Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work | Hacker News Reader

Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work

theregister.co.uk

1,166 pointsdevilcius1,286 comments

I personally think this is awesome. I don't wan't some git hosting startup to be the arbiter of morality for society. The engineers, designers, and PMs shouldn't have an outsized voice in society because they have a specialized useful skillset and ended up on a successful product.

If these users are breaking laws, then put them out of business via the courts and sieze the assets (the repos in this case) via legal means. Otherwise why would I wan't gitlab to have anything to do with this process?

The tech unicorns screwed themselves over BIG TIME, the second they stopped claiming they were just infrastructure and platforms and got into content moderation. They will now forever be a pawn of whoever has some power and has some agenda. It's an obviously unwinnable game for everyone involved besides maybe some politicians.

I don't want this to become a Joe Rogan debate but Naval Ravikant got this exactly right on his Rogan Interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qHkcs3kG44&t=3661

Wow, that is such a clear analysis that someone should transcribe it. Here's the main part of what Naval says:

"If Google, Facebook, and Twitter had been smart about this, they would not have picked sides. They would have said "We're publishers. Whatever goes through our pipes goes through our pipes. If it's illegal, we'll take it down. Give us a court order. Otherwise we don't touch it." It's like the phone company. If I call you up and I say something horrible to you on the phone, the phone company doesn't get in trouble. But the moment they started taking stuff down that wasn't illegal because somebody screamed, they basically lost their right to be viewed as a carrier. And now all of a sudden they've taken on a liability. They're sliding down this slippery slope into ruin, where the left wants them to take down the right, the right wants them to take down the left, and now they have no more friends, they have no allies. Traditionally the libertarian-leaning Republicans and Democrats would have stood up in principle for the common carriers, but now they won't. So my guess is, as soon as Congress (this day is coming if not already here...)... the day is coming when the politicians realize that these social media platforms are picking the next president, the next congressman. They're literally picking, and they have the power to pick, so they will be controlled by the government."

Being a publisher might get you off in the States, but in a lot of countries publishers are held to be legally culpable for material they publish. So publishing nazis, online abuse, illegal content etc is a legal issue.

> If it's illegal, we'll take it down. Give us a court order. Otherwise we don't touch it.

What about jurisdictions where the act of allowing something to be published will trigger a fine or other bad consequences? Doesn't it make sense to pro-actively remove things then?

This is also true in the US. See my reply to the parent. The Naval quote is wrong.

He's exactly right on it. Facebook is not a court. If certain speech is illegal, how would they even decide? If certain speech is illegal, have a court label it illegal and send them an order to remove.

That concept exists within our system.

Naval is exactly wrong.

Facebook must choose between being a “platform” like a phone company and being a “publisher” like a newspaper or broadcaster.

The rules are different and the accountability is different, which is why Fb lawyers spent years and millions arguing for “platform” status.

Edit: my main goal for posting my comment is to prevent some startup on HN from reading the parent & deciding to classify itself as a “publisher” only to find later that was a huge mistake. I’m not a lawyer & they shouldn’t take my advice, but hopefully they’ll at least double check with someone who is.

Facebook certainly wants to be a platform based on their lobbying. But they are clearly a publisher by setting editorial guidelines and sponsoring and removing content.

The phone company analogy doesn't really work, because phone calls are by default private, between exactly two parties, usually just two people. If you look at the tech company equivalent of that, like FB messenger, or Hangouts, or other messaging systems, they behave more similarly to the phone company. It'd be difficult to get in trouble for something you said in a private message.

If you want the analogy to make sense, you'd have to use something that's more of a broadcasting platform, like TV or radio, or a magazine.

Disagree with this.

First off, in the world of VOIP and conference calls this isn't true anymore, and we still don't censor VOIP providers.

The point is you can choose to be a carrier or you can chose to be a service.

We don’t need analogies.

It’s fairly clear how these organisations and their internet powered machination work.

So let’s talk about them in that context.

The phone analogy is terrible because the vitriol doesn't prevail. You aren't bombarded with 100 people's bigotry every time you pick up the phone.

What about the postal service then? That is a common carrier. Never mind being bombarded with bigotry, people can bombard you with literal bombs using the postal service, but hey if some kids are shitposting memes on 8chan... well we have to shut down that service altogether.

Radio, TV, and newspaper are each a better analogy.

Postal service is more akin to the infrastructure of radio/TV/newspaper (which differs, and is rather not one but various, e.g. cable, FM, and paperboys).

The analogy with Internet would be transit providers. The undersea cables between US and EU, for example. These are heavily logged, e.g. by UK. Imagine all your post be scanned, that'd be GDR-esque.

The "we're not being political" approach also fails at an earlier hurdle; which is that the decision to not allow "political" discussion at work -and the decision to refuse to review taking business from hate groups are themselves inescapably political decisions.

Perhaps if it's presented this way:

Group X that we don't like gets its phone service from AT&T. We know they're conducting their hateful business, fundraising, and coordination over AT&T's service. We need to put pressure on AT&T to cut off their service, or we'll assume that AT&T endorses their message.

Which is absurd. Putting that kind of censorship control in the power of ATT is dangerous. That’s why we have laws and elected officials.

That's the point of the analogy. People keeep saying Twitter etc. are private companies and can do whatever they want apparently without realizing how ridiculous it all seems when applied to another business.

The analogy still doesn't work. AT&T phone service is not a broadcast platform, and phone service is usually a government-granted monopoly that's highly regulated.

There are very obviously plenty of businesses where we'd expect people to cut off hateful organizations from service. I imagine most party caterers wouldn't want to host the KKK, and nobody would think this unreasonable.

I think you're correct -- a phone call is one-to-one and the internet is a broadcast medium.

I believe radio (as in ham radio) actually has FCC rules regarding identification and profanity.

It does, but as far as I understand that's only because EM spectrum is a very limited (as used in practice) public resource. The logic wasn't (many to one) -> (regulation), it was (limited resource) + (EM interference problems) -> (government controlled public space) -> (regulation). The US National Parks might be a good analogy here - very high traffic combined with limited space availability.

In particular, note that in the public resource analogy the regulation is quite neutral; legal censorship of profanity in the US is very narrow.

> If you look at the tech company equivalent of that, like FB messenger, or Hangouts, or other messaging systems, they behave more similarly to the phone company.

FB Messenger censors pornhub links or at least it did a few years ago.

The problem with at least Facebook and Twitter (and possibly Google) in this analysis is that their attention-grabbing model requires them to analyse and interfere with the data which is coming through their systems. The only way not to do that would be for FB timelines and Twitter feeds to be strictly sequential feeds which at some point in the past they may have been but they are not now.

Once you start basing your business model on selectively making some content more visible, you have already crossed a rubicon between a strictly neutral common carrier and a publisher.

(There is an error in the quote where they use publisher when they mean common carrier, a publisher is precisely an organisation that does have full editorial control of what they put out which is the opposite of what they intend from the rest of the quote.

Exactly. At face value, I'm firmly in favor of what Ravikant was saying, but even the simple example of a spam filter proves how it's impossible in practice: without basic spam filtering, something like Twitter would be absolutely unusable in the face of endless crypto and malware spam. At some level, Twitter/FB/et al have to do SOMETHING to shape/filter the volume of traffic they receive.

I don't think calls to regulate Twitter/FB would get much traction if all they were doing was spam filtering. To see it from a different direction: imagine the shit show that would happen if Google started "moderating" gmail content, even though it currently does very aggressive spam filtering.

Indeed. Spam filters, porn filters, swearword filters... all of those have precedents (in mainstream, non-social/internet media) and are perfectly acceptable by most of society.

In addition, notice that even GMail doesn't actually filter spam. It just hides it - it's an assistant, not arbiter of what you should see. It's more than happy for you to adjust the filters (for yourself personally).

Edit: GMail also does prioritization as of recently - but again, the purpose of that is to help users not filter content. Again, those algorithms are also adjustable for each user separately, they just have some "smart" defaults.

Kind of. You can't turn their anti-spam off, you can't exclude addresses from it and, worse for me, Gmail can hard bounce if it doesn't like something in your server/IP/content in a way that's not fully documented or reproducible.

You can now. You can create a filter matching whatever criteria you want (including from:foo@example.com or a catch all), and specify matches 'never get flagged as spam'. Its not obvious, but it is there. And the usual limitations of filters apply, such as not being able to match arbitrary headers.

Things can get flagged outside of your mailbox as so spammy that they will never arrive. This is how every spam filter works that I have seen to date and google is no exception.

That only works on mail that actually gets delivered to your mailbox. Gmail can and will:

- Reject delivery of mail from sources it has determined to be spammy (e.g. residential IPs) - this mechanism allows the sender to be aware that delivery failed.

- Accept delivery and then silently drop the message somewhere between after accepting delivery but before appearing in the end user's mailbox.

In either case, there is nothing you (the mailbox holder) can do. In the second case, there is no way for anyone to know the message hasn't been delivered.

>GMail doesn't actually filter spam. It just hides it

This is not accurate. There is a long on-going issue with GMail (and others) wholesale blocking delivery of email from domains/IPs/providers it deems to be spam or otherwise inappropriate. GMail users get no indication/notification, and generally have no idea that email sent to them was simply not delivered.

Google does censor my email to some extent. It send a number of conservative emails straight to spam.

Political emails tend to get tagged as spam in general. I have someone close to me who is involved in local Democratic Party and progressive organizations. When you go to an event or donate money (say an award banquet), they share your name and spam the crap out of you. A lot of that mail gets tagged as spam as a result.

Conservative outlets work similarly, but they seem to have bigger online operations and are hard to get out of. My in laws get barraged with this stuff, and a mail provider like GMail or Microsoft gets a lot of spam signals from it I’m sure.

I've heard people in the political world talk about buying and selling email lists, which I thought was illegal, but seems to be common practice.

In the early 90's I gave something like $20 to the Sierra Club or a similar group. After a deluge in physical mail asking for donations from around the political spectrum, I never did it again. I left no forwarding address after moving either. Pretty dumb on their part, they traded all their goodwill for a short-term dollar.

Political emails are spam. No matter from which direction they come from. So tagging them as spam seems just the right thing to do.

Political emails often are spam but not all of them. I subscribed to few newsletters from various political parties and I don't want google to block them from me.

It's only spam, if you don't want it.

If you explicitly solicit those emails, eg by signing up to a newsletter, it's not spam.

Some of the conservative emails I did not opt in, so could be considered spam. Others I did opt in and it still gets sent to spam.

On the other hand I get unsolicited email from some Democrat groups, and I never see such emails in spam.

I'm liberal, and lots of the unsolicited Democrat emails go to my spam folder.

Then it doesn't censor your email at all.

You can freely view the emails in your spam folder, with one click. You can optionally move the emails to your inbox and train Gmail ("not spam" button) not to place them there in the future.

It's going too far to call it censorship (in any manner) when an email provider places an email into a spam folder that requires one click to view/review.

A lot of overt spam (when gmail is most certain that it's spam) doesn't end up in the spam folder. A counter is incremented and the message is thrown out.

Unless you are talking about email coming from the most blacklisted of IPs, that’s not true.

It's not censorship. It's basic hygiene.

Is it doing that because they are “conservative emails” or because they violate spam rules?

If those emails are flagged because they’re “conservative” then I agree with you that needs to he corrected.

However, if those emails are flagged because they violate well known spam rules then let’s help “conservative” email senders to follow the rules. Examples include not using single or double opt-in for signup, not honoring or providing an opt-out link, using emails from a bulk list that includes known flagged emails, not including a plain text copy of the email in the message, and originating from a flagged server. Reputable email services like MailChimp go to great lengths to educate email list admins how to follow these rules & curate high value email lists.

Needs to be more specific as well. Is it intelligent conservatism in the vein of Bill Buckley or a knuckle-dragging ad hominem attacks from the lowbrow right?

Gmail thankfully sends all the republican and democratic party emails I receive straight to spam.

One year, I made a concerted effort to troll some friends by getting them bumper stickers from the opposing party that they supported (e.g. dems got republican bumper stickers, repubs got democrat bumper stickers).

Since then, despite being sure to opt out of mails at the time of purchase, and clicking 'unsubscribe' numerous times, both parties continue to spam me.

Gmail filters these emails into spam for me. Thank goodness.

I'm led to believe that if enough gmail users mark emails as spam, this will get fed across to other users that haven't. So you can probably blame people like me for marking these messages as spam, for it occurring to you.

Or y'know, they could actually honor the 'unsubscribe' request and stop spamming me, and I wouldn't have to mark it (legitimately) as spam.

It’s still not so easy. At what point does “fake news” become spam?

Its pretty obvious what’s spam and what isn’t. “Fake news” is extremely subjective, so try not to anger half the country :)

Anything can be spam because spam is in the eye of the beholder, but nonetheless, politics is generally not spam. You can have a politically-neutral policy against undesirable content that passes the smell test. It does require that you a) use reasonably objective terms in the definition of "spam", and b) that you resist the inevitable pressure to reinterpret those terms to cover that which others find undesirable political content.

Actually politics generally is spam - in the sense that much of it is knowingly dishonest self-promotion of individuals and social groups.

Just because politics isn't trying to sell you a penis extension doesn't mean it isn't trying to sell you something far worse.

It doesn't even matter how political content is published. What matters is that currently voters get more protection from a faulty toaster than from lies knowingly generated by politicians and corporate PR outfits.

The creation of deliberately false "talking points", fake news, smear campaigns, organised trolling and astroturfing, fake reviews, fake feedback, and other kinds of cognitive pollution should be banned from all forms of media.

Which is not to say this is easy or straightforward. But attempts should be made - because lying to voters and consumers is absolutely toxic to genuine democracy.

There’s something fascinating when you equate penis enlargement spam with political speech.

Btw, laying in politics has happened for like forever. Is there any evidence that it’s worse than in the past?

Both are messages coming to you. Just because they have the right to metaphorically knock on your door doesn't mean both campaigners and vacuum cleaner salesmen don't get the door slammed on them and doormen won't tell both to scram if they try to visit apartments unsolicited. The difference in categort broadness seems classically strawmen as well.

Not true at all.

Spam is unwanted email that you did not sign up to receive and sent from someone who you do not know.

At Google the top metric used to be relevance for a long time (until Amit Singhal was kicked out) for a good reason: it's a metric that kicks out spam, but doesn't pick sides.

Times and leadership has changed since though.

All good things...

> without basic spam filtering, something like Twitter would be absolutely unusable in the face of endless crypto and malware spam

I don't understand this argument at all. Is it so difficult for users to curate the list of accounts they follow?

Replies. It would be impossible to follow a thread. Even today it can get rough following a thread spawned from an elon musk tweet, given all the crypto-scamming.

That's interesting because we desperately need spam filtering on our phones right now.

Firefox on Android allows extensions. Including ad blockers.

I was referring to filtering spam phone calls.

Oh, those are annoying. I've been getting some lately, but not nearly as many as other people seem to be getting.

I think Google lets you report numbers as spam? (And, of course, caller id can be faked, but the important bit is that spam will differ statistically from legitimate calls.)

I think if there are going to be filters, then it would make sense for users to be able to opt in or out of filters. That way you can choose what you want to see, instead of having an almighty force that determines what you see. Having global filters that users can't turn off, besides to filter out illegal content, needlessly take away freedom from users.

I think there is a "I know it when I see it" type of argument to say, we will make the strongest effort possible to never censor anything that is not attempting to sell a product but we reserve the right to force advertisements to go through a specific channel.

For better or worse the types Of things which get called to be banned from a platform for being unacceptable speech rarely resemble the specific styles of advertising we classify as spam.

Another argument is let users be ther own spam control.have some idiot acquaintance from middle school who keeps spamming pyramid scheme and/or nazism? Fine, just unfriend them.

As long as you are given control over what content is pushed at you directly, there is no need to sensor the whole platform because of a specific undesirable.

Usenet dealt with this via killfile. There is no reason why you cannot do client-side filtering (compare /silence with /ignore in IRC). Client-side and server-side each have their pros and cons.

Usenet also had Cancelmoose and the Cabal (TINC).

Both individual and administrative filters are necessary.

I think it depends on how the recommendation algorithms are implemented. (I have no idea about how Facebook and Twitter recommendation algorithms work)

Let's say for example you have a community contributed labeling system that allows users to label content. A recommendation algorithm might then be written that simply pulls the top 10 highest number of viewed pieces content that have the same labels as a piece of content the viewer just viewed. In this case, there is nothing in the algorithm that evaluates the content itself. The evaluation was done by users of the software, not the software itself.

Simple "neutral" algorithms are generally easy to game. If you choose an algorithm that you already know will be gamed for harassment or whatever then you're essentially choosing that outcome.

The labeling algorithm is just a relatively naive example. More complex "neutral" algorithms can be designed. Mitigations for abuse that are "neutral" themselves may be added before/after initial implementation. (e.g To extend the labeling example, a moderation system could be added that allows users to flag inappropriate labels.) Also, I don't think it is always possible to foresee in what ways a system/algorithm might be abused; therefore, it might be necessary to address said abuse once it reveals itself.

People warned that this would happen when Facebook (YouTube, Steam, etc.) started sliding in this direction.

And years before Facebook was even created, a middle way was also proposed where a carrier like Facebook wouldn't be legally responsible for the content they carried, unless they started to select and/or moderate that content, at which point they would lose the carrier status, becoming a simple broadcaster, which would be legally responsible for everything that they would help to broadcast.

> unless they started to select and/or moderate that content, at which point they would lose the carrier status

But since the homepage feed (or any medium really) displays contents in a certain order, some selection must take place.

Typically some algorithm (usually a recommender system together with some business logic) is used to determine which contents from all that's available to you are actually shown to you and in what order.

Bias seems to be an unavoidable part of the design to me.

There are shades of grey. However, we have leaked footage of a Google co-founder saying (at an all-hands meeting no less) that the outcome of a democratic election conflicts with Google's values. There is a lot of room for interpretation there, but there are signals from Google in particular (eg, donation streams; leaked video; the occasional scandal bubbling out) that their management might be seeing the world through a partisan lens.

Abstract ideas of unavoidable bias are only of academic interest; the right wing of politics is justified in seeing Google as a direct political threat. That would not be justified if Google had a strict "no political talk, no political campaigning, we are the Switzerland of the internet" style policy for their workplace.

Would you mind providing a source for this leak?

It was that one from late last yer. Might have been https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2018/09/12/leaked-video-googl... . There wasn't anything there that was particularly scandalous; it was just a really interesting that this was the state of affairs inside Google.

I mean, it's OK if management have political views, as long as those views don't influence search results.

As long as the experimental process is rigorous and the people are incentivised to use the right metric (and the metric isn't politically biased), then it should be fine.

However, upon making that argument I find myself concerned at the possibility that Google's corporate interests (and perhaps some political interests) may shape which questions get asked, and thus the direction the service takes.

It's quite analagous to Chomsky's views of news organisations in Manufacturing Consent.

Every industry sees the world though a partisan lens to some extent. Those criticisms also apply to energy, education, repair, etc

Exactly. Criticisms about Google's politicking are unjustified as long as lobbyists are allowed in other industries.

I honestly don't see the problem with Google using its position to affect peoples' viewpoints. If we're going to allow other industries (such as energy) to hire lobbyists or advertisers to change peoples' viewpoints, and even worse, going straight to the decision-makers with lobbyist $$$, then criticizing Google is hypocritical.

>the outcome of a democratic election conflicts with Google's values.

What's wrong with this? The outcomes of the previous Presidential elections conflicted with many other companies' values. Every political election's outcome conflicts with some company's values, because companies stand to gain or lose depending on the policies enacted by that politician.

I'm not making a moral case. I do think there is a moral case as well but it is a very complicated do-unto-others-as-you-would-have-them-do-unto-you style one with some nuances that isn't going to fit into one comment. The case is that Google is potentially a direct threat to the right wing of politics. It would be prudent for the right wing to respond by trying to break Google up and neutering them as a platform, so that there are several successful competitors in all their markets. Realistically it is possible that the moderate left wing could be convinced as well - nobody is served by the risk that an entity as powerful as Google becomes an active propaganda platform. If they aren't even professing neutrality internally then they are on the way to becoming one.

Google could have avoided this situation by not explicitly championing political views inside their organisation.

Also the energy situations you cite aren't really comparable, the companies are only lobbying for things that make them more money and they don't have the same sort of power as Google in the political sphere.

It would be totally hypocritical for the right wing to break up Google. The Democrats tried that with Microsoft back in the late 90s, and as soon as Bush took office the case was dropped because Republicans don't believe in enforcing anti-trust law.

>the companies are only lobbying for things that make them more money

Every company does this if they can, and it's either going to help or hurt some political side. The case you're making here is that Google is bad for Republicans. Maybe, but coal companies are bad for Democrats (they give money to Republicans to help them win races), so why is this OK for coal companies, but not Google? I don't see the difference. As long as other companies or industries are allowed to influence politics with money, it's perfectly OK for Google to influence elections however they want, and it would be wrong to break them up because, as I said before, the Republican party is opposed to anti-trust law.

> It would be totally hypocritical for the right wing to break up Google. The Democrats tried that with Microsoft back in the late 90s, and as soon as Bush took office the case was dropped because Republicans don't believe in enforcing anti-trust law.

Circumstances were different - Microsoft wasn't doing anything particularly political. They aren't pro-Republican. This is the difference between politically attacking an entity because it is a corporation (a bad reason) vs attacking because they are politically active (an acceptable reason).

That is the central point. Google are removing potential defences against a political attack.

> Maybe, but coal companies are bad for Democrats (they give money to Republicans to help them win races), so why is this OK for coal companies, but not Google?

It is OK for Google, they can donate to whoever they want to. The issue is if they are going to be an partisan actor they control too much information and have too much influence on how people gather information.

>It is OK for Google, they can donate to whoever they want to. The issue is if they are going to be an partisan actor they control too much information and have too much influence on how people gather information.

If they can donate to whomever they want, they are also morally correct to control information however they want. Giving money to politicians is bribery, and is much more direct than merely controlling information on the internet. Personally, as long as bribery is legal, I have no problems with Google using a different tactic. It's much more ethical to try to shape peoples' opinions at large than to directly bribe politicians.

That argument ignores scale though, giving money to politicians directly may well be unethical, but it is a path that is open to everyone and is at least somewhat out in the open. Compared to that, Google basically is the internet for a large chunk of people and tracking how they use their index is practically impossible.

Compared to news media where the actors are highly partisan but there are strong voices and opportunities to be heard for all points of view. The alternatives are a lot thinner for Web search and Youtube; and most people would be shocked if it did turn out they were actively pushing a message.

Besides, I'd expect political donation laws to come under attack to. It is a very political question. Google should have stuck to strategies and pronouncements that are neutral so that they were less likely to get involved in partisan politics.

It doesn't really matter whether you see it as ethical or not; what matters is that Google has huge and largely unchallenged reach in a field and appear to be official stances by management on social issues that they do not need to. This makes them a legitimate political target.

> If we're going to allow other industries (such as energy) to hire lobbyists or advertisers to change peoples' viewpoints, and even worse, going straight to the decision-makers with lobbyist $$$, then criticizing Google is hypocritical.

I'm curious that you would assume that as being the default position ?

Everyone was fine with chronological order.

In that case one can just spam the same (or similar) post every second and your feed will likely be filled with that post.

I know I'm setting up a bit of a straw man here but my point is even chronological order can be exploited.

> I know I'm setting up a bit of a straw man here

Especially as this thread has already mostly said spam filtering (which your example would easily trigger) isn’t in opposition towards a goal of neutral status.

> my point is even chronological order can be exploited

The question is, how easy can it be?

The straw man, is indeed, that you can filter such, client- or server-side. If you see the same shit the whole time, you ignore it all. Easy; even IRC clients with scripting had such features in the 90s. Here is a list of techniques used in e-mail filtering [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_filtering#See_also

And if you did that, people would unfriend/unfollow you. Problem solved.

The problem is also that they are advertisers, and I'll be damned if I want ads for my company appearing next to "Illinois Nazis" or ISIS or whatever other garbage.

There's another problem: it becomes a race to the bottom if it's nothing but trolls and garbage content.

> The problem is also that they are advertisers, and I'll be damned if I want ads for my company appearing next to "Illinois Nazis" or ISIS or whatever other garbage.

I don't understand the problem. Why can't Toyota or Proctor and Gamble say it only wants to bid on a certain white list of channels or videos? The only downside is a smaller reach for the advertiser and a smaller "pie" for the "content" company (be it Instagram or YouTube).

I think the main problem is the "content providers" be it Instagram or YouTube want to maximize the ad revenue and any suggestion I have such as strictly reverse chronological timeline by default goes against the idea of "growth hacking".

I would personally love to be a fly in the wall in Netflix or Spotify headquarters. Because in my naive mind, Netflix makes MORE money when people subscribe to Netflix but never watch anything. But then if people watch Netflix a lot, they are more likely to talk about what they watch to others and encourage others to subscribe to Netflix?

Any company probably wants to make sure they make more money the more customers they have? Kind of sounds obvious but I don't think it is the case with every company. I'd imagine there are some businesses where there is an ideal size and if you are bigger, the additional customers kind of follow a law of diminishing returns? I can't think of any examples but would love to hear if anyone reading this can...

And the problem this creates for society is that we censor content that isn't advertiser friendly. We've already seen where this leads with broadcast television, lowest common denominator trash that is safe for advertisers, escaping that advertiser optimum made youtube good in the first place.

I subscribe to a lot of history channels so I've seen the effects of this filtering directly, history contains a lot of talk about nazis and hitler and you can't even mention the big H without being demonetized.

But this is just another example of how advertising is a cancer on society.

I don't think it's been convincingly argued that ranking or recommendation algorithms necessarily represent any sort of editorial bias. The purpose of these algorithms is to rank content based either on a prediction of what the individual user would want to see based on their existing history or on which content is more broadly engaging in general. In other words, if YouTube decides I really like to watch Ben Shapiro owning the libs with FACTS and LOGIC, that doesn't mean YouTube is making an editorial decision to promote that content, it just means YouTube has profiled me as some sort of conservative. If YouTube profiled me differently, they would be equally happy to recommend TYT videos or whatever.

There may be some editorial bias introduced if the userbase of a given social media site is themselves skewed in a particular direction. For instance, there seems to be some skew in the content that shows up on my Tumblr dashboard that seems fairly irrespective of anything I've subscribed to. But even that isn't necessarily damning for Tumblr, because they're not necessarily making an editorial decision to promote that content.

These platforms (these meaning the ones with the most market cap) need to be advertiser-friendly in order to grow. They inherently require editorial bias.

I'm not an expert on advertising, but I suspect these concerns are often overblown. There are YouTubers who get demonetized--presumably because their content isn't "advertiser-friendly"--who still manage to get individual sponsorship deals. If these companies were serious about being a "common carrier", they would invest more money into developing an advertising market where advertisers could pick and choose the content they wanted to advertise and less money into demonetization.

demonetized video still get ads, it is a two tier system where ad space on demonetized videos is lower in price.

Even if that’s true—which I somewhat doubt—YouTube basically makes demonetized videos disappear in terms of recommendations. They don’t admit it but every YouTuber I’ve seen get demonetized confirms that views basically stop after demonetization, aside from subscribers.

There's a very simple solution here that avoids any and all bias and hidden agendas: simply make everything transparent.

- Users get to create their own profile. For instance in your profile you get to selected whether you would like to see content geared towards men/women/any. And this would follow for a whole slew of other topics, similar to the opaque profile companies are creating on users today without their consent or input.

- All recommended videos have all their profile tags openly shown. And the reason for recommendation is also completely open.

The cool thing about it is that this also works really well with the current neural network based recommendation systems since they output a weighting of things. Simply transform those weightings into a nice output and the user can see exactly what's going on and exactly how they're being viewed. As a nice aside this would also remove a big chunk of the incentive for increasingly aggressive spying as companies try to get ever more extensive profiles on each and every person that uses their products.

One downside here is that users might not be consciously aware of their own preferences. This could again be resolved transparently. "Hey PhilWelch, we've noticed you like videos about underwater basketweaving. Would you like for this interest to be ticked in your profile? [Yes, No, No + Never ask again]

That would be awesome for advanced users but unfortunately bad for mass ergonomics. A shockingly high percentage have never cracked open the settings page even once.

Why would it be hidden away in some settings instead of right in your face with a nice fat button "Change how my videos are recommended..."? Even beyond that though, most online platforms today offer very limited general customization - and so there's not much reason for users to go digging through settings. They are designed to work primarily with the default configuration, and so that becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.

No, if they instead worked to develop better user moderation tools, it would work just as well as it does now, just without their (appearance of) liability. Things like word filters, subscribable block lists, etc.

This is where twitter screwing over third party developers comes in to play. I would have preferred if twitter main feed was sequential and then there were thriving third party alternatives to it. Twitter could have easily monetised by taking a slice of ad revenue from third party developers, or by charging API fees to them.

> The problem with at least Facebook and Twitter (and possibly Google) in this analysis is that their attention-grabbing model requires them to analyse and interfere with the data which is coming through their systems.

Not to mention a completely different topic - ads for scams. When I create a new ad on FB, they keep it in review for at least a couple of hours. But every day I see dozens of ads that are obviously dishonest. Some financial scams, ads for some fishy schemes, some of them badly translated.

When you are a publisher and accept an ad, obviously it's very tempting to claim all responsibility is with the advertiser (it is not, although details vary between jurisdictions). But even if you didn't have any responsibility legally, it still feels terribly wrong from the ethical point of view to get rich by helping scammers cheat some poor chaps of their money.

Not on a daily basis, but I see ads for scams on youtube as well.

Different topic, but the strangest thing I witnessed on youtube was ads for audible during a stolen audible book... So the owner of the content payed the thief (indirectly, but still) for placing an ad during performance of the stolen content. And youtube couldn't care less, as long as money moves...

They could make the algorithm customizable and let the user to control it. That would be much better than the current blackbox where you get uninteresting stories promoted because of misclicking once, and have no way to tell the algorithm about its mistakes.

> They could make the algorithm customizable and let the user to control it.

It often gets it wrong, but that's the general idea, isn't it? You don't customize it by checking some boxes or adding some keywords, you customize it by giving attention to some results more than to others.

Obviously, there's the added layer that they aren't optimizing for your satisfaction but for your business value to them.

He oversimplified the issue. Phone companies don't make money through ads. FB/Twitter/Google make money by "getting into the weeds". They chose a business model with much more reward (hence much more risk). They're basically running ads businesses. You post about shoes, they sell you shoes. You talk about unemployment, they sell you a candidate ? Gitlab/Microsoft et al have slightly less dependent business models that aren't dependent on ads (for the most part).

Publishers don't exercise editorial control? Come on now.

This business model is the reason that FB, T and G are dominant platforms worth discussing. Products that are purely transactional are easy to compete with, splitting up markets and driving down prices. This is why true "common carriers", like ISPs, have fought desperately against net neutrality and to capture more customer data -- they want in on the value capture that comes from shaping content, because they are rapidly being commoditized as carriers of bits.

IMO this is a moat in the eye of a lot of libertarian tech philosophy. Most software products become competitive by building networks -- with end users (e.g. social networks), with developers (e.g. open source), or indirectly via content (from media aggregators to spam filtering). Once you're in the business of curating a network, you are implementing values whether you acknowledge them or not.

It's inevitable these platforms will have government mandated restrictions on speech, as well as government mandates to NOT restrict speech. There's no other way to really manage the issue.

Whinging of the poorly informed that free speech protections can only apply to the government aside.

Doesn’t make sense: a phone conversation is more akin to a gchat or messenger convo. A Facebook page or wall is more akin to publishing... and historically publishers have used considerable discretion about what gets published.

They fucked up when money entered the picture. Naturally some companies don't want their ads next to ISIL/ISIS beheading/recruitment videos for some reason... and it's allegedly bad for growing the audience too.

The bottom line is, that G/FB/Tw did not remain neutral, because that hurt the aforementioned bottom line. Now, of course - as you said/transcribed - the problem is that if fascism becomes profitable then what?

> If it's illegal, we'll take it down. Give us a court order. Otherwise we don't touch it.

Interestingly the underlying assumptions in most analyses like this is that everyone lives in US and obeys US laws. What if China goes after a political dissident through Facebook? Even worse, what if Facebook propaganda is used to incite genocide by the government of Myanmar? Where do you get the court order to take it down?

Unfortunately the business model of Silicon Valley is at odds with this simplistic first-amendment/court-order sort of argument.

> Interestingly the underlying assumptions in most analyses like this is that everyone lives in US and obeys US laws.

Even better! Stop trying to act like global companies, and pick a jurisdiction to work out of. If Facebook is an American company (which they are), they are held to and follow US laws.

Maybe this means that Facebook doesn't remove Nazi propaganda because of the US 1st Amendment. What follows is actual proper competition, perhaps Germany bans Facebook, which means either a new German company GesichtBuch, can compete by being based in Germany and following german laws. Or, people enjoy Facebook and then rally their government for laws to be changed.

What we have now is companies trying to exist in every country, which means they have to follow the worst laws of every country.

So give up Germany (lost: billions in revenue) or give up Nazi propaganda (lost:thousands in revenue).

Companies are trying to make money. That's the purpose of a company.

So give up China (lost billions) or give up democratic propaganda.

It’s not the size of the market that should determine right or wrong. Having free speech laws means you get democracy and nazi stuff and spend time on more important stuff as to what’s too nazi or too democratic. Just rely on the rule of law.

It's the issue that should determine plus marketsize. Nazi symbols being sold or not is not going to push the needle. Pushing back on China for democratic injustices is what we should be doing.

Pretty much what happened with Google in China ?

> Or, people enjoy Facebook and then rally their government for laws to be changed.

It's not going to happen, because people can connect to FB easily using a vpn without giving FB the chance to monetize ads. It's already happening in countries that have banned FB.

Public-facing communication has always been trickier and much more muddied.

Twitter is not like telephone (except direct messages I suppose).

A more apt comparison would be newspapers (which have publishers and editorial staff) or radio/TV (with similar structures).

So the analogy only really works if you claim something like “Twitter should have been like paper mills“, but I’m not sure whether that’s the right analogy or useful way of thinking about Twitter.

Sometimes things are just complex and I do actually think it’s wrong for Twitter to run away from this responsibility. They are the ones who want to run this public-facing way of communicating as a capitalist enterprise, they should be beholden to doing it right (whatever that means – but that’s the hard part and it’s ok that it’s hard).

The telephone analogy is terrible. Phone calls are usually between two people, or a small number of people. At the very least, they're bounded to some relatively small number.

When you post something on Twitter, unless your account is private, you've broadcasted your speech to anyone in the world who cares to see it.

Not moderating any speech at all is a quick way to allow a community to turn into a cesspit of spam and trolling. Look at any web board or forum over the past several decades for inspiration. They either have moderation, or they get overrun.

Twitter isn’t a phone call, but it also isn’t a message board. You only see the tweets of the people you personally choose to follow; it doesn’t matter if there are 100 billion spam accounts posting ads to nobody.

There are millions of Twitter accounts in Japanese, but if you don’t follow any of them, and nobody you follow retweets them, you’d never know they exist. You can also block or mute specific accounts, mute keywords, etc for even finer control.

> You only see the tweets of the people you personally choose to follow

That's not at all true by default; you also see tweets from people that have paid for involuntary reach for the tweet (promoted tweets), tweets that people you follow have interacted with, tweets that respond to or mention people you follow, and probably others that I'm forgetting.

So Twitter broke their platform, and they show ads. This is vastly different from a message board that shows all messages to all users.

> You only see the tweets of the people you personally choose to follow

If that was true, that would help a lot.

That is a vast oversimplification of how Twitter works. People absolutely see tweets from people they don't follow, all the time. Sometimes it's a promoted tweet, sometimes a retweet, sometimes just by browsing through trending topics. It's pretty much impossible to use the platform in such a way that you'll only see tweets from people you follow, and nothing else.

Agreed that Twitter isn't a message board, but that's a much closer analogy than calling it a phone call.

Imagine if those promoted tweets were delivered to you as automated phone calls from spoofed numbers.

>Twitter isn’t a phone call, but it also isn’t a message board.

Well, Twitter is Twitter. But Twitter is probably closer to a message board than it is to a phone call.

> They either have moderation, or they get overrun.

But those boards are moderated by people who are part of the community. Not by the software nor the software host.

Twitter, FB, Google are not part of those communities. If they want to be cesspit of spam and trolling they should be free to do so.

Edit: I see the Naval quote is from the Joe Rogan podcast (which I often enjoy). I haven’t listened to the episode, so don’t have full context but Naval seems to have the timeline, “publisher”, and “platform” confused.

Facebook, Google (YouTube), and Twitter have historically claimed to be “neutral tech platforms” like phone utilities or internet service providers. They maintained that claim so that responsibility for content would be on the user/sharer and so they could avoid regulation.

More recently, at least Facebook has claimed (2018) it is a “publisher”. They updated their claim in order to justify the right to editorialize & choose what content people see on Facebook.

The shift to “publisher” aligns with the reality that the news feed algorithm is a form of editorializing. The algorithm decides what you see. It doesn’t matter if a human or a computer is making the decision.

The news feed does not editorialize. It doesn't edit the content itself. It's automated curation.

Furthermore this whole "publisher" vs "platform" argument is not nearly as relevant as people make it seem. Contrary to popular belief, tech companies describing themselves as publishers instead of platforms does not affect the fact that they are not held liable for user generated content (so long as they meet reasonable standards for taking it down when notified). The New York Times is afforded the same protection for user generated content that they host (e.g. their comments section).

“Facebook, [company attorneys] repeatedly argued, is a publisher, and a company that makes editorial decisions, which are protected by the first amendment.” https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jul/02/facebook-...

...which doesn't at all affect their section 230 protections. Again, contrary to popular belief, whether or not a service considers itself a "publisher" or a "platform" has no bearing on its protections under section 230. It's all about whether the content was user generated, or written by the service itself.

Why people are dedicating so much attention to the fact that Facebook calls itself a publisher is a mystery to me.

See https://www.eff.org/issues/bloggers/legal/liability/230 for more details.

Thanks for that reference. Fan of EFF. I’ll check it out. The case history archive is a pretty cool resource.

It seems to be someone's talking points or more charitably a meme (differentiated by how organic the idea is). The publisher/platform dichotomy is a flat out wrong myth which keeps on being repeated - and often from high places.

I would call it outright propaganda at this point because the dogged insistence on not listening to objective facts seems more "big lie" style opinion shaping than mere ignorance which has caught on. At this point I reflexive downvote all who repeat it uncritically as "fact".

> We're publishers. Whatever goes through our pipes goes through our pipes. If it's illegal, we'll take it down.

That's a great way to lose users though. They need to provide some limit for abuse. That means either good moderation tools for end-user (which I don't see how they could scale without also providing bad-people-lists) or moderation on their side. Otherwise you end up with /b/ or worse.

If they want their users (and advertisers) to stay, they need to filter content. They're social networks, not limited-scope opt-in party lines.

That's a great way to lose advertisers. Case in point: Youtube's demonetization policy.

Advertisers didn't care for over a decade until partisan agitators such as Media Matters and Vox methodically cherry picked screenshots of brands next to maligned youtube channels, and then contacted brands threatening to publish names and shame if they didn't pull their advertising.

The result of this short-sighted crusade was Youtube becoming unprofitable for millions of small creators around the world, and people of all sides of politics suffering including non-political LGBT creators.

This is the first I’ve heard this hypothesis. Do you have links to any data?

Any particular advertiser needs Youtube more than Youtube needs the advertiser. Youtube has a critical hold on the young adult market in particular. If Youtube just said, "if you don't like it, Pepsi, someone else can enjoy this ad space instead", what recourse would they have? In conclusion Youtube demonetizes because they want to and need an excuse.

If you look at the data, the "adpocalypse" cost alphabet over 70 billion dollars on their market cap.

It's also a great way to whitewash history. Want to educate the next generation about Hitlers atrocities? No money for you.

Basically anything war seems to be getting demonetized these days. Advertisers only want to appear next to cats on roombas.

I B M

'we're publishers' is exactly the wrong thing to say. Publishers have some responsibility over what they publish.

The smart thing to say would have been 'we're common carriers'. And then to actually behave like common carriers.. At least that would have gotten them to first base. Now they look like heavy handed censors with a stake in the game.

If you don't want to act as a steward of society - with your own leadership, governance, as a lead - if you don't want to be accountable to potential societal consequences, then sure, ignore the behaviour of bad actors or the irrational.

The problem has been lock-in and users unable to "take their network with them."

The idea of decentralization to me is being fully mobile and having the decision to be able to choose what network(s) you're part of, and in part that would be based on leadership, governance, rules that each platform can have in place - and ideally enforcing and evolving as necessary.

Imagine you could have Facebook but immediately you can decide who's leadership you're following for moderation and all other settings/decisions of the platform - and thus who your attention, money, goes to.

The government being in charge of moderating free speech - except for perhaps acting along with, setting rules for authority like police - is going to be very inefficient, bureaucratic, not leveraging the efficiencies of free market systems, capitalism.

Government could potentially play an important role, however private sector options are likely to exist sooner and be better. Let people choose who moderates their community, networks, allow the best options to naturally rise to the top - to act as role models for competitors to take notice and attempt to mimic the best parts.

This comments' votes have been going up and down since I posted it - funny to see.

> "We're publishers. Whatever goes through our pipes goes through our pipes. If it's illegal, we'll take it down. Give us a court order. Otherwise we don't touch it."

It is not possible to do that and make as much money as google, fb, etc. The end result of unmoderated public places on the internet is always this: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/22/rip-culture-war-thread...

Which is great! But not for making money. From that article:

> Allowing any aspect of your brand to come anywhere near something unpopular and taboo is like a giant Christmas present for people who hate you [...] It doesn’t matter if taboo material makes up 1% of your comment section; it will inevitably make up 100% of what people hear about your comment section and then of what people think is in your comment section.

> It is not possible to do that and make as much money as google, fb, etc.

Exactly. This is a choice that companies need to make. Or a regulation coming.

A regulation is coming anyway; the CDA safe harbor, which is what both those complaining about what the big tech firms are censoring and those complaining about what they are not censoring are targeting, has been under broad, bipartisan attack for some time, under a variety of different pretexts. Pm

Naval, like most VC investors, think too highly of themselves and go on twitter tirades in areas where they have absolutely no clue what they are talking about. The quote above is a real example. Their views are tinged by living in advance Western societies, and in their libertarian bubbles. In real life, a platform like Google and Facebook, that has unprecedented reach globally, is the opposite of a private phone call. ISIS rode YouTube's lax enforcement policy to create a Caliphate and slaughter millions of people. Was Naval advocating Google to wait for an order from the Syrian government before taking out beheading videos ? In India, WhatsApp is used by religious extremists to form lynching mobs, resulting in deaths of multiple people just based on rumors. We are living in a world, where we have software platforms that hold unprecedented leverage to alter people's lives. We should try to move away from some one size fits all simplistic policies that are created in Sand Hill road thought bubble

If I understand the argument, he isn't saying that those horrible things are fine and should be allowed. He's saying that it's the government's job to do something about them. Once the tech companies took a bite out of that poisoned apple, their fate was sealed, to become government-controlled.

In many places across the world, there is barely any government to act on these things. A functioning government is limited to a handful of countries

> "If it's illegal, we'll take it down. Give us a court order. Otherwise we don't touch it"

I think that works better on paper than in practice. If I get offended enough by something, can't I go try to sue under the premise of defamation?

If you sue successfully you can get a legal order to take down the content as part of the judgement.

Libel, slander, and harassment are all crimes or civil offenses (illegal). They work pretty well.

Carriers can't be sued for the content they carry. It's been tried many times and so long as the carrier acts like a carrier (neutral channel), it fails.

Working at MySpace and getting sued by all the state attorney generals, that defense doesn’t work. We were ultimately responsible for the actions of our users including exploitation of minors which triggered the investigations.

This sounds right, but what if the corporations are more powerful than the government? What if they have enough money to collectively rent enough politicians so that they never have to face the scrutiny that Naval is talking about here?

If social media platforms are picking the next congressmen and next president, and you’re in Congress vying to keep your seat, do you really want to introduce or sponsor legislation to upset these companies?

They did this for many years - when I moved to Silicon Valley in 2009 tech's attitude was "We just provide the mechanism, we let our users determine policy". My first couple years at Google (09-10), management was very insistent that "We don't take sides - we show the user the best result for their query regardless of how much we dislike it." There were examples like literal searches for Nazis where the top result was a hate group and rather than censor it, Google took out a house ad (basically paid themselves, using the mechanisms available to the general public) saying "Don't like these results? We don't either, but we believe strongly in freedom of speech, and so we're using this space to explain our views without depriving others of theirs."

The thing is, sometime around 2012-2014 this became unacceptable. Public discourse shifted into "silence is complicitness - if you allow this speech on your platform, that means that you endorse it." So it became a forced-choice issue. And the thing is that if it's a forced choice, very few people are going to stand up and defend Nazis. Most of these tech execs personally hold fairly liberal, progressive views. When the general public said "You're a Nazi sympathizer because you show Nazi websites in the search results", a.) it wasn't true and b.) it was personally insulting, because that was essentially the opposite of what actually was true.

And then once that started happening, you run into the age-old problem with restricting freedom of speech, which is that the people who hold the power to restrict it might not agree with you on what's worth restricting. Be careful what you wish for.

If search engine results are a "public space", can you yell fire in a crowded theater?

> Public discourse shifted into "silence is complicitness - if you allow this speech on your platform, that means that you endorse it."

Public discourse? Or the loudest segment of the discourse most influential on Googlers?

The loudest segment of the discourse most influential on Googlers, but this caveat is usually inherent when we talk about "public discourse". (If you've studied Foucault, you'll recognize that power and influence are inherently tied in with the concept of discourse. Public speech happens all the time, but it only gets labeled "discourse" when it influences or is intended to influence society in some way.)

The way you put it above seemed to imply the discourse in society as a whole, not a narrow and unrepresentative segment of it.

Google listed its own services high in search results in order to promote and show favor to those services. Why shouldn't people use this same logic to criticize Google for effectively promoting hate groups?

The thing is - it didn't, at least while I was there. The triggering of universal result groups (eg. Local, Shopping, or News results within the search results page) was based on the probability that for a given query, the user would end up wanting to switch over to the respective Google property rather than click on the top result. There was no manual tweaking of search results, and the formulas were so simple (basically straight ratios) that it's hard for them to be mucked with.

What you say makes a lot of sense but a court ruled that Google's search ranks were self-promoting. I guess a good question here would be whether there were similar algorithms to funnel people towards E-Bay or other competitors' shopping services if they were likely looking for those.

https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/27/google-fined-e2-42bn-for-e...

But this is really a digression. The point is that search rank does promote. We can come up with many cases where Google perhaps shouldn't display the most relevant results. The question is whether Google should use their near-monopoly to influence the world via search results according to their moral code instead of strict legal responsibility.

Just because a court says something doesn't mean it is reality. At all.

Likewise can we all please give the open farce of abuse of the word "monopoly" to rest?

A court is a third party that is more objective than a Google employee. That is why I mentioned it.

Google is a great service (that I love and use daily by choice) but they also spend a lot of money to make sure they are the default search provider. They have more means than smaller search companies and they use those means to achieve almost total market share. Then Google used their vast market share to skew business in their favor. That is almost the textbook definition of monopolistic behavior.

> What you say makes a lot of sense but a court ruled that Google's search ranks were self-promoting.

And over a hundred years ago, the Supreme Court ruled that “seperate but equal” was a valid argument. Doesn’t make it correct.

Google was literally funneling people to its own services via its search results and had no similar linking for other services. The court's decision seemed reasonable.

> Public discourse shifted into "silence is complicitness"

It leads to the "deplatforming" approach, i.e. not only refusing to provide a neutral publishing platform (or assimilated-related tools), but also to actively fight against those who do so.

'Be careful what you wish for', indeed.

TL;DR the exercise of advertiser preferences not the shift in public discourse is the true cause.

I agree with your account in every way, but one and I recognize that I might be wrong about it.

In my opinion, it was not public discourse that shifted first. Instead, in my opinion, it was advertiser choice to not have their ads shown alongside certain content be it search results, YouTube videos, tweets, Facebook posts, or whatever else these tech companies were carrying.

I believe that ignoring advertiser preferences in this discussion is harmful in that ignores their impact on both business choices and public discourse such well-meaning commenters here end up talking past each other needlessly.

If we consider the role of advertisers in this discussion, then the comparison of these tech companies to telephone, radio, and newspapers becomes more interesting if not more apt. The advertisers don’t have any sort of explicit freedom of association given to them by the tech companies about what kinds of content they are allowed to associate with, but the point becomes moot with advertisers being customers allowed to take their business anywhere.

1. Taking the comparison of telephone, what if there was a phone service that provided free calls with the caveat that the caller or the receiver had to listen to an ad? What if that had was in some way, shape or form related to past or present telephone conversations? I would personally find this feature annoying to have some third-party delay my conversation, but I can see where this might be useful for people who would not otherwise be able to afford the service. I assume that most people who use telephones would feel similarly to myself.

2. The comparison to radio, newspapers, and television is less interesting in that both mediums are essentially curated, but both do run ads and/or sell subscriptions. Some of them even offer services that come about from gaining expertise in their domains or being in close proximity to content creators in their respective mediums (record labels, television and movie studios, recommendation sites, marketing firms, public relations experts, etc.), which in turn can be funded by subscriptions, ads, or investments.

Consequently, there are similarities between these media. First of all, these tech companies offer services that allow ordinary people to broadcast themselves to a wide audience much like radio or newspapers. Second of all, these tech companies make a majority of their incomes from a combination ads and subscriptions. Third of all, users of Facebook, Twitter, Google and the like have conversational expectations much like those of telephone conversations: even the people working in radio, newspapers, and television feel really strongly negative when any other party tries to change their message or silence them.

Like some of the other commenters here, I too feel that these tech companies have made a mistake in policing content the way they do. I believe that they did so to this degree wholly to appease advertisers. Had they been laser-focused on preserving the integrity of what their users posted before the demands their advertisers then things could have been very different.

If I was an advertiser and I only wanted to show ads to people who like cat pictures, but absolutely never show those ads to people like pictures of other animals even if there are pictures of cats in some of those pictures then these tech companies should build the tool for that.

In my opinion, these tech companies should be even more of a transparent marketplace between the ad buyers and content producers and the free association that both these groups are allowed to have with other and not police or manipulate content or that is permissible by law (keep things chronological with a user being able to keep a list of favourites). Then this whole discussion would boil down to which set of advertisers pulled sponsorship from which set of content producers and vice versa.

Yes, this is all easier said than done. Yes, the thing that it would all boil down to is potentially a problem in itself. Yes, these tech companies still have to follow laws that can be in conflict with laws elsewhere or some set of values in general. Yes, people would still take tech companies over something else related or not.

But, at least then, we wouldn’t we talking about this.

Google, Facebook, and Twitter are not "literally picking" the next president or the next congressman. That is delusional.

Obviously they're not "literally" picking the next president, however they have full control on what opinions you see first, and they have utilized that ability to tilt many (yes, very many) people's opinions (especially those whose understanding of even general politics is superficial) towards a specific candidate.

Under that logic we need to heavily regulate cereal boxes and milk cartons because many of us see that first thing every morning.

