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

> they feel people there are resistant to different social values and political ideologies

This is just bizarre to to me. I moved here from the Midwest, which I found stifling. There's a far greater variety of social values and political ideologies (not to mention backgrounds and interests) here than pretty much any place I've lived. The main hostility I see is to intolerance, but that's hardly surprising given SF's long, welcoming history and the paradox of tolerance. [1]

If I were to worry about any sort of uniformity, it wouldn't be political, but in startup culture. 20 years of success has created some very well-greased rails into which most innovation has to fit: bright young founders, seed round followed quickly by A and B rounds. That can be fine as far as it goes, but it has become so orthodox that I think we're not a great place for doing anything other than a plausible Next Big Thing.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

> This is just bizarre to to me. I moved here from the Midwest, which I found stifling. There's a far greater variety of social values and political ideologies

Really? Because the only values I've heard expressed have been standard democratic talking points and once in a while far left ideologies.

Paradox of tolerance, huh? Being intolerant towards the 'intolerant' while still claiming to be tolerant? That's exactly the kind of crap that made Thiel and Altman making such strong arguments towards the culture in the valley.

> the 'intolerant'

i.e. anyone who disagrees with us.

Precisely! Not what OP's political views are but I would guess if he found the Midwest "stifling" and SF "a breath of fresh air", it's because he's aligned with the politics in SF.

Having also lived in the mid-West and SF, I would agree the mid-West leans more conservative, but in any decent sized city you'll find both view points (election resulted confirm it).

I would say SF is just the opposite of a hardcore conservative town. There is almost no consideration for having a different viewpoint. And if you happen to express one, you're certainly made to feel their is something wrong with you.

That's the problem. Any dissenting political view is twisted to something intolerant and becomes verboten.

How is this different from animals having both a microbiome and an immune system? I'm guessing you rely heavily on Popper's theories in the lab, so I think you really ought to give this one the time of day rather than dismissing it without actually making an argument for why you don't subscribe to it.

Do we include libertarian techno-utopianism as left leaning or democratic talking points?

Because there's a ton of libertarian techno-utopianism.

(Not American and don't live in either place you describe.)

Is that feeling of pushback to an (assumed) different viewpoint just that in the midwest, a conservative is in the majority, and in SF they're not? So, in one place you'd encounter almost no confident opposition, and in the other you would? I assume it might stand out and feel like suppression if you weren't at all used to it.

> Because the only values I've heard expressed have been standard democratic talking points and once in a while far left ideologies.

You've not been around much of SV if you've not run into a libertarian, or an anarchocapitalist. Either that, or you've made the considerable error of confusing their values with "standard democratic talking points".

The argument here is that people like you label anything you don't agree with as "intolerant" and justify social lynching of the ideas based on your likely angry or frustrated emotional assessment. This didn't start with James, although that's one of the more popular incidents. Disagreeing with operational policies that are based on politically charged ideas that we need to correct for the inequalities in outcomes rather than provide an unbiased and meritocratic foundation of opportunity is not intolerance. It's politics.

Are you not doing the exact same thing?

Maybe it's who you hang around.

I regularly see a lot of different views and values, both online and in the streets. I agree the most common is what I think of as "moneyed Democrat", meaning pro-status-quo left, what in other countries would be either center-left or center-right. But I hear a lot from socialists, communists, anarchists, libertarians, and what I think of as fundamentalist capitalists. And I know plenty of people who are, like myself, socially liberal, fiscally conservative independents that in another era probably would have been Rockefeller Republicans.

The only thing I really don't see much of here is modern Republicans. Which I get, in that a lot of the modern Republican talking points are anti-tolerance (e.g., anti-gay, anti-trans, anti-nonwhite-immigrant), anti-science (e.g., evolution, climate change), pro-corporate, and/or pro-authoritarian. And given the way the CA Republican Party self-destructed over the last few decades, the lack just seems unsurprising.

