10 thoughts on “Wordcamp 2009 talk”

  1. Twitter has its limits. The whole quote, and the context, are as follows:

    “The accusations are aimed at comments Sotomayor made during a 2001 lecture at the University of California-Berkeley. Referring to former Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s saying that ‘a wise old man and wise old woman will reach the same conclusion in deciding cases,’ Sotomayor said, ‘I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.'”

    http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/SCOTUS/story?id=7685284&page=1

  2. As Larry Summers and James Watson have demonstrated, venturing into this territory is fraught with political danger, so it was a stupid thing to say. However, it is undoubtedly true. Sotomayor’s quote says that if you take two ethnic populations, A and B, and from A eliminate all the ones who are not wise, then sample a person from the remainder of A and from all of B, then with probability > .5, the person from A will reach a better conclusion. If you believe there are at least some non-wise B’s, then this is almost a tautology.

  5. Folks: This was supposed to be a collection of links to support a short talk at Wordcamp, not the opening of a big debate on the mental inferiority of white males. I put the Sotomayor quote in there because I thought it was funny and would wake up the group in the middle of a long sleepy afternoon (my talk was at 3). I think “wise Latina woman” is going to become a catchphrase for the next few months. My cousin was trying to figure out why iMovie was stuck in a mode that put bizarre sound effects behind his daughter’s video footage, I said “if you were a wise Latina woman you’d have figured this out a long time ago” (he never did figure it out, of course, and neither could I, but his wife will still tell you how it makes sense to spend 2-3X extra on a Macintosh because it is so much easier to use than Windows).

  6. I love that “servo” diet. I don’t know why, but it left me laughing until it hurt. The whole diet thing, as understood by an engineer, without any allowance for human factors.

  7. Hello Philip,

    I hope you will share some of your impressions from Wordcamp.

    EW

  8. Edie: I’m just home in Boston as of a few hours ago. Mostly I’m impressed by Automattic and Matt Mullenweg (25 years old and seemingly incapable of doing anything wrong). The energy of the community was impressive and contagious (I would highly recommend attending Wordcamp in the city nearest you). The great unknown seems to be what happens with video.

    One thing that surprised me was how many people are plunging into Web publishing as a career. They are pretty much unaware of what was on the Internet prior to Facebook but that kind of ahistorical perspective seems to be helpful. They don’t know that publishers spent billions of dollars in the 1990s on sites that never caught on. It isn’t quite the Tech Bubble 2.0 because these folks aren’t raising VC money and then pissing it away. They are spending $10/month on a WordPress-based site and investing only their own time and effort.

  9. Update on the Macintosh/iMovie problem: my cousins gave up on removing the unwanted soundtrack using Apple’s so-simple-anyone-can-understand-it interface. They started over from scratch with the 35-minute movie.

  10. @ Peter – I would have to disagree with your analysis that her statement is true. I would say that it is indeterminate. She is quoted as saying,”Second, I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.”

    I parse this statement as “I would hope for X (to be true).” It doesn’t matter what X is, the truth is in whether or not she hopes for X. Since we can’t know what she actually hoped at the time of the statement, I would say the statement is indeterminate. Assuming that she is incapable of misrepresenting her own state of mind, and really did hope for X, then the statement is true, but not for the reasons you outlined.

    However whether the X statement, which I parse out as “A wise Latina woman is more likely to reach a better conclusion than a [wise] white male who hasn’t had her experiences.” (It is accurate to include [wise] in front of white male, because if you read the statements immediately before and after this one in the transcript, she is discussing wise women and wise men, and it is indisputable that this is her train of thought.)

    So what is a “better conclusion?” In her speech, better conclusions are those that would have decided in favor of cases brought by women or racial minorities to the Supreme Court claiming gender or racial discrimination in our society.

    She says while white judges are actually capable of understanding the experiences of women and minorities they just may be too lazy [they are not willing to give the time and effort] or may lack the right experiences or just don’t care enough to try to understand, so there should be women and minority race judges, because a person’s gender and ethnicity affect what facts they are able to see.

    Her general commentary in the speech is not about whether a decision was correct based on the case law or Constitution, but whether it resulted in the correct moral conclusion, as defined by her.

    Her speech essentially advocates moral relativism and judicial activism, and I think that is why people who oppose those philosophies oppose her nomination.

    I personally have not formed an opinion on the matter at this time since I am only commenting on the facts relating to her speech and quote.

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