[kordless]

This is not a throwaway account. Anyone can look at both my comment history and profile to determine identity.

You, on the other hand, represent yourself under the guise of anonymity, yet with purported knowledge of Facebook internal processes and discussions. The ramification is that, we as a group, must now take the irrationality of "your" identity and match it up with a rational "truth" presented which is "the level of rejection between genders is the same" (at Facebook).

The act of anonymity is likely rationalized as required to avoid judgement. Alternately, the act may be rationalized as an act by the company to avoid judgement, which means you aren't you, but someone posting on behalf of the company. Third, you may be an irrational actor who is posting this to troll us, which is to say an irrational desire to spread irrationality further into our group.

In all cases, this comment is highly irrational. If it's a troll, it's an objective of the troll to seek to spread further irrationality (additional unknown work). If it's a real human, who works at Facebook, posting this information is irrational because we have no way of knowing the context of the conversation, i.e. why did such a topic come up to begin with, who discussed it, who wrote the tests for it, and who conducted and analyzed the test results? Third and finally, if it is the company itself posting it, why is the company posting it? From an irrational standpoint, keeping this information "unofficial" makes it more likely to spread as a "truth" coming from the company, which means they are acting more like a troll with a purpose. (Which is not to say all trolls do not have purpose.)

If the company was ever to make this a public statement, I'm sure more work, or irrationality would come of it, given the questions I raise above about whether testing for this is done in a logical and fair manner.

Side note: I don't believe we should allow anonymous accounts to post because of the work required to untangle the logic. This is currently not possible to do with the HN software, so it's a moot point, and remains a source of dissonance for us.

Edit: Hello Facebook. Streisand effect, anyone? Getting about 1 negative downvote every 2 minutes. Fascinating.

[sctb]

Please don't go off like this here. Throwaway accounts are standard and Hacker News users are perfectly capable of incorporating that datum into their interpretation. We detached this thread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14255769 and marked it off-topic.