Re: IESG Statement On Oppressive or Exclusionary Language

[Dan Harkins <[e-mail]>]

On 7/26/20 8:49 AM, Salz, Rich wrote:
>>       The idea that a metaphor can prevent someone from joining a STEM career
>      is ridiculous.
>
> And how do you know this, strongly enough to say that those who feel otherwise are ridiculous

   I know this because I pursued a STEM career. It was an incredible
amount of work to get into an impacted major at university, elbowing
out other ambitious and smart kids. I made a great many sacrifices
to get what I wanted so the idea that a metaphor would cause me to
throw up my hands and say, "forget it" is ridiculous. It is
inconceivable that someone would be willing to sacrifice time,
friends, and fun, to do extra work in order to succeed but then would
decide a mere word was a bridge too far and give up.

   I also know its ridiculous because the people who assert otherwise
do so with a fallacy, the residual fallacy. It goes like this:

   1. find a statistical difference between 2 groups;
   2. demonstrate that a random selection would not produce that
      difference;
   3. "control" some arbitrary variable to eliminate it from the
      difference;
   4. attribute the remaining difference to whatever you want.

So people who want to find racism in RFCs will naturally determine
that the reason black people are not pursuing STEM degrees according
to their proportion in select countries, after eliminating racism in
university admissions, must be because the technical specifications
necessary to pursue that career use exclusionary language (like
"master-slave") that dissuades the black person from the STEM career.
That's the residual. Ta-da!

   It's completely unscientific and this process can be used to "prove"
both racism in technical specifications and also to "prove" genetic
inferiority among races. It can, in fact, "prove" anything you want
which is why this particular fallacy is so attractive.

   Does this answer your question?

   Dan.