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Recycling (and slightly modifying) a previous comment [0]: Certain topics, that otherwise might be interesting to discuss, are surrounded by minefields. One su

Recycling (and slightly modifying) a previous comment [0]: Certain topics, that otherwise might be interesting to discuss, are surrounded by minefields. One such topic is the distribution of intellectual ability within subgroups of the population. This minefield was not put in place by a repressive government. Nor was it secretly put in place overnight by a fanatic band of social-justice zealots. My observation, which I will offer without citation, is that this particular minefield was put in place, mine by mine, over a period of decades, through a process of fairly broad societal consensus. To those who suggest clearing the minefield, thus permitting this topic to be discussed freely in public, I will invoke the principle of Chesterton's fence [1]: Before you talk of removing the mines, you need to show that you understand why the minefield was created in the first place, and you need to explain why now is the time to remove it. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14970661 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14970661 [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton%27s_fence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton%27s_fence

ryan-allen 9y ago
It's better to let people discuss these topics rather than to try to stop them talking about them. If the sentiments exist and they are repressed they will simply go underground where you cannot see them. Don't you want to know what your opposition think? Painting those you disagree with (whether you're wrong, or you're right) with the bigot brush is not going to bring any change, there's only two choices: violence or discussion, so let's discuss.
- JauntyHatAngle 9y ago
  Part of the difficulty, in my view, is that we are thinking about this as a high level benevolent debate - in this scientific, clean and clear environment we think of where we can throw out all manner of idea and deconstruct it logically then there is no argument that is off limits. Let me say straight up, I love that kind of discussion, I often have a good chat with my right/left/feminist/religious etc. close friends about usually off limit topics... I theoretically would want to be able to do that in the broader population and in broader society. But the older I get, and the more I see where the internet has taken freedom of discourse, the more I believe that most people don't argue and debate like that. With "Fake news" and barmy political ideologies getting airtime and actually GAINING in backing, and with the quality of media dropping more and more every day with the volume of rubbish news getting regurgitated on social media as fact without journalistic standards in place, I'm more seeing that the majority of discourse is headlines and snippets thrown around with awful evidence and logic, people see it, get confirmation bias on it, or think it falls in line with their view, and then they share onwards. A post/article/clickbait arguing against it, or proving its sources as incorrect is not nearly as shared and not nearly as widely disseminated and then you end up with a debunked viewpoint being spread wider than it ever should have, because there was no curation of the evidence. The "Bigot Brush" perhaps played a part in stopping ideas being shared around that were fairly out of the normal discussion, though it also repressed peoples ability to discuss and expose their broader ideas that went against the grain too. It played its part in stopping aggressive ideas from circulating to a broad enough audience for it to damage people. (Not all the time of course, but more than it occurred in the past). Now am I saying that curation and thought policing of ideas is a good thing? No, probably not. In many cases I think the media that aims itself at the soft left issues that have realised they can turn a buck through whipping up a frenzy on inconsequential "SJW" issues are to blame for pushing away a significant portion of the population towards their own barmy news sources, but I also think we are stuck between a rock and a hard place, and neither complete freedom without fear of reprisal, or significant policing/social shaming of ideals is a good place to be - and somehow we have ended up with a fair bit of both.
- santoshalper 9y ago
  I liked it better when these people were confined to ugly subreddits, Daily Stormer, and Breitbart and not working in the White House and getting attention in popular media. I hope we send them back to hell ASAP and twist the lid on a little tighter next time.
  - ryan-allen 9y ago
    It's pretty obvious what choice you prefer. You're part of the problem.
hzay 9y ago
It's a mine field only at work and in formal situations. Outside work, one hears slurs about women often. There's nothing "careful" about it. Women felt protected and comfortable at the work places because there were explicit and implicit rules that said you can't speak slurs, or even something that might look like a slur. Personally I don't think it's time to clear this "mine field" yet, but I think a valid argument would be "we're educated enough that both men and women today can debate about gender without the prejudices that plagued our ancestors". I don't think the valley companies are there yet.
- DarkKomunalec 9y ago
  I must have missed the part of the memo where he used slurs. I've noticed this kind of statement often: "How can you say X about group A - don't you know group A suffers from Y??", as a way to try and associate X with (the clearly bad) Y.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
jamesrcole 9y ago
> I will invoke the principle of Chesterton's fence [1]: Before you talk of removing the mines, you need to show that you understand why the minefield was created in the first place, and you need to explain why now is the time to remove it. That's a bit different to what the Wikipedia page describes it as. It describes it as being to important to understand the reasons for X before trying to change X. It doesn't say anything about needing to show that you understand it, and needing to explain why now is the time to remove it. Those two additional requirements seem unreasonable for wanting to talk about some topic. For example, I would imagine that, 50-100 years ago, in a lot of the world, the idea of discussing the legitimacy of gay marriage would have been mostly taboo in public. To say that anyone wanting to broach the topic needed to show why the taboo was created in the first place, and why then was the time to remove it, seems unreasonable to me. ---- As a sideline, that Wikipedia entry is, in its current state, pretty poor quality. Here is a quote from it: History is full of examples of negative outcomes that resulted from the failure to understand this admonition. Pandora opened a box containing all the world's evils. Adam and Eve ate from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, despite God's admonition not to, and the whole world was plunged into original sin
