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Ellen K. Pao was right all along. Also if the replies in here are representative of Silicon Valley as a whole, damn. It just reminds me of the stereotypical too

Ellen K. Pao was right all along. Also if the replies in here are representative of Silicon Valley as a whole, damn. It just reminds me of the stereotypical too-smart-for-their-own-good hacker who is prone to making sweeping generalisations and extrapolations in domains that lie outside of their own experience or expertise. I know I'm prone to this and I've met a lot of arrogant smart people who fall into this category. I really think that there is an empathy problem here. Sometimes we just need to shut up and listen instead of looking at the world in binary terms.

vincentmarle 6y ago
> Also if the replies in here are representative of Silicon Valley as a whole, damn. Unbelievable indeed. When is HN going to come out with their anti hate policy?
- manigandham 6y ago
  The HN guidelines are already sufficient: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
concordDance 6y ago
Isn't the whole point of this upcoming policy change to prevent people being able to hear racist voices?
- kitsune_ 6y ago
  This is the exact kind of gotcha look-at-me-i-am-smart rethoric that I was talking about, you do not engage with what I wrote. "He said 'listen' without technically qualifying it further so let's reframe this so that listen also covers listening to racist view points, something orthogonal to the essence of his post, gotcha!". We both know what you are doing here, and honestly I expect better from people. I have no idea why you are doing that however, I'm interested in what led you to reply in this manner.
  - guykdm 6y ago
    Kitsune, your rhetorics are high on arrogance and low on substance.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
anti-hate 6y ago
Here's the thing: forums are not publications. Forums are discourse, so it's not a platform, and discourse cannot exist with muzzles, and must operate in tune with real world consequences. That's how you know you're having a conversation. It's a conversation when there are no boundaries that render topics off limits. Expressly forbidden subject matter with little justification other than personal desires to shift goal posts represents the destruction of personal agency, at which point the value of discourse and interaction becomes dubious. You can see this emerge in many stifled areas, where self appointed referees march in and police activity down to a single word or punctuation mark. The interactions are sterilized and dead. To say they'd been rendered kid friendly might be charitable. Reddit's no exception. Imgur as well. It's been obvious for years that the discourse is molded and extruded to fit into a sentiment of entertainment that strikes one's cognition as uncanny. There's curation beyond the natural "organic" crowdsourced voting that assists in ranking the value of participation. Facebook, while moderated, and wrapped in the slimiest of user interfaces still demonstrably rings as augmented discourse, but true discourse among familiar peers, no less. Twitter as well. Instagram and Snapchat are mostly channels for drug dealing and prostitution, by contrast. Something twitter chased away at one point, and Facebook has intimidated with seemingly unwitting blunders originating from all angles, such that teens and parents blow up their own ploys regularly, never mind other criminal elements. Anyway, it's laughable that we worry about a word like nigger, uniquely American in its sensitivity, when there are many other ways individuals deliver serious and real harm beyond exclusion and hurt feelings, by way of discussion. Feel free to regulate another platform to death, and watch people vote with their feet, until real laws completely ruin the internet and prevent natural discussion with honest consequences, but perhaps worthwhile risks.
dang 6y ago
> Also if the replies in here are representative of Silicon Valley as a whole, damn. The replies in here are coming from all over the world. People assume that HN comments are representative of SV and come to extremely distorted conclusions, because that's quite false. In fact only about 10% of the HN community is in SV and the majority of those are not posting to HN in the middle of the night. I want to write more about this misconception, because it's common, poorly understood, and unfortunately damaging. Readers frequently misinterpret other comments because they have no idea of how frequently national lines are being crossed on HN. They misinterpret a conventional comment coming from a different country or region for an extreme comment coming from some other place—usually their own, because that's what we naturally calibrate to in the absence of differentiating data—or else they assume everyone is in SV, which is an illusion as I described above. This is particularly significant in flamewars about race, like this one. Many HN comments that count as racist, or point that way, in a mainstream American context are being posted by users from countries that don't have the US's fraught history with race. These users are looking at race issues in the US from the distant outside, and often they have poor intuition for the depth and complexity of the issues, the intensity of the feeling around them, and the conventions by which Americans debate them. Because these comments get widely assumed to all be coming from American commenters (which, to be sure, some are, but many are not—certainly the majority in this thread were not), suddenly the population sample appears highly skewed, and much more extreme, to readers who are familiar with the US. Some people will say 'racist comments are racist, period', but I bet that they, along with everyone else, make many fine-grained adjustments of interpretation when they have information about someone coming from a different background. For example, they would be more likely to perceive a comment as ignorant, and respond by educating the other person, if they think of them as foreign—and more likely to perceive them as an enemy if they come from nearby, even if the comment is otherwise identical. It's likely that many of these adjustments aren't even conscious. Humans are deeply conditioned to react to nuances in social cues, and foreignness is one of the biggest categories of social cues. Unless we're arguing about specifically national disputes (which is a different sort of flamewar) we make extra allowances in such cases. Unfortunately, most of this nuance is lost in the stream of HN comments, and it puts extra strain on divisive discussions. The social machine runs without the lubricant it typically relies on, leading to excess friction, heat, and damage. This lack of lubricant gets experienced as a defect in the machine—which it is, in a sense, but it gets misinterpreted.
Veelox 6y ago
While your comment is eloquent I have no idea which sweeping generalizations you see as problematic. What problem would empathy solve and how would it solve it?

