9 ms·

Regular folks who were "cancelled": - David Shor - Justine Sacco - James Damore - Adria Richards A full list would be a mile long

joshuamorton 6y ago
Of those, the last three didn't suffer any long term consequences (all three were employed relatively soon after they were fired), and the first happened too recently to really analyze.
- ThA0x2 6y ago
  FWIR: Justine Sacco still suffers from severe PTSD and has to attend regular counselling. Adria Richards fell off the face of the planet, was chronically unemployed for a while, then finally ended up at a no name company, probably making peanuts compared to where she was. James Damore was also similarly unemployed for a while, was in several lawsuits with Google, and claims to be working at a start-up, but he may also just be freelancing since he's effectively unemployable. Those are all long term consequences, so, you're effectively wrong here.
  - joshuamorton 6y ago
    Adria Richards is actually an interesting case. She was "cancelled" for cancelling someone else. One of the major criticisms of the Harper's letter is that people speaking out about injustice have historically faced severe retribution, and that the recent concern about cancellation is only in response to this retributory cannon being pointed toward those "in power". I can't see the people who are today concerned about Cancellation standing up for Adria Richards were that to happen again today. See the recent argument between Yann LeCun and Timnit Gebru for a somewhat analogous situation. The backlash against the person perceived as trying to cancel someone else was much greater than the initial "lash", so to speak. > James Damore was also similarly unemployed for a while Not a very long time though. And the lawsuits were ones he chose to file.
    - ThA0x2 6y ago
      >Not a very long time though. It was for a long time. He may actually still be unemployed. >And the lawsuits were ones he chose to file. No one said otherwise.
  - crawsome 6y ago
    James Damore threw away an engineering job at Google with a long, generalized, and internally-shared rant about women, listing off their "Qualities". He then tried to start a lawsuit making it about his politics, which never went anywhere. Why is there sympathy for this man?
    - friendlybus 6y ago
      It was scientifically sourced and he did not spread it himself, others did that on 'his behalf' whilst also stripping out the sources.
      - crawsome 6y ago
        He sourced things from scientific journals, but he pieced them together to fit a narrative that he knows better about what women want. It wasn't a good argument.
        friendlybus 6y ago
        Uhhh, no? He didn't say that. The comments you're giving are grasping at straws for a negative interpretation of his memo.
        NotSammyHagar 6y ago
        The facts of his case are he went on bizarre and unsupported rant against women. Are you going to support the thesis that women are inherently intellectually inferior and that hiring practices that encourage hiring people from diverse groups are enforcing intellectual idiocacy?
    - ThA0x2 6y ago
      >He then tried to start a lawsuit making it about his politics, which never went anywhere. Settled out of court for a non-disclosed amount. That's somewhere, so, you're wrong. >Why is there sympathy for this man? Data-driven adults place a high value on facts and truth. Virtue signalers don't.
- plzbo 6y ago
  Good that they didn't suffer any long term consequences, but that does not diminish the point made.
  - joshuamorton 6y ago
    Yes and no. One of the concerns about cancel culture is that it results in people's lives being ruined/ended. This (usually) is not the case, even among the most egregious examples that people can come up with.
    - throwaway894345 6y ago
      Because social protections haven't eroded enough to get to the point where lives are actually ruined. Why wait to speak out against cancel culture until it's actually ruining lives?
      - joshuamorton 6y ago
        If your entire concern is based in a slippery slope, it's more difficult to take it seriously, especially when the concern conceals a disregard for actual harm happening now. "Cancellation" is a democratization of power. It allows the little guy to push back effectively against the bigger guy. Saying "look there's the possibility that it might eventually have bad consequences" rings hollow when it's also actively having good consequences right now.
        DenisM 6y ago
        Was Damore a bigger guy?
        joshuamorton 6y ago
        Compared to the generic "woman at Google", I'd argue yes. But even if you disagree in that one case, that doesn't invalidate what I said. It allows upward facing action.
- throwaway894345 6y ago
  I never understand these kinds of arguments. Is the idea that "because there are still enough good and decent people resisting the mob in order to prevent long term consequences for their targets that we should not condemn this mobbing at all"? What point are you making?
  - a1369209993 6y ago
    > What point are you making? Presumably something to the effect of "It can't [currently] be a especially horrible problem if all the listed consequences were quickly fixed.". On the other hand, see (https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2278 https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2278).
- sky_rw 6y ago
  I would describe having your name included in such a list and immediately recognizable by a huge percentage of the population as a seriously detrimental long term consequence.
- friendlybus 6y ago
  Analyzing the consequences is only half the ethical story. Doing the right thing sometimes is different to what the consequences are. If you don't do the right thing in the first place regardless of the outcome, you let weaknesses in the system grow. James damore's memo was created and went nowhere within google. It's some people fretting over the consequences who took it, spread it among the company and got a good engineer fired, sowing distrust in the community. Should have just left the memo to be forgotten in somebody's email account somewhere. A deontological ethic will come to bite back if you are determined to ignore the fact that sometimes you have to do the right thing regardless of the consequences.
  - joshuamorton 6y ago
