First off, I applaud YC's efforts in this sphere to give all groups more opportunity to participate in startups and tech in general. I do not mean to disparage efforts or "derail" a conversation, but to bring up the fundamental question once the low-hanging fruit - discrimination, etc. is gone - self-selection and equality of result as a goal.
Any diversity discussion will eventually reach the awkward points of over-represented minorities and self-selection, which negatively impact numerical diversity: There are some elements of the industry that will inherently self-select for groups. Asian males are currently the most over-represented group - racially due to US immigration policy and cultural factors encouraging many recent immigrants to go into technical fields and not humanities.
Men tend to self-select into higher risk and highly competitive environments - e.g. startups, hackathons [1] but also ones with negative outcomes - crime, gambling addiction - see the 9-to-1 ratio of incarcerated men to women. (Denying the evidence for risk-taking and self-selection is to me, similar to denying evidence that sexism exists -- on the face of not wanting to confront it).
At what point do these become issues to address? It seems like the desired result is not the strawman, Harrison Bergeron, 100% representative (of what? the US? the world?) demographic, so what is the desired outcome? I'm for eliminating discrimination and bias, but I don't think this will leave us with a 50-50 perfectly balanced startup scene, but it's the most fair. You would either have to change humans' own free-will preferences for risk, or the nature of the industry (with other side effects). If you have ideas on this, I'm open to hearing them.
This is a legitimate question - shutting down discussion here in the name of being "against progress" or trivializing the issue is highly reminiscent of Paul Graham's warnings in "What You Can't Say [2]. The demographic balance of any industry or field is always in constant flux, and heavily influenced by self-selection and non-discriminatory factors. We need to remove discrimination, but also know that a fair outcome in the absence of discrimination - with equal opportunity does not necessarily lead to perfectly equal outcomes.
"Broadly speaking, competition definitely creates sex-based selection-bias. Men self-select into competitions more than women, and are more motivated by them.
I think the disconnect comes from having a minority group strongly over-represented, and the disagreement over what causes representation differences. It's the inconvenient factor that doesn't get discussed a lot. Benefactors see diversity initiatives purely as eliminating discrimination on the part of privileged groups, whereas detractors see it as unfairly lobbing claims of wrongdoing on white men, calling for soft quotas - which in this case, imply fewer Asian males in tech.
Fundamentally, people disagree to WHY certain groups are over-represented - is it mostly discrimination, mostly cultural, mostly self-selection? Discrimination is bad, but how bad - or not - are cultural factors and self-selection? Asians are strongly over-represented - but no one says this is because admissions officers prefer them - there is strong evidence to the contrary - and most agree it is a combination of selective immigration policy and cultural factors on the part of frequently college-educated, first-generation parents. However efforts to take race into account in college admissions no doubt will tend to work against members of this still minority group (in fact - only 5% in the US).
Finally, the attacking white males is basically a motte-and-bailey tactic [1] in which something very obviously wrong, and not defended by a majority of any group e.g. racial discrimination, is then used, strawman-like, to strike down countervailing discussion as "derailing" (no one is saying racism is good). Do white men need to make counter-adjustments in order to correct for previous sins (or sins by others in the same group - see sexual harassment by another unrelated man in the same industry)?
Is that fair to those white men to take steps - perhaps even extending privileges to other groups at their own cost, or is it fair because the discriminated-against groups have experienced injustice? This is the fundamental disagreement in the social justice debate. What makes sense on an individual level can look wrong on a collective level, and vice versa. It just depends on your sense of fairness. The voices on the collective side of this debate are the strongest in Silicon Valley, but a greater amounts of people - and Americans overall - frequently disagree on what needs to be done to address racial disparities e.g. affirmative action or no affirmative action.
Why does privilege mean that white, male, straight, or non-disabled people are not allowed to say "lighten up" or even express an alternative opinion on these topics? Why are their opinions now less because of their skin color or sexuality?
Privilege goes in both directions: It's now become standard to diminish any white male's opinions on matter of diversity or gender or race, because of their identity, and give explicit power to anyone who is not a white male to criticize that group. Some say it's "leveling the playing ground" but it often just turns into a straight-on attack. It is now highly possible for someone in the "most privileged" group to be accused of X -ism and then be publicly attacked by outraged people, often with real job consequences.
