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Like Peter Thiel, Tech Workers Feel Alienated by Silicon Valley ‘Echo Chamber’

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Re: Like Peter Thiel, Tech Workers Feel Alienated by Silicon Valley ‘Echo Chamber’

#501
post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was thinking more of gender diversity than racial diversity, though the racial diversity of SV is not great. There are loads of female mathematicians, doctors, civil engineers, writers, journalists, etc. so obviously language and math is not beyond women. Programming is just language and math.

> obviously language and math is not beyond women I think there's several claims here: 1) "no/very few women can be good at stem/math/language/programming." Nobody but the most comically self-parodying misogynists says that. 2) "fewer women are good at stem/math/language/programming than men." This is the "SV conservative/classic liberal" position. If equal opportunity is provided, any remaining differences in hiring…

I used to believe #2 but experience brought me to #3. People are really irrational. Racism, sexism, and ageism are really just a few of the many dumb conditioned biases that guide decision making.

A random example: taller people and people with broader shoulders make more sales.

We are intelligent minds grafted clumsily onto apes.

Re: Like Peter Thiel, Tech Workers Feel Alienated by Silicon Valley ‘Echo Chamber’

#502
post #169

I don't get it. I grew up in Silicon Valley and I work in tech, and so do many other people I know. They run the gamut from far-left socialists to libertarians to own a bunch of guns. They have all kinds of ethnic backgrounds and religious views. Some of my most libertarian/pro-gun friends have not been shy about their political views and it hasn't hurt their tech careers at all. They are far more welcome here than l…

> If he can't take the heat he should stay out of the kitchen Exactly, that's why he moved away.

He will find out soon enough that people don't like him no matter how far away from them he lives.

Re: Like Peter Thiel, Tech Workers Feel Alienated by Silicon Valley ‘Echo Chamber’

#503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you not doing the exact same thing?

No, not at all. Being tolerant of political views means accepting political views from a broad spectrum. This is being co-opted by some to reframe tolerance as being actively intolerant towards disliked views. The latter is intolerance attempting to disguise itself as tolerance. There is no tolerance paradox. For example, people's ability to advocate for the repeal of the 1st Amendment is protected by the 1st Amendme…

I disagree; there absolutely is a tolerance paradox. You chose a rather benign example, but one that would be more illustrative would be Nazism. Expressing tolerance of those principles makes them more accepted and mainstream, thus making more accepted and mainstream the intolerance they demonstrate toward nonwhites.

Re: Like Peter Thiel, Tech Workers Feel Alienated by Silicon Valley ‘Echo Chamber’

#504

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Visual Studio Code Surely Atom would be a better "typical hipster editor"?

It's whichever sucks more 100s of MBs of memory for putting a text file on screen.

So Atom then ;)

Re: Like Peter Thiel, Tech Workers Feel Alienated by Silicon Valley ‘Echo Chamber’

#505

I recently moved (fled) from downtown San Francisco to Nashville TN and couldn't be happier. I lived in SF for over 5 years, and there is absolutely a mass exodus of people and engineers leaving the bay area because of extreme ideology, hypocrisy, constant outrage, and the echo chamber that engulfs everything. Downtown San Francisco is a great place to visit for a few days but no place to start and raise a family.

I left SF before the election, I could tell early on that Trump was going to win and figured free speech clampdowns in SV would follow and I knew my work was going to be affected. I worked in search and I remember the scandal within the industry when Yahoo accepted money from the Chinese government to censor pages on the 2008 tainted milk scandal. They charged $10K per link. At the time Google was seen as a beacon of…

[deleted]

Re: Like Peter Thiel, Tech Workers Feel Alienated by Silicon Valley ‘Echo Chamber’

#506

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not about who is dominant, it's about the fundamental right of the non-dominant minority (whatever that is in any particular place and time) to express themselves and not having to hide. Equality of opportunities/rights for the particular individual wherever they may be, not attempting to get equality of outcomes for the aggregate by harming individual rights or justifying local oppression by some wider goal. If…

That’s the excuse I hear a lot from people who, upon closer inspection, simply see spouting their particular brand of extreme intolerance as something which should be utterly free of backlash. People like Peter Thiel, who seem to be some flavor of neo-nazi/white nationalist and don’t like that their noxious opinions have little remaining audience. You have every right to speak, and people have the same right to speak…

Sure, people have the right (and possibly a moral duty) to speak against those who they believe to be immoral advocates of the wrong belief.

"Feeling alienated" because others don't agree with you is a reasonable result; I mean, this is a zero sum game, all viewpoints can't be most popular everywhere. But it crosses the line when it comes to actual discrimination in the workplace, which is bad no matter whether it's done by or against the nationally dominant "tribe". If people have to shut up or face personal consequences (as opposed to getting ignored because the voice of others is considered more sane), then "You have every right to speak" has failed.

