Jordan Peterson is launching Thinkspot, a “free speech” platform where his fanboys can downvote posts they dislike and make them vanish

@Cat Mara
It’s also called “spreading”, but I wasn’t sure if anybody here would recognize either term. I’d say creationists are the worsts, but these misogynists and now the alt-right also exist.

So, basically Peterson is going to repeat the same experiment that failed on Reddit

@Rhuu: I apologise for not including a content warning. I should’ve done so. I didn’t actually read any of the thread on Twitter, or the original on Reddit, the OP was enough for me.

@Cat Mara

On a related issue, I read another post recently called “Contempt Culture“, which points out a great many technical communities in the IT industry are driven by contempt for those outside their group (“you use programming language/ technology X?! What a loser!”

Technically I’m not in the IT industry, but I’m in a field where I hear this a lot. I would be interested in seeing the post, because I wonder if it takes into account what I think might be the genesis of some of this sort of thing.

For instance, I loathe python. It’s the most frustrating thing in the world and entirely unsuitable for my field. I therefore lack experience in it, and when I go back and forth to my preferred languages I have to spend time going “oh wait, you can’t do that here, arrgh”. This leads to my initial dislike.

Then I see multiple articles submitted to top tier conferences that try to use python as a legitimate experimental language in my field, which it is in no way suitable for, and I think “oh gosh, this dude actually thought they would get accepted here with python as their language? Do they know anything at all about the field? REJECT!” (I don’t actually reject based only on python experiments, tbf, but I’m trying to make a point here.)

Then I go to a class in the field and the question is “can we submit the homework using python?” a day before it’s due and the answer is Didn’t you listen to the first four weeks of lecture or READ THE ASSIGNMENT? NO NO NO NO! AUUUGH!

Then the general conclusion is “People who use python are sucky losers that don’t know anything. SAD.”

And in my field that classifier has ~99% success rate at differentiating poor performers from high performers.

However, in the wider world, python is a fine tool for knocking up programs to do many things (I’ve heard), and it has graphing packages that are second only to Matlab. In those situations, I’m fine with people using python and would never think they were a loser just for that.

Does the Contempt Culture article account for this type of situation-specific contempt, or is it more to do with people that never move out of the specific context where you don’t want X language/technology and just hate all of them all of the time?

So it looks like 2 comments touched on this, but to my surprise, no one has come right out and said:

Jordan Peterson’s idea of free speech is not being able to speak unless you pay Jordan Peterson.

ELL OH FUCKIN’ ELL

@Big Titty Demon:

I think what the blogger was getting at is much more extreme than what you describe… it’s like taking that, “People who use python are sucky losers that don’t know anything. SAD” feeling you get and pushing it beyond simple frustration at someone using a wrong tool for the job at hand and pushing it till you actually believe that anyone who uses Python– ever, even at tasks it’s uncontestably good at– is a sucky loser and saying so as loudly as you can becomes almost part of your identity. Where you go out of your way to attack Python users publicly and in as contemptuous a way as you can, till you start almost seeing yourself in terms of being anti-Python. It’s us-versus-them. Sectarianism, almost. And a lot of IT people are like that, unfortunately. They get into this almost performative mindset where expressing contempt in the most over-the-top way you can against technologies you don’t like becomes part of your public persona.The blogger notes that it’s probably rooted in the imposter syndrome a lot of people in IT feel and this is one way of coping with it: you may be a fraud, but at least you’re not like those people who don’t even know good tech when they see it! And it takes a good deal of self-awareness for some people to even realise that this is what they’re doing: the blogger herself notes that she was happy loudly shitting on people who used technologies she didn’t like until someone called her on it.

There it is! And it worked! Yaaaaay!

@CatMara
Thanks for posting a link to that blog post, it’s very interesting
and thanks
@Big Titty Demon
for mentioning it, I would’ve missed it otherwise.

I’m involved in CS, but it’s not my focus (I’m majoring in both CS and Physics, but CS is just an ancillary to Physics). I’m more or less an outsider to the sort of things that article describes in the CS field, but I have a close spectator seat. I’ve seen the abuse they hurl at each other all the time, though rarely to each other’s faces. Some lecturers like to deride other languages or fields and the people working with them as apparent fuel in a constant turf war, and women especially are popular targets. Often, when a language was unpopular, it was joked that the only reason it was used at all for whatever they didn’t like was because of women. (For example, a “joke” I heard was that Java was soft and only women should use it (or effeminate men), I guess real men use COBOL)

There are very few women in CS, especially in the conservative state I live in, and the male dominated lectures and seminars a lot of my female friends that were in the field had to go to made some of them seriously consider leaving the field. Sexism was absolutely rampant at these events, and when the presence of women was even acknowledged, they were derided or dismissed. Jokes were often made at the expense of women in general, and my friends were frequently harassed personally by attendees. I wasn’t surprised that any of this was happening, but it shows just how toxic male dominated communities like that can be.

