throwaway1584

The difference is that I believe in a sense of justice and recourse, and that is something social justice warriors do not believe in for their actions. I also believe that evidence can prove me wrong, which is clearly outside the realm of social justice warriors. I continue to seek out evidence when forming my opinions, and do not form ideas uncritically in my head.

> Do you think HN as it is now is the place to constructively have these discussions?

I see your point about the fitness of a platform for challenging the prevailing viewpoints in Silicon Valley, and for making sure that people can develop rapport and reputation that makes them accountable. Those are all great points.

We would agree fully if HN banned all articles on contentious topics or unapologetically allowed all viewpoints with all the mess that brings.

Where I think we differ is what the right action is when highlighting a viewpoint that cause social dissonance. My opinion is that giving the stage only to people that shout the loudest when opposing viewpoints speak is a terrible choice, as in general the most extreme people are the loudest and I doubt those represent the majority. We gave the stage to the extremes in communism and fascism, and it didn't end so well. We do not need to repeat that experiment again.

There is a lot of smoke for there to be no fire. However, who knows. Personally I have seen the same behavior where I work so I am not surprised if this is all true.

There are screenshots in the suits of concrete messages from people claiming they do each of these actions. At this point the question seems mostly to be about if this is systematic or just individual actions.

Why? Social justice actions that should be firable offenses that have been brought to light are;

- blacklists of workers that have the wrong viewpoint

- explicit race and gender discrimination

- using power to enforce that no one can express an opposing viewpoint

All actions that hurt those that are affected in material way.

We as a society agree to state sanctioned consequences that are similar to actions unacceptable to individuals. The difference is that there need to be a sense of justice and recourse, which social justice warriors don’t think should apply to their actions. Acting like a social justice warrior in the workplace should for instance be a firable offence, and things like doxxing should receive severe punishment.

That’s very reasonable. Maybe there are new functionality that can be implemented to at least bring back to the frontpage flagged articles of interest to the majority?

I think there needs to be a punishment function for ideologically motivated flagging and maybe even other actions done by such a minority, so that it cause the articles to stay on the frontpage longer when brought back in order to dissuade the behavior.

Yes, according to my Iranian colleagues.

HN policy states that topics should be relevant to tech and startups. This topic in particular clearly is and also garnered a lot of interest. Arguably a majority might actually be interested in discussing this topic as they might be perceived as a majority and be potential targets of this kind of discrimination. When an ideologically possessed social justice minority then in violation of HN policy and the interest of the audience remove it from the frontpage that is problematic.

It is also disingenuous to say this happens to articles on the prevailing viewpoint to the same degree. Articles on Damore and Fowler was plentiful, and they were not voted off the frontpage. The sin of oppressing critical viewpoints in the valley falls squarely on the social justice warriors.

You can’t both flag an article on a topic off the frontpage so few in the audience see it and get to claim that another article on the topic is a dupe for the audience.

Even if that is correct it does not make it a just way of fighting for your cause. Voting for articles on the front-page of HN is equivalent to a vote in a democracy. If you removed the opposing party candidate from the ballot you might reach your short-term goal, but at the cost of a functioning democracy.

In this case the article was marked as a dupe, but this specific article was not posted twice and previous articles on the subject was quickly voted off the frontpage by people like you despite high interest. This didn't happen to articles critical of Damore, so this seems to be exclusively a social justice tactic.

Edit: explained better why talking about voting is relevant as an analogy

> The irony in all this hoopla is that literally every engineer who has been so bad that I wondered how the heck they made it past the interview stage has been......drumroll ... white or asian male.

I work with a lot of engineers of all backgrounds, and no group has been without bad apples.

> But this argument that there are floods of under qualified minorities and women engineers getting jobs is hilarious.

You are misrepresenting the argument. The argument is that there is explicit discrimination in the hiring and promotion process which comes at the cost of equal opportunity.

In addition to this the people that experience this or feel this is unfair say they have experienced illegal retaliation when bringing this up. I personally experienced such retaliation.

If you believe in reason I suggest reading the Quilette [1] and if you have an academic background you can join the Heterodox Academy [2].

[1] http://quillette.com

[2] https://heterodoxacademy.org

So what you are saying is that you are the kind of person that would have send people to the Gulag for having a different viewpoint. Good job.

I am sure this feels pleasant as long as your viewpoint is in power. Tyrannies rarely stay that way though, so good luck.

Unfortunately no. However, I do not personally use reddit etc.

I think we need to do everything we can to highlight injustices in the power applied to force only one viewpoint to be heard. In addition to this social justice warriors need to receive negative social and life repercussions for their tyrannical actions.

At this point I expect actions like this from people holding the prevailing viewpoints in Silicon Valley whenever someone with a different viewpoint dare speak.

