sololipsist

Welcome to hacker news. I hope your first day is pleasant.

I said:

> horizontal or vertical

And what if she's using the relationship to get ahead? What, are we going to pretend that women are powerless, agentless puppets that smart, capable men can use?

If the company you're in doesn't prohibit relationships, if you get into one you need to resolve conflict in those relationships outside of work.

So what? People who work together have sexual relationships, and people who have relationships will have conflict.

"People who disagree with me are ignorant." Come on, man. Seriously? You sounds like a college kid on facebook.

If a company is not going to prohibit employees from having sexual relationships with each other, horizontally or vertically, that company also need to expect those employees to work their conflict out outside of work. If google does want to prohibit this, they should have disciplined both of them the moment they heard about it and fired them if it continued.

What's with people expecting companies to be mommy and daddy when we have conflicts in our relationships? That's crazy.

..... And what if the accusation isn't credible, and it wouldn't actually hold up in court to fire him because of it?

Rubin deserves to be punished for sexual harassment....

IF, in fact, he sexually harassed, right?

A) What in the hell was his partner doing reporting to his place of business that she felt like he had compelled her to have sex with him in a hotel room? What does that have to do with work? That smells like using an accusation as a weapon to me.

B) What does "compelled" mean? I had a girlfriend once who was into kink and I wasn't. We did kink all the time and it wasn't fulfilling to me, and once time in particular I was trying very hard to just get her to have sex with me (which I thought was going to be part of the relationship and was just beginning to realize it was not). I kept asking, she kept saying no. Eventually she gave in. After our break-up she cited this as a rape to a friend. Is this rape? Is it even sexual harassment?

There are so few details here it's shameful it's even being reported on.

So what if Google gave a severance to someone who was accused of harassment? It's not even clear, from the details, that he did. Shit, what if they did an internal investigation and determined that he didn't?

What's wrong with people here, acting like this is something we know he did?

Do you understand that if you perceive non-harassment as harassment, you're perceiving it as harassment, so of course you think you're not misperceiving it? Like, you get that reality is sometimes different from your perception of it?

If someone suggests you're misperceiving something and your only reply is "I'm not because I know I'm not," you have an obvious epistemological problem.

That's an example, yes.

> How much more clearly can you out yourself as biased garbage?

Are you really surprised, or are you just pretending to be?

This is par for the course for every major journalism outfit - from Fox to MSNBC down to NPR and PBS. There isn't a single major outlet, irrespective of funding model or platform, that isn't blatantly biased.

I have found over and over and over that when I read "memos" or "screeds" or whathaveyou coming from the tech industry I inevitably find that a huge portion of the media is pushing a narrative that is so uniform and so disjoint from the actual content I have a hard time imagining how it wasn't coordinated journo-pros-style.

okay mom ::rolls eyes::

Some things don't deserve a response. In that cases it's perfectly acceptable to note this and move on with your life.

If you correct every brain-dead thing people tell you on the internet, either never say anything remotely controversial so you don't get ill-informed but confident replies, you spend all day correcting people, or you literally just started saying things on the internet to tell me how to live my life.

I didn't say a word about Kissinger.

If you need to pretend someone is arguing something they've never argued so you can disagree with them, you really need to take a step back and ask yourself what the fuck you're really doing.

Appreciate it.

It also reveals a weird logic I can't wrap my head around. If you vote, and you think others should vote, you believe that we have significant influence on politics. So if we abandoned our military dominance, what other country is going to fill that power vacuum? Do we trust their country with that power, a country which might or might not have a government that is influenced by its populace? Honestly, who are the other players that would likely make such a move... China, Russia, and the EU? Well, unless you're particularly fond of two of those governments, I don't like your odds.

Isn't it better to just keep the military dominance here, with a government influenced by the people, pretty much half of which are strongly opposed to the mobilization of that power? Absent some unintuitive answer to that question, I don't see the consistency of a person who thinks we should "get out and vote" genuinely wanting to degrade US military dominance.

> iceland has no military, and no real political or economic significance in the world. it has no genuine allies to whom it is worthwhile. why doesn't anyone/everyone invade them? nobody would risk a major war over them. they're what could amount to a strategically useful port. they might have some minerals or something. it wouldn't even be hard.

> the answer is that nobody cares to.

This is an over-simplification of truly mind-boggling caliber.

People forget that gunboat diplomacy is literally a violence deterrent. There is no better solution to geopolitcal mass-murder than to be so god-damn scary we can resolve things without death.

Sure, you can do a lot of bad shit with gunboat diplomacy - but giving up dominance doesn't eliminate bad shit, it just creates a power vacuum - which will be filled either by another geopolitical entity with the capability to do that bad shit or geopolitical violence on a massive scale.

Getting rid of our army does not lead to peace. I can't understand how any adult thinks it will, or is willing to act like it will.

Why? Air superiority is important for power projection.

Edit:

So I'm getting a comments here that are much lower-quality than I expect from this place.

Geopolitics is not like interpersonal relationships. There is nobody governing governments. It's a free-for-all, literally the state of nature. In societies it seems like "Might makes right" is a dated concept, but you have to remember that's within the frame of a governed society. Geopolitically we're literally in a kill-or-be-killed mode.

There is no game-theoretical solution to geopolitics except to be able to defend yourself with deadly force. At a minimum you must be able to inflict enough damage on other geopolitical entities to disincentivize them from projecting their power within your borders. A better solution is to have as much be able to inflict so much damage other geopolitical entities can't do this to you so that you have the choice to deploy that power wisely, as opposed to not having the opportunity to deploy it wisely.

The military dominance of the US post-WW2 has unambiguously been a stabilizing force on the world. I understand that doesn't guarantee it will continue to be so, but that isn't an argument against game-theoretical geopolitical realities.

