Rolling Stone Story Annihilated By Columbia Journalism Report, Nobody Fired

I reckon we shouldn't be too surprised that the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism report on last November's Rolling Stone article, "A Rape On Campus: A Brutal Assault And Struggle For Justice at UVA" was both damning of virtually every action taken by managing editor Will Dana, and immediately followed by an abject refusal to take any responsibility for changing things so this can't happen again:

Rolling Stone’s senior editors are unanimous in the belief that the story’s failure does not require them to change their editorial systems. “It’s not like I think we need to overhaul our process, and I don’t think we need to necessarily institute a lot of new ways of doing things,” Dana said. “We just have to do what we’ve always done and just make sure we don’t make this mistake again.” Coco McPherson, the fact-checking chief, said, “I one hundred percent do not think that the policies that we have in place failed. I think decisions were made around those because of the subject matter.”

In which case, it's necessary to actually question what the real, not titular, points of those procedures really are, viz. bias confirmation of their most loyal readers and clickbait/issue sales. The Pressthink deconstruction is a lot more succinct, and especially, their point 7 about how "[n]one of those schools felt quite right". That is to say, none of the other stories fit the narrative as well; Rolling Stone knew their audience and knew their point, true or not. Likewise, Sabrina Erdely's bad faith apology which does not even mention Phi Kappa Psi, to whom her story had done real reputational and even physical damage. Rolling Stone's lawyers must be pretty sure of their case that they don't sense a libel suit coming, because indeed nobody will get fired for this mass indiscretion. Similar sentiments apply to UVa president Teresa Sullivan, who has refused to apologize for her actions of shutting down all frats in the wake of the article. The future is clear: so long as you don't libel specific people who can sue, bias-confirming, fact-free, unchecked articles will keep getting published.

Update: Phi Kappa Psi has initiated a lawsuit against Rolling Stone. I hope they win big, but I am rather doubtful.

More On Gender Imbalances In STEM: The Hidden (And Real) Good News

I made the mistake of looking at (and actually commenting on) Megan Geuss' silly Ars Technica opinion piece of the Ellen Pao verdict; there's nothing you haven't already seen in TechCrunch or Verge, i.e. It's Important We Have A Conversation About Sexual Bias In Tech (Now Stop Looking At What An Obvious Grifter Our Poster Girl Was). But that got me thinking about a post I happened upon a few days ago at Randal S. Olson's data visualization blog, showing the actual percentage of women graduating with bachelor degrees in STEM fields over time:

With the exception of engineering and computer science, women increasingly near parity with men in mathematics and the hard science fields, and have surpassed them in biology and the social sciences. Further, the so-called "pipeline problem" appears to be mostly a myth, according to a large-scale research study from Cornell, U. Texas, and Northwestern. Women are no more likely to "leak" (i.e. exit) from the "PhD pipeline" than men, something that will no doubt come as a disappointment to TechCrunch and anyone else invested in the idea that brogrammers and other modern bridge trolls are somehow chasing women out of these fields.

"There’s been a lot of focus on this idea of women in particular leaving academic science at far higher rates than men," says Miller, an advanced doctoral student in psychology at Northwestern and lead author of the study. "But in some cases … there’s been scant evidence of some of those gender gaps in persistence, and evidence that those gaps in persistence don’t exist at other time points."

That's not to say, however, that women and men are equally represented in pSTEM academia. Men still outnumber women about 3 to 1, Miller says. But the differences are not explained by gender bias in the pipeline – the percentage of women earning pSTEM degrees is now higher at the doctoral level than at the bachelor's degree level, the researchers found.

"We need to start reframing the conversation from instead of just trying to plug leaks, we need to get more students interested in the first place," Miller says.

