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On managing outrage in Silicon Valley

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Re: On managing outrage in Silicon Valley

#181

Post by yesbabyyes »

cm2187 wrote: post #78
OoTheNigerian wrote: post #34

Silicon Valley controls a lot of the world's communication and we should be really worried if silencing of unpopular opinions is the order of the day. As a "minority" I perhaps disagree with a lot of what this person has written but my reaction to it will be to counter his arguments with a better one rather than go on to silence him. -- I have already written about this somewhat during the past elections. https://med…

And calling "fake news" any opinion they disagree with. I find it pretty problematic that Facebook wants to police the political debate. Kind of like if gmail started blocking emails sent to a gmail account if it disagrees with its content.

> Kind of like if gmail started blocking emails sent to a gmail account if it disagrees with its content.

I'm pretty sure that gmail's superior spam filter was one of its big initial selling points?

Re: On managing outrage in Silicon Valley

#182

Post by 11thEarlOfMar »

Likewise, are they different enough to justify the massive disparity in nursing?

As of 2011, 90% of nurses in the US were women[0]. That's even more skewed than tech. Moreover, the average income of a nurse in Silicon Valley is $100k. To my knowledge, there is no outcry or movement to bring more men into the nursing profession.

[0] https://www.census.gov/people/io/files/Men_in_Nursing_Occupa...

Re: On managing outrage in Silicon Valley

#183

Post by evgen »

rcoveson wrote: post #142
abhi3 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whether there exist biological/psychological differences between sexes that affect career choices is a discussion that needs to be had in an academic setting rather than a political setting as the author sought to do (read the first section). Secondly, it does not belong in the work place where it is rightly perceived as an aggression by the female coworkers (Telling them the bar was lowered to recruit them, they are…

Was the bar lowered to recruit female or minority candidates? That's not a rhetorical question and I don't presume to have an answer to it. It was, however, the subject of the original memo, which suggests that some policies or proposed policies exist that lower standards for diversity candidates in the author's opinion. One example is, in the author's words: "Setting org level OKRs for increased representation." If…

I think you are suffering from the same delusion that many have regarding this so-called bar. At the level of recruiting done by the big-five you end up with a pool of candidates who all make it over "the bar." You only need a couple, so now you get to decide on additional criteria like how well they seem to work in teams, how well they can communicate with their peers, how easily they can adapt to new situations and shifting goals...all things that have very little to do with the pure technical criteria that you initially filter for, but which seem to end up contributing more to any particular candidate's impact on the org than simple coding abilities.

tl;dr they don't need to lower the bar to diversify the company.

Re: On managing outrage in Silicon Valley

#184

Post by CalChris »

hncens0rship wrote: post #52
Meekro wrote: post #39

"If Galileo had said that people in Padua were ten feet tall, he would have been regarded as a harmless eccentric. Saying the earth orbited the sun was another matter. The church knew this would set people thinking." -- Paul Graham, What You Can't Say [1] "And worse than simply thinking these things or saying them in private, you’ve said them in a way that’s tried to legitimize this kind of thing across the company,…

SV/YC culture is extremely toxic, and people hate having that pointed out to their faces. edit: sv/yc are toxic for how they actively shame outsider opinions, then headhunt the individuals who put said opinions forward. from sama's what i heard from trump supporters, "Almost everyone I asked was willing to talk to me, but almost none of them wanted me to use their names—even people from very red states were worried a…

Neither YC (you probably meant HN) nor SV are toxic.

Re: On managing outrage in Silicon Valley

#185

Post by CodeCube »

shaftoe wrote: post #89
drewrv wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people don't want to work with jerks, and in a libertarian ideal would be free to choose whether to do so. Most companies choose to get rid of jerks for a ton of sensible reasons. In a libertarian ideal they'd be free to choose who to hire/fire. Large groups calling for someone to lose their job is totally in line with libertarian ideals. Nobody is calling for government regulation, this is just the (employment)…

That's all well and good, but one of the core instincts of libertarianism is a deep distrust of angry mobs. I don't think the SV crowd gets how reasonable the author looks to everyone else and how unreasonable the angry rants on Twitter look.

"everyone else" ... I don't know man, I haven't been ranting about this on twitter, and I find the author's document to be completely unreasonable, and many of the arguments against it to be entirely reasonable.

