Tim Ferris comments on his move from Silicon Valley
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I experienced this first-hand last weekend. My friend throws dinner parties where we discuss a different philosophical topic each time. The topic of last dinner party was sexual harassment and sexual agency. One person stormed off at the beginning because she got offended at the topic and ostensibly some mild language my friend used in a hypothetical situation. He was later crucified on social media.
When I was growing up, it was the right that constrained discussion while the left pushed boundaries. Now more often the left constrains speech. Rather than air positions in the marketplace of ideas, they would rather bully, shame and act offended at things they disagree with.
Sometimes we're so focused on being right, or what we believe is right, that we can't open ourselves up to other thoughts or arguments. Across the political spectrum, we're missing empathy and the ability to have discussions beyond yelling at one another.
You just, in the preceding sentence even, assumed that the version of the story fitting your own narrative was correct. So I have a slightly hard time believing your message.
Perhaps the woman in your example was offended because she has been harrased or assualted personally. The fact that you felt the need to minimize it by saying the language was "mild" says a lot, who cares if it was mild? Go as hard as you want, free speech is absolute, contextless, consequence free. Anyone hurt by what you say is just trying to score political points by pretending to be offended. My advice would be to listen to the women on this topic before indulging them in your pure axiomatic philosophical opinions of what they have experienced.
The whole idea of someone being "crucified" or "bullied" on social media is cowardly coming from a supposed free speech proponent. Man up, own your opinions.
A marketplace of ideas is fine, but no one is going to give you a fair shake if you are intentionally tactless, and that is your failing not your audiences.
That is so healthy.
I don't believe you can both have an intellectually honest debate and judge at the same time.
I hope they don't share the actual quotes because that wasn't the argument. The argument was open debate is not possible anymore, because we get actively judged and harassed for opinions because the flesh mob (you, me, everyone) only allows for socially accepted top 40 opinions.
Freedom also means freedom from each other. Not just the state.
If you said something bad about a person you don't personally know in the last month, then my judgement on you (yeah hypocrisy) is that you are a horrible person and the world is better with you not consuming oxygen.
This stands out:
> Even though Silicon Valley has the highest concentration of brilliant people I've found anywhere in the world, it also has the highest concentration of people who think they're brilliant. The former are often awesome, keenly self-aware, and even self-deprecating (let's call that 15% of the population), but the latter are often smug, self-satisfied, arrogant, and intolerable (let's call that 60% of the population).
Which is why it's funny that people think trolls are an online phenomenon. They are simply a reflection of a real-world in which most people are (subjectively perhaps) those you neither want to talk nor listen to.
The difference is that online, the filter of proximity and permission that works so beautifully to delineate our offline relationships, is void.
Sydney has this problem, except the conversation topics are real estate, what high school you went to, and gym memberships.
I've heard too many conversations in S.F. that follow a kind of judgement ritual. If you work for a startup in a popular field (e.g. A.I.), or a major tech company, then you pass. Anything else and the conversation just stalls.
- free market vs. regulations
- Bay Area housing issues
- Google's evilness, ad-based Internet economy
- Facebook's evilness, benefits of deleting one's account
- Apple's design decisions
- is Bitcoin a bubble or not
- holy wars between programming language camps
- any kind of US politics
- diversity in tech
- File formats and open protocols are dead, everything is stored in someone else's database. How do we regain the ability to switch providers and interoperate?
- The web has petrified as a medium. Only the few big giants can now evolve it, and all but one does so in direct competition with their own walled garden. Does anyone care?
- Mobile devices: How do I make them useful? Are there apps that aren't toys for kids? Tricorders, not mini TVs plz.
- Anyone wanna let me in to their secret clubhouse? I don't bite, I'm just a sperg who values truth as a terminal value over high school antics and who lacks the energy to chit chat about trivia to meet people.
Every once and a while I see a comment deriding the ability of people who live outside of silicon valley to make a meaningful impact on the world, and it is heavily downvoted without fail.
I think that's a good thing personally, because HN would suck if it was merely a SV echo chamber.
Like, did anyone freak out about Marc Andreessen supporting Romney or any of Trump's primary opponents? Nope. Actually I take that back: lots of people on the right got real angry when he supported Hillary Clinton after it became clear Trump had cinched the nomination.
For people who are wondering about the mono-culture, the question to be asking is "Does my job actually make a positive difference in the world?" Quite often the pay makes you feel like it does, but the actual work is meaningless or harmful to society.
Ignorance is bliss, so maybe don't ask yourself that question. But if you do care, it is an extremely hard question to get to the bottom of. I bet the founders of Twitter and Facebook really did think they had made the world a better place, but now that's much less clear.
In any case, it warms my hear to imagine Tim and his dog in Austin--truly a great American city. Love it there.
If you like cities then New York is bigger, denser, more diverse, less poop, has a public transportation system that actually works, and yet somehow the rent is cheaper. If nature or beaches are your kinda thing there's Oregon and Hawaii not far away. Want urban sprawl and traffic? Los Angeles has San Menlo Alto beat (but not by much).
But, for those of us in tech, the opportunities here are unlike anywhere in the world. And, despite all the drawbacks of the Bay, there's just something inspiring about being here with the leaders and top experts in our field.
You’ve got the ocean/bay right there, various forests and mountains within a short drive, skiing and Yosemite a few hours away, etc.
This has been on the top of my mind more than I would like lately, what with the ramped up rhetoric coming out of the white house regarding North Korea -- to the point of considering actual plans for how to deal with such an event. Does anyone here have any thoughts on how to assess the risk of this, or is it just irrational?
Don't get me wrong, it's totally understandable. I hate to rely on "the terrorists won!" as an argument, but terror is only effective when we allow ourselves to be terrorised by it. If we/politicians/the media applied the same amount of attention to road safety that we do to terrorism we'd all be in self driving cars by now.
This is the biggest factor for me as someone who grew up in Texas and is now in Los Angeles
I feel like this happens in cities with a lot of transplants. Most people move to big cities because they are (or think they are) the best at what they do. That makes it difficult for me to know who to trust since I don't know off the bat if someone is talking to me because they are genuinely nice or because they want to see if I can be used to help them achieve their goals. It's a vicious cycle because it causes me to put my guard up and in turn be less friendly than I am with people I really know.
;)