Comment by geofft | Hacker News Reader

Comment by geofft | Hacker News Reader

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> But perhaps equally important is whether we want to live in a society where the smallest amount of "wrong speech" can subject you to almost unlimited social & economic consequences, none of it state-sanctioned.

There are two things I'd like to ask, in this discussion.

The first is whether the social condemnation of "wrong speech" is the problem here, or the social standard of at-will employment for a living. There are a lot of people who have trouble getting good employment for various reasons beyond their control. To worry about those who are already employed, especially when they make "wrong speech" about those who are not (e.g., an IAC executive talking about AIDS victims in Africa), seems to be misplaced priorities. If we truly believe that people should not be losing their living for small mistakes, we should also believe that people should not lose their living for no mistake, either, and we should find a way for everyone to live a comfortable, happy life, whether or not any employer wants to associate with them.

The second is that I don't believe that this is actually happening. There's been a certain scientist in the news recently, who resigned from his job, but has kept his knighthood and Nobel Prize. This does not seem like unlimited consequence and going into hiding and starting a new life. It certainly does not seem like a poor-taste joke made to 50 Twitter followers; the comment in question was given in an invited speech at a conference with a worldwide audience.

I believe there is certainly an incentive for the powerful to weave a story that regular innocent people are losing their lives for an honest mistake, since they want to protect their power (the same reason they have the opinions that people find distasteful: they act in accordance with those opinions, to protect their power). But I think we should be skeptical of this tale.

> If we truly believe that people should not be losing their living for small mistakes, we should also believe that people should not lose their living for no mistake, either, and we should find a way for everyone to live a comfortable, happy life, whether or not any employer wants to associate with them.

Surely. But the issue at hand is whether people should lose their living for a small mistake; why do you feel discussing that takes something away from support for people who lose their living for no reason?

Because it's tying in two not-intrinsically-related concepts, namely, whether someone should lose their living and whether someone should lose their status, authority, and power. These get tied together a lot in popular parlance.

In the article about the school principal linked elsewhere in the thread, the "fired" principal actually got a desk job elsewhere in the school district. I think that's a remarkably mature position to take (provided that compensation is not wildly lower): it's certainly excessive for that person to be unable to pay rent/mortgage or provide for his family, but not excessive to be unable to supervise children and teachers.

In the story about Brendan Eich, the CTO position was available for him to step back into (and available for him to have kept from the beginning). Even if we allow that he was forced out of the CEO role less than voluntarily, it seems much clearer that he left employment with Mozilla voluntarily, since there were no calls for his resignation while he was CTO. But it still gets reported that he was sacked.

In the story about Sir Tim Hunt, he resigned (possibly voluntarily, but no matter) from an honorary professorship at UCL, while maintaining his day job at Cancer Research UK. But the media spin is that he lost his job as a professor.

I would absolutely agree that people should not lose their living for a small mistake. I would disagree that any of these are examples of that, and I would strongly disagree that an employer should feel compelled to maintain public ties with someone they wish to distance themselves from, just because they feel an ethical responsibility for providing that person's living. That would compromise freedom of speech and association, namely that of everyone else at the company.

> I would strongly disagree that an employer should feel compelled to maintain public ties with someone they wish to distance themselves from

Here's one of the secrets of the world: companies don't really care who they associate with. They don't really care about much of anything, to be honest. They're businesses, they exist to make money, and most of them don't care beyond that. So to say that a company "wishes to distance themselves from [someone]" is a bit disingenuous. It's not like the company decided "yeah, we don't like X anymore". Maybe people inside the company feel that way! But companies don't have much of an opinion about that. What they do care about is, are there people angry with the company about X? If so, they're going to fire X, or demand their resignation (if firing them would make the company look bad), or if they can't get rid of them, shuffle them off into a corner where nobody notices them. But it's definitely not, the company has a crisis of conscience, and doesn't want to be involved with X anymore.

What if the company is a nonprofit, such as University College London or the Mozilla foundation?

Well, examine the evidence for them—Mozilla, for instance, had no problem with Eich as a CTO, nor had a problem promoting him to CEO. But a sustained negative publicity campaign—from people within the organization, as well as completely unrelated companies like Ok Cupid—and they backed down.

In some cases, they might actually be more aggressive about it, since usually they care about something, and so quick to drop things that interfere with that thing. Take World Vision, for instance. They're a non-profit devoted to supporting orphans. They changed their policy to allow homosexual employees—but a campaign from their primarily evangelical Christian supporters cost them millions of dollars in donations, so they reversed the policy after two days. Did they still feel that allowing homosexual employees was correct? Almost definitely. But they cared more about their work supporting orphans, so anything that got in the way was removed.

Yup, that's why I said that it impacts the freedom of speech and association of the people at the company, not the company itself. I don't want to get into "Corporations are people my friend" territory. :)

If we have a situation where either one employee feels like their freedom of speech cannot be exercised lest they lose their livelihood, or other employees feel like their freedom of association cannot be exercised lest they lose their livelihood, then we have done a terrible job, as a society, of structuring our framework around livelihoods to make the freedoms of speech and association realistic.

You lie when you say Eich could simply have reverted to CTO -- as CEO he had promptly promoted Andreas Gal to CTO. To promote with succession plans in place is good business practice; to undo those commitments is fatal for a business. Note now that not only is Andreas Gal no longer at Mozilla, but a number of other key leaders have left. Mozilla's undoing of _its_ decision to make Eich CEO looks to be fatal too, with its leadership departing and market share sliding into single digits.

