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Comment by jxidjhdhdhdhfhf | Hacker News Reader

This is kind of the end result we're heading for, where you can only talk candidly with people who are equal or lower than you on the oppression hierarchy. The shitty part is that I'm pretty sure 99% of people are reasonable human beings but the media has to make it seem like that isn't the case so the risk equation changes. Similar to how kids used to roam around the neighborhood but now it's deemed too risky because the media makes it seem like there are murderers lurking around every corner.

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One of my main concerns is that almost all legitimate discussion is now happening in private invite only communities because people are too risk averse to continue to chat on public sites that will be indexed forever in a culture where they can be cancelled for even a slightly uncouth opinion. Almost all of my consumption and contribution on the Internet is now in private communities that are quite strict about invites and the trend among my colleagues is similar.

When I was younger I learned so much and established many valuable relationships by having discussions on public services/websites. Many legends in the field were quite accessible on public sites and mailing lists. My life would be much worse if I hadn't had those experiences and it feels like a lot of younger people that don't have connections to the SV bubble are now going to miss out on similar experiences.

This isn't to say that we should be tolerant of everything but it definitely feels like we've swung too far in the opposite direction.

Not saying I do this, necessarily, but friends of mine who are active in policy circles write for various publications under pseudonyms now for this reason. The development of the idea happens in private group chats, where everyone is using their IRL name, but the publication happens under a pen name.

I really don't know if this is a positive change for how policy gets made, but it is happening actively right now.

Can you link to some examples of policy papers written under pseudonyms?

Obviously no? That would defeat the purpose.

I understand what you're getting at though. I just made a claim that people in policy circles are writing things under pseudonyms. You want evidence for this (justifiably), but this would require me to essentially out the pen names. Sorry, not going to happen.

Oh, so the pseudonyms appear to be real names, and are not known as pseudonyms? Or are they things like “Cicero.” I wasn’t looking for your contacts as much as I am trying to answer “Are pseudonymously written works more bold/risk-taking etc?”

What happens if someone Googles the pseudonym? Or tries to contact it? Do they use an anonymous email address or just not allow it?

>“Are pseudonymously written works more bold/risk-taking etc?”

The answer to this question is yes.

Wasn't most "legitimate discussion" already happening in private already? This article is pointing out situations where even in private people might not want to give out candid feedback, which seems like a different concern that what you are saying.

I'm a pretty active person online and I genuinely do not understand your concern. If you want to say something controversial online, just do so anonymously like you are doing now. If you want to give somebody candid advice I'm not sure why you'd do that in public anyways.

My apologies, I should have made clear that my post wasn't directed at the article.

> Wasn't most "legitimate discussion" already happening in private already?

Probably, but I think there was still much more interesting discussion going on publicly in years past. It's anecdotal but I've definitely seen a huge spike in how many of my colleagues are retreating entirely to private communities and most of them never make public comments anymore. That's disappointing to me because I think there's a lot of value in having these discussions in the open with respected and accomplished names attached. It also gives a level of perceived accessibility that I think is important.

“but I think there was still much more interesting discussion going on publicly in years past.”

Really? Prior to anonymous Internet comments there were even fewer discussions. I think recent years is when we’ve finally began to understand how people really feel.

You are correct. I should have limited my statement to discussions between people using their real identities. I also think this is subjective depending on how much value you place on being able to identify the participants. For example, in language related discussions I think it's extremely valuable to have people like SPJ, Anders Hejlsberg, Andrei Alexandrescu etc. as active AND identifiable participants. When I was in high school, during the very early days of Slashdot, quite a few highly respected developers, professors and authors would comment regularly under their own names. Reading their comments and having discussions with them definitely changed my life and I think it would be sad to see all these discussions move into private spaces or under anonymity due to fear of the mob.

I don’t think they fear the mob. They fear wasting their time. Where there are quality discussions you will still see lively discussions. Math is an area where top experts will still discuss online. It’s because they are less likely to be inundated with clowns.

Pop culture and politics is where the mob culture resides.

> I don't think they fear the mob.

I vehemently disagree. In my experience, a very substantial number of them fear the mob because there's so much at stake and nobody is interested in falling on their sword. Many people want to talk politics and philosophy and those subjects are often hard to avoid unless conversation is heavily restricted. I've had tons of conversations about algorithms that naturally turn into discussions of political and philosophical ramifications. A substantial amount of the screening that goes into accessing private communities revolves directly around likelihood of charitable interpretation, secrecy and behaviour on public social networks.

I disagree. In fact I spent some time looking online and I think there are more technical discussion I've ever seen online. There is more open source code then ever before and most of that discussion happens in the open. Many of the biggest contributors have these discussions online. I simply haven't seen the discussions disappear from public view as you seem to. Maybe you just aren't looking hard enough to find them?

Can you give an example of what you mean by 'private communities'? Are they online? Can you give an example?

I can't link either of the two I use here for obvious reasons, but the primary one I frequent is just a private website made by a bunch of Googlers. It's basically just an invite only forum with a more complicated trust/permission system. It's very active with roughly 5,000 users and access to boards is limited by a trust system which operates similarly to private torrent trackers.

The second one, which I only use occasionally, is a private Android/iOS app that is very similar to Signal group chats.

I've heard of quite a few others but I don't have first hand experience with them.

Most forums have private boards or even private discords etc that you’d never know about until invited. (And if you do know about them they’re not the private ones, just the restricted ones - many layers like onions.)

I believe this phenomenon is more like overshoot in an underdamped system than being the end result. Rapid changes always lead to overshoot.

I also think the amount of overshoot is proportional to the amount of sexism that was present in a society thirty years ago. I believe Northern Europe has been trending slowly towards gender equality since the 90s, and thus the amount of overshoot here is much less from the recent rapid changes like #meetoo.

Also our kids roam around the neighbourhood freely. We're thinking of giving our 9-year-old a cellphone soon, for now she just has an analog watch and we agree on what time she has to be home by.

If you look at statistics, the rate of women murdered per capita, and the rate of women who experience sexualized violence per capita, are around 5x higher in the US than in Northern Europe. The murder rate here for children (excluding by their own parents) is below 1 per million children per year.

We're definitely not perfect, we have a long way to go still, but we are starting from a more equal place if you look at the status pre-2017.

There's no such thing as overcorrection when _any_ correction in the direction we're seeing on display in this article is a net negative for literally everyone involved. Women get worse advice, men tip-toe around women, and society loses out on potentially valuable investments.

> I also think the amount of overshoot is proportional to the amount of sexism that was present in a society thirty years ago.

What is the mechanism for this? The majority of the "woke" twitter mob is 30 or younger.

I believe this phenomenon is more like overshoot in an underdamped system than being the end result. Rapid changes always lead to overshoot.

"Underdamped system" is very apt here. There are some positive feedback factors which exacerbate the situation in the "underdamped system." If you give over power to a mob, then the very principles which act as damping can be completely abandoned. Things like "innocent until proven guilty," and the valuing of evidence.

The answer to unchecked, abused, one-sided power is not more unchecked, one-sided power with the vector rotated 180 degrees. That's just welcoming more dysfunction and abuse.

we are starting from a more equal place if you look at the status pre-2017

We are starting from a place where typical middle-school, high school, and college kids are likely to answer with expletives towards the principles mentioned above -- depending on the context in which you ask their opinion.

EDIT: Way back when, when I was watching that Vice report about the Evergreen State College activists, and one of them said, "...then f#ck your Free Speech!" I became very afraid that our society was in for a world of hurt. I'm pretty sure Gandhi and MLK were for Free Speech and the other principles mentioned above.