> one thign that annoys me about the media scrutinizing tech companies like this, is that the MEDIA themselves is one of the most masogogynistic cultures out there

NY Times, Huffington Post and many other outlets have a social justice agenda so this is easily shown to be false. Any news publication regularly read by left leaning Americans stay uncritical of anything that furthers a social justice agenda.

How often do you see news articles critical of the prevailing viewpoints? How often do you see articles critical of the prevailing viewpoints on the left?

You are correct that if you work in tech create a throw-away account to discuss anything critical of the prevailing viewpoints. Many holding the prevailing viewpoints are tyrannical and have shown themselves willing to destroy the lives of anyone pointing out problems in their viewpoint.

Almost anyone working in tech has seen race and gender discrimination in favor of women and minorities at this point. I have personally experienced it.

If we were to apply affirmative action then class would be a better differentiator than race or gender. As it stands now an upper-middle-class Ivy League educated person of the right identities will receive affirmative action over a man that worked his way up from a poor neighborhood in Bangalore. I fail to see how that is just.

Personally I wanted to discuss the article yesterday, but it was moved off the front-page too fast despite high interest. It is very common on HN for articles that does not agree with or points out problems in the prevailing viewpoint to be blown off the front page.

I think this is emblematic of how tyrannical some of the people subscribing to the prevailing Silicon Valley viewpoint are.

You are entirely correct that despite immigrants being the largest source of diversity in tech, all diversity and inclusion programs in tech misclassify immigrants into US demographic categories from the EEO-1 Instruction Booklet [2] that underpins all diversity and inclusion programs.

For instance all of the following are categorized as white Americans; my German colleague, my French colleague of Iranian descent, my Iranian colleague, my white american colleague from Colorado, and my Iraqi colleague.

Silicon Valley recruits outliers from around the world. Applying US demographics to an industry where ⅔ [1] of the workers are immigrants does not make sense.

[1] https://jointventure.org/images/stories/pdf/index2018.pdf

[2] https://www.eeoc.gov/employers/eeo1survey/2007instructions.c...

From personal experience after having talked to several colleagues about this in private, all of whom feel this is wrong, the simple reason for why people don't speak or engage in open discourse is fear. And after having seen what happens to the ones that speak up it seems like legitimate fear.

Anecdotally I only knew two Trump voters in the Bay Area. One is Chinese and the other Indian. Polling was not great in the last election, maybe because pollsters can mainly call people with landlines [1] which excludes large pools of people.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/govbeat/wp/2014/03/12/t...

A pretty straightforward explanation is that ⅔ [1] of the tech workers in Silicon Valley are immigrants. Silicon Valley recruits outliers from around the world, and it doesn't make sense to apply US demographics to an industry that recruits from such a pool.

If you assume that the Silicon Valley percent of immigrant workers holds for Google you conclude that 6% of the American Googlers are African Americans, since none of the foreigners can be. About 2.4% [2] of computer science degree recipients in the US are African American.

[1] https://jointventure.org/images/stories/pdf/index2018.pdf

[2] https://cra.org/crn/2015/09/expanding-the-pipeline-the-state...

It also doesn't make sense to apply US demographics to an industry where ⅔ [1] of the workers are immigrants. Silicon Valley recruits outliers from around the world.

Immigrants are misclassified into US demographic categories from the EEO-1 Instruction Booklet [2] that underpins all diversity and inclusion programs, and they risk discrimination for this.

[1] https://jointventure.org/images/stories/pdf/index2018.pdf

[2] https://www.eeoc.gov/employers/eeo1survey/2007instructions.c...

The EEO-1 Instruction Booklet [1] that underpins all diversity and inclusion programs do not have an 'other' category, but it has a 'Decline to State'. The EEO-1 booklet states that if a person decline to state their race and/or ethnicity the employer is allowed to classify them on their own.

[1] https://www.eeoc.gov/employers/eeo1survey/2007instructions.c...

Most of these are also misclassified as white and asian Americans. ⅔ [1] of Silicon Valley tech workers are immigrants that risk discrimination due to being misclassified into US demographic categories from the EEO-1 Instruction Booklet [2] that underpins all diversity and inclusion programs.

It is currently impossible for an immigrant to avoid being mis-classified because the EEO-1 booklet states that if a person decline to state their race and/or ethnicity the employer is allowed to classify them on their own.

The misclassified immigrants is by far Silicon Valley's largest source of diversity, and the misclassification also makes diversity statistics incorrect for Americans in tech.

[1] https://jointventure.org/images/stories/pdf/index2018.pdf

[2] https://www.eeoc.gov/employers/eeo1survey/2007instructions.c...