Hacker News Reader

Comment by kajecounterhack | Hacker News Reader

No, what the whole episode really seems to show is how prejudice that hurts people is viewed as "just words" rather than a tangible / real hurtful thing. You can't curse off your boss. You can't demean people of other genders and races at work. You can't create a hostile workplace environment and expect nothing to happen to you.

You can try to cloak it in a longform "civil" or "facts-based" document but ultimately what this man wrote was sexist lies a.k.a a steaming pile of shit.

FWIW I don't give flat earthers the time of day or try to humor them as being scientific either. You have to go back to arguing the basic laws of kinematics with them. Sexists are one of the same.

View on HN

This is authoritarian logic.

A threat is never just an opinion in authoritarian thinking. It's outside of what constitutes an opinion, it's outside the system.

Hence, for the greater good, it must be not just be rejected, it must be destroyed as a moral necessity.

If you go down this road, there is only one destination.

I can sympathise with your view point. Of course I can. That is my whole point. It takes incredibly mental expenditure to not follow that style of thinking.

No, it's "treat others the way you want to be treated" logic. A.k.a basic human fucking decency

You're misinterpreting freedom here. It's not authoritarian to have rules. The existence of rules and enforcement != authoritarian. If trump makes all the rules absent of the peoples' will, that's authoritarian. If society agrees that you're a net negative and makes a choice to ostracize you, that's the level of freedom we have under democracy.

The golden rule isn't a high bar.

I'm not sure I understand your point so please correct me if I misunderstand, but the person wasn't fired for having a different opinion.

He was fired for saying things which were deeply hurtful for a large number of employees.

Have you even read his text? Please quote the "deeply hurtful" passages

I have but I can't quote anything because I wasn't offended.

Other people were clearly hurt by it though and I don't believe I'm in a position where I should tell other people what they should or shouldn't feel.

We are all responsible for evaluating the reasonableness of claims of being hurt by someone. Otherwise dishonest or mentally unwell people hold us all hostage to their arbitrary claims.

> We are all responsible for evaluating the reasonableness of claims of being hurt by someone. Otherwise dishonest or mentally unwell people hold us all hostage to their arbitrary claims.

If they are mentally unwell, it doesn't make their suffering any less real does it? I admit I am biased as someone with a mental illness, I wouldn't want someone to disregard my opinion based on knowledge of my illness.

As for dishonest people, I suppose I like to believe I can believe other Googlers, especially when there are so many of them in this case who were upset by this.

Thank you for pointing out flaws of ambiguity in my comment.

> If they are mentally unwell, it doesn't make their suffering any less real does it? I admit I am biased as someone with a mental illness, I wouldn't want someone to disregard my opinion based on knowledge of my illness.

I meant only to reference the variations in tendency towards certain mental behaviors (such as accurately assessing reality, or taking responsibility for emotional responses) that exist among people. I gave an example of the "mentally unwell" to illustrate that this spectrum exist, but all parts of the spectrum are worth considering.

As an aside, and to hopefully show I'm not brushing with too wide a brush here: people with mental disorders are, sometimes, actually far better (at, say, having an accurate view of events) than people who don't have disorders, because they have [in the course of learning to cope with their issues, have also] learned to understand and correct for flaws that we all have.

I did not mean to suggest that people with mental disorders should automatically have their opinion/experience/claims discounted!

We should evaluate each situation individually. But there are clearly cases where a person's claim of "being hurt" should not be allowed to influence certain decisions, or policy, regardless of their overall mental/emotional functioning.

> As for dishonest people, I suppose I like to believe I can believe other Googlers, especially when there are so many of them in this case who were upset by this.

This touches on another problem area of ambiguity/clarity in my statement. We should question the reasonableness of the claim of being hurt - by which I not only mean "Were they really hurt?", but also "Is it reasonable for them to have been hurt?"

I can choose to be deeply hurt and offended by almost anything. We must strike a balance between respecting peoples feelings, and not allowing manipulators to exploit that respect to unreasonably coerce our behavior.

If you take 'respect for people's feelings' to an absurd extreme, we could create a world in which I could have you jailed for posing the questions you pose above. 'They hurt me.'

The fact that some demonstrably ideologically intolerant people successfully pressured Google to fire someone for expressing reasonable opinions based on evidence - this suggests to me that our society has already crossed certain thresholds in the balance between "respect for claims of being hurt" and other societal values - such as the allowance of independent thought.

We can start from the implication that it's natural there are less women in the profession because most of them are biologically unsuited to it.

Now replace woman with black (or Jew) and see what happens.

Do you still think it's OK?

If it was true then yes. If you find reality offensive then that's your problem to deal with.

Is it true?

Yes.

- There are fewer white men in the NBA because they are biologically unsuited to it.

- There are fewer tall fighter pilots because they are biologically unsuited to it.

- There are fewer women as pitchers in the MLB because they are biologically unsuited to it.

These are descriptive statements about reality. The world in which we find ourselves. You may not like that world, you may think we should change the rules of that world, but it is the world as it exists today. Calling it out as such can not rationally be considered offensive.

So, do you believe women are biologically unsuited to be software engineers?

His main point was that MORE of them were biologically UNINTERESTED in it, not that MOST of them were UNSUITED.

And to your point... yes?

If someone said a profession mostly working outside in the desert has less gingers in it because most of them are biologically unsuited for prolonged sun exposure, would you really take offense?

This isn't phrenology we're discussing here. If you're discussing real, tangible biological differences backed while proper scientific research, while taking care to treat people as individuals and avoid generalizing based on the distribution mean, then what's actually the problem here?

Is the gender bias due to a biological lack of interest by women, by cultural norm, by harassment, or by active discrimination?

I don't know, but I think the answer is not obvious and this is a discussion worth having. Which is, arguably, exactly what the guy who wrote this memo was trying to do.

There IS well-established scientific evidence for differences IN THE DISTRIBUTION of areas of interest and specific abilities between the sexes, although even /that/ is apparently too taboo to discuss in this day and age. How big an effect this has on the gender bias in specific professions is a much harder question, although personally I find the assertion that it is "none" difficult to accept without overwhelming evidence.

Add on to that the question of how to correctly tackle this bias and you've got an even more divisive topic, as now you've layered on an ideological issue on top of a difficult-to-isolate research question on top of a scientifically well-studied but publicly controversial topic. Unfortunately, this is the issue the author of the memo tried to address.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com