It was not in fact a racist view. It's a view about power dynamics in a system that is racist and sexist.
If you really can't get over your feelings of personal insult and your need to defend white men, then please go back and substitute "part of the socially dominant racial group" for "white" and "part of the socially dominant gender group" for "men". In US history, those terms are equivalent. If you don't like that, talk to the founding fathers who set it up that way.
The reason it's material here is that a large portion of Twitter abuse is related to this. You can look at famous incidents, for example. Leslie Jones received a giant wave of racist, sexist abuse: https://www.thecut.com/2016/08/a-timeline-of-leslie-joness-h...
Note also your standard here. You, a white man, refuse to accept that race or gender could be relevant to a social problem until other people take the time to spoon-feed you. Why isn't it your job to know something about American history? Why isn't it your job to learn about the problem of online abuse before deciding that the privilege afforded to white men couldn't possibly be the relevant? Answer: because you were raised to believe that whiteness and maleness were the default and were good. So you choose that as your supposedly neutral stance, and require others to prove you wrong.
The true neutral stance would either be "I don't know about this problem and would like to learn" or "let's assume that online culture has some relationship to the existing offline social dynamic".
The problem is not the genetic characteristics of whiteness or maleness. It's that they grew up in a society that favors whiteness and maleness, and is much more accepting of the abuse of people who aren't so favored. If Twitter had started in China, where the Han are favored over ethnic minority groups like Tibetans and the Uyghur, it would be the same dynamic but with different ethnic groups.
Of course, tech is disproportionately white and male, so it's entirely unsurprising that HN readers have risen up en masse to defend the honor of white men. It exactly proves the point. White men will say that fighting abuse is important. But when they have to show their real priorities by how they allocate time and effort, actually understanding the abuse problem and how it disproportionately effects minorities comes well after defending their own interests.
(And: Yes yes, not all white men. Generalizations are general statements that may or may not apply to an individual.)
The abuse is disproportionately targeted at people who aren't white men, and is is disproportionately performed by white men.
This is nothing particularly new. It's the history of America, which was founded by and for white men, and whose story can be told as white men slowly and reluctantly giving up their power.
If "many (most) 'white men' do in fact care", history doesn't really demonstrate that. Not, at least, in terms of doing anything about it. This is not particularly shocking; people care more about problems they experience, and less about problems that happen to benefit them.
We need only look at how the majority of white men supported a blatant racist and sexist for president. And who continue to support him despite (or because) that has only become more clear.
Hi. Former Twitter anti-abuse employee here. If I had to sum up Twitter's executive leadership, it would be with Hanlon's Razor: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
Their leadership is mainly white and mainly men. I don't believe they really care about abuse in a meaningful way. They mainly care about it as a PR problem, so they'll do the minimum necessary to get out of trouble. But that's not because they hate anybody; it's because as a company they're not very good at getting anything at all done. They succeeded because they created a platform with a network effect; in that situation, competence is secondary.
My guess is that Smyte was failing as a business and looked around for an acquihire. I'd further guess that they had some connection at Twitter, and that getting a few engineers with relevant experience at a low price seemed like a good deal. So I'd suspect that nobody at Twitter cared either way what happened to Smyte customers.
Definitely. If people talked about physical illness the same way we did about mental illness, we'd diagnose anybody below than the 30th percentile in height with High Shelf Access Disorder and try giving them growth hormones. Mismatch to an artificial environment is not necessarily a disease.
Don't let that put you off. My experience was that I had to try several therapists before I found one that I connected well with. (The same was true with my normal medical doctor and my business lawyer; it's just hard to find good professionals that you can work well with.)
I should also add that the psychiatrist could be wrong about the thoughts, but still might be correct about the feelings that flow from the thoughts.
As I progressed in my treatment for social anxiety, I realized the more appropriate emotional reaction to generalized government data collection was not personal anxiety, in that nobody was actually likely to look at my data or use it against me. I still have my recognition that it's a political danger and my anger about government overreach, but in retrospect I see my anxiety about surveillance as inappropriate, and related to my generally excessive anxiety reactions.
Being able to see the future isn't enough for a financial bet. You have to be able to see the future before other people with money. If something is sufficiently obvious, it will already be priced into the market.
In other words, a financial trade isn't a bet on your insight. It's a bet that your insight is sharper than the person on the other side of the trade.