Sexism in Tech

I understand that whatever I'm writing here can be used against me. But I still believe that people should be judged for who they are and not who they seem to be, and I hold myself to this standard. I just hope that whoever happens to chance upon this inactive blog in the future understands that I wrote this as a 23 year old and I may have changed by the time you're reading this. If I haven't, then judge me as appropriate.

I read this article recently: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4980350

Before reading this article, I hadn't realized how big of a problem sexism in tech is. Man, I really feel for all the crap the writer had to go through. I can't empathize, but I know it must have felt worse than anything I've been through. But at that same time, I know that I have perpetuated this myself - I remember that at the first day working at BloomReach (a tech company), when Helen introduced herself to me, the first thing that I noticed was that she's cute. And the first question that popped to my mind was, "Are you an engineer?", because I've heard that women are underrepresented in engineering roles in tech and I wanted to check my hypothesis. She smiled and defused the question really well, but it was only after I read some other article that I realized the undertone in that question.

And so I realize I'm part of the problem. I am biased. When I find out that a woman I haven't met before is in tech, it genuinely comes to me as a surprise (especially if she's attractive, but that's another stereotype). Unconsciously, my words reveal my beliefs, and they make them feel a little smaller.


Why is this a problem? After all, stereotypes can serve as mental shortcuts that allow us to arrive at better decisions with less information. It is not factually wrong to claim that since women are underrepresented in tech, if the only information I am given is that this person is a woman, then the conditional probability that she's not in tech is higher than otherwise. So if I were to go up to a random woman(not in the CS department building of course) and say, "you are probably not a CS major", I would be right most of the time. But that makes her feel bad and doesn't achieve anything. So I know not to say it.

Alright, so I shouldn't voice out my beliefs based on stereotypes that make people feel threatened. But if it's likely to be true, I am still justified in believing it, right? Why should I be blamed for attempting to arrive at a belief that's more likely to be correct than not?

I think the problem here lies with priming. I'm not surprised at all when a guy tells me he's in tech - why? The base rate of people in tech isn't really that high in the first place. The difference, I think, is the bunch of concepts that pop into my head (aka the schemata that get activated) when I see a person. Somehow(just guessing), the schema for "probably not a tech person" gets activated when I see a girl but not when I see a guy, even though the belief would be justified for both guys and girls.

I really can't think of a "thinking cure" or "reading cure" for my bias. But I know of one method that has worked for me in the past. I previously held the stereotype that girls aren't good at math. But Elaine blows me out of the water when it comes to math, and working with her on psets has shattered this stereotype for me. I suppose if I had done psets with Irene it would nuke the stereotype into oblivion(along with whatever ego I started with), but I'm not at the level where I'm even taking the classes she's taking.

That might work.

(Unrelated random trivia: Lisa Einstein is currently studying undergrad physics at Princeton.)

"Sibei cui sia!" => "[This is in] an extremely deplorable state!"

Perhaps you can end a proof by contradiction with the words "LPPL. QED." Hokkien + Latin ftw.

Random thought:
Is the 叉烧包 song just a sneakier version of "My Humps"?

Reconciliation

Yesterday, I saw a video from North Korea about American propaganda. Despite the disapproving tone and wide generalizations, I think they've got some things right. It's an hour and a half long, but I think it's worth watching. (Also note that the translator now has some doubts about whether this film is really targeted at DPRK citizens or are actually targeted at the global population.)

In summary, the video is about how the US uses the media to maintain a consumerist culture and keep its citizens ignorant and "enslaved", so that they don't spend time thinking about things that really matter. It discusses how advertisements, celebrities, the War on Terror, and empty catchphrases are used to achieve this, how the US consumerist culture is unsustainable, and why people in the US are not truly free.

I was intrigued by this video, so I asked people about their thoughts on it over brunch.

"Oh, propaganda about propaganda? Propagand-ception!"

"It's from North Korea? They're not doing so well themselves either."

"What's wrong with a consumerist culture? Is there something that matters more than economics? Anyway you should watch this movie about North Korea invading the US, it's like top ten in the box office."

And they continued talking about their favorite food, sports teams, and the flowers in the middle of the table. Sigh. I guess these things matter a lot to them.

-------------------------

So here are my thoughts.

