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Comment by curun1r | Hacker News Reader

Where did I ignore that? I called their behavior reprehensible. I'm just saying that it's unlikely the behavior exists in a vacuum and that things are never as black and white as they're made out to be.

Historical oppression doesn't justify questionable behavior. I've seen many instances where women have "dated up" to help their careers. I even saw one instance where a female director dated the CTO and later the CFO to have someone to support her coke habit. Just calling out the men will never truly fix the problem. We need to be giving a consistent message to both sexes. These types of relationships (and expectations of relationships) are not acceptable under any circumstances. Because if it's wrong for men to pressure women but it's okay for women to pursue those men, then there can always be the hope in the back of the man's mind that maybe it's possible.

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So if, say, 1,000 men got completely unsolicited propositions, groping, etc. and one man "dated up" at a company with women in high leadership positions, would you argue that those problems are exactly equally important and exactly equally serious and make sure to post comments about how incredibly important it is to ensure some balanced coverage and make sure everyone knows that it's not just solely a one-sided issue? Would you make sure to imply that anyone who focused on the much more common case was "justifying questionable behavior"? And try to drag the topic away from the common case?

Do you also do this in discussions of any other topic whatsoever? Whenever someone posts something about HTTP, do you make sure to post comments about Gopher and present it as being just as important?

I'm not trying to say they're equal problems. I'm trying to say that the one problem contributes to the other. In your example, the one man who dated up creates that possibility in the mind of the groper in those other 1,000 incidents. It's like the 1 super lotto winner among the millions who bought tickets. The event doesn't have to be likely for people to think that they might get lucky...people generally suck at estimating risk/reward. If there are zero winners, no one buys tickets, but since someone wins, millions play.

In the same way, if those advances were never successful, these men would quickly get the message and stop playing. But that doesn't seem to be the case since it's still happening way too frequently. If we want to stop this problem, we need to figure out how to get the message through that even in the cases where the advances were welcomed, they still did something wrong. And that requires more than just laying into those unfortunate few that are unlucky enough to do this kind of thing to women brave enough to come forward. It will require calling out those instances where the advances were welcomed.

This is a pretty good argument, or way of looking at it, which I almost dismissed simply because of the hostile tone you state it.

In particular, the last paragraph you could have done without. These discussions already get heated enough, IMO.

I disagree. It's quite possible the behavior was completely unsolicited and uninvited. Things are sometimes exactly as wrong as they appear to be. To assume otherwise, with no evidence other than your own anecdotal experience, is... well, pretty much sexist!

This article, and this conversation is about one pathology. You bring up a different one and say "we should treat them equally!" - that's not very different from the "all lives matter" bullshit. Sexism and discrimination of women in tech industry is a massive problem. What you described probably exists in some cases, but is not a) related to the problem at hand and b) orders of magnitude less profound. By bringing it up here and trying to tie those two together you're devaluating the severity of the problem at hand in the same way as if you went to an article about rape and started talking about those promiscous people who like sex.

Those pathetic douchebags were not "primed" by any experiences with women "dating up". They were primed, trained, protected and covered up by the shitty patriarchal society we live in. And it's worth tackling that problem without attempting to dilute it in "maybe she wanted it" sauce.

The other pathology is relevant because it contributes to the first one. It's not about equal exposure for the sake of equality, but relevant to understanding how shit works and how to deal with it.

No, it really doesn’t. The two have nothing to do with each other. One is quite rampant, while the other is quite rare.

Trying to see it from a cultural perspective, how common is it that female character "dates up" in books, TV and movies (and in particular, those targeting a female audience)?

Thinking back at the show Grey's Anatomy, ABC's highest-rated drama show, got a female lead, and was among the top 10 shows in the US. A recent joke the character made was that all of them married their bosses. While fictional, culture impacts perception regarding behavior and in turns causes behavior.

Everyone keeps mistaking my meaning. I'm not trying to excuse the behavior or say that it's okay. I've repeatedly condemned it. But we need to decide what we want as a result of bringing this kind of behavior out into the open. Do we want to punish and ostracize the guilty or do we want to minimize the occurrence of this behavior going forward? If it's the former, then by all means get out your pitchforks and we can condemn these men as fundamentally flawed human beings and women can continue to be subjected to this BS. But if it's the latter, then we really need to approach it from a more empathetic position. We need to understand the thought processes of these men to understand why they thought the behavior was in any way acceptable.

I see a lot of the vilification in these threads, but very little effort towards trying to understand. Chalking it up to "patriarchal society" may be fine from the standpoint of PC talking points, but it is intellectually lazy and just makes the situation more adversarial rather than one where we can come together and figure out the best ways to avoid this happening in the future. We want to make sure that the men who are in a position to abuse women like this learn why the behavior is wrong and not the steps to avoid (sms/fb/etc messages) getting caught.

