> 5) Silicon Valley also has an insidious infection that is spreading -- a peculiar form of McCarthyism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism) masquerading as liberal open-mindedness. I'm as socially liberal as you get, and I find it nauseating how many topics or dissenting opinions are simply out-of-bounds in Silicon Valley.
I experienced this first-hand last weekend. My friend throws dinner parties where we discuss a different philosophical topic each time. The topic of last dinner party was sexual harassment and sexual agency. One person stormed off at the beginning because she got offended at the topic and ostensibly some mild language my friend used in a hypothetical situation. He was later crucified on social media.
When I was growing up, it was the right that constrained discussion while the left pushed boundaries. Now more often the left constrains speech. Rather than air positions in the marketplace of ideas, they would rather bully, shame and act offended at things they disagree with.
I think that's cool that you're able to go to what seems like a version of an intellectual salon and have those talks. It seems that the person that stormed out wasn't as open-minded as some of the other participants.
Sometimes we're so focused on being right, or what we believe is right, that we can't open ourselves up to other thoughts or arguments. Across the political spectrum, we're missing empathy and the ability to have discussions beyond yelling at one another.
> Sometimes we're so focused on being right, or what we believe is right, that we can't open ourselves up to other thoughts or arguments.
You just, in the preceding sentence even, assumed that the version of the story fitting your own narrative was correct. So I have a slightly hard time believing your message.
If you care about your audience, present your ideas sensitively. If you don't care about your audience, then don't bother presenting any ideas because you aren't going to convince anyone. The point of discussion isn't to score points.
Perhaps the woman in your example was offended because she has been harrased or assualted personally. The fact that you felt the need to minimize it by saying the language was "mild" says a lot, who cares if it was mild? Go as hard as you want, free speech is absolute, contextless, consequence free. Anyone hurt by what you say is just trying to score political points by pretending to be offended.
My advice would be to listen to the women on this topic before indulging them in your pure axiomatic philosophical opinions of what they have experienced.
The whole idea of someone being "crucified" or "bullied" on social media is cowardly coming from a supposed free speech proponent. Man up, own your opinions.
A marketplace of ideas is fine, but no one is going to give you a fair shake if you are intentionally tactless, and that is your failing not your audiences.
Yes because we the internet mob need to judge the lives of others.
That is so healthy.
I don't believe you can both have an intellectually honest debate and judge at the same time.
I hope they don't share the actual quotes because that wasn't the argument. The argument was open debate is not possible anymore, because we get actively judged and harassed for opinions because the flesh mob (you, me, everyone) only allows for socially accepted top 40 opinions.
Freedom also means freedom from each other. Not just the state.
If you said something bad about a person you don't personally know in the last month, then my judgement on you (yeah hypocrisy) is that you are a horrible person and the world is better with you not consuming oxygen.
A bit ironic then that it was squares who were made fun of and derided for being offended by fuck, shit, and all derivations. Now it's the new squares who get offended by words they don't believe belong in polite conversation.
For some reason I was expecting it to be fluff but it's actually a really poignant, self-aware breakdown about the cons of SF and the quest to pursue happiness.
This stands out:
> Even though Silicon Valley has the highest concentration of brilliant people I've found anywhere in the world, it also has the highest concentration of people who think they're brilliant. The former are often awesome, keenly self-aware, and even self-deprecating (let's call that 15% of the population), but the latter are often smug, self-satisfied, arrogant, and intolerable (let's call that 60% of the population).
Which is why it's funny that people think trolls are an online phenomenon. They are simply a reflection of a real-world in which most people are (subjectively perhaps) those you neither want to talk nor listen to.
The difference is that online, the filter of proximity and permission that works so beautifully to delineate our offline relationships, is void.
3) Silicon Valley is often a culture of cortisol, of rushing, and of fear of missing out (FOMO). There is also a mono-conversation of tech that is near impossible to avoid (much like entertainment is some parts of LA), where every dinner has some discussion of rounds of funding, investing, and who is doing what with Uber, Amazon, or someone else. This can be dodged, but it takes very real and consistent effort. I don't want to spend 20-30% of my daily mental calories on avoiding the mono-conversation.
