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Comment by overgard | Hacker News Reader

This is why the idea that it's never ok to question an accuser is really dangerous. "J" obviously discovered something that way too many people have now discovered: if you drape yourself in the cloak of the victim, you make yourself socially impervious to any critical inquiry. We can and should be disgusted by "J", but it's less about an individual and more about a vulnerability in our system: mob justice and crucifying people outside of the legal system is a very very bad idea. And no, I'm not suggesting we should never take victims seriously, since in discussions of this nature people always want to create strawmen. But I don't think we should just take anonymous commentary with no contact with actual law enforcement seriously.

There's a really good reason we have an innocent-until-proven-guilty system. False accusations can be just as harmful as actual crimes.

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One other aspect that is important to the innocent-until-proven-guilty system: literally everyone is capable of lying. Who knows how bad it gets in accusations with power differentials involved - pretty much impossible to study. I personally believe that in a family law case it is likely that everyone involved is lying. It is even more common that people are trying to be truthful but just are wrong (consider that in formal testing, people are doing their best to be right and typically get a whole bunch of things they were actively taught wrong - how much worse does it get when they aren't trying to remember?).

There has to be a minimum standard of evidence before we can assume someone is guilty of something; even if bad apples are getting away with crimes. Otherwise the system can only fail.

if you drape yourself in the cloak of the victim, you make yourself socially impervious to any critical inquiry

You seem to live in a parallel reality. Susan Fowler's career was destroyed twice when she came out with accusations.

For the victim, it's not even an uphill battle, in most of the cases it's a guaranteed losing battle.

There are two realities, or so it seems. Some accusers are suppressed & destroyed regardless of fault.

In response, processes were created to instead suppress & destroy the accused regardless of fault.

Now cases take the shape of one or the other, depending on the context under which they are processed.

Susan Fowler is doing just fine - far better, in fact, than she would have been doing if she had kept quiet.

I read up on Fowler and Wikipedia says this which is very very different from your take.

> Fowler's role in changing Uber made her into a business world celebrity. She has received book and Hollywood film deals and continues to work towards legislation and workplace protections for women.

How is that "getting her career destroyed"?

Good for her that she got a book deal out of the experience and got on the speaking circuit. For most people it doesn't work like that. (The other problem is that labour rights in the US would be a nice to have and Title IX is the only law with teeth.)

I can't imagine most posters here would rather do a speaking circuit then program.

Especially now that the speaking circuit / conference presentation / business world celebrity career path has come to a sudden unexpected dead end due to COVID.

You keep stating that Susan Fowler can no longer be an engineer. This is not substantiated. Can you provide examples where she is being denied employment? From what I can tell, she was hired by Stripe after leaving google. Did Stripe fire her as for sharing her experience at Uber?

If people would pay me $50K for a speech (https://www.allamericanspeakers.com/celebritytalentbios/Susa...) I'd seriously think about it. I mean I could work 10 days a year (ok, let's say I need 3 days to prepare the speech - 30 days a year!) and get much more than I am getting now. What's not to like?

Fowler wanted to be a physicist but can't now, then wanted to be an engineer but can't now. I'd call that a twice destroyed career.

why can’t she be a physicist or an engineer? Is the implication that no one will hire her? If so, could you substantiate? It seems hard to believe.

Is this based on non-public information? Professionally, it seemed like she had kept a job at Stripe during the post and at least its immediate aftermath. I am sure she dealt with a lot of personal harassment though, since our law enforcement doesn’t seem to care about crimes online.

> Susan Fowler's career was destroyed twice when she came out with accusations.

What do you mean by this? She was working at another company when she published her story, and as far as I know was not fired or otherwise had action taken.

Fowler's story of abuse at the hands of the physics department at UPenn is absolutely harrowing. The way that they realiated against her was only half of the story though-the other student (who the department had, absurdly, charged her with taking care of) made false complaints against her and those where taken seriously in a situation not totally unlike the one in the article.

Harrowing indeed. It reminds me of the numerous instances in which Title IX was abused to ruin the lives of students and faculty, including TFA.

Most people and by extension most abusers aren't the very powerful. A majority of abuse is probably committed by people who have only slightly more power than the people they abuse.

It's entirely possible that our society makes it very hard to touch high status people and easy to destroy low status people. We can easily have the worst of both worlds.

Yeah, I feel the tension with this. We have people like Susan who are genuine victims and then we have all of the Title IX “victims” and university administrators who wielded the law to ruin the lives of their (largely male) targets. Seems like due process and due diligence offer the best of all worlds.

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