Ellen K. Pao was right all along. Also if the replies in here are representative of Silicon Valley as a whole, damn. It just reminds me of the stereotypical too-smart-for-their-own-good hacker who is prone to making sweeping generalisations and extrapolations in domains that lie outside of their own experience or expertise. I know I'm prone to this and I've met a lot of arrogant smart people who fall into this category. I really think that there is an empathy problem here. Sometimes we just need to shut up and listen instead of looking at the world in binary terms.
> Also if the replies in here are representative of Silicon Valley as a whole, damn.
The replies in here are coming from all over the world. People assume that HN comments are representative of SV and come to extremely distorted conclusions, because that's quite false. In fact only about 10% of the HN community is in SV and the majority of those are not posting to HN in the middle of the night.
I want to write more about this misconception, because it's common, poorly understood, and unfortunately damaging.
Readers frequently misinterpret other comments because they have no idea of how frequently national lines are being crossed on HN. They misinterpret a conventional comment coming from a different country or region for an extreme comment coming from some other place—usually their own, because that's what we naturally calibrate to in the absence of differentiating data—or else they assume everyone is in SV, which is an illusion as I described above.
This is particularly significant in flamewars about race, like this one. Many HN comments that count as racist, or point that way, in a mainstream American context are being posted by users from countries that don't have the US's fraught history with race. These users are looking at race issues in the US from the distant outside, and often they have poor intuition for the depth and complexity of the issues, the intensity of the feeling around them, and the conventions by which Americans debate them.
Because these comments get widely assumed to all be coming from American commenters (which, to be sure, some are, but many are not—certainly the majority in this thread were not), suddenly the population sample appears highly skewed, and much more extreme, to readers who are familiar with the US.
Some people will say 'racist comments are racist, period', but I bet that they, along with everyone else, make many fine-grained adjustments of interpretation when they have information about someone coming from a different background. For example, they would be more likely to perceive a comment as ignorant, and respond by educating the other person, if they think of them as foreign—and more likely to perceive them as an enemy if they come from nearby, even if the comment is otherwise identical.
It's likely that many of these adjustments aren't even conscious. Humans are deeply conditioned to react to nuances in social cues, and foreignness is one of the biggest categories of social cues. Unless we're arguing about specifically national disputes (which is a different sort of flamewar) we make extra allowances in such cases. Unfortunately, most of this nuance is lost in the stream of HN comments, and it puts extra strain on divisive discussions. The social machine runs without the lubricant it typically relies on, leading to excess friction, heat, and damage. This lack of lubricant gets experienced as a defect in the machine—which it is, in a sense, but it gets misinterpreted.
> I despise this kind of actions taken
> based on the colour of the skin
Are you sure you aren't applying a rule, on this occasion, without thinking it through? Skin-colour is relevant to the job here: it's a guarantee that the board member will have first-hand experience dealing with the issues Alexis thinks Reddit has mishandled.
I am sure and I think we shouldn't fall into this kind of traps.
First of all it doesn't guarantee anything. They will pick someone black with the same line of thought that they already have on the board. They won't be selecting, let's say, a black conservative. So in the end, their skin colour would be less important than their ideology but at the same time it'll be the decisive factor, which is stupid. Just as stupid as it would be to fire someone not white to hire a white person.
I'm saying this as an immigrant and hence a minority. I wouldn't even think about taking a job where they want me because of where I come from. It would make me feel like if I had some kind of disability or special needs and I couldn't do the same thing as others.
Race problems won't stop until people understand that the more emphasis you put into race, the more you'll divide people.
Not necessarily guaranteed, not every person with a certain skin color has experienced the same thing... but you can probably find someone that has if that is what you are selecting for.
True. I actually considered clarifying that. But if we're being pragmatic, the chances are awfully good that a new "black" board member will understand the issues.
Have to say, unless the board member is also a prickly character, there's a high likelihood, even with an understanding, that he or she won't really rock the boat anyways.
