spaceseaman

No duder at paypal thinks they're morally responsible for this decision. My point is that because Paypal is a company whose only goal is to make money, lecturing them on morals is pointless. If you want to impose your morals on them, the only way to do so is legislation (impose is a strong word here sorry).

In other words, you're wasting your breath because Paypal doesn't care about morality or norms. We must restrict them via legislation that matches our societal values.

> Enforcing decency by legislation has always backfired

Murder? Rape? These are crimes whose very existence is to enforce decency via legislation. The social norms come first I agree, but you need the law to help prevent morally reprehensible behavior. That's kind of one of its main purposes.

I agree we must have a conversation of morals first and legality later, but the legal conversation needs to actually happen. And until it does, no large corporate entity will care.

Thus we must change our legal one. Therefore, I claim that our conversation is implicitly and inherently about the legal definition of free speech and what that should be. Paypal has no obligation, no requirement to do anything unless the law is changed accordingly. Otherwise they will continue to operate in the way that benefits them and their shareholders the most.

My point was simply that you're not explictly asking to change the law when you should be. As the law is currently written Paypal is doing everything right. If that is still wrong for a moral and societal perspective, how do we change the laws to match? Specifically, how do you change the laws in a way that upholds our previous decisions and court cases because these have served as bedrock principles.

I wasn't attacking you mate, my bad - just trying to get you to be more specific.

> Why should I waste my life for other people that don't care at all and enjoy theirs?

You are legit asking the question every single public servant has ever asked ever. How much do you actually care? If it's enough, then do something about it and get in government. If it's not, then so be it: you'll have to deal or try and elect politicians who show they actually recognize that our current methods are atrocious.

> my government keep promising to make taxes on these but don't do anything, what should I do?

Elect different politicians. If they can't get enough votes, try and convince people around you. If that doesn't work, run yourself.

I know this may sound condescending - not my intention at all. I've just had the same thought process and my only real conclusion was:

1.) I could be apathetic and not care. This is what most people do. This works fine - I can be happy. 2.) I can work my self to death to try and improve things. If it doesn't work, at least I know I tried. If it does work, then I have succeeded.

Just depends where your priorities are mate. Some people don't have option (2) at all. It's your call now.

Personally I think that governments have been irresponsible and shifted these policies onto the people because they're unpopular. No one wants to be the guy instituting a carbon tax because there's plenty of anti-carbon tax rhetoric out there ready to annihilate you. Something you can do right now is start getting rid of that rhetoric. Informing yourself so you can take on those arguments with people might be another option

A says that this should be considered "free speech" (not in words but in intention) B says that Paypal isn't a government entity. C says that shouldn't matter.

I'm responding to C, so I say "When you say Free Speech" as a rhetorical technique to recenter our argument on the thing actually being discussed. I apologize if there was confusion or it seemed I was being clever or something.

(sarcasm of course)

That's not people's point. Sorry but you're taking the wrong idea from the argument. The point is that there are no laws in the United States that demand private forums have any semblance of "free speech". It's not that it's "not illegal". It's just simply not a concept that has any laws backing it up.

People bring this up because if you have any background in constitutional law, you know that free speech is something that took a long time to define (and most people don't even know what it is...). It's a legal concept, not a societal one. So when you complain that Paypal isn't respecting your free speech, anyone with a background in law goes "???"

Free speech is a legal term. When you say "Free Speech" you're referring to a very specific set of laws and rules that apply to public entities in the U.S. - not private ones. If you're actually talking about a sociological concept, then preface it as such. And if you feel that the laws don't match up in the United States to our perceived values, then say that as well.

But as is, Paypal has nothing to do with free speech. If you want to talk about some other idea, that's not the legal concept of free speech, but how you want Internet companies to operate in the U.S. you need to preface your statement as such.

Otherwise it just comes across as if you don't know what free speech is, so people respond with the tried and true "Paypal isn't the government". They're not trying to shut down any possibility of Paypal being regulated in a way that matches our current definition of free speech, just correcting your improper use of the term (is it pompous? I would say it could be framed better.) In other words, ya'll are arguing circles around each other.

