Hacker News Reader

Comment by psychometry | Hacker News Reader

When it comes to Chick-fil-A, there's also the regressive side in addition to the modern and traditional sides.

https://hornet.com/stories/chick-fil-a-anti-lgbtq-donations-...

Your comment is essentially "the owners hold certain values I disagree with regarding sexuality, therefore I'm surprised their technical team is any good."

I don't see how that follows.

I never made any statement conflating views of ownership with technical team skills. That's absurd.

No, that was not what he said. He said to keep in mind the opinions of the company owners, which I imagine encourages one to not purchase from them.

I do not see how one can claim a criticism of their engineering follows from his statement.

Political values are important to point out. Companies create these tech blogs as a recruitment vehicle. You should know if the company you're considering applying to is funding bigotry (or "wholesome family values" if that's your angle).

> 'Bigotry'. noun : intolerance towards those who hold different opinions from oneself.

Surely castigating the owner of Chick-fil-A for advocating his personal beliefs is the truest example of bigotry here.

You should probably not rely on Google's fairly crappy dictionary definitions.

The quoted definition of bigotry as "intolerance toward those who hold different opinions from oneself" is from the New Oxford American Dictionary, from Oxford University Press (the OED people). If that's what Google is using, I don't think I can rely on your definition of "crappy."

Yep, it's a crappy definition that does not reflect current usage. It doesn't even reflect the definition in the OED, if you want to check there. 'Bigotry' is not limited to difference of opinion. Nobody uses it like that, you can take a look at the quoted usage examples here, which are from current publications.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bigotry

Ahh, yes. Always useful to continuously cherry-pick or alter definitions to tailor words that have an objectively negative moral implication to apply to exactly the standards you want.

Just because some publications use the word in that way does not mean the definition of the word should be shifted.

I’m sorry but this is a pointedly stupid comment. I’m doing the exact opposite of cherry-picking - I’m saying the definition is much broader than the inaccurately narrow one posted.

The OED is a historical dictionary; the Oxford Dictionary of English and the New Oxford American Dictionary are explicitly meant to reflect more current usage. At any rate, I think this is getting awfully pedantic; the definition you linked is "obstinate or intolerant devotion to one's own opinions and prejudices," which seems similar enough that I'm not really sure what the point of this argument is. Given that I'm fairly sure the point of this was whether Chick-Fil-A's executives and in-the-company's-name giving exhibits bigotry, by any dictionary anyone's linked to, the answer is "yes."

The point is that the definition posted is narrow and bad. This isn't some obscure technical point, a debate about the proper usage of 'less' and 'fewer' or whether 'literally' literally means what it says in some odd case. All you have to do to convince yourself of its badness is read a newspaper or magazine or listen to a news report. What exactly would 'racial bigotry' mean if the posted thing was the only definition of 'bigotry'?

As to pedantry, you're the one who started arguing this clearly lousy definition is not lousy, brought up the OED, decided the OED is no good, finally acknowledged the existence of a broader definition but then somehow decided that it's, in fact, as good as identical to the narrow bad definition. I'll be the first to acknowledge I have a habit of getting involved in some deeply silly threads but I'm left utterly flummoxed by this Cirque-du Soleil-level display of mental gymnastics.

I just hope the authors of that lousy definition aren't holding your cat hostage.

Of course neither of those things is actually bigotry. This "oh I'm suffering" crap is disgusting. If we actually cared about suffering our freely elected government wouldn't be causing so much of it.

No, not really, since his personal beliefs involve advocating for others to suffer.

He suffers nothing by permitting LGBT people to live as they wish.

There is no world in which pointing out the political beliefs espoused by a corporation should be considered an example of bigotry.

Euphemisms like "advocating for his personal beliefs" wouldn't fly, if say, the owner was donating to organizations that fought to make interracial marriage illegal again.

We'd call that what it is: bigotry.

