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Comment by phillipcarter | Hacker News Reader

That thread is hilarious. He went on blast about "the N-word" being used in company communications and so now I know that what got leaked is embarrassing and a terrible look. I wouldn't normally care, but now that the CEO has gone and done this I'm gonna be on the look out for the story.

As a side note, if this CEO thinks it's okay to toss around "the N-word", then why doesn't he just actually spell it out in Twitter? Or is he just a coward? ;)

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Wild that (supposedly) only 20/3200 think using what is basically the ultimate racial slur in English is bad. And that he thinks this is a good thing? Just when I thought my opinion of crypto companies couldn't get any lower ...

I think you're interpreting that backwards.

Hmm, I revisited to check and Tweet #1 is:

> We recently attempted to summarize what the @krakenfx culture has been over the past 11 years, and what we hope it continues to be.

> We had a few heated debates and it turns out we have about 20 people out of 3200 who are totally not on board.

Ok so 20/3200 are "totally not on board" - i.e. they're the group of people supposedly causing trouble that we are going to be discussing in this thread. While tweet #5 lists what this group are annoyed about:

> 5/ What are they upset about?

> * DEI (Silicon Valley's version)

> * pronouns, whether someone can identify as a different race and be allowed to use the N-word

> * whether differences in human sex exist at all

> * being respected and unoffended

> * being "harmed" by "violent" words

So my overall read is that he's taking aim at "woke" culture, and my initial interpretation of the second item was "that non-black people are using the n-word" which tracks with the overall point. I guess it could be interpreted differently ("if you identify as black [these unhappy people] think you should be able to use the n-word") but that isn't really in line with the rest of the tweet.

But my interpretation was, someone's clearly dropping n-bombs and either:

1. only a small minority are vocally upset about it, the rest are ok

2. only a small minority have no qualms with it, the rest are upset

And the scare-quotes in 'being "harmed" by "violent" words' kinda look like he's ridiculing this point. Honestly it reads like a tech-bro version of the usual "these liberal snowflakes need a safe space..." rant to me.

I don't think it seems like 20/3200 are saying "Using the N-word is negative", but rather that they are unhappy with the company internals overall. Could be because of that, could because of a lot of reasons, some of them being outlined in the Twitter thread. But to suggest that those people are the ones unhappy with using the N-word and the rest being neutral about it, seems to extrapolate a bit too much from the thread.

I've worked at Kraken for almost 6 years, and know Jesse pretty well. He acquired my project and I reported to him for a while. I manage a large engineering team here.

I think you and many others are misinterpreting what he wrote. He's not defending the use of the N-word and I've never, ever seen anyone use language remotely close to that in internal communications. I think the example he gave is the ridiculous scenario of someone identifying as a different race so they can have permission to use the N word.

I think people are getting outraged over literally nothing with this story, I've found the vast majority of people working at Kraken to be perfectly reasonable and respectful to each other. I don't understand why everyone on HN/Twitter is so eager to get outraged over stories like this when they have so little detail and context.

Well, the poorly written 11 tweet rant doesn't come across as reasonable or respectful.

Mostly it comes across as unhinged and cocaine-fueled gibberish.

I hope his communication skills aren't this bad in real meetings.

Have you read the culture document? Do you agree with it? Has anyone you manage chosen to leave because of it?

I agree with the culture in general but didn't read the document thoroughly because I've been here for so long I know what the culture is. The document was more for recent hires and new candidates.

That's not what he said.

Automated TOS takedowns?

I don't think that's what he is saying, lol

From the tweet:

> pronouns, whether someone can identify as a different race and be allowed to use the N-word

Perhaps his argument is that no one should be able to use it at work? I'm not convinced your take is the correct one.

So he's not saying the N-word himself, but instead arguing that opressed minorities should not be allowed to reclaim slurs formerly used against them?

I really do not see how that is much better. The entire statement reeks of privilege.

No. He’s making the troll argument that if people born men can identify as women (and therefore be treated as such) then why can’t white people identify as black and say the n-word.

Not as superficially bad as saying the word, but bad in the sense it is a two-for-one: trivializing the experience of black people and trans people.

