That's just Hanlon's razor (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor) in action. I have edited my post to correct this omission.
240 karma · joined June 17, 2020
The court documents (https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/29095511/parler-llc-v-a...) from their case against Amazon contain other examples of hate speech.
Democrats made similar claims about at least the 2000, 2004, and 2016 elections.
Trump's claims about election fraud and the sheer number of lawsuits are an escalation but it isn't a difference in kind.
Edited to add the following.
The child post correctly points out that I should have mentioned Trump's inciting a violent attempt to overthrow the government. This wasn't a deliberate omission.
This message is too complex to be accurately relayed across the Internet. It's a virtual certainty that it will be mangled into headlines like "NY Times reporter uses racial slurs, denies systematic racism, endorses blackface." If you've played the children's game Telephone (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_whispers) then you have seen this in action.
The message they released was simple enough to hopefully cause the scandal to go away.
My only posts in this thread have been to explain why I flagged the post and why I feel it's valid to dismiss the author based on his other views.
The author's position on masks is that he's too precious to comply with local laws, that businesses complying with said laws should be boycotted, and that executive orders aren't actually laws so he isn't bound by them. The first two beliefs are merely antisocial; it's the last claim that causes me to place him in the crank category.
> If you only limit your exposure to arguments made by people who agree with you in other domains then I have to assume your interest in this space is not very high.
My political beliefs are sufficiently bizarre that at best few people agree with them; if anything, he and I probably have some beliefs in common.
That doesn't consider the opportunity cost; time that I spend on this argument can't be spent on another better argument.
There are more arguments then I could read in a lifetime so I focus my attention on people who are otherwise sensible.
I flagged it because it's poorly written flamebait that doesn't add anything to the comments on the GitHub thread.
The Internet doesn't have a shortage of rants. If you're wrong about other areas then why should I care about your opinions on technology?
They weren't her prisons.
The Secretary of California's Department of Correction and Rehabilitation is responsible for prisons.
Attorney generals and district attorneys aren't going to know about a secret program in another department.
Would you know if another department at your employer had a secret project? This is doubly so for an illegal program like involuntary sterilization.
It's not like they receive monthly reports about all the illegal programs that other departments are conducting.
If you're going to rake anyone over the coals for this, go after the Secretaries of California's Department of Correction and Rehabilitation. They were in charge of the department and accountability ends at the top.
Gender ratios are widely tracked within the industry, though, e.g. (https://ylw.yale.edu/top-firms/). Also clients for legal services often have their own diversity requirements (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/02/business/dealbook/faceboo...).
If you're looking for a historical reference, (https://scholarship.law.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?arti...) is 26 pages and covers the history of women in law from 1920 to 1970. Cynthia Epstein's Women in Law should cover this topic but I haven't yet read it.
Quotas and affirmative action have worked successfully in other fields.
Law in the US was a hostile profession to women in the 1950s and 1960s. Ruth Bader Ginsburg (first in her class at Columbia) and Sandra Day O'Connor (third in her class at Stanford), for example, both had trouble finding work after graduation. The legal industry addressed sexism by making gender balance an explicit goal. Law schools admitted equal numbers of men and women; law firms hired equal numbers of male and female associates. Women now make up 36% of lawyers and the majority of law school graduates.
I'm not sure about the UK but law and medicine in the US used affirmative action to address sexism in the profession.
There were class action lawsuits that required law firms, law schools, medical schools, and hospitals to accept women doctors and lawyers. After sexism was recognized as a problem law schools used affirmative action to admit gender-balanced classes and law firms hired equal numbers of men and women.
STEM subjects didn't have these interventions so it's unsurprising that sexism is more of an issue than in other fields.
Poorly written papers are a regular occurrence in any field - that doesn't justify attributing bad faith or character issues to Dr. Gebru.
People interested in this topic may like the book Direct Action (https://www.versobooks.com/books/2331-direct-action) on the history of protest movements.
Part of my job is administering a system for detecting unauthorized sharing, exporting, or printing. It has thresholds and a rules-based engine for specifying what behavior should trigger alerts. Google's system is probably custom but there are definitely products on the market for this sort of thing.
According to (https://reclaimthenet.org/literary-agent-fired-gab-parler/) and (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25924637) her Gab and Parler posts were mirrored from Twitter.