> I believe this phenomenon is more like overshoot in an underdamped system than being the end result. Rapid changes always lead to overshoot.

No I don't think it's this. I think it's the advent of the internet. The internet changed everything. What you will find is that the internet is responsible for making everything look like an "overshoot."

I realize some of you may not remember life before the internet but before the internet was around these "outrages" were nowhere to be found.

At that time the abolishing of Racial Segregation was already old news and happened at least 5-6 decades before the internet. If this was an overshoot you would think the overshoot would've happened after Martin Luther King Jr. was shot and not on some random time period 60 years later when the internet just happens to be 2 decades old.

>I believe this phenomenon is more like overshoot in an underdamped system than being the end result. Rapid changes always lead to overshoot.

this is the way

>Hegelian dialectic, usually presented in a threefold manner, was stated by Heinrich Moritz Chalybäus[27] as comprising three dialectical stages of development: a thesis, giving rise to its reaction; an antithesis, which contradicts or negates the thesis; and the tension between the two being resolved by means of a synthesis.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectic#Hegelian_dialectic

30 years ago the feminist and equality movement was very different from today's view, and not all for the worse. A lot of focus was then to eliminate gender in the ways people were treated, with the more extreme parts of the movement wanting to eliminate gender roles all together. Gender segregation in Northern Europe held the best numbers 30-40 years ago, and has only gotten worse since with pretty large strides. Gender segregation today is more like the 1920 than the 1990's.

women murdered per capita has indeed gone down, but so have the general murder rate. Men are still murdered far more often than women, and reached the highest ratio ever measured in the last summery by the government agency BRÅ, with around 77% to 23%. I would be careful to attribute such numbers to gender equality, especially since the trend seems to continue upwards.

The statistics for assault and sexual assault has similar complexity. The combined risk of being assaulted or sexual assaulted has been historically similar for both women and men, with assault being more common for men and sexual assault for women. Between 2012 and 2018 there were a major increase in sexual assault, and especially rape after 2015. The reason for this can't really be discussed since it involve an other political hot topic.

It still might be a rapid change that is causing people to overshoot, but it is likely a much harder token to measure. Changes in political power.

> the rate of women who experience sexualized violence per capita, are around 5x higher in the US than in Northern Europe.

That statement does not seem to be accurate: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/nordic-count...

It's a matter of risk mitigation.

Either a person accepts extreme, but very unlikely, risk by exercising perfect candor with everyone or they decide to clam up around people lower on the 'oppression hierarchy' which costs them almost nothing to do.

Why would any rational actor not choose option B unless they're getting some reward great enough to offset the risk of option A?

https://brucefwebster.com/2008/04/15/the-wetware-crisis-the-...

Thank you for sharing this. This issue is constant but I’ve never had it explained so well.

There's a weird inversion of the Thermocline happening in the past few years, with "activists." Social Media can so amplify the voices of "activists," that they gain power which people are afraid to speak out against. Especially if the power is based on mob mentality. Especially if power is given over to accusation without evidence. (This is borne out by history. McCarthy, for example.) So when certain people go too far -- and given how power corrupts, it's inevitable that sudden onsets of power will corrupt -- people who should be saying "wait a minute" are saying nothing.

All power is fleeting.

All power is contextual.

Any one who tries to deny these truths, is attempting some manner of deception to further their own power at someone else's expense.

> where you can only talk candidly with people who are equal or lower than you on the oppression hierarchy

Wouldn't someone talking to someone "lower" on the "oppression hierarchy" just be what we basically have today? That sounds like "privilege," or an "imbalanced power dynamic." I think you'll only be able to talk to equals, whatever that is, and by whatever metric is en vogue for that day.

People don’t talk candidly most of the time now to those lower on the hierarchy. In many Corp environments, almost no one talks candidly to anyone - too many minefields.

You’d generally only talk candidly to those who were not just peers, but you already had a deep seated existing rapport with and trust. Friends?

Everyone else gets the politically safe story that is supposed to be told. I’ve seen it in action, and it makes me sad because it becomes fundamentally corrosive.

And if you think for some people that doesn’t include the right kind of outrage discussion or telling the right stories to the visible oppressed minority they’re mentoring so they can get the right checkbox when they hopefully get considered for SVP (or as plan B, their mentee does) - I’ve also got a bridge to sell you.

I believe when OP says "lower on the oppression hierarchy" they mean we only talk candidly with those who are as oppressed as us or less. i.e. someone higher on the oppression hierarchy would be more oppressed.

yes, i have been perceiving same as he sayed. my thinking is that this is a bad thing for persons who are having less advantages: if white manager can give forthright feedback to only white persons this is actual bad for black one and maybe will harm the black one more than it help. this is likewise if most in office are feeling less cameraderie with a black for that they are not able speaking so openly and believe they are having to guard tongues. i wonder about these un-intended consecuences.

That is the gist of the article linked up top, yes.

I do some work with HIV prevention. Sometimes I give talks where I'm very blunt about the realities of HIV among men who have sex with men. I've watched people immediately shift from mild hostility and discomfort to wholehearted acceptance of what I am saying, when I tell them I'm gay myself.

In that circumstance, I think it is clear that my sexual orientation is the basis by which they are judging the authoritativeness I have to speak on the topic. Never mind the formal qualifications, or the logic or veracity of what I am actually saying. Like, I know we all have little unconscious checklists like that for judging whether someone is credible, but it is uncomfortable to see the effect live.

As a bisexual male, I think a good part of disdain about connecting HIV and gay goes to the older naming of the disease: GRID. gay-related immune deficiency

It also dates me, but I had a blood transfusion in 1982. At that time, it was a Russian Roulette if I ended up with HIV blood or not. I didn't. Had I been innfected, I would have ended up like Ryan White.

Even knowing the term GRID dates you. :) Per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_HIV/AIDS#1981%E2%80... , the "GRID" moniker was only used for under two years, forty years ago. I think it's unlikely that the name is to blame.

I was born in 1982 and I knew about it.

I don't think it's unlikely. It was early in the chain of events, so even if it was six months it could have had a big impact.

Quite illustrative. People have referential groups, that’s human nature. One could work with the framework to achieve desired result and hopefully minimize externalities, or one can lament biases and lambast the biased people for extra whatever points.

This is not a dig at you, btw, it seems clear that you’re making the best of the situation.

This suggests that a possible answer to TFA could be to find a trusted female peer to carry the message.

You'd think so, but I have seen this specific idea play out and in one case the "trusted female peer" accused the person doing the asking of expecting her to do his emotional labor.

Interesting, can you give an example of a fact that is initially resisted but is then accepted when you provide additional personal experience.

It's the most obvious one. According to Public Health Canada, men who have sex with men are 71x more likely to become HIV+ during their lives than men who have sex with women. Based on the infection rate modelling of the early 2010s for which we have data, a young gay man in Toronto has about 30% odds of becoming HIV+ in his lifetime.

Wide eyes. Disbelief. That can't possibly be right. With all the people I have watched become HIV+ over the years, it is of course very believable to me. But the data from PHAC is reliable enough, and it speaks for itself. I shouldn't need to make it believable. But of course people are not emotionless abstract rational machines, and that's why I'm doing these sort of talks rather than emailing out memos with charts.

(The good news at least is those numbers are almost certainly coming down with new medical interventions like PrEP, earlier treatment and routine testing, which are my main points these days. I might actually get to be happy with the numbers in the national HIV tracking data when it's compiled for 2021.)

You see this on Reddit all the time, every day.

