Game Over
antirez.com
antirez.com
The fact that the first comment that was posted here was just more critique about the original blog post and how supposedly "wrong" it was illustrates how much of a problem this has become. Whether or not his opinion is wrong doesn't matter. What matters is that he expresses it as an alternative perspective to mainstream conciousness.
Problems are solved and society is moved forward by a multitude of various opinions, all right and wrong in their own ways, interacting with each other. Each perspective provides a unique method of solving a problem which may not yet exist. The more perspectives we have, the more ideas we have to work from when we try to solve a problem.
By violently critiquing such controversial stances, we are indirectly silencing those voices, and ultimately destroying our own ability to find progressively better solutions to problems, because we get stuck inside a single point of view and refuse to move outside of it. It is not simply a matter of ignoring trolls either, because many of the most hurtful comments, at least in my experience, are otherwise highly intelligent people who completely missed the point of what you were trying to say, and have spent 10 minutes writing a scathing critique against a nonexistent problem.
If we continue to censor ourselves, it will destroy us.
"I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - Voltaire
The blog post on sexism wasn't a "controversial opinion." The author wasn't bravely standing up to the mainstream. It was just his crappy opinion that tech needs to continue to try very hard to move past.
Most importantly, his opinion was NOT silenced. Why do people in this arena of conversation seem to consistently misinterpret the meaning of free speech? He espoused his opinion, and then a whole bunch of other people espoused theirs. Nobody was silenced. Quite the opposite, actually.
So very much this. The author wasn't deviating from the mainstream, he was promoting mainstream, sexist points of view regarding women and work. That many people took offense to this and called him out on it is to be expected.
Because as far as I can tell, regardless of whether he is right or wrong (I think he is wrong), his blog post had very little to do with expressing a sexist point of view of women, and was more of a critique of how we currently judge discrimination and how the current dialogue around sexism is framed.
Except this critical mass of people behave more like an angry mob with pitchforks and torches, rather than a room full of shouting retorts.
The internet has given us a remarkable freedom in expression - it has also lowered the floor for discourse. Instead of writing an angry email explaining how you're wrong, there are more people who will post your address, take satellite pictures of your home, threaten to kill/rape you... I could go on.
I don't think this post was about the people who disagreed with him (for the record, I do disagree with his first blog post), but rather the extreme, vitriolic, disturbingly violent blowback that we see so much these days.
And this applies to all subjects and all sides. On the internet it seems if you say something sufficiently controversial, you will be deluged by a flood of extreme sociopathic behavior. We're talking well beyond just ad hominem attacks and insults - many a blogger have been entirely silenced from blogging due to personal threats, mob outrage, incitement, and simply inhuman levels of anonymous cruelty that, prior to the internet, were the sole territory of deranged psychopaths.
> "He espoused his opinion, and then a whole bunch of other people espoused theirs. Nobody was silenced. Quite the opposite, actually."
I don't think the mild, "I think you're stupid and wrong" responses are why he's quitting Twitter.
So, what you're saying is that you have no proof that he deleted his Twitter over anything more than not being able to stand criticism?
I'd be curious how many people here find this beyond the pale. As a data point, I didn't. I don't agree with all of it, but I don't see what part of it counts as sexist, in the sense of advocating discrimination based on gender.
It is sexist, in that advocating for the sexist status quo is advocating for sexism.
Well, /he/ is not silenced, but definitely the next thoughtful persons will likely decide to keep silent.
In a very brief skimming of this topic, I noted even tweets dragging his employer (and by extension his livelihood) into this, which imo is likely the real reason for his departure from tweeter.
The fact is that there are dissenting views on this topic by well meaning and civilized humans.
Well-meaning and civilized has nothing to do with it. Your intent and whether you view yourself as sexist has little to do with whether the views you espouse are actually sexist.
With regard to further opinions of this type being silenced... this will not take place, going by the lengthy historical precedence.
