My comments on other threads and possibly even this won’t show up due to me being flagged for voicing the opinions in this thread. I think this is another example of the dangerous behavior of the ones holding the prevailing viewpoints in the valley.
This stems from the postmodernist idea that everything is a social construct, and that our biology does not influence our behavior at all.
The interview of a postmodernist in [1] is the best tool I've seen for understanding how a postmodernists view the world and their rejection of obvious biological differences. It gets really interesting at 4m45 [2].
The difference is that I believe in a sense of justice and recourse, and that is something social justice warriors do not believe in for their actions. I also believe that evidence can prove me wrong, which is clearly outside the realm of social justice warriors. I continue to seek out evidence when forming my opinions, and do not form ideas uncritically in my head.
> Do you think HN as it is now is the place to constructively have these discussions?
I see your point about the fitness of a platform for challenging the prevailing viewpoints in Silicon Valley, and for making sure that people can develop rapport and reputation that makes them accountable. Those are all great points.
We would agree fully if HN banned all articles on contentious topics or unapologetically allowed all viewpoints with all the mess that brings.
Where I think we differ is what the right action is when highlighting a viewpoint that cause social dissonance. My opinion is that giving the stage only to people that shout the loudest when opposing viewpoints speak is a terrible choice, as in general the most extreme people are the loudest and I doubt those represent the majority. We gave the stage to the extremes in communism and fascism, and it didn't end so well. We do not need to repeat that experiment again.
There is a lot of smoke for there to be no fire. However, who knows. Personally I have seen the same behavior where I work so I am not surprised if this is all true.
There are screenshots in the suits of concrete messages from people claiming they do each of these actions. At this point the question seems mostly to be about if this is systematic or just individual actions.
We as a society agree to state sanctioned consequences that are similar to actions unacceptable to individuals. The difference is that there need to be a sense of justice and recourse, which social justice warriors don’t think should apply to their actions. Acting like a social justice warrior in the workplace should for instance be a firable offence, and things like doxxing should receive severe punishment.
That’s very reasonable. Maybe there are new functionality that can be implemented to at least bring back to the frontpage flagged articles of interest to the majority?
I think there needs to be a punishment function for ideologically motivated flagging and maybe even other actions done by such a minority, so that it cause the articles to stay on the frontpage longer when brought back in order to dissuade the behavior.
HN policy states that topics should be relevant to tech and startups. This topic in particular clearly is and also garnered a lot of interest. Arguably a majority might actually be interested in discussing this topic as they might be perceived as a majority and be potential targets of this kind of discrimination. When an ideologically possessed social justice minority then in violation of HN policy and the interest of the audience remove it from the frontpage that is problematic.
It is also disingenuous to say this happens to articles on the prevailing viewpoint to the same degree. Articles on Damore and Fowler was plentiful, and they were not voted off the frontpage. The sin of oppressing critical viewpoints in the valley falls squarely on the social justice warriors.
You can’t both flag an article on a topic off the frontpage so few in the audience see it and get to claim that another article on the topic is a dupe for the audience.
Even if that is correct it does not make it a just way of fighting for your cause. Voting for articles on the front-page of HN is equivalent to a vote in a democracy. If you removed the opposing party candidate from the ballot you might reach your short-term goal, but at the cost of a functioning democracy.
In this case the article was marked as a dupe, but this specific article was not posted twice and previous articles on the subject was quickly voted off the frontpage by people like you despite high interest. This didn't happen to articles critical of Damore, so this seems to be exclusively a social justice tactic.
Edit: explained better why talking about voting is relevant as an analogy
> The irony in all this hoopla is that literally every engineer who has been so bad that I wondered how the heck they made it past the interview stage has been......drumroll ... white or asian male.
I work with a lot of engineers of all backgrounds, and no group has been without bad apples.
> But this argument that there are floods of under qualified minorities and women engineers getting jobs is hilarious.
You are misrepresenting the argument. The argument is that there is explicit discrimination in the hiring and promotion process which comes at the cost of equal opportunity.
In addition to this the people that experience this or feel this is unfair say they have experienced illegal retaliation when bringing this up. I personally experienced such retaliation.
Unfortunately no. However, I do not personally use reddit etc.
I think we need to do everything we can to highlight injustices in the power applied to force only one viewpoint to be heard. In addition to this social justice warriors need to receive negative social and life repercussions for their tyrannical actions.
At this point I expect actions like this from people holding the prevailing viewpoints in Silicon Valley whenever someone with a different viewpoint dare speak.
You are correct that if you work in tech create a throw-away account to discuss anything critical of the prevailing viewpoints. Many holding the prevailing viewpoints are tyrannical and have shown themselves willing to destroy the lives of anyone pointing out problems in their viewpoint.
Almost anyone working in tech has seen race and gender discrimination in favor of women and minorities at this point. I have personally experienced it.
If we were to apply affirmative action then class would be a better differentiator than race or gender. As it stands now an upper-middle-class Ivy League educated person of the right identities will receive affirmative action over a man that worked his way up from a poor neighborhood in Bangalore. I fail to see how that is just.