Hi. I'm someone's mom, and both of us understand this. When you use mothers as a metonym for people who don't understand technology, think about who you are assuming is your audience, and who are you are excluding and insulting.
I think it seems appropriate to laugh (especially since it pertains in your particular life) and at the same time understand and appreciate what sort of societal stereotypes it perpetuates, which might then contribute toward less women desiring to participate in technology communities.
Personally, I am much more bothered by the caustic atmosphere created by the overly Politically Correct backlash when an insignificant implication is made...
The environment is caustic in large part because you're pouring lye onto it.
Someone took a moment to explain --- very correctly --- that using "mom" as a metonym for "technically naive" is inaccurate, dismissive, and exclusionary. That comment didn't accuse anyone of intending to do any of that. It simply pointed out the outcome of the wording. The very same comment could have been written about "grandfather" and ageism.
Nobody asked you to be offended, or to take offense.
I thought that if so many were being offended on the behalf of others (women, parents, elderly, I dunno), the implication was that there was something that needed attention.
Due respect, but who do you think you're kidding? Use your browser, hit CMD-F (or whatever), type "offen", and grep through the thread to see who's using that word.
Now pay attention to the timestamps and see who's introducing it. The only person to use the word before you was carefully explaining that they were not taking offense. You responded to them by accusing them of being "primed and ready".
Please, please stop doing this to HN threads. What you're doing on this one is poisonous.
Top thread refers the title being "insulting", which is what set this whole thing in motion.
I am not ranting & raving. I am having a logical conversation. Stop treating me like I am out of control. I am happy to have a logical conversation, but your numerous "please, please stop" replies are non-contributory and demeaning, so... please stop. :)
No, you just said my posts were poisonous and you repeatedly begged me to stop, which is completely unconstructive criticism, bordering on plain old insults, which I never resorted to.
Just because I disagree with you, you think you can bully me with nonsense rather than having a conversation? Whatever. You win.
I was pleased when I opened the comment section to see this as the top comment.
I want to live in a world where being kind, respectful, understanding, and caring are the highest of virtues. In that world, hopefully all people will work toward working together to understand others and appreciate our many wonderful differences instead of insulting them, even in a micro-aggression, this might be funny, yet deprecating sort of way.
Although I personally don't often spend much time being offended by these culturally accepted deprecating statements, I have recently started to wonder if it is contributing toward the public policies that attempt to marginalize and discriminate against any group of people.
Moms build things. Girls build things. Women build things. I build things.
Does being kind & understanding mean allowing someone to make a joke about you? I often allow jokes at my expense if the intent was not malicious.
Also, I perceived the joke to be making fun of the elderly, not women. Honestly, you post seems like you were primed & ready to be offended by the slightest thing, which has more negative social impact than the light-hearted title of the linked article.
Interesting. I think it is unlikely that most people would consider me easily offended.
If it wasn't historically pervasive, yet false to declare that women are not tech savvy, I likely would not have said anything, however, this is a technology focused community and thus it seems relevant to not promote that unfortunate typecast.
I was unaware that Moms were considered elderly - I had my first child at 25, is that old? I guess that's another case in point why not to use 'Mom' in this sense, it comes off insulting to some and also is perceived to mean multiple, possibly unintended things.
I think your assessment of my intent and approach are incorrect.
I fear we are entering the spiral of pointing fingers at one another.
As a mother and thoughtful human being, this is when I would suggest to my children they walk away from the situation at hand and I will thus follow my own advice.
Why would it be OK to make fun of the elderly? Why would you stick up for that?
Also, the person to whom you're responding had, when you wrote this, one carefully worded comment on the thread. "Primed and ready"? Clearly, the person on the thread most fitting that description is you. Please stop doing this.
My comment about the elderly was intended to show that the poster was overly focused sexism when the title may have been referencing ageism or perhaps something else or perhaps nothing negative at all.
> I want to live in a world where being kind, respectful, understanding, and caring are the highest of virtues.
That's cool and stuff, but the humankind as a huge organism doesn't work like this and will never as long as we don't start genetically modify humans at scale to be engineered that way when hatched. We're still just "animals" or low-power carbon based computers if you prefer that phrasing.
Obviously, because that creates the presumption that the thoughts and opinions of dads (or moms, or grandfathers, or whatever) regarding technology can be dismissed.
I always thought a statement of someone's ignorance was more or less a statement of fact, vs questioning someone's abilities or intelligence, which are considered insults.
Whether the implication was intended to be negative... I dunno.
"Figure of speech" isn't a defense against something being harmful. "That's very white of you" used to be an expression in the South in the US, where "white" meant "good". (It's now changed to me, "That's very Christian of you.")
