Stuff You Can't Say in Silicon Valley
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I mean, people might make some judgments about you. But that happens whenever you state any opinion, especially if it isn't the mainstream.
I think a lot of people are used to saying what's on their mind without consequence. They're used to other types of people remaining quiet on certain topics -- especially topics related to race, gender, and sexuality. And that's changing.
So: For some people it's a shock and they suddenly feel attacked from all sides for opinions they've been vocal about for years. Feels weird. But in many cases what's actually happening is people who have historically been silent are suddenly speaking up and offering their own differing opinions.
For example, it used to be acceptable to behave in certain ways towards women. Some men didn't see the problem because women wouldn't or couldn't speak up to make their opinions known. Now many women feel more empowered and it turns out many attitudes men have about women that seemed mainstream are in fact controversial (or, worse, actually destructive). And they always were. The opposing voices just hadn't been speaking. Now they are.
No, it's simpler still. What is happening is that conservatives feel awkward and nervous being a minority (irony much?), so they look to strawman arguments to make themselves feel better.
Obviously you can have those fights if you want. You just can't find many people to agree with you. This is like walking into a megachurch in Mississippi and complaining that no one wants to listen to your opinions on reproductive health care.
Oh, do I need to state that was sarcasm?
> This is like walking into a megachurch in Mississippi and complaining that no one wants to listen to your opinions on reproductive health care.
How can you not see the irony in this? Your example is a bad outcome. SV doing the reverse is bad. Not there are ideas that are OK and ideas that are bad, contextually, and alienating people is all good and fine, where my badness is OK if it is proportional and opposite to your badness. Intolerance ITSELF is the problem, fullstop, no matter the "rightness" of the idea.
We live in a diverse world, and finding ways to get along is the key. How can we do that when any form of alienation is defended?
What you and the poster say you want is Free Speech in some kind of abstract principled sense. What you actually want is a safe space where people won't argue with you for believing different things.
Thus, strawman.
And to respond to your opening sentence, I don’t mean anyone is silenced physically (who does that?), but rather psychologically, culturally, and socially. That’s not a good thing.
Giving everyone a voice is good precisely because it facilitates debate, such that good ideas rise to the surface and bad ideas sink. Silencing voices opposed to your own views may serve you in the short term, but as a principle it’s incredibly dangerous and almost certainly harmful in the long run.
Edit: P.S. This doesn’t mean that bad ideas shouldn’t float down to a point where their advocation questions ones’ rational credibility, nor does it mean we should be entitled to say anything we want (no matter how extreme) without consequence.
For example, if you blurted out “The earth is flat - it’s all a conspiracy!”, most people would shake their heads in pity and keep walking away. But if someone presents evidence or ideas to a claim so extreme, the degree of our interest must be proportionate to the credibility of the evidence and the logical consistency of the argument — not the social stigma attached to the topic. This is a subtle distinction, but so important.
Social stigma can serve perhaps as a caching mechanism of consensus, but it is a tool we must wield with extreme caution.
This all boils down to the fact one group is trying to add a number of new entries to the list of censurable topics. It's fine to disagree with that, but then you have to state a) what topics you think shouldn't be added to the list and b). why. When people walk around loudly complaining about how they can't say anything anymore without being specific as to what they want to say, it suggests that perhaps they know that those positions are not really defensible.
[EDIT: To explain things a little more. Societies must limit some forms of speech because some speech limits who can be a member of a society. "We should murder all Asian people" is not compatible with a society that contains Asian people. And no, it is not fair to expect Asian people to have to constantly defend their humanity to others who have nothing to lose in the argument. Much as it's nice to think about abstractly entertaining every possible idea, when some of those ideas actively push out or dehumanize members, the society is forced to choose between accepting debate on the idea or excluding those members. So yes, if you want to complain about how SV society shuns people for not wanting to experiment on human embryos or whatever, go ahead. But assuming that all ideas should be up for debate is ignoring the fact that some ideas are incompatible with your fellow society members. And you get to choose between debating those ideas or having those people in your society as equals. You do have a choice, but you can't have both.]
Care to bet what the historical trend has been for the percentage of the population that claim the earth is flat? If evidence didn't work it would be flat or random.
Not everyone has to be persuaded. Some will have to be left behind.
I am going to quote the man who has arguably done the most to end oppression in the USA.
"Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that." - MLKJ
Ethically and morally, as a society, we have to choose what behavior is okay and what isn't. What's happening right now is that we're verbalizing the changing of those definitions to include things like "'Grab them by the pussy' and other transparent actions of sexual harassment are not tolerable ways to treat women in 2017," in response to a wide number of people coming forward to complain about it all at once, for possibly the first time in history.
And understandably some conservative people who grew up in the "Mad Men" era (when these kinds of things were acceptable) are unhappy with those changes and inevitably writing articles like this one, thinking that the vast majority of people being upset with them for their now antiquated beliefs and speech is equal to the suppression of that speech. No, we aren't chilling your speech. Society is asking you to change your behavior and mocking you for not being able to. We went through this with women's suffrage, the civil rights movement in the 60s, and now we're going through it again with the #MeToo movement.
I'll defend to the death your right to say something stupid. That is your constitutional right in this country, and we have to stand by that to keep our democracy alive. But you had better believe I will call you stupid to your face for saying it, probably with a sarcastic and mocking tone befitting your stupid statement.
When two sides have different solutions to a problem or opinions, but one side feel morally justified to seek the firing of the other and have the power to do so we are not talking about an abstract concept of moral theory anymore.
There is a reason why functional societies follow the rule of law instead of the rule of the mob.
Couldn't disagree with you more.
The best antidote for bad ideas is sunshine.
The alternative is totalitarianism.
It is unclear that either of those notions are false. It is also unclear that either of their opposites is false. An environment that squelches debate of interesting, but sensitive questions is not a healthy one. The question of whether men are inferior to women (or vice versa) is definitely an interesting one, though perhaps poorly posed. Men and women are different in various ways, some of those differences may adapt each better to different tasks. Boiling that down to 'inferior' and 'superior' is facile. But the enterprise of elucidating those distinctions should not be taboo. It should be treated carefully, because the knowledge that may come from its investigation can lead people down dark paths, but that does not mean the question shouldn't be asked.
