observation

It's not as if I believe in slavery or Fascism myself, however everything should be examined contextually.

The historical alternative to slavery was mass murder. Dan Carlin will tell you that.

> There is no 'lesser of two evils' when those are involved.

There kind of is. It takes no imagination on my part to come up with dozens of historical examples of Bad, Badder and Worse.

I wonder at what point would you say "Yup, that's been a failed experiment"?

Do your ideals have a metric by which they may be considered?

Do you believe the 'lesser of the two evils' to be a false dichotomy for this case?

There's little doubt in my mind that the politics of Silicon Valley are nearly entirely a distraction from technology, which, as should be obvious, is the only thing that will matter in 20 years time.

Ironically I think the reason for the politics is that there isn't enough to go around, people get more political, more conscious of class, race and sex when they sense opportunities becoming fewer and the stakes higher.

The most interesting thing out of Silicon Valley in the last five years has been the evolution of Elon Musk's companies - very physical, real world stuff aided and abetted by software. What is he always banging on about? "First Principals".

There exists this enormous pile of problems the working class have and few developers in Silicon Valley are working on anything related to them.

> The Crockford/Nodevember thing

That's the sort of thought process I expect from a totalitarian regime, not being humorous. What's next? Slashdot looks too similar to a Heil Hitler salute?

Peter Thiel made a bunch of observations on this kind of thinking. It's in 1996 if the C-SPAN camera's date is correct, but very relevant I think.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E6cxRYgqfHY

There's something to be said for that. It's always interesting how a natural disaster can bring a community together, often for the first time. Maybe it'd be nice if these sorts of things would be done in a more structured manner.

In respond to the person who deleted their message: Yes, it would be nice if Silicon Valley was weirder, my sense is that as it strives for professionalism it's ironically losing that quality even as it references diversity.

It must be like how Banks always talk of 'innovation' while they do no such thing.

I think it's a great question.

I don't know the answer but your thread has reminded me of a book called "How to Read" that may be helpful to you. It sits next to me on my bookshelf and ironically I have yet to read it.

I have noticed that my searches on certain wrongthink topics bring up a slew of supposed 'rebuttals' to the information I was searching for. I did look at the rebuttals, but they were all non-sequiturs coupled with fury and not, well, reason.

A little while ago a Socialist website argued they were being demoted in the search results and only typing their explicit domain name alongside the search terms brought up their arguments.

I know this is a complex topic far beyond my tiny snippet of text here, but I do not think this is good.

I also think this website (its owners and management) has a bias, towards Liberalism. I do not mean 'Democrats'. I mean the political thought of the upper middle class. This isn't a Red Team vs Blue Team thing the way most people seem to assume, there's a third actor. It believes itself correct, rationally and morally but naturally has its own vices.

Remember Orwell's discussion of class in 1984!

I've had the pet theory that we ought to give teenagers and young adults uncomfortable jobs to do so they develop some empathy for other sorts of human beings and learn something.

For instance yesterday I was cleaning a house, the urine had crystallized in two toilet bowls to about an inch thick and I removed it with acid and a knife. The other rooms only admitted visible light to about half their size because thick cobwebs black from tobacco smoke draped everywhere. Everywhere, bottles of vokda and whiskey.

I thought to myself: if a schoolchild worked this one day, they'd potentially learn some things. Like how some people can turn into shut-ins and how that's a bad thing. How smoking and drinking can help a person develop a mental sickness to this extent. Fairly sure they'd never forget it. Also: hey! Practical skills too.

That's a great word to describe how reporting is made and used on the web. Nearly all reporting by partisans on their enemies is fan fiction.

You're quite correct on the dogmatism, but I didn't mean 'Democrat' when I said 'Liberal'. I meant 'Liberal' in the old sense which is in a nutshell the politics of the upper middle class.

In my view Authoritarian is something in demand because of poor rulership. People sense that cracks are opening up in society and then they become more authoritarian because they sense that aggressive actions may be required to reverse the trend or prevent cracks from widening. If we have good rulers, we have reduced demand for it. We don't, the governing of Europe and the United States is shockingly bad in comparison to the past. That's not a reference to Trump, it's been a slow rot and it's been systemic. Thiel has been talking about this in his videos on Youtube, there is a basic decline in the ability of government to, putting it bluntly: get shit done.

That's not a good idea. It's an umbrella term that covers a large number of subgroups. Are Google, GoDaddy and Discord happy to ban all Communist related content? I'm not advocating that, and I think this pushes a much larger group to the margin than most people at these organizations think.

I'm enjoying "Home Comforts".

It's a scientific look at cleaning your house, it's great :-)

Remind me again. Why did we stop doing World Fairs?

A few organizations have a text copy of the web. They could potentially offer a service like "WWW in the year 20XX".

It loaded so fast!

Check out the one with David Krakauer of the Santa Fe Institute

Found it too easy to zone out into a biltz of phrases and names, not certain if I were truly grasping what was being said. Typically finding that a guest is trying to encapsulate something and then Melvin butts in to speed things along.

It is good though, but I find subjects I knew something about already were dealt with in a somewhat obscurantist manner that didn't really impart a high level understanding.

You should check out Reddit's /r/audiodrama subreddit.

Some recommendations:

Mabel - Mysterious ghost story.

