It's really quite ridiculous, because if you watch some of her videos where she's doing a build, it's obvious she's doing all the cutting, soldering, drilling, etc
But more then that, if you watch videos where she is being interviewed talking about being a Maker (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JcnChnrHwXg) she talks just like a real hacker. She uses the exact terminology and process you'd expect, knowing you're not an expert in something, but just scraping a whole bunch of different other projects that other people contributed and made tutorials on, and tweaking them and combining them to make it your own.
It's like this CEO didn't spend even 10 minutes watching her videos and just decided to believe a conspiracy theory.
The problem I have with this woman is that she actually demeans women. There is no way I would have my little girl watch her videos as a role model. The entire thing is plain stupid.
I would have exactly the same reaction if we were talking about a guy going around town in tight fitting speedo's doing technology projects and interviews. Ridiculous. Stupid. Demeaning.
I suspect that because she is a woman I am not allowed to object to her walking around nearly naked, nipples showing through nearly see-through clothing, nearly all of her ass out there to behold, etc. I, personally, find it disgusting and as far from role model behavior as one can get. I am not a prude by any measure.
She does nothing for women other than to propose that to be accepted in technology you have to walk around showing your tits and ass in a ridiculous outfit that paints you as a sex toy and, yes, know your shit too. I find that repugnant. Just as I would for a man who might behave behaving similarly.
Raise your hand if this is what you want to teach your little girls. Exactly.
She's not supposed to be a role model for you to show to your little girl, or took aesthetically comfortable for you, or to be an example of how women should or not be accepted in technology.
She is not yours - nor even other women's - servant.
Not everyone has to be a role model for your little kid.
I don't want my kid to hear people swearing, but I'm not going to slander Linus Torvalds for doing so. I'm not stupid enough to believe that just because someone is crass they can't possibly be a good maker/developer/engineer/etc.
The part you guys are missing in my comment is that I said this is the problem "I" have with this woman.
I am not trying to pass judgement for all of humanity here. If you are OK watching videos of a nearly naked woman playing with tech and think that's great for women and humanity, so be it. I happen to thing it's disgusting.
All I can speak for is myself. I see this person as a clown who demeans every single female engineer I have every worked with or hired. She might as well be doing soft porn videos and make more money, she ain't too far from that.
Because of that I can't respect what she is doing.
Do we really want to portray women in tech this way? Really?
At one end of the spectrum people are up in arms about politicians objectifying women (and worst) and meanwhile, on the tech side of things we are OK with a woman walking around with tits and ass hanging out there?
Is the tech community OK with women being portrayed this way? I am not. Definitely not. If you defend her you are defending the objectification of women. Which is shameful.
I look at it this way. I wouldn't recommend it, because society still discriminates against you based on how you look and dress. I mean, if you show up at a job interview with 98% of your body tattooed you're also going to face bias.
Conformity in a way increases opportunity. On the other hand, she's a transhumanist, so she probably believes all of these rules and customs are pretty primitive and totally changeable. I mean, who says you ever have to wear clothes if you're in a warm climate? Who says our genitals shouldn't be seen? These are all developed customs and specific to each society. She's deliberately breaking the mold and refusing to be shamed.
I'm ok with people portraying themselves however they want to portray themselves. I can make a rational argument for "playing it safe" and being conservative, then again, when you're 70 years old and lived a life of conformity, maybe you'll regret you didn't live life openly and flamboyantly like she does.
Why would anyone question that she is a real person? If you like her content, watch it. If you don't, leave. What's wrong with being an anonymous creator?
Because she doesn't fit your stereotype of what a maker looks like, and that challenge to your preconceptions can either be accepted or rejected. Some percentage of people will reject the challenge, and come to the conclusion that this person is not who they claim to be.
In short: sexism.
For further reading, see criticism of the "fake geek girl" meme.
I remember reading a study that posited low status men tended toward misogyny when they felt threatened by the skill of women they were competing against, and this was the first thing that came to mind as I was reading over this whole saga.
Most of the comments here reference the fact that her skill is self evident. He could easily have felt threatened by her technical skill, and the fact he couldn’t plainly see it as other commenters did adds credence to his own deficit of technical ability.
The fact that he maintained a sustained slander campaign when he ostensibly had other priorities implies he felt that ‘exposing’ her became important to him, again a trait of insecure, low status individuals.
Or so you would think, but as I recall her biggest detractors were SJWs complaining about how much skin she was showing. The whole idea of her being just a facade for some male engineer was driven by the feminist notion of "male gaze". By contrast, the "misogynistic nerd" crowd (Gamergaters and the like) were quite supportive of her.