I think it's much more viable to translate some of these privately owned aspects of the internet to publicly owned institutions. Then you obtain the free-speech allowances you desire without burdening a private company with further regulation and restrictions.

This isn't the only solution of course though. But just claiming that these goods are so important doesn't necessarily mean they should be treated like government entities. They're not - that's not how the laws here work.

I am amazed by the speed with which mathematicians are able to quickly congregate and debate such things like this. It makes me excited to enter a graduate program knowing that people take academia so seriously. Their love and devotion to purely intellectual pursuits should really be appreciated every once in awhile.

There seems to be some slight bugs with the input being not read correctly but this is kind of cool.

> Finding several anecdotes from people who have seen the sky blue can never confirm my null hypothesis

were my words exactly. May I ask what issue you take with this wording? In your counter, you misinterpreted this and claim that I throw evidence out. My actual claim is such anecdotes actually do not serve as well as evidence.

As you said, you cannot throw out such evidence, and I agree. You seem to have misunderstood what I meant.

More importantly, you then fall prey to the exact logical fallacy I'm discussing while trying to counter me:

> Encountering normalcy is evidence for things being normal

False. False. False. False. This is legit the encapsulation of what makes this a fallacy. Consider the following thought experiment:

Suppose I give you a black box, and I ask you to prove to me that this machine works perfectly. You sit down and watch the machine, and you can verify that it is working perfectly right now. It is now logically impossible to prove the machine works perfectly at all times, however, because you lack any evidence the machine does not operate normally. You could watch the machine all day, and all night, for eternity, till the stars die in the sky. At any point while watching it, would you claim that you now have evidence the machine always operates normally? How do you know I haven't programmed it to break the instant you turn away from it? Or the instant you stop observing it? There's no way to know for sure...so do you have any evidence it's performing perfectly?

Anecdotal evidence is very similar. Many anecdotes re-affirming that all is working as planned don't tell me anything because that is the "null hypothesis". I take issue with your wording "because you labeled it the null hypothesis". I didn't label one or the other maliciously or even intentionally. The definition of the null hypothesis is (in my experience, I'm not a mathematician by trade) the scenario which is the "default" or "normal" or "expected". This fits both the scenario I gave and the analogy I make.

Again, I'm not saying I'm "throwing out" such evidence. In actual human interactions, we cannot swing the pendulum entirely the other direction and simply ignore and throw any evidence that confirms the "normal" either. In such a case, we would be making the exact same logical error except in reverse. I'm just trying to point to a general guideline based upon statistics and our usage of the null hypothesis within it.

Mathematical ideas do not map perfectly to worldly ones, but they serve as useful tools and models. In this case, I use my model to remind myself to consider anecdotes that are "abnormal" or "beyond the norm" as more important evidence since these "abnormal" events are the very things I want to be able to recognize.

A more rough "human" example might be: Say you give your cancer test results to five random doctors, and 4 of them say you're okay as expected, but one says you have cancer. My point is that the fifth doctor's evidence is more "important" (in a human, not mathematical way) to me than the other four. He could have found something they all missed.

Is there some reason programmers feel this need to bring up workarounds when I'm looking for an actual solution? If I could count how many answers on StackOverflow are just "well if you use JQuery..." or "Well if you use Boost...".

Address the point the person you're responding to is making, and answer only the questions they are asking. Making assumptions just wastes people's time. I understand you're just trying to help, but it comes across as really condescending.

"You should be doing this you pleb!"

is how I always read these types of responses in my head, and it's really frustrating because often-times I'm already aware of whatever workaround you've mentioned, have already tried it, and know it's not suitable. It's doubly frustrating when you're specifically looking for the solution that's not the workaround.

I think this happens because people generally believe that a anecdote confirming the null hypothesis serves as evidence for that hypothesis. It's one of the best examples of something that scientists, engineers, and so-called "logical" thinkers screw up on a day-to-day basis.

In other words, suppose I claim that some days a subset of the population can see the earth's sky as green, rather than blue. My null hypothesis in this case is that the sky is blue and always will be for all people at all times. Finding several anecdotes from people who have seen the sky blue can never confirm my null hypothesis. They may have simply never seen the sky green.