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 Amendment. Allowing people to advocate for the removal of the 1st Amendment, despite being a massively unpopular position (I hope), is an act of tolerance. What is not correct is attempting to claim that it is an act of tolerance to harass or shut down those people advocating for the Amendment's repeal because people believe it would lead to a worse society.

Do you draw the line anywhere? Like, planning murder is illegal right? Openly advocating the destruction of life and property are illegal - why would calling them a political belief change that? Certainly some actions aren't viable political beliefs, no?

No, intolerance is a specific term of art here, not just anything lefties don't like.

For example, look at the US right's decades-long pursuit of anti-GLBTQ policies. Gay people mostly just want to be left alone to live their lives. the US right wants to use the power of the state to discriminate against them. It went so far in California that Prop 8 specifically rewrote the constitution to strip the right of equal protection from gay people.

That is intolerance.

Also, "social lynching" is just a ridiculous term. The US has a long history of actual lynching, which is the extrajudicial murder by hanging, mainly carried out by intolerant racists. What you apparently mean by "social lynching" is people exercising their freedoms of speech and association by critcizing or not being around people whose ideas and behaviors they think harmful to other people.

As first-amendment champion Ken White, aka Popehat, often points out, freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences. "Speech has consequences. Among those consequences are condemnation, vituperation, scorn, ridicule, and pariah status. Those consequences represent other people exercising their free speech rights. That's a feature of the marketplace of ideas, not a bug."

You are right. My apologies if I implied this only happens on "the left". There's a lot of context in this thread so I didn't feel the need to caveat.

However, "social lynching" is not an absurd term. While everyone has a right to express their opinion and face the consequences thereof, social lynching occurs when people mob together and demand, pressure, or otherwise effectively execute physical consequences for a utterance of speech that is otherwise entirely legal and often totally unrelated to the consequences. Losing your job because a group of people found out you donated to a conservative social/political group is an example of social lynching (in this context). No, they didn't kill the person, but there is a real impact on that person's lively hood and it can often mean the death of a career. I agree that speech is not consequence free, let the assholes be shamed, but when we start to cross realms and impact people's jobs, families, lively hoods, for simply holding other opinions, something else is happening. We're beyond the realm of speech and have entered the wold of actions.

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 stronger border enforcement, etc. are nowhere near the levels of abject illegality as plotting a murder. The notion that these are even comparable is testament to how much of an echo chamber tech in Silicon Valley has become.

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 specifically dangerous to specific groups of people. So, for me the line is a little further over than it is for you.

The whole issue is made more complex by Trump's endorsement of (and by, I guess) the modern Nazi movement in America. When you embrace partisan politics and associate yourself with that kind of group, even otherwise 'good' things will be viewed with skepticism.

(For the record, I am one of those people who is uncomfortable voicing my political opinions at work; I'd never do it in the workplace, and have received harassment - mild, but very targeted - because of comments I've made here on HN and elsewhere on the internet. So I know what it's like to keep quiet for fear of cultural reprisal :)

That quote can easily be used to justify intolerance towards groups by choosing not to hire them ("pariah status"). Are you sure you want to defend discriminatory hiring under the guise of free speech?

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.

> 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.

As quick clarification, if you aren't aware the Nationalist Socialist (AKA, Nazi) Party of America genuinely is a party that is protected by the First Amendment[1]. Conversely attempting to suppress Nazism forcibly didn't work either. Remember, Hitler and other early members of the Nazi party were imprisoned. It didn't stop them.

And regardless this is straying from the core point. Of course, advocating the mass extermination of Jews, Roma, or any other group would be grounds for a company to fire employees that make those statements - I did not and do not attempt to state that every piece of speech protected by the 1st Amendment should be allowed in the workplace. Rather, the simple principle is that tolerating a view that some people consider intolerant is not, itself, an act of intolerance. Let me put this in a scenario that is more appropriate to a workplace:

* You have two co-workers, A and B.

* A thinks that affirmative action (structuring hiring policies such that non white & Asians, and women have greater chance to get offers than non-diverse candidates) is necessary to have a tolerant workplace, and by extension not having these policies is an intolerant situation.

