I’m sure you are just trying to share a memory of interacting with an illustrious colleague here - and my sympathies go to you as it’s always a shock to learn of the passing of someone you worked with.
But I think you maybe need to work on how you present this anecdote - as it is, it reads like you tried to mansplain her own research to a Turing Award winner. I hope you approached with more humility than this telling suggests?
Also, you should be aware that contextualizing professional women in terms of who their husband is or what his credentials are has long been used to underplay women’s individual achievements. Again, I don’t think that’s your intent, but you could consider whether, in the case of talking about Jacob Schwartz, you would have been moved to drop in the detail of who he was married to?
graycat's comment contains several details that go against your interpretation. For example the fact that Fran "had a smile" and patiently explained to him why his "little PL/I routine" would be slower than her state-of-the-art optimization work is clearly intended to depict the narrator as naive, and Fran as the expert. The mention of PL/I means that this anecdote likely took place fifty years ago, decades before she Turing Award winner. And the story makes it perfectly clear who ended up being the explainer and who the explainee. Indeed, that seems to be its main point.
As for the marriage bit, the strongest plausible interpretation is simply that it's interesting. Anyone familiar with computer science history would be interested to find out that the two of them had been married, and certainly that goes both ways: an anecdote about Schwartz would be enhanced by mentioning his marriage to a famous compiler optimization researcher. Indeed, it's not hard to find web pages about Schwartz that do this.
I don't think your points are entirely ungrounded, but they weren't the most plausible or good-faith reading of the comment. The cost of introducing an ideological scolding into a discussion like this is non-zero, so there needs to be a bar to clear. That's one reason why we have that guideline, which has proven to work well in situations like this: it basically leads to scolding for egregious cases, forgiveness for borderline cases, and open-mindedness in unclear ones.
>I hope you approached with more humility than this telling suggests?
Why the question mark at the end? Are you expecting the poster to reply for your own benefit or is it that you'd enjoy seeing him/her apologise publicly for sharing a personal (and presumably happy, at least to them) memory of a former work colleague who has just died. A memory that you have just tortuously construed into a supposed sexist encouter with literally zero insight, context or knowledge ?
Perhaps you might wish to consider your own humility.
> Again, I don’t think that’s your intent, but you could consider whether, in the case of talking about Jacob Schwartz, you would have been moved to drop in the detail of who he was married to?
That is actually very common in my experience when people talk to me about some guy and they think I might have heard of his wife.
At least as of when I was at IBM several years ago, PL/I and derived languages are still in widespread use in the IBM ecosystem for both high-level and low-level coding.
Not who you're responding to, but: My assumption was that the user is the greycat, which is the well-known alias of the programmer Greg Wooledge.
Now that you call it out, I realize that it's probably a mistaken assumption, because Greg spells it "greycat" not "graycat". But it wasn't an unreasonable assumption for HN.
Do I really believe that people should take care about the way they tell personal anecdotes about professional interactions with women, if they do not want to be seen as perpetuating sexist tropes? Yes, I do.
If the OP was trying to share a moment when they enjoyed learning from a great mind, the way they told that story was not a good way to express that. I wanted to give them the feedback that they might want to reframe the story because, telling it the way they did they run the risk of coming across as having behaved poorly. I feel I approached that with reasonable tact and in a spirit of good faith.
I appreciate dang’s commentary back to me about exercising the principle of charity. But I don’t accept that I was nasty. And I don’t appreciate your presumption of bad faith on my part.
Imagine you were at Frances Allen's funeral, and you walked up to graycat, after he told this anecdote about his esteemed friend and colleague, and said these words to him.
Imagine the frozen look of disgust on everyone's face. Imagine the flush of shame coming to your cheeks.
That's what you did. You should apologize for that.
The irony is that your and jameshart's motivations are likely similar. You're both reacting to a perceived slight and standing up for someone who you believe deserved to be treated better. That's a positive motivation, but we need to learn to take the shame bit out. Otherwise it just escalates, and where do we end up?
The fundamental premise of jameshart's comment is that group membership is what counts. jamehart assumes graycat is a man, that men talk to women in certain (oppressive) ways, and therefore graycat must show humility--or else.
The comment is nonsensical and incoherent interpreted any other way, and it obviously uses shame as a threat. A threat such as this is only effective if graycat is actually not a misogynist; if he were, he would just ignore it.
In other words, the essential characteristic of jameshart's comment is an appeal to graycat's moral self-doubt and it relies on his fear, guilt, or ignorance. jameshart expects graycat to renounce or revise his anecdote without discussion, under threat of being considered morally unworthy.
That seems like overinterpretation to me, based on the ideological battle lines of the moment. Even if you're right, though, I think people mostly do that because they want to stand up for someone.
Edit: maybe it would be of interest to add that, from the therapeutic work I've been involved in, it is clear that people's motivations in these areas can often be traced to family dynamics—which is to say, to love. Even when it doesn't look or sound like love, love is usually the driving force. I often think of Chesterton's line, "The soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him". You can say the same thing about political and ideological battles, which after all are (quoting a different celebrity) war by other means.
This is an optimistic view, because the more we can see and acknowledge that love in each other, the less we need to be in conflict. The challenge is that such love often goes through complex transformations and distortions which can be hard to disentangle.
I believe in treating people with justice, which means to treat each person as they deserve to be treated.
So long as I believe a person is merely mistaken--that is, they lack evidence or the proper method of thinking, but are otherwise virtuous--then I will forgive them a thousand grievances and "acknowledge [the] love" in them. If they are important to me and I don't have to give up something more important, I would be willing to invest the time to bridge our differences. A relationship is the earned reward of the participants' virtues.
But if a person consciously takes a single step toward evil, they are a threat to my life. It would be self-destructive for me to try to see the love in the thug mugging me at gunpoint. It disrespects the people I admire and destroys the value of those positive relationships. Such a person might work to reform their character, but I have no obligation toward them.
I've come to the conclusion there are people in this world who act out of hatred for life and fear of living.
There are soldiers who fight for evil causes, and they are evil. Robert E Lee was offered a senior role in the Union army, but chose to fight for the Confederates. Some might say he fought for love of southern culture or his home or family or any number of other inessential factors; they evade the essential that Lee fought to preserve slavery.
There are soldiers who fight for good causes, and they are good. Sherman fought slavery and he obliterated everything in his path that supported slavery.
To equivocate between the two rewards the wicked and damns the good. Any ethical method that fails to distinguish the essential difference between the two is at best useless, and at worst a tool in the service of evil.
Minimizing conflict is a standard that is anti-life. We should be in conflict with evil. The test I apply in online discussion is to ask myself "What is this person advocating for? If this person achieved their ideal outcome, what would that look like?"
The opinion I've come to regarding comments like jameshart's is that they actively advocate for nothing--nihilism. I don't see any evidence indicating they want to replace something bad with something good. In this case, they want to replace a sentimental anecdote with silence.
By the way, I know these views are radically different. If you are curious about other applications or how it might apply to family interactions, PM me and I'd be happy to chat.
But I think you maybe need to work on how you present this anecdote - as it is, it reads like you tried to mansplain her own research to a Turing Award winner. I hope you approached with more humility than this telling suggests?
Also, you should be aware that contextualizing professional women in terms of who their husband is or what his credentials are has long been used to underplay women’s individual achievements. Again, I don’t think that’s your intent, but you could consider whether, in the case of talking about Jacob Schwartz, you would have been moved to drop in the detail of who he was married to?