Over the years, I've told colleagues and friends about things I have seen or experienced. Many times, people have said that I should write them down so that they won't be lost and forgotten, since some of them might be useful parts of our history. I've been writing them down, without being sure what I would do with them. I decided to gradually post them on this website, and see what reactions I get. I suggest reading from the bottom up (starting with the August 2017 post "The Meritocracy"). Thoughtful and kind feedback would be useful for me, and would help me to revise the exposition to make it as useful as possible. I hope that while you read my stories you will ask yourself "What can I learn from this?" I'm particularly interested in knowing what you see as the point of the story, or what you take away from it. Please send feedback to asilverb@gmail.com. Thanks for taking the time to read and hopefully reflect on them!

I often run the stories past the people I mention, even when they are anonymized, to get their feedback and give them a chance to correct the record or ask for changes. When they tell me they're happy to be named, I sometimes do so. When I give letters as pseudonyms, there is no correlation between those letters and the names of the real people.

Wednesday, May 5, 2021

Kangaroo attack?

When I was a visitor at an Australian university in 1989, I saw strange flyers on walls here and there on campus, warning about attacks on women. Detailed physical and demographic descriptions were given of the women who were attacked. So little was said about the attacker and the modus operandi that I realized that the flyers were consistent with the women having been struck by lightning. Or punched by a kangaroo.

Now, I knew (or at least strongly suspected) that the women hadn't been hit by lightning or punched by kangaroos. It would be odd to put up flyers for lightning strikes. I guess if an unusually large number of people in a short period of time were hurt by lightning, it might make sense to post flyers.

But why give detailed descriptions of the victims?

The fact that some of the victims wore jeans, or had Asian ancestry, or were of medium height didn't help me much. Nothing in the descriptions told me anything useful about what I should do differently (other than perhaps not walk alone on or near campus). It was winter and got dark early. There wasn't much I could do to ensure that I wouldn't look, to an attacker on a dark evening, like the victims.

As I walked from the math department to my lodging at the end of the day, I wondered what I should and shouldn't do. Should I be afraid of the boy walking towards me? Or of the older man with a beard? Should I turn and run when the mustachioed middle-aged man appeared suddenly around a bend in a dark alley?

Descriptions of the attackers might have been helpful. Or whether the women didn't get a good view of the attacker because he/she/it always approached from behind. Even better would have been improved lighting. (I recalled being told at Princeton that better lighting wasn't an option since bright lights would be unsightly.) I wondered whether the point of the flyers was to get women to stay inside, especially young women of Asian ancestry.

Luckily for me, lightning didn't strike while I was there, and I wasn't ambushed by kangaroos.