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Comment by jmspring | Hacker News Reader

I'll risk down votes...but...this is one of those posts that doesn't fair well here in the sense of balanced conversation...and the comments I have already read...I hope it disappears soon...

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I'll vote you up mainly because I also wonder a bit about why this article is here. I haven't been around HN for that long, but even a year ago I seem to remember that the articles voted up were mainly technical in nature or related to startups. I have noticed that as discussion boards get more popular they seem to move to being platforms for expressing opinion on political subjects. It may be my imagination, but these kinds of topics seem to be becoming prevalent to the point where I'm seriously thinking of not checking in any more.

One may wonder why I am looking at the comments for such a topic, if I am not interested. To be honest, I'm wondering if I am the only such person. Possibly not.

The comment is topical on HN because of previous incidents of sexual assault allegations at/after tech conferences that were not dealt with by the criminal justice system, but rather by internet mobs and character assassination.

I'm of the opinion that this kind of stuff should be reported to the police and be dealt with there, rather than via blog posts and twitter, but the argument "police don't care" seems to trump my position.

I live in Australia where the police would give a flying shit, especially if you have corroborating witnesses (the case I am thinking of here on HN did).

This all ties in with the "All White Men"/"Women In Tech"/"Male Privilege" microcosm that is not unique to startup web tech, yet has somehow crept in, in the last few years.

I like to keep my peas and corn separate on my plate, but others like to mix them together. Oh well.

Social/political issues are not orthogonal to technical issues -- in fact, the belief that they are orthogonal is fundamentally conservative (protective of the status quo).

You do have a point. It's conservative in the sense that it has been this way for a long time and that it's been working out well enough. Why do we need to change it?

And no, rehashing the old ">2011" meme for the millionth time is not a valid argument.

Working out well enough for whom?

I would like to posit a variation of the anthropic principle:

We are currently alive to have this discussion, therefore the things we've done to get here are not the worst we could have done.

I recognize that's not the strongest argument, but it sure as heck beats the stupid "it's 2016, therefore you are on the wrong side of history" meme that people seem so fond of throwing around.

To answer your question: Working out well enough for you, me, and everyone here.

So can we please stop trying to force the latest political fad into everything ever?

It's been working out well enough that we're alive? That's a pretty low standard for whether we should discuss the intersection of social/political issues and the tech industry. Surely in that case, we shouldn't be discussing any regulations or taxation of the tech industry either?

That was more intended as a defense of conservatism in general, since the post I was replying to gave the impression that "conservative" was synonymous with "wrong, evil or stupid" - maybe I'm reading too much into it.

Still, humor me. Can you tell me why we should be wasting time with the ever more outlandish demands of the politically correct language police? Can you tell me why we should replace merit-based hiring with some variation of the progressive stack? Can you tell me why we should be expelling people from conferences and open source projects over things they say on their private twitter accounts?

Because when I see someone advocating for "intersectionality" those are the kinds of suggestions they seem to come up with.

As in, if I'm not part of the solution I'm part of the problem? ;-) I can understand that this is an important issue. I can understand the desire to discuss it and to do so in front of specific segments of the population for which the issue is important (in this case technology workers). I would argue, though, that this particular issue clearly is orthogonal to technical issues in that it is something that is important and relevant to all humans in all walks of life. That's what orthogonality is. I think that's precisely why people want to discuss these kinds of things in terms of technology/hacker culture.

However, as important as this issue is, there are other issues that are just as important to every human in the world. And just like this issue, they are orthogonal to technology. They are just as important to discuss in front of an audience like HN as they are anywhere else. As such, there are people who are very determined to get access to this audience. It is easy to reason that these are important issues that nobody should ignore. It is easy to reason that we should make sure to provide a stage and put it front and centre.

But my life is full of people screaming to get my attention to important issues. I spend quite a lot of my time and energy dealing with them. Sometimes I don't want to do that. Sometimes I want to find out about trivial things like what new crazy javascript framework I'm going to be cursing about tomorrow. Or why I should pay attention to some unicorn startup (who will almost certainly be gone in a few years despite all the hype). Sometimes I don't want important. That's why I come here. I assume there are others who feel the same way, but I could easily be wrong.

I think that this is probably just your perception. I've been here on and off for at least a few years now and I don't think that the content has really changed.

When you read the guidelines[0] it is clear that basically anything can be discussed here, given the right angle.

> anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity

> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon [emphasis mine]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

My own comment has been bouncing between a score of three to zero and up again. It's fun to see the limits of HN's scoring system - there are plenty of greyed out comments that are reasonably argued and that many people upvoted, but if the same number of people plus one downvoted it, then you get a lighter colour signifying, fairly inaccurately, that you have overstepped some sort of bounds.

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