Subject: Re: sexism and political correctness in AI papers?
From: [email-masked] (Subbarao Kambhampati)
Date: Thu, 8 Apr 1993 23:26:04 GMT
Newsgroups: comp.ai

Let me start by saying that this whole thread has increasingly tenuous
connection to comp.ai. If we need to publicize our opinions on PC and
AA (affirmative action), perhaps we can take this out to
alt.political-correctness-red-herring.bash.bash.bash or some such.

In article <[email-masked]> [email-masked] (Matthew L. Ginsberg) writes:
>
>Until recently, science has been a discipline that respected one
>thing: merit.  But all of this political correctness is changing that;
>science is being forced to recognize sex instead of merit.

Without getting into arguments about desirableness of AA, I must still
admit that I find this idea that Science was pure as driven snow until
day before yesterday when AA started, quite quixotic boardering on 
hypocrisy.

You opine that science only respected merit until recently. Let's
consider two different notions of respect -- respect for your work in
the shortterm when you are alive, and respect for your work in the
long term when you are long dead and gone.

In terms of the first, Science, being a human enterprise, always
suffered human follies. Something said by a Cambridge person or an
aristrocrat always had a better chance of taken seriously compared to
something said by a plebian or someone from a community college.
History is replete with people who got respected in the short term for
reasons other than merit.  We continue to bestow short term respect on
scientists based on such syntactic considerations as where they are
from, who they know etc. etc.  Short term respect based entirely on
objective considerations of scientific merit is an idealization that
we all know is far from true in the best of circumstances. If we want
to worry, lets worry about this whole trend. Why single out AA as
the only "wrong syntactic" consideration?

If you are talking about long-term reasons, then don't you worry! Even
if you are right and CS departments are being stacked with second-rate
female computer scientists (which I hardly believe) take comfort in
the fact that real meritorious work almost always gets the respect it
deserves, if only pothumously and many many centuries too late.

>
>It is absolutely the case that women members of computer science
>departments are less talented -- on average -- than their male
>counterparts.  It has to be this way; there is simply too much
>pressure to admit women faculty.

Says who? Based on what realistic evidence? Without backing evidence,
I am forced to see it as your personal opinion and hearsay that you
are trying to pass off as self-evident truth.

>  But it's sadder because of the opinions being formed by
>the computer scientists already out there -- women faculty members are
>*already* often dismissed as token appointments instead of merited
>ones.

Really? By who? Level headed people or academic bigots? If the latter,
why should one be worried excessively about what snobs and bigots think?
They will always undervalue people as they damn well please.

>  In the long run, this attitude is going to do female computer
>scientists far more harm than the good resulting from a scattering of
>female appointments.

You started with a case of someone giving an example in some as yet
unpublished journal article, which you subjectively found to be
implausible. Rather than dismiss it with a simple explanation, you saw
it fit to postulate a deep rooted pattern of political correctness in
CS and AI, and publicize your worries to comp.ai. Now, you are
expanding the scope and are also saying that academic CS is full of
women who are less intelligent than their male counterparts, and that
by and large people consider women as token appointments. All of these
are being postulated as self-evident truths, without a shred of
objective evidence.

We need to do better than to ask our audience to take our
pronouncements at face-value. And we may need to find a more
appropriate forum than comp.ai to propound our political idealogies.

regards
Rao
[Apr  8, 1993]
---------------

    I do not see that the sex of the candidate is an ar-
    gument against her admission...  After all, we are
    a university, not a bathing establishment 
 
        David Hilbert, arguing unsuccessfully for the appointment
         of Emmy Noether to the faculty at G"ottingen.