That said, something about the tone of this blog post is utterly repellent to me and I'm struggling to put my finger on the reason why.
I'm more interested in the un(der)examined assertion that, when it comes to accusations of sexual misconduct, the accused should have a presumption of guilt. Have there been any published arguments in favor of this?
If anyone's been following, for instance, the Jian Ghomeshi trial, any reasonable person should conclude that he is quite probably a rapist, and is most definitely a predator. (As he himself admitted in the Kathryn Borel trial). However, the jury failed to conclude that he is a rapist beyond reasonable doubt.
Sending someone to jail when their odds of being guilty are say 50%, or even 75% is unconscionable (Although if you don't have a good lawyer, that most can most certainly happen). On the other hand, say, not banning that same person from your conference is grossly negligent.
Additionally, in many environments, the consequences for reporting that you were a victim of sexual harassment are far more serious then for being an actual perpetrator of sexual harassment. By default, we bias ourselves to favour attackers.
If people do this as often as they see things happen, no matter how big or how small, then the problem people would soon become obvious to everyone. Each individual can decide for themselves who to believe, based on the full availability of the evidence, that is now right in the open for everyone to see.
That may be how social media work, that's absolutely not how justice should work. Anybody can be accused of sexual misconduct on social media. It's not justice when one can't defend himself.
The accused then takes the stand, and insists that yes, you clearly consented to being assaulted at 2 am behind a dumpster, when you were too drunk to speak.
And if, heaven forbid, the case falls apart, you'll likely be sued right back for slander, damaging your attacker's public image, loss of income, etc.
That's the defense's job in an adversarial legal system. That doesn't make in any better for victims.
I could be wrong, of course, and in fact I am wrong in my imputations of the intention of others with startling frequency. However, I am usually fairly aggrieved by the sort of apologetics with which feminism becomes an excuse for the arrogation of power, and I am not really getting that feeling in this case.
This means that if you are actually doing harassment, your odds of getting called out on any particular interaction are low.
This also means that if you aren't actually doing any harassment, your odds of being falsely accused are even lower. While you're not more likely to be hit by a bus on the way to work, it's not that far off.
Getting falsely accused by more then one person (Which is what the article points out as the big red warning sign) would be like winning the lottery. It's best not to structure your policies about landing 6 for 6 on the 6/49.
To me the dissonance came from an unusual definition of the word "rockstar." In the programming context, I've usually heard it as "someone who is really good at programming," but here they are trying to define it as "someone who pretends to be good at programming and harasses everyone around them."
A lot of people are also uncomfortable the the gendering implied in the word "whore". It's not worth litigating here (please let's not), but it's worth knowing about.
Points for honesty. Drawing from my own experience: sometimes this feeling happens for a reason, and sometimes it happens gratuitously when we encounter a perspective we're not used to hearing. As Daniel Kahneman (among many others) has pointed out: "familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth."
It just sounds like "Just say no to rockstars!". Yes, it goes deeper, and outlines why rockstars are a problem, but the 'just say no' message makes me a bit uneasy.
It may be b/c she's conflating "rockstar" with "asshole", begging the question are all tech rockstars assholes, and are all tech assholes rockstars? Her personal experience seems characterized by a preponderance of evidence in support of that, but others may not have the same experience.
She also seems to define rockstars as attention whores who don't actually get any real work done (in the section on how you recognize one), which is not the definition the HN crowd is used to (quite the opposite), and begs the question why are they rockstars? Coasting on a single past achievement maybe?
That's among those I've worked with. I know there must be those who don't fit this type. But they haven't been in my personal circles.
There can and should be discussion and debate around this issue especially when it casually calls for things like tossing due process and burden of proof out the window.
Perhaps the piece is too weak to stand on its own merit.
Everyone knows sexual assault is bad, jerks are jerks, not all jerks are sexual predators and Twitter is still the worst source possible, next to Tumblr.
I'm not giving them a free pass either. Both behaviors are wrong (one MUCH worse), but neither need to be tolerated.
You shouldn't. But you also shouldn't let people appropriate the political capital of a topic as serious as sexually predatory behavior to argue points about assholes. Not only because the magnitude of the negatives they introduce into the world are so widely disproportionate, but also because "asshole" is a suspiciously flexible term. "Asshole" doesn't even describe behavior, it describes an assessment of behavior. From a mild but harmless annoyance, all the way to fireable and beyond.
I'm not. But I've seen FAR TOO MANY statements here and elsewhere that provable death threats or sending porn pics is wrong but anything no matter how jackassy up to that is fair perfectly acceptable. I'm VERY tired of that attitude.
And I don't believe in the slippery-slope of assholeness. Everyone knows their definition, I don't think it will slip to anything trivial. Asshole will not equal annoying any time soon.