The notion that only representatives from those who suffer racism or oppression can be the ones to get us out of it, is an attitude that hinders all of us from making progress against it.
Putting people that don't have an intimate understanding of the problem sounds like a great recipe for success.
Sure, a plumber might have the solution to the halting problem, but I'd trust someone who's spent a good deal of their life interacting with the problem instead
I guess doctors who treat end stage dementia need to have had it too?
The wish to have a person of the same race solve the problems of race are understandable. But I would encourage you all to hope for the better situation which is that anyone with good ideas, regardless of race, should be considered as equally as someone else to solve our problems.
Because, I have the feeling that your position leads to bad side effects. Like having very fragile victories. Like black voters (or young people) being very fickle and not turning out to vote because the person who might have good ideas doesn't look like them. Like not engaging or believing what someone says just because of their skin color.
The very things you're fighting against. Take a longer term sustainable position and you will be better for it.
> I guess doctors who treat end stage
> dementia need to have had it too?
I did specify "other factors being equal." A brain disease is clearly a special case, since the real advantages bestowed by first-hand experience (eg: better empathy, fuller understanding of symptoms) are negated by the doctor also becoming a mental vegetable. Further, unless you equate being "black" with having brain damage, how would that example even apply to the original issue?
The remainder of your comment rails against a position I do not hold, and did not claim to hold. My best guess is that you were thinking of Affirmative Action? Affirmative Action, as I answered someone else in this thread, is its own issue.
About time. It is almost impossible to browse the front page without seeing some hateful content.
And I am not talking about the political stuff. You can upload video of a random dude getting beaten to death, make some absurd claims like "the guy is a pedophile caught in the act" and watch the hateful comments roll in.
Basically, you can make any claims and the ones that keep people's blood boiling seems very popular way of getting clicks and upvotes.
I don't know about others, but for me the "top" subreddits are filled with things that I consider very hateful and it goes way passed the "hate" radar of most of the mods due to the politics.
E.g. I was on the main gifs subreddit the other day when a gif of a wall being erected around the Whitehouse was shown. The amount of vitriol, hatred and borderline violent/violence-encouraging comments I saw that was at the top and mostly directed at conservatives/Donald Trump was just too much. It was truly hateful, but because it was directed at the right groups/people, it went unpunished and mostly upvoted.
Here's hoping that all hate and violent stuff like that gets removed from reddit, instead of just having it aimed at "the right", because that's their goal here really. Maybe we can then have an honest conversation about left/right politics.
You're not alone! I feel exactly the same way. Not only the submission and upvoting of mean-spirited, tasteless content, but the utter sense of entitlement when someone tries to remove it: "it's our right to watch videos of people dying and being maimed!"
At the same time, it seems impossible to find any sentence on Reddit that isn't just a few expletives mixed together with a stock catch phrase.
That combination (ie: of depravity and vapid language) makes me snort with disgust at the idea that people conduct "serious debate" on Reddit.
Maybe we should just embrace the concept of an Internet License, after all.
Sadly Reddit's announcements have a long history of verbosity, with little to no action taken afterwards. It's a long post but you'll notice very little in the way of actual measurable goals.
The comments in that thread are very telling of how Reddit's admins have chosen to wring their hands, or lament over their lack of involvement in the past rather than address issues, policies or tools.
This whole post is weird. Based on the tone they seem to think they are combating racism. But really the CEO of a company just announced that they are looking for a new candidate.
Requirements? - No particular requirements, except having the right skin color.
Your implied reverse-racism argument just doesn't hold. Are you telling me that there are no capable African-Americans who could fill that board position? If not, the what are you arguing? That increasing the representation of historically oppressed minority groups is bad?
It seems a bit silly to say "reverse racism" doesn't hold when race is an explicit criteria for the job. Maybe this is still net positive for all the good that could come out of it, but clearly racist to say certain races need not apply.
