What You Can't Say (2004)
paulgraham.com
paulgraham.com
Post election, I recall my timelines erupt with emotion -- outrage, despair, betrayal -- then subdue to reflection. Some called for the need to truly reach out to those across the aisle and to listen and understand, earnestly lending an ear even to views that we strongly oppose.
Recent events will be a step back in such relations, as dissent has been dismissed demonstrably without such considerations.
When the people we must understand in order to reach bipartisanship go into hiding for fear of being outed, broadening our perspective becomes difficult.
A perfect example is the stand one may take that 'Sanctuary Cities' are bad. Voicing opposition to sanctuary cities can get you labelled as a racist, which is ridiculous.
We've always conflated moral leanings with truth. Previously, "the truth" was right leaning; it is now left leaning. Unfortunately, many people find (and have always found) that all it takes to dismiss an opposing moral position is to point out that their opponent's position is untruthful, and the discussion (or lack thereof) ends there.
As a general principle, much of modern Western thought seems to be obsessed with minimizing any sort of discomfort in the present moment, regardless of whether that discomfort is a temporary and necessary phase one must pass through in order to reach a better future.
Is this a difficult or arguable point?
But the larger question, of whether it is good that a particular political ideology, adhered to by a small minority of the country, should hold such sway over public discourse that to challenge any of its dogmas is to commit career suicide, remains. This is a trend that is only accelerating, and it's going nowhere good.
Being divisive at work isn't good for business.
The above sentence is a fact but I am compelled to write it with a throwaway account since even mentioning the idea that this may have been unfair puts my career at risk. That's how bad it's gotten.
They're firing him not even because of his opinions but because he's just bringing more "bad" than "good to the compagny.
At the end of the day it's not the "compagny taking a moral standpoint" but "solving a compagny problem" in the most simple way
So if I understand your argument correctly, if people hate you then it's OK to fire you? I'm sorry, this makes no sense to me.
As best I can tell Google is within their legal rights to employ this individual as they see fit
I'm going to disagree that getting rid of inconvenient truth tellers is 'good for business' though
Prior Posts:
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=what%20you%20cant%20say&sort=b...
This one has 291 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7443420
Follow-up: http://www.paulgraham.com/resay.html
Follow-up thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=956884
* hate crime laws are institutionalized double jeopardy.
* much of kitchen hygiene are just rituals.
* early infanticide isn't so bad.
(Avoiding gender stuff because that's been done to death)
Having said that (and falling into the de-railing track):
>hate crime laws are institutionalized double jeopardy.
How so? I am not an expert (and only have any knowledge of the US system), but aren't hate crimes considered enhancers to existing crimes. That is, to be found guilty of a hate crime, you must also be found guilty of an underlying crime; if you are found not-guilty of the actual crime, then you can not be tried for the hate crime. Being found guilty of a hate crime only serves to increase the severity of punishment for a normal crime that you have been convicted of.
Most often when we hear about hate crimes, it is regarding a separate federal case, prosecuted independently from the local or state case.
Still, this is a more general issue that hate crimes. Each state (and the federal government) are considered separate entities, which means that double jeopardy does not prohibit being tried for the same crime multiple times, so long as you are being tried by different states (or the federal government). It is not nessasary to have a hate crime for this principle to be invoked. It is also not unreasonable by modern standards to disagree with this; it is just an odditiy of the American legal system that most people never think about.
Might it be true that women are just naturally much less attracted to STEM than men?
For the record, I think even among men, being attracted to STEM or even good at it is rather rare. It's probably even rarer among women.
EDIT: I wonder if the downvotes are because I'm going offtopic or because I can't say that?
No.
In India in 2015, 45% of CS undergrads were women[0]. In the US, in 1984, it was 37%[1], as opposed to 18% in 2010. The downvotes are because you can tell the answer to your question in about 5 minutes of Googling.
[0]: http://www.hcixb.org/papers_2017/hcixb17-final-37.pdf [1]: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/what-happened-all-w...
There's less economic or social pressure in the west so people tend to choose more to their liking and "follow their passion".
Not to have a go at you personally but this is revealing of a highly middle class bubble that a lot of people are trying to reason from within (including that silly kid at google). It's like a moral and socio-political version of the Blub paradox. It's the same reason that it isn't possible to be racist against whites (in the West) or sexist against men, and why that is hard to understand if you are white or a man (you don't know you are in the privilege bubble and it seems inequitable).
(I'm not even white).
Edit: to expand on the above point, the funny thing is, people peddling this kind of bullshit know it's bullshit. For example, feminists want "social justice", and try to redefine "racism" as "institutional racism". But, obiously, by prefixing other adjectives to the words, they're modifying the words themselves - "justice" is just "justice", if you're talking about "social justice", you're obviously not talking about actual "justice", because if you were, you'd simply use the word "justice" without any additional qualifying adjectives. But then, most people respond to emotional arguments way more than to rational arguments, so that's where the war is fought, and it keeps escalating until we get Trump.
Yes of course, it was the first thing I thought and I held onto that. If both parties were on equal ground you would be quite right and there would be equivalence so you could just flip the roles, but they aren't. Middle class white men have greater opportunities in society. Racism and sexism are oppressive by definition, and redressing inequality of opportunity isn't oppression.
And btw talking about institutional racism is the opposite of an emotive argument. It's a more precise way to highlight that the issue is systemic and not the result of individuals being deliberately racist.
That's the key word, not "white" or "men". I fully support redressing inequality of opportunity... as long as it's not sexist or racist.
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/social-mobility-memos/2017/01...
Edit: in other words, if you want to help poor people, help poor people. If you want to help black people, help black people, but don't pretend you're helping poor people, and don't be surprised when you're called racist (like white supremacists, who help white people) or when you receive backlash from non-black people.
