top | item 21923259

(no title)

pmikesell | 6 years ago

As an aside, is there a term for the kind of virtue signaling comment torrent this post is likely to elicit? Perhaps "Business Woke"?

discuss

order

blueline|6 years ago

i am genuinely curious what you mean by virtue signaling here.

do you think that anyone who posts a critique of worker-employer relations is just pretending? isn't a simpler explanation that they actually care about the issue?

SilasX|6 years ago

My criterion is: Does the comment show an understanding the benefits of contract-work relationships and potential downsides of AB5-style laws? If so, it's a substantive contribution, even if it condemns employers/promotes legislation.

If not, the commenter is contributing nothing but how boldly they can speak against a perceived evil, and is rightly dismissed as mere virtue signaling.

Is that an unfair criterion?

(This is a special case of the Goldilocks heuristic, that you shouldn't trust someone saying that "X is too low" unless they have a model for when X would be too high.)

ouid|6 years ago

[deleted]

smallgovt|6 years ago

Not sure how OC's comment could be considered an egregious example of virtue signalling. If anything, he's expressing a lack of virtue.

Waterluvian|6 years ago

Can you comment a bit more on what you're referring to? I'm not sure I understand.

I learned about "woke" a while ago and I dunno what's PC these days but it's a huge red flag to me of controlled speech and samethink.

pmikesell|6 years ago

Yes - I just meant that we're going to see a ton of comments here from people who want to let it be know that they think Uber, Postmates, etc are super evil and everything the government can do to shut them down is what they deserve.

It is samethink. A lot of people posting here hold these positions because they read them in the last story about these companies and they want to join in on the rabble. And discussion or nuance gets lost in this blizzard of conformity of opinion. It gets boring after a while.

peterwwillis|6 years ago

It's not PC, it's slang for "aware of and actively attentive to important facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice)". It was added to Merriam Webster Dictionary in September 2017.