My philosophy is to always be suspicious of those grabbing at the keys to power - they are up to no good.

Worse, they don't want someone else doing their filtering. Try to write a Twitter or Facebook client with spam filtering. They don't want the user to have that kind of control.

There should be only once choice, either you're a platform or a publisher.

A platform should be open, and only illegal stuff should be removed. No preferences, no nothing.

A publisher can be closed, can be whatever they want it, can filter whatever, promote whatever and censor whatever.

...but!

If you're a publisher, you've decided what to publish, and you should be responsible for all content published on your webpage. Fake news? Illegal porn? Nuclear bomb plans? Your problem, your responsiblity, you face the consequences.

If you want to be an open platform and blame users for content posted there (and have them face the consequences), then you should have no right to promote, censor or block/hide content (except illegal).

The "illegal" criteria seems rational for countries that have rational laws but in many countries there are laws against political speech or criticism of people in power. By removing that 'illegal' speech in those countries the platform is in effect working as a government actor to police customers in those nations.

In such nations (ex China), this entire debate is irrelevant - you follow their rules or they kick you out.

In western societies, this debate is relevant and I strongly side with the poster you replied to. That being said, reasonably unbiased filtering should probably be allowed in some form. For example, while I don't want YouTube picking sides politically, I also wouldn't want to force them to host hardcore pornography against their will.

> ...so they will be controlled by the government."

The cynical Regulatory Capture inspired take is that they want to be regulated now. Because regulation always favors the established players and makes it very hard for newcomers to overthrow them.

Google, FB etc are now big and old enough to need that protection, and settle in to comfortable corporate middle age.

They're more like broadcasters than carriers. The phone companies don't broadcast. If you broadcast, then you're going to run into this issue one way or another.

Considering In-Q-Tels involvement, sometimes I think they major social media companies were setup as trojan horses to enable censorship and governmental control in the first place. (besides the more obvious surveillance aspect)

I mean you can say it's a clear analysis in the abstract, but if you look at the HN comments on the thread about CloudFlare cutting off 8chan it's clear that most people no longer agree with the principle as soon as they're presented with a real world example.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20610395

The problem with the analogy to the phone system is that conversations via phone are transient and private. There is no place with the AT&T logo on it where you can go and see that awful thing that person said. The internet itself is a much better fit for the phone company analogy, and indeed internet service and backbone providers have pretty much entirely been able to stay out of this.

A better (though still imperfect) analogy really is media: TV stations, newspapers, magazines, radio stations. And indeed you see similar problems there as the online media companies are facing now. The biggest difference is that traditional media companies were forced to make editorial choices because of physical constraints - physical space for print, airtime and spectrum for TV and radio - so this question of whether you could just let anyone say anything in your publication or on your broadcast just never really came up.

A better analogy for Twitter and Facebook is the town square, rather than the phone company. They don't just enable point to point discussion, but broadcast to any and all who will listen.

Which is fine, and good, except when algorithms keyed only to engagement cause the noisiest, most provocative and potentially divisive content to be amplified.

We have, for a very long time, had laws concerning appropriate behaviour in a town square, or any other 'public' setting: don't incite riots, don't behave violently towards others, be respectful if someone doesn't want to talk and walks away. I support the efforts we're now seeing to bring those norms into online spaces.

This is the actual thing about technology, amplification. One person has 1 voice, but then they buy a megaphone, or say something to get attention online and the algorithms are programmed to say that's good. What's picked to be amplified, or muted, is the issue.

Problem is that is only a carrier creates a barrier to monetize the platform through ads. Nobody with a serious brand doesn't want to see ads next to nazi propaganda and some kinky furry porn.

The problem wasn't so much about "taking stuff down that wasn't illegal because somebody screamed." More problematic wa sthe fact that, in the case of Facebook, their algorithms promoted content that was more "engaging" (read: controversial), so basically the whole system turned out to be optimized for fake news.

This has actually been the law in i.e. Germany and I think many other countries as well. As long as the platform doesn't interfere with the content (§ 8 Abs. 1 TMG) they are directly accountable for the content (Which doesn't mean that they don't have to take it down in case of an infringement for example). But as soon as they moderate said content they are legally liable. And this is exactly what social media platforms have done and that is one reason why they are responsible for their content now. This is of course only one part of the truth, because at the same time there has been a shift in perception of these platforms and other laws (i.e. Netzwerkdurchsetzungsgesetz) have been specifically aimed at social media platforms to hold them accountable.

"Wow, that is such a clear analysis that someone should transcribe it."

There's no way the three could have predicted the show that would have been put on today.

Just like we couldn't have predicted the massive impact iphones/android [steve jobs + android] would have had in the past decade on today's society.

My two cents, i guess.

The problem is, the current law isn't match the pipe analogy. If it's a private communication, they can be a pipe. But they are publicly present the information as soon as it gets to the pipe.

There are many expressions you can't publicly present by law. For example, copyright infringement, privacy infringement, pornography, national/personal/organization secret, fraud, malware and all. You may argue some of them are ridiculous, but there are some expression you agree to be supressed. Like the fake news of you committing the crime.

Yes, In an ideal rule of the law world, you should take the court order to censor that expression. But it takes time. The current law is, if you knowingly publish the material that is obviously illegal and ignore the censorship demand, you are responsible for that.

People working for Google, Facebook, and Twitter are smart. They understand this and have used the argument of being just infrastructure in the past.

They had to switch their story because they are not a neutral carrier. They prefer some messages over others. This is linked to their revenue model.

The simplest solution to 'just be infrastructure' is to show all messages linearly.

A more complex solution with possibly lower revenue is this: they could let the users pick algorithms to filter and sort the content, then they could claim to be infrastructure again. The user would need to be able to inspect the algorithms. The simplest one would be: no sorting, no filtering. That would make the sites unpleasant.

The smart people at Google, Facebook, and Twitter must have considered this option but decided that it is more profitable to share the power over what people see with the regulators than to share it with the people.

If Google, Facebook, and Twitter had been smart about this, they... would have consulted deeply with lawmakers, regulators, copyright owners and other deeply entrenched parties before doing anything... move fast, and, er, what was it again ?

The day they started messing with ML driven results and TL's was the day the whole argument about neutrality went out the window.

Excellent analogy! I'm so happy that telephone carriers do nothing to prevent my phone from being called by spammers 10x daily.

I would advocate for Joe Rogan, he is a voice of openness and willingness to talk about things rather than just shutting down conversations because you might not agree. He is also a great listener. The world needs more people like Rogan.

Actually I generally agree with this. I think he has some distinct flaws too. I just didn't want this to become a referendum on Joe Rogan.

What he does is allow someone to explain their beliefs, but he makes no real effort to establish evidence to support or oppose that.

It’s actually perfectl content for the internet especially for the really out-there interviewees, because people inside the relevant filter bubble can watch and feel their beliefs are being validated, and someone outside can watch and be entertained by a freak show. Each person can watch the same content and be entertained for their own purposes. I’m not sure how healthy it is for society though.

Yes. I agree that companies shouldn't become adhoc moral arbiters. beholden to social media campaigns, or the like.

However, the bigger problem is that companies with international presence are going to have an increasingly difficult time navigating legal sanctions or directives from the various countries they may sell to or operate in.

The challenge comes when a company is faced with being closed out of a large market if they don't comply with another country's legal directives. While, the best/right answer might be to ignore those countries, the reality of having to withdraw from valuable markets would be challenging.

Though, while it may seem like new problem, non-digital industries have been dealing with this kind of thing for a long time. Maybe the WTO, or the like, will develop fair trade/IP regime to guard against enabling a country to block or sanction international digital/media companies for violating local laws. But I wouldn't expect anything like to happen soon because countries are not to keen on giving up sovereignty.

Maybe spontaneous digital trade wars will become a thing.

edit: typo as usual

That's what Google did with China.

> I don't wan't some git hosting startup to be the arbiter of morality for society. The engineers, designers, and PMs shouldn't have an outsized voice in society because they have a specialized useful skillset and ended up on a successful product

Refusing to serve a customer when you disagree with that customer's goal is pretty far from being a "moral arbiter for society." Keep in mind that anyone is free to use other services (or roll their own) and gitlab can't do anything about that. Neither would it be overreaching for the workers building that product to request a say in how it's used.

> If these users are breaking laws, then put them out of business via the courts and sieze the assets (the repos in this case) via legal means.

Refusing someone a service you provide is a completely legal action. This has never been illegal afaik. In many cases I can think of the users wouldn't be actually breaking any laws, which isn't the same as saying that their actions aren't immoral.

> The tech unicorns screwed themselves over BIG TIME, the second they stopped claiming they were just infrastructure and platforms and got into content moderation. They will now forever be a pawn of whoever has some power and has some agenda.

In this last sentence, who are you claiming has power? It seems to me if I had power I wouldn't bother trying to persuade my boss not to do business with certain agencies, I'd just make it illegal and force them to change. Does that seem like a course of action available to gitlab employees?

> Refusing to serve a customer when you disagree with that customer's goal is pretty far from being a "moral arbiter for society."

This sounds really good until someone refuses to bake a wedding cake for a couple because they're gay. The supreme court ruled in favor of the baker. You're advocating for a world where that's ok. Is that the world you want to live in?

I think these bakers suck, but I do agree with the Supreme Court. A private business should be allowed to refuse to serve customers for whatever reason they choose.

The only exception should be legal monopolies; they shouldn't be allowed to discriminate, because there are otherwise no other options.

Hah, ninja'd. We wrote the same comment, except mine's longer.

What about refusing to serve black people ? This was literally the premise of civil rights.

And the “but for” argument should have clearly applied here. They would not be denied a cake but for the gender (protected class) of who they were marrying. This was a clear case of judicial reinterpretation to meet an agenda.

Doesn't Colorado explicitly ban discrimination against gay people?

Refusing to serve black people is illegal discrimination. It sucks that sexual orientation isn't a protected class in all states, but the bakers are legally clear here.

30, if not 3 years ago, this wouldn't even be a question. If somebody argues that the refusal is based on religious grounds, it seems like it would be a relevant test case in US politics.

> A private business should be allowed to refuse to serve customers for whatever reason they choose.

So you're fine with "whites only" signs in shops?

Hope that doesn't sound too extreme but while I understand where you're coming from I think it's important to acknowledge where the rhetoric about not distinguishing your customers based on their personal characteristics comes from.

"Whites only" signs are illegal discrimination. I suppose I should have said, "for whatever legal reason they choose". If the state wishes to make discrimination based on sexual orientation illegal -- which I would support! -- then obviously things go differently.

There are a couple cases being heard by the Supreme Court right now that are attempting to argue that discrimination against gay and transgender people is inherently discrimination based on sex (which is a protected class everywhere in the US); I'm very interested in how that turns out.

For the record, almost of all of the baking cases in the courts, including the famous Colorado baker case, are in states that have anti-discrimination laws for LGBT people. These cases are challenging the laws saying that it's the religious right to discriminate against LGBT people.

It seems a little circular to say that your argument is based on what is legal, when the discussion is about what should be legal.

Anyways I think your point is mainly that there is a line between what is required of a business and what constitutes a right to self-determination / self-expression. Where to draw that line is certainly not obvious and we understand new things about it as society progresses. So in that sense I do understand your point of view, and I happen to agree that certain decisions regarding what work they take should be allowed by a business, but I hope the point has been made that you have to be careful what you wish for when stating absolutes like "for whatever reason they choose."

> I think these bakers suck, but I do agree with the Supreme Court. A private business should be allowed to refuse to serve customers for whatever reason they choose.

This was not the conclusion of the SCOTUS case.

It pushed the case back down to the State on procedural consideration.

We also have a bunch of reasons (protected classes) that a company cannot refuse to do business. Colorado specifically includes sexual orientation in their definition of protected classes.

>We also have a bunch of reasons (protected classes) that a company cannot refuse to do business. Colorado specifically includes sexual orientation in their definition of protected classes.

I don't think this is relevant to this specific case. The baker didn't refuse to do business with the gay couple. He was happy to sell them a generic off-the-shelf wedding cake.

He refused to sell them a personalized cake, which is considered a form of expression. The government cannot compel you to express yourself a certain way if it goes against your religious beliefs.

But that was not determined by this SCOTUS case and remains an open question to the best of my knowledge.

> He was happy to sell them a generic off-the-shelf wedding cake.

If you're talking about the Masterpiece Cakeshop baker, he didn't say that until the lawsuit was in-progress. At the time that the couple went in, he refused to serve them without discussing what they wanted.

> We also have a bunch of reasons (protected classes) that a company cannot refuse to do business. Colorado specifically includes sexual orientation in their definition of protected classes.

I would absolutely support adding sexual orientation to that list in every state, or at the federal level. But if it's not there in the bakers' state, then, legally, they are (unfortunately) in the clear.

Colorado does indeed have anti-discrimination laws to protect gay people which the baker was in clear violation of. The Supreme Court made a narrow ruling on a procedural matter.

> I think these bakers suck, but I do agree with the Supreme Court. A private business should be allowed to refuse to serve customers for whatever reason they choose.

That's not what the Supreme Court found; it has not invalidated public accommodation anti-discrimination law in general, nor even the specific law the State relied on in the case. It did rule that the specific procedural history of the case indicated that State officials acted with specific targeted religious animus in the case, invalidating the state enforcement action even if the law was Constitutional and the enforcement factually warranted under it otherwise.

OK, but are they a private business? Are they a small reservation only shop, preferably not located on commercially zoned land?

I'm not so worried about the supreme court ruling -- businesses don't usually succeed or fail based on the justices ruling that their business model isn't technically illegal. I want to live in a world where the community embraces good things, and actively rejects fascists and bigots whether or not it's legal to do so.

Same sex marriage wasn't even recognized in Colorado at the time. Your ire would be better directed elsewhere, such as the state where the action they wanted to celebrate wasn't legal. Especially a state where you can penalize someone for not baking a cake for an event that isn't legal in the first place.

The whole case was a ridiculous hit job.

People buy wedding cakes for handfastings, renewals of wedding vows, and many other kinds of ceremonies somewhat like a wedding but not legally a wedding, such as the sham weddings that people hold after being married by a justice of the peace at a courthouse. People even buy them to use on stage during theater productions.

That's not actually at issue in the Colorado case. "I will not sell you that cake because you're gay" is the issue, not the type of cake.

> "I will not sell you that cake because you're gay" is the issue, not the type of cake.

This contradicts everything I've read about the case. The baker disagreed with gay marriage, not being gay. To suggest that the baker wouldn't have sold any cake to a gay customer is ridiculous.

Is this a rhetorical question? Yes, it is the world I want to live in. If the business operates within the context of healthy competition, then while they are free to refuse service, others are equally free to boycott it. This democratizes social norms. I don't want to force gun shops to sell to people they have a bad feeling about (say, because they have a racist tattoo), and I don't want a law that attempts to distinguish between "good" iffy feelings and "bad" ones.

If on the other hand the company is a monopoly and no reasonable alternatives are available, then it is de-facto infrastructure and should be more stringently regulated for impartiality, as is the government (and frankly such companies are a problem anyway, and should possibly be adopted by the government when they reach that size). The DMV isn't allowed to turn you away for a swastika tattoo, and neither should the electric company. But a baker? Absolutely.

The problem with this seemingly simple philosophy is that it results in minorities being ostracised. "Democratising social norms" turns into "Outlawing anything the majority won't tolerate". Suddenly you have towns where black people can't live, because no-one will do business with them. Sure, "healthy competition" should solve this problem - there's money to be made! But people are not perfectly economically rational. We are tribal creatures of prejudice, predisposed to subconsciously reject and suspect anything or anyone as "different".

Laws are often made to protect minorities, because history shows us time and time again that an unchecked majority of people can be real dicks.

How far do you want to go? Should a company be forced to offer products to minorities? Say a comb maker who creates combs for the straight hair market should they be forced to offer hair picks? Not doing so leaves them ostracised.

In France it is straight illegal to refuse to sell to a customer without a legitimate reason. Whether a reason is legitimate is up to court interpretation but not liking the skin color or sexual orientation would not qualify. A racist tattoo at a shoot range would probably.

And it doesn't cause any trouble. B2B is not concerned obviously.

As far as possible.

Of course companies have to offer products to minorities, have you ever seen parking spots for handicapped people in the mall?

Of course a restaurant has to ask you if you have some intolerance before serving you food that could contain allergens.

USA Better start to learn that 300 millions people don't make the entire world.

> Laws are often made to protect minorities, because history shows us time and time again that an unchecked majority of people can be real dicks.

Under democracy, a majority of people can decide what laws there are, and inflict their dickishness as they wish. Laws are often made to oppress minorities. For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Crow_laws

See also part I of this essay: https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/02/21/current-affairs-some-p...

While there are obvious exceptions, much of the time the majority has some empathy with traditionally oppressed minorities and votes for politicians who make laws to protect them.

> Under democracy, a majority of people can decide what laws there are

Also worth pointing out that under most democracies, this isn't true. The people decide which people should decide what laws there should be. It's an important difference.

I'm completely on supreme court's side in the case of the baker (who are assholes but should have their legal right to be assholes). However, this analogy doesn't work with Facebook or Twitter as they have oligopoly status in terms of access to mass audience: there are hundreds of different bakeries that you can choose from, but there's just a couple of SV companies can very effectively silence you.

I still don't know what would be an effective solution to this problem, but giving these giants the same freedom to do whatever as a small business enjoys just feels wrong.

> This sounds really good until someone refuses to bake a wedding cake for a couple because they're gay. The supreme court ruled in favor of the baker. You're advocating for a world where that's ok.

That's not what the Supreme Court ruled. They ruled that the CO commissioners who decided against the baker in the first place were being blatantly flippant about the baker's religious beliefs. They should have at least considered those beliefs. They explicitly did not rule that the baker's religious beliefs were enough on their own to prevent the sale.

https://www.scotusblog.com/2018/06/opinion-analysis-court-ru...

Suppose the custom cake bakery owner is black, and a customer asks for a cake with a confederate flag design? There's nothing illegal about the confederate flag, so the baker should be compelled to bake it, right? There isn't even a basis for refusal based on religious grounds.

I would want the black baker owner to be able to not only refuse to bake the cake, but to also tell the customer to take a hike and never return.

> so the baker should be compelled to bake it, right? There isn't even a basis for refusal based on religious grounds.

No. Because "supports the confederacy" isn't a protected class.

As far as US law goes, you can generally refuse a service to anyone for any reason, unless that reason is related to a protected class to which the person belongs, unless you have some other exception (almost always religious) for not doing the thing.

As you say protected class is a very US specific, but even there it actually depend on the state as they can and in some places has extended it. Protected class under federal law is one list and protected class under state law is an other.

Protected class does also not mean that everyone else if a free target for discrimination, and for international companies there is the European Convention on Human Rights. Refusing service based on politics require the company to do a quite complicated dance around a long list of laws and I doubt any company lawyer would be very happy to give a green light for it.

Suppose the custom cake bakery owner is black, and a customer asks for a cake with a confederate flag design?

This is a fun game! Suppose the baker is Muslim and you ask for a cake with a cartoon of The Prophet? Wouldn’t that make you the bigot?

My point is you can contrive any example here to get the conclusion you want.

Ever read ToC on free services? They have the right to terminate the service at any time for any reason. It doesn't matter if you've connected 100s of services to your free Google login, or keep thousands of mails and contacts in your gmail, or made a great business grabing eyes on youtube so that Google can sell ads on your videos and share a bit of profits with you.

For example today we've seen Google terminate a service of distributing an app on AppStore because it disagreed with a developer having a donation link, despite that not being excluded in ToS (or so I heard). And it doesn't really matter, how you company refuses a service. ToS just makes reasons for refusal codified and ToS can change at any time.

This is already a world we live in, SV companies practice this daily, and I doubt tech companies want this to change.

Moral arbiter is society at any rate. Tech workers are part of society, and their companies can't really make rules like you suggested (no service for gays) at scale without getting a major backlash from the public, or internally. Or if they could, it would indicate a much wider societal acceptance for such rules.

We also agreed not to discriminate service based on race. It's a similar matter but nobody thinks that was a good idea [to discriminate]. Freedom of association has limits.

That's not what happened, the baker offered to sell them any cake he had. The couple also wanted him to write a message on the cake that was against his religious beliefs.

Nobody here noticed the difference between "refusing to serve a customer" and "not wanting to to business with other unethical businesses". Gitlab could definitely chose with which other business they associate, and that would not mean allowing to target minorities. But every customer-facing business should not be allowed to refuse their service to anyone, because you're right, it would very easily lead to cases like the one you're describing.

> It seems to me if I had power I wouldn't bother trying to persuade my boss not to do business with certain agencies, I'd just make it illegal and force them to change. Does that seem like a course of action available to gitlab employees?

You're thinking in terms of fighting the last war. Companies of today know how to work around things at risk becoming illegal. Today, a more effective strategy to persuade your boss about an issue is to spin it as something outrageous on social media, in hope that news portals will pick it up. This power is very much available to a Gitlab employee.

> Refusing to serve a customer when you disagree with that customer's goal is pretty far from being a "moral arbiter for society." Keep in mind that anyone is free to use other services (or roll their own) and gitlab can't do anything about that. Neither would it be overreaching for the workers building that product to request a say in how it's used.

I think this is the crux of the issue. Anyone is of course free to roll their own GitLab (or facebook, or news channel). But this ignores reality.

Facebook control ~90% of social media. There's a very high chance that Facebook could sway every election in America (and lots of other countries also) if they truly wanted to.

I think we are entering a new era. Just as it required a paradigm shift to outlaw anti-competitive practices, I think we need to re-consider what rights these platforms have around speech.

I didn't realize facebooi owned 90%. If you exclude twitter/reddit what's left snapchat?

Facebook owns Instagram - the 2nd largest social network - as well as Whatsapp which is ginormous in its own right as well.

I'd guess mostly WeChat/Alibaba/TikTok, and a few tiny players that ebb and flow in impact.

Eh, I guess this is not true. To me, 'social media' always meant websites like MySpace and Orkut where friends connect, and not just 'website where users can communicate in some way' a la Pinterest/Reddit/YouTube.

But I realise now that isn't the right definition... still not sure what the word is for the Friendster/MySpace clones--but among those I am pretty sure Facebook is more than 90% of the market (outside of China), possibly more than 99% with Google+ closing.

Or, just break up the alleged monopoly under existing anti-trust regulation, instead of welcoming a terrifying new power of the government mandating that private business serve customers they disagree with?

On the list of ‘terrifying new powers’ this one is waaay down. If the customer is not doing anything illegal you have no reason not to serve them.

Other than that pesky nebulous western value of "Freedom", sure, I guess you have no reason to be able to make that kind of business decision. Compelled speech or compelled production of value come in many disguises, and are hallmarks of oppressive and dangerous regimes. It's disingenuous to suggest that starting down that path would be innocent.

But these things are already happening, such as forcing religious bakers to bake cakes for couples they don’t agree with

Of course, because the reasoning wasn't 'you are a jerk' or 'we don't want to make that type of cake' or 'we're too busy right now' but rather 'you are gay'. Sexual orientation is a protected class and acting like a jerk on the internet isn't.

No one is forcing all businesses to do serve all customers everywhere always. We are saying you can't discriminate on the basis of marginalized groups.

I lean libertarian, but sometimes realty breaks that.

True libertarianism dictates that I can ban whomever I want from my shop. But in reality most of the bans were of the 'No Negroes' variety. I would love to think that the free market would take care of discriminatory businesses, but history shows it will not.

I agree that the true issue is ultimately monopoly: if a town has 10 newspapers and one goes democrat-leaning, no one would really care. But it's different if there is only 1 newspaper.

I worry that there can only ever be a single Friendster/Google+/Myspace around, because people will always gravitate towards the most popular one.

If you see platforms being moderated, it's because the platforms want to survive. Because their usually is only one around, because once it becomes toxic the regular people flee and the toxic elements follow because having a platform is not the point for them.

Or the free market was hindered by the government's regulatory Jim Crow laws.

How would you break up a giant social network? What lines would you cut it along?

I mean, I personally wouldn't. I don't think this is an actual problem, but in the face of a suggestion that "tech platforms are too big, ergo they must not be allowed a choice in who they do business with", I'll pick the "use anti-trust framework to make them not so big" option over "force a business transaction" any day.

Of course, those who make the "publisher or platform, pick one!" false dichotomy aren't really genuinely concerned about the size of the company. They just want to force someone to host their content, which is why they jump to "free speech means more nowadays than what it says in the constitution [so platforms must carry my speech]."

Sorry for the tangent, just want to make sure my position is clear.

> Of course, those who make the "publisher or platform, pick one!" false dichotomy aren't really genuinely concerned about the size of the company. They just want to force someone to host their content,

It is not nice to lump us all together. Many of us here both

- despise certain content

- while we still find it totally unacceptable that tech giants are allowed to do whatever they want with their power "because hate speech"

This is just a variant of introducing bad laws "because of terrorism":

The laws are bad not because anyone wants terrorism but because we don't want anybody to be punished without a good reason.

And today as tech giants wields more power than many courts or - in many but obviously not all ways - even small countries it might be time to make sure they have to be careful with that power.

Force them to provide an openly accessible API to allow people to receive messages/event invites and send messages to the users of that platform. Then they can choose to use a different social network without having to give up their connections with people who haven't jumped ship. This way the advantage of the network effect of popular social networks will disappear.

Telcos have shown that there are ways to maintain network effects in the face of federation: ridiculous connection fees for users outside of your network.

The world has changed, USA are no longer the center of it, FB is not a giant if you compare it to WeChat

Now try to apply US anti trust laws to it.

Ah the old "too big to fail" argument, alive and well.

> Facebook control ~90% of social media.

Source? That doesn't really match the numbers I've seen. Especially not for younger people.

Instagram and whatsapp are facebook. Ofc, even then 90% might be too much.

By MAU, 2.3 billion vs 1.9 for YouTube (arguably not a messaging-based SM site), and 1.0 for Instagram (owned by FB). Qzone is 4th at 563 million, 17% of FB+Insta.

Not quite 90% by that measure, but close.

https://www.dreamgrow.com/top-15-most-popular-social-network...

Mindshare, reach, time-on-site, and media references are alternate measures. Definitions matter.

Remember that Facebook owns Instagram and Whatsapp.

They might not be 90+ everywhere, but they do own a significant amount

I think we're getting to the core of it here. [The law's opinion isn't clear yet, but it appears to lean in this direction.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masterpiece_Cakeshop_v._Colora...) GitLab's decision may not be adequate - but it could help dodge a bullet or two while the law sorts itself out.

> "The problem with the whole 'activism' mindset is it doesn't actually target the people who created the problem, it just creates lots of noise – and the problem with noise is facts get lost," Fellows said.

The responsible thing to do is to refuse to play ball. If they claimed to be actively vetting content and something slipped through the cracks, it could be more legitimately portrayed as an endorsement than something that occurred with a Laissez-Faire policy in place.

> Refusing to serve a customer when you disagree with that customer's goal is pretty far from being a "moral arbiter for society."

The civil rights movement and suffrage prove this is patently untrue. The biggest difference is that gender, religion and ethnicity are easy things to point out, while ideologic belief systems are tricky.

Where do you draw the line on what grounds a business can refuse service? Should I be able to refuse service to republicans? How about amputees? I hate the color yellow, so I'm not going to sell to anyone with an outfit on that has that color. I live in Los Angeles, where it's still plenty common to see signs saying "No Shoes, No Shirt, No Service" - which, btw, is not aimed at scantily clad beach goers but targets the poor and homeless population. Same with silly dress codes around baggy pants and hats - all clear examples of bullshit rules intended to single out an "undesirable" customer. Except it's not race/religions/gender so it's cool, right?

I'm in the camp that the reasons businesses should have to refuse service should be a whitelist, not a blacklist.

In some countries (e.g. France) it is illegal to refuse to sell to an individual bona fide customer. That's in addition to the anti-discrimination (race, gender, etc) laws we have in Europe.

So if you sell cakes for €10 and I show up and hand you €10 you are not legally allowed to refuse to sell me that cake. (heads have rolled for less...)

This is pretty effective at preventing discrimination that may otherwise be difficult to prove.

>Refusing to serve a customer when you disagree with that customer's goal is pretty far from being a "moral arbiter for society."

This is similar rhetoric to what people would have used to justify segregated restaurants and schools. I'm not saying you sympathize with this but there is a reason why we don't want public businesses turning people away for political speech or other categories. It's not a nice place to end up as a society.

You'd be surprised at what is "not illegal". Every community moderates.

You can make an argument that some sites have moderated too much, or been too overtly political.

But every community moderates, and has to. This can be demonstrated with a simple example. Guess what isn't illegal? Spam!

It should be obvious that FB and Twitter etc have to take spam down though.

Then there's abusive behaviour. Stalking, harassment, etc. Often not illegal, but hurts a platform. Better take that down.

What about propaganda? They should let it all go? That sure sounds like a....phone network. Actually wait, it sounds more like the news media, which has been regulated for decades. A zero moderation policy would likely have led to demands for regulation, too.

And then there's the massive category of topics which are not illegal, but horrifying. Have zero moderation, and you end up as 4chan or worse.

--------

I'm generally in favour of keeping politics out of things, but your "we take stuff down only for a court order" is a naive view. Literally every forum moderates, they have no choice.

good point, but from a tactical perspective, not moderating might have made sense, to force lawmakers' hands in passing stronger laws about spam, harrassment, propaganda, etc.

they'd have a regulatory shield and probably retain carrier status, rather than sticking their necks out by selectively moderating content.

a moderate amount of moderation is my preference, but i see the value in freer speech zones on the internet (that i can mostly ignore).

They do have a regulatory shield though. Section 230 allows platforms to moderate their sites, while leaving them not liable for any content they do leave up. It's considered speech of the user.

This has come to a head as plarforms have grown larger. Note that even if some platforms were strictly neutral, they'd still be affected by the changes the government is proposing. It would have been very unlikely that none of the major platforms would have moderated beyond legal minimums.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communica...

i realize it's hard to draw a bright line on acceptible moderation, but then, is it fruitless to strengthen such laws?

seems like a lot of lawsuts and not a lot of legislating, from the wiki.

The US government is practically incapable of taking on that role because that actually would make it a First Amendment issue.

But, as graeme has pointed out, this idea of any moderation increasing a platform's liability is as wrong as it is widespread.

>good point, but from a tactical perspective, not moderating might have made sense, to force lawmakers' hands in passing stronger laws about spam, harrassment, propaganda, etc.

Why would companies find that preferable to moderating themselves? If the government makes laws prohibiting that stuff, then that means the companies could get in trouble if they let any of that through. If companies self-moderate, then there will be less pressure for laws like that to exist, and the companies won't get hit with penalties for missing a few things here and there.

> Spam

Spam, pornography, and profanity are not viewpoints. The problem with social media is not censorship of unwanted content that an ordinary person can identify without reference to viewpoint. What bothers civil libertarians, myself included, is censorship of specific points of view, even when these points of view are expressed in a calm and civil manner.

> Horrifying

Who gets to decide what's horrifying? You? Why?

> What bothers civil libertarians, myself included, is censorship of specific points of view, even when these points of view are expressed in a calm and civil manner.

Is this actually occurring? I haven't seen anyone get deplatformed because the company disagrees with the message, but rather because they violated ToS with regard to how they were communicating their message.

That's one part of it. The part were employee cannot discuss politics at work is very problematic however. What about unionizing?

It is ostensibly illegal to prevent employees from unionizing in the United States.

Then the requirement to not discuss politics at work must be illegal too.

No? You can’t forbid people from forming a union, but you can forbid things like arguing about the president.

Discussing things you may want to unionize over are often connected to the larger political realm, and cannot be severed.

Here’s an example: should a group of unionizing employees be able to say “vote for candidate foo, because they support legislation that aligns with our unions goals?”

Courts have said yes, and I agree.

The President, the Congress, the Senate, every political instance has a direct link to labor code for example. They can make or remove laws that have a direct impact on working conditions. Unions must be able to talk about all this.

'Arbiters of morality of society' is only possible because American capitalism is rigged to favor gravitation towards one or a few consolidated entities. This need not be. When Americans ask, where's Europe's Google, I smile, because the landscape, for now, seems to prevent consolidation into a handful of olicharch, and therefore no one company can arbit anything. There's always loads of choice, or there should be.

Next, the bystander effect. Is it commendable a company watches as bad actors use its platform up until a court ruling puts an end to it/ Another area where Europe has history and Americans would do well to learn.

> where's Europe's Google

Europe's Google is Google. Everyone there uses it, so why would you need your own?

Counterpoint: many tech workers want some agency over what they are building and don't want to be forced to work on nefarious applications. I don't seek an outsized claim on society but I do reserve the right to decide what my hands will - or won't - build.

That’s why I like posts like this from GitLab. They are clear what their priorities are so you can choose what to build with your hands.

Lots of people don’t care or don’t have time to evaluate the thousands or millions of customers using software. The evaluation never ends so even if you shut off the really bad one, there will be another.

Picking a legal limit let’s me focus on other things.

nobody is forcing you to do anything - You're free to find a new job at any time, unless you're indentured and you didn't tell anyone.

If you want to decide what to build go into business for yourself. If you're working for someone else you have the choice to either work for them and do what they want or quit.

A job is negotiated. You don't just accept or quit, you have a thousand different ways to come to a compromise with your employer about all sorts of things. It's baffling that so many people insist that the only feedback you can give your employer is quitting on the spot.

If you have an ethical or Maral issue with your work chances are you're doing the wrong work. You can of course try other Ave us but why do you think the business should compromise with a replaceable employee about his personal ethics?

That's not the way this works. He's free to find work that agrees with him or make his own work. But this "I want to work for you and decide what I work on" is a non starter for most people

Do you say the same things to a union when they try to address things? "No, you shouldn't have any say over the wages, or the firing policy, or whether we supply dictators"? Because unions negotiate on major issues with companies all the time.

If you think unions shouldn't negotiate, you're awful.

If you're okay with unions doing negotiation, why shouldn't a lone employee be able to negotiate a little bit? Why is a group of employees protesting not treated like an impromptu union?

"You're small compared to the company, so you should have exactly zero influence, instead of influence proportional to your contributions" is something a petty tyrant says.

unions are about working conditions, not deciding what you get to work on. You're under the direction of your employer and their organizational structure.

Unions have exactly zero with choosing to do the work you want to do while getting paid for someone else.

What jobs a company takes are part of working conditions. It's a valid thing to unions, or others, to negotiate over.

It's also pretty silly to say "Well if companies A, B, and C are hiring individually, the workers can all choose to work for A and B but not C. But if they all contract out to company X, then company X workers need to shut up and either work for all three or none. They can't even ask for things to change, they can only quit."

>What jobs a company takes are part of working conditions.

Again, you want to pick your own job, work for yourself or find the right employer.

Picking what you work on is not a reasonable expectation of any employee.

If nobody is doing C, start your own firm and get rich doing something no one is doing. Or perhaps you'll find out why no one is doing C. But forcing your employer to make bad business decisions under the guise of "working conditions" is a bridge too far.

The employer is never forced to make bad business decisions. They get to decide what is better for the company: taking that contract, or having all the protesting employees continue to work for them.

Doing it your way can actually cause much worse business decisions. If employees don't give any verbal feedback, only quitting, then the employer might take a hot-button contract and suddenly have multiple important workers quit all at once, losing far more money to replace them than the contract was worth.

I wish it was that simple honestly.

If Google is doing business with nazis then as a consumer I have absolutely every right to boycott Google.

Consumers have every right not to do business with someone for any reason they please.

Generally where things go into lawsuit territory is when a business refuses to provide service to someone based on something that has protected status.

In this case, it's likely that Nazis would be labeled a terrorist organization, or a wartime enemy, and would be subject to federally-enforced economic sanctions. It actually would be illegal for Google to do business with Nazis.

I'm not so sure. During WW2, Nazis enjoyed strong political support from the American Right, and the discussion is known as The Great Debate. It was the ambush at Pearl Harbor, and not a clear moral consensus, which closed the debate.

We're talking about Illinois Nazis, not 1945 Nazis. The bums who won their court case - it doesn't seem like the law is stopping them.

The trouble with libertarianism is, ultimately, that libertarians only care about themselves.

The kind of policy that GitLab is proposing here is fine - or even aspirational, under a certain lens - until one day you wake up and find that the same software is being used to destroy your community and compatriots.

How could that happen? Isn't this free speech to max utility? Isn't that flawless?

No, it's free utility to anyone - and you might eventually find that the people who are using it don't have you and your neighbours interests at heart.

The design of technology is _not_ ideologically neutral. It contains embedded biases and beliefs - even if they were subconscious or part of a community mindset - and those can and will be changed and overruled over time.

Careless licensing of technology will lead to the overriding and subversion of those ideologies, in ways that many of us would find abhorrent.

If you'd like to support that on the basis of free speech, you should ask yourself whether the worst re-applications of these technologies would still allow you to speak freely.

You say that like the rest of the gov does not exist. The mere knowledge that a dangerous program exists can be reported to the FBI with all relevant information without Github having to run a gestapo firewall on all content it hosts.

Can everyone in the world appeal to the FBI?

Yes? No? I don't know what happens when an Iranian sees a hostile app on Github to his interests and then reports it to the FBI. It'll probably work for countries close to the US. Microsoft will probably make relevant info available to the UK, but obviously not Iran.

I mean if your qualifying rule is everyone in the world, you've given Github the job of being world police. A role that won't make an earth shattering impact because bad actors can make those same programs offline. Why not have it in the light where we can see it coming? Being world police is the gov's job. Github should be treated as an american service and be required to respect only the gov's the US cares about and let the rest of the world use it on an "as is" basis.

I agree with you that policing all the content on a large user-driven community site is untenable.

My point - and I didn't make this clearly - is about the relationship between the company (GitLab) and the customers it chooses to do business with (think: aggressive undemocratic countries and the companies within them that enable oppression).

If you live in one of those countries and find that you are being stepped on by tools enabled and built by a U.S. company, then you're going to question the ethics and intentions of that company.

Until now GitLab has fostered a very positive open source ecosystem, making their own core product available for modification under the MIT license. That's fine, and that seems a principled and ethical stand.

It's still possible that their code will be deployed and used for malign purposes; those are the cases where as a victim you'd contact your (local) law enforcement if there's anything clearly illegal.

What seems a lot more questionable here is who GitLab chooses to peer with to profit from, and to allow influence over the direction of the product and the code itself. That is the change which is signaled in this policy shift - it is that GitLab will do business with anyone, and that employees shouldn't discuss that - indeed they are being told to treat it as some kind of virtue.

When USA government deems undemocratic countries problematic enough, it issues a ban on deals with them: https://dailycaller.com/2019/08/06/trump-executive-order-emb...

> The trouble with libertarianism is, ultimately, that libertarians only care about themselves.

I am wondering on what you base this line of thinking? Do you have any examples where persons advocating for liberty are acting primarily out of self interest?

You're right, this was an off-the-cuff generalization and wasn't well explained; here's roughly where I was coming from:

- GitLab is claiming to do business with any customer, on the basis of free trade and contribution

- GitLab is encouraging a culture where employees do not discuss or talk about those relationships

- I believe that technology is not neutral and the behaviours we as software engineers define in code, which then may affect thousands or even millions, are a result of customer influence (product decisions, feature requests, pull/merge requests, etc)

The commit[0] I read describes this as inclusion and 'efficiency' (i.e. 'yours not to question why'), but the real outcome I foresee is: "we are going to do business with shady companies and/or countries, and we want to encourage a company culture where this is seen as fine and dissent is discouraged"

This is self-interest on the part of GitLab the corporation - and ironically it also reduces liberty and freedom for GitLab employees to speak openly.

Meanwhile I can understand the top-level comment's description of why this might in some sense be a good business strategy. There's not a whole lot of discussion around the negative externalities of being successful in a way that compromises values though.

[0] - https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/commit/b5a35716...

I always thought relying on companies to enforce morality was far more libertarian, their ability to do so relies solely on companies having freedom of association. The result is it limits free speech to anyone not causing bad publicity for the company, the only care about themselves as you said. Last year it was neo nazis, this year it's anyone speaking ill of the CCP.

As a definitely not libertarian I think we should be placing much greater restrictions on companies ability to discriminate against their employees and customers.

But don't you think individual employees have a responsibility to recognize when they're contributing to causes they don't like, and possibly resigning?

Doesn't this rule therefore forbid employees from discussing and acting collectively over this, which in the US is a federally guaranteed right?

While I largely agree, history has shown this wont fair well for humanity either. Look at IBM and the Holocaust [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust

The flurry of downvotes is telling.

That comment didn't exactly add much value to discussion, given that this exact (and fairly obvious) example is prominently featured in the article, under a headline "Historical precedent".

> If you can see how people might respond to IBM, infamous for providing technology that helped the Nazis in World War II [...]

> The flurry of downvotes is telling.

Im not sure I understand the comment?

To quote someone quoted in the article, "As a commenter identified as "casiotone" observed, "If your values aren't used to inform who you're doing business with, why do you bother pretending to have values at all? This [merge request] demonstrates that you don't have any values except 'we want to make money, and it doesn't matter who gets hurt.'""

Because values are useful for different things. I think casiotone is confusing lack of values with specific values. GitLab has values but they don’t include stopping specific companies or orgs from using their service, other than illegal stuff.

They even call out efficiency as a value. That’s not the same as “we want to make money.” An artist may value art more than relationships so they are a jerk to helpers.

This doesn’t mean the artist lacks values or that the artist wants to make money. It just shows specific values.

Saying "we don't care about anything but whether it's legal" is a value. Not deciding is a decision, here.

> I think casiotone is confusing lack of values with specific values. GitLab has values...

Yes, as pointed out above, the value is demonstrated to be "we want to make money, and it doesn't matter who gets hurt". Casiotone didn't say they don't have any values at all.

> The engineers, designers, and PMs shouldn't have an outsized voice in society because they have a specialized useful skillset and ended up on a successful product.

They built these services. They are, ate least in part, responsible for how they work and the consequences of what they built. The content they’re serving and data has a meaning to us.

You can’t pretend that a social network doesn’t have a role in bringing anti-vaxxers together and enabling them to organize.

You can’t pretend that an advertising platform doesn’t have a role in distributing misleading information by business or other interests.

> If these users are breaking laws...

Laws aren’t the ultimate arbiter of everything. There’s a reason they change and evolve over time. Personal responsibility is not a law, yet we expect everyone to have some.

Social networks bring people together.

Advertising sends a message to groups of people.

Roads allow people to travel by car.

Roads are being uses to bring people to places where murders happen. You can't pretend that roads have no role.

So many things had a role.. power, internet, the company who made the computer they used, teachers, friends (or lack of), parents.. why decidd that social media or ads is the problem.

Social media has reduced the number of cults.

A better analogy would be if you could pay the construction crews to organize all right-leaning but non-trump supporters down new, secret roads that only they see, and then to let you line it with propaganda that, again, only they see. (Replace right leaning and trump with whatever).

Come on, there’s a difference between building a service or a tool that ends up getting used for problematic purposes (ISIS used lots of Toyotas, is Toyota evil?) and knowingly allow and even even enable problematic purposes (imagine if Toyota recognized ISIS as a rising power in the Middle East and started selling them trucks).

We can always replace words in other peoples’ statements to make them sound silly, but I’ll roll with it.

What if these roads provided, as part of the government’s offering, rest stops and gathering points exclusively for murderers? — Just like how a social network allows problematic groups people to gather and enable them.

What if certain schools accepted money from anyone and in exchange taught kids any curriculum, including murder? — Just how some services bombard people with outright lies, because special interests pay them to.

If your service has a massive reach and influence you can’t just say “nope, we don’t do politics”. It’s simply not honest.

So does that mean libraries should be shut down yesterday? There are chemistry books and outright army field manuals to do essentially exactly that - the status of war is the only thing which makes it not-murder.

Toyota does know their trucks are being sold to ISIS. Yet don’t do something drastic like banning all truck sales to the Middle East.

And yet we have regulations about what you are allowed to do on public roads, such as which direction you travel, how fast you go, restrictions on open wheels versus having covers, sound pressure levels at various distances, visibility at night, appropriate indicators to allow other road users to be advised what you are planning to do, controls on emissions from vehicles, regulations about how close you can get to the car in front while moving, licenses allowing for drivers to be disqualified from driving, etc.

What similar controls do we have for social media? An institutionalised system for silencing people which is euphemistically called “suspending users reported for harassment” which is just a formalised lynch mob.

"Don't discuss politics at work," is a political statement. It rules particular views in bounds and rules others out.

Similarly any business ends up making moral choices. It's unavoidable. To act in the world is to have impact. To consciously act is to intend particular impact. Commerce is inherently social; you choose to serve certain people in certain ways, with particular outcomes intended. These choices are inherently moral.

The notion that we should ignore that sometimes is of course a strongly political view. And when it pretends to be non-political, I think it's also incoherent.

Thank you for writing what I was thinking so eloquently.

Everyone's life is effected by politics and GitLab is making a political decision as to which politics are acceptable to discuss at work. Politics will still be discussed, but only the politics that those deciding deem acceptable and this inherently political.

You're stretching the definition of "political" to such a degree that it renders the word meaningless. You're basically claiming that any act that has any impact on anyone is political. That it's basically impossible for an organization to be non-political or even less political than any other organization.

And that simply flies in the face of common sense. Only the most hardcore post-modernist would deny that the NRA is a more political organization than the IETF. So obviously some dimension of "politicization" exists beyond just "acting in the world".

And if an organization wants to be less political, one way to do so is by relying less on political considerations when making decisions. With "political" simply meaning topics that are widely and commonly considered to be political. In the same way that the NRA is widely and commonly considered to be political in a way that the IETF is not.

You can debate about whether it actually is a lofty goal for an organization to strive to be non-political. Certainly there are many counter-arguments for why organizations should be more political. But I don't think you can deny that the dimension exists in some meaningful and actionable way unless you completely throw common sense out the window.

> to strive to be non-political.

To strive to be "non-political" is an intensely political position. It's basically a complete support of the status quo.

To not take a stand on a position is as much of a position as taking a stand. We live in this world. It's literally impossible to disengage.

Not saying anything, or not disagreeing is as much a statement as saying something, or disagreeing. Neutrality is a political position. Deal with it.

----

The IETF is absolutely a political organization, but it's focus is in areas where there is much less discord and a general interest in actual practical problem solving, with hard, measurable outcomes, so there's much less room for gaming of facts. Go look at the discussion of any contentious RFC if you don't agree. Just because it's not advocating a extreme viewpoint that's completely divorced from reality (as the NRA is) doesn't make it "less political", it just makes it less contentious.

> It's basically a complete support of the status quo.

I've seen many people spout this off as if it's self-evident, and I can't for the life of me understand why.

The status quo isn't some neutral, natural resting state that will continue on until otherwise affected, it needs to be _constantly_ maintained.

Being non-political doesn't maintain the status quo, because maintaining the status quo is an _active_ endeavour, in the same way a plane doesn't keep flying forever just because its engines turn off.

You are mostly right, except that the actions of gitlab _are_ an active endeavour in various respects:

- putting a stop on political discussion at the workplace

- making it clear in the handbook as a matter of policy that gitlab will sell to whomever they legally can

- sending a clear signal that any time spend on considering not to do so and expressing an alternative opinion is seen as a violation of the values of gitlab and waste of time

- engaging in commercial activity with anybody, assuming you don't rip them off and they actually benefit from it, can also be seen as support in a very weak sense

However, 'support' also has the meaning of condoning. It's like a bystander not taking action when somebody is sexually harassed. You don't say he actively caused the harassment but his lack of action betrays an implicit support.

It fits as a "total war" mentality essentially. Delivering food to a city is supporting a siege. So is paying protection money supporting an armed group of criminals. Technically right but a matter of nuance. It may be effective in some cases but like nearly anything assuming automatic morality is a way to leap off the slippery slope.

Even the advocates don't take it literally usually because of how barking mad that would be in a "strangle infants for not supporting the cause" way. But that isn't special because any philsophy can be twisted into something horrific.

I suspect its popularity is more for the memetic effectiveness than a deep philosophy - regardless if it is right.

This is true but misleading. The status quo is much less of an active endeavor than changing the status quo.

As an obvious examples, the American Revolution was clearly more active. And surely the revolutionaries were seen as more "political" than people who just wanted to go about their lives. Said lives of course including a variety of actions that directly or indirectly supported British rule.

I agree "politicalness" is a spectrum. I just disagree that it's possible to be anywhere close to zero if you are running a company.

The current American notion of "nonpolitical" is based on a post-WWII period where there was a broad consensus on a bunch of issues, and I think that consensus was in large part driven by the moral clarity provided by the war. But that started to decline circa 1980: https://xkcd.com/1127/large/

It was still propped up for a while by common interests between southern Democrats and non-northeastern Republicans. A big common interest being an opposition to civil rights. But most of the blue dog Democrats are now Republicans and liberal Republicans are basically extinct, so that middle ground has basically vanished.

For you "common sense" is doing a ton of work here, as is "widely considered". But as far as I can tell, it's tautological. You want your priors (or those of dominant groups) to be considered nonpolitical, while those of others to be political.

> claiming that any act that has any impact on anyone is political

What is politics if not people regulating the impacts we have on one another? Of societies deciding whose pain and whose gain is most important?

> it's basically impossible for an organization to be non-political

This is exactly the point. It's impossible for an org to be non-political. Any choice made has wider socitial context and effects for the workers at that company. Politics is basically the effect of decisions on people. Not all political decisions are as extreme and sensational as NRA etc. most are mundane but still important.

Your definition of this political spectrum seems to be focused on politics that generate controversy rather than their importance or number of people they effect. Mundane politics are also politics, you just don't necessarily notice them

GitLab has to define what are acceptable politics to discuss and draw that line. This is a decision that has to be made and will be based on their political views and what they think is normal or extreme which won't be the same for everyone who works there. The whole thing just seems very naive.

Good to hear a sane voice here. It's weird how people are able to convince themselves and others they can just not take a position. As if that is not an position in itself, usually supporting the status quo and conventional morally of the time.

I think people conflate 'I don't want to think about this' with 'I am neutral and not a party in this issue'.

It is also incredibly luxurious to not engage with politics and the ramifications of our actions on both micro and macro- levels.

Spot on. This whole thread on HN reeks of "I was just following orders".

I, as a user, and as an employee am going to refuse to do business with nazis or do business with people who do business again. It’s a free country and I’m allowed to do that, and companies like GitLab can do whatever they want with that information.

I’m not the only person like me, and they’re going to have a choice as to whether they want to do business with nazis or so business with people like me.

They don’t get to just wave their hands and make these sorts of decisions go disappear. They have to make a choice.

If someone replies to this comment saying they are a Nazi, are you going to stop using hacker news? Perhaps you're restricting yourself to only paid services, but that still doesn't seem like a tenable plan. Nazis buy coffee from the same cafés as you, they ride the same trains as you.

If you think people should be removed from society altogether, you should vote to make what they're doing illegal so they can all be thrown in jail. Short of that, I don't think it's fair to try to prevent them from participating in society. Jail is the way we prevent people from participating in society, stopping them from using their bank accounts seems like a half-measure.

> If someone replies to this comment saying they are a Nazi, are you going to stop using hacker news?

If someone from $ORGANIZATION made it clear that people that work for them and don't like Nazi's aren't welcome to be clear they don't like Nazis, I'd certainly consider dropping $ORGANIZATION.

