're on F-1 visa." I was totally disheartened by that response and it literally ruined my whole positive outlook for the grad school for me.
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/11/the-unde...
“The coal industry is a huge polluter and we’re finally thinking about how to end it.”
And you replied:
“The good news is that we’re also starting to acknowledge that the beekeeping industry creates pollution, too.”
That doesn't sound much smaller scale.
A direct conflict with your adviser is not something you want to risk, as it can easily put you in a terrible situation. You also can't just switch departments or something like that without losing a lot of progress, if it is possible at all.
The way science is structured makes it rather susceptible to abuse by people in authority, and it inherently discourages challenges by PhD students.
I hate the way these reports misuse language and terminology.
No lay person is going to think gender harassment is sexual harassment.
Who here thinks that all sexism is sexual harassment? And why?
If I say to a woman "women are not capable of being good scientists" why is that sexual harassment as opposed to plain old sexism?
A lot of things can be antecedents to sexual harassment.
This categorization obscures instead of illuminating.
For example part of the findings for the study is transgender people are far more likely to face sexual harassment from staff.
This sounds like normal harassment and highly unlikely to become sexual in nature.
The approach you take to stopping this kind of harassment is unlikely to look anything like the approach you take to stop sexual exploitation.
I would like to know the use cases to lumping them together in this study/report?
From reading the nature article it doesn't seem like the point of the study was to support a lawsuit - so what purpose does using the legal definition have?
Because that is the commonly understood definition? Both in the legal and academic world (I can find citations from 1995 but I bet it was used before that). As lay people we do get confused when we don't understand those terms. I know I did, which is why I looked it up.
It didn't come from general use by the population.
At some point academia decided to use a definition that deviated from the mainstream.
Certain fields of academia have a long history of doing this and it has led to millions of average people being mis-informed.
> As lay people we do get confused when we don't understand those terms.
Yes even the well educated hn reader gets confused - and so how do we fix this?
Either we have to fix academia or we have to fix reporting on academia.
Especially because the majority of the population does not have the education or time necessary to properly investigate for themselves.
Propaganda by any other name...
In this case, I don't think it's THAT complicated to explain what the term means to the average person. The definition of terms can sometimes be intuited, but intuition can be wrong and lay people should not necessarily be the arbiters of definitions of terms. My co-worker refers to their hard disk storage space as "computer RAM". We know what they meant as opposed to what they said and can work around it.
I wondered the same thing, but a few comments in this thread highlight why postdocs are generally more trapped than employees.
Paraphrasing other comments:
A PhD student conflicting with their advisor is risking years of effort and their degree. You also can't just switch departments without losing a lot of progress (if it is possible at all).
"If the postdocs want good recommendations, they better keep their mouths shut".
Many postdocs are international students. It is very hard to change jobs as a student on a F-1 visa.
> The worst news is probably that men who are hostile to women to begin with do not improve with training. Men who score high on “likely harasser” and “gender role conflict” scales are the most likely to have adverse reactions to training
> In an unpublished paper on diversity training, we find that mandatory training reduces actual workforce diversity and voluntary training increases it. It looks like forcible training of people who are hostile to the training message may backfire.
> Workplace gender equity is still our best bet for reducing harassment, but progress on equity has stalled in the corporate world and on the faculty.
http://www.asanet.org/news-events/footnotes/apr-may-2018/fea...
https://facultyhandbook.stanford.edu/handbooks/faculty-handb...
Tenure simply means 'without limit of time'. That's all it means.
https://facultyhandbook.stanford.edu/handbooks/faculty-handb...
1: https://www.aaup.org/issues/appointments-promotions-discipli...
"I am shocked -- shocked! -- to find that gambling is going on in here!"[a]
Still, it's progress.
> Just take our word for it, or else pay $60 for the report itself.
Can we please stop doing this shit?
It's free to read. The button is right there on their page.
Either way, it's only $60 if you want a print copy, apparently.
If you're legitimately concerned about journalistic ethics in the gaming world (which is a real thing), you should really avoid the "GamerGate" moniker as much as possible.
