Comment by ashtonkem | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ashtonkem | Hacker News Reader

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I think this is badly missing the point. I think two very specific things happened here:

First, the executives absolutely clamped down hard on a discussion about workplace behavior. I think their attempt to cast this as “political” is deeply cynical; discussing how people behave at work will always be in bounds, even if it touches up against issues that are politicized. The initial trigger here was a discussion about the list of “funny names”; there’s no easy way to sweep that under the rug as off topic, since it’s explicitly at-work behavior.

Second, they did an end run around the employees. Announcing the policy to the world, and implying that the Basecamp workforce was having a problem focusing on their jobs was an asshole move destined to blow up in their face. Nobody likes feeling crapped on by their boss, especially not in public like that.

Honestly, it didn’t have to be about politics. Treating employees like that, especially ones with options, is typically not going to go well.

Third, they secretly deleted over a decade's worth of company chat history shortly before making the disastrous blog post. Why?

Fourth, they retaliated against employees by taking away benefits in the most humiliating way possible, via the aforementioned disastrous public blog post.

And yet, people are still going to bat for them because...I don't know. It seems like a lot of people have a religious faith in the decision-making capabilities of men like DHH and JF. Seems like it might be related to some of the issues employees tried to raise internally.

> Third, they secretly deleted over a decade's worth of company chat history shortly before making the disastrous blog post. Why?

I can think of a reason. To protect employees who are not part of the woke mob from being “canceled” by the woke mob.

There does not seem to be any evidence of this. If there is, please provide it.

> First, the executives absolutely clamped down hard on a discussion about workplace behavior.

The current state of politics bled into this. There is a fair amount already written on it but the insinuation that laughing a names leads to genocide ended up in the picture. It wasn't about what was appropriate or not and then handling it. The discussion went far beyond that.

> Second, they did an end run around the employees.

This was really surprising to me. I thought they would have posted publicly after all the employees had learned about this. This is poor change management within the company and a lesson I hope they learn.

Laughing at names did not lead to genocide and no one implied that. What someone did was share why it was important to treat this seriously and not let it slide... lest the offending behaviors continue to escalate. An example was shared from social science on a pyramid of normalization where such behavior eventually gets normalized.

Classic and indisputable example might be Germany in WW2. It wasn’t like citizens woke up and immediately decided that genocide was okay; they slowly were worked into finding it acceptable and palatable as a measure to endorse.

It is only meant to illustrate the classic slippery slope.

People did equate the names list to some mass shooting of Asians though.

A name like, say, "Fuk Yo" is accidentally similar to the English "Fuck you". It's kinda funny in a childish way, but I don't think that making fun of it automatically implies that they think these people are of lesser value. i.e. I don't think it's automatically racism in the first place.

It's inappropriate because making fun of your customers is never a good idea, and it's also inconsiderate and impolite. But that's not the same thing as racism, or evidence of white supremacy.

And maybe some employees who worked on that list were racist; there is no way for us to know. I like to opt for a more good-faith interpretation, which seems very uncommon these days.

The idea that this would "escalate" from a simple list to actual racism seems unlikely. Everyone knows the difference.

Also, the holocaust was a lot more complicated than this "pyramid" lets on. The Nazis took power by force, in some exceptional circumstances, and the Holocaust wasn't widely known among the German people. It's overly simplistic at best.

> It is only meant to illustrate the classic slippery slope.

I have never seen a single "slippery slope" argument that I found convincing, including this one. In every single case I've seen everyone is acutely aware of the difference between A and B. I don't consider it an argument, I consider it a fallacy.

>And maybe some employees who worked on that list were racist; there is no way for us to know. I like to opt for a more good-faith interpretation, which seems very uncommon these days.

Racism is the air we breathe. I grew up around mostly white kids, and there is undeniably more fear amongst those kids (myself included) when interacting with black people than with white people. It seems similarly undeniable that affluent white people are more afraid of african american people when its dark out than they are of other white people. When a black person applies to a job, their blackness is not neutral. It seems to me that most people have underlying feeling about blackness, and that people of color have to contend with that when they're going through their lives.

I think this is mostly correct; although I personally wouldn't go as far to say that "racism is the air we breathe", but that's an unimportant detail.

I'm not saying there aren't problems; I just don't see the connection between something like this list and the actual problems, and I certainly don't see a good reason for some of the strong and bold claims that are made about it.

It is hard to argue that showing the pyramid of hate doesn't imply that laughing at names leads to genocide. That's very much the overt message - it's not even an implication.

Saying E comes after B doesn't mean inevitably B leads to E. And it seems likely the employee wanted to make a point about the level the company was at or the next level up. Not the top of the pyramid.

The employee putting up that pyramid didn't appear to have the outcome they wanted. It turned into much more. This should be a lesson learned.

I've read a fair number of books on helping things through change. The pyramid being put where it was seemed like a bad idea the moment I read it. The way it was responded to is something I would have expected.

There is a lesson here. If you want to bring about change in others it's about leading them rather than saying what you want to say.

It depends. Did Hansson read what the employee wrote? Or did he glance at the diagram and react to 1 word? Hansson's reputation and how he handled this situation make me think something would have set him off inevitably.

It says you're at the first step along the path to genocide. Whether or not it is inevitable is irrelevant to where the path leads.

No. It's saying that allowing any lower level of the pyramid to exist and pervade allows for further levels to be built up. Whereas if that lower level doesn't exist, it's less likely that other forms of hate will develop and subvert society. It's the frog boiling in the water. It's a cautionary tale to know when the water is heating up and how to stop it.

I agree with your assessment. That is exactly why I stated that the overt message of the Pyramid of Hate is that laughing at funny names leads to genocide, because "allowing any lower levels of the pyramid to exist and pervade allows for further levels to be built up". Not sure what the disagreement is tbh.

> It is hard to argue that showing the pyramid of hate doesn't imply that laughing at names leads to genocide.

I don't find it challenging to make that argument at all.

"Laughing at names leads to genocide" to me implies that laughing at names is a necessary and sufficient condition to a genocide.

The pyramid of hate, to me, implies that laughing at names is a necessary but not sufficient condition of genocide.

Therefore showing the pyramid of hate does not imply that laughing at names leads to genocide, as it lacks the sufficiency condition.

Not so hard to argue.

That would be a good argument if the statement was that "laughing at names leads inevitably to genocide."

> There is a fair amount already written on it but the insinuation that laughing a names leads to genocide ended up in the picture.

I think that's a misinterpretation of what that graphic is trying to convey. The point isn't that people and groups that exhibit behavior at the bottom of the pyramid are on the march to genocide. It's that there's a spectrum of bigotry and discrimination, and each level of it that is tolerated enables worse behavior. It doesn't mean every situation is going to get to the level of mass-killings.

Normalizing bigoted behavior encourages more bigoted behavior. The same way that normalizing managers who scream and yell at people often leads to others becoming more openly belligerent or otherwise creates a toxic workplace.

I think the "Pyramid of Hate" illustration is really quite immaterial to it all, and overly focusing on it ignores the fact that the founders completely failed to understand their employees' subsequent concerns.

You might feel the illustration is incendiary, sure, but I think coming down as hard as they did on it to a pretty valid concern of "hey maybe no funny names list" did no favors to those concerned, and subsequently doubling and tripling down on it has really really not helped.

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