Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

An Update to Our Community and an Apology

meta.stackexchange.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

321–330 of 424 posts

Re: An Update to Our Community and an Apology

#321

Post by atq2119 »

qqwwqqww wrote: post #316
henrikschroder wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Think of special pronouns as names. All the etiquette we have surrounding names apply equally to pronouns. It's not expected to remember someone's name if you've only met them briefly, but the more you've interacted with the person, the more embarrassing not remembering their name becomes. Mis-naming someone intentionally, repeatedly, is rude and quickly moves into harassment territory. But the flipside is also true,…

The use of hurtful nicknames in the workplace can indeed be considered harassment in the eyes of the law and/or polite society. That being said, not sure pronouns are indistinguishable from names. As a species, we evolved sexual dimorphism alongside a visual apparatus to detect the dimorphism. We are able to tell a male from a female at a glance with high accuracy, even in presence of elaborated disguises. Being aske…

> For name tags with less obvious genders, most people would default to gender neutral.

This is a bit of a tangent, but I don't think this is really true yet. There are plenty of online forums where I see people using "he" when referring to users with ambiguous nicks. It's probably changing over time though.

Re: An Update to Our Community and an Apology

#322

Post by atq2119 »

chipotle_coyote wrote: post #293
michannne wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But I do know that knowingly and actively hurting people "because society does it too" when you could trivially avoid it is reprehensible My argument isn't "do it because society does it too", it's we already have systems in place to give people the therapeutic treatment they need to get past issues like this, which are issues, because it is unfeasible to expect society to shape itself around coddling that person's…

So let me get this straight: - You meet Gabrielle, and call her Gabbi. - She says "I don't like that nickname, could you use Bree?" - You say, "No, I'm going to call you Gabbi, because you should not expect society to shape itself around coddling your beliefs, GABBI." Honestly, you probably wouldn't do that, right? I mean, maybe you would, but it'd... kind of make you a jerk. It would be a stupid, stupid hill to die…

Pronouns are different from names because there is a very strong correlation between pronouns and certain physical aspects of people.[0] What is being asked of people in the gendering debate is to go against this correlation sometimes. Our minds are built on pattern matching and working with such correlations, so it really shouldn't be a surprise that asking people to go against it is going to tick some of them off: you're asking them to enter into a state of cognitive dissonance, which can be unpleasant.

Names, on the other hand, are really quite arbitrary and independent of physical attributes. So yes, there's an important difference.

[0] I believe these kinds of correlation are what people intuitively mean when they talk of biological gender and the like, which make most of the responses against this argument miss the point...

Re: An Update to Our Community and an Apology

#323

Post by codezero »

mosselman wrote: post #96
pariahHN wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, in some instances you can define extremeness relative to alternatives, not number of believers. Execution as a punishment is more extreme than a fine regardless of how many people favor execution over fines. I would argue that generally a position being extreme results in fewer believers, not that fewer believers results in a position being extreme.

> Execution as a punishment is more extreme than a fine regardless of how many people favor execution over fines. Not if you are talking about fining or destroying sentient robots. The sentient robot probably has a pretty good back-up system of his mind, so he can just respawn in a different body, his bank account, though, is singular and coupled to the identity that its brain can prove to be. So executing such a rob…

01010111 01101000 01100101 01110010 01100101 00100000 01100100 01101111 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101 00100000 01110011 01110100 01101111 01110010 01100101 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100010 01100001 01100011 01101011 01110101 01110000 01110011 00101110

Re: An Update to Our Community and an Apology

#324

Post by goatinaboat »

tenpies wrote: post #181
djsumdog wrote: post #16

-542 before it was locked. That's incredible. People are really really afraid to talk about this particular topic (which they don't mention in the statement), because this type of call-out to be banned happens a lot. The book "The Coddling of the American Mind" is an amazing book that documents how this is happening in academia, and it's happening on the software world too. Most people in our industry, in the US, EU…

> I'd like to think the majority of people just want to live and be kind to each other What you're getting to is the Golden rule in almost all human civilizations: treat others as you would like to be treated. The problem is when this rule broke down because the majority's "would like to be treated" became a hate crime to a small, but vociferous, radical contingent of the population.

You could surely express the golden rule as “A won’t tell B what to identify as and B won’t tell A what words they can and can’t use”. But this requires both A and B to participate.

There is another group C, overlapping with B, people scrutinising your every word waiting for something, anything they can use, out of context, to get you fired. That’s problematic.

Re: An Update to Our Community and an Apology

#325

Post by natecavanaugh »

yakshaving_jgt wrote: post #320
natecavanaugh wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll be honest, I don't find the Platinum Rule at all a compelling argument against the Golden Rule. There are many cases of people in power claiming that their behavior is what the other person "really" wants (such as women "really" want to be treated poorly, or the slaves really prefer subservience as it's their destined station in life). And who am I to be able to speak about what someone else wants? It's a full t…

> such as women "really" want to be treated poorly This depends how you define “poorly”. Some progressives would say all sex work is harmful to women. Some sex workers who are women would ask how you dare try to rob them of their agency. It’s not that simple. > or the slaves really prefer subservience as it's their destined station in life Again, this depends on how you define “slavery”. To some, all factory workers…

> It’s not that simple.