I'm skeptical. All the high level summaries imply that most of the pre-Dougherty "fake" theories came from anonymous redditors. How do you know that was the "SJW" set?
It's a made up term. Titles are suppose to be specific. I made a nice dinner yesterday myself. Guess I'm a maker too(no recipe used,original as well!)
Since they are using "maker" to describe persons that are engineering electronics related work,why not just call themselves "electronics engineer"?
Edit: seems I stepped on toes with my comment,I don't know how else to react to a term like "maker". Could have been less sarcastic but I'll eat up the downvotes and maintain what small amount of common sense I have.
I think "maker"/DIY go hand in hand - and are probably most useful as umbrella terms for people who genuinely enjoy tinkering and enjoy experiencing learning and experimenting with new physical skills.
So, yeah, "DIY dinner" does sound a bit silly. But, as someone who has done amateur shoe modification - I would never call myself a cobbler. A maker? Sure.
I sympathize a bit with your criticism of the term, because I've thought long and hard about whether or not some new terminology is coined or supported by men when they get into a hobby which is traditionally practiced by women.
eg, "crafting" is a well established word, but seems avoided by men, and DIY is an easy substitute, eg "DIY foam halloween costume"
I first noticed this when I got a sewing machine, and started to frequent DIY camping gear/hammock forums. There's an obnoxious habit around those parts to not even call a sewing machine a sewing machine - it's a "thread injector." It drives me up the wall, it seems so blatantly sexist.
When you describe what you do with a term (made up or not),that term should at the very least give your audience some idea of what you do.
Everyone is a maker. The point of a language is to communicate information,not to obscure it. Would it be a proper use of language if a programmer called himself a "writer"? After all he is writing. "programmer" or "software developer" is used to distinguish what type of writing he/she works with for a living.
Sorry if that offended you,but from my perspective,it just does not communicate the nature of their work efficiently.
"Maker" refers to an entire tinkering movement. The projects are often electronics-related, but not always. And in any case, a "maker" generally isn't performing "engineering" in anything but the loosest sense (kind of like the criticism of most "software engineers" not performing "engineering").
> Would it be a proper use of language if a programmer called himself a "writer"?
No, because that would be confusing; no one uses "writer" in that way without extra explanation. In contrast, "maker" is used to describe a tinkerer who builds designs and/or builds projects, often reusing ideas from other makers. It's "proper use of language" not because it makes sense, but because that's how people use it.
One of the things about "maker" is that in many ways it's a social descriptor - it almost means "someone who might read Make magazine". After all, it covers a huge variety of things. Someone who's into amateur electronics but is not a radio ham. Someone who dabbles in programming, does a bit of soldering, stitching, 3D printing, carpentry etc. Not someone who specialises in a particular craft. Also not an "artist" as traditionally construed (artist is itself a social descriptor), even though many of the pieces made could be considered art.
I'm not sure that "writer," or even "fiction writer," the job title shared by James Joyce and Stan Lee and William S. Burroughs and J.K. Rowling and Dr. Seuss and Toni Morrison and The Coen Brothers, is especially descriptive.
It doesn’t matter that it’s made up. What matters is that the word refers to a category of entities in the real world that it’s useful for us to be able to distinguish and refer to.
That’s a video of her being interviewed near the end she talks about why you can call yourself a maker to the host who feels he is a passive observer even though he has tinkered.
If you go to her channel, watch the build for her LED transparent bikini top for example. That can’t be faked by her husband, she demonstrates skills with the tools that many people on HN don’t even have.
Is she an electrical engineer? No, she’s a tinkerer, but what’s wrong with that?
A beautiful girl decides she wants to tinker, is into transhumanisn and body modification, uses her popularity to encourage other girls and women. Does it even matter if she has help?
I mean the guys on Mystbusters have a production staff too as do many YouTubers have collaborators.
Why do we only doubt Women’s ability or downplay it? Is it not real real because she’s attractive? Because an attractive woman couldn’t possibly be into hacking and making?
What does an engineer “look like”? What does a hacker “look like”?
Naomi already coded ruby under a male pseudonym for this very reason, to avoid gender discrimination.
If you're talking about the disparity in language skills spoken and written, that's not surprising, if you've worked with Chinese people. It's common to meet someone who is hard to understand when speaking but who can write very well indeed. I'm thinking specifically of Chinese fellow students I had in my Masters and my PhD.
I do the same for my reports. And that's simply because I want to deliver the best work possible, even if my customers would most likely be more than happy with the version that I would give them directly. Not having your stuff proofread when it is for public consumption is unprofessional.