> you should vote to make what they're doing illegal so they can all be thrown in jail.

What? There's a broad spectrum of things I personally don't like, or even think are odius that I'm not seeking to make illegal. The law is not a reflection of morality. I'm not seeking to impose my own value judgements on others (excepting murder, etc...), but the illegality of something has no substantial bearing on what I view as right.

What do you think the laws are for, out of curiosity? I assume you don't think they're supposed to reflect morality?

> If someone from $ORGANIZATION made it clear that people that work for them and don't like Nazi's aren't welcome to be clear they don't like Nazis, I'd certainly consider dropping $ORGANIZATION.

This is shifting the goalposts and not an answer to my question. Allowing Nazis does not imply disallowing anti-Nazis. You can allow both.

Laws are for lots of things, but they are for imposing morality, yes. I mean, I'm a consequentialist, so morality and "good outcomes" are synonymous for me. The law is to create incentives that make people cooperate in prisoners' dilemma type situations, at the societal level.

You personally avoiding Nazis is one thing - you are entitled to it and it has nothing to do with the law. However, if you are taking part in activism to exclude them from society, not just your part of society but payment systems, social media, things where them taking part has no effect on you, then I don't know why you don't go the whole way and make their views illegal. Also, being excluded from society in the ways that people think Nazis should be is a consequence so harsh that I would want it to have legal oversight. As the past has shown, "I don't like people x" plus mob rule is not a good way to decide people's fates.

Avoid them in your personal life, sure, but it sounds like you're talking about activism to exclude them from places where you could just not interact with them.

Just don't contribute to Nazi gitlab projects. If you're boycotting gitlab to try and get them to exclude Nazis, then I think you are using the private sector to enforce what you think should be a general rule, and I think companies and mobs are the wrong tool for the job. Take it to the voting booth, that is what democracy is for.

I had no idea who Naval Ravikant was until I randomly read one of his tweets and thought "this dude has good thinking" and went to look up him. Interesting character.

> The engineers, designers, and PMs shouldn't have an outsized voice in society because they have a specialized useful skillset and ended up on a successful product.

The size of every group's voice in society isn't a magical balance. I don't want rich people or corporations to have an outsized voice either. It's a zero sum game, so the only way to reduce that is to give more voice to other groups. Employees should try to leverage their numbers more, not less, because that's the only tool they have. Gitlab is based in San Francisco, so their votes probably don't matter either.

Maybe they are not "infrastructure". Maybe they are actually middlemen.

>The engineers, designers, and PMs shouldn't have an outsized voice in society because they have a specialized useful skillset and ended up on a successful product

So do you also feel that billionaires shouldn't have an outsized voice in society?

Finally I read a comment on a platform and I can listen to ideas and deep understanding. Thanks for sharing that interview!! You won Naval a fan already :)

>I don't wan't some git hosting startup to be the arbiter of morality for society.

Me either! The point is everyone should be the arbiter of morality for society. Abstaining from moral judgements because it's "inefficient" is just alibistic, and leaves society worse as a whole. Tech companies are participating in society just as any other company, there's no reason they should be exempt from ethical considerations.

Technology is not neutral, never was, and pretending it is isn't going to change it - it's just going to pave the way for "inevitable" unethical programs and moral lapses (see: mass surveillance, Amazon->Ring cooperation, ICE cooperation...)

Is it ethical to cut these same people off from food, etc as well when they haven’t violated the laws our society has decided should be followed?

Companies and people “being moral arbiters” of everyone they interact with is just idiots making knee jerk reactions based on other people’s perceptions and opinions.

An employee at a software company knows far to little to meaningfully judge if ICE should be helped. Are you even aware of the duties of the ICE?

Companies do not magically become exempt from needing to behave ethically just because they're participants in the economy. If, for example, some government is committing human rights violations, companies have an ethical obligation not to enable it, even if the services they offer aren't under specific legal sanctions. This idea of a company just doing business with no social or ethical responsibility to anyone other than stockholders is an ancap fantasy.

And Gitlab isn't some unconcerned third party passing judgment on morality for the rest of us. We're not talking about your local Dairy Queen franchise gratuitously taking a position on Brexit for no reason. The only power Gitlab has is to withhold their own service. If you're going to argue that their service is so important for society to function that withholding that service constitutes being an "arbiter of morality for society," to the extent that's even true it only increases their responsibility to make sure its products aren't used for evil. A Dairy Queen franchisee doesn't have much power so they don't have much responsibility, but a Google or an IBM has enormous power to make a difference and therefore they have enormous responsibility.

I fundamentally don't agree that corporations should be given carte blanche to use any legal options to maximize profit with no regard to the consequences. The political process and legislation/regulation is probably a better way to address companies behaving unethically, but given that in many cases our political process has failed to put those laws in place we need to hold corporations accountable ourselves.

> If these users are breaking laws, then put them out of business via the courts and sieze the assets (the repos in this case) via legal means.

What if it's legal where's it's happening? Let's say that China use Gitlab to host their repo for their software that track US citizens. Would you be happy with that?

> The tech unicorns screwed themselves over BIG TIME, the second they stopped claiming they were just infrastructure and platforms and got into content moderation.

That's absurd, it was always true for ANY industry. You can decide not to support a company by not buying there because you don't support their moral standards. That's perfectly fine. Would you still be with an ISP that is against net neutrality while there is another one that is for net neutrality? Now replace "net neutrality" with any other moral decision and it's still valid.

That's what make company decide to takes moral stands. It's purely economics.

> They will now forever be a pawn of whoever has some power and has some agenda.

That was always true and still is even with Gitlab decision. Even in this case, Gitlab decision makes them a pawn to whoever has the means to do business with them. They want to still be able to get the business of ICE, China, etc... and you.

Assuming Gitlab is based in the United States, I wouldn’t expect them to unilaterally deny service to the Chinese communist regime. That’s a situation where I would advocate for Congress to impose economic sanctions.

> The engineers, designers, and PMs shouldn't have an outsized voice in society because they have a specialized useful skillset and ended up on a successful product.

isn't that true for all voice in the soicety though.

Without trying to be inflammatory in any manner, I will say that it takes a certain level of privilege to say one shouldn’t discuss politics at work.

If you disagree I’m happy to discuss this viewpoint rather than being downvoted to oblivion.

Lots of issues are deemed “political”, but imagine you fall into one of the marginalized groups:

— lgbt: Don’t discuss the possibility about being fired for your sexuality because it’s too political.

— Women in tech: Nope, let’s not go there, too political.

— Underrepresented minorities in tech: Sorry it’s a pipeline problem, don’t bring politics into this.

— Education: Too political to discuss the fact that schools are trying to balance their admissions in the face of very uneven opportunities amongst their applicants. Never mind the fact that school admissions were never fair to begin with.

We can’t improve without discussion, and it’s unfortunate that these type of issues are so divisive.

Again, If you disagree I’d love to understand your viewpoint as to why.

Preach. Politics being silenced in a work place is so short sighted and dumb. We should strive for a world where disagreement is not the end of a good working relationship, not one where crypto-politics is the new normal in the workplace. Because if you genuinely belief people want try to identify who is and isn't racist in a "conforming" way then you're delusional.

Would you please clarify what you mean by, "Because if you genuinely belief people want try to identify who is and isn't racist in a "conforming" way then you're delusional?"

Here's the problem: at least in SV, you're going to be restricted to a sub-set of very narrow beliefs which are acceptable to express. I may hold a personal belief that, say, trans-sexuality is not a "real thing" or ought not to be treated with surgery. Do you honestly believe I'd be able to express that in such an environment, as much as someone who believes it is "a thing"? You may believe my belief is just too "in-tolerant" or "bigoted" to be expressed, but who are you to be the arbiter thereof?

Now let's take the other side of the coin. If you work in the energy industry, heavy manufacturing, etc., you probably couldn't express support for trans-sexuals without having problems. On the other hand, you'd likely have no issue saying you didn't believe in such a thing. I know someone in energy who wore a rainbow flag pin during one gay month a few years ago; he wasn't fired, but many of his superiors became noticeably cold toward him and he left after realizing he probably couldn't move up at that company. Again, why ought that to be the case?

The biggest issue is that when people start talking politics, you are expected to participate. Some one looks over and says, "Hey Big Chungus, what do you think?" In such a situation, I cannot reasonably say, "Oh, I have no opinion." Certain issues are simply so partisan that such a response, even in the rare circumstance that it is true, will anger both sides and damage me.

So, I avoid talking politics at work and try to work at places where others do the same. People I work with generally never know my politics. I am more than happy to bloviate about political stuff with friends and family, or to go be mad online after work. At work, it is best to stay non-partisan.

> Do you honestly believe I'd be able to express that in such an environment, as much as someone who believes it is "a thing"?

Should you be able to comfortably express that to your trans co-worker, no matter how uncomfortable that makes them?

That's why this is not a symmetrical issue.

What if you have a co-worker who is an Arab immigrant and does not believe in trans-sexuality due to his cultural and religious background? Should he be able to express that? Why or why not? Ought the trans-sexual to be able to express his beliefs if it makes said co-worker uncomfortable?

When two deeply-held elements of personal identity are in conflict, the only way to resolve it is for both sides to keep silent or for a third party to insert himself and pick the side in which he believes. In either case, you are telling someone he must change who he is.

The alternative is to simply not discuss such matters at work.

And yes, I believe both sides have the right to express their beliefs and that the comfort of neither trumps the right of the other to speak. I just think time, place, and manner are generally reasonable constraints.

Yes, not discussing it doesn't mean you can't accommodate them. Just because you don't discuss religion in the office doesn't prevent you from having halal/kosher meal options. Not discussing transgender issues doesn't prevent you from having a gender neutral bathroom.

The absolute answer is yes. You have a right to say it. Nobody is owed comfort.

However this clearly won't lead to a productive workplace, which is why it's not a good idea to allow these discussions. There are plenty of other restrictions within a private company to create the best conditions for the work they're paying you for. It's perfectly reasonable.

Whether one gets uncomfortable hearing a statement isn't good evidence for whether that statement is correct or wrong.

This asymmetry of feelings is actually an argument in favor of not talking about some topics at work, unless all involved parties voluntarily agree to it. A less controversial but essentially equivalent example would be religion. It's widely recognized that you shouldn't spend time at work trying to invalidate your co-worker's religious views (or lack of them), unless they specifically ask you to. This applies to everything people build their identities around.

If you can have political discussion as long as you have the right opinions, that's not really a discussion is it? It's "affirm you agree with my political beliefs or be fired".

And a few parallels - what do you do about the person who's afraid of being shot if the government comes to take their guns (and thus is going to be uncomfortable with opinions leaning that way), or the person who's afraid of their kids being shot at school (and thus is going to be uncomfortable with opinions leaning towards fewer restrictions on guns)? You can't satisfy both of them without banning discussion, and a lot of issues are like that.

Gun ownership is not a "protected characteristic", because it's not something intrinsic to the person.

Your example discusses risks and statements about the future, but not questions of identity and personhood.

Religion isn't intrinsic to the person but is a protected characteristic so in reality the line isn't where you claim it is.

Also, while characteristics defined by biology or history are not choices, identity to a large extent is.

> Religion isn't intrinsic to the person ...

Interestingly, even that statement takes a particular religious stance.

Some branches of Christianity hold that a person does not choose to be Christian, but rather is chosen by God to be a Christian [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irresistible_grace

> "Gun ownership is not a "protected characteristic", because it's not something intrinsic to the person. Your example discusses risks and statements about the future, but not questions of identity and personhood."

Identity is whatever a person decides it is, according to progressive doctrine, therefore it's not intrinsic to the person either. There's no objective identity-o-meter.

I think we're all conflating social and political opinions here. If you aren't comfortable with gay people, then that's super lame, and we're probably not going to be friends, but I wouldn't want to try to get you fired. However, if you support denying equal rights to gay people, then I don't want to be associated with you in any way.

So I don't see some things as political issues at all; they have political components, and extend into politics, but they start somewhere else: I see them as human rights issues, and issues around empathy. If you're going to deny someone their existence, and are arrogant enough to proclaim that your lived experience is the be-all, end-all of everything, and that your exclusionary way of life should be enshrined in law, then I frankly just don't think you're a good person. And that has nothing to do with politics.

(To stop the expected rejoinder: no, this isn't a way to justify things like pedophilia. Everyone should be able to live their life they way they want to, but the key component is: as long as they aren't hurting anyone else in the process. Gay rights doesn't hurt anyone else. Pedophilia does.)

Regarding guns, I've had many productive discussions with people who own guns and staunchly support the 2nd Amendment. (My personal view is that 2A should be repealed, and we should have strict licensing and training requirements around gun ownership.) I don't know that I've changed anyone's mind, but I do feel like I understand some people better, and vice versa. With a few people I just hit an impasse; then I agree to disagree, and get on with my day.

And regardless, there's plenty of room for common ground there, too. Most of the gun owners I know think it's ridiculous how easy it is to get hold of a gun, and support more restrictions and requirements. Some even agree with me that "assault style" weapons should be restricted to gun ranges (or banned entirely) and not sold to the general public. And I've fired guns at ranges before and totally get how fun it can be. I'm generally skeptical of self-defense arguments, and think defense-from-government-tyranny arguments are laughable, but there's still plenty of common ground and productive discussion to be had.

"deny someone their existence"

This is one of the most overused, vague and inaccurate arguments. Nobody is denied from existing. These kind of extreme claims cause more friction than any actual discussion of the issue at hand.

I don't think it's that extreme. There are quite a few people who deny that being gay is real, and is just a mental illness that can be fixed. I would say that sexual orientation is a big part of a person's identity. It might not be "existence" in the strictest sense of the word, but it's certainly not hyperbole either.

Regardless, if you don't like it, remove that phrase from your reading; my point still stands without it.

Ok, I doubt there's really any significant number of people who care to deny these things but I'll rephrase:

If your identity requires acceptance by others for you to consider yourself valid then it's not really your identity at all. If that sounds strange then replace gender identity and sex orientation with religion. Nobody needs to accept your faith for you to have one. You remain fully independent and capable of having whatever identity you want.

> if you support denying equal rights to gay people, then I don't want to be associated with you in any way.

Does that include Muslims and Catholics who oppose gay marriage?

> Regarding guns, I've had many productive discussions with people who own guns and staunchly support the 2nd Amendment. (My personal view is that 2A should be repealed, and we should have strict licensing and training requirements around gun ownership.) I don't know that I've changed anyone's mind, but I do feel like I understand some people better, and vice versa. With a few people I just hit an impasse; then I agree to disagree, and get on with my day.

> And regardless, there's plenty of room for common ground there, too. Most of the gun owners I know think it's ridiculous how easy it is to get hold of a gun, and support more restrictions and requirements. Some even agree with me that "assault style" weapons should be restricted to gun ranges (or banned entirely) and not sold to the general public. And I've fired guns at ranges before and totally get how fun it can be. I'm generally skeptical of self-defense arguments, and think defense-from-government-tyranny arguments are laughable, but there's still plenty of common ground and productive discussion to be had.

To me, this looks like you're so far to the gun control side of things that you're having conversations with milder gun control advocates and then thinking they're second amendment supporters. Have you ever had such a conversation with a true, "machine guns and artillery should be unregulated"-tier 2nd Amendment advocate? Or any 2nd Amendment advocate that doesn't support increasing gun control?

Spreading a view that being trans isn't "a thing" takes away the rights and agency of people, denies their experience, and arrogantly espouses the experience of the speaker as the be-all, end-all of how life is. This is something I consider a "negative view", not because the view itself is "bad" (though IMO it is), but because it's a view that pushes or causes negative consequences upon the group it is about.

Spreading a view that trans people should be supported acknowledges that everyone is different, and even if the speaker is not comfortable with the concept of people being trans, recognizes that someone else's gender orientation has nothing to do with them, and that people deserve to live in a way that makes them feel whole. This is a "positive view": it acknowledges the experience of others, even if that experience is incomprehensible to the speaker, and advocates support, not ostracism. (A simple test can also be: "does supporting X cause actual harm to anyone", and if the answer is "no", then one ought to support it, or at least not oppose it.)

So yes, I certainly take a dim view toward people who have the first kind of view (regardless of what the topic is about). I would feel uncomfortable working with someone like that. But if we didn't talk politics, and I didn't know -- is ignorance bliss? Perhaps? I'm not sure. I mean, it's certainly possible that I work with people right now who have views that I would find gross, and maybe we get along (professionally) just fine? Is being in the matrix better?

But what about the larger implications? I would refuse to work for a company with leadership that was actively anti-trans. Take Chik-fil-a for example. They've come out against LGBTQ rights, and have donated to anti-LGBTQ groups. I'm very glad I know this about them, because I would never take a job with them if offered, and I boycott their restaurants. On the flip side, I'm pleased that I work for a company whose CEO speaks out publicly in favor of diversity and inclusion, and I respect him for using his position of (relative) power to promote good.

I think it's important to recognize that companies are made up of people, and people have political opinions. It's hard to say that political opinions are always unrelated to work; sometimes those opinions do actually intersect with what the company works on. For example, if I were at Google, I would definitely have pushed the company to cut ties with China; I don't think it's worth supporting a repressive, authoritarian government in exchange for profits. Should I have been prohibited to talk about politics at work and let that go? Should my only recourse be to quit in protest?

I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to 'order' than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice

- Letter from a Birmingham Jail [King, Jr.]

had me in the first half

Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21078125

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20722525

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20599451

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20140962

As a wealthy white male, I couldn't agree more. For people like me, politics is a choice. But as my female friends of color often remind me, politics is not a choice for them.

Which actually really boils down to what the word "white male privilege" really means. If you think politics is annoying, then it's because you're privileged enough for it to not matter.

^^^ privileged white male

>> If you think politics is annoying, then it's because you're privileged enough for it to not matter.

I felt this way as a poor minority. This statement people keep bandying about that white people are forced to repeat lest they seem racist is absurd.

I've worked at a company that heavily encouraged discussion of politics at work, and it was a nightmare. The things management sponsored (at the request of employees) included:

- A women-only Slack channel.

- Women-only events, such as a free screening of Wonder Woman. The men at the company were expected to work during that time.

- An "ally skills workshop"[1], which attempted to indoctrinate us with an explicitly racist and sexist ideology.

- A Diversity Council that had the explicit goal of increasing the number of non-white non-men in engineering. One time when I was invited to a meeting of the council, I said that their goal should be to eliminate bias in the hiring process (such as by blinding resumes, replacing phone screens with text-only mediums, etc). I was taken aside and chastised for my statements.

If I had actually said my opinions, I have no doubt I would have been fired for my beliefs. If that's what happens when people are encouraged to bring their politics to work (especially in SF), I will gladly take the "no politics" option.

1. Slides from the workshop: https://files.frameshiftconsulting.com/Ally%20Skills%20Works...

Edit: the slides have been updated since I last saw them. The slides presented to me were closer to this version from 2017: https://web.archive.org/web/20170911021528/https://files.fra... Though even that version is more toned down than what I saw.

Sounds like a nice place to work.

Believing that the teaching you how to be a good ally is racist and sexist (against white men, I assume) is probably why you didn't fit in great there. I read that whole slideset and there's nothing racist in there - unless you're counting the scenarios of "what not to do."

The slides didn't have the explicitly racist and sexist bits. Basically if you were a white guy, you weren't allowed to interrupt anyone and anyone was allowed to interrupt you. There were also implications that one should discriminate against white men when choosing who to hire, who to promote, and who to have speak at conferences.

Then why'd you link the slides?

So if the white male has some important information for the bottom line of the company, should he wait 2hrs for wonder woman to stop playing or go and 'interrupt' 10 women not working and be a bad ally? What a joke.

Yeah, people have meetings. People go to lunch sometimes, or have appointments outside the workplace.

If it's "stop the world" important and absolutely needs to be dealt with right now, interrupt it, same as you would any other break. Otherwise, deal with it like you would any other situation.

The slide set is a big can of crazy.

What's the crazy part?

Uh, all of it?

That's not an especially helpful answer.

The ideology is not especially deserving of anything but ridicule, but I went through the slides and excerpted some particularly goofy stuff.

"Marginalized person: Any woman who wants to work for pay for an employer"

"Oppression: The self-reinforcing system of stories, TV, news coverage, police, and legal system stereotyping Black people as criminals, that benefits non-Black people and harms Black people"

What TV shows has the author been watching? For my entire life, at least 95% of the depictions of black people that I've seen on television have been positive, sometimes to the point of being pandering. (For example, if a show has a black character and a white character, and one has to do something wrong to advance the plot, it will be the white character, because that won't cause outrage, while the reverse will.)

"You are eating lunch in the employee kitchen when a group sits down near you. One person comments loudly “If I ate that, I’d be as big as a house!” A higher-weight coworker is sitting nearby and can clearly overhear."

It's not clear who's talking to whom here. If it's someone commenting on the lunch of a coworker with whom they're not sitting, well, I've never seen behavior like that in any workplace, nor have I heard of anything like that happening. If it's someone commenting on one of their lunch-mates' lunches, then it's none of the "higher"-weight coworker's business.

"Higher weight people face workplace discrimination, particularly women, regardless of ability to do the job Body size is falsely equated with virtue: self-control, hard worker, in good health"

Body size is correctly associated with self-control, energy, and good health. The proportion of overweight people who couldn't reach a normal weight if they ate sensibly and exercised is tiny. The "healthy at any weight" meme is absurd.

"Black people face a much a higher bar than white people during hiring (and in general), and white people often get a pass or exceptions to the process"

Bullshit.

"A co-worker shares an article on your work Slack claiming that white men are biologically more suited to STEM careers, saying "I don't agree with all of it, but it has some good points." Another co-worker replies, saying that they disagree with the article but we have to be tolerant of co-workers with different political views because diversity of thought is important too."

Men are biologically more suited to STEM careers, on average. You have to be willfully blind not to see that this is true. Why does this make people so angry?

""Office housework" is necessary but unrewarded work (taking notes, organizing parties, tidying, etc.) People of color and women of all races are expected to do more of this work and punished for not doing it"

Bullshit.

"On a company mailing list, someone writes “How would you explain this [technical thing] to your grandmother?”"

Old women (and, to a lesser extent, old men) are much more likely to have trouble with technology than are young men (and, to a lesser extent, young women). Again, why does this make people so angry?

Intersectionalism is just borderline personality disorder in ideological form.

Half the stuff you called "bullshit" on have been scientifically tested (and proved) in reputable journals.

You're projecting emotion on your perceived opponents ("why does this make people so angry") because your dismissal of their arguments depends on it. If you instead took this discussion seriously, you'd lose the ability to be sure you were right.

I don't expect you to have a revelation overnight, but sit down and think sometime about why this topic is so scary for you.

"Half the stuff you called "bullshit" on have been scientifically tested (and proved) in reputable journals."

I called two claims bullshit, so I presume you believe that one of them has been proven. Which one? Citation?

I'm not projecting anything onto anyone. I--like many other reasonable people--am bewildered by the intersectional left's refusal to accept reality. They are in fact the ones who become enraged when you point out obvious truths, such as that men and women are different.

The topic doesn't scare me, but if the discourse in the West continues down its current path, intersectionalism could become a dangerous thing. The core of the ideology is resentment, and history has shown that these resentment-based ideologies often have horrific results. (See, e.g., the the Rwandan genocide, the Holocaust, the Russian Revolution, etc.)

I spent all of five minutes on google scholar, and here's the results:

Anti-black media bias. https://stars.library.ucf.edu/etd/5420/

Racial hiring bias: https://www.pnas.org/content/114/41/10870.short

Men aren't somehow biologically more in tune with computers: https://peerj.com/preprints/1733.pdf

"Office housework": https://worklifelaw.org/publication/climate-control-gender-r...

So I guess it wasn't that half your claims were scientifically wrong, sorry. It was all of them. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I don't know who downvoted you, but it wasn't me. I'll look at the papers you cited.

I didn't find the slides so bad. But..

> Ally is a verb, not an identity

That's... that's a noun.

It can be either, depending on context.

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

GP is referring to the slide (linked in GGP post) that calls it a verb but uses it as a noun:

> Ally is a verb, not an identity

> [...]

> Acting as an ally is about action - it is not an identity, which is why we talk about "ally skills" instead of "allies"

(In military slang 'ally skills' could be adjectival use, but I'm pretty sure this is using it like 'friend skills', a noun.)

My reading of the slide is that they're making the distinction that it's an action (verb) not a state of being (identity), similar to the meme that "human being" is an action rather than a thing.

I take the following sentences as confirming this reading:

> Being a marginalized person takes no action - it is an identity:

> Acting as an ally is about action - it is not an identity, which is why we talk about "ally skills" instead of "allies"

> Depending on what is most relevant about you to the situation, you may switch between being marginalized and acting as an ally

You didn’t find the slides so bad? Really?

Those slides present a rather extreme ideology, which is not based on (and is often flatly contradicted by) evidence.

Yeah, the slides are normal and reasonable. You think it's extreme ideology to say that people often treat men different than women?

Any ideology which hinges on the "blank slate" hypothesis is extreme, insofar as that hypothesis is very obviously false. Furthermore, intersectionalism is essentially a conspiracy theory.

That's, uh, a wild statement. You don't think people disadvantaged on multiple axes have a harder time than people on one or none? Because that's what intersectionality means.

No one is on "one or none" "axis of disadvantage". Everyone is born with many advantages and many disadvantages. Intersectionality is concerned exclusively with the the advantages held by white men in Western democracies. Women have many advantages that men don't have, but intersectionalists don't care about those.

Western society has a long history of producing ideologies centered on guilt and sexual propriety, and intersectionality is just the latest iteration. It's a descendant of puritanism.

That doesn't sound so much like that's discussing politics at work' so much as it's 'indoctrinating' at work.

When disagreement almost ensures punishment (further indoctrination sessions with some career damage taken, on the "least harsh" side of the spectrum, to the loss of one's job, income and a heavily tarnished reputation on the other), I would be less inclined to call it indoctrination and more inclined to call it forced re-education.

Wow. Did that company implode? What's the point of so openly dividing your employees along political lines? How are you supposed to work as a team? It's bad enough with normal workplace troubles like pay differences and whatever else.

It was quite a successful company. The team I worked on was pretty chill. It was the overall company that had the annoyances I mentioned.

Heck, despite what happened, I still like and admire the leadership of the company.

What were the admirable bits?

I love their reasoning for choosing a three hour workshop.

> 2 hour-long workshop: most common complaint was "Too short!" >3 hour-long workshop: only a few complaints that it was too short

There’s no other data or reasoning presented. Surely other factors must be important and it seems unwise to select a time solely on these two points.

There's a lot of information in the world that isn't on a powerpoint slide.

Yes, of course. It would be useful to include some of that information on the slide to help justify why the session is three hours. As it, I think the author loses credibility as this is an irrational, non-data driven conclusion.

Using evidence to support statements is even more important when introducing a new concept to an audience.

This mirrors my experience at Salesforce, to a large extent.

>"I said that their goal should be to eliminate bias in the hiring process (such as by blinding resumes, replacing phone screens with text-only mediums, etc). I was taken aside and chastised for my statements."

While it does sound like a good idea to eliminate bias, appearance is a contributory factor in the hiring process. If someone turns up with matted hair, hasn't showered in months, and is wearing a pizza stained t-shirt then most companies won't want to hire them and most employees won't want to work near them. Good idea in theory, not really in practice. You're going to have to have a face-to-face interview at _some_ point and that's when (mostly subconscious) racism/sexism/\*ism will

Also, that first slide from the workshop presentation reminded me how much I hate the push for people to declare pronouns. Contrapoints tweeted about this from a trans perspective[1] and got labeled "problematic" by a lot of leftists.

[1] https://arcdigital.media/contrapoints-and-the-scandal-that-s... (referencing the first set of tweets)

> If someone turns up with matted hair, hasn't showered in months, and is wearing a pizza stained t-shirt then most companies won't want to hire them and most employees won't want to work near them.

Such a person would probably stink, which is a sensible reason for employees not to work with them. Such a person also appears to demonstrate either being unaware of (very unlikely unless their sense of smell is broken and they don't have any friends who have told them it's a problem), or not caring about inflicting their stench on their prospective coworkers, which probably implies something bad about their judgment and considerateness, which is also a sensible reason not to hire them.

If you never saw the person until hiring them, that could be an issue; but if it were a line item in company policy (maybe alongside the dress code) that employees shall not inflict a stench on others, then at least you could get on their case about it on day 1, and have a fully justified reason to fire them quickly if they didn't shape up. Of course it'd be more efficient to have not hired them at all, but there will always be some problems you just don't find out about until later. I don't think this particular failure mode is common.

We're talking politics at work. Not politics in general. You can still discuss politics outside of work.

My neighbor is a wealthy white male and I'm willing to bet he's less like you than your female friends of color are.

The problem with this kind of identity framing is that politics is central to it. One wrong step and your enemies of color (for instance) may play their victimhood against your prosperity and it'll become brutally obvious how political you are by merely existing within a demographic.

Have you seen problems with people in any of these groups unable to talk about these issues? I had a project owner once who had a manager not get along with her at all.

"Is it because you're a woman," I asked her. She said, "No, I don't think that's it." .. and he did get along with another woman; one of our Functional Analysis.

Sometimes person x doesn't like person y because .. they don't like person y. They don't think person y is effective or useful or good at his or her job, not because y is an Asian, or woman, or trans or Mexican. ... or it could be and the person is a victim of bigotry and doesn't know it.

I know it's anecdotal, but I've worked in a lot of different places, in 3 different countries, and in my experience, I think it's the opposite. I think people are afraid to say anything remotely non-left or criticize any minority employee or say anything that could remotely be inferred as problematic.

Absolutely right. Saying “don’t talk politics at work” seems to assume that politics is something that goes on on the outside. A stream of news on divisive topics.

In reality, politics happens everywhere and you can’t really avoid talking about it.

“Don’t talk about politics not relevant for the workplace” could be reasonable (most poltics is after all not related).

To me this (news not your comment) sounds like a very slippery slope. What happened to freedom of speech? And who is to decide what is "political" what is not?

As long as speech is not offensive, I think it should be protected.

> As long as speech is not offensive, I think it should be protected.

Speech that isn’t offensive usually doesn’t need protection.

Isn't that the case here? A company is suppressing all speech about politics?

What happens when people start taking offense at opposition to affirmative action? Or take offense at disapproving of putting biological males with male genitalia that self identity women in women's prisons? And conversely, plenty of conservatives take offense at gay marriage. Whose offence counts?

This is akin to the idea that you don't need privacy unless you have something to hide. Freedom of speech is important, but at the same time, so is the responsibility of a person to his team and community to maintain a minimum level of politeness and empathy. That entails understanding that some people are affected by some political issues significantly more than others, and that it might be intimately tied to their working situation.

A person's privilege to speak out about issues facing them in the course of their work is to be protected, irrespective of it being offensive.

The text of the 1st amendment discusses the Congress not passing laws that abridge the freedom of speech. It’s origin is for a people’s right to protest the government without retribution from the government. It has nothing to do with private actors having rules about what happens in their private property, and for good reason — that would unduly restrict a persons freedom to enjoy their property.

So prohibiting discussion of politics in the work place is legal I get it. But "freedom of speech" is more than a law. It is an ideal. Just because it is legal to prohibit speech does not mean it is a good idea.

I would say that an employer that prohibits free exchange of ideas is not "open minded". I would not want to work for such an employer, without getting paid extra for having to work under such dire circumstances.

All speech is protected or none of it is. Offense is subjective. It's useless as a measure of what to protect.

>> What happened to freedom of speech?

It still exists. Gitlab does not infringe on your freedom of speech. The government does.

It is definitely true that Gitlab doesn't infringe on my freedom of speech, since I don't work there. But what are you referring to when you say "The government does"?

That you can sign an NDA and it’s not a limitation of your freedom of speech (for example). There are thousands of situations were there are things you agree to not say.

Anything you agree with some entity that isn’t the government doesn’t count as infringing your freedom of speech.

Freedom of speech is a narrow legal thing. It’s not “I can say what I want when I want it”.

Agree - and workplace rules shouldn’t be “don’t talk about X” but rather ”please avoid talking about X unless strictly necessary.

Sounds good, more like "speech etiquette".

It could also be phrased in terms of "Everyone has a right to decline to talk politics". If people agree to talk politics I don't see problem, except of course it can lead to lower productivity perhaps.

So then maybe all non-work-related speech should be forbidden? That just sounds inhumane.

To me "don't discuss politics at work" would apply to management as well and imply that people should only be hired or fired for performance based reasons and not because of their sexuality, race, or gender.

Nobody is saying "don't get involved in politics", just "don't bring it to work".

If it were the case that these things were never mentioned, and anytime they were brought up, people were silenced, I'd totally agree with your point here.

But we're getting wall-to-wall coverage of basically those exact issues, all the time, with only one point of view endorsed. It's uninclusive to anybody who thinks differently in terms of methods or priorities.

And the people who are suggesting that it’s somehow a “privileged” position to be able to suggest that politics and work don’t mix are being incredibly disingenuous about this point. The people whose viewpoints are least welcome in the modern workplace - traditionalists - are both the ones who would benefit _most_ from finally being able to get in a word in edgewise in workplace political discussions and also the ones who are calling for a professional rather than political workplace.

> We can’t improve without discussion, and it’s unfortunate that these type of issues are so divisive.

Around 40% of voters support Donald Trump in some way. Are you sure you really want to discuss politics at work? Do you want someone wearing a MAGA hat explaining to everyone why immigration is too high?

Because that is what real political discussion will involve. In fact, I suspect many people who are advocating for politics at work, actually only want people whom they agree with to be able discuss policies that they generally agree with.

So for me, as long as the company does not prevent political activity outside of work, I am happy to have work be a neutral zone where people from opposite ends of the political spectrum can just work together on how to make money for the business.

> Are you sure you really want to discuss politics at work

It would really depend on the individual Trump supporter whether I would want to discuss politics with them or not.

However I don't think whether I 'want' the discussion has anything to do with anything. Discussion of communal affairs is basic to humans, and my 'wanting' has nothing to do with others' need and right to continue to be human. An employer does not own people (even during their hours of employment), and this kind of clause would be illegal in any reasonable polity.

Obnoxious behaviour, forcing of one's opinion (or neurotic need to discuss) on others, etc, is another matter and prevalent enough in plenty of areas quite outside of politics. The only simple authoritarian solution to that would be to ban conversation altogether.

It's like having prayer in school. It might seem like a good idea on its surface to some, but then you have to decide whose prayer. In Engel v. Vitale many religious groups actually filed amicus briefs against having public school start their day with a prayer because to be nearly universally acceptable, it had to be designed by a committee to be as bland and unobjectionable as possible.

Likewise, anything publicly debated at work has to be inherently bland and without class consciousness, as that calls into question relationship between the workers, the professional management classes and the reigning neoliberal order. The only approved topics will ones that distract from class consciousness and divide the workers into factions that render them unable to operate cohesively.

Completely agree. Besides which it's a hopelessly medieval master-slave attitude to employment - the notion that they're not paying for time, expertise or work, but rather taking temporary ownership of subjects. I would have nothing to do with Gitlab knowing this, as employee or customer.

"I will say that it takes a certain level of privilege to say one shouldn’t discuss politics at work." Can you clarify the meaning? As it reads to me, if one belongs to a marginalized group, one would suffer disproportionately from making such a statement. I'm not quite clear on the semantics I suppose.

On another note, anecdotally, how many people have had a work relationship or project suffer due to discussion of politics at work, or alternatively, improve? (This being a reason not to discuss, it would be beneficial to sample for how likely it is to occur negatively.)

These are the _only_ kinds of politics that are acceptable in many workplaces. We have diversity departments and minority groups and women's groups and consultancies and recruiting agencies advertise their ability to find minority candidates. People are afraid to publicly question these policies.

> Education: Too political to discuss the fact that schools are trying to balance their admissions in the face of very uneven opportunities amongst their applicants. Never mind the fact that school admissions were never fair to begin with.

Women outnumber men in universities and pretty much throughout the pipeline (EDIT: to clarify, I mean the broader education pipeline, not the tech subset thereof). This whole post is so disconnected from my experience and any experience I've heard about that it feels like it's from inverse universe.

I absolutely agree that politics is everywhere and picking and choosing which type of political discussion is allowed is itself political, (I’ve also never been convinced that URMs in tech isn’t primarily a pipeline problem but ofc wouldn’t want to shut off debate on that)

I guess the difference in what is allowed is between “positive” vs “negative” politics. By that I don’t mean positive politics is absolutely the best whereas negative is stuff I disagree with, but saying “We want to empower marginalized groups” is positive and doesn’t bother that much people who.. don’t think it’s necessary, because it’s not a political position you can disagreee with per se. But negative politics might be something like “we are going to ban X because we find it abhorrent” whether X is racist stuff, antivaxx stuff, or LGBTQ stuff you are directly prohibiting beliefs.

Note that I don’t necessarily agree that positive vs negative (or, un-disagreeable vs actively disagreeing) is exactly where you should draw the line where politics is allowed, but I’m just trying to rationalize and say maybe it’s not inherently hypocritical.

I also agree with the parent comment here, but wanted to shed some light on your input.

The problem with your "negative" vs "positive" distinction is that it's quite subjective and not at all clear cut.

> “We want to empower marginalized groups” is positive and doesn’t bother that much people who.. don’t think it’s necessary, because it’s not a political position you can disagreee with per se

There are groups who have very big problems with this statement per se. See the numerous court cases over the past decade challenging affirmative action in university admissions. Many view helping one group as oppressing another (a view I find quite misinformed given the inequities in our society, but not completely irrational, given bad priors).

Maybe what you're trying to get at is progressive politics vs. oppressive politics. This distinction I can understand more clearly, however when you choose to oppress a group that is oppressing others, maybe this is justified?

For instance, banning ISIS from access to Twitter seems like a pretty morally sound decision to me as an American. Given that, is there really a difference between banning ISIS and banning white supremacists who discuss violence? Or Presidents who promote violence against journalists? What's the moral outcome of NOT banning any of these groups?

Any choice, including choosing not to act, is morally liable. I think Gitlab's stance here is quite morally lazy, if not wrong.

Yeah, I was trying to figure out if gitlab’s position is a bit more morally consistent than it might seem at first glance, but I agree with everything you said. Perhaps we can say a progressive vs oppressive split is more consistent but not fully consistent

Regarding eg affirmative action, I guess that also brings up a good point that the implementation of an affirmative/positive/progressive opinion may start to get a bit hairier than a simple platitude. Platitudes or moral statements can easily be defended but once you begin to take concrete action based on those, people may disagree with how you rationalize those actions

>> “We want to empower marginalized groups”

This also means nothing. What does "empower" mean in this context? Define it, and you are guaranteed to piss off plenty of people in the marginalized groups, to say nothing of the majority groups (whose rights today apparently are meaningless).

Don't act like this isn't defined. You empower marginalized groups by ensuring that they can't be fired just for being in that group, for starters.

Your rights aren't minimized by granting rights to minorities. I can't believe I have to explain this to you. This isn't a zero sum game.

I am a minority. Not sure why you think otherwise.

To me, there is a big difference between discussing politics and preaching politics. I do want my company to tell me not to discuss politics with coworkers who are willing to discuss it. Not dicussing politics, especially with people who have a difference of opinion, is what leads to rage filled echochambers that are so common now. However, I do not want people preaching politics unsolicited at work though.

I think politics being a taboo topic is an attempt to keep workers in order and ignore any political or environmental impact that their own company might have.

> I will say that it takes a certain level of privilege to say one shouldn’t discuss politics at work.

My counterpoint would be that it takes a certain level of privilege to be able to discuss politics at work. Or, to be more specific, anything other than the job you are working. (And, of course, the things your employer can't legally stop you from talking about.)

Or, to put my point more specifically: Almost all of the discussion I have seen ignores that most of these problems are, at their root, class based problems. I suppose what is more saddening from a humanist standpoint is the way the extremists on both sides wish to eventually put the other under their heel.

That said, touching specifically on my personal experiences in Education, the issue is that any Metric based solution will likely run up against Goodhart's law sooner or later. While what I witnessed in Academia was probably far from the norm, I doubt it was rare.

> I will say that it takes a certain level of privilege to say one shouldn’t discuss politics at work.

Having a discussion is hard. While you come to this well-intended, participants bring their own life experiences and hardships. They may not agree on the starting point of the conversation:

How is "marginalized' and "privileged" is defined? Some may not take that perspective on the above issues, and people with these characteristics may not consider themselves part of the "group", they may believe overcoming hardship by the way of grit and merit being the ideal.

People with these characteristics who don't consider themselves part of the "groups" may find the rhetoric being used patronizing, they don't want to be treated special or different, they want to be recognized for their contribution to the collective. That's where role models come from, to some.

They may disagree on what "empathy" means. Casting a group as marginalized draws broad strokes about others, because who isn't marginalized? How could someone know how someone else feels or what they have faced in life? If you don't like having your hardship belittled, why potentially do the same thing to others? We all have feelings and bring our unique stories and experiences to the table.

The definition of "inclusiveness". To some, the qualm isn't the subject, it's how some people who cite these groups disregard the larger collective or group they're apart of (e.g. their team, their workplace).

The definition of "discussion". There are stories of people being fired for merely citing agreed upon academic social/psychological research. Some sense viewpoint discrimination - fear of being sanctioned for stating their perspective - or to even say they're hurt by the topic's inferences.

>Casting a group as marginalized draws broad strokes about others, because who isn't marginalized? How could someone know how someone else feels or what they have faced in life? If you don't like having your hardship belittled, why potentially do the same thing to others? We all have feelings and their own unique stories.

Let me give you a real world example.

In the US, the average white person goes to a better funded school than the average minority. That is a form of privilege. I personally am white, but went to a majority black school that is extremely underfunded and around an 80% below poverty level. I (and all others attending my school) missed out on numerous opportunities that other schools provided.

But when people see me, they immediately stereotype me as having gone to a better funded school. This is an assumption they make about me based on my race, and which some use against me (thinking me privileged in relation to school system).

When applying to college, many colleges use race to assume a level of hardship and then adjust admission standards based on hardship. Someone who goes to a very underfunded school won't score as high on the SAT as they would have if they had gone to a better school. Yet because of my race, the assumption is made that such reasoning does not apply to me.

>This is an assumption they make about me based on my race, and which some use against me (thinking me privileged in relation to school system).

Conversely, they might use it FOR you. They might assume you're smarter because you're white and went to a better school, and give you that promotion or that job or that loan.

But that is socially condemned, as it should be. Why can't we be consistent in condemning racial stereotypes?

I also went to a school that was majority black and am white.

> When applying to college, many colleges use race to assume a level of hardship and then adjust admission standards based on hardship. Someone who goes to a very underfunded school won't score as high on the SAT as they would have if they had gone to a better school. Yet because of my race, the assumption is made that such reasoning does not apply to me.

I do not think this is true for the highest tier of colleges, who will also consider what highschool you come from.

Yeah I think with African Americans there's definitely a case to be made for that. What I don't buy into is that narrative being applied to white and Asian women, who are every bit as privileged as white males if not more so.

Why do you think LGBT rights (first item on your list) is something that should be discussed at work? There are laws against discrimination and companies have to comply, but I don't see a good reason why this kind of topic should be addressed at the workplace. Some employees are uncomfortable with discussing politics at work as it may create unnecessary tensions.

Those who like debating about politics can always gather after work.

I don't see what it has to with a level of privileges.

That being said, I also don't like being told what type of conversations I'm allowed to have.

Companies (including Gitlab) have public statements about these things. Discrimination being illegal doesn't mean it doesn't happen, and attempting to address it (or defending current practices) then also quickly becomes political. One of many areas where politics can easily leak into normal operations of a company.

Because someone in such a group might have a workplace issue that they believe should be addressed and pertains to treatment of that group.

> Why do you think LGBT rights (first item on your list) is something that should be discussed at work?

Because what if you are an LGBT person and such things materially affect you? What happens when you bring your same-sex spouse to a company party? What happens if you realize you were born the wrong gender and decide to (publicly) transition? Suddenly you are not just "discussing" politics, your very identity is political (and that distinction is something imposed by society on you).

Also note that in the US not every state has laws against LGBT discrimination. There's currently a lawsuit before the SCOTUS to decide if the existing federal ban on "sex discrimination" also applies to sexuality and gender identity but with the current composition of the court it's likely to be decided that those categories are not protected under the law.

>Why do you think LGBT rights (first item on your list) is something that should be discussed at work? There are laws against discrimination and companies have to comply, but I don't see a good reason why this kind of topic should be addressed at the workplace.

Because the discrimination laws as they are currently setup in the US do not protect LGBTQ folks in the way they protect others. For example, in many states people can still be fired based off their gender or sexual identity [1].

I don't have to give a second thought to bringing my significant other to an office holiday party. If my coworker needs skip that same party out of fear of being fired for bringing their significant other, that is a workplace problem.

[1] - https://www.fastcompany.com/90369004/lgbt-employee-protectio...

If you're in an area where discrimination against LGBT people is still widespread, then keeping politics out of the office most likely benefits LGBT workers.

In San Francisco, almost everyone expressing a political opinion will support gay rights. In rural Mississippi, many of those workers will be bringing out their anti-gay inflammatory baggage when discussing politics. I'm virtually certain that far more anti-LGBT vitriol occurs within political discussions than the average non-political conversation.

This isn't unusual either. Throughout history oppressed groups have very frequently found refuge in the apolitical world of commerce. Just look at the history of Jews in Europe. Even when surrounded by a bigoted culture, trade and business ties encouraged tolerance and cooperation. The worse periods always tended to be the points where some ruler decided that politics all of a sudden needed to be injected into every sphere of life. Just look at the Spanish Inquisition or the Nuremberg Laws.

I don't think the closet ever benefited gay people. Also commerce is probably the furthest you can get from being apolitical so I'm not sure of the point you're trying to make.

Your argument is the same one made by this satirical political cartoon from The Onion: https://i.imgur.com/XCPFpnd.jpg

Not talking about these issues allows the underlying bigotry to fester unchallenged.

Personally I'd prefer to live/work in the left panel of that comic.

The point the comic is trying to make (from the satirist's perspective, not the fictional Kelly's perspective) is that both of the depicted scenarios only exist in the flawed perspective of highly-priviledged people who don't have to think about racial issues on a regular basis. When interpreting this comic, keep in mind that it is being told from the perspective of the fictional character of Kelly who is very white, very middle-aged[1], and moderately conservative (in the sense that Kelly is vaguely patriotic and doesn't like changes to the status quo that do not directly benefit him -- as far as I can tell Kelly has no coherent politics beyond this).

The first panel depicts Kelly's perception of race in America in his everyday life: people of different races exist (as horrific outdated stereotypes) but there is absolutely no tensions between them. The second panel depicts Kelly's perception of what it feels like to him when racial tensions are discussed. Kelly, like most white people in America, experiences "white fragility"[2] when race is discussed. Because white people have usually not been regularly exposed to racial issues discussions of such create mental stress which can feel like a personal attack on them which Kelly depicts as a general riot. To white people, the easiest way to alleviate this stress is to shut down the discussion altogether and return themselves to the ignorance depicted in the first panel.

[1] https://i.imgur.com/vIHrvlg.jpg

[2] https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/a-sociologist-ex...

> Why do you think LGBT rights (first item on your list) is something that should be discussed at work?

If you're gay and you mention the gender of your spouse, you are going to get a reaction. People consider the existence of LGBT individuals to be political. It's hard to have anything other than surface level conversations without family and relationships coming up.

>There are laws against discrimination and companies have to comply, but I don't see a good reason why this kind of topic should be addressed at the workplace.

because it is entirely unfeasible that any social problem that arises is immediately delegated to a court. workspace problems that are not necessarily criminal are most effectively solved directly where they occur. This requires that discourse at work is allowed so that information can be exchanged freely.

Carrying every conflict into a legal battle because employers don't like the fact that human interaction on occasion results in tension and is messy is quite ridiculous. You might as well start pouring Xanax into the water dispenser to calm the employees.

> "Why do you think LGBT rights (first item on your list) is something that should be discussed at work? There are laws against discrimination and companies have to comply, but I don't see a good reason why this kind of topic should be addressed at the workplace."

In the United States, right now, trans people can literally be fired for being trans. The "laws against discrimination" that you refer to do not protect trans individuals, and those laws themselves the product of people organising together and deciding that certain kinds of discrimination should not be allowed.

That you included trans people in your example suggests you are currently unaware that laws against discrimination do not provide trans people the protections given to other groups.

I don't understand how any of these conversations(besides the first one, in perhaps an HR meeting), could possibly be topical at work? The company isn't paying me to preach my political agenda.

Have you also considered that while a "marginalized" person might be keenly aware, researched and emotionally invested in discussing these things, a "privileged" person may feel ambushed and distracted by these questions while they are trying to focus on work? The language and obvious expectation in many of these "discussions" is a with-us-or-against-us recruitment for the agenda, often backed up with moral blackmail(e.g. "we're fighting for our lives here and you won't even help us"). At work we try to afford each other respect, politeness and professional courtesy, but from what I've seen, these "discussions" are anything but.

I don't think imposing oneself onto other people like these "discussions" do is effective. Surely you've seen the hyperbole, the aggression and vitriol that goes with them and can imagine how it seems to someone who isn't invested in the agendas? After all you ask to not be downvoted even in your meta-discussion about the topics, what about when discussing the topics themselves?

I agree with the progressive arguments - that you can't just say "no politics in X", that politics are inherent to what you do. What I absolutely disagree with is the tactics employed, and I think they are not just ineffective, they have a negative effect on engagement. People may want to help, but they don't want to feel like they're being coerced to. People may want to discuss, but they want to do it on their terms. People may want to listen, but they don't want to be lectured.

I think this is why there is such a strong push to disengage and ignore these problems - and I agree that they are problems that need discussion and need solutions. The in-your-face unapologetic advocacy, the constant motte-and-bailey argumentation, the extreme emotional reactions to any dissention, the preaching from a perceived moral high ground - these are not a conductive environment for changing minds.

So I agree with you. I'll go even further. It's bullshit to say "no politics at work", and it's hypocritical. I will keep supporting that policy, because it's the lesser of two evils, because I think progressive strategy is counter-productive and a recipe for disaster. I'm happy to have any of these discussions, on a neutral, preferrably anonymous forum, where there is enough distance that perhaps we could have a productive argument. Work is none of those things.

> I agree with the progressive arguments - that you can't just say "no politics in X", that politics are inherent to what you do.

I would push back on this. In a trivial sense, politics is in everything, because everything is somehow related to everything else.

For most work-related purposes, an LGBT issue, to take a random example, is relevant in the same way it is relevant to include the gravitational influence of Neptune when calculating the trajectory of a thrown object on Earth: technically there is an influence, but it is minute. This would be true unless, perhaps, you work in HR and dealing with this stuff is part of the job description. Naturally, strongly committed activists won't see it that way because they see literally everything through the lens of their hobbyhorse.

But I agree very much with your second paragraph. I work in medical research. The important thing about it is to find cures for diseases. If some allegedly or actually marginalized person comes in and attempts to derail this important work with their own issues, it is incredibly self-centered. I don't care how bad you think your group has it, it isn't as bad as "the group of people with metastatic cancer". Privileged as I may or may not be, it isn't me such a person would be harming, it's the patients.