Someone can talk about selling illegal or unproven drugs and have opinions on how illegal drugs should be legal even if they are dangerous. That should all be allowed even if in practice it would be negative to society at large.
On the other hand if they acted on that belief then that should not be accepted by society and should be punishable.
Likewise, someone could have the opinion that whites are inferior racquetball players, so long as when selecting racquetball players in a professional team they do not select based on that opinion (given discrimination/selection based on race/skin is illegal).
If you study history the decline of many great countries have started with a censorship of unpopular opinions and shaming as well as ostracizing of anyone that think wrong:
- Struggle session in Communist China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Struggle_session
I'm seeing this line a lot on HN today, but I think it's a dangerous rationalization of why it's OK to take away their free speech rights, and absolutely, positively nothing more. There is no other philosophical virtue to this position.
I think it's a reasonable line to say that if Silicon Valley is outright silencing something a billion people believe, and doing it quite frequently, there is quite likely a problem. You are welcome to deplore the fact that a billion people believe it, and will probably find another billion people standing with you on whatever matter you are deploring, because that's how this goes.
"When people walk around loudly complaining about how they can't say anything anymore without being specific as to what they want to say, it suggests that perhaps they know that those positions are not really defensible."
No, it's because they're avoiding an obvious trap. You trick someone into naming the list of censurable thoughts, then you immediately grab a big ol' mob of censorious folk anxious to score some political points (and they are readily available and hot to trot) and start censoring them because they said the bad things. It is impossible to name the topics being censored without the conversation immediately becoming exactly the one you are trying to turn it to, about how the censored topics really deserve it, and so it's not really censorship, right?
First commit to not censoring the topics, then perhaps you can get some discussion going. In the meantime, you are being deprived of that discussion, and perhaps should be less confident that you understand the issues than you think you do, because... how would you know? You probably don't actually know what your opposition thinks. What you know is almost certainly (statistically speaking, based on my interactions with the ever-more-doctrinaire and ever-more-insular HN) what your side wants you to think the opposition thinks, which is very, very far from the same thing.
Further, I acknowledge that ender7 may not personally have the power to censor very much. However, Silicon Valley as a whole does, and it is actively using it, and it is not only not ashamed, it has used faulty logic like this to convince itself it is being positively virtuous in the process of statistically removing the opinions it doesn't like from the Internet.
In the 1950s, during the Red Scare, saying or doing things that showed that an indivdual was a socialist or Communist, including labor union activism, would have been enough to cost a person their job and get them ostracized from society. Quite a few were even jailed. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism)
Had you been a member of the left in that era, would you have have agreed that the loss of your job / jailing was a, in your own words, "necessary thing"? Would you have agreed that leftist positions were, again in your own words, "not really defensible"?
I mean, honestly, I don't get it. Do modern liberals really think McCarthyism was a good idea that just happened to be aimed in the wrong direction?
I think we've got to be cautious in defining what "being silenced" means. Because I see a world in which people are saying all sorts of things out loud. There was a protest with a bunch of people waving Nazi flags in a public park in Virginia a few months ago.
I don't think people are being silenced.
I think community norms are shifting quickly in many parts of the country and, again, it's disorienting for certain people who have held certain views without problem for most of their lives. Suddenly they're being told it's not okay to say something and it feels like they're being silenced. They're not, of course. But I understand that it can feel like it.
[Edit: This is in response to your original comment, which you edited.]
If people see that people who share the same views are losing their livelihoods, they are more likely to be silent. Only the independently wealthy wouldn't consider losing their job risky.
And just to be clear, I in no way support their views, desires, or actions. But claiming the goal isn't to silence them is disingenuous.
I don't think those people were silenced.
They went to a public protest in a public place to make a statement. That statement was broadcast across the country and the world. The opposite of being silenced.
Now, they faced consequences for what they said. But that's what happens when you say things. Words have meaning and you can say words which will cause people to no longer want to associate with you.
When those people watch Fox News (http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2017/08/14/twitter-users-identif...) and see what is happening to those people for their speech and actions, they are being silenced.
These are also probably the people more amenable to changing their views. It's got be pretty hard to swing someone with a tiki torch marching down the street, but someone who feels sympathetic to their views could maybe be reasoned with if they would talk about it.
If people changed their minds just because everyone else disagrees with them loudly and violently, how would any previous social change have come about? New thoughts and perspectives always start as minority views. So majority consensus must not be enough to change someone's mind.
Also, this really isn't about winning. We're all losing right now.
I don't mean angry disagreement and antifa, I mean social disapproval.
And what of those who were incorrectly identified by the vigilantes? Do their fates not matter?
Getting fired is only marginally better.
But glad you support repression when it supports you.
If I were a huge proponent of NAMBLA I'd recognize that being a public advocate of such would negatively effect my social status as well as potentially attract negative attention to any brand I associate myself with. That doesn't mean I'm being silenced or censored.
I think we both know the answer.
Science Denialism is just the new community norm, I guess.
I'm not sure what you're responding to in my comment.
https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1600/0*H5PrnnEAD7GteRHf.
https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1600/0*H5PrnnEAD7GteRHf.
> There was too much data pointing to the biological basis of sex-based cognitive differences to ignore, Halpern says. For one thing, the animal-research findings resonated with sex-based differences ascribed to people. These findings continue to accrue. In a study of 34 rhesus monkeys, for example, males strongly preferred toys with wheels over plush toys, whereas females found plush toys likable. It would be tough to argue that the monkeys’ parents bought them sex-typed toys or that simian society encourages its male offspring to play more with trucks. A much more recent study established that boys and girls 9 to 17 months old — an age when children show few if any signs of recognizing either their own or other children’s sex — nonetheless show marked differences in their preference for stereotypically male versus stereotypically female toys...
And you still seem to be implying that, because there are biological differences in preferences or some task skill at a statistical population level, any one individual can be categorised, based on their gender alone, as having different ability at a different technical and education dependent task.