Saying you are a mom (or dad) and are offended is a valid argument that offence is occurring. Saying you are a dad (or mom) and are not offended is not a valid argument that offence is not occurring.
Sounds right for any rational argument.
Of course, having established that offence is occurring, it still leaves open what the appropriate response is.
Stereotypes wouldn't be stereotypes if there wasn't a grain of truth in them.
If we take a sample of N>1000 mothers, I bet my money more then 50% would fall under this "stereotype". Is this democratic enough to suit as an argument ?
> Stereotypes wouldn't be stereotypes if there wasn't a grain of truth in them.
Not true. Stereotypes are usually based on assumptions. The "grain of truth hypothesis" is used to enhance the stereotype, most often by people that prefer to believe in the assumption rather than facts.
So everybody's complaining about the second part of the title, I'm gonna complain about the first. Metadata is a very broad and general term, and metadata is not bad. Here I thought I'm gonna read an article about why I shouldn't be storing metadata in my applications. Instead I get a video explaining how data is collected about me on the internet, mostly via social websites, and how this data can be used not according to my personal interests. That's a very specific case of metadata, and I don't even think the "meta" prefix is important here.
Agree. The non technical folk have latched on to a specific use of the word "metadata" completely ignorant of the broader use. They should just say "data" but "'metadata" somehow makes it scarier?!
The non technical meanings are "metadata" and "content".
The use of "metadata" word is designed to make it sound less scary - it's a word that politicians use when they want to reassure people.
"We don't want the content! We just want the metadata - how long a call lasted for, for example".
It's a good thing that people are a bit scared about metadata. It's the metadata attacks that make tor hard. It's the metadata attacks that make end-to-end encryption weakers.
Companies collect a lot of data. They should be thinking carefully about how much they actually need, and how harmful it is to their users if it gets slurped.
Longer video (25 minutes) of a talk from BlackHat 2013, about how metadata was used to expose an illegal(?) 2003 CIA operation carried out in Italy. It's by a non-tech journalist, so it's also largely non-technical and provides a very interesting overview of what metadata can expose.
Interesting video, but it feels a bit 'icky' to me, for lack of better words.
The voice feels patronising, perhaps even scary, and towards the end it suddenly turns into a description of a dystopia. If this were an advert I think it'd have most reaching for the remote control fairly rapidly.
It's a real challenge to describe these issues without looking unhinged.
Personally, as a (would say) techie, I tend to underestimate the importance of this topic.
Indeed, the times when I used Tor I felt curious about the technology and how it achieved anonymous traffic. But when people asked me why I was using it I didn't know what to answer.
"You know, those poor people under dictatorships..."
To my understanding, we miss a big public case where metadata and information collected are used against western people.
I fear we won't see any, before it'll be too late.
I have no problem with dystopian unrealistic scenarios -- and have no problem accepting it could happen, under the ghost of terrorism.
But the majority of people feel this is all too much "cyber-punk" or, worse, that "you have something to hide".
If you're gonna try to explain to non-technical people maybe you should choose your title more carefully. Metadata itself is not bad. It's how it is used and who has access to it.
The thing that's bad here is:
1) Lack of personal control over your own meta data. You can' go to Google and say "Erase everything you know about me." easily. Some Google services allow you to do something like this, others don't, it's purposely a big pain in the ass. That goes for all these big companies.
2) Most (all?) governments have too much easy access to this data, and no public disclosure or oversight about what/who they are looking at and for what reasons.
"It's only metadata" and "We drone strike people based on metadata" aren't exactly the most congruent of messages, are they?
Either it's close to useless to the point where we have to question why they bother gathering so much in the first place and adding to the noise, or it's so valuable that we assign assassination targets based on it.
Which is it, world governments? You can only choose one. You can't choose the middle, because that would be admitting to "assassinating people based on mostly useless information" (and therefore likely killing many innocent people because of that).
Its a common feature of HN that we don't condone sexism, racism, hate speech etc. A lazy stereotype of dumb women in an article title is not cool here.
Because criticizing those in authority is very different from the opposite. The tired old dead horse of "its technically also racism to criticize the plantation master!" is an unworthy argument.
The "punching up is okay!" excuse is only useful to people who are in it for the punching.
How about if nobody gets punched. Don't roll out demeaning stereotypes against any groups; instead, treat people like human beings. Who knows, it might work out!
What? Criticism of a specific subculture/attitude is not the same as being anti-male. If someone was stereotyping all men as "bros", that would be equivalent. And I'm pretty sure we'd have plenty of reactions against it.