A preface to talking about "consumption"
One easy trap to fall into when talking about consumerism is using the word consumption to describe anything we do in order to make it sound like it is a bad thing to do, then using a different set of vocabulary to talk about an alternative in order to make the alternative sound like a "solution" to the "problem". The video commits this mistake a lot. Whenever the video talks about consumption, it shows footages of morbidly obese people eating junk food to viscerally cement the point that consumption = bad. But a farmer eating rice with beanstalks after a hard day of work is also consumption. So is taking the train. Many things we do are acts of consumption, and you have to do some of it to remain as a productive member of society. You have to eat something. You have to dress appropriately for your job interview. You have to go school because it helps you make better decisions, and the decisions you make affect others. All these are acts of consumption in some form, but few will argue that they are bad things to do. So consumption ≠ bad. But consumption is a word loaded with bad connotations, so I'll avoid using this word.

Balancing out the video's tone
The video claims that a consumerist culture is the result of a positive feedback loop in a capitalist economy:
1) People want to buy things. People who make and sell goods want to buy things too, so they want to make more money.
2) To make more money, corporations need to sell more goods, so they advertise aggressively. The most effective advertisements have an effect of making people want to buy their things. Go back to 1).

But the implicit message is that in such a culture, when people buy and use/eat things,
1) They are only doing it to make themselves feel better. It implies a hollow and ultimately unfulfilling existence. This is essentially the problem of how one can possibly find meaning in life if one subscribes to utilitarianism. It's a philosophical problem and capitalism did not cause it.
2) They don't do anything else. Since corporations strongly affect what people want to buy, by controlling what people buy they effectively control how people live, and thus the people are "enslaved". Well, this is not true. When someone buys a camera, it's generally for taking photos and not "look I have a camera I am cool". The things you own facilitate what you already want to do. It would take a fantastic leap of reason to argue that an artist who buys a canvas is a slave to consumerism just because he/she bought something from a corporation. Using something that you have bought is also not just a passive act that merely fulfills a hollow desire. You can use a cell phone's text messaging function to meet up with friends. A husband can also use his car to drive his pregnant wife home(shout out!). People want to be nice to each other and will do it in any way they want. There is still a great deal of freedom in a world where almost everything you use has to be bought with money.
3) They mostly buy things they don't need. Technically you don't need a camera to survive. Technically you don't need books either. Or vaccines. But now that technology has granted us such powers, why not use it? Good reasons: You could have spent that money on better things. It's bad for the environment. Bad reason: You don't need it to survive.

So the big problem that the video makes that it assumes that life in a consumerist culture is inherently unfulfilling. It need not be. But one thing they did bring up is: people could, theoretically, live happier and healthier lives with less impact on the environment, so why aren't we doing it? I think this is a good point. But there is the problem of how such a life is going to look like. The next problem is how we get there and stay there. It's hard though, because many people are already used to a certain lifestyle and it would be a very disruptive change. (People have tried disruptive changes before, but it didn't work.)

Is there a point to it though? Even if we are not making cultural progress, there is definitely progress in infrastructure and science. If the Earth is all we have to care about, then if we can find the "meaning to life", not having scientific and technological progress that doesn't really matter either. But we'll all be fucked if an asteroid comes along.

The problem of sustainability is a big problem for capitalism though. Perhaps capitalism causes such a strain on the planet that it doesn't even make sense to worry about asteroids. I don't know. But the technology actually exists to solve our problems, it's just that incentives are currently not aligned correctly for everyone to act in the optimal way. When solar/fusion power becomes available on a large scale, we're going to be okay.

I remember one year ago, I asked a Romanian, "So Romanian uses the English alphabet?"

The reply: "English uses the roman alphabet."

---------fast forward---------

"Ah I see, so you speak English in Singapore. But where does the accent come from?"

"I don't have an American accent because I'm not from America."

Can the flaws in the MCMC algorithm give some insight on stereotyping?

Stereotyping = guessing based on prior assumptions. Tends to be more accurate than guessing at random.
Why bad? People less likely to recognize individual differences and focus on group differences, which may be of a small magnitude. Humans are limited - focus on group differences => less attention to individual differences (Side note: less attention to individual differences = bad? Or only in individualistic cultures like US?)