Newsweek's story on the firing (https://www.newsweek.com/literary-agents-firing-over-parler-...) doesn't mention any offensive posts on Gab.
None of the Reddit discussions I have looked at mention any offensive posts either; I would expect Reddit to find such posts if they had existed.
AWS can afford to be sued for hosting a forum or the costs of a boycott for hosting Stormfront - a smaller provider could easily be wiped out.
Edited to add the following.
Most of this post was wrong. ttt0 is right that section 230 protects providers in the cases I mentioned. TIL about the scope of section 230 provider protection.
If you are interested in this area then I would recommend reading the book Why Aren't More Women in Science?. It has 15 essays by experts debating the issue.
rayiner, a HN lawyer, also has some good posts that discuss affirmative action in law (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21775576) (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6875443).
> "This makes no sense. There were negative stereotypes about everything! Somebody has to explain why the equal and greater negative stereotypes against women in law, medicine, etc were completely powerless, yet for some reason the negative stereotypes in engineering were the ones that took hold and prevented women from succeeding there."
There were class action lawsuits that required law firms, law schools, medical schools, and hospitals to accept women doctors and lawyers. After sexism was recognized as a problem law schools used affirmative action to admit gender-balanced classes and law firms hired equal numbers of men and women.
STEM subjects didn't have these interventions so it's unsurprising that sexism is more of an issue than in other fields.
Denying a problem is senseless but you have to pick your battles. It's a waste of time and political capital to question some decisions. You have to pick the hill you want to die on.
Strategic decisions are divided into at least the following categories:
1. Decisions and practices that are effectively written in stone. You probably aren't, for example, going to be able to move Google away from a monorepo. It can be difficult to identify this category from outside the organization.
2. Decisions that are open to influence by people in that part of the org chart. The Chrome developers, for example, probably have some influence on Google's involvement in WHATWG. Someone who works on ad quality probably doesn't.
3. Decisions that seems possible from outside the organization but the inside perspective is quite different.
4. Decisions that anyone can influence. Some of the successful Google protests fall into this category.
5. Decisions that only a director can influence because they don't listen to anyone below them in the org chart. Google is large enough that there are probably some directors like this.
Google has been pursuing non-advertising sources of income for at least a decade; your other asks fall into at best category #2.
I certainly have my complaints about Google but this post is way off base.
Whether Google pursues any of these possibilities has nothing to do with this sponsorship; they would all be in separate budgets.
It's also highly unlikely that the grandparent has any input on these topics - how much influence do you have over your employer's strategic decisions? It's absurd to chastise someone in a large organization for decisions they almost certainly had nothing to do with.
> But I suppose that the corporate culture dictates that you don't discuss most of these topics with management.
Questioning strategic decisions is rarely beneficial to your career in any organization. I have yet to see anyone promoted for doing so but can think of at least 5 firings related to this.
Most of what you read on the Internet is written by a small percentage of people (https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most...). This was previously discussed on HN as (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18881827) and (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25600274). The clicks and likes they receive also provide positive feedback, can be addictive, and contribute to spending more time online. It's also well established that social networks can contribute to unhappiness.
> Has the demography gone down in age which results in lot of shitty behaviour like witch hunts and trending non-issue outrage? Young generation seems to like these and they especially love twitch from what I have seen. Maybe an impact of that?
Witch hunts and moral panics are part of the human condition. The main difference is the internet makes it much easier to start a witch hunt or moral panic and lowers the transaction costs of participating. Modern moral panics are started by a tweet or post - it used to require authoring a book (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satanic_ritual_abuse) or months/years of press coverage. It's also much more likely for controversial content to be shared (https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage...). Your friend or relative on Facebook who shares click bait wouldn't have bothered to do so before the internet.
Another factor is that the woke don't believe in debate (https://newdiscourses.com/2020/07/woke-wont-debate-you-heres...). They feel that the deck is rigged against them, debating reinforces the current oppressive system, that all disagreement is illegitimate, and that anyone with power who isn't dismantling the current system is evil.
> What do you think is the biggest reason for the current condition?
I think the biggest reason is that the internet has made it much easier for people to publicize their views. People have always been this awful; you just weren't exposed to their views.
AWS cut off Parler after several months of moderation problems (https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/29095511/13/parler-llc-...). Any service provider will cut you off if you break the acceptable usage policy or don't pay your bill.