The mostly male professors often had a pretty clear bias against women too. In one pretty clear case, for example, one professor refused to let a (female) friend of mine leave class five minutes early so they could attend another class that too soon for them to make it to otherwise. This was exactly what a number of male students (I was in this class as well, but didn’t have a class immediately afterwards) already did, but this professor refused her permission to do the same thing, and threatened to drop her from his class if she did it without his permission. His male students were never punished for it. The double standard was sickening.

I’ve also noticed this a lot in my physics courses, though to a lesser degree (thankfully, a significant number of my mathematics professors have been female.) A lot of my fellow students give female students the stink eye and mock them when they ask for help. Some of the male instructors also tend to just ignore it when a woman asks for help, or preferentially answers a man’s question. The general format of a lot of the classes (lecture hall), though, seems to prevent it from being as apparent as it is in CS. Seminars tend to be more or less the same way as well, and groups focused on encouraging women to participate in STEM heavily attend public ones.

I work for a female professor as a research assistant and have for years, so I am not really sure what male professor’s hiring practices are with regards to female research assistants and how they behave with them. My money’s on “not great”, though.

Ignore that, it seems it hasn’t disappeared, it just wasn’t showing up and I jumped the gun a bit. Phew, I was quite worried about losing my typestorm. (Sorry for all of the literature I write)

I would like to add, though, that I also see some of what @Cat Mara’s link talked about with regards to “Contempt Culture” in physics, but more in regards to the importance of fields. (I.e., “is this really worth funding and research?”)

The research I help with is into how climate change and local weather affect river flow through bodies of water and flooding throughout the state, as well as ancillary issues, especially the sources that feed those rivers, like ice melt.

@Jackson Ayres:

That’s funny. The only person I ever met who was a full-time COBOL programmer was a good friend and housemate in the 90s. She was also a young woman with ataxia (involuntary muscle movements combined with lessened voluntary muscle control when you want/need it). She used scooters and electric wheelchairs to get around, had all sorts of adaptive tech just to be able to do her job. On top of THAT, there were complaints that too many people were hanging around her desk too often, getting in the way of people trying to walk through her department on their way to other places.

A couple of times some people above her boss questioned whether all the adaptive tech was worth it for one employee. But they weren’t willing to fire her for having a disability (I guess their lawyers weren’t stupid), so she kept on. But her type of ataxia was progressive (she has actually since died: most people with her type die of suffocation during sleep as the diaphragm gives out or heart attack while active as the heart gives out). As her ataxia progressed, she asked for some new adaptive tech. Nike got slower and slower at giving it to her.

…And then one of the higher-ups at Nike where she worked suggested moving her department to another office where she wouldn’t have been able to access it except through a cargo elevator (which was unavailable for long periods on a regular basis for cargo loading/unloading) unless they put in a new funky drive-on stair-lifter thingy, which would have been expensive, created difficult design & safety problems, etc.

So the higher-ups decided that they could move the department without moving my friend, at least until the new high-tech stair-lifter was in place.

The. Entire. Department. Revolted.

It seems that her department required fluency in COBOL, but only a couple people worked with COBOL 40 hours/week. The rest used it as needed, usually not even a full 8 hours/week. Of the 3 people who used COBOL full time, both of the others relied on my friend to check their code and to help them plan code structures (I’m not sure of the right technical term, but planning what form things should be in and which functions should be shunted off to subroutines, etc.), and EVERYBODY in the department came to my friend whenever they had any questions at all on COBOL, as they all had to use it occasionally.

It seems they weren’t all equally “fluent”.

Nike ditched the plans for moving her department to the new location (though they eventually found a different location with better elevator access where they could move her department) when they were told that multiple people would have to walk between buildings at least a couple times per day each just to get her advice, and that if she was left in the middle of another department, they would have to put in a separate workspace just for the visitors coming to ask for help. They then got a CS professor to consult with them on how to handle their dependence on one employee for COBOL expertise and if they needed to increase job requirements when hiring, etc.

The professor looked at the work they were doing, how productive they were, how the workflow was handled, what types of questions they brought to my friend, all of it. The prof reported back that they had a good department, it was just that

1. need for COBOL programmers fluctuated so they couldn’t have more full-timers and needed to maintain their inter-language flexibility

2. My friend was just better than everyone else, and they should feel damn lucky to have her at pay rates for a CS undergraduate major instead of a CS PhD.

Not long after, they stopped complaining about the guys in the department hanging out at her desk, upgraded her to a private office – and made it big enough to have visitors, and then all of a sudden her languishing adaptive-tech requests started being filled in a week or two instead of (and I kid you not) two YEARS for the longest-delayed tech she’d asked for.

So… yeah. The only COBOL programmer I’ve ever know wasn’t a real man, but she was a bad-ass woman with a damn fine brain for COBOL given her undergrad-only education.

I miss her.

And the leader of the group that developed COmmon Business Oriented Language was Admiral Grace Hopper — not some misogynistic man.

On the COBOL thing, don’t tell the brogrammers who created it. The Navy techs still call her Grandma COBOL, I hear.