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Comment by Amorymeltzer | Hacker News Reader

For better or for worse, I think of one thing when I think of Basecamp/37signals/Hey. From <https://basecamp.com/handbook/code-of-conduct#politics-at-wo...>:

>We respect everyone’s right to participate in political expression and activism, but we avoid having political debates on our internal communication systems. 37signals as a company also does not weigh in on politics publicly, outside of topics directly related to our business. You should be at peace with both of these stances.

From April of 2021:

Changes at Basecamp - <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26944192> (883pts, 814 comments)

Behind the Controversy at Basecamp - <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26963975> (65pts, 47 comments)

What Really Happened at Basecamp - <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26963708>(193pts, 38 comments)

“About one-third of Basecamp employees accepted buyouts today” - <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998127> (1366pts, 2020 comments)

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Seems like a decent perk to have an employer that actively discourages partisan activism in Slack.

Does that include renaming the “master” branch on GitHub because of slavery? The definition of modern politics is that they make governing the nation related to little everyday things.

Follow-up question: do you think of it as a good thing or a bad thing? My guess is that either way, that's perfectly fine with them. They want employees who embrace this mentality, and do not want employees who would be upset by it.

If, as a politician/party, you wanted to exert complete control over a population, then banning talk about politics at work (where lets face it the majority of people spend the majority of their lives), and ensuring companies don't talk about politics themselves either, would probably be an essential step.

Additionally, DHH somewhat regularly blogs about political things. While I understand it's his "personal" blog, can you really have a personal blog separate from work when you're the CTO of the company and the creator of Rails?

It's complicated if you have personal but identified channels and are also a somewhat public figure in the context of various communities, including companies and tech projects.

I guess my take is that if you want to have a truly personal blog or social media channels, it should be as anonymized as possible. (Which has pros and cons.) Certainly, there are a ton of things I wouldn't write on a public channel even if I weren't technically violating any company policy because they would bite me.

When I was an analyst, I would absolutely not write anything about a CxO that differed from what I would put in a research report.

I don't see why not - and notably they don't seem to attempt to ban other employees from having personal blogs or engaging in activism outside the workplace either.

Right, it's an explicitly political stance. I think there are plenty of ways to speak to the need for collaboration, kindness, respecting difference without drawing artificial boundaries around what is and isn't politics. It's pretty clear that DHH is doing politics all the time, just that his politics are conditioned on understanding itself as "not political."

It would be very concerning (and in violation of the First Amendment) if the government forbade you from talking about politics at work. But this is not that — it's a company saying that at their company, they don't have political debates on their internal communication systems. This is different in both degree and kind.

Are you concerned that if too many companies take this approach, it will become the norm, like it was before about 10 years ago, and that then there will be attempts by politicians to codify it into law?

If it became the norm, politicians wouldn't need to encode it into law - they'd have 'won' already.

The question I suppose really is to what extent society (through the agency of the law and elected representatives) can police (or more precisely in this case to prevent the policing of) private forums like company internal communication systems. I'd argue that simply being privately owned does not put up a perfect barrier to society, and that society does have a legitimate interest in how such forums are run.

There seems to be this idea in the US that any form of tyranny and oppression is ok, so long as it is not the government that is doing it.

> If it became the norm, politicians wouldn't need to encode it into law - they'd have 'won' already.

This was the norm until recently. Would you say that these politicians (who are they, by the way?) had already won during that time?

I seriously doubt it. I don't know of anything interesting that has come from discussing non work-related politics at work. What needs to be preserved is the ability to discuss work-related politics at work, which can currently easily get you fired (but for a made-up reason.)

As for companies not talking about politics, I don't care what companies have to say. They're the mouthpieces of their owners. As can be seen in this case, when the owner dictates that the company doesn't participate in politics unrelated to its business. Should companies have the right to speak about arbitrary subjects, but not the right to silence? How can an employee feel like they'll be treated fairly if they don't agree with the company line (issued yesterday) about apricots in Africa?

I'd go farther and say that the list of subjects that a company opines in public about is the same as the list of subjects an employee can feel like they're not free to have an opinion on that anyone at their job could hear about without risking their livelihood.

The fact that DHH goes on and on about politics in his personal life but keeps it away from the company is a positive indicator that it's not opinions that are being suppressed, but opinions about business-unrelated political matters on internal systems.

edit: I feel that a priority for any sort of socialism, or civilization for that matter, is to figure out how to work productively with people you don't like or agree with. And psychologically, not being able to cooperate with people who differ from you is an issue of autonomy and boundaries.

