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Stuff You Can't Say in Silicon Valley

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Re: Stuff You Can't Say in Silicon Valley

#171

Post by billfruit »

jonathankoren wrote: post #101
toomuchtodo wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m talking from an employment perspective where your wage is on the line. The Supreme Court has ruled in the US that there is no exception to free speech for hate speech. If this is not preferred, your argument is with the judicial branch or Congress and a constitutional amendment, not me.

You’re confusing the state with a private actor. Yes, private actors have a lot of power in this world, but that’s not what the law is about. The law is about the government, not private actors. If you don’t allow businesses to fire people, then you’re compelling speech. Think about it. Say you’re a restaurant and you have a waiter that habitually refers to guests with a constant stream of expitives that would make a…

I would say it is not about private vs government, it is a question of legal Vs illegal. IANAL, If my recollection is correct, all speech, except those containing immediate/imminent threat/ incitement of violence is legal. That is the protection that Constitution affords the citizens. If companies are placing further restrictions on what can be said at the threat of people loosing their jobs, then they are not affording the same kind of protection that citizens enjoy viz the government, to be applied regarding the employees to themselves.

Re: Stuff You Can't Say in Silicon Valley

#172

Post by tzs »

eksu wrote: post #71
lotsofpulp wrote: post #10

Trump is literally putting the health of my country's citizens at risk for political posturing, I think animosity towards him is easily warranted: https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/cdc-g... Apparently, there's nothing better our tax dollars can be doing than destroying some of the most important and successful organizations human civilization has managed to create.

You are literally part of the phenomena described. This, "I'm right, you're wrong, this is the only lens to look at this through" positioning is really bad. In Policy Debate (CEDA, Cross-Examination) it's part of the sport to take mundane issues like creating a tax credit for electric vehicles and both teams try to extrapolate out to the worst possible impacts. Nuclear war, mass famine, extinction, etc. It seems to m…

> Sure, people can hold animosity toward Trump, just like most trump supporters hold animosity towards Secretary Clinton. But you shouldn't extend this animosity towards the people that support that candidate, and you shouldn't convince yourself that there aren't two sides to every issue, because there are.

Sure, every issue has at least two sides...but aren't there issues where one side is so wrong that it is reasonable to conclude that those who take that side have something wrong with them?

For example, at the risk of having someone who doesn't understand the nuances of Godwin's law trying to incorrectly apply it here, take the issue of whether or not the Nazi attempt to implement an answer to their perceived problems with Jews was a good solution. If someone says the Nazi solution was a good one, am I supposed to just say "Oh well...two sides to every issue! We'll have to agree to disagree!" and just ignore that they support genocide?

Or how about someone who believes that the Earth is flat? They dismiss evidence such as the curvature you can see from a high altitude plane, photos from space, and everything else that says it is not as fake that a vast conspiracy of government and academia is forcing upon us. Two sides to every issue, right, so I should not infer that the person is an idiot and so hold their opinion on other matters lower than I normally would?

Yes, there may be two sides to every issue, but what side you take does say something about you. On issues of fact, it says something about your ability to understand facts and the reason from them. On more subjective issues which position says something about your morals and ethics.

Re: Stuff You Can't Say in Silicon Valley

#173

Post by BRAlNlAC »

strangecasts wrote: post #153
eksu wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are literally part of the phenomena described. This, "I'm right, you're wrong, this is the only lens to look at this through" positioning is really bad. In Policy Debate (CEDA, Cross-Examination) it's part of the sport to take mundane issues like creating a tax credit for electric vehicles and both teams try to extrapolate out to the worst possible impacts. Nuclear war, mass famine, extinction, etc. It seems to m…

But you shouldn't extend this animosity towards the people that support that candidate, and you shouldn't convince yourself that there aren't two sides to every issue, because there are. That doesn't mean those sides are equal . Take anti-vaxxing and young-earth creationism: do they offer any truth or useful insights for policy proposals? e: Another point: why should I not hold animosity towards hucksters who hamper…

No, but those people get to have a say in our government. So in some ways yes, they are equal. If you want that to change, be a missionary and convince them, but to deny them representation is violence upon a class.

