pages tagged rantyakkinghttp://yakking.branchable.com/tags/rant/yakkingikiwiki2014-12-22T12:00:14ZAvoid generalisations, most of the timehttp://yakking.branchable.com/posts/avoid-generalisations/Lars Wirzenius2014-12-22T12:00:14Z2014-12-22T12:00:08Z
<p>I no longer live in the same city as my fellow Yakking authors Daniel
and Richard, but we communicate over IRC. As I write this, they're in
a cafe, writing new articles together, and mentioned that the table
next to them are having a fairly common type of discussion.</p>
<ul>
<li><p>"blah blah men do xxxx"</p></li>
<li><p>"blah blah women expect yyyy"</p></li>
</ul>
<p>Saying that kind of thing tends to indicate you're not appreciating
the diversity of humanity. Indeed, you're de-humanising groups of
people by treating them as identical, just because of a shared
attribute, rather than as unique persons.</p>
<p>"blah blah some people do xxxx or expect yyyy" tends to be less
discriminating and more accurate. It makes it evident that you at
least try to see people as who they are, rather than judging them
based on aspects of themselves they can't do anything about.</p>
<p>This is important when you participate in any kind of free software
community, as well. Even in a software context, you should treat
people as people, and treat them well. Without a diverse set of
people, software is worse. More importantly, treating people well
Doing The Right Thing, a bit like keeping one's code clean is DTRT.</p>