7 ms·

Its amazing the first thing people assume here is that she's lying. Why would she lie? What does she gain?

by DonnyV 6y ago

iron0013 6y ago
She’s being accused of lying by folks who don’t like what she has to say, simple as that. Contrast this to HN’s response to the tech CEO who was outed as a kkk member who had committed violent hate crimes: most people here bent over backwards to interpret his story in the most sympathetic possible way.
- stronglikedan 6y ago
  > most people here I highly doubt that.
  - iron0013 6y ago
    Here’s the thread, go ahead and tally the number of comments that are sympathetic vs unsympathetic to the hate-crime CEO, and compare that to the proportion of comments in this thread that are sympathetic/unsympathetic to the Florida whistleblower: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23007512 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23007512 Kinda funny how HN commenters decide that certain people’s perspectives need to be “steelmanned” but not others’
    - true_religion 6y ago
      Oh I remember now. The CEO was an abused kid, who joined the KKK and stayed in it till he was about 19; then gradually left. Then 32 years passed. I am willing to believe 3 decades is enough to change a man. HNs response was also tempered by the fact that many posters are young, so when this man committed his crimes they were not even born. Throw in the fact that he is Jewish and still joined the KKK, and you can see why some decided he was a deluded or tricked child who escaped the KKK clutches rather than someone who would continue to harbor self-hate for 3 decades, acting as a sleeper agent. This case now, is about the present day. The researcher can’t claim that any faults are merely past transgressions she has moved beyond. Nor can anyone say they don’t understand the time period this is occurring in (as the time period is now). Edit: In the above I reference the KKK, but the CEO was actually a neo Nazi. Same hate. Different clothing.
      - iron0013 6y ago
        Thanks for making my point—-You’re willing to swallow anything the kkk ceo claimed (including the obviously false “but I’m Jewish!” howler), but are comfortable discounting this whistleblower’s claims based on a vague sniff test and nothing more.
        Chris2048 6y ago
        They didn't swallow, nor discount, anything. They pointed out reasonable doubt without committing to a conclusion, which you interpret as taking sides; which makes a different point entirely..
        deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
    - dang 6y ago
      You're cherry-picking these two examples to compare precisely because the comparison reinforces your pre-existing view, which is ironically the same response that this subthread is criticizing. There have been plenty of HN comments supporting whistleblowers, and plenty of HN comments decrying things in the KKK bucket. This is a classic example of the notice-dislike bias that governs how people, especially those with strong views, perceive HN (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20notice%20dislike&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). We notice what we dislike, and weight it heavily; we gloss over what we like; poof, bias. The result is a generalization about HN that is invariably an inverted afterimage of your own preferences (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20afterimage&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). And I do mean invariably; I'm not sure I've seen a single case, out of thousands, that violated this pattern. Needless to say there's an endless litany of people making the opposite generalization about the HN community to the one that you are making (it's overrun by socialists, it's full of SJWs, it's extremely left-biased, blah blah blah). I've posted lists of those many times. Do you really think that they are wrong and you are right?
      - iron0013 6y ago
        I feel like “both sidesing” the issue could be countered empirically. Are there really as many pro-“SJW” comments as KKK-forgiving comments, or is that just a comfortable thought-annihilating truism?
        dang 6y ago
        I've thought a lot about how this might be studied empirically. The problem is that the only people who'd care strongly enough to bother are people with a strong pre-existing commitment to one side or the other, and any study they produced would be guaranteed to regurgitate the conclusion they've already come to—for a whole bunch of reasons, some obvious, some not so obvious. You'd just re-encounter the same problem at a meta level. Here's a different way to look at it empirically. Can you, or anyone, find a single example of someone making a strong ideological generalization about HN that wasn't opposed to their own ideological preference? If my analysis is wrong, these shouldn't be hard to find, so let's start with an existence proof. I'm pretty sure I can find thousands of cases the other way around. If that's correct—thousands of cases exist on one side, close to zero on the other—it is surely evidence of something. I claim that it is evidence of a psychological mechanism, and not a weak one. By the way, while I have you: would you please stop arguing in the flamewar style on HN? It's against the guidelines, it's destructive, and it's tedious. Snarky swipes like "or is that just a [fancy synonym for stupid]" destroy curious conversation and don't belong here. People do this when they're more