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

I recently moved (fled) from downtown San Francisco to Nashville TN and couldn't be happier. I lived in SF for over 5 years, and there is absolutely a mass exodus of people and engineers leaving the bay area because of extreme ideology, hypocrisy, constant outrage, and the echo chamber that engulfs everything. Downtown San Francisco is a great place to visit for a few days but no place to start and raise a family.

SV is very liberal, yet typically engineers (eg. EE, Mechanical, Civil, Aero, Industrial, Chemical, ...) are conservative. I wonder how many people with real engineering degrees (disclosure my BS is EE with CS minor from top school) are SV liberal.

SV liberalism is kind of hypocritical and surface. Here we have an apparently super-liberal place whose main industry is mass surveillance and that does everything in its power via local zoning policy to price out the poor and minorities. The local echo chamber is all about 'diversity' yet the local tech industry is among the least diverse industries in the world. A lot of the echo chambering is in the "methinks you doth protest too much" category IMHO.

> among the least diverse industries in the world.

If you count asians as white...

Also gonna want a cite on that. afaik sv hiring is about equal with labor market.

I was thinking more of gender diversity than racial diversity, though the racial diversity of SV is not great. There are loads of female mathematicians, doctors, civil engineers, writers, journalists, etc. so obviously language and math is not beyond women. Programming is just language and math.

> obviously language and math is not beyond women

I think there's several claims here:

1) "no/very few women can be good at stem/math/language/programming." Nobody but the most comically self-parodying misogynists says that.

2) "fewer women are good at stem/math/language/programming than men." This is the "SV conservative/classic liberal" position. If equal opportunity is provided, any remaining differences in hiring are plausibly down to availability which is down to average capability.

3) "women and men are just as good at stem/math/language/programming." This is the progressive/feminist position.

The people who hold 3 want the rest of the world to think that the people who hold 2 actually hold 1. Many 2 would be willing to tentatively jump on board with 3, but 3 somehow keep antagonizing them. As such, similarly to the Trump election, it's politically a question of which side disgusts you less.

I used to believe #2 but experience brought me to #3. People are really irrational. Racism, sexism, and ageism are really just a few of the many dumb conditioned biases that guide decision making.

A random example: taller people and people with broader shoulders make more sales.

We are intelligent minds grafted clumsily onto apes.

All of that is true. Nonetheless, I don't respect the methodology of many of the people who hold #3 in that it does not seem to me like they're fighting #2 in ways that are sensitive to truth.

Just because somebody's opponents are biased doesn't mean they aren't.

Note that I am not saying that #3 is not the case! I'm saying that I personally have not been given reliable reason to believe #3 over #2, or reason to believe that the people who have tried to get me to believe #3 are competent and respect their own fallibility to the point where I could tentatively trust them.

Ironically, the more aggressively people try to get me to agree with #3, the more skeptical I tend to become of it. To me this is analogous to the AI risk debate, where I at least partially worry about it because the arguments against from otherwise intelligent people have been so consistently lackluster.

edit: To iterate on that earlier "which side disgusts you less" comment:

As with the Trump election, people on either side tend to assume that people on the other side agree with their candidate.

This is not necessarily the case. Often when forced to choose between two alternatives, the question is down to which outcome seems to you more desperate. People who vote Trump consider immigration a desperate struggle. People who vote $not_trump probably consider sexism/racism a desperate struggle. Both sides are willing to sacrifice some values so that they can try and preserve others.

I believe the debate between #2 and #3 is mainly down to whether you consider sexism or knowledge the more desperate struggle. Personally I tend to come down on the knowledge side, possibly because I am not personally affected by sexism. This does not mean I will condone sexism, it means that I will trade it off, if I am utterly forced to, against a value that I consider more vital. That does not mean I wouldn't like to reduce sexism if I could; it does mean that when people are censured due to citing scientific studies, I feel that something I consider more urgent than gender equality is at stake.

In any forced tradeoff, there is only one value that can win. I think sexism and racism are serious issues, but I don't think they are the most serious issues. If that makes me a misogynist in people's eyes, then so be it.

Of course, in any remotely sane civil society we would try to negotiate solutions that satisfy the values of everybody involved. This is a large part of why the aggressive, condescending rhetoric of certain parts of #3 is so frightening to me. I see no reason why the fight against sexism and racism has to be at odds with truth; it's an unforced overaggression that's alienating people like me for no reason.

In summary: my issues are with the #3 methodology, not the #3 position.