Someone wants to disagree with whatever nonsense the hivemind is raving about in the moment, but in order to do so they have to prostrate themselves and make it clear whose side they're on before they make their (often very valid) point.

e.g. "I hate Trump just has much as the rest of you but..." or "Look we need to be super supportive of X group and my dad is actually X but..."

That happens all the time here too, which is an interesting note.

Doesn't this happen in pretty much any group ? The more what you say goes against the consensus, the more the group will reject it.

No, I don't think so. It certainly wasn't a thing that I was aware of prior to roughly two years ago. Maybe it's "normal" now but that's probably because certain people made you show your identity card in order to dissent.

I've noticed this trend where people started to accuse each other of psychological trickery a lot. I think it descends as a "defense" from that. I was never really sure of how many psychological games were really being played and how much people just reached for the terms to use as dismissal from criticism.

Yeah, if you believe the internet, "gaslighting" is something that people are trying to do to you all the time.

That definitely happens, but sometimes the motivation is a bit more nuanced than just crawling to the mob. With everything so tribalised, and most people unwilling to stick their neck out and call their ingroup on its bullshit, we end up in situations where anyone expressing a dissenting opinion is quite likely to be an extremist of some kind -- or at least solidly on the 'other side' -- because they are the ones most likely to be motivated to speak up.

So if I preface an opinion with 'X, but', it may not be all about begging for the right to dissent; I may have good reason to think that, without the preface, what I say will signal some beliefs or values that I don't hold. If those things are genuinely hurtful to a vulnerable group, or simply reprehensible to me, then I have good reason to disavow them, regardless of whether I need to do so in order to be heard.

Yeah, but isn't that the same thing, said in a different way?

If I'm hyper-paranoid about my statement signaling beliefs I don't hold, isn't that just an indication that people are trying to assume too much based on that "signaling"?

> Yeah, but isn't that the same thing, said in a different way?

Sort of, and it's definitely part of the same dynamic. The differences, or at least the points I wanted to emphasise, are:

- I thought you were focusing on people's need to signal their in-group membership and general conformity (sometimes sincerely, sometimes not) so that they might be listened to and not shunned. I was pointing out that the motivation for the caveats can have a less cynical/craven strand: the simple desire to clearly communicate one's true values and beliefs.

- We might be collectively reinforcing this state of affairs without individually doing anything irrational. You say 'people are trying to assume too much based on that "signaling"' -- but given the equilibrium we're currently in, if someone expresses unpopular opinion X on hot-button topic Y in context Z without any caveats, I may be quite right to suspect that their real views are even more extreme, and/or that they come as part of a broader ideological package. If that's not the case, and the person wants to express their actual unpopular opinions without appearing to hint at the other ones, they may be right to add the tortuous preface. If they do so, the strength of the implicit signal sent by those who don't add the caveats increases, and the cycle continues; none of us can unilaterally break it without (on the receiving end) wilfully ignoring implicit meaning, or (on the sending end) risking being completely misunderstood.

edit: also, I don't know if you were implying this is a notably modern/progressive thing, but I think the basic dynamic is pretty universal. Definitely right now in the circles I live in, I'd mostly be afraid of signalling right-wing stuff. And the whole thing does seem to have increased in intensity over the last decade or so. But I see people in the various right-wing tribes being just as conformist, and I don't think it's really anything new. I'm confident that people arguing for less conservative interpretations of the Bible 20/50/100/1000 years ago were very careful to signal that they were genuine pious Christians.

(I don't like this dynamic, by the way. I'm a bit of a literalist, I like to make clean logical distinctions and evaluate each idea on its own merits, and I'm not very comfortable with the world of social signalling and game-playing we all seem to be trapped in. But it's completely pervasive (not only in political contexts) and I don't think people are wrong to read and react to the signals, even though they sometimes do it badly.)

I guess my perspective on this is slightly more permissive, in that I don't actually care what your underlying beliefs are as long as the point you are making is a coherent / valid one.

It shouldn't matter if you are pro-Trump if a bunch of people are being anti-Trump in a wildly over-the-top way and you want to point that out. Or vice versa – if you're surrounded by Trump loyalists and want to point out that something he did you disagree with, you shouldn't have to say "I love Trump but...", you should just be able to say "This is dumb, he shouldn't have done this".

The problem is that we've polarized everything to the point where this isn't very feasible.

> I don't actually care what your underlying beliefs are as long as the point you are making is a coherent / valid one

I half agree, but for me it depends on the situation. If the point is purely logical or empirical, and a fully detailed argument is made or watertight evidence presented, then the speaker's other beliefs and values are irrelevant. But often things are a bit fuzzier, and it makes sense to take the speaker's identity and character into account when making a snap judgment on how seriously to take them. And there are social reasons to care as well; conversation usually isn't just about truth-seeking. Even if people would take my arguments equally seriously regardless, I would prefer not to imply alignment with a set of values I don't actually hold.

> But often things are a bit fuzzier, and it makes sense to take the speaker's identity and character into account when making a snap judgment on how seriously to take them.

In all honesty I think this mindset is precisely why we've ended up in this massively polarized situation. When you "take the speaker's identity and character into account", you're obviously ("you" here being people in general not you in particular) to lend more credence to someone who's priors match your own. In other words, you give the benefit of the doubt to people like you, and interpret more uncharitably the words of someone who you think isn't like you. This creates a destructive cycle where everything eventually devolves into an echo chamber, increasing polarization and creating more echo chambers.

That's why I like how one of the principles behind Hacker News is to employ the "principle of charity" – try to interpret people's words in the best possible light, regardless of their priors or your own.

It absolutely can (and often does) lead to a cycle of reinforcing one's own biases. But I'm not convinced it would be either possible or desirable to completely avoid it. You simply can't thoroughly evaluate every claim you hear, or independently fill every gap in every apparently cogent but not absolutely watertight argument, or determine exactly how cherry-picked the evidence being presented to you is. You can't even pay full attention to more than a fraction of the ideas you encounter. At some point you've got to make judgments about the credibility of the speaker, the biases and incentives that might cause them to make mistakes or mislead you, the fundamental moral disagreements that might render your opinions on certain issues mutually irrelevant. If you're not doing it consciously I strongly suspect you are doing it unconsciously.

I agree wholeheartedly that the problem is information overload, but I disagree on the solution.

If you don't have the bandwidth to process all the arguments you're receiving... receive fewer arguments. Get involved in fewer shitposting threads on the internet. Have fewer arguments about politics at work. The solution is not to assume / reduce / summarize until the arguments become tidy little things you can stick in boxes, it is to just reduce your workload so that you can give the arguments you care most about the attention they deserve.

You must be filtering by speaker at some level and in some contexts, though, right? I assume you have opinions on e.g. scientific topics that you don't understand in depth. The only way I know to form those opinions is by doing my best to work out who to (provisionally, partially) trust.

Likewise, you talk about devoting your attention to the most important arguments -- but how do you decide which arguments deserve that attention? You can't be doing that 100% independently, you must at some point be allowing other people to raise issues to your attention, and to shift your priors a bit by virtue of the credibility they have earned via their track record (of being right, of being honest, of caring about things you care about).

https://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/the-messe...

The Messenger Is the Message: Science Talk podcast, June 2020.

The subtext of this entire conversation is that you'll never be able to talk "freely" in front of subordinates, so you need to either pine for yesteryear or take another look at your power dynamics.

I respectfully disagree.

Feedback is best received when you relate to the person who is giving it and you trust the giver has your best interest at heart.

While the "current environment" may make it so women are more weary of men (and thus less likely to receive feedback) - I think there is a stronger current.