interested in defeating enemies than in learning from each other, and this site is supposed to be for the latter, not the former. You unfortunately do this a lot. In fact, the last time you asked me a question (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23018879 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23018879) I had the same feeling: that it was not a genuine question but a cross-examination, almost of a "have you stopped beating your wife yet" sort. There's a reason why we added "Don't cross-examine" to the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. "Both sidesing" is another example. That's a reductionist label which doesn't reflect back to me how I actually see this problem at all. When you categorize what I'm saying that way, my felt sense is that you want to back me into a corner rhetorically, alongside a bunch of concepts I don't have, but which are easy to argue against. In other words, that you're advancing a step in a fight. I don't enjoy this impression. I prefer the feeling that the person I'm talking with is curious to understand what I actually think and feel, and is interested in dropping any distorted perceptions they may have, rather than affixing them to me further.
- HumblyTossed 6y ago
  IOW, because she's a girl.
disease 6y ago
They are accusing her of lying because what she is saying does not confirm their biases or reinforce their prejudices.
- hitekker 6y ago
  That is true. Some people are terrified of the world not being as just as they think it is. Any whistleblowing at all poses a challenge to their worldview and therefore a threat to their comfort. It provokes a lashing-out as you can see in some of the comments.
- non-entity 6y ago
  Yes, the COVID-19 subject has generated way more controversy than I ever expected. I'm sure if she was fired for refusing to cover up say, some sort of mass privacy invasion, the general opinion here would be much more unanimous.
  - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
    If she said "yeah they asked me to do a big privacy violation", with no details about what the privacy violation was, I think people would still be pretty skeptical.
SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
I mean, support is what she gains. If I get fired after getting in a fight with my boss, my version of the story is definitely going to say that my boss was in the wrong and I was heroically standing up to him, even if that's not quite what a neutral observer would say.
- didibus 6y ago
  But it wouldn't get you your job back. I kind of have to agree with OP here, I feel "follow the money" is often the best way to unravel mysteries. Its really unclear what this person has to gain. You got fired, why make a big public mess out of it, it'll just hurt your career further. Unless she's getting paid by some other involved party for this fabrication, I really don't see the motive from her side.
  - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
    I'm sure you see the problems with a rule that "follow the money" is ironclad and you'll never believe that someone acted badly unless they were paid to.
    - didibus 6y ago
      The word "money" here is meant as more than just money. Basically you've got to have motives, especially if doing anything that puts you at considerable risk.
commandlinefan 6y ago
> What does she gain? Well, she got fired (for one reason or another). The more sympathetic the reason she can make people believe, the easier it will be to get the next job. Not saying she's lying, but there is a clear motive for her to do so here.
- kaitai 6y ago
  That doesn't make sense to me. It's easier to get a new job if you just spin it as a shift in business need & don't look like a troublemaker. Who wants to hire someone who'll think about what they're doing and push back on apparently politically-motivated requests? Nah -- going public with this is a PR disaster for her next job; she should have stayed quiet.
- mcguire 6y ago
  No one is going to hire a whistleblower, no matter how sympathetic. Why would they take the risk?
Mikeb85 6y ago
Maybe because of this part: > she was fired because she was ordered to censor some data, but refused to "manually change data to drum up support for the plan to reopen." > She provided no further details. As for why she would lie and what she would gain, she'd gain notoriety and probably a big paycheck from the next company who hires 'a hero' standing up against corrupt government.
gweinberg 6y ago
I haven't seen anyone that seems confident that she is lying, just a lot of people less than fully confident she is telling the truth.
jariel 6y ago
"Why would she lie? What does she gain?" She gains the veneer of credibility after being fired for possibly not doing her job. We have no idea if that's the case, but it's actually pretty easy to see how someone who is arguing with their managers over 'how to report' is then fired, and then makes some grandiose claims. In her mind she might not even be lying when that could be the case. She believes she's being asked to 'censor' when maybe that's not the case. We don't know, but we need to know exactly what she was asked to do and not before drawing conclusions.
username90 6y ago
I don't think I've seen a single discussion on HN where everyone had the same opinion. There will always be people who disagree or reject claims. That is what makes me still visit HN, since there isn't much discussion if you don't have more than one side represented.

