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Comment by wpietri | Hacker News Reader

What horrible actions are people refusing to take responsibility for? As far as I can tell the sequence is:

* He wore the shirt on international broadcast * People around the world objected * He admitted the error and apologized * People accepted his apology

Also, it's not clear to me that he was the lead scientist, and he only joined Rosetta in 2013.

The rest of what you have looks to me like sweeping assertions. Quite a lot of people, me included, think it was a proportional reaction driven by a reasonable sense of social justice, and it was his casual sexism that spoiled a momentous occasion.

Your last line is just sad. I assume that's just willful ignorance and a lack of empathy, but in case you really can't tell the difference: rape victims get harmed for going about their lives, so bringing up what they wear is shifting blame to the victim. But here the shirt is the thing causing harm, so it's reasonable to call it out.

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Here you show your difficulty perceiving men as victims. He didn't just apologize, he broke down crying. He was being tried in a court of public opinion where he was not allowed to explain or defend himself. Look at what happens to men who refuse to prostrate themselves to the social justice mob: they lose their jobs (even if they founded the company: Brendan Eich, even if the have a Nobel Prize: Tim Hunt.) Threatening somebody's career for an honest mistake and then celebrating their tears is, in a word, scary. It's bullying and I'm touched that others have come together to show him support (https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/matt-taylor-rosetta-proje...)

The reason I bring up victim-blaming is that even when it's pointed out to you, you don't see it. Benefit of the doubt suggests it's because you don't believe that what happened to him was wrong.

An aside: nobody asks what the effect this charade has on young boys looking at a career in science. It tells them that an undergrad in physics (which is 10x the work of most degrees), and a PhD in magnetohydrodynamics (which would be literally impossibble for most people), and 10 years hard work as a scientist still won't be enough to earn them the benefit of the doubt.

> Also, it's not clear to me that he was the lead scientist, and he only joined Rosetta in 2013.

True, apparently Taylor joined Rosetta in 2013. He joined the ESA as a project scientist on different mission in 2005 before getting the Rosetta job. Notice that here (http://sci.esa.int/rosetta/43058-mission-team/) his name is second from the top. He's a superstar.

All of this is so far blown out of proportion that the fundamental argument isn't being challenged, is "casual sexism" really what's keeping women from careers in science? I'm not convinced.

Since you're calling people out for being anonymous in this conversation just remember you get to have your name attached to your arguments without risking your social life and career.

I can perceive men as victims. But here he is not a victim. He thoughtlessly did something bad in front of the whole world. People told him that he did something bad. Lots of people, many of them angry. This upset him and he apologized. Forgiven and forgotten, end of story. Except, apparently, for bitter anti-feminists who can't help bringing this up every time Rosetta is in the news.

I too have said and done dumb, hurtful things, been called out, and tearfully apologized. That's not victimhood. It's being a vaguely responsible human.

> the benefit of the doubt

What doubt did he fail to benefit from? The accusation is that he wore an inappropriate shirt on an international stage while representing an important scientific effort. I am not seeing a lot of room to doubt that was true. The general assumption I saw was that it was something he did thoughtlessly, with no understanding of the impact. So to the extent that his motivation was unknown, I'd say he got plenty of benefit of the doubt.

> I'm not convinced.

You say that like I might worry, but I don't. Quite a lot of views change in a progressive direction not because any given individual learns anything, but because those defending old errors die off. Note the rate of change here is pretty close to the rate of death:

http://content.gallup.com/origin/gallupinc/GallupSpaces/Prod...

We've been moving toward gradually less sexism for the last couple hundred years. I figure it's going to be at least a century more. If you have sincere questions (as opposed to argumentation in question form) I'm glad to answer. But otherwise, feel free to remain unconvinced. Your participation in bettering the world would be useful, but history suggests it's far from necessary.

> Since you're calling people out for being anonymous in this conversation just remember you get to have your name attached to your arguments without risking your social life and career.

Sure, but this is mainly true because I'm an older white guy. Just based on that status, I can get away with almost anything and still be employable.

I agree that things have changed such that for the first time older white guys can no longer be guaranteed total impunity for being openly and vocally bigoted while occupying high leadership roles. I agree that this sucks mildly for people like me. Now I have to do the slightly difficult work of actually caring how my words might impact other people, and the actually hard work of learning how to apologize well when I fuck that up.

