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Comment by chatterhead | Hacker News Reader

"Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead."

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

Edit: you've unfortunately been breaking the site guidelines quite badly lately. Could you please stop doing that?

Change your rules then, the title of the piece is "White Boy".

What the title of the piece means and its implications is up for discussion.

If you don't like it - don't read it.

That rule exists for precisely this sort of occasion. I read part of the article and—agree or disagree, like or dislike—there's actually a lot there to have interesting responses to, if one wanted.

To pick the single most shallow and obvious provocation and then respond in a predictably indignant way isn't "discussion"—not in HN's sense of the word. Rather, it's the sort of reflexive response we're trying to discourage. We want thoughtful, reflective, curious conversation here. There are plenty of other places for everyone's nervous systems to get reflexively activated.

Do you have a stimulus reaction to anything mentioning whiteness?

It's not particularly surprising that people would criticize someone focusing on a bad actor's ethnic group, whether it's Kanye West going on a Twitter tirade or a "crypto influencer" writing a deliberately provocative headline to drive clicks.

The actual article is more nuanced than its title suggests, almost acknowledging the obvious fact that a blue-collar "white boy" in Ohio has nothing close to the "social currency" that someone like Bankman-Fried did. It's still clearly provocative to suggest Bankman-Fried's Stanford educated, genuinely "privileged" upbringing as the son of well known Stanford professors is somehow reflective of hundreds of millions of people rather than his own circumstances. Doing something for clickbait doesn't somehow make it not provocative.

The title and article are intentionally provocative.

>For now, let’s be clear that I hate using them, but for the sake of brevity and ease of understanding I shall continue to use these misguided – and frankly, insidious – labels.

I read the article, I'm just pointing out that asking someone who is provoked by an intentionally provocative article — even if just for clicks — is silly. Not to mention that "white" or "black" has different connotations than "white boy" or "black boy".

If you read it then you'll be familiar with his response to that criticism, and given the responses, I'd say he's right.

That doesn't make it not provocative. It also misses the mark, in my opinion, by failing to mention how insanely well-connected SBF is.

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