Which, basically, is what I've been saying all along. Math instruction, particularly, is almost uniformly horrible at the K-12 level, even in fairly well-off districts. This is personal experience talking; if not for one particularly good instructor in college, I would not have ended up taking the major I did. But that is not the kind of thing feminist advocates wish to emphasize, because it means women might have some responsibility for learning math and how to write solid code (e.g.) instead of mewling pitiously that they are owed a high-status job despite inexperience.

Insisting On My Own Reality: Teaching Rape Law In A Trigger Warning World

Whatever you may think of BuzzFeed, they occasionally have some thought-provoking reportage. Today's example is mostly of interest because it gives us a glimpse into the deeply entitled and horribly flawed thought processes behind the students objecting to rape law instruction. Back in December, the New Yorker ran an excellent essay by Harvard Law professor Jeannie Suk in which she wrote that

Students seem more anxious about classroom discussion, and about approaching the law of sexual violence in particular, than they have ever been in my eight years as a law professor. Student organizations representing women’s interests now routinely advise students that they should not feel pressured to attend or participate in class sessions that focus on the law of sexual violence, and which might therefore be traumatic. These organizations also ask criminal-law teachers to warn their classes that the rape-law unit might “trigger” traumatic memories. Individual students often ask teachers not to include the law of rape on exams for fear that the material would cause them to perform less well. One teacher I know was recently asked by a student not to use the word “violate” in class—as in “Does this conduct violate the law?”—because the word was triggering. Some students have even suggested that rape law should not be taught because of its potential to cause distress.

In other words, we should not teach rape law because ... even talking about rape will freak certain people out. "[C]riminal law professors at schools across the country ... are concerned about what they perceive to be a troubling trend among students who would rather protect themselves than engage with complex issues." Well, yes (emboldening mine):

“What’s new is the suggestion that the teaching of rape doctrine and its flaws in a serious way, open to contending views, makes some students feel ‘unsafe,’ and because they feel ‘unsafe,’ there must be something deeply wrong — immoral and perhaps even illegal — going on,” said Yale Law School professor Jed Rubenfeld. He said he’s been asked (and has declined) to give trigger warnings and announce phone numbers of sexual assault hotlines before teaching rape, although he does ask students to be especially conscious of their classmates and refrains from cold-calling on students when rape is being discussed.

“This is a sad and profoundly anti-intellectual point of view, and it’s spreading,” he said. “Every topic taught in criminal law is a terrible reality.” Professors who don’t teach the class in a serious way, “subjecting both the doctrine and the criticisms of it to searching logical and moral scrutiny,” are “failing the most basic principles of intellectual honesty and academic rigor.”

But what happens when female law students vehemently disagree?

“I am not afraid to study rape law,” said Cari Simon, a Harvard Law graduate and former president of the college’s Women’s Law Association who now defends survivors of sexual violence at colleges and fraternities. “Of course I understand the import of studying rape in law school. That I expect rape to be taught with the understanding that 1 in 5 women are assaulted while in college, and therefore there are very likely survivors sharing the law school classroom does not mean I am afraid. It means I care.”

In other words, as always, teaching about rape is okay provided we cater to her fantasies about rape victimization rates, and that we refer to everyone accused of such charges as a priori guilty.  I've repeatedly gone over the intentional infantilization and propagandizing necessary to arrive at the "1 in 5" figure (the Heather MacDonald piece in City Journal lays it out perfectly). It's of a piece with the overall kid glove treatment certain women seem to demand here. One thing I didn't realize is that

“There was a point in time where women were excused from not just rape but any disturbing legal topic because it was too traumatic,” said University of Colorado Law professor Aya Gruber, who said she’s noticed a “rapid and profound shift” in the way her students think about rape pedagogy over the past few years.

“Several of my contemporaries do not teach rape because it is too fraught, but I find this to be an almost sexist position,” she said. “My question is always the extent to which we as teachers are protecting women in a world which oppresses them, and the extent to which we as people in power are reaffirming and reinforcing the messages that keep women in that position.”