I love seeing this argument. It's like you people think you can raise any arbitrary instance of hate/intolerance/bigotry onto a criticism-proof pedestal simply by brandishing a dictionary. Like, who are the real bigots: Nazis, or the nasty people who have the gall to disagree with their racist, antisemitic, etc. views? Is the answer not obvious? Does the question send you scuttling back under your dictionary?

I'm fine with a bit of pedantry but ultimately in the real world we need to show a little more intellectual maturity.

You're missing the point. I'm not concerned about the word. I'm concerned about the definition - those quickest to cry bigot are often guilty of acting like one themselves.

Case-in-point: Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey being forced to apologise for eating at Chick-fil-A during LGBT Month. What kind of bizarre intolerant nonsense is that?

Another case-in-point: Boston and Chicago mayors claim "Chick-fil-A values are not [our] values" and refuse to let them open branches in those cities.

Absurd.

> I'm not concerned about the word. I'm concerned about the definition

Come again?

It seems like you're the one who's missing the point, anyway. You didn't address anything I wrote in my comment. Par for the course, I guess. Just imagine I wrote the exact same comment again, and reply to that if you feel like it.

The paradox of intolerance[1]: being tolerant of those who are intolerant leads to less tolerance. It is completely right to call out intolerant views and actions and work towards eliminating them.

[1] https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Paradox_of_tolerance

The obvious problems with 'the paradox of intolerance' being that anyone who can convince themselves of another's intolerance now has moral license to behave intolerantly to an unspecified degree. Of course, exactly this sort of thing happens all the time; notably, it was used to rationalize Google's firing of James Damore--Damore's memo allegedly contained "dogwhistles" so he deserved being fired, slandered by the media, and mobbed on social media.

If it wasn't problematic it probably wouldn't be called a paradox.

I'm inclined to divide intolerances into two types: intolerances based on what somebody thinks, and intolerance based on what somebody is. I'm further inclined to model intolerances as a directed graph where nodes represent a group of one of those two types, e.g. conservatives and men might be represented by individual nodes of those two types respectively. Edges represent an intolerance, e.g. there would be an edge pointing from Klan members to black people. The former node would be of the first type, the latter of the second.

Where there's a cycle in this graph we are seeing a mutual intolerance of people with different ideas. An example might be people who think the Earth is flat and people who think it is round. Who is right? It's impossible to say without diving into the issues themselves.

    flat earthers <=> round earthers

Because what you think is independent of what you are, nodes of the second type cannot have outgoing edges. Incoming edges represent base intolerances of the sort that have historically been very harmful: racism, sexism, homophobia, and so on. Obviously these edges represent a different type of intolerance because they are based on innate attributes that their targets have no control over. To a liberal person, they are essentially definitionally bad. To an illiberal person, they're fine. Great, even, depending on who you ask.

Note that I'm talking about liberalism in the general definitional sense, not in the modern U.S. politics sense (i.e. "the left").

So, how about this graph taken from real life (the <=> represents two edges, one pointing in each direction):

    anti-racists <=> white racists -> non-whites

Deletion of the rightmost edge (i.e. deletion of white racism) means that we also have to delete 'white racists' or the implied meaning of the graph is paradoxical. It then follows that we have to remove 'anti-racists'. Now we have no intolerance at all—all that's left in the graph is `non-whites`, enjoying their existence without harassment, and all it took was the elimination of racism. You could also remove the 'white racists' node, with similar meaning and identical effect.

However, deletion of 'anti-racists' leaves the racism intact. I'd argue that this form of graph appears in many places where there is an illiberal group intolerant of a type two group and a liberal group locked in mutual intolerance with the illiberal group. The inverse setup doesn't really appear because, as I noted before, edges pointing to type two nodes represent a sort of intolerance that is anathema to liberals.

I'd also argue that there is a strong implication that these sorts of edges are the most important to remove—because, as demonstrated, doing so causes the rest of the graph to collapse. They are the "root cause", if you will, of many webs of interconnected intolerances.