If that is the case, a cite from a Cochrane study that linked specific brain characteristics to intellectual task performance would have some weight. A pop sci piece does not.
I am not and neither was Damore, who in fact went out of his way to talk about population level differences, including providing bell curve distribution graphics
If an idea we disagree with is rare or harmless, we often ignore it. If an idea we disagree with is more common and worth refuting, we should respond to it with debate. If all parties involved in a debate are reasonable, consensus is possible. In aggregate, humans are capable of being reasonable, thus society progresses over time (amortized).
Sadly, there is often difficulty reaching consensus immediately — especially with deeply entrenched viewpoints. However, given time, history has proven over and over that truth prevails though patient use of rational argument. It is only through presentation of evidence and calm, rational argument that society progresses.
Other, more heavy-handed means of ideological conquest have more often than not made the world a much worse place. In fact, more than just a few million deaths have resulted from what we could call “non-rational ideological conquest” (which inevitably manifests in progressively more violent ways).
I fully expect decentralised social behaviour blocklists to emerge in the near future. Who would want to (employ/socialise with/do business with) a (trumptard/libtard)? Why take the risk of employing someone with racist tendencies, etc.
It might even use a distributed cryptographic ledger.
Your last two paragraphs sound an awful lot like the book 1984. If you haven’t read it, I recommend you check it out.
"You can fool some of the people all the time," as said by Unknown -- probably not Lincoln, but one of the things continually misattributed to him, in an earlier style of meme misinformation. It is ironic that people thought that the internet would purge misinformation (by making sources easier to check) but instead it has made it worse, by bypassing expertise, analysis and references altogether.
1984 isn't really about tribal groupings using computerised social credit systems, but I take your point. From the authoritarian POV, China already has nascent systems to score each citizen's thought correctness factor.
It really depends on the context. For example, I think there's a certain kind of racist, sexist, and homophobic talk which simply adds nothing good to the world. I don't think it should be illegal necessarily, but I'm fine if people are ostracized for holding such views. I certainly don't want to be exposed to that kind of shit.
And there are many situations which require learning and understanding to participate. A software developer would be appalled if they had to continue to have debates at work about software development with someone who had no idea how computers work -- especially if that person was adamant that their views much be heard and listened to. "Why is my opinion that we should write our iOS app in ActiveX being SILENCED?" Again, that dumb opinion shouldn't be made illegal. But maybe that person doesn't need to be invited to developer meetings any more.
You get my point.
Lots of subtlety when it comes to free speech.
Not all controversial opinions are the same.
There is a reason why advanced societies are ruled by the rule of law and not the rule of the mob.
Q.E.D.
Some have been comfortable espousing bigoted views. Now they are forced to think about what they say and how they say it. As a white man, this has affected my own behavior (for the better IMO): I've been forced to be more thoughtful of others.
The Paradox of Tolerance shows we must be intolerant of such bigotry.
Let's hypothetically say that a sapient alien species, with the full range of emotions and thoughts a human being can have, was discovered that was also demonstrably not as smart as human beings after centuries of scientific study. Would saying "humans are smarter than these aliens" be bigoted?
Flip it around. If different sapient aliens were demonstrated to be more intelligent than human beings by an order of magnitude, would it be bigoted to say "These other aliens are smarter than humans."?
In other words, can facts be bigoted?
> The Paradox of Tolerance shows we must be intolerant of such bigotry.
Must we? If you've studied the paradox of tolerance, you should know that it has no universally agreed upon answer.
To be clear, I am neither rejecting evolution nor advocating racism or sexism. I am merely pointing out that secularism-materialism binds you to accept the very real possibility of things being true about sex, race, ethnicity, etc, that those holding secularist, materialistic views categorically and in principle reject (at least verbally, if not in action) as a matter of principle even though they are bound BY THE VERY PRINCIPLES THEY CLAIM TO HOLD to accept these things as possibilities, if not present actualities.
This is but one of many absurdities in vogue in circles like the SV circuit and its allies. You can't have your cake and eat it, too, and you can be sure that repeating mantras and going on the offensive only works for so long. You have to reexamine your foundational beliefs. The truth will, sooner or later, exact its revenge and come for its pound of flesh. The tension forces of contradiction will cause the facade to cave no matter how much stucco you use to conceal the growing cracks.
That is one way to phrase the question. Another way to phrase the question is "what are the average IQs of the races in the USA and why are they different?" This question can be used as a starting point to help change things so that those who are below average can be helped.
The above is a question that I would not bring up in my workplace for fear of being fired. That is why there is an article called "Stuff You Can't Say in Silicon Valley."
Read Damore's treatise and replace every mention of gender with one of race, and see how it reads.
Similarly to identity-conservatives, for whom belief in global warming is heresy and tax cuts are gospel, I believe there is a similar phenomenon with identity-progressives around immigration, in this case specifically the H-1B program. There seems to be some belief in its sacred power that is not to be questioned and not to be curtailed.
As I see it, big businesses - not least the major tech companies - are loaded with incredibly bright, incredibly well-compensated staff. These companies can figure out solutions to the toughest scientific and technical problems, can create new markets when regulations shift, and change the world. They sure as sh*t will figure out how to adapt if immigration policies change and the H-1B program is reduced. As it stands right now, to me it seems - by and large - a handout for companies to get mid-range IT talent enslaved to them for a fractional price of what they'd pay an American.
Basically Indians on h1-b are highly paid shackled slaves of America, because they wait crazy number of years (10-70 years) to get a green card. During that wait their options to demand better pay/raise/jobs are extremely limited.
And these shackles are the source of conscious/ subconscious abuse.
Now try saying to anyone in America who is a DACA sympathizer that those in the green card backlog are in a much worse situation. (I did to one in Bay Area and it didn’t end well)
The abuses of the program are bad for both the visa holders and domestic workers.
After that time, whenever Brendan wanted to fix things in the language, he couldn't, because you can't break the web for people already using things as they are. This happened several times.
