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Comment by smtddr | Hacker News Reader

>>I think its us-vs-them tone and cherry-picking of facts makes it very easy to dismiss outright.

This only happens because the problem is constantly ignored. Personally, it's clear to me that nearly every single time anyone tries to talk about *ism in tech it degrades into a meltdown of horrible and/or needlessly pedantic comments. So much so that the actual problem never gets addressed. No choice but to try again and again; focusing harder and harder on examples. I do notice though, over a wide enough range of time, the conversations do very slowly inch towards maturity. And just think, if not even HN can handle the topic... what hope is there for anywhere else? Seriously, if anyone knows of another online community of mature discussion comparable to HN I'd like to know. Right now, HN seems to be in a class of its own in regards to quality of comments.

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Hacker News is no longer really a community for serious debate or challenging insights WRT non-technology subjects. YCombinator's position as a public face of the tech industry sort of requires that submissions/comments, especially relating to gender issues, be whitewashed to some degree.

The intelligent discoursers I know have all moved to communities like slatestarcodex, LessWrong, potentially-vile "neoreaction" sites (you can read Mencius Moldbug's writings for a primer), and other obscure parts of the Twitterverse. Your mileage may vary with any of these subcultures, and there is plenty of "toxic" content, but IMO the quality of discourse is vastly higher that what you'd expect on a typical Hacker News thread for anything not explicitly related to startups or programming.

Just so I can be sure I understand this: you're suggesting that YC whitewashes gender topics off HN, so instead you discuss gender at LessWrong?

Although I don't read LessWrong much any more, people always seemed willing to talk about their actual beliefs in depth. It's about as male-heavy as HN, I guess. There was, a long time ago, some controversy over 'here's what you need to do to get more women', which, as you'd expect, enraged a few folks.

I actually don't read LessWrong itself, but I've interacted with lots of people and sub-communities that are associated with / spun off of the rationality movement. These were just rough pointers to directions I've followed to find higher levels of quality discourse. Ribbonfarm is another such community.

Why don't we remove ALL *isms, and call them biasses?

"The X bias is Y, and from the data we'd expect a bias of Z, therefore the bias is D".

By calling it sexism, we make it a value judgement. By talking about bias, we remove judgement.

was in a class of its own.

religionism.

People here (and everywhere google is a verb) ignorance is not only implied, but encouraged.

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