Hacker News Reader

Hacker News is about pseudonymous discussion. Only a small percent of HN posters are building a brand name. Twitter is much more real-name based and personal brand-building focussed.

Jumping in on a bandwagon to signal group membership in an in group can help brand-building. Going against the in group is potentially fatal to your brand. The risk/reward balance does not favor genuine discussion of a controversial topic.

On HN most comments are up/down voted based on their content. The post authorship usually matters little. There is little benefit for the author to announce support of a popular position and little risk for the author to express an unpopular one. So discussion here can be more about substance and less about signaling.

This is one of the most illuminating assessments of Twitter. It’s virtue signaling , as cliche as it sounds to use that term - that’s what Twitter has become. No fault of Twitter, we’ve created a culture in our society where persons with their open identity cannot easily voice dissenting opinions and going against the grain without getting cancelled.

What a fucked up world we live in.

I am not on twitter. What's with this canceling? Who got cancelled? What does that mean for them? Could you illustrate some examples?

In case you're still curious: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancel_culture#Examples

This is not true. HN very much behaves like the rest. The hive mind here just keeps repeating the mantra while still downvoting dissenting opinions. Look at the other dead comment. Was that really bad enough to kill it? And from my experience, if you really challenge the powerful crowd you get vengeance killed all over the thread.

Also accounts here are not like on reddit. You gain power with accepted comments. That's the most echo'y power dynamic imaginable. If you don't play the old boy's game, you can't participate and shape the conversation.

So, HN, are you gonna give me voting rights or will you kill me, too?

Remember that outside the valley AI bubble Gebru is primarily famous for having publicly whipped up a mob against Yann LeCun and chasing him off Twitter by constantly claiming he was a racist sexist white man with no clue. Given that, it's maybe not a huge surprise that the tweets you're finding are more pro-Timnit than actually exists.

Another obvious problem: she keeps being described as a highly respected AI researcher, a leader of the field etc. Er, no. I read a lot of AI papers. I don't respect Gebru or the sub-field of AI ethnics much at all. What's happening here is simple: criticising a black woman in tech is impossible to do under your own name in corporate America, as radical leftists will immediately set out as a group to destroy you. The only acceptable position is to praise her and claim she's a genius. On HN and Reddit you can see what people really think and it's very far from that.

I find that the average HN thread demonstrates a broader diversity of thought, and generally deeper, more critical, more scientific thought than the average Twitter feed. So it’s not surprising that Twitter would be near unanimous and HN would be more nuanced.

This is one of the reasons I prefer HN to just about any other online forum.

I agree that there is a broader diversity of a thought, but there’s also a dominant, conservative streak when it comes to deferring to corporate authority. This is unsurprising since many people on this site get paid a lot of money by the same people being critiqued, but does represent a kind of self-selection toward servility.

HN is the new /.

Oh I haven't thought about that site in a long time. I used to be obsessed with it back in the day.

Deeper and more critical sure (likely due to the platform, not necessarily the users).

On Twitter I can choose to follow POC, women, experts inside/outside this field and hear their opinion—-which I’d argue provides a more diverse representation than anonymous posts by a largely white male message board.

I also trust the opinion of someone willing to share their identity, it forces you to think more carefully about the stand you’re taking when your reputation is on the line.

What makes someone's opinion particularly valuable when that someone's a woman or not white? They might have different life experiences and perspectives on day to day life compared to a white male, but sex or race has zero relevance to knowledge-based fields.

The opinion of someone anonymous is probably very close to their true opinion. The opinion of non-anonymous users on Twitter is almost certainly censored.

Er, who is claiming "all research at Google is pointless and should stop until reform"? Presumably not the person who was trying to do and publish research at Google?

(Are you confusing this with her email that said that participating in Google's feel-good diversity and inclusion work, specifically, was pointless and should stop, so that people could focus on their real jobs - such as research - instead of wasting time placating unknown managers?)