White male investors see people outside of their social group and realize that their advice might not be well received- not because of a flame war, but simply because they don't look like them. I'm fully convinced this effect is visible with all mixes of social groups (race, gender, religion, national origin, job family).

This effect sucks, and we should be looking for ways to unite ourselves to other people so that we can receive hard advice and also give hard advice.

One explanation here is certainly the media being sensationalist for sensation's sake. An alternative is that some in media might think the crackdown on sexism is bad. Hence they focus on the bad effects. Whether this is explicit propaganda or honest reporting on what they consider the more important issue almost seems like a semantic question.

I suspect both elements play a role. How big a role I have little idea.

> One explanation here is certainly the media being sensationalist for sensation's sake.

Sadly I think it may be for profits, for survival's sake. The media business is very different now than it was pre-Zuckerberg.

It's a sort of similar to the prisoner's dilemma. It's hard to keep a community cooperative when there are defectors about and our impression of how likely others are to defect on us influences how willing we are to cooperate.

That's why you see people looking for smaller, more trust-bound online communities to associate with.

The risk of the unpredictable, catastrophic risks that children face when they roam lower than it has ever been.

The risk of an unpredictable, catastrophic event for a man is higher than it has ever been.

I don't think that's a good analogy.

> people who are equal or lower than you on the oppression hierarchy

This supposed hierarchy of oppression, based on identity characteristics such as race, gender and sexuality, really is the biggest scam going.

Almost all of the oppression we see around us can be explained by wealth disparities, corruption, and abuse of power. Yet, identarians insist on shoehorning everything into their flawed worldview.

The Black Lives Matter movement was a telling example of this - police brutality is indeed an ongoing problem in society, but it doesn't just apply to black people. It's anyone the police feel they can get away with abusing. Just look at how they treat homeless people, drug addicts, and so on, regardless of race.

Another is celebrating people as tokens regardless of their actions. First mixed-race female Vice President of the USA - okay, but what sort of shitty role model is this? Rather reminds me of: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Co90umqUsAAdgQI?format=jpg

We would all do well to be critical of how identity politics is being used to mask the real root causes of oppression in our society. The so-called left wing of politics is the worst for this too, and I say this as a life-long leftist. Why make everything about identity; where has the traditional focus on class gone?

> Almost all of the oppression we see around us can be explained by wealth disparities

Yes, and almost none of the people founding startups in Silicon Valley are oppressed by any reasonable understanding that concept.

none of the people founding startups in Silicon Valley are oppressed by any reasonable understanding that concept

I’ve never understood why they are so desperate to be oppressed that they have to invent new categories to be part of then claim to be oppressed when literally no one even knows what they are.

> Almost all of the oppression we see around us can be explained by wealth disparities

I recently talked to a mom who visited her adult foster daughter with a different skin tone. Her daughter reminded her to make sure she doesn't forget her ID in the hotel.

The mom was confused. They were just going to take a walk in Munich. Why would she need an ID? She never has an ID on her when she goes for a walk.

The daughter said, because the police, they stop you and ask to see your ID!

Mom couldn't believe it that the police was so different in Munich. Then it dawned on her. Foster daughter had brown skin, so she was randomly stopped by police and asked for ID because she looks like an immigrant.

Mom was white and has never ever been stopped by police before.

The police absolutely treat people different because of race.

ok but the parent comment was discussing policing and blackness in America, I don't agree with their conclusions but at any rate comparing that situation to policing in Munich doesn't really make much sense.

I think the point is that white people are likely to lack this lived experience. If there's a massive difference in opinion about racism in the country between white and black Americans, that difference of opinion may be due to factors that white people can't easily see.

I certainly believe that American police and the American justice system treat black people worse than it treats white people, although the parent commenter was also correct that they hurt whomever they feel they have the power to hurt in my experience they still treat black people worse, all that clarified although I expected it should have been clear from my previous comment that still does not make anyone's experience of policing in Munich relevant (assuming it is Munich, Germany we're talking about)

Black Lives Matter protests were in several European cities as well. Not as big as in the US, of course. But racist police are a world wide problem, it's not something limited to the US.

in my experience while Europe and the U.S have similar problems things play out quite differently in each, and it is often useless to make a comparison for this reason.

I've also seen a free Leonard Peltier protest march in Copenhagen, but I'm not sure that the state of Native American rights in Denmark and the U.S is somehow comparable.

The point of my story was not that the police are racist. The point was that racism is sometimes invisible to people who are not personally affected.

This point is universal and it doesn't matter on which side of the Atlantic it happened.

Ok, sorry for my misunderstanding your point which is one that I would be in agreement with.

> Foster daughter had brown skin, so she was randomly stopped by police and asked for ID because she looks like an immigrant.

This conclusion isn't quite there.

In China, foreigners are notionally required to carry their passport with them. I have never actually obeyed that, because it is a very bad idea. And it's never mattered, because although I'm obligated to produce it on demand, that demand has never been made.

It's not because I blend in. Any idiot can see that I'm not Chinese. "Looking like an immigrant" is not sufficient to be stopped by the police.

> It's anyone the police feel they can get away with abusing.

And a core premise of the Black Lives Matter movement is that Black people are generally an easier target that the police can get away with abusing, and police know this. Police can also typically identify Black people easily on sight, putting them at greater risk. Class is a valuable lens through which to view systems of oppression, but we shouldn't neglect these other dimensions of race, gender, etc... that are clearly a part of our society.

> The Black Lives Matter movement was a telling example of this - police brutality is indeed an ongoing problem in society, but it doesn't just apply to black people. It's anyone the police feel they can get away with abusing. Just look at how they treat homeless people, drug addicts, and so on, regardless of race.

And if you actually stuck around in leftist circles you would see how the "indentarians" as you so called them are in opposition to those, too.

> First mixed-race female Vice President of the USA - okay, but what sort of shitty role model is this?

Everyone I know in identity politics circles was critical of her too! Indeed!

I think you've essentially misunderstood why there was a push against solely class-based analysis, and why identity-specific systemic oppression was introduced to this concept -- the two are not in opposition. The reason it was brought in was because measures to deconstruct and eliminate class-based oppression, often kept systemic inequality between identity.

For example, the push to eliminate sexism has for the most part only advantaged white women (You'll have to trust me on the proof for this since I'm writing this while on the go -- however look up books like Carceral Capitalism and "Why I Don't Talk To White People About Race" for examples). The introduction of how your identity impacts how class boundaries affect you was necessary to better understand the dynamics and better shed and cast off systems of oppression

I can see your comment in the context of democratic party circles, but not leftist circles, at least in the US. I have difficulty placing it in the leftist circles I run in, which generally view politics in the US as consisting of a center/far right party (democrats) and reactionary fascists (republicans).

> Everyone I know in identity politics circles was critical of her too! Indeed!

I'm quite skeptical of this claim. For the most part the people pushing race and gender identity narratives in the US had at best mild criticism of Ms. Harris, and were mainly focused on her multi-racial identity and its historical significance. Almost as if her terrible politics simply didn't matter because of her identity.

> I have difficulty placing it in the leftist circles I run in, which generally view politics in the US as consisting of a center/far right party (democrats) and reactionary fascists (republicans).

The same view shared by myself and my fellow 'intersectional-ists'. I haven't heard of anyone aside from 'centrists' and fascists that adopt a different viewpoint? Perhaps there is a subset of fools on breadtube or facebook, sure, but they are vastly outnumbered.

> Almost as if her terrible politics simply didn't matter because of her identity.

