OK I want to talk about this more.

Reflecting on some recent examples of white men in tech trivializing or mocking concerns about racism, a common pattern is the belief that you don't need context or history as long as you have logic and reason. https://twitter.com/avdi/status/1346593233074270209

In fact in most cases, the very possibility that one person might have more context than another is never even raised. "Different people can have different opinions", with the assumption everyone has equal information and just reasons their way through it differently.

Of course, this goes all the way back to Aristotle reasoning out why women have fewer teeth than men (they don't) and why some people "deserve" to be slaves.

There is a long, long history of the white/western chattering classes being strongly emotionally tied to the idea that as long as you have THOUGHT HARD about a topic, you cannot be accused of ignorance.

And this thread seems to have been picked up with a passion by techies.

This was crystalized by reading a prominent techie hand-wringing about @timnitGebru speaking to a very smart Googler as if she might maybe know something he didn't. The audacity! After all, he's VERY VERY SMART.

The thread was framed in terms of "opinions"; the possibility that she might actually have background he lacked was never even considered.

Now look. As a programmer, I myself have very often sat myself down to think very, very hard about a code bug and reason out why it was happening. This is such a time-honored technique that there's a term for it.

It's called Being a Fucking Dumbass.

In nearly every instance, what actually resulted in solving the problem was more diagnostics, or more research, or giving my brain enough downtime to surface some context I'd initially missed.

Maybe this is naive, but I'm actually kind of shocked at how many people in this industry treat context and background as if it doesn't matter, or as if it is universal, or as if it doesn't even exist.

It feels ironic that in my list of acts that ACTUALLY help unravel bugs, I omitted probably the most effective one of all: getting another person's perspective. From their context and background, revealing my own blind spots.