This metastasizing view of women as overgrown children incapable of dealing with a sometimes brutal world is a real problem for anything resembling actual equality between the sexes. It draws from a deeply Victorian sensibility, one catering to women by way of the fainting couch.

Update: I appear to have been banned from further comment on that page. No surprise.

Why Craft Beer Is Like Dog Food

My friend Scott Templeman today mentioned that Yuengling is now the top craft beer in the US, which can be the case thanks to a relaxing of standards for what qualifies as "beer". Yuengling, which is still privately owned, cracked the top spot despite using corn and other "fillers" thanks to a relaxed definition from the Brewers Association. That got me going on a discussion about the relevance of ownership; Anheuser-Busch, whose signature Budweiser has never appealed to me (except in relation to even worse beers, e.g. Iron City), is now a part of the InBev monster based in Belgium. Thereupon I found this excellent rant on the topic from I Think About Beer, which I wanted highlight for an odd parallel in the dog world. It's no secret that Budweiser's market share is in decline, possibly terminally; last year, more Americans drank craft beer than Budweiser, and wine and spirits are eroding beer's popularity. To fight back, InBev has been obliged to buy every craft brewer it can get its mitts on. The hook for the independent craft beer brewer, as ever, is the ease of distribution once they get bought by the powerhouse, but ...

Elysian and co. will see some increased distribution to fuel their volume growth. But where does this come from? With 3,000 breweries in operation and 2,000 more coming on line, available store and bar space certainly isn’t keeping pace. AB-InBev isn’t acquiring craft brands because it believes in the segment’s quality. They’re buying out craft breweries to capture shelf space and profits. Big Red is down and continuing to slide in sales. Coors Light is gaining market share on Bud Light and even out sells it in Oregon. AB-InBev’s former imports are in a steep decline. AB-InBev is losing valuable shelf real-estate. It needs some way to stem the flow; so they’re picking up brands they can take to stores and bars to capture their lost business. That business has to come from somewhere: the competition.

The more brands AB-InBev has to take before retailers; the easier it is for them to decide against smaller and independent brands. And let’s face it, retailers don’t really want to deal with a million different vendors so if someone can bring them a whole host of products that will fulfill their needs, why should they care if they’re only supplied by one mega-conglomeration. Each brand AB-InBev can present is tap or shelf space they’re denying an independent competitor. Distributors and breweries are in a state of constant war when it comes to beer sets and tap handles; and the more weapons you have the more territory you can conquer.

The problem, of course, is that over the long term, the only way the new owners can keep such duplicative efforts rolling is to eventually slash staff and cut corners, with long-term consequences for the quality of the suds. (The author points to Goose Island's mainline product as an example of lowered standards.) And it's here that the comparison to dog food kicks in, because Mars alone is responsible for no fewer than eighteen brands of pet food (and rumored last December to be finalizing a purchase of Blue Buffalo), many of which were purchased for exactly the same reasons: the demand for shelf space. Of course, the arguments about quality are probably less compelling in this space — it's broadly lower to begin with, with the Friday night recall dump aimed at suppressing broad dissemination among the target PR outlets that might not get to it until Monday. But the pressures driving reduced cost and quality ingredients are identical.

Ellen Pao's Lawsuit Ends In A Kleiner Perkins Clean Sweep

The news came out earlier today that Ellen Pao's lawsuit against Kleiner Perkins came out snake eyes for the plaintiff. I don't have a good handle on the particulars of the case yet, as I haven't read the trial brief, but this does not look, even from Verge's biased telling, as though Pao's would be anything but a weak case. She fought Kleiner Perkins, who has historically hired more women than is typical in Silicon Valley, and maybe more importantly, could call on partner Mary Meeker, an epic defender of frauds during the height of the first wave of dot-com collapses who subsequently failed up from Morgan Stanley to Kleiner Perkins. Perhaps knowing what she owed them, she was all too happy to provide a good story for Kleiner. If the feminist mob that "needs a win" in their legal and other campaigns against perceived sexism would seek her head for this, they'll first need to grapple with the fact that "ethical fluidity is not a liability in Silicon Valley". That is to say, at first glance, Pao's case appears to have been a weak one, and she had bad legal advice in pursuing it.