Well then your lenses are vastly, vastly different to mine, and do not match up with both those in modern academic circles (Like, literally just read any new literature covering intersectionality and the introduction of it to communism), those on the ground in protests, and those present in progressive/queer groups (like me). It's worth noting that at the moment there is a huge divide between "progressive" communists, and, well, "regressive" communists (For want of better terms). From what I observed from stalking facebook commie groups, most of the latter are still stuck with 100 year old debates -- and while they have a huge amount of theoretical knowledge, they have no practical contributions to any revolutionary movements thusfar. For example, most of the discussion I observed was focused on rehabilitating Stalin's image, whereas most of the 'on the ground' antifacist-aligned folks are of the mind that that isn't really something modern communism should waste it's time on.

I would suggest at least reading some modern intersectional writing, if only to better understand the thing you're arguing against. The basic focus of intersectionality and how the systemic abuse created by late-stage capitalism impacts specific groups differently (The 'intersection' of those groups and the oppression they face), and how movements (even revolutionary) to improve conditions have backfired have been around for at least 60 years if Tony Cliff's 1978 writing "Why Socialists Should Support Gays" (https://www.marxists.org/archive/cliff/works/1978/08/gays.ht...) is anything to go by -- at least if you will give me the small leeway of temporarily ignoring how controversial Tony Cliff is as a figure in Communism.

If you are in search of one of the progressive communities I talk of, Something Awful has recently (last 5ish years) turned into a very leftist-heavy place, with frequent debate about neoliberalism, capitalism, etc. You will be able to ask questions there and receive answers and engage in productive discussion.

'Disease and Disaster' (Debate and Discussion): https://forums.somethingawful.com/forumdisplay.php?forumid=4...

And 'C-SPAM' (The politics subforum): https://forums.somethingawful.com/forumdisplay.php?forumid=2...

Are both good places to talk about this with progressive, mostly-intersectional communists. Just take note a lot of the thread titles are in jest, you should navigate to the last five pages and pick up context as you go (A lot of the threads have been running since 2016!) and espousing neoliberalism in an annoying way is a swift path to a probation :)

Communism isn't a synonym for leftism. There is plenty of debate regarding the merits of intersectionalism. I wouldn't call it rigorous or academic, as neither intersectionalists nor many of the people who find it objectionable are particularly analytical, and their resistance to empirical methods isn't particularly inspiring.

Suffice it to say that I don't think you're on as solid intellectual footing as you think you are.

I have stairs in my house, too, by the way. SA has always had a pseudo-leftist bent, even when we were passing around videos of 9/11 set to the tune of Benny Hill. I have a few photoshop friday entries, in fact, if that's still a thing. D&D is the self-absorbed, ego-driven SA analog of stoners marveling over their own hands at 1am at the local Denny's. No thanks.

But the Black Lives Matter movement never proclaimed that police brutality only applies to Black people.

Consider that it's common for anyone who suggests the impoverished of any race are more susceptible to police violence to be quickly and roundly piled on for trying to erase race or for supposedly engaging in “pity poor whites” rhetoric. It doesn’t even matter if “and impoverished black people even more so” is included. The fact that one isn’t solely focused on the racial minority in this context is grounds enough for social scorn and ridicule.

There is a very real problem with “oppression olympics” centered on racial identity, in this country.

The statement

> The impoverished of any race are more susceptible to police violence, and impoverished Black people even more so

is true. But the statement

> Black people of all economic classes are more susceptible to police violence

is also true. There is no logical contradiction between the two. Therefore, when someone responds to the second statement with the first, their response carries the connotation that the first statement is somehow "more true". It implicitly minimizes the struggle of Black people.

Not everyone who makes the first statement in response to the second intends minimize the struggle of Black people, but I think in the majority of cases that is exactly what they intend to do.

It's not even about making the statement in response, as you suggest.

There is no contradiction between the two, but only one of them is considered socially acceptable in certain circles, these days, in any context. That's problematic.

The title kinda implies it.

I don't know why people keep adding "Only" in front of "Black Lives Matter".

I have heard conservatives get on board if the word ‘all’ is added before.

Because proclaiming that all lives matter was interpreted often and publicly as racist against black people.

Well you instantly become a white supremacism if you say "All Lives Matter" so you can't blame people for feeling like they're getting mixed signals.

Because that catchphrase started in reaction to Black Lives Matter, and is used largely to signal opposition to the goal of constraining police actions. If people were holding All Lives Matter protests in opposition to police violence of all kinds, I doubt they'd get much flak; instead, they're protesting the idea that black lives matter.

Just because you say it means something to those people, doesn’t mean it means that to them. You don’t get to choose the hidden meaning behind other peoples words, and you’re clearly giving them the least charitable interpretation

Because when you point out the group that is MOST likely to be killed in a police encounter is Native Americans, you are branded a racist. https://lakota-prod.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/uploads/Nativ...

Yes they did. And they actively targeted people who stood up for Asian lives or "All Lives Matter"

All of the "All Lives Matter" people I've interacted with have been trying to minimize the problems.

The fact that so many large corporations are eager to throw money at BLM, change their corporate logos to black, etc. while doing nothing tangible to address the real issues, proves to me that the current identity politics narrative is serving the elite very well.

> while doing nothing tangible to address the real issues

Doing things to solve the real issues would run into difficult real-world problems both symbolic and logistical/physical. Overcoming them require having conversations where people

1. Do creative problem-solving

2. Say “well, actually...” about practical implementation details.

3. Speak honestly about the real difficulties and risks of unintended consequences.

4. Admit to failure and error and even inattention.

All of which is blocked by similar social dynamics to the ones discussed in the article.

> Why make everything about identity; where has the traditional focus on class gone?

that's the point of identity politics, to take away that focus by distracting and dividing the working class

https://i.imgur.com/wusW5Rn.jpg

"Almost all of the oppression we see around us can be explained by wealth disparities, corruption, and abuse of power. ... The Black Lives Matter movement was a telling example of this - police brutality is indeed an ongoing problem in society, but it doesn't just apply to black people. It's anyone the police feel they can get away with abusing. Just look at how they treat homeless people, drug addicts, and so on, regardless of race."

You're not wrong about that. But many people face further oppression based on their race, gender, and sexuality, in addition to wealth and class.

Women have for years had the same fear of men. Most men, good people. Or at least not criminally bad. But some are. But the social stigma of women going out alone at night, fear of first dates etc. has permeated the social fabric of how women have to treat men on their day to day. I've yet to encounter a woman who has gone from internalizing this aspect of society to dropping their priors and living care free without fear of men they don't know / met for the first time.

They have had decades, minimum, of this just being how things are. And things have not found a way to change to a more easy going society. If anything things have just hardened up as information and media have become more prevalent. In comparison, powerful people fearing being potentially (mis)interpreted not being worth the risk to their entire career is a relatively new phenomenon. I wager that the OP of this article doesn't have a solution to the problem of trust by investors, because women have yet to discover the solution to their own generalized mistrust of men outside their direct social circle despite how long that situation has gone on for.

Until the risk / reward dynamic changes (and I do not see how it could without making people less accountable), I fully anticipate that this self censorship in society will not only just continue, but will yet increase further in an information society where powerful people can be made accountable by the public as stories of people being held to account to their actions, regardless of whether those actions were deliberate, accidental or misunderstandings.

>Women have for years had the same fear of men. Most men, good people. Or at least not criminally bad. But some are. But the social stigma of women going out alone at night, fear of first dates etc. has permeated the social fabric of how women have to treat men on their day to day. I've yet to encounter a woman who has gone from internalizing this aspect of society to dropping their priors and living care free without fear of men they don't know / met for the first time.