By the way, I'm not white, but I don't think that should give my argument any more or less power. The post-modernist focus on identity politics and who is making the argument gives another channel for an ad hominem attack merely phrased in other words.
Edit: I can't reply anymore, but there seems to be a spectrum of offensiveness - and "lighten up" means moving the bar of acceptability in one direction, when people disagree about crass or potentially offensive humor - though of course the bar is different in a professional setting. In general I try to be respectful and conscious of potentially offensive things in a work-place. But among my friends (or among co-workers who have become friends), or at a comedy club, I'd imagine we develop a different threshold of offensiveness and be more open to crass humor. That's the "breaking the ice" effect Roizen mentions in her last example
If we look at the actual population growth trends, the suburbs are experiencing plenty of growth, not a decline, even if cities are doing well too (especially compared to the 70s/80s). In the New York City metro area, 29% of the population growth took place in NYC proper, as opposed to the rest in the suburban counties. One demographic of 20-somethings and a few interviewed people does not offset the rest of the population.
There are plenty of people moving into suburbs today and they make up most of the fastest-growing areas of the US. The pattern of growth barely seems to have shifted, and doesn't match the rhetoric of suburbs in decline.
http://www.joelkotkin.com/content/00406-cities-and-census-ci...
The point is not the slippery slope of "all boycotts are bad" or "boycott everything!" but rather that we've become too trigger-happy and insular in boycotting non-tech political opinions that while mainstream outside of Silicon Valley, are not inside.
The entire debate is on when a boycott is appropriate and grellas is arguing to draw the line farther than the current one that's solidifying in tech. Cynically, it just has to do with fitting in with your group politically, be it SF tech or Southern Baptist (no Planned Parenthood donations there) and the point is - what happens when you're in the moral minority? Because Rice chose to enter an SF tech company rather than a random American one, there is way more backlash.
Ultimately, the Rice situation/backlash has a far stronger business case rather than a pure political boycott, due to objections of surveillance/digital security for cloud providers (hence the entire host outside of America movement). Here I mainly focused on the meta-debate about boycotts, and I suppose grellas decided to comment on the broad pattern given the original article's major headlines about the Iraq War.
Just like war is not universally wrong, neither are boycotts - it's just the degree to which we ask whether they are justified. Vietnam, Iraq, Gulf War, Korea, they were all controversial - and not in a "0.1% of the crazy population controversial", but rather "front page of TIME, Economist, BCC" controversial
It might sound tactless because it breaks down the illusion of moral superiority that most sides in a political battle believe they have. In general, people don't like being told they may in fact be wrong, they want to believe their side is unique, superior, and the other side is committing crimes against humanity/unborn children/whatever it may be. When a huge proportion of the broader population (not necessarily HN) disagrees, in order to function as a society we need to remove these litmus tests. (The most compelling Rice-specific argument is about internet privacy vs. government surveillance, which goes beyond this - he's speaking of the "personal becoming political" in general)
It's completely relevant to the debate though and not de-railing, when it directly addresses the point of boycotting Dropbox for something political. Our society is becoming more polarized on these issues and (internet) forums of self-selecting ideologies and subgroups contribute to this. Going boycott is one weapon in an arsenal of political expression - now how often should people use it? (The next level of course is street protest, institutionalized ideology, and the extreme is fighting a war over it).
If we used a boycott at every opportunity, at every disagreement, where would we be? Would Christians, Muslims, and atheists ever do business with each other? Would pro-lifers and pro-choicers be able to open their mouths without calling each other baby murderers/misogynists? He's basically saying, draw the line closer to where the overall population is, so society can function without imploding. And we generally go about this on an everyday basis. Geographical self-segregation also tends to help. It's a moral cognitive dissonance, but one that people draw various lines for. My theory is those who have a more logical/black and white and less socially influenced conception (which may be more common in geeks) have a harder time squaring with this cognitive dissonance.
The corollary is also that Rice (and many other figures in recent, post-WWII American wars) remain highly controversial, but the moral condemnation is not universal the way it is for certain other wars. In the SF Bay Area tech scene, there does seem to be a seriously strong consensus - and Obama is also negatively regarded when it comes to issues of continuing wars, wiretapping, etc. but generally not as strongly
When does something turn from "political" into "criminal"? Crimes are defined by politics - thus war criminal and international law are completely political. Similar to how someone can say "Aaron Swartz's case is not political at all, he violated criminal hacking laws!" And yet at some point, politicians decided to enact the laws that criminalized his behavior.