Wouldn't you then likewise defend the right of people to criticize the post, including to criticize it harshly, even if you disagree with he criticisms or the way they're phrased?
edit: That said, I can see a case for communities maintaining discourse norms, in order to promote discussion/etc. But to me that's precisely the opposite of a free-speech absolutist view, because discourse norms are limits on what/how/when to say things.
It's also not simply offending language that equals defamation.
From wikipedia:
"Opinion is a defence recognized in nearly every jurisdiction. If the allegedly defamatory assertion is an expression of opinion rather than a statement of fact, defamation claims usually cannot be brought because opinions are inherently not falsifiable."
also
"In Common Law it is usually a requirement that this claim be false."
Based on the post, many of the tweets were insult - direct attacks against the author, and not simply criticism/opinions.
All but 4 states in the US also recognize cases of defamation per se, where the truth of the claims is irrelevant, and the damages are predetermined. Claims which impute the following fall under that category (I've omitted 2 of the 4):
1. Allegations or imputations "injurious to another in their trade, business, or profession"
2. Allegations or imputations "of loathsome disease" (historically leprosy and sexually transmitted disease, now also including mental illness)
I think mostly we're discussing something else here, angry and vitriolic "piling-on" responses, which is a different issue from defaming someone.
The government censors people through force, sometimes in autocracies this quite literally means a gun to a dissenter's head.
It is a separate thing all together, On the other hand, if individuals freely choose to criticize, flame, or just simple disassociate themselves with someone else because they disapprove of their opinions. We should all be free to do at least this without fear that merely by agreeing with the majority we will be accused of 'censoring' the minority.
I take his argument as supporting individual merit, and condemning praise for the seemingly meritless based on being a minority (what is often called affermative action). A proper disagreement with this position might be based around a purposeful cultivation of the minority to overcome the historical imbalance or avoid a flawed evaluation of merit. Debate then between cultivation and pure meritocracy is a valuable exchange, both sides of which are worth defending.
There appear to be many responses to sound bites taken out of context. Many of them are additionally vitriolic reiterations of much less insight and nuance than what antirez said. They do not contribute to progressing the core discussion, and are only valuable to the extent that we attempt to answer a subtle social issue by taking a vote of twitter users. Which is to say, they are not valuable at all.
Surely you see the problem with that line of argument.
His piece was hardly insightful. In fact, he did not show a basic understanding of the issues he was pontificating on and the piece was mere noise, not worth defending by anyone.
Once you start trying to parse out who's right, you're missing the point of free speech aren't you?
Hence, the title of OP's post.
It was all really inevitable though.. The collective code we write spawned this. We make it increasingly simple for humans to share.. and equally as easy for humans to collaborate. These forces will combine for good and/or evil.
Take this past week on reddit as an example... If you don't know it, one of their most prolific users, Violentacrez was forced to close his account for simply sharing controversial photos. As a result, he became a target of ShitRedditSays, Project Panda, and RedditBomb. He was doxxed and threatened IRL.. He is now offline.
If we were to listen to Voltaire unequivocally, then the same should go for OP, and Violentacrez.
How would you respond?
Honestly, it's like when people say "free speech" they really mean "be able to do anything I want no matter how horrible with zero consequences or criticism." I'm glad VA is gone. I hope he gets thrown in a jail cell.
I don't really have an opinion on the situation at reddit.. I was just mentioning it as a related current topic.
[1] http://gawker.com/5950981/unmasking-reddits-violentacrez-the...
To my mind this is a case of "if you can't stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen". If you're deliberately offering an unusual perspective, you should be prepared for it to be rapidly shot down. If it's on an emotionally charged issue, you should be prepared to be shot down viciously. The author can't have been unaware that his original post was going to offend a great many people.
Do people's emotional reactions get in the way of solving sexism? Maybe. But if you've found a way to take the emotion out of it, you're probably 9/10 of the way to a full solution already; if not, complaining that people treat the issue emotionally without offering a solution is rather empty.