Before you get outraged I just want to caveat this by saying that what I'm about to say is just controversial and anecdotal. If you share a different opinion than fine, this is just my opinion.

The general fear women have of men that permeates all of their behavior is more of a biologically programmed fear than it is a an environmentally programmed one. What makes me say this? Because, anecdotally, women have this fear even when there is ZERO prior trauma. Although they can train this fear away, practically all women are naturally more guarded when among unfamiliar men, even with No prior Trauma.

I've been been in tons of fists fights when I was a kid. There are many times where I've lost and was beaten until my face was a bloody mess by other dudes. This is 100x more trauma than an average woman will ever go through and even I don't live in fear of "men."

Now this is not scientific evidence but anecdotal evidence is not invalid. It's the only way to talk about such subjects short of doing a 10 year scientific study. So you may have a different experience and I respect that but I also respectfully ask anyone who replies not to start a gender flame war and get outraged at my viewpoint.

>They have had decades, minimum, of this just being how things are. And things have not found a way to change to a more easy going society. If anything things have just hardened up as information and media have become more prevalent. In comparison, powerful people fearing being potentially (mis)interpreted not being worth the risk to their entire career is a relatively new phenomenon. I wager that the OP of this article doesn't have a solution to the problem of trust by investors, because women have yet to discover the solution to their own generalized mistrust of men outside their direct social circle despite how long that situation has gone on for.

You used the word "decades," and this is what the wrong part of your statement. It is actually factually wrong and there is tons of anthropological research to back this up. The word you should have used was "centuries." Practically all of human civilization has been patriarchal. They have never identified in the history of archaeology and anthropology any human civilization where the dominant sex was not Men. This fact flies across time and across geographic boundaries of countless cultures. There is not a single exception. There are civilizations where women took on roles that are traditionally "male" but there has never been a civilization that has been consistently matriarchal. Thus from this perspective it is arguable that patriarchy could be biologically ingrained and that modern civilization is currently trending beyond out biological imperative.

The additional rights afforded by women today is largely a modern and very unique phenomenon. According to the current school of thought in academia much of it is attributed to changes in technology. Sewage, tampons, etc.

I caveated decades with "at least", not because I think that things were going swimmingly in the 1800s or earlier but more around when women attained more freedom in society to associate with who they wish by their choice than in the authoritarian sense of the older patriarchal societies. I'm referring to the choice aspect of ones own actions, not just the historical context.

I do not subscribe to the belief that patriarchy is biological because there is numerous empirical examples of historical matriarchal societies in places such as South America, Asia, Native American Hopi tribe, Celtic society, Germany and Estonia including in the recorded history of my own non-American society.

>I caveated decades with "at least", not because I think that things were going swimmingly in the 1800s or earlier but more around when women attained more freedom in society to associate with who they wish by their choice than in the authoritarian sense of the older patriarchal societies.

Yes but it's like saying humans live for at least one minute which is true but misleading because humans live for about 80 years. Huge timescale issue that exists despite your caveat.

Your second opinion which I respect is not one shared by experts who study gender roles in anthropology. They cite that the reason why women have more power in modern society is not one made by choice but one made by technology. Women today have greater freedom in our societies because they are no longer held back biological weaknesses such as menstruation as modern technology helps assist them in this endeavor. Additionally, modern society is no longer centered around manual labor so women can gain power without resorting to physical strength.

Keep in mind, this is not MY opinion. This is the opinion of the scientific world that exists outside of both the gender cancel culture agenda or the male dominated mens rights activists.

>I do not subscribe to the belief that patriarchy is biological because there is numerous empirical examples of historical matriarchal societies in places such as South America, Asia, Native American Hopi tribe, Celtic society, Germany and Estonia including in the recorded history of my own non-American society.

You can choose what belief you wish to subscribe to, and I respect your choice. However facts are facts:

Among anthropologists of science within academia there is no question all societies have been patriarchal including the one we live in right now. I am well versed in the anthropological studies on this, very very well versed. Source:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matriarchy

Scroll to "History and distribution" and read the following quote:

"Most anthropologists hold that there are no known societies that are unambiguously matriarchal.[59][60][61] According to J. M. Adovasio, Olga Soffer, and Jake Page, no true matriarchy is known actually to have existed.[55] Anthropologist Joan Bamberger argued that the historical record contains no primary sources on any society in which women dominated.[62] Anthropologist Donald Brown's list of human cultural universals (viz., features shared by nearly all current human societies) includes men being the "dominant element" in public political affairs,[63] which he asserts is the contemporary opinion of mainstream anthropology.[64] There are some disagreements and possible exceptions. A belief that women's rule preceded men's rule was, according to Haviland, "held by many nineteenth-century intellectuals".[5] The hypothesis survived into the 20th century and was notably advanced in the context of feminism and especially second-wave feminism, but the hypothesis is mostly discredited today, most experts saying that it was never true.[64]"

I took anthropological studies in UCLA and even the female teacher there outright told the classroom that there are no examples of true matriarchal societies. Also be careful about studies promoted by the feminist agenda as cited by the section above, don't let those articles (they are all over google) lead you astray.

There is a lot of false misguided information on the internet about this topic but if you dig deeply or actually study this topic (as I did) in academia you will find the cold hard truth.

Either way you can still subscribe to your belief despite what the scientific literature has found. Science is not always correct, but be aware about whether or not you're subscribing to that belief because of evidence or because of desire.

There is another possible source of fear - in addition to biology and trauma, there is also observation together with reason. Even if one has zero prior trauma, it's not hard for one to realize that men are on average an order of magnitude more violent than women are.

My own experiences with fighting have not given me a fear of men in general, but they have certainly contributed to a caution that I have around certain types of men - in particular, around men who have either an animalistic concern with territoriality and status, a socioeconomic desperation that makes them willing to rob outsiders, or both. I try to steer clear not only of men of this type but also of entire demographics and parts of the world in which they are common.

>There is another possible source of fear - in addition to biology and trauma, there is also observation together with reason. Even if one has zero prior trauma, it's not hard for one to realize that men are on average an order of magnitude more violent than women are.

This is sort of true. I'll talk about the aspect that is true. What is true is that men are an order of magnitude stronger than women on average. What isn't true is the violence part. Women are actually more violent then men and the reasoning is simple.

It's because men are stronger will do more damage if they get violent so men have a tendency to hold back. I don't know if you dealt with women a lot socially, but when women get frustrated they're more likely to pound you or push you with their pathetic little fists. They often have much less ability to control themselves.

This is supported by statistics: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/women-are-mo... which should be taken with a grain of salt as violence from women against men is highly highly under reported.

The caveat here is that when it comes to actual damage men do far more greater damage, meaning that when a man actually does decide to lash out at a woman the damage is far greater and the crime far more severe. Outside of specific studies the severe crimes are the only ones that are reported. However, make no mistake, within studies that account for this bias, the numbers show women are more likely to be violent. In fact even those "territorial" men you talk about actually literally hold back when there's a woman around. There is no equal treatment here.

>My own experiences with fighting have not given me a fear of men in general, but they have certainly contributed to a caution that I have around certain types of men - in particular, around men who have either an animalistic concern with territoriality and status, a socioeconomic desperation that makes them willing to rob outsiders, or both. I try to steer clear not only of men of this type but also of entire demographics and parts of the world in which they are common.

Have you had much encounters with women? Even in dating and going to the club practically every aspect of their lives is centered around safety and caution. They rarely go out alone. Always with another man friend or with other groups of women (three at least) and when in bars or clubs even women who are strangers are always watching each others backs.