If I can say whatever I want but my political opponents (who want to implement evil policies for immoral reasons) can not, then we don't have free speech. Even if someone rabidly opposes free, inclusive, diverse society, says so, and gets punished for that - that's not a free, inclusive, diverse society; just as in that overused "Voltaire" (Evelyn Beatrice Hall) quote.

Political opponents will always consider and label each others policies and arguments as immoral and unacceptable, as you say, extreme and noxious; so unless we allow (in practice, by ensuring that people don't get punished for that by others) speech that seems immoral, unacceptable, extreme and noxious then we ensure that the political opposition doesn't get free speech. People should be able to talk in our workplace about why they like the noxious candidate and why the evil policy is needed (to achieve the immoral reason) without me or the workplace punishing them - otherwise I might not be able to talk in our workplace about why I like my candidate and why I want to have the opposite policy for incompatible moral reasons, which seem immoral and evil to them.

Re: Like Peter Thiel, Tech Workers Feel Alienated by Silicon Valley ‘Echo Chamber’

#507

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SV is very liberal, yet typically engineers (eg. EE, Mechanical, Civil, Aero, Industrial, Chemical, ...) are conservative. I wonder how many people with real engineering degrees (disclosure my BS is EE with CS minor from top school) are SV liberal.

Unable to edit my comment so adding this: http://www.machinedesign.com/news/politics-engineers "Engineers tend to view themselves as much less liberal and slightly more conservative than the general public, according to a recent survey of over 1,200 readers of MACHINE DESIGN and Electronic Design magazines. The same survey also found that engineers say they are more likely to be Republican (42.1%) or Independent (33.…

I imagine this correlation could be explained by engineers having a high average salary, and I think high salaries (on average) correlate with being conservative.

I don't have references though.

Re: Like Peter Thiel, Tech Workers Feel Alienated by Silicon Valley ‘Echo Chamber’

#508

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, if somebody is conspiring to commit a crime that isn't protected by the principles of political tolerance (or the law for that matter). However, the fact that people even think to place tolerance of conservative views on the same level as planning homicide is ridiculous. Advocating that country raise the minimum salary for H1Bs, wearing a Trump hat (when your co-workers are wearing Hilary gear), advocating for…

I don't think they're directly comparable, necessarily. But people are talking in this thread as though finding a 'political view' disgusting and not worthy of public discussion is somehow inherently wrong, and I don't think that's the case. Giving airtime or lending legitimacy to holocaust deniers, ethnostate-supporting white nationalists, anti-science FUD types, etc. is detrimental to society as a whole as well as…

> Giving airtime or lending legitimacy to holocaust deniers, ethnostate-supporting white nationalists

Pointing to the most extreme end of political spectrum as justification for silencing or ostracizing the people everywhere on that half of the spectrum is both disingenuous and terrible for the political atmosphere. Imagine the reversed situation, someone stated "our company should tolerate liberal views" and I responded by saying, "but what about the mass starvation of the Great Leap Forward, and the genocide perpetrated against the Ukrainians by the USSR?" It would be absurd, which is also how I regard this response.

Tolerating conservative views is no more an endorsement of Nazis and the holocaust than tolerating liberal views is an endorsement of the Khmer Rouge, the Holodmor, etc. Silicon Valley would be a better place without this kind of rhetoric.

> anti-science FUD types

Arguably, this could just as easily be applied to mainstream liberal views on the danger (or lack thereof) of nuclear power, GMOs, etc.

Re: Like Peter Thiel, Tech Workers Feel Alienated by Silicon Valley ‘Echo Chamber’

#509

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes but there are no far left parties in the USA to vote for.

As non-american, living outside of america (but having lived there for a year and a half starting January 2000), I concur. I still follow american politics quite a bit (too much for me to remain healthy actually) and I'm constantly bamboozled trying to comprehend what people mean by the "far left". To me it seems like any one is considered "far left" if they believe in: - treating all people, regardless of race, gend…

>believing that the more you earn, the more tax you should pay

I suspect you've fallen for some propaganda here if you think the rich pay less in taxes in the US or that Republicans think they shouldn't pay more. The top 1% already pay half of all taxes at the federal level.

The argument comes down to what proportion of income should go to taxes at various income brackets. This is hardly a settled topic even in liberal countries like France.

Re: Like Peter Thiel, Tech Workers Feel Alienated by Silicon Valley ‘Echo Chamber’

#510
post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Clinton Foundation scandal and the use of an unsecured private email server for classified emails? Probably not. This is false equivalence. People like Clinton might appear corrupt for republicans and Dick Cheney might be horrible for democrats, but Trump is in completely different plane. >workplace social scene (if not their job altogether) based on one data point that by itself means next to nothing is wrong. Wha…

>What you think is the threshold where political opinion can become personal? When your family is deported? Hilariously enough, Clinton and Obama deported far and away more people.

Trump deported more people already living in the US; Clinton and Obama deported more at the border, by enough that total deportations were higher.
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