EDIT: My vote total is bouncing up and down like a rubber ball, so I'll just go ahead and post the details I mentioned.
GamerGate was founded around an incident where Eron Gjoni made a blog post accusing his girlfriend Zoe Quinn, who makes free video games, of cheating on him with several men, whom he named. Most of them were also game developers. One of them, Nathan Grayson, was a games journalist. He once wrote an article with a single paragraph about one of Quinn's games, released (by Gjoni's timeline) months before he allegedly slept with Quinn.
This narrative somehow became "women developers everywhere are sleeping with writers to promote their shitty games and it's destroying gaming and must be stopped." This wasn't even an accusation Gjoni made; it was a conclusion jumped to by his readers.
Ethics in games journalism is a legitimate issue. Major publishers have been buying good reviews with cash and perks for almost as long as there's been a gaming industry. No one's ever cared enough to make a lasting fuss about that. It wasn't until a woman who writes tiny, free games was accused falsely of buying good reviews that the cry of corruption went up. I think that illustrates firmly what the real priorities were here.
Some well-meaning people have taken GamerGate's message at face value and been motivated to expose actual ethical issues. That's laudable, but doing it under the GamerGate banner devalues the entire message.
EDIT AGAIN: crooked-v's post and link about the controversy around the GamesJournosPros mailing list is also valuable. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17306791
Interestingly, the FBI got confessions from some of the attackers, and decided not to prosecute. http://www.businessinsider.com/gamergate-fbi-file-2017-2
Just because they didn't have a central organization, doesn't change the fact that it was a movement that caused a lot of damage. In fact, there's a parallel with the Alt-Right.
Many terrorist organizations operate with individual cells who work independently, so that they can't implicate each other. I'd still call that an organization.
I'd argue there's a more interesting parallel with political terrorist organizations: they often start out as non-violent groups until subsections radicalize over time, therefore attracting a set of new members who further radicalize the group. Think Hamas, PKK, etc.
It's pointless to argue whether GamerGate was about "ethics in journalism" because there's the set of people who care about that and the set of people who like to threaten women over the internet, and it's not clear which one are "GamerGate" and which ones aren't.
Would it be fair to paint the critics of gamergate with the same brush?
My best advice is to look at the majority of the people and see how they act, then make your own judgements.
Minor details like him not actually being part of Gamergate in any way and his videos being obvious jokes didn't stop the media reporting this as an example of Gamergate death threats against women. Meanwhile, in actual non-media reality Gamergate was split between people who thought his jokes were distasteful but not actually harassment and those who considered them over the line. Then when it became clear he was a fictional character, the narrative changed to one where Gamergate were now threatening him because they'd discovered he didn't really support their harassment of women. Of course, the Gamergate position all along was that he obviously wasn't serious, the fact it was like harassment made him unpopular, and it was still that other internet community sending death threats and harassment. (A community, if I'm remembering rightly, which went out their way to go after a bunch of Gamergate supporters for taking a stand against their harassment.)
The most important thing to understand about Gamergate is this: the entire media (and social media) anti-harassment campaign of the time was primarily about attacking Gamergate and criticism of the game critics in general. Everything else fell by the wayside. All the groups actually doing the harassment went unmentioned. The most powerful, long lasting meme to come out of this fight, "It's about ethics in games journalism", was entirely about crushing the idea that games journalism has ethics problems. About discrediting criticism of games journalism, not stopping harassment or death threats or anything like that.
(The second most important thing to understand is that the media coverage attracted a bunch of hangers-on who wouldn't otherwise have had anything to do with it, and some of them were exactly the kind of people you'd expect to be attracted by that kind of coverage.)
Nobody is disputing the facts. The problem comes when people take disparate facts and weave a narrative that supports their own beliefs without any supporting evidence.
>Many terrorist organizations operate with individual cells who work independently, so that they can't implicate each other. I'd still call that an organization.