For some reason I find this even worse. What an ass. It's a shittier version of the "trans apache attack helicopter" meme from forever ago.

Maybe I am giving him the benefit of the doubt, but I read it as the exact opposite.

I read it as him saying: the argument that "why can’t white people identify as black and say the n-word" is a troll argument, made in bad faith, and is disruptive to work culture and productivity, and people making that argument have no place in their culture.

I arrive at that conclusion because the heading starts "What are they upset about?" They are upset "whether someone can identify as a different race and be allowed to use the N-word." I dont really think someone parading against wokism would in good faith argue that somebody can identify as a different race. They would only do so facetiously. Three tweets above it, his SYN flood DoS analogy makes its pretty clear he is against people derailing good conversation with in bad faith arguments.

As an aside, I'm honestly a little concerned that basically every other commenter arrived at a different conclusion. We are all all over the place. Is our ability to connectively parse tribal language, in a consensual way, really this broken? Is what he wrote really that cryptic or unclear? EDIT: I guess he is the facetious bad actor.

No, we are just reading a very charged statement and revealing our biases.

One only needs to look at the history of biblical textualism to see that this is nothing new.

Edit: my interpretation of “they” btw is that “woke” people are upset someone made that argument, which ceo is arguing is a way to shut down good faith argument.

Your interpretation is the other way I read it. Either the pronoun people and the n-word people are the same people, or they are two different groups of opposite upset people.

Given your interpretation, is he saying "engaging troll arguments further is a form of disruption"?

It's also possible the n-word people are prowokism but making a twisted not in bad faith argument that everybody saying the word is more inclusive. And meaning it earnestly. This reading seems the least likely.

His more egregious transgression, to me, is going from "If nobody is ever offended, we either don't have enough diversity of thought or we don't have enough transparency in communication" to 'let's sever ties with our 20 most outraged, so there isnt so many offended here.' There's some contradiction between words and actions. If he wants to build a offense-inclusive environment, it needs to include all outrage.

These 20 people should be encouraged to continue as an anti-culture team, as a counterfource and check & balance counter to their culture, albeit in a way that doesnt monopolize internal attention.

Update: The NYT says he's the one who made the troll argument. So maybe he is the disruption that doesnt fit his own culture. Extending someone the benefit of the doubt only goes as far as until they prove otherwise.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/15/technology/kraken-crypto-...

I admire your effort to try to parse it, but I don't really think we should, or can: it's not a topic that can be explained in 280 characters, one can only fit so many layers of implicit ironic quotation in a tweet, so…

Don’t make convoluted points about discrimination on twitter. It's not suited for such points.

If you need to, draft something deliberate, long-form and edit it several times. Have a close friend review it, edit some more, and link to it from a tweet, but everything about this thread tells me no one gained much by being exposed to it. As a CEO, he should have known better, learn to communicate clearly and in the right forum, and not force you & others in a futile exercise on exegesis.

Not sure why this is being downvoted. A thoughtful person would probably not try to summarize their views on race, equity, or free speech in a tweet.

It’s really weird to give him this benefit of the doubt, given his post in /7.

Just as a curiosity what is the counter to this troll argument? Philosophically speaking why is one obvious and the other unthinkable?

If you want a simple appeal to medical science, gender dysphoria is recognized in the DSM-5 [1], and gender-affirming care and identification have been shown to result in measurable improvements in transgender people’s health outcomes [2].

Neither of those things are true for “trans-racialism.”

Beyond that: I struggle to find almost any good-faith examples of people claiming that they genuinely believe themselves to be “trans-racial.”

[1] https://psychiatry.org/patients-families/gender-dysphoria/wh...

[2] https://www.pcori.org/research-results/2013/examining-health...

The issue there philosophically is that prior to it's recognition in the DSM-5 transgender people would then not have existed. That is more of an appeal to authority than an explanation why one accident of birth is a social construct and one is not.

Yeah, that’s fair as an argument from first principles.

But speaking from a more practical standpoint: we know, empirically, that there are a lot of transgender people out in the world. We know that many of them feel much healthier when they are able to transition, in various different ways.