Re: Stuff You Can't Say in Silicon Valley

#174

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

mperham wrote: post #134
electrograv wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I 100% agree with your premise that “the more voices the better” (i.e. the fewer voices that are silenced, the better). What you describe certainly covers much of what’s happening, but something else is happening too: Voices are being silenced. And to respond to your opening sentence, I don’t mean anyone is silenced physically (who does that?), but rather psychologically, culturally, and socially. That’s not a good t…

Let's be clear here. We're not talking about where to eat lunch or controversial scientific theories, a la Galileo or Darwin. We're talking about "is race X smarter than race Y", "is gender X smarter than Y". Bigoted ideas. Some have been comfortable espousing bigoted views. Now they are forced to think about what they say and how they say it. As a white man, this has affected my own behavior (for the better IMO): I'…

> We're talking about "is race X smarter than race Y", "is gender X smarter than Y". Bigoted ideas.

Let's hypothetically say that a sapient alien species, with the full range of emotions and thoughts a human being can have, was discovered that was also demonstrably not as smart as human beings after centuries of scientific study. Would saying "humans are smarter than these aliens" be bigoted?

Flip it around. If different sapient aliens were demonstrated to be more intelligent than human beings by an order of magnitude, would it be bigoted to say "These other aliens are smarter than humans."?

In other words, can facts be bigoted?

> The Paradox of Tolerance shows we must be intolerant of such bigotry.

Must we? If you've studied the paradox of tolerance, you should know that it has no universally agreed upon answer.

Re: Stuff You Can't Say in Silicon Valley

#175

Post by sn9 »

joshuamorton wrote: post #122
electrograv wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn’t it be far more effective (and safe) to defeat bad ideas with evidence and reason?

It would, unfortunately that doesn't work. If it did, no one would believe that the Earth is flat.

That's a completely insane counterargument.

Care to bet what the historical trend has been for the percentage of the population that claim the earth is flat? If evidence didn't work it would be flat or random.

Re: Stuff You Can't Say in Silicon Valley

#176

Post by 21 »

I'm in London, and the day after the US elections we needed to name an internal project, so we just named it Trump. One of the team members also had for a while a red Trump hat on his desk (if he was alt-right in any way, I couldn't detect it). None of us was a US citizen.

I'm genuinely curious if such things would be accepted in a SV software company.

Re: Stuff You Can't Say in Silicon Valley

#177

Post by jerf »

ender7 wrote: post #103
electrograv wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I 100% agree with your premise that “the more voices the better” (i.e. the fewer voices that are silenced, the better). What you describe certainly covers much of what’s happening, but something else is happening too: Voices are being silenced. And to respond to your opening sentence, I don’t mean anyone is silenced physically (who does that?), but rather psychologically, culturally, and socially. That’s not a good t…

On the contrary, silencing voices is a necessary thing. All societies have to determine what speech is allowed and what isn't. There are lots of things you can say in general American society that will get you censured. Claiming that black people are biologically inferior to white people, for example. Claiming that women are biologically inferior to men, though? Some still seem fond of that one. This all boils down t…

Silicon Valley is not silencing the voices that claim that the round earth conspiracy is brought to you by the lizardoids that rule the Earth because their spaceships are spraying you with radioactive toxins in the contrails. Silicon Valley is silencing the voices that are saying things that literally billions of people on planet Earth believe, and on the order of half of the country that Silicon Valley happens to be located in believes. In some cases quite a bit more than half, if some surveys are to be believed.

I'm seeing this line a lot on HN today, but I think it's a dangerous rationalization of why it's OK to take away their free speech rights, and absolutely, positively nothing more. There is no other philosophical virtue to this position.