I think most people in my field recognize this and political issues generally aren't a problem there. I wonder if there is an inverse correlation between the importance of the work and the likelihood that people will bring up political issues.

Thanks, favorited! Especially this part:

> The in-your-face unapologetic advocacy, the constant motte-and-bailey argumentation, the extreme emotional reactions to any dissention, the preaching from a perceived moral high ground - these are not a conductive environment for changing minds.

It seems to me what you want is not to discuss politics at work but dictate politics are work. Unless you are perfectly okay with your co worker coming in with a MAGA hat every day and explaining to you why they think LGTB people don't deserve the right to marry.

I don't view this as a political issue at all.

If I ran a company and had LGBTQ employees, I would not want what you just described because it would be creating a hostile environment for those employees.

Coming into your workplace and telling your co-workers that they don't deserve equal rights under the law is just a shitty thing to do. It's an issue of basic respect and has nothing to do with politics.

You can attempt to frame it however you would like but what you want is an environment where people can only discuss political views that you agree with.

There is no harassment when someone simply states "I don't think same sex marriage should be legal.". And before I get downvoted into oblivion, I don't agree with that statement, I'm actually completely apathetic to it and think it's unimportant.

Politics is more or less the mechanism by which society takes collective action. Since people are broadly speaking in favor of free value, pretty much every policy that has nearly exclusively positive or at worst neutral effects has been implemented. It's not like anyone would oppose such policy! So "politics" exists as the realm of policy proposals that help some people and harm other people. All political opinions involve harming someone. If they didn't then they wouldn't be "political" opinions, they would just be opinions.

That is because you see it as equal rights under law while the other person will see it about their religious right under law.

I would think the most influential voice in these cases would be managers/leadership adding a provision to company guidelines and the like, in order to attempt to cultivate and safeguard a productive day to day culture.

But this particular perspective isn't necessarily a function of their 'privilege' in the sense of cultural capital and an advantageous background etc, but just of their own self-interest in this exact moment.

Let's not forget office politics. In that case, you basically can't discuss anything at work.

In your "neutral" comment, you're already taking a stance on the topics and automatically defining marginalized and privileged. People are far more complicated than that.

That's why these discussions aren't a good idea. Companies are paying you for productivity and ensuring a calm environment is important. You have plenty of opportunity to discuss and create all the change you want elsewhere.

> We can’t improve without discussion, and it’s unfortunate that these type of issues are so divisive.

Except Cancel Culture is making it that these can't be discussed without complete agreement.

Take for example, "Women in Tech", personally I don't see underrepresentation of women in tech as a problem that can be or should be 'solved'. For the better part of 15 years, there has been a massive movement to encourage women in STEM. There are hundreds of Women in Tech meetups, scholarships, Womens only courses... yet the numbers have barely budged in more than 10 years. Personally, it looks like in aggregate it will be difficult to get 50/50 representation of women and men in tech. To make it clear, we should definitely support everyone who is in tech, and make it an inclusive environment, but the continued push for 50/50 isn't going to happen so perhaps its not worth the huge money sink it is.

At the last place I worked that opinion was flat out branded "sexist", and if you didn't vocally agree with every women in tech initiative people asked why.

So I would say the ability to speak openly about politics was shut down long ago, and not by the people you think.

Women were barely allowed into workplaces in general within the last 50 years and are still fighting biases that have existed for millennia. Fixing the lack of women in tech is a multi-century process, not something that's just knocked out in as little as 15 years. We'd be lucky to start seeing the needle move in such a short amount of time.

Interestingly, the rates of women in tech were higher 50 years ago than they are today. Reduction in inequality between men and women has an inverse relationship with rates of women in engineering. The countries with large inequality between men and women like Indonesia and India have some of the highest rates of women on tech. Egalitarian countries like those in Scandinavia have the lowest rates. The idea that low rates of women in tech is a product of inequality and discrimination is hard to justify in practice.

My response to bluntfang, HN is rate limiting my office IP:

> Who's to say there's a reduction?

Anyone who studied gender relations over the last half century will say so, unambiguously, Trump notwithstanding. Women didn't have the right to abortion 50 years ago. They earned college degrees at half the rate of men (today, 3 women earn a degree for every 2 men). Workforce participation was much lower. Many states did not allow women to initiate divorces except under specific circumstances. Explicit denial of employment on the basis of sex was socially acceptable.

I'm willing to claim that women are better off today than they were in 1969 is a fact. I suppose "equality" is fundamentally subjective, and there might be people who genuinely believe that women getting the right to abortion, divorce, protection from discrimination, etc. somehow harmed them. But I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that most women see such changes as beneficial.

I think those are interesting data points, but it's hard to take that data and clearly conclude there is a non-problem.

For one, 50 years ago in America, women were unintentionally at the frontline of computers perhaps because high numbers of women were the "computers" before machine computers were introduced. And when the machine computers were introduced, the departments of women "computers" got exposure to them perhaps because of a high overlap in the departmental "compute" functions.

Similarly if you look at high level women in computing from 50 years ago, they often got chances to apply their extraordinary skills because they happened across extraordinary opportunities - in some part because no-one else was above them for unique job, nor was there a formal role to hire for and choose between a woman or man. Another contributing factor might be the nature of war as well as the newness of the tech that created a temporary gender-blind vacuum.

Those are all fine points, but it doesn't entirely address this gender paradox issues of Engineers in developed countries.

Moreover, it doesn't address the underlying assumption that 'equality' actually has to imply 50/50 in every labour category.

I personally believe that anyone should be able to do anything, but that gender is so deeply ingrained into culture and society, that there'll never be 50/50 in most professions not matter what we do - and that we should consider accepting 'different strokes for different folks' - and that ironically 'diversity' means people will do different things. There can still be equality in the world even if people do different things, we might just have to look at things a little differently and make sure 'fairness' is applied from another angle.

In the 1920's, Lenin tried to abolish that utterly bourgeois institution of the 'family'. He banned 'weekends' and made Russia work on a 5 day work day. Everyone got one day off - but different days off were assigned to different workers. Husbands and wives would often be assigned different days off specifically so they'd never see each other, i.e. to wear down the coherence of the family. This is not some Netflix Dystopia - this was a reality for 10's of millions of people in a 20th century country.

It failed miserably because I think the hyper intellectual social egalitarian attitudes were at odds with the social reality of humanity. I believe much of our gender wars boil down to this as well: we have gender, it's never going away, and trying to kill it is absurd. It's ok, we can have real equality without having to wipe out gender - we just have to think a little bit about it.

> For one, 50 years ago in America, women were unintentionally at the frontline of computers perhaps because high numbers of women were the "computers" before machine computers were introduced. And when the machine computers were introduced, the departments of women "computers" got exposure to them perhaps because of a high overlap in the departmental "compute" functions.

The correlation between lower gender equality and higher rates of women in STEM is not just a pattern in US history. It also holds across different countries in the modern day [1]. The idea that this is just a coincidence that electronic computing happened to come into existence around the time that women started gaining more rights does not hold up.

> Similarly if you look at high level women in computing from 50 years ago, they often got chances to apply their extraordinary skills because they happened across extraordinary opportunities - in some part because no-one else was above them for unique job, nor was there a formal role to hire for and choose between a woman or man. Another contributing factor might be the nature of war as well as the newness of the tech that created a temporary gender-blind vacuum.

This, too, does not hold up to scrutiny. Women's share of computing jobs did not drop after the war was over. It continued to rise until the late 1970s or early 1980s depending on which estimate is used. Since the share of women in computing continued to increase several decades after WWII, the idea of a temporary gender-bind vacuum is not promising.

1. https://digest.bps.org.uk/2018/03/14/investigating-the-stem-...

> The idea that this is just a coincidence that electronic computing happened to come into existence around the time that women started gaining more rights does not hold up

This is a misstatement of my idea, which is that which is that greater numbers of women were higher in stem at the beginning because of a historical circumstance. The data you show in [1] is a snapshot of the modern day, and really says nothing about the historical circumstances.

> Since the share of women in computing continued to increase several decades after WWII, the idea of a temporary gender-bind vacuum is not promising.

You act as if there are no momemtum effects of the initial higher rate of women in computing technology. A baseline rate of women in the culture at the time would encourage more women to be in the industry, perhaps until other effects became stronger. That the numbers continued to rise, in my opinion, say nothing about my second proposition one way or other.

> This is a misstatement of my idea, which is that which is that greater numbers of women were higher in stem at the beginning because of a historical circumstance. The data you show in [1] is a snapshot of the modern day, and really says nothing about the historical circumstances.

For the third time, the inverse correlation between gender equality and women's participation in engineering and technology hold true both when viewed over time within individual countries and when comparing different countries at the same time. Look at the rates of women's participation in engineering and technology in the US and it peaks at in the 1970s and 80s and tapers off after that. It does indeed show a relationship between the historical circumstances of women and their career choices. And when the same circumstances exist today in other countries, the inverse relationship between gender equality and rates of women in STEM holds true as well.

> You act as if there are no momemtum effects of the initial higher rate of women in computing technology. A baseline rate of women in the culture at the time would encourage more women to be in the industry, perhaps until other effects became stronger. That the numbers continued to rise, in my opinion, say nothing about my second proposition one way or other.

The same trends are observed in countries that did not participate in WWII which makes this hypothesis that the war imparted some sort of momentum on women in computing questionable.

> For the third time, the inverse correlation between gender equality and women's participation in engineering and technology hold true both when viewed over time within individual countries and when comparing different countries at the same time.

For the second time, that's not what the data in your link shows. It shows a single data graph of the modern day state. It is an interesting conundrum - but I don't understand how it supports what you are saying about the historical state.

Other nations who didn't participate in WWII were largely further behind the industrialization curve. Not sure what that means for interpreting STEM data other than there wasn't as much STEM in those nations then.

> For the second time, that's not what the data in your link shows. It shows a single data graph of the modern day state. It is an interesting conundrum - but I don't understand how it supports what you are saying about the historical state.

Because you asked for evidence on geographic trends, and I provided it. If you insist that I demonstrate statistics that are widely known, I'll oblige:

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when...

https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/chart-of-the-day-the-declinin...

> Other nations who didn't participate in WWII were largely further behind the industrialization curve

Sweden, Switzerland and Denmark (only fought for 9 hours, so it effectively didn't fight) are further behind in the industrialization curve? France, too, could be counted in this category, as their wartime contribution was largely paused from 1941 to 1945 besides partisan activity and French forces outside of mainland Europe.

The gender equality paradox is widely understood. What is motivating the instinctive dismissal of such a widely studied and known phenomenon?

> Reduction in inequality between men and women has an inverse relationship with rates of women in engineering. The countries with large inequality between men and women like Indonesia and India have some of the highest rates of women on tech. Egalitarian countries like those in Scandinavia have the lowest rates. The idea that low rates of women in tech is a product of inequality and discrimination is hard to justify in practice.

That sounds like a cherry-picked example. For example, Eastern Block (USSR and similar countries) had a lot more gender-equality than the Western Block (like US) and has way more women in STEM.

This does nothing to explain why 85% of women and 85% of men in Sweden work in gender segregated professions, with gender segregation getting worse for every year. It does nothing to explain why out of 5 professions with 99% or higher gender segregation, 3 is female dominated and 2 is male dominated. It also does not explain why the only university program that ended up single gender a few years ago was female dominated.

The gender paradox is also poorly explained through the narrative that historical gender roles is the cause of gender segregation today.

It might just be that with a social net that one can fall back onto, people pick the careers that they want instead of the careers that pay more?

Right, and what we’re seeing is that men and women enjoy different things.

> barely allowed into workplaces in general within the last 50 years

Pardon? 50 years ago was 1969. Not discounting the fact that lower class women have always worked, the 60s saw a huge growth in Women's liberation, with the first woman to be a Fortune 500 CEO happening in the 1972.

To say Women were "barely allowed in the workplace" during the 60's, 70's 80's and 90's needs significant proof.

Why not just look it up? It took 10 seconds. https://www.dol.gov/wb/stats/NEWSTATS/facts/women_lf.htm#Civ...

In 1969, the labor force participation rate of women was 37.8%, and today it’s 46.8%. That’s a big change, and you have to realize that this difference is also coming out of the men’s share; it’s a bigger change than it looks. Also the women’s share was much lower - only 29% - just 20 years before that in 1949. In 1920 it was 20%. And don’t forget 1920 was the first year that women were allowed to vote. So if you’re looking at the bigger point and don’t fixate on exact dates, the pattern is one of massive change in the last 100 years from almost nothing to now nearing 50%.

FWIW, while the comment you replied to maybe seemed to overstate the claim a little for recent years, your response here doesn’t look particularly good in this sensitive/divisive topic, if you’re actually worried about being unfairly labeled. For example, the fact that the first woman Fortune 500 CEO happened in the last 50 years, after 1969, really goes straight to the parent comment’s point, and constitutes extremely clear proof that in 1969 women were barely allowed in some parts of the workforce.

> In 1969, the labor force participation rate of women was 37.8%

I would not call 38% participation "barely" in the workforce. And the point of noting the first female Fortune 500 CEO in 1969 was to highlight that while it is a shame it took so long, women would have been in senior roles well before 1969 to make her promotion possible.

> Fixing the lack of women in tech is a multi-century process

Why does tech take longer than other professional fields like medical and legal? Harvard law started admitting women in the 1950s. MIT started admitting women in the 1870s. Yet the gender balance in the legal field narrowed much more rapidly.

I don't see how this argument can coexist with the reality that during the same time, women have achieved equal numbers and majority status in many other lucrative careers in medicine and law etc.

Highly talented women are not having to work as nannies and school teachers because they're kept out of tech. They choose other high paying careers and do very well in them.

When people go and talk to women who started out in the tech pipeline but left, many say that the reasons they left are that they felt unwelcome in some way: they were harassed, under-valued, talked over, stalked, underpaid, etc.

Too many women choose to leave not because they didn't like the work, but because they didn't like all the bullshit they were implicitly asked to put up with, in order to do the work.

If very few women expressed these sentiments; if the tech workforce pipeline was a safe and fulfilling place for everyone, then at that point, I think it's fair to question whether 50/50 should be the goal. But we're not nearly at that point, and IMO it is counterproductive to talk like we are. For now, the numbers imbalance is a simple and obvious way to measure and talk about the cultural factors that exclude women (or certain ethnicities, or backgrounds) from equal participation in this industry.

One reason 50/50 makes a fine straw goal is that there is no obvious reason that men should be more successful than women in the tech industry. It's not like the NFL, where well-understood human sexual dimorphism is relevant. Women were heavily involved in the early days of computing and built some of the early foundations of the field, like the first compiler.

And what happens when people go and talk to men who started out in the tech pipeline but left? Don’t they say similarly negative things?

Yeah. I'm pretty sure being harassed, under-valued, talked over, stalked, underpaid, etc. are universally true.

I've encountered at least two at every single one of the 15 or so jobs I've had prior to this one. Most of them weren't in tech and I'm a man. Having a shitty job isn't exclusive to being a female in tech.

Perhaps men and women in tech face different challenges, and the challenges that women face are unique to women and related to their sex/gender expression.

> When people go and talk to women who started out in the tech pipeline but left, many say that the reasons they left are that they felt unwelcome in some way: they were harassed, under-valued, talked over, stalked, underpaid, etc.

That "many" sounds anecdotal. Since we're doing that: In my experience woman don't go into tech because they enjoy other, more social, jobs more.

> One reason 50/50 makes a fine straw goal is that there is no obvious reason that men should be more successful than women in the tech industry. It's not like the NFL, where well-understood human sexual dimorphism is relevant. Women were heavily involved in the early days of computing and built some of the early foundations of the field, like the first compiler.

There is an obvious reason. Autism-like traits are more prevalent in men.

Your hypothesis regarding harassment or being made to feel unwelcome is reasonable and always needs to be explored. But it is not the only hypothesis, and other factors are probably also in play. I disagree that there "is no obvious reason that men should be more successful than women in the tech industry" and I suppose the argument would then hang on the word "obvious".. are the other hypotheses obvious? Perhaps not to people who don't study evolutionary psychology.

There is evidence that more freedom and equality for everyone to be in any job they want leads to even less women choosing STEM careers (https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more...) That might be because of social issues you mention (harassment, under valued, talked over, underpaid, stalked, etc). It might also be a result of natural selection causing women and men to differentiate in useful ways wherein women were more attracted to nurturing roles, and men more attracted to technical challenges.

I don't think it's useful to pick one reasonable hypothesis and ignore other reasonable hypotheses. Let's explore all the useful ideas and recognize how little we actually know for sure.

I would want any analysis theorizing a difference rooted in biological dimorphism to work with sex as a multidimensional distribution, as that's what it is.

If you want to do one on gender, you would go in for self-reported gender, and have 3+ selection options (m/f/o).

If you're going to talk about natural selection resulting in career preference, you should talk sex, not gender.

I agree gender is irrelevant here. I'd even go so far as to agree that there may be more than two sex states on individual bases (multiple X or Y chromosomes, different levels of testosterone, hermaphordism, chimerism etc). But these are neither particularly common nor genetically transmissible and thus do not exert pressure on the nature of sexual dimorphism. Sex can be modelled quite accurately with a single binary bit even in individual cases, and entirely accurately for species in evolutionary terms. Distributions and multiple dimensions have not shown themselves to be useful. If you disagree I'd like to see references to the relevant research papers.

I don't mind recognizing any individuals uniqueness or their socially less-privileged situation for social or political purposes, but it shouldn't have any affect on the science of sexuality which should just reflect nature as it is.

Sexual dimorphism in animals can be dramatic. The male angler fish is a tiny parasite, the dramatically larger female does all the angling work. And we aren't seeing non-binary angler fishes. If none of the other species are coming up with non-binary specimens, why should we assume humans are any different?

> I agree gender is irrelevant here

Ah, if that's what you're getting from what I'm saying, then I don't think you getting what I'm saying.

If your theory is that biological factors drive differences in behavioral outcomes, then I'm saying you should measure those biological factors, and you should do so on a more detailed level than genitals. I'm not arguing that sexual dimorphism isn't a thing. I'm arguing that a simple m/f measurement of it is insufficient, particularly if you're trying to correlate it to behavioral outcomes. As for your science paper request, I'll just go with this, instead: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_dimorphism_measures

If your theory is that gender (how society treats you) affects this, then measure /that/; which itself is more complicated than a simple binary. A masculine woman and a feminine man are treated very differently by society than a feminine woman and a masculine man. Although it's a lot more reasonable to go with a binary here, since basically all of society will put people into that binary, I'd definitely want some measure as to how well or poorly that category fits the person in question. It would make for a much more compelling case to see that the outcome isn't affected by that second measure.

Aside from harassed or stalked, the others apply just as much to men. Hate to break it to you. We have been trained by society to put up with it.

You can make anything true if you start your sentence with "aside".

I've heard this hypothesis a lot, but there's something that bothers me about it.

If you've ever been passionate about something, something that's hard and takes a lot of effort and practice to become good at, would you really let microaggressions stop you from doing that thing? I mean, being a programmer is not exactly a high status thing for white males either. If I tell people I'm a programmer, I generally am competing with the perception that I am socially awkward. People assume I'm like some Big Bang Theory character until I prove otherwise. I don't like that stereotype, but it never stopped me from learning to code, or even was a thought that crossed my mind.

Also, how many other industries are or have been actively hostile towards women and still have plenty of females in it? Show business is an obvious example.

I'm not saying that things can't or shouldn't be improved, but I feel like the argument that goes "well the nerds are making women uncomfortable" is just a cartoon with very little evidence other than anecdotes.

I think “microagressions” is a bit of an understatement. Also not sure that being stereotyped as “socially awkward” is comparable to experiencing or even just witnessing sexual harassment.

Women in tech report more mistreatment than in many other male-dominated industries. See: https://www.axios.com/tech-sexual-harassment-women-silicon-v...

In this survey the finding is exactly the opposite: https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/04/17/ssc-survey-results-sex...

All I see in that link is a VERY vague assertion that some women have received “unwanted physical contact”, which doesnt really mean anything without specifics. That could mean something creepy, or it could mean someone tapping them on the shoulder, or a saleswomans obnoxious insistence on high fiving all the time. And then some persons quoted opinion.

If someone touched me in any physical way at work I'd say it would be unwanted. It's pretty reasonable to not want other people to touch you, no matter the specific "kind" of touch it is.

Every now and then my boss gives me an overly-friendly shoulder pat. It really annoys me, I guess I'm a victim of physical harassment. Should I leave the industry over that?

What would you do if you had 8 bosses in a row all do the same thing?

It quite often means something creepy. You shouldn't assume that actual aggression aren't happening just because you have the privilege of not experiencing them.

>If I tell people I'm a programmer, I generally am competing with the perception that I am socially awkward. People assume I'm like some Big Bang Theory character until I prove otherwise. I don't like that stereotype, but it never stopped me from learning to code, or even was a thought that crossed my mind.

People thinking you're socially awkward is different from people sexually harassing you at work.

If the issue was as simple as women being sexually harassed it might not be easy to fix but itd be straightforward. But all the evidence suggests its a very nuanced and complicated issue. I don’t think just caricaturing and oversimplifying the issue helps anything.

I think you did exactly that here and I agree that it is an unhelpful contribution

> If you've ever been passionate about something, something that's hard and takes a lot of effort and practice to become good at, would you really let microaggressions stop you from doing that thing?

Yes, actually, people do this all the time. They find new things to be passionate about if being passionate about something is too painful.

If you can just go find something new to be passionate about then you're not really passionate about it.

It may come as a shock to you but some people have multiple passions in life. Besides, your arguments reeks of the classic gamer 'women are not really into it' take

It may come as a shock to you but how many passions you have is not relevant to my argument.

And that second part of your post is really damn far fetched. I never even mentioned anything remotely related to gender.

the second part wasn't about what you said, but an example of how the claim "if a person gives up something, then they weren't passionate enough" is nonsense.

to give you a better example: since guido van rossum gave up leadership of python, does that mean that he wasn't passionate enough about it?

absolutely not. but how he was treated destroyed his passion, and he couldn't handle it any more and burned out. this is the argument above. women leave despite their passion they got more pain than they could handle. just like guido.

How was Guido treated?

How did it destroy his passion? Did he quit all of CS entirely, including coding as a hobby, and took up shit like fishing instead? No? Then it didn't destroy his passion. He quit Python but Python isn't his passion. It's just a manifestation of it.

If you really love knitting then you're not gonna quit it altogether because you once had a shitty experience with a knitting group. You're just gonna find another knitting group or do it alone. But if you do quit, then you never were passionate about it. That's my point and that has nothing to do with female gamers or whatever juvenile bullshit GGP is currently interpreting into it.

> Yes, actually, people do this all the time.

I have trouble really imagining someone finding much success if they drop things they care about because the situation around them isnt ideal.

> I think it's fair to question whether 50/50 should be the goal.

There's a very strong inverse correlation between a country's gender equality and female representation in STEM. I.e. countries like Algeria and the UAE have much higher female participation in tech than countries like Sweden and the Netherlands.

That doesn't necessarily mean that women in tech don't face discrimination or harassment. But it strongly suggests that discrimination isn't the primary driver of female under-representation in the industry.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more...

I think that in Algeria and the UAE if you have spent the amount of money it takes to get a STEM education you don't divert into a different field even if the conditions are difficult, in the developed world the calculations are quite different.

This is something I can attest to personally to a certain extent.

> But it strongly suggests that discrimination isn't the primary driver of female under-representation in the industry.

I don't see that it does. It's entirely possible that in less egalitarian countries, women are just less likely to leave tech on account of discrimination or harassment. I can think of several reasons why this might be the case:

- Women in poorer countries might be more likely to endure mistreatment for financial reasons.

- Women there might just be more accustomed to mistreatment.

- Tech might be less hostile to women relative to other fields in those countries. Eg. in Western countries, it's "normal" for women to become teachers, but somewhat less normal for women to become programmers. In more misogynistic countries, it's considered abnormal for women to be teachers or programmers, so there would be less to differentiate the options.

Maybe. It's possible. But it's not a finding in isolation. Another recent finding is that gender equal societies tend to have larger personality differences between men and women. I.e. women in Sweden tend to have much more different personalities and preferences than men in Sweden. Whereas in Saudi Arabia the two genders tend to be more similar.

Overall the general theme of these findings is that gender parity is not a good proxy for gender equality. Equality is a very important goal that we should strive for. But the reality is that increasing equality may paradoxically result in larger divergences among the genders in terms of behavior, life trajectories and modes of expression.

In my opinion if there is a tension between equality and parity, than gender equality is a much more important goal. And that's what we should be measuring, not parity metrics like representation percentages.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2018/08/gender-pe...

> Women were heavily involved in the early days of computing and built some of the early foundations of the field, like the first compiler.

Maybe because it was considered mostly a secretarial job and they did not have a lot of other opportunities. Once given the choice to get into more fulfilling careers they took it. It's only because there's money in what is thought as "easy white collar job" that some women try to do it. And it is only because coders cost a lot that there is a push to get more women doing it as a way to lower wages. Even if they don't want to.

> It's only because there's money in what is thought as "easy white collar job" that some women try to do it. And it is only because coders cost a lot that there is a push to get more women doing it as a way to lower wages. Even if they don't want to.

This is the kind of unsupported claim that makes these discussions unwelcome on hn.

Just to chime in, I also unknowingly got myself labeled sexist when the topic came up during a random lunch with "friends" (company provided lunch so it had random people from HR and recruiting).

Somehow or another the topic of whether going for 50/50 will "lower the bar". So I started thinking about the problem mathematically like any engineer would, with statistical distributions and estimates of the existing pipeline and all. The more I said I am leaning towards that it will lower the bar, the more uncomfortable people around me looked.

I was too socially ignorant to realize we aren't talking about math problem here and that they don't want anything said that might weaken their cause, good faith argument or not.

After that I got no more women in my interview pipeline and a "talk" from my manager.

This parallels my experience. I have repeatedly feigned support for denying employment to white and Asian men to increase our proportional representation of demographics categorized as diverse. The company has set an outcome based goal to have 33% women in tech roles. When the industry is only 20-25% female, such a target is effectively impossible without discrimination. But no one who wants to succeed dares bring that up.

>But no one who wants to succeed dares bring that up.

Nor should they. The pursuit of equality has been replaced with a demand for equity and the talking heads espousing this demand have become sufficiently skilled at publicly shaming companies and individuals that leaders have decided that acquiescing and silently taking on the bill involved in prioritizing in-office demographic makeup over all else rather than ending up on Vox & co. and being publicly tainted forever.

On an individual level, it is career suicide to go against the corporate narrative supporting the above, particularly when you consider that the most ardent supporters of the narrative are empowered to also have some of the most significant impact on your career (HR).

One org’s discrimination is another org’s curation, semantically-speaking. The subjectivity usually depends on which side of the dividing line the perceiver finds themselves.

It’s discrimination either way. The subjectivity is just about whether or not it is deserved. Some people think certain races or sexes deserve it, which is deplorable but technically subjective.

Right. When the new executive is tasked with “cleaning up the misogyny problem at Uber” (as an example) it can only be be accomplished by discriminating against misogynists, by removing them and especially through not-hiring new ones.

I genuinely can’t tell if “misogyny” means “sexual harassment” or “men having mildly nonconforming political views” a la Damore. If the former, no one would object to said “cleanup”, so that’s pretty clearly not what we’re discussing.

It is indeed the former. No one [of high value to society] would object to the discrimination, but it is still a discrimination occurring if the outright harassers are rejected for the benefit of the whole organization.

This isn’t about races or sexes deserving it, this is about fixing an existing imbalance that happened via cultural discrimination. The idea is to get closer to balance and then as soon as we’re closer, stop discriminating in either direction. When you call people trying to fix this deplorable, let’s just be clear, you’re judging negatively the people hoping to end cultural discrimination. If your proposed solution is to not do anything, we already know what will happen, because it already did: more cultural discrimination.

It’s not deplorable to try to end discrimination, it’s deplorable to discriminate on the bases of race and sex, even if you believe that you can fight racism and sexism by way of more racism and sexism. And it’s as ridiculous to think that this approach would reduce the amount of racism/sexism as it is to think that the only other option is to do nothing. The obvious alternative is to discourage racism and promote (real) equality. But even if you do nothing, it’s strictly better than promoting some twisted notion of “positive racism” if only because our society had already been trending away from racism from the start of the civil rights movement right up to the point when “positive racism” became fashionable some 8 years ago or so.

I can understand why some people think fighting discrimination with discrimination sounds bad, especially when you say it that way. But I very much disagree, and framing it that way is exactly that: it's a frame intended to make positive actions look bad. On the one had you have permanent negative cultural discrimination that is keeping some people down who don't deserve it, and on the other you have an attempt to counter that with positive, visible, out-in-the-open affirmative action that is boosting the group that's being discriminated against. (And only until they're no longer being discriminated.)

The symmetry you're trying to imply doesn't really exist. Victims of cultural discrimination in history have been killed, enslaved, raped, harassed, etc. There is no analogue to that for the receivers of affirmative action. It's frequently quite difficult to show who's being materially harmed by affirmative actions as a group. It's common to say that giving a job to a women or black person because of affirmative action is discrimination, but it's not always zero-sum, it doesn't always mean someone else lost the job. And you just can't forget that if someone did lose the job, they still, as a group, already had unfairly high numbers of that job.

Another problem with your judgement is that the whole idea with affirmative action is to favor whoever is the underdog and only until they no longer are, where cultural racism doesn't change sides.

> when “positive racism” became fashionable some 8 years ago or so.

This comment sounds like it doesn't know any history. Affirmative actions have been used globally for a very long time in repose to times & places when discrimination occurs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirmative_action

> The obvious alternative is to discourage racism and promote (real) equality.

Ah, so you do you do that? People have been trying that for a very long time. How well is it working? When has it worked better than affirmative actions?

To make a more subtle and deeper point about the irony of what you're saying, how do you actually "discourage" racism without in some way, shape or form giving preference to the downtrodden group? Isn't "discouraging" racism discriminatory against someone? If all discrimination is deplorable, is "discouraging" racism then deplorable because it's discriminatory against racists?

> But even if you do nothing, it's strictly better

Disagree. And note that proponents of actually fixing the problem would call doing nothing deplorable, because it in effect protects existing known discrimination by refusing to fix it.

> On the one had you have permanent negative cultural discrimination that is keeping some people down who don't deserve it, and on the other you have an attempt to counter that with visible positive visible/out-in-the-open affirmative action that is boosting the group that's being discriminated against.

The issue isn't positive vs negative discrimination or else the "fight racism with racism" camp wouldn't cry foul when positive discrimination is applied toward whites or men (in those rare cases when it actually is) nor would there be so much overt negative discrimination toward men and whites (the use of "white men" as a slur, the accusation that men are rapists and need to be trained not to rape, the propensity to blame all problems on whites/men, the existence of work groups and meetups that specifically exclude whites/men, etc). It's pretty clearly that there is some notion that certain genders/races are more deserving of both negative and positive discrimination than others.

> This comment sounds like it doesn't know any history. Affirmative actions have been used globally for a very long time in repose to times & places when discrimination occurs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirmative_action

The confusion is understandable; I should have used a different term. I coined "postive racism" to mean discrimination (specifically negative discrimination, per your definition) toward some group that is perceived to deserve it--those who advocate for the discrimination see it as righteous, hence 'positive'--for the sake of a somewhat familiar, concrete example, Antifa advocates for negative discrimination toward whites, men, etc. I should have used different words since "positive racism" sounds too similar to "positive discrimination" which already has an established meaning (and perhaps "positive racism" also already has an established meaning as well). I also used "discrimination" a lot when I technically meant what you're referring to as "negative discrimination"; in general, my post was ignoring affirmative action or "positive discrimination" because I don't understand it to be even remotely central to the broader national debate on race and social justice.

I would specifically not consider "affirmative action" to be a form of racism, although I think it's ill-considered and probably produces more racial tension, division, and strife than it alleviates. The specific reason I wouldn't consider it a form of racism is that I think racism implies animosity/hatred and not just discrimination. And while there probably are some who support affirmative action to antagonize whites, the overwhelming majority of proponents of AA over time have certainly been genuine in their intentions to reduce suffering.

> Ah, so you do you do that? People have been trying that for a very long time. How well is it working?

It's been working very well. Racism has been declining since the civil rights movement by all indicators. Equality of opportunity is at an all-time high in the history of the US, the West, and the whole world. You promote equality by promoting education, prosperity, and western/judeo-christian values. Chief among those values is individual liberty which naturally gives way to equality, and which is the antithesis to collectivist movements such as white supremacy, fascism/nationalism/national-socialism, communism, and so-called "anti-fascism" and "anti-racism" movements that are popular today.

> When has it worked better than affirmative actions?

I speculate (speculation is all we can do for this question) that it has always worked better (and far better) than affirmative action. As previously mentioned AA has probably not had a net positive impact even if it was well-intentioned.

> And note that proponents of actually fixing the problem would call doing nothing deplorable, because it in effect protects existing known discrimination by refusing to fix it.

Depends on how the problem is defined and one's values (hence the "subjectivity" in my original comment).

If the problem is "too much racism", then most people (including me) who are "proponents of fixing the problem" will naturally disagree with the idea that racism can solve the problem--racism is deplorable.

If the problem is "certain races and sexes deserve to be treated poorer than others" then of course racism will appear to be the solution. It's an inherently racist viewpoint, and people who espouse that viewpoint are (by definition) racists.

> I would specifically not consider "affirmative action" to be a form of racism [...] The specific reason I wouldn't consider it a form of racism is that I think racism implies animosity/hatred and not just discrimination. [...] the overwhelming majority of proponents of AA over time have certainly been genuine in their intentions to reduce suffering.

Agreed. Whatever differences of opinion we might have, this was well said, and I agree with you there.

The last part of your comment seems like it switches back to calling affirmative action racist implicitly though? Or, maybe I can't tell. I don't really understand the distinction you're making between positive discrimination and affirmative action.

I would totally agree that hateful discrimination is a bad thing, but from the top of the thread down, all we've been talking about is affirmative action, as far as I can tell, and nothing else. When @manfredo said "such a target is effectively impossible without discrimination", by "discrimination", he means affirmative action, right?

> You promote equality by promoting education, prosperity, and western/judeo-christian values.

Yes, true! And... this is exactly why some colleges have prioritized making sure they admit a few extra people from minority groups known to be suffering from discrimination, right?

> most people (including me) who are "proponents of fixing the problem" will naturally disagree with the idea that racism can solve the problem

Except nobody proposed racism as the solution in the animous/hateful sense. People proposed affirmative action as the solution.

> As previously mentioned AA has probably not had a net positive impact even if it was well-intentioned.

It sounds like you're hinting at the mismatch theory here and elsewhere... which is a common criticism, and it has been debated and studied at some length. Might be worth looking up some of the results.

Since AA has been used a lot, I'm not clear on why you're saying that racial tension and opportunity has improved dramatically, but that AA had nothing to do with it? Why are you sure that AA isn't the reason things are now better?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirmative_action#Mismatching

This article demonstrates some of the positive effects of AA, and also some of the negative effects of banning AA:

https://www.gse.harvard.edu/news/uk/18/07/case-affirmative-a...

I guess if I have a single point it's that framing affirmative action as discrimination isn't clear thinking. It sounds like that's not what you're talking about, but this is what I jumped into the fray to say. The argument used above, not by you, is trying to suggest and imply there's a hypocrisy to taking any action to prevent cultural discrimination because the action is also discriminatory. That's true only in a technical sense, but is only FUD that confuses the issue. The goal is what's important, and the goal is equality of opportunity and removal of all animous/hateful behavior. Taking actions to meet that goal have worked in the past and will continue to.

Why would it requiring discrimination be a problem?

Well, employment discrimination by gender is illegal in my country.

Because employers in the US are legally prohibited from discriminating on the basis of sex and race. At least in theory, enforcement seems to be lax in Silicon Valley.

Also, it creates a situation where people are aware that non-diverse employees are held to a more selective standard. This can increase impostor syndrome among diverse employees who may feel that they would not have been employed if they weren't of a specific gender or ethnicity.

You're asking why race and gender discrimination might be a problem?

I am asking why using discrimination (favoring women) to reverse a discrimination trend is a problem. Not why discrimination in general is a problem, which it obviously is.

Thanks. I have two thoughts.

1. The position that it's OK to fight discrimination with more discrimination is very different from the idea that discrimination is inherently bad.

2. The theory that some gender differences in occupation choice are caused by discrimination is both controversial and unproven.

If the difference is mainly caused by the genders having different statistical distributions of interests, you're actually using discrimination to fight peoples career choices.

> If the difference is mainly caused by the genders having different statistical distributions of interests, you're actually using discrimination to fight peoples career choices.

Conversely, if genders don't have a different intrinsic, permanent distributions of interests, then not using some affirmative action to correct the situation amounts to preserving the status quo of known cultural discrimination.

The problem with what you said is that we already have data, the distributions of interest have changed dramatically over time recently, and they are currently different from country to country.

That's pretty clear, hard evidence that the gender differences in occupation choice we have today in the US (for example) are not intrinsic to the genders. So, what does that leave as possible causes?

At most, it's evidence that intrinsic interest is not the only factor in career choice.

The most fascinating fact here is that the more rich and gender equal societies become, career choices end up more "gender stereotypical"!

It's easy to interpret that as when you're rich enough to pick the career that actually interests you, rather than the career most likely to keep starvation at bay, people follow their interests more.

What evidence is there that there is any intrinsic difference in interest?

> the more rich and gender equal societies become, career choices end up more "gender stereotypical"!

What if gender stereotypical career choices is an indicator that our society is not gender equal, and that we're patting ourselves on the back prematurely?

BTW, not really true that there's a correlation between gender equality metrics and stereotypical career choices. To come to that conclusion, you have to ignore some periods of time and ignore some countries in the world.

There is a huge amount of evidence that women and men are different statistically. That is, anyone can have any interest or personality trait, but on average the genders have separate distributions.

This is very controversial among political activists, but established fact in the relevant sciences.

Pinker's "The Blank Slate" is a good introduction.

I think that response is dodging the question and being very hand-wavy.

I didn't ask if the distributions are different. They are different, that's a fact we know, and what many people believe is the problem.

The question is, what evidence is there that the differences are intrinsic? For that, there's very little evidence in favor and strong evidence against. Specifically, the differences in the distributions of preferences among women over time and country by country are larger than today's differences between men and women in the US. That's pretty solid evidence that the distributions are cultural and not intrinsic to gender.

If those distribution differences were constant over a long time, say a thousand years, and constant globally, then your argument might have a leg to stand on.

Those are quite obvious things to control for, and it's not a good bet that the collective of world scientists never thought of them.

The established way to classify people's personality traits is the "Big Five"/OCEAN model: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits

Systematic gender differences show up across all cultures: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits#Ge...

If they’ve been controlled for, then point me to some data demonstrating it. If they have been controlled for, doesn’t the fact that some places in the world have greater than 50/50 female participation in STEM mean that the controlled data is nearly certain to show there is negligible or no intrinsic sex difference? It seems like you’re ignoring some of the data we actually do have in favor of belief.

Your second non-answer to my question is to point at the updated version of the Myers-Briggs test, right after saying ‘but, science’? Okay, what do personality tests have to do with cultural sex or race discrimination?

This only repeats your previous argument, it shows that cultural differences currently exist. Again, we already know that. It does not show that intrinsic sex differences exist. I recommend reading all of that article carefully before assuming it’s helping your argument in any way. The conclusion of the section you shared on gender differences says:

“It is important to recognize that individual differences in traits are relevant in a specific cultural context, and that the traits do not have their effects outside of that context.”

And Big Five is “established” as a personality test. Personality tests are pseudoscientific, even if Big 5 is ‘more scientific’ than Myers-Briggs.

“Like the Big 5 model, any personality or behavior assessment can’t know things you haven’t explicitly answered in the questionnaire, Stein says. Sometimes commercial personality tests ask odd questions—like, Do you identify with snakes? or How do you react to a certain color?—and try to draw inferences from your answers. Those kinds of conclusions venture into the pseudoscientific, Stein says.“

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-accurate-are-...

https://qz.com/1201773/we-took-the-worlds-most-scientific-pe...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits#...

I've been on the net long enough to not fall for the "spend hours digging up raw science or I won't believe you" gambit. Those guys will never change their mind even if you do devote your weekend to doing research for them.

I gave you a Pinker book to read and a well footnoted Wikipedia article on the science. I've spent enough work trying to educate someone who gives all the signs of just not wanting to change their mind.

> Okay, what do personality tests have to do with cultural sex or race discrimination?

Nothing, and I never claimed it had.

> Personality tests are pseudoscientific

The big five is the established scientific fact of 2019. Denying science because it doesn't fit with your ideology doesn't put you in great company.

Why did you give me links to Big 5 then, what is your point? How does a personality test demonstrate intrinsic sex differences? It doesn’t, and your well documented source says so clearly and explicitly.

I’m sorry I made you angry, there’s some miscommunication going on here. I’m not convinced we’re talking about the same thing because you haven’t brought anything to this conversation that demonstrates there’s evidence of intrinsic sex differences when it comes to career choices, you’ve only pointed to known cultural differences.

I agree with you that there are cultural differences.

Rereading, I'm struck by this quote:

> If those distribution differences were constant over a long time, say a thousand years, and constant globally, then your argument might have a leg to stand on.

So your standard of proof here 1000 years of studies, until you can agree that there is a chance this could be true.

Obviously, nothing anyone can say convince someone with such firm beliefs.

I agree there is miscommunication. I've been as clear as I can be, and I don't think any amount of me restating things can reach you.

A thousand years was just an example of something that could make your argument above work, or at least not disprove it immediately. Your argument doesn’t currently work because gender preference distributions have been changing dramatically in the last hundred years, and they’re still changing. Recent history disproves the notion that current preferences, and the current discrepancies between the sexes, might be intrinsic.

I’m ignoring your ad hominem, but FWIW it weakens your argument because it demonstrates you didn’t understand mine. It has also become clear you didn’t fully understand my question. So, yes, you could keep restating that cultural differences exist or bringing up other irrelevant things like personality tests, and yes, that will continue to fail to show that intrinsic sex differences exist.

> The theory that some gender differences in occupation choice are caused by discrimination is both controversial and unproven.

Its certainly not controversial that _some_ of the discrepancy is caused by discrimination. It is very obviously true historically for many careers. Consider medicine, where women were relegated to nursing because they couldn't cut it as physicians. Today that idea seems absurd, and of the brightest people I met in medical school, there was a fairly even split of men / women. So far medicine was more challenging than the typical programming job I"ve held, which is at least partially relevant.

To be clear I am certainly not arguing that 50/50 is the natural distribution of men/women among programmers. I have no idea what it is. But I'll bet it is higher than 98/2, which is about the ratio in the last 4 programming jobs I've held.

Lastly, I have two young daughters now. Its been a bit shocking to me to see how early they are inundated with messaging steering them towards being pretty, dressing like a girl, etc. I have no doubt the lingering stereotypes and cultural pressure steers women into so called traditional roles from an early age.

My programming demographic experience has been 80/20, FWIW.

Yeah, the smartest women go into medicine and law instead of programming. I claim it's largely because they find working with people more interesting than working with machines.

Your daughters being interested in "traditionally female" things might just be because they're female, and that is who they genuinely are.

> I claim it's largely because they find working with people more interesting than working with machines.

Well two in particular went into pathology and radiology, so its definitely not the social aspect (they don't regularly deal with patients). Also, what do you claim of the equal number of men who go into law and medicine?

> Your daughters being interested in "traditionally female" things might just be because they're female,

They aren't interested in much of anything yet -- they are 6 months and 2 years old.

Women are now a small but growing majority of both law and medical students:

https://www.enjuris.com/students/law-school-female-enrollmen... https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2017/12/19/women-a...

Breaking down the medical fields by gender distribution also follows expected patterns:

https://www.ama-assn.org/residents-students/specialty-profil...

I'm not saying these facts proves anything in particular, but they're good to be aware of.

FWIW, in her debate with Steven Pinker, Elizabeth Spelke shreds the incorrect argument that females have more interest in people and males have more interest in things. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Hb3oe7-PJ8

Please think carefully about what happens if your claim turns out to be wrong. If males and females turn out to have equal interest in people and things, then your argument that you're spreading here is unintentionally a cultural gender based bias, in effect unconscious sexism.

> When the industry is only 20-25% female, such a target is effectively impossible without discrimination.

This type of discrimination has a name, it’s called “affirmative action”. This argument that fixing an imbalance is discrimination and therefore somehow worse seems to be really common but I think it’s a little misguided to say we shouldn’t use it, and here’s why.

The imbalance we have is an imbalance that was caused by cultural discrimination against women, and it’s a type of discrimination that is often unseen and is hard and time consuming to fix. (Not to mention, nobody actually knows how.)

The idea for affirmative action is to provide a counter-acting force to the already existing discrimination. Furthermore, the idea is to use this force gently and, most importantly, temporarily, until some balance is restored.

We already know what happens if we take no action at all: we get discrimination against women. The industry used to be a much higher percentage of women 40 years ago. Why has it declined? It’s obviously cultural because it used to be higher in the recent past, and just before that it was near zero and women weren’t allowed to vote. The numbers have been swinging all over the map in just 100 years, so it clearly has not settled from the perspective of history.

So what would you do to fix an imbalance? What is your suggestion? Doing nothing already has a known, negative outcome. There are other ideas besides affirmative action. How well have they worked in the past?

Why do you think it is discrimination and not just women not choosing that career?

Look at other previously male dominated positions like doctors and law where you now in Sweden have more women graduating those fields than men. Something changed there. I doubt software development has been more hostile and conservative than for example law.

The thing is that women are studying at university at a larger degree than men in Sweden but they are not selecting STEM fields, especially not computer science.

Maybe it will change with role models, culture and different initiatives but I suspect that most young women right now think it is a boring as fuck career (at least those I talk to).

It would be like someone asking me if I would like to study to teach kindergarten. Maybe I as a male have been conditioned not to see that as an option and maybe many more would choose that career if we were raised differently but for me it just sounds like something I would really really not like. I respect the work but for me taking care of tons of kids all day sounds incredibly boring and rough. The idea that there is discrimination (which there is and some men suffer from) is not near my mind.

Most women I talk to express similar thoughts about software development.

> Why do you think it is discrimination and not just women not choosing that career?

Why do you think those two things are mutually exclusive? What if women are choosing to leave computer science because it's somewhere between subtly discriminatory and outright hostile?

I'm sure it's cultural because: in the US women in CS was ~37%, today it's 18%. Why the huge swing? There have been times in recent history when many many more women chose computer science. In India, there have been years when the participation rate was above 50%. There are places on earth today where many many more women chose STEM.

So, it's obvious based on the data we already have that today's low participation rates by women in the US and Europe is not an intrinsic property of women, rates are neither fixed nor the natural state of things.

All the rest of what you said is that maybe it's attitudes, and sure, maybe it is. Maybe that's the problem?

I've spoken with women too, and anecdotally, most women say the exact same thing as most men when they say computer programming sounds super boring. Some women I know confirm that discrimination and hostile behavior exists and is alive and well, especially the higher you go in an organization.

I don't think the problem is that they are leaving computer science, it is that they are not choosing it.

Participation used to be higher but now it is less; despite women getting more agency, doing better at school and getting high education than men. If you look at the most equal and rich countries where women are doing as well or in some areas better than men you don't have many who chooses software development as a career.

It could be just that fewer women want to be software developers and that is all that there is. And that more choice and more opportunities just makes other career paths more alluring.

Of course there can still be sexism and discrimination in certain cases but it is also very possible that it does not affect the number of women in tech much at all.

Yes, "leaving computer science" means that participation rates are going down, that fewer women are choosing it now versus in the recent past. The phrase always meant women as a group are leaving, it never meant that lots of individual women were starting CS careers and then quitting.

> If you look at the most equal and rich countries where women are doing as well or in some areas better than men you don't have many who chooses software development as a career.

That is not true. Participation rates have been very high in some of the countries that are now low. Participation rates in some of those countries are currently high.

You're trying to suggest that women as a group don't want computer science, by their nature as women, but to make that claim you have to deny history and ignore facts.

> It could be just that fewer women want to be software developers and that is all that there is.

The numbers changed a lot, and there is a reason. What you're saying is you don't know the reason, and I agree with you.

> it is also very possible that it [discrimination] does not affect the number of women in tech much at all.

I think it's extremely, extremely unlikely. It's demonstrated that the choices are cultural and not intrinsic to gender. So, your job then is to show that cultural attitudes are not affected by cultural discrimination. You're setting yourself up for an impossible task.

>That is not true. Participation rates have been very high in some of the countries that are now low. Participation rates in some of those countries are currently high.

Yes, and my point is that when those women got more power, more choice, more money and more freedom they started to become less likely to choose software development and more likely to select other professions. Other professions that had historically been male dominated.

So it could be that if you are free to choose there are certain professions that will have a larger part male or female and that will amplify in a culture of freedom. You will choose what your friends choose.

For example I don't think that you would ever have 50% men/women that are interested in working in kindergarten. I think there is some biology in that and then it is amplified by most men not wanting it making it less likely for those that might want it to actually choose.

> when those women got more power, more choice, more money and more freedom they started to become less likely to choose software development

You're cherry-picking there, and incorrectly assigning causation to correlation. Before 1984 in the US, women's choice and power was increasing, and so what their participation in CS. In some other countries, women's participation rates in STEM have continued to increase as they integrate with the workforce. So you could use the very same argument you used to come to the opposite conclusion.

> You will choose what your friends choose.

Totally agree there! That may or may not have to do with discrimination, but you're right about that.

> I think there is some biology

This is the root of it. You've decided that women intrinsically don't want to do math or engineering.

There's data that shows otherwise, but it is indeed difficult to prove anything concrete. Nonetheless, we have strong indicators that today's ratios are not natural. And why would they have settled yet? It's barely been 3-4 generations since women were allowed to even vote. It's clearly still in flux, so suggesting that biology explains today's difference is obviously stretching.

Bottom line is I don't doubt preferences are at play, and what I'm saying is that biology can't explain the current preferences in the US or in Sweden either. Biology is not fluctuating on the 100 year time scale, and cultural norms are. Assuming that the known, documented sexism during the last century is fixed now and that cultural attitudes have settles and job choices reflect intrinsic gender differences... well it's my opinion, but looking at all the facts we do have, that seems so unlikely I believe it's impossible.

> The imbalance we have is an imbalance that was caused by cultural discrimination against women

This is a very bold assumption on your part. For one, representation of women in technology was actually higher when discrimination against women was more prevalent, during the 1970s and 80s. This inverse relationship between gender equality and representation of women in technology is reproduced today. Countries with less gender equality actually see higher rates of women in tech as compared to countries with more gender equality.

The notion that discriminating against men will somehow end discrimination against women is similarly naive. When discrimination in the workplace occurs, employees are aware of it. Putting women in a situation where the majority of their coworkers know that they are being held to a different standard is an exceedingly easy way to foster a toxic workplace.

> So what would you do to fix an imbalance? What is your suggestion? Doing nothing already has a known, negative outcome. There are other ideas besides affirmative action. How well have they worked in the past?

Rethink whether there's anything that needs to be fixed. We should see women as individuals capable of making their own career choices, instead of as objects to be herded into one field or another.

