But, IMHO, the threshold for taking arguments outside the political arena and into the realm of boycotts and demands for resignations should be a lot higher than it seems to be today. Otherwise vibrant, productive arguments don't happen, since everyone's concentrating on bankrupting the other side of money, "platforms", or legitimacy.
This is the reason I keep two HN accounts - I fear that any political comments I make here could jeopardize my professional life (about which I contribute fairly often).
Online, that's a fairly easy thing to manage. In real life, it means I really have to walk on eggshells a lot, and I seldom participate in voicing my opinions (or supporting certain causes) in which I'd otherwise participate, solely out of fear. In many cases, you can keep your personal views and professional life isolated, but not always. Maybe it's an irrational fear, but then again, in today's political climate it seems foolish not to worry about that.
And if that need to self-censor isn't cause for concern, I don't know what is.
I do this too. I found it almost impossible to post on my account under my own name, on any topic about psychology, politics, economics, or diversity because I am too afraid of what I've said being taken out of context later, or used against me in ways I can't anticipate now. I found myself frequently writing a post, only to delete it shortly afterward, worrying that it was somehow too risky.
In today's climate, you can't really even propose a thought experiment or discuss a hypothetical without being accused of holding that position yourself, and criticized as such. I don't even really have strong convictions about most of the things I discuss, except the desire to analyze them rationally and objectively, and the willingness to challenge both conventional wisdom and new radical positions.
Even while posting under an anonymous username, I still find myself self-censoring because of the risk that my identity could someday be connected. HN administrators can certainly trivially connect me, since they see the origin of my traffic for my two accounts, and I have not taken pains to anonymity the traffic for this one. However, HN admins themselves like pg have been posting under alts (and probably still do, for the same reasons), and seem to support this.
I have been wanting to propose that HN or some site like it offer a feature where you can switch your post to "Anonymous Coward" later, if it proves to be too controversial. Or post as "Anonymous Coward", and later assign the post to your name if you feel OK about how the discussion turned out. I think this would be better than having people feel like they can't post at all, or that they need alts to post. Having an alt is kind of like Anonymous Coward, except that you can't claim credit for just a single post that you turn out to feel OK about later.
The thing is, I think, that humans "try on" ideas like they try on clothes. We don't necessarily mean everything we say all the time (unless we take great pains to ensure it). The public discourse seems to expect that people have their minds firmly made up about everything, and a completely firm viewpoint that can be understood and criticized, but the reality is much more fluid. Or to put it differently: writing something that you can firmly stand behind requires a lot of time and energy, and a bar of quality and thoughtfulness and judgment that can rarely be met for Internet forum comments. Sometimes I'd just like to have a conversation, without fearing that something I say can be taken out of context and used against me years later when random-topic-of-the-day becomes a hot-button issue.
"I have been wanting to propose that HN or some site like it offer a feature where you can switch your post to "Anonymous Coward" later, if it proves to be too controversial. Or post as "Anonymous Coward", and later assign the post to your name if you feel OK about how the discussion turned out."
1. I've thought about this too.
2. I don't think it's possible because Google indexes these comments at lightning speed.
3. I used to wonder why HN only allows a user to delete for a specified period of time(a few minutes?). I think it's because of Google?
4. I have never used my real name on the Internet. Wait, I did have a Facebook account, but changed my real name years ago. I would like to use my real name, but just don't want to be taken out of context. Or, never forgiven fir having a bad day.
5. I would like to see the day where the IP owner can delete anything indexed by Google, or any database, but that will probably never happen.
6. People on here know the risks of posting under your real name, but the average person doesn't have a clue. They post away with a false sense of impunity.
7. What scares me most about the Internet never forgetting is what if a website decided to post your IP to your house number?
8. Then again 99.99 percent of the stuff I say, I believe strongly. It's just we need to play the phoney game in real life.
I view HN as a forum for professionals so I don't make comments that could negatively impact my professional life here. In that way I think self censure is fine. If you don't agree with my assessment thats fine as well of course.