Imagine I'm selling clothes to upper middle class people in Iowa and someone applies to be a salesman or a general manager. "Oh sorry, I'm really looking for a white person here because I feel we've mismanaged our relationship to white consumers in the past." That seems like pretty clear cut racism to me. I don't see we should apply different logic just because the races or jobs are different.
No it is not. This is not the innocent, pristine untouched garden of eden before Adam and Eve ate the apple. This is a society where the ancestors of one group of people auctioned off the ancestors of another group of people like cattle. This is a society where 38 years ago, the KKK last lynched someone. This is a society, where 30% of all black males in Alabama permanently lost their right to vote. This is a society where you get a slap on the wrist if you are a rich white coke-head but get years in prison if you happen to be black, poor and are caught with a bong.
The counter-example to your argument: Imagine a company with a serious sexual harrassment problem, where men abused and raped female staff. You argue that in such a situation, giving a voice to a female victim is sexism! No!
john_alan asserted that hiring where having a specific skin color is required is racist hiring. Your response is black people have been treated poorly so it isn't racism. Your argument more reads like a justification for treating people different based on race rather than this specific action isn't racist.
Would you be willing to give an alternative definition of racism?
>This might be difficult for you to understand but explicitly hiring someone with a particular skin colour is the fucking definition of racism.
The only difference between what they're doing now and what they did before is the skin color requirement is explicit instead of implicit. Only hire white guys? Meritocracy! Decide you want to hire 1 black guy? Racist!
How far does one have to go "out of their way" and who is to judge if one has gone enough? By this logic, racism is fully the responsibility of the employer. Are all employers responsible, then, for homelessness, drug addiction, cancer and all other issues of our society, and should go "out of their way" every day to address them? If not, then who is to judge who should go out of their way and when? If employers are responsible then employers should attempt to resolve all the problems of our society, all the time, which is, a priori, impossible. Hence, I don't think your argument is correct or constructive.
Those things are all about exploiting ambiguity though. Such an argument will never be used to say that black people should step down so that a white person can take their place
To do so would mean discriminating against the races you're not choosing. This is, by definition, racist. Also the mere fact that inequality exists is not evidence of racism.
I find it very troubling to see that race is increasingly the primary selection criteria by people who want to progressively "eliminate" racism. It might be good-intentioned but it's ultimately incompatible and doomed to failure. The only solution is to go beyond such attributes and focus on actions and character instead.
If the inequality is along racial lines, it's tautological that racism exists. You don't need more evidence than that
Sure, they should also get representation on the board from other races too. Can they do that without specifically looking for people from those races?
Are they not already hiring board member without considering race? How's that gone? How do black people get consideration based on actions and character as board members, when said experience is gated by connections?
What do you mean by inequality? Employees not perfectly representing the population? At what level of geographic census does this matter? Any why did you choose racial lines? What about other factors like education which show far more significance?
If a certain group indexes higher or lower in a profession, why is that a problem? Do you consider NBA and NFL teams to also have inequality? By your definition, you must.
You're discounting a group of people as unfit by nothing more than their race/skin color. That's racist, by definition.
None of this will ever be solved as long as race and physical characteristics continue to be of importance (regardless of what "side" you're on) over someone's actions and character.
I really really implore you to read up on this stuff more. It's clear that you haven't approached the subject of racism with humility, humbleness, or even the possibility that you aren't the best person to know about the issues that other people face.
You are right in a way, I am discounting a person who hasn't felt the effects of racism to fully understand racism and give a good opinion on it. Which seems like a pretty good benchmark? I think your response to this enforces that those who haven't felt it aren't good judges of it.
>Is your claim that only certain groups feel racism? And are these groups defined by their race? If so, isn't that inherently racist?
No, obviously not. Otherwise it would be, for example, inherently racist to say that black slaves in 1700 felt racism whereas white colonists did not. In fact, the statement is both obviously true and obviously not racist.
> "It's clear that you ... aren't the best person to know about the issues"
That was directed at me specifically. Why are you answering for them?
