Hacker News Reader

Comment by deltarholamda | Hacker News Reader

>you can form your own judgement about who is telling the truth based on what little there is to go on

Therein lies the danger. An outsider with little knowledge cannot make a good judgement. Their judgement will be based on intangibles, such as "something similar happened to somebody I know, so I tend to believe X's account over Y's account".

But that's not proof, or evidence, or anything really. It's just naked bias from a different situation applied to an unrelated one. Saying "history is replete with examples" is exactly that. If that is going to be used as a metric, then it is well worth it for men to consider that mentoring women carries with it a high degree of risk. No matter how you behave, a single accusation from somebody willing to lie or exaggerate--for whatever reason--will be supported and amplified using this same historical rationale.

View on HN

I do not accept that this is "naked bias".

If the accusations are true, then this is yet another example of a pattern of behaviour played out so regularly, across cultures, centuries and communities, that it is boringly predictable: "Senior community member, almost always a man, sexually exploits vulnerable women seeking acceptance into that community."

When a possible situation arises you should investigate it and, if there is reasonable evidence that it is true, do what you can to stamp it out and ensure it stops happening.

In Jon Pretty's case, if his account is true, it wasn't investigated. It was simply decided in a court of public opinion, quite possibly because of the historical metric you brought up.

The only way you can ensure that it stops happening is strict segregation by sex, but I don't think that's what you'd want.

If this was done bayesian style we could say the priors are man taking advantage of woman. 9 cases out of 10 if there is a rape case you can assume the perp is male and if you don't you are like a born yesterday idiot. And if you're a woman it's super important to keep it in mind, like you think of getting into elevator (or airbnb like in this case) alone with a random man you should not be like "let's not pre judge people".

With wrong cancellation it's different because it's not an urgent situation and people should not ruin someone's life randomly. It would be stupid to force us to think "really there's a 50/50 chance if the rapist is that man or that woman" but if you say "there's a 50/50 chance if the guy is a creep or that woman is scheming something" then it can be not that wrong (depending on country)

But in this case we still don't know who is wrong. This is the original letter https://medium.com/@yifanxing/my-experience-with-sexual-hara... and it was not shown false. All that the courts said was "no evidence was provided". And the guy didn't clearly deny it in the letter as I understand it

> But in this case we still don't know who is wrong. This is the original letter https://medium.com/@yifanxing/my-experience-with-sexual-hara... and it was not shown false. All that the courts said was "no evidence was provided". And the guy didn't clearly deny it in the letter as I understand it

Just as a reminder, it's: "Innocent until proven guilty."

The accuser has to provide proof that what they say is right and until that happened the person is considered innocent.

You are quoting law concepts. If there was proof enough for legal action then "cancellation" would be not necessary right? Just go to jail for rape.

Often problem behavior is not criminal enough OR there is no proof to make it criminal enough.

If you were the victim what proof do you imagine your will have in this case? There would be no incriminating text messages. Everything is fine until he gets your college ass drunk in the privacy of own airbnb. The cards are stacked. A mature perp picks situation when there is no proof and no witnesses. And it is statistics that 9 out of 10 times it is a man.

Maybe the only proof if any after this would be STDs. Do you want to announce to the world you have some incurable virus that you will spread to new partner who you would want to have kids with? etc

Yea it sucks that fixing this mess makes men uncomfortable. If you are scared about getting drive by cancelled, you know who to blame. Other men.

> You are quoting law concepts

It's a concept based on the historic lesson that pushing innocent people is worse than not punishing guilty people. You seem to disagree though.

> Yea it sucks that fixing

This is shuffling which innocent gets to suffer, but is not fixing anything.

The historic lesson is that men and especially men in power commonly abuse their position ranging from harassment to rape and legal system will fall over itself to serve them. That lesson led to metoo and stuff. Look it up.

> This is shuffling which innocent gets to suffer, but is not fixing anything.

Bro I really really hope you are not trying to compare wrongful cancellation and rape.

> Bro I really really hope you are not trying to compare wrongful cancellation and rape.

You have to compare such things. A cancellation if strong enough has ruined your entire social life, all your friends and family now shuns you, that is worse than rape. Of course a "cancellation" which is just some posts online and stays online is not a big deal, but some victims of false accusations do get their entire social life destroyed. Historically rape did lead to such cancelations for the woman, she was no longer fit for marriage and was seen as used goods, so then it was worse of course, but we no longer see it that way.

They are comparable but the outcome of the comparison is not what you think it is. Even in an individual case.

And then remember that wrong cancellations are super, super rare compared to the scale of violence men commit most of which is never reported.

> we no longer see it that way.

Who is we? Many people are still religious (in UK for example more than half of people and growing) but even without that remember this is a physical assault and a major black mark on your ENTIRE life that you have to deal with even if you move abroad and not a single soul around you knows what was done to you, ruinous psychologically and causing destructive behaviors, making you intuitively scared of men. And meanwhile the biggest consequence men suffer, like this guy, is "I lost my way of making money because everyone in Scala community hates me". The number of ways to deal with it, move, change your community, change your name.... he mentions some of them himself. And for a rape victim, none of that works, it's just with you until you die.

This shit requires healing that for some never happens. And for the perp it's just inconvenient logistics (and only IF one victim is brave enough to speak)

This is an insane conversation but I will continue because again the only way to avoid innocent men from a cancel is to try to get more men to understand how this is fucked up beyond belief.