- kobeya 9y ago
  > That's a bit different to what the Wikipedia page describes it as. It describes it as being to important to understand the reasons for X before trying to change X. It doesn't say anything about needing to show that you understand it, and needing to explain why now is the time to remove it. That seems like the same thing to me...
  - jamesrcole 9y ago
    Understanding X is one thing, having to provide a demonstration of that to others, that is considered adequate to others, is another. Understanding the reasons for X before trying to change X is separate from needing to show why the present time is right for changing X.
- my_first_acct 9y ago
  You're correct that I went a bit further than Chesterton himself did. But not a lot further. By the way, I linked to the wrong Wikipedia entry. The one I linked to (and that you found the strange quote in) appears to be an internal document, explaining the principle of Chesterton's Fence to would-be Wikipedia editors. I should have linked to the Wikipedia article instead: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton#Chesterton.27s_fence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton#Chesterton.27...
beefman 9y ago
Apologetics. Truth is always best policy. If you really want to live in a regime of repressive groupthink, Christianity has demonstrably better side effects this bullshit (it is possible to draw parallels to the evolution of virulence with these...). Still not as good as the truth.
siliconc0w 9y ago
Sure it's uncomfortable to talk about but it's becoming increasingly important that we do. Without understanding why a phenomena like the STEM/leadership gap exists we can't hope to fix it. Diversity programs really aren't working - Google is at 80/20 for tech which is just about the same as the industry (78/22) (Department Of Labor). My policy is 'Fuck Chesterton Fences'(FCF). I don't want to live in a world of rusting fences.
- sgift 9y ago
  > My policy is 'Fuck Chesterton Fences'(FCF). I don't want to live in a world of rusting fences. I remember that policy from the time of rampant privatization here in Europe. "Why should the government provide this service .." - well, a few years later we knew why. It's also quite often the mentality of people that say "you know what? Our software sucks and the architecture is stupid, I will build a new, far better one!" ... yeah, that usually doesn't work either. I saw a comment the other day which sums the problem with that attitude up quite nicely (paraphrased, cannot find it right now): "Without inside knowledge it's hard to distinguish stupidity from good engineering"
  - DarkKomunalec 9y ago
    > I remember that policy from the time of rampant privatization here in Europe. "Why should the government provide this service .." - well, a few years later we knew why. Going roughly by what I assume to be the GP's logic then, there should be a minefield surrounding discussions of having the government provide public services at all, since, naturally, that will lead to Soviet-style communism and the deaths of tens of millions. I'd also be wary of ascribing to large-scale political sentiment (not even shared by all) the kind of purpose and wisdom involved in engineering decisions. As you quoted "Without inside knowledge it's hard to distinguish stupidity from good engineering" - in this case, there is no inside knowledge.
    - strken 9y ago
      That's not the argument at all, because there was nowhere in Europe where the government provided no services[0]. Chesterton's fence isn't an argument in favour of non-intervention or laissez-faire economics, it's an argument in favour of inertia. If anything, it implies that the Soviet bureaucracy should have been slowly and carefully dismantled, which isn't obviously wrong if you read accounts of what happened after the dissolution of the USSR. [0] At least in theory. Failing to provide a promised service is not the same as deliberately providing no service. It might not even possible for a government worth the name to do literally nothing.
dang 9y ago
> Recycling (and slightly modifying) a previous comment Please don't. There's too much repetition on HN already without copy-pasting previous comments.
- teddyh 9y ago
  What? So according to this policy, you are now no longer allowed to complain about repeating comments, because you have now written that comment, once and for all?
- my_first_acct 9y ago
  I agree in general, but made an exception in this case: 1) The original comment appeared on a thread that fell off the front page soon afterwards, so not many people saw it; 2) I thought it offered an original point of view; 3) It received some upvotes, which I interpreted as meaning that it put into words something that others had been thinking, but hadn't quite figured out how to say. Anyway, it has now had a chance to be viewed by an appropriately large audience, so I will happily retire it.
  - dang 9y ago
    Ok, fair enough.
JohnStrange 9y ago
In my experience, there are three problems with these debates (incl. the Google memo) that are huge enough that I believe it's best to avoid them entirely in the general public: 1. To many opinions in them are agenda-driven. There are racists and sexists, and if they are allowed to post pseudonymously they come out in troves. For example, the memo was recently discussed on /. and this turned very, very ugly. 2. Not enough people are aware that issues of social justice cannot be backed up by scientific facts in a straightforward way. They don't distinguish between preferences and capabilities, status quo and what would be desirable, etc. It's pointless to discuss such topics with anyone who isn't aware of these distinctions. Facts do not play the role in these debates that many seemingly scientifically-minded people believe they do. I can give examples, but don't want to do that now, because these would invariably stir up some unnecessary controversy. Well, I'll give one that is perhaps not so controversial: Many women did not express any desire to vote and considered suffragettes as too radical. The preferences of these women doesn't tell you anything about whether women should be allowed to vote or not, though. The status quo can be changed at any time if there is enough of a will to do so. Women used to be executed for adultery in Medieval Europe, and this is no longer so, because we have changed society to the better over the centuries. 3. The discussions are almost always based gross and insubstantial generalizations and an inability to describe tendencies correctly or draw adequate conclusions from small tendencies. The groups chosen are also often based on superficial differences or historical accidents.