Its amazing the first thing people assume here is that she's lying. Why would she lie? What does she gain?

by DonnyV 6y ago

Its amazing the first thing people assume here is that she's lying. Why would she lie? What does she gain?

She’s being accused of lying by folks who don’t like what she has to say, simple as that. Contrast this to HN’s response to the tech CEO who was outed as a kkk member who had committed violent hate crimes: most people here bent over backwards to interpret his story in the most sympathetic possible way.

stronglikedan 6y ago
> most people here I highly doubt that.
- iron0013 6y ago
  Here’s the thread, go ahead and tally the number of comments that are sympathetic vs unsympathetic to the hate-crime CEO, and compare that to the proportion of comments in this thread that are sympathetic/unsympathetic to the Florida whistleblower: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23007512 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23007512 Kinda funny how HN commenters decide that certain people’s perspectives need to be “steelmanned” but not others’
  - true_religion 6y ago
    Oh I remember now. The CEO was an abused kid, who joined the KKK and stayed in it till he was about 19; then gradually left. Then 32 years passed. I am willing to believe 3 decades is enough to change a man. HNs response was also tempered by the fact that many posters are young, so when this man committed his crimes they were not even born. Throw in the fact that he is Jewish and still joined the KKK, and you can see why some decided he was a deluded or tricked child who escaped the KKK clutches rather than someone who would continue to harbor self-hate for 3 decades, acting as a sleeper agent. This case now, is about the present day. The researcher can’t claim that any faults are merely past transgressions she has moved beyond. Nor can anyone say they don’t understand the time period this is occurring in (as the time period is now). Edit: In the above I reference the KKK, but the CEO was actually a neo Nazi. Same hate. Different clothing.
    - iron0013 6y ago
      Thanks for making my point—-You’re willing to swallow anything the kkk ceo claimed (including the obviously false “but I’m Jewish!” howler), but are comfortable discounting this whistleblower’s claims based on a vague sniff test and nothing more.
      - Chris2048 6y ago
        They didn't swallow, nor discount, anything. They pointed out reasonable doubt without committing to a conclusion, which you interpret as taking sides; which makes a different point entirely..
        deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
  - dang 6y ago
    You're cherry-picking these two examples to compare precisely because the comparison reinforces your pre-existing view, which is ironically the same response that this subthread is criticizing. There have been plenty of HN comments supporting whistleblowers, and plenty of HN comments decrying things in the KKK bucket. This is a classic example of the notice-dislike bias that governs how people, especially those with strong views, perceive HN (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20notice%20dislike&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). We notice what we dislike, and weight it heavily; we gloss over what we like; poof, bias. The result is a generalization about HN that is invariably an inverted afterimage of your own preferences (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20afterimage&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). And I do mean invariably; I'm not sure I've seen a single case, out of thousands, that violated this pattern. Needless to say there's an endless litany of people making the opposite generalization about the HN community to the one that you are making (it's overrun by socialists, it's full of SJWs, it's extremely left-biased, blah blah blah). I've posted lists of those many times. Do you really think that they are wrong and you are right?
    - iron0013 6y ago
      I feel like “both sidesing” the issue could be countered empirically. Are there really as many pro-“SJW” comments as KKK-forgiving comments, or is that just a comfortable thought-annihilating truism?
      - dang 6y ago
        I've thought a lot about how this might be studied empirically. The problem is that the only people who'd care strongly enough to bother are people with a strong pre-existing commitment to one side or the other, and any study they produced would be guaranteed to regurgitate the conclusion they've already come to—for a whole bunch of reasons, some obvious, some not so obvious. You'd just re-encounter the same problem at a meta level. Here's a different way to look at it empirically. Can you, or anyone, find a single example of someone making a strong ideological generalization about HN that wasn't opposed to their own ideological preference? If my analysis is wrong, these shouldn't be hard to find, so let's start with an existence proof. I'm pretty sure I can find thousands of cases the other way around. If that's correct—thousands of cases exist on one side, close to zero on the other—it is surely evidence of something. I claim that it is evidence of a psychological mechanism, and not a weak one. By the way, while I have you: would you please stop arguing in the flamewar style on HN? It's against the guidelines, it's destructive, and it's tedious. Snarky swipes like "or is that just a [fancy synonym for stupid]" destroy curious conversation and don't belong here. People do this when they're more interested in defeating enemies than in learning from each other, and this site is supposed to be for the latter, not the former. You unfortunately do this a lot. In fact, the last time you asked me a question (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23018879 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23018879) I had the same feeling: that it was not a genuine question but a cross-examination, almost of a "have you stopped beating your wife yet" sort. There's a reason why we added "Don't cross-examine" to the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. "Both sidesing" is another example. That's a reductionist label which doesn't reflect back to me how I actually see this problem at all. When you categorize what I'm saying that way, my felt sense is that you want to back me into a corner rhetorically, alongside a bunch of concepts I don't have, but which are easy to argue against. In other words, that you're advancing a step in a fight. I don't enjoy this impression. I prefer the feeling that the person I'm talking with is curious to understand what I actually think and feel, and is interested in dropping any distorted perceptions they may have, rather than affixing them to me further.
HumblyTossed 6y ago
IOW, because she's a girl.