Only because they have a shared goal. There is no shared goal in gamer gate. The thing called "gamer gate" was filled with crazy and non-crazy people with wildly differing goals and beliefs.
GamerGate wasn't coordinated enough and lacked the centralized leadership to have been "founded" for a purpose or be a "front" to achieve specific clandestine goals.
From what I gather, it was sort of like Occupy Wall Street in that there was really no there there besides a vague ethos shared by the people who took up its flag to pursue their disparate pet causes.
Now, is the rest of the statement true?
No, clearly not. There are a lot more problems with the paragraph than can be solved by a simple substitution.
The root problem is that it's very hard (almost impossible) to make statements about the whole of an uncoordinated, loosely defined group that are both specific and true. Also, when you think you can easily make such statements, it probably doesn't mean that you're right but rather your thinking is being driven by biases and group-prejudice.
It blew up from there as many people became leaders of multiple subsections of GamerGate, many of whom we see today in the alt-right parts of the internet which I am sure is entirely coincidental. The difference between Occupy Wall Street and GamerGate is that GamerGate rallied behind multiple different leaders which would push the the movement towards various directions. This was all stuff I saw from personal experience.
He did nothing to direct Gamergate, most of what I saw him post in the early days was trying to put the cat back in the bag.
The second was that he was constantly active in various chat channels encouraging and pushing the movement forward while lying about his claims that he was trying to back away from it.
http://antinegationism.tumblr.com/
I would also be interested in seeing any logs of Eron in the chat servers, I was never on those so I only saw what was posted to Reddit.
This blogpost from 2014 has multiple examples of Eron posting under a trip on 4chan as well IRC logs.
The author of that post says that Eron abused Zoe but has not provided any evidence, do you know of anything to back that up? All the evidence that Eron posted was never denied by Zoe afik.
It is a well known fact that game companies pay people to write positive reviews.
One example (Microsoft): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OeHjN4oWVfk
However, that was not the claims of corruption and reviews made during the course of GamerGate (ie that Zoe had slept with reviewers for positive coverage). None of GamerGate dealt with the actual issues of corporate influence on reviews and the policies thereof.
>Just for the record: GamerGate was 100% founded on harassing women.
>Some well-meaning people have taken GamerGate's message at face value and been motivated to expose actual ethical issues. That's laudable, but doing it under the GamerGate banner devalues the entire message.
You seem to have back pedaled from your original absurd claim. That's progress I guess.
---
Its hard to find any neutral source that aggregates all the factual information. Does this website cover everything? Do you have an alternate source?
http://thisisvideogames.com/gamergatewiki/index.php/Timeline...
Not at all. The GamerGate movement began with people looking to punish Quinn for her infidelity, and people who already hated her game jumped on the bandwagon to invent conspiracy theories to explain why it was well-reviewed. These people jumped to the demonstrably false conclusion that she had traded sex for reviews, and that narrative, unfortunately, went mainstream, and caught the attention of people who legitimately cared about journalistic ethics and weren't aware of the previous facts.
And that's still continuing--you see a lot of well-meaning people in this thread who are still not aware how much of the sex-for-reviews narrative and the GameJournoPros narrative are outright lies.
> Its hard to find any neutral source that aggregates all the factual information. Does this website cover everything? Do you have an alternate source?
That site may work as a timeline, but whatever your position, I think we can agree that GamerGate's own wiki is not an unbiased source.
Your proof is not at all sufficient for your claim
Thats what I understood from my far-away vantage point, at least. But its difficult to imagine it was just the latter; there's not enough sexism in gaming for it to blow up so easily, I think. (She was hardly the first woman in gaming to operate unethically).
That's a false accusation.
What actually happened was that an angry ex-boyfriend accused her of sleeping with a gaming journalist to get positive reviews. No such positive reviews ever happened. The journalist in question made a single off-handed mention of one of her games (in a non-review context) before they'd ever actually met in person.
The phrase you're looking for is "unfounded accusation". Unless you are the woman in question or you were stalking her 24/7, you can't falsify it.