You can't use statistics without a model. The problem is that you have a shitty model and it's annoying when you keep parroting it like you're so logical. Your model as inferred from this comment is that there's some way to quantify the current applicants, and that applicants below a certain value are always rejected. The remaining applicants are "above the bar" and could be hired. The current "above the bar" group is not 50/50, therefore changing it means accepting people below the bar.

The problem is that none of your assumptions hold water. Technical interviews are about as accurate as flipping a coin. Mundane factors like whether or not the interview is after lunch have a major impact on pass rates. Performance on the interview has little to no predictive value for future job performance.

You can't brush this off as social ignorance, this is simply ignorance of the facts.

You did not actually refute any of his claims or demonstrate in any way that his argument 'does not hold water'.

If you truly believe that 'interviewing is completely random' then I have some other, far deeper concerns you might want to address before we even remotely broach the subject of gender disparity.

Moreover - you're totally missing the point: it's not sexist to merely make the argument that 50/50 hiring can lower the bar. It's just intellectual rhetoric. Maybe it's good maybe it's bad, but it's not inherently sexist.

Ergo: if you don't agree with the PC, even if you make a reasonable argument (or even one that's very good) you're put out to pasture.

This is just one example of PC insane enforcement, there are many.

Which is why it's probably better to avoid such subjects because even intelligent people seem to have difficulty being tolerant, or even navigating the issues.

Yes! This is the kind of response I would like to have from my coworkers. Attack my models, my assumptions, my arguments. Don't just silently disagree and then label me a sexist afterwards.

Your presumption that I have some agenda and it wasn't social ignorance is a little offensive but whatever. "Ignorance of facts" should not be used as an insult but an opportunity to educate. The social fact that I am guilty of not knowing is that this a commonly parroted argument instead of the first logical model you come up with.

I do think you represented the argument I had at the time very well. The difference is that I used competitive programming as my example for something more controlled (plenty of stats going all the way back to high school level and on the internet no one knows if you're a man/woman/dog). Your counterargument that it isn't predictive is still valid.

Regardless, my current stance is that the question of "whether it lowers the bar or not" is not a relevant question to ask.

The only point I was trying to make with my story is that you can evoke very passionate attacks just for talking about the topic.

>Don't just silently disagree and then label me a sexist afterwards.

Why can't you criticize your own model, though? Your assertion that hiring more women will lower standards is premised on a belief that men are inherently better. Isn't that embarrassingly obvious to deduce from what you say?

Why isn't it the case that the bar is already lowered for straight, white men or people who otherwise fit tech stereotypes?

Or why does the value of diversity have to manifest in every individual? Maybe being in a diverse work force makes the cis, straight, white men and the company as a whole perform better.

And even if everything I'm saying is just flowery rhetoric with no rational basis, it's still a respectful way to view and treat other people, and your model that suggests women are generally inferior to men takes a big shit all over the aspiration of living in an inclusive, harmonious society.

"Anybody can create a cryptosystem that they themselves cannot break" -- it's easy to not see something wrong with what you're proposing for a variety of reason, this is why level-headed discussion is necessary and valuable. Nobody has the same background or viewpoint, and it's oftentimes harder to criticize others than it is to criticize yourself.

But it's difficult. Nobody likes to confront people and tell them that their views on women's biology affecting their engineering skills are sexist. It also causes strife in the workplace.

What I suggest is to just be polite to your coworkers and let HR worry about the hiring process. Don't say anything to your coworkers that could suggest they are somehow inferior or have "bad" genetic traits. This seems like basic human civility that gets tossed out the window when someone has a right-wing view about a minority or women.

> Why can't you criticize your own model, though?

I do but lunchtime only lasted so long before it imploded

> Your assertion that hiring more women will lower standards is premised on a belief that men are inherently better. Isn't that embarrassingly obvious to deduce from what you say?

If you're making "embarrassingly obvious deductions" you might be pattern matching me into your favorite straw man and not really deducing anything at all.

I never said women are inferior to men and it's not possible to logically deduce that from what I said. The only premise I assumed is that there are currently more men than women at the top (e.g., pipeline problem). You can even have the average women be way superior to men and still have the problem of hiring more women leading to lower standards, if the few top women are all happily employed elsewhere. I am not even saying this reflects reality, just that your logic sucks.

Why does everything have to be a dog whistle to fit people into hate groups? Some assholes like me are merely technical correctness assholes.

> ...pattern matching me into your favorite straw man...

So you were just trying to make a nuanced point about women's general engineering skills based on their biology and don't want to be lumped in with all those unsavory people who give lesser consideration to women engineers based on sexist beliefs about women. Noted.

>I never said women are inferior to men and it's not possible to logically deduce that from what I said.

Didn't you imply that hiring women would be 'lowering the bar'?

Are you so blinded by your pattern matching of what you think he’s saying that you can’t even read the second half of his post??

If there are significantly less women applying for software development jobs then statistically, assuming women are equally good software developers as men, aiming for 50/50 representation necessitates lowering the bar

This does not mean that it’s not a worthwhile pursuit to aim for equal representation

It’s an argument for working towards more women in STEM (we want bigger application pools!)

> Your assertion that hiring more women will lower standards is premised on a belief that men are inherently better. Isn't that embarrassingly obvious to deduce from what you say?

Not at all. Consider:

- You have a pool of 100 men to choose from

- You have a pool of 10 women to choose from.

- You need to hire 20 people.

So, you choose the top 10% of the men and 100% of the women in order to achieve gender parity.

There is no premise that men are inherently better, only that the talent pool is so much larger that you can more easily distill high quality candidates.

>There is no premise that men are inherently better...

Well, you explicitly contrived a premise that suggests women are excluded from hiring for some other reason. Why are you only choosing from 10 women? And did you not consider the point about the benefits of diversity not needing to manifest in every individual?

> Why are you only choosing from 10 women?

Because only 10 women applied. Meanwhile 100 men applied.

So then you say: "Your recruiting efforts need to target more women".

How? If you go to a college STEM fair to recruit, the same thing will happen. 10 men will stop by your booth for every 1 woman.

> Why can't you criticize your own model, though? Your assertion that hiring more women will lower standards is premised on a belief that men are inherently better

Why couldn’t you criticize your own model of what you assumed the guy you were replying to was talking about?

He said nothing about women being inferior to men

The fact that you seem to think that challenging your own assumptions is so easy while at the same time being fully incapable of doing so is pretty damned rich

>He said nothing about women being inferior to men

No, he just clearly implied it.

> Your assertion that hiring more women will lower standards is premised on a belief that men are inherently better.

You are incorrect. Let's imagine a group of ten men and ten women: we want to hire four in total. Let's assume that we can reduce a potential employee's worth down to a single number from 1 to 10, in order to simplify the example. The men are rated [1, 2, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 9, 10]; the women are rated [3, 4, 5, 5, 6, 6, 7, 7, 8, 10]. In this example the women are better on average (5.6) than the men (5.5) — but hiring the top four candidates results in hiring three men [9, 9 & 10] and one woman [10].

This is because while the mean woman is better than the mean man, the standard deviation of skills is more widely distributed across men than women in the example: more men are excellent, but also more men are terrible (in the example, the lowest three candidates are men!).

If we're going to contrive an instance that will result in a gender gap then why not just say we hire only 3 people? That would be a perfectly contrived example that would illustrate what you're trying to say.

Beyond your contrivances, I take issue with you suggesting that employees can (or should) be rated on a linear scale. Companies have very specific needs and maybe a candidate who is a "2" on your scale is a "10" at fulfilling what the company needs.

I'll say again too that the value of diversity doesn't need to manifest itself in every individual.

Regardless of the model, how can optimizing two metrics ever yield an improvement in the first compared to just optimizing it alone?

Or is the idea that, because the old model sucks, we need to optimize this intermediary metric (diversity) in the interests of the ultimate goal of raising-the-bar?

It could work better because we are so bad at actually optimizing for the first variable that we would get better results by not optimizing for it.

> Mundane factors like whether or not the interview is after lunch have a major impact on pass rates.

[citation needed]

If this is just inferred based on that observation about judges and meal breaks, then keep in mind that this is just a factoid, and a one that fails the sniff test. C.f. http://nautil.us/blog/impossibly-hungry-judges.

You don't need statistical models to figure out that if you're desperate to hire certain people and there's very few of them in your hiring pipeline, you'll turn a blind eye towards certain interview mistakes where you would normally disqualify candidates.

This is the standard model used in education, military, and industry. Millions of people go through processes designed according to this model every year, and probably tens of thousands of scientific papers have been written in context of this model. Your complaints are mostly utterly false (eg. “technical interviews are about as accurate as flipping a coin“ is in contrary of the established consensus in literature, and so is “ Performance on the interview has little to no predictive value for future job performance“).

If this was indeed a shitty model, it would have been pointed out to grandparent when he brought it up, but since this model is commonly used and extremely useful, what he got instead was silencing and penalizing through anonymous back door channels.

I've once engaged in a similar discussion with a female colleague and it escalated into a shit-show with manager & HR being involved and colleague being in tears claiming I'm "sexist" despite my aggressive attempts to de-escalate and walk away from continuing the conversation. The HR did an investigation and came to a conclusion that I didn't do anything wrong, but strongly suggested not talking about anything like that in future. The colleague made a claim that she wouldn't be able to work with me in the same company and quit.

"aggressive attempts to de-escalate"

She initiated the conversation in the first place and I was trying to backpedal pretty much the whole time, but she just kept pushing.

I don't support or discourage your argument in this case. I'll just make a very important point that many young folks take (and my younger self took) a while to grasp…

There are a number of sensitive issues where stark logic and "inconvenient" facts are very much not appreciated. Best to avoid them in polite discussion.

Given that most social issues are not cut and dry, there is difficulty in finding the logical answer anyway. Rarely do we have all the facts available, even if a correct decision could be made with them. Rather we have mostly personal anecdotes which are not sufficient.

So the unpopular technical point of view is rarely worth giving, while also potentially a CLM (career limiting move).

For an example, see the results of RMS' recent pedantic take on the Epstein case.

> So I started thinking about the problem mathematically like any engineer would, with statistical distributions and estimates of the existing pipeline and all.

This is one of the problems a lot of engineers have, and I make this mistake too more often than I want to admit.

Cultural discrimination isn't a math problem, and however you modeled it, your logic doesn't map well to history at all. When you double down on a math argument, what it sounds like to other people is that you're not open to the possibility that you made a logic or modeling mistake, that you've decided men are better than women, and that you're trying to confuse the argument with a technicality.

FWIW, there might be math problem with your suggestion that 50/50 would lower the bar. The ratio is not absolute, and this isn't zero sum. More women participating doesn't mean fewer men, it means more people. When there are more people, in general, the absolute number of excellent people goes up.

I don't know what you mean by "the bar". What does it mean to lower the bar? Are you talking about how hard it is to get a job, get promoted, be in the top 10%? I don't understand your argument.

No matter what math/logic you used, the layman translation of saying the bar goes down with inclusion of more women is that you believe women to be inferior. That may not be your intent, but that's what people are hearing you say.

>personally I don't see underrepresentation of women in tech as a problem that can be or should be 'solved'

I say the below not as an attempt to criticize you for this viewpoint, but as a way to try to explain why this viewpoint is often interpreted as sexist.

The question is why do you believe this? The possible explanations for why women are underrepresented in tech basically comes down to either nature or nurture. Either there is something in the way we as a society and industry educate, hire, manage, and promote women or there is something fundamentally different about women that prevents them from participating in this industry at the same rate as men. The former is fixable and you say this isn't fixable so we can assume this isn't your viewpoint. That would seem to mean your explanation relies on the idea that there is something fundamentally different about women that leads to them not going into tech. Do you see how that could easily be interpreted as sexist? It doesn't take much of a leap for people to hear the non-sexist "woman don't do this" as the sexist "women can't do this". You need to be able to articulate why you belong in that first camp or else everyone will just write you off as being in the second.

There's something fundamentally different about women that enables them to give birth to children. Humanity has been discussing the differences in behaviour between these two groups for literally millennia. Are we really going to just decide by fiat that there is zero possibility of a difference in inclination or ability that lends itself to women simply not wanting to be in this field as much as men?

You essentially have to practice some kind of biological denialism in order to believe this "problem" is entirely managerial in nature. Discussing biological differences between sexes should not be considered sexism.

what is more interesting to discuss is why the same fervour is not given to other jobs where an imbalance in gender exists (for example, registered nurses).

There's also more male electricians than female ones.

I feel that if females who would have made good engineers are turned away by discrimination or harassment, there's a good opportunity for a company to find hidden gems of an employee for lower cost than the equivalent male by making sure she is treated well. Then natural competition should balance out the cost difference over time.

For the record, there is absolutely a push to get more male nurses and there are orgs that try to get men into nursing.

How big is that push compared to the push mentioned in this thread? I have no numbers but my first guess is that it is smaller.

negligible. It's actually very simple. Programmers are big money makers for companies, specially good programmers. Programmers are mostly male, that means there is almost 50% of the population that s not even considering that career. How much easier will it be to hire new programmers if the hiring pool would almost double? There is no such problem in other areas. Not other "mostly male" or "mostly female" career is as effective for generating money for employers or is so hard to get good employees.

Yeah, you're right. People just have to accept that back when we were living in caves, women did the child-rearing, and men did the computer programming, and by now it's hard-wired into our nature. If you doubt this, it must be because you don't believe that men and women differ biologically at all.

Ah, the straw-person in its natural habitat.

I mean, if you don't think there were gender roles during the caveman days that had critical impact on our evolution and the formation of civilization, then so be it. Tactical nihilism is super cool, just disbelieve everything and reject all premises! We'll arrive at a perfect mathematical sphere of truth eventually, right?

> Do you see how that could easily be interpreted as sexist? It doesn't take much of a leap for people to hear the non-sexist "woman don't do this" as the sexist "women can't do this". You need to be able to articulate why you belong in that first camp or else everyone will just write you off as being in the second.

Here you've identified the actual problem, which is people hearing "don't do this" as "can't do this". I.e. people failing to apply their brains to a basic comprehension task. If we're to levy accusations of "-ism", then I'd call promoting this behavior as anti-intellectualism, or being pro-stupidity.

Or they are just trying to get ahead of the argument and shut it down before it gets really uncomfortable.

I don’t know how many times I have seen the “don’t do this” argument being propped up by a due to “can’t do this” argument.

If you let these things run it’s course then it always ends up at the genetics/skull. And it’s always by people who clearly have no idea about what they are talking about and can’t actually point to any biological differences that would cause it, other than child birth... So it ends with “must be biological” because reasons, so “don’t do anything”.

Seeing the same argument play out over and over, always ending at the same spot with no evidence is infuriating.

> Or they are just trying to get ahead of the argument and shut it down before it gets really uncomfortable.

That would make them not only anti-intellectual/pro-stupidity, but also assuming and acting in bad faith to shut down the discussion. A honest person would point out that the conversation makes them uncomfortable, and that they don't want to continue it.

> If you let these things run it’s course then it always ends up at the genetics/skull.

Except all the times it doesn't. Quite often, the conversation ends up being about voluntary preferences (people will e.g. point out that the weaker the economic pressures and the higher the freedom of choosing your own career, the more gender-segregated the job market becomes). Also, even if the discussion ends up at genetics, it's only ever a problem if one or both parties make the error of reasoning and passing judgements about individuals from population-level statistics.

> So it ends with “must be biological” because reasons, so “don’t do anything”.

It can be a valid and correct conclusion. If you starts by assuming something must be done, then there's no point in even having any discussion, because you've already made up your mind and seek justifications. It would be then best if you left the discussion to those who want to discover the truth about the issue.

> Seeing the same argument play out over and over, always ending at the same spot with no evidence is infuriating.

How can people tell, if they always shut the argument down beforehand with some underhanded maneuver like reading "don't do" and accusing the person of saying "can't do"?

Can’t say I have ever seen it play out any different, so I would assume that “quite often” to be exceptionally rare.

People can tell if they have seen it lots of times before they start to shut it down.

I would also argue that it makes them smart, not pro stupidity or anti intellectual. Let me try and use a tech analogy to explain it. Say you repeatedly see junior admins putting unsecured databases on the internet which subsequently get compromised. How many times do you need to see the beginnings of that event chain before you start intervening?

Also there is nothing intellectual about entertaining the same argument over and over. Or do you also think we should seriously consider the flat earth argument every time someone brings it up.

> People can tell if they have seen it lots of times before they start to shut it down.

Yeah, I can buy that. So now please scroll to the top of the thread and see the topic - the question why some people don't want to discuss politics at work. Exactly because of that - because it very predictably leads to nothing good.

But unlike the anti-intellectual position we're discussing in this corner of the thread, opposing political topics at work because of their inflammatory nature is a rational, consistent, and smart position. Nobody is telling a particular political position is wrong - just that work is not a right place for off-topic, highly emotional discussions. "Don't discuss politics at work" is the equivalent of "don't let junior admins manage public-facing databases with sensitive data without supervision".

And as for the anti-intellectuals, the reason they like to do the "don't do/don't want to" -> "can't do" substitution is because without it, if viewed calmly and rationally, they would reveal themselves to be similar to anti-vaxxers, in terms of pushing positions unsubstantiated by evidence but emotionally appealing.

>don't let junior admins manage public-facing databases with sensitive data without supervision

Poor Yorick will never live it down, will he?

In this particular case it’s not just politics that could be equally right either way. It’s politics where one of the options is wrong and science should be able to reveal which one.

And in that case challenging the popular opinion better come with actual scientific research, not lunch time napkin math pulled out of thin air.

> It doesn't take much of a leap for people to hear the non-sexist "woman don't do this" as the sexist "women can't do this"

Have you considered that this assumed malice is creating a false sense of sexism in the industry and in turn driving women away from the industry?

> nature or nurture

This has been studied now, and the data points strongly towards nature. Country's with a higher level of gender equality have more gender disparity in fields such as STEM, not less. The country's that have done the most to alleviate the issues you've mentioned have the lowest percentage of women engineers.

It was the exact opposite of what everyone thought would happen. These results were so unexpected that we called it the Gender-equality paradox.

That women have less interest in or capacity for STEM work is the most parsimonious explanation.

"Either there is something in the way we as a society and industry educate, hire, manage, and promote women".

I would add raise and socialize as kids to the list, but to me that's clearly part of it.

The entire evolution of a person from baby to adult is moulded by society, which makes it pretty ridiculous when the enlightened techies want to solve the lack of women in tech by only "fixing" hiring and promoting. And management, if we're feeling generous.

>To make it clear, we should definitely support everyone who is in tech, and make it an inclusive environment, but the continued push for 50/50 isn't going to happen so perhaps its not worth the huge money sink it is.

Not worth the huge money sink to whom? The companies involved? Because the ideologues of identity politics capitalizing on this "shame"-induced economy are making a fortune from it and while they continue to do so, you can expect more of the same.

It will stop of course when the bubble pops, lucrative front-end JS jobs requiring a 3 month "bootcamp" to get into disappear and every remaining IC is stack ranked based on that which is quantitative.

> the numbers have barely budged in more than 10 years

What are you talking about? The numbers have varied wildly in the last 50 years. In the US it was almost 40% women in CS in 1984. Now it’s 18%. Why? The numbers also vary wildly from country to country, and in India some years have seen greater than 50% women in CS. Why?

Cherry picking numbers to make it seem like it’s not changing and make it seem like today’s numbers are the natural order of things, when that’s very very far from the truth, is a way to ensure people who think will interpret your argument as sexist.

>> Underrepresented minorities in tech

>> If you disagree I’d love to understand your viewpoint as to why.

I'm a underrepresented minority in just about everywhere but tech, yet you draw the line "at tech" for some arbitrary reason (as if my place of work or work opportunities defines who I am).

This is why I disagree. Someone is making arbitrary groups of underrepresentation and/or minority harm who have no real claim over said power.

Also:

>> I will say that it takes a certain level of privilege...

I am one of said underrepresented minorities "not in tech" (I also don't work in tech anymore, so I guess I'm in the clear now) who have no interest or desire to talk politics at work. Not when I was poor and drawing on EBT/SNAP/WIC and not when I've been well off, or anywhere in between.

There is no absolute reason you have to be privileged to not want to talk about politics at work. This is a majorly false assumption.

By "discussing" do you mean a bunch of people getting together to agree with each other on these topics? I ask that because I can't see a socially well-adjusted person openly opposing any of these ideas. This is the curse of political correctness. The topics you list carry the weight of such moral certainty in most peoples' minds that opposing someone's opinion on the topic will immediately trigger a negative reaction. This makes it "political"

For example, if someone at an office in downtown SF openly announced they didn't want to work with an lgbt person, would their coworkers look at that person and be like "Aww, poor thing, lets discuss this with him or her so I can understand his way of thinking" or would they just think "bigot! I knew something was off about him"

Btw, I think these are all important topics and I agree that we should be trying to educate people via discussion and empathy.

Take underrepresented minorities in tech (presuming yours is a tech workplace): You can work on that in a "nonpolitical" way. (It is, as you say, still politics, in a way, but it's not being done like it's politics.) You say, "You know that Android developer position that's been open for four months, that we can't find anyone for? I wonder if there might be some non-traditional candidates that would fit that role. How could we go about finding them?" That's done in a non-political way. The emphasis is on "this could help the organization".

Or, you could address the same issue by saying "We need to pressure HR to require them to present at least one under-represented minority candidate for each open position." That's a much more political approach to the same problem.

On a more general level:

> We can’t improve without discussion, and it’s unfortunate that these type of issues are so divisive.

Sure. But don't do the discussing at work. That's not what work is for. (The exception is when the problem does affect work. If the workplace is trans-hostile, say, you need to address that at work, and there's probably not a non-political way to do it.)

Serious question: why do you think work shouldn't be about discussing the issues that matter? Why dance around the issues?

Behind your question seems to be the idea that all places should be places for discussing the "ideas that matter". I don't think that is correct.

Work isn't a debating society. It isn't part of a political campaign. It's a place for efficiently producing things that people want. If it fails at that, society suffers, even if some really good debates happen. We have other places for those debates; we don't have other places for producing the things that society needs.

Work isn't a debating society but it is part of larger society, if we all go to work building gas chambers without any willingness to discuss the political implications of having all these damn gas chambers around, well..

— lgbt: Don’t discuss the possibility about being fired for your sexuality because it’s too political.

— Women in tech: Nope, let’s not go there, too political.

— Underrepresented minorities in tech: Sorry it’s a pipeline problem, don’t bring politics into this.

In my experience in tech (though only Silicon Valley tech companies, so that's a narrow sample) this the opposite of what is true. Companies are very eager to display how much they support LGBT movements and announce how they'll increase diversity by offering larger hiring bonuses for diverse hires and institute systems of reservations for women and non-Asian PoC. Both the private and public companies I've worked with have been very active in pursuing these goals. And we're not alone Microsoft offers larger bonuses for hiring managers that hire diverse candidates [1], and Intel withholds portions of bonuses unless diversity quotas are not met [2].

1. https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/19/18508013/microsoft-pro-di...

2. https://www.wsj.com/articles/intel-hits-a-novel-diversity-ta...

> it’s unfortunate that these type of issues are so divisive.

The reason they are so divisive is because the loud people fall into two categories: 1) people who loudly and constantly complain about these issues and for whom no amount of improvement is enough, and 2) people who think all these problems are greatly exaggerated, part of the liberal culture wars, and find it extremely annoying that anyone would bring it up.

The "silent majority" in these issues are people who say "yeah, sure, it seems fair to allow gay marriage, why not" and "let's see what we can do to improve female and minority representation but let's not jump to the conclusion that anyone in particular is to blame".

The hallmarks of being in this silent majority are:

- being generally well-intentioned

- supportive of incremental, common-sense solutions that are not zero-sum

- dislikes intense conflict and blame games

- does not take a view of the issue that makes one group of people the "heroes/victims" and another the "villains"

So, if you hear the proposal "let's allow politics at work", who do you think is actually going to speak up? That's right, the loud and annoying people that you can hear anytime by turning on the news. Ideologues for whom compromise and assuming good faith in your opponents is anathema. No thanks.

>The "silent majority" in these issues are people who say "yeah, sure, it seems fair to allow gay marriage, why not"...

For a very long time this was NOT the majority opinion despite some brave tech companies imposing policies that prevented LGBT discrimination.

Keep in mind too that many states in which tech companies do business still (with the support of the majority) legalize discrimination of LGBT in hiring, housing, lending, everything. Some states even have policies that try to prevent LGBT people from raising families.

This isn't a case of two strident extremes causing a ruckus while the well-mannered majority knows best.

Of course. Every old idea was new once, and that is the role of the activist and ideologue: to introduce new ideas for public assessment.

But these people would do well to remember that the bulk of the public they are trying to convince are not ideologues as well.

The well mannered majority may not know best but it is what is ultimately making the decisions.

And that is the problem, isn't it? If the majority had been left to make decisions, things wouldn't have changed. Things only changed because the minorities spoke up and convinced the majority that change was needed. This is why discussion, debate and dissent are necessary, because opinions should percolate and attitudes should be exposed to contrary influences.

I think a large majority of the arguments here are folks looking at this through an engineering lens, trying to optimize the workplace at the cost of minorities or discriminated groups, but shouldn't this be the other way around? Workplaces should instead be optimized for everyone to be able to work there, and inclusion is an important part of that goal.

The ideologue does what the ideologue does, and campaigns for change. That's as you said, their role is to believe that change is possible, and that their efforts will contribute to bringing it about. And the whole point of theirs is to reach out to the non ideologues. The fact that there's some bad actors out there that either die to incompetence or maliciousness make a mess of it doesn't mean that the ideology is flawed.

You are right about how change comes about. It is just that there is a time and place for it. I said that the role of the ideologue is to introduce new ideas to society, not to harp on them constantly when and where they want without restriction.

A line is crossed when they come into the workplace and make wrongthink a fireable offense. The proper place for these things to be worked out is, for the most part, in the media and on discussion boards like these. Or in private conversations like the bar. The key to understanding this is in the word "workplace": it isn't the "socialjusticeplace" or the "inclusionplace".

Conservatives have their place too. The role of progressives is to introduce new ideas. The role of conservatives is to present the argument about why these new ideas might not work. "Change" is not an automatic good. For example, all of us will undergo the change from "alive" to "dead". Personally, if it were within my power, I'd prefer not to undergo that particular change.

If I could wave a magic wand and create a space for conservative and liberal ideologues to beat each other senseless, and leave the rest of us out of it until the winner is decided, I would certainly do so.

>...make wrongthink a fireable offense. The proper place for these things to be worked out is, for the most part, in the media...

When you contend (at work) that some of your coworkers ought to be second-class citizens and be considered inherently inferior due to their biology then you absolutely should be fired. That is in clear violation of most companies' very reasonable policies. This isn't merely "stating why new ideas might not work" (also, people's existence are not "new ideas"). Furthermore, spreading these negative attitudes about your coworkers very likely contributes more negativity to the workplace than arguments that workers should be treated with similar respect and dignity.

> If you disagree I’d love to understand your viewpoint as to why.

I don't disagree, but I'm "privileged" and want to keep it that way for me and my posterity. Not ashamed in the least because its not bad to be privileged.

I'll openly admit that I don't have an answer for the deeper issue here (Gitlab selling software to evil customers), in terms of specifically politics:

I don't think politics should be discussed at workplaces that do not participate in political systems in an official capacity (lobbying, PACs etc.). If your employer engages in politics, then that should be an allowed topic and/or other accommodations should be made for employees who regard their employer as morally reprehensible.

> LGBTQ+, women in tech, underrepresented minorities in tech, education

I don't consider these political in any way. Employees should be able to talk about how the company can improve its own diversity policies, irrespective of what the government decides what to do. The line of thinking here is similar to "separating church and state," and also that it's easier to change company policy: changing company policy provides quick and "easy" improvements to social progress, while the longer and more difficult fights at the political level occur.

Every voter (and non voter) is participating in a political system by choosing to vote (and not vote!). Those who got democracy also got all the responsibility with it.

Those in a democratic system who do not engage in politics are bad citizens.

Which portion of my comments suggests nonparticipation in government by citizens? It suggests exactly the opposite.

Voting is a continuous event. Participating in it requires extensive and continuous discussion among peers who would make up their mind.

The problem is getting hooked on politics that doesn't actually affect you personally, other people on your team, or how you do your job. Just like we do on Hacker News, you can have employees reading about stuff happening elsewhere in the world, commenting on it, and getting upset over it.

At large companies, this can include things going on in different parts of the company. You don't know them or how they work, but you start taking it personally because it affects the company's reputation.

I'm retired, but if I went back to work, I would want to pay more attention to helping my co-workers and accomplishing the team's mission (which of course involves some politics) and pay a lot less attention to other, less relevant politics.

You can say it's privileged to want to shut out the world and concentrate on improving one thing, but I prefer to think of this as an aspirational goal.

No, you're just privileged enough to not have to worry about a divisive political issue because it doesn't directly impact you. There's nothing wrong with that, if you're aware of it.

But maybe this is true of most people and most political issues, other than the ones that do affect them? And even then, they might want to get away from politics when they go to work?

Others made good general and specific arguments for avoiding such discussions at a workplace, but I'd like to offer a thought experiment that can help understand it better.

Imagine yourself noticing that people around you start to reveal themselves as strongly religious - and not in your religion, if you subscribe to any - and very much into proselytizing. Not a day goes by without someone approaching you to convince you to believe in their god. Even when not explicitly preaching, they keep invalidating everything you worry about. "You fret about your 401k as if you were to use it. Armageddon is coming soon, and if you believe in God, you'll get the best 401k there is!". "I wonder how can you spend so much time on that hobby, when so many people still haven't heard the Good News." "Yes, this disease is a tragedy, but God's Kingdom will soon cure it, and all others too. These doctors are wasting their time." "You're depressed because of climate change? Don't be! God won't let anything happen to Earth!"

At some point you would really start to prefer people to stop talking any and all religion at workplace.

This isn't an arbitrary example. As a teenager, I've been that preacher. People who do that believe strongly in what they talk about - it's literally the most important issue in their lives. The conflict stems from failure to understand that just because they care about an issue, doesn't mean everyone else does too. Failing to recognize that, doubling down on efforts to make others pay attention, breeds contempt, resentment, and otherwise achieves the exact opposite of what's intended.

I've seen both sides of this, and the way the topics you mention are approached today very much reminds me of such religious groups. There's a time and place for all discussions, but they need to happen in contexts where all parties are at least a little receptive, and not by performing DDOS on someone's attention, or invalidating everything they care about that's not related to the important issue.

This is not a fair comparison. The OC was not talking about proselytizing, they were talking about how to create an inclusive environment at work. We cannot create an inclusive environment at work if we are not allowed to openly talk about groups who currently do not feel included and why that is.

Common sense states that it's okay to talk about politics insofar as it relates to workplace productivity.

> Common sense states that it's okay to talk about politics insofar as it relates to workplace productivity.

I don't think this is a sensible idea or common sense.

The problem with it is that it's fine as long as science shows our ideal workplace environment as more productive or superior. We can say things like "diverse working environments increase productivity" and act backed by those facts.

Problem is that it's not really guaranteed that the mechanisms science might suggest in the future actually do support our ideal workplace conditions.

Do we then act on those productivity enhancing ideas as well, even in cases in which they are against our ideals? Would we embrace racism or ageism in the name of productivity?

To me normalizing (allegedly) neutral arguments based on productivity feels like a dangerous shortcut.

Being a preacher does not feel like proselytizing. It feels like focusing people's attention on important issues, and working towards an inclusive* environment conductive to open talk about the most important of issues.

* - Inclusive environment obviously cannot include the people who hardened their hearts to God, and apostates who turned their back on the Word of God and only speak to poison the minds of good people.

Why is the preacher at my work? Right? Preacher is a title. Why is the preacher at my work and why are they not just my coworker.

In a proselytizing religion, every faithful member is a preacher. It's not a title, it's an act of loyalty to God. The preacher works at your work, but since their faith is the most important topic on their mind, they will not miss a chance to directly or indirectly mention it at any available occasion.

(If you live in a western country, surely you know of at least one such faith, perhaps more. And to be clear, I'm not picking on those religions here, but pointing out an experience most westerners can probably relate to, that has strong similarities to the way certain political topics are handled.)

The definition of preacher places an emphasis on one who does it professionally, words can mean different things though.

It is not helpful to change the definition of the word "inclusive". In the context of the workplace - not the church - inclusivity means ensuring all employees have the opportunity to execute to the best of their capacity. In workplaces that are less inclusive, some groups may not be able to do so for various reasons.

The OC named LGBTQ+ people as an example, which is fair, as at many workplaces discussion of family or inviting family to social functions is considered a norm and perhaps even a core value. If gay employees face harassment or (in some jurisdictions) termination for discussing their family, that is a failure of inclusion policies.

Another example of inclusion is related to accessibility. Is your workplace welcoming of colleagues with disabilities? Can someone with limited mobility attend all corporate events? Are people with speech impediments given time to speak on meetings? This is outside of my personal wheelhouse but I hope the point is clear.

There are many ways in which a workplace can improve its inclusivity, and they are all rooted in improving the performance of the employees.

You bring up a series of fair points, of issues that absolutely need addressing when they occur.

The point of my thought experiment is not to diminish these issues, but to point out why people may oppose bringing up those topics. Most reasonable people won't react negatively to issues of accessibility, or someone feeling uncomfortable because of their LGBTQ+ status in context of a mostly non-LGBTQ+ workplace; they'll often jump to accommodate their colleagues. But there's a bunch of people wielding these topics the way preachers from my example wield the Bible, and these are the people who are first in line to tell that you need to discuss politics at work (and everywhere, all the time). If one is sympathetic to their position, it may be hard to imagine why others oppose it - hence the example from the other side of social spectrum.

I don't think your thought experiment is pertinent to the discussion in this case.

People who promote diversity and inclusion in the workplace are not trying to change the lifestyles of all employees, as your hypothetical preacher is doing. In the context of discussing "politics" at work, the point is to create a more inclusive workplace. Yes, that means people may have to attend uncomfortable trainings or learn to behave differently on the clock. But nobody is being asked to change their behavior outside of work.

It may be true that some people in some companies are overzealous in their enforcement of inclusivity policies. It may be that the way they are trying to implement those policies has an adverse effect on some other groups in the company. But that is an issue of execution that can be taken up with the people responsible for the initiative. At larger companies, these sorts of programs will be run by professionals who have studied these topics extensively, and who have goals and metrics just like any other employee. If their programs fail to produce the results leadership is looking for, presumably the approach will change.

> People who promote diversity and inclusion in the workplace are not trying to change the lifestyles of all employees, as your hypothetical preacher is doing.

Oh, but they are. Don't do "not all SJWs" argument ;).

Seriously though, this is a bit motte-and-bailey-ish. Sure, diversity and inclusion in the workplace are desirable, but the meaning of those terms is quite different from the one that's being actively promoted (until challenged, when the promoters revert back to pointing out the desirable characteristics; hence the motte-and-bailey).

> Yes, that means people may have to attend uncomfortable trainings or learn to behave differently on the clock.

Yeah, and this is where it often starts to feel like indoctrination. You have the trainings telling you what to do, and HR playing the role of commissars, ensuring you comply. Things like [0] don't happen when it's the level-headed people who are promoting diversity.

> It may be true that some people in some companies are overzealous in their enforcement of inclusivity policies. It may be that the way they are trying to implement those policies has an adverse effect on some other groups in the company. But that is an issue of execution that can be taken up with the people responsible for the initiative.

There's a very real and documented risk that trying to do that will result in the termination of the person doing the taking up, perhaps loud enough to attract a headline.

My point with the religious example is to try and make you change perspective, to look at things from the POV of people who oppose discussion of diversity/inclusion politics at work. I'm not it's a perfectly rational position. Feelings are involved. But it is a position that has reasons behind it, and I try to shine the light on those reasons. Do the thought experiment. Look at your social feed, and mentally replace every minority issue with a theocratic issue. Look at the co-worker zealously fighting for social justice and imagine they have a Bible in their hand instead of the rainbow in their lap. This is how it feels to be a person for whom diversity, while still desirable, isn't the most important issue in their lives.

People who say they want to keep politics out of work aren't enemies. They're often sympathetic to your cause, and at the very least willing to accommodate your personal idiosyncrasies. They just know that once you start encouraging such discussions at work, some preacher will always come out of the come out of the woodwork and turn the workplace into a battleground between two rabid minorities fighting it out and trying to desperately recruit people from the indifferent majority to join the cause. None of this is conductive to work, happiness or civilization.

What I'm trying to do with the preacher example is to point out that just because you care about some issue deeply, doesn't mean others do, and you'll get much better headway with them if you respect the fact they have different priorities, and don't want to join wars they don't believe in. It's just as true in case of religion as it is in case of diversity.

[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21276507

I'm not sure what you think my perspective is?

Allowing religious employees the space to practice their faith at work is explicitly part of diversity and inclusion. That is why many workplaces have prayer rooms, why dress codes allow people to wear crucifixes, why on-call rotations are moved around to cater for high holidays, why the cafeteria has vege options, and so on. Religion isn't the opposite of diversity - on the contrary!

I think it's disingenuous to portray modern attempts to make the workplace a more inclusive environment for people of different backgrounds as some kind of political indoctrination. There is nothing controversial about companies expecting their increasingly diverse workforce to do their best not to offend one another. It's good people management. It's good business.

If there really is - as you suggest - an "indifferent majority" who find it outrageously disruptive to learn how to treat their colleagues with respect, then that just reinforces the OC's point: people who resist "discussing politics" at work are privileged because they are the majority.

Fortunately, in my experience, that is not the case. I don't think most employees have a problem with doing training on unconscious bias or inclusion or whatever else, because they understand that they are at work and they are expected to uphold a certain level of professionalism. There are lots of trainings people do at work that they don't care deeply about - bribery, first aid, occupational health and safety, etc. Some of that will sink in, some of it won't, but overall the trend will be toward a happier, safer and more productive workplace for everyone.

I think you're still missing my point. I didn't mean any religion. I explicitly and purposefully brought up proselytizing religions - as a parallel to the kind of people who push for doing politics at work.

Much like many workspaces cater to the regular needs of religious people, many workplaces cater for the diversity requirements for their employees. This is non-controversial, and people generally aren't against it.

But there is a reason why most of the same workplaces will frown upon making a show of practicing your own religion at workplace, or constantly bringing it up and pushing your religious views on your co-workers. There's a difference between inclusiveness and converting. The same applies to politics, and to identity politics in particular.

> If there really is - as you suggest - an "indifferent majority" who find it outrageously disruptive to learn how to treat their colleagues with respect

I really hate this rhetorical trick. It's totally disingenuous. The indifferent majority doesn't "find it outrageously disruptive to learn how to treat their colleagues with respect". They treat their colleagues with respect already. What they find disruptive is the disrespectful colleagues who try to bully them into things by abusing their minority status, or aggressively try to force their involvement in issues they're not interested in. The "practicing politics" of this colleagues is the adult environment of punching someone in the face and then asking, "why are you hitting my fist with your face?".

You may not agree with anything I said. But consider at least the possibility that the opponents of politics at workplace, who you try to paint as morally deficient and ignoring basic decency, actually view this the way I described it. That it's true from their point of view. Accepting that will make it much easier for you to understand why they react the way they do.

You seem to be operating under the absolutist assumption that all people who discuss politics at work have some kind of malicious intent to entrap or brainwash their colleagues. That is not the case.

All that the OC pointed out is that there are situations at work - and diversity and inclusion programs are one - where the discussion of issues deemed to be "politics" can be in the interests of improving the workplace.

Obviously if an employee is disruptive, that is a problem. Your hypothetical preacher is disruptive. Your hypothetical diversity advocate who bullies their colleagues is also disruptive. But both of these are straw people. Bullying is clearly not appropriate at the workplace. That is separate to the issue of discussing politics.

I would be very surprised if the "indifferent majority" feels that inclusion programs containing some political discussion is tantamount to workplace bullying. If that were the case, it would be observable in the metrics. At least engagement and likely also productivity would take a hit if the majority of employees felt bullied. I am quite sure HR and People Ops professionals would adjust their programs if they were received that poorly.

I think the reality is that the majority of people truly are indifferent. That is, they don't care about diversity and inclusion one way or the other. They do the trainings. They hear that certain groups feel oppressed in society. They stop describing situations as "gay" or "retarded". They let women speak first sometimes. Then they get on with their day because really what difference does it make? It's just work.

Please understand that I do know there are people who are very offended or unhappy with the idea of politics in the workplace. I read HN. I can see lots of them like to comment here. These people's feelings are important to consider too, and HR professionals do exactly that when thinking about how to implement their initiatives. It's a delicate balance, and whatever they do may upset someone. But trust that they are working in good faith, and they are doing their best to try serve the interests of all employees. That is their job, after all.

I think you've somewhat missed the analogy. There's a specific system of beliefs that insists upon bringing up these subjects, framing them in terms of collective privilege and oppression, and silencing anyone who disagrees with that framing. This ideology is ultimately no more "inclusive" than Agile processes are "agile" or the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is "democratic".

I’ll take a shot at it, with the caveat that I too would like to not be downvoted into oblivion xD.

So discussion for the sake of discussion is not exactly what I would see as a high need for the workplace. If you are trying to address these types of issues in a way that has business impacts, I think you’re outside of what I would term as “discussing politics”. From that list — discussing inclusivity initiatives has clear workplace benefits. Discussing a highly charged political event involving lgbt issues is adjacent to that, and has a highly likelihood of being inflammatory, and isn’t directly correlated to anything actually going on with the business.

I think that framework would also help everyone stay on point. You don’t go to work to solve the worlds ills. But you can address some of the ills where it’s actually impacting your life at work. Further, it should prevent backlashes from other groups, and help humanize by getting out of ephemeral arguments and getting into discussions about building a collective environment where the business thrives and everyone is equally entitled to feel safe at work. Making work a better place — good. Making work look like Crossfire — bad.

Here's my 2c.

Why do you need to discuss anything at all? Work is where I work. I'm being paid for my time and professional expertise, not my opinion on anything else. I don't get why would I be allowed to spend that time on conversations not related to work.

Being allowed to have some short talk, maybe discuss something quickly, like a game last night or something, is and should be more of a nicety. Nobody gonna stop me from doing this. But I don't see why we should be allowed spending long periods of time discussing other important issues.

There are meetups, we can get together after work, go for a beer etc... And have those conversations in our personal time if we deem it important. But not during business hours.

Work is for work. So banning conversations is reasonable imo, and not only political.

>So banning conversations is reasonable imo

I think that's a very sad thing to say. Say conversation is banned but "small talk" is allowed, where's the line between that? And like the guy above said, there's also no line on what's political - even talking about a video game like you said can be political.

So in the end, I believe that would end up with people just avoiding talking to each other at all, to avoid any complications.

And that "Why discuss anything at all?" could be applied to other places - "Why discuss anything political at a school/dance class/supermarket/bar? You're just here to learn/dance/shop/drink-and-relax. Those conversations are _banned_ here".

It seems like a slippery slope to ban this natural social interaction.

It is sad indeed, that we lost the ability to discuss difficult issues. But it is true nonetheless, it is impossible to discuss politics unless we all pretend to be on the same page, and yes, in tech for the most part that is the left page. Silence makes for a dull workplace, but it is better than living in abject hypocrisy.

I'm not saying it has to be silence. I'm saying someone else shouldn't be paying for it. We have time before/after work, nothing is stopping us from having those conversations.

I was only saying if from my perspective - when I talk about anything other than work, I don't code, I don't talk about possible solutions, I don't explore... I don't work.. while being paid for it.

Short amount is ok, it helps to recharge, remain sane.

Because tech culture has skewed so insanely towards the authoritarian left that any challenge to the orthodoxy your post suggests is immediately weaponized. There is simply no way to honestly discuss the points you bring up without putting one's reputation and eventually career in danger. The Damore memo is a perfect example of this. The only safe thing to do in our culture right now is virtue signal and nod along with the rest of the mob. Perhaps one day the madness will pass and we will be able to again ask hard questions in public and try, together, to get to the bottom of things. Until then, lets just not talk about these things, so that a great many of us are not forced to wallow in hypocrisy for the majority of our waking hours.

  tech culture has skewed
  so insanely towards the
  authoritarian left

Have you worked at a tech job lately? This is just.. wow..

Yes, have you? And more importantly do you read the news? If so then perhaps we have different ideas of what authoritarian means.

Well, the problem is that practically anything can be "politics", I don't think it's a useful way to frame thinking around what you can or can't say at work.

Generally though, when people say something is "politics" what it means is it comes down to a value judgement, rather than there being a middle solution, or the issue is too complicated for there to be a general consensus. As an example that probably wouldn't come up at work, consider the abortion question. If you're of the fundamentalist religious sort, your values practically demand you believe that aborting a baby is wrong. If you're not, then it's a lot more grey. Something like that is a value issue, there isn't really a compromise that doesn't involve one side changing fundamental beliefs about the world and the universe.

To answer your specific issues though:

- lgbt: not relevant. It's illegal to discriminate on that, so... either your company is following the law or it's not. Also: nobody needs to know. It doesn't need to be discussed, it just either needs to be litigated or not litigated. But no smart company wants their employees talking about their personal views on that because that could be a huge liability if someone has intolerant personal views (even if they don't apply them professionally).

- Women in tech & underrepresented minorities: ... well it IS a pipeline problem. I'm pretty sure the vast majority of companies would love to have more diversity, but you can only hire the people that apply. I see a lot of the SJ types make offices miserable hammering on this stuff that frequently can't be fixed locally. I mean yeah, if someone is scaring away people, then address that behavior, but that's more of a "having respectful competent management" issue.

- Education - Never really heard of this being an issue that isn't allowed to be talked about. I don't think anyone would really get upset about this though.

Also, as others have mentioned... a lot of times when people say these issues should be "discussed" they don't really mean that. The far left generally hates "discussion" on their pet issues if there's even a hint of not towing the party line, and it quickly escalates into people being called racist. So frequently, avoiding "politics" is just saying, "please pick your fight somewhere else"

It takes a huge amount of privilege to be able to talk about politics at work. The despised minorities, like zoophiles, would not only be fired but arrested with the whole office cheering that on.

Something I find pretty odd given that fucking a cow is a lot better for the cow than eating it.

I don't mean to be inflammatory but you are subjectively biasing the subject of "political discussions at work" out of concern for marginalized groups. In my experience this bias often has the opposite of intended result by providing what might be a marginalized group into a specialized class deserving extra-special care instead of equality, which eventually results in entitlement and possibly resentment.

If you want to protect marginalized groups write and enforce policies that focus on inclusion, equality, and anti-discrimination regardless of politics or preference. In other words: when nobody is special everybody is equally special.

In all of your example topics (and others), there are clear sets of "acceptable" and "unacceptable" opinions, and if you share an unacceptable one, you face all kinds of potential work-impacting repercussions ranging from "sad faces" to getting fired.

In the spirit of imagining you're in the out group: Imagine you're a Trump supporter and work in a big-name SV tech company. Someone asks you at work "Boy, Trump is a bonehead, isn't he?" Well, now you're put in a no-win situation: You have to either lie about your beliefs to keep everyone happy, share your beliefs and risk getting fired or some other type of discipline. Or, you'll need to dodge by saying "I don't think it's appropriate to talk about politics at work," leaving it to the asker to speculate about your views.

Remember "Invasion of the Body Snatchers?" At the end where most people are aliens and the few real humans have to put on a fake persona in order to walk around freely? If you slipped up and dropped the persona for an instant they'd all point at you and make that alien noise, and you're done for! That must be what it feels like to hold unorthodox political views working in a Silicon Valley tech company these days.

Yeah, taken in the most widely possible way, politics is anything that you say or do outside of your family - so it becomes the absurd injunction of "no communication or work allowed at work"...

These kinds of policy always scare me because people don't realize how prevalent politics are in our daily lives, even as devs. Dark patterns? Ad tracking? Hell, even something as simple as a dropdown for sex/gender is political. With these kinds of policies, you're forced not to think, just execute.

I suspect very strongly that each of your 'marginalised' groups would have much greater luck discussing politics at works than its opposite. I can't imagine any tech company these days allowing folks to use work time to support the traditional view of marriage, traditional gender roles or old-fashioned racial views (that last, in particular, is completely unimaginable — and that's a really good thing!).

I think the privilege right now belongs to those in those 'marginalised' groups, who have the privilege to advocate for their views.

I am glad Dang changed the title as the original one was unnecessarily inflammatory.

I don’t understand why it’s encouraged (in some companies) to discuss politics at work in a way that leads to internal issues. Purely from a commercial stance, team cohesion has a positive impact on people and product. Why do anything to disturb that?

> Such a declaration could run afoul of legal boundaries in some circumstances. While workers have no constitutional speech protection in the context of their employment, federal labor law requires that employees be allowed to discuss the terms and conditions of their employment and possible unlawful conduct like harassment, discrimination, and safety violations.

This seems like a false dichotomy. There is a difference between being amoral and illegal.

The nazi example they gave is also quite egregious. America has sanctions. If the public wants corporations to not interact with certain countries, they can ask their legislators to fascilitate passing of sanctions (like we have today against Syria, making it illegal to provide services to them).

Being held to a political moral standard is tricky if you are not in the mainline political stance. That would make me quite uncomfortable. I go to work to support myself and my family. Don’t make that hard for me to do due to politics.

> I don’t understand why it’s encouraged (in some companies) to discuss politics at work in a way that leads to internal issues.

There is a middle-ground between "talking about politics" is "encouraged" and "forbidden".

yes but large organisations find the middle ground difficult to cultivate.

It requires that people avoid becoming excessively emotionally invested in the discussion; such that disagreements do not negatively impact their working relationships.

Small teams with good temperaments are easily capable of this. Large organisations tend to look for more definitive policies that can be easily laid out and enforced.

You have a point there (and hence no downvote from me ;-): GitLab is a 961-strong company (all remote, says the website). However, we have much larger nations and, as a society, we should try to get along with each other, despite differences.

Mind that this rule even prevents discussing legitimate concerns about customers with your team mates.

Where we seem to find ourselves today is in a position where if you have very progressive politics, you can say whatever you like - no matter how radical - whereas if you have conservative politics you can't even admit that without any specifics without being thought of as evil.

This is how we can get away with saying it's "encouraged" while really making sure any meaningful counter-argument is "forbidden" at the same time.

I work at an oil company in Houston and if I expressed a shred of progressive thought I would be run out of town. Maybe this place is more your speed?

The context here is obviously tech companies and media, which appear to be entirely in control of extremists. Keeping of course in mind that it's most likely a small but very vocal minority that dictates the general perception.

> The context here is obviously tech companies and media

That's not obvious to me at all. The parent said "Where we seem to find ourselves today..." which pretty clearly implies a universalist statement, and one that happens to be dead wrong.

The opposite of progressive intolerance is not intolerance toward progressives. One can (and should) object to both.

Probably, but what if we both got something that improved our quality of life? I don't want to hear preaching any more than you do. Wouldn't we all get along with our coworkers better if there was less of this in general?

I meant middle ground as in "you can talk about it, but you're neither forced to nor is it banned".

Also, there used to be a political spectrum and not just "progressive" and "conservative": This is something completely different than left/right - a right-wing person can easily be a progressive about his right views, while a left-wing person can be conservative [or even reactionary] about his left views.

[Edit: Note, I'm a non-native speaker: Maybe this differentiation is different between English than in German?]