I agree, which is why I think it's pointless to try to conjecture on what other people want, and jump straight to how I would want to be treated. And of course, even that is tricky, but it's by far a more reliable set of information than guessing the myriad of preferences any given person may have at any given moment. Again, there's still the possibility of getting it wrong, but if I don't know myself as well as anyone possibly could, how can I think that guessing at what others want is going to somehow be more reliable?

So yes, it's not that simple, but the Golden rule is about as simple as you can reliably go on. Anything else seems to me to be bordering on the presumption of omniscience.

Re: An Update to Our Community and an Apology

#326

Post by BlueTemplar »

BrandoElFollito wrote: post #64
luckylion wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I also wonder if scraping the Q&As and posting elsewhere would be some sort of legal violation? The (unilateral) relicensing was another recent issue, but generally not. All user contributions are licensed CC-BY-SA 3.0 so I don't see legal reasons stopping you. Google won't send you any traffic, though, because it will be duplicate content and the original has a gajillion links pointing to it.

And a gajillion comments on code # see https://stackoverflow/something to understand the next two lines And then one day SO closes. (I saw some software build pipes explicitly looking for SO comments and rejecting the code)

I link to websites when I copy someone else's code, for attribution. How do these "build pipes" expecting me to do it instead if the code is from stack exchange ?

Re: An Update to Our Community and an Apology

#327

Post by tmp20191006cars »

damnyou wrote: post #281
tmp20191006cars wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not among this group we speak of, but I will never accept that view of them. They are not malicious, they are just different, and we should be tolerant of them even if they are not tolerant of transgenders.... in the same way that we are tolerant of Islam even though Islam is not tolerant of women's rights. I consider them (Christians) to be mentally ill what with all that christian god stuff they preach. Do you…

The goal should be to shift the overton window towards greater justice, not simply broaden it. Yes, a view that all Christians are mentally ill has no place in workplaces either. This does not mean that you cannot privately hold such views, but that you should not act in the workplace in ways that show you hold those views (so you should not misgender a trans person, for example).

My mother is in her 70s. She won't willingly knowingly recognize a trans person to be of the "gender" they claim, because she honestly believes deep in her mind that doing so is a sin against God and man, and she would be forfeiting her place in heaven. She wouldn't hurt a fly but she's between a rock and a hard place. The only emotion she ever expresses is guilt. I think she is delusional (mentally ill) and I blame religion. If some website decided to kick her off because of a silly pronoun, even though she was behaving entirely sincerely, because IMHO they are intolerant of her viewpoint (and she is not an isolated case), then I would be inclined to leave said website as well.

I will not reply to anymore of your comments as you have expressed your view that I shouldn't be allowed to, and I don't want to offend you any further.

Re: An Update to Our Community and an Apology

#328

Post by goatinaboat »

shadowgovt wrote: post #143
goatinaboat wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is true but SE gained a critical mass of answers by encouraging one set of behaviours through its points and badges system, then pulled a bait-and-switch and told those subject matter experts that they were no longer welcome. Wrong demographic, see. SE is dying. The quality of the questions is falling because being welcoming to new users is deemed more important now than the newcomers absorbing the culture. Ques…

How does one get to the Q&A on GitHub? When I Google a question, an SE link is still the most common thing I'll get (especially for error codes).

Search issues and PRs - that’s where the real knowledge is now.

When I Google a question, an SE link is still the most common thing

Yep because SE gained critical mass, and in its earlier incarnation was often linked to from outside. But in its present form recent question are unanswered and old answers are obsolete. Because all the people who actually did the work were told by SE that they had served their purpose and were no longer welcome.

Re: An Update to Our Community and an Apology

#329

Post by simo7 »

henrikschroder wrote: post #249
asdjlkadsjklads wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes i consider myself lucky that i don't know anyone seeking special pronouns - because i imagine i would repeatedly use what i visually see, not what they request. These days i seek to find a gender neutral word i can get into the habit of using (it, or they, or something similar) , for fear of mis-nouning someone. Though, i also have the fear that if i use something neutral, when someone requested a specific…

Think of special pronouns as names. All the etiquette we have surrounding names apply equally to pronouns. It's not expected to remember someone's name if you've only met them briefly, but the more you've interacted with the person, the more embarrassing not remembering their name becomes. Mis-naming someone intentionally, repeatedly, is rude and quickly moves into harassment territory. But the flipside is also true,…

> Think of special pronouns as names.

That's exactly the problem: pronouns are not names for a reason.

Pronouns are meant to be a finite set of words that can group an infinite set of other words, names.

In many languages gender is the criteria to form those groups. It 's a natural choice if you think of gender as a binary category.

Once you introduce the concept of gender fluidity the most logical solution is to introduce a residual pronoun that includes everybody who doesn't fit in the male/female dichotomy.

To adopt instead a inifinite set of pronouns means to poorly re-engineer a language. It's an extremely important and complex common good, we shouldn't be tinkering with it so lightheartedly.

Re: An Update to Our Community and an Apology

#330

Post by yakshaving_jgt »

cc81 wrote: post #132
dr_dshiv wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an American in Europe, I honestly think this is uniquely American.

It is not, it exists in Sweden in a way as well.

Only because Sweden is obsessed with American media and culture.
Post reply on HN