Because it does not play into stereotypes hence is needlessly specific. Say white man conjures the image of an establishment elitist who has unrealistic standards for being a scientist (being white, male, well off)
I’ve been to lots of scientific talks and the idea of someone trying to call put the person talking is kind of ridulous and never happens. You would have to an asshole of the highest calibre to do that. And the fact he mentions a specific paper/person and that just happened to be tbe person speaking and the idea that the speakers name wasn’t listed is just so incredibly unlikely I can’t ever imagine that happening.
This just seems like the kind of thing people fantasing happening, so they can smugly correct them.
Seems like the kind of thing that would have been an intentional poke at being funny if it actually came up until Karen tries to make a thing of it because it goes straight to her head.
To be fair, she didn’t say she was giving a talk, guess it could have been a side conversation. It would seem more likely in a little side conversation.
However, at least when it happened to me, the other person remembered the paper but not the author, so it seems weird to refer to the paper by author. Also it feels weird even if he did remember to throw in the “et al”. It’s extra weird for her to declare that she is “McCarty et al”, since she is saying she is “and others”. It feels like a detail thrown in to make the exchange sound more “sciencey”, when it doesn’t make sense.
Since I had it happen to me, I’m sure it’s happened to other paper writers, but this exchange doesn’t sound like a realistic way for it to go down. So it’s at least massaged for dramatic effect.
Honestly, I didn’t think it through. I saw this on Lemmy and thought “It looks like !confidently_incorrect material and I haven’t seen content from it for some times.” So I crossposted it.
She’s just pointing out that because of his race, the man she was taking to was in a place of social privilege and he should be more mindful of this when talking to under-represented groups in his field, such as women and POC.
Reminding him that his race grants him a level of authority, encourages him not to approach every conversation with the assumption that he is the smartest in the room.
I actually experienced this exact same scenario, where someone accused me of being an idiot on a topic and referenced me to educate myself on a paper that I myself wrote. Dude was a white male, but I am too.
Hilarious because when he threw that at me I told him to look at the author and he doubled down that I was wrong, and I didn’t understand the nuance of the paper I wrote.
Short of it is people can be condescending douches even without sexism.
I know how it sounds, but it happened and it was very much not “and everyone clapped”.
It was not in some big venue, there was no audience for the exchange.
There was no wittiness in some snappy comeback, it was a plain statement of looking at the author.
There was no satisfying element of him realizing he was wrong or spinning out somehow, just a continuation of his argument largely unabated. This was in spite of the fact that it wasn’t some big complex phenomenon, it was a very specific problem with a provably correct solution (mathematically speaking), but he had already decided there could be no solution so he wasn’t receptive.
Things happen, though it’s rare that things go down on such a publicly standing satisfying way as documented on these internet stories.
To paraphrase my comment from elsewhere in this thread:
When someone commits a robbery and they happen to be the race that commits robberies the most often, do you think their race is a key piece of information that should be included when talking about the robbery?
Behaving like a sexist pig != committing a robbery
And frankly, as robberies are often a symptom of inequality, and historical racism has led members of certain “races” to have very few options for living a decent life, the “race” of a robber can be just as relevant as any other factor when discussing it.
Especially if the discussion is about how to reduce the number of robberies occurring.
It’s not irrelevant. It’s actually being intentionally framed as if his race is the reason for his undesirable qualities. That’s worse. It’s racism specifically for the sake of it. She’s propping herself up by putting down a race and a gender because she knows others with her same racism will get a kick out of it and upvote her bullshit meant to put her in the spotlight.
Some really scientifically based response by ChatGPT
Sending 1MB of data to Mars depends on the distance between Earth and Mars and the data transfer rate, which varies widely. When Earth and Mars are closest, about 54.6 million kilometers apart, using NASA’s Deep Space Network (DSN) as a reference, with rates up to 250 kbps under optimal conditions, it would take approximately 32 seconds to send 1MB. However, this is an ideal scenario, and actual times could be longer due to various factors like signal processing and interplanetary communication delays.
The average ping, or round-trip communication delay, between Earth and Mars varies depending on their relative positions in their orbits. On average, it ranges from about 4 to 24 minutes, due to the vast distance between the two planets. This latency presents significant challenges for real-time communication and coordination between Earth and Mars missions.
You know how it goes, not all white males… but almost always it is a white male.
This guy probably wouldn’t have even considered insulting a speaker that way if she wasn’t a woman. In a scientific setting it’s one thing disagreeing with an argument, and attacking the person proposing the argument.
OMG, how dense can you be? You can be a sexist black men. But the chances that you will be invited to a NASA conference to insult a female scientist in the first place is mediated by your chances of being a highly educated scientist yourself which is limited by systemic racism still inherent in STEM and the education system of the US.
So, statistically speaking, it would still be more likely to be a white male, the one doing the insulting.
So you’re saying everyone can be racist or sexist but only white people are established? That’s fair enough. I’m pretty anti establishment myself because there’s a million ways that power gets abused.
Yet somehow it is true that the vast majority of smug people who are confidently wrong are white males. Maybe someday we can have equality in the ratio of being smug while confidently wrong.
Yes and I don’t think you pointing out the truth of this stereotype is unwarranted here. But her pointing it out in the first place was. Replace this with another accurate stereotype about another race. Let’s say there’s a city in which a certain race, per capita, commits crimes more than another. Does that warrant someone saying, “So I got mugged, and of course it was a black guy!”
This type of stereotyping is clearly spiteful, ignores greater understanding about the social situation, and perpetuates the untrue idea most people conflate with these stereotypes: Every member of the race is like this. This is even internalized by members of the race in question, perpetuating the greater social issue itself.
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