I think it's a reasonable line to say that if Silicon Valley is outright silencing something a billion people believe, and doing it quite frequently, there is quite likely a problem. You are welcome to deplore the fact that a billion people believe it, and will probably find another billion people standing with you on whatever matter you are deploring, because that's how this goes.

"When people walk around loudly complaining about how they can't say anything anymore without being specific as to what they want to say, it suggests that perhaps they know that those positions are not really defensible."

No, it's because they're avoiding an obvious trap. You trick someone into naming the list of censurable thoughts, then you immediately grab a big ol' mob of censorious folk anxious to score some political points (and they are readily available and hot to trot) and start censoring them because they said the bad things. It is impossible to name the topics being censored without the conversation immediately becoming exactly the one you are trying to turn it to, about how the censored topics really deserve it, and so it's not really censorship, right?

First commit to not censoring the topics, then perhaps you can get some discussion going. In the meantime, you are being deprived of that discussion, and perhaps should be less confident that you understand the issues than you think you do, because... how would you know? You probably don't actually know what your opposition thinks. What you know is almost certainly (statistically speaking, based on my interactions with the ever-more-doctrinaire and ever-more-insular HN) what your side wants you to think the opposition thinks, which is very, very far from the same thing.

Further, I acknowledge that ender7 may not personally have the power to censor very much. However, Silicon Valley as a whole does, and it is actively using it, and it is not only not ashamed, it has used faulty logic like this to convince itself it is being positively virtuous in the process of statistically removing the opinions it doesn't like from the Internet.

Re: Stuff You Can't Say in Silicon Valley

#178

Post by rectang »

Veelox wrote: post #167
rectang wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what's happening: bad ideas are being defeated. But if those bad ideas are still near and dear to you even while society moves on, it feels bad. Not everyone has to be persuaded. Some will have to be left behind.

I think part of the issue is the tactics. The original post was pointing out that the way that bad ideas are being defeated is through force, not through reason. If the law says "Be happy or else" everyone is "happy". The problem being pointed out is that SV is becoming a place where you must believe the right things or else. The or else part is what makes it McCarthyistic.

It's hard for me to get worked up over this when the injustices suffered by those who are now being heard were many times worse.

Re: Stuff You Can't Say in Silicon Valley

#179

Post by gkop »

dang wrote: post #141
superquest wrote: post #117

This post has 195 points in an hour, and it is currently #20 on the front page. Why isn't it higher?

For the usual reasons: user flags, software, and a moderation penalty. The latter can vary in weight but at the moment is a small downweight applied to follow-up discussions that don't contain significant new information. The software involved is HN's flamewar detector a.k.a. overheated discussion detector. All of these are typical responses to articles with a large heat-to-substance ratio.

> All of these are typical responses to articles with a large heat-to-substance ratio.

To save others from having to look it up themselves: according to [0], it took 13 hours for Sam's article to fall off the front page, while this article fell off after about 1 hour.

dang didn't say it was ONLY heat-to-substance ratio causing the downmod. Clearly, there are other factors than heat-to-substance ratio causing it though. It's hard to dismiss the suspicion that either "embarrasses YC president" could be a factor in downmodding this article or that Sam's article was not downmodded in order to avoid embarassing Sam :(

HN is tremendously influential in tech culture, so even a tiny difference in moderation of similar articles reflecting opposing points of view could compound to a very destructive effect.

[0] http://hhn.domador.net/

Re: Stuff You Can't Say in Silicon Valley

#180

Post by dahdum »

vbtemp wrote: post #67

I'm glad it mentions H-1Bs. Similarly to identity-conservatives, for whom belief in global warming is heresy and tax cuts are gospel, I believe there is a similar phenomenon with identity-progressives around immigration, in this case specifically the H-1B program. There seems to be some belief in its sacred power that is not to be questioned and not to be curtailed. As I see it, big businesses - not least the major t…

H1B programs at the top tech companies aren't the problem, they're hiring the best they can and paying them well. It's the H1B mills and other abusers of the program (like Disney) that are dragging it into the political limelight. Reform is needed but ending it would be a terrible loss.
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