Newsgroups: comp.ai Path: ennews!news From: rao@parikalpik.eas.asu.edu (Subbarao Kambhampati) Subject: Re: sexism and political correctness in AI papers? Message-ID: <1993Apr8.232604.21623@ennews.eas.asu.edu> Sender: news@ennews.eas.asu.edu (USENET News System) Organization: Dept. of Computer Science, Arizona State University, Tempe References: <8054@blue.cis.pitt.edu> <1993Apr08.181704.19762@sue.cc.uregina.ca> <1993Apr8.201047.4528@CSD-NewsHost.Stanford.EDU> Date: Thu, 8 Apr 1993 23:26:04 GMT 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 <1993Apr8.201047.4528@CSD-NewsHost.Stanford.EDU> ginsberg@t.Stanford.EDU (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.