It should be obvious that this model denies the assertion made by many modern American 'conservatives' that intolerances are all equivalent and relative, "the tolerant left", etcetera. I would say the water is most muddied by the fact that our 'left' and 'right' do not map cleanly onto liberal and illiberal. It's easy and sexy—but invalid—to apply the same political label to someone who thinks gay couples should be able to enjoy the same legal benefits as heterosexual married couples, and someone who thinks all white people should be killed.

P.S. Damore is a moron and his pseudoscientific screed was legitimately offensive to his co-workers. That's fine justification for him to be fired from his job at a private company. As for the rest of it, we live in a culture of growing illiberalism and zeal for generating outrage. It's a bummer.

I think you missed the point of my post, which was that this paradox allows anyone to abuse anyone else if the abuser can convince themselves that the abused is really 'intolerant'. As in the Damore case, a certain political group didn't like his message, so they claimed it contained hidden white/male supremacy messages, which was sufficient to justify his termination and abuse (contrary to your ad hominem post-script); the mob patted themselves on the back citing this very paradox.

I think you missed the point of mine. Doesn't matter.

A lot of people made a lot of politicized fuss about the Damore thing, but the simple fact is that his document contained offensive generalizations about women and if I was a woman I would not want to work with him. He's free to say whatever he wants; as I said before, though, this is a fine justification for termination.

A lot of people from all sides of the spectrum made it a political issue, because of course they did. The left said Google didn't act quickly or harshly enough and the right acted like Damore's right to speak freely was being taken from him. I'm not one of those people and I'm not interested in discussing the issue in terms of 'ideologies'. Ultimately, as I've said before, what he did does not have to be viewed through a political lens for it to be a legitimate justification for termination.

edit: I said "if I was a woman I would not want to work with him." Actually I would not want to work with him regardless.

> I think you missed the point of mine.

I may have. It sounded like you were highlighting the paradox itself, while I was intending to highlight the way the paradox lends itself to abuse. Perhaps ironically, your comments about Damore and the memo are exemplary--the memo contains zero offensive generalizations; it's been picked over and no one has produced an 'offensive generalization'--only phrases that allegedly contain offensive hidden messages. And because of those hidden messages, the mob pats itself on the back for helping to suppress Damore's "intolerance" (by the way, the same mob was rationalizing the New York Times hiring Jeong despite her four-year montage of overtly racist tweets). Again, I don't want to focus too much on any one example, because there are so many others and I don't want to steal attention from the broader phenomenon.

> I may have. It sounded like you were highlighting the paradox itself, while I was intending to highlight the way the paradox lends itself to abuse.

My intent was to illustrate that not all intolerances are only relative degrees of the same thing (as claimed in the popular 'conservative' talking point); some are categorically distinct, and in a web of interconnected intolerances the two types that I identified interact in asymmetrical ways.

I mostly just wanted to write down an idea that occurred to me on my walk home from work. I don't expect something that long to play well in an internet forum. It's meant as an interesting abstraction, not an airtight position.

> Perhaps ironically, your comments about Damore and the memo are exemplary--the memo contains zero offensive generalizations; it's been picked over and no one has produced an 'offensive generalization'--only phrases that allegedly contain offensive hidden messages. And because of those hidden messages, the mob pats itself on the back for helping to suppress Damore's "intolerance" (by the way, the same mob was rationalizing the New York Times hiring Jeong despite her four-year montage of overtly racist tweets). Again, I don't want to focus too much on any one example, because there are so many others and I don't want to steal attention from the broader phenomenon.

Have you read this: https://blog.ycombinator.com/ask-a-female-engineer-thoughts-...

It's quite literally the only piece of coverage I've seen of the Damore saga that I mostly agree with. Otherwise I think I've said what I have to say about him and his document. If you want to project politics onto me, I can't stop you, but I don't think it's productive. My opinions on this issue aren't political.

