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Comment by jhickner | Hacker News Reader

Anyone smart enough to have an interesting opinion on this topic is probably also smart enough to see that there's absolutely no upside to expressing that opinion. It either parallels the mainstream (in which case it's redundant) or it differs in some way, in which case it invites a retaliatory shitstorm.

In a nutshell Salvatore said that he prefers to raise the level of abstraction (as programmers are wont to do) from focusing on how _female_ humans are treated unequally to focusing on how _all_ humans are treated unequally. At worst isn't this a disagreement on methodology rather than a disagreement on values?

What purpose has been served by turning this topic into a third rail?

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>Anyone smart enough to have an interesting opinion on this topic is probably also smart enough to see that there's absolutely no upside to expressing that opinion.

That's my exact conclusion for pretty much every interesting/controversial topic. There's a very small circle of people (not necessarily friends by the way) with whom I exchange ideas on politics/religion/philosophy or anything potentially controversial. I know these people are smart and enjoy an educating conversation. To the rest of the world I just spew the usual boring conventional opinion when I'm forced to, or change the subject altogether when I'm allowed to..

Agreed. Any relationship where you can freely "entertain ideas without accepting them" (- Aristotle) is something to be cherished. pg wrote an essay on this topic, for anyone interested: http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html

I think it's fairly natural for some topics to become third rails, if they attack views people hold strongly, or are seen to be outside the acceptable range of debated opinion. You even occasionally see it at HN: I recall a thread some months ago where someone expressed a leftist, vaguely anarcho-communist viewpoint on something, and got a flurry of replies that weren't really engaging the comment's content in debate on an intellectual level (if you don't like capitalism you shouldn't be typing this on a computer, accusing him of ignoring gulags, etc.). Certain opinions are just outside various communities' "ok to debate" range, which varies by community, and will get you piled on if you cross a particular community's line (trickier these days because web communities are very fluid and stuff criss-crosses between them).

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