Whether it is through law, custom, or company policy, anything that stifles political debate weakens our democracy. To be clear, that does not include or allow hate speech or incitement, which are identifiably different.

Of course we should balance this with the needs of the business in keeping company communications 'on topic' as it were, and to avoid damaging professional relationships.

Good thing that’s not what happened here!

This was voluntary, and there is no evidence that it was anything but internal.

Do you have something that would point to a specific politician or party being involved?

As a counterpoint, the liberalization and allowing of corporate lobbying and speech has made it much easier to manipulate political agendas, and remove agency from the population.

Seems normal to me to avoid it. Honestly I can't even imagine chatting about anything political in public within a company's chat channels.

I have zero interest in politics, if I had to mentally filter dozens of lines of chat about XYZ political topic when I'm trying to find something technical that would bother me. It wouldn't offend me but it would have a negative affect on productivity due to spending more time finding things.

If a group of folks with a common interest want to talk about politics privately that seems reasonable to me. That would be comparable to going out for lunch in a non-remote setting, chatting in the parking lot or an empty conference room during a break.

I think the issue is that forms of workplace organizing and labor disputes that might fall short of protected union activity under the NLRB are dismissed as being "political", rather than there being too much chat about political news on Slack.

When I worked in San Luis obispo around the time of proposition 8 banning marriage equality we all opposed prop 8 except for one guy who insisted on bringing it up all the time and said we'd be discriminating if we stopped him.

It seems like a sensible rule to me.

My, perhaps unpopular, opinion is that email/chat/even lunchtime workplace discussions can easily escalate to something contentious/distracting, will make at least some people uncomfortable, and are probably sensibly approached by either keeping your mouth shut or voicing generic assent with the reigning political ethos in the organization.

By all means, talk among your friends circle after work at the bar. But I don't have a lot of interest in engaging with a lot of political conversation that I may or may not agree with.

Personally I've been split on this since I first read about it: I get a weird feeling from the way it was decreed to be not allowed, but I also don't think it's totally unreasonable to tell people to take it elsewhere (how hard is it to make a group chat on another platform these days?), particularly given the increasing polarization and vitriol in American politics in recent years.

I think the decree was a bit ‘loud’ because it was uncommon at the time to take that stance.

But I think if a company nowadays wanted to have the same stance, they could just nonchalantly say “we have the same policy as coinbase and basecamp regarding politics at work”.

The issue is they set the line for what's political and that line is based in leaderships own believes about identity. It telegraphs what kind of company it is based on what it classifies as political under an abstract definition based on who runs the company at the time.

It may come down to how they define "politics". Given a reasonably broad definition, it would be nearly impossible to avoid some discussion of political things.

If it is used as a weapon to prevent discussing of topics that management doesn't want discussed, while promoting topics they like, it becomes simply a policy of control.

As an example, recently the topic of remote work has become of interest in political debates.

I think the danger of such a policy is that it's easy for those in charge to declare that any complaint or POV they don't want to hear is "political" while the discussions and opinions they approve of are not.

In other words, if people of a particular subgroup of the population were to complain that the company's policies or culture were harmful to them, that might get shut down based on this policy. An example I could see happening is a company with a handful of Deaf employees who ask in the #general Slack channel that anyone running a Zoom meeting could please enable captioning when setting up the meetings. If few people honor this request, maybe the complaints escalate and the Americans with Disabilities Act gets mentioned. Suddenly it's "political" and the Deaf folks are causing a distraction. But really, they are just asking to be put on a more even playing field so that they can actually participate and contribute to the work, but if the wrong person got their feelings hurt, suddenly it's a "political" issue and no one can talk about it, and before you know it, all the Deaf employees have left for greener pastures, and now maybe there's no more "politics" in the shared channels, but the company is worse off for letting themselves become a hostile work environment for those folks.

Is this sort of thing alleged to have happened at Basecamp? My understanding was that it was more politics-first activism, not a response to employees being held back by ADA violations. As someone who works in the field, I don't hear about ADA compliance being treated differently based on partisan affiliation. The ADA was signed by a Republican president, and there are many pro-accessibility folks on the left and the right.

I do understand your general point that it can be difficult to draw lines. I just think that issues like the one you raised would be handled through HR if a friendly "hey can we turn on captioning" message didn't get enough support. I've also never heard of anyone getting their feelings hurt about zoom captions.

But you're right that the people at the top will be the ones deciding what is deemed "political" and what is not. If their definitions don't match up with what the remaining employees think, there could be issues. I haven't heard of any drama since the original incident. Has there been any?

