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Comment by googthrowaway42 | Hacker News Reader

> The thing HN likes to do best with any story is to generalize it and find sweeping conclusions.

This is what intelligent people do. They recognize patterns and extrapolate. At this point the vast majority of people have experienced variations of what this guy has gone through.

In my own experience I have seen the exact same pattern of behavior in a slack community set up for my town.

> This is one of those posts where the title is going to trigger a lot of unproductive subthreads,

They seem quite productive to me. This sort of pathological behavior is increasingly common and finally people are willing and able to talk about it in public.

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> This is what intelligent people do. They recognize patterns and extrapolate.

Any level of intelligence does this. How well one extrapolates varies, and extrapolation is always eventually wrong.

If we were to let that be a showstopper we would only have scientific hypothesis in place of scientific theories.

Consult the search bar below to disabuse yourself of the notion that "intelligent people" have had any trouble discussing their qualms about codes of conduct until now.

I can assure you that speaking out against CoCs under your real name in a professional context can be quite difficult. The people who tend to create, promote, and defend CoCs tend to engage in incredibly Kafkaesque and pathological behavior as a matter of course.

As far as HN goes, I use the term "intelligent" quite loosely but one of the hallmarks of intelligence is pattern recognition.

> I can assure you that speaking out against CoCs under your real name in a professional context can be quite difficult.

Christ I wish.

Maybe it's not what's being said but how it's being said. And, the irony of your bit about intelligence is that you're critiquing an instance of pattern recognition. ;)

> Maybe it's not what's being said but how it's being said.

This is the kind of rhetoric I'm referring to when I say Kafkaesque. These people derive power from being victims so if they are given this benefit of the doubt you are granting them where the onus is on some person to walk on eggshells lest that person upset the perpetually upset these perpetual victims will of course announce they are upset and victimized no matter what is said, thus fending off any attack.

Kafka would be proud.

You know it's possible for us to just disagree about things, right?

"Agreeing to disagree" is the easy way out of an argumentation. I think the parent is right in that having to worry so much about how others see things is unproductive and toxic. There's such a diversity of sensitivities, having to cater to all of them is a fool's errand.

Yes of course but in this case you're just wrong. This is a very well documented pattern of behavior at this point. Fortunately you're not my boss or colleague and so you can continue to promulgate these structures that cause a lot of misery and distress and lost productivity and I will continue to avoid being subject to them.

There's no "but". You feeling that I'm "just wrong" is what disagreement is. You don't have to drag Kafka into it. He's got better things to do.

I've been scrolling through the comments, and this whole place seems like a mad house. Everyone's got their own theory on what's "Destroying society/America/the world/the Internet" and are foaming in the mouth convinced that their pet idea is the right one...

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