Sydney has this problem, except the conversation topics are real estate, what high school you went to, and gym memberships.
I had someone ask me in a job interview what high school I went to - I was about 35 at the time. Needless to say I got the impression he was someone I didnt want to work with and I discontinued the application.
And yes this was in Sydney...
Reminds me of when I meet new people in a "night out" type context and it feels like everyone vying to work in different forms of status signaling into the conversation.
Some cultures arent like this - I lived in the Netherlands for a while (and im sure some Dutch HN readers could comment too) but if you meet someone and ask them what they do straight away they are likely to answer you with "Why so you can judge me by it?"
I avoid asking people where they work or what they do for as long as possible, and instead try to focus on interests and hobbies.
I've heard too many conversations in S.F. that follow a kind of judgement ritual. If you work for a startup in a popular field (e.g. A.I.), or a major tech company, then you pass. Anything else and the conversation just stalls.
Some topics are a guaranteed Groundhog day with the same arguments over and over again, for example:
- free market vs. regulations
- Bay Area housing issues
- Google's evilness, ad-based Internet economy
- Facebook's evilness, benefits of deleting one's account
- Apple's design decisions
- is Bitcoin a bubble or not
- holy wars between programming language camps
- any kind of US politics
- diversity in tech
I've learned some interesting perspectives from these discussions but they are mono-conversations that I try to avoid nowadays.
HN seems very well constructed for being a mono-culture. Every story is only active for a day or so. And a lot of what people know about the issue is going to be from the previous stories. Both when commenting, but especially so when voting. So for every iteration of an issue the most prevailing opinion is going to get more and more established. While it will become more and more work to dissent. At the end you find yourself holding opinions that you don't really know what the came from or if they are even correct, just that other people seem to agree with them.
What would we like to talk about instead? I'll start:
- File formats and open protocols are dead, everything is stored in someone else's database. How do we regain the ability to switch providers and interoperate?
- The web has petrified as a medium. Only the few big giants can now evolve it, and all but one does so in direct competition with their own walled garden. Does anyone care?
- Mobile devices: How do I make them useful? Are there apps that aren't toys for kids? Tricorders, not mini TVs plz.
- Anyone wanna let me in to their secret clubhouse? I don't bite, I'm just a sperg who values truth as a terminal value over high school antics and who lacks the energy to chit chat about trivia to meet people.
I think the mono-conversation group is present on HN, but I feel like it's balanced out by a pretty substantial group of people who have made a conscious decision to live somewhere other than SF or NYC because they don't agree with the culture.
Every once and a while I see a comment deriding the ability of people who live outside of silicon valley to make a meaningful impact on the world, and it is heavily downvoted without fail.
I think that's a good thing personally, because HN would suck if it was merely a SV echo chamber.
I'm not very fond of Tim's product, but I agree with him in his perspectives on SF and the Bay Area in general. Too much of it feels toxic at this point, and it has felt that way (to me) since about 2011 or so. It pushed me further and further into a state of introversion. While I used to go out and talk to people, I got tired of people wanting to talk "the mono-conversation" as he called it. It's been great for professional development as I have a lot more time to tinker with things, but it certainly hasn't helped me too much socially. I don't really care about who's funding who, who paid for what, what shit that founder just bought in Hayes Valley, or who's sleeping with whomever. I just want to poke at things, find bugs, and make shit.
He's so right about #5. See what's happened to Peter Thiel. People were calling for him to be fired because he supported a major party nominee. That's not a good sign for so many reasons.
Trump has been unique here. Thinking back to 2012, I don't think anyone really cared that much when a significant minority of VCs lined up to support Mitt Romney.
Like, did anyone freak out about Marc Andreessen supporting Romney or any of Trump's primary opponents? Nope. Actually I take that back: lots of people on the right got real angry when he supported Hillary Clinton after it became clear Trump had cinched the nomination.
Whereas I agree with you in principle, let's not normalize Trump by calling him a "major party nominee" as if that abdicates us of our responsibility to push back against dangerous political identities. We can point to many a "major party nominee" in history that people supported who also shouldn't be normalized...