Seriously, it's unfortunate that their handbook is so thoughtful and yet management has shown the same callous behavior as your average corporate overlords. Something something words and actions.

For many of us this is a positive signal. I really don't need coworkers screeching their political opinions at me.

While I agree that I don't want to hear about some things in the workplace, I don't know how to define that. Many decisions a company makes are inherently political.

This seems perfectly sane and fair to me. Indeed, it seems like the only realistic option. Don't bring political debates to work. If they show up in the course of business, handle them carefully, but for the love of god do not borrow trouble by abetting them. For those looking for a place where people argue about politics, I'd politely refer them to literally everywhere else in the world right now.

For me it's a plus. I wish it would be done more.

I think the politics aspect should be one where there is a separation from work and strongly held and compelled to discuss. A company I have worked at had a slack / similar channel where tantrums about very personal self esteem / political view issues were not uncommon. It got old especially given the political leaning (in general) of said company was much in that individuals wheel of support.

There was some very visceral discussions in one of the CNCF groups late last year around the events in the middle east that impacted discussions, saw individuals publicly at odds, etc. Technical conferences, in a sense, may be different than work, but individuals participating in conferences should feel supported in engaging, discussing, and presenting the material relevant to the conference. Harassment/etc should be frowned upon and actively dealt with. Conferences, unless political/societal in nature, should also be political free zones.

This was very strange of them considering they actively participated in the 2019 Chicago municipal elections possibly breaking some campaign finance regulations subleasing space below market to a mayoral candidate (a candidate, who, incidentally, was very pro-startup)

Based on what happened at Valve they deserve credit for stating it in no uncertain terms.

I'm pretty out of the loop on a lot of things - what happened at Valve? I've done some searching but my keywords aren't pulling up much of anything aside from a 2018 account of internal politics at play at Valve.

Major plus in my book. Anyone who wants to talk politics with me first gets redirected to https://studiahumana.com/pliki/wydania/In%20Praise%20of%20Pa... -

"Political actors, including voters, activists, and leaders, are often ignorant of basic facts relevant to policy choices. Even experts have little understanding of the working of society and little ability to predict future outcomes. Only the most simple and uncontroversial political claims can be counted on. This is partly because political knowledge is very difficult to attain, and partly because individuals are not sufficiently motivated to attain it. As a result, the best advice for political actors is very often to simply stop trying to solve social problems, since interventions not based on precise understanding are likely to do more harm than good."

This leads to a strong status-quo bias (“uncontroversial” and “stop trying to solve social problems”).

Status quo bias unfairly benefits those who are at the top of the social hierarchy and perpetuates ongoing harm against those lower on the hierarchy.

To take one example, this attitude would be very convenient for white men to take and encourage others to take, but would be seen as negative for people of color, women, LGBTQ people, etc. Pushing this attitude in a corporate setting would then turn off recruitment for those people and limit the diversity of the company, which has longer term implications for hiring quality and product appeal.

Put simply, the desire to “avoid politics” favors certain classes of people to the detriment of others.

I am not saying the answer is to bring politics in to the office, but I am suggesting a more nuanced response to those who desire to do so. Encouraging people to “stop trying to solve social problems” is very transparently an attempt to solve the social problem of political activists making choices you view as flawed. If you truly don’t want to be involved with social problems yourself that includes letting others make their own choices and being sensitive to that (while still balancing workplace norms). For example you might decide not to encourage others to stop their activism, but limit activism at work that distracts the company.

Your answer is well intentioned and well written, but it doesn't address any of Huemer's abstract points in a way I find convincing. You're welcome to walk through the paper and try your hand at it, though. Maybe there are holes in his logic I'm having trouble seeing, it wouldn't be the first time with these philosopher types.

Indeed you linked to a PDF with 25 pages of main body text, and I generally come here for the comments. I can just as well respond to your excerpt, as it is clear to me the implications of such an attitude. If you view all activism as folly and encourage others to do the same, you can be quite assured that those who do choose to influence the world will have more success in your absence.