This is despite the very true fact that Men are actually much more likely to be the target of violence from other drunk men then women are when going to bars or clubs. The fear women have is biological and inbuilt as valid defenses for the more savage hunter and gatherer era. It is currently an outmoded standard of behavior that is no longer as relevant in modern society. But biology is biology and we are slaves to our biology.

Additionally it could be that women have these defenses because the consequences are much more severe. While a man is more likely to suffer from a violent attack from other men and women then a woman herself would, if a woman should get unlucky enough to suffer from an attack the consequences are extreme. This would be an argument in favor of your point of view, but still in support of the fact that women behave this way because of biology not reasoning. The biology is just an "reasonable" evolutionary response to the environmental pressure.

Why are you being downvoted? You're right!

I don't blame the media for this. The media just magnifies a very real and sizable aspect of our culture that already exists.

Just like how these people are seeking someone to blame, you are seeking the same when you blame the media. It's not just the media, what's going on here is something we're all responsible for.

The magnification distorts reality and alters peoples behavior such that everyone is a little bit more irrational.

But the distortion existed in society in the first place. The main stream media reports what people what to hear because it's good for business. The root of the problem is us.

The phenomenon isn't something created by the media and deployed into society. The origins of cancel culture and most of this outrage come from extremist leftist elements from students in college campuses. The media just made the spreading of this phenomenon faster.

You can't really blame social media either. Because we control what goes onto social media. We're responsible for the news on our social feeds.

"Similar to how kids used to roam around the neighborhood but now it's deemed too risky because the media makes it seem like there are murderers lurking around every corner."

They're called cars. Houses are packed tighter and there's more cars per household than when I was growing up (maybe due to everyone being double income now). Streets are also narrower and most have street parking, creating visibility issues. Go check out a development than went up 40-50 years ago compared to one that went up in the last 5 years. The difference is pretty stark and pretty hostile to kids running around doing kid stuff.

I don't think media's focus on bad guys has nearly the impact that the enormous increase in cars has had.

Honestly, this is pretty trivially avoided. My parents drilled it into my head to look both ways before going into a street. I always look ways before going into the street. It's really not difficult.

It is trivially avoided once the kids are old enough, but there's a long period during which kids would be safe enough to roam around in the absence of cars, but aren't in the current environment.

We live a block from the playground, close enough that I can almost see it from our window, but you can't get there without crossing the street. So our kids (7y, 5y) can only go there with a grown up. I've worked on teaching them how to cross the street safely, but they're just not good enough at checking for cars yet.

I'm still not buying it. I lived in Switzerland for a while where kids walk themselves to school starting at like 5 years old, and there are loads of cars.

Whats the speed limit? In Australia there are a lot of 60kmh roads near parks

https://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/full-frontal-psych...

https://www.kidsandcars.org/how-kids-get-hurt/frontovers/

https://www.kidsandcars.org/how-kids-get-hurt/backovers/

Who are “we”? Anglo-Saxons? Unite States Citizens? or even only a subset of the later? particularly those active in finance and other fields where a man's social conformance weighs more than his skills.

I can't say that I have ever in my life noticed much of the Anglo-Saxon gender, race, and other such politics in real life and I remain sceptical as to what extent it is actually true within Anglo-Saxon offices, for I find that all “sides” of the issue seem to offer very different, contradictory experiences, and mostly reads as a rather exagerated an implausible story of how bad it is for one's own side.

Though there might be a kernel of truth behind some of it, most of it reads as though the writers see boogymen, and unreasonable fear, and I will say that when actual hard statistics be available, they almost always paint a very difficult picture than what is complained about in all these “culture war” discussions, and that certainly goes for all sides.

Imagine a woman were to say, if we don't put an end to casual sexism, the end result we're heading for is that men will take any woman they see, kidnap her, and lock her in a dungeon.

A much more realistic and likely outcome, and a far less hysterical perspective than yours, is that the needle was way too far one way, now people are learning to cope with it shifting, and if we try to be more empathetic, perhaps getting help when we need to, we can shift it to a better place than it was before.

How do I know this? Because identical dynamics play over and over, change is scary, even if it is for the better, and people have opposed it on similar grounds -- it would lead to absurdities and worst outcomes for everyone involved -- since time immemorial. For example, see some arguments against women suffrage from just over a hundred years ago [1]:

> Because the acquirement of the Parliamentary vote would logically involve admission to Parliament itself, and to all Government offices. It is scarcely possible to imagine a woman being Minister for War, and yet the principles of the Suffragettes involve that and many similar absurdities.

> Because Woman Suffrage is based on the idea of the equality of the sexes, and tends to establish those competitive relations which will destroy chivalrous consideration.

And, of course, women do not want the vote [2]

The belief that we can -- and must -- work tirelessly change the world by, say, allowing humans to fly and even reach other planets, but when it comes to how people should speak to one another, well, that's too difficult to change, there's no point in trying, and if we try then the outcome will obviously be bad, just seems so bizarre.

[1]: https://www.johndclare.net/Women1_ArgumentsAgainst.htm

[2]: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1903/09/why-wom...

> men will take any woman they see, kidnap her, and lock her in a dungeon.

> And, of course, women do not want the vote

Please keep this sort of flamebait out of your HN posts. It's guaranteed to make everything worse, and you can make your substantive points without it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

The second was a quote from numerous reasoned arguments (which I linked to) posted in similar forums in the ear 20th century. Anyway, this thread is so terrifying (and brings back bad memories from my time in SV) that the natural reaction should be to scream in horror and not make any "substantive points." I am even more worried and, frankly, hurt that you don't see that. The most I could manage is try to hold a mirror up so that some people might see what they sound like to others.

Usually when people describe their internet comments with phrases like "hold up a mirror" they're coming across as far more aggressive than they think they are. Everyone always feels like they're just playing defense while the others are committing outrages.

As for how shitty this thread is, I've spent the last several hours posting dozens of comments, feebly trying to do something about that. All I'm asking you (and others) is not to make it worse yet. Gratuitous provocation takes discussion straight to failure modes. We're all worse off if that happens.

How that's a reason not to make substantive points, or what it has to do with SV, I'm not following. The vast majority of HN is far away from SV, all over the world, and I've never seen a correlation between posts being shitty and posts being from SV. On the present topic there is probably a mild negative correlation, just because people in SV have been through so many iterations of this discussion, for so many more years than most places, that they're less likely to get activated with naive outrage.

I don't think that trying to appear less aggressive is the correct ethical response to the putrid horror show unfolding here. Aiming for a civil discussion of "the woman problem" is not the right goal here. The correct answer to how should we best debate the question, But What Shall We Do About the Women? is not to have such a discussion at all. Just the fact that how to treat women is even considered an appropriate topic for discussion is enough to deter any human that isn't on the autistic spectrum from approaching this community, and the industry sector it represents. If the dehumanising, humiliating monstrosity of this "discussion" is hard to see, try replacing "women" on this page with "Irish" or "Jews."

I'm just asking you not to omit gratuitous flamebait like "men will take any woman they see, kidnap her, and lock her in a dungeon" and "women do not want the vote" from your HN comments. It's obviously against the site guidelines, and pouring kerosene on flames is arson even if the building was already on fire.

People who feel strongly on topics routinely use language like "putrid horror show" to justify their own breaking of the site guidelines and making a discussion even worse than it already is. This sort of "why bother" / "fuck it" attitude is a big part of why things are so bad to begin with; it leads people to create the situation they deplore. No one wants to look at the "putridity" of their own contributions—the problem is always caused by other, never by self.