Flaw of MCMC algorithm: the sampling process is biased, especially when features are highly correlated. Positive feedback loop, occasionally broken by chance. Slow convergence. Similar to stereotyping? Less accurate, and tends to "jump to conclusions".

random thoughts

Random ideas:

Is it feasible to scan entire books without flipping any pages?
- Approach: Powerful beam of focused light that passes through the pages. Focal length can be changed to provide more data points. Page boundaries can be discerned by the difference in absorbance of paper, laminate and ink.
- Difficulties: Thick hard-cover books would be quite opaque. Difficult for sensor to discern print on pages that face each other. Noise due to paper grain.
- Easier workarounds: Mechanical page flipper. In fact, it probably already exists.

VCG mechanism (which is truthful in DRM under non-negative valuation, non-positive external contribution and quasi-linear utility domain) is not collusion proof. It's truthful because telling the truth is the Nash equilibrium. However, Nash equilibrium does not imply sub-game perfect. VCG is also not collusion-proof. But interestingly, it seems that Nash equilibrium, if we consider for simplicity that the action set is continuous and differentiable, only considers the first and second derivatives of the multi-dimensional mapping between utilities and utilities (for each outcome rule assuming a dominant strategy exists for all players and they play that). Wait, it's not a derivative of a function - it's a derivative of many functions. Darn. I'm wondering if there is an many-to-many mapping equivalent of a Hessian determinant. If there is, it would probably be completely useless, but still kinda cool. The real solution might not even give any insight since non-integral indices doesn't mean anything at all in this scenario.

My first-world problem: Watching a youtube video on developing countries when I have a slow internet connection, and feeling guilty and annoyed at the same time when it stops to buffer.

Also, reading the Communist Manifesto while listening to "Do you hear the people sing" is pretty awesome.

I remember vaguely that I would once have used words other than "a mapping from the set of combination of clothes to days" in a dinner conversation. Nowadays it feels like a completely normal and natural way of saying something that everyone can understand. Thanks Charter club. (I think the words would have been a choice of outfit, but I'm not sure if my mouth has ever uttered these words before either.)

Quora is amazing. But I still think the problem of people repeating arguments that have a set of good counter-arguments still hasn't been adequately solved. I want to learn more about what it takes to build a large information system, and it's looking rather intimidating. There is the computational component, the incentive component, and the business component. I mean, holy crap it's a hard problem. But I still think it's absolutely worth solving. Branch is doing nicely on part of allowing people to debate on issues that branch out, and stack exchange is doing well on the community edited answers front. In fact, stack overflow is fantastic on search - if the top thread on google isn't the question you're asking, one of the "related questions" probably is. It's amazing and worth emulating. Stack overflow is solving one of the problems on forums. But debates aren't handled very well, and the available solutions still disappoint me. What I would like to see is more scoring of responses to arguments. Quora allows embedded quotes. That is fantastic - I would like the whole internet to allow embedded quotes, so that attribution is easy.

Seriously though, can we have embedded quotes for the whole internet? What would it take? First problem - webpages change. Can't archive everything - too much space needed. A browser tool for a generating citation on the fly? That would be nice, but seems a bit intrusive. Yeh, attribution of a source in a user-friendly yet informative and structured way is hard. Reproducing the source wholesale could probably do it. Sounds like a job that "turn it in" has already figured out though, so the infrastructure definitely already exists.

"Ideas" are difficult to handle - it's so context dependent. A probabilistic approach is good at figuring out the topic, but is it good at figuring out the meaning?

I wonder what hardwired parameters our brains have. What is the "corpus" of a human being? It would be interesting if we can get hold of all the sensory inputs to a child from birth onwards. What does the baby know about the world when it's born, and how much of it was learnt from experiences in the womb? (Alas, hard to know)

Implementing an MCMC algorithm for Bayesian reasoning is pretty interesting. There was this case where all the nodes reinforced each other, and the algorithm took a really long time to converge - because the chance of the algorithm "changing its mind" about the central node's value. It makes me wonder if that is somehow related to religious beliefs - strongly reinforcing nodes. But that requires a certain model of reasoning.

Thoughts on a model of reasoning (I'm sure the cogn-psy peeps have figured out a large part of it, but I guess I can always ramble). People can hold on to inconsistent beliefs. People only reason some of the times, and believe what has been said most of the time.