Hacker News Reader

Comment by cozuya | Hacker News Reader

I view HN as a forum for professionals so I don't make comments that could negatively impact my professional life here. In that way I think self censure is fine. If you don't agree with my assessment thats fine as well of course.

Of course most of the sparse comments I make here are dumb jokes...

View on HN

The point is, thanks to Social Justice Warriors, you never know what comment could affect your career. Expressing opinion about merits of Angular.js is probably safe. But anything that involves gender - a study, or a remark about distribution of men and women in tech industry - is not to be touched with a ten foot pole if you value your employability. It takes very little to become a victim of a Twitter outrage.

Bingo. Let's say that I wanted to argue that -- just for the sake of argument, not necessarily as a true belief -- that discrimination is not a significant problem in tech hiring with respect to diversity, and that the key problem is that there aren't qualified candidates from special-interest-group-in-question applying in the first place, and so the majority of the problem is upstream when you consider tech companies.

Is that something I'm allowed to say, even as a hypothetical? It seems like anyone saying that could be viciously attacked. Yet if we want to reason about the world objectively we need to consider all shades of truth and possibility, not blindly latch on to one particular idea and walk on eggshells while talking about it. The victimhood culture is completely stifling to any kind of discussion about such things.

Now, maybe we shouldn't have discussion about that on HN. I don't know. A lot of them have sure been interesting though. For example, I've found contributions by yummyfajitas particularly thought-provoking to read. He frequently challenges the "popular wisdom" and gets downvoted for it despite making what seem to me like reasonable, fair, respectful arguments that go against the popular activist narrative and victimhood culture. I don't know where I really land on these issues, but I've not been satisfied that there is adequate thoughtful analysis of them in mainstream culture (even arguably on HN).

I am hoping that this victimhood thing, and that attempts at social justice by creating privileges for special interest groups, are phenomena that are ultimately temporary as our society evolves to a greater level of egalitarianism and liberty. That is, I hope that what we're seeing now are the growing pains as old prejudice is put down, as we as society we eventually move past this (in whatever subdivision you care to name). We've seen huge strides for equality in recent years such as with recent US Supreme Court ruling on gay marriage. But it feels like for every two positive strides, we take a step back with victimhood culture or by fighting injustice with more injustice (e.g., changes to Mormon Church doctrine on gays, to pick a totally random example).

The problem with starting these hypothetical-filled discussions is that they're not helpful. People can and have been positing many hypotheses about the pipeline issue in tech (and of course many other issues) and the discussions have been mostly heat and very little light.

What would be helpful, is if you would post actual objective findings--studies, analyses, etc. Cold hard facts. Otherwise you're just adding to the heat. Even my reply is not adding much right now, being primarily opinion.

It's hard to post actual objective findings, beacuse scientists themselves are seriously affected by the culture around those issues. Just like people are afraid of saying something contrary to the mainstream narrative, scientists are afraid to publish it too. On the other hand, a lot of studies - even completely unrelated to the issue - are having their conclusions purposefully and forcefully fitted to match the narrative, to score cheap popularity points. The topic is so politicized, that you can't rely even on studies to tell you anything at the moment.

I'm willing to admit that all I think about various minorities is completely wrong. I'll be happy to, when presented with evidence (and I've been adjusting my views every time I stumbled upon something that looked even little like legit research). Personally, I'm not arguing for any side of the issue. I'm arguing against using bad methodology, bad science, logical fallacies, lies and propaganda. I'm arguing for civility and detached behaviour in discussion. Only when people calm the fuck down we'll be able to figure out where the truth lies and how much we have to adjust at personal and societal level.

> Expressing opinion about merits of Angular.js is probably safe.

As long as you don't say that Angular is better or anything else that might be construed as you supporting meritocracy...

Still, people are not that insane yet to make expressing opinions about frameworks a danger to your employability. I've frequently been a part of flamew^H^H^H^H^H^Hcivilized discussions about obvious superiority of Emacs over IDEs, or Lisp over everything, and never for a second felt I'll get fired for it, or that I'll lose my career, my home, or that I'll get into national news over it.

Contrary to your first comment, it sounds like you know very well which comments could affect your career.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com