    > James damore's memo was created and went nowhere within google. I'm not sure what your mean here, but this applies most readily to James himself. He posted the memo to larger and larger mailing lists until finally it spread.
    - friendlybus 6y ago
      No he discussed it with peers and it died in discussion >"There was no outcry or charge of misogyny. I engaged in reasoned discussion with some of my peers on these issues, but mostly I was ignored," he wrote, of the initial response to his document. It went viral later on.
      - joshuamorton 6y ago
        This is incorrect. I worked at Google at the time and commented on the original document. He posted it in a few small groups related to diversity. Nothing happened. Then he posted it in a relatively large public group unrelated to diversity. There was discussion in that group, and as part of that discussion it went viral (being linked elsewhere and posted around). It was specifically because of the "mostly ignored" that he chose to escalate to a larger group where he felt he'd get more feedback and response (and agreement).
jmalicki 6y ago
In James Damore's case, at least, he engaged in the "problematic behavior" at the workplace - it wasn't like he was participating in a group outside of the workplace which then led to him being fired. Regardless of what your beliefs are, harassing your coworkers about them isn't going to make your coworkers, or bosses, happy. For a second, forget about the content. "Hey coworkers, your decision to use a NoSQL database is stupid, you VPs should change the way you're doing things" when not asked for comment and when the decision is well outside of your role is always risky, and can quite often lead to conversations where the targets of your rant can say "I can't deal with this person anymore, I'm ready to quit over this."
- dnissley 6y ago
  If that's what you think happened, you need to go look at the facts. No harassment occurred. There was no emotional outburst. Only a solemnly worded paper that was written in response to a request for feedback and wasn't even meant to be spread around as much as it did.
  - jmalicki 6y ago
    I did not mention harassment, or an emotional outburst. The most controversial part of cancel culture is the blurred lines - is something in your private life grounds for you losing your job, is a tweet outside of the context of your job grounds for losing your job, etc. If someone wants to boycott sellers of JK Rowling's books for her tweets about transgendered people, that is reasonably called cancel culture. If someone wants to boycott sellers of JK Rowling's books based on hypothetical comments about transgendered people within the books themselves, that is something quite different.
    - someguydave 6y ago
      “Regardless of what your beliefs are, harassing your coworkers about them ” You did mention harassment though?
ytrytr 6y ago
(I made this standalone comment somewhere else because of you so I might as well reply directly to you) HN is filled with people who are hardly ever on the receiving end of abuse bemoaning "cancel culture". Yeah yeah, cry me a river. People are really out here using Justine Sacco, who spoke about going to a country and getting AIDS and got rightfully attacked by the citizens of that country, as a poster child. Lol it seems like a lot of you have lived lives without consequences for your actions and are suddenly surprised that this is how the real world works. I personally wouldn't cancel anyone but I hope cancel culture lives forever.
- dang 6y ago
  Please don't use HN for ideological warfare. It's not what this site is for and will eventually get your main account banned as well.
  - ytrytr 6y ago
    Can you explain what ideological warfare is according to the rules please? And how my comment is ideological warfare but not the people complaining about cancel culture?
    - dang 6y ago
      I don't like definitions because every definition has loopholes and then people treat the loopholes as if they are sanctioned. Hacker News is supposed to be a spirit-of-the-law, not a letter-of-the-law place [1] However, look at it this way: ideological battle is when people use HN to smite enemies rather than for curious exchange. Particularly, to smite enemies on hot topics. Those sorts of threads are predictable, tedious, and quickly turn nasty. They not only crowd out the quieter, more curious conversation this site is supposed to be for—they burn it to a crisp. For that reason we have no choice but to moderate it [2]. It always feels like the mods are against you; whoever your enemies are, I guarantee they feel just as strongly that we're against them [3]. This seems to be some sort of hard-wired bias. In reality people on both sides of the ideological divide get the same moderation messages. If someone was breaking the rules and we didn't moderate it, the likeliest explanation is that we didn't see it. We don't come close to seeing everything that gets posted here [4]. Accounts that have been created primarily for ideological battle are against the rules here and we ban them [5], so I banned this one. Please don't do that. As I said, it will eventually get your main account banned also. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html [1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20spirit%20letter&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... [2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20political%20overlap&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... [3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20always%20feels%20mods&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... [4] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20likeliest&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... [5] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20primarily%20test&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
claudiawerner 6y ago
>- James Damore Regular as compared to a celebrity (well, I suppose he is a celebrity now on HN and tech places on Reddit), but being regular is no panacea agaianst criticism.
- dnissley 6y ago
  No one said that.

joshuamorton 6y ago

Of those, the last three didn't suffer any long term consequences (all three were employed relatively soon after they were fired), and the first happened too recently to really analyze.