* B thinks that discriminating on the basis of sex or race in the hiring process is intolerant.

* Both A and B go to HR claiming that the other is making intolerant statements.

I would argue that if HR takes action against _either_ employee that would be an act of intolerance. Allowing A to make that statement isn't an act of intolerance against B, nor is B's an act of intolerance against A. Sure, I get that A _believes_ B's viewpoint to be intolerant and vice versa. But the company's decision to allow both statements is not an act of intolerance because of that. This is what I'm getting at by saying "there is no paradox of tolerance" in allowing speech. True, individual speakers may think the other is intolerance. But there is no intolerance in allowing these conflicting views to co-exist.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Socialist_Party_of_Am...

I totally agree, Black Book of Communism numbers aside. I think that having someone who's aligned themselves (again, tacitly) with those who explicitly make calls for and white supremacy makes it hard for people to distinguish.

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

Yeah, it's obnoxious and dangerous there, too.

Meritocracy is incompetent. It is trust destroying because it's inherently corrupt. The privileged, the elite, control the metric by which merit is defined and judged. They create a system of self-preservation that excludes others who would dilute their control. There is no such thing as privilege, elitism, without exclusion and inferiority. Meritocracy always leads to the very thing it purports to try and avoid: incompetency. And that is why it is incompetent.

I would suggest trying to use a different term than "social lynching". It is a hyperbolic word that describes actions that are quite out of proportion with what might be called "actual lynching". Loss of a specific, typically rarified, job is far less consequential than death.

Using that term is going ensure that a large portion of the population disregards your argument out of disgust (at the co-opting of a historically powerful word for political points). Use it if you like, but you should expect that it will lose you debates if you do. There is probably a different term you could come up with that would be better received.

I hear you. What would you suggest instead?

I don't necessarily disagree, but I think we need a pretty big overhaul of the way we govern ourselves if we're going to escape it. And the only civil way I can think to do that is to rewrite our constitutions and laws using the guidelines that have been laid out describing how something of that nature is to be done. I don't think it's paralegal corporate enforcement of popular ideologies.

I'm willing to entertain a social structure that protects human agency in a world where our traditional means of measuring human value are quickly becoming obsolete, but I think we need a lot more agreement that's the direction we need to head...

<blockquote>For example, look at the US right's decades-long pursuit of anti-GLBTQ policies. Gay people mostly just want to be left alone to live their lives.</blockquote>

Being left alone is all I ever wanted as a gay man. But the gay rights activists are demanding all sorts of positive rights and privileges from the government, and worse yet, they are trying to do it in my name.

<blockquote>welcoming history and the paradox of tolerance</blockquote>

The "paradox of tolerance" is only a paradox if you assume that society can determine objectively for its citizens what constitutes "tolerant" and "intolerant" behavior; such societies are by necessity totalitarian.

In a free society, there is no paradox of tolerance; in free societies, individuals make their own choices and judgments about each other, and there are many different, conflicting views about which choices are tolerant and which are intolerant.

That's a fair question. After a bit of thought the best I could come up with are, depending on situation:

driven to professional exile

ridden out on a [digital] rail

digital skimmington

pilloried

[digitally/professionally] tarred and feathered

As far as I know, they’re just asking for the same rights as privileges that heterosexuals and heterosexual couples are entitled to.

What, exactly, are the “all sorts...of rights and privileges” that are unique to homosexuals that you are referring to?

And if (everyone minus you) freely chooses to not sell you food, water, shelter or services for $random_reason, does that still count as a free society?

I posted my experience with this on HN before...it was very disheartening: https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=16396441&goto=threads%...

I think objectivity is a red herring; there are useful subjectivities, good-enough heuristics. And I think your theoretical, "Gosh, what is tolerance anyway," waffle breaks down when you apply it to real examples.

Was early American society free for its time? Sure. Was it enormously intolerant? Yes. (Hint: black people were property because of their supposed inferiority. For similar reasons, white women were pretty close property themselves.) America has gotten somewhat better, but the Nadir [1], Jim Crow [2], redlining [3], white flight [4], and the Southern Strategy [5] make it clear that has only happened partially and with significant setbacks. The US right's recent hostility to GLBTQ rights and acceptance make it clear it's not just race.