Your English appears to be excellent and your original point seemed quite clear to me.

@core-question's reply under yours wasn't an indication that yours was unclear; it was just taking the conversation in a slightly different direction (which is normal).

I think you're wrong that this affects conservatives significantly more than other groups (and maybe that betrays your personal bias).

What is true is that people who are beliefs much are out of far outside the norm for their workplace are discouraged. For example, if you're someone who believes that profit is theft, and you make that clear during work, it will probably have negative effects for you. Whether "conservatives" are the victim of this depends on their workplace and just what views they espouse.

Not a conservative, more of a third positionist myself. Even in places where conservatives are comfortable, I've still got opinions they'd hate.

So I shut up.

> I don’t understand why it’s encouraged (in some companies) to discuss politics at work in a way that leads to internal issues. Purely from a commercial stance, team cohesion has a positive impact on people and product. Why do anything to disturb that?

The health of the democracy is far more important than your company's profit margin. And besides, enforcing silence is still a political move that strongly favours the opinions that the power structures imply with their actions.

Democracy is fine.

The health of my family is more important than your politics.

The health of politics has a massive impact on the health of your family.

Every lunchtime my colleagues and me solve world problems. We talk about how stupid the current leaders are, and how easy it is to fix the problems in the world. We solved world hunger a few times, and also transportation issues and other things.

Then we say "Another world problem solved!" and go back to work.

What exactly is the "health of politics"? And what does some discussion in the workplace where you're paid for productivity have to do with it?

I don't want to hear your political opinions at work. I want to work and make money for myself. Just because I have to be at work to make money for myself shouldn't mean I now have to listen to your views on politics. That is my view on it.

no ones talking about forcing you to talk about it, question is, if you wanted to talk about the ethics / poltical impact of what you are doing with coworkers, shouldn't you be allowed to?

I come to work for one reason -- to get a paycheck. If you want to talk about politics to your friends/coworkers, do it after work. If you don't like your company's ethics-- change companies.

So nobody should ever advocate for the fictional person to whom their work is assigned, whose existence is granted by the society at large only because of the theory that its existence improves and betters that society, should be a better citizen of that society?

That's not super dystopic and antisocial at all.

That has worked great at countless workplaces /s

Every moral system I can think of would prescribe that, everything else being equal, you should attempt to change the behavior of the company you find unethical while you have at least some power over it, rather than removing yourself from a position of power to affect more ethical behavior. It strikes me as very strange to advocate that folks remove themselves from positions of power to effect moral progress.

How much power do you think an employee has at a global company - especially one that is now owned by Microsoft?

GitLab ≠ GitHub.

Look at Google and Maven. Individually, not that much. Collectively? More than you think.

I'm on board with this right up until the end.

I'm a security guy and have been a privacy person. My job is often to advocate for the customer over the immediate desires of my employer. There's no pretending that doesn't have a moral or ethical dimension. So, how am I supposed to do my job without trying to change-- steer, guide, develop, choose another word if you prefer-- my company's ethics?

Advocating for your customer is different than ranting about geo political conflict.

What if your customer is a geopolitical entity involved in a conflict.

What if they are an entity having "politics done to them" by a geo political entity.

A lot of the time I agree. I don't think I've ever had a need to opine on the merits or demerits of the filibuster at work.

But "should we deploy in China, knowing we will have to hand over data on possible dissidents?" is something I've had to deal with repeatedly. I see no way of having that discussion without getting into politics.

Of course, you can rightly say that some people just sit down and write code without becoming embroiled in the great conflicts of our time. That's true.

But the struggle for diversity in tech and equality more broadly is one of the great struggles of our time, and I know of very few engineers who do not recruit, interview, or hire. Should those people just cash their paycheck, or should they take the time to discuss an issue that nearly all employers claim to take seriously?

I think you can continue with this line of reasoning to include things like compensation (especially health insurance, m/paternal leave, and sick leave policy). And nearly everybody has a stake in the compensation discussion.

So, while I get the desire to just do the work and go home, I don't think it's so easy to separate politics from work without doing grievous harm to both. Which suggests to me the obvious thing: that the real goal of these efforts is not to foster inclusiveness or provide a better working environment, but rather to prevent a dialogue about how to do just that.

Is this an opinion strictly about politics? Or does it apply to other topics? Sports? Art? Entertainment?

Sometimes others look for more than just a paycheque at work.

If you come to my desk while I am working and start ranting about you don’t believe how bad your sports team is, I don’t care about that either.

I have friends. I even have made friends at work (very cautiously). But we shoot the shit after work.

> If you don't like your company's ethics-- change companies

Why is that the only recourse? Attempting to change your company's mind is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. You may find that you're unable, and then would prefer to quit, but quitting in protest should always be the option of last resort.

I would go as far to say: aren't you morally obligated to? There are jobs that are inherently in political/philosophical/moral bounds. And they should be treated as such.

I didn't say anything about forcing me to talk about it, I said I shouldn't have to listen to it.

Do it at lunch or on a break. During work, nope.

If it's important to you, you should be willing to pay for it yourself instead of insisting someone else pay for it.

Whatever activities you're doing on company time are paid for by the company.

If you're yakking about politics, it is impacting the time of coworkers around you. It's distracting and unnecessary.

Democracy bestows upon you, certain responsibilities. Earlier, you did not have to worry about political stuff because someone else (the lord of the land, the king or an emperor by divine right) took care of the things for you. You just work the fields or smith around.

Since the concept of democracy, the rule of the people, politics is also one of the unwritten (or written) responsibility of the people. If you do not want to do it, then you are actively running from your responsibilities, which might make you a bad citizen in other people's eyes.

Fact: In ancient Athens, if you were a free citizen and you did not participate in politics, you would have been considered a non ideal / bad citizen

How is it a useful democratic exercise to inundate non political employees, or employees who don’t share the majority’s moral political views?

The types of moral politics I am thinking about is discussing the tweet-du-jour, basically celebrity gossip about politicians, etc. Worse still would be people taking strong, loud and uninformed positions on foreign policy, like Syria. I actually happen to find that triggering, given my background. I would rather that people keep their opinions outside of my cubicle so that I can focus on producing the best work I can - instead of constantly being reminded of the shithole I left behind.

What you do matters. The people on the ground turning Syria into the shithole you consider it to be were probably also "just focusing on producing the best work they could". Apparently they did a pretty good job.

Will someone talking about Syria at Gitlab have any meaningful affect?

Syria was an example, in practice it depends the relevant questions will depend on your company.

For example: I work at a MedTech company. I consider it supremely important that I (and everyone else) am able to say no, I am not going to work on feature X because it would breach patient privacy, or feature Y that is impossible to do without unacceptable risks of causing malpractice.

Of course, whoever proposed those projects would then be free to make a convincing case for how we could mitigate those problems, or why I might be wrong.

That’s not discussing politics - that’s keeping your company in compliance and keeping them from getting sued. That is work related.

I would go so far as advocating not manufacturing in China because of the current political climate is work related because it can have a direct impact on the bottom line.

Being work-related is orthogonal to if it is political, or the benefit it'd bring to your employer.

I'd be making the same objections if I didn't have GDPR and Patientdatalagen to point to. Hell, I'd have been in favour of introducing those laws, even knowing that it would increase our costs (which I also care about, just not to the same degree).

The purpose of going to work is to get a paycheck and to either make your company money or save your company money. Doing what’s best for your customer is a long term investment in your company.

The health of democracy requires that individuals be able to speak their mind and advocate their beliefs.

This doesn't work if their livelihood is controlled by a group of hyper-intolerant political totalitarians.

What GitHub is doing is giving individuals rooms to breathe, think, and live. It's preventing the rule of the intolerant minority, the forced homogenization of thought and suppression of dissent. We banned these things from the government long ago; this is a good step towards reducing the power of non-governmental power centers in corporations to coerce speech and thought of people around them.

As a free-thinking person this would make me much more likely to want to work for GH. At a place like Google I know I'd have to be deeply closeted as others flagrantly denigrate my identity and ideas around me. Here at least everyone can be closeted together, and live in a pluralistic way with different beliefs alongside each other.

This is how we suppress constant political conflict. You just aren't allowed to go after people for who they are or what they believe; we accept differences. And reducing political speech at work helps with that.

At my place of work, when I brought up my opinions on diversity/inclusion/gender neutral speech, I was verbally bullied, and resent this still, after 3 years of working there. Talking politics at work is not democracy, because people with dissenting opinions get silenced by belligerent activists. I applaud gitlab for refusing to be arbiter of morals

Not sure if/what Github is doing, but I think you meant Gitlab.

> The health of democracy requires that individuals be able to speak their mind and advocate their beliefs.

Exactly.

> This doesn't work if their livelihood is controlled by a group of hyper-intolerant political totalitarians.

Exactly. Hence why we need to acknowledge the right to speak your mind.

> a place like Google I know I'd have to be deeply closeted as others flagrantly denigrate my identity and ideas around me.

The Google case is interesting. Maven was pretty equivalent to a peaceful demonstration. Management had one opinion, (many) employees had ethical objections and eventually got their way.

Damore's case was.. messier, and more relevant to your point. Then again, this policy would just subject everyone to the same thing, while sacrifing the previous benefits. And it's all ultimately enforced by humans anyway, so if anything I'd expect it to lead to further polarization.

> Here at least everyone can be closeted together, and live in a pluralistic way with different beliefs alongside each other.

Many decisions don't have a neutral option. This policy just means that you won't have any say once those crossroads become relevant.

>It's preventing the rule of the intolerant minority...

If a majority want to discuss politics and political change, isn't this just an intolerant majority enforcing their politics on everyone?

Unless someone is the type of person who would never advocate for any change no matter what happened to them, from being made King to being made a slave, then they aren't actually apolitical. Everyone who doesn't want to discuss politics or thinks they aren't political are just saying that the current political status quo fits their views.

Politics isn't an atomic unit. It's perfectly normal - and arguably the default state - to be apolitical on many if not most issues.

The default state is still a state, its not a null option. You wouldn't be apolitical if the current politics said your parents had to be executed when they hit 50 and your children had to be turned over to the state so they could best determine their use, would you?

That's a hyperbolic statement, but the intent is to show that being "apolitical" about current politics has no distinction between agreeing with the current politics. If you start telling people they can't discuss their politics because "we want to be uninvolved in politics" what you are really saying is, "My politics are in charge and the status quo. Your opinion needs to be silenced"

Your hyperbolical example notwithstanding, I disagree. Being apolitical isn't about promoting status quo, it's about being indifferent to the status quo and the whole space of adjacent options.

If I'm apolitical about issue X, it doesn't mean I'm a happy supporter of current state of X. It means I don't care whether it stays the way it is, or changes to any of the possible alternative states that are within the Overton window around X.

To use a clarifying analogy: if there's a C++ project in the company, and somebody asks me for the opinion about whether to rewrite it in Java, and I say "I don't care, I'm indifferent about this issue", it doesn't mean I support the project staying as is. It means literally what I said - go ahead and rewrite it in Java, or Python, or COBOL. Whatever, I just don't care. This is what being apolitical about an issue means.

And back to politics - I have a right to care or not care about whatever I please. You can try to convince me to care about some thing you care about, but you have no right to force me to care, and trying to do it makes me only want to oppose you out of spite. The "apolitical means just supporting status quo" meme is essentially a manipulative attempt at forcing people to care about something they don't, a rehash of the old "if you're not with us, you're against us".

>If I'm apolitical about issue X, it doesn't mean I'm a happy supporter of current state of X. It means I don't care whether it stays the way it is, or changes to any of the possible alternative states that are within the Overton window around X.

You don't have to be a happy supporter. You can be an extremely unhappy supporter if you still think the status quo is better than other options.

Saying "I don't care", is just an opinion and doesn't affect anyone. Saying "I don't care, so nobody else is allowed to talk about the subject" is implying that your world view and opinions supercede others. If you were in a group that agreed on a mechanism for deciding what could be talked about, then it would make sense for everyone in that group to follow the decision. That's not whats happening though. The people who are okay with the status quo are telling the unhappy people to be quiet, because it makes the currently okay people feel uncomfortable.

Why would anyone who disagrees with the status quo stop talking about it solely because other people didn't like it?

The situation is different. People who are apolitical on a topic tend to stay away from discussions on the topic, but do not actively prevent others from having those discussions. Except some of those who are into politics like to have this discussion everywhere, all the time. At work, at school, at church, at the bar, everywhere. Left unchecked, this makes loudest, most emotional people infect every aspect of everyone's lives with discussion on their pet topic. That's why apolitical people fight to have "safe spaces" like the workplace, where everyone is actually supposed to be working, and not constantly getting derailed into politics by someone with an axe to grind.

You have the picture of the battleground completely wrong on this. It's not apolitical people shutting down oppressed minorities. It's a minority of people with an opinion on a topic fighting it out with a different minority with a different opinion on the subject, and both sides try to recruit followers to their side from the larger population of people indifferent to the issue, using the "if you're not with us you're against us" argument. Whereas what the larger population wants to say to both groups is, "fight it out among yourself and leave as alone, and for the love of everything that's holy, mind the collateral damage".

(See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21276788 for another take on how a political side feels to both those who disagree with it and those who just want to be left alone.)

Democracy is fine. So is your freedom to choose a different job where you can discuss and do what you want.

The fact that other companies exist without this policy means there is no "power structure" other than a private company deciding what's best for its own culture.

The health of the democracy is independent of discussing politics in the workplace. There are plenty of other opportunities to discuss politics and otherwise tend to the democracy.

Since when are businesses responsible for the health of democracy?

Have most business in American history been hotbeds of political discussion and activity? Have we previously attributed the relative health of American democracy to this characteristic of American businesses?

Probably since at least Citizens United and social media provided a medium for spreading targeted propaganda.

Why do titles have to be sanitized for this audience? I can't remember of too many other sites whereby the admins have to essentially scrub the original titles. That makes me question the userbase more than it does the writers of said article.

Because as much as we'd like to believe that everyone reads the articles and that editorialized headlines don't affect us, they do. Sanitizing headlines helps people stay on topic.

>America has sanctions. If the public wants corporations to not interact with certain countries, they can ask their legislators to fascilitate passing of sanctions (like we have today against Syria, making it illegal to provide services to them).

This is a very confusing position to me. It is a bad thing to pick and choose your customers based on moral agreement, unless that morality is defined by the government in which case it's good?

Morality is not defined by the government - legality is. There're a lot of things that a lot of different people deem immoral - based on their religion, upbringing, media consumption and whatnot - which are not illegal. There's nothing wrong with the company conducting business compliant with the law, even if it may be viewed immoral from someone's point of view. It's a free country after all.

> There's nothing wrong with the company conducting business compliant with the law, even if it may be viewed immoral from someone's point of view.

Right and wrong are subjective, legal and illegal are objective.

From the perspective of the business owner who is focused primarily on maximising revenue / profits for their business, there is nothing wrong with simply focusing on legal compliance.

From the perspective of the employee who is motivated by things other than maximising revenue / profits / their own salary, there could be plenty wrong.

It’s a free country cuts both ways. Both parties are free to see things as right and wrong as they see fit.

I'm not sure if we're in disagreement about what living in a free country means. Everyone has their opinion on right and wrong, but as a society we agree that there's a specific set of laws that we all follow, so we all could get along.

All true. But additionally, it is not quite right to say that morality and legality have nothing to do with each other. Legality, generally speaking, is the subset of morality that a sustainable majority has codified into objective laws.

In other words, legality is basically the subset of morality that Republicans and Democrats can agree on. Which is why going beyond legality into subjective morality so often becomes polarizing.

> legality is basically the subset of morality that Republicans and Democrats can agree on

I largely agree with this, except when we start looking at uncharted territory.

Generally speaking, we are (legally) free to do as we please. As people do things we (as a sufficiently large group) disagree with, laws may eventually pass to restrict the freedoms to do those things.

Just because something hasn't been codified into law, doesn't necessarily mean it's not likely to be largely condemned, it could just mean nobody anticipated anyone actually doing the thing prior to it happening.

Combine that with a legal system that works on the letter of the law, rather than the intent of the law, and incentives can (and when capital is concerned, often do) skew away from morality entirely.

Consider that the falsehood that a corporation CEO has a fiduciary duty to maximize profits for shareholders at all costs continues to perpetuate, for a consideration of the mindset that simply works on the basis that if it hasn't been outlawed, then it's okay.

Trying to choose your customers based on some moral framework is entirely pointless in most situations. Putting aside the fact that whatever framework you decide upon is going to be completely arbitrary. If you take the position that you should only do business with people who’s values are consistent with yours, then you can’t stop at your customers. You need to examine the customer base of your customers, and the customer base of the customer base of your customers, and your entire supply chain, and the supply chain of your supply chain, ad infinitum. To apply this idea consistently is impossible, and to apply it inconsistently is just meaningless virtue signalling.

The idea that you should never do anything that provides utility to any party who’s values are incompatible with your own is not tenable, and it’s simply incompatible with any sort of open or tolerant society.

I think it’s much more sensible to look at the impact you’re having on society as a whole. I wouldn’t work for Facebook or Google, because I disagree with what they’re trying to achieve. But I’d sell them a service if I was offering one on the open market. If I ran a gun factory I probably wouldn’t want to sell them to <insert government that I think is evil>, because I know they’ll take that product and do evil things with it, but I’d sell that same government an SCM service.

> If the public wants corporations to not interact with certain countries

I dont believe most democracies really represent the public. They do on paper, in theory, but in practice there are lobbies that lobby for big biz and their main owners. They have much more influence in political decisions. Hence I dont believe the "public" wants sanctions on Iran/Syria/Cuba/etc, but that it is merely convenient for big biz to have those sanctions.

I don't think even Google actually encouraged people to discuss politics at work. They never did when I was there. It was more a side-effect of decentralising the power to create forums. Anyone could create discussion lists there without asking permission, this was highly useful for coordination, making it easy to spin up new projects and avoiding siloing of information into people's private mail accounts. The flip side was nothing stopped anyone creating lists to discuss whatever divisive topics they wanted.

There's also been a cultural shift over time. When I first joined Google I remember feeling that it was a pretty libertarian sort of place. In my team several colleagues were openly and proudly very pro-capitalist, anti-communist, small government types. If anyone was left wing it wasn't visible and I don't recall encountering identity politics, ever. There was a very strong cultural commitment to neutrally serving every user with every query, and ranking being completely algorithmic, to the extent that the company agonised over hot-patching "Googlewhacks" where pranksters manipulated results for unusual searches to offend their ideological opponents.

This didn't seem strange, it was just how it was. I have a vague feeling I thought other tech firms were the same. Twitter declared they were the free speech wing of the free speech party after all, and anything internet or web related had a strong vibe of "communication will make us stronger".

This is a very far cry from the modern Google where arguing maybe girls find geeky stuff boring gets you fired, where they manipulate ML models to believe the world is some intersectional 'utopia' as part of social engineering programmes, where employees spend huge amounts of time erasing gendered pronouns from source code comments.

I suspect the shift was caused by Google running out of experienced software engineers to hire, and switching to growing through recruiting new college grads at much greater numbers. The hard shift leftwards in academic institutions has been well documented. Even in 2006 I remember a recruiter telling me they'd "run out" of candidates in the USA and that's why they were expanding more into Europe. The concept you could "run out" of candidates in a place as big as America was pretty shocking to me - on probing, he explained that almost all people with the skills they needed were in well paid happy jobs already and few were interested in moving, even with the great perks on offer. Whilst there were always a small flow of people coming onto the market due to natural churn, "everyone who cares knows Google is hiring" he said, and they'd already interviewed vast numbers of them.

This change in culture would inevitably lead to this situation due to the way that conservatives see leftists as naive, but leftists see conservatives as evil. Combined with leftists generally understanding conservatives much worse than the other way around (this has been shown by large scale ITTs), and together it means flooding your firm with new grads is a surefire way to create massive internal conflicts.

>I suspect the shift was caused by Google running out of experienced software engineers to hire, and switching to growing through recruiting new college grads at much greater numbers.

Could this not have easily been a backlash against the companies no longer operating neutrally? You describe a timeline here that goes neutral Google -> hard left because of the employees. That doesn't jive with what I've seen in the news. Google and other tech companies were the ones trying to get into China and building systems that censor users. The big data companies started surreptitiously tracking everyone, whether or not you had agreed to ala Facebook's shadow profiles. That doesn't really mesh up with libertarian ideas of free trade. Based on the employee backlash these all seem like they were management driven decisions that employees didn't agree with. Wouldn't a natural reaction be to push hard in the opposite side of the direction the companies management was going towards?

Isn't that push exactly what's happening? The decision making power is still concentrated and many of original hires are still there so I'd imagine there's plenty of oversight and momentum involved in the company's direction. But the ongoing and increasing protests clearly show there's a change in attitude, or at least by a very vocal minority.

I didn't describe a neutral Google internally: looking back, it's possible there were a bunch of closet Marxists who felt uncomfortable admitting that. I doubt it because in other offices I've never seen people on the left hold back from publicly announcing their views (it's called virtue signalling for a reason!), but I guess it's possible.

The companies policies were neutral though. There was no concept that helping people find information might hurt them, as you see in modern day Google.

During the time period I'm talking about Google got banned from China because they refused to continue censoring the search engine. That was circa 2010, I think. So consistent with a company having a very free speech, libertarian view. It made waves because so few companies were willing to sacrifice the Chinese market on the altar of free speech, but Google was. Building a new censored search engine only seems to have started after Pichai took over and Brin/Page checked out.

As for "started surreptitiously tracking everyone", that was a media attack that started around the time Google News took off. Nothing had actually changed about privacy policies of tech firms, and users were clearly very happy with the ads-for-services arrangement given the rapidly rising usage numbers. But the news industry was shrinking, and editors/owners in particular felt hugely threatened by Google News, which effectively replaced them with an algorithm and commoditised news almost overnight. The media went from being very positive about Google (great company to work for) to trying everything they could to attack and destroy it. What they wanted was money, pure and simple, and eventually as the attacks stepped up they stopped pretending otherwise. Hence the new EU Copyright directive and "link taxes" that started popping up.

The employee backlash phenomenon only seems to have started recently. There were always pointed questions at TGIF when I was there, but disagreement with management was largely congenial. Things started going downhill around the time Colin McMillen created Memegen. It was basically an internal Twitter but worse, I don't think you can ever fit 140 characters into an image macro. That introduced and encouraged Tweet-sized thinking/viral liking campaigns whereas previously disagreement had been surfaced in email debates (the famous "centi-threads") or through face-to-face discussion. Long email discussions did annoy some people, but they at least had an expectation you'd contribute by writing something useful. After Memegen got big I started seeing people unironically cite that they got highly voted memes as evidence of creating value in their internal CV and promotion packets, which was ridiculous.

>Building a new censored search engine only seems to have started after Pichai took over and Brin/Page checked out.

>The employee backlash phenomenon only seems to have started recently.

Yes and concurrent with the executive change, Google employees have started becoming openly more liberal. I am saying that its just as plausible that the change in tone from the employees as a group, was a reaction to the managerial decisions that were themselves a change in tone.

>As for "started surreptitiously tracking everyone", that was a media attack that started around the time Google News took off. Nothing had actually changed about privacy policies of tech firms, and users were clearly very happy with the ads-for-services arrangement given the rapidly rising usage numbers.

That's three separate ideas that are not coupled together. Nothing has to change about the privacy policies if they were always tracking, and most users can be happy with the product even with the privacy intrusions.

I will disagree with you that they were happy though. It seems more like a matter of ignorance as there has been a rise in ad blockers and deleting Facebook since the privacy violations of major tech companies has become more widely known

Also for this claim specifically

>As for "started surreptitiously tracking everyone", that was a media attack that started around the time Google News took off.

Are you really trying to claim that Google does not track user data? That it does not suck up every bit of data it can from all the traffic they have access to? How exactly does Google target their ads and make their revenue then?

Edit: Literally at the top of the front page as I am writing this comment

https://www.pulse.ng/bi/tech/google-exec-says-nest-owners-sh...

You're right that it is hard to disentangle cause and effect, but Google's senior leadership has been very stable over time. Pichai was clearly the continuity candidate. The things I've named were all bottoms up - Google's leadership has always been quite reactive hence policies like 20% time. But when I joined the whole company was 10k people and only 5k in engineering. Now it's over 100k people.

Google does track user data but if you aren't logged in it's anonymous, resets frequently and is a very noisy dataset. That's why they create lots of good incentives to be logged in, like useful products.

Facebook isn't suffering at all, it continues to do great. To the extent users get bored of the classical product they move to Instagram which Facebook also owns. There's no evidence of any real change in user behaviour: free is a great price.

But most as targeting isn't based on personal data. The core Google cash cow is ads targeted to your current searches. That works even if you're anonymous. The rest is worth doing but not that massive. It's certainly not worth worrying about. Bear in mind the media had for years been claiming Google "sells your personal data to advertisers" which as I'm sure you know is totally misleading (really is just a lie).

What's an ITT? You seem to mean none of these? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITT

Took me a bit to figure that out, he's referring to "Ideological Turing Tests" https://www.econlib.org/archives/2011/06/the_ideological.htm... ... use of the term is kind of a dog whistly connection to a number of internet communities where that idea is considered very persuasive.

[The few times I've seen the term used have largely been cases where the speaker is really embarrassing themselves by claiming ignorance on the part of their opponents while demonstrating an absurd amount of their own...]

Experiments that ask people to fill out surveys as themselves, or as they imagine a liberal would, or as they imagine a conservative would, in equal proportion.

Jonathan Haidt did one of these experiments with about 2000 participants. It's social science so it should come with all the usual disclaimers, but the results can be found here and have apparently been replicated since (though I'm having trouble rapidly re-locating a study I found that replicated it, for some reason I can't find the right keywords to surface it).

You can find a writeup here: https://goodmenproject.com/featured-content/sympathy-for-the...

> This is a very far cry from the modern Google where arguing maybe girls find geeky stuff boring gets you fired, where they manipulate ML models to believe the world is some intersectional 'utopia' as part of social engineering programmes, where employees spend huge amounts of time erasing gendered pronouns from source code comments.

Huh? Can you link some substantiations to these claims, it seems way bizarre?

There was recently a large trove of google documents leaked, comments linking to them get vanished on most sites (including HN).

They were a mishmash of various things but included e.g. descriptions of various programs and employee activities such as influencing search results to inaccurately reflect the world in the interest of 'justice', e.g. if you search for CEO a neutral search engine mostly men in the results because there are more male CEOs, but a 'fair' search engine would return more women or at least equal numbers. The documents also described google's use of demographically targeting election notices for the benefit of particular candidates (and great consternation with significant number of the targeted demographic voted for the other candidate)... stuff like that. The documents also included lists of penalized news sites which unsurprisingly was largely conservative sites, but wasn't just the more extreme alex jones type stuff.

A lot of it was culled off these internal political lists that the earlier poster was mentioning... so it's probably pretty dubious that many of the things in it actually reflected google company positions. (That said, the 'fairness' and news penalties appear to be active programs and not just smack talk by internal political activists).

More smoke than fire overall, but the more extreme right wing has been promoting it as a pretty substantial bit of evidence of unethical (and in some cases unlawful) conduct by google. Thoughtful discussion of it hasn't been aided by the widespread suppression of the subject.

Erasing gendered pronouns from comments: no, because that's a story I heard from former colleagues who are still there.

Arguing maybe girls find geeky stuff boring: this is what Damore did, but he wrote it much more formally and cited lots of studies. It boiled down to though, "most women find tech boring because they're women". Damore's essay is here: https://firedfortruth.com/2017/08/08/first-blog-post/

Manipulating ML models: https://developers.googleblog.com/2018/04/text-embedding-mod... with their stated example:

An example of bias in this context is if the incoming message is "Did the engineer finish the project?" and the model scores the response "Yes he did" higher than "Yes she did." These associations are learned from the data used to train the embeddings, and while they reflect the degree to which each gendered response is likely to be the actual response in the training data (and the degree to which there's a gender imbalance in these occupations in the real world), it can be a negative experience for users when the system simply assumes that the engineer is male.

This logic is broken and wouldn't have happened in the old Google. If you're predicting what response the user is most likely to type next, then "Yes he did" is a more useful prediction by any objective measure because most engineers are men. But here, Google AI Research concludes that the most likely prediction would be "a negative experience for users" and sets out to "debias" their models. Debias in this context means to bias the model away from learned reality and towards what liberal intersectionalists want the world to be, in the hope that by subtly manipulating people through AI predictions they can actually bring that world about.

I want to play devil advocate for a moment and defend a wildly optimistic view of what some googlers might intend to do.

Already a way to debias a model (I know nothing of ML in specific, it is just an overview) would be to have the model explicitly realize that "engineer" need to be assigned a gender in certain situations. So in this sense the correct answer should be to try and understand whether this engineer is a specific human whose gender you should know so not to make wrong assumptions.

Whether this defense applies to this specific case I do not know, my point is that sometimes it is possible to actually partly debias something. The fact that it can be done in the wrong way does not mean it should not be done.

The same way there is a nice middle point between corporate anarcho-capitalism and totalitarian regimes.

I give you points for optimism and arguing in good faith :)

Unfortunately the extract I quoted is very clear. They aren't talking about understanding that engineer is a person adjective and thus could refer to an entity of unknown gender, which is a separate subfield of AI to word vectors (it'd entity analysis/knowledge graph). They're talking pure probabilities here: given a sequence of words, what is the most probable following sequence? The model gets the answer correct but Googlers are weak and cannot handle the truth, so in an Orwellian twist they label measured reality "biased" and set out to edit the model to convince it that there's no difference in probability between "Yes he did" and "Yes she did".

> Combined with leftists generally understanding conservatives much worse than the other way around (this has been shown by large scale ITTs)

This seems the opposite of true, but I'd be interested to see some sources to back that up. One of the few reasons I still use Google News is because it oddly links me to conservative news sites more often than I'd expect. I'll click on some of those links just to see what the "other side" is talking about, and I find their characterizations of liberal viewpoints to be pretty bizarre most of the time.

On the flip side, what I read (as a liberal) from conservative sources tends to be what I expect.

> I don’t understand why it’s encouraged (in some companies) to discuss politics at work in a way that leads to internal issues

I am not familiar with companies that encourage discussing politics.

Politics is about how people ought to be organised. I find it strange that this would not be something to discuss in the context of many persons primary organisational structure.

Part of my remuneration is the effect I may have on the world. Positive or negative.

> The nazi example they gave is also quite egregious. America has sanctions. If the public wants corporations to not interact with certain countries, they can ask their legislators to fascilitate passing of sanctions

While you correctly note that governments can pass sanctions against countries to facilitate trade restrictions, it's worth considering the full context of the article when considering their descent into proving Godwin's law.

They explicitly state the example of Chef working with arguably contentious and/or politicized domestic organisations. Given that recent employee protests are based around domestic government organisations, that have (rightly or wrongly) been compared to nationalist and/or protectionist organisations in history, what is the correct course of action there?

If you disagree so strongly with your own government, and/or believe your own government cannot be trusted to tell you the truth, what is the correct response? In recent history, we had marches against going to war on what wasn't considered believable grounds. Despite the best intentions of the leaders at the time, who ultimately ignored the peaceful and legitimate protests, the protestors were later proven to be true.

Given that backdrop, and the corporate / commercial capture of legislative interests, how is employee activism not a logical next step of 'vote with your wallet' combined with 'change it from the inside'?

> Being held to a political moral standard is tricky if you are not in the mainline political stance. That would make me quite uncomfortable. I go to work to support myself and my family. Don’t make that hard for me to do due to politics.

This cuts both ways: If your employer is known to take millions from ICE to support what ICE does, and your opinion is that ICE is an evil organization, that can also make you "quite uncomfortable". It might also make you want to leave that employer, which would make it harder to "support yourself and your family".

I would suggest leaving, in that case. If not your employer, some other company will fulfill that contract anyway.

Millions of people work in the defense industry. I did too, in a different life. I left due to moral reasons (Not that i am doing anything moral today).

> I would suggest leaving, in that case.

Well, that's the thing. If that's such a simple thing to do, I would suggest that you leave if you're uncomfortable in a company where employees are allowed to voice their opinions on company policies. You supporting your family is not more important than me supporting mine.

The issue is the null stance is functionally equivalent to support for the status quo which at this moment includes a lot of stuff people would not actively sign on to but often feel very content with passively signing off on it.

> If the public wants corporations to not interact with certain countries, they can ask their legislators to fascilitate passing of sanctions (like we have today against Syria, making it illegal to provide services to them).

This ignores both just how much the business tail wags the legislative dog in the US and the mountain of other factors that prevent or slow Congress from taking action against specific countries.

> Purely from a commercial stance, team cohesion has a positive impact on people and product

Do you think the Gitlab CEO's policy declaration helped or hurt team cohesion?

Depends on how it was received by actual employees. We don't know how many received this positively vs. negatively.

Evaporative cooling of group beliefs does actually work to increase cohesion. If, given a controversial decision like this, people who disagree with it pack up and leave, the variance of opinion within the company will actually decrease, improving cohesion.

I see. Your scope of "cohesion" is at whatever remains of the team AFTER the divisive action by the CEO. My scope was the ORIGINAL team.

I agree that decreeing a divisive policy and prohibiting dissent tends to leave one with a more "cohesive" team. I very much doubt that it's a commercially optimal strategy. You end up with (a) true believers, who build up group think and (b) yes-people and the spineless, neither of which strike me as high value contributors. You've optimized for agreement, rather than excellence, as a hiring criterium.

I would much rather see "cohesion" in the form of a team that, DESPITE widely diverging views, manages to agree on a common vision.

> The nazi example they gave is also quite egregious. America has sanctions. If the public wants corporations to not interact with certain countries

You're talking countries--that's one case but it's not the only case. America also has Nazis. Here. They are Americans. Even if they weren't, it's an abdication one's core moral responsibilities to one's community and society with this kind of "oh, ask your [bought] legislator [about something unrelated]" do-nothingism. But they are.

I'd make damned sure that an executive team knew it was them or me before I took one thin dime that might've come from Richard Spencer or one of our other homegrown Nazis. When I was a consultant I fired clients for less and I slept great for doing so. It's literally the minimum duty I have to my community and to the human race at large--the denial of custom to hostis humanis generis wherever they rear their heads? A bare minimum of decency.

I'd do the same, but this is just describing the choice of every worker in a free labor market. And almost nobody in the US has more labor market power than tech workers. Some people leave their jobs because their leadership is too Christian, or their boss is an adulterer, or whatever reason.

I don’t think the issue is politics itself really, it’s more of a lack of maturity or compassion when it comes to having the conversation.

If people engaged in the conversation aren’t prepared to take every participant seriously, no matter their politics stance, then it’s a sure-fire way to create a toxic work environment. You can’t go into it with the assumption that everyone needs to be a left-leaning liberal, or that it’s okay to bully a Trump voter (or vice-versa with right-leaning and Obama).

If at that point you can hold a conversation about politics without losing your shit as soon as someone supports something you don’t like, then encouraging it is fine. If you’re still in the mindset of having compassion for only the people on your own side then some growing up needs to happen first. Otherwise all it does is alienate those colleagues with marginal beliefs. Not exactly diverse and inclusive then.

And it doesn’t necessarily follow that you’ll enable far-right nutjobs or neo-Nazis as a result. HR tends to frown on things like racism and such like, it wouldn’t really get very far.

I had plenty of conversations at work about differing tax policies, libertarian vs authoritarian policies in regards to land ownership, drug legalization, military action, etc.

The problem is the willingness of people to engage in civil discourse has fallen off a cliff. "Thought leaders" on both sides are making serious $$$ by convincing their followers that the other side is to be truly despised and that all opposition must be met with aggression of some sort (if not physical, verbal, spiritual, etc). Creating an us vs. them mentality has proven (yet again in history) to be very profitable.

Every time this happens, the results are regrettable and 50 years later everyone is looking at history books going "what the holy hell were they thinking?"

tl;dr the problem isn't discussing politics at work, the problem is that society in general has turned into a team sport where people pick sides and start acting like hooligans when they meet someone from the other side.

>I don’t understand why it’s encouraged (in some companies) to discuss politics at work in a way that leads to internal issues. Purely from a commercial stance, team cohesion has a positive impact on people and product. Why do anything to disturb that?

Fail early. You can achieve cohesion by letting go of everybody who cannot discuss politics in a civilized manner. Then you can be sure that the remaining team can discuss anything without any problems.

On the other hand, is it cohesion when the team is held together by outer influences?

I'm not usually a "the people in power are actively trying to keep the workers divided amongst themselves and seeing one another as the enemy, so they don't organize against the people who are actually keeping them down" sort, but in this specific case... well, there might be a bit of that going on, at least for what "political discussion" usually means in the context of SV-type workplaces.

I think this sounds very reasonable for the kind of tool that is being produced.

Joel Spolsky has a great article on Big Macs vs Naked Chef

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/01/18/big-macs-vs-the-na...

In there, he talks about bespoke development vs mass market products, using McDonald's Big Macs vs a chef.

I think this provides a reasonable framework for approaching the present controversy.

For example, if McDonald's sold a Big Mac to <villain>, no one would bat an eye. However, if a chef went to work for <villain> there would be questions.

In the same way, if you are making a mass-market, generally useful tool, nobody should be excluded from using your tool. However, if you are doing custom, hi-touch development, then it might be more justified to screen your clients more.

I think Gitlab falls more into the mass-market, generally useful tool.

I think that the point is McDonalds doesn't empower $villain to do $badstuff (that is, unless he is literally starving - in which case it would be inhumane to not give him food). However, technology empowers us to do things that would not be possible without it.

Sometimes, a company can not choose who uses their tools - e.g. if it is open source, you can hardly prevent $villain from using it. This is similar to a hammer: If $villain buys a hammer at a hardware store, the hardware store is not to blame if $villain smites people (unless maybe $villain is known to be villainous, but that's not the point right now).

On the other hand, if a known $villain comes to you, and asks you to help him commit $atrocities: You can make the decision not to help.

(So, to put it short: I think your analogy is bad).

I think the analogy still stands if the goods/service is a commodity. It's not like $evil_corp will just forego using version control if GitLab doesn't offer it; there are tons of version control offerings.

The interesting spot is where you're selling off-the-shelf goods/ services that nobody else can provide. I would say that it's morally wrong to provide those services in that case since it's directly attributable to you that $villain did $bad_thing because of your offering, even though you had little personal involvement in the interaction.

So if $villain goes to the hardware store, says he needs a good hammer since $villain is feeling like hitting $someone with it - then the hardware store should sell a hammer? After all, $villain may go to the competing hardware store and get a hammer there, or even build his own hammer.

If $villain has outright said he’s going to do that with it, then the $salesperson might still sell the $hammer if their personal safety is endangered. But they should also notify the $police so that $someone can be warned and $villain can be apprehended.

I think this $scenario is outside the $effective area of the $metaphor.

Here the metaphor breakdown for a very simple reason: crimes are crimes and not crimes are not crimes.

the villain part is irrelevant. If $hero/heroine wants to buy an hammer to smite $villain, the hardware store is in the same situation: protect your safety and call the police.

The analogy avoids the difference that food is a consumable that everyone, from minimum-wage workers and billionaires, uses and getting better quality food doesn’t make you orders of magnitude more powerful than everyone else. Computer technology is different, it enhances the differences between people. An artist working for a villain to make propaganda posters doesn’t raise as many protests as Facebook being open to villains because through Facebook your campaign can get orders of magnitude stronger.

If Happy Meals came with an assault riflevpeopke would probably be more angry at McDonalds for catering to bad guys.

It's tough to make appropriate analogies (which are hyperbolic) without the topic being blasphemous. But companies like IBM, Hugo Boss, and Volkswagen still get talked about as supporting Nazis during WWII. BASF even has a page about their involvement manufacturing Zyklon B gas [1]. I do think you have a point of bespoke vs mass market, but I still think there's a line. Even in the bespoke category you hear about celebrities taking large paychecks to attend parties for questionable people and often get defended because they're not formally supporting them but are draining their wealth by some amount.

I think the difference might be a commodity relationship; nobody would question <villain> using Windows, but a business account with Microsoft would. Even with <villain> using Windows, if it was a prominent and ongoing thing I imagine people would expect Microsoft to intervene.

[1] https://www.basf.com/global/en/who-we-are/history/chronology...

I am not sure why you include Volkswagen in this list. VW was founded by Nazis, it would be strange if it did not support them during WW2. On the other hand IBM had a choice.

It was mentioned more as long-term baggage because of the association. I honestly have no idea if relationships, like IBM's, were frowned upon at the time. I believe most of those close relationships were clandestine at the time and only publicized later. The others, being German companies, even if they weren't founded by Nazis probably would no longer exist if they hadn't cooperated.

Gitlab falls into both - what you are referring to is the cloud offering, the self-serve one.

I doubt anyone (employee or otherwise) would bat an eye if ICE or the U.S. military would open a private repository on Gitlab cloud.

But Gitlab also does enterprise sales (I assume it does enterprise sales at least since they have enterprise software) - which usually means customized integration, bizdev and account management. More often than not organizations like Gitlab approach the companies to sell to them. In the case of government agencies they often can't even approach legally, Gitlab would have to apply into an open bid contract.

This is a divisive topic, but the story seems to pass the interesting-new-phenomenon test (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). If you comment, note this guideline: "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."

We've changed the title in accordance with https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, but if anyone can suggest a better (i.e. more accurate and neutral) title, we can change it again. Edit: I took "won't exclude customers on moral grounds" out of the title above, since they apparently no longer have that policy. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21275311

I don't normally agree with such editorial changes, but this one is really bad. Thanks.

Just to confirm, "this one" in your comment refers to the original article's title being "really bad"? (As opposed to the editorialized title.)

I think "this one" refers to the original article's title being really bad: "Blood money is fine with us, says GitLab: Vetting non-evil customers is 'time consuming, potentially distracting'"

Wow, glad they changed it, that is cringe inducing bad.

It's The Register. They're known for 'silly' headlines; it's their gimmick.

I'm kind of glad the Slashdot/Fark/Register era of Internet headlines seems to be over. Headlines trying to be funny rarely ever are.

Let's talk about how immoral it is to write headlines designed to spark controversy and outrage. Those who do so are disrupting our collective ability to discuss rationally about things- and they do it for profit- all the while posing as guardians of morality.

The Register's headlines have always been tongue in cheek, a dig at tabloids if anything.

Not sure where you are from, but maybe this kind of humour doesn't translate well to the US?

I'm sorry, I don't know the Register, so I might be misinterpreting the headline. And I see that many others on their homepage are similarly exaggerated.

However, unfortunately at this point I'm so used to headlines misrepresenting basic facts or taking quotes out of context to sell a political point or generate controversy, that the headline seemed perfectly plausible- my general point still stands, even if it doesn't apply to this particular case.

I can understand that if you're not familiar with them, but The Register literally predates click-bait - they've been doing satirical headlines for decades.

TheRegister really is the gutter press of the tech world.

I've come to believe that it's a bit more subtle than that.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21275051

Did you notice how the motto is "biting the hand that feeds IT", and the logo is the head of a scowling vulture? :)

It's a tedious schtick. Yet in this case there was also real reporting.

Yes, exactly this.

Wow, finally read the site guidelines. "If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic." I always wondered why even the world's most important news events barely register on HN!

Because you can turn on your TV or go to a regular news site.

Hacker News is for subject matter that you would definitely not see in the regular.

Can you imagine? CNN newsflash: "Y-Combinator founder Paul Graham proposes new Lisp dialect."

I felt a sudden sense of longing and felt incredibly sad, as if I had forgotten something, something that had been precious to me.

The article has an intentionally inflammatory title and is more opinion than journalism. It's not a good faith exploration of the topic.

Dang's editorialized title is.

I believe you and your parent are saying the same thing. (You can see this same discussion playing out in this same thread.)

You're 100% right. Wasn't clear to me from the first read but we are. Going to leave my comment up just for the elaboration on the theme...

> We've changed the title in accordance with the site guidelines

You've change it away from the story title, which is normally the site guideline isn't it?

The site guideline is "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait." Since Gitlab retracted that part of their policy, that part of the title became misleading. That's why I edited it. As always, we're open to suggestions for a better, i.e. more accurate and neutral, title.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> Since Gitlab retracted that part of their policy,

Must have missed something - what was retracted?

The context is linked in the original comment edit now: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21275311

Thank you!

In other words, you did them a favor.

My job is to do HN a favor, such as by making sure the site guidelines apply.

HN changes (and suggests submitters edit) submission titles generally if that edit will provoke a better discussion.

Sometimes that's removing or changing clickbait phrases. Sometimes it's clarifying or sharpening focus. Sometimes it's softening, blurring, or removing provocative language. And in every case I'm aware, they've commented on having made such edits.

It's a judgement call. I've edited numerous of my own submissions, often for length, occasionally in mind of discussion. I've emailed the mods, usually for clickbait (in the original) titles. Sometimes my edits are accepted, sometimes not.

But what's been done here isn't an exceptional practice. And given the already politicised nature of the topic at hand, for HN, I fully stand by dang's edit in this case.

(Would have commented earlier if I'd had a decent keyboard available.)

It wasn't misleading at the time that the article was written though, or even at the time that it was submitted. This article was posted here two hours ago, and the changes on the Gitlab repository were made an hour ago.

Is it now the policy of HN to keep titles up to date as events change?

We have the full context here. I appreciate the change dang made given this post is #1 on HN and about a tool (git) we all use.

Gitlab != git

Sure. We've always tried to do that. Actually we have to, because once a title becomes inaccurate, the thread will fill up with complaints about its inaccuracy until it's corrected. It's less important for stories not on the front page.

You literally are being dishonest.

It's a routine application of HN's rules. I'm happy to hear what you find objectionable, but you're going to have to be more specific if you want a specific response.

If they no longer have that policy then it no longer passed the interesting-new-phenomenon test and almost all of the article is irrelevant.

I don't think I agree. For a tech company to officially say "don't discuss politics at work" is also a phenomenon I don't think we've seen before, and in the context of recent events/trends it seems significant.

Technical professions are generally held responsible for what they enable. Biology: researchers can't do anything they want on plants, animals or humans. Medicine: doctors are expected to follow strict guidelines with their patients. Even engineering: implementing a cheating system for diesel tests will (rightfully) get engineers into trouble.

But software engineering seem to have a pass on how the things we build is actually used.

Dark patterns, facial recognition, mass surveillance? Just some code, a nice puzzle. It's like the profession as a whole feels only distantly connected to what they actually do.

I welcome the trend of developers taking more moral responsibility for their work. I want more ethics courses, more difficult questions, more uneasiness about what we do with our code, and what we enable. Not to be sure we build the right thing, but at least to be less wrong–and, sometimes, to know when we clearly build the wrong thing. I want us to be accountable; like other technical professions in the world.

And if in the workplace, the place where the majority of software in the world is usually produced, we can't have these discussions, what use will it be?

> Technical professions are generally hold responsible for what they enable. Biology: researchers can't do anything they want on plants, animals or humans. Medicine: doctors are expected to follow strict guidelines with their patients. Even engineering: implementing a cheating system for diesel tests will (rightfully) get engineers into trouble.

Biology researchers are held responsible for what they do. Not usually what they enable. The examples you gave are biology researchers themselves doing something. The relevant analogy would be if we held the inventors of CRISPR responsible for some future super-virus engineered using it.

I like you analogy if in your story, the inventors of CRISPR can exert some sort of power or control over the actors who are engineering a super-virus and thus make a moral decision to do so or not

In science, the only kind of control you can have is keep the research secret , or not do the research at all. Both are worse options

Hosted services is an ongoing act of support though - it's more like the inventors of CRISPR taking a contract that let someone use their equipment to engineer a supervirus.

They should have never discovered DNA. Look at this mess, now the police have files on all of us and our cousins

How does arguing if politician X or politician Y is better makes tech more responsible?

Supporting politician X doesn't make person more moral or ethical. Same as believing in god A over god B.

Politics discussions are just tribal wars.

It seems you are understanding "politics at work" as "discussions about political parties, candidates and elections".

IMHO, politics is much more than partisan politics. In the broad sense, it is reflecting and deciding on how live together. And parties and candidates are only a part (maybe the most divisive) of it.

Your examples aren’t very convincing for biology and medicine. The counter examples seem way more numerous.

Biologists enabled chemical warfare. Same harm has been done with mathematics. Physics.

I think we largely let researches do research, and don’t hold researchers accountable for harm enabled with that research.

In other words, self policing of customers seems like a newer and uncommon phenomenon.

Sorry, I don't buy it. Biologists at large may have "enabled" biological (not chemical, that's chemists) warfare by learning about biology and contributing to humanity's understanding of it, but it was only specific biologists who actively created biological weapons, and only those biologists should be held accountable (and they should).

Mathematicians at large may have enabled various terrible things again by contributing to our knowledge of math, but those mathematicians are blameless; only the ones who used their knowledge to (insert bad thing here) are the ones who can be blamed.

Doing research that can be later used for good or evil is generally fine. To say that improving our understanding of biology is a bad thing is clearly ridiculous. However, actively contributing to a biological weapons program is a very different matter.

For a hosting service, that's much more like active contribution than simply providing knowledge. The people who wrote the Linux kernel are akin to the biologists who simply increased our understanding of biology, but people who manage a hosting service with actual customers are not like this: they have the power to decide who is using the service for actual evil, and the ability to refuse their business.

Software development is not actually a profession, it's just an occupation. That's not necessarily a bad thing but let's not pretend that it's something that it isn't. In order to be a profession on the level of law, civil engineering, medicine, arms, accounting, etc it would need — among other things — a clear code of ethics. Years ago the IEEE made some tentative steps toward turning software development into a profession but they didn't get much traction.

I think you're confusing "being a profession" with "having the trappings of a profession".

No I haven't confused anything at all. Perhaps you misunderstood my comment.

Nope. I disagree with your definitions. And I disagree with the definiteness of your definitions. That is, you speak as though this were the only possible definition of "profession". In that, I believe you are in error.

The definition of a profession in the western world has been well established and generally understood for centuries. My comment was fully consistent with that definition.

From dictionary.com:

1. a vocation requiring knowledge of some department of learning or science: the profession of teaching. Compare learned profession.

2. any vocation or business.

3. the body of persons engaged in an occupation or calling: to be respected by the medical profession.

It goes on, but the rest have to do with "profession" in the sense of declarations.

So, you can make your claim all you want that you have the correct definition of "profession", but you seem to be mistaken...

> Technical professions are generally hold responsible for what they enable.

Not really. Doctors are expected to do the best for their patient without worrying about societal consequences. If Hitler came to a doctor in need of medical help, the doctor would be ethically required to do their best for him, desolate the negative consequences of Hitler to society.

Same with lawyers. Even if their client is a serial murderer and has co fessed their guilt to them, they still have to do their best in representing them.

> Even if their client is a serial murderer and has co fessed their guilt to them, they still have to do their best in representing them.

IANAL but I believe this is untrue. It would not be acceptable for a lawyer to represent to the court something that they have reason to believe is false.

"Do their best" does not mean "lie to the court." The defense does not have to turn over incriminating evidence that it does not intend to use, and lawyers can ethically and accurately enter a "not guilty" plea and argue that the prosecution has insufficient evidence available to prove guilt beyond a shadow of a doubt.

> hold responsible for what they enable.

