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This sounds true, but is actually incorrect. Whenever women speak out on social media, they get at the very least abuse, but also often rape threats and death threats against them. That is retaliation, plain and simple.

That's just the loud stuff. There's also the quiet "oh she's too much of a firebrand" or "oh she won't fit into the small team because she might call people out for their casual sexism" that happens all the time.

>This sounds true, but is actually incorrect. Whenever women speak out on social media, they get at the very least abuse, but also often rape threats and death threats against them. That is retaliation, plain and simple.

Rape threats and death threats are illegal. They should be reported, investigated and prosecuted. (As an aside, I've seen many instances where women claim to have received rape or death threats, with no mention that they reported them to the authorities. I find that perplexing.)

If by "abuse" you mean garden-variety insults and name-calling, well, that's been one of the left's go-to tactics for a long time. And women have certainly engaged in it plenty.

I'm referring to waging public campaigns to have a person fired or otherwise professionally, personally or economically harmed. The left has done this many times to people who have dared express wrongthoughts publicly. And it has had a chilling effect against others who might harbor similar wrongthoughts and are thinking of expressing them publicly.

So far, there's been no downside for the left for employing these tactics; only upside. That needs to be changed. They'll continue these bully tactics as long as they carry no risk.

I want to see this change. I want to see leftists who gin up rage mobs find themselves facing one themselves, more often than not. I want to see companies who capitulate to the demands of leftist rage mobs get besieged by an even more vocal and organized rage mob from the right.

In short, I don't like rage mob tactics, but the only way to fight against them effectively is with opposing rage mobs.

> Rape threats and death threats are illegal. They should be reported, investigated and prosecuted. (As an aside, I've seen many instances where women claim to have received rape or death threats, with no mention that they reported them to the authorities. I find that perplexing.)

True! They should be, but they frequently aren't because there's a significant amount of time, friction, and effort required to do an accurate police report. Even more importantly, the internet's ability to enable harassment through pseudo-anonymity is unparalleled. It's really easy to send a death threat to someone over Twitter with a burner phone. It's not easy to come to the police and say "hey, throwaway99475 on Twitter posted a picture of my house and said he was going to rape me."

To quote yourself:

> So far, there's been no downside [for] employing these tactics; only upside. That needs to be changed. They'll continue these bully tactics as long as they carry no risk.

> time, friction, and effort required

Is it important, or isn't it? I'm pretty sure you'd find the time to do something that would save your job, so shouldn't a rape threat be the same?

> posted a picture of my house

This would be taken seriously, but aren't the vast majority of rape threats.

You original post suggests that, because there is not retaliation against people speaking in favor of diversity efforts, we should thus create one to balance it out.

I have shown you that there is retaliation against people who speak out about diversity efforts. Thus you should retract your suggestion that we form a mob, because it is no longer necessary (among other reasons).

When it comes to professionally, personally, or economically harmed, if you don't believe that this happens to women in tech on a regular basis, then you clearly have NOT been reading Hacker News, or ANY of the accounts from your fellow colleagues like Susan Fowler!

I don't like rage mob tactics either, but you want to create a reactionary rage mob to fight the rage mob of the left created to fight the rage mob of the right. No more rage mobs, please.

> rape threats and death threat

Which any 14 year old with internet access can make, the seriousness of which depends entirely on your perspective. I note, "I'm gonna rape you" isn't taken as seriously when directed against a male, meaning there is a strong component of interpretation there. What do you think the probability (of an attempt) of any particular rape threat made online is?

In the meanwhile, we are comparing this to the real outcome of someone being fired. It seems an apples and oranges comparison; Either we compare threats of rape, to threats of being fired - or actual instances of both. You can't balance real consequences with speculated ones.

One side is free to express its views at an institutional, public level. Entire corporations can express support for ill-founded political views to much praise. The other side is condemned for doing the same.

Fight angry outrage with threats of angry outrage?

It's hard to see how that makes sense.

Personally, I hope Google ignores the angry people on all sides and does the right thing. I think it's ok to have principles and standards and to stick by them when the situation is tough. (Otherwise, what's the point?)

>Fight angry outrage with threats of angry outrage?

It's hard to see how that makes sense.

Not threats of angry outrage, actual angry outrage. The left's tactics should be used against them, in greater degrees, until they cease using those tactics.

Show them how wrong they are by becoming like them? That's... not very wise. Also cowardly.

>Show them how wrong they are by becoming like them? That's... not very wise. Also cowardly.

I have no interest in showing them they're wrong. I just want them to stop trying to destroy people who publicly express opinions which with they disagree.

As to whether or not that's "cowardly", I'm not really concerned.

You mean there is not enough angry outrage on the right? Are you serious?

Your comment highlights the main problem in American politics, on both sides: a vicious cycle of self-victimization where participants seem to become completely blind to how their own actions are a reflection of the hated others'.

>You mean there is not enough angry outrage on the right? Are you serious?

My point was not that there is not enough angry outrage on the right. There certainly is. My point was that the right's angry outraged is not as organized and focused as the left's. In addition to random angry tweets, they need to wage public campaigns against the employers or businesses of their counterparts on the left to get them fired or professionally destroyed, the way the left does to people on the right who express badthink in public.