> The historic lesson

_The_ lesson? As in, there's no other lesson? Pretty convenient ignoring everything else if it doesn't fit your goal.

> Bro I really really hope you are not trying to compare wrongful cancellation and rape.

The base difference is really between cancelling someone or not giving a victim the relief that the perpetrator got punished, since if the crime already happened you cannot undo that, however I can see why this doesn't include punishing someone as a deterrent for others to avoid performing similar crimes in the first place.

On comparing wrongful cancellation and rape however, have you ever tried imagining yourself losing your friends, your job, your house, all your savings etc etc for something you didn't do? This is torture, most people would go crazy from it, at least I would. Can you even begin recovering from this? Not to downplay rape, but at least rape victims get recognized as such, get help and support from other people and have some chance of at least partially recovering.

"The" means the lesson we are talking relevant to this sort of circumstances, not the only lesson:)

> since if the crime already happened you cannot undo that

Prosecution is not just making victim feel okay but making it very damn clear to others thinking of doing it

> have you ever tried imagining yourself losing your friends, your job, your house, all your savings etc etc for something you didn't do

It sucks a lot if you are innocent but as I said in another comment it is still a big inconvenience by comparison. Did he even lose a house? in the letter he just said he can't pay rent. move in with parent, solved

Saying in these cases "we must believe the man" is not OK because we all know 9 out of 10 times it is a man. Saying "hard proof or it didn't happen" is not OK because the way this crime works unless you put entire society under cryptographically signed cctv 100% of the time so that you have proof what everyone did when. Even just online as soon as government makes a sound about e2ee chats every techbro (almost always it's a bro, coincidence) goes bananas. So yes this is the alternative and it sucks but is the least bad if you are privacy conscious.

What we can do is work to have this not happen. Goading "don't put your dick in crazy" (where not crazy = a victim who shuts up) like in comments of this thread is not how you do it tho

> It sucks a lot if you are innocent but as I said in another comment it is still a big inconvenience by comparison.

Getting your life destroyed is not just an "inconvenience", it's psychologically devastating and the fact you consider it acceptable is seriously fucked up.

Nah yeah sorry, it's an inconvenience compared to the other side. "life destroyed" you can always switch communities, move, change your name etc, all the options and even he named a few of them. There is not even a criminal charge. all the doors are open to you. Borrow a credit.

On the other side if you got raped, you live with it until you die.

It's not as easy as some people make it out to be to create a believable story about abusive behavior.

> then it is well worth it for men to consider that mentoring women

You don't need to worry unless you're having sex with your mentees. If you do, then yeah maybe you need to think twice about that, and maybe that's not such a bad thing?

>You don't need to worry unless you're having sex with your mentees.

"He exhibited problematic behavior. He touched me inappropriately. He cornered me in an elevator. He used demeaning language and made me feel unworthy."

Zero sex involved, and these accusations can be completely true or untrue, depending on undefinable intangibles and individual interpretations.

I know someone who was written up at work for what (after the investigation) amounted to "brief, unwanted eye contact" with a co-worker. It's kind of a minefield and casual, innocent behavior can easily be misinterpreted.

If you read the blog posts of at least one of the women it's very clear that in her story sex was involved. And I doubt he's contesting that part of the story.

Point I was trying to make is it's not actually that hard to be outside of the risk zone for being cancelled.

If you're mentoring a young woman, don't suggest to share Airbnb together, don't drink alone and then initiate sex. Not doing those things makes it extremely unlikely to ever be accused of taking advantage of someone.

There's plenty of sex mentioned in https://medium.com/@yifanxing/my-experience-with-sexual-hara...

All of those things are far worse than having (consensual) sex with your mentees.

What if "he cornered me in the elevator" was actually "he talked to me while we were alone together in the elevator, but I have background trauma that made this extremely uncomfortable for me".

That's the point I was trying to make. One person's interpretation can be wildly different than another's interpretation of the same event. If we are going to assign preference to the interpretation that is the most damaging to both parties involved--she is traumatized, he is fired--then perhaps it is better to completely separate the sexes.

But has this ever in the history of time happened? In the "elevatorgate" scandal you're referencing here:

* The guy _followed_ her onto the elevator.

* The guy explicitly invited her to his room for a 4 AM coffee.

* She didn't identify the guy at all, just mentioned this as an offhand example of something it would be nice for men to avoid doing.

Inviting a person for sex is not harassment unless you keep doing it to a person who told you no, or its done from a position of power, but "elevatorgate" was neither of those.

Women who don't want that sex of course will tell you to stop, but other women who do want that sex will tell you to do it more and that men are too reserved. Men can't read minds so women will just keep having to say no.

Again, "elevatorgate" wasn't anything! A woman discussed one particular elevator proposition that she didn't appreciate. She didn't name and shame the guy who did it, she didn't say that people who do such things ought to be cancelled; she just said that she, personally, thinks it would be nice if guys didn't do it. The original source of the controversy was Internet commentators who were outraged at the idea that there might be a tradeoff between maximizing romantic overtures towards people who might be interested and maximizing your reputation among people who aren't interested.

(Many of those commentators then went on to exaggerate or outright lie about what the original story was, and I wonder whether it wasn't one of those distorted versions you heard, since you seem to agree that it's reasonable for someone to decide they personally don't like this kind of thing.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com