In statistics, we can sort of work around this problem with p-tests or confidence intervals. In interactions with normal humans, I like to take the personal approach of always putting a little more weight in anecdotes that push against the null hypothesis. Just because they're contrarian, it doesn't mean their argument is more valid, but when you encounter something "outside of the norm" it's worth evaluating whether your sense of "normal" is more biased than you might think.

While I haven't seen many hard statistics on the matter, the cultural interpretation is definitely that SV has a hard time with women and minorities. Highly prominent examples in the news like Uber don't improve this image. Also the conversation around Google (regardless of your "stance") has been filled with vitriol lately.

While I'm still questioning where I stand amidst the Google stuff lately, it's pretty clear that there are some really screwed up people in this industry that legitimately think women can't do as well in this job (not saying Google was an example of this, it's just that story brought a lot of the roaches out from under the fridge).

Going by Google searches, it looks like the NYtimes has been writing a lot of stories about sexual harassment in SV. Some have been pretty click-baity opinion pieces, but overall I think their coverage has been quite good.

So my point is, this may not actually be a "pandemic" but SV is where this stuff is being talked about in context to. So it makes sense to frame the conversation as "Why is SV where all these stories are coming from anyways?"

(You could always just say that the "Fake Nytimes is just looking for clicks again" but I find that argument misses the forest for the trees.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_of_the_Ancients

In other words, it's all in your head. A real, physical, "negative apple" does not exist in this world. Only the human philosophical concept of "owing someone apples" or similar such things. That's the guys' point. It doesn't matter whether you can bring representations of negative apples because those all depend on a philosophical bedrock.

The micro-scale achievement is not invalidated by the macro-scale injustice.

If I am an excellent businessman, who makes several cruicial business decisions that save my business from disaster - it doesn't really matter whether my industry is in a good position right now. I still survived my own disasters. And it still allows me to empathize with business leaders in failing industries who were able to turn themselves around as well. They may have had it a little harder, but we both still kicked ass and that's what matters. It just means I might be more empathetic to that business leader when something comes up down the road. I think this is analogous.

Your issues and tribulations are still meaningful and important. We're just trying to make macro-scale decisions for macro-scale groups. It doesn't invalidate your accomplishments, seriously. There doesn't have to be a hierarchy. Since there is no way to evenly evaluate every single injustice someone has overcome in their lives, we can only make vague estimations and attempt to correct for them as best as we can. An insistence on maintaining the status quo, would only maintain what is already a flawed situation for many people.

And this is where I kind of break down on the whole argument. I've already made similar comments below, but I sort of what to expand on this sentiment. I do not think that the views of the author of this piece were political in any way shape or form. They are purely idealogical, and the ideology that he professes has no basis in reality. This is what we may criticize.

I will employ an extremely gross simile to illustrate my point. Suppose that some item exists in the world called a "whizzer". A whizzer spins extraordinarily fast. So fast in fact, that we can't even tell which direction it's spinning for sure. We can use rough guesses to determine the spinning, and support it with some evidence from the environment. If I claim that the whizzer spins left, and you claim that the whizzer spins right we have reached a state of deadlock. Would you call our disagreement in this case one of politics? Suppose I had some information that hinted the spinner spins left. (Analogous to evidence that women are actively stopped from entering technical fields due to sociological rather than natural factors, which exists in multitudes.) There is still no evidence that the whizzer spins right. Arguments that the situation of the United States' gender divisions are natural rather than sociological can easily be dismissed by looking at clear evidence. Women are not as discouraged from entering fields like biology, or medicine. These are just as technical and difficult as other STEM fields. This implies that the factors that affect this are sociological rather than "natural". This evidence is not indisputable and it does not tell the whole picture, but it points in a general direction.

If we return to the whizzers, let's suppose my evidence is very similar. It's not all-knowing, or all-answering but it provides a general direction. There's nothing "political" about this. The "other side" is simply not providing an actual basis of evidence. Your argument does not hold up to any burdens of truth. It's as if the person with no evidence that the whizzers spin right is furious that I should try and make decisions that assume the spinner spins left. That's what all the evidence points towards!

