10 Problems Women Need to Fix Before They Can Complain About Problems With Popular New Software, On a Blog

All points well taken, but if I were to offer a defense of my programmer brethren, I would say that what aggravated me about this whole affair was the immediate and unexamined assumption of some kind of united conspiracy of the new technocratic patriarchal class to bring women down.

Most nerds that I’ve known in my life (many) are ridiculously, violently libertarian in their social policy leanings.

If my name were to appear on some sort of “anti-abortion woman-hating petition because fuck women’s rights” online, the probability that I wouldn’t know about it is very, very high. If someone were to see my name on such a petition, I’d prefer something like a, “wtf dude? did you know about this? did you sign such a petition?” (to which my answer would be, “wtf! no!”) as opposed to “OMG!!!!!!!! LOOK AT WHAT HE DID!!!!!!!!!!!” directed at a wider audience, where then the burden is on me to prove that no, I am not and was not beating my wife, in the face of an incredibly hostile audience that has already decided, really, that it understands my intentions perfectly well thank you very much.

I don’t think that asking me “why didn’t you check to make sure your name didn’t appear on such a petition, then????” is a reasonable question, nor do I think it’s reasonable to ask that Apple have first tested how its software does in terms of locating abortion clinics. (Seriously, are you joking?) It is a very big world, and a very big internet. Programmers are typically under enormous time pressure to make sure that shit _works_ at a basic level of non-crashing non-data-losing functionality, and as you may have noticed in your software-using travels, the effort has not been universally successful, as this basic level of functionality is actually really hard, no shit.

I know that people are going to react however they’re going to react, and people carry around a bunch of experiences that color their reactions to various things, and very often groups of people ACTUALLY DO engage in intentional dickheaded moves, I get all of that, and I won’t be holding my breath that people are going to adopt any less of an “ASSUME INTENTIONAL MALICE!!!!!!!!!” attitude about any of their deeply held beliefs anytime soon.

All I’m saying is this: I don’t own an iphone, I don’t care about Apple’s success or failure, and I don’t have an anti-abortion or availability-restricting bone in my body. But I felt vastly more sympathy for Apple than I did anybody writing angrily, if only for the basic reason that I can easily see any number of projects to which I’ve contributed that could fail along some axis like this (including, as you say, through the intercession of some individual highly motivated to achieve this particular end, which seems like the likely explanation to me also) and I didn’t like the feeling that I’d be assumed very, very, very guilty before given a chance to defend myself, and also didn’t like what seems to be the assumption that taking a dump on the good name of a company or a person is of secondary importance in the holy war on sexism. Maybe some benefit of the doubt should come before the rage.

(Good luck finding lots of “frat-boy assholes” in your typical crowd of hackers.)

I can forgive everything except the lack of a Mars mission. It’s Mars. people! Red planet, largest mountain in the solar system, deepest canyon in the solar system – the list goes on.

Crooked timber needs an upvote button.

Thanks for that Most Righteous Rant. I’m still scratching my head over Richard Dawkins’ blissfully ignorant response to Rebecca Watson.

As an aerospace engineer and son of a feminist … yeah. Win. Mars or bust! The others deserve the higher ranking, but I’m glad space made it into your top 10.

What about lack of wifi coverage on Mars? Not so keen to talk about that when it’s your side doing it, right?

@3, someone with a title like content producer, or editor, at Google? Is likely to be a woman (a lot more likely than the programmers). So is markedly less likely to have done this (although it is not impossible).
As a person editing and producing content while female, your comment made me go ouch.

Brett: I feel like people focus too much on human space travel. We have a space probe about to cross the heliosphere, which is just awesome. Of course, a manned visit to Mars would be pretty cool too since human beings are able to do stuff that a thousand or so pounds of 1970s technology can’t do, but the space program can do quite a lot of really great exploration while the humans themselves stay cooped up in the Earth’s gravity well.

Also, I agree. I didn’t particularly care about this story, (because I don’t really care about Siri to begin with) but you’re right to complain about it.

Thanks, good post.

I think it’s interesting to think about how this happened. I think the “one guy did it and a hundred others didn’t notice” is a plausible theory, but I think the “hundred and one people thought of coding a link to an escort service when you say ‘horny’ but not of anything related to women’s reproductive rights” is at least equally likely. From a feminist perspective I find that actually more interesting – you don’t need an explicitly bad guy at all – you just need structural sexism of the tech world (I think Armanda Marcote made that point first).

Look, if you’ve been following these sorts of technologies, language recognition and AI, you would think twice about chalking it up to a conspiracy. I don’t know how Siri works, but odds are it’s based on mining of some sort of big data set and/or user supplied data. The potential for offense with that is unlimited.

I mean, I’ve followed the Google Translate forums (a spam-filled hellhole where nationalists from all over the world come to rant at a free service provider – don’t ask why I’m there, please). Sometimes, the mysterious AI powering Google Translate decides that “dog” is a good English translation for the indonesian word for muslim, or that the Irish national anthem needs a couple more uplifting lines, like “God save the queen!”. If you didn’t know how it works, you’d think it was some sort of universal insult generator.

I just wanted to say this is the finest rant I’ve ever read on this blog.

And 10. Mars. Yes.

I find institutional sexism more plausible as an explanation than one bad apple employee.

The way a program like Siri is developed is to give it to a test community, record what the test community says to it, analyze this body of input, spot cases where the program isn’t performing very well, and work on improvements. The testers inevitably find many more problems than the developers have the resources to solve, so the choice of which problems to work on depends on (a) the frequencies with which the problems are encountered by the test community and (b) the priorities assigned to those problems by the development team. Bias enters this process via the selection of the test community (which for security reasons probably consists largely of Apple employees, about which Apple are reluctant to provide any demographic information) and via the prioritisation of the work (which again depends on decisions made by those same employees). If most of the testers and developers are men, they needn’t consciously be trying to marginalize the concerns of women: it’s going to happen unless they make very strenuous and conscious efforts to prevent it.

