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Comment by whalesalad | Hacker News Reader

Why is there so much overlap between infosec and furries?

Well, before it was a cool identity to have, geeks used to go into computing often in order to escape what they perceived as reality that was hostile to them. I guess if you think you are an animal (even if ironically) you would also be more keen to stay in the virtual world. And infosec is one of those fields where hiding behind an avatar or a nickname is still somewhat accepted.

Possibly the same reason there's an overlap of queer people and furries: motivation to learn, a need for well-paid work to get out of hostile families and geographies, a need for an accepting community while you're working toward getting out.

To anyone confused by Kye's comment: Most of the furry fandom is LGBTQ+.

https://furscience.com/research-findings/sex-relationships-p...

I think you might have wrote furries instead of infosec/software?

The furry/infosec/queer Venn diagram isn't a perfect circle, but the overlap is significant and growing with greater acceptance showing in surveys.

Maybe in your social circles it is. If you move outside of the social circle of furries you'll find that they're just a small fraction of the queer population, just as they are only a small fraction of the non-queer population.

We might be more accepting of furries than our non-queer counterparts, but that doesn't make us furries ourselves. Claiming furry and queer is anywhere close to a a perfect circle venn diagram is way off base.

I don't know what to do with a response that's completely unbound from anything I said in the thing it's replying to.

I didn't say:

* all queer people are furry. Most A are B is not all B are A.

* that the Venn diagram is anywhere near a perfect circle. In fact, I said that's not the case.

HN's guideline on reading things charitably could have saved both of us some annoyance here. Try again. It's absurd to think I could mean the things you thought I meant.

They aren't objecting to 'all' they are objecting to 'most'. Your post reads as LGTBQ is mostly furries, I suspect you meant that furries are mostly LGTBQ?

I'm a fan of this guideline:

>> "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

It would be absurd to suggest queer people are mostly furries, so that interpretation is implausible. Act as though the person you reply to is rational, and you can discard the absurd.

A strong, good faith reading could reasonably assume I don't know anything about Venn diagrams and didn't realize all the circles are equal when I posted that. I'm assuming good faith, and that's why I didn't just flag their post for trolling. Maybe they're not trolling and just don't practice this principle.

Why aren't you applying that principle to yourself here? You could be far more charitable and seek to bridge some misunderstanding. It feels like you don't understand that this expectation is symmetrical.

Giving someone some small benefit of the doubt when they make a comment like that is about my limit. This isn't my first rodeo. It's on them to demonstrate their absurd, unreasonable, unfair, completely off the rails read of my comment wasn't meant to kick off a hell thread.

There’s a path from “hanging out on a role playing server” to “running the server” to “hey I can fill this Unix admin job” that has only gotten easier as more furries take it, then look to their friends when their company has positions that need filling.

This furry-to-IT pipeline has been running since the beginning of the World Wide Web as a thing people put money into.

I hope I don't get flagged for this but neurodiversity is wide in the furry community.

You're correct and shouldn't be downvoted for it. Diversity in general is pretty wide in the fandom. We have a much higher percentage of LGBTQ+ people here, because we do accept those people.

Furries on the whole are accepting and welcoming. For people who have faced discrimination in one form or another, the fandom is a place where one can belong and simply be who they are.

I only heard this anecdotally, but I understand that "alternative" folks and lifestyles were intentionally curated in the early years.

People who spend inordinate amounts of time indoors on the computer have more time in which to develop computer skills.

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