> "discounting a person who hasn't felt the effects of racism"
That's the claim. How do they know someone hasn't felt the effects? Based on their race? So they're using nothing but race to define and determine who is what - which is quite literally racist.
To me, it seems like a combination of childish-authoritarian beliefs that the world will change for the better once, and only once, you stop anyone from saying anything controversial at all. Once nobody is able to disagree, bad things won't exist any more.
What does this actually do though? There are countless examples of hiding disagreeable/hateful/unwanted speech leading to no reduction in action, if not actually increasing it.
I'm not sure if this is good or bad. Maybe time will tell.
One thing popped up in my mind was YouTube demonetized a lot of videos that are not 'family-friendly', and eventually destroyed a lot of great content creators.
I deleted my reddit account. Reddit is becoming an editorialised website where people propose content, slowly but surely. Promoting sub they entirely control and moderate heavily. I used to visit reddit daily for more than a decade. Reddit is dead to me.
Yep, that HBD-loving subreddit was actually called /r/coontown and was actually worse than you might guess, if possible.
Other commenters in this thread seem to miss it. Says more about them than about reddit, which is much better than it used to be. If anyone misses the coontown crowd they can easily catch up with them at "free speech" havens like voat and gab, which are both worse than most people would guess.
Is HBD verboten because it's factually wrong, or because even if it's right it's repugnant to talk about such things?
If you believe it's factually wrong, is that belief falsifiable? Is there some sort of study or experiment that could convince you otherwise? I'm not talking "plausible" or "morally correct" experiment here - if it would take blinding a few hundred infants of different races and raising them without non-automated human contact and comparing outcomes, that's fine - but it would be nice to know what level of evidence you'd be looking for.
But hey, I'm just some guy who's looking forward to Embryo Selection [0], which kind of depends on some part of intelligence variance being genetic, and who thinks Blank Slate/Tabula Rasa is pretty dead [1]. Maybe I'm wrong, but from that perspective your BadSocialScience link is pretty questionable.
I deleted my reddit account too. Reddit is becoming an editorialised website where people propose content slowly but surely. Promoting sub they entirely control and moderate heavily. I used to visit reddit daily for more than a decade. Reddit is dead to me.
Reddit's downward spiral has not changed since Tencent. It has always been like this and has nothing to do with Tencent and everything to do with the administrators/owners/boardmembers and the few moderator friends they let control most of the big subs. Go read what actual moderators (not the admin-friend-mods but everyone else) says about this and it will have nothing to do with China.
Could you not have left Reddit on Reddit instead of taking it with you here? There's enough China-hate here already.
> feel that thug brutality is a bigger problem than police brutality
That phrasing, as if we had to choose between two forms of brutality, is the problem itself. Police brutality doesn't decrease other forms of violence.
On the contrary, it legitimizes it and contextualizes it as a war. This has been exhaustively studied for the past half century. It is a sociological problem which has sociological solutions, which a functioning police force is a large part of. Perhaps it is easier to see this pattern if you look at other countries than your own.
If you find yourself accused of taking sides with hate speech, this framing in the form of a false choice might be a big part of why.
> And what defines "hate"? Are they going be as consistent with the content of gangsta rappers? I'd wager no.
Probably because the content from "gangsta rappers" doesn't instigate brutality that leverages a power imbalance the way cultural and systemic hatred drive police brutality.
> thug brutality is a bigger problem than police brutality
It's objectively not, and I won't hide the reasoning either: police brutality is the end result of power-induced amplification of (as noted earlier) cultural and systemic hatred against minority/protected classes. "Thug" brutality on the other hand... isn't even a thing.
p.s. Your implicit analogy between "gangsta rappers" and "thug" brutality suggests you see "thug" and "black" as analogous; not sure if that's what you were going for, but it certainly reads that way. And since you're asserting "thug brutality" as being worse than power-imbalanced crime - more specifically since you're stating your perception of black-on-black crime as worse than police-on-black crime - it's important for you to understand why the movement itself is so focused on police brutality and systemic bigotry. Circa 2016: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2016/07/27/wh...