Sure, I worked through the bad old days of writing `document.getElementById()` by hand, Scriptaculous vs MooTools, mountainous files of jQuery, Backbone vs Angular, and CoffeeScript when it was cool, but I can't deny that things aren't so bad nowadays.
Maybe I'm just naive.
He lost the confidence of the internationally focused diverse organization he was charged with leading due to that financial support.
...So his political views.
My comment doesn't just pertain to you nor did I really dig into the merits of your situation, but it does serve as a valid test case that even someone with your obvious and deep technical skills requires more than just those skills to be in alignment with what the company needs from a leader.
To this day you can find people angry on both "sides" of the fake-news version of what happened. It constitutes an open wound for Mozilla which people salt and pick at over more recent or ongoing PR mistakes. That's a shame, because the truth is far removed from the cover story. I'll get to it as a memoirist, if ever, only years from now.
Mozilla is a private organization where Brendan Eich served at the pleasure of its body. What if he was pushing to rescind suffrage for women or to re-instate Jim Crow? Pushing for the legalization of child cannibalism by funding legislative efforts in that direction?
Or it crystal clear that legalization of hard drugs is one of those ideas that is so obviously right than any opposition to it should be squelched?
Back in the days, skin colour was a political view. That was a dumb idea. And the effects of that is still felt up to today. These days sexual orientation and climate change are political views.
This isn't ok. And we shouldn't treat it as such. Bigotry and un-science don't deserve a seat as a "reasonable voice" at the table of progress no matter who you are.
Everyone likes to use examples like racial differences as an example. How about something more gray? Should someone be able to voice opposition to immigration? Or is that another one of those ideas that "don't deserve a seat at the table"?
Absolutely. Few things to note here:
1. The topic of immigration is a valid political discussion with a large amount of studies done from the perspectives of science, economics, and even ethics and philosophy. Taking a stance in it is a political stance and that conversation is crucial to progress.
2. That said, it's not a valid comparison to what was actually being mentioned in my comment which was religious or non scientific views getting a free pass to masquerade as political stances. Those were the ones I said that don't deserve a seat at the table
3. To expand on the discussion of what's valid to be at the table though, immigration is a valid topic. "No people of a certain ethnicity should be allowed to immigrate because they are bad people" is not a political stance. That's a baseless bigoted view that pretends to be a political stance. That can be shown out of the room.
4. One last thing on above. There are close but grey line topics related to the above statements that should be part of discourse. Eg - people from certain areas of the world have a higher risk of being radicalized than others prior to immigration. Statistically provable. Good science. Worthy of discussion. Making the outcome of that "ban everyone of the given ethnicity from that area" though is the kind of discussion we really need to stop these days.
"Income inequality is not an actual problem"
"The affordable care act was bad for America"
"It would be beneficial if we got rid of all government guaranteed loans for university tuition"
"People should be allowed to own automatic weapons"
"wikimedia has plenty of money"
"Mozilla is institutionally focused on supporting left wing views exclusively"
"all of the rich people who speak out against guns have bodyguards who carry guns. they basically don't want poor people owning guns"
"fwd.us is against Trump's wall but Mark Zuckerberg wanted to buy a city block in Palo Alto to keep the masses out"
Another I'll add from my list: "The social costs and spillover of disruption are not fairly priced today, representing a market failure; it's a problem akin to pollution in pre-regulation 19th century manufacturing."
The election of Trump and enthusiasm to "build a wall" to protect manufacturing jobs reflects a real pain felt by a large number (maybe the majority) of Americans who are scared about their future job prospects and inability to provide for their families; many tech companies today are making their problems worse. These externalities are being foisted on society and these workers, who are not involved in the disrupting technology itself, and the companies have no obligation to pay for this cost.
An assumption that disruption will "work itself out in the long run" isn't acceptable (nor is it necessarily true). I think it's like environmental pollution in the 70's, before we had the EPA to penalize the behavior. It's also accelerating, and could reach a tipping point that would put serious risks on our political system and social fabric.
“If San Francisco residents really believed that sea levels were rising, they’d have all sold their homes by now.”
Apparently the author has never been to San Francisco or seen the sea level estimates for the next 30-70 years.
The last time I looked the northernmost and easternmost parts of SF will have some trouble, but by far the biggest areas of concern are east of 101 south of the city. And yes, if people thought ahead that far they would probably be concerned but even in the areas that are predicted to have the most impact we’re still talking 25+ years.
Meanwhile, to pick a random example, "Much of Florida has an elevation of less than 12 feet (3.7 m), including many populated areas such as Miami which are located on the coast."[2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_hills_in_San_Francisco
Anyone who says that is, frankly, unobservant.
We have government bail outs for people who live in areas that frequently flood due to things that have nothing to do with climate change, such as normal rain and hurricanes. Many of these areas flood almost predictably, yet we keep providing government support to keep people living there, or to help them move to someplace that floods less.
There is no way that something similar won't happen to people when climate change induced sea level rises starts making some coastal property unlivable.
Also, a good fraction of the population live in areas where there is a good chance that something will destroy their house over the next 30 or 40 years. Besides the aforementioned floods, there are earthquakes, wild fires, and tornadoes.
The only real difference between those and gradual sea level rise destroying your home is that with sea level rise afterwards you have to go live somewhere else instead of rebuilding where the old house was. No one claims that people who live in states that can have earthquakes or tornadoes do not really believe that earthquakes or tornadoes happen.
You can take every effort to respect someone else, not allow any of your behavior to be construed as harassment, and still be out the door because someone objects to or is offended by what you’ve said.
Let’s be honest here. What these folks want is the ability to insult and attack people with impunity. That’s not what free speech is. It never was.
The Supreme Court has ruled in the US that there is no exception to free speech for hate speech. If this is not preferred, your argument is with the judicial branch or Congress and a constitutional amendment, not me.
If you don’t allow businesses to fire people, then you’re compelling speech. Think about it. Say you’re a restaurant and you have a waiter that habitually refers to guests with a constant stream of expitives that would make a sailor blush. It gets to the point that it hurts your business. Patrons stop coming in. You can’t recruit. Do you fire him? Of course not! You’d be impugning his free speech and that’s horrible.