Anyway, my theory re your question is that Reddit and HN are usually pseudonymous, and so you have no idea whether the person saying something actually knows anything about Google or actually participates in the industry. The norm on Twitter is to use your real identity, and so comments from Googlers and ex-Googlers are boosted there. On Reddit and HN, good-sounding first-principles arguments are boosted. The two models are better at different kinds of discussions.

A bit of a mixup I think. Good to clarify it. The Google walkout blog demands all research needs reform (but no stop) but the email did specify that specific field to stop.

Yeah, the email was clearly written amidst frustration and isn't the world's most polished piece of prose, but I think it's pretty clear that the thing it's saying you should do is stop writing DEI docs that meet OKRs and are aimed at an internal audience, not stop doing research:

> What I want to say is stop writing your documents because it doesn’t make a difference. The DEI OKRs that we don’t know where they come from (and are never met anyways), the random discussions, the “we need more mentorship” rather than “we need to stop the toxic environments that hinder us from progressing” the constant fighting and education at your cost, they don’t matter. [...]

> So if you would like to change things, I suggest focusing on leadership accountability and thinking through what types of pressures can also be applied from the outside. For instance, I believe that the Congressional Black Caucus is the entity that started forcing tech companies to report their diversity numbers. Writing more documents and saying things over and over again will tire you out but no one will listen.

(It seems to consistently use the word "paper" instead of "document" for research.)

And Jeff Dean's reply identifies that she was asking to stop the DEI work, not to stop research:

> I also feel badly that hundreds of you received an email just this week from Timnit telling you to stop work on critical DEI programs. Please don’t.

Maybe deeper knowledge of the issues at hand than in Twitter. Or maybe different interests. Why would they agree? There is a reason why I don't use Twitter and I read HN.

This is not surprising. On Twitter there is a strong cancel culture to irrationally oppose anything that fails to unquestioningly accept “wokeness” narratives. Critical thinking and evaluation of evidence is not really permitted. Twitter is more about trying to look (publicly) like you affiliate with this or that celebrity, so the regular person can feel some sense of patronage to their chosen circle of intellectuals or artists. It has no connection to objective appraisal of evidence. It’s more tribal. It’s “Team Timnit” (all the details supporting wokeness narratives are believed, all details supporting Google taking an appropriate action are heresy) or “Team Google” and you feel the opposite.

The James Damore episode is another example. It is essentially 100% equivalent to what Timnit has done in this chain of events, but in that case the “wokeness” bloc on Twitter called for Damore’s firing and railed against his perspective - virtually a complete double standard compared to how they view Timnit’s behavior.

By the mostly anonymous nature of Hacker News, and the removal of any type of social credit for patronage of different ideologues, the commentary here is able to be much more nuanced and try to really account for a much greater variety of facts or perspectives.

The basic difference is that she implied I&D work at Google was ineffective while he implied half his co-workers were unworthy of their jobs.

She made her managers mad while he made half the company mad.

I would say she did much more than imply - she wrote a workplace email imploring her coworkers to stop doing their jobs - something that would get you fired anywhere, any time. I also think you’re overstating Damore’s claims and you’re taking the interpretation or reaction to his claims to be equivalent to the claims themselves.

The claims themselves, that innate biological differences between men and women can partly account for their different representation in hiring in certain professions, is pretty much beyond dispute and has so much academic research supporting it that it’s pure gaslighting to treat someone like they are sexist or discriminating or biased for saying so. Note this has to do with factors that lead to representation in certain fields, and is not a statement about whether people of a given gender actually perform jobs in that field in any better or worse way.

Both Gebru and Damore are pushing agenda-based interpretations of existing facts, and both are doing so in ways that are not appropriate for a professional workplace.

I am glad at least to see that Google handled both situations relatively consistently, given how extremely similar in scope and impact Gebru’s comments are to Damore’s.

Did she say to stop doing your job? Or to stop writing about achieving diversity?

