Outreachy Announces Its Winter 2018 Interns To Work On The Linux Kernel, GNOME

[Spooktra]

And how much do the doctors earn? Is that profession overly subscribed with females?

I worked in 2 hospitals, in an Oncology department and in Behavioral Health, in the Oncology department, out of about 10 doctors, there was 1 Italian guy, 1 Black woman, 1 Jewish older man, 2 Indian women and the rest were Jewish women.

In behavioral health, in the PICU the 2 main doctors, 1 was an Irish guy and the other a Black guy; the LCSW's were all women, you know what the nurses were, in Children's PICU the head doctor was a Black woman, in ACDS the department was run by a Nurse Practitioner, a white woman and ACDU had a white guy in charge with a Pakistani doctor as a backup.

You're on the internet, it's a global network. Countries outside the US exist you know. I know, I'm in one.

Considering we are communicating in English, I think it's safe to assume that most of the participants are located in an predominantly English speaking country, you know a country founded and developed by the "evil" white men that it's become fashionable to hate on.

Of all the doctors I have visited over the years, I have been examined by an Asian female doctor as part of a medical clearance when I was working for FedEx, I have seen a Jewish Chiropractor, a Jewish Neurologist, Indian female MD, a Filipino female PT, Greek dentists and so on.

I have no idea where this notion that somehow White men have been actively working to exclude other groups has popped up. It's a fiction, a figment of the imagination of liberal hippie douches.

In fact, if anything, White men are underrepresented in most of the highest paid profession, when you consider that in the U.S. white people account for over 60% of the population, Black people make up 17% and Latinos make up about 23% and the rest are Asians and other minorities.

[Spooktra]

It is very sad you would admit to holding such thoughts, let alone proclaim them so proudly in a public and publicly archived forum.

What's sad is that people like you propagate bullshit about some conspiracy against so-called minorities. Let me ask you something, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, based on current reproductive rates, the White population in the U.S. will be the minority group, will you still support programs meant to benefit "minorities" when the "minorities" are White people?

How about in countries where White people are the minority currently, would you support similar programs if they were meant exclusively for White people?

[Spooktra]

It would be more appropriate to have an outreach program for people from low income backgrounds who could not afford a college education, for instance, rather than to create a program with racial or gender qualifiers, something we should move away from. If people want to become involved in a project or to get into programming, they should, regardless of what their background, pedigree, or identity is. There should be no barriers to doing so. We should not give special benefits to any group, based on their pedigree, background, gender, ethnicity, etc. And, outreachy is giving such benefits, and it is quite frankly no different than what they claim to be against, racial discrimination. Thats technically exactly what it is, to confer a benefit based on ethnicity or gender which is not available to others because of their ethnicity or gender.

Make it income/means qualified. Period.

The problem with this is how do you verify the claims of low income/means?

Steve Jobs famously used to only accept $1 per year salary for his role at Apple, the rest was stock options. When I used to work for myself, I paid myself a salary and the rest was help by the company, of which I was the sole owner. I could honestly say that I as an individual only earned 10 grand a year, what the company made was a different matter entirely.

I don't see why this program couldn't be a bounty, make it open to everyone and say the first person to add a given feature, bug free, gets a $5500 reward. If in the end all the winners were minorities, so be it. But at least make it talent and skill based, not based on the color of the participant's skin, ethnic background or gender.

[Dedale]

We have plenty of official status for low income people like yours truly where i live. Depending on the institution, the method of control differs. Sometimes, your tax declaration is enough. Sometimes i had to provide proof of my bank movements. And by income they mean income. Salary AND stock options or any other more folkloric means of remuneration.

People likely to be interested by such internship would have very few mean to cheat where i live. You could work off the books if you have the good connections but even with that you would still be low income !

[uid313]

uid313 any particular reason you no longer contribute to wikimedia ? , i was planning to start doing so myself

No, not really.
I just haven't been reminded to donate in a long while, so it's not really been on my mind.
The last time I attempted to donate was when I got one of those notification/alert/banners on the site, but then my card didn't go through.

I would contribute to Wikimedia again. I have also contribute to FSF. I might have contributed to EFF, not sure.

[bregma]

I take it you're not a huge fan of Charles Darwin then? Evolution is a consequence of both random mutation and natural selection combined.

Positing a bizarre and unfounded assumption about my motivation and then arguing against it as a proxy for a discussion on the topic at hand is the very definition of a "straw man". You should be hesitant to use that technique, since the educated will immediately recognize it and know only a fool or a scoundrel would resort to using such a logical fallacy.

What these "diversity" programs are doing is essentially trying to selectively breed humans to fit the ideals of the author. This has been tried before, in fact it was the pet project of a certain dictator not too long ago.

A program such as Outreachy is not engaged in any sort of breeding program or purification of the master race.

