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This is dangerous advice that assists abusers and others from being called out regarding their behavior, because those who witness / are victimized / etc feel t
by numair 5y ago
This is dangerous advice that assists abusers and others from being called out regarding their behavior, because those who witness / are victimized / etc feel that they should “keep a low profile” and avoid getting involved. I know, because I used to believe this sort of thing and didn’t act when watching abusers operate in a variety of scenes, including Silicon Valley. Luckily, large groups of angry women have vocalized the before-hidden consequences of this sort of thing, so I’ve gotten wiser.
Hollywood producers and shadowy finance guys used to “keep their identity small.” We have learned quite a bit about them in recent years (and there’s obviously so much more we don’t know). As we live in a time when there is a crisis of trust across institutions — politics, religion, corporate, whatever — you’re much better off being transparent.
The thing that’s missing, of course, is that people aren’t “iterating on their beliefs” and people aren’t also accepting of the fact that people who had beliefs that were wrong or problematic in the past are able to iterate and change. This is a future area of improvement for human social development.
All of this “every human in the world is connected” stuff is very new. There aren’t really any absolute truths or rules yet. It’s going to take a lot longer than 30 years to sort out.
Edit: I would also say that there are binary opinions (ex: people shouldn’t harm kids) and what I call “spectrum” opinions (ex: the existence of America is a net positive to the world). We have to get better about engaging people on spectrum opinions and allowing differences to exist, without going to war as we would with a binary opinion that probably has only one right answer for any decent human. Again, things to be done in the future.
- imgabe 5y agoI don't understand the connection between this and abusers. The advice is to avoid attaching your identity to any particular ideology. What does that have to do with enabling abusers?
- numair 5y agoBecause when you are a witness to something with which you disagree, speaking out and acting on it is a matter of making an opinion, and then attaching your identity to that opinion. And thus, you might be a developer who only cares about the superiority of C++ over Scala, but now you’ve got to attach your identity to “I didn’t think it was okay for my boss to take our young female employees home if they got drunk at our office party” (this happens!) or whatever. Things seem totally benign until something goes wrong. Then all of this “advice” starts to look totally different as you watch everyone who should act and take a stand decide they need to “keep their identity small.”
- refenestrator 5y agoYou could have the opinion without being a zealot about it to the extent that you're making up a guy to get mad at. If I saw my supervisor taking home a young female employee, I'd go right to HR about it, done, next question.
- 3np 5y ago> and then attaching your identity to that opinion. This step is optional. The argument is that it is in your interest to do the former without the latter.
- imgabe 5y agoYou can make an opinion without attaching your identity to it. I don't even know where to begin with that. Are you seriously incapable of holding an opinion without it entirely subsuming your identity? I think maybe you are viewing this from the perspective of your identity being how other people perceive you, rather than how you perceive yourself? Like if you pull a drowning child out of a river, do you now become "guy who pulls drowning children out of rivers" and you have to quit your job and patrol the rivers looking for drowning children, because this is your whole identity now?
- nine_k 5y ago> “I didn’t think it was okay for my boss to take our young female employees home if they got drunk at our office party” Since this is usually openly against the rules in nearly any company, of doesn't even take identifying with anything, it just takes following instructions. Also, while you keep your identity small, reducing it to zero might not be the wisest approach.
- IncRnd 5y agoI don't think you are using the proper words for what you are trying to convey. Forming an opinion doesn't attach one's identity to such transient factors.
- travisjungroth 5y agoThe essay has nothing to "keeping a low profile". Not as an abuser, victim, or anything else.