Update 3/28/2015: Upon rereading the Verge piece linked above, a couple passages popped out at me for what they actually said first about the story and second about Pao herself:

[T]here’s an expectation — a fantasy, even — of what putting Silicon Valley on trial for sexism should look like. But Meeker’s statements on the witness stand served as another reminder that this lawsuit is not Ellen Pao vs. Institutionalized Sexism. This is Ellen Pao invoking California’s Fair Employment and Housing Act and possibly coming up short.

This is Verge author Nitisha Tiku going off the deep end, willfully blinding herself to the reality that just happened. One does not sue under Fair Employment acts without it being a case of discrimination; the hope, I suppose, is that if we can call it something else, maybe our worldview won't have to be altered. Try again, Nitisha. And then, this (emboldening mine):

Where Pao had notebook after notebook of complaints, Meeker could not have seemed less bothered by the state of affairs. ...

 Who the hell keeps a journal of insults at work — except perhaps someone who always planned to sue in the first place? This is the action of a brittle, thin-skinned, and humorless individual.

Update 3/28/2015 11:49 PDT: Entitlement mentality kicks in, in particular, this:

7. Hopefully my case will inspire the venture capital industry to level the playing field for everyone, including women and minorities
— Ellen Pao (@ekp) March 28, 2015

"Level the playing field for everyone" = "make me partner or I'll sue you because I have a vagina/the right skin color/the right surname/etc." Yeah, no.

Update 3/29/2015: Pretty good summary of predictable media reaction from Joe Concha at Mediaite:

As you can imagine, it’s virtually impossible to find a column that actually supports the jury’s decision to dismiss all counts. That Mashable headline is almost correct, but should be modified to read: Ellen Pao trial loss sends shock waves through media establishment that really, really wanted her to win and never imagined a jury would actually dismiss every claim she entered

A bit cumbersome, but more accurate nonetheless.

And so it goes when it comes to a gang-rape that never happened at UVA…or a recklessly false narrative out of Ferguson… or Ellen Pao’s multiple claims of discrimination that a jury didn’t buy:

Facts mean little. It’s the conversation that comes afterward that matters.

Even if that conversation is built on a house of cards.

Death Before McHonor: Taco Bell's New Creepy, Totalitarian-Themed Ad Campaign

Thanks to @Clarkhat (and this tweet) for an inspired yet deeply disturbing ad campaign from Yum! Brands showing a dystopian, just-pre-perestroika eastern European country run by a totalitarian (and yet vaguely familiar!) clown:

That's all to say, it depicts a dystopian world, but the whole concept also can't help but come across as some kind of meta wormhole, like a microcosm of capitalism trying to devour itself. A smaller fast-food giant is knocking a bigger goliath for creating a fantastical totalitarian communist state, wherein the greatest strain on individual freedom is uninspired food, and the most dire physical threat to would-be defectors is whatever horror befalls a person who gets hit by a confetti bomb, or jumps into a grimy ball pit. (Though, in fairness, it's always been hard not to wonder what's lurking in the bottoms of those things—they're too colorful to trust.)

In fact, the campaign's biggest problem may be that it's too well done. The visuals nicely mimic the state-sanctioned artwork of the communist era—e.g., majestic sunburst portraits, imposing statues—and morph it into a series of creative, dog-whistle attacks. In addition to the epic narrative ad, which will air as a :60 on the season finale of The Walking Dead this Sunday, there's a mock-propaganda video (which might remind some gamers of BioShock) and a series of posters espousing the principles of the breakfast dictatorship.