> My intent was to illustrate that not all intolerances are only relative degrees of the same thing

Ah, I see. I agree, though I wasn't espousing the "popular conservative talking point" (which I've never actually heard before), so I'm not quite sure why the conversation took that particular turn.

> Have you read this

I have, but I don't really want to dissect that here and now.

> If you want to project politics onto me

I don't want to, and I don't think I did. :) Sincere apologies if I offended.

Your very own link lists other major philosophers and thinkers (including Thomas Jefferson) who disagree with Karl Popper's conclusion on paradox of intolerance! There is _no_ universally agreed upon answer to the paradox of intolerance; I do not know why people keep pretending that there is.

(I will also observe that, where the article notes: "Popper asserted that to allow freedom of speech to those who would use it to eliminate the very principle upon which they rely is paradoxical.", it clearly applies to those who wish to (quoting from your post) "...call out intolerant views and actions and work towards eliminating them".)

That's very intolerant of you to cry bigot about people who support LGBT rights.

Totally bizarre intolerant nonsense.

Like IBM or Facebook?

..who get ripped on HN for every reason possible as well (and rightfully so).

The poster said nothing of the sort.

To make the point more directly for you, I think and I’m guessing the poster thinks we ought not to normalize certain kinds of discriminatory corporate behavior by just looking away and cheerfully admiring their oh-so-efficient tech stack.

This whole post and thread are an effort to recruit engineers and accumulate good will within the HN community. Pointing out that the company is rotten is extremely important, as is anything else that can undermine the project of manipulating talented, powerful hackers into working on the project of generating profits that power an evil social agenda.

https://thinkprogress.org/sorry-marco-rubio-chick-fil-still-...

For those coming to the thread later: the parent comment pointed out a certain fact[1] about the corporate activities of Chick-Fil-A that doesn't directly relate to the contents of the article.

The basis was the observation that such articles are,in essence, a "work-for-us" ads, and in that vein, informing the readers of other, broader actions of a corporation is relevant, especially when it pertains to ethics.

[1]https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/chick-fil-a-gay-marriage/

Hey, this is Brian and I wrote the article. I have worked at Chick-fil-A for over 17 years. I will volunteer time to take a phone call with anyone that is interested in hearing my first-hand experience with Chick-fil-A and its culture over the years. Just reach out on LinkedIn if you are interested and we will schedule some time.

I'm sorry, but whatever positive experience you've had as a member of the organization does not simply negate the negative effect the ownership has on our society.

Came here for this.

Imagine being so dead inside you feel perfectly fine, even proud of working for Chic-fil-A, lol

HN loves to talk about how CS needs ethics courses - this is a great example :|

At least we aren't quite to the point of HN articles praising the cutting edge technology being implemented at Raytheon and Northrop Grumman

If you're going to complain about the ethics related to Chik-Fil-A, it would probably be better to start with the fact that they raise and kill a billion chickens every year rather than that they have donated $120,000 to organizations like the Salvation Army (example from above article).

Eh, regardless of my personal thoughts on the topic, the ethics of eating animals are a lot more controversial among the HN crowd than LGBTQ rights.

Chik-Fil-A is not an arbiter of LGBTQ rights. Their small 6-figure donations to organizations that focus on other issues do very little in the grand scheme of things.

Do you really think Chik-Fil-A is directly causing more suffering by donating to a few charities in amounts this small than by raising in captivity and then killing billions of chickens? I see no way to reasonably argue that.

Again, regardless of my personal beliefs:

If I thought Chick-Fil-A shouldn't be supported for either their treatment of animals or for their anti-LGBTQ corporate giving, and wanted other people to stop supporting the business, I would focus on the latter in my messaging, because I suspect it would be more effective on the audience. Attempting to draw conclusions about which of their behaviors I personally think cause more suffering from this is not a good use of your time.

If your audience cares significantly about the charitable donations and not at all for animal suffering, and your goal is to only to convince them to be against the company, then sure, go for it.

