Hacker News Reader

Comment by epx | Hacker News Reader

Not judging the merit of the complaints, but trying to "cure" gender imbalances by adding another imbalance will create strong non-linearities, that will attract people that like to exploit these non-linearities instead of attracting true talent.

For every individual, every probability is always 50/50 - either something happens, or not. If an individual, a man, is affected negatively by a pro-women policy, he won't forget it for a lifetime. Because he is not a statistic, he is a person that has only one life to live.

Personally, if I were affected by this, or a colleague were, I'd find another job immediately, and watch the ship sinking from a safe distance.

View on HN

Affirmative action is discrimination, and has strong negative effects on local economies.

Consider a firm which operates at equilibrium (where peak profit is achieved), with a ratio of 80% male, 20% female. Artificially capping the number of males allowed in the corporation, or artificially increasing the number of females pushes the corporation out of equilibrium thus reducing profits in the long term.

On the flip side of the coin, if the firm discriminates (equilibrium 50% male, 50% female but it chooses 80/20) - the economy punishes the firm by reducing its potential profits.

Companies should be hiring on skill, and culture fit. Not to fill a quota or someone's agenda.

It's true that there is a gap within genders in tech - but the answer isn't reducing another equally skilled person's chances of getting the job - this is bad for everyone (except the person who got the job). Instead, we need to look at the root cause and try to learn why the gap is so obvious. Fix the issue at the source, rather than using affirmative action as a bandaid. Maybe it even turns out not to be an issue. Who knows.

> Companies should be hiring on skill, and culture fit. Not to fill a quota or someone's agenda.

As opposed as I am to discrimination (including "reverse" discrimination), i have to point out that you're missing part of the picture.

Companies are optimising for profit, and there are many things that influence it. Including, for example, the media - and unfortunately, in the current (pro-female, anti-male) media climate, it pays off to be seen as pro-women - such companies simply get a better media exposure and extra praise! In other words, if the whole country supports discrimination, it might be in the best interest of a company to go along with it.

In general, I don't think we, as a society, should expect companies to influence the culture (in a positive way) - it would have to be the other way around.

That may seem to be true, that a company being pro-female brings it better media exposure, which is also something libertarians like to promote (i.e. let everyone hire/sell to whomever they want, discriminate however they want, and let the market decide who wins). But I have a feeling that despite repeated pro-female media coverage for Yahoo, saying that it discriminates* for women, that when someone decides to search they will just go with Google because it's easier or a habit.

* = just in terms of making a choice, not a negative meaning.

Yep. You're touching here on one of the common bridges from libertarianism to neoreaction. Libertarianism is based on a handful of simple principles that work -- in theory. Neoreaction takes a step back and looks at the practical issues surrounding implementation of libertarianism (e.g. profit being derived from culture as you mention here), and of the results of libertarianism, and thus all the philosophical deductions and political necessities that result from those considerations.

(new account because I would like to remain employed)

> You're touching here on one of the common bridges from libertarianism to neoreaction

Actually, my reasoning is coming from an entirely different point of view. My basic assumption is that people follow incentives. Markets (i.e. libertarianism) are very good at providing certain kinds of incentives (basically, they encourage competition and drive the world toward greater and greater efficiency), but there are also well-known examples of market failures: monopoly, duopoly, cartels; externalities (pollution, resource exhaustion); barriers to entry and wasteful competition (main example being infrastructure - do we really need 2 companies digging through the whole city to establish 2 sets of separate, but otherwise identical phone lines?); agency problem; tragedy of the commons and free-rider problem (i.e. who pays for the fire department). In this case, I believe that government regulation is required and welcome; it has to be carefully enacted and continuously evaluated to make sure it results in increase of competition in the markets (otherwise we get e.g. copyright, which significantly hurts competition). I don't think neoreaction is a good example here; I believe that parts of EU, allegedly Denmark in particular (with their "flexicurity" style labor markets) are particularly good examples.

Libertarianism is flawed in many ways, yes, and its proponents do not consider its peripheral realities. To what you wrote I would add the observations that markets are created from the will of a central authority, and that the mob can become tyranny when not restrained by a more level-headed authority in whatever form.

These critiques (and more) are prominent in the neoreactionary literature on liberalism/libertarianism (but nowadays they have more important things to talk about). An interesting hypothesis of neoreaction is that liberal ideals, or even a libertarian world, will invariably lead to democratic socialism -- due to the power of the mob.

Personally, the foundation of my disillusionment with liberalism/libertarianism is the fact that people are so much more than economic units, and that collectivism trumps individualism. What's important is preservation of heritage, culture, tradition, creation of art in all its beautiful forms, and the maximization of humanity's potential.

I can't see liberalism/libertarianism getting us much further than working on advertising systems to push junk food, while NASA spends half its time making reports to get a few more handouts, and cultures worldwide are systemically destroyed in the name of economic growth.

it's not true that there's a gender gap in tech.

but since I've been in CA, I've only ever saw the token black guy in every office.

  > Not judging the merit of the complaints, but...

And the rest of your comment is just grinding your axe with the biases your brought into the discussion. Now, I could add to that by arguing with you using the biases I brought into the discussion.

And neither of us would be talking about this one specific company and one specific employee at that company who had one specific problem, and has chosen to accuse the company of discrimination.

This is how “linkbait” works: People are already heavily biased to believe something-or-other, and they charge in and read the post through the lens of whatever they want to believe, and to argue whatever they wanted to argue.

If we don’t actually judge this case and this post by the specific merits of a specific claim by a specific person about a specific circumstance in a specific company, we might as well just spin a wheel every morning, read off whatever hot-button topic comes up, and just start commenting.

This assumes your biases are as equally valid (or invalid) as epxs. Even if we work this assumption into the definition of 'bias', we only shift the argument to whether epx's assumptions are biases or not; Maybe some biases are borne of empiricism?

also I took the above quote to mean that epxs wasn't implying that those assertions were to be applied in this case. Nothing in the post implies epxs was referring to this specific example.

I don’t assume anything about validity. My point is that a diatribe about discrimination, or reverse discrimination, or sexism, or men’s rights, or pick-up artists, or about SJWs flooding HN, or anything else that is wholly and complete divorced from the post itself may or may not have some basis in the author’s experience, but it’s still a recipe for HN going down the tubes.

My past experience grounded in using HN since it was founded is that with certain hot-button topics (racism, sexism, IQ tests, codes of conduct, &c.) devolve very quickly into threads that are indistinguishable from one another, with people staking out entrenched positions and virtually cutting and pasting their comments from one discussion into another.

The only way to keep a high signal-to-noise ratio is to either kill all posts that touch on hot-button topics, or to be disciplined about staying on-topic about the post being discussed.

The degree to which my, yours, or anybody else’s knee-jerk reactions are based in reality or fantasy is orthogonal to the problem of hot-button topics producing “generic" discussions.

Summary: My opinion is that it’s bad for HN if discussions about posts devolve into generic discussions that are indistinguishable from each other.

Where was the diatribe? You invoke some kind of slippery slope argument, but it seems you are ultimately railing against an opinion you disagree with. What does PUA have to do with sexual discrimination in the workplace?

A better way to keep a high signal-to-noise ratio is chasing off poor arguments - banning certain topics or tangents from the OP is clumsy moderation.

> The degree to which my, yours, or anybody else’s knee-jerk reactions

exp's post is "a knee jerk reaction", but you aren't judging it invalid? It certainly sounds like you are...

Company sinks. Problem solved.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com