It really looks very like a campaign someone my own age would have assembled — especially the pull of the Ramones' "Blitzkrieg Bop", which would have been timely in that era. I probably would have left it there but for another take that @Clarkhat linked to, one from someone whose family had to endure those exact horrors:

On the one hand, I am genuinely grateful to live in a world of such plenty, such color, diversity, and vibrancy that the grim, dark warnings of George Orwell can end up as fodder for corporate pissing contests. It suggests that the mass exterminations of the Soviet Union and Nazi Europe are now quaint artifacts of a Whig history, now long overcome. On the other hand, I have actual relatives (in-laws, to be specific) who had to hide buried in outhouse shit to escape Red Army rape squads. So fuck you, Taco Bell I guess is what I'm saying.

Twelve million human lives were fed into the slaughterhouse that was 20th century totalitarianism. Twelve million people, or at least their descendants, might still walk the earth today were it not for the horrors inflicted by the governments whose imagery Taco Bell ad execs felt comfortable deploying in ads for their diarrhea factory slop.

 Yes. This.

Bechdel By Other Means

I recently encountered an essay about an attempt at making a separate-but-equal programming test analogous to the famous Bechdel Test inspired by a tweet from Laurie Voss:

Does your project pass the Bechdel test? To pass, a function written by a woman dev must call a function written by another woman dev.
— Laurie Voss (@seldo) February 27, 2015

I confess that this is one of the stupidest ideas I've ever heard in my life, and yet another sign that Slashdot, whence I got it, is increasingly overrun with Social Justice Warrior types and thus jumping sharks with metronomic regularity. In all this raving about female underrepresentation in tech fields, a persistently missing perspective is that of the employer, i.e. why should a woman make a more appealing choice than a man for a particular job? Just as Jackie Robinson represented a means for the Dodgers to acquire low-cost "amateur" talent as first movers, there has to be a motivation for employers to hire women. That should be the case if the "77 cents on the dollar" factoid were true; no rational employer would throw away that kind of advantage, and should stock their cubicles with women almost exclusively. Yet it doesn't happen, and it's hard to conclude otherwise than that there's some underlying reasons for it, such as a preference for fewer hours and more time spent at home. This exact trend animates Sweden's labor market, which (along with the other Scandinavian countries) is one of the most sexually segregated. That is to say, it is a direct consequence of choices women make that their feminist "betters" expressly reject.

Consider, in this regard, the gender disparities in engineering. An article on the Wharton School website laments the paucity of women engineers and holds up China and Russia as superior examples of equity. According to the post, "In China, 40 percent of engineers are women, and in the former USSR, women accounted for 58 percent of the engineering workforce." The author blames workplace biases and stereotypes for the fact that women in the United States earn only 20 percent of the doctoral degrees in engineering. But perhaps American women earn fewer degrees in engineering because they don't have to. They have more opportunities to pursue careers that really interest them. American women may be behind men in engineering, but they now earn a majority of all Ph.Ds and outnumber men in humanities, biology, social sciences, and health sciences. Despite 40 years of consciousness-raising and gender-neutral pronouns, most men and women still gravitate to different fields and organize their lives in different ways. Women in countries like Sweden, Norway and Iceland enjoy elaborate supportive legislation, yet their vocational preferences and family priorities are similar to those of American women.

Instead of worrying about whether module X engages function Y based on the sex of the author, shouldn't we be more concerned about whether the damn thing works as designed? Acolytes of the cult of Ada Lovelace never have much interest in providing value to the end customer, or even asking how meeting their demands would result in customer value. There is in programming no female analogue to either the Negro Leagues, the color line, or Jackie Robinson, i.e. employers are free to hire women, and in fact do so. Such data as we do have suggests women choose not to enter the field in the first place — which is not the fault of employers or coworkers. In the absence of actual polling data, proof by repeated assertion and hyperbolic conclusion-assuming is all we have, and nowhere close to conclusive. In fact, it represents the same kind of willful reality denial we see in the many feminist "rape" studies that insist on answering important questions for women rather than asking them directly: there's a justifiable fear in the questioner that the "right" answer won't come back often enough.