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Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

A good question.

I can't talk for all "weirdos", but let me tell you about my personal fears.

I fear that I will have to give up my intellectual honesty. I fear that I will have to start caring about politics (which I consider waste of time and something that shows the worst parts of our nature). I fear that I will have to start playing signalling games. I fear that I will have to censor my words and my thoughts, so that I don't express an opinion that is unpopular this week (winds on the Internet change fast). I fear that I will have to accept and participate in absurdity and irrationality I try so hard to stay away from.

I'm a very open, tolerant and accepting person. Just like every other "weird nerd" I know. But the crowd that tries to overwhelm us is not open, not tolerant, despite waving the banner of "diversity" and "equality". I fear I won't be allowed to be a nice, honest, decent person with interest in technology anymore.

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What I hear you saying is you personally identify with what you perceive as intellectual honesty, what you perceive as rationality, and the freedom to say whatever you want without worrying whether listeners will like it.

The trouble with such identifications, though, is they can lead to logical errors that make your life a lot worse, by causing you to feel as though a question about your intellectual honesty, rationality, or empathy is in fact a personal attack. This happens entirely unconsciously, and repairing it can seriously suck.

I could go into the ways in which I eventually learned that challenges to my own intellectual honesty and rationality ended up strengthening them both once I stopped reacting to those challenges emotionally and started choosing to believe in the good will of the people making them. But that might just be tedious; instead I will say that in my own life, waving the banner for diversity and equality has come along with being happier, feeling more decent, and being more energetically invested in technology than I was before.

> The trouble with such identifications, though, is they can lead to logical errors that make your life a lot worse, by causing you to feel as though a question about your intellectual honesty, rationality, or empathy is in fact a personal attack. This happens entirely unconsciously, and repairing it can seriously suck.

I agree. Thanks for a reminder.

> But that might just be tedious; instead I will say that in my own life, waving the banner for diversity and equality has come along with being happier, feeling more decent, and being more energetically invested in technology than I was before.

I agree. I like diversity and equality. But diversity means allowing different groups to coexist, and to tolerate people with different opinions and outlooks on life. I don't see "weirdos" trying to impose their own worldview on everyone - on the contrary, it's them who are being forced to conform to the rest. That is not diversity.

What is the specific thing you feel you're being forced to do?

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