If we insist on explaining biased outcomes in terms of consciously biased inputs then we’re probably not going to be able to solve this kind of problem.

Gareth, while I can’t totally exclude the role of testing and input bias, I interned at a company making what I suspect was an early version of the medical terminology database Siri uses to determine things like that if you need a filling, you should go to a dentist. The company is gone, and I don’t know who acquired their database (probably Nuance, they got everything made in Belgium in the end) but it was the most comprehensive available at the time. And it very definitely included abortions and the knowledge that abortions are medical procedures related to pregnancy. But even if it’s a purely statistically trained scheme using just newspaper data – something that I promise you is totally not the case – it would make the link between abortion and Planned Parenthood even if it just used the universally available WSJ corpus and a straight-forward LSA model.

I have my doubts about the single evil programmer. Bing and Wolfram Alpha are major information sources for Siri, and they do terribly badly for abortion queries. Bing in particular is unable to tell “abortion clinic” from “right to life” and never gives you “Planned Parenthood” unless you ask for it by name. It’s not impossible that part of the problem comes from outside data sources and this is (it feels so retro to say this) Microsoft’s fault.

But Siri uses a lot of data sources and even does Google searches when all else fails. Google handles abortion related requests quite well. It’s failure to give responses in some cases, or to give salient responses even when simple string-matching would find them, requires a large explanation.

If I had to bet, I would suggest that somewhere in the development process, someone came up with a list of controversial topics and programmed Siri not to go there. My guess is someone at SRI or CALO – someone expected to demo Siri to Bush-era bureaucrats when it was still a government project – made sure Siri would give non-committal answers to some queries, and the code is still in there because later testers never asked the question.

Yes, institutional bias may play a role in that sense.

But – at risk of mansplaining (or, ok PhDsplaining, which isn’t better) – consider the way a company like Apple would sample a population for properly representative testing. How many people seek abortion services? How often? How many would use a personal digital assistant to do it? How many of those would try to locate abortion services when they know their queries are being tracked for research purposes? And of those, how many belong to the social class likely to buy an iPhone, given that women with that kind of money and technology interests are probably the ones most likely to already take measures to control their reproduction?

In the universe of likely queries, I bet the number related to abortion is vanishingly small. Even an inordinately large sample is probably not large enough to contain many. And the testing procedures almost certainly went in depth for only a few queries or classes of queries. So, one part of the problem may be a general problem in statistics: utilities count, and sampling without consideration of utilities can mess you up. Abortion queries may be rare, but they are important, as Apple has just found out the hard way. That’s a general problem for things other than gender bias, and I think labeling it “institutional bias” misses the point – it’s a long-standing unsolvable problem in statistics. If that’s all there really is to it, I’m not sure there is anything Apple really could have done.

Apple bought Siri from SRI. I’m not sure how much Apple testing and development went into it, but I bet that either Apple or SRI gave a lot of thought to medical queries in general. I bet it occurred to them that people would use Siri when they needed a pharmacy or a doctor or a dentist in a hurry. I bet they had a team of lawyers consider whether or not the vendor could be held liable for screwing that up, and the lawyers told them it would be best not to screw it up in the first place. I bet they tested that in great depth and thought up all kinds of scenarios for it rather than relying on statistical data.

And somehow they still missed reproductive health? That’s certainly bias – whether institutional or an explicit choice.

Belle Waring: That should be clear from my posts. I read the Google Translate forums, where people accuse Google of inserting subtle and not-so-subtle insults to their identity groups constantly. Mainly because I think statistical translation is awesome, I have made it a sort of perverse hobby to patiently explain to these people that no, you’re going to see things like these with statistical translation, and there’s no conspiracy going on to deny the Irish/Indonesian/Turkish people their rightful place in history.

Most of these people are not women, by the way.

I was extrapolating from that. I know little of Siri, which is why I tried to express myself in a careful fashion: all I know about it, is that it has a tendency to produce responses which look like they’re plagiarized from cleverbot.

As it turns out, I was most likely wrong, and this is intentional censorship.

Hey people!!! Did you know J. Otto Pohl lives in Africa?!!?

#16: It was an unserious focus-grouped Karl Rove election year stunt. Everyone, right and left, saw that immediately. It was swiftly dropped and not mentioned again. Future administrations will approach it cautiously for fear of getting Bushstink on themselves. Mission accomplished!

A really warm planet.

OK, you go to Venus then. The rest of us will be on Mars.

Thought about feeding the troll with the analogy of “Europe, is their economy in the shitter or what?” which is a valid statement for most useful purposes even though it’s probably inapplicable to Sweden. Decided I couldn’t be arsed.

Scott Martens 12.07.11 at 8:20 am

” Okay, I’ll do the devil’s advocate role here:

If it’s legitimate to complain about Siri, despite the existence of far more immediate and violent threats to women’s rights, is it right to complain that anti-choice people seem to stop caring about life after birth? If a right-wing blogger makes a similarly sarcastic list of “all the things that have to be solved before we get to complain about abortion” – childhood poverty, preventable disease, bad schools, etc. – do they have a point?”

It actually would be, except that the anti-abortion circle and the ‘f*ck ’em, they should have been born rich’ has a lot of overlap. The right acts in a remarkably united manner to worsen the lives of children who aren’t in the upper few percentiles.

Slocum 12.07.11 at 11:20 am

” Hey people Did you know J. Otto Pohl lives in Africa?!!?”

No, Slocum, I didn’t. Not even Siri was able to tell me.
Do you know if the police pepper spray students in Africa? :)

I liked the 10-point rant. Spot on. The better title would have been ’10 Problems Women Need to Fix Before They Can Complain About Anything’ but that is because I do not care about SW and was not part of the previous discussion.