Similarly, someone has to set the laws for war as well, to define what a "war crime" and "false pretenses" are.
Everyone believes his or her point of view, that one specific version of war crimes is correct and above the realm of politics. Ultimately though, everything is "different strokes for different folks". Abortion? Killing unborn children, or denying women's rights?
Who has convicted any of George Bush, Condoleezza Rice, etc. for war crimes?
And who ultimately gets to decide and enforce the actions of an international court? Whoever has the biggest army. "One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter". No one has a big enough army to put Americans on trial for any war (bet it Vietnam, Korea, Kosovo, Iraq)
The one thing I agree most with is that Rice's actions are far more substantial and far-reaching than Eich's. On her imaginary resume somewhere is presumably "Secretary of State" and everyone's mental bullet point of "Iraq War" - that is part of her professional career and she should be judged upon that for job fitness. As offputting or not one may consider Eich's actions (what if it were not gay marriage but some other minority position in the tech world, say pro-life or anti-marijuana legalization he had donated to?), his were pretty much completely separated from his professional career.
There are some good points in here that make us question what human rights are and how we treat them.
All human rights are up to majority vote or dictatorship decree at some point. (Who created the UN, or whatever international body you want to use? Who elected the officials who appointed the courts?) And if human rights are truly universal, who gets to decide? Is it you? Or me? Is it Holland? Or the US? China? Iran?
By your definition, the right to own firearms is also a human right as defined by the US constitution. Similarly, in the United States there is a human right to free speech (including offensive speech such as Holocaust denial), but in Germany this is illegal. Would this be a human rights violation by Germany?
Similarly, one can say pro-choice people are at war with humanity, by denying the human right of the unborn child to life (the right to life is in all constititions) - stripping that right via an abortion is essentially murder. How do we reconcile these differences in moral systems?
One can say Muslim nations operate in a much "larger" space as it comes to rights. Hello sharia law!
Maybe some differences are worth going to war over, to settle the score. Is the right to vote or the right to free speech also in this category? Some agree, and have invaded countries on this basis and attempted to set up a democracy. Others disagree, and only apply sanctions. Or less. Usually, countries are not as idealistic, and require their own group to be threatened militarily for this to happen. See the US not partaking in WW2 until attacked by Japan at Pearl Harbor. Or the US invading Iraq to gain advantages of oil and Middle Eastern control. And ignoring human rights violations by Saudi Arabia because it's politically expedient.
If no bill can be passed without mentioning gender, we should remove the US "Violence Against Women" act as being anti-male as well.
Basically the idealistic black and white moral analysis, while noble, fails to explain what happens in the world.
The reaction to Eich is best seen through a lens of human group power dynamics, as it isn't logically consistent with some supposed ideals (civil discourse, etc.). Geeks have a harder time understanding this social acceptability aspect, especially within a given group or tribe. For this particular political question, a "no gay marriage" opinion has passed into the socially unacceptable in the Bay Area tech crowd.
I'm not saying it's right or wrong to react or ostracize like this, it's just the way crowds of people tend to work. And when tides shift in one direction, a desire by the winning side to celebrate, express power, and pick on the losing happens.
In 2008 it may have been a serious political question in California and the United States as a whole - and we totally can judge based on popular opinion - the difference is supporters narrow the judgment of social acceptability to Eich's narrower group of Bay Area techies. That's why saying it's "obviously wrong" or "there are no rational arguments" is a cop out - and the same denying civil rights argument can be applied to say abortion (denying women's right to choose! Murdering unborn infants!) or opposing affirmative action (racist against minorities! discrimination!).
The main difference? Public opinion rapidly moved against Prop 8 whereas for gun control or abortion it has been far more steady. [Even though over 20% of San Franciscans voted for Prop 8, the number among the educated tech crowd was likely far lower, and same among California as a whole]. Meanwhile, a movement like neo-Nazism is more universally reviled and not socially acceptable in 2014 US, although it may have been mainstream in 1938 Germany, and speaking out against it would leave you ostracized. This is where the "right side of history" aspect becomes interesting. Everything happens within the context of your time and your tribe, and this morality breaks down after these context changes.
