stonecraftwolf

I agree. When I swam competitively taking even a week off was something you could feel in the water. It might only add a second or two to your splits, but you could definitely feel it. It was weirdly distressing, actually.

Yeah, but so was the rest of the country.

They did the annual sodium drop pretty soon after 9/11 and were somehow surprised when the response was different.

For smart people, they could be really, really dumb.

In fact IIRC people buy printbait considerably more than they buy actual newspapers.

I don’t know, but I do know caffeine can be a trigger for many people with PTSD. The military is probably not a great place to encourage use of substances that can trigger PTSD episodes, but they do a lot worse to soldiers, so...

Because constant surveillance of a targeted group will be systematically abused. And because next is using facial recognition to monitor other groups — LGBT, activists, political opponents.

That is extremely frightening coming from an administration that is increasingly using violent and elimitionist language to levy completely made up charges at immigrants, LGBT, and particularly political opponents.

I’d also be interested in your friend’s work.

This, unfortunately, is exactly the sort of attitude I’m talking about. This comment reflects a profound ignornance of what we currently understand about how trauma works — that there are protective elements that may be in place even in terrible circumstances, that a developing nervous system does not care if society is functioning if the people responsible for a child are not, that there are circumstances that can occur anywhere that quite literally change the brain during key developmental stages — and cloaks it in a moral judgment.

It is somewhat stunning to see someone make sweeping declarative statements about a field they know nothing about on this forum in particular. I would encourage you to read the relevant research.

Both of your scenarios assume that the issue is due to some fixable personal failing, and both of those assumptions are unfounded. “Lack of planning” is how you might describe “poor executive functioning” if you were to attach a moral weight to it; in reality, poor executive functioning is itself often a symptom of trauma, particularly complex or developmental trauma. It is also a feature of autism, particularly in how it manifests differently among women. Similarly, there are many people for whom no known weight loss method has worked without intolerable costs. (Suicidal ideation, dramatic hair loss, debilitating fatigue or cognitive deficits.) This seems to be one of those things that people often refuse to believe, instead gas lighting the hell out of the people who suffer from this. I have known people who’s compulsive behavior absolutely contributed to their weight problems (and in those cases, trauma was also a factor), but I’ve also known people who have done and tried everything, and the way they suffer is not something I would wish on anyone. We don’t yet fully understand how trauma, particularly long term trauma, affects the body, let alone the metabolism, nervous system, endocrine system, or even GI tract, but everything we are learning seems to point to profound effects. It seems incredible to assume that there might not be purely physiological mechanisms at work beyond the control of self-directed behavior.

In general, trauma symptoms encompass many more dysfunctional behaviors than is often understood by lay people, and while self-destructive behaviors in response to trauma or persistent C/PTSD are no less self-destructive because of their origins, describing them in moralist terms is actively harmful. It is often more accurate, and compassionate, to describe those behaviors as adaptations to stress that have become maladaptive. They are not moral failings; they are the result of bad conditioning. Put another way: if the only tools you have for internal regulation are shitty tools, you learn to depend on shitty tools to survive.

This does not make traumatized people any easier to be around or to help. You still need to draw your own boundaries, as you noted. But if you’re able to approach such people within your own acceptable boundaries with an open mind, and the willingness to point them towards trauma treatment that might actually be helpful, those conversations you’re not sure how to have might have better outcomes.

For further reading on trauma I’d recommend Van der Kolk, Levine, and others.

To be fair, I don’t think any company is positioned to take on the CC companies and win.

This. This thread is killing me. This might be the only comment so far to even consider women as having agency. When you give women control over their own bodies and equal enough rights to support autonomy — so, treat them like people, basically - it turns out they don’t want to have so many kids, because growing and birthing humans is incredibly taxing and traumatic. The trauma, in particular, is weirdly something that people don’t talk to young women about, and that often remains hidden from view. Reach a certain age (as a woman) and get alone in a room with other women of a certain age and the stories are absolutely harrowing. Of the women I’ve known personally who have given birth, all but one had PTSD from the experience.

I am, frankly, dreading the replies to this comment, as the thread already tilts heavily towards the sort of dehumanizing abstraction of women’s rights that often precedes more explicitly misogynist arguments cloaked in utilitarianism, so I will just say that if you consider coercing women into traumatizing and often debilitating situations to be an acceptable “cost” of a hypothetical economically optimal birth rate, I do not consider you to be capable of engaging in good faith and will not respond.

I would also suggest that concerns about “birth rate” or other abstracted metrics are often a screen for concerns — from men — about access to sex. I mean, in the context of intensifying climate change, a decreasing birth rate is not really our biggest problem as a species. It might actually be an asset.

I think the fact that these tools don't exist speaks to Twitter's priorities, though, and in a discussion of editorial control of social platforms that seems like a salient point.

How is it flawed? A TOS that discourages hate speech and enforces some sort of standard seems far less stifling than intimidation by rape and death threats.

It's funny to see people get bent out of shape at the idea that they might have to watch what they say when the consequences of saying something offensive are just that a platform might not let them publish everything they want to while there are large groups of people who already have to watch what they say because the consequences of saying something that another group disagrees with are rape threats, death threats, and harassment campaigns.

On the east coast, the mosquitos that carry Zika are found as far north as New York.

Reasonable doubt is not defined in terms of statistical confidence.

Obviously not, and that is a reading in such bad faith that it veers into trolling. For anyone reading who is not trolling: the point is that like most other people who break the social rules in some way, abusers, harassers, and yes, rapists, are often very good at publicly performing adherence to social norms while deviating from them in private. Nor do they personally identify as abusers, harassers, rapists--even if they might acknowledge the behavior that defines them as such. This isn't a new phenomenon.