vincentmarle 6y ago

> Also if the replies in here are representative of Silicon Valley as a whole, damn. Unbelievable indeed. When is HN going to come out with their anti hate policy?

manigandham 6y ago
The HN guidelines are already sufficient: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

concordDance 6y ago

Isn't the whole point of this upcoming policy change to prevent people being able to hear racist voices?

kitsune_ 6y ago
This is the exact kind of gotcha look-at-me-i-am-smart rethoric that I was talking about, you do not engage with what I wrote. "He said 'listen' without technically qualifying it further so let's reframe this so that listen also covers listening to racist view points, something orthogonal to the essence of his post, gotcha!". We both know what you are doing here, and honestly I expect better from people. I have no idea why you are doing that however, I'm interested in what led you to reply in this manner.
- guykdm 6y ago
  Kitsune, your rhetorics are high on arrogance and low on substance.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

anti-hate 6y ago

Here's the thing: forums are not publications. Forums are discourse, so it's not a platform, and discourse cannot exist with muzzles, and must operate in tune with real world consequences. That's how you know you're having a conversation. It's a conversation when there are no boundaries that render topics off limits. Expressly forbidden subject matter with little justification other than personal desires to shift goal posts represents the destruction of personal agency, at which point the value of discourse and interaction becomes dubious. You can see this emerge in many stifled areas, where self appointed referees march in and police activity down to a single word or punctuation mark. The interactions are sterilized and dead. To say they'd been rendered kid friendly might be charitable. Reddit's no exception. Imgur as well. It's been obvious for years that the discourse is molded and extruded to fit into a sentiment of entertainment that strikes one's cognition as uncanny. There's curation beyond the natural "organic" crowdsourced voting that assists in ranking the value of participation. Facebook, while moderated, and wrapped in the slimiest of user interfaces still demonstrably rings as augmented discourse, but true discourse among familiar peers, no less. Twitter as well. Instagram and Snapchat are mostly channels for drug dealing and prostitution, by contrast. Something twitter chased away at one point, and Facebook has intimidated with seemingly unwitting blunders originating from all angles, such that teens and parents blow up their own ploys regularly, never mind other criminal elements. Anyway, it's laughable that we worry about a word like nigger, uniquely American in its sensitivity, when there are many other ways individuals deliver serious and real harm beyond exclusion and hurt feelings, by way of discussion. Feel free to regulate another platform to death, and watch people vote with their feet, until real laws completely ruin the internet and prevent natural discussion with honest consequences, but perhaps worthwhile risks.

dang 6y ago

> Also if the replies in here are representative of Silicon Valley as a whole, damn. The replies in here are coming from all over the world. People assume that HN comments are representative of SV and come to extremely distorted conclusions, because that's quite false. In fact only about 10% of the HN community is in SV and the majority of those are not posting to HN in the middle of the night. I want to write more about this misconception, because it's common, poorly understood, and unfortunately damaging. Readers frequently misinterpret other comments because they have no idea of how frequently national lines are being crossed on HN. They misinterpret a conventional comment coming from a different country or region for an extreme comment coming from some other place—usually their own, because that's what we naturally calibrate to in the absence of differentiating data—or else they assume everyone is in SV, which is an illusion as I described above. This is particularly significant in flamewars about race, like this one. Many HN comments that count as racist, or point that way, in a mainstream American context are being posted by users from countries that don't have the US's fraught history with race. These users are looking at race issues in the US from the distant outside, and often they have poor intuition for the depth and complexity of the issues, the intensity of the feeling around them, and the conventions by which Americans debate them. Because these comments get widely assumed to all be coming from American commenters (which, to be sure, some are, but many are not—certainly the majority in this thread were not), suddenly the population sample appears highly skewed, and much more extreme, to readers who are familiar with the US. Some people will say 'racist comments are racist, period', but I bet that they, along with everyone else, make many fine-grained adjustments of interpretation when they have information about someone coming from a different background. For example, they would be more likely to perceive a comment as ignorant, and respond by educating the other person, if they think of them as foreign—and more likely to perceive them as an enemy if they come from nearby, even if the comment is otherwise identical. It's likely that many of these adjustments aren't even conscious. Humans are deeply conditioned to react to nuances in social cues, and foreignness is one of the biggest categories of social cues. Unless we're arguing about specifically national disputes (which is a different sort of flamewar) we make extra allowances in such cases. Unfortunately, most of this nuance is lost in the stream of HN comments, and it puts extra strain on divisive discussions. The social machine runs without the lubricant it typically relies on, leading to excess friction, heat, and damage. This lack of lubricant gets experienced as a defect in the machine—which it is, in a sense, but it gets misinterpreted.

Veelox 6y ago

While your comment is eloquent I have no idea which sweeping generalizations you see as problematic. What problem would empathy solve and how would it solve it?