Speaking Freely: Why I resigned from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation • Hacker News Board

Re: Speaking Freely: Why I resigned from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation

#121

Post by bartread » Mon, Jan 03, 2022, 7:55 PM UTC

commandlinefan wrote: post #101

badRNG wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I didn't word it well enough, but I intend to comment on a broad category of discussion that I don't think is necessarily inappropriate according to the guidelines, but tends to produce unproductive, hostile conversations. I understand that anti-diversity blogs often gain a lot of traction with a particular subset of HN readers, but it consistently winds up producing flame wars and can make HN a less friendly p…

It seems to me that HN is the last place you can discuss this topic - it's just preemptively deleted on Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, etc.

Tend to agree.

And, yes, there are people who get really hostile with these kinds of conversations (HN is a decent-sized community, so not surprising, and it's not always the same people in every discussion so I'd like to avoid any broad brush interpretation of this remark), but I think HN is one of the last places where it is possible, online, to have difficult discussions about challenging issues. That's an incredibly important, although possibly (originally) unintended, role.

On a personal note, I value hearing different perspectives, and often come away from HN discussions feeling like I've learned something, so I am against squelching it.

Re: Speaking Freely: Why I resigned from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation

#122

Post by monkeybutton » Mon, Jan 03, 2022, 7:55 PM UTC

mikepurvis wrote: post #36

newsclues wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never fill out the preferred pronoun section that have suddenly made their way into forms.

Isn't preferred pronouns kind of orthogonal to the rest of the stuff? It has nothing to do with attempting to ensure representation and is instead about addressing a person in the manner of their choosing, akin to asking a woman if she prefers Ms, Miss, Mme, Mrs, etc. I expect it's probably way more appropriate in most contexts to directly ask a person what their preferred pronouns are than to ask what their gender i…

>asking a woman if she prefers Ms, Miss, Mme, Mrs

This was at one point a controversial topic. Conservatives objected to the new construct of neutral meaning "Ms" and feminists objected to "Miss" and "Mrs" because they indicated marital status. The argument being that viewing a woman's name with those titles was reducing her to an object who's worth was determined by if she was available or not to men.

Re: Speaking Freely: Why I resigned from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation

#123

Post by nefitty » Mon, Jan 03, 2022, 7:55 PM UTC

CapitalistCartr wrote: post #30

Except at political groups to which I belong, I am almost always the left-most person in the room. The Lefts greatest weakness is an enthusiasm for splintering over small matters of doctrine. Identity politics, tribalism over principle, virtue signaling, whatever fad this is, it's deeply hurting progress.

Peter Thiel (gay man), Caitlyn Jenner (trans woman) and Kanye West (black man) all publicly support Donald Trump. It's not identity that's the issue, it's economic inequality. Even as part of marginalized groups, these people's vast wealth allowed them the luxury to support a man who did not have marginalized group's best interests in mind.

If I was rich and wanted to take over a local government, I would channel my efforts toward dividing people on everything except economic class. Yeah, you're both poor and live in squalor next to the train tracks, but you're different races! How could you possibly get along!

Re: Speaking Freely: Why I resigned from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation

#124

Post by shadowgovt » Mon, Jan 03, 2022, 7:55 PM UTC

notreallyserio wrote: post #79

coolso wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pronouns are merely virtue signaling acts of control. By specifying pronouns if they are obvious (99% of the time) you are signaling you are part of a non-bigoted, non-hateful club. Surely you don’t hate people right? So why don’t you have your pronouns visible, fellow citizen? It’s also a form of control in redefining the obvious. You want to just live your life? Nope, sorry, you need to consciously be aware of my p…

It's just an extension of using someone's name. Is that virtue signaling, too? Or is the problem really that it's new and scary?

This. The crowd that replaced suits and ties with jeans and t-shirts are now nervous that someone is coming along to upend their status quo of culture and norms and they don't much like the idea.

Re: Speaking Freely: Why I resigned from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation

#125

Post by hcurtiss » Mon, Jan 03, 2022, 7:55 PM UTC

badRNG wrote: post #64

teg4n_ wrote: post #24

This is incredibly tedious. I can't fathom how this has anything to do with "Hacker News" but I guess it's appeal to a certain subset of the audience here overrides that.

The strong opposition to diversity efforts has been a pretty common trait associated with the tech community/silicon valley. It seems reasonable that a subset of the culture that produced the work environment at Blizzard [1] or has historically rallied behind alt-right thought leaders would also be here on HN. Talk to any woman software engineer, I 100% guarantee they have multiple stories about dealing with a...spec…

This is totally wrong. At private law firms it's the tech clients more than any other hammering diversity quotas (literal quotas) in the racial composition of their outside counsel.