See also: ’10 Things left wing people Need to Account For Before Anything They Say Can Be Deemed Admissible In a Blog Discussion’ with two variants for a Left Leaning Blog and a Right Leaning Blog (yes, global warming is real and no, I don’t think Stalin was right are two respective examples).

When you start off with a ten point rant with gratutious capitalisation, my eyes may gloss over a bit.

Harald, can we dial it down please? Having a bit of a push on the comments policy at the moment.

re: Venus

This is something I never got, what’s the obsession with Mars? Venus has a stable atmosphere, it’s located down the solar gravity well, it’s so much more Earth-like than Mars in terms of size and geology (venusology?), there’s so much less we know about it because of the perpetual cloud cover. Venus makes much more sense from both a logistics of getting there and expansion of knowledge perspective.

There are some disadvantages- Mars’ shallower gravity well makes return trips more viable, Venus’ stable atmosphere contains a delightful mix of extremely corrosive acids and at the surface has enough density to give it some serious oomph at about 100 bar pressure, the perpetual cloud cover precludes the possibility of using solar power at the surface. The surface itself is somewhere around 500 degrees Celsius. I say “somewhere around” because we only have a vague notion of what the surface of Venus is like, so it’s pretty difficult designing equipment that will survive the surface conditions. Okay, those are pretty big disadvantages. Mars it is!

Argh, comment in moderation or spam filter or something.

Anyways, for the question about the experiments showing that Siri can find the little blue pill, you have to scroll way down the page, but here’s the link I provided in the previous Siri thread.

The 10-point rant was fucking funny.

I read it, and I think I got it: this boils down to “Women! Stop being so uppity and demanding until you’ve done the world’s housekeeping first!”

Huh. So these are all issues women should fix.

Thanks for letting me know what I should do.

I agree the outrage over Siri was overkill. I paid little attention to it and focused more on the issue of states attempting to outlaw abortion.

That is a far more pressing issue for privileged American women to fight for.

The issues listed are of utmost importance, but the fight for equal rights is global because sexism is institutionalized nearly everywhere (or so it seems).

“Bing in particular is unable to tell “abortion clinic” from “right to life” and never gives you “Planned Parenthood” unless you ask for it by name. It’s not impossible that part of the problem comes from outside data sources and this is (it feels so retro to say this) Microsoft’s fault”

I tried this, and it’s not true.

As far as I know, the story was raised in this abortioneers blog post on November 27 before being picked up by Jezebel and others. The poster says, “I ask because I have heard from others in the women’s reproductive health community that Siri is noticeably silent on these issues.”

@sg: Gates is not personally the floor level manager anymore for any projects, from what I can tell.

Google uses a category model for things like businesses and lists of objects, one probably originally derived from DMOZ categories (or possibly stolen from Yahoo!) or licensed from a yellow pages service. They make a categorical distinction between “Abortion Clinic” and “Abortion Alternatives Organizations.” You can check this yourself by using google maps to look for “abortion in North Dakota”. It shows a lot of matches that are explicitly labelled “Abortion Alternatives Organizations” – but also finds, as its #2 listing, the sole and unique abortion provider in North Dakota, and lists it as an “Abortion Clinic.” So Google has either trained a model of some kind to distinguish abortion clinics from anti-abortion operations, or it has a lot of pre-categorized data from somewhere, or some of both.

Bing just… hasn’t done all that work. Either they don’t have the data, or they don’t have the staff and time, or they don’t have the algorithms. That’s a business decision, one probably not made with any specific policy towards reproductive rights in mind.

Scott, following up on Barry, I just did a search for “abortion clinic tokyo” in English and Japanese and it comes up with the goods straightaway. It also (rather conveniently!) in the first page of the English search, comes up with a site that gives the Japanese translation of the phrase (kanji and romaji) and some advice on finding English-language clinics. Couldn’t be more helpful, really. On the other hand, the sponsored sites need to ask for their money back: two nurse recruiting agencies, and two skincare clinics.

So maybe your theory about Microsoft’s problems is wrong.

“Gates is doing great things in developing nations.” Oh, how lucky these nations are to get all these great things from Gates. Nothing like a Chief Philanthropist to minimize impacts of structural underfunding and political corruption induced by Chief Lobbyists who want to suck all the natural wealth from under the population’s feet.

Chief Whatever Officers all over the globe concur in applauding a magnificent status quo where they get to keep and the money and a most splendid reputation.

I don’t want to say Microsoft is anti-choice. I will complain that their search isn’t all that good.

The major factor appears to be the density of matches – where there are a significant number of abortion providers, it will list them, mixed with anti-abortion listings. But where the density of abortion providers to anti-abortion listings is less favorable, it doesn’t do very well. It’s not making the relevant distinctions in its listings.

The most plausible account of Bing’s shortcomings is technical issues rather than a policy, but it’s not enough to fully account for Siri’s behavior.

Great Post? or Greatest Post? I say, Great Post!

(Hope this is OK as a comment topic. Also: a still more glorious dwawwn awaits!)

I’ll retract the previous comments about complaining. They seem to have been misunderstood, and I didn’t intend any of the readings that people have had of them.But the next time someone asks me for money for something in the First World I’ll still ask them how many lives my money will save compared to sending it to UNICEF. Forgive me for wanting to do good rather then be considered good.

“the next time someone asks me for money for something in the First World I’ll still ask them how many lives my money will save compared to sending it to UNICEF. Forgive me for wanting to do good rather then be considered good.”

Asking that question isn’t actually doing good; it’s being holier-than-thou.

That’s an interesting point from a search engine-y perspective, Tedra. 3 out of 10 women have an abortion, but only a very small number of clinics exist. So even though a large proportion of the population are looking for those clinics, a purely algorithmic search engine is going to be trying to find a needle in a haystack.