It’s not just an appeal to authority, it’s an appeal to a fairly significant consensus in medical science. Which feels better to me.

We just don’t have any meaningful evidence for “I identify as black so I can say the N-word” being anything other than an annoying troll argument. Or at least, I certainly haven’t seen any.

But if you want to talk about race/gender as social constructs, that’s a whole ‘nother conversation — one very worth having!

I don't disagree that people are suffering from a condition and feel the way they do. I'm sure if I had it, I would feel the same way. I don't care one bit what clothes you wear or what name you want me to call you.

My problem is mainly when I think about other, similar conditions, like elderly people who think they are 8 years old or patients who think they are celebrities. I'm not asked to think of them in the manner that they think of themselves. Another example: a teenage girl with body dysmorphia identifies as obese, but you'd have to be evil to go along with that dysmorphia. It just seems to me that this one case is different but I can't point to a good reason why.

This kind of argument has been used to deny people their rights forever.

In the 90s and 00s one of the arguments was that if you legalized same-sex marriage then bestiality would be next. These arguments are just a new flavor of that so that people can still be jerks to transgender people.

I think the crucial difference is that nobody was disadvantaged by legalizing same-sex marriage. At least in how it was implemented in the UK, religious venues are not compelled to officiate such marriages. So the LGB folks still get to enjoy marriage equality, but the reverends and imams and suchlike don't feel disrespected.

Who is disadvantaged by using someone's preferred pronouns? or not using racist slurs?

I was thinking more along the lines of how women's rights are affected, for instance. What's recently been happening to women in prisons quite exemplifies the issue.

Conservatives have complained bitterly that legalizing same-sex marriage disadvantaged people. You've got clerks who say it violates their rights. You've got people who say that it devalues their own straight marriages.

Some clerks have claimed that, but that's akin to a vegetarian working in a butcher's shop and complaining that they have to handle meat. If the job description changes such that conflicts with your religious beliefs then you do have a choice to resign, or, ideally, be made redundant and given redundancy pay to tide you over until finding a more suitable job.

Of course, but the point is that “gay rights and trans rights are distinct because trans rights disadvantage people” isn’t something that everybody agrees on. We shouldn’t let the fact that pronouns aggravate some people create toxic environments for trans people.

It's gone a bit too far now though. I mean, previously it was just a polite fiction to assuage the mental anguish of those who feel at odds with their sex for whatever reason. Now we're all compelled to actually believe it, in all situations. Or at least, convincingly act as if we do.

I suppose the question I would ask you is: why do you need it to be a fiction?

Why can’t you just… make it a new reality?

The honest answer is that I've not yet heard any convincing argument that would cause me to accept this as a reality.

Perhaps this is partly because I used to be a biologist and worked in the medical research field for a while (before pivoting to software development to get out of academia), so I have a very critical eye when it comes to the studies that proponents of this set of beliefs tend to use to support their arguments.

Dolezal wasn't acting in good faith? Wasn't she heading a NAACP chapter? What does good faith look like?

That's an interesting question. She is on record lying about her parentage and about being discriminated against by police.

Trans people (as far as I know) don't claim that their genetics are different from reality, but that their experienced gender is different from their genetically determined one.

I don't know if that's enough to consider her "bad faith", though. If you genuinely did "feel black" despite having white parents, it would certainly be tempting to at least withhold information about your parents.

We as a society have one class where we accept “separate but equal” which is gender.

White identifying as black should have no impact on day to day life, as we strive as a society to not discriminate on race.

Male identifying as female does have an impact on day to day life, since we do allow for some amount of gender based discrimination.

So the solution is “either make all bathrooms, etc unisex or take trans peoples issues seriously.” But most conservatives obviously want neither.

For me it makes me question a number of assertions we have. Why not just have stalls in bathrooms so everyone can have privacy? Why is gender on your drivers license at all? Etc.

Fun fact: gender was not indicated on United States passports until the 1970s, when it was added to combat a perceived rise in androgyny. In other words, it exists to enforce gender roles, not as an actual identifier.

edit: here's a source: https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-the-rise-of-androgyny-chan...