Of course most of the sparse comments I make here are dumb jokes...
The point is, thanks to Social Justice Warriors, you never know what comment could affect your career. Expressing opinion about merits of Angular.js is probably safe. But anything that involves gender - a study, or a remark about distribution of men and women in tech industry - is not to be touched with a ten foot pole if you value your employability. It takes very little to become a victim of a Twitter outrage.
Bingo. Let's say that I wanted to argue that -- just for the sake of argument, not necessarily as a true belief -- that discrimination is not a significant problem in tech hiring with respect to diversity, and that the key problem is that there aren't qualified candidates from special-interest-group-in-question applying in the first place, and so the majority of the problem is upstream when you consider tech companies.
Is that something I'm allowed to say, even as a hypothetical? It seems like anyone saying that could be viciously attacked. Yet if we want to reason about the world objectively we need to consider all shades of truth and possibility, not blindly latch on to one particular idea and walk on eggshells while talking about it. The victimhood culture is completely stifling to any kind of discussion about such things.
Now, maybe we shouldn't have discussion about that on HN. I don't know. A lot of them have sure been interesting though. For example, I've found contributions by yummyfajitas particularly thought-provoking to read. He frequently challenges the "popular wisdom" and gets downvoted for it despite making what seem to me like reasonable, fair, respectful arguments that go against the popular activist narrative and victimhood culture. I don't know where I really land on these issues, but I've not been satisfied that there is adequate thoughtful analysis of them in mainstream culture (even arguably on HN).
I am hoping that this victimhood thing, and that attempts at social justice by creating privileges for special interest groups, are phenomena that are ultimately temporary as our society evolves to a greater level of egalitarianism and liberty. That is, I hope that what we're seeing now are the growing pains as old prejudice is put down, as we as society we eventually move past this (in whatever subdivision you care to name). We've seen huge strides for equality in recent years such as with recent US Supreme Court ruling on gay marriage. But it feels like for every two positive strides, we take a step back with victimhood culture or by fighting injustice with more injustice (e.g., changes to Mormon Church doctrine on gays, to pick a totally random example).
The problem with starting these hypothetical-filled discussions is that they're not helpful. People can and have been positing many hypotheses about the pipeline issue in tech (and of course many other issues) and the discussions have been mostly heat and very little light.
What would be helpful, is if you would post actual objective findings--studies, analyses, etc. Cold hard facts. Otherwise you're just adding to the heat. Even my reply is not adding much right now, being primarily opinion.
It's hard to post actual objective findings, beacuse scientists themselves are seriously affected by the culture around those issues. Just like people are afraid of saying something contrary to the mainstream narrative, scientists are afraid to publish it too. On the other hand, a lot of studies - even completely unrelated to the issue - are having their conclusions purposefully and forcefully fitted to match the narrative, to score cheap popularity points. The topic is so politicized, that you can't rely even on studies to tell you anything at the moment.
I'm willing to admit that all I think about various minorities is completely wrong. I'll be happy to, when presented with evidence (and I've been adjusting my views every time I stumbled upon something that looked even little like legit research). Personally, I'm not arguing for any side of the issue. I'm arguing against using bad methodology, bad science, logical fallacies, lies and propaganda. I'm arguing for civility and detached behaviour in discussion. Only when people calm the fuck down we'll be able to figure out where the truth lies and how much we have to adjust at personal and societal level.
Still, people are not that insane yet to make expressing opinions about frameworks a danger to your employability. I've frequently been a part of flamew^H^H^H^H^H^Hcivilized discussions about obvious superiority of Emacs over IDEs, or Lisp over everything, and never for a second felt I'll get fired for it, or that I'll lose my career, my home, or that I'll get into national news over it.
But, IMHO, the threshold for taking arguments outside the political arena and into the realm of boycotts and demands for resignations should be a lot higher than it seems to be today. Otherwise vibrant, productive arguments don't happen, since everyone's concentrating on bankrupting the other side of money, "platforms", or legitimacy.