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Comment by EC1 | Hacker News Reader

You're thinking only one level deep and taking her statements at face value. Look at the entire construction of this piece. What was specifically referenced? Nothing really.

In my opinion, a simple tweet like "@x has done @y thus influencing me to leave this company, will put up a blog post." would be much more effective.

This way people know what happened, and all journalism is formed around the actual event. If the guy didn't want to get called out publicly, maybe he shouldn't have fucked up, but this way we get to hear both sides of the story.

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Have you ever heard of gaslighting? I don't know what actually happened with this woman either, but it is unfair to say, "Tell us what exact event caused this."

Many people have developed PTSD from a traumatic childhood within which no one distinct event/spoken sentence can be pointed to-- just many, many hurtful episodes over days, weeks, months, and years.

There probably was an event that set her over the edge. I just wouldn't expect it to be some Disney movie scene in which a guy in a suit slams his fists down and shouts, "Women are the worst!" Real people are more crafty than that. Real-life abuse is more subtle.

Again-- I don't know what happened. Just can't help but point out the kind of faulty logic being used here, since it is so common.

No, I'm using risk analysis to conclude that the cost to me of accepting a job there if she's telling the truth is much higher than the opportunity cost of not taking the job (assuming I have other options) if her complaint turns out to be wrong.

Edited to add: the process of deciding the best action to take given uncertain information is fundamentally different from the process of trying to decide what is most likely to be true when there is nothing in particular at stake personally.

1) You have no idea what happened 2) The company has no history of this

Great basis to form a decision.

1. Which is why I have to estimate risk from incomplete information. Which is a pretty common thing for people to have to do in real life.

If I'm in an unfamiliar city and someone I don't know says "Hey, watch out for that alley, several people have been attacked there recently," I wouldn't know whether it was true. But it would be pretty stupid to decline to take any precautions until I could perform my own plot of crime statistic data by location to assess the truth value, don't you think?

2. Actually, they have a history of problems with women that they were trying to repair. Which is why she was trying to turn the company around on the issue and evangelize it in the first place. Did you read the article?

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