I'm an example of the unorganized, unfocused anger on the right. I've never yet taken concrete steps to bring about the change I'd like to see, beyond talking about it on HN.

Why is it interesting to you that one side of this debate doesn't feel free to express itself? This debate has that in common with plenty of other debates, from the legitimacy of ISIS to the criminality of child pornography --- both of which are debates that have happened in some form on HN, if you think I'm just cherry picking. Sometimes these dynamics form simply because there's a clear right answer, and we're repulsed by the implication of the wrong answer.

I'd ask you to read some of my past posts that brush up against this subject matter. I consider myself aggressively moderate, but if you look at the "results" of what I considered rather unoffensive thoughts, you'll see that they were met with almost immediate silencing.

First; it's a bit disingenuous to paint it as a white vs black; since much of the substance of the debate to my eyes is the nature of the intervention you chose, not "is there necessarily a problem", but given that, I think it's very fair to say those on the spectrum of opinion short of "full unflinching support" have felt a chilling effect as of the last few years. Granted I can only speak for myself, but to suggest that differing opinions on the greys of implementation could be perceived as "repulsive" is an excellent and apt example of how far the discourse has already fallen. It's on both sides, frankly. Extremely polarized with dogma abounding. I don't know how to fix that problem, unfortunately.

The parent of this post is getting a lot of upvotes, and a lot of downvotes.

The guy has just alienated over a third of the company. Likely any of the women on his team don't trust him anymore.

Manifesto dude: Women/Blacks are too stupid to be engineers

Women/Blacks: Fuck this guy

You: Why are those women/blacks being so rude?

Let's be super clear: if this guy gets fired, it would not be because he expressed his opinions. It would be because he has abhorrent opinions that will forever affect his ability to work with women, whom he has decided are inherently incapable of working at Google.

> women, whom he has decided are inherently incapable of working at Google.

But that's not at all what he wrote?

Oh sorry. I was too broad. He wrote that it is unpopular for him to say that, for many biologically determined reasons, women do not have the traits required to excel in computer science, and that in reality the lack of their employment at Google could be reducible to their being women.

He then went on to explain at length that any effort to suppress this sort of opinion is the real diversity problem.

So I'd summarize that as: he believes that women are biologically not fit to work at Google, and therefore diversity programs are misguided, and therefore the real diversity problem is in not taking his unpopular opinions seriously.

The vast majority of people are biologically not fit to work at Google. All he said is because of slight differences in average ability and preferences we should expect the proportion of women in that incredibly small pool of people who are capable of working at Google to be lower than you would assume if you thought there was no sexual dimorphism in traits needed for engineering.

Another example, East Asian people and Ashkenazi Jewish people are much smarter than gentile whites, half a standard deviation to a full standard deviation on average: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289606...

Because of this we should expect them to be over represented in cognitively demanding jobs such as engineering at Google. And this is indeed exactly what we see. Should we positively discriminate for white people? This does not mean all white people are unfit to work at Google, it just means that on average white people are less likely to have the requisite ability, though many individuals will.

Biologically unfit?

The vast majority of people are _biologically unfit_ to work at Google?

Are you serious? What 100 meter sprint time do you need to get a job at Google?

IQ is mostly genetics. You won't find many 100 or even 120 IQ engineers working at Google.

No, it's not what he wrote. But it's how he's going to be painted.

Which, ironically, confirms one of his main arguments...

It is tempting to reduce an argument to the most uncharitable caricature imaginable. To counteract this, image I transported you to a world where there was not a subconscious misogynistic pressure keeping women out of programming and women chose not to become programmers because of some combination of average differences in personality and variance in ability. What would this world look like? How would it differ from our own?

Well, you probably wouldn't see women constantly exiting the field of tech because they encounter endless entrenched sexism, and endless skepticism of the existence or significance of sexism.

An interesting question. Is that a commonly cited reason for women leaving engineering programs? If we were to poll women who dropped engineering and sexism was low on the list of reasons for leaving would this reduce your certainty?

The summary you've provided here leaves me with no confidence that you understand even the very basics of the topic at hand. Your apparent level of confidence and outrage, in light of that fact, is truly remarkable.

I noticed that you edited your post to add a comment about my level of confidence and outrage, and I thank you for using your outrage to better clarify your concerns.

Exactly. It would be because he expressed the wrong opinions. If he expressed the correct opinions, he would face no backlash.

I do honestly get what you're saying - nobody is going to want to work with that guy. However, if he possessed the opinions and did not voice them, he would have been fine. So, it's not because he has these opinions that is the problem, simply that he expressed them.

I actually don't say that. I say that he should be fired because he has - not simply that he expressed - abhorrent opinions. It's an unfortunate epistemic reality that we don't know many peoples views until they explicitly put them to paper, but the epistemic issue doesn't cloud the moral one: he believes morally wrong things.

Are you implying that his opinions prevent him from working with women in a general sense, then? I understand where you would conclude that but I have no evidence of it so can't come to that conclusion myself. The only thing I can see is that if someone expressed those opinions, women wouldn't want to work with them.

Personally, I don't have a problem with people having bad or morally repugnant opinions. I have a problem with them acting on these opinions where it effects others.