This is why both pathologies are relevant. I'm not trying to blame the women who try to use their sexuality to their advantage or even those that engage in consensual relationships with men in a position of power. But because those instances exist and these men have likely witnessed them personally, even if they're rare, they create the possibility in the minds of these men. It's an exploration of the thought process that led them to act in this way. Perhaps it's not what these men were thinking...it's just my projection, but no one has presented any argument or any other substantive possibility. They've just, like you, overreacted and sought to distort what I was trying to say because it didn't match the outrage and need for vengeance that they feel.

> Do we want to punish and ostracize the guilty

Yup, that one.

> or do we want to minimize the occurrence of this behavior going forward?

False equivalence. I would imagine if VCs and investors get the message that if they hit on women they'll be fired, they'll stop doing it.

> I'm not trying to blame the women who try to use their sexuality to their advantage or even those that engage in consensual relationships with men in a position of power. But because those instances exist and these men have likely witnessed them personally, even if they're rare, they create the possibility in the minds of these men.

Okay, so to combat this "pathology", we'll say, "If you engage sexually with someone who approached you in a professional context, consensually or otherwise, you're fired". Seems easy enough, and that takes care of the problem.

> I would imagine if VCs and investors get the message that if they hit on women they'll be fired, they'll stop doing it.

You imagine wrong. Instead, they'll learn how to do it without getting caught. Lesson one comes from these incidents. Don't leave an electronic or paper trail. It's much less likely these women would have come forward if they hadn't had electronic records of chat sessions to back up their assertions.

If you only treat the symptoms of the problem, it will keep returning in different forms. You need to address the root of the problem and your over-simplified view of the issue will never allow you to do that.

In theory, there could be an intelligent psychological model that analyzes a male VC's brain and provides thoughtful suggestions to them to dissuade them from this behavior right before it occurs. While that's a nice thought, it's incredibly unrealistic.

The far more practical approach is to catch the bad guys over and over again, make examples of them and mete out punishment. That's how criminal deterrence works in every other field. No reason to make an exception here.

> Yup, that one.

So you're advocating for zero tolerence.

>> But because those instances exist and these men have likely witnessed them personally, even if they're rare, they create the possibility in the minds of these men

There was never any suggestion that any of the men in the article observed some woman "dating up" and as a consequence of that felt justified to grope or send inappropriate messages to the women in the article.

The men in the article themselves did not even try to portray their alleged actions as justifiable, or excuseable by association with any other past behaviour. They either admitted their behaviour was wrong or denied they ever behaved in this manner.

And yet, here you are relating a story about a woman you once saw "dating up" to try and explain those men's behaviour as something else than a simple mistake that should not be repeated.

How is this useful, exactly? In what way does it contribute, besides changing the subject and trying to shift the blame on the people who, in the article, were reportedly subjected to undeniably inappropriate behaviour?

> Everyone keeps mistaking my meaning.

This should tell you to stop and think about what you’re really saying.

No it shouldn't. What he is saying is just fine if people would take the time to actually read it.

It's not even that people are disagreeing, it's that they see a trigger word and stop reading, then launch into a straw man attack. I see that frequently in these "social justice" threads.

>> But because those instances exist and these men have likely witnessed them personally, even if they're rare, they create the possibility in the minds of these men

Btw, this does not compute. Those instances are "rare" but those men have "likely" witnessed them? When something is rare, most are unlikely to witness it.

Welcome to the law of large numbers. Winning the lottery is a rare event--more than one in a million. A hard drive failure is a rare event--most drives can have trillions of successful reads and writes before they fail. Yet we've all seen the people holding up those oversized checks and who among us has never had a hard drive fail on us?

These guys see hundreds of pitches. There's hundreds of VCs in the valley. Something can be rare--less than one in a hundred and still be likely. Rare for a single instance can be likely and expected across a large number of instances.

There's a bit of confusion here with "the law of large numbers". People do win the lottery, but because it's very rare, only very few people do so. Hard drives may fail if they remain in use over a very long time, but only a few drives will remain so.

Accordingly, the "law of large numbers" as you report it, means that either only a handful of those hundreds of VCs in SV have witnessed inappropriate pitch behaviour, or this inappropriate pitch behaviour is not rare.

Regardless of the exact quantities, it remains true that an event is either unlikely to be witnessed, or it is not rare. That an event will be witnessed even though it is rare doesn't mean that it will be witnessed often.

The law of large numbers doesn't say that rare things happen often, is what I'm saying. Because that would be an oxymoron, not a paradox (which that "law" is meant to illustrate).

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