That's irrelevant. The rules are for conducting responsible research, not for pondering the potential misuse or evil use of whatever technology. Physics and bio have a far greater record of evil uses, and it was never questionable. It was accepted that scientists do science, and ask questions later. The before-the-fact crusades are a very recent (like, 10 years) phenomenon limited to the west coast of the US

> limited to the west coast of the US

I'm from Europe, for the record :)

That said, you're right, of course there are no laws regulating the potential misuse or evil use of research results.

However I feel we, as societies, tend to feel that researchers have some kind of moral responsibility in the use of their discoveries. That somehow, the researchers working on nuclear bombs are not entirely unrelated to its use – and, on the other side, that Alexander Fleming deserves some moral credits for the uses of penicillin.

My point is that in software engineering we are usually held responsible neither by law or by this shared understanding.

This fetishization of these "professional careers" has got to stop. Particularly this fictional glamourization of the philosopher professional who is held responsible for all outcomes of his work. To this day, Dr. Jeffrey Glassberg roams free despite mistaken forensic DNA tests putting so many innocent people in jail. That is one, but I could produce hundreds. As a matter of fact, I challenge you to name a single inventor (who, for sake of this argument, we may choose to be also a 'professional') who is innocent by this metric.

I personally have no problem with them making this decision. I wish more companies would take stands like this. At least it's honest. Unlike the NBA and every other company with value statements they honor only when convenient or advantageous.

Look, if you morally object to this, then don't use GitLab. If you think businesses should be held to a higher ethical standard than they are currently, get active with local or even national politics. Start a letter writing campaign to your elected officials. Do something productive.

You know what isn't productive? Getting outraged on Twitter or Hacker News, making emotional outbursts of regurgitated sound bites and platitudes.

> You know what isn't productive? Getting outraged on Twitter or Hacker News, making emotional outbursts of regurgitated sound bites and platitudes.

Genuine question: you're making a strong statement on Hacker News expressing your disagreement with how other people are acting; what do you think distinguishes this from the behavior that you're describing that makes it more productive?

> If you think businesses should be held to a higher ethical standard than they are currently, get active with local or even national politics. Start a letter writing campaign to your elected officials. Do something productive.

I would say the productive thing to do would be to start your own business that holds itself to a higher ethical standard, and then out-compete the other businesses.

Sadly sometimes I think having lower ethical standards gives an edge during competition.

I mean, not to put too fine a point on it, but this is true and is the weakest point of capitalism.

> sometimes I think having lower ethical standards gives an edge during competition

Which means people aren't willing to enforce higher ethical standards as customers. So is the problem the companies, or the customers?

Someone at GitLab just made a suggestion to change the wording of the policy that I merged https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/merge_requests/...

That merge appears to change the policy in ways that render this discussion largely irrelevant (given the current subject line).

It used to say:

We do not currently exclude anyone from being a customer based on moral/value grounds.

followed by a list of reasons why not. It now says:

In some circumstances, we may opt to not work with particular organizations, but we assess those on a case-by-case basis. Some reasons we may choose not to work with certain entities include, but are not limited to ... Making derogatory statements ... Encouraging violence or discrimination against protected groups.

We're a team that moves quickly and is receptive to ideas and opinions. I'm very proud of that.

It looks from the outside like the opposite - you changed the policy explicitly so you can refuse to deal with organisations whose ideas and opinions you're not receptive to.

Worse, it looks like you just reversed direction because the Register made fun of you. You went from being willing to work with all organisations to reserving the right to drop any organisation on a whim. I wonder, what does Gitlab believe exactly?

You aren't the CEO but apparently the actual CEO lets you set global sales policy, so perhaps you can illustrate with some examples how your new-new policy will work.

I ask because the edited policy looks more like a personal speech code than something designed for companies. Do software development organisations routinely "encourage violence towards protected groups"? They don't, in my experience. So which organisations did you have in mind when writing it? Who exactly will you refuse to do business with now who would have been served before? You list some categorisations that look quite vague and state it's not a full list.

For example, in recent times certain political factions have argued that immigration control is violence against protected groups: can you clarify if you do/would sell Gitlab to ICE?

GitLabber here, one of our core values is iteration and our mission statement is "Everyone can contribute" https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/values/#iteration

Honestly, you could submit and merege request to our handbook to change global sales policy and tag our CEO to review and merge if he agrees :) Admittedly, this is a unique way to run a company. Other companies are limited by only getting ideas from a small group of people that are directors and executives. At GitLab we understand that good ideas can come from anywhere and we embrace that.

I get where you're trying to go with this, but a core value of 'iteration' just means you don't have any values. Any value you may claim to have can be 'iterated' at any time into the polar opposite, which makes any statement of what GitLab believes as a group to be worthless. You should accept that your organisation stands for nothing. It's not so bad. Most people work for such firms.

Ultimately the values of a company must come from the CEO, as he is the only person who can enforce them. Your CEO can and does decide what the policy is, the fact that he uses PRs to do so is a distraction. But it appears he either doesn't know what he believes or his beliefs are so weak that criticism from some random journalist or marketing woman is sufficient to change them completely.

We currently use GitHub. Microsoft isn't perfect but its position on selling to customers is pretty well established: they sell to anyone who uses computers, and always have. Satya Nadella does not reverse his companies policies because someone filed a pull request. This is reassuring. I don't want to ever be in a situation where Chrissie Buchanan, a blog writer of no importance at all, gets to influence our business relationships because who the hell knows when she might decide that her personal "values" don't include doing business with us? What even are her values? She refuses to explain when asked: just more evidence GitLab makes it up as it goes along.

I have nothing against your software. Other than the fact you're a distributed company and make a GitHub competitor, I didn't know much or have any opinions about you before this incident. But frankly this looks astonishingly unprofessional. Businesses want certainty and you give none.

>Encouraging violence or discrimination against protected groups.

But violence against non-protected groups is ok, I guess.

It's called a reversal. They went from "we do not currently exclude" to "this list, _not limited to_" which means anything they want it to mean.

> we encourage diversity of ideas. We respect the uniqueness and autonomy of others, even if we do not always agree with them.

I like this. I like this a lot.

I've never been a fan of the way the Contributors Code of Conduct does explicitly allow for people to have opinions of their own outside the projects so long as they don't try to represent those opinions as being a representative of the project.

If it had, and offered remedies, the guy in the Opal situation could have just removed Opal from his Twitter profile, instead of being asked to leave the project.

No one with any power asked Elia Schito to leave Opal. He kept his position and still mentions it in his Twitter profile.[1]

[1] https://twitter.com/elia

This still leaves the "talking about politics is banned"-point-of-criticism. Since you're the CEO: How did problems discussing politics manifest at GitLab that you feel this step is necessary? Or is this a "preemptive strike"?

For example I was deeply moved by Executive Order 13769 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_13769 and posted so in our Slack. The first comment was 'F* Trump', written out. At the same time many people in our company probably voted for Trump.

I don’t think there is anything preventing them from defending him or EO13769 is there?

I don’t quite see how they could effectively do that, but the possibility is there.

(Yes, I realize it would be social suicide, but while I understand that this is theoretically a bad thing, I just cannot quite apply it to Trump supporters)

> I don’t think there is anything preventing them from defending him or EO13769 is there?

The new ban on politics would ban them from defending Trump or EO13769 in the workplace. Before the ban they could have defended Trump and EO13769, and the following discussion would have likely devolved even further than just "'F* Trump', written out".

This sounds like one example out of many? Disclaimer: I don't know the involved persons and their personalities, and I'm only a remote spectator to the whole thing playing out in the US. But here is my take at the issue:

There is a increasing divide splitting the American people, and the fronts are hardening more and more. I know a company is not a place to heal the nation, but the wider the gap becomes, the more difficult it becomes for the people to actually discuss their views and develop understanding for one another - as opposed to yelling at each other (and "F* T." is close to that).

Whatever your stance on that EO or T. or the whole state of politics is: I think instead of outright banning discussions of politics (or are violations against the CoC not enforced?), you should maybe try to foster a culture of "you're neither required disclose your political views nor to participate in political discussions, but if you do either, be constructive and accept that others might have a different opinion.".

(Or something in that general direction - I don't have too much time today to produce a nice and watertight formulation of this ;-))

We don't really have a "ban" as such, see my recent handbook change here with more discussion: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/merge_requests/...

But even before that it just seemed like a "guideline" to me rather than a strict "rule" that was actively enforced, and it was introduced years ago before we had a proper Code of Conduct in place.

The new text is on a slippery slope: "Derogatory staments", "threats" and "discrimination" are all very subjective and up to the interpretation of whoever-has-power or feels offended by anything, and we've seen this go wrong so many times recently. It's almost a complete reversal from the previous statement.

Most aspects of running an organization and having a culture are subjective by nature. The previous statement — “do not discuss politics in the workplace” — is no less prone to subjectivity and interpretation.

We added a second clarification https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/merge_requests/...

This seems like a knee-jerk backtrack that is a step or two too far. "Gitlab Inc is full of wishy-washy dudes and I think old people always drive slow." I guess I'm banned from paying for Gitlab now if anyone chooses to "assess" me, since I made derogatory statements about your community and encouraged discrimination, however trivial, against the elderly.

And a third with only minor changes I think https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/merge_requests/...

- Engaging in illegal, unlawful behavior. - Encouraging violence or discrimination against legally protected groups.

You might need to clarify what legal jurisdiction you apply to those rules. California's definitions? Another U.S. state? Another country? As a global company where illegality varies by country, I think those statements present an opportunity for different interpretations without clarification.

- Related topic: We generally don't discuss religion or politics.....

Too much waffling added. Political discussion in the workplace can devolve into a hostile work environment.

I'd suggest this simplification of the two versions: We do not discuss politics in the workplace. However, we encourage discussion and iteration on any company policy.

This reads like a complete 180 on the previous policy. It's very far from a "change of wording".

Don't get me wrong, I welcome it, and if the most we can get I feel like it is acceptable. However calling it a "change of wording" is a bit dishonest, really you reverted it completely in response to the negative feedback.

Out of interest does anyone know what Atlassian's policy on this is?

(as someone who moved from github to gitlab, and is now open to other options).

Good, this makes me glad to be using Gitlab. Gives me confidence that I can rely on them even if I ever get into hot water politically. I also think that it's good to assert that yes, it's fine for a git host to just host people's repositories and not have to be in charge of making moral judgements. We have other tools for judging morality; things so immoral that society shouldn't allow them should be handled by the law, and things that individuals do not morally agree with should be boycotted by those individuals.

>Gives me confidence that I can rely on them even if I ever get into hot water politically.

Rely on them for what, exactly? What makes you think they would bend for you and not this other political entity that has you in hot water?

>Rely on them for what, exactly?

It's nice to know they're not going to cave to a gaggle of Twitter blue checkmarks.

For those who are a little confused about the no politics at work thing...

If you read the policy we link to about politics, we mention people talking politics during coffee chats, 1-on-1s, etc, but as a general rule we don't lead with those topics.

We focus on inclusion, and we have been very successful at that by respecting others and making work a collaborative, judgment free place. As someone who sometimes has the minority opinion I have absolutely loved this policy, and I feel closer and more accepted by my colleagues as a result.

I'm very proud to work at GitLab.

what marketing firm do you work for? Oh you're literally the content marketer for gitlab lol (as per your comment history). you're literally getting paid to say this.

That doesn’t make it untrue or any less valuable.

I believe the context of his employment and role completely strips the value from the statements.

Fair point. I disagree. I’ve worked with plenty of sincere and reasonable marketers. None of them have shilled publicly under their own name when they weren’t sincere. Startups are on the above average side of hard working and thoughtful people, in my experience. If you want to shit on marketers, go ahead.

FYI: If you say you don't care about politics and you ban political speech in your workspace - that on its own is a political statement that you're fine with the status quo.

Which status quo? Say what your interpretation of the "status quo" is, and I'll read it as a political statement. Say that you shouldn't accept it, and I'll read that as a political statement too.

I think you've almost got it...

Literally anything that can affect someone's life is political.

Not really, though - the “status quo” at the moment is that everybody should shun U.S. government agencies, whereas gitlab appears to be taking the exact opposite stance; that is, bucking popular opinion.

Is it? You can not be fine with the status quo but still have a multitude of reasons to ban political speech in your workspace:

- you think political speech isn't useful for changing the status quo

- you think the political speech that will probably take place will lead to a world worse than the status quo, in the opposite direction of which you want it to go (this doesn't just mean "I think my coworkers are of the wrong party" but also "I think the world should be less politically divided")

- you think political speech will change the world for the better, but you also just hate political speech even more than you hate the status quo

> You can not be fine with the status quo but still have a multitude of reasons to ban political speech in your workspace

You left out a reason: that the workplace is for getting work done, not for arguing about politics.

The workplace is an extension of the society it exists it.

It does not exist in a vacuum no matter how hard you try to put it there.

> The workplace is an extension of the society it exists it.

The workplace is a place for getting work done. Arguing about politics is not getting work done. Unless your workplace is Congress, I guess, although they seem to argue a lot but don't get any work done.

When I see people saying things like "everything is political so politics is part of the workplace", I translate that as "I would rather argue about politics than be productive". Or, alternatively, "I would rather argue about how other people should use their time and energy and money, than actually do the hard work of using my own".

The workplace has always been an extension of society. Humans are not robots and what's happening in society will impact how they work somewhere.

Trump making it harder for h1bs to get citizenship will impact how h1b workers feel in the company.

Supreme Court deciding on if abortion should remain legal or not will impact a lot of people in their workplace.

I'm sorry, but you seem like the type of person who knows the country isnt going to drastically make it harder to live for them. It's easy for people in that position to see work as...just work.

If that's not the case with you I apologize. But what happens with politics 100 percent impacts me at work and I should be able to talk about it.

> what happens with politics 100 percent impacts me at work and I should be able to talk about it

What happens with politics impacts me at work too, but my response is not to spend time talking about it at work. My response at work is to make my work valuable to my employer. My response outside of work is none of my employer's business.

Not necessarily. You may just think that the costs of the discourse outweigh the benefits in some specific context.

The costs outweigh the benefits to you, probably because the status quo is pretty favorable to you. This may not hold for other people, except now they're gagged from doing anything about it.

They're not gagged, they can still engage in political activity, just not on company time.

And not against others at the same company.

No, that doesn't follow from "not at work". You can engage in political activism outside work, even if somebody from the same company is active on the other side. Both of you are asked to not turn work into the battle ground however.

There are many places and times that people do not want to discuss the politics of the outside world. Examples could include while giving birth, while shopping alone at the grocery store, while sitting alone on a city bus, while performing surgery, while discussing your raise with your boss.

Just because someone does not want to discuss something here and now, doesn't invalidate that they have original opinions. Not everything is a dichotomy all the time. Plenty of people who are not fine with the status quo don't want to discuss it at work.

Which toilet (if any) I use is political. Being dressed as myself is a political statement. My right to have documentation that matches me is political. Whether or not I can be fired for being myself is political. So since one side has decided to make my very existence political then I think I have the right to talk about it. If you don’t want me talking about it at work then convince the GOP to stop trying to take away my rights, women’s rights, and so on. Until then tough cookies.

This reply is an example of exactly why people don't want to discuss things like this at work. People rarely want to have such a combative discussion with our coworkers, especially when framed as an all-or-nothing, very high stakes conversation.

If these issues, such as where you use the toilet, what you wear to work, what documentation you are provided, are relevant to your work-place, I would suggest that they are not "political" topics, but instead workplace topics and could, and should, be broached. However, I don't know GitLab's stance on this.

That being said, I do agree with you that all of these things are political, as well as who is causing the issues. However, your coworkers might not, and there might be very good reasons to continue to work with such people.

I disagree. There are a variety of reasons to prohibit political speech in the workplace even if one desires to change the status quo:

* A company might find that it's employees become toxic when political disagreements happen.

* A company might find itself alienating people with minority viewpoints.

* A company may find itself losing customers because political views discussed in the workplace is attributed to the company.

This mentality that lack of political discussion in the workplace implies agreement with the status quo has negative consequences, and makes employees feel pressured to voice support for things they don't actually support in order to avoid losing face with coworkers.

Gitlab might have noticed that people have gotten weary of the Cancel culture and are taking a distance. Good insight.

Good thing that gitlab is fully remote because a) there is no possible way to reconcile the viewpoints of people who live in very different parts of the workd, and b) they can survive when inevitably they will become shunned from SF.

It's also smart PR to get some controversial open source projects in their platform

GitLab are being hypocritical[1][2]. Let's not pretend the "women in tech" and LGBT movements aren't political. Frankly, I think more women in tech and LGBT representation are probably good things, but GitLab is being profoundly disingenuous with their guidelines.

To clarify my point: if you open the gates to the marketplace of ideas, make sure it's an actual marketplace.

[1] https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2018/10/08/stem-gems-give-girl...

[2] https://shop.gitlab.com/products/womens-rainbow-shirt

Those are great questions. But please omit the flamebait. (Edit: dvt kindly took the flamebait out—see below.)

If flames take over, only the people who enjoy flaming will remain in the debate. That's a strict loss for thread quality, which is one reason for the guideline I asked everyone to remember above: "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Or, more succinctly: "Generate light, not heat"

Or, reworded: "Please put 300 weasel words to sneak it past the Civility Detector 3000"

The GP comment can be made better simply by removing words, not adding any.

Please omit ye words of terror, lest ye inflict your verbal assassinations upon our poor fragile temperaments. Don't know of anything more scared of a little heat than a snowflake. [1]https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/why-does-formation-of-...

It's a question of which words to remove. Information-free swipes make for a lower signal/noise ratio and cause feedback loops that rapidly escalate. The risk isn't "a little heat", it's scorched earth. The purpose is not to suppress intelligent discourse but to keep the forum from destroying itself.

Which words would you remove from Shakespeare to make his plays objectively better?

Oh no, someone dares to question the left-authoritarian talking points. Better shut that discussion down.

I assumed the writer was posting from the opposite ideological position. But frankly, we don't care or even much look at that. When your job is to do the same thing over and over, after a few hundred thousand times you tend to see only the relevant bits in the mask.

The thing is: It's flame-bait simply because it's a sentiment that is so prevalent here. It's flame bait because there is a breed of people who lose their shit over it, and that breed is a large fraction of the visitors of this website. There is nothing remotely controversial in what dvt said. Nobody would bat an eye about it at my workplace, for example. You have to be aware of the monoculture here.

It was flamebait because it originally included "Oh is that not political either? It must be nice having the spinal rigidity of a mollusk." dvt was thoughtful enough to edit it above.

The comment is still live with positive votes, I don't think anyone is shutting anything down.

dang has called me out for degrading a conversation in the past. dang was correct then, and the comment replied to IS degrading the conversation as described. You don't have to be wrong to be expressing it poorly or unconstructively.

What do you mean? I am honestly asking, not flaming or anything. What is the point you are making?

That they are being hypocritical. Frankly, I think more women in tech and LGBT representation are probably good things, but GitLab is being profoundly disingenuous.

I think there's probably some room here to differentiate between politics (in the US, Democrat and Republican for most offices) and ideology.

Ideology is the framework for politics. I don't see anything wrong with saying discussing politics (a given candidate, or a platform stance) at work is discouraged while encouraging a certain ideological stance (more people from historically marginalized communities in tech is a good thing).

I have yet to see a no-politics policy interpreted as such.

This is what you should have posted in the first place, along with the links. Here you make your point in a way that people can actually understand and that does not destroy the container here.

There's a common phenomenon where a user's later defense of a flamebait post is often the high-quality, substantive explanation that they should have posted in the first place. I almost want to write software to replace the one with the other.

Fair, I'll move it.

Thanks!

While you're at it, add a feature to delete just the last sentence of posts.

Someone pointed the phenomenon out the other day and I've noticed it all over here since: a lot of posts are great but then the last sentence goes too far, off the rails. I've been watching for it in my own posts. I think it's just hard to get the right rhetorical flourish.

(BTW, awesome job here dang. I don't know how you do it.)

Typically, "no politics" ends up being enforced as "no politics that contradict the office norm".

It is clear how this ends up happening. When people express an opinion generally supported in the office, it is unlikely someone will complain. When someone expresses a contrary opinion, they will appear to be the one "making trouble".

I'm not sure if more women, minorities, LGBT, group x, group y, group z in tech .. matters as much. Sure it's good to have diversity of people and ideas, it can help people in workplaces come up with more varied ideas, and there's nothing wrong with it ... but I think we're missing something.

What about more men as secondary school teachers, or in art, or as nurses/medical techs? There's an equal and opposite side to the women in tech debate: why not create a world where men feel like they can and should take jobs that pay less, but that can be potentially more fulfilling.

Why is there also not a push to get women into other high-income lines of male work, that are more hazardous like construction, oil rigs, truck driving?

I think that's really ignored today. Just as there are family pressures for women to take the paths they do, men similar (but different) pressures to take carers they may not want at all, in order to "provide for a family" or whatever.

Please let's not open up all those cans of fiery worms. It's off topic in this context, and such threads are invariably repetitions of the previous thousand flamewars.

"Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I honestly still don’t understand. Why are they being disingenuous?

That most of human society is inherently political, and that trying to pretend there is some arbitrary line dividing political and nonpolitical is disingenuous.

I think it's fair to call women in tech initiatives nonpolitical. There's no significant political opposition to them; things like the INSPIRE Women Act (the women in tech initiative for NASA) regularly get passed with no real debate.

"I think it's fair to call women in tech initiatives nonpolitical"

I don't actually know if this is true? James Damore has largely been considered a political act, and James Damore was stating being skeptical of the needs of women in tech initiatives. So, if being skeptical of the initiative is a political act, wouldn't going through with the initiative (being nonskeptical) also political?

(Personally I am for women in tech initiatives, FTR, I just don't know if they're not considered political.)

I see the symmetry you're referring to, but I don't think that's a useful way to think about what's a political act. In the 2008 election, there was a political controversy about whether it's snooty to eat fancy mustard; it wouldn't make sense to generalize from that and say condiment choices are always and forever political.

I see; does this also apply to the LGBTQ posts by GitLab blog?

No. I'm not sure whether I think they ultimately are political (is it political for a company which employs lots of Christians to talk about Jesus?), but it's a harder case at the least.

Political opposition? Well, no, not visibly, but that's because "people should only get jobs if they're qualified" is already the default mainstream position. Women In Tech style initiatives claim to be about encouragement but invariably devolve into discrimination against men (in my experience at least) and that's illegal. One political faction turning a blind eye to violations of the law doesn't change the fact that it's still the default position.

This isn't about one political faction, though. Both major political parties support women in tech programs; again, bills to set up women in tech programs for government organizations generally are unopposed.

If it was non-political, then you would expect to see no debates on the issue. Given that there was a post here on HN [1] about an initiative for women devolving into flamebait and arguments about reverse sexism, I think one cannot say it's non-political. As most things are political.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19464269

I'm not sure why I would expect that. People have heated debates on lots of nonpolitical things. Have you seen the HN threads on microservices?

Perhaps more on point, Gitlab surely doesn't have a policy that you can't discuss anything people disagree on at work.

> about an initiative for women devolving into flamebait and arguments about reverse sexism, I think one cannot say it's non-political. As most things are political.

More specifically, an initiate that explicitly excluded non-females elicited comments that said this program was sexist and exclusionary.

It's hard to define what is and isn't political right? It can get ontological .. (i.e. if everything is political than nothing is political and if nothing is political than everything is political).

It seems like in this case Gitlab is trying to avoid some of the Google/Amazon blowback for taking questionable contracts. In those cases .. tech people are in high demand. It's not that difficult for us to find work elsewhere.

That being said .. it's almost impossible to be moral in customers. Everyone company does questionable stuff, has questionable clients, mixes normal with military contracts, etc. Should Gitlab not allow projects from churches who create tools to help minister to homosexuals (in trying to convert them away from homosexuality)? Is being intolerant of the intolerant .. tolerant?

There are really complex questions here.

> Should Gitlab not allow projects from churches who create tools to help minister to homosexuals (in trying to convert them away from homosexuality)?

No matter how misguided in practice, is it even immoral for people who believe that homosexuality is immoral to try convincing gay people to change?

> There are really complex questions here.

This is the sort of question that GitLab should not be asked to answer.

> is it even immoral for people who believe that homosexuality is immoral to try convincing gay people to change?

It depends on the details.

On one end of the spectrum, a one-off conversation may be OK.

On the other end, there are the horrible things inflicted on gay people in the name of "conversion therapy". And many people who believe homosexuality is illegal want to keep that practice legal (or make it legal again, respectively).

Thank you for providing those links. In both cases gitlab is partnering with a non-profit organization that AFAICT is not lobbying to pass or repeal laws. I understood "politics" in the context of this article as being about election candidates, government actions, or changes to the law. These gitlab partnerships are only "political" in the sense that people who like to argue about politics also like to argue about topics that these partnerships touch on.

I disagree. Selling LGBT T-shirts and partnering with non-profits implies discussing both of these hot-button issues at work. The corollary is that only certain viewpoints will be allowed to be discussed at work, and that's how you end up with situations like James Damore.

Topics like "who should we hire" are relevant to the business, and that overrides politics. Obviously topics like "what business should we be in," "what countries should we sell to," "what customers do we want" and on and on can have political components. But those are nonetheless important conversations to have at work.

The difference here is the potential for revenue generation stemming from the ostensibly political stance. Gitlab's goal is to make money, and they're signalling that this goal is firm regardless of who is hurt by their customers, using their tools. So they're happy to sell you a rainbow shirt to support women in tech. If there was a similar shirt they could sell about ICE and CBP (and that would be the end of their involvement in said political stance) they'd sell that too. Instead, the moral stance is obviously to not work with these organizations, and that will potentially cost them money.

This is pretty standard neoliberal politics. Just as with similar decisions at Microsoft and Palantir, this change will never come from executives. It's up to the workers to change the company's direction, and I hope they will.

How is women in tech a political thing? Just seems like an effort to make the work place more welcoming to people.

It's a manifestation of a larger debate between equality and equity, or put another way, equality of opportunity vs equality of outcome. This is a political and ideological debate that has been going on for many years, and will continue for many more; it is split almost entirely party-line. Even if something is not originally political, enough politicians arguing about it makes it nearly impossible to disentangle the political elements.

When setting workplace norms, there may be a substantial difference between discussing, for example, social issues, policy, partisanship, governance, and ethics. Depending on context, any of these may be "politics".

It feels uncharitable to call them hypocritical without understanding what they mean.

Could you clarify why you mean that women in tech and LGBT movements “are” political?

Movements are broad, and one way of reaching the goals that people in movements seek may be through political means, but that goes for a lot of things, and there is always a lot of of other ways of reaching those goals that one can work on without bringing politics into the picture.

For example, political legislation is one way that we may bring more women into tech, but there are many other ways too. The GitLab page you linked is focusing on inspiring the next generation of women to work in tech, and telling stories about successful women inside of GitLab. I did not immediately see anything inherently political on that page, though I only skimmed through it briefly so I may have overlooked something, in which case feel free to point out any examples of anything political that you see there.

Certainly, blanket saying that talking about politics is not allowed may well turn out to lead to situations where something becomes challenging to talk about because politics may be intertwined. For example, a speaker might go into politics territory in some talk, and how should they handle that? But that could happen in any area of discussion.

Equal opportunity, equal rights, and equal treatment, which is at the core of both the women in tech and the LGBT movements, is not political. It is about human rights.

I don’t see any hypocrisy in simultaneously wanting to talk about certain issues at the company level while at the same time saying that national politics are to be avoided. But like I said, the two may intertwine more than we’d like and it could be difficult to distinguish the two in some or even a lot of cases.

I'm sure everyone who has to earn a living to support their family will appreciate this move. Nothing is worse than politics at work, where you may lose your paycheck if you don't align with the correct factions.

"There are three things in life I learned never to discuss with people: religion, politics, and The Great Pumpkin." — Linus

That's an odd thing for Linus to say. I read a lot of Peanuts comic books in my youth, and it seemed to me that Linus could never stop blabbing relentlessly about the Great Pumpkin.

It was in the TV show. Probably right after Lucy called him a blockhead.

Well, some countries have laws against that kind of a thing.

The problem isn't the discussion of politics, it's the fact that that would even matter or influence your job in any negative way.

I would normally consider that part of the human condition, not a problem that a company needs to solve. Trying to minimize the negative impact of it (like they are doing) seems about all they can do.

I do think that Americans in general tend to be oversensitive when it comes to politics, and this mindset bleeds into the workplace. And I say this as an American. I've heard that discussing things like politics isn't as big a deal in say Europe or Israel.

Personally I wish the discussion of things like politics wasn't considered taboo because I think it makes for a more boring work environment, but I'm also the type who loves to debate with people who have opposing viewpoints and don't get offended easily. Unfortunately American culture has moved in the opposite direction revolving around appeasing to the most sensitive "victim".

During a recent company outing, I talked about politics with like four other people. Sure, it can be a bit awkward and you kind of have to think about what you're saying, but it wasn't exactly unusual.

It probably helps that we, like many other European countries, have more parties than just two, so you're not always in an us vs. them situation like in the US of A.

Europeans in general just seem to be more open to political discussion. When traveling I've heard many Europeans tell me that Americans tend to be very sensitive when it comes to politics, and I've found that to often be the case in my experience as well.

Well, as a European, I can agree with that opinion. I'd even say that Americans are very sensitive about a whole bunch of things.

America has become very polarized over just the past decade. We say we want diversity, but that doesn't include that one fundie Christian person who reads his or her Bible at lunch and believes that homosexuality is wrong, but still wants to be friends with and accept everyone. We want diversity of people, but not diversity of ideas or ideology.

People are afraid to talk about anything remotely controversial today, because it could result in a call for them to be fired or resign. We've seen it in academia and I feel like we're going to see it more in industry. One opinion stated on a blog or social media will be enough for others to dig up every hint of anything someone has ever posted that could be seen as negative and outright calls to have them leave.

There's almost a point system in call-out culture; a subconscious social credit system among those who participate. The Coddling of the American Mind is a great book that talks about this growth in the academic space. It's made professors afraid to talk about difficult topics with their students.

While everyone does have to earn a living and it's fair to think that's very important, if you believe your employer is doing something wrong and yet don't either speak up or look for a new job you're effectively condoning your employers actions. That isn't particularly admirable and your peers would be right to tell you as much.

Whoever is not with me is against me?

I may disagree passionately with what my employer is doing, but I also understand I may be wrong and they may be right. Or they may be wrong in some things, but still better than 90% of other employers. Or I may disagree with what they say, but wholeheartedly agree with what they do. And so on so forth.

There is only a very limited number of hills that most people are willing to die on. So saying that they're condoning something doesn't actually tell us all that much, it means that they're tolerating something that they might find disagreeable, even deeply disagreeable. One can also say North Korean citizens are condoning their government, do we think badly of them for it?

I'm well aware I'm in a very privileged position, but I've tried to make a very strong effort throughout my career to live below my means. Maybe I'm pessimistic about losing my job or my company going under, but the freeing thing is if I'm unhappy for whatever reason I have options for leaving.

I try hard not to assume or expect this from others, but I very strongly encourage it.

> I'm well aware I'm in a very privileged position

This is indeed a very privileged position. Most people need to pay rent, buy food, save for retirement, pay for their kids clothes...

In what possible way could you have read pfranz's comment to think they don't need to save for retirement or buy food?

People who need to do those things can't just leave a company because their politics don't align with it.

Because they were not living below their means like the comment said. Either because they make only just enough money to survive or they spend it on luxurys

Yes, most people make just enough money to survive.

Do they really? It seems that most people have enough money that they can afford expensive phones regularly and to drive cars. They amount of luxury people consider the bare minimum to survive is quite high now.

You can look at employment statistics yourself and see that most people barely make any money at all.

Most people here (HN) overspend to a ridiculous degree and pretend that $200k/yr cash comp "isn't that much."

Most people in the US live paycheck to paycheck and make price-sensitive decisions on things like food and rent.

I'm trying to figure out what you're trying to add here. I have to do all of those things, I'm in that privileged position partly because I've made it a long term priority at the expense of other things. I don't fault people who aren't in my position, but I encourage them to do the same.

The reason was never politics, but being beholden to a job because of disagreements with your boss, the work you're assigned, or being beholden to specific benefits like health insurance. I see so many people who are miserable because they're forced to do things they don't want. They're not even properly compensated because they can't say no.

I'm responding to this from your comment:

> I try hard not to assume or expect this from others, but I very strongly encourage it.

While I personally agree with you that living below your means and having a safety buffer to tell your workplace to fuck off is a great idea. I think it doesn't take most people's reality into account. You and I can do that because we make enough money that "living below our means" is a possibility. For the vast majority of people, that's not an option.

Perhaps I just worded it poorly. I encourage people to make the long-term decision to live below their means so they're not put in that kind of a position. I'm sympathetic to their short-term position and very supportive of changing their long-term position.

If wage labor, “work,” is the condition of surviving in society, how could it avoid being political? Who is included in it, privileged by it, how it is organized, etc all have serious consequences that determine, again, one’s, baseline survival.

What are the correct factions?

What are your moral convictions?

"Nothing is worse than politics at work, where you may lose your paycheck if you don't align with the correct factions."

I should bring up in this light that its still legal to fire people for being gay in much of the USA and there's a current supreme court case coming up to determine federally if discrimination on the basis of orientation or gender identity is covered under current antidiscrimination law. In that case you're at risk for losing your paycheck if you aren't born the correct orientation and are found out.

Right, people should advocate for whatever politics they want... just not at work. The issue you identify is a government one, not an individual workplace one. Even something like that is too much burden to put on your fellow co-workers to have to advocate for or pick a side.

If you get fired for being gay you may think about this differently.

"Even something like that is too much burden to put on your fellow co-workers to have to advocate for or pick a side."

The manager has to pick a side- they can choose to fire an LGBTQ person for being LGBTQ or not. A co-worker can choose to treat a co-worker differently if they happen to be LGBTQ. An employee who is married and gay may need to choose to leave off their wedding ring and to not allow their spouse to enter healthcare with them, because they cannot risk their jobs by being found out by HR as a homosexual.

These are all political workplace choices.

I have a pet theory that we (that is, the culture I'm familiar with, so I don't really know how widespread it is, but at least the white U.S.) have spent too long saying "don't discuss politics, sex, religion, and politics".

We literally have no practice handling differences regarding the very items people are passionate about.

The answer isn't to get into massive drama-filled flame wars, nor to drive people with minority opinions into hiding, but at the same time I don't think continuing the "enforced silence until it's considered common knowledge" is the right way to handle it.

See another comment pointing out that issues like gender equality, cognitive diversity, and workplace rights regardless of sexual preferences are ALL "political", but also directly impact the workplace. How do we decide workplace issues if not at the workplace?

>We literally have no practice handling differences regarding the very items people are passionate about.

Looking at it from the employer side, that passion is precisely why these policies are being enacted.

Were I employing someone, I'm required to not have a hostile work environment, which includes certain jokes (because people may be offended), and now includes politics (because people may be offended), and people being offended means I can get sued.

The safest thing I can do, that any company can do, is say "check your politics at the door" and then fire anyone who does it anyways.

It's a garbage solution for the reasons you bring up, but unless we change how those regulations are set up, it's the option that many will take.

IANAL, but I don't think a hostile work environment means "no one ever says something that is offensive", but rather an environment where that is normal and accepted. If we learn how to be more adult in our conversations, which includes:

* Trying not to offend

* Being open to accepting that we have

* Try not to repeat

* Accepting that others will make mistakes and can change their ways

...then we're not hostile. (But again, IANAL)

Given that being "non-political" is inherently not possible (see above posts regarding the inevitability of political issues affecting the workplace to enter the workplace), the above points may be hard, but are the more plausible option.

That doesn't mean ALL politics has to enter the office, but firing anyone that doesn't "check their politics at the door" just won't work.

And regardless of office rules, we as society need to learn these skills SOMEWHERE, because we've made it a social rule not to discuss these topics anywhere people might disagree. We're coming up on a few holidays, and I expect the "can't we just have a peaceful dinner and not discuss these stressful topics" to start making the annual rounds.

It's not regulations, it's society, and society isn't going away so we need to adjust it.

Yes, but...actually try to put yourself in an employer’s shoes.

What I find most amazing is less the politics aspect and more the moral/ethical issue. For a company to have an explicit stated policy of _actively_ never taking into account the moral/ethical impact of their work is just... astounding.

It is difficult to imagine a more inhuman and bloodless statement.

Didn't Cloudflare take that stance prior as well?

I think that's a bad faith interpretation.

It's more like a pressure cooker company saying "We build kitchen tools. We don't care who buys them. We will not spend any resources vetting customers to make sure they won't blow up a marathon with our product. Yes, even neo nazis are allowed to buy our product even though we executives disagree with them politically/morally/etc."

That's an entirely reasonable stance.

And it's one other people and companies will factor in while doing business with them. To their good fortune and their bad.

So where do I go to buy kitchen tools from a company that does spend resources on vetting their customers' morals?

Not exactly the same, but have you looked into Penzeys Spices?

That's definitely a position worth considering, but I don't think it relates to the reasons behind this change. For one, the straw-man argument you put forward relies on the seller not knowing the customer's intention with their product. Given the timing, I think it's absolute reasonable to assume why they put forward this change (though I'd be happy to be told otherwise). An appliance seller can reasonably deduce that their pressure cooker will reasonably be used for cooking if there's no evidence to the contrary. If a neo-nazi recently featured on the news for blowing up some people with a pressure cooker turns up at your pressure-cooker store asking to buy a pressure cooker and you knowingly sell them a pressure cooker, yes, you are absolutely complicit if they blow up some people. Similarly, if a government organisation, recently in the news for putting children in cages, wants to buy or license your software, it's reasonable to assume that they're going to use your software to directly or indirectly further their goals, which may or may not include caging children. Washing your hands of it, in a pull-request, is a moral and ethical choice, as much as they wish it wasn't.

The company isn't run by robots. Someone is still making judgement calls.

This policy just says if you're the wrong somebody, you can be fired for taking about it.

Reminds me of Peter Handke's recent Nobel prize in literature, where the committee were/are heavily criticized for judging only by literature, and not by Handke's political viewpoints.

Maybe politics doesn't need to be involved in every single part of society, only the political aspects of it.

What are the bounds of the “political aspects” of society though and how are they negotiable? If we’re to preclude “politics” from the workplace, we would have to have also explain how most of the rights we enjoy as workers are the direct byproducts of labor struggle and its “politicization” of the economy and business practices.

It's a diametrically opposite situation.

Handke was hand-picked by a panel to receive some special benefit.

Gitlab offers a mass service which essentially anyone can use; any denial of the service would require searching out individuals to penalize from among the masses.

Can you expound upon which aspects of society are political and which are nonpolitical? The Supreme Court is currently considering whether or not companies can discriminate on sexual orientation, just as it had done for race and religion. What do you say to such people whose identities are inherently political?

I think his point is that any aspect of a person not directly related to the question at hand should be off-limits. In his example, that would mean that the literature should be judged on its own merits, without any reference to the character or activities of its author.

Which seems to me like a reasonable and consistent ethical position. However, it does have some consequences that might be hard to stomach. Such as, that selling computers to the Nazis would be an acceptable activity, even knowing what they intended to use them for.

I don’t understand how exactly a person can consider themselves ethical when they knowingly assist in performing actions they find unethical - it seems like a contradiction that people find bearable as long as they themselves aren’t directly impacted by that decision. It sounds more like dressing up amorality than it does a principled morality.

I suppose the viewpoint is best viewed from a system design perspective. Do we want each cog responsible for producing widgets to be making independent ethical evaluations of those up and down stream from them in the process? Or do we want to have our cogs be amoral, and have a "morality" module somewhere else that deals with those kinds of questions?

To be clear, i'm not sure if I subscribe to this perspective. But I can see its appeal.

If you’re amoral and don’t care where your revenue comes from as long as you follow the law you should say so. But you definitely shouldn’t champion yourself as having values above and beyond the letter of the law if those value don’t inform your actions. But it sounds like GitLab is trying to hide it’s amorality and market itself to perspective customers and employees that it does have some kind of moral code.

I don't think it's amorality per se. I would characterize it more as having the humility to defer to the structures society has in place for addressing those sorts of things.

But society doesn't have a "morality module" "in place" that people can just outsource their moral judgement to.

Well, I think that's arguable. At least in the US, we live in a democracy. That democracy sets up the structures to regulate business. One could argue that if our democracy has not decided collectively that we should not do a certain thing, it is not the place of corporations to regulate that thing by refusing to do business with it.

Is it ethical for a doctor to provide medical help to someone they find unethical? Would it be moral if it refused to help someone because of different political stance?

If your ethical framework would approve of selling computers to the Nazis knowing they’ll use them to commit genocide… maybe find a new ethical framework?

Did IBM actually know that the Nazis were committing / going to commit genocide when they sold the computers?

> Maybe politics doesn't need to be involved in every single part of society, only the political aspects of it.

Sure, but when the "political aspect" involves denying a known genocide that's something that many of us aren't willing to ignore.

And I say that as someone who has enjoyed Handke's work.

Sorry, but he shouldn't get a pass for what he said in the 90's. He, of all people, should have known better.

Giving someone public recognition also gives recognition to anything that person might say. If they are known for believing that killing certain groups of people is okay, then giving them recognition is inherently political.

I tend to think of everything in life as political in some way. After all, politics is the fundamental question of how power is distributed in the world. However, even if you don't subscribe to this view, I would argue that work and the workplace are one of the more political spaces.

I agree that it isn't easy to be political in the workplace, and it is often better to keep your head down. But think about all the posts here on HN about workplace issues: compensation, toxic bosses, dubious or unethical product and design choices...and so on. All of these things are political because they involve people exercising their power on others, and other people organizing to take that power back.

If a workplace is political space.. Can it discriminate based on political stance?

Politics is very important to many people, and conflicts may arise because, when confronted on something that they value, people tend to get emotional.

These conflicts are rarely pretty, and I'd like my workplace to avoid them as much as possible.

Yes politics is about all of us. Trying to limit speech in the office to the football game last night is like saying we prefer our employees to avoid intellectual subjects in their discussions.

Politics is about what is WRONG and what is RIGHT. It is about ETHICS. Saying you can not discuss politics is saying you can not talk about what is wrong and what is right.

The logo of Gitlab should now be the 3 monkeys; See no Evil, Hear no Evil, Speak (about) no Evil.

There was a long stretch during the early days of the Internet when it seemed possible that tech was going to have a uniquely positive impact on the world. Certainly in the 1980s and 1990s, it was possible to think that tech was going to help people overcome the past, and move towards a world of greater understanding. These last 10 years have brought many disappointments. It is frustrating that these tech companies refuse to do the right thing. Over and over again, when we might hope they will take the ethical path, their response is something like "Don't talk about politics at work" which is the corporate way of saying that they've decided to duck their ethical obligations. Very frustrating.

> Blood money is fine with us, says GitLab: Vetting non-evil

> customers is 'time consuming, potentially distracting'

If that isn't a divisive title, I don't know what is. This should be labelled as an opinion piece.

> Code-hosting biz also bans staff from talking politics at

> work

Good, it's the work place - it's for work. Some freedoms are restricted whilst at work, for example at home I can walk around naked - that doesn't tend to do down so well at work.

> It was proposed to clarify that GitLab is committed to

> doing business with "customers with values that are

> incompatible with our own values."

This seems like a no-brainer, the article literally lists a bunch of examples where companies that get politically activate have their efforts backfire. I commend GitLab for this.

"If your values aren't used to inform who you're doing business with, why do you bother pretending to have values at all? This [merge request] demonstrates that you don't have any values except 'we want to make money, and it doesn't matter who gets hurt.'"

It sounds a lot like GitLab has a set of values that it doesn’t feel comfortable openly championing, so it just lies.

that black or white thinking sounds fallacious

Which part is black/white thinking - the belief that values need to inform your actions?

"why do you bother pretending to have values at all?"

plus how does one go from "dont discuss politics at work" to "they have no values at all"?

By performing work that contradicts their professed values? How is it fallacious to call values pretend if they don’t actually inform any decision made?

they said they ll do business with customers that are incompatible with their values. That doesnt sound like an absolute amoral acceptance. its instead a statement that they won't be restricted to 100%-ethically-equivalent companies. You 're stretching the argument to absurd proportions

The consequence of being guided by your values is that you intentionally forfeit opportunities to enable things that are contrary to your values. Even with the championing of today’s moral relativism, I struggle to understand how that is an ‘absurd’ result.

O/T: the "Blood Money" part of the article title is why I hate news media in general. Sensationalizing, editorializing headlines marked as "news" and not just opinion.

I'm not defending it but The Register is, avowedly, aiming to be the tabloid of tech news.

This is The Register. Their headlines are fairly hyperbolic and/or tongue-in-cheek (or both) about everything.

They should have tried something far worse, this is not funny enough. I suggest "Gitlab: Eating babies is fine"

Good to see that the very non-controversial opinion of “be neutral at work and treat customers equally” is being used to compare GitHub to IBM during Nazi Germany.

Why can’t GitHub just provide code version control systems without concerning itself with who is writing code?

Given the recent implosion of StackOverflow, less politics in tech is probably a good thing.

The Register has a special mix of technology reporting and satire. As with the title, that bit is obviously there to maximize provocation. Yet the article itself has some diligent research behind it, poking through commit logs and internal threads that few other journalists would. As a result it appears to be a scoop. Googling doesn't reveal any other media piece on this. I bet there will be others after this thread, though.

Basically, it's their job to provoke and our job as a community not to take the bait.

I'm not sure why you're getting downvoted but no comments addressing the points you raised.

Can anyone provide an example of Nazi code being hosted on Gitlab? It might be nice to justify what otherwise looks like an absurd comparison made by this article. What would nazi code even look like? Or is "nazi" in this case just a catch-all for wrongthink?

What if for example the People's Republic of China was hosting its code on Gitlab? This is a state that has "re-education camps" (interment camps) for a specific group of people and it reported to be engaging in organ harvesting.

I don't find it too hard to draw parallels between Nazi Germany and China at the moment.

Sure, we can all agree that China is involved in human rights violations.

But if we are going to ban anything, we need a very clear list of what is banned, when and for how long.

We know that CloudFlare has banned all Nazi-esque/White Supremacist material. China is a communist state, and Communism (in all real world implementations) requires violent redistribution of wealth. Should GitLab or Cloudflare remove all Communist material?

Who is the arbiter for which political opinions are not allowed in tech? Or should we just neutral towards customers?

So every time somebody signs up for any service you need to provide your address, name, date of birth, 2 forms of id, maybe even your SSN so they can run a background check on you?

At any random point in the future they can just revoke your access to the service if they decide something you were previously doing is no longer acceptable.

I asked for an example and you're still arguing hypotheticals. And the PRC would not host its code on Gitlab, that's not even a realistic comparison.

So far the only pattern I see is people making up hypothetical situations and using them to claim Gitlab is complicit in enabling human rights violations. But last I checked free speech is a human right!

You quite literally asked "What would nazi code even look like?" and I replied.

Well the USG can always sanction China and make it illegal to do business with them. Feel free to lobby your congressman if it bothers you so much. Or just quit. Or get raised to a level where you can make a call whether to do business or not with someone.

There are a lot of ways to influence someone. Leaving general politics at the door is good idea. You are getting paid to work - so unless you have standing of being harmed directly by company action - just do your job or quit.

Well, uh, it's not on GitLab I don't think, but Plankalkül... "a programming language designed for engineering purposes by Konrad Zuse between 1942 and 1945."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plankalk%C3%BCl

> While Zuse never became a member of the Nazi Party, he is not known to have expressed any doubts or qualms about working for the Nazi war effort. Much later, he suggested that in modern times, the best scientists and engineers usually have to choose between either doing their work for more or less questionable business and military interests in a Faustian bargain, or not pursuing their line of work at all.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konrad_Zuse

When was it ever okay to discuss politics at work?

Maybe it's a SV thing? I saw some of the documents from a recent lawsuit against Google and was pretty astounded by the sorts of things that people were willing to not only say but actually put into writing where anyone on their intranet could see (things along the lines of "I won't let anyone on my team if they have political belief X or voted for Y")

It's 100% a SV thing. It is assumed that everyone working for a SV company is on the left and hates anything on the right. Voice dissent at your own peril.

I suppose it is also assumed that everyone working for a SV company is on the left, except when it comes to wealth distribution? :) (this reply is not against you, I hope it does not come out that way)

"We're on the left, but we looooove tax havens."

That seems to make sense if you consider how political beliefs and preferred candidates correlate with given personality traits. Why is it stigmatized?

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/study-predicts...

Generally diversity is better for a team because it brings in a variety of viewpoints. Someone with different political views might be able to offer some perspective that the rest of the group would have missed.

At the same time, they likely won't mesh well with the team's culture.

But what does that mean really?

That we can't talk politics over alcohol? I still don't see that being an issue unless you can't be civil about conflicting beliefs. If you can't be civil when confronted with conflicting beliefs then you have larger problems I think.

I'm with you, but I think you're expecting too much once you add alcohol to the mix.

Diversity is not an unquestioned good. It means more fights, less common ground, more misunderstanding.

There are plenty of examples of relatively insular cultures (e.g. Sweden, Paypal) producing great stuff.

I don't hate diversity, I just don't buy this unquestioned "diversity is good" idea. It has pros and cons.

There's very much a social norm in some social circles found in Silicon Valley that total political agreement is expected. Opinions are voiced in the expectation of loud and vociferous agreement.

Like any such environment where conformity is the norm, it works until someone fails to conform.

It's not just an SV thing. Working in tech in Portland, it's also pretty much expected.

I do think it's more of a tech thing. I believe it stems from valuing "culture fit" more than other industries do. I appreciate the idea of culture fit, but feel uneasy about it because it's also discriminatory and leads to problems like this.

I wonder if it's party because of the generalness and youngness of the industry. I imagine fields like oil rigging, therapy services for children, auto repair, or military service have more self-selecting cultures than building generic CRUD apps or web design for random clients.

It may not be in the US (I couldn't tell) but in all other countries I've been it usually ranges from slightly awkward to perfectly acceptable or normal.

It should be ok to discuss politics in any and every space as it affects every single aspects of everybody's lives. Considering most adults spend around half of their awake time at work it seems silly to avoid it there.

We actually do this quite often, and that's even though our field is not concerned with politics. But maybe that's a cultural thing? (Edit: Also, views at work vary. In US terms the spectrum is probably from Bernie-Sanders-left to pre-Trump-Reps-right.)

It's only okay to discuss left-leaning policies at work. I'm libertarian leaning and keep my mouth shut because if I said how I felt about half of the things my co-workers discuss I would be ostracized.

Whenever you have reasonable adults working together?

I think I’ve, on appropriate occasion, discussed politics with friends and colleagues at every workplace I’ve ever been at. [Edit: some senior leadership] openly supports the DNC and has commented to that effect at town halls.

To pretend that people are apolitical or to ban all political discussions because some people can’t seem to handle disagreements in a professional manner is one way to handle the problem, but perhaps not the first nor optimal solution to implement.

Would you feel the same way if your current CEO openly supported the RNC?

Wouldn't you want to know if you were indirectly lining the RNC coffers?

No. The odds that I align politically with every person that will benefit financially from my work are zero, and I wouldn't want it any other way. I find mandatory political adherence much more threatening than any particular political party.