I think this problem can be solved algorithmically, through a machine learning process in which the population’s response to bad search results causes the engine to refine its search procedures. But this doesn’t appear to be working on the map side of the search engines (even google). Of course since this isn’t working the method that did work (pressure on Apple) is much more effective. I’m wondering if the same problem would occur with a similarly rare and controversial topic like, e.g. “homosexuality counselling.”

sg, the problem with feedback on abortion is that it isn’t going to be honest. There is no way to keep out legions of motivated anti-abortion protestors from downgrading Planned Parenthood and upgrading whatever lies they want to spread.

@sg: I don’t think there is a genuinely algorithmic solution.

The general problem is that if you can’t find a döner kebap when you crave one, it’s a bummer, while if you can’t find reproductive health services and you need some, it’s a tragedy. If Google’s computers could know that, somehow, it would scour its search archives – or direct its human minions to do so – to make sure that abortion provider searches were perfectly accurate and up-to-date, while if the listings for Turkish fast food in your neighbourhood aren’t always accurate, well, life goes on.

Google doesn’t have an automatic way to tell the difference. People could, I suppose, provide input: “How important was this search to you? a) not very. b) earth-shakingly.” But that methodology tends not to work that well.

This is an across-the-board problem in data-driven NLP. I have loads of data, I can’t tell which parts of it are important and which are marginal by any obvious means. It leads to real howlers in machine translation. (i.e., How was the computer supposed to know that that verb means sexual intercourse when the subject is a woman? 85% of the time it just means to assemble furniture!)

I suspect the solution is a lot of painfully screwing things up until the system learns what matters.

See also above #72.

1. I wish I had my foreskin. Just sayin’.
2. Why not just “Rape”?
3. Yes.
4. Yes. But I wouldn’t confine concern simply to Islam. Any belief system that comes from a book is suspect.
5. Yes.
6. Yes.
7. Yes. Large urban areas anywhere, actually.
8. Qualified yes. The free spread of useful knowledge is a pre-requisite for justice.
9. Yes.
10. WTF? 10? Maybe down around 500. If it didn’t look like NASA had become a jobs program, I’d be more enthusiastic. Or if maybe there were more job programs for the non-brilliant.

Just saw Emma @ 13: @3, someone with a title like content producer, or editor, at Google? Is likely to be a woman (a lot more likely than the programmers). So is markedly less likely to have done this (although it is not impossible).

Not that much more likely to be a woman where I’ve worked. More likely to be management than labor though.

a programmer in mobile search at a top company decides to risk his career in order to make a search query on Siri temporarily more difficult

Nah, no career risk; you’re putting a lot of specificity into describing a thought that it seems to me would normally take the form “heh, come to think of it, wouldn’t it be funny if…” Tangentially–

There’s a whole niche category of speech — e.g. I’m sorry that you [X], forgive me for [X], heh wouldn’t it be funny if [X], can you imagine if [X] — that gets employed to effectively launder various forms of assholishness by cloaking them in clauses that sardonify or distance the speaker, creating some space in which the speaker does not seem to stand alone. (Not to say all uses of those phrases fall under this subcategory–I’m sorry that your friend hasn’t called, please forgive me for my harsh tone earlier, can you imagine if the check actually clears ok because of that bank holiday we forgot, wouldn’t it be funny if that casually-tossed-from-half-court basketball goes through nothing but net.) Like any laundering operation, the malign intent gets slipped into sufficiently clean legitimate source material to make the result palatable.

The assholishness is still there, in irony or the detachment, but with enough plausible deniability to filter away any possibility of discomfort-inducing self-awareness. The subcategory exists specifically so that we have a means for expressing assholish feelings and beliefs without quite feeling like we’ve committed to the full strength of the assholosity that underlies the statement. (It’s definitely implicitly about the self-awareness; nobody in the world hears something like “I’m sorry that you didn’t get that” and genuinely thinks, whew glad to know you feel regret about my failing you, but people say “I’m sorry that you didn’t get that” and then “but I apologized!” all the time, only to realize after some later introspection that they felt upset and hurt, not sorry.)

Anyhow the point is that people can be malicious assholes without even being able to be aware of their own assholishness even if their malice is completely patently obvious to anyone else listening in.

“Look at that dog leaning out the car window, wouldn’t it be funny if it fell out [when the car screeches to a halt at the impending red light]” is an example of jocular malice or malicious jocularity from this morning, but among those of us who were waiting there for the walk light to light, I’m pretty sure the only person to not instantly realize how sick it was was the stoner kid who said it to his friend.

When people think these types of thoughts rather than say them, and then act on those thoughts while laundered blind of their own assholishness, you get stuff like ‘programmer decides to easter-egg in replies to such-a-a-such type request with cheeky-arsed quip or whatever, without realizing they’re actually being quite an insensitive asshole to the end-users by doing so.’

I’m just going to go out there and say the Siri thing was a conspiracy—of one.

I’m just going to note that given how abortion providers in the US don’t advertise themselves as such, while bullshit “pregnancy crisis centers” pretend to be abortion providers, the old mantra of “garbage in, garbage out” seems like the most obvious explanation, and it’s taken a lot of people a lot of time and money to corrupt the dataset that much.

it says something that, in thinking of ways to tweak the system, presumably large numbers of people thought “hey, geeky sci-fi jokes!” but did not think “hey, women’s reproductive health!”

Yes: it says that computer programs are programmed by computer programmers. I believe that xdoctor in Emacs is also callously indifferent to women’s reproductive health.

sg 12.07.11 at 4:21 pm

” That’s an interesting point from a search engine-y perspective, Tedra. 3 out of 10 women have an abortion, but only a very small number of clinics exist. So even though a large proportion of the population are looking for those clinics, a purely algorithmic search engine is going to be trying to find a needle in a haystack.”