So the restaurant closes, and you start another. And guess who shows up for a job? Sailor Blusher. Do you hire him? Of course! You have to because if you didn’t, you’d be infringing in his right to get paid to berate strangers!
This story isn’t an exaggeration. This is the logical outcome.
So, what are your thoughts on compelling speech in this case?
https://aclu-co.org/court-rules-bakery-illegally-discriminat...
You'll have a few dollars for sure. However you probably also won't hear from people who couldn't say it. Because well, they ... didn't say it. The idea I think is that those who mention it claim they speak for some larger group who couldn't. Don't know how true that is, but that's the idea.
(I’m sure someone can explain this better, but I’ll give it a shot.)
As a silly example, let’s say 85% of an area believes that carbonation is harmful to health. 10% are indifferent, and 5% believe that it’s good for health.
One carbonation lover happens to be bold enough to drink carbonated beverages in public. Many bystanders walk past thinking, “Wow - that guy is nuts. But, oh well, it’s his life.” One of the carbonation haters walks by and happens to be bold enough to challenge the guy and say, “Drinking carbonated beverages is stupid, man!”
The carbonation lover and hater then get into a visible argument. Naturally, a few more people get involved in the discussion. Ultimately, outnumbered, the carbonation lover goes home feeling misunderstood and defeated.
He meets up with a buddy of his at the carbonation lovers group, and they trade similar stories and conclude that the area is just intolerant of carbonation lovers. The next time, they decide to drink in public more defiantly and with some defensiveness. They start to wear T-shirt’s that say, “Carbonation is not a crime!”
What they missed is that for that one person out of 100 who challenged them in public, 84 walked by and didn’t.
It seems completely obvious to me that any social grouping will have some strongly held convictions that are not based on fact. A unique set of sacred cows that persist because it is orders of magnitude faster to copy successful examples than figure out why they were successful.
I mean, I applaud efforts to align cultural conversation with fact. Very worthwhile activity. But it seems more important to me to accept that social groups can behave erratically, and that nothing should be taking precedence over the rule of law; and anything that looks like mass hysteria should be resisted.
The enemy is the idea that 'everybody knows' something and therefore due process can be thrown out. I recall the slogan 'Not My President' being trotted out when Trump won. That sort of thing is dangerous. Disagreeing with the result of an election? That is fine. A bout half the population can do that. Chipping away at the legitimacy of the electoral process, because you can't say and do what Trump says and does? Huge threat.
"Earlier this year, I noticed something in China that really surprised me. I realized I felt more comfortable discussing controversial ideas in Beijing than in San Francisco."
I also feel comfortable speaking about controversial things foreign cultures would not have the appropriate context to judge, out of concern for being rude, culture value differences etc.
I'm losing a lot of respect lately as it turns out more and more people involved with YC seem somehow okay with Peter Thiel and Trump supporters. Even VICE for fucks sake (Gavin McInnes's all white trash fuck boys) etc.
Have a little respect for your country fellow Trump supporters!!! You have a fucking KGB puppet in charge! Actively working against the long term interests of your country who also happens to assault women, writes asinine shit and gets in the bed with the enemy.
that's enough anger seething...im just anxious that the US is veering off course and into a different beast that would allow more nastier beasts to come into power.
Furthermore, this isn't a new thing. One of the other things "you can't say in Silicon Valley" is that black people are only fit to be slaves to white people, but if anyone's out there shaking their heads and clucking their tongues about how great it'd be to be able to say that if it weren't for those terrible lefty PC liberals always SJWing up the place, do you wanna be associated with them? It turns out that being openly racist in that way is, to most people in most parts of the country, really unacceptable.
Also, I've noticed that when these discussions come up, nobody ever talks about the "stuff you can't say" in more conservative parts of the country. Perhaps part of the reason people out here in the Bay Area are so "intolerant" is because so many of us have suffered consequences for what we say--or even what we don't say, but just what we are--when we've lived in other parts of the country. Try putting a "Black Lives Matter" bumper sticker on your Prius, drive to rural Alabama, and strike up conversations about your strong support for Obamacare, abortion rights, and gun control. Then get back to me about how gosh-darn friendly everyone was to you.
Note: (spoilers?) Deliverence doesn't actually paint the negative picture of the south that people associate with the movie. It's just as much about prejudices people have against rural people.
I've been to Alabama with a large group of friends that were very liberal and I have to admit...the people were incredibly friendly. (maybe not always willing to engage on the issues - but clearly friendly).
And in the meantime, as someone who’s not interested in waiting on the current power-brokers in SV to admit to it, I think it makes sense for those who are the primary target of this new McCarthyism to engineer a way to preseve their rights.
Depending on SV’s prevailing power structure is obviously a terrible idea.
Here are some defences I've seen so far
1. Debating is pointless because the person wont change their mind
On the Internet, you're not debating a person. You are also debating for the benefit of uninformed (yet potentially well meaning) bystanders that are watching and reading. Hard as it may be to imagine, a lot of these people just don't know what you know.
This is the exact time to bring out your best, most convincing material and information. Why not do it?
Its not a stretch to assume a lot of generally well meaning people will be sceptical to progressive ideas at first. After all, isn't the whole premise that we've normalised unfair behaviour so much that people can no longer easily see it from within their bubble?
Can we really afford to write off everyone that is like that completely? Why not try and give them a peak outside their bubble instead?
2. Debating will legitimise the other person's reprehensible point of view. We are taking a huge step backwards just by engaging.
Assuming no other information is available to the uninformed bystanders, here is how this looks like to them:
* Person A makes a plausible-looking argument;
* Person B says they're wrong,
* wont even dignify that with a debate
* will continue to be enraged
* will do everything in their power to get person A fired.
3. I'm outraged right now. Not quite in the state to educate people. I also just debated with 50 others before this person and I'm sick of doing it over and over.
Thats understandable. Please though, if at all possible, consider the potential consequences of continuing to engage without a debate.
* You can support Trump, it doesn't mean other people don't have the right to think you're a moron, bigot, or supporter of fascism for doing so. You go right ahead and think the same thing about them. NO ONE ACTUALLY CARES. Most people are too busy working to get caught up in politics.