But any effective altruist should have their goals set higher than this, at actually reducing the insane amount of suffering that's created. It does very little good if everyone stops supporting Chik-Fil-A only to flock to another chicken company, which will be the same in almost every way, possibly minus some donations, possibly one which treats animals even worse. Effective altruism is a very different beast than simply appealing to or signaling the crowds' most popular views on ethics in order to persuade.

Chick-Fil-A is just the service provider, if not for Chick-Fil-A people would get their chicken elsewhere. If they were raised in a place that felt less like captivity, that would probably be worse for the environment, in terms of using more natural resources per pound of chicken produced. There are trade-offs to everything.

Chick-Fil-A isn't really in the meat business, they're in the restaurant business, and given that they aren't in a very tiny niche, their menus feature meat. They sell plenty of soft drinks and fried potatoes which reduce the amount of meat as a percent of the total calories.

Finally if you're going to get people excited about animal rights, it's probably better to mention cows than chickens. To me, Chick-Fil-A's ads suggest eating chicken as a lesser of two evils, without ever saying that eating chicken is evil. We also don't have a separate word for chicken meat like we do for cow or pig meat, which I think serve as euphemisms.

Most effective altruists would agree with you (and thus disagree with a possible takeaway from Chik-Fil-A's advertising) that eating chicken is better than cows, as cows provide significantly more meat than a chicken, with ratios being up to 50 chickens per every 1 cow, as far as quantity of meat for normal portions go. In other words, someone eating only chicken may kill X chickens, but someone eating only cows may kill 1/50X cows. Of course there are other variables involved like weighing the differences between these animals, their treatments, lifespans, etc., but it is nonetheless a point with notable weight. Although this isn't quite the area I was getting at, just that the most significant things should be looked at first, all else constant.

> Finally if you're going to get people excited about animal rights, it's probably better to mention cows than chickens. To me, Chick-Fil-A's ads suggest eating chicken as a lesser of two evils, without ever saying that eating chicken is evil.

I posted this article to our company #random channel and that was the first reply- better chicken than beef!

pretty sure the ads are just a joke to not eat hamburgers, but to eat chicken whether it be nuggets or sandwiches or whatever which is essentially the menu for Chick-fil-A.

You may well already know this, but the separate words for meat and animal are likely because of the Normans; the richer French speakers cooked and ate the animals, so they got French names; the poorer "English" raised the animals and called them by their English/Germanic names.

We do have a word with a French root for chicken, by the way: poultry. As to why the separate name didn't catch on, I can only speculate that it's because chicken are cheap to keep and so the English may have eaten them themselves.

Not all languages have separate words for meat - German perhaps being the most famous. It's slightly disconcerting to walk around a supermarket and see schweinefleisch being advertised.

The "other issues" that organizations like Focus on the Family are concerned with are just a reprehensible as their anti-LGBT bigotry.

Not... really...

Chik-fil-a is only a useful example in so far as how well the ethical throughlines match things we've seen many times before, the media has taught us to care about, and how much time and effort political interest groups have spent highlighting those to the public. Ethical thinking on this topic will not be engaged, people will take the opinion their political affiliation and chosen memes have predestined them to take, and they'll act like it's serious thinking.

Parent poster said "Imagine being so dead inside you feel perfectly fine, even proud of working for Chic-fil-A, lol." Substitute in Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft or Twitter, and you might be approaching an interesting statement.

Where the ethics gets engaging are the day-to-day business model at any currently big or hot software company. Only a small subset of people have the background to comprehend the issues. And the people saying "let's stop and think about the consequences of this" gets steamrolled by the status quo that has money to make. That's where all the good examples live.

But it's a bit harder to come to terms with when the focus hits close to home. So we have whipping boys like Chik-fil-a. "At least I don't work THERE"

I agree that there are many important ethical questions that are bypassed in the day-to-day of those companies for sure, but at the same time I think there is an attitude here of "who cares what happens with the company's money once it leaves my area, they are solving interesting problems and the people working for them are doing intellectually engaging work".