I accept political disagreements with senior leadership as a fact of life. I've worked for many companies where this was the case; one where donations to the RNC was not-so-subtling encouraged; and another that suggested we donate to the company's PAC.

Most of us can separate our politic beliefs from our work. Regardless of how we feel about certain laws and regulations, we have to work within the limitations they impose.

Certainly. What they believe and support as a private person is interesting and maybe a topic for conversation, but not determinant of whether I want to work for them.

I’m openly Libertarian; I have people on my team who are openly pro-Trump. Being in MA and in tech, there are obviously many pro-left employees.

If you can only work for and with people with whom you agree politically, you might have (or be) a problem. “Not talking politics at work” is a bandaid over this problem, at best.

I think being public about it was a deliberate choice and signaling--attracting and filtering their workforce and clientele. I'm sure vocal RNC support would work really well in other fields.

Someone in tech who openly supports a left leaning party? How truly unique and brave of him.

Had a coworker who openly supported Trump. Didn't affect my relationship with him or how we worked together, despite not respecting Trump at all. We had some good conversations as well. I may not agree with him politically, but I don't need to agree with someone on everything to be friends, or at least respectful.

So yeah, any place that has functioning adults, or, better, mature people, can have mature discussions. But then it takes two to make this work. For example, if you belittle or insult people freely or mock those who you might not agree with, you aren't going to ever see that mature environment.

you do you but i'd be very, very careful about volunteering your identity as well as CEO's political points of view (trivial to associate via your profile) without his consent on a widely trafficked web site

Nearly every place I've worked at (in the US) over the last 20 years has had an explicit prohibition against discussing politics or religion in the workplace.

I'm not saying if it's OK or not as a philosophical matter, but it does help make the workplace more pleasant.

Which is great, right up until you work with people that aren't straight cis white men. Nonaction is and always will be political; it's just the politics of upholding the status quo.

When a regular political talking point is whether it's ok to fire you for existing the hypocrisy of the "don't put politics in my <x>" becomes painful (and certainly less than pleasant).

Companies should be free to declare they support the status quo, but they should never get a free pass as if that's some sort of neutral, objective opinion. They've chosen to make a stance and should be appraised as such.

>>Which is great, right up until you work with people that aren't straight cis white men.

My company has a "no drama" policy. Our team could be a poster for diversity and inclusion from all across the spectrum and it works really really well. We all appreciate each other.

Ah, so anyone who doesn't agree with the existing norms in your office, like gay people being out at work and men and women working together, would just have to quietly live with it or leave.

That sounds fine to me, because I think that's a good status quo. But twenty years ago I bet the status quo was different and a totally different set of people was being made uncomfortable and encouraged out.

> Which is great, right up until you work with people that aren't straight cis white men.

I find it interesting that you make such an assumption about the places that I've worked.

Also, I should mention that I absolutely have had numerous political discussions with coworkers. They just don't usually happen in the workplace itself.

Depending on your field, it can be unavoidable. Look at the stuff Facebook is having to deal with now, deciding whether to reject specific advertisements from US presidential candidates. It's impossible to tackle that without ending up just having regular old political discussions in the workplace, if only to figure out what actions to take.

Thankfully most jobs won't touch this but if you're running internet services it'll probably come up.

When things some people classify as "politics" directly affect work. When you're trying to get your company to make improvements to the state of the world. When you're talking about corporate culture, inclusion, and solving problems. When you're arranging for your company to make a donation, or sponsor an event, or advising against doing so due to potential ramifications. When you're making travel plans and need to know more about your destination. When you're discussing salary or investments or retirement or health or hobbies and the potential impact of future legislative or political changes on those.

We're not just talking about the stereotype of people standing around a water cooler declaring affiliations and throwing political talking points past each other.

> We're not just talking about the stereotype people standing around a water cooler declaring affiliations and throwing political talking points past each other.

Who said they aren't talking about just that?

At one of my first jobs people got a bit upset in a discussion at some point about religion. My then boss said 'I have learned to never talk about politics and religion at work.'. He didn't forbid it, but the point is valid: why talk about things that gets people unreasonably fired up?

Like text editors? or code formatting?

That wouldn't be unreasonable ;)

I say this as a very left-leaning person (by British standards at the very least), but in my company strong left leaning values are part of the culture and it's expected that you promote LGBTQ+ issues, promote Women in the workplace and promote immigration.

It's not a bad thing in my mind, it's heavy handed at times, I can see how it would rub some traditionalists the wrong way in an extreme way. If you held some form of conservative view then you'd almost certainly be a pariah in our company/studio.

But left-leaning politics is definitely promoted and discussed in the office.

What if you support these policies, but don't actively promote them because you're there to do work, not discuss politics?

What if you have reservations about specific things that have been lumped in with "left" politics, which you believe are inherently not "left" and do not benefit humanity?

Then don't talk about it; else be labelled something nasty and be effectively unpersoned.

( Not trying to reach for the 1984 language, but it's the most accurate terminology I can come up with.. :\ )

If I talk about whether it's legal to fire people for being gay, is that bringing politics to work? How can I be focused on work if I keep hearing about gay people? Also, isn't it obvious that homosexuality is seen as a severe spiritual evil to a large (if not majority) segment of the population?

What is the professional intuition on productivity when a large segment of the population considers homosexuality to be spiritually depraved?

It's astounding that people do! We talk about work at work.

In my mind it has always been ok to talk about your politics as long as you're respectful and you respect the differences of people who disagree.

To make it against whatever workplace "rules" there are seems overbearing and thought-controlling. Our personal beliefs and political experiences make up a lot of who we are, our individual perspective on the world and somewhat how we think.

How can you hold your organization to socially responsible policies and actions if you can't discuss what should be socially acceptable? Political beliefs form the ideas of what is the scope of the organization's responsibility.

In my recent experiences at a hedge fund and a very large investment bank, politics were discussed pretty openly in both environments (alas this was only in NYC). I found the discussions worthwhile and informative as it helped me understand my own beliefs more.

It's unwise to hold beliefs that you never have to justify. You should put in the intellectual work so that you can articulate and argue your own politics it will make sure your beliefs are well founded.

Back when it was possible to have a conservative viewpoint on social issues without being subject to public shaming by a disruptively loud minority. It wasn’t that long ago either.

Most people spend more time at work than with their actual families. This leads to all kinds of conversations, in the office, in the break room, or at a bar. Not everything is appropriate for every setting but pretending differing opinions don’t exist is ludicrous.

Depends on people, I suppose. I'm easily capable of disengaging and leaving people not upset so I have discussed politics (anarcho-capitalist views, full paternalism views, just-world views) safely and without rebuke everywhere I've worked.

This is what I'm baffled by in all of this discussion. Work is not a place for politics. Maybe some light-hearted stuff, like discussing a ribbon cutting or some generally agreeable policy change (like a change to paid parking).

Even with very, very close co-founders, politics was an extremely rare discussion. When it did come up, it was generally in the context of how certain things affected the business. Even then, it was with a deep understanding that the other parties where smart, well-meaning individuals.

Selling screws to anyone who asks is one thing. Coming onsite to help build a sturdy black ops detention facility is another.

Which one will gitlab be doing?

The same people mad at ICE are fine doing business with China. Gitlab is making the right move, as the people who all of a sudden are pretending to become ethical, are mostly just posturing for their friends, otherwise ICE would be far down their list of business concerns.

I hope more tech companies follow their lead. Politics in the workplace is paralyzing to productivity and as a customer, I don't want platforms to be our morality police.

I really like the idea that as engineers, our speciality is not politics but creating technology for a company in order to maximize revenue by following the existing law. It was surprising for me coming to America that employees have the option to discuss politics (I come from South America) where my limited working experience there was if you are not happy with who the company is conducting business you either quit or build your own company. In Bay Area people come from different country, religion, social class and school to name a few. There's an intrinsic bias about what is a valid customer or not. Help ICE to detect faces, if ICE is doing it based on existing laws and it's an important contract for the future of your company, why not? There are decisions that should be discussed in the realm of legality, morality and business but makes sense to keep opinions outside work. Me as a right conservative can barely discuss topics like pronouns, Trump mistakes and achievements, religion without being tagged as a caveman. Good

Now that people in the western world have largely abandoned churches for their attitudes toward "sin" and morality, they replaced churches with corporations, media companies, and governments to dictate what is sinful in society.

Once people realize what they've done will they reject corporations, media, and government? If so, where will they turn to?

I suspect that the need for parental moralization of behavior at some tribal level is a group survival mechanism that we can't get rid of.

Regardless of whether it is the church, government, news media, social media, or some corporate policy, it all seems to end up the same from where I sit. Yet, in replacing faith with consumerism or corporatism or governmentism, it seems many people have lost a great deal of hope along the way (see the current mental health crisis for evidence).

It seems people were happier when they left this sort of moral policing to the church/temple/whatever at least they had hope in something positive to keep them going.

I worked at a company where they tried to apply a "no political discussion" policy in response to (justified) moral uneasiness with the direction of the company. Because work that has any social bearing has a political element by definition, it seems extremely counter productive.

Of course, by saying this they didn't mean that there shouldn't be political discussion. They were just using vague and overgeneralized language to say that there shouldn't be political discussion that they didn't like.

That said, I think it's a good move from Gitlab to say that they'll sell to anyone they legally can sell to. We shouldn't rely on corporations to make moral choices, because between that and making more money, they most likely won't. We should instead have airtight regulation and unions that make sure that morally reprehensible choices lead to less money.

There's really two mandates to workers here:

1: Don't discuss politics at work. This seems reasonable, when the discussion has a good chance of getting heated and making it more difficult to work with colleagues.

2: Don't vet potential customers (in part because it might get political)

This second one is less defensible. Avoiding politics is fine when it's unrelated to the work, but when it intrudes on work, it becomes relevant, and avoiding the issue is a lapse of ethical responsibility. That people might disagree on the boundaries of that responsibility is precisely why the discussions are needed.

I'm not saying this is easy, that it won't lead to conflict, but it can be done in a structured fashion that minimizes the ability for conversation to blow up into flame wars. Again, not easy, but necessary to avoid abdicating moral responsibility for your actions.

For the downvoters: maybe you haven't worked somewhere that the work has explicit political context. I have. There are ways of dealing with that fact that don't degenerate into shouting and acrimony. There are ways of professionally, maturely, addressing difficult issues relevant to the work you do.

They've since changed #2 to the point of walking the whole thing back.

I find it kind of weird that this has to be stated.

Work-- and commerce in general-- should be a place where people can put aside differences which are irrelevant to their enterprise and work together for a common benefit.

Extensive discussion of divisive topics which are unrelated to working conditions can really get in the way. Twenty+ years ago it seemed like it was the norm to me, I'm not sure why people seem to have lost this insight.

This doesn't mean that you have to be totally neutral to mass murderers or what not, but it's prudent to think carefully about where your political and moral hard stops are. If they're not significantly more extreme than your preferred views then you're probably adopting a position which is overly intolerant to a diversity of opinions and you're probably wasting a lot of time by failing to cooperate with others.

Whenever I think about this topic, my gut says that a service provider's moral obligation to refuse service to customer relates linearly with the customer's reliance on the service in conducting its morally odious behavior. In other words, I see McDonalds selling cheeseburgers to ICE differently than I see a physical security company selling cages to them.

Is this defensible? From a utilitarian standpoint there's an argument that your refusal of service has greater moral impact as the customer becomes more reliant on it. Practically speaking there's the argument about efficiency. A lot of people need cheeseburgers and so the list of companies you have an issue with is going to be pretty damned large. But other than that is there a philosophical basis for this way of thinking?

Discussing politics at work has NEVER been a routine thing for me and as far as I know that's always been the cultural norm, at least where I live. It's handled very carefully. So I just assumed that this was the norm and discussing politics at work was the exception.

It is the norm, in the non-SV world.

Don't be yourself at work. Don't live at work. Don't say what you think at work. You have been hired to do your job, not to enjoy your time.

I get it, it's totally normal, I'm honestly not judging anyone or saying it should be otherwise: it's most probably the matter of that it couldn't be otherwise. But I find it kind of sardonic, that you take the fact you don't really belong to yourself for most of your life much more naturally, than the fact you have been told you cannot discuss politics by one of your potential temporary owners. Because, yeah, politics is special, obviously.

Oh, and I'm totally fine with treating customers as "just customers" by the way.

They're Ukrainians. Slav people are pretty blunt about these issues. Simply put, they don't care. Work is work. Politics is not work.

The idea that even spam is does not fall into "content moderation" is very interesting.

A fake Rolex email is an interesting advertisement to some people and belongs in the garbage for others.

Research has shown that buyers of spam advertised products will literally dig through their spam folder to find a store to buy from.

As this (naturally, pun intended) expands to green coffee, açai, news articles about Florida man, and on up to what we see as disinformation, the difficulty in identifying intent becomes equally as challenging.

There's no way to "just host content", and anyone attempting to do this will face a range of laws, user challenges, and more that introduce "content moderation" into the platform.

I disagree with GitLab on this one, but that title is one crazy leap in logic... "Blood money is fine with us, says GitLab"

The Register has somewhat clickbaity editorial standards, to be sure.

(Edit: media name correction. Egg on my face!)

This article seems to be laced with innappropriate bias. It appears to be judging gitlab for this decision.

Beyond that, its weird that this is not only an uncontroversial position to take but anything other than the only legal option. The government should be the only arbiter of morality with regards to business, where judging your business or actions to be illegal and/or issuing a court order to a company to stop service or remove content should be the _only_ legal way a company can refuse you service.

I do not think putting these kinds of decisions into the hands of unelected people or companies is a good idea.

Hypothetically, why is it so unreasonable that you would ban someone who advocated for genocide from participating on your platform?

The government is not supposed to legislate all morality. There's plenty of awful things you can do that are perfectly legal. Companies can and should be able to choose who they do business with.

I wonder if they're trying to pre-empt the issues Chef has been facing recently in selling to ICE.

Discussed in the article. The CEO was asked, specifically, about this.

Mea culpa, I shouldn't have skimmed.

However, if your organization has any lobbyists under their pay, your organization is inherently political.

I can accept that ideological divisions within a team sows disorder and that businesses want to avoid that.

I would also suggest that in an age where we are again facing the threat of totalitarianism, the threat of treasonous acts, human rights violations that evoke memories of the holocaust, we, the adults, citizens, and guardians of civil society have to cast aside our professionality for moral duty.

It would be preferable of course if we were able to take our moral convictions and take to the streets instead of arriving at work each day, but many of us do not have the luxury to take time off.

Politics is often the practical pursuit of our moral convictions. It's kind of surreal to me that our pattern of livelihood forces us to stop considering and dismiss the moral consequences of our daily actions.

The frank truth is that work is 1/2 of our waking lives. Acting without prior moral deliberation for half our lives seems immoral.

I do not want to be calculating the moral value of everything I do, but having become aware of the impact of my decisions in so many different areas, the individual contribution I make to what is acceptable in our society, I cannot help but be motivated to be more morally conscious - even if I fall short all the time. At least, I am aware of it and disgust myself at times.

This is a biased article written in an inflammatory style. Also, there is a mistake in the first 5 letters (Gitlab is not "San Francisco based" being remote-only)

The company entity is headquartered in San Francisco, even if its only a PO box that is its "address".

a company has to be registered somewhere.

Politics could be discussed at work, if parties didn't decide to go for super extreme, polarizing positions. These days it feels like you cannot speak with the other side of the wall without getting into a fight. What happened to pragmatism and centrists? Politicians need divisiveness to keep their chairs.

That said, I would exclude any customer that has extreme views. Why support their platform, especially with a product like Gitlab, and help them spread hate?

> and help them spread hate

because hate has been extended to include whatever people don't like, i.e. hate. Hate is a particularly bad choice of sieve. Violence is better

In practice, "don't discuss politics" policies imply "don't discuss it (below a certain pay-grade)."

Corporations are political entities (even the decision to do business with people regardless of their politics is a political position), so someone at every corporation is considering that angle. Or the corporation is adrift on seas of change without attempting to navigate them.

I think most of this discussion has missed the point. The point of the memo is that Gitlab isn’t sorting customer into morally “good” or “bad” buckets and choosing to do business with them.

The decision making process required to do that will necessarily be filled with politics and value judgments.

He’s right, that is a huge distraction from the business of making money.

The important question is whether that distraction is worth it.

As of yesterday, GitLab's marketing team have made some changes to their Customer Acceptance policy:

https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/merge_requests/...

In particular this seems to clarify that the company may under some circumstances not work with particular customers, and that employees can - in private contexts - discuss such issues.

In addition, the justification of 'efficiency' as a reason not to spend time vetting customers has been removed.

It'll still be interesting to watch how GitLab behaves in future, since the original policies stated may remain their true direction, even if the externally-facing language has changed.

HN to me is the ideal model of modern, democratic publisher for the times we live in. Content here is self-moderated and slightly editorialized. The community strives for a civil, educated debate and penalizes who doesn't follow suit. I don't know if HN would scale in a larger context, like in FB/Twitter feed scale, or on more personal networks ie Whatsapp or Telegram. Also comment sections of newspapers or Youtube should have a more HN-like moderation and overall charter to make it more civil.

It really drives me nuts to not be able to vote or moderate down or my family members that publish fake news to Whatsapp, or read racist and mysogenist comments in YouTube that seems to persist regardless of downvoting and flagging.

It sounds idealistic, but I really think the world would be a much better place if the HN culture and processes could be somehow automated and embedded into public and private threads everywhere as some sort of nearly inescapable standard.

I think it's concerning that everybody seems to think it's okay for companies to clamp down on political discourse. Where do people think we're supposed to talk about this shit? Who's supposed to champion these causes if not companies? Who has actual power in this world other than companies? Companies dominate the media, the way we consume media and everything that we see.

All this means is nothing changes, nothing improves and companies are free to profit off of suppressing rights in authoritarian countries without blowback from people using their platform (like Blizzard/Riot) or people that work for them. Companies are not and never have been neutral entities. If your goal is profit maximization to the detriment of the social fabric and moral principles, then sure, go ahead and pretend to be neutral. But I'm not sure that should be the goal and we shouldn't be helping companies pursuing this goal.

> Where do people think we're supposed to talk about this shit?

With your personal friends and family? With NGO or activist groups and forums? Town halls and local political events? Literally anywhere outside work?

> Who's supposed to champion these causes if not companies?

Democratically elected representatives? NGOs, activist organizations, and citizen groups? Since when were for-profit fiduciaries the primary battleground for politics?

Utilities are forbidden to deny service based on similar reasoning. It would not be right for Verizon or ConEdison or similar to deny services to ICE etc.

However Gitlab is not a utility or regulated as anything remotely close to one.

A company that takes pro-active steps to declare that they will do business without any scruples or ethical concerns is just plain disgusting.

The author Thomas Claburn is not entirely correct when he writes: "GitLab, a San Francisco-based provider of hosted git software, recently changed its company handbook to declare it won't ban potential customers on "moral/value grounds," and that employees should not discuss politics at work."

The segment on discussing politics within the company has not changed for a while and doesn't explicitly exclude discussing politics at work, but does so in a public context. From the handbook:

"Religion and politics at work We generally don't discuss religion or politics in public forums because it is easy to alienate people that have a minority opinion. It's acceptable to bring up these topics in social contexts such as coffee chats and real-life meetups with other coworkers, but always be aware of cultural sensitivities, exercise your best judgement, and make sure you stay within the boundaries of our Code of Conduct."

I regularly discuss topics like politics and religion when I feel free to do so as it's part of my identity, of course I try to be considerate to opposing viewpoints.

And I get the point to do business with others regardless of their political views. For example

"A pro-democracy restaurant in #HongKong offers free meal to student protesters. A pro-Beijing woman took her daughter there for the free meal, but kept complaining the “rioters” are “destroying” things etc. Restaurant owner waived her bill and told her to leave. "

He said... “This is a private property. I can call #HongKongPolice to get u out but I won’t, coz I don’t believe in them.” Later on he said “u asked why we are doing this (to her daughter)? Then ask yourself why did u say those things (about the young #HongKongers)? I don’t want your biz!” https://twitter.com/ajmm19923493/status/1184173217474207744

It's reasonable to not want to get into exhausting political battles at work. But such a policy falls apart fast. What about when a coworker asks about your dating life and you talk about a same-sex partner? A lot people see that as political because it's not status quo.

"We're not going to be political" sounds so simple, but a whole lot of status quo politics spills out when you try to apply it in reality.

Another example: a coworker is from a country bombed by the branch of government you're selling stuff to. What then?

Aside: Hacker News rightfully sees a lot of criticism, but it has improved some. This thread is full of people pointing out that apolitical is synonymous with support of the political status quo, making apolitical an oxymoron.

I would encourage Github, Gitlab, and all the rest to continue working with ICE. There's a good chance the next administration will want to prosecute ICE for human rights violations and good version-controlled records of who did what when will be essential.

Observation: It seems like we have lost faith in the legal system in recent times based on everything from call-out/cancel culture to protests over contracts. My question to the world is, are we right to feel this way?

I certainly feel at least in the U.S. that the legal system has done a poor job of protecting humanities interests on many occasions, though I do not think pushing the responsibilities of policing morality to businesses and society is really a good thing over all. It has come with a lot of negative side effects.

I do not pick a side strongly here, though. I sure as hell wouldn’t feel good about helping an entity I feel is highly immoral. Is a mutual contract “helping?” You can really get into the weeds fast.

This is honestly a breath of fresh air. It seems that in the past 5 or so years, most tech companies have begun to radicalize and become more authoritarian. It's great to have neutral platforms for people who don't particularly identify as far-left.

Regardless of whether they are just talking about not looking into the background of their clients, or they are banning all discussion of politics in their offices, this is incredibly shitty. Ignoring politics doesn't make it go away.

As many here seem to like the idea of not a non political workplace couple quick questions:

- If I work at a workplace which produces a deadly weaponize-able Gas (lets for random reasons call it Zyklon B) should I care for politics or just do my job and provide any customer with my product?

- If I offer storage (e.g. for Cars, Git-Repos, Shoes, ...) should I care if maybe one of my customers is this Gas producing company which needs some storage?

You see where I am getting? There seems to be this trend that politics is some side business which people should only think about when they do either nothing or do it as a job. I don't think Democracies will survive this way.

Switching to Gitlab from GitHub. I wish they added a stackoverflow-like product too.

I was wondering why something that I thought so obvious that I would consider GitLab making it official a formality, gathered over a thousand comments. And then I read the article and quite a few of the comments.

The second top comment (which starts with the assumption that anyone who wouldn't walk to talk politics at work must be "privileged") cleared up why this subject got so many comments pretty quickly. In hindsight, I should not have expected any different.

Appropriately enough, though, this thread is probably evidence of why politics should not be discussed at work, I think.

There is an issue opened to revert this:

    > [...] I understand the motivations behind the
    > policy change but they are misguided: GitLab,
    > please show that the concerns of your community and
    > staff are our first priority by reverting
    > this change.

See: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/issues/5579

An update was merged a few minutes ago: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/merge_requests/...

I think this is a good decision. I actually hold similar beliefs to many of my coworkers in SF but I find it horrifying how common it is to dehumanize nearly half the country. I've lived in three major cities in the US, two on the east coast. San Francisco is the only city where co workers routinely disparaged people living in other states. I do not think employees in tech companies have the capability to be arbiters of anything cultural in this country. Leave that to governments.

Not discussing politics at work seems like it's missing a pretty key point here. Saying we will not choose our customers is not a realistic stance in this world. Choices will have to be made and when they are it is helpful to have a framework in place to make them. This just kicks the can down the road. I have no doubt that a future article will feature gitlab in a situation where they have had to choose and find themselves having to wordsmith or spin their way out of it.

This is awesome. Generally, Politics is opinion based which change with time. I have seen people who have spoiled their long term relationship in politics debates

I feel like discussing politics at work has always been something most folks try to avoid.

On the other hand your company telling you not to is a whole other situation. I'm not sure a policy really solves much. Anyone who wouldn't think twice before discussing such things ... probabbly isn't going to read / care about the policy.

It's one of those rules that no matter how well intentioned, I'm not sure it works well as a policy.

we discuss brexit every day at work. in my previous job too. i don't believe there is an office in Britain where brexit is not mentioned.

That sounds exhausting.

Companies are not divorced from politics or reality no matter how much they want to be. Trying to be non-political is a political act and one that is usually means "I benefit from the status quo, please don't change anything". It's the corporate version of the white guying saying "I don't see color" when he means "I don't want to think about issues of race"

I know many of you work in tech in areas of the country that lean very far one way. I go back and forth on this: is this guideline more important in state like Virginia where you will start to see a more diverse and potentially time wasting or is it more important in Silicon Valley where some minority opinions should be protected if only unpopular? And if unpopular they would respect users views more?

An organization is not a tool, it's a group of people thus it reflects the morals of those people. Software is also not a tool, it's a continual process in an organization of people. Just think, is the code you wrote today a rock? Will it survive without you supporting it? I used to think that was the case but after decades have never seen that to be true.

The Reddit thread, IDK why, feels more to the point than HN’s one:

https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/dj1048/gitlab_...

Who are you to judge someone? Unless someone is proved to be a terrorist or something everything else is subjective. I support Gitlab.

If your policy is going to be, "we'll take your money in exchange for goods or services, no matter who you are", it seems that you'd be better off not making your policy public. It just draws attention to you, and it's not going to positive.

Gitlab is also a remote workplace, so it's not like there's much opportunity for water-cooler talk.

Thanks for the clarification - gives people like me yet another reason to champion using GitHub at the companies we work for

I agree with casiotone; why pretend you have an important, guiding set of enshrined morals and ethics at all when there’s a clause that nullifies everything by saying ”some people might be fundamentally against our values but if they’re loaded, and they want to do evil stuff more efficiently, we’re the company for them!”?

Companies are not neutral entities. People work there and have values. If a company thinks it’s ok to serve people that commit crimes against humanity, in the case of ICE and the Drumpf administration, than they have a serious problem. Maybe send the guy a link to the story about IBM and the nazi regime for context.

Theo said it best: "But software which OpenBSD uses and redistributes must be free to all (be they people or companies), for any purpose they wish to use it, including modification, use, peeing on, or even integration into baby mulching machines or atomic bombs to be dropped on Australia." -- Theo de Raadt

Gitlab, being a remote first workplace probably has a more politically diverse workplace than most and probably realizes that not everyone agrees with everyone else on many things.

Most SV companies, on the other hand, are political monocultures that assumes that west coast liberal politics is the norm and everyone are just Nazis.

It seems no one has yet mentioned the potential illegality of this policy. The rights of employees to discuss their working conditions at work, a largely political discussion, is protected by the NLRA. Google got whacked by the NLRB for their ban on political discussion as well.

They have changed it already: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/commit/c69d6dc2...

I like it, just wish they'd drop the "against protected groups" from point three. Encouraging violence or discrimination against some other groups are okay? (no) Odd.

Good point, I wonder how they define "protected group". If that's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_group then it is slippery slope in some situations. E.g. when you decide to work with Chinese companies should you take into considerations how China (as country) is behaving with Muslims in their country.

I always liked the rules that one prominent local web design company has: they don't work with political or religious organizations. They don't seem to include state organizations in that, but I would. I think this removes lots of potential headache right away.

I don't think there is a right or wrong approach in this one. In my opinion, each organization shall be left to do whatever they want: if they want sensorship, so be it, if they don't want sensorship, so be it. Let the market decide what's best.

Banning staff from talking politics at work shouldn't be allowed under the First Amendment.

That's not what the First Amendment is about - it's about preventing the government from making laws that infringe free speech. But this isn't a law, and GitLab isn't the government, so the First Amendment does not apply.

> It is a common misconception that the First Amendment prohibits anyone from limiting free speech, including private, non-governmental entities. It is applicable only to state actors. (Wikipedia)

If Congress passed a law banning discussion of politics at work, yes that would be a First Ammendment issue.

  Congress shall make no law ....

All the amendment does is specify what Congress can't do.

As a general rule, the First Amendment only restrains the government. It means the government can't ban speech (except in narrow, "content-neutral" ways) and courts can't punish you for it (except for things like defamation).

But the US follows at-will employment, under the more general principle of freedom of association. An employer does't have the same duty to treat its employees "fairly" that the government has to its citizens. Your employer can fire you for pretty much any reason, including differences of opinion, and the First Amendment has nothing to do with that.

The exceptions to this rule are better thought of as exceptions to at-will employment, rather than extensions of First Amendment protection. For instance, you can't fire an employee for discussing wages or working conditions with their co-workers, in the same way that you can't fire someone for being the wrong religion or for reporting illegal behavior.

(If you're saying that the courts should change their interpretation of the First Amendment to include a right to discuss politics at work... well, that would be a major break with precedent, and a huge reach beyond what the text of the amendment says, with wide-ranging ramifications. Instead, some states have passed specific laws that protect workers from discrimination on the basis of political opinion, without needing to invoke the First Amendment.)

That same logic would suggest that no company should be able to ban any topics, content, speech, or people from their platform, no? What is free speech and expression, and what is censorship?

I think society and corporations are wrestling with these concepts right now, and I'm not sure anyone has it right yet.

Re: everyone who commented, I said "shouldn't," not "isn't."

How does a rule like “can’t discuss politics” even work? Anything and everything is political. Not allowing political discussions is in itself political activism for the status quo. Are GitLab employees allowed to discuss the rule?

Based on the title alone, anyone who gets offended by this has not read what GitLab actually states in their "values" page.

In case you don't want to go dig for it here it is: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/values/#religion-and-polit...

TL;DR: it says that generally there shouldn't be discussions about religion or politics on PUBLIC forums, but that such discussions are OK in social context, like during coffee breaks. Also goes to say to keep in mind not to exclude people due to their minority political/religious views.

This seems very reasonable and this whole issue seems almost like a hit piece. GitLab hasn't done anything wrong, but since their world view isn't completely black and white like people-in-the-current-year should have according to the same people who get offended time after time from the most minute things (and even about things that happened decades ago) they must be bad.

About 6 months ago, when the deplatforming conversation seemed to be at its peak, people couldn't spit out "free speech only applies to the government" fast enough. Well, reap what you sow.

The wording of this statement sounds very poorly thought out. Does a customer have to pay them? What if I argue I don't believe I should have to pay, or I have a moral objection? What if my belief in freedom says it's OK to ddos them? Presumably they'll fall back on something like "our contract says you have to pay us to use our services". Great. So you can and will refuse to work with a customer for a reason you chose, not an externally imposed restriction. The intended meaning is probably more like "we will work with anyone who works within our core beliefs about how society and payment for services should work, but we have not done the work of figuring out what those are in advance".

You're conflating beliefs and actions. I can have a moral objection to paying for Gitlab's services and still pay for Gitlab's services. I can write article after article about how it is immoral to pay for Gitlab's services. As long as I pay for their services, I will get them.

I don't think anyone is suggesting that Gitlab and other tech companies stop selling to ICE because they disagree with the beliefs of the organization, but because they object to the actions ICE is taking. If you think those can be treated separately, then gitlab would still be able to say "we won't work with any customer who sells guns".

Didn't google do something similar? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20779004

>This [merge request] demonstrates that you don't have any values except 'we want to make money, and it doesn't matter who gets hurt.'

Well, considering gitlab is a publicly traded company and as they state clearly on their website

https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/stock-options/#stock-optio...

>We are in business to create value for our shareholders

I personally appreciate their blunt honesty. Watching corporations pretend they have morals and obligations other than providing profit to their shareholders, while continually doing the opposite of said stated morals gets tiring.

There seem to be a lot of extremely left-biased el-reg articles coming from the SF office.

e.g: "James Damore's labor complaint went over about as well as his trash diversity manifesto"

In my perfect workplace, people would be able to have political discussions by mutual consent, or opt out of any political discussion, and not get penalized for either.

I think more companies should avoid politics in the workplace. It is really easy to create a divisive or more likely, a one-sided org that is generally less healthy.

Discussing politics at work is very crass, and people who do it should know better. Politics is a draining subject, and employees should not be draining each other.

Corporations have become hotbeds for oppression and self-censorship. They will devolve towards mediocrity.

At least it should become easier for startups to compete against them.

Good for them. Work is about getting things done.

A comment I thought was insightful on the NBA subreddit with regard: "You cannot be global and apolitical at the same time".

I just need to laugh at this point remembering the fanbois who said we had to use gitlab because it was open source and ethical.

Meta, what actually upsets me is how we seem to be avoiding the need to use human judgment.

By definition, every time some process or code is adopted, it takes the human element out a little bit. You have to look case-by-case whether that's a good thing. In some cases, where speed, consistency, precision, or efficiency are valuable, that's a good idea. Leaving humans in the loop is probably better in situations involving most kinds of moral judgment, situations that vary a lot, or things involving a heavy emotional/social component.

Sidenote, I work in self-driving, so this is actually a big question that comes up in my work: what's best to automate vs. what will humans do long-term? It's an interesting question.

It's germane here because, I don't think anyone is really going to suggest, oh, let's sell tools to people who are committing genocide, or pedophilia, or rape, or a variety of other things considered harmful in most cultures. But that's a very hard thing to put into a "code", or a statement of what you will and won't do, precisely because (a) it involves moral judgment, and (b) situations vary a lot.

So we get statements of policy that are black-and-white, perhaps enforceable, but totally absurd. There is no way any reasonable person can take "don't discuss politics at work", at face value. As a straight man, am I supposed to not mention that I'm married? Is that "political"? Of course it is. But I can make the human judgment that that's not likely to offend someone if I mention that I'm married.

There are good and bad effects to a lot of this. Codifying things probably does reduce bias, such as in hiring, or university admissions. But I think we also need to be cognizant of the cost: forcing unnecessarily rigid decision-making into things that are better left a bit fluid.

The best outcomes are probably in the middle, but I don't think we should be as scared as we are of human judgment, whether in university admissions, work promotions, who companies do business with, etc. And yes, there is a thing called "bad judgment" - not all judgments are the right ones, or good, but not all are bad, either.

That article took the least charitable interpretation possible in order to achieve the most clickbait it could possibly be.

Semi-related, but supposedly one of the developers at GitLab also happens to be an African Tribal Warlord.

Don't ask me why I know this

Diversity is good, remember?

When did diversity instantiate as “if you don’t agree with X without qualifications, you’re Hitler”?

Good, right? This allows the consumer to make the decision without distracting GitLab from product building.

That's how it should be. I'm not enjoying while I play WOW nowadays because of damn politics

At the end of the day, you can either put your customers first, or your employees. Gitlab has made their choice. Microsoft has made their choice.

Cancel culture is cancerous, but this is a case where if I can avoid Gitlab, I will, on the grounds that I wouldn't want to recommend them to another entity given their CEO's readiness to do business with the worst scum on the planet.

It's much better than Apple not hiring people based on their political views expressed online.

I think this is perfectly acceptable, especially since they've announced it ahead of time.

for everyone who thinks this is good, google has a child pornography problem that they haven't taken seriously. With great power, comes great responsibility, but unfortunately it's with great power, comes great ignorance.

Many political issues are so heated and have become so divisive that they can create barriers to team cohesion (and societal cohesion for that matter), and occasionally turn into outright intolerance.

Unless you work directly in politics, why are you talking about it at work anyway?

>If ICE has violated the law, he argues, there are legal processes to deal with that.

Well, problem solved then. It's a good thing that the law is always right, and that it is regularly applied in full force to punish law enforcement agencies guilty of wrongdoings.

"Don't discuss politics at work" seems an eminently reasonable position to me. You're on the clock at work.

The second portion about KNOWINGLY doing business with entities that don't share the company's values is extremely difficult to defend.

It's impossible for a company to be entirely non-political. By choosing to stay quiet and not vet potential clients, Gitlab just made a large political statement. Choosing to not discuss politics means implicitly endorsing the current status quo.

a sound strategy. Don't mess with other people problems.

The argument "if you don't engage in politics then you might be part of the problem", is itself a political argument, therefore it is irrelevant in the context of a no-politics rule.

Then the initial demand to not discuss politics must also be political and therefore self-contradictory, so it should be ignored.

"recently changed its company handbook to declare it won't ban potential customers on "moral/value grounds," and that employees should not discuss politics at work."

I'm assuming that "should not" means it's discouraged as a culture and not enforced somehow, because otherwise I would think something different. If so the article seems to try and persuade you against this because politics is somehow important, but the whole point of the new rule is to precisely ignore that.

Hmm, I definitely interpret "should not" in an employee handbook as much stronger than cultural discouragement.

It comes down to whether it's enforced (regardless of how). If there are repercussions of any kind, then in order to make that judgement you need an objective perspective of what's political which is even more of a waste of time if not impossible. Whoever is tasked with discerning what should be punished and what isn't is bound to have some bias.

I guess they can't talk about anything then.

It’s funny how these modern companies are rediscovering the old rules for behavior. When I was young it was a given that you didn’t discuss politics, religion, etc...

A society that has decided to become unforgiving is halfway to becoming a police state. The intent to arrest is the same.

Foreword: I am not suggesting that general political discussion should be allowed at work; it has traditionally been taboo since it gets people riled up.

I am concerned that developers and companies are attempting to somehow opt out and divorce themselves of ethics, and to be amoral. This is not possible.

Ethical considerations are present in all work, especially ours - our work as programmers, leaders, technologists, and so on has the potential to affect large masses of people, even indirectly. Society has rapidly changed due to the advancement of technology and it will continue to do so. I'm not suggesting that every single agreement or project needs to be deeply evaluated for its ethical implications, but projects or sales for questionable organizations ought to have some thought put into them.

I will give an example: should GitLab sell its product to the American Nazi Party, or other fascist organizations across the globe, should they request? It is reasonably uncontroversial to say that fascist parties are vile, wrong, unethical, even evil. Therefore, aiding these organizations and their missions by selling them helpful products is unethical. Saying "we sell to everybody" does not magically make the sale ethical.

To suppress the discussion of ethics as it pertains to a company and its actions is itself unethical, as the impact of a company's actions can be wide-ranging and the implications cannot be divorced from ethics.

This is why gitlab isn’t a company to work for. Nice folks but culture of explicit silence is corruptive.

As much as I love Gitlab I've heard more than one rumor that they have weird values internally.

Well, Gitlab just became even more irrelevant in my book.

Pulling GitLab into the "ICE is literally Hitler" smear campaign; nice smear campaign.

Everything is politics.

sorry is this real ? It read as satire

Human rights aren't politics, they're non-negotiable.

Agreed. I am reminded of MLK Jr's Letter From A Birmingham Jail: https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham....

The salient point being that indifference at scale is worse than individuals with explicit bias.

While this seems self-evident, this claim is only made possible by a mass politics and organization to defend its “non-negotiability.” Arendt wrote about this problem as the “right to have rights”

http://criticallegalthinking.com/2019/07/12/hannah-arendt-ri...

Human rights are massively political. Saying anything else is either ignorant or naive.

Soviet bloc countries didn't vote for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights because of the right of citizens to leave their countries. And let's not get into the human rights of Uyghurs and the worldwide approval/disapproval to China's re-education camps.

There are few things more political than rights, their extent, their upholding or abrogation, their contradiction etc.

Right, and when different human rights conflict, then we resolve the conflict through a political process.

Simple example: Religious freedom/freedom of speech and gay rights. So should the Christian baker be _forced_ to make a cake with words explicitly against his religious beliefs? Which human rights come first here?

Human rights exist only as a political construct formed by many treaties and agreements which have been thoroughly negotiated. I could not come up with anything more political than international law if I tried.

I was born under a dictatorship (that fortunately became again a democracy while I was still a child) and I can tell you human rights don't exist unless you have enough people willing and able to stand up for them.

More broadly, laws aren't worth the paper they're written on if you don't have a police and armed forces willing and able to uphold them.

I understand what your point is; I've talked to several people who voice the same opinion when discussing my country's dark past, but trust me, when the bullies get to power, you can't shout "it's a human right!" back at them. You either have to fight back, hide, or run away.

We're American. We fight back.

People disagree on what exactly qualifies as "human rights" though, and perhaps that's where it becomes political.

I might agree with you that human rights are non-negotiable, but we're probably going to get into a fight when it comes time to list those human rights.

Who said otherwise?

Rights are absolutely negotiable; it's part of your right to be able to trade some of your rights for some benefit.

If you're employed at a desk job, you've traded much of your human right to be wherever the heck you want between the hours of 9 and 5, Monday through Friday, in exchange for a salary.

So this doesn't preclude discussion of HK Police beating protesters or the Uighur concentration camps operating in Xinjiang? Or is this also politics now?

Has anyone read the pull request? For those that didn't, here it is:

  + We do business with customers with values that are incompatible with [our own values](/handbook/values/) for the following reasons:
  + 
  + 1. Our mission is 'everyone can contribute', while there is a [code of conduct for contributing](https://about.gitlab.com/community/contribute/code-of-conduct/) we want to get as close to everyone as possible.
  + 1. We [do not discuss politics in the workplace](/handbook/values/#religion-and-politics-at-work-) and decisions about what customer to serve might get political.
  + 1. [Efficiency is one of our values](/handbook/values/#efficiency) and vetting customers is time consuming and potentially distracting.
  + 1. It maps to the MIT expat open source license we use that [doesn't discriminate against fields of endeavor](https://apebox.org/wordpress/rants/456).

Of the "we do not discuss politics in the workplace", this is the quote from the handbook:

  We generally don't discuss religion or politics in public forums because it is easy to alienate people
  that have a minority opinion. It's acceptable to bring up these topics in social contexts such as
  coffee chats and real-life meetups with other coworkers, but always be aware of cultural sensitivities,
  exercise your best judgement, and make sure you stay within the boundaries of our Code of Conduct.

Here's the problem: this policy can be used to protect people, and disenfranchise people.

On the one hand, you can use this policy to prevent white people from loudly supporting a white supremacist political leader in an office with a very small percentage of people of color. Banning talk of politics here will make it easier to stop dog-whistle racism before it even starts.

On the other hand, you can also use this policy to shut conversations by minority groups who want to support politicians who are improving the lives of people of color. If one goal your company has is, for example, to make your company more ethnically diverse, it would perhaps behoove you to allow different ethnic groups to discuss the political issues they face, and raise awareness of issues critical to them. Banning such speech makes it much harder for them to advocate for better treatment, and educate people in the workplace about the issues they face.

Everyone who thinks this is controversial is falling into the trap of trying to judge a complex issue with emotion, rather than complex rational thought. If you literally decided your opinion about this within 30 seconds, chances are it wasn't very well thought out. I'm willing to bet the CEO is just as guilty of such rushed decision-making.

But there were three other points in the PR!! The last of which I think is really worth considering: "The MIT expat open source license [..] doesn't discriminate against fields of endeavor."

The most common example given is that "you cannot stop an abortion clinic, or an anti-abortion activist, from using the source code". This is an incredibly important part of our society that protects minority groups.

In 2012, in Colorado, a bakery discriminated against a gay couple by refusing to make their wedding cake, because the bakery owners didn't approve of gay marriage. This was (rightly, I think) found by the courts to be illegal discrimination. But you could also consider this case a form of discrimination of field of endeavor, if what you're endeavoring-for is to be married while gay. You can't refuse to make the gay couple a wedding cake - so should you be able to refuse a white supremacist from using your version control tool?

This is where we walk into ethical quicksand. There is a l o n g philosophical rabbit hole you can fall down trying to figure out how to treat people you disagree with. People have spent their whole lives going over these issues and literally nobody has figured it out for certain. And that's why I think the policy, based on the third reason, is acceptable.

The third reasoning, "vetting customers is time consuming and potentially distracting", is clearly true. We could spend our entire lives arguing the moral philosophy of how to treat people we disagree with, but we'd never get any work done. Sure, you could start an ongoing process of defining who can and can't be a customer, but if it takes any amount of discussion at all, and impacts your business, you're losing money and time, and not necessarily achieving an increase in value, either for society, or your customers/stockholders.

So for the sake of expediency, for simplicity, for being the Switzerland of open source, this one company can allow that particular conversation to go on outside its walls, and continue to just bake cakes and write version control tools, and let history be the ultimate arbiter.

What part of the world do you live in, where there’s a real risk of a white supremacist politician receiving even 1% of 1% of the popular vote?

The USA. We've had white supremacist politicians for hundreds of years, and in many parts of the us they carry more than 10% of the vote. As recently as 2016, the former head of the Ku Klux Klan received 3% of election day votes (58,000 people) for a United States Senate seat for the state of Louisiana.

Here's an article from 2018, "All The White Supremacists Running For Office": https://www.huffpost.com/entry/white-supremacists-running-fo... There are 12 candidates listed.

Here's a white supremacist running unopposed for Congress in 2018: https://www.npr.org/2018/02/08/583993705/a-white-supremacist...

In Germany there has recently been an alarming rise in white nationalist political sentiment in large swaths of the country. Here's a list of European white supremacy groups: https://www.counterextremism.com/european-white-supremacy-gr...

I should have been more specific: I was referring to elections for head of state. Regardless, your post is high on rhetoric and low on content. You provide no citation for your strongest claim (that in many part of the US white supremacists carry more than 10% of the vote for some office or another). The white supremacist whom you claim is running for Congress “unopposed” will certainly be opposed by a Democrat, and will certainly lose. If only 12 white supremacists ran for office in 2018, that runs counter to the notion that white supremacists are a significant force in American politics. Almost anyone can run for office, and I highly doubt that any of them won anyway. Given the number of elected officials in the US, I think it’s fair to say that any group that doesn’t hold at least one office is not a significant political force. Can you name an elected official who is a white supremacist?

(Before you accuse me of shifting the goalposts: I wasn’t clear in my original post. If you can find a presidential election that occurred in the last 20 years in which a white supremacist received more than 0.01% of the popular vote, I’ll stand corrected. You’ll have to go back farther than 2016: I googled every candidate [1] who received more than 0.01% of the popular vote in 2016 and none of them is a white supremacist.)

1. https://transition.fec.gov/pubrec/fe2016/2016presgeresults.p...

Did I miss something? Is there a reason why you have to qualify that you're not advocating for Joe Rogan? Did he get "cancelled"?

To clarify I don't dislike Rogan. I don't always like him either. I think he occasionally makes great points and sometimes says profoundly dumb stuff. The point is he's divisive and I don't wan't this to become a Joe Rogan debate.

> I don't always like him either. I think he occasionally makes great points and sometimes says profoundly dumb stuff.

This is most people, especially the talking head types.

This new purity test we're giving every celebrity is unrealistic and culturally/intellectually self-destructive. Some people are even reaching back decades.

Fair enough, I was just genuinely curious. I only started listening to him recently and didn't realize he was someone people would want to argue about.

He's willing to interview right wing people and treat them as if they're people.

While you're not wrong, I don't think this is the issue people have with Joe Rogan's lack of criticism towards some of his interviewees.

Unless by "right wing" you mean people like Alex Jones, and by "treat them as if they're people" you mean not challenge factually incorrect statements. Then I guess you're right.

I find it interesting that an admittedly not-that-smart (calls himself a moron regularly) fighter/comedian who just talks with all sorts of people is sufficiently divisive enough to merit such asterisks.

Strange times.

I think it's because he's not that bright and has one of the most prolific podcasts in terms of listeners that he's divisive. He is mostly uncritical of whatever someone says and isn't that quick on the draw to call people out so he's basically a platform for any mildly famous person to go on the show and spew whatever crackpot theory there is for a few hours unchallenged to his huge base of listeners. He himself is not that controversial but he allows on controversial characters unchallenged.

It is mostly because he has hosted some controversial guests such as Milo Yiannopoulos, Jordan Peterson, and Sargon of Akkad. And by hosting them he is accused of giving the alt-right a platform while also not sufficiently attacking their views.

I don't know of a single person in the world that doesn't say profoundly dumb stuff sometimes.

Is there a reason someone shouldn't make such a clarification if they choose? "I may not agree with what you say, but I'll defend your right to say it" gets brought up an awful lot in free speech discussions on HN, and that's fine, but we need to emember that it definitionally includes defending the right to say, implicitly or explicitly, "That guy over there is saying really stupid/dangerous things and this is why he should stop and why you shouldn't listen to him."

Is there a reason someone shouldn't ask about the reasoning behind such a clarification? I never disputed their right to make it, just didn't understand why.

People try, they label him various things and will call you "alt right" if you don't qualify your reference to him. Its a pretty desperate label but they try.

There is a contingent out there who are very much against him if only for the reason that he has given a platform to people they don't like.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21275269 and marked it off-topic. The comment originally said something like "Not advocating for Joe Rogan but..."

Politics are the new religion anyway: all rational thought has long been abandoned by both camps, at least in the US. So if it's mauvais ton to discuss religion at work (an it is), politics should follow the same rules. Same with political activism: do it on your own time and dime, if it's not related to e.g. worker rights and such.

Excellent policy, but they could stand to realize how political their offices have already become. Maybe the culture of the company blinds them to this, but GitLab's overtly involved in politics.

gitlab has offices?

No.

The point stands, I'm aware that they're relatively decentralized, but I struggle to find that many ways to say "in the course of conducting their business" that are succinct while not inviting nitpicks like this.

Also, yes, GitLab has offices, to some minimal extent.

Was actually a legit question (since "we don't have offices" has been big in their marketing), but I should have made that clearer.

I agree with that statement. California's collective conscious has been such a mess after the democrat loss. Everyone my colleague's vilified who knew how to play the game was temporarily promoted to powerful positions. Thinking Peter Thiel specifically.

Administrations globally change all the time.

When I enter a new market I'm just excited to be there and figure it out, I don't stop and say "waaait a minute, did extremists just come into power here?" I think, looks like there's some opening in high level positions.

But if you do ask yourself that and prefer to do something about it, don't bring it into the workplace.

So when do you imagine they'll be implementing Navajo language support in their UI?

Or is someone going to have to make the judgement call that Navajo users don't constitute a big enough political block to influence their l10n priorities?

Someone has to make those calls

Navajo speakers aren't a political bloc, they're a linguistic bloc, and support for languages is driven by revenue potential in any software company I've ever seen.

Language is partly power and identity. Definitely somewhat political.

Cultural respect should not be contingent on monetary incentives.

A company choosing where in the world they want to do business has approximately nothing to do with “cultural respect” as far as I understand the term.

While I have no doubt that this is said with well intentions, imagine a systemic way of dealing with this that is not facism.

There isn't. The only systemic and consistent way of enforcing "respect" as a society is some government thought court crime tribunal.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21275269.

"Trump just got impeached!". When that happens, are we not allowed to mention it in the coffee-room?

I understand it is not good to ARGUE about things loudly. But no more "free speech" sounds alarming.

Silence is politics.

"Efficiency is one of our values and vetting customers is time consuming and potentially distracting."

Always thinking about efficiency and performance, even to justify a decision for vetting a costumer that may be evil. Money.

I just gained a lot of respect for Git.

We really need more companies to take a stance against all this moral posturing.

It's like at some point people forgot that publishers should not take sides, and only remove things that are illegal.

Burning books has a long, dark history. Even if those non-criminal books are truly nasty. At one time books portraying miscegenation were the nasty ones. One generations nasty books are the next generations accepted ones. Internet media is no different.

It's companies like GitLab that are propping up Saudi and Chinese empires. Hope one day they get their Scrooge moment. Anyhow, most companies probably do this by default and quietly but what is interesting about Gitlab is they felt like they needed to announce publicly that they'll support all customers regardless of their morality.

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