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

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370 points sillypuddy | 4 comments | 18 Feb 18 16:50 UTC | HN request time: 1.126s | source
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wpietri ◴[18 Feb 18 19:47 UTC] No.16407907[source]▶
> 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

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mlloyd[dead post] ◴[18 Feb 18 22:00 UTC] No.16408989[source]▶
The argument here is that intolerance wants to have a voice. They feel persecuted because people don't view their intolerant viewpoints as points to be debated but rather ideals to be shunned.

This all stems from the sexist Ex-Google guy who is butthurt that he can't write a sexist manifesto at work and have his co-workers debate him on the science, but rather be fired and ostracizedfor expousing discriminatory views.

Sorry, free speech is protected from government persecution, not a guarantee of a debate or to have your ideas taken seriously or to not be criticized for professing them.

dcow ◴[18 Feb 18 22:10 UTC] No.16409066[source]▶
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.
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wpietri ◴[18 Feb 18 23:35 UTC] No.16409568[source]▶
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."

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dcow ◴[18 Feb 18 23:46 UTC] No.16409634[source]▶
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.

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1. wpietri ◴[19 Feb 18 07:09 UTC] No.16411245[source]▶
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.

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2. dcow ◴[19 Feb 18 09:22 UTC] No.16411748[source]▶
> 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".

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3. wpietri ◴[19 Feb 18 20:32 UTC] No.16415495[source]▶
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.

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4. dcow ◴[22 Feb 18 08:39 UTC] No.16436159{3}[source]▶
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.