Are some people going to argue that Nazis in favor of violent ethnic cleansing are good people and that one can't really say they're intolerant of the people they're willing to kill? Sure. Can we still come up with a useful-enough working definition of "tolerance" (and therefore the "paradox of tolerance") that will save lives? Definitely. Many countries have done this successfully, and suggesting they're totalitarian just doesn't fly.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nadir_of_American_race_relatio...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Crow_laws

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy

This so poorly matches both my understanding of what they request and what my GLBTQ friends say on the topic that you're going to have to be much more specific if you want to make your case.

The biggest issues I've seen are just not getting discriminated against. For example, the biggest fight I've seen in my time in California was Prop 8, which was very clearly about equal protection under the law. The next-biggest was marriage equality, which is just removing needless heterosexual privilege from marriage law.

I still think this term is ridiculous.

You still haven't given any indication that you underand the weight of the term "lynching". If you'd like to, maybe start with this slim book, which I found sobering: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0933121180

The only example I can think of where someone lost their job due to a donation was Brendan Eich, whose political cause was changing the constitution to strip a civil right from LGBT people. You are worried about the effect on his family, but he was literally trying to harm hundreds of thousands of LGBT families, and the LGBT families at Mozilla were very reasonably afraid of more direct harm.) Why are you concerned about only one kind of family?

(And I'll note that if his career has been harmed, it's hard to measure. He's the CEO of a company with $42m in funding, which doesn't sound like death to me.)

Your taxonomy is also suspicious. The problem is not people having opinions; it's them acting upon them. And make no mistake, political speech is action. The whole point of it is to change society. That's why we protect it so fiercely under law: its enormous power to shape democracy for the better.

More than that, your dudgeon here is anti-freedom. If people don't want to work with Eich, who are you to tell them that they have to? He gets his freedom of speech; they get their freedom of association. If you don't like that, you get to exercise your rights to speech and association.

Of course, if you really wanted to pursue that, you'd have to end at-will employment. It would be an interesting world where nobody would be fired for a political opinion. But it would require absolutely massive government intervention in employment, so I doubt you'd find many conservative backers.

> I still think this term is ridiculous

I'm trying to think of a better term. The point is the concept. And in my defense the Wikipedia definition aligns with my usage of the term: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynching.

> The only example I can think of where someone lost their job due to a donation was Brendan Eich

Yeah that was just an example. Another similar scenario I can think of off the top of my head: the president of the University of Missouri was coerced into resigning because he said something that equated to, "I don't believe in institutional racism".

I'm not trying to paint doom and gloom or anything I was responding with the counter argument to, "intolerance wants a voice", which is (naturally by now), "only an intolerant person would condone silencing in the first place".

>As quick clarification, if you aren't aware the Nationalist Socialist (AKA, Nazi) Party of America genuinely is a party that is protected by the First Amendment[1].

Yes, that's correct. But not forced to be accepted as a debatable idea, a polite disagreement, or a view point that deserves a seat at the table.

>(structuring hiring policies such that non white & Asians, and women have greater chance to get offers than non-diverse candidates)

This is not affirmative action. Affirmative action is structuring hiring policies such that everyone gets an equal chance at an offer - even if it means that some groups get more help to get there than others.

Hence the comic:http://i2.wp.com/interactioninstitute.org/wp-content/uploads...

This is definitely not my experience. Your framing that there are only two significant viewpoints (thus, "both") is exactly part of what I was glad to get away from.

There are many different sets of "social values and political ideologies" in the Bay Area. That was the glory of it for me. I have met all sorts of radicals and artists and weirdos here. And plenty of perfectly normal people, but whose notions of "normal" don't overlap all that much. E.g., the Lebanese-American family that ran a store in my neighborhood. The Latino family in the apartment next door. GLBT families far more into normcore than I'll ever be. Etc, etc.