ryan-allen 9y ago

It's better to let people discuss these topics rather than to try to stop them talking about them. If the sentiments exist and they are repressed they will simply go underground where you cannot see them. Don't you want to know what your opposition think? Painting those you disagree with (whether you're wrong, or you're right) with the bigot brush is not going to bring any change, there's only two choices: violence or discussion, so let's discuss.

JauntyHatAngle 9y ago
Part of the difficulty, in my view, is that we are thinking about this as a high level benevolent debate - in this scientific, clean and clear environment we think of where we can throw out all manner of idea and deconstruct it logically then there is no argument that is off limits. Let me say straight up, I love that kind of discussion, I often have a good chat with my right/left/feminist/religious etc. close friends about usually off limit topics... I theoretically would want to be able to do that in the broader population and in broader society. But the older I get, and the more I see where the internet has taken freedom of discourse, the more I believe that most people don't argue and debate like that. With "Fake news" and barmy political ideologies getting airtime and actually GAINING in backing, and with the quality of media dropping more and more every day with the volume of rubbish news getting regurgitated on social media as fact without journalistic standards in place, I'm more seeing that the majority of discourse is headlines and snippets thrown around with awful evidence and logic, people see it, get confirmation bias on it, or think it falls in line with their view, and then they share onwards. A post/article/clickbait arguing against it, or proving its sources as incorrect is not nearly as shared and not nearly as widely disseminated and then you end up with a debunked viewpoint being spread wider than it ever should have, because there was no curation of the evidence. The "Bigot Brush" perhaps played a part in stopping ideas being shared around that were fairly out of the normal discussion, though it also repressed peoples ability to discuss and expose their broader ideas that went against the grain too. It played its part in stopping aggressive ideas from circulating to a broad enough audience for it to damage people. (Not all the time of course, but more than it occurred in the past). Now am I saying that curation and thought policing of ideas is a good thing? No, probably not. In many cases I think the media that aims itself at the soft left issues that have realised they can turn a buck through whipping up a frenzy on inconsequential "SJW" issues are to blame for pushing away a significant portion of the population towards their own barmy news sources, but I also think we are stuck between a rock and a hard place, and neither complete freedom without fear of reprisal, or significant policing/social shaming of ideals is a good place to be - and somehow we have ended up with a fair bit of both.
santoshalper 9y ago
I liked it better when these people were confined to ugly subreddits, Daily Stormer, and Breitbart and not working in the White House and getting attention in popular media. I hope we send them back to hell ASAP and twist the lid on a little tighter next time.
- ryan-allen 9y ago
  It's pretty obvious what choice you prefer. You're part of the problem.