But as far as I'm concerned, that is good news. Certainly for everybody who isn't an old white guy, as they can throw off some of their burden of fear of unpleasant consequences for saying things that might upset older white guys. I think it's good even for we old white guys. Privilege stunts people. I'm glad to live in an age where decreasing power imbalances mean a decrease in distorted communication.

In the situation of the shirt a reasonable reaction would be to not hijack the publicity earned by the Rosetta team and to deal with the issue once the mission was at a point where the lead scientist could be pulled aside to talk about his wardrobe choices.

Benefit of the doubt means that you accept your own fallibility, not that you use weasel words and implications to communicate the outright accusations you're making. To be clear, the accusation was at best that this guy in his stupidity is responsible for the gender gap in science. If you're a jealous keyboard warrior that's even better than calling him aggressively sexist because now you get to call him stupid even though he's the one with a PhD in magnetohydrodynamcs and you barely got a communications degree.

In your view of history women have entered science as the barriers of sexism have fallen so you believe fighting sexism is a Very Important Cause. But in the time period of science we've also had several major technological revolutions and science itself has drastically changed. That means you can't choose two signals and establish a cause-and-effect relationship between them.

These days STEM fields are the only ones feminists get to complain about because women dominate education at almost every level except for STEM fields. But we don't talk about women being 60% of college students, we don't talk about young black men having a 50% high school graduation rate while their female counterparts are doing significantly better. Instead we talk about the STEM gap and if we resist we get shamed into public apologies?

> If you have sincere questions (as opposed to argumentation in question form) I'm glad to answer.

I'm not sure if you realize how condescending it is to assume that you have nothing to learn from me but this is a great opportunity for me to learn from you. It's a common point in these conversatins where the person I'm speaking to assumes I just don't understand their One True Worldview. Next you realize I do, after that you decide I'm too emotionally attached to my privilege to admit the truth. Then, if this were in person, the public shaming and social penalties would begin and wouldn't stop until I gave an unqualified apology and retracted all previous statements.

> But as far as I'm concerned, that is good news.....I'm glad to live in an age where decreasing power imbalances mean a decrease in distorted communication.

I look at this and I see hegemony[0]. A social group with a significant amount of power over you has publicly shamed you (call-outs are done in public for a reason) into at least one tearful apology and as a result their worldview became your own. There was a time the Left thought this was a tool of evil people, seeing it become business as usual has been....interesting.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_hegemony

> In the situation of the shirt a reasonable reaction [...]

That's a fine claim to make, but I don't agree with your judgment of reasonable, and neither to a lot of other people. Your theory that we can make major cultural changes through polite, meek requests is... unproven: https://thenib.com/great-moments-in-peaceful-protest-history...

As Deborah Blum puts it, "I do have sympathy for anyone caught in the leading edge of a media storm. But if we are ever to effect change, sometimes we need the winds to howl, to blow us out of our comfort zones."

> the accusation was at best that this guy in his stupidity is responsible for the gender gap in science

I believe the actual accusation was that he was contributing to maintaining the gender gap, not that he was responsible for it.

> we don't talk about young black men having a 50% high school graduation rate while their female counterparts are doing significantly better

Actually, intersectional feminists talk about this quite a bit. They just don't think the solution is to stop fighting sexism.

> Instead we talk about the STEM gap and if we resist we get shamed into public apologies?

Yes, all this middle aged white dude resistance to a dollop of accountability for one's actions is really about helping black men. Now pull the other leg.

> I'm not sure if you realize how condescending it is to assume that you have nothing to learn from me but this is a great opportunity for me to learn from you.

I don't mind as being seen as condescending here, but that's not my point. My point is that I have limited time, and I don't think spending it rehashing stale arguments with dedicated antifeminists is a good way to work towards the goals I have. If somebody actually wants to learn something, I'm glad to help them out. And if I end up with questions, I'll surely ask them. But absent that, I have better things to do.

> I look at this and I see hegemony[0].

Yes. There was an entrenched pro-sexist cultural hegemony that has lasted thousands of years. It is finally dying. I want that replaced with an anti-sexist cultural hegemony, because that shifts us in the direction of a more even distribution of power. I personally hope that what comes after that is the dissolution of hegemonies, but primates being what we are, I suspect the best we'll be able to get is an anti-kyriarchic hegemony. My target for that is 2100, but I've always been an optimist.

> A social group with a significant amount of power over you has publicly shamed you [...]

