Comment by lexcorvus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lexcorvus | Hacker News Reader

I can see two basic solutions to these issues:

    1. Purge every company of assholes
    
    2. Allow complete freedom of association

#1 is hard to implement because assholes are everywhere. #2 is the obvious solution, and in fact it is so obvious that Julie Ann Horvath's actions implicitly endorse it—don't work for companies filled with assholes.

Alas, the obvious solution is illegal under US federal law. Asshole-filled companies are required by law to hire the kind of people assholes love to harass. In other words, the very laws designed to promote the interests of asshole-targets guarantee that they will come into contact with assholes. (Medical geeks might recognize this as iatrogenesis.)

Of course, there's always:

    3. Convert all assholes to non-assholes

This can be considered a special case of #1, and would be the best of all possible worlds. Indeed, a great deal of energy goes into achieving it. But it essentially reduces to "eliminate the existence of assholes". It doesn't take a particularly subtle grasp of human nature to understand why this doesn't appear to be working.

In sum, the obvious solution is illegal and the desirable solution doesn't work. Is it any wonder this conflict seems never-ending?

It sounds a whole lot like you're saying:

A. There are only two impossibly simplistic solutions to the problem.

B. Neither of them are workable in practice, so clearly the problem is intractable.

There are people out there who have spent more than 10 minutes considering the problem. Many of them have conducted research and published on the topic. You might consider reading some of them before concluding that it's hopeless.

A. There are only two impossibly simplistic solutions to the problem.

Can you think of a solution that doesn't fall into either of the categories I suggested?

B. Neither of them are workable in practice, so clearly the problem is intractable.

Don't shoot the messenger.

Many of them have conducted research and published on the topic.

This is exactly what you would expect when there's an illegal but obviously workable solution. Nobody ever got a job for saying "let companies hire whomever they please", so researchers have an incentive to make the impossible solution seem possible—if only we would listen to (and fund the research of) people like them. The results simply involve increasingly complicated ways of purging (or converting) assholes.

I can think of a solution: enforce the law regarding gender harassment. Face lawsuits otherwise. Period.

Companies facing gender harassment lawsuits need to purge assholes or risk going out of business. In other words, your solution reduces to solution #1.

Upvoted for elegance.

The desire to reduce something as complex and hurtful as discrimination and gender harassment to an algorithm of limited choices is pretty much a perfect example the issues at Hacker News.

For those with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

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