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from the the-long-painful-decline-of-a-once-proud-open-source-project dept.
Mozilla CEO Chris Beard has threatened to fire an anonymous person complaining about "social justice bullies" at Mozilla on Reddit, should the person be discovered to be an employee.
Chris Beard stated that the Reddit user aoiyama's complaints "crossed the line" in a series of posts about the women in the company, including recently departed community organizer Christie Koehler. In a series of tweets earlier this month, Koehler complained about Mozilla's lack of diversity in the workplace and its failure to address accessibility issues.
The Reddit user's comments:
"Frankly everyone was glad to see the back of Christie Koehler. She was batshit insane and permanently offended at everything," the user wrote. "When she and the rest of her blue-haired nose-pierced asshole feminists are gone, the tech industry will breathe a sigh of relief." It was that remark that appeared to trigger Beard's warning today. "When I talk about crossing the line from criticism to hate speech, I'm talking about when you start saying 'someone's kind doesn't belong here, and we'll all be happy when they're gone.'"
(Score: 4, Informative) by JNCF on Tuesday August 25 2015, @05:02PM
(if only there weren't any research at all that the brain is a gendered organ and if only there weren't any evidence at all that the body may have organs of conflicting gender)
Isn't there actually research showing sexual dimorphism in the human brain? For example (emphasis added): [nih.gov]
Morphological sex differences in the nervous system are established by exposure to testosterone and its aromatized end-product, estradiol, during critical periods in development. In most cases the mechanism(s) through which testosterone and estradiol direct these neural changes are not known. Effects of early exposure to steroids last a lifetime, and there is often a delay between the hormone exposure and the appearance of a morphological sex difference. For example, the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BNST) is a limbic forebrain region that exhibits several sex differences. The most prominent region of the BNST, the principal nucleus (BNSTp), is larger in volume and contains more cells in males than in females. This has been established in mice, rats, guinea pigs, and humans (Hines et al., 1985; Guillamon et al., 1988; Hines et al., 1992; Forger et al., 2004). In mice and rats, this sex difference is due to greater developmental cell death in females. The sex difference in cell death is not apparent until about postnatal day 6, but is determined by testosterone exposure on the day of birth (Chung et al., 2000; Gotsiridze et al., 2007; Hisasue et al., 2007).
I'm perfectly fine with calling anybody whatever pronoun they prefer, I just think that your claims about science are wrong.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 25 2015, @07:24PM
Did you miss the "If only"?
(Score: 2) by JNCF on Tuesday August 25 2015, @11:01PM
It's an oddly phrased sentence. I see how you're parsing it, and I think you're technically correct to parse it that way, but I'm pretty sure it goes against the intentions of the author (the author can obviously correct me if I'm wrong). Consider this: if the "if only" clause flips the intended truthiness of what comes after it, combining it with "there weren't any research at all that the brain is a gendered organ " outputs something like "There is any research at all that the brain is a gendered organ." This sounds awkward because the phrase "any _____ at all" is only used when people are trying to stress a lack of something.
(Score: 3, Informative) by kurenai.tsubasa on Tuesday August 25 2015, @11:45PM
I apologize for the misunderstanding. I intend to use sarcasm to call out the problem that research showing brain gender is often ignored. Thanks for posting relevant research as well!
(Score: 2) by JNCF on Tuesday August 25 2015, @11:57PM
Well, there you have it; I'm wrong again. That makes four times today that I'm aware of (and many more I'm not).
(Score: 2) by kurenai.tsubasa on Wednesday August 26 2015, @01:30AM
Don't sweat it! That post was fairly ranty, even for me.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 25 2015, @11:07PM
> Isn't there actually research showing sexual dimorphism in the human brain?
What there is not is research showing that such dimorphism has any meaningful bearing on general behaviour. Or more colloquially, the people who argue for biological determinism are making mountains out of molehills. Its just modern day phrenology.
(Score: 2) by JNCF on Tuesday August 25 2015, @11:48PM
What there is not is research showing that such dimorphism has any meaningful bearing on general behaviour. Or more colloquially, the people who argue for biological determinism are making mountains out of molehills. Its just modern day phrenology.