ThA0x2 6y ago
FWIR: Justine Sacco still suffers from severe PTSD and has to attend regular counselling. Adria Richards fell off the face of the planet, was chronically unemployed for a while, then finally ended up at a no name company, probably making peanuts compared to where she was. James Damore was also similarly unemployed for a while, was in several lawsuits with Google, and claims to be working at a start-up, but he may also just be freelancing since he's effectively unemployable. Those are all long term consequences, so, you're effectively wrong here.
- joshuamorton 6y ago
  Adria Richards is actually an interesting case. She was "cancelled" for cancelling someone else. One of the major criticisms of the Harper's letter is that people speaking out about injustice have historically faced severe retribution, and that the recent concern about cancellation is only in response to this retributory cannon being pointed toward those "in power". I can't see the people who are today concerned about Cancellation standing up for Adria Richards were that to happen again today. See the recent argument between Yann LeCun and Timnit Gebru for a somewhat analogous situation. The backlash against the person perceived as trying to cancel someone else was much greater than the initial "lash", so to speak. > James Damore was also similarly unemployed for a while Not a very long time though. And the lawsuits were ones he chose to file.
  - ThA0x2 6y ago
    >Not a very long time though. It was for a long time. He may actually still be unemployed. >And the lawsuits were ones he chose to file. No one said otherwise.
- crawsome 6y ago
  James Damore threw away an engineering job at Google with a long, generalized, and internally-shared rant about women, listing off their "Qualities". He then tried to start a lawsuit making it about his politics, which never went anywhere. Why is there sympathy for this man?
  - friendlybus 6y ago
    It was scientifically sourced and he did not spread it himself, others did that on 'his behalf' whilst also stripping out the sources.
    - crawsome 6y ago
      He sourced things from scientific journals, but he pieced them together to fit a narrative that he knows better about what women want. It wasn't a good argument.
      - friendlybus 6y ago
        Uhhh, no? He didn't say that. The comments you're giving are grasping at straws for a negative interpretation of his memo.
        NotSammyHagar 6y ago
        The facts of his case are he went on bizarre and unsupported rant against women. Are you going to support the thesis that women are inherently intellectually inferior and that hiring practices that encourage hiring people from diverse groups are enforcing intellectual idiocacy?
  - ThA0x2 6y ago
    >He then tried to start a lawsuit making it about his politics, which never went anywhere. Settled out of court for a non-disclosed amount. That's somewhere, so, you're wrong. >Why is there sympathy for this man? Data-driven adults place a high value on facts and truth. Virtue signalers don't.
plzbo 6y ago
Good that they didn't suffer any long term consequences, but that does not diminish the point made.
- joshuamorton 6y ago
  Yes and no. One of the concerns about cancel culture is that it results in people's lives being ruined/ended. This (usually) is not the case, even among the most egregious examples that people can come up with.
  - throwaway894345 6y ago
    Because social protections haven't eroded enough to get to the point where lives are actually ruined. Why wait to speak out against cancel culture until it's actually ruining lives?
    - joshuamorton 6y ago
      If your entire concern is based in a slippery slope, it's more difficult to take it seriously, especially when the concern conceals a disregard for actual harm happening now. "Cancellation" is a democratization of power. It allows the little guy to push back effectively against the bigger guy. Saying "look there's the possibility that it might eventually have bad consequences" rings hollow when it's also actively having good consequences right now.
      - DenisM 6y ago
        Was Damore a bigger guy?
        joshuamorton 6y ago
        Compared to the generic "woman at Google", I'd argue yes. But even if you disagree in that one case, that doesn't invalidate what I said. It allows upward facing action.
throwaway894345 6y ago
I never understand these kinds of arguments. Is the idea that "because there are still enough good and decent people resisting the mob in order to prevent long term consequences for their targets that we should not condemn this mobbing at all"? What point are you making?
- a1369209993 6y ago
  > What point are you making? Presumably something to the effect of "It can't [currently] be a especially horrible problem if all the listed consequences were quickly fixed.". On the other hand, see (https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2278 https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2278).
sky_rw 6y ago
I would describe having your name included in such a list and immediately recognizable by a huge percentage of the population as a seriously detrimental long term consequence.
friendlybus 6y ago
Analyzing the consequences is only half the ethical story. Doing the right thing sometimes is different to what the consequences are. If you don't do the right thing in the first place regardless of the outcome, you let weaknesses in the system grow. James damore's memo was created and went nowhere within google. It's some people fretting over the consequences who took it, spread it among the company and got a good engineer fired, sowing distrust in the community. Should have just left the memo to be forgotten in somebody's email account somewhere. A deontological ethic will come to bite back if you are determined to ignore the fact that sometimes you have to do the right thing regardless of the consequences.
- joshuamorton 6y ago
  > James damore's memo was created and went nowhere within google. I'm not sure what your mean here, but this applies most readily to James himself. He posted the memo to larger and larger mailing lists until finally it spread.
  - friendlybus 6y ago
    No he discussed it with peers and it died in discussion >"There was no outcry or charge of misogyny. I engaged in reasoned discussion with some of my peers on these issues, but mostly I was ignored," he wrote, of the initial response to his document. It went viral later on.
    - joshuamorton 6y ago
      This is incorrect. I worked at Google at the time and commented on the original document. He posted it in a few small groups related to diversity. Nothing happened. Then he posted it in a relatively large public group unrelated to diversity. There was discussion in that group, and as part of that discussion it went viral (being linked elsewhere and posted around). It was specifically because of the "mostly ignored" that he chose to escalate to a larger group where he felt he'd get more feedback and response (and agreement).