The argument that the email's sender makes is inherently flawed. There exist issues with the conclusions that they make because their reasoning is flawed. I am not demonizing a political opinion, or attempting to police your ability to think or express your opinion. The email fails to convince anyone because it lacks an accurate argument.

I am not trying to demonize you. I don't think this has anything to do with Right / Left. Look at the facts. Look at the data. Listen to women from the industry who time and time again have stories of all the crap they've had to wade through. When all this overwhelming evidence claims something and the only thing the other side can produce are appeals to cognitive bias and naturalism, arguing that this is "just how the world works" it makes no sense because there is no sense in the argument.

If this were "how the world naturally works", how could we have possibly normalized so quickly? Women were only allowed to vote very recently in this country, black americans were only recently systematically segregated. There are people currently alive who have seen both of these greatly disruptive forces in direct action. What argument can possibly claim that those forces have completely dissipated in the United States? What about the United States allows such forces to be dissipated so quickly? Why are these issues more prevalent in places like Silicon Valley than other countries when the United States was one of the latest to adopt the different policies?

The argument simply does hold up to intellectual rigor. It fails to answer those questions in a consistent and convincing matter. If you believe that those questions are flawed, then why is that? Again, there exists no refutation except one born from cognitive bias and a flawed world-view. That's why people are opposed to it. It just doesn't make any sense. The conclusion is not a logical continuation of the premise, and that is why people are upset. I don't know or care where you lie on the political spectrum - all I see is a flawed argument.

Specifically you say "reflective of inherent psychological differences". What inherent psychological differences? Do you truly claim that you can generally predict the way your daughter will think differently than your son from the moment they are born? Do you think that these are in way accurate or determinate of your son or daughters future interests and achievements? Do you actually believe that they will have a "fair shake" regardless of whether they are male / female / white / black? That their life will be entirely based on the way they live it, and not on the way the world looks at them? Do you further believe that we shouldn't try and correct such distinctions?

If you actually want to engage in argument, then attempt to address these issues. Instead all I see is a further appeal to bias by just grouping this as a "right-leaning" opinion. What makes this right-leaning? All this does is further divide idealogical issues as if they have to be "one side vs another". It's nonsensical and all it does is further group or divide people rather than address the objective quality of the argument.

EDIT: May I ask why I'm being down-voted? It seems that no one is even willing to acknowledge these questions, let alone address them. I'm attempting to engage with people at a fair and even level. I don't intend to lecture or degrade, but simply discuss. A resistance to this is concerning.

[1] The beauty of your vagueness is that it allows someone to inject whatever they believe is the "real cause" of the problem in the United States, perfectly allowing them to project their own bias upon your post as well. It also makes it difficult for someone else to counter it since they're not entirely sure what you're trying to say at all. An intriguing approach I must say.

Furthermore, your comment essentially only exists for you to cast doubt on the opposing viewpoint while bringing up common reactionary points of view that also have no evidence. You have no evidence that women in the United States "study literature or gender studies for fun" [1] or that "women just study something to meet men to marry". Not only are these ideas incredibly flawed, but you appear to have brought them up for no other reason that to further cast suspicion on the parent poster without actually addressing any of their claims. You just threw out ideas that people are likely to get up in a huff about.

[1] While I majored in CS in college, I also pursued a minor in critical theory. The people in that classroom were not taking those courses "for fun" any more than programmers took to their classes. They felt it was incredibly important to be able to dissect the immense amount of media we have in the world today and what it means. What are video games trying to say? Or modern films? What ideas do these share with bedrock pieces of literature that we've studied in critical theory again and again? Is it really so bad to enjoy that? Furthermore, gender studies is filled with people itching to try and discuss (and come to good conclusions about) THE VERY THINGS WE ARE ARGUING ABOUT RIGHT NOW. Isn't the fact that we spend so much time discussing such things nowadays evidence that it is a very real and important thing to study and discuss?