Incorrect, actually. Just because something is rare, doesn’t mean that it’s harder to find.

I’ve noticed the tendency for commenters to use the word “conspiracy” (rolls eyes upthread, and sideways to t’other thread) to denigrate claims of entrenched sexism in cases like this. This does a beautiful job of setting up a straw-argument and making your opponent look like a nut at the same time.

From a feminist perspective I find that actually more interesting – you don’t need an explicitly bad guy at all – you just need structural sexism of the tech world (I think Armanda Marcote made that point first).

Yes, THANK you for getting that. Socially entrenched gender roles and expectations, opposition to abortion and assumption that we’re entitled to make access to it difficult, =/= a “conspiracy”.

“the next time someone asks me for money for something in the First World I’ll still ask them how many lives my money will save compared to sending it to UNICEF. Forgive me for wanting to do good rather then be considered good.”

And the beauty of that, my dear Watson, is that you can do this and still – not being female, that is – benefit from structural inequality and sexism, in preferential treatment in careers, higher pay, less time spent in domestic work, more superannuation due to fewer career interruptions… to a greater lesser extent, of course, I wouldn’t assume you benefit from all of these. But it is a statistical probability that you do, or will.

So you can be purer than the rest of us and still come out ahead!

In fact, one might even think that it’s in your interest to ignore these structural inequalities… but ssh!…

Whatever the explanation is, I doubt juvenile frat-boys are behind this. The last thing this demographic wants is becoming fathers.

Helen, so even though I can’t stop benefiting from these structures, I’m morally obligated to destroy them instead of helping others? Of course, feminism at once holds that changing attitudes will naturally destroy them and that they aren’t anyones fault. Clara Zeitkin’s interview of Lenin should show that the road to woman’s liberation is through socialism. And no, I don’t benefit from exemption from domestic labor, nor will I ever. But there we just need to get married people to share equally the domestic chores.

JanieM, you decided to buy warm fuzzies from knowing the people involved rather then save lives. It wasn’t that Friends of Kakamega saved more people then UNICEF, it was that you knew some of the people. And because of that you sent your money elsewhere. You didn’t actually bother to think about what your actions were actually doing, just what sort of person they would make you out to be. Next time think before you give.

Re Mars
back on planet earth, we don’t know how to keep people healthy (bone loss, muscle tone loss, sanity) for the long tri
We don’t know how to build equipment that has a prayer of going
there is no reason to send people there, other then the fun of it; assuming cost scales roughly with square of distance, and moon was 25 billion, in 1970, that makes cost to Mars what, in IWUs (IWU = Iraq war unit, roughly 1 Trillion dollars)
etc
when I was a kid in the 60s, popular science had stories about flying cars, and today they have the same stories.
some things are practical, some are not.

Watson, a lot of kids are living decent lives because of the Kakamega orphanage who would otherwise be on the streets. A lot of kids are going to school who otherwise couldn’t, because the Friends of Kakamega provides the money for them to do it. A lot of people are better off because of that organization, and neither you nor anyone else has a magic yardstick to tell you how to balance those benefits against the benefits of other charitable dollars. It’s not a math problem, but then I don’t expect someone to understand that who has given evidence of never having had a nuanced thought train in his life.

You didn’t actually bother to think about what your actions were actually doing, just what sort of person they would make you out to be. Next time think before you give.

You don’t have a clue how much I bothered to think about that or anything else. Why are you wasting energy giving holier-than-thou sermons to people who aren’t listening, when you should be spending your time earning more money to give to UNICEF? You didn’t actually bother to think about what your actions were actually doing, just how good it made you feel to be superior to someone on Crooked Timber. Next time think before you type.

This, Belle, is why science works: Where’s your evidence? As opposed to speculation?

And no, I feel not the slightest obligation to prove you wrong, to make you say you’re wrong, or indeed even to speculate that there wasn’t a conspiracy of one (or many.)

Science . . . it’s good stuff. Maybe you should learn how it’s done.

Yeah, hellblazer, where’s the frakking courtesy from Belle here?

All I’ve seen from her is nasty, rather unimaginative snark. And snark addressed at an easy target at that.

Oh, But That’s Different, isn’t it? Now, you little enabling piece of noise, why don’t you exhibit some frakking courtesy and apologize? Or at least admit that I maybe have a point here? Naw, according to you, lightweight, pointing out that there’s no there there is frakking discourteous.

Nah, you’re too small for that.

What would be appreciated is that if Belle wants to actually snark on those poor downtrodden women suffering at the hands of the patriarchy, she might, actually, you know, go with snark about real issues? Like the very real problems women face with getting Plan B without everybody and his dog knowing about it when it’s none of their damn business.

That’s a substantive issue, and a very real problem. As opposed to Belle’s usual schtick, which is much ado about nothing and hyperventilating when people call her on it. Gives “feminism” and “feminists” a bad name, she does. You want someone who’s setting women’s rights and issues back with their particular brand of commentary? Her name is Belle Waring.

Naw, according to you, lightweight, pointing out that there’s no there there is frakking discourteous.

That bit, while I might not agree with the diagnosis, wasn’t my peeve. My peeve was with your last sentence, which was thoroughly patronizing and makes some of us with a nominal grounding in the sciences really, *really* quite depressed.

If Belle were snarking on your blog, Oh Fragrant One, then maybe I would take your umbrage a little more seriously. As it is, your comments at 117 seem to evince the attitudes which the original post was aiming a broadside against

Now, you little enabling piece of noise, why don’t you exhibit some frakking courtesy and apologize? … Nah, you’re too small for that.

Fallacious deduction. Did I libel you? I just attempted to reflect the tone of your comment back at you and impugn your behaviour.

But hey, if you want to feel aggrieved, knock yourself out.