I agree with you that vicious responses to different positions on emotionally charged issues are common. The word 'vicious' bothers me though; it's not ok to use non-arguments and threats or insults to respond to an argument. If someone told me that Abraham Lincoln was the current President of the United States I don't think I'd respond viciously... I'd tell him he was an idiot and show him some evidence on my phone. If he kept it up I think I'd just leave because I'm not responsible for someone else's idiocy. If someone argues with a more complicated position that I hold dear, then I can see how I might respond viciously if I had no actual counter-argument or if I didn't want to spend time to argue with this person. I think you're recognizing how the world works, for complex issues with a bunch of ignorant people you're likely to see very vicious responses because most people cannot articulate the reasoning behind their position or choose not to spend the time to and instead use violence (virtual or otherwise). Perhaps some have real counter-arguments and choose not to present them and instead just respond with arrogance; if so that's sad because no one is informed by better understanding.
My initial thought after reading your post was that your view is practical and accurate, that people like Antirez who care more about their primary work (Redis in this case) and not some other issue they have a perspective on (sexism in software) will be drowned out and crushed under the common view and those who choose to elevate a particular view or cause to their primary purpose. I think (with disdain) about "pundits" whose job is to promote some position regardless of its merit; people who spend their lives arguing passionately for whatever pays the most... that is ugly and works against adapting a culture to handle new ideas and situations.
EDIT: Spelling only.
I don't know; a certain degree of specialization helps society function better. Espousing contrary positions is valuable to society and at the same time emotionally draining (which is mitigated if you do it often); having it done by dedicated people seems like a win.
(I felt kind of similarly about the story of the disabled guy who goes around suing places for ADA compliance as a full-time job: if we really care about making businesses accessible for the disabled, it's more efficient to have him doing the lawsuits and other disabled people getting on with their lives)
I'm more surprised that it took you this long to realize that. That statement sounds bit like realizing that 4chan has mostly low quality comments.
If I may... this wasn't the world of "blogging". This was the world of Twitter et al.
Blogging itself actually has a very interesting property, which is that even if somebody tears you a new one in their own blog post, you don't actually have to know unless you go looking for it. It's a lot easier to blog a controversial opinion than it is to twit it, Facebook it, or post it here or in a forum, because they all have the characteristic that any body with a pulse and a computer anywhere in the world can essentially stick their reply in your face. After the first couple of thousand nasty replies, this can start to wear on a person.
When it first got going around 2000, I found this very interesting, and I still think that there's something about that model that we need to find a way to recover in the Next Great Social Medium. It isn't perfect, because you don't get that immediacy that you get in a forum, and it's easy to end up feeling like a lone voice in the wilderness due to lack of feedback, and presumably that's why this medium faded as a means of generating community, killed by the immediacy and quick feedback hits of the more popular community mechanisms. To me it's pretty abundantly clear that all the "any idiot in your face" community technologies ultimately start falling apart (requiring either an inhumanly thick skin or flat-out sociopathy), and somehow I'd love to see if there's a way to build something a little more immediate and a little less likely to isolate people entirely, while at the same time retaining the fact that you aren't assaulted by what feels like an entire Internet of knaves and fools every time you open your browser.
So the folks who are moderate and make up the bulk of the population don't respond, and the ones who are most easily incensed do. In a newspaper the editor would get all the letters that came in as rebuttals to an opinion and print the ones that were insightful or made a reasoned argument, and they would simply throw away all of the letters from folks who were ranting. This allowed for reasoned (if heated) debate to be carried out in the opinion section of the daily paper.
Twitter doesn't 'fix' this, I don't think they see it as a problem, but a bit of moderation goes a long way toward providing a better environment.
It is an unsolved problem to date, perhaps App.net or identi.ca or some other micro-blogging service will take it on and make things better. I expect it would attract quality posts and quickly gain a solid base.