Anthropologists have observed that social selection pressure is one of the most powerful of all evolutionary selection pressures. This has been widely observed not only among human societies but also in the animal kingdom, where you might see something like the peacock, the howler monkey, and even the radical sexual dimorphism among our close cousins the great apes. Social pressure influences the selection of members of various populations within society, including the populations of engineers and programmers. It works in various ways, including a tendency to hire, select, and promote those from a similar social group (for the engineers: a positive feedback loop), but it can have more insidious origins including less access to resources and opportunities based on geographic location, home life, and many other factors. It's not a simplistic explanation to a complex problem and you;re not going to learn about it on Fox News.

Mean time programs like Outreachy are an attempt by some to alter the selective pressures by providing incentives for the not-white and the not-male to enter or progress in the field against whatever selection pressures are presenting a disincentive to them already. It's not a "we only want coloured broads that wear comfortable shoes to write our software" thing, it's a "they shutting you out? Here's a bit of help getting your foot in the door" thing.

If you actually understand the idea Darwin presented when describing the descent of species through natural selection, you would understand how it results in a lack of diversity in some fields where and how a program like Outreachy is attempting to introduce alternative selection pressures to alter the composition of the population.

Free will should be rewarded, not punished. If that means men and women will tend to different areas of interest then so be it.

Yes, that's how Outreachy works. It rewards those who choose to work in a STEM field when they would otherwise have not done so, for specific reasons. If someone would not choose to become a software developer because the white boys' eyes never go above her neck when she's trying to discuss the tradeoffs of various traversal algorithms and the manager that wore his red ballcap to the interview told her he doesn't hire people like her because they just quit to raise their babies, then maybe the reward few dollars to grow some internet-anonymous bona fides in the free software development arena might just help shift the balance so the positive feedback loops inherent i the selection system might become weaker.

Outreachy isn't punishing anybody. If they reward someone else other than you, they're not punishing you. You have received no negative incentive. In fact, it doesn't even affect you in any way other than perhaps make you feel that you're not getting something you mistakenly think you are entitled to.

If, on the other hand, you're arguing that those uppity folks should know their place and stay in it because that has always been the tendency, well, you lose. People who make that argument have always lost. That's why we're not still brachiating in trees.

[bregma]

Considering we are communicating in English, I think it's safe to assume that most of the participants are located in an predominantly English speaking country, you know a country founded and developed by the "evil" white men that it's become fashionable to hate on.

No, it's not safe to make that assumption. Even if it were safe, it would not be to your advantage to invoke the history of a country founded exclusively by white men who owned slaves based on race, passed laws forbidding women from engaging in most activities and making any variant expression of human sexuality punishable by jail, torture, or state-sanctioned murder, tried to outlaw all religion but their own narrow variant of Christianity, and even actively undertook genocide against the indigenous inhabitants of the land they live in not once but again and again. Definitely not the best exemplar to uphold in an argument.

I have no idea where this notion that somehow White men have been actively working to exclude other groups has popped up. It's a fiction, a figment of the imagination of liberal hippie douches.

I see your use of language identifies you as an alt-right neo-Nazi (capitalization and use of the word "White"; use of "liberal" as an epithet; use of the word "hippie" two generations after its widespread use in practice ceased; denial of the existence of racism or sexism while claiming to be a victim of the same).

You should be happy to know that the notion that white men have been actively working to exclude other groups is purely an invention of the alt-right. People like you. It was brought forth as a strawman argument because it's so easily refuted. It's a fiction, a figment of the imagination of the alt-right used as a weapon to maintain the status quo. Of course people like that, like you, would be against a program like Outreachy because by trying to affect change to the status quo it threatens any real or (more likely) perceived privileges they currently hold.

[GunpowaderGuy]

bregma

you feel that you're not getting something you mistakenly think you are entitled to

you keep strawmmaning the actual right we are referring to ( which as i have said in my previous comment ,that you haven't replied, is apparently implemented in American and Californian law in a way that it makes outreachy illegal )
For an exception to be reasonable , there should be ( among other things ) ample evidence that unfair discrimination exists , and enough insight to conclude that the problem can't be satisfiably solved more directly , not just

whatever selection pressures are presenting a disincentive to them already

[DanL]

Well, while I don't agree that all of the comments are tired, and I think that being committed to not hearing those opinions is kinda silly

No, it's not silly if you've read the comments every time Phoronix has an article on it. Blah blah blah, discrimination this, special snowflakes that, white male privilege this, SJW that. Some people even crawl out of the woodwork just to whine (*cough* Redfoxmoon).

...to your point:
> Improve the "git bisect" command
seems pretty ambiguous. I mean, there's probably not much better than binary search here, so I imagine they're talking about some sort of batching or automation improvement, but seems a bit open-ended. And maybe that's not a bad thing!