What exactly do you find "off base"? I'm saying that I didn't see the same sort of backlash to a "bro culture" article as I am seeing for this one here.
Edit. So the term I was specifically thinking of was not "bro culture" but rather "brogramming", which is definitely some sort of jab at male individuals in the programming profession.
I'm a proud SJW. I actually find it really amusing that such a positive, admirable label is used as an insult. I have people in my life that I love who are women, gays, people with mental illness, etc. I'm proud to be a "warrior" for them. I'm not exactly sure what you're afraid of "SJWs" doing to your life, but I promise that we'd fight for you, too, if you needed it.
The problem is that people think that because I do not get offended by "mom" in the title, I can't also have men, women, gays and the disabled in my life whom I love.
That's a straw man. No one has said you should be offended. They're just saying that there are really good reasons that "mom" in the title is problematic.
And yet all your comments have been on the reactions to the video, and not about the video itself. Physician, heal thyself!
The reality is that the video is not very interesting, really. The content is well known around here, and even simplified explanations have been done before. There's nothing much to say about it.
It wasn't about gender. It was about "incompetent about technology." Your mom, grandma, dad, grandpa, dumb cousin or incompetent friend would all work as well.
Don't you see that you just proved the point? You read "your mother" and you understood "incompetent about technology." That is the sexist stereotype we get irritated by.
If your experience was anything like mine, then you grew up regularly handling technology (fixing computers, hooking up VCRs, etc.) for and explaining it to people older than you. That's the stereotype at play in the title--old person won't understand tech.
It would be quite different (and have a totally different effect) if the title said "3 minute video even a girl will understand"
Google searching shows very many more hits for "your mother would understand" and "your grandmother would understand" than for father / grandfather / grandpa / etc.
The number of query results from a google search aren't evidence of anything except that your argument is weak enough that you couldn't find actual evidence.
Except I would have made the exact same assumption about "your father". The idea is that our parents, grandparents or whatever are technologically incompetent. It had nothing to do with gender.
It's heartening to see this thread land so solidly on the intersection of sexism and ageism. You're right, assuming older generations are technically incompetent is wrong, mean, and unnecessary--just like assuming the same thing about women. When you combine the two with phrases like "so simple your mom could understand", you end up with a big bucket of nope.
My mom has a STEM degree, and her mom had a bleeding edge Thinkpad when the rest of my family was married to a beige box. My dad is a system administrator, and his dad is a chemical engineer. I have a postgraduate degree in software engineering. To assume any of us are technically incompetent because of our age or gender is insulting, and exclusionary.
So your goal by making people not write titles like this is to completely exterminate people's connotation of it?
We all agree sexism is bad, and there are real issues to overcome in all countries, but sometimes I would feel more supportive of the case if it focused on what really is unfair, and a hindrance to a gender.
>We all agree sexism is bad, and there are real issues to overcome in all countries, but sometimes I would feel more supportive of the case if it focused on what really is unfair, and a hindrance to a gender.
Thank you.
This is so indicative of the internet generation, where talking about something ridiculous and missing the point is seen as actually doing something.
Look where the downvotes are occurring; every comment that doesn't think the title is a big deal. God forbid someone's opinion is different. Remember that when this crowd expresses how great and open to debate HackerNews is as a community.
> No, the long history of the phrase used to stereotype someone who knows nothing about technology made it about gender.
No, it was age ageism. But the STEM field has an enormous gender gap so now we're actively looking for every single sentence that might be gender-biased and pretending that our feelings are facts.
This is just another example of having a hammer makes everything look like a nail. The title was very clearly biased... that "older" generation can't understand modern technologies. But we had plenty of people here to defend women, even when they don't need it.
I find it interesting and funny that this video about metadata turned into one giant metadiscussion of the video with almost no mention of the actual content.
The amount of outrage generated over a very common turn of phrase honestly smacks of a disinformation campaign. I guess privacy matters are 'passé' on HN now.
Just because it's a common turn of phrase doesn't mean we should be less outraged. In fact, we should be more outraged, because it's more likely that it's actively harming people. Ideas -- in this case, stereotypes -- are very powerful and have real effects. Language is important in creating expectations, and people are given opportunities based on expectations.
Also, it's not a common turn of phrase in my world because I don't spend time with assholes stuck in 1950.
Insulting anonymous people based on their behavior (and using curse words) isn't harming anyone, especially because they're anonymous.
Perpetuating stereotypes does harm people, because it degrades people based on the way that they were born (or, in this case, also based on the fact that they decided to have a child).
No one is on the verge of electing Trump, by the way. More than 70% of women dislike him. More than 60% of the country actively dislikes him[1].