I was a researcher, so it wasn important for the team to submit papers with good English in them. Doubly so for double blind submissions, where you want to mask that the paper is coming from china to avoid reviewer bias against chinese papers.
You're right and I remember reading that at some point, but to be honest I wouldn't have looked for an explanation if one was not provided.
In the interest of full disclosure, I am myself a migrant in an English-speaking country (a Greek living in the UK). I know first hand that there is a big difference between having been taught English as a foreign language, and actually using it to speak with native English speakers day-in and day-out.
My first years over here I had real trouble talking to people and making myself understood, or understanding them, although at the same time I was perfectly fine reading English literature and textbooks, participating in lectures and writing university assignments. I believe many foreign students (if not all of them) had the same issue.
There's an assumption that the way you speak a language reflects your general intellectual skills, but when it comes to non-native speakers it's just wrong. People taught a language as a foreign language acquire oral and written literacy skills in a different order and pace than native speakers. For instance- two friends of mine can read and write Japanese, but can't speak or understand it when spoken.
Basically, speech can be much harder than text for foreign speakers. So using the disparity between oral and written skills was already a very shaky piece of "evidence" in the original claim- even before reading Naomi Wu's explanation. It reminded me of classic conspiracy theorists looking at the shadows in pictures of the moon landings.
I wondered about that when I was in college. Had a fellow student who was from China and had pretty poor spoken skills, but I had to write something (I think it was a write-up of a circuit) with him (on an old Mac SE/30) and his written English was amazing. It was such a weird split and not that uncommon or confined to the Chinese as I later found out.
I think it comes down to reading a lot and absorbing that formalism, but not really speaking that way because, well, spoken English is a different bird.
It goes the other way too. I can read and write Chinese far better than I can speak it or listen to it in real time. If I have time to think, I can get grammar mostly correctly but if I have to do it on my feet I make many mistakes with tones and grammar.
I can read Dakotah ok, but I never could speak the language because I cannot really do the guttural without sounding idiotic. Had a boss who learned the language from her uncles, so she was teased by her aunts for "talking like a man". Reading is safer.
How so? That's interesting- how is speaking like a man or a woman different in Dakotah? Is it like in Japanese, where different first-person pronouns are used, or?
(er, not trying to make some political comment on gender roles etc, just genuinely interested to hear from a speaker. I guess I can just google it :)
There are some word differences and tone. I'm pretty poor at the difference since I'm not really a speaker (that whole guttural problem). If you look up Lakota, its basically the same difference since they are pretty close language wise.
On a side note, it is a pain in the butt to search for Dakota as opposed to Lakota on Google because it keeps giving Lakota pages. What a pain.
I think in general it's writing and reading that's easier- possibly because speech is a noisy channel, or maybe because when you're taught a language as a foreign language (at school that is) you get taught from texts and they also teach you a kind of "official" version that's not quite the version spoken by native speakers.
Like I say above, I had a big problem with that in my first couple of years in the UK. I once spent an hour having a conversation with a man from Glasgow. To this day, I have no idea what he was talking about. I didn't understand a word he was saying, so I just nodded along politely. I might have been agreeing to the need for the extermination of all sentient life or that the Earth is flat, for all I know.
I got better at it. I can now understand about 40% of what someone's saying in a Glaswegian accent. I love Scottish accents btw- probably more because I don't understand everything being said.
For reasons I cannot fathom you're reiterating the same type of suspicion that started the whole controversy, and that this apology seeks to address. Then you feel a need to share that unsubstantiated and damaging conspiracy with other people.
The apology include several reasons why this is wrong.
For a Chinese person living in China, her English is very good (compare to the English of the merchants in the same video). There are very few e.g. Americans living in the US with similarly good Chinese.
I've met Chinese people in China with accents that to me said "valley girl", I honestly thought they came from LA.
Far fewer Americans are taught Mandarin, and even fewer from an early enough age that they can master tones easily (I suspect that like Danish vowels you almost need to be born into it)
The tones themselves aren't hard (it's mainly just altering the pitch of the sounds you make in different ways); the pronunciation issues come from actual sounds that English speakers just don't make.
Yes, people who are highly motivated and go through months of intensive language immersion training followed by several years of immersive missionary work in a foreign country – where their full-time job and religious obligation is literally talking to strangers all day long – tend to learn the language quite well. Why would I be surprised about that?
What does that have to do with Wu? Presumably she never went through any similar experience, and her language skills have been largely driven by her own personal desire to communicate with foreigners rather than any structured program or religious duty. (I don’t know much about her, so maybe that’s wrong.)