We're Alive - High quality Zombie TEOTWAWKI.

Our Fair City - Dystopian adventure with comic momments. Stay with it until Season 2, it takes a while to warm up but is one of the best.

EOS-10 - Scrubs in Space.

Wolf 359 - Space mystery adventure.

Liberty - There are two related series: I recommend starting with 'Critical Research' for the worldbuilding and then proceeding onto 'Tales from the Tower', which is extraordinary.

I have a thing related to this.

i firmly believe that people are not reading books. At least not the old books on important subjects. I rarely meet 'educated' people who read books.

I believe that the liberals in particular have lost their way intellectually post-World War II. There used to be Great Intellectuals and widespread public debates e.g. Isaiah Berlin. Today there is nothing. Maybe in place of that there is a smug contentment that we've the right answers, that probably is real.

In my internet travels I've seen that people will vehemently defend the UN Declaration of Human Rights. Yet they have not read it. It is a single page of text. It is easy to mythologize a text that you haven't read. I feel like modern Liberals are becoming like the folk who didn't know Latin but received audience from the priest.

If you can't read a single page but stick up for Human Rights, then you are an idiot in the most literal sense (the original meaning of the word 'idiot' from the Greeks). These people certainly won't have read J.S Mill's On Liberty, or the counter arguments.

tldr; Read more old books.

Sure that is true. But any public debate always reduces a topic to its least complex form.

The core question really is: do meaningful biologist differences exist?

I see this as a scientific question, it has metrics, and we already have the answer. It is yes.

From there you can have a discussion about the nuances, but in regard to those people who do not believe the answer is Yes, there's no more point in validating their arguments than those of creationists or communists. Sometimes they'll bring up interesting perspectives maybe, but they are basically just wrong.

The echo chamber is most of the Tech world, you should read the comments at arstechnica. Cringe doesn't cover it.

There is a healthy chance this goes very wrong for Google, I see that Breitbart has collected some engineers and is releasing interviews with them. Some of the allegations made by the interviewees are very serious if they are true, potentially laying the groundwork for Google to get attacked by the White House. e.g. search engine result manipulation against right wingers, which would have include/included Trump so...

If I were Page or Schmidt right now I'd have a pit in my stomach.

Was going to correct (posts don't have edit function), my other posts mention he has a Masters.

> What if a big part of solving the pipeline problem is simply for companies to demand more diverse candidates because leadership finally start to recognize the research that suggests that diverse teams outperform homogeneous teams on many metrics?

Last I read, the Economist said there is an advantage to diversity when attempting to be creative, but in other scenarios the advantage goes to the homogeneous team.

https://www.economist.com/news/business/21692865-making-most...

I think it was that article I read, can't tell because I'm over my article limit.

Yonatan Zunger says this:

> nearly every statement about gender in that entire document is actively incorrect,¹ and flies directly in the face of all research done in the field for decades, they should go for it. But I am neither a biologist, a psychologist, nor a sociologist, so I’ll leave that to someone else.

Except it turned out James Damore of the DM has a Masters in Biological Systems from Harvard. And is experienced engineer working in Search (he disputed the author's chops there too).

He claims the author is ignorant of gender, yet the person has turned out to be a PhD in a Biology related field from Harvard.

Fortunately I think there's a connection between heretical thinking and originality, so hopefully that tilts towards variety. I think that was the whole point of Thiel's 'interview question'.

Not sure if sarcastic or friendly, but that is the plan.

No contradiction, I'm saying there's a scientific way to be non-biased and in the current political environment I wouldn't choose that option. It's a selfish tactic, not an altruistic one to better society.

I would have political uniformity which would prevent Red vs Blue infighting.

#Warning# This isn't an attempt at flamebait, it's something like a hypothesis.

I would also likely be able to hire from a undervalued portion of Silicon Valley, I suspect I'd be able to get talented Eastern European, Asian and white men at discount rates. They wouldn't have to deal with PC from HR and other firms may be less willing to hire them.

It is not unusual for a sector of the economy to have a political slant. Everybody knows health/care is mostly leftist, military/intelligence is mostly rightist. These are slight tilts but the net affect has an enormous sway over sector thinking/dogma. I suspect SV will split along such lines (right companies, left companies).

My 2 cents.

I did write an essay but this is the TLDR.

Google has made a giant political mistake. Everybody saw this coming. Straight into the fire, Google must have known that even as they did it.

If Google's real aim was non-talent-bias, we already know the solution: blind hiring.

Let's use a little metacognition here. People on HN are highly likely to be in the Bubble (same way as average academic must be left of center). They belong to the Valley and will rationalize these kinds of events all day long, it's worthy of "Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom!". Rightists are penalized in SV. That's been true for a while, that is the bottom line. This forum itself used to contain more rightists.

I don't know the future for Google or SV but the upshot is that if I found a company it will explicitly not hire leftists. I will have internal cohesion in my mini one party state. Do I want "diversity of ideas/perspectives". Yes, but the atmosphere is already poisoned by events like this and the firing of Brendan Eich. Plainly nobody has the right answers so I'd opt for political uniformity to keep infighting at bay.

More broadly I suspect Affirmative Action is on the ropes which means that SV is way behind the curve.

tldr;tldr; Somebody as brilliant as Peter Thiel would be fired today, or more likely: never hired. That is where we are at.