I find it intriguing how this has become part of the conservative political zeitgeist, when it's an issue that previously was the sole preserve of left-wing radical feminists. And one they have been battling for many decades now.

Of course, the conservatives approach it from an entirely different point of view to the feminists, for whom this a fundamental women's rights issue. But it's interesting how they can all reach roughly the same conclusion from entirely different sets of principles.

Yeah, politics are a weird mix of 'we disagree that this is even a problem' (i.e. abortion rights) and 'we disagree about the solution to this problem' (i.e. trans/women's rights)

^That framework and the hypocrisy it breeds is honestly 99% of the humor on The Daily Show and the Fox News knock-offs of The Daily Show (Greg Guttfield etc.)

It helps to have a more concrete example rather than one designed to be a straw man. I know someone who passes as white, but you'd never guess that she has a black father, making her ethnically as black as Barack Obama, and well above the infamous one-drop rules ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-drop_rule ) that would have allowed her to be denied civil rights under segregation. By that criteria she's black, but she doesn't use the word in question. We can ask whether she should use it, or should want to use it, or should be able to use it, and that might be an interesting conversation, but not one with any hope of having a useful generalizable outcome; the context differs too much from person to person.

And since racial slurs carry much different, and much more charged connotations than gendered pronouns do, trying to draw analogies here seems almost deliberately designed to generate argument rather than discussion.

The obvious answer is that what you identify as does not give you the right to do things that others reasonably consider offensive.

So if a transwoman goes on a rant about how women are all crazy bitches, she doesn't get to justify it by saying she's a woman. She can reasonably ask others to treat her as a woman. But it isn't a get out of jail free card.

Now for a harder one. Why philosophically is being trans OK, but it is not OK for a white to identify as a minority and then receive preferential treatment as one? What if the white is detectably a minority, but so little that nobody would notice if they didn't make an issue of it?

You're going to need to provide a concrete example of the "preferential treatment" in your hypothetical. The concrete example of the treatment trans employees are asking to receive is, in almost all cases, being referred to with the correct pronouns. Pronouns come up in casual conversation routinely -- that's precisely why folks make an issue of it. What's the comparable situation you envision for a coworker who doesn't "look Black" or "look Hispanic"?

Concrete example, a certain number of government contracts are reserved for minority owned businesses.

The counter is that the troll argument compares a substantial community of good-faith actors (transgender people) to a largely imaginary community of bad-faith actors (people pretending to be trans-racial) and from that point on it assumes that those groups are entirely alike in every way, even though one of those groups doesn't exist to any meaningful extent.

I've been wrong before in this thread, but I have to guess that the troll argument is actually a https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_absurdum where he doesnt believe his argument as much as is using it to illustrate how absurd he finds the pronoun debate.

The idea that a libertarian modeled company is ruling by fiat, and issues a decree telling people they cant ask to be referred to by nicknames/pronouns, is somewhat absurd, and he doesnt appear to see the irony.

No pony in this race, but no. He is saying the exact opposite.

To prevent this confusion, should have said nothing at all.

Well said, babypuncher.

Not allowing the N-word at all would be the best option. Never really understood how the word can be positive at all, but it seems it can be.

I think it's (deliberately) been left vague who is saying has been using that language. But if you look at the tweet itself, it looks like he's got a problem with people who he deems as overly sensitive about some contemporary issues like respecting someone's pronouns and having diversity policies

Nah, it just seems that he wants to be an edgelord ceo in his little kingdom.

> That same day, he invited employees to join him in a Slack channel called “debate-pronouns” where he suggested that people use pronouns based not on their gender identity but their sex at birth, according to conversations seen by The Times. He shut down replies to the thread after it became contentious.

> Mr. Powell reopened discussion on Slack the next day to ask why people couldn’t choose their race or ethnicity. He later said the conversation was about who could use the N-word, which he noted wasn’t a slur when used affectionately.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/15/technology/kraken-crypto-...

> it just seems that he wants to be an edgelord ceo in his little kingdom.

What's the point of being a CEO then /s

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