Wu's major in college was English so it's not unexpected. I work with many Chinese engineers, my wife's Chinese. She spoke pretty good English when she arrived in the US 20 years ago, and her dad, who lived in China most of his life, also speaks good English, but was trained as an engineer.
I think the OP is correct that it is far more likely to find white collar mainland Chinese with a good command of English than it is to find a Westerner with a good command of Mandarin.
The reasons are really simple:
1) English is taught in school from a early age. In US schools, Mandarin usually wasn't an option until very recently, mostly Spanish, French, German, and Japanese were the standard choices.
2) English is the defacto international lingua franca. English speakers can live their whole life and not really have to learn another language to consume most of the world's published information and trade. However, Chinese speakers often need to know English to consume the output of other countries. If you need to need read an AI paper, it's most likely published in English, and unless the original authors were Chinese, they're not likely to have published a good translation.
Given the importance of the Chinese economy, I expect the next generation will change this asymmetry somewhat. Already many schools in California offer Mandarin immersion, and it seems even more common these days to see Australians who can speak good Mandarin.
What point are you trying to prove here? It's not like English is some magical language that no one can possibly learn well if they didn't grow up speaking it. Go to Europe and you'll find millions of people who aren't native English speakers but nevertheless speak it excellently.
In the grand scheme of things, being able to learn another language well does not beggar belief. In the context of this discussion, your comments are leaving a sour taste in my mouth. She's been questioned enough already.
I’m just saying her English seems quite a bit better than average.
(My wife is Chinese and has very good English, as do many of her friends. I by no means think Chinese people are generally incapable of learning English or anything.)
I thought my point was pretty obvious and simple.
There are sure a lot of people here with sticks up their butts.
Huh? Why is it a weird comment? The previous commenter said her English was bad. I think her English is quite impressively good! Kudos to her. It’s hard work to learn a foreign language to such proficiency.
She has better English than many foreigners I know who have been living in the US for >5 years, and better than the foreign language skills of many Americans I know who have lived overseas for that long.
Ya, I do also. But it isn’t weird, it hasn’t been for a long time. Likewise for Americans speaking great 大山 quality Chinese, not weird or unusual anymore.
It's still rare enough that 老外 speaking good Chinese gains you attention in Chinese media. Lots of Chinese TV contains foreign guests whose only skill is speaking Chinese, and if you travel to a tier-3 city or other area, speaking any level of Chinese can produce visible surprise and compliment in people. Imagine a US TV show that invited on Chinese natives for no other reason than they could speak passable English.
I'm pretty sure you know this. Yes, in Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, it is not uncommon. But go to a smaller city, and some people will treat you like a rare Panda. I was in 九寨沟 one time during 清明节 and a lot of out of town people were there on vacation, some of who had never met a 外国人 in person before, but after they heard me speaking, a lot of people kept coming up and asking to have a photo with me, offering too much praise for my terrible Mandarin, and intensely curious how I learned.
I'm glad to see so many people following in the footsteps of 大山， but we have a ways to go before the asymmetry is more balanced and a Westerner speaking Chinese is no longer surprising enough to be on a talent show.
I mentioned SLC for a good reason, and it has little to do with mainland China since they don’t allow missionaries. If you go to Taiwan, you’ll find, compared to the population, more foreigners speaking mandarin.
China has no problem finding foreigners who speak good Chinese like they did in the 90s. Likewise, they are a bit unnerved when the American ambassador speaks fluent mandarin like Huntsman did, or like various prime ministers of austrailia are ought to these days. They definitely exist, and if some random white (or black or Indian, etc...) guy/gal breaks out mandarin in some random context, well, it really isn’t amazing anymore.
If you visit a tier 88 city in china, the fact that you are a foreigner at all is amazing, this has little to do with your mandarin skills. Now hit the bath house with them and it’s double amazing.
It was my impression Huntsman spoke conversational Mandarin, but he wasn't fluent. Whenever he gives complicated speeches, he says a few sentences, and then transitions back to English.
Huntsman did is mission in Taiwan, so he probably was fluent at some point, well, with the standard southern accent. FYI, diplomats and leaders will typically use their official language regardless, even if they are fluent in their host country’s language. For example, the prime minister of Singapore is definitely fluent in mandarin, but always will use English for official communication.
But more then that, if you watch videos where she is being interviewed talking about being a Maker (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JcnChnrHwXg) she talks just like a real hacker. She uses the exact terminology and process you'd expect, knowing you're not an expert in something, but just scraping a whole bunch of different other projects that other people contributed and made tutorials on, and tweaking them and combining them to make it your own.
It's like this CEO didn't spend even 10 minutes watching her videos and just decided to believe a conspiracy theory.