The thing is, the world is full of people who are abusive or terrible when in private or one-on-one, yet adhere to social norms when in a group. Every woman I know who has reported her rapist or her harasser has had this said to her in some variation--it couldn't happen here, because we're not like that. It doesn't work that way.

I've had conversations with male friends about this that eventually boiled down to, "well, I just don't want to think the people I know and like could be capable of that." Yeah, imagine how much we hate it.

Oh God, yes, lawyer. And yes, fire him. In regards to OPs confusion about the innocent employees trepidation -- there is a reasonable fear of reprisals here. From you, from others on the team, and from the sexual harasser.

Reprisals are often not easily identified -- they can be subtle and social in nature. What often happens is that the person who reports harassment is then punished because people no longer want to talk to her. They keep her out of the loop on casual stuff, but lots of professional discussions happen in casual contexts. Over time, she gets iced out for reporting illegal behavior.

And then there is the fact that this person who has already shown a marked disrespect for women and a willingness to cross appropriate boundaries will know exactly why he has been fired. If you've ever been on the receiving end of a sustained campaign of abuse and harassment, that is not something to take lightly.

You should do everything you can to make sure she doesn't suffer for having reported illegal behavior, and you should reassure her that you'll have her back in whatever way you can. That might mean working out with her and HR what the best way to move forward is, keeping in mind that she has every reason to think she's going to get screwed over in this process, because that's what happens the vast majority of the time.

I'd say it's actually a huge vote of confidence in you that she brought this to you immediately.

I think we may have cross-posted our replies/edits. Honestly, I think the best you can do is approach it with an open mind, which you seem to be doing now. A big part of my irritation was the dismissiveness that I think originates in the common fallacy that I described in my other reply. But it's also...I mean. People--women, especially--have been talking about these sorts of problems with social networks for as long as they've existed. I think if you want your app to be useful for everyone, you have to consider the experiences of...everyone. The only way I've found to do that in my own work is by talking to as many kinds of people as possible, and asking them specific questions where appropriate. I've tried to provide you with some of those answers already, but I would encourage you to keep asking questions.

I think part of the problem here is the fallacy that if you can't eliminate a problem entirely then it's not your responsibility at all. This seems to be a common approach for some tech companies that deal with social interactions, and it's obviously convenient to simply wash your hands of something, but it's an abdication of responsibility. it's also just not how life works. No risk can be completely eliminated; it doesn't mean we don't take whatever steps are available to us to mitigate those risks anyway. People wear seat belts, they buy insurance, they use all sorts of tools to help them mitigate risk. If you make the decision not to provide your users with the tools they need to mitigate risk on your platform (or wherever), you are very much making a decision about what experiences and what users you value. In our current culture, that often means it's a hostile place for women. Again, that's a choice, but obviously it has consequences.

Baron, I've read your responses again, and I do think you are sincerely trying. But I also think you have massively missed the point. I don't think you are unique in this respect; in fact, I think you have a lot of company, and that's...kind of the problem. I appreciate whatever efforts you can make, and I really hope that you can try to seek out feedback from as many kinds of users as possible.

"Picking and choosing" is not remotely the same thing as "screening," and that you conflate the two indicates that you either didn't read my comment in good faith or you missed the point by an almost insurmountable margin.

I'd urge you to listen to the needs of your users. You managed to dismiss this out of hand in a way that implies you haven't thought much about women at all. Obviously you don't have to, and you wouldn't be alone there. But this is quite literally a case of a woman giving you feedback about something that many (if not most, by another large margin) women consider vitally important. (The response amongst my group of friends have so far ranged from "unbelievable" to "Jesus Christ.") Do what you want with that information, but don't dismiss it as "wrong" or irrelevant because you believe it applies to all areas of life. You don't have to care about female users, but know that it's obviously a choice.

ETA: in response to the comments below:

1. No one suggested that risk should be completely eliminated, or indeed that this was possible. You're responding to a straw man argument. Which...also doesn't seem in good faith.

2. If you don't understand that someone may screen a group for potential danger without applying further filters ("picking and choosing"), I'm...not sure what else to say except that you obviously have never found yourself in such a position. It seems trivially obvious to me that a user who has already self selected as someone who is looking for a service to match them up with new people would be perfectly capable of deciding to continue in a group after they'd screened it for potential dangers, since that's what they signed up for. People are capable of moderation. In this case, I don't want to be in a group with someone I've seen in a violent situation, and I would rather they hadn't gotten that automatic notification email, either.

This is really very basic stuff.

I witnessed an incident of domestic violence involving the other person in my group. I don't want to go into more detail than that for reasons that should be obvious.

I disagree with your limited use case. IME there are many stages of life where you might need to refresh or replenish your friend group. Aside from moving to a new place, people complain about the difficulty of making friends after college, when their friends get married or have kids, if they're stuck in a job without peers, after a divorce, etc etc etc.

I thought this was a cool idea, and so I just signed up, but I was so alarmed by the process that I made an HN account to address this here.

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but you drop people into randomly assigned groups of people who live within a certain distance without giving the user a chance to screen that group for people they already may know and need to avoid?

This is such an obvious potential problem that it didn't occur to me that your service wouldn't account for it. In my case it's at least not a dangerous situation, although I'm betting the other person in my new group is really not going to be pleased to get this particular notification email. But I imagine overlap will be a problem, particularly when your userbase is still small.

I have to ask--are there any women working at your company? Anyone over 25?

This may seem like a nuisance question to you, but for many women I know (and for myself), the inability to screen potential groups is an immediate dealbreaker. It's a safety issue at it's most extreme, but it's also just common sense. For many women this is an absolute dealbreaker in a way men might not understand.