I'd wager good money I'm a lot closer to that Conrad character than the author will ever be and from where I'm sitting it's pretty clear that tech culture has started becoming completely toxic. The article reads as if written by a psychopath (and one begins to wonder whether Evgeny Morozov has a point about SV's movers and shakers). Putting aside the shallow and barely informed notions about fashion and art themselves, dismissing morality as no more than a seasonal fad or craze is itself an unwitting confession of a deep-seated amorality.
When has this happened?
>As for "political correctness" it was a term that was first popularised by the right to attack college activism and shut down people challenging the status quo.
Actually, it was a term first popularized by the socialists, to attack the communists.
Happened to me a few months back.
> Actually, it was a term first popularized by the socialists, to attack the communists.
I'm talking about it becoming popularised in contemporary politics. We can all google that it was rebirthed in 87. The reason I know this though is that I remember seeing it coming into common currency after it was repeatedly being used as a hot button term by the GH Bush election campaign team in 88. This was talked about in the broadsheets at the time.
(That's completely fine in the context of a private community with its own specific set of values but it should be clearly advertised so that participants understand it's not a wider consensus in the world at large and that they aren't getting anything like an open discussion with a range of views.)
In fact, Copernicus was a canon of a cathedral, and dedicated his book to the pope. And published it just before his death. So was Galileo himself deeply embedded in christianity trying to resolve the conflicts within the system. He didn't see himself as heretic, that was a label applied to him by others. The pope actually asked him to pursue his research on heliocentrism on a hypothetical level.
The Ludendorff reference seems overblown at least, as some picked up tidbits by a 3rd party retelling of history. Maybe he mixed it up with the so called Stab-in-the-back myth that happened after the war. The 1917 Reichstag Peace Resolution was never popular with the already quasi-dictatorial OHL, so it never needed a purge in that sense. The events in Russia led people to believe an annexation victory Siegfrieden was possible at some point so the resolution got obsolete at some point.
The Dutch seem to live their lives up to their necks in rules and regulations. Huh? So seem Americans if seen from Europe.
Stalin and Hitler (who else of all people not name-dropped yet) are singlehandedly responsible for the claimed demise of representational art, not the advent of photography and film (aren't those two representational by the choice of medium already)? Maybe it simply got boring for artists for a while?
Imagine you make a post inside your company Slack complaining all your colleagues are stupid and unqualified. You'd probably be reprimanded right?
Didn't that guy basically just do that but only about his female and minority colleagues (and future female and minority colleagues)? Don't we all monitor our words at least a bit at work for the sake of the day going smoothly?
And if he's so correct about Google's diversity initiatives being a problem and/or failure why doesn't he start a company that only hires men to take advantage of the market inefficiency in hiring (if you say hiring laws would get in the way, when is the last time a company paid a serious price for failing to have diverse hires)?
The most upvoted HN comments on threads about the diversity manifesto reek of protecting the status of the people already at the top. And are as flimsy and irrational as they claim the liberal values they decry are. White men have traditionally been in power in this country and suppressed the rights of women & minorities to vote, educate themselves & work for years. How can we know that another group wouldn't be historically more powerful without a control group study where each group is allowed to be a historical oppressor for an equal amount of time?
No, actually quite the opposite.
When a company/university/country enshrines diversity quotas, they are basically telling minorities that they are by default stupider than average.
Also, enforcing these diversity quotas will create a (probably valid) impression that minority members who make it anywhere did not do so on their own merit.
As a minority I would much rather know there are no diversity programs so that I know that where ever I get, it's based on my merit, not some charity. Even if I was the only one in the room from my ethnic origin (which is actually often the case).
Quotas are a crude tool but I'd rather see something like that than simply accept a world with a cycle of the powerful remaining powerful in large part due to the less powerful never having opportunity.
You don't need any wealth to enter university. You just need to be smart and get good grades.
Family wealth plays no factor what so ever.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/eriksherma...
- Underrepresented groups are by default less qualified than average
- Hiring decisionmakers are incapable of assessing people objectively enough to overcome inherent biases
Are there other possible consistent implications? Honest question.
It seems to me either scenario is fundamentally toxic.
If you come from a disadvantaged position, you have to be better to succeed, not equal. White men don't have it easy but they have it less hard.
But merit is just a table stake and never goes far on its own. Nobody is supposing that companies are occupied by a bunch of white cabbages (although the fact that googleboy got any support really does make me wonder as he was so intellectually vacuous). And it's ingrained into our culture that white men take the top jobs right through business, culture and arts, science, and politics - so the danger is we see it as 'how things are' and assume it's evolved for the best.
But it's completely optional and man-made, and ultimately a political choice, 1. not to have a level playing field when it comes to equality of opportunity and 2. to stack it in that direction. The reality is that tech companies led by women do better and the biggest indicator of ending up poor is having the misfortune to be born poor, so society at large isn't going to fall in by redressing the balance.
And no, fixing a racist and sexist system isn't racism or sexism. The issue many people have here is that they don't recognise it as institutionally racist and sexist in the first place. That's because they are the beneficiaries of the system and cannot see it (I know how hard it is to see past that as I'm one too, and this is why I mention the Blub paradox). You are absolutely right to look at the the figures and point out the number of Asians. We need to check the figures because we can't be objective by just going off our feels (we are a great bunch of guys and love and respect women and don't have a racist bone in our bodies etc). It's a systemic issue, very rarely a personal one (although of course it's personal to all those who are disadvantaged by it).
http://truewealthvc.com/women-led-businesses-outperform/
btw I believe that comparing someone to a Nazi is against the conduct rules of HN and can earn you a shadowban