disease 6y ago

They are accusing her of lying because what she is saying does not confirm their biases or reinforce their prejudices.

hitekker 6y ago
That is true. Some people are terrified of the world not being as just as they think it is. Any whistleblowing at all poses a challenge to their worldview and therefore a threat to their comfort. It provokes a lashing-out as you can see in some of the comments.
non-entity 6y ago
Yes, the COVID-19 subject has generated way more controversy than I ever expected. I'm sure if she was fired for refusing to cover up say, some sort of mass privacy invasion, the general opinion here would be much more unanimous.
- SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
  If she said "yeah they asked me to do a big privacy violation", with no details about what the privacy violation was, I think people would still be pretty skeptical.

SpicyLemonZest 6y ago

I mean, support is what she gains. If I get fired after getting in a fight with my boss, my version of the story is definitely going to say that my boss was in the wrong and I was heroically standing up to him, even if that's not quite what a neutral observer would say.

didibus 6y ago
But it wouldn't get you your job back. I kind of have to agree with OP here, I feel "follow the money" is often the best way to unravel mysteries. Its really unclear what this person has to gain. You got fired, why make a big public mess out of it, it'll just hurt your career further. Unless she's getting paid by some other involved party for this fabrication, I really don't see the motive from her side.
- SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
  I'm sure you see the problems with a rule that "follow the money" is ironclad and you'll never believe that someone acted badly unless they were paid to.
  - didibus 6y ago
    The word "money" here is meant as more than just money. Basically you've got to have motives, especially if doing anything that puts you at considerable risk.

commandlinefan 6y ago

> What does she gain? Well, she got fired (for one reason or another). The more sympathetic the reason she can make people believe, the easier it will be to get the next job. Not saying she's lying, but there is a clear motive for her to do so here.

kaitai 6y ago
That doesn't make sense to me. It's easier to get a new job if you just spin it as a shift in business need & don't look like a troublemaker. Who wants to hire someone who'll think about what they're doing and push back on apparently politically-motivated requests? Nah -- going public with this is a PR disaster for her next job; she should have stayed quiet.
mcguire 6y ago
No one is going to hire a whistleblower, no matter how sympathetic. Why would they take the risk?

Mikeb85 6y ago

Maybe because of this part: > she was fired because she was ordered to censor some data, but refused to "manually change data to drum up support for the plan to reopen." > She provided no further details. As for why she would lie and what she would gain, she'd gain notoriety and probably a big paycheck from the next company who hires 'a hero' standing up against corrupt government.

gweinberg 6y ago

I haven't seen anyone that seems confident that she is lying, just a lot of people less than fully confident she is telling the truth.

jariel 6y ago

"Why would she lie? What does she gain?" She gains the veneer of credibility after being fired for possibly not doing her job. We have no idea if that's the case, but it's actually pretty easy to see how someone who is arguing with their managers over 'how to report' is then fired, and then makes some grandiose claims. In her mind she might not even be lying when that could be the case. She believes she's being asked to 'censor' when maybe that's not the case. We don't know, but we need to know exactly what she was asked to do and not before drawing conclusions.

username90 6y ago

I don't think I've seen a single discussion on HN where everyone had the same opinion. There will always be people who disagree or reject claims. That is what makes me still visit HN, since there isn't much discussion if you don't have more than one side represented.