Imagine feeling the bizarre compulsion to turn every discussion about technology on HN into yet another tedious political argument.

The company themselves chose this political stance, not the community around them.

No, the grandparent's political stance is to be outraged at anybody he/she disagrees with and has an unhealthy obsession to blurt it out on discussions that aren't political.

All discussions are political. The only question is whether or not the politics at hand affect you.

And to quote Chick-fil-a's CEO: "Jesus had a lot of things to say about people who work and live in the business community … Our work should be an act of worship. Our work should be our mission field." So he sees everything they do as political as well.

Not political. Religious. For those of us who are Christians, our politics are driven by our religion, not the other way around.

The Heidelberg Catechism sums it up well:

> Q. What is your only comfort in life and in death?

> A. That I am not my own, but belong — body and soul, in life and in death — to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ.

Was funding a lobbying group to reinstitute the death penalty for homosexuality in Uganda a reflection of their religious principles or their political ones?

monocasa,

HN won't let me reply to your next comment, but regarding:

> a reflection of their religious principles or their political ones

This is actually a common misunderstanding and what I'm trying to explain. "Religious principles OR political principles" means there are actually (at least) TWO categories of ideas a person holds, with specific items (homosexuality, death penalty, etc.) falling inside one of those categories.

That's a secular worldview, and it isn't how Christians think. We have one category: God. God is sovereign, he owns everything including me. As Thomas Aquinas said "all truth is God's truth". When we're being consistent (key caveat), we approach all issues as "what does God want me to do?". Political activities follow from there. We often disagree about those secondary conclusions (what God wants from us regarding issue X), but not the core starting point (ultimate allegiance is to God alone).

> This is actually a common misunderstanding and what I'm trying to explain. "Religious principles OR political principles" means there are actually (at least) TWO categories of ideas a person holds, with specific items (homosexuality, death penalty, etc.) falling inside one of those categories.

> That's a secular worldview, and it isn't how Christians think

And yet literally the previous comment you say

> Not political. Religious.

So which is it?

I was responding to scope of the statement:

> So he sees everything they do as political as well.

Obviously we have political views, but they're a only subset of religious views. By analogy, geometry exists and is a legitimate field of study. But if you said "all mathematicians think about is geometry" that would be false because it's too narrow in scope. If he's consistent in his Christian worldview "he sees everything they do as religious as well" would have been true.

There's nothing Christian about the board at Chick-Fil-A

> All discussions are political.

Nonsense. A certain subset of our society insists on making everything political.

Most of us don’t like it because it ruins otherwise interesting conversations.

Or... your privilege allows you to ignore the political consequences of most conversations.

What do you think politics is? Like an actual definition.

> Or... your privilege allows you to ignore the political consequences of most conversations.

What political consequences are there to most conversations?

Once again, define 'politics'.

Why is their stance deemed as political and not humanitarian?

This was not helpful. Sometimes people take jobs just to survive; I know I have.

Yeah, me too, but at least I wasn't writing Medium articles about how cool it was that I was generating revenue to be funneled directly into conversion therapy youth camps.

This person[0] seems to have found a way of engaging the CEO in dialog. I, personally, think this is the best way of discussing differences.

[0] https://www.huffingtonpost.com/shane-l-windmeyer/dan-cathy-c...

We also have an open dialog with Kim Jong-un; doesn't mean we should applaud the people that work and support him or feel sorry for those workers. They're traitors to the human race, in just the same way that Chick-Fil-A workers are directly responsible for what the company does.

Really? You're equating the "workers" of CFA to Kim Jong-un?

Nothing changes with attitudes like that.

No I'm equating the CEO Dan T. Cathy to Kim Jong-un. This guy's a scumbag who loves nothing better than commanding the world to follow his hypocritical commands, and his staff are personally responsible for supporting this behavior by going along with it. I can't say I have any respect for him, his company or the people who work for him. The US should simply outlaw his antisocial policies because that's the right thing to do.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com