The only solution I can see to this is to prioritize taking care of the commons, regardless of how bad things are or you feel they are.

I don't think you understand the seriousness of what's unfolding here, and the level of virulent dehumanisation expressed. There is no right way to discuss "The Woman Question" any more than there is a right way to discuss "The Jewish Question." The tone of discussion is insignificant in comparison to conducting it in the first place.

Where you get these thoughts that you imagine moderators think, I don't know, but I don't recognize any of them. I don't give a shit about tone. I'm simply trying to support an internet forum in not going to hell and asking you not to make that job harder.

What I hear you saying is that it's already gone to hell, so it doesn't matter what you do. Actually it matters a lot what you do. Every user here needs to abide by the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

Bringing up "Jewish Question" is singularly unhelpful and more gratuitous provocation. It seems to me that you're the main person framing this thread as "Woman Question" to begin with, then using that to justify pouring kerosene of your own. That's not cool.

What I've noticed is that users with strong ideological passions tend to describe as "putrid" and "cesspool" and so on, any discussion in which their own ideology isn't imposed as the dominant one. That's understandable, but it's not a realistic demand. HN is a large forum which is as divided on ideological topics as any other large population sample—moreover this population sample is all over the world, which unfortunately makes people far more prone to interpret others' statements as "putrid" without it even dawning on anyone that that's a factor.

Much as I might wish it, we don't have the power to change how divided this community is. All we can do is look for ways to nudge users into having thoughtful discussion despite divisions. Everyone has a different sense of what that might look like, and we can talk about how to do that, but we don't have the power to make people agree.

There is a great moderation tool for such a discussion: not to have it. I think my framing is helpful, because clearly you're not seeing what I'm seeing. Here are three comments I picked from the top five at the moment (so, almost at random); there are far worse ones:

> As an investor, of course I clam up. I spend my days looking at the world in terms of risk-adjusted returns and cost benefit analyses, so why would I take a human capital risk? My entire business is based on my reputation and I've seen what happens to the people who get comments like "not the best with Jews at conferences" ... I can count on two hands the number of Jews I would feel comfortable giving the exact same feedback to as I would a non-Jew.

> I appreciate the effort to think of a better word than antisemitism. My question is, is this even antisemitism at all? How many people can get publicly denounced as “antisemites” and have their life ruined because they didn’t speak carefully enough, before it is simply just “smart” rather than “antisemitic” to be extra careful with how you speak to Jews.

> Imagine what it's like being the intended target and not just "collateral damage". It's not a problem that non-Jews are nervous to be candid but it's a problem that Jews are feeling the secondary effects of that?

I'm overwhelmed by the quantity of comments here. I don't have a chance of even seeing them all, let alone read them all, let alone patiently and painstakingly moderate them all. One reason for that (today) is that I've been writing long, careful replies to you in the hope of explaining the kind of comments we're looking for here and why we need you to eschew gratutitous provocation.

In response, you made a bunch of quotes in which you replaced the word "women" with "Jews". I just spent several minutes trying to track down those comments before I realized that you were pulling that trick. I'm really shocked that you would stoop to that.

The flamewar trope "I'm going to replace $group1 with $group2 just to show how $xist your comment is" is one of the most common. Usually it's people on the other ideological side who do that, and often garden-variety trolls. It is a strong marker of cheap flamewar and a good example of how the ideological enemies who perpetuate these flamewars actually resemble each other more than they do anyone else.

Maybe, but right now I can't think of another way of showing how illegitimate it is to have a discussion over how best to treat a discriminated group of people, especially when when that group is so underrepresented on this forum. There is just no right way to have this discussion at all. If discussions on a tech forum look like they're minutes from a men's rights group meeting, then that's a huge problem.

If you can't think of another way than altering quotes for shock value, that may be because your view of the thread and the community is not actually accurate. I've looked again, and I don't think your description is fair. The OP seems to me legitimate; painful, but not gratuitous. As for the thread, many of the comments are thoughtful. I don't agree with or like all of them—or most of them, actually—but I think you're misassessing the amount of bad faith in the community. That's a big deal because, as I tried to explain above, it takes people to a why-bother/fuck-it place, from which they end up creating the very thing they were deploring.

It's unfortunately all too easy and common for people to mistake a divided community for a "putrid horror show", dominated by demons [1] or, as the internet likes to call them, "terrible persons", when in reality most people here just have different backgrounds and experiences from one another [2]. I'm not saying that's the only factor—anyone can scan my moderation comments in this thread to find examples to the contrary (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26613942). But I still think the HN guidelines are right to say "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith." ...and I think that if you took that guideline more to heart, you might see the bulk of the thread differently. (I don't mean the long tail of trolls and flames—those are always with us.)

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098

Hang on, do you mean the comment that started this is 'painful but not gratuitous'? Because:

This is kind of the end result we're heading for, where you can only talk candidly with people who are equal or lower than you on the oppression hierarchy.

Seems pretty clearly gratuitous flamebait. Oppression hierarchy? We're heading to where nobody can frankly speak to anyone? This is 'first they came', in different words and is equally cheap and dumb.

No, by OP I meant the original submission.

The people aren't monsters; it's the dynamics of such discussions -- an emergent property -- that breeds such results. My problem isn't bad faith of the participants; I'm sure people are authentic. It is that HN finds it appropriate to host and publicise a discussion in an overwhelmingly male forum on how to best treat women in the workplace (and not from the professional HR perspective). The very thing I was deploring in the first place is the thought that such a discussion in such a forum is ethically legitimate.

BTW, I am not talking about the actual article. It's fine. I'm merely talking about the ensuing "debate."

You need exactly 0 women in a discussion about how to treat women in the workplace to reach the right conclusion, it's ridiculous that you attribute having right perspective on things to sex.

You threat women exactly as everybody else. See? Wasn't that hard.

We've banned this account for trolling. Please don't create accounts to break HN's guidelines with. Doing that will eventually get your main account banned as well.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Thank you so much for everything you do dang!

> Usually it's people on the other ideological side who do that, and often garden-variety trolls.

Huh, and here I was under the impression that you moderated both sides equally.

There isn't enough information in your comment for me to understand, but it sounds like some sort of gotcha? If so, I'm afraid you'll be disappointed. HN moderation practice has been thoroughly covered by the tens of thousands of posts we've made about it. There aren't any surprise revelations or factors that haven't been explained a zillion times.

Why the need to search for deeper underlying meaning in my response? Why not take it at face value?

Because I didn't understand it?

> There is a great moderation tool for such a discussion: not to have it

Do you honestly think the situation improves if the discussion is censored here? Whether you like it or not these industry discussions, and much worse, are happening elsewhere and censoring relatively timid discussions like this only makes matters worse. There are 490 comments at the time of this post and I'd bet the vast majority of them are relatively benign.

Absolutely. Respectable media platforms and discussion forums have always "censored" some topics (if by that you mean that they've chosen to exercise their freedom of speech to choose what they deem worthy of publication); that's precisely the one thing that separates them from unrespectable ones. Right now there are a lot of discussions going on about blacks or Jews, but that doesn't mean a respectable forum should lend the subject legitimacy by hosting it.

To be fair, there are more people from UK and Eastern Europe (Russia, Romania, Poland, Ukraine) posting here than SV, probably because the majority of the software devs congregate in these countries.

FWIW, I don't think that matches the numbers either.

However ineffectual it may feel at times, I and many others are grateful for the nuanced work you do here encouraging us all to maintain constructive, good-faith discourse. Thank you dang!

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