I am happy to respond to any specific questions you have (even with excerpts) but I am not here to read a 25 page PDF. And as an aside, I see in the author's conclusion that they are wholly dismissive of Karl Marx, which I view as a serious error. I suppose the author is not familiar with the excellent work of modern Marxist intellectuals like Richard Wolff and David Harvey who have quite effectively applied Marx's original works to modern day economic analysis. If the author were familiar with their works it would be clear that modern Marxist intellectuals view the 20th century not as a complete failure of Marx's theories, but of the application of those theories in the hands of the centralized state. When applied with coercive violence those theories lose the very democratic power they had hoped to capture and give way to human greed and demand for accumulation of power. We can nonetheless learn from Marx's analysis of the problems of class-based society and the benefits of worker or community control of the means of production. As Wolff and Harvey repeatedly explain in their work, the task is not to dismiss Marx's analysis but to learn from 20th century experiments of the importance of democratic control. As a practical example, Wolff's primary takeaway from all this, informed by the desire to reduce the importance of class and expand worker based control of production, is that we should aim to move our economy to one where firms are more predominantly worker owned. That we would move from top-down managed firms to worker-managed firms is a well founded and reasonable argument that bears no resemblance to Stalin's USSR, for example. I don't know if the author balances the arguments of pro-Marxist and anti-Marxist intellectuals or simply chose only to look at one side and believe they had the full picture, but it only reinforces my belief that if someone advocates for a depoliticized society, they will simply favor the status quo.

I would encourage reading or listening to the words of people of color and other marginalized groups to ensure that any prescriptive views of society you hold take in to account the different ways that marginalized people experience the world. You mentioned you are interested in holes in Huemer's logic, and that is where you will find them.

Huemer mentions Marx as an example of someone whose politically motivated actions broadly led to more harm than good over time, in his view. One can swap in Stalin or Mao, for their Cultural and Russian Revolutions which both killed many hundreds of thousands, or some living memory political actor like George W. Bush or the 9/11 airplane hijackers themselves for their political actions inciting and stoking the flames of the War on Terror, which killed some 3 million in its own right. The paper condemns all of these people for their part in mass murder, and thinks the world would have probably been a better place if they did nothing at all.

Marx doesn’t fit in to this group. All he did of consequence was write books. Stalin, Mao, and George W Bush all directly or indirectly ordered the murder of millions. Marx just wrote theory which only when misapplied by a violent state led to suffering. Marx never killed anyone!

It seems to me to be a gross intellectual error to conflate Marx with mass murderers. Marx’s theories were popular among revolutionaries at the time of Lenin’s rise and he took advantage of that appeal when he styled himself a Marxist. But even then he created his own theories we call Marxist-Leninism, so called because they are not based purely on Marx.

To say Marx played any real part in mass murder is like saying the Nasis were socialists because they put “socialist” in their name - intellectually vacant. I implore you - do not put so much stock in the writing of someone who has led you down this path! There are better answers out there without these gross errors.

A defeatist argument. We would need a crystal ball, there's no point in even trying!

I propose we create models to reduce complexity, and then make adjustments to approximate reality with increasing accuracy. If this works out in our favor, let's also give it a name, like science.

The fact that no person can understand everything in detail doesn't mean some of us shouldn't try in some capacity.

Kindly read the part of the paper about expert knowledge, it's not very long. Huemer is not arguing that all knowledge is useless, not even close - he's concerned by the fiendish complexity of political knowledge specifically.

Not long ago 'how can birds fly' was a subject of fiendish complexity.

Then the human race spent a few centuries studying physics.

Sociology may be running in circles now (i.e. replication crisis), but imagine what it can discover in a similar timeframe.

Meanwhile, our best course is educating ourselves, no matter how futile, because inaction is not a good way to live with other people on the same planet.

>imagine what [sociology] can discover in [a few centuries]

See Section 3.3, "Social Theory is Harder than you Think". It would be nice, but I'm very doubtful.

>our best course is educating ourselves, no matter how futile, because inaction is not a good way to live with other people on the same plane

Many possible rebuttals here, but let's take the simplest one: Opportunity cost.

Huemer argues for political inaction, not freezing yourself in a block of ice. All that time you save on politics could be time you spend on e.g. discovering new drugs for terminally ill patients, or making it cheaper to desalinate water. Or, just doing your normal job. These are not easy tasks, certainly not as easy as reading The Sociological Times for 8 hours a day, but they will almost certainly end up doing far more good for people.

Culture has shifted, and every action is now also a political action.

Especially if you have a new drug in your hand, or have a better way to get clean water. One tribe will milk the optics, the other will sabotage and rally people against the thing.

Have a co-worker in Kiev, and you say you're worried? Boom, your neighbor buries you under Russian propaganda.

Got vaccinated? Congrats, half your family just disowned you.

Every decision is taking a side, if not in our own minds, then in those who breathe the same air.

But I must say, Andrew, this is awesome, and you gave me a lot to think about.

Lol this is ridiculous

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