You're missing his point; what defines "hateful" is mostly subjective and is always influenced by the watchmen interests. And what is acceptable today may be considered hateful tomorrow, in fact back in the 1990s "gangsta rap" was considered hateful.
Reddit was infinitely more valuable (to the user) when it lead a hands on approach. I understand somethings should and must be removed from the platform but it is undoubtedly an echo chamber, almost unparalleled at this point. It's value to provide viewpoint, insight and discussion is almost nonexistent at this point. This announcement certainly doesn't bode well for anyone hoping to find it a platform that fosters better discussion.
Can you elaborate on the connection between this announcement and the platform's value as a platform that fosters discussion you perceive? Do you mean content moderation has turned the site into an echo chamber?
Reddit still feels like a biker bar to me. I don't know how many important conversations hinge on the ability to use racial slurs. My naive take would be: few, if any.
The average age on Reddit is probably 12 anyways, and those tweens upvote factual errors, more readily than correct information. That's on any topic, political or not.
The rate of important problem-solving on Reddit is a big fat goose-egg: Reddit is a counterexample to "the wisdom of crowds."
> I don't know how many important conversations hinge on the ability to use racial slurs. My naive take would be: few.
But that wouldn't be content policy, that would be tone policy. You can say incredible racist things without using any slurs. If you want to police the content, you'll outlaw saying racist things (or rather: things you perceive to be racist). If you want to police the tone, you'll outlaw the use of slurs, insults etc, but allow the content.
I assume that Reddit has an issue with the content, not its presentation.
I wish the average age on Reddit was 12. That would explain a lot of things but it's far from true.
The biggest group on Reddit are millennials, those between 25 and 35 years approx. And it's pretty sad because they don't want to have a civil conversation with anyone. They only want to hear what they already think/believe.
The real value Reddit has it's the small niche subreddits that fly under the radar. Small communities that are not dragged by the hive mentality.
This week the NYT apologized[0] for publishing an op-ed[1] from a Republican senator which stated something (using the military to restore civil order) which has broad - if not majority - support among Americans[2].
Some columnists apologetically said that giving Sen. Tom Cotton a stage could be justified on the basis of giving that to other enemies of the US in the past, such as Iran and the Taliban[3].
It seems like in the USA circa 2020 there's a pretty narrow legitimate range of opinions, stepping out of which immediately earns you *cist expletives.
Why are you mis-representing what the NYT did? Are you just hoping people don't read your citations. From your citation
> For example, the published piece presents as facts assertions about the role of “cadres of left-wing radicals like antifa”; in fact, those allegations have not been substantiated and have been widely questioned. Editors should have sought further corroboration of those assertions, or removed them from the piece. The assertion that police officers “bore the brunt” of the violence is an overstatement that should have been challenged. The essay also includes a reference to a “constitutional duty” that was intended as a paraphrase; it should not have been rendered as a quotation.
The NYT didn't apologize for publishing an Op-Ed from a Senator. It apologized for doing it's job badly and publishing materially false statements as fact.
It's worth noting that Senator Cotton went on to publicly call for the extra judicial killing of protestors. Which, if we're really so concerned about legitimate opinions, I would suggest murdering protestors would have more of a chilling effect than choosing not to publish their op-eds.
The "opinions" section is not for fact checked objective pieces of journalistic integrity; it's for stating the personal opinions of important people, whether factually right or wrong.
My opinion remains that NYT had to apologize and take corrective steps for letting a stray wave penetrate the echo chamber.
I've read quite a few NYT opinion pieces with completely false claims in them in the past, some of them racist (against British people!).
They only start to care now? I thought the point of an op-ed is that it's like a blog. The publishers don't interfere with its content and thus it can be totally wrong.
Seems that a new thing these days is that we need to be lectured on what the content mean. And that we are incapable of understanding ourselves. When did we get so dum that some individuals/groups gets to do the explaining. What makes us sure that these actually have the right answer. IMHO, I’m not sure.
