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> Not judging the merit of the complaints, but... And the rest of your comment is just grinding your axe with the biases your brought into the discussion. Now

> Not judging the merit of the complaints, but... And the rest of your comment is just grinding your axe with the biases your brought into the discussion. Now, I could add to that by arguing with you using the biases I brought into the discussion. And neither of us would be talking about this one specific company and one specific employee at that company who had one specific problem, and has chosen to accuse the company of discrimination. This is how “linkbait” works: People are already heavily biased to believe something-or-other, and they charge in and read the post through the lens of whatever they want to believe, and to argue whatever they wanted to argue. If we don’t actually judge this case and this post by the specific merits of a specific claim by a specific person about a specific circumstance in a specific company, we might as well just spin a wheel every morning, read off whatever hot-button topic comes up, and just start commenting.

Chris2048 11y ago
This assumes your biases are as equally valid (or invalid) as epxs. Even if we work this assumption into the definition of 'bias', we only shift the argument to whether epx's assumptions are biases or not; Maybe some biases are borne of empiricism? also I took the above quote to mean that epxs wasn't implying that those assertions were to be applied in this case. Nothing in the post implies epxs was referring to this specific example.
- braythwayt 11y ago
  I don’t assume anything about validity. My point is that a diatribe about discrimination, or reverse discrimination, or sexism, or men’s rights, or pick-up artists, or about SJWs flooding HN, or anything else that is wholly and complete divorced from the post itself may or may not have some basis in the author’s experience, but it’s still a recipe for HN going down the tubes. My past experience grounded in using HN since it was founded is that with certain hot-button topics (racism, sexism, IQ tests, codes of conduct, &c.) devolve very quickly into threads that are indistinguishable from one another, with people staking out entrenched positions and virtually cutting and pasting their comments from one discussion into another. The only way to keep a high signal-to-noise ratio is to either kill all posts that touch on hot-button topics, or to be disciplined about staying on-topic about the post being discussed. The degree to which my, yours, or anybody else’s knee-jerk reactions are based in reality or fantasy is orthogonal to the problem of hot-button topics producing “generic" discussions. Summary: My opinion is that it’s bad for HN if discussions about posts devolve into generic discussions that are indistinguishable from each other.
  - Chris2048 11y ago
    Where was the diatribe? You invoke some kind of slippery slope argument, but it seems you are ultimately railing against an opinion you disagree with. What does PUA have to do with sexual discrimination in the workplace? A better way to keep a high signal-to-noise ratio is chasing off poor arguments - banning certain topics or tangents from the OP is clumsy moderation. > The degree to which my, yours, or anybody else’s knee-jerk reactions exp's post is "a knee jerk reaction", but you aren't judging it invalid? It certainly sounds like you are...

Chris2048 11y ago

This assumes your biases are as equally valid (or invalid) as epxs. Even if we work this assumption into the definition of 'bias', we only shift the argument to whether epx's assumptions are biases or not; Maybe some biases are borne of empiricism? also I took the above quote to mean that epxs wasn't implying that those assertions were to be applied in this case. Nothing in the post implies epxs was referring to this specific example.

braythwayt 11y ago
I don’t assume anything about validity. My point is that a diatribe about discrimination, or reverse discrimination, or sexism, or men’s rights, or pick-up artists, or about SJWs flooding HN, or anything else that is wholly and complete divorced from the post itself may or may not have some basis in the author’s experience, but it’s still a recipe for HN going down the tubes. My past experience grounded in using HN since it was founded is that with certain hot-button topics (racism, sexism, IQ tests, codes of conduct, &c.) devolve very quickly into threads that are indistinguishable from one another, with people staking out entrenched positions and virtually cutting and pasting their comments from one discussion into another. The only way to keep a high signal-to-noise ratio is to either kill all posts that touch on hot-button topics, or to be disciplined about staying on-topic about the post being discussed. The degree to which my, yours, or anybody else’s knee-jerk reactions are based in reality or fantasy is orthogonal to the problem of hot-button topics producing “generic" discussions. Summary: My opinion is that it’s bad for HN if discussions about posts devolve into generic discussions that are indistinguishable from each other.
- Chris2048 11y ago
  Where was the diatribe? You invoke some kind of slippery slope argument, but it seems you are ultimately railing against an opinion you disagree with. What does PUA have to do with sexual discrimination in the workplace? A better way to keep a high signal-to-noise ratio is chasing off poor arguments - banning certain topics or tangents from the OP is clumsy moderation. > The degree to which my, yours, or anybody else’s knee-jerk reactions exp's post is "a knee jerk reaction", but you aren't judging it invalid? It certainly sounds like you are...