Damore said more than just that there might be reasons for the lack of women in tech. He also said that we should stop trying to increase their representation. Among a bunch of other things.

She said to stop doing your job.

Re: Damore, I agree. He was pushing a bad agenda that tried to draw more than is reasonable from some academic research on gender disparity.

Very, very similar to what Gebru did as well. First by pushing agendas in a publication leading to its disapproval, then in her follow up email.

I can’t find where she said to stop doing your job. Can you quote it here?

It’s directly in the email Timnit wrote, among just the first few lines. If you were unable to find it, then either you did not try whatsoever, or you are disingenuously pretending like there is some other potential way to interpret Timnit’s email that miraculously causes it to not refer to the explicit labor tasks of the Google employees she sent it to.

The direct quote (which can be read in the link [0]) is:

> “What I want to say is stop writing your documents because it doesn’t make a difference.”

This is a direct, explicit, unequivocal reference to researchers and ethicists employed by Google to write research and policy documents on fairness, DE&I, and bias, within machine learning, staffing and hiring, and other areas.

The phrase, “stop writing your documents because it doesn’t make a difference,” cannot be falsely made to apply to any context other than actively encouraging coworkers to specifically stop performing their direct job responsibilities.

My suspicion is that you would try to falsely misrepresent Timnit’s imploring to stop work as instead being about some type of non-work related activities or optional / extra-curricular activities that Google wouldn’t have a formal labor productivity stake in - and if that is in fact what your response would be, it is completely and wholly false and wrong.

[0]: https://www.platformer.news/p/the-withering-email-that-got-a...

What was communicated on social media was that the company had fired her, but it appears that the researcher tied the continuation of her work to the company accepting her conditions. The company did not accept.

In poker terms: one party bluffed and the other party called the bluff.

Now whether the clauses were abusive and the company was compelled to satisfy these conditions is left to lawyers, I suppose. I'm not privy to more details to have an opinion one way or the other.

This isn't poker. She made demands and stated she'd discuss it further after her PTO. Google accepted a resignation never made as a punishment (it has financial implications).

Sure it's not poker. I believe the researcher was looking for an employment lawyer, and the pressure is increasing. The email was discussed in public and subsequently "published" by the company's people. Again, not privy to more details.

She directly said stop writing these documents. They are not effective for doing the job. The data shows this. She doesn’t say stop doing your job. In one example she gives job is to increase diversity in gender and lamenting that all of this talking has had no impact yet Samy seems to have done it with no incentive (I’d like more of the backstory on Samy).

The job is to increase diversity and inclusion, not to write documents. Programmers get this in other domains (the job isn’t to write lines of code, but to provide value to customers), but suddenly become naive when it comes to things like this.

> while he implied half his co-workers were unworthy of their jobs.

Why do you and other keep propagating this myth?

If anything I think you are making it harder for women in IT:

You are building a narrative that many respected people doesn't respect girls in IT which probably makes it even harder for them to choose IT.

Also I think you are building up under the idea that men and women are enemies in the workplace.

At this point I think it is well established for anyone that cared to read what he actually wrote that he was trying to help bring more women into Google, not saying that those who were there were somehow unworthy.

sarcasm

I heard buying Twitter bots is cheap.

> Why is this?

Because there are lots of FAANG engineers in here (i.e. working at Google, or with friends working at Google, or working at companies who do the same nasty AI stuff as Google) so them unconditionally supporting Gebru on this would be against their direct financial interests. It's as simple as that.

HN strikes me as being pretty consistently anti-Google almost every time Google comes up, so I don’t think this is the reason.

It's split quite evenly in pro and against camps, at least on privacy.

FAANG employees tend to consistently be among the most vocal and outspoken critics of FAANG. Also see the 1,200+ employees who signed a petition unconditionally supporting Gebru while turning a blind eye to her problematic behavior.

There's significant overlap between FAANG employees (and SV tech employees in general) and Woke Twitter.