Comment by abtinf | Hacker News Reader

Comment by abtinf | Hacker News Reader

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> The world needs more women-led companies.

This seems like a very broad statement.

What is meant by "the world"?

Whoever is meant by "the world", why do they "need" more companies and why should that need factor into one's career decisions?

Why "more" companies instead of working at existing companies? Given that the most obviously influential speaker at that event is an employee at a not woman-led company, isn't that a contradiction of the claim?

Why "women-led"? Why focus on biological sex? What about intersex? How about trans or non-binary gendered?

In my view, starting or leading a company is just about the single hardest professional undertaking. You should only do it if it closely aligns with your personal purpose, otherwise it will be a nightmare experience. Encouraging someone to take a career path simply because of their association with a group, without reference to their individual objectives, is improper and will lead to an unhappy life.

People who insist on relitigating this from first principles every time anything in the category comes up are trolling, whether they mean to or not. Why? Because they force everyone else to either (a) cede the battlefield or (b) suffer the soul-crushing boredom of engaging an argument they don't want to have, one that is always the same and never leads anywhere but nastiness.

Here's a first principle that really does apply here: Hacker News exists for the gratification of intellectual curiosity.

There is no intellectual curiosity in this battle—only resentment and repetition, the chocolate and peanut butter of tedium. You can agree with either side ideologically, or with both, or with neither, and still know that such flamewars are off topic here, because they violate the core value of the site.

Imagine a 2x2 matrix in your head. "Angry tedium" is the quadrant we most want to avoid.

Does the conference not gratify your intellectual curiosity? That's cool; there are 29 other things on the front page that might. (Ok, 28 and a job ad.)

> There is no intellectual curiosity in this battle

it's not a battle. it's a conversation. humans can be good at both, but often not at the same time.

Deleted comment

The only comment I killed is the one marked [dead] by the user we banned (edit: plus one reply of my own to a comment that was flag-killed by users). All the others are being affected by user flags.

Dan, the purpose of the relitigation is the same as it is everywhere else online -- to make the topic itself so toxic that it can't functionally be discussed (this works particularly well on HN because of the flamewar detection).

The way out is through. Acknowledge, recognize, and do something about the pervasive misogyny and bigotry that appears here every time topics like this are brought up.

that seems like a pretty unfortunate way of viewing what should be discussion on a discussion forum. I agree that there does tend to be a certain amount of misogyny that these discussions draw, but criticisms like "I don't think gender segregation is a good thing" don't fall into that category. For me, the problem seems to be that both sides want to shout and neither want to listen, but simply banning one side of the argument widens the valley further.

I would word this differently but I think this is fundamentally correct. What we have now isn't quite as bad as it would be if HN were unmoderated, but our current policy concedes a hecklers veto on stuff like this.

What's to be done? They ban people where bans are deserved. Almost every comment that's off-topic has been flagkilled. The system seems to be working pretty well.

The comments are unpleasant for the ~8 or so minutes they're active, but they go away swiftly. It's hard to imagine a solution other than pg's "all comments start dead and need a vouch to come alive" idea from several years ago. Reddit deals with this situation by locking threads entirely, which many people wish wasn't a feature. Do you have any other suggestions?

Charging money for accounts seems to work pretty well.

You mean like the heckler's veto that saw yummyfajitas leave? Because if you see a heckler's veto in the treatment of feminism here and I saw the death of hope for US politics in dang telling Stucchio to shut up about controversial topics the moderation team has a hard job.

yummyfajitas leave?

He did? Well, good riddance. He's a person who reveled in wrapping overt sexism and racism in a cocoon of what can only very generously called 'scientism'. 'This isn't bigoted, you're just not following my axiomatic logic/fearless inquiry/bayesian maths' is a trope that even the most charitable moderator eventually catches on to.

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