I think the problem with both the WSJ piece and your approach is that "social values and political ideologies" is some sort of code, an attempt to frame a very particular strain of conservativism as just another kind of viewpoint while carefully not looking at the contents of that strain.

The only viewpoints I've seen people be actively hostile to here are ones that already include active hostility to other people. If you start out with some anti-gay slurs in the Castro, for example, and you will definitely be made to feel that there is something wrong with you. And that's not shocking to me at all; after a lifetime of hostility and abuse from self-proclaimed conservatives, gay people are quite reasonably sensitive.

How about simply "fired" or maybe for cases that go beyond being excluded from a single job "blacklisted". Those examples are all very hyperbolic, albeit less so than "lynched".

I suspect that's part of it for sure. A lot of what conservatives have been getting upset about over the last few decades is diffusion of power away from well-off, white, straight men to everybody else. Loss of power still feels like a personal loss, even if systemically it's a move toward a more equal structure.

I hope you note that you don't have an actual argument here. You're just shitting on something it's not even clear you understand.

I'm sure that some people do that, but to cast everything in that light is just laziness.

The Wikipedia bit is uncited and does not agree with any of the first 5 dictionaries I looked at. And it's definitely now how it's used in the US. E.g., the book I pointed you to is not about extrajudicial parking tickets or something. It's about violent racist murder.

Your telling of the Missouri thing is highly suspect. He openly admits he made a series of mistakes in handling racism on campus and related student and faculty protests. His bosses wanted him out.

I can't find him saying anything equivalent to what you said; indeed, he clearly said the opposite. But if he did say and believe that, that's clearly grounds for dismissal, just the same as if he said he didn't believe in evolution or global warming. Institutional racism is a a well-established, well-documented phenomenon. A person denying basic facts about institutions in America can reasonably be seen as not qualified to lead an institution in America. Especially one in a state with huge racism-related problems.

Yeah, I think direct description of the actual events is the way to go. Especially when so often the actual event is something like, "felt uncomfortable after receiving public criticism".

> This is not affirmative action. Affirmative action is structuring hiring policies such that everyone gets an equal chance at an offer - even if it means that some groups get more help to get there than others.

If this is the case, then the diversity policies at big-name Bay Area tech companies often go beyond affirmative action and into the realm of outright discrimination. For example, identical resumes at my company have 3-4x chance of getting an interview if the name suggests the applicant is a woman and or black or Hispanic. You may or may not agree that "structuring hiring policies such that non white & Asians, and women have greater chance to get offers than non-diverse candidates" is affirmative action, but the point remains: that's what many Silicon Valley companies are doing.

Words mean exactly what they're intended to mean. Nothing more. I clearly don't mean violent extrajudicial murder so telling me that's a bad term because it has been used in the US to describe incidents of violent extrajudicial racist murder is exactly the type of thought policing that makes zero logical sense especially in a global forum. There's an argument for avoiding such a term out of respect/sensitivity for people personally affected by some piece of language in order to prevent triggering emotional responses, but that's not the argument you're making. And I'm sorry if that is how the term affected you.

> “Wolfe verbally acknowledged that he cared for Black students at the University of Missouri, however he also reported he was ‘not completely’ aware of systemic racism, sexism, and patriarchy on campus,” a statement from the group read.

After which Wolfe appologized but people wouldn't have it. It's the mob mentality that I don't like. Once he said that there was nothing he could do to save his job even though he met most all of the demands laid before him. At that point it became about making a statement not about humans learning to tolerate each other. It's intolerance at its finest. All the politicians asking for his removal were just being political..

CEO of Papa John's is another example. And this all started with chick-fil-a's COO.

Enough with the snark. I am actually trying to listen to recommendations for better terms and you're deliberately not helping which is really making it hard for me to extend empathy here. (HN is generally a place for constructive intellectual commentary not petty frustrated juvenile crap.) I am not talking about people simply feeling uncomfortable. That should be abundantly clear by now.

Or, we can chalk this one up to you misinterpreting the scope of events to which my initial comment refers...