Because the opinion on gay marriage is so universal within the tech crowd of the Bay Area, Eich doesn't really have a way out in this. (Look at the contribution numbers for employees of Google, Facebook, etc.) Meanwhile minority opinions on gun control, abortion, etc. are still socially acceptable but will still trigger suspicion. Ditto on economic issues and the entire anti-libertarian techie backlash, even though libertarianism continues to be weaker than liberalism. For another industry and group, look at Whole Foods' CEO writing an anti-Obamacare Op ed which triggered a backlash - the difference is that Eich said nothin, and most definitely continued to adopt gay-friendly policies at his workplace.
In medieval Europe, the adherence to your group (or broader society) was enforced through excommunication, in communist Russia, through purging and re-education camps, in Hollywood during the Red Scare, via McCarthyism and impossibility of finding a job. In Silicon Valley, is it by Internet campaigns and removal from high-ranking positions? What supposed Eich defenders are saying is - let's try not to be like that, no matter how righteous we believe our opinions to be.
The National Review may be on this side purely due to politics, but many others (For instance gay-marriage supporter Conor Friesedorf) are on this side due for open political discourse and anti-comformity.
I completely agree that a lot of the rhetoric is completely tribal (this side is right, the other side is wrong, now let's sling mud and accuse the other side of X!). But some people (in fact, a lot of Hacker News) does seem to get beyond this.
If everything in the world turns into a political boycott, you effectively don't have free speech either. There is always some cause people feel strongly for or against, and consider it a violation of their fundamental rights. It's completely valid to not go nuclear on every single political issue.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7526663
"I keep hearing people saying that gay marriage is more than just a political view, but so is every other political view.
Don't support welfare? You're against poor people. Support welfare? You're against the working man. You're pro-choice? You're against babies. You're pro-life? You're against women."
You know what's different? Because this particular issue has a clearly decisive split in this country.
If you want to play the ostracism game, don't ostracize a majority of a society (a majority of Californians back then).
Ultimately it's all about fitting in to your tribe - if you had donated to Planned Parenthood as the CEO of a Southern family restaurant chain, people would say it's the exact same thing. Abortion is not a "political view", it's murder of unborn children, and you deserve to lose your CEO-ship because of it. If you disagree, you are "completely wrong" and unworthy of time.
The lofty rhetoric about unacceptable and "political views," bigotry, offensiveness is the same as tribalism - the Silicon Valley tribe agrees that you must accept gay marriage, the United States tribe in 2014 agrees that you must accept gay marriage. At a different culture in a different country in a different time, the standards may be completely different.
It's actually perfectly understandable to feel loyalty to your tribe. Just understand that some principles are in fact not universal.
In the end it might be about lines in the sand and certain things crossing from the realm of acceptability or unacceptability, depending on tribe. The winning group CAN ostracize Eich for it, in 2014, so they are. The winning group couldn't do a thing like that in 1999 when Eich was busy founding Mozilla.
Anyone can play the game and Paul Graham's essay deals with precisely this form of thought limitation: http://paulgraham.com/say.html
Cynically, it's about conforming to the views in your given industry, company, culture, or society.
The lofty way to put it is a Mozilla CEO should represent the organization's ideals of tolerance, diversity, etc.
The cynical way to put it is tribalism. Humans want people with similar beliefs around, because they are good, and believe the other side to be evil (this being one of the strongest issues). One way for ordinary people to enforce their political power is through means like this. There's no need to dress it up in terms of fundamental rights, bigotry, intolerance etc. And in the tech world, gay marriage is one of those "not OK's" to oppose. I'm sure in the Southern Baptist world, donating to Planned Parenthood, will immediately get you called for an ouster as a baby-killer. It's just that the climate in the tech world has already shifted to this point, whereas the climate in Brendan Eich's church probably has not.
It's really about what acceptable opinions. For some opinions, there are silent majorities in some areas, that are silenced in others. I'm just trying to come up with a way to understand this, that can be applied to all situations and all ideologies.
Let's take affirmative action as a civil right - it's also an issue that will affect a lot of organizations: Some people consider opposing affirmative action as racist and anti-minority, and such a person unfit to be a CEO. Meanwhile others see affirmative action itself as racist (see Ward Connerly, from California Proposition 209) and sometimes discriminating against minorities too. This fundamentally leads to a similar clash - so who's right here on what the civil right is (e.g. anti-racism)?