(This also wasn't the focus of the original blog post at all. To cut a decades-long story short, the reason that particular aspect caught people's attention was because there were a whole bunch of people who already very strongly distrusted the entire gaming press for reasons entirely unrelated to women. Then Reddit started shadowbanning anyone who mentioned the journo's name, hosters were pressured to shut down sites which covered it, the entire gaming press declared gamers as a whole misogynistic scum over it, and every escalation fanned the flames more in typical Streisand-effect fashion. In fact I don't think it was even mentioned in the blog at all, but I could be wrong.)
https://www.mobygames.com/game/browser/depression-quest/cred...
Her boyfriend mentions multiple incidences of cheating in the post, but only one appears to be with a reviewer.
When Weinstein told casting directors that actresses that rebuffed him were difficult to work with and promoted to films of those that didn't, I'm sure his biases weren't as transparent in light of his professional reputation. Was that not a breach of ethics on multiple fronts?
http://deepfreeze.it/outlet.php?o=Kotaku
At some point one of Kotaku's editors(maybe, its been a while) stated that there were no ethical violations.
Gamergate then worked to boycott Kotaku and get advertisers to move away from the site.
A great many people in Hollywood began to ignore Weinstein's claims after they became public (to the industry) knowledge, though this was unfortunately too late for some of his earlier victims like Asia Argento and Annabella Sciorra.
Slut-shaming is a bad thing and we would all do well to move past it asap.
There is a clear conflict of interest when reviewers are sleeping with developers. Calling attention to this fact is not an attack on women or any such nonsense.
I'm sure you can provide a link and evidence of the "suspicious" part, right?
There was an intentional misinformation campaign regarding her in order to suggest that the harassment was in some way OK.
This is false. Details here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17306626
That's completely wrong. While there are always trolls and bigots lurking everywhere, the vast majority of people were protesting the forced censorship of games by those who found them "offensive" or "not inclusive enough". The whole brouhaha was a microcosm of the ongoing debate that many are having in this country about free speech. There are many who want to eliminate free speech and pass "hate speech" laws that ban and/or criminalize speech that some find offensive. Some of us believe that in a free society people have the right to be offensive, bigoted, racist, or despicable in a wide variety of ways that we don't agree with. By extension we also believe that people should be able to make any games they choose to make, whether we find them offensive or not.
I've talked to Brianna Wu. I've followed her work. She has never advocated censorship.
And of course none of that has anything to do with free speech issues - but it’s verifiably the start of when the #GamerGate hashtag was used. So somehow the movement supposedly entirely swivelled from ethics in video game journalism to being pro free speech at some undefined point, while its targets shared a common characteristic?
This is false. No one proposed censorship. They proposed and created new games that were more inclusive. In doing this, they also criticized mainstream games. The narrative of censorship was invented by GamerGate.
And clearly, their version of events was so compelling that others repeat it as fact.
If you want any sort of unbiased responses on this topic you can't look at it from afar or from responses (including mine) - it will actually require some independent research and a willingness to read both sides.
My conclusion: there is little to no evidence of the kind of collusion that was alleged by gamergate. Indeed, most of the corruption that was (and still is) out there was big name publishers inviting reviewers to lavish review events or blacklisting reviewers that give unfavorable scores - something gamergate seemed to care little about. Not an indie developer sleeping his/her way to the top.
Gamergate also seemed to fundamentally misunderstand the purpose and form of games criticism - frequently demanding "objective" reviews. As if that's something that's possible or even desirable in an artistic medium.
Finally, at some point the whole movement was co-opted by reactionary and conservative commentators whose agenda had nothing to do with gaming and everything to do with pushing traditional gender roles and anti-SJW mania. Basically the "PC police" complaints from 15 years ago transplanted into a new host community that was ripe for it.
The GameJournosPro mailing list and multiple articles with nearly identical spin coming out on the same day are pretty good evidence of collusion.
I strongly encourage anyone still interested in the topic to watch some of Christina Hoff Sommers videos about it. She demonstrates that it is possible to discuss the actual issues without demonizing one's opponents.