Yeah, I think making it more noob-friendly to aid in bug reports might be a worthy cause.

It seems like there are no proposals here for core issues with GNOME, such as the performance of the shell

I don't know if that would be a good intern project unless it was narrowed down and more focused. I feel the same about "unspecified GPU subsystem work".

[Djhg2000]

Positing a bizarre and unfounded assumption about my motivation and then arguing against it as a proxy for a discussion on the topic at hand is the very definition of a "straw man". You should be hesitant to use that technique, since the educated will immediately recognize it and know only a fool or a scoundrel would resort to using such a logical fallacy.

It is not an assumption about your motivation, I was pointing out the massive hole in your logic. Then you go on to insult my intelligence by implying method of choice to conduct a discussion is through straw men.

A program such as Outreachy is not engaged in any sort of breeding program or purification of the master race.

Allow me to repeat myself; what these "diversity" programs are doing is essentially trying to selectively breed humans to fit the ideals of the author. If you fail to grasp the meaning of these words then there's not much I can do to help you.

Anthropologists have observed that social selection pressure is one of the most powerful of all evolutionary selection pressures. This has been widely observed not only among human societies but also in the animal kingdom, where you might see something like the peacock, the howler monkey, and even the radical sexual dimorphism among our close cousins the great apes. Social pressure influences the selection of members of various populations within society, including the populations of engineers and programmers. It works in various ways, including a tendency to hire, select, and promote those from a similar social group (for the engineers: a positive feedback loop), but it can have more insidious origins including less access to resources and opportunities based on geographic location, home life, and many other factors. It's not a simplistic explanation to a complex problem and you;re not going to learn about it on Fox News.

It's also by far the easiest factor to manipulate for evil. The fundamental principle of evolution is that in a population, the subset that achieves the most successful outcome will have the largest influence on the next generation of the population. Success is arbitrarily defined by the population itself, so the metric is not one clear constant you can easily quantify by a mathematical expression. But to state in absolute terms that the white man is the source of evil, as you do in the next paragraph, is not only racial discrimination based on social stereotypes but also contributing in a most horrifying way to a reduction in that particular subset.

Postscript; for future reference it's "you're", not "you;re".

Mean time programs like Outreachy are an attempt by some to alter the selective pressures by providing incentives for the not-white and the not-male to enter or progress in the field against whatever selection pressures are presenting a disincentive to them already. It's not a "we only want coloured broads that wear comfortable shoes to write our software" thing, it's a "they shutting you out? Here's a bit of help getting your foot in the door" thing.

With stereotypes like these making the rounds it's no mystery why the suicide rate of white men in the west is on the rise.

If you actually understand the idea Darwin presented when describing the descent of species through natural selection, you would understand how it results in a lack of diversity in some fields where and how a program like Outreachy is attempting to introduce alternative selection pressures to alter the composition of the population.

Precisely as I exclaimed then; free will punished under the banner of pleasant numbers, for the race of those pesky white men is tainted by success in the eyes of the beholder and should be abolished by the means of poverty.

Yes, that's how Outreachy works. It rewards those who choose to work in a STEM field when they would otherwise have not done so, for specific reasons. If someone would not choose to become a software developer because the white boys' eyes never go above her neck when she's trying to discuss the tradeoffs of various traversal algorithms and the manager that wore his red ballcap to the interview told her he doesn't hire people like her because they just quit to raise their babies, then maybe the reward few dollars to grow some internet-anonymous bona fides in the free software development arena might just help shift the balance so the positive feedback loops inherent i the selection system might become weaker.

But that's the problem you see, by circulating the notion that white men will seek to punish those who oppose them, you are just one more cog in the machinery to push stereotypes as a whole into the pool of criteria for success, as long as it's in the name of discrimination against a subset you deem to be inferior. I'll have you know men in the STEM field have been begging for more women to socialize with, but doing so through luring them in with false promises of outcome is outright repulsive. A facade of rewarding minor progress as major is far more condescending than being told upfront that we all have struggles achieving what we want. Those who seek a career in STEM fields should find comfort of being judged by merit rather than arbitrary factors beyond their control.

Outreachy isn't punishing anybody. If they reward someone else other than you, they're not punishing you. You have received no negative incentive. In fact, it doesn't even affect you in any way other than perhaps make you feel that you're not getting something you mistakenly think you are entitled to.

Yes it is, it's substituting one subset for another on irrelevant parameters. How can you not perceive the punishment of exclusion?

If, on the other hand, you're arguing that those uppity folks should know their place and stay in it because that has always been the tendency, well, you lose. People who make that argument have always lost. That's why we're not still brachiating in trees.

Well dress me in a suit and task me repel the crows, for I am the biggest straw man of them all. What nonsense you are spewing.