hzay 9y ago

It's a mine field only at work and in formal situations. Outside work, one hears slurs about women often. There's nothing "careful" about it. Women felt protected and comfortable at the work places because there were explicit and implicit rules that said you can't speak slurs, or even something that might look like a slur. Personally I don't think it's time to clear this "mine field" yet, but I think a valid argument would be "we're educated enough that both men and women today can debate about gender without the prejudices that plagued our ancestors". I don't think the valley companies are there yet.

DarkKomunalec 9y ago
I must have missed the part of the memo where he used slurs. I've noticed this kind of statement often: "How can you say X about group A - don't you know group A suffers from Y??", as a way to try and associate X with (the clearly bad) Y.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

jamesrcole 9y ago

> I will invoke the principle of Chesterton's fence [1]: Before you talk of removing the mines, you need to show that you understand why the minefield was created in the first place, and you need to explain why now is the time to remove it. That's a bit different to what the Wikipedia page describes it as. It describes it as being to important to understand the reasons for X before trying to change X. It doesn't say anything about needing to show that you understand it, and needing to explain why now is the time to remove it. Those two additional requirements seem unreasonable for wanting to talk about some topic. For example, I would imagine that, 50-100 years ago, in a lot of the world, the idea of discussing the legitimacy of gay marriage would have been mostly taboo in public. To say that anyone wanting to broach the topic needed to show why the taboo was created in the first place, and why then was the time to remove it, seems unreasonable to me. ---- As a sideline, that Wikipedia entry is, in its current state, pretty poor quality. Here is a quote from it: History is full of examples of negative outcomes that resulted from the failure to understand this admonition. Pandora opened a box containing all the world's evils. Adam and Eve ate from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, despite God's admonition not to, and the whole world was plunged into original sin

kobeya 9y ago
> That's a bit different to what the Wikipedia page describes it as. It describes it as being to important to understand the reasons for X before trying to change X. It doesn't say anything about needing to show that you understand it, and needing to explain why now is the time to remove it. That seems like the same thing to me...
- jamesrcole 9y ago
  Understanding X is one thing, having to provide a demonstration of that to others, that is considered adequate to others, is another. Understanding the reasons for X before trying to change X is separate from needing to show why the present time is right for changing X.
my_first_acct 9y ago
You're correct that I went a bit further than Chesterton himself did. But not a lot further. By the way, I linked to the wrong Wikipedia entry. The one I linked to (and that you found the strange quote in) appears to be an internal document, explaining the principle of Chesterton's Fence to would-be Wikipedia editors. I should have linked to the Wikipedia article instead: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton#Chesterton.27s_fence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton#Chesterton.27...

beefman 9y ago

Apologetics. Truth is always best policy. If you really want to live in a regime of repressive groupthink, Christianity has demonstrably better side effects this bullshit (it is possible to draw parallels to the evolution of virulence with these...). Still not as good as the truth.