Maybe this just says more about our individual social groups ... or one of us is wrong about how prevalent one viewpoint is vs the other. Could be me :)

Re: On managing outrage in Silicon Valley

#186

Post by rhapsodic »

rhapsodic wrote: post #179

No matter what side of this debate you're on, I don't think you can argue against the notion that there is only one side of it whose adherents can feel completely free to express their opinions or argue their case without fear of retaliation. Many stupid, unsupportable statements have been made by people on the left side, but I've yet to see much in the way of internet rage mobs formed against them. I think if google…

The parent of this post is getting a lot of upvotes, and a lot of downvotes.

Re: On managing outrage in Silicon Valley

#187

Post by mcguire »

I'm a little confused when he writes, "Yet a newer form of discrimination is starting to greatly alarm me, and that’s discrimination against anyone with a point of view that’s deemed offensive to the tech majority."

This has been the case for as long as I've been in the industry. Heck, it's probably older than the industry. Simply saying, "there’s still far too little diversity" has been enough to get you mocked, downvoted, shouted down, and generally dismissed for decades. There's nothing at all new about it.

Re: On managing outrage in Silicon Valley

#188

Post by hncens0rship »

CalChris wrote: post #184
hncens0rship wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SV/YC culture is extremely toxic, and people hate having that pointed out to their faces. edit: sv/yc are toxic for how they actively shame outsider opinions, then headhunt the individuals who put said opinions forward. from sama's what i heard from trump supporters, "Almost everyone I asked was willing to talk to me, but almost none of them wanted me to use their names—even people from very red states were worried a…

Neither YC (you probably meant HN) nor SV are toxic.

Yes they are. Y Combinator and its employees, the Hacker News community at large, and the SV/SF tech companies them and their ilk occupy, are all toxic. Is that clear enough for you? Don't put words in people's mouths.

Re: On managing outrage in Silicon Valley

#189

Post by asciicircum »

Could someone opposed to the arguments the manifesto makes explain to me what quotes caused them to strongly dislike it?

Reading the reactions to the manifesto I'm left feeling like I'm taking crazy pills. I must have read a different manifesto.

AFAICT the main idea of the manifesto is that biological differences between men and women account for part of the representation gap. This seems to be perfectly logical and fair to me. Whether the explained part is significant or just a fraction of a percent should definitely be discussed. The available version of the manifesto not having its sources makes this a lot harder though.

> The text of the post is reproduced in full below, with some minor formatting modifications. Two charts and several hyperlinks are also omitted.

If your offense is with the manifesto misrepresenting the amount of the gap explained by biological differences I can relate to your point of view and this post is not directed at you (which quotes of the manifesto lead to this impression would still be interesting to hear).

If not, I would really like to understand where you are coming from. The manifesto does not seem sexist (e.g. representing women in tech as inadequate) to me. Some quotes from the manifesto to support my claim:

> I value diversity and inclusion, am not denying that sexism exists, and don’t endorse using stereotypes.

> Differences in distributions of traits between men and women may in part explain why we don’t have 50% representation of women in tech and leadership. Discrimination to reach equal representation is unfair, divisive, and bad for business

> Many of these [biological] differences are small and there’s significant overlap between men and women, so you can’t say anything about an individual given these population level distributions.

> I hope it’s clear that I’m not saying that diversity is bad, that Google or society is 100% fair, that we shouldn’t try to correct for existing biases, or that minorities have the same experience of those in the majority.

> I’m also not saying that we should restrict people to certain gender roles; I’m advocating for quite the opposite: treat people as individuals, not as just another member of their group (tribalism).

Please help me understand.

Re: On managing outrage in Silicon Valley

#190

Post by tripplethrendo »

wutbrodo wrote: post #61
pnathan wrote: post #12

What happens when the lone voice is in the right, and the mass of people are in the wrong, and all of the preponderance of current science and wisdom is against the lone voice? It's no great stretch to find examples through history of this in different social contexts.

This is what's so insane to me about how willing people are to throw away the foundations of civilized society for short-term political victories. Especially for those who claim to be fighting for the marginalized, it should be obvious to anyone who's not a complete idiot that the marginalized are those who suffer in the long run when dissenting speech is punished. Not to get nakedly political, but for someone who be…

Couldn't agree more. The polarization I've seen in the last two years is just insane to me. I've always been pretty firmly in the center, and I feel like it's a lot of work to stay there.
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