We can't let the fact that we're inside a governed society make us forget what it's like outside a governed society. Acting like geopolitical dynamics are like social dynamics is profoundly stupid.

> The rest of us will continue to ~~learn and innovate~~ buy $tsla after silly controversies cause it to tank, and sell $tsla once everyone remembers they like money and it climbs again.

I've got to say, I think this is parallel to the issue that faaaaaaar too many people are getting bachelor's degrees. Generic sales jobs require them at this point, which is nuts. One should absolutely be able to get a sales job with a 6-digit income potential with mere experience in lower-powered positions, but for some reason we're forcing these people to study humanities for four years before we let them sell a CRM tool.

Shit, there's no reason most low-level programming positions need a CS bachelors. We really, really need good associates degrees that teach functional coding (logic structures, two common languages, git, agile). There is no reason to expect someone to be in school for four years to be able to code.

Grades must be inflated to accommodate the horde passing through universities. The masters degree is the new bachelors degree.

You got a few. Satisfied?

Okay. Sorry, I'm used to reddit were everything is a veiled accusation.

Yeah, you can train yourself, but everyone does it nonetheless. Everyone does it by default, and I don't think it's reasonable to claim that anyone has completely or effectively rid themselves of motivated reasoning.

I try to do this as much as possible, though. It usually ends up with me just having no opinions, rather than an "unbiased" one.

Though I'm not sure how effective training yourself in this way is. There have been studies that show it's difficult to induce this in people, but that statistical, of course. Some people likely take to it much better than others - some people may even take to it very well. I like to think I've had some success, but, you know, that might be motivated, so I don't really have a strong opinion.

He says it's a problem that can be tackled, it just hasn't been yet. Like you look at a square block, and you need to get it in a square hole, you just haven't gotten to it.

It's not the language of someone that isn't confident that there isn't a perfectly fine solution. I mean, it's likely that other people have already figured this out, just not him.

Mhm. I try to. Why?

Are you implying I prefer functional programming? I don't. I don't have a horse in this race.

Motivated reasoning. He prefers imperative programming (or something other than functional programming), so he hears the "criticism" without hearing the solution. I mean, of course he physically hears both, but one is prominent in his consciousness. It doesn't matter that there is a solution, he heard what he needed to hear to get the evidence he needs to maintain his bias, and shuts off his frontal lobe.

To be clear: Everyone does this. I just think it's interesting.

Eh, not really. I've learned over the years to avoid providing sources because more often than not the person won't believe you either way and will only use the source as a tangible target for disingenuous attack through motivated misinterpretation. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motivated_reasoning)

I typically provide sources in response to replies like: "That's interesting, but I can't really find anything on the matter; can you point me to something?" But if there is no indication that the person actually tried to find corroboration independently I take it as a sign that he is not actually interested in corroboration. I'm sure this is inaccurate sometimes, but it's the best approximation I can come up with.

> Sending a troubled kid to a great private school probably will cause the kid to do better ... However selection bias already does this

Funny thing, though. We've done a bunch of studies on this and it doesn't actually help. The people who care about their kids more getting them into better schools, yes - but placing the kids of parents who don't care into better schools, no.

This has been shown time and time again. The best results to the contrary managed this by ... drumroll ... designing selection bias into the study.

I'm using "mastery" as a shorthand for what he actually said, not literally quoting the man. It's normal human communication that normal humans do every single day and there is no reason I should need to explain that.

You know what? I don't think this is going anywhere.

> Saying "I know I am probably biased, so I will act on the margins to try to correct that" is in no way irresponsible.

Whether this is true depends on your methods of correction. That's what this whole conversation is about. If you don't KNOW you are biased (you don't), but suspect you are, and further, if you are, but don't know the extent to which you are biased or what the outcome would have been if you weren't biased (you don't; shit, the outcome may have even been the same), adding explicit discrimination that you do know is happening is stupid, unethical, and unjust.

Now, if you solution is instead to, say, "I'll do blind resume reviews, score candidates based on those, then do separate scores based on interviews, and compare them after a few dozen hires. If I see a significant and meaningful drop in acceptance rates for ANY group moving from blind resume reviews to in-person interviews, I'll do further review to see if there is good reason to believe the cause is, in fact, discrimination, rather than some benign issue like candidates of specific groups being legitimately worse at things that only come out in interviews. Then, if I don't find clear evidence of non-benign cause, I won't change anything, but if I do, I will attack those specific causes - even if we happen to find that it's actually white men that are being discriminated against, however unintuitive that is." then you'd be fine.

The response to the suspicion of injustice is key, here. Simply assuming your suspicions are correct and attacking perceived symptoms by doing exactly what you're trying to prevent, while qualifying as "trying to correct that," is not okay.

Whether or not it has value on it's own (which I'm not convinced of in coding). It doesn't matter.

Meritocratic hiring has value on its own. The best person getting the job has value on its own. Not including OR discluding someone from a job based on their skin color or genitals has value on its own.

Insisting that having people with different skin color program a piece of software makes that software better is one thing, actually playing god with people's careers on the basis of their skin color or genitals because you, personally, value that more than meritocracy is an irresponsible and highly unethical course of action.

> But what if there are still biases in hiring? That someone sees a woman and assumes this or that about her based on gender alone?

Quotas are not the answer, period. It's not okay to deny someone a job to correct for some possible, unmeasured, inaccurate judgement call on another person based on a stereotype whether or not that stereotype is accurate across populations. All you're doing is transferring the injustice to another person. What you're doing is preferring certain victims of injustice based on race/gender/whatever, and transferring their injustice to some other race/gender/whatever.

Find another solution. Get creative. But subverting explicit meritocratic hiring to correct for unconfirmed but suspected implicit non-meritocratic hiring is unjust. And stupid.