siliconc0w 9y ago

Sure it's uncomfortable to talk about but it's becoming increasingly important that we do. Without understanding why a phenomena like the STEM/leadership gap exists we can't hope to fix it. Diversity programs really aren't working - Google is at 80/20 for tech which is just about the same as the industry (78/22) (Department Of Labor). My policy is 'Fuck Chesterton Fences'(FCF). I don't want to live in a world of rusting fences.

sgift 9y ago
> My policy is 'Fuck Chesterton Fences'(FCF). I don't want to live in a world of rusting fences. I remember that policy from the time of rampant privatization here in Europe. "Why should the government provide this service .." - well, a few years later we knew why. It's also quite often the mentality of people that say "you know what? Our software sucks and the architecture is stupid, I will build a new, far better one!" ... yeah, that usually doesn't work either. I saw a comment the other day which sums the problem with that attitude up quite nicely (paraphrased, cannot find it right now): "Without inside knowledge it's hard to distinguish stupidity from good engineering"
- DarkKomunalec 9y ago
  > I remember that policy from the time of rampant privatization here in Europe. "Why should the government provide this service .." - well, a few years later we knew why. Going roughly by what I assume to be the GP's logic then, there should be a minefield surrounding discussions of having the government provide public services at all, since, naturally, that will lead to Soviet-style communism and the deaths of tens of millions. I'd also be wary of ascribing to large-scale political sentiment (not even shared by all) the kind of purpose and wisdom involved in engineering decisions. As you quoted "Without inside knowledge it's hard to distinguish stupidity from good engineering" - in this case, there is no inside knowledge.
  - strken 9y ago
    That's not the argument at all, because there was nowhere in Europe where the government provided no services[0]. Chesterton's fence isn't an argument in favour of non-intervention or laissez-faire economics, it's an argument in favour of inertia. If anything, it implies that the Soviet bureaucracy should have been slowly and carefully dismantled, which isn't obviously wrong if you read accounts of what happened after the dissolution of the USSR. [0] At least in theory. Failing to provide a promised service is not the same as deliberately providing no service. It might not even possible for a government worth the name to do literally nothing.

dang 9y ago

> Recycling (and slightly modifying) a previous comment Please don't. There's too much repetition on HN already without copy-pasting previous comments.

teddyh 9y ago
What? So according to this policy, you are now no longer allowed to complain about repeating comments, because you have now written that comment, once and for all?
my_first_acct 9y ago
I agree in general, but made an exception in this case: 1) The original comment appeared on a thread that fell off the front page soon afterwards, so not many people saw it; 2) I thought it offered an original point of view; 3) It received some upvotes, which I interpreted as meaning that it put into words something that others had been thinking, but hadn't quite figured out how to say. Anyway, it has now had a chance to be viewed by an appropriately large audience, so I will happily retire it.
- dang 9y ago
  Ok, fair enough.

JohnStrange 9y ago

In my experience, there are three problems with these debates (incl. the Google memo) that are huge enough that I believe it's best to avoid them entirely in the general public: 1. To many opinions in them are agenda-driven. There are racists and sexists, and if they are allowed to post pseudonymously they come out in troves. For example, the memo was recently discussed on /. and this turned very, very ugly. 2. Not enough people are aware that issues of social justice cannot be backed up by scientific facts in a straightforward way. They don't distinguish between preferences and capabilities, status quo and what would be desirable, etc. It's pointless to discuss such topics with anyone who isn't aware of these distinctions. Facts do not play the role in these debates that many seemingly scientifically-minded people believe they do. I can give examples, but don't want to do that now, because these would invariably stir up some unnecessary controversy. Well, I'll give one that is perhaps not so controversial: Many women did not express any desire to vote and considered suffragettes as too radical. The preferences of these women doesn't tell you anything about whether women should be allowed to vote or not, though. The status quo can be changed at any time if there is enough of a will to do so. Women used to be executed for adultery in Medieval Europe, and this is no longer so, because we have changed society to the better over the centuries. 3. The discussions are almost always based gross and insubstantial generalizations and an inability to describe tendencies correctly or draw adequate conclusions from small tendencies. The groups chosen are also often based on superficial differences or historical accidents.