Cites needed. The only results claiming BLM-related arsons and riots are online zines known to be fronts for white nationalist movements.
Edit: As a followup, a number of white supremacists set fires and framed the BLM for those fires, but were subsequently caught and are in various stages of the criminal justice process.
Which is the majority of what I saw only weeks after the initial episode. Although it took the movement a few months before realizing that mainstream media outlets were going to lock step with the media outlets being criticized instead of independently researching at all. It's easier for me to cite a source that cites its sources than simply parrot them here [0] [1]. The blacklisting/censoring reviewers is also mentioned quite frequently ,on Twitter, at least. Not sure about on Deepfreeze.
>Gamergate also seemed to fundamentally misunderstand the purpose and form of games criticism - frequently demanding "objective" reviews. As if that's something that's possible or even desirable in an artistic medium.
There is a place for critics, who develop their palettes of tastes, and review games based on that. You can find a critic you tend to agree with and hold their opinions with more weight. The problem surfaces when the critics all have the same (social) biases and aren't reviewing the game itself so much as they are reviewing the game as a form of media from a social commentary slant. Especially when the community doesn't give a shit about the social commentary slant and wants to know about the game. (Which is why Gamergate quickly devolved into a culture war - which is when I stopped following the movement as closely.)
But I disagree with your second point. You can create an objectively bad and poorly designed game. Riddled with bugs with little to no thought of how game mechanics should interact with one another. Throw in a jarring, repetitive soundtrack and poorly written dialogue/story full of typos. If you were able to picture what would be considered a completely trash game with no redeeming factors - you're certainly capable of doing the opposite.
This will be my last post on HN regarding this thread. If you'd like to continue discussion (although discussion around #GG tends to be quite fruitless as anyone with an opinion on it has long since chosen their side) you're free to email me or contact me through any other means I list on my website, found on my profile.
off course these "journalists" caught red handed are not going to report on their misdeeds. they'll quote tweets then claim they are victim of the internet mob.
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2014/09/addressing-allegation...
The "controversial" content was a single message to a politically neutral industry mailing list suggesting an open letter of support for Zoe Quinn in the face of harrassment, which was rejected by the other members of the mailing list as inappropriate for journalists.
you can't find a more biased source. can you?
check deepfreeze the web site.
Here is a link from a neutral source instead of one of the people who was accused of collusion.
Regardless, in the worst case, since the GameJournoPros mailing list has not been publicly released that I'm aware of, your source and mine are equally cherry-picking to support their views.
You should be aware, however, that the source of your cherry-picks is Milo Yiannopoulos. Milo has, ironically, also been implicated in organizing journalists to push a narrative, only his journalist friends are literal, self-described Nazis. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milo_Yiannopoulos#Leaked_Breit... So I would be very, very wary of taking him at face value on any subject involving women or politics.
Zoe was just accused of being a horrible person afik.
I too would be interested to see the full text of the list.
If you want more information than you'll really be able to read, check out the FAQs on Reddit's r/KotakuInAction. Before buying into the above mentioned narrative, you might want to learn more about how the GameJournoPros mailing list was involved and which side received credible bomb threats. Christina Hoff Sommers has some good YouTube videos about it (i.e. https://youtu.be/5RVlCvBd21w).
This is a major issue with some online "progressives" who are incapable of any nuance about it. Be warned if you want to have a rational conversation.
Like I said above, there are a number of self-styled "progressives" online who are unable to have a rational discussion on this topic.
> r/KotakuInAction
These are basically the same people under different identities. There was also a "secret" irc channel coordinating the harassment.
> credible bomb threats
Did the police ever untangle any of this? I can see http://uk.businessinsider.com/gamergate-fbi-file-2017-2 and http://uk.businessinsider.com/ethan-ralph-gamergate-leader-a...
While I hope the focus and importance that #MeToo has brought to the issue of sexual harassment will be a long term thing, I think human nature being what it is, people will make the right statements while in reality continuing to protect and promote harassers as long as they are producing for them (be they politicians or scientists or engineers).