The claim being made was that the human brain does not show signs of sexual dimorphism (at least, this is how I took the term "gendered organ"). Of course, it does. Now the bar is raised, and we must have proof that changes in the brain result in changes of behavior in this specific instance, ignoring all the general data we have about changes in brains resulting in behavioral changes. It is obviously very difficult for modern science to show a causal effect here without raising humans in a controlled environment, and that isn't going to get past an ethics board any time soon. You're asking for a level of proof that is unattainable with modern practices and technology, unless you have a clever proposal for how to test it.
I'm not actually aware of any species that have two sexes and don't have sexually dimorphic behavior (I'd love to see an example, if possible), so it seems like biology probably had a good head start on culture there. Obviously, culture is huge. But so is biology. There's no reason to split science into cults.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 26 2015, @01:01AM
> You're asking for a level of proof that is unattainable with modern practices and technology, unless you have a clever proposal for how to test it.
Like this? [time.com]
> so it seems like biology probably had a good head start on culture there
All that rationalization to say that the incredibly plastic human brain is biologically determined is still no better than phrenology.
(Score: 2) by JNCF on Wednesday August 26 2015, @01:33AM
All that rationalization to say that the incredibly plastic human brain is biologically determined is still no better than phrenology.
I really don't feel like that's a fair summary of my views. The sentence I wrote immediately after the one you quoted says "Obviously, culture is huge."
Quotes from the article you linked (corrections in the original, not my doing):
But a new study of two tribes living in the northeast of the country offers intriguing evidence that biology alone does not determine women’s math aptitude (or lack thereof, as former Harvard President Lawrence Summers once infamously suggested) and that culture has a lot to do with the differences between the genders.
“It would be wrong [to conclude from the new study] that nature doesn’t play a role. [But] nurture plays a substantial role, large enough that we can even see a gender difference wiped out,” Hoffman says.
Seems like your news article is suggesting that these differences (on a specific test) are complex products of nature and nurture, just like I was saying before. The question isn't simply whether it is possible to engineer a culture that stifles or encourages different behaviors/abilities in different sexes, that is obviously happening all the time. I'm only arguing that biology is another significant factor. This isn't controversial for any other species. Note that I'm not arguing for mathematical/spacial reasoning differences specifically, this is an example you've brought to the table. I'm simply arguing the case for general sexual dimorphism in the brain and in behavior, and I don't really even care that much. You can keep ignoring biology as a factor, nobody's stopping you. I'm not emotionally invested in this, and I hope you aren't either.
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Wednesday August 26 2015, @06:25AM
I hate wasting a reply on a stupid AC but I gotta troll a bit....
All that rationalization to say that the incredibly plastic human brain is biologically determined is still no better than phrenology.
Hmm. Lemme process this.
1. We know, beyond debate, that human brains do indeed vary between individuals. Some are geniuses, some are barely as smart as a turnip.
2. We know, again beyond debate, that some of these variations are genetic.
3. We know, again beyond serious debate, that almost every measurable physical trait of any sub grouping of H. Sapiens varies in statistically meaningful ways when compared to other groups. For an example in less scientific lingo: While it isn't possible to say "White men can't jump." because champions exist in the NBA that everyone would agree are 'White', what can be said is that the racial makeup of the NBA differs greatly from the general population they recruit from and other possible explanations are insufficient to explain all of the variation. Genetic differences have to be credited with at least some of it, endless arguments will continue on the details.
4. If one subscribes to the Theory of Evolution, which of course all right thinking people do, none of this is a problem. Different groups adapted to local environmental challenges, Until perhaps fifty years ago, all human societies tasked males and females with very different roles. Whether culture drove evolutionary change or evolution dictated culture is an interesting debate but don't really matter at this point. Reality is probably both in multiple feedback loops.
Now you propose that taken statistically (I assume) that male and female brains (and I also assume you extend this to every racial grouping?) average when compared in the aggregate. That while bodies vary, minds are precisely (or at least beyond any current or future measurement) the same. I say the odds of this occurring by blind chance via evolution to be so improbable as to ignore. No, there is only one available theory to explain such a curious thing. Intelligent Design.
This is of course very problematic. So I have one thing to say to that:
"So, Citizen. Are you now or have you ever been a Christian?"