I left too, but apparently actually enjoy the cortisol rush. I moved to NYC because I liked the ambition in SF but not the monoculture of having all that ambition in one industry.
For people who are wondering about the mono-culture, the question to be asking is "Does my job actually make a positive difference in the world?" Quite often the pay makes you feel like it does, but the actual work is meaningless or harmful to society.
Ignorance is bliss, so maybe don't ask yourself that question. But if you do care, it is an extremely hard question to get to the bottom of. I bet the founders of Twitter and Facebook really did think they had made the world a better place, but now that's much less clear.
In any case, it warms my hear to imagine Tim and his dog in Austin--truly a great American city. Love it there.
Do any of us actually want to live in the Bay Area?
If you like cities then New York is bigger, denser, more diverse, less poop, has a public transportation system that actually works, and yet somehow the rent is cheaper. If nature or beaches are your kinda thing there's Oregon and Hawaii not far away. Want urban sprawl and traffic? Los Angeles has San Menlo Alto beat (but not by much).
But, for those of us in tech, the opportunities here are unlike anywhere in the world. And, despite all the drawbacks of the Bay, there's just something inspiring about being here with the leaders and top experts in our field.
If you want to live in a dense city with high culture, a good economy, and nice weather (debatable of course), SF is one of the only games in town. Yes, many want to live in the Bay Area, it's not as if the army of developers there are all being coerced. The tech obsession of SF/SV is a draw for some people.
> Golden Gate and tech are terrorist targets, and I don't like being close to the bullseye.
This has been on the top of my mind more than I would like lately, what with the ramped up rhetoric coming out of the white house regarding North Korea -- to the point of considering actual plans for how to deal with such an event. Does anyone here have any thoughts on how to assess the risk of this, or is it just irrational?
It's irrational, really. Not to say that the Golden Gate bridge won't ever get attacked, it may well. But you're far more likely to get killed crossing the road every day, and I doubt you apply the same level of calculation to working out if every road is worth the risk of crossing.
Don't get me wrong, it's totally understandable. I hate to rely on "the terrorists won!" as an argument, but terror is only effective when we allow ourselves to be terrorised by it. If we/politicians/the media applied the same amount of attention to road safety that we do to terrorism we'd all be in self driving cars by now.
> The people are also -- in general -- much friendlier.
This is the biggest factor for me as someone who grew up in Texas and is now in Los Angeles
I feel like this happens in cities with a lot of transplants. Most people move to big cities because they are (or think they are) the best at what they do. That makes it difficult for me to know who to trust since I don't know off the bat if someone is talking to me because they are genuinely nice or because they want to see if I can be used to help them achieve their goals. It's a vicious cycle because it causes me to put my guard up and in turn be less friendly than I am with people I really know.
But I agree 100% with Tim. You couldn't pay me to live in SF or California again. Liberal leftist gestapo run wild have destroyed the entire state. SF in particular.
I lived in Austin for 2 years after being in Boston, NY, Hong Kong and LA. Have to say I was bored out of my mind in Austin. The "music scene" is typically a guy with a guitar hopping up on a stage somewhere at 11pm. The outdoors = one lake in the middle of town and a very few hiking trails. NO arts scene or galleries to speak of. The culture revolves mainly around drinking. It's a city for obnoxious Millennials and all the people who got sick of CA and and now bringing all that to Austin. Sorry, but many people I know who lived in Austin for years have left for Utah, Idaho, Colorado - even places like Nashville and Columbus. Hope Tim likes it more than I did!
I experienced this first-hand last weekend. My friend throws dinner parties where we discuss a different philosophical topic each time. The topic of last dinner party was sexual harassment and sexual agency. One person stormed off at the beginning because she got offended at the topic and ostensibly some mild language my friend used in a hypothetical situation. He was later crucified on social media.
When I was growing up, it was the right that constrained discussion while the left pushed boundaries. Now more often the left constrains speech. Rather than air positions in the marketplace of ideas, they would rather bully, shame and act offended at things they disagree with.