Re: Speaking Freely: Why I resigned from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation

#126

Post by colechristensen » Mon, Jan 03, 2022, 7:56 PM UTC

phonypc wrote: post #87

epivosism wrote: post #17

What clearly seems wrong is the requirement to fill out forms on the race and gender of people you interview, and to have quotas to control whose voice is heard based on those irrelevant traits (irrelevant relative to the individual person's life, ideas, experiences, ability to express themselves etc.) My policy is to refuse to give my gender or race. If everybody did this, high frequencies of "other" or "unknown" co…

> which seems difficult since they're also the people who claim it's not a real concept. A straw man if there ever was one. Insofar as anyone even says something like "race isn't real", the claim isn't that the concept doesn't exist. What would that even mean? The claim is that it isn't biologically grounded, or that it's socially constructed or some such.

I don’t really see that as a straw man, there is significant cognitive dissonance where the same movement seems to be both for and against putting things into categories like “race”. Like we should all be blind to this artificial construct but also classify everybody and every thing with it and all “stay in our racial lanes”.

Observe and it seems to be a real phenomenon and not just an invented opponent.

Re: Speaking Freely: Why I resigned from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation

#127

Post by ketzo » Mon, Jan 03, 2022, 7:56 PM UTC

john_moscow wrote: post #60

badRNG wrote: post #22

I'm not sure these sorts of articles provide much value on HN. By "these sorts of articles", I mean the ones that have claimed that "diversity efforts have gone too far this time ." Regardless of your support or opposition to diversity, I think one would agree that these rapidly turn into unproductive, highly divisive comment sections that are out of place with the rest of HN.

I would argue that the article highlights the biggest problem of the West. It used to be a society of strong independent and happy individuals, capitalizing on their strengths and trading with each other in search of prosperity. We traded it in for a steady paycheck in exchange for mindlessly fulfilling standardized corporate jobs, and are now surprised that the human ambition got redirected from finding ways to crea…

So, to be clear: "end of barter system" -> "steady paychecks" -> "death of innovation in the West" -> "bitter people seek to create division"

That is an absolutely wild series of logical leaps and generalizations, each sorely needing any kind of evidence or even intuitive explanation.

Re: Speaking Freely: Why I resigned from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation

#128

Post by hammock » Mon, Jan 03, 2022, 7:56 PM UTC

kennywinker wrote: post #67

epivosism wrote: post #17

What clearly seems wrong is the requirement to fill out forms on the race and gender of people you interview, and to have quotas to control whose voice is heard based on those irrelevant traits (irrelevant relative to the individual person's life, ideas, experiences, ability to express themselves etc.) My policy is to refuse to give my gender or race. If everybody did this, high frequencies of "other" or "unknown" co…

I mean it sounds bad, right? But if all the people they talk to for stories are white - and they’re attempting to fix that, and track their progress in fixing that - how exactly should they go about doing that?

Is the issue that all the people they talk to for stories is white?

Or is that a symptom of the real issue, which is something else?

And if it is something else, is there a better thing to track?

Re: Speaking Freely: Why I resigned from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation

#129

Post by darawk » Mon, Jan 03, 2022, 7:56 PM UTC

badRNG wrote: post #92

finite_jest wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From HN guidelines ( https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html ): > Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it.

Maybe I didn't word it well enough, but I intend to comment on a broad category of discussion that I don't think is necessarily inappropriate according to the guidelines, but tends to produce unproductive, hostile conversations. I understand that anti-diversity blogs often gain a lot of traction with a particular subset of HN readers, but it consistently winds up producing flame wars and can make HN a less friendly p…

If this were some strictly academic or political debate, i'd completely agree with you. But these ideas and policies are having a pretty major impact on employment and hiring in the tech industry, which obviously directly impacts everyone here, and the culture of the industry. If HN isn't a forum where those sorts of issues should be discussed, where is?

Re: Speaking Freely: Why I resigned from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation

#130

Post by david38 » Mon, Jan 03, 2022, 7:56 PM UTC

CapitalistCartr wrote: post #30

Except at political groups to which I belong, I am almost always the left-most person in the room. The Lefts greatest weakness is an enthusiasm for splintering over small matters of doctrine. Identity politics, tribalism over principle, virtue signaling, whatever fad this is, it's deeply hurting progress.

Broadly speaking, the left likes to go come up with new ways of doing things, the right likes to implement the "tried and true".

Almost by definition, this means the left is always trying many things (always need the next new thing) and the right is consolidating on what they perceive to be the best of the tried and true.