What is wrong with that? I was defending both his right to speech suggesting people shouldn't shit on him for his views and also the need for conversations to be two-way and for him to consider the contrarian viewpoints that were too often expressed hatefully.
I'm encouraged that I've received net-upvotes for that comment, but I worry that EITHER I didn't express myself clearly enough or that people on HN are really committed to not re-thinking their views on sexism given how many downvotes it received. I'll fully accept that it's likely that it was my poor wording.
Without critique, ideas fail.
Edit: If you think someone is wrong, you should tell them (if you can articulate it in a well-reasoned, well-supported manner). Controversial ideas especially shouldn't get a free pass from critique just because they're on the dubside of mainstream thought. How does that even make any sense? Mainstream ideas are, by definition, more popular. While this popularity could lead to less (direct) critique, it still leads to more people thinking about the idea, refining it, etc. There's more brainpower behind a mainstream idea than behind a controversial one. All ideas are deserving of critique, but the ones that have been built with less human hours should probably be looked at a little more closely.
In a nutshell Salvatore said that he prefers to raise the level of abstraction (as programmers are wont to do) from focusing on how _female_ humans are treated unequally to focusing on how _all_ humans are treated unequally. At worst isn't this a disagreement on methodology rather than a disagreement on values?
What purpose has been served by turning this topic into a third rail?
That's my exact conclusion for pretty much every interesting/controversial topic. There's a very small circle of people (not necessarily friends by the way) with whom I exchange ideas on politics/religion/philosophy or anything potentially controversial. I know these people are smart and enjoy an educating conversation. To the rest of the world I just spew the usual boring conventional opinion when I'm forced to, or change the subject altogether when I'm allowed to..
One sees this all the time:
- outrage about someone saying that, all things considered, paedophiles are not a particularly large risk to children
- outrage about someone saying that terrorists are not the huge threat they are made out to be
- outrage about someone saying we should consider a more nuanced, pragmatic approach to drug strategy
- outrage about someone saying that maybe the IT industry is not solely comprised of misogynistic psychopaths out to crush every woman under their boot at every chance
I really hate this pattern. Needless to say there is little nuance to any of the smears, it's all just claims of "terrorist sympathiser" or "he's just sexist too". Is there a name for it?
http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/r5zrf/is_there_a_...
Then I looked at Twitter.
If there are multiple people tweeting basically "you're stupid" dozens of times ( https://twitter.com/kendall seems particularly egregious) it's not being in any way productive, it's a bunch of people being assholes and claiming "you're sexist" as a shield against anything they might do.
I don't know if it's something specific to Twitter, or just making people "celebrities" who aren't ready to handle the stupid comments that come with it.
The anger might even be justified; just don't go to twitter expecting to read the justification.
Who just coincidentally works on a product which may (or not) be in commercial competition, and could just possibly be attempting to gain some measure of the internet fame his target has earned in actually producing something of value to many developers.
I can't help but notice in all of the vitriol, the loudest are those who appear to do little more that talk (on the internet).
(A completely unscientific analysis)
What exactly were people taking issue with? I couldn't tell from the post.
Your thoughts about sexism, at least how to express them? Absolutely. I don't want to diminish you or your ability to assess a complex system, but it seemed to me (and a lot of other people) that you expressed a great deal of ignorance and a lot of classic misguided assumptions based on limited and biased personal anecdotal experience. But if you don't agree after considering that, then that is just that. I only urge you to take this opportunity to do some thinking. Isn't that why you put your thoughts out publicly in the first place?
It's not as he presented his case as stone-cold fact and call me crazy, but aren't personal anecdotal experiences exactly the things that give birth to opinion?
Since when did sharing a belief/stance/daring to opine on something demand anything other than anecdote? I don't like that thought pattern at all.
Convincing opinions are supported by facts and theories, by knowledge of past thinking on the topic at hand. All opinions are not created equal.