You're correct, sorry. The Mozilla FAQ says the board offered him some other C-level position.

Whether this was the right decision for Mozilla is still an orthogonal question from whether he unjustly lost his livelihood. If bowing to public pressure is bad for corporate health, let's talk about that, and avoid dragging the emotional "but he lost his job!" into it.

> The second is that I don't believe that this is actually happening.

This article[0] posted elsewhere in this thread reveals a high school principal recently lost his job for saying "He did nothing wrong. He was afraid for his life, I commend him for his actions." in response to the McKinney story. So not only is it happening, it's apparently getting worse.

[0] - http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/fla-principal-sacke...

That's a good example, thanks. It looks like he still has a job with the school district and he's not hiding.

The job of high school principal is one, also, where I think there should be space for someone's private opinions to qualify or disqualify them for the job, just because of the enormous trust and power we place in them. I'm not sure what I think about these comments, but in general I think it's fine for us to be more cautious with schoolteachers. Especially because he currently has a job with the same school district on "administrative duties", I expect that if he expressed the same opinions as a back-office employee with the district, or in many other individual-contributor careers that do not involve management or oversight, he would have been fine.

I'm curious how we can measure that it's getting worse. In 2003, this teacher was fired after sending an e-mail (we had no Facebook back then) with certain distasteful remarks about race, and claimed to be a "victim of political correctness":

https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1696&dat=20030308&id=...

In 1995, this teacher was fired for making a single, though completely unacceptable, comment to some students with racial slurs:

https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=2519&dat=19950130&id=...

I can't read enough of the first link to comment, the second one makes me think "you said what to your students??" But then again, that was 1995 and cases like that are part of how language like that became unofficially outlawed, not just for teachers but for everybody.

When a principal gets fired for calmly saying he agrees with Interpretation A of events it's clear that he's being fired for having the wrong belief system. The fear is we're not just removing words from our lexicon but attempting to eradicate entire belief systems. The problem with that is who gets to decide what the right belief system is?

Er, as I understand it, the reason to remove racial slurs from our lexicon is not because the words are bad in themselves, that the phonemes are opprobrious, but because we're attempting to eradicate the belief systems implied by those words (or at least disempower those who hold those beliefs).

In the 1800s, you could talk in public straight-up about how black people are naturally suited to not having the rights to life, liberty, and property. That belief system is all but gone today. And that does not strike me as a great loss. Historically, the arc of history seems to have been bending towards justice: I have not really found belief systems in history that are unspeakable today that I think would actually be cool.

>Er, as I understand it, the reason to remove racial slurs from our lexicon is not because the words are bad in themselves, that the phonemes are opprobrious, but because we're attempting to eradicate the belief systems implied by those words (or at least disempower those who hold those beliefs).

This is true, but why is it just for a majority to censor belief systems out of existence. Your example is obviously extreme, but what about something like censoring a religion out of existence?

>I have not really found belief systems in history that are unspeakable today that I think would actually be cool.

Do you not think that would be a natural side effect of the people in charge of censoring things also applying their censorship powers to history?

Take communism for example. It is quite conceivable that people hating the general idea will heavily conflate the idea with the poor implementations when writing history. Then people studying it in the future will wonder why anyone in their right mind would have ever wanted anything to do with communism.

This should be getting much harder with the Internet and the easy storage of information, but it's likely to have been quite prolific throughout history. Especially when governments wanted to make sure a belief system that was a threat to its existence never rose up again.

So, the arc of history seems to have been bending towards justice because that's the way the arc of history was intended to be written.

I dunno. As a schoolchild in a conservative region of the Southern US just after the end of the Cold War, I distinctly remember thinking that communism was actually a pretty cool idea, and just had some bad implementors. There are real people in the hacker community who advocate the restoration of the monarchy, the elimination of democracy, and the return of certain races to slavery, which naturally suits them. In Christian theological discourse, it's not uncommon to see people accuse certain liberal theologians of first-millennium heresies. Unless there are other actually unspeakable things that were popular in the past, I don't think there's any evidence that we're writing ideas out of existence, just exerting social pressure to keep known-bad ideas from being retried again without learning the lessons of history. This (naturally) involves knowing what those ideas are.

Basically, given empirical evidence that a certain approach is actually having good effects for the world, and a complete lack of empirical evidence that it's having bad effects of the world, I think it's somewhat misplaced to worry about potential bad effects, unless we can come up with a way to maintain the good effects.

I agree that the point of removing words is to change the way people think. (Orwell once wrote a popular book on the topic.)

It takes some pointed questioning to get people to go from "we're banning words" to "we're banning racism" and finally to "we're banning thoughts that we don't like." The last statement is where the problem becomes evident. We give our government the right to kill but in theory they don't have the power to act against a religion, group or philosophy. On the other hand we have this nebulous, almost rogue entity we let wield this power and somehow it's almost beyond critique.

I agree there are situations where giving a group the power to shape discourse and language might be a reasonable thing to do. I don't believe in giving a group that power and letting them use it to make questioning or critiquing themselves impossible. That's exactly what the social justice movement's doing when anybody who disagrees with them is cast as sexist, racist, bigot, ignorant, etc.

As hueving notes, history is written by the winners. Even Howard Zinn spoke of how hopelessly biased history will always be. He who controls the past controls the future, and all that. Part of why I don't like the social justice movement is I think their version of history is self-serving to the point of being inaccurate.

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