(I’d also love to know what I’m enabling, here. Alcohol abuse? Wife-beating? The tyranny of those who set back women’s rights and issues with their particular brand of commentary? Rob Liefeld? Tiki-taka?)

Belle, a shelter in Burnley for female victims of domestic abuse just called. They said that your spiteful drivel has set them back, everyone who supported them is now assuming they’re as bad as you are, and redirecting their time and resources accordingly.

(They also told me I’m small and enabling, and then also criticized my fashion sense, personal hygiene and general demeanour. I think that’s me told.)

@Watson

For crying out loud, you need to consider that saving children needs to be coupled with measures aimed at helping to ensure that their subsequent lives will be other than miserable. “Death isn’t the only thing that matters. What matters is decent lives.” (K.A. Appiah, Cosmopolitanism, p.167 – btw not someone I usually quote b/c I disagree with him on quite a few things, but these two sentences seem right). Saving lives is the first and highest priority but can’t be the only one.

It’s fine to give to UNICEF but does that mean it’s not ok to give to Oxfam or other groups, or Friends of Kakemega, or whatever? What about the group founded by the former U.S. Marine (Barcott) that works in Kibera? Is it really the case that everyone should be concentrating all their giving on one or two organizations? I tend to doubt it. (And Zetkin’s interview with Lenin has, I’m pretty sure, little or nothing to do with this.)

Comprende? SoV is your purpose here to prove that you can’t argue without insult, invective, and faux tough-guyism? If so, done, done, and done. Do you really think that the OP here is a “scientific” argument? Because if you do, you are really seriously missing the point.

Original:
some of us with a nominal grounding in the sciences

Rejoinder:
or shut the hell up about your mighty science knowledge

So, no comprende.

I guess my confusion, leaving aside the genuine ire you have against what you see as Belle’s sloppy reasoning, is why you drag science into the discussion. “Evidence” is not solely the province of the scientific method, unless you feel that the only way to refute or confirm Belle’s claim/theorizing is by a science experiment as opposed to, say investigative journalism or consulting software engineers. Either might support her position, or else show her claim to be wrong.

“Science… it’s good stuff. Maybe you should learn how it’s done” seems a counter-productive addendum to “Where’s your evidence? As opposed to speculation”. Unless this is one of those “scientists can show you all up for charlatans” salvos.

Is the great toilet seat debate settled yet?

Chuckle. Can I call ’em or can I call ’em?

Yep, pointing out the time-wasting no-information bile that is Belle’s latest effort just goes to show that I’m against women and women’s rights.[1] What’s next – I’m antisemitic because I despise the current policies of Israel ;-)

This prediction was just too easy. The “go make a sandwich dear” comment is just so much icing on the cake.

[1]Because nothing says you’re against any sort of equality for women when you explicitly mention your concern that Plan B – contrary to scientific evidence – is not being made available OTC.

I would also like to pre-empt SoV’s next comment by saying that whatever SoV goes on to say: it is right, it shows me up as mistaken; it puts me in my place, it smacks me down;

Shrug. And yet . . . you still haven’t admitted that when doing science the burden of proof is on the one advancing the hypothesis.

Awfully strange, seeing as how it would take you less than twenty words to do so – and you’ve gone well over twice that number in distracting verbiage.

Well? I’m waiting ;-)

So, Tedra, are you saying that Plan B not being available OTC is not a substantive issue?

But I think you’ve let the cat out of the bag here:

There will be no pitting the feminist bloggers against each other. Go this direction and every post I make for the next month will be about Siri just to spite you.

That’s what it’s about, isn’t it? Solidarity ;-) Not anything so tawdry and mechanistic as, you know, actual evidence and actual issues. Feminists got to stick together whatever the merits of their arguments (and if you’ve got actual evidence to support the notion that Siri’s lack of functionality in this regard is the work of a lone misogynist, I strongly suggest you do so right now[1]).

Looks like we’ve come round full circle to – wait for it – Femsplaining.

[1]Unless, of course, you do have this evidence – but you’ve decided to suppress it just to spite me :-)

This is a novel use of emoticons.

Deferring cooking for a little while yet:

you still haven’t admitted that when doing science the burden of proof is on the one advancing the hypothesis.

True. I also didn’t admit that when doing historical investigations the burden of proof is on the one advancing the hypothesis. Or when prosecuting purported crimes, the burden of the proof is on the one advancing the hypothesis. Or that when claiming that Coleridge’s Kubla Khan is inspired by extra-terrestrial, time-travelling shenanigans, the burden of proof is on the one advancing the hypothesis. Your point being?

Going back to your claim that when doing science, the burden of proof is on the one advancing the hypothesis: doesn’t that depend what the hypothesis is? My working hypothesis is that the Earth is an oblate spheroid and that to a good working approximation (ignoring quantum and relativistic effects) it behaves like a solid mass orbiting a far larger mass, with certain amounts of precession. That’s a pretty heavy burden of proof you’re putting on me, I need to clear my schedule at the nearest telescope and start travelling to collect data on lengths of shadows.

Or maybe by proof you mean evidence. Well, again, why bring the scientific method into it when other disciplines have their own standards of epistemological confirmation? Historians are fully able to kick a rock and refute Bishop Berkeley thus, should the mood take them; I don’t think that counts as them employing the scientific method (or, from my meagre attempts to read Berkeley, refute him that well).

Oh look, I’ve been using too many of those “words” again. My bad.

Only by crossing the streams of our righteous outrage can we hope to subdue our common enemy Gozer the Gozerian

I shall slink home defeated, comforted by the image of SoV as the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man.

Oh, and Tedra dear – you’re not the only cookie on the Christmas plate.
In response to a post about sexist condescension this bit of sexist condescension is evidence of sexist condescension, qed.