jmalicki 6y ago

In James Damore's case, at least, he engaged in the "problematic behavior" at the workplace - it wasn't like he was participating in a group outside of the workplace which then led to him being fired. Regardless of what your beliefs are, harassing your coworkers about them isn't going to make your coworkers, or bosses, happy. For a second, forget about the content. "Hey coworkers, your decision to use a NoSQL database is stupid, you VPs should change the way you're doing things" when not asked for comment and when the decision is well outside of your role is always risky, and can quite often lead to conversations where the targets of your rant can say "I can't deal with this person anymore, I'm ready to quit over this."

dnissley 6y ago
If that's what you think happened, you need to go look at the facts. No harassment occurred. There was no emotional outburst. Only a solemnly worded paper that was written in response to a request for feedback and wasn't even meant to be spread around as much as it did.
- jmalicki 6y ago
  I did not mention harassment, or an emotional outburst. The most controversial part of cancel culture is the blurred lines - is something in your private life grounds for you losing your job, is a tweet outside of the context of your job grounds for losing your job, etc. If someone wants to boycott sellers of JK Rowling's books for her tweets about transgendered people, that is reasonably called cancel culture. If someone wants to boycott sellers of JK Rowling's books based on hypothetical comments about transgendered people within the books themselves, that is something quite different.
  - someguydave 6y ago
    “Regardless of what your beliefs are, harassing your coworkers about them ” You did mention harassment though?

ytrytr 6y ago

(I made this standalone comment somewhere else because of you so I might as well reply directly to you) HN is filled with people who are hardly ever on the receiving end of abuse bemoaning "cancel culture". Yeah yeah, cry me a river. People are really out here using Justine Sacco, who spoke about going to a country and getting AIDS and got rightfully attacked by the citizens of that country, as a poster child. Lol it seems like a lot of you have lived lives without consequences for your actions and are suddenly surprised that this is how the real world works. I personally wouldn't cancel anyone but I hope cancel culture lives forever.

dang 6y ago
Please don't use HN for ideological warfare. It's not what this site is for and will eventually get your main account banned as well.
- ytrytr 6y ago
  Can you explain what ideological warfare is according to the rules please? And how my comment is ideological warfare but not the people complaining about cancel culture?
  - dang 6y ago
    I don't like definitions because every definition has loopholes and then people treat the loopholes as if they are sanctioned. Hacker News is supposed to be a spirit-of-the-law, not a letter-of-the-law place [1] However, look at it this way: ideological battle is when people use HN to smite enemies rather than for curious exchange. Particularly, to smite enemies on hot topics. Those sorts of threads are predictable, tedious, and quickly turn nasty. They not only crowd out the quieter, more curious conversation this site is supposed to be for—they burn it to a crisp. For that reason we have no choice but to moderate it [2]. It always feels like the mods are against you; whoever your enemies are, I guarantee they feel just as strongly that we're against them [3]. This seems to be some sort of hard-wired bias. In reality people on both sides of the ideological divide get the same moderation messages. If someone was breaking the rules and we didn't moderate it, the likeliest explanation is that we didn't see it. We don't come close to seeing everything that gets posted here [4]. Accounts that have been created primarily for ideological battle are against the rules here and we ban them [5], so I banned this one. Please don't do that. As I said, it will eventually get your main account banned also. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html [1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20spirit%20letter&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... [2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20political%20overlap&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... [3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20always%20feels%20mods&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... [4] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20likeliest&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... [5] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20primarily%20test&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

claudiawerner 6y ago

>- James Damore Regular as compared to a celebrity (well, I suppose he is a celebrity now on HN and tech places on Reddit), but being regular is no panacea agaianst criticism.

dnissley 6y ago
No one said that.