Re: [DIYbio] Re: Help end harassment in hacking!

I haven't said anything until now for this exact reason: I don't know, haven't met, and until this thread had not even *heard* of any of the people or labs involved in this situation. Granted I live in a hole with a rock on top of it, but that does not obligate me to act, or even make a decision, without reasoning through the information available to me.

It is certainly the case that nobody should be made subject to harassment or unwanted attention, from anybody. I haven't heard any disagreement with that point.

It is certainly the case that harassment should have consequences. I don't think anyone particularly objects to that notion either.

It is also the case that the people Jen accuses have not presented any substantive response to her quite detailed accounts of their actions, and that has a bad smell to it.

But "end harassment in hacking" is one of those open-ended aspirations like "end terrorism," and it also smells a bit off that Jen has so far sidestepped all the questions people have asked about what specific consequences would make amends for the harassment she experienced. Jen also appeals to the authority of Julie Horvath and Liz Henry. Liz Henry is one of the founding members of the Ada Initiative, an organization whose primary activity is to whip up social media frenzies about sexism in technology. Their website at one point mentioned that they provided "consulting services" to companies that were having "diversity issues"; this language has disappeared from the site, probably because it made "corporate blackmail as a business model" just a little too obvious. (Now they just provide workshops and trainings like any other diversity org, but they remain a huge mover and shaker in the 24-hour outrage cycle that lampreys like BuzzFeed and DailyDot feed off for the advertising clicks.) 

It's probably too late for this situation to escape the attention of the 24-hour outrage cycle. Not much we can do about that; try not to get too distracted by it, folks. Jen does still have a problem.

So, Jen, can you answer that question for us? These "culture wars" drag on because the discourse always stays at this high level of abstraction. But we're scientists. We observe what happens in nature and induce patterns from it. Then the engineers step in and figure out how to scale it. What would solve *your* problem? We all know that there's a *general* problem. Let's find out what solving individual cases of it looks like, one at a time, and find the patterns in those solutions, because that's where we're going to find the solution to the general problem.

--mlp