This is an incorrect reading (and also false), but hey, don't let me get in the way of your fantasies.

> their worldview became your own

Also false. I'm not much of a fellow traveler in that I have a number of deep philosophical disagreements, but our goals are aligned for the next few decades or so.

> As Deborah Blum puts it, "I do have sympathy for anyone caught in the leading edge of a media storm. But if we are ever to effect change, sometimes we need the winds to howl, to blow us out of our comfort zones."

She's implying social change only happens when forced by some group of activists and therefore activism isn't responsible for the collateral damage it causes. Many things cause social change so I think the role of "howling winds" may be overstated. In addition, one must make the argument that this particular form of activism is genuine and deserves solidarity.

> I believe the actual accusation was that he was contributing to maintaining the gender gap, not that he was responsible for it.

He may not have been blamed for it (the gender gap predates him by centuries) but the responsibility was placed on his shoulders.

> Actually, intersectional feminists talk about this quite a bit.

They try and I commend them for that.

> I don't mind as being seen as condescending here, but that's not my point. My point is that I have limited time, and I don't think spending it rehashing stale arguments with dedicated antifeminists is a good way to work towards the goals I have. If somebody actually wants to learn something, I'm glad to help them out. And if I end up with questions, I'll surely ask them. But absent that, I have better things to do.

I'm open to being persuaded and I don't think you can accuse me of deflecting or not taking what you say seriously. In fact I would love to be persuaded, the social punishments for disliking feminism are steep.

> I want that replaced with an anti-sexist cultural hegemony, because that shifts us in the direction of a more even distribution of power.

No it doesn't, that's only true if being male is a meaningful predictor of power, but it isn't. You can see this in poor white males: class outweighs sex and race combined. Feminism isn't interested in addressing or critiquing the real institutions of power, they want the power for themselves. It could even make the power distribution worse because those in power will have the outward appearance of equality.

I'm not sure what your political background is but ideologically your anti-sexist cultural hegemony bears striking similarities to the dictatorship of the proletariat(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictatorship_of_the_proletaria...) which was rejected by the socialist libertarians of the time and would later become the platform of Lenin and Stalin. Anybody adopting this type of thinking should be aware of the horrors it has brought in the past.

> Also false. I'm not much of a fellow traveler in that I have a number of deep philosophical disagreements, but our goals are aligned for the next few decades or so.

The reason I say their worldview has become your own is because sometimes it seems like you're reading their script. I don't actually know you.

> She's implying social change only happens when forced by some group of activists and therefore activism isn't responsible for the collateral damage it causes.

If you can give examples of quick, major social change that don't happen when somebody pushes pretty hard, I would be interested to see them.

Also, I wouldn't say that they aren't responsible for collateral damage. But as long as the collateral damage is lower than the damage caused by the continuance of the problem, I don't think they'll mourn much. In particular, I am not willing to prioritize the hurt feelings of old white guys who a) have benefited from sexism, and b) who are (unconsciously) sustaining a sexist situation over the harm they are doing (and the large amount of hurt feelings caused by it).

> He may not have been blamed for it (the gender gap predates him by centuries) but the responsibility was placed on his shoulders.

Sure. Is that fair? No. Is it more unfair than it being placed on the women forced to deal with it? Definitely not.

> No it doesn't, that's only true if being male is a meaningful predictor of power, but it isn't.

There are also class differences, but that doesn't mean that sexism didn't or doesn't exist. For millennia women were effectively property of males. We are moving away from it, but we are far from done yet. Power is still disproportionately in the hands of men.

> Feminism isn't interested in addressing or critiquing the real institutions of power, they want the power for themselves.

Depends on the feminist, really. But my general heuristic is that moving in a direction where more people have access to power is good, so even if we only shift the power from n well-off white guys to n*2 well-off white people, I'll call it a provisional win. And any shift in the power structures makes easier to make further changes. E.g., gay marriage is proceeding more quickly and easily than interracial marriage, and trans rights quicker still.

> anti-sexist cultural hegemony bears striking similarities to the dictatorship of the proletariat

It also bears striking similarities to America in the age of de Tocqueville; we had a native opposition to concentrations of power that we have gradually lost. I'm not going to sweat this one too hard.

> I'm open to being persuaded and I don't think you can accuse me of deflecting or not taking what you say seriously. In fact I would love to be persuaded, the social punishments for disliking feminism are steep.

Feel free to drop me a line, then; I'm glad to discuss this.

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