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from the anything-you-say-will-be-used-against-you dept.
The Facebook messaging group was at one point titled "Harvard memes for horny bourgeois teens."
It began when about 100 members of Harvard College's incoming freshman class contacted each other through the university's official Class of 2021 Facebook group. They created a messaging group where students could share memes about popular culture — a growing trend on the Internet among students at elite colleges.
But then, the exchanges took a dark turn, according to an article published in the Harvard Crimson on Sunday. Some of the group's members decided to form an offshoot group in which students could share obscene, "R-rated" memes, a student told the Crimson. The founders of the messaging group demanded that students post provocative memes in the main group chat to gain admittance to the smaller group.
The students in the spinoff group exchanged memes and images "mocking sexual assault, the Holocaust and the deaths of children," sometimes directing jokes at specific ethnic or racial groups, the Crimson reported. One message "called the hypothetical hanging of a Mexican child 'piñata time'" while other messages quipped that "abusing children was sexually arousing," according to images of the chat described by the Crimson.
Then, university officials caught on. And in mid-April, after administrators discovered the offensive, racially charged meme exchanges, at least 10 incoming students who participated in the chat received letters informing them that their offers of admission had been revoked.
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Thexalon on Wednesday June 07 2017, @03:17PM (4 children)
They learned an important lesson: When you do something you know you shouldn't do, even if you're doing it for the lulz, even if it's legal to do it, there are consequences. I mean, how many people have lost their jobs due to stupidity on social media?
Harvard's attitude, in essence, is "We're Harvard, which means we don't need to put up with bad behavior from anybody. Attending and/or working for this university is a privilege, and you'd do well to remember that." This isn't limited to students: For instance, a president of the university was ousted over an extremely sexist speech he had given. (Full disclosure: I'm one of the few members of my family without some kind of affiliation with Harvard, so while I have a bit of an insider perspective I'm also biased as all get-out.)
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Wednesday June 07 2017, @03:24PM
> When you do something you know you shouldn't do, even if you're doing it for the lulz, even if it's legal to do it, there are consequences.
Sometimes.
http://www.businessinsider.com/how-mark-zuckerberg-hacked-into-the-harvard-crimson-2010-3 [businessinsider.com]
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Wednesday June 07 2017, @03:43PM (2 children)
To be fair, Larry Summers was ousted for several reasons; he was already rather unpopular at Harvard and had other issues beyond the speech.
And the reception of the speech [wikipedia.org] was oversimplified. It was widely reported that he was implying "women are dumber in science and math," but what he actually was arguing is that the standard deviations for men in cognitive tests tend to be larger, which leads the distribution for men to have longer "tails." Thus, there are potentially more "really dumb" men with math and science skills compared to women, but also more "really smart" men. For average math and science people in their careers, this shouldn't result in a significant difference in distribution of men vs. women, but Summers was specifically talking about tenured faculty at top universities and research institutions, where the "long tail" distribution of men MIGHT make a part of the difference.
And this was all offered among other discussion of other theories about why there aren't more women in such top positions, and it was placed in a talk that Summers himself repeatedly labeled as "provocative" while giving it.
I personally don't think he was right about this being the primary factor, but it's a reasonable argument to at least discuss what impact "long tail" distributions for men might have here. But this speech seemed to be a "domino" that added to the other criticisms of Summers already in place, and that ultimately led to his resignation.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by bradley13 on Wednesday June 07 2017, @05:53PM (1 child)
what he actually was arguing is that the standard deviations for men in cognitive tests tend to be larger, which leads the distribution for men to have longer "tails."
While the difference in standard deviation is relatively small (a ratio of around 1.1), it makes a huge difference when you get out on the tails. This has been repeatedly demonstrated, although people who don't want it to be true continue to deny it. Amusingly, one paper that tries very hard to disprove it actually does the opposite [ams.org]: look at the graph on the top-right of page 14, and you'll see the ratio of 1.1 very clearly shining through their data.
As for the effects: above an IQ of 130 (2 standard deviations out), you expect around twice as many men as women, and above an IQ of 145 (3 SDs), roughly 3 times as many men as women. Engineers are typically in the 120 to 130 range (so we might expect about 1/3 women and 2/3 men from the outset). In the upper reaches of science and mathematics (IQ 140+), women should be expected to make up under 25% of the cohort. Obviously, other factors are in play as well. Men tend to like things, women tend to like people. More women tend to become nurses and doctors, whereas more men are technicians and engineers.
All of which is very unacceptable to the crowd that is determined for people to be identical, rather than equal.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 07 2017, @11:22PM
Why are we even using pseudoscience like IQ? We don't even understand intelligence, yet so many people believe that IQ is an accurate measurement of it. The social sciences tend to be nonsense and we should pay little attention to them until they clean up their act or on the very rare occasions when they produce something decent.
This isn't to say that you are wrong, but that IQ has not been proven to accurately measure someone's intelligence. It is correlated with several things, but that doesn't mean those things are all that relevant to one's intelligence; it is mostly arbitrary.