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Comment by wil421 | Hacker News Reader

TBH it doesn’t matter if she is right or wrong. Her tone and angry writing is pretty harsh.

The Twitter replies read a lot like her Google message thing. She’s got a lot of good things to say but needs to work on the delivery.

I think she’s playing the victim and race card a lot more than she should. She’s got all the ammo she needs to make her arguments without the angry victim tone.

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Have you considered that there are many other people with the same thing to say, who are saying it with the respectful tone you demand, and are being just as politely and quietly ignored?

I think the simplest thing to be said about messaging and tone is this: If your goal is to say things to convince people to change their behavior, it makes sense to spend some time thinking about how your message and its tone will be perceived, since that has a big impact on how people receive and process the message.

Based on a long career of watching people trying to convince the others, attacking people is typically a failing strategy. Instead, learn how to message in a way that is non confrontational, and most importantly, make it clear what is your opinion, versus fact.

Yes but I’m not a prominent AI Ethics Academic with ties to 2 of the best colleges in the country, Stanford and MIT. Who also had a very good job at one of the most sought after companies in the world, Google.

When she speaks people listen. Nobody listens to wil421.

Well, she didn't get ignored. Instead, she got fired. If that was her goal, then she succeeded. If it wasn't, maybe she should have taken a different approach.

I agree that her tone is not good, indeed. It's true that this is a big problem on Twitter especially. I still think it is an interesting and under-discussed point, though.

Tone policing is a common way to silence people though.

Criticizing tone policing has to be self defeating.

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