But the key is that the author's achievements in this unfair world are no less impressive. They still achieved great things given their lot in life, yet they should still be willing to acknowledge the many advantages they've had every step of the way. They're slight in many cases, true. But they exist and we are all aware of them.

It's a shame the author of the email feels that these policies are based on a political agenda rather than an idealogical one.

EDIT: I think it's also important to note that since this is an idealogical decision, I think it's totally within Google's power to make broad and impactful policies like this. They aren't beholden to all idealogical viewpoints within their company. They should attempt to respect political differences, but I don't think that this issue is political in any way. It's an issue of how you see the world you live in. Is it a fair world that needs no correction (or should not be corrected for some reason) or is it world that needs to be steered in a different course. Google is within their power to choose an idealogical direction for the company on such an issue, and it's up to the employee to decide if that matches with their worldview.

I may not have used entirely the correct terminology for political opinion vs. ideology (I would defer to a sociologist for this), but I think the point that remains is that Google is not aligning themselves with a viewpoint on governmental policy, but instead adjusting the way their corporate environment works to better match the company's view of how the "world works". Every company has to have such a thing due to the immense amount of power we grant large corporations in this country (imo of course).

EDIT 2: I would further encourage the parent poster to not get too reactionary themselves about the issue. Mainly people on the so-called "other side" believe that they are being demonized for a political opinion, when in reality they are being criticized for something that we believe is a very flawed way of looking at the world. Take care not to address them as much as an enemy, but as someone who has seen very different parts of the world than you. Give them a guided tour, not a lecture with snark. I empathize with your intense emotions - I myself get very emotional about this due to events in my personal life - but if you let them dominate the conversation, then people will just try and claim that you're being "too emotional" further reinforcing their flawed reasoning.

The poster's point was that commercial platforms must address the same issue of undesirables. People realized that allowing the government to prohibit certain forms of speech has the negative externality that governments also gain the power to regulate all speech. On the other hand, corporations can never feasibly have that much power. They can only limit speech on their own platform. There's always another place to speak freely if you wish.

This is why I find the "free speech" argument for not regulating internet comments intractable. It assumes that since we don't want governments regulating all speech, we don't want corporations regulating speech on their platform. But that simply doesn't make sense for idealogical reasons, which I believe was the top-level poster's point.

To actually address your point, however. There is both a breadth and depth of scientific literature, which goes much beyond this nonsense of only "pretty charts". Even reading the linked article in the above nytimes article gives the detail the poster asked for.

Scientists work hard on this. They're not "making it up". They're not lazy. They're not just trying to get rich. Have you spent the last 10 years studying climate change? Have you read all the literature on the subject? From people who have claimed that it was human-driven or not, from scientists across the world and political spectrum. Scientists have. Their entire job is to stay up to date on the current research everywhere in their field.

When you have a problem you don't understand, or don't have enough information about, or don't have a good solution for, what do you do? You ask the expert. The scientists are the experts, and the scientists have a consistent, well-explained consensus on their positions (read the IPCC report for this exact thing). People's resistance to this consensus comes because of two reasons and two reasons alone. 1.) People don't understand climate change because it moves slowly, imperceptibly, and then violently. Climate is far away from an intuitive thing to study, and people's expectations for what's 'logical' in this case is in fact, not always 'logical'. 2.) People's preexisting political affiliations or preconceptions have colored their view. They believe that any position taken by Democrats must be a conspiracy, or ascribe to whataboutism and "moderation". "They're so adamant about this position! But both sides are wrong, so they must be wrong somehow!"

It's nonsense. The fact that so called "intelligent" programmers so easily fall for this garbage is sickening. People claim to be skeptical or logical, but it's all the same stuff with a different lens. Programmers are just as flawed, make their decisions on the same mindless emotional feelings, and don't question anything.

Reading the comments on this post made me lose faith that we will ever address any difficult political and societal challenges. We'll just argue for decades about whether they "actually exist".

"What's especially intriguing is that this study reveals that people didn't like to see other people's fortunes reversed. So this isn't about selfishness or protecting what's yours. It's some kind of fear of upsetting the hierarchy that goes beyond greed."

The article then goes on to present possible hypothesis for this behavior.