Neurodivergent folks often need a little extra time to learn or for somebody to sit down and explain things to clearly. We do not need a carte blanche for decades of sexual harassment. That's just somebody being an asshole and using us as a shield.
Author here, wasn't advocating for this. Proving intent in court is an extremely high bar, and means that a lot of stuff, such as fraud, goes unpunished. So, I'm not sure that this is appropriate for many issues, especially ones like violent crime.
What I was advocating for here is that people who are not directly wronged step up and help out. If a man behaves inappropriately towards me and I say something, it is (quite reasonably) often mistaken as a threat. I've never been a man so I don't know for sure, but I suspect that if a male colleague stepped up, took the person aside and said something privately, that this might go a lot better.
I want to shift the focus away from the person who did something wrong and towards minimizing and fixing harm. Too often we focus on the person who did a bad thing. Unless there is reason to believe that the person hurting people is dangerous or unable to stop hurting people, I'd much rather focus on "what are we going to do to fix this situation" than "what do we do with the person who caused this?"
This is, unfortunately, the bane of microaggressions. A lot of inappropriate behavior slips under the radar: anybody who calls it out is accused of making too big a deal of it. A man might be slightly more effective than having you call it out, but it would have to reach a fairly high level of impropriety.
It may help when somebody says, "Hey, X was talking, and I want to hear it." Fixing it immediately helps more than a talking-to afterwards: the odds are good that they don't even remember interrupting you, and if they're not intent on taking it to heart, they won't. They'll often feel the callout was a disproportionate harm, way worse than whatever it is they did.
But a lot of men won't even notice. I've missed a lot of them, or rationalized "that wasn't so bad" and quickly forgotten about it.
You're correct that we should focus on minimizing and preventing harm, but it's just really hard.
Support doesn't have to be voluntary, and often isn't. If you are coerced into supporting the status quo, that doesn't mean you aren't supporting it, it just means you lack the freedom to make this decision.
Going to especially second that last bit. Not everybody is expressly data science, but most companies start running into some sort of data at one point or another.
Campaigns aren't wrong to be concerned about who has their data. There is good historical reason for them to be skeptical that security on your system will be strong enough to prevent customers from accessing other customer's data. https://time.com/4155185/bernie-sanders-hillary-clinton-data...
Now imagine getting buy-in for using customer data to improve your models.
I can't blame campaigns for being paranoid about vendors potentially going across the aisle. NationBuilder is one of the only big names I know that does it. They are in a unique and unenviable position given the death grip NGP VAN has, and they pay a big price for it on nearly every front.
Really interesting point here. Although, there is a little more nuance needed and this is one of the big issues plaguing the campaigning software space - not all are created for the same goals and not all offer the same services.
If you take your example of NationBuilder, a company I know well as I led their European expansion, it only sold software not data. Unlike most American campaign software, NationBuilder does not sell data as part of their package. NationBuilder does not believe that you can create a sustainable and powerful community by using data that you have purchased, and thus only sells the platform.
So yes I agree with you that while campaigns can (and should) be paranoid about who has access to their data, and even how it is being used, this data brokerage model isn't the model that all companies adopt and it's a really important distinction to make.
While I am here, I will add the following, tech companies who want to democratise democracy (and I'm not saying that's the mission for everyone) and help lower the barrier to entry, cannot claim to do so if they alone decide who has access to these tools. Crucial decisions, such as which parties have access to the latest technology, should not be in the hands of a few tech titans of Silicon Valley - where the power they already wield is already unmeasurable.
All of the above is a fascinating and important debate and also a very American one. Campaigning and political technology is incredibly partisan in America, compared to Europe where what we fear most are monopolies.
because you are a non-partisan software? I agree with the 'getting into trouble piece' I think. I don't see how being non-partisan gets you into more trouble or would increase those chances.
Customers will probably be less upset if something leaks internal to a party during a primary than they would be if something leaked to a different party.
I agree with all this. To your point, NationBuilder has been nearly shut out of the Democratic Party at anything above the local level as a result of serving Trump in 2016.
A really core question(/assumption in many comments) is "is a computer science education only for SV job prep?" As usual, we could stand to remember that the world doesn't revolve around us. People learn to program for a lot of other reasons too.
If you want the quickest path to a SV job, you learn the most modern frameworks and drill them until you scrawl the boiler plate in your sleep. Project-based learning is extremely appropriate for this. You absolutely don't need four years of education to crank out a comfortable 6 figure salary off this knowledge. (In fact, it might be a liability if your pet framework ages out). You only have to be able to fill a need (even one will do) which a lot of companies have.
If you're looking for anything else, a diet of only back-to-back projects might not be the best way. If you're jumping head first from javascript into kernel modules you might consider a book. If you're looking to automate some bio or physics lab equipment, you can't expect getting good at a few popular frameworks to carry you. If you're learning math there are advantages to having people grade your work and offer office hours.
And if we're being really honest, this non-project-based stuff is pretty useful as SV job prep too. Not knowing things like linear algebra, statistics, and discrete math can be career limiting. I mean, how many of us are really ready to jump the gap to doing serious ML work?
Another way to view it would be that speakeasies thrived where the police didn't bother (or accepted discouragement) to go. Police resources are financial and political, and often stretched thin over poor or minority neighborhoods. So it is strange to divorce something and call it just "norms" when such strong economic forces are in play.