I’m sorry, but if you write a stunningly ignorant post on sexism that takes so many wrong turns, you shouldn’t be surprised when other people are offended by your displayed lack of knowledge and care. I don’t want to apologize bullying or harassment – that simply isn’t something you can ever apologize – but anything below that line is perfectly ok.
We are talking about the experiences/opinions of a man about sexist treatment of women. This is a classic example of someone speaking over the voices of people actually suffering from sexism and then making opinions that dismiss key issues about sexism. While the author is totally entitled to that opinion and speech, why would anyone be surprised that people got angry about the post?
Yes, he did ... so what? That's his opinion. Didn't you just write an entire blog post about how everyone should be entitled to their own views?
This whole thing is little more than hypocritical whining on your part. You wrote an offensively naïve opinion piece about problems you've never faced and now you're shocked — shocked! — that those whom you've offended have responded in-kind with their own opinions that now offend you?
Embracing free speech also means recognizing the right of others to respond to you.
They are likely to be old ways (compared with Twitter). You've hinted already on your website, if I understood correctly, about the ideal form of communication on the web. If people want to comment on one of your articles they should write one of their own, giving themselves the time and space to construct something worth reading.
"People should stop writing articles about sexism in tech. It's not interesting and IMHO it's not the central problem for most women in tech."
Edit: Oops, left out the blog post: http://antirez.com/post/different-take-sexism-it.html
However, try to remember that there are people out there who were not taught or never picked up on the idea that you should be courteous when talking to over individuals. Maybe they were never taught it, taught the opposite, or have difficulty in controlling their anger. They can also believe so strongly in something to the point of doing something unethical. The point is not to take things personally when people attack you directly versus your ideas. Instead why not ask them why they felt it was necessary to talk in that fashion?
Apologizing for offending them can also help in alleviating any direct attacks as it makes them aware of how they are acting. A little social engineering is a good thing to know. Don't just run away from it. There are so many better ways of going about it.
With that being said, antirez, it seems that your experience got too noisy and counterproductive and it makes a lot of sense to disengage a bit. You're missing out on very little.
Also, thank you for your work.
The article itself-—as with any article that discusses sexism--was guaranteed to be controversial from the get-go, given its topic. Given that you seem to be somewhat popular, a controversial post from a popular person will elicit all types of discussion, including lots of flaming. I'm not sure why this surprises you, or why you are responding so strongly, but I would definitely encourage you to reconsider; I love interacting with people whose articles I read frequently, and I imagine the same is true in your case with your audience.
Author complains that people are acting badly, but these people are everything that the world consists of. There is nothing else on the receiving end of his message except these (and other) people. Who else to express your opinion to? I'd assume author knows that. When you add salt into your tea, you don't blame your tastebuds for disliking it. Occasionally, however, you dip bacon into chocolate and your tastebuds go "whoa, awesome". This is the risk of controversial opinion. If you make it, just prepare yourself for the inevitable. There is a reason experiments require goggles.
As a community, we should strive to be calmer and more thoughtful about the way we express ourselves, and try harder to make the right calls. If everyone could do that, however, we probably wouldn't have the sexism problem in the first place.
You sound like you are trolling
Want to express the opinion that women (and presumably men) who are highlighting and combating sexism are just demanding special treatment and wasting everyone's time? That's fine, but everyone else has the freedom of speech to criticize your speech and form an opinion of you based on what you've said. That's how this works.
Hypocrisy is unbecoming. Self-censorship because other people will point out how wrong you are isn't censorship; it's doing your homework. If you don't want to be called ignorant and wrong, don't be ignorant and wrong.
Imagine some journalist coming in and saying the problem with software development was that programmers didn't document enough. It isn't censorship for their opinion to be laughed out of the room.
Trolls will just detect this is a sensitive topic, and regardless if they personally care or not about the issue, will see a potential for flame war and will not resist the urge to dump a can of gasoline in the fire and then watch the show.
Win-win.