True. I also didn’t admit that when doing historical investigations the burden of proof is on the one advancing the hypothesis. Or when prosecuting purported crimes, the burden of the proof is on the one advancing the hypothesis. Or that when claiming that Coleridge’s Kubla Khan is inspired by extra-terrestrial, time-travelling shenanigans, the burden of proof is on the one advancing the hypothesis. Your point being?

Sgh. Tht Blle hsn’t prsntd ny vdnc fr hr ln hckr thry.

S thr’s n “thr”, thr. n fct, strngly dobt tht Bll hs th xprts – nd sy, wrn’t ppl jmpng ll vr Sbstn jst th thr dy fr jst th sm rsn? S wht’s dffrnt nw? thr thn Bll bng n f th cntrbtrs mn.

n fct, t pprs tht n n hr knws wht rlly hppnd, r hs th rqst nsdr nfrmtn nd xprts t mk tht dtrmntn. nd thr’s nthng wrng wth syng tht.

Gt t, gys? Smtms hvng dfnt pnn – ny pnn pr r cn – jst mks y lk lk n dt. dn’t knw wh Sr gltchd th wy t dd. Y dn’t thr. Th dffrnc s, I dn’t hve prblm wth dmttng t (wll, th thr dffrnc s m nt usng t s sprngbrd t scr chp rhtrcl pnts thr!)

thr ppl, pprntly, cn’t lv wth tht lvl f ncrtnty; thy cn b n thst r blvr, bt b n mns cld thy vr b gnstc. Sd, rlly.

h, n lst thng:

h, nd Tdr dr – y’r nt th nl ck n th Chrstms plt.
n rspns t pst bt sxst cndscnsn ths bt f sxst cndscnsn s vdnc f sxst ndscnsn, qd.

‘ll tk ths cmmnt wth ll th srsnss dd whn y md th sm cmplnt bt ts lttl bt frm Bll:

Although I am a little hungry; just make me a sandwich before you go, there’s a dear?

xctl th sm srsnss ;-)

It really hurts to say this, but at the risk of not detecting the irony at Tom Bach’s comment, clearly the disemvowelled comment by SoV was meant as satire.

Banging on irrelevantly about the scientific method, though, apparently wasn’t.

Complete non-sequitur: this from SoV seems to put the intended point rather better. Don’t really understand why it wasn’t what was originally said, but hey, that’s ’cause I don’t know a damn thing about science. I think.

Why is it important to speculate about why Siri wasn’t coming up with abortion clinic search results? Isn’t the important demonstrable point simply that Siri wasn’t coming up with these results? Surely the victory here is not identifying whether this or that person is to blame (though Apple, in placing this product on the market, surely can be blamed) – the victory is in getting Siri to function so that women around the country can accurately locate abortion clinics.

@149. I see the vowel-less comments too. They’re awesome! Here’s a sample:

Gt t, gys? Smtms hvng dfnt pnn – ny pnn pr r cn – jst mks y lk lk n dt. dn’t knw wh Sr gltchd th wy t dd. Y dn’t thr. Th dffrnc s, I dn’t hve prblm wth dmttng t (wll, th thr dffrnc s m nt usng t s sprngbrd t scr chp rhtrcl pnts thr!)

Something like this sort of corruption happened with jack strocchi’s comments on a recent thread as well (Farrell’s post about Sullivan, IIRC). Which makes me think that the CT site has some weird Jedi powers that turns troll posts into brilliant gibberish.

Maybe worth noting that when you type “abortion clinic” into the search engine duckduckgo it finds the Abortion Care Network as a top search result (they’re a directory of abortion care providers with some bare bones information and resource links). This requires extensive and tricky algorithmic computation, and/or recognizing that when someone inquires about an abortion clinic maybe considering returning http://www.abortionclinic.org/ is reasonable.

ACN is not exactly keeping a low/concealed profile, with the word “abortion” appearing 67 times on their homepage alone, which they have also populated with quite enough META tags to satisfy even the hungriest of spider crawler link-finding things. Other similar searches brought up other websites, but every top result I could generate contained address and contact information for abortion clinic health service providers.

js, it’s called disemvowelment, it’s quite Googleable, and it’s a troll-discouraging device. Pioneered by the great Teresa Nielsen-Hayden, and now relatively standard. She is the one with the awesome Jedi powers, and I am not joking.

BTW, Tedra, there are some commenters here who have a long and bad history – Scent of Violets is one, Jack Strocchi is another. Some are directly abusive and obnoxious, some are the sort of people who will make a thread about what they want to discuss, at an annoying volume (i.e., when every other comment is by them).

I suggest asking the other posters about them, and using the ban-hammer or disemvowelling knife regularly.

Watson:

I give a small amount of money to Oxfam every month.

I also give $15 dollars every year to the college I went to, mainly so they won’t bombard me with endless letters and phone calls. Of course, I could choose to ignore the letters/phone calls and give them nothing. It’s not like they really need the money since they are a wealthy institution. (They claim they need the money, of course, but they don’t.)

How many children each year am I killing by giving that $15 to my alma mater instead of adding it to what I give to Oxfam or giving it to a group recommended by GiveWell? Three? Four? Ten? And since I’m a child murderer, why am I being allowed to walk the streets? Why aren’t I in prison, at a minimum? Why haven’t I been charged with murder and sentenced to death? Since I don’t make much of a contribution to the world anyway — if I did, I wouldn’t be spending time on a CT comments thread, after all — my death would be no great loss. (Plus, I am an immoral, bad person, so my death would also be no loss from that standpoint.) Would you suggest that I be killed by lethal injection or by electrocution?

I used to think along Watson’s utilitarian lines in my charitable giving, but changed my mind, and basically for the reasons that JanieM gives. In my case I started to imagine what it would be like to be a homeless American full of hypocritical utilitarian checkwriters–“Oh, I can’t give money to help you when that same money would save ten children in Africa.” The day I decide to pay myself the bare minimum I need to function and earn money to send overseas (no saving for retirement, obviously, as that money would be best spent elsewhere) I might reconsider this issue.