* Diversity of thought often comes with diversity of skin color because people with different skin color have a hell of a different experience than white people. They even have different experiences among their different ethnicities. Does it mean white people can't have different thoughts? No, but when you're in a bubble how would you even know?
* The way the H1-B is written now is terrible both to the H1-B holder and American workers. It forces workers to get paid below what they should get paid both as an H1-B worker and as the American worker. H1-B holders should not require sponsoring by a company. If their skills are in such high demand they should have no problem getting a job.
* If they could afford to sell. If they were stupid. Maybe they are optimists? Seems like San Fran has a ton of optimists. Maybe they plan on selling before sea levels rise or trust their government to bail them out.
* If this was all he said, sure, there's room for conversation about how and why we got into this situation, but it was a stupid screed against diversity. This guy is no champion of discourse. I doubt you could do what he did anywhere and have it go over well. You keep your politics out of your work whenever possible and speak your mind at home. A company is not a free speech zone.
* Equality of treatment doesn't mean equality of outcomes. That's a strawman argument.
I definitely agree (ethnical?) diversity is desirable, but the idea that differences in race correlate highly enough with differences in thought to justify largely using race to locate thought diversity is the very racist idea itself; that people who look like this think one way, and people who look like that think another way. It's a low-resolution view of the world; in reality, the variance between individuals within a given race is greater than that of individuals between races.
Why isn't it higher?
Edit: Looks like you edited your answer to include flamewar info. That makes a ton of sense.
To save others from having to look it up themselves: according to [0], it took 13 hours for Sam's article to fall off the front page, while this article fell off after about 1 hour.
dang didn't say it was ONLY heat-to-substance ratio causing the downmod. Clearly, there are other factors than heat-to-substance ratio causing it though. It's hard to dismiss the suspicion that either "embarrasses YC president" could be a factor in downmodding this article or that Sam's article was not downmodded in order to avoid embarassing Sam :(
HN is tremendously influential in tech culture, so even a tiny difference in moderation of similar articles reflecting opposing points of view could compound to a very destructive effect.
You say "clearly" and then switch to "hard to dismiss the suspicion". There's no "clearly" there, just suspicion. I'm sure it's a natural suspicion or you wouldn't be posting it, but it lands with me as strange somehow. How could an article that doesn't mention Sam embarrass Sam? It was written weeks before his essay anyhow.
What you're missing, perhaps, is that the reaction here, by both the users who flagged and the moderators, probably isn't about the subject matter per se, but about the fact that this topic was thoroughly covered yesterday and in follow-up threads like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15936614. Doing the same thing every day is boring, and the current article doesn't clear the bar of substantiveness enough to justify overriding that.
There's another point that sits a bit uncomfortably with me. You say HN is influential in tech culture, but if that's true, it's because of qualities HN has that are the product of the very system (community plus moderators plus software) that you seem to object to. That comes up all the time and to me it seems incongruent.
You overrate the power of moderation to control this community. Even if we wanted to control it, which we don't, we couldn't, not even close. We serve it and we never forget that.
All I meant by “clearly” was that the signal-to-heat was the same between the two articles.
Sometimes user flags are overridden by mods, so it seemed like maybe that’s what happened on Sam’s article but not on this one?
I am worried by your argument that we just discussed his yesterday so let’s not today, it’s just as much about the articles as the discussion, this article has substance and is a neat counterpoint to Sam's article, don’t you think? Perhaps in these cases lock comments but leave the article on the front page?
Regarding the influence of HN, please don’t ignore that Sam is YC’s president and YC operates HN, so maybe the issue is just that HN isn’t sufficiently independent from YC? Under the status quo the optics look really bad.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply and your hard work! It reassures me that you take the judgment calls you make seriously. Communities like HN are challenging to moderate indeed.
Re yesterday: if we didn't moderate HN like this the front page would consist mostly of repetitive stuff. There's no doubt in my mind that the community wouldn't like that, and certainly it would make HN a different place. Intellectual curiosity shrivels under repetition.
Edit: ok, it's a bit complicated because the influences of these factors are constantly varying, so giving you an accurate answer means sounding like I'm contradicting myself. But at present, the story's rank is only being affected by upvotes and user flags, not by the anti-flamewar software and not by moderation.
The tug-of-war between upvotes and flags on HN is the fundamental dynamic of how the community expresses what it wants. There's a balance between the two and it has worked this way for a long time. Sometimes upvotes get the upper hand, sometimes flags do. But it works the same way in every case, more or less. You're right that part of the community is interested in discussing the article, but then another part of the community feels otherwise. Both matter, and the community is rarely in agreement.
If you're in the camp that wants a particular article on the front page then obviously you will be tempted to conclude that the other camp is trying to suppress the topic, possibly with help from secretly-opposing-you mods. Usually this is not accurate—it just feels that way. In reality there are many more things that go on. One is that when a similar article has just recently been thoroughly discussed, the community's distaste for repetition kicks in. It isn't that people oppose the topic, it's that repetition is boring. In cases like that, we turn off the flags only if the article is unusually substantive or contains significant new information. I don't see that here.
Another factor is that if there weren't countervailing mechanisms like anti-flamewar software and moderation, attention would flow, every day, to the same few controversies that happen to be hot that day. Empirically, that's just what upvotes do. No one wants an HN that looks like that, and we need both software and moderation to actively prevent it. To have HN be HN—that is, a site about intellectual curiosity—the system can't be purely upvote-driven. From our point of view as moderators that's all we're doing: providing a systemic service. But from the point of view of people whose wishes about a particular article are thwarted, it feels like moderators are intellectually, politically, and even personally aligned against them. People notice the cases they dislike much more than all the times the roulette wheel comes out in their favor, so it's both easy and common to feel consistently aggrieved, yet still come back to the site every day. That's kind of weird if you think about it.
The way I read the response is the following: the tug of war between users who want to see / comment on this and those who are flagging the article is being won by those flagging it - and thus the article has fallen below the front page.
