No, that's just a thing I can relatively readily point to that gets respected here if you have male bits between your legs but gets roundly dismissed as worthless internet points if you have female bits between your legs.
I can empathize with her because I was one of the top three students of my graduating class and had the highest SAT scores of my class. I was STAR student and a National Merit Scholarship winner.
I was inducted into Mu Alpha Theta, a college-level math honor society, at age 16 in eleventh grade, the earliest you can be inducted. At age 15, I was state alternate for the Governor's Honors Program, a residential gifted summer enrichment program. That means only two other people outperformed me in the entire state of Georgia on a topic I sort of picked randomly out of a hat because I was a well-rounded student and didn't have any particular area of obvious strength like most candidates.
But more to the point, I have a form of cystic fibrosis and I have been getting myself well for nearly two decades while the entire world calls me crazy and a teller of tall tales and a liar and throws me off of one forum after another which is why I don't cite it more often as a reason I can empathize with someone like Mileva Einstein. I much more often compare myself to Semmelweis and talk about trying hard to not end up locked up in an insane asylum and beaten to death for the crime of thinking I know something medically useful.
What I know really ought to qualify me for something like the Nobel Prize in Medicine. But I'm not holding my breath. I'm not likely to ever get any recognition for my accomplishments. The dismissive nonsense in this thread is very much the norm, unfortunately.
"No, that's just a thing I can relatively readily point to that gets respected here if you have male bits between your legs but gets roundly dismissed as worthless internet points if you have female bits between your legs."
Sure, whenever anything you say is dismissed, it must be because you are a woman. Not because you didn't provide any evidence at all to make your case. Also, women don't have to provide evidence, I guess, they just know things and have to be believed.
Historically, it was somewhat common for men to say to each other here "You must be smart and competent because you have a lot of karma on HN." People tend to not say that about me and when I say that about myself -- "Look, this is a metric right in front you that gets used to say other people here are smart and competent" -- it generally gets ugly reactions, as occurred here.
I'm trying to walk away from this discussion at this point. I haven't had enough sleep and I've been on HN over eleven years and the degree to which I still get treated like "Shut up woman, there is no sexism here!" is a point of personal aggravation and there is no good means to combat it.
Ideally, someone else should be telling people "She's probably the only woman to have ever spent time on the leader board and a respected and valued member of the community" or someone else should be telling people "She kicks ass. This is a list of her accomplishments." That's generally how respected men get treated.
But that's not happening and I end up feeling like I have no real choice but to defend myself at times, knowing that will also go badly and be used against me as evidence that I'm not actually important or respectable or smart and so on.
That's the essence of sexism. It's a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation. There simply are no good answers for me. They don't exist and trying to find them gets a lot of abuse heaped upon me.
I was openly homeless on HN for nearly six years. I remain dirt poor. I continue to get treated like I'm a loon who has no basis to claim any kind of competence at all.
And if I say that is evidence of sexism, well, that's just more "evidence" I'm some crank.
Anyway, I haven't had enough sleep. I have had more than I care to have of this type of conversation for today. I'm trying to walk away.
May I offer some context for what appears to be general push-back to your argument.
There are some incredible contributors to this forum who are women that I respect a lot, despite that they actually have quite low HN karma, devaboone for example. The only thing that causes respect in most eyes is the actual quality of discourse, the content itself. When I see a high karma, the only conclusion anyone draws is that this is someone who spends a lot of time on this site, which is just fine. But anyone here can have a high karma if they want to spend that time, and merely spending that time is not in and of itself a source of interest. What is definitely not interesting is talking about the karma score itself and whether or not someone is on some list of frequent users.
> I continue to get treated like I'm a loon who has no basis to claim any kind of competence at all.
> And if I say that is evidence of sexism, well, that's just more "evidence" I'm some crank.
You claimed in the thread that you were deserving of the Nobel prize in medicine. If people are treating you like a crank and you are making claims like that, that is pretty far from "no basis to claim any kind of competence at all." That one seems to be a claim of supreme competence.
I've never seen people flaubnt their karma or congratulate others on their karma here, and I have been on HN almost from day one. I've also been on the leader board at some time (when the board was introduced or was topic of discussion, may have been the only time when people where congratulated for their karma or position on the board).
These days I use throwaway accounts because of the increasing censorship and to force myself to ignore the karma system.
I think karma does affect the algorithm that decides if you get flagged or banned, or at least alerts the mods. May just be the short time votes on specific comments, though.
I'm not going to spend all day on this -- it's pointless anyway because answering you will be some new crime on my part since I said I was walking away and no one will feel like "Well, they shouldn't have doubled down and tried to lure her back into the conversation" because it's all about proving I'm evil and the way I get mistreated is justified -- but here are a few:
You rarely would say "He has accumulated lot of good karma by doing good, I better see what he has to say". On HN, its a different story.
Those are all old comments. Probably not a coincidence because as stated previously when I began pointing out the double standard -- that men would praise each other for having high karma here but nothing I do is ever good enough and I get attacked for trying to assert that I deserve to be treated better -- then people began saying that less rather than, you know, decide to treat me better.
I can empathize with her because I was one of the top three students of my graduating class and had the highest SAT scores of my class. I was STAR student and a National Merit Scholarship winner.
I was inducted into Mu Alpha Theta, a college-level math honor society, at age 16 in eleventh grade, the earliest you can be inducted. At age 15, I was state alternate for the Governor's Honors Program, a residential gifted summer enrichment program. That means only two other people outperformed me in the entire state of Georgia on a topic I sort of picked randomly out of a hat because I was a well-rounded student and didn't have any particular area of obvious strength like most candidates.
But more to the point, I have a form of cystic fibrosis and I have been getting myself well for nearly two decades while the entire world calls me crazy and a teller of tall tales and a liar and throws me off of one forum after another which is why I don't cite it more often as a reason I can empathize with someone like Mileva Einstein. I much more often compare myself to Semmelweis and talk about trying hard to not end up locked up in an insane asylum and beaten to death for the crime of thinking I know something medically useful.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis
What I know really ought to qualify me for something like the Nobel Prize in Medicine. But I'm not holding my breath. I'm not likely to ever get any recognition for my accomplishments. The dismissive nonsense in this thread is very much the norm, unfortunately.