LFC, utilitarianism doesn’t answer questions about good or bad but about courses of action. That makes your and JamieM questions meaningless from a utilitarian standpoint: deserts are never part of utilitarian theory, and your questions rely heavily on deserts and base moral intuitions. But yes, we’ve drifted far from the topic.

As for your sensible question the answer is 1/10th according to Singer. Seven years of life vanish when you give to your alma matter.

Watson: “utilitarianism doesn’t answer questions about good and bad but about courses of action”

Odd, since Mill refers to it as a theory of morality, and Rawls and others treat it as a major tradition of moral philosophy. From ch.2 of Mill’s Utilitarianism:”…these supplementary explanations do not affect the theory of life on which this theory of morality is grounded–namely, that pleasure, and freedom from pain, are the only things desirable as ends….” (M. talks about higher and lower pleasures, but anyway utilitarianism clearly does “answer questions about good and bad,” ISTM. And in more recent versions too, I would think…)

the problem here isn’t utilitarianism, it’s that everyone involved is assuming that Oxfam faces a smooth, monotonic production function where lives saved = f(donations), and this function doesn’t exist.

‘Considering that David Hume was willing to consign ethics to the dustbin of metaphysics and yet was a utilitarian’

The first claim here is controversial (for whatever it’s worth, I don’t buy it, but reasonable people can disagree). The second claim is quite implausible. Hume is not a utilitarian but a virtue theorist: he’s not interested in judging actions according to their overall results, he’s interested in judging individual character. When he talks about social utility, he’s giving an explanation for why a decent person cares about, for example, others’ virtuous actions which don’t affect her personally. He’s not offering a justification for action.

(Sorry, Hume scholar, can’t help myself.)

Ah, you are right. It was a while since I read Hume, and I recalled only his discussion of property rights which is utilitarian. To the extent he attempts to explain the sentiments, it is via utilitarianism. Certainly the conclusion to the Treatise of Human Nature has him explaining virtues as promoting good things to those who possess the virtues or to others, motivated by sympathy. That seems a lot like utilitarianism in an emotivist cloak.

176: I’ll help. That “Antônio Conselheiro” dude is not really a Portugese revolutionary.

And I…wait…you know me.

Disemvowelling this get a laugh.

I sense new energy on what had become a somewhat stale blog.

So clearly, little hysterical Belle Waring needs to dial it back, and defer to the more scientifically-minded menfolk

Oh, do stuff those words in your own mouth first before trying them on others. To presume cock-up before conspiracy, based upon the polluted information pool for women’s reproductive health in the US, does not mean that the cock-up is acceptable.

Watson, let me throw some Mill at you (LFC: your point’s exactly right, but this might be more effective):

The creed which accepts as the foundation of morals, Utility, or the Greatest Happiness Principle, holds that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness.

Now you might say that the right action/wrong action criterion is different from standards of “good” vs. “bad”. So I give you this:

From the dawn of philosophy, the question concerning the summum bonum, or, what is the same thing, concerning the foundation of morality, has been accounted the main problem in speculative thought, has occupied the most gifted intellects, and divided them into sects and schools, carrying on a vigorous warfare against one another.

Go and read the whole thing. Utilitarianism (and Utilitarianism) is an investigation of and (purported) answer to, the question of the “highest good”.

Let’s move on to Hume. The Enquiry could conceivably be read as utilitarian. The account of property rights in the Treatise is explicitly based in a “convention” that is motivated by a recognition of self-interest. So it seems rather more contractualist than utilitarian. (You can check out David Gauthier’s “David Hume, Contractarian”, for one version of this argument. (You may need a JSTOR subscription.))

Look, the point here is this: you can give your money to whoever or whatever you want. But it’s best not to claim the moral high ground if you’re unsure about (a) what “the moral high ground” means, and (b) what, umm, “quotable philosophers” have said about it.

18th and 19th century philosophers knew about the internet!?

My pride stings so painfully when I can’t even derail a thread that I totally agree with. It’s somewhat difficult to respond since the comments are all over the place, but here goes…

(Personal note): BW makes things exciting and attracts attention. Good for business and trolling. I think this is my first double post on a thread after all. The passion (not mine) so allures…

Impact of concluding statements of the OP? I think the outrage is fair, if Siri was the only way you got information your universe. What if you stopped buying certain products? What if all the richpoor people asking Siri about biology realized it had nothing to do with any “juvenile frat-boy” programmer?

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/world/jan-june11/china_04-13.html
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1382396/Workers-Chinese-Apple-factories-forced-sign-pledges-commit-suicide.html (build my computer bitches!)
http://www.itworld.com/hardware/228133/apple-factory-workers-strike-china-loyalty-rises-among-iphone-users

There is no conspiracy, only salesmanship. Buy an ipad, won’t we all?

In conclusion, I think putting nets up to save the world is totally awesome. I’d jump out of my highrise apartment every day if i knew a net was saving me. One last thing based on so-called news (from previous link): “the investigation found that employees claimed they were not allowed to speak to each other.” I think this is way more hardcore than Disemvoweling.

Cheers and rock on BW.

grismcthorn

“Of course, I used to think like Donald M until I thought about what it would be like to die of Guinea worm while homeless people in the US some more food then they usually do. Hitting the emotional button is easy. It also is of no help in moral reasoning. ”

How do you know?

Also, you persist in ignoring one of JanieM’s points. How is it that this concern over utility maximizing only seems to occur when we are comparing money given to the American homeless vs money given to overseas children? Don’t you think the money you waste on the internet or some other facet of your life could be better spent on those children?

That “Antônio Conselheiro” dude is not really a Portugese revolutionary.

More a Brazilian visionary.