The irony is strong here. An article talking about what you can't say, being flagged to oblivion, further confirming that, indeed, some things can't be said.
Strange world these days..
This is unfortunate. The discussion has been heated, yes, but I would argue there is plenty of substance to be found. Ironically, @sama was decrying precisely the ever-shrinking social space for controversy.
What an absurd argument. Is it possible instead that people are capable of believing that sea levels are rising and the US government wouldn't allow $500B worth of GDP to sink into the Bay?
Essentially, in colloquial, they don't want to give an inch for fear they'll grant a mile.
For example. A position might be, yes, means yes, but it can also mean no, if the person saying yes, feels they were forced into yes. So unless it was a resolute yes, it means no.
Someone might want to take exception to that and say that, no, it depends on the situation and personality, etc., and that there are grey areas and there will always be and we also know people might initially think something is a good idea and retroactively take back a yes. But some people may not want to admit that people do on occasion retroactively change their minds on something.
Because what I saw were a bunch of smug, self righteous hypocrites with a dubious moral code based on non-realistic understandings proffered by cynical opportunists who's real agenda was far from what they preached.
Remaining true to myself, to my understanding of objective reality, to not be afraid to give voice to that reality was every bit worth it then and it's worth it now.
Smug hypocrites suck and it isn't worth becoming one at any price, no matter what flavor the unrealistic hypocrisy and groupthink is.
It’s like everyone knows they are in an echo chamber but not daring to be the first one to speak up.
e.g. if a white man offers a controversial opinion in a left-leaning arena, he is more likely to be dismissed.
As a brown guy (I think right of Center) my views tend to piss off the far right/left equally. And I think there are many like me who are just keeping their mouth shut listening to garbage from both the far ends.
It's like everybody need to receive a gold medal for being different nowadays.
But we never speak about the average Joe, who struggles in life too!
I don't generally care about SV and I think it has its fair share of problems but being accountable for sharing your (mostly ill-informed) beliefs, especially when you have the social reach to influence millions is not "oppression". It's the simple fact of there being consequences of what you say and do.
Is that as a CULTURE we are self-censoring due to the Chilling Effect from learning that the NSA collects unfathomable dossiers on every citizens private browsing behavior.(1)
It is sad and hilarious that SV leaders - who have spawned & continue to lobby for anti-privacy technology in the name of data collection and personal information dealing to sell advertising are crying that they can't be honest with their peers.
If we want people to be more open and honest, to be open to broader views than their own how about start by fixing the fucking group-think algorithms that FB / Twitter / Goog are so fond of?
(1) https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/apr/27/nsa-surveil...
I wonder what effect the hills have on that.
I googled "sea level rise san francisco" and found this:
http://geology.com/sea-level-rise/san-francisco.shtml
At the default view of +7m, it seems like the parts of the city that used to be water (Marina, Mission Bay, parts of the Mission, east part along the bay) are most vulnerable. The interior looks like less of a problem.
I wouldn't buy property in Mission Bay, though.
It's not a good situation. There's blatant hypocrisy in the air as well. (Many of the same voices calling out politicians for past sexual misdeeds have yet to sever ties with the Clintons, for example.)
It's to our collective detriment. I can't wait for the pendulum to swing back the other way so we can all speak what we think without fear of falling on the wrong side of the PC police.
To be fair, that probably hits too close to home.
If you don’t feel safe talking about it publicly, feel free to email me (you can track it down via my account). I wish I didn’t have to say that last sentence, but this is the USA we live in right now.
1: http://www.silive.com/news/index.ssf/2016/11/election_day_20...
[0] My mother didn't actually vote for Trump, but this woman got the impression that she had and was appalled that I hadn't done more to stop her.
"Use my code as you please. Just promise to contribute back any improvements you make to it."
As someone who is loyal to the human race before my demographic, I'm thrilled.
In fact, isn't it - to a degree - virtue signaling to write that one thinks it's such a shame that these verboten things are so verboten as to write an article enumerating them and describing how verboten they are?
And yet, ctrl-f, "virtue". Ah, there it is.
Perhaps yours is really more of a comment about the homogeneity of the company you keep than on the universality of their beliefs?
Is it because you disagree with the statement or you agree but believe that it would have been flag killed quickly?
I can see why some people feel threatened by the sudden rise of opinions that differ from the mainstream narration but this is precisely because the silenced voices are SPEAKING UP.
The most bizarre part about this is that a minority female would openly become a doormat for the very people that told everybody who wasn't like them to shut the fuck up....
This is hardcore Uncle Toming from a woman who wouldn't be viewed as a white women by mainstream America but through the lens of fetish. Especially, shaming another Asian American women like Ellen Pao to further her article's message.
I apologize for any harsh words but as a minority myself, it was hard to contain the anger.
I'm genuinely curious if such things would be accepted in a SV software company.
I think SF is doing a great job tackling homelessness, human excrement management, and broad daylight IV drug abuse. They just need to raise taxes to increase funding for all the really successful programs underway. I'm sure they've got a handle on it. It's a wonderful vacation destination for families.
Affordable housing will definitely be solved by higher taxes, implementing rent control, and subsidizing below market rents in luxury buildings. It's important to keep the character of our neighborhoods by preventing higher density housing.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/cdc-g...
Apparently, there's nothing better our tax dollars can be doing than destroying some of the most important and successful organizations human civilization has managed to create.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2017/1...
While virtue-signalling about nomenclature is fun, this actually has a measurably horrible impact on public health.
Let me be more clear: What does this have to do with 'What you can't say in Silicon Valley', or 'animosity towards Trump'?
This, "I'm right, you're wrong, this is the only lens to look at this through" positioning is really bad.
In Policy Debate (CEDA, Cross-Examination) it's part of the sport to take mundane issues like creating a tax credit for electric vehicles and both teams try to extrapolate out to the worst possible impacts. Nuclear war, mass famine, extinction, etc.
It seems to me that we're adopting this quality for our public discourse, and that's a bad way to go. There is no 'discourse' in debate, that's an activity about winners and losers, not about truth seeking or implementing any real policy.