Men: I FEEL PERSONALLY ATTACKED!!
Just watch. That's exactly what will happen here.
edit: And the downvotes pour down like rain. No shit.
It's not "ironic". It's a basic rhetoric technique in discussions of racism and sexism. If a generalization is made that doesn't specifically (preferably personally) exclude some dude, then suddenly it's all about him and how offended he is to be lumped in with this thing that of course he doesn't do. And then the conversation degenerates into said dude(s) howling about the offense to his sacred honor, and the original topic is lost.
Sit back and watch any online discussion about sexism, you will see this pattern repeated. Saying the downvotes are because I'm generalizing is missing the point entirely. That's just an excuse for the downvote.
The reason for the downvote is I pointed out the nasty, toxic, sexist crap, so I'm getting punished for it.
In the interest of the Socratic method, do you think women would be more likely to downvote the OP, or men?
As I've said before, "I FEEL PERSONALLY ATTACKED!!" is a redirection, a way of changing the subject and reversing the roles of attacker and victim. Men who understand sexism (including the sexist responses in discussions of sexism) don't feel personally attacked by generalizations and statistical truths. I don't feel attacked.
Let's get Socratic again. Was my comment alienating? Yes, and deliberately so, to a targeted audience. Was it alienating to those who accept the basic truth of it? No. But the real question is... is what I said untrue? As a generalization, are women likely to find this study unsurprising? Are men likely to take a defensive position and make it about themselves? You seem to be agreeing with this - "alienating to men, obviously". It wouldn't be alienating to men if they weren't likely to do the role-reversal defense, and it would be alienating to women if it were untrue.
So we're in a position where my comment is strongly punished by the community for saying true things. And here comes the hemlock. Socratic method is very interesting sometimes.
Not necessarily; people have biases that affect their perceptions and reactions.
> Men who understand sexism (including the sexist responses in discussions of sexism) don't feel personally attacked by generalizations and statistical truths. I don't feel attacked.
I didn't feel personally attacked by your post or anyone's in this thread, yet still downvoted your OP for being alienating.
> Was my comment alienating? Yes, and deliberately so, to a targeted audience. Was it alienating to those who accept the basic truth of it? No.... Are men likely to take a defensive position and make it about themselves?
Yes, men are more likely to react that way, but one can still find your post alienating and counter-productive while acknowledging its truth.
> So we're in a position where my comment is strongly punished by the community for saying true things. And here comes the hemlock.
I think you're being a bit dramatic, downvotes are in now way equivalent to forced suicide.
And of course, Socrates' real crime was saying true but uncomfortable things.
All told, it's a pretty good analogy. It's not about the suicide, it's about society's reaction to uncomfortable truth, and what happens when you say the truth even knowing you'll be punished for it.
I think a good example of how to approach this issue constructively is found in the civil rights movement. The messaging in the civil rights movement wasn't: white people are doing bad things. It was: black people deserve the same treatment as everyone else. One of those messages alienates people, the other unites everyone in a common cause.
Similarly, a more constructive way of viewing the current sexual harassment issue would be something like: here are some things women experience in the workplace that we can all agree are wrong, and men have an important role to play in both not engaging in these actions and in dissuading their colleagues from engaging in them when they occur.
The most recent major civil rights protest is the kneeling protest during NFL games - black (and some white) players taking a knee rather than standing during the national anthem, to protest racism and state violence against black people. And millions of white Americans are furious. Players are being punished for it. The president refuses to meet with a team (that interestingly, had no kneelers before). The vast majority of white Americans disapprove of this protest.
The nature of the protest? Black men, sitting quietly, saying nothing, breaking no laws, for about two minutes. And white America is furious.
Remember that past tense thing? MLK was assassinated a half a century ago. And we're still fighting for civil rights, although white America tends to think of it as a past tense thing where there was no violence and everyone agreed.
Now, take this lesson and apply it to sexism.