This is so important.
Preface: I am not defending Jacob Appelbaum at all here---the evidence of wrongdoing in his case looks solid.
Encouraging internet pitchfork mobs is wrong. Morally wrong. Due process can be frustratingly slow, but the principle of innocent until proven guilty is vital.
Preemptively labelling people "oppressors" or "abusers" is wrong.
--
Story time. The scene is my high school sophomore English class, ~9 years ago. There was a huge news story about some men on Duke lacrosse team hiring a stripper and then raping her. It was the perfect storm of outrage: multiple white men from a privileged background, a single black woman, a rape accusation.
In English class, we debated the ethics of the case, rape culture, and so on.
I pointed out that with no witnesses and no rape kit, the only incriminating evidence was the accuser's word. I said that the accusation might well be true, but that we should reserve judgement until the court case ran its course.
I got a lot of flak for saying that. A few classmates said I was being misogynistic and that I was part of the problem. The teacher lectured me somberly about how much courage it takes to report abuse and how important it is to believe such reports.
--
A few months later, the men were acquitted fully and the accuser admitted she had fabricated the whole story.
To this day, if you Google any of the mens' names, the first page is full of national news stories about how they raped someone.
--
Here's a picture from a few days ago. Spoiler alert, the arrows point to the wrong apartment.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11724935
(and more on Twitter, of course).
Please tell us more about how important this principle is to you.
Also, much as I hate to spoil a fun new narrative wave for you to surf, but none of the authors of this post condone vandalizing the homes of people accused of abuse. In fact: you quoted one of the more vocal Appelbaum critics as doing exactly the opposite, while sneakily implying otherwise.
Here, I'll link directly to the thread you're talking about, so people can judge for themselves.
https://twitter.com/dcposch/status/707069168852410368
I'm not saying you succeeded in creating a pitchfork mob, just that your attempts to do so were cartoonish, and so it's pretty funny to learn you've found religion about pitchforks now.
I would wrap this up by saying: things are complicated, they're often complicated in every possible direction, we usually don't have all the facts (you sure didn't), and we are rarely well served by platitudes. For example: the reason you believe the evidence against Appelbaum appears solid is that people spoke up.
That was rude, unkind and you shouldn't have posted it.
Happy to have people read both the Twitter thread and the one on HN, I think I said things that were worth, if you'll pardon the phrase, speaking up about.
Specifically: I feel bad that I didn't come up with it. It was funny!
Instead, I ended up subjecting someone else to the shitstorm you and Nadim briefly generated. Just weeks ago, you were on HN --- unbidden! --- to inform everyone that I'd been "joking about Nadim's penis". You two deserve each other.
I'm going to bow out of this part of the thread before we start litigating a different monster in the security/privacy community.
Edit: Since people objected and it seems like a bad idea to argue about this, I've put it back.
Your description seems pretty tendentious, though. That comment neither "point[ed] out that [tptacek] was being untruthful" nor "prove[d] that the accusations are false". It just linked to an earlier spat.
This thread is about tptacek's claim that I "attempted to whip up an Internet pitchfork mob".
I think his accusation and my response should be in the same place. Thanks.
I'm sure the authors of the article would recommend you read the linked piece on http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Tone_argument
For me what sits a little uneasily is that a huge amount of this directly conflicts with the startup culture and stories of early tech, especially ones which may actually have appealed to certain "nerdy" personalities. Be it your Apple or Microsoft with people staying extremely late living on pizza, throwing themselves entirely into the project, people being almost 100% responsible for their particular portion be it QuickDraw or the SID chip or CP/M or such things, building a sense of camaraderie through the shared struggle to deliver. I agree that long-term it's harmful, and I certainly wouldn't want to work in a company that tried to make it the indefinte norm, but I dislike the insinuation that it is so bad that there is never a time or a place for it (due to leading to harassment etc).
If some people want to draw life satisfaction primarily from their work and getting acclaim for it, is there no place for that in the world?
I think the repellence comes from cognitive dissonance.
I recognize that most people are probably way more social than me. So maybe you are also averse to this kind of compassionless judgement of other people's behavior.
For what it is worth, I find these people making proclamations about how everyone should behave (in particular, based on their field of interest) to be world champion fart sniffers. Hopefully some day they will grow up and stop demanding that other people conform to their whims.
I hope that she will take the evidence to the police and file charges as soon as possible. Violent crimes such as are being reported can not be allowed to slide. It's critical that trained authorities take over the investigation at this point and determine the facts, gather evidence, interview witnesses, and proceed as needed with prosecution. Prosecuting a case through amateur blogs is not an effective or appropriate means of obtaining justice.