Sure, people can hold animosity toward Trump, just like most trump supporters hold animosity towards Secretary Clinton. But you shouldn't extend this animosity towards the people that support that candidate, and you shouldn't convince yourself that there aren't two sides to every issue, because there are.
wrong. plain and simple. im anti-murder, i dont need to listen to pro-murder people. im anti-rape, i dont need to listen to pro-rape people. there are issues that have a wrong and a right side, unless you really want to go down some dumb freshman philosophy major rabbit hole. the earth is not flat, yet there is a flat earth society. the list is endless.
That doesn't mean those sides are equal. Take anti-vaxxing and young-earth creationism: do they offer any truth or useful insights for policy proposals?
e: Another point: why should I not hold animosity towards hucksters who hamper efforts to slow climate change, or indirectly cause deaths from preventable diseases?
Sure, every issue has at least two sides...but aren't there issues where one side is so wrong that it is reasonable to conclude that those who take that side have something wrong with them?
For example, at the risk of having someone who doesn't understand the nuances of Godwin's law trying to incorrectly apply it here, take the issue of whether or not the Nazi attempt to implement an answer to their perceived problems with Jews was a good solution. If someone says the Nazi solution was a good one, am I supposed to just say "Oh well...two sides to every issue! We'll have to agree to disagree!" and just ignore that they support genocide?
Or how about someone who believes that the Earth is flat? They dismiss evidence such as the curvature you can see from a high altitude plane, photos from space, and everything else that says it is not as fake that a vast conspiracy of government and academia is forcing upon us. Two sides to every issue, right, so I should not infer that the person is an idiot and so hold their opinion on other matters lower than I normally would?
Yes, there may be two sides to every issue, but what side you take does say something about you. On issues of fact, it says something about your ability to understand facts and the reason from them. On more subjective issues which position says something about your morals and ethics.
I don't find the discussion itself objectionable, but I also don't want to grant intellectual capital to anybody who is going to use a controversial topic in bad faith to control the discussion. I don't want to be used to legitimize more extreme views. Sometimes people don't bring these topics up in bad faith, but it's been my experience that they're the minority.
FWIW, I don't live in Silicon Valley or in CA.
How does any of that apply to what some dude says on the internet? It doesn't. Who would they even be dog whistling for or to? Nobody. It's nonsensical. It's really just a way to say, "I think you believe something other than what you're actually saying."
In other words, it's a polite way to call somebody a liar. Which is fine, I guess, but if you want to call somebody a liar, just call them a liar. We don't need a new term for that, especially one that already has a perfectly good meaning in another context.
I find it highly unlikely that a black woman in charge of Inclusion and Diversity at a most socially progressive company would blow into that particular dog whistle.
When that part of the audience starts using the dog whistle, the goal has been met: they're using it in good faith, while the original user is still signalling the secondary message.
That's why "family values" works so well as a political slogan -- nobody is against "family values" in a superficial sense, and half of the population understands that "family values" is really code for "christian values."
> nobody is against "family values" in a superficial sense, and half of the population understands that "family values" is really code for "christian values."
If half the population is christian the other half is probably also not completely oblivious to what that other half understands by family values.
I think the best way to overcome this "dog whistle" problem is to appropriate it and steal it. "Family values" -- "good, we want to have gay, transgender, happy and safe families and we love our family values".
"Diversity of thought is more important?" - "Yes it is, and we find that people of different ages, races, genders, nationalities, educational, social and economic background end up with the best diversity of thoughts and ideas so we go out and actively recruit accordingly". What I see tech companies doing is being very vocal about diversity then turning around and recruiting young white men from a few top universities. Or saying women should be equal but then paying them less. Or covering up harassment and abuse (thinking of Uber here).
So she is Uncle Tom's wife and is secretly dog whistling to the white supremacists.
That's part of the reason people are not speaking what they think -- because they end up getting responses like that, which are completely indistinguishable from a comedy skit or an article from The Onion.
It's like talking to someone and hearing them try to convince you about contrails or lizard people. You can't argue at that point, because you realize it's way beyond that, so you just kind of keep quiet an nod. Especially if that person is your boss or coworker.
> “There can be 12 white, blue-eyed, blond men in a room and they’re going to be diverse too because they’re going to bring a different life experience and life perspective to the conversation,” the inaugural diversity chief said.
> ”Diversity is the human experience,” she said, according to Quartz. “I get a little bit frustrated when diversity or the term diversity is tagged to the people of color, or the women, or the LGBT.”
This is what Denise Young Smith, 20 year HR veteran at Apple said. She 'resigned' and was replaced after the ensuing outrage.
I want to be clear: it's bad to fire people just for expressing a different opinion. But that's not what my comment was about -- it was about how, as a society, we've learned to detect and avoid conversations that are probably faithless.
I don't shut anybody down. My time and attention are limited resources, and I don't like wasting them in a discussion that the other party is using in bad faith. To that end, I avoid starting questions that (through experience) tend to go down that path.
Like I said in the GP, I don't find the discussion itself objectionable. I've just applied a heuristic to determine who I have the discussion with.
If you want to have a workforce representative of a given community, and the characteristics of that community are evaluated along ethnic or skin color, then diversity thereof is key.
If you want a workforce representative of people's economic status, then you evaluate on economic characteristics of the community.
IF you're looking for creativity then diversity in thought is paramount [however, that does not imply not guarantee diversity in any other human feature.]
The issue can become muddled due to a couple of reasons. Companies while looking to address ethnic diversity imbalance will imply that increasing ethnic diversity will coincidentally result in creative diversity [with the implication that greater creative diversity results in company success]. Their confounding of these things make things muddled.
If diversity of culture were necessary to succeed, then relative monocultures like China and Japan would never succeed.
I would like to hear an entire podcast from Ferriss. But this author seems to criticize a Ferriss for not going into detail and that’s inappropriate. It would be valid if Ferriss left out these details in a book or in depth coverage, but he author is taking a few sentences and reading way too much into it.
What do you call it when someone uses a bigger name to try to rouse controversy in order to get clicks? It’s not yellow journalism, but there must be a term for this kind of shitposting.