Some will say that affirmative action is not an obvious thing you'd question the ethics of a person for. But oppose or support that sort of initiative and you'll be called a racist, sexist, etc. by at least one group, based on how you feel about certain groups of people.
Cynically: Some degree of conformity to your group is required as a CEO, including on political issues. In the tech world, supporting SOPA is a killer, but also certain other social issues, including gay marriage. If you run a big popular chicken sandwich in the South, don't start donating to pro-choice (abortion) groups either.
The gay marriage issue seems to be the most socially poisonous out of all in Silicon Valley - I find the level of vitriol offputting. Would this apply to someone who was pro-2nd amendment, pro-life, or held other similarly minority views? Many people disagree on the civil rights of gun ownership or abortion, but it is not nearly as loud. Everyone paints social issues a black-white, right-wrong decision, and ignore that over half of Californians, whether their religion or personal beliefs dictated so, voted for Proposition 8. While you or I don't necessarily agree with them, we will interact with them thousands of times in our lives.
It goes both ways. Just let that sink in, and realize the role that human nature and tribalism plays in addition to the loftier goals of political ideals and tolerance.
I agree that people can be racist against whites too. However if you're the majority in the country you'll experience it far less than if you're say 6%.
The copious comments stem from the negativity toward men - male culture and gaming is seen as a bad thing and toxic, but female groups. Why are predominately or all male groups not celebrated for bringing community to young boys?
Both groups may be at a disadvantage and may have certain privileges, but people rarely acknowledge the (1) the disadvantage of Asians, especially Asian men, and (2) the privileges of white women. Secondly, the population of Asian men is 3% in the US, the population of white women is 32%, and the feminist movement is far stronger than the Asian (or Asian male) movement, thus Asian men are also placed in the "privileged" and "oppressor" class.
So while one powerful group is pushing for representation of women in engineering, another is fighting for broader social equity for Asians - the latter is often seen as less legitimate when applied to Asian men specifically (low social status, lower marriage/dating prospects), or which are huger racial things that may never be fixed anytime soon in a US society while Asians remain a tiny minority, because those are the kinds of inequalities that people tolerate, while under representation of women in engineering is widely recognized and addressed as a bad thing.
Unfortunately as an Asian man, you'll get very little sympathy except from other Asian men, and we have very little social or political power to create these sorts of things - people don't really care, or will say you are privileged anyway.
Especially social inequalities: there isn't going to be an affirmative action program for dating, and no one's going to create a "make asian guys popular" program.
I've found that expecting the modern political system to take care of us is still a fantasy, so the best solution is to not complain too much, focus on your blessings, and work on improving yourself.
Any diversity discussion will eventually reach the awkward points of over-represented minorities and self-selection, which negatively impact numerical diversity: There are some elements of the industry that will inherently self-select for groups. Asian males are currently the most over-represented group - racially due to US immigration policy and cultural factors encouraging many recent immigrants to go into technical fields and not humanities.
Men tend to self-select into higher risk and highly competitive environments - e.g. startups, hackathons [1] but also ones with negative outcomes - crime, gambling addiction - see the 9-to-1 ratio of incarcerated men to women. (Denying the evidence for risk-taking and self-selection is to me, similar to denying evidence that sexism exists -- on the face of not wanting to confront it).
At what point do these become issues to address? It seems like the desired result is not the strawman, Harrison Bergeron, 100% representative (of what? the US? the world?) demographic, so what is the desired outcome? I'm for eliminating discrimination and bias, but I don't think this will leave us with a 50-50 perfectly balanced startup scene, but it's the most fair. You would either have to change humans' own free-will preferences for risk, or the nature of the industry (with other side effects). If you have ideas on this, I'm open to hearing them.
This is a legitimate question - shutting down discussion here in the name of being "against progress" or trivializing the issue is highly reminiscent of Paul Graham's warnings in "What You Can't Say [2]. The demographic balance of any industry or field is always in constant flux, and heavily influenced by self-selection and non-discriminatory factors. We need to remove discrimination, but also know that a fair outcome in the absence of discrimination - with equal opportunity does not necessarily lead to perfectly equal outcomes.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8087536
"Broadly speaking, competition definitely creates sex-based selection-bias. Men self-select into competitions more than women, and are more motivated by them.
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/brain-wise/201210/when-c...
https://www3.nd.edu/~wevans1/fresh_honor_seminar/vesterland.... "
[2] http://paulgraham.com/say.html